Updating this for the lovely readers including one who messaged me today, here's the next chapter, wrote it just now for you! Thanks for the reminder and hope everyone is having a super day :)

6. Resurfacing

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Hermione held her injured hand to her chest. Her eyes wide as the lake began to churn as if coming alive with magic, thrashing and waves forming violently, throwing wet gales at her.

Perhaps coming to the cave had not been the brightest of ideas in her long career of brilliant ideas. Ron always said she was too bright for her own good and sometimes meddled with things she ought not.

Though the cursed locket had long been removed, the echoes of dark magic remained in the cave and seemed to bounce off the stalagmite covered rocks and greenish dark waters. Voldemort had once used the cave as a hiding place for a part of his soul. Who knew what other horrors or monsters lay hidden in its corners? She shivered to think.

Who knew how many people had died here. Would she die here too if she stayed any longer? It was a risk she was willing to take. Yet she knew this was the last resting place of Regulus Arcturus Black and he had once promised they'd meet in the flesh. She could not turn back easily so she held her wand out, hand shaking, by the edge of the lake.

The water began to thrash around like the whole lake was filled with piranhas or inferi squirming just underneath the surface where they couldn't be seen.

Something moved violently beneath the surface. She tried to illuminate what was below with the light of her wand but the waves kept thrashing, threatening almost to engulf the whole cave.

She contemplated again, leaving for safety, before whatever was below the lake resurfaced or else submerged the whole cave with it.

Instead something inside her told her to wait.

Wait. Wait. Something is coming out of that water. I just know it, somehow.

She gasped as a hand thrust out of the water. Then an arm. Pale flesh, sinewy and thin, yet unmistakably branded with the Dark Mark.

Hermione covered her mouth and began to shake when she saw what the hand was holding. The mirror. The mirror she had just thrown in.

"Regulus?" her voice was a hoarse whisper.

Without thinking, she jumped out into the cool water of the cave and reached towards the arm to pull the body out of the water.

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It was unmistakably him.

As if someone had taken the Sirius Black she knew and made him twenty years younger and about fifty pounds skinnier. With a narrower face and sharper features. Though with the same long black curly hair, which was currently wet from being submerged in water for nearly twenty years.

"Wake up," she spoke in panic as she used her magic to gently lift his body onto the rocky shore.

The man that had submerged out of the water was Regulus Black, unmistakably so. He was alive? Yet how could it be. Blood magic?

His lips rosy, his skin pale white, his adolescent youth preserved, as if it were yesterday that she spoke to him in the mirror.

No, that was wrong. This Regulus was older than the one she knew in the mirror.

Handsomer too. He had filled out and was much taller and heavier than she imagined. A proper fully grown man, perhaps eighteen, she couldn't remember what age he died at. Though he was still skinny, it had been impossible to lift him out of the water without the help of magic.

"Are you alive?" She stared at his frozen features in awe and realized she was staring at his lips a bit too long. Though they were so red in contrast to this pale white skin that it seemed impossible he could be dead...And she couldn't help admitting to herself, now as a woman of seventeen, he was extremely handsome. Almost a sleeping beauty...since he seemed dead and yet didn't show any signs of mortification. He was perfectly preserved this whole time, no decay.

Yet when she slapped his cheek or tried lifting an arm, it would fall back down limp and unresponsive.

"Are you there, Regulus? It's me, Hermione." Somehow the mirror was still clenched in his fist as if the muscles had frozen stiff around it. "You told me we would meet again."

She smirked. "Well, I guess, you're too asleep to complain if I kiss you."

And for want of a better idea or thing to do, while she was drenched in cold water, ostensibly clinging onto a dead corpse, she pressed her lips to his rosy but dead lips. "I'm sorry we couldn't meet sooner," she cried, preparing herself to leave the cave and then place Regulus back into the water. "I would've liked to get to know you."

She brushed his long black hair out of his face, admiring the brave man she never got to know.

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