WRITTEN FOR THE HOUSES COMPETITION, YEAR 10, ROUND 6
House: Slytherin
Class: Prefect
Category: Standard
Word Count: 1583
Prompts: [Location] Hogwarts Express; [Word] Unseen
Warnings/Disclaimers: none
It was supposed to be one of those 4+1 things, then shit happened and now we're here.
1.
Regulus was nine the first time Sirius left for Hogwarts.
He didn't know if the memory was supposed to be quite that important to him—if he was supposed to remember that day with such a level of detail even years after the fact—but Regulus could close his eyes and feel like no time had passed. Somewhere inside him, there was still that nine-year-old boy who woke up on the morning of September 1st, got dressed up in some of his best day robes, and accompanied his parents and his older brother to King's Cross.
That was all it was, really. He'd been there but he hadn't done anything to remember. He'd kept quiet and unseen, unobtrusively standing a step behind his father like a secondborn was supposed to. He hadn't merited a single look, not from any of the pureblood lords approaching his parents to exchange greetings and pleasantries, and least of all from his parents, who'd had their hands full trying to keep Sirius from running towards the train as soon as they stepped out of the floo.
Completely overlooked as he was, Regulus had had all the time in the world to study the train that would carry Sirius away from them all.
His older brother was off to a new adventure, and Regulus would be left behind. Alone in Grimmauld Place. For two years.
Regulus realised he was frowning at the train only when his head started to hurt.
2.
When it was finally Regulus's turn to take the Hogwarts Express for the first time, he was cautiously optimistic.
The house had been unbearably silent while his brother was off at Hogwarts, but every time he came back, Sirius regaled Regulus with all sorts of incredible tales. Regulus wasn't particularly interested in pranks, but the way his brother talked endlessly about his new friends made them sound like the best part of the whole experience, and Regulus thought something like that would be nice. He wasn't funny and outspoken like Sirius, but the way his brother told it, sitting down in a random compartment had been enough to meet his future best friends, and Regulus didn't think that would be beyond his capabilities.
He climbed into the Hogwarts Express without much fuss, as his parents weren't interested in waving at him overly long, and he started looking for somewhere to sit. He couldn't help but think that he would have enjoyed spending his first train ride to Hogwarts with his brother, but Sirius had stalked off towards the train as soon as they arrived at the platform and he'd long since disappeared into the crowd of older students.
Regulus didn't even know how he would go about looking for him in such a press of people—not that he could. Sirius had found his friends during his first ride on the Hogwarts Express, so Regulus had to at least try to do the same. Trying to hang out with his older brother instead would be pretty pathetic, and Sirius wouldn't have time for him anyway.
Regulus repeated all those perfectly valid reasons to himself as he looked for somewhere to sit, ducking low to avoid older students' careless elbows and dragging his heavy trunk along.
When he finally found an empty compartment, all the way to the end of the train, Regulus breathed a sigh of relief and settled in to wait for his future lifelong friends to arrive. So he waited. And waited. He'd laboriously pushed his trunk on the designated rack, and he'd dithered a while on the choice of seat, but it seemed to him like a long time had passed since he'd settled near the window, facing the direction the train was moving towards. They'd left King's Cross Station, and Regulus could hear that there was a lot less movement going on outside the closed doors of his compartments. He stayed strong, though, and waited for someone to knock, looking for a place to sit. At one point, both looking fretfully at the doors and staring out of the window at the changing scenery lost their gripping mystique, and Regulus got a book out of his trunk.
One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi wasn't exactly an engrossing read, but Regulus ended up finishing the book as the train sped towards Hogwarts. He thought he heard people walk by his compartment a few times, but no one ever knocked, so he spent the ride alone—unseen, and overlooked.
It wasn't a state of affairs he was necessarily unfamiliar with, but not what he would call an auspicious start to his Hogwarts career either, he thought.
3.
