lunatic thirteens

James Potter must be noticing him too.

At least, that was the only explanation Regulus could think of for his behaviour. 

Pandora said to believe the lies that make you brave and kind and happy and healthy, and Regulus had, for an absurd moment, taken that to heart. (He didn’t think Pandora really abided by that; however outlandish some of her beliefs, she seemed to arrive at all of them fairly impartially. He thought it was a quote she liked.)

But he was going to die soon enough; even if he didn’t deserve it, there couldn’t be that much harm in letting himself experience something pleasant momentarily, even if only through delusion. 

That had been his mentality throughout everything that happened with Barty last year, and he had managed to keep himself emotionally distant enough from that that when he had broken up with him, he had managed to make Barty think it had meant nothing to him. He had managed to channel his sadness into rage, which he used to keep his occlumency shields strong during the summer, and to perform the Cruciatus curse on spiders when Bella came by to train him. 

Pandora told him some Muggles believed in reincarnation as different species according to how one had lived their past lives. He wondered how many months it would be until he was reincarnated as one of the spiders Bella used to train young Death Eaters.

Still, James was different from Barty in so many ways. Not only would he never have sent someone to St. Mungo’s with one of his pranks—what had happened Regulus’s fourth year with Snape had of course been initiated by Sirius; he was related to Regulus and fucked in the head; James had tried to stop it—, and he wouldn’t see Regulus as someone safe to experiment with, even if James weren’t completely straight, which he almost certainly was.

All that was going on was that James was naive; Regulus was not. He knew that he had to take away most of his family’s power, or they would go after Sirius after he died. Hence his plan for his parents… James was surely looking at him to see if he was Marked, and to tell him he could escape, as though his family would let both their sons fall from grace like that.

That was all it had been in the past, and that was all it was now.

But Regulus, who, like any sensible queer pureblood, had plenty of practice such that he would never be caught looking at boys he fancied, had to avert his gaze from James often so that he wouldn’t see him watching.

The first day of classes, James had caught him walking alone. James had cornered him like this before, once a year or two, to ask him how his home life was or to tell him he could escape like Sirius. Regulus always snubbed him, told him if Sirius had problems at home it was because he didn’t know how to behave himself, told him he had no intention of becoming a traitor to his family the way Sirius had.

It was false, in a sense. He did intend to become a traitor to his family, perhaps even more than Sirius had. And James Potter, muscular and kind-hearted though he might have been, could neither aid him in it nor save him from it.

This year was no different. 

“Regulus!” James yelled at him through the empty hallway.

“What do you want, Potter?”

“Just to ask you something.”

Regulus stopped. He always would for James. He was an idiot, and he was weak, and he deserved everything that was going to happen to him. At least he had the dignity to preface the conversation to show disinterest. “Make it quick. I really do have better things to do.”

“It’s only the second day back, what do you have to do? And I've been told I’m a scintillating conversationalist.”

“Who tells you that? Sirius?”

“How did you know?”

Merlin, was James flirting with him? Regulus might be letting this plan of some self-indulgence this year before everything ended cloud his judgment. But he kept his tone straight. “He’s the only one stupid enough to believe something like that.”

James stepped closer to him. It felt intentional, charged, but surely Regulus only felt that way. “Please,” he said much more seriously. “Tell me if you’re OK.”

“I don’t need your help, Potter.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“Thank you, Potter,” he kept his tone level. Polite, even. He looked him in the eyes, and out of instinct he kept his occlumency shields up, even if he was fairly confident that James was rubbish at legilimency. “Right now I need to get to Charms, and I can assure you that I don’t need your help.”

He brushed past James as he walked around him to get to the Charms classroom, and slowly breathed out, still so aware of where his body had touched James’s.

“I’m going to head down to the Great Hall for auditions. Are you both sure I can’t get you to join me?” Pandora asked Regulus and Evan at the end of an afternoon spent in the common room, in Evan’s case, doing arithmancy homework, and in Regulus’s and Pandora’s case, reading about Slytherin students of the past century and Parseltongue speakers in order to gain insight into the Dark Lord’s origins. After finding a passage indicating that in the 17th century, some wizards closely related to the Gaunt and Slytherin families had learnt the language, he thought he might be able to learn the language, and he had found a book in the library in Latin on Parseltongue grammar Saturday afternoon, hen Pandora had prefect patrol (usually they only had patrol in the evenings, but the first week was different since first years would need extra help). He had also copied the past decade of the Daily Prophet into her Pureblood Etiquette book. It was hard work, avoiding getting caught (library materials weren’t allowed to be copied through simple duplication charms, but there weren’t any magical prohibitions on it, only Madam Pince’s watchful eye), but the librarian never suspected Regulus of anything. 

Pandora and Regulus spent Saturday night and Sunday morning reading through these records, learning that while the reports of dark magic after Grindlewald’s fall had increased throughout the sixties, people only believed there was a new Dark Lord beginning in 1968, two years after Pandora’s father had died. The Dark Lord only was named as Voldemort in the newspapers for a year, when the war began in 1970. After that, the papers began calling him He Who Must Not Be Named.

