Archive of Our Own

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. 

Chapter Text

Regulus

“How the hell do you know James Potter?” 

The jam falls over as Regulus clambers across the kitchen table on his hands and knees, the hardboiled eggs rolling, slop of salami, butter on his shin.

Sirius throws his cutlery to the side. “Are you kidding? Get off the table, you infant.” 

“How do you know him?” Regulus repeats, cocking a brow at Remus.

Trying to remain stoic, Remus leans back, the twitch in the corner of his mouth the only thing giving him away. “I know I was the one who started calling him by his full name, but it’s getting weird.”

“Put some trousers on.” Sirius thwacks one of his fancy napkins against Regulus’ hip. “No one needs to see your ass at ten in the morning! What is happening right now?”

Regulus plops onto his calves. “I’ve been subject to the ghastly image of both of you starkers so many times I’ll go blind by the time I’m thirty—”

“Then learn how to knock, you tosspot—”

“—Plus, if you didn’t want me climbing over the table, you shouldn’t have squashed this monstrosity into a kitchen the size of a bloody pantry.”

At this point, arguing over Sirius’ “serendipitous” Facebook Marketplace find has become a sport. It’s mahogany! Ever heard of Sotheby’s, you uncultured swines? It’s a sign! It’s a sign! Regulus knows every one of his brother’s ridiculous arguments by heart. They had to disassemble this whale to make it fit through the door. 

Bristling like a cat, Sirius leans forward. “It’s called an investment, yeah? And once we get out of here, all of you will thank me for my manifesting.”

“Sometimes you say the dumbest shit.”

“Remus likes the table.” 

Sirius whips his head towards Remus, who’s peeling an egg, unbothered. He looks up. “This is your conversation.” 

With a wheeze, Sirius pushes his chair back; he doesn’t get far before it hits the kitchen counter. Cooking has become such a feat, that if all three of them try to whip up anything more complicated than spaghetti bolognese, Regulus has to peel the potatoes crouched on the floor beneath the table. Like a gremlin. 

Regulus zeroes in on Remus again, tries to, but he’s hungover, or maybe he’s still high from Barty’s horse tranquilizers because it takes him a moment to focus. “How do you know him?”

“Who?” Remus says—but wilts once Regulus arches his eyebrow dangerously low; apparently there’s a very specific angle Remus has learned not to let tilt any lower, lest have his eyes gauged out with spoons. “Saw him in the tube, caught him taking pictures of me, and then we had some drinks.”

“Great,” Regulus says. “He’s a creep.”

“I’m sorry—you had drinks?” Sirius sputters, all bobble-headed. 

Remus shrugs. “What. We can’t catch up?”

“Catch up? How was there any catching up to do? With James Potter? From St Anne’s?”

“Okay, can we please stop with the full name?” Remus tosses his head back. “And I don’t know, we used to get high a lot. He was the only guy in school who had pot, and I liked pot, and that’s that. I don’t understand what the big deal is?”

“How do I not know this?” Sirius says, pouting like a child.

“Because it’s not important.”

“See, here we go again with you withholding information—information, I might add, that you’ve deemed—”

Regulus shoves a hand in his brother’s face. “So, we’re really not going to talk about him taking pictures of you? In the tube. Like a pervert.”

“No, just Google him.” Remus takes a breath. “It’s what he does.”

Sirius whacks Regulus’ hand aside, shooting him a pointed glare. “You know, he actually managed to take a picture of you where you don’t look completely butters.”

Regulus grabs an unfinished toast from Sirius’ plate and dunks it right into the open Nutella, the way he knows his brother hates. It’s become a complex, really. Sirius slaps his wrist so fast Regulus snorts, shoving the toast into his mouth. 

“Why’d you invite him to the club then?” He continues his interrogation, mouth full.

Again, Remus shrugs. “I don’t know, we hit it off.” 

Sirius scoffs, “Oh, you hit it off, did you?”

“Look, he’s a good guy, and he’s got this...project he’s doing, and I told him about the club, and it seemed to fit, so, yeah—Yes, I invited him. And everyone had fun, so what’s the problem? You had fun, right?” Remus is getting nervous the way he only does when he knows both Sirius and Regulus are waiting for satisfactory answers.

“A project?” Regulus remembers James saying that, all boyish and bashful and disgustingly good-looking. 

Remus picks at his egg. “Yeah. I don’t know, a series? A theme?”

“Bet that’s what all the perverts say. It’s a theme, Siri. It’s tits and ass.”

Sirius laughs loud enough Regulus hopes he’ll get away with dunking his whole finger in the Nutella, but Sirius stops before he has a chance. Fixing Regulus with a stare, he leans forward, toughens.

“I see how it is,” Sirius says, like he’s got him. He’s speaking French, a language they usually reserve for insulting each other without Remus overhearing. “When shit hits the fan, don’t come running to us in hopes we’ll mop it up.”

Regulus rolls his eyes, stretching. His left shoulder pops. 

It’s been three months since Regulus moved back in, three months of Sirius and Remus hovering over him like hawks, still making sure he eats, still knocking on the bathroom door whenever Regulus takes a little too long. If it were up to his brother, Regulus would live the rest of his life as a eunuch chained in a basement. 

But Regulus is hungover, Regulus is a cunt: “Says the guy who was all over him yesterday. Was his camera heavy? Was it so, so big?”

Sirius lifts a brow. “Careful.”

“You worried?”

“You should be.”

“He’s just some guy.”

Sirius’ face softens just enough to look like pity. “That’s what you thought last time.” 

♡ ♡ ♡ 

Describing who Remus and Sirius are to him is nothing short of complicated. 

When they snuck Regulus out of 12 Grimmauld Place—snow pelting across the windows of that NationalExpress bus they took to the final stop, his ballet shoes crunched so tightly in his hands—they might as well have been more his blood than their real parents ever were. Through the years they’ve metastasized into this brother-father-uncle-friend monstrosity he’s never bothered to pick apart. Remus showed him how to file his taxes. Sirius showed him how to break out of cable ties. They never missed a recital. 

He supposes when you grow up in places so full of God and rosaries, homes clogged with so much shame you can scratch it from the walls like a rind of fat, that’s the glue that’ll stick you together. Maybe that’s why they ended up at The Coven, between a questionable massage parlor and a pub frequented by fascists, down the stairs, below, subterranean—closer to hell, according to his mother who pops up in his emails like a vampire in its coffin, coming out when hungry or needy for attention, sending random quotes from the Bible pasted onto pixelated pictures of Christ on the cross.

She only ever writes Regulus. He keeps her emails to himself as much as he can, because every time Sirius finds out she’s sent something new, he’ll whip out the incense, sit on the mahogany whale, barricaded behind a wall of mooncakes and mochi ball wrappers, and listen to Mazzy Star. 

It’s an unspoken thing, that deep down, no matter how old they are or how much distance they’ve put between themselves and Grimmauld Place—it’s the feeling of knowing it’s still out there in the world, gaping deep and acrid, their family tomb. Echoing back at them in the wrong people, the wrong places. The wrong men. 

And like a bird building a nest in a windy place, Sirius will line their Chinatown flat with Facebook Marketplace finds and tossed-aside furniture piling up on sidewalks, dreamcatchers from the Brixton market, botanical prints and monstrous feather-leafed plants. Anything tasseled, anything velvet. If he can’t get it screened past Remus (who is far too tall to maneuver through Sirius’ hallucination of The Munster's film set), Sirius will bring it to the club; where Lola blames eighty percent of the clutter on his hoarding habit. 

But on days like these, where it’s just them, where there’s no work or expectation, where they’ve done all their errands, and they’ve managed not to strangle each other to death, and Regulus nurses his achy muscles with tape and Tiger Balm, and they’ve made enough spaghetti bolognese for this part of the globe, and they laze in the living room watching Practical Magic (Regulus got to choose tonight; if it were up to Remus, they’d be watching some three-hour French New Wave where all anyone does is furiously fuck or furiously smoke), and Regulus is in his sweats and jumper, unshowered, uncaring, with his head resting on Sirius’ thigh, letting his brother massage his scalp, the way he’s always done, even as a child. 

It’s on days like these Regulus is glad to be back home. He has his old room again. He listens to Remus practice his piano in the living room. He complains about Sirius’ bath bombs painting the inside of the tub a vibrant sudsy purple. 

The lanterns from the streets paint the walls a hazy red, and now that it’s prime time, the smells from Lao’s Dim Sum waft into their flat, the sweet tang of bamboo steamers—and home. Home smells of sesame oil and xiaolongbao. 

On the screen, a young Sally Owens conjures her true love spell. 

“He can flip pancakes in the air,” she tells a wide-eyed Gillian while she plucks petals off white roses. “He’ll be marvelously kind.”

And his favorite shape will be a star, Regulus mouths. 

James

Regulus Black stands in his doorway—two hours late—cap low, baggy sweats and busted Nikes, unbothered, with a coffee-to-go and a pre-rolled cigarette fastened above his ear. So unfathomably normal. Just a bloke dressed like those kids loitering around the chicken shop round the corner sneaking a spliff. 

Except he forgot about the face. God, the face. An impossibility of a face, tilting towards him beneath the brim of his cap. It’s even more startling, bare, in the daytime.

James opens the door wider. “And here I thought you changed your mind.”

“You live in Clapton.” Regulus shoulders past him. After their initial meeting, and a brief exchange via text, James has come to realize that some people are blessed with the talent of making anything sound like an insult. 

Watching Regulus silently judge his flat, James is relieved he cleaned—not too much, just enough to seem like he cares but he’s not anal. He’s cool. He’s chill. Glad he opted for a hoodie instead of a shirt. Glad he’s got music playing, nothing he’d actually listen to, just casual enough to fill the silence clamping down on them. Because he’s cool. He’s chill. 

James doesn’t remember the last time he felt like a teenager desperate to impress, scared Regulus can smell it on him like sweat. Are you nervous? 

And James is usually good at this, the small talk, the easing of tension—master of diffusion, Lily likes to call him, the bomb expert of socializing—he prides himself on how far he can bend himself backward for a smile (even for Lily’s two-year-old demon, Hailey, who chomped his finger the last time he babysat her).

But talking to an unwilling Regulus Black is like trying to chat up a can of beans.  

James tries offering him coffee, which he takes back once Regulus dangles his cup in the air. He asks if he needs anything, which he politely declines. It’s weird, his politeness. He says please and thank you, but it’s the way he says it—curt enough to feel like he has to force it from himself.

In James’ home studio, Regulus perches on a stool in front of a black background surrounded by softboxes and reflectors. In the light, he wilts a little, tucks into himself—arthritic, almost—shoulders rounded, eyebrows severe like he’s scowling. A little awkward and a little angry. And as James adjusts the settings on his camera for the test shots, it’s clear Regulus isn’t who he’d expected him to be.

It pushes something strange and hot up his spine. The thought of capturing this: Regulus without a stage, without a crowd.

James clears his throat, lifting his camera. “Anything we need to discuss before we start?”

“Nothing below the waist,” Regulus says without pause like he rehearsed it.

“Sorry—what?” 

Regulus gives him this look, like James is slow. Which—granted. “I’ll strip, but nothing below the waist.”

James lowers the camera, blinking. 

“You got a robe or something?” Looking around, Regulus’ knee jumps once, twice. 

James swallows. “This isn’t—Wait, this isn’t what you think it is.”

“I dance in a burlesque club for a living, you think you’re the first guy who wants to ‘take a picture’?” He uses air quotes, the motion pulling James’ attention to his pink-painted fingernails, pale-blush, with little pearls at the tips. Pretty.

James shakes his head. “I told you to come as you are, that includes…everything else. But we really don’t have to do this if you don’t feel up for it—”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” 

“And I’m glad you are,” James says, mustering as much earnestness as he can. It’s the douse of shame that stifles it. How he never stopped to realize what all this might look like to someone like Regulus. Someone who looks like him, who slouches in baggy clothing like the weight of it declares some silent counterargument. 

“Is this what you usually wear?” James asks—because he turns into a brainless knob under pressure—taking another test shot in hopes one of the softboxes explodes in his face. “Outside the club?”

“I don’t wear sequined lingerie to Tesco if that’s what you’re asking.” Regulus narrows his eyes. James likes when he does it, how it gives his delicate features something barbed, gutsy. Mean. 

“I like it,” James says, nudging his head towards his sneakers. A lace is undone, urging to be tied. He clears his throat. “You should feel comfortable, that’s all that matters—”

“I’m fine.” A jab. Chin pulling in, eyes snapping down, his shoes curling inward. All these little gestures caught in a vacuum.  

“We’ll start slow, yeah?” James says as gently as he can. “Look at the camera for me.” And Regulus does, eyes a sharp grey like a snow leopard’s. “We’ll start with a couple of test shots, let you get comfortable with everything, and then we just—we go from there. Sound good?” 

“Is there a safe word?” For all his discomfort, Regulus can still sound like some taunting lordling.

James chuckles. “Have one in mind?” Taking another picture. 

“Clapton.” 

“Funny,” James says, hoping Regulus remembers their exchange at the bar. “Color?” he mumbles jokingly; it’s on impulse, as he readjusts the settings, attention on the display. 

“Green,” Regulus answers without hesitation.

Looking up, James’ chest goes heavy, like there’s this terrible thing slumped on top of him. Looking at Regulus was easier when his bloodstream was made up of eighty percent martini.

He watches blots of red creep past the hem of Regulus’ T-shirt, up his neck. 

Fuck me. 

Clearing his throat again, James ducks his face behind the camera. “Tilt your head a little to the left,” he says. “A little more—Stop. Chin a little lower. Perfect. Right there, don’t move. Perfect.” Does he sound professional? Please, God, make me sound professional. 

Regulus doesn’t fuss. He does what he’s told, his expression unchanging. Hardened like he’s hiding something. James takes picture after picture, trying to pull into it, that thing in his face like a drawbridge unwilling to lower. How is he so different here than he is on stage? In the limelight, all daring and liquid-lush, a fantasy of himself. Here, he’s rigid. The awkward, unwilling monarch posing for his coronation painting. Tactful. Cautious. When was the last time James was this fascinated by a face, by a body? All of its duality? Here is someone in constant disagreement with himself. 

It’s hypnotic. 

“Turn towards me a little. Loosen that left shoulder—my left. Sorry, no, the other—Yeah, lovely. There we go. Tilt your chin down, just like that. Perfect.” Click. “Perfect. Lovely.”

It gets easier, the two of them moving for each other. Swapping lenses. Thrum of the shutter. Softboxes popping. The little bob in that throat when he swallows. 

Perfect, lovely, just like that. 

Easing him open like the pad of his thumb on stiff muscle. Digging him open, digging—

All his toughened edges going shy, going tender. 

“You’re doing great,” he reassures. “Place one of your feet on the ground for me? Yeah, keep the other, yeah, on the—Perfect. Lean a little forward. That’s it. There we go. Loosen those shoulders.” With a foot, James nudges one of the reflectors closer, gets the light to hit Regulus’ face just so. But then his hair, his hair it’s not falling right. Wavering, James stumbles over an extension cord as he crosses onto the backdrop. He feels as though he’s in unknown territory, like he’s let himself into someone’s home uninvited. He moves closer, hovers over Regulus. That face tilting towards him, the green mound of a sprout lifting its head into the sun. 

“Do you mind if I—?” James’ hand lingers between them. 

He catches another bob in Regulus’ throat as he nods. 

James brushes a finger through the curls fastened behind Regulus’ ear, loosening them, one sweeps across his forehead, soft and glossy, like that night. His face dipping towards him. Shining below the exit sign like something sanctified. Regulus’ breath on the back of his hand as he retreats, stepping off the backdrop, hiding behind the camera. 

“Look at me,” James says, soft, feels it flooding his mouth, coaxing. Right here. And Regulus looks at him, through the lens, lips slipping apart, all pink, pliant. And there it is. Whatever he’s been looking for in that face, he’s found it. He’s found it. The hot secret inside of it. A dancer sitting on his knees in a drunken haze of limelight and red lace and pearls and heaven—

“Beautiful,” he feels out of breath, dizzy from it, like he’s slipping into this thing here, this thing like the inside of a damp palm. “Knee down. Other one.” Regulus with that face of noble men and false gods. “No, don’t hide the fingers. Keep them—Yeah, just like that. Perfect. Show me. You can show me.” The freckle above the left corner of his mouth. Jut of Adam’s apple. Black fanning of lashes. Heavy-lidded. Plush-cheeked. There’s a scar ribboned right below his jaw. “That’s it. That’s it, beautiful—”

“Clapton.” 

James feels it like a kick to the back of his head. He fumbles. The camera almost drops. He’s sweating.  

Regulus’ chest heaves like he’s out of breath. Eyes glassy. Mouth open. 

But before James can say anything, Regulus clambers off the stool. “I just need a smoke,” he says, ducking beneath a softbox. 

He stumbles over his loose shoelace. James should’ve tied it. 

Regulus  

James Potter. 

James Potter winking at him, at eighteen, blasting down the hallways of St Anne’s. 

James Potter grinning down at him, haloed by streetlights. 

James Potter behind the camera, telling him how good he’s doing. 

Good. Lovely. Perfect. Beautiful—

Regulus slumps against the railing of the balcony and dangles his head over the quiet street. Chugs at cold air. He feels dazed, like someone strangled him, and he’s trying to breathe and it’s coming out funny, and his heart is trumpeting through his body like it’s lost itself, bumbling about like a drunkard, and it might be in his groin, and he might be hard. Painfully so. 

Regulus wishes he could tuck his head between his legs and close himself like a box. 

Why did he agree to this? Who allowed him to come here? Is he truly so desperate for affection he’ll crawl to the kind of person who probably tosses it at anything with a hole between its legs. 

He wasn’t even planning on actually coming, loitering at that shitty kiosk by the train station, chugging cheap coffee until his cheeks tingled, waiting for the minutes to pass. Because it’s James Potter—James Potter who probably fucks people in that very studio, on that very stool, who probably invites all of Great Britain to his cushy Clapton loft to “take photographs”. 

(Which, in all fairness, is understandable, but only because if Regulus looked anything like James, he would shag all of Great Britain too, all of Europe, possibly. The planet. He would’ve bent Pastor Clarkson over his stupid podium and fucked the old minger to death.)

The worst part is that Remus might be right. James Potter is sweeter than he expected, dorky, and a little doting. Asking if Regulus needs anything, if he’s sure, really, are you sure? He fixes him a cup of tea, brings him his jacket, stands there with him on the balcony, while Regulus tries really, really hard not to think about how this is the same James Potter from St Anne’s, with the dirty smile and the sloppy shirts, the same James Potter he stalked online until three in the morning. His interviews and coffee table book collections and that gallery opening at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and those portraits he took of Poppy Delevingne (whom he most definitely fucked on that stool). 

Apparently James is not just some pervert; he’s a pervert Street Photography Magazine described as “the next Saul Leiter”. 

Regulus is so high off of this man’s attention he’s going through whiplash. There are only so many perfects he can take before he pulverizes.  

James turns towards him now, all concerned in the incoming dark, and he’s saying something, and Regulus remembers what his hand felt like along his temple, and he wasn’t listening, and will he touch him again? Please don’t—Please do. Please, please—

“Hm?” Regulus digs his cigarette into the soggy ashtray on the railing. It’s full. He imagines James coming out here every evening, watching the world move along through a camera lens. 

“I said I’m a shit cook, but how does take-out sound?” 

“What about—” Regulus shifts, looking past James into the flat, thinking of that lonely stool crowded by lights and gadgetry and stuffy heat. Something twists deep in his gut. 

“I think we’ve got it.” That same reassuring tone he used when his face was obscured by a camera. 

Clearing his throat, Regulus hesitates. He keeps his eyes fastened to the street below. He nods. “I could eat.”

“Say all you want about Clapton, but we’ve got the best Vietnamese restaurant on this stuffy little island.” 

And when he looks up, James smiles, and of course some higher cosmic order blessed him with impossibly perfect dimples. 

Because of course. Of course. 

Probably blessed him with a perfectly large cock to go with those perfectly large hands. 

Because of course. Of bloody course. 

♡ ♡ ♡ 

“I’m not actually going to make you pay,” Regulus says, swirling his chopsticks through the last mound of cao lau. James ordered far too much—he seems like someone who would—and it’s almost midnight by the time they’ve worked their way through styrofoam boxes and two bottles of wine, sprawled around the coffee table in the living room. Because James is so easy-going it’s like he has to make a point of it. Lazing on the rug with his head leaning against the expensive leather sofa. Oh, this old thing? I don’t much care for it. 

Regulus is just relieved he’s not hard anymore. (Half-hard; he can deal.)

James laughs. Chummy-chummy. “Kind of pegged you for someone more business savvy.”

“I prefer the term charitable.” Regulus pointedly looks at this ridiculous flat. “What do people pay you anyway?”

“Far too much to be warranted.”

“How ungodly of you.” He remembers how much of a hard-on Pastor Clarkson had for the virtue of humility. If it were up to him, they’d all be stationed at supermarkets waving pamphlets around, reciting the Ten Commandments to rushing shoppers and pigeons. 

