Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Five paces forward, three paces to the left. Regulus knows it well. It’s the white space between his door and his window, his wall and his bed. His feet snake the through the white space, one step left, two steps forward, two steps left, three steps forward, turn. One step right, two steps forward, two steps right, three steps forward, turn. It’s the longest diagonal route through his cell. His feet move, his head bobs above the water he can’t sweat out. Step over the crack in the floor. He does it thoughtlessly.

Five paces forward, three paces to the left. Four hours, fifty-three minutes, and twenty-seven seconds have passed since Regulus began his daily stroll. The second hand of the belltower clock ticks, ticks, ticks outside his window, two-hundred years old and just a tick slower than real time on every third beat. If Regulus weren’t so good at turning off his ears, the tick-tick-tick-tick-tick would drive him raving mad. The size of his window is still one forearm length and just shy of one hand tall at its widest, wrist-long and third-knuckle-high at its narrowest. He fights the urge to stop pacing and measure it again, to see if his window is growing. Measuring the window happens at half six. It’s only half ten.

The green mold spore in the northwest corner of the white ceiling has grown past the size of Regulus’ pinky finger, blooming outward with every slow drip-drop, two water droplets every day, inching closer and closer to the size of his ring finger’s nail.

Four hours, fifty-five minutes, and seventeen seconds since Regulus started pacing. He doesn’t feel tired. Doesn’t feel much of anything. He feels light like air. Like his body isn’t being dragged under, weighed down by three layers of soaked clothes, cold to the bone, wet.

Steps come easy. His brain turns off.

Regulus didn’t used to pace like this. Old Regulus was never one to move at all. He wasn’t Sirius. Old Regulus didn’t dodge blows, didn’t see a need to. Old Regulus would stay rooted in place forever and let whatever happened, happen.

Old Regulus is long gone. New Regulus supposes he’s changed since being locked up in the looney bin.

New Regulus walks in a short line for six hours every morning and six hours every evening. New Regulus has horrific cramping pains in his feet at night. New Regulus eats whatever bread and meat is handed to him through his cell bars. New Regulus can’t sit still on his fucking prison bed for hours on end or he’ll kill himself.

So, New Regulus moves. He moves a lot, and often.

It looks vaguely like late summer through the forearm-long, hand-high picture box in his white wall. Time has passed and life is easy now. A year, maybe two or three, maybe ten, who fucking knows, have passed in quiet isolation. New Regulus doesn’t own a mirror, and wouldn’t look in it if he did. He wouldn’t put a mirror in his white room if they offered him one. Not that they ever would.

Regulus hated his white room at first. Hated it so much he lashed out, hated it until he hurt himself, until he broke his bones, shattered his hands and ribs against the cold white stone that lay under the padded white walls. The animal inside has grown accustomed to life in captivity. Complacent, no longer desiring enrichment beyond the daily glimpse of his keeper’s hand through the bars as they deliver his meal, neatly butchered and prepared for him, served on a cold, civilized plastic tray with neat, round edges, too forgiving to snap into shards even if you bent it, not even if you beat it against the wall. The warden thinks of everything.

Regulus thinks of his room as his now. He can’t remember much about where he lived before. Can’t remember the time before his white room, the time before the entire world shrunk helpfully down to five paces forward, three paces to the left. All that— the before, the Old Regulus, whose rooms were cluttered, black and green and deep, dark blue— felt so, so distant now. A different lifetime, someone else’s lifetime. Maybe the looney bin really was helping him, in that sense.

Vaguely, New Regulus realised that he had come to feel safe in his white room. It was an odd feeling, one he’d never ever felt before, one he wouldn’t know how to let himself feel if he wasn’t so good at turning his brain off. How did Old Regulus manage living in stone-cold sobriety? New Regulus has no idea. Maybe the warden’s treatment worked. Maybe it was curing him, like the warden said it was. There were no threats here, no other animals. Just New Regulus. Just New Regulus and his padded white walls, plastic furniture, tiny picture-box window. Comfortable and safe, if unenriching. New Regulus would happily trade unenriching for safety .

Five hours, eleven minutes, and forty-seven seconds since Regulus started walking. One step left, two steps forward, two steps left, three steps forward, turn. One step right, two steps forward, two steps right, three steps forward, turn. Belltower tick-tick-tick-tick. Step over the crack. Count the time, beat the lag on every third tick. Leave the clock running and tune it out. Take it all in, eyes unfocused, passive and unalert. Move on auto-pilot, push muscle through air. White walls, stale, cold white space.

Forty-three minutes and thirty-seven seconds until the zookeeper would come with Regulus’ bread and meat.

Sweat cooled on the skin of his back and shoulders, making him feel cold-hot. New Regulus was naked. New Regulus walked twelve hours every day through his cell. New Regulus was given one set of day clothes and one set of night clothes, each set laundered only once every fifteenth day for the sake of being auspicious. New Regulus hated the feeling of sweat sticking to fabric sticking to skin, hated it more than anything, hated it more than he hated the warden, even. New Regulus prioritized his bodily comfort over everything else. So, New Regulus was naked.

Regulus’ nakedness didn’t bother him anymore. Not in the least. He barely registered it now, only deigning to notice when sweat started to condensate on his skin, which always happened after the belltower clock struck hour-two of his morning stroll. Old Regulus hated nakedness, avoided it like the plague, refused to even strip down all the way to change clothes, ducking inside fabric to shimmy in and out unseen by even God’s eyes, struggled to even bathe alone without a bathing-suit on, deathly afraid of being caught unaware and pounced on. Old Regulus was painfully alert, awake, aware. New Regulus was an animal. A docile, naked animal.

There were no threats here. No other animals.

Five hours, twenty minutes, and eight seconds have passed since Regulus set off on his morning stroll. Thirty-nine minutes and fifty-two seconds until the zookeeper would come and see Regulus’ nakedness, hand him his food, pay Regulus a brief glance at a white-skinned human hand through the barred slot in the door.

Old Regulus would have shuddered at seeing bare human skin, even on something as inocuous as another’s hand. The other animals in this zoo would scratch at the hand, bite at it, force their groins at it, pleasure themselves obnoxiously loudly at the mere sight of it through the bars. Luckily, New Regulus’ cock didn’t work. Or maybe it did, and he just didn’t know it. He can’t remember the last time he had a hard-on. New Regulus didn’t feel much of anything below his waist, he felt utterly disconnected from that half of his body. The warden seemed to be curing him of that, too.

Poor zookeeper. A thick, haired hand with a squishy, meaty palm and one swollen middle knuckle, doubtlessly belonging to a tired middle-aged wizard who didn’t get paid nearly enough to have pent-up perverts and degenerates jerk their cocks at the sight of his ugly, fat man hand every day at noon-sharp while he fed them their bread and meat.

Every day at noon-sharp, the zookeeper saw Regulus naked. Plainly, New Regulus didn’t give a fuck.

New Regulus doesn’t have a concept of being perceived. A body is just something you throw around your cell, nothing more. A body is something you walk back and forth. It doesn’t exist beyond that. It certainly doesn’t exist in the eyes of any other. The warden has done New Regulus several favors in that regard.

The zookeeper never did anything, anyway. He didn’t linger, didn’t show any interest in the naked animalman he fed. He even seemed mildly disgusted by Regulus’ day-after-day nakedness. Not that Regulus gives a fuck. Even if the zookeeper did look at Regulus like that, even if he touched him, New Regulus still probably couldn’t be arsed to give a fuck. Instead, the zookeeper probably thought Regulus was another degenerate nutter with some perverted fixation, same as every other animalman in the ward.

Or maybe not. If they thought Regulus got off on his own nakedness— or worse, got off on exposing his own nakedness to the zookeeper— they’d stop allowing it, Regulus would have to stop pacing, and Regulus would suffer a lot of pain and anguish before dying. Death is whatever, dying is not. Regulus would know.

Better they just let him be a little mad.

The air is cold on Regulus’ skin as he paces in his white room. It’s hot when it meets the beads of sweat on the back of his arms, his neck. Regulus hates sweat. He walks faster. His six hours are almost up, gone too soon. Soon, he’ll have to be still. Still for long enough to eat. Even with his brain turned off, he dreads it. The still hours are the worst hours. The dread threatens his calm, his placidity, tries to turn his brain back on. Speed it up. Exhale hard. Outrun the dread boiling up inside.

Five paces forward, three paces to the left. Split it up, long diagonal. The morning stroll is a comfort. Regulus speeds up again, as if gaining more steps before he’s forced to stop might somehow make the stopping easier. He sweats more, feels more cold-hot, walks faster, gets worse. Wants to crawl out of his skin when sweat starts to proper pour, droplets forming rivers under his arms that make him want to skin himself with a razor and die.

Not die, but be dead. Stop feeling. Be precise, the warden says. I can’t help you if you’re not precise.

In total isolation, Regulus finds that bodily discomfort is the only sin.

Five hours, fifty minutes. Fifty five minutes. Speed it up again. Tick tick tick tick goes the belltower outside. Step over the crack. Heel, turn. Step over the crack. Fifty-nine minutes. Twenty seconds…

Six hours.

The zookeeper doesn’t come.

Six hours, ten minutes.

Regulus waits. Breathes hard. Sweat dries on his skin, cold-hot, miserable. The arches of his feet begin to cramp the longer he stands still on the padded stone, threatening to cripple him, make him fall down and howl like a dog in the blinding pain of it.

More minutes pass in the white room.

No scuff-slide-thud of the slot pulling open. No hand in the door. No white plastic tray with chewy food on it. Just Regulus. Just Regulus, feeling frightened and confused in a base, animal way.

Six hours, forty minutes. Fuck.

Regulus is jittery. Doesn’t know what to make of this, or what to do about it. He shifts back and forth, winces at the stabbing pains in his feet, shifts inward-outward, tries to find a way to allay it. Pounds at the tendons in his calf with his heel, careful not to bruise, but it doesn’t help. Hunger pangs hollow out his insides, an old, foreign feeling threatening to destroy the careful bodily equilibrium he’s built.

Regulus shoots nervous glances out his picture box, trying to make sense of the belltower clock. The circadian clock in his brain screams it must be wrong. The second hand still ticks out of time, lags every third beat, pounds into Regulus’ head like a migraine.

At seven hours and four seconds, Regulus starts pacing again. He tumbles out of rhythm, hits his hipbone on the edge of the bed, doubles over in pain. Keeps walking, bent over and groaning, limps through it. He has no choice. It’s half two, prime pacing time. His feet keep shuffling.

Five paces forward, three paces to the left. Regulus takes four paces to the left and bangs his foot against the bed frame, splits his little toe from his heel, snaps some tiny bone into two clean pieces under his skin.

A deep, throaty moan. Regulus doesn’t realize he’s making the sound. He stumbles again, hits his hipbone again, grabs the edge of the bed and keeps walking. Keeps sweating. Hops on one foot thrice, binds the broken toe to the intact one next to it with one hand and the ankle banding from one of his two socks, magical fabric refusing to stretch or tear even as Regulus tugs at it.

His new binding itches, sends him off kilter all over again, even worse than last time. Sharp, stabbing pains in the arch of his feet travel up his calves, seize up the muscles, lock up his knees.

Dehydration is a fucking bitch.

Old Regulus never swore. Before the white room, New Regulus had cellmates to teach him the art of it.

Regulus gives up and sits down before he collapses, head swimmy, his lower half seized by paralysis. The lower halves of his legs twist and writhe of their own accord, cramps refusing to pass. His newly broken toe throbs in time with the heart beat in his neck. Regulus falls back and moans through a parched throat, twitches, kicks at nothing and yelps like a dog when his feet connect with air.

Ten minutes pass. Then, fifteen. Pain fades, stale and biting. The remains of it threaten to linger for another hour.

How to pass the time without moving?

He can’t go snake hunting. The warden made that very clear, no more snake hunting. None. None at all. Never. Not even when something hurts, or when something’s broken. Still, the urge tugs at him.

With every second that passes, Regulus feels less and less human. Not like the animalman he is when he paces his cell, the free naked devil-may-care animalman he’d come to be, but something vile. Rotted.

Regulus is hairy. Feels hairy, even after the stinging depillatory charms they’d forced on his face and limbs when he first arrived. Even after the monthly treatment that left him with a shorn head, his black hair— the crown jewel of the Black family— stolen from him by a rough-handed zookeeper through the bars of his cage. Regulus feels like he was born hairy, something half-human and beastly, like the animalman is what he’d always been, or was always destined to be. Like he slipped out of Walburga in a ball of slimey wet hair and blood and gnashing teeth before she shaved him bare and sewed him up.

Ce n'est pas un chien, he says to himself, and laughs at his own joke. He can barely recall his mother’s name, and isn’t even sure anymore what she looked like.

Turns out, the caged animal is only content for as long as you continue to feed it. For the first time in an indeterminant number of years, Regulus feels an urge to be even more naked than he is. Take off more clothes, somehow. Maybe throw his shit at the zookeeper when the daft cunt finally appears.

The thought is so ridiculous, it makes Regulus laugh. The rasping sound sends pain down through his broken pinky toe.

The mold spot in the northwest corner of the ceiling is still growing a water droplet. It clings to the surface, glistens in the angular light beam that’s bent through the picture box window.

Sundown. The dam breaks and his stomach proper growls. Night falls, and Regulus fades without noticing.

He wakes to the sound of the door slot sliding open.

Scuff-slide- thud.

It’s dark. Regulus’ eyes flutter open, adjust to the blackness of the room. Moonlight condenses in a line on the floor, fed through his picture box window and spit out as concentrate. His knees ache.

The shuffle of someone in the corridor outside. The familiar white hand appears in the slot and Regulus jumps up, barely feeling the blinding white pain in his foot with the broken toe on it, bone grinding on bone, the back of his eyes turning white and then black again. He sways on his feet, naked body about to tumble over.

“Stay down.” The zookeeper speaks at Regulus for the first time in months, maybe years. Regulus’ head is buzzing static. He falls backward. His bed catches him. His hipbone cracks, twin bruises smarting.

The zookeeper lingers outside Regulus’ door longer than he ever has, not casting even one furtive or disgusted glance Regulus’ way. He was well used to Regulus’ stark white nakedness. He had to be by now.

It’s dark in the white room. Regulus can feel the magic bubble ripple around the walls, the thin staticy film clinging tightly to the white space, separating him from a world he couldn’t remember and buffing out its sounds.

There are no other animals here.

New Regulus suddenly feels fine again. Head drifting by, floating. He lays neatly on his bed like a good little boy, hands folded and ankles crossed, his mind blissfully passive.

The zookeeper mumbles something about a fresh intake, the red glow of a wand holstered on his shoulder, sending his words out over the ether as he mutters something to the other zookeepers about space assignments. Thick accent. Northern, Regulus thinks. A fitting accent for a brusque, burly man with hairy hands and swollen knuckles.

“Accio cot.”

Magic. The word is low, casual, like saying it means nothing at all to the zookeeper. Flat and dry, business as usual.

A plastic white bed appears opposite Regulus’, butting up against Regulus’ wall.

Regulus’ head feels swimmy. I don’t need a second bed. Puzzled, passive.

It happens fast.

There’s a shout in the corridor, breaks through the bubble in its closeness, and the zookeeper is suddenly hauling something fucking massive into Regulus’ room.

A body. Tall, white body, dark hair— wrapped in a white jacket, Regulus realizes, huddled against the zookeeper’s chest, grunting out an ugly sound as it digs its heels into the padded floor. It rears up, bashing the zookeeper from the chin-up, and sprints out of Regulus’ room, bent over its restraints, spitting blood and teeth.

The zookeeper catches it right outside the door. He grabs it around the middle, picks the giant up with an ugly animal grunt, and drags it back inside by the leather belts around its bound arms, ignoring it hissing in pain and the powerful kicking of its legs in the air.

The zookeeper throws the massive body onto the new cot. “Stay down!” He grits out through closed teeth, smacking the man in the ear hard with a petty final blow. He pulls off the belts and snaps one at the animal, striking it so hard across the thigh that it jerks and yells some ugly non-word.

Zookeeper disappears out the door and pulls it closed with an angry metal slam! that’s swallowed up by the magic bubble, dulled out. 

The body groans. Moves.

There’s a man in Regulus’ room.

Warm, earthen skin. A mop of wild black hair, slick with copious amounts of oil and sweat, black strands sticking to a face that rang distantly familiar. Warm, flushed, beast of a man, meaty limbs akimbo, splayed out on the cot and bent over at the waist, dry heaving, blood dripping, the first splash of life or color Regulus has seen in his white room since the white room became his. The copper-iron tang of sweat and blood rolls off the man’s skin, and the smell of cold, sterile liquor spills from his mouth as the man breathes great, heaving breaths. Veins bulge in his forehead. Blood dribbles from his mouth and nose, catches in his untamed beard.

It’s dark. That’s the only thought Regulus has. It’s dark, and there’s another animal in the room. Before he knows it, Regulus is up on the head of his cot, crouched defensively, squinting, every muscle painfully tense. His broken toe throbs.

The massive man groans, moves slow like a zombie, grabs his shoulder with one bloody-knuckled hand. The cold, sterile scent of liquor only strengthens, like it’s pouring out of the man’s pores as sweat. Black and purple blotches decorate his hands, his familiar face.

A drunk animal. A drunk animal that tried to fight off the zookeeper.

The rubber band snaps inside. Old Regulus recognizes him.

James Potter looks up, “Fucking cunts,” he swears, spitting globular red blood from his mouth. He squints through skewed glasses, half-absent and drunk. Something dawns on his face. “Why are you bloody naked, mate?”

Deep, gravel voice. A man’s baritone. Not at all like the whiny adolescent voice Regulus barely recalls from childhood. Gone is that god-awful pitchy, posh countryside accent. Still posh, but older, jaded, hidden under something rough and common. Vulgar.

Regulus doesn’t reply. Doesn’t know to. The sound of another human voice registers as foreign, alien. It grates on him, like the annoying persistent buzz of a gnat. His ears have been turned off too long.

When did James Potter bulk up to the size of a fucking bear? The short, narrow teenager Regulus barely remembers is dwarfed by this grown man. Potter is a man. Fuck, how long has it been? How many years? How many decades?

Potter is still talking, his dark eyes half-lidded. Blood dribbles down his beard. “Those ugly bastards take your clothes? Fucking paedos.”

Regulus fights the urge to cross his legs, cover himself. Regulus doesn’t know what to make of this. Old Regulus hated James Potter, hated him more than anyone. He told the warden that.

Hate ignites in his chest, burning it, the old familiar feeling threatening to drown Regulus.

“Oi,” James slurred. “Am talking to you. Paddy’s kid brother, right? Thought you were dead. Fucking small world, mate.”

Something else spikes in Regulus’ chest. “What do you mean you thought I was dead?” Petulant, child-like. Regulus hasn’t sounded like that in years.

“Right, yeah, the cunts buried you. Pads took me once. It was bloody miserable, I’ll tell you that. The wanker cried.”

Old Regulus freezes.

Buried him?

His family told the world he was dead? Told Sirius he was dead?

Old Regulus wants to throw up. New Regulus doesn’t give a toss. The thought of leaving the white room has never crossed his mind, never so much as formed in the back of it. The white room is the world.

New Regulus disappears to the back of the house. Old Regulus is pent-up, angry, ready to lash out. His hands curl around the bottom of the bed frame, grip the cold muggle plastic as hard as he can, grits his teeth and wheezes through the pain.

“Oi,” Potter says too loudly, leaning forward and down ungracefully, trying to catch Regulus’ eye. Blood drips from his mouth. “Reggie, right?”

Old Regulus hates James Potter. Regulus hates James Potter.

Something inside wakes up.

Regulus surges forward, fists-first, left food twisted outward on the sock binding keeping his broken toe together.  Blind rage. Two fists, straight for James’ midsection.

James catches him with ease, an inelegant swipe of his drunk hands has Regulus pinned tight to James’ chest.

James looks baffled. Non-plussed, but baffled, like Regulus is some tiny gnat he can swat away. “Oi,” he slurs, drunken and confused. “What’s with the fucking assault? I could arrest you for that.”

Potter’s hands are scorching hot around Regulus’ laughably tiny wrists. Regulus’ cold skin burns. His brain glitches.

When was the last time he was touched?

Regulus freezes, deer in headlights, caught in the claws of a much larger, much deadlier animal. Naked in the claws of a much larger, much deadlier animal. Old Regulus registers the panic. New Regulus wants blood.

Potter is tall, smells strongly of sweat and musk. “Getting jumped at by naked blokes is what got me here, mate.” His breath is hot on the top of Regulus’ shorn head, alcohol heavy on every exhale. “Be fucking calm, yeah?”

Blood drips from his beard, stains Regulus’ skin.

Regulus can’t move. His legs start to seize up again, muscles curling, paralyzing. He almost whimpers, the sound swallowed up by the dark room.

James drops him, plops back down on the new cot, wipes the blood from his mouth and smears it across his chin.

Regulus’ skin burns where Potter’s hands were. His broken toe throbs,  his breaths come shallow. The spatter of James’ mouth blood is wet on his face.

“I hate you!” Regulus snaps. It comes out hoarse and wordless, rusted by disuse, almost a silent scream. He lunges forward, starts hitting James’ with closed fists, his hands meeting the muscle and bone of Potter’s chest and stomach. The magic bubble swallows up the noise of each impact. “I hate you, I hate you, I—“

James bats at him like he’s a fly.

Regulus keeps swinging. His stomach feels hollow, concave. He turns the hunger outward, rage, throwing his useless body around his cell.

It happens fast. Potter surges forward, lunging, tackles Regulus backward onto his bed and holds him there.

James’ massive body presses him into the mattress, weight pressing down on his legs, on his stomach. Still, Regulus can tell he’s holding back, sober enough to concentrate his mass in his hands and feet instead of Regulus’ fragile sternum and ribcage. Regulus squeaks like a mouse, like his tail got caught in the claws of the tomcat.

“Merlin’s fucking tits, mate.” James’ breath is hot on Regulus’ face, reeks of liquor and spit, deep voice slowed to a gritty drawl. “Bloody long night, I’ve had. Don’t make me hurt you. ‘Cus I fucking will.”

Regulus is frozen. Two scorching hot hands wrapped around his wrists, dwarfing him in their absurd size, a fucking bear-sized man holding him down, talking to Regulus like they know each other. Two dark eyes. A dark, bloody beard.

“Can you be fucking calm now? Merlin, no wonder they shipped you to fucking Janus Thickney. Stark raving mad, you are. Attacking a bloke for no bloody reason.“

Regulus stills, even his breaths stopping.

James grunts, shifts. His weight pulls off Regulus, disappears to the other side of the dark room.

Regulus lays perfectly still. Old Regulus? New Regulus? He isn’t sure. He only knows he doesn’t feel like animalman right now, even though he’s still arse fucking naked.

“Fuck,” Potter groans from across the room. “Bloody kill for a fag right now. Do they let us smoke?”

Regulus doesn’t reply.

“Still a fucking mute, huh? Right.”

This isn’t Regulus’ room. Regulus’ room has one bed. Five paces forward, three to the left. What’s it now, with two beds crammed wall to wall? What’s the longest diagonal route now? One left, two forward, one left, three forward? One and a half steps left? Fuck, Regulus might chunder.

