A Hollow Kind of Nothing

Disclaimer: The boys are not mine, at all, in any shape or form.

Rating: R

Warnings: This fic contains slash and Incest! You have been warned.

Almost everything in the wizarding world is sentient; voices were everywhere, whispering secrets, spread through the house like a disease, a plague of spies and half silent mutterings. But with sentience comes sense, there are things not to be told to the wizards, the ones truly free to walk around and have a life, they are sentient but slaves meant only to exist and they are only permitted the freedom to keep those secrets they root out, to hoard them. There is a freedom in that.

Mirrors see everything and keep it locked inside themselves to play back upon when they are spotted and cracked and the only thing they can see any more is the broken walls and dead alleys of abandonment so they can believe that they are really reflecting the memories, that they can still see the life trapped between the atoms inside. The memories of mirrors don't fade, they are eternal in their recollection and the colours are vivid blurs on shattered shards. He used to keep a mirror with him, one of the few things he cared enough about to take from the house he abandoned, the only thing that wouldn't argue, wouldn't fight. Mirrors are sentient but they are slaves, even in their minds, they cannot turn to hate. His mirror didn't speak, it hadn't spoken since they were both so little that he can even put an age on it and they were innocent. Even mirrors can see too much.

When the nights in the Potters' house were too cold and too silent because they bought muggle things to stop the whispers, the half murmurs, when the silence was too whole and he didn't know how to deal with it because he was only even a shattered thing in a house of shards he would pull out the mirror and ask it to show him. Show him that he would never fit in with this complete, flawless house because he was too damaged. He belonged to the thin black lines that drew its spidery truths out on the spotting surface. He would watch the winding bodies when they were young, so young and it was so wrong but they were ragged fits and when his breath fogged the surface he could almost hear that half silence of muffling moans around bites of flesh and tugs of material and secrets that even portraits would not tell.

The first time he kissed his bother he was eight and Regulus was so small against him. That first time, for those first few years he tasted like the thick red cherries he would press into his mouth whenever their mother turned back to her sparkling (it was always sparkling) glass and he could pull them off their north-facing tree. The first spell he learnt was one to keep the tree in fruit all year long. It took him forever to find it in their musty library and even longer to master it with his child's wand, he would only be bought a proper one when he was going to school. But it was worth it to see the look on his brother's face, to taste the slightly acidic sweetness on his lips. But after those first few years all he could taste on the boy was the buttery nothingness of the anti-depressant potions that Regulus was given and kept locked in his bedside table. The potions that he was so jealous of because it took him away from how fucked up they were and how fucked up their life was and how fucked up it was that they had been to the houses of all the noble purebloods and theirs was the only one that resounded of secrets and half silence that only showed them the half lives and the shattered pieces that they mesh together to try to make a whole but always fail. One swig a night that had to be two because he would be pounced on by Sirius before he could fully swallow it and soon it was always there as a barrier between them, a protective coat. They could pretend that the whispers and murmurs didn't sound like failure.

The day he left Hogwarts was the last time he saw the real Regulus, the last time he could kiss and lick and fuck him and the last time he wondered why his little brother still did this with the boy (man) he hated, the one who had abandoned him and left him with nothing but a room with no mirror and a house of secrets and black, spidery lines. Strands of delicate hair cutting into what could have been a perfect composition. Art is all about the negative space, what isn't there. When he bought his own flat he filled it with the murmurings of wizarding objects and enlarged the mirror as big as could fit inside the locked room that none of his friends even knew existed in the home. None of them knew that he wouldn't come of out of the room unless they were there to force him to keep secrecy instead of dreaming of when the idea of pieces were pushed back to his mind and he could dream of buttery nothingness and pretend that they still lived in a world of ripe cherries pressed against white teeth. When what he saw wasn't marred with spots and cracks because they were all hidden on the inside and they didn't have to face what they were doing because the silence of the mirror hid their thoughts and it was only what they did and how it felt and it was only to make them feel whole. It was nothing to do with them. Desperation, not love.

