Fic: "Paradise Regained", Regulus, Rated R
Title: Paradise Regained
Author: Sionnain
Rating: R
Length: 2900 words
Character(s): Regulus Black (cameos by Mrs. Black, Sirius, Bellatrix and Rodolphus Lestrange, Voldemort, and Evan Rosier)
Warnings (if any): Darkfic, angst, implied torture/murder, character death.
Author's notes: Thank you very much to Kethlenda and Jazzypom for the beta. Written for Ribuu in this year's Springtime_Gen ficathon.
Paradise Regained
I, who erewhile the happy Garden sung, by one man’s disobedience lost, now sing/Recovered Paradise to all mankind, by one man’s firm obedience fully tried/Through all temptation, and the tempter foiled in all his wiles, defeated and repulsed, and Eden raised in the waste Wilderness.-John Milton, Paradise Regained
Won’t they be surprised, when they find out what I’ve done…
He’s cold and yet he’s sweating, and there’s an army after him of dead…things…with fetid breath and rotting skin, but it doesn’t matter because he’s never been so happy in his life, because for once…
For once, he’s done something right.
* * *
As a child, Regulus Black suffered from the dreaded youngest-son disease, never as handsome and clever as the elder but always noticeably more-loved. His mother, a formidable creature, was capable of withering speech that would strangle houseplants in their pots or wilt the buds of freshly-cut flowers in their crystal-cut vases. Most of her tirades were directed at Sirius-perfect bloody Sirius, with his clever friends and his easy smile-who was never the son she wanted, but could have been.
Regulus was her beloved, but he was a disappointment. No amount of embraces, always accompanied by the cloyingly tartness of the heavy rose perfume his mother was fond of were enough to mask her dissatisfaction with him. It was as if by heaping all that brittle-edged affection on him, Regulus would become the man she wanted him to be. Regulus thought she wanted him to be Sirius without the pesky radical notions, like equality for Mudbloods, that made her eyes narrow and her mouth tight.
Regulus wasn’t Sirius and he felt like the philodendron that drooped in the pot, the fresh flowers that wilted in the vase under the heavy weight of his mother’s expectations. He would never be Sirius, and so he became something else. Someone she might be proud of, because that is all he had left that Sirius had not taken.
When Bella came by one night with her thin cigarettes and her Irish whiskey, pouring him shots into crystal glasses that caught the yellow light from the gas lamps and gleamed bright, he didn’t ask her to leave. When she promised him glory in her honeyed voice that reminded him of the arsenic-covered doughnuts Kreacher left out to catch the mice-sweet and poisoned-he didn’t tell her to stop talking.
When she took him before the Dark Lord, he knelt in obedience to those tainted promises. When Voldemort kissed his flesh with the branding heat of his Mark, Regulus Black made not a sound.
* * *
It was dark and unseasonably hot in London on the night of his first kill.
He was with Bella and that dark-haired man, Lestrange, the one with the sly eyes that made Regulus feel like he was being laughed at, and Evan Rosier. Rosier was the senior among them, it was his mission to command.
Rosier wore the black cloak and the mask like some demigod, like the pictures of Lucifer in the copy of Paradise Lost that his mother used to read to Regulus at bedtime.
Lucifer before the fall, that was.
“Hurry up,” Rosier snapped, a thread of irritation in his voice as if his patience was being pulled thread-taut and would soon break. Regulus figured Rosier was angry at Bellatrix and Rodolphus, who were clearly full of blood-lust and the sort of excitement only the truly deranged felt at impending murder.
Regulus didn’t feel excited. There was dread in the pit of his stomach and he manfully pretended it wasn’t there, pretended it didn’t rise like a vine to choke the very breath from his throat. His fingers were slightly damp as they curled around the wand, which he held in his pocket. Beneath his hood the sweat pooled mercilessly on his brow and ran into his eyes hot and stung.
Their targets they were supposed to kill lived in a poor section of town. Regulus wondered if the family was rich, maybe they wouldn’t have Death Eaters crossing the cobblestone street towards the little townhouse. He didn’t think too much about that, though, because it was hot and he wanted to be done with it, wanted to be at the Three Broomsticks with a pint and his well-deserved accolades.
