Archive of Our Own

By the time the sirens started, the whole of the pub already smelled like wet wool, chips, spilled vinegar, damp stone, and the kind of sweet cheap smoke that clung to old beams no matter how many windows were cracked open.

Outside, Hogsmeade was grey and restless.

Not just rainy. Not just windy. Restless.

The clouds had been wrong all morning—too low, too green at the edges, dragging their bruised bellies over the rooftops, making the daylight look sickly and thin. Even the weekend crowd had felt it. Students had come down from Hogwarts wrapped in scarves and coats and bravado, trying to laugh over it, trying to pretend it was only dramatic weather and not the sort of sky that made every grown adult in the village keep glancing out the windows with their mouths drawn tight.

Inside the pub, the Gryffindors had claimed two booths and half a table they absolutely had not paid enough for.

James Potter was leaning halfway over the bar with the kind of grin that had probably charmed his way out of detentions, arguments, and broken noses since birth.

“Come on,” he said to the woman polishing glasses behind the bar. “You’re telling me you can’t make an exception? Not even one tiny one. A legal one in spirit, if not in—”

“In any sense of the word?” she said flatly.

“Yes, exactly.”

“No.”

James put a hand to his chest like she’d mortally wounded him. “That is brutal.”

“It’s policy.”

“It’s oppression.”

“It’s cider,” she said. “And you’re not getting it.”

Sirius Black, sprawled in the booth like the place belonged to him, barked out a laugh. “You’re losing your touch, Potter.”

“My touch is immaculate,” James said, still affronted. “She’s simply a tyrant.”

“I heard that,” the woman said.

“Then you also heard that I respect you deeply.”

Remus Lupin, sitting beside Sirius with his elbows on the table and a mug of something safely non-alcoholic between his hands, shook his head. “You’re not as persuasive as you think you are.”

Peter Pettigrew snorted into his chips. “You really thought calling her a tyrant would do it?”

“It could have,” James said.

“It absolutely could not have,” Lily Evans said.

She was tucked into the corner of the opposite booth with Mary Macdonald and Marlene McKinnon, coat still on, hair a little frizzed from the damp. She hadn’t looked up from where she was picking salt off a chip since James started trying to talk the staff into a crime.

Alice Fortescue laughed into her drink. “I think the problem is you’re trying to commit the crime while announcing it.”

Frank Longbottom, shoulder to shoulder with Alice, nodded gravely. “Rookie mistake.”

Fabian Prewett had one arm slung over the back of the booth and was grinning with the lazy delight of someone watching a very predictable disaster unfold. “No, no, let him keep going. I reckon if he starts listing character references they’ll cave.”

Gideon Prewett, sat beside him and looking far too entertained, lifted a chip and pointed it at James. “Tell her McGonagall thinks you’re trustworthy.”

Mary choked on a laugh. Lily covered her face with one hand.

“That’s slander,” James said. “Professor McGonagall thinks I’m very—”

“Annoying,” said Sirius.

“Exhausting,” said Remus.

“Loud,” said Peter.

“Suspicious,” said Lily.

James looked wounded. “You lot are awful. I need better friends.”

“You couldn’t get them,” Marlene said.

James turned back to the barmaid with a dazzling smile. “You see what I suffer? Surely that earns me a drink.”

“What it earns you,” she said, taking his empty glass and moving it out of reach, “is a pumpkin juice refill.”

The entire booth erupted.

Sirius folded in half laughing. Fabian smacked the table with both hands. Gideon made a noise like he was dying. Even Remus gave up and grinned into his sleeve while James stared at the refill being set in front of him like it had personally insulted his entire bloodline.

“This is humiliation,” James said.

“This is justice,” Lily said.

Then the first siren went off.

It was loud enough to cut the room in half.

Everything stopped.

Not gradually. Not in the stuttering, disbelieving way things did when someone shouted or dropped a glass. It stopped all at once, as if the whole pub had been seized by the back of the neck.

The sound was ugly. Mechanical. Long and rising, then dropping, then rising again. An alarm that didn’t ask for attention so much as yank it out of everyone by force.

James straightened.

Remus turned towards the windows.

The barmaid froze with a glass in her hand.

Then another alarm joined the first. Then another, somewhere farther away through the village, the sound echoing between stone buildings, strange and wrong in a place like Hogsmeade.

“What the hell is that?” Peter said.

Nobody answered him right away.

Across the pub, chairs scraped back. People were already getting to their feet, staring towards the front windows. Someone near the door swore.

Sirius stood. “Move.”

The whole Gryffindor table lurched up at once and crowded towards the glass with half the room.

Outside, Hogsmeade had become chaos.

Adults were in the street shouting and waving people off the roads. Shop doors were being thrown open and students were being ushered inside by handfuls. Two men were dragging a sandwich board indoors. A woman across the lane was trying to force a panicking owl into a crate. Cloaks snapped like flags in the wind. The clouds overhead had deepened into a monstrous green-black churn, low enough to make the chimneys seem swallowed by them.

And somewhere over it all, louder now, came the alarms.

Mary’s voice went thin. “What is that?”

One of the older men near the bar answered without looking away from the window. “Tornado warning.”

Nobody spoke.

It took a beat for the words to land.

Then James said, “A what?”

The man tore his gaze away from the glass and looked at them, face hard. “Tornado warning. Away from the windows, all of you. Now.”

Lily blinked. “In Scotland?”

“As if I scheduled it, miss,” he snapped, already moving.

The pub exploded into motion.

“Right, everyone off the floor!” shouted the barmaid from behind the counter. “Windows shut, shutters down! You lot—” she pointed at a pair of villagers, “—help me with those tables. Bert, lock that side door. Move!”

The adults obeyed with frightening speed, fast and practiced not because they’d done this before, maybe, but because real danger had entered the room and every useless second suddenly mattered.

Outside, more people were being pushed indoors. Through the warped front glass, James saw a cluster of students sprinting up the street under the shoving guidance of two grown witches in aprons. Cloaks whipped around their legs. One of them nearly slipped.

Then James recognized the pale head at the center of the group.

Regulus Black.

He was half a step ahead of the others without seeming to mean to be, hair snatched by the wind, coat flaring behind him. Barty Crouch Jr. was at his shoulder, saying something sharp and rapid that vanished behind the scream of the sirens. Evan Rosier had one hand on Pandora Rosier’s arm, dragging her around a puddle and a toppled sign. Dorcas Meadowes was looking over her shoulder at the sky like she wanted to swear at it personally.

The pub door banged open hard enough to shake the frame.

Wind punched into the room. Rain came with it in cold diagonal sprays.

“Inside!” bellowed a villager, hauling the door wider. “Inside, come on!”

Regulus and his friends stumbled through in a rush of noise and rain and sharp breathing, followed by a few other students from farther up the street. Someone slammed the door behind them. Someone else threw the bolts.

For a second the whole pub was only the sound of breathing, sirens, and the frantic clatter of people moving furniture.

Pandora shoved wet hair out of her face. “What the fuck is happening?”

“Tornado warning,” Marlene called from near the booth, voice much too high.

Barty stared. “A tornado?”

Evan looked at the windows, then at the ceiling, then at the door like he was mentally calculating whether leaving and taking his chances in the open would somehow be less ridiculous. “That’s not a real thing here.”

“Apparently it is now,” Dorcas said.

Sirius looked at Regulus automatically.

Regulus was soaked through at the shoulders, rainwater caught silver in his lashes, expression blank with shock in that strange, still way he had when he didn’t want anyone to know what he was thinking. He met Sirius’s eyes for a fraction of a second, then looked away first.

“Don’t just stand there,” barked the barmaid. “Everyone to the back corner, under the booths and tables, away from the windows. Now.”

“What?” James said.

“Move!”

That did it.

The students were herded bodily across the pub in a crush of limbs and wet coats and muttered swearing. Adults were shoving benches, dragging stools, throwing extra blankets and cushions toward the far end of the room. The shutters came down over the windows with heavy wooden thuds, blotting out the last of the daylight until only lamps and wandlight lit the place in nervous gold.

The safest point, apparently, was the back corner where the thick interior wall met the stone base of the chimney breast. Booths were being pushed together into a kind of barricaded hollow. Tables were upended and then righted low, making a crowded sheltering pocket. It looked absurd. It looked makeshift. It looked terrifyingly final.

“Under, under, all of you,” one of the villagers urged. “Sit low. Heads down if it gets bad.”

“How bad is bad?” Peter blurted.

No one answered him.

They ended up packed together in one shuddering knot of students and soaked coats and bony knees.

The Gryffindors took up most of the left side—James shoved himself in first and nearly cracked his head on the underside of the table, Sirius swore at him to watch it, Peter squeezed in after Remus, Lily and Mary ducked low with Marlene and Alice, Frank beside them, Fabian and Gideon taking the outer edge like they could bodily hold the furniture together if they had to.

Regulus and his friends were pushed in from the other side, close enough that knees and shoulders knocked immediately.

“Brilliant,” said Barty, voice brittle. “Absolutely brilliant. This is how I die. Under a pub table, smelling chips.”

Pandora shoved him. “Shut up.”

“I’m serious.”

“That’s not helping.”

Dorcas twisted around to look at the shuttered windows. “Can they not just magic it away?”

“Probably because weather this big doesn’t care,” Remus said quietly.

James looked over at him. “You know about tornadoes?”

“Only because I read things,” Remus said.

Fabian gave him a look. “Very useful. Any inspiring details?”

Remus held his gaze for a moment. “Not any you’d like.”

That silenced everybody fast.

One of the adults crouched by the edge of their little shelter, breathless and trying for calm. “Listen to me. Stay where you are. Stay away from the windows and doors. Professors have sent Patronus messages all over the village—students are to remain inside wherever they are until a professor comes to collect them after the storm’s passed. Do not go outside for any reason. Do you understand?”

There was a scattered murmur of yes.

The man nodded once and moved away to help secure something else.

For a while after that, nothing happened.

Or at least, nothing happened that justified the noise in the sky.

The alarms still wailed outside, distant through stone and shutters. Rain battered the roof in hard spells. The lamps shook now and then in their brackets. Every so often the pub groaned around them, old wood settling under wind, and somebody would tense and then force themselves to relax again when the walls stayed standing.

