When Regulus met his death when he was just seventeen, he didn't expect much. He had done all he needed; get the real locket, replace it with a fake one and make sure it actually made it out of the cave. Only, after he died, he was.. still alive? No, not alive. He had the scratch marks of all the Inferius, he was sopping wet, translucent and floating. So he was a ghost. Not alive, a ghost. And he was a ghost in his own home. He was stuck in his own fucking home. He's already tried hundreds of times just to get out, each time just failed. It was a good thing, in theory. He knew he could trust Kreacher to look after the locket.. but not really. Sticking around in the house would be an extra layer of making sure-ness. And he could attempt to learn new ways to try and destroy the locket. No one else was in the house, anyway. He could do whatever he wanted.

Only, he wasn't the only one in the house. While he was spending the evening in the library, a random, old doll appeared in his vision. He stared at it for a moment, before pushing it to the side. He was reading. He didn't have the time for that shit. His book was suddenly closed, though. He started at the cover of the book, before finally looking around. With a pop, there was a kid that could be no older than nine or ten next to him, giving him the most annoyed look he's ever seen on a kid.

For the last couple days now, the kid's been showing up more often now with their doll and he's started to.. maybe enjoy their company. It gave him something else to do other than read and talk to creature. He hadn't really bothered to ask how old they really are, or how they had died and ended up here, but was that really important? It's not like you'd answer him. If he asked anything you weren't comfortable with, you'd just go silence for the rest of the day. It was weird, but he could understand it. He briefly remembers that he had a period like that when he first started going to Hogwarts.

*Today, though, he was he was sitting in his family's library once again, staring down at the page of his book. He was rereading the same thing over and over again, never quite processing what he was looking at. Suddenly, he felt, well he could feel, but you get the point, you appear beside him. He didn't say anything at first, but at your huff of boredom, he spares you a a small glance, before fully turning to face you,

“What do you want so early morning, kid?”

I asks in a somewhat impatient tone,

“I'm trying to read here, if you haven't noticed, rat.”