evan!

They were toeing some line— the one where Sirius becomes the bad guy, or the one where he is patient— he can never tell between the two nowadays. Pale fingers draw metaphorical ropes ‘round his wrists, locking him into place there in the train cart, where James stares at him like he is more dog than he is man. So here he is this wretched thing, with no collar and no home but a porch, toeing this same line— the one where he is man, or the one where he is bygone.

there's some sort of metaphor in the fact that sirius, a boy who spent his whole life trying to convince himself he was anything other than the monster his family was, fell in love with one. there is some tragedy in the fact that neither of them found what they needed in the other: consistency, support. you thow two wolves in a cage and what happens? they fight. until one lands belly up or dies. sirius spends his whole life crawling out of that cage. he is born in it, and he dies in it. monsters cannot console one another, they are no good at being kind.

James has heard of the act of pressing bruising knees to a floor and shoving clasped hands to a damp, bowed head. And of how it brings good things. But Regulus is not a man who can be swayed by a good man's prayer. Nor a god with the notion to shove any sort of righteousness toward someone like him. He is unaffected by plea, by any sort of push or shove, by his lips to own unmoving throat. When he watches, his tongue moves wordlessly against the stone-thick barrier of his grit teeth. But nothing he says will change his devotion. Nothing they do will make this wrong thing right.

He caught Regulus’s eye at the door, the smoke from the man's cigarette feathering out into the summer air through the door frame the last of him James was sure he’d ever get to breathe in again. But that was hypothetical, it was prose, it was longing left too long behind his tongue and he wasn’t sure he wanted to find out what else it could become. He lingered in the door way far too long, listening to the soft chatter and laughter of the rest of the group like it was an old home movie, and even though he was standing further away than he was close, for the first time in his life, James didn’t feel like he was on the outside.