Fic: Broken Wizards (Regulus/Remus, R)
Title: Broken Wizards
Author:
youcantseeus
Pairing/Characters: Regulus/Remus, Remus/Sirius
Summary: Regulus can never be like his bright, beautiful brother -- but he can become a Death Eater.
Rating: R
Word count: 5,900
Warnings/Content Notes: Angst, infidelity, violence, humiliation, self-harm, mental illness, implied abuse, some fudging of the canon timeline.
Author's Notes: This fic was originally posted at
hp_concrit_fest. Participating in the fest was an incredible experience. After much consideration, I have made only very minor changes to this fic. While I agree with many points of feedback that I recieved and will use some of them when I write other works, I always considered this fic to be a finished product. Thanks so much to josephinestone for doing a great pre-fest beta read for me. Any remaining mistakes are my own.
My parents entertained Lord Voldemort for the first time on June 5, 1979. He was supposed to arrive at our home at 7 p.m., but he didn’t show up until 7:08. When you’re a Dark Lord you can be late like that. When you’re a Dark Lord you can do whatever the fuck you want.
In the minutes before Lord Voldemort arrived, I sat in my room arranging my collection of glass wizards on my nightstand. It was a Saturday and it was after 7 p.m.; which meant that the red wizards should go in front of the orange wizards, and the clear wizards should stay the fuck away from the rest. The green wizards could touch the blue wizards on their left side, but all the others had to be spaced exactly half an inch apart. The purple wizards guarded the edge. I didn’t have many pink wizards, but they went in the center. If I messed it up then it was bad, bad luck, and everything would feel wrong until I fixed them.
Yeah, I was a crazy little shit. That’s what my father said to me one time when I was about eight years old. He just looked at me, arranging my glass wizards into position before bedtime, and he said: “You’re a crazy little shit.” Everyone thought that old purebloods like my father didn’t talk that way – not because of the cruelty, but because of the vulgarity. But purebloods could talk in whatever way they liked.
No one was more pure than the Blacks. No one was more obsessed with blood purity than the Blacks. You’d think we’d have been the biggest supporters ever of the Dark Lord, but up until that night we’d been ambiguous. Voldemort had started a war and my father thought wars were shit. My mother heard a rumor that Voldemort himself was a half-blood. Voldemort had become one of my many obsessions. I listened for any scrap of news about him or his Death Eaters. I even collected newspaper articles about him. I told my family that I did this because I admired him, but this wasn’t quite true. I just had a feeling that Voldemort was going to be important to my life.
When I heard someone at the front door, I put down my glass wizards and stood to regard myself in the mirror. I was wearing my very best dress robes, which were necessarily very stiff and old-fashioned. I’d combed down and ruthlessly straightened my hair. Sirius always wore his hair in slightly messy curls, and it gave me a sense of satisfaction to wear mine differently though we had almost identical dark curls.
The Dark Lord was tall and thin and I suppose handsome, though he was middle-aged. He was all eyes – I had never met someone with such intense eyes. When he talked about his Death Eaters, he kept looking in my direction. My mother squeezed my hand. With increasing panic, I saw that I would soon be expected to take up the mantle of Death Eater.
I knew that I wouldn’t be much good at it. I hated hurting things, and I imagined that I would hate hurting people, even Muggles. Besides, I wasn’t the right type of crazy. Most of the Blacks were crazy, but there were two types. The first type went about the world with wands drawn, ready for a fight, able to ascend to unbelievable heights of joy or descend to bottomless depths of despair at a moment’s notice. The insanity lighted their eyes and quickened their feet.
The second type quietly nurtured their various obsessions and paranoias within the confines of home. This type usually ended up a shivering and muttering to themselves in some corner, clutching their wands close, rocking back and forth. My mother was this type. And so was I.
I didn’t speak much which pleased my parents. Whenever we had guests over I was always under the strictest of instructions to avoid speaking. My brother Sirius could charm fairies with his voice, but I was the opposite. I spoke with a stutter so bad that I might as well have been mute through most of my childhood. By the time the Dark Lord decided to recruit me in my eighteenth year, my stutter was slightly less noticeable. However, my father still instructed me to avoid speaking so as not to embarrass our family.
We didn’t give a definite answer on the whole Death Eater issue which satisfied me well enough. After dinner, I went upstairs and showered for a long time. I felt dirty where the Dark Lord had touched my hand, but I also wanted to get extra clean because I might fuck someone that night (and not even a pure someone) and fucking always required lots of showering both before and after.
It was around midnight by the time I stood outside my brother’s flat. It was cold and rainy and despite the warming charms I cast around myself, I soon got chilly. But still, I watched the window, memorizing the pattern on the incongruously old-fashioned floral print curtain. I knew that Sirius wasn’t home. That’s why I was hovering outside his flat like a vulture waiting for my meat.
After about half an hour, a pale hand appeared at the window, motioning me inside. I knocked on Sirius’s door just once and Lupin answered. He looked pale with dark circles under his eyes, but he was wearing a warm, fluffy robe that looked like something Sirius would wear. I wondered if it belonged to Sirius.
“How are you?” Lupin asked as he led me inside.
“Cold. And h-hungry.” I always kept my responses short.
“I’ll make some tea.” Lupin puttered about with the teapot while I raided Sirius’s cupboards for food. I always thought of everything in the flat as belonging to Sirius, even though Lupin lived there as well. I made myself a cold chicken sandwich and ate it off one of Sirius’s plates.
After I finished my sandwich, I drank a cup of Sirius’s tea. Then I sat in Lupin’s lap in Sirius’s armchair, and we snogged for a few minutes. The snogging was always one of my favorite parts. I thought Lupin was rather good at it, though I wasn’t much of a judge because I’d never really snogged anyone else. I’d been engaged to Aria Nott since I was about four years old, but she never let me get close enough for a kiss. Mother said it’s because she’s a proper pureblood lady, but I’d seen the way she looked at me. To her, I was just a crazy little shit who stuttered a lot.
Just like always, Lupin pulled away. “Regulus, I need – Regulus, please.”
I sighed, feeling suddenly weary. “You n-need the other thing?”
“Yes.”
I turned so that I was no longer sitting in his lap but straddling him. Then I slapped him across the face. His cheek turned remarkably red. “Mudblood.”
I felt the power of the word coil tightly in my stomach. There’s no word in our language that’s quite as powerful as “Mudblood.” When I said it, I didn’t sound like meek, stuttering little Regulus Black at all. I sounded controlled and superior like my father, but there was also a hint of Sirius’s brash mockery in my voice.
“Yes,” Lupin hissed through his teeth. “More.”
I slapped the other cheek. “You filthy, dirty-blooded piece of scum. You should feel grateful that I bother with you.” My hands moved to the buttons on his Muggle trousers. Lupin wasn’t actually a Mudblood. I knew this because my mother was rather obsessed with the subject of Lupin’s parentage. Lupin was rumored (quite correctly) to be my brother’s lover and that left him open to scrutiny from my family. I’d heard at least a hundred times that Lupin was a half-blood – his mother an honest-to-goodness Muggle and his father some sort of disgraced Ministry worker who had been fired from the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.
