-1Title: Disillusionment.
Character/Pairing: Regulus Black, Walburga Black, various mentions of others, mostly Blacks.
Rating: PG.
Word Count: 1038.
Genre/Warnings (if applicable): General/Tragedy. I surprised myself in this one; it's not obvious either way if a certain controversial set of initials belongs to Regulus Black or not . . .
Other: Written for June 11th prompt at the 30 Hath community on Livejournal: Elegy of innocence and youth.

He was so young, with stars in his grey eyes. His cheeks were still childishly pudgy, with even a trace of dimple; he had never the fiercely mature features of his brother and eldest cousin-- no high cheekbones and sunken cheeks, no sharpening of the corners of his eyes, no decay of the brightness in his skin. His smile was genuine. He glowed with absolute boyishness-- innocence, ignorance, happiness, naivety, bliss . . .

Walburga could not tear her eyes from the portrait of her son that hung in the hall. Every time her steely eyes locked with his, she felt her mind swell with a terrible dirge composed of the worst news she had ever known. "Auntie Walburga, it's a terrible tragedy, I know; they never even recovered his body . . . "

She might have known it would be Bellatrix who would break the news, her voice ironically light and vaguely mocking, as if she knew (as she most certainly did) more about the details than his own mother did. "He just wasn't fit for it, I suppose-- and Voldemort weeds them all, then, out in the end." She would not mourn the loss of the those bright, endearing eyes-- not she, with her sharp, skeletal features, worn nearly to death with the fatal passion to her ruthless cause. Nothing was rounded anymore on the girl besides her breasts, Walburga had noted, and even those were a far cry from those of the full, healthy figure of her aunt. Bellatrix was no mother; she felt no regret for the untimely snuffing out of Walburga's bright little star, a boy barely out of Hogwarts and all she had left.

She didn't know Regulus had been dying for ages.

His death had started slowly and invisibly, like the worst kinds of diseases. For Regulus had been dying from the moment he had first been lied to, and he was lied do from the moment he was born. The only cure, disillusionment, was a bitter medicine-- and a cure more fatal than its disease.

All lies have first to be learned-- and first taught. Was it Walburga herself who first told Regulus he was the little king he believed himself to be for so many years? Was it Orion who first extolled the virtues of being Black, or one of the cousins, spouting off what they too had swallowed? Certainly there wasn't only one to blame, not even Bellatrix.

Regulus even had his own part. More like a disorder than a disease, however, clinging to the comfortable crutch of these lies was more comfortable than to face its cure. Indeed, means to the cure had stared Regulus in the face from the moment a scarlet-and-gold scarf entered the front hallway the first day of summer holidays to the cool summer night it disppeared from Grimmauld Place never to return again. He had to seek it at points more desperate on his own.

So Regulus grew comfortable in the words of his family. After all, any boy may adopt his family's lies, and even reject truth outright for fear of his former self's reputation. Yet he lived in dangerous times to be living a lie.

So warm contentedness turned to heated, passion love, and a fever overtook him, wrought in whole by Bellatrix and with some support from his ambitious parents-- Walburga shivered at the memory-- and the poisonous flush it brought to his cheeks was mistaken as good health, not the deadly ailment that would undo him.

Like all fevers, it broke.

Regulus would never fully comprehend the damage he had wreaked, and the willingness with which he had wreaked it. The ease of sin that emerges from the comfort of obedience surprises those who wake to perceive it, and fails even more often to be perceived. It was enough, however, to know that he had sinned-- and something like the truth in him, a truth deeper than even the most treasured lie from his childhood and beyond, was uncovered.

The plunge began, towards wellness or death or both. Even the tiniest piece of truth can unsettle the thickest of lies, and so Regulus could never go back to his blissful ignorance and blind contentedness. He clawed his way through the murkiness within himself, the mud of his own illusions-- and found his hands cleaner than they had ever been.

Yet some remedies are so harsh they are deadly, and these remedies have no remedy of their own. Disillusionment has no cure; there is no alternative to the truth.

. . . and truth's is a death to experience alone.

Indeed, the last of Regulus's wishes would have been to die with his family at his bedside. Gasping for his parting breaths, alone, shaking-- but anything but afraid-- there was no moment for a father's somber eyes or a mother's wretched tears. It was no triumphant glory, a moment of joy and honor, but it was no solemn resignation, either. It was a fight-- a desperate, confused, chaotic fight-- but a fight nonetheless, pivotal and necessary but indectable to all but he who it within rages.

For whatever it was Regulus spent his last hours struggling with, its physical, worldy form was no matter; it made no difference in the scheme of the abstract war within his mind and soul. After all, a man who is dying pays no real attention to the world he is soon going to leave; he must devote himself to himself and his approaching absence-- or more. It is not selfishness; rather, it is a deeper attention to worlds greater and more beyond of which he may never previously have been aware of.

So the child that had been untimely ripped from his mother's bosom had indeed lost his childhood far before his parting breath. Yet it was not until just moments before he would truly face his manhood.

Walburga would never recover the body. She never saw the cheekbones that sunk more deeply than was healthy, the raw wounds plaguing the young skin, the bruises and shadows of mistreatment and malnourishment, the baggy lids from fearful wakefulness.

Indeed; she never saw, either, that the stars in his eyes never did snuff out.