Lionheart--DvD Commentary, Part 1
This is a bit long. I'm going to have to break it down into several sections, I think.
Title: Lionheart
I was being a Latin geek with the title. The other name of the star for which Regulus is named is Cor Leoni--the heart of the lion. Since Regulus is brave and heroic in this fic, I thought I'd find a way to suggest this--and that he was living up to his name.
***
"Crucio!"
And this gets us right into the action. I confess I'm still rather pleased with that opening.
As the curse was spoken, he fell to the ground, his nerves and muscles convulsing with pain, bones and organs twisting in ways that the human body should not. Tsunami after tsunami of mind-twisting pain pounded through his blood, brain and body.
::wince:: Oh dear. I really don't like that description any more--it doesn't express clearly enough what kind of pain Regulus is in. And I use the term "tsunami" too much as a metaphor for overwhelming pain. Incidentally, this was written in June 2004, long before any actual tsunamis were in the news.
He opened his mouth to scream in anguish, but his vocal cords were as taut as steel cables. He couldn't make a sound.
Regulus, he thought dimly. My name is Regulus.
Establishing the identity of the torture victim, naming the viewpoint character and pointing out that Crucio is messing with Regulus's mind and memory.
He clung to that thin strand of knowledge for the remainder of the torture session, as voice after voice flung spells at him. Silencio was cast on him, making it impossible for him to scream even if he had been able to do so. His body was lifted, slammed into walls, locked in stone-like paralysis and sliced with invisible knives. Strangely, Crucio was the only Unforgivable used.
Someone doesn't want me to die too quickly, Regulus thought as he struggled to ride out the pain.
He did not think of begging for mercy. Even in his disoriented state, he knew that wouldn't work.
If I were writing this now, I'd probably have Regulus beg anyway--not because he thought it would help, but because the pain was so excruciating that he just wanted it to stop.
At last, the waves of pain ceased. He felt himself dragged, none too gently, by his aching limbs into a small, empty room. It was little better than a closet, Regulus recalled. A picture of it skittered across his dazed mind: a cloakroom in some Muggle place of worship, with a dusty wooden floor, hooks for coats and jackets, a few stray maroon hymnals and one window emblazoned with a stained glass portrait of a sad-eyed man in scarlet and royal blue robes. The man's portrait had a name, but for the life of him, Regulus couldn't recall it, and he could not check now--Bellatrix had cursed him, yet again, with Te caeco. It had been one of his mother's favourite curses when he was a child.
Te caeco. I blind you.
That's exactly what it means. It made sense to me that there would be a blinding spell, but that it would have to have a definite target or else it might rebound on the caster. (Te caeco has actually shown up before, in the Regulus Arc, so, even though this isn't a Regulus Arc story, I left the spell as is.)
Te caeco would wear off after a few hours.
Probably.
A day or two, at most.
This is a pattern that recurs in my stories. If there are three or four one or two-sentence paragraphs in a row, the odds are that the viewpoint character is trying to convince himself of something that he knows isn't true.
Regulus was loath to admit even to himself that the curse did more and more damage to him each time that Bellatrix cast it--and she had cast it quite a number of times already, both during this session and others.. He dared not think that his eyes could only perceive light and darkness, blobs of colour and vague, fuzzy shapes…and that very likely he would lose even that shortly.
Regulus isn't completely blind due to a person who used to post to the God-Awful Fan Fiction boards, Wandering Namek. Namek is blind, and has been since infancy, and he used to ridicule stories in which completely blind characters were written by sighted people, for, he said, they never got it right. Hence, Regulus is purblind as a result of cumulative cursings, not blind.
It's not worth thinking about, he scolded himself, half-dragging, half-crawling into the speckled white blob of warmth that he knew was sunlight pouring in through the stained glass window. Yes, I'm losing my sight. What difference does it make? I'll be dead before I learn what it's like to be a blind wizard, anyway.
He lay in the warm patch for a while, letting the comforting heat sink into his aching body as if it were a lover.
And that has certain slashy overtones that I didn't even notice till now.
Sadly, he could not lie there for long. He still had something important that he needed to do. And who knew when the Death Eaters--his fellow Death Eaters--would return, and drag him away to torment--or, perhaps, this time, to death?
At least his wounds were still bleeding. He supposed he could thank Merlin for that small mercy.
He forced himself to his feet. Some rituals had to be performed while standing, and this was one of them. He staggered toward the source of the warmth, right arm outstretched like an antenna. A few moments later, he felt his over-sensitised fingertips brush the smooth, wooden windowsill. Then, slowly, cautiously, he turned, placed his left hand on the sill, and groped his way forward, the sill beneath his fingers giving way to cold, rough-hewn granite wall, and then to hard, curved brass coathooks on the eastern wall.
This was the place.
Regulus sank to his knees, placed his right index finger against a still-bleeding wound in his left hand and then, with deep concentration, began scribing runes in blood on the floor. Runes were no easy task to write at the best of times, and Regulus knew that these runes--part of the last spell he would ever cast--had to be perfect. He would never get a second chance.
I have no idea why I insisted on making Regulus stand up when he just had to kneel down again.
As he wrote the runes he'd memorised, his mind turned back to the cause of this whole nightmare--the order that the Dark Lord had sent to him.
