He Can't Hurt You if You're Already Dead

by unspeakable3

In which Regulus Black finds his peaceful post-life disturbed by his stupid brother and some stupid organisation called the Order of the Phoenix or something. (takes place in the summer of 1995, between "lie low at Lupin's" and the events of HP and the Order of the Phoenix)

2. Chapter 2

Fuck.

He shouldn't have done that. What a stupid, mindless, idiotic thing to do. What was the point in spending all that time making all these plans, hiding in his own home, making Kreacher serve that— that brute, if only to go and waste it all by charging about like bloody Cadagon or something, completely heedless, unthinking, acting so impulsively in a way that he hadn't since—

Regulus paced around his bedroom, furious at himself. He flung himself down onto his bed and screamed into a pillow. He snapped upright again and beat his fists against the wall, letting out a frustrated yell when they passed straight through. He paced the room again.

He heard footsteps thundering up the stairs and turned, vainly hoping that Kreacher had decided to walk for once. But he had no such luck. Sirius barged into the room and stopped abruptly on the threshold, his hand curled around the door handle and his chest heaving as he stared at Regulus.

"Have you forgotten how to read?" Regulus asked, his voice more staccato and high-pitched than he would have liked it to be at the time of his reunion with his brother.

Regulus turned his back on Sirius and glared at the wall. He couldn't bear to look at Sirius, to see him looking so… frail. So old . He raised a hand to his cheek. Was that what he would have looked like if he had lived to age? Everyone had always said how alike he and Sirius looked, but he had never understood that when he had been alive and he certainly didn't see it now.

"What?" said Sirius, sounding wrong-footed.

"The sign on the door!" Regulus snapped. "Did you fail to read it? Or did you assume, as usual, that the rules do not apply to you?"

"No, I—"

"Get out!"

Regulus crossed his arms and glared at the wall some more. There were faint patches on the wallpaper; he could have easily removed them, but he thought it important to keep this reminder of his idiotic teenage idolatry. Where Sirius had covered his walls with obscene posters of muggle women draped half-naked over muggle vehicles, Regulus had made a patchwork of newspaper clippings of the Dark Lord's crimes.

Both had horrified their parents, in the end.

When he heard no sounds that would suggest that Sirius was leaving, Regulus whirled around, his eyebrows drawn together in fury. He hated that Sirius was still standing there, immobile, gazing at him with a look that could only be described as pity .

"Get out !" Regulus repeated, flinging his arm out towards the door as though Sirius had forgotten where it was.

He refused to be pitied by him - by this hopeless, worthless, stinking traitor of a brother.

Sirius took an unsteady step towards him. Regulus automatically lurched backwards, passing through one of his bedposts, but Sirius turned away and staggered into the chair at Regulus's desk. He seemed to grow smaller, crumpling in on himself, resting his head in his hands.

Regulus would not feel sorry for him.

"You look exactly how I remember you," Sirius murmured.

"Stop it."

"I knew you'd died, but I had no idea you were—"

"I said stop it !" Regulus cried. "Get out of my room!"

Sirius sighed and lifted his head. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Please just leave me alone," Regulus said, humiliated by the way his voice cracked.

"No."

He huffed and flung himself onto his bed. Sitting cross-legged in the middle, he stared sulkily down at his eiderdown and plucked at the loose threads. He didn't care if he looked like a petulant child. He was sick and tired of being the mature one; if Sirius was going to act like a bratty teenager, then he would too.

"I hate you," he said.

"I know," said Sirius, annoyingly unperturbed. "I'm not leaving, though."

"Why? What could you possibly want from me?"

"I dunno. We need to talk, or something."

Regulus let out a bitter laugh and flopped backwards onto the bed. "Right. Because that's worked out so well for us in the past."

"Don't be a twat."

"Fine." He folded his arms behind his head - a feint of nonchalance, because in reality his entire not-body was thrumming and prickling with unease - and turned to give Sirius what he hoped was a withering stare. "What makes you think that talking will solve all our… issues?"

"You're dead, for a start."

"Hilarious, Sirius."

Something in Sirius's expression changed. He didn't soften, exactly - nothing about this strange, sharp Sirius, more angular than Regulus had ever known him, could be described as soft - but it was something more than pity, it was like…

No. It was not nostalgia.

"What?" Regulus demanded.

"What, what?"

He sighed. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Like what?"

" Merlin's arse ," he muttered under his breath. "Why are you looking at me like you've just—"

"Just what?" Sirius interrupted. "Seen a ghost?"

"I hate you so much."

"So you've said." Sirius shifted in his seat. He crossed his legs, ankle over knee, and fiddled with the hem of what Regulus assumed he thought passed for trousers.

He couldn't hold it in any longer. "Why do you insist on wearing those disgusting rags?" he blurted out.

To his surprise, Sirius let out a bark of a laugh. "Really? That's the first thing you think to ask me?"

"Well," he said indignantly, "it's difficult to take you seriously when you - don't you dare , Sirius, or I swear I will haunt you for the rest of your miserable little life." Sirius had raised an eyebrow, threatening to make that most terrible of jokes. "It's difficult to take you seriously ," Regulus continued, "when you look like some sort of—"

"Wanted criminal?" Sirius suggested, flashing his teeth.

"I was going to suggest 'street urchin', but I suppose 'criminal' will do."

He shrugged. "Dunno. Don't really see much point in dressing to your high standards when I can't go anywhere anyway."

"But you have so many things in your wardrobe that are nicer - cleaner. Robes without holes would be a good start, don't you think?"

"Is the afterlife really so boring that you've spent your time sorting through my wardrobe?" Sirius asked. He snorted. "Bloody hell. You— wait. All that folding, and— I thought that was Moony . It was you?"

"Yes," Regulus said tightly, feeling his face heat up. "I was haunting you."

"That's what you call haunting ?" Sirius said, laughing. "Doing my laundry and folding my clothes? Fuck, Reg. That's pathetic, even for you."

Regulus lay very still and stared at the ceiling, blinking. His ghostly fingers were tingling, twitching. No one had ever called him— not in years - Mother would never, of course, and Kreacher—

"What is it?" Sirius asked, a little more urgently than Regulus might have expected. "What's wrong?"

He blinked.

"Reg?"

"Nothing," Regulus said hastily. He felt sick. Could ghosts be sick? God, he really didn't want to vomit ectoplasm all over his bed. Especially not in front of Sirius . He'd never live it down, but—

"It's weird, isn't it?" Sirius said quietly. Regulus turned his head to stare at him. "To hear each other speak again, I mean. When you said my name, I almost… How long has it been?"

He pressed his hands down against the eiderdown, centring himself. "Twenty years."

"Jesus."

"You're an old man, now."

"Shut up, you little shit."

Sirius swiped a book off the desk and threw it at Regulus; he instinctively rolled over to avoid it, but it would have passed right through him regardless.

The act reminded Regulus of what he had heard, what he had witnessed, downstairs - of what he had risked revealing himself to prevent. He bristled and, frowning, sat up again to glare at Sirius.

"What now?" he asked, rolling his eyes. "Don't get all uppity about your precious book ."

"Never again will you lay your hands Kreacher. Never ."

"What?" Sirius laughed. "Why the fuck would I want to touch that wrinkly old—"

"Have you forgotten what I literally just saw you doing?"

"Oh, come on. I know you're besotted with the hideous git, but—"

"You could have really hurt him, Sirius! You could have killed him!"

"Yeah? Good!" Sirius rose from his seat. "He would have deserved it!"

"No, he wouldn't! You've tormented him your entire life, and—"

"Wait," said Sirius. He took a step towards the bed and jabbed his finger in Regulus's direction. "It was you , wasn't it? You set Kreacher on everyone! Your pathetic attempts at haunting couldn't cut it, so you made Kreacher do all your dirty work for you!"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Sirius took a step closer. "You pair of foul-mouthed little shits."

"How dare you—"

"Did you know there's a muggle-born living in your house?"

Regulus blinked, wrong-footed by the abrupt change in conversation. "Yes," he said, shifting uncomfortably.

"I'm surprised you haven't ordered Kreacher to do her in yet. She likes house-elves, you know - I suppose the novelty hasn't worn off - I thought the irony in that would have appealed to you."

"I would never hurt—"

Sirius laughed. "Wouldn't you? What's that on your arm then, Reg?"

"Shut up."

"Or did you just join a murder cult for a laugh? Of course ," Sirius said, snapping his fingers, "precious little Reggie couldn't possibly get his hands dirty."

"Get out."

"Gladly."

---

Sirius returned to him in the dead of night.

Regulus hadn't yet bothered to try to sleep - he didn't think he'd be able to, not after what had happened - and instead had been sitting on the windowsill, watching the shadows cast by the cloud-covered moon creep across the garden. He turned towards the door as Sirius knocked lightly against the frame and moved hesitantly into the room.

"Hi, Sirius said quietly. "I was just wondering if—"

"OUT!" roared a hoarse voice. Kreacher came hurtling out of his pile of blankets and thrust himself between Regulus and Sirius. "The nasty, ungrateful swine will not harm Kreacher's Master!"

"Kreacher—" Regulus began.

"What the hell is he doing in here?" Sirius demanded.

"Kreacher might ask the same thing of the traitorous boy!" he said, standing as tall as he could, hands on his hips, in an attempt to look down his bulbous nose at Sirius.

Sirius snorted. Kreacher growled and took a step towards him, but Regulus stayed him with an ice-cold hand on his shoulder.

"It's alright, Kreacher," he said, gently but firmly tugging him backwards and out of Sirius's reach. Kreacher seemed very unsure about the situation; he eyed up a candlestick on the desk and seized it, brandishing it in front of him like a sword.

"Am I hallucinating again?" Sirius asked. "This is really odd, even for this house."

"Thank you for that helpful contribution, Sirius," Regulus said primly. "What do you want?"

Sirius regarded Kreacher for a long moment. "Does the elf have to be here?"

"Yes, actually," said Regulus, ignoring Kreacher's growls and muttered insults. "Since your horrible little friends decided to kick him out of his own kitchen, Kreacher has been staying here. With me."

