"Are you Tobi?" a quiet voice inquired.
Tobi looked up from her moping. "Yeah…Why?"
"I'm Regulus," the boy declared. "Sirius' little brother."
Tobi sighed, already bored of the conversation. "You're not in Morpheus' year," she remarked, "so, what do you want?"
"I want to apologize," Regulus declared. "For Sirius."
"Did he ask you to?" she inquired.
"No," he responded. "I'm apologizing for him hurting you and his lack of an apology."
"Well, don't," Tobi flatly replied.
Regulus blinked in surprise. "Why not?He disgraced…"
"If he wants to apologize, he can do it for himself. Besides, maybe if your family was a little nicer to him, his self-esteem would not be so damaged that he must inflict pain upon others to make himself feel secure. You could start by not using the whole 'disgraced' thing.I'm technically a 'pureblood', and you don't see me being an obnoxious Slytherin blood supremacist. Well… I may be Slytherin… pureblood… and obnoxious, but I don't believe in prejudice and genocide."
"Genocide?" Regulus echoed in horror.
"Well, yeah," Tobi answered. "Killing people off because they have the wrong genetics or beliefs is wrong. I don't know why crazy overlords always go for killing gives the economy a scapegoat, but it also makes the minority and anyone with any heart turn against 's cruel, really, and it never works."Regulus stared up at her with huge eyes. "Oh, don't look at me like that. Do your parents hang out with Death Eaters? The scary people with the cloaks and the tattoos? Do they look down on Muggleborns?"
His eyes grew even wider.
"Well, maybe nobody in your family killed anyone, but they support a person that is prepared to kill as many people as he needs to gain power. If you don't believe me now, just watch. Sirius probably knows, too. That doesn't excuse him from being a jerk wad and assuming all Slytherins must be like that; it just makes it more understandable. "She frowned at how distraught the boy looked. "Okay, kid, I'm sorry. Will a flower make it better? I have marigolds, sometimes."
Regulus slowly took the wilted flower. "I think that's a chrysanthemum," he quietly informed.
"It's yellow," she flippantly replied. "It's close enough. Hmm… How about this? It's purple."
He smiled a little. "That's an aster," he informed.
Tobi grinned mischievously. "Alright, then, kid…What's this one?"
"A dahlia?" he uncertainly replied, but he was smiling.
She plucked off a few more and handed them to him. "There you go, kid. Try not to let Hogwarts wear you down." Regulus grinned and left.
"Well, that was sweet," Julian remarked from behind her. "I didn't know you were capable of being nice."
Tobi turned and glared up at him. "He needed some love," she replied. "When I leave Hogwarts, I'm just going to take in all my babies and shelter them from the world. No more unloved kids that grow up to be Death Eaters, cowering minions, or bullying jerks."
"Well, that's very noble of you, Flower Face," Julian commented, but there wasn't any malice in his voice.
"I know, Julian," Tobi evenly replied. "I know."
At the time, my friend Akozu Heiwa was writing a very sweet fanfiction with Regulus in it, and it made me think about the character a lot more. Since Regulus in the actual story is a bit morally unclear, I wanted to write a Regulus who was maybe too young and blind to notice what was going on. All he knows is that Sirius kept "hurting himself" by fighting with his parents all of the time. If I had actually wrote the rest of the story, Tobi would have ended up sort of accidentally befriending Regulus, and Regulus is morally conflicted at first but ends up infiltrating the Death Eaters so that he can help Ember + Tobi in their attempts to locate/ neutralize Horcruxes for an oblivious Harry to destroy. This flashback was supposed to tie into something later, probably when Sirius "abandons" Regulus to live with James's family.