Chapter Text
Chapter One
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1st August,
How on earth do people deal with roommates?
Sirius cannot for the life of him cook, Remus is always studying for a test or something, and don’t even get me started on James Potter.
I hate that man with every fiber of my being.
He is an annoying, cocky, self-obsessed, asshole who believes he was brought on this earth because he’s god.
I cannot stand him.
I. HATE. JAMES. POTTER.
-R
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The house smelled like burnt toast and Sirius's terrible taste in music.
Regulus stood in the doorway of the kitchen, still half-asleep, his dark hair a disaster and his eyes barely open, and stared at the catastrophe unfolding in front of him. Sirius was at the stove, spatula in hand, performing what could only be described as a cooking-related crime. Smoke curled lazily toward the ceiling. Remus sat at the kitchen table with a thick, dog-eared history textbook open in front of him, a mug of tea cradled between both hands, reading with the focused serenity of a man who had simply accepted the chaos around him as a permanent condition of his life.
And then there was James Potter.
James Potter, who was leaning against the kitchen counter like he owned it — like he owned the entire house, the street, the city, the general concept of space itself — eating an apple and looking insufferably, offensively awake for seven-thirty in the morning. His hair was its usual catastrophe, dark curls sticking up in approximately eleven different directions, which somehow, infuriatingly looked deliberate. His jaw moved slowly as he chewed. His stupid brown eyes drifted over to Regulus the second he appeared in the doorway.
He smiled.
That slow, easy, maddening smile that Regulus had decided, sometime around the third week of knowing James Potter, was specifically engineered to make him want to commit a minor act of violence.
"Morning, Reg."
Regulus's jaw tightened. "Don't call me that."
"You look terrible," James said, still smiling, because apparently observations delivered with a grin counted as charm in whatever universe James Potter had crawled out of.
"I look exactly the same as I always do," Regulus said flatly, moving past him toward the coffee maker, which was, unfortunately, right next to where James was standing. He had to pass within approximately eighteen inches of him to get to it. He did so without making eye contact, which he considered a personal victory.
"That's what I said," James replied.
From the table, Remus turned a page. "Good morning, Regulus."
"Remus," Regulus acknowledged, because Remus was a reasonable person who deserved acknowledgment.
"Toast?" Sirius offered, holding up something that was less toast and more a small, flat piece of carbon.
"Absolutely not."
"Your loss." Sirius tossed the ruined toast onto a plate like it was a culinary achievement and leaned back against the stove with the satisfied expression of a man who genuinely believed he was a good cook. This was one of the great mysteries of Regulus's life — the absolute iron-clad confidence Sirius Black had in abilities he demonstrably did not possess.
Regulus poured his coffee and tried to pretend James Potter wasn't still standing two feet away from him, still eating his apple, still taking up an unreasonable amount of physical and psychological space.
"First practice is today," James said, to no one in particular, though his eyes didn't move from Regulus.
"I know when practice is," Regulus said.
"Just making sure."
"I don't need you to make sure of anything on my behalf, Potter."
"Right." James took another bite of his apple. The sound of it — the crisp, deliberate crunch — made something in Regulus's left temple throb. "You've got it all handled."
"I always do."
James hummed, low and noncommittal, and Regulus hated that sound. He hated it because it wasn't an agreement and it wasn't an argument. It was the conversational equivalent of a shrug, and somehow James managed to make it feel like a challenge every single time.
Regulus took his coffee and left the kitchen.
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The house was, objectively speaking, not a bad house.
It was close to campus — close enough to walk in under ten minutes, which Regulus had tested on his first day purely because he distrusted Sirius's estimation of distances. It had four bedrooms, which meant everyone had their own space, which meant Regulus did not have to share a wall with his brother and Remus, which he was grateful for in ways he would never say out loud. The living room was a comfortable disaster of textbooks and football boots and Remus's history notes spread across every horizontal surface. The kitchen was functional, if occasionally smoke-damaged. There was a small garden out back that no one used.
