I couldn't help but noticing with appropriate dismay that Sarah's Comet was nowhere near as fast as my old Silver Arrow. My level of dismay surely would have risen to inappropriate levels given much more travel time, but all I had to do was get off school grounds and Apparate. Where to, I hadn't really considered.

It hadn't occurred to me until mere moments before that I wouldn't very well be able to Apparate into Sirius's sitting room, and well, Apparating onto the street in front of his building didn't seem like an especially appealing idea, especially not if word got out that Sirius and Potter had been with me. For a second, a kind of self-destructive, psychotic idea gripped my mind that I could just Apparate to Grimmauld Place and grab the locket now in the midst of the confusion.

And well? I don't think I'd made a concrete decision when I blinked and found myself on my two feet in the middle of a familiar, drizzly street. It was quiet, and I could hear someone talking on the telephone out an open window a few doors over. I tiptoed up the stairs outside Number 12 and peered around me, off as far as I could see over the fog and cobblestones. I didn't hear anything other than water dripping and a slight female voice prattling on. I was already reaching for the doorknob when I felt the sharp tip of a wand press into the soft, vulnerable skin on the side of my neck.

I sucked in my breath and the drip-dripping from the gutter to the cobblestones became the heartbeat and the voices, and the fog twisted and reached. But then the pressure from the wand eased up and an unpleasant, cracking voice said, "Oh, it's you."

That didn't sound like the statement of a man about to murder me, so I opened my eyes and stepped back.

"Snape?"

"Your keen powers of observation serve you well." He withdrew his wand and tucked it away in his robes. "Though I can't say I really understand where you're going with your fashion choices these days."

"Rich, coming from you." I stiffened all the muscles in my body and kept my hand by my hip, close to Sarah's wand. Despite the fact that Snape did not appear to have plans for killing/torturing me, his presence set me on edge. If he had been set the task of skulking around my doorway in case I came home, it didn't make sense that he wouldn't know he was supposed to do very painful things to me on sight. "What are you doing here?"

"I fear your puny head might explode if I attempted to explain to you the intricacies of the situation, but rest assured I'm not here to impede your progress."

I was far from "assured". "Are you here alone?"

"Yes. For now. Though I can't say how long, and if you continue dilly-dallying out here, you might not avoid a cozy little family reunion with Bellatrix and Malfoy."

"There aren't others inside? Of course, how would I know if you were lying and there was an ambush waiting right inside the door?"

"How about this: if you don't go in inow/i, I'll kill you myself."

While I could have called his bluff on what I was sure was an empty threat, I wasn't anxious to spend anymore time conversing with Snape, and if anything he said hit home, it was that if I kept hanging around I might encounter Bellatrix. I announced myself to the door and it swung open to reveal Kreacher standing, looking slightly lost, by the base of the stairs. God knows how long he'd been standing there.

"Master Regulus, you've returned!" Kreacher squealed in delight, jumping forward to take Sarah's broom and deposit it in the umbrella stand. "Master and Mistress Black have been so worried, they have, Mistress cries all day, she thinks young Master is dead, but won't she be happy now that young Master has come home." Kreacher's small, wrinkled face was split in half by a giant, toothless smile, and his big, insect eyes shown with such innocent joy that I just couldn't tell him I wasn't staying.

"Where are Mum and Dad?" I asked instead.

"Master and Mistress have gone to the hospital. Master is ill, Master is even more ill than when young Master disappeared-"

"Right." I mentally smacked myself upside the head. iGet on with it, already!/i "Listen, Kreacher, remember that locket I told you to destroy?"

His smile evaporated. He grabbed his big, hairy ears and yanked them down, shaking his head in shame. "Oh, Master Regulus, Kreacher tried to destroy it, he did. He tried all the magic he has, he even put it in the fireplace, but nothing worked, and the wicked locket remains."

"But you still have it?"

He nodded, breathing in heavy rasps.

"And you didn't tell anyone about it?"

He shook his head.

"Not even Mum and Dad?"

He shook his head again, still twisting at his ears.

"Good, very good, Kreacher."

He looked up at me, easing up on his ears.

"I don't need you to destroy it anymore, but I do need you to bring it to me."

