It was warm.
It shouldn't be warm. That feels wrong. Regulus thought. Warmth has not been part of his life for a long time. He lay there with such a stillness of wrongness not opening his eyes and trying to understand where he is. His mind was slow as if he just woke from a very long dream. A dream that clings to dark water, and wet, cold and damp stone. The warmth never fit in it.
Regulus started to move. Hands first he noticed to be resting against something soft. That shouldn't be there. When he flexes his fingers carefully, it responded. He hadn't been entirely certain they would.
Then the weight of his own chest. Rising. Falling. The strange, almost offensive luxury of breathing without having to think about it, without rationing it, without the constant low-level negotiation with his own body that had become so habitual he had stopped noticing it was happening.
Then the rest of him, arriving slowly, like a map being filled in from the edges inward. His legs. His shoulders. The back of his neck against something that was, impossibly, a pillow. Everything carried a dull, diffuse heaviness. It was like a deep protest of a body that has been asked to exist after a long time of managing its survival.
He opened his eyes.
The ceiling was stone. Unfamiliar stone. Not the cave, not the dark, not the low jagged rock he had last seen above him before the water. This stone was old but maintained, the kind that had been lived with rather than merely existing. There was a window to his left, and through it came light. Actual light, grey and northern and carrying the particular quality of a sky above open water, and Regulus looked at it for longer than was probably necessary because it had been years since he had seen light that came from outside rather than from spells, and it turned out that was the kind of thing you noticed.
He turned his head.
There was a chair beside the bed. It looked like it had been there for a while. It looked like someone had been sitting in it for a while, too.
Sirius was asleep in it.
Regulus went very still.
He looked older. Regulus thought. The last time he saw his brother was when Sirius was sixteen. His brother's youthful face is gone. The man has lines that hadn't been there. The grey threaded through the dark hair at his temples. He still looked stunning as always. He may be older, but Regulus still recognized him. The bone structure, the angle of his shoulder, the shape of his nose, it is all very Sirius.
He looked tired. He also looked, underneath the tiredness, more at peace than Regulus had ever seen him.
Regulus looked at him for a long time.
He had imagined this. In his dreams. The moment he will meet his brother again. Imagined what to say to him. Imagined what to see. He had imagined giving his brother a hug. But all of them were just his imagination. Never a reality.
He had not imagined a castle with light through the window. He had not imagined a chair or clean sheets or the smell of something cooking somewhere distant in the building below. He had not imagined waking up with his brother sleeping on such chair.
Sirius's eyes opened.
Not dramatically. Just the slow return of consciousness. He lifted his head. Gray eyes finding the room before finding himself on Regulus. Sirius eyes shift in surprise.
Neither of them spoke.
There was too much to say and no agreed upon place to start and they had never, even before everything, been particularly good at starting. So, they simply looked at each other across the small space of the chair and the years and everything in between. The silence was not comfortable exactly but it was honest, which was perhaps more than either of them had any right to expect.
Sirius leaned forward in the chair. His elbows went to his knees. He looked at Regulus the way you look at something you have been afraid to look at directly for a very long time.
"Hey, Reg," he said. His voice was rough from sleep and something else underneath that. He said it quietly, like he was trying not to startle something that might bolt.
Regulus looked at his brother's face. At the lines and the grey and the tiredness and the peace underneath it.
"Hey," he said.
His own voice came out wrong. Thin and disused, the voice of someone who had not spoken in years and was relearning the mechanics of it. He cleared his throat. It didn't help much.
Sirius's mouth did something complicated. Not quite a smile. Something that wanted to be one and was waiting to make sure it was allowed.
"How do you feel?" he asked.
Regulus considered this with the seriousness it deserved. "Like I've been at the bottom of a lake for five years," he said.
Sirius let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Yeah, I think it was longer than that," he said.
The almost-laugh faded. They looked at each other again. The thing that needed to be said was there in the room with them, had been there since Regulus opened his eyes, patient and enormous and waiting for one of them to be brave enough to reach for it first.
Regulus had spent five years at the bottom of a lake. He was tired of waiting.
"You saved me," he said. It came out simpler than he intended. More honest because of it.
Sirius looked at him steadily. "Of course I saved you."
"I didn't—" Regulus stopped. Started again. "I didn't think anyone would. I didn't think anyone knew."
"Kreacher told me," Sirius said. "Eventually." A pause. "I had to order him to. He was bound by what you told him." Another pause, shorter. "He's been there the whole time, Reg. In that house. Alone. Waiting."
Regulus closed his eyes briefly. The guilt of that was old and familiar and he had made his peace with it, or had tried to, in the long dark of the cave. It settled differently now, in a warm room with northern light coming through the window. "Is he—"
"He's fine," Sirius said. "He's here, actually. In the castle." A beat. "He's been keeping watch. It was the only way I could get him to get out of there."
Regulus opened his eyes. "You have a castle."
"I have a castle."
Regulus looked at the ceiling. Then back at his brother. "You've been busy."
"You have no idea," Sirius said, and something shifted in his expression — not closing but preparing. The look of someone who has things to say and is finding the order for them.
Regulus found it first.
"I saw you," he said. "When you left. When you were sixteen." He kept his voice even. He had been carrying this for long enough that he knew how to carry it without dropping it. "I was in the hallway. I saw you, packing."
Sirius went very still.
"I didn't stop you," Regulus continued. "I thought about it. I was going to." He looked at his hands on the sheets — steadier than he expected them to be. "But you looked — you looked like someone who could finally breathe. And I thought that if I asked you to stay, you would. Because you always tried to take me with you and I never went, and I knew that if I asked you to stay you would stay and you would never—" He stopped. "You would never have been happy. Not there. Not with them."
