Chapter Text
The smell of blood was nauseating, but at least it reminded him that he was still alive.
Where Regulus sat, bound by the armrests to a chair, there was a small pool of blood at his ankles, he could tell from the sound it made as it dripped down. The Diffindo charm left quite a mess. But there was no use in trying to assess the damage. Instead, he was just looking up, trailing his eyes around the ornate patterns of gold leaf on the high ceiling of the Malfoy Manor dining room. It glimmered ever so slightly from the moonlight as it passed slowly over each section.
By the angle of the light, he could tell that night was drawing to a painful end. At least the night had bought him time, granted him some mercy. Morning would bring none.
It had been his own cousin Bellatrix that had dealt the most blows. From the way the rest of them talked around her, it was as if she was being judged on it all, initiated. Her sister had only watched from in her shadow. The whites of her eyes had still shone through even in the darkness.
They weren’t getting answers; his old master had already come and scraped through every conceivable hiding place in his mind, racked through any and every memory only to come out with nothing. In a fit of unbridled rage, he had used any last shred of energy to Crucio Regulus into oblivion. He thought he could’ve unlocked the secrets of The Order with the capture of Regulus’ brain. He had turned out to be very wrong.
His hands still shook from the effects of the curse. They had been for hours.
Now Regulus’ mind was a jumbled mess of memories, everything out of place and time after he had carved his way through. Having him in his head felt like being cut with a knife, one that twisted and turned inside of him, enough that he could practically feel the scraping on the inside of his skull as it cut his mind to pieces.
Regulus was a good occulemens, but he still had the weak, unfortified mind of a seventeen-year-old boy. He had stood no chance.
Someone entered the room. The door had been opened slowly and shut softly again, making barely a sound, and someone’s footsteps began gently making their way towards him. A whispered episkey pulled him through his stupor as he felt his wounds begin to stitch themselves shut. His restraints disappeared a second later.
His head was then cradled from behind as a glass vial was pushed up to his lips and a tangy liquid ran into his mouth. It tasted familiar, and if his mind was back to normal he probably would’ve been able to figure out what it was.
From still gazing up at the swirling ceiling, he couldn’t see the person in front of him. His head was far too heavy to move.
“Regulus.”
His mouth felt heavy too.
“Regulus.”
The voice was one he knew. Vaguely. But what did it matter now? Part of Regulus hoped that it had been poison poured down his throat, but that didn’t explain closing his wounds.
There was a sad sigh from whoever his company was.
“I just wanted you to know that this isn’t something I want to do, this isn’t personal.” They spoke in a hushed voice, thick with remorse. Then the hand returned to the back of his head and brought it forward, making Regulus eye-level with the speaker. He recognised their face too, some ravaged memory in his mind somewhere was sounding out like a chime, only to remain lost in the ether of everything else, unable to surface.
“I’m just taking away the pain. It’ll be over soon, I promise.”
Their sincerity bore right through to Regulus’ heart, right before something else happened that drowned it all out.
Regulus was just about able to register the wand pressed to his temple, before the floodgates opened.
Everything stopped. Only for a mere moment.
Then, everything else began to burst through. All the tattered remains of his memory tore out of him in an instant gush. His first game of quidditch, the summer he spent in St Mungo’s, a game of exploding snap in the common room, Barty showing his new Dark Mark, Sirius leaving out the front door, spilling baneberry potion on his robes and scorching them, being called to his father’s study…
Everything. All of it pouring out of him. No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t stop it all from spilling out like water through trembling fingers. He was being cleaned out, cleansed of everything.
Some memories were tugged on more harshly than the rest. Fragments of information such as certain people’s names, locations, images of Malfoy Manor and other sorts of hideaways he’d spent time in. Hushed conversations in back alleys and parchments passed discreetly between people under Regulus’ eyes. Anything related to the Dark Lord was sought out and yanked away.
All else was just collateral damage. Rinsing him out of everything, just to be thorough.
