sirius had fucked up in the most egregious fashion.

his life as a rockstar in a boy band, alongside his best mates, was a relentless whirlwind of commitments—an almost unpalatable schedule for someone who tended to oscillate between being a trauma-bound perfectionist and a half-asser.

you were his motivation, a friend beyond the eyes of the public and nosy media projectors who thought that reporting every one of his bar rendezvous was a full time job. see, he had a bit of a loophole as the both of you were not exclusively in any form of relationship beyond casual dalliances and fleeting assignations; but that did not mean he wasn't stricken by guilt.

a thing to note, was that you had found out through a gossip magazine article; perhaps the worst way to discover infidelity, as it was hard to mourn when the text itself was preposterously melodramatic, so gauche.

however, the blaring reality was clear: sirius had been photographed kissing the french model yvonne couriez outside a bar. and you could not even be that mad, as she was the picture of one kissed by aphrodite, with her gossamer black curls and the coy bat of feathery lashes.

sirius had been drunk out of his mind, which was no excuse, but the silence was deafening. sirius despised having to rely on anyone for anything as it made him feel inferior, but he hadn't realized how dependent he had been on you till you'd withdrawn from him. perhaps, as regulus had once said with cruel prescience, he was simply born to be a cheater.

"it meant nothing, she meant nothing, you know this." sirius had made a show of appearing at your doorstep well past the hour of sensibility, beneath a rain-washed sky—soaked through—hazy gray eyes looking simultaneously orphic and desolate when he set eyes upon you. it'd been over a month, and he was sick of the justified cold shoulder. "i was drunk, high, whatever state of hell i was in. i didn't mean to hurt you."

his ink-dark hair curled about his cheekbones, heavy with water, plastered like wilted laurels against ghostly, lightly freckled skin. his leather jacket—of exquisite make—clung miserably to his form, stained and sodden; but he was rich, so it probably didn't matter to him. silver earrings glittered along with the trails of moisture he'd dripped onto your doormat.

"don't look at me like that." sirius muttered, wincing at the expression on your face. "i swear on my life, that i never wanted to do anything to hurt you, even though technically i didn't do anything illegal. i'm a fuckwit." oh, that pretentious arse.