The Marauders - Order of the Phoenix - Part One

Looked More Like Drowning

Regulus Black stood at the edge of the lake on the grounds of Hogwarts, staring out into the water, the full moon reflecting off the surface. His pyjamas hung loose - he'd been losing weight all term long, he was so stressed he could barely bring himself to eat, and here it was, mid-November and he could scarcely put a scrap of food in his mouth the past week, he was so anxious.

Despite Slughorn's talking-to, Regulus had been out of his dormitories every night that week. More careful, of course, and no where near the Transfiguration wing, either. He knew better. They never would've put the portrait back where he had taken it from. They weren't completely stupid.

Though he had made sure of it, asking Kreacher to go and have a look-see.

Every time he laid down to sleep, he heard voices now, and it terrified him. Not voices like the kind the mad people hear that aren't real or anything, but voices like memories that wouldn't shut up and get out of his brain. Nightmares that wouldn't stop returning again and again and again until he'd gotten up and walked it out.

So he'd been pacing, really, pacing every which way, every night, glancing at the paintings, hoping to see Cadmus Peverell, but he was never anywhere. Wherever they'd put his portrait, he wasn't able to come out into any of the other paintings anywhere. Or maybe he reckoned he'd told Regulus all he needed to. Maybe it was just Regulus was thick and he didn't know how to connect the dots that would tell him what he had to do now that he knew about horcruxes.

One of the voices he heard in his head when he closed his eyes was Alabaster Jackson's.

The other was the Dark Lord's.

"That which is contained in this locket is most precious... It is among my finest achievements. You might say that it means so much that it has sort of... become a part of me."

Become a part of him, yeah, and of who else? Regulus thought, feeling sick.

He'd been obliviated, the memory wiped from his consciousness... but it lingered in the dark bits of his mind, the part of his mind that felt as dark and fathomless as the depths of the lake. He stared into the black, unbroken surface, and he replayed the words over and over, the little bit his nightmares had brought back to him.

Suddenly some strange urge overtook him. He didn't know what made him do it, but he walked boldfaced into the lake.

The water was ice-cold and it soaked through his pyjamas, his bare feet feeling jagged little stones threatening to pierce them. He'd already been feeling positively frozen and mad for having been pacing the castle barefoot, and all the more for having gone out doors where the frost had made his toes ache and then numb. The water felt like that too, except all over his body, like a million knives stabbing into his flesh. He could feel his skin so acutely, feel his eyes flooding with tears.

Murky depths, dark waters. They haunted him constantly. Dark crevices, blacked out bits of the mind.

"You don't want to disturb what is under those waters, boy."

He was up to his waist.

He could hardly move, he felt so cold all over, and he staggered, tripping over a stone, and fell head long into the water, slamming into it on his belly, a terrific splash and the water closed over him and absolute panic overtook him as it did.

"How is it brewed?"

"...Liquid Nightmare is not simply brewed, it is extracted. It is the results of when the venom of a dementor is sipped and then extracted from the mind..."

Then a strong hand had him by the robes and was pulling him back up to his feet, and he felt the air smack him and his whole body felt blue with cold.

Regulus couldn't think, he couldn't move, couldn't react. He was just so cold and so wound up with panic and echoes of memories he barely had left.