Lupin writhed and twisted under my hands as I continued to whisper insults. When he was on the brink, I leaned in very close, put my mouth against his ear, and said: “Half-breed. You fucking half-breed.”
“Oh my God.” He threw his head back and came all over my hand.
Lupin was kind of a sick bastard.
By that time, I’d already figured out that Lupin was a werewolf. I’d started wondering why he wanted me to call him a half-breed; why he got off so much on it. From there, it wasn’t hard to observe the days when Lupin was sick or to count down to the full moon. It made perfect sense –Sirius would take up with a werewolf, because that would piss off our parents the most. Sirius had been disinherited a few years previously, but that hadn’t stopped him from making all his decisions based on what our parents least desired.
After the sex, Lupin held me close, curling tendrils of my hair around his fingers. He liked my hair. After a few minutes, there was a clattering sound outside, and Lupin stiffened until the door to the neighboring flat opened and then slammed shut.
“You were afraid that was him,” I whispered.
Lupin smiled, faintly. “So were you.”
“You d-don’t want him to find us together.”
Lupin shrugged. “Well, he is my boyfriend.”
I frowned. “But he d-doesn’t give you what I give you.”
Lupin stroked my back, soothingly. “No, baby. Only you.”
“Why do you call me b-b-baby?”
Lupin leaned back, his face now utterly relaxed. “I don’t know. I guess you seem young sometimes.”
I leaned against his chest and closed my eyes. Lupin smelled like earth and tea and the darkest of chocolates. It was less than a week until the next full moon.
Once, I asked Lupin if he’d ever done the things with Sirius that he did with me. If he’d ever asked Sirius to call him a “mudblood” or ever wanted Sirius to hurt him. Lupin had smiled, sadly.
“Just once,” he said.
“He didn’t like it?” I had a ghoulish curiosity about my brother and Lupin having sex.
“He seemed to. But the next day, he told me he’d never do it again. He said that if I wanted a pureblood to treat me like shit, I’d have to look elsewhere.”
“Is that what I am? A pureblood who will treat you like shit?”
“No,” Lupin lied.
*
Until I was ten years old, I barely spoke at all. My stutter was bad in those days and it always upset my parents to hear me speak. My mother used to scream at me and my father would go very red in the face while trying to correct me. The house-elves were patient with me and seemed to understand me better than most wizards, but the truth was that I hardly felt the need to speak. I had Sirius.
Sirius and I went everywhere together in those days. He always knew what I wanted to say even if I could only manage to stammer out a few syllables. He was as charming and eloquent as I was awkward and bumbling. My parents adored him as much as it was possible for them to adore anyone. And they didn’t seem to care as much about my stutter when they remembered that they had one son who was brilliant and beautiful. I was loyal, sweet, and compliant enough. These were attractive qualities in a second son. Sirius and I were so connected that we anticipated one another’s every thought, and I sometimes wondered if our link was magical.
All this changed when Sirius went to Hogwarts. During his long months away at school, I had to speak for myself and it was a disaster. My parents understood, for the first time I think, the full extent of my affliction. They realized that I could barely speak without Sirius around to complete my sentences. They panicked – I was to start Hogwarts the very next year, and I was clearly nowhere near ready. They sacked our governess and hired a speech coach and two tutors who drilled me ruthlessly for twelve hours a day.
But worst of all, when Sirius came home he was different. I knew he’d been sorted into Gryffindor, but my intense loyalty to him meant that I couldn’t condemn him for it. My parents fumed over Sirius’s Sorting, but I didn’t let them sway me. If Sirius had done it, then it must be right. But when Sirius came home, he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. He just locked himself in his room for days at a time, writing letters to his friends and only coming out when Mother and Father yelled loudly enough to disturb him.
When Sirius finally left home several years later, we kept his room exactly as he’d left it. It was as if he were a family member who had died rather than one who merely moved away. It sometimes felt as if he had died. The real Sirius was hidden from us under layers of distrust and dislike – only the likes of James Potter and Remus Lupin got to see that side of Sirius.
After I left Lupin in the wee hours of the morning, I Apparated back to my bedroom. My father was sitting in a stuffed chair by my bedside looking at my glass wizards. The glass wizards were mostly sleeping, and I saw that the orange wizards had been turned away from the gray wizards which meant that Kreacher (the only person I allowed to touch them) had turned them in the appropriate direction for the date and time while I was gone. I almost freaked the fuck out when I saw my father sitting beside them, but I quickly calmed myself by telling myself over and over that he hadn’t touched them, hadn’t moved them at all.
“Regulus,” he said in his low, melodic voice. My father was a tall man with graying hair and an elaborate mustache. His demeanor always reflected the utmost gravity. Like the rest of my family, he was more than a little crazy, but he was excellent at hiding it in public.
“Father,” I answered, bowing my head in respect. He didn’t ask where I’d been. My parents were always oddly inattentive about things like that. From the time I was about six years old, Sirius and I would sneak out of his bedroom window in the middle of the night – our parents never seemed the least bit concerned when we weren’t in our beds. As long as we were at lessons the next day, acting the part of good little Black brothers, then everything was okay.
“Son. I wished to speak with you about an important matter. A very grave and important matter.”
I listened impassively. I hadn’t supposed he’d shown up in my room at three o’clock in the morning to discuss something trivial.
“Volde – the Dark Lord’s power is growing. Most of our friends believe that the Death Eaters will have taken over the government by the end of this year. The Dark Lord wishes to know why an old, pureblood family like the Blacks, a family which shares the Dark Lord’s values, has done so little to help the Death Eaters’ cause.”
My father’s words came to me as if from a far distance. I already knew where this was going, of course, but I pretended that I didn’t. “So give him m-money. You have enough.”
For perhaps the first time in my life, my father couldn’t meet my eyes. “He doesn’t want money.”
“No. I don’t imagine that he d-does.” And he wouldn’t want my father either. Everyone knew that the Dark Lord took the young men.
“If the Blacks were to be branded blood traitors by the Death Eaters then circumstances could become dire. You read the papers. You remember what happened to the O’Neals, the Prewitts, the Hagels.”
“The idea of the B-blacks as b-b-blood traitors is —”
“Ridiculous, I know,” my father interrupted me. “But these are not rational times that we live in. Listen, the families who actually are blood traitors at least have the option of seeking sanctuary from the other side. The Blacks have no such choice. Dumbledore wouldn’t help us. Most of our friends have already declared themselves for the Dark Lord.”
I looked him in the eye. “I know. But I c-can’t.”
My father shook his head. He always wore a signet ring on his right hand with the crest of the family Black engraved on it. He twisted it now. “You’ve always understood the importance of belonging to a great family, Regulus. That sometimes the interests of the family must come before the interests of the individual. And unfortunately, the greatest of burdens sometimes fall upon the weakest member of the family.”
I snorted. It wasn’t surprising to hear that my father had so little faith in my abilities.
“Your brother should be here, that’s true. He would be better suited to this task than you are. But he’s made the choice to shirk his duties as a Black and deny his heritage. And so this burden must fall on you.”