Regulus wouldn't have said he was avoiding everyone. First of all, "everyone" was a very broad term, and he probably wouldn't have minded meeting Madam Noria, the trolly lady.
There would have been a second point to the argument in defence of his behaviour Regulus was mentally constructing—and it would have been an extremely valid point—but he heard a noise coming from the corridor and ducked behind a stack of trunks before anyone could see him.
It wasn't because he was avoiding everyone. It was just that he didn't rightly know if being in the last carriage of the Hogwarts Express—the one reserved for cargo such as cumbersome trucks and caged pets—was expressly allowed.
One thing Regulus happily credited to his Slytherin sorting was the honing of his already well-developed sense of self-preservation, so he had no qualms about the fact that his first instinct when spoked was to move deeper into the compartment he wasn't supposed to be in and seek cover.
Once he'd settled in between the trunks, perfectly hidden from the entrance to the carriage, Regulus admitted to himself that crouching down may have been a little excessive. The worst case scenario would be being discovered by a prefect, of course, but Regulus wasn't the cowering first year he'd been almost two years ago—he could have propably talked his way out of a confrontation. Not to mention that the Hogwarts year was over and the Express was bringing all the students home, which significantly lowered his odds of being punished.
Regulus had almost talked himself into getting out of his hidehole to walk back towards the main part of the train like nothing was amiss when he heard a voice that made his blood freeze in his veins.
"Are you quite done steering me around?" Bellatrix demanded.
Regulus missed the answer as he thought about how much he didn't want to be found out by his cousin.
Sirius hated Bella with a passion, of course, but Regulus was pretty sure his brother had forgotten the original reason.
Bella had always had a weird fascination with small and weak things—in that she enjoyed breaking them. As the youngest Black of their generation, Regulus had always been the smallest and weakest thing Bellatrix could get her hands on. One of his earliest memories was Sirius launching himself against the older and significantly larger Bella as Regulus took the offered respite to run away as fast as his chubby toddler legs could take him.
At eighteen, Bellatrix was exponentially more dangerous than she'd ever been before, and Regulus wouldn't bank on anyone she could be having a solitary rendezvous with lifting a finger to protect him from her.
"Well, you've got me alone. Now, stop wasting my time. Say what you want to say or get out of my way, Rodolphus," she ordered.
An involuntary tremble went through Regulus's body. That pretty much sealed his fate, didn't it? Bella's fiancé wasn't going to do a single thing except hold Regulus down—maybe, if she even needed it. Keeping unseen and out of the way had just become critical to his survival.
"You want me to be blunt? I'll be blunt," Rodolphus said. Sirius would probably admire his courage—Regulus braced himself to witness a murder. "You may have managed to impress the Dark Lord, but it doesn't matter if He puts His Mark on you, you will be my wife first and foremost, Bellatrix. I won't have you shame the Lestrange name with your—"
Regulus heard a cackle and the noise of something hitting a wall of trunks. He focused on staying low, silent and unseen, completely unremarked.
"Such strong words from someone who left his little warning to the very last minute! You cornered me on the train home. Another hour and you wouldn't have gotten me alone until the marriage night." Bellatrix's voice dripped with condescension. "Were you scared, Rodolphus? Hesitant? Don't tell me you've been planning this little speech ever since the last revel. I can just about picture it—you bent over a piece of parchment as you try to think up the best words to admonish me." Regulus heard a low, pained moan. "Let me make it easier for you. You don't have to feel threatened by my relationship with the Dark Lord. There is no competition. You're so far below Him that the mere thought of pitting the two of you against each other makes me laugh."
For a moment, everything was silent, and Regulus bent his head over his knees and begged not to be found. Then he heard the tap tap of heels walking away.
"We'll be married in a month," Rodolphus bit out, somewhat strangled.
Bellatrix's heels stopped.
"High time you learnt your place then, isn't it?"
The door to the carriage clacked, and Regulus thanked the powers that be that he'd remained unseen throughout that confrontation.