Conversation came back in fits and starts, hushed and weird.

James picked at a splintering edge of the table leg and said, too brightly, “Well. This is memorable.”

“No one likes you when you do that,” Lily said.

“What?”

“The cheerful thing.”

“I’m not being cheerful.”

“You are, and it’s upsetting.”

James exhaled through his nose. “Right. Sorry.”

Mary wrapped her arms around herself, trying to wring water from the end of her sleeve. “I still don’t understand how there can be a tornado in Hogsmeade. That feels rude.”

“Tell it that,” said Gideon.

“I will.”

Fabian nudged him. “If we survive, you can write a stern letter to the weather.”

Peter tried to laugh and failed. It came out too small.

Sirius, hunched low because he was too tall for the space, glanced across the cramped shelter towards Regulus again. “You all right?”

Regulus looked back at him, expression unreadable, then shrugged one shoulder.

Evan answered instead, dry as dust. “He’s fine.”

“I wasn’t asking you,” Sirius snapped.

“I know. I’m answering anyway.”

“Charming.”

“Always.”

Pandora dropped her head back against the booth seat above them and said to nobody in particular, “I hate all of this. This is stupid Muggle weather. Magic weather knows how to be theatrical properly. This is just… ugly.”

Barty rubbed at his wet fringe and laughed once without humor. “No, it’s theatrical. I’d say this qualifies.”

Dorcas leaned forward, elbows on knees. “Maybe it’ll pass around the town.”

Remus didn’t say anything.

James noticed and wished he had.

Lily noticed too. “Remus.”

Remus kept his eyes on the floor. “Sometimes they don’t.”

That shut down the last of the weak attempts at banter.

The waiting turned heavier.

The air in the little shelter became warm with breath and wool and wet clothing, but every time the wind rose the floor seemed to breathe cold up through the boards. Outside, something metallic went clanging down the street, then clanging again farther away, carried or rolled by the gale. Someone in the pub proper whispered a prayer.

The minutes stretched.

Frank shifted closer to Alice until their shoulders pressed tight. “You okay?”

She nodded too fast. “Yeah.”

He looked at her. “Alice.”

“No,” she said, a little laugh in the word. “No, actually.”

He took her hand.

Mary was chewing the inside of her cheek raw. Lily kept smoothing her own palms over her knees, over and over, like she could iron the fear out of them. Peter had gone pale. James looked like he wanted very badly to get up and do something useful and was trapped by the fact that there was absolutely nothing to do.

Even Sirius had gone quieter than usual. That, more than anything, made the whole thing feel real.

Then, without warning, every lamp in the pub flickered at once.

The room gasped.

A second later the wind hit the building so hard it sounded like a train had slammed into the side of it.

Everyone screamed.

The entire shelter jolted. Wood groaned. Glass rattled violently somewhere under the shutters. Something heavy fell over in the main room with a crack and a shower of breaking ceramic.

“Oh my God—”

“Fuck—”

“What was that?”

“Stay down!” shouted one of the adults.

The next gust came harder.

Not wind anymore. Impact. A huge, roaring, continuous violence that wrapped around the building from all sides. The pub shook under it. Not metaphorically. Truly shook. The floor vibrated under their knees. Dust sifted from somewhere above. A girl from another table started crying openly.

“That’s not normal,” Peter said, voice breaking. “That’s not normal, that’s not normal—”

“Peter,” Remus said sharply, but Peter was already spiralling.

James grabbed the back of Peter’s neck and hauled him bodily closer. “Oi. Look at me. Look at me. Breathe.”

“I am breathing—”

“No, you’re not. Do it properly.”

Another impact hammered the wall.

Now people were shouting in earnest in the pub proper. Somebody screamed for their mother. One of the villagers yelled at everyone to keep their heads down. The shutters rattled so violently they sounded like they might tear straight off.

The roar outside deepened.

It was impossible to tell what part of it was wind and what part was everything else—the rain, the alarms, objects being lifted and smashed, the building itself straining around them.

Then came a sound none of them had ever heard before and would never forget afterward.

A low, monstrous, grinding howl that rose and swelled and filled every gap in the world.

It didn’t sound like weather.

It sounded alive.

Marlene made a sharp, horrified noise. “What the fuck is that?”

Remus went white. “That’s it.”

“What?”

“That’s it.”

James stared at him. “Remus.”

Remus swallowed. “That’s the tornado.”

And suddenly the waiting was over and terror arrived whole.

It moved through the shelter like fire catching.

Alice slapped both hands over her mouth and started crying. Frank wrapped both arms around her instantly, pulling her down against his chest even while his own face drained of color. Mary grabbed Lily’s wrist so hard Lily winced and didn’t say a word about it. Peter curled in on himself with a small, panicked sound. Fabian’s joking expression vanished completely. Gideon’s eyes were wide and fixed and unbelieving.

Pandora whispered, “No. No, no, no.”

Dorcas actually laughed once in shock. “You’re kidding.”

Barty’s voice went thin. “That isn’t funny.”

“It isn’t a joke, you idiot,” Evan snapped, and even his voice shook.

The next second the whole pub shuddered with such force that everyone was thrown sideways into each other.

James hit Sirius’s shoulder. Sirius’s elbow drove into Remus. Lily and Mary slammed together. Barty grabbed the table leg above them with both hands. Pandora yelped. Somewhere nearby glass exploded.

People were sobbing now.

Not just one or two. The whole room had cracked open into panic.

“Oh God—”

“Jesus Christ—”

“Merlin, please—”

“Is it on top of us?”

“I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die—”

“Shut up!”

“Don’t tell me to shut up!”

“Everyone get lower!” an adult roared.

There was no lower to go. They were already crushed together on the floorboards, under tables and benches and half their own fear.

Marlene, white-faced and wild-eyed, clasped her hands together under her chin and started praying at machine-gun speed.

“Right. Okay. Right. God, any god, whichever one is working, hello, please don’t let us die in a pub, that’s embarrassing. Jesus, maybe. Or Mary. Saint somebody. Athena if she’s real. Thor, maybe you’d respect weather. Fuck it, all of you, whoever’s strongest, sort it out—”

“Marlene,” Lily said, half-hysterical.

“I’m covering all options!”

Fabian let out one strangled laugh that turned immediately into a flinch when the walls shook again.

Mary had started crying silently. Tears were running down her face and she didn’t seem to notice them. Alice was openly sobbing into Frank’s shoulder. Peter’s breathing was loud and ragged. James still had one hand on him, the other braced hard against the floor, jaw locked so tight a muscle jumped in his cheek.

Sirius looked across the crush of bodies for Regulus again and saw him exactly where he’d been before.

Still.

Too still.

At first it looked like calm.

It was almost eerie, compared with the rest of them.

While everybody else lurched and grabbed and swore and cried, Regulus sat ramrod straight under the booth edge with his back pressed to the wood, hands flat on his thighs, shoulders rigid. His face had gone utterly bloodless. His eyes were fixed somewhere past the floorboards and the bodies and the dark, seeing nothing.

“Reg?” Pandora said, grabbing at his sleeve when another crash shook the building. “Reg.”

No answer.

Barty looked over. “He’s fine.”

But his voice had lost confidence halfway through.

Evan frowned. “Black?”

Nothing.

Dorcas leaned closer. “Regulus.”

He didn’t blink.

Outside, the howl swelled until it felt like it had wrapped around the whole building, a huge spinning throat swallowing the village. Something enormous hit the roof. Everyone screamed again.

Regulus did not move.

Sirius stared at him.

Not calm.

Not calm at all.

Frozen.

He knew that look. Knew it from a hundred different childhood moments he tried not to remember too often—summer storms behind blackout curtains, shouting downstairs, Walburga’s voice turning sharp enough to peel skin, Orion’s hand slamming a glass onto a table, and Regulus on the settee or in a doorway or on the edge of Sirius’s bed with his face gone blank as candlewax and his body locked so rigid he looked carved instead of born.

Sirius’s stomach dropped.

“Regulus,” he said, sharper.

Nothing.

The roaring outside blurred with the roaring suddenly in Sirius’s ears. He shoved at James to get past him.

“Move.”

James twisted to look at him. “Sirius—”

“Move!”

James did.

Sirius crawled over Peter’s legs, over the hem of Lily’s coat, half under the table beam, and caught Regulus by the shoulders.

Regulus didn’t react.

Up close it was worse.

His breathing was wrong—tiny, shallow, catching things that barely lifted his chest at all. His eyes were glassy. There was tears gathered in them but not falling, just making everything shine. He looked like a person whose soul had stepped six feet to the left and forgotten to come back.

“Reg.” Sirius shook him once, not hard. “Regulus.”

Pandora’s face changed as she saw it properly. “Oh my God.”

Barty swore under his breath. Dorcas went visibly pale. Evan, for once, lost every trace of his usual sneer.

James looked from Sirius to Regulus and then went white too. “He’s panicking?”

“He’s frozen,” Sirius snapped.

Another violent impact shook the pub so hard the table above them jumped. Dust rained down in a choking veil. Somebody on the far side of the room shrieked.

The shift in mood was instant and catastrophic.

Because if Regulus Black was scared—Regulus who rolled his eyes at consequences, at authority, at pain, at common sense, at nearly everything—then whatever was outside had just become ten times more real to everybody else.

Lily saw it happen on the faces around her.

Mary’s terror sharpened into something worse.

Peter made a high, awful noise and clapped both hands over his mouth.

Pandora whispered, “No, no, no, no.”

Even Fabian looked stricken. “Is he—”

“He’s here,” Remus said quickly, though he sounded shaken himself. “He’s here, he’s just—”

“Not with us,” Dorcas said, and that was somehow worse.

Marlene, still half in prayer mode, stared at Regulus with absolute horror. “Oh, brilliant. Great. Wonderful. If he’s scared we’re fucked.”

“Marlene,” Lily snapped.

“What? We are!”

Sirius ignored all of them.

He shoved himself closer until he could get both arms around Regulus and drag him bodily over the few inches of floor between them. Regulus came without resistance, limp in all the wrong places and stiff in all the others, knees knocking clumsily into Sirius’s legs.

“Come here,” Sirius said, voice rough. “Come here, you stubborn little—”

He hauled Regulus tight against his chest.