His last Christmas with Sirius flashed before his eyes, where he had given him his first cigarette, then mocked him for coughing so much. He realised he was crying. Or maybe his eyes were just overflowing, trying to hold everything in.
Not even a few seconds later he had already forgotten why his eyes were wet.
The voice had been truthful. The pain was gone.
Years could have passed before he was finally let go of. The thread holding his consciousness was completely unravelled by then, a loose string dangling by a single fibre left. His head hit the back of the chair. He wanted to close his eyes, make it all disappear for the last time. The ceiling decoration swam in crazy patterns above him.
“Regulus?” The voice sounded frightened now. And so, so far away. “I… I had to do this…”
Nothing made sense anymore. He was no longer there. This wasn’t a room, he wasn’t a person, he was barely real.
“… This was the only way I could let you go…”
Those sounds were no longer words. The only sound was a ringing noise, and it seemed to come from everywhere.
Something was put in his hand. Something small with a little weight to it. It was soft. Then it wasn’t soft anymore as the outer was pulled away from it and his hand touched something cool and hard. Then there was no chair under him and he fell backwards, through a tight bubble that swallowed him whole, until he was somewhere else entirely.
A cold air caressed his skin.
Under him now was something wet and cold. A wetness also spat down at him from above. The ringing continued. All around him was darkness, and eventually, that’s all his mind was too.
*
A darkness made a home inside of him for what felt like a small eternity. Time didn’t pass. Time was stuck in his throat, lodged down there so far he could barely breathe.
This darkness stayed in his mind, if that’s what was still there. He wasn’t so sure he did have a mind anymore, or that he ever did. The sinking feeling in his chest told him this is what had always been and always would be. Nothingness.
The darkness was like a plague, paralysing him. Things seemed to move above him, in the periphery of his vision, but it was all so far away that it didn’t seem possible he existed in the same place as it all. His body was a hollow casket, and the shapes and colours that passed around him had to be mourners. But sometimes, the things that floated around in that strange plain of existence had a way of reaching him through all those layers of darkness and space.
Over time, he began to remember the location of his hands, and the fact that he had hands in the first place. At first feeling like a foreign object, he learned to feel through them again, slowly, testing the waters of the world he was coming back into from inside his own pool of oblivion, where his mind still resided.
His hands, he discovered, worked better than his mind at grasping reality. There would be times something intertwined itself between his fingers and held it steady. He felt comforted by that, and it gave him something to reach for. But when it disappeared, he was lost again.
Slowly but surely his eyes began to see again. They began to unfreeze from their position and wander a little. They weren’t as good as his hands, nothing ever contacted them, but they did allow for more exploration than his heavy limbs did. Though most of what he saw was a lot of white looming over him. No longer feeling six feet below his surroundings, the moving shapes around him started to make more sense up close as heads and vials, but everything still moved so fast that it all blurred at the edges, and he couldn’t make much sense out of it.
At one point, a voice, so hoarse and loud pierced through the heavy layers of his deep daze enough to make him hear the words If you try and take him to Azkaban, you’ll have to go through me first. He’d forgotten he could hear things. The ringing must have stopped at some point.
He seemed to ebb and flow in and out of dreamless, open-eyed sleep for eons until one moment where he suddenly and completely came to, in some kind of body of water.
There was no gradual settling back into his body, he kind of just was back in it, snapping out of his darkness with violent abruptness. All at once he could feel his arms, his legs, his head. He was lying against something, something hard, yet his head rested on something soft. Firm, but soft, and something about it felt safe.
Water splashed up his torso. He heard it, felt it. It was warm, and there was a smell in the air of… of something nice, like a flower or plant. Flowers smelt nice, that was something he knew.
Where he was hadn’t quite made sense to him yet, but he had a feeling he was being cleaned. Not in the way that had his head screaming before but washed. Bathed. A bath?
Words floated around aimlessly in his head, but most were unintelligible or didn’t match what he was trying to find. Why couldn’t he find the words? It was like they were hiding from him.