You want the praise and the glory without earning it. Your brother Sirius would do the work, his mother’s voice whispered slyly in his mind, and Regulus dropped his head and scowled under the mental onslaught, staring down at the slick cobblestones beneath his feet.
But it wouldn’t be this, Regulus thought viciously in response, that Sirius was doing. Didn’t that count for something?
Bellatrix and Rodolphus wanted to make the parents watch when they killed the child. Rosier looked bored but nodded his assent and searched the house, though Regulus privately thought such a search completely unnecessary. He wondered into the living room and traced his fingers over the small mantle above the fireplace, ignoring the mother’s desperate pleas to spare the child. His black glove came up clean, not a smidge of dust on his fingers.
This house was tiny; it would fit inside the ballroom at Grimmauld Place three times over.
The light from the moon spilled in through the curtains, which were obviously homemade, illuminating the picture of the family that rested atop the pristine wood mantle. The little figures-a mother, a father, the girl-waved at him from within the cheap plastic frame.
Regulus thought about his house, about the Irish lace curtains that were tattered and ripped in the music room, yellowed with age. He thought about the dust on the floors in the ballroom, the kind that would stir up and make you cough if you moved too fast through the room.
The screams of the little girl blended with those of her mother and the anguished shouts of her father. The only thing that made him wince was Bellatrix’s laughter. The wild sound, akin to braying hounds, was sharp and manic and cut like a dagger through the house, jarring him from his reverie and forcing him bodily from his curious inertia.
There was something here that Regulus hated, but it wasn’t the fact that the family was filthy useless Mudbloods or any of that tired rhetoric that his mother was always spouting.
No, he hated them because they were happy. He hated that little girl because she was so obviously wanted and there was no dashing little boy hiding in the shadows and ruining it all with his perfect smile and his charm.
They left the mother for him to kill. By the time he slid into the room just as the night began to die, her eyes were dull and lifeless. The death of her little daughter had killed her more effectively than any curse. Still, Regulus did his best to make it last, to make it agonizing. Rosier gave him a terse nod and clapped him on the back when it was over, after the bright flash of green flared.
“We have such hopes for you, Regulus,” Bellatrix said, patting him on the cheek. Her fingers left blood on his face, and he waited until she turned her back before he wiped it off, sneering in disdain in a way that would have made his mother proud.
“Don’t sully me with their blood,” he said, but mostly because they expected it. Lestrange laughed. On their way out of the house, Regulus pointed his wand at the frame and shattered the picture of the once-happy family. Bellatrix told him it was a nice touch.
The next morning, he tore the curtains down in the music room. No one ever asked him why.
* * *
There would be nights when all the dark magic became too much for him, because dark magic was like a slow-acting poison that slowly pulsed through the veins and made one mad in heart and mind and soul.
If I even still have a soul.
He’d wake up in a cold sweat, imagining all those he’d killed in Voldemort’s name standing round his bed like some ghostly Greek chorus. He’d pretend they were speaking to him, accusing him of murdering them, wailing in spectral voices why why why just like the women did in Medea.
His mother had interesting ideas about bedtime stories. Maybe it wasn’t the dark magic that made him crazy, after all.
Sometimes he spoke back to them, like he was on stage and this was the monologue that would bring piles of roses to his feet when he took his final bows. “I killed you because you were a traitor,” he’d say, pointing into the shadows of his room. “I killed you because you have no blood pride. You are a disgrace to our very race.” Parroting words he’d heard a thousand times before, the only litany taught to scions of the House of Black.
One night Sirius heard him talking. It was summer; outside he could hear crickets chirping and the breeze fluttered in his window to cool his hot skin as he ranted like a preacher on the pulpit, addressing the ghosts he knew weren’t there.
“Who are you talking to?” Sirius asked, dark hair lying just so over his forehead. He was coming back from somewhere he probably wasn’t supposed to be--out with those friends of his, Mudbloods and blood-traitors all-and Regulus hated how he looked, flushed with good cheer and health.
You escape this house, you wretch, while it drags me down with it to kill me.
“No one,” Regulus answered, turning away to face the window. The panes were dirty and streaked with mud in the moonlight that fought to break free “No one at all.”
