The Green Lion, Amesbury
"Oh, come on," Reg protested. "All right, I know your dad's a bit… hard, but he just wants what he thinks is best for you. It's not his fault he's, er, not very imaginative, is it?"
His companion rolled his eyes. "No, Reg, your mum just wants what she thinks is best for you, and she's not very imaginative."
Reg sort of wanted to give a very long list of examples to prove how wrong that was, but since he knew perfectly well that his old yearmate, in saying Mother wasn't imaginative, hadn't been talking about Disciplinary Ideas That Might Work On Sirius, all it would prove was that Reg had been spending too much time with Severus. Of course, since his friend had been a Ravenclaw, he might not judge Reg too much for it or even think he ought to mind being corrected if it meant he learned something, but still, embarrassing. And not something he should know anyway.
"My father wants what's best for his career," he concluded, not noticing Reg's you're-off-track twitch, with a chuckle that was trying to be airy and didn't come close.
And because Reg had spent too much time at school with Evan and Narcissa and Spike, he said, a bit apologetically, "Um, if you were trying to pretend that was a joke, it still came out sort of bitter, Barty."
Then he had to smile, because that won him a cockeyed are you kidding me look that he hadn't thought to miss in years. It was the kind he and Evvie and Cissa had got so often from Spike at the start, before he'd been Spike, in the winter and spring of Reggie's first year when Getting Snape Respectable Enough To Be Seen With had first started to be a family project.
Severus had largely been on board with it. In fact, when it wasn't too close to exams he could usually be convinced to read out one's textbooks in exchange for having his accent corrected while he did it. But every so often they'd run into something like Narcissa telling him to bow when he thought he was supposed to shake hands, or Evan telling him he'd been tying his laces like a girl (he'd tried, in a blindingly obvious attempt to save face, to convince Narcissa to take offense at the suggestion that it was a bad thing, but she'd told him not to be silly, it was breaking established rules that everyone else knew about for no better reason than ignorance that was the bad thing, and he'd shut up for once, worryingly thoughtful), or absolutely everyone insisting they'd never heard of his precious 'Oh-ee-dee,' and he'd be absolutely sure they were putting him on.
Barty's look, though, came with a distinct flavor of what is wrong with you, so Reg explained, "Well, if you want people to believe you. I mean, if you sound bitter they'll think you're complaining, and then they'll think you're exaggerating."
"Reggie," Barty said, in a tone of strained patience. "I'm not going to try to undermine the head of the DMLE just because he happens to be my father the complete wanker."
"Well, okay," Reg said, "but shouldn't you know that kind of thing if you're going to be an Auror?" It was as close as he meant to come to asking if Barty was deliberately sabotaging his own training.
He could quite see both why Barty's father wanted his son in a profession that had a really good combination of cachet, respectability, the potential for glory, and, at the higher levels, access to not just anyone they wanted but very nearly any records. He could see why Voldemort wanted someone who'd been working with Bella long enough to either catch fanatical loyalty or get too scared to think about backing out to infiltrate the MLE, too, especially when that someone had the family ties to get in without anyone blinking at it. But he did rather wonder about why Barty had cooperated with Mr. Crouch, since he'd already been in training when Voldemort had chosen to make it known to him how pleased at Barty's position the wizard was, and that had been long before he'd swapped Barty in for Reg in Bella's, er, team.
He would have understood Barty's wanting to work in the Department of Mysteries, or at St. Mungo's in a research capacity like Spike. 'Auror' didn't say 'Barty' to him. Okay, Barty wasn't as anxious as Reg knew himself to be when his father wasn't involved, but Auror was the kind of job that Gryffs who liked to jump out at people got enthusiastic about. And, okay, according to Bella Barty was doing a better job for her than he had (with the implication that a sick puffskein would also have done better. Reg hadn't said it would have had to be a very sick puffskein indeed, and since she'd just kept sneering at him and hadn't got angry or offended, he must have kept the thought out of his eyes, too), but surely turning out to be good at violence didn't mean you'd always secretly wanted to seek out confrontations?
