(no subject)
The second half of my entry for laurel_tx's RAB fic challenge. The first part is here: tawabids.livejournal.com/3658.html
Title: Equation (Part Two)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Slash, Murder, Glossed-over sex, Mild cussing, Character Death, and important warning nonsensical mathematical jargon.
To Summarise: Regulus Black loves Barty Crouch (and Arithmancy). This Monday will be his last seven days on earth.
Where to go? Regulus, his head spinning like the worst of hangovers, knew he had no home. There was already a Regulus in Grimmauld Place and the Leaky Cauldron would soon have two Regulus’ among its occupants. He had nowhere to go, nowhere that his past selves did not already occupy. He had become the remainder of an equation, cut adrift and superfluous. And he could still smell Bellatrix’s skin, her hair, her sex…
He Apparated again and found himself outside the house of the Crouch family, a stout little box on the edge of a village somewhere in Salisbury. Barty’s petite mother was sitting in the front window, playing a glowing amber cello between her knees. Regulus did not think further, staggering up the front steps and slamming his fist against the front door until the frosted window panes rattled. He heard the cello’s song abruptly screech and the heavy instrument thump to the floor, twanging. Barty’s mother cursed loudly and a moment later the door was thrown open to reveal her with her wand outstretched. When she saw his face her expression changed at once from anger and fear (she thought it might have been a Death Eater! Oh, how terribly hilarious! Regulus said to himself) to one of kindness.
“Regulus! Merlin’s beard, are you well? Come in!”
Half an hour later he was lying under the sheets of Barty’s bed with a cup of pepper-up potion steaming and undrunk on the cabinet beside him. Barty was sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning against him, but Regulus couldn’t hear anything he was saying - awkward, jerking questions punctuated by his tender stroking of Regulus’ hair and face. He thought he was going to vomit again, but the hum of Barty’s voice distracted him and gradually the nausea subsided. But not the phantom weight of Bellatrix.
“Regulus,” Barty repeated. “What’s happened? Why’re you sick?”
He sat up so quickly Barty jumped from surprise. Regulus’ eyes were wide and wild, his teeth bared in a grimace. “Have you ever let Him touch you? Have you? Have you ever given the Dark Lord his pleasure, Barty?” he snarled.
Barty’s hand flew to the Dark Mark, near-invisible on his forearm. He stared at Regulus for a moment, then slowly shook his head.
Regulus collapsed against the pillows. “Bellatrix was the only way, then,” he mumbled. He wasn’t even sure whether he was speaking aloud or not, but Barty’s rapt attention attested to it. “Had to be Bellatrix. Got His soul now, Barty. Got it now. Clever, huh? Merlin, that wine made me sick… Bellatrix made me sick… Bellatrix is wine…ha ha…”
Barty still didn’t speak. Regulus’ ramblings settled into the silent twitching of his lips and he felt himself sinking into sleep.
When he awoke, night had fallen and the skinny straw-haired boy had crawled in under the covers with him, wrapping his arms around Regulus’ shivering, feverish frame. He realised the two of them hadn’t touched each other for two months, since that long night when Regulus retrieved his Obliviated memories and realised he had lost his right to a place in this bed. In that moment he needed Barty, needed things to be the way they were before his father died, before that hideous mark touched his skin, when people outside of Hogwarts perished at the hands of Death Eaters but he was safe and comforted inside the castle walls. Sirius always used to say that comfort was a child’s illusion, but what did Sirius know? Nothing could comfort his miserable bastard of a brother. Sirius was never satisfied. Regulus wanted to be satisfied, so badly.
Barty must have felt Regulus move against him because he turned his head in the darkness and whispered, “Go ahead. I need you too.”
Tomorrow, he knew, Barty would go to his Master and report everything he had seen and heard. Tomorrow, Tuesday, they would come hunting for Regulus. If he hadn’t come to Barty today and blurted his nonsense about Bellatrix he might have had a chance to live past Tuesday, but that was impossible now.
It didn’t matter anymore. He didn’t have to live past today. Here, now, he took his fill from Barty and was satisfied.
Moonlight spread across the carpet with infinite slowness. Barty had fallen asleep an hour ago. Regulus got up and put his heavy robes back on in silence. He took out the timeturner which looked silver out of the reach of the sun. With his forefinger he traced the profile of Barty’s nose against the pillow and then bent down to kiss one crescent of a closed eyelid. He felt the dial of the timeturner with his other hand and turned it.
Monday
In a Ministry funded Library at the end of Diagon Alley, Regulus cast a spell around a corner of the uppermost storey so that no one would stumble onto him by accident. He sat down on the dark blue carpet and with a quick Severing Charm, cut open the lining of his robes and gingerly placed the instruments in a circle around him. Some were sparking with little white flashes, others simply displaying ghostly numerals or arcane symbols which floated across their surfaces like shredded paper beneath the surface of a pool. Regulus conjured his notebook and, one by one, began to record the measurements and the readings that the instruments had taken from his ghastly fuck with Bellatrix. Little voyeur-meters, they were.
One-one-Delta-six-three-eight-ehwaz-omega-bronze-twelve, he wrote, hand moving in a blur across the page as he studied the first of his instruments. Yellow-yellow-five-two-nine-over-delta-one-one. The numbers were already beginning to fade; he should have done all this yesterday, while they were fresh. He might lose some of the measurements, Merlin curse it all. At least he had had the foresight to make more than was needed.
It took him an hour to get all of the readings from his instruments. Only two had faded so much as to be useless. What he had was plenty to go on.
Now came the difficult part. He stared at the pages of numbers and short-hand symbols he had scribbled down. Now he had to translate it all into the echo of the Dark Lord’s soul and the location where it was hidden.
----------------------------------------------------
Professor Vector wouldn’t let Regulus do his NEWT level exam two years early, insisting that he to wait until sixth-year. He didn’t mind so much in the end, realising when he reached his OWLs that one less exam that year was a blessing. But he knew that if he could have done the Arithmancy exam two years early instead of one, he would have had no problem getting ‘Outstanding’.
Professor Vector was young for a teacher, barely into his thirties. Regulus was the gem of his classes and he didn’t squander an ounce of the boy’s talent. He ordered books for Regulus from the furthest reaches of the globe, trying to find a limit to his pupil’s talent for Arithmancy. He never succeeded. Regulus Black knew mathematical magic like nothing the young Professor had ever seen. He treated the Slytherin boy more like a place to store his knowledge than a student. Everything Professor Vector knew, Regulus learned. Sometimes he even understood them better than the Professor himself.
“Most wizards can’t look at the world logically, Reggie,” he said. “Let alone understand magic! There isn’t an ounce of real reason in their senses. Magic doesn’t look like it works logically, so nobody bothers to try and force logic on it. But it’s there, oh yes, it’s all there. That’s how the make spells, my boy, they’re not born from nowhere - dedicated Arithmancers like you and eye work them out step by step, number by number. But Arithmancy is just as useful with the magic used around us. Find the common denominator in the ingredients of a potion and you can render it as harmless as a cup of water. Learn the equation that shapes a spell and you will deflect any curse you like with the weakest of shields.”
“What about the killing curse?” Regulus asked lazily.
