Chapter Text
Regulus
Bodies on bodies on bodies on bodies—
The stage deck smattered in a rhythmic tangle of glitter-slick thighs, hands and chests, throats arching into pillars of light striking with a kind of devastation.
The spectacle of it: Lola’s meticulously crafted Birth of Venus spills across the stage, utilizing every dancer the club can spare.
And this part, this: when the music ebbs into something thick and liquid, the oozing hum of the base, and they all slow to one collective rhythm, witches pooling around the altar for their midnight ritual. The feeling of it crawling through him, that secret pleasure of being thrust into the bowels of it, sprawled amongst skins waxed and plucked and bruised knees smeared in makeup, torsos slippery with body oil and glitter, flakes of gold that catch the light just so, rhinestones on eyeshadow, powdered cheeks leaving their dust on Regulus' chest. The breath there too; cigarettes, weed, Spearmint. His back arched, his hands roving over a crinkle of elbow, the lizard-smooth arch of a foot. He wants to lick the sweat off it. It’s a moment suspended forever. He reaches forward, gives it a peck, the sweet stifled giggle it elicits. Pandora reaches down to squeeze Regulus’ shoulder twice, their signal: I’m good, you good?
The rhythm picks up.
Regulus squeezes back.
Spotlights descend and slice into the center, striking tonight’s starlet, their Venus erupting from her shell of bodies: heavy-lashed Marlene in her platinum blond ringlets and white bodice of lace as she rises above her ocean of flesh.
Bodies untangle from the miasma to make way for the rest. Feather fans and strings of pearl and legs kicked high and fake champagne corks whizzing and the blitz and dazzle of sequined corsets, fake lashes spangled with diamonds.
Regulus loves seeing it from afar. Even under the unforgiving glare of fluorescents striking the club in the daytime, even with the dancers in sweats and shucked T-shirts—something about it shakes right to the center of him every time. Their explosion of limbs. The tumble of it like cherubs frolicking across the spiral clouds of an Italian fresco.
Sometimes he thinks they have no right to move like this in a sleazy burlesque club on a Friday night.
It hits him then, the pill Pandora slipped onto his tongue before call—yellow as a lemon drop, the little heart printed off-center; snapped in half to share—it hits him in waves and waves, and he’s a holy roller, and this is heaven, and God is Pandora’s hand pulling him along to the rest of the routine. Legs gliding, soaring, arms untethered, his hair a whip-crack across his forehead. Spine thwacking back, chest stretched like a sparrow’s, heart there, full and full and full of things. Sweat a tangy pinch in the corner of his mouth. The music slams across his body like sheets of rain. Itch of lace. Feather fan gliding across his thigh, his back, lower. There. A whoop from the bachelorette table to the left.
And this part, this: Regulus on his knees, sliding across the stage with the others, arched spine, arms flying. Glitter and pearls and the hot twinkle of the confetti canon, limelight glowing across their gauche little parade.
He hears Lola somewhere in the back of his head like a vein throbbing. Go.
Go, my little love witches.
♡ ♡ ♡
“Where’s Mum, my tits are falling out—”
“Here!” Sirius squeezes past a cluster of dancers stumbling in from off-right, his arms in the air, needle and thread in hand. “What did I tell you about pulling? What do I literally tell all of you about the bloody—”
“—pulling, I got it! But what the hell am I supposed to do out there, pull a Janet Jackson?” Dorcas whines.
“Yes!” Pandora shouts from the crowded dressing room, hobbling out of her stilettos and ripped fishnets. “S’ literally why we have tassel pasties,” she says, yanking down her bustier like an impatient toddler, displaying her pasties, pink bejeweled hearts.
“You know they make me break out. I get itchy nipples…”
“Not the itchy nipples,” Gideon mumbles as he rushes past, headset clinging for dear life on his frazzled hair as he lugs the next prop to the stage, their big spinning Hex-agon for the Witching Hour.
Regulus feels his tongue loll. Is it already midnight?
Did Pandora really only give him half a pill? Are they on fucking ketamine?
“Mum!” Someone shouts from behind the bursting clothes racks.
