ilovewithfictionalmen

[ilovewithfictionalmen]

easy silence

(bradley bradshaw x reader)

When a car accident leaves you with custody of your three younger siblings, your world crumbles. Navigating your own grief, funeral arrangements, and the children depending on you - it feels like there's no way out. But if there's one thing Bradley Bradshaw knows about, it's loss. A new position brings him back to San Diego, and back into your life right when you need it most. (from this anon request)

warnings: parental death, angst, hurt/comfort, sad dad bradley, w/c: 10k

for my 1k follower celebration! thank you so much to everyone who's ever read and supported my fics <3

It’s been seven hours since your parents died. Seven hours since the truck collided with your dad’s Chevrolet, on a freeway just two miles from your childhood home. They had been going out for dinner, their first night alone since the twins had been born.

They were stopping off at The Hard Deck to drop a birthday present off for Maverick, neighbour and long-time friend, before heading across town to hit the new Thai place that had just opened up.

At least, that’s what the babysitter had told the cops.

Your mom had been coming to visit you in San Francisco just next weekend. Want some time with my biggest girl, she’d said. Especially since we haven’t been around much recently, what with Olivia and Molly.

But now they’re gone, and your entire childhood resides only in your memory.

Never again will you go to a concert with your dad, continually teasing about his teenage girl taste, and the fact that you’re pretty sure he likes Lana Del Rey more than you do. You’ll never have coffee with your mom, gossiping about distant family members who neither of you have seen in years.

In a single instant, life has become abstract - you’re not sure who you are without them. You’re not even sure you want to find out.

The traffic’s slowed down, now that it’s after midnight. You’ve been driving since you got the news, knuckles white as you grip the steering wheel.

One second you were applying lipstick, getting ready to head out for a date. You’d met the guy on Hinge, and it was unlikely to go anywhere, but you’d been trying to force yourself to get back in the game. It felt like all your friends were starting to settle down, find their person. You’ve not had much luck on that front. Three months here, six months there - it never went anywhere.

You weren’t committal enough. Too unwilling to change. You’d heard it all.

Now all you can think about is your horrifically inappropriate shade of lipstick, and the fact that you’re never going to see your mom again.

You think you might be sick.

*****

You had been an accident. And unfortunate, but indisputable fact. Sure, your parents loved each other - but they certainly weren't planning for a baby at eighteen.

Fresh out of high school, they’d made the best with what they had - a tiny house in the San Diego suburbs, all while scrambling to find jobs. It’s a decision that would forever intwine your lives with the Bradshaw family.

Living in the slightly better house at the end of the street, Nick and Carole Bradshaw were approximately a year ahead of your family. Eleven months earlier, they’d had Bradley, and while they were slightly older than your parents, they were very much all in the same boat.

You don’t have many memories of Nick. Dying just after Bradley’s fourth birthday, you were barely even three. The last time you’d seen him had been at Bradley’s party - you’d spent the entire last hour perched on his shoulders, giggling as he chased Bradley around the back garden.

He seemed like a good man. A good husband. A good father.

But life went on, and your parents stayed incredibly close with Carole. Eventually both of you moved to another neighbourhood in San Diego, beside Bradley’s godfather Maverick, and his wife and stepdaughter, Penny and Amelia.

Things were good.

You don’t remember exactly when you became aware of your parents trying for another baby. There had been vague references to getting a sibling throughout your childhood, but when nothing ever came to fruition, you just shrugged it off. Bradley didn’t have any siblings, and neither did you. You didn’t need siblings when you had each other.

Each day was spent in your backyard or the Bradshaw’s, playing make-believe until you were exhausted.

Even in the throes of puberty, where Bradley was finding his footing in high-school, while you were still in middle school, he’d always make time for you. Would never let his cooler, older friends make fun of you, or make you feel less than.

You’re sure he must have caught his own flack for it, but he didn't let you see it.

Your teenage years passed, and still no sibling. Eventually, words like ‘infertility’ and ‘IVF’ began to get thrown around. Suddenly, nights when your mom was inconsolable became far more understandable.

It seemed like you were meant to be a three-person family.

Finally, they got Adam. Born three months before your twenty-first birthday - the jokes had made themselves.

It had been the last round of IVF they were going to have. It was too taxing, emotionally and physically, to keep going. Especially when you were coming of an age where you might want your own kids in a few years. Your parents didn’t want your kids to have aunts and uncles their own age.

You loved Adam. You did. You do. It’s just always been quite difficult to bond with a kid twenty years your junior. You were across the country at college for all of his major milestones, barely seeing your parents, nevermind anyone else.

It was also at this point that you lost contact with Bradley.

He’d joined the Navy, hellbent on following in Nick Bradshaw’s footsteps after Carole’s death. You wrote occasionally, sent Christmas and birthday cards, but it was never like it used to be.

That had been enough for your parents. Your family complete, mom and dad content with a son and a daughter.

If the cards had fallen differently, Adam might have been your only sibling.

Against every single odd, your mother found out she was pregnant again on her forty-second birthday. After fifteen years of fertility treatments, they conceived naturally just two years after stopping trying.

Oh how funny the universe can be.

Shock had quickly multiplied when the first ultrasound scan showed twins. You wanted to be happy for them. Really, truly. Your parents were finally getting the big family they’d once dreamed of.

You just wished it didn’t feel like you were being replaced in your own home. Your childhood bedroom had been immediately converted to a nursery, like there was no longer a place for you.

You understood. After some tears, you came to the conclusion that if losing your bedroom in a city you didn't live in was the worst thing in your life, you should be grateful. But that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt a little.

Visits thinned, relegated to holidays and summers, even after college. You moved back to the West Coast, opting for San Fran over Diego, and life has been fine. A little boring, not so great on the dating end, but fine. When you’d hoped for a change, this had certainly not been what you were wanting.

At least the kids are okay. A brief reprieve amongst the chaos. You’ve been on the phone to Maverick - he and Penny are staying with them until you make it there.

“Bradley’s here too.”

There was a name you hadn’t heard for a while.

You're not even sure when you thought about him last.

The roads start to blur together, until finally you're on your street. You haven't been home since Christmas.

The door opens as you pull into the driveway. You half-thought the tears would come as soon as you saw the house, but everything seems dry.

Bradley steps out, making his way over to you. He pauses for a second, allowing you to make the decision, before you throw yourself into his arms. His hands settle on your waist, and you let out a small sob as you bury your face into the crook of his shoulder.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” He murmurs, voice deeper than you remember. With all his deployments, the last time you saw him was Christmas a few years ago. His first after Carole had died.

Other than the occasional Instagram post, you have no idea what he’s up to these days. You hadn’t even known he was even living in San Diego again.

He looks good. Really good. Sporting a moustache that would look ridiculous on anybody else, he’s filled out in a way that makes your throat constrict slightly. The Navy has served him well.

“A-are the kids okay?”

“Penny and Mav put them to bed,” He replies. “The twins are fine, but uh… Adam was pretty upset. He knew something was going on from the babysitter - we wouldn’t have told him straight away otherwise, but things were so confused, and-”

“Thank you,” You whisper, pulling back. “For being there for them. I-I didn’t even know you were in town.”

“For the past few months. Moved into mom’s house.” He gestures at the near identical house next door.

It’s a horrible club to be joining. That of the dead parents. But the smallest, most selfish part of you is endlessly relieved that he knows how you feel. How he might be the only one who does.

“Was the drive okay?”

“Hm?” You murmur, distracted by the windows upstairs. So many memories flash through your mind - sneaking out to go to parties with Bradley at sixteen, sitting and stargazing with your dad on the 4th of July. Or that time Bradley fell trying to climb up, and had been in a cast all summer.

“The drive? You must be exhausted.”

“Oh, yeah. I’m okay,” You dismiss, making shaky steps into the house. It looks exactly as you remember it. Mav and Penny sit in the living room, faces grave. After Nick, and then Carole, you can tell they’re vastly unprepared to bury another set of friends.

“Oh, kid,” Maverick begins, wrapping you in a hug. “I’m sorry.”

Something about Maverick’s embrace, the way he cups your head against him reminds you painfully of your dad. “I-I don’t know what to do,” You cry. “I don’t know where to start.”

“Don’t worry about any of that right now,” Penny breathes, tears staining her own cheeks. “We’ll help you with whatever you need.”

A glass of water is pushed into your hand, a kiss pressed to your head, and you’re sat in the living room.

Chat is stilted, dancing around the obvious, and soon you begin to insist that they all head home, get some sleep. If it weren’t for the fact that they’re a maximum of fifty meters away at any given time, you’re not sure you would’ve been able to convince any of them to leave.

It’s only when you agree to Mav and Bradley coming over in the morning to help with arrangements, while Penny helps with the kids, that they filter out.

Soon, you’re alone, and the tears return in waves.

Choked sobs that had hidden themselves in the presence of others, now nearly bringing you to your knees.

This isn’t right.

Your dad should be on the couch, watching Cheers re-runs, while your mom knits and pretends that she isn’t watching (she always is).

The kids upstairs should have a real adult looking out for them. Not a girl, barely out of grad-school, who regularly forgoes breakfast because she can’t be bothered making it for herself.

You get very little sleep that night - wandering through to the kid’s rooms every hour or so to make sure they’re okay. Outside of the occasional babysitting gig as a teen, you have no idea what to do with anyone under the age of ten. You opt for the couch in your parent’s bedroom, rather than their bed.

Still unmade from the night before, you don’t think you can bring yourself to sleep in it just yet. It still smells of your mom’s shampoo, your dad’s aftershave.

It’s such a strange sensation, to be somewhere that should be so familiar. Instead, it’s like you’ve wandered into another universe, one where your parents are dead and nothing makes sense anymore.

*****

Adam’s forgotten about yesterday’s incidents by the time morning comes round. He prances into the bedroom, face dropping into a frown when he sees the bed empty.

“Hey, kid,” You murmur, opening your arms for a cuddle.

“Where’s Mommy?” He asks, chewing on one of his fingers as he allows you to pull him onto your lap.

You swallow, trying desperately to come up with a way to tell your four-year-old brother that both his parents are dead. “There was an accident yesterday, and Mommy and Daddy got really hurt.” A lump forms, and you pray that you can keep it together long enough to get through this. “The doctors weren’t able to help them, and they died.”

There’s a moment of quiet, as Adam considers your words. “They’re not here?”

“They’re not here,” You repeat quietly, a tear trickling down your cheek. “But I’m going to look after you and the girls, okay? And Aunt Penny and Uncle Mav. S’ okay to be sad.”

“Mommy’s not coming back?”

You shake your head, pressing a quick kiss to his forehead. “No, honey. I’m so sorry.” A whimper sounds from the nursery. The girls are waking up. “Why don’t you head downstairs, and I’ll grab Liv and Molly, and I’ll make you pancakes?”

Seemingly placated, Adam nods and heads downstairs, while you try and wrangle the twins. It’s a challenge, but you manage to get them into their highchairs, just as the door rings.

It’s Bradley, looking far too put-together for 6:45am. “I uh, saw that the curtains were open - figured you were up. How are you holding up?”

“I don’t think it’s really sunk in yet,” You admit, leading him to the kitchen. “Kind of just feels like I’m playing pretend.”

Bradley greets Adam with a wave, and drops a kiss to each of the girls’ heads. It feels so natural that a guilt tugs at your stomach. Bradley isn’t even family, and yet he feels far more familiar to these kids than you do.

“It’ll feel like that for a while,” He replies. “You want me to make breakfast?”

“Oh. I was just going to make pancakes.”

“Are you any better at cooking than you were as a teenager?” Bradley asks, the smallest smile tugging at his mouth.

Despite everything you laugh, shaking your head with your lip between your teeth.

“Got it. I’ll cook then.”

“I think I can survive pancakes,” You protest.

“Okay, grieving lesson 101. Learn to accept help.” His voice is firm, and you find yourself nodding. “Mav’ll stop by later - he’s got all the lawyer’s numbers, and funeral planning. Believe me, last thing you want to be doing is thinking about catering right now. Let us handle the paperwork, and we’ll ask you about anything important, okay?”

“Thanks, Brad.”

You’re overwhelmed by their presence, their willingness to drop everything to be here. A comfortable silence falls, Adam chattering nonsense in the background as Bradley cooks.

“Bradley?” You ask.

“Yeah?”

“When does it start to get easier?”

He looks over at you, with a candour that makes your heart sink. “My mom? I think it took me about a year.”

“That’s a long time,” You whisper.

“I know.” He reaches out, almost tentatively, taking your hand. His thumb rubs circles onto your palm. “But you’ll get through it.”

“Can you maybe help with changing Adam’s insulin sensor? It needs done every two weeks, but he doesn’t like swapping them out.”

Bradley nods. “Yeah, of course. What do you need me to do?”

“Just chat to him, keep him distracted.”

You and Bradley make an excellent team. Bradley keeps him talking about baseball the entire time, allowing you to swap his sensor with relatively few tears.

It’s one of the only things you feel like you can manage. Ever since Adam got diagnosed last year, your parents made sure that everyone in the family was up-to-date on what to do, how to keep him safe. Everyone knows where the insulin and glucagon can be found, and how often his Libre sensor needs changed.

In an attempt to get you all out of the house, Bradley suggests a walk to the local park. He’s got Adam on his shoulders, and you push the twins.

It gets your mind off of everything for a little bit, and for that you're grateful.

You wonder what it looks like from the outside. If people assume that you’re married, had kids straight out of college. You suppose they must. You don’t hate the idea as much as you should.

*****

“I guess, what we’re saying is that you have options,” The lawyer says, sitting back in her chair. You, Maverick, Penny and Bradley are crowded into the cramped office. “You’re the legal guardian of the kids, but we understand that’s a lot for a twenty-five-year-old to deal with. As you’ve discussed already, Pete and Penelope would be willing to take them-”

“I’m going to keep them,” You interrupt. It’s been a decision that’s eaten away at you for the past week. It was never a question of adoption - you couldn’t ever do that to your own siblings. But after a particularly hard night, when Penny had offered it to you, a tiny part of yourself had wondered.

