On a Wing and a Prayer, DvD Commentary, Part 1
Fourth commentary, but it's going to have to be divided into four parts, as the story itself is a bit long. "On a Wing and a Prayer" ended up starting the AU known as the Regulus Arc, in which Regulus's future changed drastically. You can find the Arc here and the original story here and here.
***
The first three paragraphs, not counting the date, are from Thistlerose's fanfic, This Bird Has Flown.
Most of this you can figure out from the text, but to summarise what happened in This Bird Has Flown:
It's the Christmas holidays, 1976, and sixteen-year-old Sirius is trying to endure being home with his family. Things are going...well, not great, but tolerably...until Kreacher, who searches the boys' rooms periodically, finds a letter Sirius has been writing to Remus. The identity of the person Sirius is writing to isn't clear to his family, but it's VERY clear that Sirius is writing a love letter to a boy. Thirteen-year-old Regulus is questioned, and reveals that yes, Sirius is having an affair with a boy at school. There's a thundering great row. Sirius flees the house. Regulus, furious at his brother, tells Sirius, "If you like playing the bitch so much, here are some real dogs," and sics the family Crups on him.
Once Sirius is gone (and fleeing to James's house), Regulus speaks to Phineas Nigellus's portrait, learning some key facts about his family that he never suspected. He then finds a photograph which proves to him that Phineas was telling the truth. Remorseful, Regulus tries to go after Sirius, but is dragged back to the house by Kreacher…and Regulus loses his last chance to reconcile with his brother.
It was brilliantly written. And it bothered me. Thirteen is very young to lose a brother for good. And I knew that, no matter how stupidly he'd behaved, Regulus did love Sirius. I wanted Reg to admit that. And I wanted Reg to give Kreacher, whom he hated and feared, a good swift kick in the nose.
So I started writing this story, to allow both those things to happen. This is a fanfic of a fanfic, folks.
***
ON A WING AND A PRAYER
The title is from this song from 1943:
One of our planes was missing, two hours overdue.
One of our planes was missing, with all its gallant crew.
The radio sets were humming, they waited for a word;
Then a voice broke through the humming and this is what they heard:
[Chorus]
"Coming in on a wing and a prayer
Coming in on a wing and a prayer
Though there's one motor gone, we can still carry on,
Coming in on a wing and a prayer
What a show, what a fight,
Yes, we really hit our target for tonight!
How we sing as we limp through the air,
Look below, there's our field over there.
With our full crew aboard and our trust in the Lord,
We're coming in on a wing and a prayer.
And this is pretty much the situation in this story. Sirius is missing, and Regulus isn't likely to hear a word about where he is, so he's going to have to go after his brother. Also, I'm giving fair warning--Regulus is not going to come out of this unhurt, and he is going to be in danger. But he's going to carry on anyway. (I had to put Regulus through hell. Otherwise he wouldn't admit how he felt.)
20 December 1976, 9:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.
Thistlerose provided the date in This Bird Has Flown. I came up with the time.
Rain still pounded the pavement. The air was chilling. He hadn’t thought to grab a jacket on his way out. It didn’t matter. There’d be hot chocolate on the Knight Bus. He could stand the cold until he saw Sirius again.
He didn’t hear the door open behind him, didn’t hear the footsteps. He pulled his wand from his pocket, and began to raise it--but a long-fingered hand clamped around his wrist and yanked it down, and then Kreacher was on him, one arm around his waist, dragging him back.
"Mustn’t do it, young master," the House Elf hissed. "Mustn’t leave. Mustn’t break his poor mother’s heart, mustn’t be like the other one, the filthy, sodomising, fornicating--"
Regulus twisted around till he was facing Kreacher. "I order you to let me go," he said, wondering if his command would be enough, and doubting it would. Kreacher idolised Lavinia Black, and felt that his mistress's orders might as well have been pronouncements of Merlin himself. But Lavinia Black's thirteen-year-old son was another matter.
I'm operating in a variant of Thistlerose's Midnight Conversations universe. Therefore, Sirius's and Regulus's parents have the same names as they do in the MC-verse: Rigel and Lavinia. Rigel means "foot" and is the brightest star in the constellation of Orion, though its other name is Beta Orionis. (Alpha Orionis, otherwise known as Betelgeuse, is a variable star and was misclassified.) Lavinia is Latin and means "purified." I honestly cannot think of a more serendipitous name for a woman so obsessed with blood purity.
The House Elf, as he'd half-expected, ignored him. "Mustn't leave, young master," he said in an ingratiating whine. "That would grieve his poor mother, oh, it would tear her heart out, it would..."
This is canonical. Elves are a lot stronger than they look.
"Let. Go. Of. Me. NOW," grunted Regulus, struggling to free himself from Kreacher's spindly but strong arms. Please, Merlin, if I could just lift my wand, and signal the Knight Bus...
Kreacher smiled unpleasantly. "Oh no, young master. Mistress said to do whatever I had to do to keep you here."
Regulus glared at the smirking House Elf gripping him about the waist and decided, quite abruptly, that he had had enough.
Turning Point #1 for Regulus. There are several throughout the story.
"Come, now, young master," chanted Kreacher as he pulled him toward the door of Twelve Grimmauld Place, "enough of this nonsense. Mistress would not like it if you were anything like the one who fled, obscene and unclean monstrosity that he is--oof!"
For Regulus had leaned forward, put all of his weight down on Kreacher's instep, and pulled back as pain forced the House Elf to loosen his grip.
Regulus lifted his wand arm.
No sign of the Knight Bus. Perhaps he wasn't close enough to the street for the conductor to see his signal.
Kreacher hissed. "Evil young master, hurting poor Kreacher," he said, glaring up at Regulus. He backed away and scowled. "What did poor Kreacher ever do to him?"
The brazen effrontery of this statement outraged Regulus as perhaps nothing else could have done on this impossible day. "Do you want a list? In chronological order, perhaps?"
Ouch. That should be "as perhaps nothing else could have on this impossible day." The word "done" isn't necessary.
On the plus side, I do like Regulus getting a bit sarcastic here. It seems fully in character for a thirteen-year-old under stress.
The House Elf cringed, hunching almost double in what should have been a parody of servility--no, not really cringing, as both of his long-fingered hands reached out, encircled Regulus' left ankle and started to pull him off-balance.
Without thinking, Regulus pressed his left foot firmly against the ground, drew back his right foot and kicked Kreacher in the nose.
I took immense pleasure in writing that line.
Kreacher wailed, and pressed his hands against his smashed and bleeding nose.
Regulus wheeled about, and raced for the kerb, extending his wand arm as far as he could stretch it.
Without warning, his feet began to slip and slide as if he were running on ice. Kreacher again, he thought wearily.
House elves do have wandless magic. It stands to reason that Kreacher wouldn't be completely helpless, broken nose or not.
He swivelled about, pointed his wand at the House Elf and fairly shouted the spell. "Petrificus Totalus!"
The House Elf fell to the ground, completely paralysed.
Regulus was unable to suppress a whoop of joy.
At that moment, a triple-decker, violently purple bus materialised in front of him. He scrambled aboard, sitting on the four-poster brass bed behind the driver.
This is it, he thought with something approaching dim wonder. I'm really doing it. I'm really and truly running away from home.
This deliberately echoes Eleanor's last lines in The Haunting of Hill House:
I am really doing it, she thought, turning the wheel to send the car directly at the great tree at the curve of the driveway. I am really doing it, I am doing it all by myself, now, at last: this is me. I am really really really doing this by myself.
In the unending, crashing second before the car hurled into the tree, she thought clearly, Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don't they stop me?
If a reader picks up on this allusion, he or she might also pick up a few clues about the rest of the story. For instance, Regulus hasn't thought about what he's doing. This sojourn of his isn't going to be as easy as he thinks. Fate/karma is involved. "They"--his family--are going to try to stop him. He's going to be in severe danger, from them and from the journey itself. And there's a strong possibility--one might say "probability"--of death.
The notion was vaguely unreal. Leaving the familiar awfulness of his mother and Kreacher and Twelve Grimmauld Place was, for one brief moment, unthinkable.
For a moment, he glanced longingly back his home. His former home. If he left now, he'd never be allowed to return. And how he was going to survive, he didn't know. He was only thirteen, and there wasn't a soul in Slytherin House whom he would have trusted in an emergency. Which meant he was going to have to trust to the charity of his brother's friends, and wasn't THAT going to be fun?