"Well, no one but you seems to think so, Reggie," Barty said, giving him a sometimes I really wonder about you eyebrow.
Reg gave him one back. "And when was the last time there were any Slytherin Aurors to even think about it?" Not bothering to make Barty answer that one, he asked, "But what I really want to know is, okay, that's not a good reason to undermine the head of the DMLE, but haven't you got one?"
"…Have I?"
"We don't exactly want someone competent in that office, do we? Not right now."
"Well, I'm glad to hear you say 'we,' anyway," Barty said sardonically. "Since we haven't seen much of you lately."
"I don't know what you've been told," Reg replied, leaning back and sipping his butterbeer, "but since the whole reason you're part of that 'we' in the first place was to free me up to do other things, don't you think that's only natural?"
Barty reared back, stung.
"Oh, well," Reg kind-of-backtracked at once in a placating sort of way, pecking order established, "I don't mean 'we' generally, you understand, just, you know, what you meant about seeing much of me. It was just the family there until he wanted me to do something else, and then he thought of you."
Barty's dishwater-brown eyes went round. "He thought of me, himself?"
Reggie confirmed this, as it was true, and drank his butterbeer with a tired sort of feeling instead of spoiling Barty's pleasure. It was mean and small, but if Barty only felt honored about helping Bella make people disappear, if it wasn't hurting him and making him sick, then it wasn't hurting him. Was it? And if he wanted it, he'd fight to keep it, and then maybe Reg wouldn't have to go back.
And if he felt just a little bit more entitled to think that way than he had before he'd heard the news from Dye-Urn… well, feeling differently wouldn't do him any good. Or, actually, anyone else: he had to look out for himself, now.
After he thought Barty had silently cuddled the thought of being personally chosen for long enough, though, he asked, "Are you having trouble keeping up with Bella? It's, er, not for everyone."
He thought for a split second that he could feel the hungry silk of his red scarf slipping away from his fingers again, hear the ghost of a desperate, terrified gurgle, smell things he didn't want to. But the scarf was, of course, at home, in his drawer, in a very secure box he'd transfigured into a set of rather dully ugly winter socks. He ought to put it in his vault, since Bella would take it amiss if he burned it.
Barty shrugged. "It does take some getting used to," he admitted, "but, well, you didn't take Muggle Studies, did you?"
"I thought about it," Reg said. "Bella was pro-Dominance in those days, so I thought we ought to know about them. And I had this moment of insanity where I felt like somebody ought to be responsible for Gildy not failing out of school."
Barty left that one alone, for which Reg, in retrospect, was rather grateful. "Well, half of Auror training is about keeping alert, but they've already got ways to do it without being at the place they want to look at, or when they want to look at it, and they keep tinkering. And they've got these… sort of like libraries, I don't know how to describe it, but it's giving them really good memories. I mean, not each person, and not exactly like a penseive, but like a really efficient library where people can find what they're looking for really fast. And not whole books or scrolls they have to look through, just one piece of information at a time, or lists of things like 'residents of Kent.' You ask your crazy friend if he knows about video cameras and computers and databases."
Reg frowned. "Bast didn't take Muggle Studies either."
Barty rolled his eyes again. "I meant Snape," he said, in a tone that added, obviously.
Regulus was heartily glad that Barty was a Ravenclaw, because he could count on one hand the number of Slytherins he knew who wouldn't have already been subtly blackmailing him with the implication that his assumption would get back to Rabastan, whether or not they had any intention of following through or even meant him to seriously think they did. None of the ones who wouldn't had a twentieth of Barty's brains.
He should have remembered that people who didn't know Rabastan and Gilderoy really, really well did think Spike was his craziest friend, but he couldn't stop remembering what Bast had said he'd done to get cursed and earn his public punishment, or that Bast had clearly only been giving lip service to the notion that he'd made any mistakes at all and not just been unlucky.