Sirius is still trying to fix Dorcas’ bustier, groaning, “I swear to Christ, you need to stop picking at the costumes, I’m running out of safety pins. Reggie, hold this—”
Regulus is too busy tripping his balls off to aim for whatever Sirius is trying to make him hold. He’s hungry, and it’s loud, and his head’s spinning from the usual explosion of backstage chaos. Bobby pins and stray feathers and glitter lobbed across the floor. Music starting too early, girls and boys shoved out before their costumes are tightened. Burst heels and bloody toes. Someone’s safety pin poked Marlene in the ass during Birth of Venus, her whines wracking through the green room: I’ve been skewered! Call the ambulance! Call the priest!
“Where the hell is Barty,” Gideon shouts, waving his clipboard through the air like he’s fanning himself. “It’s about to start!”
“Where do you think?” Sirius scoffs. “Eating ass in the storage room—”
“Stop trying to make that a thing. They were snogging, you shit-stirrer.” Pandora tosses a powder brush in his direction; she misses so tremendously it’s fascinating.
“Same thing.” Sirius shrugs.
If there’s one thing his brother will not let go of, it’s Lola hiring Evan Rosier as the new bar manager. He hasn’t been doing much of any bar managing with Barty around. Regulus has stopped counting the times he’s caught them with their faces suction-cupped to each other in the green room—which is even more times than he’s caught Remus and Sirius trying to do it on the piano after hours. A true feat.
Sirius gives Dorcas’ hip a quick pat to check his handiwork. “Right, no pulling, Ms. Itchy Nipples.”
“Fuck you.”
“Next!” he shouts, and another dancer rushes towards him, turning to show him his loosened garter belt. Sirius is about to get to work when one of the waitresses Emmeline, all big hair and feather boa, tumbles in on her platforms. “Oh my god, can someone tell Bang to stop letting these rahs in? Mum! They’re basically climbing on stage!”
Sirius closes his eyes for a moment before he grabs his phone, and Regulus is glad he feels steady enough to hold the belt, while his brother thumbs across his cracked phone screen before wedging it between his shoulder and ear while his hands fiddle with the belt clasp, “Yeah, hi—No, it’s me, genius—How do you not have my number saved? What did we say about letting the bloody bankers in? I don’t care. Piss on them, lock the doors, just don’t—No. Get down here and get them out. Blacklist the mouthy ones.”
Regulus manages to catch the phone as it slides from Sirius’ shoulder.
Sirius blinks at him. “What are you still doing here? Get dressed!”
“What about Barty?”
“I will toss every single one of you on stage myself, do not test me today.” Sirius narrows his eyes, clutching at Regulus’ arm. “Are you high?”
Swaying back a little, Regulus shakes his head with his lips clamped between his teeth. Pandora cackles. He bites down on a laugh. He really wants to sit down.
“Great!” Sirius yanks at the dancer’s belt a little too hard, making him yelp. “So everyone’s having fun without me.”
“Then stop being a cunt.” Gideon smacks Sirius’ head with his clipboard.
♡ ♡ ♡
Regulus knows that for all his tutting and whining and fussing—Sirius loves this, loves when Lola leaves him in charge (especially now that she’s sailing along the Greek coast with some new Bumble-find, a service top whom she lovingly refers to as Mr. Big-Dumb-and-Full-of-Cum—and for a woman in her sixties, Gideon has described her current chapter in life as spiritually profound).
Regulus also knows that for all the tutting and whining and fussing of the dancers, they wouldn’t know their asses from their elbows without Sirius. Lola and he are their North Stars: Mother and Mum. Zeus and Hera.
Who else will fill out all the paperwork? Stock the bar? Fix hemlines and feather fascinators and shove jelly pads into sagging braziers? Duct-tape the leaky pipe in the ceiling during the second act? Who else will toss the girls out the bathroom for snorting lines before curtain call?
Sometimes it’s almost like they’re kids again, back when Sirius used Regulus as his own life-sized doll in secret, haphazardly stitching together long billowing skirts and patting on makeup using a face-paint kit they’d nicked from the kiosk down the road. Back when he made unitards for Regulus because they could barely afford ballet school, let alone any of the uniforms. How he’d make Regulus twirl, how he could kick a smile out of any of Regulus’ frowns if he just made him twirl fast enough. You’re precious, you little shit!
