Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The castle after curfew always felt like a living thing.

Not asleep. Never asleep. Hogwarts did not sleep; it breathed.

It sighed through arrow-slit windows where the wind pushed in soft and cold from the grounds. It muttered in old stones that had watched too many children grow up in pieces. It creaked in staircases and groaned in portraits and whispered beneath doors when tapestries stirred though no one had touched them. At this hour, the corridors belonged to shadows, moonlight, and students foolish enough to think themselves cleverer than the castle trying to catch them.

Which was, more often than not, exactly where the Gryffindors found themselves.

James Potter led the charge with all the confidence of a boy who had never in his life truly believed consequences applied to him. His wand was out, though kept dim, the tip only barely lit so it cast a muted silver wash over the floor rather than anything likely to catch a prefect’s eye from the far end of a corridor.

Behind him came Sirius, equally at home in rule-breaking but far more graceful about it, as though sneaking out after hours were not an act of rebellion but an art form. Remus kept pace at James’s shoulder, map in hand, eyes flicking between the parchment and the next turn in the corridor. Peter scurried close beside them, trying to be quiet and still somehow managing to breathe like a frightened kettle. A little further back were Lily, Mary, Marlene, Alice, Frank, Fabian, and Gideon, the whole ridiculous flock of them moving as a loose pack through sleeping hallways in search of entertainment.

“Remind me,” Lily whispered, arms folded against the cold, “why exactly I agreed to come with you lot instead of staying in bed like a sane person?”

“Because,” said James with immediate certainty, “you love me.”

Mary snorted.

Marlene muttered, “Tragic.”

Lily rolled her eyes. “Because you’re incapable of not getting caught unless there’s at least one intelligent person with you, actually.”

“See?” James grinned over his shoulder. “Love.”

Frank stifled a laugh.

Alice leaned into him as they rounded a corner and whispered, “I’m only here because if you get detention again, your mother will send me a letter asking why I allowed it.”

“You imply I’m governable,” Frank whispered back, affronted.

“You aren’t,” Alice said. “That’s why the letter would be addressed to me.”

Fabian clapped a hand over Gideon’s mouth before his brother could laugh too loudly.

Gideon pried it off. “You are all cowards. We should be doing something interesting. Breaking into the kitchens. Stealing a suit of armour. Summoning Peeves into the prefects’ bathroom.”

“Last time you said that,” Remus murmured, eyes on the map, “we spent three hours hiding in a broom cupboard while McGonagall tried to figure out why there were chickens in the Charms corridor.”

“There was no proof that was us,” Fabian whispered.

“There were feathers in your hair,” said Mary.

Fabian lifted his chin. “Fashion.”

Peter tugged nervously at Remus’s sleeve. “Are we close to Filch?”

“No,” said Remus. “He’s on the fourth floor near the portrait of that horrible woman with the lapdog.”

“The one that screams if you walk too loudly?” Marlene asked.

“The very one.”

James rubbed his hands together. “Excellent. Then the night is young.”

“The night is freezing,” Lily corrected.

“The night,” Sirius declared, voice low and amused, “is full of possibilities.”

“Spoken like a man with no plan,” said Alice.

“I have a plan,” Sirius said.

“What is it?”

“To find one.”

Mary gave an approving nod. “Bold. Stupid. Elegant.”

“Thank you.”

They turned down another passage, footsteps softened by old runners and shadows, and Remus halted so abruptly James nearly walked into him.

“What?” James whispered.

Remus lowered the map slightly, frowning.

On the parchment, labelled in neat ink that none of them ever got tired of marvelling over, little names shifted through the castle.

Most were where they should have been this late at night — in dormitories, staff quarters, office rooms, common areas. A few moved in predictable routes: a patrolling prefect, Filch stalking a staircase, Peeves darting with incomprehensible purpose from one end of the castle to the other.

But one name stood alone in a place none of them expected.

Remus tapped the parchment.

James leaned in. Sirius too.

There, drifting across the edge of one of the interior courtyards, was a name that made all of them pause.

Regulus Black.

For half a beat, no one said anything.

Then Sirius’s brows lifted. “What’s he doing out there?”

“Sacrificing something to dark forces,” said Gideon promptly.

“Or burying a body,” Fabian added.

Peter swallowed. “Do you think he’s actually burying a body?”

Mary looked at him. “Peter, love, if he were burying a body in a courtyard at midnight, I doubt he’d do it under his own name.”

James squinted at the map. “He’s been there a while.”

“That’s weird,” Marlene said.

“That,” said Sirius, voice sharpening with immediate suspicion only an older brother could summon, “is my brother. Weird is his natural state.”

Lily gave him a look. “That’s not suspicious in itself.”

“No,” Sirius said, already moving, “but him skulking around alone in a courtyard after curfew absolutely is.”

Remus caught his arm. “Sirius.”

“What?”

“Maybe leave off the dramatics until we know what he’s doing.”

Sirius’s mouth twisted. “Oh, come off it, Moony. He’s a Slytherin, he’s a Black, and he’s out alone at night. Best case scenario, he’s being insufferable in private.”

James grinned, already interested. “Well, now we have to look.”

“We do not have to look,” Lily hissed.

“We absolutely do,” said Fabian.

“This is better than finding chickens,” Gideon agreed.

Frank sighed in resignation. “We’re going to look.”

Alice pinched the bridge of her nose. “Of course we are.”

And like the catastrophic idiots they all were, they did.

They moved more carefully after that.

The map kept them well clear of a Hufflepuff prefect making rounds two floors above and a professor gliding through a far corridor, and soon enough the stone halls opened toward one of the castle’s smaller interior courtyards — half enclosed, with ivy dark against the walls and an old fountain at the centre where water spilled in a soft, endless hush.

James raised a hand for silence though no one had been speaking anyway.

At first, all they heard was the fountain.

Then, faintly, something else.

Music.

All of them froze.

It was soft. So soft that at first it felt like the castle itself might be making it — some half-haunting thread of melody caught in stone. But no, there it was again, clearer now as the wind shifted: the warm, intimate sound of fingers on guitar strings, careful and sure.

Guitar.

Mary blinked. “What?”

Peter stared. “Is that—”

“A guitar?” Marlene whispered.

“In Hogwarts?” Gideon whispered back, scandalised and impressed all at once.

Sirius frowned.

He knew that sound. Not the song, but the instrument. Knew it vaguely from Muggle music shops glimpsed through London windows, from records and radios James brought back and Lily insisted were superior to most wizarding nonsense. But he had never once in his life associated it with Regulus.

Or with the courtyard beyond.

They crept to the archway, gathering in a hush of robes and held breath, and peered around the stone.

Then all of them simply stared.

Regulus sat on the edge of the fountain as if the night had grown him there.

Moonlight silvered the pale line of his face and caught in the dark tumble of his hair. The fountain water behind him glimmered like scattered glass, and stars shone overhead between the open square of sky framed by old castle walls. He was dressed nothing like the polished, sharp, immaculate Slytherin they were used to seeing. No uniform. No pressed edges. Just soft clothes — a loose dark jumper that had slipped slightly at one shoulder, worn trousers, sleeves shoved up over thin wrists. Comfortable things. Private things. The sort of clothes a person wore when no one was meant to see them.

An acoustic guitar rested against him with astonishing familiarity.

And Regulus Black — quiet, haughty, cutting, cold-eyed Regulus Black — was playing it beautifully.

Not fumbling. Not amateurish. Not someone who had picked the thing up last week and was pretending at mystery in the moonlight.

Beautifully.

His fingers moved with confidence, callused certainty, shaping chords with effortless precision while his other hand coaxed something soft and aching from the strings. The melody wound through the courtyard and settled into their ribs.

No one breathed loudly enough to disturb it.

James whispered, stunned, “Bloody hell.”

Lily nodded once, unable to look away. “He’s good.”

“Good?” Mary breathed. “He’s insane.”

Marlene stared openly. “Since when can Regulus Black do that?”

“Since apparently forever,” Fabian whispered.

Frank was frowning, not suspicious anymore, just surprised. “I’ve never even heard anyone mention it.”

Alice glanced sidelong at Sirius.

He had gone very still.

His eyes had fixed on his brother like he was trying to make sense of someone he’d been certain he already knew.

“I didn’t know,” he said flatly.

It was not quite meant as a whisper, but it came out as one anyway.

Remus looked at him, then back toward the fountain. “Maybe no one did.”

Regulus kept playing.

Then he sang.

Softly at first. So softly they almost missed the first sound of it under the water.

“Ooh-ooh-ooh-oh,” Regulus sang under his breath, voice low and clear as if he had no need to push it louder, as if the night would lean down to hear him anyway. Then, after a beat, still looking at the guitar instead of the stars or the fountain or anything beyond himself, he sang, “Whoa-oh, whoa-oh, oh, whoa-oh, whoa-oh.”

Peter’s mouth fell open.

Lily actually put a hand over her own lips.

Because Regulus could sing too.

Not just sing — sing.

His voice was not loud or theatrical; it did not need to be. It slid through the courtyard with a kind of bruised steadiness that made every word land exactly where it meant to. He sounded young and tired and terribly honest.

Regulus’s fingers shifted on the strings, and he sang, “On some level, I think I always understood,” his voice quiet enough that it felt like overhearing a confession, “that these hands of mine were clumsy, not clever.”

Remus’s eyes flicked to Sirius.

Sirius’s jaw tightened.

Regulus kept going, gaze fixed somewhere beyond the surface of the fountain. “And I tried to do the best that I could, but try as I might, I couldn't bring myself to hold you.”

There was a tiny silence after that line where the water seemed louder.

Mary whispered, “He wrote this?”

“He must have,” said James, equally hushed.

“No way I’ve heard it before,” Lily murmured. “I’d remember.”

Regulus’s shoulders rose and fell with one careful breath as he played on.

“It’s a secret I keep tucked inside my chest,” he sang, a little rougher now, “with this heart of mine that’s guilty, not remorseful.”

Something in the wording made Alice’s brows draw together.

Then Regulus sang, “There is love that doesn’t have a place to rest, but it would have buried you if it had settled on your shoulders.”

Lily’s expression shifted.

Mary looked sharply at Sirius.

Sirius had gone from startled to closed-off in the space of a few lines.

James leaned slightly toward him. “Pads?”

Sirius didn’t answer.

Regulus bowed his head over the guitar and let the melody roll through another aching measure before he sang again, “Ooh-ooh-ooh-oh,” and then, quieter still somehow, “Whoa-oh, whoa-oh, oh, whoa-oh, whoa-oh.”

The song did not sound like something written by a boy performing sadness. It sounded like something carved carefully out of it.

A wind stirred the ivy on the walls.

Regulus lifted his face a fraction toward the sky, and this time when he sang, it hit harder.

“On some level, I think I always understood,” he said, the note trembling only at the very end, “that a ship could never really love an anchor.”

James exhaled softly through his nose.

“Merlin,” Gideon whispered.