James is still talking, drunk-slurring. “Suppose as far as cellmates go, I could do fucking worse. Unless you’re hiding a shiv over there, little thing like you’s not gonna do any real damage.”

Cellmates.

It clicked.

Regulus had a cellmate again. Regulus’ room wasn’t his room anymore. The fucking warden put Regulus back in general population. Did it in the dead of night, like Regulus wouldn’t notice his comfort and safety being ripped away. Like he wouldn’t notice another animal being thrown violently into his enclosure and fucking left there, turning his gnashing teeth inward, on Regulus.

Fuck. Regulus was sharing his cage again. New Regulus is rocked by this. Old Regulus wants to scream, tear at his face, pull his eyes out, rip his ears off until the warden is forced to put him back on MAC, or at the very least, send him a healer to fucking sedate him. New Regulus would easily trade bodily comfort for bodily safety.

Potter’s laying on the second cot, rubbing his shoulder where the zookeeper strained it. “Do think you should put on fucking clothes, though. Assuming the nonce lets you, and running around stark naked isn’t some mad choice you’ve made.”

The dam breaks. Regulus’ stomach proper growls. The magic bubble barely dulls the sound.

“Merlin,” James says, perching halfway up on his elbows. He squints from across the dark room, moonlight reflecting rectangles on his glasses. “Do these arseholes starve you? Is that why you’ve gone mad?”

“Fuck off.” Regulus’ voice is still hoarse. Still rusty-quiet, like some cruel healer went inside his throat and shortened his vocal chords. “I hate you.”

James didn’t sound the least bit concerned. “Yeah, so you’ve said. Haven’t the fucking faintest why. Haven’t seen you since school, and bloody didn’t see you back then, either. That was six-and-a-half years ago, mate. Nearly seven.”

Six-and-a-half-years since Sirius left Hogwarts. That means five-and-a-half years since—

Merlin. Five-and-a-half years in the looney bin. Five-and-a-half years in total isolation. Has it really been that long?

Regulus is reeling. New Regulus doesn’t give a rat’s arse about the passage of time, only the now. The right now. And right now, there’s another animal in Regulus’ room.

His broken toe throbs. The darkness feels darker. The animalman comes back, grows hair, tenses up in the dark.

“Oi,” James says from across the room. “You didn’t answer me. Will they let us smoke in the morning?”

Chapter Text

Regulus didn’t sleep. He perched at the head of his bed and shifted back and forth on his feet, intentionally provoking muscle cramps and seizures that shot up to his knees, made him flinch and swallow whines in the back of his throat. The pain of balancing on his broken toe kept him awake. He stared out the forearm-long hand-high window, no longer a pretty picture box, but a black rectangle in his wall as the waning moon hid behind dense cloud cover. The clocktower was barely visible. Its black silhouette against black sky was vaguely backlit by the soft white lights of faraway London. Tick tick— lag— tick. Tick tick— lag— tick.

Time has become an uncomfortable variable in the white room, in very short order.

James lumbered in Regulus’ white room like a beast. Even in sleep, Potter seemed bloody massive, tossing and turning in a drunk stupor, the dark misshapen mass of him breathing up and down, up and down, dwarfing the plastic cot beneath him, his arm and leg forced to hang off the side. The plastic creaked with every shift of his weight. His mouth fell open, smeared streaks of dried blood barely distinguishable in the cold dark, and a deep, gritty purring sound came out on every exhale. Drool and slobber fell with each sudden twitch and jerk of his beast-like body.

It’s been ages since Regulus has seen another man in its entirety. Not since the unfortunate incident with his last cellmate, probably.

For the first time, Regulus’ sterile white room smells like something. The hint of ash from a smoking pipe, a deep, earthy musk under sharp, stinging alcohol, and something else— something organic, living, body-like. Sweat and blood and iron and breath all wrapped in one, if Regulus had to guess. It was the smell of another animal.

No, Regulus thought, pushing his back into the padded wall in a vain attempt to escape the animal smell emanating from the dark, breathing mass. It was the smell of another male in Regulus’ territory. A threat, a competitor. Danger.

Panic spiked. Regulus’ heart beat up in his ears. He could feel the adrenaline shoot through his veins, turning his blood in his head ice-cold and the blood in his limbs burning-hot. The magic bubble tightened on the walls, dampening Potter’s snores, dulling them out. He still sounded like an animal. Still smelled like an animal.

Regulus had forgotten what scent is like to an animal. An entire sense was stripped away and forgotten because of the constants in his empty, unchanging white room. Regulus’ nose twitches like it’s trying to pull away from the smell. He shrinks further into the padding of the wall. Animalman wonders, not for the first time, if the warden’s treatments are actually helping. New Regulus made himself scarce after locking up Old Regulus in the back of the house, and says nothing in return.

The animal smell permeates the room slowly, creeping and crawling across the floor with every gritty, purring exhale from James’ liquor-soaked mouth.

Regulus forces himself to reach behind his thin, cardboard pillow, into its thin, plastic-y case. He slowly withdraws both of his trousers and both of his jumpers, all three socks, both undergarments.

James groans.

Regulus freezes, pads of his fingers barely grazing the coarse, unfamiliar fabric. His mouth turns dry. He holds his breath, heartbeat pounding in his ears.

James kicks, grunts, and grows still. He’s on his back now, chest rising with every breath. He mutters something and whisky-saliva drips from his mouth.

One. Regulus counts. He hasn’t done the count in a very long time, not in years, not since the very last time he had to tiptoe around a dangerous, drunk man. Two. Twelve long seconds, he and Sirius had learned. If you think the man’s gone, count twelve very long seconds before you come out of hiding. Three.

James is still. The gritty purr of his breath is even. The thin, paper blanket is scrunched up around him, evidence of his restless tossing and turning. Four. The clocktower ticks outside, dull and faraway outside the magic bubble. The mold spot on the ceiling holds a new water droplet. It slowly expands outward.

Five. James’ hair is black and long. His beard, too, shaggy and unkempt, slicked with sweat. The zookeeper will be back in the morning to shear it all off, Regulus thinks, if the warden plans on keeping Potter long-term. Six. The moon briefly reappears from behind the clouds, casting a diffuse light across the white floor. The blood streaks on Potter’s face become obvious.

Seven. Regulus is forced to take breath again, his bare chest straining with the effort. His white room feels crushingly uncomfortable, unfamiliar. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.

Regulus sighs. He grows lax, body melting almost to a relaxed state with one deep exhale. For now, Potter is asleep. That doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous. The threat still lingers, makes the fine hairs on the back of Regulus’ arms stand up.

Regulus pulls on every article of clothing the zookeeper has given him. Jumpers first, both of them, he shimmies them up his bare legs and over his hips, unwilling to sacrifice his eyes for even one moment. Then both undergarments, then the trousers, both sets of them. He unbinds his broken toe and pulls on both pairs of scratchy woollen socks, sucking his teeth on a sharp, pained inhale.

Regulus pauses. It’s the first time he’s been clothed in more than five years.

It feels wrong. It makes Regulus itch inside. The wrongness starts in his belly and balloons upward until it settles right under his skin. The clothes were dusty and smelled old. They were the last set the zookeeper gave him before they all finally gave up giving New Regulus clothes he wouldn’t wear.

Still, it’s a comfort of the mind. It’s a layer between him and Potter, no matter how thin, and that comforts the mind a bit. No matter how easily the beast-like James could rip it off him. The thought makes Regulus shiver. His thighs clench together in one sudden twitch. He’s struck, suddenly, at how odd it is to no longer feel his skin with other parts of his skin. The two undergarments and two trousers force his thighs apart, makes the skin of them meet foreign, itchy fabric instead.

The clothes aren’t enough. He needs Potter out of his room.

The witching hour begins. The clocktower goes tick tick— lag— tick. The wards on the room pop and spark red with magic, suddenly pulling Regulus down, off the head of his bed, forcing a bone-deep exhaustion into his chest. His eyes begin to droop.

For the first time in five years, Regulus wakes to the sounds of another person.

James is grunting. Deep, low, evenly-spaced and broken over sudden catches in his breath, strained effort exerted in every exhale. He breathes out, hard, grunts, inhales, sharp and shallow. Grunts again, breath catches through gritted teeth, a strained exhale.

New Regulus is up in an instant. He’s on his feet in his bed, paper blanket ripping apart under the sudden movement, his bleary eyes squinting, gaze sharp and narrow, teeth bared.

The sight wasn’t what New Regulus expected. He had been prepared to bite the bastard’s cock clean off and tear it to bloody shreds between his teeth, had the beast been pleasuring himself like the other animals in the zoo do. Merlin forbid, pleasuring himself over New Regulus’ sleeping body.

Potter was exercising. Push-ups, New Regulus vaguely recalls the word from a different lifetime. The beast is so broad through his back and shoulders that one deltoid rests under his cot and the other under Regulus’, spanning the whole open width of the white space and then some. “What are you doing?” Regulus’ voice comes out petulant, child-like.

James’ eyes flit upward, glancing at Regulus through sweat-slicked strands of black hair over his face. “I’ve done three hundred of these every bloody morning for almost ten years,” he grunts out. “Hardly going to stop now.”

James looks sick. Proper sick, greenish-yellow in his warm, brown face, fucking sweat pouring off him and puddling on the floor, in the cloth between his shoulder blades and in the small of his back.

“Stop that,” Regulus says, still petulant and child-like.

James groans, pauses on the downswing, fat-covered muscles of his back bulging through his shirt. “Piss off, mate,” he grunts back, teeth gritted through the straining effort, green flush growing reddish-pale. “Fucking go back to sleep if it bothers you so much.”

The warden put him on the chunder potion. Regulus doesn’t know how to say it, doesn’t even feel like he wants to. He shifts passively on his feet, still perched on the bed, twitching every time he shifts onto the broken toe.

James retches, spit puddling on the floor. His arms give out and he nearly bashes his face nose-first on the padded stone. He pushes himself back up with a throaty groan, sweat beading on bulging muscle and fat.

Oh, pity. He survived. It certainly would have made Regulus’ life easier if he hadn’t.

“Every time you think about the drink, you’ll empty your stomach.” Regulus’ voice is still hoarse. The room is small and his throat feels weird.

“Sorry?” James pushed himself up onto his heels, wiping his mouth with a burly hand.

“The water they gave you in the drunk tank.” Regulus shifts on his feet, cringes at the grind of bone in his broken toe, feels the unfamiliar scratch of the socks. “It’s called a chunder potion.”

James is quiet for a moment. “Bloody hell,” he finally says. “Fucking bastards.”

Regulus doesn’t reply.

“Well, fuck.” James coughs a deep smokers’ cough, spit catching on his beard and mustache. He’s looking remarkably better. The yellow-green faded fast from his skin. His sweat slicked hair stuck to his neck, flushed red. He stood to his full height and his animal smell followed him.

Regulus watched him with wary eyes, resisting the urge to lean away from that fucking smell.

“Fuck,” Potter groaned, his head almost brushing the ceiling. “Can’t remember the last time I slept through the night.”

Regulus can’t move.

James wiped his face with the hem of his shirt, sweat and dried blood smearing on the cloth. “The bloody toddlers keep me up. They’re all night owls like Lils. Nice to have a fucking break, if I’m being honest.”

Merlin, does he ever stop talking? Regulus grimaces, and resists the animal urge to tear the layers of itchy cloth off his skin. New Regulus scowls from somewhere in the back of the house.

“The first one was an accident.” James pulls his shirt off, absentmindedly wipes the sweat from his tree trunk of a neck. “Bloody awful timing, right in the middle of the war. But Lily wanted more after that, so we got married, and now we’ve got three babies in the house. Bloody difficult to raise three babies on an Auror’s salary, mate, I’ll tell you that.”

New Regulus’ feet are itching to move. There’s twenty three minutes and seventeen seconds until his morning stroll begins, and he hasn’t measured the white space since the second bed was accio’d into the room. He should measure the window, too. Pain pulsates in his broken toe, dull and draining.

Potter is still talking. “Bloody unlikely I’ll even have a job when I get out of here. Fucking blokes in the arse— it’s not something the lads at the office take kindly to. Probably have to ask my father for a job.”

“Stop talking.” Hoarse, petulant, child-like. Regulus doesn’t recognize the sound of his own voice.

James looks at him like he’s missing something stupidly obvious. “It’s not for you, mate,” he says. “I’m fucking rough as toast. Sick in the head, and I can’t think about the one thing that’d make me well again.”

Regulus shies away from the eye contact, whole body tensing under the weight of Potter’s stare.

It doesn’t go unnoticed. James doesn’t mention it, only raises his eyebrows and returns to piddling around with his clothes. “Glad you put bloody clothes on, at least. But it’s fucking August, you’re going to sweat yourself into a fever under all those jumpers.”

Regulus’ arms jerk up on instinct and wrap protectively around his chest at the mention of sweat. Regulus hates sweat, more than he hates James Potter. He bares his teeth, sneers.

“Am not your fucking Dad,” James relents, hands in the air. “But if you start to chunder, I bloody well can’t help you clean it up. The bastards took my wands.”

Regulus’ wand hand twitches in a long-forgotten reflex. New Regulus doesn’t know what to make of this. What is talking? New Regulus doesn’t know. He’s never had to do it. He was born alone in the white room and has lived in bodily isolation ever since. He knows how to move. He doesn’t know how to move around other animals. The animalman isn’t one for the spoken word, either. They look at each other and shrug, and consider disappearing into the back of the house. Only the primal inability to abandon Regulus at the same time keeps them rooted in place behind his eyes.

Potter keeps talking. “Do they allow us a proper bath here, or is it just the bloody spells? We use those on the bastards in the holding cells at the office. And in the field, too. Bloody waterless nonsense. Nothing like a proper, watery bath.”

Regulus’ shorn nails dig into his palms, making bloodless indents. His jaw tightens and he fights the overwhelming animal urge to lunge off the bed and bite around the flesh of Potter’s throat. The animalman lost that fight last time, humiliatingly so. He’s still licking his wounds. Still, the mention of water is almost enough to provoke him back into violence.

The magic bubble on the room stretches, pops, snaps back tight on the walls. The clocktower tolls, the sound dull and diffuse. The zookeeper approaches and the echoes of his footsteps are swallowed up in the bubble.

Why is the zookeeper coming to the white room in the morning? New Regulus feels off-kilter again. Animalman feels like he’s been put back on his heels.

Scuff-slide-thud. The zookeeper’s white hand appears in the slot and hungry saliva floods Regulus’ animal mouth.

“Potter,” the zookeeper says in his thick, Northern accent, dry and bored. “Approach the portal.”

James spares the zookeeper an unimpressed glance. He pulls himself up slowly, the massive bulk of him making the comparatively puny bed creak loudly in complaint. His animal scent shifts, stales, becomes something prepotent. He pauses at his full height, unmoving, like he’s unconcerned with the zookeeper. Like the order is meaningless. He’s posturing. He’s exerting dominance. It’s a move the animalman knows well. New Regulus’ lips pull back over his teeth.

James takes two steps and he’s at the door.

There’s a flash of magic behind the slot, the quick tap of a wand, and James’ head and face are suddenly shorn almost down to the skin. Smoke spills off his skin and the scent of burnt hair fills the room, acrid and bitter.

“Fucking hell, mate,” James swears, snaps forward at the waist and turns around swinging, meaty fist crashing into the white door in an angry smack! of metal on flesh.

Regulus nearly jumps out of his skin. His eyes dart back and forth between James and the zookeeper hiding behind door.

“What the bloody fuck was that?” James shouts at the door, pounding his fist against it so hard there’s an audible crack of bone under flesh. James doesn’t even flinch at the break.

The zookeeper sounds bored. His voice floats through the slot, dulled by the magic bubble. “Depillatory charm, patient. Your hygiene will be maintained while you’re in hospital.”

“Merlin’s fucking tits,” James swears again, rubbing his jaw like it aches. “Three bloody years of careful beard maintenance down the fucking drain. Oi, send me a fucking healer, would you? Broke my bloody hand.”

Regulus has gone perfectly still. They took Potter’s hair and beard. The warden has decided to keep the bastard. There’s going to be another animal in Regulus’ precious white room for a long, long time. New Regulus is frozen. The animalman is also still. Old Regulus screams bloody murder from somewhere in the back of the house, still locked down wherever New Regulus caged him up.

James is muttering to himself, rubbing the side of his fist. Bare-faced, he looks closer to how Regulus remembers him. The James Potter from six years ago, nearly seven, the one Regulus had to look at in the Hogwarts corridors after Sirius abandoned him, after Potter fucking stole him away and left Old Regulus alone in that fucking house. It’s the face that Regulus hates more than any other, even more than Mother or Father. 

The warden cut Potter’s hair. The warden has decided to keep him. The thought echoes in Regulus’ mind, shock and panic and rage all wrapped into one feeling that has Regulus’ chest burning. 

Regulus has to kill James Potter.

A white plastic tray suddenly appears in the slot. Bland, white food steams on it, a pile of shapeless chicken, potatoes, cauliflower, and grainless factory bread. A tall plastic cup of water sits next to it. New Regulus sends Regulus a baffled, panicked look.

“It’s morning,” Regulus says, hoarse and uncertain, nearly a whisper.

The zookeeper is unaffected. “You’ve been reassigned to general population, Black. You eat at 0600 and 1800.”

New Regulus eats what’s handed to him through the door slot. He knows that much, at least. And he’s desperate for some return to normalcy, for something belonging to his familiar routine, something familiar from the five blissful years he spent on MAC. New Regulus goes blind to James’ presence and grabs for the tray.

Regulus blinks and he’s suddenly sitting across from James. They’re opposite each other on their respective beds. A white tray of white food steams under Regulus’ nose, scentless and unsalted.

“Are you not going to eat that?” Potter asks, indicating the pile of caulifower on Regulus’ tray. It’s mostly untouched. The meat, bread, and potatoes are down to bare scraps and crumbs. The cup of water— Regulus’ heart stops at the sight, mouth dry, chest seizing with a stabbing and painful spike of bone-deep panic— sits still, still full, no tracks of spit or condensation to indicate New Regulus even touched it. Of course he didn’t. The warden doesn’t feed New Regulus cups of water, not ever.

Regulus doesn’t respond.

“Come on. Veg is good for you. You could use the bloody nutrients. Wire-thin, you are. Not near enough body fat. Winter’s coming, mate. I can’t imagine this place stays warm enough for you to be that fucking petite. Not comfortably.”

Regulus can’t respond. New Regulus and the animalman are frustratingly silent.

“Oi, baby Black.” James leans down, tries to make eye contact. “Do I need to feed you? Here comes the train, lad. Open up.”

Regulus sent him a disgusted look.

James threw his hands up and shrugged, relenting. “It works on my toddlers.”

Regulus’ face darkened.

James keeps talking. “Oi, little fella. At least drink your water. The nice man went out of his way to give it to you.”

Regulus blinks. The cup is rolling on the floor with loud, empty clatters against the padded stone. Water coats the opposite wall in an ugly, damp spatter. He wonders which Regulus did that.

“Fuck’s sake, mate,” Potter says, sounding neutral and utterly unbothered, like Regulus hadn’t just chucked a projectile at his head. “Lucky you missed my bedding. Am not sleeping in anything damp and moldy.”

The animal returns and Regulus springs off his cot, lunging straight for James’ throat, claws and teeth bared.

The white room turns black. A heavy crunch, and Regulus’ face caves into his brain. 

Regulus keels over, wheezing. His sight returns fuzzy and blurred. Blood spatters on the floor, explodes out of his face in ugly red sprays as he gasps, blinded by shooting pains from his nose up to the crown of his head. Bones grind and shift in his face.

Something topples Regulus over in his blindness, something dark and fucking massive, a fast-moving wall of flesh bodies him into something crunchy and plastic.

He’s in James’ bed. He can barely see his wall through the blood in his eyes, the tell tale crack in the padding. Regulus tries to curl up into himself, his eyes screwed shut tight, a low, pained moan coming out the back of his throat. There’s something heavy on top of him.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” James says, deep, gritty baritone right in the shell of Regulus’ ear. His breath is scorching hot on Regulus’ neck, smells like whisky and potion and smoke. “But I bloody will do. I don’t know what your deal is, if you got the family curse or whatever Pads is always talking about, but the next time you try to hit me, mate, I’m going to break a lot more than your fucking nose.”

Regulus tries to swallow, tries to open his eyes. The hand on his throat is burning hot and fucking huge. Regulus’ voice is a weak and pathetic whisper, a high, nasal plea through the broken bones in his face. “Sirius—“

“Pads isn’t fucking here,” Potter says, grip becoming firm, pressing down hard into the column of Regulus’ throat. “I’ve got kids to get back to, mate. Have a little consideration.”

Regulus becomes petulant, biting. Bitchy. “You weren’t considering your kids when you were fucking those men.”

James grunts, hand disappearing from Regulus’ throat and catching his wrists instead, pining them hard to his chest. His bruising vice grip curls around Regulus’ wrists almost twice-over. “Is that what this is, mate?” Real anger colors his voice. “Is this a fucking wind up? Are you fucking winding me up?”

Regulus spits in his face. The pain in his nose blinds him again, turns the whole world into white and static.

James doesn’t rear back, doesn’t even blink at the bloody spit hanging off his lashes. He leans closer, bares his teeth in an ugly sneer. “Are you fucking suicidal?” He hisses, shoving a knee between Regulus’ legs, stopping him from trying to writhe out from under James’ solid bulk.

Regulus doesn’t reply, can’t reply, he only whines under his breath, eyes still screwed shut in pain.

“Right, yeah,” James says, breath hot on Regulus’ face, stinging his shattered nose. “Forgot I was in the bloody mad house.”

Regulus tries to turn his face, bury it into James’ cardboard pillow, pass out.

Potter is still talking. “What is your deal, mate? What, you were in solitary holding for five fucking years? If this is how you treated your last cellmate, color me fucking unsurprised.”

Regulus’ eyes fall almost closed. Blood bubbles out of his mouth.

“Just my luck. I get canned for a bit of drunk buggery and my cellmate attacks me for no bloody reason.”

Regulus finds his voice. It comes out a resigned whimper, pathetic and small. “I hate you.”

“You’re raving fucking mad, mate. You can’t hate me. You don’t know me.”

Regulus blindly opened his mouth to reply, or maybe to spit in his face again—

Something suddenly shifted in James’ animal scent.

James went still. The massive bulk of him shifted slightly as he looked down, gaze fixing on where his tree-trunk thigh pinned Regulus’ groin to the bed. “Have you—“ He sounded surprised. “Have you got a fucking hard-on?”

Regulus started. New Regulus didn’t feel anything below his waist, and neither did the animalman. They were detached from it. Regulus wasn’t so lucky. Regulus froze, eyes glassy as he paused to assess the lower half of himself, a frozen little prey deer pinned under James’ beast of a body.

His cock was hard. Regulus’ cock was hard. It poked through the two layers of trousers, butted up against James’ solid flesh. It wasn’t even half a stiffy, Regulus realized faintly, embarrassment and humiliation washing through him like a cold rush of seawater. His cock was full-fucking-mast.

