Regulus was a cauldron about to bubble over. A thick, bulging Puffapod ready to explode. A particularly nasty boil ripe for the squeezing.
His hands were shaking and his legs were shaking and his stomach was tying itself in knots and his throat was constantly dry and scratchy and he wanted to be sick but there wasn't anything to sick up, not any more.
He hadn't been eating. He'd started cutting up his meals into tiny scraps and feeding them to the birds that liked to sit and sing on his windowsill because he couldn't bear to look in Kreacher's big, sad, beseeching eyes any more. He couldn't bear to be yet another disappointment.
The pressure was mounting on all sides, now. Sirius had gone. Mother had marched Regulus into the drawing room and made him watch as she blasted his brother from the tapestry, blasted him from their family and blasted him from his life entirely. She'd told him that under no circumstances was he to make contact with his brother, not even at school. He was to act as though his brother had never existed.
Regulus was the heir, now. Father had shown him the ring that he would inherit. The study and the desk and the books. The responsibility. It was down to Regulus, now, to uphold the Family's honour — and the way he'd said it made it sound like there was a capital F; the Family; there could be no other — to continue their pure, noble lineage.
Mother wanted him to go along with Bella to her little meetings. He knew what they were. There was nothing little about them. He'd heard enough talk about these so-called meetings in the common room to know exactly what they entailed: servitude to a madman. Why couldn't anybody see that? Why were they all so insistent that this unknown maniac who didn't even have a last name would be the one who would rescue their society? Would be the one to bring the Minister and Dumbledore to heel? What were they thinking?
He was struggling to picture a way out. This self-proclaimed Dark Lord had already seized half his family and half his friends. The whole of Slytherin House was abuzz with rumours of his plans for a better society, a better standing for purebloods. Avery had taken his Mark. Mulciber was to follow this summer, if that could be believed. They were idiots. They believed his rhetoric and thought nothing of the consequences of what they might have to do to achieve their ultimate goal.
Idiots, all of them.