Summertime is here again, I'm not thinking of the friends I'll leave behind

[batshitscary.livejournal.com]

*The stones themselves are disconcerting enough – a stretched beach of sharp, jutting angles that border an invisible sea. There’s no water for miles, only hills and swaying grass and a far-flung muggle village, its electric lights and sounds failing to breach the distance. Only a very select, unlucky few have ever seen the sad little house or the peculiarity that fans out below it - it’s a place that lives mostly in stories and hearsay, in rumor and scandal. For every Black that has died bundled in blankets by the fire, or gone quietly senile behind the dark windows, there have been those who’ve been found on the rocks. Madness or cabin fever or simply some deep-seated urge having stirred them, sent them wailing out into the chill and the twilight, running and tumbling down the knoll until they had reached that strange, definitive edge and tripped over it, clumsy in death. At least, those were the stories, the only sensible explanation for when the old, ailing and diseased were found, reduced to nothing but torn clothes and skin.

He has come to this house, they know, for the same reason his uncles and aunts and great-grandparents had. The same reason that perhaps, one day, his mother and father will. The house has a task and a purpose, it is an efficient entity, a series of walls and floors and ceilings meant to confine and conceal and facilitate the same processes they devour. He has come here to die. They know this all without being told, reading the bursts of emotion wrapped around every unhinged shingle and creaking step.

The stones are not really enough though. The memory of the place – the flavor – those strange silent, secret moments shared only once and with no one - are too weak. Tiny echoes that bring a swill of taste and no substance. So it would be very easy, even justified, to reach further, across the rocky un-shore, through glass and bedding. It would be easy to feast on what little remains of Regulus Black.

Something stops them.

It’s strange. They have no concept of challenge, or the virtue of resisting temptation. They are quite beyond the small sentimentality that governs human beings. They know only need and they know only hunger. They also know that they were promised more. More than simply a regular soul, weakened by stress and horror and now creeping madness.*

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[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*The world is a much harsher place than Regulus had once conceived it to be, and it continues to batter him with that reality even this far into the English countryside, even this alone. This lonely place is still first and foremost a forced refuge for Barty, but it has wormed its way into Regulus as well, and he has begun to feel a vague and faceless haunting that grows stronger with each day he keeps the both of them caged inside. To someone who grows up knowing one's ancestors better than they know their own mother, being in a place where so many of them have ceased to be is rather disconcerting to someone as faded as Regulus himself feels.

There is so much more to be done than he can do now. So many difficulties to figure though and bridges to cross - they cannot stay here forever, Barty reminds him seemingly daily - and on top of all other responsibilities Regulus is finding living without a house elf to be far more work than he ever assumed. It is Kreacher his mind is on, and not his deal against Voldemort, when the windows stiffen in an unnatural chill and the constant worry in his stomach pitches heavily around in a warning fit. It doesn't take long at this point for Regulus to recognise he has a visitor.

Regulus locks the back patio door behind him with (now always slightly) shaking hands, as though the antiquated deadbolt will keep Barty safe inside without him. In the dark pane of glass he sees the shadowy figures of the Dementors before turning to face them.

"I don't have-" "Any news-" "-for you-*