Can't Run But

Just like his dad, just like his dad (the same mistakes)

Some things will never be different

--bloc party, helicopter

Harry has always been compared to his father. He looks like his father, people tell him. He acts like his father. He's as brave, as reckless, as mischievous, as powerful a wizard as his father was. He would be his father incarnate, if not for the glaring flaw of his mother's eyes.

Draco doesn't really look like his father, except for the pale hair. He's not as powerful or noble or subtle as his father. He's spent his entire life trying to live up to his father, to emulate him, but he always falls short.

He hates the ease with which Harry seems to fill James Potter's shoes.

*

His mother's nails are long and smooth. She lifts his chin up with icy fingertips and smiles. Her eyes are dark and cold. "I know you won't fail me, Regulus," she says with a voice like steel. "You are your father's child."

"I'll do my best," Regulus mumbles, and knows it already isn't good enough.

"What more can a mother ask?" She lets her hand drift away from his face. "My noble son, my only."

The air still smells faintly of smoke from the fresh scorch mark on the family tree tapestry. Sirius's name has been blotted out, but the dark hole it leaves behind is too big for Regulus to fill.

He has to try anyway.

*

The nights and days immediately following Dumbledore's death and Draco's failure are a blur to him. He runs a lot, he'll remember. He apparates in huge leaps that he hasn't really been trained for, and once misses, several miles short of the intended mark, and runs through a muggle village disoriented and nauseous until he finds a place to hide in the moors and waits helplessly for Snape to find him.

He hates being so dependent on anyone, even though he has to admit that he could do a lot worse than Snape.

He wonders if Voldemort will kill his mother now that he's failed.

It's raining, a unseasonably chilly, driving rain. Draco huddles under his already soaked robes. He hates the rain. He has no idea where he is, and hates that too.

It occurs to Draco that he hates a lot of things, really.

So why had he failed, then? He ought to have had more than enough hatred in his heart to kill Dumbledore, to speak the Unforgivable. He'd certainly hated Dumbledore, hated that ultimate model of a father figure who'd never given Draco so much as a sidelong glance. Well, until Draco was standing over him, wand at the ready. Then Dumbledore had noticed him, all right. Spoken to him in a fatherly tone of voice. For an instant, he'd almost resembled a proper Headmaster, who actually gave all his students equal attention and care. Ha.

Well, what did it matter, anyway? Lucius had always said that Dumbledore was a rotten Headmaster. And Draco's father was always right about these sorts of things. Dumbledore should have been removed from Hogwarts ages ago.

But Draco still hadn't been able to kill him.

It stings.

*

The first time he uses the Avada Kedavra curse, it works perfectly. The muggle drops dead right at his feet, eyes wide with terror and confusion. Regulus covers his shudder with a laugh, tossing his head back and forcing himself to enjoy it. One of the other Death Eaters in the group nods appreciatively at him, and Regulus basks in the approval. He's done something right, something to be proud of. Something his mother would admire. Something Sirius would never do.

Later, when he's alone in his room remembering that glassy, dead stare, he throws up.

*

There's an old cottage out on the moors. It's small and ugly and the roof leaks. Draco and Snape live there for the better part of a month.

Not too surprisingly, Draco hates this arrangement as well.

Every few days, Snape apparates away to meet with other Death Eaters. He's playing a dangerous game, Draco knows, because in addition to Draco's hiding place on the moors he's also hidden Narcissa away somewhere in Northern Ireland, even though he was supposed to have killed them both. Draco wonders who Snape is really working for, but as long as he and his mother are safe, he doesn't much care.

He wonders if Voldemort's also gotten to his dad in Azkaban, or if he decided that life in that prison was punishment enough. Once, it occurs to Draco that Voldemort might just not care about what happens to Lucius, but that thought rankles. It's better to be hated than forgotten.

He wonders if Dumbledore hated him, at the end.

