Voldemort has taken liberties with Black property, and the family never liked him in the first place. Severus is hypnotic, (black)bird-brained, and slythe, but not omniscient.

Warnings: ...No. ;p

#12 Grimmauld Place, London

"Thank-you-Dobby-you-may-go," Regulus said, his voice shrill even to his own ears. Dobby wasn't even sort-of-his-by-proxy since Grandfather had given him to Narcissa and Lucius, but he still belonged to a Black; he could still hear Regulus calling him. And elves helped family out the same as anyone else would, if it didn't go against their orders. Reggie would count himself lucky if all Kreacher needed was help.

"Regulus, this will not do," he heard the cobra press at him sternly, but he didn't look up. "I can't be hauled out of the lab every other week. Narcissa keeps owling with 'crises' that mostly turn out to be gas, and if I have to explain to both of you about—"

He must have meant it, too, because he obviously could clearly see that Regulus had a sweaty, moaning house elf in his lap. "All right, I'm sorry, Naj," he interrupted, as humbly as he could manage when he felt this frantic. "But will you please—!"

There was a dangerous pause, but then he heard a sigh and a rustle. "What happened?" Severus asked in a resigned tone, from closer to Reg's level.

"I don't know, I don't know," he said, hating the way his voice caught. But Kreacher had tucked him into bed more often than his own mother had. "He said—"

"Who said?"

"Him, Spike!" Reg said, looking at him finally, exasperated by this unusual stupidity.

"Quiet," Severus ordered, his voice soft but very firm. Reg gulped, and swallowed his voice down. Strong, calloused fingers settled over the sides of his face, holding him tightly in place—too tightly to move, but not hard enough to hurt. Severus smelled very odd, come fresh from his lab. "Look at me."

Reg dragged his eyes up to meet Severus's. He felt himself settling gently into a pool of ink, the cool dark flowing soothingly through his blood. He swallowed again, his hands starting to shake in relief as the calm swept through him.

Just like it had when that disgusting upper-former had gone after Gildy and he hadn't known what to do, and when Siri had been getting himself thrown out of the family, and then when he'd gone and left Reggie in over his head, suddenly appointed to Be An Authority without making a laughingstock of authority and himself and needing to study for his OWLs and learn fifteen years' worth of Siri's job at the same time, and when Bella had swooped in and crowed so fondly and eagerly about what she expected from him.

There were only a few things Severus was good for if you needed actual help, if you needed something done for you, and Reg had gold and Kreacher and his own library and wand for everything like that. When Reg needed to remember how to stand up, though, or Evan asked him to pretend he did, Spike would stop cold in the middle of a panic attack to be steady for him. Sometimes Reggie wasn't sure how he felt about that; he'd only been eleven for the first few weeks they'd known each other, spent nearly three months every year being Severus's age and six being Evan's. He knew how he felt about it today.

"Breathe," his friend said. "The elf is stable. Breathe down into your stomach. Through the floor. Into the earth. Breathe out, through your feet, right through to Australia. Breathe it back. Smell that rankness? That's a kangaroo. They don't wash much. Regulus: you have time."

Something loosened in his chest, and a tremulous smile slipped past his panic. "Name your arms," he quoted. "'Spike.' Please, can you…"

"We'll see," Spike cautioned, brushing Reg's hair back until his hand was cupping Reg's nape, the other dropping to Reg's shoulder. "But if you start hyperventilating again, I'll do what the elf wants, not you. So calm down."

Reg managed another shaky smile, and let his forehead drop to press against Severus's for a few long breaths. "Okay," he said, almost noiselessly. "Okay."

"Good kitty," Severus said, sarcastic and acidic enough to stiffen anyone's spine, and squeezed the back of his neck comfortingly before letting him go. "Now. Try again. What happened?"

"He called me," Reg said, giving the pronoun enough extra emphasis this time that Spike couldn't help but understand him. "He said he needed an elf, one that was completely reliable, and since everyone gets nervous and puts on their best show for Mother and Father he thought I'd probably know whose elf that was."

"So of course you thought of Kreacher," Spike filled in dryly.

Since his sarcasm obviously had everything to do with the The Elf Daily Redefines Hackneyed Pedestrian Bourgois Garish Chintzy Vulgarity, Which Possibly Did Not Exist Before He Invented It /The Halfblood Spits On His Heritage And Is, Incidentally, Also Completely Barking, Master, Stay Away From Him It Might Be Contagious recipes war, Reg ignored it. Nodding, "I told Kreacher to do whatever he asked for and come back, and… and he came back like this," he finished, his voice splintering again.