And for all of Regulus’ tutting and whining and fussing, secretly, he’s always liked it, being dressed up and fussed over, watching the deep furrow between Sirius’ brows as he stitches the fabric closed, making sure not to poke him.
Even during his time at Kremen’s Ballet School, Regulus enjoyed the frenetic pace of backstage the most, humid and cavernous, full of nerves, the getting-ready, the prepping, the bustling heat of people, of stagehands rushing past and dancers in wrap sweaters leaning into mirrors dabbing their cheeks with blush, seamstresses fixing the wild burst of tutus. At the school, Regulus only ever wore unitards and tights.
But now, here, it’s different. Here, it’s sloppy tubs of body glitter, hollowed out to the bottom. Here, it’s Dorcas sticking false lashes to your eyes with the pinch of her long acrylics, and it’s Pandora slathering your nails in baby-pink and tiny pearls twenty minutes before call.
Even for the Witching Hour—all the boys on stage in suspenders and bowler hats, heckling the crowd and inviting them on stage for their game of spinning Hex-agon (a stupid Spin-to-Win where Barty makes sure every volunteer gets motorboated to their heart’s content)—even then, Regulus gets to keep wearing his cheap diamond earrings, letting them slap at his neck as he twirls. Barty’s eyes shimmery-black and smudged with eyeliner as he hypes up the crowd, slinking around the tables like a big wild cat, yanking at clean collars and curling loose hair around his finger—a taunting Cupid; Puck, the mischievous jester—coaxing patrons into buying another round of drinks.
Regulus is high enough time feels like a vortex, spinning, spinning as he spins the hexagon for the screeching bachelorette table, their pink sashes and tiny plastic tiaras. Out of the five options, the dial lands on Free Shot. Barty pushes it towards Free Motorboat with a pop of his hip, and Emery, their big-chested mountain of muscle hops off stage to perch himself on the lucky woman’s lap, pressing her face to his oiled pecks, while the band plays some ditzy number.
Maybe it’s the pill, or maybe it’s the light tonight, that feeling inside him somewhere that knows it’s going to be a good show. How the crowd laughs along so unafraid, rowdy, alive, their warmth like sitting inside of a heart. Regulus sighs open from it, wants to sink right in.
Sirius has calmed down by the time Marlene (with a pink bandaid on her right butt cheek) pulls the boys out for her Caldron Cabaret, followed by a big group number, Mischief Managed, where they move amongst the crowd in the dark, popping up in flashes of spotlight like a game of peekaboo. Mimi, their snake of an acrobat, doesn’t fall this time as she dangles from a Champagne-stocked chandelier for upside-down bottle service, and Dorcas manages not to splash the first row too much as she swishes around in her giant martini glass of ‘Spider’s Silk’ (a silly name Evan came up with for a martini all the middle-aged tourists go rabid over).
Backstage, as Pandora helps Regulus out of his corset and into his pearl body chains, he feels his high soothe into something pleasant and fuzzy. He can’t wait to grab a kebab from around the corner. He’ll have three. Humming with his eyes closed, he lets her paint his lips in wine-red lipgloss until his mouth is thick and tacky with it. She uses a curling iron to get a string of hair to twist just so over his forehead. The smell of it. She kisses his cheek softly.
“There you go, pretty baby,” she mumbles, fluffing his hair. He realizes they’re swaying.
“This shit’s really nice.” He grins, basking in it like he’s dipping into a warm pool.
“‘Course it is. Got it from Barty.”
Regulus makes a face. “Pretty sure we ingested horse tranquilizers.”
“He says when it mellows, it gets you real horny.”
He snorts. “Sure it does.”
“Check out the guy in the left corner booth is all I’m going to say. Now go,” she says, giving him a sharp spank, and in a cheap lilting imitation of Lola’s Ukranian accent, she shouts, “Go, my little love witch!”
James
James needs to know what the ever-living fuck they put into this Spider’s Silk martini because he is one glass away from leaving this dimension. It’s getting harder and harder to be less obvious about the camera he is hiding behind the bulbous lampshade spread over his table. And it’s getting harder and harder to seem less creepy. It’s not like he didn’t notice the “no pictures” sign at the entrance, nor the burly bouncer prepared to defend its decree; James simply has a terrible sense of self-preservation, or maybe it’s some bizarre variant of OCD, because if he’s told not to do something, he will walk over bodies to do it at least twice.