“Of course! I’m glad you asked! Theory says it can be done, Reggie. Mathematics is universal and Arithmancy tells us every spell has its anti-magic. There’s just never been anyone who can calculate the negative equation for the killing curse. You have to take account of the wizard being killed into your calculations, you see, along with the angle of the wand, the point of contact, the strength of the wizard casting it and his willpower at the moment he speaks the words, so by the time you’ve figured it all out the man’s already dead! Very unfortunate.”
“Can Arithmancy see the future?”
“Why, of course! Centaurs manage it pretty well. They use the reflection of magic off the atmosphere to calculate the exact location of every atom that will take part in the event they would like to foresee in order to figure out where that atom will be at the point in time they are looking at.”
“What do you mean the reflection of the atmosphere? They can see magic in the air?”
“Not quite,” Professor Vector winked. “They study the way stars flicker. The distortion of their light provides all the measurements. Of course, you have to have the stars in certain positions to calculate the events you want… very heavy stuff, Reggie. Humans can’t handle it. Centaurs’ brains just work differently from ours.”
When his seventh year came, Regulus had passed his NEWT exam with top marks in Britain so he no longer had an Arithmancy class to attend, but he kept visiting Professor Vector in the evenings anyway. This was a few months before he and Barty took the Dark Mark, but Barty was already delving deeper into the dark arts and he needed Regulus to help him with the calculations of the spells, which he couldn’t get from the Hogwarts library. Perhaps the dark magic rubbed off on Regulus and Professor Vector, trained for years as an Arithmancer, could sense its traces. Perhaps he recognised the cold glint in Regulus’ face that said he was on the first steps to becoming a murderer. Or perhaps he was just a frightened young man who knew his best student’s family history - who knew that the Death Eaters were everywhere.
“Arithmancy isn’t something that should be in a war,” the Professor muttered to himself one night, running his fingers absently over the spines of his bookshelf, searching for a text on the mathematics of magical architecture which he’d promised to lend Regulus. “Did you hear about that Arithmancer whose wife and daughter were killed by a werewolf, just because the Ministry forced him to help with the schematics of some new curse they’re developing? Horrible,” he shuddered. “Makes me glad to be under the eye of Albus. We’re academics, not soldiers. We shouldn’t have to take sides!”
“Spoken like a true Ravenclaw,” Regulus sneered, leaning against the Professor’s desk with his arms folded.
Professor Vector turned slowly to look at him. “You think it’s cowardly, do you?” he growled, looking quickly back to his books. “Then on your head be it. I warn you, Reggie. You’ll overreach yourself.”
Regulus was surprised by the disgust in Professor Vector’s tone. Bristling, he replied, “Maybe you would. I can’t overreach.”
“Idiot!” his teacher spun around. “My mind is a speck compared to yours, maybe, but that’s what will destroy you! You think you’re a God, Regulus, but the rest of you cannot keep up.”
Regulus shook his head, but Professor Vector had never spoken to him like that and he didn’t know how to reply. He felt like a stupid first-year again. He wrinked his nose and stomped away, slamming the door behind him.
----------------------------------------------------
The theory was simple. With the proper instruments, anyone who knew numbers could read the frequency of the soul the way muggles could read radio waves and gamma rays flying through space. Get close enough to a soul and you could measure their radio waves, analyse their frequency and from there, calculate their location anywhere in the world.
There were three problems. Firstly, Regulus had only read about the frequency of souls in theory and you had to have an unprecedented knowledge of Arithmancy to put the numbers to any use. Well, alright, that wasn’t a problem for him. The second problem was that nobody in the twentieth century knew how to build the instruments required and none had survived from the seventeenth century, the last time they had been successfully put to use. It had taken Regulus a month and a half to overcome that problem, but his own ingenuity had managed it.
The third problem was that the only time he had been that close to the Dark Lord, he had been writhing and screaming on the ground. He couldn’t approach his master without looking in his eyes - and the moment he did that, that mysterious ability called Legilimency would reveal every inch of his plans to the Dark Lord and he would be dead or dying before he even knew his thoughts had betrayed him.
There was only one other part of a creature that exhibited the frequency of its soul. That was the piece of it that was left behind after intercourse. And that part could only be measured during sexual stimulation.
Hence Bellatrix. Hence the aphrodisiac elixir in the wine. Hence that carnal act so soon after Bellatrix had been filled with the Dark Lord’s seed. It had been the only way to get that vital sample of Bellatrix’s master. Now he had it, he tried to put the price of it out of his mind.
Regulus unfolded a map of the United Kingdom, complete with the most detailed lines of latitude and longitude, magnetic currents and air density. His instruments had recorded three frequencies, as expected: one for his soul, one for Bellatrix’s, and a very faint whisper that had been the Dark Lord’s, fading quickly inside of her. He isolated that frequency and picked one of his instruments that could listen for it. It was a crystal on a long thread of spider-web which spun gently, dipping down at the point where it sensed the frequency. This would show him where on the map that frequency was coming from. There would be two origins: the Dark Lord himself and his Horcrux.
The lamps in the library became brighter as the sun set outside. Regulus wiped his brow with his sleeve and got up to stretch his legs. The instruments weren’t working as he had expected. One minute they said that the soul was in London, the next it seemed to be just outside a muggle village in the countryside, then next it was overtop of Hogwarts, then somewhere on the edge of the Atlantic ocean, then somewhere else entirely! Was the Dark Lord Apparating from place to place? How could his soul be in more than two places at once? It just didn’t make sense!
He strode to the window, looking out over the last shoppers of Diagon Alley hurrying home before dark. He could not believe that all his work would go to waste. There had to be someway to focus the instrument, increase its strength, or direct it to an area more specific than an entire country…
His hands tightened on the windowsill. He remembered the hideously scarred man in the corridor of number 12 Grimmauld Place, four days ago (or just this morning, technically). Hadn’t he already given him the answer? ” It’s in a cave by the sea,” he had said. Regulus rushed back to the map spread on the floor of the library and focused the instrument on the coastal area where it had dipped before. There it was: an insignificant point on a rocky cliff side. That was where he would find the Horcrux.
Regulus recorded the exact coordinates and then gathered up the map and his instruments into his cloak. With one hand he managed to fish the timeturner out of his pocket and twist the dial one notch.
Monday
There was an old broomstick in a child-swallowing cupboard in the attic of Grimmauld Place. Regulus had to sneak in the window of the attic that night and slept there on the cold planks, praying that none of his mother’s failed experiments more dangerous than the swallowing cupboard were stored up here. The next morning he took the broomstick and Apparated to the seaside village as his coordinates directed him.
It was a mark of his fatigue that he missed the village by a good two miles, luckily two miles inland or he would have ended up in the sea. Thankful that he hadn’t splinched himself, he flew over the edge of the cliffs and began to search for a cave of any kind. The sea air and the flight pumped him with energy again and he felt a fearful thrill begin to pump through him.
But he knew the signs of magic when he found it. Late in the afternoon he alighted on a tall spire of rock above a deep pool of water filled by the tide and vanishing into the gloom of a crack in the looming cliff. Steps lead down into the water, which was a dead giveaway, really. Regulus laughed aloud - if he’d been a dark lord, he would not have displayed the location of his soul with a flight of steps. Behind him the waves threw spray forty feet into the air, yet the thin entrance to the cave looked as tranquil as a garden pond. He could almost feel the magic licking against his face and, mounting the broom again, he flew over the water into the mouth of the rock, his toes trailing in the pool and his head bowed low enough to pass into the fissure. More steps lead into a large cave where the distant boom of the waves echoed like cannon-fire.