“So,” Regulus continued, fingers moving with that same painful grace, “I did the only thing that I could, and severed the rope to set you sailing from my harbor.”

Sirius’s expression changed.

It was small. But Remus saw it.

That flinch. That recognition.

Lily saw it too. She looked from Sirius to Regulus and back again, and something in her face shifted from simple astonishment to dawning understanding.

Regulus sang on.

“There are times when I still wonder about you,” he said. “You are someone I have loved, but never known.”

Mary closed her eyes briefly.

“Oh, God,” she whispered.

And then Regulus, still not knowing anyone was there, still alone in the middle of the moonlit courtyard with the water shining behind him, sang, “And you’ll never see the reasons I had for keeping my claws away when they were close enough to hurt you.”

James’s grin had vanished entirely.

Frank looked hollowed out with sympathy.

Alice’s hand had found Frank’s without either of them seeming to notice.

Regulus swallowed and went on, his voice thinning around the edges but never losing control.

“I am selfish, I am broken, I am cruel,” he sang. “I am all the things they might have said to you.”

Sirius muttered, so low it was almost soundless, “No.”

Then Regulus asked, in a voice so stripped-back it barely seemed to belong to the same boy they all knew from daylight, “Do you ever think of me and my two hands?”

No one moved.

“And wonder why they never soothed your fevers?” he sang.

Sirius’s face went sharp with something ugly and immediate.

“And wonder why they never tied your shoes?” Regulus continued.

Lily inhaled.

“And wonder why they never held you gently?”

That was the line that did it.

Sirius straightened so abruptly he almost hit James in the chest.

James grabbed for him instantly. “Pads—”

But Regulus was still singing, voice fracturing now in a way no one there was prepared for.

“And wonder why they never had the chance to lose you?”

The final words hung under the stars.

Regulus let the chord ring. Then, very softly, almost too softly to hear, he sang, “Ooh-ooh-ooh-oh.”

The guitar carried the ache for him.

“Whoa-oh, whoa-oh, oh,” he sang after a moment, voice thin and tired, “whoa-oh, whoa-oh.”

Then the music ended.

The fountain filled the silence.

No one spoke.

Regulus sat very still, head bowed, one hand loose over the strings. Moonlight touched the wet shine on his cheeks.

Remus noticed it first.

The tear tracks.

Then Lily.

Then Mary.

Regulus wiped at them quickly, angrily, like someone used to hiding the evidence of himself even alone.

And Sirius moved.

James caught his sleeve hard. “Don’t.”

Sirius yanked free.

“Pads,” Remus hissed.

Frank reached too, but too late.

Alice whispered, “Oh, no.”

Because Sirius was already striding into the courtyard.

He did not storm so much as cut through the night like something sharpened, fury pouring off him in waves. The others had no choice but to follow after him, and the moment they left the shadow of the archway, Regulus looked up.

The surprise on his face was so naked it hurt.

He jerked, fingers slipping violently on the guitar strings with a harsh discordant scrape. For one second he looked young. Younger than he ever let himself look. Startled, red-eyed, caught in softness he had never meant anyone to see.

Then he saw Sirius.

And everything in him locked down.

His face went blank.

His shoulders squared.

His mouth flattened.

The wetness on his cheeks only made the rest of him seem colder.

Sirius stopped several feet away from the fountain, chest heaving once.

“What the fuck was that?” he snapped.

Regulus went motionless.

The others hovered behind Sirius in a tense, uneven line. James looked alarmed. Remus already tired. Lily furious with the entire male sex. Mary wary. Marlene braced for impact. Peter frightened. Frank uncomfortable. Alice sharp-eyed. Fabian and Gideon suddenly much less entertained than they had been ten minutes ago.

Regulus slowly set a hand over the body of the guitar as though steadying himself through it.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

His voice had gone back to what they knew. Flat. Quiet. Guarded enough to cut on.

Sirius laughed once, without humour. “You don’t get to ask that after that.”

Regulus stared at him. “After what.”

“You know exactly after what.”

Regulus’s jaw tightened. “I was sitting in a courtyard.”

“You were singing about her.”

That flicker.

Tiny. But there.

Regulus’s grip on the guitar neck shifted. “So?”

“So?” Sirius stepped closer. “So you’re out here in the middle of the night writing miserable little songs about Walburga Black as if she’s some tragic figure worth mourning?”

James winced.

Lily muttered, “Oh, for God’s sake.”

Regulus’s face changed again, but not to hurt. To something harder.

“What did you think you were doing?” Sirius demanded. “Romanticising her? Making her into some wounded saint? After everything she is?”

Remus said quietly, “Sirius.”

“Don’t,” Sirius snapped without looking back.

Regulus slid off the edge of the fountain, standing now with the guitar still in hand. He was not tall like Sirius, not broad, not imposing, but there was something in the way he held himself that made him feel sharp enough to draw blood.

“You were spying on me,” he said.

Fabian opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“Yes,” said Sirius. “And apparently with reason.”

“With reason,” Regulus repeated, each word clipped. “Because I was sitting alone with a guitar.”

“Because you were singing about our mother like she deserves grief!”

“She is my mother.”

Sirius barked out a laugh, furious and disbelieving. “You cannot be serious.”

Regulus’s eyes flashed. “No, that’s you.”

Gideon made a strangled sound that might have been appreciation in another context. Marlene elbowed him sharply.

Sirius took another step. “She made our lives hell.”

“Yes,” Regulus snapped.

The word cracked through the courtyard so fast and sharp that Sirius actually stopped.

Regulus was breathing hard now. He had not raised his voice much, but it had changed, and all of them heard it.

“Yes,” Regulus said again, louder, eyes bright with anger. “I know.”

“Then what the hell is this?” Sirius shot back, flinging a hand toward the guitar, the fountain, the whole scene. “What is this pathetic—”

“Don’t,” Lily said sharply.

Sirius ignored her.

“What, exactly, am I meant to think when I hear you singing about her hands and her love and all the rest of it?”

Regulus’s expression twisted. “That maybe not everything in the world is about what you’re meant to think.”

Sirius stared at him.

Regulus was crying in earnest now, though it looked like it disgusted him. He dashed at his face again with the heel of one hand, furious at himself for it.

“She’s his mother too,” Mary whispered, barely audible.

James glanced at her, then back at Sirius.

Sirius heard it anyway. “Do not start.”

Mary lifted her chin. “I didn’t say he was right. I said she’s his mother too.”

Regulus laughed once, broken and mean. “Brilliant. Thank you, Mary. I’m glad someone in this courtyard can understand basic facts.”

Sirius rounded on him again. “Oh, don’t you dare.”

“Don’t I dare what?”

“Act like this is some noble, complicated thing. She hurt you too.”

“I know she hurt me!” Regulus shouted, and this time there was no mistaking the force of it.

The sound hit the stones and came back louder.

Even the fountain seemed quieter.

Regulus’s chest was rising and falling too fast. He clutched the guitar against himself like a shield and glared at Sirius through tears and humiliation and years of swallowed things.

“I know exactly what she is,” he said, voice shaking. “I know she isn’t perfect, I know what she’s done, I know the things she says, the things she believes, the way she can be, I know all of it, Sirius.”

Sirius’s face hardened again. “Then why are you defending her?”

“Because just because you feel one way about her doesn’t mean I have to.”

James shut his eyes briefly.

There it was.

There was the real fight, raw and waiting.

Sirius went white around the mouth. “You don’t get it.”

Regulus stared at him like he had said something unbelievably stupid. “No. You don’t.”

The words landed like a slap.

Sirius’s brows drew together. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Regulus laughed again, but this time there was no humour in it at all. Only pain sharpened into cruelty.

“It means,” he said, voice trembling, “that you left.”

Silence.

Sirius did not move.

None of them did.

Regulus pressed on before anyone could interrupt, each word seeming dragged out of somewhere deep and long-rotting.

“You got to leave. You got to hate her in the open. You got to slam doors and shout and run and make a grand, dramatic exit and go somewhere else, and everyone let you. Everyone helped you. Everyone saw you.”

Sirius stared at him.

Regulus’s mouth shook. He bit down on it once, hard enough to whiten the skin, then kept going anyway.

“I stayed.”

The words were quieter than the rest, and somehow worse.

“I stayed there,” Regulus said. “With her. With him. In that house. In all of it. And I didn’t get you. I didn’t get any of it.”

James looked stricken.

Remus’s grip tightened on the map until his knuckles whitened.

Peter had gone pale.

Lily’s eyes flicked to Sirius, then back to Regulus with awful understanding growing by the second.

Sirius found his voice first, but it had lost some certainty. “Regulus—”

“No.” Regulus shook his head hard. “No, don’t. Don’t do that now.”

“Do what?”

“Say my name like that as if we’re having some tender fucking revelation.”

Fabian winced softly under his breath.

Regulus swiped viciously at his face again, tears spilling faster for it. “You want to know why I wrote it? Fine. Fine. Because she is my mother too. Because there were times with her that I remember. There were times when she was—”

He broke off, jaw working.

“When she was what?” Sirius demanded, but the anger in it was fraying.

Regulus looked at him with open hatred for a heartbeat, hatred born mostly of being made to say any of this out loud.

“Soft,” he said.

The word seemed to embarrass him even more than the tears.

“There were times she was soft,” Regulus said again, as if forcing the shape of it out past broken glass. “There were times she sat beside me. Times she knew things about me. Times she looked at me and I thought—”

His breath hitched.

He shut his eyes.

Then, quieter, “I thought maybe she loved me in the way I needed.”

No one spoke.

Not even Sirius.

Regulus let out a laugh so hollow it seemed to scrape him open. “Stupid, apparently.”

“That’s not what I said,” Sirius muttered.

“You didn’t have to.”

Sirius ran a hand through his hair, suddenly furious at the whole scene, at himself, at Regulus, at Walburga, at the stars, at being forced to stand in a courtyard and hear something he had never prepared himself to hear. “How can you miss her?”

Regulus stared at him as if the answer were obvious and humiliating. “Because I do.”

“She’s vile.”

“Yes.”

“She’s cruel.”

“Yes.”

“She would gut you for the things you think she doesn’t know.”

Regulus’s expression shuttered for a second at that, which told them enough.

Then he said, “Yes.”

Sirius spread his hands in exasperation. “Then how—”

“Because she’s my mother!” Regulus screamed.

It ripped out of him, ragged and unbearable.

The courtyard went dead still.

Regulus stood there shaking, clutching the guitar like it was the only solid thing left in the world, tears streaking his face, and for one devastating second he looked much younger than sixteen. Not a Slytherin prince. Not a sharp-tongued little aristocrat. Just a boy.

A lonely one.

“Because she’s my mother,” he said again, smaller now but no less wrecked by it. “And I know what she is, and I know what she isn’t, and I know what she did to you, and I know what she’s done to me, and I know all of it, Sirius, but she is still my mother.”

His voice splintered on the last word.

There was a long silence.

Lily spoke first, very softly. “Regulus…”

He ignored her.

