A/N: This chapter takes place some time in May of 1977, coinciding with Chapters IV,55 - IV,59 of The Path Not Tread, during Sirius' weekend visits to Sundance Street, and is told from Alphard Black's perspective. I advise reading this before Chapter IV,60 if you've stumbled onto this collection before finishing PNT (which I'll be posting later today).

Heritage, Legacy and Regrets

Growing up a middle child in a lesser branch of a high society family had been a challenging experience even before all the various realisations Alphard Black had had about himself and the family he belonged to.

The history of the Black family went as far back as the tail end of the Roman Empire and the beginnings of Anglo-Saxon settlement on British soil, and as such, they were the oldest British wizarding family still extant in the male line. The Blacks were certainly a prolific bunch, perhaps to compensate for their relative short-lived-ness, and there was no shortage of male progeny on the whole, even if certain generations had had their bottlenecks here and there throughout history.

Alphard was the first son born to his father, Pollux Black, who himself had been the only son of his own father, Cygnus Black, after whom Alphard's younger brother had been named. Unfortunately for them, though, Cygnus Black the Elder had been the youngest of three sons born to the famous Phineas Nigellus Black, the infamous Slytherin Hogwarts Headmaster, and as such, Alphard's status as the firstborn son was worth about as much as three Knuts put together.

He was not the eldest of his parents' lot, either; that dubious honour went to Walburga, who as a proud five-year-old girl had loved and resented him in equal measure for being born a boy – loved, because he was the long-awaited son who'd inherit whatever his parents left behind and was thus to be cherished, and resented, because he'd had the audacity to be a boy when she herself had been born a girl. But if Walburga had been anything, even as a child, it'd been loyal to the family and to their long heritage, and thus the duty had won out over all else, tipping the scales towards love.

(It also helped that he'd always been a very easy-going child, and thus had merrily let his elder sister boss him around to her heart's content. Alphard suspected Walburga's dislike of their youngest brother Cygnus was born the first time he told her to piss off, at the tender age of eleven months and in rather higher decibels than Walburga's ears would tolerate.)

They didn't grow up at Grimmauld Place, of course; the townhouse had ever been reserved for the main branch of the family, the eldest son of the eldest son inheriting it for generations. The spiel regarding the townhouse being the ancestral seat of their family was quite a load of hogwash, but the truth – that Lycorus Black had gambled away their true ancestral seat, Atropos Hall, in 1844 and that the only reason he hadn't been disinherited for it was the fact that none of his siblings had had children, thus disinheriting him would've effectively risked ending the Black family entirely – had been buried so deep in family history that by the time Alphard had been born, five generations later in 1930, not even the eldest heirs themselves were apprised of this information. He and Orion had dug this up at age fourteen, in a journal belonging to Lycorus' eldest child, Misapinoa, hidden away in a concealed nook in Lucretia's room – Lucretia being Orion's elder sister and Walburga's yearmate.

According to Misapinoa, Lycorus and his children had managed to conceal the truth of his deed for a few years from the family, and they'd used the time to ensure they wouldn't lose their position as the main family branch by having Misapinoa's barely sixteen-year-old brother Cygnus (after whom Alphard's grandfather had been named) court and impregnate a girl in order to further their branch's standing by bringing the next male heir into the family – Phineas Nigellus' elder brother Sirius. By the time the truth about Atropos Hall could no longer be hidden, Cygnus' wife had had Phineas Nigellus as well, and the only other possible male Black heir, Lycorus' first cousin by his uncle Auriga, died under circumstances that Orion and Alphard thought rather suspicious. This death had had either a karmic or a bit more literal retribution in Cygnus' death four years later, at the tender age of twenty-two. He left behind, straight into his sixteen-year-old brother Arcturus' keeping, a twenty-year-old pregnant widow and three children below the age of six.

Alphard thought it rather logical that everything would be hushed up after that.

Be that as it may, Grimmauld Place had been the seat of the main branch to the Black family when Alphard had been born, and had thus belonged to Alphard's great-uncle Sirius, son of Phineas Nigellus and named after Phineas Nigellus' elder brother, who'd chosen not to marry and thus to pass on the privilege of the main family branch to his extremely competent namesake nephew. Having inherited his mother's shrewd people skills as well as his father's cunning, Sirius Black II managed in his lifetime not only to recoup all of the losses that his great-grandfather had burdened the family with, but to then grow the wealth to such an extent that their supremacy in Wizarding Britain had been fully secured.