Remus, out for a smoke, spotted him in the line. It was that small smile of relief like he didn’t expect James to actually show up, pulling him past the velvet rope and the bouncer and down the winding stairs, to a big corner booth with a reserved sign and a bowl of bar peanuts.
“I mean, I can also just sit at the bar,” James assured.
“Can’t let the legendary James Potter sit at the bar now, can I?”
“Right. Sod off. So you’re just going to leave me here in this giant booth. Alone?”
“I’m at work, mate.” Remus shrugged with the kind of nonchalance James is still getting used to, like he can never quite tell if he’s taking James seriously or not.
"Just try not to get caught,” Remus said, gesturing at the camera. “Oh, and drinks on me!” He shot over his shoulder, before dipping through the crowd to get to the band and sliding in front of the piano for a quick warm-up, his fingers soaring dizzyingly across the keys. In tank top and suspenders. Remus Lupin. James doesn’t think he’s ever seen this guy wear anything but frumpy jumpers. Even back at St Anne's, his shirts were always oversized. Bucktoothed Blake Shelly used to say he was hiding a conjoined twin at his hip.
And so there James is feeling kind of silly sitting in a giant booth all alone, nursing his—third?—Spider’s Silk martini, two of which he ordered with extra olives, and the bartender just slid him a whole bowl along with the third, paired with a look signaling both judgment and pity, which James feels sinking in only now that his stomach is hurting. Can you die from eating too many olives?
He plans on googling it, but after his fifth martini, he concludes the whole human race should survive solely off of a diet of olives and vodka. Really, he’s enjoying himself too much, sitting there in his big booth like a kid forgotten at a gas station, drunkenly laughing along with the crowd.
It was confusing at first, to think of someone like Remus Lupin, that quiet head-in-book kid from St Anne's, playing in a jazz band in a burlesque club. Remus Lupin who sat at the baby grand during every school assembly playing Our God is a Great Big God, before getting high with James in silence, sprawled on the floor of the decommissioned bathroom in the east wing.
Even though James doesn’t remember much about him, he’s pretty sure Remus wasn’t the type to smile like this, leaning over the piano now, taking a sip from his drink and happily chatting with the bassist during a short break. Maybe it’s this place, the way the people act here, the way they are, as if spaces like this demand it from you. Honesty, perhaps. It’s exactly the kind of place James has been scouring London for, for weeks now. To think it’s been here in Soho all along, covert, wedged between a Thai massage parlor and a sports pub; no banners or posters, nothing but a neon sign in the shape of a naked witch on a broom, sitting with her back to passersby.
The Coven is surprisingly large. A round space, two floors with a mezzanine, aligned along the shape of the stage; a huge thing, framed by a complicated mess of red curtains, rows of drapes, lace stitched with beads like spider webs. The set pieces are ornate and over-crowded with a kind of showmanship James has only ever seen in big theatre productions or the circus. Above the audience, a crowd of chandeliers dangle from the ceiling like lilies in a pond, caked in dust and old webbing, their light splintering in the curlicue mirrors puzzled across the walls, scratched up and foggy, hanging between tipped crosses and gold-trimmed portraits, their subjects murky in the low light. In the pit, patrons group around tables lit by fake candles globbed with wax, parlor lamps all tasseled shades and thick webs of crystal, casting their light in shards.
The lovely haze of it all, sumptuous, velvet. The dream of a gothic parlor, a fortune teller’s living room.
Even after two hours, James doesn’t know where to look. He already spent five full minutes staring at the skeleton by the entrance to the bathrooms, topped with a blonde wig, a cigar clamped between its teeth, and a giant dildo stuck to its groin with duct-tape and cable ties. Fondled every time patrons stumble to the loo.
The club is packed once the reedy man with the tattoos jumps up on stage again, his blinding Cheshire grin. The hype man, the comic between routines. (If he weren’t busy dry-humping the bartender between performances, James would’ve managed to order five more martinis—which would’ve resulted in his immediate death, so maybe bless him). With a booming voice, he introduces the next performer. The spotlight, round and crisp as it envelopes him. James angles his camera, takes another picture. Click.