Shaking off the chills that story had given him, and the further chills he'd had at realizing he wasn't tough enough even after all those nights with Bella and her in-laws that his friends couldn't still shock and sicken him, he shrugged, "If Snape's crazy, so's your Reflexes and Assessment master."
"Moody is crazy," Barty assured him fervently. "He told six perfect strangers last week alone they were going to blow their buttocks off if they were too cheap to spring for wand-holsters. Mostly stopped them in the lunch queue and spoiled their appetites."
"See? Even Snape's not that crazy—he waits till he knows you to fuss." The example made him smile privately; Spike had had a decent hip-holster and wrist-sheath years before he'd been willing to spend his silver on anything else but books and potions stuff, and he'd gotten the wrist-sheath after Narcissa had already decided to be his friend and started nagging him about the importance of good shoes. And Narcissa could nag.
"Anyway, see if he can tell you," Barty said, waving a hand to dismiss Severus. "My point is, it's quite possible that no one will have to break the Statute of Secrecy to make our world impossible to hide. I think we're okay for now, but they keep tinkering, and we don't."
Reg stared at him. "You don't think we're going to have witch-burnings again?" he hoped.
"No-o-o," Barty said slowly. "As far as I can make out, they think magic is shiny and cute with unicorns you can ride and talking dragons that are more interested in snoozing on piles of gold than eating anything bigger than a sheep, and a witch that's real is someone who, I don't know, has some kind of weird relationship with crystals and probably eats a lot of yoghurt."
"A lot of what?"
"Don't ask."
Reggie looked at him dubiously, but kept getting the don't-ask look. He'd ask Spike about that, later, too. "What are you so worried about, then?"
Barty sighed. "Well, we're not like that, are we? —Well, Nanny Carrie is, a bit, or at least she'll talk your ear off about amulets if you give her half a chance."
And medieval chromamancy, Reg remembered now he mentioned it, which was probably why she'd thought Evan was so sweet.
"But mostly we're not, and even she'd hex anyone who came anywhere near her with yoghurt into a string of sausages. So once they work that out, they'll start reacting like muggles always do once they find out they have a wizard in the family, on a bigger scale, won't they? And, honestly, Reg, that doesn't always go half as badly as your lot thinks it does, but it's always difficult."
He hummed noncommittally.
"But that's not even the main thing," Barty said. "Even if there isn't some huge popular uprising… well, we're living in the same country, sometimes on the same streets, under the same queen, but not under the same government. And we don't have the same sets of laws. Really at all. According to Father, they have… a lot. Really a lot. Very complicated. And, you realize, they don't need as much security when they want to send a muggle to prison. You can just put a muggle behind bars and he's stuck, end of story, jobberknoll has sung. So they use that more than we do as a punishment, in a much more complicated way, and for much more minor things. If the wizarding world even got a sniff of the idea that Muggle standards were going to be applied when it comes to who goes to Azkaban, that'd put us into open revolt all by itself, even if up to then everyone had been completely happy about the idea of coming together into a one-layer nation."
He looked at Reg meaningfully. Reg did his best to just look back with his best well-go-on face, because he wasn't going to be cowed by Barty, or even Barty's awful ghost stories. His next sip of butterbeer was an uncomfortable one, though, and not really taken in appreciation of the flavor.
Sighing again, Barty explained, "It'd take a miracle to avoid war with them in our lifetime, Reggie. Your cousins are, er, a bit overenthusiastic, and I can't say I quite understand their attitude. It's no good being missish, though. Better to be ready when the time comes. He understands that," he added, eyes glowing a little.
"Well, of course he does," Reg said with a bland little smile that Barty took, as intended, as complicity. Not that Reg had any idea whether Voldemort knew about the things Barty was talking about, specifically. But he was, by now, convinced that the man knew more about muggles and from closer-to than he was admitting. "Maybe he's going to be putting everyone through Bella's training, so we all get used to the idea, before he puts us to our real work," he proposed.
Barty made a huh noise. "That's a thought," he said. "Why do you say that?"
