Smooth Sailing

Wednesday

Content warning for descriptions of abuse, religious trauma, and implied homophobia/transphobia.

Sailing Terminology: A roll-tack is basically when you tip the boat over while you're turning to make it go faster. If you're out of sync, you're pretty much doomed to capsize.

James was knuckles-deep in Sirius' hair and knee-deep in a reenactment of the previous day. He'd sulked all day after he left Regulus at the restaurant; he'd never failed to win someone over, aside from all of those misguided MKTO serenades. James styling Sirius' hair was a regular occurrence whenever one of them needed to rant about something, and Sirius conveniently had a lunch date with Hospital Man in three hours, giving James just enough time to work his magic.

"And he's so good at talking shit about other people, but the moment I ask something about himself, he shuts down. Even when I asked him about his music taste, he got all defensive on me," James complained. "I don't know what to do with him anymore."

"Regulus is a dick, but he's really just hidden under a bunch of layers. Like an onion," Sirius said protectively.

"That's an insult to onions and you know it," James huffed.

"Give him time. Remember how I was in secondary school? He was stuck in the tenth circle of Hell for way longer than I was. For a while, he literally wore noise-cancelling headphones when I walked in, and I just had to wait for him to be ready to listen," Sirius explained with uncharacteristic patience.

"I thought that was because someone was blasting Fearless ," James smirked.

"Hey, he needed to be introduced to culture at some point," Sirius joked, but the description of Regulus reminded James of the first time he'd done Sirius' hair, in a different bathroom sink, when his friend was much more tight-lipped about, well, everything.

Sirius had shown up in a taxi, barely sixteen and scared out of their wits, in the dead of night with broken ribs and infected wounds. For three days, they hadn't spoken, they'd barely eaten, and they'd spent most of the time in the Potters' guest room after they returned from the hospital. No one, not even Euphemia, could get Sirius to say a word about what happened that night. Finally, James came up with an idea he thought might work: giving Sirius a bit of normalcy. Their hair was always in top shape in school, but in their nearly catatonic state, the normally well-defined curls had fallen apart into what could only be described as a frizzy mess.

James and his father, who was something of a hair genius and had made a fortune on his own line of products, worked for days to formulate a routine from scratch, but in the end, it was James who went in alone and armed with knowledge. At first, Sirius was silent, but as he massaged their scalp with utmost care, the story had come pouring out.

James could practically hear the crack of Orion's belt despite being a world away from that night in the drawing room. As Sirius began to describe the night, James felt every hit his best friend had taken as if it was his own body. When they inevitably broke down into breathless sobs, James stopped what he was doing to hold them—not too tight, like they might break—trying to give them the strength to explain what he would never fully understand. When they reached the crux of the story, the Google searches Walburga had found that led to those merciless injuries, they couldn't meet James' eye, but he didn't care. He just went on with his work as Sirius told him how confused they felt, how they felt constricted by their body, but only some of the time. How every label they tried on felt like it was meant for someone else. The countless Sundays they spent praying for something to fit, only to be answered with indifferent silence. All James could do was listen, and he felt powerless.

He spent hours on the Internet after that, discovering the vastness of its LGBTQ community for the first time, hoping for something that sounded like Sirius and finding an inkling of himself in the process. He remembered the happy tears that had stained his T-shirt the day he'd come to their bedside, holding up an article entitled The gender-fluid generation: young people on being male, female or non-binary. "That's me," Sirius said, over and over again, growing louder as they dug deeper, moving from The Guardian to a seemingly endless stream of Tumblr posts about others proudly sharing the identity Sirius hadn't known existed until James showed up in their room with a computer and a grin.