This was originally a TikTok post from months ago but I’ve edited it and now it’s on Tumblr xo
btw I’m in the process of writing about a bajillion more things w them and making a hcs post + an aus post so STAY TUNED for more forgottenstar/saintwater/whatever you wanna call them
Regulus Black had never expected to fall in love with Mary MacDonald, of all people.
A nobody to the wizarding world, the type of girl that was a somebody to everyone but nobody’s somebody. She moved around the halls of Hogwarts with a bounce in her step, eyes exploding with golden hazel folds of sunlight and dust. Not the rotting kind that settles over abandoned homes, but the kind that swirls over the dry cement of your quiet, southern hometown just before the wind picks up. A sign of chaos before the chaos even starts.
She and Regulus had nothing in common; he was quiet and lived his life drowning shadows, and she’d known nothing if not the kiss of the sun and the warmth of a summer.
Yet she managed to get a hold on him that nobody else had.
She was a muggleborn, not an ounce of magic in her blood but something about her seemed to divine, Regulus was convinced at times that maybe she was lying about being a muggleborn. How could you look like an angel, like magic hums a song in your veins, and be so plainly human?
It didn’t make sense to him. His love for her felt misplaced, in the sense he’d never had room in his heart for a feeling like this. He was scared to put a label on it, on the churning ache in him when he looked at her, but he knew what it was. It was only a matter of how he could dare to put it into words.
His love skyrocketed a summer evening spent together. He never had much to do in the yawning summers, but watch the sun settle over the horizon and melt back away as the clock ate away at time. But Mary had changed that; she had took his hand and welcomed him into a world so bright and full of colour it felt like something from a dream. Or maybe, that was just her; a girl born from the traces of stardust trapped in your childhood dreams. All joy and love, no room for misery, casting away the nightmares and soothing the wounds they left behind.
It was the first summer he’d ever ridden in a car, Mary had driven them out to a spot far away from the city. He had been nervous, fidgeting and stealing glances at her every chance he got. She laughed and he felt that this world, bright as it had become, could not compare to the sound of her laughter.
They sat on the hood of the car, exchanging words between laughter and secrets.
Mary reached over, with the biggest smile on her face, the type of almost angelic smile that made the sun want to hide behind the clouds in shame. She leaned in close, and she smelled something like vanilla and cherries, something so distinctly her. Sweet like honey. When she smiled, he couldn’t help but smile too, even just a little. Her laughter, her smile, it was contagious. She knew how to make even the gloomiest of days compare to the brightest days of summer. She reminded him of his fondest memories, the warmth of a fire during a rainy day, or the first rays of August sun reaching over to wake him up through his bedroom window. He felt his heart stutter in his chest, threaten to burst, when she reached over and pressed her palm into his.
“For you,” she said, her voice was a truthful sound. She didn’t know how to hide how she felt. For a boy who’d known nothing but to hide how he felt, who he was, he couldn’t put into words how much that honesty mattered to him.
“For me?” He echoed back. He looked back down at what she’d placed in his hands, a silver necklace shaped around the image of the planet Venus. It was glowing in his hand, faintly.
“You said it was your favourite planet. The planet that mimics a star.”
He looked down at the necklace. “You remembered that?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” She hummed, “what are our brains for if not to remember these things? The little things. Don’t they matter the most?”
Regulus stared at her. He felt sick. Her love was so pure. And he was completely tainted; a heart painted black. He did not deserve what she gave him. He could never deserve what she gave him. She pressed a small kiss to his cheek, just a peck, and his heart crumbled, like moth wings withering by flames. A moth that died just watching the light it always chased when it lived. Why would fate deliver him, for once, something so good after he’d only now decided to devote his life to all that was bad? Suddenly his skin felt like it was burning. But he just smiled and held the necklace close.
Love like this was a luxury a boy like him could not afford for long, but maybe for now, he could risk it all to have it.
He held it close to his chest, a warm necklace, silver outlining Venus—the planet. He had held it in his hand and wondered how she could be so beautiful, whether in the sun or the moon, she was radiant.
“Since you love the stars and space so much,” she hummed, helping to attach it around his neck. The slight feeling of her fingers against his skin was enough to make him melt, his heart felt something like liquid gold drizzling down his chest.
In 1979, when Regulus went missing, he first sat in his room and wrote a series of letters. The world around him felt dark, and he felt stupid. How could he think to get comfortable with the idea of a world, vibrant and bright and lit up with something warm like her love?
He wrote a set of letters to his brother.
He wrote another set for his mother, feeling a sting of guilt. It was not her fault her life had been a cycle of misery. But she knew as well as anyone that she was not the mother they needed.
And lastly, a flock of letters to “Venus”.
When Sirius found the letters, years after dust settled on them, he couldn’t pin down who “Venus” was.
“Dear Venus, you were not a star,” Regulus had written. “You had no right being as bright as you were.”
Nobody would know of Mary’s own set of unsent letters. She wrote in one, “To the star that burns out the fastest, there will never be a star that shined the same you did. You might have burned the fastest, but you shined the brightest, if just for a moment, enough to light up the dark to the envy of the sun.”
Mary waited a whole two years; patiently and restlessly. A hole in her heart, an ache diffusing into her blood.
Sirius didn’t find out Regulus was dead until a year later, in 1980, and the whole time between Mary had been searching. Searching. Searching.
In 1981, when her best friend died too, she lost it all and gave up. Her memories vanished, drowned in a melancholy gospel of hushed, hazy voices. They blocked her from remembering him; his face, his voice, his laugh.
All she remembered, in the crooks of her dreams, was a black-haired boy, faceless, holding a necklace—the one of the planet Venus, with a locket in his hand, smiling at her bitter sweetly. She could not see his face, his eyes that were a celestial silver. She could not see the traces of her lover that made him who he was, just the traces of him that erased it.
(Mary as Venus is the best thing ever and im spreading this agenda BECAUSE I can write her “as a star born from the sea” and Regulus as “the star that died to the sea”. I LOVE THEM)
( @princesswidget @ineffablelyqueerwolfstarshipper @lady-of-the-pomegranates @whispers-unspoken @wdev @space-girl3 @mothwingsmayy @marriedtonarcissablack @jam-pots ) - reblog this and tag any more Marylus obsessed pooks you know so I can tag them in my next instalment of “spreading the Marylus agenda” ❤️