"Well, because they started with us," he explained. "That is, you and me. No offense, but you're a Ravenclaw, and I hated it, and Bella's known me long enough to know it'd be hard for me, and everyone tends to think Slytherin's the only House that's willing to get our hands dirty."
"Which is ridiculous," Barty said drily. "Huffies will do anything for a friend, Gryffs will do anything for a cause, and our House has been known to put out the occasional chickie who's a lot more interested in the experiment than the ethics of the experimental procedures."
Reg grinned at him. "You sound like Snape."
"Yeah, well, Snape probably thinks ghosts are dangerous," Barty rolled his eyes.
"Actually, he thinks Binns is destroying the world," Reg admitted, and they laughed. "Anyway, they probably think if Bella can get us ready for combat, everyone else will be easy."
"I feel less honored now," Barty said drily.
"Well, you're probably impressing her more than I did, if that helps," he offered, going for disarming humbly honest flattery. "It's really not my thing."
"Maybe they're waiting for a model student to announce the initiative," mused Barty, eyes lighting.
"Could be," he allowed, and carefully didn't roll his eyes, taking another sip of butterbeer instead. The muggles, he reminded himself, were going to die anyway: there was no point in feeling badly about making Barty more enthusiastic. "Listen, talking of Bella, she's a little disgusted with me since, you know, so I didn't want to ask her myself, but something occurred to me and now I'm worried about him."
Barty blinked. "Well, she doesn't like Snape," he said judiciously, "but I haven't heard her rant about him especially, lately, if that's what you want to know."
"No," he explained with emphasis, "I'm worried about Him."
"Oh!" Worried now, too, "Why?"
"Well, I was talking to Evan, and it occurred to me to wonder whether he's had a portrait done. I mean, I've never heard of one, have you? And no one knows who his family is. So we really have no idea if he's taken care of, in case something happens, do we?"
Looking surprised, Barty agreed, "I suppose not. But I'm sure he does, Reg. There isn't a pureblood mother alive—"
"I don't think he has," Reg said flatly. "I've been thinking about it, Barty. Because Evan didn't know. Barty, my Uncle Darius is one of us. It's not like me and my parents or Bella and hers, with Evan and his dad. Ours aren't getting in the way, but you can kind of tell they wish we hadn't gotten involved. I get this sense my parents and Granddad don't like our Lord, personally. I mean, they don't like him as a person, even when they like what he's for. But Uncle Darius is his friend. They've been close forever. Uncle doesn't talk about it much, he doesn't brag, but if you ever watch them together, you can tell. They're comfortable with each other. And I know he doesn't have as much of a reputation in England as a painter and a portraitist as the Rose & Yew artists who don't travel as much, but he's got one internationally, Barty, he's good."
A side of his mouth tugged up. "Sorry, I've got to use a Spike expression here; I just don't know how else to say this—Barty, it beggars belief that our Lord would have gone to anyone but Uncle for a portrait. It just wouldn't make any sense."
Barty had been nodding along thoughtfully, sipping his own pint. "I'm with you so far," he said. "But I don't see that Rosier would know just because his father got the commission. I never got the impression they were especially close."
"They're not close," Reg agreed, "but it's probably not the kind of not-close you're thinking of. They just… never saw each other much. Evan knows his dad's proud of him, though. I mean, Uncle Darius wouldn't have told him about doing a particular portrait if he wasn't supposed to, but I'll bet you anything he would have made sure Evan found out."
Barty gave him a cockeyed look over the rim of his glass. The lager made his eyes look washed out, but then most things made Barty look washed out. It probably made his Concealment and Disguise master weep tears of joy, and his Command and Intimidation master despair.
"Well, it's like how he made sure Evan would join when he grew up," he explained. "He wasn't going to tell a little kid about it, obviously, but he sort of gave Evan the wink and the nod about eavesdropping on conversations he officially shouldn't have. So Evan knew what was what, and he knew it was a secret, and he knew his dad wanted him to be part of it. They don't tell each other things, but… Uncle Darius would have been really proud, Barty. And he's proud of Evan. He'd have wanted him to know."