Without realising he could do it yet, he furrowed his brows.
“Reg?”
There was a voice here. A person. The soft thing behind his head readjusted and jostled him a little. Was it an arm? Surely baths didn’t have arms? Unless they did.
“Reg, can you hear me?”
Reg… Reg…
Regulus?
“Please, Reg, answer me.”
“Regulus?” Somehow, he had managed to make sound come out of his mouth, in the form of a strange word. A few disjointed syllables that twisted his lips and made his tongue move heavily in his mouth. But he knew it. Somewhere in his addled mind he knew that word had a meaning, and he wanted to find it. If he just tried hard enough…
“Yes! Yes, Regulus, can you hear me?”
The voice spoke with such urgency it almost made him shrink away from it. But he knew that voice. He could never forget that voice, if only the faces and voices and names weren’t all scrambled up, he would know the person it belonged to.
He wanted to answer it, but his mouth was full of lead and it was filling up his whole body and was bringing him under again. The last thing he caught was the voice echoing the words “I’m right here Regulus, I’m right here.”
*
The second time he regained consciousness, he was far more awake than the first. Underneath him was another soft surface, but this one was not firm like an arm, but smooth and supple like linen. He was in a bed. He moved his fingers on its cover and felt it wrinkle between them.
There was a creaking sound in the distance, but it was too far away for him to take real notice. What wasn’t so far away was the dark figure next to him.
He turned his head to look at the shadow, meanwhile testing his ability to move. He was sluggish still, but his body obeyed his command at last.
The shadow turned out to be a boy, with long, black hair and eyes that were staring ahead. No, not ahead, but looking at him. He was struck with a sudden recognition, so strong it almost pushed the air out of his lungs. He knew him, knew him so well, his name sat on the tip of his tongue, he fought to remember the sound of it.
“Regulus… are you there?” the boy tried asking. His face was awash with an emotion that he couldn’t understand.
He was frantically searching for that name. He had nothing else to hold onto other than that name, nothing else he needed other than to find it.
The boy almost conceded, thinking that he wasn’t there or couldn’t hear him, until he managed to sputter out what he hoped was the right jumble of letters and sounds.
“Sirius.”
The boy’s eyes opened wide then. So he repeated it, more coherently this time he hoped, “Sirius.”
The boy pulled his chair closer to the bed, right up against his side. “That’s right, it’s me. It’s me, Sirius.” He took his limp hand into his and the realisation came as to what he had been feeling this whole time. “Do you know who I am?”
He wasn’t expecting a question. Of course, in a sense, he knew exactly who this boy was. He was Sirius. But any more than that, and everything in his mind started to wither away into dust as he tried to sift through it all to find the answer.
Sirius. Sirius was important to him. He knew because the name dredged up something profound inside of him. Something real and reachable, though not quite understandable yet.
Another emotion came through in the boy’s – Sirius’ – eyes, as they dropped downwards. “It’s okay. It’ll come to you, Reg.”
“Reg…” he frowned; Sirius kept saying that.
“Regulus,” Sirius said again, looking straight at him. “That’s your name. Regulus”
His… name?
His name is… Regulus.
Regulus is a name?
“Regulus?” Sirius tried using it again. He supposed he should answer to that if it really was his name. He supposed it would feel as right as any name would.
“Yes?”
“What can… How much do you…?” Unexplainably, Sirius’ eyes started to fill with water and splash down his cheek like the water in the bath. His voice became choked.
Was this his fault? Was there a question he had asked that he hadn’t been able to decipher? How did he answer him?
“I’m just sorry. Regulus, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to do.”
Just those few words somehow made him feel worse than anything else ever had.
*
From then on, he was conscious much more of the time, slowly emerging from his death-like state more and more. Time was still a silly concept and he didn’t quite understand it or how it passed, but he sensed that time was moving slower for him than it was for everybody else.