For one terrible second, Regulus stayed exactly as he was—rigid, unresponsive, eyes fixed over Sirius’s shoulder at nothing.

Sirius held him harder.

Regulus was his little brother.

That thought arrived stupidly, wildly, as if it was fresh information.

Not the vicious little Black heir everyone at school thought they knew. Not the cutting, composed, impossible Slytherin who smirked through every insult and every threat and every stupid reckless thing he did.

Just his little brother.

So Sirius tucked Regulus’s head under his chin and pressed one hand flat to the back of his neck and held on like he could physically anchor him to the world.

“Regulus,” he said into his wet hair. “Breathe.”

No response.

“Reg, breathe.”

James leaned in, face tight with worry. “Can he hear you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Regulus?” Lily said, voice shaking. “Can you hear us?”

Nothing.

Pandora had tears in her eyes now, one hand clamped over her mouth. Barty looked furious in the helpless way people did when fury was the only shape fear could take. Dorcas was staring at Regulus like she wanted to force him back into himself by sheer will. Evan looked sick.

The tornado roared on top of them.

A new crash exploded somewhere close—wood splitting, maybe from a neighbouring building, maybe from the pub itself. The villagers shouted. A baby somewhere in the main room was screaming so hard it sounded painful. The shutters banged and groaned.

Everyone was talking too loudly, too fast.

“What do we do?”

“Do something!”

“We are doing something!”

“He’s not breathing right!”

“None of us are breathing right!”

“Shut up!”

“I hate this, I hate this, I hate this—”

Sirius tightened his hold on Regulus and forced his own voice low, though it shook. “Reg. Listen to me. It’s Sirius.”

James heard the crack in that and looked away abruptly, jaw working.

“It’s me,” Sirius said again. “You’re in the pub. You’re with me. You’re with all of us. You’re not on your own, all right? You need to breathe.”

Regulus’s lashes fluttered once.

Only once. Barely anything.

But Sirius saw it.

“So you can hear me,” he said, fierce with relief. “Good. Fine. Great. Then listen. Breathe with me.”

Outside, the sky sounded like it was being torn open.

Inside, under the tables, shoulder to shoulder and packed so close none of them could tell where their bodies stopped and fear began, they all listened without meaning to.

Sirius drew in one long breath. Exaggerated it. “In.”

Regulus did not follow.

“Again,” Sirius said.

He breathed in.

This time James did it too.

Then Lily.

Then Remus.

Then, because panic is contagious but so is rhythm, Mary tried. Frank did. Alice clung to him and copied. Fabian and Gideon exchanged one terrified glance and joined in. Marlene sucked in an uneven breath in the middle of muttering to every deity she could think of. Peter tried and nearly choked but kept going. Pandora, crying now, mirrored Sirius exactly. Dorcas did it out of stubbornness. Barty did it because not doing anything was impossible. Even Evan, pale and grim, started counting under his breath.

The whole shaking shelter breathed together.

“In,” Sirius said. “Hold.”

The pub groaned.

“Out.”

Somebody sobbed through it.

“In.”

The tornado howled.

“Hold.”

The lamps flickered.

“Out.”

Regulus shuddered suddenly against Sirius’s chest.

Not much. Barely anything. But it was movement. It was a crack in the freeze.

Pandora made a broken noise. “Reg?”

His fingers twitched once against his own thigh.

“There you are,” Sirius said immediately, voice dropping softer without losing urgency. “There you are. Come on.”

Regulus’s next breath came in wrong—too sharp, too fast, catching halfway down.

“That’s it,” Remus said quietly from nearby. “Again.”

Another impact hit the building with such force that everyone ducked and screamed. The table above them lurched. James threw an arm over Peter and Mary on reflex. Frank bent over Alice. Fabian grabbed Gideon’s shoulder hard enough to hurt. Dorcas swore viciously. Barty shut his eyes. Pandora buried her face in her sleeve and sobbed once.

Sirius didn’t let go.

Regulus was trembling now.

Not dramatically. Not with sobs or shaking limbs. Just a fine, awful tremor all through him, like something deep in his bones had started rattling loose.

His hands had gone icy.

“Reg.” Sirius pressed his forehead to Regulus’s temple for half a second. “Stay with me.”

A whisper caught somewhere in Regulus’s throat.

Sirius pulled back just enough to look at him. “What?”

Regulus’s lips moved.

No sound.

Then finally, on a raw, broken breath: “Sirius.”

It gutted the room.

Pandora started crying harder. James closed his eyes briefly like he’d been punched. Lily’s face crumpled and then steadied by force. Even Evan looked away.

Sirius swallowed hard. “Yeah. I’m here.”

Regulus blinked like he was resurfacing through dark water. His eyes were wet and huge and unfocused, pupils blown wide. He looked around once—at the crushed shelter, at everyone pressed together, at the shaking walls—and all at once understanding came back into his face.

With understanding came terror.

His breath hitched again, far too fast.

“No, no, no,” he said, barely getting the words out. “No—”

“I know,” Sirius said quickly. “I know.”

The roar outside intensified so suddenly the whole room screamed again.

This time it felt as if the tornado was not near them but on them—over them, around them, chewing at the village. The pub walls moaned. The shutters slammed in their braces. Something huge flew into one side of the building with a deafening crack that made the adults shout and the students lose whatever scraps of composure they had left.

Alice was fully sobbing now. Mary too. Peter had started crying without seeming aware of it. Marlene was praying and swearing in alternating bursts. James was white-knuckled and breathing like each inhale hurt. Lily’s eyes were bright with tears she refused to let fall. Frank clung to Alice and looked scared enough for both of them. Fabian and Gideon had gone from joking to grim silence, both braced against the floor like their bodies could somehow help. Barty looked on the edge of fury and panic both. Pandora was clutching Dorcas’s hand so tightly both their knuckles had blanched. Evan kept scanning the walls, helpless and livid.

And in the center of all of it, Sirius held Regulus as the younger boy finally broke out of the freeze and into fear proper.

Regulus sucked in a breath and could not seem to make it leave right. Another. Another. His hands were shaking violently now.

“I can’t—” he choked.

“Yes, you can.”

“I can’t breathe.”

“Yes, you can.”

“It’s—”

“I know.”

The tornado screamed around them.

Regulus tried to turn his head away, tried to fold in on himself, but Sirius kept one hand firm at the back of his neck and the other around his ribs.

“Look at me,” Sirius said.

Regulus didn’t.

“Regulus.”

Finally, slowly, Regulus dragged his gaze up.

Sirius had never seen him look that young.

Not childish. Not even vulnerable, really. Just stripped. Every sharp clever polished thing peeled away, leaving the boy he had once hidden with in cupboards and behind curtains and under blankets while thunderstorms battered Grimmauld Place and their mother raged at the state of the world.

“Breathe with me,” Sirius said.

Regulus’s mouth trembled.

“Do it because I said so.”

That almost worked.

Almost.

A tiny, wrecked laugh came out of James at the sheer absurdity of trying to bully someone through a panic attack while a tornado tried to remove the pub from the map.

Regulus heard it. His eyes flicked toward James, just for a second.

Good. Better. Present.

“There,” Lily said softly, catching it too. “That’s good. Stay here. Stay with us.”

The next breath Regulus took was ragged but deeper.

“There you go,” Remus said.

Barty leaned in. “Black, if you die before me I’ll actually kill you.”

Pandora made a wet, hysterical sound that might have been a laugh. “Barty.”

“What? He knows what I mean.”

Dorcas scrubbed at her eyes angrily. “Regulus, I swear to God, breathe.”

Evan’s voice came rough. “Don’t be dramatic.”

Pandora stared at him. “That is your comforting voice?”

“It’s all I’ve got.”

Fabian let out a shaky breath. “Fair enough.”

Gideon, pale but game, said, “Honestly, Black, this is a terrible time to go weirdly nonverbal on us.”

James shot him a look. “Gideon.”

“What? He knows I’m right.”

And somehow, impossibly, that worked too.

Because Regulus blinked again and there it was—a tiny change, a flicker of offended awareness through the terror.

He dragged in another breath.

Sirius felt it against his chest and nearly sagged with relief.

“That’s it,” Sirius said, quieter now. “Again.”

Around them, the pub was still in hell.

The tornado had not left. The wind still hammered the stone walls. The roof still shrieked under pressure. Somewhere nearby another building lost something large enough that the crash rolled through the ground under them. The adults were still yelling warnings. Students elsewhere in the room were still crying. Every few seconds something in the village outside smashed or tore or broke.

But under the tables, in that cramped, filthy, terrified pocket of the world, the students clung to each other like wreckage and kept breathing.

In.

Hold.

Out.

Again.

Marlene was still praying, but now it had become half-prayer, half-threat. “Any of you useless divine bastards listening, I’ve named names, do your jobs.”

Mary laughed and cried at the same time.

Peter wiped his face roughly and failed to hide it. James didn’t call him on it. Lily reached across and squeezed Mary’s hand without letting go of her own fear. Frank kept rubbing Alice’s back in the same rhythm every time the building shook. Fabian and Gideon leaned shoulder to shoulder, pretending not to. Barty kept swearing under his breath at the storm like it had personally insulted him. Pandora pressed close to Dorcas and Regulus both when she could. Evan still looked like he wanted to fight the weather.

And Sirius held on.

He could feel every staggered breath Regulus took. Could feel the shivering easing only by degrees. Could feel, under the terror, the humiliating animal relief of having his brother warm and real and alive in his arms.

Regulus’s fingers finally curled into the fabric of Sirius’s coat.

That was when Sirius nearly lost it himself.

But he didn’t.

He just bent his head and said, so low only Regulus could hear over the raging world outside, “I’ve got you.”

Regulus shut his eyes.

The storm kept coming.

The pub shook.

The village screamed.

The tables rattled above them and the shutters groaned and the whole sky seemed determined to grind Hogsmeade down into splinters and stone.

So they did the only thing they could.

They stayed low.

They stayed together.

They panicked and prayed and cried and swore and breathed through terror in a tight human knot under a pub table while a tornado tore through the town around them.

And no one, not one of them, let go.

Rain hit first.

