Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

By the time the guests began arriving, Regulus was already tired of his own birthday.

He stood on the little gilded stool in his bedroom while two house-elves fussed over the hems of his robes and his mother adjusted the fall of his collar with cool, precise fingers, as though she were dressing a display doll and not her son. The robes were deep black, velvet-dark, with silver stitched into the cuffs and starbursts scattered along the sleeves. They were beautiful. They were expensive. They were not what he had wanted.

He had wanted dinosaurs.

Not one dinosaur. All of them. The ones with the long necks and the horns and the sharp teeth and the plates along their backs and the funny little arms. He had drawn them in the margins of old parchment scraps with a stubby green pencil until the bottoms of his hands smudged. He had wanted broomsticks hanging from the ceiling and little silver Snitches made of spun sugar and a cake shaped like a dragon if they said dinosaurs were too Muggle and absolutely impossible, though he did not think they were impossible at all because dragons were very real and he liked them too, though not as much as the giant lizards with names he whispered to himself at night like secrets.

He had wanted unicorns as well, because unicorns were pretty and because he liked the idea of things being allowed to be pretty without anyone making that mean something.

He had wanted bright colours. Candles. Noise that belonged to children. Games. Presents that were actually his.

Instead he was having a ball.

A ball for his sixth birthday, though he was not six yet. Not until later. Not until cake time. Not until the candles, if there had been any candles at all.

His mother tilted his chin up.

“Stop fidgeting.”

“I’m not fidgeting,” Regulus said softly.

“You are.”

“I’m trying not to.”

“Then try harder.”

“Yes, Mother.”

Her hands left him. The room felt colder when she stepped back.

“Perfect,” she said.

Regulus looked at himself in the mirror.

He looked perfect too.

He hated it.

He did not say that. He never said things like that.

He had learned very early that there was no point.

From somewhere farther down the corridor came the distant thud of hurried footsteps and then Sirius’s voice, loud even through walls, already cross.

“I said I hate these shoes!”

A sharp pause.

Then his father, clipped and warning: “Sirius.”

“They pinch!”

“You will wear them.”

“They’re stupid!”

“They are appropriate.”

“I don’t care!”

Regulus stood very still on the stool, listening.

He always listened.

His mother’s mouth went thin. “Of course.”

There was another thump. Something hitting wood.

“I don’t want to go,” Sirius shouted from the corridor. “It’s boring and everyone stares and Aunt Lucretia smells like dead flowers and I don’t even like Regulus’s stupid party—”

The door to Regulus’s room opened so hard it struck the wall.

Sirius stood there in formal dress robes, hair half-brushed and already escaping down his forehead, his cheeks red with fury. He was seven and looked like a storm in a child’s shape.

“It’s not my stupid party,” Regulus said before he could stop himself.

Sirius turned to him.

For a second the room held still.

Then Sirius scowled, because he scowled at everything. “Well, it’s not mine.”

“I know.”

“Then why are you dressed like that?”

Regulus looked down at himself. “Because Mother said.”

Sirius rolled his eyes so hard it looked painful. “Obviously.”

Their father appeared behind him. “Enough.”

Sirius jerked away when a hand tried to settle on his shoulder. “Don’t touch me.”

“Behave.”

“I am behaving!”

“You are shrieking in the corridor.”

“I’m talking.”

“You are causing a scene.”

Sirius drew himself up, indignant and wild. “Maybe I’m causing a scene because no one listens unless I do.”

Their father’s expression hardened.

Their mother did not look at Sirius at all. “Take him downstairs.”

“I don’t want to go downstairs.”

“You will.”

“I hate everyone downstairs.”

“That is immaterial.”

Regulus stayed on the stool. Sirius looked at him again, eyes bright and furious in that way that made adults go cold and house-elves disappear and doors close.

Regulus didn’t know how Sirius did it. He had never known. Sirius burned outward. Regulus folded inward. Both of them were punished, but only one of them ever seemed able to make the room change shape around him first.

Sirius saw the look on Regulus’s face and frowned.

“What?” he demanded.

Regulus swallowed. “Nothing.”

“That’s not nothing.”

“It is.”

Sirius stared another second, then huffed and dragged both hands through his hair, making it worse. “You look ridiculous.”

Regulus looked away. “I know.”

That made Sirius pause.

Before he could say anything else, their father said, “Downstairs. Now.”

And because Sirius was Sirius, because being told to do something always seemed to make his whole body rise up against it, he bared his teeth like a tiny furious dog and snapped, “No.”

The silence after that felt expensive.

Then their father said very quietly, “Do not test me.”

Sirius lifted his chin.

Regulus stepped off the stool.

No one noticed.

He smoothed his hands over the front of his robes while his mother swept from the room without another word, their father after her, Sirius dragged along in a tide of irritation and command. No one looked back to see if Regulus followed.

He did. Of course he did.

He always did.

The ballroom downstairs was full before the sun had properly gone down. Crystal chandeliers gleamed overhead, filling the polished black floors with fractured light. There were flowers everywhere, pale and elegant and scentless-looking, though Regulus knew flowers still smelled even when they looked like that. White roses. Silver branches. Dark glossy leaves twisted around enchanted candelabras. String music whispered from one end of the room where a quartet played for people who did not seem to hear it.

Everywhere there were adults.

Pure-bloods in jewel colours and black silks and old family silver. Women glittering at throat and wrist. Men with signet rings and voices like cool knives. Teenage cousins standing in clusters, already taller than him, already bored in a different way than he was bored, speaking in murmurs behind gloved hands. Great-aunts stooping to inspect things. Great-uncles laughing too loudly. Aunts kissing the air near cheeks. People telling his parents what a beautiful event this was.

“Exquisite.”

“So refined.”

“Very tasteful.”

“How grown-up.”

“What an impressive evening.”

“An occasion befitting the Black name.”

No one said it was befitting Regulus.

They did say happy birthday, sometimes, but always after they had said something else first. To his mother. To his father. About the room. About the guest list. About how splendid it all was.

Regulus stood near the edge of the ballroom while the words moved over him.

“There he is.”

“Darling boy.”

“Happy birthday, sweetheart.”

“How old are you now?”

“Six,” someone answered for him before he could.

“Such a pretty child.”

“He has his mother’s eyes.”

“No, he has his father’s mouth.”

“He’s so quiet.”

“He’s always quiet.”

“Well-bred.”

“Unlike some.”

That one made several people glance toward Sirius, who was currently being pinned in place beside their mother and looked like he would rather throw himself from the Astronomy Tower than remain there another minute.

Sirius caught Regulus looking and made a face.

Regulus almost smiled.

Almost.

But then Aunt Druella’s friend whose name he never remembered bent down and pinched his cheek, and the moment was gone.

“Such a solemn little thing,” she cooed.

Regulus pulled back instinctively.

She laughed, as though that too were charming. “Oh, he’s shy.”

“He is not shy,” said his mother from somewhere nearby. “He is reserved.”

Reserved sounded like furniture.

Regulus drifted after that.

He was good at drifting. He knew how to move through rooms without becoming a problem, how to stand just outside the reach of adult hems, how to fold his hands behind his back and murmur yes, ma’am and no, sir and thank you and excuse me and sorry in the right places. He knew not to tug on robes. Not to interrupt. Not to ask when presents were happening. Not to ask where the games were. Not to say that he had thought there might be little paper dinosaur hats or at least something with Quidditch hoops or silver unicorns with sugar manes.

He knew better.

So he wandered.

He passed a long table of gifts wrapped in dark luxurious paper and stacked high like offerings. He stopped in front of them, hands at his sides.

From where he stood, he could make out the little attached cards.

For Orion and Walburga.

With appreciation to the House of Black.

For your family.

For the home.

For your collection.

For your table.

For next season at the country estate.

None of them looked like they were for a six-year-old.

One long velvet box had a card that said, For the drawing room.

Regulus looked at it for a very long time.

Then he walked away.

Near the middle of the ballroom, adults kept drawing his parents into conversation.

“Orion, you must tell me—”

“Walburga, have you heard—”

“Surely you’re attending—”

“The Minister said—”

“Ancient lines must keep together—”

“We really ought to discuss an arrangement—”

“There is so much to be gained—”

His mother’s smile stayed sharp and perfect. His father’s voice stayed calm and important. Sirius’s expression worsened by the minute.

Regulus made himself smaller and slipped toward the food.

The table was beautiful too.

Of course it was beautiful.

Everything was beautiful except the parts that were supposed to matter to him.

There were polished trays of little things adults liked to eat while pretending not to eat much. Silver dishes steaming under lids. Fruits that had been arranged in towers. Miniature pastries glazed so flawlessly they looked fake. Glass bowls full of sugared almonds. Tall pitchers that sweated cold.

And in the centre, on a raised stand, was the cake.

Regulus stopped moving.

It was huge.

Three tiers, white and black and silver, with spun sugar wrapped around it like lace. Tiny silver stars had been piped over every surface. The top was crowned with some elegant confection that was probably meant to look like a family crest or a constellation or something equally important and equally dull.

It was not shaped like anything fun.

It was not green or gold or bright blue.

There were no dinosaurs marching across the icing. No broomsticks. No hoops. No unicorn horn made of sugar. No little frosted clouds. No chocolate earth with fossils hidden inside. It was not even the flavour he liked. He knew because he had heard the house-elf in the kitchen say almond sponge with blackcurrant preserve and buttercream, and Regulus did not like almond sponge. It tasted dry and strange on his tongue.

But it was still his cake.

His birthday cake.

His.

His eyes went wide and soft.

He took another tiny step toward it.

Cake time soon, he thought.

Surely.

Maybe not now. But soon. Soon they would gather everyone. Soon someone would remember. Soon there would be a knife and plates and maybe—maybe even candles, if they had only not put them on yet. Maybe they were waiting. Maybe the candles would come later. Maybe he would still get to blow them out.

The thought warmed him so quickly it almost hurt.

He rose onto his tiptoes and peered over the edge of the table, lips parting. “Hello,” he whispered to the cake, because it seemed right to greet it.

No one heard him.

That was all right.

He stayed there, balancing carefully, eyes fixed on the sugar stars and the glossy dark filling visible where one slice line had already been marked for serving. He imagined the first bite. He imagined someone handing him a plate before anyone else. He imagined sweetness and birthday and being looked at for once not because he was standing where he had been placed but because it was his moment.

Across the room, voices rose.

Sirius.

Even before the first shout fully broke free, Regulus knew it was Sirius.

“I said I don’t want to stay!”

A hush rippled outward in that peculiar way only expensive rooms could hush. Not silent, exactly, but shocked into awareness.

Their mother’s voice came sharp as glass. “Sirius.”

“It’s boring!”

“You will lower your voice.”

“No!”

Heads turned. Fans stilled. A glass paused halfway to someone’s mouth.

Sirius stood in the open space near the ballroom doors, fists clenched at his sides, dark hair a mess again, cheeks bright with anger. Regulus had not even seen him move away from their parents, but now he was there, blazing.

“This party is stupid,” Sirius shouted. “No one even cares!”

A ripple of disapproval moved through the room.

“Sirius Black,” their father said, each syllable clipped clean, “enough.”

“No one does!” Sirius yelled over him. “No one cares about this party and it’s not even important and I don’t want to be here and you can’t make me!”

“You are making a spectacle of yourself.”

“I don’t care!”

“Care.”

“I don’t!”

His mother took one step forward, face pale with fury. “You will apologise this instant.”

Sirius laughed, disbelieving and furious. “For what?”

“For your behaviour.”

“What about everyone else’s behaviour?”

“You insolent little—”

“I hate it here!”

He snatched something from a passing tray—Regulus never even saw what—and hurled it. It hit the floor with a crack. Several witches gasped.

“Sirius!” their father barked.

Another thing flew. This time a goblet. Silver skidded across stone.

Someone said, “Merlin—”

Someone else hissed, “Control him—”

“Absolutely disgraceful—”

“He’s always been wild—”

“He needs discipline—”

“He needs—”

Sirius let out a sound of pure fury, wordless and huge for such a small body, then shoved past two startled adults and bolted for the doors.

He ran.

Not the way children were meant to run in a ballroom. Not careful. Not graceful. Full tilt, as if the room were on fire and only he could see the flames.

Their mother went after him at once.

Their father followed, voice like thunder. “Sirius, get back here!”

Several guests stepped hastily aside. The doors to the gardens were already open. Sirius vanished through them. Their parents followed, still shouting.

“Sirius!”

“Come back!”

“Do not make this worse!”

The noise spilled outward into the night.

For one absurd second, everyone else inside stayed frozen, caught in the shape of the scene Sirius had torn through.

Then the spell broke.

A cough.

A murmur.

A lift of shoulders.

An aunt saying lightly, “Perhaps some air would do everyone good.”

“Yes, quite.”

“The gardens are lovely this evening.”

“Shall we?”

“I think the next part must be outside.”

“Of course.”

“Come along.”

And just like that, as if it had all been settled by invisible agreement, the room began to empty.

People turned. Glided. Drifted toward the open doors and the terraces and the lit gardens beyond.

Regulus did not move.

He stood by the cake and watched them go.

His grandparents passed without stopping.

An aunt touched a cousin’s elbow and steered them outside.

Teenagers murmured among themselves and followed the tide.

A great-uncle laughed too loudly about children and temperament and stalked garden-ward.

No one said, Wait, the birthday boy.

No one said, Where is Regulus.

No one said, Has he had his cake.

They just left.

Left in clusters, in pairs, in trailing silks and polished shoes. Left with glasses in hand and opinions ready and attention turned toward the more interesting disaster now unfolding somewhere outside among the hedges and fountains.

Regulus stayed where he was until the room had gone strangely enormous around him.