It was easy to untangle the spells that protected the entrance. Unable to remember the spell for a knife, he chewed his knuckle until blood welled up at the joint and he could smear it across the stone. An arch flashed silver and the rock vanished. Regulus strode through the doorway with his broom over his shoulder.
He caught himself before he went one step too far. He had almost stepped right into an enormous black lake filling a massive cavern too large to echo anything. His eyes made out a distant green star of light - that was the Horcrux. He was certain of it. He got onto the broom once more and, careful now not to touch the pitch water beneath him, floated towards the green glow without letting his eyes leave it.
A dais of flat stone stood out of the water and upon it was a basin, the source of the green glow. Regulus slighted beside it and peered within. It seemed to be full of liquid and a tall silver goblet was standing in the centre of the basin, half-submerged. It did not take long to establish that he could not touch the liquid with his hands, nor vanish it with any spell. The goblet caused no such trouble. He picked it up wondering if this was the object in which Barty’s master had entrusted his soul - but the goblet was plain and a little tarnished by the salty air, quite unremarkable. The Horcrux must be at the bottom of the pool of glowing green.
Regulus dipped the goblet quickly into the basin and found that it easily entered the bright liquid and came out full. He eyed it for a moment, but there was no way he was going to put that foul-looking stuff in his mouth. He turned away and tipped up the goblet; the glowing liquid streamed out onto the ground, hissing as it drained away down stone dais. Smirking to himself, Regulus filled another goblet from the basin and tipped that on the ground, too.
Behind his back, the green liquid bled in a long stream towards the water’s edge and then spread in a diluted bloom into edge of the lake.
Regulus turned with a third full goblet and as he raised it, a white hand locked onto his wrist. His feet slid on the dais and he nearly fell, but the fingers on his wrist held him upright. A leering face cocked its head at him and he choked to see flesh hanging loose from cheekbones and eyeballs withered as raisins in their wide sockets. The creature was trying to drag his hand down, to push the goblet towards his face. More corpses were rising out of the surface of the lake with barely a ripple; three, six, ten of them… Even as he began to panic, his mind was delighted to think to had discovered where the Dark Lord kept his army of inferi. He fumbled for his wand in his robes and hoarsely shouted a spell for fire.
The flames burst out of his wand tip and the corpse clutching his wrist was engulfed, twisting and falling backwards onto its fellows - leaving its hand still wrapped tightly around Regulus’ wrist. In his surprise at being released, the lack of resistance made his arm pull upwards suddenly. The goblet tipped up. The cup of green liquid was emptied in a moment, onto the face of the boy looking up at it in horror.
It was cold when it splashed across his face. Regulus rubbed frantically with his hands, desperately trying to scrape the liquid off. That was when it began to burn, and Regulus started screaming.
He could no longer remember what his legs were doing and he stumbled forward, as his hands were being eaten down to the bone. Every nerve in his face was firing in agony and on top of it all, he could feel the gaunt fingers of the inferi clamp down on his limbs and grab his hair, dragging his face towards the ceiling.
He did not see the goblet, kicked under the feet of the inferi, roll down the dais and into the lake where it vanished silently. He was still screaming as they carried him, flailing and kicking, towards the lake. In a moment the frigid water rose up over his legs, his torso and then his head.
The pain in his face and hands dimmed, the green liquid washed away and what was left of his skin numbed by the cold. The last of his screams emptied the air from his lungs but his struggles were weak, hopeless. He was drowning already, as the hands of the corpses dragged him further down into the water. He wand was gone from his fingers, dropped in the commotion somewhere.
But somehow his hand, stinging with an unearthly crescendo, found the pocket of his robes and the motion of the water wrapped the long, thin chain of the timeturner around his fingertips. He clutched at it, managed to pull it out into the water. By practise he felt for the dials with the same hand that had found the chain and twisted one at random, not caring where he was being sent.
A moment later, the inferi found that their prey had vanished. They clutched at the empty water with gaping, frustrated mouths, but Regulus back was a hundred miles and twenty-two hours behind them.
Monday
He wasn’t really sure how he came to be lying on his back, staring at the sky. He’d got there somehow. There was a high, frantic voice coming from somewhere. It had been shrieking and wailing at him for some time now, at least a few minutes, but Regulus hadn’t been listening to it up until now. It sounded like a house-elf.
“I am going to St Mungo’s master,” the house-elf crooned above him. There was a hard tar-sealed road under Regulus’ skull, he could feel its roughness against his shoulder blades and see the bulbous head of the elf with its enormous ears silhouetted against the sky. “Do not move, Kreacher will be back in only a moment!”
“No,” Regulus’ voice scraped against vocal chords hoarse and dry from screaming. Kreacher paused and gave a sob, torn between the need to help his charge and obedience to the wizard. “Kreacher, take me inside at once.”
“Yes! Kreacher will do at once! Kreacher will tell Mistress to send for St Mungo’s!”
“No. The - the basement. Take me to the basement and lie me down somewhere comfortable. Do not tell anyone I am there, no one at all, not even myself.” That was all he could manage before his voice petered out.
The night passed in a haze of fevered dreams, sleeplessness and pain. He thought Barty was with him, holding a cup of the green liquid and putting it to his lips, no matter how many times Regulus tried to warn him. Comfort came from the long fingers of Kreacher, administering ointments and cool, damp towels, perhaps infused with some inhuman magic of the house-elf’s own design.
He did not know how many hours had passed when Kreacher came back with armfuls of bandages and a bottle of pale blue liquid. He heard the house-elf murmuring to him, saying something about stealing the medicine and that master must be brave for a moment. Then Kreacher poured the charmed disinfectant over his face and his nerves exploded again. He screamed, not caring that the scream was loud enough to wake the whole house, though only one person above him heard the scream. Through the white-hot blaze of pain he fainted and fell into a heavy sleep at last.
The blue liquid must have done good. His face felt less taut as he awoke sporadically throughout the day, and already the throbbing had subsided. His hands were bandaged tightly and he found he could sit up and hold things without trouble. Kreacher brought him a meal but he gave up eating before he got very far through it: moving his jaw hurt too much. He wrote instead, phrasing letter after delirious letter to the Dark Lord, wondering if he should inject a note of triumph or smooth satisfaction. Should he speak of the work he had done, how cleverly he had tracked down the Horcrux? Or should he make it sound easy? At last he picked a letter at random and shoved it down the front of his crumpled robes.
He ordered Kreacher to bring him a clock and a mirror and the house-elf complied at once, lugging down a large oval of glass specked with mildew. He stared at his reflection and wondered how Kreacher had recognised him. All that was left in place of his face (the face Sirius used to call “gorgeous as any girl’s” back when Sirius was still his brother) was melted candle wax, folds of skin for lips and two dull, uneven windows where his eyes peered out.
“I look like Him. I look like Barty’s Master,” he whispered and began to laugh until it hurt.
He had to go back as soon as he could. He had no more strength for another week like this. But what was the use? How could he empty that basin?
He waited as long as he could, staring at the mirror and letting his mind wander aimlessly along algebra equations and disassembled plots and spells that might help him gain the Horcrux, through midnight, when Tuesday came unseen except to the clocks and calendars of London, until the sun had risen. Then he called Kreacher to his side, looped the chain of the time-turner around both their necks and twisted the largest dial one notch.