Wondered if it would be so bad, for them to grow up with two parents, who were far more capable and experienced than you are. Penny’s a far better mother than you could ever hope to be - maybe you’d be doing them a favour?

Maybe everybody would be better off if you weren’t in charge.

Then you’d stood in the nursery, after the twins had fallen asleep, with tears streaming down your face, and realised that you couldn’t give them up. Not for anything. You owed it to them, and your parents, to try.

Maverick nods approvingly. “We’ll be here for whatever you need, kid. Whenever you need it.”

“I’ve got a permanent position in San Diego now,” Bradley adds. “I’ll still have to ship out occasionally, but I’ll be here too.”

The rest of the afternoon is spent going over will logistics, funeral arrangements, and adoption papers. Something about health insurance means you need to formally adopt the kids, a process that’ll take a while.

But with Adam and his diabetes, it’s something that has to be done.

Slowly but surely, things seem to be becoming a little more manageable. Maverick and Penny explained any of the financial aspects you don't understand, while Bradley's hand stays firmly on your knee the entire meeting, tracing soothing patterns onto your skin.

*****

You don’t fall apart until the tenth. Two weeks, four days and three hours after your parents die. The funerals are over, the flowers are dying, and now there’s just grief. Raw, unfiltered grief that’s been pushed under your need to care for the kids.

But tonight, Adam has been asking questions you don’t know how to answer. Crying tears you don’t know how to soothe, sobs only ceasing when Bradley arrives after work.

You busy yourself with the girls, trying to soothe Liv’s sore throat while Molly does everything she can to avoid a bath - all while pretending that Adam’s rejection doesn’t bother you.

The fact that Bradley’s the sun, moon, and stars to him - and you’re just the poor mother substitute. The perpetual bad guy. The one who won’t let him see Mommy and Daddy.

You hold it together for approximately ten minutes after the twins go down. Standing in the kitchen, leaning against the island, a small sob escapes as you wrap your arms round your shoulders. Trying to ground yourself, stop your head from pounding so viciously.

It’s only when you hear Bradley’s footsteps padding down the stairs that you swallow, turning to the mountain of dishes piling up in the sink and busying yourself. He’s just spent the last hour comforting Adam. You don’t want him to feel responsible for you too.

“Is he asleep?” You ask, voice far thicker than you’d like.

“Yeah - took some convincing, but he’s out.”

“There’s some pasta in the fridge, if you want to take it for dinner,” You manage, back still pointedly turned.

“You don’t want me to stay?” You wish you could unhear the hurt in his voice, the fact that he’s the only reason you’ve survived the past few weeks, while you can’t even look him in the eye.

There’s nothing you want more than for him to stay. To let this unsteady rhythm you’ve both concocted continue for as long as its able. Until he decides to move on.

Because he will. The kindness he’s shown you is immeasurable, and you’ll never be able to thank him enough, and yet you know it must be finite. One day, he’ll meet a girl, fall in love, and you’ll go back to just childhood best friend.

“Is everything okay?”

You’ve been quiet for too long. Bradley’s perceptive. He always has been. A normally endearing trait, you surprise even yourself when a cry slips from your lips.

A dam shatters, and the sobs wrack your body.

Bradley’s across the room in seconds, pulling you into him. His arms circle your waist, strong and steady as he keeps you upright. Just like he’s been doing since the crash.

“I don't think I can do this,” You whisper, voice hoarse. “I can barely look after myself. Nev-nevermind them.”

"I know it's hard," He murmurs, pressing his lips to your temple. "You're doing the hardest fucking thing in the world, kid. You've gotta give yourself some grace. They were your parents too."

"I-if I let myself feel it, I don't know where it'll end. I don't know if it'll end." Another cry bubbles up, and you bury your face in his shoulder. "I'm so scared, Bradley."

“Mav and Penny and I, we’re here for whatever you need, okay? Anything.”

You nod, trying to quell your tears. “Y-you’ve done so much already. I can’t ask you to do any more-”

“You aren’t,” He replies. “I’m offering. I love those kids, I love you all. I'd do anything for you.”

Your grip on him tightens just slightly, needing to ground yourself.

“Do you have the life insurance payout yet?”

You detach from him slightly, hands dropping to his forearms. “I used it to buy the house. There was still a lot of the mortgage to pay off. A-and I couldn’t afford the payments without it. The last thing they need is to be moved, on top of everything else-”

“Hey,” He interjects, voice soft. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me, okay? You’re doing what you need to. Go run yourself a bath, try and relax for a bit.”

“I need to do the dishes, and make lunch for tomorrow-”

He shakes his head. “I’ve got it.” Your protests die on your lips. A bath does sound nice. “We can watch a movie or something, after you’re done.”

You wipe the last of your tears, and press a kiss to his cheek. “I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

He’s going to make someone incredibly happy someday.

The thought leaps into your head unprompted, and you swallow it back. You don’t need more reminders of how temporary this is.

*****

The next day is even worse. Adam’s doing his best moody teenager impression, while Molly’s contracted Olivia’s cold.

Penny spends the afternoon, and makes things slightly more bearable, but her and Maverick have theatre tickets that night. She offered to cancel, but you’d insisted they go. They needed some normality too. It’s easy to forget that Mav and Penny have known your mom and dad since their twenties. They’re grieving almost as much as you are.

You barely make it to seven before your tears start too. It’s all you can do to dial Bradley’s number.

“Is everything okay?”

“I-I,” You stammer, hardly able to even get the words out. “I don’t know what to do. T-the girls are sick, and I can’t get any of them down, and I don’t know what I’m doing-”

“I’ll be over in a second.”

The phone cuts off, and true to his word, the bell goes in approximately half a minute. You’ve never been more grateful to see someone in your life. You’re sure you must look like a total mess, hair unbrushed and mascara dripping down your cheeks, but Bradley doesn’t comment. Instead, he takes Olivia from your arms and presses a kiss to your forehead. He greets Adam, who looks considerably happier to see Bradley than he was to see you, and whispers a couple of words into his ear.

You can’t make out what he says, but Adam immediately softens, before approaching you and offering a hug.

“Why don’t you get Adam, and I’ll get the girls?” Bradley offers, and you nod gratefully.

Whatever Bradley said worked wonders, and Adam’s far more amenable to bedtime than he was before.

It takes Bradley a little longer, and a lot more sniffling, but forty-five minutes he appears down the stairs, and all is quiet again. “Come on,” He murmurs softly. “You’re exhausted.”

“It’s only eight,” You reply, voice barely more than a whisper. “I haven’t made myself dinner yet.”

“Sounds like a night for pizza in bed then,” He replies.

And so, twenty minutes later, Bradley’s tipping the delivery guy, before clambering into bed with you. It’s the best meal you’ve had in your life, tucked into his side as some cheesy rom-com plays in the background.

“How do you do it?”

“Do what?” Bradley asks, eyebrow raised.

“How are you so good with them? So natural? It feels like I make the wrong choice at every possible turn.”

He shrugs slightly, pulling you in closer. “It’s easy when they aren’t yours. I’m a novelty to them - if they were my kids, you’d be the exact same.”

You’re not sure you agree, but you nod, placated with his answer.

It doesn’t take long to drift off to sleep, still curled up against him. And the next morning when you wake up to a solid shape beside you, an arm draped across your waist, your heart soars.

*****

You know you're being unreasonable. Bradley's been the best thing that's ever happened to the kids - endlessly patient, full of energy, always down to play. He's shouldered things you wouldn't expect from a close relative, much less a distant family friend.

When there was a problem with the house insurance, Bradley spent three hours on the phone to agents, working out a plan that worked best for you.

Every Saturday, when another week passes and your parents slip further from your grasp, he turns up at 7pm on the dot, armed with casserole and ice cream. He takes Olivia from your arms, and soothes them all to bed with his stories and tales, allowing you the briefest moment of reprieve.

For the first month, he'd end each night holding you while you cried, pressing soft butterfly kisses to your forehead as he promised better things. Promised that things would get easier, that he'd be there for whatever you needed.

But it can't last forever. Made starkly obvious by the woman in the park today.

You’d been having a picnic, while Bradley was continuing Adam’s baseball education. From your perspective, it was just throwing a ball back and forth, but they’d both insisted there was considerable technique and skill to it. You’d taken the girls to go get ice-cream, and had come back to a woman chatting to Bradley, while Adam busied himself with a mitt. You couldn’t hear what was going on, but Bradley smiled, shook his head, and she went on her way.

Turning back round, he was immediately by your side to help with the ice-creams, hand reaching out to push a stray hair back from your face.

You understand the thought process. She saw an attractive guy, with a cute kid, and no ring. You'd have taken those odds with Bradley if you were her.

And when he turned her down, you had no idea what to think. The last thing you want to do is hold him back. Keep him from any kind of happiness.

Even if it killed you a little, you'd be thrilled for him. Even if it meant you became relegated to his past, meant only for occasional visits and cards at Christmas.

Maybe you'd find someone else too. Someone that liked kids, didn't mind some baggage. Maybe this ache in your chest won't last forever.

You can tell he knows something's up when he slips into bed wordlessly, clicking the light off as he goes. You've been lying on the edge for the past twenty minutes, cheek turned out to the window as you try and quell the awful guilt festering low in your stomach.

Bradley's freshly twenty-six. The last thing he wants is to be tied down to three kids. To you.

You're being selfish with him. And it breaks your heart.

But he's in your bed tonight, and maybe that's enough for now.

When you shuffle over towards the midline, far closer to him than you've ever dared before, he finally speaks. "You alright?"

"Can't sleep," Is all you can muster.

"C'mere," He murmurs, voice gravelly as he reaches out for you. You let him loop a hand round your wrist, pulling you across the bed until you're settled against his chest. It feels so terribly right that you want to bawl. Instead, you press your face into the crook of his shoulder and let out a shaky breath.

His arm is draped across your waist, and you're almost chest-to-chest. It's the closest you've been since childhood.

"Better?"

"Better."

*****

Bradley gets orders to deploy the following week. It’s only three months, hardly anything by Navy standards, but the idea of going that long without him makes you feel a little ill. You don’t remember the last time he spent the night in his own house. Each night you somehow manage to get closer, waking up fully intertwined as the kids throw themselves on top of you both.

The house feels too big without him, even with three children racing around.

You both made the decision not to bring the kids to base to say goodbye. After the year they’ve had, neither of you want to make a big deal of Bradley’s leaving. Instead, last night he came home armed with three build-a-bears, each one with a sound-bite of him singing.

American Pie, Adam’s favourite song, much to Bradley’s delight.

Shake It Off for Olivia.

And that godawful new Benson Boone song for Molly.

The idea of Bradley Bradshaw standing in build-a-bear, singing quietly into a little machine, just so the kids have something to remember him by, makes you want to sob. If Bradley Bradshaw’s out to ruin all men for you, he’s doing an excellent job.

Penny said her goodbyes to Bradley at the house, before Maverick drove you both out to base. Now, you’re standing on the tarmac, watching on as Bradley and Pete say their goodbyes. As soon as Maverick’s pulling back, he suddenly spots someone across the lot that he’s got to go say hello to. A squeeze of your shoulder as he passes, and you’re left with Bradley.

“You'll write?” He knows the answer, but when this is the last time he’s going to see you until November, he’d like the reassurance.

“Every day,” You murmur. “I-we’re really going to miss you, Brad.”

He reaches out, pulling you in for a tight hug. “I’m going to miss you too. But it’ll be over in a flash. Promise.”

You somehow can’t imagine that being true. “Stay safe. Don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

“When am I ever stupid?” He asks, smiling until he sees your expression. “Don’t answer that.”

Too quickly, it’s time for him to go. “See you soon, sweet girl.”

And then he’s gone.

Bradley wonders how you're getting on today. If Adam's talent show went well, or if the twins are still teething.

They'll be eighteen months by the time he gets back. Not much older, in the grand scheme of things, but he'll know.

At that age, consistency is everything. Adam's old enough to know Bradley, understand that he's going away for a little while - but Olivia and Molly? He might return a complete stranger.

Sitting in the barracks, head in his hands, he wonders if this is how his dad felt every time he left him and his mom behind.

He knows what Jake would say if he were here. Something snarky, probably. A comment about how they aren't even your kids, nevermind his. That Bradley Bradshaw must be the only bastard on earth who can land himself with diaper duties before first base.

He slips the picture out of his wallet. The one at the picnic. Nat had taken it, the five of you all crammed onto one blanket. Adam's clambering over Bradley's shoulders, and Olivia sits on his lap, reaching up for her brother. You've got Molly, smile wide as you watch the scene before you. Your eyes are on the kids, but his are very much on you.

A guilt festers in him, but he feels happier than he has in years. Ever since his mom died he’s felt totally aimless, drifting from one mission to another, little care as to whether he lived or died. Now, the idea of not going home to you all at the end of the day feels inconceivable.

It just makes him feel terrible that four people had to lose their parents for that to happen.

"Bradshaw," A voice greets, knocking him out of his trance. "How's it going?"

Seeing the picture clasped in Bradley's hand, Reuben steps forward to take a look. "Cute kids. This your first deployment since having them?"

They're not mine. They're my best friend's siblings, but I'm pretty sure I'm in love with her, and I think it would kill me if I don't get to see those kids grow up.

"Uh, yeah. It is."

“Ah, first one’s always the hardest. But it’s so much better getting to go home at the end of it. I used to go home to an empty house after deployments-” Other than a visit to Penny and Maverick, that had been Bradley’s experience with deployments. “-and let me tell you - going home to your kids after a few months? Best feeling in the whole world. I cried the last time I saw my wife on the tarmac.”

Bradley imagines what life would be like if you were his wife. If, when he gets home, he’d be able to pull you close, and kiss you until your lips are pink and swollen, before heading home to the kids.

He wonders what your own kids would look like. His and yours. He doesn’t even know if you’d want that now, not with the three you’ve already got, but he doesn’t mind. As long as you’re happy, he’d be happy too. In whatever form, whatever capacity that turns out to be.

