Chapter Text
The hospital looked like a monument to things left unsaid.
Regulus stood across the street for a long moment before crossing, hands buried deep into the pockets of his coat though the air was not cold. The glass façade reflected a distorted version of himself—sharper, older, hollowed out. For a second, he imagined Sirius standing beside him in that reflection, shoulder knocking against his, grin reckless as ever.
For once, choose me.
The memory struck before he could brace for it.
Regulus wanted to run.
He could still see the way Sirius had looked that night—furious, yes, but beneath it something far more fragile. Fear disguised as anger. Love disguised as demand.
“You don’t owe him anything,” Sirius had said, pacing Regulus’ tiny flat, desperate. “He disowned you. He made you think you were unlovable for loving!”
“He’s dying,” Regulus had whispered back.
“So?”
That was not the worst of it.
Regulus swallowed and crossed the street.
The sliding doors parted with a mechanical sigh, and the smell hit him immediately. Antiseptic and something underneath it, metallic and sterile and final. Hospitals always felt like suspended worlds. Time didn’t move properly here; it either dragged mercilessly or leapt forward without permission.
He signed his name at reception without looking up. He had written it so many times over the years that it felt detached from him now. A formality. A ghost signing in to see another ghost.
Fighting his instincts telling him to turn back, he forced his legs to move in an all too familiar direction.
The walk to Sirius’ ward was muscle memory. Left at the nurses’ station. Down the corridor with the muted landscape paintings. Past the vending machines that hummed in perpetual indifference.
He almost didn’t see Remus at first.
Remus was standing by the window at the far end of the hallway, shoulders curved inward as though he were perpetually bracing for impact. The morning light cut across his profile, catching in the streaks of grey that had multiplied in his hair over the past few years. He looked thinner than the man he knew from happier days, thinner than the photographs Sirius used to keep in his wallet. Grief had a way of sanding a person down.
Grant, one of the nurses here—Regulus wished he wasn't in a position where he would know the names of every medical staff in this hospital—stood beside him in navy scrubs, holding two paper cups of what was probably terrible hospital coffee. He said something low, something Regulus couldn’t hear, and Remus— Remus smiled.
It was small. Brief. But real.
Regulus slowed without meaning to.
That smile had been rare since the accident. It had become a relic, like laughter in an abandoned house. But here it was, coaxed out by someone whose name did not belong to Sirius.
A sharp, traitorous bitterness curled in Regulus’ chest.
Grant handed Remus the cup, their fingers brushing in a way that lingered a fraction too long. Or maybe Regulus only imagined it lingering. Maybe grief had sharpened him into cruelty.
Remus looked up then and saw him.
The smile disappeared, not guiltily no, but carefully, as though folded away out of respect.
“Regulus,” Remus greeted softly.
Out. Away. Go.
Pushing the thoughts away, Regulus inclined his head. He had never quite known what to call Remus now. Brother-in-law felt too warm for a family that he had shattered. Remus felt too intimate for someone who held the legal right to decide whether his brother lived or died.
“How is he?” Regulus asked.
It was a ritual question. A very pointless one.
“The same,” Remus replied.
The same.
Three years of the same.
Grant offered Regulus a polite nod before excusing himself back toward the nurses’ station. Regulus watched him go, noting how Remus’ gaze followed him for half a heartbeat before returning.
Another small twist of something ugly.
They walked the remaining stretch of corridor together, footsteps echoing faintly. The silence between them wasn’t hostile—just heavy. Overfilled with things neither dared say aloud.
Regulus’ hand hovered near the door to Sirius’ room, but he didn’t push it open yet.
Instead, the memory came unbidden.
“I told you not to go,” Sirius had said over the phone, voice tight with restrained panic.
“It’s just a meeting,” Regulus had insisted. “He wants to see me.Maybe Apologize."
“He wants to control you, Reg!” Sirius snapped. “Even now. Especially now!”
“You’re being dramatic.”
A sharp exhale on the other end. “Reg, please. Don’t do this.”
Regulus had rolled his eyes then, staring at his reflection in the mirror as he adjusted his collar. “You don’t get to dictate my life just because you hate him.”
“And you don’t get to keep choosing people who hurt you over the people who love you.”
Silence.
Then, quieter—almost broken—“For once, choose me.”
Regulus closed his eyes briefly in the present.
He hadn’t chosen him.
He had walked into that hospital room alone. He had listened to their father spit venom even with morphine thick in his veins. He had walked out shaking and called Sirius, asking him to come get him because he suddenly felt eight years old again.
Sirius had come.
Remus’ voice pulled him back. “He had a stable night.”
Regulus nodded, because stable was the only word anyone ever used anymore. Stable meant no infection. Stable meant no seizures. Stable meant nothing had gotten worse.
It never meant better.
They stepped inside together.
