When Regulus landed in Diagon Alley, it wasn't solidly. It probably couldn't be, when only half his mind had been focused on the desperation to get away, and the other half reeled in pain. He let go of Nym as he stumbled forward and hit the ground shoulder first. Hard. There was a moment of silence as he looked up at the stars, his gaze landing on Orion and by necessity Bellatrix's namesake forming the mythical man's shoulder. "Damn," he mumbled.

Then he let out an inarticulate moan, because with ripped robes and two gashes on his chest, he felt entitled. "I see Severus Snape taught Bella a trick," he mumbled. "I'm not sure which to kill."

"Are you all right?" Nymphadora demanded. From the looks of it, she'd hit the ground, too, but had been sensible enough to roll with it rather than skid as Regulus had done.

Regulus sat up, rubbing his shoulder. He'd ripped the seam and there was yet more blood from a scrape, but compared to the throbbing Bella had left in his chest it was nothing. "I'll recover," he answered simply. "Now . . . where is it you live?"

"I'm not going home," she answered stubbornly. "I dunno where my parents are and the door won't lock." She hesitated. "And how did you know my last name?"

"I'm your mother's cousin. Call me Reg."

"Cousin Reg?"

"If you insist." Regulus got to his feet, still holding his wand out no matter how much it would hurt to wave it. Fortunately, at eleven thirty at night the street was almost guaranteed to be deserted. This well-known fact was not, however, enough to make him put his wand up just yet.

He laid his other hand on Nymphadora's shoulder. "Where do you want me to take you, then?"

"I'll go with you," she answered. "You saved me from that scary lady, and your Mum's cousin. I don't think Grandma would be very happy if I showed up this late, and I'm really not sure where she lives now that I think about it, and there's really no one else I can go to."

Regulus sighed. "Must you?"

Nymphadora nodded. "Maybe you can find Mum."

"I doubt it. The reason you never hear from your mum's relatives is that we aren't in contact with her much anymore. That 'scary lady' was you aunt."

Nym frowned. "Well, she did look a little bit like Mum, but . . . she couldn't've been. My dad's a Muggle-born."

"Yes, she was. Your mother's maiden name was Black, and that—"

"I know that."

"But I don't think you know what it actually means," Regulus snapped at her."We aren't a fluffy welcome-to-the-fold family. Your mum used to complain that we looked at potential husbands for our daughters the same way horse breeders looked at stallions for their mares, and she was damn right. And so when she ran off with the wrong man, my aunt and uncle pushed her out of their lives without another thought. My parents are second cousins for roughly the same reasons. You're pureblood and either share my mother's politics or don't have any opinions, otherwise you're not a Black. . . ." He shook his head, not sure a six-year-old could possibly pick up on these nuances. "And this isn't the place to be having a discussion. I'll take you back to Grimmauld Place, but only to get out of the open. All right?"

"All right. Are you going to Apparate us again?" she asked. "Only it wasn't very comfortable."

"I'm too tired to do it again, anyway. I'd splinch us both into a million pieces," Regulus answered. "Which is of course no more than I deserve for not Apparating you out of there at once. But I can't keep you from splinching, too. The Leaky Cauldron's open at all hours, so we can floo home from there."

He took her by the elbow and steered her down the street, tapped the wall, and continued to mutter inarticulate curses. Nymphadora was fascinated by the moving bricks. "Mum doesn't take me here very often," she announced.

"That's because Meda's a bright girl, and she knows these are dangerous times to be out, 'specially at night."

"You were out at night," Nym accused.

"Yes, but I was with Bella, and nothing with an ounce of sense attacks Bellatrix Lestrange," Regulus answered, shoving her into the Leaky Cauldron as gently as he could.

Tom the barman looked up from cleaning glasses when he entered and his skin went the same white as his hair. "Oh, dear Merlin! Has there been an attack?"

"Well over a hundred miles north of here," Regulus assured him. "There are so many protections around my house that I'm not sure I could get in there, and Diagon Alley was the only other place I could think of to Apparate."

Tom nodded. "Was it just you and your daughter and an attacker, then?"

Regulus wondered absently how Tom could possibly think he was old enough to be Nymphadora's father. She was six, after all, and he eighteen. "My cousin, actually," he answered. "But otherwise yes."

"You looked pretty banged up."

"I'm going to go home and hope we aren't out of really strong cutbane," Regulus replied. "Can we use the floo?"