It went from loud to deafening in the space of a breath, slamming against the roof and shutters in furious sheets, hard enough that it no longer sounded like weather at all. It sounded like handfuls of gravel hurled by giants. It drowned out voices. It drowned out thought. It merged with the howl of the wind and the grinding scream of the tornado until the whole world outside the pub became one single, monstrous wall of noise.

Something large and wooden tore loose somewhere outside and skidded screaming down the street.

Then something else hit the side of the building hard enough to make the stone under them tremble.

Inside the little shelter, everybody flinched at once.

The air felt wrong now—too tight, too full, charged with something sharp and metallic that made the inside of James’s mouth taste strange. Even with the panic already chewing through all of them, the change in the atmosphere made new fear crawl in under the old.

Remus lifted his head a fraction, listening.

Lily saw his face. “What?”

He didn’t answer.

The rain came harder.

The wind shrieked.

The tornado dragged something else through the village with a crash and a splintering burst of sound.

And then the thunder started.

Not a rumble.

Not distant.

A crack so violent it split the world in two.

The pub seemed to jump beneath them. Somebody screamed. Somebody else cried out, “Christ—”

And then every light in the building went out.

All of them.

The lamps.

The sconces.

The little enchanted glow over the bar.

The last shaking amber scraps of light vanished in one blink, and the pub dropped into absolute, smothering black.

Pitch black.

The kind of dark that swallowed even outlines. The kind that made it impossible to tell if your eyes were open. The kind that turned the space under the tables from cramped shelter into coffin-dark nothing.

For half a heartbeat there was stunned silence.

Then the entire room came apart.

Students screamed. Adults shouted over each other. Someone knocked a chair over in the dark. The baby in the main room started wailing again, high and frantic. Wood scraped, glass rattled, the storm hammered on, and somewhere in the center of the shelter Regulus Black broke.

Not just a gasp. Not just a flinch.

He screamed.

It tore out of him raw and high and horrified, a sound so naked with terror it made every person under the table go rigid in shock.

Then he folded in on himself all at once.

Sirius felt it happen before he could see anything—Regulus jerking violently against him, trying to curl into a ball, hands flying up over his head, body going from stiff panic to pure animal terror in an instant.

“No—no, no, no, no, no—”

His voice shattered on the words. He started sobbing so hard he could barely breathe between them.

The effect on the others was immediate and terrible.

Pandora cried out his name.

Mary started sobbing harder.

Peter made a small, broken noise in the dark.

Even James, who had been holding himself together by sheer nerve and habit, felt ice sluice down his spine at the sound coming out of Regulus. This was not ordinary fear anymore. This was something ripped open.

Another thunderclap hit so close it sounded like the sky had burst right on top of the pub.

Regulus screamed again.

He tried to twist away from everything and everyone at once, burying his face in his hands, curling tighter, knees coming up, shoulders hunched as if he could somehow make himself small enough to disappear.

“Get them out, get them off, get them off, get them off—”

“Regulus!” Sirius grabbed at him blindly. “Reg!”

“No, no, please, please, please, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

His words came tumbling over each other, sobbed and babbled and half-lost in the dark.

“It’s on me— it’s on me, get it off— please—”

“What’s on you?” James said, panicked.

Regulus made a choking sound like he couldn’t even explain it. He was shaking so hard it travelled through everyone touching him.

Another crash outside. The pub shuddered. Somebody else in the room shrieked.

“Lumos!” Lily’s voice cracked through the black.

Wands were fumbled for all at once.

“Lumos!”

“Lumos!”

“Lumos—”

One by one, then in a rush, thin trembling wandlights bloomed under the tables like tiny trapped stars. Pale points of gold and white. Not enough to fill the pub, not enough to make anything feel safe, but enough to carve faces and hands and wet eyes out of the dark.

Enough to see Regulus properly.

And God.

He was wrecked.

He was trying so hard to make himself smaller he looked like he might fold in half. His face was buried in one hand, the other clawing at his own sleeve, at his neck, at the air like he genuinely felt something crawling all over him. His breath was coming in raw little shrieks. Tears had soaked his face. His eyes, when he dragged his hand away for a second, were enormous and glassy and wild, lashes clumped dark with tears. His mouth was trembling so violently the lower lip wobbled uncontrollably. His nose had gone red from crying, a tiny twitching little thing above his shaking mouth that somehow made him look heartbreakingly young—like a child caught in a nightmare too big for him.

Pandora put both hands over her mouth and cried harder.

Dorcas just stared, horrified.

Barty looked like somebody had kicked the ground out from under him. “What the fuck—”

Evan, pale to the lips, said nothing at all.

Regulus didn’t seem to see any of them. He was somewhere else entirely, crying and gasping and babbling through the sobs.

“Please, I’ll be quiet, I’ll be good, I’ll be good, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, don’t leave me, please don’t leave me down there, please—”

The words hit the air and landed wrong.

Too wrong.

Sirius went cold.

James looked at him sharply. “Down where?”

Regulus was clawing at his own arms now, frantic. “Ri—Ri, Ri, please— please come back, please, please, I can’t— it’s dark, I can’t—”

That name.

That tiny, broken, childhood shortening of Sirius.

The entire cramped shelter seemed to stop breathing.

Sirius’s face changed.

He caught Regulus’s wrists, firm but careful, trying to stop him from scratching himself raw. “Reg, listen to me. Regulus. Look at me.”

But Regulus was far gone. Tears were streaming down his face. He kept twisting, panicked, trying to curl tighter, trying to get away from things no one else could see.

“There’s spiders,” he sobbed. “Ri, there’s spiders, there’s spiders on me, make them stop, please make them stop—”

James stared at Sirius in dawning horror.

Lily went still.

Pandora’s mouth fell open around a shaking breath. “Spiders?”

Sirius looked up, and in the thin, shaking light of half a dozen Lumos spells, everyone saw something on Sirius Black’s face they almost never saw.

Not sarcasm.

Not rage.

Not swagger.

Helplessness.

And then something uglier than helplessness.

Memory.

The thunder rolled again, closer, and Regulus sobbed like the sound itself was flaying him alive.

Sirius moved fast.

“Shift,” he snapped.

James didn’t ask what he meant. He just moved.

Sirius dragged Regulus bodily across him, pulling him away from the outer side of the shelter, away from the direction of the windows, away from the thunder and darkness as much as that meant anything. Regulus came half-willing, half-collapsing, clinging without knowing he was doing it.

“Gideon,” Sirius said.

Gideon was already moving. “Got him.”

They rearranged in a frantic knot of elbows and knees and shaking wandlight. Gideon got behind Regulus and pulled him back against his chest, one arm braced across Regulus’s middle to keep him from curling so violently he’d choke himself. Sirius pressed in on one side at once, James on the other, boxing him in with warmth and bodies and solid pressure. Regulus ended up wedged tight between them, knees drawn up, shoulders shaking, face turned into the crook of his own arm and Gideon’s chest.

It was cramped. Awkward. Uncomfortable.

It was perfect.

There was nowhere for the dark to get him from that angle. Nowhere for the storm to touch him without going through three other people first.

Regulus clung.

Not gracefully. Not consciously.

He grabbed fistfuls of coat and jumper and sleeve and held on with desperate, shaking hands while he sobbed.

“That’s it,” Gideon said, voice gone unexpectedly gentle. “You’re all right. You’ve got us.”

Regulus made a broken whining sound. “Ri—”

“I’m here,” Sirius said at once.

The word came out rougher than he’d meant it to.

Regulus turned blindly toward Sirius’s voice, face blotched and wet and miserable beyond belief, and Sirius thought, with a sudden brutal ache, there he is. There’s the little boy again. The one with the too-big eyes and the shaking mouth and the awful habit of trying to apologize his way out of being hurt.

James saw it too.

For the first time in his life, James Potter looked at Regulus Black and saw not his best mate’s vicious little brother, not a Slytherin rival, not an insufferable pure-blood menace.

Just somebody’s terrified baby brother.

And God, that was worse.

Regulus was still babbling.

“Please don’t let them lock it, please, I’ll be good, I’ll be so good, I won’t cry, I won’t cry, I won’t make noise, please don’t shut it—”

The words were coming apart on sobs now, pieces of memory and panic spilling into each other until it was impossible to tell what he thought was happening and what was actually happening.

James looked at Sirius. “What does he mean, lock it?”

Sirius didn’t answer.

Another thundercrack split over the village. Regulus shrieked and tried to curl even tighter, face disappearing fully now against Gideon’s chest. Gideon’s expression crumpled with immediate distress.

“Easy, sweetheart,” Gideon said without thinking.

Fabian shot him a startled look and then, seeing Regulus’s face, visibly melted as well. “Oh, fuck.”

Pandora was crying openly now. “What is he talking about?”

No one answered her.

Barty, whose fear had curdled into a furious kind of disbelief, said, “Sirius.”

Sirius still didn’t answer.

“Black,” Evan said this time, sharper.

Sirius looked up.

The wandlight caught the angle of his face, the set jaw, the eyes far too bright.

“When we were kids,” he said, and every word sounded like it had to be cut out of him, “our parents used to lock him in the basement.”

Silence.

Even with the storm screaming around the building and the thunder still rolling over them, there was a silence inside the little shelter so complete it felt holy and horrible all at once.

Pandora stopped breathing.

Dorcas went white.

Mary whispered, “What?”

James felt his stomach lurch. “What?”

Sirius stared at nothing for a second, then looked back down at Regulus because that was easier than looking at any of them.

“He was scared of storms,” Sirius said, voice flat in the way people went flat when feeling too much to survive it honestly. “Thunder. Dark. Spiders. Anything that made him cry, really. They thought it would toughen him up. If he made too much noise or got frightened or… sometimes just because they could. They’d lock him down there until he stopped.”

Lily made a strangled sound.

“No,” said Alice, horrified.

Frank just said, “Jesus Christ.”

Barty looked like he might be sick.

Pandora actually reached out and touched Regulus’s shoulder with shaking fingers, as if the knowledge alone had changed the shape of him under her hand. “He never told us.”

“Of course he didn’t,” Dorcas whispered.

Evan’s face had gone carved and dangerous. “Your parents did that to him?”

“Yes,” Sirius said.

“How old was he?” Mary asked, and her voice sounded like she regretted asking even as it left her mouth.

Sirius swallowed. “Little.”

