The safehouse was different than Regulus had remembered it. Maybe it was because of what happened on that night, the last time he was there, or maybe it was because he'd just been confined to one of the bedrooms, only seeing the rest of the safehouse when he'd attempted to run away. After seeing it in the daylight, he realised it'd been a small glimpse of everything that was inside. Small parts of it, the bedroom, Regulus had seen already: the books on James' shelf, the contents of the nightstand, the pattern on the bedspread.
"Hurry up," James had said, when they'd first landed in the forest. "I have a bad feeling about this."
And yet it was strange to see the photographs that lined the walls, the swaths of books piled in towers, the strewn notes, the cluttered kitchen. At one point, Regulus realised, this was James' hom e. Or, more likely, Regulus guessed, a family home. While Headquarters, as James called it, was the Potter Manor, the safehouse seemed to have an equal importance to the Potter family.
Most of the photographs lining the walls were of James as a child: flying on a broom ("first time in the air!" the caption read), eating an ice lolly from Fortescue's ("day in Diagon"), dressed in colourful robes ("Ministry fundraiser"), holding the hand of a woman ("meeting Mam"). There were only a couple of James from Hogwarts. But in each of them, looping over and over, James' smile was bigger than the world, captivating and carefree. The handwriting written in the white space of each picture frame was neat—not as exaggerated as Regulus', but still trained and perfect.
In some spots on the wall, photos had been taken down recently, so that the paint behind where the frame had hung was a slightly darker colour than the rest, untouched for years. Regulus felt his fingers itching to reach up and inspect the spot, though there wouldn't be any remnants of what once hung there.
"We used to come here in the summers," James said, from somewhere behind him.
"I see," Regulus said, pointing to the photographs. There hadn't been any in the bedroom before, though now that he'd thought about it—there were the same empty paint squares, where James must have taken them down.
"The library is this way," James said, shifting on his feet. Regulus looked away from the photograph of him in his dress robes, and found him shifting on his feet, glancing around the room with a slight awkwardness.
Regulus ignored his embarrassment, and instead said: "I like your robes."
His feet tapped on the hardwood as he walked over, shoulder brushing Regulus' as he peered at the photograph, "They're traditional. Mum made me wear them until I was eleven."
He looked at James curiously, "And you stopped?"
James didn't answer. He looked at the photograph wistfully, mind somewhere else. In the photograph, James was standing next to his father, who was wearing the traditional Auror robes. Then, finally: "They were uncomfortable, I think. Looked nice, though."
There was a silence as the two of them watched the photograph loop, James' smile brightening slightly and his father's arm, perpetually reaching down to touch his shoulder. He couldn't have been more than seven or eight. Regulus' primarily fixed his eyes, though, on the stoic face of Fleamont Potter, a hint of a smile upon his lips as he gazed down at James.
It reminded him of the way his father used to look at Sirius, when they were younger. It hadn't all been bad. Not for Regulus, necessarily, and not for Sirius either, at the beginning.
When they were younger, their parents adored them. They'd been perfect—little children that Walburga could dress up, put in priceless robes and parade around pureblood society, kept in a little gilded cage that she let them out of every once in a while, just to show them off. At that age there was nothing more that Regulus wanted, than to be marvelled at.