“Settle down, settle down. Ladies and Whores and Gentle-theys! I present to you the sweetest little thing on this side of the Atlantic. Captured in the Red Sea and Amazon-primed all the way here in a crab crate lined with canned oat milk lattes, because he’s a whiny picky bitch.” There’s a sound like a scoff from backstage. “But don’t let the face fool you—Baby Siren’s got teeth.” He bares his, pulling at his suspenders until they thwack against his bare chest.
The band’s gone quiet, safe for Remus having swapped the piano out for a synth, while a recorded track plays a yawning sax on reverb, eerie and echoing. James backs further into the booth, lifting the camera to his eye, his fingers twitching on the shutter as he zeros in on the band, one of the trumpet players with his hands clasped, looking at some faraway corner of the club, thinking. The sweat gleaming on his brow, the system of veins by his temple throbbing from all his efforts. Click. The chipped black nail polish on Remus’ fingers as they move in measured motions over the keys. Click. The silver stud at the tip of his ear. Click. The corner of the stage, splattered in sweat, spit. A stray pearl there, catching the light. Click.
The curtains part in a slow rise to reveal a layered backdrop, a giant half-moon with a face dangling between strings of stars and clouds curling, the set of a vintage paper moon photobooth. The stage itself covered in mounds of fabrics and pillows, dark red, ruby, as wind turbines billow the sheets up into the air. They undulate, roiling wave-like, hiding whatever’s moving beneath.
James catches the quick flick of a stagehand pulling at a sheet to rearrange it. Click, click.
Then, like a snake, something writhing and serpentine rises from the red waves. Tender-skinned as milk. A hip, a leg, the stubby pink jut of an elbow. James aims the lens at the pillowy thigh arching up towards the ceiling. And there, the feathery shock of black hair. Red mouth stretching glossy-wet around a yawn, like a sprite waking from its nap on a breeze.
It goes on like this: a finger, an ankle, a chest, shoulder, that startling wisp of a profile —moving with the way the sheets fall and the music ebbs like some sultry lullaby. Teasing, teasing.
James’ eyes feel heavy, chest tight. That telltale itch crawling up each notch in his spine, like a bug, this needing thing that lodges its teeth into his skin. He wants to get a better vantage point. His attention snaps to the mezzanine, then higher, to the lighting, the complicated puzzle of bars and wires, and he imagines himself dangling from it, lens angled down. That sweet body writhing in waves of silk and plush—
Maybe this is how James knows his life expectancy will remain tremendously low: he’d toss himself off buildings for the perfect shot.
The saxophone pulses deep like a whale. Its slow seduction, its casting of spells. The whole club’s gone stiflingly quiet in shared communion. Someone coughs. A couple to his left murmurs into each other’s necks. They kiss.
The wind turbines, the music, it all stops, and the sheets fall with a cresting sigh, and Baby Siren sits there on his knees with his hands on his thighs. Naked safe for the dainty webbing of pearls like sea foam.
Pious, framed by heavy curtains, with the moon and the stars eclipsing his body, he’s a deity of old in his temple of worship.
James realizes too late he’s looking right into the camera.
Click.
The lights shut off.
Regulus
“He's a pervert.”
“But he’s hot, right?” Pandora interjects, shimmying her breasts up in her diamond-spangled bustier—which she really doesn’t have to because God blessed every inch of her body at least ten times.
“I’m sorry, what? I couldn’t tell with the camera stuck to his face. Plus, he’s sitting there alone, mind you, and it’s weird, and don’t you dare tell me I’m being paranoid, because I will yank those tassels off your tits. Where’s Sirius? Or actually—never mind, I’m calling Bang.”
“Give the poor man a break,” she mutters checking her hair in the mirror before Gideon violently waves his clipboard at her, ushering her towards off-right.
“He’s the bouncer, Pan. It’s his job,” Regulus says.
My Heart Belongs to Daddy booms through the club for the last number, the sound of chairs and canes scratching across the stage, heels stomping, and the trumpets blasting over the crowd’s heated cheers.
“Bang needs to stop letting these weirdos into the club. Next thing we know they’ll show up in trenchcoats,” Regulus hisses, but Pandora’s too busy bursting onto the stage, going under in a wave of whistles and applause.
“Reggie!” Sirius rushes towards him from the dressing room.