He wonders about a lot of things, because there really isn't anything else to do.

*

Regulus wonders why Lord Voldemort ordered the attack on those muggles. He wonders who the man he killed was. He wonders if the man had a family, if he had even known about the existence of the wizarding world that so paralleled his own. He wonders why his mother bought him an expensive new set of dress robes for killing someone she'd never met, someone whose existence had no effect, positive or negative, upon her life at all.

He doesn't wonder what his father (who died of nothing in particular three years ago) would have thought of him. He knows his father would have been proud.

The thought almost makes him ill again.

*

The worst part, Draco decides, is the revulsion he'd felt when Snape finally did the deed. His gut reaction to the killing itself was to hate it, to hate Snape for doing it. A good Death Eater would have rejoiced. Well, actually, a good Death Eater would have done it himself, but even a cowardly Death Eater would have rejoiced.

Draco obviously made a lousy Death Eater.

"How did you do it?" he asks Snape suddenly, one day in late July. "How did you kill him?"

Snape gives him a Look. The sort of You Are A Blithering Idiot Look usually reserved for, say, Neville Longbottom. "It's called an Unforgivable, Draco."

"Obviously," Draco says, attempting his usual sneer but falling short in the face of Snape's open disdain. He'd always been one of Snape's favorites, before. "But, I mean..."

Snape turns his back on Draco, shuffling some mysterious rolls of parchment. "I had to."

"Because I was such a useless coward," Draco mutters, openly indulging in a new bout of self-loathing.

Snape looks over at him sharply. "A coward?" he repeats. "A coward would have exulted at the opportunity before him. Dumbledore was a weak, helpless old man, without even the strength to run. A coward could have killed him."

"So what does that make me?" Draco snaps, his face flushing with shame. "Less than a coward?"

"It makes you a human being," Snape replies shortly.

It isn't until much later that Draco realizes that he meant it as a compliment.

*

He nearly runs right into Sirius once in Diagon Alley, after leaving Hogwarts, but he turns away and ducks down Knockturn Alley before Sirius sees him.

The parcel under his arm hisses softly. He feels vaguely ashamed, and isn't sure why.

*

Something's happened. Draco isn't sure what, because he's totally cut off from the rest of the wizarding world and Snape never really tells him anything. But something's happened. Something must have, because Snape apparated back to the cottage in a frenzy this morning, and has spent the past two hours doing a lot of pacing and shuffling frantically through parchments and periodically muttering things like "Damn fools!" and "Right under our noses the whole time!" He also curses with a fluency that even Draco has to admire.

He leaves again as abruptly as he arrived, without a word of explanation.

*

He overhears the word accidentally, delivering the parcel to Bella. She's in her drawing room with someone, a male-sounding someone, and he doesn't want to disturb her. He leaves the parcel by the door and turns to go.

"...safeguarding our Lord's Horcrux," the man is saying.

Regulus wonders what it means.

*

Snape is gone for a good two weeks, and Draco starts wondering what he's supposed to do when their store of food runs out. It's a long walk to the nearest muggle village, and he hasn't got any of their stupid money to buy anything. He doesn't have any wizarding money, either, for that matter. He wonders what sort of food-like things might be found by foraging about the heath, and how he would distinguish what was edible from what wasn't.

Wealthy purebloods don't forage. They summon house-elves when hungry, or, under dire circumstances, floo to the nearest shop in person. Draco is somewhat out of his element here. He wonders what his father would think of him now.

Fortunately, before the situation gets desperate, Snape reappears. "We're leaving," he says shortly, without even giving Draco a chance to ask where he's been. "If you have anything worth packing, get it now."

Draco doesn't.

*

When Sirius left Grimmauld Place for the last time, he didn't take anything with him. He left a lot behind.

Sometimes Regulus unlocks the door to his brother's old room and just stands there, looking. The room remains the way Sirius left it, untouched, as though waiting for him to return.

Regulus wishes he would.