Monday
The broom had been left on the ground beside the deadly basin, but even a great wizard’s spells against portkeys and Apparation did not apply to house-elf magic. Regulus looked into the self-generated light of the basin, empty of reflection. An hour ago he had spoken to himself and seen his own face for the last time. If the players had changed, if Sirius had been in his stead, would his brother have warned himself of the dangers that were to come? Would that have doomed him or saved him? Would Sirius have been able to bear looking at his face burned beyond recognition, bereft of those handsome features that had ensnared Potter and the hearts of too many girls - ugh. No, Sirius would never have let that happen to himself.
“Kreacher,” he said through lisping lips, flicking his wand to summon a plain copper tumbler. He dipped it into the basin and knelt on one knee. “Drink this.”
The house elf didn’t ask questions. His long fingers wrapped around the tumbler and he knocked it back with a few quick gulps before letting his arms drop. Regulus took the tumbler back. He watched Kreacher’s face for a moment. The huge grey eyes were growing shinier: then Kreacher burst into a torrent of tears. “Wh-what is that, master? What?”
“It’s nothing,” Regulus said, refilling the tumbler. “Here. Drink again.”
Kreacher drank, tears mixing with the green liquid and trickling off his chin. He sobbed through two more glassfuls of the potion before his trembling fingers could no longer hold it to his mouth.
“Drink!” Regulus ordered, pushing the edge of the tumbler into the house-elf’s face.
“Kreacher d-does not want to!”
“Regulus Black, last male descendent of the noble house of Black, commands you to continue drinking this potion until I tell you to stop!” he snarled, holding the back of the house elf’s head. Kreacher drank every drop.
“Another!” Regulus pressed. Kreacher was twisting like a scarecrow in a high wind, his limbs flapping backwards and forwards and his ears quivering. But the orders had been clear and he could not disobey. He drank again and nonsense words spewed from his mouth, unconnected syllables of distress. The basin was more than half empty now. The glow was dulled, so Regulus lit his wand and balanced it across one edge of the bowl.
“Another!” he refilled the tumbler and held Kreacher’s head tightly as he administered the drink. Kreacher gulped it down, shuddered, and lay still. One eye lay half-open, pupil-less, while the other was tightly shut.
“Wake up!” Regulus shook the frail body as hard as he could. “Wake up! Damn you! Damn you!”
Kreacher rolled out of his arms and struck the stone with a soft crick. Regulus stared at the tumbler in his hand and plunged it into the basin. He was clutching the cup so hard it was shaking as he thought of the unbearable burning when the liquid struck his face. But Kreacher did not seemed to have burned. He put the tumbler to his lips and drank.
Again - and again - and again - why was he doing this? It was all a trick. The Horcrux was probably lying at the bottom of that serene black lake, cocooned in a slowly-swimming shoal of Inferi, all claim to it lost even to the Dark Lord. He bent over the basin, clutching the stone so tightly his bandaged fingertips broke up and blood seeped into the white dressing. He drank again.
In front of his eyes Barty was screaming, “Stop, stop! He’s killing me!” and there, standing on the black water across the basin from him was the hunched profile of Snape, leering, laughing, walking away in disdain. A drop of the green liquid hung from Regulus’ bottom lip and them tumbled down into the bowl. Regulus followed the path of the droplet and saw it strike the copper cup, which was rolling gently back and forth where he had dropped it. There was only enough left for one more glass.
The tumbler scraped against the stone. Regulus held it up and forced his hand to tip it until not a drop was left. He shakily drew himself upright and looked down into the basin. He reached out and his bleeding fingertips lifted up a golden locket, as long as his thumb. It was quite dry and on its surface, the engraving of an ornate ‘S’ glinted in the light from the wand. With his other hand, Regulus drew out of the depths of his pocket the small, cheap trinket his mother had given him five days ago - or technically, the afternoon that had just passed.
He folded up his letter and jammed it into his mother’s locket, then dropped it into the basin. He wrapped the chain of the larger locket around his hand, pressing the ‘S’ into his palm. It felt heavy, but not as if it were carrying a piece of soul.
The broom was still by the basin where it had left it. He cradled Kreacher’s limp form in the crook of his arm and before he knew it he was on the edge of the lake again, standing in front of the invisible entrance to the outside world.
The house elf stirred against him. Regulus lowered his head as one thin arm reached up to him and an entreating voice, “Water, master…”
Regulus could feel a numbness beginning to spread through his chest. So it was poison? Was he dying? Yes. He could feel it tightening his arteries. His eyelids were heavy and Kreacher’s request did not seem so great a thing. The copper tumbler was in his pocket; he crouched and filled it from the lake. At once, he saw the white faces of the Inferi rising like bubbles through the black water in response to the intruder - but he quickly pressed his bloody fingers to the entrance and slipped through to safety on the other side.
He drank half the water from the tumbler and the coldness jarred him. Kreacher gulped down the rest as Regulus set him back on his hoary feet.
“Kreacher,” Regulus barked. The house elf turned bloodshot eyes towards him.
“Darling Regulus, Mistress’ Darling, what could he want, what could the bitter, cruel boy want?” Kreacher muttered, rubbing his hands together. “Cruel boy, beautiful boy, Mistress always said him so beautiful, oh, she will be angry… Mistress is Kreacher’s only master now…”
“Kreacher,” Regulus said again, bewildered for a moment by the speech that has issued forth from the tiny mouth. He grabbed Kreacher’s ear and forced the wrinkled face to look up at him. The house elf’s eyes darted across Regulus’ mutilated face as he spoke, “You must take this,” he pushed the locket into Kreacher’s hands, “and hide it in the house. My mother does not want to see it.”
“He orders me, oh, yes, but Kreacher only wants to take orders from my beloved Mistress, she isn’t cruel,” he growled, taking the locket.
“If Sirius comes back,” Regulus grabbed the house-elf’s ear again to keep him from squirming away, “Listen! If Sirius ever comes back, the locket is his. Understand?”
“Kreacher understands,” came the surly reply.
He ordered the house elf to return to the house and not to tell anyone what had transpired this day. Once he was alone, Regulus mounted the broom again and went swiftly out into the clear night air.
He stood on the edge of the sea where the ragged rocks fell away in gradual sheets, with the waves sucking away at the mussels clinging a few inches from Regulus’ toes. He watched the moon rising for a few minutes, calculated in his head the degrees of it trajectory across the sky and then its speed in orbiting the earth. He picked three stars at random and had worked out the three angles that formed between them before he realised the topmost one was Sirius.
Centaurs could see the future by reading the stars. That was beyond his human mind, no matter how acrobatic his brain could be. Sirius’ future was so uncertain. He would probably die in battle, Regulus imagined, still young and beautiful as he had always been and all the Wizarding world would think of bravery and glory when they heard the name Sirius Black. Barty’s future was more clear - he would die in the service of the Dark Lord. He would worship his master until the end and perish with the mark searing his arm.
At least I know my own future, Regulus thought. The numbness of the green poison had returned now in greater force. He was beginning to lose feeling in his feet and the blood from his fingertips had ceased without clotting.
He had found the equilibrium. Regulus Black = Lord Voldemort. Not quite orgasm, but it felt as good. It felt as satisfying. It felt like completeness.
A few minutes later a raging wave swept over the rock and took the body of Regulus Black with it as the water was sucked, booming, back into the ocean.
