Chapter Text
Chapter Two: Regulus’s POV.
Regulus wakes up in the dark: shivering and twitching, warm tears on his cheeks. Though it was freezing, he felt stiflingly hot - soaked in sweat, hair plastered to his forehead. He always woke up sweating after a nightmare. He remembered only the vague shapes of it: Sirius, the Dark Mark, long, empty hallways, Voldemort, his Mother.
He sat bolt upright, stiff in his bed. He wasn't friends with any of the boys in his dorm. All his friends were two years above him - sixth years - so they weren't in the same room. He doubted they would've comforted him even if he was in their dorm. They'd probably laugh him out into the common room.
Pandora would comfort him, though. She always did. She was also plagued with nightmares - or visions - that came to her in sleep; something about stars most of the time.
He slips out of bed, only now realising that everyone else was awake, and sat on Balfour Greengrass’s bed. They were playing cards again, with battered, torn old cards, and no one actually seemed to be winning.
“Oi! Finally awake, Black? Wanna play a round?” Balfour’s grateingly loud voice sent a twitch up Regulus’s neck. He protested every time someone called him “Black”, though he was too shaken right now to say anything at the misuse of his last name, no matter how much he hated hearing it. It was a reminder of his family, of his dishonour, and the expectancy on him to become a Death Eater - to follow the Dark Lord. Balfour had an absolutely dreadful buzzcut, harsh and close to his scalp. His eyes were oddly close-set, and his nose far too big for his face.
Regulus just shook his head and scowled, feeling a dry lump in his throat (as if he'd swallowed an acorn) and not trusting himself to speak without his voice wavering or more tears falling.
“Suit yourself then. And you look shit, by the way.” Icarus Nott, a gangly, brunette boy who was lying sideways over an armchair scoffed at him.
Regulus wrenched open the door and left, trailed by hollered insults and jibes by the three boys (the third being Enoch Wilkes, a greasy, snobbish boy who was close friends with Severus and who Regulus thought was the spitting image of a small mouse or perhaps a rat).
Regulus stumbles through the castle, which was lit purely by the half moon, pale beams slipping through windows, casting a dappled glow across the halls - reflecting off the suits of armour and muted on the worn cobbles of the floor. He ran the pads of his fingers over the cracks in the bricks and down his favourite tapestries. He pulls up the corner of a tapestry embroidered with a sleeping dragon in a snowy mountain and slips into the small nook behind it. Sitting with his knees pulled up to his chest, Regulus stares up at the ceiling of the little hole and wills himself to stop crying. He taps his fingers on the floor, running the heel of his palm over the cold stone. He eventually crawled out of the hold, dusted himself off, and started wandering the halls. The corridors were totally desolate, empty except for the few rulebreakers that snuck out after curfew to steal from the kitchens or visit a partner. There were small clusters snarfing chocolates in shady corners, couples making out, and the odd prefect on duty that Regulus snuck behind pillars or into empty classrooms to avoid. Regulus paid no one any mind, focusing on hiding and getting into the Ravenclaw dorms without getting apprehended.
Regulus’s tears came back full force when he reached Pandora’s dorm. His heart leapt to his throat the second she had opened the door. He coughed quietly, clearing his throat so he could speak past it. Regulus knew that look in her eyes; the painful sympathy he hated. Oh, how pathetic he must look, a little kid showing up at her door with a nightmare. She must always see him as a kid, since he was so much younger than she was. She'd never take him seriously.
"Come in, Reggie."She coos, voice still soft and low with sleep. She had led him to the bed, and Regulus had knocked something - he couldn't tell what - over in attempting to find his way through the dark. She lights a small lamp with a flick of her wand, gesturing for him to sit down. She sits beside him, close enough for comfort but not so close that she was touching him. He leans over and presses his chin into her shoulder. She doesn't pull away, just tipping her head to rest against his.
"Don't worry.. I'm here. I'm here. It wasn't real."
Regulus grips her arms, trembles only intensifying. Pandora rubs his thumb over her knuckles.
"You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."
This happened a lot. Regulus knocking at Pandora’s door at the early hours of dawn, tears streaking down his face as she let him in. He always looked so terrified, ruined by nightmares. She had staked countless nights awake, comforting him in the warmth of her bed and the dark of her dorm, far more spent waiting alone in the pitch black, sat hunched over on his bed, eyes trained on the door, just in case it happened again, and she was asleep when Regulus needed her most.
Pandora also had horrid nightmares. Though she had always classified them as “Visions”, she never went to regulus, though. She had always sought out Evan, her brother. He’d calmed her down and duelled anyone who so much as spoke to her when she was distressed like that. Regulus found no comfort in this fact; it only upset him more that Pandora never went to him, and made him feel that much more like a burden.
“What was it about Reggie?” Pandora was the only person who ever called him “Reggie”, and he was surprised to find that he didn't mind so much. Everyone else called him either “Reg”, “Regulus” or just “Black”.
“I.. was..” He trails off, trying to think of how to say without dissolving into tears. “I was a... a Death Eater.”
In his dream, Regulus Arcturus Black had been a Death Eater.
He had found himself looking up to Voldemort, who was said to be carrying out Salazar Slytherin's noble legacy. The Dark Lord, who was going to bring the wizards out of hiding to rule the Muggles and the Muggle-borns.