"I swear on the Serpent, if you crack up on me I will treat you and leave the elf to writhe," Severus said levelly. Reg didn't believe him for a minute (about the last bit, at least), but he nodded convulsively and worked at breathing again. Kreacher would probably gang up on him with Severus, even in this state, and he might not have that kind of time.

"Good. That's all you know?" Reg nodded, and Spike asked, "Kreacher, can you speak?"

"Kreacher can speak," the elf got out, his teeth chattering.

Reg nearly burst into tears. His elf's strong, deep voice, the voice that made Spike's sound so much like home, had been withered into something like a bullfrog's croak.

"Good," Severus said. He'd winced, too, but then he'd drawn his cold assessing face over himself. "Kreacher, it's your master's desire for you to recover. If you're to satisfy him, you must tell me exactly what happened to you. You can't obey him in this without help, and I can't give it unless I know precisely what has brought you to this state."

"Yes," Regulus said, firmly, making it an order. "Do what he says, Kreacher, unless I say otherwise."

The cobra raised a cool eyebrow at this undermining. Obviously Kreacher would stop obeying Severus instantly if Regulus told him to. Had it really been necessary, his eyes asked, to weaken the message that Severus was doing the orchestrating here? To make it more likely that Kreacher would get contentious with the mudblood he was so used to arguing with and complaining about?

Regulus flicked an expressive look down at his shivering-wet elf before looking steadily back at Severus. Look what had happened the last time he'd left Kreacher on his own with that order! Reg wouldn't let his elf think for a moment he'd be outside the reach of Black protection again. Even if Reg knew Spike would never hurt him

—unless you counted that incident with the shortcake and the mint-and-thyme balsamic-pickled strawberries, which Reg knew had been purely for the sake of driving the elf insane even if it had all turned out brain-bendingly more palatable than it should have been—

—Kreacher didn't know Spike like he did. What he did know was that his perfect obedience had just been abused, and he was still suffering for it.

Severus gave him an annoyed and resigned I take your point sort of nod, and they helped Kreacher sit up together. "Tell me everything," Severus said, holding Kreacher's eyes. "Leave out no detail."

They listened together to the strangest tale Reg had ever heard outside a book. Caves and blood. Lockets that felt like death and pedestals that felt like summer noonlight on the heart in the cool cavern air, marbled hands in an underground sea. Translucent crystal basins of glowing green potion that tasted like burnt sugar and ash and gave terrible visions.

"Can't he have some tea and honey?" he'd pleaded, the shreds of Kreacher's voice shredding him. But Spike had said no, only water until he knew whether there might be interactions to consider. Tea had active flavonoids, he said, which didn't sound to Regulus like a real word, and honey was powerful, and how it was powerful depended on the pollen, and no one paid attention to that when they bought—

"All right, then, he can't," Regulus said hastily, and conjured Kreacher a cup of water.

"Glowing green," Severus repeated, half an echo and half asking to have it confirmed. "Tasted like scorched caramel and ash?"

"B-burnt sugar," Kreacher hiccoughed.

"...We'll explore that distinction later. Describe it as though it were a wine," Severus ordered.

Even through his anxiety, Regulus had to smile when Kreacher rallied a little. When he and Sirius had been growing up, it had been Kreacher's responsibility to make sure they had at least enough of a palate to keep from embarrassing themselves.* The sudden authority in the elf's wrecked voice as he talked about the potion's legs and nose and mouth-feel was so reassuring he could almost let it be funny. Now that neither of the two most pragmatically competent people he knew were panicking, everything would be all right.

"What was it?" he asked when Kreacher was done.

Severus looked thoughtful for a while, the old, familiar, searching-his-memory expression, his eyes cast up and to the right. Finally, he replied, bright-eyed, "No idea."

"What!?" Regulus squawked.

Severus shrugged, unmoved, and said, "I've never heard of anything like it."

"You don't have to sound so ruddy interested!" he nearly yelled, incensed.

Raising an eyebrow at him, Severus said, "Thank your stars I am the sort of person intrigued by such things. And tell your library's retrieval spell to obey me. And stop shrieking; I'd like to think there's one Black immune to hysterical fits."

