Alice was shivering even before she tried to get herself upright. Her eyes were straining with tears of worry and grief even without the loss of her familiar common room in place of the misty gloom settling around her. Then she blinked, blinked again, and slowly, with every forced breath, realized the body before her was indeed there.

She screamed. She screamed, and kept screaming and would surely continue even after her throat was swollen shut and even as she began to hurt her own ears she couldn't look away-

Even after she felt his strong arms trying to pull her away, pressing her face into the bronze eagle emblem stitched across his school robes, she couldn't stop screaming. It felt like she'd never be able to blink again without seeing the already paling pallor, the sightless gray eyes.

James had crashed into the bottom of the gravestone, face first against the name, so when he finally got his vision to stop blurring, the name Riddle was all he saw. He heard the screams, and he didn't need to turn to know what they meant. He saw out of the corner of his eye Peter vomiting into the diamond-encrusted cauldron, Sirius rubbing his back and muttering to himself again. Still he had to fight off the urge to look, all eyes drawn to Cedric, and the book laying open across his chest, the reason for his death scrawled on the words right across his heart.

So it was to everyone's amazement when Peter Wormtail Pettigrew forced himself off the cauldron, pushed away Sirius's hands, and grabbed the book to read "The Death Eaters." He only allowed himself one more moment of hesitation, whispering an uttered apology for no one's ears, before he read relentlessly.

Maybe it was another way of atonement, maybe he just couldn't stand another second of being stuck in the presence, it was even possible he was doing this in some vain attempt to redirect their wordless shock and horror into fury upon the person who'd done it, but whatever the reason, Regulus watched every word he forced out. His jaw never unclenched, he stood above the body and recited, almost in one breath, like a eulogy You-Know-Who's second coming.

His cruelty, his vanity, his disappointment in his followers. Regulus stayed where he was, as unable to do anything to stop him as he was to look away from the sight. He stayed on his knees the whole time and was repulsed at his own actions, but had no strength to get to his feet and correct this. He thought of Bellatrix and her fanatical devotion, her already bloodthirsty nature; she'd been whispering this was the promise of his future. He thought of how Sirius had always tried to distance himself from this and wound up in the same place as her. He thought of his mum and dad and let a few tears fall free as he finally admitted to himself he could never be what they wanted.