Much to Sirius's displeasure, Arcturus did not seem in any sort of hurry to head home, where they could talk freely about Regulus. The pessimistic, untrusting side of Sirius thought it likely that he was delaying a conversation that was sure to be unpleasant in hopes that Sirius would forget about it. The rest of Sirius thought it much more likely that Arcturus really did want to avoid needing to come back to Diagon Alley in a few hours for robes and a wand.
And so Sirius clenched his teeth and sat patiently through Madam Malkin's fussing over how thin he was and endlessly debating the merits of different sleeve shapes and asking if he wanted dress robes without snapping at her even once. It was fortunate that the wand for him was in one of the first dozen Ollivander pulled off the shelves, because Sirius was not sure how much waving wands around to no effect he could manage before he exploded.
"So, what do you know about Regulus?" Sirius asked the moment they stepped through the door of Arcturus's house. "Considering the terms on which you last parted with my parents, I really can't see them letting their obedient little boy anywhere near you, but there were an awful lot of things that you said Regulus had said about me."
Arcturus sighed. "Can't this wait until you've settled in a bit? It's nearly time for dinner, and I have strict orders not to let you skip meals."
"No," Sirius said. "I want to know what happened to Regulus. That's why I came home with you, because you didn't want to talk about it in front of Healer Shacklebolt."
"You didn't have any desire at all to get out of St. Mungo's?" Arcturus asked. He hung up his cloak and started off down the hall. Sirius followed him.
"I could have waited for Remus," Sirius said. It might have driven him mad, but he could have. He would have, if there hadn't been something that Sirius wanted to know.
Arcturus nodded, but there was a glint to his eye that made Sirius think he wasn't buying it. "Remus... he was one of the other boys you used to run around with, wasn't he, along with James Potter and Peter Pettigrew."
"Yes," Sirius said. For half a moment he was back in Hogwarts with the three of them, laughing as they ate sweets and endlessly debated what prank to pull on the Slytherins next. Then he blinked and Hogwarts had vanished, replaced by Arcturus Black's living room. "Regulus told you that, didn't he?"
"You should probably write Remus another letter telling him that you're no longer at St. Mungo's," Arcturus said. "It would be embarrassing if he came to pick you up and you weren't there."
Sirius hadn't thought of that. In the back of his head there had been the vague idea that Healer Shacklebolt would take care of it, but now that he thought of it there wasn't any good reason for her to do so. "I'll do that later," he said.
Arcturus frowned.
"My letter is still going to reach him four hours after the one from the hospital," Sirius said. "So if he goes to pick me up right away there isn't much of a point."
"You thought he might not come to pick you up right away, but he was still the only person you asked to take you home from the hospital?"
"Remus is responsible," Sirius said, to cover the real reason Remus might not come for a few days: the timing of the last full moon, which Sirius did not know. "He'll probably want to gather up proof of residency and employment and all that so that the Healers don't refuse to let me live with him."
"I suppose he doesn't have the benefit of a prior acquaintance with one of the Healers on staff," Arcturus said after a second's thought.
"You knew Healer Shacklebolt before you came to get me?" Sirius had kind of figured that, given the way they had spoken to each other, but he was still curious about it.
Arcturus settled himself into one of the armchairs, a stiff, understuffed thing not at all like the cozy armchairs Sirius remembered from the Gryffindor common room. "I thought you wanted to know about Regulus?"
"Yes," Sirius said. "I thought it was a bit funny that you just happened to know one of the Healers assigned to my care."
"I think you're mixing up cause and effect," Arcturus said. "Healer Shacklebolt took particular interest in you because she knew that you were my grandson. There's not any coincidence to it. Sit down, please. You look like you're about ready to keel over."
Sirius thought he probably only looked sickly because he had spent so much time in Azkaban, as he certainly didn't feel like he was in any danger of falling over. "I'm fine standing for a bit. What were you going to tell me about Regulus?"
