Stars Shine Darkly ★ Regulus Black

Chapter Five: Slimy Little Snake

Dormitories were awful and smelly and noisy and disgusting and Regulus didn't know how anyone had ever managed to survive an entire seven years at Hogwarts. He wasn't sure how he had managed to survive seven days.

Sleepless nights were nothing new to him - even as a baby he would lie awake in the darkness for hours. His mother used to love telling anyone who would listen how Sirius would scream and scream and scream himself to the point of exhaustion, while Regulus would simply lie in his cradle as still and silent as a corpse. The way she always told the story made it clear that she approved of Sirius's tantrums - of his "liveliness" - far more than Regulus's meekness and docility.

And Regulus supposed that he ought to have known how disgusting other boys could be, since he had grown up in the same house as Sirius. But sharing a dormitory was so much worse than living across the landing from someone. At least at home he had been able to escape to the sanctuary of his own bedroom and bar Sirius from entry.

Regulus lay on his back, his fists bunched up in the bedcovers, and stared unblinking at the heavy draped canopy above his bed. He longed for the familiar surroundings of home: for his honey-scented night candle, his celestial eiderdown, the stupid stuffed hippogriff which he had, in the end, decided against bringing to school in case the other boys thought him childish and laughed at him for it.

Why had he cared so much about what they might think, or say, or do? Only Evan was a proper pureblood. The others' opinions didn't (shouldn't) matter in the slightest.

He knew that.

(But why did he still care so much about what other people thought?)

He huffed and rolled heavily onto his side, dragging his bedcovers over his head in a futile attempt to block out the sound of the half-blood's snoring which echoed from the far side of the dormitory.

Was it a half-blood thing, this ridiculous snoring? Sirius was the noisiest, most irritating person that Regulus knew, but even he had never snored like this. Perhaps it was one of those deficiencies of muggle blood that people were always talking about. Perhaps he ought to ask Professor Slughorn - he had told Regulus to go to him with any concerns he might have, after all.

The snoring half-blood made a horrid throaty, grunting, snorting sound, the sort of sound that Sirius used to make when he would hide in a cupboard and pretend to be an erkling to scare Regulus.

Regulus wrinkled his nose and peeped out from beneath his bedsheets. The dormitory was almost entirely dark; only the gloomiest, moon-dappled glow from the windows gave form to the various boy-shaped lumps and shadows in the room. None of them looked particularly erkling-like, but he pulled the covers back over his head, just in case.

A few nights into his suffering at Hogwarts, when the snoring had become unbearably loud, Regulus had ventured to leave the dormitory. He'd tiptoed across the cold stone floor, bundled up in a thick woollen jumper a few sizes too big for him that he had absolutely, definitely not pilfered from Sirius, and crept down the corridor into the common room to sit in front of the dying embers of the fire and feel sorry for himself.

He mustn't have been as quiet as he'd thought, however, as Evan came padding across the common floor to join him shortly after.

"Can't sleep?" he'd asked.

Regulus had shrugged, unwilling to admit that he felt scared and homesick and lonely, so so lonely, but that was all it had taken. Evan had curled up beside him on the sofa and talked to him, just talked, telling him stories about his father and his uncles back home in Berkshire, about the rest of his sprawling family spread out across France and Belgium, about their bickering and their nonsense and their achievements in duelling.