-----------------------------
FIN.
Title: Equation (Part Two)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Slash, Murder, Glossed-over sex, Mild cussing, Character Death, and important warning nonsensical mathematical jargon.
To Summarise: Regulus Black loves Barty Crouch (and Arithmancy). This Monday will be his last seven days on earth.
Where to go? Regulus, his head spinning like the worst of hangovers, knew he had no home. There was already a Regulus in Grimmauld Place and the Leaky Cauldron would soon have two Regulus’ among its occupants. He had nowhere to go, nowhere that his past selves did not already occupy. He had become the remainder of an equation, cut adrift and superfluous. And he could still smell Bellatrix’s skin, her hair, her sex…
He Apparated again and found himself outside the house of the Crouch family, a stout little box on the edge of a village somewhere in Salisbury. Barty’s petite mother was sitting in the front window, playing a glowing amber cello between her knees. Regulus did not think further, staggering up the front steps and slamming his fist against the front door until the frosted window panes rattled. He heard the cello’s song abruptly screech and the heavy instrument thump to the floor, twanging. Barty’s mother cursed loudly and a moment later the door was thrown open to reveal her with her wand outstretched. When she saw his face her expression changed at once from anger and fear (she thought it might have been a Death Eater! Oh, how terribly hilarious! Regulus said to himself) to one of kindness.
“Regulus! Merlin’s beard, are you well? Come in!”
Half an hour later he was lying under the sheets of Barty’s bed with a cup of pepper-up potion steaming and undrunk on the cabinet beside him. Barty was sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning against him, but Regulus couldn’t hear anything he was saying - awkward, jerking questions punctuated by his tender stroking of Regulus’ hair and face. He thought he was going to vomit again, but the hum of Barty’s voice distracted him and gradually the nausea subsided. But not the phantom weight of Bellatrix.
“Regulus,” Barty repeated. “What’s happened? Why’re you sick?”
He sat up so quickly Barty jumped from surprise. Regulus’ eyes were wide and wild, his teeth bared in a grimace. “Have you ever let Him touch you? Have you? Have you ever given the Dark Lord his pleasure, Barty?” he snarled.
Barty’s hand flew to the Dark Mark, near-invisible on his forearm. He stared at Regulus for a moment, then slowly shook his head.
Regulus collapsed against the pillows. “Bellatrix was the only way, then,” he mumbled. He wasn’t even sure whether he was speaking aloud or not, but Barty’s rapt attention attested to it. “Had to be Bellatrix. Got His soul now, Barty. Got it now. Clever, huh? Merlin, that wine made me sick… Bellatrix made me sick… Bellatrix is wine…ha ha…”
Barty still didn’t speak. Regulus’ ramblings settled into the silent twitching of his lips and he felt himself sinking into sleep.
When he awoke, night had fallen and the skinny straw-haired boy had crawled in under the covers with him, wrapping his arms around Regulus’ shivering, feverish frame. He realised the two of them hadn’t touched each other for two months, since that long night when Regulus retrieved his Obliviated memories and realised he had lost his right to a place in this bed. In that moment he needed Barty, needed things to be the way they were before his father died, before that hideous mark touched his skin, when people outside of Hogwarts perished at the hands of Death Eaters but he was safe and comforted inside the castle walls. Sirius always used to say that comfort was a child’s illusion, but what did Sirius know? Nothing could comfort his miserable bastard of a brother. Sirius was never satisfied. Regulus wanted to be satisfied, so badly.
Barty must have felt Regulus move against him because he turned his head in the darkness and whispered, “Go ahead. I need you too.”
Tomorrow, he knew, Barty would go to his Master and report everything he had seen and heard. Tomorrow, Tuesday, they would come hunting for Regulus. If he hadn’t come to Barty today and blurted his nonsense about Bellatrix he might have had a chance to live past Tuesday, but that was impossible now.
It didn’t matter anymore. He didn’t have to live past today. Here, now, he took his fill from Barty and was satisfied.
Moonlight spread across the carpet with infinite slowness. Barty had fallen asleep an hour ago. Regulus got up and put his heavy robes back on in silence. He took out the timeturner which looked silver out of the reach of the sun. With his forefinger he traced the profile of Barty’s nose against the pillow and then bent down to kiss one crescent of a closed eyelid. He felt the dial of the timeturner with his other hand and turned it.
Monday
In a Ministry funded Library at the end of Diagon Alley, Regulus cast a spell around a corner of the uppermost storey so that no one would stumble onto him by accident. He sat down on the dark blue carpet and with a quick Severing Charm, cut open the lining of his robes and gingerly placed the instruments in a circle around him. Some were sparking with little white flashes, others simply displaying ghostly numerals or arcane symbols which floated across their surfaces like shredded paper beneath the surface of a pool. Regulus conjured his notebook and, one by one, began to record the measurements and the readings that the instruments had taken from his ghastly fuck with Bellatrix. Little voyeur-meters, they were.
One-one-Delta-six-three-eight-ehwaz-omega-bronze-twelve, he wrote, hand moving in a blur across the page as he studied the first of his instruments. Yellow-yellow-five-two-nine-over-delta-one-one. The numbers were already beginning to fade; he should have done all this yesterday, while they were fresh. He might lose some of the measurements, Merlin curse it all. At least he had had the foresight to make more than was needed.
It took him an hour to get all of the readings from his instruments. Only two had faded so much as to be useless. What he had was plenty to go on.
Now came the difficult part. He stared at the pages of numbers and short-hand symbols he had scribbled down. Now he had to translate it all into the echo of the Dark Lord’s soul and the location where it was hidden.
----------------------------------------------------
Professor Vector wouldn’t let Regulus do his NEWT level exam two years early, insisting that he to wait until sixth-year. He didn’t mind so much in the end, realising when he reached his OWLs that one less exam that year was a blessing. But he knew that if he could have done the Arithmancy exam two years early instead of one, he would have had no problem getting ‘Outstanding’.
Professor Vector was young for a teacher, barely into his thirties. Regulus was the gem of his classes and he didn’t squander an ounce of the boy’s talent. He ordered books for Regulus from the furthest reaches of the globe, trying to find a limit to his pupil’s talent for Arithmancy. He never succeeded. Regulus Black knew mathematical magic like nothing the young Professor had ever seen. He treated the Slytherin boy more like a place to store his knowledge than a student. Everything Professor Vector knew, Regulus learned. Sometimes he even understood them better than the Professor himself.
“Most wizards can’t look at the world logically, Reggie,” he said. “Let alone understand magic! There isn’t an ounce of real reason in their senses. Magic doesn’t look like it works logically, so nobody bothers to try and force logic on it. But it’s there, oh yes, it’s all there. That’s how the make spells, my boy, they’re not born from nowhere - dedicated Arithmancers like you and eye work them out step by step, number by number. But Arithmancy is just as useful with the magic used around us. Find the common denominator in the ingredients of a potion and you can render it as harmless as a cup of water. Learn the equation that shapes a spell and you will deflect any curse you like with the weakest of shields.”
“What about the killing curse?” Regulus asked lazily.
“Of course! I’m glad you asked! Theory says it can be done, Reggie. Mathematics is universal and Arithmancy tells us every spell has its anti-magic. There’s just never been anyone who can calculate the negative equation for the killing curse. You have to take account of the wizard being killed into your calculations, you see, along with the angle of the wand, the point of contact, the strength of the wizard casting it and his willpower at the moment he speaks the words, so by the time you’ve figured it all out the man’s already dead! Very unfortunate.”