Tom nodded and gestured to the fire. Nymphadora strolled over and threw a handful of the powder into the flames. "What's the address?" she asked.

"We're going together," Regulus told her firmly, taking her shoulder and stepping into the green flames. She joined him in the fireplace and he put his other hand on her other shoulder. "Twelve Grimmauld Place."

Everything that followed passed by in a blur, until Regulus stumbled around Nymphadora for the second time in ten minutes and into his own kitchen. Once again he wound up sprawled on the floor, although this was not an unusual result of traveling by floo and Nym once again joined him on the ground.

Anna, Regulus's cat, had been waiting for him to come back, and probably had since he'd left. The last thing he'd heard before Apparating with Bella had been her indignant mewing— although he'd left her behind because she hadn't taken a shine to Bellatrix, who kept threatening to skin her. Now, she leapt onto her master's lap and rubbed up against him, purring.

"Ann! Ow! Get off!" She was pressing against his cuts, bloodying her gray tabby fur and hurting him. Regulus picked her up and handed her to Nym, who accepted her wordlessly.

Footsteps came down the stairs. "Reg?"

Regulus stiffened until he realized it was his father rather than his mother calling. "Kitchen!"

"All right. I'm glad you finally came home. It was getting late enough that I was starting to worry," Orion Black announced, pushing open the door and putting his glasses back on as he did so.

In less than a second, he took in Regulus's bloody and torn robes and Nymphadora's presence and came up with half the answer. "Oh, my God. Reg, what happened?"

"Got attacked," he grunted, getting to his feet and putting his wand on the table. He made his way over to the potions cabinet and started going through it.

"Tell me something I don't know," Orion muttered. "Who? How? I thought I'd made Bellatrix promise to protect you."

Regulus shrugged, deciding to ignore his father's implied lack of confidence in his ability to look after himself. Orion was paranoid and prone to worrying, which was why his hair was gray streaked with black at forty-nine— sprightly for a wizard— and probably why he'd had three heart-attacks in the past ten years. How he'd actually survived them was anyone's guess. Overestimating his children and underestimating their enemies was not something he was likely to do. "Bella was the attacker, Dad."

"Damn. Wh—" Orion stopped, shook his head, and turned to matters Regulus expected he found slightly more pressing. "Who's the girl?"

"Nymphadora, although she said to call her Nym. She's Meda's daughter."

"Ah." Orion glanced at her with a distracted smile— he'd always been fond of Andromeda, Regulus assumed because she was one of the few Blacks who was as quiet and bookish as he was, and he'd never really stopped speaking of her as if she could pop in at any time. Then, concerned once again, he turned back to his son. "What are you looking for?"

"Bruise balm. I've got one hell of one on my shoulder where I hit the ground."

"I'm afraid we haven't bought it since Sirius ran away. He was always the one who needed it," Orion answered, coming up behind his son and laying a tentative hand on Regulus's shoulder. "Regulus, I want to know more about what happened. Now. Bella doesn't attack people randomly."

"Any daughter of Meda's can only be half-blood. She married a Muggle-born, and you know what Bella thinks of Ted Tonks," Regulus reminded him. "Ah. Here we are." He pulled a dumpy black bottle out of the cupboard and turned it upside down. "No, this expired last year. Why didn't Kreacher get rid of it?"

"Probably isn't empty, and it'll still be the only one we've got. Although," his father added dryly, "if you intend to make this a habit, we'll have to invest in some more. You'd be better off looking for cutbane, anyway."

"No, I wouldn't. She used a severing charm on me— well, she was aiming at Nym but I got in the way— so cutbane isn't going to work."

Orion spun his son around and grabbed him under the chin. "Well, I hardly expected my dear niece to use a knife," he said quietly. "Anyway, I'm capable of the healing charms to rival cutbane and bruise balm, at least, and you would be too if you weren't so out of it from blood loss. And I still haven't gotten a good explanation. Where's Meda and her husband?" He shook his head. "But first, let's get you cleaned up."

☐☐☐

Thirty minutes later, Regulus was sprawled on the sofa with his shirt unbuttoned, muttering, protesting, and occasionally cursing as his father played with healing spells and the potions spread across the coffee table, which dittany featured heavily in. He wasn't a skilled enough healer for Regulus to dignify it as anything but playing, and he'd told Orion this at least twice.