*****

The babysitter’s left, and the house is quiet. You’d managed to transfer your work to the San Diego offices, but unfortunately that means two days a week in the office. You’re still grateful that you can stay at home with the girls most of the time, but you’re starting to feel it. Balancing work and the kids, all while worrying about Bradley every day is taking a toll.

All three of them are sleeping, totally exhausted after Uncle Mav decided that they should go to a local theme park first thing, before the babysitter arrived. You’ve never used her before, so Mav and Penny offered to take them in the morning to make her day a little easier.

You’re going to grab some leftover pasta for dinner, when you frown. Adam’s insulin is missing.

Pulling out your phone, you shoot a quick text to the babysitter.

You: Hey, have you seen Adam’s insulin anywhere? Green and orange pens.

Andie: it had fallen out of the freezer, so i put it back!

Your heart sinks. Frozen insulin is unusable. You must have knocked it out of the fridge this morning before work. Andie wouldn’t have realised, and just put it back in.

That’s a thousand dollars of medication down the drain.

You have no idea how you’re supposed to pay for more, if insurance doesn’t cover it. Hands shaking, you dial the number. Maybe you can catch them before they finish up for the day.

You get a polite but tired-sounding woman on the phone, who is very apologetic, but firm about the fact that they can’t do anything. You can only afford base coverage, and that doesn’t have any stipulations for accidents.

After the car payments, and school, and insurance, you’re running low. Really low. It’s not something you’d ever admit to Bradley or Maverick, unless the kids were at risk.

Maybe you can sell something. Your mom’s engagement ring, your dad’s watch - there has to be something you can do.

The tears come anyway, and it isn’t until your phone rings that you realise what time it is.

You let out a quiet curse. This is Bradley's call night. The single video call he gets for this entire month. After tonight, he'll be stuck with e-mails until he's home.

Four weeks of not seeing his face. You’re not sure how you’re going to cope. Hastily wiping at your eyes, you accept the call, and move through to the kitchen.

“Hi, Brad,” You smile, desperately hoping the camera doesn't pick up your tear tracks.

He looks tired, but happy. His hair is cropped closer than you like, an unfortunate side effect of military duty. But he’s okay, and that’s what matters. You can’t help the feeling of dread that seems to fester in your stomach each time you think about Bradley being somewhere in the middle of the ocean, doing things he can’t tell you anything about.

“What’s wrong?” He’s frowning immediately, and you want to curse yourself. You should’ve made more of an effort to freshen up before getting on the call.

“I-it’s nothing, just a long day at work.”

“Kid, you look like you're about to sob. Please tell me what's going on.”

“I dropped Adam's insulin out of the fridge today - i-it must've been right after I left for work, and the babysitter thought it was meant to go in the freezer. A-and all of his insulin for the month is ruined.”

“Did you call the insurance company?”

“They won’t cover it,” You reply, voice weak. “We don’t pay enough to get replacements - all we get is the base coverage. But uh, it’s fine, I’ll work something out. He has enough for tonight.”

“I can send you the money-”

“No!” You interject immediately. “God, Bradley, you’ve done too much. It’s okay, I can work it out to tomorrow - go to the bank, see what they can do-”

“Sweetheart, I really don’t mind. I don’t want you to have to sell anything, or take out a loan or anything. The money’s just sitting there in my account, anyway. I’d always rather it went to the kids, or you.”

“My dad has a watch, that-”

Bradley’s face falls, as he shakes his head. “Please. I’m not letting you sell your parent’s things. Let me send you the money.”

“I just- I don’t really want to talk about it, is that okay? Can we talk about anything else?”

He nods, eyes still concerned. “Of course. You decided what you want to do for your birthday yet?”

You shake your head. “Just a quiet day, I think.”

“What if I told you I had some Stevie Nicks tickets with your name on them? It’s the day after your birthday, so not quite-”

“You didn’t,” You gasp. “How the hell did you get them from Japan?”

“I left very detailed instructions with Mav and Penny. I think the seats are terrible, but we’ll have fun. It’s in LA, so I’ve booked us into the Garland too, so we don’t have to worry about the drive back.” Sensing the question on your tongue, he continues. “I’ve already asked Mav. They’ll stay with the kids.”

“You’re insane,” You laugh, still wiping at your eyes slightly.

“In a good way, I hope?”

“The best.”

“I’m glad. We can plan it properly when I’m back. Maybe catch lunch in the city beforehand, go to the pier? Whatever you want, honey.”

“You’re going to make me cry again,” You mumble, dabbing at your eyes.

“As long as it’s happy tears.”

“The absolute happiest.”

*****

Just minutes after you hang up, a notification comes through on your phone.

Bank transfer: $1500 has been deposited into your account ending in XXXX, from Bradley Bradshaw.

07/07. 21:37.

Dear Bradley,

You shouldn’t have sent all that money, it’s far too much! You’ve done so much for us already, I can’t even begin to thank you the way you deserve. But since I figure you wouldn’t take kindly to me sending it back, thank you <3 I think Adam’s insulin should be about 1k, so I can send the rest back afterwards. Really. I don’t know what I’d do without you.

Missing you lots, and I’ve attached some pics of Adam’s last game - he insisted I send you some, so that you can see how he’s been practicing his throw! They lost, but it was a lot closer than it’s been recently. He attributes it all to you.

The girls are settling into daycare. I miss them during the day, but I really just couldn’t handle working from home and juggling them both at once. And the staff are so lovely - very hands-on, and they always come home with some kind of arts and crafts.

They’ve already decided that they want to go to the zoo when you’re back, plus a picnic. Sorry to start booking you in for social stuff before you’re even home.

Stay safe and thank you again x

07/08. 05:19.

Kid, I really truly don’t want to see that money back in my account. What’s the point of having it if you can’t use it for the people you love? Buy yourself something nice (and by that I mean by something for you, not for the kids).

Tell Adam he’ll be coming for the big leagues in no time, guy’s a pro! I think that calls for a new mitt when I get home. And I’m so glad Liv and Mol are doing well, I know you’d been worried about the time apart.

We’re about to go offline for a little while, but I’ll be in contact as soon as I’m able. Would you be able to send some more pictures? I have a few of the kids, but there’s only one with you. I don’t know, no worries if not - just missing all of your faces. There’s only so much of Reuben and Mickey that a man can take.

You’re doing so well, honey.

See you soon,

Bradley x

07/10. 18:03.

Hi Brad,

Hope you’re doing okay, and staying safe. As usual, we miss you loads. I got Adam’s insulin sorted, so we’re all good on that front. He says thank you, and I’ve attached a picture of the drawing he did of you both. You’re apparently on holiday in Paris - some not-so-subtle signals for after I get that promotion maybe?

Mav and Penny took the kids so that I could go to Nat’s birthday, which was really nice. They all send their love, and I sent a pic of everybody. I used most of the money left over for Adam’s baseball summer camp (I’m sorry! I know you said to use it on me, but you really should’ve known that was going to happen), but I did treat myself to a dress so you couldn’t be too annoyed. There should be a picture of that somewhere in the files too - I don’t know why I sent it really. Proof that I can spend money on myself? Anyway, feel free to discard.

Sent you a bundle - I didn’t really know what you wanted, so I thought too many was better than not enough. Please email as soon as you’re able - you know I worry.

Can’t wait to see you x

07/17. 03:58.

Hi honey,

That’s us just back to base - can’t tell you any more than that, but we’re all safe. Sorry for the stupid hour, but I wanted to reply before I went to bed.

The new dress looks beautiful. Really. Wish you’d spent more of the money on yourself, but I’ll take what I can get. Green is definitely your colour, though. I’m glad you had a nice time at Nat’s, and that the kids are still doing well.

I love Adam’s drawing, and it’ll get pride of place in my office back in San Diego. With the art and the baseball, I think we might have quite the ladies man on our hands in the future.

Can’t wait for these two weeks to be over, so I can come home to you all.

Love,

Bradley x

It’s the slowest two weeks of his life. Made bearable only by the photos you continue to send, he tries to have one on him at all times, slipped into his flight suit. More often than not, it’s the solo shot of you, in the floaty green summer dress that makes him feel dizzy each time he looks at it.

If Bradley Bradshaw were a smarter man, he’d realise that keeping your best friend in the crevice of your heart saved only for loves of your life is a very telling act. That you’re the first person he thinks about in the morning, and the last at night.

For the first time in his life, it’s not just Maverick and Penny waiting for him. As soon as Bradley’s feet are on the tarmac, he’s sifting through the crowds. Before he can even find you, a shape bursts forwards from the throngs of people, and Adam starts sprinting in his direction. Letting out a laugh, Bradley hoists his duffel bag higher, ready to catch him as he throws himself the final few feet.

“Bradley!” He exclaims, arms immediately wrapping around his neck.

“Hey, kiddo,” Bradley replies, arm tightening round the boy as he starts to move. “Long time no see.”

“We missed you.”

“I missed you too. Care to point me in the direction of your sister?”

Adam glances around, before offering a vague gesture to his left. Bradley follows his finger, and finally his gaze lands on you.

In the green dress.

Liv is balanced on your hip, Molly clinging to your leg. And when you smile at him, a lump forms in his throat.

He thinks he understands what Reuben was talking about now.

All of Bradley’s fears of the twins not recognising him evaporate when Molly smiles up at him, toothy and wide as he makes his way over. She takes some unsteady steps towards him, letting out a giggle when he scoops her into his arms.

Suddenly feeling left out, Olivia starts to reach out too.

“Let’s wait until Bradley puts the others down, okay-” You begin, but he shakes his head.

“Wait, hold on, I can make this work,” He murmurs, readjusting Adam and Molly as he takes Olivia, still somehow managing to find a way to hug you at the same time.

“Hi,” You breathe.

“Hi,” He replies, dropping a kiss to your forehead as he balances the three kids. Another second passes, and then Mav and Penny reach out to take the kids back, allowing you and Bradley a second alone.

“You’re okay?”

He nods, and then he’s hugging you again, far tighter than the one with the children. Your arms fasten round his neck, while his tighten round your waist, pulling you just off the ground as he holds you close. “Missed you.”

“Missed you too. Thank you for the money, Brad. You really saved us.”

“Don’t mention it,” He mumbles. “Really. I’d do anything for you guys.”

“Ready to go home?”

Home. Not his mom’s old house, but the one next door. The one he can’t ever imagine leaving. “More than anything, honey.”

*****

You muddle your way through dinner, having spent three months trying desperately to get better at cooking. While there’s a marked improvement, you’re not sure you’ll ever reach Bradley’s level. But the pasta was edible, and Bradley seemed to appreciate the effort.

Exhausted from welcoming Bradley back, the kids all go down relatively easy, and when Penny and Mav head back home, it’s just you and Bradley. You’ve worked your way through a bottle of wine, and are sitting far closer than you normally would.

Your feet are in his lap, his thumb stroking gently at his ankle.

“Listen, feel free to tell me if this is insane - but uh, I was thinking that maybe we should get married.”

You almost choke on your drink. “What?”

“I get really good health insurance with the Navy - i-if you wanted to, we could get married, and I could adopt the kids - and you wouldn’t have to worry about them.”

“Bradley…” You start, totally at a loss for words. “I-I can’t ask you to do that.”

“What if I want to?” He whispers, eyes earnest, and you can feel yourself welling up. It’s not how you imagined a proposal going, not by any stretch, but the tenderness in his voice makes your knees weak. It would be nice to not have to spend every month wondering if you’d be able to make the healthcare payments.

“Y-you’re sure?”

“Yeah. I am.”

Things move pretty quickly. Neither of you are sure when Bradley’s going to get deployed again, and he needs to have formally adopted the kids to get them put on his health insurance.

Adam is ecstatic with the news, and has already signed Bradley up to talk at career day about being a pilot. And the girls, while not quite at the speaking stage, adore him too. For the first time, you feel like you might be making the right choice.

It’s a tiny affair. Just you, Bradley, the kids, Maverick, Penny and Amelia. You’d agreed not to dress up, and Bradley had suggested your new green one. He’s wearing slacks and a shirt, hair bleached a little from the sun.

It takes everything in you to remember that this isn’t romantic. It’s a platonic wedding, happening only for the sake of the kids.

Something that becomes clear when it’s time to kiss the bride, and Bradley kisses your cheek. You’d been expecting it. Of course you had. The two of you aren’t together, and there’s no reason to believe that Bradley would choose a room with his family and the kids to make his first move.

But it reminds you of what today really is.

A duty. Nothing more.

You wait until Bradley’s distracted by the twins to sneak off to the bathroom, allowing a few tears to escape as you go.

This isn’t how it was meant to go.

For you or Bradley.

Bradley shouldn’t be caging himself in at twenty-six to three kids. This is your reality, but it doesn’t have to be his.

*****

The two of you settle into a rhythm in the house, cautious and a little awkward. It’s hard to think platonically about a man who you wake up next to every morning, who you raise children with. No matter how far apart you start the night, by morning there’s always a knee between your thighs, or his face pressed into your hair. Normally you can untangle yourself before Bradley wakes up. Makes things less weird for both of you.

He’s still your best friend, and you figure it’s probably a lot better than some of your friends who married for love.

So things move on, and while the grief is still very present across all your lives, Bradley alleviates it a little.

Right after Christmas, you get a wedding invitation from Jake, something Bradley had assumed he’d never see. Ever the eternal bachelor, it seems that he’s giving it up to settle down with his girlfriend, Bea.

With everybody now stationed in San Diego, you’ve spent a decent amount of time with them both. They’re a nice couple, they make a lot of sense.

And they’re disgustingly in love.

Like, more love than you could ever have expected Jake Seresin to be capable of showing.

Adam is Jake’s number one fan, and had been thrilled when they’d asked him to be the ring-bearer. Bradley had gotten a little huffy, put out at not always being his favourite anymore. He’d been pacified when Olivia had crawled onto his lap, wanting cuddles during The Lion King.

The wedding is beautiful. Standing in a new dress that Bradley had insisted you buy, after he had seen you hovering over it online one too many times, you feel pretty for the first time in months. His arm has been settled on the small of your back all night, and you’d teased him relentlessly for crying when Adam walked down the aisle.