“Thought you were in here for being bloody mental,” James said, sounding far away outside the heartbeat in Regulus’ ears. “Are you in here for sodomy, too, mate?”

Regulus’ breaths became shallow. He willed his blood elsewhere, anywhere else, anywhere but his cock.

“No,” James said, still looking at where his thigh met Regulus’ groin. His smoker’s voice deepened, grittier, grew husky with lust. “They wouldn’t room us together if we were both bloody bent.”

His eyes flickered back to Regulus’, dark and unreadable. “They don’t know, do they? That you like fucking blokes?”

Regulus’ mouth thins into a tight line. A whine builds in the back of his throat. He tries to shift his hips, buck his way out of from under the fucking massive beast of James Potter. His nose spikes with pain. James is solid, unmoving, fucking beast-like. He’s pinned.

Potter’s voice sounds close. Too close. “Or, do you like getting fucked by blokes? Is that it?“

“I’m not bent.” Regulus sounds weak, pathetic. His voice is small and breathy.

“The way you’re under me right now, I can’t believe that, mate. I barely got your wrists in my hands and you’re bloody flushed red and hard. Begging for me to fuck you. If you weren’t Paddy’s dead kid brother, and if these bastards wouldn’t pull my date, I bloody would fuck you. Whether you hate me or no.”

Regulus’ breath caught. He whined in the back of his throat, a pained, scared wheeze.

James pulls away, his massive body withdrawing back to his side of the room. His animal scent follows him. “Don’t worry, mate. I won’t tell. As far as cellmates go, I’d rather have a tiny bitch of a thing like you.”

The solid, heavy, bear-like mass disappears from Regulus, burly hands unwrapping from his wrists, tree-trunk thighs withdrawing from his bird-like legs. Regulus gasps at the absence. He opens his eyes as much as the exhaustion lets him. 

James is gone from sight. A loud creak of plastic, a cot weakening under his weight. He’s sat down on Regulus’ bed.

Regulus glances over, eyes barely open, breaths shallow and pained. For reasons Regulus can’t begin to fathom, his mind outright refusing to, James grabs at the crotch of his own trousers and adjusts something there.

Regulus looks away with a pained gasp, jaw falling open, nose blood filling his mouth like he’s drowning all over again. Regulus freezes up under his skin. He withdraws into the back of the house.

Time passes. When Regulus returns, his mouth is empty, and James is back. Potter’s scorching hand is gripping Regulus’ foot, firm but not hurting.

“How’d you break this?” James asks, gently pushing Regulus’ pinky toe forward.

Regulus sucks in a sharp breath.

A ripping sound. Regulus doesn’t feel anything. He ventures a cautious look down, and James has torn the corner off Regulus’ paper blanket. His massive hand rests firmly around Regulus’ ankle, dwarfing it.

Regulus makes a desperate, wheezing sound. He tries to jerk his leg up at his knee, out of Potter’s grasp.

“Come off it.” James sounds unbothered, like Regulus is one of his kids and James just knows better. He separates Regulus’ pink toe from the toe next to it, his grip gentle and slow.

Regulus proper wheezes. Blood shoots out of his nose, spatters James’ sleeve in red lines.

Potter wraps Regulus’ broken toe with the paper cloth, binding it carefully to the toe next to it. He massages out the purple, bruised swelling with careful presses of his thumb and palm.

Regulus sucks in a pained breath with every slow winding pull of James’ hand around his broken toe. His voice comes back, bitchy and petulant, tinny and high-pitched through his collapsed nasal passage. “Learn that on the battlefield, did you?”

There’s something in James’ voice that Regulus can’t place. He dabs at Regulus’ skin with another corner of the paper blanket. “The war’s over, mate. You missed it.”

James pulls away, scorching warmth disappearing, his animal smell leaving with him. Regulus breathes slow through his mouth.

There’s a shuffling sound somewhere else in the room. James sounds tired. “This may be my first time in the fucking magic mad house, but I’ve put plenty of bastards in prison. I know how it goes. You need friends in a place like this.”

Regulus cautiously moves his ankle. The new binding doesn’t itch, doesn’t stretch his tendons to provoke the muscles into cramps. New Regulus begrudgingly admits that James’ work is comfortable. Bodily comfortable.

James is still talking from elsewhere in the white room. “A broken nose is out of my purview, mate. You’ll have to wait for the healer. You don’t want me to set that for you. It’ll end up crooked like mine, and wouldn’t that be a bloody shame.” 

Regulus didn’t have to wait long. Or maybe he did. Time was no longer a constant in the white room and instead, it had become an unfamiliar variable to New Regulus. New Regulus was quickly learning that he doesn’t adjust well to change. Pain kept the body pinned to James’ bed, lax and still, time fading from his notice. Blood coated the back of the throat in a slow-moving river, a thin sludge.

Scuff-slide-thud. The sleeve of a green robe brushes against the inside of the door slot. A healer, summoned by the zookeeper for James’ hand. There’s too many people in Regulus’ white room. 

“Him first,” James says from far away, the gritty gravel baritone of his voice quickly becoming familiar in Regulus’ ears. “He broke his nose. Bashed it on the floor, the git.”

Regulus wants to retort, but he’s floating somewhere above the body, lost control of the mouth and vocal chords. The Healer’s touching him and Regulus jerks away, but his body doesn’t move.

“Potter,” the zookeeper says from somewhere beyond the door. “You have an appointment with the doctor. Hands up for the white jacket. No sudden movements.”

“Fine,” James says, just as far away. He sounds bored, like he’s deigning to speak to the zookeeper. “But I’m not taking any more bloody chunder potion.”

Chapter Text

When Regulus wakes, James is gone. His beastly animal smell still stings Regulus’ nose, bitter and stale, a stark and harrowing reminder that Regulus’ room is no longer his own. The hatred and overwhelming paranoid distrust Old Regulus had for the warden in the early days of his imprisonment rears its ugly head, pollutes the room even from where Old Regulus lays locked up in the back of the house.

Tick tick— lag— tick. Time starts to beat again.

Regulus’ eyes are weighed down and drag dully to the left. The second bed is neatly made, new white paper sheets and white paper blanket magically bound to the cot with crisp, perfect lines. A pair of trousers, a jumper, undergarments, and socks are folded neatly atop a fresh cardboard pillow. Even folded, each garment looked fucking giant, laughably bigger than the clothes that appeared for Regulus— a cruel reminder of how outmatched he is against his new cellmate.

Regulus wasn’t in any kind of headspace to register cruelty. The wards on the room still hum with magic. Regulus’ nose, too, hums with magic. It’s pleasantly warm and dull. The inside of the mouth tastes like dry cotton and iron. Sunlight falls on the white floor at a softened angle, one-third and one centimeter of the way between the picture-box window and the second y-shaped crack in the floor padding. It’s half ten. A little later than half ten. Be precise, the warden says. I can’t help you if you’re not precise.

For the first time in years, Regulus feels no overpowering itch to move. He’s blissed out on whatever pain spells the healer left on his face and feet. So blissed out, that he can’t be arsed to care that somebody touched him while he slept, that some stranger came into his white room and did Merlin-knows-what, put Merlin-knows-what spells on him. He can’t even be arsed to care that fucking James Potter probably watched. New Regulus is gone somewhere and took his rigid routine with him. Animalman shifts his weight and takes advantage of the emptiness behind the body’s eyes.

The animalman comes back from the house. He takes over Regulus’ skin from behind the eyes, grows hair and long fangs, stretches himself into the hands and extremities with a low, animal moan. He discards the ridiculous layers Regulus put on the body, ripping through the paper cloth with ease and tossing the scraps aside. He settles onto the head of Regulus’ bed, naked arse hitting cold white plastic, and takes up his letters.

The warden let Regulus access quill and parchment upon request thirty-eight appointments ago, apparently curious as to what the animalman wanted to write about so badly, what he needed to say that he wouldn’t— or couldn’t— speak aloud.

‘Doctor,’ the warden said sweetly. ‘I’m your doctor, Mr. Black, not your jailer. You’re in hospital. Think of me as your healer.’

The scratch-scratch-scratch of the quill against parchment. The animalman is eloquent in his own head.

Precious Sirius,

Ah, mon cher! How sweet it is to hear your voice again. I admit, mon ami, I had forgotten the sweet sound of you calling for me, your brother! The sound rings so sweetly between my ears and within my mind. I hear you now, calling for me from so many kilometres away. Your blood sings for me from inside your breast, sings for me to take you in my claws and drink deep your nectar of life. We are connected, mon amour, even as the distance separates our physical bodies, even as these iron bars lay between our forms. They could not keep you from me, my sweet brother; even now, the one who stole you away rests in my cage and sleeps, ignorant and proud. I will take my vengeance on him for stealing you in the night, for taking you from my house and into his own. I hear your blood yearn for me, and fear not, mon frère, I will return and give you the esctasy you beg for, the ecstasy of death! I will see you soon, Sirius, very soon, and I will greet you familiarly with kisses on your cheeks! For I am your brother and you, mine, and I will not forget you, nor how your blood sings for me, even from Mother’s cage. Ensemble, nous sommes des chiens!

Yours Very Truly and Forever,

Your Dearest Brother in Blood

The warden blanched corpse-white after reading the animalman’s first letter. Every letter since has been pretty much the same. Animalman doubts she even reads them anymore, much less sends them off to the various addresses he writes with care.

New Regulus doesn’t bother to read this new letter. He has no interest in the written word, nor any use for reading of any kind. New Regulus lives in the white room. He paces in the back of the house, naked as the day he was born in the white room, resuming his precious routine in private as if the warden never disrupted it. Old Regulus is quiet, wherever they locked him up. He’s finally stopped screaming. Still blissed out, Regulus can’t do anything but stare passively above the body, brain creeping slowly forward like a syrup river.

Animalman slowly taps the tip of the quill to his dry tongue, willing it to stretch the precious ink further. A new roll of parchment unfurls and another letter pours from his clawed hand.

Dearest Uncle Cygnus,

Bonjour tonton et j'espère que tu vas bien; I am your nephew, the one who has been away in convalescence for some years; how I miss seeing your face at the château le jour de Noël, and that of your dear wife Aunt Druella. I write to enquire about the status of my fonds bénéficiaire, and that of my precious parents’ fiducie vivante. For my compte d'investissement, it is my wish that the sum of three-hundred and thirty-five thousand galleons be transferred from the fiducie d'héritier to my compte cadeau, and that la deuxième propriété de l'est be moved from the general London estate into the fiducie d'héritier with much haste. I wonder, dearest tonton, to what extent le récit du prédécesseur are eligible for pre-emptive acquisition by the fiducie d'héritier; if you may, please write me once you have posed the question to the primary estate asset manager. I am faring quite well and improving rapidly under the careful attentions of many fine healers and esteemed professionals. I am much interested to know of the estate’s recent business, and maintain the most sincere hope that you will entertain my enquiries.

Most Sincerely, et au revoir pour l'instant,

Your Nephew in Hope and Esteem

The animalman surrenders the quill and leans back on the wobbly plastic, admiring his work. Merlin, it’s good to be arse naked again. It feels natural. Right. This is Regulus’ cleanest, purest state.

Whatever unmindful spells the healer left on the body’s face disappear in an instant, as if they’d run out a magical timer. The face comes alive, pleasant humming warmth fading behind new pins and needles and tinny little jerks of muscle. The animalman rears back on instinct, withdrawing from the nose in primal fear as if he might feel the injury again.

Regulus comes back behind the eyes and immediately pales at the contents of the letter. Why in Merlin’s name do I need to liquidate three-hundred thousand galleons out of my account? He wants to scream. What fucking use do I have for money?

The animalman spares him an unimpressed glance.

Regulus squints at the parchment, one hand tearing anxiously at where his hair used to be. That property is easily worth four-hundred thousand galleons! Four-hundred and fifteeen thousand galleons, even! I can’t be arsed to care about any of this!

It’s your money. The thought comes from somewhere a long time ago, from sometime several Reguluses ago. Don’t you want to know if you still have control over it? If they’ll let you control it?

Why the hell did I write this to Sirius? Regulus thinks instead, ignoring the other voice entirely. Sirius’ letter sounds mad. Raving fucking mad, bloody mental, truly. Regulus needs to get James Potter out of his white room, but he’s probably not going to kill the fucking self-important thieving bastard, not unless Potter strikes first— that was just a passing thought, a passing thought from another Regulus. Regulus didn’t mean it. Writing barking-mad drivel about it from the animal part of him is just— well, it feels bloody odd. It feels odd deep in his gut, where it settles and unsettles and leaves a sour taste up in his mouth. Regulus doesn’t even think about Sirius, not anymore, and hasn’t in years. Sirius is Old Regulus’ concern.

Regulus stuffs both letters into the pillow case and closes it tight. The warden can’t see those. No one can see those.

Regulus puts his head in his hand. Pain spikes through his sinuses, leftover and dull like an old ache. Is the animalman talking to Old Regulus? Merging concerns with him, taking on his traits, becoming one? Conspiring in some way to make Regulus feel more different than he already does? Why? Is Regulus going to start feeling like Old Regulus and the animalman at the same fucking time? The last thing Regulus needs is to start feeling like any new Reguluses. Merlin, he’s already been segmented into a New Regulus.

This is the warden’s fault.

Something lurches in Regulus’ chest, sour and acetic. He’s out of control. Something in his head is unraveling.

And Potter thinks Regulus is fucking bent? The lumbering beast in his room could fuck Regulus if he wanted. He said so, and Regulus bloody well couldn’t stop him. The animal has already lost that fight twice. Regulus suddenly feels the ghost of Potter’s massive fucking hands around his throat, heavy and bruising. Merlin, Potter could kill Regulus if he wanted.

You think too much.

Regulus’ bare skin itches. He wants to jump out of it. The clothes lay in a heap on the padded floor, ripped from where the animalman inelegantly tore them off. Regulus pulls the tattered scraps back on, not caring that they’re in ruins, not thinking clearly enough to bang on the door for the zookeeper to beg for another set, laundry schedule be damned.

Half-relief is immediate. There’s something on his skin. There’s something between him and James, for when the beast returns to the white room and claims it with his animal smell again. Still, the heart beats out of control.

The animalman bares his fangs and hisses at the feeling of fabric on his hair. He scampers off and disappears into the back of the house.

New Regulus seizes order and Regulus gladly hands over the eyes without even realizing that’s what he’s done. He lets the feeling of being New Regulus settle in behind the dull ache of the healing nose. It’s better to feel like New Regulus. New Regulus is simple, regimented. He follows rules.

New Regulus is up and pacing the white room as if he never stopped. There’s a dull grinding in between the toes, where the still-healing break drowns under liquid inflammation and deep bruising. The front of the face aches. New Regulus barely feels any of it. His feet are moving, light like air, one step left, two steps forward, half step left, three steps forward. He has forty-one minutes and eighteen seconds worth of time to make up on his morning stroll.

The half step feels like shite. New Regulus lengthens his stride instead, ignores the crunching pain in the knee as it overextends, the warning ache in the arch of the foot as it’s pulled too taut.

The room and everything in it fades into a tunnel. Movement becomes all that matters. One long step left, five steps forward, heel, turn. One long step right, five steps forward, heel, turn. It doesn’t feel like the longest diagonal route across the room anymore and that fact forces New Regulus to pace faster, body desperate to scratch the itch despite how unfulfilling the route is.

Scuff-slide-thud.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

New Regulus startles, the suddenness of Potter’s gravel voice making him whirl around and leap backward onto the head of his cot like a frightened cat. James’ animal smell permeates the room.

The zookeeper mutters something from beyond the white door, grumbles about Regulus being practically naked again.

Regulus squeaks and scrambles for his paper blanket, covering the parts of him peeking through the rips and tears of his papery clothes.

James shoots a suspicious look at the closed door. “Relax, mate,” he finally says, voice gruff and bored. His dark eyes slide back to Regulus. “Not like I haven’t seen it before.”

Regulus is frozen. He watches for Potter’s next move with wide eyes. Tick tick— lag— tick. Time beats off-kilter, creeping slow like syrupy molasses.

James sits on his bed with a heavy exhale, and doesn’t move again. Even hunched over with his hands between his knees, he dwarfs the cot to an almost comical degree. He’s uncharacteristically quiet. Eyes are lidded, mouth drawn down, animal scent dour and surly. He’s brooding.

He looks strange, Regulus thinks. Having a shorn head and a bare-stubble face doesn’t suit James. It makes him look odd, uncanny. Unsettling. He has less hair now, but somehow, Potter manages to seem even more beastly and animal-like than he did before.

James Potter is expressive. Emotive, in his face and his eyes. Regulus hadn’t noticed it before. His brow moves almost like he’s talking, his eyes widening and narrowing almost imperceptibly, betraying his every thought and passing feeling. Regulus supposes Potter can’t hide behind his wild hair and beard anymore.

Scuff-slide-thud-thud. The white door  gives way, disappearing to reveal a small tiled room with a drain and strange metal fixtures on the wall. James gives it a curious look.

The muggle shower stall. Regulus hasn’t seen it since his early days in the white room, back when the staff hadn’t learned him yet and the warden was still insistent on pushing his obvious boundaries. A water droplet beads, falls from the head and travels slowly downward, gliding down the strange metal pipes like he’s staring down the business-end of an enemy’s wand. It hits the tiled floor with a loud splat. To Regulus, it sounds like the crack of a hex.

“Well, it’s no proper bath,” James says, stretching up to his full height. “But it’ll do.”

Regulus can’t move. He waits to feel like the animalman, or like New Regulus, but nothing comes. His lungs are heavy with water he can’t get out.

“Hope you don’t mind,” James continues. “But I reek of piss and bile and sweat. And fucking whisky. That chunder potion is bloody something.”

James doesn’t wait for Regulus to tell him it’s okay, to just go first. He’s already stripping down. His shirt is gone, thrown aside in a massive heap of paper cloth, and before Regulus can blink, he’s already dropping his paper trousers.

Regulus’ eyes dart away, fix on his wall. James’ wall, now, he supposes distantly. Time becomes fuzzy. Regulus starts to feel like something else. The water starts in the muggle shower, the pattering far away but smacking the tile loud like thunder, each peal of it echoed a thousand times over, and Regulus keels right over at the waist. He grabs blindly at the sides of his head and grips his ears so hard they begin to tear off at the seams, blood beading slowly in the nail wounds, thick, black, and sludge-like from dehydration. His calves start to seize up in protest.

Regulus’ mouth is open in a silent scream. How could he forget that it’s bath day, the third day? How could New Regulus forget that?

James is humming something over the sound of the water. He coughs, wet and gritty, and Regulus flinches, curls up tight under the paper blanket.

Mist fills the air. Warm, wet fog, expanding outward and seeking ventilation. It touches Regulus, clings to his skin like a coat, or like a second skin, a slick, wet, rubbery second skin that he wants to tear off himself with a paring knife.

Regulus is wet. He’s wet all over, wet all the way down to his bones. Mist clings to him, every inch of his body, creeping in to cover even the bits protected by his tattered clothes and paper blanket. He can’t breathe, suddenly. The mist fills his mouth, his lungs. He’s drowning all over again.

The water sounds stop with a squeal of metal. They’re replaced by a steady drip drip drip, a few drops at a time. James gives another wet cough and there’s a shuffling sound, a scraping sound of rough, coarse fabric on wet skin.

Regulus is on his side in his bed. He’s not sure when he did that. He’s gripping the blanket so hard he’s punctured right through it and into the sparse meat of his hands, blood so thick and waterless that it beads but doesn’t flow, his bony knuckles white from the strain of it.

Potter appears out of the mist. A flash of a cock— thick as Regulus’ forearm, long and snake-like, angry-red at the tip and purple-blue veins bulging— hangs down limply from an untamed forest of coarse black hair on Potter’s groin. A bead of water collects in the slit at the head.

Regulus moves his eyes so fast his head spins. The white room turns black for one dizzying moment.

Potter’s brown feet appear at the edge of Regulus’ vision, dripping water onto the padded floor. Regulus makes no move toward the muggle shower.

James spares him a glance. “Are you not going to wash, mate?”

Regulus can’t meet his eye. He feels squirrelly, inhuman. He opens his mouth and no sound comes out.

“Right. Well, you bloody reek. So I’m going to ask you to bathe. Nicely, first. Then I’m not going to be nice about it.”

Regulus’ mouth is dry. Gritty. “Spells,” he barely gets the word out, hoarse and breathy.

“Bath spells, you mean? The waterless kind?”

Merlin, Potter picked that up fast. Regulus can’t even nod. His mouth is open, tongue lax like a dog.

“They know to do that for you?”

A nod, finally.

“Right,” James says, though there’s something in his voice Regulus can’t place. His feet disappear from view. “Brilliant.”

Regulus tears the rest of his paper clothes off from underneath the blanket, barely holding back a pained moan. Nothing hurts. Everything hurts. His whole body feels like it just finished a brutal four-hour pacing stroll through the white room. For the first time in years, his nakedness feels wrong. Vulnerable.

The clock tower tolls, muffled through the magical bubble, and there’s a timely burning flash of light under Regulus’ paper blanket. The chemical smells of astringent soap and burning hair slowly roll off his body as the waterless cleaning spells take effect.

Regulus moves to put his torn paper clothes back on, slow as a tortoise under the paper blanket.

James gives him a reprimanding look. “You can’t wear that, mate. It’s in tatters.”

“Is not.” Petulant, bitchy.

“I can see your nipples.”

Regulus’ hands jerked the blanket up instinctively with a nervous yelp-whine.

“Just ask the orderly for fresh trousers and a jumper.” James sounds frustrated, like he’s one bitchy comment away from rolling his eyes. “Merlin.”

Regulus doesn’t move.

“Fuck’s sake.” James appears in Regulus’ vision, the sudden sight of his face so close to Regulus’ has the smaller man flinching away and kicking in pure instinct, the surprise of it making him forget that he’s arse fucking naked under that blanket he just kicked off.

“Stand up,” James says, hauling Regulus up by his arms before he has a chance to comply on his own.

Regulus bites down a squeal as the world shifts, blurry and white, two scorching hands on his skin making his brain turn to white static.

James pulls off the remains of the paper blanket and jerks Regulus’ arms straight up. Scratchy paper cloth scrapes against his wrists and ears. Regulus is still reeling, still can’t see straight. He sways on his feet like he’s moments from passing out.

Potter’s hands are hard, but the touch is clinical and unyielding, as if it means nothing but pure function, a straightfoward means to an end. Like Regulus is one of James’ toddlers who rolled in the grass and simply needs changed, nothing to it. Old Regulus was always changed by house elves. No one touched him for that.

James reaches for Regulus’ leg and Regulus suddenly comes alive again, jerking back inelegantly, slapping a hand on James’ shoulder and meeting his eyes with a wild, panicked stare.

James cocks one unimpressed eyebrow. His breath is warm on the top of Regulus’ head, wet like mist. “I’ve already seen your prick, mate. You were arse naked when I got here.”

Regulus’ voice is small. “It was dark.”

Something colors James’ voice. “Not dark enough.”

Something jerks up over Regulus’ legs, itchy and bristled. James’ night clothes, Regulus realizes. His head is dull and floaty.