Sirius Black II's son Arcturus III (named after Sirius II's brother Arcturus II, who'd in turn been named for Misapinoa's other brother, he who might or might not have had relations with his widowed sister-in-law – Alphard had very strong opinions about overuse of certain names in their family, and was quite proud of the fact that he was the only Alphard ever to appear on the tapestry) didn't inherit a single bit of his father's intellect; luckily for the family, Sirius II had been aware enough of that to secure his son a very good match in the ambitious Melania Macmillan, who served as the mistress of Grimmauld Place in her mother-in-law's stead and who made up for her one great failure in having a first child be female by then giving birth to Orion Black, Alphard's yearmate at Hogwarts and probably the most brilliant mind their family had produced in the last two hundred years.

Walburga, Alphard and Cygnus III were frequent visitors to Grimmauld Place as children, despite not growing up there, not least because they were practically built-in lackeys to Lucretia and Orion. Of the three brothers – Sirius II, Arcturus II and Cygnus II – the middle brother had taken his time and gotten his first child at the ripe old age of thirty one, compared to his overachiever siblings (twenty-four and nineteen respectively), thus that branch of the family had never held a lot of interest to Lucretia, Walburga, Orion, Alphard and Cygnus III, and the five of them had made quite a unit all on their own.

All of this was to say that Grimmauld Place, in all its macabre glory, had held a special spot in all of their young hearts. But while Alphard had accepted things quite as lackadaisically as he accepted almost everything and his baby brother Cygnus had grown resentful of Orion almost before he could properly understand what resentment even was, Walburga had held loftier ambitions – ambitions that had taken her thirty-three years to achieve, but achieve them she did: to become mistress of Grimmauld Place and bring the next Black heir into the world.

Alphard thought that Walburga and Orion loved each other in some odd way he didn't quite have the stomach to think about too much. He certainly could never have understood it, given the fact that he himself saw Lucretia as his second sister.

(He often wondered how much Orion's grandfather had had a hand in it, considering that the man had married a very vapid woman for her connections who'd produced him three equally silly children, and that his relationship with his daughter-in-law Melania had been questioned in the gossip circles of the wider family environs.)

For his part, Alphard had never felt resentment over any of it, the way Cygnus always had. Walburga had shown him more love than hate in their childhood, had protected him at Hogwarts for the two years they'd shared, giving Alphard just enough time to rein in his more problematic qualities, and had left his personal business well enough alone; Orion had been his brother in arms well into their twenties, and if Alphard had been his inferior rather than equal, Orion had known to value that and never take Alphard's friendship for granted.

The resentment had come from another place entirely, and late enough in their lives that it'd caught Alphard by surprise.

The one thing Alphard had wished for in his life that he couldn't quite see how he'd get were children. The main impediment to that was the fact that witches interested him about as much as haemorrhoids, and for all the wonders that magic could do, it could not give biological progeny to two people of the same sex. Something about the sapience of humans combined with the power of the human soul simply did not mesh with whatever biological mechanism allowed for trait inheritance, and from all that Alphard knew, any and all attempts to circumvent the requirement of ovum and sperm in humans by magic ended in failure sooner or later, often very grotesquely.

Perhaps, if he'd had a bit fewer scruples inherited from his grandmother Bulstrode and a bit more ruthlessness found in the most successful of the Blacks, Alphard could've married a woman and used magic to beget children while he had his paramours on the side. But he'd come by his scruples quite honestly, and watching Walburga, Orion and Cygnus throughout his twenties had resulted in a severing between him and his family's values somewhere beyond his full comprehension, so that the very notion seemed repugnant.

Cygnus had started young, for all the good it'd ever done him; he and Alphard had never gotten on (though in truth, Cygnus had hardly gotten on with anyone at all by the time he was all but five, never mind twenty) and thus Alphard had had relatively little to do with Bellatrix, Andromeda and Narcissa when there'd been any chance of counterbalancing Cygnus' influence on them. By contrast, Orion and Walburga had waited until Orion had established himself properly as the family head before having offspring, and for the childhood closeness they'd held for each other, Alphard had been allowed unfettered access to little Sirius III and Regulus II.