You can’t help but feel like this is what Bradley deserves. Someone like Bea, whom he can love completely and openly. Not you, riddled with trauma and baggage that would make even the most experienced therapists wince.

He deserved a wedding like this. Not a court-house cheek kiss, full of adoption papers.

“What are you thinking?” Bradley murmurs, lacing his fingers through yours as you watch Jake and Bea have their first dance.

“I-I was just thinking about our wedding,” You reply, trying desperately to keep your voice steady.

“Yeah? What about it?”

“I don’t know, it’s stupid,” You dismiss, feeling the familiar prick of tears in your periphery. You won’t cry today. You won’t make Bradley feel worse than he probably already does.

Sensing the tone, Bradley drops it, pressing a quick kiss to the back of your knuckles. “Can’t believe Jake’s getting married. Never thought I’d see the day.”

“I thought for sure Bob would get married first out of all of you guys - he’s been with Chloe for so long.”

“Did I tell you they were talking about getting married in London, to be near Chlo’s family? Would maybe be nice to make a holiday of it. Take the kids, do Scotland-”

He’s cut off by the DJ asking for couples to get up and join the Seresins. Bradley’s immediately on his feet, offering you his hand.

“Oh, Brad, I don’t know-”

He doesn’t reply, just laces his fingers through yours, and pulls you to the dancefloor. Holding you tightly against him, you rest your head on his shoulder as he starts to sway.

A Frank Sinatra ballad plays in the background, and you try and keep your attention focused solely on Bradley. This is a happy occasion. You shouldn’t be ruining it with all this over-thinking.

“You look really beautiful,” He murmurs, head dipped to speak directly into your ear.

“You don’t look half-bad yourself.”

“No, I mean. You look really beautiful. Prettiest girl I’ve ever seen.”

This feels like dangerous territory, and you swallow. “Brad-”

“I wish I could’ve given you something like this, like today.”

His words tip you over the edge, and a small sob escapes. Eyes widening, Bradley pulls back to look at you. A few of the nearest couples on the dancefloor also turn, concerned. “Oh, kid. I’m sorry- wait, fuck. Hold on.”

He’s leading you outside, pointedly ignoring any attention you’re both receiving. It’s colder than usual for San Diego, and he drapes his suit jacket over your shoulders, thumb reaching out to wipe at your tears.

“What’s wrong, honey?”

“I’m sorry,” You cry, chest heaving as you try and regain control of yourself.

His arms are gripping yours, almost as if trying to keep you upright. “Don’t apologise, sweet girl. Was it talking about the wedding?”

“Y-you deserve better than this.”

“What?”

“You deserve a wedding like that. A wife like that. Not… whatever this is.”

Everything is pouring out. All the doubts of the past year, every insecurity, all the guilt about trapping Bradley. You don’t think you could bottle it up now if you tried.

“We’re holding you back.” Your voice is miserable, full of terror that he’ll agree. That he’ll leave, and you’ll be alone again. “That should be you in there. With someone that you love.”

“With you-” He begins, but you cut him off, another sob bubbling up.

“You don’t have to keep pretending, it’s okay.”

“Sweet girl, when I think about the rest of my life, all I can see is you. You, and the kids, and 23 Ridgemont Lane.”

The tears continue to trickle down your cheeks. “Bradley, you’re so young. What about if you meet someone, down the line-”

“That’s not going to happen-”

“You might want more, more than this - and I wouldn’t blame you-”

“Sweetheart, please let me talk for just once second-”

You’re spiralling. You know you are. But something about watching Jake and Bea in there makes you want to sob. That might not be in the cards for you, but you want it desperately for Bradley.

“I don’t want you to hate me one day.” The shake in your voice is borderline pathetic. It’s an admission. One you haven’t been sure you’re strong enough to make. That Bradley holds your heart in his hands, and he can do whatever he pleases with it.

“I could never hate you,” He whispers, reaching up to cup your cheeks. “God, kid, no. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

You’re about to protest, when he closes the distance and presses his lips to yours. Your eyes flutter closed in surprise, hands resting on his chest.

He’s softer than you imagined, the slight scratch of his moustache the only friction.

It’s a kiss that knocks your world off its axis. One that you’re pretty sure would knock you off your feet were it not for Bradley’s arms holding you up - one curling at the nape of your neck, the other dropping to your hip, bring you closer, ever closer.

It’s a little uncoordinated, and it’s only when his nose bumps yours that you begin to realise that this is real.

You’re kissing Bradley, and he’s kissing you, and you’re not sure you ever want it to end.

He's smiling against your mouth, pressing you into the wall of the venue.

You’re not sure how much time has passed when he pulls back. Maybe minutes, maybe hours. “I love you,” He murmurs, nose brushing yours. “So much it kind of terrifies me.”

You let out an almost incredulous laugh. “I love you too.”

“Yeah?”

You nod, leaning in to kiss him again. “Can’t tell you how bad I’ve been feeling these last few months, thinking we were holding you back.

He’s shaking his head. “I'm right where I want to be, sweet girl. I want to be there for Adam starting elementary school, and for the twins starting to talk more. I want to fix up the basement, so that the kids have a playroom, and I want to build you one of those shed-things that give you a little peace and quiet after a long day.”

“You’ve thought about this a lot, huh?” You mumble, pressing butterfly kisses all over his face.

“I want to make sure the girls know that there’s no guy out there who will ever be good enough for them, and I want to teach Adam to play the guitar. Acoustic, not electric, for the sake of all our ears. But mostly, I really, really want to love you the way you deserve. I want to be a comfort during the bad times, and celebrate the good, and the rest of the time I just want to be near you.”

His arms are wrapped around you again, pulling you in tightly as you cry into his shoulder.

“What do you say?” He breathes. “Want to get married for real this time?”

How lucky you are to have Bradley Bradshaw in your life.

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[ilovewithfictionalmen]

DAVID CORENSWET

Photographed by Noua Unu Studio for GQ (July 2025)

[ilovewithfictionalmen]

CLARK KENT in Superman (2025)

[ilovewithfictionalmen]

what they dont tell you about growing up as a very lonely little girl is that you grow up and still a part of you remains that very lonely little girl

[ilovewithfictionalmen]

Grimmauld: The House That Buried Its Children & The Ones Who Stay

brother!sirius black x fem!black!reader (centered) , james potter x fem!reader

synopsis: within the ancient and noble House of Black, where shadows cling like whispered memories, the story of its heirs unfolds — bound by blood, silence, and a past that never lets go. this is the quiet tragedy of a family built on legacy and expectation, the tale of three siblings — Sirius, Regulus, and you — whose lives were shaped by the name Black and forever haunted by the weight it bore.

cw: grief, trauma, loss of family, sibling conflict, secret romance, emotional and psychological distress, neglect, abuse, war, death, sacrifice, PTSD, intense emotional themes, bittersweet romance, legacy burdens, depression, death, very minor brief hints of suicide, forced marriages, and mourning. (timelines aren't canon compliant)

w/c: 13k (what can i say, the Black trauma is very detailed and long)

a/n: this is probably the best thing i’ve written — maybe the best i ever will — and i won’t apologize for the angst <3

masterlist

1978

It is raining the night Sirius leaves.

Not the kind of rain that arrives with spectacle and fury. Not the dramatic sort that rips through the clouds like a wound or makes the house tremble with thunder’s weight.

But a quieter sorrow. A gentle and ceaseless drizzle that feels older than memory, as if it began long before the sky turned grey and will linger long after the world forgets what it means to be dry, to be warm, to be whole.

Grimmauld Place breathes in that rain like it knows what’s coming, like it has always known, and the halls are colder than they’ve ever been. Not because the hearth has gone dark or the embers have died, but because something unseen is curling into ash in the walls. Something made of shared secrets and childhood echoes and the paper-thin thread of love that once bound a family, now fraying with every breath, every step, every silence.

There is no shouting now. Not anymore. Not since the voices collapsed into exhaustion, into finality.

And even though it might have been an hour ago or maybe two, or maybe longer than that, the house still hums with it, still remembers the shape of the words, the violence of the vowels, your mother’s voice cutting through the air like something sacred and profane all at once—a blade you’ve heard so many times your bones flinch on instinct, and your ears have begun to confuse cruelty with comfort, with home, with love.

You sit on the stairs, knees drawn up and head pressed to the banister, half-swallowed by shadows like the house is trying to hide you or keep you from breaking, and you listen even though it hurts. Listen because it’s the only way you know how to say goodbye without saying it, without naming it.

And down the corridor, your mother’s voice rises again, shrill and bitter and full of rot. But Sirius does not raise his voice in return. Not tonight. Not this time. And that silence is worse than any screaming. That silence is a goodbye carved in stone. It is a decision made in a place too deep for you to reach.

You do not know where Regulus is. Only that he is not here. Not in this moment that has changed everything. And maybe that’s his gift—to disappear when it matters most, to tuck himself into corners and shadows and silences so precisely that not even grief can find him.

Maybe he is in the library with the door shut and the curtains drawn, pretending that thunder doesn’t exist and neither does rain. Maybe he is curled so tightly into himself that to unfold him would be to shatter him completely.

But you are not Regulus. You never were. And silence does not fit in your mouth the way it fits in his—soft and seamless and sharp. You are not good at pretending you don’t feel the world falling apart around you. You are not good at swallowing the scream that’s lodged in your throat or the ache that is blooming beneath your ribs like something alive and vengeful and unspoken.

You are not good at pretending you don’t care.

And tonight, as the rain keeps falling and the house holds its breath and Sirius walks away without looking back, you feel something in you break in the exact shape of him.

You rise when you hear the trunk click shut. You move before you think, your bare feet slipping across the floor as if your body already knows it has to chase him before your mind catches up.

You don’t remember crossing the corridor, only the way your breath falters when you see him at the door—one hand on the handle, the other curled tight around the strap of his bag.

His hair is damp with sweat or maybe rain, eyes bright with something that is not joy, not quite sorrow either, more like finality, like he’s standing on the edge of something and has already decided to jump.

“Sirius,” you breathe, and the name comes out small and frightened, like it used to when you were six and couldn’t fall asleep without his hand wrapped around yours.

He turns, and for a moment you almost forget how to speak.

“Don’t,” you say, and your voice cracks halfway through. “Please don’t go.”

“I have to,” he says, gentle but firm, like he’s already rehearsed it, like he’s already said goodbye to you in his head.

“No you don’t,” you say, stepping closer, arms trembling now. “You don’t have to leave me, Sirius, please. You can stay. We can fix it, I’ll talk to her, I’ll try harder, I swear I’ll—”

“You can’t fix this,” he interrupts, and his voice is rough around the edges, like it’s been scraping against his own ribs. “You shouldn’t even be trying. None of this is your fault.”

Your hands are shaking now, reaching out without permission, fingers grasping for something to hold on to, something steady in a world that’s coming undone.

“But you’re my brother,” you whisper, and your voice breaks entirely, like it’s never learned how to carry this kind of goodbye. “You’re my favourite person in the world. You always were.”

“I know,” he says, and this time his voice shakes too. He drops his bag. Takes a step toward you. “You were mine too. You never had to earn that.”

You want to laugh, or fall to your knees. “So don’t go.”

“I have to,” he murmurs, but softer now, like he’s hoping you won’t shatter if he says it gently enough. “I’ve stayed for as long as I could. But staying... it’s not living anymore.”

“But I need you,” you say, almost like a child, almost like a prayer. “You’re the one who made it bearable. You’re the reason I could stay. If you go—Sirius, if you go, I don’t know who I’ll be without you.”

He’s closer now, so close you can see the shine in his eyes and the way he’s biting the inside of his cheek, like he’s trying not to fall apart.

Then he’s kneeling in front of you, as if to make the leaving softer. As if to make sure you remember his face from this angle too.

“You’ll still be you,” he says, and his hands come up to cradle your face, as if he could hold all the years you’ve shared between his palms.

His thumbs brush the tears from your cheeks, slow and reverent. “You’ll still have the stars in you. You’ll still sing in the morning when you think no one’s listening. You’ll still make Regulus eat when he forgets. You’ll still be light, even here.”

Your lip trembles. “I don’t want to be light. I just want you.”

“I know,” he says again, and this time it sounds like it hurts. “I want you too. But I can’t stay. Not when staying is killing me.”

You press your forehead to his, tears dripping between you, breath shared like it used to be when the world was smaller and kinder.

Sirius’s breath hitches. He leans in and presses his forehead to yours, just like he used to when you were children afraid of thunder.

For a moment, you are six again, hiding under blankets while he told you stories about stars and carved tiny moons into the wood of the headboard. For a moment, there is no family name, no blood purity, no war waiting at the doorstep. Only the brother you loved first.

“Take care of Regulus,” he whispers, voice like wind through a dying tree. “He’s going to need you. Even if he doesn’t know how to ask for it. Even if he pretends he doesn’t want you near.”

“He hates me,” you say, and it stings because part of you believes it. “We don’t talk anymore. We’re twins but we’re strangers.”

“Then love him anyway,” Sirius says, pulling back just enough to look at you again. “Because this house is going to eat him alive. And you’re the only one left who can remind him what a soul is.”

“No,” you say, stepping forward. “No. You can stay. Please. I’ll—I’ll talk to Mother. I’ll make her stop. You don’t have to leave me, Sirius. Not you. Not you too.”

He shakes his head, and for a moment something in his eyes breaks, softens, just slightly, but then it’s gone again and his mouth sets into that line you’ve come to dread—the one that means he’s already decided.

“She’s never going to stop,” he says, voice low and bitter. “She doesn’t know how. This house will never stop. And you—you don’t understand, you think this is just noise, but it’s not, it’s poison, and it’s been inside us since the day we were born.”

You don’t realize you’re crying until he lifts a hand to brush your tears away, gentle like always, like you’re still little and he’s still the one who could fix things just by being there. “I want you to stay,” you whisper. “You’re my brother. You’re the one person I—”

Your voice breaks, and you fold forward, hands fisting in the fabric of his shirt like if you hold tight enough, he won’t go.

“You’re the one person I feel safe with.”

