It was early morning, a mist set in the park across the street, Grimmauld Place grey and quiet. The door to Number 12 opened carefully and Kreacher stuck his head out. An owl had landed on the house step and hooted, fluttering its wings with impatience, hopping about. A small bag was tied to its leg. Kreacher reached out and took the bird, dragging it inside with a surprised "hoo!"

Up the stairs he carried the owl, the bag still tied on, and he knocked on the door at the top of the third floor landing.

"Kreacher, you don't have to knock," came Regulus's voice.

Kreacher pushed open the door just a smidgeon and slid into the room through a narrow space rather than opening it all the way. "Master has received this owl, which Kreacher has fetched from the stoop for Master Regulus."

Regulus looked up from a map he'd spread out on his desk and had been pouring over for some time. He was trying at locating Little Hangleton on it. He took in Kreacher's rough grip on the owl's wings, carrying it like it was about to explode at any given moment - well at arm's length. "Kreacher, really, you could've just taken the delivery, you needn't have kidnapped the owl..." Regulus got up and crossed the room, relieving Kreacher of his bounty. The owl hooted miserably, and Regulus untied the bag from it's ankle. It was a fairly miserable-looking creature, not one of the official post owls. He looked half-starved. "Kreacher, go get a bowl of water and something for this bird to eat."

"What does the bird eat?" Kreacher asked.

"I don't know... get a bit of that roast we had last night, I guess. They eat rats don't they? I mean, the roast isn't a rat but it's meat, at least? And don't we maybe have some old owl nuts in the attic? Merlin knows where Adolf's gone to, so we needn't be saving them for him anymore."

Kreacher nodded and rushed off.

Regulus looked at the poor owl in his hands and plopped it onto a chair to wait for it's dinner. He took the velvet bag and opened it up, reaching inside and finding a small vial of opalescent liquid and a rolled up note. He turned the vial over, wondering what it was, then set it down on the desk and unrolled the parchment.

Most interesting. - S.

Regulus looked at the vial. Snape, clearly, but what the hell was the vial of? Perhaps a potion? He lifted it up again and looked it over.

"Memory," Cadmus Peverell said from his frame, his voice lazy.

Regulus looked over at him.

"That there is a memory. It's bottled up to be viewed in a pensieve. Have you got one?"

"Mother does. In the library," Regulus answered. He turned the vial over again, watching the swirling colors in the grey liquid. "I've never used one... I don't think..." for even as he said it, he could almost imagine himself staring down into one.

"You simply pour the memory into the pensieve and then put your face in it."

Regulus raised an eyebrow. "That sounds... incorrect, sir."

"It's precisely how it's done."

"It sounds like something Sirius would tell me to do just to guffaw at me when I've done it."

Cadmus Peverell puffed, "I am not a nasty older brother, Mr. Black, I had enough experiences of the sort with my own older brother, without you accusing me of being like him! Don't do it if you're so suspicious!"

Regulus really wanted to know what Snape had found and why it was "most interesting".

Picking up the owl gently, and waving his wand so that the portrait followed after him, Regulus made his way downstairs to Walburga's library. He put the owl down on another chair and went to the cupboard where Walburga's pensieve was stored. The pensieve was heavy and made of thick grey stone lined with mother of pearl. It reminded Regulus of something that sent a shiver into his spine.

He had a flash of cold wet stone beneath his palms and knees, of the smell of algae and salt water... a feeling...

Then it was gone.

He was in the library, balancing the great stone basin, pushing it onto the table. The portrait of Cadmus Peverell watched from his frame, one eyebrow raised. He'd seen the flicker of Regulus's face. "What is it?" he asked.

Regulus shook his head, "Nothing, I don't - I don't really remember. It's nothing.."

"Kreacher has got the food for the owl, Master, just like Master Regulus asked." The elf came into the library carrying an old box of owl treats and a plate of roast. He carried it to the chair where the owl was, pushed the plate up before the owl and shook the box of treats so that several large nuts fell out with a clinking noise against the china plate. The owl knocked on the nuts with it's beak, as though checking that they were real, then began gobbling up the food the elf had given to him. Kreacher looked at it with a mixture of pity and judgement, waiting while the owl ate, holding a bowl of water.

"Thank you Kreacher," Regulus said. He looked at the vial again and the parchment, at the curling handwriting of Severus Snape, and he opened the cork of the bottle. He had no idea what to expect. He poured the liquid out, and watched it pool into the basin, continuing to move and swirl about...

Another flash. Another basin. Black liquid... like the smoke that followed the cloaks of a dementor, swirling... then slowly it solidified so that it was like mercury... Was it another pensive? The one he could imagine himself having stood near before? But this basin that he thought of was different - it was not memory in that one. 