"I don't mean— god, that's so weird. Dorming with your house-elf? Jesus, Reg." He rubbed his hands over his face. "No, I mean - does he have to be here when I… while we talk?"

Kreacher turned around, his eyes wide and beseeching. "He is a traitor, Master Regulus! A murderer! He betrayed this family and many others! He is dangerous! He will try to hurt Master Regulus!"

"I'm already dead, Kreacher," Regulus said, with a sad smile. He ignored Sirius's snort. "He can't do me any more harm than that which has already been inflicted."

Kreacher frowned, glared at Sirius over his shoulder, and turned back to Regulus. "If Master Regulus is sure—" Regulus nodded. "—then Kreacher will leave. But only to the landing!" he warned, turning to brandish his makeshift weapon at Sirius. "If Kreacher hears any nonsense, the traitor will be sorry!"

He sloped off towards Regulus's bedroom door, hissing at Sirius as he passed. He gave Sirius one last foul look through the crack in the door before he fully closed it.

"How do you put up with him?" Sirius asked once Kreacher had left. "Miserable git. He's more than half-mad."

Regulus glared at him.

"Right. Sorry, I forgot - he's your best mate. No offence meant."

"If you've just come here to insult me and Kreacher, then—"

"No. No, that's not what I meant. I…" He sat down heavily at the end of Regulus's bed; Regulus tried not to wince at the inevitable mess Sirius would leave in his wake. "What happened, Reg?"

Regulus looked at him blankly. Where to start ?

When it was clear that no clarification was forthcoming, he said, "I'm afraid you're going to have to be more specific."

Sirius was staring in Regulus's direction, his gaze fixed somewhere above Regulus's head, and, just when Regulus was beginning to think that Azkaban really had addled his brother's brain, he blurted out, "How did you die?"

His hands immediately flew to his neck, to the deep furrows ploughed by dead men's nails, dead man's bones, as they gripped him and tore at him and dragged him down beneath the surface, choking and spluttering and—

And he knew that his scars weren't really visible, not as visible as they would be if he had lived, anyway, and not at this distance, in this light, but—

"That is an extremely impertinent question," he said tightly, "even by your standards."

"We assumed one of your lot did you in."

"Delightfully put." How lovely. Imagining Sirius and his idiotic friends sitting around with cups of tea and discussing how Regulus might have died was exactly how he wanted to spend his eternity. "If you must know," he said, "I drowned."

"Oh. Cool."

"It wasn't, particularly."

At least Sirius had the decency to look somewhat awkward about the situation. He continued staring at Regulus, frowning - not advisable for someone who had already begun to develop deep furrows between his eyes. Regulus supposed one benefit of dying young was never having to deal with wrinkles. He stared back at Sirius, adamant that he would not be the first of them to look away.

Sirius blinked, shook his head, and leant forwards. "So where were you when—"

"Do we really have to do this? Right now?"

"I don't know, Reg, when would be a more convenient time for you? Tell you what, why don't you make an appointment with my secretary since we're both such busy people."

He felt exhausted. Sirius was exhausting. "I might remind you," he said, glaring at his brother, "that you are squatting in my house. The very same house that you took it upon yourself to relinquish, a quarter of a century ago."

"Oh, can ghosts own property? I didn't realise."

"Shut up, Sirius," he snapped, turning back to the window. "What do you want ?"

He watched Sirius's reflection in the window. Sirius sighed heavily, his too-narrow, too-bony shoulders shrugging with the effort. He scrubbed at his face with his hands, sighed again, and slapped his knees.

"Right," he said, looking up. Regulus quickly averted his eyes and pretended that he'd been staring at the moon. "I don't know how much you know about why I came back here and what I've been doing, but—"

"You think you've given the house to Dumbledore as a place where he might gather his special little friends and reformed his ridiculous secret society."

He could feel Sirius's eyes boring through him.

"Well, yeah," Sirius said. "That's the gist of it, I suppose. And…"

He trailed off into silence. Regulus turned, confused; it wasn't often that his brother was lost for words. He felt an eddy in the empty space where his stomach used to be as he saw Sirius bumping a thumb over the knuckles of his other hand, counting each bone, a comforting gesture that Regulus hadn't seen him do for a very long time.

He drifted down from the windowsill and sat cross-legged in the middle of his desk, facing Sirius. "And…?" he prompted quietly.

Sirius let out another heavy sigh. "Voldemort's back. I need to know if you still support him."

Regulus stared at him for a moment, frozen, taken aback. "You— you are aware that I am a ghost, aren't you?"

"Well, yeah—"

"And that I am of no use to anyone , since I cannot leave this house?"

"You— what? You can't leave?" Sirius sounded surprised. Regulus glared at him for his ignorance. "Sorry, I never took Spirit Studies."

Regulus frowned. "There's no such thing as… oh, forget it. I can't tell if you're being deliberately obtuse or if you're just an idiot. I'm tethered , Sirius."

"Tethered?"

"To the house," Regulus said, gesturing around him. "I'm— I can't leave."

"Oh. That explains why you're being so snippy, then."

"Shut up, Sirius."

"There we go."

Regulus sighed and tilted his head back to stare at the ceiling. He didn't understand how Sirius could still be so immature, so annoying - he was an old man, for goodness sake, he ought to have learnt some decency by now.

When he looked back at Sirius, he found him chewing the side of his thumb and bouncing his leg up and down. Regulus wasn't sure if he had ever seen Sirius looking nervous before, but he was still adamant that he was not going to feel sorry for him. Not now. Not when Sirius was the one who had invaded his house, and disturbed his routine, and upset his house-elf, and he was the one who was dead, gone, irreversibly expired.

"Please leave me alone," he said quietly.

"I can't," Sirius said, looking up again as he took in a deep breath. "I need to— look, the last I heard, you were running around killing muggle-borns for sport, so forgive me if I'm a little wary about inviting people to share a house with you."

Regulus bristled. "I've never killed a mud— muggle-born. And I certainly wouldn't do it for sport ."

"Oh, sorry," he said sarcastically. "I forgot I was talking to the gentlest little Death Eater."

"If you insist on behaving in this manner then I shall simply refuse to talk to you."

"If I'm behaving like—" Sirius began, indignant. He must have realised that Regulus was right (as always), though, or else finally worked out what a massive arsehole he was, because he changed tact. "Alright," he said. "Fine. I'll make it easy for you: do you still support Voldemort?"

"I'm not sure if I ever did support him, to be honest," Regulus said lightly, inspecting his not-fingernails.

He felt sick. It was entirely unfair, considering the fact that he no longer had a stomach or a digestive system and hadn't eaten anything in well over a decade, but he felt sick. He knew that Sirius wasn't working for the Dark Lord but for Dumbledore, and there was no way that the Dark Lord and Dumbledore could be on the same side - unless Sirius had managed to trick Dumbledore, somehow, as well as Alastor Moody and all those Weasleys…?

"Answer the question, Regulus," said Sirius. "Yes or no: do you support Voldemort?"

"No," he said quietly.

"Right. Good. I can work with that."

"What do you mean by 'back'?" Regulus blurted out.

"What?"

"You said that the Dark Lord is back. What did you mean by that?"

"He has returned," Sirius said evasively.

"Helpful, Sirius. What does that mean ?"

Sirius sighed. "Even if I wanted to tell you, I couldn't. I don't know the specifics. Harry was there, and… Look, there was some sort of ritual and he's back, alright? That's all you need to know."

"What ritual?"

"I don't know . Some dark magic shit, I presume. I thought you were the expert on that sort of thing."

Regulus stared down at the floor, tapping the surface of the desk with his fingernails. He knew, from all that manic research he had conducted in the final weeks of his life, that there were certain methods of regaining a body after one had died, if one had…

"But we destroyed it," he said quietly, frowning.

"What?"

"Unless…"

He felt sick again. Sicker than ever.

"Reg?" asked Sirius.

But there was no other way. He and Kreacher had definitely destroyed the locket. It had taken them almost an entire year, and it had been awful, perhaps even worse than dying, but they had done it. There was no other way the Dark Lord could have returned.

"He must have made more than one," Regulus whispered.

"What are you on about? One what?"

How could he have been so stupid ? Of course the Dark Lord would have made more than one horcrux! It was obvious, really, wasn't it? Who would stop at one? Why would someone like him stop at one? Having one was risky, precarious. Having two was far more secure. More, perhaps…?

Regulus shook his head. "It doesn't matter."

His head was spinning. He'd fucked up. He'd fucked up so badly. He'd died, for nothing. He'd almost had Kreacher killed, twice , for nothing. He thought he'd been this great hero, this martyr , thought he'd reached some sort of salvation, redemption for all the terrible things he'd stood by and allowed to happen, an ending - a terrible ending - that could absolve him of all his sins. And it had all been for nothing.

"Reg…"

"It's nothing."

"Didn't sound like nothing when you were talking to yourself a second ago. Or is this just another ghost thing that I don't know about?"

"Shut up , Sirius," he snapped.

"Alright, calm down, no need to get your wand in a twist."

"Just leave me alone!"

"Reg, c'mon—"

"I said leave me alone !"

---

Regulus hadn't slept all night. He wasn't sure if he would ever sleep again, not after the revelation that his greatest fears had come to fruition. Not now that he knew that the Dark Lord was alive again, corporeal again. Not now that he knew that he had gone and killed himself - in the most undignified manner imaginable - for no good reason at all.

He wondered whether he should tell Sirius. He wondered if he could tell Sirius.

Sirius had always been the brave one, the clever one, the one for whom everything always turned out well in the end, no matter how foolishly and impulsively he rushed into things. Sirius had always been better than him in every way that mattered. How could he possibly admit that he had fucked up so monumentally when his brother had never fucked up anything near this bad before?

Although… Being a wanted criminal might not be quite as bad as dying fruitlessly, but landing oneself in Azkaban for twelve years was still pretty terrible, wasn't it?

Their grandfather Arcturus had tried, at first, to appeal for a trial. But with the distance that death had granted him, Regulus had known almost immediately that it was a pointless task. He could see, now, what he had never been able to see in life; he could see the rift in their family that had appeared before he had even been born, that had grown into a great chasm throughout his teens. He knew now that his mother's father, his grandfather Pollux, had been waiting for an opportunity to improve the position of his own side of the family and had found it with Sirius's abdication and Regulus's death. There was no way Pollux would allow Arcturus to bring Sirius back into the fold - not when his own granddaughter had provided him with a great-grandson. With an heir .