Sirius exhales sharply, and for a second you think maybe—maybe—he’s going to change his mind. That he’ll sit down, put the bag away, crawl back into the twin bed down the hall and wait for morning. But instead he presses a kiss to the top of your head, slow and lingering.

“You were my home long before I knew what that meant,” he says quietly. “But I can’t live in a place that only wants to break me.”

“I don’t care about the house,” you cry. “I just care about you.”

“I know,” he says, and his hands are trembling now too. “That’s why I have to go. Before I forget who I am. Before I become what they want.”

You look at him and realize this is the last time he’ll ever be your brother here. The last time he’ll be Sirius Black of Number Twelve Grimmauld Place. After this, he’ll belong to somewhere else. To someone else.

And still—still—you whisper, “Don’t go.”

He closes his eyes. And this time, he doesn’t say anything at all.

He just reaches for the trunk, fingers curling around the handle like it’s an anchor, like if he doesn’t hold on he might shatter entirely. And then he turns, and he walks. Like he’s already gone.

You stumble after him, barefoot and unraveling, your voice rising into something feral, something half-child, half-grief.

“Sirius, please—don’t do this. Don’t go. You can’t leave me here. Not with them. Not alone.” The words come out wrong, cracked and too loud, but you don’t care.

You’d burn yourself down to keep him in this hallway if it meant he’d stay. You reach for him — just his sleeve, his hand, anything — but the world shifts.

You don’t know if it’s the mist curling under the door or your own shaking limbs, but your feet slide out from under you. The marble rushes up and meets you with no softness at all.

Your knees hit first, a dull, ugly sound echoing through the corridor. Then your palms, scraping raw against the cold. A flare of pain licks up your legs and into your chest, sharp and immediate — but not worse than the ache already blooming beneath your ribs.

Blood beads along your skin, tiny red betrayals of how fragile you are. You cry out before you can stop it, a startled, broken sound. Not for the fall, but for what’s walking away.

That’s when he turns. When he finally looks.

His eyes find you — crumpled on the floor, bloodied and shaking, your face wet with tears you can’t seem to stop. For the space of a single breath, he doesn’t move. And you see it then — the boy he used to be. The boy who held your hand through thunderstorms. The boy who carved moons into your bedframe because you were scared of the dark. The boy who always came back for you.

For a moment, just one, he looks like he might come back again. Like he might run to you, drop everything, fall to his knees and pull you into his arms and promise you the world won’t win. That he won’t let it. That he won’t let them.

But he doesn’t move. He doesn’t run back. He doesn’t kneel beside you and press his forehead to yours. He doesn’t reach for your hands or wipe the blood from your knees. He only stands there, soaked in silence, the storm rising behind him like the breath of something ancient and cruel. His mouth opens, just barely, and the words come soft and weightless, as if he already knows they won’t be enough.

“I’m sorry.”

Then the door yawns wide and swallows him whole.

Rain pours in, cold and relentless. It soaks the marble, the hem of your nightclothes, the trembling shell of your body. You don’t rise. You don’t call his name again. You crawl. Fingertips dragging against the stone, knees splitting open with every inch, the sting lost beneath the throb of something deeper. You reach the threshold on hands and knees, soaked and shaking, and watch the place where he used to be.

You wait for him to turn back. To look over his shoulder. To see you the way he always used to, like you were the only part of this house worth saving. You wait for the sound of footsteps, for the thud of the trunk being dropped, for the whisper of his voice promising that he didn’t mean it.

That he’s still your brother. That he’ll stay.

But the silence is complete. And he is already gone.

You kneel there as the blood from your knees stains the rainwater pink, as the storm creeps into the house, into your lungs, into your bones.

You stay until the cold makes you numb and your arms are too tired to hold you upright. You stay because you do not know where else to go. Because nothing feels real anymore, except for the way your chest keeps breaking open in slow, quiet pieces.

You are thirteen years old, and you have never known this kind of silence. Not even in the dead of night. Not even in your mother’s shadow. You will remember this silence for the rest of your life. You will carry it like a second skin, like a wound that never quite closes.

That night, you will wash the blood from your knees in water gone lukewarm.

You will not cry again. Not then. Not in front of the mirror. Not where anyone can see. But the ache will settle into your spine, deep and wordless, and it will never let you go.

You will grow into silence like it’s the only thing that ever wanted you. You will wear it like a second skin, learn its contours, let it fill the spaces where love used to live.

You will master the art of stillness, of holding your breath when you want to scream, of smiling when your throat burns with grief. You will stop reaching for people who walk away. You will become so good at pretending you don’t need anyone that even you begin to believe it.

You will teach yourself to cry only behind locked doors. You will carry sorrow in your ribs like a splinter, sharp and invisible, a secret that hums when it rains. You will speak softly and laugh rarely and wonder, always, if you are too much or not enough.

You will look for Sirius in the curve of strangers’ hands, in the way someone tilts their head when they listen, in every boy who calls you brave without knowing why. But no one will ever be quite him. No one will ever hold your name like it’s sacred.

You never spoke to Sirius again.

Not after that night. Not after the front door of Grimmauld Place slammed like the end of the world. Not after your knees stopped bleeding and your voice forgot how to say his name without splintering.

Not after you wrote that letter two weeks later, alone in the dark, words trembling like a heartbeat you couldn’t hold still. You didn’t send it. You couldn’t. So you folded it and slipped it into the lining of your trunk, where it still waits.

1981

You are sixteen now.

You wear Slytherin green like silk-wrapped steel and walk the halls like the castle owes you something. Your mother calls you her softer one, the quiet twin, but there is nothing soft left in you. Not really.

Not after everything you’ve learned about silence and what it costs. You’ve mastered the art of holding your breath, of keeping your voice still, of curling your fingers into fists behind your back. Regulus watches you sometimes like he almost remembers who you used to be. But you don’t look back.

And yet here you are — beneath the Quidditch stands at midnight, with your tie crooked and your shirt coming undone, with James Potter’s hands at your waist and his mouth pressed to your throat like it’s the only thing keeping him alive.

You shouldn’t be here. Not with him. Not with someone who makes the world feel brighter than you know how to bear. But your hands won’t listen. They tangle in his hair, slide over his jaw, trace the freckles across his shoulder where his sleeves are rolled, where his skin is warm and golden and too much.

“Someone will see us,” you whisper, the words barely formed, lost against the breath between you.

James just smiles, that crooked, reckless smile that should not feel like safety. “Let them.”

Your heart stutters. He always does this. Knocks the wind out of you with nothing but his grin and the impossible tenderness in his eyes.

“You Gryffindors are all the same,” you murmur, but the words are an echo, stripped of bite.

“And you Blacks are all trouble,” he says, and it doesn’t sound like a warning. It sounds like a promise. Like worship.

His fingers brush your hair behind your ear, soft, reverent, and you freeze for half a second. Not because you want to pull away. Because you don’t. Because when he touches you like that, something in you splinters. Something buried and locked.

You look at him, and he’s still there — real, impossibly real — and you don’t know how this happened. How someone like him ended up here, with someone like you. How he looks at you like you’re not something broken.

And still, you stay. Still, you let him touch you. Because no one else knows you like this. Because with him, you are not a name or a legacy or a weapon in the making.

James doesn’t ask why. He never asks. Maybe that’s why you keep coming back — because he touches you like you’re not broken, like you’re not a Black, like your blood isn’t dripping with secrets that could ruin everything it touches.

He doesn’t flinch when you go quiet. Doesn’t fill the silence with questions or pity. He just waits. Steady. Warm. Like he has all the time in the world to watch you come undone and still choose you after.

“Do you ever think about what would happen if your brother found out?” he asks, his voice low, careful. Not a threat. Not a warning. Just a wondering.

You scoff, sharp and breathless. “Which one?”

He looks at you then, really looks — the way he always does when you try to be cruel and fail. His eyes never waver. “Both.”

You don’t answer.

Because the truth is, you do think about it. You think about it more than you want to. You think about Sirius finding out and looking at you like you’ve become someone else, someone dangerous, someone he can’t save. You think about Regulus finding out and looking at James like he’s something to destroy. A danger. A betrayal. A boy who dared to love the wrong part of you.

Sometimes you think about dying before they ever find out. That would be easier. Cleaner. You could keep this — this secret softness, this impossible thing — untouched by consequence.

James shifts closer, and when he speaks again, it’s not words, not really. It’s warmth. It’s the space between heartbeats. “You’re not your family, you know.”

The sentence cracks something open. You swallow around it. The air tastes like smoke. Like ash.

“Yes, I am,” you say. Quiet. Final. “That’s the problem.”

But you kiss him anyway.

You kiss him like it’s a prayer with no god left to hear it, like it’s the last thing keeping you tethered to the world.

Because here, under the stands, in the dark, with his mouth on yours and his hands at your waist, you are not a name or a legacy or a shadow waiting to fall. You are not a sister, not a secret, not a danger.

You are a girl. Wanting. Wanted.

His fingers thread through your hair, and you let him. You let him touch you like you’re real. Like you matter. Like he doesn’t see the ruin clinging to your bones or the storm sitting in your chest waiting to tear everything down.

And that’s enough. It’s not safe. It’s not smart. It’s not forever.

You always know when he is near.

The air changes first — grows thin, almost reverent, like the world itself remembers. Like the stone corridors remember. Like the dust in the windowpanes and the cracks in the floor still carry his name beneath them.

The sound softens, dims around him. Laughter hushes. Footsteps falter. It’s the kind of silence that used to fall over you both when you stayed up too late, whispering stories by the fire, your shadows dancing on the walls like they had lives of their own.

There was a time when his presence meant warmth. Hearth-smoke and moth-eaten blankets. Winter pressed against the glass while you curled into each other like the last two embers in the world. He would talk about stars — draw them with his voice, sketch them in the dark with words that made you believe escape was possible, that the night sky could make you brave. You would fall asleep to the rhythm of his breathing and wake to find his hand still wrapped around yours.

But all of that is gone now.

Now there is only stone beneath your feet and a bone-deep cold that doesn’t leave you. You are ruins, both of you. You are the silence after a song. You are what’s left when the fire goes out.

You see them just as you’re turning the corner out of the library, a book held tight to your chest like it can keep your ribs from cracking open. Defensive Magical Theory, something dense and forgettable, a shield made of ink and false comfort.

Your knuckles are white. Your fingers ache. Your robes are perfectly pressed, every pleat a performance. Because since he left, you have had to become flawless. You have had to become iron.

And there he is.

In the center of them like a flame, Sirius with his head tilted back in laughter. It is the same laugh that once made you believe the world could be beautiful. The same laugh that stitched broken hours into joy. And now it’s a blade.

Now it cuts. Because he laughs like nothing was lost. Like he didn’t tear himself out of your life and leave you to bleed in the quiet. Like he doesn’t remember the night you screamed his name until your throat gave out and your knees went red on the marble.

He laughs, and you want to tear the sound out of the air.

You remember it all too clearly — the way the front door slammed like a gunshot, the way you chased after him with shaking hands and a voice that couldn’t carry the weight of your grief. You begged him not to go. You begged like a child, raw and ragged and terrified. And he looked back, once, with something like pity.

Now you are ghosts in the same castle. Passing shadows. No nods. No glances. No names.

You walk past each other like graves being dug on opposite sides of the world. And you do not look back. And he does not turn around.

But your heart still breaks in your chest, quietly, every single time.

They round the corner and time thickens, slow as honey spilled on cold stone. His eyes find yours first—piercing through the crowd, through the clatter of footsteps and whispered names.

For a breath, the corridor dissolves. No James, no Remus, no ticking clocks or careless breezes—just you and him, two children once again, sharing a room heavy with secrets and the soft crackle of an old record player spinning lullabies.

But this time, he does not smile. He does not speak your name. He only looks at you as if trying to recall a face buried beneath years of silence, like the memory itself has fractured and turned to glass too sharp to hold.

Your heart clenches, a sudden, fierce knot, because you remember everything—the way his fingers braided tiny plaits into your hair when exhaustion pulled at your lids, the way your small hand reached for his in the dark before Regulus could even string words together, the way he whispered that you were his favorite, that he would never leave you behind.

But he did.

He burned the letters you wrote, one after another—long, trembling confessions stitched with apologies you never owed. Letters full of Regulus, school, a house growing colder and quieter, a mother retreating into silence, and a brother who refused to eat. You signed each with love, fierce and stubborn, because even after the cracks, even after the distance, you loved him still.

Regulus told you he saw the letters in the fire, unopened. Your handwriting curled into ash like a voice that never mattered. And you cried—not in front of Regulus, but later, submerged in the bathwater, where no one could hear.

You cried as if something sacred had been ripped from your chest, as if your brother had died and left only a hollow shell behind, wandering with someone else’s heart inside.

Now he passes you in the hall, silent and cold. Your fingers twitch, aching with memory, yearning for the ghost of his palm that once cradled your cheek—the night he left, trembling breath promising strength, begging you to protect Regulus when he could no longer do it himself.

You nodded through your sobs, because you were always the older twin by a single minute, and he said it meant something—that you were meant to keep him safe.

You have tried. But Regulus does not want your protection anymore.

You pass him in the corridors too—your twin, your mirror just slightly cracked, a shard drifting farther with every passing year. His eyes have grown colder, sharper, his mouth set like a blade forged from quiet bitterness.

Sometimes he speaks, brief and clipped, syllables sliced thin—news, reminders, fragments of a life you once shared but now only touch through echoes. There is no laughter, no whispered confessions in the dark, only the vast, cold distance measured in the space where hurt has settled deep and unmoving.

And still, you ache for the warmth you once knew. You ache when you see Sirius throw his arm around James like it costs him nothing, when he leans in close and laughs against his shoulder, calling him brother with a light that never shone for you.

You hate yourself for it, for the ugly bloom of envy rising in your chest, a bitter flower twisting through your ribs, because James gets to have him.

James gets to be near him every day, to tease him, to bicker with him, to follow him into trouble and hold a place beside him like it was always meant to be that way.

You used to be that person. You used to be the one Sirius reached for first.

Now you walk past them with your chin lifted, your stomach hollow, wondering if he ever thinks about that night.

