Chapter Text
There are dead hands clawing at his chest, gripping his arms, and holding him down into the freezing cavern lake. He tries to scream, but water floods his lungs. A small chain wraps around his neck, a vile evil thing that curses his throat and pulls at the noose to his certain death. The locket. All of this for a bloodthirsty locket. For a wretched piece of a monster; a dark lord, a dark mark, a dark soul.
“The locket, the locket, the locket–” Regulus’s mouth repeats again and again. He’s waiting until the chain finally strangles him and lets him rot alongside the Inferi where he belongs.
“Young Master,” Kreacher pleas. Kreacher shouldn’t be here. Kreacher almost died the first time. Regulus isn’t going to let him die a second time. “Young Master is safe.”
Safe? He’s drowning. Alone in a cave. The water is swallowing him up. His lungs will harbor fish and his hair will grow seaweed and his body will become the seafloor.
“Mr. Black,” one of the Inferi says to him. The corpse of an old, withered man with a long coarse white beard and long faded purple robes. “Mr. Black, you are, indeed, safe here.”
Regulus rubs his skin raw, trying to get the nasty hands off of him. Another Inferi kneels in front of him. The shape of a woman in white robes. She shushes him and stops his hands from their incessant rubbing. He jerks back from the contact, because he’s trapped again, and she wants to pull him down, down, down. There’s a struggle, another potion being poured down his throat, and he wants to choke on it, because his lungs are full of water and he can’t swallow any more.
He’s surprised when the potion doesn’t hurt. It should. It’s supposed to. Regulus doesn’t know what to do these days with things that don’t cause him pain. His brain forgets, but his body doesn’t, reluctantly sobbing in both relief and agony. His eyes droop tiredly. Regulus stops thrashing around, but his limbs don’t stop shaking uncontrollably. Those same sharp hands pull him down, but instead of an icy cave floor, he is laid on a soft, clean bed.
There is an audience here: shadows of Inferi with people names. There’s a Professor McGonagall in a wide-brim pointy hat dripping with murky water. There’s a Dumbledore with pale ashen skin rotting over his wrinkled face. There’s a Madam Pomfrey with a white white gown stained in bright red.
“Mr. Black,” Dumbledore repeats his name. Except, he’s not Mr. Black; that’s his father. Except, his father is dead now, a nasty case of being cursed by your own dark objects, and maybe like the Black family madness, Regulus inherits that too. “Your house-elf confessed there is an urgent matter you needed to speak with me about.”
Kreacher glares at the old headmaster and mumbles about half-bloods and blood traitors, yet turns to Regulus like he can still pull the drowned boy out of the lake. “Young Master must trade vile lockets. Keep Young Master safe.”
Of course, Regulus remembers, he traded his life for a locket. It’s still wrapped around his throat and Regulus rips it off. Hoarsely yells at it as if the words could reach the Dark Lord and hurt him somehow. “Where’s your immortality now, you filthy muggle spawn? Crack your soul all you like, but I found you once, I can find you again.” A part of him is mortified to hear this petty speech. A Black is far nobler than boyish taunts. But he is his mother’s son, she’d scream bloody murder even after death.
“May I see that locket, Mr. Black?” Dumbledore says, and his flesh no longer rots but Regulus still finds him foul. There is one locket then two. He’s not sure which one the headmaster wants to see. It almost killed Kreacher, it killed Regulus, so it might kill Dumbledore too.
“You can’t die yet, Headmaster,” Regulus tells him, not out of any fondness for the man but from knowing the old wizard is the only one standing between a dark soul and a lighter world. “Because the Dark Lord won’t die either. He made sure of it.”
Dumbledore makes a thoughtful face. “What do you want, Regulus?”
What he wants shouldn’t matter. Regulus is drowning at the bottom of a dark cave. He’s barely eighteen, barely out of Hogwarts, barely fixing his mistakes. He needs more time. But a childish part of Regulus wants to escape, like Sirius did. “I want to live.”
Pomfrey comes back with more calming draughts, her gown pure as snow once more, and they struggle all over again when Regulus refuses to drink them. Good potions are being wasted on a dead corpse. But his body relaxes, and his head grows foggy, his lungs are waterlogged yet he breathes on anyway. He’s not sure what the Dark Lord is so afraid of. Right now, dying feels a lot like falling asleep.
***
Time escapes him, or maybe Regulus escapes time. He wakes up sometimes thinking he’s still trapped in the cave. Other times, he wakes up thinking he’s still trapped at Grimmauld Place. It’s rare when he wakes up knowing he’s at Hogwarts.