For instance, a woman (one he didn’t recognise at all) came into the room he was in at some point, where he laid in bed almost all of the time, and started to peel away his skin. He started to panic until he realised that it was not skin that she was peeling off but rather a white cloth that wrapped around some parts of bis body exposing his real skin which was covered in strange little lines. She had used the word scar when describing the permanence of them, so he supposed that’s what they were called. She did everything so quickly that he barely noticed when she had gone, only looking at the patterns on his body.
There was also a large black mark in the middle of his forearm which didn’t look much like the other marks, but he assumed it must be something similar, for the woman said nothing about it.
Sirius didn’t have these scars, nor did the woman. When Sirius was back in the room, he tried to speak again to ask him, “Did I always have these?” His voice still sounded strange coming from his own mouth.
Sirius had that look again in his eyes, the one he can’t work out. “No.”
He said nothing then for a while. The scars were curious things to him. They were something the woman had sounded worried about and were something that made Sirius have an odd sort of look about him.
Under his breath, he murmured, “Were they my fault?”
Sirius went rigid. “Why would you ask that?”
He hesitated. Truly, he didn’t know why he had said that. The thought had just popped into his head and come right out of his mouth a second later. It didn’t even feel like he’d thought it, more like a strange thought had wondered into the forefront of his mind out of some unexplored depths of his unconscious, that he had yet to even scratch the surface of.
Looking at Sirius didn’t clear it up for him either as he looked just as unknowing as he felt inside, and more than that, Sirius looked… concerned. Concern he could recognise for some reason, just not the other one.
“I…” he started, “I don’t know.”
He was telling the truth, but something inside still nagged at him for some reason. He didn’t say anything about the scars after that.
He came to learn new things though. Sirius spoke a lot, but not all of it made sense or went in. Sometimes he said something that sparked a specific fragment of his brain that he was almost able to understand, but then the thought would dissipate and be lost again.
Sometimes he asked Sirius questions, but more often than not he wouldn’t get an answer. There were lots of things Sirius wasn’t allowed to tell him yet: where he was, who else was there, why he was there. Probably for the best, they were important questions, and he wasn’t sure if he would be able to comprehend an important answer in his state.
Sirius tried to explain back to him what had happened the night the darkness had taken hold of him and what must’ve lead up to it, which seemed odd as he couldn’t imagine anything coming before that. Lots of what he said about that distressed him and he tried to ignore it, which wasn’t hard. Returning to the darkness was a lot easier than leaving it. He almost wished to be sucked right back into it, to before he even knew that he had hands and eyes and a body and mind. Though it did make Sirius annoyed when he zoned out.
Sometime in one of Sirius’ explanations he mentioned the name Dumbledore, which set off a flurry of urgent and racing thoughts.
“Dumbledore! I have to see him, I have to speak with him…”
“Regulus–”
“… I have to give him something, it’s urgent! I have to…”
“Regulus,” Sirius spoke louder this time, although it was still taking time for him to recognise Regulus as his name.
“I… it’s important,” he pleaded.
“Regulus, Dumbledore had already been alerted of your presence here, and your condition. He’s coming as soon as he can I can assure you,” Sirius said, pushing him back against the pillows. He’d barely remembered sitting upright.
“He’s coming?”
“Yes, he’s coming,” said Sirius, before he did something weird. The corners of his mouth turned up and pulled his face into a funny shape. It changed the look in his eyes too. With a light feeling in his chest, he realised that Sirius was smiling. He remembered what it was to smile.
“You’re smiling,” he said, dumbfounded.
Then Sirius chuckled. “It’s just nice seeing you more… alive again.”
That did make him feel weird, but he pushed the feeling away. And he smiled back at Sirius, enjoying the exchange. Enjoyment was new too.
“I’ve also just never known anyone so eager to speak with Dumbledore. But then again, you were always a keener.”
He would have to ask what the word keener meant later. But for now, he just enjoyed seeing Sirius smile. He also tried to forget about whatever was so urgent to tell Dumbledore. That could wait.