Regulus's room was the smallest, which he had chosen on purpose, because the smallest room had the best window. It looked out over the narrow side street, where a row of trees had just started to turn at the very tips of their leaves — the first suggestion of autumn threading through the green, thin as a rumor. He had a desk, a bookshelf, a bed, and a very strict organizational system that Sirius had violated exactly once by borrowing a book and not putting it back in the right place. Regulus had not let him borrow a book since.
He sat on his bed now, coffee in hand, and looked out the window, and tried very hard not to think about James Potter's smile.
He failed, because James Potter's smile was, unfortunately, the kind of thing that stuck in the mind the way a song does — not because you want it there, but because some part of your brain had decided to be deeply unhelpful about it.
This was the fundamental problem with James Potter.
Regulus had known, from the very first moment Sirius had introduced them — "Reg, this is James, James, Reg, you're going to love each other" (Sirius had been spectacularly wrong) — that James was going to be a problem. Not because he was overtly awful. He wasn't. Regulus could have handled it . Overt was easy. Overt gave you something to push back against, something solid and defined that you could point to and say, There, that is the thing I hate. James Potter was not overt. James Potter was friendly and loud and effortlessly charming and annoyingly good at football and he had this way of looking at people like he was actually listening, like what they said actually mattered, and it made Regulus deeply, profoundly suspicious, because nobody was actually like that. Nobody was genuinely like that.
There had to be an angle.
There was always an angle.
Regulus had grown up in a house where there was always an angle, where kindness was currency and warmth was transactional and every smile had a price printed somewhere in the fine print if you looked closely enough. He knew how to read it. He was good at reading it.
He just hadn't found James's angle yet, and that bothered him more than he was willing to admit.
He finished his coffee, set the mug on his desk in its specific place on its specific coaster, and pulled up his training schedule on his phone.
First practice of the new term. Nine o'clock. He had forty minutes.
He pushed James Potter's smile to the back of his mind — firmly, deliberately, with prejudice — and went to get ready.
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The thing about being on the same football team as someone you were determined to hate was that it required a very specific kind of compartmentalization.
Regulus had compartmentalization down to an art form. He'd been doing it his entire life. You took the thing you didn't want to feel, you put it in a box, you put the box on a shelf, you closed the door of the mental room the shelf was in, and you carried on. Simple. Clean. Efficient.
It worked perfectly well in every other area of his life.
It worked significantly less well on a football pitch when James Potter was in your peripheral vision for ninety percent of practice.
The university pitch was good — proper grass, well-maintained, the white lines crisp and fresh for the new season. The morning was cool, the kind of early September cool that still had summer underneath it, warmth lurking just beneath the surface of the air, and the sky was the flat, washed-out blue of a day that hadn't fully decided what it wanted to be yet. Other players were already arriving when Regulus got there, dropping bags on the sideline, pulling on boots, the easy noise of a group settling back into a familiar rhythm after a summer apart.
Sirius appeared at his elbow, somehow already in full kit, his dark hair pulled back. "You're in a mood," he said, by way of greeting.
"I'm not in a mood."
"You have a face."
"I don't have a face."
"The specific face," Sirius clarified. "The one that means you're annoyed about something and you've decided to be annoyed about it in the most efficient way possible."
Regulus said nothing, which Sirius apparently took as confirmation, because he grinned.
"Was it James?"
"It's always—" Regulus stopped. Recalibrated. "I am not annoyed about James Potter. I am not, in general, affected by James Potter in any capacity."
"Right," said Sirius, in a tone almost identical to the one James had used earlier, which was either a coincidence or evidence that the two of them had been spending so much time together that they had started to converge into a single, uniquely aggravating entity.
"You're doing a voice," Regulus said.
"I'm not doing a voice. That's just my voice."
"It's his voice. You've absorbed his mannerisms. It's deeply concerning."
Sirius threw an arm around his shoulders, which Regulus tolerated because fighting it took more energy than it was worth. "Reg," Sirius said, warmly and entirely too cheerfully, "I say this with love. You should genuinely consider the possibility—"
"Don't."
"—that the reason James Potter gets under your skin—"
"Sirius."
"—so spectacularly and reliably—"
"I will put your boots in the bin."
"—isn’t because you hate him."