The quartet had stopped playing.

The chandeliers still glittered.

The cake still sat in the centre of the table.

His cake.

The only part that had felt like it might become his at all.

He looked toward the doors.

He could hear noise outside. Not words. Just the muffled wash of it. Adults calling. A sharper voice that might have been his mother. Maybe Sirius still yelling. Maybe not.

Regulus turned back to the cake.

Very carefully, he stepped closer.

The ballroom felt different with no one in it. Not empty, exactly. Emptiness would have been simpler. This felt abandoned.

He came right up to the table and placed both hands against the edge.

The cake loomed above him, beautiful and unreachable.

Regulus rose onto his tiptoes.

The edge of the stand was still too high.

He stretched harder, mouth pulling downward with effort, fingers scrabbling uselessly against polished wood.

“Please,” he whispered.

He was not sure whether he was speaking to the cake or the room.

He tried again, one hand reaching up as far as it could go, the other braced against the table.

“Please.”

His shoes slipped slightly on the floor.

He huffed and pushed himself higher.

“Please.”

His fingertips brushed nothing but air.

The cake remained where it was, serene and impossible.

Regulus swallowed.

Maybe if he just reached a little more. Maybe if he jumped. But he wasn’t meant to jump in these shoes. He wasn’t meant to scuff the floor. He wasn’t meant to climb.

He tried once more anyway, stretching so hard his arm trembled.

“Please,” he said again, quiet and sweet and small.

Still nothing.

He let himself sink back onto his heels.

For a moment he stood there breathing hard through his nose, staring up at it. Then he gave a tiny, frustrated little whine, too soft for anyone outside to hear.

His eyes burned.

He blinked quickly.

Not crying. He did not cry at parties.

He looked toward the doors again. No one came.

The noise outside swelled, then drifted farther off.

Regulus pressed his lips together. Then, because there was nothing else to do and nowhere else that felt more his than the place directly beneath the thing he had wanted, he lowered himself carefully to the floor.

His robes spread around him in a dark pool.

He scooted backwards until his shoulder touched the carved leg of the table. Then he curled up, folding in on himself neatly, one arm around his shins, the other wrapped over it, chin settling on his knees.

The tablecloth hung beside him like a curtain.

Above, the cake waited in unreachable silence.

Regulus looked toward the open doors.

Beyond them lay lantern-lit gardens, summer-dark hedges, voices that did not call for him.

He rested his cheek against his knee and pouted, small and solemn and terribly patient.

After a long while, in a voice so quiet it barely seemed to exist at all, he said to nobody, “It’s my birthday.”

The ballroom did not answer.

Outside, someone laughed.

Regulus curled a little tighter at the base of the table leg and kept looking toward the doors, as if maybe, maybe, someone might still come back before cake time was over.

Regulus stayed by the table for a long time.

Long enough for the sounds in the garden to turn from sharp and startling into something distant and ordinary again. Long enough for his legs to go a bit stiff where they were tucked up close. Long enough for the ache in his chest to stop feeling sharp and start feeling familiar.

No one came back.

Not his mother.

Not his father.

Not Sirius.

Not an aunt or uncle or cousin or grandparent or anybody at all.

The ballroom stayed bright and shining and too big, full of flowers that weren’t his and silver that wasn’t his and a cake that was supposed to be his and somehow still wasn’t.

Regulus let out a tiny huff through his nose.

Then another.

He unfolded himself from the floor, slow and careful, brushing imaginary dust from the knees of his robes because he was not meant to get dusty. He stood there for a moment with his hands at his sides, staring up at the table as if maybe the cake might have changed while he wasn’t looking.

It hadn’t.

“Well,” he muttered to it in a small offended voice, “you’re s’posed to be my birthday cake.”

The cake, being a cake, said nothing.

Regulus frowned at it and huffed again.

Then he turned away from it and began to wander.

At first it was only a little aimless pacing, his soft shoes whispering over the floor, but then his eyes kept catching on things and every time they did he found himself pointing at them.

“No,” he murmured to a tall arrangement of pale flowers near the musicians’ corner. “Not those. I’d have big ones. Big green ones. And gold ones. And maybe blue. Not boring white ones. An’ there’d be dinosaurs in it. Tiny ones. Not real ones,” he added after a grave pause, because even at nearly six he knew some clarifications mattered. “Just little toy ones. But nice ones. Not ugly ones.”

He pointed at the draped silver fabric winding down one wall.

“That could be a banner,” he informed the empty room. “A proper one. With broomsticks on it. Or a unicorn. Or a tricer’tops.” He pronounced it carefully, proud of knowing that one. “An’ maybe stars. But fun stars. Not these ones. These are grown-up stars.”

He walked farther, pointing at the line of crystal glasses.

“There’d be little cups. Not those. Those are breaky.” He wrinkled his nose. “There’d be juice. Red juice. And fizzy one. And maybe the orange one. And sweets in bowls. An’ the sweets would be colours, not all boring.”

He paused at a tray of tiny elegant pastries and leaned in suspiciously.

“And there’d be dinosaur biscuits. With icing. Green icing. An’ unicorn biscuits. And little broomstick biscuits. And cakes what are chocolate.” He straightened. “A birthday cake ought be chocolate. Or strawberry. Or both. Not weird.”

He pointed at the polished centre of the ballroom floor.

“And here,” he whispered, now warming properly to it, “here there’d be games.”

He stepped into the middle of the room and turned slowly, looking around as though he could already see them.

“There’d be pin-the-tail. But on a dragon. No, on a dino. A big one. With the spiky back. Or…” He thought hard. “Or ring toss. But on unicorn horns. But soft ones, so no one gets poked.” Another pause. “An’ maybe a broom race. Little kid brooms. Not fast ones. Safe ones.”

He turned again, robe hem swishing around his ankles.

“And treasure hunt,” he decided with deep certainty. “With clues. And choc’late coins. And little prizes what are actually for children. Not…” He glanced toward the gift table and his mouth pinched. “Not boring things.”

He stalked over to it with all the dignity a very small, very upset almost-six-year-old in formal dress robes could manage.

The table of gifts still waited in neat ranks, gleaming and untouched except by the eyes of adults who had admired the wrapping more than the thought behind it. Regulus stood in front of it for a moment, chin tipped up. Then he spotted a chair nearby.

He looked at it.

He looked at the table.

Then, with the furtive caution of a child who knew very well he wasn’t supposed to climb on furniture in fancy clothes, he dragged the chair over by little jerking shoves, wincing every time its legs made the faintest scrape against the floor.

“That’s not noisy,” he whispered to himself. “That’s barely noisy.”

When the chair was close enough, he climbed up onto it, kneeling first and then standing, one hand braced carefully on the gift table for balance.

Now he could see properly.

His eyes moved from one bag to another, one box to the next. He reached out and gently parted the tissue paper in the nearest gift bag.

Inside was a silver serving set.

Regulus stared at it.

He did not know what it was for. Not properly. It looked like a collection of shiny oddly-shaped spoons and forks for people who were probably very pleased about spoons.

He let the paper fall back.

In the next bag was a folded length of something dark and glossy.

He touched it with one fingertip.

Fabric. Table linen maybe. Or curtains. Or something for one of the endless rooms adults cared about more than children.

“That’s not mine,” he said to it.

The next box held a set of crystal glasses nested in velvet.

The next, some sort of carved object made of stone.

The next, a decanter.

The next, a little silver-framed thing he didn’t understand at all.

Regulus’s face grew more and more crumpled with each discovery.

He opened another gift and found a set of dinner plates painted with a black crest.

He blinked at them.

“They got me plates?”

His voice came out small and baffled.

He looked around as if someone might explain.

No one did.

He opened one more bag and found something wrapped in dark tissue and tied with ribbon. He carefully unwound it, slow and hopeful despite himself, and pulled free—

A heavy silver candlestick.

Regulus stared at it in naked disbelief.

“A candlestick?”

He looked personally offended by the concept.

“It’s my birthday.”

The candlestick remained smug and useless.

Regulus put it back with trembling carefulness, because he was upset, not careless, and then climbed down from the chair with a little jump at the end. His shoes landed with a soft tap.

He stood there breathing hard.

None of it was for him.

None of it.

Not one toy. Not one dinosaur. Not one broom. Not one unicorn. Not even one ridiculous silly thing meant for a little boy turning six.

His lower lip pushed out.

He folded his arms, then unfolded them because that made him feel too much like Sirius, then folded them again anyway.

“That’s stupid,” he whispered fiercely.

He blinked very fast.

Then he turned away from the table and marched toward the balcony doors because the room suddenly felt too full of things that did not belong to him and too empty of everything that should have.

The balcony above the gardens was cool and open to the night air. Regulus stepped out beneath a row of stone arches and pillars, the breeze stirring the dark curls at his temples and the soft edges of his robes. Below him the gardens spread wide and elegant, lanterns glowing among clipped hedges and pale gravel paths. Guests moved through it all like drifting jewels.

He went to the stone rail and peered through the gaps between the pillars.

There they all were.

His family.

His guests.

His birthday.

Far below, voices rose and fell in one long pleasant murmur. No one sounded upset anymore. No one sounded like the evening had broken. They had all just… carried on.

Regulus gripped the stone.

If he squinted, he could make out dark heads, glittering hair, moving shoulders, the white flicker of servants weaving through the crowd with trays. Once he thought he heard his mother’s laugh, thin and polished. Once he thought he saw Sirius in a flash of black moving between adults, but he couldn’t be sure.

He pressed his face between two pillars as far as it would go.

“I’m up here,” he called softly.

The wind took it.

No one looked up.

Regulus frowned harder.

“I’m up here,” he tried again, a little louder this time.

Still nothing.

He watched the garden for another long minute, then pushed back from the rail.

“All right,” he informed himself, because somebody had to. “I’ll just go down.”

The plan felt sensible enough. He would go down to the garden, find someone—anyone—and say, very politely, that it was cake time now. Or maybe a bit past cake time, actually. And then somebody would remember and say oh dear, of course, Master Regulus, and they would bring out a slice. Maybe even the first slice. Maybe if he asked nicely.

He nodded to himself once, firm and small.

Then he turned and went back inside.

At first it seemed easy enough. He had seen staircases. Corridors. Open doors. Black House was huge, but it was his home, or one of them, and surely he could find the garden again.

Surely.

Regulus walked down one corridor, then another. He took a staircase because he thought he remembered using it once earlier, though maybe that had been the other staircase with the long portrait of the witch in green. He passed a statue he didn’t remember at all. He turned right where he might have needed to turn left. He followed a patch of brighter light that led only to a drawing room full of empty chairs. He backed out again.

“The garden,” he said under his breath, as though reminding the house what he wanted might make it easier. “I’m finding the garden.”

He went down another passage.

A house-elf hurried past carrying folded linen and barely glanced at him.

“Garden?” Regulus asked.

But the elf was already gone, disappearing around the corner with a frightened little pop before he could repeat himself.

Regulus kept going.

The corridors got quieter.

The walls changed. Less gold. More dark wood. Fewer flowers. Fewer sounds from the party. He passed a row of tall windows showing only night outside. He opened one door and found a sitting room. Another and found a coat room. Another and found only darkness because the chamber beyond had not been lit at all.

He shut it quickly.

“I don’t like that one,” he muttered.

A bit of worry had started to nibble at him now, small but growing.

He turned around, certain this time that the ballroom must be back the way he had come. He retraced his steps, then got to a staircase he did not remember descending.

He stopped in the middle of the landing and looked around.

The house said nothing.

Regulus swallowed.

“All right,” he whispered. “That’s fine.”

It was not fine.

His eyes were beginning to sting again.

He did not cry.

He kept going.

Somehow, after what felt like ages and probably wasn’t, he found a pair of familiar doors and realised with a rush of relief that they led back toward the ballroom. He hurried the last few steps, shoes tapping more quickly now, breath catching with hope.

Maybe they had waited.

Maybe cake hadn’t happened yet.

Maybe—

He reached the doorway and stopped dead.

Inside the ballroom, servants were cutting the cake.

Not one slice.

Not the ceremonial first piece.

All of it.

The grand three-tiered cake was already half-dismantled, one side carved away into neat portions. Two servants worked with quick efficient hands, lifting slices onto plates. Another was carrying trays away. The silver stars he had been staring at for so long were being divided and separated and made ordinary.

Regulus stood frozen in the doorway, one hand still resting against the frame.

A servant lifted the last piece from the top tier.

Another gathered the final slices from the stand.

A third reached for the remaining decorations.

Regulus watched, unable even to make a sound.

When they were finished, there was nothing left for him at all.

Only smears of icing. Crumbs. The empty stand.

Then even that was taken away.

In its place servants began setting other things. More plates. More silver. Long neat arrangements for the next part of the evening. Formal dinner. Courses. Proper service. The birthday cake—his birthday cake—gone as completely as if it had never belonged to him in the first place.

Regulus made a tiny noise.

Not quite a sob. Not quite a word. Just the sound of something little and wounded cracking.

One of the servants glanced up, saw him, and immediately looked back down again.

No one said anything.

No one hurried over with a saved slice.

No one told him they had been looking for him.

No one even looked sorry.

Regulus stepped backward.

Then another step.

Then he turned and walked away very quickly before anyone could see his face.

He needed to find someone.

Anybody.

His mother. No. Not his mother. An aunt, maybe. A cousin. A servant who might at least listen. Someone who could fix it. Someone who could say there was another cake. A little one. A slice in the kitchen. Anything.

He hurried down the hall, blinking hard and wiping at one cheek with the heel of his hand because something wet had escaped and he refused to let it stay there.

“I just need someone,” he whispered to himself. “Just one person. Just— just one.”