James shrugs, unashamed. “I pay my taxes.”

“So what’s this project of yours? Because I have a theory.”

“A theory.” James lifts his brows. Tease of a grin. “Let’s hear it then.”

“What better way to take ass pics and call it art?”

James laughs again and takes a sip of his wine. (Out of a wine glass, not a mug or a jar, because he’s a grown-up; he owns wine glasses and a vinyl collection and a pasta maker.)

“To be fair,” James interjects, “I’ve never been to a burlesque club, didn’t know what to expect.”

“Verdict?”

“Killer martinis.”

Regulus snorts, remembering James swaying out in the alley with his cheeks flushed. “We hadn’t noticed.”

“Christ—What do they put in them anyway? I woke up, like, discombobulated.”

“Who mixed them for you? Because if it was Barty, there’s a good chance it might’ve been LSD. Or cum…Don’t laugh—I’m serious. He grows shrooms in his closet. He’s like if Burning Man were a person.”

James laughs anyway, huge and booming. He does this thing where it looks like it’s slapped out of him, like it’s a constant surprise. It sounds genuine too, like he always thinks you’re terribly funny.

Regulus tries to hate it, how encouraging James is by nature. 

“Is it sad that’s the most fun I’ve had in a long time?” James says. 

“Tasseled tits will do that to a man.”

“Or a little pearl get-up.” It’s a little impish—school-boy-naughty—and he’s smiling, his eyes go low, and Regulus knows this is how he gets them, this is his move. His heir of arrogance, cocooned in the surety that people never say no to him.

Regulus squares his shoulders on reflex, and it must look weird enough James shakes his head, clearing his throat. “No, I’m serious,” he says. “You’re a fun lot, all of you. Kind of reminded me of being back at school.”

“I think you and I had very different experiences.”

James cocks his head. “You were just a baby…Do you even remember me?”

Baby. 

“You were impossible to ignore.”

James wags an eyebrow. “That memorable, huh?” If Regulus scooted a little closer, he could spit right into his mouth. 

“That’s one way to put it.”

“Granted, I was a bit of a shithead—”

“We had to learn this passage from the Book of Matthew by heart because you kept sneaking girls into the dorms. Jesus in the wilderness, temptations of the flesh and all. I thought my dick was going to fall if ever touched it.”

“That’s—sorry. If it makes you feel any better, I had detention for, like, two months…which they enforced for…two weeks, but it was excruciating.” 

“Devastating.”

“Unbearable.” James is close enough he nudges his shoulder into Regulus’. “What about you? Bet you followed the rules, bet all the sisters adored you.”

Regulus shoots him a glare. Anti-social was what they labeled him. Unwilling to be a part of the community. Most of his time, he spent listening to Radiohead in his dorm room trying to pirouette barefoot. “I think the sisters would strongly disagree.”

“But you’re such a sweetheart,” James hums, all sticky sarcasm. And he’s looking right at him, the soft glow of the lights reflected in his glasses, and he smells of watered-down cologne, and his hair is so effortlessly tousled. And it’s James Potter, fully grown in his fully grown flat, all art-collective cool, all laid-back and covertly expensive. With the exposed concrete and coffee table books and the huge photographs and paintings leaning against empty walls in that I’m-not-trying-so-hard type of way. Because he’s so cool, isn’t he? He’s just a cool guy who has Al Green on vinyl and a home studio and eats pho on designer rugs. 

Because he has his life in order, doesn’t he? 

Because he pays his taxes and he laughs so unguarded and he asks if you need anything, and really, are you sure?

Because Remus says he’s a good guy. 

When was the last time Regulus was into a good guy? 

Regulus takes a big gulp of wine. (Italian; from James’ mother’s hometown; Regulus likes the way he says it: Vernazza.) He can’t tell if it’s helping or if it’s making things worse, his muscles clinching down on the back of his neck. He wants to shove his hand in to pry them apart. He clears his throat, looks at his lap, looks past James like that’ll make things easier. 

“So are you going to tell me what this project is or not? Or have I just unearthed what a blatant pervert you are.”

James looks at him for a moment, like he’s thinking. 

“Here, wait. I’ll show you,” he says, stumbling back to the studio to grab his laptop. 

It’s sloppy, the desktop filled with a scatter of unnamed folders and Jpegs. Yet, James seems to know exactly what to click. 

“I’ve been looking for places people gather at night. Like, there’s this chicken shop around the corner where all the kids go after a night out, or this launderette in Lower Clapton, and there’s this old Asian lady, always the same, who just sits there almost every night reading these wilted magazines someone left on the dryers. There's the tube, there's Megabus. There's clubs in Shoreditch, Fitzrovia. You know, couples, commuters, bus drivers, cabbies, sex workers—People in transition, you know?” He places the laptop between them and lets Regulus click through photo after photo. “It’s painfully generic, but it’s just—I just love the light. I love the way…people look and the way they act, you know, at night, and how weirdly revealing that is.”

Regulus already spent so much time sifting through James’ photographs the night before, but it’s different to see them like this. They remind him of paintings, diffused and textured and strangely pastoral for the frenetic streets of London. How they remind him of Hopper’s Nighthawks. Dreamy and voyeuristic. How James hides beneath umbrellas and corners and blinds, taking shots from behind rainy-streaked storefronts, in scratched-up mirrors, framing his subjects in windows of taxis and trains, foggy from breath, that soft speckling of light. The silhouettes of people, places, sometimes just the shape of a mouth or a dainty child’s hand, so perfectly arranged, so thoughtful it seems orchestrated. The way he captures someone in moments where they shouldn’t be seen, where they don’t think to be. Waiting for the bus, waiting for a lover. 

“You’d be surprised how often people look lost. But in the club, it’s like—I mean, all of you were so present, like you’ve got nowhere else to be. There’s, I don’t know, there’s something incredibly romantic about it.”

Regulus stops at a picture of himself, bowler hat and suspenders, leg flung high with his earrings flying, a spray of spit and sweat in a pillar of limelight. 

It’s become such a routine he’s never bothered to think about what he might look like, what any of them might look like. Dancer’s in a sleazy club in Soho. They should look cheap in their frilly costumes and their scuffed heels. But under James’ gentle, mystic gaze, they look painted. Their jubilant sprawl. Their frolic. They’re laughing. They’re lovely. 

Would anyone ever describe them as lovely?

Regulus hastily jumps to the next picture, only to realize he’s reached the end. He snaps the laptop shut. He’s quiet for a moment. James’ eyes are on him. All of his insistent, heady attention crowds the little space between them until Regulus swears he can feel it in his mouth, vibrating, feels it throttling him, feels it like hands around his bloody throat. 

“How’d you know you wanted to do this?” Regulus breathes, smoothing his hand over the laptop before letting it slide to the floor. 

“How’d you know you wanted to dance?”

“It’s my fifth limb.” 

James nods. “I like that.” Then: “I don’t like studios though.”

“I don’t think I like them either.”

“Next time we’ll take it outside, then.”

Regulus snorts, shaking his head. “You’re being awfully presumptuous again.”

“Last time it worked.”

“Barely.”

James leans in close. He’s all breath. Regulus can see his own reflection in his glasses. “You’re here, aren’t you?” 

“And you’re glad I am,” Regulus says. 

“You are known for your charity.” James grins. 

Cheeky fuck. 

James  

When James was sixteen, his father sat him down to hold a very Shakespearean monologue about a very serious family affliction: 

Listen here, Jamie. I see it in you. 

Obsession is an extremely useless trait your mother has to regularly thwack me with a spatula for—but she stopped once she realized I quite enjoyed it. 

It isn’t some huge revelation. James created a whole photographic series of a quince in a shoebox, which he kept under his bed for days on end (inviting an army of maggots and flies into his childhood bedroom, much to his mother’s dismay). At nineteen, he spent every afternoon in bed with sweet, awkward Emilia Abbot from the waterpolo club, taking pictures of nothing but the gap between her two front teeth. He's always loved bodies, he's always loved faces, he loves the dusty-dry patches of elbows, the slew of hair frizzed against the elastic of underwear, razor burn, the earthy swirl of belly buttons. The summer he realized he was into men, was a summer bursting with pubic hair and armpits and asses and dimpled thighs. Followed by a month of him frequenting the straightest live-rock pub to take a picture of a very particular angle of a very particular cluster of stickers on the bar counter, because, like his father, he’s a very particular type of nut. 

James doesn’t know when it started. Maybe with the text Regulus sent him after the first time he came over—Home now. Goodnight. Curt, with full stops. Awfully sweet. Awfully charming. 

Maybe it started with Remus inviting James for drinks at the club after the show, sprawled around the bar with the dancers in sweatpants and hoodies, nursing their sores. Regulus perched on the bar counter chatting with the band, his hair still gelled into place with bobby pins and pearls, his pretty painted fingers tinkering through the air. Cheeks flushed with exhaustion.

Maybe it was the impromptu passport picture he took for Marlene, or the headshots he took of Pandora before curtain call, lower, make sure it’s mostly my cleavage! Or maybe it was that night Sirius pulled him out to Westminster—a covert vetting process—and the two of them ended up on the rooftops at sunrise, trying to flick toffees into the open windows below, like children, and Sirius looked at him, all cackling and sloshed, Fine, he said, you’ll do.

Maybe it was all those hungover breakfasts around the monster of a table that crowds the kitchen in the flat Regulus shares with Sirius and Remus; all dreamcatchers and Moroccan lanterns, the magnets on the fridge. Maybe it was Barty and Dorcas trying to make rigatoni with James’ pasta maker, his kitchen island sludged with egg and splashed wine. 

Or that night James took Regulus to the chicken shop around the corner, how delighted he felt about finding out that Regulus prefers his fries curly, that he hates pickles, hates when people suck their fingers when they eat. How James got away with taking a photo: Regulus sitting by their table, framed by the shop windows in a yellow glaze, blurry safe for the pink of his mouth. Regulus’ mouth. Regulus’ mouth curling to the right during his Baby Siren routine, curling down when he’s being inconvenienced, hardening when he spits a jab that lands perfectly. 

The night James called him Regs out loud and Regulus let him. No one calls me that. 

I want to, James thought. I’ll call you Regs. I’ll bring you kebabs after training. I’ll walk you home. I’ll go out and dance with you on the nights you feel like it. 

Regulus rarely goes out, always turning down Sirius’ and James’ ardent attempts at pulling him out to Brixton. But then sometimes he will, sometimes it’s all of them, Pandora bouncing in the beaded corset she’ll keep on after the show, Dorcas and Marlene slinking around each other, their matching shingle bob wigs. And all together, they’re this magnetic cluster of flesh moving through fog machines, so in control of their bodies even when they’re high and pissed and singing raucously along to Britney Spears and Madonna. Regulus’ lovely pang of a face in a shard of cheap laser light, the sway of his hips, his plush little thighs. How he dances when he doesn’t care, doesn’t think to. Little darling. 

Being with Regulus is being constantly aware of where his arm is in comparison to James’. To know his knee is jumping beneath the table, his elbow sharp and bony, his feet two steps ahead, his shoulder there, his mouth. Being with Regulus is thinking constantly, unbearably—about his mouth. 

“You’ve been acting weird,” Lily said to James just last week when he took Hailey off her and Fiona’s hands, their two-year-old tumbling through his flat like a canon ball. “Barely see you anymore…” She said it like she was accusing him of something, like he held this big, big secret. 

James doesn’t know when it started, all he knows is that everyone in his life is eternally busy, eternally making plans that someone will ultimately cancel on. Everything has to be checked in calendars and apps, with secretaries, with families; life is about politics and summer holidays and kids and new cars. Lily’s wife is a banker, and his neighbor, Mary, is a dental hygienist and her kids go to St Vincent’s—and it’s not what you went through, James. It’s modern now. Like, liberal, it’s Christ for show!—and the last guy he dated was some corporate banking intern at an FX-desk who’d scramble out of bed for his boss, speeding to the office at three in the morning.

When did everyone around him start growing up?

When was the last time he was around people who didn’t want anything from him, who didn’t have any expectations, who didn’t care about vacation plans and tax brackets? 

At the Coven, James is just the guy who brings them food before curtain call and raises his hand during Spinning Hex-agon when they’ve been hit with a shy crowd. 

It’s gotten to the point where James will sit in the left corner booth in the afternoon, with his laptop, editing photos, answering emails, telling his agent over Zoom that he’s found some weird new co-working space (You wouldn’t believe it, they’ve got a live band!).

At this point, he’s brought them so much take-out, they expect it, groaning in disappointment whenever he doesn’t descend the stairs balancing towers of cartons and styrofoam boxes.

They get especially rabid on training days. They’ve been hacking away at a new routine. Emery, the beefy guy that successfully lifted James onto his shoulder, during a particularly wild night out, is supposed to catch one of the dancers falling from a chandelier, a willowy acrobat with the toughest Hull accent James has ever heard. 

They’ve been at it for hours now, all chairs and canes, all the tossing and spinning about making them collapse into each other the second the music stops. 

It still surprises James, seeing them like this—and not just the dancers, but everything about this place. With the lights on, it reveals all the worn-down corners of normalcy. The musicians leafing through sheet music during quick breaks, the wait staff hunched over the bar watching Evan and Barty shake together the new menu (including an improved Spider’s Silk, which James is too traumatized to even look at). The dancers helping each other stretch. All their bodily closeness. Without the lights and the crowd, they lean against each other, fix each other’s hair, muffle laughter into shoulders and share granola bars.

They screech when Remus sends the band out on a smoke break, letting Dorcas reign over the AUX-cord. Dancing in silly bursts of delight when she lets Beyoncé’s Heated boom through the speakers. Marlene shakes her hips, pretending to dry-hump Pandora who’s bent forward fixing her tights. Even Regulus tiredly shimmies his shoulders, a lazy wave of his hand as he mouths along.

In sweats and a big jumper, he’s a cat lazing in a patch of sun, unbothered, enjoying himself. Even when James doesn’t have a camera to capture it, he pretends he does: Regulus puddled on the stage, jumper shucked up to reveal the flat planes of his pale stomach. It’s the perfect angle, little tufts of lint in a bar of limelight, the soft hairs on his skin like peach fuzz. His swooping profile, swirling of curls. 

Pandora flops onto him, pressing her face into his stomach to blow raspberries. Regulus laughs. Something inside of James cracks just a little.

The music stops when, emerging from behind velvet curtains, Sirius claps his hands. “Okay, focus up! We need some fresh routines for the next quarter or Lola will actually have to ride her human bull all the way down here—”

“Well, speaking of bulls,” Marlene says so fast, the way she does every time, and like every time she’s flattened by a wave of groans and eye-rolls. 

“Stop!” Someone whines. “Don’t bloody start, Marlene…”

“What?” She shrugs. “Dua Lipa did it, it’s chic!”

“It’s tasteless.”

Gideon scoffs from the pit and tosses his clipboard on stage. “American.”

“For the last time,” Sirius says, rubbing at his temples, “we’re not doing mechanical bulls.”

“You just want to hump something,” Dorcas mumbles. 

Marlene yanks at Dorcas’ leggings so hard she yelps. “You’ve got a better idea then, let’s hear it.”

“Bubble machine.”

“And you lot call me divinely uninspired.”

“What about leather?” Barty shouts, wiggling his eyebrows at Evan who’s busy polishing glasses with the expression of someone who’d rather be doing anything else. 

Sirius closes his eyes, still rubbing at his temples. “Here we go again with the BDSM—”

Regulus

Pandora drops her head onto his stomach, pressing down hard until he coughs. “Jesus—stop.” He bats at her. 

Regulus lost track of reality the second his brother clapped his hands. He’s poured across the stage, picking at leftover gaffer tape, trying horrifically hard not to think about how James is sitting right there, being horrifically good-looking. Especially today. He had a meeting, and Regulus doesn't know what that means, but he does know how to appreciate a fit man in a dress shirt one size too small. 

Pandora digs her head into his stomach again.

“What,” he snaps. His head hurts. 

Wriggling onto her stomach, she nudges her head to the side. “Oh, what, like you’re not loving the fact that Father Potter is eye-fucking you within an inch of your life—”

“Can everyone stop calling him that?” Regulus says. 

It only started because James kept bringing food. One afternoon he jokingly fed Pandora a crouton in mock-Holy-Communion. The truth is everyone gets a little horny saying it: Oh, Father, I have sinned. 

Pandora bats her eyelashes. “Daddy Potter—”

Snorting, Regulus grabs Gideon’s clipboard and hits her square on the ass, loud enough everyone goes silent.

“Ow,” Pandora hisses.  

“Seriously, Reggie?” Sirius slaps his arms against his sides. “We need that rump tomorrow.”

Gideon seethes. “How about you go get the whiteboard before you start incapacitating what little talent we have left. It’s running thin these days.”

“Oh, get fucked, Gideon!” Marlene snaps. 

“Get the sticky notes too.” Gideon narrows his eyes.

Everyone groans again. The one thing Gideon loves more than barking at stagehands is his whiteboard. Regulus has lost count of how many times Barty has tried rendering it useless with a giant cock drawn with waterproof Sharpie. If anything, it spurs the guy on. He will have his mindmaps and his silly, silly sticky notes. He will drive them all bloody insane. 

Regulus rolls his eyes. “It’s too heavy.”

“Emery, help him,” Sirius sighs, because he knows as much as he despises Gideon, he’s their little clipboard twink who will get things done out of sheer spite.

Emery grumbles something incoherent, sprawled across the stage with his eyes closed, dead to the world with how often he’s had to catch Mimi from that chandelier.

“James will help you,” Pandora chirps. “Right, Father?”

James looks up from his laptop, all pretend-confused. “Uh—hm? Yeah, sure—” Muppet. 

Muppet. 

All of them muppets. 

Regulus feels James’ eyes on him. Always on him—through camera lenses and crowds, across tables, across the pit when he watches him dance. And Regulus loathes how dizzy he gets from it. Adores it. Hates it. Might go bloody cross-eyed from it. 

It’s been getting worse, the staring, the touching too. Lately Regulus can’t decide whether he wants James’ fingers in his mouth, or if he wants to strangle the man to death. Because his hands, his perfectly proportional, big, big hands. His hand on Regulus’ hip, his shoulder, the top of his head the last time James held his hand above the door of a cab after a night out, watch your head. Because James is ridiculous. Because he’s one of those guys with a cabinet of moves that should feel sleazy, but don’t, because it’s all so weirdly genuine. When was the last time any guy asked him if he got home safe? If he was hungry? If he was okay? Or have his standards plummeted down a cliff?

When was the last time Regulus was so bloody rabid to crawl onto his knees for anyone? A good guy? A stable guy? 

Eyeing him, Regulus scowls a little because it’s come to his attention that James kind of likes it. Makes him soft and teasing, makes him just a little disrespectful. 

Regulus lugs himself to his feet, ignoring the ache in his legs. His heart’s doing that thing again; it’s loosened itself, slamming through his body like a pinball. It’s in his throat, in his mouth—

And when James gets up to follow him backstage, it presses into the back of his teeth like a fist. 

James

“So what’s with the whiteboard anyways?” James asks in some sad attempt at small talk.

It’s moments like these where he’s terrible at reading Regulus. He’s not used to it, not being able to tell what someone’s thinking. Regulus Black is a foreign language, unrevealing, full of tricks. 

Regulus shrugs. “There’s a bet going on that one day we’ll catch Gideon fucking it.”

James coughs up a laugh as he follows Regulus into the dressing room, parting the beaded curtains as he heads towards a vanity near the back. He switches the lights on, the satisfying fizzle-pop of the lightbulbs pinging alight. A bulb at the top stutters.

With an exhale, Regulus lifts himself onto the table, kicking the chair back. A feather boa that was dangling from it slides to the floor. James picks it up. Regulus watches him, sitting there amongst cleanly organized powders and tubes of glitter, lipsticks, jars of pencils for god-knows-what. 

Regulus leans back against the mirror and closes his eyes. “Can we just—Can we stay here for a moment?” No bite. No back-handed undertone. “Maybe they’ll forget about us. I can’t handle Barty talking about some bizarre BDSM routine for the next half hour.”

James hangs the feather boa on the chair. It’s quiet here, a room cushioned with a clutter of clothing racks and rows of wigs, jewelry dangling from hooks. Hats, scarves, lacquered heels. The linger of hairspray and perfume that has settled across everything like dust. 

“That bad, huh?” James asks. 

“Oh, he’ll want to demonstrate it. With volunteers. Preferably Evan.” 

Bare-faced and exhausted, Regulus looks younger like this. Has he been sleeping? Eating? James noticed the way Sirius and Remus watch him every time they go out to eat. A habit that must’ve grown out of caution.

“Just going to stand there?” Regulus mumbles, opening his eyes. 

James swallows. He hesitates, like maybe he’s reading this wrong, but Regulus parts his legs just a little, and his face, it’s doing this thing, unearthing itself. Like he’s not sure about this either. Like this needs be careful, cared about. 