And Pollux hadn't cared that it had torn his daughter apart. If Orion's death hadn't already broken Walburga, if Regulus's silence and withdrawal following his own death hadn't, then Sirius's incarceration certainly had.

As the pale sun began to creep above the city's skyline, Regulus snuck out of his bedroom and drifted across the hallway into his brother's room. It was still dark in there, so he crept over to the windows and drew open the curtains with a flourish, hoping to startle his brother into wakefulness. But when he looked back at the bed, he saw that Sirius wasn't there - and that the bed didn't look as though it had been slept in at all.

Frowning, Regulus floated back across the hallway and wondered what he could do. He couldn't very well wander through the house to find out which room Sirius had decided to take for his own. He couldn't risk accidentally disturbing one of the other unwanted occupants of Number Twelve.

The pile of blankets in the corner of the room, rising and falling in time with Kreacher's soft snores, caught his eye. He knelt beside them and tapped where he thought Kreacher's shoulder might be.

The house-elf woke up at once. "Master Regulus?" he said, rubbing his eyes. "Is Master Regulus hurt?"

"No, Kreacher, I'm fine. I was just wondering if you could tell me where Sirius is?"

Kreacher narrowed his eyes, instantly alert. "Why would Master Regulus want to know such a thing?"

"I just… I'd like to talk to him."

"No good ever came of talking to that ungrateful swine, Master Regulus!"

"Please, Kreacher."

"Kreacher does not wish to see Master Regulus upset again, but if that is what Master Regulus wants…"

He nodded and Kreacher, throwing him one last concerned look, disapparated.

Regulus barely had time to drift over to the window again before Kreacher returned, a look of deep fury on his face while he muttered a stream of insults.

"Did you find him…?" Regulus asked, somewhat wary.

"Locked himself up with that dirty great beast in my poor Mistress's chamber - oh, what would she say! - Kreacher is glad Mistress is not here to see the way the traitor is befouling, polluting, defiling her great house - the depravity! - beasts and criminals and mudbloods and Weasleys and—"

Regulus backed out of the room and made his way carefully downstairs, pausing outside each door to make sure that its occupants weren't stirring inside. The door to his mother's old bedroom was slightly ajar, allowing a soft yellow light to spill out onto the landing carpet.

Not wanting to startle either of the disgusting creatures that lay within, Regulus edged the door open and floated silently inside. He bit back an expression of horror at how drastically the room had changed since his mother's death: Sirius had unceremoniously shoved all the furniture to one side, stacking a plush ottoman on top of an intricately-carved wardrobe, and a centuries-old dressing table on top of the ottoman, stuffing the gaps with mirrors and trinkets and sparkling jewels.

The curtains and bed hangings had been ripped from their fittings and, along with his mother's once-beautiful robes, had been shredded into what Regulus presumed was supposed to be some sort of nest for the Hippogriff. Said beast was sitting proudly in the middle of his mother's bed and glaring at him.

"Bow," Sirius growled, lifting his head to peer at Regulus over the Hippogriff's back. Regulus hadn't spotted him, curled up against the other side of the beast.

"What?" he said.

"Bow to Buckbeak."

"I'm not— I'm not bowing to that—"

The bed creaked as the Hippogriff shifted its weight. Its enormous wings fluttered as it rolled its shoulders and rose onto its forequarters. Sirius sat up with it and rested his hand on the creature's neck.

" Bow , Reg," Sirius insisted. "Trust me, you can't out-stubborn a Hippogriff."

"I'm not—" The Hippogriff stretched its neck and opened its hideous beak; Regulus faltered, staggering backwards. "Fine, fine! I'm doing it!"

He bent at the waist, keeping his gaze fixed on his mother's ruined bed because he wasn't entirely convinced that Sirius wouldn't set the beast on him. The Hippogriff, apparently satisfied, settled back into its seated position.

"A better performance than the Malfoy boy, at least," Sirius said nonsensically.

"What?" asked Regulus. He kept an eye on the Hippogriff as he edged further into the candle-lit room. "Lucius?"

"No, his— wait." Sirius sat up straight again and scrambled over the Hippogriff - which, to Regulus's annoyance, didn't seem to care about this disturbance in the slightest - to move into Regulus's line of view. "You know they had a son, right? Lucius and Narcissa?"

Regulus sniffed. "Oh. Him ."

He could clearly remember the day the tapestry had changed. The first birth in the family since his own should have been something momentous, something celebratory, but with his world so broken and fragmentary and confused , the birth of Draco Malfoy had just felt like a slap in the face. A reminder that he had ruined everything, had destroyed his family, for the sake of a stupid, immature, ill-conceived desire for some sort of noble fucking martyrdom that had proven to be essentially worthless, in the end.

No wonder everyone thought he was such a moron. He hadn't even managed to die properly.

"Harry hates him," Sirius said, with a smirk and a glint in his eye that Regulus hadn't seen in a very long time.

"Who?"

Sirius stared at him as though he were the stupidest thing he had ever seen (accurate), but all Regulus could think of was his mother furiously yelling that he was an embarrassment, a disgrace, a traitor who had allowed their wealth and power and precious bloodline to pass to a Malfoy.

What she had never realised - and what Regulus could never have told her - was that there was still a tiny flicker of hope that not all was lost. She never knew that Regulus had made a will, the night before he'd died: a will in which Sirius had been named his heir.

"My godson," Sirius said, frowning. "Harry. Harry Potter."

"Oh, right. Him."

"For someone so obsessed with legacy you seem to have very little interest in the next generation."

Regulus sniffed and turned his back to Sirius. The sun was rising higher. The house's other occupants would soon be awake and moving about and acting in a generally irritating manner.

"My apologies," he said stiffly, "if I find it difficult to muster up any sort of enthusiasm for the spawn of Potter ."

Sirius sighed. "Don't start all this crap again. Surely we're too old for stupid rivalries by now."

"I suppose you and Snape are the best of friends, then?" Sirius glowered and tossed a scrap of nondescript meat to the Hippogriff. "Mm," Regulus hummed, "I thought not."

He drifted closer to the window and looked out at the sunrise as it bathed the garden in its pink-gold light. If he closed his eyes, he could almost remember how it felt to have the sun caress his skin; warm fingers of light, a reassurance that he was alive, that he was living .

The sun had not shone the day he had died. He sometimes wondered if he might have found the strength to fight, to survive, to convince himself that Kreacher could retrieve both him and the locket, if the sun's life-giving power had managed to penetrate that dire dark cave.

"Did you do it?" he asked quietly.

"Do what?"

"What everyone said you did. What they sent you to Azkaban for."

There was a creaking noise, a rustling. Regulus turned around and saw Sirius drape himself over the Hippogriff once more, resting his head against its flank.

"Do you really have to ask me that?" Sirius said, his voice hoarse and muffled.

Regulus shrugged. "You betrayed me, once upon a time. I didn't want to rule out the possibility of you betraying the brother you replaced me with, too."

"I never replaced you—"

"It looked a lot like replacing from where I was standing. One day you were here, talking to me, sharing secrets with me, being my brother , our parents' pride and joy, and the next—"

" Pride and joy ? Pull the other one, Reg," Sirius scoffed, flicking a small bone off their mother's bed.

"They adored you."

"Stop talking out of your arse." Sirius rolled over so he was resting his back against the Hippogriff and jabbed his finger in Regulus's direction. "You've always been a sentimental prick but this is a step too far. They fucking hated me."

"No they didn't."

"Yes they did!"

How could Sirius still not see ? Why was he still denying the truth of the matter?

Regulus had tried explaining it to him when they were younger - that all Sirius had to do was just behave himself occasionally, to keep his mouth shut and stop antagonising Mother all the bloody time. All he had to do was just act like a normal person instead of spouting off about his stupid ideas and morals at every opportunity.

It wasn't a lot to ask for. And if he'd have done it, then maybe they could have been a proper family. Maybe they would all still be together. Alive.

"Mother never recovered after you left," Regulus said quietly. "Your leaving like that - so suddenly, in the middle of the night - it… broke something in her. She was never the same again."

Sirius sighed heavily and tilted his head to stare up at the ceiling as he folded his arms across his chest. The Hippogriff turned to sniff at his hair.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I don't know," Regulus said, quite honestly. He hadn't intended to start dredging all this up. All he'd wanted to do was ascertain Sirius's level of guilt, to see if there might be a chance that he would understand Regulus's own guilt, and—

"I couldn't give one single shit about that bitch," Sirius said irritably, kicking at the tangled and shredded blankets around his feet.

Regulus bristled and tried to resist rising to the bait. "Is that why you've turned her bedroom into… whatever this is supposed to be?"

Sirius shrugged. "Maybe."

"I can't imagine it's the most suitable habitat for a Hippogriff."

"Yeah? Well what the fuck would you know?" Sirius snapped.

Regulus sighed and dragged his foot across the floor, clearing a small patch of carpet of debris so he might sit down without feeling ill.

"She did care about you," he said quietly, not daring to look at Sirius. "She just found it difficult to express herself."

Sirius gave a bitter laugh. "Yeah, her and everyone else in this fucking family."

"She always preferred you over me," Regulus continued, deciding it would be best to avoid pointing out that Sirius had always liked to express himself rather too plainly. "Father, I think, understood me - or tolerated me, at least - but Mother… Everything I did to try to make her happy, or pleased with me, just ended up making her even more irritated. I was too soft, she said."

"That's not necessarily a bad thing," said Sirius.

Regulus shrugged and picked at his sleeves. "It is in this family."

"You'd have made a good Hufflepuff."

Regulus scowled at him. He'd never told Sirius that the Sorting Hat had, in fact, considered placing him in Hufflepuff. And Ravenclaw. Even - to Regulus's abject horror - Gryffindor . That stupid talking Hat had spent so long meandering its way through Regulus's mind that he'd begun to worry that it would proclaim that he didn't fit in anywhere at all, and that he'd have to be thrown out of the school until he could develop a personality.

