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It’s the end of August, and the air smells like rain that is yet to arrive. James has the windows of the Escort rolled all the way down because the air conditioning gave up trying to work sometime in 1998, and Don’t Look Back In Anger is playing on the cassette for the third time, because nobody can be arsed to lean over and find another one. The cassette has lived in the deck so long that the box has cracked and the corners have gone soft with sun.
In the back, Peter has his head out of the window like a dog, eyes shut, the wind taking his hair backwards. Remus has a battered copy of A Clockwork Orange spine-up on his thigh, which he is not reading, because nobody reads in James’s car—you only bring a book to look like the kind of person who might. Sirius has one knee up against the dashboard and a stolen bottle of Lagavulin at his feet. Lagavulin has always been his father’s favourite, and his father’s father’s before that, and his father’s father’s father’s before that, and so on. It’s definitely worth more than the car. Sirius doesn’t give a fuck.
Regulus is in the back with Peter and Remus.
It’s the first time. The first time he has ever come.
Sirius keeps glancing at him in the wing mirror and pretending he isn’t when Regulus turns his head almost-catching him, which they have been doing all evening. Regulus said yes when Sirius asked him this afternoon, said yes in that suspicious way of his, like he was sure it was a trap. And then he got into James’s car at the bottom of the Black estate drive and didn’t look back at the house. It’s the not-looking-back that has Sirius feeling something particularly complicated.
The road narrows. The hedges come in close, leaning over the lane like they are trying to see what’s inside the car.
“Where are we going, anyway?” Regulus asks. It’s the first thing he has said since they left.
“Farm out near Gibson’s,” James calls back, drumming on the steering wheel.
“There’s a farm there?”
“Used to be. Foot and mouth got the herd, didn’t it? S’been empty for years. Bit of a dump, in a good way.”
“Right,” Regulus says. He looks out of the window. Sirius watches him in the mirror.
The farmhouse stands at the end of a track, the windows long boarded up, the gate half off its hinges. Someone got at the wall with white spray paint years before—MAGGIE THATCHER IS A—and then it trailed off because they ran out of paint or nerve. The newer graffiti is bolder: NUFC, BORN TO RUN, SOPHIE 4 CRAIG, and on the door someone has written NO WAR in big sloppy capitals, the O’s done as peace signs.
Peter lets out a long, satisfied sigh. “Oi, lovely.”
They climb out into the dusk. The air is humid and humming—the last of the summer’s bugs still going in the long grass, midges and crane flies, a moth or two already taking the lights of the car. The sun is a low orange thing over the field, washing everything pink and gold.
“Right, lads,” James says, stretching. “Drinking. Smoking. Misbehaving. Off we go.”
They drink the Lagavulin first. Sirius pours into plastic cups he has nicked from the pantry, the type you use at children’s parties; however, Sirius is not really sure why the Black house has these cups in the first place. It’s not like he or Regulus have ever gotten a birthday party before. James pulls a face after the first sip, trying and failing to look impressed. Peter says it tastes like fire. Remus closes his eyes when he sips and doesn’t open them for a moment, and Sirius watches the colour come up on the bridge of his nose and then looks away before anyone catches him. Remus in particular.
Regulus takes a tiny sip. He doesn’t pull a face. He doesn’t even really say anything. He just sits down on the front step of the farmhouse and holds the cup in both hands like he is trying to warm himself on it.
The cigarettes come out—Marlboro Lights, scrounged off Dorcas Meadowes’s older brother for a quid each. Peter coughs for so long on the first drag that James thumps him on the back and scolds him for trying to die before they have even gotten drunk properly. Regulus takes one when Sirius offers, with the same suspicious look as before, and holds it between his fingers exactly the way Sirius holds his, which Sirius notices but doesn’t say anything about.
The light goes down. The bottle goes round. Don’t Look Back In Anger plays for about the twentieth time from the car, because they have left the door open and James doesn’t care about the battery of his car.
At some point (Sirius has stopped keeping time) James and Peter decide that they are going to play chase-and-murder in the field, and Regulus, two cups in and starting to laugh at things he wouldn’t laugh at sober, gets dragged in.
Sirius watches him go.