James remembers the last time they went out; Regulus’ hand pulling his to the swell of his hip, holding it there as they moved together in roves of light—

“What would you like me to do instead?” James says, testing the waters. 

“Something else.” Again, no bite. 

“Like?” 

But Regulus doesn’t answer. Instead, James moves towards him like he’s being called upon. Being in a room with Regulus is feeling the laws of gravity rearranging themselves to pull him closer, lower, there. Always tumbling towards him. 

James stops at his parted legs. His dark green sweats, his socked feet swaying back and forth. They’re so small like this. He could grab them. Kiss the arches, the little toes. 

Clearing his throat, James sweeps a look across the vanity. “So this is yours.” 

Regulus drops his head to one side, nodding. 

They’re close enough that James’ legs bump the inside of Regulus’ thighs, once, twice. He swears he feels them open just a little more. 

“Orderly,” James mumbles, pressing his legs forward, feeling the unbearable heat of him. “You’ve got lots of—lipstick and…things.” No wonder Regulus thinks he’s slow.

“And things?” Regulus repeats. And there it is, there’s the bite. He lifts a lipstick with a sharp black casing like a talon. “This is Rouge Louboutin.” The sumptuous softness of his French.

“Scusi.” James snorts. “Rouge Louboutin.” 

The perfect raise of that perfect brow. It’s a challenge. 

Regulus pops the lipstick open and twists it, the tip a deep dark red, and before James can react, Regulus grabs him by the jaw. It surprises him still, how the smallness of Regulus deceives you into thinking he’s frail. James has seen this body in the limelight, knows of the sinewy strain of muscle roped beneath his skin, trained, impossibly solid. 

Breath held, James doesn’t fight as Regulus pulls him down, closer. Closer. Close enough his face turns into a pale blur in a ring of glowing light. Regulus lifts the lipstick. He seems to ponder for a moment, his breath there, before he carefully runs it along James’ bottom lip.

James knows what this is. He’s gotten used to the way Regulus tests him over and over, waiting for a reaction he can deliberate on. It’s a game James likes to think he’s become quite good at. 

They’re so close, he hears the wet click of a swallow. “Smack,” Regulus whispers. 

“Hm?”

He watches as Regulus curls his own lips inwards, rubbing them together in a way James has seen his mother do in the bathroom mirror every morning she did her face, hair clumped in huge rollers around her head. All that confusing equipment and that soft smell of lotion. 

James does as he’s told. He’d do anything if it meant he could stay here, in all this closeness, in the smooth cloud of his cologne, of sweat, skin. His hairline damp from all the dancing, sticking to his forehead in pretty little swirls. It’s in moments like these where James goes a little fanatical, where the thought of Regulus wafts through his body like fumes, where all he can do is look at Regulus’ hair, his forehead, and want nothing more than to lick it, lave his tongue along his skin to gather each bead of sweat. 

The spell of him. Like this, James would do anything, everything. 

The lipstick is silky and foreign on his mouth, and Regulus fixs the edges with his thumb. The flash of his pink-painted nail with the pearl at the tip. Regulus pats the excess from his fingers to his own lips, smudging it in, a soft red tint like an afterthought, freshly kissed—freshly bitten. James would sigh if he could, would part that perfect mouth and crawl right in, crawl further. Without looking away, Regulus closes the lipstick, lets it slip from his fingers. The sound of it clattering onto the table, the floor. 

He leans back, James leans in and in and in. 

The game between them changes. James loves when it happens, when the pulling and pushing between them twists, the weight of a scale sliding to the other side. A shifting. Regulus stays impossibly still. It’s almost like he’s waiting, for him he’s waiting, like he’s placed himself into the pillowy center of James’ palm, like James could close his fingers around him and squeeze, just a little. He can’t help himself. It’s this shock of a face, basking in the oily glow of old lightbulbs, with his legs spread and his neck bared and his hair curling. Darling. 

James doesn’t remember the last time he was this careful for a kiss. How much he needs it to be. How he’s never questioned whether or not it would happen with his mouth so close to anyone else’s. It’s as if, even like this, with his eyes watering from it, teeth and jaw and tongue thrumming with it—he can’t figure him out. 

Is this a test too? 

Have the rules changed?

Regulus’ hands grab his shirt. He pulls.

Their lips brush. Once, dry and quick. His hot torrent of breath. James’ head floods with it. The lipstick smooth on his mouth when Regulus nips at him, like he’s tasting, they’re tasting, and James could spend hours just slowly, slowly, coaxing out the plushest, littlest kiss. He could squirm all the way into it, with his hands curling around these thighs, thick with muscle, like the quads of a racehorse, furiously trained. These legs that can twist, kick, fly, carry him across the stage. He wants so desperately to wrangle his head between them, open his mouth wide to taste him there. Eat him whole. 

The sound Regulus makes, a gruff whine that falls apart in the middle, sweet enough James grips into the back of his neck, pulls him in as close as he can. Mouth open, tongue a warm-wet surge. All he wants is to yank him closer, closer, here, wants to feel him go pliant and open, wants to dig through to grab anything he can, wants to scrape him clean. He wants him so terribly all he can think is let me, please let me. 

Regulus’ legs clamber around him, the dig of a heel on his hip. And James’ hands feel so good here and here and here, here around his waist, underneath his jumper, the jolt of his bare skin. His thumb raking along each bump of his ribcage. He wants to count them, lick them, slide his teeth against them, kiss each and every one. He’s so warm, he’s so warm he wants to bury himself inside.

Regulus’ mouth goes wet and heady, and their teeth clack, and it makes him smile, makes him laugh. James could drink the fucking spit from his mouth, would let him feed it to him. He’s so out of his mind he doesn’t know what to do with himself, where to go, how to do all the things he craves, everything, anything, anything to have him closer. Bite into him, drown himself in his hair, gnaw along each collarbone, suffocate in the hot humid plush between his thighs. These perfect thighs. Have them, have him. Have you. Would you let me? Let me put my mouth to your cock. Let me fuck you right here. Let me fuck you. Let me take care of you. I’ll take such good care of you. God, let me inside of you.

Regulus’s hands are everywhere, fumbling, frantic, like they don’t know where to go. They’re in James’ hair, running along his scalp, they’re at his neck, around his shoulders, on his chest, tearing at his shirt. It knocks a sound from him—because what a mess, what a big helpless mess, because he can hear the blood looping endlessly through his body, going places, going down, pooling all the way at the bottom. He’s so fucking hard. Pressing desperately into the heat Regulus is offering every time his legs wrestle him closer. How they move together. How good they fit. 

He thinks of nothing but a low wailing saxophone, and the luscious surprise of a finger floating from a silky sea of red, night after night. Do you think of me? Think only of me.

James slides his hips closer, impossibly, and he feels Regulus. God, he feels him there, his cock a hot swell against his. He wants to make him come, just like this, he wants him wracked open, wants to take him against the vanity until his head snaps back and his leg stutters high, wants him to shake apart right here in his hands, until he’s wet and sputtering and heaving. The sound Regulus makes, a stifled sob, as James grips into him, down his back, his fingers dipping past the elastic of his boxers. The impossible heat of him there. Right there. Christ, please—God. 

A hard pull. 

James snaps for breath. 

Clapton.

Maybe he thinks it, or maybe he says it, or maybe Regulus does. He feels like someone torn out of a current, like a cub dangling from a bear’s jaw, catching his breath and fumbling to catch the rest of himself. Blinking. He’s lost all sense of direction. He’s upside-down, he’s right-side-up. He’s staring at a neck. Deep red splotches stamped from Regulus’ open mouth to his chin, all the way down the curve of his throat. The red so bright it’s like he’s been flayed. 

Panting, they look at each other. 

Regulus is splayed across the vanity, amongst toppled jars and sponges and brushes, his jumper shoved up his stomach, the line of his cock against his sweats, that blooming patch of wet—

But before James has a chance to process what an insufferably beautiful mess he looks, Regulus flings his head back and laughs so hard it’s a buckshot to the face. The shock of it is so ridiculous Regulus slaps a hand against his mouth, wide-eyed, full of surprise. It’s one of the most genuine things James has ever seen him do. 

Regulus laughs and laughs, and it’s his real laugh, throaty, the kind that tears his whole face apart. He blooms from it. He’s unbearable to look at. He’s devastating.

♡ ♡ ♡ 

Somewhere in the recesses of James’ mind, the memory of his father looms over his sixteen-year-old self with a face crushed with concern: 

Listen here, Jamie. 

I see it in you. 

Chapter Text

Regulus

Focus. 

Regulus tries to grab hold of whatever he can:

The heat of the spotlight a scream to his face. Sweat spraying. Twinge of sequins. Everything frothy with diamonds and glitter-smacked lips. The swat of gelled hair across his forehead as Emery spins and spins and spins Regulus out towards the crowd. Linked by nothing but their fingers, Regulus leans forward, arm out, reaching, reaching, the muscles in his arms vibrating tight like the mooring lines of a ship. 

And the music stills, and his body revolts, that huge sprawl of pain moving through him, and just when he thinks he can’t hold it, his eyes raking through the black pit of the crowd on the look-out—all at once, he’s yanked back. 

He falters. He almost falls. Emery catches him. 

He swears he can hear Lola’s drawl in the back of his head, focus, moya lyubov vid’ma! Focus! Count! Listen, little witch!

Regulus tries to concentrate on the sounds, the music, the crescendo of the brass section: Caleb on the trumpet in his green bowler hat like a leprechaun, Twinkle-Toes Tony and Pauly Q on the saxophones, their shapes in the dark, brass glinting liquid gold. 

The clack-and-slide of heels across the stage deck, dress shoes black as oil spills. 

His costume pinches into his hip as he twists, spinning out. Emery’s damp breath down the shell of his ear. 

Focus. Just focus.

But all Regulus can think of is James Potter’s insatiable, filthy fucking mouth. 

He stumbles. 

Emery catches him before it gets too far, adds a quick two-step before he yanks Regulus back into the routine. A peek of concern on his face before he whirls Regulus too fast for him to catch the rest. He spins and spins, along with the others, the couples on stage a red-white mass in the lights. All devil horns and bespangled angel wings. Marlene and Dorcas are dancing to their left with their faces almost touching, the slick glide of their skin as they move close. 

Devil’s Tango is one of their oldest routines. Regulus knows it down to every swivel of hips and kick of legs, and it’s easy, it should be easy, and usually Regulus doesn’t stumble, doesn’t miss his beats or cling to Emery in hopes he’ll toss him into all the right shapes, because Regulus feels like a bloody spinning top, out of control and careening across the stage in a sticky bumble of safety pins and wet hair gel and sequined angel wings and body glitter and petroleum jelly to keep his skin from chafing. 

Is he here? 

Regulus could keen from it. 

He could rip the hair from his scalp and hold great big furious fists of it at the sky.

His body goes hot. He hums with it, the memory of James, how they’d danced in that grimy basement club in Westminster just two weeks ago; how they’d been even closer in the dressing room, just last week, the sweet sounds he made, how he could’ve crushed himself in half to fit into that mouth. 

Regulus is so lost in it for a second he slips completely, thinking only of James somewhere in the crowd. 

Can he see Regulus like this? Through the lens of a camera, zoomed in: on his arms, his exposed stomach, the stretch of lace on his garter belt.

He stumbles again, misses his queue completely. Emery’s breath hitches when Regulus fits his smaller body around him, the angel wings on his back slicing into his shoulder blades as he glides down Emery’s bare torso, body oil tacky against his palms, leaving long marks. He pools at Emery’s feet along with the rest of the dancers and their partners. A slow sweet drop. And the limelight scorching, and his leg kicking out to sweep around him in a long arc, the tip of his shoe scratching across the tape-riddled stage. He’s shaking with the strain of five nights in the spotlight. Back arched, face lifted towards Emery’s bowed head. His devil horns slump. Regulus closes his eyes. He could sigh from the relief when he feels the clasp of a hand on the back of his neck, pulling him up and up, his body following. He feels Emery breaking the routine to grip into his waist, helping Regulus find his footing, because Emery knows, knows how tired Regulus is, knows his head is so far from himself. 

And Emery is so close, and James is not, and the brass section howls, and Regulus takes a kind of liberty their friendship doesn’t have the room for—sweet, straight Care Bear Emery Carson—and he runs his hand up the back of Emery’s sweaty neck, pulls him down until their mouths are inches from each other. 

Is he watching? Is he the jealous type? Does he care? Do you?

That face above him stutters open to reveal a moment of panic, Emery’s kohl-lined eyes huge in the light, and they’re two beats behind, trying to catch up, and their knees bump, feet skittering. Marlene and Dorcas swap places with them—a move accompanied by a scorching side-eye from Marlene and a mouthed what the hell are you doing?—taking center stage, red and white, Dorcas’s angel wings fluttering as she twists and turns, the pearly strings of her too-short flapper dress sputtering out.

The music wails, saxophones whizzing high. Regulus presses his eyes closed once and hard, tries to focus—please just focus—hooks his leg around Emery’s waist. Hands to Emery’s neck. Pulls him down. Arches his back. 

Stillness. 

They hold their poses. His body throbs with the pain of it. Emery’s so close his nose brushes against Regulus’ collar bone as each breath wracks up his chest. 

The lights shut off. The curtains fall. 

Emery immediately lets him go, and Regulus almost stumbles on his ass as he’s hauled backstage along with the others. His ears won’t stop ringing. His mouth numb. 

“What was that?” Emery heaves, yanking him out of the way as the next group of dancers dash on stage. He looks concerned the only way Emery can. Regulus’ chest goes tight and small. 

“Are you okay?” Emery asks. 

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m fine—”

“You’re fine? Really? Because you were all over the place. I had to drag you through half of that.” He narrows his eyes. Emery’s big shoulders round as he inches close, face going taut with concern, and he chucks Regulus under the chin the way he does when he checks in on any of them. Because this is Emery, big, goofy Emery who pulls them out to karaoke nights and bakes the best sour cherry scones and meditates before curtain call and Regulus is…stupid. Just really, really stupid.

“What’s going on?” Emery says. “Is it—Have you been eating properly? Sleeping?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Not this again. Regulus can’t deal with this again. 

Emery stoops even closer, and he’s careful now. “Look, if this is about James—”

“What the fuck was that?” Marlene shoves between them so hard her devil horns slide off her head. “Tango’s our thing!” She points at Dorcas, who’s carefully inching towards the dressing room like she doesn’t want anyone to notice. “You have your own solo! Don’t come for our spot. That’s snake behavior, Reggie. I mean, snogging? On stage? Are you mental?” 

“Are you high?” Regulus bats her hands away from his face. 

“Rich coming from someone who’ll lap up shrooms like it’s fucking kibble.”

“Nobody was snogging anyone,” he says the same time Emery mumbles, “Ease off it, babes.” Because Emery’s always so sweet, isn’t he? Even now. Regulus feels sticky all over, feels foul.

A sharp clap from behind them makes them all jerk. 

“Marlene and Ms. Itchy-Nipples, get dressed!” Sirius orders, scooping the devil horns from the floor and tossing it at Marlene. 

“Stop calling me that,” Dorcas groans.

Ignoring her, Sirius jabs a finger at the rest of them. “Emery, help Mimi with her harness. I’m done trying to convince her she’s wearing it backwards. If she falls from that chandelier, I refuse to attend her funeral. And you,” Sirius stalks over with a finger pointed right at him.

It doesn’t matter how old Regulus is, but his big brother fuming down at him will never cease to be terrifying. 

“Stop being messy,” Sirius says in French. 

“I’m not—”

“Get changed.”

Shaking his head, Regulus tries to shove past him. “I’m not on for two more numbers.”

Sirius grabs his arm. “No. Get properly changed, I’m not letting you back on stage.”

Regulus scoffs. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means Pan’s taking your spot for Mischief.” He leans even closer. A long strand of black hair falling from his bun. 

“Fix your shit, Regulus.”

♡ ♡ ♡

Messy. 

Is he being messy?

Socially inept? Rude?

Really, really, bloody stupid? 

His mother must’ve dropped him on his head when he was a baby. Or maybe things went wrong far earlier, in the womb, when he was bobbing around in acrid amniotic fluid like swamp water. Maybe it’s some grand mishap in his genetic coding. Maybe it’s a multi-generational Black family curse.

Regulus isn’t built for blokes like James Potter. 

Blokes who kiss you and text you after, and text you again, and again, just to make sure, Let’s meet for coffee? Want me to grab you a wrap from the deli? Bring the lipstick— 

Blokes like James who know what they want, who don’t pretend or play games, because they’ve possibly got a billion better things to do, like work or therapy or change their bedsheets once a week, because they’re grown-ups who do grown-up things without an ounce of shame, because the James Potters of the universe simply do what they do without hesitation, and if it happens to be frotting someone to death in a dressing room, then godspeed. 

Regulus hasn’t texted him back. Not once. It’s been a week. He left him on read. Because he’s socially inept. He’s rude and really, really stupid. God, he’s stupid. Confusing. Confused. 

He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know what to do with himself or where to start, and he certainly doesn’t know if he should keep thinking about James’ mouth or James’ big veiny hands or James’ thick thighs between his, how Regulus was so miserable with the thought that he hadn’t spent more time paying attention to them at St Anne’s, how he could’ve leaned out the library windows to watch him thunder across the football pitch, would’ve spent his time at the back of class thinking of the soft dusting of hair there, imagining his tongue gathering sweat, imagining his head wedged between them. How he would’ve let him crack his skull wide open. 

Does James still play from time to time? 

Does he think of their days at St Anne’s? Does he think of Regulus there? Does he think about what happened in the dressing room? Can he not sleep because of it? Does he fuck himself to the thought of him?

The image of James’ frazzled face leaning over his, how he looked at Regulus like someone who knew exactly what he wanted to do next but couldn’t, he couldn’t, all red lipstick smudged and his face a mess, and his glasses crooked and foggy and his hair, God, his perfectly tousled, awful hair. Regulus wanted to grab it and wipe it across his face and stuff it into his mouth. How incomprehensible, how hilarious. He laughed right through it, he laughed and laughed, and how James watched, and how Regulus couldn’t even enjoy it before Gideon’s steps came clacking behind the beaded curtains. James, all dazed and hard, as he let Regulus shove him into a clothing rack to hide him behind feather boas.

Puckish, chummy James Potter. 

How Regulus laughed, at himself, at James, at how it might be a curse after all, how whenever he gets too close to things like this—toe-to-cusp, chin-deep—he starts grabbing at anything he can, tearing it all the way down. How bloody hilarious. How all the ghouls of his childhood come crawling over his shoulders, speaking to him like oracles: You will blow this up. 

Regulus laughed through that too. 

♡ ♡ ♡

James isn’t weird around people. If anything, he becomes sickeningly convivial with the people he should be weird around, which is terrifying in its own right—but ever since last night, James is so tense around Emery even Barty picks up on it. A man who barrels through life micro-dosed with blinders on the sides of his head like a juiced-up racehorse. 

“Do I smell…conflict?” Barty warbles, a wide excited smile ripping across his face as he leans over the bar counter to slide a set of gin tonics towards Pandora and two of the servers, Eleanor and a new hire with a mullet.

“Maybe he’s just in a bad mood,” Evan says. 

“What? Graham Norton over there?” Barty doesn’t even bother to hide the thumb he jerks in James’ direction, who’s sitting in the pit, beer in hand, chatting with the band.

Regulus strains not to pay him any attention from where he’s perched on a bar stool.  

It’s the first time he’s seen James not laugh at Emery’s terrible jokes; James who goes out of his way to make anyone feel good. Emery caught up on it quickly enough and has made large berths around both Regulus and James all night, refusing to interact with either of them. 

“Come on, Baby Black,” Barty drawls, crawling up onto the bar counter like a big cat, shoving a tumbler of who-knows-what towards Regulus like a bribe. “You were all cozy with him, what happened? He didn’t like you dry-humping Mr. Buff-and-Beefy on stage?”

“Barty,” Evan murmurs in warning. 

Regulus cocks a brow. “Mind your own business, Crouch.”

“Oh, baby. You’re kind of making it everyone else’s.” Something in Barty’s eyes glitters. “You know, there’s a bet going on whether or not—” But he’s cut off with a squeak when Evan yanks him back by his belt loop and Barty goes stumbling against the liquor shelves. There’s a silent conversation firing between their furrowed brows. Evan seems to have won once Barty flips his hands in the air, huffing, before grabbing the tumbler he shoved towards Regulus and downing it in one long gulp. 

Regulus doesn’t even want to know what’s been going around. What Remus knows. What Sirius knows. And presumes. And fears. And panics over. 

Regulus hates that he came. Sirius told him to take the day off for a reason, but knowing James would be here, just the knowing of it, displaced all the air in his room, in their flat, in all of China Town and all of the world, like gas pushing oxygen all the way into this horrid little basement. It’s only now that he can feel his breath, staring into the pit and watching the milky red lights glow across James’ body like he’s something painted. 

The light glints in his glasses when James turns to look at him. 