But in the end, to the relief of everyone, it seemed, the Hat had eventually declared Regulus a Slytherin.

He didn't dare to dwell on what might have been if it hadn't.

"What happened to that Hufflepuff you used to hang around with?" Sirius asked, sitting up straighter. "Don't tell me she turned out to be a Death Eater as well, like all the rest of your weird little friends."

"Of course she didn't," Regulus said stiffly, looking anywhere but at Sirius. "She married Rupert Abbott in 1980. They have a child. A daughter," he added, unnecessarily.

"Oh, bad luck."

"It makes no difference to me."

"Right. Of course not."

"Did you do it, then?"

"Do what?"

"Betray Potter."

Sirius glared at him for a long moment before he turned to rest his face against the Hippogriff again and busied himself with combing his fingers through its feathers. "In a manner of speaking," he said eventually.

"Now who's the one being cryptic?"

"It was Peter," Sirius said, his voice unusually quiet. "Peter was the Secret-Keeper. They wanted me to do it, but… I said I was the obvious choice for the job. Too obvious. I said no one would expect it to be little old Peter." He snorted. "You were right all along, Reg. My hubris caught up with me in the end."

"Peter?" Regulus asked, frowning. Who on earth is Peter?

"Pettigrew." Sirius practically spat the word out.

Blimey.

"Peter Pettigrew betrayed Potter? To the Dark Lord?"

"That's what I said, isn't it?" Sirius huffed and ran his hands over his face. "I take it you weren't on first-name terms with Voldemort's special little spy, then?"

"I was hardly counted among his inner circle, Sirius. I doubt he even noticed when I died."

"Yeah. Yeah, I always thought… well. I liked to think that you would have warned me about him, if you'd known."

"Perhaps."

Would he have, though?

He liked to think so, but… He had been so scared all the time. Wherever he'd been, whether at school or home or among his friends, he'd been surrounded by people who thought of him as disposable (if they thought of him at all). He'd been surrounded by Death Eaters, and potential Death Eaters, and people who might have been secret Death Eaters. By people who would have had no qualms about giving him away to the Dark Lord if he'd dared to suggest that he was having even the slightest doubt about the Cause. He'd had no idea whom he could trust, if he could have trusted anybody.

Not even Evan, in the end.

Not even Sirius.

But if he'd spotted Pettigrew - odd little Pettigrew, always hanging around Sirius and Potter, laughing along at their stupid little jokes - or if he'd known that Pettigrew was a Death Eater, or even if he'd just overheard one of the others talking about Pettigrew… Would he have had the courage to tell Sirius? Would he have assumed that Sirius would ignore him, tell him to stop being daft, perhaps even grow angry at him for daring to question his judgement when it came to his friends?

He wasn't sure.

"I miss him," Sirius said quietly.

Pettigrew? Regulus frowned - who on earth could miss Pettigrew , even if he hadn't betrayed Sirius's closest friend, the brother he hadn't been given but had chosen?

"It's uncanny," Sirius continued, "how much Harry looks like him. He has his mannerisms, too, the way he holds his wand and pushes up his glasses and—" He cut himself off, swallowing, and looked away.

Oh. Not Pettigrew.

Of course Sirius missed Potter. Of course Sirius couldn't go a second without thinking about Potter . It was always fucking Potter.

"I'm sorry that I'm the one who lingered," Regulus said stiffly, rising to his feet. "I'm sure you would have preferred Potter over me, in death as you did in life."

"What?" Sirius looked back at him. "No - Reg - that's not what I meant—"

"It's fine, Sirius. I'm tired."

Sirius scrambled off the bed and hurried after Regulus as he drifted towards the door. "Wait, Reg - do you mean that sort of metaphorically, or…?"

"I mean I would like to go to sleep."

"Oh. Right. I didn't realise ghosts needed to—"

"Of course you didn't." Regulus sighed. "Enjoy your Hippogriff, Sirius."

---

"Have you told your friends about me?" Regulus asked.

Sirius had managed to acquire a packet of cigarettes - whether it was a decades-old packet from his youth or something Lupin had purchased on his behalf, Regulus wasn't sure - and had insisted, for some inexplicable reason, that he must smoke in Regulus's presence instead of escaping onto the rooftop as he had always done before. He had marched into the bedroom, heaved the sash window open, and beckoned Regulus over.

Now, the two brothers were squashed up next to each other, sitting side-by-side on the windowsill and facing the moon, with their legs dangling over the edge of the sill into the void.

Sirius snorted. "They're not my friends. Most of my friends are dead."

"You and me both. Perhaps we should form a society."

"Very funny," said Sirius, taking a long drag on his cigarette. "But no, I haven't told them. Not yet."

Regulus watched the cigarette smoke curl upwards and dissolve into the night sky. "What do they think you're doing, when you're up here with me?" he asked.

"Moping, probably. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but I'm not exactly a barrel of laughs these days."

"Were you ever?"

"Cheeky git," Sirius said as he bumped his shoulder against Regulus's. "A lot of people find me hilarious, actually. It's not my fault you've inherited Walburga's terrible sense of humour."

It was nice, Regulus thought, to slip back into this good-natured teasing, the sort of teasing that wasn't layered with barbs and traps and stinging hexes. It was almost as though the intervening years had never happened, that Sirius had never begun to change and Regulus had never been forced to step into the role he had vacated and the war had never happened and their entire family wasn't all either dead or close to it.

The weight of his brother's shoulder pressed against his was comforting - sharper than it used to be, more fragile, more bone than flesh, but still comforting. It gave Regulus a sense of corporeality that he didn't think he had felt since the last human occupant of the house had died.

Upon Regulus's own death, his mother had been so disturbed by his new transparent, intangible form that he and Kreacher had spent days, weeks, months scouring Number Twelve for any scraps of information that might help him understand his new not-body. With Kreacher's assistance, he had learnt to control his movements, the directions and speeds at which he could travel through the house, how to pass through solid objects without destabilising himself and, most importantly, to alter the level of his corporeality to such an extent that he could hold small objects and even shake Kreacher's hand.

He glanced sideways at Sirius. He pressed his ghostly shoulder very gently against his brother's, just because he could, and gave himself a little self-satisfied smile at the achievement.

Sirius tilted his head and caught his eye; Regulus smoothed his expression, tucked his hands in his lap, and quickly asked, "What will you say when you tell them about me?"

"Oh, I dunno. I thought something like 'by the way, everyone, we're sharing Headquarters with a dead Death Eater. Thought you'd like to know,' would do the trick."

"Sirius…"

"I know, I know, reformed Death Eater," Sirius said, rolling his eyes. He stubbed his cigarette out on the window frame and flicked the end into the void below. Regulus leant forwards and peered down, hoping it hadn't landed among the azaleas. "I'm not sure. Haven't decided yet. Any suggestions?"

Regulus bit his bottom lip and kicked his feet in the air, knocking his heels against the wall. "I think Dumbledore might already know that I'm here," he said quietly.

"What? How?"

"He seemed to…" Regulus sighed. "I'm not sure. I think he saw me."

"When?" Sirius demanded, shifting position to straddle the windowsill so he could face Regulus.

"When you did the Fidelius Charm." He was starting to wish that he hadn't brought this up. "I was hiding in the chimney breast, and—"

"You were hiding where ?"

"Shut up! I thought I was going to end up being exorcised from the house, I—"

"That's hilarious," Sirius said, grinning widely, as though Regulus hadn't just disclosed the fact that one of the most powerful wizards in the world potentially knew that he, a dead Death Eater as Sirius had so eloquently put it, was hiding in the Headquarters of his stupid secret organisation. "Do much hiding, do you?"

Regulus sniffed and stuck his chin in the air. "A little," he said primly.

"So you've been sneaking around the house and eavesdropping on people's private conversations, have you?"

"Perhaps."

"And what have you heard?"

Regulus kicked his feet again and said, as nonchalantly as he could, "Oh, this and that. Nothing worth repeating."

"I see," said Sirius, leaning back against the window frame as he folded his arms across his chest. "Sounds to me like you're a horrible little grass who needs reporting to Mad-Eye."

"What on earth is that?" Regulus asked, raising an eyebrow. "Some sort of ridiculous muggle anti-eavesdropping device you've brought to terrorise me with?"

Sirius rolled his eyes. "No, you moron. Mad-Eye Moody . The wizard."

Regulus froze. "Who?"

"Mad-Eye Moody! You know, Alastor Moody, with the eye…?"

Sirius was gesturing to his face but Regulus just stared blankly past him as those wretched newspaper headlines proclaiming Evan's death swam into his vision once more.

"I can't believe you don't know this already," Sirius continued. "You were always so obsessed with reading the Prophet from cover to cover when we were kids, you little swot. Moody lost his actual eye at some point during the war and replaced it with this mad magical one - he can see through stuff with it and everything. Tonks thinks it's a right laugh."

"No…" Regulus whispered.

"I'm not making it up. It's kind of weird, to be honest. They let him teach at Hogwarts - well, it wasn't actually him , but—"

"No, Sirius!" Regulus said, panicking. He grabbed Sirius's arm. "You don't understand!"

" Jesus that's cold—"

"Sirius, listen! " Regulus demanded, squeezing Sirius's arm tighter, pressing his icy ghost fingers deep into his flesh. "He must have seen me!"

"Okay? You reckon Dumbledore has too, so I don't—"

"That's different! Dumbledore hasn't— Dumbledore didn't…"

"Use your words, Regulus."

"Shut up!" he snapped. "Just shut up! You don't understand!"

"Maybe if you just explained —"

"He murdered Evan!"

Sirius's face grew very still. He retreated, wrenching his arm out of Regulus's grasp, and seemed to withdraw into himself. "Murder, was it?"

"Yes!" Regulus insisted. He felt sick, lost, adrift, like he would float away in a thousand million tiny pieces of ectoplasm and dissipate into the atmosphere if he wasn't gripping so tightly onto the windowsill, in place of his brother's arm. "He killed him! In broad daylight!"

"Right," Sirius said quietly. "And how many people did your precious Rosier kill?"

