AN: I guess I kind of wrote this as a bit of a companion piece to the wonderful Laser Lance 720's Pour One Out, which I urge you all to read as it's wonderful. I read that story and it kind of resonated with me on a personal level. Nearly two years ago, my older sister walked out of my life and I haven't seen or spoken to her since. I know absolutely nothing about her life anymore - where she lives, what she's doing, what's going on with her family. I try not to think about it, and I try to cut myself of from it, but we were sisters, once, and no matter how much you try, that bond just doesn't go away. So I kind of took what I know about that kind of loss, with the inspiration from Laser Lance's story, and wrote this piece on how Regulus might have felt about the whole situation with his brother. I hope I've done it justice, and I hope you enjoy it :)

Prompts:
If You Dare Challenge: 417. Seen It Grow
Valentine-Making Challenge: Hug me Conversation Hearts - Write about a sibling relationship.
Chocolate Frog Cards Challenge: Copernicus (Bronze) Prompts: important, talent, stars, earth.
Gringotts Prompt Bank: (colours) midnight blue, (prepositions) alongside, inside, underneath. (family and friends vocabulary) family tree, ancestor, (celestial, weather and nautical words) earth, twinkling, sun, wind, hateful
1,121 words.
Warning for ridiculously licentious extended metaphors xD

Tangled Boughs

He was my brother, once. We were two twigs on our family tree that twisted around each other, overlapping this way and that, inseparable. We borrowed strength from each other to keep us upright, to keep us reaching up to the sun and it's eternal energy. We grew together, growing from small twigs that a child might break off to drop over the edge of a bridge to half-formed branches, blooming with our first few flowers. We each became our own people in the darkness of the shade of the long-dead branches above, covered in toxic lichen. We thickened out, and grew long and hard, our skin thickening to bark, and yet we still left each other room for themselves to shape their own path.

But he was stronger than I was. He still is. Back when I still had the chance to talk, I'd have never said that to him. I wouldn't have given him the satisfaction of the knowledge that I though well of him in any way. He was strong enough to know that he could break away from the family tree and still survive for a while on the ground. He had the resources in himself to keep himself alive: the water, the minerals. And down there on the earth, away from the shadow of our ancestor's boughs, there was more sunlight than he'd ever known.

The wind carried him this way and that, sending him to the foot of another tree, a bright silver birch full of fresh green leaves and flowers, but bringing him back to rest among our roots, underneath our shade, in the summer. He withered here, aged. His leaves grew weak and dark in the summer shade, his flowers didn't open quite so far, as if he was trying to curl up into himself like some kind of resurrection plant, preserving what little he could keep of himself from the intensity of the summer heat.

Back then, I thought I wanted nothing to do with him, but he was still there. I didn't seek out the information, but I knew who his friends were, I knew what he was doing. I didn't realise that was important to me. I saw his happiness, but I looked at it like it was some kind of threat. He shouldn't have been happy. It didn't mesh with what I thought I knew, with what I'd been told. He'd gone against tradition and turned his back on his family, and all the honour, prestige and glory that went alongside it. He'd chosen to have nothing instead. He shouldn't have been happy. I should have been happy.

I wasn't. I wasn't happy because I was too busy trying to live up to historic expectations. I was too busy trying to say the right thing, make the right moves, build connections with the right people. Later, I was too busy second guessing everything I'd ever believed in. In the midst of all that, I didn't have time to be happy. He did.

I heard his bark of laughter resonate through the walls of the castle, as if the castle itself was happier for the sound. I heard it and I was jealous, because I'd never laughed like that, not since our branches were intertwined, not since he left. I took that green jealousy into my heart and turned it black: black like my name; black as the ash left behind after a tree is burned to cinders; black as hate.

I watched his branch as it planted itself anew, in the cold hard ground. He made a new home for himself, began a new tree. He had a talent for surviving, and I watched as he thrived and I hated him. I'd seen it grow into something almost unrecognisable to me, but I knew him. I'd always know him. That knowledge brought bile to my throat, then.

He tried to apologise once. He tried to tell me he was sorry for ever leaving me, for ruining what we'd had when we were younger. I threw it back in his face and spat on it for good measure. I couldn't see past the blackness inside of me. I was hateful. It was like I was blind, seeing only monochrome, when the world was full of fabulous colour I didn't understand.

And then he was gone.

No longer a part of my daily life, and for the first time, I admitted that I missed him. There was a hole in my world where he had been, like the branch of my life was still moulded around the space where he had been, but there was nothing there any longer. Only the coldness of the winter air. That hole in my world was empty. Completely barren. I didn't know anything. I didn't know where he was, or what he was doing. I no longer knew who his friends were. I couldn't even tell you if his laughter still broke free as often as it always had, if it still carried across halls and down corridors with the same strength and volume.

He might have been dead, or fighting for his life, or anything. I didn't know.

The not knowing was worse than the knowing. I used to look up to the stars at night, finding mine and then his twinkling in the midnight blue, because at least in some way I felt like I was close to him. I discovered that the jealousy I'd harboured was only a coping mechanism, and now I had nothing to be jealous of, it broke free of me with a long sigh, leaving me with the charred remains of a withered, unfeeling heart. At least, that was what I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe I no longer felt anything, because it was easier that way.

But I did. There was a part of my heart, deep inside where it hurts the most, that felt everything, all at once. Years of hatred were still there, beating a staccato rhythm that I marched by, but beside the hatred was love.

It was the love of a four-year-old boy looking up at his big brother teaching him how to ride a broomstick in the back garden. It was the love of a six-year-old-boy sitting opposite his brother at the kitchen table playing gobstones.

It was a love that never went away, and never would. No matter what happened, no matter how many years of silence passed us by, the love would remain inside, buried and bullied but still, always, there.

He was still my brother. That was a fact, and I couldn't change that even when I wanted to. I didn't want to, not anymore.

And I'd never get to tell him.