Chapter 264: Chapter 264: Sirius’s Reckoning

Every word Regulus had said was something Sirius had never considered.

He’d assumed he left the House of Black because he chose to.

Walking out that door, he’d believed it was his doing. His decision, his nerve, his hand on the handle, his feet on the other side.

He thought he’d won. But Regulus said the family never chased him.

So what did that make him?

What he’d called escape, Regulus saw as neglect. Nobody bothering to stop him.

Sitting still now, turning it over, he realized it might be true.

He’d chosen Gryffindor. Walburga lost her mind. Orion said nothing.

He’d skipped Christmas, stayed at the Potters’. Walburga screamed a few times. Orion still said nothing.

He thought he’d been fighting. Rebelling. Using every choice to tell that house he rejected everything it stood for.

But the other side never engaged. His fists landed on cotton. Not even an echo came back.

He’d never thought about it closely.

All he knew was that he didn’t want to be in that house. Didn’t want to hear Walburga’s voice, didn’t want those portraits watching him, didn’t want to wear tailored robes to Pure-blood galas.

So he ran. And running felt like enough. But Regulus hadn’t run.

Once that thought surfaced, it wouldn’t stop.

Did Regulus stay because he left?

Did walking that path mean Regulus couldn’t?

Did choosing Gryffindor mean Regulus had to go to Slytherin?

When he broke with the family, did Regulus have to stay behind and catch everything he’d thrown away?

He’d never considered any of this. He’d assumed his choices were his and Regulus’s were Regulus’s. Two separate roads. Unrelated.

But they weren’t unrelated. He’d taken the left fork, and the right fork had only one person standing on it.

Everything he’d discarded landed on Regulus.

He hadn’t shouldered a single one of those things. He’d bolted, dropped the lot, told himself it was no longer his problem.

But none of it vanished because he ran. It was all still there, pressing down on someone else.

Regulus had never said any of this to him.

Not as children. Not at Grimmauld Place. Not at Hogwarts.

Maybe he’d decided there was no point.

Sirius wanted to laugh at that. Couldn’t manage it.

He thought about who he’d been, and knew that even if Regulus had told him, he wouldn’t have listened.

He’d have called it an excuse. A variant of the Black family line. Another way to lure him back.

He’d have blocked those words before they reached him, refused to think about them, thrown them right back.

Back then, nobody could’ve gotten through.

Then he thought about what Regulus had said about power.

Voldemort didn’t need to show his face to make people choose what he wanted. Dumbledore was the same. That was power.

Regulus had said it in his usual tone. No heat, no weight, no anger.

Sirius couldn’t tell if there was emotion underneath.

Whether Regulus was trapped and bearing it, or whether he genuinely didn’t care. He couldn’t read it.

Regulus had been that way since they were small. Sirius could barely remember a time he’d seen the boy’s feelings break the surface.

Maybe he’d shown them to someone. To friends. To their father. Never to him.

The thought tightened something in his throat.

He looked down at his own hands. Fingers spread, then closed into a fist.

He’d told Regulus he’d found his talent. Transfiguration. Regulus said it was good, told him to keep practicing.

He could tell it wasn’t dismissal. It was real acknowledgment. But then what?

Why was he practicing Transfiguration? To be better than James? To show off in front of his friends? To prove he was impressive? 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

Before, that had felt like enough. Practice magic to get stronger. Get stronger to win.

So why was Regulus practicing magic?

Voldemort hadn’t given him the option of saying no. Voldemort offered a choice with only one answer.

Maybe Regulus practiced magic so that one day he’d have a real choice.

Something settled heavy in Sirius’s chest.

He used to think the gap between himself and Regulus was magical skill. That he hadn’t practiced enough, hadn’t pushed hard enough, hadn’t committed.

Now he wondered if what separated them wasn’t magic at all.

James scooted over, waving a hand in front of his face. No reaction. He waved again.

Then he climbed onto Sirius’s bed, crossed his legs beside him, and bumped his shoulder.

"What are you thinking about?" James’s voice cut in, laced with teasing. "I’ve been calling you for ages."

Sirius surfaced. Glanced at him. "Nothing."

James studied him a moment, poked him again. "The Forbidden Forest thing. You’re really coming?"

Sirius nodded. "I’m coming."

James broke into a grin, shoved his wand under the pillow, and flopped onto his back, muttering, "Good. I was starting to think someone had stolen your soul."

Sirius didn’t respond.

Lupin came over too, and the three of them hashed out the plan in low voices. Wait for curfew. Out through the Fat Lady’s portrait. Take the side door on the castle’s flank, skirt the Black Lake, cut past Hagrid’s hut, enter the Forbidden Forest from there.