“Sirius. There’s a wanted sex offender in—”
“You’re not going to guess who’s sitting in the corner booth.” Sirius cuts him off, twisting Regulus around to unclasp the pearl body chains in a flurry of movement that has become their routine. “Remember the fit prefect who sold weed in the haunted bathroom at St Anne's?”
The chains slip to the floor with a hard clank.
♡ ♡ ♡
The first time Regulus saw James Potter, he was thirteen.
James was a year above Sirius and Remus, and to a thirteen-year-old, James at eighteen might as well have been twenty-eight, fully grown and full of the world, with his tousled hair and shirtsleeves sloppily shoved up, the tail of his shirts always hanging out like a tongue lolling, something so undone about him, so easy. Dirty. How the nuns would yell, Mr. Potter!, as he stumbled down the hallways, racing away from whatever trouble he’d gotten himself into. (He got into more trouble than Sirius, which, looking back, is both impressive and very, very alarming.)
Maybe it was the holiness of older kids, like they knew everything, saw it all, did all the things you were too shy to even think about.
James, perpetually summer-soaked, skin that healthy color people got when they spent every holiday by the sea. How he’d return to the dusty halls of St Anne's, after a summer back home, tan and taller and more broad-chested than before. Regulus remembers creating elaborate backstories—wrought with clichés from a thirteen-year-old who’d never left the country—imagining James’ mum came from some small town by the Mediterranean Sea, where locals believed in gods and olive oil and dinner at ten. He imagined he wore espadrilles unironically, and his summer girlfriends all looked like some rendition of Monica Bellucci in Malèna, and if the nuns were to let him, he’d wear leather bracelets and a single gold hoop earring.
Of course Regulus remembers him, remembers the first guy to make him realize he didn’t just like guys—he’d quite possibly let them kill him, or kill them, whatever circumstance demanded. (He’d watched Romeo + Juliet on repeat that year, and Leonardo DiCaprio dying in his little Hawaiian shirt was nothing short of a revelation.)
Leaning against the bar in the flurry of patrons getting their last drink before moving down the twisting streets of Soho—James Potter looks better than Regulus remembers.
All five-o’clock-shadow and broad fucking chest, and it’s the glasses—the glasses—paired with that crooked smile crowded by straight dazzling teeth, hooked just a little to the right, an impish kick, disrespectful, I’m quite darling, aren’t I?
Yes.
Yes, you are.
You coastal sunset of people.
You horrifically gorgeous fuck.
“You still remember that?” Regulus hears James say, loud and boisterous. His eyes kind of twinkle. Regulus wants to hit him with something.
“You had the best weed, mate,” Sirius shouts over the crowd and the clanking of the bartenders hurling their shakers. He lifts his pint. “Christ. James Potter. What are you even doing here?”
“Remus invited me.”
“Babe!” Sirius yells at Remus and gestures at James like he’s some holy champion. Christ Returned in the stained glass of the chapel at St Anne's.
“Surprise!” Remus yells back, lifting a shot before downing it, laughing the way he only does when he’s decided he’s blacking out for the night. “Recognized him in the tube.”
“Do you even remember me?” Sirius says, all flushed and starstruck.
Harlot, Regulus thinks.
James does this big booming laugh thing, before he slaps Sirius on the shoulder. Because he’s one of those guys. Communal. Overly chummy. “Of course I remember you. You fell through the ceiling hiding from Pastor Clarkson. Wildest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“He was going to molest me in the library, what was I supposed to do! Oh—Reggie, come here.” Sirius waves at Regulus, who’s been loitering by the bar, watching from afar. He tries not to look James in the face. “Regulus, this is the tosser everyone and their mother wanted to shag back at school. James, this is my little brother.”
Sirius keeps babbling and James is staring. Regulus can feel it in his cheeks. He feels silly, standing there in Pandora’s Rituals bathrobe one of her sugar mommies sent her for Christmas. They never dress up for a drink at the bar; it’s leg warmers and sweats, whatever you can grab.
Regulus wishes he tossed on his jumper. He feels like a whore in a Roman bathhouse.
“This is—” James shifts, clearing his throat. “This is your little brother?”
“Do you remember him?” Sirius says, turning towards Regulus. “You must’ve been, like, what—twelve?”