He turned down another corridor.

Then another.

Then through a side passage he didn’t know.

He thought he heard voices and followed them, but found only an open door and the sound of wind. He crossed a little vestibule. Another hall. A narrower stair. A servants’ passage, though he did not know the word for it. A side door half-open to the night.

He went through it without thinking, because maybe the voices were outside. Maybe the gardens looped around this side. Maybe everyone was just there.

But they weren’t.

The path beyond the door was dark and stony and unfamiliar. Regulus paused, frowning, then kept walking because he thought perhaps the gardens were farther on. Surely the grounds just stretched. Surely there would be lanterns soon. Hedges. People. Music.

Instead there were shadows, deeper and stranger than the bright sculpted parts of the estate he knew. Trees. A gravel path fading into darker earth. A stone wall broken by an open gate he did not remember seeing before.

Regulus went through it.

He did not know he had left the grounds.

He did not know the night beyond the boundary was not theirs anymore.

He only knew he was trying to find someone, and that every corridor had tricked him, and every door had been the wrong one, and somewhere behind him in a bright beautiful house full of guests, his birthday had gone on without him.

So he kept walking, small and dark against the vast night, one hand rubbing at his wet cheek, wholly oblivious to the fact that the estate was behind him now and he had wandered out into somewhere no one had meant him to be at all.

By the time Regulus realised he was crying properly, he was far enough from the house that he could not even hear the party anymore.

Not the music.

Not the doors opening and closing.

Not the smooth stream of grown-up voices.

Nothing.

Only the sound of his own little shoes on the ground and the hitching, stubborn breaths he kept trying to swallow down and failing.

He walked with his arms folded tight across himself, face hot and wet, lower lip wobbling every few steps no matter how hard he pressed it in. He kept making tiny wounded sounds under his breath, angry little huffs tangled up with sniffles, because there was no one here to hear him and no one to tell him to be quiet and no one at all to care if he sounded small.

“It’s stupid,” he muttered thickly, rubbing hard at one eye with the side of his fist. “It’s all stupid. Stupid party. Stupid house. Stupid cake.”

His voice cracked on cake and he hated that.

“It’s my birthday,” he whispered furiously to the dark. “My birthday.”

He kept walking.

The night around him felt too large now. The paths were wrong. The shadows were wrong. Even the air smelled wrong, not like trimmed gardens and polished halls and old stone and smoke but damp and cold and open and strange.

Regulus sniffed hard.

“All right,” he told himself, which would have been much more convincing if he had not sounded so shaky. “I just gotta find somebody.”

That was the problem, though.

Somebody.

Who?

He slowed, hiccuping a little with leftover crying, and frowned into the dark as though the answer might be written there.

Mother and Father were impossible. That much he knew straightaway. If he found them, they would be angry before they were worried. Angry that he had disappeared. Angry that he had gone wandering. Angry that his robes were a bit crooked now and his face was blotchy and there were tears on it and he looked like a child instead of like something polished and perfect for display.

Walburga would say, “Regulus Arcturus Black, what on earth is the meaning of this?”

And Orion would go very quiet, which was worse sometimes.

Regulus scowled at the thought and kicked a little pebble.

“Not them.”

Sirius, then?

But Sirius had been the one who ruined it.

Not on purpose, probably. Sirius ruined things the way storms ruined picnics: loudly, completely, and without really looking where everything landed afterward. Sirius would care if he found Regulus crying. Sirius probably would. Sirius would get wild-eyed and furious and start shouting and maybe hit somebody’s shin and maybe pick Regulus up and stomp off with him like a knight rescuing a princess from a tower except meaner.

But Sirius was seven and hard to catch and currently probably in trouble.

Regulus sniffed. “An’ it’s your fault anyway.”

That made him cry harder for a few seconds, because saying it out loud made it feel true in a way he had not wanted it to.

He stumbled on, muttering through it.

“Could go to Grandfather Arcturus,” he said, thinking aloud because there was no one else to think with. “But he’d just look. He does the looking.” Regulus tried to imitate that awful silent assessing stare and failed because his face was too crumpled and wet. “An’ then he’d say somethin’ all weird and old.”

Arcturus was not cruel exactly. That was almost more inconvenient. He was distant in a way that made Regulus feel as though he were a small object being judged for craftsmanship.

“Grandmother Melania…” Regulus chewed his lip. “Maybe. But she’d say don’t fuss and fix your sleeves and stand up straight and stop sniffling.”

He adored her a little, in the way children adored beautiful terrifying things they knew would never bend down far enough to hold them.

“Pollux…” He frowned harder. “No. He’s fright’ny.”

Pollux Black always seemed as though he had stepped out of a portrait frame only to find real life beneath him. Regulus would rather get lost twice over than approach him while crying.

“And Irma…” He hesitated.

Irma looked at people as if she could see the flaws in the blood beneath their skin. Regulus did not think she would be sympathetic to blotchy cheeks.

“No.”

He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, then remembered he was not meant to do that and looked offended with himself.

“Uncle Alphard?” he tried next.

That one made him slow a little.

Alphard was… nicer. Or at least stranger in a softer way. Sometimes he smiled with one side of his mouth like he knew a joke the rest of the family didn’t. Sometimes he asked questions that sounded real. Once he had given Sirius sweets without permission, which had made Walburga livid. Once he had knelt to show Regulus how smoke curled from the end of his cigar and called it a dragon without ever acting as though Regulus was silly for seeing one there too.

Regulus’s face wobbled.

“Maybe Uncle Alphard,” he whispered.

But Alphard vanished a lot. Into smoking rooms. Into libraries. Into scandalised murmurs at the edge of gatherings. There was no use picking someone you couldn’t actually find.

“Aunt Lucretia…” He grimaced instantly. “No.”

Lucretia pinched cheeks too hard and laughed in a way that felt like being laughed at.

“Uncle Cygnus…”

Absolutely not.

Cygnus had the sort of cold, dry attention that made even adults go careful around him. Regulus did not want to be looked at by Cygnus while crying about cake.

“Aunt Druella…” That was worse somehow. Druella was all silk and sharpness. Beautiful. Controlled. Every word chosen with surgical neatness. Regulus could already hear it: Really, Regulus. Whatever is the matter with you?

He sniffled angrily.

“Not them either.”

Then there were the cousins.

Bellatrix would call him pathetic for crying and then perhaps menace whoever had made him cry, which sounded useful in theory and horrible in practice.

Andromeda might kneel and ask what happened in a gentle voice, which made her the best option by far except that Andromeda was older now, older enough to be absorbed into whispered disapproval and careful supervision and not always allowed to drift where she pleased. Regulus did not know where she had been taken in the grand machinery of the evening.

And Narcissa…

Regulus hesitated, because Narcissa was sometimes kind in a cool, doll-like way. She would smooth his hair and tell him not to look so rumpled. She might say poor little thing. She might even mean it.

But she would not understand dinosaurs.

Or cakes.

Or the world-ending tragedy of having had one’s birthday turned into a formal networking event full of silver spoons and old people.

He kicked another pebble harder this time and it skittered off into darkness.

“They’re all rubbish picks,” he declared hoarsely, then burst into fresh tears because it felt terribly unfair that even imagining rescue had to be done so carefully.

He walked and cried and muttered until the world around him started changing.

At first he did not really notice. He was too busy wiping his face and glaring at the dark and trying to breathe without it shaking. But then the silence wasn’t quiet anymore. There were sounds now. Strange ones. A distant engine. A burst of laughter. A clatter. Not house sounds. Not garden sounds.

Regulus looked up.

There were more buildings.

Not the estate. Not walls and wings and terraces he knew by shape if not always by direction. These were different. Smaller. Closer together. Wrong in a way that made his stomach drop.

He stopped dead.

Lantern-light—no, not lanterns, something harsher—glowed through windows ahead. Signs creaked faintly. Shadows moved behind glass. The road beneath his shoes was different too, rougher, edged with things he did not recognise in the dark.

Regulus turned slowly in a circle.

The house was gone.

Not gone gone, obviously. Houses did not vanish. But gone from sight. Gone from sound. Gone from reach.

He did not know where he was.

A cold prickle ran all the way down his back.

“No,” he whispered.

His breath came quicker.

“No, no, no—”

The dark was bigger now that he knew it was not his dark.

He could not see anyone he knew. Could not hear anyone he knew. There were only strange buildings and lights and a world beyond his family’s grounds he had somehow wandered right into without even noticing.

His chest went tight.

He turned toward the brightest building he could see.

Through its windows came warmth and yellow light and the muffled noise of many voices, and that was enough. Regulus did not stop to think what it was or who might be inside. He just hurried toward it with all the blind desperate certainty of a frightened child chasing light.

His shoes thudded over the ground, then changed sound on a different bit of path, then on steps.

The door was not fully shut.

He pushed it open and slipped inside.

Warmth hit him first.

Then noise.

The place was full of it—voices piled atop one another, laughter, glasses clinking, the scrape of chairs, the low hum of people eating and talking and living in a way utterly unlike pure-blood drawing rooms. The air smelled thick and strange and wonderful and confusing all at once: frying things, roast meat, gravy, ale, sweetness, polish, damp coats, smoke clinging faintly to fabric.

Regulus stopped just inside the door.

He had no idea what a pub restaurant was. He only knew this was a place where ordinary people seemed to exist at volume. Muggle adults sat around wooden tables with pints and plates and sleeves rolled up. A couple near the fire were laughing with their heads thrown back. Someone was carrying a tray laden with food. Someone else called for another round. There was a dartboard on one wall, a chalkboard sign he could not fully read from here, and framed things that meant nothing to him.

No one noticed him.

Not yet.

Regulus stayed very still, breathing hard, eyes wide.

Then something across the room caught his attention so completely that everything else fell away.

A huge glass box, lit from above, full of water.

He stared.

Inside it, things moved.

Fish.

Real fish.

Bright ones and silver ones and striped ones, drifting through little waving plants and a tiny castle and bubbles rising in shining strings. Regulus had seen ponds before and paintings and enchanted moving illustrations in books, but never this. Never a whole little world trapped inside a glowing wall where the creatures moved like thoughts.

His mouth fell open.

Without even realising he was doing it, he crossed the room toward it.

Past tables.

Past chairs.

Past adults who still did not register the tiny solemn child in black velvet and silver embroidery wandering through their evening like a lost prince from a storybook.

Regulus went right up to the glass and pressed both hands to it.

“Oh,” he breathed.

A fish with a ridiculous swishy tail flared past his nose.

Regulus gasped.

Another one, orange and white, nosed near the gravel and vanished behind a fake rock.

His tears stopped for a second just from sheer amazement.

“Hello,” he whispered reverently.

The fish did not answer, but one of them opened and shut its mouth at him, which felt close enough.

He leaned nearer, face almost touching the glass now, utterly awed.

“They live in there,” he whispered to himself. “They’re all in there. It’s a whole—”

Someone near the bar had finally looked up.

The look did not stay singular for long.

A woman carrying empty glasses paused mid-step. Her eyes widened. She turned her head.

“Tom?”

A man behind the bar glanced over. “What?”

“There’s a child.”

That got several more heads turning.

“What?”

“Where?”

“Bloody hell, there is.”

“Whose is he?”

Regulus stiffened at once.

He pulled back from the tank and turned, all amazement vanishing under old instinct. His face closed up as much as a nearly-six-year-old’s face could close when it was still blotchy from crying. He folded his hands in front of himself automatically, shoulders drawing in.

A woman in an apron had already set down her tray and was hurrying over, not fast enough to frighten, slow enough to seem careful. She crouched when she reached him, bringing herself closer to his height.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said immediately, voice going soft in a way Regulus had never heard directed at him before. “Where did you come from?”

Regulus blinked.

Sweetheart.

He stared at her.

She had kind eyes. Worry all over her face. Not the polished performance of concern adults in his world wore when it reflected well on them, but something rounder and warmer and immediate.

Another woman came too, older, with flour still on one sleeve, and she put a hand to her chest.

“Oh, look at him.”

A man from behind the bar was coming around now as well, wiping his hands on a cloth. “Mate, are you all right?”

Mate.

All right.

The questions landed on Regulus like snow falling on skin too warm, strange and soft and impossible to understand.

He did not answer.

He could not, for a second.

The first woman tipped her head, even gentler. “Hey. Hey, lovely. You’re safe, all right? No one’s cross. We just want to help.”

Lovely.

Safe.

No one’s cross.

Regulus’s throat tightened dangerously.

He tried to stay still. Tried to stay reserved. Tried to pull that familiar cool little shield over himself. He was a Black. He knew how to stand. How to look. How not to spill.

But no one here was looking at him like an inconvenience.

No one was irritated.

No one seemed embarrassed by his existence.

They looked horrified for him.

The older woman made a tiny sound and knelt too, ignoring whatever her knees thought of it. “Oh, pet, he’s freezing. Look at those little hands.”

A man from one of the tables had stood up. “He on his own?”

“Looks it.”

“That’s a baby.”

“He’s dressed like a wedding cake.”

“Hush,” the woman in the apron muttered, though not unkindly.

Another voice from farther back said, “Poor little mite.”

Poor little mite.

That did it.

Regulus’s face crumpled all at once.

He made one broken whining noise—small, breathy, wounded—and then the whole thing burst out of him. Sobs. Real ones. The kind that shook his chest and caught in his throat and made speech come out in pieces.

“It’s my birthday,” he wailed.

The effect on the adults around him was immediate and devastating.

“Oh, no,” said the woman in the apron, one hand flying to her mouth.

“Oh, darling,” said the older woman.

“Bloody hell,” said the barman, sounding stricken.

Regulus sobbed harder because now they sounded sorry and because no one had sounded sorry all night.