Sirius lay in the bed, impossibly still beneath the quiet architecture of tubing and wires. The ventilator breathed for him in soft, measured sighs. A monitor traced uneven green lines across black—proof of something electrical still happening beneath bone and skin.
For a split second—like every single time—Regulus expected his brother to sit up and complain about the lighting.
Instead, there was only the rhythm of borrowed air.
He moved to the bedside automatically, fingers brushing against Sirius’ hand. Warm. Always warm.
Warm meant circulation. Warm meant his heart was still choosing to beat. Warm felt like proof of something the scans couldn’t show.
Behind him, Remus lingered near the window again, putting the cup of coffee on the table near it.
Regulus could feel the conversation waiting there. It had been waiting for months now. in hushed meetings, in careful phrasing, in the way doctors avoided absolutes but leaned heavily on statistics.
After this long, chances get smaller.
After this long, improvement becomes unlikely.
After this long, you have to ask what you’re holding on to.
They didn’t call it gone.
Just fucking prolonged.
They will never say never.
Instead they will say very low.
He didn’t turn around.
Not yet.
He stared at Sirius’ face instead—at the faint twitch beneath his eyelid that might have meant nothing. At the stillness that wasn’t death, but wasn’t presence either.
“You’re still in there,” Regulus murmured, more to himself than anyone else.
The ventilator exhaled for him.
Behind him, Remus shifted, the sound of someone carrying a decision too heavy to set down.
Regulus’ jaw tightened.
He knew what the doctors were asking now.
Gently. So fucking gentle.
How long do we keep the machines doing what he cannot?
How long do we call this waiting instead of ending?
Regulus tightened his grip on Sirius’ hand.
He looked briefly at his brother-in-law, and bit his lip, he didn't mean to feel bitter, but the thoughts that surrounded his mind made him want to run to the bathroom and throw up the little food he had forced himself to swallow earlier.
He looked back at his brother ti avoid Remus' knowing eyes.
You don’t get to smile at someone else while he’s still breathing.
And beneath that, quieter and far more dangerous—
If he wakes up and I’m not here, will he think I chose wrong again?
The machines filled the silence for them.
A steady mechanical inhale. A soft electronic pulse. The faint drip of fluids that had long ago replaced hunger and thirst and all the ordinary things Sirius used to complain about just to hear himself talk.
Regulus kept his fingers wrapped around his brother’s hand as if the warmth might vanish the second he let go.
“He had another brain scan last night,” Remus said quietly from the window.
Regulus didn’t turn. “And?”
“There’s still activity.” A pause. “It’s just… uhm— not the kind that you know... answers back.”
Not him. Not Sirius Black.
The words sat there anyway.
Regulus traced his thumb over Sirius’ knuckles—hands that should have been scarred from handlebars and rooftop stunts and every reckless decision he’d ever made. Instead, they were smooth. Untouched. Preserved in this awful pause between living and leaving.
“He squeezed my hand yesterday,” Regulus said.
Remus inhaled slowly. “Reg—”
“He did.”
“I know.” His voice was gentle. Careful. “They’ve told me that can happen. The body reacts sometimes. Muscle Memory. It doesn’t always mean he meant to.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” Remus admitted, and that was the part that hurt. “I don’t. But I’ve seen his fingers move when no one was talking. When the room was empty.”
Regulus’s jaw tightened.
Remus pushed off the window and crossed the room, slower this time.
“The damage is… spread out, they said,” he said quietly. “It’s not one place you fix and everything comes back online. They said It’s like the connections just aren’t reaching each other. Like some parts still light up? But some don’t. And after this long, they don’t expect those connections to suddenly repair themselves.”
“So that’s it?” Regulus let out a humorless breath. “Brains adapt, Rem. People wake up after years. It happens.”
“It does, yes.” Remus said. “Just not often.”
The ventilator exhaled for Sirius.
In.
Out.
Remus looked at the floor before he said it.
“They’re asking if we should keep the machines going.”
There it was.
The god awful truth.
“They can ask whatever they want,” Regulus replied evenly.
“They’re asking what he would have wanted.”
Regulus’s grip tightened unconsciously. "Well too bad, he's not awake to say it."
Sirius had once laughed—sunburnt and loud and sprawled across a beach in La Union ranting about a movie he watched with Ev the day before—and told him if he ever became stuck in a vegetative state, Regulus was to “pull the plug dramatically and scatter my ashes somewhere illegal.”
But leave some for Remus, Reggie. He'll miss me too much.
Remus rolled his eyes beside him.
That had been before hospitals.
Before ventilators.
Before reality.
“We don’t know,” Regulus said. “People say things when they think they’re untouchable.”
“And sometimes they mean them,” Remus said softly.
Regulus turned then.
“Is that what you want?” His voice sharpened. “To let him go?”
Remus flinched—not from the words, but from the accusation behind them.
