Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter.
RegulusSnape.
.xxx.
He is sixteen and he's young and he's wild and just a little mad (in the end, all Blacks are.), and he joins because that's what his father expects him to and he has never learned how to say no, not really.
.xxx.
It's a cold and gray day and the Slytherin and Gryffindor Quidditch teams are playing against each other, and he watches his brother go higher and higher in the sky and—
(We all fall in the end.)
.xxx.
It has been a year and the pain of the Mark is still there and at times he thinks that maybe it's all in his head, the pain and all, but he's too afraid to ask.
He kills two random Mudbloods and Bellatrix laughs, and laughs, and he doesn't feel a thing, not a thing and he turns to a dark-eyed boy and says,
'the blood isn't going to come off my hands, is it?'
'never.'
(The answer isn't surprising.)
.xxx.
Two weeks before his ill-fated death, he shares a conversation with his brother's enemy.
'do you think we're meant to do something besides this?'
He doesn't expect an answer because the other boy just does a lot of scowling and nodding, so he's surprised by,
'yeah, sometimes i do.'
.xxx.
Three days before his death, he writes a letter to his brother and gives it to Kreacher (only to have it buried and lost and for it to never reach him), and two days before he dies, he thinks of the dark-eyed boy and thinks that maybe, in another life, they could have been something.
In another life indeed.