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whitechapelTitle: Historical Fiction
Fandom: Harry Potter
Genre: Gen
Characters: Regulus Black and assorted contemporaries
Warnings: dark themes
Length: 1,960 words
Summary: Regulus knew history and mythology and ancient magic because they were in his blood; his mother had made sure of that. [originally posted 2008.01.06]
His mother changed a little when she was telling stories. She told them well, speaking with the tone and faint cadence of an epic poet; her face opened up and she gestured more gently, almost as though the stories were speaking through her. Even Sirius would listen to her stories, reluctantly enraptured, though he always denied later that he’d even been paying attention.
But while his brother was off exploring the house or playing with Andromeda, Regulus would seek his mother out and beg for a story. She always favored him with an indulgent smile—this was a son she could relate to—and told him a story even as she wrote her letters or studied something from her books. Regulus later wondered how many years of his life he spent sitting on the huge old armchair in his mother’s study, legs swinging above the floor as he tried to commit every word of the stories to memory.
Mother’s favorites all had to do with the family; she always told Regulus that you couldn’t get as much history from books as you could from blood. Regulus soon memorized the story of the poor little uncle who had the same name as his brother—drowned in the river after saving his baby sister, far too young to have to die a hero. And then there was Great-Grandfather Cygnus, who stood up to the mad half-blood Grindelwald and was killed for saying that blood and power were the same.
But Regulus secretly liked it best when Mother spun a yarn of pure fancy. She had stories about where the bad wizards and witches in Beedle the Bard came from, and stories about gods and ancient kings that he could never find an equal for in his mythology books.
“A long time ago…” Mother leaned against the chair across from his, painting a wispy landscape in the air with her wand. It was wintry and wild, her imagining of eastern Europe.
“A long time ago,” she said in a faraway voice, “there was a man who couldn’t die.”
+
“You did not,” he teased.
“Do you want me to prove it?” Bellatrix regarded him with a twisted grin and pulled up her left sleeve. The mark stood out vividly against her pale forearm—a deep, rusty red, jagged like a scar.
Rabastan’s friend, a small-framed weed of a boy with stringy black hair, leaned in for a closer look. “Does it hurt?” he asked, more out of pragmatic curiosity than fear.
Bellatrix looked almost as if she didn’t understand the question. “Of course it hurts,” she said haughtily.
“It wouldn’t mean anything if it didn’t,” Regulus put in, awestruck and zealous. He thought distantly of his tortured great-grandfather, of mythical heroes who suffered for the sake of an idea, and imagined his cousin as a warrior among their ranks. “It’s a test of how strong your principles are. When you’re defending something important, it has to hurt, otherwise you aren’t really fighting.”
The older boy regarded him with guarded appraisal, as though he recognized something that he wasn’t sure he liked. But Bellatrix leaned back in her chair and gave Regulus a slow smile before launching into a narrative about all the brave work her Lord was doing, and Regulus imagined the stories he was going to be able to tell his children someday.
(Bella fought alongside others who wanted to save the world from its own folly, and she was never afraid, not even once.)
+
The Aurors were all tall and burly and scruffy and near-indistinguishable from one another. Regulus kept trying to count them, but he got lost and counted the same ones twice every time he tried. Like everyone who didn’t matter as much as they thought they did, all of them had forgettable faces and nondescript posture.
This one, a ruddy-faced blonde woman, moved with the gracelessness of new blood that had never had to learn its place. She pulled at the corner of one of his newspaper clippings and examined it with distaste.
“Keeping track of your family’s political interests?”
Standing by the door with his arms akimbo, Regulus glared at the Auror, half-tempted to refuse to dignify that with a response. “I like to be aware of current events,” he said coldly. “It puts history in context, for those of us who care about that sort of thing.”
The woman Auror caught the eye of one of her compatriots, and they gave identically derisive laughs. The second Auror rummaged through Regulus’s favorite old books, occasionally cracking a spine or bending a page, and when he knocked over a wrought-silver candlestick Regulus had to bite his tongue to keep from snapping at him.
