Chapter 1
The cave is dark, and not very warm either. Regulus’s curls plaster against his forehead, weighed down by cool sweat as the dim light of his lamp flickers with every stale gust of wind.
At Regulus’s side sits the house elf. Kreacher is the one holding the lantern, and they both watch in silence as the small, rickety boat they are sitting in cuts through the thick water.
Regulus tries to force down the wave of terror he feels as the boat slows several meters away from the island. For one horrible moment he thinks they’ll be stuck in the middle of the infernal lake forever, but the boat slowly coasts onto the shore of the small piece of land.
As he steps off of the boat, he thinks he sees a flash of something white in the water. It’s gone just as quickly as it appears, however, so he pushes it aside. At the moment, fish in the lake are the least of his worries.
The locket sits in a large stone basin, intricate runes carved around the rim and stem. It’s filled with a greenish, viscous liquid that seems to glow faintly, and Regulus sees a glimmer of something flash inside it as he approaches.
“Young Master Black must drink the potion,” Kreacher says mournfully, startling Regulus as his croaking voice penetrates the heavy silence, “but it will make him see terrible things. Terrible, terrible things.” The house elf is shaking, and Regulus feels a heavy pang of guilt for sending him off to do Voldemort’s bidding.
“Kreacher, I—” Regulus opens his mouth to speak, but Kreacher interrupts him. “Master Regulus had no choice,” he professes solemnly. “He must not feel guilty.”
Regulus disagrees, but it’s a moot point.
With trembling fingers, Kreacher hands him the large brass ladle that sits on the rim of the basin. It’s shiny enough that Regulus can see his reflection in it. He tries to ignore the dark circles under his eyes, the terrified expression on his face that he tries to school into something more dignified. You’re a Black, for Salazar’s sake, Walburga's shrill voice says in his head. Act like it.
The surface of the liquid does not ripple as Regulus dips the spoon in, but when he pulls it out there’s a perfectly drink-sized amount sitting in the bowl of the ladle.
Slowly, almost to stall more than anything, Regulus lifts it to his lips. If I don’t drink it, I can still turn back around. He won’t know. He won’t know.
And then, in the back of his mind, a voice. Not his mother’s, but Sirius’s. Coward.
Before he can think about it too much, Regulus downs the first sip. He can hear Kreacher’s horrified sound of distress, but for one moment Regulus thinks to himself that it isn’t so bad.
The pain comes in waves. It’s unlike anything Regulus has ever felt, worse than even the crucios that started coming his way once Sirius wasn’t there to take the fall for him anymore. It’s debilitating, and Regulus feels tears start to prick his eyelids as he squeezes his eyes shut tightly.
“Kreacher–” he gasps out, but the house elf understands.
Reluctantly, Kreacher pushes another ladleful of potion towards him, and Regulus swallows it quickly.
If it was debilitating before, now it’s excruciating. He sees stars, flashes of lights, and crumples to his knees as red-hot pain flashes through his body.
The ladlefuls keep coming, one after the other. Regulus is hearing voices, now. His mother’s, his father’s. Sirius’s. Voldemort’s.
You’re a failure, Walburga sneers, the words reverberating through his skull as his blood roars in his ears. Regulus digs his fingers into the ground and swallows more of the potion. He’s fairly sure Kreacher is crying now.
Regulus is crying too.
You deserve every blow that I laid upon you, Orion spits, and Regulus lets out a choked cry as pain wracks his body. Another sip, another sip.
I should have left long before. You don’t deserve my protection, you never have. Sirius’s drawl is almost casual, but the words are laced with malice. Regulus tries to fold himself smaller, and in a distant corner of his mind he can hear himself begging Kreacher to stop.
Kreacher doesn’t stop. He has orders not to, under any circumstances, but that doesn’t stop Regulus from screaming himself hoarse. “Kreacher, please!”
Images start to unfold themselves behind Regulus’s eyelids. Sirius, watching with disinterest as Orion holds Regulus under crucio. The dark mark, branded into Regulus’s forearm. Bellatrix letting out a mad cackle as Voldemort orders her to kill Regulus’s friends. Barty and Evan, staring at him with disgust. Look at what you’ve become, they say. A monster.
A heavily bearded man clad in emeralds and silver. A disappointment to my house, he says scornfully. Slytherin himself? A distant ancestor? Regulus lets out another cry of pain as he forces down another swallow of the potion.
