InsaneJournal

Who: Regulus and Ariadne
What: Regulus has a complete mental break down
When: After the fight between Reg and Sirius
Where: His flat and then ends at the Clinic
Rating/Warnings: High, self-harm, blood (he didn't try to kill himself and he doesn't die! There, have a spoiler)
Status: Complete


Regulus didn’t speak as they walked back to his flat. After starting back down the street Regulus had untangled his hand from Ariadne’s and thrust his deep in his pockets. The silence was deafening, but not uncomfortable for Regulus. It wasn’t that Regulus didn’t know what to say, it was he didn’t have anything to say. This is where he went when he shut down mentally, it was peaceful here. All decisions were directed by someone else, and Regulus didn’t have to register or care, which made this an ideal coping technique when he was faced with an attacker he could fend off, they could do their worst and it wouldn’t matter.

He would stay like this until something so loud and shocking jarred him from it, or his mind no longer perceived any threats. Sadly, he didn’t trust Ariadne enough to break out of this state the moment they were away from Sirius.

When they reached his flat it took prodding from Ariadne for him to pull out his keys and unlock door and let them in. Once in, he resumed just standing until someone gave him another command to follow.

Ariadne was worried. Regulus pulling his hand away was probably a good sign, given his usual distaste for physical contact, but that was about it. He was silent and she didn't want to say anything till they were out of the street. Until they reached somewhere he'd recognize as safe. Which meant his flat. Now that Arthur was back, she didn't particularly want to spring this on either of them. Trying to explain it to her new flatmate - "oh, this is your doppelganger, he's just been terrorized by his older brother, and by the way they're both wizards" - did not seem like a great idea. Nor did she want to think about Regulus might act when confronted with his double. So it was Regulus's flat she led him to, as much as she might have if he'd still been holding her hand as she dragged him along.

She flipped on the lights and frowned. Things were ever so slightly askew, and between the compulsive servitude of the house elf and Regulus's own tendencies towards neat-freakiness it seemed like one more giant warning bell. "Sit down," she said, walking into the kitchen and retrieving a tea towel, then getting it wet before she returned. "And hold still," she added, looking down at Regulus. "Are you okay? You didn't knock any teeth out or anything, did you?" Carefully she started wiping the drying and crusted blood from his chin. This was gross, but fixable. Fixing whatever was wrong with him on the inside? Far more complicated.

Regulus did as he was told, his one shining talent at the moment. He sat himself down on the sofa, found a spot to fix his gaze to on the wall and waited for further instruction. Ariadne disappeared from his very limited peripheral vision, there was some sound of drawers being pulled and shoved from the kitchen, and then she was back, pressing a damp cloth to his chin. He didn’t pull back even when she grabbed him to hold him steady while she worked.

The words permeated slowly through the haze surrounding him, trying to coax him out. He resisted, it was safe here. His eyes flicked briefly to Ariadne’s, a glimmer of his usual self in that look, a revelation he was still in there somewhere and he just needed something more... But the flash of him faded and he shook his head slightly in answer to the question of knocked out teeth, and then his eyes were back on the wall.

This was creepy. He didn't move, he didn't talk; there was a brief look of something familiar in his eyes but that passed very quickly. When she was finished, Ariadne dropped the towel on the coffee table before sitting down on the table herself, knees bumping into Regulus's legs. Was it worth it to try and provoke a response? Okay, maybe provoke was the wrong word. Elicit a response. Just to make sure he wasn't going to go totally catatonic in there.

"That'll have to do for now, but washing your face would be more effective. And you should probably rinse - do you have hydrogen peroxide? I'll bring some over later." Ariadne stopped and gave him a searching look. Part of her wanted to ask if she should call someone, see if Juno or Merlin could come over. They knew him better than she did and might even be able to get him to talk. On the other hand, even suggesting it might be one more rejection than he could handle right now.

"Do you feel like telling me why you were on the ground when Eames and I showed up?" she asked finally. It was a place to start, after all. If he didn't want to answer she could figure out where to go from there.

It took Regulus a long while to answer. It was unclear, from the look of him, if he had even heard Ariadne. He had, but he was deciding whether or not to acknowledge it now or let it pass and process it all later. He had no idea what hydrogen peroxide was, he was a wizard, he used potions. But no, he shook his head again, at last, he didn’t have any healing potions on hand.

