[From Samhain to the Solstice]: A New Creation, Harry/Regulus, R, 7/8

[lomonaaeren]

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Part Seven

Regulus does insist that they go back to Grimmauld Place to sleep and shower and eat. Harry is opposed at first, insisting that they stay in the night world, but Regulus points out that they have no idea how much time has passed in their own dimension and the Potters and Dumbledore might be panicking. Besides, the Cloak and the other Hallows should have the power to bring them back whenever they like.

(He’s far too pleased when Harry doesn’t protest at Regulus calling his dimension theirs).

Regulus collapses into his bed almost immediately after they step into the house, and rises around midday when Kreacher shakes him. Regulus opens his eyes and yawns, sitting up when he spots Kreacher standing impatiently beside the bed. “Yes? Mmm, what is it?”

“Stupid Master Regulus went to bed last night with his boots on,” Kreacher snaps.

“Sorry about that,” Regulus says lazily, and extends his left foot so that Kreacher can wrench the boot off. Kreacher does, glaring at him all the while. Regulus laughs and falls back on the bed, patting his stomach. “Do we have breakfast, Kreacher?”

“Kreacher has breakfast. Kreacher is deciding whether stupid Master Regulus gets any of it.”

Regulus laughs. Kreacher goes still in the middle of pulling his right boot off and stares at him with his ears rising.

“What is it?” Regulus asks, and stretches and yawns again.

“Kreacher is not hearing Master Regulus laugh like that in—many years.”

Regulus considers that and decides it’s probably true. He usually laughs sarcastically when he’s at home if at all, reading the fawning letters that want him to go somewhere and do something, or sign some petition, or agree to a date or a marriage contract. Fools, all of them. Not interesting.

Nothing was interesting, until Harry.

“Harry makes the difference,” Regulus says, and Kreacher makes a face at him. “He really is important, Kreacher.”

“Harry Potter is too much like Sirius.”

Regulus just nods. He didn’t notice at first when Kreacher stopped referring to Sirius as “Master” Sirius, and now, although he suspects the timing was significant, he doesn’t know when it began. “But he makes me laugh. And you’ll give him breakfast, won’t you?”

“He is already being down in the kitchen eating it,” Kreacher grumbles.

Regulus barely waits until he can disrobe, stand under a magically-warm shower for about five minutes, and then put on clean robes before he goes down the stairs. Harry glances up at him from the middle of Grimmauld Place’s kitchen table. He has what look like maps spread around him.

“Hello,” he says. “Did you know that there aren’t that many maps of Azkaban? Even in the books I stole?”

“I didn’t know that we would need one,” Regulus says, walking slowly over to the table and sitting down. He did wonder, when he woke up this morning, if some of the magic of being with Harry would fade when they weren’t in the night world or fighting for their lives any longer.

But it hasn’t. Even the food that Kreacher puts on the table smells appetizing in a way it hasn’t in years. Regulus smiles at Kreacher and digs in, ignoring the way that Kreacher grumbles about him sleeping with his boots on.

“I was trying to see if I could figure out what it looked like so that I could navigate if we had to go there.”

Regulus chokes a little on his eggs, something he always hates, because Kreacher immediately starts patting his back heavily. “There’s no reason that we would have to go to Azkaban,” he mutters.

“Says you.”

Regulus stares at Harry. Harry raises an eyebrow back at him and bends over the maps again. At least this one looks like he drew what he could remember of their journey through the night world, not like a map of Azkaban.

“Yes, says me,” Regulus says, when he can recover his breath. “And there’s no reason that we would have to go to Azkaban. The binding has broken and the Dementors follow you now, remember?”

“We think that,” Harry mutters, his face pensive as he traces his fingers over the map of the night world. A plate pops up next to him, full of steaming bacon. He ignores it, and even ignores Kreacher when the house-elf pokes him in the elbow, an impressive feat. “But I don’t want to leave anything to chance.”

“We don’t have any maps of Azkaban that I know of,” Regulus says firmly. “And certainly not any recent ones. Eat your breakfast.”

“I did—”

“Harry is eating more bacon,” Kreacher says loudly. “Two eggs is not being breakfast.”

“Why don’t you call him Master Harry?” Regulus asks, noticing that for the first time.