Want me to grab you a wrap from the deli? Bring the lipstick— 

Regulus swallows, looks away, which just knocks his gaze towards the music stage where Remus and Sirius are violently snogging on the piano bench—Jesus Christ—so he tries to settle his attention on Dorcas and Marlene inspecting the new dress Sirius finally finished for Marlene’s Cauldron Cabaret with the boys, velveteen, bejeweled. She twinkles in the light as she spins. 

“—okay, but this cleavage though.” Dorcas says matter-of-fact.  

“I know, right?”

“Looks like you’ve got airbags for boobs.” Humming in appreciation, Dorcas cups one in each hand with the seriousness of a marketing team assessing a new product. 

When Regulus’ gaze travels back to the pit, James is still looking. Or maybe it’s something softer with the lights so low. Is there anything softer than looking? 

When James stands, Regulus straightens.

James shucks his jacket on, waving his cigarettes at the band before he heads towards the stage. Regulus’ feet slide to the floor. James shoots him a look over his shoulder. Regulus feels all of these things inside himself scrambling to hold on—because the rules here are simple: James exists, Regulus fucking dies. 

He’s too caught up to care who sees as he follows like a puppy on a leash, clambering up the steps to the stage, rushing after James as he walks into the dark maw of the left wing. The narrow passage padded by thick gauzy curtain and usually buzzing with dancers rushing past, the bottleneck where they trip into each other, kiss cheeks and squeeze hands for good luck, a slap on the ass, a wait, your wig’s loose!

Even though Regulus expects it, when James’ hand fits against his back to pull him further into the dark, Regulus can’t help but seize up. James lets him go. He looms over Regulus in a way that reminds him of how tall James actually is, almost as tall as Remus. Like this, James outstrips him in height, eyebrows knitted as he scans his face. And Regulus feels cocooned in heat and dusty lush velvet, and the low lights from the stage pour across James’ cheekbones, his mouth, and he’s so unbearably readable he’s a house with the door wide open.  

“If kissing me was a mistake, just tell me.” James prattles out with the truth. 

His face bursts with everything. Regulus could scrape it from him, he could bloody chew on it. 

Swallowing, Regulus leans back into the curtains, reveling in the way James’ eyes rake down his exposed throat. He remembers what that mouth felt like traveling down his skin, scavenging, taking things. 

“That wasn’t kissing,” Regulus whispers. 

James’ stare is clear behind his glasses. 

Cornering him now, how he crushes him, his warmth and his needing so unbelievable it’s a force that could bend a space in half. Regulus vibrates with the anticipation of being pulverized by the might of being wanted so, so much. His head fogs up. He’s hazy with the memory of those hands on his body and that tongue in his mouth, of how being with James Potter means being gorged on, bones and all. 

James leans in closer, and it’s so unbearable. His breath is hot. He smells like beer and too much cologne. Is he only like this because he had something to drink?

“You haven’t texted me back for days,” James says. “You don’t look at me.” He stoops his head down when Regulus tries to look away, making sure Regulus’ attention is where it needs to be—like it could be anywhere else when James is this close. 

“You don’t talk to me, but then you—Look, if you’re seeing other people, then just tell me. Tell me if that’s what you want.” He stops, shakes his head, steps back.

Regulus’ arm reaches for him on reflex. 

He’s the worst, always pushing to see how far someone will bend—but this is James, and he’s come to learn James will shove you right back. 

“I—” Regulus takes a breath. Then he pulls James even closer, grabbing his wrists to slide his hands against his waist, pulls them up until they’re gripping him. Hands big enough to clasp Regulus right below his ribs, shake him apart, make him do anything he wants. 

The threat of it thrums behind his eyes like a migraine. 

“I’m not seeing other people,” Regulus says with so much honesty it sears hot-metallic through his mouth. “I don’t want to see other people.”

James whips his head back, looking up at the ceiling like there’s something there to calm him. Regulus almost expects him to laugh, but he shakes his head. “Christ…” he scoffs. It should sound annoyed but it’s so sweet. “You have no idea how much you confuse me,” James says. 

“There’s a club for that. Apparently I am famously dysfunctional.”

It’s stupid enough to nudge a chuckle from James. He’s still shaking his head. And Regulus is still trying to knit together the right things to say, but he doesn’t know how to tell him that he might be cursed or that James has a disastrous taste in men, but they’re here now, and James is so close his glasses fog every time Regulus takes one wheezing breath after another. 

“So?” James whispers.

“So, what?” Regulus whispers back. 

“Are you going to keep torturing me? Because I have no self-respect and I am this close—and I mean it—” His grip tightens and Regulus’ breath hitches like it’s squeezed from him. “I am this close to losing it. Like, look—if this is some karmic punishment for what a shitty knob I was at school, then lesson learned. God, lesson learned. Just don’t—Fuck, just, give me a break. Please.”

James saying please is the most divine thing to have ever been uttered by a man this beautiful.

“Please.” He says it again. 

Regulus is a butterfly pinned. He’s a pitted fucking plum. 

Their mouths are close enough if he just angles his head up, he can have him. That mouth that’ll eat him whole, eat him clean through. Legs move on their own. James’ thigh sliding between Regulus’. The hardness of him there, pressing thick and insistent against the bottom of his stomach. That punch of heat. That deep, liquid buzzing. They’re so close. Say please again, please. Please. I’ll give you my mouth, my cock, any place you can reach. I’ve fucked myself to the thought of you—

“—anyone seen James? Father Potter?” Marlene’s drunken yap is an ice-pick to the skull. “I’m too hot not to be immortalized! Get these airbag titties on camera!”

Regulus stills. James winces. Their foreheads meet. James’ thumb smoothes a circle across Regulus’ stomach before pressing in so hard he feels the nick of his nail through his T-shirt. James’ thigh presses up, a hard zing of thrill, of panic, and Regulus can’t help his stifled whine when his head jerks, their lips almost touching. A promise. Inhaling, exhaling. 

In his head, Regulus imagines that James has to tear off each of his fingers to make himself let go as he takes a step back. 

“James!” A chorus of his name from the pit. The sound of someone clambering on stage.  

Regulus imagines big chunks of himself missing—stuck to James’ fingers like burs—and he chokes on how terrible it feels, how terribly he wants them back, he’ll point at all the spots, here, and here. 

James’ eyes don’t leave his as he backs away, pulling off his jacket and tucking it casually in front of himself to hide the very thing Regulus would’ve lodged into the back of his throat if just given one more minute. Stepping back onto the stage, James turns and shouts a cheery, “Here!” The lights wash him in the sweetest, loveliest glow. 

Regulus prays for the curtains to tumble down and bury him alive. His breath comes out in bursts when he sinks down into a crouch and presses his face to his knees. 

Fuck. 

His cock is so hard he could cry. 

♡ ♡ ♡

When it comes to Remus and Sirius, they can tell by nothing but the set of Regulus’ jaw that something is wrong. It’s some inexplicable witchcraft that comes with spending so much time around one another they exist via osmosis. Regulus knows what Sirius is thinking based on the angles of his eyebrows or the very particular way he fiddles with his rings. He can determine Remus’ mood with the way he eats his food, the bend of his back, and especially what movie he chooses for Monday movie nights. 

Regulus should've known something was wrong when Remus chose Tous les matins du monde, should’ve expected him to head out the second the credits rolled, claiming he forgot to grab something during their grocery run. An impossibility really, considering Remus is the one who writes their grocery lists, managing the roster with a terrifying precision that has graced him with the gift of knowing how long the toilet paper will last them, down to the day. Remus Lupin never forgets something—especially if he and Sirius have something planned. They’re leaving for Mauritius in two days, and that means Remus is so painfully organized he finished packing a week ago. 

So there Regulus lays, defenseless, full-bellied from Sirius’ famous midnight quiche (a fancy name for when he makes quiche for dinner, which is neither famous nor eaten past midnight, as it barely survives the trip from the pan to anyone’s plate without being disemboweled by bare hands), eyes puffy from two hours of French tragedy, and positively drowsy from Sirius massaging his scalp for the past twenty minutes. 

It was a trap. He’s been played. 

Sirius slides to the rugs next to him, grabbing a pillow to place it on his lap, his black-manicured fingers swirling across the frilly fabric. 

Regulus can tell this is about to get very, very uncomfortable. He tries to wait it out, watching the rest of the credits roll on the television. Fresh rain patters in from the window they left open, dripping onto the ledge and soaking Sirius’ little trinkets: filigree candle snuffers and ceramic figurines, yellowed family photos of the three of them grinning in front of the London Theatre after one of Regulus’ recitals. 

“What,” Regulus finally says with a sigh, grabbing the remote to turn off the telly. 

“Maybe we shouldn’t go.”

“Oh, fuck off. If you stay here any longer, you’ll strangle someone to death,” Regulus mumbles, thinking of how running the club for so long has rendered Sirius murderous. No wonder Lola hasn’t stepped foot in it for the past six months; happily sending them pictures of her and Mr. Big-Dumb-and-Full-of-Cum baking under the Greek sun. (Gideon’s convinced she’s getting dick too good not to retire early—a thought that has sent Sirius into an existential spiral; hence the impromptu holiday.)

Regulus runs a finger over the pearls on his nails. “I’ll be fine.”

“Will you?”

“Yes, I’ll try my best not to drown in the bathtub while you get sloshed on daiquiris.”

Sirius goes grave and quiet, and Regulus knows this isn’t what he wanted to talk about, not really.

“What else?” Regulus says. 

Sirius doesn’t bother feigning confusion. “It’s too early,” he says. 

“What—”

“For you to get into something you shouldn’t.”

Slackening, Regulus stretches his limbs across the rugs. His head slides from the edge of the sofa and lands on the floor with a thud. He lays there like a dead man. “Look I get you want a clear conscience before wasting away in the Indian Ocean, but if you’re going to lecture me, say it to my face.”

“This whole thing with James.” Sirius slides his head to the floor next to his. He smells like their shared shampoo, his hair still damp from a shower. Lavender, cedar. “You’re not ready.”

Regulus sits up. “Stop infantilizing me.”

Sirius blinks, his hair spider-webbed across the colorful rugs. He doesn’t look angry. He doesn’t look sad. His face drawn in long deep lines. 

“I’m watching out for you, Reggie, there’s a difference.”

“Really? Because it looks the same from here.” Then, and he can’t help murmuring it, Regulus says, “Why don’t you like him?”

“I like him.” Sirius sits up too, still clutching at the pillow. “If you haven’t noticed, we all really, really like him.”

“So,” Regulus shakes his head, “why don’t you like him…for me?”

It cleaves him in half just to ask. 

For me?

Why not ever for me?

Regulus who always ends up pulling the shorter straw—the harder blows, the bigger mistakes. 

Regulus who always loves feeling so sorry for himself. 

Sirius is quiet and he looks at him for a long moment. It’s a look Regulus knows, the kind he’s caught from across silent dinner tables and church pews and rooms filled with people who didn’t like the way they dressed. 

Sirius looks at him like this, and he’s Sirius from back then. He's Sirius working multiple jobs to keep him in school. The three of them camped out in the Barbican Library when they couldn’t afford heating in winter, playing UNO until closing time. He’s Sirius standing in the crowd of every ballet recital, howling so loud Remus had to calm him with a hand on his shoulder. He’s Sirius fixing the hem of Regulus’ baby-blue unitards, making sure the needle didn’t pierced his skin, not ever, not once.

“Because I just got you back,” Sirius says in hushed, poignant French. 

Through the open windows, Regulus hears the gregarious Tagalog of the dishwashers out in the alley, the tourists milling about on the rainy street below. The smell of sesame oil and xiaolongbao. 

And Sirius, his big brother, looks at him with a kind of pain they can’t reveal to anyone else. 

“James isn’t like them,” Regulus says, breaking the moment like a fever. 

How he’ll clump together everything that turned him into this person Sirius and Remus worry about endlessly. How he can ball up his past into one terrible colossus—terrible exes and terrible friends and decisions so catastrophic—how just three months ago Sirius had to pull him out of yet another disaster, because sometimes life is nothing but this echo chamber where Regulus will always wait for his big brother to act as his savior. To help pack his duffle bags, to sneak him out into the street and into the night bus, Regulus’ scuffed dance shoes scrunched in his lap.

“He’s not like them,” Regulus repeats. 

“Exactly,” Sirius says, and it’s a spit to the face. 

James

He doesn’t know why he bothers looking at the huge Nelson clock mounted above the dining table. He distinctly remembers feeling proud of having won it at Lyon & Turnbull, a silly why-not moment when he drunkenly decided to register for an auction online, high off his first big paycheck: mid-century, brass and spiked cedar and thrice as big as his head; kind of brilliant; kind of ugly.

If he’s being honest, the only reason he kept bidding on it was because he liked pressing the big red button and he got off on people, somewhere, out there in the world, wanting it more than he did.

Now Big Nelson grins down at his plight, reminding him, painfully, that exactly two minutes have passed since he last stared at it, exactly two minutes since Petunia Evans has gone off on a tangent about James’ “fickle career as a little bohemian”. 

(According to her, art is a pastime for those liquid enough to afford it, and no matter how financially stable James has become, Petunia will always see him as the struggling voyeur dwelling in that maisonette with asbestos in the pipes.)

“I think we broke him,” Petunia tuts. She’s a tutter. And a cunt. It’s very synergetic. “How on earth do you survive those interviews, James?”

Lily hisses, “Petunia.” 

“James? The gallery?” Fiona—Lily’s better and perpetually unbothered half—presses the heel of her stiletto into his foot until he snaps out of it. She sounds more bored than she was five minutes ago, which James knows down to the second, thanks to Big Nelson. 

“Uh—Yeah.” James yanks back his throbbing foot. “We want it done by the summer. Got some work to do, but, you know, think we’ll manage. Always do.”

It’s silent again. Lily nods. Fiona stuffs so much mashed potato into her mouth her cheeks bulge. Petunia stares at an abstract photograph of a man’s hairy nipple. James spears into his lamb chop.

He made lamp chops. He spent a day marinating lamb chops for this disaster of a dinner, and really, it could’ve been less of a disaster if all he had to deal with was born-bored-to-death Fiona Evans-Gutierrez but of course Lily had to invite her sister along; it’s not like these things take a month in advance to plan because of Lily’s kid and Lily’s wife and Lily’s wife’s very serious, very time-consuming career and Lily’s own very serious, very time-consuming career that involves her being on call, even now. 

“It’s at Somerset House,” Lily adds, trying to resuscitate a conversation that keeled over and died about two hours ago. 

Someone kicks his leg. He jerks back. Lily gives him a panicked look, mouthing sorry, then steering her attention towards Fiona, who jerks in her seat once her wife manages to aim. Clearing her throat, Fiona scoots back in her chair. 

“Yes, fantastic news, we’re very proud,” she hums in that lilting American twang of hers, stuffing more mash into her mouth and averting her gaze from Lily’s heated glare. 

Christ, James wants to get positively, impossibly drunk. 

The last thing he needs to talk about is how unprepared he is for Somerset. Or questions about Somerset. Anything that has anything to do with Somerset. His agent has been hounding him for days now, demanding updates James has yet to produce. 

The truth is he’s been spending too much time at the club, his hard-drive humming with portraits and snapshots veering so far from what he initially set out to do he’s lost sight of it completely. He’s been having too much…fun? Fun. Fun and other things, like having the worst case of blue-balls since puberty, thanks to a black head of curls and the plushest, meanest little mouth.

Petunia smells his nervousness like a fly on shit.  

“Somerset,” she purrs. “That’s quite official. Oh, you must be so nervous, James.” 

“What do they call it?” Lily bumbles. “The home of cultural innovators? They’ve got van Gogh hanging in the Courtauld Gallery, all earless and things—”

“I’ve been doing this for twelve years. I’m not nervous.” James bolsters his words with as enough arrogance as he can muster. His eyes on Petunia’s in a silent dare. 

“They filmed Shanghai Knights in the courtyard. Did you guys know that?” Lily says. “Jackie Chan kicked ass in that quadrangle—”

“It’s just us, you can be honest.” Petunia arches a brow at him. 

James frowns. “I am.”

“Not even a little? Gosh, I truly admire your propensity for risk. It’s so…idealistic.”

Fiona downs her wine glass in a long gulp before topping it off to a ridiculous degree. James slides his glass toward her, urging her to top his off too. Lily has to stop her from filling it to the brim. 

“Thank fuck it’s not for everyone,” James murmurs.

“Well, you are a professional after all. What’s it going to be this time? Can’t hang up close-ups of cocks and balls at Somerset, now can you? They let children in.”

“Petunia,” Lily hisses for what feels like the hundredth time this evening. 

Petunia pointedly stares at the photograph of the nipple again—a photograph in a series of others just like it, strange un-talked about body parts that once slathered the walls of David Zwirner’s gallery. The first showcase James was ever truly proud of, and the first gallery opening he ever invited the whole Evans family to. A decision he regrets greatly. 

“I’m just saying.” Petunia tuts on. “It’s all so bloody frisky these days. And with anyone being able to snap a photo, there’s such a fine line between tasteful and sleazy.”

Fiona groans. “And there’s such a fine line between being candid and being a fucking bitch—”

The trill of the doorbell. 

Jerking up in her seat, Fiona’s elbow swings sideways, knocking her wineglass into the bowl of mash. Red wine splashes across the table and Petunia’s pristine white turtleneck. She squawks. Lily swears. Fiona chortles like she surprised herself, slapping a hand to her mouth. There’s a splatter of wine on James’ shirt. "Shit."

Napkins go flying, and Petunia continues her squawking while Lily desperately tries to get her wife to stop scooping the wine out of the mash, especially when she tries to slurp at it. 

The doorbell rings like morse code. 

“Okay, uh—Let me just check who it is.” James scoots his chair back. “Lils! I’ve still got those baby wipes you left, somewhere underneath the kitchen sink?”

“Baby wipes?” Petunia pats at her turtleneck. “I need a flame thrower.”

Fiona stifles another drunken laugh. “Oh, relax, Tunia, it’s just, what, Primark?”

“And you’re just, what, incapable of moderation? This isn’t the Flatiron District. Some of us know how to act in public.”

“You grew up in Putney. Stop acting like you’re on The Crown.” 

“Maybe once you’ve stopped that horrid American habit of reducing a whole country to a television show.”

James doesn’t catch Fiona’s response as he heads to the door, praying one of his neighbor’s sons didn’t lock themselves out again. Maybe someone called the police. Maybe Petunia’s nasal drawl warrants a noise complaint. Maybe they’ll drag her to Wormwood. Fiona too. 

Another insistent trill of the doorbell pushes him down the hallway. “Coming,” he mutters. 

Something bumps against the door. Brows furrowed, James peers through the screen of the ring cam. 

His mouth goes dry when a thatch of black curls crowds the screen.

And as James yanks the door open—Regulus tumbling onto the floor in a flurry of clacking elbows and knees, his bumped-up Nikes, his pre-rolled cigarette—he wonders when looking at this man won’t feel like having his knees blown out. 

Laying there, eyes bloodshot and cheeks horrendously flushed, Regulus says, “Hi, Jamie…” It comes out in a garble: hijamie.

Regulus grins the way he never does, and then he laughs, all throaty and giving, and it's the sweetness of it that makes James think of mercy, karmic bestowals—

“Fancy a sleepover, Father?”

Barty’s Cheshire grin rounds the corner as he hauls a jaunty Evan over Regulus and straight into James’ flat. 

No, he thinks. This is divine punishment.

♡ ♡ ♡

James is an idiot on any good day, most would agree, including Lily, or perhaps especially Lily—which is why she was the first to be flabbergasted when James managed not to kill her toddler the first time he ever babysat. Maybe it’s some evolutionary switch, some dormant part of his brain bullying itself forward when he’s handed tiny babbling things. Fiona calls it Dad Mode. James calls it Panic-induced Tunnel Vision. 

In record time, he’s got Regulus and Evan shooed past Lily, standing in the hallway with baby wipes, and confined to the bathroom. Barty’s a slippery thing, lost to the rest of his apartment the second he squeezed past James; either raiding his wine fridge or eating mash straight out of the bowl or flirting with James’ dinner guests. (Knowing Barty Crouch Jr., he’s probably doing all three.)

Regulus sways where he’s sat on the toilet lid. His eyes are closed. With a sigh, James kneels before him, ungluing the sweat-sticky hair from his forehead. Humming at the touch, Regulus leans close. 

“You gonna tell me what happened?” James says. He wants to say baby. He wants to say baby so bad it’s a living thing kneeling on his tongue. 

It’s never Evan or Barty he’s worried about when they go out—their livers of steel, their brains of psychoactive brew—it’s always Regulus. Regulus, who rarely ever goes out these days, who’s always left slumped in corners, forgotten in dingy pubs, passed out with his forehead on the bar counter.

Evan’s laugh lashes through the room like a whip-crack. “Oh—I think, think Reggie’s got a lot to tell—” But he’s cut off by Regulus slurring something about ripping and ballsack and clean off your body, and Regulus almost topples over, and James wishes he could split his body in two to keep Regulus from falling flat on his face and Evan from rummaging through his medicine cabinet. 