When Regulus was nine he stopped talking. When he stopped talking the mirror stopped talking, he didn't understand it at first, his brother sat in the corner of their room like a shadow and the mirror ignoring any attempts to find out if the particular shade of black was becoming to him. Even when they kissed, they pushed beneath the covers and rutted against each other with hot hands and hotter mouths his little brother only ever gave him silence. He was going to Hogwarts next year and he would no longer have his brother by his side, in his bed, he would be exploring the Slytherin Dungeons with his year mates and he had to spend as much time with his brother as he could before it happened. But it's so hard to hold onto shadows. His loose children's clothes turned to the thick heavy robes that accentuated his still so young body, still androgynous and sweet until his fist shot out and he had a black eye and he didn't understand but still at night they would lie together in their chains of material and they would kiss and push and pretend that they made a whole. He doesn't let the mirror show him his brother's eyes when they were that age, when he would fall asleep in an innocent parody of that they had been doing and Regulus would lie there with his darkening eyes watching the mirror. But he was so beautiful then, when his depression stained that young frame with the darkness deep enough to drown himself in, his little brothers sadness only ignited his own fire. In the mirror every encounter is like it was then, but, like it was after. Silent soulless bodies sliding together but separated by the buttery potion that accentuated the dark sometimes, sometimes when they were together. The shadow stains of depression were never really washed away with that nothingness and it was beautiful. He was beautiful.

When Regulus joined Hogwarts he was so consumed by his sickness, and his cure, that the shadows and the nothingness had replaced him and he became the Slytherin that he had never been, the pride of the family that he had never been. He spoke again but never to him and only, it seemed, words of emptiness and promises and a world of snakes. And he was placed in the house of trades and power, the potions stripped him of his ability to feel pain and his ability to feel sadness and to care about himself, but he couldn't just blame it all on the potions. He had created his brother with those nights where he stole his innocence and where he twisted him and corrupted him and having older pureblood boys take his body for themselves was to be expected and he couldn't care and he didn't even know that he should. He had made his own brother into a slut in the only house where such a child could be one and he could only be thankful for their house of lies, corruption and sadness, where their parents lurked imperiously ready to control what they owned, that saved Regulus and made him into a manipulator. Slytherin just became another shadow for him to become, no longer even a student only a force to have the oldest, purest students eating out of his hands with those stained red lips and the seductiveness of a false innocence each being able to believe that they could own this creature but they didn't know that what you create becomes yours and he had fucked his brother up so badly that he was an uncontrollable sexual power but he still owned him and whenever his band of friends could be shaken off and he could sneak to the dungeons with a stolen cloak and his taken mirror (because little Regulus always was an exhibitionist, even if just for them) his brother would always drop whoever he had to be taken into countless dusty rooms that really should have been sealed off because they only encouraged the behaviour really. It was no more romantic or loving than it was in their angular wooden bedroom and the grey powder stuck to their skin and made them age past appropriateness for their actions and into their graves and it was almost like it was telling them that they would be together for their whole lives but when you are a still product of stagnant age what can you do but lie? But with the small body forced at unnatural angles, pressed against creaking desks that mark the skin with a longing to claim and the gash of a red and gold tie digging into the greyed white skin of the boy that belonged to him and answered to him and would always return to their bed when school was a fading memory and who knew nothing more than this he could almost forget what his little Regulus had become. What he had made him.

But he does not like to watch those days, when he can see them getting older, when Regulus still stared into the glass as though as captivated by himself as so many perceived him to be but his eyes were no longer the pools of nothing that were locked away in bottles in his cabinet but were more mirrors that were playing their own memories. The remembrance of all those other hands that trailed across his chest, all those other mouths that slid down his body and that stole the taste from his mouth so that when he finally could kiss him there wasn't even the cure's taste of nothing anymore. They say that when you take nothing away from nothing then you stay with nothing but he knows that they are wrong because Regulus tasted of loss and even seeing those marks against his body as vividly as the days that he put them there only forced the realisation that they were always gone by the next day and that if Regulus knew how to do that then he could have been hiding patchworks of marks and bruises with one simple spell and his were just another stitch in the rug. But even as he demanded to see only them in the holidays or the days when it was still just them and he didn't have to pretend that no one else had taken what he had found, he could feel the memories of those captured days pulsing behind the silvery surface and leaking out of those cracks and seeping across to him, reminding him that it wasn't only Regulus's eyes that were mirrors and he couldn't control what was playing on his.