Or maybe he couldn’t bear to look at anyone but Sirius now that the wound was open.

“There are things about her you don’t know,” Regulus said, breathing unevenly. “Things from before. Things from her own family. Things she told me when she thought no one else would understand. Things that don’t excuse anything, before you say it, because I know they don’t, but they exist. They exist.”

Sirius’s eyes narrowed, more confused than angry now. “Why would she tell you that?”

Regulus laughed weakly. “Because there was no one else.”

James frowned. “Reg…”

Regulus looked at him for the first time as if only just remembering James and the rest were there at all. The sight of all of them — every single face watching, listening, knowing now — seemed to hit him like a physical blow.

Humiliation flooded over his face.

He looked ill.

But Sirius, too caught up in the revelation, pressed on. “What do you mean, there was no one else?”

Regulus’s expression changed.

Whatever had loosened in him snapped back with vicious force.

He looked at Sirius, really looked at him, with all the misery and fury and old abandonment of years packed into one glance.

“What do I mean?” he repeated.

Sirius said nothing.

Regulus huffed out something between a laugh and a sob. “God, you really don’t know.”

There was something so nakedly bitter in it that even Sirius flinched.

“I didn’t know you played,” Sirius said, and the sentence came out wrong immediately. Too small. Too irrelevant. The kind of stupid thing people said when they had missed the point entirely.

Regulus stared at him in disbelief. “That is what you’ve got from this?”

“No, that’s not—”

“You didn’t know anything.”

And there it was.

The true fracture.

Not one fight. Not one song. Not one mother. Years.

Years of it.

Regulus’s tears kept coming, though he looked like he wanted to tear his own face off for allowing them to.

“You didn’t know anything,” he said again. “You don’t know anything about me.”

Sirius opened his mouth.

Regulus cut him off.

“You didn’t know I played. You didn’t know I sing. You didn’t know I write. You didn’t know what she tells me. You didn’t know what he ignores. You didn’t know what that house is like when you’re not in it anymore. You don’t know what it was like after you left. You don’t know what it was like before you left either, apparently.”

Sirius went utterly still.

James looked from one to the other like he wanted desperately to intervene and had no idea how.

Remus did know, probably, but also knew better than to step into the line of fire too early.

Peter looked close to being sick.

Mary had her arms folded tightly, jaw tense.

Marlene looked furious on Regulus’s behalf and horrified by the entire situation.

Alice’s face had gone sharp with a sort of protective anger she usually reserved for people insulting Frank or her friends.

Frank himself looked gutted.

Fabian and Gideon, stripped of every scrap of earlier mischief, stood silent for once in their lives.

Regulus drew in a shaky breath and wiped at his face with angry, trembling fingers.

“You know what’s funny?” he asked, and his voice had gone deadly calm in the worst possible way. “You were always the one they noticed.”

Sirius stared at him. “What?”

“The golden child of rebellion,” Regulus said. “The difficult son. The brilliant heir gone wrong. The shame. The star. The disappointment. The spectacle. Everything in that house orbited you.”

Sirius shook his head once. “That’s not true.”

Regulus barked a laugh. “It is.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is!” Regulus shouted. “They were obsessed with you!”

He was fully crying now, not even able to hide it anymore, and the rawness of it made every word harsher.

“They watched you, they tracked you, they talked about you, they argued about you, they punished you, they tried to shape you, they raged at you, they built the whole miserable house around you, Sirius. Around you.”

Sirius’s voice went low. “You think that was a privilege?”

“No,” Regulus snapped instantly. “I think it was attention.”

That hit.

Everyone felt it hit.

Sirius looked like someone had struck him across the face with an open hand.

Regulus swallowed hard and kept going anyway, because at this point pain was driving.

“You want to know what I got?” he asked. “Nothing. Nothing. I got overlooked. I got left in rooms. I got handed off. I got forgotten. I got silence unless I was being corrected.”

Lily’s face crumpled.

James whispered, “Christ.”

Regulus laughed weakly, bitterly. “Do you know our cousins stopped caring once I wasn’t little anymore? Once I wasn’t a novelty? Once I wasn’t cute enough to pick up and parade around?” His mouth twisted. “Do you know our grandparents couldn’t give a damn? Our aunts and uncles either?”

Sirius had gone grey.

Regulus’s voice dropped, but only because it was breaking. “Do you know Uncle Alphard always favoured you?”

Sirius blinked. “Alphard liked you.”

“No,” Regulus said. “He remembered me when you were in the room.”

That silence was somehow worse than any shouting had been.

James lowered his head.

Remus looked at Sirius with a kind of helpless sorrow.

Peter stared at Regulus as if seeing him for the first time.

Mary pressed her lips together hard.

Marlene muttered, under her breath, “Bastards.”

Alice looked actively furious, though at whom was almost impossible to separate.

Frank’s hand tightened around hers.

Regulus swallowed again, shoulders shaking. “So forgive me,” he said, voice laced with acid and shame, “for wanting some sort of family. Forgive me for wanting anything. Forgive me for taking scraps and pretending they mean something because it’s that or admit I’ve never had anyone at all.”

Sirius made a small, awful sound.

Regulus’s eyes flashed up to meet his, bright and wounded and blazing. “I don’t have anyone,” he said.

Then, more quietly, more honestly, and therefore infinitely worse: “I never have.”

No one moved.

It did not feel like a courtyard anymore.

It felt like the centre of something collapsing.

Sirius’s mouth parted, then closed again.

For once in his life, he had no words.

Regulus saw that too.

Saw all of them seeing him.

The knowledge of it washed over his face in real time — the horror, the embarrassment, the regret. He looked suddenly cornered, like an animal that had bled in front of wolves and only now realised it.

His eyes darted over the group.

James, stricken.

Lily, soft with pity he clearly did not want.

Remus, too observant.

Peter, frightened.

Mary, sympathetic.

Marlene, furious.

Alice, sharp and sad.

Frank, devastated.

Fabian and Gideon, silent witnesses.

And Sirius.

Always Sirius.

Regulus’s mouth hardened.

That blank, defensive expression swept back over him in shards, hastily assembled and poorly fitted.

“I shouldn’t have said any of that.”

“Reg—” Sirius started.

“Don’t.”

“Listen to me.”

“No.”

“Regulus.”

“Don’t call me that like you know me.”

The words sliced clean.

Sirius recoiled as if physically struck.

Lily stepped forward a little. “Regulus, no one here is going to use this against you.”

He laughed sharply. “That’s meant to help?”

Mary said softly, “No.”

Regulus looked at her, surprised enough that it showed.

Mary held his gaze. “But it’s true.”

For one brief second, something in his face loosened with gratitude he clearly hated himself for.

Then it vanished.

Sirius took another step. Slower this time. Cautious.

“I didn’t know,” he said.

Regulus stared at him with red-rimmed eyes. “Clearly.”

“I didn’t know,” Sirius said again, more roughly. “Not about any of it.”

Regulus’s laugh came out shaking. “And whose fault is that?”

Sirius went silent.

Because there was no good answer.

James tried, because James always tried when people he loved were hurting, even when he had no right language for it. “Reg, he’s not saying that to excuse it.”

Regulus looked at him. “Did I ask you?”

James flinched, but only a little. “No. But I’m saying it anyway.”

“You’re very brave when the target’s crying.”

James’s face tightened. “That’s not fair.”

“No,” Regulus said, voice trembling again, “none of this is fair.”

And then, because he could not stay here another second under all their eyes, because the tears would not stop, because the guitar was suddenly too heavy and his skin felt wrong and the whole courtyard had become a nightmare, he moved.

Fast.

Too fast for anyone to stop.

He put the guitar down on the fountain edge with careless haste, nearly dropping it. His notebook and sketchbook, which had been tucked beside him on the stone lip of the fountain all along, slid askew.

Sirius’s head turned toward them in reflex.

Regulus stepped backward once.

Then turned.

“Regulus!” Sirius called.

Regulus did not look back.

He broke into a run.

His shoes struck hard against wet stone, then dry flagstones, then vanished through the archway and into the dark corridors beyond.

James swore and took one step as if to go after him.

“Don’t,” Remus said immediately.

Sirius stood rooted to the spot, staring after his brother as though willing him to come back by force of shock alone.

The sound of Regulus’s footsteps faded.

Then they were gone.

Only the fountain remained.

And the guitar.

And the two books he had left behind.

No one in the courtyard spoke for several long seconds.

It was Lily who finally broke the silence, very quietly and very dangerously.

“Well done.”

Sirius looked at her sharply. “Lily—”

“No,” she said. “No, don’t you Lily me. What the hell was that?”

Sirius stared at her. “You heard the song.”

“Yes,” Lily snapped. “I also heard the part where your little brother stood here crying his eyes out telling you he’s been neglected half to death and you responded by shouting at him about your mother.”

Sirius’s face twisted. “He was defending her.”

“He was mourning what he never had properly,” Remus said, tiredly but firmly.

Sirius rounded on him. “You don’t know that.”

“I know exactly that,” Remus said. “So do you.”

That landed.

Fabian crouched by the fountain and carefully picked up the notebook before it could slip into the water. “Blimey.”

Gideon, beside him, lifted the sketchbook with unexpected gentleness. “He really legged it.”

“Do not make jokes right now,” Alice said sharply.

Gideon looked chastened. “Wasn’t a joke.”

Frank rubbed a hand over his face. “Merlin.”

Peter hovered near James. “Should someone go after him?”

“No,” Mary said immediately.

James looked at her. “Why not?”

“Because if someone runs off like that after saying all that, the last thing they want is a crowd following them.”

Marlene folded her arms hard over her chest. “Especially not this crowd.”

Sirius looked like he wanted to either punch a wall or be sick. “I didn’t know.”

“Stop saying that,” Lily said.

He glared at her. “It matters.”

“It matters to you,” Lily shot back. “It doesn’t magically un-say what you just said to him.”

James rubbed at the back of his neck, gaze still fixed on the archway where Regulus had disappeared. “He wrote all that alone.”

Remus nodded once. “Looks like it.”

Sirius looked over at the guitar as if it had personally betrayed him.

“I didn’t know he could play,” he said again, but the words were emptier now, spoken more to himself than anyone else.

Alice gave him a look that would have flattened a lesser person. “That is not the point.”

“I know it’s not the point.”

“Do you?” she asked.

That made him flinch harder than shouting had.

Frank stepped in before Alice could go further. “Sirius.”

Sirius looked at him blankly.

Frank spoke more gently. “I know you’re in shock. But he just told you he felt invisible his whole life.”

Sirius’s mouth tightened.

“And,” Frank continued carefully, “from the sound of it, he’s not wrong that you were… central.”

Sirius let out a breath that was nearly a laugh, nearly a sob, nearly something else entirely. “So now this is my fault?”

“No one said that,” James said at once.

“But part of it isn’t not your fault,” Mary said bluntly.

“Mary,” Peter whispered.

“What?” Mary snapped, then lowered her voice again. “He needed someone to say it.”