*

They set up a sort of camp in a forest in Switzerland. Snape curtly instructs Draco on the finer points of building a small bonfire without using magic. Draco feels absurdly pleased with himself when he succeeds.

"What are we doing here?" he finally asks.

Snape hesitates, and for a moment Draco thinks he won't tell him. "I believe I have located a certain artifact that the Dark Lord values highly," Snape says carefully. "Of course, what is valuable to the Dark Lord must be equally valuable to...to us."

Of course, Draco thinks, and wonders again exactly where Snape's loyalties lie. "Did he hide it here himself?"

Snape grimaces. "Hardly. A mercenary vagabond named Fletcher managed to get his hands on it. He apparently sold it to a lover of antiques who has a manor house not far from here."

"How did this Fletcher character ever find it?" Draco demands, startled. "I should think that the Dark Lord would be able to safeguard his valuables from petty thieves."

Snape eyes him critically. Draco feels as though he is being measured, judged, and found somewhat wanting. He juts his chin out and tries to assume his old haughtiness, willing Snape to find him worthy. He has to trust Snape because he has no choice; it would be nice for that trust to be reciprocated.

With a sigh, Snape relents. "Fletcher stole it, along with a number of other items, from the Black family house in London. He did not know its worth."

"The Black house?"

"Where it had been lying for years, and we never recognized it," Snape murmurs, to himself. There's bitterness in his eyes. Draco wonders who this we is. What would Snape have been doing in the ancestral home of Sirius Black?

"How did this...artifact ever get into the Blacks' possession?"

Snape shrugs, frowning. "I can only speculate."

Draco waits.

"There was a young man named Regulus Black," Snape says slowly. "I knew him at school, though not well. In many ways, he was quite similar to you - pureblooded, proud, reasonably intelligent, and he had a taste for danger. He joined the Death Eaters, like you, both because his family expected it of him and because he wanted to be a part of something great and powerful. But he got in too deep, and learned he had no taste for killing. He tried to back out, and he was killed. An ignoble, cowardly death, we thought at the time."

Draco shifts his weight impatiently. He's heard this story before. His mother was a Black, after all, and he'd been told about her weak cousin Regulus. "So?"

"So," Snape says absently, "it seems that he was far cleverer than any of us gave him credit for."

Draco raises an eyebrow, but Snape doesn't explain further. He looks into the fire as though it holds all the answers to all the questions in the world, and if he stares long enough, he can learn them all.

*

He has learned how to be persuasive, in his months with the Death Eaters. He takes his old posse of Slytherin friends with him to Borgin & Burkes after the shop is closed and shoves his wand in Mr. Borgin's face.

Mr. Borgin is easily persuaded to tell Regulus everything he knows about Tom Riddle and Horcruxes.

*

Draco doesn't sleep that night. He lies on a rough blanket under the trees and wonders about Snape and allegiances. Is he really with the Death Eaters? He did kill Dumbledore, after all. That has to mean something, doesn't it?

He wonders exactly how valuable this 'artifact' they're hunting is to Voldemort. Valuable enough for Snape to find it worthwhile to haul him halfway across Europe in search of it, that's certain. Valuable enough to buy Draco back into favor with Voldemort? To buy his mother's safety, his father's release from Azkaban?

Valuable enough to buy Snape back into favor with...with the not-Death Eaters? What is Snape going to do with this thing once he finds it?

What could Draco do with it? What would his father want him to do?

*

The very thought of Horcruxes disgusts Regulus, repulses him. To deliberately kill another human being just to safeguard a part of yourself - who would do that? And the killing, that's only one part of the process. The rest turns his stomach. He wishes he'd never found out.

He's not supposed to think this way, to feel this way. He tries to convince himself that there's something wrong with him, something unnaturally squeamish and sentimental inside him that should be routed out or silenced.

It doesn't work.

