"Well?" Arcturus looked at his grandsons. "Are you going to say anything?"
The two brothers glanced at each other and looked away.
Regulus spoke first.
He had not planned to. He was supposed to be here for support in case anything went wrong. He had been in the same panic as Sirius when the letters arrived. Both men had assumed something serious had happened. He should have known something was off the moment he saw the entire family standing behind Sirius in the hallway. He could have warned him. But it had been far too late for that.
So, he decided to tell the truth.
Not all of it. There were parts that belonged to Sirius's story rather than his own, and parts that were not ready to be said aloud in any room yet, and parts that he had made his peace within the long dark of the cave and had decided to keep there.
"I believed in it," he said. "I want to be clear about that. I am not going to tell you I was coerced from the beginning or that I didn't understand what I was joining. I was seventeen — old enough to have thought better. But I believed everything they told me about blood and legacy and what the wizarding world should be." He paused. "I wanted to matter. After Sirius left, there was nothing in that house that felt like it did, and they gave me something that seemed to."
Arcturus said nothing. His expression had not changed, which with Arcturus meant he was listening completely.
"Bellatrix was part of it," Regulus said. "She was persuasive, when she wanted to be. You know how she is." He paused. "Was. I don't know the current state of things." He glanced at Sirius briefly.
"Azkaban," Sirius said quietly. "After the war."
Regulus nodded. He and Sirius had not yet spoken properly about what had happened to the family in the years between. "Lucius was the other one. More subtle than Bella but in some ways more effective because of it." Something in Arcturus's expression shifted as Regulus continued. "He understood how to make you feel that you were choosing freely when you were being steered. He was good at it."
"I imagine he was," Arcturus said.
"He still is, presumably," Regulus said. "I would be careful with him."
"I am always careful with Lucius Malfoy," Arcturus said.
Regulus accepted this and continued.
"The belief held for a while," he said. "Long enough that I did things I am not going to minimize or excuse. I was a Death Eater, and I acted accordingly, and I am aware of what that means." He kept his voice even. "What began to change it was watching what actually happened to the people Voldemort was supposedly fighting for. Pure-blood families. Old families. Families with names as old as ours. They disappeared — not only the Muggle-borns or the blood traitors, but families who had done everything right by his measure and still found themselves destroyed because they had questioned something, or because someone had decided their resources were useful, or simply because he had decided they were no longer necessary." He looked at his hands briefly. "I began to understand that the protection he offered was not protection at all. It was compliance. And compliance had a very short shelf life."
"And what made you act on that understanding?" Arcturus asked. The question was measured. Not judgmental — the genuine inquiry of a man who wants the complete account.
"Kreacher," Regulus said.
Arcturus looked at him. The expression on his face was that of a man who has heard a great many things in his life and has prided himself on being difficult to surprise, yet — "The house elf?"
"He used him as something disposable," Regulus said. "A creature who had served this family his entire life. Who trusted me." He stopped. "I understood then that the ideology was not the point. It had never been the point. The point was power, and we were all of us — pure-blood, half-blood, it made no difference — instruments of that power until we were no longer useful."
Arcturus was quiet.
"So I went into the cave," Regulus said. "I knew what he had made. I understood what it meant. I went in to destroy it, and I failed — and I woke up with my brother sitting in a rather uncomfortable chair beside my bed and years unaccounted for." He said it with the slight dryness that came naturally to him when he was describing things too large for any other register. "The rest you know."
The silence that followed had weight to it. Not uncomfortable — the silence of three men sitting with something that has been said and deserves a moment before the next thing is said.
"A Horcrux," Arcturus said.
"Yes."
"You said you are attempting to destroy it."
"I am working on a method," Regulus said carefully. "It requires research. I have access to the Grimmauld library and certain resources through channels I won't detail here. The work is ongoing."
Arcturus looked at him for a long moment. "If Voldemort made a Horcrux," he said slowly, "then he cannot be killed by conventional means."
"No."
"Which means the war—"
"Is not finished," Regulus said. "Not truly. His body was destroyed. The piece of his soul tethered to this world was not." He held his grandfather's gaze. "If the Horcruxes are not destroyed before he finds a way to return, everything that happened before will happen again. Worse, possibly. He will have learnt from the first attempt."
The fire crackled in the grate.
Arcturus looked at it for a moment.
"This information," he said finally, "cannot leave this room."
"Agreed," Sirius said.
"Not the family. Not anyone." Arcturus's voice was very even. "If it became known that a Horcrux exists — that Voldemort could return — the consequences would be significant and largely counterproductive. People who believe a war is over behave differently from people who believe it is ongoing. We need them to believe it is over whilst the work of actually ending it is completed."
