Title: Toys
Author: Erie Maxwell, adventurer and future nutcase.
Disclaimer: If I owned these lovely things, do you really think I'd be writing this here?
A/N: My writing schedule? So very odd. This was entirely a whim and will go through the betaing process ASAP. This is basically to entertain me until I can figure out how to start off my (completely mapped out for once, go me) MWPP fairy tale and to fuel the crush I've had on Reg since OotP came out. Seriously, my random character crushes are so taking over my life. Between my Brideshead!Sebastian fic and my numerous Reg fics, I HAVE NO LIFE. grins For the cause though, eh? ;)
Regulus Black was not one for stuffed animals, generally.
The scent of stuffing, silk and plush all combined with the feel of soft velvet beneath running across his palm and topped off with just the slightest hint of dust triggered a deeply repressed picture-show of his childhood. Days spent wading for hours through the sand and beads and in some cases, cotton that carpeted his floor at least once a month, the guilty knife gleaming clean on the nighttable while somewhere in the house, his mother smiled; the weeks filled with little but bitter screams (or worse, soft whispers) lamenting the child who clung to the past when the future was so obviously what he was destined for; whole months where each night he was lulled to sleep by the crackle and pops of glassy eyes and grinning mouths being eaten away a floor down in his father's study, all of it clouded Regulus' perception and left him a bit blinded to the world beyond the angles of his mind.
It wasn't shaming, this trial of adolesence. He had lived through it just as each of his peers had, all but Sirius who had been spared on pure misguided favouritism and didn't really matter at all, in the end. There was little Regulus could do at the time, he told himself, and it was all for the best now that he was sixteen and grown.
Nevertheless, it stung each year, as the first years gathered their things and set themselves up, to see a teddy bear or a stuffed rabbit peeking out from under their cloaks. The youth today, Regulus sighed, were becoming entirely too dependent on his set.
He picked himself up off out of the chair he had sprawled himself across and, with a flick of his wand and a smirk, went to greet the children.