Seeing Barty's face, he scoffed, "Don't look like that. What did I just say? Our Lord's known Uncle Darius forever. He trusts his judgment, or they wouldn't be close."
"Yeah, but maybe knowing him forever means he knows Master Rosier would let your cousin know and he doesn't want that," Barty pointed out.
Scoffing some more, Reg asked, "Why not? If a dad wants to hint at his kid that he's done something amazing, that doesn't mean he's going to give him the keys to the vault. Even if Uncle knew where the portrait was kept after it was painted, and why would he? That's not a portraitist's business, unless the client makes special arrangements, and I'm sure he's got better security than anyone. And, like you said, having a portrait isn't exactly unusual. It's not as if it would be some great secret that he had one. Everyone has one! The only secret would be about where it is, and I'm certainly not asking about that! I just want to make certain, because it's weird that Evan doesn't know for sure. So could you just tell Bella I'd feel better if I knew he was safe? I know she'd want to know for sure, too."
"She'd want to make him show it to her so she could snog it," Barty drawled. Reg scowled at him. He got an I work with Alastor Moody and you're not intimidating look, but Barty sighed, "Fine, I'll ask her."
"Thanks," he smiled. "Do you want me to ask Narcissa to have your mum over for tea?"
Barty looked at him as though he'd just thrown a Quaffle into the stands in the middle of a game. "Why would you do that?"
"Well, so your mum would know she ought to have a word with your father."
The look did not alter. "What do you mean, have a word with him?"
They stared at each other, stymied. "Well, I don't know," Reg said finally, "just… whatever she does. Other People's Marriages: You Will Never Have Enough Context To Understand. It's a rule."
"Whatever she does?" Barty asked, mystified.
They stared at each other some more. Finally, Reg sighed. "In your training, is there something you're especially good at?" When Barty looked a little shifty, he said drily, "Right. Is that teacher afraid of your father?"
Just as dry, Barty informed him, "Reggie, the thing about people who have jobs is, usually they don't have them just for fun, but because they need money."
"Why?" Reg asked disingenuously. "Didn't they pay attention in Charms?" He beamed, having caught Barty in mid-drink and made him snort bubbles into his lager.
Barty peered at him cautiously. He widened his eyes, shining innocent inquiry. "You are kidding," Barty half-asked, caught on the wary line between certainty and hopelessness.
He laughed. "Barty, you realize, when it's a family like mine, 'heir' is a job, do you? It's sort of a short way to say 'steward and junior bookkeeper.' Just because it's my parents I'm getting room and board and vault-access from doesn't mean I don't earn them. The only reason Evvie gets to live in London and not be bothered with all the accounts is he's still only third in line. The prat," he added ruefully.
Not because Evan's Rosier grandfather was still acting as Head of his family. Reg was happy for Ev, that his Grandpère still felt up to running the family as well as the family business. You didn't have to be jealous of someone just because you would have liked to be in shoes like theirs, when they weren't taking anything away from you.
No, it was because everyone who knew Evan knew perfectly well that even once he became the Rosier heir, Spike would growl and snatch all the paperwork away from him after about a minute and a half of watching him look sadly at it with the quill drooping between his fingers. Evan first and foremost. The prat.
Barty relaxed, and raised his eyebrows drolly. "No wonder your brother skipped out. I can't see him bent over a ledger for longer than about thirty seconds at a time."
"Try two," Reg agreed sourly. "But, look, is that teacher so afraid of your father they wouldn't be able to tell him, 'Barty has enough potential in my subject that I want to take up his time making him specialize?'"
He blinked. "I don't know."
"Okay," Reg said, taking pity. "Don't worry about it, I'll talk to Cissa."
Looking annoyed, Barty asked, "Does everything come down to talking to Narcissa Malfoy with you?"
"Well, mostly," he explained, "because when it doesn't, she goes and tells Evan or Lucius to do it, or asks her mum, and then if none of them gets anywhere we—well, we used to save Bella for the last resort, but these days it's hard to think of anyone who could possibly deserve making her mad at them. So now we tell a house elf to make popcorn and then give Snape a red quill and tell him what the poor sod spelled wrong."