Sirius stared at her.

Mary stared back, unflinching. “You left. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have. I’m saying you did. You left, and he stayed, and from what he just said, everyone looked at the dramatic son running away and forgot there was another child still in that house.”

That stripped the remaining defensiveness out of Sirius’s face.

Because he knew.

Or rather — he knew now, and could suddenly see all the places he should have known sooner.

The silences. The distance. The clipped little remarks Regulus made whenever family came up. The way he moved through school like someone who expected to be watched and overlooked at once. The fury in him whenever Sirius tried to act like he understood him. The polished mask.

Remus had seen pieces of it. Lily too, maybe. James would have if given enough time. But Sirius—

Sirius had been too busy making Regulus into an enemy to realise he had also been making him into a stranger.

Fabian opened the notebook.

Lily immediately said, “Don’t.”

Fabian looked up. “I’m not reading it.”

“Then why open it?”

“Because there’s water on the cover and if it’s soaked through it’ll wrinkle the parchment.”

That stopped her.

Because he was right.

The edge of the notebook was damp from fountain spray.

Fabian handled it with surprising care, peeling the cover back just enough to check the damage. His irreverent face softened.

“Oh,” he murmured.

“What?” Gideon asked, peering over.

Fabian turned it slightly.

They all drew a little closer despite themselves.

The notebook pages were filled with writing.

Lines crossed out. Margins packed tight. Fragments of songs. Half-formed verses. Scrawled thoughts in dark ink. Some pages crowded, some nearly empty save for one line written in the centre. It was messy in a way Regulus never looked messy in public, and intimate in a way none of them had earned.

On one visible page, near the middle, there were lyric lines they had just heard sung under the stars.

On some level, I think I always understood.

That a ship could never really love an anchor.

Sirius looked away as if burned.

Beside him, Gideon had opened the sketchbook just enough to keep it from bending. Unlike Fabian, he did not speak at once.

Marlene took a step closer. “What’s in it?”

Gideon angled it.

Sketches.

Dozens of them.

Some quick and rough, some patient and detailed. Fountain shapes. Hands. The moon over towers. A corridor corner. A profile of some professor drawn with withering precision. A page of eyes. Another of shoes. Then, a few pages in, a study of Grimmauld Place’s drawing room fireplace. Another of the bannister. Another of a woman’s hands folded in her lap.

Walburga’s hands.

Lily inhaled sharply.

There were more.

A young Sirius, seen from behind, halfway out a door.

A dining table laid too perfectly.

A child sitting alone at the far end of a room enormous enough to swallow him.

Nobody said anything.

Because suddenly Regulus’s whole private world was sitting in Fabian and Gideon’s hands, and it felt indecent even looking.

“Close them,” Remus said quietly.

Fabian nodded at once and shut the notebook.

Gideon closed the sketchbook too.

Peter swallowed. “He’s really good.”

Sirius laughed once, weakly and with no amusement in it. “Apparently that’s hereditary too.”

James looked at him. “Pads—”

Sirius dragged a hand down his face. “Don’t.”

“Someone has to say something helpful eventually,” James said. “We cannot all just stand here while you implode.”

“I am not imploding.”

“You’re absolutely imploding.”

Lily glanced between them with deep impatience. “Could we perhaps focus on the child who ran off crying?”

“He’s not a child,” Sirius snapped automatically.

“Tonight he bloody looked like one,” Alice said.

That shut him up again.

Frank exhaled slowly. “He said your parents always paid attention to you.”

Sirius let out a harsh breath. “Yes, because they were awful.”

“No one is saying otherwise,” Remus said. “But attention and love are not the same thing.”

Mary nodded. “Neglect’s its own kind of wound.”

Peter looked miserable. “He said no one cared once he wasn’t little anymore.”

James shut his eyes for a second. “I heard him, Pete.”

Peter wrung his hands. “I know, I just—” He broke off helplessly. “That’s awful.”

“It is awful,” Marlene said. “And he told all of us by accident, which means it’s probably worse than even that.”

Fabian shifted the notebook carefully under one arm and looked toward Sirius. “What are you going to do?”

Sirius stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Fabian said, unusually serious, “what are you going to do?”

The question hung there.

Sirius looked back toward the archway again.

What was he going to do?

Run after Regulus now, while the boy was raw and humiliated and furious? Probably the worst possible choice.

Leave it? Impossible.

Pretend this had not happened? Even more impossible.

The night had split something open. There was no stitching it closed by morning and calling it done.

Lily, still angry, crossed her arms. “You are going to apologise.”

Sirius barked a laugh. “That simple, is it?”

“No,” Lily said. “It isn’t. But it’s the start.”

“He won’t want to hear it.”

“He absolutely won’t,” said Mary.

“Then what’s the point?”

“The point,” Remus said patiently, “is not whether he receives it perfectly.”

James nodded. “The point is that you owe it to him regardless.”

Sirius looked down at the guitar.

It leaned against the fountain where Regulus had abandoned it, one string still vibrating ever so faintly from when he’d set it down too quickly, as though some remnant of the song still clung to the wood.

Sirius moved toward it without meaning to.

When he reached out and touched it, his hand hesitated just above the polished body before settling there lightly.

Carefully.

Like touching evidence of a life he had not been invited into.

“He cried,” Sirius said, almost to himself.

Lily’s expression softened by a fraction. “Yes.”

“Over her.”

“Not just over her,” Remus said.

Sirius shook his head. “No, I know that. I know that now.”

James stepped up beside him. “Do you?”

Sirius looked at his best friend.

James did not look accusing. Only sad.

And somehow that was worse.

Sirius swallowed. “I thought he was… I don’t know. Cold. Loyal to them. Smug. Fine.”

“Some of that may still be true,” Marlene said.

Mary snorted softly. “Mostly the smug part.”

Even Alice let out the faintest breath of humour at that.

But it died quickly.

Sirius’s face twisted. “I thought he chose them.”

Remus answered quietly, “Maybe he thought they were all he had.”

No one could argue with that.

The fountain went on whispering.

Somewhere overhead, an owl crossed the square of sky and vanished.

James finally crouched by the fountain edge and sat down where Regulus had been sitting, looking at the place from the same angle — the stars above, the water, the enclosing stone. “He comes here a lot, I bet.”

“How do you know?” Peter asked.

James shrugged one shoulder. “Because no one plays like that unless they’ve played here before.”

Frank nodded slowly. “He was comfortable.”

“Until we ruined it,” Lily said.

No one argued.

Fabian shifted the notebook again. “We should take these to him.”

“Not tonight,” Mary said.

“Why not?”

“Because he’d die of humiliation.”

“That’s fair,” Gideon admitted.

Alice looked at Sirius. “You should be the one to return them.”

Sirius gave a humourless smile. “He’ll slam the door in my face.”

“Probably,” Alice said. “Still yours to do.”

Peter looked at the archway again. “What if he tells someone we were out?”

Marlene turned and stared at him.

Peter shrank slightly. “Not important. Right. Sorry.”

“Jesus, Wormtail,” Fabian muttered.

Remus rubbed at his temple. “He won’t tell. Not after that.”

James nodded. “No. He won’t.”

Lily’s voice gentled at last, though only slightly. “He’ll be mortified by morning.”

Sirius closed his eyes.

He could picture it too easily.

Regulus, once the tears stopped, going ice-cold with self-loathing. Reassembling himself in all his usual armour. Pretending. Avoiding. Cutting first so no one could touch the bruise.

And beneath that, the truth of what he had said still standing there, undeniable.

I don’t have anyone.

I never have.

Sirius opened his eyes again and looked at the sketchbook in Gideon’s hands.

“Did he really say Alphard forgets he exists?”

James looked at him carefully. “Yes.”

Sirius’s laugh this time was broken clean in half. “Alphard used to sneak him sweets.”

Mary said, not unkindly, “That doesn’t mean Regulus felt seen.”

Sirius swallowed.

The awful thing about the conversation was that now he could think of a dozen examples that proved the point if he looked at them from the wrong angle. Alphard arriving with presents that were always handed first to Sirius. Adults asking after Sirius’s marks, Sirius’s temper, Sirius’s running off, Sirius’s friends, Sirius’s future. Regulus there too, polished and quiet, receiving approving nods rather than true attention.

Had Sirius noticed? Had he ever?

No.

Not enough.

Not nearly enough.

The thought made something in him turn sick.

Remus stepped closer at last. “We should go.”

No one moved immediately.

It felt wrong to leave the courtyard as if it were any other place. Wrong to simply trail back into the castle and let the night close over what had happened here.

But eventually, because they had to, they gathered themselves.

Fabian carried the notebook.

Gideon took the sketchbook.

Sirius lifted the guitar.

He held it awkwardly at first, then more securely, one hand around the neck, one supporting the body. With each passing second his expression got stranger, softer and more haunted at once.

James watched him. “You okay?”

“No,” Sirius said.

It was honest enough to hush them all.

They started back through the corridor as a quieter group than the one that had arrived. No jokes now. No plans for mischief. Even their footsteps had changed.

Peter stayed near Remus as though proximity to sense could protect him from the emotional fallout.

Frank and Alice walked shoulder to shoulder, hands brushing.

Fabian and Gideon, both subdued, kept the books carefully out of harm’s way.

Mary and Marlene moved together, whispering only once in a while.

Lily fell into step beside James.

Up ahead, Sirius walked alone with Regulus’s guitar.

After a long stretch of silence, James said softly, “You’re going to have to talk to him.”

“I know.”

“You can’t shout at him again.”

Sirius cut him a filthy look. “Thank you, Prongs. Inspiring advice.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

James stared at him. “That wasn’t funny.”

“No,” Sirius said after a moment. “No, it wasn’t.”

Lily looked at the guitar. “The song was beautiful.”

Sirius’s grip shifted.

“Yes,” he said.

“And awful.”

He gave a tiny nod.

Mary, from behind them, said quietly, “The line about the anchor.”

No one answered.

Because all of them had heard it. All of them had understood enough.

A ship could never really love an anchor.

Sirius let out a slow breath through his nose. “That one was about me.”

Remus looked at him. “Partly.”

Sirius laughed weakly. “No, Moony. Very much.”

Fabian murmured from behind, “Harbour too.”

Sirius shut his eyes for half a step, then opened them again.

Back in the corridor proper, the map showed no one nearby. The castle seemed to have withdrawn from them, leaving them alone with their thoughts.

It made things worse.

By the time they reached the stairwell that would split them toward their various towers and rooms, the group came to a stop almost reluctantly.

No one wanted to be the first to say goodnight after that.

Finally Frank spoke, voice low. “We keep this to ourselves.”

Everyone nodded at once.

“Obviously,” said Marlene.

Fabian lifted the notebook slightly. “Even this?”

“Yes,” Lily said firmly. “Especially this.”

Gideon looked at Sirius. “When?”

Sirius understood the question immediately.

When would he return them?

Tomorrow? Soon? Before breakfast? After? Quietly? In person? Through someone else? No version of it felt anything less than catastrophic.