Once when he had left his home and his room and his bed and his brother there was a storm though the night and winter had stripped the trees and was beating the spindly remains with rain (water stains blurring the mirrors picture while the black web of cracks stand strong) he couldn't resist running out into the Potter property and spelling his mirror to hang in the branches of a dying oak while he watched the memory of the day that he taught Regulus to stop being afraid of storms. The day he realised his fetish for marking that pale, child's skin as the bark left scratches on his arms and whip marks against his cheeks from the frailest of branches made violent by wind. And it wasn't till then that he realised that the mirror had captured a third person that day, that in the looming manor his mother stood still and silent. Watching them. And when he saw Regulus's eyes meet hers, just for a moment, before pressing his face back against his neck and groaning his completion he wondered if he had ever really made his brother. If he had ever been his. He felt sick and almost let the mirror crash to the ground, relishing the knowledge that even the sound of it enlarged over and over then crashing to the ground would be drowned out by the roaring of the purifying world where it would all begin again when it finally grew silent and everything of before would be gone. But he didn't and it was safely hidden back into his pocket as he ran back to his new home where a house elf could find him and fuss over his sodden clothes and shuddering frame, where they took away the mirror while it was still wrapped in his robe and he could breathe again and convince himself that it had never been real. And when it was returned to him room three days later atop of a pile of fresh washing having been polished to sparkling he almost cried with relief and ate a whole bowl of cherries before locking himself in his room for the rest of the day while the Potters sat and worried and told themselves that the holiday season must be the worst for him without the family he had once belonged to. He never looked at that memory again and he swore never to go near his mother or brother or home again and then on the first night spent back in school he bumped into Regulus when he was walking back from the kitchens and his brother had clearly just been with someone and had mussed hair and a debauched face and he had dragged him into some room before he even realised what he was doing and it was the only time he could remember that he was with him without the silent witness of the mirror and to watch it he must dredge it up from his own mind where it could just as well be an invention and it may never have happened at all.

Oh god, he was his brother.

The day they took him to Azkaban, they left his mirror behind. In the scale of all the fucked up things that led him there, the lack of mirror was a very minor detail. But it stabbed him in the mind like a little needle that burnt and spun until it forced the pain of a mangled body away to only remember the needle. (His dreams were of dark shadows like the cloaks of his guards and like the lack of the glint of the mirror and when he woke up he was grasping into the shadows as though) and god, not having that mirror hurt and he had to rely on his own mind as it was ravaged over and over and when he pulled up the images they were all of shadows and glints. But sometimes he saw the spill of that black black hair across the bend of a neck and the smooth curve of his back as (no, it didn't curve, it just broke over and over and over again) the cracking of vertebrae as they are snapped into shape. And amongst the wretched groans of his companions he can hear the captured gasps and trapped moans and before the Dementors descend on him he can remember how his brother is a Death Eater and he will never see him again and the mirror is gone and the rest is all in his head and the promises are all in his head and it might all have been in his head because people went crazy in Azkaban. But he could see that snapping back and he stamped on his finger until he was roaring like an animal and bleeding a river across the grey of his cell like water stains on glass and he could roll it back, arched and hear the cracking. You have to break something to appreciate its beauty.

(Sometimes the Dementors would crowd around his cell and he wouldn't be able to force glimpses of the mirror anymore because all that would be running though his mind was the dead bodies of the Potters and the burnt out Godric's Hollow and the first day back from school ever when he found out that Gryffindors would never be allowed and the beatings he got from his father and his brother being fucked by Death Eaters and potion killed eyes and above it all a domed, lead-piped window ruthlessly cleaned by legions of house elves keeping him forever an exhibit to the cruel figure of an aristocratic woman gazing down on him who couldn't be, couldn't possibly be his mother. The meeting of their eyes. Blackout.)