The coarse pads of James’ fingers linger too long on Regulus’ waistband, rough-hewn ghosts over his hipbone. Regulus’ mouth turns bone-dry.

James pulls away. “Right,” he says, voice gruff. His throat sounds dry, too.

“Why did you do that?” Regulus sounds wounded, child-like.

James looks him up and down. Regulus shrinks into himself, picks at his fingernails like a scolded schoolboy.

James turns away. “You’re an odd one, Black.” He shakes the towel over his head as if he still has long hair, like the warden didn’t steal it.

Regulus sits nervously on the edge of his bed. James’ clothes are fucking massive, like he’s drowning in crunchy, papery fabric. He feels out of place in his own room, left adrift. There’s a half-naked beast in Regulus’ safe, white room, a violent one the size of a bloody hippogriff, and all Regulus can do is go still and play dead.

“Been meaning to ask,” James continued, dropping his towel to the floor. He was black-haired all over and pockmarked by scars of all kinds, deep red slashes and black wounds, and spattered with black ink that shifted and moved with magic. Regulus’ eyes darted away and he muffled a surprised squeak. “Does Paddy know you’re still alive? Fucking tosser to cry in front of me like that if he does. Bloody sociopathic.”

Regulus starts so hard he almost whirls back to look at James despite the other man’s nakedness. Regulus realizes, for the first time, that he really doesn’t know. Does Sirius believe he succeeded in killing himself? Did anyone tell him they’d only locked Regulus up?

Somewhere in the back of the house, Old Regulus starts thrashing under his chains. Spit foams at his mouth and sprays like arterial blood. Animal grunts come out.

Regulus keeps his eyes trained tightly on the floor like the mere sight of Potter’s skin might kill him.

James is still talking. “I bought him a bloody éclair to make him feel better.”

Regulus’ voice is hoarse. Distant. “Sirius doesn’t eat éclairs.”

“Yeah, the little chocolate thing,” James replies, waving his hand dismissively. “The pastry.”

“Pain au chocolat.” Regulus can almost taste it in his mouth.

”Fuck, if you say so. All I know is it cost me 50p. Fucking muggle currency, because the place didn’t take galleons.”

The animalman came back without warning and Regulus lunges for James, before the animalman can grow his hair and fangs or even extend his claws. James catches Regulus’ body with ease, grabs him by the arms and shakes him, lifts him until his toes are barely dragging on the padded floor.

James’ eyes are hard, unamused. “This again?” He asked, fingers digging into Regulus’ skin. “This is the thanks I get?”

Regulus can’t breathe. He scratches desperately at Potter’s hands, but the man’s grip only tightens. James’ mouth thins to a hard line.

Scuff-slide-thud. Regulus goes rigid-stiff in James’ hands. Potter notices and his dark, narrow eyes dart to the door.

“Oi,” the zookeeper barks through the open slot. “Patients don’t touch each other. Back to your side of the room, Potter. Black, you know better. Tell him the rules, yeah? Don’t want a bloody incident like last time.”

James releases his hold and wanders back to his bed unceremoniously. The pads of his fingers phantom-burn and itch on Regulus’ arms.

Regulus squints desperately at the clocktower, checks the diffuse light on the floor from the picture box window, the angle, the softness of the edges, which cracks in the floor padding it falls between— it’s quarter three, a minute shy of quarter three. The zookeeper isn’t due with dinner until six. Why—?

“Stand up,” the zookeeper says. Regulus holds back a terrified whimper. “Face the door.”

No.

No, no, no—

“What for?” James’ voice is lazy, indifferent.

Regulus’ veins turn to lead.

“Recreation and enrichment,” the zookeeper answers. “Doctor wants you to spend an hour with the other patients. You’re being released onto the ward.” 

Chapter Text

Tap tap tap. The sound of his unbroken foot on the padded stone floor, itching to pace. Regulus doesn’t know what to do with himself.

It’s too bright.

Endless, boundless open space, white walls, vaulted ceiling and columns, tables and floor crawling with ants.

Ants— people. Green-suited people in paper jumpers and paper trousers, milling about, some aimless, some not. Green-robed orderlies are posted around the walls at fixed increments, while green-robes healers stand behind glass, far away and busy with their hands.

Animals, all. Too many animals. More animals than New Regulus has ever seen since his birth in the white room, more animals than Regulus has seen since he was put on MAC five years ago. Animalman thirsts for blood but he cowers, huddled in the back of the cage of Regulus’ mind.

The last time he was in the recreation room…

Regulus is frozen in place. His healed foot throbs in time with his nose. Air in, air out, it feels like pulling blood from a stone. He can’t force enough dry air into his lungs.

There are eyes on the walls. Regulus can feel their magic hum on the rafters, pulse like a living thing, beat and thrum in the air, a dull bubble sticking to the room like a skin that moves and breathes.

“Move forward, patient.” The zookeeper is six paces behind him, cross and irritation thick in his voice. He’s pissed that Regulus dragged like a ghoul all the way down the corridor, dragged like a man on his gallows’ walk.

He’s not quite how Regulus pictured him from behind the door of the white room. Tall and bulky, sure. Portly, definitely. He’s shaped like a dreidel. But not balding. The zookeeper has a full head of salt and pepper hair, thick and brittle.

The air is cold where Regulus’ own hair used to be.

Potter’s at his back. James is a hulking mass between Regulus and the zookeeper, a brick wall breathing down Regulus’ neck, so close Regulus can feel his body heat radiate, feel the fan of his hot breath on the top of Regulus’ shorn head.

“Can’t stay in the threshold forever, Black.”

Potter’s gravel voice is right in his ear.

Mutely, Regulus sidesteps.

James forges directly ahead, the beast that he is, dwarfing even the tallest ants as he cuts through the crowd of them.

The zookeeper lingers. He takes in Regulus’ massive clothes— James’ massive clothes, hanging on Regulus’ tiny frame— and clicks his tongue. He shakes his head and walks off, pulling the door to the recreation room firmly shut behind him.

Regulus knows the zookeeper is thinking about the last time Regulus was in the rec room. It’s legend among St. Mungo staff, he’s sure. Even after all this time.

Click, click, thud. Magical lock.

Regulus tries not to fall to his knees.

New Regulus is behind the eyes but he’s blinded by the expansion of the world beyond his white room. Animalman is cowering at the back of the skull like a pathetic rat. Old Regulus is still strapped down in the back of the house, still New Regulus’ prisoner.

Regulus is on his own.

The people look strange. Not-quite-right, not quite how Regulus remembers people to generally look. Off, but he can’t articulate how. He just feels it in his gut. The inmates—

Patients, Mr. Black, says the warden. I don’t have inmates, I have patients. You’re in hospital, not Azkaban. Be precise.

The smell is death.

Sweat, breath, human filth, yellow teeth, it emanates off the inmates in waves. It’s an animal smell so potent that Regulus misses when it was just Potter. Bleach, alcohol, sterile, clinical latex all simmers underneath, stings Regulus’ throbbing nose.

There are voices. There are lots of voices, some louder than others, but all sound foreign. It’s the buzzing of flies in Regulus’ ears. It’s carrion beetles on his skin. It’s the crunch! of exploding snap cards, the clank of rolling gobstones, the clink of knocking chess pieces.

The animals are socializing. They stand around, or sit around, in groups or alone. Regulus recognizes a few of them, knows they might recognize him but hopes— prays— they won’t.

Regulus puts his back to a wall and sits head-down-eyes-up.

Air in, air out. Air in, air out.

The body feels vulnerable. Exposed. Regulus crosses his legs under the table and breathes deep, sucks air in, tries to pull all his weight behind his eyes so he can’t feel it in the pit of his stomach or Merlin forbid, his groin.

He forces the eyes to stay up and tries to watch the ants.

There’s a witch at the opposite table. She’s hunched over, picking at the hem of her paper jumper. A full cup of water rests by her right hand. The stillness of it makes Regulus seize, start to withdraw. The telltale humming starts up behind his ears, pounding and pulsating as his thick, waterless blood rushes north. The world blurs fuzzy and grey.

Focus. Stay in the eyes.

Regulus forces his gaze to move.

The animalman starts to defrost. He unfurls, muscle by muscle, tendon by tendon, creeps cautiously forward.

Animalman reaches the eyes, nudges New Regulus aside, who’s still wide-eyed-blinded by the sheer volume of space, the sheer size of the windows— two bodies tall and four forearms wide, easily, Merlin, he should go measure them—

The animalman takes the eyes and they drift, naturally, to the biggest animal in the room.

Potter is a beast among beasts.

James stands in a group of men at the center of the rec room, shoulder to shoulder but half a head taller and half a chest broader. The sheer bulk of him manages to make the rec room seem small, crowded.

They’re too far to overhear but their postures, though guarded, are almost relaxed. Arms are crossed, but the muscles are untensed.

James meets Regulus’ gaze. He pauses mid-word, tongue lagging.

Fuck.

Warm, dark eyes. Appraising, assessing. Regulus doesn’t look away fast enough. Potter sets off directly for him.

Fuck.

Too quickly, he’s in front of Regulus.

Fear spikes in Regulus’ chest. Real, animal fear. One sharp bolt of it shoots straight to his heart at James’ familiar, animal smell.

The animalman rears back, bares teeth, and leaves the body’s eyes open for Regulus to take.

For one moment, Regulus wants very badly to hide under the table. It didn’t work then. It won’t work now.

It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt. Until it does.

James finally has his fucking commissary cigarette. It hangs out of his mouth, smoking but lightless and without flame, undoubtedly cold to the touch.

Regulus’ mouth is dry. The bitchy comment bleeds through anyway. “Make some friends, did you?”

James is undeterred. “They said your last cellmate tried to kill you and you bent him over behind a post.”

“And you believed them?” Petulant, bitchy.

James spares him an unimpressed look. “I’ve felt your hard-on, mate. You’re not bending anyone over. Not in that position, you’re not.”

Heat pools in his aching face and Regulus flushes bright red. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.

Smoke billows from James’ mouth. “It’s alright, baby Black. Most blokes won’t care how little cock you’ve got, since it’s your arse getting fucked.”

“I’m not— I am not bent!” Regulus sputtered, choking on his own tongue.

“Right.”

“I’m not!”

“I heard you the first time.”

“Piss off!”

“Mind your language,” James said mildly.

“Don’t talk to me like I’m one of your fucking kids.”

Potter doesn’t take the bait. Instead, he tilts his head, looks— Merlin, Regulus thinks with disgust. He looks understanding. “Hard on you, innit? Room full of people after years in solitary holding. Room full of nutters, at that.”

Regulus can’t breathe. Fuck, he can’t breathe. James’ rancid animal smell is in his nose, he can’t take it. “What do you want?” He manages, voice hoarse and rusted. Merlin, he sounds pathetic. Small.

James tilts his head. Something carnivorous glints in his eyes, makes Regulus’ breath catch. “I want—“

“Oi!” A raw, angry shout from a man across the room makes Regulus jump. “You! Yeah, you! The bloody Auror!”

James turns slow.

A podgy animal stands there sneering, scarred fists clenched, an ugly pockmark disfiguring his white face. A shorter, fatter man looms behind him and scowls darkly.

The Lord’s Mark mars both their forearms.

Regulus’ stomach drops out from under him.

“James fucking Potter, as I live and breathe,” the taller one says.

Regulus’ own forearm starts to itch. It prickles where the Morsmorde carved into him once, remnants of the cursed ink still buried where he took a razor to skin himself clean.

“Aye,” says James. He sounds casual, looks casual, but Regulus knows he sees their Marks, he must. “Do I know you?”

The Deatheater doesn’t like that answer. “You put me in here. You arrested me, remember that? Thought I’d go to Azkaban, did you? Well, I fucking did. Now I’m here. Eating fucking shite with the loonies.”

“Right,” says Potter, like it doesn’t matter.

“You don’t fucking remember me?”

James doesn’t pretend to think about it. “Afraid not, no.”

“Jugson,” the man grits out. “And this here’s Gibbon.”

The other man gives an ugly sneer.

“Your buddy put him away. His first week in Azkaban, some cunt carved out his throat and stole his bloody voice box. He went mad from the pain of it.”

Where are the zookeepers? Regulus wants to scream.

“Right.”

That’s all James says.

There’s an awkward beat of silence.

The Deatheater— Jugson, Regulus racks his own brain, tries to forcibly grab onto Old Regulus’ memories with both hands, tries desperately to remember if he knows Jugson or not, or if Jugson knows Old Regulus—

“And don’t think I don’t see you back there, Black.”

Fuck.

Panic. The Animalman rears his head, takes the hands and grips them hard around the table’s edge.

The short one— Gibbon— makes a gurgling sound.

Regulus doesn’t remember either of them. Old Regulus’ memories are locked up as tight as he is. Did they meet Old Regulus at meetings? Missions? Battles?

“Don’t think I haven’t heard about you,” Jugson continues. “Crazy bitch. Fraternizing with the enemy again, are you?”

“Oi,” Potter says, a hard edge on his voice. “Your fight’s with me.”

“This isn’t a fight, Auror.” Jugson cracks a crazed smile, all yellow teeth and cherry-red gums. “This is a friendly conversation.”

Where are the fucking zookeepers?

Animalman’s claws dig into the raw skin of the body’s forearm. Regulus hisses through his teeth.

Something shifts in Potter’s animal scent. “If it’s friendly, then let’s call it here.”

“Call it,” Jugson repeats.

“Walk away.”

“Am not turning my back to you, Potter.” Something like glee enters Jugson’s voice, mixes with the cruelty there. “You might bend me over and fuck me. Sodder.”

“Least I’m the one doing the bending.”

Regulus’ body knows what’s coming before Jugson even does it. He feels it in his chest, in his head, and rears back as if he’s the intended victim.

The man surges forward, swinging at James with a closed, scarred fist, aiming for his chest.

James veers violently left.

Snap! An exploding card.

Splash.

Something cold and fluid drips from Regulus’ chin.

The witch at the opposite table is on her feet and screaming. Her water cup rolls dry and empty on the padded floor, clattering to a stuttering stop at Jugson’s feet. Bloody-murder shrieks echo off the magic skin of the walls.

Something cold hits Regulus’ eyelashes and he full-body-jerks like he’s been hexed. It drips down his nose, collects in the shell of his collar bone—

Water.

Cold, wet, water.

Something rushes at the eyes with violent force. It rips the animalman aside and seizes the body in full, turns the eyes wholly black.

Regulus is buried under rubble in the back of the house before he can turn to see who the hell just took the body.

Thud.

Crunch.

Time passes.

Regulus comes to half-conscious, half-gripping the eyes, the unnamed Other One still hellbent on shoving him away.

Scorching hot fluid burns the hands, there’s spit on his lips, something heavy in front of him, under him— yielding, pliant, squishy flesh.

“Merlin’s fucking tits,” James swears right in Regulus’ ear. His familiar hands are iron-gripped around Regulus’ arms, buried so deep he might be touching bone. He’s clutching Regulus hard from behind and lifts him until his feet kick air. “Enough, mate! He’s down! You’ll kill him!”

There’s a throaty, gargling sound and one of James’ hands disappears into a heavy swing, shoving something away with brutal force. James lets out a horrific swear and a furious curse, one that Regulus has only ever heard his mother say.

“Stop, Black,” Potter grits out, losing his hold on Regulus. “Fucking stop! Stay still!”

Another deep, throaty rasp has Potter dropping Regulus again.

The feet hit the floor. The Other One grabs Regulus by the neck and throws him off the eyes with a wordless scream.

Bone grinds on bone.

Thud.

Crunch.

The world goes black again.

Time returns slowly. The eyes clear, start to form a picture.

Tick tick— lag— tick. The clocktower outside says three minutes have passed.

Regulus is wet. From shorn head to unbroken toe, he’s dripping wet. Cold water, warm spit, hot blood.

Potter’s arms are wrapped around Regulus from behind like a vice. It’s a bruising, burning grip, so tight Regulus isn’t sure where he ends and Potter begins. James breathes in Regulus’ ear, deep and gasping, his sweat and blood mixing on Regulus’ skin, making rivers down his face and back. 

Something blunt rests down the back of Regulus’ thighs.

The drum of boots hit the ground. Inmates squeal and scatter across the rec room, ants or rats, mad with panic.

The zookeepers are mobilising.

“Down!”

Potter’s bruising grip disappears. The knees hit the ground.

“Get down!”

Finally, Regulus thinks, letting himself fall to the padded floor face-first. Stinging magic binds him, sticks to his skin like syrup. Took you long enough.

The world turns black again.

Regulus blinks and he’s in the warden’s office.

The world swings and blurs. Yellow, grey. Grey, yellow. Some green and blue blobs snake their way inside, twisting and writhing like worms in Regulus’ eyes. Leftover magic coats the inside of the skull, drapes itself over the cranial nerves.

Not her office, Regulus realises distantly, but her primary exam room. The talk therapy room.

He hasn’t seen it in five years, the warden taken to holding his rare appointments through the door slot of his private room after the incident with Barty. He hasn’t seen any of her rooms since she put him on MAC.

Making a change, a voice hums in the back of his mind, but he can’t tell whose. Making a change, making a change…

The walls are still padded, white, and windowless, reflecting artificial white light from spells that keep the room at precisely the same brightness 24/7, 3-6-5.

The white walls offer a little comfort and assuage New Regulus, who’s already itching to move, to get up from where the body’s been seated and measure the room before pacing it like a madman.

Animalman grumbles, or purrs, from his spot on the floor of the eyes. He’s flat on his back, feeling humiliated, his stubby prehensile tail tucked between his hairy legs.

Old Regulus lets out a low, pathetic wail from the back of the house. His chains rattle and shake.

The head feels swimmy. Something buzzes, or tingles, inside Regulus’ fingers. Magic, he thinks distantly. Healing magic.

It’s a familiar feeling.

Where’s Potter?

Not here, Regulus realises. He’d know if Potter was here, he’d know his beastly animal scent, he’d feel his overpowering presence. The talk therapy room smells like nothing at all. It feels like nothing at all.

No, Regulus thinks. It’s just him and the bitch.

The warden is staring at Regulus rather unkindly from across her desk.

Cold, grey, and unfriendly, she’s as stoic a witch as Regulus has ever met. She’s aged in the last five years. Aged considerably. But the air shimmers at the corner of her eyes and takes on a waxy sheen around the edges of her mouth, like something was there and was wiped away.

The exam room dampens cosmetic glamours. Interesting, Regulus thinks, but unsurprising. The warden would never let anyone hide anything from her.

She can’t tolerate lies.

The words EMERGENCY APPOINTMENT DISCIPLINARY ACTION are scrawled upside down on her parchment scroll in ugly, slanted cursive, the kind of barely-legible chicken-scratch one only sees on a healer’s prescription pad.

“One day on general population and you’re already fighting again.” Tap tap tap goes her quill on the desk. “I’m not impressed, Mr. Black.”

Regulus is speaking before he can stop himself. “That wasn’t me, it wasn’t Animalman, there was someone else—“

“You are not an animal.”

The animalman’s head lolls. He bares his teeth lazily. Regulus fights to keep his focus, but the room’s magic loosens his tongue. “The animalman didn’t—“

“Feeling like an animal and being an animal are two different things.”

“I know that,” Regulus insists. He feels himself revert to petulant and child-like, helpless in the face of the talk therapy room. “There was someone else. Someone new.” 

Regulus scrapes his mind for the moments before the fight. Something lunged at him behind, something picked him up and threw him into the back of the house with superhuman force.

There’s residue of one image still stuck to the inside of the eyes.

It was humanoid. It was lunging out of the dark on all fours like a beast. Its grey-white leathered skin, ice-cold to the touch and pulled back, was shrunken over bone and dehydrated beyond repair, revealing claw nails and opposable thumbs. A big, human mouth, with dull human teeth, was black from mold and decay. Its gaping maw was thick with the scent of rot and death and magic.

Regulus realises too late that he’s speaking aloud.

The warden puts the pieces together quickly. “You believe there is an Inferius living inside your mind now.”

There’s a beat of silence.

It’s not possible, Regulus thinks dully.

Animalman grumbles about competition, still nursing his wounds from Inferius Regulus ripping him off the eyes. New Regulus is thrown off-kilter and freezes up, apparently utterly useless outside of his white room.

The Inferius, if he exists at all, doesn’t pitch in. He doesn’t even show himself.

“I think the splitting happened again,” Regulus says, hollow and trying desperately not to sound as afraid as he is. “I think there’s an Inferius now.”

“Because of what you believe happened to you in the cave.”

Anger stabs at Regulus, red-hot and blinding. They’ve had this conversation before. He knows what comes next. “I know what I saw. I know what I felt.”

“You did not encounter any Inferi, Mr. Black. If you had, you would not have survived your suicide attempt and we would not be having this ridiculous conversation.”

“I know what I saw,” Regulus repeats. “I know what I felt.”

“You believe that you know. Your beliefs are not in alignment with objective reality, Mr. Black. Your beliefs are merely perceptions. They are flawed.”

“The treatment,” Regulus asserts, some force in his voice. He knows they’re beating a long-dead horse now but he can’t help it, can’t stop himself.

“The splitting spell severed your old self from your new self by sequestering the old self’s memories. It does not create new persons or new personalities.”

“I didn’t agree to that. I didn’t agree to any of that.”

“Of course you didn’t. Your family approved of the treatment, Mr. Black.”

“It didn’t work. It made me into this.” He spits out the last word. He’s seething now. Regulus doesn’t even know what this is, he can barely articulate what’s happening to him.

“The splitting spell did as it was meant to,” the warden replies as if it’s simple. “You are no longer suicidal.”

Regulus almost scoffs at that. There’s nothing to want to die about, he thinks. Not in an empty white room.

“I have used the splitting spell on many other patients, each with great success. It is quickly becoming the standard of care.”

Regulus stews. He folds his arms and glares, cross and vexed. “I didn’t agree to be anyone’s lab rat.”

Tap tap tap. Her quill on the desk. “Do you know what today is?”

“No.”

“It’s the anniversary of your father’s death, Mr. Black.”

Tick, tick— lag— tick from the unseen clocktower. Time is slow.

“Is it,” Regulus says, as if he doesn’t give a toss. He has no bloody idea what calendar day it is, barely even remembers the word calendar to begin with. The warden knows that.

“You found him at his desk. What happened next?”

“He was dead.”

“What would the old Regulus feel about that?”

“You’d have to ask him.” Or the fucking animalman, apparently, since they’re best mates now.

“I’m asking you,” the warden says. “There’s just you. Just Regulus. New and old, but the same person nonetheless.”

Regulus’ eye twitches. He wants to spit in her face, but the room won’t let him. Drool dribbles bitterly from his mouth instead. “Why did you put James Potter in my cell?”

“Room, Mr. Black. You’re not in prison. You’re in hospital. Be precise.”

“I’m to believe that’s just a coincidence? I told you— I’ve told you how much Old Regulus fucking hates him, and why. It’s a fucking small room,” he spits out the word, “Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”

“The room can always get smaller, Mr. Black.”

Regulus goes still, all vitriol draining in a moment. He sounds weak. Horrified. “No.”

“Some time spent in the Waiting Room may help you collect yourself.”

