Morning Charms class. By the time Regulus reached the classroom, Professor Flitwick was already perched atop his stack of books.
He was mid-explanation on the pronunciation keys for the Cheering Charm. When Regulus walked in, Flitwick simply raised his wand toward an empty seat and carried on without a word.
Regulus crossed to the Slytherin section and sat beside Cuthbert.
Cuthbert leaned in immediately, voice low. "What did the professor want?"
One look from Regulus was enough. Cuthbert shut his mouth, straightened up, and pretended to pay attention.
This session was shared with Ravenclaw. Regulus had barely settled in when he felt it: a stare, sharp with hostility.
He turned.
A Ravenclaw boy, seated by the window.
Regulus placed him. Russell Clark. Muggle-born. Solid marks in Charms. Flitwick had praised him twice this term.
Clark was watching him now, lips pressed thin, undisguised disgust in his eyes.
Regulus looked away. He understood well enough.
Russell Clark had heard about last night. But he was Muggle-born. He didn't understand the rules governing Pure-blood circles, didn't grasp the rigid architecture of family hierarchy.
From where he stood, what he saw was simple: Regulus Black had used magic to force a seventh-year student to kneel through the night, humiliating him publicly in a common room like a trophy on display.
To him, that was bullying. The worst kind.
Worse than ordinary cruelty, even, because of the ceremony behind it. The deliberate, ritualized degradation.
A punch left bruises. But kneeling, that near-execution posture, destroyed something deeper. It broke dignity.
Clark was probably thinking: What could possibly justify this? Why not just talk it out?
Regulus found it almost funny.
Russell Clark had no idea that the very act he condemned as bullying had, indirectly, saved him. Him and every Muggle-born student like him.
The undercurrent running through Slytherin, that whispered campaign to "clean house," had people like Clark squarely in its crosshairs.
If Arnold Belmont had succeeded in whipping the room into a frenzy last night, if Regulus hadn't stepped in and shattered the momentum, that undercurrent would have broken the surface. Become action.
Then what Russell Clark would face wouldn't be wounded pride.
Though, admittedly, maybe he'd have preferred that to the indignity of watching someone kneel.
By responding with disproportionate force against one of their own, Regulus had yanked every eye back to the fractures within Pure-blood ranks, buying time before the violence spilled outward.
It gave students like Russell a reprieve they'd never know about.
Regulus wasn't going to explain himself. There was no point. The people who understood already did. The rest wouldn't get it no matter how many words he spent.
He pulled his attention back to the lesson.
Flitwick was demonstrating the wrist movement for the Cheering Charm. "Soft at the wrist, like stirring honey. Not scrambling eggs!"
Regulus opened his textbook and found the chapter.
---
After afternoon classes, Regulus headed to the library as usual.
Today he wanted to research rune variants in ancient magical script. Professor McGonagall's notes had mentioned in passing that certain advanced Transfigurations required runic stabilization of the structure, but she hadn't elaborated.
He walked toward the row of tables by the windows, his usual spot. Good light. But someone was already there.
Lily Evans sat on the window side, a thick book spread open before her, quill moving fast across parchment.
Someone else sat beside her.
Severus Snape.
Regulus's stride hitched for half a step.
Interesting.
Snape rarely came to the library, but sitting with Lily made a certain kind of sense.
Their relationship was unusual. They were neighbors, had known each other since childhood, growing up together in the Muggle town of Cokeworth.
Lily had told Regulus once that she could make flower buds bloom early when she was small. Snape had been the one to tell her she was a witch, had even shown her his wand.
What they had fell somewhere between childhood sweethearts and strangers. Something without a clean label.
At school, they kept their distance. Snape in Slytherin, Lily in Gryffindor. House rivalries made their friendship a liability. They usually only spoke on weekends, or in the evenings out on the castle grounds where no one was counting.
Regulus walked over without breaking stride and sat on the empty side of the long table, directly across from the two of them.
Lily looked up. Her expression was hard to read. She glanced at Regulus, then turned to Snape, then back again.
Regulus's face gave nothing away. Snape, on the other hand, looked deeply uncomfortable.
He sat rigid, eyes fixed on the page in front of him. His pupils weren't tracking the words.
Regulus caught it in his peripheral vision and had a fair idea of what was going on.
Snape was smart. Set aside the talent for potions and the Dark Arts, his powers of observation and comprehension were sharp in their own right.
He was a member of one of Slytherin's secret gatherings. Last night's events, even if he hadn't grasped the deeper strategy in the moment and took it at face value as Regulus defending family honor, the discussions among the upper-years afterward would have filled in the gaps.
He'd have realized that Regulus's display might have served a second purpose: slowing the fever building inside Slytherin.
Snape was probably remembering their earlier conversation. The one where he'd come to Regulus on his own, reporting on the rhetoric and mood inside Slytherin's inner circles.
Regulus had asked him why. Why tell me?
Snape's answer: For Lily.
The shame of saying those words aloud had been excruciating.
He agreed with the rhetoric. Pure-blood supremacy. Muggle-borns as contaminants, as filth to be purged. When he was inside that environment, wrapped in the collective fervor, his head filled with nothing but the slogans, the intoxicating certainty of absolute righteousness.
But the moment he stepped outside and saw Lily's eyes, heard her ask, "Severus, how's your week been?"
The fervor receded like a tide, exposing the light he couldn't ignore: Lily Evans was Muggle-born.
If the others in that gathering learned he was friends with a Muggle-born, what would they think of him?
If the purge they fantasized about ever became real, would those curses one day find Lily?
The contradiction coiled through his mind like two snakes, one biting from the left, one from the right.
He couldn't stop those people. He didn't want to. Deep down, he believed they were right.
But he wanted to protect Lily. Even if all he could do was keep her a little further from the danger.
So he'd turned to Regulus.
It had felt like a last resort, a desperate, reckless gamble. Regulus already knew about his connection to Lily. Regulus didn't seem like a zealot. And doing something, anything, was better than doing nothing.
Now, looking back on it, the memory made his skin crawl.
He knew Regulus and Lily met regularly in the library.
Snape genuinely believed Regulus was the model Pure-blood. Gifted, well-born, composed, masterful at leveraging the system to protect his family's interests.
He assumed Regulus's closeness with Lily had to be calculated. Maybe it was about projecting an image of openness toward Muggle-borns. Maybe it was about cultivating a talented Potions student as a future asset.
So today, he'd followed Lily here.
Maybe to expose Regulus's true intentions. Maybe to confirm something. Or maybe last night's display of raw, hierarchical dominance had been too much stimulus to process alone.
As a half-blood who'd clawed his way into the Pure-blood circle on talent alone, watching that naked display of power had sent a tremor through him. Fear and exhilaration, braided together.
But now, sitting across from Regulus in the quiet of the library, under Lily's watchful gaze, Snape had no idea what to do with himself.
His lips parted, then pressed shut again. His eyes stayed locked on the page. Not a single word registered.
He lowered his head. The tension inside him was close to spilling over.
Part of him wanted to belong to the Pure-blood camp. To carve out a place there. That was his shortcut out of his birth, his path to power.
He studied the Dark Arts obsessively, attended the secret gatherings, all of it aimed at one thing: acceptance.
But Lily was a nail driven through his feet, pinning him in place.
Every time he was ready to commit fully to that side, her face surfaced. Those green eyes, watching him.
So he stayed caught in the middle.
In front of Slytherin, he played the promising half-blood. In front of Lily, he played the slightly extreme but fundamentally decent friend.
Both roles were tearing him apart, and he couldn't let go of either one.