The resentment he felt for his sister and brother-in-law began the first time he saw them treat their boys like possessions belonging to them, like property to be shaped and moulded to their own purposes of furthering the Black family and Toujours Pur. The resentment he felt grew out of Sirius' violent nightmares and Regulus' crippling timidness, the way that the boys loved and hated each other without understanding what it was they were feeling at all, out of all the poison and tiny wounds that Walburga and Orion inflicted on them out of the hubristic belief that it was their right to impose such conditioning on two children, children which Alphard could only dream of but never have.

Alphard had learned to love Sirius and Regulus as his own for their toothless smiles and gleeful laughter, for the curiosity in their grey eyes and the persistence in attaining mobility on their pudgy little legs, and for that love did he also learn to hate those he'd once cherished, those who'd brought these two little beings into his life.

And then his illness had come, and had brought a rather more bombastic end to his last love affair than had suited anyone in the family, and all that love he held in his heart for his two nephews was worth diddly-squat to him when he was so restricted from interacting with them as to be almost cut entirely, at the very time when they'd needed him the most.

Alphard had quite given up chasing men after that; no wizard, no matter how charismatic and good in bed, had ever been worth Sirius' laughter and Regulus' smile.

There was a phrase in the Muggle medical circles, for the latent phase preceding death by radiation poisoning – the walking ghost phase. These days, Alphard thought it was a rather apt description of his current state.

The new potions he was taking for Ehrlich's disease suppressed his magic to the extent that, had these potions been perfected twelve years ago, he might've had a chance at living another decade at least. Unfortunately, the damage his magic had done to his body was by now quite irreversible, and so while the progress of his illness was drastically slowed, the weakness in his body still persisted, some days being felt more than others.

He did all he could to ensure that his good days fell on weekends, when Sirius was staying over with him. In the quiet privacy of his home, during the work week, Alphard despaired of his nephew's state; when Sirius was there with him, he exercised iron self-control to ensure none of his pity and guilt found their way onto the surface – Sirius was a Black quite as much as all the rest of them, and he would not have tolerated anything he perceived as acknowledging his weaknesses.

Instead, Alphard made sure to bolster, encourage and heal what he could of Sirius' broken soul, and when his nephew was ensconced at Hogwarts, he spoke long with Milby, his house-elf, telling her all he could think of about Sirius' childhood and what he'd need from her once Alphard had shuffled off his mortal coil. It was all he could do for Sirius, now when it was far, far too late for the both of them, but the sense of purpose and fulfilment this gave him was such that it'd quite beaten his depression into proper submission for the first time in more than a decade, and his wistful wish for an end was now so far from his heart as to give him pause over how he'd even survived the last ten years with it there.

He had long, deep conversations with Sirius, too, and when the boy asked probing, impertinent questions, Alphard did his best to answer them thoughtfully and honestly, to the best of his abilities and Sirius' limits of acceptance.

There were some things Alphard suspected Sirius wouldn't be able to easily digest, things that stated truths about Sirius himself and his relationship to his friends, but Alphard rather thought – with true regret – that he'd die before Sirius would ever be ready to talk about them. All he could do in these cases was skirt around them and try to give Sirius such advice as the boy would need down the line and hopefully remember, too.

"Why did you never marry?" Sirius asked him one time during such a conversation.

"It never really interested me, to tell the truth," Alphard answered. "Of course, love doesn't mean very much in our family; certainly neither Walburga nor Cygnus married primarily for love, though I do think your father and mother hold a level of respect for each other that substitutes well enough, and Druella was quite enamoured of Cygnus when they were young. You younger generation seem to have done better than we have in that respect, at least as far as Andromeda and Narcissa are concerned; I can't imagine Bellatrix could ever love anyone but herself, but then she seems to have picked up all the worst of the Black family traits. I do hope your brother will not have to choose duty over love, though as the situation stands, Orion might put pressure on him to marry quickly."

"Were you ever in love?"

Some things such as this.

Alphard thought of Walter Barnes, whose Muggle heritage had caught up with him in the worst possible way, with incarceration and chemical castration and the ignominious end at the bottom of the Thames. He thought of Bilius Weasley, with not a single streak of the Black heritage in him despite his mother being one, whose foolish antics had left Alphard in stitches and who'd loved to make Alphard laugh because he'd not known how else to fight against Alphard's pain, until he couldn't anymore. He thought, too, of Elijah Smith and the too steep price Alphard had ended up paying for those hollow, mindless pleasures with no attachments or trust that he'd sought in Elijah's bed, after the burns of those previous failures.

