Chapter Text
The black water of the lake lapped gently against the stone of the cave floor, the sound rhythmic, almost soothing. The air was still and earthy, like moss and cold water and an overturned grave.
Beneath the calm and quiet, death lay thick. Not even the dark of the water could entirely mask the stench of a thousand undead lying in wait beneath its surface.
There was a reason the lake was not still.
In the middle of the lake was a small island of stone, and from the island rose a thin pedestal with a basin atop it. The basin was, or at least recently had been, filled with a potion that emanated a sickly green glow. Now, it was almost gone, painfully choked down in heaving gulps by the man who stood hunched against the basin’s rim.
He was young, though the faint glow of the potion and the war it was waging on his mind made his face almost ageless with pain. His shaking hand scooped another gobletful of the potion and forced it down his throat. His chest jerked and he let out a dull, weak moan, but he didn’t fall.
His dark hair was lank with cold sweat, his robes still damp with the sea spray from the rough waves he’d crossed to reach the cave. It didn’t matter, though, not when he would soon be little more than bone and memory.
It was how it should be. He would finish his task, and that would be the end. A short, painful life full of cowardice and sin completed by one great act of good, even if no one ever knew it.
Regulus Black had always been a coward. The second son who hid in his brother’s shadow or bowed to his parents' wishes. The boy who sneered out the opinions he was told to have and put down those who disagreed, because that was easier and safer than striking out on his own. He’d done countless things he was ashamed of, had hurt people because he was too cowardly to defy those with power over him.
Funny how people always said your life flashed before your eyes in the moment just before you were about to die. He’d never thought it would be so literal. He’d been warned about the horrors of the potion by his family house elf Kreacher, but Regulus couldn’t have imagined just how horrible it would be.
All of his darkest moments, his worst days, relived as if he were traveling back in time. Sometimes, it was him being hurt, by weapons, or words, or curses. Other times, he was the one hurting others.
Every swallow of the potion reminded him of that. Even the best memories were corrupted by the crushing guilt that had driven him to this cave. Though at least that guilt had driven him to finally do something right.
He scraped out more of the potion and brought it to his lips. He could do this alone. Even though every drop made him want to do nothing more than hurl himself away from the potion-filled basin and the memories it brought back, he forced himself to drink more. It was his penance.
He wasn’t a good man.
Regulus had not wanted to be a bad person. When he was small, he’d been enamored by his family’s talk of being Great and Noble and saving the wizarding world from its own demise. Regulus wanted to help people. He wanted to be good and do the right thing, and oh, how he’d believed in everything his parents said.
His older brother Sirius hadn’t. He’d argued back and took blow after blow for it. He’d taken the ones meant for Regulus, too, even if there’d been fewer of those and even when Regulus just couldn’t understand why Sirius didn’t follow the rules and shut his mouth.
Regulus asked his father once why Sirius always argued about everything the family said, and he’d told him that it was because he was a fool. “You’re not like him, though, Regulus. You’re our smart little one. You’ll be great someday. Make the family proud.”
Regulus had wanted so badly to make his mother and father proud. So he did everything they told him to, always believing that this next thing would be what finally secured their pride and their love.
It had taken him so many long years to understand that he never would, but even then, he’d been too much of a coward to defy them.
He was an insect trapped in a spider’s web, being pulled ever deeper by a hundred sticky threads. Those threads had always been there, since he was born, but it was hard to really notice something that you’d never been without. The first time he’d truly felt just how tight those threads held him was when Sirius was sorted into Gryffindor, and his father had made sure Regulus knew that something like that would never be tolerated from their younger son.
The next time he’d felt the threads tighten was when Sirius left home. His mother had left no doubt in his mind that Regulus had no such freedom. He would not stray a step out of line. He would not dare to show any inkling of support for his brother's foolish ideologies. He would be the good, proud son the Black family expected.