*

The owner of the Swiss manor house is a muggle, and he isn't home. Draco supposes this is just one of his manors, a vacation villa of some sort. There are plenty of security devices about and within the house, of course, but while these may ward off muggle thieves, they're quite useless in defending the house from wizards.

Draco still isn't sure why Snape decided to take him along, but he's not complaining.

They apparate into the house and begin searching.

Draco only has a vague idea of what, exactly, he's looking for, and Snape claims that he is unable to locate it magically. Draco wonders what has been done to the thing to make it so difficult to trace.

It's a locket, Snape told him. Heavy, ornate, old. That's all. It's not much to go on, but then again, Snape is probably equally frustrated by the innocuousness of the description.

After about half an hour, Draco decides that he hates huge manor houses, with their twelve hundred rooms and thousands of display cases and closets and drawers which may or may not contain a locket.

His father would probably know a spell that could locate the blasted thing. Snape's brilliant with potions, but there are limits to his knowledge in other areas. There must be.

It occurs to Draco that this locket might really just be very, very hard to find. After all, it's been hiding in plain sight for more than sixteen years.

*

The Horcrux is a locket, and after several weeks of searching and questioning and persuading, Regulus knows where to find it.

The only question now is what to do with this information.

*

Draco's mind wanders as he searches for the locket. He thinks about what he'll do once he finds it - or once Snape finds it, for that matter. Does it make a difference? Snape clearly has some sort of plan for this thing, and if Draco gets to it first, it's assumed that he'll hand it over to Snape. But Snape will do what's best for Snape, and Draco wonders if that's the same as what's best for Draco.

Maybe, if he finds it first, he should just keep it for himself.

And do what, then? Bring it to Voldemort? Is that really what's best for Draco?

That's a new thought. He doesn't know what Voldemort wants from it, after all. And the Dark Lord could easily just take it from Draco and then kill him. Voldemort doesn't care about anyone except himself.

Up until this year, Draco was the same. But this past year, with his father in Azkaban and his mother's life hanging upon the success of his mission - it was a new thing, for Draco, having to live for someone else. To have to protect his mother and defend his father's name, instead of relying on their protection and power. New, and more difficult than he ever could have imagined.

And in the end, he'd still failed.

Why? Why couldn't he do it? Why had he looked down at Dumbledore - a weak, helpless old man, without even the strength to run - and...done nothing? What stopped him?

Because it just seemed wrong. What an inconvenient moment to develop a sense of morality.

Draco doesn't like thinking in terms of right and wrong. Previously, right was whatever his father told him, and wrong was anyone who said otherwise. Under that moral code, killing Dumbledore was the right thing to do. Letting the Death Eaters into Hogwarts was the right thing. Killing countless students who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time was the right thing.

God, what kind of monster has he become?

In a cabinet in the library, Draco finds the locket. He picks it up and examines it, and doesn't know what to do.

*

If killing nameless muggles was bad, killing people he actually knows - people he went to school with, people like that Gryffindor boy several years ahead of him who tutored him in Arithmancy for a year - is much, much worse. Regulus hates himself for doing it, for the ease with which the Unforgivables slip off his tongue, and hates the other Death Eaters for doing it with him. Above all, he hates the Dark Lord for ordering it, for forcing him to do all these horrible things, for turning him into a monster.

He wishes he could just run, run away from the war and the madness and the death, and never stop running. To put as much distance between himself and England and Voldemort as possible. It's a hopeless dream. He knows what happens to deserters among the Death Eaters. He's killed one himself. He knows that no matter how far or fast he runs, he'll be caught. It's just a matter of time.

So he can't run, but...

But there's one thing he can do.

*

There's a shout from another room, and a crash. The sounds echo down the empty corridors of the manor house. Draco runs towards the source, still clutching the locket tightly. It's been so long since he's used his wand that he doesn't think to pull it out of his pocket.

He turns into a large, airy room and freezes.