Kreacher pokes Harry in the elbow again, and he sighs and puts the maps aside so that he can scoop more bacon onto his plate. “Because I told him not to call me Master Harry. I said I hated it. I had a friend who was a house-elf, and he died in the war in my world—dimension.” Harry swallows some bacon without appearing to taste it. “And I don’t like house-elves acting too subservient, anyway.”

“Kreacher’s not subservient.”

“Kreacher is being very subservient,” Kreacher says, sounding offended.

“Uh-huh,” Harry says, and somehow manages to give both of them a skeptical look, for all that Regulus would think he would have to choose one or the other. He eats another piece of bacon and takes the Elder Wand out of his robe pocket.

Regulus feels himself going still in the presence of the Elder Wand, and Kreacher gives it a nervous look of respect. Harry doesn’t appear to notice. He waves the wand and mutters something under his breath that doesn’t sound like an incantation to Regulus. The air in front of him shimmers and warps.

“What the hell is that?” Regulus asks flatly, as a dark blue hole appears in the air.

Harry gives him an innocent look. “I thought you would recognize it, after we spent so much time there.”

“Just making sure that I am seeing you make a portal to the night world,” Regulus says, and leans back to put as much distance as he can between the hole and him. He would never try to venture in there without Harry.

“The Elder Wand says it isn’t called the night world. It’s called—”

The word that dances off Harry’s tongue isn’t even really a word, as far as Regulus is concerned, but more like a whistle or a warble full of long trilling sounds. He just gives Harry a look.

“Okay, maybe we should call it the night world,” Harry says, sounding sheepish. “I can only pronounce it because I’m holding the wand, anyway.”

“Could I try?”

Harry gives him a narrow look, and then looks down at the wand. A distinct spark leaps off it, and the sense of another, wary presence is suddenly in the room, although Regulus doesn’t really know how he’s feeling it.

“Uh, yeah, that would be a no,” Harry says.

Regulus shrugs. “Worth a try.” From the shiver the wand gives in Harry’s hand, it disagrees. Regulus ignores it. “All right, it doesn’t really matter what that world is called. We can travel back and forth between it at any time we need to, right?”

“Yeah.”

Regulus nods. “Then I think we should approach the Potters and Dumbledore, tell them what we’ve learned, and ask them for their help.”

Harry gives him a quick smile that Regulus doesn’t understand until he hears Harry say softly, “Thank you for not calling them my parents.”

Regulus feels a sharp warmth running through him. He manages to smile and nod, and tries not to watch Harry’s arse too obviously when he gets up and goes to the bedroom Regulus gave him to change clothes into robes that Kreacher shrank.

I don’t even know if he wants to stay friends after we uncorrupt the Dementors, let alone more than that.

But Regulus has never been good at denying himself things he wants, so he thinks about it anyway as Kreacher chivvies him out of the kitchen.

*

“I do not think you can trust anything the Hallows told you.”

“It’s a good thing that it was the white rock and not the Hallows that told me this, then.”

Regulus settles back and watches Dumbledore battle with Harry. It’s good entertainment even without any Firewhisky on hand. The Potters and Sirius likewise seem baffled that Harry disagrees with Dumbledore. Sirius has tried to intervene a few times, but Dumbledore asked him to sit down, and he did.

Regulus finds himself hoping that versions of his brother in other dimensions aren’t this obedient. Surely there must be some happy line between Azkaban and lapdog.

Dumbledore pulls off his glasses and rubs his face. “Harry…”

“You can argue all you want,” Harry says, his face polite but his eyes spitting fire. “It doesn’t matter. I am going to go into the night world and summon the Dementors and reverse the corruption that Ekrizdis caused.”

“Why does it have to be you?” Lily whispers. She’s sitting close to Harry, and her look at him is yearning, her hand resting on his shoulder. “From what you told us, it was always you in your other world as well.”

Regulus sees Harry’s mouth twitch, but he doesn’t correct Lily by calling it a dimension instead of a world. He leans back with a long sigh and looks at the ceiling for a moment. Then he turns to consider the people who are one version of his parents.

“Because it needs to be done,” Harry says softly. “And no one else is doing it.”

“What about Voldemort in the other world, though?” James jumps in. “I doubt that no one was fighting him. From what you said, we died fighting him…”

He doesn’t think of you as them.

Regulus holds that to himself, because Harry simply shrugs. “Other people were doing it. The Order of the Phoenix. You, sir.” He nods to Dumbledore. “My parents, when they were still alive. But all of them died. So I had to do it.” He exhales hard. “And this time, I’m the only one who can do it, given that I’m the Master of Death.”