He hasn’t seen his brother run in years. He hasn’t realised that’s a thing he can even notice, that someone can stop running in the first place. Regulus is fourteen—fourteen—and he runs like he is eight again, like the world has not yet taken running away from him. James is chasing him with a length of old hosepipe like a sword. Peter is wheezing somewhere off to the side. Regulus is shrieking, actually shrieking, the kind of laugh Sirius hasn’t heard come out of his brother since their Uncle Alphard died, and there was nobody left in the house to remind them how to laugh.
Sirius is sitting on the bonnet of the Escort with Remus.
The metal is warm under his thighs. The car is ticking as it cools. From the open door, the cassette has skipped ahead at last to something mid-album.
Remus has a cigarette he is not really smoking, watching the orange of it like it’s a small fire he’s been trusted to mind. He has taken off his jumper, and his arms are bare in the last of the light, and there is a midge on his elbow that he isn’t bothering to brush off.
“He’s actually laughing,” Sirius says quietly.
Remus glances over at the field. Regulus has fallen over. James is bowing dramatically in front of him.
“Mm,” Remus says.
“I don’t think I’ve seen him laugh like that since he was about…six.”
“Your house is awful, Padfoot.”
“I know.”
Sirius takes a long drink. The whisky is warm now, and tastes of the inside of the car. He doesn’t actually like Lagavulin. He has taken it only because it is the most expensive thing on the shelf, because his father loves it, and because he has wanted to drink it badly, out of a plastic children’s cup, in a field with people his father would hate.
He suddenly says, “I’m getting out of here.”
Remus doesn’t look at him, but his head tilts, listening.
“Soon as I’m done with sixth form. London. Wherever. I don’t care. Just—out.”
“Yeah?”
“Never coming back either. Not for Christmas, not for Easter, not for anything. They can rot in that house. They can fight over the silver. I’m done.”
Remus is quiet for a moment. The midge has moved up his arm. “What about Reg?”
For a moment, Sirius could’ve sworn Remus wanted to ask: What about me?
Sirius doesn’t answer right away. In the field, Regulus has got up and is now apparently the murderer, and James is running, and Peter is on his knees laughing.
“I’ll get him out,” Sirius says. “I’ll go, and I’ll come back only for him. I’ll get him out the second he’s old enough.”
“And if he doesn’t want to come?”
“He’ll want to come.”
Remus looks at him then, sidelong, the corner of his mouth quirking up the way it does when he doesn’t quite agree but isn’t going to fight about it. Sirius has always loved that look. He has not yet thought of it as love; he only thinks of it as a thing he keeps track of, the way you keep track of where the exits are in a room.
The field has gone properly purple now. The bugs are going mental in the long grass.
“I don’t know why I told you that.”
“You tell me everything.”
“I don’t.”
“You do. I’m sort of the dumping ground for everything you think and won’t say in front of James.”
“You’re not a dumping ground.”
“Mm.”
“You’re not. Don’t say that.”
Remus shrugs one shoulder, easy. He is so easy about it, about being known, about being the person Sirius tells things to. Sirius doesn’t know how to do that; how to wear it that lightly. He looks at the side of Remus’s face and feels something unknown move underneath his ribs, but he couldn’t say what it is if someone paid him.
Out in the field, Regulus glances over once. His face is still bright with laughter. Whatever he sees on the car bonnet doesn’t stop the laughter; if anything, it softens the laughter into something gentler. Then James tackles him sideways and he goes down shrieking, and Sirius stops analysing the look.
They are sitting so close on the bonnet. They have been sitting so close for a while. Remus’s hand is flat on the warm metal between them, and Sirius’s hand is flat on the metal too, the way you put your hand down on a thing when you’ve stopped using it and forgotten it’s there.
Their little fingers are touching.
Sirius doesn’t look down. He doesn’t move his hand. Remus doesn’t move his.
In the field, James is now tackling Peter into the grass. Regulus is bent over, laughing with his hands on his knees, drunk on barely two cups and on the sheer outrageous fact of being allowed to be drunk, and the last of the August bugs are rising in clouds out of the grass where they have been disturbed, lifting into the lavender air like small dying stars.
Sirius doesn’t move his hand.
Don’t Look Back In Anger starts again from the car.