The room was very quiet.
"So, I didn't stop you," Regulus said. "And then you were gone."
Sirius said nothing for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice had changed — lower, stripped of the careful control he'd been maintaining since Regulus opened his eyes.
"I should have tried harder," he said. "To get you out. I kept trying and I kept—" He stopped. Pressed his mouth together. "I kept doing it wrong. The things I said. The way I went about it." He shook his head slightly. "I was so angry all the time and I took it out on everything near you and then wondered why you wouldn't come with me."
"You were sixteen," Regulus said.
"And you were younger."
"I know." Regulus looked at him. "I'm not — I'm not telling you this so that you'll feel guilty, Sirius. I'm telling you because I need you to know that I understood. Even then. I understood why you left and I was glad you did even when I—" His voice caught slightly on the next word. He let it. "Even when I missed you."
Sirius looked at him with the expression of a man absorbing something that is going to take a long time to fully land.
"I missed you too," he said. It came out like something that had been waiting a long time to be said and was lighter for the saying of it. "Every day. Even when I was furious at you. Even when I—" He stopped. "You were my brother. You were always my brother. I just didn't know how to—"
"You didn't know how to," Regulus agreed quietly. "Neither did I."
The silence that followed was different from the one before. Less weight in it. Not resolved — nothing as clean as resolved — but different. The kind of silence that comes after something has been said that needed saying, that has been sitting in a room long before the people arrived and will leave now that it has been acknowledged.
Sirius leaned back in the chair. He looked at the ceiling for a moment, then back at Regulus.
"The Death Eaters," he said. Not an accusation. Just the next thing.
Regulus nodded slowly. "At first I believed it," he said. "I want you to know that. I'm not going to pretend I was dragged into it against my will. I believed it. I was — I was seventeen and I believed everything they told me about blood and legacy and the new order and I wanted—" He paused. "I wanted to matter. To be doing something that mattered. After you left there was nothing in that house that felt like it mattered."
Sirius said nothing. He was listening in the way he had always been capable of listening when he chose to, which had not always been often enough.
"And then he borrowed Kreacher," Regulus said.
His voice had changed. Flatter. The flatness of someone describing something they have already processed as much as it is possible to process and have decided that clinical is the only way through.
"He used him as a test. For the enchantments in the cave. To see if a house elf could drink the potion." Regulus looked at his hands. "Kreacher came back. He wasn't supposed to — house elves can apparate places wizards can't, that was the point, he was supposed to die there and he didn't. And he came back to me." A pause. "And I saw what had been done to him. And I understood, very clearly, that everything I had believed about what we were doing and why — none of it was true. It had never been true. We were just — useful. Until we weren't."
"Reg—"
"I don't need—" Regulus stopped. Softened slightly. "I've made my peace with it. Or most of it. I just need you to know that I wasn't — I wasn't the person I was when I went into that cave by the time I went into it. I want you to know that."
"I know," Sirius said. Simply. Without qualification.
Regulus looked at him. "How?"
"Because you went in," Sirius said. "Because you tried to destroy it. Because you sent Kreacher home." He met his brother's eyes. "Because you're you, Reg. Even when you were making the wrong choices you were still you underneath them. I just—" The complicated expression again. "I just couldn't reach you."
Regulus held that for a moment.
"You have a castle," he said again, because the alternative was crying and he had not cried in five years and he wasn't prepared to start in front of his brother in a conjured chair.
Sirius recognized the deflection immediately. Accepted it with the grace of someone who had used the same move himself more times than he could count. "I have a castle," he confirmed.
"On a cliff."
"Above the North Sea."
"That's very dramatic of you."
"Thank you. I thought so, too."
Regulus almost smiled. It pulled at muscles that hadn't been used in a long time and felt strange and right simultaneously. "Is there anything else I should know? A dragon, perhaps? A private army?"
"No dragon," Sirius said. "I do have—" He paused, and something in his expression shifted into something Regulus couldn't immediately read. "I have a wife."
Regulus stared at him.
"And children," Sirius added.
The stare continued.
"Four of them," Sirius said.
"Four," Regulus repeated.
"Four."
Regulus looked at his brother. At the lined face and the grey temples and the settled quality that he hadn't understood until this moment. "Someone," he said carefully, "agreed to marry you."
"Yes," Sirius said, with the dignity of a man who has decided to rise above this.
"Willingly."
"Entirely willingly, yes—"
"And then stayed."
"Reg—"
"And produced four children with you."
"I'm going to need you to stop."
"I'm just saying," Regulus said, and the almost-smile had become an actual one now, thin and tired and real, "that is a remarkably patient woman."
"Hey!" Sirius said.
Regulus looked at the ceiling. "I'm simply surprised. That's all. I'm allowed to be surprised. I've been at the bottom of a lake."
"You're going to keep using that."
"For as long as it works, yes."
Sirius shook his head, but the expression underneath it was not irritation. Not remotely. It was the expression of a man who has been given something back that he had stopped expecting to get back and doesn't quite know what to do with it yet except hold it carefully.
The smile faded from Regulus's face slowly, not because anything had been said but because he had been watching his brother's expression and he knew that face. Had always known that face. And there was something in it now that hadn't been there a moment ago.
"What," Regulus said. Not a question exactly. More of an opening.
Sirius looked at him. The settling quality was still there but underneath it something had shifted — the look of a man preparing to say something that needs to be said and has not yet found the right shape for it.
"I need to know some things from you, Reg," Sirius said carefully. "About what you found in that cave with you. About what Kreacher has been keeping safe." He paused. "And about something else. Something that's going to be harder to hear."
Regulus held his brother's gaze.
He had been at the bottom of a lake for five years. He had made his peace with hard things.
"What do you need to know?"