No Regrets

Lucius stood in front of the veil, watching it flutter, as if stirred by a breeze from the other side. He could hear voices carried on the breeze. They called to him, and he thought he could recognise one of them: Sirius Black, whispering to him from beyond death, telling him delicious secrets and truths, if only he had the language to comprehend them.

Mesmerised, Lucius reached out a finger to tough the veil. It moved suddenly, enveloping his hand. A thousand digits moved, stroking him from fingertip to wrist. He thought to struggle, but, lulled by the contact, he relaxed instead.

Then the hands grabbed his and pulled, dragging him into the veil. As other parts of his body touched the strange fabric, more hands seemed to pull at him. Slowly, a coldness took him; when it reached his head he blacked out.

He awoke to rough pressure above him. Hair tickled his face and he opened his eyes. Sirius Black lay above him, hands holding Lucius' arms on either side of his head, knee pinning his legs.

"Welcome to purgatory," Sirius said with irony.

"Black," Lucius said, acknowledging the reason for his trip to the Department of Mysteries.

"Malfoy," he returned.

"We're dead."

"No, we're not. We're just imprisoned."

"What?"

"The veil doesn't lead to death. It just leads to this grey misty place of regret." Sirius gestured around them.

Lucius looked, insofar as he was able. 'Grey misty place' seemed an apt description, because that was all he could see. It seemed to stretch for miles, but was so opaque that there could be a wall within touching distance of them, and he wouldn't have known it.

"Then it must be possible to escape," said Lucius determinedly.

"Is it?" asked Sirius. "Mostly, I find that it's possible to remember." He gazed at Lucius thoughtfully. "Like the time you asked your father to teach you Cruciatus so that you could use it on a Muggle who had shooed you away from her children."

Lucius remembered. She hadn't liked his manner.

He had gone to his father and begged to be taught the torture curse. His father had said it was too difficult for the five-year-old Lucius, and besides, he should not have been consorting with Muggles in the first place. At Lucius' incipient temper tantrum, his father had taught him a simpler spell and accompanied Lucius as he tested it on the Muggle. Nonetheless, Lucius learned Cruciatus by himself from books in the Malfoy library. By his sixth birthday, he had been able to torture a rat; before his seventh, he had used it on the Muggle woman.

Sirius scowled. "You were the reason I was ashamed to be a pureblood."

"That didn't stop your fascination, did it? Remember the first time we met?" Lucius said. "You sought me out."

"I was six years old, Malfoy!"

The Blacks had been visiting the Manor. Lucius sat out in the garden, playing with a spider. Sirius came up behind Lucius and told him, with perfect sincerity, "Mama says I should try to be a gentleman pureblood like you."

Lucius had laughed, and, with ten-year-old cruelty, had cast an engorgement charm on the spider and sent it after Sirius, who ran away screaming.

"I don't regret it," said Lucius, with a smirk.

"Of course you don't, you bastard, You regret nothing, but this place--" Sirius gestured at the grey mists "--changes a person. I didn't regret when I crossed the veil. I thirsted for revenge, resented, wished, mourned and longed, but I never regretted.

"Now all I can do is regret. Soon, you'll start to feel it too, Malfoy."

Lucius made a sound of disbelief.

"Do you want to know what I regret?"

"Enlighten me," Lucius said, tone edged with sarcasm.

"I regret not being able to teach Regulus anything that could save him from himself." Sirius sighed, staring off into the mist. "I regret that my parents died hating me, and I them. I regret that the last words I spoke to James Potter were angry, that Peter Pettigrew is still alive--" he paused for breath, his face scrunching up--"and that I never made Harry understand how much I loved him for just being himself. That I regret most of all."

He stopped, then added, almost as an afterthought, "I regret not protecting Narcissa from you."

Lucius raised an eyebrow. "You think she needed protecting?"

"Yes," Sirius said flatly. "You destroyed her."

"It was a good marriage," Lucius said disinterestedly, "She wanted it as much--more--than I."

"I never got along as well with Narcissa as I did with Andromeda, but I loved her like a sister. Even though her beliefs differed increasingly from mine, she was always lively and insightful. When she married you, her wit died. I've seen her since I escaped Azkaban. She's your puppet, nothing more."

"You assume that I was responsible for this."

"Of course you were. You broke enough others to be able to do it with finesse. Just because with Narcissa it was civilised and bloodless, does not make it any different. I know the people you destroyed. In here I can see them all, and so can you."

Memories followed these words. Pryce, McMahon, Parker, Doyle, O'Grady, Leary, Gray, Portman, Chen, Delaney, Smith, Sanderson, Fletcher, McLeod, Thompsett... each name was accompanied by an image. Rosemary Pryce, screaming and screaming; Pelosia Parker, crawling across the stone floor to accept food from his hand; Kieran O'Grady, staring blindly forward, reciting facts in a monotone; Hay Delaney, sniveling piteously and begging Lucius to make the pain stop; Francis Fletcher coldheartedly killing Jaime McLeod on Lucius' orders; Jaime McLeod kissing Lucius' boots even as blood flowed from a mortal wound, staining the stone floor.

Lucius watched these memories.

"I regret nothing," he said.

Sirius sighed. "In this place, regret is salvation. I have to make you regret."

Lucius saw himself as an old man in the hazy, amorphous future. He was sitting in a white-draped chair, in a sterile white room. A distinguished man with white-blond hair stood beside the chair.

Sirius' voice spoke in his ear. "Your son."

Draco? Lucius felt a surge of pride. His son was following in his footsteps.