“It’s my birthday,” he cried again, as if they might not have grasped the tragedy of that on first hearing. “An’ it was horrible!”

“Oh, sweetheart,” the woman said, reaching out slowly. “Come here— can I hold your hand?”

Regulus hesitated for about half a second, then let her.

Her hand wrapped around his tiny cold fingers like this was the most natural thing in the world.

That only made him cry more.

“It had nuffing I wanted,” he sobbed. “Nuffing! It was all boring and grown-up and stupid an’ there wasn’t even dino-saurs.”

“Dinosaurs?” the older woman repeated, already on the verge of tears herself.

“Yes!” Regulus wailed. “My fav’rites! I wanted the pointy one— the tri-tri— tricer’tops— an’ the one wif all the plates, the steg’saurus, an’ the really giant one wif the long neck, the diplo…” He broke off, frustrated by his own mouth. “The long one. An’ the one wif all the horns. An’ the one wif the club tail. An’ pterodactyls.”

Someone at a nearby table quietly said, “Oh my God.”

Regulus gulped wetly and kept going because he had been uncorked now and everything was pouring out.

“An’ unicorns! And Quidditch!”

A man near the bar frowned. “What’s Quidditch?”

“No clue,” muttered another under his breath.

“Must be one of those little boy things,” said the older woman softly, as though the specifics hardly mattered next to the catastrophe at hand.

“Yes!” Regulus cried at once, seizing on being believed. “It is! An’ I wanted games and nice cakes and choc’late things and banners and fun and proper presents but they didn’t do any of it.”

“Oh, sweetheart.”

“They just made it all ugly!”

His words came in outraged hiccupping bursts now, grief and indignation woven together. “It was more like a ball than a birthday and everyone was there for them, not me, an’ all the presents were rubbish and not even mine and some of them were just things for tables! Who gives tables a birthday present?”

That got a horrified-laughing sort of sound from somewhere behind the immediate circle of adults.

The barman put both hands on his hips and looked ready to march out and personally arrest every person responsible.

“And then,” Regulus continued, voice wobbling dangerously again, “an’ then everybody left without me.”

Every face around him changed.

“What?”

“They just went away,” Regulus said, tears running freely again. “All of them. They all went to the garden and nobody came back an’ I waited and I waited and then I tried to get my cake ‘cause it was my cake but I couldn’t reach it and then—” His breath hitched so hard he had to start over. “Then I got lost and when I got back they were cutting it up and they took all of it and there wasn’t any left for me!”

The woman still holding his hand looked like she might start crying with him.

“They took your birthday cake?”

Regulus nodded violently, shoulders shaking. “And I didn’t even like the flavour! It was weird! It was almond and horrid and it had no candles and it wasn’t fun and I still didn’t get any because they stole it all!”

A collective noise of outrage rose from the nearby tables.

“That is criminal.”

“Who does that to a child?”

“On his birthday?”

“Jesus Christ.”

“He didn’t even get a slice?”

The older woman, fully teary now, reached out and stroked his hair back from his damp forehead with extraordinary gentleness. “Oh, darling. Oh, my lovely boy.”

Regulus leaned into the touch without meaning to.

That undid the last of him.

“No one cares about me,” he sobbed. “They never care, they always do this, every day they do, and I tried to find them and I couldn’t and now I don’t know where I am and it’s dark and I’m scared—”

By the time he got to scared he was hardly saying words anymore, just crying them.

The woman in the apron made a helpless devastated sound and looked over her shoulder. “Can someone get him something warm? And maybe some water? Or juice? Oh God, juice, he’s a baby.”

“Got it.”

“Get a blanket too.”

“Kitchen’s got a sponge cake in back,” someone else called.

“Yes, bring the bloody cake!”

At that, several adults murmured urgent agreement, as though a council had been called and reached immediate consensus on emergency birthday measures.

The barman crouched down properly now too, broad and careful and speaking as if Regulus were something precious enough to break. “Listen to me, mate. You’re safe here, okay? We’re gonna sort you out. No one’s gonna leave you wandering about in the dark.”

Regulus blinked at him through wet lashes.

Sort you out.

Safe here.

The phrases were so foreign they almost sounded magical.

The older woman smiled at him with heartbreaking softness. “Can you tell us your name, sweetheart?”

Regulus hiccuped. “Reg’lus.”

“All right, Regulus,” she said, pronouncing it carefully, like it mattered to get it right. “I’m Jean. This is Maggie. And that grumpy one there is Tom.”

“I’m not grumpy,” said Tom automatically, deeply gruff and thoroughly concerned.

“You are a bit,” Jean said.

A watery confused sound escaped Regulus that was very nearly a laugh.

Several adults visibly melted right in front of him.

“Oh, there he is,” Maggie whispered, as if Regulus himself had just stepped briefly into view from behind all the crying.

Tom pointed toward the fish tank. “You like the fish, then?”

Regulus gave a tiny nod.

“Never seen one before,” he admitted miserably.

That hit the room almost as hard as the cake.

“Never seen a fish tank?”

“Oh, bless him.”

“Come off it, now I’m gonna cry.”

Jean squeezed his little hand. “You can look at them as long as you like, all right? They’re not going anywhere.”

Regulus turned to stare at the tank again, tears still clinging to his lashes.

The fish swam on, bright and careless in their lit-up little world.

Behind him, adults were already moving with fierce purposeful kindness. A chair was pulled closer to the fire. Someone appeared with a folded blanket. Someone else brought orange juice in a glass and then frowned and replaced it with one that had a bendy straw because clearly that was better for a crying birthday child in formalwear. In the kitchen, a woman could be heard saying, “No, put the icing on it anyway, I don’t care if it’s meant for tomorrow.”

Regulus stood in the middle of it all, black velvet rumpled, silver embroidery gleaming softly in the pub light, small hand curled in Jean’s, cheeks damp, eyes huge.

No one was ignoring him.

No one was talking over him.

No one was making him feel like the least important thing in the room.

For the first time all night—maybe for one of the first times he could properly remember—every adult looking at him was looking as though he was a child first and a problem nowhere at all.

Jean brushed his curls back again and said softly, “Oh, birthday boy. We’ve got you now.”

And Regulus, exhausted and heartbroken and awed and still a little dazzled by the fish, gave one last shivery sob and believed her.

They settled him by the fire as if the whole pub had silently, collectively agreed that this was the only sensible thing to do.

Someone brought over a sturdy wooden chair with a cushion on it because the normal ones were too big and swallowed him up. Someone else tucked a blanket around his shoulders, then around his legs too when they noticed his little shoes weren’t enough to keep the chill out. Jean took his hand again just long enough to guide him into place, and Maggie crouched to straighten the hem of his crumpled robes with the sort of automatic tenderness that made Regulus stare at her in startled confusion.

“There we are,” Maggie said softly. “That’s better, isn’t it, duck?”

Regulus gave a small, uncertain nod.

He was still blotchy from crying, still hiccuping now and then, but the terrible edge had come off him. Warmth was creeping back into his fingers. The fire crackled. The pub was bright. The adults kept looking at him with these awful soft faces that made his chest ache in a way he couldn’t name.

Jean set the orange juice in front of him. “Sip that for me.”

Regulus looked at it suspiciously. “What is it?”

“Orange juice.”

He looked at the bendy straw as though it were a magical device. “Why’s it curly?”

A couple of people nearby laughed under their breath.

“So it’s more fun,” Jean said.

Regulus thought that over with great seriousness, then leaned forward and took a sip.

His eyes widened.

“Well?” Tom called from behind the bar, pretending not to hover.

Regulus swallowed. “It’s good.”

“Course it is,” Tom said, looking absurdly pleased with himself.

That got him another little almost-laugh, shakier this time but real enough that Maggie pressed a hand dramatically to her heart.

“Oh, there it is again,” she said. “That little face.”

Someone had moved his chair so he could still see the fish tank properly, and it turned out this was a masterstroke. Every few moments Regulus’s attention drifted right back to it. He sat there in his blanket, clutching his glass in both hands, staring as fish slipped in and out of the waving green plants.

“There’s the orange one,” Jean said quietly, pointing.

Regulus gasped softly. “There he goes.”

“And that stripey one’s a menace,” said a man from the nearest table. “Always starting trouble.”

Regulus’s head whipped round. “Really?”

“No,” Jean said dryly. “Barry, don’t tell him fish gossip like it’s fact.”

“It could be true.”

Regulus looked between them, then back at the tank. “I think he is trouble.”

“See?” Barry said smugly. “Knew it.”

That opened the door.

Very soon half the pub was helping him assign personalities to the fish.

“That little silver one looks shy.”

“No, he’s posh.”

“He’s definitely posh.”

“The yellow one’s a show-off.”

“That one keeps hiding.”

“He’s not hiding,” Regulus said. “He’s sneaky.”

“Oh, sneaky, is he?”

“Yes.” Regulus pointed solemnly at the glass. “Look at his face.”

This, somehow, was accepted as compelling evidence.

People laughed. Gently. Not at him, but around him, with him tucked safely in the middle of it. Someone brought him a little bowl of crisps. Someone else put down a plate with cut-up bits of warm bread and cheese. Then a woman from the kitchen emerged with a little dish of apple slices and asked, “Do you like these, birthday boy?”

Regulus looked up at the title.

Birthday boy.

He still wasn’t used to hearing it like that. Soft. Meant. Like it belonged to him.

He nodded.

“Ta,” he said automatically, then glanced at Jean as if checking he’d done the right thing.

Jean smiled. “Perfect manners.”

Regulus sat up a tiny bit straighter.

They found colouring sheets too—clearly kept somewhere for children dragged along to long lunches and Sunday dinners—and when Maggie laid them out in front of him with a little box of crayons, Regulus looked at them as though she had produced treasure.

There were animals. A castle. A page with balloons. A silly maze. A half-finished pirate ship. A dinosaur one, miraculously, though it was printed badly and the tail looked wrong.

Regulus touched it reverently.

“Dino’saur,” he whispered.

Maggie nearly combusted on the spot.

“Oh, he likes that one,” she whispered to Jean, as if Regulus were some rare woodland creature they mustn’t frighten.

“I can hear you,” Regulus said.

That made three people laugh outright.

“Good,” said Tom from the bar. “Means you’re feeling better.”

Regulus coloured with immense concentration, tongue just barely peeking between his lips sometimes when he had to stay in the lines. He explained very gravely that the dinosaur on the page was not really right, because the head was funny and the feet were wrong and also it should be greener.

“So fix him,” Barry said.

Regulus blinked. “Can I?”

“It’s your dinosaur.”

That seemed to him a principle so beautiful it required a moment of silence.

Then he seized the dark green crayon and got to work.

While he coloured and ate and watched the fish, the adults kept asking him little questions in careful voices.

Not too many at once. Not sharp ones. Just gentle nudges.

“How old are you today, then?”

“Six,” Regulus said proudly, because now he properly was.

“Well. Happy sixth birthday.”

“Thank you.”

“What’s your name again, lovely?”

“Regulus.”

“That’s very grand.”

He frowned a bit. “S’just my name.”

“What do your friends call you?”

Regulus stared blankly. “I don’t got any.”

That made the adults go visibly still for a second.

Jean recovered first. “Well. What do people at home call you?”

Regulus thought about it. “Regulus.”

“Anyone call you Reggie?”

His whole face twisted in appalled offence. “No.”

“Right,” said Jean, very serious. “Good. Not Reggie.”

He relaxed a little.

“Have you got brothers or sisters?” Maggie asked.

“One brother. Sirius.”

“The one you mentioned earlier?”

Regulus nodded, colouring hard over the dinosaur’s tail. “He’s seven.”

“And what’s he like?”

Regulus paused, considering. “Loud.”

Several adults hid smiles behind their drinks.

“Very loud,” Regulus added.

“That sounds tiring,” Barry said.

Regulus nodded with profound weariness beyond his years. “Mm.”

“Does he look after you?”

Another pause.

Sometimes, Regulus thought. In his own way. Like an angry dog standing over something it had decided belonged to it.

But Sirius had also ruined everything.

“He shouts a lot,” Regulus settled on.

This was accepted as an answer.

“What sort of things do you like?” Jean asked.

Regulus perked up a bit. “Dinosaurs. And broom—” He stopped, corrected himself because these people didn’t know the word. “Flying games.”

“Flying games?”

“Mm-hm.”

“With what?”

He looked at her like the answer was obvious. “Brooms.”

There was a tiny pause.

Jean, to her eternal credit, did not even blink. “Of course. Brooms.”

“And unicorns,” Regulus added. “An’ stars. But not boring stars. Nice stars. An’ dragons a bit, but not as much as dinosaurs. An’ I can draw rather well.”

“Can you now?”

He nodded, grave with self-belief. “Yes.”

Maggie leaned in to inspect his colouring page. “I can see that.”

That pleased him so much he immediately looked down to hide it.

In the kitchen behind the swing door, there was a different sort of bustle going on.

Regulus did not know it, but every adult who passed through there seemed to have an opinion on his emergency birthday cake. There was sponge. There was icing being spread too quickly. There were candles being found from somewhere deep in a drawer because somebody swore they had seen them near Christmas. There were sweets sprinkled on top because Jean had said in no uncertain terms that if the little lad wanted a proper child’s birthday, then by God he would have one.

At the same time, by the telephone near the bar, Tom was speaking in a low serious voice to the police.

“No, I’m telling you, he’s tiny. About six, maybe. Alone. Wandered in from outside in formal clothes, crying his eyes out… Yeah, no, he’s safe here. Fed, warm, looked after. We’re not sending him back out in the dark… No, he doesn’t know where he is. Says he got lost… Right. Good. Soon as you can.”