I bowed my head again. My father turned, idly, and looked at my collection of glass wizards. His face screwed in thought. He picked up a purple one. I had to stop myself from snatching it from his hand. “You still collect these?”
“Yes.”
My father frowned. “This is a hobby for children, Regulus. Your brother stopped collecting these things by the age of seven.”
Even after all Sirius had done, my father couldn’t stop himself from comparing me unfavorably to him.
“I know,” I said, watching the small wizard struggle in my father’s fist.
My father raised his hand and quick as lightning, he threw the wizard against floor where it broke into several pieces.
“Stop it!” I said. “Stop!”
My father ignored me. He stepped on the wizard’s head, grinding it into dust. The body continued to flail around on the floor.
“Time for you to grow up.” My father stood up, brushed off his robes, and left the room. He didn’t look back.
I knelt down beside my poor, broken glass wizard. My father had ground the head down so fine that there was no hope of repairing it with a spell. I held the struggling body against my chest for a moment before softly murmuring the spell that would put the little fellow out of his misery. Then I called Kreacher to clean up the mess.
I took a long shower that morning. When I was alone, under the hot stream of water, I banged my head against the shower stall several times until my lip was cut and my nose was bleeding. My parents didn’t even need to punish me properly anymore – I did it to myself.
*
When I was a first year at Hogwarts, I tried to follow my brother about the castle. I suppose it should have been obvious to me that he didn’t want me around – I was younger and I was already getting a reputation as a weird, stuttering kid who obsessively collected glass wizards, made his bed a dozen times a day, and freaked out when his roommates touched his possessions. Meanwhile, Sirius was one of the most popular boys in school. He was best friends with James Potter who was already a Quidditch star in his second year. Sirius and Potter played an enormous number of pranks but none of the professors disliked them. They got invited to parties thrown by much older students. They were constantly surrounded by admirers. They flouted every rule.
But even after Sirius’s distant attitude towards me over the summer, I couldn’t quite conceive of a universe where Sirius didn’t want to be near me. Sirius and I had always been a team, united in withstanding the crazy cruelty of our parents. He’d been my voice and my protector for as long as I could remember.
But one blustery November day, when I found Sirius and his friends sitting under a tree on the grounds of Hogwarts, Sirius had been less than pleased by my presence. I’d asked what Sirius and his friends were doing and stuttered a bit as I did so. James Potter, whose hair looked like a wild, bristly porcupine had grinned at my stutter and Sirius had seen.
“W-w-w-w-w-what was that, R-r-r-r-regulus?” Sirius asked. Potter had laughed loudly while Lupin and Pettigrew looked at one another and smiled uneasily.
The world cracked apart for me. I knew that Sirius could have a cruel sense of humor, but he’d never turned it on me before. He’d never mocked my stutter, not even once. It had never even occurred to me that he could do such a thing. It was as if I’d woken up to find that the sky was green. I didn’t speak. I was afraid to speak, afraid of bringing more ridicule on myself. But more than that – I was afraid that I would somehow break Sirius further.
After a moment, Sirius had given me a shove. “Shoo, then,” he’d said to general laughter. I’d never had much of a relationship with my brother after that.
In the days following Voldemort’s visit to my family, I prepared myself to become a Death Eater. This included everything from going to parties at Malfoy Manor to reading the Dark Lord’s manifesto to getting a haircut. My father was adamant that certain things would be expected of me as a Death Eater. Other actions were designed to advance my status once I joined. I obeyed all of his requests because I realized that he was right. If I didn’t do this, then Voldemort would destroy me and my parents.
Three weeks to the day after Voldemort’s visit, I found Sirius sitting on my bed. He was wearing Muggle trousers and some sort of leather coat. I closed the door quickly before my parents or an elf could look in and see him. I barely even worried about him rumpling my bedclothes.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hello.” I tried to make my voice deep and hypnotizing like my father’s. I didn’t stutter over the word.
“Nice robes,” Sirius said, nodding towards my tall, oak wardrobe. I gulped. I was to be formally accepted into the Death Eaters in two days and my robes had already been sent over. They hung on the front of the wardrobe.
I didn’t speak. It was easier that way.
“Is that it, then? Are you a Death Eater?” Sirius asked.
“No. N-not yet.”
Sirius let out a long, slow breath. “Good. That’s good, Reggie.”
I wanted to tell Sirius that I had to join the Death Eaters, that they would hurt our family if I didn’t, but I thought it better to remain silent. In truth, over the last few weeks, I’d started to warm to the idea of being a Death Eater. Eloquent, sophisticated people like my cousin’s husband Lucius Malfoy paid attention to me now. My father looked at me with a silent pride that he’d never exhibited towards me before. Even my mother could find little fault with me, and for her that was close to miraculous.
Sirius stood up and took both my hands in his. “I heard that they were courting you. You don’t have to do it. I know that Mother and Father probably think that Voldemort is the best thing to happen since Muggle baiting was invented, but you won’t like being a Death Eater. I can promise you that. Don’t do it.”
I smiled, wryly. “Where would I go?”
“You could come and live with me and Remus."
I blinked. This wasn’t what I’d expected. “You want me now? You’ve n-never offered before. You just left m-m-me here. With them.”
Sirius stared at me. “I can see how it must have felt like I left you. But I couldn’t exactly bring you with me when I went to live with the Potters. And I guess I thought that you wanted to stay. But none of that matters now. Come and live with me. It’ll be like when were kids.”
A wave of nostalgia passed over me. The idea of being Sirius’s little brother again was an appealing one. “I-I-I – what would I d-do? There’d be no way for m-me to live without father’s money.”
I had a grand total of three N.E.W.T.s to show for my time at Hogwarts – and they were in the thoroughly cerebral and mostly useless subjects of History of Magic, Astronomy, and Magic Runes. I was decent at wand work, but I hated the loud bangs, bright flashes, and dangerous effects that came with the spells professors generally wanted students to experiment with in upper level classes. Besides, my stutter had the tendency to ruin spells that couldn’t be easily accomplished by wordless magic. I preferred subjects that could be mastered with a lot of research and a well-written essay.
None of this mattered as long as I was Orion Black’s son. I’d never have to work a day in my life. But if my father disowned me as he’d disowned Sirius, I’d have to earn a living and I wasn’t well equipped to do so. Sirius, of course, would not understand. Despite his near constant misbehavior, he’d obtained seven N.E.W.T.s, most of them in highly desirable subjects.
As I’d expected, Sirius waved away my objection. “I can help you find a job. What about Quidditch? James said you were the best Seeker at Hogwarts our last year.”
“All the p-professional Quidditch teams are dis-disbanded because of the war.” Quidditch had been a godsend to me. I’d joined the Slytherin team as a Fifth Year. I loved flying – on a broom I was never awkward the way I often was on the ground. But I mostly liked it because it meant that my housemates stopped teasing me. No one mocked the most important player on the Slytherin house team, at least not when he was winning. Even my parents had shown excitement, though they usually didn’t care one whit for Quidditch. My mother went around telling people that I was a good Seeker, always sounding surprised that I could be good at anything.
“I know they’ve been disbanded,” Sirius said. “I meant after the war. It has to end eventually, you know.”