Does he remember your hands clutching his sleeve? Your voice cracking as you called after him? Does he think of the blood staining your knees and how long you sat on the steps of Grimmauld Place, shivering long after he was gone?

He does not look back now.

But James does.

His eyes find yours and hold you there, a quiet tenderness breaking beneath the weight of unspoken things. He sees the ghosts too, the empty spaces where love was stolen. Maybe he even feels the ache when Sirius talks about his sister as if she never existed, or only existed in shadows and silence.

James tries to reach for your hand beneath the table, tries to make you laugh in the soft places where the world feels less heavy—but it is not the same. It will never be the same.

Because you are no longer the girl you were when Sirius left. You have spent too many nights wondering why love was not enough to make him stay.

And he is not the brother you remember.

The wind moves gently through the willow branches, like fingers combing through hair. The sunlight glimmers through the gaps in its leaves, casting thin golden lines across your cheek as you lie curled against James beneath the canopy of green.

You should not be here. You both know it. This is not the kind of softness your life has been shaped to allow. But here, in this sliver of stolen time, you forget the weight of your name and the way your chest has ached since you were old enough to know that in the Black family, love always came with locks and keys.

His arm is wrapped around your waist, and your head rests just below his chin. Your fingers are loosely entangled on the warm grass. His heartbeat is steady against your back, a rhythm you are slowly teaching yourself to trust.

You don't speak at first. Just listen—to the breeze, the rustle of willow limbs, the distant laughter from the Quidditch pitch.

And you try not to think about how long it’s been since you laughed like that with someone, without feeling like you were stealing it from a world that was never meant for you.

He shifts slightly, runs a hand through your hair, and you feel his lips brush the top of your head. There is something so gentle about him tonight, and it makes your ribs ache.

You know he is about to ask you something. You always know when James is thinking too much.

“Hey, baby,” he murmurs, voice barely more than a breath, hesitant and fragile, like he’s afraid the sound might shatter the space between you. “Can I ask you something?”

You nod, your head heavy against his chest, eyes shut tight as if the darkness behind your lids might keep the world at bay. You already know what’s coming.

“Have you ever thought about talking to Sirius again?”

The words hit you like ice water spilled over skin. Your whole body stiffens, every nerve on fire, the warmth of his arms suddenly burning too bright, too close.

You sit up with a sharp movement, pulling away like his question has scorched you, like it’s a wound you thought had scabbed over but still bleeds when touched.

His brows knit together in confusion he reaches out, as if to catch you before you fall apart, but you shake your head fiercely, as if to say don’t. Don’t reach for me here.

Your voice comes out sharp, brittle, colder than you expected, words clawing their way from a place you’d hoped was buried deep beyond reach.

“Why would I do that?!”

James blinks slowly, the calm in his gaze unwavering, gentle but not naive.

“Because he’s your brother.”

You laugh then, a sound bitter and quiet, like broken glass scraping against old stone. It catches in your throat and leaves a raw ache in its wake. You stand abruptly, arms crossing over your chest as if to hold yourself together, and you turn away, facing the shimmering lake instead, the silver-blue water reflecting back a fractured version of your own haunted eyes.

“I don’t want to talk about him.”

The silence that follows is thick, heavy with all the things left unsaid. You feel the weight of his gaze burning into your back, soft but relentless.

And somewhere deep inside, the fight inside you trembles—part pain, part stubborn hope—that maybe if you don’t speak his name, you can keep the memory from unraveling completely.

But the truth is a jagged stone lodged in your throat. You’ve thought of him every day since he left—the brother who once braided your hair and whispered promises like a sacred lullaby. The brother who vanished like smoke, leaving only echoes and cold silence behind.

You want to believe that love could have held him here, that if you’d been enough, he wouldn’t have slipped away. But love in your world is never simple.

James sighs deeply, sitting up beside you with a careful softness that somehow feels like it might break under the weight of your silence. “I just think maybe it would help. You’re hurting, and he’s—”

“Don’t.”

The word cuts through the air sharper than you meant it to, like glass breaking in a quiet room. Your voice trembles, but the edge is there, raw and fierce. “Don’t defend him. Don’t pretend you understand.”

James’s brow furrows, confusion and hurt flickering in his eyes. “I’m not pretending. I just know Sirius. He didn’t mean to hurt you. He was hurting too. You know what that house did to him.”

You laugh, but it’s not a laugh. It’s a bitter crack, like a blade scraping bone. “Do I? Do I know what it did to him? Because last I checked—” Your voice catches, then steadies, voice sharp and jagged — “I was there too. I lived it. I breathed the same suffocating air. I walked those same cold hallways. I heard the same poisonous words about blood and duty and silence that built a prison around us all.”

You turn slightly, hands clutching the grass beneath you until your nails dig into dirt. “I watched those cursed portraits scream their curses night and day, felt the walls shrink closer, trapping my breath. I watched my brother—the only one who stayed—fade, twist into someone I barely recognized, someone swallowed by shadows and cold.”

You swallow hard, the memory like a stone lodged in your throat. “And yet, somehow, he’s the one who gets to hurt? The one you all rush to protect? The only one whose pain matters?”

James shifts uncomfortably, voice quiet but earnest. “That’s not what I meant. Not at all.”

But you shake your head, bitter tears burning the edges of your eyes. “No, James. That’s exactly what you meant.”

Your voice cracks, ragged and breaking, revealing the wounds you’ve fought to hide. “You all look at him like he’s some kind of hero. Brave Sirius Black—the runaway, the rebel who escaped the nightmare of that cursed house. The one who got to find Gryffindor, friendship, love. The one who got to build a new life from the ashes.”

Your chest heaves with the weight of everything left unsaid. “And what did I get? What did Regulus get? We got left behind.”

Your hands ball into fists, digging deeper into the earth, grounding yourself to the pain you can still touch. “I begged him to stay. I cried until I had no tears left. I chased after him on bleeding knees, desperate and small, and he left anyway. Left like I was nothing. Like we were nothing.”

You swallow, voice raw, “He never looked back. Never answered a single letter. Never came home. Not for me. Not for Regulus. And I waited. I waited years, hoping maybe one day he would come back. And you want me to just… talk to him now?”

Your breath catches, broken by the shuddering ache in your chest. The world feels hollow, cruel, and empty around you, and the distance between you and Sirius stretches wider than any words could ever cross.

James’s voice drops, soft and cautious, like stepping on fragile glass. “He was just a kid. He was doing what he had to do.”

You laugh, bitter and broken, the sound splitting the silence like a wound. “And I wasn’t?” The words shatter on your cracked lips, voice cracking with the weight you’ve carried far too long. “I was a kid too. Barely thirteen. And I had to stay. Had to sit at that cursed table and swallow every poisonous word Mother spat about the purity of our name. Had to learn to bite my tongue until it bled, lower my eyes until they almost forgot how to look. Had to be perfect — or at least pretend.”

Your hands tremble as you clutch your knees, the ache raw and alive beneath your skin. “I had to watch Regulus vanish into silence, buried under pressure and cold that no one—not one soul—asked if I was okay. No one ever tried to save me.”

James’s hand reaches for you, slow and hesitant, but you recoil like his touch burns you.

You fall back against the tree, the rough bark pressing into your spine, your palms clutching your eyes as if the darkness can swallow the ache whole. The tears come harder now, hot and unrelenting.

“You think he hurts? You think he cries?” Your voice breaks, raw and ragged like a shattered song.

“Because I do. I do every time I see him walk the halls like nothing happened. Every time I watch you two laugh like you’ve known each other forever, and I wonder if he ever laughs like that for me. If he ever remembered me.”

You choke back a sob, voice barely more than a cracked whisper, “I sit in a common room full of snakes and secrets, keeping my head down, swallowing my pride and my pain, because I’m still there. I never left. I never got out.”

“You don’t get it,” you whisper, but the whisper breaks halfway, splintering like thin glass. You’re shaking now, fists curled into the grass as though it can hold you together. “You never will.”

James doesn’t speak. He watches you the way someone watches a dying star—helpless, reverent, a little afraid.

“You were always allowed to be human.” Your voice wavers, rough with disbelief and years of swallowed words. “You were allowed to get angry, to mess up, to fall apart and still be loved. You don’t know what it’s like to live in a house where love is a chain. Where affection only comes after obedience. Where silence is survival.”

You laugh, but it’s not really laughter—it’s the sound a wound might make if it could scream.

“You have people. People who would tear the world apart if you broke. You have a mother who kisses your cheek and a father who’s proud of your name. You have friends who call you home, James. You’re the sun, don’t you see that? You’re the sun and everyone else just gets to grow around you.”

You’re crying harder now, tears streaking down your cheeks in thick, aching lines. You try to wipe them away, but they keep coming.

“You got to love Sirius without bleeding for it! You got to become his brother in the safety of a dormitory, with warmth and laughter and stolen butterbeer. You didn’t have to earn it in that house. You didn’t have to survive it!”

Your voice rises now, shrill with grief. “You got the best parts of him. The jokes, the loyalty, the fire. I got the version who left. The one who didn’t even look back.”

You gasp for breath between sobs, pressing your palms against your eyes until you see stars.

“Do you know what it feels like to scream for someone as they walk away? I begged him. I begged him not to go. I ran after him barefoot in the cold, my voice going hoarse. And he left anyway. He left me there.”

You pull your knees to your chest, rocking slightly. “He chose to leave. And then he chose you. He chose you over me. Over Regulus. Over every piece of his old life. You’re his brother now. You’re his family. And I—”

You look up at James then, face soaked, lips trembling. “I’m just a ghost he doesn’t talk about.”

The words fall out of you like stones from your mouth, one by one, and each one seems to hurt more than the last.

“You sit around the fire with him and laugh about pranks and broomsticks and I sit alone in the dark, wondering if he remembers the sound of my voice. If he ever thinks about the way I cried that night. If he ever sees my handwriting and feels guilt. Or if it’s just... easier. Easier to forget I existed.”

James moves again, slowly, like approaching a wounded animal. He doesn’t touch you this time. He just listens.

You curl tighter around yourself. “You want me to forgive him. You want me to reach out. But you don’t know what it costs to touch someone who let you rot. You don’t know what it’s like to scream for someone and never hear your name again.”

Your voice drops to a whisper—ruined, splintered, soft.

“He’s your brother now.”

And then, the softest, most broken truth:

“But he was mine first.”

You fold in on yourself completely, hands trembling, heart heaving with grief too old for your bones, and the only sound left in the world is your breath—shattered, uneven—echoing in the hush beneath the willow branches.

James looks at you then like he finally sees the wound beneath your skin. Not something angry. Something abandoned. Something small and bleeding and still waiting on the floor of a house that swallowed you whole.

-

The year slips through your fingers like water, and you try to hold it tight, but it’s already gone.

It’s strange how time moves differently when you’re pretending everything is fine, the days bleeding at the edges into one another with a quiet rhythm of routine that softens sharp edges but never heals the cracks beneath.

You go to class, you study, you sit beside James under the willow tree and pretend not to ache when Sirius walks by laughing with Remus, a sound that feels like a sun you cannot touch anymore.

You watch Regulus drift further away, his shoulders straighter, his eyes colder, his voice a careful blade you no longer recognize—once a warmth you could finish, now a silence you cannot breach.

You used to finish each other’s sentences; now he barely finishes his own. He doesn’t talk to you much anymore, not really. At the long, silent dinner table, he sits across from you, nodding when spoken to, answering questions like they’re lines from a script he’s been forced to memorize but doesn’t want to perform.

He disappears into his room, each time returning quieter, more distant, as if someone has reached inside him and hollowed him out with a spoon, leaving only a shell that reflects nothing back but shadows.

You want to scream at him, to shake him until he remembers how to breathe, to pull him back by the collar like Sirius did when you were children and Regulus was about to climb too high in the trees, but you don’t.

Because you don’t know if he would let you catch him, and you don’t know if you still have the strength to hold on to what’s already slipping through your fingers.

So you keep your head down, your voice soft, your secrets close, like fragile embers you cannot risk exposing to the wind. And still the year ends.

There’s something about the last few weeks of school that tastes like dread, like metal pressed cold against your tongue, like the low rumble of a storm you know is coming but cannot stop. You walk the corridors counting how many times Sirius glances your way and how many times Regulus doesn’t, memorizing James’s grin like it might be the last warmth you touch for months.

You stop sending letters home because there is no one waiting to read them.

Because summer means going back. Not home. Back.

Grimmauld Place isn’t a home. It is a mausoleum, a cold, echoing archive of all the things you never got to say, the silence between your words etched deep into the walls.

It smells of wax and dust and something darker, something ancient and unforgiving beneath the surface. The portraits still scream behind their frames. The silver still gleams with a sharpness that cuts through the gloom. The curtains block out the sun like heavy lids refusing to open.

Your room remains untouched, waiting in suspended breath for you to return and pretend you don’t hate it.

You dread the silence most. The way it wraps itself around the furniture like cobwebs spun from forgotten sorrow, the way the house watches you with a patient, waiting hunger, as if it expects you to fold back into its cold embrace and fall in line with the shadows that have claimed it.

Regulus is already there. He has been slipping for a while now. You have seen it in the way he avoids certain topics, in the sharp flinch when someone utters the word “Mudblood,” in the way his fists clench so tightly at insults to the Dark Lord that his knuckles whiten, before he tries to play it off as nothing.

His robes darken with every passing day. His smiles become rarer, like a flame too weak to chase away the night. His wand is never far from his grasp, a silent threat held close, as if waiting for the moment he must become someone else—someone you barely recognize anymore.

So you pack your trunk slowly, each movement deliberate as if by folding your robes with care you might fold yourself back into a place that no longer holds you. You close your books with trembling fingers, the pages whispering secrets you cannot bear to carry anymore.

You don’t say goodbye to Sirius because his eyes no longer meet yours, and you don’t say goodbye to James because you know the pain would only unravel tighter if words were spoken.

You watch as Sirius swings his arm around James’s shoulders, already grinning at the thought of staying with the Potters for the summer, and something inside you twists — not anger, not sadness, but a sharp, aching envy that claws at your ribs like a hungry bird.