It’s pouring rain and the entire family, Narcissa and Bellatrix and every inbred aunt and uncle, have all gathered in the living room to watch Sirius be tortured.
Except Sirius isn’t the one being tortured. Sirius is holding the wand, wearing crisp robes, with closely-cropped hair and a face devoid of any emotion.
Regulus is on the floor, screaming as his relatives watch.
“Crucio,” Sirius sighs with a languid flick of his wand, and Regulus’s screams get impossibly louder.
All his relatives are laughing now. He can hear them. “Disgusting,” growls Alphard from the crowd. “Twisted.”
“Certainly,” agrees Narcissa with a scornful curl of her lip. “A stain on the House of Black.”
“Such a pity,” coos Bellatrix, puckering her lips into a mocking pout. “To think he had such potential.”
Sirius crouches down, leaning forward to whisper in Regulus’s ear. “Please,” Regulus tries to say, but a scream forces its way out of his throat as the pain intensifies Somehow, Regulus hears Sirius’s response through his sounds of pain and the gossiping of his relatives.
“This is the least of what you deserve,” Sirius says simply, and stands once again. He says it with such conviction that Regulus doesn’t doubt him for a second.
And then Kreacher is suddenly by Regulus’s side. “Master Black!” He cries as his relatives laugh. “Master Regulus!”
Slowly, painstakingly, Regulus opens his eyes. There is no fireplace, no rain, no gathered family members crowding around him as his brother tortures him endlessly.
Regulus’s face is wet with tears. Pain rockets through him, but he manages to rise back onto his knees, shaking as wave after wave crashes over him. His throat burns with thirst, but he focuses his blurred vision long enough to see the basin in front of him.
He shoves a hand into it, not caring if it corrodes through his hand like acid. Whatever god is laughing down at Regulus grants him the small mercy of the basin being empty—Regulus must have drank it all.
His fingers close around the locket and he pulls it out, but it grows so hot to the touch that he nearly drops it back into the basin. Instead, he manages to toss it out, landing with a thud at Kreacher’s feet.
Kreacher scrambles back in terror, whimpering something that Regulus’s addled mind doesn’t understand. Regulus is thirsty.
He somehow manages to conjure water into the ladle, but it vanishes when Regulus tries to drink it. He lets out a choked cough, vision becoming more and more strained as dehydration burns through his body much faster than it should.
His hands are shaking so much that he finally drops the ladle, and that’s when he remembers the lake.
A small voice in his head warns him not to. There’s something nefarious about the lake, he remembers, but in his thirst-induced haze he can’t bring himself to remember. He lurches forward, desperate for even a drop, but Kreacher drags him back.
“Kreacher—” Regulus is clawing at the house elf, and he knows he should feel bad but now the only thing that Regulus can even think of through the pain is how badly he needs water. The thirst is almost worse than the potion, except for the hallucinations.
Kreacher lets out a whimper. “Master Regulus must forgive Kreacher,” he keens miserably, and everything goes black.
– - – - –
Familiar green light filters in through the thick drapes, illuminating the darkened room. Regulus’s eyes flicker open, and he’d be startled to see a heavily-pierced face peering over him if he wasn’t so exhausted.
“Oi, he’s awake!” Barty crows, and Regulus winces at the volume. Everything hurts. He’s not thirsty anymore, but he can feel scrapes across his palms and forearms and he can’t move his right arm. “Stay here,” Barty says with a smirk, and Regulus feels a familiar spark of irritation at his words. “Evan!”
While Barty leaves, presumably to fetch Evan, Regulus contorts himself up into a sitting position. Further inspection of his injuries shows that his hands are bandaged across the palms and knuckles. His left arm is in a swing, though he does have feeling in it.
Regulus can see the horcrux from this angle, lying in a crumple at the foot of the bed. The sight of it fills him with despair, only partly brought on by the dark magic radiating off of it in waves.
There’s no easy way out now, he reflects. Voldemort will know, surely. He’ll kill me.
The door creaks open again and Regulus’s eyes snap towards the front of the room. Kreacher, Pandora and Evan shuffle in, followed by Barty who looks unreasonably gleeful for the amount of injuries Regulus has sustained.