“You d-d-don’t r-really want me to live with y-y-you,” I said. I was starting to get upset which always made it difficult for me to speak. “You just d-don’t want me to become a D-d-d-death Eater. You’ve n-never wanted me b-be near you before. And you m-made fun of my st-st-st-st-st. My st-st-st-st —”
“Your stutter,” Sirius interrupted. “Look, I’m sorry, okay. Is that what you want to hear? I was an arse when I was thirteen or fourteen years old. I was a bad brother. That’s no reason for you to become a fucking Death Eater. The things that they do to Muggles, to Muggleborns, even to some purebloods – they’re unforgivable.”
“If I don’t join then they’ll hurt Mother and Father.” I blinked, surprised that I’d got through a whole sentence without stuttering when it had been so bad a moment ago.
“Who cares?”
I felt my eyebrows shoot up. “Who cares?”
Sirius flushed. “I just mean – of course I don’t want anything bad to happen to our parents. Despite everything they’ve done to me. But they’ve made their own bed. You don’t have to sacrifice your life or your soul for them, Reggie. They wouldn’t do the same for you.”
I didn’t trust myself to speak. Sirius leaned forward to inspect my lip which still sported a visible cut from when I’d banged my head against the shower stall several weeks ago. He touched my lip gently. “Is this – did Father —”
“No,” I quickly interrupted.
Sirius shook his head. “I should fucking kill him with my own hands before the Death Eaters can get to him. He —”
“Shut up!” I said. “He d-didn’t d-d-do anything. You don’t know what goes on in this house anym-more.
Sirius smirked. “Loyal little Regulus. You should have been a Hufflepuff.”
I felt my face heat up. The blasted Sorting Hat nearly did put me in Hufflepuff, but I talked it into Slytherin. My parents would have killed me if I’d been sorted into Hufflepuff – in the eyes of the Blacks and most other old, pureblood families, Hufflepuff was a joke. My mother called it “the house of the Mudblood” because it tended to have a large proportion of Muggleborns. It was even worse than Gryffindor.
“You should go, Sirius.” I channeled my father a bit, and for once my voice sounded strong and confident.
He turned and looked at my Death Eater’s robes. I watched him shiver. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet. “Regulus, whatever I have to say, whatever I have to do to stop you from becoming a Death Eater, I’ll do it. Just tell me how I’m going wrong here.”
But it was already too late. I may not have taken my oath yet, but it was far too late for Sirius to convince me of anything. “You’re not doing anything wr-wrong. I’ve just made up my mind.”
Sirius sighed and looked down at his shoes. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was more powerful than him. “I’ll share Remus with you,” he whispered.
I was so surprised that I stepped back. “What – what are you talking about?”
He looked me in the eye. “You know damn well what I’m talking about. And I’ll share him with you. I don’t care. We can make it work. Just don’t go to them. Please.”
I bit down on my lip, feeling embarrassed and guilty about the business with Lupin. “He j-just. You won’t g-g-give him what he n-needs. That’s why he comes to me.”
I hadn’t thought that Sirius would understand exactly what I meant, but he looked at me sharply. “Ah. I see.”
“He’s the one who w-wants it like that, n-n-not me. He loves you. If y-you’d give him what he wants —”
“Let me tell you something,” Sirius interrupted. “Maybe someone who wasn’t raised in the way that you I were raised could call his boyfriend a ‘Mudblood’ and have it mean nothing. But that isn’t an option for me, and it isn’t for you either. It will always mean something to us.”
Lupin once pointed out to me that I never stuttered when I talked to him like that. I smirked, imitating Sirius’s mocking grin. “You just didn’t like it.”
“Aren’t you listening? I did like it. That’s the problem.”
“Whatever you say.”
Sirius sighed. “Just think about leaving, okay? For the sake of the bond that we used to share – just think about it. You can always come to me, Reggie.”
He hugged me. I just stood there stiffly.
*
At Hogwarts, I’d liked Lupin because he was the only one of Sirius’s group (including Sirius himself) who was nice to me. When I stuttered Lupin would smile – not in the mocking way that most people smiled, but encouragingly. It was as if he said: “It’s okay Regulus. Just calm down and you’ll be able to get it out.”
When I started meeting Lupin clandestinely, I knew that I was just a pale substitute for Sirius. But I didn’t care, because I’d always been a pale substitute for Sirius. That was my life. For some time I even wanted to be like Lupin. He was always so mild and easy-going. I never saw him get angry. He was completely different from anyone in my family.
One time, Lupin told me that he thought my stutter was sweet. Then he tilted my face up and gave me my first kiss. And even though I knew that I was a Sirius substitute, it was everything that I’d hoped a first kiss would be.
Lupin’s weird sexual kinks had bothered me at first, but I forgave him for them. I figured that everyone was a little fucked up in some way, and I was just seeing Lupin’s particular dysfunctions. After some time, I even came to enjoy pretending to be the strong, cruel pureblood. It was as if I’d become my father, my grandfather, my brother. I was finally a Black.
Sirius could never understand that. He might strongly disagree with our family’s values, but Sirius was a Black from the top of his head to the tips of his toes. He hated it, but that didn’t change it. I was the opposite. I’d spent my entire life trying to prove that I was good enough to be a part of my family.
I put on my Death Eater robes. The material was a soft whisper of velvet against my skin. The hood blocked my peripheral vision so that I felt as if I were looking down a long tunnel. I stared at my glass wizards who were arranged into perfect rows just as they should be.
“Kreacher!” I called. After a few moments, the old elf popped into existence beside me. Kreacher practically raised me when I was very small. My parents had been far too busy with Sirius (who was a demanding child) and with themselves to notice that I was effectively being brought up by a male house-elf.
The old elf looked at me with round eyes. I would need him to clean up the mess.
Earlier, I’d brought a poker from the downstairs fireplace to my room. I now clutched it in my hand. “Time to grow up you crazy little shit,” I whispered to myself.
With the poker, I swept about a dozen of the glass wizards off my nightstand where the majority of them shattered on the floor. The ones that were left on the nightstand, seeing my ill intent, ran in all directions. They scurried down the nightstand and across my floor. I wasn’t bothered. My door was locked and there was no escape for them.
Slowly and with great deliberation, I hunted down each tiny wizard and destroyed him. They opened their mouths in silent screams or raised useless glass wands against me, but I beat them with the poker and then with my hands and feet until they were nothing more than tiny shards of glass. I found a few terrified stragglers under my bed and behind my wardrobe. A yellow wizard even climbed into one of my house slippers.
When I was done, I looked down to see that my hands were bleeding. My room was covered in tiny multi-colored shards of glass. Here and there a tiny glass arm or leg still wiggled feebly. I forced myself not to care about the untidiness. Regulus the crazy little shit cared about such things. Regulus the Death Eater did not. There were tear tracks running down my face though I could not remember crying.
I ordered Kreacher to clean up the mess. Then I went to wash the blood off my hands.
I was ready.
