summer rain || jegulus + jily ✔️

2 ~ peripheral vision

Chapter 2

Love. A difficult conundrum to untangle himself from. Everyone experienced it differently. It had started as a cheap summer fling, a means of escapism, and now he was stuck in the quicksand. Go figure. He didn't want to admit it, but he'd been falling in love with James for a couple of years and was only acting on it now that James had acknowledged his presence.

Problems. He had so many problems; he couldn't keep them all straight in his head.

Oh! That was a problem in itself. Not being straight. What would Walburga Black say when she found out her second son was not in any way straighter than her disappointment? She'd scar him in thin lines and then hide them. 

He was her perfect heir, yet he couldn't do anything without feeling Sirius' shadow clinging to him like all his regrets. He'd followed in his footsteps, as younger brothers often did, but then the prints got lost in the rain and he'd been wandering along his own path, lost, ever since then. He'd been caught in so many blizzards and so many earthquakes, yet his shaking feet kept moving. They always kept moving. When would they stop moving?

He remembered the fidgety, anxious, not surefooted third year he'd been at Hogwarts. He saw James Potter once and wanted to be him, then realized he wanted to be with him as well. James had a brilliant eye for Quidditch, a supportive group of friends. 

Oh, and parents who nurtured him. What a nice life.

Back then, Regulus had none of the above. He didn't have envy. He was envy.

Needless to say, he'd stuck a knife through that version of himself and his hands had been bloody ever since.

What? He was a Black. Drama ran through their blood.

James turned to him with his lips quirked up, interrupting his morbid thoughts with a bout of composure that struck Regulus as out of character. "You were going to order something different, weren't you?"  Weirdly, he was kind of intuitive. Regulus had always thought he couldn't see two feet in front of his face, metaphorically and literally.

Grabbing his ice cream and heading outside to a little bench area paved with cobblestone, Regulus scratched the back of his head. "Yeah. Was too complex, though." He sat on the bench with James next to him.

"What was it?"

"A large pistachio ice cream with Oreo crumbles, cookie bits, almonds, and caramel drizzle syrup. Social interactions give me heart palpitations, so I didn't go for it," he said, all in one breath. It was his very first time getting ice cream. The whole day had been planned and suggested to James courtesy of him and Andromeda. He remembered everything she'd mentioned about the Muggle world when he was little and could still splash in puddles without being disgusted by the debris.

He missed her every day as one misses their family (that is, if they have a functional one) when they move out to an apartment and realize it's so much colder than they expected. She was the closest thing to a real family he had. He hadn't seen her in years. She'd married a Muggle and was exiled from the bloodline. Chop, chop, they cut her off. It was that easy.

"Ah, so you're one of those people," James teased.

"Not everyone has your effortless social skills, James. Some of us are struggling." Regulus leaned against the bench, scooping chocolate ice cream into his mouth. When he was little, he and Sirius would bake cookies when Walburga left them unattended for long periods. He always liked sniffing the vanilla extract and pouring it into the bowl. Sirius always did the egg since he didn't trust his little brother's dexterity, as if he had one ounce of dexterity himself (Regulus was still bitter about that.)