In the Melancholy Moonlight, Part 5: Dark Matter

Chapter 256: Wage War on Gravity

LUCY:

I'd just finished up my letter to Cedric when I heard Hermione shout downstairs.

"Harry? Lucy? Ron, wake up! HARRY! LUCY!"

"WE'RE OKAY!" I shouted back, jumping up and darting from the bedroom. "We're up here, it's okay, we're both okay!"

"You're both gits!" Ron shouted.

I sighed. "Sorry!"

Harry got to his feet and joined me in the doorway, sighing as well. "Merlin, I hope they don't think we were up to anything scandalous."

"They won't once they see what you found," I replied as I gestured to the letter and photograph in his hand. "Come on, let's go downstairs."

I started to lead the way, but Harry's voice stopped me dead in my tracks.

"Lucy, come back up here, will you?"

I turned immediately and did so. "Yes?"

"R.A.B. I think I've found him."

Harry pointed to the only other door on the landing, directly at a sign reading Do Not Enter Without the Express Permission of Regulus Arcturus Black.

"Ron! Hermione! Harry found R.A.B.!" I called. "Come up here, quick!"

Two sets of pounding footsteps rushed up the stairs, and they joined us in front of the door at once.

"Sirius's brother?" Hermione asked breathlessly.

"He was a Death Eater, Sirius told me about him, he joined up when he was really young and then got cold feet and tried to leave," Harry explained, "so they killed him."

Hermione gasped. "That fits! If he was a Death Eater he had access to Voldemort, and if he became disenchanted, then he would have wanted to bring Voldemort down!"

"Wait, the locket," Ron said. "Do you think — ?"

Before he could even finish the question, I had grabbed my wand and unlocked the door and walked inside.

Unlike Sirius, Regulus seemed to be quite proud to be a Black. The family crest and motto was painted over his bed, and the walls were decorated with Slytherin banners.

Hermione hurried over to inspect a collage of newspaper clippings on the wall. "They're all about Voldemort. Regulus seems to have been a fan for a few years before he joined the Death Eaters."

Harry, on the other hand, gravitated toward a picture of the Slytherin Quidditch team he'd spotted on the wall. I turned to investigate a nearby trunk, but I was interrupted by the sound of Harry gasping.

"What is it?" I asked, going over to stand beside him.

He pointed wordlessly to a boy on the Slytherin Quidditch team who looked exactly like Tom Riddle.

"What?" I breathed as I yanked the photograph from his hand. "But — that's not possible, it can't be — "

"What's up?" Ron inquired.

Hermione looked up from the newspaper clippings. "Did someone find it?"

"No, but — " Harry started. "Looks like Voldemort played Quidditch."

"WHAT?" Ron and Hermione both burst out, rushing over to see the picture for themselves.

"It can't actually be him," I said, "but, well, I was with Harry in Dumbledore's lessons last year, I know what Tom Riddle looked like as a student, and that has to be — well, surely it's not him, we know what he looked like after he was a student too, and he didn't look like that, certainly not in the 70s, but — could he have had a son?"