“You’re not going to find anything,” he said, echoing his mother’s distant, furious shouts. “All you’re doing is giving proper wizards more reason to hate you.”
The woman Auror ripped back his bedsheets and sliced open his mattress, looking as though she almost expected to find a dead Mudblood inside it. “Being a proper wizard doesn’t have anything to do with how long you’ve been marrying your cousins or how much money you have,” she said, mending the torn mattress carelessly. “It has to do with your power, and how you use it. Blood doesn’t determine that, and the sooner you people realize that the better.”
Regulus raised an eyebrow, and this time he didn’t condescend to reply. He dearly wanted to tell her that he’d read all the old speeches and that she had nearly quoted Grindelwald verbatim, but she was one of the multitudes to whom history meant nothing, and he knew she wouldn’t care.
+
He got his first proper mission on Christmas Eve.
“You’re ready to do some real fighting now,” Bella told him, her voice soft and rapturous. The others were gathered at the other end of her wine cellar, engaged in a last-minute review of tactics; Regulus stood next to his cousin and wore blood-red gloves just like she did, and he imagined that someday they would be remembered as heroes together.
“You mustn’t be afraid. We stand for what’s right, what’s good, and that means fate is on our side.”
“I’m not afraid,” he said, and he sensed Bella’s smile behind the mask.
He didn’t make a liar of himself, at least not in a way that she would understand. Blood was power, after all, and the Mudbloods never stood a chance—the fool of a husband died voluntarily, even, throwing himself in front of a curse meant for his son.
The woman was one of Dumbledore’s pets, and she was harder to subdue; the old man trained his puppets well. Bella finally got the better of her—she pinned her to the wall beside the Christmas tree like a crucified saint, and lined the woman’s frightened children all in a row. “Which one’s your favorite?” she cooed. “We’ll keep one alive, just to be nice.”
The Mudblood cried and pleaded and finally chose the youngest; Bella pulled her out of the line and shoved her toward Regulus, speaking loudly to drown out the woman’s pained apologies.
“Fry her,” said Bellatrix, in the same playful voice she had once used when they played spies in the courtyard. “Don’t be scared to overdo it. I don’t want a single thought left in her pretty little head.”
The Cruciatus Curse was the easiest Unforgivable to master, and for something small and simple it didn’t take much force. It wasn’t long before the little girl’s eyes went blank.
It would have been impossible to be afraid of the opponent. But Regulus felt dizzy and sick and ashamed and locked himself in his bedroom the moment he got home, because he was scared of Bella and scared of watching people die. Most of all—and he could scarcely admit it to himself—he was scared that he could destroy something tiny and weak and harmless and not even have the decency to flinch.
(Once upon a time there was a stupid boy who thought that doing the right thing was supposed to be easy. He wasn’t a very good soldier because he didn’t understand that the ends justify the means.)
When he left a sack of sweets under Kreacher’s boiler the next day, Regulus told himself he was paying penance for his cowardice. It was the only explanation that allowed him to fathom his own remorse.
+
It was still blazing hot, even hours after sunset. Late June, but it felt like August, and in the tweedy Muggle costume he’d obtained he felt like he was going to melt. He wrapped his arms around his ribcage as though to stifle his heartbeat; it sounded unbearably loud in his ears, nearly drowning out the voices and laughter coming from inside the house.
Every now and then his brother wandered past the window, never looking out. Regulus couldn’t help but think about how the story would play out if he knocked on the door and begged for help or forgiveness. In a narrative sense it would be perfect—it had redemption and irony and everything else from his mother’s best stories.
He watched with detached interest as Sirius laughed behind the glinting reflection of the sky. Strong, brave, cruel Sirius, who had nearly killed one of his classmates for a lark, who had no patience for feelings unless he could empathize with them himself. Regulus imagined explaining himself, the way he would if his life were a parable. I can’t even pretend the ends justify the means anymore, Sirius, because the end is to hurt people who can’t fight back. We’re not protecting anything but his ego, and anyone who pretends otherwise is lying to themselves. I’m tired of letting people get hurt.