Regulus falls back from the eyes in terror.

“No,” he breathes. “No, please…”

Panic. Sheer, primal panic. New Regulus is frozen in place. Animalman seizes up and plays dead on the ground, visceral instincts all reverting to fawn. The eyes become white and empty, no one at the reins.

The Waiting Room.

No.

No, please—

He won’t survive it again. He won’t.

“I’m very busy, Mr. Black. If you can’t be precise with me today, perhaps you can be precise tomorrow.”

“I’ll talk,” Regulus pleads. “I will!”

“I believe you’ll talk. I also believe you won’t be precise.”

“Not the Waiting Room, please, anything but that. Potter can stay! He can stay, I’ll stop whinging about it, I swear, and I won’t hit anyone again, please—“

“You hardly hit Mr. Jugson, Regulus. You beat him into a coma.”

“Is he…?”

“Dead? Not at this moment, no.”

“Please,” Regulus says, voice a hoarse, pathetic whimper. “Please don’t—“ 

“We had hoped that stripping your environment of all external stimuli would cease the false production of alternate personalities. Clearly, after today’s episode, that is not the case.”

“I’ll try again.” Regulus’ throat closes up. “Please, I can be good. I’ll be good. Let me try again, please, just don’t—“

“MAC has done all it’s going to do for you, Mr. Black. It’s time to make a change. Petrificus totalus.”

The world turns black again, and Regulus begins to scream.

Chapter Text

The nose is cold. Regulus feels it distantly, like a twitch between his nostrils, the sharp sting of an unhindered draft that hangs low and persistent between unforgiving wallstones.

Cold air. White wallstones. The imprint of the memory— or the sensation— lives somewhere on the back of the eyes, persistent and iterative.

But Regulus sees no wallstones. A wide, open field lays before him instead, green and lush, its eternal vegetation depressed by the winds atop the mountain’s peak and the sleeping herds of deer that travel through it.

It’s a pleasant, green day in the ghost of the Ardennes, and Regulus is nowhere near the eyes.

Regulus reaches up and cups his own nose with the palm of his hand. He lets out a hot breath and all thoughts of the cold nose disappear in the warm, spring-summer air of the green hills. The grass is smooth and dry under his stomach. The familiar weight of the rifle rests light on his back, the heirloom bayonet throwing its weight pleasantly off-center by one familiar centimeter.

Regulus knows exactly where he is. There’s a snake pond on the southern face of this green hillside, an old, swampy jungle hidden inside the wall of bramble and multiflora rosa.

Father took him snake-hunting here as a child.

Their hunting parties feel like years ago, in a nagging, nostalgic way, but Regulus bats that notion away like it’s a buzzing fly.

There are no flies here. The ground is soft and fertile with no evidence of the rot or decay that made it so.

Regulus rolls leisurely to his side and finds an easy foothold in the perfect soil. He stands, light as a feather, every part of his body and mind at perfect, tranquil ease.

The sun is directly overhead, yellow and unencumbered, puffy white clouds always moving but never disappearing. The sun never sets, time never passes, the perfect memory of the green hills never tainted by hunger or thirst or animal threats like darkness, exhaustion.

There’s just Regulus and his snakes, and the endless green grasses that hide them.

Regulus stares placidly forward. A barn sits in the distance to the east, an empty and abandoned shell of a building that fits just right into the mountaintop. He and Sirius spent many afternoons playing there in their youth, boldly sneaking around the muggle war-planes stored there by Uncle Alphard decades before. Regulus wonders, momentarily, if the planes are still there.

He doesn’t go check. Curiosity lives without contentment here.

Bright, blooming sky. Perfect green hills.

Air in, air out. 

Regulus pulls in a deep breath. He can’t tell where his body ends and the air begins. It’s a pleasant nothingness, a lack of sensation everywhere he is.

The virgin forest stretches around the bare faces of the hills in clean, neat blocks, cleverly maintained with fallow fields of golden grasses holding back the borders.

Grandfather Pollux cleared this hilltop in pieces over several decades, and shared the labour with Grandfather Arcturus. It was an asymmetrical split, from what Regulus knows. It’s paradise, though. It’s heaven on earth. Regulus understands why they fought over it, why everyone fought over it.

Regulus didn’t particularly care about the financial reasons for sheltering family assets here. Paradise shouldn’t be tainted by anything beyond it. Owning paradise is enough.

Regulus takes in another deep breath. The sun is bright. His hills are green, lush. There’s good hunting to be had.

Regulus sets off down the hillside, rifle at his back, his father’s knife secured in his hand. The blade is long and serrated. It gleams sharply in the eternal sun, nicked and weathered.

The bramble looms overhead. It’s an ancient wall of tree and vine and untamed flora, its wild ground brush stretching even taller than Regulus.

The forest wall is old. Older than Regulus, older than wizards, older than magic, even. Still, it bends under Regulus’ blade, vines parting as easily as if they never hindered him at all. The virgin forest curls around Regulus with its arms of branches and thorny vines. It brushes the top of his head without scratching him.

Still, Regulus crouches. More for ease than anything, he thinks, ducking under the branches in his face. The endless forest swirls in front of him, green and brown and chasmic. He falls into it, every step met with the perfect crunching sink into fertile black soil.

Thorns of the wild multiflora rosa catch on his hair and clothes, cutting through him like butter and drawing no blood. Regulus starts to hum, deep in his chest, too quiet to alarm anything he might yet kill.

The forest feels deep and eternal.

Regulus walks for a long time, half crouched-over. The brush is taller than he is. It curls into itself like a thatched roof. He keeps his eyes high and his head low, one eye on the vines and the other on the fallen logs and branches.

The world narrows to green and brown and blade in hand. Regulus takes deep, even breaths, humming casually between them. His heart is slow but his eyes feel much sharper.

There are no snakes in the soil. No snakes in the trees. No sign of any snakes, either. No shallow trails through the earth, no prismatic, shedded skins hidden in the brush. No small, circular holes in the ground. There are no movements at all, beside the temperatureless wind in the leaves and Regulus’ hand slicing through coiled thorns. 

There are no birds.

It’s silent in many ways, Regulus thinks distantly, preoccupied with the coil of thorns pulling bloodlessly at his thigh. A small bloom of some kind sticks out of the new hole in his trousers. He hums quietly to himself, at the bottom of his register, and idly picks a second row of multifora thorns out of himself.

Regulus has never been much of a solo hunter. His senses are too dull, his limbs too leisurely. Father always said so. They always hunted in threes, Regulus, Sirius, and Father, though Sirius and Father could have managed swimmingly without Regulus at all.

Sirius carried Father’s gun back then. The two of them always split off to form the two arms of the trap on the southern face of the hillside, leaving Regulus to herd the backend alone and unarmed. It was the slower, harder part of the job, to be sure, but also the most useless. Any of Father’s dogs could have done it.

It wasn’t unusual to see Father or Sirius pass by Regulus then, making brief, flitting appearances in the brush some distance away as they moved expertly, rapidly, through the unforgiving thorns.

Regulus didn’t have their killer instinct back then. Maybe he does now.

“Hé,” Regulus says aloud. The air from his throat meets the air in the forest as its perfect equal. The sound carries down the hillside without echo. “Avez-vous tous trouvé le chien de chasse?”

Someone answers, maybe. From far away. Whether memory or sensation, Regulus can’t tell.

Sensation, his mind decides for him. His nose feels lukewarm here.

Regulus pauses. He waits for a bark, or a yelp, or for the poor hound to come speeding back up the hill with the brand of Father’s whip burned into its grey, shorn flank.

He waits for Father or Sirius to appear.

Regulus leans on the dull end of his blade. Something strains in the arch of his left foot, stretching taut without pain. But the forest is quiet and still.

“Est-ce que vous savez tous où est allé le chien?” He asks again, pitching his voice louder, aiming it higher in the air.

No sound comes.

The sun filters through the forest canopy. It’s golden without warmth. A light wind comes from the east, temperatureless and never catching on the thick, bramble wall as it cuts straight through it.

Time passes.

Regulus hums. He trains his ears outward, listening closely for Father’s familiar footfall or Sirius’ signature hacking through the forest wall. Or even the dog, circling back to base with a kill in its mouth and whining at the subterfuge.

Regulus waits.

An answer never comes.

Regulus hunches over again and keeps walking. The brush turns to tall, winding grasses. The trees shorten, taking on squatty, sprawling shapes that lay close to the ground, thorny vines twisting around branches. The thatch roof of the bramble thins and the sun peeks in.

Regulus has cut a fairly clean circle around the snake pond. Like the curve of a scythe, if a bird flew overhead and watched him do it. Regulus saws through a tangle of old, dead vines, and thinks idly about the taste of snake in his mouth. White flesh, bending, flaking, the thick roll of once-living meat in his mouth, fleshy, white, and the slick of fluid, rust-coloured blood on his hands.

Saliva forms around Regulus’ teeth, thick and syrupy. Hunger gnaws at him without pain. Father’s voice, Hunger without pain is excitement.

Hunt, hunt, hunt.

Kill. 

The ghost of a cold wind overtakes the skin of the body. Regulus pushes it away with ease, wraps himself inside himself.

His world is still green and brown and swirling, endless forest.

Regulus feels much of nothing at all. Everything comes at him as if through a pin cushion, soft and unimportant.

Green, yellow, brown, black.

Green, yellow, brown, black.

Green, yellow, brown, black…

“Hé!” Regulus calls once more.

No answer. He can’t rightly tell where Sirius and Father are, or if they’re even here at all. If they are, one should be to his left and the other to his right.

Regulus pauses, the crunch of a branch under his palm breaking the silence with an earthy cracking sound. He looks for movement— black hair in the trees, perhaps. Or the flash of the hound’s silver fur close to the ground.

The forest is still. So, Regulus keeps walking. He keeps one eye on the ground and another on the vines.

There’s a sharp drop off, Regulus’ foot landing in fertile, black earth half a meter lower than he expected, but he doesn’t stumble.

The hillside becomes steep. Regulus drops to his hands and knees and crawls, his bare palms in the fertile, black dirt which smells like nothing at all, and he crawls face-first through empty gossamer cobwebs and scritchy vines. The spider silk is soft on his face and hands. Their makers are absent, as if they have none.

There are no sounds. No hares, no dogs. No deer. Nary even an ant crawls through the soil.

It’s just Regulus and the bramble.

Green, yellow, brown, black.

Green, yellow, brown, black.

Green, yellow, brown, black…

The sun dulls under the canopy of the brush as it thickens again, the light taking to golden-green splotches and muted white patches.

Regulus crawls downward on his hands for a long, long time. Hours, perhaps, or maybe days. How many days? It’s hard to tell. He crawls until the fertile black dirt coats his entire forearms up to the elbows and blankets his shins in black smudge up to his knees. He crawls until he’s sunken half a meter down into the black earth.

He doesn’t tire.

He sees no snakes. No signs of any, either.

That’s alright, Regulus says to himself.

You haven’t struck black, yet, Father’s voice says.

Time passes. It’s hard to say how much.

Eventually, Regulus swipes his face with the back of his hand and finds mud. The slick of it jolts him awake, makes him alert again. It’s thick, black mud, crumbling with solid dirt, but mud all the same.

There’s water here. The muscles in Regulus’ abdomen seize up with anticipation and a pit grows where the snake meat will soon be. It’s heavy, wanting. Excited. Hunt. Father’s voice. Kill. Regulus’ jaw twitches, his trigger finger mirroring the movement in perfect time.

He’s getting close. He must be.

So, Regulus stops humming. His chest goes still like his heart doesn’t beat. Like his lungs don’t breathe. The earth is soft in his hands.

Regulus pauses, tilts his face upward to the canopy. He stares at the sun without squinting.

Regulus remembers the snake pond being almost central to the hillside, a natural cavern settling into the flat, level indent of a glacial crater. It’s somewhere to his left, he guesses, if the angle of the sun on the brush and the gentle, intuitive tilt of the bedrock are to be believed. If his scythe-shaped path was true.

There’s another cobweb in front of Regulus’ face. Its maker is nowhere to be seen, as if it never had one at all.

Regulus crawls in a circle until he forgets how to stand. He thinks he’s always been this way, four-legged and mud-smeared. Hunched, four-legged, a creature of mud and smell. He circles around until the bramble starts to look familiar, until he starts recognising specific trees, specific cobwebs.

There are no snakes, no water, no pond. They never appear. Time passes and Regulus’ mind quiets.

Eventually, even through the haze of the green woods, Regulus is left with an unshakable truth. The pond is gone. There are no snakes left.

Green, yellow, brown, black.

Green, yellow, brown, black.

Green, yellow, brown, black…

Days have passed. Time moves without moving, here. But Regulus is more certain of it now, as he stands in a makeshift campsite and chews at the inside of his cheek like it’s jerky. He can’t ignore outright evidence.

There’s a firepit at his feet. It’s encircled by upturned stones, black soil carefully hand-wiped from their gray faces. There are two logs at either side of it. Regulus can tell from a glance that they’re free of dry rot or termite damage, the sides of them littered with successive gradations like Regulus had sawed down a sturdy, living tree at some point.

Across from the pit, felled branches are tacked together into a vaguely-square frame with tar and turpentine. Soft moss is bedded down into it, lush and green. A crude bear door sporting sharpened wooden spikes lays beside his rustic moss bed.

This camp would have taken days to put together. A couple weeks, even. Couple of months, possibly. Regulus isn’t sure what he’s been eating, or if he’s been eating at all.

That’s alright, he thinks. It’s of no consequence. Hunger lives without contentment here. 

It’s all still perfectly green.

Regulus is close to the top of the perfect hillside. A stone’s throw away, he can feel it. One of Grandfather Pollux’s trails is less than a league behind him. This camp Regulus apparently made is well-situated above a steep drop, but not too steep. The hillside is green with tall grasses, its brown trees too scattered to hide anything at all. It’s a fine vantage point to watch the running of the deer.

But, the sun isn’t golden yet.

So, Regulus waits. He hums under his breath, a work song Kreacher hums when he’s deep in the labyrinth of Grimmauld Place, shoveling bone chips into the furnace.

Ah! Vous dirai-je maman, ce qui cause mon tourment?

Papa veut que je raisonne comme une grande personne,

Kreacher’s jaw cracks over a bone chip he snuck into his mouth. He sucks it dry and spits it into the fire.

Moi je dis que les bonbons valent mieux que la raison…

Regulus feels the vibrations in his chest. Low, deep, quiet. It blends indistinguishably into the living hum of the forest.

Eventually, the sun turns golden. Regulus stops humming and stills his whole body, his hunter’s blind carefully chosen to give him the best view of the hill’s smooth face.

The deer come slowly.

The herd is as relaxed as deer ever can be. They stalk, still suspicious and vigilant at baseline, and filter one at a time into the clearing below Regulus. They circle, gather, making low, beastly sounds at each other. They’re suspicious of one another. They’re a herd, but one of convenience. One of shared purpose. Survival.

They don’t stand a chance. But, they never did. The Blacks are a herd of  dominance. United by it. But even by himself, Regulus can scatter a herd. Regulus can kill.

Father made sure of that. 

Regulus is perfectly still. Father’s rifle rests on the split of the tree hiding Regulus’ body from the herd below.

The deer mill about. The sun turns from golden to ochre, as close to darkness as his perfect hills ever come.

One member of the herd eventually ventures into the dead center. It lumbers, fat, and bleats out a pathetic sound.

The barrel of Father’s rifle meets its perfect mark, and Regulus’ breath hitches. His heart stills. 

Regulus doesn’t act. 

Now. Father’s voice, outraged at the hesitation, at weakness, at failure. Now! 

Regulus’ trigger finger curls in one firm, instinctive twitch.

Ah! Vous dirai-je maman, ce qui cause mon tourment?

Papa veut que je raisonne comme une grande personne…

The animal screeches, a pained death cry that rattles every leaf and web on the perfect hillside. The bramble swallows the sound and the deer drops, dead-weight, into the soft, black earth with a dull and final thud. 

Thunder of hooves and dewclaws, shouts, screams, and then—

Silence.

The rest of the deer are gone. The herd has scattered and won’t reconvene until nightfall. Whenever that is.

Regulus hikes carefully down the hillside, rifle at the ready, eyes on his prize.

The animal Regulus shot is even bigger up close.

Regulus crouches down next to it, eyes flickering upward to watch the hill for any lingering deer, any too-brave or too-curious members of the herd who might decide to circle back and lock horns with Regulus. He slings Father’s rifle around his back, his elbow still notched in the strap.

The forest is still. 

None of the herd were that brave. Or that selfless.

The animal Regulus shot is of impressive size. The bulk of its body is broad, spread out, and weighed down by gravity. Its chest doesn’t move. It doesn’t breathe. Blood pools under it and the black puddle creeps steadily outward.

Regulus settles two fingers under the crook of its neck and presses inward, past the coarse hair there, searching for a pulse.

He finds none.

It’s dead. Its eyes, clear and glassy, stare at Regulus without staring at him. The whites are bloodshot with stale fear.

Regulus reaches into its robes.

The wand in the animal’s pocket is a deep, chestnut brown. It’s cheaply made but lovingly sanded down, carefully oiled and well-maintained. It’s simple, tapered, and rigid. One smooth indent delineates the handle from the staff. Regulus sniffs, and the smell of hard-wax offends Regulus’ nose, foreign and crude in comparison to the pure linseed oil scent of his own wand. It stings, almost. Clinical, sterile. Its natural ingredients are soured by modern chemical solvents.

Regulus weighs the humble wood in his hand. Affordable. Economical. A halfblood’s wand, Regulus decides. One belonging to a bitter, insipid member of the middle class, one too prideful to know its true place in the natural pecking order.

Regulus grasps the animal’s wrist. The skin is pudgy, white, still warm to the touch but cooling rapidly. It squishes inward when Regulus presses down with the pads of his fingers. Well-fed, he thinks, turning it over. An ugly black mark scars its forearm. The edges of the Lord’s mark are purple-red with permanent bruises, magic binding onto skin in a way it was never meant to.

Regulus drops the arm and retrieves Father’s blade from its sheath.

Regulus can feel the ghost of Father’s hand on his back, too low, too familiar, dampening Regulus’ instinct to keen into it like a fawn.

Good hunting, Father says, and gives Regulus’ hipbone an ungentlemanly squeeze.

The cold shocks Regulus to his core.

He’s inside the body in less than a moment. Too-suddenly, he’s settled into its limbs, but it’s a dark space.

The eyes are closed, he realises, his mind still foggy and slow. The air is cold, he can feel it, even despite the filmy grey soup where the eyes are. The wind is cold on his skin, his bare skin, and the body is rolling over. It’s being manuevered, turned over, bare legs lifted, shimmied. The sensation is distant. Regulus’ mind is slow to catch up.

The limbs won’t move on his command. Regulus reaches out and stretches himself thin. He tries to curl a finger, twitch a toe.

The body refuses. It’s limp. Dead.

Not dead. Paralysed. 

Calm. Regulus clamps down on the rising panic. Calm. Breathe. Just breathe. All the other muscles can lock up, that’s fine, just focus on breathing. You won’t die so long as you keep breathing. It’s Sirius’ voice. The jaw won’t move, so Regulus focuses fully on the nose.

Pull air in, pull air out. Don’t panic.

Breathe.

Air in, air out. Air in, air out.

There’s a ringing in his ears, sharp and insistent, the jaw pulling too taut and stressing the teeth with pounds of pressure.

Breathe in, breathe out.

The panic of the full-body paralysis evens out, keeps the heart steady at just-above-baseline. Breathe in, breathe out. The grey soup in front of the eyes starts to brighten. His nose returns with each breath into it, Regulus finally becoming aware of the smells of wherever he is.

There’s something on him. Two things, on the legs, on the trunk of the body. They’re warm, organic. Solid. They’re moving around, moving Regulus around—

There are hands on him.

Regulus is asleep.

There are hands on him.

Panic.

Calm. Breathe. Regulus breathes in through the nose, strains for the scent of fresh mint and tung oil, searches for the fragrance of ambergis and Bulgarian rose aftershave potion mixed with deadly amounts of firewhisky…

Instead, Regulus is met with a beastly smell.

A beastly, animal smell.

Regulus is up and screaming. The limbs finally respond. His whole body cringes, limbs snapping upward to protect his trunk, swatting at the massive, heat-radiating body standing over his.

“No!” Regulus grits out, locking his forearms over his face, pulling his knees into his chest. He blindly ignores the pain of muscle stretching too far and bone grinding on bare bone. “No, no—!”

He lands a useless kick and Potter shoves his leg away, pressing his whole body into Regulus’. He’s between Regulus’ legs.

He’s pinning him down.

“Stop,” Potter sneers, gripping Regulus’ wrists in two burning hands. His breath is hot on Regulus’ face, sweat dripping from his chin onto Regulus’ mouth, thick and salty. 

Regulus spits in his face.

Potter’s taken off guard, clearly not expecting the outburst, but he subdues Regulus with ease. It takes less than half of his weight to do it.

Regulus cries out in rage, bucks his hips uselessly, turns his head into the cardboard pillow. He snaps his jaw uselessly in the air, tries to catch flesh, drink blood, kill the animal.

Potter doesn’t move. He’s not even shaken, the fucking mass of him dwarfing Regulus like a lion eating a baby gazelle. Like a man eating a snake.

Regulus screams, the sound tearing apart his unused vocal chords, panic swallowed up by the magic bubble of their white room. He tries to shove himself upward, out from under Potter. His feet kick uselessly, unable to find purchase against the paper sheets as he flails like a beetle on its back.

“Be fucking calm,” Potter spits, wrestling Regulus still. He shoves a hand over Regulus’ mouth, a wet, scorching-hot muzzle that burns Regulus’ skin, sears it like meat.

James breathes out, breathes heavy, and the bulk of him stills. His grip tightens.

Panic surges in Regulus’ chest, sharp like lightning. Potter isn’t moving.

“No!” Regulus begs into Potter’s hand, muffled and desperate, thrashing anew. His knee finally hits solid flesh and Potter hisses. “Don’t, please—!”

The muzzle hand disappears.

It returns like a hot iron.

Potter slaps him.

It feels like a brand, like he’s taken a hot iron to Regulus’ cold face. The sting shocks Regulus into stillness. He withdraws from the limbs, curls up behind the eyes like a sick, scared child, huddling for safety that doesn’t come.

Potter’s hand settles back over Regulus’ mouth. The feeling is too familiar. Painfully familiar.

It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt. Until it does.

Regulus makes a pathetic, whimpering sound. It’s swallowed up by the coarse skin of James’ scarred hand.

Father’s smell isn’t here. Somebody tell the body that, because it’s seized up like it is.

Regulus realises, suddenly, that a pair of paper trousers are halfway up his legs. They’re scratchy and offer little shield from the cold wind. Potter’s other hand is gripped around the waistband of the hospital trousers. Slowly, he draws them upward, covers Regulus’ cock. Covers his decency.

Blood fills the face. It’s cherry-red, crimson-red, it has to be. Regulus fights the urge to bury his face into the pillow in his embarrassment.

Potter was dressing him.

Potter was dressing him?

Regulus forces himself still. He lets out a submissive, deferential sound, like a whimper but more resigned. Like he’s given up.