Jean kept half an ear on that while pretending not to, and every time she glanced at Regulus her face softened again.

He was in the middle of telling Maggie, with great intensity, why triceratops was an excellent dinosaur when the kitchen door finally swung open.

The first thing he noticed was the light.

Tiny golden flames.

Then the cake.

He froze.

It was not enormous. It was not elegant. It was not black and silver and polished into oblivion. It was a little round cake on a plate, thickly iced, a bit lopsided, with bright sweets scattered over the top and six candles burning in a golden cluster.

For one second Regulus simply stared.

Then his mouth fell open.

Then he gasped so hard it sounded like he might swallow his own breath.

The entire pub went soft around the edges.

Jean came out carrying the cake like a sacred offering while Maggie hovered at her shoulder and Tom dimmed the lights nearest their corner. Someone shushed someone else. Chairs turned. Conversations faded. Warm faces turned toward the little boy in the too-fancy robes and blanket cape, staring as if the moon had just been set down in front of him.

Regulus slapped both hands over his mouth.

“That’s for me?” he breathed.

Jean stopped in front of him and smiled. “Course it is, birthday boy.”

Regulus made the tiniest squeal.

Actually squealed.

Then he clapped, quick delighted little smacks of his palms, and let out a giggle so bright and startled it seemed to surprise even him. He wriggled in his chair, blanket slipping down one shoulder, little legs kicking happily beneath the table because he simply could not contain it all inside his body.

The adults around him absolutely melted.

“Oh, look at him.”

“Bless his little heart.”

“He’s kicking his feet.”

“Don’t, I’ll cry again.”

“He’s so excited.”

Regulus was. Wildly. Completely.

It was a real birthday cake.

Not beautiful in the sharp cold way his old one had been. Beautiful in the way this was supposed to be. Warm. Bright. Candles. Colour. Meant for him.

Jean set it carefully on the table in front of him.

The candles flickered in his wide dark eyes.

“All right,” Maggie said softly. “We sing first.”

And they did.

Not polished. Not formal. Not arranged. Just a pub full of mostly Muggle adults, some tipsy, some flour-dusted, some still in work aprons, all singing in a warmly off-key chorus to one tiny astonished boy at the centre of their attention.

“Happy birthday to you…”

Regulus clapped along as best he could, beaming and breathless.

“Happy birthday to you…”

He giggled again, then looked around at all of them singing to him and seemed briefly unable to believe this was really happening.

“Happy birthday dear Regulus…”

At hearing his name sung like that, he gave this delighted little bounce in his chair that nearly finished everyone off on the spot.

“Happy birthday to you.”

When the song ended, there was a tiny hush.

Everyone smiled at him.

The candles burned steadily.

“All right, sweetheart,” Jean said. “Time to make a wish.”

That became very serious business.

Regulus drew himself up and stared at the candles like a scholar confronting an impossibly important question. His brows knit. His little face scrunched all up. He squeezed his eyes shut so tightly his cheeks puffed out, lips pursed in concentration.

The room waited.

No one hurried him.

He thought hard.

Hard enough that one of the candles bent slightly in its own wax while he was still deciding.

Around him, adults exchanged silent emotional glances as if this were the most sacred moment any of them had witnessed in years.

Regulus kept thinking.

Then, apparently satisfied, he opened his eyes.

His expression was solemn with purpose.

He leaned forward, took one big determined breath, and blew.

All six candles went out in a rush.

The pub erupted.

Cheers. Clapping. Whoops from the bar. Maggie actually threw both hands in the air. Barry banged the table once in triumph. Someone shouted, “He did it!”

Regulus jumped at the noise, then realised it was for him and burst into laughter—real laughter this time, delighted and bubbling and bright. He clapped again, kicking his legs so hard his shoes knocked against the chair legs, and the sight of him so openly happy made the whole room go soft all over again.

“There’s our birthday boy.”

“Look at that smile.”

“Worth every candle in the building.”

Tom, from behind the bar, wiped a hand over his mouth like a man pretending he had something in his eye and not feelings.

Jean bent slightly so she was level with him again. “Best birthday wish?”

Regulus pressed both hands to his cheeks, still glowing from the effort and the joy and all the attention. He nodded very hard.

“Best one,” he said.

And because every single adult there was already far too gone where he was concerned, that finished them completely.

They did not let the brightness fade after that.

That seemed to become the mission of the whole room.

The moment the candles were blown out and Regulus was still sitting there glowing, cheeks pink with happiness and surprise and heat from the little flames, everyone appeared to decide—without saying it outright—that this child had clearly been failed by every adult before arriving here and that they were now, collectively, going to overcorrect.

Jean cut him the first slice herself.

Not too big, because he was little, but proper. A real first slice, laid onto a plate with ridiculous care. Thick white icing, soft sponge, coloured sweets pressed into the top. Regulus accepted it with both hands around the plate as though it were some sacred relic.

“It’s vanilla,” Maggie told him, delighted by how reverently he was looking at it. “Not almond.”

At that, Regulus brightened all over again.

“Really?”

“Really.”

He took his first bite and closed his eyes.

The sigh that came out of him nearly caused another full-room collapse.

“Oh, now he’s happy.”

“Look at his face.”

“That’s proper cake, that is.”

Regulus opened his eyes and announced, with enormous seriousness, “This is much better than the other one.”

Tom, polishing a glass much more aggressively than necessary, muttered, “Low bar, pet.”

He was given more cake, then slowed down gently when Jean saw the speed he was attempting and informed him, in the tone of one who had likely managed many children before, that if he bolted all of it at once he would make himself poorly and then nobody would be having a good time. Regulus accepted this with the grave dignity of a child willing to trust rules only when they made sense.

After the cake came more snacks. More juice. A warm little plate of chips because Barry had insisted he needed something “real” after all that crying. Regulus, who had never before had adults hovering around him with this kind of practical thoughtfulness, accepted every fresh kindness with a mixture of caution and slowly deepening wonder.

Then the gifts started.

It began with one woman standing by the pub phone, hand over the receiver, saying, “My Lucy’s got that stuffed stegosaurus she’s too grown-up for now, hasn’t she? Tell her to bring it. And the colouring set from the cupboard. And that knitted cardigan, the blue one, if she can find it. No, I don’t care what time it is, there’s a six-year-old birthday emergency.”

That opened the floodgates.

Another man rang home and said, “Check the toy chest, love. Anything nice we’ve still got from when Jack was little. Cars, books, whatever. And the red jumper he never wore. Yeah. Yeah, I know. Just bring it.”

Someone else called a grown daughter in a flat nearby and said, “Have you still got those puzzle books from when you babysat the twins? Bring ’em over. And maybe that little stuffed bear from the top shelf if you don’t want it anymore.”

One woman vanished into the back and came out with a little bag of children’s things clearly kept for relatives—hair ribbons, a tiny pack of stickers, a pair of mittens, two small picture books with softened corners.

Maggie laid them all beside Regulus one by one as though presenting treasure before a throne.

“These are for you now.”

Regulus stared.

“For me?”

“For you.”

He touched the picture book first, fingertips light against the cover. Then the stickers. Then the mittens, which were red and slightly too big but wonderfully soft. He looked up, bewildered and almost overwhelmed.

“But… why?”

That question wrecked three adults at once.

Jean crouched beside him. “Because it’s your birthday, love.”

The answer seemed to strike him speechless.

He looked back down at the little gathering of things beside his plate with the solemn awe of a child who had never quite trusted that gifts could really arrive and mean him.

A while later, the first of the called-in reinforcements began to arrive.

A woman in a coat came through the door carrying a paper bag and two toy cars tucked awkwardly in one hand. She had barely got inside before she said, “Where is he? Where’s the birthday baby?” and then softened at once when she saw Regulus by the fire. Out came the promised stuffed dinosaur—rather worn, bright green, with a slightly squashed face and soft felt plates down its back.

Regulus made the most wounded little sound of joy.

“It’s a stego’saurus,” he breathed.

“It is,” the woman said, nearly crying herself just from how he said it. “He used to belong to my Lucy, but she says he ought to go to someone who’ll love him properly.”

Regulus took the dinosaur into his arms as though handed a breathing thing. He hugged it straight to his chest. The blanket slipped; the green toy’s tail stuck out from under his little arm. He looked down at it and then up at the woman.

“I do love him properly.”

“I can tell.”

The next arrival brought a little stack of comic books with bent corners and a striped scarf and a wooden puzzle. Another teen boy came in half-awake in a hoodie, carrying two old action figures and saying, “Mum, I told you, he can just have them, it’s fine,” before one good look at Regulus turned his expression instantly protective.

“Oh,” he said. “He’s tiny.”

“Exactly,” said his mother.

Soon the table near Regulus was becoming a glorious, mismatched hoard of secondhand affection. A stuffed dinosaur. Crayons. Books. A scarf. Puzzle pieces. A toy car. A knitted cardigan. A little tin of marbles somebody’s son had grown out of. A paper crown hastily made by Barry out of a clean napkin and the shiny side of some wrapping from the kitchen, because if this child was having a birthday, then he was having birthday nonsense too.

Regulus put the paper crown on without protest.

It sat crooked over his dark curls and made the whole room want to lie down and die of adoration.

They played games with him after that.

Tiny little ones at first. Easy things.

“Which hand is it in?” with a coin and two fists.

A silly beanbag toss improvised with balled-up bar towels and an empty basket.

A game where Jean made animal noises and Regulus had to guess them, which he did with startling confidence even when Tom’s cow sounded demonic.

“That’s not a cow,” Regulus informed him.

“It is in Yorkshire,” Barry said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Neither do I,” said Maggie.

There was a paper maze competition, which Regulus took very seriously, tongue peeping out as he guided a crayon along the printed paths. There was a drawing game where they took turns adding bits to a creature nobody could agree on until it ended up looking like “a horse what went wrong.” Regulus laughed so hard at that one he had to clutch his stomach.

At some point Tom found a deck of cards and performed a very basic trick for him, utterly fooling him.

The look on Regulus’s face afterward was so stunned that Tom had to sit down and take a minute like a victorious uncle.

“How did you do that?” Regulus demanded.

“Magic,” Tom said.

Regulus narrowed his eyes suspiciously, which only made the adults laugh harder.

By then more people were trickling in—called by phone, summoned by concern, curious, carrying offerings. The pub had become, by common agreement, the site of an emergency birthday restoration project.

And then one of the last arrivals came in with two boys.

Their mother had a carrier bag looped over one arm, with a folded child’s jumper poking out and the box of some old toy set balanced on top. Behind her trailed her sons, perhaps eight and ten or thereabouts, both in hastily pulled-on coats over night clothes, hair not quite brushed, faces alight with the kind of righteous excitement only children get when told there is a crisis involving another child.

“There he is,” their mother whispered before she had even crossed half the room.

The younger boy gasped.

The older one drew himself up immediately, eyes fixed on Regulus with open astonishment.

Because Regulus, bundled in a blanket with a paper crown askew, clutching a green stuffed dinosaur and sitting by the fire like some displaced tiny royal, really did look rather like a prince from a story.

The boys approached with the solemnity of envoys.

Regulus noticed them and immediately went shy.

He sat straighter, hugging the dinosaur closer, dark eyes flicking from one to the other and back again. His face was warm from cake and the fire and all the attention. The paper crown had slipped slightly over one eyebrow.

The older boy stopped a few feet away.

“Hello,” he said.

Regulus stared.

His mother nudged him lightly. “Go on, then.”

The boy squared his shoulders. “I’m Daniel. This is Ben.”

The younger boy waved so hard his whole arm went with it. “Hi.”

Regulus gave a tiny nod. “Hullo.”

Daniel looked at him very seriously. “Mum said it’s your birthday.”

Regulus nodded again.

“And that you got lost.”

Another nod.

“And that people were mean.”

Regulus’s mouth pinched at the memory. “Yes.”

Daniel glanced at Ben. Ben glanced back. Something immediate and wordless passed between them: the ancient code of children recognising a wrong that needed fixing.

Then Daniel said, with breathtaking certainty, “Don’t worry. We’ll help.”

Regulus blinked.

Ben came one step closer, peering at the stuffed dinosaur. “Is that yours?”

Regulus looked down at it and, with clear pride now, said, “Yes.”

“What’s his name?”

Regulus froze.

He had not named him yet.

This was evidently serious.

Ben waited, full of respect for the process.

Regulus thought hard. “Don’t know.”

“That’s all right,” Ben said kindly. “You can think of one later.”

The kindness of this nearly undid Regulus again, but in a warm way this time.

Their mother handed over the bag, from which emerged several marvels: a little tin soldier set missing a few pieces, a soft red pullover, and—most importantly to the boys—a toy sword and a toy shield from some costume set they had apparently brought entirely because they felt the situation called for it.

Daniel seized the sword at once.

Ben grabbed the shield.

Both of them turned to Regulus.

There was a pause.

Then Daniel, in a voice thick with sudden mythic importance, said, “Are you a prince?”

Regulus, who had never in his life been asked anything so obviously excellent, blinked at him.

He looked down at his paper crown.

He looked at the blanket around his shoulders like a cape.

He looked at the adults, all watching with smiles already breaking.

And then, because six-year-olds know when a story is being offered to them and know better than to refuse it, he said in a small cautious voice, “Maybe.”

That was enough.

Ben gasped. Daniel went rigid with purpose.

“I knew it,” he whispered.

“We have to guard him,” Ben said at once.

“We do.”

“He’s little.”

“He’s very little.”

“And pretty,” Ben added, which caused Jean to have to turn away and pretend to wipe down a table because she was losing the battle to remain composed.

Daniel nodded gravely. “Exactly.”

Then both boys stepped to either side of Regulus’s chair.