"That is precisely our position," Regulus said.
Arcturus nodded once. The nod of a man who has decided and considers the matter settled. He was quiet for a moment, looking between them both — at Sirius, who had built something extraordinary from the wreckage of everything he had left behind, and at Regulus, who had gone into a cave alone to undo what the world had made of him and had very nearly not come back from it. Neither of them had done any of it with his help, or with anyone's. He was not a man who said such things aloud. But he must admit. His grandsons are impressive on their own right.
"You can use the family library here," he said. "It is considerably more extensive than Grimmauld's. And that enchantment of yours—" he looked at Regulus with the expression of a man who has spent eighty years believing he understood the limits of what magic could do and has just had that belief quietly revised, "—hiding from the tapestry. I still cannot entirely account for how that was possible. It is a remarkable piece of enchantment."
Regulus accepted this without comment, in the manner of someone who has learnt that accepting a compliment from an Arcturus Black requires simply not responding to it and allowing it to exist in the room.
"There are Death Eaters who escaped Azkaban," he said. "Others who were never caught. If they knew I was alive and working against what Voldemort built — what he is still building, somewhere — I would become a target immediately, particularly if they understood what I was doing. As would anyone associated with me." He paused. "It is safer for everyone that I remain dead."
"Agreed," Arcturus said. He looked at Sirius. "There is something else that has been bothering me. Tell me about Dumbledore. You sided with him during the war. Your side won. And yet your opinion of him has changed considerably."
Sirius had been waiting for this question since the conversation began. Not dreading it — he had his position and he was comfortable with it — but aware that it was coming and aware that the answer mattered.
"I believed in him," Sirius said. "The same way Regulus believed in Voldemort, if we are being honest about it. Different cause, different methods, same fundamental error. I was following someone else's lead and telling myself it was my choice."
Arcturus said nothing. His expression suggested he had suspected this and was waiting for Sirius to arrive at it himself.
"During the war, the choice felt clear," Sirius continued. "The two powers were Dumbledore and Voldemort. You chose a side or a side chose you. I chose Dumbledore because the alternative was everything I had left home to get away from." He paused. "That was the extent of my reasoning at seventeen. I was immature and I am not proud of it."
"And later?"
"Later I had better reasons," Sirius said. "Voldemort was genuinely dangerous and genuinely needed to be stopped and the Order was doing real work toward that end. I don't regret the fighting. I regret being blind to what I was fighting within." He met Arcturus's eyes. "Dumbledore wanted soldiers. Tools. People who would do what was needed and not ask inconvenient questions about why." He stopped. "I ask inconvenient questions. It's something of a constitutional failing."
"It is a Black trait," Arcturus said, with the dry precision of a man stating something simply true.
"Yes," Sirius said. "Which made me useful in certain contexts and deeply inconvenient in others. I was good at the work — the intelligence work, the combat work — and I came with James Potter, whom Dumbledore valued enormously, so I was tolerated." He paused. "But I used dark magic. Not the Unforgivables — I am not talking about those. The effective spells. The ones that actually work against dark wizards. The ones that have been classified dark by people who have never stood across from a Death Eater and needed to stop them quickly." His voice stayed even. "The Order didn't like it. Dumbledore didn't like it. There was a persistent implication that the means by which you fought mattered as much as what you were fighting — which is a very comfortable position to hold when you are not the one in the field."
"Dumbledore has always had strong opinions about dark magic," Arcturus said, with the tone of a man who has sat through many of those opinions and found them consistently wanting.
"He has. And he has spent considerable influence — both in Britain and through the ICW — pushing those opinions into policy." Sirius leaned forward slightly. "I didn't fully understand the scope of it until I was with the Custodians. Until I could see how far his reach extended. He doesn't simply oppose dark magic in Britain. He has spent decades shaping international wizarding law around his definition of what is acceptable — and his definition is very specifically the one that keeps him and people like him in a position of authority." He paused. "He is not a dark wizard. I am not suggesting that. But he is a man who has decided that he knows best and has spent fifty years building the structures that ensure everyone else agrees with him and calls it good."
Arcturus looked at him for a long moment.
"I have watched Dumbledore operate," he said, "since before you were born. Since before your father was born." He was quiet for a moment, with the quality of a man selecting from a considerable store of opinions. "He defeated Grindelwald. I will not minimize that. What came after concerned me considerably more than the defeat itself." He paused. "A man who defeats a dark lord acquires a particular kind of authority that has nothing to do with office or title. He becomes the measure by which good is defined. And Dumbledore understood this and used it with the same deliberateness you are describing — the same accumulation of influence dressed as principle." He looked at the fire. "I was against Voldemort. But I was also against Dumbledore. In this country, during that war, that position was not easily held."