"I came close a couple of times, I believe," he told Sirius, "but neither time was it a powerful enough incentive to go against family stances, so nothing came of it. I don't mind; the only true reason I'd have wished to marry was to have children, and I'm not certain I could have performed my duty in that case anyway, so I have no regrets. A lot of witches in Pure-blood circle might have been fine tolerating my sort of lifestyle for the chance to marry into the Black family, but I rather think it must be a torture after several years, what with the required secrecy and understanding between husband and wife if peace is to be kept. It never seemed worth it, especially after you and your brother were born."

There was a glimmer of understanding in Sirius' eyes, there and gone again, buried beneath what denial and self-defence Sirius needed in order to accept Alphard's explanation without true comprehension of the words left unsaid.

"How come Father and that Wretched Woman didn't mind us being close with you when we were little?"

He could be a bit more open there, and he had to give the boy's parents their due, at least in this one respect – the rift had been the product of indiscretion, not Alphard's proclivities themselves. They'd both known about his preference for men almost as soon as Alphard had known it himself.

"Orion is above all a pragmatic man, Sirius. He made it clear that certain topics would be off-limits in my interactions with you two, but I've always been a far more discreet man than my brother, and he was already having plenty of difficulty with Cygnus. It came down to a matter of trust and family cohesion; for all the prejudices that Walburga carries, she was always more tolerant of me than Cygnus, mostly because I knew how to handle her when we were children and he didn't."

"Uncle Ciggy's biggest gripe with the world is that he was born last, rather than first," Sirius noted with a snort.

"Oh, most certainly. Though that's quite usual, you know, that younger children think they'd have been better off as the eldest child, when in fact they'd not have been able to lead anything resembling the charmed existence they imagine, were they forced to shoulder all the burdens that regularly fall on the eldest. You cannot imagine the pressure that Walburga was under by our parents for having you four years after the last of Cygnus' girls was born, simply because Cygnus emulated our parents in his 'oops' moment that forced him to marry at nineteen, while Walburga waited until she was thirty-four for Orion to deem it the right time to have you two. If you ask me, saddling Cygnus and Druella with our parents was the sweetest revenge Walburga could've ever come up with for all four of them. But speaking of, is there anyone you're interested in? Another Gryffindor, maybe? You only ever speak of your friends."

"Can't say there is," Sirius admitted with a dismissive shrug. "I mean, most of the interesting birds are Ravenclaws and Slytherins, aren't they, except I'm not in a mood to be anyone's dirty little distraction these days. I've got too much on my plate anyway, and when I see James and his broads – he's been frankly impossible since Evans made it clear he was barking up the wrong tree, and I can't even imagine how he can stand the sight of Athenora Adelmann, let alone act as if they're bosom buddies – it just makes me happy I don't have to deal with it, to be honest. I don't know who needs that in their life, Uncle; being in love seems to make people go completely off their rocker."

Alphard supposed that was true for more people than not; he himself had never been of that sort, but then, his attraction to men hadn't been something he'd wanted advertised during his youth in Slytherin House, and later on, when he'd found his way into the Muggle world and to Walter, the danger had been quite real for his partner, if not for himself. Even with Billy, he'd been just as discreet, because Billy was the eldest son of the disowned Cedrella Black, and having relations with him would've hurt Alphard's position in the family far more than his proclivities towards men ever had.

"It does," he concurred, adding, "though I imagine most people would think it worth it for the positive emotions they experience through it."

"Well, I never will," Sirius declared with all the confidence his seventeen years on the planet had given him. "Shagging is grand, but all this lovey-dovey stuff... no, thank you."

"I tend to agree with you, though I would add that you shouldn't let yourself get caught unawares if you do fall in love one day. Chemistry between people cannot be controlled; if it happens to you, give yourself permission to explore it. It might change your views, or it might cement them, but either way, running away from it will only hurt you, and I wouldn't wish you to do that to yourself."

Sirius nodded, though Alphard could read him like an open book – and no wonder he'd had the hardest of times in their family, with such bold expressiveness – and could tell that the boy thought running the other way was the most sensible course of action.

Alphard knew, perhaps better than anyone else in their family other than Sirius, that love hurt. It didn't surprise him that the boy was so skittish over it, and he knew that Alphard's impending death wouldn't make things one jot better on that front, either. He hoped the fear of that hurt wouldn't stop Sirius if he ever truly fell in love, though he suspected it might prevent him from ever reaching that strength of emotion for anyone.

