Chapter 2
“Give me one good reason not to kill you right now.”
Dorcas looks the maddest he’s ever seen her and she’s straddling him with a knife to his throat.
Icarus can’t say anything. Sure, Dorcas is threatening to kill him, but many have before. He has never deserved to get out of it like he always does.
Dorcas looks to be in worse shape than even him. She’s bleeding, bandaged, and broken-boned all over. The scar on the side of her neck and cheek, it looks like a mix of a lightning strike and spider veins. He doesn’t know what that’s from.
“I will give you five seconds.”
She doesn’t look very different from the last time Regulus saw her, but the glaring difference is all of
her scars. He recognizes some of them as signature scars of certain dark spells, ones that he was taught. One scar he sees, it’s a pitch black scar lining the edge of her jaw. The spell is supposed to bleed you dry and drain from there.
“Five.”
Regulus knows this because he taught the death eaters that spell.
“Four.”
As always, his past is dragging like a dead body behind him with a snail-slime trail of guilt and regrets. But this time the dead body was his best friend.
“Three.”
Most of the wounds aren’t even healed, they’re fresh. Icarus knows he should expect that, Dorcas died in a war after all, but he was still holding onto his demented fantasy that nothing he could’ve done could’ve saved her. Or could’ve saved any of them, really. He doesn’t want that guilt on his shoulders, but he knows it will be there either way.
“Two.”
He’s almost certain the spell he taught them didn’t directly cause her death, but, based on how healed it is, he does know for a fact it was a big part of it.
“One.”
Regulus deserves this death.
He blinks away tears.
She does as well.
Dorcas slits his throat.
—
Death is lying sideways on the air in front of him. Regulus hears the crashing of waves outside the cave, and the deafening silence within it, and the children giggling next to their sandcastles, and seagulls yelping, and Kreacher crying. The sounds of summer visits to the French coasts before Bella went mad and Andy got disowned. The sounds of splashing in the Black Lake with his bestfriends before everything went wrong. The sounds of walking to his own fated doom. It is all of these things at once and Regulus doesn’t know how Death’s embrace can be so comforting and so petrifying all at once.
“Back so soon?” Death asks. Regulus looks at Apollo, his eyes the same as Pandora’s and still reminiscent of grim, disaster-prophesying skies. Icarus does not answer. He thinks it’s possible to speak in the Veil, but this is the second time he’s been killed in what (in his perspective) has barely been more than a day.
Death looks at his tired, sunken, and undeniably dead eyes. “You three are Luna’s pet project. I’d like it if you got along.”
Regulus stays silent. He’d like that too.
The being sighs, his breath ray of sunshine from bright blue and white suns. It feels like dread and doom and it smells like moldy rot. Icarus flinches back.
“Lady Magic will heal your wounds and then I will resurrect you,” He says before phasing backwards.
Someone Regulus can only assume is Lady Magic appears in front of him. If Death is the sun and water, She is the moon and fire. Her presence feels like trying to do wandless magic with Sirius under the covers before Hogwarts. Sure, there’s an undertone of the curses his parents had thrown at him (the curses his colleagues had thrown at Dorcas), but mostly She feels like curling up in front of the Slytherin common room fireplaces with his friends. Mostly She feels like the escape of Quidditch and sweeping throughout the air with Dorcas. Mostly She feels like whispering “I think I’ll finally be okay” to the moon in a pitiful moment of hope for the future.
Regulus feels his throat get all tight, and his eyes water, and his lower lip shakes. He tries to hold it in but soon he is gasping for air and weeping. He knows how to deal with anger and silence but he unravels at the first hint of love.
He does not like showing weakness, but he is dead, and he is so, so tired, and he has to go back to the life where his bestfriend killed him.
Lady Magic envelopes Icarus, hugging and blanketing him in the feeling of a desperate hope, an unprecedentedly powerful (but not enough, never enough to combat Them fully) defense against Fate. Icarus is shaking and shivering within Her ‘arms’ and he can feel Her sewing him up with tendrils of Herself.