Recalling the scene that had happened not more than a half hour previous was difficult. He’d retreated to this state to buffer himself from the events of the day, not to review them now. He screwed up his face in concentration and then relaxed when the answer came. Without turning to look at her he said quietly, “He hexed me… when my back was turned.”

His hand came up to touch his chin in memory of falling forward. The contact of his own fingers against his face seemed to startle him slightly and he looked down at his hands. He was starting to register more things and to come out of that daze that had a tight grip over him. There was grit and dried blood in the scrapes on the palms of his hand. He ran the pad of his thumb gingerly over one particularly long cut.

“I should go wash,” but he didn’t move to rise. One thought at a time, first the acknowledgement of what he should do, then, after another slow moment, the thought leading to action. Regulus was still on acknowledgment.

Ariadne flinched at the revelation. It took so long to come that she had stopped expecting an answer. And while she wasn't exactly surprised it was still hard to hear. She knew Sirius the charmer, the fun-loving boy who would play harmless pranks. Not the bully that was hinted at in the books and who would do this to his own brother. Would she ever understand the relationship they had? Probably not. It was completely foreign to her and her experience of how siblings should get along. But then, she hadn't grown up with an abusive mother in a stultifying aristocratic household. Lucky her.

"Yeah, probably," she said, looking down at his hands. "Come on." Ariadne stood and offered Regulus her hand again, intending to pull him into the bathroom. Maybe he'd have some tweezers and she could get the grit out of his hands. "While your back was turned?" she asked finally. The undercurrent of disgust was self-evident.

It was easy to leap to the next step, action, when someone else was guiding him. He was rather highly susceptible to suggestion at this point. Another furtive glance at Ariadne and Regulus was reaching for her hand. He rose and let her lead the way to the bathroom.

He’d been directed to sit on the edge of the tub, and was taking his seat by the time he answered her question, though, it seemed redundant. “Yes, I’d turned...” His train of thought was interrupted as he watched her search the drawers under the sink, it was unclear what she was looking for. If she was looking for that muggle stuff she’d suggested earlier she wouldn’t find any. When she came up with tweezers he understood. He was normally an impeccable groomer and there were some things you did not rely on the clumsy wielding of a wand to take care of, sometimes you just needed tweezers, and now more so than ever that he lacked any magical ability.

“I’d turned to go back the other way,” his mind jumped back to his original thought now that the mystery of Ariadne’s snooping was solved, “he wouldn’t let me pass around him.”

The tweezers shook in her hand, and Regulus was lucky to not have them jabbed into his palm. "He did what? Oh, that is fucking low." Attacking when somebody's back was turned? That just wasn't fair. It seemed entirely antithetical to Gryffindor values as well. And when Regulus was so obviously out of it... this was just further damaging her already fractured opinion of Sirius. The downside of trying to judge people fairly on their present actions - how she managed to connect with Eames in spite of what his past might have been, how she formed a friendship with Regulus despite his Death Eater past - was that when somebody fucked up she took it that much harder. And the fact that Sirius had thrown aside whatever fragile peace he and Regulus had come to in order to attack him from behind? Definitely a major fuckup.

"Why were you fighting in the first place?" As if both of them were equal in this. But she couldn't know till he told her what had happened, and Ariadne badly needed to make sense out of this.

If Ariadne stabbed Regulus’ palm with the tweezers he probably wouldn’t have noticed. He’d fixed his eyes on the corner of the countertop, not taking in any detail in particular, just back to staring because it was easier to let his eyes go out of focus. One less sense bombarding his brain with information that needed organizing and classification. But he furrowed his brow in concentration again, going deeper into the heart of the matter meant examining things again. That took effort, and a willingness to open himself to painful memories.

“I’ve been ignoring him… since after seeing him, after I… returned.” It took him forever to finish the sentence.

"And we all know how much he hates being ignored," she concluded. The older boy's need for attention was almost pathological. "Him specifically, or just part of the way you're not seeing anybody unless we barge in?" Because she'd noticed how unenthusiastic he was about seeing her, how he didn't appear to have showered or bothered to leave the apartment. And speaking of which... "Why were you out, anyway? I thought you were holed up in here more or less permanently." She was working as she talked, picking grit out of his hand and dropping it in the wastebasket, trying not to do any further damage.