“Can Arithmancy see the future?”
“Why, of course! Centaurs manage it pretty well. They use the reflection of magic off the atmosphere to calculate the exact location of every atom that will take part in the event they would like to foresee in order to figure out where that atom will be at the point in time they are looking at.”
“What do you mean the reflection of the atmosphere? They can see magic in the air?”
“Not quite,” Professor Vector winked. “They study the way stars flicker. The distortion of their light provides all the measurements. Of course, you have to have the stars in certain positions to calculate the events you want… very heavy stuff, Reggie. Humans can’t handle it. Centaurs’ brains just work differently from ours.”
When his seventh year came, Regulus had passed his NEWT exam with top marks in Britain so he no longer had an Arithmancy class to attend, but he kept visiting Professor Vector in the evenings anyway. This was a few months before he and Barty took the Dark Mark, but Barty was already delving deeper into the dark arts and he needed Regulus to help him with the calculations of the spells, which he couldn’t get from the Hogwarts library. Perhaps the dark magic rubbed off on Regulus and Professor Vector, trained for years as an Arithmancer, could sense its traces. Perhaps he recognised the cold glint in Regulus’ face that said he was on the first steps to becoming a murderer. Or perhaps he was just a frightened young man who knew his best student’s family history - who knew that the Death Eaters were everywhere.
“Arithmancy isn’t something that should be in a war,” the Professor muttered to himself one night, running his fingers absently over the spines of his bookshelf, searching for a text on the mathematics of magical architecture which he’d promised to lend Regulus. “Did you hear about that Arithmancer whose wife and daughter were killed by a werewolf, just because the Ministry forced him to help with the schematics of some new curse they’re developing? Horrible,” he shuddered. “Makes me glad to be under the eye of Albus. We’re academics, not soldiers. We shouldn’t have to take sides!”
“Spoken like a true Ravenclaw,” Regulus sneered, leaning against the Professor’s desk with his arms folded.
Professor Vector turned slowly to look at him. “You think it’s cowardly, do you?” he growled, looking quickly back to his books. “Then on your head be it. I warn you, Reggie. You’ll overreach yourself.”
Regulus was surprised by the disgust in Professor Vector’s tone. Bristling, he replied, “Maybe you would. I can’t overreach.”
“Idiot!” his teacher spun around. “My mind is a speck compared to yours, maybe, but that’s what will destroy you! You think you’re a God, Regulus, but the rest of you cannot keep up.”
Regulus shook his head, but Professor Vector had never spoken to him like that and he didn’t know how to reply. He felt like a stupid first-year again. He wrinked his nose and stomped away, slamming the door behind him.
----------------------------------------------------
The theory was simple. With the proper instruments, anyone who knew numbers could read the frequency of the soul the way muggles could read radio waves and gamma rays flying through space. Get close enough to a soul and you could measure their radio waves, analyse their frequency and from there, calculate their location anywhere in the world.
There were three problems. Firstly, Regulus had only read about the frequency of souls in theory and you had to have an unprecedented knowledge of Arithmancy to put the numbers to any use. Well, alright, that wasn’t a problem for him. The second problem was that nobody in the twentieth century knew how to build the instruments required and none had survived from the seventeenth century, the last time they had been successfully put to use. It had taken Regulus a month and a half to overcome that problem, but his own ingenuity had managed it.
The third problem was that the only time he had been that close to the Dark Lord, he had been writhing and screaming on the ground. He couldn’t approach his master without looking in his eyes - and the moment he did that, that mysterious ability called Legilimency would reveal every inch of his plans to the Dark Lord and he would be dead or dying before he even knew his thoughts had betrayed him.
There was only one other part of a creature that exhibited the frequency of its soul. That was the piece of it that was left behind after intercourse. And that part could only be measured during sexual stimulation.
Hence Bellatrix. Hence the aphrodisiac elixir in the wine. Hence that carnal act so soon after Bellatrix had been filled with the Dark Lord’s seed. It had been the only way to get that vital sample of Bellatrix’s master. Now he had it, he tried to put the price of it out of his mind.
Regulus unfolded a map of the United Kingdom, complete with the most detailed lines of latitude and longitude, magnetic currents and air density. His instruments had recorded three frequencies, as expected: one for his soul, one for Bellatrix’s, and a very faint whisper that had been the Dark Lord’s, fading quickly inside of her. He isolated that frequency and picked one of his instruments that could listen for it. It was a crystal on a long thread of spider-web which spun gently, dipping down at the point where it sensed the frequency. This would show him where on the map that frequency was coming from. There would be two origins: the Dark Lord himself and his Horcrux.
The lamps in the library became brighter as the sun set outside. Regulus wiped his brow with his sleeve and got up to stretch his legs. The instruments weren’t working as he had expected. One minute they said that the soul was in London, the next it seemed to be just outside a muggle village in the countryside, then next it was overtop of Hogwarts, then somewhere on the edge of the Atlantic ocean, then somewhere else entirely! Was the Dark Lord Apparating from place to place? How could his soul be in more than two places at once? It just didn’t make sense!
He strode to the window, looking out over the last shoppers of Diagon Alley hurrying home before dark. He could not believe that all his work would go to waste. There had to be someway to focus the instrument, increase its strength, or direct it to an area more specific than an entire country…
His hands tightened on the windowsill. He remembered the hideously scarred man in the corridor of number 12 Grimmauld Place, four days ago (or just this morning, technically). Hadn’t he already given him the answer? ” It’s in a cave by the sea,” he had said. Regulus rushed back to the map spread on the floor of the library and focused the instrument on the coastal area where it had dipped before. There it was: an insignificant point on a rocky cliff side. That was where he would find the Horcrux.
Regulus recorded the exact coordinates and then gathered up the map and his instruments into his cloak. With one hand he managed to fish the timeturner out of his pocket and twist the dial one notch.
Monday
There was an old broomstick in a child-swallowing cupboard in the attic of Grimmauld Place. Regulus had to sneak in the window of the attic that night and slept there on the cold planks, praying that none of his mother’s failed experiments more dangerous than the swallowing cupboard were stored up here. The next morning he took the broomstick and Apparated to the seaside village as his coordinates directed him.
It was a mark of his fatigue that he missed the village by a good two miles, luckily two miles inland or he would have ended up in the sea. Thankful that he hadn’t splinched himself, he flew over the edge of the cliffs and began to search for a cave of any kind. The sea air and the flight pumped him with energy again and he felt a fearful thrill begin to pump through him.
But he knew the signs of magic when he found it. Late in the afternoon he alighted on a tall spire of rock above a deep pool of water filled by the tide and vanishing into the gloom of a crack in the looming cliff. Steps lead down into the water, which was a dead giveaway, really. Regulus laughed aloud - if he’d been a dark lord, he would not have displayed the location of his soul with a flight of steps. Behind him the waves threw spray forty feet into the air, yet the thin entrance to the cave looked as tranquil as a garden pond. He could almost feel the magic licking against his face and, mounting the broom again, he flew over the water into the mouth of the rock, his toes trailing in the pool and his head bowed low enough to pass into the fissure. More steps lead into a large cave where the distant boom of the waves echoed like cannon-fire.
