Curse Breaker (or how to find answers)

Boys don't cry and yet a tear ran down his cheek - pt.2

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Frenetically scribbling over what he had just previously written, Regulus took his head in both his hands, ruffling his hair, as he was leaning on top of his book. Both his elbows on the table — oh, his mother wouldn't be proud of his late night manners —, he was trying to hold himself awake, though his eyelids threatened to close at any given moment, with how heavy they had gotten.

Evan, Dorcas, and Barty and Pandora as well, all decided to go to the stupid Christmas party organised right before the Christmas holidays in the Gryffindor common room, maybe even just for the sake of crashing it. Regulus declined the invitation when Evan tried to drag him there. For once, they hadn't managed to bring him with them at the social event. Even when Barty laughed and tried to trick him into going with them. Regulus had been adamant on that one.

For nothing in the world he would have put a foot in the Gryffindor common room that night. He had more important matters to attend to. Like decrypting this sodding prophecy.

"Give back what was taken

Repair what was broken

If you loose yourself on the way

Don't forget to restore what existed long before"

If the author of this prophecy had wanted to be the most vague anyone had ever been while writing a prophecy, they couldn't have been closer, honestly. Regulus sighed. This riddle looked like thousands of others; he had found it in a book about a story oddly similar to Leif and Griffith's, in the Restricted Section the day before, but he could have found it in any other book, to be fair. Regulus was used to foggy and mystic prophecies, after years of watching the stars at night and finding all the stories and myths that were linked to them, but he had rarely hated it more than then. It wasn't the time to be so mysterious; why prophecies couldn't be more direct and more simple?

He had a feeling this prophecy was holding answers he had been searching for for months — the book he had found it in told a story way too close to the Cysgyu curse, Regulus couldn't help but thinking it was an obvious hint. There was probably no other book in the entire library of Hogwarts that could help him more than this one; at least it was his feeling. He could feel it. Regulus had been blessed with a good intuition, and so, he stood by it.

Looking to the side, to the window, he noticed it was snowing outside. Frost was drawing patterns on the cold foggy window covered in steam. His desk only lit with a simple candle was blurrily reflecting in the window. Regulus looked at the little snow he could see falling outside for a few minutes, before turning back to his work. Maybe tomorrow, the entirety of Hogwarts would be covered in a thick white coat.

It had been literal hours he had been rummaging on this prophecy; the party was probably on the verge of ending, by now, and maybe some students were already making their way back to their dorms. It was late.

Regulus had made lists of what the words of this prophecy could be referring to; he had drawn mind maps around the words he judged to be keywords. He had linked words together like a goddam puzzle, searched for definitions, etymologies in Latin, drawn arrows and underlined some terms. He had tried to find answers in other books he already had in his own personal library.

But he got nothing new out of it; he already knew all of that: when curses induced by a feeling of love occurred, it often implied repairing something or restoring something, or else the curse was bound to last forever.

But here, in Leif and Griffith's case, what was to be repaired, to be restored? Their brotherhood? It made Regulus want to throw up. It reminded him too much of Sirius. And that was too recent. Every time he tried to push his own life aside, and think seriously about Leif and Griffith's relationship as brothers, to think about it objectively without letting his feeling and thoughts invade his reflexion, his mind was uncontrollably clouded with thoughts of his very own brother, that he absolutely did not want to see in his thoughts.