And then he imagined how Sirius—not the prodigal son of the perfect story, but the real Sirius—would react, secure in what he always knew and uninterested in revelations.
You should have thought about that before you signed up. I always knew you were soft.
Blacks didn’t grovel for a few scraps of scornful pity; they didn’t plead for help or forgiveness. He wasn’t about to sacrifice his pride in the name of a narrative he’d never receive. This Sirius, unlike the first, wouldn’t want to save him even if he admitted he was drowning.
Regulus waited until Sirius had disappeared from the window again, then strode forward to slide a note under the door.
They’re going to try and kill you next week.
Take care of yourself.
R.A.B.
He knew Sirius would see it eventually, and didn’t stick around to make sure.
+
(“He kept a piece of his soul hidden inside an egg, which was near impossible to find. And as long as his soul was safe inside the egg, he was immortal, and could never be harmed.”)
The Dark Lord wanted very much to boast, and he indulged himself every now and then, dropping oblique hints in between empty remarks about the greater good. He, too, was one of the fools who didn’t care enough to read about history or listen to old stories.
Regulus knew history and mythology and ancient magic because they were in his blood; his mother had made sure of that. The Dark Lord’s every word dismissed them as useless, just as they dismissed elf magic and Muggle-borns’ humanity and everything else he found inconvenient.
(“But if the egg were found and broken, he would become mortal again. And Death was eager to catch up with the man who had been hiding from him.”)
+
It didn’t scare him, because this was the only way that his sad little story could possibly end.
When they pulled him under he didn’t fight back.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Genre: Gen
Characters: Regulus Black and assorted contemporaries
Warnings: dark themes
Length: 1,960 words
Summary: Regulus knew history and mythology and ancient magic because they were in his blood; his mother had made sure of that. [originally posted 2008.01.06]
His mother changed a little when she was telling stories. She told them well, speaking with the tone and faint cadence of an epic poet; her face opened up and she gestured more gently, almost as though the stories were speaking through her. Even Sirius would listen to her stories, reluctantly enraptured, though he always denied later that he’d even been paying attention.
But while his brother was off exploring the house or playing with Andromeda, Regulus would seek his mother out and beg for a story. She always favored him with an indulgent smile—this was a son she could relate to—and told him a story even as she wrote her letters or studied something from her books. Regulus later wondered how many years of his life he spent sitting on the huge old armchair in his mother’s study, legs swinging above the floor as he tried to commit every word of the stories to memory.
Mother’s favorites all had to do with the family; she always told Regulus that you couldn’t get as much history from books as you could from blood. Regulus soon memorized the story of the poor little uncle who had the same name as his brother—drowned in the river after saving his baby sister, far too young to have to die a hero. And then there was Great-Grandfather Cygnus, who stood up to the mad half-blood Grindelwald and was killed for saying that blood and power were the same.
But Regulus secretly liked it best when Mother spun a yarn of pure fancy. She had stories about where the bad wizards and witches in Beedle the Bard came from, and stories about gods and ancient kings that he could never find an equal for in his mythology books.
“A long time ago…” Mother leaned against the chair across from his, painting a wispy landscape in the air with her wand. It was wintry and wild, her imagining of eastern Europe.
“A long time ago,” she said in a faraway voice, “there was a man who couldn’t die.”
“You did not,” he teased.
“Do you want me to prove it?” Bellatrix regarded him with a twisted grin and pulled up her left sleeve. The mark stood out vividly against her pale forearm—a deep, rusty red, jagged like a scar.
Rabastan’s friend, a small-framed weed of a boy with stringy black hair, leaned in for a closer look. “Does it hurt?” he asked, more out of pragmatic curiosity than fear.
Bellatrix looked almost as if she didn’t understand the question. “Of course it hurts,” she said haughtily.
