Shades (A Regulus Black Character Study)

Shades

"Fatefully / I tried to pick my battles till the battle picked me"

                                                 ~ Taylor Swift, 'long story short'

"You crave the applause / Yet hate the attention / Then miss it, your act is a ruse"

                                       ~ Gang of Youths, 'Achilles, Come Down'

Regulus saw the world in shades lighter than his surname.

Black was the color of vacuity, of the merciless hole that devoured all and left a void in its wake. Black was the tone of decisiveness, of commitment, of choices and their consequences. Black was the simultaneous absence of light and iridescence of a rainbow.

Black was power, power of a voltage so high that it burned everything it touched--even the one who wielded it.

It hadn't been a surprise, then, when it was Sirius who rebelled against the charred hands that reared the two of them. Sirius rose like a phoenix from the ashes, shone like a lantern that refused to be snuffed. Sirius was the brightest star in the sky. But given the right amount of pressure, the right amount of time, even that light could collapse into the cosmic chasm that haunted each of their very identities.

The night Sirius imploded was the night that Regulus became a painter. If light and dark could coexist in the same entity, if Sirius Black could fill up another household yet leave Regulus staring at the gaping mouth of a schism, if he could light up the world around him yet leave Regulus a black hole in his stead, then the world was not black or white. It was everything but.

There were times when Regulus felt a pull in his direction--quickly counteracted by the clutches of the vacuum in which he raised--thus remaining suspended in gravity, inching along the orbit paved for him. Regulus was not the brightest star in the sky; he was merely the brightest of his constellation--the so-called Lion's Heart--and he was ironically terrified. He was not powerful enough to explode and leave his own Black legacy, nor would his radiance hold a candle to that of the rest in the eyes of skeptical stargazers. (How could he give to the world when he had spent his entire life drinking from a liquid that left him thirstier with each sip? No, his light could only ever hope to shine upon the hidden crevices of the world, upon those so undervalued and so in the dark already that even the smallest of sparks made a difference.) If ever he escaped, he would instead be a rogue star, wandering the outskirts of galaxies, the doorsteps of the home that he abandoned and the homes that would abandon him, and he would be drowning amid his undead conscience, amid all of those he had failed.

He would be alone.