"Don't you dare move," Harry Potter says through clenched teeth, leveling his wand at Draco's face. Snape lies crumpled in a corner of the room, bleeding through a hundred gashes.

"Potter. You have a talent for showing up where you're not wanted," Draco spits, suppressing a shudder. He's seen this particular spell before - when Harry used it on him. He wants to vomit.

"So do you," Harry says coldly. He glances over at Snape, then bites his lip. He looks vaguely ill, himself.

Draco wants to go over there and wring Harry's stupid, scrawny neck, but Harry has the advantage for the moment. It would take Draco just a little too long to pull out his wand, and Harry's quick. "What the hell is that spell, anyway? He's fucking dying, you realize that?"

Harry swallows hard. His face is pale. "He deserves it," he says. "He killed Dumbledore. I was there, I saw it. And he invented this particular spell, so it's his own bloody fault if someone uses it against him."

It's a very nasty spell. Draco wouldn't know how to counter it, even if he had the chance. Somehow, he doubts that Harry knows, either.

What the fuck is he doing, just standing here and chatting with Harry fucking Potter while Snape, the man who fucking saved Draco's life, who saved his mother's life, is fucking bleeding to death?

"You don't know anything!" Draco snarls. "You fucking idiot, you don't know the first thing about him. You don't know what he's done--"

"Oh, believe me, I know what he's done!" Harry retorts. "Dumbledore trusted him, and he killed him! He betrayed--" He cuts himself off abruptly, and glares at Draco.

So Snape was working for someone other than Voldemort. Or had been. Was that why he wanted the locket, to redeem himself?

Draco hates being so helpless. He hates Harry for putting him in this situation, and part of him even hates Snape for letting his guard down, for giving Harry the chance to catch him unawares. Snape's too good a duelist to have fallen this easily unless he'd been taken by surprise.

And this was Harry Potter, the noble, righteous son of a bitch. "Where's your precious honor now, Harry?" Draco taunts. "Did he even see you coming? Did you even give him a chance to explain himself, or did you throw that spell at him while his back was turned?"

Harry hesitates. Clearly, his conscience has finally awoken and is giving him hell. "Petrificus totalis," he snaps at Draco, and Draco stiffens up immediately. Fucker.

With Draco temporarily incapacitated, Harry turns back to Snape and mutters something that Draco can't quite make out. The blood stops seeping out of Snape's body, and the wounds start closing up. He's deathly pale, still, but alive.

Harry glances back at Draco. "Hermione helped me create a counter-spell," he says quietly. "Once I knew what the Sectumsempra did...well, I needed to know how to undo it. I didn't know its effects when I used it on you, I swear."

Draco just glares at him. Well, there's not much else he can do.

After a moment's thought, Harry walks over to Draco and pulls Draco's wand out of his pocket. He releases him from the Petrificus, but calmly keeps both wands trained on him. "It'll take Snape a while to get his strength back," Harry says. "I'll...deal with him later. In the meantime, I'd like to have a word with you, Malfoy."

*

Regulus finds the cave and manages the boat, but nobody warned him about the poison, or the pain.

The pain. God, the pain. The liquid sears his throat and carves a line of fire straight down into his stomach. His limbs feel impossibly weak, and it takes all his concentration not to drop the cup. He babbles mindlessly to himself, his thoughts lost to the pain and the horror of whatever he's being forced to drink.

He swallows it all, cupful by agonizing cupful.

*

"You're out of favor with Voldemort, aren't you?" Harry demands, once they're in the corridor with the door closed behind them. "You really managed to disappear, you know. I haven't even heard any rumors about your whereabouts."

"Why did you care?" Draco snaps, suppressing the urge to make a break for it. Without his wand...well, he'll get it back eventually, he's sure.

Harry studies his face intently. "Like I said, I was there when Snape murdered - when Dumbledore died. I saw, well, everything."