If you liked this fic then you might also enjoy:
The Living (Remus/Sirius, Remus/Regulus)
Letters From Malfoy Manor (Lucius/Remus, Remus/OMC, Remus/Sirius)
Author:
youcantseeusPairing/Characters: Regulus/Remus, Remus/Sirius
Summary: Regulus can never be like his bright, beautiful brother -- but he can become a Death Eater.
Rating: R
Word count: 5,900
Warnings/Content Notes: Angst, infidelity, violence, humiliation, self-harm, mental illness, implied abuse, some fudging of the canon timeline.
Author's Notes: This fic was originally posted at
hp_concrit_fest. Participating in the fest was an incredible experience. After much consideration, I have made only very minor changes to this fic. While I agree with many points of feedback that I recieved and will use some of them when I write other works, I always considered this fic to be a finished product. Thanks so much to josephinestone for doing a great pre-fest beta read for me. Any remaining mistakes are my own.My parents entertained Lord Voldemort for the first time on June 5, 1979. He was supposed to arrive at our home at 7 p.m., but he didn’t show up until 7:08. When you’re a Dark Lord you can be late like that. When you’re a Dark Lord you can do whatever the fuck you want.
In the minutes before Lord Voldemort arrived, I sat in my room arranging my collection of glass wizards on my nightstand. It was a Saturday and it was after 7 p.m.; which meant that the red wizards should go in front of the orange wizards, and the clear wizards should stay the fuck away from the rest. The green wizards could touch the blue wizards on their left side, but all the others had to be spaced exactly half an inch apart. The purple wizards guarded the edge. I didn’t have many pink wizards, but they went in the center. If I messed it up then it was bad, bad luck, and everything would feel wrong until I fixed them.
Yeah, I was a crazy little shit. That’s what my father said to me one time when I was about eight years old. He just looked at me, arranging my glass wizards into position before bedtime, and he said: “You’re a crazy little shit.” Everyone thought that old purebloods like my father didn’t talk that way – not because of the cruelty, but because of the vulgarity. But purebloods could talk in whatever way they liked.
No one was more pure than the Blacks. No one was more obsessed with blood purity than the Blacks. You’d think we’d have been the biggest supporters ever of the Dark Lord, but up until that night we’d been ambiguous. Voldemort had started a war and my father thought wars were shit. My mother heard a rumor that Voldemort himself was a half-blood. Voldemort had become one of my many obsessions. I listened for any scrap of news about him or his Death Eaters. I even collected newspaper articles about him. I told my family that I did this because I admired him, but this wasn’t quite true. I just had a feeling that Voldemort was going to be important to my life.
When I heard someone at the front door, I put down my glass wizards and stood to regard myself in the mirror. I was wearing my very best dress robes, which were necessarily very stiff and old-fashioned. I’d combed down and ruthlessly straightened my hair. Sirius always wore his hair in slightly messy curls, and it gave me a sense of satisfaction to wear mine differently though we had almost identical dark curls.
The Dark Lord was tall and thin and I suppose handsome, though he was middle-aged. He was all eyes – I had never met someone with such intense eyes. When he talked about his Death Eaters, he kept looking in my direction. My mother squeezed my hand. With increasing panic, I saw that I would soon be expected to take up the mantle of Death Eater.
I knew that I wouldn’t be much good at it. I hated hurting things, and I imagined that I would hate hurting people, even Muggles. Besides, I wasn’t the right type of crazy. Most of the Blacks were crazy, but there were two types. The first type went about the world with wands drawn, ready for a fight, able to ascend to unbelievable heights of joy or descend to bottomless depths of despair at a moment’s notice. The insanity lighted their eyes and quickened their feet.
The second type quietly nurtured their various obsessions and paranoias within the confines of home. This type usually ended up a shivering and muttering to themselves in some corner, clutching their wands close, rocking back and forth. My mother was this type. And so was I.
I didn’t speak much which pleased my parents. Whenever we had guests over I was always under the strictest of instructions to avoid speaking. My brother Sirius could charm fairies with his voice, but I was the opposite. I spoke with a stutter so bad that I might as well have been mute through most of my childhood. By the time the Dark Lord decided to recruit me in my eighteenth year, my stutter was slightly less noticeable. However, my father still instructed me to avoid speaking so as not to embarrass our family.
We didn’t give a definite answer on the whole Death Eater issue which satisfied me well enough. After dinner, I went upstairs and showered for a long time. I felt dirty where the Dark Lord had touched my hand, but I also wanted to get extra clean because I might fuck someone that night (and not even a pure someone) and fucking always required lots of showering both before and after.
It was around midnight by the time I stood outside my brother’s flat. It was cold and rainy and despite the warming charms I cast around myself, I soon got chilly. But still, I watched the window, memorizing the pattern on the incongruously old-fashioned floral print curtain. I knew that Sirius wasn’t home. That’s why I was hovering outside his flat like a vulture waiting for my meat.
After about half an hour, a pale hand appeared at the window, motioning me inside. I knocked on Sirius’s door just once and Lupin answered. He looked pale with dark circles under his eyes, but he was wearing a warm, fluffy robe that looked like something Sirius would wear. I wondered if it belonged to Sirius.
“How are you?” Lupin asked as he led me inside.
“Cold. And h-hungry.” I always kept my responses short.
“I’ll make some tea.” Lupin puttered about with the teapot while I raided Sirius’s cupboards for food. I always thought of everything in the flat as belonging to Sirius, even though Lupin lived there as well. I made myself a cold chicken sandwich and ate it off one of Sirius’s plates.
After I finished my sandwich, I drank a cup of Sirius’s tea. Then I sat in Lupin’s lap in Sirius’s armchair, and we snogged for a few minutes. The snogging was always one of my favorite parts. I thought Lupin was rather good at it, though I wasn’t much of a judge because I’d never really snogged anyone else. I’d been engaged to Aria Nott since I was about four years old, but she never let me get close enough for a kiss. Mother said it’s because she’s a proper pureblood lady, but I’d seen the way she looked at me. To her, I was just a crazy little shit who stuttered a lot.
Just like always, Lupin pulled away. “Regulus, I need – Regulus, please.”
I sighed, feeling suddenly weary. “You n-need the other thing?”
“Yes.”
I turned so that I was no longer sitting in his lap but straddling him. Then I slapped him across the face. His cheek turned remarkably red. “Mudblood.”
I felt the power of the word coil tightly in my stomach. There’s no word in our language that’s quite as powerful as “Mudblood.” When I said it, I didn’t sound like meek, stuttering little Regulus Black at all. I sounded controlled and superior like my father, but there was also a hint of Sirius’s brash mockery in my voice.
“Yes,” Lupin hissed through his teeth. “More.”
I slapped the other cheek. “You filthy, dirty-blooded piece of scum. You should feel grateful that I bother with you.” My hands moved to the buttons on his Muggle trousers. Lupin wasn’t actually a Mudblood. I knew this because my mother was rather obsessed with the subject of Lupin’s parentage. Lupin was rumored (quite correctly) to be my brother’s lover and that left him open to scrutiny from my family. I’d heard at least a hundred times that Lupin was a half-blood – his mother an honest-to-goodness Muggle and his father some sort of disgraced Ministry worker who had been fired from the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.