That’s a good bitch.

James gives a noncommittal grunt in response. “You awake now?”

Regulus’ head swims. The muddy grey soup of the eyes is swirling like potion in a cauldron, making movement appear where there is none.

Potter’s voice is hot and heavy in the cold shell of Regulus’ ear, and Regulus clamps down on making another bitch sound. “About fucking time, mate. I was getting proper concerned about you.”

Regulus’ jaw cracks open. One word falls out in a pathetic whisper. “Cold.”

It fans across Potter’s face. Regulus’ breath is as cold as he is. James’ eyes bore down into his, warm and black. “It’s the end of October,” he says, and Regulus fights the animal urge to flinch at their closeness. “You’ve been in a bloody stupor for months.”

Regulus’ fingers twitch. James notices, eyes shuttering downward and then up again.

Months.

August, James had said so. It’s bloody August. Won’t you be cold?

Winter’s coming, mate.

James’ voice, scorching-hot and hoarse, a smoker’s gritty baritone, brings Regulus back. “Socks and shirt, mate. That’s all that’s left.”

It takes Regulus a moment.

Permission. Potter is asking for permission. Regulus doesn’t know how to respond to that. He doesn’t know what the hell to do with that. 

Regulus gives a hesitant nod from under James’ hand. His eyes are wide, fearful, though he hates that they are.

Potter waits to comply. He’s posturing again, proving he’s in charge. Telling Regulus to behave, to obey. Regulus’ heart beats in his ears, rapid and shallow, so close to the surface he thinks Potter can feel it under his beastly hand.

Air in, air out.

The muzzle disappears. Regulus bites down another whimper. 

James manuevers Regulus like it’s nothing. He lifts Regulus upward with one hand and slides the paper shirt over him, jostling him only slightly.

He’s well-practiced. Like Regulus is one of his kids and Potter has dressed him a thousand times.

“Lift your arms,” James grunts out.

Regulus complies. He moves slowly, but James is patient. He matches Regulus’ speed.

Pressed together, their body temperatures even out. Regulus becomes warm, Potter becomes cool. It’s comfortable. Not at first, but it becomes comfortable.  James is solid. The feeling of him becomes slowly dependable. Regulus’ heartbeat is still rapid, still shallow, but the panic dulled at some point. He can breathe just fine, inflate his lungs almost all the way. 

Regulus hasn’t been touched in a long time.

Potter is the perfect temperature.

James withdraws, moves slowly downward. He wraps Regulus’ bare shin in one hand twice-over.

Regulus takes in a shuddering breath.

The cotton socks are the warmest thing yet. They slide over Regulus’ skin with ease, the cheapest fabric to ever touch it, but they’re warm.

The wind is cold.

“There you go,” James says, quiet and placating, like Regulus was a toddler who had just come down from a tantrum.

Potter withdraws, his substantial weight leaving Regulus’ bed, making it creak and groan. His choking animal scent lingers behind him.

There’s a beat of silence.

Then Regulus flies upward like a spring, his feet hitting the white tile floor with two loud smacks. He’s reeling forward, not sure at all where he’s going.

Something snaps inside.

Hunger tears through the stomach with a blinding, wretched pain. Regulus cracks forward at the waist and groans, grabs at his abdomen with desperate hands but immediately grasps the hard bone of his spine instead. The thin skin of his stomach clings to the notches of the vertebrae.

Regulus dry-heaves, panicked and confused, wordless. Crucio, his brain screams in its confusion. I’ve been cursed.

It’s the same pain.

Almost.

“Eat,” Potter says, and the word swims in Regulus’ ears. “You need to eat. You’ve been on sustenance spells for months. Those only go so far.”

Three steps forward, two steps to the right—

No! Regulus shoves that away with both hands. He’s still reeling. His palms hit the tiled floor and the eyes turn white.

“Hurts,” he gasps, curling onto his side. “It hurts.”

“Water.” Potter says it like it’s simple.

Regulus moans.

“You’ve got the soldier’s curse. Desiccation, mate. You need potable water and to eat something that isn’t a plain, unsalted cracker. That’s what a sustenance spell is. Fucking magic crackers.”

Regulus takes a deep, shuddering breath. The floor is cold. He gasps soundlessly and phantom tears sting his eyes, all salt and no water.

Regulus forces himself as still as he can be. If he’s going to die, he’ll die with a shred of dignity. Not flailing around like a fish out of water.

That’s a good bitch.

The pain subsides slowly. As long as Regulus doesn’t move, the knots in his stomach continue to unfurl. The skin of his thighs still burns where Potter touched him. He turns his head just slightly, and ventures a glance over at the beastly Potter.

James looks different. His warm, earthen skin is a sallow grey-black-brown, and pallored around the edges like he hasn’t seen the sun in a year. His tattoos are obvious now, stark against his newly-pallored skin, and strangely absent in movement. The magic in them drained out and left them lifeless. Short, prickly stubs of black hair stick barely a centimeter out of Potter’s head and face.

He looks like shite.

“You look like shite,” Regulus whispers from his place on the floor.

James gives no indication that he heard it. He sits on his own bed with a heaving sigh, dwarfing it under his weight, and clicks his fingers together as if casting a match-strike spell. It doesn’t work. “The bitch took my fags. Cunt.”

He doesn’t look quite like James Potter anymore. Not the James Potter that Old Regulus knew in school, not the James Potter that arrived in St. Mungo’s spitting and cursing and lively.

He looks more like an animal. He looks like the other animals.

He looks like a prisoner.

Regulus’ skin starts to prickle. Unease, he thinks. Or want.

Regulus knows want. He’s seen it. Felt it. Hates himself for it, feels a strange urge to cry. New Regulus starts to grow antsy.

Potter keeps talking. His voice is rough, crass. Not threatening, not exactly, but his animal smell overtakes the room and that’s threatening enough. “Nobody talks about how fucking hard it is. Not fucking, I mean. You go from having a wife and all the blokes on the corner to just your own fucking hand for company at night.”

Regulus doesn’t reply. His jaw is lax, useless. Something boils deep in his stomach that he doesn’t have a name for.

Potter’s tone changes. Even his scent changes. “Other blokes in the mad house aren’t as pretty as you are.”

Regulus’ hands twitch on the floor. His fingers curl inward.

James notices. “My point is, it’s nice to have something to look at. And I don’t blame you for that fucking sissy hard-on you get when I change your trousers and hold your fucking prick while you take a piss. That’s all.”

Regulus turns deep-scarlet. His heart skips a beat and stutters, fights to get back into rhythm. In fear, he assumes, as he takes in Potter’s animal scent. He’d almost forgotten that Potter is an animal, and a dangerous one. 

Regulus steels his nerve and forces himself to take  a quiet inventory.

The ulcers in his mouth hurt when he runs his dry tongue over them, but they’re intact. They aren’t ruptured, they aren’t bleeding. There’s no metallic tang in his gums. He focuses downward, forces himself to fill the lower half of the body and occupy it. He doesn’t have a word for it but he hopes— prays— James didn’t take advantage of Regulus’ state to go even further.

Regulus only occupies the groin for a second. He lets the inventory happen without controlling it. His cock is fine. No friction burns tug at the sensitive flesh, no sticky spit or fluids cling to the paper trousers. His arse is fine, too. Uninjured, unbroken. Dry. That’s all he needs to know. It’s all he wants to know.

Maybe Potter did just look. Maybe he pleasured himself at the sight, too. Oddly, the thought doesn’t send Regulus into a spiral. Animalman barely responds to it, wherever he is in the back of the skull. New Regulus is just anxious to move. Merlin knows where Old Regulus is. 

James is still talking. “You don’t look a thing like Pads.”

“We’re brothers.” Regulus sounds weak, distant. The cold, white room dwarfs him, and he almost wishes Potter would come back and lay on top of him again. He wishes they could stop talking. 

“In name, maybe. Sirius would die before he let that cunt of a warden bitch him.”

Potter sounds frustrated with himself, so Regulus lets that barb lie.

Regulus’ eyes wander to the twitching, nervous fingers. The nailbeds are half-blue. “Why is it cold?”

The clocktower in the picture box window is laden with a dusting of pure, white snow. Tick tick— lag— tick.

Tick tick— lag— tick.

Potter blows out an exhale as if he has a cigarette in his mouth. “You’ve been curled up on that bed like a sick dog. Haven’t a clue what the bitch did to you, but you were gone for four days before the cunts brought you back here.“

Regulus voice is hoarse. It cracks. “I laid here for four days?”

“You’ve laid there for two months.”

Two months.

Two months.

Regulus doesn’t know what to make of that. But Potter seems calm enough, so Regulus ventures forth some careful questions. “Was I quiet the whole time?”

Potter shrugged and gives another exhale, as if he were expecting smoke to come out. “You got up. Limped around, moaned. Muttered some nonsense about aninals and lakes and then collapsed back onto that sorry excuse for a bed. Fucking pissed yourself, mate.”

“You cleaned me.” The words sound hollow. Regulus is less than half-present. The cold stings his skin, but it’s lulling him to sleep. No one pulls him off the eyes. They don’t even try to. 

James is nonplussed, like he’s frustrated more by the work than the indignity of it. He says it matter-of-factly in his gritty, smoker’s voice. “I did your sheets. Took you to the toilet.”

“You—“ Regulus’ brain stutters.

“Held your cock while you pissed, yeah.”

“Fuck.” Regulus doesn’t know what else to say. All his blood pools in his face and his cock. Animalman itches himself and New Regulus groans in nervous distress.

“I think that makes us closer than brothers.” 

The words come out before Regulus can stop them. “Like father and son.”

James makes a weird sound. It sounds like he means, you mad purist fucks. “You’re about the same size as my kids, yeah,” James says instead. “They’re potty-trained, though. Nary a clue how you’ll survive the winter here. Fucking fairy, you are.”

Regulus tries to shrug, but the cold tile meets the bones of his shoulder blades and he hisses through his teeth instead.

“Are you planning to stay on the floor forever?”

“Hurts,” Regulus says again, for lack of anything else to say. And it does. The stomach twinges with every word he grits out between his cold teeth. His back hurts. His spine hurts. Stiff with the cold, half-frozen.

Air in, air out.

Air in, air out.

There’s a creaking sound. Then Potter raps on their door, three loud, firm thuds, and he shouts, “Orderly! Need an orderly in here!”

“Why?” Regulus barely gets the word out. His brain is white static, confused and easily swayed.

“It’s half one. Supper’s not for hours, and you might die before then. Am not going to force you to drink toilet water, either. The fat fucking minger can bring you proper nourishment.”

Regulus makes a passive sound from his throat. Or, he thinks he does. His head feels swimmy.

James sounds tired. Like he wishes he could stop talking, too. “Suppose you could wait for rec and ask then. Half of those nutters won’t remember what you did and the other half are probably plotting on you. Lots of Marks lurking around here. I imagine they don’t take kindly to being picked off like that.”

Regulus is barely present. The parts of the body he can feel start to vibrate against his will.

Did he kill a deatheater?

Did Regulus kill a fucking deatheater? Here?

Fuck.

James is still talking. “Not like you’ll need me to hang around. I gather you might have had one before, but you’ve certainly got a reputation for yourself, now. Since what happened to Jugson.”

The unfamiliar name triggers something instinctive in Regulus. His mouth is open before he can stop it. “Who?”

Potter freezes. For a fleeting moment, he looks almost sympathetic. Regretful, like he wishes he could eat his words. Whatever the feelings are, they disappear from his face in a moment. “The deatheater scum you beat to a bloody pulp,” he replies instead, voice suddenly gruff and clinically detached. He sounds like an Auror. “The bloke died.”

The bloke died.

Regulus’ fingers start to twitch again.

That’s a good bitch. 

“No great loss, if you ask me,” James continues. Something colours his voice. Reverence? Envy? Merlin, he sounds proud of Regulus. “That’s the kind of end they all deserve. Second-best, compared to Azkaban. Good on you, I say.”

Regulus hasn’t killed anyone in a long time. Not in years, not since— Regulus pushes that thought away with both hands.

He hasn’t killed anyone in years. He doesn’t know any Jugson, either, but Potter says the name like he did— like they both did.

Good hunting, Father says. He sounds proud.

Regulus’ stomach seizes up. Acid bile churns, scorches its way up his windpipe. He doesn’t know what the hell Potter is talking about, no idea at all, can’t recall beating anyone, but he needs to play it off. He can do that. He’s even good at it.

“No great loss,” Regulus agrees, as coldly as he can manage.

That’s a good bitch.

It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt. Until it does.

“Indeed.” Potter sounds as cavalier about killing as Father and Sirius do. “The system failed on that one. He should’ve stayed in Azkaban to begin with.”

Regulus manages a quiet, agreeing sound. Azkaban is locked up safely with Old Regulus.

Air in, air out. 

That’s a good bitch.

There’s silence. Regulus doesn’t know for how long. He just knows that no one tries to take the eyes from him.

He breathes as deep as he can, as steady as his useless body will manage. The stomach continues to untie its knots, muscles unlocking and expanding.

Potter hums. It sounds muffled, like he’s holding his head in his hands. Regulus doesn’t recognize the tune. It sounds foreign.

Eventually, Regulus looks over with the eyes. He’s too careful, too in control, to try to move the neck after an hour on the cold tile.

James is hunched over on his bed, the beast of him, and holding pieces of parchment in his hand. He regards them with idle curiosity, the whites of his eyes— now sickly, grey, and bloodshot— wander passively over the ink lines.

Regulus recognizes those letters, at least. No idea what they say, but he knows the author.

Fuck.

Panic. Animalman rears his head and snarls, territorial and enraged at someone else handling his things.

The entire body freezes, locking up again. Animalman claws violently at Regulus for the seat behind the eyes and New Regulus pounces in Regulus’ defence, blind but quick.

“Found these the first time I changed you,” James says casually, holding up the Animalman’s letters. “I don’t read much French. Care to translate them for me?”

Regulus’ stomach is already down in his toes and at that, it disappears entirely. Shrinks into nothing and blips out of existence. Dry bile rises up in its place, scorches Regulus’ throat.

Animalman and New Regulus lock horns, one snarling and the other blank. They’re at an impasse.

Regulus tries to get a word out and chokes, the powdered stomach acid expelling outward in a cloud and coating his mouth in something that burns. Burns like the soap powder Regulus vaguely remembers Old Regulus being force-fed.

Strangely, he’s saved by the bloody zookeeper.

Scuff-slide-thud. The door slot slides open and a familiar, fat hand appears.

“Black is up?” The zookeeper sounds almost surprised. Whatever feeling it is, it disappears quickly under his coarse Northern accent. “Black, Potter. Stand up. Hands out.”

Potter doesn’t respond at first. His eyes roll toward the door. He sounds bored. His voice drawls. “What for?”

“Patient escape,” the zookeeper replies. “The whole facility’s on lockdown. You’re being herded to the rec room with the rest of the floor.”

Chapter Text

Two grey lines swing, catch, fall across big white squares and a black spire soaked in the floating acids of thirty-eight foils.

A rabbit cuts through the perceptible natural movement of the air— Quelle chance!— A spoor of it, a twinge of ruddy fur snaking, slithering, in the dull white breeze and soupy grey air. It shakes its wiry mane and disappears inside a herd of much larger foils. Le pauvre cher. C'est presque trop petit pour être mangé.

Mon Dieu, Animalman thinks in a rare moment of lucidity, twitching his writing hand, Il fait un froid de canard.

The big white cage blurs. There are too many scents. Animalman grows his hair out long, long, long, extends it a length past his knuckles, and ponders his position in the herd. The hairs twitch in their open pores. The animalman isn’t a herd animal. His nose is dull but lively, long hairs twitching, twitching, searching, always. 

The tiny female would be no good prey. The waft of foreign hormones from her nethers are shriveled, stale, chemically sterile and sharp on the animalman’s nose. It’s the stench of atrophy, sickness. Poison, the kind seeped so deep into her muscles that animalman would only catch the sick himself if he sank his teeth in. Her blurry form huddles somewhere inside the herd. Her scent isn’t gone, only mixed, stirred right into the overfull stewpot the animalman finds himself in.

Animalman’s nose twitches in offense. He could not eat a rabbit, certainement pas, he’d sooner eat a dog. He is not hungry, besides. He is only waiting. There are no dogs. Poor Siri.

Posser un lapin, the animalman thinks with glee. Animalman is no stranger to a cage, Mother made sure, but this big white cage is bizarrely tall, and almost as open as any open field. Animalman can taste the old carcass in his maw, all white flesh and tattered black hair trapped between his fangs.

Mother was a good meal, he thinks. Not yet too old to lack meat.

The animalman is disoriented. That’s the explanation for his calm disposition amidst so much blubbery, hairless prey. There are eight white suns swinging overhead and fifty strange scents poking at his brain through his lax claws. The river between his snout and his head is severed, dammed up, leaving his nose numb as if he’d just received the cold caress of Mother’s calming cocaine. 

One, two. Quiet. A command. Fine white powder, numbing, tingling, cold—

The wallstones are cold like a cage. Il y a peu de différence, he thinks, though he feels remarkably lucid inside. He’s stretched all the way into the hands but the body feels, not for the first time, not his own. Or not under his control. He bristles, and the hair responds, but the head is another beast entirely. The animal inside closes up, claws out, and waits.

Animalman roams the cage with his eyes. Left, right. Right, left. Tick, tick, lag— tick. It’s a blurry grey-white-black-green soup. A zookeeper shifts on its haunches somewhere behind the animalman, the movement provoking a low, beastly growl from deep inside the throat.

Even surrounded by other animals with their teeth and claws and hair, and zookeepers with their meaty hands and snarling mouths, the animalman is unlike them.

There are wolves and there are sheep. Mother’s voice from sometime before. Your brother thinks he’s a dog. A dog is meat for the wolf. Go on, Regulus. Eat.

Bang! Something clatters loudly against a charmed barricade, bang bang bang, falling all the way down, something flimsy and projectile. 

“Mum!” An animal screams, his toothless mouth slurring and spitting foam. The thing he threw is swiftly collected by a zookeeper and tossed behind the well-fortified outcrop. Magic buzzes on its surface, twitching the animalman’s nose. 

“Mum!” The other animal’s eyes bulge out, grey, grey and bloody, blood falling lopsided and pooling heavy in the animal’s flank. Everything about the animal is grey. Grey skin, grey head, grey clothes stained grey with piss, and a grey tongue stuck out sharply to the left of his grey lips. “I need help! Mum! I need help in here!”

“That’s enough, Archie.” A zookeeper goads the screaming animal into a chair as it bucks and writhes and spits. A green zookeeper nods, her wide face bored and blank, and the zookeeper pulls out belt restraints from the magic of thin air.

“Mum!” The animal screeches. “I need help in here!”

The zookeeper snaps open the belt. “Hush, Archie. Your mum’s dead.”

Lymph bubbles up from the animal’s throat, the screech raw and fleshy. “Mum!”

The zookeeper forces the belt around the grey animal, locking him into place, blood still pooling inside, Animalman can smell it. “You had a stroke. Settle down, for Merlin’s sake!”

“Mum! I need help!”

“Just leave it,” the green zookeeper says. “If he winds up anybody else, just belt them, too.”

The orderly looks up, exasperated. “Canny put a sound lock on him?”

The healer only shrugs. “Madam Healer was very clear. No spells on unit today. How’re his ears?”

The orderly ducks around the screaming animal, glancing at the sides of his head. “Flat as my arse.”

“Mum!”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“He’s not long for this world, then.” The healer beckons the orderly back to the station. “Best leave the belts on him. Easier to get him in the oven that way.”

“Bloody pensioners,” the orderly mutters, dusting himself off.

“Mum! I need help in here!”

The healer and orderly ignore him, turning into the station and closing the charmed glass firmly shut. 

“Mum!” 

Animalman disappeared from the front of the house some time ago. Regulus breaks the surface instead, comes up gulping for air, and finds himself staring placidly at the situation unfolding across the hall. 

How long has the front of the house been empty? Nothing happened, a quick catalogue of the body’s condition says so, but the gap— minutes? hours?— spikes Regulus’ nerves.

Something could have happened, something nags from the back of the head.

Piss off, Regulus thinks back.

The animalman isn’t gone, only hiding. He clings to the rock in the back of the head and makes of it a dark cave.

Tick tick— lag— tick. The familiar sound of the belltower returns in the ears, and something buzzes under the skin of the hands. It’s a persistent drill.

New Regulus begins to itch. The new white room grows stifling with the bodies pressed in on each other, each movement leaving lasting stains. The left foot lifts, drops, lifts, drops. Up-down up-down, itching to move, measure, and pace. 

Sometimes, Regulus feels like an unbroken horse.

He sits down alone. The table is the smallest within reach, only two nailed-down chairs around it, so no one will try to join him. His back is to a barred window. The sunlight is almost warm on his shoulders.

“Mum!” The man screams again, thrashing in the charmed restraints, words slurred. “Mum! I need help!”

“Mum!” A female prisoner screams back through her white jowls, mocking. “Mum! Mum!”

Bang! Bang bang bang! An old man across the hall pounds his veiny fist against a table. “Shut your whore mouth, you two-sickle bitch!” He shouts, an animate pile of hairless blubber and faded ink. “Merlin burning on a fucking stick and pyre.”

There’s a cacophony of laughter and jeering.

Regulus turns away. Deep breath.

The recreational hall is fucking crowded. Everywhere he looks, Regulus sees bald heads and bruised, pallored skin, and a sea of shifting paper clothes. It’s bright, too bright, sunlight and muggle electric diffusing through the air like a big white blanket on a batch of hairless newborn pups.

New Regulus is nervous, so nervous, his eyes dart left-right, right-left, desperate to get up and move but unwilling to brush shoulders with any of the strange, hairless people.

It’s only until shift change. Regulus clings to the thought. He can’t decide if he’d rather be out here with the animals or alone in his cell tonight with—

Potter. 

Regulus picks up that thought with both hands and throws it as far away from the front of the house as he can. Old Regulus, from somewhere deep inside the house, jostles momentarily awake with a deep blue flush and stutter.

Deep breath. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt.

Until it does.

“Mum! I need help!”

New Regulus counts. Tick tick lag— tick. Tick tick lag— tick. The familiar sound of the belltower, though slightly to the left, is a tenable substitute for measuring. The new white room is too large, too loud. 

One, two, lag, three. Four, five, lag, six. Seven, eight, lag, nine. Twelve? One, two… 

Regulus has only four minutes and twenty eight seconds of peace before two prisoners sit down at the table next to him.

A haggard old man with the face of a rode-hard horse and a shorter, fatter one with bulging blue-grey veins heave downward, their paper trousers crinkling against the muggle plastic chairs.

“Resentencing is a load of fuckin’ bollocks, mate,” The horse man says. “No one gets out of here. No one, nowhere, ‘cept to Azkaban. An’ the food’s better here.”

“Tribunals are a crock a shite,” the veiny one agrees. “Just an excuse for that bitch to drug you to yer eyes in potions an’ tell a jury of her peers yer not fit to get out. They bring yer family, too, so they can all see how fucking batty you are an’ keep paying yer fucking hospital fees. Crock of fucking shite, I’m telling you.”