Arcturus made a face that suggested he thought Sirius was only remaining standing because he had asked him to sit down, but he didn't challenge him on it. "I met Regulus for the first time since my falling out with your parents the summer before his fifth year at Hogwarts. He claimed that he was curious about his father's childhood and Orion refused to talk about it. I thought it more likely that Walburga had put him up to it because she was afraid I would follow in Alpharad's shoes and make you the sole beneficiary in my will unless she did something about it."
That sounded like exactly the sort of thing Sirius's mother would have done, although he was at a loss to understand why she would have thought that Arcturus would cut his 'respectable' son and grandson out of his will in favor of the unruly scalawag who had been sorted into Gryffindor, especially when he had never had any contact with said unruly scalawag. Perhaps that was when she had begun the downward spiral into the madness that seemed to be the eventual fate of most members of the Black family.
"Nevertheless, I spoke with Regulus frequently over the summer. I answered his questions and continued to write him when he returned to Hogwarts. He came to visit me again over Christmas break and when your father died shortly before term resumed I was the one who arranged for him to return to school after the funeral."
"That's very nice," Sirius said, conscious of the fact that he needed to stay on Arcturus's good side if he wanted him to tell him anything. "But can we skip to the part when Regulus gets involved with the Death Eaters. I'm not seeing the point to all of this..."
Arcturus sighed and leaned forward enough to rest his forehead against the tips of his fingers. "I suppose I should have known better then to expect you to have any interest in how the situation developed." Before Sirius could make any remarks about old people and boring tangents, Arcturus sat up again and looked him in the eye. "The point, Sirius, is that Regulus was already involved with the Death Eaters when he first approached me."
"But he would have been fourteen," Sirius said. "Maybe fifteen, if it was near the end of summer, but that's still too young to be worth bothering with. Dum– The Ministry didn't even start encouraging kids to become Aurors until after they've taken their O.W.L.s at least."
"The Dark Lord has always preferred to recruit his follows younger than either the Ministry or Albus Dumbledore– don't look at me like that, I'm not stupid, I know he was involved somehow– nevertheless, Regulus was unusually young to be actively recruited, yet alone given assignments." Arcturus's face took on a bitter cast. "He said that Bellatrix had played that up as an honor, proof that he was guaranteed to go somewhere within the ranks if only he performed adequately. Walburga was so proud."
"You're going off on a tangent again," Sirius said. "What was Regulus supposed to be doing? He can't have been fighting, not when he was still in school all the time and had the Trace on him."
"Gathering information, primarily," Arcturus answered. "As a Hogwarts student, he had access to the entire school library, including a number of texts that are not generally in circulation. Also, he was a prime candidate to gain access to the Black Family Library, which I had moved out of Grimmauld Place after I inherited it."
"So that's why he wanted to talk to you," Sirius said. "He wanted to go to your house and nick your books." It was sort of funny, if Sirius didn't think about how Regulus had died two short years later from the aftereffects of this. "When did he finally come clean?"
"Shortly after his sixteenth birthday," Arcturus said. "He came to stay with me for most of the summer. Apparently, Bellatrix had taken Orion's death as an opportunity to press Regulus into doing more and more for the Dark Lord and went a bit too far. Regulus decided he no longer wanted in, and took refuge in my house, where Bellatrix was no longer welcome as a result of... prior misadventures with the aforementioned library."
Sirius chuckled. "You caught her trying to make off with one of your books, you mean."
Arcturus blanched. "No, I did not. Back on topic, Regulus's attempt was only mostly successful. He got a barrage of letters every day that he immediately burned. He claimed he'd gotten in an argument with his mother over his relationship with Bellatrix and that now they were both mad at him."
"Did you believe that?" Sirius had received numerous Howlers throughout his school years, and he reckoned that if Mummy had every been mad at dear little Reggie she would have expressed her disapproval in the same way.
Arcturus paused, his mouth twisting into a sort of half-frown that Sirius figured was what passed for concentrated on Arcturus. "It's difficult to say now, knowing what was actually going on. I knew that he was hiding from someone. I don't think I much cared who it was at the time. I was too busy being happy that he had decided to hide with me."