*
It turned out that waiting for Dumbledore was much more excruciating than he had first thought it would be. So much so that he remembered what excruciating meant. Sirius never did give him a clear answer for how long it would take for him to get there so he had no idea whether it would be hours, days or weeks even. And to him they all sounded like eternity.
He tried to keep himself busy. At all times he was testing his limits of his movement, setting new goals like dressing himself, getting out of bed, walking around and even bathing himself.
It occurred to him that it must’ve been Sirius before who had taken him into the bath and washed him. His arm that held his head upright.
Baths did prove to be a bit of a challenge as the heat and humidity made his head feel funny and the darkness almost took him again once before he was able to call for Sirius, who had been waiting just outside the door.
The idea that Sirius must’ve helped him undress and seen his entire body when he bathed him made him feel strange. There were still many blank spots in his mind around Sirius, despite having gathered some things. He could picture him as a child for starters, which is how he knew that his hair hadn’t always been long. He also knew that they went to school together even if he couldn’t match an image to that knowledge.
Using that, he knows he must’ve known Sirius for a long time and been close with him. But that could still mean a lot of things. Friends. Brothers. Lovers even, which would make the bath less weird. Although wouldn’t a friend or brother do that for him too? What exactly was the difference between all those relationships anyway? It was all too confusing for him, he wanted to wait for Sirius to tell him. Yet he always avoided saying.
It was like Sirius desperately wanted him to remember it himself, like it was important that he had to do it. But he was terrified of saying the wrong thing.
Sirius showed him a bit more of where he was staying outside of the bedroom and the bathroom. It was like his world was expanding. There was a whole floor below him that had a kitchen and dining room and the other kind of room where people sit on big chairs that faced each other with a low table in the middle. He sat on one of those chairs while Sirius did something in the kitchen.
There came knocking sound at what must’ve been a front door to wherever they were. Sirius went to him first though to quickly tell him to stay where he was, which made him nervous, before he answered it.
What he could hear was very little as both Sirius and whoever he spoke to conversed in hurried, whispered words, muffled by the wall between him and them. But parts he did make out were “here for almost a week now… intense surveillance… can’t be helped… if everyone does their job… can’t know much… too late to try… might get Moody to… end sooner or later…” As with most things, none of it made any sense. Additionally, surveillance was not a word he had heard before. He might ask Sirius about it later if he wouldn’t be concerned about him having eavesdropped.
Soon enough, the door shut with a click and Sirius waltzed right back into the kitchen without an explanation. He was also carrying a small rectangular package wrapped in brown paper. A while later he came back with a very full mug of dark purple liquid.
“Drink this.”
Should he have been a little more curious about what he was drinking? Possibly. But Sirius was perhaps the one person in Regulus’ entire world that he really trusted. He was also the only real person in Regulus’ entire world anyway unless he wanted to count the mysterious woman that had unwrapped his scars, or the name of Dumbledore that he seemed to be hung up on.
He drank the whole thing without question. It tasted sweet, and he remarked that he liked the taste. Sirius said nothing as he drank his own mug of a very different brown liquid.
Later, when he had gotten into bed, with Sirius still at his side in the chair with a book in hand, he began to feel the effects of whatever he had drank.
What constituted as sleep was hazy to him, as sleep could mean any various type of unconsciousness ranging from the total darkness that enraptured him to the kind where he might seem distant for a moment and wouldn’t hear Sirius calling to him or shaking him back to reality.
But what he felt that night was probably the closest he’d had to a normal type of sleep that most people have, and what he imagines Sirius means when he talks about sleep.
He fell into a deep level of calm. But only for a moment, before images started to appear in his mind.
He was transported to a place he couldn’t quite recognise but felt that he remembered somehow. A place with tall walls – much taller than the place he was really living in – and even higher vaulted ceilings with, impossibly, little white lights hovering in the air, suspended above him. There were lots of people around him. A sea of faces and black robes that whizzed past him and sat at long tables that stretched on for miles. The scale was almost overwhelming. As was the sound, a cacophony of laughter and chatter and hoots and jeers that felt like it might bring back the ringing in his ears.
