Regulus Black had known, since his second year, that girls loved his brother. He couldn't help but notice that there never failed to be a gaggle of them following Sirius about. When he sat at a table in the library, a group of giggling skirts from every House and a variety of years sat a table away, hiding behind their books and tittering excitedly, primping and pouting in his general direction until Madam Pince kicked them out. The same basic principle seemed to apply in the Great Hall at mealtimes, and Regulus could only suppose it was the same in classes. He knew that one evening after detention they'd had to serve together (for hexing each other in the hallway), they'd exited the classroom they'd just scrubbed from the floor all the way up to the ceiling only to find five girls lurking rather conspicuously down the hallway.

Yes, the attention Sirius garnered from those of the female persuasion at Hogwarts was considerable. Regulus had spent a lot of time being vaguely annoyed by it, as though it affected him on any personal level, until some time in the middle of his fourth year when things took a rather strange turn.

At first, he thought he was imagining it. There was nothing more than the odd shrill giggle and the quick shuffling of parchment when he turned toward the source, and a growing sense that he was being followed - Rabastan called him a paranoid freak when he mentioned it offhandedly and Evan only snorted derisively into his issue of Veela Vixens-but the more time passed, the more pronounced the feeling became, and when he returned to school in January after a turbulent but mercifully paranoia-free holiday, the feeling returned full-force, stronger than ever. He was convinced something was up. He set himself to the task of figuring it out, but somehow turned up nothing until he managed to get into a war of words with Snape that quickly degenerated into a name-calling match and Snape made a particularly unforgivable comment about he and his brother being just alike.

What the fuck had he meant, Regulus demanded to know, he was nothing like Sirius, but Snape began to expound a list, the only item of which Regulus took any notice of being the assertion that they were both vain prats who reveled in being trailed everywhere by their own personal fan clubs. He had just begun to take issue with that ridiculous claim when he heard quiet and high-pitched whispering coming from behind him, and he whipped around in time to catch two third year girls watching him avidly. They blushed a furious red when he caught them and bent over their homework so far their noses were pressed to the parchment. He could hear Snape laughing triumphantly behind him and felt the tips of his ears flushing even as something inside of him cried 'A-ha!' victoriously. He composed himself, turned around, and calmly put an end to the argument by telling Snape to fuck off and go back to licking Lucius Malfoy's balls before excusing himself to the dorm. Once there, he lay down on his bed and stared up at the ceiling, a wide smile spreading across his face.

It wasn't until his sixth year that, after more than a year of pretending he didn't know who his classmates were talking about when they mentioned the name Sirius, things more or less came to a head, and Regulus ended up with a black eye and a busted lip, and Sirius with a split brow and a bloody nose.

In the hospital wing waiting for Madam Pomfrey, the curtain drawn between their beds did not prevent them from continuing to argue. It was the longest conversation they'd had in months.

"Don't act like you and your friends are some kind of saints-"

"If you think my friends are bad you ought to take a look at your own-"

"You think anything we do is any worse than how you treat us-"

"Don't think I haven't seen the newspaper clippings, Regulus, you're as bad as any of them-"

"You're so selfish, what do you expect me to do-"

"Not be one of them!"

"You don't understand anything about what it's like to have to grow up and make adult choices-"

"Oh, you're so damn mature, you don't think I made a choice?"

"You made a selfish, immature choice, and you turned your back on everything that's most important in life, and now you're out there, living with muggle-lovers and... diluting the gene pool-"

"What the hell are you talking about diluting the gene pool, you know-nothing prick?"

"As though you haven't fucked muggle girls and mudbloods."

"And so what if I have? At least I can find a girl willing to have sex with me."

"Oh, and I can't?" Regulus was so incensed he didn't even realize the direction of the conversation had suddenly veered off-track, and lost track of whatever point he had been trying to make. "I bet I could get more girls at this school than you could."

"You really want to bet that? You really do?" Sirius pulled back the curtain and stuck his hand out.

At first, Regulus was hesitant. No, he really did not want to bet on it at all, and he had absolutely zero confidence in his ability to attract the ridiculous number of girls Sirius seemed to be able to, but the way Sirius was looking at him, with that damn condescending smirk... Regulus stuck out his hand and shook.