That was somehow the worst answer of all.

Because everyone could see it now without wanting to.

Little Regulus.

Little and frightened and shut in some cold dark basement while thunder rolled over the house and spiders crawled through the corners and nobody came.

James’s hands clenched into fists against his own knees.

Lily had tears running down her face now and didn’t seem aware of them.

Marlene, of all people, looked genuinely speechless for about three whole seconds, which might have been a first in her life.

Then she whispered, “Those evil bastards.”

“Yeah,” Sirius said.

Regulus whimpered and tried to hide deeper in the crook of Gideon’s arm.

Gideon made the softest sound in the back of his throat and pulled him closer automatically. Regulus went easily, pressing back against Gideon’s chest, curling tighter between him and the warmth on both sides. James put a steady hand on Regulus’s upper arm. Sirius kept one hand at the nape of his neck, fingers sunk in his hair.

Regulus’s face was a wreck.

His eyes were so wet they looked glass-made. His lashes were stuck together in black points. His cheeks were flushed pink and blotchy from crying. His lip kept wobbling every time he tried to speak. His little nose twitched hard every now and then when he sniffled, red and damp and somehow so absurdly vulnerable that Fabian made a helpless face like he might actually start cooing.

Pandora was already there.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she whispered, crying harder. “Oh, Reg.”

Barty scrubbed both hands over his own face like he was trying to erase the image and failing. “I’m going to kill them.”

“No queue-jumping,” Evan said coldly.

Dorcas nodded once. “Get in line.”

Another crash outside. Another pulse of thunder. The walls shuddered.

Regulus cried out and buried his face harder, body going rigid all over again.

Sirius leaned in immediately. “Reg. Regulus, listen to me. You’re not there.”

Regulus shook his head frantically against Gideon’s chest. “No, no, no—”

“You’re not there,” Sirius repeated. “You’re in the pub. In Hogsmeade. With me.”

“Please don’t shut it—”

“It’s not shutting.”

“It’s dark—”

“I know.”

“There’s spiders—”

James glanced at Sirius. Sirius nodded once, jaw hard.

James reached carefully for Regulus’s free hand and pressed it flat against his own sleeve. “That’s me.”

Regulus flinched.

“That’s just me,” James said, keeping his voice low and steady despite the storm and the terror and the fury boiling in his chest. “No spiders. Just my sleeve. Feel it? Wool. Awful quality, very tragic, but definitely not spiders.”

A tiny, broken sound came out of Regulus that might almost have been a laugh if it hadn’t dissolved immediately into another sob.

“Good,” James said quickly. “That’s good. Keep hold of it.”

On Regulus’s other side Sirius pressed Regulus’s hand against his own coat. “And this is me. You know this coat. Stop trying to claw your own skin off and hold on properly.”

Gideon shifted behind him so Regulus’s back was fully against a solid chest instead of open air. “And I’m here. Lean back, sweetheart. There. I’ve got you.”

Regulus obeyed in tiny, miserable increments, like his body wanted desperately to trust and only half remembered how.

Every time thunder cracked he jumped. Every time the building shook he whimpered. He was crying so hard that even when he managed to breathe deeper, it snagged again on sobs and hiccupping little squeaks.

It was awful.

It was also contagious.

Because once again, watching Regulus unravel made everyone else worse.

Mary was crying harder now. Alice had gone back to quiet, constant tears. Peter looked wrecked. Even Fabian and Gideon had lost every scrap of flippancy. The whole shelter was lit by wandlight and fear and the kind of protective tenderness that only appears when terror strips people down to what they actually are.

Marlene, eyes red and wild, leaned closer. “Reg, babe, listen, right, if the thunder wants a fight I will absolutely fight the thunder, so you need to stop giving it the satisfaction.”

Lily would have laughed if she hadn’t been trying not to cry. “Marlene.”

“What? I’m helping.”

“It’s terrible help.”

“It’s all I’ve got.”

Pandora sniffled hard and wiped her face on her sleeve. “It’s not terrible.”

“See?” Marlene said. “Validated.”

Barty huffed a shaky breath that might have been the ghost of a laugh. “You’re all insane.”

“We know,” Dorcas said.

Regulus made a small whining sound and tried to curl even tighter. Gideon kept him from crumpling completely, one hand rubbing slow circles over his ribcage through his coat.

“Easy,” Gideon murmured. “Easy, darling. You’re all right.”

Fabian looked at his brother. “Since when do you sound like somebody’s mum?”

“Since now, apparently.”

James kept his grip gentle but firm on Regulus’s hand. “Stay here. Stay with us.”

Sirius lowered his voice until it was almost the same one he might once have used in a dark bedroom years ago, before Hogwarts, before distance, before all the damage that had come later. “Reggie.”

The nickname hit like a spell.

Regulus froze for a second, not in fear this time but in startled recognition. His eyes blinked open wider through tears.

Sirius hadn’t called him that in years.

“There you are,” Sirius said softly. “There’s my baby.”

James looked away very quickly to give him the dignity of pretending he hadn’t heard that.

Pandora, on the other hand, made a tiny devastated noise.

Dorcas covered her mouth.

Even Evan’s expression briefly cracked.

Regulus’s face crumpled all over again. “Ri,” he whispered, voice shredded.

“Yeah.”

“I’m scared.”

The honesty of it wrecked half the people listening.

“I know,” Sirius said. “I know, love.”

James’s head snapped toward him. Love. Not even a pause before it. As natural as breathing.

Regulus pressed his face back into Gideon’s chest and sobbed.

Gideon, very carefully, tucked his chin over the top of Regulus’s head. James shifted closer until his shoulder was pressed warm and solid against Regulus’s. Sirius stayed locked to his other side. Between the three of them, Regulus was held completely.

Protected.

Contained.

Not alone in the dark.

Outside, the tornado still raged through Hogsmeade.

The rain battered the village in blinding sheets. Wind screamed down the lanes. Debris crashed and scraped and flew. Thunder cracked over and over, merciless and huge, making the stone floor vibrate under their knees.

But under the booths and tables, the students had carved out the smallest possible island of human warmth against it.

A ring of wandlights.

A crush of bodies.

Hands on sleeves, hair, wrists, shoulders.

Remus, watching Regulus try to breathe through sobs, said quietly, “Keep him talking if he can answer. Simple things.”

Lily nodded at once. “Regulus.”

He made a wet noise into Gideon’s jumper.

“What colour is James’s sleeve?”

James blinked. Then, absurdly, looked down at his own arm like he had to check.

Regulus’s breathing hitched. “D-dark.”

“That’s right,” Lily said. “What about Sirius’s coat?”

“Black.”

“Good.”

“What about Gideon’s hair?” Fabian asked at once, seizing on the game. “This is important. There’s only one correct answer.”

Gideon turned his head. “Do not make this about you.”

“It is always about me.”

Regulus’s mouth twitched.

Tiny. Barely there. But it was movement.

Fabian saw it and pointed with triumph. “There! He hates me, which means he’s coming back.”

Pandora laughed through tears. “That did work.”

“Of course it did.”

Another thunderclap split the air and Regulus flinched hard enough to whimper, but this time he didn’t spiral all the way under. He grabbed Sirius’s coat and James’s sleeve and held on.

“That’s it,” Sirius murmured. “Hold on.”

Regulus did.

He kept crying. Kept sniffling, little squeaky miserable sounds catching in his throat. Kept trembling so hard Gideon could feel it in his own bones. Every now and then a fresh bolt of panic would seize him and he’d babble again—sorry, please, don’t leave, too dark, too loud, Ri, Ri, Ri—but each time the hands around him pulled him back faster.

James’s voice. Lily’s voice. Sirius’s.

Pandora’s soft little coos.

Dorcas’s blunt orders to breathe.

Fabian’s running commentary.

Gideon’s hand on his ribs.

Even Barty and Evan, both visibly out of their depth with tenderness, kept talking now just so the sound would stay around him.

“You’re in the pub,” Barty said stiffly.

“With us,” Evan added, no less stiff.

“No spiders,” James said.

“No basement,” Sirius said.

“No parents,” Dorcas said, with a viciousness that made the words feel like a promise.

That got another awful, watery sound out of Pandora.

Mary, still crying herself, whispered, “Poor thing.”

Alice nodded furiously against Frank’s shoulder. “He was just little.”

Frank closed his eyes for a second. “Yeah.”

Marlene wiped under her nose with the back of her hand and muttered, “I’m haunting those bastards after I die. I don’t even care if I die old. I’ll make time.”

“That’s not how haunting works,” Remus said automatically.

“I’ll innovate.”

Lily made a shaky sound halfway between a laugh and a sob.

The storm still had them trapped. The pub still shook. The dark still pressed at the edges beyond their little wandlit knot.

But now, inside it, there was this:

Regulus wedged tight between Sirius, James, and Gideon.

His face hidden because he couldn’t bear for anyone to see it and seen anyway, loved anyway, pitied anyway, protected anyway.

Sirius with one hand in his hair and one bracing his shoulder.

James giving him a solid arm to cling to and pretending not to notice when Regulus’s grip got desperate.

Gideon behind him, warm and steady, letting the smaller boy fold back against him without a flicker of mockery.

Around them, everyone else crouched close, pale in wandlight, horrified and furious and heartbreakingly gentle.

And in the middle of the storm, Regulus Black sobbed like a child and called for his big brother, and Sirius held him through every shaking breath.

The storm did not ease.

If anything, it grew teeth.

The rain kept hammering the roof in dense, vicious sheets, louder now than it had been before, like the whole sky had tipped itself upside down over Hogsmeade and meant to drown the village where it stood. The wind screamed through the streets with a force that no longer sounded natural. It shrieked through cracks in the shutters and under the door and down the chimney in thin, evil notes. The tornado was still somewhere too close—close enough that every few moments the entire building shuddered under another impact, another dragged crash, another sound of something outside being ripped apart and hurled into something else.

The thunder kept coming too.

Not in neat little intervals. Not in a storm’s ordinary rhythm.

It rolled and cracked and detonated overhead in wild, brutal bursts that made the stone beneath them tremble and the wandlight shake in their hands.

Inside the cramped shelter under the booths and tables, nobody was even pretending to be calm anymore.