Because he gets to escape.

He gets to walk into a house that smells like sugar and laughter and freedom, a sanctuary where love is worn openly like a second skin.

He gets to sleep in a room where nothing screams at him in the dark, where the walls cradle him instead of closing in. He gets to sit at a table where voices rise and fall like music, where people eat too much and ask about your day as if it matters, where family is not a story told in fragments but a living breath around you.

And you get the house.

The house with your name carved deeply into the bannister, a cold reminder of roots that bind you to shadows. The house where every unspoken word drips from the ceiling like damp, settling into the cracks until the silence itself weighs heavy and thick.

The house where your mother waits, her eyes colder than winter and expectations sharper than knives, where portraits hiss and leer from their frames like silent witnesses to your undoing. The house where Regulus drifts through the halls like a ghost caught between worlds, already halfway gone, already fading into something you cannot hold.

The house where no one speaks Sirius’s name aloud, where you are still the older twin, and yet each day you feel smaller, as if your own shadow is shrinking beneath the weight of everything unsaid.

You step off the train, and the air already feels colder, a thin frost settling on your skin even though the season has only just begun.

The night tastes bitter with regret, heavy and metallic on your tongue, and Grimmauld Place waits like a patient predator, breathing you in as though you never left, as though it has been holding its breath for your return. It closes the door behind you with the hush of finality, a sound like a tomb sealing shut.

The silence settles on your shoulders like dust, thick and suffocating, a reminder that you belong here — even if you wish with every trembling heartbeat that you did not.

You try not to flinch when the wards hum around you. When the doorknob bites your palm. When the portraits blink awake at the scent of your return. They watch you with knowing, disapproving eyes, oil-painted mouths already ready to spit something cruel.

This house was never a home, but once it breathed — not warmth, not safety, but noise, presence, life. It used to echo with slammed doors and uneven footsteps racing up the stairs, with Sirius shouting something reckless and defiant down the corridor just to make someone angry enough to shout back.

It used to be full of Regulus’s low hum when he thought no one could hear him, that quiet little song he’d hum while reading in corners, while brushing his hair, while stitching up the tear in your sleeve when you’d come back from a duel pretending you weren’t crying.

It used to be full of voices, arguing and demanding and laughing and hurting and always, always living.

Now it is quiet in the way that makes your chest ache, the kind of silence that feels like a punishment rather than a peace. The air tastes like dust, like something lost and forgotten and left to rot behind velvet curtains and locked doors. The carpets still muffle your steps, but there's no one left to hear them anyway.

This is the first summer without Regulus.

Not the shadow version that’s lingered these past few years, the one who walks too quietly and listens too carefully and parrots the words of your parents with a voice that isn’t his. Not the stranger in dark robes who stops humming and starts watching. Not the version who still existed in some half-form, drifting down corridors without speaking, but still there.

No, this is the first summer without him, without the boy who used to read beside you in the library, his knee bumping yours under the table. The one who used to steal sweets from the kitchen and then blame you with an innocent blink. The one who tied your shoelaces together under the table at family dinners and bit back a grin when you tripped on your way out.

That Regulus faded the way ink fades in water — slowly, gently, irreversibly. You didn’t notice at first, only that he laughed less, and then not at all. That his hands stopped reaching for yours. That his voice grew thinner and his silences heavier. You lost him the way you lose something to illness, slowly and with a thousand tiny betrayals of the body before the final breath.

But this time is different.

This time, he did not come back.

No warning, no owl, no quiet knock on your door, no hurried explanation in a whisper only you would understand. Just silence. Just your mother’s lips pressed into a thin line when you asked, and your father’s eyes skimming past you like your question was a speck on his glasses.

You sit in his empty room. It smells like dust and lavender and something that aches in your teeth. The bed is still made. The books are still in their careful order, spines aligned like soldiers. His desk is untouched. His quill still leans in the inkwell.

The window is cracked just slightly, letting in the faintest breath of air, like the room itself hasn’t quite decided if it should keep holding on. There’s dust on the windowsill now — and there never used to be — and that tells you more than anything else. That the room has been waiting. That no one has come back.

This time, he is truly gone.

And you are alone.

You try to shrink yourself into corners. You keep your footsteps light, your voice quieter still. You tie your hair the way your mother prefers it and fold your napkin just so and tuck your wand out of sight at the table.

You speak only when spoken to. You say nothing when the family says things that hurt. You keep your grief compact and clean and buried deep in your chest like a well-folded shirt, like something shameful.

You make yourself smaller every day, and still, somehow, it is never enough.

But this summer — it’s different. This summer, they hand you your fate like a gift wrapped in silver and blood, gleaming like something sacred, rotting like something buried.

You sit at the long dining table, the one with claw-footed legs and too much silence, and you hear the words spill from your mother’s mouth like prophecy. Your father folds his hands, watching you without warmth, without softness, only the calm expectation of obedience.

They tell you the name.

He is a man older than both of them, old enough to have stood beside your grandfather, old enough to know better, but still willing. He is loyal. He is powerful. He will honor the purity of your blood.

He will preserve the name of the House of Black.

You are seventeen. He is not young. You do not need to ask his age. You already feel it sinking into your skin like ice.

Your stomach coils, tight and bitter.

“No,” you say. Soft at first. Like a breath you’re trying to swallow.

Your mother doesn’t even blink. “You will.”

“No.” Again, louder this time. Sharper. The air around you stills.

She lifts her chin, unbothered. “You are a daughter of this house. This is your duty.”

“Duty?” The word tastes like ash in your mouth. “You want me to marry a man three times my age so you can keep the family name alive like it’s something holy. You want me quiet and obedient and grateful.” You’re trembling, but you don’t care.

“I am not a vessel for your legacy.”

Your father rises. His voice cuts across the room like steel. “You will not speak to your mother with such—”

“You don’t get to speak for me,” you snap, voice breaking at the edges. “You don’t get to decide who I am just because you raised me to be afraid of you!”

Silence floods the room, thick and bitter.

“You want to talk about duty?” you say, your voice low, shaking with fury. “Let’s talk about Sirius. You pushed him out like he was nothing. You wrote him off, erased him, like he never belonged to you in the first place. And Regulus—”

You choke, just for a second. But it’s enough to taste the grief under your rage.

“Regulus is gone. And you didn’t even flinch.”

Your mother’s gaze turns to ice. “Sirius was a disgrace,” she says. “Regulus was loyal. We will not lose the last child we have left.”

You laugh. It sounds wrong. Crooked. Cracked open.

“You already did.”

You stare at them — these people who gave you their name and called it love.

“I’m not your child,” you say, the words leaving your mouth like a final spell. “I’m what’s left. After the screaming. After the silence. After all the sons you burned through.”

You do not cry in front of them. You never cry in front of them.

The house taught you early that tears are weakness, that silence is survival, that emotion is something to be buried beneath polished shoes and perfect posture.

But the moment the door shuts behind you, the weight drops. You press your back to the cold wood and slide down until you are curled on the floor, your body folding into itself like it’s trying to vanish. And you cry. Not the gentle kind. Not the cinematic kind.

You cry until your throat burns and your face is damp and your chest feels like it’s being carved open from the inside. You cry the way the walls might, if they could. With all the grief they’ve soaked up over the years spilling out through the cracks.

You cry for every year you were quiet. For every word you never said. For every version of yourself you buried to stay alive in this house.

You feel seventeen and seven and seventy all at once. You feel like a ghost of your own girlhood, flickering between doorframes. You feel the house watching. Breathing. Remembering.

The floor beneath you is cold and unkind, and still you cling to it because it's the only thing solid left. You think of Sirius, and the way he used to laugh so loudly it shook the curtains. You think of him sleeping now in a house full of warmth and sugar and safety, a house where love isn't earned but given, where no one flinches when he reaches for joy.

You think of Regulus, not the boy they mourn in stiff silence, but the boy who once left crooked notes in your textbooks and stared out windows like he was already halfway elsewhere.

You think of the way he disappeared — not all at once, but slowly, like a tide pulling further and further out until you could no longer see where he ended and the darkness began.

And you think of James.

James with his easy smile and his steady hands, who never asks for more than you can give, who touches your shoulder like it means something, who holds your gaze when the room is too loud.

James, who looks at you like there is still something worth saving, like you are not the ruin this house has made of you, like you are more than a name etched into silver and expectation.

You wonder what he would say if he saw you now, curled like a child, broken open in the hallway like a spell gone wrong. You wonder if he would still look at you like you matter. If he would still believe you could be more than this.

But the truth is: you are not Sirius, brave enough to run and let it all burn behind him. You are not Regulus, quiet enough to disappear without a sound. You are not even James, bright enough to belong to a world that doesn’t hurt like this.

You are just you — the one who stayed.

The one who held her breath while the house tore itself apart. The one who learned how to fold pain into politeness, how to wear duty like perfume, how to live without taking up too much space.

You stayed because someone had to. Because someone had to carry the name. Because someone had to keep the silence from swallowing everything.

And now, you are the last one. A girl with no room left to run, with a dress being stitched by house-elves who won’t meet your eyes, with a fate wrapped in silver and blood and sealed with your mother’s satisfaction. A girl being handed over like an heirloom. A girl they call duty. A girl they call legacy. A girl they will call wife.

And you cry not because you are weak — but because you were strong for too long. Because this house eats daughters and calls it honor.

Because deep down, you are still waiting for someone to come back. Or take you away. Or give you a reason to leave. But no one comes. And so you cry.

So you give in. Not to the marriage — no, that would be too clean, too final — but to something slower, heavier, something like gravity or grief.

You give in to the house. To the quiet. To the truth you’ve always known but never dared to say aloud. You let it wrap around you like ivy, creeping in through the cracks in the walls and the bruises you keep hidden under your sleeves. It isn’t sudden. It isn’t cinematic. It’s the kind of surrender that looks like silence.

Each day becomes a ritual of forgetting. You wake late, eyes heavy with sleep you never earned. You push food around your plate until it cools and congeals and no one bothers to tell you to eat. You wander from room to room like a ghost, dragging your fingertips along the wallpaper as if it might remember you.

You reread the same book, the same page, five times, and the words never stick — they slide through your brain like oil through a sieve. You braid your hair tighter and tighter each morning until your scalp stings, until the ache becomes something solid you can carry. You stop speaking at meals.

You stop asking where Regulus went. You stop writing letters to Sirius, because no one writes back and ghosts don’t send owls.

And then one night, when the wind wails like a child outside your window and the rain lashes against the glass with the fury of everything you’ve swallowed, your feet carry you where your mind dares not go.

Up the stairs. Down the hallway. To the door you haven’t touched since he left. Sirius’s room.

You shouldn’t go in. The house groans like it’s warning you. But your hand is already on the handle.

The room is a battlefield.

The bed is splintered, cracked in the middle like a snapped spine. The posters are slashed, half-hanging like open wounds. The wallpaper is clawed down to the plaster. His name, once spelled in bold ink across the wall, is a black smear now — a wound too scorched to read. The air smells like old fire and bitter memory. You step inside.

You lower yourself to the floor with slow, trembling hands, and that’s when it breaks.

The scream tears from you before you can stop it — low and ragged and real.

You cry for Sirius, who ran and burned and somehow found something close to freedom. You cry for Regulus, who disappeared into silence and shadows and never looked back. You cry for James, whose laughter doesn’t belong in this house, whose kindness is a bruise you keep pressing. But mostly, you cry for yourself.

And when there are no more tears left to cry, your eyes catch something under the bed — a soft flicker of gray, tucked away like a shy secret waiting patiently.

Eventually, with trembling fingers, you take up your quill and smooth a sheet of parchment across your desk.

You’ve written to him a hundred times before—maybe more. None of them ever came back. None of them were ever answered.

And this one, you know, will be the last.

Dear Sirius, I do not know if this will ever reach you. I imagine it will not. And even if it did, I cannot picture you reading it. Perhaps you would glance at the ink, then turn away, pretending not to know the hand it came from. Perhaps you have already taught yourself to forget. Still, I write. I write because I do not know what else to do with my hands, now that they have nothing left to hold. Regulus is gone. They will not say how or where or why, only that he vanished, and everyone speaks of him now in the same tone they used when they stopped saying your name. He is gone, and I feel something in me beginning to follow. This summer has been long. There is sun in the air and dust in the curtains and no one speaks above a whisper. They say I am to be betrothed by autumn. He is pure of blood and proper of name and perfectly forgettable. I have already begun practicing how to look content beside him. Everyone tells me how lucky I am. No one asks if I am well. The house is colder than I remember. I think you were the last warm thing in it. Since you left, it has not once felt like home. The corridors are quieter now. The portraits turn their eyes away. Today I found your old toy — Buttons, the little grey dog with the floppy ear. He was under your bed, asleep in dust, but still whole. I pressed him to my face and thought I might fall apart from the scent of him. Smoke and summer and boyhood. I found Honeybell too. Her stitches are split and her eye is gone. But I held her anyway, the way you hold something that remembers what you cannot say aloud. Regulus’s was still in his room. Mister Wisp. The black raven. He was soaked through with rain. His wings sagged. His thread was fraying. He looked like something abandoned. He looked like someone who had waited too long. I placed them on your bedroom floor. Buttons. Honeybell. Mister Wisp. The three of us, in our own way. I sat with them until the sun went down and the house forgot me again. I hope you are safe. I hope there is laughter where you are. I hope someone brushes the hair from your eyes with tenderness. I hope you never once feel as forgotten as we did when you vanished. I want to hate you, but I never could. This is the last letter. Not because I have stopped loving you. That would be easier. No, I am stopping because love should not be sent into silence forever. And I have been silent for too long.

Ta Sœur, Pour Toujours

You fold the letter and press it to your heart, feeling the weight of every word settle deep inside you.

You sit there in the broken room, cradling the worn plushes as the first pale light of morning spills through the cracked window, soft and hesitant, like forgiveness that always comes too late.

The summer stretches endlessly, longer than any before, a slow and quiet rot rather than rest—a soft unraveling that steals breath and hope alike. Time does not move but lingers, thick and suffocating, pressing down on your bones like a heavy secret.