Merlin only knew how his brother's friends would react when they learned that he'd sicced the Crups on Sirius.
Sirius would probably kill him for that. Not that he didn't deserve it.
I have a tendency to have my shady characters realise that they deserve punishment for their sins.
"Youngster?"
Regulus looked up and saw the conductor. "Yes?"
"Yer do want to go someplace? Yer did flag us down, dincha?"
"Yes," said Regulus. "How much to go to Mel--no, not Melrose. Diagon Alley. I've got a few things I have to pick up first."
"Four Sickles, " said the conductor. "Five for the trip and hot chocolate."
The fare is low because both Twelve Grimmauld Place and Diagon Alley are in London.
Regulus counted out five Sickles. He had just begun to sip his hot chocolate when the door to Twelve Grimmauld Place swung open and a small, dignified figure in black stepped out, glancing this way and that.
The bus gave a tremendous lurch, knocking him backwards and nearly causing him to upset his hot chocolate. It reappeared moments later beside a sign reading WELCOME TO CARDIFF.
The Knight Bus tends to go rocketing all over the British Isles, with no particular rhyme or reason to its appearances. Cardiff is in Wales, 151.18 miles west of London and 361.22 miles south of Melrose, Scotland.
Regulus closed his eyes and pressed his head against the cool window, hoping it would take some of the pain from his hot, stinging eyes. "Goodbye..." he whispered, as he wondered what, exactly, he was going to miss. Or who.
***
21 December 1976, 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
He ended up in Melrose, Scotland perhaps ten hours later, laden with the maximum number of Galleons that the goblins at Gringotts had allowed him to withdraw, warm clothes, gloves and boots for Sirius and himself, and an apology in the form of a Christmas present. An apology that he only hoped that Sirius would accept.
Or was alive to accept.
I hope he's all right, he thought miserably, scuffling through the cobblestone streets.
Some streets in Melrose are cobblestoned, though not all.
He'd been worried about his brother's health since the night before. Crups were nice to wizards, and ferociously loyal--not surprising, as wizards had bred them, originally, from pit bulls--but the Crups his family owned were not house pets. Those Crups were trained guard dogs for the House of Black, and they never forgot it.
The Harry Potter Lexicon describes a Crup as "a magical creature which strongly resembles a Jack Russell terrier, except that it has a forked tail. Crups are extremely loyal to wizards and ferocious toward Muggles. They eat almost anything."
I thought that a Jack Russell terrier was another name for a pit bull. If it isn't, I apologise. That is, however, what I picture Crups looking like.
/"If you like playing the bitch so much, here are some real dogs."/
I shouldn't have sicced the dogs on him.
But I didn't know! he shouted silently. I didn't know...
Didn't know what? a voice deep within him asked. That they could hurt him? Cripple him? Kill him, maybe?
"Stop it," he muttered aloud.
The voice, which sounded suspiciously like that of his great-great-grandfather, Phineas Nigellus, sneered. What's the matter, don't want to face the fact that you set him up to be torn to shreds?
First appearance of Phineas in this story. The portrait is still back at Twelve Grimmauld Place, but that's not going to stop Phineas from having his say at all.
"Stop it, I said!" Regulus repeated angrily, clenching and unclenching his fists.
Your brother, Phineas said, sounding disgusted. Your own brother. The boy you threw yourself into Slytherin for so that there would be one Slytherin he couldn't hate. You had the effrontery to tell my idiotic great-grandson and that gold-digging bitch he married about your brother's proclivities--knowing how they would react to the news of what he'd been doing with another man--
I didn't tell them anything Kreacher hadn't told them already! Regulus mentally yelled at the voice.
--and then you set the dogs on him.
And hello, backstory!
The last sentence resounded like the clap of judgement.
Regulus closed his eyes, sagged against the white brickfront of Alex Dalgetty & Sons' Bakery, ignored, as best he could, the intoxicating scents of black buns, savouries, cakes and Selkirk Bannocks, and rubbed his temples.
Yes, there is a bakery with this name in Melrose, Scotland. This is a black bun; this is a Selkirk Bannock, for which the bakery is famous.
Oh, Merlin, I'm not a bastard. Please.
I didn't want to kill my brother.
Make him be alive.
How long he stood there, he was never sure, but when he opened his eyes, a young Scottish policeman was eyeing him. He stepped away from the shop hastily, and scurried off in the opposite direction in order to find the post owlery.
When he found the owlery, which was in an entirely different part of town than the Muggle post office, it was already close to noon; by the time that he reached the counter, it was almost one. The woman behind the counter, a round-faced middle-aged witch with dusty brown hair and a gap between her teeth, smiled pleasantly at him. "Yes? What can I do for you, dearie?"
"I'd..." Regulus forced himself to speak the hated name. "I'd like to know where the Lupin residence is, please. I know they live in Melrose, but not the address."
The witch looked perplexed. "The Lupins live several miles outside of town, dear. But if you're looking to go there, they're not home the now. They're off in France, the three of them, and will be for the next few weeks."
Conforming to the MC-verse. Because Remus is in France with his parents, he doesn't know yet that Sirius has run away.
The news felt like a hammer blow.
"I--I see," Regulus whispered. "Thank you."
The witch cocked her head at him, resembling, momentarily, a plump and worried tabby cat. "Why would you be wanting to find the Lupins? You're no kin to them, I can tell that by looking at you."
"Why would you be wanting" is an idiom my grandfather from Dundee commonly used, so I employed it here.
"My brother ran away from home," said Regulus dully, wondering why grownups always demanded explanations from children--and why he, a Slytherin, couldn't seem to lie on the spur of the moment.
Indicating that Regulus is not the ideal Slytherin, although he tries to be.
"I thought he might be here."
"Not the dark-haired boy that was here the past summer?"
Regulus and Sirius look a great deal alike, and in the MC-verse, Sirius and Remus went into Melrose a number of times during the summer between fifth and sixth year.
Regulus nodded.
"And you've come to fetch him back home?" The owlery witch pursed her lips, as if to say she didn't think much of that idea.
"Merlin, no!" As the words burst from him, his cheeks crimsoned, much to his shame. He hated losing control and he hated blushing. Both were so girly.
Just to let everyone know--Regulus has NOT changed his opinion of homosexuality overnight, despite the fact that he's going after his brother. He's still homophobic, very much so.
He hastened to explain. "I--we had a fight. I did something bad. Something that I have to apologise for. Only now I can't find him." He hung his head and scuffed the toe of his black leather shoe against the hardwood floor.
"I wish I could help you," said the owlery witch. "Have you checked with his other friends? They might have seen him."
Regulus could have kicked himself. Of course. James. He went to James. Sirius wouldn't want Lupin to know what had happened, since Lupin was the cause of it, but James, his best friend, was a different matter. It was so simple. How had he missed it?
"Is the Lake District very far from here?" he asked in a trembling voice.
In the MC-verse, the Potters live in the town of Windermere, in the Lake District.
"Not terribly. Might be better if you stuck to Muggle transportation, though. You'd likely get there in less time. And you might want to send your brother's friend an owl to let him know you're on your way."
Regulus thought of trying to explain unleashing the Crups, and winced. "I don't think I'd better do that. Thank you."
"Just as you say, dearie," the witch was saying as he turned around and headed out the door.
Because the directions are very simple, and because if they were followed, Regulus would get to James's house quickly and would never admit that he loved or feared for his brother--I'm about to introduce three enormous complications.
"Well," a familiar voice said with amusement as he emerged from the owlery, "the prodigal son returneth."
Regulus looked up, icy dread seeping through his bones. No. Please, no.
Bellatrix.
And flanking her were her husband, Rodolphus Lestrange, and 'Cissa's intended, Lucius Malfoy.
In the MC-verse, Narcissa is the same age as Sirius, so she would be sixteen. Lucius, her betrothed husband, is six years older than Narcissa, MWPP, Lily and Snape, so he's twenty-two. I'm not sure how old Bellatrix and Rodolphus are. Twenty-four, perhaps.
Involuntarily, he moaned. He backed up against the post owlery door and pushed against it with all his might. It didn't budge.
Bellatrix seized his left hand. Rodolphus grabbed his right. The parcels of warm clothes he'd purchased in Diagon Alley fell from his arms into a soft, lumpy, useless pile on the pavement.
They pulled him forward. There was no time to protest or to retrieve what had been lost. And judging by their faces, there was no earthly point in doing so.