"No," Sirius said. "It wasn't."
"Blacks don't follow," Arcturus said. Not loudly. As a statement of fact. "We were never good followers. We have made significant errors — in my lifetime and before it. But we do not follow other men's causes. We lead our own." He looked at Sirius steadily. "You left the Order because you understood that. You may not have articulated it that way at the time. But that is what you understood."
Sirius was quiet for a moment.
"James didn't," he said.
It came out simpler than he had intended. More honest because of it.
"Potter?" Arcturus said.
"He believed in Dumbledore completely," Sirius said. "Not blindly — James was not a stupid man — but completely. He had decided that Dumbledore was right, and everything that didn't fit that decision he found a way to make fit." He paused, and something beneath the evenness shifted slightly. "After the war ended, Dumbledore's position on dark magic became more aggressive. More pointed. He had won, and winning had confirmed everything he already believed, and there was no longer any tactical reason to tolerate people who operated outside his preferred parameters." He stopped. "He made it clear that certain things would need to change. Certain methods. Certain associations." He looked at his hands briefly. "I was part of the Order. I had fought alongside them throughout the war. And yet I was still regarded with suspicion because I was a Black — regardless of what I had actually done."
"So, you were expected to fall into line," Arcturus said.
"It was made clear," Sirius said. "Gradually, and then less so." His voice stayed even but something in it had edges now. "James believed them. Or he believed that I was the problem — that if I would simply adjust, stop arguing, stop using spells that made people uncomfortable — everything would resolve itself." He stopped. "We argued. We had argued before, James and I, about everything, for twenty years — that was the nature of it, that was how we worked — but this was different. This was him telling me that Dumbledore's judgment was more reliable than mine about my own methods, my own assessment of what we had just fought and what it had cost." The edges in his voice sharpened briefly. "I told him what I thought about that."
"I imagine you did," Arcturus said.
"And then I left," Sirius said. "All of it." He exhaled. "I am still angry about it. I am also still grieving it." He looked up. "I loved James Potter. He was my brother in every sense that mattered. And he chose to believe that Dumbledore's read on my life was more accurate than my own, and I have not been able to forgive that." He paused. "Not yet. I don't know if I will."
The room was quiet with that for a moment. Arcturus looked at him with the expression of a man who has heard something true and is giving it the space it deserves.
"You did not introduce Esme to the Order," he said.
"No. We kept it quiet — the relationship, the marriage. I knew how they would receive it and I was not willing to put her through that." Sirius's voice was flat. "A Malfoy, in the Order's eyes, was not a person with her own history and her own choices. She was a name. I had had enough of names being used as verdicts."
Arcturus was quiet for a moment. Something moved across his face that was too controlled to identify precisely but had the quality of a man integrating information he had not expected.
"She is a healer," he said.
"One of the finest in the world," Sirius said. "She has spent her career in field conditions, in places where the distinction between dark and light magic is considerably less relevant than whether the person in front of you is going to survive. She has saved more lives than I can count, and she has done it without once asking whether those lives aligned with the correct political position." He held his grandfather's gaze. "She is also the reason Corvus is alive."
Arcturus looked at him for a long moment.
"I do not," he said carefully, "share the same objections to the Malfoy family that Dumbledore's people hold. My objections to Lucius Malfoy are specific and personal rather than ideological." He paused. "Abraxas is a complicated man who has made complicated choices, some of which I understand and some of which I do not. But the name itself is an old one. The blood is sound." He said it with the slight deliberateness of a man making a concession that doesn't come naturally. "My concern about the connection is political rather than personal. The Malfoys have significant influence, and I do not yet know where that influence will be directed in the years to come."
"Esme is estranged from her family," Sirius said.
"So, I am given to understand." Arcturus looked at his hands briefly. "I would like to meet her."
Sirius looked at him. "I will need to speak with her first."
"I am aware." A pause. "I would like to meet her properly. With appropriate time and setting." He looked up. "I want you to bring her and the children to Blackwood. A family gathering — family only, no press, no outside observers. An opportunity for the family to meet them properly." He stopped at Sirius's expression. "To meet my great-grandchildren."
"They're five," Sirius said. "And four. And two. The two-year-old calls people ugly."
"Then he is already more direct than most of the adults in this family," Arcturus said, with the precise dryness of a man who has spent eighty years in rooms full of people saying things they don't mean. "I find that promising."
"But I don't want the family to meet them."