They were surviving minute by minute. Breath by breath. Crash by crash.

And in the middle of them, Regulus had cried himself beyond words.

He was still wedged between Sirius and James, with Gideon behind him holding him steady whenever the shaking got so bad he nearly folded in on himself again. But the frantic babbling had given way to something almost worse—just raw, helpless sobbing, one after another, every breath hitching and breaking apart into little whining sounds he clearly couldn’t help.

It was awful to listen to.

It was impossible not to.

His face was still buried most of the time, turned into Gideon’s shoulder or Sirius’s sleeve or his own arm, but every time Sirius managed to coax him to lift his head even a fraction the same wrecked picture appeared—massive wet eyes swimming with tears, lashes clumped into dark spikes, cheeks hot and pink and soaked all over again no matter how many times Sirius wiped them, lower lip trembling in tiny repeated wobbles that made Pandora keep making soft, devastated little noises under her breath.

Sirius sighed—not irritated, not impatient, just tired and aching and old in a way seventeen-year-olds should never sound—and used the edge of his sleeve to wipe Regulus’s face again.

It lasted all of two seconds.

Fresh tears gathered at once and spilled over.

“There we go,” Sirius murmured anyway, voice gone into that low, coaxing softness that still made James feel like he was overhearing something private and ancient. “Good boy. Get it out.”

Regulus only sobbed harder, a tiny broken whine escaping him as another thunderclap hit somewhere over the village.

James shut his eyes briefly.

It was one thing to know, abstractly, that Sirius and Regulus had a history none of them really understood. It was another to sit three inches away from that history while the storm clawed at the building and watch Sirius deal with his younger brother’s terror like this wasn’t unusual at all. Like he’d done it before. A hundred times. A thousand.

Sirius wiped Regulus’s face again.

Again it made no difference.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Pandora whispered, crying all over again because apparently she had no end to it. “He just keeps crying.”

“That was always him,” Sirius said quietly.

The words pulled eyes toward him.

Even in the thin, trembling ring of Lumos light, his expression had that faraway cast again—the look of somebody seeing two versions of a person at once. The one in front of him now, and the one from years ago layered over the top.

Regulus shuddered through another wordless sob. Sirius smoothed wet hair off his forehead.

“He was like this from birth to eleven,” Sirius said.

Silence settled over the little knot of them, not because the storm had lessened—it hadn’t—but because everyone under the table was suddenly listening harder than before.

Sirius let out a breath through his nose and kept one hand at the back of Regulus’s neck, thumb moving in slow little circles.

“Honestly,” he said, softer now, almost fond despite the grief in it, “he was always a sensitive little scaredy cat.”

Regulus made a tiny protesting sound through his sobbing, too weak to be real offense.

It should not, under the circumstances, have been cute.

It was.

James saw Fabian visibly melt. Pandora fully covered her mouth again. Even Dorcas’s terrifyingly stern expression softened by a whole degree.

Sirius glanced down at Regulus and there, for the first time since the lights had gone out, there was the ghost of a smile at one corner of his mouth.

“My baby brother,” he said, like it was simple. Like it was obvious. “Always crying. Always clinging. Always too soft for that house.”

Regulus gave another little whining noise and turned his face further into Gideon’s shoulder as if trying to hide from the conversation altogether.

Sirius ignored that too.

“He was tiny,” he said. “Like, genuinely ridiculous. Little thing. Big eyes. Huge tears. Cried over everything. Thunder, dark rooms, nightmares, being left alone for five minutes, scraped knees, loud voices, weird shadows, spiders, those stupid taxidermy elf heads in the corridor at Grimmauld—”

“Those what?” Lily said, appalled.

Sirius waved that away. “Not the point.”

“That absolutely feels like a point,” James muttered.

“He was a cute little crybaby,” Sirius went on, because apparently once he had started he wasn’t stopping. “Would follow me around everywhere. If I put him down, he cried. If I left the room, he cried. If Kreacher looked at him funny, he cried.”

Pandora made a completely involuntary cooing sound.

Barty stared at Sirius. “You raised him.”

Sirius’s expression went flat around the edges again. “More or less.”

There was nothing dramatic in the way he said it, which made it land harder.

Frank looked at him for a long moment, then looked away.

Regulus’s sobbing had eased only in the sense that it was less sharp now, more exhausted. He was still crying continuously, shoulders jerking every few seconds, breath catching on small, miserable sounds. Sirius kept wiping his face with patient futility.

“No wonder he keeps asking for you,” Mary whispered.

Sirius didn’t answer that.

He only tipped Regulus’s chin up for a second with two fingers, wiped away another wet streak under one eye, then let him hide again.

Another crack of thunder split over the town.

Every person under the table flinched. Regulus, already beyond flinching, made a choked sound and suddenly lurched sideways.

Before anyone could figure out what he was doing, he turned his face hard into Gideon’s shoulder and bit down.

Gideon yelped.

Not a dignified sound. Not even slightly.

A full, shocked, “Ow— what the fuck?”

Everyone stared.

Regulus did not let go.

He had latched on with the desperate single-mindedness of someone running entirely on instinct. Face buried against Gideon’s shoulder, jaw clamped tight, still crying around it, still trembling, but biting down like that was the one thing in the world currently keeping him together.

Gideon, pinned behind him, went rigid with disbelief. “Is he— is he biting me?”

Sirius only sighed.

“I should’ve warned you,” he said.

Fabian made a strangled noise halfway between horror and hysterical laughter. “Warned him about what?”

“Reg’s always been a biter,” Sirius said.

That somehow made Pandora look even more heartbroken. “Of course he has.”

James turned to stare at Sirius. “Of course he has?”

Sirius shrugged one shoulder. “When he gets really frightened. Or overwhelmed. Or can’t stop crying. He used to bite himself.”

That killed every scrap of humor instantly.

Gideon stopped trying to pry Regulus off him and just went still, one arm tightening protectively across Regulus’s ribs.

“He what?” Dorcas said sharply.

Sirius’s face had gone distant again. “When he was little. Hands, wrists, sometimes his arm. Whatever he could reach. One time he bit himself hard enough to make himself bleed.”

Pandora shut her eyes.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she whispered again, voice cracking clean through the middle.

Sirius kept his hand at the back of Regulus’s neck, gentle and certain. “After that I started getting him to bite me instead. Easier to manage. Less blood.”

Nobody had anything to say to that.

Because what exactly was the response to I taught my little brother to bite me so he wouldn’t hurt himself when he was terrified?

Nothing useful. Nothing big enough.

So for a few seconds all they could do was listen to the storm and look at the boy currently clamped onto Gideon Prewett’s shoulder like a terrified little animal, still crying quietly through his nose, still shaking all over, and feel their hearts break in twelve different directions.

Fabian recovered first, barely.

“That,” he said weakly, “is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

“Same,” Mary said, already crying again.

Lily scrubbed hard at her face. “Jesus Christ.”

James looked at Regulus, then at Sirius, then down at the floorboards because there was suddenly too much in his chest to fit anywhere sensible.

Gideon, still being bitten, said with astonishing calm, “Right. Well. Grand. I’m honored, I suppose.”

Regulus bit harder.

Gideon made a face. “Actually, no, that really hurts.”

Sirius glanced over. “Yeah, sorry.”

“No, I gathered that part. Why does that hurt so much?”

Fabian peered closer, as much as the cramped space allowed. “He’s tiny. That should be, like, kitten damage at most.”

Evan, who had gone quiet in the particularly dangerous way he did when furious, said flatly, “He’s got a vicious streak.”

Barty nodded once. “True.”

Sirius rubbed Regulus’s back. “It’s probably the braces.”

Half the people under the table blinked.

“The what?” Peter said.

Sirius looked up. “His braces.”

Another small beat of silence.

Then James said, “Regulus has braces?”

Pandora looked offended with herself. “Oh my God, he does.”

“I forgot,” Mary said.

“I didn’t know,” Alice admitted.

“Neither did I,” Frank said.

Fabian stared at Regulus like this was somehow the most shocking revelation of the night, which, given current competition, was impressive. “Black has braces?”

Regulus, still firmly attached to Gideon’s shoulder, made a faint wounded sound as though even in this state he disliked being discussed.

That nearly did Mary in completely.

Pandora gave a wet little laugh-sob. “He never smiles with teeth.”

“Hardly ever talks with his mouth open either,” Dorcas said, like she was mentally revising years of observations in real time.

Barty rubbed under one eye. “I knew about the elastics.”

Everyone looked at him.

He shrugged. “What? We share a dormitory.”

Pandora sniffled. “I hate that that’s useful.”

Gideon, still being chewed on, said, “Elastics?”

“Bands,” Sirius translated. “Rubber bands. That’s probably why it hurts more.”

Gideon absorbed this in silence for a moment, then said, with grave dignity, “Fantastic. I’m being attacked with orthodontics.”

That got a real laugh out of Fabian, brief and strangled and desperately needed.

Even James barked one out before clapping a hand over his mouth like he’d committed a crime.

Sirius huffed a tiny laugh too, then looked down at Regulus with exhausted fondness. “Yeah, sorry. He’s weaponized.”

Regulus did not unlatch.

If anything he seemed more settled there, like the pressure of biting down was anchoring him in his own body. His sobs had quieted into little hitching breaths and the occasional whimper. One hand had fisted so tightly in Gideon’s jumper that his knuckles had gone white. The other still clung to Sirius’s sleeve.

Gideon tested moving his shoulder by half an inch.

Regulus whined and bit harder.

“Right,” Gideon said immediately. “No, fair enough. We’re staying like this.”

“You’re taking it weirdly well,” Remus observed.

Gideon gave him a look. “I’ve got a sobbing Slytherin attached to me like a haunted handbag. ‘Weirdly well’ is relative.”

Fabian nodded. “That’s true.”

Another crash boomed outside. The building shook. The thunder rolled again, endless and cruel.

Everyone jumped.

Regulus did too, but instead of spiralling straight back under, he only whimpered around Gideon’s shoulder and curled tighter into the wall of bodies around him.

Sirius noticed immediately.

“There we go,” he murmured. “That’s helping.”

James glanced over. “The biting?”

“The pressure,” Sirius said. “Same reason he likes being held tight when he’s bad. Helps him feel where he is.”

