Regulus woke with his skin on fire.
It wasn't unusual for him, but the sensation was different, as though someone had taken hold of his skin and was just pulling. Like it was, quite literally, being fused back together.
It wasn't until his vision refocused that he realised it was James Potter at the source of the pain. He had his wand held low over Regulus, focused singularly upon the wounds that snaked their way up his legs. An incantation was falling from his lips in a low mutter, and Regulus felt his head swell, both from the confounding situation and a headache from dehydration. Though he remembered little else, the memory of vomiting water was fresh in his mind.
Composing himself, Regulus reached for his own wand, only to find his hands bound to his sides, tied with a relashio. His wand was gone—he recognized the distinct lightness in his pocket. He did, fortunately, still have the knife holstered on his left thigh.
James hadn't seemed to notice he was awake, or he didn't care that Regulus was awake, and he took the moment to run through his memories of the recently-passed events. He'd gone to the cave, with Kreacher, to retrieve the locket—the Dark Lord's Horcrux. He'd drunk the potion, endured the pain, and replaced the locket with a fake. He'd told Kreacher to get out, to escape with the real Horcrux, and the house elf had done so—he was left for dead, dragged into the depths of the lake by the same inferni that he'd just narrowly escaped. He died. Hadn't he?
No, he hadn't, because—the hand had appeared. James' hand, at the surface of the lake. Regulus had desperately kicked off the inferni to reach it, drawing on a fragment of hope that someone was there to save him. In his head, it had been Sirius.
The man in front of him was decidedly not Sirius. It was James, definitely, although different from the last time Regulus had seen him. Upon his face was a beard, although just a short one, and he wore his hair longer than it usually was back at Hogwarts. He carried himself slightly differently, too; still tall, but less cocky and more stoic. His glasses were still the same shape, but the wire-rimmed ones from Hogwarts had been replaced with a more sensible horn. And the eyes—the eyes behind them were hardened, almost cruel, although they were so focused on his wand that he thought it might have been a trick of the light.
Regulus thought achingly of his own. It had been far from his greatest weapon, but he still felt the loss of it—elm with a unicorn hair—acutely. And in a war, losing one's wand was a death wish. Even ending up in the hands of the Order was a death wish, too. At this point, Regulus was a dead man walking; it didn't matter whether James knew him from school, he'd turn him into the Ministry like a good little soldier always would.
That was, of course, why James was healing him. It was a strange kindness—Inferni wounds were impossible to heal without magic. It would've been far more painful to do on his own, particularly now, when his limbs felt so foreign.
He knew the true reason James was healing him, though, and it wasn't a kindness. The information he was privy to was priceless to the Order. He wondered, briefly, whether the Order knew him as Voldemort's youngest disciple; whether they'd already marked him as an enemy in their eyes.
It was true, though, that Regulus knew more than most about the Dark Lord; he'd done his research, some of it told to him by Voldemort himself. He had thought, mistakenly, that Regulus' youth would mean his mind was weaker, more susceptible to melding to his whims. At first, he'd been right, in all honesty, Regulus thought. He still remembered the pride he felt when he was made Head Boy, when the Dark Lord thought it further evidence that Regulus was the future of the Death Eaters, a carbon copy that he could use as another right hand.
He knew better, now.
Regulus snapped out of his thoughts when he began to heal a particularly deep gash upon his thigh, voice betraying him with a moan of pain. James' eyes snapped to his own immediately. And fuck, now James knew. It left Regulus with significantly less time to come up with a plan or explanation beyond his silence on the matter. No doubt, James would be wondering what he was doing in the cave, too.
