Chapter 268: Hermes, Honestly Chicken [bonus]
Tuesday.
The owlery smelled the way it always smelled: straw, old feathers, the particular sharpness of birds who had opinions about being disturbed before dawn.
Regulus came up here sometimes in the early morning. Not to send letters. Just to think.
The owls tolerated him. Most of them. There was a large tawny in the upper rafters who had never forgiven him for arriving once during a rainstorm and dripping on its perch, and it made its feelings known periodically by rotating its head to face the wall whenever he entered.
He found that reasonable.
He sat on the stone bench beneath the eastern window and unfolded the letter that had arrived at breakfast.
His mother's handwriting. Narrow, precise, each letter formed like a small act of will.
Regulus,
Your brother has written to say he will not be returning home for the summer holidays. He has given no explanation. Your father has said nothing. I am writing to you because I expect you already know.
If you do, tell me.
If you don't, find out.
— Mother
He read it twice.
Then he folded it, tucked it back into his robe, and looked out the window.
The grounds were pale and still in the early light. Frost on the grass. The lake flat as stone.
He had, in fact, known since October. Sirius had told no one at home but had told a Gryffindor friend who had told another Gryffindor friend, and that chain of information had eventually reached Rosier, who had mentioned it to Regulus with the air of someone delivering a minor administrative update.
Your brother apparently told Potter he's not going back this summer.
Rosier had not asked what Regulus intended to do about it. That was one of Rosier's qualities. He delivered information and then left it alone.
Regulus hadn't done anything about it.
He was still deciding whether there was anything to do.
He looked up at the rafters.
The large tawny was facing the wall, as expected.
There was one other owl awake and watching him — a small grey one, three perches down from the tawny, round-faced and attentive. It had been watching him since he arrived. It had the look of an owl that wanted to be involved.
"I'm not sending anything," he told it.
It blinked.
"Not yet."
It blinked again, apparently satisfied with not yet as a timeline.
The question of what to write back to his mother was not a question of what he knew.
It was a question of what he was willing to say.
Yes, I know. Sirius isn't coming back. He has made his position clear.
That was true. He could write that.
I don't know. I will find out.
That was a lie. He didn't lie to his mother. Not directly. It was a rule he had made for himself at age nine after the one time he had tried it and spent a week with the particular discomfort of knowing she knew.
So the options were: tell her, or say nothing.
He was considering a third option, which was to write back with a question instead of an answer. Not to deflect — she would see through that immediately — but because there was something he genuinely wanted to know first.
What did she actually want him to do with the information?
He pulled out a fresh piece of parchment and a quill.
Paused.
Put the quill down.
The small grey owl made a soft sound.
"I know," he said.
It tilted its head.
"I'm thinking."
The thing about his mother was that she was not simple.
Regulus had spent considerable effort in his early years misunderstanding her, the way children misunderstood parents — by taking what was on the surface and treating it as the whole of the thing.
On the surface: Walburga Black, rigid, traditional, fully committed to a view of the world that Regulus had significant private reservations about.
Underneath: a woman who had watched the family she built begin to fracture, and who expressed her response to that fracturing in the only language she had ever been taught, which was control.
She was not asking him to report on Sirius.
She was asking him whether Sirius was gone.
Whether it was confirmed. Whether there was still a thread.
That was a different question.
He picked up the quill.
Mother,
I've heard something, but not from Sirius directly. Before I tell you what I know, I want to ask: what do you want to do with it?
Not to be evasive. Because what I say next depends on what you're actually asking me for.
— R
He looked at it.
Too direct, possibly. She valued precision but this was edging into something that might read as impertinence.
He crossed out the last line of the second paragraph.
Mother,
I've heard something, but not from Sirius directly. What I know is secondhand, and I want to be sure before I tell you anything.
I'll write again by Thursday.
— R
Better.
True, technically. He had heard it secondhand. He would confirm it directly before Thursday. That required talking to Sirius, which he had been avoiding for two months, which was its own separate problem.
He held the letter out.
The small grey owl was already moving before he finished the gesture, hopping forward along its perch, inflating its chest slightly with the energy of an owl that had been waiting for this moment.
It took the letter, puffed once, and launched itself out the window.
Regulus watched it go.
The tawny in the rafters rotated fractionally. Still facing the wall, but angled now as if it might eventually consider forgiving him.
He stayed for a few more minutes, watching the small grey shape diminish over the frost-pale grounds.
Then he stood up, straightened his robe, and went to find his brother.
Sirius was not difficult to locate.
He was in the east courtyard with Potter and Lupin, doing absolutely nothing disguised as something, which was their standard occupation at this hour before first period.
Specifically, they were sitting on the low wall beside the fountain, and Potter was attempting to balance a Chocolate Frog card on Lupin's head without Lupin noticing, and Sirius was watching this with the expression of someone who found everything about their life deeply satisfying.
Regulus stopped at the entrance to the courtyard.
He could already feel the quality of the morning shifting. The way it shifted whenever these two sets of trajectories entered the same space.
Sirius saw him first.
The expression didn't close off, exactly. It never fully closed off anymore, which was new and which Regulus was still adjusting to. But something in it recalibrated. Settled into a different register.
Potter's card fell off Lupin's head.