“I want him to stop being stuck,” he said, and there was no anger in it. Just rawness. “If he’s not coming back, I don’t want this to be all he gets.”
“And if he will? Come back, I mean? He’s not stuck, Remus.”
“He can’t talk, Regulus.”
“He could hear us.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Yes, we do. You know we do.” Regulus insisted, desperation cracking through. “They’ve done studies. People process voices even when they can’t respond. He could be aware. He could be trying to get back to us! I've read all the fucking studies out there, and you read them with me!”
He swallowed everything that was eating him from the moment he entered this infrastructure three years ago.
"We had hoped. You used to hope. With me."
Remus’s composure finally splintered.
“And if he is?” he asked, voice breaking. “If he can hear everything and he can’t move, can’t speak, can’t tell us he’s scared—what if this is hell for him?”
The question tore through the room.
Regulus saw red.
“So that’s it?” he snapped. “You’re tired? You want something easier, huh? Someone who smiles at you in hallways and doesn’t come with machines attached?!”
Remus went very still.
“Grant is a friend.”
“Is he?”
“He is.”
“And you still love Sirius?” Regulus demanded.
Remus looked at the man in the bed before he answered.
“I have loved him every day he’s been here,” he said quietly. “And every day he hasn’t.”
Remus’ jaw tightened. “More than you know.”
“Some love you’ve got,” Regulus spat.
For a moment, Remus looked like he might finally shout back. His mouth opened, eyes flashing with something sharp and wounded.
Regulus braced for it.
You have no right!
He was driving to you.
But Remus swallowed it down.
“You think I don’t know whose name he was saying when they brought him in?” Remus asked instead, voice shaking. “You think I haven’t replayed that night every day for three years?”
Regulus’ breath hitched.
“He was trying to get to you,” Remus continued. “Because you called him. Because you were hurt.”
The words were not accusatory.
That made them worse.
“I didn’t mean—”
"Stop it, I'm not accusing you.”
Silence collapsed over them, thick and suffocating.
Regulus felt the familiar wave of nausea rise. Guilt was a living thing; it nested in his ribs and refused to leave.
“I’m keeping him alive,” he said finally, but the conviction had thinned. “That’s all I’m doing.”
“Are you?” Remus asked gently. “Or are you keeping him here for yourself? To ease that godforsaken guilt that lives within you?”
The question struck deep.
“The best thing for him is to live,” Regulus insisted, louder now, as if volume might turn it into truth.
“Is it?”
“Yes!”
Remus’ shoulders sagged. “I’m not sure about that anymore.”
The words detonated.
Remus bit his lip, his eyes somewhat red. "Look, Reg—"
“I—” Regulus’ vision blurred suddenly. “I need air.”
He didn’t wait for a response. He pushed past Remus, past the door, down the corridor that felt too narrow and too bright and too full of eyes.
He didn’t stop until he burst through the hospital doors into the open air.
The sky was overcast, low and grey like a held breath. But it always does, these days.
He stumbled toward the side of the building, pressing his palms against the brick as if the solidness might steady him. His chest heaved. Tasting a metalic flavor inside his mouth, Regulus couldn't help but crouch down and expell his lunch on the pavement.
You’re keeping him here for yourself.
He thought of Sirius on rooftops, pointing at constellations and inventing alien civilizations just to make Regulus laugh.
He thought of Sirius promising that they would leave someday. Somewhere warm. Somewhere loud. Somewhere that didn’t feel like a mausoleum of expectations.
The Philippines.
Nanay Mara’s voice singing him to sleep in Tagalog when storms rattled the windows of their childhood home. The way Sirius had insisted on learning curse words first. The way they’d spent one summer chasing stray dogs along a beach in Batangas, brown-skinned and sun-drunk and freer than they’d ever been in England.
“You know,” Sirius had said once, staring out at the water, “if we ever disappear, this is where we should do it.”
Regulus had laughed. “Disappear?”
“Start over,” Sirius corrected. “Different sky. Different story.”
Regulus pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes.
When he came back down the corridor, the hallway outside Sirius’ room was empty.
But there were voices coming from the consultation room at the end of it. Low. Measured. The kind of voices people use when they think they’re being kind.
He didn’t mean to listen.
He just… stopped.
“…the ethics committee would support whatever decision you make…”
A pause.
“…if you choose to remove the ventilator, we would keep him comfortable…”
Regulus’ stomach dropped.
Another voice, softer. “He wouldn’t feel distress. We’d manage that.”
Silence.
Then Remus.
Low. Strained thin.
“I just don’t know if this is living,” he said. “He wouldn’t have wanted to be kept like this. Not if he wasn’t… here.”
The words hit harder than anything medical ever could.
A different voice answered gently.
“These cases are about quality of life. About what he would have considered acceptable. After this long, meaningful recovery becomes… unlikely.”