Regulus trudged between them, trying not to think about the implications of his cousin and in-laws searching for him, or of how Lucius was walking behind him in a perfect position to Avada Kedavra him, should he desire to do so.
Caught. Caught. And Sirius would never know how hard, how desperately hard, Regulus had tried to reach him…
Hard? shouted Phineas Nigellus, so loudly that Regulus tried to put his hands over his ears. You haven't even begun to try yet! Listen to me, you idiot. They haven't Portkeyed you back to Twelve Grimmauld Place yet, which probably means they want to intimidate you first. So the question is--are you going to give in? Let them hollow you out and turn you into one of them? Or, the voice said softly, does Sirius mean slightly more to you than the approval of creatures like these?
The main reason Phineas is in the story: he pushes Regulus to do what Regulus normally wouldn't.
For a single mad moment, Regulus saw himself walking between two hideous and impossibly overgrown Kreachers. The sight sickened him.
"Stop twitching," said Rodolphus irritably. "I might think you were trying to escape." He grinned humourlessly at Regulus, a smile as cold and as white as a winter moon.
"I was thinking," said Regulus, with all the chill dignity that an angry and frightened thirteen-year-old could manage. "I do that occasionally."
"Not often and not well," said Bellatrix with a smirk, "if thinking caused you to run away after your miserable sodomite of a brother. And don't tell me he's not. I've known about him since he was your age." She studied him for a moment, her expression an odd admixture of dispassionate curiosity and dreadful hunger. "Is that it? Are you like him? Were you hoping for a threesome with the Scottish boy and your brother?"
Bellatrix is very twisted on the subject of sex; for her, it's all about being in control. She views homosexuality as a weakness to be exploited.
And oh, yes, she would molest Regulus in a second if she thought he was gay, despite the fact that she's an adult and he's a child.
Regulus' gorge rose. He fought to keep himself from throwing up. "No," he said, his voice thick and choked. "I've never thought of any boy that way. Least of all my own brother."
"Bella," said Lucius in a reproving tone. Bellatrix simply ignored it.
"I tried to cure him once," she continued in a dreamlike tone. "He was just about your age, too. He looked very much like you...such a pretty boy."
As Sirius tells Remus in Thistlerose's story She Will Have Music. The molestation by Bellatrix is one of Sirius's ugliest secrets.
Rodolphus gazed venomously at Regulus.
Regulus shivered.
"He was hopeless, of course," said Bellatrix in a conversational tone. She eyed Regulus speculatively, as if wondering if he would be as uninterested in women as his brother. "Not that I didn't make an effort, but really, he had no talent in that regard. It was pathetic.
All of which she told Sirius at the time.
I suppose I was too much woman for someone like him."
And this is what she's been telling herself ever since.
"Too much woman? Or maybe not woman enough?" Regulus heard the words coming from his mouth, and wondered if somehow Sirius was speaking through him. "Or maybe not man enough..."
Regulus has just put his finger on the reason for Sirius's disinterest. Of course, that's not what Bellatrix wants to hear; it's the 1970s, and the concept of "converting" homosexuals by outstanding heterosexual sex is fairly widespread. It's even accepted by some psychiatrists.
Bellatrix stopped walking and stared at him in disbelief. Almost casually, she released his left hand and slapped him across the mouth with her right.
Regulus allowed his head to roll back, depriving the blow of much of its momentum. He sagged backwards, pulling his now free left arm across his stomach in a protective way. Frantically, he fumbled to retrieve his wand from his right-hand pocket.
Notice that Regulus doesn't even think about how reduce the impact of a blow; he does it automatically. Another clue, if any clues are needed, that Regulus has often been beaten in the past...probably by his mother.
Bellatrix already had her wand out. "Scindo!"
"Scindo" means "I cut" in Latin. This is one of the nastiest spells I've ever created.
Regulus screamed as he felt his skin slash open in a thousand places on his body, limbs, hands and feet, and then begin to bleed. He collapsed onto the street, struggling not to cry as his wounded legs struck the granite cobblestones.
He managed to ease his oaken wand from his right-hand pocket, wincing as he did so. He gripped it as tightly as he could in his left hand and waved it. "Stupefy!"
Since Regulus has his wand in his right-hand pocket and yet can use his wand with his left hand, he is probably ambidextrous.
Bella fell Stunned onto the street, face first.
"I--you--" Rodolphus glared at him. "That was a stupid thing to do, boy. Very stupid." So saying, he tightened his grip on Regulus' right arm, then gave it a firm wrench.
The world turned mist grey in front of Regulus' eyes. Sounds and colours seeped into nothingness. Pain was everywhere, licking at him with acidic flames. He looked at his broken right arm and wondered dimly why it was still there. Surely, from the way it felt, it should be no more than black and melted bones by now.
He heard a low, ululating moan coming from somewhere. He supposed it was coming from him. He didn't care.
I did NOT plan on having Rodolphus break Reg's right arm. He did that entirely on his own. He also complicated the plot enormously by doing so.
"Enough," he heard Lucius snap at Rodolphus. He pointed toward an antique and rusty pump a hundred or so yards away with his cane. A Portkey, Regulus realised. "Take your woman and go. I will take care of this."
There is an antique pump in the middle of Melrose, preserved for some historical reason that I can no longer discern. It doesn't fit in with the surrounding business district at all, so I decided that it was a permanent Portkey.
Rodolphus said nothing. However, a few minutes later, when Regulus dared to risk a cautious look at the world, he noted that Bellatrix and Rodolphus were both gone.
"Stand up," Lucius commanded. There was a razor-sharp edge to his voice which said he had best not be disobeyed.
Regulus forced himself to his knees, wincing at the pressure of rock against open wounds, then braced his left hand against the cobblestone street.
A roaring filled his ears, and he almost fell over onto his fractured arm.
"I can't," he whispered. "Sorry..."
There was a long pause. Then strong hands pulled him to his feet.
"Thank you," Regulus mumbled.
Lucius gazed down at him with the expression of a cordon bleu chef forced to contemplate Cockroach Clusters candy.
Candy which, according to the Lexicon, contains real cockroaches. I couldn't think of anything more disgusting.
"Do not thank me. My only wish is to get you home. Come along." So saying, he began walking toward the pump, clearly expecting Regulus to follow him.
It took a second for Regulus to realise that no one was holding him any longer. That he was free.
If this seems entirely too easy--you're right. It is. Regulus isn't going to figure that out for a while, however.
Hesitantly, he took one step in the opposite direction.
It was like walking on knives.
Never mind. It was still walking.
He crept down one street, then another, then another, choosing streets at random to prevent Lucius from figuring out which way he had gone.
If only he could get out of Melrose. A pity that there was no Knight Bus, but it was still afternoon.
My mistake. I thought that the Knight Bus was strictly a NIGHT bus.
Then, in front of the grocer's on High Street, he saw a red-haired woman--accompanied by several red-haired children--putting groceries in a station wagon.
Weasleys, thought Regulus exultantly. Everyone knew that they were daft about Muggle devices. He was saved. Lucius Malfoy--not to mention his blood relatives--would never look for him among the Weasleys.
Redheads in the Potterverse are always Weasleys. I'm using that piece of fanon here so that I can explode it in the next section.
Oh, and Lucius IS a distant cousin--all purebloods are related, after all--but Regulus thinks of him more as a "cousin-in-law" by virtue of his engagement to Narcissa.
He limped over to the woman before he could change his mind.
"Excuse me," he asked politely. "Could I please have a lift?
***
21 December 1976, 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
They were Muggles.
Muggles.
And here the fanon explodes.
He hadn't realised it at first--not until the woman, who had introduced herself as Kate MacGregor of Carlisle, and who had confessed to an absurd weakness for the Selkirk Bannocks sold at Dalgetty & Sons' Bakery, had suggested taking him to a hospital to get his cuts cleaned and bandaged up.
The trip from Carlisle to Melrose is 58.35 miles and takes an hour and a half. Kate MacGregor REALLY loves Selkirk Bannocks. (I read about one man who drove from London to Melrose and back--a total of 707.26 miles--every two weeks for those bannocks, though, so Kate's love of the cakes is a little less extreme.)
More importantly, Carlisle is about halfway between Melrose and Windermere--just about forty-six miles from James's house.
Regulus had suffered from Scindo wounds before. They don't heal when treated non-magically, he thought wearily. They don't even heal if you use basic medical magic. You have to use the right countercurse, or you just make the wounds and the pain worse.