"So that was it?" Sirius said. He was a bit disappointed in his little brother. Sure Regulus had always been rather stupid and almost completely useless in a fight, but he had expected something a little more dramatic. "He hid with you until he had to go back to school and Bellatrix finally got him next summer."
"Bellatrix got him that summer," Arcturus said, "when Regulus when to Diagon Alley to do his school shopping. She got him off alone and side-along apparated him off to a meeting with the Dark Lord, whose orders he had been ignoring all summer. He promptly blamed me for everything. I was controlling, I suspected he was up to something, I wanted to spend every minute of his time rambling on about my long-forgotten youth. He had done some digging in the portions of my library I had told him not to touch and he managed to hand over enough information to convince them that he'd been obediently following orders all along."
"I would have told the 'Dark Lord' and all his cronies to go to hell," Sirius said.
"And then they would have killed you and you would have been dead," Arcturus said, in a perfectly even voice that somehow managed to carry a great deal of tension.
"Fat lot of good it did him, since they killed him next year," Sirius said, his voice not at all even.
In the second of silence that followed, Sirius realized that Arcturus was very upset by this. It wasn't so much the expression on his face, which had probably been schooled from years of running around with Slytherins not to let anything Arcturus really thought come through, so much as the way that he was gripping the arms of his chair hard enough to turn his knuckles white.
Sirius had thought, when Arcturus had been so cagey about what had happened, that he was trying to hide something or that he enjoyed tormenting Sirius by making him wring out the truth drop by drop. It hadn't occurred to Sirius that Arcturus might have been actually hurt by Regulus's death. He was a Slytherin and Sirius had never noticed any of them having much in the way of emotions at all. They had been too wrapped up in hexing muggleborns and toadying up to Slughorn to be bothered with such things.
"I'm sorry," Sirius mumbled, a little too proud to say it clearly. "I... That wasn't a very nice thing to say. Regulus... He still had the Trace on him. They couldn't have done anything to him without alerting the DMLE."
Arcturus seemed to accept that as enough of an apology, because he said, "If the Death Eaters haven't found a way to circumvent the Trace entirely, they certainly managed to get someone in the department to cover up their activities for them."
"No, we got warning from the Trace sometimes," Sirius said. Not nearly often enough, now that he thought about it, but he had only been a full-fledged Auror for a couple of months before getting thrown in Azkaban and all he could remember of that time was a frenetic haze of too much to do and not enough sleep. "When the Bones were murdered, we found out about the attack through the trace."
"Exactly," Arcturus said. "When the Bones were murdered. By the time you showed up they were all already dead and the Death Eaters had fled."
"Yes," Sirius said, finally understanding what Arcturus was trying to get at. "So, they probably could have killed him then and there, if they were willing the scramble out of the area afterwards, but I really can't see Bella letting Reggie off that lightly if she thought he'd turned on her."
"Ignoring the fact that your list of light punishments includes death–"
You know what I mean," Sirius snapped. Or maybe he didn't, if his familiarity with Bellatrix only extended as far as her trying to weasel her way into his library.
"Unfortunately, yes." A shiver passed across Arcturus's frame, almost too quickly to be seen. "I also know that Bellatrix does not need a wand to make someone wish she had killed them."
Sirius had forgotten about Bella's fondness for knives. Probably because her aggression, while disturbing and unpleasant to be around, had usually been directed at either dolls or small animals and never at anything that Sirius actually cared about.
"And, if the Death Eaters as a whole didn't know how to circumvent the Trace, Bellatrix certainly did." Arcturus paused, seeming to realize something. "Shortly after your incarceration, Frank and Alice Longbottom were tortured into insanity, primarily using the Cruciatus Curse, with their infant son in the next room."
"Frank and Alice," Sirius repeated. He could remember them, the happy couple who managed to find joy in the worst of times. Always good for a bit of cheer or a word of advice. Especially Alice, who had the amazing ability to remember every single one of the most trivial protocols. "The Longbottoms. Bellatrix–"
"Was caught, along with Rudolphus and Rabastan Lestrange and Barty Crouch's son of all people, several hours later when Augusta Longbottom decided to pay her son a visit."