Horse man scoffs, spits, rubs his wrinkled white jaw. “Dinny need another bloody sodomite here, an’ not one getting any special privileges. This place is miserable enough as is. They ought to burn ‘em. Burn ‘em all, right next to the fucking murderers. Vile fucking perverts, all of ‘em.”

“Just as bad as murder, that is,” the veiny one agrees. An unlit roach of a fag smolders on the inside of his lip, burning a hole through the grey flesh. “Just as bad.”

Horse man taps his fingers impatiently on the table, fingernails yellow and ridged. “You did murder someone, Wilkes. You killed that poor bastard.”

“Dinny mean to,” Wilkes sniffs. “But if I had, then the poor bastard fucking deserved it.”

“Say, I’ll not miss him. Bloody good riddance. That cunt brought nothing but trouble, and trouble is all he owed. They could bury that rat under our feet, they could, an’ I’d be fuckin’ happy.”

Wilkes chews on the roach, spotty black ash crunching, crunching, crunching into the sick flesh of his mouth. “What happened to sending those to Azkaban? Back in my day, they did. It was ten years in Azkaban for bitching a bloke, and another ten for every bloke you bitched after him.”

“Mentally ill,” The horse man agrees. “Sick in the fuckin’ head, to be sure. But they’re a criminal like any other. They don’t need to be in hospital, they need to be put down like a fuckin’ dog. Shot between the eyes with a killing curse and left out to rot in the fucking sun.”

Wilkes scoffs. The roach rolls in his mouth. “Azkaban would be too fucking kind. I say, kill ‘em and bury ‘em right there like you do the fuckin’ giants. Scum of the fuckin’ earth, fairies are. Scum of the fucking earth.”

“Did you hear they put ‘im with the fucking nutter?”

Wilkes casts a baneful glance at the milling nutters behind him. “Hardly narrows it down,” he mutters in response.

“The prince,” Horse face emphasizes. “The hoity toity noble lad who gets his own fucking suite.”

“They put the new sodder in with that fucking scrap of a thing? Merlin, he’ll be eaten alive.”

“Eating out of a fucking tube, more like.” Horse face snorts, derisive, angry. “Dinny like the rich bastards, but dinny mean they should get poked like that. Not even a runt.” 

“Poor lad. They’ll ‘ave to sew his arsehole shut.”

“Bleeding hell. Better to send the bloke right to hell, then. If I saw ‘im, I’d do it myself. Fucking merciful, that would be.”

Send the bloke right to hell, then.

Fucking merciful, that would be.

Send the bloke right to hell, then.

Fucking merciful, that would be.

“Mum! Mum! I need help in here!”

The white room suddenly feels much smaller. Two grey lines swing, catch, fall across big white squares and a black spire soaked in the floating acids of thirty-eight foils. A rabbit cuts through—

Regulus is jolted out of his quiet stupor by the sudden appearance of James Potter. 

He’s a beast in sight, tall and broad, all dark eyes and hulking, brown mass, standing over the horse man’s shoulder like a grim reaper. At some point, Regulus had lost track of him through the room. Fucking confounding how that happened. 

“Piss off, Wilkes,” James says, gruff and bored. Ash stains his hands and jaw. “Sisterfucker, you are.” 

Wilkes pays him the most disgusted, contorted look Regulus has ever seen on a wizard. “Speak of the fuckin’ sodder,” Wilkes spits, and he’s quick to get on his feet, the bell-shaped bulk of him taut like a coiled spring, ready to— 

“Oi!” A zookeeper shouts from across the hall. “Wilkes, Macnair. Move on, then.”

Horse face— Macnair— looks like he wants to bash the zookeeper’s head in. He grumbles, but stands, the full height of him barely reaching Potter’s shoulder, but he shoves James’ side as he pushes past him, not at all cowed like he should be. 

Potter only scoffs. Under the ash on his hands are the dried remains of blood. 

Macnair disappears into the crowd of paper clothes. 

Wilkes isn’t as easily swayed. He waits, gnarled hands gripping the edge of the table so tight Regulus thinks it might snap off. 

“Wilkes!” The zookeeper says again, a dry warning. “Six metre radius. Now.”

“Fuckin’ sodder,” Wilkes mumbles. He stumbles off, the bulk of him side to side, side to side. He casts a baneful look backward, hobbling on a missing leg, but Potter doesn’t even dignify him with a glance.

Regulus lets out a deep, deep exhale.

James looks down at Regulus, from metres above it feels like, a wooden box under his bulging arm. Regulus wants to tell him to piss off but Potter— stupid, brazen, bent Potter— sits right down in the chair opposite Regulus and starts digging through the wooden box.

“Fuck off,” Regulus says without thinking.

Potter shoots him a chastising glance, a vague admonishment one would pay a toddler, and Regulus feels himself shrink in his chair. 

Potter takes out a thin, folded wooden slat, three hinges and muggle glue holding it together by its underside. He unfolds it, setting it on the table between them.

Potter clicks his tongue, searching ardently for something in the box. “You keep up with quidditch any, Reg?” He asks, distantly.

Regulus doesn’t dignify that with a response. He just glares, exasperated and cold, wishing the fucking bastard would just leave him alone. 

But Potter keeps talking. “They don’t televise the matches here. Bloody ridiculous. I’ve no idea if Cannons took Holyhead in the nationals, and I had parlays. Curiosity’s killing me. I’ll get an earful from Lils if that cunt of a Healer ever gives me visitation. I’ve bloody well earned it.” 

Tick tick— lag— tick. Chittering all around the corridor, chittering like birds. Birds are good to kill and eat. Silence beats for an indeterminate amount of time and the eyes turn into grey soup.

“Mum! I need help in here!”

Visitation? Regulus’ brain is slow like sludge. It crawls like a lizard with its belly on the ground. His thoughts creep, dull and stupid. Is that a thing that happens here?

Has he heard this word before? Visitation.

Something tugs at New Regulus, something from deep inside Old Regulus’ eyes. New Regulus can barely make it out as it forms in the grey soup. It’s a blurry picture of Crouch.

Regulus pushes the image away like it’s poison.

James is still talking. “That’s a right useful muggle invention, television. You ever seen one, Black? Muggle telly? Amazing what they can do without magic. Lils is always telling me.”

Regulus doesn’t reply. Potter stares, expectantly, and infuriatingly patient.

“…No,” Regulus eventually grits out. What the fuck is a muggle telly? But he’s not going to ask. Better to be silent than stupid, that’s a lesson Sirius never learned. 

New resentment boils under Regulus’ skin at the thought of Sirius. 

James starts to set out tiny wooden figurines, placing them on the board in an order Regulus can’t even begin to understand. “Got this from Doge over there.”

“Who?” Regulus’ mouth moves without him commanding it. 

Potter nods at the animate pile of blubber and ink across the room. “Mr. Shut-your-whore-mouth-you-two-sickle-bitch,” James clarifies, turning back around in his chair. “Calls himself Mayor of the Nuthouse. Bloody mental, but he’s talked the healers into loads of games and things. Basic model, but you don’t need much to play wizard chess.”

Regulus’ own voice sounds foreign in his ears. “I don’t know how to play.”

James gets an odd look on his face. “Don’t know how? Sirius said you played him all the time.”

A stab of hurt cuts deep inside at the sound of Sirius’ name in Potter’s mouth. Did Old Regulus play wizarding chess with Sirius? 

Animalman, curse him, is still too spooked from the noise and the crowd to make Potter pay for that offhanded remark about Sirius.

In absence of an answer, Regulus just shrugs. 

“Right.” Potter doesn’t believe him, or he doesn’t know what to think, but he leans forward suddenly and picks up one of the figurines on Regulus’ side of the board.

Regulus reels back so fast it’s comical.

“Whoa, there,” James says mildly. He shows off the figurine, turns it around in his hand. “This is your Queen. She can move any number of places in a straight line. The King moves one place in any direction. Rook, any number of places up or across. Bishop, diagonally. Knight goes one up and two across, or the other way ‘round. Pawn goes one forward, but captures one diagonally. All that make sense to you?” 

Regulus levels a dead-eyed stare at him. “I didn’t agree to play.”

Potter cocks an eyebrow. “You’re doing fuck-all else.“

“No.”

“Ah, come on.”

“Piss off.”

Potter takes out a small vial of sand from the box and sets it on the table. “One match, baby Black. It’ll make the time pass faster.”

“You’re not going to stop, are you?”

Something like amusement glints in Potter’s eyes, belittling and patronizing. Regulus wants to bash his head in.

“Right,” Potter says. “I’ll open. You’ll pick it up fast, smart thing like you. Thought you’d like playing Black, as it were.”

Regulus, somehow, has reverted to an old posture, spine straight, hands folded, ankles crossed, like maybe he can somehow win this interaction by keeping his dignity.

Potter picks up a white figurine— a pawn, Regulus presumes— and sets it down two places farther from him. Then, with a casual hand, he reaches over and flips the vial of sand.

Regulus stares at the board. Slowly, he picks up one of his pawns and moves it two places forward.

James lets out a begrudging grunt. He’s impressed. Something sick flutters in Regulus’ chest. “Fucking bell end, you are,” Potter mutters, tapping his fingers on the table. “Don’t know how to play, my arse.”

Potter flips the sand vial back over and slouches, jaw resting on his fist, as he considers the board.

Regulus’ leg begins to shake. It jolts up-down, up-down, up-down, something of New Regulus begging to up and pace, and move—

Suddenly, Potter is touching him.

Under the table, hidden from view, James slowly runs his thumb over the braised skin of Regulus’ forearm. The pads of his fingers are coarse, rough with blisters and sticky with sweat, and they burn hot. They burn hot over where the Mark used to be, over the ridged and scarred tissue left from Old Regulus carving it off.

Regulus’ leg is shocked still. His eyes dart surreptitiously to James, but he’s not even looking back, his warm, black eyes instead fixed steadily on the board between them. There’s no tension in his hulking broad shoulders, no guilt, no shame, no outward sign at all of what he’s… doing… under the table.

Regulus isn’t sure what Potter’s doing. (He knows why he’s doing it). Tick tick— lag— tick. Tick tick lag— tick. Something blue swims up the head and Regulus’ nerves turn over, rotting and fried even a decade after. The last person to touch his Mark like this was—

Animalman huffs from the back of the head, an annoyed sound, and tries to swat the board away with his claw. The arm doesn’t answer his command.

Regulus tries so hard to breathe normally. He tightens his fist, hopes the obvious clench will deter Potter, the fucking bastard, maybe if he’s not so soft then Potter won’t want to fucking caress him. 

James doesn’t retreat. His foot nudges between Regulus’ feet, hidden under the table, and wedges itself up against Regulus’ ankle. His hand rotates slowly on Regulus’ forearm, twisting, burning.

Regulus exhales through his teeth. 

Potter’s palm and fingers are incredibly calloused. The ridges are more crust than skin, old injuries piled on old injuries piled on rough, rough fibrous tissue. Regulus can barely feel anything in the flesh where the Mark used to be, but James’ calloused thumb suddenly hits the exposed ridge of an artery and Regulus gasps, hisses through his teeth, and tries to pull his arm back on instinct.

Potter’s grip is firm. Unyielding. His fingers trace back and forth, back and forth…

The animalman has no tactility. Mother tested those limits. But somewhere in the back of the head, Regulus chokes on his own tongue.

Still, Potter doesn’t even fucking look at him. James just picks up his pawn, rubs it against the bare stubble of his jaw a few times, and sets it back down again. He clicks his tongue and sighs. Skin clings too tight to his Adam’s apple, evidence of onsetting malnourishment from the paltry prison food, but Regulus feels nothing but nervous at that. Hunger makes men do strange things.

You would know.

“Apologies, mate,” Potter grunts, still not fucking looking at him. “Been forever and a day since I played.”

Bastard, Regulus thinks, something deep inside his stomach clenching. Potter’s grip is a ghost on his forearm, so insistent on the body Regulus thinks he can feel it even from the back of the skull, the place where most of him is withdrawn, curled up into a ball, and when did that happen? 

Potter’s foot has Regulus’ ankle trapped firmly against the wall. Something rises up inside, something like panic, but sharper. Someone’s going to see. 

Someone’s going to see. 

Some of Regulus is in the eyes. The eyes dart nervously about the room, flickering from the other animals to the zookeepers and back again. The hall is cold, white and cold and spotted with green. The face floods with heat and the stomach drops hard into the clenched place, so embarrassing Regulus wants to shrivel up and die before he tries to meet Potter’s gaze again.

Someone is going to notice. Someone in the hall is going to see.

Potter is a fucking actor, brilliantly, infuriatingly calm, even as he touches Regulus he can’t give him the courtesy of fucking looking at him.

Tick tick lag— tick. Tick tick lag— tick. 

Regulus can’t breathe. 

“Mum! Mum! I need help in here!”

The body is frozen. Regulus doesn’t know where to go from here, and Potter’s still fucking touching him. 

He hates him. He hates him. He should be pulling away. He should be lunging at the beast, clawing his eyes out, stomping on his head until it’s naught but red mash for the warden’s dogs. He stole Sirius, the bastard. 

Potter still doesn’t fucking look at him.

The skin around Potter’s eyes is sunken and sallow. Amusement radiates off of him and his hand ventures a centimetre further up Regulus’ nervous, twitching arm. He’s definitely sensed Regulus’ hostility, the bastard, but he’s just fucking staring at the chess board like he’s not—

Fuck, it burns. It burns like fiendfyre, lighting up Regulus’ dead nerves with something like panic, something screaming get away.

“Mum! I need help!”

Still, Potter doesn’t fucking look at him.

Animalman is too occupied by the match to bother killing the opponent. He peeks his hairy snout out from the rock in the back of the head and turns over strategies. Regulus can see it in his beady, black eyes, the gears turning in his clever animal mind as Potter somehow manages to coax him out of hiding. Regulus hopes the animalman will unleash his claws but the fucking useless beast is unusually docile. 

The unseen clocktower goes tick tick lag— tick outside Janus Thickney’s walls.

Tick tick lag— tick.

Tick tick lag— tick.

“Mum!”

Regulus tries so fucking hard to time it with his breathing. Blood pounds in the ears. The heart pounds in the chest, weak and faint. Potter’s calloused thumb trails over the raw forearm, back and forth, back and forth…

The rhythm is intimate.

Regulus wants to die.

He’s struck, suddenly, by how public they are. Voices from the animals rise and fall less than a stone’s throw away. Regulus could touch one of them if he just stretched his arm out to the right.

Conversation is muted but the symphony of the muttering fills the hall, reminding Regulus that a hundred other animals are close by. Watching, waiting, eyes shifting about. They’re so close that the animalman can smell their sweat, their spit, the dried seed and piss stains on the insides of their paper trousers. He can smell their breath. Their yellow, rotting teeth and their white tongues.

Potter— brazen, stupid, bent Potter— doesn’t seem to care. He swipes his thumb firmly over the thin skin on the inside of Regulus’ forearm, right over another prominent vein, all red and raw and broken.

Regulus draws in a sharp breath.

One animal glances over at Regulus for half of a moment, a fat, beady-eyed beast of a man, and Regulus almost coughs aloud in panic. His arm twitches in James’ grasp, half a reflex undampened, and his foot kicks against James’ ankle, but the bastard has him well and truly pinned. 

Potter’s eyes burn into Regulus’ temple, but Regulus keeps his gaze fixed steadily to the right, fixed on the crowded hall.

For one terrible moment, Regulus’ heart stops beating.

Then the fat, beady-eyed animal finally looks away. He’s none the wiser.

Regulus lets out a careful breath. No one notices their game under the table. Not even the eyes on the walls can see.

Regulus’ face burns hotter. The secret is thrilling.

Whore.

James’ scorching-hot fingers pause. They press down, and Regulus’ breath hitches.

Potter tightens his grip to a minute degree, and Regulus finally looks back at him.

The bastard is smiling. Not with his mouth, but Potter’s coffin dirt eyes are crinkled around the edges, and black with a hunger Regulus knows too well.

Foolish boy. This is the fun bit.

Regulus bites down a throaty sound. A gulp? Excitement? Fear? His stomach turns over with something new, something like bile, too close to the unwanted way it sometimes turned over for Father.

It doesn’t hurt.

It doesn’t hurt.

Until it does.

Old Regulus is nowhere nearby, or Regulus would ask him how to name a feeling.

Relax yourself. An order. You always enjoy this part.

“Mum!” The chained up animal moans, gurgling blood and lymph. “I need help in here!”

“Your move, Black.”

Potter’s gravel voice is deep, much deeper than the posh country shrill Regulus remembers in school. The lack of drink and smoke and the cold, cold air has only made it deeper, gruffer. Angrier.

Regulus notices, suddenly, that James has begun to speak like the zookeeper. Common, vulgar, northern. It suits him. Not the Potter from before, but the bald, cold, pallored, veiny, hungry Potter— it suits him.

Potter’s forefinger trails up the side of the forearm with a gossamer touch. Not gentle— too insistent, too threatening to be called gentle— but Regulus still has to take a steadying breath. The whole body shakes.

Fear? Nervousness? Merlin— excitement?

Fucking tosser, he thinks angrily at himself, his interior voice faint and fading quickly. Hold yourself together.

James’ chapped plum-purple lips twitch. The bold bastard looks infuriatingly smug. Satisfied, like Regulus’ reactions were exactly what he’d wanted. Entertained, like Regulus was his circus monkey he’d gotten to jump at his every command.

Regulus couldn’t clamp down the bitterness. He couldn’t pull his arm out of Potter’s grasp, either. 

Potter’s foot still has Regulus’ leg pinned tightly to the wall. 

Animalman is still considering his next move. The timer is running down, down, down, sand leaving the chessboard hourglass quicker and quicker as the vortex in the middle deepens.

Regulus’ heart creeps steadily up into his throat.

Potter’s thumb caresses the thin skin of the crook of the elbow and Regulus faints inside, falling backward off the eyes and scrambling toward the safety of the back of the house. He breathes hard, tries to collect himself, fails. Inside, he snaps forward at the waist and retches instead. It’s blood and lymph.

That’s a good bitch.

The body doesn’t move at all. It rarely obeys Regulus. Animalman settles on a course and picks up his hairy, shaggy arm, directing the body with ease, and placing his knight two spaces to the left and one space forward.

Potter gives a wry smile with his lips turned downward. He hums deep in his throat and the tattoo ink on his neck, a faded regiment symbol, ripples with the bob of his large Adam’s apple. Veins bulge and recede, bulge and recede. “I told you you’d remember how to play.”

He sounds proud.

Regulus starts to unfurl in the back of the skull, sluggish blood still pounding in his ears, still limb-weak. Even absent from the body, he can still feel Potter’s massive fucking hand around the arm. Get off. Grab more.

Leave me alone.

Fuck me.

James picks up his bishop and moves it in a diagonal line. “My kids aren’t old enough to teach yet, and Lils never wanted to learn. I’ve been so bloody bored, mate, you’ve no idea. Two months doing fucking nothing, I’ve been. But you and I, we can do this now.”

Potter’s blistered fingers still burn around Regulus’ arm. His thumb presses into the pulse point in the crook of the elbow, rolls over the delicate veins there. The touch is so foreign that Regulus doesn’t know whether to scream or keen into it and fawn like a bitch.

We can do this now.

Mortifyingly, Regulus’ cock decides for him. The traitorous thing twitches and grows under his paper trousers, stiffening enough to make the blood in Regulus’ face pool in his cock instead. He shifts slightly, tries to be subtle, and fights the urge to cross his legs like a witch. He doesn’t need to give anyone proof that he’s a fairy. Because he’s not a bloody fairy. Regulus glances nervously away, eyes darting around the hall, praying no one notices his humiliation.

Regulus fawns. He always does.

“Mum!” The man screams. “I need help in here!”

Regulus almost jumps out of the skin.

Potter, damn him, notices, and his sunken eyes light up with amusement at the panic in Regulus’ sudden, fruitless pull away from him. Potter has him pinned arm and leg, and Regulus can’t pull away if he tries. 

Mud lover bastard, Regulus tries to think, but the words aren’t his and they have no teeth. Regulus willfully doesn’t think about why Mother’s bitterness is suddenly failing him.

James doesn’t let Regulus pull away. His calloused fingers only press down harder. Something spikes inside and Regulus swallows an embarrassing, throaty sound, fights the urge to shake his leg. Potter’s eyes burn onto his forehead but Regulus can’t make himself look up, damn him, damn you, he just looks down through his lashes like a meek little runt. Runt of the litter, you—

The other animals’ trivial conversations aren’t enough of a distraction from Potter’s burning hand or his burning eyes, or the press of his leg against the inside of Regulus’ bruising ankle. 

Regulus wants to crawl out of his skin. He’s dying for it, needs to get somewhere farther away than the back of the head, needs to leave the body entirely. His cock twitches again, the useless, treasonous appendage, and Regulus reluctantly returns his eyes to the chess match.

The board isn’t enough of a distraction, either. Blood pools down and Regulus loses feeling above his neck.

“Mum! Mum!”

Regulus ventures a quick, subtle look upward, hoping he’ll get away with it.

Potter is smiling. His mouth is twitched the barest degree upward, his sallow, stubbled face drawn up the slightest bit. His dark eyes are smug. Satisfied.

We can do this now.

Under the table, James’ fingers shift upward. They curl around the distal end of the upper arm, dwarfing it twice-over. Blood pounds under his touch.

He could stop the flow of it at any time. He just has to press down. The threat is there, the threat to stop Regulus’ blood. To overpower him, to just take what he wants, up to and including Regulus’ life.

Regulus tries to swallow, and finds that he can’t.

Potter is still smiling. Something shifts in his demeanor. His beastly animal smell sharpens with victory, becomes prepotent. He knows he’s won. Regulus can see the proud triumph behind his eyes. “Your move, Black.”

Animalman wrinkles the nose, suspicious of Potter’s new smell, of Potter’s sudden self-assuredness. Animalman can’t lose to the beast who stole Sirius, not again. He bares the teeth in an unpleasant snarl. He throws the vestiges of Regulus off the eyes in one fluid, violent motion and assumes full control, becoming Mother’s hairy little beast again.

Then Potter’s fingers leave Regulus’ forearm and slip into the band of his paper trousers.

Regulus almost jumps out of his chair. His hips jerk, reflexive, instinctive, and he takes a sharp inhale of breath that sounds like a pained hiss.

The pads of Potter’s calloused fingers are hot. Hot like iron, like molten metal, sticky with sweat. They dip lower, lower, burning into Regulus’ paper-thin skin.

Regulus holds his breath, his body twitching under the table.

Potter smiles, the edges of his mouth turned down, smug and victorious. “I win.”

His hand— his fucking scorching-hot, invading, bold hand— caresses the edge of Regulus’ groin, calloused fingertips running over the sensitive skin with a feather-light touch so gentle Regulus almost bucks up into it. 

Instead, he forces his hips down, angles them away, hoping stupid fucking Potter will take the hint without Regulus having to make a scene in front of so many inmates. 

James doesn’t take the hint. Something like a prey drive sparks in his eyes and he chases Regulus down, down, his hand leaving a scorching trail down Regulus’ hip. 