Remember when I said that Scindo was a nasty curse? Yeah. Also, Regulus has suffered this kind of injury before--which again hints at abuse.
Thank Merlin for Concealment Charms. If she saw that my right arm was broken and took me to a hospital, and the doctors notified my parents...
Concealment Charms are canonical. I think of them as illusions. Regulus's broken arm looks perfectly healthy. He hasn't used Concealment Charms on the Scindo wounds because he fears he might make the wounds and the pain worse.
"I promise," he said earnestly, "I'll get them looked at as soon as I find my brother." After all, he told himself, it wasn't exactly a lie.
"So how did you lose your brother?" That was Moira, the smallest MacGregor at the age of six, and terminally cursed, in Regulus' view, with frizzy orange hair and buck teeth.
No, she's no relation to Hermione. I just decided that I couldn't abide an adorable little girl in this scene. Also, there are a lot of redheads in my family, and I know that orange hair is common among redheads, so someone had to get less than gorgeous hair colour.
Incidentally, the description of the four redheaded MacGregors echoes an early scene in the book Gone With The Wind, when Scarlett and her father meet Mrs. Tarleton and the four redheaded Tarleton girls, who are out on a carriage ride.
"We had a fight. About something he did." Regulus hoped she'd leave it there.
"What did he do?" demanded eleven-year-old Samuel, who had brick-red hair, round spectacles and an owlish expression.
"You shouldn't ask." That was Will, who was a year older than Regulus. He was skinny, auburn-haired and very definitely the boss of the MacGregor clan--at least the portion of it that was fourteen and under. "Maybe he doesn't want to talk about it."
"It can't have been too bad," said thirteen-year-old Jennie. Her hair was mostly brown with a few copper highlights, while her face had been liberally peppered with freckles. "Otherwise, you wouldn't be going after him."
What was Regulus supposed to say to that? Yes, it was bad, it was disgusting, and he was furious with his brother for defying their parents in such a spectacularly depraved way. But the idea of never again seeing the boy who had protected him from the elf-heads that watched, from Kreacher, from his parents' wrath, of never hearing his brother teasing him or laughing over some stupid joke, of having to accept that his brother no longer existed in the eyes of his family...
No. That was unthinkable.
Regulus thinks of Sirius's homosexuality as being based on defiance rather than desire, which is causing half the misunderstanding right there. And he really does love his brother, which makes the anger and confusion worse.
"What do you do," he said slowly, and trying to avoid the four pairs of eyes peering at him from the back seat, "if someone who really, really matters does something that you really, really hate?"
Will looked thoughtful. "Depends on why, I guess. Did your brother do something bad to hurt you?"
"I didn't say I was talking about my brother."
"No, you didn't," said the Muggle boy easily. "What he did--did he do it on purpose to hurt you?"
"No," said Regulus a trifle sullenly. Even in his wildest dreams, he couldn't believe that.
"To hurt anyone?"
"Maybe our parents."
"He told them what he was going to do, then?"
Regulus winced. "Uh--no. I told them." After the House Elf found a love letter he was writing to Remus, he thought. Then they asked me. And I told them. Pretty quickly, too. After all, they were going to find out anyway.
Yes, he's rationalising; he feels guilty. He's also a bit off-centre because Will, a Muggle and therefore a supposed inferior, is figuring things out so quickly. Regulus is rapidly entering a world where everything he thought he knew is turning out to be wrong.
There was a long silence, broken by Moira's chanting:
"Tell tale tit
Its tongue shall be split,
And all the dogs
In our town
Shall have a little bit."
Victorian nursery rhyme. I found it in E. Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet. It seemed like something that a six-year-old would chant, and it balanced Phineas's rhyme in This Bird Has Flown.
"Stop it!" Regulus shouted as he pounded on the dashboard with his wounded hands, almost welcoming the pain because it blotted out the words that kept echoing in his mind:
/There was a bitch had three whelps.../
/"If you like playing the bitch so much, here are some real dogs."/
/All the dogs in our town.../
"What did you do?" asked Will quietly. "Besides telling on him?"
Regulus closed his eyes. "I...I set the dogs on him."
He could feel the car swinging over to the side of the road and stopping. He could almost sense Mrs. MacGregor's eyes boring through his skin to see what kind of a person he truly was.
"Why," Mrs. MacGregor demanded in a voice like cold iron, "did you do that?"
"I can't say," Regulus all but wailed. "I can't..."
Homosexuality in the 1970s was not, for most people, a matter of pride, tolerance or acceptance. Regulus isn't kidding when he says that his brother disgraced the family--that's how he sees it. Sirius's being gay is a shame, a disgrace and a stain on the family honour. Telling a perfect stranger about this would be--well, unthinkable, to use one of Reg's favourite words.
"And why," Mrs. MacGregor asked in that same cold, terrible, iron voice, " are you going after him? To finish the job?"
"No! I--" Regulus stopped to blow his nose on his handkerchief.
I couldn't picture Regulus without a handkerchief, any more than I could picture Sirius with one.
"I did something wrong. I know that. I don't know how to fix it. I don't know if it can be fixed. I just know that I have to go after him and tell him I'm sorry. And that I'll make it up to him. I don't know how, but I've got to. And I have to find him now, because if I wait, Mother and Father will make sure I never speak to him again. They're disgusted with him. And--probably--with me too, now." He stopped, opened his eyes and took several long, shuddering breaths.
This is Regulus's first admission that a) he was wrong, b) "I'm sorry" isn't going to be enough, and he's going to have to atone in other ways as well, c) this has to be done now before his parents can prevent it and d) he's taking a stand against his whole family, including his parents, for the sake of the older brother he loves.
"Can't you just call or write...?" Jennie asked.
Thistlerose pointed out that a Muggle kid would think about methods somewhat more practical than Regulus's haring off into the blue, so Jennie gets to ask about telephones and snail mail.
Regulus wondered briefly what "calling" was. Doubtless a Muggle thing. As for sending an owl post, he dismissed that automatically. "I hurt him in person," he said, inwardly cringing. "I have to make up with him in person. He'll probably kill me, but--I have to." I wish I didn't have to, he added silently, but I do.
Regulus really does believe that Sirius is going to hurt him very badly because of his tattling and because of the Crups. This is logical, from his viewpoint: If you do something wrong, you get punished, usually with physical pain, so that you know not to do it again. The fact that Regulus is still going after Sirius despite his conviction that Sirius is going to harm him says a lot about how much he cares for his brother and how fundamentally decent he is, since he's trying to do the right thing even if it means suffering.
This resolve will be tested very shortly.
No one had much to say after that. Regulus kept his head turned facing the window so that he wouldn't have to meet anyone's eyes. He chewed his lip until it was bloody.
Please, Sirius, he mutely implored his brother. Be all right. Please. Please forgive me.
At last the station wagon stopped in the centre of Carlisle. Mrs. MacGregor pushed a button and opened his car door.
"Well, here you are," she said firmly. "We have a ways to go yet, but I think you'll do better here in the centre. More food. More transportation."
She's fair. She doesn't like what he's done, but she's fair.
"Thank you," said Regulus, meaning it. "I--I never met anyone like you or your children before."
They're his first Muggles, actually.
Mrs. MacGregor bowed her head solemnly. "Good luck with you and your brother."
Regulus nodded.
The silence stretched into awkwardness.
He got out of the car. After a minute, he remembered to close the door as well.
Regulus's ignorance of Muggle inventions briefly kicked in.
The MacGregors' car took off at high speed.
Carlisle's afternoon streets were all but empty, except for him.
Better find the magical area of town, he thought. Find a shop that sells sandwiches or something, and wait till evening, when the Knight Bus runs.
A snowflake landed on his cheek.
Great. Snow. Well, at least, he didn't have to be out in it.
He walked to the corner of East Tower and Lowther, the wounds on the soles of his feet causing him to wince as he did so.
Yes, there are two streets in Carlisle called East Tower and Lowther, and they do meet. I believe they're in the centre of the business district.
The snow began to fall faster, with small gusts of winds causing the snow to swirl around him as if he were the centre of a sleety galaxy.
Now we know why practically no one else is out--a bad snowstorm has been predicted, and is just beginning.
Then, suddenly, he heard a dreadful howl--still several miles away, but closing fast.
Oh Merlin.
Wind, his mind gibbered, it's just the wind, howling through the north, winds blow during snowstorms, that happens all the time, nothing to be afraid of, nothing at all...