But there was only one answer.

“As soon as I can,” he said.

James nodded.

Remus added, “Not in front of anyone.”

“I know.”

Alice’s voice softened for the first time in several minutes. “He told you something raw tonight. Even if it came out in anger. Be careful with it.”

Sirius met her gaze and, to her credit, did not deflect with a joke. “I will.”

Peter looked between them all. “Do you think he meant it? That he’s never had anyone?”

Remus answered after a beat. “I think lonely people often mean exactly what they say when they finally break.”

That left a chill in the air.

Mary reached over and squeezed Marlene’s wrist once.

James clapped a hand briefly to Sirius’s shoulder. “Don’t leave it too long.”

Sirius gave one sharp nod.

Then, because there was nothing else to do, they split.

One by one, twos by twos, they slipped back toward their tower with the strange heaviness of people who had gone looking for fun and found a private grief instead.

Sirius lagged behind the rest for several steps.

Then several more.

At last even James paused at the corner and glanced back. “Pads?”

“I’ll be there in a minute.”

James searched his face, then nodded and went.

Sirius was alone in the corridor.

He stood there for a long while, holding Regulus’s guitar in the blue-grey dark.

The castle was quiet again.

The night had wrapped itself back around the stones.

But he could still hear the song.

Not just the melody.

The words.

These hands of mine were clumsy, not clever.

A ship could never really love an anchor.

You are someone I have loved, but never known.

Do you ever think of me and my two hands?

And wonder why they never held you gently?

His throat tightened.

He had spent so long hating everything about where he came from that he had never fully let himself imagine what was left behind in the wreckage.

Regulus had not just been left in the house.

He had been left in the orbit of everyone’s assumptions.

Slytherin. Black. Walburga’s darling. The loyal younger brother who had chosen the family, chosen the ideology, chosen the coldness, chosen the divide.

And maybe some of that was even true.

But tonight, in the courtyard under the moon, Sirius had seen the cost of those assumptions laid bare.

Not a villain.

Not a caricature.

A boy with a guitar.
A notebook full of things he never said.
A sketchbook full of the world as he saw it.
And a hunger for family so sharp it had made him reach for even poisoned versions of it.

Sirius looked down at the instrument in his hands.

Then, very carefully, he shifted his grip and turned toward Gryffindor Tower.

Tomorrow would be awful.

Regulus would be furious.
Humiliated.
Cruel, probably.
Closed off to the point of violence.

Sirius almost wanted him to be.

Because he deserved the anger.

But beneath that, beneath all of it, there was something else now that he could not unknow.

Something small and terrible and far too late.

His brother had been lonely.

And Sirius had not seen it.

When he finally moved, the corridor gave back only the sound of his footsteps and the soft creak of the guitar strap against polished wood.

Far away, somewhere in the castle, a door shut.

And the night went on breathing.

The corridor outside the tower was dim and empty when Sirius finally reached it.

The portrait had barely finished swinging shut behind him before the tower’s familiar silence settled back into place around his shoulders — warm, red-gold, quiet in that particular late-night way that only happened when the fire had burned low and every laugh from earlier had long since died into ash.

Usually Gryffindor Tower at night felt easy.

Messy, loud even in sleep, full of half-finished jokes and discarded socks and somebody’s books left open where they had fallen. Home in the rough, makeshift way Sirius had taught himself to accept home. But tonight the whole room felt far away from him, like he had walked into a painting of his own life rather than the thing itself.

The common room was empty. Only embers glowed in the hearth, dim orange against the dark. A forgotten scarf hung over the back of a chair. Two butterbeer bottles from earlier sat abandoned beside the sofa. Somewhere far above, one of the dormitory stairs creaked and then fell still again.

Sirius stood there for a second with Regulus’s guitar in his hands, looking at the room without really seeing it.

Then he went upstairs.

The boys’ dormitory was silent.

James’s bed curtains were shut. Remus’s too. Peter’s as well. Three dark, still shapes in the room, all of them asleep or pretending to be. No whispered greeting came from behind the hangings. No comment. No questions. They must have heard him come in, but none of them said a word.

Sirius was grateful for that in a way he couldn’t begin to articulate.

He crossed to his own bed, sat down carefully on the edge of it with the guitar still in his lap, and after a second’s hesitation reached up and pulled the curtains shut around himself.

The little enclosed space went dim at once.

Not dark — never fully dark. Enough moonlight slipped in around the edges of the hangings, and enough firelight reached up from downstairs, that everything inside the bed-curtains glowed in low shades of wine-red and shadow. But it was private. Small. Close.

Just him.

Just the guitar.

Sirius sat with it for a long time before he moved.

His hands rested awkwardly on the instrument at first, like he still expected it to reject him somehow. He was not afraid of breaking things in the usual sense — he broke things all the time, chairs and rules and noses and peace — but this felt different. This felt like holding a piece of someone else’s inner life, and Sirius was suddenly, vividly aware that he had never in all his years known how to handle those gently.

The wood was smooth beneath his fingertips, worn in places with use. Not precious in the polished, untouched pure-blood sense. Not ornamental. Lived-in.

Loved, probably.

That thought alone made something in his chest tighten.

He turned it slightly in the low light, inspecting it.

There were little marks all over the body once he looked close enough.

At first Sirius thought they were just the normal scars of use — light scratches from rings or nails or a careless button, the faint dulling where a forearm would rest again and again against the varnish, tiny nicks at the edges from travel and handling.

But the more he looked, the more the marks stopped being random.

Some were carved.

Small enough that they disappeared from a distance. Easy enough to miss unless you were looking for them. But deliberate.

Sirius traced one lightly with his thumb.

A star.

Not a proper heraldic one, not the prim, symmetrical sort that would have suited the Black family tapestry. This one had been scratched in by hand, uneven and a little crooked, more feeling than design. Beside it was another, smaller. Then what looked like a crescent moon, thin and sharp. A tiny set of lines like the suggestion of water. Another star. A little sunburst. Then a pattern that might have been ivy or might have only been nervous, thoughtless carving done over time when Regulus needed his hands busy.

Sirius stared.

Regulus had done this.

Not some anonymous maker. Not wear and tear. Regulus himself, sat somewhere alone, probably on a bed or a windowsill or beside that same fountain, dragging something sharp against the wood in little absent-minded gestures until the guitar belonged to him in ways it hadn’t before.

It was such a strange intimacy that Sirius had to stop for a moment and close his hand loosely over the curve of the instrument just to steady himself.

He bent closer.

There were more.

A cluster of dots linked into something almost like a constellation. A line of wave-shapes low near the edge. The outline of what might once have been a flower and then been scratched over as if Regulus had changed his mind halfway through. Tiny initials in one place Sirius couldn’t make out. A little arrow. Another star.

Then, near the lower side of the body where the varnish had darkened from years of contact, Sirius found a name.

Not carved cleanly.

Scratched in with hesitation, letters faint and then deepening as if whoever had written them had gone back over them once, twice, three times until they were impossible to ignore.

Archie.

Sirius went very still.

For a moment he just stared at it, uncomprehending.

Then the world inside the curtains seemed to narrow abruptly, all the air thinning in his lungs.

Archie.

No one had called Regulus that in years.

Not Regulus.
Not Reg.
Not little brother said with impatience or annoyance or some fleeting softness.

Archie.

The old family name.

The baby name.

The name given not by school or house or reputation but by home — or whatever half-broken thing their family had passed off as home. A name from before regiments of pure-blood expectation settled on Regulus’s shoulders like a permanent hand. Before Slytherin. Before ideology. Before polished blankness. Before he had learned to look at the world like it couldn’t hurt him if he met it cold enough first.

Archie.

Arcturus. Little Arcturus. Their grandmother Melania’s doing.

Sirius could hear her voice with eerie clarity the moment the name registered.

Not because he had thought about it recently. He hadn’t. Years had passed without the name crossing his mind. But memory, cruel thing that it was, only needed one thread to pull and suddenly it unravelled whole rooms.

“Little Archie,” Melania had said once, laughing softly as she took Regulus from a house-elf’s arms when he was no more than three, small and dark-eyed and solemn even then. “Look at you, agi. Such a tiny star.”

The family had taken it up because Melania did.

That was how things often went. What she blessed, the rest imitated. What she named, the household repeated. And Regulus, named after their grandfather Arcturus Black, had become Archie in the mouths of family members and cousins and aunts and even house-elves sometimes when he was very small.

Little Archie.

Our Archie.

Archie-ya, one great-aunt had cooed once, pinching his cheek while Regulus stood stiff and blinking under the attention.

Sirius hadn’t heard anyone use it after Regulus was seven.

Maybe eight at the very outside.

By then he had become Regulus in full again — formal, correct, starched into himself. Somewhere between one family gathering and the next, the nickname had simply fallen away, as if childish softness had expired and no one thought to replace it with anything gentler.

Sirius kept staring at the carved name.

Why had Regulus put it there?

The question lodged like a splinter.

Because he missed it?
Because he hated it?
Because he remembered a version of himself that no one else did?
Because sometimes lonely people carved old names into wood just to prove they had once been held in language softer than the one they lived in now?

The thought made Sirius’s throat tighten.

He ran his thumb lightly over the scratched letters, careful not to catch on the grooves.

Archie.

He could not remember the last time he had thought of Regulus as small.

Truly small.

Not just younger. Not just annoying. Not just trailing after him as children did after older siblings when there was nowhere else to put their devotion. Small in the way children are when they are still all softness and quick fear and too-large eyes.

But now that the name had pulled the memory loose, he couldn’t stop it.

He remembered Regulus little.

Not happy.

That was the first thing that came with awful force.

Not happy.

Sirius frowned hard at the guitar as if concentration could somehow change memory into something kinder, but it wouldn’t.

Even when Regulus had been very young — tiny enough to still have rounded baby cheeks, tiny enough that the hems of his hanbok would bunch around his ankles on holidays and make him walk carefully so he wouldn’t trip — Sirius could not summon a version of him that was truly, uncomplicatedly happy.

Content for moments, perhaps.

Occupied.
Quiet.
Amused once or twice.

But happy? Bright? Wild in the way children ought to be?

No.

Never that.

Sirius leaned back against the pillows, still holding the guitar, and let memory come as it wanted, piece by piece and merciless.

He remembered Regulus at four, maybe, standing in the drawing room doorway while a cluster of older cousins ran shrieking past him in a game he clearly wanted to join. Sirius had been one of them. Running. Laughing. Already loud enough to fill every room he entered. Regulus had darted after them a beat too late, small slippers slapping against the floor as he tried not to be left behind.

“Wait,” little Regulus had called, breathless in that soft voice he’d had before he learned quiet could be armour. “Wait for me.”

No one had.

Not cruelly, not in a deliberate, cartoon sort of way. Worse than that. Carelessly.

They just kept running.

Sirius shut his eyes.