Daniel planted the toy sword on the floor like a knight taking an oath. Ben hefted the shield, nearly dropping it on his foot, recovered, and stood very upright.

“We are your knights,” Daniel announced.

“We’ll keep you safe,” Ben added.

Regulus stared up at them, shy and dazzled and visibly trying not to smile too much all at once.

“Really?”

“Really,” said Daniel.

“No one can get you while we’re here,” said Ben.

“That’s right,” Daniel agreed. “We’ll guard you.”

“And if bad people come,” Ben said, lifting the shield with effort, “we’ll go bang!”

“Not bang,” their mother said weakly.

“Whack, then,” Ben amended.

“That’s better,” Tom muttered into his glass.

Regulus’s shoulders, which had spent most of the evening tight with instinctive caution, slowly loosened. He looked from one boy to the other, then down at his dinosaur, then back up again.

“All right,” he said.

This was apparently the highest possible honour.

The boys glowed.

From that point onward they attached themselves to him completely. Protective did not begin to cover it. They hovered at either shoulder when he moved. They explained things to him in solemn whispers. They fetched crayons before he even had to ask. If another adult approached too quickly, Daniel subtly shifted closer while Ben glared with the full force of a child convinced he now had sacred duties.

“He’s fine, boys,” their mother kept saying.

“We know,” Daniel said, not moving.

“We’re guarding.”

Regulus, who had never before in his life had anyone his own age decide he was worth defending on sight, seemed both baffled and deeply delighted by it.

He let them coax him into more games.

There was a little treasure hunt improvised around the pub, with Barry hiding wrapped sweets and Ben loudly pretending to discover clues. Regulus followed in the middle of their tiny formation, dinosaur tucked under one arm, Daniel leading and Ben checking behind them every few seconds as if assassins lurked near the dartboard.

“There!” Ben cried. “A clue!”

“It’s under a chair,” Daniel said, pulling out a folded napkin with an X drawn on it.

Regulus gasped appropriately.

They found sweets, a shiny coin Tom donated from the till for dramatic effect, and a little plastic ring someone produced from nowhere and declared “royal treasure.”

Then they played dragons-and-knights, though this version was heavily adjusted to accommodate the fact that Regulus was the prince and therefore not required to do anything strenuous unless he wanted to. Mostly this involved Daniel and Ben patrolling around his chair and announcing dangers.

“Dragon by the window!”

“I see him!”

“Stay back, Your Highness!”

Regulus, now openly smiling, would clutch his dinosaur and say things like, “Be careful,” in the tiniest grand voice imaginable, which sent nearby adults into fresh spirals of silent adoration.

At one point Daniel leaned close and whispered, with proprietary seriousness, “Don’t worry. You’re ours now.”

It was not threatening. It was not strange in the way adults might have made it strange. It was the utterly straightforward declaration of a child who had decided, within the rules of play and affection, that this smaller prettier child had been abandoned and therefore must be folded immediately into his sphere of protection.

Ben nodded in fierce agreement. “We’ll keep you.”

Regulus went pink from forehead to collar.

“You can’t keep me,” he whispered, though without any real objection in it.

“We can till the police come,” Daniel said reasonably.

This struck Regulus as fair.

“All right.”

So they did.

For the next while, Regulus belonged to a strange and shining little kingdom made inside the pub: Jean and Maggie and Tom and Barry and all the soft-hearted adults orbiting around him; the fish tank glowing nearby like an enchanted wall; the heap of scavenged birthday presents stacked beside his chair; and his two self-appointed knights, who stood guard with wooden sword and battered shield and the full impossible seriousness of boyhood.

Every time Regulus laughed, both boys looked absurdly proud.

Every time he went quiet, one of them would crouch beside him and ask, “You all right, prince?”

And every time he nodded, they nodded back as if they had personally secured the realm.

It was late enough by the time the police arrived that the pub had taken on that strange, suspended feeling places sometimes got when the normal shape of the evening had been interrupted and replaced by something more important.

The fire had burned lower. Some tables had emptied. Others were still occupied, but quieter now, everyone half-listening for the door, half-watching the little pool of warmth around Regulus.

By then he was deeply settled in.

The blanket was still around his shoulders, though it had slipped a bit with all the games. His paper crown had been straightened and then gone crooked again. The green stuffed stegosaurus sat tucked under one arm. The second slice of cake had left a faint smear of icing near the corner of his mouth that Maggie kept trying to wipe and Regulus kept dodging with solemn dignity. Daniel and Ben still flanked him like tiny bodyguards, one on each side of his chair.

So when the door opened and two uniformed officers stepped inside, the entire pub looked up as one.

Regulus did too.

He stiffened a little at once.

Not because he knew what police were, not properly, but because uniforms were still uniforms and adults arriving with purpose always made some part of him brace.

Jean put a hand lightly on his back.

“It’s all right, love,” she murmured. “These are the policemen I told you about.”

The older of the two officers took his hat off the moment he saw Regulus.

“Oh,” he said very quietly.

His partner, a woman with kind eyes and a neat dark notebook already in hand, softened all over too. “Well. There he is.”

Tom met them halfway, speaking low and serious, and both officers listened with the particular concentration of people hearing something already bad and then realising it might be worse.

“Found him wandering in alone.”

“Came in from outside.”

“Clearly been crying for ages.”

“Didn’t know where he was.”

“Says it’s his birthday.”

At that, the woman officer looked over at the remains of the little cake and then at Regulus in his crown and blanket and had to take a tiny breath before coming closer.

She crouched when she reached him, exactly like Jean had.

“Hello,” she said softly. “I’m Officer Harris. This is Officer Clarke.”

Regulus looked from her to the man and back again.

Daniel edged slightly closer to his chair.

Ben folded his arms and frowned at the newcomers with eight-year-old suspicion.

Officer Harris noticed and smiled faintly. “And you must be the royal guard.”

Daniel straightened at once. “Yes.”

Ben nodded. “We’re his knights.”

“That’s very helpful,” Officer Harris said with admirable seriousness. “Perhaps you can stay while I ask him a few questions.”

This seemed acceptable to them.

Regulus looked at Jean.

Jean gave his shoulder a gentle rub. “Just answer as best you can, sweetheart.”

He nodded, small again.

Officer Harris opened her notebook. “Can you tell me your full name, darling?”

Regulus sat up a little straighter, as if this at least was something solid he knew. “Regulus Arcturus Black.”

Officer Harris wrote it down.

Officer Clarke repeated it under his breath. “Regulus… Arcturus… Black.”

Regulus watched the pen move.

“All right, Regulus,” Harris said. “And how old are you?”

“Six.”

“It’s your birthday today, yes?”

He nodded.

“Happy birthday.”

That almost made him smile again.

“Thank you.”

Harris’s eyes flicked briefly over the room—the cake, the gifts, the blanket, the dinosaur—and then back to him. “Can you tell me where you live?”

That was harder.

Regulus frowned at once.

“At home.”

A couple of adults behind Harris exchanged sympathetic glances.

“Yes, sweetheart,” she said gently, “but where is home?”

Regulus looked down at his dinosaur. “In my house.”

“Can you tell me the address?”

He blinked.

That word meant nothing useful to him.

“The what?”

“The number on the house. Or the street name.”

Regulus stared.

Officer Clarke stepped in a little, voice equally calm. “Do you know the name of the road, son?”

Regulus shook his head slowly.

“No.”

Harris tried again. “What does your house look like?”

“Big.”

That got the faintest huff of helpless amusement from Barry at the bar.

“How big?” Harris asked.

Regulus spread his hands as far as he could. “Very.”

“Well,” Clarke said quietly to his partner, “that narrows it down.”

Harris kept going. “Do you know the village name? Or the town?”

“No.”

“All right. That’s okay.” Her voice stayed soft, but there was a new thread of concern in it now. “Can you tell me your parents’ names?”

Regulus looked confused.

“My parents?”

“Yes.”

“What are they called?”

He considered this.

“Mother and Father.”

The room went very still.

Harris smiled carefully. “Yes, but their names.”

Regulus’s face began to crumple with frustration. “That is their names.”

“No, sweetheart, I mean the other names grown-ups have.”

He looked genuinely bewildered now. “They’re Mother and Father.”

Officer Clarke glanced at Harris.

Harris wrote something down.

“All right,” she said. “That’s all right. What about grandparents? Do you know their names?”

That, at least, he did.

“Grandfather Arcturus,” he said promptly. “And Grandmother Melania. And Grandfather Pollux. And Grandmother Irma.”

Harris wrote those too.

“And aunts and uncles?”

“Uncle Alphard. Aunt Lucretia. Uncle Cygnus. Aunt Druella.”

She wrote faster.

“And cousins?”

“Bellatrix. Andromeda. Narcissa.”

Officer Clarke looked faintly startled at the names, perhaps because even to Muggle ears they sounded like characters from opera or myth rather than a child’s relations.

Harris kept her expression neutral. “Good job. Do you know their surnames?”

Regulus blinked.

“No.”

That went down too.

Officer Clarke had moved to the pub phone by then, quietly asking Tom whether he could use it to make a call. Tom nodded at once. Clarke began relaying the name.

“Regulus Arcturus Black. Male child. Approximately six years old…”

Regulus watched him with solemn dark eyes, not understanding any of it.

Harris stayed crouched with him. “Can you tell me what happened tonight?”

That part poured out more easily, especially with Jean nearby and Daniel and Ben still at his sides.

“It was my birthday,” Regulus said. “But it was all wrong. It wasn’t for me really. It was for them.”

“For who?”

“My mother and father.”

“And what happened then?”

Regulus twisted the edge of the blanket in his fingers. “Sirius got cross.”

“Who’s Sirius?”

“My brother. He’s seven.”

“And then?”

“He shouted and threw things and ran away and they all followed him and everyone left and I was still there.” His mouth pushed downward again. “They left me in the ballroom.”

Harris’s pen slowed.

“By yourself?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

Regulus shrugged helplessly. “Long.”

“Did anyone come back?”

“No.”

“Did anyone look for you?”

“No.”

That landed heavily.

Harris’s tone stayed even gentler. “What did you do then?”

“I tried to get my cake.”

The whole pub, which had already heard this once, made a fresh collective noise of quiet outrage.

“But I couldn’t reach it,” Regulus said. “Then I got lost and when I came back they took it all and there wasn’t any for me and then I got lost again.”

Harris looked up. “You were alone the whole time?”

Regulus nodded.

“No one came with you?”

“No.”

“And no one stopped you leaving the house?”

He frowned. “I don’t know.”

“Did anyone notice you were gone?”

“I don’t think so.”

At that exact moment Officer Clarke came back from the phone, face professionally composed but unmistakably troubled.

He bent toward Harris and spoke low, though half the room still heard it.

“Nothing coming up.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“Nothing on the name. No birth record, no school registration, no listed address, no guardianship paperwork I can see. Could be a typo, could be he’s not in the system.”

Regulus, hearing only fragments, hugged the dinosaur tighter.

Harris nodded once without taking her eyes off him. “Keep trying.”

Clarke moved aside again, this time speaking into the radio, giving the full name once more. Spelling it. Repeating it.

Nothing changed.

Regulus had no idea he was causing increasing concern simply by existing beyond the reach of any record.

Harris returned to her questions.

“Do you go to school, Regulus?”

He shook his head.

“No.”

“Not yet?”

“No. Never.”

“Has anyone taught you at home?”

Regulus thought about it. “Sometimes they say things.”

That was not reassuring.

“Do you have friends nearby? Neighbours? Anyone you know outside the house?”

“No.”

“Are you often left on your own?”

That answer came too quickly.

“Yes.”

A silence followed it.

Regulus, sensing something shifting but not what, looked up at her uncertainly. “Sometimes they forget.”

Harris did not write for a moment.

Then she did.

“When you say they forget…”

Regulus looked down again. “They just do. They get busy.” He swallowed. “It’s not bad.”

That made Jean visibly turn away and busy herself with empty glasses because otherwise she was going to say something unhelpful about Regulus’s parents and the police sitting two feet away.

Harris’s voice dropped even softer. “Do they leave you alone a lot?”

“Yes.”

“At night?”

He hesitated, then nodded once.

“Do you have enough to eat?”

That confused him. “Usually.”

“Has anyone hurt you?”

Regulus looked startled by the question. “No.”

It was the one answer that seemed to let Harris breathe a little easier, but only a little.

Clarke came back again.

Still nothing.

Not on the name. Not on the grandparents. Not on any immediate match for the family names in the surrounding area that could explain a missing six-year-old in formal clothes. Certainly not any plausible household connected to a child who apparently had never been to school and could not state an address, a road, or his parents’ legal names.

To Muggle authorities, the picture forming was bleak and horribly familiar in all the wrong ways: a child hidden away from normal systems, socially isolated, poorly supervised, missing from records, wandering alone at night, describing chronic neglect without having the language to call it that.

Officer Harris closed her notebook for a moment and looked at Regulus with a fresh heaviness in her face.

“All right,” she said carefully. “Regulus, we’re going to make sure you’re somewhere safe tonight.”

He blinked.

“Here’s good,” he said.

That almost undid her.

“It is good here,” she agreed. “But for tonight we’ll need to get some more help. People whose job it is to look after children.”

Regulus frowned. “I’m not a baby.”

“No,” she said quickly, smiling faintly. “No, you’re not. But you still need taking care of.”

He looked at Jean, then Maggie, then his knights.

Daniel at once said, “He can stay with us.”

Ben nodded fiercely. “Yeah.”

Their mother nearly choked on air. “Boys—”

“We’ve got room,” Ben insisted.

“You have bunk beds and a cat who hates everyone,” she said.