The order that he could never obey.
***
The order had been hand-delivered by a messenger to Regulus' flat, rather than to his official address of Twelve Grimmauld Place.
Regulus had supposed that it was simple practicality--after all, the Black townhouse was Unplottable, and would have been difficult, if not impossible, for a messenger to find. It was quite logical. Really.
I knew that someone was going to bring up the issue of Twelve Grimmauld Place being Unplottable, so I just acknowledged it and then added the "Yes, it is, but..." of the following paragraph.
No. The Death Eaters just want you to know that they always know where you are, said a little voice in the back of his mind--a voice that had been speaking up more and more often lately. That they can find you even when you're not at an "official" address. That you can never ever escape.
Regulus would have had an easier time dismissing the voice's suspicions if the messenger bearing the order had been Lucius Malfoy, or Bellatrix, or one of the Lestrange brothers. They frightened him with their zeal--which bordered on madness, in his eyes. They'd always frightened him. Nor did he trust them; he could not recall a time when he had trusted any of his kin, save for his brother Sirius.
Amazing--even under these circumstances, Regulus still trusts his brother. That says a lot about him, I think.
But--they were family. Purebloods, like himself. And, unlike himself, fiercely loyal to Voldemort and to his cause. Seeing them would mean that Voldemort still had some hopes of him.
Not too surprisingly, Regulus is VERY good at reading non-verbal clues about status.
Regulus had no illusions about his skill as a Death Eater. He was a failure. Oh, he'd done his duty. He'd killed Muggles. Tortured. And...other things that his mind preferred to shy away from.
Regulus isn't innocent by any stretch of the imagination. I thought I'd establish that right up front. As for the "other things" that Regulus's mind shies away from…I decided I'd leave those up to the audience.
But he'd done such things fearing what the others would do to him if he did not. His duty never bubbled over into sadistic enthusiasm, as it did for Bella, or to amused and lethal manipulation, as it did for Lucius.
In other words, Regulus, like Bartleby the Scrivener, would "prefer not to."
And now he knew that the Dark Lord had noticed his ineptitude. The messenger was a shivering, cowering girl of eighteen or so. Though she claimed to be a halfblood, gossip said that she was Muggleborn and had thrown in her lot with Voldemort in hopes that it would save her. Everyone knew it would not.
In sending her, Voldemort was serving him notice: Fail me again, and your blood will not save you any more than her false loyalty will save her.
She's sort of a Death Eater prelude to a pink slip. Only a pink slip from the Death Eaters is made of green light, and is always fatal.
A chill ran through Regulus' body as he thanked the girl and courteously accepted the missive she'd brought. The girl gaped at him for a minute as if he were mad, then scurried away.
Regulus knows that his position is precarious, but he's STILL going to be courteous to this girl of ill omen. Reg is whistling past the graveyard here, but he's definitely doing so with style.
It can't be that bad, thought Regulus desperately, casting a Silencing Charm before cracking the poison green wax seal on the parchment. It can't.
Turn Remus Lupin, the parchment said, speaking the words in Voldemort's voice.
Turn him? thought Regulus wildly. How can I do that? How the hell am I supposed make my brother's werewolf lover turn traitor?
I don't know how Regulus found out about Remus's lycanthropy. I suspect that The Prank and Snape had something to do with it.
Even as he thought this, he realised that the terminology was wrong. He should have thought in terms of making Remus Lupin see the light, or recognise that the Dark Lord offered Dark Creatures more freedom than the wizarding world did.
He should not have thought in terms of betrayal.
Because that implied, didn't it, that changing over to the Dark Lord's side was somehow wrong.
Which, of course, is the point that Regulus has been avoiding for so long.
He glanced back at the parchment, which immediately began speaking again.
Turn Remus Lupin--if you can. The voice echoed sardonically, as if there was no chance that Regulus could accomplish such a task. If you cannot, then kill him.
Well. That gave him some incentive to turn the wretched beast, didn't it?
Whether or not you turn Lupin, however, you must kill Sirius Black.
Regulus gripped the parchment tightly, staring at the parchment in horror and disbelief.
You cannot make an exception in Black's case, the parchment said. He will never permit his friend to change sides. And he defies all that we value. He must die in agony, as a message to those who would oppose us.
His stomach roiling and his head pounding, Regulus gazed unseeing at the parchment gripped in his hand, but the message spoke no more. At last, he crumpled the parchment into a ball and tossed it into a wastebasket, where it instantly burst into green flames, then turned to ashes.
Eliminating all traces of the parchment from Regulus's flat, since in OotP, Sirius doesn't appear to know the exact terms of Voldemort's final command to Regulus.
Sirius. Oh, Sirius.
Regulus was under no illusions that he was one of his elder brother's favourite people. They had not spoken for years. They were miles apart politically; they valued nothing close to the same thing. They couldn't even be in the same room without shouting at each other. He'd managed to hate Sirius for years with a clear conscience.
But Sirius had been one of the few bright spots in a bleak childhood. Regulus' boyhood had bordered on something from a Gothic novel: a dark, evil, brooding house; a half-mad mother who shrieked in perpetual rage; a morose alcoholic father, whose cane was hard and whose words were even harsher; a treacherous servant; and, of course, haunted portraits. All I needed was a sickly sister locked up in the attic and a dissipated, debauched elder brother to complete the picture.