In this world, even he was wearing the same black robes, with a gold and red bit of fabric around his neck. Someone was looking at him, their mouth moving with sound coming out in words too fast for his mind to compute. Something about “Quidditch try-outs” and “mess in the dorm room” and “divination exam”. Words that he wasn’t able to take the time to match up with their meanings in the world he was in, but words he definitely knew.
Something was being demanded of him, an answer? An agreement?
But before the stress set in too much he appeared to have changed locations, and suddenly found himself by the side of a large body of water surrounded by trees and greenery. The water was very still, and he tried to think of the word for large bodies of water but drew up short. He liked this place better. Everything was calm here.
Although, he wasn’t alone. Sat beside him was a girl, with reddish hair and a lot of rolls of parchment strewn around her. Then suddenly, and without meaning or thinking to, he began to speak, and someone else’s words came out of his mouth.
“Come on Lils it’s not like you even need to study anyway, we all know you’re going to smash history of magic.”
He felt like a puppet, his mouth moving when he willed it not to, saying words that were not his own, in a voice that didn’t belong to him. He was utterly perplexed.
“Sirius, the only reason I do well is because I study. I’m not like you I can’t just wing it.”
This time the girl spoke… and called him Sirius. He looked around. Sirius wasn’t anywhere around him.
“I just need to do well so I can go home for the holidays unstressed, you know?”
The girl was flicking through the mess of parchments, all with scrawled ink notes covering them. She then sighed and looked right at him.
“Sirius, are you okay? You don’t look good,” she said.
“What?” he said, finally a word he had some volition over. His heart was pounding.
“Sirius…”
But the rest of her words were drowned out by an odd black swirl that engulfed them both and swept him up and off of the grass.
He awoke with a gasp.
Back in his bed. Sirius next to him, awake also, and eyeing him closely.
“Regulus, breathe. It’s okay, just breathe,” said Sirius.
But he couldn’t. There was no more air left in the world. The black swirl had taken it all.
“Reg, seriously just breathe, you’re going to pass out if you don’t!”
That did nothing to calm him. He felt his body convulse, trying to pull air into his lungs, but he could only sputter and gasp. Sirius gripped his hand.
“Breathe with me Reg, breathe with me. At the same time, okay? Okay, in,” Sirius was wide eyed and frantic trying to get him to breathe, motioning with his other hand that slowly rose up his chest that he should breathe in now. He tried to do as he was told, trying to suck air or anything in. “Okay, okay now out,” Sirius demonstrated himself by animatedly breathing out, his entire chest sinking on the exhale. As hard as he tried to mirror it, inside his chest was a solid block of concrete and barely any breath came out.
Still, diligently, Sirius kept on trying to establish a rhythm of breathing in then out. In then out. He supposed that it must be working as he hadn’t passed out yet, though it didn’t get much easier each time. His heart still thumped with the power of a hippogriff kicking him in the chest each time. And the air was still too thin.
But after a long, long while, once light had begun to seep through the blinds, he realised that he could breathe properly again and that there was still air in the world.
“Regulus? You with me still?” Sirius asked. He nodded against his chest where his head had fallen at some point.
“Regulus I’m sorry, I should’ve warned you first,” Sirius’ voice sounded wet and heavy, “I just didn’t realise it would affect you like this.”
Regulus heard voices coming from downstairs, but again, they were too far away for him to bother asking about, especially when he already had a lot of questions to ask. “Sirius, the dream... what was that?”
“It... I…” Sirius started to stumble over his words. Then came a knock at the door.
“Can I come in now?” An unknown voice from behind the door.
“Oh give him another minute.” Another unknown voice. This one softer than the first and spoken more quietly. When had others arrived?
Sirius pulled his head up from his chest, held his face in his hands. “Regulus, I promise I will explain everything. I mean it, you have to trust me. But for now, is it okay if the others come in? They don’t like to be kept waiting.”