Back in the library again. Regulus stumbled back a step, his breath caught. 

He had half expected to back into a wall of stone... like in a cavern...

"Regulus?" Cadmus Peverell actually sounded concerned. "Boy?"

"I'm fine." His voice was even less convincing this time than it had been the first time, and Regulus gripped the edge of the desk. He peered over the edge of the pensieve again, at the opal liquid, and he felt his stomach knot up.

"Is Master needing something? Kreacher can help him with anything, anything Kreacher can do, Kreacher will do for his Master."

"No Kreacher. Take care of the owl." Regulus commanded.

"Yes Master Regulus, Kreacher will take care of the owl."

Regulus drew a deep breath and he plunged his face deep into the opalescent liquid.

It was funny, how the memory worked. It was Snape's memory of the thought that Voldemort had, and it played like watching a telly screen on a telly screen, and as though it were static-y and slightly unclear.

The edges were jagged like the edges of Regulus's own memories, but in a more purposeful way. These had edges like they had been cut off, like the way his hair had sharp lines where the agrafo had been drawn too close to the scalp...

What Snape - and therefore Regulus, seeing this through Snape - understood of the flicker of Voldemort's mind was that there had been a doctor, and he had worn a white coat and talked in very calm tones, even as he did unthinkable things. There had been something akin to the cruciatus, but a muggle variation with wires and knobs and a bit forced between teeth. The doctor's face loomed, nightmarish and cruel...

Afterward (for there was a clear sense of afterward), the boy sat on a hard mattress in a small, stringent white room, and stared at the wall as he desperately tried to regain himself and put the pieces back into order. The boy's entire being had been torn apart, like a piece of paper ripped into bits and trying to glue it back up.

Nobody was there to help... nobody to care what he'd just been through.

"I hear you've give my nurses a good deal of trouble, Tom. Not to mention how poorly you've repaid poor Mrs. Cole for taking you in at Wool's." A man with a very unkind face clucked his tongue in disapproval. "Let's make you better for Mrs. Cole's sake, shall we? Dear woman has done nothing to hurt you."

"But she has."

"Nonsense! Now don't accuse people of things you know are untrue, Tom. I've known Mrs. Cole a very good deal of time, much longer than you've been alive, even!"

But the woman had - she had - she was always screaming, cursing, throwing a glass of gin against a wall, and there were the laughing, mocking faces... 

"He's mad as the woman who gave him birth," clucked the woman - the woman was speaking to a man - the doctor? - someone else? - clutching another of the glasses she broke against the wall. "If it weren't for the crowns given to care for him, I'd right chucked him out by now. It's the look to his eyes...."

There was anger bubbling up in the boy as he sat on the mattress in the stringent white room. Oh so much anger, which seemed to course through the veins as white-hot as electricity... just as painful as the electricity that came from the wires and knobs...

"This is what the muggles do," a high rasping voice said, and it was almost a thought more than spoken aloud, the fleeting thought that went alongside the image. "That is what they do to those who are unlike them... what they would do to the witches wizards if left unchecked. They've done it before... history repeats itself... they will do it again... first there will be obscurials and murders, unfair trials to accuse the witches and wizards of things not done by magic, electroshock treatments... Attempts to remove the unnatural... to stifle magic because they believed it dangerous and they believed it something that needed to be controlled and limited... because they didn't understand it... Because I am not like them. Because we are not like them. Filth. Slime. Abhorrent..."

The memory lasted less than two minutes and Regulus had pulled back from the basin, his stomach turned by what little he'd seen, but how much each little bit would represent in a bigger, fuller picture.

Regulus sat down heavily onto the floor.

Kreacher was there in a moment. He looked at Regulus with concern.

Regulus felt overwhelmed... dizzy from what he'd seen... what he knew now.

"Master," Kreacher held the bowl of water up to Regulus's mouth. "Kreacher's Master must drink, he is very pale, and Kreacher worries..."

But as the water crossed Regulus's lips, Kreacher standing there, a flash of a nightmare went through Regulus's head and he reacted by shouting and lashing out, his hand knocking the bowl and it went flying from Kreacher's hand, crashing across the library, the china shattering, and Kreacher let out a shriek of horror and ran to get the broken pieces of the bowl as Regulus reacted to a stirring in his chest, deep in his chest, a dark, dark place somewhere there that he had been pushing back, restraining, keeping quiet.

You've done it now, he thought fleetingly, you've awakened what lay dormant... what had been obliterated...