I'm being a bit meta here, because in a few timelines, Regulus does have a sickly sister the family hid away and erased from the tapestry--Electra Mirzam Black, who was born with a weak heart that couldn't be corrected by magic. In both Thistlerose's Midnight Conversations and our co-written Regulus Arc, Electra dies of heart failure at the age of eight, when Sirius is six and Regulus is three. In this story's timeline, Regulus is two years younger than Sirius.
Well, there had been no ailing sister that Regulus could recall.
That he does not remember does not, of course, mean that she didn't exist in this world...
But if present-day Sirius was debauched and dissipated (Regulus could not quite decide whether or not a monogamous homosexual relationship counted as debauchery), he had not been so in childhood.
Regulus is making a conscious effort to think about Sirius's homosexuality in emotionally neutral terms, as opposed to emotionally loaded ones.
Regulus remembered Sirius' constant, patient attempts to teach him how to ride a broom, and the endless, laughing games of tag and hide-and-go-seek among the gravestones and crypts in the small family cemetery adjoining the back garden. He recalled the pranks they'd played on the house-elf, Kreacher, taunting and tormenting their mother's obsequious slave and spy.
He recalled nights when thunder had reverberated in his bones and lightning had seared his eyes with blinding whiteness, when his three- or four- or five-year-old self had crept from his own bedroom in the west wing, past the stuffed and staring heads of house-elves in the parlour, into Sirius' bedroom in the east wing.
Reference to Dazzle. The timeline is a bit off, but I can still see this Regulus having some of the same fears.
Sirius had always been grumpy upon awakening, and he had never understood Regulus' phobias or night terrors, but he'd been there, alternately scolding (you have to learn to fight your fears, Reg) and calming (it's all right, Reg, nothing to be afraid of, trust me) and comforting (go to sleep now, if anything happens, I'll be here to protect you).
How many times had he fallen asleep thus, his head pillowed on his older brother's shoulder?
Their mother had never liked her sons sharing the same bed, no matter that one was five and the other was three. It was wicked, she had shrieked at them. It was abnormal. It was unnatural. Brothers, she insisted, should not be close. He and Sirius had often exchanged looks of total bewilderment as she ranted and raved, wondering what the old bat was blathering about now.
I figured someone would bring up the idea of chan Blackcest if I didn't. So I just had Mrs. Black do it, while her small sons listened in utter confusion.
They'd remained friends, despite their mother's best efforts, despite their father's stern insistences that boys needed to grow into strong, self-disciplined men, that it did neither of them any good to take the blame (or, as they grew older, the curses) for the other's faults. They'd been both brothers and sworn brothers for years.
Until Sirius went to Hogwarts.
Until that damnable Hat put him in Gryffindor.
He'd barely spoken to his brother for the next two years. Their parents made certain of that. They intercepted Sirius' letters, forbade Sirius from coming home on holiday, and, when Sirius inevitably came home for the summer, watched Regulus with the chill gaze of cobras about to strike each time the two of them spoke.
Those two years had cost them a great deal of closeness.
Regulus being put in Slytherin put paid to it for good.
Sirius had never forgiven Regulus for ending up in Slytherin. Regulus had never forgiven the Hat for putting him there. Oh, yes, he was ambitious. His ambition was to survive…a lofty ambition in Twelve Grimmauld Place. Oh, yes, he was cunning. But it was the desperate cunning of an animal at bay. Even at eleven, he'd known that his goals and skills had nothing to do with those of his yearmates.
The Sorting parallels the situation in which Regulus now finds himself--in a select group of, primarily, purebloods, among whom Regulus superficially belongs but fundamentally does not.
Sirius had seen his placement in Slytherin as a sign of moral corruption, as if the little brother he had loved had vanished and been replaced by a golem lookalike.
I almost used the term "android," but then I remembered that Sirius wouldn't know what an android was. A golem was the best magical equivalent that I could think of.
Regulus, for his part, had been no less carefully watched at Hogwarts than he had been after Sirius' placement.
Avery. Goyle. Nott. Narcissa. All watching him with flat, cold eyes. All reporting the slightest transgression from conformity to his parents. All mentioning the slightest contact with his rebellious elder brother.
I envision Reg's years in Slytherin as being rather like living in a goldfish bowl in which half of the fish are pirahnas.
Regulus learned early that any violation of what his parents wanted would affect both him and Sirius. He also learned that his housemates were eager to redouble whatever punishment his parents had visited on him.
Remus Lupin had seen some of what was wrong, and had tried to mend it. He'd talked to Regulus, despite the fact that Sirius and Sirius' best mate, James Potter, had detested Slytherins and had condemned them all, loudly, as incipient dark wizards and future Death Eaters. He'd been kind to a desperately lonely younger boy.
It had bewildered Regulus for years. People were not kind without cause. They certainly were not kind without expecting any favours in return.
Which explains a lot of what was wrong with Sirius's and Regulus's upbringing.
Then he had caught Remus and his brother together in an empty classroom.
Remus was using me, he'd thought, sickened. He just wanted me to like him so I wouldn't say anything when I found out.
