Prologue
When he was born, they rejoiced. They already had a boy, the eldest, for an heir. Now they had a girl to marry off, to keep the family ties. The perfect set.
Or so they thought.
He’d known from the start that he was different. Not in the way that Sirius was, but in a way that he’d spent so long denying, yet cradling in the deepest corners of his heart, unable to let it die.
What he hadn’t understood to begin with was that it wasn’t the kind of different his parents wanted. They never wanted different to begin with, but this was something else. Something much bigger than idiocy or intelligence or rebelliousness that set him apart.
He’d grown up with this feeling, knotted in his chest, and knew that he could never speak of it. Sometimes it made him proud, to know he was different to what his parents wanted him to be, but other times it scared him. What if I’m just unloveable? What if there’s just something wrong with me?
The days that it was the worst, though, were the days when he thought he couldn’t take it any longer. When he thought he was going to snap, one way or another, just like his parents did with the stick. Sometimes, he thought about taking his mother’s sleeping pills while in the bathtub and just letting it happen. Others, he thought about screaming at his parents, telling them the truth, tearing his dresses to shreds, and running, as far as he could possibly go. It scared him, how close he was sometimes.
But he never did. He just sat in the corner, lips sealed, praying to get through each day.
After all, he was just Regulus Black.