Regulus stared off in the direction from which the howl had come and broke into a run, as one word kept beating in his head like the boom of a snare drum:
Crups.
Karma's a bitch.
***
The first three paragraphs, not counting the date, are from Thistlerose's fanfic, This Bird Has Flown.
Most of this you can figure out from the text, but to summarise what happened in This Bird Has Flown:
It's the Christmas holidays, 1976, and sixteen-year-old Sirius is trying to endure being home with his family. Things are going...well, not great, but tolerably...until Kreacher, who searches the boys' rooms periodically, finds a letter Sirius has been writing to Remus. The identity of the person Sirius is writing to isn't clear to his family, but it's VERY clear that Sirius is writing a love letter to a boy. Thirteen-year-old Regulus is questioned, and reveals that yes, Sirius is having an affair with a boy at school. There's a thundering great row. Sirius flees the house. Regulus, furious at his brother, tells Sirius, "If you like playing the bitch so much, here are some real dogs," and sics the family Crups on him.
Once Sirius is gone (and fleeing to James's house), Regulus speaks to Phineas Nigellus's portrait, learning some key facts about his family that he never suspected. He then finds a photograph which proves to him that Phineas was telling the truth. Remorseful, Regulus tries to go after Sirius, but is dragged back to the house by Kreacher…and Regulus loses his last chance to reconcile with his brother.
It was brilliantly written. And it bothered me. Thirteen is very young to lose a brother for good. And I knew that, no matter how stupidly he'd behaved, Regulus did love Sirius. I wanted Reg to admit that. And I wanted Reg to give Kreacher, whom he hated and feared, a good swift kick in the nose.
So I started writing this story, to allow both those things to happen. This is a fanfic of a fanfic, folks.
***
ON A WING AND A PRAYER
The title is from this song from 1943:
One of our planes was missing, two hours overdue.
One of our planes was missing, with all its gallant crew.
The radio sets were humming, they waited for a word;
Then a voice broke through the humming and this is what they heard:
[Chorus]
"Coming in on a wing and a prayer
Coming in on a wing and a prayer
Though there's one motor gone, we can still carry on,
Coming in on a wing and a prayer
What a show, what a fight,
Yes, we really hit our target for tonight!
How we sing as we limp through the air,
Look below, there's our field over there.
With our full crew aboard and our trust in the Lord,
We're coming in on a wing and a prayer.
And this is pretty much the situation in this story. Sirius is missing, and Regulus isn't likely to hear a word about where he is, so he's going to have to go after his brother. Also, I'm giving fair warning--Regulus is not going to come out of this unhurt, and he is going to be in danger. But he's going to carry on anyway. (I had to put Regulus through hell. Otherwise he wouldn't admit how he felt.)
20 December 1976, 9:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.
Thistlerose provided the date in This Bird Has Flown. I came up with the time.
Rain still pounded the pavement. The air was chilling. He hadn’t thought to grab a jacket on his way out. It didn’t matter. There’d be hot chocolate on the Knight Bus. He could stand the cold until he saw Sirius again.
He didn’t hear the door open behind him, didn’t hear the footsteps. He pulled his wand from his pocket, and began to raise it--but a long-fingered hand clamped around his wrist and yanked it down, and then Kreacher was on him, one arm around his waist, dragging him back.
"Mustn’t do it, young master," the House Elf hissed. "Mustn’t leave. Mustn’t break his poor mother’s heart, mustn’t be like the other one, the filthy, sodomising, fornicating--"
Regulus twisted around till he was facing Kreacher. "I order you to let me go," he said, wondering if his command would be enough, and doubting it would. Kreacher idolised Lavinia Black, and felt that his mistress's orders might as well have been pronouncements of Merlin himself. But Lavinia Black's thirteen-year-old son was another matter.
I'm operating in a variant of Thistlerose's Midnight Conversations universe. Therefore, Sirius's and Regulus's parents have the same names as they do in the MC-verse: Rigel and Lavinia. Rigel means "foot" and is the brightest star in the constellation of Orion, though its other name is Beta Orionis. (Alpha Orionis, otherwise known as Betelgeuse, is a variable star and was misclassified.) Lavinia is Latin and means "purified." I honestly cannot think of a more serendipitous name for a woman so obsessed with blood purity.
The House Elf, as he'd half-expected, ignored him. "Mustn't leave, young master," he said in an ingratiating whine. "That would grieve his poor mother, oh, it would tear her heart out, it would..."
This is canonical. Elves are a lot stronger than they look.
"Let. Go. Of. Me. NOW," grunted Regulus, struggling to free himself from Kreacher's spindly but strong arms. Please, Merlin, if I could just lift my wand, and signal the Knight Bus...
Kreacher smiled unpleasantly. "Oh no, young master. Mistress said to do whatever I had to do to keep you here."
Regulus glared at the smirking House Elf gripping him about the waist and decided, quite abruptly, that he had had enough.
Turning Point #1 for Regulus. There are several throughout the story.
"Come, now, young master," chanted Kreacher as he pulled him toward the door of Twelve Grimmauld Place, "enough of this nonsense. Mistress would not like it if you were anything like the one who fled, obscene and unclean monstrosity that he is--oof!"
For Regulus had leaned forward, put all of his weight down on Kreacher's instep, and pulled back as pain forced the House Elf to loosen his grip.
Regulus lifted his wand arm.
No sign of the Knight Bus. Perhaps he wasn't close enough to the street for the conductor to see his signal.
Kreacher hissed. "Evil young master, hurting poor Kreacher," he said, glaring up at Regulus. He backed away and scowled. "What did poor Kreacher ever do to him?"
The brazen effrontery of this statement outraged Regulus as perhaps nothing else could have done on this impossible day. "Do you want a list? In chronological order, perhaps?"
Ouch. That should be "as perhaps nothing else could have on this impossible day." The word "done" isn't necessary.
On the plus side, I do like Regulus getting a bit sarcastic here. It seems fully in character for a thirteen-year-old under stress.
The House Elf cringed, hunching almost double in what should have been a parody of servility--no, not really cringing, as both of his long-fingered hands reached out, encircled Regulus' left ankle and started to pull him off-balance.
Without thinking, Regulus pressed his left foot firmly against the ground, drew back his right foot and kicked Kreacher in the nose.
I took immense pleasure in writing that line.
Kreacher wailed, and pressed his hands against his smashed and bleeding nose.
Regulus wheeled about, and raced for the kerb, extending his wand arm as far as he could stretch it.
Without warning, his feet began to slip and slide as if he were running on ice. Kreacher again, he thought wearily.
House elves do have wandless magic. It stands to reason that Kreacher wouldn't be completely helpless, broken nose or not.
He swivelled about, pointed his wand at the House Elf and fairly shouted the spell. "Petrificus Totalus!"
The House Elf fell to the ground, completely paralysed.
Regulus was unable to suppress a whoop of joy.
At that moment, a triple-decker, violently purple bus materialised in front of him. He scrambled aboard, sitting on the four-poster brass bed behind the driver.
This is it, he thought with something approaching dim wonder. I'm really doing it. I'm really and truly running away from home.
This deliberately echoes Eleanor's last lines in The Haunting of Hill House:
I am really doing it, she thought, turning the wheel to send the car directly at the great tree at the curve of the driveway. I am really doing it, I am doing it all by myself, now, at last: this is me. I am really really really doing this by myself.
In the unending, crashing second before the car hurled into the tree, she thought clearly, Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don't they stop me?
If a reader picks up on this allusion, he or she might also pick up a few clues about the rest of the story. For instance, Regulus hasn't thought about what he's doing. This sojourn of his isn't going to be as easy as he thinks. Fate/karma is involved. "They"--his family--are going to try to stop him. He's going to be in severe danger, from them and from the journey itself. And there's a strong possibility--one might say "probability"--of death.
The notion was vaguely unreal. Leaving the familiar awfulness of his mother and Kreacher and Twelve Grimmauld Place was, for one brief moment, unthinkable.
For a moment, he glanced longingly back his home. His former home. If he left now, he'd never be allowed to return. And how he was going to survive, he didn't know. He was only thirteen, and there wasn't a soul in Slytherin House whom he would have trusted in an emergency. Which meant he was going to have to trust to the charity of his brother's friends, and wasn't THAT going to be fun?
Merlin only knew how his brother's friends would react when they learned that he'd sicced the Crups on Sirius.
Sirius would probably kill him for that. Not that he didn't deserve it.