He didn't want to believe that. But he couldn't think of any other explanation that made sense.
He'd said nothing. The pride of the house of Black was at stake, after all. And he had no wish to subject himself, as well as his brother and--what was Remus? A friend? A former friend?--to venom or ridicule. So he had kept silent.
Then Snape had learned the truth, and had spread it all over school.
It occurs to me that in this story, Regulus makes a habit of being silently just and fair. He would have made an excellent Hufflepuff.
Sirius had been furious, and had cornered Regulus in the hallway outside of the Transfiguration classroom. "I thought better of you, Reg," he'd said, white-lipped. "How could you tell Snape, of all people? How could you do that to Remus? I thought he was trying to befriend you, at least. Do you really hate him that much? Or was this just the best way you could think of to hurt me?"
And Sirius does what he so often does in the books and in my fics--he asks a series of questions that show he has a preconceived notion of what has happened, and doesn't allow the questions to be answered. I love Sirius, but that particular trait of his drives me crazy.
He had stormed off before Regulus had a chance to answer.
Regulus had never found a way of telling his big brother that he still loved him--not then, when he was thirteen, nor ever after.
So much for hating his brother for years with a clear conscience.
And now he was eighteen, and his brother was twenty. And he was a Death Eater. And he had his orders.
For lack of anything else to do, Regulus wandered into the kitchen and made himself a cup of tea. He sat down at the kitchen table and sipped the tea tentatively. It tasted bitter.
I can't do this.
Regulus had no doubt that the other Death Eaters in the family would leap at a chance to prove themselves to the Dark Lord. So what if the person who had to be killed was kin? The cause was what was important. This was a war, after all. In war, people died.
Not to mention that Sirius was very firmly on the opposing side. He'd fought and killed Death Eaters himself. Sirius was no innocent, any more than Regulus himself was.
I didn't want Sirius to be whitewashed into blamelessness, so I thought I'd better point out that both of them were very young--and that both had killed.
I can't kill my brother.
Regulus had no doubt that this was a test of his loyalty, brought about by his own lack of enthusiasm. The Dark Lord had put him in a position where he had to do the unthinkable...or die himself in an unspeakably hideous way.
Neither choice appealed.
Sirius comments in OotP that apparently Regulus refused to obey an order of Voldemort's without realising what the consequences would be. Given Voldemort's homicidal nature, this doesn't make sense. So here Regulus thinks about that, and his other options.
Warning Sirius would do no good. Too many years and too much mistrust separated them. Besides, telling Sirius that he was in danger would be the surest way of forcing him to face the Death Eaters...and, very probably, die.
As for Remus, he would not be warned, either. He believed in honour, and in standing by his friends. Besides, Voldemort regarded werewolves as Dark Creatures. Beasts. Remus saw, or chose to see, himself as a man. A person. He would never choose to serve a leader who viewed him as an animal.
I could run. I could flee to America or Australia--Antarctica, if that's what it takes. Change my name. Start a new life. Then I wouldn't die, and I wouldn't have to kill Sirius or Remus, either.
Except that the Death Eaters would find him, eventually. And they would set another Death Eater to track...and, inevitably, to kill...Sirius and Remus. Fleeing would solve nothing, and would save no one. And simple refusal would result in the same situation--torture and death for him, death by another Death Eater's hand for his brother and Remus.
Lots of people had suggested on the Fiction Alley boards that Regulus should have just run when given his last fatal assignment. I had to figure out why that wouldn't work, because it initially sounds like a viable solution.
No matter what Regulus did, his brother and his brother's lover would die.
And if he didn't kill them both--for there was no hope of turning Remus Lupin, and Regulus knew it--he himself would die.
There seemed to be no escape.
Commit suicide by Death Eater, or kill an old friend and his own brother. What a wonderful choice.
He bowed his head, nearly knocking the cup of cold, bitter tea from his hands. Hastily, he put it down on the table and shoved it away.
I can't kill my own blood, he thought wearily. The kinslayer is forever accursed; that's ancient magic. It would be true even I hated Sirius.
I think that the concept of the accursed kinslayer goes back at least as far as Cain and Abel.
How long he sat, his eyes staring blindly at the coarse-grained wood tabletop, he never knew.
Eventually, a few words began knocking together, as if trying to remind him of something:
"I'll protect..."
Blood.
Ancient magic.
To quote Spike from "The Gift": "…it's always gotta be blood…Blood is life, lackbrain. Why do you think we eat it? It's what keeps you going, makes you warm, makes you hard, makes you other than dead. 'Course it's her blood.
And Regulus's blood and life prove to be as essential for his purposes as Dawn's blood and life are in opening a portal to a Hell dimension.
The direction that his train of thought was taking shocked him to breathlessness for a moment. Then he shook himself.
If he had to choose destruction in some form, he would rather it was merely physical. At least he would die human.
Whether they kill me or I kill Sirius, I'll be destroyed. But maybe...maybe I can save them.
Erk. A "they" in one sentence and a "them" in another, each referring to a different group? I should have changed that.
He sighed, stood up from the table and walked into the living room. Grabbing a handful of Floo Powder, he flung it into the flames.