The second time, Orion just smiled grimly and looked from his son's chest to his face. "Do you have any other ideas?" he asked mildly. "Anyway, hold still while you think of them; you're struggling and whimpering worse than Nymphadora did."

"Nym," she muttered. "It's Nym."

"All you had to heal on her was a bruise where my fingers had dug in too hard," Regulus growled, taking a different route of protest. "I don't think the comparison is apt. And dammit, Dad, this hurts."

"You expected anything else?"

"Daaad."

"All right, all right," Orion muttered. He waved his wand, summoning bandages from nowhere to wind themselves around Regulus's chest. "You're lucky Bella was drunk and not too focused, kid. Otherwise some of these might have been deep enough to kill."

"I know that."

"Yet you still got in her face," Orion muttered. "I thought the hat put you in Slytherin. From what I've picked up, this was idiocy worthy of your brother."

"If I hadn't gotten in her face, as you put it, she would have killed Nym."

"Oh." There didn't seem to be anything else he had to say on the subject, and the tone said it all. Clearly from Orion's viewpoint, the possibility of death changed everything, and acts of stupidity became acts with a perverse sort of sense to them. "Well . . . that should do it for the cuts. I put enough magic on them they'll have closed up by the morning, although probably with scar tissue."

"Enough magic . . . I guess that explains why it feels like someone's sitting on my chest?"

Half a grin flashed unbidden across Orion's face— Blacks learned to develop a grim sense of humor, and by now it seemed encoded in the genes. "Button your shirt back up and move so the rest of us can sit down, will you?" he asked. "Then I want the full story."

Regulus sat up and moved over so Orion could sit down beside him. Nym, still clutching Anna, crawled onto Orion's lap. Regulus half-expected him to push her back off, but as his father's arms snaked comfortingly around the girl's shoulder, he realized he was thinking in terms of his mother. In fact, he realized that the conversation had thus far lacked such pointed, Walburga-like questions as, "Who the hell's the girl?", "What have you done to yourself, Regulus?", and "For Merlin's sake will you stop defending the boy, Orion, you did it all the time with the other one and it drove me mad!"

"Where's Mum?" he asked.

"She and Druella are at some kind of convention in Scotland. She shouldn't be back for another week," Orion answered. "Why?"

"Well, what do you think Mum would say about having a half-blood in the house, even if she is her great-niece?"

"Point taken. Now, explanations, please."

Regulus gave them. ". . . and then I told her I wasn't sure if the dark lord was truly pureblood and she really lost her temper with me—"

"Hold on. What?"

"He says he's descended from Slytherin, Dad. That's not possible."

"Well. . . ." Orion shook his head. He'd spent most of his life trying to retrace the Hogwarts Founders' lines, so he was one of possibly half a dozen people to know for sure. "It does end, but there is something. . . ." He shook his head. "Kreacher!" he barked into the thin air.

There was a crack as the house elf appeared rather than bothered to run down the stairs. Nymphadora shrank against Orion at his sudden appearance, and Regulus supposed that house elves did look bizarre if you'd never seen one. "Yes, Master?"

"Go get me the Gaunt file. It should be in the bottom drawer of my desk. There's something I need out of it, but I've spent the last three weeks on Gryffindor. I'm sure your mistress has complained about how bad my memory's gotten."

Kreacher nodded and scurried off.

"You let him go through your desk?" Regulus murmured. Personally, he barely trusted the house elf in his room anymore, and Orion was more paranoid than he was. Then, Orion also probably had less to hide.

"Only when I'm too lazy to go up and get something to show to a guest. Usually the Gaunt file," Orion answered, shrugging. "There's not usually anything sinister a man— or an elf— can get out of a family tree. Tonight, though, there may be an exception."


Author's Notes:
It is quite difficult to keep Nymphadora in character, considering she's six here and an adult in the series. I hope I managed. . . . Anyway, yes, my Orion is a genealogist. He has to be, since you need to give Regulus some kind of route to necessary information, and no one wants to read about him combing through old books. Mizz Moony Luver: Thanks, and I'm glad you thought Bella and Regulus's interaction was good; she's a really tough character to write. Isis Flamewing: I do intend this as a "missing chapter" fic rather than an AU, and I'm glad you like it. And thank you so much to everyone else who dropped me a line, and to anyone who cares to review this chapter! Cheers! — Loki