Barty squinted at him. "For a Slytherin, Reg, your world sounds improbably simple sometimes."
"'Deceptively,'" Reg said glumly. "The word you wanted was 'deceptively.'"
He really, really hoped Bella would come back and say Of course our Lord has a portrait, I've seen it, it's beautiful. If Voldemort had prepared for his death like a normal wizard, then maybe, just maybe he wasn't pursuing immortality research. Reg really hoped so. Immortality research never ended well, according to Madam Bagshot.
But he'd gone to Borgin and Burke's, and Judocus Borgin had been only too happy to be persuadable on the subject of leaving that nice young Regulus Black alone in his back room to look for a present for the esteemed Walburga Black. Quite alone, with all his really good stuff and also, coincidentally and unimportantly, his forty-year-old books. It hadn't even been nearly as much of a bribe as Reg had been prepared to pay, but of course he had said it was for his mother, and no one especially wanted to be on her bad side.*
Reg wasn't exactly sure yet what he should be worrying about, specifically, because there were all sorts of nasty ways wizards had tried, over the centuries, to turn other people's lives into more life for themselves.
Nothing in Reg's library involved the kind of slow life-sucking he'd started to panic over when he'd realized the pattern behind the sites that Borgin and Burke's young acquisitions clerk had dawdled over and dwelled on and found excuses to re-visit, the items Riddle hadn't managed to buy, whose owners had died around the times of his last visit—but never too close, never too close. Reg hadn't found anything that involved any variants on the Protean charm, either. But then, that didn't mean the Dark Mark wasn't doing something Voldemort had made up himself.
If Madam Bagshort was right, then whether Riddle was a pureblood or not, he was certainly muggle-raised and his mother had never had the chance to have him painted, even as a child. Not that anyone wanted to live a whole life and wake in paint after death with an adult's memories and only a child's face to show, let alone a baby's, but it would still be better—safer—than the nothing that Riddle had been given by a mother who'd barely lived long enough to even give him life.
But that nobody from nowhere had vanished into nothing, and years later Voldemort had come to England out of Europe. Looking a bit melty, which nobody commented on, even though everybody knew that the only thing that changed a person's appearance subtly, unpredictably, and slowly, while making them happy about it (typically, according to what Reg had read, what the wizards would say about it was either 'this might look odd but it means I'm doing something right, mustn't stop in the middle,' or 'I'm becoming better than I was/the weaklings around me'), was serious, serious dark magic.
He'd come out of Europe, which was where Evvie and Spike were going, and going very soon. But asking after Voldemort's past, his beginnings, his researches, his experiments… not safe. Not smart. And they'd do it if Reg asked them to. They'd do it if he even let them know there was a question. Not even for him, but because Spike's extremely noticeable nose had obviously been plastered on his clever face as a warning to everyone that he was going to stick it in everywhere, he just was.
But maybe Bella would come back and hug him and say, Oh, Reggie, it's so sweet of you to worry about our Lord, I knew you cared even if you are more of a sissy than Cissy, but you don't have to worry, he's got about twelve portraits locked away safely, I've seen them.
Maybe.
At least, either way, since Barty was legitimately too proud to tell him which teacher to lean on, he had an excuse to tell Lucius and Narcissa to get the whole Auror training corps complaining about how Crouch was interfering with their recruits and treating his son-who-was-not-complaining. He didn't have the kind of connections to do it himself, but Cissa would make sure he got credit for the idea. And being pleased with him over starting trouble in the DMLE should keep Voldemort from thinking to wonder whether Reg's worry over his afterlife could have any ulterior motive.
He hoped. After all, that was the sort of thing he'd been told to do, but it wouldn't be some great and glorious success that would attract attention to him and win him another, harder task. It should just make Voldemort think Bella's weak cousin was gamely doing his best and was now slightly better placed to be of some slight use in stirring up the sort of atmosphere Voldemort wanted to take advantage of.