“Him specifically,” he said and then fell silent. He’d done that enough thus far in the conversation that it wouldn’t seem too out of the ordinary. He decided the best option was to focus on the first question, as painful as it might be, and he would ignore the other question. It was better than lying, which he was, incidentally, quite opposed to.

“I went to see him, and he realized… I wasn’t who he wanted to see.” Even with a resolve to answer this question he still found it hard to focus and answer in a timely fashion. “This last week… I just couldn’t,” he didn’t shrug, it would have been one if he had enough energy to put towards the movement, it turned into more of a slight incline of his head. That would have to do to convey the right meaning. “I couldn’t deal with that.”

Ariadne sighed and, finishing with the last piece of gravel she could see, stood back. "Wash your hands." He seemed to be responding to commands, and that was a fairly benign one. Thinking back over the past few weeks, she realized that Regulus must have meant Remus, and her spine stiffened. So she wasn't the only one who'd been feeling rejected. That, at least, she could understand. How much worse must it be when it was your brother showing that he would rather see someone else first?

As Regulus stood, she laid a careful hand on his back between his shoulder blades, just letting it rest there. She wanted badly to hug him, but she suspected that wouldn't go over well at all.

Regulus did as he was told and started washing his hands. The cuts on his palms stung but not enough to shock him. Some semblance of normalcy was returning. They were having an actual conversation, after all, somewhat jilted and slow, but he was still talking and that was a vast improvement over the silence all the way back to his flat. But that all reversed when he felt Ariadne’s hand on his back.

It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t know that when she touched him there it called up the memory of another person resting his hand on Regulus back, very close to that same spot, and lamenting how the scar underneath that shirt was not inflicted by him. It always bothered me Rabastian did this, instead of me. The memory recalled by touch tugged at some deep fear within him just as any number of things had been doing to him throughout the week.

He froze, hands still in the stream of the water. And it was a good minute before he found his voice to speak. “Can I have some priv-“ he nodded towards the toilet, as if the ashen look on his face didn’t explain it all.

Ariadne could feel the sudden tension in his muscles and practically see the blood drain from his face. She dropped her hand quickly and stepped back, bumping into the door frame. "Oh, god, I'm sorry. Are you okay?" Obviously he wasn't, but she didn't want to just leave him there either. Regulus was normally standoffish and formal. This, though, was several orders of magnitude worse. Maybe it had something to do with whatever had happened to him when he'd been dead, the things he said he couldn't remember. This looked like the moment before a fight-or-flight response kicked in, and she didn't want to be on the receiving end of the first of those from a terrified and highly trained wizard.

She sidled over to the threshold, taking another step back. "Are you sure?" she asked. Hopefully he wouldn't just slam the door in her face. And even if he did, she wouldn't leave him alone for long.

Regulus put up a shaking hand to try and let Ariadne know this wasn’t her fault and mumbled a pitiful, “Please.” Though he’d tried to tell everyone his reinstated no touching rule and this was the reason, he still understood this wasn’t her doing. She had merely been the means that triggered the memory. And he needed her out of the room because his stomach was roiling fast and he had little time.

The moment she was outside the room he closed the door; he didn’t worry over whether he’d been gentle about it, because the next moment he was on his knees and lifting the lid of the toilet without a moment to spare. It was mostly dry heaves as he’d had little to eat all day. When his stomach finally gave it a rest he dropped his head to the seat, letting the cool of the porcelain permeate through to his skull. But it wasn’t doing him any good. He could feel the blood pounding against the inside of his skull, and he was trying to push the memory that had caused all this to the back of his mind where he could forget about it and move on. But it wouldn’t budge from his thoughts.

He climbed to his feet and found the water had been left running from before. He rinsed out his mouth and tried splashing his face with water to help his troubled nerves, but they had reached the end of their patience for the day and were unraveling faster than he could catch hold.

He watched himself in the mirror as he clutched the countertop, desperately trying to grasp a hold of any kind of reality in a vain attempt to steady himself. He hated himself. He hated the way he looked in his reflection, and how it clearly revealed he was losing his grip. He hated how dying and not being able to stay dead affected him. He hated the way he couldn’t deal with his brother, or the way he let Sirius get to him and he could never make things right with him. He hated his fractured soul, and that he could feel it broken, like it was something you saw only out of the corner of your eye but disappeared when you turned to look. He hated his past and the things he’d done and the things done to him and who he’d become because of them. And he hated the loss of the life he could have had had he just made a different choice at any number of points down the timeline of the past. He didn’t just hate himself, he loathed himself in that moment.