Should he call someone? Remus? Pandora? It’s as if Regulus senses when James’ thoughts settle on Sirius because he jerks his head from side to side, blinks slowly, his words coming out in garbles. He must get dizzy from it as he reaches for James, clutching at his leg. “Don’t call.”

James leans closer. “Hm?”

“Don’t call him,” Regulus says. It’s the scratchy panic in his voice as he leans his forehead against James’ thigh. He paws for James’ phone peeking out the front pocket of his trousers. 

James stops him with a gentle hand to his. “Regs.”

Regulus knocks his face into James like he’s trying to make a point. “Please—”

“D’you have any, like, uppers?” Evan has made it to the sink, slapping his hands over the medicine cabinet and swinging it open. “Christ on a stick. Colognecolognecologne…Oh—Concerta?” He eyes the white pill bottle at the top. 

“Don’t touch that.” James reaches for Evan the same time he feels Regulus pulling James’ phone out of his pocket. “Hey, don’t—Regs.”

“Wow,” Evan says. “Who needs cologne, this much cologne anyways?” 

James huffs. “Don’t—” But Evan grabs a vial before he can stop him and aims the nozzle at his face. “Put that down.” James bats the cologne aside and turns to Regulus. “What are you going to do with that, hm?” Regulus fumbles with the phone, aiming the screen towards James’ face in hopes it’ll unlock. 

“Is it, like, every, like day, like, another cologne?” Evan continues. “Like socks? Think you might be sick, mate.”

James manages to swipe his phone back, gifting himself a breather that barely lasts a second, before Regulus jerks his head up and starts tearing at his own T-shirt like an impatient child. What follows is bare skin and a familiar spiderweb of body chains, the jut of a nipple peeking out between a delicate web of pearls—

“So, who’s your girlfriend?” Evan says, spraying cologne into James’ face. James wheezes. Regulus slides to the floor like a wet noodle, arm stuck in his shirt sleeve. 

A knock on the door. 

“We’re fine!” James shouts the same time Evan bumbles into the bathtub and cheerily slurs, “Come in!”

Armed with a jug of water and two glasses, Lily steps into the bathroom. “Do you need me to resuscitate anyone?”

“Only if it’s mouth to mouth,” Evan blubbers. He turns the faucet on.

Lily snorts as she settles the jug and glasses on the sink. Wiping a strand of hair out of her eyes, she turns to James, an expression on her face that reminds him of when she was called to Hailey’s daycare because the kid clogged the toilet with towels and flooded the bathroom.  

“Think we’ll be heading out. I’m dropping Petunia off before she has an aneurysm.”

James frowns. “That bad?"

“Yes, well, I thought I’d save my sister from you knocking her out with a lamb chop—Plus the kid with the tattoos is trying to get her to do body shots on your kitchen island. He’s naked by the way.”

Evan wields another whip-crack laugh (loud enough James wonders why anyone would describe him as quiet; drunk Evan is a demonic fever dream). Regulus slurs something unintelligible from where he’s sprawled on the bathmat.

Lily regards them, unfazed by Regs’ get-up, by Evan stripping in the bathtub. 

It’s almost like they’re back at uni, how she was so used to James being surrounded by a new set of drunken strangers every weekend. I know you get bored, Jamie, but I’m starting to get whiplash. Isn’t that what she said? Or has he tampered with the memory so often he’s molded them into some self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Lily looks at him now, like a grand expectation has been met, but James looks away before he lets that thought sink its teeth in. 

With the composure of both a mother and a pediatric surgeon on call, Lily pours a glass of water and turns towards Regulus.  

“You should see them,” she says to him as she hands him the glass—light, conversational—waiting patiently for him to have a firm grip on it. “Family dinners turn into a Piers Morgan interview.” 

James’ frown deepens. “Then stop dragging her to things no one wants her at.”

“Oh, shush. She’s, you know how she is. Vernon left her—”

“A year ago.”

“Well, she’s, you know, fragile. This is the crossroad where people either kill themselves or join a cult or write Jesus Christ Superstar. What was I supposed to do?”

“Here’s a fantastic idea. Maybe not invite her?” James reaches over to turn the bathtub faucet off. Evan turns it back on. He grabs a shampoo bottle and squirts it into the spray. 

Folding her arms at her chest, Lily gives James a curt look. “And to think you and her got along so well that Christmas.”

Because of course the universe won’t ever let James live down the night he snogged that cow underneath a mistletoe, pissed on Mrs. Evans’ weapons-grade eggnog. Of course. 

He narrows his eyes. “That’s a low blow—Stop that,” James warns Evan, who’s moved on to rubbing a loofah into what seems to be his asscrack. 

James is about to pry it out of his hands when the door whizzes open, Fiona there, frazzled in a way he rarely sees her—Fiona, with the usual glacial grace of a New York It Girl.

“How dare you leave me alone with Princess Margaret,” she hisses, visibly drunker than she was when they arrived. 

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Lily groans, “she’s not that bad!”

“I will shove her into James’ noodle machine—”

“Do not touch my pasta maker—”

Petunia’s ruddy face squeezes past Fiona’s in the doorjamb, morphing them into the two-headed hellion of James’ worst nightmare.

“I very begrudgingly want to partake in this bathroom circus situation,” Petunia tuts, “but there’s a naked junkie in your kitchen, and I’d very much like to go home.”

A lovely, throaty laugh rumbles through the bathroom. 

If James weren’t neck-deep in this delirium of an evening, he would’ve knelt in front of Regulus to watch that laugh pour across his perfect, perfect lips, because maybe, just maybe, this evening could be saved, and maybe, just maybe, the universe really isn’t so wretched—

Evan sheds his last piece of clothing. His boxers hit James’ head with a wet slap. 

♡ ♡ ♡

James manages to keep Evan and Barty sequestered in his guest bedroom. He’s too tired to think about the cleaning crew he’ll have to hire. Maybe he’ll find one that’ll conduct an exorcism.

According to Barty they were at some shit rave in Dalston (“—how were we supposed to know it’s London’s armpit?!”) at which they didn’t even last a full hour before getting so high they collectively decided James’ flat was closer than theirs. They also decided James’ flat is a bed and breakfast. 

There’s mash all over the table like someone dug through it with their hands, a half-eaten lamb chop on the leather sofa, and his only bottle of Château Lafite is open and half-guzzled on the balcony. James grabs the wine and takes a long, long swig. He smokes. He thinks about his mum; he’ll call her tomorrow. He thinks about Somerset and about the series of photos he’s got on his hard-drive. He thinks about his favorite one: a kid in baggy sweats, staring into the camera like a dare. 

He thinks maybe Petunia’s right. He thinks someone should push her off Big Ben. He imagines Petunia falling off various other cultural landmarks—the Eiffel Tower, the Burj Khalifa—as he helps Regulus out of his clothes and chains and into old sweats and a jumper he found tucked into the back of his closet.

In his head, James watches Petunia fall off the Statue of Liberty in hopes it’ll distract him from having ten separate heart attacks because seeing Regulus Black in nothing but body chains is one thing, but seeing him in James’ jumper with the neckline swooping down a shoulder might actually kill him. 

Regulus’ skin is left puckered and red from where the chains snagged into his neck. He’s so pale everywhere, supple-soft.

Somewhere between staring at his collarbone and his chin, James realizes he hasn’t touched Regulus since that day in the dressing room: the sumptuous glittering bubble of lightbulbs and powder blush and Regulus’ throat sweet enough to bite. 

Something inside of him throbs and he’s ashamed of how terribly it does. Thinking of Regulus stumbling through some dingy Dalston rave hiding in his loose Diesel jeans and T-shirt, hiding the pearl chains and his chest and the swoop of his spine and each bow of his ribs and his hips and his thighs and his knees and his ankles and heels and toes. And skin. 

Being around Regulus is thinking relentlessly of where his body is in relation to his. It’s the constant thinking of his body. His body somewhere out in the world. 

His body, moving. His body, existing. 

James had too much wine. 

Leaning against the door, James watches as Regulus sloppily knots the sweats to keep them from slipping. He lets Regulus raid his medicine cabinet and bathroom cupboards, watches him gurgle mouthwash while he slathers on whatever he finds until his face is dewy with cream, sunscreen and aftershave. He surveys James’ colognes, his contact lens fluid, his dental floss and shaving cream, every comb and Q-tip, touching all he sees with the messy intensity of toddlers and drunks. Two days ago, James was convinced Regulus wouldn’t step foot in his flat again. 

Once he’s had his fill, Regulus smiles bleary-eyed, slurring, “‘Kay, m’ready.”, like they’re going somewhere. 

James snorts, opening the door to the bedroom and nudging his head at the bed. “Alright. Andiamo, topolino.”

Bumbling past him, Regulus manages to aim for the bed in the dark as he flops across it.

Regulus Black is in his bed; his bed is full of Regulus Black. Something in James’ head blares when Regulus twists his face into the pillows and hugs them tight, his shoulders rising like he’s inhaling. 

Backlit by the bathroom lights, James’ shadow stretches forward, pouring across the valleys of Regulus’ body. That milky strip of skin where the jumper's shucked up. James takes a breath, opens his mouth, closes it when Regulus finally comes up for air, his arm batting towards James, his fingers, his blush-pink nails and their little pearls glinting. 

Like he’s been beckoned, James moves towards him, his shadow eclipsing all but Regulus’ face. James is too exhausted not to sink right to his knees. He presses his cheek into the mattress. 

“Sorry,” Regulus murmurs. “Shit at this…” He closes his eyes, long lashes fanned across his cheeks. James has the unbearable urge to touch them, rub them between his fingers, lick them. He doesn’t remember ever wanting to lick anyone’s eyelashes. 

It takes James a moment to understand what Regulus means. 

“I’ve noticed,” James murmurs back, digging his face into the mattress, the frame of his glasses poking his temple. 

“’S a curse,” Regulus says.

“Really.”

“Yeah—and infantile head trauma.” 

“Sounds serious.”

Regulus nods gravely. “M’sorry…Ruined your evening.”

“Trust me,” James sighs. “I ruined it long before you came along. Lily’s family thinks I’m a porn photographer. Her sister’s the only one who openly shames me for it.”

Regulus looks like he doesn’t know if he wants to smile or grimace. “So that’s, was Lily.”

How he says her name. 

“The one and only.”

“Shit.” Regulus pinches his eyes closed. 

And it’s the first time James realizes he’s met everyone in Regulus’ life—while Regulus knows none in his. Lily and her family, always some faceless presence he’s mentioned in passing conversation. The extras buzzing softly in the backdrop of his life. 

Maybe Lily didn’t ask for Regulus’ name because she’s never expected anything different from James, who will forever toss himself into new people, stumbling from one place to the next like a nomad. Stir-crazy. Always seeking.

The way she looked at him on the way to the car; how it reminded him so much of his father every time he caught James sneaking back into his room at the crack of dawn, high and his shirt inside-out, his socks missing. 

I see it in you—

James swallows. He takes a breath. “Could’ve gone worse, all things considered.”

“Oh, really.” Ohreally. Regulus opens his eyes and deadpans.

“There could’ve been a lot more bodily fluids.”

Sober Regulus wouldn’t have twitched at that, let alone laughed, but Regulus tips his head back and laughs and it’s weird and loud enough Barty joins in from one room over.

James lifts his head, smiling. A moment, then Regulus goes quiet. 

Music from a flat downstairs. A car rumbling past. 

Regulus lays there, and he smells of James’ shampoo and his aftershave, his clothes, his sheets, like he’s loosened himself from these walls, like he’s been here all along, and James can’t stop himself from reaching for him, pulling gently at a curl like a boy at a playground yanking at pigtails. 

Give me all your attention. 

“You like me,” James says. “You’re still confusing as all hell, but you need to start admitting you like me.”

Regulus shakes his head, defiant and sloppy, and he’s smiling small. It cracks James wide open, that smile. He wraps another curl around his finger and tugs a little harder. “You’re obsessed with me,” James whispers. “You can’t live without me,” he jokes. “You’d die otherwise.”

He expects an eye-roll, a slurred little quip, but Regulus rolls so close his breath clouds over James’ glasses. 

“Cm’here.”

James hisses when Regulus grabs his wrist. Shaking his head, James leans back. “Not a good idea.”

But Regulus moves closer. “Come here,” he breathes, clasping his hand. James can’t will himself to stop as he brushes his lips over Regulus' knuckles, inhaling the smell of lotion, soap. Welcoming the way Regulus wriggles so close his face is all blur—like he wants to be there for James’ mouth on his knuckles, his palm, the smooth lacquered nail of his pinkie—arching closer until there’s nowhere else to go. 

Regulus

Kissmekissmekissmekissmekissmekissme

James

The warmth of Regulus’ breath spills everywhere. James’ mouth remains pressed against Regulus’ knuckles, inching closer when Regulus’ lips open against the heat of his own palm, his fingers. His flash of wet tongue, pink in the light. 

There’s no game here. There’s no stage and no challenge, no tipping of scales. Regulus is as open as a nerve, and James can feel his want writhe in the open; it’s a pulse beating right in his face, hurtling him back into that dressing room. Regulus caught in a sprawl, oily lightbulbs like a nimbus. 

What James wouldn’t give to bury himself inside that memory. 

Regulus’ attention is a hot cloud bank rolling over him, crawling heavy-solid, until James can feel it sticking to the back of his throat every time he swallows. 

He could choke to death on attention this thick. 

He’ll stay here forever. He’s immovable. On his knees like a praying man. 

Regulus

Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease

James

Something shatters in the guest bedroom. 

Evan’s whip-crack of a cackle.

Apparently forever doesn’t even last a full minute. 

James doesn’t know when he finds his breath. He doesn’t know how he manages to stand either, hovering there with all his common sense spewing about and on the floor. 

“I should—” James has to clear his throat. “Should probably check on them.” He gives him a pained smile. “Get some sleep, yeah?”

Regulus still has his arm outstretched, and it’s a gesture so unabashed and so unlike him James wants to nail his knees to the ground and never leave.

Regulus Black is in his bed and he’s so unbearably fucking darling.

Divine punishment, was it?

When James finally manages to move again, he feels dislocated, an inch beside himself, all of his edges not meeting right as he turns off the bathroom lights, stumbles through the dark and out the bedroom, leaning against the door to shut it. He does this with all his weight in fear it might swell open as if it has something to say. 

Regulus

“I’ll die otherwise.”

Chapter Text

Regulus

It’s barely been a day since Regulus ruined James’ dinner. 

In their empty flat, he splays across his bed, a rabid Vitruvian Man foaming at the mouth while Mazzy Star blasts through the speakers. He feels thirteen again, struck by the vision of James floating down the halls of St Anne’s like some sun-dappled saint, and he can’t fucking—breathe. 

He feels thirteen again, and it’s every John Hughes movie, it’s boomboxes and lawnmowers, it’s every fist raised on a football pitch. It’s Casablanca. Mitski. It’s every desperate letter Herman Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne. It’s Frida Kahlo thinking of murdering Diego Rivera. It’s Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand and Bruce Springsteen belting Atlantic City on a boardwalk in Jersey. 

It’s Leonardo DiCaprio dying in his little Hawaiian shirt. 

It’s Moses and the burning bush. 

Rolling onto his stomach, he buries his face in his pillow, stuffs the cotton into his mouth. He’s hard. He’s been hard since the beginning of time. He’s not sure if this is a tantrum or an existential crisis, but his pillow’s damp with saliva and his jaw aches from how hard his teeth bear down, and he is seething at the thought of sneaking back into James’ flat, climbing up the pipes to his balcony, breaking the glass just to drown in his bathtub and devour all his cotton swabs, his used towels, strip his bedding to wear around himself like a cape, crown himself king of all the delusional whores who have salivated over James Fleamont Potter’s jawline when the light hits it like a sundial. He’ll lick every crumb from his kitchen counters. He’ll crawl into the space between the leather couch cushions, sleep between pennies and lost batteries. 

He wants to gorge on James’ life; on Lily and her wife and that tiny squawking lady, wants in on all their conversations, wants to know how often James calls his parents, how often he babysits Lily’s kid. Does he like kids? Does he want them? He wants to know where James goes when he’s not around, where he gets his groceries, his teeth cleaned, his shampoo. Wants to know if he stands on his balcony at night, taking photographs of the way the street lights scoop great orange mounds into the pavement. Wants to know if he kneels at everyone’s bedside after they crash his dinner parties, if he makes them eggs the morning after and insists on driving them home, stopping by the pharmacy for vitamins. 

Regulus wants to swallow his life whole like a gluttonous leviathan.

He wishes he’d never let James drive him home, and if Barty and Evan hadn’t been sprawled in the backseat, nursing their cataclysmic hangovers, he would’ve reached over and whipped the steering wheel around so hard they would’ve catapulted right back into James’ flat. Preferably into his bed. Or across his living room floor. Regulus isn’t picky. Regulus is crazy. Regulus is flopping onto his back and staring at his bedroom ceiling. He groans and smacks a hand to his face. He stares at his phone.

He thinks of calling Sirius. He decides not to. He thinks of calling James. He shouldn’t. 

He doesn’t even last a full hour before he migrates from bedroom, to kitchen, to living room floor, swirled into himself on the carpet, surrounded by the plastic wrappers of Sirius’ secret mochi ball stash, scented candles, tea gone cold on stacks of books, a barely-touched tumbler of cognac they only open on Christmas. He’s placed them around himself like offerings for a ritual.

His phone, the sacrificial lamb, lies in its middle: “Is someone bored?” 

“I don’t even get a hello for my efforts?” 

“Oh, someone must be really bored,” James’ voice crackles through the speakers. 

Regulus rolls his eyes. Horny, he wants to yell. Desperate, infatuated, bloody upside-down-sideways. 

“What if it’s an emergency?”

“Regs, you could be on fire, and you’d still text.” A moment. “I mean, one week later, but you’d still text.”

Muppet. 

Regulus presses his face into the carpet. This is him trying. “Will you be there tomorrow?” he muffles. 

“What?”

Regulus twists his head, carpet bristling against his cheek. “Are you planning on being at the club?” He swallows and reaches for a purple mochi ball wrapper, digging his finger into the pasty crumbs. 

“Is that an invitation?” James’ smooth laugh spools through his body like a spirit. 

“Have you ever needed an invitation to sit in the corner booth with your sad bowl of olives?”

“Ha-ha. Funny.”

“So, will you be there?” Please be there. Pleaseplease. 

James hums. “Do you want me to be?” Something clicks and shutters, and Regulus knows James has him on headphones while he’s fiddling around with his camera. He hears a rush of distant cars or maybe rustling of trees. Regulus imagines him out in Kensington, Holland Park maybe, half-distracted while he takes photographs of old men in caps playing chess. (James’ new hyper fixation.)

“I asked first.”

“And I’m curious.” 

“Obnoxious.”

“Part of my charm.”

“Delusions.”

“Just tell me you want me there,” James teases. 

Does he know that while they were texting yesterday, Regulus was suction-cupped to his phone screen like a bloody teenager, staring at the little bubbles every time James typed something, delighted every time the tosser sent him heart-eyes and sunwashed photographs of his neighbor’s one-eyed tabby cat?

“And then?” Regulus murmurs, grinding his face into the carpet. He wants to open his mouth and pull the bristles out with his teeth. 

A pause, rustling, like James is pulling his phone closer, like his eyes are closed and his mouth is pressed to the shell of Regulus’ ear, brushing so sweetly. “Do you even have to ask?” 

Regulus Black’s most shameful secret is that he’s up for grabs for anyone nice enough to care. He’s the lightweight. He’s the easiest fucker in any room. 

♡ ♡ ♡

“—hello? Are you even listening?” Pandora dabs his nose with blush, allowing him a breath before she continues her monologue about her most recent venture into the world of older women basking her in riches—an investment banker this time, divorcee, with a house in Palermo, who sends her driver to pick Pan up after performances and decks her out in Cartier and baggies of Chitral kush.  

Regulus tries not to check his phone again. He’s been glued to it since he last texted James: you here yet?

Baby Siren was two numbers ago, and James’ reserved corner booth has remained empty. Even worse, James hasn’t answered. 

“I’m fine,” Regulus says, fixing his lashes with a nail. 

“Really? Because Barty said—”

“Can everyone just stop believing everything Barty says? He’s got mollywater for brains.”

“He said you threw up on James’ doormat.” Marlene quips, snuggled up with Dorcas in her lap at their shared vanity.

“He said you got a BBL last summer and that’s why you were gone for two months,” Regulus says. 

“For the hundredth time, I had to get my tonsils removed!”

“Sure, and then they implanted them into your asscheeks.”

Marlene lifts a middle finger, black acrylic like a talon, and maybe Regulus has Dorcas to thank for such a muted response. They’re in one of their weird on-again phases, which has rendered every unoccupied corner in this hell dungeon into a game of Russian Roulette. Barty caught them starkers in the ticket booth just last night. (“Yeah, and guess who had to clean that shit up? Not me—but that’s beside the point!”)

