The Story of Regulus Black - Years 5-7

XCV. Twenty Hours: Part I

Chapter Notes: all italicized dialogue (in the beginning) is being spoken in french
CW: self-harm (not in the form of c*tting)

The run back to the Beauxbatons from that circular clearing in the middle of the surrounding forest had never felt longer. Regulus felt like hours were passing between every stride, days between every breath, months between the gaps of one tree to another. Regulus had to ground himself, to tell him that this peculiar passing of time wasn't real, that it had been mere minutes since he left Lestrange Manor and he still had well over nineteen hours left to find this elusive diary that the Dark Lord so desperately wanted.

He still had nineteen hours to save Barty, and that would be enough. It had to be enough.

When he finally broke through the tree line, he didn't stop. He didn't try to catch his breath, to come up with a plan. Desperation was his plan, and he just hopes that it would be enough; that it would work. For, if it didn't, Regulus truly didn't know who else to go to.

He didn't know the time. He thought that he had a rough estimation, somewhere in the back of his mind, but he didn't know the exact number. Was it ten? Eleven? Had it even passed nine yet? He figured that he ought to find out, to see just when the marker for twenty hours would end, but he didn't want to waste the time (he thought that was rather ironic, really). So, when he walked into a desolate entrance hall save for one person, he knew that he shouldn't have been very surprised at all. Luck, after all, had proven not to be on Regulus's side for the past few hours at minimum.

"You're back," Christian commented, a hint of satisfaction in his voice as though he thought that Regulus was coming to specifically see him.

"I don't have time for this," Regulus snapped, voice full of so much venom that he saw Christian physically recoil.

Even then, he truly didn't seem to be getting the point. "Where have you been?" He inquired, looking at Regulus's splotchy cheeks and dirt stained clothes, the small flecks of snow that still clung to his hair and the shoulders of his robes and the leaves that were bound to be sitting right beside them. "You look horrible."

Regulus didn't even respond. He simply passed Christian, never having slowed to anything less than a jog and speeding back up to a run. Christian watched him go, eyes narrowed in suspicion as he considered his options. He figured that he shouldn't follow Regulus, for that would be much too obvious. Though, they were patrolling together an abnormally high amount for the next few days (it wasn't all Christian's doing, just a few off-handed comments that had made it to the right ears), so he decided that those would be the perfect opportunities to question Regulus as to just where he had been and why he was in such a panicked rush to get somewhere else.

And if the patrols weren't a viable option, there was always the ball.

Regulus stood in the corridor, his fist having rapped so hard against the wood that his knuckles were sore and the skin was on the brink of coming apart. He was tapping his foot, pulling at the skin around his nails, looking at his watch and feeling incapacitating levels of anxiety ebbing at the edge of his mind. He knocked again, because he didn't know what else to do, and he heard a very irritated voice shouting incoherent words from the other side. He didn't look over when he heard footsteps down the hall, he didn't react when students began commenting on the odd behavior of Regulus Black as they returned to their rooms for the night, he simply waited and waited and waited and felt the time passing by as though it was a physical entity being ripped right out of him.

He was biting the skin on his lips when the door was swung open, a very disheveled-looking Deacon Ackland standing in its frame. He looked at Regulus through narrowed and sunken eyes, dimmed and encapsulated in a ring of dark circles. "What the fuck do you want?" He demanded, and Regulus didn't even have it in himself to recoil. He simply continued to bite his lips and pull away strings of skin from his fingers, tapping his foot and shifting his weight as he resisted the urge to check his watch yet again and attempted to get rid of all of the nervous energy that would likely come back to bite him later on.