"Augusta Longbottom managed to take out Bellatrix, her husband, his brother, and another person without getting killed." Frank had always talked about how scary his mother was and how she had been a dueling champion before old age had finally caught up with her, so Sirius had known that Mrs. Longbottom was not to be trifled with, but he hadn't thought she would be that good.
"From my understanding, she arrived home, immediately realized that something was amiss and followed the screaming up to where the Lestrages were at work. Crouch was supposed to be keeping watch, but he was too..." Arcturus trailed off, his lip curled upwards into an expression of distaste. "Engrossed in what was happening to be bothered with it. Augusta stunned him, Bellatrix, and Rudolphus before any of them knew what was happening."
Which would have left her dueling Rabastan, the youngest of the Lestranges and probably the worst in combat. "I don't think I would have settled for stunning them," Sirius said.
"I'm not sure I would have either," Arcturus said. "Even knowing that it would be better if the people captured were fit for questioning. And that the Ministry is unlikely to look kindly upon vigilante justice."
"The Aurors have been known to turn a blind eye to a certain amount of violence, given enough incentive. Especially when Crouch was in charge," Sirius said. Hell, the man had authorized the use of the Cruciatous curse on suspects. He wasn't likely to be too upset by some old lady beating up the people who had been torturing her son.
"Bribing the Ministry doesn't really appeal to me," Arcturus said. "And it makes me worry a bit about the impartiality of our criminal justice system."
"Didn't you pay the Minister of Magic to give you an Order of Merlin?" Sirius asked. Arcturus shot him a look that could have curdled milk. "That's what Father made it sound like."
"For your information, the Ministry was roughly a hundred galleons away from bankruptcy when I made a very large donation to the Restoration Fund and refrained from inquiring too much about where that money was spent or making a fuss when the Ministry preferred making payroll to building a monument to those lost in Grindewald's War. Now do you want to hear what happened to Regulus or not?"
"I want you to tell me what happened to Regulus," Sirius said, even though a part of him was tempted to ask for a rundown of who all had died and what laws had been changed when he was in Azkaban. For some stupid reason, he had thought that the world had sort of stopped when he was imprisoned and had only just started running again.
"Right." Arcturus paused for a second, his eyes flicking upwards as though he had forgotten where he was in the story and was trying to remember it. "Regulus blamed me for his absence and claimed to be a faithful servant of the Dark Lord. He asked to be given a task– any task– to prove his loyalty."
"They had him kill someone," Sirius said, his heart sinking in his chest. He had hoped that somehow, his little brother would have been able to avoid that. It would fit in with what little he remembered of Regulus that wasn't shadowed over by Mother's wishes. He had pitched a fit whenever Sirius had stomped on spiders, insisting that he should pick them up gently and let them go outside.
"No," Arcturus said. "I don't think there was anyone on hand that the Dark Lord was willing to sacrifice and they didn't want to send a sixteen year-old, who still had the Trace on him, off to murder someone who had already been marked an enemy of the Death Eaters. There were too many ways that could go wrong."
"They could have captured someone, brought them back to wherever they were hiding and then have Regulus kill the bloke," Sirius said. In retrospect, that might have been the explanation for all those people who went missing and were never found or who did turn up someplace they never would have entered voluntarily.
"That would have eliminated most of the risk, yes," Arcturus said, "but I think that Regulus, at least until he finished school, was not meant to be anything more than a spy. If he had killed for them, he would have been theirs, but there was a very real risk that he would refuse. And if he did, then they would not only have to find another student to monitor Dumbledore and copy information from the Hogwarts Library, but also someone to worm their way into my good graces."
"He was too valuable to kill," Sirius concluded. It sounded odd to say that about a little boy, only just passed his O.W.L.s, who had evidently not been too valuable to kill a short year later.