He doesn’t exude the aura of distaste he has before when talking about his powers. Regulus hopes that means his attitude towards them is improving.

“But you don’t have to,” James says, wistfully, reaching out to catch hold of Harry’s arm. “I mean, nothing changes if you don’t. The Dementors in all the worlds stay in Azkaban and you don’t have to put yourself in danger—”

“Except for the Dementors in this dimension following him around,” Regulus drawls, leaning back in his chair. Sirius dates him a hateful glance. Regulus ignores him. Sirius wishes he looked this good.

“Yeah, that,” Harry says. “And it’s wrong to leave Dementors to rot in Azkaban. It’s wrong to use them to guard prisoners, especially innocents.” He darts his gaze at Sirius and then away. Regulus cocks his head. So Harry has more trouble separating this version of Sirius from the one he knew than he does separating the Potters from his parents. Interesting. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Regulus sighs a little, internally. He just had to fall for a Gryffindor obsessed with doing the right thing, it seems, after making fun of the type for decades.

But that’s probably part of the reason that Harry keeps him so interested, so he isn’t going to get upset about it.

“Couldn’t you summon one world’s worth of Dementors at a time?” Lily asks softly. She hasn’t taken her hand from Harry’s shoulder. Regulus has to work quite hard to ignore how unreasonable he feels about that. “Just the ones that are following you around here first, and then come home and rest for a while, and then go back and do another world?”

Harry blinks at her. “Do you know how many dimensions there are?”

“No. Tell me?”

Lily sounds absolutely certain that Harry will know. Then again, Regulus and Harry have been working pretty hard to present that certainty as part of the reason he can do this.

“I don’t know,” Harry says, which makes Lily flush and smile a little, looking down. “But I know there’s loads.”

That very scientific measurement, the load.

Regulus decides there’s no reason to keep that comment to himself, and drawls it, making Harry laugh. Regulus basks in the laughter, and then sees Lily and James and Sirius all glaring at him, hands tightening around their wands.

Regulus snorts. If they wanted to have a say in Harry’s dating life, they should have arranged to cross-dimensionally-adopt him before he came of age.

“So I could be working on this the rest of my life, if I don’t do it all at once,” Harry says, and shakes his head. “I’m not even sure that I could separate one dimension’s Dementors from the rest. The night world…it doesn’t have distances in the same way we measure them. There’s no dimension of our world that’s further away or closer to it. So I’ll call all of them at once, and they’ll answer.”

Harry looks excited by the prospect. Regulus again sighs to himself. He had to fall for someone who’s more interested in death-defying stunts than a Quidditch player.

“I would still object that you do not have to do this, Mr. Potter,” Dumbledore says, because apparently he’s gone long enough without inserting himself into the conversation. “And I maintain that if you think you need to do, you can take someone with you other than Master Black.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because all of you still think of me as a child.” Harry sweeps his gaze up and down the table. James has the grace to flush; Lily looks startled; and who knows what Sirius looks like behind the beard that’s still feasting on his face. “You would try to push me out of the way, or talk me out of it once we got there, or undermine my confidence with your conviction that I shouldn’t be doing this, that I’m just a baby. Regulus doesn’t think of me as a child. He’ll try to keep me safe, but he’ll listen to me when I tell him how to make sure that happens. So that’s why he's the one coming with me.”

Ha-ha, Regulus tells everyone at the table silently. He does manage to keep this particular brilliant comment silent.

Dumbledore gazes at Regulus over his glasses. Regulus ignores him and says to Harry, “You did say that it would take a ritual to call the Dementors, too, and that they could help with that ritual.”

“Yes, they can.” Harry frowns at everyone sitting around the Potters’ table again. “As long as they behave themselves and don’t try to say that I shouldn’t be doing this.”

It’s really making Regulus’s life, to see Sirius and Dumbledore put in their places like this. He smiles.

*

“I don’t see why it’s white candles, when the Dementors are grey and the world you’re going to is dark. Or blue.”

“It’s white candles for the white quartz rock,” Harry says absently, his eyes focused on the circle of glowing light that’s sprouting into being in the Potters’ garden as more and more of the candles come alight. “And it’s light so that the Dementors cane follow it.”

“Will they come here?”

“I don’t know, Sirius. Be quiet so I can concentrate.”