Lupin writhed and twisted under my hands as I continued to whisper insults. When he was on the brink, I leaned in very close, put my mouth against his ear, and said: “Half-breed. You fucking half-breed.”
“Oh my God.” He threw his head back and came all over my hand.
Lupin was kind of a sick bastard.
By that time, I’d already figured out that Lupin was a werewolf. I’d started wondering why he wanted me to call him a half-breed; why he got off so much on it. From there, it wasn’t hard to observe the days when Lupin was sick or to count down to the full moon. It made perfect sense –Sirius would take up with a werewolf, because that would piss off our parents the most. Sirius had been disinherited a few years previously, but that hadn’t stopped him from making all his decisions based on what our parents least desired.
After the sex, Lupin held me close, curling tendrils of my hair around his fingers. He liked my hair. After a few minutes, there was a clattering sound outside, and Lupin stiffened until the door to the neighboring flat opened and then slammed shut.
“You were afraid that was him,” I whispered.
Lupin smiled, faintly. “So were you.”
“You d-don’t want him to find us together.”
Lupin shrugged. “Well, he is my boyfriend.”
I frowned. “But he d-doesn’t give you what I give you.”
Lupin stroked my back, soothingly. “No, baby. Only you.”
“Why do you call me b-b-baby?”
Lupin leaned back, his face now utterly relaxed. “I don’t know. I guess you seem young sometimes.”
I leaned against his chest and closed my eyes. Lupin smelled like earth and tea and the darkest of chocolates. It was less than a week until the next full moon.
Once, I asked Lupin if he’d ever done the things with Sirius that he did with me. If he’d ever asked Sirius to call him a “mudblood” or ever wanted Sirius to hurt him. Lupin had smiled, sadly.
“Just once,” he said.
“He didn’t like it?” I had a ghoulish curiosity about my brother and Lupin having sex.
“He seemed to. But the next day, he told me he’d never do it again. He said that if I wanted a pureblood to treat me like shit, I’d have to look elsewhere.”
“Is that what I am? A pureblood who will treat you like shit?”
“No,” Lupin lied.
*
Until I was ten years old, I barely spoke at all. My stutter was bad in those days and it always upset my parents to hear me speak. My mother used to scream at me and my father would go very red in the face while trying to correct me. The house-elves were patient with me and seemed to understand me better than most wizards, but the truth was that I hardly felt the need to speak. I had Sirius.
Sirius and I went everywhere together in those days. He always knew what I wanted to say even if I could only manage to stammer out a few syllables. He was as charming and eloquent as I was awkward and bumbling. My parents adored him as much as it was possible for them to adore anyone. And they didn’t seem to care as much about my stutter when they remembered that they had one son who was brilliant and beautiful. I was loyal, sweet, and compliant enough. These were attractive qualities in a second son. Sirius and I were so connected that we anticipated one another’s every thought, and I sometimes wondered if our link was magical.
All this changed when Sirius went to Hogwarts. During his long months away at school, I had to speak for myself and it was a disaster. My parents understood, for the first time I think, the full extent of my affliction. They realized that I could barely speak without Sirius around to complete my sentences. They panicked – I was to start Hogwarts the very next year, and I was clearly nowhere near ready. They sacked our governess and hired a speech coach and two tutors who drilled me ruthlessly for twelve hours a day.
But worst of all, when Sirius came home he was different. I knew he’d been sorted into Gryffindor, but my intense loyalty to him meant that I couldn’t condemn him for it. My parents fumed over Sirius’s Sorting, but I didn’t let them sway me. If Sirius had done it, then it must be right. But when Sirius came home, he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. He just locked himself in his room for days at a time, writing letters to his friends and only coming out when Mother and Father yelled loudly enough to disturb him.
When Sirius finally left home several years later, we kept his room exactly as he’d left it. It was as if he were a family member who had died rather than one who merely moved away. It sometimes felt as if he had died. The real Sirius was hidden from us under layers of distrust and dislike – only the likes of James Potter and Remus Lupin got to see that side of Sirius.
After I left Lupin in the wee hours of the morning, I Apparated back to my bedroom. My father was sitting in a stuffed chair by my bedside looking at my glass wizards. The glass wizards were mostly sleeping, and I saw that the orange wizards had been turned away from the gray wizards which meant that Kreacher (the only person I allowed to touch them) had turned them in the appropriate direction for the date and time while I was gone. I almost freaked the fuck out when I saw my father sitting beside them, but I quickly calmed myself by telling myself over and over that he hadn’t touched them, hadn’t moved them at all.
“Regulus,” he said in his low, melodic voice. My father was a tall man with graying hair and an elaborate mustache. His demeanor always reflected the utmost gravity. Like the rest of my family, he was more than a little crazy, but he was excellent at hiding it in public.
“Father,” I answered, bowing my head in respect. He didn’t ask where I’d been. My parents were always oddly inattentive about things like that. From the time I was about six years old, Sirius and I would sneak out of his bedroom window in the middle of the night – our parents never seemed the least bit concerned when we weren’t in our beds. As long as we were at lessons the next day, acting the part of good little Black brothers, then everything was okay.
“Son. I wished to speak with you about an important matter. A very grave and important matter.”
I listened impassively. I hadn’t supposed he’d shown up in my room at three o’clock in the morning to discuss something trivial.
“Volde – the Dark Lord’s power is growing. Most of our friends believe that the Death Eaters will have taken over the government by the end of this year. The Dark Lord wishes to know why an old, pureblood family like the Blacks, a family which shares the Dark Lord’s values, has done so little to help the Death Eaters’ cause.”
My father’s words came to me as if from a far distance. I already knew where this was going, of course, but I pretended that I didn’t. “So give him m-money. You have enough.”
For perhaps the first time in my life, my father couldn’t meet my eyes. “He doesn’t want money.”
“No. I don’t imagine that he d-does.” And he wouldn’t want my father either. Everyone knew that the Dark Lord took the young men.
“If the Blacks were to be branded blood traitors by the Death Eaters then circumstances could become dire. You read the papers. You remember what happened to the O’Neals, the Prewitts, the Hagels.”
“The idea of the B-blacks as b-b-blood traitors is —”
“Ridiculous, I know,” my father interrupted me. “But these are not rational times that we live in. Listen, the families who actually are blood traitors at least have the option of seeking sanctuary from the other side. The Blacks have no such choice. Dumbledore wouldn’t help us. Most of our friends have already declared themselves for the Dark Lord.”
I looked him in the eye. “I know. But I c-can’t.”
My father shook his head. He always wore a signet ring on his right hand with the crest of the family Black engraved on it. He twisted it now. “You’ve always understood the importance of belonging to a great family, Regulus. That sometimes the interests of the family must come before the interests of the individual. And unfortunately, the greatest of burdens sometimes fall upon the weakest member of the family.”
I snorted. It wasn’t surprising to hear that my father had so little faith in my abilities.
“Your brother should be here, that’s true. He would be better suited to this task than you are. But he’s made the choice to shirk his duties as a Black and deny his heritage. And so this burden must fall on you.”