He witnessed Draco's failure. Fantastic. "So, what, you think Dumbledore was right?" Draco goes heavy on the sarcasm. "You think I have some good in me? Are you trying to recruit me? Is that what this is?"

"Yes," Harry says calmly. "I am."

"I hate you. You know that, right?"

"I hate you, too. But you've got nowhere else to go, unless you just want to keep running for the rest of your life. Voldemort won't take you back. You were supposed to kill Dumbledore, but you didn't." Harry moves as though to put a hand on Draco's arm, then pulls back. "You didn't have it in you."

"Fuck off!"

"That was a compliment," Harry says shortly. "Look, I've done a lot of thinking this summer--

"That must have been an invigorating change for you."

"Shut up. Look, Dumbledore trusted you. He had faith in you, that you would, well, do the right thing, in the end. That you weren't a murderer. And he was right. I just thought, you know..." Harry shrugs. "That has to count for something, right?"

He reaches out and gives Draco's wand back to him.

Draco takes it, suddenly unsure of himself. What the hell was this? He hates Harry. Hates him. There's no real possibility of an alliance between them. Harry had established that right at the beginning of first year, had deliberately set himself in opposition to Draco. And he thinks Draco can just put all that behind him? Harry nearly killed him once. There can be no trust here, no alliance.

"You put my father in Azkaban," Draco snarls, taking a step backward. What once seemed all-important to Draco now sounds like a rather flimsy excuse, but it's...well, it's something. He can't ally himself with Harry. He can't. It just goes against everything Draco has ever stood for. He may not be sure of much these days, but that, that's a constant. That can't change. "My fucking father!"

Something shifts in Harry's expression, making him look somehow older and wearier. "I know," he says. "But you don't have to keep making his mistakes." And he extends a hand out to Draco, an offering.

Draco wonders if James Potter had tried to bargain with Voldemort, that last night in Godric's Hollow. If he had begged or pleaded or tried to appeal to Voldemort's better nature. No, Draco decides. No, James Potter had gone down fighting. And, unlike his idiot son, he had not once lowered his wand.

"Petrificus totalis!" Draco yells, and for fuck's sake, this is Harry Potter, you'd think that an Unforgivable would slip naturally off his tongue, but no. Harry stiffens, and Draco flees, running as far as he can before apparating away, the locket still clenched tightly in his fist.

*

He barely has enough energy to make it back to Grimmauld Place. The poison he swallowed seethes in his bloodstream, eating away at him from the inside out. He'd sworn to destroy this locket, this thing, but now his hand shakes so much he can barely lift it from his pocket.

His mother isn't home, which is a blessing, because she'd probably have him killed. He hopes Kreacher is out running errands with her, as well. The locket weighs him down, makes him drag his feet and stumble on the stairs. The drawing room seems miles away.

When he collapses in the doorway and has to crawl the last few meters to the cabinet, Regulus realizes that he is going to die.

*

Draco dreams that he's in a long corridor. He hates it for being such a stereotype even as he makes his way along it, inexplicably drawn to something that waits at the end, a need to see. He curses his own subconscious for being so clichéd even as he dreams.

The corridor seems endless. He starts walking faster, then jogging. Finally, he breaks out into a run.

He's so tired of running, but he can't stop.

The candles along the walls (and there would be candles, wouldn't there? Ghostly and old-fashioned and quaint) flicker as he passes, dancing in the breeze stirred up by his billowing robes.

He almost doesn't realize he's reached the end of the corridor, almost runs smack into the wall, but snaps out of the illusion just in time and stops. There's a huge mirror hanging there, and maybe that's why he'd thought the corridor to be endless, because it's all reflected right back upon itself.

The mirror hangs in an antique frame, gilded and ornate and astonishingly ugly. Draco ignores it.

He looks into the mirror, and his father stares back out at him.

It's all he's ever really wanted in his life, to see his father's face in the glass, but now he hates it.