He wished that he'd had a chance to watch Sirius with his friends, to see him carefree and playful, the way he'd been as a toddler. Perhaps that might've given him a stronger insight into Sirius' own preferences. Alphard suspected they weren't quite so clear-cut as the boy thought them, not when all his strongest emotions were directed towards other boys. Sirius wasn't like Alphard, that much had always been clear, but the older wizard's excursions into those hidden parts of both Muggle and wizarding society had shown him that there were many, many variations on certain themes, and attraction and love were definitely some of those.

Alphard had met people of all genders who'd been attracted to people of all others; he'd met people who'd never felt any attraction whatsoever towards anyone, too, and for whom sexual congress meant something a bit left of centre, definition-wise, as a consequence; too, he'd met people for whom attraction and love had no overlapping regions, and people for whom attraction had little or nothing to do with physical attributes. In short, he'd learned that when it came to emotions, humans were extremely complicated creatures, and that ultimately, society's pronouncement of what contentment in life could constitute of had very, very little to do with the true state of things.

He didn't know to which of these groups his older nephew might belong, but he rued not having a chance to help Sirius on his path to discovering it himself – discovering this, and everything else that constituted adult life. More than anything else, Sirius was missing a stable adult figure in his life, someone whom he could trust to guide him when he didn't know the way himself, and Alphard regretted bitterly that he couldn't be that for the boy.

By Merlin, he should've grabbed his chance with both arms when he'd had it before him, last summer, after the travesty of what'd transpired at Grimmauld Place. Sirius had come to him back then, and Alphard had been exchanging letters with him since, but he'd lulled himself into the belief that at Hogwarts, Sirius was ensconced in the safety of the Gryffindor House and his friends, insulated from further pain and struggle, and of course, Sirius had had years and years of practice in writing utterly believable falsehoods in his missives. He couldn't lie with his face to save his life, at least not to family, but when given pen and paper, he could certainly lie with the best of them.

Alphard berated himself over it, over the time he could've given Sirius and hadn't, and now it was too late, too late, because he was weakening by the day, he could feel his own life force spilling through his fingers like sand in the hourglass. After all the torture and manipulation that Walburga and Orion had put the boy through, Sirius needed more, deserved more. But Alphard had spent years and years mired in regret and guilt, and it'd taken Sirius coming under his roof for the older wizard to tear himself away from them, for the sake of another when he couldn't for his own.

So he made sure to give Sirius everything of himself he could. When Sirius transformed into his dog form and came to rest against Alphard on the older man's bed – and there, the trust this boy had in Alphard in spite of all his mistakes, to reveal such a closely-guarded secret as his hidden Animagus abilities – Alphard ran his hand soothingly down the great dog's back, over the dense, slightly coarse fur, and told Sirius that he was loved, that Alphard loved him and would whether he were alive or dead, that he'd be watching over Sirius and listening, too, for everything that Sirius wanted him to know and couldn't say just now, when Alphard was still there to reply.

He knew Sirius hated these reminders of Alphard's mortality; in truth, Alphard hated them quite as much. But he needed to prepare them both for the inevitable, and death was ever close, preying on him in his deepest thoughts, making him pick through everything he'd done and not done in his forty-seven years of life. And it wouldn't do for Sirius to lose sight of the limited time they had together; to allow the child false hope would be a catastrophe.

It didn't make it any easier when Sirius did things like curl up in the chair next to Alphard's bed and say such things as: "When I was little, I wished so hard Father would let me stay here with you whenever he picked us up after the sleepovers. Now I could, because he's chucked me off the tapestry, and I won't get that chance, will I?"

In spite of the distance between himself and Sirius' parents, both of the Black heirs had been allowed to stay with Alphard when Orion and Walburga travelled; it'd been some of the only extended times Alphard had ever had with Sirius and Regulus, because their safety was more important than Orion's grievances with Alphard over Elijah, and of their whole extended family, there was no place for them safer than this house.

"I am sorry for not asking you to come last summer, after everything went down," Alphard replied. "I thought that being with the Potters would be better for you; I know how much James means to you, and I know how Fleamont and Euphemia feel about you, that they think of you as their own son."

"Except I'm not; I'm a Black, and whether I'm on the tapestry or not, I'm always going to be a Black."