“The cat won’t hate him,” Daniel replied with absolute confidence. “He’s a prince.”

This caused a ripple of laughter through the room, thin with nerves.

Harris smiled despite herself. “That’s very kind.”

Then she stood and moved a little away to speak with Clarke.

The words social services and emergency placement were murmured first. Then child services. Then temporary care. Then paperwork. Then somewhere safe for tonight. If no relatives could be identified and no legal guardians found, he’d have to be entered into the system. Immediate safeguarding. Potential foster placement. If no foster carer available by midnight, then emergency children’s accommodation. Longer term, perhaps the local orphanage until proper arrangements could be made.

The pub grew subdued around these words.

Regulus did not understand most of them.

But Daniel and Ben understood enough to know one dreadful thing: someone was taking their prince away.

Daniel’s face darkened at once. Ben actually stepped in front of Regulus’s chair like a tiny furious wall.

“You can’t,” Ben said.

Everyone looked at him.

Daniel planted the toy sword on the floor with a thunk. “He’s ours.”

Their mother put both hands over her mouth.

Officer Clarke, to his enormous credit, crouched so he was eye level with them too. “Hey. Easy. No one’s taking him somewhere far away.”

Ben looked unconvinced. “You said placement.”

“That just means somewhere safe to sleep.”

Daniel narrowed his eyes. “Where?”

“In the village, most likely,” Clarke said. “Nearby. He’ll still be close.”

The boys exchanged a glance.

“Still close?” Ben repeated.

“Yes.”

“We can visit?” Daniel asked.

Clarke nodded. “I don’t see why not, once things are sorted properly.”

That took some of the fight out of them, though not the protectiveness.

Ben turned to Regulus immediately. “We’ll still come.”

Daniel added, with deep solemnity, “We won’t just leave you.”

Regulus, who had only been half-following and had caught mainly the fact that something was changing again, looked up at them with sudden alarm.

“Where’m I going?”

Silence rippled.

Harris came back over at once and crouched again, gentler than before. “Just somewhere safe for tonight, darling.”

“I want here.”

“I know.”

“I want Jean.”

Jean had to turn away completely this time because that one went right through her.

Harris kept steady. “You can stay here a little longer while we wait, all right? Then we’ll take you somewhere warm with a bed.”

“A bed?”

“Yes.”

“With my dino?”

“Yes, with your dinosaur.”

He thought about that, eyes filling a little again.

“And my presents?”

“Yes.”

“And my knights?”

Daniel and Ben straightened instantly.

Harris smiled. “Your knights can visit. They’re staying in the village.”

That seemed to matter.

Regulus looked at Daniel.

Daniel nodded. “We’ll come.”

Ben nodded too. “Promise.”

Regulus pressed his mouth together, trying very hard to be brave now that bravery seemed required of him. He had already cried so much tonight. He did not want to do more in front of the police.

“All right,” he whispered.

The whole room felt the fragility of that assent.

So while the officers made the necessary calls and the machinery of child services began turning somewhere beyond the pub walls, the people around Regulus set about preserving the little kingdom they had made for him for as long as they could.

Jean poured him one more juice.

Maggie wrapped the cardigan someone had brought around his shoulders over the blanket because the night was getting colder.

Tom found a clean paper bag for the gifts.

Barry drew an absurd little shield on one side of it and wrote PRINCE REGULUS in large block letters because if the world insisted on becoming bureaucratic now, then by God the bag could still be enchanted.

Daniel and Ben resumed their posts.

And Regulus sat by the fire with his crown crooked and his dinosaur held tight, listening to adults decide the shape of the rest of his night, not understanding that he had just, in the eyes of the Muggle world, become an abandoned child.

It was even later by the time the next wave of adults arrived.

The pub door kept opening now, letting in little gusts of cold night and new people with serious faces and clipboards and folders and heavy coats. A woman from social services. Another from child welfare. A man carrying a case file wallet under one arm and wearing the sort of expression adults put on when they were trying very hard to be calm in the face of something upsetting. Then one more woman, younger than the others, with a knitted scarf and eyes that softened the instant she spotted Regulus by the fire.

Each new arrival seemed to go through the same sequence.

Professional concern.

A glimpse of the child himself—small, over-dressed, paper crown still askew, green stuffed dinosaur clutched to his chest, surrounded by makeshift birthday presents and self-appointed knights.

Then immediate heartbreak.

“Oh,” said the first social worker quietly, before she had fully crossed the threshold.

Jean, who by now had appointed herself unofficial guardian of the scene, met them halfway and filled them in with the clipped, furious efficiency of someone trying not to start swearing in front of children.

The officers spoke too. Harris from her notebook. Clarke from the calls made and records not found and names that led nowhere. Bits of the story kept surfacing in repeated phrases, each sounding worse every time it was said aloud.

Alone at night.

No address.

No legal names for parents.

No school.

No records.

Left behind at a party.

Unable to locate home.

Describes being regularly forgotten.

The social workers’ faces tightened more and more.

Meanwhile, Regulus watched all of it from his chair by the fire with the wary expression of a child who had had far too many adults suddenly take an interest in him in a single evening. Daniel and Ben stayed close, one perched on each side now, shoulders almost touching his, as if proximity itself could count as defense.

When the first woman from social services finally came over, she did what all the good ones had done: she crouched.

“Hello, Regulus,” she said gently. “My name’s Ms Carter.”

He looked at her from beneath his curls, one hand sunk into the plush side of the stegosaurus. “Hullo.”

“I hear you’ve had a very long night.”

He nodded.

“I’m here to help make sure you’re safe, all right?”

That word again. Safe.

It still sounded foreign.

“All right,” he said cautiously.

She smiled just enough. “Can I ask you some questions?”

Regulus glanced instantly at Jean.

Jean leaned in from nearby. “Just answer what you can, lovely.”

He nodded again.

So it started all over once more, only slower and gentler and somehow sadder now that the full weight of it had settled over the room.

“What’s your full name?”

“Regulus Arcturus Black.”

“How old are you?”

“Six. Today.”

“Happy birthday, sweetheart.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you know where you live?”

“No.”

“Can you tell me what your house looks like?”

“It’s big.”

“What colour is the front door?”

Regulus blinked. “I dunno.”

“Do you know the road name?”

“No.”

“Your parents’ names?”

“Mother and Father.”

Ms Carter paused, then tried from another angle.

“What do other adults call them?”

He frowned. “Mother and Father.”

“Do your parents ever use each other’s names?”

That stumped him entirely. He had no idea. Adults did so much talking when he wasn’t there properly, when he was near but not included.

“I don’t know.”

“All right. That’s okay.” She made a note. “Do you know your brother’s full name?”

That at least he could do. “Sirius Black.”

More notes.

“Have you ever been to school?”

“No.”

“Nursery?”

He blinked, confused.

“Classes with other children?”

“No.”

“Does anyone teach you at home?”

Regulus made a little uncertain face. “Not… properly.”

“Are you looked after by a nanny? A governess? A babysitter?”

He shook his head.

“Who takes care of you during the day?”

This one took longer.

Sometimes house-elves. Sometimes nobody. Sometimes a servant in passing. Sometimes Sirius, in the rough chaotic way Sirius did anything. Sometimes meals simply appeared and people assumed that counted as care.

Regulus tried to put some of that into words and failed.

“I just… am there.”

Several adults nearby had to look away.

Ms Carter stayed careful. “Are you often left alone?”

“Yes.”

“How often?”

He shrugged helplessly. “Lots.”

“Do you sleep alone?”

“Yes.”

“Do grown-ups check on you?”

“Sometimes.”

“When you get hurt or upset, who do you go to?”

That question hit him strangely. He stared at her as if she had asked what colour the moon smelled like.

“I don’t,” he said at last.

There was a silence.

Ben actually made an offended little noise on his behalf.

Daniel folded his arms tighter.

Ms Carter’s face changed, very slightly but unmistakably. “You don’t?”

Regulus shook his head.

“Is there anyone in your family you trust?”

That made him think much too hard for a six-year-old who ought not to have had to weigh adults like dangerous weather systems.

“Maybe Uncle Alphard,” he mumbled finally. “Sometimes.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“No.”

“Has anyone told you not to speak to strangers?”

“Yes.”

“And yet you came in here tonight.”

Regulus glanced around the pub, then at the fish tank, then back to her. “It was dark.”

The younger child worker in the knitted scarf pressed her lips together and looked abruptly like she might cry.

Ms Carter nodded. “Yes. It was.”

By now the not-found records had become a full problem rather than an oddity. Harris and Clarke had already checked the local systems twice. Nothing under Regulus Arcturus Black. Nothing under Sirius Black of the appropriate age. No birth registration. No school registration. No doctor’s record they could trace quickly. No address associated. No emergency contact that matched anything he had said. Even the grandparent names produced nothing useful in the Muggle records they could search.

Every absence deepened the picture.

To them, there were only two plausible explanations, and neither was good.

Either the child was identifying himself wrongly and came from some isolated, deeply hidden household.

Or he was exactly who he said he was and had somehow never existed, on paper, in the ordinary systems meant to protect him.

Neither possibility made returning him anywhere without proof remotely acceptable.

Near the bar, the social workers and officers gathered in a tight cluster, voices kept low but not low enough to keep the drift of it from the room.

“We need emergency placement tonight.”

“Absolutely.”

“If no parent or verified guardian presents by morning, then we’re into emergency safeguarding paperwork.”

“Given the statements about chronic neglect, being left alone, lack of schooling, and wandering unsupervised at night—”

“We’d need to open a case.”

“Child abandonment at minimum.”

“Neglect, likely emotional abuse.”

“Potential educational neglect too.”

“And no documentation.”

“That’s the nightmare piece.”

“If nobody comes, we start an investigation.”

“And if we still can’t establish lawful guardianship?”

“Then he enters temporary care pending review.”

“With no records, we may need to go through the court to regularise the placement.”

“Fast-track, emergency child protection basis.”

“And longer term—”

“If the family remain unidentified or fail to claim him appropriately, then yes, care system.”

The younger worker winced. “He’s six.”

The answer came back flat and grim. “I know.”

Regulus did not understand most of the words.

He caught tone before meaning, the way children always did.

He knew this was about him.

He knew none of these adults planned to put him back into the dark and send him walking.

He also knew, dimly, that they were talking as though no one was coming.

That part sat in his chest strangely.

He hadn’t really expected anyone to come. Not fully. Not after the ballroom. Not after the cake. Not after all the hours. But hearing adults say it—hearing it become official—felt like standing on a patch of ice and realising only then how cold it had been beneath him all along.

Daniel noticed the change in his face immediately.

He leaned close. “You all right, prince?”

Regulus nodded, because that was easier.

Ben was less fooled. “You’re sad.”

“I’m not.”

“You are a bit.”

Regulus pressed his mouth tight.

At that exact moment Daniel and Ben’s mother, who had been hovering nearby while pretending not to listen too hard, was drawn into the discussion by her sons tugging on both her sleeves at once.

“Mum.”

“Mum.”

“What?” she whispered, exasperated and already knowing she was doomed.

“Can he stay with us?”

Her eyes widened. “Boys—”

“Just tonight,” Daniel insisted. “He can have my bed.”

“No, mine,” Ben said immediately.

“You can’t both give him your bed.”

“He can sleep in the middle.”

“In the middle of what?”

“Our room.”

Their mother rubbed both temples. “Absolutely not in the middle.”

“Mum,” Daniel said, in the tone of one making a case before Parliament, “he’s little.”

“I can see that.”

“And he’s nice.”

“Yes.”

“And he hasn’t got anywhere.”

At this, Ben went for the killing blow. “And he’s a prince.”

Their mother closed her eyes for a second.

Around them, several adults looked suspiciously interested in how this argument would unfold.

“Mum,” Daniel repeated, softer now. “Please.”

Ben clasped both hands together under his chin. “Please let him stay.”

The social workers noticed the huddle and one of them—Mr Patel, the man with the case wallet—came over with a polite, tired expression.

“Everything all right here?”

Daniel turned on him with the solemn force of a child defending a sacred cause. “He can stay with us.”

Mr Patel blinked once. “That’s kind, but it’s not quite that simple.”

“Why not?”

“Because we have procedures.”

Ben scowled. “Procedures are stupid.”

A tiny sound escaped from Tom that was probably agreement disguised as a cough.

Mr Patel crouched. “Sometimes they are. But they’re there to make sure children are safe.”

“He would be safe with us,” Daniel said at once.

“He’d have my dinosaur lamp,” Ben added.

“He already has a dinosaur,” Mr Patel said gently.

Ben looked offended by this failure to grasp the larger point. “He can have two.”

That almost got a smile out of Mr Patel.

Their mother, now pink with mortification and tenderness both, said quietly, “I’m sorry. They’ve taken to him.”

“No need to apologise,” said Ms Carter, who had joined them. She looked at the boys with a sort of exhausted fondness. “It’s rather lovely, actually.”

Daniel took this as encouragement. “So he can?”

Ms Carter glanced at their mother. “In theory, a private emergency arrangement can happen. In practice, it depends. We’d need names, address, some very quick checks, officer approval, and the team would still need to be satisfied it’s appropriate.”

The boys stared.

Their mother stared too. “You’re serious?”

“Potentially, yes. It may still be more straightforward to use approved emergency accommodation tonight, depending on what’s available and how quickly we can process anything.” Ms Carter lowered her voice a little. “But if we can’t find a foster bed fast enough, we do have to consider all safe options.”

Daniel looked as though he had just been handed the keys to heaven.

Ben actually bounced.

“Mum!”

Their mother put a hand over her face. “Oh God.”

Jean, from nearby, said under her breath to Maggie, “He’d have a better night there than in some office cot, poor lamb.”