"Twelve Grimmauld Place," he stated loudly, and then stepped into the fire.
***
Title: Lionheart
I was being a Latin geek with the title. The other name of the star for which Regulus is named is Cor Leoni--the heart of the lion. Since Regulus is brave and heroic in this fic, I thought I'd find a way to suggest this--and that he was living up to his name.
***
"Crucio!"
And this gets us right into the action. I confess I'm still rather pleased with that opening.
As the curse was spoken, he fell to the ground, his nerves and muscles convulsing with pain, bones and organs twisting in ways that the human body should not. Tsunami after tsunami of mind-twisting pain pounded through his blood, brain and body.
::wince:: Oh dear. I really don't like that description any more--it doesn't express clearly enough what kind of pain Regulus is in. And I use the term "tsunami" too much as a metaphor for overwhelming pain. Incidentally, this was written in June 2004, long before any actual tsunamis were in the news.
He opened his mouth to scream in anguish, but his vocal cords were as taut as steel cables. He couldn't make a sound.
Regulus, he thought dimly. My name is Regulus.
Establishing the identity of the torture victim, naming the viewpoint character and pointing out that Crucio is messing with Regulus's mind and memory.
He clung to that thin strand of knowledge for the remainder of the torture session, as voice after voice flung spells at him. Silencio was cast on him, making it impossible for him to scream even if he had been able to do so. His body was lifted, slammed into walls, locked in stone-like paralysis and sliced with invisible knives. Strangely, Crucio was the only Unforgivable used.
Someone doesn't want me to die too quickly, Regulus thought as he struggled to ride out the pain.
He did not think of begging for mercy. Even in his disoriented state, he knew that wouldn't work.
If I were writing this now, I'd probably have Regulus beg anyway--not because he thought it would help, but because the pain was so excruciating that he just wanted it to stop.
At last, the waves of pain ceased. He felt himself dragged, none too gently, by his aching limbs into a small, empty room. It was little better than a closet, Regulus recalled. A picture of it skittered across his dazed mind: a cloakroom in some Muggle place of worship, with a dusty wooden floor, hooks for coats and jackets, a few stray maroon hymnals and one window emblazoned with a stained glass portrait of a sad-eyed man in scarlet and royal blue robes. The man's portrait had a name, but for the life of him, Regulus couldn't recall it, and he could not check now--Bellatrix had cursed him, yet again, with Te caeco. It had been one of his mother's favourite curses when he was a child.
Te caeco. I blind you.
That's exactly what it means. It made sense to me that there would be a blinding spell, but that it would have to have a definite target or else it might rebound on the caster. (Te caeco has actually shown up before, in the Regulus Arc, so, even though this isn't a Regulus Arc story, I left the spell as is.)
Te caeco would wear off after a few hours.
Probably.
A day or two, at most.
This is a pattern that recurs in my stories. If there are three or four one or two-sentence paragraphs in a row, the odds are that the viewpoint character is trying to convince himself of something that he knows isn't true.
Regulus was loath to admit even to himself that the curse did more and more damage to him each time that Bellatrix cast it--and she had cast it quite a number of times already, both during this session and others.. He dared not think that his eyes could only perceive light and darkness, blobs of colour and vague, fuzzy shapes…and that very likely he would lose even that shortly.
Regulus isn't completely blind due to a person who used to post to the God-Awful Fan Fiction boards, Wandering Namek. Namek is blind, and has been since infancy, and he used to ridicule stories in which completely blind characters were written by sighted people, for, he said, they never got it right. Hence, Regulus is purblind as a result of cumulative cursings, not blind.
It's not worth thinking about, he scolded himself, half-dragging, half-crawling into the speckled white blob of warmth that he knew was sunlight pouring in through the stained glass window. Yes, I'm losing my sight. What difference does it make? I'll be dead before I learn what it's like to be a blind wizard, anyway.
He lay in the warm patch for a while, letting the comforting heat sink into his aching body as if it were a lover.
And that has certain slashy overtones that I didn't even notice till now.
Sadly, he could not lie there for long. He still had something important that he needed to do. And who knew when the Death Eaters--his fellow Death Eaters--would return, and drag him away to torment--or, perhaps, this time, to death?
At least his wounds were still bleeding. He supposed he could thank Merlin for that small mercy.
He forced himself to his feet. Some rituals had to be performed while standing, and this was one of them. He staggered toward the source of the warmth, right arm outstretched like an antenna. A few moments later, he felt his over-sensitised fingertips brush the smooth, wooden windowsill. Then, slowly, cautiously, he turned, placed his left hand on the sill, and groped his way forward, the sill beneath his fingers giving way to cold, rough-hewn granite wall, and then to hard, curved brass coathooks on the eastern wall.
This was the place.
Regulus sank to his knees, placed his right index finger against a still-bleeding wound in his left hand and then, with deep concentration, began scribing runes in blood on the floor. Runes were no easy task to write at the best of times, and Regulus knew that these runes--part of the last spell he would ever cast--had to be perfect. He would never get a second chance.
I have no idea why I insisted on making Regulus stand up when he just had to kneel down again.
As he wrote the runes he'd memorised, his mind turned back to the cause of this whole nightmare--the order that the Dark Lord had sent to him.