"He— no. It wasn't like that, you weren't there, you—"

"Wasn't I?"

Regulus stared at Sirius. His head was spinning, a whirlpool of memories and emotions and fear, fear above everything else. He was tingling, his grip on the windowsill weakening even as he tried to hold on tighter. His not-body was becoming more insubstantial by the second, growing more transparent, less solid, less real .

"No," he whispered, shaking his head. "No, you—"

"I suppose you think Rosier only ever acted in self-defence."

"No, that's not—"

"Just like his dad, right? Just like all the rest of your Death Eater friends. Always hiding behind their masks, aren't they? Too cowardly to look their victims in the eye as they murder them."

"No, Sirius—"

"And how many people did you kill, little brother?" he asked, his voice savage.

"No, I didn't, I—"

"Of course you didn't." He leapt down from the windowsill and strode across the bedroom.

"Would you— would you have cared?" Regulus called out desperately. "If he'd killed me, Sirius, would you have cared?"

"Does it matter? You ended up dead anyway. Who cares how you died," Sirius spat over his shoulder, before he slammed the door behind him.

---

That night, Kreacher took the opportunity to sneak down to the basement kitchen while - he assumed - the rest of the house was asleep, so he might "return everything to its proper place" and make sure that the Weasley woman hadn't broken anything or messed up his delicate organising system.

And Regulus was glad for Kreacher's absence, because Sirius returned in the early hours of the morning and slammed the bedroom door open with such force that Regulus was sure the elf would have hexed him to within an inch of his life if he'd been there. Regulus himself had ended up on the ceiling, having unwittingly shot up there in his surprise at the intrusion.

"I need to know, alright?" Sirius said loudly, with no introduction.

Regulus, quite mortified at his reaction to Sirius's unexpected entrance, drifted down from the ceiling and sat daintily at the end of his bed.

"Know what?" he asked, crossing his legs and arms in an attempt to hide how nervous that question made him feel. He wasn't sure if he would be able to cope with further interrogation about his Death Eater activities, not in this state.

"Did you—" Sirius started. He frowned, dug his hands deep into the pockets of his dressing-gown, and paced up and down in front of Regulus.

"Did I…?"

"Who put me back?" Sirius demanded forcefully.

Regulus frowned. "What? Where?"

Sirius stopped mid-stride and whipped his head around. "On the tapestry!" he exclaimed, flinging his arm out behind him in the vague direction of the drawing-room. "Why is my face still on the fucking tapestry?!"

"Oh. That."

"You told me the old hag had cursed me off it - you gloated about it! Did she put me back? Why? "

Regulus scratched the back of his neck. "I don't know," he said, trying to sound innocent.

"You are the worst fucking liar. I know you did it, you little shit. Why?"

"I didn't…" Regulus argued weakly, knowing he didn't really have a defence or a reasonable excuse. Not that he'd ever had his brother's talent for making up excuses, anyway.

"Regulus," Sirius growled. "How did you do it? That's Old Magic, Reg, really Old… Can you even use a wand in that state?"

"No." He pursed his lips. "Thank you for noticing."

"So how did you do it?" Sirius was nothing if not relentless in his pursuit of whatever it was that he had set his mind to; Regulus was reminded of a dog with a bone. Or a thestral with a particularly juicy piece of meat. " Why did you do it? What was the fucking point? "

Regulus frowned and looked down at the floor. He could feel Sirius teetering on the edge of one of his endlessly frustrating rants about the pointlessness of the tapestry and any number of their other precious family heirlooms, and he wasn't sure if he had the energy to argue with him about it.

" Why, Reg?"

Regulus rubbed his palms on his thighs and looked up. "Because the tapestry is an important record of our family history," he said, quite calmly, he thought, given the current situation and Sirius's furious face.

"I'm not a part of the bloody family!"

"Yes, you are," Regulus said. To me, you are. You always have been.

"No! I'm not!" Sirius thundered. "I left! I— I renounced my birthright, or whatever it was they said in that stupid fucking book you're so obsessed with."

" Nature's Nobility said that you had forsaken—"

"I don't care what the stinking old Nobility said!" Sirius snapped. "I don't care about any of it, you shit!"

"If you don't care, then why are you making such a fuss?"

"I'm not making a fuss! And when the hell did you start speaking like Father?!" Sirius yelled.

Regulus blinked. He hadn't realised that he had been speaking like their father but, as he glared at Sirius, he tried to channel Orion's spirit in the hopes that it would stop his brother from yelling and hopefully prevent the whole house from waking up.

"I'm not making a fuss," Sirius repeated stiffly, his jaw tense. "I just want to know why my face is still on the family tapestry, despite me no longer being a part of the family."

"Family isn't something you can choose." Regulus glanced over his shoulder, to the Black family crest he and Kreacher had painted above his headboard on his first summer back from Hogwarts. "You can't just decide that you're not a Black any more. It's in your blood, whether you like it or not."

Sirius glared at him, looking very much as though he would like to drain all the hated Black blood out of himself and fling it at Regulus.

"You're wrong," he said finally. "I did choose. I chose to get the hell out of this shit-hole before it could turn me into someone like you ."

"And yet you came back."

Sirius let out a twisted, frustrated yell and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him for the second time that day.

---

Regulus found it a rather odd experience to be hosting his former headmaster in his childhood bedroom. And it was even odder to have his older brother lurking behind said headmaster, leaning against the doorframe and glowering at him. Or glowering at Dumbledore. Perhaps at both of them.

Regulus absent-mindedly scratched the scars on his neck and wished that Dumbledore wasn't looking at him with such an infuriatingly serene expression. He had expected anger, upon his first encounter post-death with Dumbledore. Hostility, perhaps. Sternness à la McGonagall at the very least. Not nothing .

He cleared his throat. Dumbledore continued watching him as though he wasn't the ghost of an eighteen-year-old Death Eater who'd never even sat his N.E.W.T.s before he'd gone and got himself killed. Regulus glanced at Sirius, hoping for some assistance or suggestion about how he ought to proceed, but Sirius merely raised his eyebrows and chewed his thumb.

When in doubt, fall back on politeness and social pleasantries. He had been raised properly, after all.

"Good evening," he said. He was being polite, but he wouldn't go so far as to call Dumbledore Sir .

"Good evening, Regulus."

Dumbledore finally shifted his gaze. Regulus watched, feeling incredibly uncomfortable, as his former headmaster walked slowly around his bedroom and silently judged everything within it.

Once Dumbledore had taken his fill of judgement, he conjured a plump armchair into the middle of the room and settled himself down on it. The chair, Regulus noted with a level of distaste, was made of deep red and gold-flocked velvet - a not-so-subtle hint, he thought. He sniffed and tried to not feel offended that the few (but very fine) furnishings his bedroom offered were apparently not good enough for Dumbledore.

"My brother told you I was here," Regulus said, framing it as a statement rather than a question. Sirius rolled his eyes and sighed dramatically.

"He did," said Dumbledore, resting his elbows on the arms of his chair and steepling his fingers.

"Did you already know?"

"I did."

Regulus sat down on the end of his bed. He frowned and scratched at his arm, at the Mark that still lay there beneath his sleeve. It had faded after his death to a glistening white colour; it was now barely distinguishable from his other scars.

"Why didn't you say anything?" he asked. "Why didn't you try to talk to me before now?"

Sirius scoffed from the doorway. "He didn't think it was important."

"What? But— you know that I was— you know, don't you? What I…" He scratched at his arm again.

"I am aware that you were one of Voldemort's followers, yes."

"But… Why didn't you think that was important?"

"You are tethered to his house, are you not?"

"Yes…" said Regulus. He wasn't sure why that was relevant to the situation. Surely that would have worked in Dumbledore's favour; there was nowhere Regulus could escape to.

"Then forgive me, Regulus, if I say that you are not, by any measure, the greatest threat to the Order at this present moment."

Regulus frowned. He couldn't help but feel offended at that pronouncement. It wasn't that he particularly wanted to sabotage Dumbledore's stupid little group - he had been eavesdropping on their meetings out of curiosity, mainly, and to make sure that they weren't discussing him or anyone he had once known - but it wasn't a very pleasant feeling to be told that nobody thought you were worth bothering about.

He supposed he should have known that Dumbledore wouldn't care about him now that he was dead, since he had never cared about him when he'd been alive, either. But he didn't want Dumbledore, and certainly not Sirius , to know how it had affected him, so he lifted his head and stuck his chin out.

"How can you be so sure about that?" he asked.

Dumbledore gave him a horrible, patronising little smile. "You cannot leave this house," he said, in a tone that implied he thought Regulus was too stupid to realise that for himself, "thus there is very little you could do to jeopardise the work that we're doing here."

"I could write a letter," Regulus said petulantly. "I could send Kreacher as a messenger. I could Floo-call someone," he added, although he wasn't sure that he actually could. He had never dared to try, just in case Floo-calling was technically leaving the house and breaking his tether.

"And to whom would you write?" asked Dumbledore.

Regulus stared at him. Everyone he knew or had known, who might care about Dumbledore's plans - or care about them enough to want to do something to sabotage them, anyway - was either dead or in Azkaban. Or—

"Narcissa," he blurted out.

"I see," Dumbledore said, quite calmly. "And have you?"

"What?"

"I understand that you have been quietly attending Order meetings for some time now, Regulus. Have you divulged anything that you have heard to your cousin, Narcissa?"

Regulus stared down at his not-feet and scrunched his not-toes in his boots. "No," he admitted.

"Then I do not think it is likely that you will do so now that you and Sirius have reconciled."

Sirius snorted. Idiot .

"May I ask you a few questions surrounding the events of your death?"

Regulus stopped glaring at his brother to stare in shock at Dumbledore. "W-what?"

"From what Sirius has told me, I believe you may have some information that may prove quite important to our fight against Voldemort."

"I…" Regulus glanced between the two men, feeling quite helpless. He pressed his hands flat on top of his velvet eiderdown and squeezed his eyes shut.

"Sirius insisted that he accompany me while I talk to you," Dumbledore said quietly, "to make sure that I don't upset you unnecessarily."