Fuck. Fuck, Regulus almost gasps aloud. His cock, evil, traitorous, disgusting appendage that it is, stiffens at the proximity, twitching toward James’ hand like a dying flower seeking sunlight.

Potter slowly turns the sand vial over with his other hand, practiced and casual. He picks up a figurine and puts it back on the edge of the board. Then another. Then another. His thumb swipes over Regulus’ groin, just over the base of his cock, and Regulus nearly groans aloud. 

Fuck off. Closer. Get away. Please, just a little bit closer—

Is the match over? Regulus didn’t even notice.

Potter’s burning, calloused fingers close around the base of his cock—

“Oi.”

Regulus almost jumps out of his skin, again. James, damn him, doesn’t visibly react at all. His hand retreats from Regulus’ groin, slipping away under the cover of the table, leaving Regulus’ heart pounding in his ears and something heavy and rotten turning in the pit of his stomach. His cock twitches, the pathetic, whiny thing that it is. Regulus is only glad Potter’s hand isn’t still there to feel it. But a nagging, haunting voice in the back of his head says, He knows. Why else would he touch you?

“Black,” the zookeeper grunts out, tapping his knuckles on the table twice. Potter’s massive hand grazes the inside of Regulus’ knee and Regulus almost chokes on his own tongue. “Hands out. Stand for transfer. Madam Healer wants to see you.” 

Chapter Text

Father’s study is blue.

The walls fade to a tepid grey at the junction of the ceiling and floors, the wallpaper having been permitted far beyond its intended age, but it matches the dust that’s settled over every surface. The grandfather clock in the corner goes Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick…

The air is oppressively hot and stuffy, all the windows shut and curtains drawn despite the awful heat, and Regulus fidgets on his hands.

Father summoned him here some time ago, but he has yet to acknowledge Regulus at all. Par for the course, but Regulus struggles to fight off the boredom of being ignored. Mostly, he wishes he could be wearing something other than his wools. The itchy three-piece ensemble doesn’t breathe, and it’s completely unforgiving in the late summer heat.

Father must be miserably hot, Regulus thinks, examining his father’s fine grey waistcoat. Indeed, a bead of sweat falls down the side of Father’s face, catching in his salt-and-pepper beard.

Father swipes his quill in short, purposeful motions, utterly focused despite the oppressive heat. His marks are perfect. Precise. Regulus has never seen penmanship so exacting. Somehow, Father avoids mixing his sweat with the ink.

Though interesting, it isn’t enough to sate Regulus’ need to move, to do something. Merlin, he’s bored. He wishes Father would just teach him something and send him away already. The novelty of Father’s attention is wearing thin.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

The grandfather clock beats like a heart. Regulus shifts on his hands, fingers growing numb under his slight weight.

A bird whistles, whistles, whistles, high and low through the windows, and Regulus almost knows the tune.

It happens quick.

Father’s quill hand twitches. The mood of the room shifts, Father’s fist clenches, and his face morphs into something else entirely. He throws an open book at the wall, its spine breaking against brick with a loud Crack!

Silence.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Regulus holds his breath. Outside, the bird drops dead.

Then the monster melts back into the chair and Father returns, with his round cheeks and bushy graying hair, slick with pungent hair potions. His beady eyes are black and familiar again.

Father doesn’t speak until half one. He buries himself in his work.

Slowly, Regulus unfreezes. He kicks his legs, bored, eager to move, to explore. It’s not natural for a child to be so still for so long.

“Stop that,” Father says, never looking up from his books.

Regulus stops.

Inside, he still itches to move. He hates being still, loathes it more than anything, even more than Sirius’ constant ribbing.

Sirius doesn’t get summoned to Father’s office. He’s too mouthy, Regulus presumes, or he refuses to suppress his disruptive natural urges. He’s become too old, too self-assured, too loud. Father no longer has interest in Sirius.

Regulus should feel special. Chosen.

Mostly, he just feels anxious. There’s an anticipatory charge in the air, and something churns in Regulus’ stomach that he can’t name.

Minutes pass in silence. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Regulus’ foot twitches, tapping against the floor in a silent, pacing rhythm.

A new bird starts to sing outside the window, its whistle tones barely audible through three layers of magic, two layers of glass, and a three-hundred year old curtain.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Father studies his books.

Regulus ruminates on what he’ll have for tea.

Eventually, Father raises a hand and beckons cleanly with two fingers.

Regulus scrambles to comply, sliding off the chair and taking long strides around Father’s desk, coming to a standstill just to the left of Father’s elbow.

A few moments pass in silence. Father, stoic. Regulus, buzzing with an excitement he tries so hard to contain. Finally. Finally, he’ll be dismissed soon. He just has to—

Well, he just has to humour Father first.

Regulus holds his breath.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Finally, Father turns in his chair and grasps Regulus under his arms, pulling Regulus onto his lap. He adjusts Regulus onto the broad side of his left thigh, pulling at him with one hand placed neatly on Regulus’ back until Regulus is level on his father’s knee.

Still, Regulus doesn’t breathe. Father radiates heat from his middle, from his mouth and chin, like there are hot coals burning under his skin. Regulus begins to sweat, too, his wools becoming tight and sticky.

Father’s hand doesn’t linger and there’s no warmth in the motion, no sense of familiarity in the touch. It’s a purely economical move. It’s more efficient than summoning Regulus a chair of his own, Regulus imagines. With his small stature, he would have to get up on his toes and lean over Father’s shoulder anyway, and that would indignify them both.

The sky is grey. The grass is green. Father pulls Regulus onto his lap in his study when he wants to teach him things. This is all very typical.

So, Regulus can’t say why discomfort lingers under his skin, prickling with every bead of sweat that drips off him and mixes with Father’s.

Time passes. Father doesn’t speak for several minutes. His breath smells sharp, though, Regulus feels the warm air on the side of his neck, feels every exhale in Father’s chest. It’s sterile and coppery like blood. Liquor is on his breath but it’s faint, so faint it could be a day old and Regulus wouldn’t know it.

Even though it’s faint, it’s sharp, and Regulus doesn’t like the smell.

Father’s breath tickles his ear.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Regulus finds himself staring at the log book below until the words blur into each other, forming a meaningless, muddy-grey soup.

He fights the urge to fidget. He’d really like to move his legs a bit, but the thought of kicking or shaking with Father right under him makes Regulus pale at the ungentlemanly nature of it.

Regulus feels a little sick.

It’s the heat, of course. Only the heat.

Something prods at Regulus’ back. A mechanical error in Father’s attire, maybe, a misplaced fold or compounded seam. This happens often when Regulus is summoned to the study. Mother wears a whalebone corset, he thinks, so maybe Father does, too. Maybe the whalebone escaped its sheath. It’s rather uncomfortable, digging under Regulus’ thigh, but when he glances up, Father looks coolly unbothered.

“What does this mean?” Regulus asks bravely, sensing an opening in Father’s mood. He points at a random entry in the book.

“This initial mark denotes the word therefore,” Father explains, not looking at Regulus at all. The thing under Regulus’ thigh grows more of a nuisance, poking and prodding. “This is a causative record of a debt collection reading, ‘Monsieur Gage was in need of fifty thousand galleons to fulfill a bride price agreement, therefore half of the sum was transferred directly from the checking vault at Gringott on the Fifteenth of September, Nineteen Fifty-Seven.’”

Regulus fights the urge to shift uncomfortably, knowing Father would only strike him for it. “Why only half?” He says instead, and forces himself to stay still.

“The lendor did not charge interest.”

Regulus looked down at the thick, leather-bound volume. There were easily one hundred entries per page. “Must you read all of these?”

“Yes.”

“That sounds difficult.”

“Such are the duties of an heir,” Father replies coolly. “You will understand one day.”

“Sirius is heir.” Regulus stops himself from saying Mother says, knowing it would only set Father off. Do not say excess words. Speak concisely. Don’t ever mention Mother, though Father never says that rule aloud.

But Father isn’t thick. He senses the implication anyway, and his mouth curls unpleasantly to the left the way it always does when Mother is mentioned.

“It would be remiss to ignore the education of the spare,” Father answers instead, deftly avoiding any discussion of his wife. “There are other ways to participate in this family. Your uncle Alphard, for example. He is not heir, is he?”

The thing Regulus is sitting on is growing increasingly uncomfortable. Regulus fights the urge to move, to shift around Father’s lap, knowing Father would only grab him and force him still like he always does. Or worse, banish Regulus from his lap and send him out of the room.

“No,” Regulus answers, swallowing down his discomfort.

“No,” Father agrees mildly. “You will understand when you take an occupation of your own.”

An occupation of your own. Regulus doesn’t quite know what that means. “Will Sirius be a barrister like you, Father?”

“Sirius is ill-suited to the practice of law. I expect the firm will one day fall under your jurisdiction.”

Regulus whirls around, interest beyond piqued, this subject so rare and enigmatic. He’s excited, too wound up to contain himself. “Did you see it?”

“Do not ask crude questions.”

Regulus shrinks back down, growing still again. “Apologies, Father.”

Father grabs Regulus’ hip with one fine, gloved hand. He repositions Regulus briefly, pushes his tailbone back and his spine forward. The strange pressure is centered neatly between Regulus’ legs now, no longer an awkward, uncomfortable lump against the back of his thigh, but Regulus feels no more comfortable than he did before.

Regulus wonders if he should mention to Father that one of the whalebones in his corset is poking out again. Maybe Kreacher would fix it if he asked.

Regulus says nothing.

It’s a whalebone, nothing more.

Father turns a page. There’s a dark ink spill on the bottom left corner. Regulus’ eyes bear down onto it.

Father turns another page. Sweat beads on his brow, dripping onto Regulus’ head, down the back of his ears. “What do you know of marital duties, Regulus?”

“Nothing,” Regulus answers honestly.

Regulus knows what marital means and he knows what duties are, so he could venture an educated guess, but Father loathes that. And being wrong is embarrassing, anyway.

Father makes a humming sound in the back of his throat. It rattles his chest against Regulus’ back, the purring of a large cat, or a resting dragon.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Father’s study is blue. The walls fade to a tepid grey at the junction of the ceiling and floors, the wallpaper having been permitted far beyond its intended age, but it matches the dust that’s settled over every surface. The grandfather clock in the corner goes Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick…

Blue, grey, yellow-green lingering between the ceiling vaults, and thick, earthen dust, casting a low haze over the room. Stale. Stale, and musk, a reminder that people emanate their smell like animals.

Father smells like musk and liquor and… not sweat, exactly, but something close.

Regulus fights the urge to kick his feet. Sometimes, he wishes he had wings. Then he thinks about the bird dead on the ground outside, or Mother’s owls, and supposes it wouldn’t matter.

Father exhales slowly, wearily. 

Then Father removes Regulus from his lap without fanfare, picking him straight up by the shoulders and setting him straight down onto the tiled floor.

Father looks away, absorbed in his books again, but there is no feeling of dismissal.  Regulus instead feels the implication is to sit opposite Father.

So, he does. He crawls onto the four-hundred year old chair opposite Father’s desk, as gracefully as he can, and sits on it, legs straight, spine straight, legs still as can be even though he so badly wants to shake and swing them. The chair dwarfs him. Regulus sticks to the velvet upholstery. His wools are tight, slick inside and out where his sweat met Father’s.

Father’s eyes flit to Regulus. When he looks away— a silent approval, though of what Regulus isn’t precisely sure— Regulus hesitantly lets himself feel the pride blooming in his chest.

“Kreacher,” Father says, and the house elf appears out of thin air. “Go to the stables and ready the thestrals.”

Kreacher bows. His knuckles are black and bone-bare from a recent beating. “Black Roses, sire?”

“All of them,” Father clarifies distantly, not dignifying the elf with even a spare glance. “I have business with Monsieur Crouch.”

Kreacher bows even deeper, his filmy, grey eyes flickering toward Regulus with something keenly unreadable on his wizened face.

Then Kreacher disappears in a cloud of grey smoke and stirred up dust.

Regulus holds his breath.

He loathes this part.

One, two, three, four. Kreacher knows. His tiny bird bones shine like ivory, raw knuckles polished with the carefully-strained muggle tallow that Mother makes him shine the bannisters with. He knows. Does Mother know?

If she did know, would she care? 

Five, six, seven…

At least the elf isn’t around to see it.

Eight, nine, ten, eleven. Regulus starts to shake. His lungs flutter.

Twelve long beats pass in silence before Father acknowledges Regulus again. It’s the time Kreacher takes to apparate to the stables.

It’s another simple, two-fingered beckon, and Regulus is back at his father’s side in a matter of moments.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

A new bird sings outside the window. Father picks Regulus up and sets him back down onto his lap, caged between both arms this time, one holding the quill and the other resting on the book in front of them. 

Breathe. 

Regulus forces himself to unclench muscle by muscle. Relax yourself. An order. You always enjoy this part.

The broken whalebone protrudes again— that’s what it must be— and it’s digging into Regulus’ back this time. Regulus bites his tongue and fights the urge to squirm. That would only make it worse.

Father examines the transaction log in front of him closely, quill in hand, sweat still thick on his brow. His voice makes his chest rumble against Regulus’ back. “Do you know how heirs are made, Regulus?”

It’s a whalebone.

It’s only a whalebone.

“No,” Regulus answers honestly.

Father doesn’t reply to this. He lights his pipe instead. The aroma is pungent, earthy, like the caves by the sea. It’s herbal, too, like Mother’s greenhouse after a hard rain.

Father sweats liquor and salt. It sticks to Regulus’ skull, to the back of his ears.

The ceiling is splashed with yellow and grey puddles above Father’s chair, stains settling between the vaults. Regulus stares, tries to form the puddles into pictures, tries to think of anything else.

Father places the pipe end in his mouth and pulls from it, sucking in the hollows of his cheeks. The smoke is low, grey, and makes Regulus wrinkle his nose as the awful smell gets caught in Father’s beard.

Then, without fanfare, Father slides the pipe into Regulus’ mouth.

Regulus tries not to yelp. The bone between his teeth is cool and wet.

It stings.

It stings, hot and sharp and biting, and whatever’s in it tingles with magic so strongly that Regulus’ whole mouth buzzes, tongue and palate coated in a sticky film with only one drag.

He doesn’t cough anymore— Merlin, that would be embarrassing— but Regulus isn’t used to the taste of a pipe yet. This one is particularly heady. Regulus’ head starts to swim, bob, unsteady and cloudy up above his neck.

This pipe is…

Strong.

Really strong.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick… 

The bird stops singing. Regulus misses the distraction.

Father isn’t attentive. The pipe clinks against Regulus’ teeth, bone on bone, like porcelain and—

Father’s study is blue. Regulus starts to float above himself, soul barely tethered to his body, and he’s suddenly much less bothered by the whalebone digging into his back. He can barely feel it anymore, can barely feel anything below his waist.

The pipe slides out from between his teeth. A trail of spit follows. Regulus breathes properly, tries not to indignify himself by choking. His tongue is heavy and numb. 

Father’s milky black eyes flicker left, settling on Regulus longer than they usually do. “Do you know what a cock is, Regulus?”

All the pride from earlier is gone from Regulus’ chest, replaced by the persistent feeling that he won’t make Father proud today. Regulus’ voice comes out small, meek, and the unpleasant taste of smoke follows it. “No.”

“No?”

Regulus flushes red, embarrassment blooming from his chest down to his toes.

Father is unmerciful. “Your ignorance in this matter will not persist. Cygnus was thirteen when he sired his first child.”

Regulus knows what sire means. He learned it when Father took him to watch the hounds make pups upon the bitches and the studs make foals upon the mares. There was a lot of pained yelping and braying. Father had enjoyed those trips immensely. Regulus… hadn’t.

Father’s hand returns to Regulus’ hip. His voice is grave, heavy, and the smoke has gone to Regulus’ head because he feels dizzy. “I was eleven when I was betrothed to your mother,” Father says, and he squeezes Regulus’ hip harder and harder until Regulus whimpers. “Do you understand?”

Do you understand?

Not yet. But he will.

The whalebone presses hard into Regulus’ back, right above his tailbone.

“You are not yet of age to attend school,” Father says. “But you will be. You cannot be ignorant then.”

He sounds as though he’s speaking to himself, not Regulus.

Hesitantly, Regulus nods. “Yes, Father.”

Father is silent for a few moments. Then he lets out a sigh, as if he’s decided something, and wraps his hands around Regulus’ waist until his fingers interlock. He lingers a moment too long. Then, he lifts Regulus straight up, and back down, onto the floor.

Father adjusts himself, shifting in his seat until his lower half is effectively hidden beneath his desk.

Regulus doesn’t breathe. He tastes blood. He runs his tongue over the ulcerations in his cheeks and flinches, flesh stinging like he’s rubbed salt in the wounds. The ridges are bony and broken.

The mood in the study has changed. Father has lost interest in him. There will be no more lessons today.

Regulus settles by the door and awaits his formal dismissal. The door is blue. The paint is chipped. Regulus drills his gaze into it, and wills himself to be anywhere else.

His throat hurts.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Smoke fills the room, adds to the drip drip drip puddles on the ceiling, Father just puffing away on his pipe. The smell clings to the curtains, drifts so far it clings to Regulus’ hair and clothes. Regulus’ head starts to swim again, floating and distant and white.

Father doesn’t look up from his books. “I am traveling to the Ardennes in three days’ time to hunt,” he announces. “You will accompany me.”

“Will Sirius be there?” The question is out before Regulus can stop it, his voice hoarse and small.

Father cocks one eyebrow. He briefly meets Regulus’ gaze with admonishment clear on his face. Do not ask crude questions.

Regulus nods, and retreats from the room feeling strangely unsettled. Something white drips from between his teeth.

—

Regulus awakes in the warden’s office. The air is light and filmy, dust floating in the stale, still room.

Not her office. Her talk therapy room. The familiar magic on the walls and in the air leaves a slick film in his mouth that buzzes like a persistent fly.

Regulus bites his tongue. Hard.

“Mr. Black?”

“What?” He answers instinctively, then curses himself.

The warden sits opposite him, her books open, dull quill in hand. She looks at him over the top of her eyeglasses. “I asked you a question.”

Merlin, how long has Regulus been here answering questions? What has he said?

“Apologies,” Regulus replies hoarsely, wishing he could work up the nerve to bite all the way through his tongue and spit it out before it can betray him again. “Repeat the question.”

The warden looks annoyed, but complies. Tap tap tap goes her quill on the desk. “Your parents struck you.”

That’s not a question, Regulus wants to sneer. He squirms in place instead, the persistent ache in his cock a curse that he can’t grow comfortable in. He bites his own tongue and tastes blood, black and so waterless it’s nearly solid. It’s black tar in his throat.

The cunt of a warden, damn her, stares calmly back at him, unfettered by his lack of response. “Have you ever thought about being a parent yourself, Mr. Black?”

Regulus’ eyes snap forward in a primal way. They discuss past and present. They’ve never spoken about futures or hypotheticals, not that Regulus can recall, not once in six years.

“No,” he replies tightly, and it’s the truth. He does not consider parenthood.

New Regulus itches to stand up and move, to pace the room and count the steps, wants it so badly that the left shin kicks without Regulus’ permission.

Regulus clamps down the urge with a whimper that dies in his throat. The absence of nail beds dig into the dry meat of the palms. Waterless blood bubbles out, stinging and slow.

Light refracts in the room. Regulus squints, retreats into the back of the house, head aching.

The warden scribbles something on her parchment. Scritch scritch scritch. Stop. Tap. Dip. Scritch scritch scritch.

What’s changed? Regulus bites his tongue so hard he tastes blood again. Metal, sour, sludge-like blood that stings like rust and stains like filth. It isn’t a fluid. It’s mud. It’s thick, choking, black mud stopping up his throat. He can’t afford to think these thoughts out loud, can’t afford to give the cunt any more ammunition than she already has.

The warden is infuriatingly calm and self-assured. She has the nerve to look pleasantly at him, the bitch. “How are you feeling today?”

None of your fucking business, hag. Regulus bites that thought down with everything he has, but—

“I am frightened,” the words come out before Regulus can bite through the tongue hard enough to stop them.

The warden’s eyes flick upward. “Explain yourself, please.”

Don’t you dare, Regulus tries to scream, tries to grab the tongue from inside the body and force it backward down the throat.

“My parents struck me,” the jaw moves without his permission. “I did not enjoy it. Now, I am of age. I am certain I would strike my own children. They would not enjoy it, either.”

Old Regulus has stopped howling long enough to speak articulately. It’s a miracle. Where did he even come from? Who let him out?

Animalman doesn’t like it, and bristles somewhere inside. His fur becomes sharp and prickly. Regulus doesn’t have time to ponder their sudden rift, no time at all, because the warden is writing again and her sticky truth magic is about to make Regulus vomit up his own severed tongue.

The warden pauses, then writes something else on her parchment. Scritch scritch scritch. Stop. Tap. Dip. Scritch scritch scritch. Stop. Tap. Dip. Scritch scritch scritch…

I can perform my duties, the plea is written all over the animalman’s face. His hairy face is red with strain, he wants to say the words so badly but can’t do anything more than growl and whimper. Si vous plait! I can be Mother’s heir in Sirius’ absence!

The warden pauses her writing. She stares steadily at Regulus, friendly and calculating. “Some children need a firm hand.”

Regulus bites his tongue so hard he tastes blood. Salty, salty, stinging blood, so waterless it was solid sludge.

His refusal to reply didn’t go unnoticed. The warden tilted her head downward, eyes upward, two shrewd pits, tricky tricky pools. Her voice is serpentine, fork-tongued, venomous. She rolls outward like one of those poisonous moths, two big eyes and venom underneath. “Don’t you agree, Mr. Black?”

Fuck, don’t say it. Don’t say it. Magic wraps around Regulus’ tongue and moves it against his will. “No,” he confesses, tight, strained, blooming-bruise knuckles white against his chair.

The warden is deceptively calm. “No? You don’t believe you deserve discipline?”

“Yes.” The response is immediate, voice quiet, and Regulus has no idea who said it.

“You do deserve discipline?”

“Yes. No.” Fuck, shut up.

“Which is it, Mr. Black? Yes or no?”

Regulus foams at the mouth, thrashes at the invisible restraints on his neck. The body doesn’t move even a centimetre.

The warden taps her quill against the desk. “Your course of treatment will be changing.”

Something rocks inside the body.

No, someone thinks in dull horror. No, no—

“Not the Waiting Room,” the warden continues, as if sensing the fear that’s spiking outward from Regulus’ weak magical core. “Prolonged exposure therapy has served its purpose. Severity of the treatment is not the issue. Minor adjustments will be made. Of a transitional nature.”

Blood is rushing in the ears, solid and warm. The words are garbled, foreign. What does that mean? He wants to scream. Old Regulus is nowhere to be found. He’s run away, retreated somewhere. What the fuck does that mean?

HEARING is written on the warden’s legal pad, stark black and upside down.

There’s a sharp rap on the door. “Dolores?” Comes a female voice from outside. “There’s been an incident in the water chamber.”

The warden’s sharp eyes flit to the door. She closes her books with a final slam and signals for the zookeeper. “That is all, Mr. Black. You are dismissed.”