Sorry, I know it's late again, but I have another good excuse—my lap top isn't working right. Actually, the computer is working fine, but the charger isn't. So my lap top is out of batteries and I have no way to charge it. So I've written this during the only time I have computer access, namely, for about fifteen minutes before school starts every morning. And yes, we do have a home computer that I could use except that I have three little brothers who are constantly on it so I never get a chance.

Chapter 30

Departure

Harry staggered back as though hit by a physical force. He felt his thoughts whirling, rushing, tumbling inside his head, screaming at him from all different directions.

Regulus Black.

Now he knew where he had seen that face, where he had heard that voice. They were almost identical to those of his older brother. Regulus' face was fuller, his build stockier, his hair shorter, but the resemblance was remarkable. Harry couldn't fathom how he had missed it before now.

The man's brow creased, and then he said quietly, "You know my name."

Harry leaned against the wall behind him for support. "Yes," he said hoarsely.

An unwanted flood of memories had washed over him, memories that he had not allowed to surface for a year and a half. He had tried not to think about it, but now all the walls he had painstakingly built to block it in were crumbling down in the work of just a few moments. He felt the tears burning behind his eyes, but he would not let them fall.

"How?"

The question was a simple one, but to Harry, the answer would require far more than just a short word. The easiest way, he decided, was:

"I knew your brother."

Regulus looked shocked, and then the blood began to drain out of his face as the implications of the statement hit him. "You... knew my brother?" he said hesitantly.

Harry realized just what he had said. Knew in the past tense, knew as in 'no longer know.'

"Where is he?" Regulus asked softly.

Harry sat down. "Sirius is dead," he said shortly. It pierced him to say them, as though hearing the words aloud, from his own lips drove the pain deeper, as though he were hearing them for the first time.

Regulus looked stunned, and for a moment his expression was frozen in disbelief, and then he sank into his chair and put his head in his hands.

"How?" he asked after a moment.

There were no tears, no sobs, no grief-wracked shudders, but his voice betrayed an anguish that went deeper than physical manifestations. It was a quiet, accepting agony that, for a moment, made Harry forget his self pity and see Sirius' brother, the brother whom Sirius had believed to be among the scum of the earth.

Slowly, haltingly, Harry explained his time with Sirius from the day he had first seen him on the Dursley's brand new television set, branded as a ;murderer who had decimated thirteen people. His third year, the truth about Sirius, Sirius' long captivity in his old, hated home, and finally, the night the Order of the Phoenix had met the Death Eaters in battle.

"You loved him," Regulus said quietly after he had finished his tale. "That meant more to him than anything in the world."

"You don't know," Harry said bitterly, turning away. "The last time you saw him was when he ran away from home at sixteen, and probably in the papers when he escaped from Azkaban."

He regretted his words almost as soon as they tumbled from his lips. Regulus' face blanched, and he hung his head. "I knew him before that," he said softly. "The brother I knew didn't seem to have changed much from your account of him."

Harry, though he would have taken back his words had he been able, struggled to understand Regulus' grief. Was it possible for him to truly love and mourn a man whom he had not seen in two decades, whose character was so utterly foreign to him?

As though reading his mind, Regulus stood and limped slowly to the window. "I do not grieve," he said quietly, "so much for his death. He was a good man who lived a good life, and death is just another path, one that we all must take. The gray-rain curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass… I grieve that I did not know him, and that he did not know me. That we each believed the other a Death Eater."

Harry was silent.

"I idolized him when I was little. I wanted nothing more than his approval, until I realized that he was not like my parents and I. Then I told myself I couldn't have cared less.

"But I did. I cared more than I ever admitted to myself. My conscience spoke in his voice when it was finally loud enough to convince me that what I was doing was wrong, and even when I saw in the papers that they were on the lookout for missing mass murderer Sirius Black, half of me didn't believe it. My heart didn't believe it."

"Professor Black…" Harry began.

"Regulus."

"The night Professor Dumbledore died, he and I went to retrieve a Horcrux. He gave his strength, his sanity—his life—to obtain it, but when it was all over, it wasn't the Horcrux at all."

"You found my locket."

Harry nodded. "Where is the real one?"

Regulus sat down slowly, as though a great weight had fallen on his shoulders. "I found it while the Death Eaters were chasing me, and I banished it to the one place I could think of that was safe."

"Where?"

"Number 12, Grimauld Place."

Harry blanched. He hated that house, especially now with the memory of Sirius lingering over his head.

"As far as I know, it's still there," Regulus continued. "Unless you've been throwing that sort of thing away."

The color drained out of Harry's face. He had spent the entire summer after his fourth year helping Mrs. Weasley and Sirius do exactly that.

"I have to go," he said, making up his mind and stepping towards the door. "I have to go and find it."

He paused momentarily and turned around to look at Regulus. "I'm sorry," he said, and without another word, he left.

In twenty minutes, his stuff was packed and he had found Viktor. "I have to leave early. I'm going tonight."

"Why?" Viktor asked, looking disconcerted. "Has something bad happened?"

Harry shook his head. "They need me back," was all he said.

Viktor walked him out to the lake. "I've really enjoyed being here," Harry told him in almost complete honesty. "I'm sorry to have to go."

Viktor shook his head. "Don't be sorry. It was nice to have you here."

They were just formalities, but Harry felt something deeper in them, as though the words that were supposed to pass Viktor's lips were also what he wanted to pass his lips. That level of sincerity was rare.

"Thank you," Harry said earnestly, extending his hand. "It's been great."

Viktor grasped his fingers in his own vice-like grip and said, in a soft voice, "Good luck, Harry Potter."