"Yes, right away!" He scampered away, and I remained standing awkwardly in the entrance. Now that I was home I wanted nothing more than a warm shower and a good meal... and my cozy bed and my familiar, respectable clothing-but Snape's presence right outside the door was a constant specter in my mind, and his warning about Bellatrix even more so. I was unclear what was happening with him and unwilling to commit any of my precious mental activity to trying to puzzle it out, but I didn't trust him. I wasn't too dumb to figure out that if he weren't killing me now his allegiance was questionable at best, and if he were working for Dumbledore, he was almost certainly the one who fitted me up with the Ministry.

But before I could give much thought to that, Kreacher returned, practically prancing.

"Thank you, Kreacher," I said, taking the locket from his spindly, outstretched hands. "You've done very well."

"Oh, thank you, Master Regulus." He bounced, before dipping low into a servile bow. "Kreacher is only happy to serve."

"And now I have another favor to ask of you."

"Anything young Master wishes." Kreacher straightened and stared up at me eagerly.

"I have to leave again, and I need you not to tell Mum and Dad that I was here. Keep it a secret, okay?"

"Yes, but-" Kreacher began twisting his ears again. "Of course, but, Master and Mistress are so upset, thinking young Master is dead, and he is the only son they have..."

"I know it hurts them to think something bad's happened to me, but it's safer for them if they don't know anything about what I'm doing. I can't explain it, but you have to trust me. Do you trust me, Kreacher?"

"Yes!" Kreacher yelped, as though I'd just trod on his foot.

"Good. When this is all over, I'll come back and everything will go back to normal, I promise. But until then you can't say anything to anyone. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Master, of course Kreacher understands." He looked as though he'd been struck.

"Look, this hurts me as much as it does you... and them. But-well, I have to go, or I'm in trouble, and then we'll really have something to be sad about." I grabbed Sarah's broom and was out the door before Kreacher could make me feel any worse.

I didn't see Snape on my way out, but I wasn't especially concerned about him at that point. I wouldn't be able to tell you if there'd been a three-ring circus organized in the round-about when I came back outside. It was all I could do to swing my leg over Sarah's broom and kick off from the ground without running directly into any nearby buildings.

I wished Kreacher hadn't said so much about my parents-my sick dad, my grief-stricken mum. He was right, I was the only son they had left, and it wasn't like Sirius was coming back, and whatever deficiencies I had-I was it, I was their last hope. Wasn't it really selfish of me after all to have done this?

It was really too much for me to consider, when I needed to be watching the road (so to speak), so I shifted my thoughts to some well-worn fantasies of me and Narcissa in the Bahamas. Narcissa was just about to remove her coconut bra because it was chafing her and I was ready with suntan oil to protect her beautiful, porcelain complexion when Sirius's window jumped up out of nowhere and nearly struck me in the face. I managed to slide to a stop just in time and the only part of my body that collided with the ambushing window was my shoulder, which alerted the flat's occupant to my presence.

Sirius's face appeared in the window and he stared at me with disbelief for several seconds before wrenching the window open. "Reg. We thought for sure you split."

"Look what I got," I said by way of reply, hooking my thumb around the locket's chain and pulling it away from my chest to show him.

"That really it?" He peered out the window with wide eyes. "It doesn't look so scary."

"Well it certainly is. Let me in and I'll even let you touch it."

"Enticing," he said, stepping away from the window to let me climb in. It took me several tries to work out how to get both me and the broom inside and drop neither of us to our deaths. Sirius, instead of attempting to help me, just stood off to the side sniggering, though I didn't see what was so funny.

When I finally managed to fall in, pulling the broom after me and landing painfully on my tailbone, Sirius took the broom out of my hands and went to lean it in the corner, leaving me to pick myself up and nurse my wounds.

"Let's take a look, yeah?" he said, rolling up his sleeves as he walked back towards me.

"Yeah, great." I ducked my head and raised the chain over it, then cast it down on the carpet between us. "I don't want to wear it anymore, I don't even want to look at it anymore. You have a go at it."

Sirius knelt down and picked it up gingerly, using only his thumb and forefinger. He then dropped it in the palm of his other hand and moved it up and down, as though weighing it. "So, a piece of Voldemort's soul is in there?" he asked, his voice quiet.

"Yeah," I said. "You can even kinda feel it. Doesn't it feel too heavy?"

"Yeah." He looked up at me. "This is eerie."

"Don't I know it?" I said, walking to the couch and flopping down. "What do we do with it now?"

"We can't go back to Dumbledore until morning. At least."