He wanted to say no. Really wanted to say no. He was only just breathing on his own, he wanted peace for a moment. But he nodded, feeling his head move in Sirius’ palms.
Sirius had barely uttered the words “Come in” before a tall man with a large stick burst through the door.
Behind him was a small entourage of two women, one who he recognised from before as the woman who unveiled his scars and the other…
The girl from the dream. With a thick head of ginger hair.
Was he still dreaming? What was going–
“Regulus Arcturus Black,” the tall man spoke. He managed to tear his eyes away from the red-haired girl for just a moment to meet this man’s eyes. Within them he held a penetrative gaze, that was hard to look directly into. “I’m aware that Dumbledore has a certain arrangement with you that the rest of us are not privy to,” the man sucked in his teeth at that, “but that in no way means that you are excused from our own practices of revealing information. After all, coming from the inner circle, I’m sure you’ll know many a thing other Death Eaters wouldn’t.”
“Might I remind you, Alastor, of his current condition,” the other woman chimed in.
“Yes, yes I know, you were very thorough on filling me in,” the man gruffly replied, “but that doesn’t mean he remembers nothing, Dumbledore himself even reassured me of that, and gave me permission for what I’m about to do.”
Sirius’ shirt would have holes in soon if he didn’t stop digging his nails into it so fiercely, but he couldn’t help it. He was terrified of what these people might to do him. And confused about the man’s words, which went without saying.
“The thing is Regulus Black,” the man continued, “we would be well within our rights to send you straight to Azkaban after everything you’ve done. The chance of that increases the more I deem you to be uncooperative.” Next to him, Sirius shivered. “But I think we would all prefer to keep this civil and avoid that option, wouldn’t you agree?”
He nodded. He didn’t need to know what Azkaban was to know he didn’t want to find out.
“Excellent.”
With that he started to walk towards him on the bed, fishing something out of his pocket. A vial.
“Sirius,” he looked up to him hearing the fear in his own voice.
Sirius tried to sound calm, failing at it. “It’s safe trust me. Just do as he says.”
Then his hand was pried off his shirt and Sirius left his side as per the man’s flick of the head. Standing near the two women, he looked back at him with a sorrowful look in his eye, and he finally understood what Sirius’ unreadable expression had been of: sadness.
Now there was nothing between him and the tall man. He took the vial from him without resistance and began to drink.
“The whole thing, mind,” the man said, tipping up the end of the vial making sure he drank every last drop. It left a fizzing feeling as it slid down his throat, and an aftertaste of something sour. Definitely not as nice as Sirius’ purple concoction.
“Now then,” the man pulled the chair into the centre of the room and gave it a tap on the seat, indicating for him to go and sit in it. He felt four pairs of eyes watching him and every move he made as he walked to the centre of the room and sat. He didn’t feel any different from the potion, not yet anyway.
Another chair was arranged across from him and the man situated himself in it so that they were now both eye to eye. “Let’s start off with you telling me your full name.”
He gulped. There was a name he knew, Sirius called him by it so it must be correct. But it still had yet to feel completely his, like it belonged to him. He said it anyway. “Regulus.”
“I said full name, Regulus.”
He wanted to look at Sirius, who was now stood behind him from his new seat. He wanted Sirius to give him the answer.
“So, it really is that serious then,” the man groaned, looking over his shoulder presumably at the others, making a worried face.
He remembered what the man had said earlier when directly addressing him, the three names he had said. Were all three of them really his?
“Regulus… Arcturus Black,” he managed. The lengthy consonants sounded foreign in his mouth.
The man looked relieved. “Ah, that’s good. Now I won’t beat about the bush because I don’t want to overwork your already strained mind, so tell me Regulus, when did you first join the Death Eaters? Let’s start there, when did you take the Dark Mark?”
He was immediately back to being confused again. The minute he ever starts to get a grasp on something, he’s reminded once again of how clueless he is.
“Regulus?” he prompted.