Maggie nodded fiercely.

Regulus, hearing only pieces—stay, us, tonight, safe—looked from face to face, confused and hopeful and frightened all at once.

“Am I going with them?” he asked.

That silenced everyone for a second.

Ms Carter turned back to him at once. “We’re trying to figure out the best place for tonight, sweetheart.”

Regulus looked at Daniel and Ben.

They both leaned toward him as if summoned by thought.

“You can,” Ben said instantly, as though this were the answer to what Regulus had meant.

“We’d guard you,” Daniel added.

Regulus’s fingers tightened around the stegosaurus.

He did not know what foster care was. Did not know orphanage. Did not know emergency safeguarding, temporary placement, or child protection investigation. The Muggle machinery forming around him was too large and too adult and too alien to make sense of.

But he did understand warm fire.

Cake.

Soft blanket.

Questions asked kindly.

A dinosaur in his arms.

Two boys who had decided he was theirs to protect.

That was enough to make his eyes go shiny again.

“You’d really come if I stayed in the village?” he asked them in a tiny voice.

“Yes,” Daniel said immediately.

“Every day if we can,” Ben said.

“Till they sort it,” Daniel swore.

“We promise.”

Regulus nodded once, trying to look very brave and very Black and not at all like he might cry again.

“All right,” he whispered.

So while officers and social workers started yet another round of calls—to emergency foster contacts, to child accommodation services, to duty teams, to supervisors who could authorise overnight decisions, and quietly, just in case, to see whether Daniel and Ben’s mother could even be considered as a temporary kinship-style emergency host despite there being no kin at all—Regulus stayed where he was by the fire.

The pub held around him like cupped hands.

The grown-ups spoke in low urgent voices.

The fish tank glowed.

His paper crown sat crooked over his brow.

And his knights remained beside him, grimly prepared to negotiate with the whole adult world if that was what it took to keep their prince close.

Daniel had, at some point during all the talking, simply decided that Regulus was too little to be expected to sit by himself through so much exhausting adult business.

So he picked him up.

No one stopped him.

Possibly because the sight of it was too disarming to interrupt.

Possibly because Regulus, after one startled squeak, had immediately clung on.

Now he was perched in Daniel’s arms like something tiny and precious that had been rescued from a storm. His little arms were looped around Daniel’s neck, his legs tucked around the older boy’s middle as best they could manage, the green stegosaurus squashed securely between their chests. The blanket had slipped half off and was now draped over both of them. Regulus’s paper crown was still crooked, his curls mussed from being carried, his face warm and drowsy and open in a way it had not been at the beginning of the night.

Daniel, who had apparently been born waiting for an opportunity to be this important, held him with immense seriousness.

“I’ve got him,” he informed everyone at least once every three minutes, just in case there was any confusion.

“Yes, darling, we can all see that,” his mother said.

Ben, beside them, looked deeply put out by the arrangement, though he kept close enough that his shoulder bumped Daniel’s hip every few steps.

“It’s my turn next,” he said for about the sixth time.

Daniel adjusted his grip on Regulus and frowned down at him. “You can’t carry him as long. He’s little.”

“I can too.”

“You get tired.”

“I don’t.”

“You do.”

Ben drew himself up. “I’m strong.”

Regulus, face tucked against Daniel’s shoulder, lifted his head just enough to peer at Ben over the dinosaur’s back. “You are a bit.”

This was clearly meant kindly.

Ben still looked wounded by the hedge of it.

“A bit?” he echoed.

Daniel, sensing advantage, said loftily, “I’m older, so I’m in charge.”

Ben made a noise of outrage that turned several adult heads.

“No you’re not!”

“Yes I am.”

“No you’re not!”

“Yes, because I’m the oldest knight.”

Ben folded his arms. “Well, I’m still the other knight.”

“That’s fine.”

“And I’m still marryin’ him.”

Daniel stopped walking.

Regulus blinked.

Several nearby adults went very still, already trying not to laugh.

“You can’t marry him,” Daniel said, scandalised. “I’m marrying him.”

Ben’s mouth dropped open. “No, I am!”

“You can’t. I picked him up first.”

“That doesn’t count!”

“It does.”

“It doesn’t!”

Daniel tightened his hold on Regulus protectively and turned to his mother with the grave certainty of someone announcing a legal fact. “Since he’s a prince and I’m the knight protecting him, we’re together.”

His mother put a hand over her face instantly.

“Oh, good Lord.”

Ben was outraged beyond all bearing. “No! I wanted to marry him!”

Regulus, whose entire experience of affection from peers had not previously included being argued over like a coveted jewel, went pink from forehead to collar.

Daniel hugged him a tiny bit closer and informed his brother, “You can’t because I’m older.”

“That’s stupid.”

“It’s not. Older means I’m in charge.”

“Of what?”

“Everything.”

“That’s not true!”

“It is when there’s princes.”

Regulus made a small noise into Daniel’s shoulder that might have been embarrassment and might have been a laugh. It was difficult to tell because his face was half-hidden in velvet and dinosaur plush.

Ben leaned closer, glaring up at Daniel. “Well I still love him too.”

The pub, already hanging on by a thread emotionally, very nearly did not survive that.

“Oh, my heart,” Maggie whispered from behind the bar.

Jean had to physically turn away and pretend to tidy the cake plates again.

Daniel looked at Ben with the exasperation of a boy burdened by younger siblings and destiny alike. “You can be his other knight.”

“I don’t want to be just the other knight.”

“You can be the knight what guards the castle.”

“There isn’t a castle.”

Ben looked at Regulus accusingly, as if this lack were somehow his fault.

Regulus, still pink and shy and held very snugly in Daniel’s arms, whispered, “Maybe there could be one.”

Ben lit up instantly. “See?”

Daniel considered this. “All right. But I’m still marrying him.”

“You can share,” their mother muttered weakly, apparently too tired to stop them and too charmed to truly want to.

“I’m not sharing my husband,” Daniel said with immediate horror.

The pub finally cracked. Laughter spilled out from several corners at once, warm and helpless and affectionate.

Regulus made the softest little giggle against Daniel’s shoulder, and that only made everything worse.

“There he goes.”

“He likes them.”

“Of course he does.”

“Look at him, he’s being carried like royalty.”

To be fair, he was.

Daniel had fully committed now. He paced slowly around the edges of the pub when Regulus got fidgety, bouncing him just a little without meaning to, muttering updates to him about the state of affairs.

“It’s all right,” he said in a low important voice. “I’ve got you.”

Regulus nodded against his collar.

“We’re sorting your kingdom.”

“All right.”

“Mum’s talking to the grown-ups.”

“All right.”

“And Ben’s being annoying.”

“Am not,” Ben said from immediately beside them.

Regulus hid another laugh in the dinosaur.

Meanwhile, at the table by the bar, the actual grown-ups were finally getting somewhere.

The calls had multiplied. Social services had reached the duty placement team. Someone at emergency fostering had finally rung back. Another officer had gone to do the quickest possible checks on the address Daniel and Ben’s mother had provided. There were forms now. Temporary safeguarding forms. Consent forms that were impossible to complete properly because there was no legal guardian to sign anything and no documentation establishing Regulus in any system at all. Emergency holding paperwork. Notes for immediate review in the morning if no verified adult came forward overnight.

The options, at last, had narrowed into something workable.

One: an emergency foster family on the other side of the district could take him for the night, but they were some distance away and had not yet met him.

Two: a temporary children’s accommodation placement—bleak, functional, safe, but hardly comforting for a six-year-old who had already been frightened half to death tonight.

Three: if she was willing, and if the rapid checks came back clean enough, Daniel and Ben’s mother could take him just for tonight under an emergency informal safeguarding arrangement supervised by the team, with the understanding that he might need to move to a more formal placement tomorrow if no one came for him and no fast-track approval could be extended.

That last option had started as something slightly absurd.

Then people kept looking across the room at Regulus asleep-not-asleep against Daniel’s shoulder, still clutching the dinosaur, still waking every few minutes just to make sure the boys were there.

And it stopped feeling absurd at all.

Ms Carter sat with Daniel and Ben’s mother at a small side table, paperwork spread between them.

“It would only be for tonight unless extended tomorrow,” she said carefully. “You understand that.”

The woman nodded slowly, still looking a bit dazed that this was even being discussed. “Yes.”

“We’d need the basics from you now. Name, address, household members, any adults in the home.”

“Yes.”

“A home check has been requested.”

“Yes.”

“And if he comes with you, it’s on the understanding that this is a temporary emergency arrangement while we continue attempts to identify family, establish legal status, and secure a formal placement if required.”

She looked over at Regulus.

At Daniel carrying him with solemn knightly purpose.

At Ben hovering like a devoted squire.

At the tiny paper crown still perched in Regulus’s hair.

Her whole face softened.

“Yes,” she said again, but this time with much more certainty. “I understand.”

Ms Carter studied her for a moment. “You don’t have to do this.”

The woman let out a soft breath. “I know.”

“Children in situations like this can be frightened. They may wake in the night. They may become distressed. He’s had a lot happen.”

“I know.”

“He may not stay with you past tomorrow.”

At that, the woman’s eyes flicked instinctively to her sons, who were clearly already behaving as though Regulus had been promised to them by prophecy.

“I know,” she said one more time, gentler now. “But I’d rather he had a proper bed with people around him than be taken somewhere cold and strange if that can be helped.”

That answer travelled quickly through the room in the quiet way important things did.

Jean heard it first and pressed a hand to her chest.

Tom just muttered, “Good woman.”

Maggie outright sniffed.

The officer sent to the house rang back. Small home. Clean enough. Nothing alarming. Two boys. Widowed? No, separated. Mother capable and cooperative. No immediate concerns for an overnight arrangement under supervision if the duty manager approved.

That approval was the next hurdle.

Another call.

Another wait.

More papers.

Mr Patel spoke quietly into the phone, laying it out piece by piece: six-year-old male child, unidentified in mainstream records, no guardian located, no safe return possible tonight, emergency foster option distant, child settled with local family, two known children already bonded, mother willing, police content pending temporary authorisation.

He listened.

Nodded.

Asked one follow-up.

Listened again.

Then finally said, “Understood.”

When he hung up, half the room held its breath.

He looked to Ms Carter first.

Then to the boys’ mother.

Then to Regulus.

“We can authorise it for tonight,” he said.

The whole pub exhaled.

Ben actually shouted, “Yes!”

Daniel nearly dropped dead with triumph, then immediately remembered he was holding a prince and stiffened protectively instead.

Regulus blinked, startled by the noise.

“What happened?”

Daniel looked down at him with shining eyes. “You’re coming with us.”

Regulus stared.

“With you?”

Ben nodded furiously. “To our house.”

“For tonight,” their mother said quickly, coming over at once and kneeling beside them. Her voice was soft and steady. “Just for tonight, sweetheart, if that’s all right with you. You can sleep at ours. You don’t have to go somewhere scary.”

Regulus looked between her face and the boys’ faces and then over to Jean, who smiled at him with tears suspiciously close again.

“It’s a good thing, lovely,” Jean said.

Regulus swallowed.

“With them?”

“Yes,” said Daniel.

“I’ll still be there,” said Ben.

“You can have my dinosaur lamp,” Ben added, because he was apparently still bargaining with the gods.

“And I’ll carry you up the stairs if you want,” Daniel promised.

Regulus looked down at the stegosaurus pressed between them, then back up again.

He was tired now. Bone-tired. A six-year-old’s exhausted bewilderment had settled over him like mist. But underneath that tiredness was something warm and trembly and new.

Being wanted.

Not tolerated. Not remembered as an afterthought. Wanted.

He nodded once, small and solemn.

“All right.”

That did it.

Ben flung both arms up in victory.

Daniel beamed like the sun.

Their mother laughed helplessly and touched Regulus’s hair back from his forehead. “All right, then.”

From there everything became movement again.

More signatures. Temporary forms. A written summary for the night. Instructions on what to do if he became distressed, if anyone appeared claiming to be family, if the police called, if Regulus woke panicked, if there were developments by morning. A social worker would follow up early. They would continue trying to verify family and identity overnight and at first light. If by tomorrow no one came and no lawful guardian could be established, the emergency case would deepen into a full child protection process.

But all of that was tomorrow.

Tonight, Regulus would not go to an institution.

Tonight, he would go home with knights.

Daniel still refused to put him down unless absolutely necessary. When they finally started gathering Regulus’s things—the dinosaur, the crayons, the books, the jumper, the puzzle, the scarf, the little paper bag of scavenged birthday treasure—Daniel shifted him on one hip with great care and informed his mother, “I’ll carry him to the car too.”

“You do realise he has legs,” she said.

“He’s little.”

Regulus, who was quite enjoying being carried, said nothing at all.

Ben gathered the presents with both arms and announced, “I’m carrying the prince’s treasure.”

“Of course you are,” Tom said.

Jean came over last, smoothing the blanket around Regulus’s shoulders one more time before letting it stay draped over him.

“Well,” she said softly. “There’s my birthday boy.”

Regulus looked at her, suddenly shy again.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

Jean kissed the top of his head before she could think better of it.

“No, lovely. Thank you.”

He did not really know what that meant.

But he leaned into it anyway.

And when Daniel, still holding him close with the stuffed dinosaur squashed between them, carried him toward the door and the cold night beyond, Regulus did not look frightened this time.

He looked tired. Crown askew. Curls messy. Little arms looped around his knight’s neck.

But not frightened.

Because Ben was beside them with the treasure.

Because Daniel was carrying him like he was precious.

Because their mother was opening the door and smiling back at him like there was already a place for him in the car.

And because, at least for tonight, when the world had split open and left him wandering in the dark, someone had chosen to keep him.