In the morning he went to his brother’s room. He didn’t know if he wanted to confront Sirius or kill him or demand Sirius get him out of the mess Regulus had gotten himself into.
Sirius wasn’t there, though. Instead Regulus looked at himself in Sirius’ mirror, which was relatively clean, and studied his reflection in the clear glass. He hardly recognized the man who looked back at him. How long had it been since he’d looked in a mirror when he wasn’t robed and wearing the bone-mask of the Death Eaters?
Death. It clung to him like a shroud, his clothes hanging from a frame too thin and lanky. His face was gaunt and ravaged by late nights and carousing and the Killing Curse, and his eyes were dark pools of something dank and drowning and wrong.
What has become of me?
At breakfast, he listened to his mother rant about Hogwarts and the Ministry and the half-bloods and their dreadful perversions. His eyes settled on the flower arrangement on the sideboard; the roses were long dead and something unpleasant was growing on their stems within the cloudy water.
Everything he ate suddenly tasted like dust.
After breakfast he told Kreacher to throw the flowers away. “Master Regulus does not like them?” the elf said slyly, its mean little face pinched and tight. “Mistress Black loves her roses. She will not be wanting Kreacher to toss them, no she will not. Kreacher does what Mistress Black says.”
“I can’t imagine Mother likes things that are dead,” Regulus snapped, then looked around the house. Dust clung to the furniture; mice had eaten the once brilliant tapestries beneath his booted feet. Everywhere he felt the ghosts, heard them sighing, and he didn’t think they were all there for him.
“Leave them,” Regulus snapped, and gritted his teeth as he heard the elf laugh. “See if I care.”
But of course he cared. That was the horror of it. He cared, and he didn’t want to. He caught his reflection in the ornate mirror that hung in the entranceway. I will never be what she wants.
* * *
“I want out.”
There was a relief in speaking it, finally. Somehow at night the ghosts had become not his tormentors but his only companions, and they urged him in frantic whispers to join us and be free of it and end it.
“Impossible,” Bellatrix said flatly, staring at him as if he were the insane one, as if he, Regulus, were the one who the night before had danced amidst their victim’s screams and pleads for mercy.
For death.
“Why is it impossible? He doesn’t need me. I am not Malfoy with endless coffers of money, nor am I Rookwood with Ministry connections.” I am not you, with devotion so pure it would pulse blinding-white if it were to escape the confines of your body. “I have nothing to offer him.”
Bellatrix grabbed his arm; her nails were talons in his skin, but he almost welcomed the pain. Dark magic did something to him; it warped his senses, so that he felt nothing that he should. Pleasure was a foreign concept only half-remembered in the moments before wakefulness. In his mind he felt the ghosts again, circling and singing their sweet siren’s song of oblivion, and that was the only pleasure he wanted, the only thing he longed for anymore.
End it.
“He doesn’t need you. He doesn’t need any of us,” she said darkly, her voice ringing with the undiluted resonance of the fanatic. “We need him.” She released him and he could feel pricks in his skin, like the delicate bite of a needle, and he saw blood seep through to stain the fine linen of his shirt.
He stood up and put out his cigarette, his hand shaking. “You’re right. I know you’re right. But don’t you-”
Don’t you miss the sunlight? All Regulus could see were the flowers, wilted and dead on the sideboard, choked to death by neglect and darkness.
“Don’t I what?” She looked at him, and her dark eyes reminded him of a scrying mirror. Like Morgan Le Fey, looking in and seeing what her son would become. Would that she had strangled him in his crib. Mordred didn’t just kill Arthur. He destroyed Camelot. I wonder if he knew that, when he rode out to face Arthur in battle? I wonder if he cared?
“Nothing,” Regulus said, and turned away from her.
That night he dreamt about the cave, about the water, and about what it would take to set himself free.
No. Not himself. It was too late for him, and had been for a long time.
If I have to be Mordred, maybe I can at least save Camelot.
* * *
They are closing in; he can hear them, pounding feet and the slide of dead feet in slick mud as they chase him into the old graveyard just beyond the church.
A fitting place to die, really.
