He shrugs, still staring at the ceiling. "Your prerogative I guess."
He hears her sigh, a tense silence falling over them. The house creaks and groans around them, begging for help. For a little attention. A little magic to soak up. This place has always been the stronghold of the Black family, he's sure it's never felt so lonely before. He's a bad caretaker. A bad son. A bad brother.
"I miss Boo," Cerci breaks the silence eventually, because of course she does. "You never have him around anymore."
"It's just a spell," Regulus replies flatly. "Not a pet."
The truth is, Regulus can't cast his Patronus when he's high. That was...surprisingly hard at first. He'd grown used to the ghostly presence at his side, to the warmth it summoned up in him, a physical representation of something that had long ago disappeared from his life. But Boo never helped him sleep, never stopped him thinking, so in the end he kept swallowing the potions. He barely even notices the absence anymore.
"Alright, enough, get up," Cerci hops off the bed, taking Regulus's wrist and tugging on it until he reluctantly sits up.
"Why are we getting up?" he grumbles.
"You're going to bathe, because quite frankly you look like you haven't had a bath in a week."
To be fair, he might not have.
"And I'm going to make lunch."
"Kreacher will be upset if you make food, you know that," he says, though he does force himself off the bed.
"Well, he can help then. C'mon, lets go, I'm assuming you can run the bath yourself? Or have you forgotten how?"
"You're hilarious."
She smiles at him, maybe the first genuine smile he's seen since she arrived. "I know."
Regulus does bathe and Cerci does make lunch (with Kreacher's help) and a few hours later she leaves, still looking at him like she's worried he's going to fall apart the minute she's out the door.
He doesn't though.
He isn't.
Falling apart that is.
Falling implies some sort of speed and destination.
If anything, Regulus is rotting.
He sleeps at some point. Gets up at some point. Crushes ingredients and stirs cauldrons and bottles potions and whenever he starts thinking too hard about where those potions are going or what they're being used for he drinks his own. Then floats around the halls. Haunting his own house.
He isn't particularly observant at the moment, which he supposes is how it happens that he walks up the stairs to his bedroom one day and finds the Dark Lord standing there, staring at something on his desk. For a moment Regulus is certain this is some sort of hallucination, rubbing his eyes and wondering if he's swallowed a bad batch of potions. But all thoughts of hallucinations disappear when the man in front of him turns around. The cold chill that runs through Regulus then is more vivid and real than anything he's felt in weeks.
"Regulus," the man says, voice slightly high and boyish despite his age. His skin seems almost translucent, eyes deep and dark and too large for his gaunt face. "It has been too long."
Regulus can't say that he agrees.
"My lord," he finally manages to force out. "I—I'm sorry I wasn't expecting you," he wracks his blurry brain for any memory of an owl or Fire Call, anything that would have warned him of Voldemort's visit, but his thoughts slosh around in his head, running into one another and providing him with no answers.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Start from the beginning
