Chapter Text
The tanks came in the morning.
Not to the village, but Regulus heard them on the radio that his father kept in his study, the one that could reach Praha, and he heard the flat official voice reporting what was happening in the streets of the capital. He knew what it meant.
He thought about Barty's information about the car. He kept the thought quiet and separate from everything else.
He went about his morning just like he always did. Kettle. Tea. Kitchen window, looking out at the garden and the gap between houses and the square. The scaffolding was gone. The statue stood clean in the morning light, the saint's face patient as ever, the left shoulder repaired. Done.
He thought about what done meant. He put that thought down.
He went to find James.
* * *
The church was quiet when he arrived. Alferd was in the nave, praying or performing the motions of it with the equanimity of someone who had made peace with the ambiguity. He looked up when Regulus came in and something in his face, something practiced smooth, caught on itself for just a moment.
"Is James here?" Regulus asked.
Alfred looked at him. "He went out earlier."
"Where?"
A pause. Not long, but long enough. "I'm not sure."
Regulus looked at him. He was good at reading faces and Alferd's face was not, currently, fully available to him. It had the quality of a window with the shutters half-drawn.
"Alferd," he said. "What's happening tonight."
Not a question.
Alferd was quiet for a long moment. Then: "I think you should find your friends."
Something went still in Regulus's chest. "Thank you," he said, and left.
* * *
Barty and Evan were at the fountain.
Evan had his cigarette in hand, long legs crossed. Barty was watching the road to the station.
"The stonemasons have bags," Barty said, when Regulus sat down. "I saw them this morning. Coming out of the church."
Regulus looked at the road.
"Three bags," Barty said. "For three people."
Regulus said nothing. The morning continued around them. The baker's van, the woman with the bucket, the two old men on the bench outside the community hall. Normal. All of it was normal, and underneath the normal something was moving that was not normal, that had been moving all month and had finally arrived at its own conclusion.
Three bags.
He thought about James saying I'm working something out and I'll tell you when I have. He thought about James's face the last two days. Still warm, still there, but with something behind it that Regulus had been telling himself he was misreading.
He had not been misreading.
America, he thought. James was going to America with his friends and his parents were waiting and the border window was closing. That was what was happening. That was what had always been going to happen.
He understood. He did. He was good at understanding things that hurt, at processing them through the part of himself that was precise and fair, the part that his father had given him. He understood.
He pressed his hand against his chest, once, briefly, and felt nothing there.
* * *
He did not go to the station.
He made himself not go. He went home instead and sat in the kitchen and drank tea he couldn't taste and looked at the gap between houses toward the square, and when the clock said eleven he thought that the train would be leaving now. Or it had left. Or it was leaving. And Sirius was on it, and Remus was on it, and James was on it, and they were going toward something that wasn’t about to be invaded by russian tanks.
He was glad for them. He was. The gladness and the other thing were separate categories and he had filed them separately. He was fine.
His father came downstairs at noon and went to the community hall without speaking to Regulus. He came back at three looking like someone had confirmed something he had not wanted confirmed.
At half past three, Barty came through the back gate.
"Evan has the car," he said. "We need to decide quickly."
Regulus looked at him.
"The people from Praha are making a list," Barty said. "A list of all the nazi pigs that escaped. I found a copy." His voice was entirely flat. "Your family is on it. So is mine." A pause. "For different reasons. Same outcome."
Regulus stood up. He thought about his mother and her careful smile and his father and his study and the house they had acquired when things got too loud in Praha. Everything that he had done to maintain the careful management of it all.
He thought about art school, a door that had closed.
He put his cup down.
"Where's Alferd?" he asked.
* * *
Alferd was, it turned out, entirely prepared for this. He had been prepared for variations of this for the better part of thirty years, and he moved through the logistics of it with the unhurried efficiency.
He gave them a route. He gave Evan the name of a man on the other side of the Slovak border who owed Alferd a debt of conscience, which was the most durable kind. He gave Regulus a letter, sealed, and told him to open it when they were across.
He held Regulus by the shoulders for a moment in the doorway of the church.
"You're your mother's stubbornness and your brother's conscience," Alferd said. "Between those two things, you'll manage."
Regulus said nothing. He thought about the gap between houses and the view from the scaffolding and the dry fountain and a voice saying I like saying it about his name. He thought about three bags and a train that had already left.
He walked to the car.
* * *
The road out of the village was clear. Not everyone seemed to feel the earth quaking under the incoming invasion.