The threads tightened as each year passed and the Dark Lord's influence grew. The family must be shown to support him. Regulus had been pledged to take the Dark Lord’s Mark before he ever learned what it was.
The threads controlled everything, in their small, subtle way that somehow amounted to every aspect of his life. His friends, his clothes, how he spent his time. Even at Hogwarts, the moments of freedom were few and far between. There was always someone whose notice might just get back to his mother if he strayed by even a hair.
His father died just before his sixth year at Hogwarts, from a long illness made worse by alcohol. The summer after, when he was seventeen, he was given the Dark Mark. He spoke the words and pledged himself. In a room full of Death Eaters with his mother’s nails digging into his shoulder, he’d had no choice.
His mother died less than a year later. She'd been fraying for years, and she unraveled ever faster once her husband died. She was convinced she would go on forever, the long-lived matriarch of the House of Black, glorious, respected and feared by all. Then one day Kreacher had appeared in the Slytherin common room, hysterical because he had found Mistress Black dead in the parlor from a strange potion gone wrong.
Regulus didn’t know what she’d been intending to do and he found he didn’t care. She was dead and that summer after he graduated was the first time in his life he had felt just a tiny bit free.
That had been the summer that changed everything.
The first thing he’d done when he’d returned to an empty home after graduating Hogwarts was to order Kreacher to change the curtains, from the heavy forest green things infested with doxies to something thinner to let in light. It showed how much of a coward he was that he waited until his parents were both dead and buried deep before he dared to rebel in even the smallest way.
He was a Death Eater already, recruited to a cause he could no longer bring himself to believe in, but couldn’t bring himself to defy it. He’d spent most of his days alone in the big, empty house with only a house elf for company, and half his nights summoned to do whatever horrible thing the Dark Lord decided. All Regulus wanted was to be away from it all. Everything around him was a nightmare or a reminder of one. Even in public he had to put on the act as the proud pureblood, looking down on everyone and acting as if he owned them all, even when all he wanted to do was disappear into the crowd and just be forgotten for once. He was so tired of feeling trapped in a life he couldn’t control.
One day he’d woken up from another night of nightmares, pulled on trousers and a nice shirt that was passably muggle, and walked into the muggle world. He’d never expected to go more than once. Part of him had almost hoped he would be horrified by the barbaric way they lived and be reinvigorated for the Death Eater cause—even though that was impossible; there was no erasing the things he’d seen, the things he’d done. Instead, he’d gone again and again, addicted to the anonymity and how foreign everything felt.
It was on one of these secret trips that he’d met her, a beautiful young witch who looked completely at home in the middle of a muggle street, who hadn’t known him or anything about him, and everything had changed.
If he’d never met her, he would have never come to this cave.
If he’d never met her, he wouldn’t be dying.
He’d expected death. He’d walked into the cave knowing he wouldn’t come out alive, and told himself he was ready.
Life would go on without him. The family estate and fortune would revert to his older brother, even if he didn’t want it. Things would be better that way.
The world would be better off without a man like Regulus Black. He wasn’t his brother, all bravery and righteousness. No, Regulus was a true Black, and had made more than his fair share of bad decisions to live up to the name. So he told himself he was ready to die.
So why was he so scared of the end?
He choked down the last of the potion and a fresh wave of horrific memories swept over him—floating bodies, spilled blood, terror and shame, a kindly smile from his beautiful witch that he had never deserved and piled the weight of his guilt too high for him to bear. But it didn’t matter now. He was dying.
He was so weak and so thirsty, his grip on reality so tenuous. He reached into the empty basin and switched the cursed locket with the duplicate he’d brought. He could feel the difference the moment he took it in his hand. The real one felt old and powerful and evil, but reached something in him and made him want to never let it go. It whispered greatness in his ear, sang belonging to his heart.
His legs gave out and his knees struck the hard rock of the tiny island. He could barely find reality through the haze of every scene the potion had forced him to relive, and with the locket whispering into his heart, it was hard to remember why he’d come.