It was easy to untangle the spells that protected the entrance. Unable to remember the spell for a knife, he chewed his knuckle until blood welled up at the joint and he could smear it across the stone. An arch flashed silver and the rock vanished. Regulus strode through the doorway with his broom over his shoulder.
He caught himself before he went one step too far. He had almost stepped right into an enormous black lake filling a massive cavern too large to echo anything. His eyes made out a distant green star of light - that was the Horcrux. He was certain of it. He got onto the broom once more and, careful now not to touch the pitch water beneath him, floated towards the green glow without letting his eyes leave it.
A dais of flat stone stood out of the water and upon it was a basin, the source of the green glow. Regulus slighted beside it and peered within. It seemed to be full of liquid and a tall silver goblet was standing in the centre of the basin, half-submerged. It did not take long to establish that he could not touch the liquid with his hands, nor vanish it with any spell. The goblet caused no such trouble. He picked it up wondering if this was the object in which Barty’s master had entrusted his soul - but the goblet was plain and a little tarnished by the salty air, quite unremarkable. The Horcrux must be at the bottom of the pool of glowing green.
Regulus dipped the goblet quickly into the basin and found that it easily entered the bright liquid and came out full. He eyed it for a moment, but there was no way he was going to put that foul-looking stuff in his mouth. He turned away and tipped up the goblet; the glowing liquid streamed out onto the ground, hissing as it drained away down stone dais. Smirking to himself, Regulus filled another goblet from the basin and tipped that on the ground, too.
Behind his back, the green liquid bled in a long stream towards the water’s edge and then spread in a diluted bloom into edge of the lake.
Regulus turned with a third full goblet and as he raised it, a white hand locked onto his wrist. His feet slid on the dais and he nearly fell, but the fingers on his wrist held him upright. A leering face cocked its head at him and he choked to see flesh hanging loose from cheekbones and eyeballs withered as raisins in their wide sockets. The creature was trying to drag his hand down, to push the goblet towards his face. More corpses were rising out of the surface of the lake with barely a ripple; three, six, ten of them… Even as he began to panic, his mind was delighted to think to had discovered where the Dark Lord kept his army of inferi. He fumbled for his wand in his robes and hoarsely shouted a spell for fire.
The flames burst out of his wand tip and the corpse clutching his wrist was engulfed, twisting and falling backwards onto its fellows - leaving its hand still wrapped tightly around Regulus’ wrist. In his surprise at being released, the lack of resistance made his arm pull upwards suddenly. The goblet tipped up. The cup of green liquid was emptied in a moment, onto the face of the boy looking up at it in horror.
It was cold when it splashed across his face. Regulus rubbed frantically with his hands, desperately trying to scrape the liquid off. That was when it began to burn, and Regulus started screaming.
He could no longer remember what his legs were doing and he stumbled forward, as his hands were being eaten down to the bone. Every nerve in his face was firing in agony and on top of it all, he could feel the gaunt fingers of the inferi clamp down on his limbs and grab his hair, dragging his face towards the ceiling.
He did not see the goblet, kicked under the feet of the inferi, roll down the dais and into the lake where it vanished silently. He was still screaming as they carried him, flailing and kicking, towards the lake. In a moment the frigid water rose up over his legs, his torso and then his head.
The pain in his face and hands dimmed, the green liquid washed away and what was left of his skin numbed by the cold. The last of his screams emptied the air from his lungs but his struggles were weak, hopeless. He was drowning already, as the hands of the corpses dragged him further down into the water. He wand was gone from his fingers, dropped in the commotion somewhere.
But somehow his hand, stinging with an unearthly crescendo, found the pocket of his robes and the motion of the water wrapped the long, thin chain of the timeturner around his fingertips. He clutched at it, managed to pull it out into the water. By practise he felt for the dials with the same hand that had found the chain and twisted one at random, not caring where he was being sent.
A moment later, the inferi found that their prey had vanished. They clutched at the empty water with gaping, frustrated mouths, but Regulus back was a hundred miles and twenty-two hours behind them.
Monday
He wasn’t really sure how he came to be lying on his back, staring at the sky. He’d got there somehow. There was a high, frantic voice coming from somewhere. It had been shrieking and wailing at him for some time now, at least a few minutes, but Regulus hadn’t been listening to it up until now. It sounded like a house-elf.
“I am going to St Mungo’s master,” the house-elf crooned above him. There was a hard tar-sealed road under Regulus’ skull, he could feel its roughness against his shoulder blades and see the bulbous head of the elf with its enormous ears silhouetted against the sky. “Do not move, Kreacher will be back in only a moment!”
“No,” Regulus’ voice scraped against vocal chords hoarse and dry from screaming. Kreacher paused and gave a sob, torn between the need to help his charge and obedience to the wizard. “Kreacher, take me inside at once.”
“Yes! Kreacher will do at once! Kreacher will tell Mistress to send for St Mungo’s!”
“No. The - the basement. Take me to the basement and lie me down somewhere comfortable. Do not tell anyone I am there, no one at all, not even myself.” That was all he could manage before his voice petered out.
The night passed in a haze of fevered dreams, sleeplessness and pain. He thought Barty was with him, holding a cup of the green liquid and putting it to his lips, no matter how many times Regulus tried to warn him. Comfort came from the long fingers of Kreacher, administering ointments and cool, damp towels, perhaps infused with some inhuman magic of the house-elf’s own design.
He did not know how many hours had passed when Kreacher came back with armfuls of bandages and a bottle of pale blue liquid. He heard the house-elf murmuring to him, saying something about stealing the medicine and that master must be brave for a moment. Then Kreacher poured the charmed disinfectant over his face and his nerves exploded again. He screamed, not caring that the scream was loud enough to wake the whole house, though only one person above him heard the scream. Through the white-hot blaze of pain he fainted and fell into a heavy sleep at last.
The blue liquid must have done good. His face felt less taut as he awoke sporadically throughout the day, and already the throbbing had subsided. His hands were bandaged tightly and he found he could sit up and hold things without trouble. Kreacher brought him a meal but he gave up eating before he got very far through it: moving his jaw hurt too much. He wrote instead, phrasing letter after delirious letter to the Dark Lord, wondering if he should inject a note of triumph or smooth satisfaction. Should he speak of the work he had done, how cleverly he had tracked down the Horcrux? Or should he make it sound easy? At last he picked a letter at random and shoved it down the front of his crumpled robes.
He ordered Kreacher to bring him a clock and a mirror and the house-elf complied at once, lugging down a large oval of glass specked with mildew. He stared at his reflection and wondered how Kreacher had recognised him. All that was left in place of his face (the face Sirius used to call “gorgeous as any girl’s” back when Sirius was still his brother) was melted candle wax, folds of skin for lips and two dull, uneven windows where his eyes peered out.
“I look like Him. I look like Barty’s Master,” he whispered and began to laugh until it hurt.
He had to go back as soon as he could. He had no more strength for another week like this. But what was the use? How could he empty that basin?
He waited as long as he could, staring at the mirror and letting his mind wander aimlessly along algebra equations and disassembled plots and spells that might help him gain the Horcrux, through midnight, when Tuesday came unseen except to the clocks and calendars of London, until the sun had risen. Then he called Kreacher to his side, looped the chain of the time-turner around both their necks and twisted the largest dial one notch.