Regulus removed himself from under his brother's arm with dignity. "I'm warming up," he said, and walked onto the pitch, and did not look toward the far end where James Potter had just arrived, bag slung over one shoulder, laughing at something Frank, their captain, had said, sunlight doing something annoyingly picturesque to his ridiculous hair.
He didn't look.
Mostly.
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Coach McGonagall was a tall stern woman with a voice like a foghorn and an absolute zero tolerance policy for what she called "ornamental footballers" — players who looked good but didn't work. She had retired from professional refereeing under somewhat mysterious circumstances involving a post-game confrontation that had apparently become something of an urban legend in local football circles, and she coached university football with the unhinged intensity of a woman who had simply transferred all of that energy to a new arena.
Regulus liked her, which surprised most people who didn't understand that Regulus respected competence and directness above almost everything else.
"Right!" McGonagall bellowed, and the scattered conversations across the pitch died immediately. "New term, new start, same standards — which is to say, high ones. We had a good run last year and I won't have anyone walking onto this pitch thinking that means we coast. We work. Clear?"
A chorus of assent.
"Good. Positions today. I want to see where everyone's at after summer. Black—" Sirius snapped to attention. "—midfield. Longbottom, flank. Potter—"
James jogged forward slightly.
"—I want you at forward again. You've earned it. Don't make me regret it."
"Never," James said, with easy, confident warmth, and McGonagall made a noise that was not quite approving and not quite dismissive, which from her was basically a standing ovation.
"Regulus Black." McGonagall’s eyes found him. Regulus held the look steadily. "Midfield. I want you pulling strings this year. You've got the vision — use it."
Regulus nodded. "Yes, miss."
McGonagall's eyes moved between him and James for just a fraction of a second — the briefest possible flicker — and Regulus had the deeply uncomfortable sense that their coach was not unaware of the general atmosphere between them. Then McGonagall moved on to the next name, and Regulus exhaled very slowly through his nose.
The drill was simple: positional play, working the ball through the lines, testing combinations. Regulus knew this kind of drill in his bones. He'd grown up playing, had spent summers in the garden before the word garden had started to feel like a polite term for a performance space, kicking a ball against the wall until the rhythm of it became automatic, meditative, the one thing that was entirely his own. On a pitch, thinking about football, he was precise and calm in a way he was almost nowhere else.
The ball moved, and Regulus moved with it, and for about eight minutes, everything was fine.
Then James Potter cut inside from the forward line to collect a dropped ball, right into Regulus's space, and they nearly collided — Regulus pulling up short, James doing the same, close enough that Regulus could see the specific amber light in his brown eyes that he definitely had not noticed before, not specifically, not enough to remember the particular quality of it.
"Watch it," Regulus said.
"You watch it," James returned, and it was so startlingly juvenile that Regulus almost laughed. Almost. He bit it back hard.
"That's my space, Potter. Forward line is behind me."
"It was a dropped ball, Black, I was collecting—"
"You could have left it for the midfielder, which is me, which means I collect dropped balls in my zone—"
"Oh, we're doing zones now?"
"We've always been doing zones, it's called positional football, it's the basis of—"
"Lads." Sirius materialized between them with the weary patience of a man who had done this before and expected to do it many times again. He looked from Regulus to James and back again. "We're twelve minutes into the first practice of term."
A beat.
"He started it," James said.
"Mature," Regulus said.
"Right," said Sirius. "Fantastic. Really setting a tone."
He took the ball from where it had rolled to a stop between them, tapped it neatly to a teammate, and jogged away with the air of a man washing his hands of a situation.
Regulus looked at James. James looked at Regulus.
"Stay in your zone," Regulus said.
"Work on your personality," James replied pleasantly, and jogged back to the forward line.
Regulus turned away and stared at the middle distance for approximately three seconds, and did not think about the amber in James Potter's eyes, and did not notice the way his jaw was set with the effort of suppressing a smile, and absolutely did not feel something warm and traitorously uninvited flicker somewhere in his chest.
He was a Black. He had iron self-control and generations of composure behind him.
He was fine.
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Practice ended at half eleven.
The team filtered off the pitch in clusters — some heading to the campus gym, some straight to showers, some collapsing on the sideline grass with the boneless relief of people who had worked hard and were pleased about it. The morning had burned off its cool and the sun was properly warm now, pressing down on the back of Regulus's neck as he unlaced his boots and tried to quiet the noise of his own thoughts.