Pandora looks like she wants to say something but keeps her mouth shut when a cloud of dancers billows into the dressing room, all sweat and bleeding heels, bobby pins loose, bra straps unclasped. “It’s a funeral out there,” someone groans. 

The crowd’s been so unresponsive tonight the dancers have bets running to keep themselves entertained. One of them is how many high-kicks they can squeeze into a routine without ripping their lingerie. Dorcas is at twenty-six; the tally marked on one of the mirrors with neon-pink lipstick. 

Another dancer—Mathilda, their very own farmer’s daughter from Suffolk, turned self-proclaimed “big milk-jugged harlot”— adds a batch of lines to her tally, dethroning Dorcas with raucous applause, feather boas flying, hands rattling at the vanities.

It’s not like they’re complete imbeciles when Sirius and Lola aren’t around—things just veer off-course. Dancers are missing their queues, smoking behind the clothing racks, scrambling around high on adrenaline and whacking each other with push-up pads. Emery hotboxed the greenroom with a bunch of newbies who were too hypnotized by his pecs to know any better, the band’s played the wrong set twice, Barty snogged two audience members, and Emmeline’s so drunk she spilled a whole tray of cosmos on a bachelor table. 

It’s not even ten yet. 

“Where’s Pecs? Emery?” Gideon’s clipboard bats the beaded curtains aside. His face bloated and shiny-red with exhaustion. “You’re on? I’m sorry do I need to teach you how to read a bloody call sheet? Should we sound out the alphabet together?”

“My balls are chaffing, mate,” Emery whines from where he’s got his muscled leg propped up on a stool, patting baby powder around his crotch area while Mimi gels his hair into place because he’s too high to multitask.

“Yes, well, I’d very much appreciate it if they did their chafing on stage!” Gideon swats him on the head when Emery hobbles out in golden spandex for a number that involves two glitter canons (which is one glitter canon too many in Regulus’ opinion).  

“We’re behind schedule!” Gideon claps his hands in some sad imitation of Sirius. “What is happening? Wake up, ladies! Let’s serve some chutzpah, you absolute melts! It’s like an orgy at an elderly home!” He whirls out of the room, clipboard whacking through the air like a tambourine.

Marlene narrows her eyes. “…What?”

“How can there be so much rage in a man so tiny?” Dorcas mumbles. 

Marlene gives Regulus a long, long side-eye. It’s his turn to flip her off. 

“I can’t believe I’m saying this but I miss Mum,” someone whines behind a clothing rack, puffs of smoke rising between peacock-feathered headdresses. Everyone whines in agreement.

Regulus stares at his phone: Nothing. 

Fine. 

He’s learned his lesson. This is cosmic balance and his misery is there to level it out.

Just tell me you want me there. 

And then? 

Do you even have to ask—

“Hey,” Pandora says softly. She pulls his chin up the way she used to when he first started working here, his nerves conspicuous only to her. Looking up at her thick-coiffed lashes, her eyes dabbed in glitter blues, Pandora’s kindness feels wholly unwarranted and wholly unjustified, as though ladled from infinite reserves inside herself. To think he hadn’t fallen to his knees for her right away. 

He leans into her weight as she holds his head in her hands, kissing one cheek, then the other, and Regulus watches her in the mirror as she carefully rubs her lipstick into his skin until it looks like blush. She pats some on the tip of his nose. 

“Look, I know you won’t talk about it,” she says. It’s that tone. She knows him. “Life’s infinitely too short to care about being sensible.” 

Regulus clears his throat, feigning confusion. “You think?”

“I don’t.” She grins, seeing right through him. “That’s the point.” 

James

A giant bowl of olives is waiting for him when he arrives, placed atop a napkin adorned with Regulus’ loopy scrawl: Buon appetitto, you freak. 

He misspelled appetito. James wants to smother his face between his legs.  

He feels half-here, sweaty and rumpled from a day of trying to jam this whole city into his camera. He has no excuse for being late, other than his phone having died, which forced him to check bus connections on charts and timetables (which, in turn, also forced him to confront the helpless wally he becomes when left stranded without the internet for too long). He hasn’t slept, he hasn't eaten. He hasn’t felt like a person all weekend, tumbling out of his flat with his camera pack slung over a shoulder at dawn. It’s this boiling medley of feelings he gets one night before a flight, or his birthday, or a surgery. 

He spent hours in Kensington, that park with the ancient men stooped like storks over their chess boards, his SD-card crowded with gnarled arthritic hands clutching rooks and queens, eyes focused through cloudy plumes of cataracts. He needs them, he needs movement and noise, his finger on the shutter, because if he stays still for too long, the spiraling in his head makes him feel carsick—or just plain sick. 

He’s sick.

Can you be sick with someone? 

Regulus is convinced Holland Park is James’ new obsession. Regulus can never know that for the past few days, James hasn’t been able to stand still in fear these things in him will fall over and stay down altogether. He can never know that James’ obsession will always and forever be this: A glossy heap of black curls shining in limelight and velvet-red reflectors. Skin a smattering of glitter and sweat and sweetness, dancing in the corner of the stage, body rippling in black lace stitched with stars.

Fucking angel. Little amore. 

Regulus Black is so beautiful James wants to die. 

Regulus

Regulus knows he’s about to do something dumb enough to warrant a borderline choleric call from none other than Lola Bakaj herself. He prides himself on never doing the dumb thing, the dumb thing is for impulsive cock-driven planks. But that’s beside the point, according to Pandora. Everything’s beside the bloody point, when finally—finally—Regulus spots the shadow sitting in the corner booth, all the way to the left, the lights reflecting off his glasses. 

He can’t look anywhere else as he tries his best to stick to the routine, to the band playing a breakneck number. Mischief Managed is the only time the dancers pour down into the pit, a mass of black lace and see-through bralettes. Regulus blinks against the blast of limelight. Marlene’s heel slips on a puddle of spilled drinks. A bobby pin angled too close to his ear jabs him every time he rolls his head to the side. The inside of his mouth is tacky with nerves.

Just as the music snaps from its ditzy pace to something slithering and slow, the lights shut off. Dancers scatter, a tipped basket of snakes gliding through the crowd to the spots they’d marked beforehand. Regulus isn’t thinking anymore, straying from his table in the pit, stumbling over a slumped purse, almost toppling over Emmeline and her tray of cocktails, bar peanuts a loud scatter. Someone swears. He hears his name. His heart, it’s in his throat again, climbing, climbing, its little insatiable hands clutching at anything they can grab. 

The warbling notes of the sax herald the lights. The blast of trumpet, the discordant crush of piano keys. 

James

Spotlights illuminate each dancer—Dorcas lounged over a table with her back arched; Marlene bent over fixing her garter belt; Emery flashing his pecs at a booth bursting with uni girls, their thrilled shrieks coaxing a slew of laughter from the pit. 

Regulus’ spotlight is empty.

Instead, a small shadow stands predator-still by the banister that separates the pit from the rest of the club. James feels himself go just as still when the music abruptly slows again, the spotlights turning off with a dramatic flash. The sound of shoes scuffing across the floor, the crowd’s nervous jitter when a voice that sounds a lot like Emery’s hisses, “Shit, sorry, was that your foot?”

James imagines every nerve in his body frays into tangles, firing their signals in the wrong direction. He imagines he vibrates with it. He imagines Regulus finds him by nothing but sound. 

James thought he’d prepared for it, but when the music slams into the crowd, all trumpets blasting, the ripple of the piano, his booth rattles hard enough the bowl of olives pitches over. 

Spotlights snap to life: Emery flexing on the bar counter; Marlene on her knees in front of Dildo Dan—their cigar-clad lab skeleton with its pink length pointing at the bathrooms—her hand on her mouth, demure like she’s been caught.

James hears the applause through a film of static. All he can see, all he can think of is Regulus perched on the table, on his hands and knees, so impossibly still, his face wreathed in shadow—until the trumpet blares once again and the spotlights vanish, and James hears Regulus moving. A stray olive rolls onto his lap. His own giddy burst of laughter. 

“Regs—” 

Regulus

Crawling as slow as the music, Regulus leans forward in the dark, his hand batting through air until it meets the starchy cotton of James’ shirt. He clutches at it. He hears James’ stifled laugh. He’s got him, he’s bloody got him, and James’ hand wraps warm and big around his wrist, pulling him close.

The impending piano riff, the trumpets—

James drags him across the table, Regulus’ knees sliding in their nylons, until he tumbles into James’ lap with the tug of the bass going liquid-low. The force of it pushes James down into the seats and they lie sprawling. 

The spotlights turn on with their deep electric thunk. 

Applause warbles up into the mezzanine, cackles, whispers wrought with glee. 

Regulus imagines his abandoned spot in the pit. 

“What are you doing?” James says. Regulus can hear his grin. James Potter, so delighted whenever anyone does anything naughty, anything wrong, when someone breaks the rules. 

And Regulus doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s full of needing, and James smells so good, and he just wants James to hold, really, really hold him. James slackens, then softens, then loops his arms around, crushing him close. The hot flush of his mouth presses against Regulus’ ear like he’s kissing it.

“Hey—” James whispers so sweetly. He’s all gusts of heat. God. 

“You didn’t text back,” Regulus says like he’s pouring it from himself. 

James lifts Regulus face up so he can look at him in the dark. “I—what?”

“I thought you changed your mind,” Regulus says, “about coming.” Like James isn’t here every week to begin with. 

“Regs, I—” he snorts, shaking his head, “Barty’s charging my phone, and my—the battery packs, my camera. I was out all day, and...Wait, this is because I didn’t text you back?”

Because Regulus is a hypocrite, and he’s acting crazy, and all of this is so baseless, and his hips hitch, and the lace bites into his crotch, and James’ big, big hand spans across his back, and Regulus wants it lower, wants it there, and he grabs his hand to guide it past the belt, the elastic, the clasps, until James lets his long fingers rove past the lace, inside, cupping his ass. Regulus keens. 

James digs into the flesh to tug him closer, his hips giving the softest roll. Distantly he hears the music, knows every note, knows it’s ending, knows there are exactly four more acts until My Heart Belongs to Daddy. Knows he has to wait. Knows he can’t.

“Let’s go,” Regulus pushes into James’ mouth, out of breath. 

“What?”

“Let’s leave.”

James murmurs against his bottom lip, “Now?” Bites him. 

Regulus shudders into pieces. 

“No,” gulping breath, ”let’s wait for Gideon to beat us to a pulp with his clipboard—yes, now, you muppet—”

“Like, now-now.”

Regulus nips at James’ cupid’s bow. Nips and nips, god, god, god, god— “Did you hit your head?”

“Did you?” James’ laugh is a smatter to the face. Regulus wants to lick it from himself. 

He’s crazy to be doing this in the middle of a routine, with Gideon backstage scanning the crowd, looking for him while the light operators shout through the headset: Tell your strippers to stick to their spots!

No matter what happens, they finish. Lola has slammed that into the back of their heads like dogma, like Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, like a Donald Hall poem: always be closing—the ABC of real estate, used cars, and poetry. 

But Regulus can’t breathe and he can’t close, and he’s crazy, and he’s so full of need it pearls from him like sweat, and James looks up at him like he’s not sure if Regulus is playing a game, if this is real or not. 

It breaks him clean through. 

“Let’s go,” Regulus breathes it against his mouth. He wants to wrench his way inside, let his heart crawl from his own mouth to his, the tiny vagrant scouring for a new home, on its hands and knees, pleading. 

James tries to stifle another laugh. He mumbles something unintelligible in Italian. It sounds nasty. Regulus wants him to say it again and again. 

James is dazzling, his bright teeth in the dark, hair tousled and splayed across the squeaky vinyl. He glows like this. Regulus swears he’s vibrating. 

“Okay.” James swallows, clutching Regulus’ head in his hands, his thumbs smoothing along the edge of his jaw, his lips. 

James grins. It’s audacious. 

“Andiamo, topolino.” 

♡ ♡ ♡

James

He forgot his camera, his battery pack and phone charging behind the bar. All semblance of logic left him the second Regulus was grinding on top of him. His jacket is shucked over Regulus’ naked shoulders as they scramble out into the rain, past a confused Bang, the Soho streets teeming with late-night tourists, drunken patrons bumbling out of pubs and clubs, congregating around streetlights like bonfires in the bush. 

James is struck by all the memories of school, that luscious mindlessness, drunk on possibility, the night spinning like a Tilt-A-Whirl that could take them anywhere, let them be anyone. He missed this feeling. 

James doesn’t know how they make it to Regulus’ front door. Did he hit his head on the way here? He sways, watching Regulus reach for the top of the door frame for a spare key. It takes him two tries to get the door to open, jiggling the lock and knocking his shoulder into doorjamb to make the bolt unlatch. 

“Someone should fix your door,” James murmurs.  

“Sirius says it adds to the charm. That and the shitty plumbing.” Tumbling over the fold of the doormat, Regulus pulls him inside the flat. He snorts when James catches him, holds him, buries his mouth in his hair, his neck, breathing in hairspray and sweat, and before he can think better of it, he opens his mouth and bites. He could dig his way into him. He wants to dig his way into him—

James catches himself from falling flat on his face when Regulus shoves out of his grip, stumbling through the darkened flat, pawing at the walls for the light switch. James follows him like a drunkard, kicking off one shoe at a time. 

He’s never been invited into Regulus’ room before. Seeing it only in passing, fearing stepping into it might cross a line, as if that’s the kind of intimacy reserved for improbabilities. But he’s standing here now, and Regulus’ bedroom is crowded with a kind of sincerity that reveals all the things he soothes himself with, snug as a coat pocket. 

Regulus stands by the bed, soft in the red glow of a parlor lamp perched on a tower of books.

If James thought Regulus was beautiful in the club, he’s something different altogether now. He’s devastating enough James swears his blood has congealed, it’s not moving, and he’s struck stupid, he’s ruined. Regulus has stopped everything inside of him, flattened it all and hollowed it out, and for the first time today James is surrounded by silence. 

Regulus lets James’ jacket slip from his shoulders and fall to the floor. 

Fucking look at you, he thinks, his attention traveling across the complicated criss-cross of elastic arranged across Regulus’ abdomen, interrupted only by sheer lace. 

James wants to take a picture of the dimple the nylon leaves along his thighs, scooping over flesh, wants to take another of the peach fuzz on his stomach, the way the light pools in the space between his collarbones. The willowy cords of muscle strung down every inch of his body. His Adam’s apple. The silver hoops hooked into the top of his right ear. 

James sees the exact moment Regulus folds inward. He likes to think that not many would notice. Regulus in a vacuum, the very specific mechanics of his body in the throes of worry—how he tries to hide it, paints it over with a small smile as he makes sure the windows are shut and the curtains are tugged closed. 

Does he know? 

Does he know that everything spins around him?

Regulus

“Come here,” James says. He sounds out of breath, standing there with his back against the bedroom door. 

Sometimes being looked at by James Potter means being disassembled, each part opened like kimberlite. James told him once that he's a collector, of moments, of feelings and faces, and he flushed and laughed like he thought that admission was silly. 

Regulus doesn't think it's silly. Regulus wants James to collect this too. 

Just moments ago time was a spiral lashing out and moving at a speed that kept everything indistinguishable, but there’s nothing but stillness here, and Regulus doesn’t know what to do, how to stand, where to put his hands. Sometimes he poses for James without meaning to. Placing his arms like this, lifting his knee just so, his head turned just the slightest. 

“You come here,” Regulus challenges, trying to slather enough petulance over his nervousness. It’s a shit disguise. He’s hot with it, can you tell? Can you tell I’m not like this?

He’s not like this. 

He’s always like this.  

He’s so bloody easy he’s wide open. 

James laughs like it’s smacked out of him, and he shakes his head, and he does this thing where he looks at the ceiling like there’s something there to calm him—and then he comes, half like he’s indulging Regulus and half like he can’t help himself. He hides it terribly. Maybe he’s not trying to hide it. Of course he wouldn’t. He was born inside-out.

James bows over him and cradles Regulus’ head in his hands, smoothing his thumbs over his cheeks the way he had in the booth. Regulus feels like a child, and James, standing above him, uncharacteristically calm, uncharacteristically patient, smiling like he thinks this is funny. If it weren’t for the tent in his trousers, maybe this would’ve been funny; the two of them staring at each other with their mouths open. 

“This isn’t going to be some quick bathroom shag.” 

Regulus tries to keep his face schooled, but he can’t help his smile. “If I wanted a quick bathroom shag, we wouldn’t be here, Sherlock.”

“And what do you want?”

He swallows. “What do you think?”

James chuckles at that, like he’s humoring him. Regulus can’t tell if they’ve taken a step backward. They’re in familiar territory now, reality with all its caution and tests—none of that headless babbling in the club or the streets. And Regulus wants it all back. He wishes he could stop fucking thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking so much. 

“I want you to say it.” James leans in so close Regulus fights for breath. “Do you want me to take care of this?” 

Regulus knows it’s coming but it shocks him all the same: The grind of James’ hard cock against his own hits him like tar burn. 

He can’t breathe like this, he wants to bite him back, claw-at, scramble-for. His body tightens when James leans in even closer, hand coming up to clutch Regulus’ chin. He tilts Regulus' head to the side, and his lips trail his earlobe, the pierced cartilage: “Tell me to take care of this.” James is pushing, pleading. The weight of their scale slams towards him until Regulus’ toes barely scuff the floor like he’s held up by his throat. He’s flying. 

“I’ll do anything you fucking want,” James says, his nail scraping along the shell of Regulus' ear, down his jaw, his chin, pulling his face towards him until he’s all breath and blur, and Regulus lets him get close enough—until he pushes back. 

Regulus drops to the bed. James follows as if the whole room tilted, his bulk shifting close, but he stops when Regulus snaps his leg up with the reflex born from years of tossing himself across a stage. His tap shoe, slick with rain and grime, digs into James’ chest and soaks the center of his pristine shirt. Expensive by the looks of it. A size too small, as always. 

Bent over him, James halts and his eyes twitch in surprise, before they ease into something insolent: Little shit. 

Regulus preens. He imagines James feels the cool wet of the sole against his skin. Making a point of yanking at his garter belt, Regulus says, “Take this off then.” How his voice cracks in the middle, how he tries so hard for it not to: “I’m not cumming in my underwear again like a teenager.”

James blurts a laugh and grins. 

“Sod off—” Regulus doesn’t bother hiding his smile as he shoves his foot harder into James’ chest, its desired outcome waning the second James grabs his calf, grin widening. Regulus jerks at the touch. He watches as James slides Regulus’ foot higher until he can kiss his shin, mouth along his nylon tights. He tugs at it with his teeth, makes it wet. The more Regulus forces his foot against James, the more James leans into it, inch by inch until Regulus’ thigh meets his own chest, pinning him in place.

It’s the strange calmness of James like this that keeps him on edge, like he can’t trust it, like he’s waiting for something to lurch out into the open, for James to collapse over him like a roof caving in, for his hands to roam and his teeth to claw into his throat like they had in the hallway.

But James is so slow and so unbearably thorough, his attention whittled into blade-sharp focus on the black straps spanning Regulus’ chest. His fingers pluck gently at the lacy edges, knuckles grazing across the dips of Regulus’ skin, circling a nipple, digging in. His intake of breath, a mumbled curse. Carefully James unlaces the shoe still planted against his chest, then the other, throwing each over his shoulder. Regulus manages a stupid chuckle, before James spans his hands over his shins, and Regulus arches, gasps for him.

“Christ, these legs.” James laughs with so much relief as he smooths his hands up the back of Regulus’ thighs, presses his face against his knees, his glasses going crooked, laughing still—until he stops and he groans and he breathes and Regulus wants to feel him everywhere, wants him to take off this silly costume, wants to be swallowed, tumble all the way down.

But he’s thinking again, he’s thinking too much. 

James leans back, hands meeting at his chest to unbutton his shirt. He’s all smooth valleys of tawny skin. A thin dusting of hair trailing into his jeans, his Calvin Kleins. Regulus stares at the gold cross necklace he keeps hidden beneath his shirts. He told him once he wears it because it reminds him of his grandmother. 

James is so lovely it hurtles Regulus back in time all over again, plastering him to the library windows as he watches James lounge in the courtyard of St Anne’s, sun-struck, his tan neck damp in the summer heat wallowing over limestone. Regulus wondered even back then how anyone could be so lovely. Could one be made for it? Or was it in the water down south? In the sun? The olive oil, the barnacles sucked to beach docks? Was he blessed by some Ligurian Sea deity to haunt this drab little isle and all its horrid creatures?

Regulus groans, “Putain de merde—” James laughs like a tipped satchel of coins. “God, look at—fuck you. Fuck you.”

“Fuck me?”

“Why couldn’t you be, I don’t know, horrifically disfigured?” Regulus swats at his chest. He knows James takes care of himself, but, “Why the hell do you even look like this?”

“Would it kill you to just give me a compliment?”