In reality, Regulus was already being pushed to fulfil this dream, and had no doubt that it would have been taken as a “sign” by his parents.
His parents approved og his becoming a Death Eater. They actually encouraged it. Not that that mattered at all to him; if anything, it deterred him more. They told him that the Dark Lord was doing a grand thing and that Regulus would do good to be one of his followers. They want him to get the Dark Mark. Regulus even sometimes thinks he might want it. It would be a great honour.
But all he thinks of when he considers it is Sirius’s disappointed expression when Regulus told him he was considering following their parents' legacy. All Regulus can think of is how Sirius stood up for him when they were younger, putting himself between Regulus and their mother as she shot curses at Sirius for things Regulus had done.
Regulus was six. Sirius was eight.
He walked into the drawing room. Sirius was scolding Kreacher, making him do some menial task. There’s a vase of peonies on the sideboard. Fat, colourful petals and dewy, thornless stems. He reached out to touch them. The vase slipped and shattered on the ground. Besides screams, that was the loudest sound Regulus’s six-year-old self had ever heard. He jolted back, scared, eyes welling with tears. He can only guess what's coming now. Their mother administered the most awful punishments. He was to be locked away, food withheld, tortured.
Sirius had taken the blame.
Regulus sat shaking in the laundry room with Kreacher as Sirius’s pleading and odd, high-pitched keening sounded from upstairs.
“M.. mum-”
Another curse. Another scream.
Regulus clasps his hands over his ears and scrunches his eyes as tight as they will go.
Kreacher extends a watered hand toward him. His mottled, grey fingers caress Regulus’s hair.
“You broke the vase, Sir?”
He’s silent and stiff for a moment before nodding, shaking as she reaches out and grabs Kreacher’s arm, bringing his withered hand to his face.
“Master Sirius cares for you deeply, then. To take such a blame is no little feat.”
Regulus presses his forehead against Kreacher’s palm. His nose ran, and he felt hot shame sear up his cheeks and down his spine. He cried and cried and cried until he woke up back in his and Sirius’s little room. It was quiet, and he was alone. Regulus’s head spun, his chest too tight, and his hands clammy and unsteady.
Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, the Black family manor, has hundreds of rooms - little alcoves hidden behind tapestries, empty, boarded-up rooms you could only clamber into via a window, or grand rooms with thick dark wood shelves stacked with old, heavy books in tiny script and little metal trinkets, and buttons, and old pressed flowers. Regulus kept a drawer in his room full of little things he found while roaming. Sirius never took too much care when showed any of Regulus’s favourite little things he’d found. Some of Regulus’s most prized ones were:
- A silver locket with a turquoise embedded into the centre, with tiny diamonds in whorls around it, engraved pattern of petals. It’s sealed shut, and the only one Sirius showed any interest in; when he tried and failed to alohamora it open.
- A huge book with a thick leather cover that’s full of little runes that Regulus has no idea how to decipher, but his wand would spark occasionally if he managed to read the rare few he could figure out.
- Three pairs of matching little radish earrings. Small, stuffed radish charms with tiny glass beads sewn into them. He’d later given two of them to a pretty blonde girl by the name of Pandora Rosier when she had been the only person to talk to him on his first day at Hogwarts. She was wearing these strange glasses; frames the shape of hands, one lens blue and the other pink. She’d told me Regulus that he was surrounded by nargles and had sat right next to him in charms class. Regulus doesn’t know what she did with the other pair.
In his little room, he peered up over the ladder of their bunk beds (Sirius always insisted on having the top bunk) to find Sirius’s bed empty, sheets untouched. He hadn't been sent to bed. He’d been locked away.
Sirius wasn't at dinner either, nor was he in bed that night. The next time Regulus saw him was at noon the next day. He looked hungry. His eyes were all red, and he was trembling and quiet, subdued like he had almost never seen Sirius. He wouldn’t be seen dead like this at school. He laughed at bullies and pulled pranks and snuck around. But at home, he was quieter, with a scared kind of anger that had nowhere to go.
Mother stood infront of him, a steaming plate of food in her hands. Sirius looked like he could faint from just the smell alone. She placed the plate on the side table next to her, beckoning Sirius over. He eyed her warily as if she were some sort of hallucination, or perhaps another cruel trick.
“Learnt your lesson, hm?”
Her eyes were a dull, pale brown that hurt to look into. Sirius nodded and extended a quivering hand. She brought him into her arms, pacing a kiss on his head.
“Eat up then, Sirius.”
He’d wolfed down the food and burnt his tongue, to which Mother tsk’ed and refrained from help, telling him that mistakes were the way people learnt.
***
After dinner, Regulus, Sirius, and Kreacher were discarded into the library. Regulus took to squirrelling through the drawers and shelves, looking for anything interesting to stave off the cold, dry boredom of an empty afternoon. The library is where they were most often sent off to when no one wanted them around, so He’d explored it more than most of the other rooms. There wasn’t much for him to find in here anymore: A shelf of odd books he’d leafed through, a drawer of ornate wand holders - coiled snakes and cauldrons and clawed hands in which you laid your wand into to make it look more impressive. There was a huge stained glass window with faded glass that cast dappled light into the room.