"—Oh." He blinked, remembered to breathe again. "Er, sorry. Right. Will Kreacher by all right while I fix the permissions?"

"I think so," Severus said judiciously, "but let's double-check." He took out his wand and ran it slowly over Kreacher's small, huddled form. "You know," he said absently, "I think it was a dose meant for a human, whatever it was. The ornamentation on that ferry sounds like the sort of thing our Lord would do, all right, but a rough-hewn basin that might have been rock salt? No. Not a Flight of Death's style. Just look at the masks. Too down-to-earth for you airy-fiery pureblood lot, anyway, although I suppose if he doesn't want anyone to find it ever… But a watery cavern that opens to blood, not wands? No, I don't think so. He's blood-sensitive."

Reg started. What—why would the Dark Lord— no, of course not. Surely not. Severus must have meant something else… but he absolutely could not have meant the Dark Lord was squeamish! And coming from Spike, who'd been sensitive about his blood himself, until he'd proved his magic (and willingness to learn to behave (even if he didn't always choose to)) to absolutely everyone's cowering satisfaction…

After it had been proven to her satisfaction, back in Reggie's first year, Cissy had developed the theory that Spike's birthday and magic combined meant Mrs. Snape must have leapt that Beltane bonfire with someone more suitable than her husband. Everyone could tell the man was dreadful even for a muggle, anyway, from the way Spike avoided talking about him with blank eyes rather than defensive ire.

It was the only time anyone had ever seen him (or, actually, anyone but Sirius and Bella) lose his temper with her, and he'd probably only survived because she'd secretly suspected she deserved it. Regulus had felt at the time like he might not survive, himself, it had felt so much like being trapped between Mother and Sirius.

Happily, Gildy had walked in after five high-decibel minutes that had felt to Reg like twenty paralyzed hours. His complete inability to not make everything all about him had led him to jump up on a table and commentate with relish.

He'd ended up blind, mute, and boil-covered, of course. And he'd had to mend his shoes where his toenails had shot through them, wound around his ankles, and tripped him off the table, jamming his wrist and giving his head a solid thumping as he fell. However, the perfect synchronization of their contribution to his not-actually-noble sacrifice had dissolved the combatants into shaky giggles on each other's shoulders. And so Reg, out of fervent, weak-kneed gratitude, had taken his idiot roommate to the Hospital wing and been the first to give him the petting he was always so incompetently scrambling after. Well, the first other than the aforesaid disgusting upper-former, but that was a completely different kind of petting and didn't count.

Once he and Narcissa had stopped shrieking at each other in the common room like fishwives and Narcissa had decided they were now friends and later realized who his mother's people were, Spike had developed a rather pawky (or possibly a better word would be deranged) sense of humor about the whole business. All his notes to her and even some of his books had been signed with escalating ridiculousness. By the end, it had reached practically Gildylocks levels. He'd started spouting Asian and Aristotalian elemental theory at every opportunity, too, just to make her stamp her foot and go Oooh! in laughing vexation.

Maybe to defuse the M-word, too, a bit. But mostly, Reg was sure, it had been to slyboots at Cissy.

That had stopped by the time they started their NEWT studies, though; Reg supposed even Spike hadn't had the energy to poke people during that. He certainly had seemed chronically exhausted during Reg's OWL year. Wound up, white-eyed, and jumpy even for Severus, too, which couldn't have helped. Not unexpectedly: the end of his own OWL year had been…

Reg really couldn't blame his parents for how disgusted with Siri they were. It was hideous and terrifying, world-shaking, that they'd decided they had to cut his brother out of themselves, that they could and had, but he could understand how upset they'd been. Siri and his friends had moved from mean to criminal that year. Only being young and well-protected and picking a victim with no strong family able to demand justice had kept them out of real trouble, and Sirius had shown no indication that he recognized he'd done anything wrong, or was willing to be tamed.

That didn't mean anything, Reg knew. Sirius was Sirius: he might have been in silent guilty agonies, for all he'd let on to anyone else. He had been subdued at school, in public, which spoke volumes. But he and Mother didn't understand each other, they just screamed themselves purple and hoarse. She shrieked, so he shrieked back, and he had no reasonable defense but wouldn't admit he'd been wrong (because he just didn't do that, which you'd think she would have known because she didn't, either), so she decided he was unsalvageable.