The dark water lapped against the stone, so softly, luring him down, begging him to drink and invite the undead to feast upon his body. The locket crooned for him to slip it around his neck. He heaved one shallow breath.
He had to do something. He had to—
All was dead bodies, pain, screaming, green light and skulls in the air.
Destroy, the locket whispered. Destroy those who’ve hurt you.
No, destroy the locket, he remembered. It was still clasped in his hand.
I can make you great. I can give you power, the locket said.
His breaths were ragged. He dropped the locket onto the stone and summoned the very last of his strength and sanity. He pointed his wand at the locket and spoke an incantation.
Fire, raw and alive, ripped from his wand, clawing towards the locket. A piercing scream rose into the air—for once, not from his own throat. The locket writhed like a living thing, twisted into a blackened lump, and fell still. The fire vanished in the cave’s dead air, extinguished by the curses protecting the place a moment too late.
Slowly, trembling, he grasped the ruined locket and tucked it into his right pocket. He vanished the ash marks from the stone with the very dregs of what was in him, and then stowed his wand, as well.
He breathed. The world tumbled.
He’d fallen onto his back and rolled towards the water. He didn’t have the strength left to raise even his head, but it didn’t matter. His mind was horror and body was pain, and both were failing. It was the end.
He wasn't ready.
He was far from the cave now, so far away that he could barely register the bony hands reaching out of the water. Something sharp tore into his left hand where it lay on the water’s edge, and he jerked away. He shouldn’t. It was better this way, to be pulled down into the water and disappear beneath its depths, taking the horcrux with him, never to be found.
But he didn’t want to die.
His right hand, still in his pocket, brushed against the handle of a dagger and he wrapped his fingers tight around the hilt. It would do him no good. After all, a single dagger in the hand of one dying man was hardly a match for an army of inferi. Yet still there was something comforting about the weight of the thing in his hand. It had been in the family for centuries, and until that very morning had sat in a prized place in the library of the Black family home, cursed or blessed, depending on whom one asked, to serve as protector to the House of Black for perpetuity. It was this dagger he’d used to slice his own arm to draw the blood required to enter the cave. He’d sliced right through the Dark Mark on his left arm, the dagger of the House of Black bringing about the Dark Lord’s downfall. He had liked the symbolism.
Now, a new pain slashed into that very same arm. A rotting bony hand was tearing into his flesh, pulling wide the wound already there. He screamed, a distant, terrible sound, and tried to wrench away, but he was too weak and more hands had joined the first. They grabbed his leg, ripped at his side, tore deeper into his arm.
He fought, but it was hopeless. His body was little more than agony and a few last breaths. He clutched the dagger as tightly as he could, remembering that at least his last act was something good for a change.
He was seeing different things now, things that hurt a little less. His mind was slipping away from his ravaged body. He saw Kreacher crying, his mother, as haughty in death as in life, his stony father, his brother, wide-eyed, betrayed.
“Regulus?”
He remembered that moment. The last time he’d seen his brother, when they’d said things that couldn’t be unsaid, done things that couldn’t be undone.
“Sirius,” he whispered. Or at least he imagined himself whispering. He couldn’t tell what was real.
He wished his brother were really here. It was such a foolish, childish sentiment. He hadn’t run to his brother since he was small. But he wanted him, so badly. Even though last they’d see each other, there’d been little but hate left between them.
“Sirius,” he said. “I wish I could have seen you...before. Before I— But I had to— I—would have said so much. Too late. Sirius. I’m sorry. Make...the House of Black better.”
Everything was darkness and pain like fire. Just a glimpse in his mind of his brother, staring. The last thing he’d see, even if it was only in the last dying ember of his mind as inferi tore apart his body.
At least the last thing was the one person who might, perhaps, have once missed Regulus Black.
It all grew darker, and he could imagine stars in the starless black of the cave. Stars, as bright and far away, as the life he’d always knew he could never have.
But now…. Well, it was over now.