James Potter surrounded by his gang of infinitely cool kids, smoking behind the mossy walls, sneaking out to town late into the night, their hushed drunken laughter echoing in the courtyard—
“Thirteen,” Regulus mumbles, and then he lifts his head and fixes James with a stare. “You’re not supposed to take pictures in here. There’s a sign at the entrance. Camera with a red line through it? Clear enough for a dog to understand.”
James jerks his head back and opens his mouth, but Remus shoves into their circle with a handful of drinks. “Easy now,” he says, handing one to Regulus as if to pacify him. “He’s a photographer. And he’s going to try and be humble about it, but he used to work for Vogue.”
“Harper’s Bazaar, actually. It’s, uh, not as cool.”
“See,” Remus says, impassive. “Humble.”
There are moments where Regulus wants to congratulate Remus for being a class covert bitch.
“So you’re not selling weed anymore?” Sirius says, leaning into Remus when his boyfriend hooks an arm around him, almost protectively.
James cocks his head to the side in some pantomime of sheepishness, but Regulus can tell he loves the attention, positively preening.
Mr. Harper’s Bazaar.
Regulus wants to hit him again.
“Honestly I was shit at it,” James says. “Couldn’t make a profit ‘cause I kept smoking it. I was useless, really.”
Regulus takes a long gulp of his drink (apple juice, because Remus thinks he’s funny), before interrupting, “It doesn’t matter if you’ve been knighted by the Queen, you’re not supposed to take pictures in here.”
Sirius rolls his eyes. “Oh, come off it, Reggie.”
“What are you going to do with those anyways?” Regulus narrows his eyes at James.
“Tape them to my ceiling.”
“Funny.” He deadpans.
“Do you do passport pictures?” Marlene chirps from somewhere by the bar, clacking her acrylics against the surface the way she does when she demands attention.
James whips his head back, his boisterous chummy-chummy laugh, and fine, it’s quite nice, and Regulus tries to despise it, but then Pandora’s sidling up to him, giggling like a skittish school girl, and something about it makes James laugh harder. Possibly the ridiculousness of her divinely blessed tits, but who knows.
“Can all of you shut up for a moment?” Pandora heaves once she manages to catch her breath. “All four of you went to the same catholic school? And now you’re all getting pissed at the queerest burlesque club in London? If this isn’t serendipity, then I don’t know what is.”
“I’ll cheers to that!” Barty jeers from behind the bar. “Thank you, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, for bringing us together this blessed evening. May your light clear the path for these hopeless, filthy sluts.”
Crossing himself before lifting a bottle of tequila to the ceiling.
James
Granted, James is a little drunk as he navigates the labyrinth of backstage—a cloistering mess of clothes racks and makeup-cluttered tables beneath mirrors ringed with lightbulbs like in the movies. He regrets having left his camera at the bar, possibly being rifled through by Sirius who started taking pictures of everyone’s nostrils once he got his hands on it. James wonders what this place looks like before a show, dancers squeezing into outfits, racks of costumes shuttled from one side of the stage to the other, props and light cues, mayhem.
He finally makes it to the back exit, making sure to follow Barty’s instructions and leaving the dented brick wedged against the door frame to keep it from locking. He stumbles out into the cold, taking greedy gulps before fumbling for his Marlboros, pulling a cigarette out with his teeth. He pats his trousers looking for his lighter.
“Need a lighter?”
James turns. He almost lets the cigarette fall.
Fucking hell.
If he were to describe what looking at Regulus feels like, he would say it's like running into a wall.
Regulus is sitting by the bins, hunched on the stairs leading out of what must be the back entrance to the pub next door. He’s wrapped in some hulking fur coat that looks taken from a rack backstage. It parts below, revealing his naked leg. The soft pink of his knee. His bejeweled Uggs. James doesn’t think he’s ever seen bejeweled Uggs. He wants so much to grab his camera.
How a curl falls across that forehead, wispy, lovely, by design. Lit below the exit sign, sainted, like the mourning madonnas gracing his nonna’s home in Vernazza—
“Do you need it or not?” Regulus says, impatient.
“Uh—Yeah, sorry. Sure. Thanks.” James wants to hit himself.
He tries taking normal mindful steps forward. He shouldn’t have agreed to that round of shots with Barty. He shouldn’t have eaten all those bloody olives.