"And, at least the way Regulus told it and I am willing to admit that he might not be an entirely unbiased source of information, there were a number of Death Eaters who believed him," Arcturus said. "Bellatrix among them. With no proof of treachery, it would be risky to kill Regulus outright. Some people might take it as a sign that the Dark Lord did not care for his followers as much as he claimed to, or that he was liable to snap and start offing the rest of them on spurious grounds."
"Bella'd be pissed too," Sirius said. "She got so nasty when she was angry." It hadn't been all that easy to make her angry, but killing her younger cousin for trying to do his job too well was probably a good way to do it.
"Whatever the reason, Regulus wasn't killed then. Instead, the Dark Lord said, if he really was a loyal servant to the cause, he would be willing to wear the Dark Mark–"
"How? He couldn't go around with it painted on his robes if he wanted to avoid being tossed in Azkaban, let alone do anything in the way of spywork," but even as he said it, Sirius knew there had to be more to it. Wearing the Dark Mark... he had heard something like that before, if he could only remember where.
"Not quite that blatantly," Arcturus said. "The Dark Lord's inner circle, the best of the Death Eaters you might say, had a copy of the Dark Mark branded on the inside of their left forearms. Regulus said that they could be used both to alert the Dark Lord and to receive summons from him. It was considered a high honor."
Exactly the kind of thing Regulus couldn't refuse if he wanted to appear devout. "It would have made it a lot more difficult for Regulus to go over the Ministry." He might have been able to pass some information, but it would be difficult to convince anyone that he had really changed sides if he was 'voluntarily' wearing around You-Know-Who's symbol.
"Yes, and anyone who saw it would know that he was an active supporter of the Dark Lord. Those who agreed with the Death Eater's aims would see him as an ally, if not a superior to be obeyed. Those who disagreed..." Arcturus trailed off. "He would have to hide it at school and it would be a constant reminder of who he had pledged himself to."
"Only, it didn't work, did it?" Sirius's voice was raw and he found himself walking a circuit around the room to avoid looking his grandfather in the eye. "He went and told you about it."
Arcturus nodded. "He came back from his trip to Diagon Alley several hours after he had said he would return, looking remarkably like he had spent the last several weeks fending for himself on a deserted island. I knew that something was wrong and it took very little pushing to get him to tell me everything. Regulus wanted out."
"But you didn't get him out, did you?" Sirius snapped. It would have been easy for Arcturus to do so, or at least a lot easier than for most people. He had connections, all he would have to do would be to get Regulus a portkey to France or Egypt or someplace and Regulus would have been safe. "You made him stay and it killed him."
Arcturus took a deep breath and let it out again slowly, but his voice was still ragged when he spoke, "It was only a couple of weeks before classes started at Hogwarts. Regulus and I both assumed that he would be safe in school. It was too late to transfer him to a different one, especially under a false identity. And O.W.L.s aren't the qualifications they were when I finished school. He'd have difficulty getting a job."
"You're rich! Couldn't you have given him a bunch of money and had him hole up in a hotel somewhere?" Sirius was beating a path from one end of the room to the other, stomping hard enough to be heard despite the thick carpet.
"Because a young man not old enough to be out on his own, taking a room in an inn that he somehow has money to pay for despite never leaving the inn for anything, is not suspicious at all," Arcturus said. "Even the muggle authorities might think it worth investigating. People don't have money unless they work for it, have a lot of investments, or are doing something illegal. And we didn't know how long he'd have to keep it up. We didn't know that the war would end two years later! We thought that Regulus would be hiding for the rest of his life."
"If you really thought that You-Know-Who was going to win, why didn't you try to do something to stop him instead of sitting in your fancy house and letting him take over!" The Blacks had, with the exception of Sirius, been considered the pinnacle of pure-blood society, surely if one of their oldest members had spoken against the Death Eaters it would have weakened their support at least a little.
"I did what I could! I wrote to the Daily Prophet! I funded–"
Wrote to the Daily Prophet. Sirius could remember that. Crouch had complained about it for weeks. "You made a blanket statement condemning violence! Everyone thought it was because Crouch had authorized Aurors to start using Unforgiveables! They thought you didn't care about what the Death Eaters were doing!"