And it was all because of one thing. He clawed at the cuff of his shirt, tearing at the button to pull the sleeve up and expose the Mark. Because of this. He ran his nails down his arm, then again, and dug harder, but is wasn’t enough. He couldn’t get ride of it. He was back to staring at himself in the mirror with more revulsion than his brother had ever looked at him with.

The spider web of cracks spread out over his face in the mirror before he realized his fist had collided with his image. He hit the mirror again, his knuckles, already red, opened more and left smears on the pieces that didn’t fall. A shard of glass, rimmed on one edge in red, hanging on by one side caught his eye. His mind dropped into a lower gear, and something primal in him took over. He heard someone call to him from outside the room, the door shook as someone tried to turn the knob, and Regulus realized that at some point he’d locked the door.

That didn’t matter as Regulus eyes followed an invisible line from the mirror shard now in his hand to the Mark on his arm. Because of this.

It hurt, the first gouge, but that did not deter him in his desperate madness to rid himself of the thing that haunted his every breathing moment, and non-breathing moments, but he couldn’t remember those. He used that sharp point again and again, tearing at his arm along the sinewy snake, because maybe if he cut it out the memories would stop tormenting him and maybe the only person who’d ever come close to loving him unconditionally would just like him unconditionally again…

The spray of red across his vision was the first clue he’d dug too deep and nicked something vital to life under that now botched skin. The second clue was the blood kept coming. Regulus stepped back and away from the sink then, back until he hit the wall and slid down to the floor. He stared transfixed at the mess he’d made of his arm and knew then, he could cut forever and ever and never get the Mark out, he would never be rid of the thing and he would never be whole again.

It was easy enough to figure out what was going on inside the bathroom, at least at first. Over the running water Ariadne could hear the noises of retching and spitting. That was normal enough, if unexpected. Apparently he had some serious post-traumatic triggers. Which was unsurprising now that she thought about it. However, the unmistakable sound of breaking glass was definitely a surprise and as clear as a warning bell. When the knob refused to turn she felt her stomach sink. This could be very, very bad.

"Regulus? Let me in!" she shouted, pounding on the door. Ariadne only tried forcing the door once; it was too sturdy to give under her slight weight, and she'd be no use if she dislocated her shoulder trying to break the door down. Instead she ran back to the living room where she'd dropped her bag, fishing out a handful of seemingly random objects before running back to the bathroom door. Luckily, when Eames had taught her how to pick locks, he'd had her practice on the bathroom doorknob in their flat, among others. It didn't take her nearly as long as it could have to trick the lock into giving way, and then she was staggering into the bathroom and staring in shock at Regulus slumped against the wall.

That was a lot of blood, she thought sickly. She'd seen violence in dreams, shots to the head with large-caliber bullets and people torn apart by mobbing projections, but that wasn't real. This was horrifically real. She dragged a towel off the rack and knelt next to Regulus, muttering a torrent of curses. It was obvious even as she started applying pressure that it wasn't going to do much good. They needed to get to the clinic - and there was only one way she could think of that would be fast enough.

"Kreacher! Regulus is hurt, he needs you!" House elves could apparate, she thought wildly, even if this particular one was likely to leave her behind in a puddle of his master's blood. That didn’t matter right now. The elf was the best chance of getting Regulus help as quickly as possible.

In his defeat Regulus had retreated back into the haze from earlier, and didn’t look up when the door opened. He just continued staring at his arm, now quite literally covered in his own blood which was soaking his clothes as well. It was easier in this place, and seeing his arm all torn up, his doing, it was hard to argue against leaving again.

His focal point was disrupted by the inclusion of a towel pressed against his arm and he looked up and saw Ariadne, looked at her like he was surprised to see her and wondered where she materialized from. It looked like he was fighting something then, he wanted to stay here where things weren’t complicated or hurtful, but the way the red was blossoming through the light blue cloth reminded him that even here he could be hurt.

“I thought if I removed it,” he was speaking to Ariadne though he didn’t look at her. His voice still had the dreamy tones from earlier clinging to it, “things would be better, that maybe I might forget… and he might…” He couldn’t bring himself to finish the thought, because neither of the things he wanted could come true, no sense talking about them.