Unlikely.
Not impossible.
But the word felt like a verdict anyway.
Regulus couldn’t breathe.
The ventilator.
Remove the ventilator.
Keep him comfortable.
As if Sirius were already halfway gone.
As if he were a decision.
Regulus didn’t wait to hear Remus answer.
He didn’t wait to hear percentages or timelines or the careful language of people who had already started letting go.
He turned.
And Regulus ran.
***
He didn’t go home.
He didn’t call anyone.
He moved through the city like a man underwater, vision tunneled, ears ringing.
By the time he found himself standing in the airport, it felt less like a decision and more like gravity.
His phone buzzed once in his pocket. He didn’t look at it. He switched it to silent instead.
At the check-in counter, his hands didn’t shake until he handed over his passport.
“Final destination?” the attendant asked politely.
He swallowed.
“Manila.”
The word tasted like salt and memory.
Now equipped with his phone switched to silent, his wallet heavy with cards he does not plan to use carefully, and a passport he has not touched in years, Regulus sits at the gate and waits.
The airport is loud in a way the hospital never is. Life moves here. People complain about baggage allowances and missed connections. Children drag stuffed animals by their ears. Announcements echo overhead in polished, neutral tones.
Regulus sits among them with a single duffel bag between his feet.
Inside it: two shirts, a pair of trousers, his charger, the photograph from La Union, and the bracelet Pandora tied around his wrist years ago—woven red and gold thread, slightly frayed at the edges.
The country he is flying to feels strange on his tongue when he thinks of it here, in this grey terminal. But so fucking familiar.
Philippines.
Home, in a way England never fully was.
Their nanny—Nanay Mara—had come into their lives when Regulus was too young to remember the house without her. She had been hired, yes, but she had never behaved like staff. She had filled silences their parents left behind. She had told them stories mixed in Tagalog and English while thunderstorms rattled the windows. She had braided Sirius' hair when he asked her in a polite manner he never uses to anyone. She had scolded Sirius in three languages when he did something reckless.
When their parents disappeared on business trips that stretched from weeks into months, Nanay Mara stayed.
And one summer, when Regulus was nine and Sirius was ten, and when their parents couldn't care less about their whereabouts, agreeing distractedly to a vacation, she brought them home with her.
Not to a house.
Home.
He remembers heat first. The kind that clung to skin and refused to apologize. He remembers jeepneys painted like explosions of color. He remembers Evan daring Sirius to jump from a rock into seawater too shallow and Pandora shouting at them in rapid-fire Tagalog that Regulus only half understood. He remembers being jealous of a family he witnessed love each other like it's breathing.
He promised himself to learn the language after.
He remembers laughter that did not echo in marble hallways.
After that, England always felt smaller.
So when university applications loomed, his parents expected compliance. Business. Finance. Something respectable.
He had agreed.
But only if he could study in Manila.
It was the only time he had ever truly pushed back.
He still remembers the silence at the dining table when he said it. His mother’s tight smile. His father’s calculating pause.
They agreed in the end,
Maybe they can see the challenge on Regulus eyes, as he made a demand for the first time. Or perhaps assuming distance would cure him of whatever softness they believed he had inherited from Sirius.
Instead, it gave him oxygen.
He built a life there. Friends who did not know the weight of his surname. Even love, once. Dust-filled streets that smelled of rain and gasoline. A skyline that felt alive instead of oppressive.
Sirius had visited plenty.
“This place suits you,” Sirius had said the last time, leaning against a balcony railing in Makati, city lights blinking beneath them like grounded stars. “You’re less… haunted here.”
Regulus sat at the gate and watched planes taxi across the runway.
He imagined Sirius waking to an empty chair.
He imagined Remus standing alone in that hospital room, forced to choose without him.
He imagined staying—and watching the ventilator power down.
The boarding screen flashes: PR 103 – Manila – On Time.
“Philippine Airlines flight PR 103 to Manila is now boarding.”
The announcement rang clear and final.
Regulus stood.
His chest ached so violently he thought for a moment he might turn back.
But if he stayed, he would have to watch the slow undoing. If he stayed, he might break in ways that could never be repaired.
Sirius had wanted a different sky.
Regulus stepped forward.
As he handed over his ticket, thoughts threaded through the noise and the light and the unbearable weight of it all.
He wonders if leaving makes him a coward.
Or if staying would have made him selfish.
Around him, passengers began lining up.
Regulus exhales slowly.
He tells himself this isn’t abandonment.
Again.
He just needs to breathe.
And somewhere, beneath layers of guilt and grief and love twisted into something unrecognizable, a quieter thought surfaces:
If Sirius had to choose between watching him suffocate here or watching him leave—
He knows what his brother would have said.
Go.
So he did.
And somewhere across the city, in a quiet hospital room filled with borrowed breath, Sirius Black slept on.
;