“Right, because if it’s one thing your ego needs, it’s more people telling you how fucking hot you are.”

James grins, and it’s the crooked one that he thinks makes him look charming. “That’s close enough, I guess.”

Regulus squirms his hips up in some sad attempt at contact. Touch me, you gorgeous bastard. Touch me here and there and down there and here, here. Touch me herehere.

His own hands fumble to unclasp his garter, yank his underwear down, but James stops him with a slap to his thigh. “Keep them on.” 

Regulus puffs his chest. He wants him to do that again. His hands, he wants his hands on him. “And I said—”

“And I heard you.” James pulls at the underwear and lets the elastic snap against his hip. “Sometimes I think you have no clue what you look like.” James swallows, chest heaving. 

Regulus zeroes in on the heavy swell in the front of his jeans. 

“Keep them on,” James says and crawls closer. “For me.” Close enough to part Regulus’ legs and nestle between them, lean against his cock, hot, solid, and Regulus never wants him to leave, and when James whispers, “Please?”, when he presses it against Regulus’ mouth, he goes limp with the shock of it. A hungry kiss to his chin, the tip of his nose, right between his eyebrows. Please—

“I’ll allow it.” Regulus manages to say it without his voice cracking this time.

James licks at his jaw then kisses it. “You are known for your charity,” he hums.

“Stop talking, and—”

“Stop talking?”

“Are you deaf?”

James leans back on his haunches so fast Regulus can barely spit out a whine. He grins like he can’t help himself, and Regulus paws at him to pull him back like he can’t help himself either. James presses another damp kiss to the corner of Regulus’ mouth, then to his cheek, the side of his nose. He bites him. Regulus feels it in his stomach. 

“I think we need to teach you some manners.” 

“I think you need a muzzle.” Regulus spits out a laugh.

“Don’t threaten me with a good time, Regs.”

Regs. 

Their foreheads bump, hair rubbing in a grainy roll. 

This is what they’re good at, tossing words at each other in hopes something will stick. It’s so familiar Regulus can almost pretend he’s in control of himself, like he’s not choking for breath and his body isn’t undoing itself with its need to be scrunched together and wrung out. 

James’ glasses catch the light. “How about we start with please?”

Regulus doesn’t bother fighting his grin. “Make me, you fucking spoon.”

And James tosses his head back and blurts a huge deep-bellied laugh like Regulus is the funniest person he’s ever fucked, and it’s the sweetness of it, bursting full, its bounds of unbridled delight. 

Sometimes when James laughs, he goes silly from it like he forgets himself, and now he smacks big kisses across Regulus’ face, until Regulus angles his head back, trying to scuttle away, and he’s laughing too, he can’t help himself. Kissing and laughing and kissing and laughing, until Regulus holds James’ head between his hands to keep him still. 

Their chests heave in time as they catch their breath. 

This time, when they kiss, it’s not kissing at all. 

Regulus is sweaty, lace clinging to his skin, and he’s caked in body glitter and Vaseline and baby powder, and James doesn’t care. He licks into his mouth like he wants to touch all his teeth.  

Regulus thinks of Remus’ old black-and-white movies, the needy tenderness of John Barrymore in When a Man Loves, kissing up a lady’s arm, from the tip of her gloved fingers to the dimple of her elbow, up the swell of her shoulder, to the scoop of a neck. A jaw. A waiting open mouth. 

Like this, he’s a puddle of clammy want, I want you and want you, I am nothing but the wanting of you—

Regulus arches into every touch James is willing to give him. James’ hands rake down his sides, his body inching lower, moving, moving, until his head is between Regulus’ thighs, one leg hooked over his broad shoulder. Regulus will die staring at the way James’ hands span over his thighs so easily, how his fingers crater into his flesh. 

James’ glasses are crooked. All of him looks a little crooked; hair a mess, mouth swollen from Regulus’ teeth worrying into his bottom lip. He leans forward, his gold chain grazing over Regulus’ navel, the cross skin-warm. Tides of hot breath pull him down. James kisses his stomach, once, twice, so softly Regulus begs to feel more of it. He arches towards him, a beggar’s gesture brimming with shame. But James’ hand grabs his waist to force him back down, and something inside of Regulus lets go without a fight. 

Pillow plush against his head, sheets swirled around them, the bed dips so perfectly Regulus is a little thing nestled in a palm. He’ll let James do anything here, have anything, take all. 

Eyes pinched, he concentrates on James’ mouth, nipping here, licking there, breathing on the damp spots he leaves as he trails lower. The scratch of his five o’clock shadow against his thighs. That sharp drag. He wants to bleed from it. He wants to slam his legs around James’ head.

Regulus’ eyes snap open when the distinct heat of breath spills over his cock. Dizzy. Searching for him with his vision in tatters. Hovering over his hardness, James looks at him. It’s a new look. Completely unashamed, its dazedness like he’s been hit. There’s something else too, squirming helpless in the open. James drops his head and digs his face into Regulus, there, his huffing breath like a dog’s, frantic, as he kisses his groin, little pecks that jolt him, the shock of a drillbit punching into his skin, over and over, until his cock peeks past the lace of his underwear, pink and drooling—pathetic—and the calmness that kept James contained starts slipping when his tongue flattens to lick across the length of him. 

Regulus slams his head back. He screws his eyes shut. He opens them wide. “Hah—fuck—” 

His hands grip at his pillows before James reaches for him, yanking his wrists down and placing his hands on his head. Regulus buries his fingers into James’ hair, feels for the frame of his glasses hooked behind his ears. The hot bone of his skull between his hands, how fragile it feels, cushioned between his palms. He sobs. 

James Potter is between his legs.

Regulus goes hazy from the realization. He laughs like some delirious little maniac, and he wants to say something, but he can’t think of anything, dumb with watching James mouth at the lace until it’s damp and sticky and a string of saliva connects to James’ bottom lip when he looks up. The head of Regulus’ cock is trapped between the elastic and his stomach, and it shines, swollen as fruit. In a slow drag, James’ tongue laves across it, digging into the slit and catching a bubble of pre-cum. 

His big hand presses down on his stomach every time Regulus squirms. James is toying with him, his free hand tugging at the lacy underwear and straining it over his cock just to watch it jut out against the fabric. It stings, it’s excruciating and Regulus wants it to hurt more. His hips trying desperately to hitch off the bed as James’ hand travels lower, cupping his balls, fingers brushing, his mouth following to suckle gently. Regulus can’t do anything but reach for him, his whole body moving for him as if pulled. He gives in so completely, falls when James pushes and pushes back when he retreats. He loves his body like this, slick with want and sound and his breath brewing deep in his chest. It’s like dancing. It’s like leaving himself.

A strap of his garter lashes into his skin as it unhooks itself. Regulus wheezes when James angles his head sideways, his mouth opening over his cock, tongue salivating like he’s about to chew. There’s so much spit the lace has lost its shine. “Christ—you’re so perfect,” James gasps, and Regulus goes pliant like an animal caught by the scruff of its neck. 

Perfect. 

An ugly sound snags in his throat when James dislodges Regulus’ grip from his head and flips him over, forcing him flat on his stomach. James does it with a kind of practiced ease that makes all the heat pour into his gut, goading Regulus into thinking of the countless people James must’ve fucked just like this. Did he call them perfect too? 

“Hey—” James strums hands over his sides as he leans over him, resting them below his armpits. James licks his cheek the way he had his cock, and Regulus opens his mouth in a silent whine. “You okay?” A whisper, a kiss. “Baby?”

Baby. 

Regulus nods. 

“You’re so sweet for me.” His hot, hot breath. “You’re so fucking good.” James murmurs into the space right below his ear, and Regulus imagines it’s reserved for secrets and wishes of the utmost tender kind. 

Good. When has he ever been good for anyone? 

Regulus twists his head to look at him: He’s a fucking mess, the burning bush. 

Carefully, like he’s afraid he’ll miss, Regulus reaches for him. He slides James’ glasses from his nose. James doesn’t waste the moment, grabbing his hand to nip at his fingers, gnaw at his knuckles. The glasses fall. Regulus’ fingers push into James’ wanton mouth, the pad of his tongue too soft as it gives way. James sucks. 

Regulus doesn’t know if his laughter even sounds like laughter anymore. It’s coming out in embarrassing bleats, and James almost chokes on his own laughter when he pulls Regulus’ fingers out of his mouth, presses a hasty sodden kiss to his knuckles, and then he’s gone, he’s scooting down Regulus’ body again. 

Regulus grabs James’ glasses as if holding them can replace holding any part of him. If he could, Regulus would mouth at the socks he’s wearing, stuff his underwear into his mouth and be grateful for it. He’d lick everything, he’d eat anything he’s ever touched. 

Regulus yelps when James tugs his hips into the air, chest knocked into the mattress, knees pushed apart. He feels James’ breath everywhere, feels him grab his underwear to stretch it between his cheeks. It scrapes over his hole. He’s so hot there he’s liquid; he’s peeling apart. 

Face turned into the pillows, Regulus opens his mouth and grinds his teeth into the cotton. God. His hips loosen on impulse and his spine lengthens. He braces for it, wants it unbelievably, with so much of himself. 

James’ hands leave him so abruptly Regulus head snaps up. James isn’t touching him. He isn’t moving—and with silent horror, Regulus realizes James is watching him. He’s playing. Fisting the blanket in one hand, James’ glasses in the other, Regulus holds his breath as tight as he can, scrunches his eyes closed, willing this moment to end. 

It’s the dread of James looming over him, the crest of a terrible wave. 

James blows. 

Regulus feels his breath shove its way through his body like a hand sliding into the space between skin and muscle, raking forward, cupping the back of his head and slamming it back into the pillow. And when James’ hands return, when they finally touch him again, tugging the underwear so hard his cock grinds into his belly, Regulus coughs up a whine. “—please.” 

“There you go.” James’ voice is all low and honey-velvet, cooing. “Hm? What do you need?” And fuck him, fuck him to death for knowing exactly what to say and how to sound, and Regulus is the sopping thrashing creature keening for things he doesn’t know how to say. “Will you tell me what you need? Hm, baby?”

Baby.

Regulus buries his face into the pillow, shaking his head. He’s chugging for breath. The strain and pinch of lace around his cock. His twitching hole.

“Tongue,” he groans, “Your mouth.”

“Mm-hmm…Where?”

Fuck you, he thinks. God, fuck you!

Regulus swears, digging his forehead deeper into the pillow. His back stretches. A groan behind him. He feels a big firm hand grabbing one cheek. His underwear yanked aside. The pressure of a thick thumb spreads him open.  

He cries silently when he feels a kiss, then the hot slide of James’ tongue on his hole. Regulus realizes too late he’s rocking with it, toes digging into the sheets for leverage, the little beggar starving for more. He’d dig at the bottom of barrels for scraps.

James hands spread him so hard he feels the stretch of it. His cock is one agonizing throb against the lace gnawing into his skin. There’s shame in knowing he could cum like this. Let me cum like this. 

James groans and licks and eats and kisses and bores his tongue into him, spits onto his hole, cracks him open, takes all he can. Loosens him with finger after finger. Regulus doesn’t remember the last time he felt so filthy, his leg shaking from the strain, his arm walloping forward to grab his headboard. All the nights he touched himself like this, wood flaky against his fingers, imagining this: James’ mouth tearing into his body. 

Regulus can’t control the shaking, and James grabs him, smoothing his thumb over his calf in slow circles. Sometimes Regulus forgets that no matter how hard he trains, James will always be bigger than he is, will always have had those years on the football pitch, tumbling through those boy-bodies, big, brutish, knees speckled in blood and dirt. James could pin him to this bed if he wanted, he could keep him here. 

Regulus muffles another cry into his pillow. He’ll disintegrate with how much he fucking yearns for this. He’ll disappear. 

James yanks at the underwear one final time, the pain slamming through his body so suddenly Regulus can feel it rattle inside his mouth. His eyes shut, his tongue lolls heavy. He’s headless with it, oozing into the bed, a drooling body without a spine. 

Fumbling for the other strap of his garter, James unclasps it. Regulus imagines James has to loosen his underwear from his skin, has to unlock it from him like a wet shackle as he rolls it down his ass, his thighs, nylon bunching, rearranging Regulus like a bag of limbs until he manages to yank it off completely. James laughs, but it’s too garbled and out of breath to be one. The distinct sting of a bite to his ass. 

Regulus hears the slop of his underwear land somewhere on his bedroom floor. 

His cock dangles, swollen heavy with its need. But he won’t touch it, won’t touch it if James doesn’t, won’t move if he doesn’t let him. 

“Let’s get this off, hm? Want me to take this off?” James is a honeyed voice in his ear, that rasp to it, his only tell. 

Regulus can’t move as James reaches for the elastics roped around his chest and back, a web of clasps and complications. It’s a beast to get into. James curses in Italian, fingers fiddling and roaming, and Regulus doesn’t care anymore when he hears the first tear. James undresses him with the haste of someone who’s lost all patience. He lets himself be dragged this way and that, lets James flip him onto his back. Breath spewing from him. Naked. Spit on his chin. 

Regulus sprawls beneath him, his cock a weeping mess on his stomach. And James kneels over him and cups his face in his palms like water. “Better, baby?” He asks this softly, wiping the spit from his chin. For a moment he’s nothing but a face hovering above him, tenderized by a kind of earnestness Regulus can never quite get used to.

Has anyone ever been so beautiful? 

James leans in, and he kisses him with that filthy fucking mouth, and it’s mashing of teeth against teeth, against tongues, the insides of cheeks. They’re in shambles. 

“—more,” Regulus manages. Maybe he didn’t say it all. He can’t tell what he’s thinking and what’s leaving his mouth. 

James’ weight hovers over him, but he doesn’t move any closer until Regulus arches his body, sparrow-chested, his naked cock kissing the hardness straining against James’ jeans. The contact is so perfect a laugh wallops into the back of his teeth. 

“Wanna say please again?” James’ voice is all rasp. “You can do that, hm? You can be good for me. You want to be good for me?”

Regulus has lost himself a long time ago, nodding and nodding, yesyesyes, and when James lowers himself, he grinds his cock against his as if to test him, but Regulus has left his dignity at the door, and he claws at James’ shoulders, his back, his ass, trying to force him down. He nods and nods, and his mouth is dry, and his head is hollowed-out, and everything burns, and he’s twisting, whining, pleasepleasepleaseplease— “Please.” 

“That’s right, there you go,” James gasps when he lets his full weight drop onto him, like a gift, the crush of his heavy cock. That liquid screaming torrent of heat.

Regulus makes a sound he can’t describe, torn from some down-deep part of himself. Neck stretched back, the wet glide of James’ tongue on his Adam’s Apple, his teeth sinking in.

Regulus twitches beneath him. He’s reduced to nothing but his body, holding on inside of it like a passenger, feeling and feeling as James’ body takes apart his own. 

Time stumbles over itself to reveal all its moving parts:  

Here’s the kiss. Here’s the lick. Here’s the unbuttoning of jeans. Here’s the huff and the groan. Here’s the glorious cock throbbing in his palm with all its girth, its aliveness. Here’s James making the most ungodly sound when Regulus gives it a tight pump, a live wire in his hand, before it slaps onto his stomach, sliding against Regulus’. The size difference makes him go numb at the thought of it squeezing inside of him, breaching him.

James’ attention is everywhere, his skin is everywhere, fumbling for lube and condoms and he’s saying things, but Regulus is so far inside himself he can’t make out a single word. It’s all rushing, moving over him; he’s the seabed, he’s the below.

James’ mouth moves, come here, and Regulus sighs, and he does. 

Here’s the crinkling of a condom wrapper, the cold shock of lube, the placing of pillows and kicking of feet. The whole bedroom spins when Regulus is flipped upward. He blinks, staring down at James splayed across the sheets, Regulus’ thighs straddling his waist.

James’ skin is a deep gold, his lashes dark and too-long, hair a tangle across the pillows. Regulus feels him like standing in the sun without shade for miles. He comes from the ocean, the peach groves. He’s a summer at noon, thick with cicadas. Who can look like this and not be loved instantly, without abandon? 

Regulus reaches for the gold chain, clumsy in this haze. He pulls. Kisses the cross, kisses his chin. The pressure of his cock gliding down James’ stomach, how the hair there pricks at his swollen skin. 

Regulus reaches back, his body wobbling until James secures him with two big hands belted around his waist. He lifts him so easily, Regulus soars with the feeling of being held like this, like nothing could happen to him here. Like he's being kept.

James’ cock pulses hot against his palm, the condom, the lube, the thick head pressed against his twitching hole. 

“Oh, fuck—go slow, go—” Regulus’ head falls back, and he pinches his eyes closed so hard everything swims. James is so big, and Regulus’ breath ratchets out his open mouth like he’s about to wail. The great pressure of it, tearing, sharp and digging and everywhere. He’s everywhere. He’ll feel him for the rest of his fucking life.  

James is saying things again, soothing things, filthy lovely caring things, and his hands push him down, down, stop when Regulus twitches, continue when he sighs. One hand releases him to wrap around Regulus’ cock, thumbing at his slit. Gasping, Regulus tips forward, nuzzles into James’ calming kisses to his neck, his shoulder, his murmurs of reassurance. 

“Slow, baby…You’re doing so well, cucciolo. Look at you doing so good, hm? You take me so good. Never had anyone take me so well—” 

It’s ridiculous, the things he says, how much he means them. Regulus wants to lap them out of his hand. 

With a shaky breath, Regulus lets his weight pull him down. It’s not enough. He wants to take all of James, wants him to tip him upside down and bury himself to the fucking hilt. He sobs from the craving of it. 

When the back of his thighs finally meet that lovely V between James’ hips, Regulus grinds their foreheads together. His ears ring. There’s so much of him. More, he pleads, more. Is he saying it out loud? Can he hear him? 

The deep drag of James’ cock inside of him is slow as James’ other hand slides from Regulus’ waist to his ass, to the pucker of his hole, his cock inside of it, rubbing a finger along the rim. Regulus whines, letting his body rock back and forth in a seething rhythm. He rides him like this. They’re bobbing in the shallow end. Their foreheads bump. James’ eyes, half-lidded, watch him. His mouth. Regulus kisses it, licks into it. Moans for it. Wants to be so wet and willing for it. 

It goes on like this for far too long, and he feels the tremble in James’ legs as they bend and stretch beside him like they can’t keep still, the held-back frenzy in the way his hands tear into Regulus’ hair, clutch at his skull. 

Regulus’ cock is stuck between their stomachs, so sensitive it threatens to spill every time they move. Regulus chokes a moan as he buries his face into James’ damp neck, breathing in his sweat, his watered-down cologne. 

“Said—You said you’d take care of it,” he’s slurring. Or is he thinking this? He doesn’t feel like himself. 

Take care of it.

James blinks, and his swallow is loud in the quiet, and whatever capacity for civility kept him calm for so long, undoes itself, and Regulus swears he sees a smile, or maybe he tastes it, all his senses leaking into one indistinguishable mass. 

The first thrust knocks the air out of his chest. James’ hips lifting, heels bolted to the bed. Regulus can’t move like this, nailed into place with James’ arms looped around his back. They’re here again, this strange place where there are no games or weights moving from side to side, it’s just this, and James looks as desperate as Regulus feels, and he slips out and in, Regulus opens for it, wider, easier. He takes him. He’s a limpet, tossed and twisted, fucked. He’s being fucked, and he can’t do anything but sob for it. 

James wrangles Regulus onto his back. Leaning over him, his face is dark with shadow. Distantly Regulus recognizes the snap of a bottle cap, the cold slide of lube. Moremoremoremore, he can’t stop thinking it when the arc of James’ cock breaches him. Kisses messy, slick, his bottom lip caught between teeth. James’ hand on his chest. James’ hand on his cock. Regulus paws at him, wraps his own hand around James’ bigger one as he guides it up and down his cock. Showing him how he likes it, twist it like this, pressure like this. He wants to show James everything, he wants to unlock his body and show him all its hows. 

James’ nail digs into the head. Regulus shakes for him. 

“—such a good boy, baby. You’re so good for me—”

Is James saying it? Is Regulus imagining him saying it? 

Regulus wishes he could absorb into James’ skin like ink on paper, travel through him to be in all these places. He wants so many unbelievable things.

The slick sound of precum, lube. James fucks him into the bed, bad-mannered, as shameless as an uninvited dinner guest. The messy eater, spilling everywhere, chewing with his mouth open. 

James Potter fucks like someone who licks the plate clean. 

Regulus is saying his name. It’s flooding his mouth, huge in his throat as he blubbers it all over himself. Blubbers it into James’ neck, across his face, into his mouth. They kiss, they fuck, James holds him down while his hips bully back and forth. The slap of his skin, the mattress whining beneath them. The sheets are damp. Regulus is whimpering, he’s deplorable. The solid ache of James’ cock is lodged so deep inside of him Regulus chokes on it. He’s so full, he’s so fucking full he can’t breathe from it. He can’t breathe. He’s scrambling. It feels so good, it’s so good, you’re so good, all of this, everything, everything, I'll take everything—

James rolls their hips together, dirty, slow, pulling all the way out until Regulus is hit with the shock of losing his heat, the wide arc of his head catching at his rim. “Ple—” Please. God, please. Regulus could wrap his hands around his own throat. Wants to throttle. He’ll kick, he’ll scream for it. With a groan, James pushes back in, lifts him, the slick of lube leaking down his tailbone. 