“So,” Evan says stonily. “Care to tell us what the fuck happened to you? The house elf won’t say a word, of course. I’m sure those were your orders.” His voice is scornful, and Regulus feels another all-too familiar stab of guilt for not telling them his plan.
If I had died in the cave, Voldemort would have tortured them for information. It was the right thing to do, he tries to reason with himself, but his subconscious doesn’t want to hear it.
“And more importantly, where’d you get that?” Barty points at the necklace, though his expression is mostly neutral. “Can we sell it? Kreacher won’t let us put it on, I tried.”
Regulus exhales slowly, trying to gauge how much he should tell them. “I don’t—” He begins, but when he looks up and meets Evan’s furious gaze he knows he has to tell them everything.
“A few months ago my mother made me attend a meeting. There was nothing special about it, except that Voldemort alluded to an orphanage in the south of the country so slightly it probably went well over everyone else’s head. He mentioned the orphanage almost intimately, so I did some research. I found some old muggle records about an incident that occurred between two students at a cave near the coast. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but then a few days ago I received correspondence from Voldemort.”
Pandora, having remained mostly silent until now, raises a dyed-blonde brow. “About?”
“He needed a house elf,” replied Regulus flatly, “and I gave him one. Kreacher only survived because I commanded him to return once he was finished. Except when he came back, the things he told me were… horrific, for one, but also borderline impossible.”
Barty toys with the ring pierced through the middle of his lip with his teeth, gesturing for Regulus to go on with a flick of his hand.
Regulus grimaces. “Voldemort had made a horcrux. At least one that I know of, possibly more. And I knew that if somehow Dumbledore and his rebels managed to kill Voldemort, he’d just come back. So I went into the cave, and Kreacher came with me. The horcrux was in the middle of this lake, and I had to drink a potion to get it. The potion made me hallucinate.” He grimaces, remembering the twisted image his mind had cooked up of Sirius. Their family life had never been good, but at least Sirius hadn’t tortured him for fun as their relatives watched. “It… wasn’t fun, let’s put it that way.”
“You were thirsty,” Pandora says gently, and Evan’s hostile expression smooths slightly at her words. They all have something of a soft spot for her, and her ability to defuse any situation is a big part of the reason they’re still friends after seven years. “That’s why you’re all bandaged up. Kreacher had to knock you out, you were so desperate to drink water from the lake.”
“Kreacher is very sorry,” Kreacher agrees mournfully from his position on the floor, crouched as if expecting a punishment or benediction. “But the hands would have taken Master Regulus, and Kreacher could not let that happen.”
Regulus doesn’t have the mental energy to decipher what that’s supposed to mean. Instead he just nods wearily, turning back to his friends. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I would have if I thought it was safe.”
Everyone’s eyes drop to Evan’s forearm where the dark mark sits branded into his flesh, an unwanted tattoo that he’ll never be free of.
Regulus has it too. Does Barty have the mark? He doesn’t know, and in truth he doesn’t want to know.
Evan swallows harshly. “Okay,” he finally says, and a small weight is lifted from Regulus’s shoulders at his forgiveness.
Barty tilts his head, squinting slightly as he thinks through what Regulus has just revealed. “You said he’s made more? How many?”
Regulus shrugs. “This is Voldemort we’re talking about. He’s one of if not the strongest dark wizard of our time—he wouldn’t just stop at one. He’d be paranoid, he’d want contingency plans on top of contingency plans.” He glances at the locket with no little contempt. “And given from the fact that this is Salazar Slytherin’s locket, they’ve got to be the most ostentatious ones possible, of course.”
“Of course,” echoes Pandora with a thoughtful expression on her face. “Do you think Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem would be one of them?”
Barty smirks. “Sure, if Voldemort took a time-turner and found it before it got lost. Although,” he says, looking appraisingly at the locket, “I wouldn’t put it past him.”
“Well, it clearly isn’t impossible to find, since I know where it is.” Pandora says it not flatly, but without any real emphasis on the words like she doesn’t think it’s important.
The silence speaks for all of them. Finally, Evan manages to choke out, “You know where it is?”
Pandora nods serenely, looking entirely untroubled by the revelation. “Mm. In the Come and Go room. I’ve put it on once or twice; it’s pretty but it makes me feel upset when I wear it.”