It was the shout for, and the subsequent arrival of Kreacher that brought him fully back. His little house elf who would do anything for him if he just asked. Kreacher could be heard waking from his bed by the window in the sitting room, muttering half drunken slurred curses aplenty, clearly not believing what Ariadne was shouting to him. But the moment he stumbled around the corner and confirmed the truth of her words he burst into tears and grabbed a hold of Regulus’ shoulder which really did nothing for the situation.

“What has Master done?!” he wailed hoarsely, and his words were quickly lost in a crackling, blubbering mess.

Regulus thought it a bit unfair to assume from the get go he’d been the culprit, but then he was still holding the mirror piece in his other hand. Oh. Right. Regulus was suddenly struck by a wave of fatigue, a culmination of the day’s events plus the blood loss, probably more the latter than the former.

“Kreacher, listen to Ariadne.” Regulus hadn’t a clue what she had planned, but clearly he wasn’t the one to decide anything more than something as harmless as what color socks he should wear in the morning, and he only owned black colored socks.

"And you thought you'd do that with a fucking piece of broken glass? Gold star for stupidity," Ariadne hissed, pushing the towel harder against the wounds and scowling fiercely. It was a sick sort of logic, she supposed, but it was really monumentally idiotic. And she didn't have the best track record for dealing with other people's self-destructive impulses in a constructive and loving manner. More like reckless and bullheaded. But right now constructive and loving could go shove themselves. "Just drop it before you hurt anything else," she added, finally seeing the glass in his hand.

Kreacher was perhaps even uglier when drunken and sobbing, which only added further fuel to Ariadne's anger. Fear for Regulus and worry about what the hell was going on were both subsumed into a clear, burning fury that he would be so incredibly stupid as to do something like this. And if she had to personally drag him by the ear into the clinic, scolding him all the way, she would. But that wouldn't be necessary.

"Kreacher, bring us to the clinic. Now." The added emphasis wasn't necessary, and apparently Regulus's order trumped any feelings the house elf might have had about transporting a pissed-off Muggle who'd been berating his master. Suddenly they were on a clean-scrubbed linoleum floor, Regulus starting to fall onto his back without the wall to prop him up. All Ariadne was aware of was that the blood under her knees was gone, and that someone was going to help them.

The harsh, clipped way Ariadne addressed him was not lost on him, and he emotionally stepped back a few feet. Trust was a delicate thing for him, if he was going to be open with someone he absolutely needed that. If he couldn’t trust them, that was fine, but he couldn’t show them the parts of himself that were most vulnerable. Incidentally those were the same parts people needed to see in order to help him. It was a vicious cycle that lead to some self destructive things, obviously.

Him dropping the piece of glass in his hand was his only answer.

The world distorted, smothered and suffocated him, then righted just as it seemed it was going to snuff out his existence it corrected itself in the form of the Clinic – or what Regulus assumed was the Clinic as he’d never been here before. The pool of blood was gone from under him, but his arm was working diligently to correct that. The wall supporting him from behind disappeared and he found himself falling backwards. But there was a rush of people around them and there wasn’t much time to care about silly things like a wall support vanishing.

And then a thought struck him, one that caused panic to well within him in a way nothing had so far during this present crisis. He grabbed Ariadne with his good hand before the urgency to move him took over.

“Don’t tell Sirius. Don’t,” he repeated for emphasis because he knew the protest that would elicit. His mind worked furiously how to explain in the short time he had. “He’ll use this against me. I’m not saying lie to him if he asks you directly, just don’t tell him first. Please?” He knew he wasn’t really in a position to make some grand sweeping decision that might affect his life right at this point, but he also knew his brother, and he knew this would only come back to harm him more in the end if the older Black knew. And he hoped Ariadne, having witnessed all that had happened today would understand.

“Please.” He sounded desperate now.

Ariadne felt trapped, and swallowed hard. "All right." Don't tell him first. Someone was going to have to tell Sirius, and she'd be damned if she was going to pretend like everything was fine, but she wouldn't tell him. Possibly she would throttle Regulus later and save everyone the trouble. And then Regulus was being pulled away, and she sat in the middle of the hallway for a moment covered in his blood and half-wondering how she'd gotten here. Maybe she should check her totem, just to be sure.