“It wouldn’t mean anything if it didn’t,” Regulus put in, awestruck and zealous. He thought distantly of his tortured great-grandfather, of mythical heroes who suffered for the sake of an idea, and imagined his cousin as a warrior among their ranks. “It’s a test of how strong your principles are. When you’re defending something important, it has to hurt, otherwise you aren’t really fighting.”
The older boy regarded him with guarded appraisal, as though he recognized something that he wasn’t sure he liked. But Bellatrix leaned back in her chair and gave Regulus a slow smile before launching into a narrative about all the brave work her Lord was doing, and Regulus imagined the stories he was going to be able to tell his children someday.
(Bella fought alongside others who wanted to save the world from its own folly, and she was never afraid, not even once.)
The Aurors were all tall and burly and scruffy and near-indistinguishable from one another. Regulus kept trying to count them, but he got lost and counted the same ones twice every time he tried. Like everyone who didn’t matter as much as they thought they did, all of them had forgettable faces and nondescript posture.
This one, a ruddy-faced blonde woman, moved with the gracelessness of new blood that had never had to learn its place. She pulled at the corner of one of his newspaper clippings and examined it with distaste.
“Keeping track of your family’s political interests?”
Standing by the door with his arms akimbo, Regulus glared at the Auror, half-tempted to refuse to dignify that with a response. “I like to be aware of current events,” he said coldly. “It puts history in context, for those of us who care about that sort of thing.”
The woman Auror caught the eye of one of her compatriots, and they gave identically derisive laughs. The second Auror rummaged through Regulus’s favorite old books, occasionally cracking a spine or bending a page, and when he knocked over a wrought-silver candlestick Regulus had to bite his tongue to keep from snapping at him.
“You’re not going to find anything,” he said, echoing his mother’s distant, furious shouts. “All you’re doing is giving proper wizards more reason to hate you.”
The woman Auror ripped back his bedsheets and sliced open his mattress, looking as though she almost expected to find a dead Mudblood inside it. “Being a proper wizard doesn’t have anything to do with how long you’ve been marrying your cousins or how much money you have,” she said, mending the torn mattress carelessly. “It has to do with your power, and how you use it. Blood doesn’t determine that, and the sooner you people realize that the better.”
Regulus raised an eyebrow, and this time he didn’t condescend to reply. He dearly wanted to tell her that he’d read all the old speeches and that she had nearly quoted Grindelwald verbatim, but she was one of the multitudes to whom history meant nothing, and he knew she wouldn’t care.
He got his first proper mission on Christmas Eve.
“You’re ready to do some real fighting now,” Bella told him, her voice soft and rapturous. The others were gathered at the other end of her wine cellar, engaged in a last-minute review of tactics; Regulus stood next to his cousin and wore blood-red gloves just like she did, and he imagined that someday they would be remembered as heroes together.
“You mustn’t be afraid. We stand for what’s right, what’s good, and that means fate is on our side.”
“I’m not afraid,” he said, and he sensed Bella’s smile behind the mask.
He didn’t make a liar of himself, at least not in a way that she would understand. Blood was power, after all, and the Mudbloods never stood a chance—the fool of a husband died voluntarily, even, throwing himself in front of a curse meant for his son.
The woman was one of Dumbledore’s pets, and she was harder to subdue; the old man trained his puppets well. Bella finally got the better of her—she pinned her to the wall beside the Christmas tree like a crucified saint, and lined the woman’s frightened children all in a row. “Which one’s your favorite?” she cooed. “We’ll keep one alive, just to be nice.”
The Mudblood cried and pleaded and finally chose the youngest; Bella pulled her out of the line and shoved her toward Regulus, speaking loudly to drown out the woman’s pained apologies.
“Fry her,” said Bellatrix, in the same playful voice she had once used when they played spies in the courtyard. “Don’t be scared to overdo it. I don’t want a single thought left in her pretty little head.”
The Cruciatus Curse was the easiest Unforgivable to master, and for something small and simple it didn’t take much force. It wasn’t long before the little girl’s eyes went blank.
