Chapter Text
November 1981 – Twelve Years Before
If you asked Regulus how he got here, he’d tell you he had no idea when everything went so wrong.
Was it when Sirius left, and Regulus stood at the staircase, silently watching, not daring to breathe for fear of dispelling the illusion that this was just another nightmare?
Or was it when he silently listened to Bella and his parents discussing his becoming a Death Eater at the sad age of sixteen?
Maybe it was when his mother informed him he would be marked in an hour, to secure the honor of the House of Black, after his brother ran away—when he didn’t run, even though everything felt so horribly wrong.
It could have been one of many moments, when he watched Bella, Barty, Evan, Fiona, and so many other people he loved lose a bit of their light with every life they took.
All his life, he had felt helpless. So when the day came and he realized that nobody could win the war because the Dark Lord had made a Horcrux—of all things—the feeling of being entirely out of his depth was nothing new, and really not as scary as it should have been.
Being a Death Eater was hard. Shielding his thoughts from the Dark Lord, Bella, his parents, and his friends was hard.
Telling Kreacher that his fate was to die in an Inferi-infested cave? Very easy.
Now, it could all have ended there. That would have been part of the plan and very much welcomed. But alas—when did he ever get what he wanted?
So again, he was not surprised to be fished out of the water by a furious Dark Lord and thrown into a dungeon in one of the safe houses.
What he was surprised about was that they didn’t find out he had succeeded in his little Horcrux heist—and that Kreacher got away.
It was what kept him sane when his old friends visited him in his cell. When he temporarily lost his voice from screaming whenever Bella took time out of her day to throw some curses at her favorite cousin.
(Was he still her favorite cousin? Well, who knows. If he was higher up on her list than Sirius, he counted it as a win… Then again, Sirius got burned off the family tree, so he wasn’t really her cousin anymore. Hmm. Things to consider.)
Sometime in Early 1993
And that was the last thing he remembered before waking up—healed and in proper prison clothes—in the middle of a new cell, this time in Azkaban. That had been a couple of years ago.
“Listen, I know you pure-blood snobs only play wizard chess and some even more pompous version of poker, but we don’t have any cards, and I will play Tic-Tac-Toe with you whether you’re done sulking or not!”
...
Pettigrew stared at him, his usually huge honey-colored eyes narrowed to two slits that might have looked threatening—if Regulus knew him any less.
“I’ll have you know that we pure-blood snobs play a lot more games than just that, and most of them involve fun activities like cursing Muggle-borns and eating their favorite pets, Pettigrew,” he shot back, doing his best impression of Lucius, even though he hadn’t seen the man in many, many years.
...
“So. How about that game of Tic-Tac-Toe, Black?”
Regulus couldn't speak yet, but he gave a shaky nod and pushed the memories of his family and the water back into that dark corner of his mind, where they would stay—until the next Dementor ripped them out again.