He could see it too clearly — Regulus trying to catch up, legs too short, hair coming loose from whatever neat styling a house-elf had done to it earlier, mouth pinched with effort. Not crying. Regulus rarely cried in front of others even then unless things had gone very badly. Just trying. Just following.

Always following.

Trying not to be left behind.

And then when the game moved on without him, he had stopped in the middle of the corridor and simply stood there.

Not tantruming. Not shouting. Not even properly sulking.

Just still.

As if whatever engine ran other children had gone briefly quiet inside him.

Sirius had not gone back for him.

The memory hit so sharply he opened his eyes again at once.

The curtains around the bed did not move. The dorm remained silent outside them.

Archie.

He swallowed.

There were other memories now, jostling to the surface behind the first. Regulus sitting on the nursery floor with an arrangement of carved wooden animals someone had brought from abroad, lining them up with eerie patience. Not making up voices for them. Not charging them into battles or giving them stories. Just arranging. Re-arranging. Quietly moving through the motions of play because that was what one did with toys.

Sirius remembered once standing in the doorway and watching him.

He must have been six, perhaps, and Regulus five.

“Why’re you doing it like that?” Sirius had asked.

Regulus, sat cross-legged in a soft little jeogori someone had put him in for the day because guests were expected later, had looked up blankly. “Doing what?”

“Playing.”

Regulus had looked down at the animals in a neat little row. Then back at Sirius. “I am playing.”

He had not sounded defensive. Just confused.

Sirius had shrugged and gone away.

Now, with the guitar across his lap and that ridiculous old nickname under his thumb, the memory felt unbearable.

Because Regulus had not looked like a child interrupted in a game.

He had looked like a child performing one.

Going through the motions.

Always there.
Never fully present.

Sirius thought of what Regulus had shouted in the courtyard.

You don’t know anything about me.

At the time it had felt like accusation.

Now it felt like fact.

He let his head fall back lightly against the bedpost and stared up into the dark canopy overhead.

Had Regulus ever run around laughing in the garden at Grimmauld Place?

No.

Not really.

Had he ever burst into rooms with scraped knees and grass stains and a grin too wide for his face?

No.

Had he ever babbled on about something he loved with the heedless enthusiasm children were meant to have?

No.

He had followed.
Observed.
Waited.
Looked.

And sometimes, when the right people looked back at him, he had smiled.

Sirius’s chest tightened again.

The cousins.

Of course the cousins.

That was one of the only places he could find flashes of softness.

Not joy exactly. Not free joy. But something close enough to hurt.

When their three cousins — the girls, older than Regulus and fascinated for a few years by how small and pretty and manageable he was — took him in hand, he did smile then. Little uncertain smiles. Tiny giggles that sounded almost surprised at themselves.

Not because they ever did what he wanted.

Sirius realised that now too, with the brutal clarity of hindsight.

They had never played what Regulus wanted.

They dressed him up.
Sat him at tiny tea tables.
Pinned ribbons in his hair once, to his profound stillness.
Pressed sweets into his hands and told him to sit here, no there, no smile, no hold this, no we’re doing this now.
Moved him around like a beloved doll.

And Regulus, desperate for attention from anyone, had let them.

Of course he had.

He never complained.

That part rang through every memory with new sickening sense.

He never complained.

Not when he was picked up and shifted from lap to lap like a decoration.
Not when older relations forgot he was in the room until they needed him to recite something clever or look pretty in a little embroidered vest for Seollal visitors.
Not when games were decided around him and never with him.
Not when other children laughed too loudly and he went quiet at the edges of the noise.

He just accepted what shape of affection was offered and made himself fit inside it.

Sirius looked down at the guitar again.

His fingers drifted back to the word Archie.

He remembered Seollal most sharply.

Not because the holiday itself had ever been unhappy in the obvious sense. It had always been ornate, busy, formal — the Black family’s particular mixture of old blood arrogance and inherited Korean custom polished into something elegant enough to weaponize.

The house would smell of food and incense and polished wood. Silk hanbok laid out days in advance. House-elves in a frenzy. Tables arranged. Ancestors acknowledged. Elders seated like royalty while the younger ones bowed in order, offering sebae with perfect posture and lowered eyes. Money envelopes passed down. Gifts wrapped in fine cloth. Tea. Rice cake soup. Fruit stacked beautifully. Candles glowing against the long winter dark.

Sirius remembered hating the stiffness of it all.

But he remembered Regulus in those holidays too.

Always exquisite.

Always still.

A tiny child folded into bright silk and expectation.

Once, when Regulus could not have been older than six, he had knelt so carefully before their grandparents for sebae that his little hands trembled against the floor. Sirius remembered seeing it and thinking with childish impatience that Regulus ought simply to get on with it.

Their grandfather had barely looked at him.

Had given the envelope.
A nod.
Nothing more.

Their grandmother had touched Regulus’s shoulder and said, “Stand up properly, Archie,” not unkindly, but distracted already by the next person in line.

And that had been that.

Sirius tried to remember whether Regulus had opened his sebaetdon later with any excitement.

He couldn’t.

He could remember his own — the way he had counted the money greedily as a child, grinning at James years later when he explained the tradition, delighted at the practicality of elders being socially obliged to give you cash. But Regulus?

Nothing.

Only a blurred image of small hands holding an envelope in silence.

Another memory came, sharper.

Chuseok.

The house lit warmer then, autumn gold instead of winter red. Plates of jeon and songpyeon set out. Gifts exchanged, always exquisitely chosen for optics if not affection. Their aunts arriving in perfume and silk. Uncles loud with drink and old opinions. Children made to bow, sit, greet, thank.

Sirius remembered one Chuseok when he was perhaps nine and Regulus eight.

Someone had forgotten Regulus’s gift.

Not maliciously — and wasn’t that the refrain of the night? not maliciously, just carelessly, which in some ways was worse.

The parcels had been brought out after dinner, stacked beautifully on a lacquered table. One for Sirius from one aunt. One from an uncle. One from Melania. Another from Alphard. Small things and grand things, all tied up in family obligation and appearances.

Sirius had had several.

Regulus had stood beside him, waiting.

And waiting.

And Sirius remembered the exact peculiar blankness on Regulus’s face as the pile dwindled and nothing with his name on it appeared.

No complaint.

No demand.

Just that awful stillness again.

Someone — maybe one aunt, maybe a cousin, the memory blurred at the edges there — had said, with light surprise, “Oh. Was there not one for Regulus?”

And another voice had answered, careless as scattering ash, “Didn’t someone do his?”

As if he were a task on a list.

As if he were something that could naturally be assumed to have slipped someone’s mind.

Sirius had opened something loud and shiny just then. A broom accessory perhaps, or some ridiculous enchanted set of stones. He remembered being distracted by it. Pleased. Showing it off.

He remembered Regulus saying, very softly, “It’s all right.”

Eight years old.

It’s all right.

Someone had promised to send something later.

Sirius could not remember whether they ever had.

His stomach turned.

He stared so hard at the guitar that the carved stars blurred for a second.

There had been birthdays too.

That one came next, and Sirius nearly swore aloud inside the curtains.

Regulus’s birthdays.

Not the grand public ones when he was tiny and still worth displaying. Not the early years with cakes and photographs and Melania pinching his cheeks while Walburga stood tall and beautiful nearby in dark silk, hand on her younger son’s shoulder like possession mistaken for tenderness.

Later.

Once the novelty wore off.

Once Sirius had become the problem worth orbiting and Regulus had become the quiet second son expected merely to be correct.

There had been birthdays missed.

No, not fully missed. The house had always been too formal for total omission. There would have been dinner, perhaps. A cake, likely. House-elves ensured the machinery of occasion continued whether anyone cared or not.

But Sirius remembered the feeling of them: thin. Obligatory. Forgotten until the day itself forced remembrance.

One year, he remembered, Regulus had sat at the end of the dining table while Walburga took some delayed owl in the middle of the meal and Orion barely looked up from his drink. A gift from one relative had not arrived. Another had sent word late. Alphard had not come at all.

Sirius had complained about something trivial that entire evening, some punishment or argument still lingering from earlier in the week. He had taken up all the air in the room as usual.

Regulus had blown out his candles in silence.

Sirius could not remember what he had wished for.

That thought hurt more than it ought to.

Because there had been so many years when Sirius had thought his brother simply self-contained, difficult to reach, uninterested in connection unless it served him somehow.

But what if Regulus had been wishing for the same thing every time?

To be wanted.
To be remembered.
To be seen coming when he entered a room.

Sirius dragged a hand over his face.

Outside the curtains, the dormitory stayed silent and sleeping.

Inside, memory would not stop.

He saw Regulus small in hanbok sleeves too long for his arms, hovering beside adults who spoke over him. Saw him standing at thresholds. Saw him perched in drawing room chairs too big for his body, feet not reaching the floor, posture perfect because being perfect was safer than taking up space badly. Saw him following house-elves into kitchens just to exist near someone who would acknowledge him. Saw him waiting outside Sirius’s room once, perhaps twice, maybe more than that, not knocking, simply lingering as if hoping the door might open before he had to make himself leave.

Had Sirius opened it?

Sometimes, probably.
Sometimes not.

The nots loomed larger now.

And underneath all of it one question kept returning, slow and terrible:

Was Regulus ever really happy?

Sirius pressed his thumb harder against the carved name until it almost hurt.

No.

Or if he had been, it had been so brief and so small that Sirius, living beside him all those years, had never learnt to recognise the shape of it.

He remembered smiles, yes.

Tiny ones.
Polite ones.
Those strange, flickering little smiles when the cousins dressed him up or fed him sweets or included him just enough to keep him docile.
A rare shy giggle when someone lifted him up and spun him and for a second he belonged to the motion.
The soft pleased expression he had once worn petting a neighbourhood cat through the garden rails until Walburga called him inside.

But happiness?

Not the deep, heedless thing. Not the kind that makes a child loud and alive and unguarded.

Even as a little boy, Regulus had seemed… not old, exactly. Not wise. Not mature in the smug adult way people praised in children they were quietly crushing.

Absent.

That was the word that kept returning.

Always there. Never truly present.

As if some part of him had learnt too early not to expect the world to meet him warmly, and had stepped half a pace back from it ever since.

Sirius shut his eyes again and saw the courtyard.

Regulus with tears on his face under the moon.
Regulus saying, I don’t have anyone. I never have.

At the time the line had felt like anger talking.

Now Sirius knew better.

No, not knew. Understood. At last.

There was a difference.

He opened his eyes and looked around the small enclosed space of his bed, the red curtains, the carved headboard, the trunk at the foot of the mattress. It was messy. Comfortable. Alive with evidence of friendship — James’s tie flung over a bedpost days ago and never reclaimed, Remus’s book on the shelf, a shared stash of sweets under the pillow, the sense of being known even in absence.

Regulus had not had this.

Not really.

Whatever he had in Slytherin now — whatever brittle alliances or strange friendships or sharp-edged loyalties — that was now. School. Survival. Performance. Perhaps real in parts. Perhaps not.