He hoped.
He was distracted from his brooding when he realized that Barty had, for the last several minutes, been telling him about a date he'd just been on, as an example of people's lives that were really simple.
After Reg had been listening to his story, rather than looking interested with his ears turned off, for a little while, Barty broke off to scowl at him. "I don't know what you're looking at me like that for," he complained.
"Because I'm having flashbacks to fourth year," Reg said crossly. "Honestly, it's like watching Evan stomp all over Snape with his eyes closed all over again."
"Except that what Rosier wasn't-dating was his best friend who, by all accounts, wasn't clueing him up on the stomping, not his deranged stalker," Barty retorted. "I've told him a thousand times: I am not his boyfriend."
"He might pay more attention if you, I don't know, stopped shagging him?" Reg suggested despairingly.
Barty looked at him flatly. "I tried that for two years and he just told everyone I was testing him and playing hard to get and focusing on my NEWTs."
"You were focusing on your NEWTs. You were mental about it. You were worse than Snape, and no one thought that was possible."
"Two years. I've come to the conclusion that I might as well, since it's got absolutely nothing to do with what he thinks, and besides, I don't want to hear that from you."
"That's different," Reg shrugged.
"It's always different when it's you," Barty rolled his eyes.
"No," Reg explained, "it's different because I know that you don't care what he does and all three of us know that's just friends anyway. Whereas you're actually dating this witch, and he does care what you do."
"Maybe," Barty replied, unphased, "but you also know he'll convince himself I haven't done it, even if he sees me or I tell him to his face I have. And I don't know if I'm dating her, we've only gone out twice so far…"
"…I'm not sure he's that deluded, Barty."
"Good. Then maybe he'll realize I'm not his boyfriend."
Reg glared at him. "Fine," he conceded grudgingly, "but when he does, you're paying me back for the damages, the bar bill, and the ten-million galleon makeover."
"With more pleasure," Barty assured him, clinking glasses, "than you can possibly imagine."
* History of a Dialogue:
psyche_gurl: I am UTTERLY DEVASTATED that I didn't get a chance to read this scene! Not least because it would be AWESOME to see young Regulus Black playing on the family name, and because the inside of Borgin and Burke's has always struck me as utterly fascinating in both its proprietors and its merchandise. :D :D
potionpen: Honestly, I felt like it was such standard, low-level intrigue that it wasn't worth writing out, but I guess it'd be good to have as a bonus/omake.. n,n
Omake!
Reggie: Hello, Mr. Borgin.
Borgin: Why, Mr. Black, what a pleasure. What can we help you with?
Spike-in-Reggie's-head: WITH WHAT MAY I help you. (scowlyface)
Reggie: Well, I'm not entirely sure, Mr. Borgin, but, you see, my mother's birthday's coming up, and I was sure I could find something she'd like here.
Borgin: (fulsome delightedness)
Reggie: (looks around dispiritedly) (disappointed sigh)
Borgin: But of course Mrs. Black is a lady of taste and discernment. Perhaps you'll find something more to your taste in our back room.
Reggie: (brightening) Oh, I'm sure I will. —What a lot of filing cabinets, is that where you keep the smaller things?
Borgin: No, no, Mr. Black, just our records. We keep scrupulous records, you know, they go back to my grandfather's day.
Reggie: Well, of course you do, the old place is Diagon history, really. And I suppose you must keep them very safe.
[pointed eye contact]
Borgin: (resigned, as he sees a sale go out the window) Yes, yes, very safe indeed. Quite as safe as two houses, I should say.
Reggie: (reassuringly, glancing around) Well, I shouldn't like to keep you from your other customers. If you'd be comfortable letting me bob along back here for a bit, I am sure I'll find something for Mother.
Borgin: (slightly more hopeful, although you can't rely on these nobs) Anything for Mrs. Black, of course.
Reggie: Thanks very much, I'll try not to take too long.
(Handshake which leaves Borgin with a couple of galleons and Reggie with the key to the file cabinets.)
(Exit Borgin)