Regulus held no particular opinion of Hufflepuff. He didn't look down on it, didn't look up to it. Just another house.
Their Head of House, though, Professor Sprout, he highly respected her.
He could picture her face if she ever heard about this student. No disappointment, no blame. Only the grief of why didn't you come to me sooner.
Someone from another house fallen this far, and he might have walked on. But a Hufflepuff, one of Sprout's children, was worth a few minutes of listening.
The professor had given him too much.
Regulus looked at the young werewolf, his tone flat, neither warm nor pitying. "Talk."
He wasn't about to volunteer help. What would that make him?
The professor had given him too much, and he was willing to look after one of her Hufflepuffs on her behalf. But the man had to earn it himself.
Speak, and I can help you. Sit there mute, and we're done here.
The young werewolf stayed quiet a while longer. Then he started.
His voice came out dry and rasping, like a throat that hadn't held a real conversation in months. It caught twice before it found the way out.
He stumbled over words, but his diction stayed clear, and his vocabulary was worlds more civilized than anything Greyback's lot produced.
"Edgar Tomlin." His throat worked. "Graduated last year."
He liked Herbology, he said. After school he'd taken work at a herb garden in an outlying county, close enough to home.
A few months back he'd been gathering plants near a stretch of marshland in north Wales. Dark had fallen, the moon was full, and he hadn't thought anything of it.
A lone werewolf came out of the grass, bit him once, and ran.
He'd gone home once. Stood outside the door a long time, watched through the window as his mother lit a lamp in the kitchen and his sister bent over the table writing something. Then he turned around and left.
He was afraid that come the full moon he'd become the thing that had bitten him, and wake up in that kitchen with the taste of blood in his mouth.
He went to St Mungo's. A few people sat waiting in the lobby. The receptionist glanced at the bite on his shoulder and told him to wait.
So he waited. A long time. Watching people come and go, thinking about spending the rest of his life under eyes full of pity, caution, disgust.
He knew what the bite meant. It was finished, all of it.
He left again.
Later he heard about a mining village north of Yorkshire, where Greyback took werewolves in, and he came.
He'd been clear-headed about it. Nowhere else to go, and this place at least didn't turn anyone away.
Only after arriving did he learn that the lone wolf who'd bitten him was one of Greyback's, sent out to bite at random.
"And after you got here?" Regulus asked.
Edgar glanced back at Greyback.
The barrier Regulus had laid down still smothered their voices. The wolf couldn't hear a word, but those yellow eyes hadn't left them, two coals smoldering.
"I stayed." Edgar turned back. "Everyone here's the same. Nobody minds you."
His voice dropped. "Nobody asks who you used to be either."
Not one corner of the magical world would take a werewolf in. Only here, where at least nobody looked at him sideways, because they were all the same.
A grey sort of making-do. Alive, but you couldn't call it living.
Listening, Regulus found himself mildly surprised, though not entirely.
He'd assumed Greyback grew the pack by biting people and dragging them back. Instead they walked in on their own feet.
Which made sense on reflection.
That was the werewolf's position. Cast out by the entire world, and the only ground left to stand on was this filthy patch among his own kind.
A swamp is still somewhere, for a man with nowhere.
He thought about the two textures of magic he'd felt earlier. The newly turned still fighting, the long-turned no longer bothering.
This one still fought. Still tore at himself. Still scrubbed his nails and restitched his seams to prove he knew who he was.
Set against that empty house he'd found in Greyback's head, this house still had someone in it, lamp burning, doors and windows buckling inward while the man inside braced them.
One a finished ending. The other a fight still in progress.
Two extremes of the same disease, laid out in front of him at once.
As living samples went, this one was livelier.
"Stay here," Regulus asked, "or do you want out?"
Having asked it, he ran the question against himself first.
Different circumstances, same fall, and the first thing he'd do is find a professor.
Sprout, Dumbledore, Flitwick, Slughorn, McGonagall. Any of them. Not one would wash their hands of it.
Then again, the hypothetical was pointless. He'd never end up here in the first place.
Werewolves threatened wizards, but any wizard with a scrap of competence could block once, buy a breath, and Apparate clear. Not a hard thing.
A full Shield Charm wasn't in everyone's range. Apparition was standard survival equipment for a proper graduate.
For a wizard with seven years of schooling to get bitten at close quarters said everything about how badly he'd been outclassed.
This one was, frankly, terrible.
Edgar had gone still, something flaring behind his eyes.
Someone willing to take him out of this place. He'd stopped letting himself imagine it a long time ago.
Then the light went out.
He lowered his head and stared at his own scrubbed fingernails, as though checking whether any part of him still qualified as human.
His voice came hoarser than before. "Can't."
Regulus said nothing, only held his gaze and waited.
The silence stretched.
"Full moon." A sigh, the sound of a man who'd stopped arguing. "When I turn, I'm not there. The head isn't mine and the body isn't mine. Here, it doesn't matter who I bite. There's nobody I care about."
His voice sank further. "Go home, and I'm near my parents. Near living people. One month I don't hold it, and that's my mother. My sister. I'd rather rot out here."