Lupin looked up, noticed Regulus, and made the small movement of someone choosing to be somewhere else in a few minutes.
Potter did not make that movement. Potter, to his credit, simply watched, alert in the way he was always alert: openly, without pretending not to.
Regulus walked across the courtyard.
He stopped a few feet from the wall.
"I need to talk to you," he said.
"Good morning to you too," Sirius said.
"Good morning. I need to talk to you."
Sirius looked at him for a moment. Then he unfolded himself from the wall and dropped to the ground and said, "Fine," to Regulus, and "Don't do anything I wouldn't do" to Potter without looking back.
"That leaves a very wide range of options," Potter said, in a tone of deep philosophical acceptance.
They went to the side corridor near the library, which was empty at this hour.
Regulus had walked this corridor a hundred times. He knew the exact way the light came through the high narrow window at the far end, how it sat differently in autumn than in spring, the crack in the third flagstone from the left that he had been stepping over since first year.
He stopped walking. Sirius stopped a half-step after him.
There was a brief silence that was not uncomfortable, exactly. More like two people calibrating.
"Mother wrote," Regulus said.
"I assumed."
"She knows you're not coming back this summer. Or she suspects. She wants confirmation."
Sirius said nothing.
"I'm going to write to her Thursday. I told her I'd confirm what I'd heard."
"So you're confirming it."
"I'm asking you first."
Sirius looked at the window at the end of the corridor. The light was pale and flat, early enough that it hadn't warmed yet.
"Yeah," he said. "I'm not going back."
Regulus had known that. Hearing it said plainly was still different from knowing it.
"Where will you go?"
"Potter's."
Of course.
He didn't say of course out loud. It would have carried the wrong weight.
"Does his family know?"
"His mum wrote to me last month." A pause. "She said there's a room."
Regulus thought about that. A woman he had never met, writing to his brother to say there's a room. The quiet enormity of that gesture.
"All right," he said.
Sirius looked at him. "That's it?"
"What else would there be?"
"I don't know. Something."
Regulus considered.
"I'm not going to tell you to come back," he said. "I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong. I'm going to tell Mother what you told me, and she will do whatever she decides to do, and that will be between you and her."
"And you."
"And me," Regulus agreed quietly. "But I'm not — I'm not asking you to change it. That's not why I came."
Sirius studied him for a long moment.
"Then why did you come?"
"Because I told her I'd confirm it directly. And because—" He stopped.
Started again.
"Because you should know that she's going to hear it from me and not from someone else. So you're not surprised."
Sirius was quiet.
The silence this time was different. Softer at the edges.
"Reg," he said.
"Don't," Regulus said, not unkindly.
Another pause.
"Okay," Sirius said.
"Okay," Regulus said.
They stood there for another moment, in the light from the high narrow window, the crack in the third flagstone between them.
Then Sirius said, "You're going to be alone in that house."
"I'm used to it."
"That's not the same as it being fine."
Regulus didn't answer.
Sirius exhaled. "If you need to — I mean, Potter's mum—"
"I know," Regulus said. "Thank you."
That was as far as either of them could go, at this hour, in this corridor, with first period twenty minutes away and years of accumulated distance still to navigate.
It was further than they had gotten in a long time.
Sirius turned and walked back toward the courtyard.
Regulus stayed where he was for another minute.
Then he started walking in the other direction, toward the library, thinking about what to write to his mother on Thursday and finding that the shape of the letter was slightly clearer than it had been this morning.
Not easy. Just clearer.
In the owlery, the small grey owl had already returned, settling back on its perch with the self-satisfied air of an owl that had performed an important service.
It had carried one letter. It had delivered one letter.
This was, in its professional opinion, a good morning.
The large tawny in the rafters had rotated approximately forty degrees back toward the room, which was as close as it came to a welcome.
No one was there to notice.
The grey owl noticed. It filed this away.
Progress was progress.
At breakfast, Samuel passed Regulus the jam without being asked.
He hadn't seen the morning's events. He didn't know about the owlery or the corridor or the conversation with Sirius.
But he had noticed, when Regulus sat down, that something had shifted in the set of his shoulders. Not relaxed — Regulus didn't relax, exactly. But settled. Like a question that had moved from unanswerable to answered, and the answer is liveable.
Lina glanced at Regulus over her pumpkin juice.
Regulus was buttering toast with complete focus.
Lina glanced at Samuel.
Samuel tilted his head fractionally toward Regulus in a gesture that meant don't ask yet.
Lina accepted this.
She went back to her juice.
At the Gryffindor table, across the hall, Sirius Black was also eating toast with slightly more deliberateness than usual, in the manner of someone who had recently said something true out loud and found that it hadn't killed him.
Potter was watching him with the expression of someone who wanted to ask and had decided not to.
Lupin was reading. This was Lupin's primary response to emotionally complicated mornings.
No one said anything about any of it.
The Great Hall was warm. Outside the high windows, the frost was beginning to melt.
"Hermes, honestly chicken" lands on the small grey owl — an eager, willing creature who was not chicken at all, which makes the title a gentle irony. The chapter threads Regulus's family situation (the Sirius-leaving-home arc), his relationship with his mother, and the quietly significant moment of the two brothers reaching a fragile new equilibrium — all through Regulus's characteristic mode of doing difficult emotional things with complete external composure.