I have a tendency to have my shady characters realise that they deserve punishment for their sins.
"Youngster?"
Regulus looked up and saw the conductor. "Yes?"
"Yer do want to go someplace? Yer did flag us down, dincha?"
"Yes," said Regulus. "How much to go to Mel--no, not Melrose. Diagon Alley. I've got a few things I have to pick up first."
"Four Sickles, " said the conductor. "Five for the trip and hot chocolate."
The fare is low because both Twelve Grimmauld Place and Diagon Alley are in London.
Regulus counted out five Sickles. He had just begun to sip his hot chocolate when the door to Twelve Grimmauld Place swung open and a small, dignified figure in black stepped out, glancing this way and that.
The bus gave a tremendous lurch, knocking him backwards and nearly causing him to upset his hot chocolate. It reappeared moments later beside a sign reading WELCOME TO CARDIFF.
The Knight Bus tends to go rocketing all over the British Isles, with no particular rhyme or reason to its appearances. Cardiff is in Wales, 151.18 miles west of London and 361.22 miles south of Melrose, Scotland.
Regulus closed his eyes and pressed his head against the cool window, hoping it would take some of the pain from his hot, stinging eyes. "Goodbye..." he whispered, as he wondered what, exactly, he was going to miss. Or who.
***
21 December 1976, 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
He ended up in Melrose, Scotland perhaps ten hours later, laden with the maximum number of Galleons that the goblins at Gringotts had allowed him to withdraw, warm clothes, gloves and boots for Sirius and himself, and an apology in the form of a Christmas present. An apology that he only hoped that Sirius would accept.
Or was alive to accept.
I hope he's all right, he thought miserably, scuffling through the cobblestone streets.
Some streets in Melrose are cobblestoned, though not all.
He'd been worried about his brother's health since the night before. Crups were nice to wizards, and ferociously loyal--not surprising, as wizards had bred them, originally, from pit bulls--but the Crups his family owned were not house pets. Those Crups were trained guard dogs for the House of Black, and they never forgot it.
The Harry Potter Lexicon describes a Crup as "a magical creature which strongly resembles a Jack Russell terrier, except that it has a forked tail. Crups are extremely loyal to wizards and ferocious toward Muggles. They eat almost anything."
I thought that a Jack Russell terrier was another name for a pit bull. If it isn't, I apologise. That is, however, what I picture Crups looking like.
/"If you like playing the bitch so much, here are some real dogs."/
I shouldn't have sicced the dogs on him.
But I didn't know! he shouted silently. I didn't know...
Didn't know what? a voice deep within him asked. That they could hurt him? Cripple him? Kill him, maybe?
"Stop it," he muttered aloud.
The voice, which sounded suspiciously like that of his great-great-grandfather, Phineas Nigellus, sneered. What's the matter, don't want to face the fact that you set him up to be torn to shreds?
First appearance of Phineas in this story. The portrait is still back at Twelve Grimmauld Place, but that's not going to stop Phineas from having his say at all.
"Stop it, I said!" Regulus repeated angrily, clenching and unclenching his fists.
Your brother, Phineas said, sounding disgusted. Your own brother. The boy you threw yourself into Slytherin for so that there would be one Slytherin he couldn't hate. You had the effrontery to tell my idiotic great-grandson and that gold-digging bitch he married about your brother's proclivities--knowing how they would react to the news of what he'd been doing with another man--
I didn't tell them anything Kreacher hadn't told them already! Regulus mentally yelled at the voice.
--and then you set the dogs on him.
And hello, backstory!
The last sentence resounded like the clap of judgement.
Regulus closed his eyes, sagged against the white brickfront of Alex Dalgetty & Sons' Bakery, ignored, as best he could, the intoxicating scents of black buns, savouries, cakes and Selkirk Bannocks, and rubbed his temples.
Yes, there is a bakery with this name in Melrose, Scotland. This is a black bun; this is a Selkirk Bannock, for which the bakery is famous.
Oh, Merlin, I'm not a bastard. Please.
I didn't want to kill my brother.
Make him be alive.
How long he stood there, he was never sure, but when he opened his eyes, a young Scottish policeman was eyeing him. He stepped away from the shop hastily, and scurried off in the opposite direction in order to find the post owlery.
When he found the owlery, which was in an entirely different part of town than the Muggle post office, it was already close to noon; by the time that he reached the counter, it was almost one. The woman behind the counter, a round-faced middle-aged witch with dusty brown hair and a gap between her teeth, smiled pleasantly at him. "Yes? What can I do for you, dearie?"
"I'd..." Regulus forced himself to speak the hated name. "I'd like to know where the Lupin residence is, please. I know they live in Melrose, but not the address."
The witch looked perplexed. "The Lupins live several miles outside of town, dear. But if you're looking to go there, they're not home the now. They're off in France, the three of them, and will be for the next few weeks."
Conforming to the MC-verse. Because Remus is in France with his parents, he doesn't know yet that Sirius has run away.
The news felt like a hammer blow.
"I--I see," Regulus whispered. "Thank you."
The witch cocked her head at him, resembling, momentarily, a plump and worried tabby cat. "Why would you be wanting to find the Lupins? You're no kin to them, I can tell that by looking at you."
"Why would you be wanting" is an idiom my grandfather from Dundee commonly used, so I employed it here.
"My brother ran away from home," said Regulus dully, wondering why grownups always demanded explanations from children--and why he, a Slytherin, couldn't seem to lie on the spur of the moment.
Indicating that Regulus is not the ideal Slytherin, although he tries to be.
"I thought he might be here."
"Not the dark-haired boy that was here the past summer?"
Regulus and Sirius look a great deal alike, and in the MC-verse, Sirius and Remus went into Melrose a number of times during the summer between fifth and sixth year.
Regulus nodded.
"And you've come to fetch him back home?" The owlery witch pursed her lips, as if to say she didn't think much of that idea.
"Merlin, no!" As the words burst from him, his cheeks crimsoned, much to his shame. He hated losing control and he hated blushing. Both were so girly.
Just to let everyone know--Regulus has NOT changed his opinion of homosexuality overnight, despite the fact that he's going after his brother. He's still homophobic, very much so.
He hastened to explain. "I--we had a fight. I did something bad. Something that I have to apologise for. Only now I can't find him." He hung his head and scuffed the toe of his black leather shoe against the hardwood floor.
"I wish I could help you," said the owlery witch. "Have you checked with his other friends? They might have seen him."
Regulus could have kicked himself. Of course. James. He went to James. Sirius wouldn't want Lupin to know what had happened, since Lupin was the cause of it, but James, his best friend, was a different matter. It was so simple. How had he missed it?
"Is the Lake District very far from here?" he asked in a trembling voice.
In the MC-verse, the Potters live in the town of Windermere, in the Lake District.
"Not terribly. Might be better if you stuck to Muggle transportation, though. You'd likely get there in less time. And you might want to send your brother's friend an owl to let him know you're on your way."
Regulus thought of trying to explain unleashing the Crups, and winced. "I don't think I'd better do that. Thank you."
"Just as you say, dearie," the witch was saying as he turned around and headed out the door.
Because the directions are very simple, and because if they were followed, Regulus would get to James's house quickly and would never admit that he loved or feared for his brother--I'm about to introduce three enormous complications.
"Well," a familiar voice said with amusement as he emerged from the owlery, "the prodigal son returneth."
Regulus looked up, icy dread seeping through his bones. No. Please, no.
Bellatrix.
And flanking her were her husband, Rodolphus Lestrange, and 'Cissa's intended, Lucius Malfoy.
In the MC-verse, Narcissa is the same age as Sirius, so she would be sixteen. Lucius, her betrothed husband, is six years older than Narcissa, MWPP, Lily and Snape, so he's twenty-two. I'm not sure how old Bellatrix and Rodolphus are. Twenty-four, perhaps.
Involuntarily, he moaned. He backed up against the post owlery door and pushed against it with all his might. It didn't budge.
Bellatrix seized his left hand. Rodolphus grabbed his right. The parcels of warm clothes he'd purchased in Diagon Alley fell from his arms into a soft, lumpy, useless pile on the pavement.
They pulled him forward. There was no time to protest or to retrieve what had been lost. And judging by their faces, there was no earthly point in doing so.
Regulus trudged between them, trying not to think about the implications of his cousin and in-laws searching for him, or of how Lucius was walking behind him in a perfect position to Avada Kedavra him, should he desire to do so.