Taking the lighter, a cheap thing with a palm tree on it, he lights his cigarette. “Cheers,” he says, giving him a nod.
Regulus nods back. James stares. Until he realizes he’s staring, which makes him want to fill the silence with anything he can think of:
“I’ll delete them if you want.” It’s punched out of him more an anything. If you want. Whatever you want.
“Hm?” Regulus leans back a little, there’s a thin silver chain resting along his collarbone. That little gap where the bones give way, the size of a thumbprint.
“The pictures,” James says, sliding his attention back to his face. It feels like getting slapped this time, like a sharp sting of surprise, like for a second he forgot about this face that could cause abrupt heart failure.
“What are they for?” Regulus says.
“A project.”
James waits for Regulus to ask, but he doesn’t. He just looks at him like James is quite possibly the stupidest person he’s ever met in his life, and really, really, James is weak, James is a whore, James is a vain cretin without a backbone of any kind, a tapeworm really, because time has proven again and again, that if a beautiful person just so much as steps on his toe, he will gladly sacrifice the rest of his foot to be fucking flattened.
He never learns. God help him.
Regulus is still staring, and James is very much still staring back, and he remembers how just moments ago, this man was writhing in a sea of red pillows, uncurling from himself, wanton. Remembers him with his legs kicked high, dressed in suspenders and a bowler hat. But sitting here like this, he looks a little awkward, a little angry.
James wants to open him like clenched muscle. He thinks of his mother's childhood home, the fishermen at Guvano Beach pressing the oysters apart with firm grips and paring knives.
“Will you let me photograph you?”
Regulus makes a face. “Why?”
“Because you’re so beautiful it kind of feels like getting hit in the face.”
Regulus blinks, he’s quiet for a long moment. Then, “Does that usually work?” Stony-faced, like he’s caught himself.
“What, honesty?”
Regulus snorts. James wants to eat it.
“I have a feeling you’re a very obnoxious person.”
“I’ve been called worse,” James takes a long drag of his cigarette. “So—will you think about it?” He says. He picks at it. He’s a picker, he’s a yanker, he’ll scratch and jab and tear at it, until the blood comes. He’ll have it.
“Will I think about what?” Regulus asks.
“Letting me photograph you?”
“Will you pay?”
James chokes on a plume of smoke, coughing with a hand to his chest. He fumbles, then laughs. “I’m used to it being the other way around.”
“Obnoxious and modest.”
“Persuasive, too.”
“Presumptuous.” Those bright eyes narrowing, feline.
James shoots him his sweetest smile, the one that goes a little crooked. “Is it working?”
“Depends.”
“On?”
Regulus cocks his head to the side, that pretty curl tumbling across his forehead. “How much you charge your clients.”
“I’ll pay you double.”
Someone please knock him out.
Was it Lily who said he would toss all his earthly possessions out the window for his dick? I mean, holy shit, Jamie! I’ve never met anyone with less impulse control than you, it’s a miracle you haven’t been murdered yet—
But then Regulus bites down on something like a smile, and James can’t tell if he’s trying to hide it or not, and his coat slips, and there’s a special place in hell for creeps like James who might have an aneurysm over an exposed shoulder. Regulus stands, he’s smaller off-stage, barely reaches James’ chin. His coat falls open even more, and it’s that flower-patterned robe beneath. That silver chain. The dusty pink of a nipple.
And the wind is so cold, and James wants to grab the coat and close it for him, wants to button it up, wants to wrap a scarf around his tender throat, wants to throw him over his shoulder and warm him up by a roaring fire, wonders what that chest looks like blooming red with warmth. He can’t stand staring at those lovely cheeks, he’ll start taking bites from them if he isn’t stopped. Just a little, just a munch.
He's drunker than he thought.
With that face, beatific and unreadable, Regulus shoulders past him. He should look silly wobbling away with a giant fur coat and bedazzled Uggs that are clearly too big for him now that James is seeing him walk, but he looks like a grumpy little cotton ball and it’s awfully sweet.
“I’m assuming that’s a maybe?” James watches as Regulus disappears through the door without a word. It swings closed, the bang of it loud enough for his shoulders to jerk.
Regulus removed the brick.