Evan drove with unhurried competence, not wanting to draw any unwanted attention. Barty was in the front seat, not speaking, looking at the road ahead, not happy, exactly, but clarified. Done with waiting.
Regulus was in the back. He watched the village go past the window. The square, the linden tree, the statue clean and whole in the afternoon light. The church. He looked at it as they passed and thought about the cold stone and the warmth of melting candles.
He looked forward.
They were two kilometres out when Barty said, without turning: "I am sorry about James not saying goodbye, but…"
Regulus went very still.
"What?" said Evan.
"I mean, isn't our plan similar to theirs? We want to make it to the west side. America if we are lucky." Barty's voice was careful. "At least if we all make it you will have someone waiting for you and you can yell at him properly." He was quiet for a moment. "And your brother is already going to be there too. I know what they did is shit but at least you have someone on the other side."
Regulus looked at the road ahead. The fields on either side. The sky.
I'm working something out. I'll tell you when I have.
Whatever you decide. I trust you.
The car moved through the afternoon and Regulus held very still and thought about nothing, because if he thought about anything he would cry. Cry about everything that he is leaving behind, same way as he felt left behind. As much as this was not the place he thought of when someone mentioned future, some of the most beautiful memories were born here. He pressed his hands flat on his thighs, bunching the material of his pants. Tears fighting their way down his cheeks.
He wanted to cry about being abandoned again without a goodbye. But he also wanted to shed the tears of pure relief that maybe somewhere out there is the future of him and James being together in America.
Even if Barty is right that he is going to yell at James until his lungs are not working properly anymore.
"Regulus." Barty's voice, quiet. He had turned slightly in the seat. "Don't cry."
"I'm not." He said, almost petulantly.
"I know. Keep not doing it."
Regulus looked out the window. A field. Another field. The road going straight toward whatever came next.
"He chose to not say goodbye," Barty said. "Whatever the reason. He made a choice."
"I know."
"And you're making one now. By staying in this car."
Regulus said nothing.
Evan drove. The light was doing the evening thing, going low and gold, and somewhere behind them the village was becoming something they had been and would not be again. Barty looked at Regulus in the rearview mirror with the expression of someone who wanted to say something useful and was not sure he had it.
"At least you have someone waiting for you," Barty repeated. "On the other side of the border. Your brother." A pause. "That's not nothing, Regulus."
Regulus looked at him. Barty's face in the mirror, Evan's hands on the wheel, the road going forward.
"No," Regulus said. "It's not nothing."
He looked forward. He kept looking forward.
He did not cry.
* * *
The cell was small and very cold.
James sat with his back against the wall and looked at the narrow window and the grey rectangle of sky it framed and thought about nothing for a long time.
Then he allowed himself to think.
He thought about Sirius and Remus on the train, moving toward the border, moving toward whatever came next, alive and together and going. He thought about his mother's handwriting, different from his father's, rounder, slower, and the letters she'd sent that he'd memorised and then burned. He thought about Alferd and the statue and the cold stone of the vestry floor and the way candle shadows breathed.
He thought about a village in August, and a fountain dry in the square, and a linden tree a hundred years old. A boy on the scaffolding in the last light, looking out at the view like it had surprised him.
He thought about grey-blue eyes.
Not grey, not blue either, the colour of the sky before rain, that specific Czech sky he had grown up under, the sky that could shift from silver to slate in the time it took to walk between two windows. He had spent his whole childhood learning to read that sky.
He pressed his hand against his chest. The letter was gone, they'd taken everything when they arrested him on the station. But the shape of it was still there, the specific weight of his father's handwriting.
We'll be waiting. Whatever you need. Come home.
When they were dragging him into the guards car with the treatment only a deserter earns in this country. He wanted to cry. Because he never got to tell Regulus that he had stayed for him. That he isn’t someone that could be left behind. That he loves him.
He should have listened to Sirius.
James looked at the rectangle of grey sky in the small window.
He thought about stormy eyes.
He thought: I hope you're going forward. I hope you're not looking back. I hope Sirius is on the other side of whatever border you're crossing and I hope you are going toward him and I hope, when you arrive, you let yourself be glad about it.
He thought: I will never see you again.
He let that be true.
He didn’t think about the fact that even if he knew the outcome he would still do the same. He didn't have to. He already knew.
Outside the small window, the sky was the colour of nothing in particular.
Inside the small window, James Potter sat with his back against the wall and thought about stormy eyes until he couldn't anymore, and then until he could again. The grey light moved across the floor the way light moved across everything. Without an end.