Evan and Regulus exchange a glance; after the childhood they had, they were both experts in the dark arts. “That would fit the criteria for a horcrux,” Evan says slowly.
Barty grimaces. “So we now know where two of them are. Regulus obviously can’t stay here—it’s not safe for anyone, especially with the Death Eaters doing surprise inspections of the castle.”
‘Surprise inspection’ is how the small group refers to the fact that Death Eaters will show up unannounced and demand to see their child at once, usually taking the longest way through the castle. It’s common knowledge that they’re reporting any suspicious activity back to Voldemort, but Dumbledore is powerless to stop them simply because their children are students at the school.
Regulus tries to lean forward, but his ribs ache in protest and he lets out a soft hiss of discomfort. “I was never planning on graduating,” he says simply. “One way or another I was going to leave. This has just… accelerated things.”
“Voldemort isn’t a fool,” Pandora cautions. “You can’t show up at your family home and pledge yourself to the cause with two months left in the school year and not expect him to ask questions.”
Regulus doesn’t speak up, but Evan realizes what he means. He was always the smart one. “You’re not going to join Voldemort. You’re going to cross him, aren’t you?”
“I’ve never supported him, Evan. You know that.” Regulus snaps. “I was always going to die—he was going to discover I wasn’t fully committed, and he was going to kill me.”
Evan curls his lip. “You think I support him? You think I wanted this?” He rolls up his sleeve, displaying the tattoo.
Barty reaches a hand out placatingly, and Evan stills immediately.
“It’s not his fault, Evan. It’s not anybody’s fault but Voldemort himself. And maybe my father,” Barty adds with a bitter twist to his mouth. “He wasn’t calling you a supporter, but right now the focus is getting Regulus out of the castle. Until we know what to do, we probably shouldn’t get the diadem—having one horcrux in the dorm is bad enough, but having two would make this place unbearable.”
Pandora purses her lips. “We could always put the locket in the Come and Go room for the time being. Should we go to Dumbledore? The man is absolutely two-faced, but if anyone would know what to do it’s him.”
“There is no ‘we’,” Regulus says a bit sharper than he intended. “You’re not getting involved. None of you are. This is my problem.”
“Fuck off,” Evan says, but there’s no bite to it. “If you really believed that, you wouldn’t have told us in the first place.”
Despite himself, Regulus grins.
Barty claps his hands together. “Well then, now that that’s settled. What next?”
“I trust Dumbledore about as far as I can throw him. Odds are he’s the only one who can destroy them, but I’d like to exhaust any other options first.”
There’s a heavy silence. Pandora is the one to break it. “You could always owl your brother.”
“Absolutely not.”
– - – - –
“Dear Sirius,” Barty drawls, lounging on his bed with a piece of parchment propped up on his leg. Evan watches him with interest, twirling a cigarette between his fingers. “I am in dire need of your assistance. I, being a poor sickly Victorian child with unpredictable health, have landed myself in the most ghastly situation imaginable.”
“Do you even know what ghastly means?” Evan asks, only half joking.
Barty’s eyes drop to the cigarette, his eyes darkening for the barest moment before a smirk breaks out across his features. “Does it matter?” He clears his throat. “Your correspondence is required most urgently. Much love, your darling fuzzywuzzykins, Regulus.”
“You’re a tosser,” Evan says, though the corners of his lips twitch up in a grin. “Give me that.”
Barty hands him the paper, and Evan tries to focus on writing and not the way that their hands brushed for a fraction of a second. It doesn’t work.
“Sirius,” Evan muses as he writes, “Regulus is in trouble. Get him out. Rosier.”
Barty lets out a mock-offended gasp. “And Crouch!”
Evan rolls his eyes, but it’s a fond gesture. Through the cigarette that’s now in his mouth, he adds, “Like you did anything.”
“I’ll have you know I’m actually the mastermind behind the whole thing,” Barty says with a haughty sniff. “This is all going according to my master plan.”
“Right,” Evan says drily, wordlessly lighting the cigarette and taking a long drag. Barty watches him, a strange expression crossing his features, before he leans forward and tugs the cigarette gently out of Evan’s mouth.
“Those things will kill you, you know,” Barty says before taking a drag of his own.
Evan would laugh if he wasn’t so wrapped up in the way Barty’s piercing gleans in his lip even through the haze of smoke around his face. Probably.