Regulus struggled to believe that Sirius would care about such a thing, or even have the foresight to realise that it might be an issue, but when he glanced at him he saw that he did, at least, look somewhat concerned.

"Could you tell me how you died, Regulus?" asked Dumbledore.

"I… I drowned." His voice sounded quiet, disconnected, like it was coming from somewhere far away and not from himself at all.

"Was it an accident?"

"I—" His voice came rushing back into him, choking him, strangling him, constricting his throat and suffocating him, drowning him all over again.

"Did you intend to die, Regulus?"

"What kind of a question is that?" Sirius demanded, pushing himself off the doorframe and striding into the room at last. "Of course he didn't— what the fuck is that?"

Dumbledore was pulling something out of his robes. A necklace— no. A locket. The locket.

Regulus's jaw dropped as he stared at it. It was charred, the clasp broken; the locket hung from its hinges and was broken beyond repair but it was unmistakably the locket, Slytherin's locket, the Dark Lord's—

How the hell had Dumbledore managed to get his hands on it?

He must have taken it from Kreacher's den. Regulus looked over his shoulder, at the bundle of blankets that Kreacher had moulded into his new sleeping place. Had he forgotten the locket, left it behind in the basement? Surely not. He had been so insistent that he keep it safe, even after it had been destroyed. Surely he wouldn't… but then how …

Regulus turned back to Dumbledore. He felt violated .

"Did you die in the process of retrieving this?" Dumbledore asked. He stretched out his arm, the locket dangling from his fingers. "Or perhaps in the process of destroying it?"

"What the fuck…" Sirius muttered.

Regulus nodded as he took the locket from Dumbledore. A wave of emotions and memories swelled inside him as he held it and turned it over in his hands, frowning slightly as he inspected it - properly inspected it - for the first time. While he had been alive he had held it for mere seconds, a minute at most, but he would never forget how warm it had felt, despite the bitterly cold temperature of the cave. He would never forget how the locket had pulsed in his hand, a heartbeat thrumming against his palm.

"I think you understand what this is," Dumbledore said quietly. "I think you understand its significance."

Regulus, still staring at the locket, nodded again.

"And Sirius," said Dumbledore, "do you know what this is?"

As Sirius stepped closer to him Regulus glanced up and found himself having to fight back the urge to snatch the locket away, to hide it again, to bury it somewhere where neither Sirius nor Dumbledore nor anyone else could ever find it. Instead, he gritted his teeth and opened his palm, revealing the locket's charred and broken surface to Sirius.

"No," he said, frowning. "I've never— wait. Is that the weird snake locket? From the Slytherin cabinet in the drawing-room?"

Regulus shook his head. "That one was a replica. This is the original. The real one, the one that belonged to Salazar Slytherin."

" What? " Sirius stepped back, sounding disgusted. "You— you died to get a piece of jewellery? You died to get Slytherin's necklace? What the fuck, Reg? What were you thinking? Was this another stupid attempt to try and impress Mother?"

"No," he said quietly. He tightened his fist around the locket and drew it close to his chest, hunching his shoulders.

"Then what the fuck were you—"

"I apologise, Regulus," Dumbledore said unexpectedly, raising his voice above Sirius's. "I assumed you had told Sirius of its significance."

Regulus shook his head.

"Would you like to tell him now?"

He shook his head again, a jerky sort of twitch, and stared at the floor.

"Can someone please just explain to me why my idiot brother thought it would be a good idea to die for a stinking old locket?" Sirius demanded.

"Regulus?"

He glanced up and saw Sirius towering over him, his arms folded, glaring at him. He shook his head and stared at a hole - a cigarette burn, perhaps - in Sirius's dressing gown, near his elbow.

"Do you know what a horcrux is, Sirius?" Dumbledore asked.

Sirius seemed to wrestle with himself, drawing his eyebrows together and pursing his lips. For one wild moment, Regulus thought that perhaps his brother did know, that the ruse was up and he'd been working for the Dark Lord all along. But then, as Sirius let out a gruff "no," he realised that Sirius had merely been struggling to admit - to the two people in the world that he probably most hated to admit his inadequacies to - that he didn't know something.

"The creation of a horcrux involves very dark magic," Dumbledore explained, "very dark, and very old. A horcrux is a vessel of sorts, a container - an object within which a wizard might conceal a part of his soul."

Sirius stared at Dumbledore in silence for a moment, processing. And then, quick as a Snitch, he rounded on Regulus. "What the fuck have you done?" he demanded, furious. "What dark shit have you been meddling—"

"This was not Regulus's horcrux, Sirius," Dumbledore said, raising his voice once more to counter Sirius's rage. "If it had been, he would not be sitting here before you as a ghost. If this had been Regulus's horcrux, he would not have wished to destroy it."

"Then what…" Sirius sighed and ran a hand over his face. He looked weary, exhausted, old . Regulus almost felt sorry for him. "What the hell is going on?"

"This was one of Voldemort's horcruxes."

Sirius staggered backwards and stumbled into the bedpost. Under any other circumstance, Regulus might have laughed; as it was, he reached out to steady Sirius. Sirius didn't react to his ice-cold ghost-hand but slumped down beside him on the end of the bed all the same.

"That's— that's Voldemort's soul? "

"The locket once contained a part of Voldemort's soul, yes," Dumbledore clarified, "until your brother destroyed it." He turned to Regulus. "Or perhaps it was your faithful house-elf who rose to the challenge?"

Regulus nodded.

"Kreacher?" Sirius sounded utterly perplexed. " Kreacher destroyed Voldemort's soul?"

"A part of it," said Regulus. He wondered how many times he would have to go over this, how many times Sirius - who was supposed to be the clever one - would need to be corrected on the finer details.

"How…?"

"A form of Fiendfyre," Regulus said quietly. He wasn't enjoying being the centre of so much attention. "It took us over a year to work out how to…" He swallowed, briefly closing his eyes against the memory, the blindingly bright flickers of barely-contained elf-fire flashing against his eyelids. "But…" He glanced up at Dumbledore. "You said that this was one of the Dark Lord's…?"

"Unfortunately so," said Dumbledore, looking graver than Regulus had ever seen him. "I had hoped that you would already know that."

Regulus turned the locket over in his hands again. "At the time, I thought this was the only one. Or perhaps I had just convinced myself that he wouldn't be so utterly… that no one could possibly…" He sighed. "How many do you think he made?"

"Certainly more than one," Dumbledore said evasively. Regulus narrowed his eyes. "May I ask how you came to learn about the locket's existence?"

Regulus hesitated. Dumbledore knew, obviously, that he had lingered. And Dumbledore knew about the locket. The only important thing that he didn't know - the only thing, perhaps, that was stopping him from exorcising Regulus or doing something equally as terrible - was how Regulus had found it.

"Reg?" said Sirius, his voice surprisingly gentle.

Regulus fiddled with the cuff of his sleeve and leant against Sirius's solid, earthly, living presence. His fingers were trembling and he felt sick, exhausted all of a sudden. "It was Kreacher, really," he said quietly. "I… I don't know where I should start."

"How was Kreacher involved?" Dumbledore asked.

"The Dark Lord needed a house-elf." He still felt so ashamed, so full of guilt that he had allowed it to happen, had allowed Kreacher - no, ordered Kreacher - to walk into danger. He'd known that the Dark Lord would hardly be planning to take Kreacher on a nice trip to the magizoo, but… "Father told me that I needed to be more openly supportive of the Dark Lord. I'd been having doubts, regretting my decision ever since I'd joined, and— well, Father knew that, and he told me that I needed to make sure that nobody, especially not the Dark Lord, ever had any reason to doubt my loyalty."

"Your parents were not Death Eaters."

Sirius snorted. "Might as well have been."

"No," Regulus said, shaking his head. "They were horrified—" Sirius made a noise of disbelief "— when I told them I'd joined. Mother's side of the family had been funding the Dark Lord's ambitions for years, but Father and Grandfather…" he paused, considering how he might phrase this diplomatically. He glanced sideways at Sirius and tried to ignore the scepticism in his face. "Our parents and the Dark Lord had the same beliefs. But they did not agree with his methods, nor did they think it was appropriate for the heir of the family to… subjugate himself."

"Were you aware that Voldemort and your parents were at school together?"

" What? " Regulus and Sirius exclaimed, each, apparently, as surprised as the other to hear such a thing.

"The Dark Lord went to Hogwarts? " Regulus added.

Dumbledore smiled at them, but Regulus was too astonished to care. "I must assume that you are also unaware that Voldemort is a half-blood."

Regulus froze. The thought had, once, traitorously, flittered across his mind, but he had forced it out again before it could grow into something larger and land him in endless amounts of trouble. But how could the Dark Lord possibly… It would explain why no one knew him, or had even heard of him, but… How could he be so adamant, so relentless in his pursuit of blood purity, if he wasn't even pure-blooded himself?

As he stared at the small, self-satisfied smile on Dumbledore's face, a little voice crept into Regulus's mind and whispered, but the Dark Lord didn't really care about bloody purity, did he? The Dark Lord killed purebloods and mudbloods alike, didn't he?

He tried to swallow down his unease. "I was not aware of that, no," he said stiffly.

Sirius let out a low whistle. "Should've seen that coming."

"Yes, thank you, Sirius," Regulus snapped.

"So you offered Kreacher's services to Voldemort," Dumbledore said, raising a hand to stop Sirius's retaliation. "What did he require of the house-elf?"

Regulus rubbed his palms on his thighs and gripped his knees tightly. "He wanted to use him to test the defences he had put in place around the horcrux."

"I see. And what were these defences?"

"There was a cave, sealed by blood magic. Inside the cave was a lake filled with Inferi." He spoke quickly, rattling off each fact so he wouldn't have to linger on the memories he had tried so long to stifle. "In the middle of the lake was a small island, in the centre of which was a font. The font was filled with a potion that induced despair, hallucinations, and extreme thirst. The locket was at the bottom of the font and could only be retrieved by drinking the potion."

"Voldemort asked Kreacher to drink the potion?"

"Yes."

"And he intended for Kreacher to die in that cave."

Regulus gave a jerky nod. He could feel Sirius exhale a deep breath next to him, but didn't dare to look at him.

"How did Kreacher survive?"