He was aware — peripherally, reluctantly — of James sitting about fifteen feet away, also unlacing his boots, also quiet for once. Without the grin, without the easy performance of it, he looked different. Still infuriating, obviously. Structurally, constitutionally infuriating, the kind of infuriating that was probably genetic and definitely irreversible. But quieter. He had a small grass stain on his left knee. His hair was worse than it had been before practice, which should not have been physically possible.
Regulus looked away.
"Good session," Remus said, appearing from somewhere to Regulus's left — he'd been sitting on the sideline for most of practice, reading, with the occasional glance up at the pitch that somehow managed to be both fond and academic, like he was studying Sirius the way he studied primary sources, with careful attention and genuine interest.
"Adequate," Regulus said.
"You were excellent," Remus said, mildly, turning a page.
Regulus paused. "Thank you."
Remus nodded without looking up. This was one of the things Regulus had come to quietly appreciate about Remus Lupin in the two years since he'd become a permanent fixture of Sirius's life and therefore his own — Remus said things and meant them, simply and without decoration, and he didn't push. He'd never pushed. He'd just appeared at Sirius's side one day and started existing in the periphery of Regulus's life with such undemanding steadiness that Regulus had gradually, almost without noticing, started to trust him.
"The combination play in the second half was good," Remus added. "You and James worked well together, when you weren't arguing."
"We were not working together. We were operating in adjacent spaces and occasionally the ball moved between us."
"Is that different from working together?"
"Fundamentally."
Remus made a sound that might have been a suppressed laugh. Regulus chose not to pursue it.
Sirius dropped down next to Remus with a spectacular lack of grace, grass-stained and pink-cheeked and grinning. He hooked a hand around the back of Remus's neck and pressed a quick, careless kiss to his temple, and Remus didn't look up from his book but the corner of his mouth curved, soft and private, in the way it always did.
Regulus looked at the sky.
He was not, he told himself, lonely. He was self-sufficient. He had always been self-sufficient. Self-sufficiency was a skill, a choice, a virtue, and he had cultivated it carefully and deliberately and it suited him perfectly.
He was not lonely.
"Coming for lunch?" Sirius asked.
"I have a lecture at two," Regulus said.
"Lunch first, then lecture."
"I was going to—"
"Regulus."
He looked at his brother. Sirius was looking back at him with that expression — the one that wasn't quite concern but wasn't quite not concern either, the one that had started appearing maybe in the last year or so, when something between them had shifted almost imperceptibly from the old architecture of their family dynamic into something newer and less defined, something that Regulus was still occasionally unsure what to do with.
"Fine," Regulus said. "Lunch."
"James is coming," Sirius added, casually, already standing, already reaching for his bag.
"Sirius."
"Just so you know."
"Why would I need to—"
"Purely informational," Sirius said, entirely unconvincingly, and walked away.
Regulus sat with his unlaced boots and the warm August sun and the awareness, slow and deeply inconvenient, that James Potter was still fifteen feet away and had probably heard all of that.
He didn't look over.
He didn't need to look over.
He could feel, without looking, that James was also very determinedly not looking over, and that they were both being very mature and normal about this.
He put his boots in his bag, stood up, and walked toward the campus path.
Behind him, he heard the familiar sound of James Potter falling into step with the group — that easy, unhurried stride, the low rumble of his voice as he said something that made Sirius laugh, and then Remus's quieter amusement following after — and Regulus walked at the front of the group, and told himself it was because he was setting a pace.
Not because he couldn't trust himself to walk next to James Potter without doing something catastrophically revealing like looking at him.
The trees along the campus path were just beginning to turn. Gold at the edges, barely. Just the first suggestion of it.
Regulus looked up at them as he walked, and breathed in the particular smell of early autumn — grass and cool air and something faintly sweet, like something not quite ripe yet, like something that was still becoming whatever it was going to be.
He thought, This is going to be a long year.
He thought, I am completely fine.
He kept walking, the afternoon stretching ahead of him, golden and ordinary. He kept his eyes on the path, and he kept his face still, and he was fine.