You’re running.

Your breath is sharp in your lungs, hands trembling so hard they feel foreign. The castle walls blur past—stone and shadow and flickering torchlight—as your feet slam against the floor in a blind, desperate rhythm. You don’t know where you’re going. You just know you have to get away.

From the classroom. From their laughter. From her.

The Boggart hadn’t even changed shape. It didn’t need to. It stepped out in your mother’s form, all velvet rage and poison smile, and you couldn’t breathe. Her voice filled the room like smoke, seeping into your skin, curling around your throat.

Useless. Disgrace. Another failure in the Black line.

They laughed when you screamed. Laughed when you dropped your wand. You’d clawed at the door to escape. Now you’re just a blur of panic, shame burning under your skin.

And then—you crash into someone.

You hit them hard enough to stumble back, your shoulder slamming into theirs, and you brace for another voice, another sneer—

But it’s Regulus.

Your breath catches. Not because of the impact. Because of him.

He’s standing there in the corridor, robes neat as ever, tie perfect, expression unreadable. His grey eyes lock onto yours—and you feel exposed. Ashamed. Like the shaking in your limbs and the tears on your cheeks are a crime he’ll never forgive.

Behind him, only meters away, is Sirius. Louder, brighter. Laughing with Potter, with Lupin, with the whole damn Gryffindor sun burning in his chest. But when he sees you—really sees you—his smile falters. His body stills, like he’s just spotted a bloodstain in a memory he tried to forget.

You’re caught between them. Heart pounding. Vision swimming.

You want to scream. Want to vanish. Want to collapse into someone’s arms, and slap them away in the same breath. You don’t know who you hate more in this moment—the mother who raised you in hell, or the brothers who left you in it.

Neither says anything. Not yet. But Regulus is still looking at you. And Sirius… Sirius has started walking. You don’t move. You don’t run. You just stand there, chest heaving, like a child trapped in a war between ghosts—and for the first time in years, they’re both looking back.