"I had ordered him to return to me."

Dumbledore nodded as though he had expected that to be the case. "House-elf magic is very old and very powerful. Voldemort is not the first wizard to underestimate it, and nor will he be the last." Dumbledore, curiously, was looking at Sirius as he said this. "So Kreacher returned to you," he said, turning back to Regulus, "and told you this tale?"

"After he had recovered, yes."

"And how did you deduce that the locket had been turned into a horcrux?"

"I'd had… suspicions," Regulus said quietly, gripping his knees even tighter in an attempt to stop himself from trembling. "The Dark Lord had spoken about uncovering a rare, arcane magic, about ruling in perpetuity - skirting around the idea of immortality, I suppose. I wondered at first if he had made a Philosopher's Stone. Like your friend, Flamel," he said, not intending to sound quite so accusatory. "But when Kreacher returned from the cave I realised it was something different. I did some research, in the Restricted Section at Hogwarts and here, at home, and… well. All signs pointed to the locket being a horcrux."

"And when you went to retrieve the locket…?"

"I asked Kreacher to take me. I drank the potion in his place, and— and…"

"It's alright, Regulus. I understand."

He couldn't bear the horribly sympathetic expression on Dumbledore's face and looked at Sirius, instead, but since he was wearing the same expression Regulus tilted his head to look at the ceiling, because at least the ceiling wasn't sentient enough to be able to pity him.

"Can you recall any other objects that Voldemort may have used for horcruxes?" Dumbledore asked. "Perhaps something that another Death Eater had been tasked with testing the defences of?"

Regulus shook his head, still staring at the ceiling. "No, I'm sorry, I don't…"

"Well," Dumbledore said, rising from his conjured armchair. "If anything comes to mind, do let me know. Sirius knows how you might contact me."

"Wait," said Sirius. "This is just hopeless, isn't it? How the hell are we supposed to find out where Voldemort's hidden parts of his soul? "

With a wave of his hand, Dumbledore made his conjured armchair vanish from existence once more. "Nothing is ever hopeless, Sirius."

---

After Dumbledore had left, Regulus and Sirius sat in an awkward and uncomfortable silence.

Regulus still didn't understand why his brother had insisted on accompanying Dumbledore, but he was reluctantly grateful that he had. He looked down at his hands, which were still shaking after his interrogation. Dumbledore might have been less hostile than Regulus had been expecting (and dreading) him to be, but it had still felt like an interrogation.

But however grateful he might be for Sirius's presence, Regulus was still furious that Sirius had gone and blabbed his stupid fat mouth off to Dumbledore. He'd gone and told Dumbledore about Regulus's lingering existence without giving him any advance warning, or a head's up, or any chance at all to prepare himself.

"Reg," Sirius said quietly, eventually breaking the silence. He lifted his hand to Regulus's shoulder. "That was… I can't believe you…"

Regulus snapped himself out of his own thoughts and slapped Sirius's hand away from him. "You told him about me!" he said angrily, rounding on Sirius. "How dare you!"

Sirius looked stunned. "He already knew about you! I don't—"

"I don't care! You told him! If he hadn't known already you would have given me away and—"

"So?" Sirius snapped, his voicing rising in volume to match Regulus's. "It's not like anything bad happened! He's not about to call in the Spirit Division and have you exorcised, if that's what you're getting your robes in a twist about."

Sirius didn't know that. How could he possibly know that? He'd always put far too much faith in Dumbledore, in the man who had done absolutely nothing for either of them in the past, except for somehow convincing Sirius to join his stupid Order and become a child soldier.

Which, now that he thought about it, was precisely what the Dark Lord had done, too. A pair of old men - a pair of old half-bloods , he remembered with a shudder - who both found pleasure in issuing orders to teenagers to fight a war on their behalf.

"He might not exorcise me yet ," Regulus said. "Not while I'm still somewhat useful to him. Why did I tell him all that?" he added, half-speaking to himself. "I should have kept some information back, tried to bargain with him…"

"Non-consensual exorcism is illegal if the Non-Living Being is not behaving in a disruptive manner towards the Living Beings in the location of tetherment," Sirius recited. Regulus stared at him in bewilderment. "Or something. I dunno. Anyway, you're pretty undisruptive even when you're actively trying to haunt me."

"What did you just say?"

"I said you're undisruptive. You're crap at haunting. The twins could do a better job and they're not even dead."

"No - I mean, how do you know it's illegal?" Regulus asked, his expression softening as he realised what Sirius must have done. "Oh… you've been looking into it, haven't you?"

"No." Sirius shrugged and rubbed the back of his neck. "Not really. Only a bit."

"Oh. That's… That's nice of you."

"Yeah, well, I didn't do it for you, did I?" Sirius said, shrugging again. "I was only looking to see if there was a way I could threaten to get rid of you when you're being really annoying."

"Of course," Regulus said. He ducked his head, trying to hide the smile that spread across his face at the thought of Sirius looking into the intricacies of the Spirit Department's legalese - at the thought of Sirius looking out for him.

Another awkward silence stretched out between them. Regulus worried at his sleeves and wondered what Dumbledore was doing. He hadn't asked for the locket back - Regulus unfurled his fist to check it was still there, half-expecting that Dumbledore had somehow managed to spirit it away again without him realising. Perhaps Dumbledore was satisfied that he had fully inspected it before he had come to speak with Regulus. Perhaps he had even managed to ascertain the lengths Regulus had gone to to retrieve it and was merely asking Regulus to see if he would comply, if he would tell the truth. Perhaps he was already on his way to the Ministry, to tell them—

"Window," he said abruptly to Sirius, who had fished a battered packet of cigarettes out of the depths of his dressing gown.

"Alright, keep your hair on," Sirius muttered around the cigarette dangling from his lips, "I was on my way, don't make a fuss."

Regulus watched him slouch over to the window, already lighting up the cigarette - wandlessly - as he went.

"How did you get your wand back?" Regulus asked him, suddenly curious. He could see the dogwood wand sticking out of Sirius's dressing gown pocket. "Did the Ministry not destroy it when they sent you to Azkaban?"

"Nope," said Sirius, groaning as he heaved the sash window upwards. "They keep prisoners' wands in storage until they die or receive the Kiss."

"But you haven't been pardoned… have you?"

"Kingsley got it for me. Replaced it with a replica." He took a long drag and glanced over his shoulder at Regulus. "Pays to have friends in high places, doesn't it?"

Regulus let out a huff of a laugh and flopped backwards onto his bed. He'd thought he'd had "friends in high places" too, once upon a time. They hadn't served him very well at all.

He stared up at the ceiling and listened to the quiet sounds of Sirius inhaling and exhaling, slowly but surely contaminating his lungs with whatever disgusting things muggles put into cigarettes.

He wondered, for the first time, if his brother had nightmares about Azkaban as frequently as he had nightmares about the cave. Perhaps it had been selfish of him not to ask, but it was still so bloody difficult to feel any sort of sympathy for Sirius when Sirius was still alive, still breathing, still insistent on damaging himself with alcohol and cigarettes and Merlin knows what else.

Regulus would be stuck in the house forever - and not in the dramatic sense of the word, not "this homework is taking for ever ", but in the literal sense, in the sense that he would be here for all eternity, lingering and waiting and watching each new generation grow and die. Sirius thought he was stuck, too. He complained about it constantly. But he would be able to leave, eventually. He could leave now if he really wanted to. Regulus still wasn't sure why Sirius hadn't tried to convince Lupin to procure him some Polyjuice. It surely wouldn't be that dangerous for Sirius to temporarily assume another identity and go out for a walk or something, to burn off all that pent-up energy.

Sirius let out a heavy sigh. Regulus turned his head to the side to look at his brother. He did cut rather a pathetic figure these days, all sharp shoulders hunched up around his ears, straggly, tangled, dirty-looking hair, a holey dressing gown hanging off him as though from a skeleton. Regulus knew, deep down, that Sirius didn't look as old as he did just because of his age - after all, he looked older now than their father had when he'd died - but because of Azkaban, and all the stress that must have put him under.

He raised his arm and inspected his own ghost-hand. If he had lived, would he have had so many lines and wrinkles and scars as Sirius did? Would his skin sag, his bones protrude? Or would he still look as young for his age as he had always done, and always hated? Perhaps he would have finally had that growth spurt he had spent his entire teenage years waiting for. Perhaps he would have grown a beard - perhaps he would have looked terribly rugged and manly, like that Argentinian who played for the Tornadoes.

"Did it hurt?"

Regulus blinked. "What?"

"Did it hurt when you died?"

The vision of Eugenio Flores and his magnificent beard vanished from Regulus's mind, to be replaced with ice-cold water filling his lungs and rotting flesh clawing at his skin and the all-pervading sense that his death, even more so than his life, had been futile.

"Yes," he said stiffly. "It was very painful."

"Those scars on your neck," Sirius said, still half-leaning out of the window, his back to Regulus, "did you get those when you died?"

"Courtesy of the Inferi."

"In the horcrux cave."

"Yes, in the lake. I was thirsty and I wasn't thinking and when I tried to drink from the lake they dragged me under and wouldn't let go no matter what I did."

"Is your body still there?"

"I assume so."

That seemed to satisfy Sirius's morbid curiosity. Regulus scowled at his back and tried to force his mind back to far pleasanter things, to beards and Quidditch and imagining what he might have looked like as a sophisticated adult wizard. Perhaps he would have played for the Tornadoes alongside Flores - but only after his mother had died, of course, because there was no way she would have allowed her son to stoop to such a profession while she lived.

"Did you kill anyone?"

Regulus sat bolt upright. "What did you— have we not already been over this?"

"I need to know, Reg," Sirius said, sounding wearier than ever. "Did you kill anyone during the war?"

Regulus felt sick. He couldn't possibly answer that question in a way that would satisfy Sirius. "Did you?"

"I wasn't a Death Eater."

"That is not an answer." Regulus curled his fingers around his eiderdown and gritted his teeth. "People died on both sides."

"I asked you first."

"You are so immature."

Sirius turned around and leant back against the windowsill, his arms folded. "Stop stalling and answer the question, Regulus."

