Let Me Disect Your Brain Please - Tumblr Posts

Spare some rabastan lestrange for the needy pls🤲 (i’m the needy and i’d like to know what you think about his dynamic with his brothers)

Sigh, fine I’ll guess I’ll spare some pennies. Thank you for the ask! This is kinda scatter brained and kinda focused on Rodolphus to like parallel/paint how the brothers are together with they are separate and yeah I dunno I threw up

So usually I internalize whatever @florsial (formal apology to you pookie, Im about to act out of line 🫶) says about Rabastan because we tend to agree on things surrounding him but I think we definitely view Rodolphus differently. Which is fine, he barely exists as a character and I think it’s just representative of how we fundamentally view sibling relationships differently. Like I don’t know what it is with me, but I feel the need ti make every sibling relationship I write for either fanfiction or my own work complicated as hell.

So Rodolphus Lestrange. I think he’s a lot like Orion Black. Like he probably even looked up to him kind of when he grew up, (which is kinda funny because Rodolphus probably isn’t much younger than him if at all considering my headcanon that both walburga and Orion were young when they had both their children to kind of get it out of the way) and you can see that in like a lot of how he just is. Hes ‘stoic’ but actually just doesn’t feel a lot of emotions and doesn’t pretend he does, he’s probably like a hair away from being an alcoholic but he doesn’t drink because he knows that (unlike Orion who is very much an alcoholic), hes antisocial and physically annoyed around people because he doesn’t understand why they are as ‘efficient’ as he is and looks down on all of them.

He’s very work oriented, so much so that he doesn’t really have a life outside of it at all. He’s always been the twin the family knew to count on and he always liked having the title so he never had a rebellious stage or any real anger towards his expectations beyond being tired at the end of a particularly grueling work day. I think the only work hes expected to do that he actively doesn’t work towards doing is producing heirs. He doesn’t like kids, he thinks they’re loud and messy and they get in the way of a schedule. It’s like the only thing him and Bellatrix agree on since she also wants nothing to do with kids. (Also quick note on their marriage, I think they pretty much ignore each other and that’s their idea of what they’ll be like forever. When in public together they put on the ‘better than you’ couple mask but in every other scenario they live completely separate lives and actively avoid each other or they’ll find something to fight about.) like the general vibe I could sum him up with is, yes he’s Rabastan’s twin, but everyone who’s ever talked with him assumes he’s like a decade older and just aged well.

So to contrast that with Rabastan, who was never really expected to be anything and never proved anyone wrong, he’s the sort of kid his mother defends no matter what but he father actively tries to forget about. The exact sort Rodolphus looks down on. He can’t help it’s his brother, he’s still below him. And that would be easier to accept if Rabastan stopped proving it over and over. He had to act out in school, he had to move where mother couldn’t find at seventeen, he had to preach to the family that they were ‘immoral’ or whatever, and then he had to preach it to a child, and then he had to marry the child. Like, Rodolphus isn’t a good man by many means, but his lack of feeling or empathy towards people gives him a more head on view of them. And his head on view of his brother is that he’s useless, dramatic, and so desperate to be anything he’ll lie to a little girl to get her to view him that way. And not to say Rodolphus is any better since he witnessed first hand what his brother was doing, he literally walked in on the two hiding away to make out in a corner when regulus was still fifteen and his brother was the same age as himself and just turned back around and never mentioned it to anyone. A truly good person probably would’ve done something. Good thing that’s not what he’s trying to be.

(Also unrelated but I wanna circle back to a point @florsial has that I love about how Rabastan and Regulus are a couple who tries to nuclear and domestic but fails, I feel like that’s a joke on its own especially in this context. The idea that Rodolphus is the nuclear working man so Rabastan must parallel him by being a family man, he just isn’t. Yes he’s closer with his wife than his brother is, and yes that could be something he has over Rodolphus but pretty much no one in their family is proud of Rabastan for his teenage wife and it’s not like their perfect or anything.)

Rodolphus has probably told Rabastan he thinks this only once since he’s usually content to be quiet about it. He probably broke and yelled about how Rabastan will never be anything ro even get his shit together and it won’t matter because no one has hope he will and it hurts because Rodolphus was never given that leeway and it must be fucking nice to have. Rabastan probably doubles back with how much it must be nice for anyone to give a shit about you, to not only exoect things from you but love you even more when you deliver. They probably kept fighting until Rodolphus, as always, gets tired and shuts it down and goes home.

Because even a man who feels nothing has breaking points, especially when Rabastan keeps fucking pushing for one. And that was their relationship a lot of their life, I think. Rabastan desperately wanting to be seen and Rodolphus who is willingly blind. When they were younger that was ok, little kids before hogwarts just played together until father came to take Rodolphus away, growing boys at hogwarts who slowly drift apart when one doubles down on academics and the other found there’s more to do (and not for lack of desperate trying on the seconds behalf.) and then they’re grown up and neither can place what really happened. They’re sure they used to love each other, at least they think so. And they don’t know what happened, because something must have happened. Right?

Yeah I dunno it’s hard to continuously explain but I think what’s tragic about them is that it’s needless. Rabastan could try ti be better and it would not only help his relationships but himself, Rodolphus could try ti be more and he same would happen to him. If either brother were better at being human then they would be better at loving each other. But they’re not, so they can’t.