Reg didn't know what reasonable defense there could have been. It had been indefensible. Although Severus had pulled himself together, and slammed the House together, and bulled ahead coldly with his head high, it had absolutely gutted him. Goodbye Spike, hello, Naja. Things he would normally have thought were funny had just gotten flat, edgy, disinterested looks, and he'd been wearily unimpressed or viciously impatient where he'd usually have been patiently amused or even glintingly wicked. Only the looming terror of failing his OWLs had forced Reg to keep asking him to flay Reg's poor, innocent first drafts alive.

That and inexplicably unrelenting pressure from Evan, who seemed to have reacted by getting a personality transplant from some uncommonly enigmatic and protectively vicious sphinx over the summer (probably not literally; he'd spent most of it in France). It had been an awful year. Reg had just been daring to hope the next one would be better when Slughorn had called Severus and all the actual prefects together and warned them who the Head Girl and Boy would be in September.

The common room had probably been due for redecorating anyway.

And the next year had been better, although most of Reg's year had sworn a solemn pact to painlessly mercy-kill any of their number who persisted in behaving, once warned, the way Lucius and Cissy had in Hogsmeade. Gildy had opted out, calling them all soulless philistines, and so had Bast Lestrange, noting that you never knew what kind of an act would be useful. They'd both spent more time trying to work out how Evan and Wilkes managed to stay friends with everyone they were snogging than Reg thought was healthy. Severus's way of paying attention to that was less creepy: he'd run the betting pool, and done well off it more often than not, and really, after the year before, anything that made him all Spike-ish again, made him look like he was trying not to laugh...

Reg caught himself. Trying to avoid thinking about Spike's unspeakably dangerous implication was only natural, was even advisable. Doing it this way wasn't fair to Kreacher. It didn't live up to Reg's liege-duty.

Spike's mouth was still running on automatic, the way it always did when he was flying two thought brooms at once, as though Reg was Narcissa and might lean over and ask some illuminating question at any moment. When it came to trusting that a question of his might be illuminating instead of stupid or annoyingly distracting, Reg frankly did not have Narcissa's stones.

"Sounds like witches' hallows to me," Severus mused on. "It may have hit him harder than intended, what with being smaller than human and male, or even some interaction with elf-magic… Would be interesting to know whether the cave opens for muggles; might give us an idea how old it is, I understand druids were almost exclusively wizards, but— Hullo…"

"What?" Reg demanded, on tenterhooks.

"There's something about the anahata-puri…"

"The who?"

"Heart chakra, Reg, look at an atlas sometime, other countries exist, they have fascinating magic, some of them, really usefu—Oh, yes. Blown open, but not blasted. Flooded, more like. Let me look at the meridians… a-ha, there we are."

He peered between Kreacher and his wand for another few moments that felt like forever, frowning and occasionally making quiet noises that didn't sound like English, Greek, or Latin. Reg hadn't taken Runes. Eventually, he sat back on his heels, putting his wand away. "I'll still want to look in your library, if I may," he said, "but I think… I don't think it was a poison."

"Then—" Reg started, his heart pounding.

"Shut up, please, I'm thinking." He glared narrowly into thin air for what felt to Regulus like aeons. "Elves," he muttered. "Don't think like people. Feudal times a thousand. Think like a slave. No, Jeeves. No—Alfred." He made a face, and glared at the floor some more while Regulus tried to think whether he knew any Als or Freds or Alfies or Frodos, because he certainly couldn't think of any Aelfreds proper, or work out what jarveys might have to do with anything.

Finally, with a shudder, Spike looked up, looking like he'd tasted something terrible. "Kreacher," he said. "You're still under orders to obey me."

"Kreacher obeys Master Regulus's order to listen to Master Lunatic Halfblood," Kreacher agreed warily.

"That'll do, you pigheaded, hidebound piece of horsenettle," Severus returned, perfectly agreeably. He must have misunderstood Reggie's swallowed snort, because he added, "Regulus, don't interfere. Kreacher, you said you saw terrible things when you drank. How many of them were about… about Regulus's brother?"

Reg and Kreacher both stared at him. But where Reg stared in surprise, Kreacher's face had a dull, glassy, look of facing the inevitable.

"Ah." Spike nodded, a sharp, quick little motion. "Kreacher… you know something Master Regulus is too kind to know, don't you. You know something your master and mistress are too sad to see clearly."

Astonished, Regulus watched fat tears well up slowly in Kreacher's snitch-sized, bloodshot eyes.