Regulus picked at the silver thread on his eiderdown, the thread that his great-grandmother and great-great-aunts had used to embroider the constellations; the thread that connected him to his ancestors.

"I did not kill any human or near-human beings," he said, eventually.

"What the fuck does that mean?"

Regulus sighed and wrapped his arms around his legs, hugging his knees to his chest. "I killed a puppy."

" What? " Sirius looked more shocked than if Regulus had said he'd killed an entire battalion of Aurors. "Why?!"

"Bellatrix."

"Why the fuck would Bellatrix want you to kill a puppy?"

"Practice, she called it," Regulus said, speaking to his knees. "Oddly enough, the Killing Curse was the only Unforgivable I was ever able to cast properly."

"That bitch," Sirius muttered. He turned back to the window, glowering.

"Quite."

Regulus stared at Sirius, thinking. He was curious. Now that Sirius had planted the seed in his mind, he wanted to know… How far had he gone for Dumbledore?

"And you?" he asked lightly. "Did you kill anyone?"

Sirius stiffened. "I don't know."

"What? How can you not know something like that?"

"There was a time, I—" Sirius began, before he hunched in on himself again, wrapping his dressing-gown tighter around himself despite what Regulus was sure was a hot summer's night. "It doesn't matter. I don't want to talk about it."

"So it's fine for you to drag up awful memories from my past, but not for me to do the same to you?"

Sirius turned around and practically snarled at Regulus. "I think I suffered through reliving my worst memories for long enough in Azkaban, don't you?"

"I'm afraid I was never in Azkaban, Sirius, so indulge me, please: did you kill anyone?"

"Oh, no , of course you weren't," said Sirius, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "Perfect little Reggie, aren't you? The Death Eater who avoided Azkaban."

"I died, Sirius."

"So what if I did kill someone?" Sirius shouted, ignoring Regulus entirely. "I never used an Unforgivable, but I bloody well made sure that I fought as hard as I could to stop any of your evil little friends from hurting any of mine. So what if there was collateral damage? It was a war , Regulus."

"I am well aware of that. I fought in it too."

"Yeah, for the wrong fucking side!"

Regulus climbed off the bed, rising to his feet. He felt so frustrated that Sirius still , after all this time, was refusing to see the world in anything other than black and white, his side and the other, what he believed versus everything else. Regulus was sick of it, sick of Sirius's self-righteousness and belief that he was always right, no matter what, and that anyone who dared to think differently was instantly the enemy.

"It wasn't as simple as choosing a side, Sirius. It wasn't as simple as the right side and the wrong side, the Dark Lord against Dumbledore. It still isn't."

"Don't try to tell me you weren't really on Voldemort's side."

"I wasn't!" Regulus protested, flinging his arms up in the air. "Did you not hear what I just told your precious Dumbledore? Did you not hear what I sacrificed to stop the Dark Lord?"

Sirius rolled his eyes. "I remember you at school. I remember the people you used to hang out with - bloody Snape , and Mulciber, and all that lot. What was that all about, then?"

"I had no choice—"

"You always have a choice!"

"I had no choice at the time . You don't know what it was like, Sirius. You were safe up there in your Gryffindor Tower, you were surrounded by people who— by people like Potter. "

"Oh, boo fucking hoo. You had no friends so had to buddy up with junior Death Eaters, is that it?"

"I'm saying it was a means to an end. An attempt to get through school alive - a futile attempt, as it turned out," Regulus said, gesturing to himself, "but an attempt nonetheless. Everyone in Slytherin could have been a spy, Sirius. Everyone . There was no one for me to talk to, no one to confide in, no one who understood what I—"

"You had me!"

"No, I didn't."

"You did! I asked you! I asked you if you were in trouble, if you needed me, I— I said I could help you, Reg!"

"You asked me in broad daylight in the middle of the bloody castle, Sirius. Anyone could have overheard us - did you never stop to consider that someone might have been hiding behind a tapestry or lurking in an alcove, waiting to eavesdrop on us?"

"I checked."

Regulus rolled his eyes. "Of course you did."

"I did!"

Regulus felt exhausted. This conversation was going nowhere. He was so drained, even more so than after his interrogation from Dumbledore. What was the point in this endless, relentless arguing with his brother? What was the point in any of it?

"Fine," he said, sitting back down on the edge of his bed. "You checked. But did you think about the portraits, Sirius? The tapestries or the statues or the suits of armour? They're not benign. They listen. They talk. Phineas Nigellus isn't the only pureblood with a linked portrait in Hogwarts."

"What, you think portraits were spying on students?"

"I know they were."

"Fine. Whatever," Sirius said, waving his hand. He lit another cigarette and took a long drag on it. "So you're telling me you were only friends with Death Eaters - that you only stayed a Death Eater yourself - because you were too scared to leave?"

"In a way," he said quietly. "But you cannot really leave. There's only one way to stop being a Death Eater."

"Oh yeah? And what's that?"

"Death."

Sirius stared at him, his eyes wide as though realising for the first time that Regulus was no longer flesh and blood but a ghost, a shade, a lingering imprint on the mortal plane.

"You were so young," he whispered.

"We all were."

"I know, but…" Sirius sighed. "I wish you'd come to me."

"And said what?"

"I don't know, that you were in trouble. That you wanted out, that you— that you were planning on hunting down a piece of Voldemort's fucking soul , Reg! Any of it!"

Regulus looked down at his feet. He had considered it. Twice. But each time he had frightened himself out of it again, reminding himself that he could no longer trust Sirius, that he could no longer guarantee that Sirius wouldn't hand him over to the Ministry without so much as a backwards glance.

"And what would you have done, if I had?"

"I would have helped you!"

"Would you?"

"Yes!" Sirius insisted. "Of course I would have! You're my brother, I—"

"We hadn't spoken in years, Sirius," Regulus said wearily. "I didn't know where you lived. I had no way of contacting you."

"I'm sure you could have worked something out if you'd really wanted to."

"And what would you have done? Honestly? Imagine that I turned up on your doorstep, the Dark Mark burning on my arm, and told you that I wanted out. Do you honestly believe you would have taken me in? Do you honestly believe you wouldn't have assumed I was trying to fool you, that I hadn't been sent to infiltrate the Order, to spy on you?"

"I wouldn't," Sirius said, determined. "I would never think that of you."

"I'm not so convinced."

Sirius stubbed out the remainder of his cigarette on the windowsill and slumped down to the floor, resting his back against the wall. "I'm sorry you feel that way," he said quietly. "I'm sorry you felt that way, like you couldn't come to me, I— I'm sorry, Reg."

Regulus felt inordinately uncomfortable at being on the receiving end of an apology from Sirius , of all people. He couldn't remember a time when Sirius had ever apologised to him before and it made him feel very, very odd.

"When do you think Dumbledore will tell the others about me?" he asked lightly, changing the subject.

"I dunno. Maybe he won't." Sirius picked at a patch of something disgusting on his dressing gown. "Do you want them to know?"

"It would be nice to not have to sneak around my own home any more," Regulus admitted. "But… won't they hate me?"

"Dumbledore will explain everything."

He huffed. "Do they all follow him as blindingly as you do?"

"I don't—"

"Sorry," Regulus said, apologising quickly before Sirius could get irritated at him again. "I didn't— sorry. I'm just… nervous, I suppose. I haven't been around people in a very long time."

"You didn't like being around people when you were alive, either."

Regulus laughed, a bright, unexpected sound that made Sirius grin in return. "No, I suppose I didn't."

"I'm sorry I brought them here."

"It's alright. I'll get used to it," Regulus said, hoping very much that that would be the case.

"Harry's doing well at school," Sirius announced randomly.

"Who?"

"For fucks sake, Reg. My godson ."

"Oh, right. Yes. Of course."

Sirius picked at his dressing gown again, deliberately not meeting Regulus's eye. "I was thinking of asking if he wanted to stay here over Christmas."

"Right." Regulus tried to ignore the tight, constricting feeling in his chest.

"He usually spends Christmas at the castle and I was… I dunno," Sirius said, sniffing and chewing his thumb. "He probably won't want to slum it here with his crusty old godfather, anyway."

Regulus considered agreeing. He was quite sure that he wouldn't want to spend his Christmas holidays with Sirius in that state if he was in the Potter boy's shoes, not when a Hogwarts Christmas - something Regulus himself had never been allowed to enjoy in person but had only heard magnificent rumours and stories about - was on offer.

But upon seeing Sirius's unusual nervousness, his softness, Regulus bit it back and said instead, "I'm sure that's not true."

Sirius looked up at him, bright-eyed. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Well, it doesn't matter anyway." Sirius frowned and looked away again. "I'm not going to ask him if you don't want him to be here, and I know you didn't get on with his dad, so…"

That was putting it mildly. Regulus had loathed James Potter with every fibre of his being. He still did.

"Sirius."

"What?"

"It's fine," he said, thinking himself extremely magnanimous.

"What?"

"You can invite him. I don't mind."

"Really?"

"Yes."

"You're not just saying that?"

Regulus sighed. "No. You should invite him. It… it will be nice. Does he like roast potatoes?"

Sirius snorted. "He's a teenage boy, of course he likes roast potatoes."

"Excellent. I'll ask Kreacher to be on his best behaviour for the occasion. We can use the festive silverware - we haven't had that out in decades." He paused, pondering, thinking back to all the Christmases he'd enjoyed in Grimmauld Place. "We'll get a tree for every room."

"And crackers," declared Sirius, not to be outdone. "The ones with—"

" Not the ones with dung-bombs."

"Fine. Plum pudding, though."

"Oh, definitely. And trifle."

"And we'll sing carols!"

Regulus groaned loudly. "Oh, god, please, no. Anything but carols. You are the world's worst singer, Sirius, I'm not sure this poor old house could take it."

Sirius was grinning widely by this point. It was astonishing how much younger he looked, just by smiling. Regulus wondered if he would be able to convince him to cut his hair before the Potter boy arrived. Or brush it, at the very least.

"It's either carols or dung-bombs, Reg, so suck it up."

"I hate you."

"No, you don't," Sirius said confidently, still grinning.

Regulus smiled back at him. "No, I don't suppose I do."