I bowed my head again. My father turned, idly, and looked at my collection of glass wizards. His face screwed in thought. He picked up a purple one. I had to stop myself from snatching it from his hand. “You still collect these?”
“Yes.”
My father frowned. “This is a hobby for children, Regulus. Your brother stopped collecting these things by the age of seven.”
Even after all Sirius had done, my father couldn’t stop himself from comparing me unfavorably to him.
“I know,” I said, watching the small wizard struggle in my father’s fist.
My father raised his hand and quick as lightning, he threw the wizard against floor where it broke into several pieces.
“Stop it!” I said. “Stop!”
My father ignored me. He stepped on the wizard’s head, grinding it into dust. The body continued to flail around on the floor.
“Time for you to grow up.” My father stood up, brushed off his robes, and left the room. He didn’t look back.
I knelt down beside my poor, broken glass wizard. My father had ground the head down so fine that there was no hope of repairing it with a spell. I held the struggling body against my chest for a moment before softly murmuring the spell that would put the little fellow out of his misery. Then I called Kreacher to clean up the mess.
I took a long shower that morning. When I was alone, under the hot stream of water, I banged my head against the shower stall several times until my lip was cut and my nose was bleeding. My parents didn’t even need to punish me properly anymore – I did it to myself.
*
When I was a first year at Hogwarts, I tried to follow my brother about the castle. I suppose it should have been obvious to me that he didn’t want me around – I was younger and I was already getting a reputation as a weird, stuttering kid who obsessively collected glass wizards, made his bed a dozen times a day, and freaked out when his roommates touched his possessions. Meanwhile, Sirius was one of the most popular boys in school. He was best friends with James Potter who was already a Quidditch star in his second year. Sirius and Potter played an enormous number of pranks but none of the professors disliked them. They got invited to parties thrown by much older students. They were constantly surrounded by admirers. They flouted every rule.
But even after Sirius’s distant attitude towards me over the summer, I couldn’t quite conceive of a universe where Sirius didn’t want to be near me. Sirius and I had always been a team, united in withstanding the crazy cruelty of our parents. He’d been my voice and my protector for as long as I could remember.
But one blustery November day, when I found Sirius and his friends sitting under a tree on the grounds of Hogwarts, Sirius had been less than pleased by my presence. I’d asked what Sirius and his friends were doing and stuttered a bit as I did so. James Potter, whose hair looked like a wild, bristly porcupine had grinned at my stutter and Sirius had seen.
“W-w-w-w-w-what was that, R-r-r-r-regulus?” Sirius asked. Potter had laughed loudly while Lupin and Pettigrew looked at one another and smiled uneasily.
The world cracked apart for me. I knew that Sirius could have a cruel sense of humor, but he’d never turned it on me before. He’d never mocked my stutter, not even once. It had never even occurred to me that he could do such a thing. It was as if I’d woken up to find that the sky was green. I didn’t speak. I was afraid to speak, afraid of bringing more ridicule on myself. But more than that – I was afraid that I would somehow break Sirius further.
After a moment, Sirius had given me a shove. “Shoo, then,” he’d said to general laughter. I’d never had much of a relationship with my brother after that.
In the days following Voldemort’s visit to my family, I prepared myself to become a Death Eater. This included everything from going to parties at Malfoy Manor to reading the Dark Lord’s manifesto to getting a haircut. My father was adamant that certain things would be expected of me as a Death Eater. Other actions were designed to advance my status once I joined. I obeyed all of his requests because I realized that he was right. If I didn’t do this, then Voldemort would destroy me and my parents.
Three weeks to the day after Voldemort’s visit, I found Sirius sitting on my bed. He was wearing Muggle trousers and some sort of leather coat. I closed the door quickly before my parents or an elf could look in and see him. I barely even worried about him rumpling my bedclothes.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hello.” I tried to make my voice deep and hypnotizing like my father’s. I didn’t stutter over the word.
“Nice robes,” Sirius said, nodding towards my tall, oak wardrobe. I gulped. I was to be formally accepted into the Death Eaters in two days and my robes had already been sent over. They hung on the front of the wardrobe.
I didn’t speak. It was easier that way.
“Is that it, then? Are you a Death Eater?” Sirius asked.
“No. N-not yet.”
Sirius let out a long, slow breath. “Good. That’s good, Reggie.”
I wanted to tell Sirius that I had to join the Death Eaters, that they would hurt our family if I didn’t, but I thought it better to remain silent. In truth, over the last few weeks, I’d started to warm to the idea of being a Death Eater. Eloquent, sophisticated people like my cousin’s husband Lucius Malfoy paid attention to me now. My father looked at me with a silent pride that he’d never exhibited towards me before. Even my mother could find little fault with me, and for her that was close to miraculous.
Sirius stood up and took both my hands in his. “I heard that they were courting you. You don’t have to do it. I know that Mother and Father probably think that Voldemort is the best thing to happen since Muggle baiting was invented, but you won’t like being a Death Eater. I can promise you that. Don’t do it.”
I smiled, wryly. “Where would I go?”
“You could come and live with me and Remus."
I blinked. This wasn’t what I’d expected. “You want me now? You’ve n-never offered before. You just left m-m-me here. With them.”
Sirius stared at me. “I can see how it must have felt like I left you. But I couldn’t exactly bring you with me when I went to live with the Potters. And I guess I thought that you wanted to stay. But none of that matters now. Come and live with me. It’ll be like when were kids.”
A wave of nostalgia passed over me. The idea of being Sirius’s little brother again was an appealing one. “I-I-I – what would I d-do? There’d be no way for m-me to live without father’s money.”
I had a grand total of three N.E.W.T.s to show for my time at Hogwarts – and they were in the thoroughly cerebral and mostly useless subjects of History of Magic, Astronomy, and Magic Runes. I was decent at wand work, but I hated the loud bangs, bright flashes, and dangerous effects that came with the spells professors generally wanted students to experiment with in upper level classes. Besides, my stutter had the tendency to ruin spells that couldn’t be easily accomplished by wordless magic. I preferred subjects that could be mastered with a lot of research and a well-written essay.
None of this mattered as long as I was Orion Black’s son. I’d never have to work a day in my life. But if my father disowned me as he’d disowned Sirius, I’d have to earn a living and I wasn’t well equipped to do so. Sirius, of course, would not understand. Despite his near constant misbehavior, he’d obtained seven N.E.W.T.s, most of them in highly desirable subjects.
As I’d expected, Sirius waved away my objection. “I can help you find a job. What about Quidditch? James said you were the best Seeker at Hogwarts our last year.”
“All the p-professional Quidditch teams are dis-disbanded because of the war.” Quidditch had been a godsend to me. I’d joined the Slytherin team as a Fifth Year. I loved flying – on a broom I was never awkward the way I often was on the ground. But I mostly liked it because it meant that my housemates stopped teasing me. No one mocked the most important player on the Slytherin house team, at least not when he was winning. Even my parents had shown excitement, though they usually didn’t care one whit for Quidditch. My mother went around telling people that I was a good Seeker, always sounding surprised that I could be good at anything.
“I know they’ve been disbanded,” Sirius said. “I meant after the war. It has to end eventually, you know.”