Pandora was more distantly related to the Slytherin and Gaunt families—her most recent Gaunt ancestor was a couple generations before his, so she would let him practise and see if he had any luck. She focused on records of Slytherin students and placed a silencing charm over Regulis as he practiced the strange hissing sounds.

“Dora, have you heard me sing?” Evan asked.

“I can’t say I have.”

“There’s a reason for that,” he replied.

“Fine, Regulus? I’m sure the tenor section could use you.”

He put a silencing charm around the three of them and charmed his mouth so no one else in the common room would be able to read his lips. “This is the first term I’ve started with my hair in two years. I told my mother I looked like a muggle soldier how she kept doing it. If word gets to her I’m in the bloody tenor section she’ll be convinced I’m queer, engagement to you or not.” Evan snorted.

She ruffled his hair. “I don’t think you’re supposed to stereotype choral sections like that.”

He glared at her.

“Practice piano with me though, after dinner.” She shot a look of urgency at him. He nodded, slightly. Perhaps she had made more headway than he had. He wanted to test if might be able to say a few words to a snake now, though he didn’t think he would understand anything a snake would say to him.

After dinner, he made his way up to Ravenclaw tower and opened the door behind which he heard Pandora singing. He started casting protective charms. 

“Thank Merlin. I need you to know something. Just use legilimency please. I don’t know how to talk about it. But I think Tom Riddle is who we’re after.” She must have made more headway than he had.

“Legilimens,” he whispered. 

She had heard a crash in the night and had run to the top of the stairwell, keeping herself hidden but wanting to know what was going on. She heard a cork pop off a wine bottle. Now that she was older, she understood that her father’s most gruesome behaviour had always come with drink. “A toast!” he had cried. “To old Tom Riddle! Now, Clarisse, let me show you what I did to the rest of those filthy Muggles!” and he started to curse her mother. Suddenly, she knew why she’d tried to forget that night; the cries of agony from her mother. Five-year old Pandora couldn’t stand to hear the screams, but she knew she couldn’t do anything to help her mother. She ran to Rodophus, begged him to help—but he only laughed, and tears started streaming down her face. When she finally went downstairs, it was because she heard a crash and then her mother’s final scream. Her mother was shouting that she put up a deflecting charm and one of her father’s own spells had killed him. His blood was rushing everywhere, her mother ordering the house elf to bury him quickly in the backyard while she started to clean, passing out from the stress of all the curses she had taken. When she awoke, Rodolphus promised he would tell the Dark Lord he had been the one to kill his father, in exchange for something Pandora never heard…

“I’m sorry, Pandora,” he said.

“It’s OK. I just played dress up with my mother for the next five years. My brothers were usually at another property or off with their friends. My childhood was better than yours. I guess I’d suppressed that memory, though.” Regulus never had been good at comforting words. Pandora had usually been the one in a position to give them, between the two of them. So she continued. “Here, look at Riddle in the leavers’ book.”

“He looks different now, but that’s definitely him,” Regulus noted.

“He was a year older than my father. And we were right—he must have been half-blood—Riddle’s such an English name. I’d love to see Bella learn that.” The Dark Lord’s disavowal of his own name had convinced the two of them he wasn’t an English pureblood. They’d thought probably he was hiding his blood status, but there had always been a chance he was foreign.

Regulus smiled slightly. “Marvolo is a wizarding name, though,” he said, noting the middle name listed in the leavers’ book. “One of the Gaunts, right?”

“Yeah, the one born in 1885 who went to Azkaban for killing some Muggles in the 40s.”

“Bella speaks of that event with reverence…” Regulus said.

“You think the Dark Lord had something to do with it.”

“Let’s just call him Tom, all right? I’m getting Marked soon enough; I don’t want to act like a Death Eater when I don’t have to. But I’d expect that... Marvolo Gaunt had two children, right? And that’s the end of the Gaunt line?”

“Yeah, Morfin and Merope. Both of them would have been about 20 when Tom was born, if he started Hogwarts two years before my mother. I think someone in my mother’s family tried to get her to marry Morfin to keep up the Gaunt line, I think it was one of her Malfoy grandparents. I guess she was about 14 then. Morfin lived in a putrid hut and refused to speak anything except parseltongue. My mother mentions how horrifying that was sometimes when she talks about how glad she is that I'm with you.” Pandora admitted.

Regulus shuddered. “Do you know anything about Merope?”

“My mother said Morfin lived alone. I don’t know of a marriage, so I guess she died.”

“Riddle would have been about 17 then. Marvolo might have been in Azkaban by then… So you think Merope was his mother and his father was a Muggle?”

Pandora nodded. “Regulus, do you think the Muggles Marvolo killed were Riddle’s Muggle family?”

“With how Bella talks about it,” Regulus mused, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Tom were the one to have killed them. He could have framed his grandfather. He would have been in Slytherin long enough to learn about the great Pureblood traditions of framing murder on family members.”