The order that he could never obey.
***
The order had been hand-delivered by a messenger to Regulus' flat, rather than to his official address of Twelve Grimmauld Place.
Regulus had supposed that it was simple practicality--after all, the Black townhouse was Unplottable, and would have been difficult, if not impossible, for a messenger to find. It was quite logical. Really.
I knew that someone was going to bring up the issue of Twelve Grimmauld Place being Unplottable, so I just acknowledged it and then added the "Yes, it is, but..." of the following paragraph.
No. The Death Eaters just want you to know that they always know where you are, said a little voice in the back of his mind--a voice that had been speaking up more and more often lately. That they can find you even when you're not at an "official" address. That you can never ever escape.
Regulus would have had an easier time dismissing the voice's suspicions if the messenger bearing the order had been Lucius Malfoy, or Bellatrix, or one of the Lestrange brothers. They frightened him with their zeal--which bordered on madness, in his eyes. They'd always frightened him. Nor did he trust them; he could not recall a time when he had trusted any of his kin, save for his brother Sirius.
Amazing--even under these circumstances, Regulus still trusts his brother. That says a lot about him, I think.
But--they were family. Purebloods, like himself. And, unlike himself, fiercely loyal to Voldemort and to his cause. Seeing them would mean that Voldemort still had some hopes of him.
Not too surprisingly, Regulus is VERY good at reading non-verbal clues about status.
Regulus had no illusions about his skill as a Death Eater. He was a failure. Oh, he'd done his duty. He'd killed Muggles. Tortured. And...other things that his mind preferred to shy away from.
Regulus isn't innocent by any stretch of the imagination. I thought I'd establish that right up front. As for the "other things" that Regulus's mind shies away from…I decided I'd leave those up to the audience.
But he'd done such things fearing what the others would do to him if he did not. His duty never bubbled over into sadistic enthusiasm, as it did for Bella, or to amused and lethal manipulation, as it did for Lucius.
In other words, Regulus, like Bartleby the Scrivener, would "prefer not to."
And now he knew that the Dark Lord had noticed his ineptitude. The messenger was a shivering, cowering girl of eighteen or so. Though she claimed to be a halfblood, gossip said that she was Muggleborn and had thrown in her lot with Voldemort in hopes that it would save her. Everyone knew it would not.
In sending her, Voldemort was serving him notice: Fail me again, and your blood will not save you any more than her false loyalty will save her.
She's sort of a Death Eater prelude to a pink slip. Only a pink slip from the Death Eaters is made of green light, and is always fatal.
A chill ran through Regulus' body as he thanked the girl and courteously accepted the missive she'd brought. The girl gaped at him for a minute as if he were mad, then scurried away.
Regulus knows that his position is precarious, but he's STILL going to be courteous to this girl of ill omen. Reg is whistling past the graveyard here, but he's definitely doing so with style.
It can't be that bad, thought Regulus desperately, casting a Silencing Charm before cracking the poison green wax seal on the parchment. It can't.
Turn Remus Lupin, the parchment said, speaking the words in Voldemort's voice.
Turn him? thought Regulus wildly. How can I do that? How the hell am I supposed make my brother's werewolf lover turn traitor?
I don't know how Regulus found out about Remus's lycanthropy. I suspect that The Prank and Snape had something to do with it.
Even as he thought this, he realised that the terminology was wrong. He should have thought in terms of making Remus Lupin see the light, or recognise that the Dark Lord offered Dark Creatures more freedom than the wizarding world did.
He should not have thought in terms of betrayal.
Because that implied, didn't it, that changing over to the Dark Lord's side was somehow wrong.
Which, of course, is the point that Regulus has been avoiding for so long.
He glanced back at the parchment, which immediately began speaking again.
Turn Remus Lupin--if you can. The voice echoed sardonically, as if there was no chance that Regulus could accomplish such a task. If you cannot, then kill him.
Well. That gave him some incentive to turn the wretched beast, didn't it?
Whether or not you turn Lupin, however, you must kill Sirius Black.
Regulus gripped the parchment tightly, staring at the parchment in horror and disbelief.
You cannot make an exception in Black's case, the parchment said. He will never permit his friend to change sides. And he defies all that we value. He must die in agony, as a message to those who would oppose us.
His stomach roiling and his head pounding, Regulus gazed unseeing at the parchment gripped in his hand, but the message spoke no more. At last, he crumpled the parchment into a ball and tossed it into a wastebasket, where it instantly burst into green flames, then turned to ashes.
Eliminating all traces of the parchment from Regulus's flat, since in OotP, Sirius doesn't appear to know the exact terms of Voldemort's final command to Regulus.
Sirius. Oh, Sirius.
Regulus was under no illusions that he was one of his elder brother's favourite people. They had not spoken for years. They were miles apart politically; they valued nothing close to the same thing. They couldn't even be in the same room without shouting at each other. He'd managed to hate Sirius for years with a clear conscience.
But Sirius had been one of the few bright spots in a bleak childhood. Regulus' boyhood had bordered on something from a Gothic novel: a dark, evil, brooding house; a half-mad mother who shrieked in perpetual rage; a morose alcoholic father, whose cane was hard and whose words were even harsher; a treacherous servant; and, of course, haunted portraits. All I needed was a sickly sister locked up in the attic and a dissipated, debauched elder brother to complete the picture.