James talked with his whole face, eyes wide, hands moving. Lupin poured cold water on every other sentence. Sirius dropped in a word here and there.

The dormitory loosened. Bit by bit, it started to feel like any other night.

---

The small hours. The Restricted Section.

Regulus stood before the deepest row of shelves, one fingertip hovering over a book’s spine.

Transfiguration: Beyond Form. Human Transfiguration. Eldritch Finn, 1739.

But Human Transfiguration wasn’t why he’d come looking for it. Spatial Transfiguration was.

Spatial Transfiguration had stalled him for a long time. The problem was clear: transfigured space was hypersensitive to any foreign magic that didn’t belong to its own structure. One touch and it collapsed.

That had made him think of something. Human Transfiguration.

When a witch or wizard cast a Human Transfiguration spell on another person, the caster’s magic had to enter the target’s body and complete the transformation under constant interference from the target’s own magical signature.

The parallel was obvious. Both were cases of sustaining a transfiguration while foreign magic pushed back.

Human Transfiguration worked. Which meant the problem had a solution.

But how?

At the time, he’d reasoned that it couldn’t simply be a matter of the caster’s magic overpowering the target’s. Otherwise, what was the point? Brute-force magical superiority wasn’t technique. It was bullying.

There had to be something more elegant.

But Professor McGonagall had since solved the Spatial Transfiguration problem, making the question of foreign magical interference moot.

With that resolved, his original reason for reading this book no longer applied.

Still, now that Human Transfiguration was on his mind, it was worth a look.

Dumbledore had said something that day in the fog, before leaving for France. Flight could be approached through Transfiguration.

Borrow traits from different magical creatures and weave them into your own body.

Regulus had listened and felt the scope of it.

Looking back now, what Dumbledore described was a higher order of thinking about Human Transfiguration entirely.

The books he’d already read, standard ones available outside the Restricted Section, covered mostly temporary cosmetic alterations and functional structural adjustments. None of them touched on what Dumbledore had described.

Hogwarts introduced Human Transfiguration in the sixth-year curriculum. N.E.W.T.-level advanced Transfiguration covered it further, though most wizards who passed the exam still couldn’t cast it reliably.

Those texts dealt in temporary changes to appearance and function. Nothing about borrowing a creature’s innate magical ability and embedding it permanently.

So he’d come to the Restricted Section to find more.

Regulus pulled his thoughts back, condensed his magic into a fine thread, and touched the magical imprint on the pages. The author’s thoughts and knowledge, infused into the text at the time of writing, began to surface in his mind.

He skipped past the opening overview and went straight to the body of the text. Cross-Species Switches.

Grafting a magical creature’s ability onto a witch or wizard required three steps.

Step one: extract the magical seed from a living specimen. The wizard extended their own magic into the creature’s body, located the strand of magic responsible for the desired ability, and copied its imprint.

Regulus read that and gave a small nod. He knew this process. The Decomposition Curse had come from the same principle.

He could do this. No issue.

Step two: implant the replicated seed into the caster’s own body. The caster spoke the incantation with their wand pointed at themselves.

The incantation’s purpose was to open an entry point, giving the foreign magic a place to settle.

The book didn’t provide a specific spell. It listed only the Latin root structure.

Facultas. Ability.

Mutare. To change.

Corpus. Body.

The combination depended on the target creature’s species and the desired ability.

Step three: coexistence. This was the most dangerous part.

A wizard’s magic would instinctively reject the intruder. The caster had to continuously suppress their own magic, carving out space for the foreign presence to settle.

The longer the suppression held, the more the foreign magic adapted. Eventually, the two currents would flow side by side, neither crowding the other.

He read on. Prohibitions.

First, underage wizards could not attempt this. Their bodies were still developing. Foreign magic introduced too early would disrupt the natural magical structure, causing permanent damage.

Second, no more than one foreign magic could be implanted in a single person. Two or more would conflict, and the wizard’s body, caught between them, would break down.

Third, transferring a human’s abilities into another human was forbidden. That constituted possession. The International Confederation of Wizards classified it as the most severe Transfiguration crime, punishable by life imprisonment in Azkaban.

The book documented several failed attempts.

Regulus reached the final page. It was blank except for a single annotation, as though written in a state of utter exhaustion.

"They’re all right. But none of them tried splitting the ability apart. Moving it whole causes conflict. What if you unraveled it into threads and wove them in?"

Regulus stared at that annotation for a long time. One phrase formed in his mind: magical weaving.

He lifted his finger from the spine.

Human Transfiguration wasn’t urgent. He was a second-year. The book was explicit: underage wizards couldn’t attempt it.

But his body was developing well. Maybe by third year, he could try.