That made another handful of small awful truths slide into place all at once.

The way Regulus had stopped fighting once they boxed him in.

The way he kept grabbing for sleeves and seams and handfuls of fabric.

The way he always seemed to sleep half-buried in blankets on school trips and sofa naps and accidental common room dozes.

Pandora looked near tears again at the sheer accumulation of it. “Nobody tells me anything.”

“You didn’t know because he’d hate you knowing,” Evan said.

“Still hate that I know now,” Dorcas muttered, but there was no cruelty in it. Just protective anger, sharp enough to cut.

Sirius kept talking, maybe because it calmed Regulus, maybe because it calmed himself, maybe because once you had broken open one old secret in a storm there was no point pretending the others weren’t stacked behind it.

“He had braces put on a couple years ago,” Sirius said, absently smoothing his thumb over Regulus’s damp hairline. “Parents hated paying for them. He hated having them. Refused to smile for about six months after.”

James looked helplessly charmed and wrecked at the same time. “That does sound like him.”

“He threatened Barty with a fork when Barty laughed the first week,” Pandora added automatically.

“I stand by laughing,” Barty said.

Regulus made a tiny offended grunt without letting go of Gideon’s shoulder.

The whole group stared.

Then Fabian pointed. “He’s listening.”

“He absolutely is,” Sirius said.

Dorcas leaned a little closer. “Regulus, if you can hear me, release Gideon before he loses the arm.”

Regulus bit down in apparent refusal.

Gideon looked affronted. “Traitor.”

Pandora hiccuped a laugh. “Oh, he’s definitely in there.”

Sirius smiled despite himself, tired and sad and full of too much old love. “Told you. Sensitive little thing, but stubborn as hell.”

Another tear spilled out of Regulus’s eye and down his cheek anyway. Sirius wiped it away with one finger. Then another. Then another.

“Honestly,” Sirius murmured, almost to himself now, “he used to cry like this for hours.”

James looked over. “You’d sit with him the whole time?”

Sirius gave him a brief look like the question itself was stupid. “Obviously.”

That shut James up.

Not because he disagreed. Because suddenly he understood that this had never, ever been optional for Sirius.

He hadn’t merely loved his brother. He had raised him. Carried him. Hidden him. Held him together through things no child should ever have had to learn how to handle in another child.

No wonder Sirius’s hand knew exactly where to go on the back of Regulus’s neck. No wonder his voice had gone so instinctively soft. No wonder Regulus, even half-lost in panic, had called for him like a prayer.

The storm hammered the pub again, and again, and again.

The darkness outside their little ring of wandlight remained complete. The thunder showed no sign of stopping. Rain lashed the roof. Somewhere out in Hogsmeade, more things were still breaking.

But under the tables, Regulus stayed latched onto Gideon’s shoulder and let himself be held.

Gideon behind him, enduring the bite with increasingly philosophical resignation.

James pressed close at one side, warm and solid and watchful.

Sirius on the other, endlessly patient, wiping tear after useless tear from Regulus’s face.

Around them the rest stayed close too—Pandora openly sniffling, Dorcas furious on Regulus’s behalf, Barty staring into the middle distance like he was composing several murders, Evan silent and sharp-eyed, Lily and Mary ruined by sympathy, Alice and Frank shaken to the bone, Fabian balancing heartbreak with humor by sheer force of personality, Remus quiet and observant, Peter pale and overwhelmed, Marlene muttering fresh threats against the Black family under every third breath.

And in the middle of all that noise and fear, Regulus Black—who so many people only knew as cold, cutting, composed—curled up trembling in the dark, cried until he couldn’t speak, and bit down on Gideon Prewett’s shoulder with his hidden metal teeth like Sirius’s tiny crybaby brother had never really gone anywhere at all.

Eventually, Regulus cried himself empty.

It didn’t happen all at once. There was no clean ending to it, no neat moment where panic simply packed up and left him alone. It was more like the storm inside him finally burned through everything it had to burn. The sobs softened first, losing their sharp edges. Then the trembling eased from violent to constant, from constant to intermittent. His breaths still caught now and then, little tired hiccups in his chest, but they no longer seemed to rip him apart on the way through.

He stayed folded into Gideon’s neck and shoulder, warm and damp and boneless with exhaustion, still clinging in handfuls to jumper and sleeve and coat. Sirius kept stroking his hair. James kept one hand braced on his arm. Gideon barely moved at all except for the slow rise and fall of breathing, letting Regulus use him like a wall.

The storm outside was still awful.

The tornado had not fully gone. Rain still battered the roof. Wind still prowled and shrieked in the gaps of the building. Thunder still rolled in ugly bursts overhead. Every now and then something outside still crashed or skidded or broke.

But within the little pocket of wandlight and bodies, the sharpest point of terror had passed.

The conversation had slowed.

People were quieter now, talked out in some deep panicked part of themselves. Mary’s voice had gone hushed. Alice had her head on Frank’s shoulder, eyes half-closed from shock and fatigue. Fabian and Dorcas were both staring off into the dark between wandlights with the loose, blinking expressions of people who had felt too much too fast. Pandora was absently petting Regulus’s sleeve with two fingertips whenever she could reach it, like she couldn’t quite stop. Barty looked angry in the tired, helpless way people did when there was nothing left to fix. Even Marlene had finally shut up for more than ten consecutive seconds, which may have been a historical event.

Then Regulus made one last tiny, unhappy sound.

His fingers slackened.

His whole body went soft.

Not gradually. Fully. One second he was still faintly resisting gravity, curled in on himself from habit and leftover fear, and the next he just… gave up. Every muscle let go at once. He went limp on top of Gideon like a puppet with the strings cut, head lolling against Gideon’s shoulder, mouth parted slightly in sleep.

Everybody froze.

Gideon looked down at him. “Oh.”

Pandora straightened. “Is he—?”

“Asleep,” Sirius said at once.

James exhaled. “Bloody hell.”

Relief moved through the group like a shiver.

Regulus had simply run out. No more sobs. No more trembling. No more frightened whining. Just total exhausted surrender, passed clean out from crying and panic and the sheer effort of staying upright through any of it.

Gideon shifted one hand very, very carefully under Regulus’s side to make sure he wouldn’t slide. “That normal?”

Sirius let out a breath that was almost a groan. “Unfortunately, yeah.”

Regulus’s cheek was squashed against Gideon’s shoulder. Even in sleep, traces of the storm still clung to him—tear-damp lashes, flushed skin, little frown line between his brows. His grip on Sirius’s sleeve had gone loose but not fully open, fingers still curled there by instinct.

For a moment everyone just looked at him.

At the sleeping wreck of him.

At the fact that the terrifying, composed, sharp-mouthed Regulus Black was currently unconscious and draped across Gideon Prewett like a very damp, very traumatized cat.

Fabian rubbed at his face. “He’s actually sort of ridiculous.”

Pandora glared at him through wet eyes. “Say that again and I’ll bite you.”

Fabian held up both hands. “Affectionately ridiculous.”

“That’s better.”

Sirius leaned in with the grim efficiency of someone who had done this before too many times to count. “Right, move your wand up a bit.”

James adjusted the light without asking questions.

Sirius gently tipped Regulus’s chin up a fraction and peered into his mouth.

Peter blinked. “What are you doing?”

“Sorting his braces,” Sirius said.

That sentence, on top of everything else tonight, felt almost absurd.

But Sirius was already working, careful and practiced. He reached into the pocket of Regulus’s coat, found a little tin and a folded handkerchief and, after another second, a small case tucked into the lining. He clicked his tongue softly.

“Thought so.”

Pandora watched with fascination and lingering worry. “What’s wrong?”

“He can’t sleep with the bands in,” Sirius said. “And there’s some other stuff he’s supposed to do before bed.”

James stared. “You know all that?”

Sirius shot him a look. “Yes, Potter. Obviously.”

James raised his hands. “Right. Stupid question.”

It was, a bit.

Sirius had already said he’d raised him. Of course he knew.

With infinite care, he hooked two fingers under the tiny rubber bands stretched across Regulus’s braces and removed them one by one. The movement barely disturbed him. Regulus only sighed in his sleep and nuzzled fractionally deeper against Gideon’s shoulder.

Gideon, who had survived the biting and the crying and the nuzzling and now orthodontic maintenance on his person, said, “I feel like I’ve been promoted without consent.”

Fabian gave him a bleary grin. “You absolutely have.”

Sirius ignored both of them and checked along Regulus’s braces again, making sure nothing was twisted or snagged. Then he cleaned away what he could with the handkerchief and tucked the bands safely into the little tin.

Pandora frowned. “He really sleeps with all that out?”

“When he remembers,” Sirius said. “Or when someone makes him.”

Remus, quiet until now, looked at the neat little ritual and then at Sirius. There was no real surprise left in his face anymore. Just something sadder and heavier.

“You still do that for him,” he said.

Sirius did not look up. “Apparently.”

James looked at him, at the bowed dark head over Regulus’s sleeping face, and didn’t say anything at all. There wasn’t really anything to say.

When Sirius was finished, he sorted Regulus’s collar where it had twisted, loosened the top button that had dug crookedly into his throat, tugged his sleeve straight where it had been bunched up, and adjusted the edge of his coat over him like sleep itself might somehow be tidier if the clothes were.

“There,” he muttered.

Regulus slept through all of it.

Outside, the storm still sounded like the end of the world.

But as the minutes dragged on, then the better part of an hour, it slowly—almost grudgingly—began to loosen its grip.

Nobody trusted it at first.

Not one person under the table believed the change was real when the thunder started coming farther apart, when the battering on the roof shifted from relentless assault to something less rabid, when the wind stopped sounding like it wanted to peel the whole village off the earth.

They noticed in fragments.

A silence between gusts.

Less shudder in the floorboards.

The rain still loud, but no longer murderous.

The absence of that huge grinding tornado-howl that had swallowed every other sound.

Mary was the first to say it aloud, almost like she was afraid to jinx it. “I think… it’s calming down.”

Nobody answered for a second.

Then another minute passed.

Then another.

The pub still creaked. Rain still hissed outside. Something dripped steadily from the chimney or the windows or both. But the vicious force had gone out of the night.

James let out a breath he seemed to have been holding for several centuries. “Oh my God.”