"Are you sure about this?" Remus asked, looking at him with a cocked eyebrow.

"Of course I'm sure! This is a brilliant idea. I'll humiliate Regulus, thereby putting all Slytherins in their place, win some money and also glory for Gryffindor, and grant the wishes of a multitude of starry-eyed young lasses all at once. Where could I go wrong?"

"I can think of about a million ways, just offhand."

"Don't be so negative. Come on, Prongs, Wormtail, back me up."

James, sitting cross-legged on the bed above Sirius and Remus, looked contemplative. "All that stuff sounds good enough, especially the bit about humiliating Regulus, but it seems somehow... off."

"And what the hell does that mean?"

"I dunno. It's probably nothing. But the words 'morally reprehensible' keep coming to mind."

"Morally... Morally re- Who are you?" Sirius didn't give him the chance to answer before turning to Peter. "What about you? Surely you recognize the greatness this prank has the potential for."

"Doesn't seem like a proper prank to me, really," Peter said, looking up from Professor Sprout's essay on the poisonous plants of the South Pacific. "A prank has stuff like exploding dustbins and green pubic hair and so on."

"Green pubic hair?"

"Well it might be a proper prank after all then, Wormtail, depending on who exactly Sirius has sex with," Remus said, a rather annoying (in Sirius's opinion) smirk on his face.

"The bet involves actual sex?" James asked dubiously.

"Well, I don't think it was exactly stipulated, but I assume the farther you go... The better it is."

"Are you working on some sort of points system here?"

"Er..."

"I fail to see how this is going to pan out when you don't even seem to have planned out the first thing about it."

Sirius's expression soured. "No okay, this is how it works. When either one of us you know, pulls a bird, he tells the other one, and then... At the end of the term we total them up and... Listen okay, it's going to work."

And that was that.

Tuesday night Sirius found himself snogging Julie Anderson behind a tapestry on the fifth floor corridor. She'd been making eyes at him through their entire Charms lesson, and Sirius was quite glad he didn't really need much instruction on the subject, because he hadn't heard a word out of Flitwick's mouth with the way Julie kept sucking on the end of her quill, with her round red lips, and the tip of her tongue appearing every now and then, as if to taunt him. Her mouth was small and bow-shaped, and her skin was olive-colored, and he thought, if he were going to start anywhere, it might as well be with her.

So now she had her arms wrapped around his naked back, her chest pressed against his as his teeth scraped her neck and made trails of raw pink skin in their wake. She was moaning already, and he thought the show was a little much, but he appreciated the effort, and loved the feeling of her fine, wavy hair between his fingers. He wondered, as he kissed her lips and she moaned into his mouth and his hands ran over the valley of her waist, whether this would lose its novelty now that the bet was on. Because, much as he would swear up and down to the contrary in front of Regulus, he really hadn't done this much in the first place. He worried about Remus's ominous admonishments and couldn't help but frown a little when she closed her eyes and tossed her hair back. Julie Anderson was a nice enough girl, but he didn't feel entirely sure that he wanted to be doing this with her.

But the point of this wager had nothing to do with whether he wanted to do it with her, but whether she wanted to do it with him. Which, apparently, she did. Still, it was almost a relief when they heard Peeves out in the corridor and had to break apart, dressing in a hurry before heading back to their respective dormitories.

The following morning, he stopped by the Slytherin table to speak with his brother, who was gnawing on the end of a sausage.

"One to nothing, Reg," he said, and turned away, not too soon to see the beginnings of a scowl creep across Regulus's features.

A/N: This story is completely ridiculous, which I realize, but I began writing in a long time ago, around 2006, and came back to it recently (after around part 2 or 3) to take a break from more strenuous writing projects. So, anyway, since I started writing this around 2006, parts of it are really only canon compliant (to the extent that you could call any of this canon compliant) up to HBP.

Also, does anyone know why on earth it's so difficult to add section breaks into stories on this website (other than the horizontal line)? Trying to add extra line breaks between sections just doesn't show up for me, and neither do asterisks put between paragraphs. Why? What is going on here?