"Kreacher," Severus said, very gently, "granted that you were working with shoddy material, but you still failed, didn't you. You've hated him because he made you fail, but the failure was yours." Kreacher gave a tiny, tiny, convulsive nod. "Kreacher… isn't it your duty to—"

He was cut off as Kreacher gave a wail that shook the whole house and flung himself back onto Regulus's knees. Things tumbled and clattered off of shelves with the force of his sobs.

It was like standing under a tsunami, but through the shock of it Regulus caught phrases like, bad, bad, bad, and Master Sirius and Kreacher could not teach and lost, lost, and Mistress's heir gone to the filth and Master so sad, Master Regulus so sad, Mistress so angry and over and over again, failed, failed, failed you, Master…

With stunned effort, Regulus made himself look at Severus, who was looking grim and sad. "You have to punish him," he said. "You'll have to really punish him. It's the greatest regret of his life, and it's been shoved up inside his eyes. He won't be healed until he's done with it. He's an elf; he won't feel it's over until he's been punished enough, and this was bad, Reggie. You may think it's nonsense to blame him, but whatever you think, he knows it was bad, and he knows it was his fault."

In a shaky voice, his hands fallen over Kreacher's thin, heaving back, Regulus asked, "What… what was it? That, that drink?"

Severus turned a palm up in a shrug. "As far as I can tell, and for lack of a better word… remorse. All the guilt he'd blocked away, all the shame he'd blamed on someone else. Everything he'd never let himself regret. Right down his throat, filling his heart till he choked.

"I'd have said despair, but it looks like it was meant to be healing," he went on somberly, "I could see it being fatal, though. If someone's heart was too weak physically, or too hard, too closed, too prideful to accept it. Certainly indirectly, if they were open to the guilt but not the cleansing. That's why you have to punish him, Reg, so hard he can believe he's atoned and earned forgiveness, without doubt."

Reg looked down at Kreacher, smoothing the pillowcase over his birdlike shoulderblades, sunk in aching for him. And then he felt a sudden surge of sympathy with Siri's oft-expressed desire to flatten the bloody-damned hard-hearted swot's nose.

Because what Severus said next, reflective and hugely inappropriately chipper, was, "Also, he's dangerously dehydrated; we should get him that tea. Fascinating, when you think about it. You will let me at your library, Reggie, won't you? I have got to work out how it's done."

"You know, Severus," he said angrily, "sometimes you are the most insensitive—"

"That's as may be," Spike cut him off, more soberly. "But think, Reg. Do you understand what Kreacher told you, really? What it means, what it was?"

"No, but—"

"Nor I. Did you pick up that the Dark Lord left him to die?"

Regulus closed his mouth, with a snap, as Kreacher curled more tightly in his lap. He hadn't.

"That, if we assume he does as he means to do, he meant Kreacher to die?"

Regulus said nothing. Not only words but thoughts failed him.

"This was important enough to him that he risked good relations with your whole family to keep it secret, Reggie. And those relations are already on thin ice. You shouldn't ask me how, but he's done Narcissa a very serious disservice and hurt her sister's feelings. And now he throws your elf's life away? Even if he just sees elves as property, he's got to know you'd take that as an insult at the very least. Reg, this was that important, and we don't know what it was. We do not understand one single piece of it, not for sure, not even close. I have got," he repeated, no longer Charlie Ravenchirp, "to work out how it was done. And you have got," he added, positively grim, "to take ill with grief—and start working a hell of a lot harder at not thinking about pink elephants."

*Sirius, of course, had decided he only liked drinks that were brown. This had not gotten him out of lessons, but had forced Kreacher to also become an expert in whiskey and beer.

Credits: It was probably mostly Living Waters by J. Odel at Red Hen, supplemented something(s) or other by Whitehound (and quite possibly other things floating around that I have entirely forgotten) that convinced me Albus had it completely up his jumper about the 'crude' and by-implication dark magic of the cave and discussed the symbology. Would not be surprised if they'd both talked about it, but it's been a long time, my memory is vague, I'm not working directly from source and I'm quite sure nothing got incorporated whole. I recommend reading both their ouvres until you get there. No need to stop reading to come let me know which it was, I know you'll want to keep going. ;)

Yes, Severus is referring to the Alfred you think he is (he's never bought any comics himself, mind, but that's not the only way to be exposed...) and if you don't know P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves & Wooster series, either on paper or through Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry... well, not everyone loves them and you don't want to overdose, but (hearts).