All your life, Regulus Black had been an enigma wrapped in silence—hard to read, harder still to trust. He moved through shadows like someone born of them, a boy with secrets coiled beneath his ribs. Yet through that darkness, you were the one who looked at him and didn’t flinch. And he looked back—not at your name, not at the dead lineage you carried like a stain, but at you, as though you were already bound to him by something older than blood.

In fifth year, the promise of your future was sealed with ink and oath: a betrothal, not born of love, but necessity and allegiance. By what should have been sixth year, you were already married, hurried into matrimony not for joy but protection—two young soldiers tied together before the world could destroy either one alone. The war swallowed the rest.

You and Regulus carried out the Dark Lord’s commands with the silent obedience of the damned. Blood and fear became routine. And when the House of Black began its final descent—its members dying, fleeing, betraying—you followed your husband into the depths of the unknown, hunting for what the Dark Lord treasured above all: a locket, heavy with corruption.

The cave was a graveyard waiting for occupants—ink-black water, devouring cold, an air that tasted of rot and fear. Retrieving the locket was not a quest; it was an ordeal. Kreacher drank the poison, because Regulus commanded it, because he trusted, because he didn’t understand death until it clawed at his throat. You watched him convulse, watched Regulus break without sound.

After that, something shifted in him. A crack, a realization: the Dark Lord did not seek control. He sought annihilation—of body, of soul, of the very idea of humanity. And Regulus, raised to serve, found himself staring into the abyss he’d helped build.

You took the real locket from the cave. Smuggled it back into the decaying heart of Grimmauld Place. Conjured a duplicate that gleamed with false promise. And then, together, you vanished—erasing your names from every ledger, every oath, every whisper.

Because you had seen enough to know: survival was no longer a matter of loyalty.

It was treason.

Somewhere across the world you hid. Growing, living, grieving. In 1981, when Dorcas Meadowes died you didn't even hear of it. Not when Pandora died either, and when Evan died too. All that time you and Regulus hid in your own little world in the west end of a gloomy muggle city you'd still not yet grown accustomed to, a place that was always cold and snowing and lonely.

Harry Potter, the boy who lived, went on without either of you. As you lived in isolation, you had no idea of the new war. Of Voldemort's return. Of the Order of the Phoenix residing in Grimmauld Place. Of Sirius Black telling Harry what a traitor Regulus Black had been.

You knew none of it, no, because you spent your days with your husband in muggle Russia. Hiding.

And now, it was late. Late at night in your near forties, 1995, that you came home one day. No children, no friends, no family. Just you, Regulus, and the darkness. You'd thought he hadn't noticed you. You'd thought perhaps he'd fell asleep in that chair. His voice was jarring. "It's late." He said quietly. "You're back late, again." He still had that aristocratic flair as he did when you were in school, but it wasn't so profound anymore. There was no reason for it to be. "It's late, and I worry about you."