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Breaking Tradition


Regulus sent Kreacher to tell Walburga he wouldn’t be coming home that night. “Master Regulus knows that Kreacher’s Mistress will be wondering after where he is?” Kreacher croaked quietly, staring up at his Master.

“Yeah, well, don’t tell her. Tell her I commanded you not to tell her. I’ll deal with it myself tomorrow.”

Kreacher stared up at Regulus.

“I command you not to bring her to me, even if she commands you to,” Regulus added. “I forbid you to tell her anything about my location or who I am with. Do you understand, Kreacher?”

Kreacher murmured something about her ironing his fingers for this, but he nodded and his ears twisted flat to his head. “Is Master needing Kreacher to transport him some place?” Kreacher asked lowly.

“No,” Regulus replied.

Kreacher bowed. “Very well, then.” And with a crack, the old elf had disapparated.

Regulus stood there in the dusty corridor of the Leaky Cauldron for several moments, staring at the spot where the old elf had been, and then he took a deep breath and turned ‘round to go back to the room.

Maryrose was kneeling before the floo, stoking a fire. She looked up at him when he came in, her hair a soft shade of buttermilk blonde. He closed the door and locked it, leaning against it and watching the fire catch in the grate, watching it reflect off her hair. His eyes flickered to the window and he walked over and closed the shutters.

Maryrose looked up. “We’re okay, Reg.”

Regulus was sealing the shutters. He turned around. “I don’t think you really get how serious this is.”

Maryrose had finished fixing the fire and she turned around and leaned forward against her knees, looking up at him, “So tell me, then.”

“I can’t. It makes you in danger if I do.” He started pacing.

“I feel like you think I’m in danger anyway,” she replied with a shrug.

Regulus gnawed his lower lip.

Maryrose got up and stepped in front of him, cutting him off from his pacing route. “Regulus, I trust you. I’d tell you literally anything. Do you trust me?”

He blinked a her.

She tilted her head.

“Remember I told you… about Severus Snape… reading minds?”

Maryrose nodded.

Regulus motioned for her to come over to the chairs by the fire and he sat down, his wand clutched in his fist. He hadn’t put it away since the fight with James at Fortescue’s. No. Not James, he told himself, Snape. The fight with Snape.

Maryrose looked at the wand, then back up at Regulus’s face.

“That was Snape. In Fortescue’s, Maryrose. Not James.” Regulus bit his lower lip, “I don’t know what exactly, or why, but he’s used Polyjuice potion to look like James Potter… and it has something to do with Voldemort being at the school.”

Maryrose’s eyes widened, “Voldemort being at the school? He’s at the school?”

“Well, not anymore.” Regulus hesitated. “Listen. If I tell you this… it cannot - absolutely cannot for any reason, any reason at all Maryrose - go past us.”

“I swear to you that it won’t,” Maryrose replied solemnly.

Regulus said, “Professor Gaunt was Voldemort in disguise. Also using polyjuice potion. That’s why he’s been sacked, I’m guessing Dumbledore got suspicious or something. But while he was at the school, I figured it out and he took me one day down in the dungeons, there’s a secret passageway that leads to the old Divination room - behind Mopsus’s portrait.” Regulus paused. “He was looking for a clock, a specific clock, one that doesn’t stop ticking when you try to stop it.” He paused and got up and grabbed a bookbag he’d been carrying all day from the bed where he’d left it, next to Maryrose’s purse, and he pulled out a clock.

Maryrose stared at the clock. It was very plain, old fashioned, with big bells and it was ticking.

“He’s been looking for this clock for some time,” Regulus confessed. “He told me in the old Divination Chamber that he’d commanded Father to fetch it for him and Father died nearly two years ago.” Regulus looked the clock over. “Kreacher said that he’d been commanded Father to fetch it from Hogwarts before Father died and not to let anybody have it except for him. But Kreacher gave it to me because my command over Kreacher is greater than Father’s.”

Maryrose stood up and went over to where he stood, holding out her hand and Regulus put the clock into it. She looked it over, “What’s so special about it?”

“I don’t know. Other than it won’t stop ticking. If you try and hold the hands, it will burn you for trying.” He held out his fingers to show her the scars that had been left when he’d tried it himself.

Maryrose stared at the marks, then down at the clock face.

“It belonged to Mopsus, that’s all I know, because that’s what Voldemort told me.”

Maryrose sighed. “He had such a fetish with clocks, Mopsus I mean.” She handed the alarm clock back to Regulus.

“Yeah, he did.”

“But what good is the clock of a deadman?” Maryrose asked.

Regulus shrugged.

“Okay, so Voldemort wants the clock. You have the clock. Snape is here in Polyjuice as James… Do you reckon Voldemort thinks that James has the clock?” Maryrose questioned.

“Why would he think that?”

“Dunno,” Maryrose answered. “And wait - if Severus Snape is Polyjuiced as James… where is James?”

Regulus hadn’t been pushing that question out of his mind, afraid of how terrified he was to think up an answer. His stomach churned with the worry that suddenly bubbled up like acid in his belly. He shook his head, “I don’t know. Dead or with Voldemort, I expect.”

Maryrose looked near to tears. “He can’t be dead. Not James Potter.”

“I know. He’s … James Potter.” Regulus didn’t realize how much he looked up to James Potter until he’d said it but the moment the weight came from his tongue with the name, he knew he’d been admiring James from afar. Not in a romantic way, just in an inspired way. In the way one would look at any man or woman who was as strong a figure as James Potter was about Hogwarts. Captain of the Quidditch Team, star of the Quidditch Team no less, having done all the adventures as James, and caused as many smiles and goodness about the castle as he’d done. It was impossible, Regulus thought, to be a student at Hogwarts and not admire James Potter.