Alphard wanted to tell him that he didn't have to be if he didn't want to; he didn't. Unfair though it was, Sirius' words were the truth – they were all Blacks, whether Gryffindor or Slytherin, whether cruel or kind, whether successful or not, whether acknowledged or disowned. It was in their blood, in their bones and in their hearts, and there was no tearing it out of there. Not for Sirius, not for Andromeda, not for Cedrella, or for Alphard and Lucretia. It was their legacy, their identity, their very sense of self, and there was no escaping it, so what was the point of trying to run away in the first place?

"Make it be something your own," he told the boy instead. "You will always be a Black, yes, but what that means is still up to you, Sirius. The name you bear is your asset, given to you at birth, and you may not have the luxury of leaving it by the road the way that Cedrella did when she became a Weasley, or putting it in a safe, hidden place the way Andromeda did when she took Tonks' name, but it is still your birthright, regardless of what a wall in a gloomy mausoleum says."

"Did you?"

"To the extent I wanted to, yes, I did," Alphard confirmed. "I put that name on good arithmantic research papers in reputable journals. I used it to get out of trouble somewhat more than perhaps I should have, but if it was a burden, then it could also serve as a salve. I protected some people with it, too, and I didn't let it stand in the way of enjoying life." When Sirius remained quiet, Alphard prompted him gently: "If you could use it for anything, what would it be for?"

"I don't know," the boy replied pensively, in those ways that meant the world to Alphard, because they showed how seriously he took the conversation. "I'd like to use it against Dark. Bellatrix is going to utterly destroy it, and I had all these thoughts on what to do with her when I took over from Father. But none of those plans are worth anything now. I suppose... it'd be nice to hear that a Black stood against Voldemort and that blood purity shite for once. Officially stood against it, not just privately. But I won't get to sit on the Wizengamot now, so I'm not sure how else to go about it."

Sirius had always been so very outspoken about his disgust on blood purity; Alphard wasn't of his siblings' ilk, though he wasn't quite so extreme in the other direction as Sirius, either. It didn't surprise him in the least, though, to hear what Sirius wished to make of his own future, and really, there wasn't much standing in his way anymore, either.

"You said you wanted to go to Auror Training."

"Yes, if the Ministry isn't so corrupt that it gives into him," Sirius noted cynically.

"There will always be bad apples, but I think so long as Bartemius Crouch and Lobelia Moody are in charge of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement and of the Auror Office, there's no fear of systemic corruption. And in any case, combating corruption needs to happen from the inside."

"You aren't against me becoming an Auror?"

"I worry about your safety if you do, especially with the political climate what it is, but I want you to be proud of your own achievements, and that will not happen unless you love what you do. I suppose I'm not one to speak for longevity over fulfilment. But, my boy, do remember that whatever you choose to do, I will be proud of you regardless."

"Thank you, Uncle. That... means a lot," Sirius said, and if his voice was a bit choked up, Alphard didn't mention it. A boy had his pride, and a Black twice as much of it. Alphard knew Fleamont and Euphemia Potter would love him as their own, and that James was already a brother to him in all but name. But he also knew that none of them would ever truly understand Sirius, not in the way that Alphard did, in the way that Regulus could.

He just hoped that, come what may, Sirius wouldn't completely lose all the people who could and did understand him, for all his flawed, marred, beautiful complexity.

Perhaps it was time for him to write a few letters of his own, to those who'd remain behind after he was gone. They would never be to Sirius what Alphard was to him – just as Alphard could never be what Orion and Walburga had been, or should have been – but they'd be potent reminders that Alphard wasn't leaving him all alone with no one left who understood him, and he suspected that his boy would be needing those, more than possibly he'd ever understand.

Andromeda and Cedrella and Lucretia had already all extended their hands to Sirius in friendship to a much greater extent than before his disownment; given the inevitability of death that was hurtling at Alphard at the speed of light, it was high time he had a few honest, final conversations of his own with everyone in his life, starting with those three.

(And if he got Cedrella to bring Billy with her, to see him one last time and apologise for how much he'd used the man to dull the pain of losing Walter, to tell him that so far as he'd been able, he'd loved him in the time they'd had together, then he thought he might even die a man at peace with the hurt that love had caused him, and that almost – almost – made up for the turmoil he felt at leaving Sirius.)

He wasn't dead yet, and so long as he drew breath, there were regrets to motivate him and heritage to contend with. And most of all, there was legacy to secure – legacy in the form of one wounded, hurting teenager, for whom Alphard would've done anything, even cheated death, if only he could've.