I'm being a bit meta here, because in a few timelines, Regulus does have a sickly sister the family hid away and erased from the tapestry--Electra Mirzam Black, who was born with a weak heart that couldn't be corrected by magic. In both Thistlerose's Midnight Conversations and our co-written Regulus Arc, Electra dies of heart failure at the age of eight, when Sirius is six and Regulus is three. In this story's timeline, Regulus is two years younger than Sirius.
Well, there had been no ailing sister that Regulus could recall.
That he does not remember does not, of course, mean that she didn't exist in this world...
But if present-day Sirius was debauched and dissipated (Regulus could not quite decide whether or not a monogamous homosexual relationship counted as debauchery), he had not been so in childhood.
Regulus is making a conscious effort to think about Sirius's homosexuality in emotionally neutral terms, as opposed to emotionally loaded ones.
Regulus remembered Sirius' constant, patient attempts to teach him how to ride a broom, and the endless, laughing games of tag and hide-and-go-seek among the gravestones and crypts in the small family cemetery adjoining the back garden. He recalled the pranks they'd played on the house-elf, Kreacher, taunting and tormenting their mother's obsequious slave and spy.
He recalled nights when thunder had reverberated in his bones and lightning had seared his eyes with blinding whiteness, when his three- or four- or five-year-old self had crept from his own bedroom in the west wing, past the stuffed and staring heads of house-elves in the parlour, into Sirius' bedroom in the east wing.
Reference to Dazzle. The timeline is a bit off, but I can still see this Regulus having some of the same fears.
Sirius had always been grumpy upon awakening, and he had never understood Regulus' phobias or night terrors, but he'd been there, alternately scolding (you have to learn to fight your fears, Reg) and calming (it's all right, Reg, nothing to be afraid of, trust me) and comforting (go to sleep now, if anything happens, I'll be here to protect you).
How many times had he fallen asleep thus, his head pillowed on his older brother's shoulder?
Their mother had never liked her sons sharing the same bed, no matter that one was five and the other was three. It was wicked, she had shrieked at them. It was abnormal. It was unnatural. Brothers, she insisted, should not be close. He and Sirius had often exchanged looks of total bewilderment as she ranted and raved, wondering what the old bat was blathering about now.
I figured someone would bring up the idea of chan Blackcest if I didn't. So I just had Mrs. Black do it, while her small sons listened in utter confusion.
They'd remained friends, despite their mother's best efforts, despite their father's stern insistences that boys needed to grow into strong, self-disciplined men, that it did neither of them any good to take the blame (or, as they grew older, the curses) for the other's faults. They'd been both brothers and sworn brothers for years.
Until Sirius went to Hogwarts.
Until that damnable Hat put him in Gryffindor.
He'd barely spoken to his brother for the next two years. Their parents made certain of that. They intercepted Sirius' letters, forbade Sirius from coming home on holiday, and, when Sirius inevitably came home for the summer, watched Regulus with the chill gaze of cobras about to strike each time the two of them spoke.
Those two years had cost them a great deal of closeness.
Regulus being put in Slytherin put paid to it for good.
Sirius had never forgiven Regulus for ending up in Slytherin. Regulus had never forgiven the Hat for putting him there. Oh, yes, he was ambitious. His ambition was to survive…a lofty ambition in Twelve Grimmauld Place. Oh, yes, he was cunning. But it was the desperate cunning of an animal at bay. Even at eleven, he'd known that his goals and skills had nothing to do with those of his yearmates.
The Sorting parallels the situation in which Regulus now finds himself--in a select group of, primarily, purebloods, among whom Regulus superficially belongs but fundamentally does not.
Sirius had seen his placement in Slytherin as a sign of moral corruption, as if the little brother he had loved had vanished and been replaced by a golem lookalike.
I almost used the term "android," but then I remembered that Sirius wouldn't know what an android was. A golem was the best magical equivalent that I could think of.
Regulus, for his part, had been no less carefully watched at Hogwarts than he had been after Sirius' placement.
Avery. Goyle. Nott. Narcissa. All watching him with flat, cold eyes. All reporting the slightest transgression from conformity to his parents. All mentioning the slightest contact with his rebellious elder brother.
I envision Reg's years in Slytherin as being rather like living in a goldfish bowl in which half of the fish are pirahnas.
Regulus learned early that any violation of what his parents wanted would affect both him and Sirius. He also learned that his housemates were eager to redouble whatever punishment his parents had visited on him.
Remus Lupin had seen some of what was wrong, and had tried to mend it. He'd talked to Regulus, despite the fact that Sirius and Sirius' best mate, James Potter, had detested Slytherins and had condemned them all, loudly, as incipient dark wizards and future Death Eaters. He'd been kind to a desperately lonely younger boy.
It had bewildered Regulus for years. People were not kind without cause. They certainly were not kind without expecting any favours in return.
Which explains a lot of what was wrong with Sirius's and Regulus's upbringing.
Then he had caught Remus and his brother together in an empty classroom.
Remus was using me, he'd thought, sickened. He just wanted me to like him so I wouldn't say anything when I found out.