Maryrose nodded.

Regulus put the clock down on the nightstand. “I don’t know how it all works together, I don’t know what it means, but I know when he said… when he threatened you… my heart about stopped.”

Maryrose laid her hand on his chest, right over his heart.

Regulus looked down at her palm against him and then back up at her. Their eyes locked. “I just wanted to… protect you,” he said thickly, and he wondered at the funny feeling coming over him as her hand touched him like that, how he felt oddly alive like he never had before, like there was something on fire inside him, moving through his veins, molton and burning… but in a good way.

Regulus’s voice was urgent and he said, “I won’t let them take you away from me, I won’t let them hurt you. I won’t. That’s why we’re here, why we aren’t going home. Because you’re in danger there if they find you. And I’m not going to let them find you. I’ll go to the bloody ends of the earth and I’ll die there before they touch a hair on your head, Maryrose, I’ll die!”

She slid her hand onto his cheek.

“I’ll kill Voldemort or die trying!”

Tears were pouring down his face.

Maryrose swept them away with her fingers… and she stood on her tiptoes and she whispered, “I know I’m safe, Regulus, with you I know I’m safe.” And she slid her hand ‘round behind his neck and pulled him in… and he lost his breath as she kissed him.

He stared into Maryrose’s eyes as she pulled back… and she stared back into his.

He could see her in the middle of them, in the reflection in her pupil was her soul… even as the irises changed colour with her nervousness now… he could still see her there. He would always see her there.

“You know that you are already promised to Lyra Greengrass...” Voldemort’s voice snaked it’s way into Regulus’s mind, like smoke.

“The old traditions are what holds this family together!” his mum had once told him. He remembered the moment very clearly. It was after Sirius had gone to Hogwarts. The day after, when the owl came from Lucius Malfoy, telling them that Sirius had been sorted Gryffindor. His mum was in a rage, she was breaking things in her library, screaming an agonized, horrified scream that echoed through the walls and had given Regulus goosepimples up and down his arms. “Tradition is all that we have left to keep our name noble!”

He could still remember her putting him to bed that night. Stroking his hair. “At least I have one good boy left… one good boy, Regulus, to uphold the family name…”

He could see the expectation that had glinted in her eyes… see the subtle desperation… feel the clutch of her fingers on his shoulder in the presence of the Dark Lord, as though presenting him, as though holding him firm to the traditions that would save her precious family name.

The traditions he’d been raised in.

The traditions Sirius had bucked so violently.

Regulus wanted to be so brave.

“Maryrose,” he whispered and his voice cracked on her name. “In… in my family… there are… traditions…” he spoke slowly. “Certain… expectations… for… for me… for who I’m… to love.” He paused.

“They can’t tell you who to love, Regulus,” she whispered.

Her eyes still did not move from his… and her hand swept over his chest… her palm nudged the pendant she’d given him last year at Christmas, the cold metal slid over his skin.

You are Brave.

And fire sparked in him. Stronger than ever before. A blazing fire.

Fuck tradition. Fuck Lyra Greengrass. Fuck them all. All the Death Eaters, all the villians. Fuck Voldemort.

“I love you!” he shouted the words and for a moment she looked surprised by the emotion that drove them, by the vehemence he said them with. “I LOVE YOU!”

“I love you, too.”

And the moment she’d said the words, he picked her up… he could barely comprehend it… he couldn’t be close enough to her, and they fell backwards, onto the bed, their mouths pressing to one another…

It was feverish and impassioned and a blur of colour and sound and Regulus could hardly comprehend what was happening through most of it, he was so caught up in the textures and sensations and the need - need like he had never feel before, that coursed through him… He stared up at her at one point, her jaw dropped and her eyes fluttering closed and open, as though she were in the sweetest dream, but actually only sighing his name, and he thought that there had never been such a beautiful sight in all of the entire history of the universes.

They lay in the dark afterwards, side by side, catching their breath, the blankets pulled tight over Maryrose’s chest, both staring at the ceiling, their hands clutched between them.

Outside, a train passed, whistling loudly. The fire had died in the hearth. The only sound in the room was the ticking of that old clock on the nightstand and their breathing - great gasps for air from Regulus, whose heart raced and body ached from the constant motion of the last half hour or so… He looked over at her after several moments had passed and he whispered, “Wow.”

She laughed, tears coming to her eyes.

He rolled to face her, curled on his side, his eyes roving over the dip of her neck and the pale of her skin that seemed to almost glitter in the pale of moonlight that seeped between the thin crack in the shutters.

She reached over and swept his hair from his eyes.

Regulus rolled closer to her, his nose and chin against the side of her cheek, his lips on her skin. He kissed her softly.

She smiled. “That was quite the way to break a tradition, Mr. Black,” she whispered.

Regulus laughed into her cheek as his face flushed. "Shattering it, really," he choked.

There was no going back.

And as such…

“I’m going to go and meet with Severus tomorrow,” Regulus said quietly.

Maryrose ran her fingers over his fingers, matching the tips of them, lining them up, pressing hers against his. She looked over at him. “Oh?”

“Yes,” he said. His voice was still ragged, though there was an exhausted gleam to his eye, and despite the seriousness of the topic, he wore a smile of contentment, even as his eyes closed and he said, “And then… I’m going directly to Sirius to tell him everything that Severus Snape tells me about the Dark Lord’s plan.”

Maryrose shivered at the determination in Regulus Black’s voice.