Dumbledore moved him into a hidden dungeon. For his safety, he was told. Dumbledore visits on occasion. Sometimes leaving in high spirits as if he’d found the answers he was looking for, and sometimes leaving disappointed as if all his hard work was for nothing. McGonagall visits him thrice each day with food. Pomfrey visits him even more than that. He’s lost count.
McGonagall visited yesterday, last week, last month (he can’t tell how long he’s been here anymore) and passed him a page from the Daily Prophet . A young man, a boy really, with black curls and gray eyes stared back. Regulus knows him. Seen him many times trapped in the mirror of Grimmauld. The Prophet declared him missing. Didn’t they know? That boy is dead. Drowned somewhere dark, cold, and alone. Always alone.
Today, Pomfrey reapplies his bandages. There are many on his body. He can’t remember why he has them. The only one that hurts now is on his left forearm. When he woke up thinking he was at Bella’s, he smashed a bottle of calming draught and tried to carve out the dark mark poisoning him through the skin. Pomfrey stopped leaving ‘potentially sharp objects’ in the room with him.
She hands him a vial of blood-replenishing potion and he drinks it under her watchful eyes. When he hands it back, he frowns down at his clothes. He’s out of uniform. “Madam Pomfrey?”
The witch is levitating the bloody bandages away, “Yes?”
“Will I miss quidditch practice today?”
Pomfrey pauses and her eyes soften into something like sympathy. “No, Mr. Black, you don’t have quidditch practice anymore.”
No quidditch practice? Did he miss the final game? He is in the hospital wing after all, perhaps another bludger knocked him out and he can’t remember how the last game went. “Did I catch the snitch?”
“Yes, you did.” She smiles, it makes her look less haggard than he’s used to seeing these days. “You always manage to catch it.”
***
Time starts moving faster, or maybe time starts slowing down. It doesn’t matter to Regulus. There’s nowhere else for him to go. He sneaks out of the dungeon, thinking he is late for class, and bumps into Ravenclaw’s ghost.
“You’re not wearing a uniform,” The Grey Lady says, looking down at him.
Regulus looks down at himself. It’s true, he’s not wearing a uniform. He feels self-conscious even in front of ghosts. “I must have forgotten.”
“Which house do you belong to?”
“Slytherin.” There’s something distasteful in the answer. Not the house, but its name. Chambers and secrets, and origins of blood supremacy. Somewhere long ago, someone taught them how to hate. Somewhere not-so-long-ago, someone taught him how to be afraid.
The Grey Lady must have learned the same lessons when she sniffs up at him. “Leave me be. I don’t want further talks with deceiving Slytherin boys.”
Regulus nods. He was deceived by a Slytherin boy too. The Slytherin boy, he could say. Instead, he says, “I’m sorry that happened to you.” Because he wishes someone had said that to him. In a dark cursed home. In a mean snake pit. Under the gaze of a heartless vile monster.
“Are you lost?” Her tone is still wary, but there’s a slight curiosity that slips through. Perhaps he is, the Prophet said so. Regulus Black is missing. How will they ever find him? He’s drowning in a dark cave. He will never get to see the stars again.
“Can dead people get lost?”
“It means little if you are dead or alive. Anything that questions its place must be in want to wander, and if you wander, you’re bound to reach the unknown.” A clever Ravenclaw response. Regulus was once offered a spot for it. He’d argued with an old wrinkly hat against it. He can’t remember why he refused. Maybe he wasn’t that clever after all.
“How do you make the unknown known?”
The Grey Lady doesn’t smile, but her eyes light up with amusement. “When being afraid of it stops mattering.”
Is that how Regulus did it? Is that how you defy a Dark Lord? Is that how Sirius did it? Is that how you run away from home?
“You can run away as far as you’d like, but home has a way of catching you.” The Grey Lady floats further down until they’re eye to eye. “I died in Albania, yet I’m still here.”
Regulus died in a cave, but he’s here too. Maybe he’s a ghost now. Maybe he’s haunting his own corpse. Or maybe he’s just a naive boy who’s late to his Transfiguration class.
“Mr. Black,” Professor McGonagall strides towards him in haste. The Grey Lady floats back up until she disappears into the floor above.
“Apologies, Professor,” he starts to explain himself, “I may have gotten lost in the dungeons. I assure you I won’t miss class again.”
McGonagall stares at him, and Regulus hopes she won’t take points off for his lack of uniform. “Come with me, Mr. Black.”