“Thanks, Regulus, I really appreciate your reminder of how my mother pinned my father’s death on my brother.” Pandora’s voice went higher, and Regulus tried to look repentant. “I guess Riddle has respect for patricide, as Rodolphus was marked and got engaged to Bellatrix just after that.” Pandora’s mouth twitched. “I don’t know what influence my mother had over Riddle. I guess they must have known each other in school, but she never talks about her interactions with him, even though he used to host meetings at our manor. She definitely could have bribed Druella and Cygnus into arranging a marriage between Bellatrix and Rodophus. They were engaged for such a long time.”

“I suppose whatever your mother bribed Druella with wasn’t quite enough for her to forget what it was like to be pulled out of school to get married at 13,” Regulus mused. “I’m glad my mother didn’t try to revive that tradition on us.”

“You mean you aren’t quaking in anticipation of our marriage and wishing it could have happened while we were prepubescent?”

Regulus snickered. “I guess we'll have an excuse for silencing charms, so we'll get to actually talk more than when we're at home usually. And it’ll be nice to get control of the manor and its magic, and I need to be of age for that.”

“As if your mother would leave us alone and in control of the house while your father is still Lord Black.”

He looked at her meaningfully, and her eyes lit up in recognition.

“You’re planning to kill your parents?! Well come, tell me. You don’t get all the fun alone; and don’t give me bullshit about saving my soul.”

“Merlin, Dora, I guess you are a Slytherin after all. But yes, I’ll need your help making slow acting potions that look like natural diseases and which I can present to them inconspicuously in tea or something.”

“The real issue will be getting that through Kreacher. Wait, wait.” She pulled out Etiquette and Marriage Customs of the Moste Anciente and Pure. “I just reread it, the real thing, so I can spout out bullshit when people see me reading it. Chapter 64 part C details a goofy tradition which largely died out in the 17th Century of a couple preparing the husband’s mother and father an elaborate supper three times: once a month before the wedding, once a week before the wedding, and once three months after the wedding. I can probably pull off that I’d want to do that.”

Regulus smiled a bit sadly.

As they returned back to the dungeons, Regulus saw a rat. There were other rats at Hogwarts, of course, but this particular, chubby rat had visited Regulus (and usually, by extension, Pandora) at the start of every term since Sirius had been disowned. They suspected this was the second semester of the rat’s tenure at Hogwarts, based on the month Sirius had spent silent the summer before he was disowned. Regulus had almost missed that—he had been annoyed at Sirius, so when his mother had put a silencing charm on his older brother, he hadn’t taken it off for two weeks. But even then he didn’t speak for another two weeks, so his suspicions were confirmed.

Regulus tapped Pandora’s arm and pointed with his eyes to the rat. She screamed as loudly as she thought Peter Pettigrew might believe of her, and Regulus rushed to yell “Scourgify!” at Peter several times, as though he were saving Pandora from it, and they started running. He rolled up his sleeves between the times he yelled the cleaning spell. He could only live in delusion so long; there was a point at which he had to let his brother and his idiot friends know he wasn’t marked yet. They would stop coming after him to check for the time being, and if that meant he didn’t ever speak to James again, then that was the price for having his eyes open. He needed to tell Sirius and James he wasn’t marked yet. After Easter term he wouldn’t be able to offer them such comfort.

But the next day James found him again. Regulus was alone in the Astronomy tower, thinking about everything he needed to do and everything that could and probably would go wrong, and Regulus heard footsteps. He checked his occumency shields, but then he realised it was James. 

He probably didn’t need them anyway. One of the last real conversations Sirius had had with him was about how the Potters never used legilimency on James or on Sirius when he visited. He hadn’t been sure what to say, so he had said something along the lines of, “Just because you don’t train for half the summer doesn’t mean our mother won’t go easier on you when you’re here.”

Like everything he said to Sirius, he meant it as a warning, but he was sure it came across more as a threat. 

“Regulus?” James asked.

Regulus nodded at him slightly, and James sat down right next to him on the bench, their knees touching.

“Merlin, Potter. Are all of you Gryffindors so touchy-feely?”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“You can sit where you like. It’s not my astronomy tower.”

“But do you mind?” Why did James always have to make everything about what he wanted?

Regulus sighed. He probably should say yes; it wasn’t even a lie; he did mind that he wouldn’t think of anything other than James’s knee and his touching for the next week. “Not particularly.”

And Regulus sat in silence as James talked and talked and talked. He occasionally replied in monosyllables, saying yes when James asked if he was bored. But James kept talking, mostly about the quidditch, but sometimes about the stars. When he told him about his grandiose plans for the Gryffindor quidditch team this year, Regulus knew he was exaggerating about having practice every morning at 4, but he still laughed. 

“I won,” James murmured. “You smiled.”

Regulus stood up.

“Where are you going?”

“I have more important things to do than smiling.” Regulus left, his heart pounding. What the hell did James want?