"Thank god, I'm exhausted." And to emphasize my point, I propped my feet up on the armrest and threw my arm over my eyes.

"Don't you even want to know how we got away and why James and I aren't right with you on the Ministry's most wanted list now?"

"Sure, I could use a good bedtime story," I said, stifling a yawn.

"Well, prepare yourself, because it's riveting-" And that's about as far as he got before I was out.

When I was a little boy, I played outside a lot. Sirius, too. In the garden there were a lot of bugs, and sometimes garter snakes, squirrels, and even neighborhood cats. Sometimes I pulled the antennae off the bugs, or their legs, or I pulled them in half and sometimes the halves would even flop around on the ground before all the life left. Sirius, too. If you hack a snake's head off with a hoe or a knife, its body keeps twitching and writhing for minutes, even though it's already dead.

When I woke up my mouth was dry all the way down my throat.

I was surprised, when I sat up, that not only was it morning and Sirius hadn't shaken me awake to shout at me for not listening to his highly fascinating tales of adventure, but I didn't have anything written on my face in Magic Marker and my pubic hair wasn't multi-colored. True, one of my eyebrows did turn up missing, but overall I was impressed by his maturity.

Because birds were chirping cheerfully outside the window and not being violently stricken from the sky, I knew that Sirius was still asleep. I would've liked to return to that state of consciousness myself, but my body had far more pressing concerns. So, either shower or breakfast it was, and because I couldn't find anything edible in Sirius's kitchen, I settled for a cup of orange juice, which was the best I could conjure this early in the morning and with someone else's wand.

I took the orange juice in the washroom and drank it under the shower's spray, which I had turned up as scalding as it would go. Though I was convinced that no amount of scrubbing would ever make me clean again, it was the least I could do to try.

When I emerged from the bathroom fifteen minutes later, towel around my waist and skin pink as a newborn baby, Sirius was in the kitchen flipping pancakes.

"Are you icooking/i?" I asked, rubbing at my eye with my fist.

"I'm the one who should be scandalized," he said, glancing down at my towel and raising an eyebrow. "Is it too much to ask that you put on some clothing? Trousers, at least?"

"I considered that, but I did just get myself clean," I said, gesturing at the pile of clothes that old fisherman had given me, which were on the sitting room floor. I was sure they were not only generating some kind of mutant odor all their own, but close to achieving sentience.

"I'll loan you some," he said, "as soon as I'm done with these pancakes."

"Fair enough," I said, sitting down at the kitchen table, knees together so as to avoid offending his delicate sensibilities. "I hope you're planning on feeding me." And if he weren't I would take the food by force. My stomach was close to controlling my mind at that point.

"I suppose I could spare a few pancakes," he said.

"Then will we go to Dumbledore?" Not that I was particularly looking forward to the meeting.

"Dumbledore will contact us when it's safe to come. I notified him this morning that you'd retrieved the Horcrux."

"You sound very official."

He snorted, tossing a pancake in the air.

"So, what do I do until Dumbledore 'contacts' us?" I asked, trying unsuccessfully to distract my stomach.

He shrugged. "Practice your knitting? You're supposed to stay here, and I'm not supposed to let you out of my sight. I'm also supposed to be inquiring after Sarah Stafford's wand and broomstick. I mean, really." He cast what I supposed was supposed to be a chastising look over his shoulder at me, but I could tell he was trying not to laugh.

I didn't like the sound of those instructions, either way. Was I a prisoner already? I would have pushed the point if Sirius had not handed me a plate full of pancakes right then.

When I lifted my nose from the plastic, my plate was clean and so was Sirius's, and he was gone.

I stood up, holding up my towel with one fist and wandered into the sitting room. I thought about trying out the television, now that I kept company with Muggle-lovers and all, but it proved far more complicated that even the call buttons, and I was distracted from my efforts by the noise of Sirius clearing his throat. I stopped pressing my palm against the screen and trying to will it on long enough to look up at him, at which point he threw an armful of clothing in my face.

"You can keep the pants, but I want the rest back," he said while I dropped the towel and began sorting out the clothes.

"Gryffindor Quidditch?" I asked, holding up his old Quidditch jersey. "Oh, honestly, you did this on purpose."

He shrugged, retrieving a small black box from the coffee table. As I pulled on the trousers, he pointed the box at the television and it came to life with a whir.