He had heard Sirius describe the feeling of Achlys before, the way it felt to have a dementor in your chest, how it felt like darkness had filled up the cavities of space in there. To Regulus, it felt like it had been poured in. Dark black liquid, filling him like a vessel... and as it did, a memory filled Regulus's mind as clear as any other.

A heavy, invisible weight pressed on Regulus's back, holding him down, leaning over a stone basin, his cheek laying on the cold stone...

"Do you know, boy, how a pensieve works?" Voldemort asked.

"No sir."

"It is a sort of bowl into which a potion is poured that allows you to see the extracted memories of others when added to the solution... That might allow you to understand the concept of the potion that we are about to brew... nothing like it is taught in the walls of Hogwarts..."

"What is it?" Regulus questioned, his breath short.

"Cauchemar liquide," Voldemort said elegantly, "Or somnum exterreri solebat."

"Liquid Nightmare?" translated Regulus.

Suddenly there was a loud sound - ringingly loud in a silent cavern - and Regulus flinched as an object hit the basin directly before him. The locket. Silver and dark amber. The insignia of Slytherin.

"An old family heirloom," Voldemort breathed.

And Regulus could see his own finger tracing bloodlines through Walburga Black's ancestory book, could see Salazar Slytherin connecting all the way to Gaunt, to Marvolo and Morfin and the crossed-out line where Merope belonged, where Thomas Riddle would have been married in, to the un-added line of Voldemort himself...

"And so... so much more," Voldemort voice continued on, and Regulus saw his mouth twist into an endearing smile as he stroked the locket. "You might say that it means so much that it has sort of become... a part of me."

"...become... a part of me."

"A part of me."

The words rang in Regulus's mind so hard as they seemed to echo...

"Liquid Nightmare is not simply brewed but it is extracted... It is what results when the venom of a dementor is sipped and extracted from the mind.... the potion induces excruciating hallucinations, such as that which they may experience during the administration of the dementor's kiss..."

Regulus felt a chill slip down his spine.

A small, pitch black vial.

The liquid that filled his chest cavity.

"Gather your wits about you boy."

"NO!" Regulus snapped out of the memory, and he was gasping, looking around the library, everything so clear to him, and he saw Kreacher in the corner, clutching the broken china bowl and smacking his face against the wall as punishment, and Cadmus Peverell's portrait staring at him with a mixture of interest and horror... Regulus was shaking.

"Locket," he choked. "Locket. The locket."

"Boy?" Cadmus asked.

"The locket, there's a locket... part of him... of course it is... it is, he told me, he said it, he all but said it was one... part of him... part of him... he said it... guarded by liquid nightmare... could be anywhere... the basin... where was the basin..." Regulus's mind was racing, his cool gone, the darkness in his chest filling him up, curling about the crevices and cavities, liquid and heavy and all-consuming and bloody hell was this what Sirius had been through all these years? When Achlys raised up in him? Was it like this for Sirius? Regulus clutched at his chest. "The locket, the locket... part of him... part of him..."

"Regulus?"

Lily sat up suddenly, breaking out of James Potter's grasp, knocking him a bit to the side.

"S'matter?" he murmured, barely awake.

Lily stared across the room, her eyes wide, hand clutching her chest. 

"Lil?" James's voice was bleary.

Tears were in her eyes, pooling so that she could hardly see through them. 

James sat up now, too, reaching to the nightstand for his glasses, shoving them on his face. He looked at her, seeing clearly now the expression on her face. "Evans??? What is it?"

"I - it's Regulus - he --" she closed her eyes, squeezed them tightly shut. "He's very distressed."

"Distressed?"

"Yes, he - he feels -- oh it's so dark, James. It's so dark and terrible he dropped the walls down - his occlumency, that is..."

"Is he alright?"

"He's so distressed..."

"But physically?"

"I think so."

"Where is he?"

"I don't know..."

"Is he with You Know Who?"

"I don't know."

"Bloody hell." James rolled out bed and he was up and pulling on clothing. He didn't know what he was doing it for - it just seemed the thing to do, because as soon as they knew what they could do to help him, he wanted to be ready to go and to help Regulus Black anyway that he could. He tried to shove off thoughts of clocks strewn on beaches from his mind. Whatever his nightmares were about these days, it wasn't as important as Regulus Black.

But Regulus Black regained control of himself before they could go, and the walls were back up, and Lily could no longer feel him, and she worried and clutched her chest, remembering the feeling that had filled up her chest... Darkness, pain, worry, fear, sadness... and, oddly enough, pity. Deep-in-the-soul pity.

Pity for a boy - not just for Regulus, but another boy - someone who Regulus was feeling pity for... a boy without love.