unspeakable | jegulus

james, are you selling your soul?

chapter title: james and the cold gun by kate bush

tw:  intimate partner violence, abuse, discussion of suicide, self-harm, non-explicunderage sexual content, murder. take care of yourself <3

if you'd like you can add:

'dragon eyes' by Adrianne Lenker / 'Fast As You Can' by Fiona Apple / 'Etienne' by Ethel Cain / 'How To Disappear Completely' by Radiohead

to your queue.

The weight of emptiness is unknowable to anyone fortunate enough to have never carried it, James thought, watching Regulus move unburdened down the corridor a step ahead of him—silent as a ghost in the dark. Sometimes when his shoulder blades drew together under thin clothes James thought he looked as if he had wings that were waiting to unfurl; not the wings of angels wreathed in feathers but wings of leather and pitch. He'd touched his deceptively cherubic curls more than once and imagined horns under his scalp, waiting to rip through his skin. The devil used to be an angel. James wondered if Regulus had ever been an angel long enough for the thing he was now to count as fallen.

James saw green eyes, a corpse of his making in a drying pool of crimson, and he saw the shape of another dead body on the horizon, right under Regulus' careless feet.

"I have so many ambitions involving death," he whispered obliviously, half a smile curling his mouth, "I think you accused me once of having baseless self-aggrandizing ideas of what I can do. I don't remember why you said it, I think you were toying with me, but it doesn't really matter why you said it... I still think about it all the time. Am I a killer?"

Am I a killer? James couldn't imagine having a question like that about himself and actually wanting to know the answer. Better not to know, he knew now. Better to never let yourself find out.

"Do I have it in me?" Regulus was whispering so perfectly, his voice never wandering or rising as Sirius' often did when they'd crept through these same halls at similar, equally forbidden hours, under his cloak with night-eyes primed for the shadowy castle, the whole world in shades of grey and black and white. "Am I delusional about all of these things I wish to accomplish?"

"This would be a strange first death." James didn't want to kill anyone. He didn't want to know whether or not Regulus was a killer, whether or not he had it in him. He wanted to sleep, before they ruined everything all over again as soon as it was starting to feel good instead of awful, and safe instead of terrifying. He wanted to close his eyes for a very long time, and open them for nothing, and hold this boy close enough to keep him from hurting anyone ever again. "A squib? Over detention?"

"Would you prefer it if my first time was a little more special?" Mockery coloured his voice. James wished he was surprised that he could be so cavalier at a time like this but he wasn't. Any impression Regulus had been attempting to give off of care or attention to maintaining James' well-being had dissolved. There was something mean about the twist of his mouth and the slouch of his shoulders. "I suppose you've always been sentimental about these things. Personally, I think a low-stakes murder is probably more sensible than finding out at the worst possible moment that I actually have a soul."

"Don't say things like that."

"Like what?"

"About your soul."

"Does that bother you now? How fascinating. You never stop fascinating me, James. If you ever do..."

"What?" James wished he could grow tired of these games, but the worst of him still revelled in them, though he'd hate to admit it out loud. Regulus was full of a feverish energy, alien to the gentleness he'd been wearing hardly an hour prior. "What will you do?"