Alice laughed shakily and put both hands over her face. “I thought we were actually going to die.”

“You said goodbye to your shoes,” Frank reminded her.

She made a weak noise of humiliation. “I did.”

Marlene tipped her head back against the booth seat and laughed once, full of raw adrenaline and disbelief. “I was praying to, like, six different religions.”

“More than six,” Lily said.

“Exactly. Covered every base.”

Peter gave a little hysterical chuckle. “I’ve literally never been that scared in my life.”

“Same,” said Mary.

“Same,” Fabian echoed.

“Same,” said Dorcas, with feeling.

Even Evan gave one short nod.

The tension had started leaking out of all of them now, leaving behind that strange, floating shock that came after surviving something too big to process on the spot. Their voices sounded half-laughing and half-broken. A few people shook with leftover adrenaline every time they chuckled. Pandora kept laughing and then abruptly looking like she might cry again.

James scrubbed both hands over his face. “A tornado. In Hogsmeade.”

Remus let out a tired breath. “I don’t think anyone’s ever getting over that sentence.”

Gideon adjusted his hold minutely when Regulus slipped a little deeper in sleep. “I’m never letting him forget he bit me during it.”

“You absolutely are,” Pandora said. “He’ll die.”

Fabian leaned toward them. “Does this mean Gideon’s his storm husband?”

That made even Barty laugh, brief and wrecked as it was.

Pandora pointed at Fabian. “You’re disgusting. Also yes.”

Regulus, dead asleep, gave a tiny sleepy sigh into Gideon’s shoulder as if in useless agreement.

That nearly set them all off again.

It took another thirty minutes after that before the building finally settled enough that the adults in the pub began standing properly, moving around, speaking louder instead of shouting. Bolts were checked. One shutter was cracked and then shut again after someone looked outside and swore at the state of the street. Somewhere near the bar, a villager declared that the sign had gone. Someone else said they thought half the chimney pots up the lane were in pieces.

The students stayed put.

No one was rushing outside.

Not after that.

Then, at last, the pub door opened.

Cold damp air spilled in, along with muddy light from outside and the shape of a professor in heavy travelling robes, hair flattened by the wet.

“Right,” Professor McGonagall said, voice cutting cleanly through the room. “Anyone from Hogwarts, stay where you are until you are directed outside. We are collecting all students building by building. The storm has passed the village.”

A sound moved through the room that was not quite a cheer and not quite a sob. Something in between. Relief too tired to be elegant.

McGonagall’s sharp gaze swept the huddled cluster under the tables. It landed on their faces, the wandlights, the bruised expressions, then on Gideon holding the still-unconscious Regulus.

She blinked once.

“What,” she said carefully, “happened in here?”

“Everything,” James said.

That actually pulled the faintest twitch from one corner of her mouth, there and gone.

“Of course it did,” she said. “Come along. Outside, all of you. We are gathering at the fire safety point. Attendance first, then injuries.”

Nobody moved very quickly. Limbs had gone stiff. Knees complained. Everyone was cold and achy and deeply uninterested in discovering what the world looked like now.

They unpeeled themselves from under the tables one by one.

James stood first and had to catch himself on the booth when his legs protested. Peter staggered up after him. Lily and Mary helped Alice. Frank ducked his head on the underside of the table and swore. Fabian and Dorcas both emerged looking like they’d been in a war, which, in fairness, perhaps they had. Pandora climbed out and immediately checked Regulus’s sleeping face even though he had not changed at all in the last five minutes.

Gideon rose last.

He did it carefully, one arm under Regulus’s knees, the other around his back, lifting him cleanly out of the cramped shelter without waking him. Regulus just folded against him in sleep, cheek against Gideon’s shoulder, arms lax, dark hair still damp and mussed from Sirius’s hands. His face, slack with exhaustion, looked younger somehow without the panic or the sharpness or the effort of consciousness in it.

Sirius hovered for half a second as if ready to take him, then stopped.

Gideon caught the glance and shifted Regulus a little higher. “I’ve got him.”

Sirius looked at him, then nodded once. “Yeah.”

They followed McGonagall out through the pub.

The main room looked half-ruined.

Chairs overturned. Glass everywhere. A section of shelving down behind the bar. Mud and rain tracked across the floor. One shutter hanging crooked. The windows intact, somehow, but stressed and rattled. Adults and villagers everywhere, pale and exhausted and moving with that dazed, jerky post-disaster efficiency of people who would deal with their own fear later.

Then they stepped outside.

And Hogsmeade looked like it had been grabbed by a giant hand and shaken.

The street was strewn with debris—branches, broken signs, bits of roof slate, shattered flowerpots, torn fabric, splintered wood. Water rushed along the gutters in dirty streams. One chimney had collapsed into the lane farther down. A cart was lying on its side against a wall. Several shopfronts had damage to shutters or signs or stonework. There were adults everywhere now, moving fast under professors’ direction, checking buildings, calling names, helping people toward the safety point.

Above it all, the sky was finally beginning to pale back from green-black horror to ordinary storm grey.

The line of students moved through the wreckage under McGonagall’s supervision, splashing through puddles and stepping over scattered debris. Every few yards they passed another cluster being led out of another building by another professor—students from tea shops, from the post office, from Honeydukes, from the stationer’s, all looking just as stunned and bedraggled as they did.

Professor Flitwick was waving a group in from the far side of the square. Professor Sprout had two shaking third-years tucked under her arms. Madame Rosmerta was standing in the doorway of another pub with her wand raised, shouting that yes, she had counted everyone twice.

At the fire safety point—a broad open area beyond the worst of the damaged lane—students and staff were already gathering in clumps. Some sat on low walls or crates. Some stood wrapped in borrowed blankets. Some cried the second they saw friends from other buildings. Professors moved through the crowd with clipboards, parchments, and wands, faces drawn and serious.

McGonagall steered their group toward the edge of the crowd. “Stay together.”

Attendance was chaos, but organized chaos.

The professors had already done a register for the students who had remained in the castle, and now they were checking the village groups against the weekend permissions, cross-referencing names, counting heads, and barking confirmations over the wind-muted remains of the weather.

“Potter!”

“Here!”

“Black, Sirius!”

“Here.”

“Black, Regulus!”

There was a pause.

Then Gideon, still holding him, said, “Present. Just unconscious.”

Several heads turned.

McGonagall pinched the bridge of her nose. “Noted.”

Names kept coming.

“Lupin!”

“Here.”

“Evans!”

“Here.”

“Macdonald!”

“Here.”

“Mckinnon!”

“Yep.”

“Fortescue!”

“Here.”

“Longbottom!”

“Here.”

“Prewett, Fabian!”

“Here.”

“Prewett, Gideon!”

“Occupied, but here.”

That got a few exhausted snorts from nearby students.

“Pettigrew!”

“Here.”

“Crouch!”

“Here.”

“Rosier, Evan!”

“Here.”

“Rosier, Pandora!”

“Here.”

“Meadowes!”

“Here.”

The register continued around them, voices overlapping across the safety point as other professors took names and marked off lists. Every so often someone would let out a breathy, relieved sound when another missing friend was confirmed in from a different building. A cluster of Ravenclaws broke into applause when the last of their group was accounted for. Somewhere to the left, a Hufflepuff was crying because she’d lost a shoe and Professor Sprout was assuring her they would survive the tragedy.

Eventually the count settled.

Every student from the castle.

Every student who had come into Hogsmeade.

All accounted for.

The relief that followed was so huge and communal it felt almost physical.

Then came injury checks.

Madam Pomfrey had either arrived already or apparated in the last few minutes, because suddenly she was everywhere at once—pressing fingers to foreheads, turning faces toward the light, demanding to know who had hit their head, whose wrist hurt, who had glass in their coat, who was bleeding and lying about it.

Most of them were, astonishingly, fine.

Bruises from being thrown into tables. Scrapes from debris. Splinters. Sore knees. Strained shoulders. A few mild cuts from broken glass. Plenty of shock. Plenty of tears. Plenty of students who claimed they were fine and then immediately started shaking when spoken to in a kind voice.

James had a bruise darkening along one forearm. Mary had a scrape on her hand she hadn’t noticed. Alice had bitten the inside of her cheek badly enough to taste blood for an hour. Fabian had a lump on his head from the table. Gideon, when Pomfrey reached him, had to explain the deep semicircle bite mark blooming through his jumper.

She stared.

He stared back with the calm dignity of a man too tired to invent a lie.

Regulus slept on.

Pomfrey looked at Sirius.

Sirius looked at the sky.

Pomfrey sighed. “Of course.”

A charm later, Gideon’s shoulder stopped throbbing quite so much.

Through all of it, Gideon kept carrying Regulus.

He never once tried to hand him off.

Not while names were being called, not while injuries were checked, not while they stood in the cold, ruined aftermath of the storm with wet shoes and aching backs and adrenaline still leaking slowly out of their systems. Regulus remained asleep against him the whole time, limp and heavy and utterly trusting in the careless way only sleeping people could be.

Every now and then Sirius checked his face. Adjusted the fall of his coat. Made sure his head was supported properly. Pandora did the same from the other side like she physically could not stop herself.

At one point James looked around at the wrecked village, the gathered professors, the pale stunned students, the grey ragged sky above all of them, and let out a laugh that was half disbelief and half shock.

“We were under a pub table praying to survive a tornado,” he said.

“Yes,” Lily said.

Marlene rubbed her face. “I’d just like it on record that I was right to pray to multiple deities.”

“You prayed to Thor,” Mary said.

“Diversification.”

Fabian snorted.

Peter looked around at the wreckage and then back at their little group, all still loosely bunched together despite the roll call being over, and gave a shaky laugh of his own. “I can’t believe we’re all fine.”

Remus, hands in his pockets, eyes tired beyond words, looked at all of them and said quietly, “Yeah.”

They were.

Shaken, bruised, freezing, humiliated by the depth of their panic, changed a bit maybe by the fact of having seen each other like that.

But alive.

All of them.

And in the middle of the ruined safety point, while professors called instructions and students were gathered to be escorted back up to the castle in groups, Gideon Prewett stood with Regulus Black asleep in his arms like he had been carrying him forever, and no one—not Sirius, not James, not anyone—had the heart to wake him.