"Why not go to a professor?" Regulus watched him. "Professor Sprout, any of them. Hogwarts wouldn't leave you to this."
Edgar was quiet a long time. "I walked to the gates. Stood outside the castle. The Great Hall windows were lit and I could hear people laughing in there."
His throat moved. "I stood there thinking. Even if a professor took me in, what does a school do with a graduated werewolf? What have I got that's worth breaking the rules for?"
Quieter still. "And there's no cure. A professor can't fix that either."
He wasn't wrong.
Wolfsbane Potion didn't exist yet. Transformation couldn't be suppressed. The only method was to lock yourself away on the night of the full moon, endure it, and change back at dawn.
Lupin had the Shrieking Shack and the Whomping Willow standing guard, protections Dumbledore had arranged specifically for him, someone watching every full moon.
A graduated Hufflepuff had none of it.
Dumbledore could shield a student inside the castle. He couldn't shield every person who got bitten and had no way back.
Regulus studied him.
Minutes ago he'd filed this one as an atypical Hufflepuff. Wretched, spineless, resigned, beaten flat.
Now the thing turned over.
He wanted to go home, wanted it desperately, and he'd shoved other people's safety in front of his own way out and pinned it there.
There was a road, and he'd bricked it up himself, purely so nobody else got dragged down.
The logic wouldn't survive scrutiny. Pick any angle and it came apart. He bit down on it anyway and refused to let go.
Not brave the way a Gryffindor is brave, hurling himself forward.
Not clever the way a Ravenclaw is clever, finding the way around when a road closes.
He knew exactly where his road ended, and he still finished the day's work, still scrubbed his nails, still endured where nobody could see him, waiting for morning.
The most typical Hufflepuff there was.
Something caught fire in Regulus's mind.
He'd been finished after Greyback's empty house. Ready to leave.
This one handed him a reason to act.
The barrier this wolf couldn't cross, turning and hurting people, happened to be exactly the thing he wanted to test, and might be able to solve.
"I can try to help you," Regulus said.
Edgar's head came up.
"Let me be clear about what I'm trying."
Regulus's tone stayed level. "I can't cure you. You'll be a werewolf for the rest of your life. But on the night you turn, keeping you from losing your mind and mauling someone, that I might be able to attempt."
He walked it back a step. "No guarantees it works. If it does, you may get a day when you go home."
Edgar's eyes lit, and this time nothing put it out.
His mouth opened without sound, lips shaking hard, and in the end he only nodded, several times, heavily.
Beside them, Lucius listened, brow creasing slightly, gaze resting a moment on Regulus's face.
Helping a werewolf was beneath him. Filthy creatures, contaminating by contact.
But he'd heard what kind of help was on offer, and he understood what it meant.
Advanced mind magic. Intervention at the level of the will. Suppressing a werewolf's transformation. You could count the wizards in Britain capable of it.
Regulus was thirteen.
Lucius set that statement against what he'd just watched happen to Greyback and reached a conclusion he was quite pleased with.
Help him? Hardly.
This was an experiment. A Hufflepuff werewolf, conveniently to hand, to verify those invisible methods of his.
Same as Greyback minutes ago. Find a younger sample, measure something different.
The look he gave Regulus shifted quietly, settling into a knowing satisfaction, the recognition of one's own kind.
At the Christmas dinner, the Regulus with grey magic bleeding off him and green light climbing his wand tip, that was the real Regulus Black. Cold, efficient. Everything else was surface.
A man who could throw Dark magic at that intensity, and you'd expect him to go soft at the sight of a sad case?
The idea was funny on its face.
Everything he'd just said to the Hufflepuff was polite handling, the sort of thing you tell a test subject to keep it cooperative.
Lucius felt considerably better. That fit properly.
Regulus paid no attention to what Lucius was thinking.
He went to work. Legilimency again, into Edgar's mind.
The approach differed from before. Greyback had been a forced entry, smashing through every obstruction on the way.
Edgar didn't resist. He came forward to meet it, opened himself, let him in.
He wanted this.
Regulus eased off accordingly, entering light and slow, pushing his mental force gently inward. The result came out the same. He was through in an instant.
Inside, he searched for the sturdiest thing in the human layer, the thing that refused to release its grip.
Past the terror that came after the bite. Past the nightmares of the full moon. Past the nights of missing home badly enough to go mad.
None of it hard enough. All of it would wash away.
Deeper, and he found them. Several, tangled together.
The family he loved. His mother's back as she lit the kitchen lamp. The crown of his sister's head bent over her homework.
He still knew who he was. Edgar Tomlin, Hufflepuff, last year's graduate, a man who liked Herbology, a man who didn't want to become a monster.
Beneath all of it, the heaviest thing of all. He'd rot here before he'd hurt anyone innocent.
There it was.
That particular Hufflepuff quality. Slow, heavy, stubborn past all reason, and tough enough to hold.
A clever man would have arranged himself an escape route long ago, and that thing in him wouldn't have been half as hard.
The quality was worth nothing in a place like Greyback's. To Regulus, it was precisely what an anchor needed to be made of.
He drew the anchor up, lit it, reinforced it.
A dark blue glimmer surfaced in his eyes.
The light of Bellatrix.