It doesn’t matter. The locket is safe and hidden and there is nothing else he can do now. The ghosts are all around, so thick now that he thinks maybe they’re really not ghosts but just the fog, but in their depths he sees gaping eyes and wailing mouths and knows it isn’t just the fog after all.
The Inferii, Voldemort’s army of the dead and the damned, will rend him limb from him when they catch him. They will eat him, alive, and there will be precious little of him left to bury. It is a good thing I am in a graveyard.
It will hurt, though he figures it is fitting the last thing he will ever feel is pain.
Eventually he stops running in front of large tomb of an obviously wealthy man, if the adornment is any indication. There is a statue with an overwrought weeping angel. Regulus Black has enough gothic appreciation in his soul to stop there, imagining the spill of blood will look lovely against the grey stone.
The inferii crawl like insects over the kill towards him, moaning, dragging limbs and walking the jerky, unnatural walk of the possessed corpse. Regulus spares them hardly a glance as he turns his face up to the sky. There is no moon; the clouds are heavy and thick and he can’t even see the stars. The ground beneath his feet hums like it is alive, breathing, and all around death and rot seep from the air into his lungs and his eyes.
Behind him, the ghosts wail. He thinks of the locket, safe and snug in Grimmauld Place. He thinks of his brother, good and pure and true. He hopes Sirius will be the one to find it, one day.
He smells roses from the graves around him and thinks of the flowers on the sideboard. Before he left for the cave he tossed them out in the backyard, left them lying supine on the ground. They’ll decompose and maybe something new, something beautiful will grow from their remains. Maybe that is what will happen to him, too.
The inferii have reached him. Their mouths are dry and their lips slide like cardboard over his skin. Their teeth tear and rend, sharper than the Cruciatus, sharper than knives. All around him is the smell of rot and death. His blood flows thick and hot and the ghosts sigh in contentment as his vision begins to blur, as the pain drags him under.
Think of something nice, Regulus. One is going for your jugular. It won’t be long, not now, not after they pierce the vein.
The last thought in his head is of Sirius.
Forgive me. I did it for Camelot. No. For Avalon. So that I may die in peace.
Author: Sionnain
Rating: R
Length: 2900 words
Character(s): Regulus Black (cameos by Mrs. Black, Sirius, Bellatrix and Rodolphus Lestrange, Voldemort, and Evan Rosier)
Warnings (if any): Darkfic, angst, implied torture/murder, character death.
Author's notes: Thank you very much to Kethlenda and Jazzypom for the beta. Written for Ribuu in this year's Springtime_Gen ficathon.
Paradise Regained
I, who erewhile the happy Garden sung, by one man’s disobedience lost, now sing/Recovered Paradise to all mankind, by one man’s firm obedience fully tried/Through all temptation, and the tempter foiled in all his wiles, defeated and repulsed, and Eden raised in the waste Wilderness.-John Milton, Paradise Regained
Won’t they be surprised, when they find out what I’ve done…
He’s cold and yet he’s sweating, and there’s an army after him of dead…things…with fetid breath and rotting skin, but it doesn’t matter because he’s never been so happy in his life, because for once…
For once, he’s done something right.
* * *
As a child, Regulus Black suffered from the dreaded youngest-son disease, never as handsome and clever as the elder but always noticeably more-loved. His mother, a formidable creature, was capable of withering speech that would strangle houseplants in their pots or wilt the buds of freshly-cut flowers in their crystal-cut vases. Most of her tirades were directed at Sirius-perfect bloody Sirius, with his clever friends and his easy smile-who was never the son she wanted, but could have been.
Regulus was her beloved, but he was a disappointment. No amount of embraces, always accompanied by the cloyingly tartness of the heavy rose perfume his mother was fond of were enough to mask her dissatisfaction with him. It was as if by heaping all that brittle-edged affection on him, Regulus would become the man she wanted him to be. Regulus thought she wanted him to be Sirius without the pesky radical notions, like equality for Mudbloods, that made her eyes narrow and her mouth tight.
Regulus wasn’t Sirius and he felt like the philodendron that drooped in the pot, the fresh flowers that wilted in the vase under the heavy weight of his mother’s expectations. He would never be Sirius, and so he became something else. Someone she might be proud of, because that is all he had left that Sirius had not taken.