"Oi!" I jumped back, my fingers frozen on the zip. "How did you-"

He pointed it again and the image on the screen changed from a nice lady lady holding a tube of toothpaste to a group of men running around a field kicking a ball around.

"So... do Muggles have magic kind of like house-elves do?" I asked, puling my zip up and staring, mystified at the screen.

Sirius laughed. "No, you moron."

"Well, then-"

"Listen, I'm not your Muggle Studies teacher," he said, and added under his breath, "I don't quite understand it myself." He glanced at me. "But it's not magic," he said with finality and a curt nod. "Now put on the damn shirt, honestly."

"Say, do they have quidditch on this thing?" I asked curiously after I pulled the shirt on.

"No," Sirius said, "but that's what I asked, too."

"So, what do we do all day? You're not really planning on staying here, are you?"

Sirius frowned. "Well, it doesn't sound particularly appealing... But Dumbledore said to, and I reckon he's right. Voldemort and the Ministry both know you're alive now, or have a good idea about it."

"Yeah, of course, Dumbledore is always right, isn't he? It couldn't be that it's more convenient for him to keep us here? You know, he could tell anyone where we are-"

"Yeah, and who would he want to tell? He knew the Ministry man would come back for his hat and he warned us-"

"Yeah, so I could bring him the locket."

"You think he couldn't have got the locket himself?"

"Yeah, he would have had a real easy time getting in Grimmauld Place."

"You think he's scared of a few Death Eaters? You think he couldn't make Kreacher open the door for him, bring him the locket?"

I inflated my chest to ready myself for my next argument and was surprised to find I didn't have anything to say.

"If you want to know what iI/i think, he's giving you an opportunity to redeem yourself-and to prove you're not some loose cannon we can't trust. When you disappeared last night, I thought for sure..." Sirius shook his head, his mouth morphing into a hard line.

"Yeah well, I came back didn't I?"

He blew a stray strand of hair out of his face and looked away, shrugging. I opened my mouth to press the point, but thought better of it and sat down next to him.

We spent the rest of the day on the couch drinking, while Sirius flipped through the channels trying to impress me with the wide variety of Muggle television programs.

James Potter stopped by early in the evening, at which point we were already moderately to severely intoxicated. He said some disparaging things about the impossibility of dealing with drunk Blacks, and I offered to defend our honor by cursing him, but Sirius advised me that I probably shouldn't do that, since Potter was a quick draw all the time, and no offense, but I was probably incapable of aiming correctly. I was forced to agree, but only because I found myself unable of making the case to the contrary without slurring my words to the point of incomprehensibility.

Potter rolled his eyes insolently. "Well, I'm glad you two are bonding and all, but Dumbledore sent me with a message: He expects you in time for tea tomorrow. Can you remember that? Should I write it on your foreheads?"

Sirius assured him that we would attend ("I'll set an alarm") while I snickered to myself about the idea of bonding.

"So, where's the Horcrux? Can I see it?"

"It's-a... It's-a... Regulus, where is it?"

"How should I know, I gave it to you."

"Oh! It's on my night stand."

"I'll get it."

"What do you want with it, you'll probably break it," I said.

"Well, isn't that what we want to do?"

We dissolved into laughter again, and when Potter walked back in, he was looking decidedly too grim for the occasion.

"That's eerie, mate," he said, his gaze meeting neither of ours. "I really don't like that thing."

"Well, you're not isupposed/i to like it."

"Good point, Reg."

"Thanks."

Potter rolled his eyes again.

"Oi, Prongs, you want a beer?"

"Well, while this look like an absolute riot, I told Lily I'd be home in twenty minutes. Oh, and I almost forgot." Potter reached into his pocket and pulled out some silvery fabric. "To get your brother into the castle," he said, tossing it at Sirius.

"Thanks, mate."

"What is it?"

"Invisibility cloak." Sirius held it up for me to see, his hands disappearing behind it.

"Whoa." I reached out to touch it.

"Yeah, I know right? Hey, be careful, this is James's most prized possession."

"It's brilliant," I said, throwing the cloak over my head. Potter grimaced.

"All right, well, I'll see you," he said, and headed back out the door.

"Bye, Prongs. Okay, okay, you'll get to play with it enough tomorrow." Sirius yanked it off me and folded it up neatly.

"Touchy." I pried open another beer, which was probably a bad decision.