MesserMoon

He needs to learn not to give everything away, Regulus thinks as he stares up into the older boy’s eyes, which are all feeling. All heart.

People make mistakes. Most of the time, James thinks, you should forgive them.

People make mistakes.

But they also make choices. It’s important to him, that difference. He does his best not to confuse the two.

Before that night, James had never fully understood what it meant to want someone dead. But he could have killed them. All of them.

“No, mum,” James glances quickly down at Sirius to make sure he’s still asleep. “Regulus isn’t like Sirius. He’s—I don’t know—he’s one of them.”

“Yes Jamie, that was terribly rude. Everyone knows she goes by feline.”

“Sirius!”

James chortles. “Cat on her bad days.”

“Kitty on her very bad days.”

It doesn’t take them long to find them. It never does, even without the map. James has always felt there was an almost electric pull between the four of them. Sometimes he swears he can feel them tugging at him, like strings wrapped around his ribs. He could find them anywhere.

“It’s all for you, my love.”

James thinks, for a moment, that he sees blush blooming on Remus’s cheeks,

I’m just waiting for the day that he wakes up and realizes I’ve been here all along.”

Remus snorts, eyes rising off his book. “Oh I know where you’ve been James, and I’m not touching that with a ten foot pole.”

Remus blinks, looks down at his book, blinks again. “My little boy’s all grown up,” he says with a quivering lip.