Thursday.
The letter to his mother was written and sent before breakfast.
Regulus had drafted it four times. The final version was eleven lines. He had cut the version that explained too much, the version that softened too much, and the version that sounded like an apology for delivering accurate information.
What remained was clean.
Sirius confirmed it himself. He will spend the summer with the Potter family. He said Euphemia Potter has already written to him. I don't know what you want to do with this, but you have it from me directly now, which is what you asked for.
I'll be home for the holidays. Nothing has changed on my end.
— R
He had looked at the last two lines for a long time.
Then he had left them.
Breakfast was normal in the way that Thursdays tended to be normal — slightly slower than the middle of the week, slightly less fraught than the approach to the weekend. The Great Hall had the quality of a room that had agreed, collectively, to be unremarkable for one morning.
Regulus ate. Lina was reading something that made her occasionally exhale through her nose in a way that suggested it was either very bad or very good. Samuel had his Transfiguration essay out and was reading it with the expression of someone who had fixed the third paragraph and was now finding two more errors he hadn't noticed before.
Across the hall, at the Gryffindor table, he was not looking.
He was, however, aware — in the peripheral way he was always aware of that table in that particular configuration — that something was happening. A low sound. A sustained low sound. The kind of sustained low sound that emerged from that section of the Gryffindor table when someone had said something that required an extended response.
He did not look.
Lina looked. "Something's happening at the Gryffindor table."
"Something is always happening at the Gryffindor table," Samuel said, without looking up from his essay.
"This is more specific." A pause. "Black is—" Another pause. "Hm."
Regulus buttered his toast.
"He's standing on the bench," Lina said.
Regulus's butter knife paused for approximately half a second.
"Why," he said, in a tone that was not a question.
"I don't — he's—" Lina tilted her head. "He appears to be reciting something."
At which point, because this was the kind of morning it was, the particular tenor of the Gryffindor table noise resolved itself into something with meter.
Sirius Black was, in fact, reciting. Or performing. The distinction was unclear from this distance. He was standing on the bench with the comfortable authority of someone who had decided the bench was a stage, one hand on his chest, the other extended, speaking to what appeared to be an extremely reluctant James Potter and an extremely entertained Peter Pettigrew.
Remus Lupin had a book in front of his face.
The book was upside down.
"He's doing a voice," Lina said.
"A voice," Regulus repeated.
"A — formal sort of voice. Very grave." She was watching with the particular attention she brought to things she found genuinely interesting. "He's saying something about — stars, I think. I can't hear it from here."
"Then stop trying," Samuel said.
"I'm not trying, I can just—" She stopped. "Oh."
"Oh?" Samuel said.
"He's—" Lina's expression had done something complicated. She turned to look at Regulus with the expression of someone who was deciding, rapidly, how to deliver a piece of information.
"What," Regulus said.
"He's reading something," Lina said. "Or reciting. It's — I think it's about you."
The Great Hall had gone fractionally quieter in their immediate vicinity, the way it did when several people simultaneously decided not to be obvious about paying attention.
Regulus set down his butter knife.
He turned.
Sirius was still standing on the bench. He was now holding what appeared to be a folded piece of parchment, held at theatrical arm's length, and he was speaking with tremendous deliberateness and a completely straight face, which was Sirius's most dangerous mode.
He was close enough, now that Regulus was actually facing him, to make out occasional phrases over the general noise.
— youngest in a century—
— walked in like he owned the stars—
— honestly, it's embarrassing—
"Oh for—" Regulus started.
— Regulus Arcturus Black, who I personally witnessed argue a professor into visible distress before lunch—
A small explosion of laughter from Pettigrew. Potter had buried his face in his hands. Lupin's book had come down entirely.
"This is about the Slughorn incident," Regulus said.
"The what," said Samuel.
"Last Tuesday. I had a disagreement with Slughorn about—" He stopped. "It doesn't matter."
"It clearly matters to Sirius," Lina said, with the carefully neutral voice she used when she was privately finding something delightful.
On the bench, Sirius had moved into what appeared to be a closing stanza. He was now addressing the hall at large, with the performance energy of someone who had fully committed and intended to see it through, Potter's mortification notwithstanding.
— and he looked at Slughorn like he was a minor inconvenience—
— which, honestly, same—
— how romantic, how sad, how entirely typical—
He stepped off the bench with the energy of someone completing a bow, which was when he looked across the hall and found Regulus looking directly at him.
There was a moment.
Sirius's expression did the thing it had been doing since October — not closing off, recalibrating — and then it did something else. Something that was not quite a smile, but was the structural blueprint of one. The one that meant: I know exactly what I'm doing, and you know I know, and that's the joke.
Regulus held his gaze for three seconds.
Then he picked up his butter knife and returned to his toast.
Behind him, he could hear Lina exhaling very slowly through her nose.
"Don't," he said.
"I'm not saying anything."
"I can hear you not saying it."
"Regulus," she said. "He wrote a thing about you."
"He recited a thing. He probably wrote it last night to avoid studying for Charms."
"That doesn't make it—"
"It makes it very Sirius," Regulus said. "Which is not a compliment."
He ate his toast.
Across the hall, he could hear the Gryffindor table settling back into its normal register, with occasional aftershocks of laughter. Potter appeared to be explaining to Sirius that there was a line between amusing and requiring a formal apology to the Potions professor, and Sirius appeared to be disputing the existence of this line.
Samuel had given up on his essay.