Sirius looks offended. Regulus muffles his laugh in his sleeve, but the laughter dies as he watches Harry pull out the Elder Wand and begin to make slow, languorous movements in front of himself with it, as if he’s conducting an invisible sonata.

Dumbledore stands near a flowerbed of blue blossoms on the edge of the garden, watching intently. Harry said something about needing him there so that he could anchor the ritual. Regulus is half-certain that’s bollocks and Harry said it to get the Headmaster out of the way, and half-certain it’s true and Harry said it for the same reason.

The air between Harry and the candles begins to vibrate, as if it’s a curtain that someone is shaking. Harry breathes out slowly and takes a long stride forwards. The candle flames leap higher as if in welcome.

“Harry?”

Regulus frowns at Lily over his shoulder and makes a shushing movement near his mouth. Lily sighs and falls silent, but her eyes are still fixed on Harry as if he’s the answer to all her problems.

In a way, Regulus muses, he’s the one here who knows Harry best, and also the one who has the fewest preconceptions about him. Lily and James, of course, can’t help but imagine Harry filling the place of their child who was never born. Sirius sees Harry as the godson he couldn’t have. Dumbledore envisioned one person as the Master of Death and still seems distraught by the differences between the reality and his vision.

But Regulus…

Regulus was just bored, and wanted someone to entertain him. And now he has so much more than that. He can let Harry just be Harry.

He steps closer to Harry when Harry motions at him with one hand. Harry’s eyes are closed by now, and everything around him breathes power. Regulus thinks he can even feel it welling from the cloak in Harry’s pocket and the stone he cradles in his left hand, a stone that the others don’t seem to have noticed yet.

“We are calling them home.”

Harry’s voice echoes across the Potters’ garden and dies away into some vast distance Regulus can’t see. Regulus leans closer to him and hums under his breath, not because Harry told him to, but just because it feels right.

Harry abruptly nods. “Yes. Please keep doing that, Regulus. Please,” he says, in a normal voice.

Regulus hums again, and then his voice rises without his permission, and he sings. He catches a glimpse of Sirius’s stunned face, with the Potters’ next to his, before he closes his eyes so that he can concentrate.

He hasn’t sung in decades. It was the kind of thing he practiced by himself when he was a boy, with Kreacher’s help to hide it from his parents, until the day that his mother overheard him and told him that no proper pureblood would make such noises. Regulus didn’t sing again. The sense of shame was too strong.

He’s not sure why he never recovered his voice in the years since his mother died. It just seemed—as if it was gone, as if it belonged to the boy, Regulus, who vanished in the shadow of the Man-Who-Conquered.

He tilts his head back and lets the wordless song rise and soar and ring around the garden. Words would disturb the ritual, he knows without asking, but Harry needs his voice. So Regulus gives him everything he has, and Harry responds with soft humming of his own, and then a chant that sounds like the noises the Elder Wand said were the name of the night world.

If Regulus thinks about it for one second, he’ll laugh at how insane everything in his life sounds right now. But he doesn’t think about it. He tosses his voice into the void, and his heart after it.

And Harry says, in a language that Regulus has never heard before but understands perfectly, “Come to me.”

There’s an enormous pull that yanks at everyone in the garden. But Regulus is the only one who surrenders to it gladly. He hears the other cry out and stumble, but he was ready for it, and he braces a hand on Harry’s shoulder as they are pulled through time and space.

*

Regulus opens his eyes, not surprised to find that they’re standing at the foot of the white rock in the night world. He is a little surprised to find that he can see perfectly in the low starlight and the shimmering glow that comes from the rock, without the addition of wandlight.

And he is more than surprised to see the look of awe that Harry turns towards him.

“You were the only one who came with me,” Harry whispers.

“Yes? That’s what we discussed.” Regulus clears his throat, because his voice is rasping.

“I know, but I wouldn’t have been able to prevent them from coming if they had really wanted to. If they had trusted that we could accomplish this.” Harry closes his eyes for a second and shakes his head. “You were the only one who had that kind of unshakable faith in me, though. Thank you.” His hand finds Regulus’s and squeezes it.

Regulus thinks that he could really stand to have Harry look at him like that more often.

He opens his mouth to preserve the moment, but cold floods over them in rippling waves, and he ends up swallowing. He turns to face the horizon, and nearly freezes despite how much he trusts Harry and the Hallows.

Dementors. Hovering all around them, as many as there are stars in the sky.

“Now,” Harry says, “I think we should start.”