He didn't want to believe that. But he couldn't think of any other explanation that made sense.
He'd said nothing. The pride of the house of Black was at stake, after all. And he had no wish to subject himself, as well as his brother and--what was Remus? A friend? A former friend?--to venom or ridicule. So he had kept silent.
Then Snape had learned the truth, and had spread it all over school.
It occurs to me that in this story, Regulus makes a habit of being silently just and fair. He would have made an excellent Hufflepuff.
Sirius had been furious, and had cornered Regulus in the hallway outside of the Transfiguration classroom. "I thought better of you, Reg," he'd said, white-lipped. "How could you tell Snape, of all people? How could you do that to Remus? I thought he was trying to befriend you, at least. Do you really hate him that much? Or was this just the best way you could think of to hurt me?"
And Sirius does what he so often does in the books and in my fics--he asks a series of questions that show he has a preconceived notion of what has happened, and doesn't allow the questions to be answered. I love Sirius, but that particular trait of his drives me crazy.
He had stormed off before Regulus had a chance to answer.
Regulus had never found a way of telling his big brother that he still loved him--not then, when he was thirteen, nor ever after.
So much for hating his brother for years with a clear conscience.
And now he was eighteen, and his brother was twenty. And he was a Death Eater. And he had his orders.
For lack of anything else to do, Regulus wandered into the kitchen and made himself a cup of tea. He sat down at the kitchen table and sipped the tea tentatively. It tasted bitter.
I can't do this.
Regulus had no doubt that the other Death Eaters in the family would leap at a chance to prove themselves to the Dark Lord. So what if the person who had to be killed was kin? The cause was what was important. This was a war, after all. In war, people died.
Not to mention that Sirius was very firmly on the opposing side. He'd fought and killed Death Eaters himself. Sirius was no innocent, any more than Regulus himself was.
I didn't want Sirius to be whitewashed into blamelessness, so I thought I'd better point out that both of them were very young--and that both had killed.
I can't kill my brother.
Regulus had no doubt that this was a test of his loyalty, brought about by his own lack of enthusiasm. The Dark Lord had put him in a position where he had to do the unthinkable...or die himself in an unspeakably hideous way.
Neither choice appealed.
Sirius comments in OotP that apparently Regulus refused to obey an order of Voldemort's without realising what the consequences would be. Given Voldemort's homicidal nature, this doesn't make sense. So here Regulus thinks about that, and his other options.
Warning Sirius would do no good. Too many years and too much mistrust separated them. Besides, telling Sirius that he was in danger would be the surest way of forcing him to face the Death Eaters...and, very probably, die.
As for Remus, he would not be warned, either. He believed in honour, and in standing by his friends. Besides, Voldemort regarded werewolves as Dark Creatures. Beasts. Remus saw, or chose to see, himself as a man. A person. He would never choose to serve a leader who viewed him as an animal.
I could run. I could flee to America or Australia--Antarctica, if that's what it takes. Change my name. Start a new life. Then I wouldn't die, and I wouldn't have to kill Sirius or Remus, either.
Except that the Death Eaters would find him, eventually. And they would set another Death Eater to track...and, inevitably, to kill...Sirius and Remus. Fleeing would solve nothing, and would save no one. And simple refusal would result in the same situation--torture and death for him, death by another Death Eater's hand for his brother and Remus.
Lots of people had suggested on the Fiction Alley boards that Regulus should have just run when given his last fatal assignment. I had to figure out why that wouldn't work, because it initially sounds like a viable solution.
No matter what Regulus did, his brother and his brother's lover would die.
And if he didn't kill them both--for there was no hope of turning Remus Lupin, and Regulus knew it--he himself would die.
There seemed to be no escape.
Commit suicide by Death Eater, or kill an old friend and his own brother. What a wonderful choice.
He bowed his head, nearly knocking the cup of cold, bitter tea from his hands. Hastily, he put it down on the table and shoved it away.
I can't kill my own blood, he thought wearily. The kinslayer is forever accursed; that's ancient magic. It would be true even I hated Sirius.
I think that the concept of the accursed kinslayer goes back at least as far as Cain and Abel.
How long he sat, his eyes staring blindly at the coarse-grained wood tabletop, he never knew.
Eventually, a few words began knocking together, as if trying to remind him of something:
"I'll protect..."
Blood.
Ancient magic.
To quote Spike from "The Gift": "…it's always gotta be blood…Blood is life, lackbrain. Why do you think we eat it? It's what keeps you going, makes you warm, makes you hard, makes you other than dead. 'Course it's her blood.
And Regulus's blood and life prove to be as essential for his purposes as Dawn's blood and life are in opening a portal to a Hell dimension.
The direction that his train of thought was taking shocked him to breathlessness for a moment. Then he shook himself.
If he had to choose destruction in some form, he would rather it was merely physical. At least he would die human.
Whether they kill me or I kill Sirius, I'll be destroyed. But maybe...maybe I can save them.
Erk. A "they" in one sentence and a "them" in another, each referring to a different group? I should have changed that.
He sighed, stood up from the table and walked into the living room. Grabbing a handful of Floo Powder, he flung it into the flames.
"Twelve Grimmauld Place," he stated loudly, and then stepped into the fire.
***