He was watching Regulus with the expression of someone doing mathematics.
"What," Regulus said.
"Nothing," Samuel said.
"Samuel."
"I was just thinking," Samuel said, "that how romantic, how sad is an interesting line."
"It's a performative line."
"Most things Sirius does are performative. That doesn't mean there's nothing in them."
Regulus did not answer this.
He ate his toast.
After breakfast, between the corridor and the first lesson, Regulus walked past the Gryffindor table's route toward the doors without intending to.
Or: he had not examined whether he intended to.
Sirius fell into step beside him for approximately twelve paces.
"Good morning," Sirius said.
"You made a scene."
"I make lots of scenes. This one was affectionate."
"The distinction," Regulus said, "was not immediately apparent."
"I thought it was pretty clearly apparent."
"How romantic, how sad."
"It's a good line," Sirius said. "I stand by it."
"What does it mean."
A pause.
"It means," Sirius said, with slightly less performance in it now, "that watching you argue with Slughorn until he agreed to give the whole class an extension on their essays was both the most romantic and the most tragic thing I saw this week."
Regulus processed this.
"Romantic."
"In the sense of—noble. Unnecessary. Entirely in character."
"And sad."
"Because you did it and then went back to your seat like it was nothing." A beat. "Which is sort of your whole thing."
They had reached the place where their routes diverged. Sirius would go left toward the Charms corridor. Regulus would go right toward Transfiguration.
Sirius stopped.
"Your mother got the letter," he said. Not a question.
"It was sent this morning."
"Right." He was looking somewhere above Regulus's shoulder. "Right."
"What happens between you and her is between you and her," Regulus said. "I told you that."
"I know." A pause. "I know." Then, quieter: "Thank you. For — the way you wrote it."
"You haven't read it."
"No. But you wrote it, so." A small gesture that meant: I know how you do things. That's enough.
Twelve seconds, perhaps. The corridor moving around them.
Then Sirius said: "For what it's worth — the otter suits you."
Regulus went very still.
"Potter," he said.
"Lupin, actually. He heard it from the Davies girl." A pause. "The whole castle knew by dinner."
"Of course it did."
"Otters are," Sirius appeared to be choosing his words with unusual care, "clever. And faster than they look. And they float, which seems inefficient until you realize it's just — they like to." He paused. "I think it suits you."
Regulus looked at him.
"What's yours," he said. It was not something he had ever asked.
Sirius's mouth curved. "Dog."
"Of course it is."
"Large, shaggy, extremely handsome—"
"Deeply undignified—"
"Affectionate," Sirius said, which landed differently than the rest of it.
A beat.
"Affectionate," Regulus repeated, evenly.
"Yeah." Not performed now. Just said. "Go to class, Reg."
"You go to class."
"I'll go when I'm ready. You'll be late if you don't leave now."
He wasn't wrong.
Regulus turned.
"Reg," Sirius said, behind him.
He didn't turn back.
"Nothing," Sirius said. "Just — nothing. Go."
He went.
Transfiguration passed in the standard way.
He took notes. He performed the assigned transformation on the second attempt, which was acceptable. He answered one question and deflected another.
Samuel, beside him, said nothing about the corridor until the lesson ended and they were filing out, and then said only: "Dog?"
"Apparently."
"Hm." Samuel considered. "Accurate."
"Deeply."
"And yours?"
"He already knew."
"The whole castle already knows." Samuel adjusted the strap of his bag. "Lina cried a little bit. She'll deny it if you ask."
"I'm not going to ask."
"No."
They walked.
The morning had settled into the particular texture of a Thursday that had been more than it appeared — that had opened something, or confirmed something, in the small way that most important things actually happened: not dramatically, not with announcement, but in corridors and over toast and in the twelve paces before two routes diverged.
How romantic, Sirius had said. How sad.
Regulus thought about that.
He thought about the word romantic stripped of Sirius's performance, holding just its root: something shaped like a story. Something that gestured toward meaning.
He thought about sad in the sense of: necessary cost. The thing that made it mean something was also the thing that made it ache.
He thought: yes, probably.
He thought: and yet.
The otter, when it came: small and fast, not a straight line. Warmth held in the body instead of announced from the mouth. Choosing to float not because it was efficient but because it simply, undefendably, liked to.
He thought that was probably true about him.
He had not known it until Wednesday night in an empty classroom, Samuel's quill scratching nearby, the silver dispersing and then — not dispersing.
He thought: this is how you find things out about yourself. Not through what you intend but through what appears, when you stop managing it.
He did not share this with Samuel.
But Samuel walked beside him with the air of someone who had already arrived at most of the same conclusions and was waiting patiently for them to become available.
At dinner, the parchment appeared.
Folded, left on his tray between the soup and the bread roll, with no name on the outside.
He didn't have to check the handwriting.
He opened it.
Otter.
Dog.
The first floats because it wants to. The second stays because it does.
There's probably a metaphor here. I'm not going to make it.
— S
Regulus read it twice.
Then he folded it and put it in his robe, beside his mother's letter from Tuesday, which he had not yet thrown away.
Lina, across the table, was looking at her soup with tremendous focus.
Samuel was eating.
Neither of them asked.
He picked up his spoon.
The dining hall was warm. Outside, the November dark had settled fully in, and the enchanted ceiling was deep and starless with cloud, and the candles held their small fires against it without ceremony.
Regulus ate his soup.
How romantic, how sad.
Yes, he thought.
And enough.