Arcturus looked at him. "Why ever not?"
"Because we are still settling," Sirius said. "We have been abroad for years and we have only recently returned to Britain properly. The children are adjusting." He paused. "And because I know this family."
He said it without heat. Plainly, the way he said things he had decided he was going to say regardless of how they landed.
"I know what this family is like in a room together. I grew up in it. I know what Cassiopeia is like, and Pollux, and the rest of them. I know what pure-blood values look like when they are directed at children who are young enough to absorb them without the context to push back." He met Arcturus's gaze steadily. "My children are not going to be subjected to that. Not while they are still finding their feet."
"They are Blacks," Arcturus said.
"They are mine," Sirius said. "That comes first."
Arcturus was quiet for a moment.
"I am not asking you to hand them over," he said. "I am asking for an introduction."
"And I am telling you that an introduction requires conditions." Sirius kept his voice even. "I am not asking anyone to become different people. I understand that is not how it works. What I am asking is that when my children are present, certain things are kept behind closed teeth. The purity arguments. The commentary. The judgments — about blood, about behavior, about what a Black child should or shouldn't be." He paused. "I mean all of them. Cassiopeia. Pollux. Anyone else in that room. Including the Malfoys."
"The Malfoys are not family," Arcturus said.
"No," Sirius said. "But Esme is. And I am not bringing her into a room with her father and her brother without knowing exactly what the arrangements between those families look like and what authority, if any, they believe they have over her." He stopped. "I don't know the full history there. She hasn't told me all of it and it is not my story to demand. But I am not going to put her in a position where she must manage them whilst also meeting the rest of the family for the first time. That is not a situation I am willing to create."
He paused.
"And there is Corvus," he said. His voice changed slightly — not softer exactly, but more deliberate. "He is still recovering. He tires easily. On difficult days he uses a cane. He is a child who has spent a significant portion of his life ill, and he is only recently well enough to have something resembling an ordinary one." He looked at Arcturus directly. "I will not put him in a room where someone looks at him and sees a liability. Where someone decides that a Black heir who cannot always stand unaided is something to be commented on or pitied or quietly considered a problem." He stopped. "I don't care how old the name is or how much the family matters. He matters more."
Arcturus said nothing for a moment. Something moved across his face that was not quite readable but had the quality of a man receiving information that has landed somewhere specific.
"I understand," he said.
"Do you?" Sirius said. Not aggressively. A genuine question.
"I understand," Arcturus repeated, and this time it came out with the weight of someone who means it rather than someone managing a situation. "The boy carries my name as his own. That is not nothing to me, Sirius. I am aware of what you were saying when you chose it." He paused. "I will not have him made to feel that he is insufficient. Not in any house that falls under my authority."
Sirius looked at him for a moment.
"Then we are in agreement on that," he said.
"We are," Arcturus said. "I will speak to the family. What is expected of them when your children are present will be made clear before any introduction takes place." He paused. "I cannot guarantee how individuals will conduct themselves in practice. I can guarantee that they will understand the consequences of conducting themselves badly."
"That," Sirius said, "is all I am asking. And, as for meeting them — it will be on our terms. Until Esme and I feel we are ready. I will be the one who sets the time and the place." He held Arcturus's gaze. "I hope that is understood."
"It is," Arcturus said.
The room was quiet for a moment. Then Arcturus straightened in his chair with the deliberateness of a man who has closed one matter and is opening another.
"There is something else we need to discuss," he said. "Something that cannot be deferred indefinitely regardless of everything else on the table today." He looked at Sirius steadily. "The headship."
Sirius looked at him. "No."
"You haven't heard what I am going to say."
"I have a reasonable sense of it," Sirius said. "And the answer is no."
"Sirius—"
"I have a wife, four children, a castle to rebuilt, and a brother I have only recently recovered from the bottom of a lake," Sirius said. "I am not taking on the headship of the Black family on top of all of that. Find someone else."
"There is no one else," Arcturus said. "That is rather the point. You are the heir. You have always been the heir. The family magic has never accepted otherwise, and it will not begin doing so now simply because the timing is inconvenient for you." He paused. "I may not look it right now. I am getting old, Sirius. I have been managing this family and its affairs for fifty years. I will not do so indefinitely."
"Then keep doing it until I am ready to have this conversation," Sirius said.
"You are not going to become more ready by waiting," Arcturus said. "The situation does not improve with delay."
Sirius opened his mouth.
"If I may," Regulus said.
Both men looked at him. He had been sitting quietly through the last several exchanges with the patience of someone who has identified the correct moment to speak and has been waiting for it.