“You d-d-don’t r-really want me to live with y-y-you,” I said. I was starting to get upset which always made it difficult for me to speak. “You just d-don’t want me to become a D-d-d-death Eater. You’ve n-never wanted me b-be near you before. And you m-made fun of my st-st-st-st-st. My st-st-st-st —”
“Your stutter,” Sirius interrupted. “Look, I’m sorry, okay. Is that what you want to hear? I was an arse when I was thirteen or fourteen years old. I was a bad brother. That’s no reason for you to become a fucking Death Eater. The things that they do to Muggles, to Muggleborns, even to some purebloods – they’re unforgivable.”
“If I don’t join then they’ll hurt Mother and Father.” I blinked, surprised that I’d got through a whole sentence without stuttering when it had been so bad a moment ago.
“Who cares?”
I felt my eyebrows shoot up. “Who cares?”
Sirius flushed. “I just mean – of course I don’t want anything bad to happen to our parents. Despite everything they’ve done to me. But they’ve made their own bed. You don’t have to sacrifice your life or your soul for them, Reggie. They wouldn’t do the same for you.”
I didn’t trust myself to speak. Sirius leaned forward to inspect my lip which still sported a visible cut from when I’d banged my head against the shower stall several weeks ago. He touched my lip gently. “Is this – did Father —”
“No,” I quickly interrupted.
Sirius shook his head. “I should fucking kill him with my own hands before the Death Eaters can get to him. He —”
“Shut up!” I said. “He d-didn’t d-d-do anything. You don’t know what goes on in this house anym-more.
Sirius smirked. “Loyal little Regulus. You should have been a Hufflepuff.”
I felt my face heat up. The blasted Sorting Hat nearly did put me in Hufflepuff, but I talked it into Slytherin. My parents would have killed me if I’d been sorted into Hufflepuff – in the eyes of the Blacks and most other old, pureblood families, Hufflepuff was a joke. My mother called it “the house of the Mudblood” because it tended to have a large proportion of Muggleborns. It was even worse than Gryffindor.
“You should go, Sirius.” I channeled my father a bit, and for once my voice sounded strong and confident.
He turned and looked at my Death Eater’s robes. I watched him shiver. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet. “Regulus, whatever I have to say, whatever I have to do to stop you from becoming a Death Eater, I’ll do it. Just tell me how I’m going wrong here.”
But it was already too late. I may not have taken my oath yet, but it was far too late for Sirius to convince me of anything. “You’re not doing anything wr-wrong. I’ve just made up my mind.”
Sirius sighed and looked down at his shoes. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was more powerful than him. “I’ll share Remus with you,” he whispered.
I was so surprised that I stepped back. “What – what are you talking about?”
He looked me in the eye. “You know damn well what I’m talking about. And I’ll share him with you. I don’t care. We can make it work. Just don’t go to them. Please.”
I bit down on my lip, feeling embarrassed and guilty about the business with Lupin. “He j-just. You won’t g-g-give him what he n-needs. That’s why he comes to me.”
I hadn’t thought that Sirius would understand exactly what I meant, but he looked at me sharply. “Ah. I see.”
“He’s the one who w-wants it like that, n-n-not me. He loves you. If y-you’d give him what he wants —”
“Let me tell you something,” Sirius interrupted. “Maybe someone who wasn’t raised in the way that you I were raised could call his boyfriend a ‘Mudblood’ and have it mean nothing. But that isn’t an option for me, and it isn’t for you either. It will always mean something to us.”
Lupin once pointed out to me that I never stuttered when I talked to him like that. I smirked, imitating Sirius’s mocking grin. “You just didn’t like it.”
“Aren’t you listening? I did like it. That’s the problem.”
“Whatever you say.”
Sirius sighed. “Just think about leaving, okay? For the sake of the bond that we used to share – just think about it. You can always come to me, Reggie.”
He hugged me. I just stood there stiffly.
*
At Hogwarts, I’d liked Lupin because he was the only one of Sirius’s group (including Sirius himself) who was nice to me. When I stuttered Lupin would smile – not in the mocking way that most people smiled, but encouragingly. It was as if he said: “It’s okay Regulus. Just calm down and you’ll be able to get it out.”
When I started meeting Lupin clandestinely, I knew that I was just a pale substitute for Sirius. But I didn’t care, because I’d always been a pale substitute for Sirius. That was my life. For some time I even wanted to be like Lupin. He was always so mild and easy-going. I never saw him get angry. He was completely different from anyone in my family.
One time, Lupin told me that he thought my stutter was sweet. Then he tilted my face up and gave me my first kiss. And even though I knew that I was a Sirius substitute, it was everything that I’d hoped a first kiss would be.
Lupin’s weird sexual kinks had bothered me at first, but I forgave him for them. I figured that everyone was a little fucked up in some way, and I was just seeing Lupin’s particular dysfunctions. After some time, I even came to enjoy pretending to be the strong, cruel pureblood. It was as if I’d become my father, my grandfather, my brother. I was finally a Black.
Sirius could never understand that. He might strongly disagree with our family’s values, but Sirius was a Black from the top of his head to the tips of his toes. He hated it, but that didn’t change it. I was the opposite. I’d spent my entire life trying to prove that I was good enough to be a part of my family.
I put on my Death Eater robes. The material was a soft whisper of velvet against my skin. The hood blocked my peripheral vision so that I felt as if I were looking down a long tunnel. I stared at my glass wizards who were arranged into perfect rows just as they should be.
“Kreacher!” I called. After a few moments, the old elf popped into existence beside me. Kreacher practically raised me when I was very small. My parents had been far too busy with Sirius (who was a demanding child) and with themselves to notice that I was effectively being brought up by a male house-elf.
The old elf looked at me with round eyes. I would need him to clean up the mess.
Earlier, I’d brought a poker from the downstairs fireplace to my room. I now clutched it in my hand. “Time to grow up you crazy little shit,” I whispered to myself.
With the poker, I swept about a dozen of the glass wizards off my nightstand where the majority of them shattered on the floor. The ones that were left on the nightstand, seeing my ill intent, ran in all directions. They scurried down the nightstand and across my floor. I wasn’t bothered. My door was locked and there was no escape for them.
Slowly and with great deliberation, I hunted down each tiny wizard and destroyed him. They opened their mouths in silent screams or raised useless glass wands against me, but I beat them with the poker and then with my hands and feet until they were nothing more than tiny shards of glass. I found a few terrified stragglers under my bed and behind my wardrobe. A yellow wizard even climbed into one of my house slippers.
When I was done, I looked down to see that my hands were bleeding. My room was covered in tiny multi-colored shards of glass. Here and there a tiny glass arm or leg still wiggled feebly. I forced myself not to care about the untidiness. Regulus the crazy little shit cared about such things. Regulus the Death Eater did not. There were tear tracks running down my face though I could not remember crying.
I ordered Kreacher to clean up the mess. Then I went to wash the blood off my hands.
I was ready.
If you liked this fic then you might also enjoy:
The Living (Remus/Sirius, Remus/Regulus)
Letters From Malfoy Manor (Lucius/Remus, Remus/OMC, Remus/Sirius)