They make their way to her office. Passing students give him curious looks. Regulus tries to find scarred half-breeds, green-eyed mudbloods, and bespectacled blood traitors. He sees none. Maybe these distinctions don’t matter. Maybe they never did.
“Take a seat,” McGonagall says when they enter her office. She sits behind her desk and points at the plate stocked with treats. “Have a biscuit, Regulus.”
Regulus complies. He always complies to stern adults and even sterner women. Somewhere not-so-long-ago, someone taught him how to be afraid. “Please don’t lump me in detention with Sirius.”
“Why do you think Sirius has detention?”
Regulus scoffs, “He and his little band of pranksters filled the Slytherin quidditch locker room with stray bludgers yesterday. It’s why I’ve been cooped up in the hospital wing all morning.” His captain, Emma Vanity, had opened her locker and the bludgers went flying everywhere. Bouncing against the walls and knocking off teammates. Regulus had a nasty bruise on his torso from the incident.
McGonagall’s face falls slightly, melting off the stern lines carved in, until she takes a deep breath and watches him with softer eyes. “Sirius doesn’t know you’re here. Do you wish to see him?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t want to be another thing that burdens him.” He’s not sure why he’s telling her this. He’s not sure why she’s giving him detention, either. Professor Slughorn handles the Slytherin detentions.
“For his safety or yours?”
Regulus sniffs, much like the Grey Lady did. “I’ll never be safe as long as the Dark Lord still lives. And he’ll live, alright, he made sure of it.”
“How?”
“With the darkest of dark arts imaginable,” Regulus says. Recalling a room decorated in Slytherin green, Black family crest on the ceiling, and newspaper clippings on the walls. A paper trail of an up-and-coming terror. A monster in the making. Or maybe the monster was already made, and it finally managed to escape from under the bed.
Regulus hopes he escapes the cave one day too. His hands shake, and he drops the uneaten biscuit. There was a locket. There was a potion. There was pain, corpses, and lungs full of water. He coughs, and coughs, and tries to push out the cold wetness that’s contaminating him from the inside. It’s buried in his ribcage. It’s stuck in the oxygen he breathes.
A woman in white white robes tips his head back and pours more poison down his throat. Perhaps, this is it. Perhaps, it’s the last gulp of potion he’ll ever need to take. Perhaps, it will finally kill him.
***
Regulus wakes up expecting to see a cavernous, dark, dripping ceiling. There are no rocky chandeliers hanging over his head. There’s no cold air or rushing water. The ceiling is smooth stone, the walls are layered concrete bricks, and there is a brown wooden door. There is no cave, and he is not drowning.
When he leaves the room, he knows where he is. The dungeons. Hogwarts dungeons. Why is he at Hogwarts? Had he been brought here? By who? He’s nowhere near the Slytherin dorms.
He marches up the staircases. The light of morning glows orange through the windows. Students of all ages enter the Great Hall. He stays out of their line of sight. It would do no good if a Death Eater, even one that defected, was caught anywhere near children. He turns a corner, deciding to leave through a less obvious exit, when he bumps into the very man Regulus wanted to avoid.
“Mr. Black, Professor McGonagall was just on her way to deliver your breakfast,” the old headmaster says, in a tone Regulus knows he reserves for lost first years.
Regulus places his hands behind his back, straightens up his posture, and keeps his face carefully blank. Something is missing. He needs more information. “And why, Professor Dumbledore, would Professor McGonagall be delivering me breakfast?”
Dumbledore’s eyebrows lift slightly. “Do you remember why you are here, young man?”
“I woke up in the dungeons. The last thing I remember is doing something important.” His hand reaches for his neck, and his shoulders tense when it fails to grab at the infected pendant. Did he lose it? Did it fall somewhere in the cave?
“Your locket is in a safe hidden place,” Dumbledore says, and Regulus puts up his Occlumency shields. If there is one thing he is grateful for having Orion Black for a father was his ability to instill paranoia in his household. The walls are always watching, Regulus, never show them your secrets . If he survived the Dark Lord’s Legilimency, he could survive Dumbledore’s.
“Why am I here?”
Dumbledore turns around and starts walking in the direction of his office. “Follow me, Mr. Black, and all will be clear.”
Regulus could escape if he wanted to. He’s a Hogwarts graduate. The headmaster has no authority over him, and yet, he needs more information. He follows.
Dumbledore’s office looks much the same way since the last time Regulus saw it back in his fourth year, when the Slytherin dungeons flooded one unassuming morning. The old man sits behind his desk, but Regulus stays standing. He keeps close to the exit.
