The Silence After
Epilogue: The Silence After
Hogwarts, November 3rd, 1979
It didn’t happen all at once.
There was no great announcement. No official mourning. No body.
Just whispers.
A broken teacup in the Slytherin common room.
An owl that never came home.
An empty bed.
And silence.
Evan Rosier found out first, before breakfast. He dropped his toast and stared blankly at the table, like he’d been slapped.
“He said don’t be stupid,” Evan muttered. “Like he knew I’d want to follow him. Like he knew I’d burn the world trying to bring him back.”
He punched the wall later that night. Didn’t even flinch at the blood.
Barty Crouch Jr. didn’t speak about it—not at first. But he didn’t finish that potion he’d been perfecting, either.
Instead, he found the jar of essence of belladonna Regulus had gifted him months ago, unopened, and stared at it for hours.
“You’re not your father,” Regulus had said.
Barty clenched his jaw. “Then who the hell am I now?”
Pandora Lovegood cried for the first time in years.
She sat in Greenhouse Three with her hands buried in soil and whispered, “I promised. I promised. I’ll keep being strange and soft and light. I’ll outlive them all, Regulus. But I wanted you to be here for it.”
She planted moonseed in his name. It bloomed silver that night.
Dorcas Meadowes stopped dueling.
They asked her to teach the younger years for a while, and she declined. “What’s the point?” she said. “The only person I wanted to win for gave up the game.”
But she carried his words like a bruise:
“Be happy. At least one of us deserves that.”
She tried. Merlin, she tried.
Remus Lupin found a note under his pillow days later, charmed to smell like cedar and ink.
It wasn’t signed, but he didn’t need a name.
“You’re not a monster, Wolf Boy.”
Remus folded it gently and put it in his pocket.
He never took it out again, but he read it in his mind every full moon.
Sirius Black didn’t cry.
Didn’t speak of it. Didn’t look at the North Wing attic again.
But he played the song they used to listen to, over and over until the record warped.
“I never blamed you for leaving me. I blamed you for forgetting me.”
Sirius sat on the floor and whispered, “I never forgot. I just didn’t know how to come back.”
Lily Evans broke a quill mid-stroke in the library when she heard the rumor. Her ink bled into runes and blurred her page.
“He said I was the best of us,” she told James, hours later, voice shaking. “Why would someone so good think I was better?”
There was no answer.
But she carved his initials into the base of the Astronomy Tower.
Peter Pettigrew was quiet—too quiet.
He didn’t speak up in class, didn’t laugh at the jokes he used to.
“I understand,” Regulus had said.
And Peter did. That was the worst part.
He understood what it meant to be afraid, to be tired, to be used.
But he never told anyone.
James Potter stared out over the Black Lake for hours.
“He said he’d still dance with me,” he muttered once, under his breath, like a prayer. “Even if the whole world was watching.”
And James—who had always been so loud, so brave—looked small for the first time.
Because for a moment, someone had chosen him.
And now, they were gone.
The castle never said his name out loud again.
But it remembered.
In the way the shadows stretched longer down the Slytherin halls.
In the quiet sigh of moonseed blooming silver by the greenhouses.
In the slight shimmer of ink when certain spells were written on certain nights.
And in nine hearts that beat a little heavier, knowing that Regulus Arcturus Black had said goodbye not with fear—
—but with love.