Stars Shine Darkly ★ Regulus Black

Chapter One: Playing Merpeople in the Bath

The steam twisted around him, winding into shimmering emerald spirals. It rose out of the bath in the form of hazy, misty manticores and hippogriffs, dragons and sea serpents, a snarling chimaera that charged into the tiled wall and burst into a thousand pearlescent curls.

Regulus tilted his head back to watch the steam drift upwards and bounce against the ceiling. The bathwater lapped against his chin, warm and soothing and smelling of home.

If he stayed there long enough they might forget about him. If he stayed there until the bubbles dissolved and the water turned cold and his skin puckered and wrinkled and the Hogwarts Express came and went without him, they might all forget he had ever been there at all.

He took a deep breath and slid down the slippery tub, submerging himself fully beneath the water.

His hair was seaweed, drifting in the water and tickling his face. His limbs were oddly weightless as they floated, just like in those photographs of space-muggles Sirius had stolen from Merlin-knew-where.

It was pleasant under the water. Mother's shouts and Sirius's stomping weren't fully silenced, but they sounded more distant. Regulus could imagine that they were happening somewhere else, someplace where he wouldn't have to contend with their sulky moods afterwards.

He slipped lower. His foot, sliding along the bottom of the tub, knocked against the bath plug.

When they'd been younger, before Sirius had gone to Hogwarts and found himself new friends to torment, back when it had just been the two of them, Sirius-and-Regulus, so close in age and so alike in appearance that they could have been twins, back then, Sirius had told him that all plug holes led to different universes. To terrifying underworlds and fantastical realms.

This plug hole, Sirius had said, the one in their shared bathroom on the top floor, left to a dark and gloomy cavern filled with the souls of the dead.

It had been humiliating, the way Regulus had cried all night long afterwards. His heart had stopped in terror every time he closed his eyes, while visions of the dead, stretching towards him, reaching out for him, danced across his eyelids. He hadn't slept for a fortnight and hadn't bathed for even longer. Sirius had been punished with a month of dinners in isolation which, in hindsight, probably hadn't seemed like that much of a punishment to the boy who'd detested family dinners, even at the age of seven.

Sirius rarely told Regulus stories these days. His tales and his imagination were reserved for his new friends, his Hogwarts friends, his Gryffindor friends.

Regulus wondered whether he would make friends, in Slytherin, who could tell stories as vividly as Sirius did. He doubted it. He thought he would be lucky if he managed to make any friends at all.

Suddenly, as in those nightmares of the plug hole and the cavern and the dead, a bony, long-fingered hand tightened around Regulus's shoulder. He forgot he was underwater and opened his mouth to scream, choking as the bathwater rushed in. The hand jerked him upright and he came up retching, spluttering, gasping for air.

He gripped the edge of the copper bathtub and tried to regain his breath. His sopping hair dripped down into his face and he blinked furiously, his eyes stinging, as he pushed it away. And as he wiped the soapy water from his eyes and his mouth the blurry image of his house-elf, standing on a stool beside the tub, came into focus.

Kreacher did not look pleased.

"Master Regulus is too old to be playing merpeople in the bath. Master Regulus will be going to school in September."

"I wasn't playing merpeople," he protested. "I was just... resting."

"Master Regulus does not have time for resting."