He had nothing. That’s all that his mind was, nothing. Dark Mark. Did he take a mark? Like the black shifting thing on his arm?
“He doesn’t know what you’re talking about,” Sirius said behind him.
“Like hell he doesn’t,” the man was back to being frustrated. He rose swiftly from his chair and over to him where he forcefully pushed up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal that black mark on his forearm. “This, Regulus, where did this come from.” He held up his own arm to his face as if to hammer his point.
“Alastor,” one of the women sternly protested.
From behind him he felt Sirius’ hand close around his shoulder as if trying to soothe him by running his thumb back and forth over the fabric. He watched the dark image slither under his skin and saw as goosebumps arose around it, but not over it. No. It was definitely not a scar, he was realising. A Dark Mark. It couldn’t have sounded more ominous.
“I’ll try something else then,” the man dropped his arm and turned away from him, giving up in that particular pursuit. “What comes to mind when I say the name Lord Voldemort, for instance?”
If possible, it felt as though the mark on his arm perked up at that. It twinged. But apart from that, nothing in his head responded to the man’s prompt. He was beginning to sweat. The air was thinning again. He fought for breath. “I don’t… I don’t know.”
He hoped that would be enough, begged with his eyes for the man believe him.
“What did you give him again Alastor?” one of the women asked. Maybe they’d noticed the tension in his shoulders that Sirius was feverishly trying to ease with his rubbing thumb.
The man was losing patience. “Veritaserum and a small dose of a memory elixir. I imagined that second one might have at least some effect.”
“But memory elixirs only help recall suppressed memories. He hasn’t got any left,” said a strained voice.
“Forgive me for saying this, ladies, but I have far more experience with dark wizards than either of you, so I suggest you leave the inquiry to me,” he snapped. “Don’t you think Regulus here might’ve been leading you all on? Don’t you think it would be very convenient for him to have us all believe that he remembers nothing of his crimes? Did you all think war was going to include friendly chats with Death Eaters and making pretty flyers?”
His vision was going dark at the edges. He feared he was running out of time to get to the bed before it went completely black.
“I didn’t sign up to interrogate seventeen-year-old boys who’ve been obliviated, no.”
“Well, that’s why Dumbledore asks me and not any of you. Because I actually have what it takes to do the jobs the rest of you get too squeamish to get on with and do.”
“Regulus, what’s wrong? Are you okay?” Sirius was crouched beside him, taking in his laboured breath.
“I think there’s only one thing for his case, anyway. The only question is if Dumbledore would allow me to take the action required,” the man continued talking, dragging his fingers through his hair, thoughtfully. He stared intently at Regulus.
“Which is?” one of the women asked.
There was a dreadful pause in the conversation before Sirius suddenly said, “No. You can’t.”
“Can’t what?” Clearly one of the women was just as lost as he was.
“He wants to get inside his head,” Sirius spat.
“… Might that work?” someone timidly asked.
The man nodded slowly in a way that sent shivers down his spine. “I have no doubt that it would.”
“Well, I won’t let you,” Sirius said, determinedly.
It was around then that his chest swelled with the unmistakeable feeling of love he had for his brother. Brother. His brother.
Sirius had always been his biggest defender. Somewhere in his broken mind he was sure of that. So sure, he didn’t know if he’d ever been sure about anything else before that moment.
Sirius would protect him. Or at least do all he could to.
He didn’t hear much of the rest of the conversation, his eyes fixed to Sirius’ furious face. It wasn’t until the others had all left that he turned to face him too. “Shit Reg, you look white as a sheet, let’s get you to the bed before you fall on this hard floor.”
He let Sirius half carry, half walk him to the bed and get him under the covers. “I won’t let them hurt you Regulus. I promise. They won’t ever get to you.” Concern was etched into the lines around his eyes. And he knew that Sirius meant every word.
“Sirius, you’re my brother,” he finally got out. “I’m so sorry. I couldn’t… couldn’t remember.”
The last thing he saw was Sirius’ face relax and his breath hitch before unconsciousness took him again.