“You came here with a most unusual urgent matter,” Dumbledore says, in a much more serious tone. “Your house-elf traded your safety and well-being for the locket. We both know what it truly is.”
Regulus frowns. Trying to recall these events. There was water and corpses, and a little wrinkled house-elf apparating them away. There was a hospital wing, calming draughts, and ugly wounds to patch up. There was a locket and a trade, and the knowledge to win a war. “What is today’s date?”
“October 21st.”
Regulus left to retrieve the locket in December. “That can't be right,” he narrows his eyes. “Otherwise, I’d have been here for ten months.”
Dumbledore nods. “You were declared missing by February. You have been recovering here. I promised to provide you refuge in exchange for information.”
Regulus decides to process these events for later. He knows what kind of information Dumbledore is asking for. “How much do you know about horcruxes?”
“Enough.” Dumbledore pushes a bowl of sweets in his direction. “Lemon drop, Mr. Black?”
“No, thank you,” Regulus declines, still not willing to sit down for a polite chat. They are in the middle of a war. Every word needs to count. “We need to figure out how to destroy the horcruxes.”
That makes Dumbledore pause. “There is one horcrux in our possession. Are you implying there are more?”
“Of course there are more.” Regulus remembers all the late nights he went without sleep researching in all the impossible places for all the impossible deeds. It was very much in the Dark Lord’s style. “For how highly the Dark Lord holds himself, he would only boast to the impossible. Multiple failsafes. Extra security. An immortal monster with a human mask.”
“Have you any idea how many he’s made?”
“I have confirmation of at least three more.”
Dumbledore’s pet phoenix bursts into flames and Regulus’s hand flies up to point his wand in defense. Orion may have taught him how to stay hidden, but learning self-preservation was all Walburga. Except, there is no wand clenched in his hand. His skin is buzzing with magic, but there is no wand to help flow it out. Patting his pockets confirms empty spaces. “Where is my wand?”
“Mr. Black, we need to know where–”
“Where is my wand ?”
The headmaster’s time as professor serves him well when dealing with disruptive children. He uses the same tone of practice patience when he answers, “Your wand had been lost during your altercation retrieving the horcrux. Though, your house-elf managed to save it for you afterwards. In your current condition, it had not crossed your mind to utilize it before, so you have never noticed its absence. But not to worry, Madam Pomfrey is keeping it safe for you.”
It was lost during an altercation. It was lost when the Inferi pulled him under. His wand is drowning. Regulus is drowning with it. Water everywhere. In his lungs, in his heart, flooding his brain.
“–ack, Mr. Black,” Dumbledore’s voice calls.
Regulus blinks. He’s in the Headmaster’s office. Dumbledore sits behind his desk, so Regulus takes the seat in front of him.
“Mr. Black if we can get back to business,” Dumbledore continues, “may you tell me where they are?”
“Who?” Regulus asks. Why was he called here? Regulus tries to remember. A cracked glass. Soggy beds. Angry mermaids. There was a dungeon and water all around. Of course, the Slytherin dorms flooded. “Apologies Headmaster, I assumed the flooding was accidental, due to weak glass. If someone did this on purpose, I wouldn’t know who’d done it or where they are.” He did. If this was a prank, then it had Sirius’s name written all over it.
“The flooding?”
“The Slytherin dungeons flooded this morning. If that is all, I’d like to get back to breakfast. I wouldn’t like to be late to class.”
Dumbledore lets out a small sigh, as if his age is finally catching up to him. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Black. Please visit Madam Pomfrey’s office on your way.”
***
On March 3rd of 1981, a rare day of remembrance, Madam Pomfrey declared him physically healthy, and the bandages came off. Except the scars – those he will carry forever.
Time continues on this way. Sometimes he wakes up with bits of clarity. Sometimes he wakes up and lives the wrong day of the wrong year.
Letters and news pour in with more frequency. War and terror. Families with young children going into hiding. Deaths and funerals. Names he vaguely recognizes (Marlene McKinnon, Edgar Bones). Names he deeply does (Dorcas Meadowes, Evan Rosier). Where did all the good in the world go? Regulus won’t find it at the bottom of a lake.
One day (Hallow’s Eve will soon become a night so deeply seared into his brain, he could never lose it) comes with an uproar. He sits with Pomfrey out by the Whomping Willow, a morning stroll before breakfast. Fireworks explode over at Hogsmeade. Witches and wizards fly overhead on brooms, cheering and laughing. He’s sent back to his dungeon room.
