Hiraeth | Regulus Black

Chapter Seventy Eight

Regulus, Remus, and Lily were watching with great amusement as they sat at the kitchen table, crowded with drinks and half-empty bottles of alcohol.

To be fair, the evening had started with Esme lightly pestering Sirius. That had been several hours ago and up until this point, the two of them had seemed to be getting on relatively well.
However, Sirius had made the mistake of thinking he could direct a jibe at Esme without any repercussions.
He was sorely mistaken.

The two of them had, for the past hour, been engaged in a heated argument about everything they could possibly argue about - ranging from how to pronounce certain obscure words to which kind of apple was best.

James and Peter had ended up drinking a lot more than anybody else, and were dancing rather chaotically to the music and laughing hysterically at anything and everything. They were clinging onto each other to stop from sliding to the ground, and all sense of sensical conversation between the two had gone out of the window.

"Do tell me if I've crossed some sort of line here." Remus began, sat next to Lily who was in the middle of him and Regulus, "But they are awfully alike, aren't they?"
"Yeah..." Regulus nodded, "I think I should see a therapist about that."

Perhaps that was why Esme and Sirius could wind each other up with such ease. They were so similar in some regards that they knew exactly how to push the other's buttons in order to get a reaction.

"I think I'd take either of them over James at the moment." Lily covered her smile with a hand as they turned to see James and Peter were now slow dancing with each other, despite the fact that a rather fast paced rock song was playing.

Remus laughed again, "We're the sane ones, aren't we?"
"I don't know." Regulus shook his head slowly and took another sip of his drink, "Sometimes I think I'm mad, and she's the sane one."

Then, without thinking, he rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. If they'd been in Hogwarts, Regulus would never have dared to do it, but outside of school he'd never had to give it a second thought. So he was more than a little confused when Remus' face paled slightly and he let out a strangled cough.

"Oh." He mumbled, quickly pulling his sleeves down again to cover the Dark Mark.

"Don't worry about it." Lily comforted with a small smile as she placed a hand on his arm, "We know it doesn't mean anything about who you are."
Remus cleared his throat, "It's just not something you see everyday, you know?"

"Well there is that about it." He replied, taking another, larger, mouthful of wine and wincing slightly as he swallowed it.

"How does it work?" Remus asked.
This somewhat caught Regulus off guard, but he explained nevertheless, "Well I haven't ever been summoned before but apparently the mark just starts to burn and then you can apparate to wherever you're needed."

They were suddenly interrupted by: "Merlin... I'll be back in a minute." Lily quickly stood up and made her way over to help James and Peter who had slipped over in the midst of their dancing, and were now lay on the floor slurring unintelligible things and cry-laughing.

"Do you think we should help?" Regulus asked Remus.
The older boy folded his arms, laughed lightly, and shook his head, "No. They'll just end up falling down again. Any second now James is going to pull Lily to the floor and none of them will get up after that."

"Hi there."

Regulus was distracted from watching the scene unfold on the floor as he turned to see Esme had sat down in the empty seat beside him. Her cheeks were flushed a light pink colour - though he couldn't tell if that was from the bickering or the drinking.