"It was the week after the Edgar Bones was murdered, along with his entire family, for who-knows-what reason! I specifically mentioned–"
"Well you weren't specific enough! I doubt there's a single person in Britain who understood what you were 'trying' to hint at!"
"Is Master Arcturus needing any help?" a high, wheezy voice said from somewhere near Arcturus's knee. Sirius left off his ranting long enough to see that it belonged to a house elf, probably female and not much past maturity. Sirius had never much concerned himself with telling apart house elves.
"Everything's fine, Mimsy," Arcturus said.
The house elf gave him a curious look, perhaps sensing that he was not being entirely truthful and then turned to glare at Sirius. "If the intruder is causing Master Arcturus any trouble–"
Sirius sniffed and held his head up high. Who cared what house elves thought?
"The 'intruder'," Arcturus said, with a hint of waspishness, "is my grandson and invited guest. You are to obey his orders as though they were my own."
The house elf did not look at all pleased by this turn of events. Sirius couldn't blame her, even if he was living with Arcturus, it was still unusual for a wizard to give a guest that kind of authority over a house elf. 'Look after his needs', yes, 'obey his orders within reason', yes, but 'obey him without question'? Sirius would have no difficulty leaving whenever he wanted.
"Mimsy will obey Master Arcturus's wishes," the house elf said. Her gaze was fixed on Sirius, as though daring him to try and order her around. She would probably rat out everything he did to Arcturus unless he ordered her not to, the same way Kreacher had always ratted him out to Mother.
"Thank you, Mimsy. Is dinner ready or were you merely concerned by the amount of noise we were making?" Arcturus did not sound nearly as upset as Sirius knew his mother would have been under similar circumstances. He was probably secretly grateful that the house elf had come along and stopped Sirius from shouting at him.
"Mimsy will finish dinner," the house elf said, before disappearing with an audible pop. Sirius frowned, trying to figure out when the house elf had come in. He couldn't remember any noise and would have thought that he was alert enough to notice someone, even if it was only a house elf, walking into the room.
Arcturus continued, "Regulus went back to school and all seemed well at first. He wrote me as often as he could, told me what information he was passing on and, while none of it was harmless, there was nothing earthshaking. Nothing to change the tide of the war."
"The tide of the war was firmly on You-Know-Who's side at that point," Sirius said. It wasn't that he was trying to provoke a fight, exactly, but he wasn't going to let Arcturus sit there and make claims that were patently false.
"Nothing to give him the final shove he needed to end it all, then," Arcturus said, rather more amiably than Sirius had expected. "I didn't see him over Christmas. I was in America, making preparations. Regulus spent the holidays with his mother and he told me that they were uneventful, except that he had discovered something. Something too dangerous to be talked about over the mail."
A part of Sirius wondered if that was true. Regulus had always thrived on attention, this news could easily be a bid for him to get Arcturus all to himself for a bit. Although, exaggeration was never one of Regulus's flaws. Quite the opposite, he could take the most exciting story and turn it into a history lesson to rival one of Binns' simply by making the least of everything that happened.
"We met again over Easter, but Regulus spent almost the entire time pouring over my library," Arcturus said. "More specifically, the portions of my library I had kept out of public eyes for years. He told me that he thought the Dark Lord had done something, something to make him unkillable, and he wanted to know all the possibilities."
"There are a lot of ways to make yourself invulnerable?" Sirius said. He couldn't think of even one, and Crouch would have given his eyeteeth for something to reduce Auror casualties during those last days of the war.
"Half a dozen or so that Regulus considered," Arcturus said. "They all have numerous disadvantages, and most of them are firmly in the realm of the Dark Arts. Not that that would stop the Dark Lord, but few people want to know about such practices, let alone use them."
"Did Regulus decide on any one of them?" Sirius asked.
"Not to my knowledge," Arcturus said. "He ruled out a few. For example, he thought it unlikely that the Dark Lord had created a Philosopher's Stone, because the elixir of life would not protect him from violence and he would be dependent on it once he had passed his natural years of life."