Days, weeks, years later, McGonagall comes in one morning with breakfast, weary eyes filled with sleepless nights. “A tragedy has occurred, Mr. Black.” A sadness runs through her so vividly that Regulus can see the cracks leak out of her mouth. “Your brother betrayed the Potters to You-Know-Who. In his escape, Sirius blew up eleven muggles and killed his friend Peter Pettigrew.” McGonagall drops a newspaper in front of Regulus. “He was sentenced to life in Azkaban.”
The front page shows a young handsome man holding up a prison placard. Every proportion of his features marks him as a Black. Regulus doesn’t know who he is, though a rapping sensation in his mind tells him he should. The man’s face twists in grief as it rages with unheard screams. Sirius used to scream like that. Screamed at Walburga and Orion for their coldness. For the injustice. Allowed the echoes to last forever in the walls of Grimmauld. Regulus can still hear them.
Sirius, the Potters, muggles, Pettigrew. All that makes sense. His brother, the blood traitor, ran away to a new family, the Potters, supported by his marauding group of delinquents, Pettigrew and Lupin. “Lupin?”
McGonagall sniffs. “Mr. Lupin is not taking the news very well.”
What news? “Are they bad news?”
“Of the worst kind.”
Tell me something good , Regulus used to ask Sirius after a particularly bad nightmare. “Tell me something good,” Regulus requests of the professor on this particularly sad day.
McGonagall pulls out her wand and summons another newspaper. She points at the bolded headlines: Boy Who Lived Defeats You-Know-Who, Wizarding War Over!
“James and Lily had a son named Harry. You-Know-Who fired killing curses at the Potters. Harry was, sadly, the only survivor, but You-Know-Who is gone now. The war is over.”
Regulus shakes his head. Immortal monsters don’t die that easily. Whatever this Potter child did only bought them time and relief, but no conclusion. The war is not over. The war lives on inside them, in all the ways it ruins people. “He’ll be back. He made sure of it.”
***
Dumbledore takes Regulus to a crowd of people in important looking robes who raise their noses up at him. As if their words mean anything to him. A blonde woman in pointy glasses writes all of it down. As if their words mean everything to her.
Dumbledore uses his grandiose-speech voice when he addresses the witches and wizards gazing critically at him. Madam Pomfrey is there, and the important-looking man holding an important-looking hammer asks her questions. At one point she holds up his arm, and reveals the mangled skin that scarred, faint traces of ink scattered into unidentifiable pieces.
She hands over a wand that is not her wand but looks rather familiar to Regulus. One of the wizards casts an enchantment on it, and the wand coughs up an echo of light spells, apparition spells, healing spells, and silencing charms.
“Mr. Black,” the important-looking man addresses him, the first time they don’t talk around Regulus. “If you can provide the names of anyone involved in the Death Eaters, you will be allowed freedom from all war charges.”
Death Eaters, Death Eaters, Death Eaters. There were many of them. Building an empire out of all the people you know. Feeding off of all the people you don’t know. Until you do; scarred half-breeds, green-eyed mudbloods, bespectacled blood traitors. A brother who loved all that and more. Regulus wishes there was enough love to fix a broken world. Enough to fix a broken family. To fix a broken little boy.
A little boy forced to play grownup. Among other mad, mad grownups. The Lestranges came to mind. They were important. Very high-up. In the Dark Lord’s inner circle. He can’t remember who pulled him along. Promised power and prestige, like she once promised to sneak him cookies before dinner. Someone who loved him, or had loved him, or never really knew how to love in ways that weren’t destruction. Eating death like it's her final meal. Black hair, black eyes, black blood. A woman he’s supposed to know. Until he doesn’t. “Lestrange.”
“Which one?”
“All of them.”
“That’s at least three names. Very well, anyone else?”
There’s something familiar in the man’s face. In the severity of his brow, and the downward curve of his lip. An upsetting face he’s seen before, in a green room, somewhere in a dungeon, somewhere underwater. Sinking underwater. There’s water in his lungs and poison in his veins. He coughs and coughs and starts clawing at his throat.
A dark cave filled with Inferi made of people names. Evan Rosier’s corpse holds his left wrist, yellow fingernails digging into the faint trails of ink. Edgar Bones pulls on his right arm, dead eyes pleading for mercy. Marlene McKinnon grips painfully at his shoulders, unwilling to go down without a fight. Hands press on his cheeks trying to keep his head steady, and Dorcas Meadowes’s cold purple lips form around a silent laugh. Regulus can still hear it, even after their years of separation. Fill your life with all the people you know. Until you don’t.