When Bella came by one night with her thin cigarettes and her Irish whiskey, pouring him shots into crystal glasses that caught the yellow light from the gas lamps and gleamed bright, he didn’t ask her to leave. When she promised him glory in her honeyed voice that reminded him of the arsenic-covered doughnuts Kreacher left out to catch the mice-sweet and poisoned-he didn’t tell her to stop talking.
When she took him before the Dark Lord, he knelt in obedience to those tainted promises. When Voldemort kissed his flesh with the branding heat of his Mark, Regulus Black made not a sound.
* * *
It was dark and unseasonably hot in London on the night of his first kill.
He was with Bella and that dark-haired man, Lestrange, the one with the sly eyes that made Regulus feel like he was being laughed at, and Evan Rosier. Rosier was the senior among them, it was his mission to command.
Rosier wore the black cloak and the mask like some demigod, like the pictures of Lucifer in the copy of Paradise Lost that his mother used to read to Regulus at bedtime.
Lucifer before the fall, that was.
“Hurry up,” Rosier snapped, a thread of irritation in his voice as if his patience was being pulled thread-taut and would soon break. Regulus figured Rosier was angry at Bellatrix and Rodolphus, who were clearly full of blood-lust and the sort of excitement only the truly deranged felt at impending murder.
Regulus didn’t feel excited. There was dread in the pit of his stomach and he manfully pretended it wasn’t there, pretended it didn’t rise like a vine to choke the very breath from his throat. His fingers were slightly damp as they curled around the wand, which he held in his pocket. Beneath his hood the sweat pooled mercilessly on his brow and ran into his eyes hot and stung.
Their targets they were supposed to kill lived in a poor section of town. Regulus wondered if the family was rich, maybe they wouldn’t have Death Eaters crossing the cobblestone street towards the little townhouse. He didn’t think too much about that, though, because it was hot and he wanted to be done with it, wanted to be at the Three Broomsticks with a pint and his well-deserved accolades.
You want the praise and the glory without earning it. Your brother Sirius would do the work, his mother’s voice whispered slyly in his mind, and Regulus dropped his head and scowled under the mental onslaught, staring down at the slick cobblestones beneath his feet.
But it wouldn’t be this, Regulus thought viciously in response, that Sirius was doing. Didn’t that count for something?
Bellatrix and Rodolphus wanted to make the parents watch when they killed the child. Rosier looked bored but nodded his assent and searched the house, though Regulus privately thought such a search completely unnecessary. He wondered into the living room and traced his fingers over the small mantle above the fireplace, ignoring the mother’s desperate pleas to spare the child. His black glove came up clean, not a smidge of dust on his fingers.
This house was tiny; it would fit inside the ballroom at Grimmauld Place three times over.
The light from the moon spilled in through the curtains, which were obviously homemade, illuminating the picture of the family that rested atop the pristine wood mantle. The little figures-a mother, a father, the girl-waved at him from within the cheap plastic frame.
Regulus thought about his house, about the Irish lace curtains that were tattered and ripped in the music room, yellowed with age. He thought about the dust on the floors in the ballroom, the kind that would stir up and make you cough if you moved too fast through the room.
The screams of the little girl blended with those of her mother and the anguished shouts of her father. The only thing that made him wince was Bellatrix’s laughter. The wild sound, akin to braying hounds, was sharp and manic and cut like a dagger through the house, jarring him from his reverie and forcing him bodily from his curious inertia.
There was something here that Regulus hated, but it wasn’t the fact that the family was filthy useless Mudbloods or any of that tired rhetoric that his mother was always spouting.
No, he hated them because they were happy. He hated that little girl because she was so obviously wanted and there was no dashing little boy hiding in the shadows and ruining it all with his perfect smile and his charm.
They left the mother for him to kill. By the time he slid into the room just as the night began to die, her eyes were dull and lifeless. The death of her little daughter had killed her more effectively than any curse. Still, Regulus did his best to make it last, to make it agonizing. Rosier gave him a terse nod and clapped him on the back when it was over, after the bright flash of green flared.