"I'm sorry, Father," said Draco with barely a hint of warmth, "But the Big House isn't your domain anymore."

Sirius' voice spoke again. "He had you committed so that you would be out of the Manor."

Lucius ignored the momentary hurt. "Naturally," he said. "I did the same for my father."

Draco turned to leave the room, only then revealing a thin woman standing behind him. She had red hair, twisted into a severe chignon at the nape of her neck. Across her nose were the faded remnants of an abundance of freckles.

"Come, Virginia," Draco said authoritatively, and she turned to follow him: head held high, eyes blank.

"Virginia?" Lucius demanded of Sirius, as the scene faded and was replaced with the familiar grey mist.

"Virginia Malfoy, née Weasley," Sirius replied. "You son married her a few years before that vision. As you can see, he did an admirable job of breaking her."

"Weasley?" Lucius demanded i horror. "That can't be the future. My son would never marry a Weasley."

"Why not?" Sirius retorted. "You planted the seeds in him yourself: cruelty, calculation, sadism, arrogance and love of a challenge. He used all these traits when he broke and married Ginny. Unfortunately, in doing so, he disregarded another thing you taught him: blood pride. You were too senile by this point to raise an objection. He married into the worst Muggle-loving Blood Traitors in England.

"Do you regret sculpting him like you did?"

Lucius' chest tightened. "No. I feel pride in my son's skill and satisfaction at the pain he has caused the Weasley family."

Sirius appeared to be musing. "Just think, though. The next generation of Malfoys are bound to have red hair or freckles."

Lucius shuddered. "I don't regret it."

Sirius closed his eyes. "You truly regret nothing?" he said.

"Nothing."

Suddenly the face above Lucius seemed much closer. He could feel Sirius' breath.

"Then, I suppose you don't regret this." Sirius lowered his mouth, paused, then kissed Lucius softly, his tongue seeking entrance like it had done countless times before.

Lucius pushed Sirius' tongue out of his mouth and upwards, until they met in Sirius' mouth instead.

At that moment, the greyish mist that surrounded them was replaced by memories.

Lucius remembered the time he had kissed Sirius when they met in the grounds of Hogwarts. Sirius shoved him over and landed on top, and it seemed the simplest thing to Lucius to take that young, beautiful mouth with his own and ravage it.

He pulled Sirius up against a garden wall after his wedding to Narcissa, shoving his hand inside Sirius' robes. Sirius moaned and wound his hands into Lucius' hair, pulling it tight.

Lucius pushed Sirius against the desk in the study, sliding down and taking Sirius in his mouth.

He listened intently for Narcissa as he pushed Sirius back against the bedhead and brought him heartlessly to the edge of climax.

Lucius enjoyed Sirius' alternating screams and moans, as he felt the impact of Lucius' whip, then the tender touch of icy fingers on his spine.

Finally, in a dingy room above a dingy pub in London, Lucius lay back and let Sirius lick a trail down his chest, past his nipples and his navel, and between his parted legs. He let Sirius prepare him and then shove inside, growling bestially as he used one hand to steady himself.

The memories departed and Lucius found himself surrounded by the mist, naked and slick with sweat, being pounded into by Sirius.

The shock rocketed him into orgasm, and moments later Sirius moaned and lowered himself onto Lucius, heedless of the sticky mess between them.

"Do you regret that? The sodomy, infidelity, depravity and crudeness?" Sirius asked softly.

"No."

"Good," said Sirius sadly. "Neither do I. And so, we are both doomed to spend forever together in here."

Just then, the mist began to swirl around them, pushing them upright. A glimmering beacon shone in the distance as they were picked up and tossed with unusual force towards it, riding on powerful winds in the mist.

The light became brighter, and almost gritty, like particles of sand rushing towards his face. Lucius had to close his eyes.

When he opened them again, he was lying on the floor of the Death Chamber. The veil fluttered innocently to his right. To his left, Sirius was just beginning to open his eyes.

Lucius sat up carefully. Sirius did the same.

"We're out," Sirius said, uncertainly.

"It would appear so," Lucius replied.

Sirius smiled, a smile which lit up his wasted features and made him almost as handsome as he had been before Azkaban. He turned to Lucius.

"Tell me what has happened in the world, Malfoy."

Lucius swallowed. "After you fell through the veil, the tide turned in the battle. The Ministry rounded up all the Death Eaters and sent us to Azkaban. A couple of years later, the Dark Lord went up against Potter again, and Potter slew him."

"Harry..." Sirius whispered.

Lucius continued. "What followed were surprisingly uneasy times. I know this because Draco brought me updates in Azkaban every few weeks."

"Draco managed to stay out of Azkaban himself, then?"

"Indeed. I kept Draco clean throughout the war. Anyway, there were a great number of pureblood families who didn't approve of the way the we, the Death Eaters, were being treated, and since the rich pureblood families provide much of the money behind the Ministry, this was a problem."

Sirius snorted.

"Eventually, the Ministry agreed to release some of the Death Eaters from Azkaban. I was one of the lucky ones."

Sirius said, "Harry! Where is Harry? I must go to him."

"Potter?" Lucius wondered if Sirius had really heard anything beyond those two syllables. He paused, then said shortly, "he died, Black. When he fought the Dark Lord."

Sirius' face went slack. "You lie," he whispered.

Lucius shook his head. "Why would I?"

Sirius stared blindly at the veil. Tears began to roll down his cheeks, but he ignored them.

And finally, Lucius regretted something; he had no words for Sirius now.