It would have been impossible to be afraid of the opponent. But Regulus felt dizzy and sick and ashamed and locked himself in his bedroom the moment he got home, because he was scared of Bella and scared of watching people die. Most of all—and he could scarcely admit it to himself—he was scared that he could destroy something tiny and weak and harmless and not even have the decency to flinch.
(Once upon a time there was a stupid boy who thought that doing the right thing was supposed to be easy. He wasn’t a very good soldier because he didn’t understand that the ends justify the means.)
When he left a sack of sweets under Kreacher’s boiler the next day, Regulus told himself he was paying penance for his cowardice. It was the only explanation that allowed him to fathom his own remorse.
It was still blazing hot, even hours after sunset. Late June, but it felt like August, and in the tweedy Muggle costume he’d obtained he felt like he was going to melt. He wrapped his arms around his ribcage as though to stifle his heartbeat; it sounded unbearably loud in his ears, nearly drowning out the voices and laughter coming from inside the house.
Every now and then his brother wandered past the window, never looking out. Regulus couldn’t help but think about how the story would play out if he knocked on the door and begged for help or forgiveness. In a narrative sense it would be perfect—it had redemption and irony and everything else from his mother’s best stories.
He watched with detached interest as Sirius laughed behind the glinting reflection of the sky. Strong, brave, cruel Sirius, who had nearly killed one of his classmates for a lark, who had no patience for feelings unless he could empathize with them himself. Regulus imagined explaining himself, the way he would if his life were a parable. I can’t even pretend the ends justify the means anymore, Sirius, because the end is to hurt people who can’t fight back. We’re not protecting anything but his ego, and anyone who pretends otherwise is lying to themselves. I’m tired of letting people get hurt.
And then he imagined how Sirius—not the prodigal son of the perfect story, but the real Sirius—would react, secure in what he always knew and uninterested in revelations.
You should have thought about that before you signed up. I always knew you were soft.
Blacks didn’t grovel for a few scraps of scornful pity; they didn’t plead for help or forgiveness. He wasn’t about to sacrifice his pride in the name of a narrative he’d never receive. This Sirius, unlike the first, wouldn’t want to save him even if he admitted he was drowning.
Regulus waited until Sirius had disappeared from the window again, then strode forward to slide a note under the door.
Take care of yourself.
R.A.B.
He knew Sirius would see it eventually, and didn’t stick around to make sure.
(“He kept a piece of his soul hidden inside an egg, which was near impossible to find. And as long as his soul was safe inside the egg, he was immortal, and could never be harmed.”)
The Dark Lord wanted very much to boast, and he indulged himself every now and then, dropping oblique hints in between empty remarks about the greater good. He, too, was one of the fools who didn’t care enough to read about history or listen to old stories.
Regulus knew history and mythology and ancient magic because they were in his blood; his mother had made sure of that. The Dark Lord’s every word dismissed them as useless, just as they dismissed elf magic and Muggle-borns’ humanity and everything else he found inconvenient.
(“But if the egg were found and broken, he would become mortal again. And Death was eager to catch up with the man who had been hiding from him.”)
It didn’t scare him, because this was the only way that his sad little story could possibly end.
When they pulled him under he didn’t fight back.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 06:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 10:28 pm (UTC)I always worry I'm being too uncharitable toward Sirius (I love him dearly), but I'm glad you think it worked here.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-29 07:48 am (UTC)particularly I liked the parts about wizarding folklore. I'm thinking about writing some, myself.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-29 04:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-30 07:17 am (UTC)a small-framed weed of a boy with stringy black hair
And I also thought the clash of worldviews between Reg and the 'new blood' that you brought out out in the third section was exceptionally well done and very convincing.
(lazy_neutrino on LJ)
no subject
Date: 2009-08-30 08:47 pm (UTC)One of the things that's always bugged me in the HP universe is why anyone would ever become a Death Eater -- it's interesting to try and rationalize it.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-10 11:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-11 09:00 pm (UTC)Perfect
Date: 2011-12-03 08:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-03 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 09:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-17 12:29 am (UTC)