“We have such hopes for you, Regulus,” Bellatrix said, patting him on the cheek. Her fingers left blood on his face, and he waited until she turned her back before he wiped it off, sneering in disdain in a way that would have made his mother proud.
“Don’t sully me with their blood,” he said, but mostly because they expected it. Lestrange laughed. On their way out of the house, Regulus pointed his wand at the frame and shattered the picture of the once-happy family. Bellatrix told him it was a nice touch.
The next morning, he tore the curtains down in the music room. No one ever asked him why.
* * *
There would be nights when all the dark magic became too much for him, because dark magic was like a slow-acting poison that slowly pulsed through the veins and made one mad in heart and mind and soul.
If I even still have a soul.
He’d wake up in a cold sweat, imagining all those he’d killed in Voldemort’s name standing round his bed like some ghostly Greek chorus. He’d pretend they were speaking to him, accusing him of murdering them, wailing in spectral voices why why why just like the women did in Medea.
His mother had interesting ideas about bedtime stories. Maybe it wasn’t the dark magic that made him crazy, after all.
Sometimes he spoke back to them, like he was on stage and this was the monologue that would bring piles of roses to his feet when he took his final bows. “I killed you because you were a traitor,” he’d say, pointing into the shadows of his room. “I killed you because you have no blood pride. You are a disgrace to our very race.” Parroting words he’d heard a thousand times before, the only litany taught to scions of the House of Black.
One night Sirius heard him talking. It was summer; outside he could hear crickets chirping and the breeze fluttered in his window to cool his hot skin as he ranted like a preacher on the pulpit, addressing the ghosts he knew weren’t there.
“Who are you talking to?” Sirius asked, dark hair lying just so over his forehead. He was coming back from somewhere he probably wasn’t supposed to be--out with those friends of his, Mudbloods and blood-traitors all-and Regulus hated how he looked, flushed with good cheer and health.
You escape this house, you wretch, while it drags me down with it to kill me.
“No one,” Regulus answered, turning away to face the window. The panes were dirty and streaked with mud in the moonlight that fought to break free “No one at all.”
In the morning he went to his brother’s room. He didn’t know if he wanted to confront Sirius or kill him or demand Sirius get him out of the mess Regulus had gotten himself into.
Sirius wasn’t there, though. Instead Regulus looked at himself in Sirius’ mirror, which was relatively clean, and studied his reflection in the clear glass. He hardly recognized the man who looked back at him. How long had it been since he’d looked in a mirror when he wasn’t robed and wearing the bone-mask of the Death Eaters?
Death. It clung to him like a shroud, his clothes hanging from a frame too thin and lanky. His face was gaunt and ravaged by late nights and carousing and the Killing Curse, and his eyes were dark pools of something dank and drowning and wrong.
What has become of me?
At breakfast, he listened to his mother rant about Hogwarts and the Ministry and the half-bloods and their dreadful perversions. His eyes settled on the flower arrangement on the sideboard; the roses were long dead and something unpleasant was growing on their stems within the cloudy water.
Everything he ate suddenly tasted like dust.
After breakfast he told Kreacher to throw the flowers away. “Master Regulus does not like them?” the elf said slyly, its mean little face pinched and tight. “Mistress Black loves her roses. She will not be wanting Kreacher to toss them, no she will not. Kreacher does what Mistress Black says.”
“I can’t imagine Mother likes things that are dead,” Regulus snapped, then looked around the house. Dust clung to the furniture; mice had eaten the once brilliant tapestries beneath his booted feet. Everywhere he felt the ghosts, heard them sighing, and he didn’t think they were all there for him.
“Leave them,” Regulus snapped, and gritted his teeth as he heard the elf laugh. “See if I care.”
But of course he cared. That was the horror of it. He cared, and he didn’t want to. He caught his reflection in the ornate mirror that hung in the entranceway. I will never be what she wants.
* * *
“I want out.”
There was a relief in speaking it, finally. Somehow at night the ghosts had become not his tormentors but his only companions, and they urged him in frantic whispers to join us and be free of it and end it.
