"Tom... what is this? What's going on?"
Kreacher had not handed over the locket.
Sirius had ordered him to obey Tom in all things, but Regulus Black had given Kreacher a command of his own, and the two instructions were in direct conflict. Regulus had told him to destroy it. Kreacher could not do both. In the hierarchy of obligations a house-elf carried, the last order from a deceased master sat above the standing instructions of a living one.
Tom had no choice but to pull Sirius away from whatever he was doing in the kitchen.
"Regulus's locket?" Sirius looked between Tom and the elf with genuine bewilderment. "Since when do you have anything to do with Regulus?"
The only thing the two of them had ever shared was a Hogwarts house. One had barely been born when the other was already dead.
"It's complicated. Too complicated to explain, and I can't explain it anyway, so save yourself the trouble of asking."
Sirius read Tom's expression and understood that pressing further right now would get him nowhere. He turned to Kreacher instead. "Kreacher. Give Tom what Regulus left you. The locket."
Kreacher's face contorted. The compulsion was absolute, but his body resisted it anyway, each step toward compliance extracted against tremendous internal resistance. Every few feet he would turn back and fix Sirius with a look of desperate appeal, begging without words to be released from the order.
Sirius did not move. He kept his expression steady and kept gesturing for Kreacher to continue.
It took the better part of half an hour.
When Kreacher finally appeared before them, one shaking hand extended, clutching the locket, Tom pulled on a pair of spell-resistant gloves he had made himself and took it from him without ceremony.
Sirius watched Kreacher's face in the aftermath and found an expression there he had never seen on the elf before. Raw grief, genuine and deep, nothing performed about it. Kreacher began driving his head against the floor, repeating Regulus's name in a broken murmur.
Sirius stopped him with a command, then followed it immediately with another. "Tell me everything. Regulus and this locket, all of it, from the beginning. Nothing left out, nothing held back, and if you've forgotten something then remember it."
A wizard's command to a house-elf carried a compulsion that went beyond the ordinary. It could reach past the elf's own limitations, past damage, past the walls memory erected around things too painful to revisit. Kreacher's mind had suffered, and there were gaps in it that had been gaps for years. Under the weight of the direct order, some of those gaps began to close. Details surfaced that he had not been able to access in a long time.
He wept as he told it.
Sirius had always been the Black family's disgrace. Regulus had been their pride. Pure-blood ideology learned young, Death Eater at sixteen, and genuinely convinced, in the way only the very young can be genuinely convinced of something, that Voldemort was the finest leader the wizarding world had ever produced.
When Voldemort needed a house-elf, Regulus gave him Kreacher without a second thought. He considered it an honour.
Kreacher's voice broke apart as he spoke. Sirius had to lean in to catch the words.
"The Dark Lord took Kreacher to a cave. Made Kreacher drink a potion, a terrible potion. The Inferius came up from the lake, so many of them, they were pulling at Kreacher, trying to drag him in, but the young master had told Kreacher to come home, so Kreacher went home."
Afterward, Regulus found out what had happened in the cave.
He told Kreacher to tell no one. Not anyone. Not even their mother.
And then, some time later, Regulus came to Kreacher and told him to take him back.
"He drank the potion himself," Kreacher said.
"What?" Sirius had been sitting very still through all of it, holding himself together through the telling by sheer will. But that broke him. He was on his feet before he finished processing the words. "You're saying Regulus drank what Voldemort left in that cave? All of it?"
Kreacher was beyond words for a moment. When they came back they came in pieces.
"The young master drank it. Every drop. He was braver than the useless eldest master has ever been. The locket was taken out. He put a copy in its place, a perfect copy, and gave the real one to Kreacher, and told Kreacher to destroy it. Kreacher could not complete the task. Kreacher has failed. Kreacher watched the young master be pulled into the lake by the Inferius."
He drove his head against the floor again, harder than before.
The fire in the sitting room guttered. Sirius stood in the edge of the shadow it cast, and nobody could see his face, because he had turned it away from the light.
Useless eldest master.
He had heard Kreacher say it a hundred times. It had never done anything to him before. Kreacher despised him and the feeling was mostly mutual, and neither of them had ever pretended otherwise.
But tonight it landed differently.
Measured against Regulus, when it actually came to it, what had he done? Regulus had gone back to that cave knowing exactly what was in it, had sat down in front of the basin and drunk every drop of whatever Voldemort had placed there, and had held on long enough to see the locket retrieved before the lake took him.
And Sirius, who had always thought of himself as the brave one, the rebellious one, the one who broke from the mold while his little brother stayed obediently in it.
He had played a clever trick on the wrong person and gotten James and Lily killed for it. Then he had spent twelve years in Azkaban while the man who actually betrayed them walked free.
A soft, broken sound came from somewhere in his chest.
Not quite a laugh. Not quite a sob. Something with no name that sat in the space between.