Swimming Lessons

What's It Like?

REGULUS

"I could sleep out here," James murmured after a long bout of silence. I'd honestly started to think that he'd already fallen asleep before spoke and had even considered just laying down and doing the same.

Sirius had taken Remus to bed, supporting him as his knees cracked all the way into the cabin. It had felt wrong to follow after them, and James hadn't gone in, either, so I sat, unsure what I was doing, but not really sure if I needed to be doing anything. It felt rather nice to have nothing demanding my attention.

I had ended up taking a few more sips of the firewhiskey, but not much. Sirius and Remus drained a bottle between them and James had done in about half of the one we shared so there was still a bit sloshing about in the bottle even after he'd given it up.

I hadn't had enough to consider myself drunk by any means, but it was enough to have eased my inhibitions and given me that heady sort of feeling where you feel just brave enough to say and do things that you might not normally, but not enough that you wouldn't remember having said and done them in the morning.

I wondered if this was what it felt like to be Sirius all of the time? It was like being a kid and putting on Father's shoes and clopping around, pretending to be bigger. I was overwhelmed.

Gods, it must be so different to be Sirius than it is to be me.

I laughed at the thought of how completely unalike we were in many of the important ways, despite how everyone always commented on how we were carbon copies of one another.

"What's funny?" James asked. He pulled a second chair over to himself so he stretched over two of them, his legs up on the one closest to me. Somehow, he'd ended up with Remus's oversized sunglasses on his face, despite it being night time, and he lay back over the two chairs, his hands clasped on his chest, head bent back and staring up at the sky.

"I feel like Sirius," I said and I laughed all the harder, suddenly realizing that in my mind I equated feeling like Sirius with feeling like having the freedom to be myself. Myself was something I'd never felt free to be.

James snorted, "You poor bastard."

"No," I said quietly, "It's wonderful to be Sirius."

"That's fucked up," James said, raising the sunglasses up from his eyes to look at me down the length of his nose. "If you think it's wonderful being him, then you haven't got any idea what it's like being him at all."

That sobered me a bit and I stopped laughing.

Silence fell over James and I and after a moment, he let the glasses drop back over his face and drew a deep breath with his nose, shaking his head as he turned his face back up to the sky, rather than looking at me.

The fire flickered and I sat cross-legged on the ground, tilting the bottle of firewhiskey side to side to feel the liquid move in a wave against the glass, mimicking the sounds of the ocean behind me as it roared across the sand and shhhh-ed away back to wherever it came from.

"What is it like?" I asked suddenly.

"What?" James asked.

"Being Sirius's real brother?"

James was silent a moment. Then he suddenly sat up, sliding the sunglasses off his face and leaning forward against his knees, looking at me with an expression somewhere between anger and annoyance. "That's a fucked up question," he accused. "Like, how am I supposed to even respond to that? How do you think that sort of question makes me feel?" he demanded.

I shrugged.

"Shit, Reg," he shook his head and rolled his eyes, sitting upright again.

"I just wanna know," I said. I knew this was one of those things that I shouldn't say outloud, one of those conversations that I would never dare to try at having without the firewhiskey in my veins. I felt sort of possessed, like the alcohol had a bit of an imperius curse on my rational side.