Work Text:
Sometime in late June, when just shy of fifteen years old, Regulus had wordlessly withdrawn from his self-appointed mediating duties. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision, more a kind of unspoken surrender. He increasingly had the sense that his relentless peacekeeping had achieved nothing, and would achieve nothing. One grows sick of postponing the inevitable.
Maybe that made it his fault. He might have prevented it. Everything fell apart when he wasn’t sneaking around in the background putting it all back together. But, realistically, there was no need to think about it like that. It did him no good. He had his methods. He could sift out the guilt and set it aside for safekeeping. Another hole dug under the willow tree.
Sirius left in August. Ran in the middle of the night, like a coward. The argument that preceded his departure had taken place in the drawing room; yells shook the floorboards three storeys up, so Regulus moved to his father’s study. Orion Black tended to compensate for most of his interpersonal deficiencies by being an astonishingly proficient spell-caster: his Muffling Charm was top-notch.
The argument ended with a bang and a whimper. But Regulus did not go downstairs. He did not try to rescue his brother. He did not soothe his mother’s smoking temper. He did not make small talk with his father. He stayed in the study, and did not go down for dinner.
And in the middle of the night, he woke, and he knew. He crept, quiet as a burglar, into the room across the hall, and there he found an empty bed and an open window. It was over. Sirius left, and Regulus felt only relief.
He said nothing until morning. Mother recorded an entire Greek chorus of Howlers addressed to Fleamont and Euphemia Potter, almost certainly guilty of harbouring their pedigree runaway. This was done largely out of spite and with no expectation of success, but Regulus and his father both thought it safer to let her scream herself out. For the rest of the summer holidays, Regulus was fawned over: a brand new racing broom, first editions of rare books, Wimbourne Wasps season tickets that, thanks to his remote boarding school, he wouldn’t even be able to attend from September onwards — never mind that the Wasps were Sirius’s favourite Quidditch team, not his own (a fact that went entirely unmentioned, of course). Sirius had abstained from the House of Black, and Regulus would now inherit. A better son, a loyal boy, who knew his duties and performed them. Regulus did not run. Regulus did not hide. And — though Regulus was not certain to what extent his mother suspected this about Sirius, and found he would rather not know — out of the two of them, Regulus was the only one likely to ever produce a legitimate heir of his own.
Walburga did not need to say it for it to be understood: there was no more Sirius. There had never been any Sirius. They had cast out that shame from the beginning. His name was burned from the tapestry, like Cousin Andromeda, who had married a Mudblood and had a baby with him; and Great Uncle Marius the shadowy Squib, left to fend for himself on the London streets at nine years old; and others who Regulus would never know, so thoroughly had they been erased from time. Their past was littered with many such little omissions, minor redactions, side-steps in time. Stories can always be changed, and histories unwritten. Say the right thing, or say nothing at all.
Pay attention, Regulus, he imagined his mother would say. This is how you do it. This is what I taught you. Omit. Deny. Pretend. This past is yours to remake.
And so the new, true history was this: Regulus Arcturus had been the only son of Orion and Walburga Black all along.