A/N: These one-shots are mostly canon-compliant with a few non-canon pairings. It is rated for character death and includes mentions of slash.
Severus Snape walked through the doorway of his dingy apartment on Spinner's End, and sank onto a hard wooden chair, not bothering to turn on a light. Regulus was gone, and he'd been missing for weeks but Severus hadn't wanted to think he was dead, and so he didn't but now it was all he could think about.
Face in his hands, Severus could see wide grey eyes, fear and pain as he looked up at Severus that last time, hands shaking with the aftereffects of a cruciatus from their master, but when he turned to leave, there had been a steely resolve in his eyes, and Severus wondered now what he had meant to do.
Except, Regulus Black was dead, had tried to run, and for a moment he must have thought he would be able to go free… or maybe he had been killed before then, with a traitorous thought that slipped past his occlumency shields or his unwillingness to torture or kill, and had never had that second of freedom, out from the Dark Lord's control.
Did it matter, now, whether or not Regulus had had a taste of life before darkness overtook him? Severus answered his own thought before it had fully formed, because of course it mattered. Not that Severus would ever know exactly what had happened to him.
But right then, with nothing but too-close walls and empty cupboards for company, Severus with all his occlumency shields and a lifetime of practice at shoving aside the memories that pained him, couldn't stop remembering Regulus Black, the boy with the grey eyes that showed everything, even while the rest of him was a study in control and careful calm. Regulus, who always looked up to his big brother, who was more Ravenclaw than Slytherin, always with a book or a quill and parchment in his hands. Who disguised the hurt of his brother's rejection by burying himself in the library. Who, when Sirius ran away from home, sat next to Severus at the start-of-term feast, unfallen tears in eyes that resolutely refused to look across the hall, to where the self-proclaimed Marauders laughed together.
Severus Snape remembered the boy who had been his friend, always, who had gone to Severus with a proud smile and told him he had made it onto the Quidditch team, who had hugged him - actually hugged him - when he won his first game. He'd been two years younger than Severus, but brilliant in a way most people weren't. He was the only person besides Lily - and Severus wouldn't think about her - who could keep up when Severus started talking about spellcrafting, about latin and rune combinations and arithmancy.
And he remembers the day Regulus had graduated Hogwarts, with a mention of his name on a list of Quidditch players and near-perfect grades, and tiredness in his young eyes. That night, he had looked at Severus, shadows clouding his face outside the bar they had been in. He told Severus that he knew Severus would never love him, but Regulus had wanted him to know that he did. Regulus had leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek, then apparated away. He had been seventeen, Severus nineteen. They never spoke of it again.
So, a little over a year later, Severus sat alone in the kitchen of a house that he had never called home, twenty years old and alone with memories of grey eyes.