But when they had been children, when it had mattered earliest, when the foundation of loneliness was being laid brick by careful brick, Sirius had not been there.

Not truly.

He had been in the house.
In the room next door.
At the same tables.
Under the same holidays and family rituals and watchful portraits.

But he had not been there for Regulus.

The realisation did not arrive all at once like lightning.

It settled heavier than that.

A slow, suffocating truth.

Because it wasn’t just that Sirius had failed to protect him from their parents. He had. Obviously. Spectacularly. Repeatedly.

It was that Sirius had failed to notice him in the spaces where noticing might have mattered most.

The waiting.
The following.
The forgotten gift.
The missed birthday.
The little boy saying it’s all right because someone had to say it.
The child performing play alone on a nursery floor.
The cousin-doll smiles.
The quiet hovering outside doors.

Sirius had been so busy surviving his own life — and then fighting it, and then escaping it — that he had never once properly turned around to see what shape of damage Regulus was becoming in the shadow.

He had assumed.

Assumed Regulus was fine because he was quiet.
Assumed Regulus was favoured because he was obedient.
Assumed Regulus was wanted because he was useful.
Assumed Regulus had chosen all of it because it was easier than admitting maybe some children chose poison because no one had ever handed them water.

His throat burned.

He looked down at the guitar again, at the little carvings, the stars and scratches and sea-lines and moon.

Regulus had put himself into this instrument in secret.

Had written songs no one knew about.
Had taught himself to play well enough to make a courtyard ache with it.
Had carved old names and symbols into the wood where only close looking would find them.
Had built a small private universe and sat inside it alone.

And Sirius, his brother, had learnt all of that by accident while spying on him with friends past curfew.

Something inside him twisted viciously.

He remembered little Archie with sudden brutal clarity then — not a single scene but a composite of them all. Small and neat and dark-haired. Nervous all the time in that quiet way no adult ever thinks to name because the child is not loud enough to inconvenience them. Quick to flinch at voices rising. Quicker still to smooth himself back into stillness after. Tiny hands clasped in front of him. Eyes always watching doors.

A child upset all the time, Sirius thought suddenly.

Not crying all the time. That would have drawn too much notice.

But upset.
Uneasy.
Braced.

That was what little Regulus had been.

As if life had started for him under bad weather and simply never cleared.

Sirius bent forward, elbows on knees, guitar balanced across his lap, and pressed a hand over his mouth.

He did not cry.

He came close enough to feel the threat of it in his eyes and throat, but the tears did not fall. That, too, felt like an inheritance of the house they had survived.

Still, something in him gave.

Not shattered. Not dramatically. Just sagged under the truth of it.

He had thought tonight had been about Walburga.

About the song.
About grief.
About their mother and what she had done and how Regulus could possibly miss her.

But lying underneath all of that had been something much larger and much older.

Regulus had not just wanted their mother.

He had wanted anyone.

And Sirius — brother, supposed star beside whom he had grown — had not been there either.

The silence in the curtained bed grew almost oppressive.

Sirius stared down at the carved nickname one more time.

Archie.

He tried, for one impossible moment, to picture saying it aloud now.

Not as mockery.
Not as provocation.
Not dragged up cruelly from childhood to embarrass him.

Just softly.

Archie.

The thought made his chest ache so hard he had to shut his eyes again.

Regulus would hate it.
Would go still as frost.
Would probably look at him like he’d committed a crime.

And perhaps he would be right to.

That name belonged to a child no one had protected.

Sirius had no right to it now.

He sat there for a long while after that, unmoving except for the slow rise and fall of his breathing, one hand resting over the carved stars on the guitar as if holding the instrument in place could somehow hold the memories there too, stop them slipping back into the comfortable lie they had lived in for years.

Beyond the curtains, one of the other boys turned in bed. The mattress creaked softly. Then stillness returned.

Eventually Sirius lifted the guitar just enough to settle it more securely beside him on the blankets instead of across his lap. He was careful with it, absurdly careful, laying it down as though it were sleeping thing rather than wood and string.

Then he sat looking at it.

At the little scratches.
At the crooked stars.
At the old name.

And in the dim red hush of the bed-curtains, with the whole tower asleep around him, Sirius Black understood for the first time that his brother’s loneliness had not begun tonight in a courtyard under the moon.

It had begun years ago.

In rooms full of family.
At holidays thick with ritual.
On birthdays half-remembered.
In games that moved on without him.
In doorways where he waited.
In gifts forgotten.
In smiles that never quite reached joy.
In the careful performance of being easy to overlook.

And Sirius, for all his righteous fury and all his talk of knowing exactly what the House of Black could do to a child, had still somehow failed to see the smallest victim standing right beside him all along.

The knowledge sat in his chest like a stone.

He did not sleep for a very long time.

-

The dungeons were colder after midnight.

Not louder, not darker exactly — Hogwarts always managed both with insulting consistency — but colder in a way that felt personal, like the stones themselves had opinions about who belonged among them and who did not. The chill sank through walls and seeped across floors and settled in old corridors with the patience of something permanent. It lived in iron hinges and damp mortar and the black seams between flagstones. It pressed into lungs. Into fingers. Into the bones of anyone foolish or unlucky enough to linger too long below ground.

Regulus knew every version of that cold.

He walked through it now without hurry.

Not because he was calm. Not because he was all right. But because there was nowhere else for the panic to go. It had already burned itself so bright in the courtyard that what remained in him now felt strange and distant — not numb, not entirely, but thinned out. Hollowed. His face still hurt from crying. His throat ached. His eyes felt raw and swollen, and every now and then his breath still snagged unexpectedly in his chest as if his body had not yet understood that the screaming part was over.

He did not go to the Slytherin dormitory.

He never meant to.

His feet took the familiar turns automatically, down one corridor, then another, slipping through the older, less-used parts of the dungeons where torchlight grew patchy and the air smelled of stone, mildew, old water, and disuse. Here the castle changed. Became narrower. Meaner. Corridors dipped lower and twisted into odd corners where no student with any sense ever wandered unless they had a reason.

Regulus did.

He passed a stretch of wall where the torches had long since died in their brackets and the shadows pooled thick and blue-black. He turned into a side passage so narrow his shoulder nearly brushed both walls if he moved wrong. At the far end sat what looked, to anyone not paying attention, like nothing more than a storage alcove half-choked with junk.

Broken chair legs.
An old crate split down one side.
A dented cauldron.
A stack of warped wooden boards.
A cracked cabinet door leaning drunkenly against the wall.
Dust.
Cobwebs.
The kind of forgotten rubbish Hogwarts accumulated in hidden corners and then abandoned to the centuries.

Regulus stepped into the alcove and crouched automatically.

He moved the crate first.

Then the warped boards.

Then he slid the cracked cabinet door aside with a soft scrape of wood against stone, revealing a narrow gap behind it. Not a door, not exactly. More a seam in the architecture where stone had once been patched badly and a careless collapse or some long-ago renovation had left just enough space for a small body to turn sideways and slip through if it knew how.

Regulus knew how.

He had known how for years.

He ducked his head, eased one shoulder through, twisted carefully around the jut of stone that always caught on jumpers if he forgot it was there, then squeezed sideways into the hidden room beyond. Once inside, he reached back and pulled the cabinet door mostly into place again by habit, leaving the entrance disguised as clutter from the outside.

Darkness folded in around him.

Not total darkness. There was always a little light in here, thin as water. It came from somewhere high overhead — a slit in the wall maybe, or some crack in the stone that let in the faintest wash of moonlight from the lake or the grounds above. Enough to turn edges pale. Enough to keep him from walking into furniture he knew by heart anyway.

This room was small.

Smaller than a dormitory by far. Smaller than any place meant for living should have been.

Stone-walled, low-ceilinged, cold enough that breath sometimes fogged faintly in front of his face in deepest winter. It had probably once been a forgotten storeroom or maintenance space or some architectural mistake no one had bothered to reclaim. There was no fireplace. No proper window. No warmth worth naming. Only old stone, damp corners, and the privacy no one else had ever thought to look for.

Regulus stood just inside the hidden entrance and let his eyes adjust.

This was his.

Not the dormitory with its neat Slytherin beds and shared silence and too many breathing bodies in the dark. Not the room assigned to him because school said boys like him went there, and therefore there. Not the space with trunks at the foot of four-poster beds and curtains that never felt like enough barrier between him and other people. Not the constant awareness of someone turning in sleep, someone coughing, someone shifting, someone being there.

He had hated it from the start.

Dorming with other boys had felt like being skinned.

Too close.
Too exposed.
Too unpredictable.

The noises in the night.
The unspoken rules.
The panic of lying rigid in bed listening to everyone else exist around him.

So he had left.

Not dramatically. Not with some speech or declaration. Regulus never did anything like that. He had just… stopped sleeping there. Shifted piece by piece, night by night, until the dormitory bed had become little more than a placeholder with nothing of him in it. No books on the table beside it. No clothes in the wardrobe. No private things tucked beneath the mattress. No evidence of life except the empty space with his name attached.

No one had questioned it.

That, perhaps, had been the most telling part.

No prefect had noticed.
No dormmate had cared enough to report it.
No professor had asked why one bed remained untouched except for appearances.
No one had thought long enough about Regulus Black to wonder where, exactly, he slept if not there.

So he had made something else.

A room.

If one was generous.

A den.
A hiding place.
A nest built by a lonely, freezing creature out of whatever it could drag home in its teeth.

An old narrow sideboard stood against one wall, its drawers mismatched and difficult, found abandoned near a classroom and hauled here over the course of two exhausting nights. A chair with one repaired leg sat near the bed. A low table, scarred and uneven. A stack of books. A lantern charmed low. A few battered crates turned into storage. Blankets folded over the end of the makeshift bed. Bits of cloth pinned or draped where stone felt too severe. Little objects gathered over years: a chipped ceramic dish, a tin box, candles, a cracked mirror, a string of beads, pages tucked between books, pencils worn almost to stubs, half a reel of muggle tape, an old jumper slung over a chair, a scarf.

Not pretty.

Not proper.

But his.

Every piece of it.

Everything in this room had been found, carried, bartered for, bought with hidden-away coins, claimed, repaired, or made useful by his own hands. Nothing had been given because someone thought of him with care. Nothing had appeared out of routine school provision except what he had stolen back from systems meant for everyone and truly belonging to no one.

His bed was against the far wall.

It was not really a bed.

A narrow frame scavenged from somewhere long ago, reinforced with boards. An old mattress that dipped in the middle but was better than stone. Blankets layered thick enough to soften it. Quilts. Worn covers. Pillows with cases that never quite matched. A knitted throw someone had discarded years back and Regulus had rescued from a linen cupboard before the house-elves binned it. Comfort piled on comfort in an attempt to trick the dungeons into mercy.

They never were enough.

They never would be.

The cold lived here regardless.

It was in the mattress.
In the blankets.
In the air that slid under cloth and settled in skin.

