Regulus stood quietly in the shadows of the staircase, watching his brother sprawl on the couch in front of the flames and talk to the bottle of Firewhisky he was drinking from. Or maybe to the golden locket glittering around his neck.
Regulus sighed. He had considered revealing himself to his brother, had dreamed when he was dying of seeing Sirius again. But Kreacher was right that a Horcrux getting hold of Sirius made it too risky.
Sirius tipped his bottle back, took a huge drink, and went back to rambling about Harry Potter. Regulus still didn't understand how the magical world could have thought the Dark Lord defeated by a baby, but maybe there had been a lot of people desperate to clutch at any scrap of hope.
"If he would just see that they aren't the best parents for him," Sirius whispered. "Yeah, the Potters died, but it's not like I knew they would. I just—do you know that James and Lily's marriage was disintegrating?" he demanded, apparently of the absent Henry Malfoy. "They wanted to have a child, so badly, and they couldn't! There was nothing for it but to kidnap one of Narcissa's twins! Not like he would have had a good life!"
Regulus rolled his eyes a little. Sirius had always wanted to do something—speak up against their mother, taunt people, play pranks, run around in circles if that was all he could do. He had never learned that patience and waiting and quietness were sometimes necessary to solve problems.
Or that some problems weren't his to solve. Which it sounded like the Potters' childlessness hadn't been.
"She still had one. What was she so upset about?"
This time, Regulus closed his eyes. He had to hope that it was Azkaban that had made his brother so callous, or the locket he wore. The Sirius he knew would never have spoken so lightly of taking someone's child away.
"Not like they missed him, not really," Sirius muttered, and tilted back the bottle for another drink.
Regulus crept soundlessly back up the stairs to the hidden room where Kreacher had first brought him. No way he could approach Sirius, not right now. He would have to reach out to other members of the family first.
And work on destroying that bloody Horcrux.
"When you are ready, Mr. Malfoy."
Harry took a deep breath and held his wand over the patch of sand they were Transfiguring into glasses today. He thought he was actually starting to see relationships between the Transfigurations they did, like glass being made from sand.
You hopefully see the bloody relationship, with the OWLS approaching.
"Commuto arenam!"
The air around him flickered. Harry thought he saw a small white bolt leap from his wand to the sand.
And then his desk exploded.
Harry found himself falling face-down on the floor, his arm wrapped defensively around his head, while wooden splinters flew in all directions and people shouted. McGonagall shouted more than anyone else, lifting shields that Harry thought, hoped, were protecting other students from his explosion. And then everything was over but the ticking sound and the subdued chatter of frightened children.
"Mr. Malfoy!"
Harry licked his lips and stood up. McGonagall was glaring at him with her lips so tight that she looked as if she would never smile again. Hermione and Ron were gaping at him from behind their own overturned desk.
"Er," he said weakly.
"What was that, Mr. Malfoy?"
"I don't know!" And Harry didn't. He hadn't practiced many spells over the holidays—Mother would have had a fit after the ritual, and he'd been too depressed to do it before—but his Transfiguration had been fine last term.
"Did you get a new wand?" McGonagall approached, hand held out imperiously for his. Harry gave it to her and watched her turn it in circles, frowning at it as if it were a deadly weapon.
Well, of course it was. But she was treating it more like one than the other wands in the classroom.
"No, Professor McGonagall, it's the same as it's always been."
"Hmmm." McGonagall gave him an intensely skeptical look, as if to say that she knew he was lying but couldn't see how, and held out his wand to give back to him. "Please go to the hospital wing after class, Mr. Malfoy. Sometimes overpowered magic is the first sign of a fever."
Harry concealed a sigh. Draco was going to have a fit. So were his parents when Draco inevitably wrote to them. "Yes, Professor."
....
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