Blood runs wherever his fingertips graze me | Jegulus

Prologue

People often say that you don't realize the mistakes you've made until it's too late to fix them. They say that there comes a time in your life when you look back at the exact point where you deviated, and you have no choice but to accept it and move on, regretting your decisions for the rest of your life.

At that moment, Regulus Black couldn't help but envy the people who looked back at their past and knew what mistakes to be sorry for. The truth was that Regulus wasn't able to establish the exact point where his life began to deviate from the right path.

He had come to theorize that it had happened so gradually that it would be impossible for him to place a starting point, and then there was the terrifying possibility that his life had started off misguided.

He sometimes consoled himself with the thought that his life had collapsed when he joined the ranks of the Dark Lord and tried to focus all his regret on that. In his most lucid moments, however, he allowed himself to admit that this was only the tip of the iceberg of his accumulation of misfortunes.

He also couldn't pin down just one reason why he'd decided his life was at a point of a catastrophe of no return. He supposed it had been a cluster. When promises began to fail, expectations to wane, and little by little the Dark Lord ended up becoming a heartless maniac in his eyes rather than the Pure-blood saviour that had been described to him from his most innocent age. And when he found himself with no other choice but to serve the arduous desires of that newly discovered maniac, Regulus decided that at some point, his life had taken a course it shouldn't have.

The final straw, of course, was when the Dark Lord decided to attack something that was his. That was the moment when Regulus decided that he would sink, and that he would drag his dearest Lord with him.

He knew his secret; his deepest, darkest, disgusting and corrupted secret, and Regulus would take care of squeezing it out enough to be able to use it to destroy him, and doing right it under the nose of the Dark Lord himself so that he would know that it was Regulus who ended up sentencing his reign.

His footsteps echoed through the ancient, dusty library like drums in a cave. Regulus found himself flooded with memories of Hogwarts; when he went to the library alone and he read those old Muggle books that one of his friends lent him when no one was looking.

The dark arts section was restricted, giving access only to members of the Ministry and Aurors, but with the right contacts anyone could have access to those volumes and, luckily or unfortunately, Regulus could boast of contacts in abundance.

He passed the librarian, not bothering to greet him, and walked to the back of the library; as he advanced the lights got dimmer, and the tables were gradually becoming emptier. When he approached the door leading to the Dark Arts section, there was a tall, broad-shouldered guy waiting for him, watching him approach with a furrowed brow.

When Regulus reached the man's height, he realized that his size was not at all normal. He was at least seven heads taller than him, and Regulus was sure he could be at least ten or eleven feet tall.

Regulus guessed that he was a half-breed of giant and human, and couldn't help frowning at the thought.

Regulus looked up, positioning his neck in a rather uncomfortable way. He cleared his throat impatiently, wrinkling his nose at the unpleasant, strong smell of the half-breed.

The giant looked down, his big bulging eyes watching Regulus for a few seconds, then asking, "Name?"

"Regulus Black," Regulus replied, preferring to avoid trouble beforehand, "I have a special permit signed by Lucius Malfoy. I require to enter the restricted section."