"And you didn't think there was one that was more likely than the rest?" Surely, there would have been a couple like that, better known and easier to create.
"No." Arcturus grimaced, his gaze drifting off into space. "Regulus, he made it sound as though this method of immortality was entirely new, or a combination of older methods."
"He can't have invented a new way to make himself immortal," Sirius said. "Messing around with stuff like that's risky, and he never risked himself if he could help it." He never risked himself at all as far as most of the Aurors were concerned, leaving it to the Death Eaters to die or get arrested. Sure, You-Know-Who killed people himself occasionally, and took part in some battles, but it was never ones that the Death Eaters had any chance of loosing.
Arcturus shot a funny look at Sirius, as though he was not looking at Sirius at all, but rather someone else who had stepped into his place for a moment. "That's exactly what Regulus said."
Ordinarily, Sirius would have made a comment about 'great minds thinking alike' or something of that nature, but he was a bit too shocked by the idea that he and Regulus had agreed on something to speak. That hadn't happened since long before Sirius had left for Hogwarts, if it had happened at all.
"Easter break was over soon enough, and Regulus was back at school. I had not allowed him to take any of my books with him, but he had taken far more extensive notes then I was really comfortable with so that he could do more 'thinking' while he was at school. I put the finishing touches on my plan. We were going to go to America to visit Lucretia for a couple of weeks. Just before it was time for us to go home there would be a terrible accident. Splinched heart from botching side-along apparition. Very messy, almost instantly lethal. There would be a whole mess with the American Ministry, but I knew how it would fall out. I'd probably lose my license for side-along apparition, but I'd bring what was left of Regulus home for a funeral. At the beginning of August, Lucretia would be joined by her new intern, a young man from Australia named Robert Brown who was–"
"Really Regulus with a load of charms on him," Sirius finished. He was not terribly interested in hearing more. "It sounds like it would have worked. Why didn't it?"
"When the school year was over, Regulus wrote me a letter, telling me that he couldn't go through with the plan," Arcturus said. "He hadn't been given permission to leave the country for long enough, and he needed to stay with the Death Eaters for just a little longer. He was very close to finding out something important."
"And he didn't think to tell you what?" Damn Slytherins, and their stupid need for sneakiness. If Regulus had just come clean with all of this, maybe not to the Ministry given the number of spies that had been in it, but to Sirius or Dumbledore or Arcturus or anyone they would actually know what he thought was important.
"I assumed it had something to do with his discovery of the Dark Lord's immortality," Arcturus said. "Or the immortality Regulus thought he had, because the Dark Lord met his end not much more than a year later."
"Unless Regulus was right and he died getting rid of whatever was keeping You-Know-Who from being killed." Sirius decided that he rather liked that theory. It was a heroic way to die, much better then being hunted down and killed for backing out.
"That's possible," Arcturus said. He did not sound as though he thought it was terribly likely. "By the time Regulus disappeared, I had returned to England. Heath reasons, supposedly. Regulus wrote me a couple of times during the summer, but he didn't ask for my help with anything."
"Maybe he thought that you were old and wouldn't be much help in a fight," Sirius suggested, ignoring the little voice in the back of his mind saying that he shouldn't antagonize the person he was stuck with for the next however long. "He probably didn't want you to get hurt."
"I'm not nearly as useless as you think I am," Arcturus said. "Even if I were, I could have helped him plan, made sure that he had all his facts straight. Talk him out of doing anything to rash."
"If he was planning to do anything rash, he wouldn't have wanted you to talk him out of it," Sirius said. "He might have left you a note or something, in case he didn't come back, but he wouldn't have warned you in advance."
Arcturus sighed. "I suppose not. If he left a note, I never found it. I never found the notes he made on my books either. I suspect they're still at Grimmauld Place. That's why I was hoping you would give me access to the house."
"Right," Sirius said, not quite knowing what else to say. Arcturus probably wouldn't take it too well if he suggested they headed back to London this minute to start looking through Regulus's old things. "I suppose that will have to wait for tomorrow."