Monday
The broom had been left on the ground beside the deadly basin, but even a great wizard’s spells against portkeys and Apparation did not apply to house-elf magic. Regulus looked into the self-generated light of the basin, empty of reflection. An hour ago he had spoken to himself and seen his own face for the last time. If the players had changed, if Sirius had been in his stead, would his brother have warned himself of the dangers that were to come? Would that have doomed him or saved him? Would Sirius have been able to bear looking at his face burned beyond recognition, bereft of those handsome features that had ensnared Potter and the hearts of too many girls - ugh. No, Sirius would never have let that happen to himself.
“Kreacher,” he said through lisping lips, flicking his wand to summon a plain copper tumbler. He dipped it into the basin and knelt on one knee. “Drink this.”
The house elf didn’t ask questions. His long fingers wrapped around the tumbler and he knocked it back with a few quick gulps before letting his arms drop. Regulus took the tumbler back. He watched Kreacher’s face for a moment. The huge grey eyes were growing shinier: then Kreacher burst into a torrent of tears. “Wh-what is that, master? What?”
“It’s nothing,” Regulus said, refilling the tumbler. “Here. Drink again.”
Kreacher drank, tears mixing with the green liquid and trickling off his chin. He sobbed through two more glassfuls of the potion before his trembling fingers could no longer hold it to his mouth.
“Drink!” Regulus ordered, pushing the edge of the tumbler into the house-elf’s face.
“Kreacher d-does not want to!”
“Regulus Black, last male descendent of the noble house of Black, commands you to continue drinking this potion until I tell you to stop!” he snarled, holding the back of the house elf’s head. Kreacher drank every drop.
“Another!” Regulus pressed. Kreacher was twisting like a scarecrow in a high wind, his limbs flapping backwards and forwards and his ears quivering. But the orders had been clear and he could not disobey. He drank again and nonsense words spewed from his mouth, unconnected syllables of distress. The basin was more than half empty now. The glow was dulled, so Regulus lit his wand and balanced it across one edge of the bowl.
“Another!” he refilled the tumbler and held Kreacher’s head tightly as he administered the drink. Kreacher gulped it down, shuddered, and lay still. One eye lay half-open, pupil-less, while the other was tightly shut.
“Wake up!” Regulus shook the frail body as hard as he could. “Wake up! Damn you! Damn you!”
Kreacher rolled out of his arms and struck the stone with a soft crick. Regulus stared at the tumbler in his hand and plunged it into the basin. He was clutching the cup so hard it was shaking as he thought of the unbearable burning when the liquid struck his face. But Kreacher did not seemed to have burned. He put the tumbler to his lips and drank.
Again - and again - and again - why was he doing this? It was all a trick. The Horcrux was probably lying at the bottom of that serene black lake, cocooned in a slowly-swimming shoal of Inferi, all claim to it lost even to the Dark Lord. He bent over the basin, clutching the stone so tightly his bandaged fingertips broke up and blood seeped into the white dressing. He drank again.
In front of his eyes Barty was screaming, “Stop, stop! He’s killing me!” and there, standing on the black water across the basin from him was the hunched profile of Snape, leering, laughing, walking away in disdain. A drop of the green liquid hung from Regulus’ bottom lip and them tumbled down into the bowl. Regulus followed the path of the droplet and saw it strike the copper cup, which was rolling gently back and forth where he had dropped it. There was only enough left for one more glass.
The tumbler scraped against the stone. Regulus held it up and forced his hand to tip it until not a drop was left. He shakily drew himself upright and looked down into the basin. He reached out and his bleeding fingertips lifted up a golden locket, as long as his thumb. It was quite dry and on its surface, the engraving of an ornate ‘S’ glinted in the light from the wand. With his other hand, Regulus drew out of the depths of his pocket the small, cheap trinket his mother had given him five days ago - or technically, the afternoon that had just passed.
He folded up his letter and jammed it into his mother’s locket, then dropped it into the basin. He wrapped the chain of the larger locket around his hand, pressing the ‘S’ into his palm. It felt heavy, but not as if it were carrying a piece of soul.
The broom was still by the basin where it had left it. He cradled Kreacher’s limp form in the crook of his arm and before he knew it he was on the edge of the lake again, standing in front of the invisible entrance to the outside world.
The house elf stirred against him. Regulus lowered his head as one thin arm reached up to him and an entreating voice, “Water, master…”
Regulus could feel a numbness beginning to spread through his chest. So it was poison? Was he dying? Yes. He could feel it tightening his arteries. His eyelids were heavy and Kreacher’s request did not seem so great a thing. The copper tumbler was in his pocket; he crouched and filled it from the lake. At once, he saw the white faces of the Inferi rising like bubbles through the black water in response to the intruder - but he quickly pressed his bloody fingers to the entrance and slipped through to safety on the other side.
He drank half the water from the tumbler and the coldness jarred him. Kreacher gulped down the rest as Regulus set him back on his hoary feet.
“Kreacher,” Regulus barked. The house elf turned bloodshot eyes towards him.
“Darling Regulus, Mistress’ Darling, what could he want, what could the bitter, cruel boy want?” Kreacher muttered, rubbing his hands together. “Cruel boy, beautiful boy, Mistress always said him so beautiful, oh, she will be angry… Mistress is Kreacher’s only master now…”
“Kreacher,” Regulus said again, bewildered for a moment by the speech that has issued forth from the tiny mouth. He grabbed Kreacher’s ear and forced the wrinkled face to look up at him. The house elf’s eyes darted across Regulus’ mutilated face as he spoke, “You must take this,” he pushed the locket into Kreacher’s hands, “and hide it in the house. My mother does not want to see it.”
“He orders me, oh, yes, but Kreacher only wants to take orders from my beloved Mistress, she isn’t cruel,” he growled, taking the locket.
“If Sirius comes back,” Regulus grabbed the house-elf’s ear again to keep him from squirming away, “Listen! If Sirius ever comes back, the locket is his. Understand?”
“Kreacher understands,” came the surly reply.
He ordered the house elf to return to the house and not to tell anyone what had transpired this day. Once he was alone, Regulus mounted the broom again and went swiftly out into the clear night air.
He stood on the edge of the sea where the ragged rocks fell away in gradual sheets, with the waves sucking away at the mussels clinging a few inches from Regulus’ toes. He watched the moon rising for a few minutes, calculated in his head the degrees of it trajectory across the sky and then its speed in orbiting the earth. He picked three stars at random and had worked out the three angles that formed between them before he realised the topmost one was Sirius.
Centaurs could see the future by reading the stars. That was beyond his human mind, no matter how acrobatic his brain could be. Sirius’ future was so uncertain. He would probably die in battle, Regulus imagined, still young and beautiful as he had always been and all the Wizarding world would think of bravery and glory when they heard the name Sirius Black. Barty’s future was more clear - he would die in the service of the Dark Lord. He would worship his master until the end and perish with the mark searing his arm.
At least I know my own future, Regulus thought. The numbness of the green poison had returned now in greater force. He was beginning to lose feeling in his feet and the blood from his fingertips had ceased without clotting.
He had found the equilibrium. Regulus Black = Lord Voldemort. Not quite orgasm, but it felt as good. It felt as satisfying. It felt like completeness.
A few minutes later a raging wave swept over the rock and took the body of Regulus Black with it as the water was sucked, booming, back into the ocean.
-----------------------------
FIN.