Caught. Caught. And Sirius would never know how hard, how desperately hard, Regulus had tried to reach him…
Hard? shouted Phineas Nigellus, so loudly that Regulus tried to put his hands over his ears. You haven't even begun to try yet! Listen to me, you idiot. They haven't Portkeyed you back to Twelve Grimmauld Place yet, which probably means they want to intimidate you first. So the question is--are you going to give in? Let them hollow you out and turn you into one of them? Or, the voice said softly, does Sirius mean slightly more to you than the approval of creatures like these?
The main reason Phineas is in the story: he pushes Regulus to do what Regulus normally wouldn't.
For a single mad moment, Regulus saw himself walking between two hideous and impossibly overgrown Kreachers. The sight sickened him.
"Stop twitching," said Rodolphus irritably. "I might think you were trying to escape." He grinned humourlessly at Regulus, a smile as cold and as white as a winter moon.
"I was thinking," said Regulus, with all the chill dignity that an angry and frightened thirteen-year-old could manage. "I do that occasionally."
"Not often and not well," said Bellatrix with a smirk, "if thinking caused you to run away after your miserable sodomite of a brother. And don't tell me he's not. I've known about him since he was your age." She studied him for a moment, her expression an odd admixture of dispassionate curiosity and dreadful hunger. "Is that it? Are you like him? Were you hoping for a threesome with the Scottish boy and your brother?"
Bellatrix is very twisted on the subject of sex; for her, it's all about being in control. She views homosexuality as a weakness to be exploited.
And oh, yes, she would molest Regulus in a second if she thought he was gay, despite the fact that she's an adult and he's a child.
Regulus' gorge rose. He fought to keep himself from throwing up. "No," he said, his voice thick and choked. "I've never thought of any boy that way. Least of all my own brother."
"Bella," said Lucius in a reproving tone. Bellatrix simply ignored it.
"I tried to cure him once," she continued in a dreamlike tone. "He was just about your age, too. He looked very much like you...such a pretty boy."
As Sirius tells Remus in Thistlerose's story She Will Have Music. The molestation by Bellatrix is one of Sirius's ugliest secrets.
Rodolphus gazed venomously at Regulus.
Regulus shivered.
"He was hopeless, of course," said Bellatrix in a conversational tone. She eyed Regulus speculatively, as if wondering if he would be as uninterested in women as his brother. "Not that I didn't make an effort, but really, he had no talent in that regard. It was pathetic.
All of which she told Sirius at the time.
I suppose I was too much woman for someone like him."
And this is what she's been telling herself ever since.
"Too much woman? Or maybe not woman enough?" Regulus heard the words coming from his mouth, and wondered if somehow Sirius was speaking through him. "Or maybe not man enough..."
Regulus has just put his finger on the reason for Sirius's disinterest. Of course, that's not what Bellatrix wants to hear; it's the 1970s, and the concept of "converting" homosexuals by outstanding heterosexual sex is fairly widespread. It's even accepted by some psychiatrists.
Bellatrix stopped walking and stared at him in disbelief. Almost casually, she released his left hand and slapped him across the mouth with her right.
Regulus allowed his head to roll back, depriving the blow of much of its momentum. He sagged backwards, pulling his now free left arm across his stomach in a protective way. Frantically, he fumbled to retrieve his wand from his right-hand pocket.
Notice that Regulus doesn't even think about how reduce the impact of a blow; he does it automatically. Another clue, if any clues are needed, that Regulus has often been beaten in the past...probably by his mother.
Bellatrix already had her wand out. "Scindo!"
"Scindo" means "I cut" in Latin. This is one of the nastiest spells I've ever created.
Regulus screamed as he felt his skin slash open in a thousand places on his body, limbs, hands and feet, and then begin to bleed. He collapsed onto the street, struggling not to cry as his wounded legs struck the granite cobblestones.
He managed to ease his oaken wand from his right-hand pocket, wincing as he did so. He gripped it as tightly as he could in his left hand and waved it. "Stupefy!"
Since Regulus has his wand in his right-hand pocket and yet can use his wand with his left hand, he is probably ambidextrous.
Bella fell Stunned onto the street, face first.
"I--you--" Rodolphus glared at him. "That was a stupid thing to do, boy. Very stupid." So saying, he tightened his grip on Regulus' right arm, then gave it a firm wrench.
The world turned mist grey in front of Regulus' eyes. Sounds and colours seeped into nothingness. Pain was everywhere, licking at him with acidic flames. He looked at his broken right arm and wondered dimly why it was still there. Surely, from the way it felt, it should be no more than black and melted bones by now.
He heard a low, ululating moan coming from somewhere. He supposed it was coming from him. He didn't care.
I did NOT plan on having Rodolphus break Reg's right arm. He did that entirely on his own. He also complicated the plot enormously by doing so.
"Enough," he heard Lucius snap at Rodolphus. He pointed toward an antique and rusty pump a hundred or so yards away with his cane. A Portkey, Regulus realised. "Take your woman and go. I will take care of this."
There is an antique pump in the middle of Melrose, preserved for some historical reason that I can no longer discern. It doesn't fit in with the surrounding business district at all, so I decided that it was a permanent Portkey.
Rodolphus said nothing. However, a few minutes later, when Regulus dared to risk a cautious look at the world, he noted that Bellatrix and Rodolphus were both gone.
"Stand up," Lucius commanded. There was a razor-sharp edge to his voice which said he had best not be disobeyed.
Regulus forced himself to his knees, wincing at the pressure of rock against open wounds, then braced his left hand against the cobblestone street.
A roaring filled his ears, and he almost fell over onto his fractured arm.
"I can't," he whispered. "Sorry..."
There was a long pause. Then strong hands pulled him to his feet.
"Thank you," Regulus mumbled.
Lucius gazed down at him with the expression of a cordon bleu chef forced to contemplate Cockroach Clusters candy.
Candy which, according to the Lexicon, contains real cockroaches. I couldn't think of anything more disgusting.
"Do not thank me. My only wish is to get you home. Come along." So saying, he began walking toward the pump, clearly expecting Regulus to follow him.
It took a second for Regulus to realise that no one was holding him any longer. That he was free.
If this seems entirely too easy--you're right. It is. Regulus isn't going to figure that out for a while, however.
Hesitantly, he took one step in the opposite direction.
It was like walking on knives.
Never mind. It was still walking.
He crept down one street, then another, then another, choosing streets at random to prevent Lucius from figuring out which way he had gone.
If only he could get out of Melrose. A pity that there was no Knight Bus, but it was still afternoon.
My mistake. I thought that the Knight Bus was strictly a NIGHT bus.
Then, in front of the grocer's on High Street, he saw a red-haired woman--accompanied by several red-haired children--putting groceries in a station wagon.
Weasleys, thought Regulus exultantly. Everyone knew that they were daft about Muggle devices. He was saved. Lucius Malfoy--not to mention his blood relatives--would never look for him among the Weasleys.
Redheads in the Potterverse are always Weasleys. I'm using that piece of fanon here so that I can explode it in the next section.
Oh, and Lucius IS a distant cousin--all purebloods are related, after all--but Regulus thinks of him more as a "cousin-in-law" by virtue of his engagement to Narcissa.
He limped over to the woman before he could change his mind.
"Excuse me," he asked politely. "Could I please have a lift?
***
21 December 1976, 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
They were Muggles.
Muggles.
And here the fanon explodes.
He hadn't realised it at first--not until the woman, who had introduced herself as Kate MacGregor of Carlisle, and who had confessed to an absurd weakness for the Selkirk Bannocks sold at Dalgetty & Sons' Bakery, had suggested taking him to a hospital to get his cuts cleaned and bandaged up.
The trip from Carlisle to Melrose is 58.35 miles and takes an hour and a half. Kate MacGregor REALLY loves Selkirk Bannocks. (I read about one man who drove from London to Melrose and back--a total of 707.26 miles--every two weeks for those bannocks, though, so Kate's love of the cakes is a little less extreme.)
More importantly, Carlisle is about halfway between Melrose and Windermere--just about forty-six miles from James's house.
Regulus had suffered from Scindo wounds before. They don't heal when treated non-magically, he thought wearily. They don't even heal if you use basic medical magic. You have to use the right countercurse, or you just make the wounds and the pain worse.
Remember when I said that Scindo was a nasty curse? Yeah. Also, Regulus has suffered this kind of injury before--which again hints at abuse.