"You cannot push it to me," Regulus said to Sirius, before his brother could suggest it. "I am aware that is what you are considering. It won't work. I am not the firstborn, and the family magic knows it. If you are alive and well, the headship belongs to you. That is simply how it is. Not to mention I'm supposed to be dead. It will be useless to fight Voldemort if everyone knows I am alive."
Sirius looked at him with the expression of a man whose preferred exit has just been closed off.
"Then what precisely are you about to tell me?" Sirius said.
"That you should take it," Regulus said. "And I can give you the reasons if you will stop arguing for thirty seconds."
Sirius said nothing. Which, from Sirius, was as close to permission as it was going to get.
Regulus looked at him steadily. "As head of the Black family you would have authority over every member of it. Not influence. Authority. Cassiopeia, Pollux, all of them — they answer to the head of house. If any of them behave in a manner you find unacceptable around your children, you have actual recourse. You can set conditions with teeth behind them." He paused. "You mentioned disownership earlier as a threat you would not use. You don't have to use it. The fact that you could is sufficient. People behave differently when the consequences are real especially that Grandfather Pollux and Great Aunt Cassiopeia knows you have a much different view than Grandfather Arcturus."
Sirius said nothing.
"The Black family has wealth," Regulus continued. "Considerable wealth, and not only in gold. Estates, assets, holdings across multiple countries. As head you would have full access and full authority over how those resources are used. For the children. For whatever else needs protecting." He paused. "And there is the Wizengamot."
"I am aware of the Wizengamot," Sirius said.
"Are you aware that the Black family seat has been largely inactive?" Regulus said. "That the voting power this family holds — through its own seat and through the smaller houses absorbed into it over generations — has not been properly exercised in years?" He looked at Arcturus briefly, not accusingly, simply acknowledging the fact. "That is an enormous amount of influence sitting dormant. As head you could use it. Veto legislation that threatens your family. Support laws that protect them. Shape the political landscape that your children are going to grow up in." He held Sirius's gaze. "You spent years with the Custodians watching Dumbledore accumulate influence through exactly these mechanisms. You understand better than most how it works and what it costs when the wrong people hold it. You can even sure the right resources are available in the event, I am not saying it will, a war was to happen. The question is whether you are going to sit outside that system or operate within it."
The fire crackled quietly in the grate.
"The Malfoys," Regulus added, "hold a seat of their own. Their influence in the Wizengamot is not inconsiderable. As head of the Black family, you would have equal standing and arguably greater weight given the history and the absorbed seats." He paused. "You said you were concerned about what authority they believe they have over Esme. This is one answer to that concern. Not the only one. But a significant one."
Sirius was quiet for a long moment.
He looked at Arcturus who seem to be smiling. "You put him up to this."
"I did not," Arcturus said, with perfect composure. "He arrived at it himself. I am simply in agreement with his conclusions."
"That is exactly what someone who put him up to it would say."
"Sirius," Regulus said quietly.
Sirius looked at his brother.
"You are not doing this for the family name," Regulus said. "You are not doing it for the politics or the wealth or the authority over Cassiopeia, satisfying as that last one might be." He paused. "You are doing it for them. For Rigel and Corvus and Lyra and Alphard. Everything you have built for them, everything you and Esme have put into Blacktide and the wards and the research and every decision you have made — it has all been to put more between them and the world." He held his brother's gaze. "This is more. The most you could put between them and anything. Take it."
The silence that followed was a different kind from any of the ones that had come before it in this room today.
Sirius looked at the fire.
Then at the tapestry. At four names written in gold beneath his own.
"I need to speak with Esme," he said finally.
"Of course," Arcturus said.
"I am not agreeing to anything today."
"I did not expect you to."
"And the conditions about the children and the family still stand regardless of whatever I decide."
"They stand," Arcturus said.
Sirius exhaled slowly. He looked at Regulus. His brother looked back at him with the quiet, steady expression of someone who has made his case and is content to let it sit.
"You are remarkably irritating," Sirius told him.
"I learnt from the best," Regulus said.
"Yes, well." Arcturus stood up. "I suppose you have to prepare yourself."
"Prepare myself?" Sirius asked, confused.
Arcturus raised his eyebrows. "You do know there is a group of family members outside this door waiting for you."
"Oh, shit."
"Language, Sirius."
Regulus stood as he prepared the invisibility cloak. Before he covered himself, he looked at Sirius. "Not to mention your in-laws are outside, too."
"Uh, fuck—"
"Language!"
"—I forgot about them."
"Either way, you have to face them." Arcturus grinned as he reached for the door. "Think of it as practice for when you take on the headship soon."
"Grandfather!"