She reminds him of the times his own magic defended him with the hope already destroyed in his conscious mind. When his magic curled around him like an ice cold but still searingly hot embrace, a poor imagining of a motherly hug by a pitiful little boy who had never known such comfort.
An encasing of light appears around him and he can tell She read his mind and responded. But the intrusion doesn’t feel like when Bellatrix ripped into his mind and laughed at it while teaching him occlumency. No, it feels like pacing before the Come and Go Room as it alters to his every need.
She rocks him back and forth and envelopes Regulus with healing. She rocks him back and forth and heals him like he has had to do himself so many times before. Her tendrils of Herself reach up to cradle his face and dry his tears.
Icarus’ throat and stomach is almost sewn up, he knows. He knows he will have to go back. He will have to back to the Dorcas who killed him, and back to the Evan who either didn’t get resurrected (and never will) or who was also killed again by their bestfriend. He will have to go back to the Pandora who he will never know again, and back to his goddaughter that he failed.
Oh stars, Regulus hopes she doesn’t see his dead body.
Lady Magic slithers away and retracts Her tendrils back into Her core. Icarus wishes he could stay here. Icarus wishes he could stay in the arms of comfort.
“I do not hope to see you here again soon,” Death says, and Regulus is alive again with none of his wishes granted.
—
Icarus is woken up abruptly and not particularly how he’d like to be woken up (which seems to be par for the course by now), by an overwhelming burst of magic and sound.
He flinches, hard, and scrambles to cover his ears. Regulus just had literal Magic personified sewing up his throat, so he seems to be especially sensitive to Her now. Which means this really isn’t his favorite time to be around an absurdly powerful accidental magic incident.
“…KILLED THEM!” Regulus only hears the tail end of the sentence. Luna then descends into incomprehensible yelling, screeching, and sobbing. He looks around to find most of the foliage that was previously there is rotted dead and there are new towering pines. The overhanging of leaves block out nearly all the light, but Regulus can see enough to see Dorcas in the air backed up against a tree.
“Luna-“ Icarus says it all croak-like before descending into a coughing fit. He clearly didn’t say it loud enough because Luna is still on a rampage, all the forest floor plants continually rotting before being renewed with foliage and continuing the cycle.
“Luna!” he yells, louder this time. On his periphery he see Dorcas, terrified out of her mind. He’s sorry for scaring her. She just killed him, and he’s sorry for her. He averts his gaze.
“LUNA!” Icarus screams it this time, and staggers over to her. When she sees him, her eyes shiny with tears that are still flowing, the cycle that is making the ground grow higher and higher stops. The leaves stop decaying, already half-dead, and Dorcas is released back on the ground.
His goddaughter runs to him, and her run-and-leap hug knocks him to the ground. The forest floor is now more like a pile of raked leaves than anything else, so it’s not that big of a problem.
He takes a moment to breathe. Regulus opens his eyes, and he sees Dorcas looking at him (with all very identifiable emotions, but far too many to list)- and she runs away. Dorcas looks at Regulus and Evan with crazed eyes before turning tail and running. Icarus doesn’t know if she’ll be back.
She runs and trips and keeps running.
Luna is still crying into his shoulder.
Evan is silent.
Regulus is just so, so tired.
He hopes Pandora would be proud of him.
“Where’s Barty?” Regulus hears Evan’s voice, falsely calm. Icarus does not know the true answer to that, but in the silence following his question they both reach the same resolution.
Barty is in Azkaban.
They knew it was coming, really. Out of them all, Barty was always the most likely to get caught. Whether by his rapidly declining mental state, or his boasting, or pigheadedness, it was always something.
Regulus knows Barty deserved it, but he hugs Luna tighter and cries for him anyway.
It’s possible he’s dead like Pandora is, but knowing Barty, it’s obvious which is more likely. Icarus selfishly hopes he did something bad enough to get the small mercy of a Kiss rather than a life sentence.