Regulus waited in the common room, alone, and watched the slim second hand slowly tick its way around the clock until it finally joined the minute and the hour hands at XII. Midnight. November 3rd, 1976. Sirius had just turned seventeen.
In another world, another life, they might have celebrated together. He might have congratulated Sirius on receiving their father's pocket watch and perhaps accompanied him to Gringott's to watch as the goblins transferred his inheritance to his vault. They might have celebrated with an ice cream or a butterbeer or perhaps even a firewhisky or two.
As it was, Regulus had been forced into sneaking around.
He'd asked the elves to bake Sirius a cake — carrot, with a thick layer of icing — and deliver it to the Gryffindor common room along with seventeen red and gold candles and a host of balloons filled with glittering stars.
He'd cornered his brother's friend, Remus Lupin, after a Prefects' meeting and given him a small parcel wrapped in nondescript brown paper and told him to give it to his brother privately and to absolutely not reveal whom it was from in front of James Potter, under pain of death.
Oh, how he'd agonised over that gift. He didn't know if Sirius still supported the Tutshill Tornadoes or if Liquorice Wands were still his favourite sweets or if he still liked to read adventure stories. He didn't know what the words meant on those t-shirts he wore at weekends or why he always carried that tattered piece of parchment around with him.
It was difficult to know your brother when he wouldn't even look at you any more.
And in nineteen months' time Regulus would be the one to inherit the pocket watch, passed down from father to son for generations. He would inherit the galleons and the sickles and even the knuts. Once the spare — and how he missed the relative freedom that offered, now it had been taken away — the younger brother had become the heir with all the responsibility and the pressure, the relentless fucking pressure, that entailed.
Regulus wanted to hate his brother for abandoning him to the suffocating house and their mad mother and silent father. He wanted to scream and shout and hex him right off the top of Gryffindor Tower but he wouldn't. He couldn't. Sirius was still his brother, no matter what their mother demanded.