“Impossible,” Bellatrix said flatly, staring at him as if he were the insane one, as if he, Regulus, were the one who the night before had danced amidst their victim’s screams and pleads for mercy.
For death.
“Why is it impossible? He doesn’t need me. I am not Malfoy with endless coffers of money, nor am I Rookwood with Ministry connections.” I am not you, with devotion so pure it would pulse blinding-white if it were to escape the confines of your body. “I have nothing to offer him.”
Bellatrix grabbed his arm; her nails were talons in his skin, but he almost welcomed the pain. Dark magic did something to him; it warped his senses, so that he felt nothing that he should. Pleasure was a foreign concept only half-remembered in the moments before wakefulness. In his mind he felt the ghosts again, circling and singing their sweet siren’s song of oblivion, and that was the only pleasure he wanted, the only thing he longed for anymore.
End it.
“He doesn’t need you. He doesn’t need any of us,” she said darkly, her voice ringing with the undiluted resonance of the fanatic. “We need him.” She released him and he could feel pricks in his skin, like the delicate bite of a needle, and he saw blood seep through to stain the fine linen of his shirt.
He stood up and put out his cigarette, his hand shaking. “You’re right. I know you’re right. But don’t you-”
Don’t you miss the sunlight? All Regulus could see were the flowers, wilted and dead on the sideboard, choked to death by neglect and darkness.
“Don’t I what?” She looked at him, and her dark eyes reminded him of a scrying mirror. Like Morgan Le Fey, looking in and seeing what her son would become. Would that she had strangled him in his crib. Mordred didn’t just kill Arthur. He destroyed Camelot. I wonder if he knew that, when he rode out to face Arthur in battle? I wonder if he cared?
“Nothing,” Regulus said, and turned away from her.
That night he dreamt about the cave, about the water, and about what it would take to set himself free.
No. Not himself. It was too late for him, and had been for a long time.
If I have to be Mordred, maybe I can at least save Camelot.
* * *
They are closing in; he can hear them, pounding feet and the slide of dead feet in slick mud as they chase him into the old graveyard just beyond the church.
A fitting place to die, really.
It doesn’t matter. The locket is safe and hidden and there is nothing else he can do now. The ghosts are all around, so thick now that he thinks maybe they’re really not ghosts but just the fog, but in their depths he sees gaping eyes and wailing mouths and knows it isn’t just the fog after all.
The Inferii, Voldemort’s army of the dead and the damned, will rend him limb from him when they catch him. They will eat him, alive, and there will be precious little of him left to bury. It is a good thing I am in a graveyard.
It will hurt, though he figures it is fitting the last thing he will ever feel is pain.
Eventually he stops running in front of large tomb of an obviously wealthy man, if the adornment is any indication. There is a statue with an overwrought weeping angel. Regulus Black has enough gothic appreciation in his soul to stop there, imagining the spill of blood will look lovely against the grey stone.
The inferii crawl like insects over the kill towards him, moaning, dragging limbs and walking the jerky, unnatural walk of the possessed corpse. Regulus spares them hardly a glance as he turns his face up to the sky. There is no moon; the clouds are heavy and thick and he can’t even see the stars. The ground beneath his feet hums like it is alive, breathing, and all around death and rot seep from the air into his lungs and his eyes.
Behind him, the ghosts wail. He thinks of the locket, safe and snug in Grimmauld Place. He thinks of his brother, good and pure and true. He hopes Sirius will be the one to find it, one day.
He smells roses from the graves around him and thinks of the flowers on the sideboard. Before he left for the cave he tossed them out in the backyard, left them lying supine on the ground. They’ll decompose and maybe something new, something beautiful will grow from their remains. Maybe that is what will happen to him, too.
The inferii have reached him. Their mouths are dry and their lips slide like cardboard over his skin. Their teeth tear and rend, sharper than the Cruciatus, sharper than knives. All around him is the smell of rot and death. His blood flows thick and hot and the ghosts sigh in contentment as his vision begins to blur, as the pain drags him under.
Think of something nice, Regulus. One is going for your jugular. It won’t be long, not now, not after they pierce the vein.
The last thought in his head is of Sirius.
Forgive me. I did it for Camelot. No. For Avalon. So that I may die in peace.