Thank Merlin for Concealment Charms. If she saw that my right arm was broken and took me to a hospital, and the doctors notified my parents...
Concealment Charms are canonical. I think of them as illusions. Regulus's broken arm looks perfectly healthy. He hasn't used Concealment Charms on the Scindo wounds because he fears he might make the wounds and the pain worse.
"I promise," he said earnestly, "I'll get them looked at as soon as I find my brother." After all, he told himself, it wasn't exactly a lie.
"So how did you lose your brother?" That was Moira, the smallest MacGregor at the age of six, and terminally cursed, in Regulus' view, with frizzy orange hair and buck teeth.
No, she's no relation to Hermione. I just decided that I couldn't abide an adorable little girl in this scene. Also, there are a lot of redheads in my family, and I know that orange hair is common among redheads, so someone had to get less than gorgeous hair colour.
Incidentally, the description of the four redheaded MacGregors echoes an early scene in the book Gone With The Wind, when Scarlett and her father meet Mrs. Tarleton and the four redheaded Tarleton girls, who are out on a carriage ride.
"We had a fight. About something he did." Regulus hoped she'd leave it there.
"What did he do?" demanded eleven-year-old Samuel, who had brick-red hair, round spectacles and an owlish expression.
"You shouldn't ask." That was Will, who was a year older than Regulus. He was skinny, auburn-haired and very definitely the boss of the MacGregor clan--at least the portion of it that was fourteen and under. "Maybe he doesn't want to talk about it."
"It can't have been too bad," said thirteen-year-old Jennie. Her hair was mostly brown with a few copper highlights, while her face had been liberally peppered with freckles. "Otherwise, you wouldn't be going after him."
What was Regulus supposed to say to that? Yes, it was bad, it was disgusting, and he was furious with his brother for defying their parents in such a spectacularly depraved way. But the idea of never again seeing the boy who had protected him from the elf-heads that watched, from Kreacher, from his parents' wrath, of never hearing his brother teasing him or laughing over some stupid joke, of having to accept that his brother no longer existed in the eyes of his family...
No. That was unthinkable.
Regulus thinks of Sirius's homosexuality as being based on defiance rather than desire, which is causing half the misunderstanding right there. And he really does love his brother, which makes the anger and confusion worse.
"What do you do," he said slowly, and trying to avoid the four pairs of eyes peering at him from the back seat, "if someone who really, really matters does something that you really, really hate?"
Will looked thoughtful. "Depends on why, I guess. Did your brother do something bad to hurt you?"
"I didn't say I was talking about my brother."
"No, you didn't," said the Muggle boy easily. "What he did--did he do it on purpose to hurt you?"
"No," said Regulus a trifle sullenly. Even in his wildest dreams, he couldn't believe that.
"To hurt anyone?"
"Maybe our parents."
"He told them what he was going to do, then?"
Regulus winced. "Uh--no. I told them." After the House Elf found a love letter he was writing to Remus, he thought. Then they asked me. And I told them. Pretty quickly, too. After all, they were going to find out anyway.
Yes, he's rationalising; he feels guilty. He's also a bit off-centre because Will, a Muggle and therefore a supposed inferior, is figuring things out so quickly. Regulus is rapidly entering a world where everything he thought he knew is turning out to be wrong.
There was a long silence, broken by Moira's chanting:
"Tell tale tit
Its tongue shall be split,
And all the dogs
In our town
Shall have a little bit."
Victorian nursery rhyme. I found it in E. Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet. It seemed like something that a six-year-old would chant, and it balanced Phineas's rhyme in This Bird Has Flown.
"Stop it!" Regulus shouted as he pounded on the dashboard with his wounded hands, almost welcoming the pain because it blotted out the words that kept echoing in his mind:
/There was a bitch had three whelps.../
/"If you like playing the bitch so much, here are some real dogs."/
/All the dogs in our town.../
"What did you do?" asked Will quietly. "Besides telling on him?"
Regulus closed his eyes. "I...I set the dogs on him."
He could feel the car swinging over to the side of the road and stopping. He could almost sense Mrs. MacGregor's eyes boring through his skin to see what kind of a person he truly was.
"Why," Mrs. MacGregor demanded in a voice like cold iron, "did you do that?"
"I can't say," Regulus all but wailed. "I can't..."
Homosexuality in the 1970s was not, for most people, a matter of pride, tolerance or acceptance. Regulus isn't kidding when he says that his brother disgraced the family--that's how he sees it. Sirius's being gay is a shame, a disgrace and a stain on the family honour. Telling a perfect stranger about this would be--well, unthinkable, to use one of Reg's favourite words.
"And why," Mrs. MacGregor asked in that same cold, terrible, iron voice, " are you going after him? To finish the job?"
"No! I--" Regulus stopped to blow his nose on his handkerchief.
I couldn't picture Regulus without a handkerchief, any more than I could picture Sirius with one.
"I did something wrong. I know that. I don't know how to fix it. I don't know if it can be fixed. I just know that I have to go after him and tell him I'm sorry. And that I'll make it up to him. I don't know how, but I've got to. And I have to find him now, because if I wait, Mother and Father will make sure I never speak to him again. They're disgusted with him. And--probably--with me too, now." He stopped, opened his eyes and took several long, shuddering breaths.
This is Regulus's first admission that a) he was wrong, b) "I'm sorry" isn't going to be enough, and he's going to have to atone in other ways as well, c) this has to be done now before his parents can prevent it and d) he's taking a stand against his whole family, including his parents, for the sake of the older brother he loves.
"Can't you just call or write...?" Jennie asked.
Thistlerose pointed out that a Muggle kid would think about methods somewhat more practical than Regulus's haring off into the blue, so Jennie gets to ask about telephones and snail mail.
Regulus wondered briefly what "calling" was. Doubtless a Muggle thing. As for sending an owl post, he dismissed that automatically. "I hurt him in person," he said, inwardly cringing. "I have to make up with him in person. He'll probably kill me, but--I have to." I wish I didn't have to, he added silently, but I do.
Regulus really does believe that Sirius is going to hurt him very badly because of his tattling and because of the Crups. This is logical, from his viewpoint: If you do something wrong, you get punished, usually with physical pain, so that you know not to do it again. The fact that Regulus is still going after Sirius despite his conviction that Sirius is going to harm him says a lot about how much he cares for his brother and how fundamentally decent he is, since he's trying to do the right thing even if it means suffering.
This resolve will be tested very shortly.
No one had much to say after that. Regulus kept his head turned facing the window so that he wouldn't have to meet anyone's eyes. He chewed his lip until it was bloody.
Please, Sirius, he mutely implored his brother. Be all right. Please. Please forgive me.
At last the station wagon stopped in the centre of Carlisle. Mrs. MacGregor pushed a button and opened his car door.
"Well, here you are," she said firmly. "We have a ways to go yet, but I think you'll do better here in the centre. More food. More transportation."
She's fair. She doesn't like what he's done, but she's fair.
"Thank you," said Regulus, meaning it. "I--I never met anyone like you or your children before."
They're his first Muggles, actually.
Mrs. MacGregor bowed her head solemnly. "Good luck with you and your brother."
Regulus nodded.
The silence stretched into awkwardness.
He got out of the car. After a minute, he remembered to close the door as well.
Regulus's ignorance of Muggle inventions briefly kicked in.
The MacGregors' car took off at high speed.
Carlisle's afternoon streets were all but empty, except for him.
Better find the magical area of town, he thought. Find a shop that sells sandwiches or something, and wait till evening, when the Knight Bus runs.
A snowflake landed on his cheek.
Great. Snow. Well, at least, he didn't have to be out in it.
He walked to the corner of East Tower and Lowther, the wounds on the soles of his feet causing him to wince as he did so.
Yes, there are two streets in Carlisle called East Tower and Lowther, and they do meet. I believe they're in the centre of the business district.
The snow began to fall faster, with small gusts of winds causing the snow to swirl around him as if he were the centre of a sleety galaxy.
Now we know why practically no one else is out--a bad snowstorm has been predicted, and is just beginning.
Then, suddenly, he heard a dreadful howl--still several miles away, but closing fast.
Oh Merlin.
Wind, his mind gibbered, it's just the wind, howling through the north, winds blow during snowstorms, that happens all the time, nothing to be afraid of, nothing at all...
Regulus stared off in the direction from which the howl had come and broke into a run, as one word kept beating in his head like the boom of a snare drum:
Crups.
Karma's a bitch.