Outside, the war no longer whispers but rumbles beyond the horizon. Names vanish like ghosts, smiles falter under the weight of dread, and the sun mourns openly, bleeding orange into clouds as if the sky itself knew the darkness to come.

Grimmauld Place waits in silence. Its walls have always been cold, but now they hold a quiet deeper than stillness, a silence like held breath, like a house on the edge of swallowing you whole.

And then Sirius returns.

He had never meant to come back, not truly.

But something pulls him through the shadows, not duty, not family in the way you understood it. Perhaps it was memory, haunting and relentless. Perhaps regret, bitter and sharp. Perhaps it was you—the echo of your voice that chased him through sleepless nights, the image of you at thirteen, trembling and begging him to stay, a scar etched deep across his ribs. 

So he came back.

By the end of summer, Sirius Black stood before the house he had sworn never to return to, and this time he did not knock. This time he did not wait. The door groaned open as if it had been waiting for him all along. Dust hung heavy in the air, the stench of magic—old, burnt, and wrong—clinging like smoke caught deep in his lungs.

Something had happened here. Something violent. The house was not quiet. It was hollow. Empty. Ruined.

And that was when he found you.

Not sitting in the drawing room, not wrapped in a blanket with a book and tea, not curled in the window seat staring out at a life that had never been yours.

But lying on the marble floor, exactly where he had left you.

You did not die screaming. There was no flash of rage, no final incantation on your tongue, no defiant end befitting the fire that once lived inside you.

You were simply still. Folded into yourself, as if the world had leaned too hard on your ribs and you forgot how to fight it. Blood pooled around you like petals from a ruined bloom, soft and red and blooming in silence.

Your hair fanned around your face like something sacred — a fallen halo, a crown undone — and your limbs lay slack in a kind of surrender that spoke not of weakness but of exhaustion. Like the house had finally exhaled, and you let it take you with the breath.

Sirius dropped the moment he saw you. Not with ceremony, not with noise — just gravity doing what grief always does.

The way your knees once buckled when he walked away.

The way your voice had cracked, trying to stretch the word “stay” into something that could bind him.

The way your chest must have caved in, not from a curse, but from absence. He fell in the way people fall when something inside them has been waiting to shatter for years.

He reached for you. What else was there left to reach for, if not the girl who once braided red ribbons through his coat sleeves, who lined his pockets with honey drops and letters that smelled of ink and lavender, who sat beside him on staircases and said nothing, simply stayed.

He had run for so long — from this house, from this name, from everything that shaped him — but no one ever told him that ghosts have longer arms than memory. That your voice, the soft echo of it, would find him across every burning bridge.

And now you were here. Not thirteen anymore, not crying in the hallway where he left you. But also, not gone from that moment either.

You had never truly moved past the marble floor. He saw it in the way your fingers still curled inward, as if clinging to something invisible. In the tilt of your head, angled just like the night you begged him not to go.

He saw the years between then and now, every one of them, stretched like threads between your ribs — unravelled, fragile, frayed.

He saw the waiting. The tea that went cold on windowsills. The letters that never found their way past trembling hands. The summers that rotted slowly around you while everyone else grew up.

The stuffed animals lined like offerings beneath dust-heavy light. Buttons. Honeybell. Mister Wisp. Childhood turned reliquary.

He saw it all and understood too late that grief does not knock — it carves its name into your skin and waits. It waited for him here.

He pressed his forehead to yours and whispered your name like a prayer never answered. He had lived, but not really. Not in any way that mattered.

You had stayed, but not whole. You had waited so long for someone who was always running, and now that he was still, you were gone.

The sun began to rise, golden and slow, creeping through the cracks like a forgiveness that had missed its hour. It lit the marble floor like a chapel.

But it could not touch you. It could only fall across your shoulder, warm and useless. The kind of light that arrives after the room has already emptied.

And Sirius stayed there. Not as the rebel or the Black heir or the boy who broke free. But as a brother.

A brother who came home too late. A brother who looked at the cost and could not look away.

Time passed for him. He found love. Friends. A family not built of blood, but of choice. He laughed again. He dreamed. He lived. The world opened for him, and he stepped through — a boy turned man, a soul scraped raw but mending, slowly, beautifully. There were hands that held him.

Voices that called him home. Places where the sky was wide enough to forget. And he let himself forget.

And you stayed.

You stayed in the house that swallowed your name like a secret. In halls that knew only how to echo orders and lock away softness. With a father who spoke in sharp edges. A mother who carved obedience into you like scripture.

A twin who disappeared — not all at once, but in whispers and footsteps and doors that no longer opened. You stayed among portraits that scowled at your breath. Among books that weighed more than comfort. Among silences that wrapped around your throat until you mistook them for lullabies.

You stayed. Right where he left you. And the world, as it always did, looked away.

Except this time, the blood wasn’t from scraped knees or childish scuffles.

It was from the war that bloomed like rot through every crack in your home. From the letters you weren’t allowed to send. From the screams you weren’t allowed to make. From the spells you learned not to cast. From the hope you were forced to smother before it ever took its first breath.

And Sirius wept.

Not the kind of weeping that shatters in public. Not the kind that can be soothed by arms or words or tea gone cold.

This was the kind of weeping that hollowed. That stripped him to the marrow. That made him reach for a version of you that no longer breathed.

He wept for the sister whose hands once clutched his in the dark, when the storms rattled the windows and the world felt too big.

He wept for the girl who tucked notes into his pocket when Mother screamed. He wept for the ghost of you still sitting on the staircase, waiting for a brother who never turned back.

He wept for the birthdays you spent alone. For the letters he never wrote. For the words he never said. For the child you were — bright-eyed and bruised and so full of belief.

For the woman you could have been — fierce and aching and free.

For the way you died in the exact place he left you.

And for the way he only came back when there was no breath left to forgive him.

Time seemed to pass, though slower now — not measured in calendars or seasons, but in aches. In absences. In the small betrayals of memory.

For Sirius, time lost its rhythm. It did not tick or toll. It bled. It staggered. It sighed through floorboards and doorways and walls that still remembered the sound of your footsteps.

Time became the color of mourning — the dull grey of ash, the deep bruise of regret, the cold white of hospital sheets that never warmed beneath your weight.

It moved in the dust he could not bear to sweep, in the scent of your perfume fading soft on a pillowcase, in the broken music box that no longer turned, in the echo of your laughter — not in reality, but in the cruel trick of dreams.

He searched for you in everything, in the corners of rooms, in the backs of crowds, in the shadowed silence of the old stairwell where you once sang lullabies to the dark.

And when he found the letter — the one you never sent, crumpled at the back of a drawer, ink smeared as though you’d tried to erase your own voice — he pressed it to his lips and sobbed like a boy again. Like the child who promised he’d take you with him. Who swore you’d never be left behind.

Three plushes laid neatly beside each other, like a shrine to what was once whole. Not toys anymore, but gravestones — soft and worn and sacred.

They should have meant nothing. Just fabric, stuffing, thread. But Sirius could barely look at them without his chest caving in.

His own — hadn’t moved in years. You must’ve thought he’d come back for it. That if you left it untouched, just as he left it, maybe it would bring him home.

Yours was different. It was torn down the middle, the seam split like a scar, like a scream frozen in time. The stuffing spilled out like spilled insides, like something wounded and left to rot. It looked like it had tried to hold itself together for too long, and finally failed.

And Regulus’ — pale blue-grey, delicate in a way only he had been — soaked through and warped from rain. It lay slumped over, waterlogged and forgotten, as if the storm outside had wept it into surrender. The window above had cracked open, and the sky had poured in for hours. Sirius liked to think the heavens had mourned with him that day. That even the sky had broken, just a little.

You never knew, but Sirius never let them go.

Not once.

Even when the world fell apart. Even when the Order returned and war carved new hollows into their lives.

Even when Azkaban loomed like a ghost at his shoulder. He kept them — hidden, at first, under floorboards and false bottoms of trunks. Then folded into boxes labeled with things like “storage” or “old keepsakes,” as if a name could make them matter less.

But they always came back out. Back to his bedside. Back into his hands on sleepless nights. Because they weren’t just toys. They were the last soft things left. The only parts of his childhood that hadn’t turned to ash.

They were what remained of the real family he had chosen — not the one etched into tapestries or carved into rings, but the one built in whispers and quiet dreams.

You, Regulus, and him. Three children clinging to hope like a secret. Three hearts hoping that if they held each other tightly enough, they could outrun their legacy. They could be something else. Someone else. Someone free.

But grief is not kind. It is greedy. It takes and takes and keeps on taking.

So it took Regulus, too.

No goodbye. No body. Just whispers in the dark — that he had gone beneath the water, chasing a kind of redemption Sirius hadn’t known his brother still believed in. That he had died trying to undo what he never had the power to fix. A boy with the name of a star, drowning in a sea too vast to name.

And Sirius had hated him, once — for his silence, for his compliance, for surviving the home that killed you. But when Regulus vanished, Sirius understood he’d been wrong. Regulus hadn’t survived. He’d only delayed the dying. Now it was just him, and the plushes — three relics, three ghosts, three pieces of a family no one ever thought to grieve.

Because what were children like them, if not warnings? What were Black children, if not cautionary tales?

1994

Years later, Sirius will stand before a boy with too-bright eyes and a scar that speaks of wars no child should remember. And in the boy’s grin — wide, reckless, full of sun — Sirius will see James, not as memory, but as marrow, as instinct.

But it's not James that makes him ache, not really.

It’s the quiet moments, the in-between ones — when the boy furrows his brow in thought, or stares too long at the stars, or speaks with a gentleness he doesn’t even know he carries.

That’s when Sirius sees Regulus, not in likeness but in the ache of being too young for so much weight.

And most of all, he sees you.

He sees you in the boy’s stubborn defiance, in the way he fights for others before himself, in the way he loves — fiercely, awkwardly, with every unguarded part of him. He sees you in the boy’s eyes when he reaches for Sirius without hesitation. He sees the child you once were, all scraped knees and wild dreams, asking impossible questions and believing in things too big to name.

And it undoes him. Every single time.

Because this boy, this Harry, carries all the pieces of the ones he lost — but he carries you most of all.

Sirius will not know how to name that kind of grace. Only that it feels like standing in the past and being forgiven by it. 

And in that child, in the fragile miracle of his existence, Sirius will understand that love does not end. It threads itself into blood and bone and story. It survives. Even when nothing else does.

And that understanding — that impossible, aching recognition — will be the cruelest grace of all. Because by then, the war will have come and gone, carving its tally marks into the bones of everyone left standing.

He will have buried too many. James, Lily, and names he once spoke with laughter now spoken in silence, in dreams. The fire will have gone out, and Sirius will have learned to live in the smoke. A man half-built from memory, half-held together by loss. He will carry it all, quietly.

The old house on Grimmauld Place will still stand, but he will not return. Some ghosts are too sacred to disturb, and some rooms still remember how to bleed.

Yours will remain untouched — the air thick with dust and song, the bed still hiding three plush toys like relics of a time when the world had not yet shattered. The scent of childhood still clinging to the curtains, as if waiting for someone to come home.

And though the world will move forward without him — blooming and burning and beginning again — Sirius will remain quietly stitched into the edges of it, in every reckless laugh, every act of love carved in defiance, every child who believes that family is something you choose.

Because what he lost cannot be measured in names or battles or years. It is deeper than that. It is a wound shaped like a sister’s lullaby, a brother’s silence, a best friend’s grin. It is the kind of grief that builds a home inside your ribs and dares you to live with it.

And even when there is no one left to speak your name aloud, Sirius will. Not out of duty, but because somewhere within him, the boy who once held your hand still waits in the dark.

He still listens for the echo of your laughter through silent halls, still glances at the doorway like you might walk through, still dreams of a world where everything broken might find a way to mend.

There is a quiet place in him that never grew older than sixteen, still caught in the house where you stayed behind, still curled beside you in the dark, still whispering stories of escape to the ceiling.

That part of him hears your voice when the world forgets how to be kind. 

It sees your eyes in every child who refuses to stop hoping, every child with bright eyes and a scar on their forehead — especially the one who looks at him like he is something good.

It believes, even now, that the love you gave was too bright to vanish, too true to ever fade. 

Sirius Black remained — not because he survived, but because love, once given, does not know how to leave, and grief, once born, does not know how to die.

And then, years later, it was his cousin who ended him — blood of his blood, born of the same ruin, raised on the same silken lies, sipping from the same poisoned cup. Bellatrix did not strike like chance, but like prophecy, like the final breath of a story written long before they ever lived it.

It was not kindness that undid them, nor mercy. It was inheritance — a name carved too deep, a legacy that devoured its own.

In the end, nothing could tear down the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black.

Except itself.

For those whose fate was never their own,

for the one who bore the weight alone,

for the one who stayed,

so ends the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black.

-

a/n: um..hi? is this too angsty? :(

[ilovewithfictionalmen]

i was thinking of attending “the Road so far… the road ahead” creation con but i’ve never been to any type of convention and don’t know what to expect, does everyone have any tips or advice??

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I adopted them as my parents. Whatever.

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i just finished watching supernatural for the first time… i am in SEVERE distress

there was in fact no peace when i was done.

[ilovewithfictionalmen]

happy birthday to the cuntiest woman of all time!! (i still cant believe she complimented my curls !!)

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me bc i was blessed with big brown doe eyes

[ilovewithfictionalmen]

why’d he take it like a good boy tho…

[ilovewithfictionalmen]

Supernatural was funny in how when Dean and Sam had parallel storylines, Sam was paired with a woman, Dean - man.

[ilovewithfictionalmen]

STACKEDNATURAL ⇉ 195/327 (part 2)

12.11 Regarding Dean Written by Meredith Glynn Directed by John Badham Original Air Date: February 9, 2017

[ilovewithfictionalmen]

Jensen Ackles as Soldier Boy THE BOYS (2022) | 3.05 – “The Last Time To Look On This World Of Lies”

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SUPERNATURAL ⏤ 2.22 All Hell Breaks Loose: Part 2

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look who i saw today😝

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i can never stop myself ⊹ ࣪ ˖