It was why Regulus’s skin stayed pale all year. Why his fingers were always cool. Why the back of his neck felt ice-cold even after sleep. Why, if anyone touched his wrist unexpectedly, they sometimes startled and laughed and called him freezing as if it were a novelty.

He was used to it now.

Used to the ache in winter. Used to sleeping curled around his own heat. Used to waking with stiff hands and cold feet and breath that hurt. Used to being chilled all the way through.

He crossed the room in silence and sat down on the edge of the bed.

For a while he did nothing.

He just sat.

His hands hung between his knees. His shoulders slumped in on themselves with the ugly exhaustion that comes after public humiliation, after tears, after saying too much and not being able to claw any of it back. The room was silent around him. No dormmates. No whispers behind curtains. No footsteps. No one.

Just the faint drip somewhere far in the pipes.
The old pressure of stone.
His own uneven breathing.

He stared at the floorboards beneath his feet.

The whole courtyard replayed in him in awful broken flashes.

Sirius’s face.
The others emerging from the shadows.
The shock.
The song still in the air.
Sirius shouting.
His own voice rising, cracking, spilling things he had never meant to say aloud.
Everyone hearing.
Everyone knowing.

I don’t have anyone.
I never have.

Regulus shut his eyes.

His stomach turned so hard he almost bent over.

How much had he said?
All of it, probably.
Enough.

Far too much.

He drew a breath, then another. Neither helped.

His sleeves had fallen partway down his forearms in the run back through the corridors. He could feel the fabric twisted there, uncomfortable against damp skin. Almost absently, he rubbed at his arms where the cloth had bunched, then pushed the sleeves upward again.

The movement stilled halfway.

Moon-thin light touched his skin.

For a second he just looked.

Old marks first because old marks were easier. Pale lines in some places, harsher ridges in others, some fine and faint, some ugly and raised, old enough now to have gone flat and cold and almost silvery against his skin. A map of hurt laid down over years. Then the newer ones. Angrier. Less settled. Tender where they had not fully healed. The sight of them made something inside him lurch.

He pushed the fabric higher without meaning to.

His forearms.
His wrists.
The insides of his arms where skin was thinner.
A glimpse of the upper arm where scars disappeared under the sleeve.
Memory supplied the rest too easily — the marks on his stomach, the ones higher on his thighs, the history of them, the repetition of them, the places he could reach and the places he had learned by habit to hide.

Not one season.
Not one moment of melodrama.
Not one single bad night.

Years.

Years of self-hatred finding a shape.
Of loneliness needing somewhere to go.
Of a body that felt too full of panic or numbness or disgust being made to feel something sharp enough to cut through the fog.
Of punishment without witness.
Of private damage done in silence because silence was where everything in him lived best.

He stared too long.

The room tilted.

A horrible lightness passed through him, sudden and sickening, the kind that made his fingertips go strange and his hearing draw away to a buzz. His stomach rolled. His chest went tight. He saw the marks not as skin anymore but as proof, proof, proof of every awful thing he had just said aloud in the courtyard, every humiliating fragment of self now loose in other people’s heads.

His breath hitched once.

Then again.

And then he folded.

Not literally at first. He stayed sitting, but the force of the sob that tore out of him bent him nearly double over his own lap. One hand flew to his mouth too late to muffle it. The other yanked the sleeve back down so hard it caught at his skin. He dragged both sleeves into place with shaking hands, covering everything, covering all of it, as if the sight alone might split him open.

Another sob came, harsher.

The room spun.

He got sideways on the bed somehow — he would not later remember how — kicking off his shoes half-blindly, dragging himself further onto the mattress with one knee, then the other. He curled in on instinct, tight as possible, shoulders rounded, arms folded hard across his middle like he could cage all the broken parts in if he pressed firmly enough.

The blankets bunched beneath him, cold and familiar.

He curled tighter.

His face buried itself into one of the flattened pillows. The fabric smelled faintly of dust and soap and the stone-cold air of the room. His tears soaked into it fast. He cried with his whole body now, silent only because he had trained himself into silence so thoroughly that even alone he could not quite unlearn it. The sobs tore through him anyway, wrenching and ugly, his ribs aching with the effort of keeping them muffled.

He had said too much.
He had said everything.
They had all heard.

Sirius.
Potter.
Lily Evans.
All of them.

The humiliation of that alone might have been enough to ruin him for the night.

But then another thought came, sharp as panic.

His things.

Regulus went still for one stunned second.

Then his eyes snapped open.

The guitar.
The notebook.
The sketchbook.

He had left them.

Left them there on the fountain edge like an idiot, like a child, like someone too busy crying to hold onto the few pieces of himself that actually mattered.

“No,” he whispered into the pillow, the word torn thin by crying.

He pushed himself half upright, then stopped because dizziness washed through him so hard he nearly pitched off the bed. One hand clutched at the mattress. The other went to his mouth.

His things.

Not school things.
Not borrowed things.
Not replaceable things.

His.

The guitar he had saved for in drips and scraps and hidden coins until he could buy it second-hand through a chain of favours and careful lies. The notebook packed with songs and lines and thoughts he had never meant another person to see. The sketchbook full of everything private he could not say out loud and so had taught himself to draw instead — rooms, faces, hands, corners of home, pieces of childhood, things he loved, things he hated, things he had only ever trusted to paper because paper never looked back with pity.

The only pieces of him that properly existed outside his own body.

He made a broken sound and folded back over himself.

Of course he had left them.

Of course.

And the Gryffindors had them.

The Gryffindors, with their laughter and noise and endless stupid pranks and jokes, their easy cruelty disguised as fun half the time, their thoughtless invasions of other people’s boundaries because they found everything hilarious if it belonged to someone else. Potter and Black and Prewett chaos wrapped up in friendship and charm. The sort of people who could knock your books from your arms and grin while helping pick them up. The sort of people who played games with people’s dignity and called it affection.

Regulus would not be surprised if they ruined them.

That was the worst part.

It would hurt, but it would not surprise him.

He could picture it too easily in the dark behind his eyes — pages passed around, songs mocked, sketches laughed over, maybe the guitar strummed badly in parody, some line quoted back at him in the corridor for the rest of term, some cutting little imitation of his voice singing in the courtyard. Sirius leading it, perhaps, or perhaps not. Potter snorting. Gideon saying something loud. Fabian adding to it. Mary or Marlene laughing despite themselves. Even if they did none of that, the fear of it tore through him all the same.

Because they had seen.

Because they knew.

Because those things were not just belongings. They were evidence.

Of the parts of himself no one else had ever been invited near.

He turned onto his back and stared at the low dark ceiling, tears sliding hot and helpless into his hairline.

He had built those things in silence.

Taught himself in silence too.

Guitar by listening, rewinding, trying again, fingers blistered and raw at first because there had been no one to show him where chords went, no one to say do it like this, no one to sit beside him and guide. Songs written in scraps between classes, in the dead middle of the night, in moments when breathing felt impossible unless words came out somewhere. Sketching by candlelight until his hand cramped, learning shadows and proportions from library books and observation and failure and trying again because drawing something made it real enough to survive.

No audience.
No praise.
No lessons.
No witness.

Only him.

He had made that private world piece by piece because no one else was going to hand him one.

And now it was sitting in Gryffindor hands.

Regulus rolled onto his side again and curled tighter, both arms wrapped around his middle so fiercely it almost hurt. The bed creaked under the tension of him. His toes were already cold. The room felt colder still somehow, as if panic made even the stone sharpen.

He thought of the notebook first and nearly gagged with fear.

The songs.
Not just tonight’s song.
All of them.

Fragments. Half-finished verses. Ugly pages from uglier nights. Things about his mother. Things about Sirius. Things about the house. About loneliness. About wanting. About death in vague poetic terms he did not even fully mean until he did. Little shards of his mind in ink, raw and embarrassing and earnest in ways daylight Regulus never allowed himself to be.

Then the sketchbook.

No.

God.

He pressed his sleeve against his eyes.

Sketches of Grimmauld Place.
Of Walburga’s hands.
Of Sirius from memory more than observation.
Of rooms and doorways and holiday tables and children sitting alone at the edge of gatherings.
Of things he was not supposed to care about.
Of the way he remembered being looked at.
Of the way he remembered not being looked at.

If Sirius saw those—

He couldn’t finish the thought.

His whole body clenched around it.

And the guitar.

The carvings.

The stars, the waves, the name cut in careful secret into the wood.

Archie.

The old childhood softness of it sat like rot in his throat.

If they saw that too—

Another shuddering sob broke out of him.

He buried his face harder into the pillow and cried until breathing was nearly impossible again, the sound staying trapped and smothered because even here, even alone in the room that was most his, he could not fully let himself be loud. Years of concealment would not permit it.

Outside, somewhere beyond the hidden walls and tangled routes back to the main dungeons, Hogwarts went on sleeping.

Students in warm dormitories.
Curtains drawn.
Bodies tucked into real beds assigned to them.
Roommates breathing nearby.
Lives going on.

Regulus lay in his cold hidden room with his makeshift bed and scavenged furniture and all the small pathetic comforts he had collected to keep himself company, and for a while the only thought in him was that he had lost the few pieces of his life that were truly his.

The room blurred at the edges again as tears filled his vision.

No one knows, he thought stupidly, half-delirious with exhaustion and panic. No one knows anything. Those things are the only proof I was ever here.

It felt true in the moment.

His notebooks.
His drawings.
The guitar under his hands.
The room itself.

Not family.
Not school.
Not house.
Not legacy.

Only the things he had chosen and built in the quiet.

He curled tighter still, knees almost to chest, cold sleeves dragged over cold hands, and let the fear wash through him in waves.

Eventually the sobbing lost some force, not because he felt better but because the body cannot sustain that pitch forever without breaking into something duller. His chest still hurt. His eyes burned. Every few breaths a shaky little hitch caught him by surprise. But the worst of the crying receded enough that he could hear the room again — the tiny sounds of hidden life, the settling of old wood, the hush of the castle around him, the silence that had always been his closest companion.

He lay there staring blindly at the dim stone opposite.

Thinking of the fountain.
Thinking of Sirius’s face.
Thinking of what had been heard.
Thinking of what might already be in other people’s hands.

He should go back for them, some frantic part of him said.

But he knew he couldn’t.

Couldn’t face the corridors again tonight. Couldn’t risk finding them there laughing. Couldn’t bear seeing his own pages opened under other people’s eyes. Couldn’t survive another conversation, another expression of pity, another look from Sirius now that everything ugly had been said.

So he stayed where he was.

Small in the bed he had made for himself.
Cold in the room he had carved out of neglect and stone.
Breathing through the ache in his chest and the sick fear in his stomach.
Alone with the knowledge that the pieces of him he had spent years teaching into existence were no longer safely his.

And in the dark, with his sleeves pulled firmly down and his body curled around itself like a wound trying to close, Regulus Black lay awake in the hidden room no one knew was truly his and thought, with the bleak certainty of someone who had practiced disappointment too long, that by morning the last private parts of him might already be ruined.