Azkaban is a looming stone structure leaning on the vestiges of an island in a sea that must be near Scotland or Eastern Europe otherwise it would be spells that cast the perpetual hatred grey over their eyes and kept that rain lashing into the groaning blocks so constantly that it could have been a prophesy of the ending of all life. It could have been falling into the sea, crashing over the spray and sinking (bubbling) down through the soft tar on the shore and no one would have noticed, no one would have changed (they were all dying and the ministry called it merciful). The bars on his window were rusted and if he wanted then he could take his shaking, emaciated arm and smash it against them over and over with copper coloured flakes drifting like a snow that he could barely remember, or even mixing with that rain that broke through them and bit into him like shards of a mirror. And the bars would break. But he was floors and floors and floors and floors up and the shore was just an inky line consuming the dirt and spitting it back out and it was all leaning towards it but they were all to filthy for that sea. Sometimes he would scratch the rock away with his cracked fingernails and torn flesh and he could carve a new place for himself where he might be free but it was all a lie because the stone was sodden and he couldn't get a grip and his bones were brittle and there were Death Eaters in the cells opposite him and next to him and their voices cut through the stone anyway and they called to him over and over aging in their insanity and they yelled at him and cursed him and they told him that his brother was dead and they were all just insane anyway but they all told him that his brother was dead and there was no freedom anymore. But it was all lies but it didn't matter anyway because he was dirty and broken and ugly and dying and his brother was still beautiful and vibrant and he could see him so he must still be alive but he didn't want the shell of a man he had become when he had the whole pureblood elite to choose from and he was twining with others as he was rotting away but he was still there, right there, and he couldn't be dead because if he was then he would know. And what he wouldn't do for his mirror, just his mirror and his brother deserved better than to be here. He had to keep living a full life but in his mind, he belonged to him and his little brother was still there and that must mean something. (If his teeth are sore and broken how can he bite that tender flesh?) He would know.

When the Minister came round he knew that he had to hunt down Pettigrew and clear his name and then kill him like he should have been able to in the first place and concentrating on that he was sane (he wasn't thinking about his brother or the mirror at all or what it would be like once he was a free man and he could save Regulus and they could run away and maybe it would be alright). But he couldn't resist asking and the Minister told him and the minister must have been lying because it wasn't true and he was going to kill Pettigrew and take his brother to safety and he would be able to because the Minister was an idiot but even he would have to see the proof of a dead Pettigrew and he would admit both his mistakes. His brother couldn't be dead. The minister was an idiot, the Ministers were always idiots.

He would know.

Even as a dog he was weak and rotted and it was so far to swim and so far to run and he still didn't know if it was near Scotland or Eastern Europe because all he could remember was the black that wasn't the same shade of his brothers hair and the cold that wasn't reminiscent of their fucking and he wasn't thinking of Regulus at all but of how he had to hunt down Pettigrew. But the ink was as thick and unforgiving as it had seemed from all that way up (if he was in the sky then it would all be fine because) and his fur had become matted and heavy but his human bones couldn't stand the pressure and it was colder than he could have ever thought and really it shouldn't have been liquid and it might not have been because it was just

he bled more than he had done after the years and years and years and he ran and ran and swam until he didn't even know where he was going but he always knew the way home, they all knew the way home because that house owned a part of each of them and no number of years could erase that blood magic with black blood soaked into the wood so deeply that he could feel it in his bones and in his mind and (Grimmauld Place wasn't an option anymore). And he shouldn't have been able to make that journey because he had died so long ago and the body was disappearing but muggles were so fond of dying animals (so like themselves) and they weren't even different people anymore but a warm blanket and wretched food that was manna and mediocre bandages and running and running and more running. (Rain). He wasn't thinking of his brother at all and he didn't flinch at ever mirror he passed.

But as he lay collapsed on the floor (old flat abandoned because everyone was too afraid of the evil and dark Sirius Black and who knew what dark magic he kept in his home?) barely able to muster the magic to become human again (again again again and never) the branches of winter trees, beaten in storms had overcome the mirror and all the shards were barely standing but heaving and leaning and he never escaped at all because every small little dagger was reflecting his brother falling again and again and again and again and again and again and