Regulus’ eyes roll. He feels him in his stomach, he feels him, and he feels, and he feels it coming. 

James’ big hands dig into the back of Regulus’ thighs, hauling his weight forward, until his spine crunches and there’s nowhere else to go. James’ arm stretches above him, swell of muscle, his hand fisting headboard. Regulus wants to lick along a vein. He closes his eyes. 

And this part, this: 

His leg kicks high. He shakes with it.

James’ hands in his hair, his mouth on his face. His hips hitting skin in wet demanding cuffs. Regulus rolls his head into James’ palm, mouthing into it, scraping at it with his teeth. “Fu-hu—fuck—James, fuck—” He’s babbling. Regulus is shucked up against the headboard, head held in hands. James’ hips lose their rhythm, he’s taking and taking. He groans, spewing things in desperate, breathless Italian, and it’s the sweetest fucking drivel, and it’s his name, James chokes on it.  

When it finally comes, when it hits him all at once, Regulus falls to the bottom of himself. 

He’s a holy roller, and this is heaven, and God are James’ teeth sinking into the juncture where his neck meets his shoulder meets the rest of everything else. 

♡ ♡ ♡

“Fine. You’re fucking hot.” 

James laughs so hard Regulus kicks him off the bed. 

James  

Sometimes being with Regulus is full of feelings so disproportionate to what’s actually happening. He’s filled with a wanting solid enough he’s convinced it’s so much older than it is, like it must’ve been there for years, secret unsuspecting tissue. 

It’s grown impenetrable enough it’s tricked him into thinking he can kiss Regulus like this, fuck him like this, hold him because it’s been years, and they share toothpaste and coffee and a bed and a mortgage and a mind. 

James has known Regulus for five months and a half. He knows his shoe size. He knows that he hates when people suck their fingers clean while eating. He likes curly fries and dim sum and Bruce Springsteen’s Atlantic City. He’s convinced Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne had an affair. He taught himself to pirouette in his dorm room at St Anne’s, spinning on the creaky floorboards listening to Radiohead. He wore leotards Sirius sewed from scraps of fabric he got from the street market in Brixton.

James knows he used to throw up before every performance. He knows about his panic attacks, knows about his exes and the first flat he shared with Sirius when he was eighteen, how they used to boil eggs in a coffee pot because they had no stove, and when he was ten, he was a buddhist for six months after reading The Life of Pi, and his mother beat him blue with his grandfather’s old cricket bat. 

James knows he’s saving up to live in the French Riviera, its azure-blue coves, and he started counting his pennies for it since he was five. His favorite color is green. He watches Romeo + Juliet on his birthdays. The first time he visited Sir John Soane’s collection of Egyptian artifacts, he cried in the basement. (“Next to the Sarcophagus of Seti. Like a loser.”)

There’s a museum inside of James, filled with every conversation they ever had: every tossed-aside comment, every drunken confession after a long night out encased in glass. Regulus leaning against his shoulder at some dingy Westminster pub, gushing things from himself in hopes James was too drunk to listen.

Regulus twists in his arms and shoves his face into his chest, huffing. They’re still in bed, naked, tacky, half-hard. James doesn’t know if any of this is allowed. He doesn’t know what time it is either. He forgot his phone at the bar. 

It’s getting bright outside, light crawling in from the gap in the curtains. He’s glad the parlor lamp by the bed is still on, its vintage cranberry red making the room glow like a hearth. 

James wants to disappear into these walls. He wants to stay somewhere between the scuffed wooden furniture and the books lined with dust. All the clues of him: the goofy cat-shaped coffee mug forgotten on a low shelf, the packet of Salems hidden behind a plant pot, the succulents on his dresser thoughtfully arranged by size, faded movie posters of Maborosi, Argento’s Suspiria, Le Plaisir.

Can you love someone after seeing their home? Their room with all their comforts on display? Their clothes on the floor? Their baby pictures? 

Regulus was an intense child, face hardened with the graveness of grown men. James observes each pictures lining his nightstand, ranging from stills of his childhood, to his time at St Anne’s, to faded photos of his family home with its gothic gabled roof. There’s a framed polaroid of Remus, Sirius, and him grouped close, blinking into the sun with their faces tan from summer. 

Funny how hard Regulus tries not to seem like the sentimental type. 

Smiling, James hauls Regulus so close there’s nowhere else to go but in, and he buries his face in his hair, and he smells of hairspray and sweat. He kisses him there. He loves the sound of it, how Regulus’ feet kick tiredly like a cat flicking its tail. 

Regulus mumbles something into James’ neck. He loosens his grip but Regulus crowds closer. 

“Hm?” James hums, chuckling when he feels Regulus worm his way up his neck until his mouth is pressed against his ear. It tickles. He doesn’t know how Regulus manages to breathe trapped between James’ hair and the pillows. “Do you like pancakes?”

James laughs. “Uh—yeah?”

“Can you flip them?” Regulus mumbles into his ear. James shudders at the damp heat of it. “Like in the air?”

“Oh, I see. Is this an attempt to get me to make you breakfast?”

A pinch to his stomach. “Ow.” Then a kiss to his ear, his neck. Regulus folds so perfectly against him. Sweet little darling, little amore, little fragola, little cuore di panna—

“I asked first.” Regulus’ voice is muffled like he’s speaking to him from inside himself. They’ve fused together now. They’ll have to drag themselves through life as a four-legged, two-headed, terrible beast. 

“If you’d like me to,“ James says. Anything for you. Do you get that? 

“But can you?”

“Our family doctor said I was superior to any child she’s ever met. My talents are infinite, god-like some might say—ow…Clapton—” There’s another jab to his stomach, possibly an elbow. James can’t check with them welded together from here on out. He’ll never see his stomach again. 

“You’ll have to prove it then,” Regulus murmurs. 

“You’re a sneaky shit.” 

Regulus bites James’ neck hard enough he groans, and it’s a weird tangle of frustration and delight, like he can’t help himself, because look at how easy all of this is—can it really be so easy? did we skip something?—and he squeezes Regulus in his arms, and he loves the shape of him, adores the arc of his neck, his shoulders, goes fanatical over the straight swoop of his nose, like that of a very serious, very judgmental French nobleman.

Regulus is quiet for so long James thinks he must’ve fallen asleep again or maybe he killed him on accident. He loosens his grip, and again Regulus clutches at him harder, that whine of his that pokes at all the dangerous thoughts hibernating in his head. 

James digs his face into Regulus’ hair. It’s the downy warmth of it, the crinkle of his curls against his lips. How he’s so soft like this, so giving, and how it reminds James of the top of Hailey’s tiny head the day she was born, that spot where the bone of her skull hadn’t closed all the way, the inside of her separated from the world by nothing but a stretch of skin as see-through as a sigh. 

Are they allowed to be like this? 

Can I hold you like this?

Are you sure?

James’ eyes travel to the nightstand again. He stares at the framed polaroid of Remus and Sirius with a grinning Regulus squeezed in their middle, two heads shorter than them, his missing front teeth, his eyes crinkling from the sun. A snapshot of joy. James wants to cocoon him in that place forever. 

Once he can’t stand it anymore, James tosses the blankets off—damp from sex; that wet spot they tried to hide beneath a day blanket—revealing Regulus, flushed, with his face squeezed against James’ chest like he’s hiding. Topolino. He blinks bleary-eyed, and he grumbles, all dramatic, when James pulls him up, rolls over him, pillows his perfect head in his hands. His mouth is acrid with sleep, but Regulus lets James kiss him anyway. His mouth travels from his lips to his nose, the freckles right under his cheekbones. James gives him patient scattering kisses until Regulus crinkles his nose with his eyes twisted shut. That throaty laugh of his. His legs fold around James’ hips, and his arms squeeze around his neck, and Regulus keeps laughing and James keeps kissing him. 

I’ll take you to Italy. We’ll swim at Guvano Beach and Nonna will teach you how to make cavatelli in the garden, and there’s the café at the plaza where all the old people dance, amongst the pigeons and the tourists, and you’d adore it, you’d look beautiful in that light—

The first gleam of sun cuts through the curtains, striking Regulus’ eye, its bright unyielding grey. 

James thinks of Sunday service in the chapel at St Anne’s, sixteen and unable to sit still—the sprawler, the grabber—and how much he dreaded it, how the only thing that ever calmed him was the sun fracturing through the stained glass above, its warmth brushing his cheek like being loved.   

Chapter Text

Regulus

Regulus watches the beamer in the media room turn off abruptly. A wave of groans seeps into the night as the room goes dark and the speakers fizzle out. 

The air-conditioning was the first to falter an hour ago, forcing the staff to shove the windows open. Regulus used it as an excuse to go on more smoke breaks than necessary, claiming the gallery had turned into a hot house. He’s gotten good at gaging the perfect moment to sneak out during parties of all sorts; once everyone’s gotten over their mingling, and they’ve had enough drinks to pretend they’ll know each other forever. Most have finished their mid-function smoke, leaving the back terrace blessedly empty, safe for a waiter or two, thumbing away on their phones while they wedge a foot against the terrace door to keep it open. Regulus has locked himself out twice now already. 

He's perched on the balustrade outside, watching everything through palladium windows, listening to the champagne glasses clinking, the distinct howl of Barty’s laugh, Dorcas' and Marlene's heels clacking across the floor, their ditzy drunken chatter. They’re the loudest bunch in the gallery. From his vantage point, Regulus catches Hailey scuttling through the crowd of patrons like a pinball—Caleb’s green bowler hat bobbing on her little head—Lily hot on her heels, hissing something he can’t hear. As for the trumpet player, he’s leaning over a cocktail table with the rest of the band, roped into a heated conversation with Lily’s weird sister, Penelope or Petunia (Regulus forgot; James refers to her simply as cunt). Penelope-Petunia seems quite charmed by Caleb, possibly because she hasn’t seen him in his bowler hat yet. 

Sometimes seeing them all outside of the club still takes Regulus by surprise, their otherness, their noise, too huge for it all. Sometimes he thinks the only place capable of truly containing them is a stage. 

Regulus watches Pandora in her floral maxi dress, the beads in her hair, her shimmering face. She lights up about something Remus is telling her, Sirius curled at his side, rolling his eyes before downing his glass in a gulp. James stands one window over, animatedly speaking to a journalist, her phone whizzing through the air like she’s trying to catch every word he spews. He glows from her attention and something about it makes Regulus smile.

Maybe it's the way they all move, the way they mix with the white gallery walls and the photographs of subjects mellowed with tenderness. The prints are big enough Regulus can survey them from his spot outside. He’s seen each of them up close, on the screen of James’ laptop, unedited, lying in bed next to him and listening to him explain composition and lighting and the secret tricks of golden ratios, like life can be contained within the confines of simple geometry.

He remembers the first time James showed him his photographs. He remembers sitting against his leather couch, eating cao lao and drinking wine, while James described the loveliness of people in transit. Going places, needing things. 

He wonders when James’ intentions changed. Or perhaps there’s a special kind of alchemy that takes place when you look at a photograph in a room full of people dizzy with life:

A group of kids sitting in a row on a bench outside a kiosk, like hens on roosting bars, clucking delightedly, their necks bent back, their mouths open with laughter. An old Asian woman in the fluorescent wash of a laundromat, smiling, her face loose with something like love. Two old men in matching checkered caps stooped over a chess board in a park. Through the barred windows of a maisonette, a family crowded around a table, stray spaghetti swirled on the checkered tablecloth. A burlesque performer swinging a cane up into the air, her sequin dress, her dazzling jewels. 

The silent joy of it all like an inside-joke. A wink of light.

The people in these photographs and the people in that room have nowhere else to be. Soaked in broad strokes of color, they've arrived. 

A loud snap makes Regulus jerk upward. The windows of the media room flash as the beamer lights up again, and Regulus catches James’ arms swing up in relief. People clap. A small group rushes into the room. Regulus can’t see it from here, but he imagines them plopping down on the long benches, their heads turned towards the video spanned across the walls like sitting inside a lantern. 

They had the room all to themselves before the gallery opened its doors, the two of them sitting on the floor, Regulus’ head falling to James’ shoulder. 

It’s a shaky video, its texture soft and grainy like it was shot on film. Barty recorded their first Birth of Venus rehearsal on his old iPhone with the cracked screen. Dancers stretching in their sweats and neon leg warmers, bandanas keeping the sweat from their eyes. 

The speakers snap again, and a recording plays on loop overhead, an old voice message Lola sent Sirius before she left for Greece:  

“—you know there’s a Ukranian word: simeyne hnizdo. Means, you know, nest. Family nest. Is place where everyone belongs, and when you’re there you’re—full. There are no, how do you say, leftovers. It’s whole. You know, it’s—that’s your heart. I built mine here. I built it with good people.”

James

James’ head is spinning. He’s spent most of the evening shaking hands and guzzling Prosecco, and it’s starting to affect his eye-hand coordination. He’s been itching for a smoke since the air-conditioning snuffed out, and telling by the absence of Regulus, he must’ve managed to sneak out before he did. They had a signal planned, a whole shtick meant to yank each other out of tranquilizing smalltalk—except James got so roped up in his own conversations he forgot to save Regulus from his. 

Aside from the faulty fuse box, it’s a surprisingly good show. James only had to deal with three heart attacks today—the air conditioning, the media room, a broken picture frame—and he successfully side-stepped a fourth when he wrangled Hailey into his arms before she slammed headfirst into an art critic for the Guardian, who’d once described James’ photography as “insipid tripes of a twenty-something peeping Tom”. 

But everything’s okay. 

He’s okay. 

Lily still hasn’t been called in to work, Fiona and Petunia haven’t decapitated each other yet, Barty and Evan are fully clothed, and even Gideon’s having a good time, devouring a whole tray of tiny salmon crackers and flirting with the wait staff. 

It’s all very, very okay. 

For the first time in a long time, James isn’t waiting for something to spontaneously combust. Maybe it’s the way the light warms the walls. He imagines something inside of himself coming to a standstill and lying down.

Once he’s checked the media room, he downs his Prosecco and decides it’s his last as he makes his way through the thinning crowd, towards Sirius who’s staring at a familiar photograph in the corner of the gallery. 

Sometimes when James looks at Regulus, he sees the man perched on the stool in his studio, his grey sweats, his jumper, his beauty complicated and startling. It took a whole night of James’ head between Regulus’ legs to convince him to allow him to showcase his portrait.  

James nudges Sirius with his shoulder. He’s been standing here for a while. The sunburn from his holiday has started to fade, but the easiness is still there, keeping his face and shoulders loose. 

“You know,” Sirius begins, “not a lot of people have the patience to—get us.”

“Is this a veiled way of giving me your blessing?”

“It’s a veiled threat actually.”

James laughs, but he knows Sirius means it.

Staring into the mirroring gaze of his brother, their eyes lock as if in a stalemate. “He’s not as…tough as he seems.”

“I think he’s far tougher than you give him credit for.”

This time, Sirius laughs, and James feels like he just passed some secret test—the Black Brothers with all their covert prodding.

When Sirius finally looks at him, James can’t help but straighten, rolling his shoulders back. Sirius snorts, then nods like something between them is final. His brow cocks and smoothes out. He sighs.

“He looks not-so-terrible in this. You can tell him. I mean, the whole joggers thing I could do without. You can tell him that too. He thinks it’s dirtbag, but he looks like Justin Bieber—” Sirius tapers off when Fiona sways past with a salmon cracker in each hand.  

“I’ve been staring at you all night. Your dress,” Sirius hisses with a feral kind of excitement. “Who from?”

Fiona twirls in gold-buttoned satin like she’s been waiting for that question all her life. 

♡ ♡ ♡

James jams a chair against the threshold of the terrace door to keep it from closing. 

Regulus is hunched on the stone railing, shrouded in smoke. He looks good in a shirt and slacks, so good James almost blew him in the changing room last week on Bond Street.

“Thanks for the saves,” Regulus says, sharp with sarcasm.

“I’m sorry, okay?” James slaps his hands against his sides. “She writes for Aperture!”

“Oh my god, Aperture?” Regulus places a hand to his chest in mock surprise, a perfect mimic of the journalist when James shared he’d been spending his time in a subterranean burlesque club for five months straight. 

“Yeah, yeah, fuck off, make fun of the media whore.”

“I’d never.” Regulus laughs, and James adores it—husky, rude and delicious.

As he makes his way towards Regulus, James almost feels like he’s floating across the terrace, like being anywhere in Regulus’ vicinity makes his legs disappear, his center of gravity. James leans over him for a kiss, but Regulus dodges it with an impish smile. James has learned you need to be quick with this one, lest be toyed with. Fast enough even Regulus can’t stop it, James smooshes a wet peck to his cheek, then another. He likes this, smattering his mouth across Regulus’ face until Regulus squeezes his eyes shut, giggling like he can’t help himself, like a crazed child with its feet kicking. 

No one else gets to have him like this. 

Sliding onto the railing next to him, James hauls Regulus onto his lap and buries his face in his neck. The only reason Regulus lets him is because they’re alone. He’s wearing his cologne. He woke up in James’ bed today, in his bedroom, in his flat, and he used his coffee machine this morning, and he called it “preposterously excessive” before proceeding to choke down four espressos like a crackhead. James called him cucciolo. He called him baby. 

“Proud of you,” Regulus whispers, raking a hand through James’ hair. 

“I’m glad you came.” James hums, closing his eyes for a moment. “All of you.”

Regulus leans into him, then pops his cigarette into James’ mouth, letting him take a drag. Somewhere inside the gallery, a sloppy cackle demands everyone’s attention. Evan has had enough to drink his alter ego is making an appearance by dancing wildly to the elevator jazz playing overhead.

James grins as he watches a fuming Petunia Evans march towards him with a finger slicing through the air in reprimand.  

“Never thought our basement club in Soho would end up at a place like this.” Regulus says this quietly, as if in fear the gaudy palatial columns of Somerset will overhear. “You’re not ashamed of us?” 

Evan cackles at Petunia, trying to get her to dance with him, her stalky arms desperately warding him off. 

James shakes his head and kisses Regulus’ shoulder. “Never," he says with an ease that surprises even himself. 

Regulus looks like he might say something but thinks better of it. He’s smiling. The nighttime breeze tosses his curls across his forehead. James thinks of Helen of Troy, a fleet of a thousand ships launching for her, all at once.

“What?” Regulus turns. James knows the choreography of Regulus’ discomfort down to its most minute details; the shoulder-slump, the curling-in of his feet. 

“I love looking at you,” James breathes. 

There comes the eye-roll—but at least he’s still smiling. “Mm-hmm…”  

James presses his mouth against his cheek again, three pecks in a row. “Patatino,” he hums.

“Did you just call me a potato?”

“How about we ditch this thing.” James jiggles him up in his lap, high enough Regulus almost topples over. “Let’s go dancing.”

“What will your boyfriend say?” Regulus stares at him, his silent goading like a cat pawing at the hem of his trousers trying to play. 

James wags his eyebrows. “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

“I think you severely overestimate your poker face.”

“Craziest thing, my boyfriend says that all the time—”

Regulus snorts, shoving his hand into James’ face to push him away. James doesn’t waste it, grabbing his wrist to gnaw at his palm. He manages to bite a finger before Regulus pacifies him with his cigarette, twisting in his grip and stumbling free. His shiny dress shoes scrape across the dusty stone, cutting through the light spilling from arched windows. Regulus strolls backward for a moment, hands behind his back, as taunting as a sprite in a Shakespeare play, rosy-cheeked, mouth florid and full of riddles. 

“I’m assuming that’s a maybe?” James shouts when Regulus finally turns around and dislodges the chair from the threshold. The terrace door slams shut behind him before James gets an answer. 

Little shit.

He watches Regulus through the windows as he makes his way across the gallery. He's framed by the window across from him when he's joined by Sirius and Remus. They almost look like the photograph Regulus keeps on his nightstand, that dreamy polaroid blue. Sirius says something that makes Regulus tip his head back with laughter, and maybe it’s the rare shock of it that beckons everyone closer, like a lighthouse calling to the ships at night. Pandora slinks up behind him to wrap her arm around his shoulder. Dorcas and Marlene with their fingers linked. Barty kisses Evan one window over. 

They're undeniable. They’re the circus twirling into town, shaking their light into every street and borough. 

In the media room, the voice message starts its lazy loop once more. By now, James knows Lola’s words by heart: 

“—when you’re there you’re—full. There are no, how do you say, leftovers. It’s whole. You know, it's—"

Regulus turns towards the windows. Maybe he sees him, maybe he doesn’t; he smiles either way. 

That’s your heart.

♡ fin ♡