"No," he tells his ersatz reflection. He pounds his fists on the glass. "That's not me!" The mirror resists his onslaught, but he keeps hitting it until his hands are bruised and raw.

Frustrated, he looks around. The corridor is empty save for the mirror and the candles on the walls. He grasps the cold metal of a candelabra, tugging at it. It remains firm. Although gilded with gold, it feels more like wrought iron in his hands. He pulls again, muscles straining, refusing to yield, until with a wrenching groan, the candelabra nearly flies off the wall. He almost falls over at the sudden freedom.

Draco slams the metal candelabra into the mirror. The candles fall out of their cupped holders to burn themselves out on the stone floor. He hits the mirror again. It cracks slightly, just a hairline fracture. Again, and again, until finally the mirror shatters explosively, shards of glass flying everywhere, cutting his cheek and hands.

Behind the mirror, all Draco can see is Voldemort's awful, skull-like face and those horrible glowing eyes, and as he meets that impossibly cold gaze, he realizes that he has a lot to learn about hatred.

*

Time seems to stretch out. Moving forward through it is like pushing through molasses. Every heartbeat is an agony, a flash of fire burning through his chest as he drags himself across the room, a horrible nightmare from which he can never wake up.

*

Draco wakes with a start, and it takes him a few long moments to orient himself. His back aches from the night on the hard ground, and there are leaves in his hair. The forest is still and silent, as though awaiting something. He stands stiffly, stretching, and instinctively reaches into his pocket for the solid weight of the locket.

He pulls it out and studies it. It's a heavy, opulent thing, marked only with an odd engraving on the face. It sort of looks like a very ornate S. There's nothing that might reveal its origin or the nature of Voldemort's interest in it, and Draco's attempts to pry it open yield no success. But the metal itself seems almost to hum, to throb with a dark, ugly power. There's magic here, of some sort, although Draco can't identify it. The locket just seems to...to hate with a power as fierce as Voldemort's.

But if it had such personal significance to Voldemort, how had it wound up in the Black family home? Staunch supporters of Voldemort's though his mother's aunt and uncle may have been, they hadn't actually been active Death Eaters themselves. Voldemort would hardly have entrusted them with so valuable an artifact. Regulus Black had been a Death Eater, for a time, but he'd backed out...

It seems that he was far cleverer than any of us gave him credit for.

Regulus must have stolen the locket. And hidden it. But if he'd really wanted to use it to get back at Voldemort, he should have just destroyed it. Maybe he'd tried, and failed. Or...or maybe he'd died before he had the chance.

The locket radiates its nameless hatred.

Draco could return it to Voldemort. He could go there right now and give it back to him. This locket was immensely valuable to the Dark Lord.

You've got nowhere else to go, unless you just want to keep running for the rest of your life.

His father would certainly be proud, if Draco returned this mysteriously precious thing to Voldemort. It's what Lucius would want him to do.

You don't have to keep making his mistakes.

And in his mind's eye, the mirror shatters, and Draco decides.

*

His mother will never notice yet another ancient and Dark artifact among her extensive collection. He places a simple Glamour on the locket, to make it as unobtrusive as possible, and adds it to the assortment in the cabinet. The pain coursing throughout his body is unbearable.

With the last of his strength, he apparates as far away as he can manage. It isn't far. Someone will find him soon enough, and some Death Eater will doubtless take credit for his death.

Regulus's last hope is that Sirius will find the Horcrux and know what to do with it.

*

Draco sets the locket down on the leaf-strewn ground and pulls out his wand, taking several steps back. He points the wand straight at the locket, and speaks the most dangerous, explosive, destructive spell he's ever learned.

Nothing happens.

He speaks it again, and again. Nothing. Draco looks deep within himself, to the rage over his father's imprisonment and the anxiety over his mother's safety and the strain of months of running and hiding and the frustration with his father and Harry Potter and Snape and Voldemort and the world, and it all finally comes together into a hatred so pure and vibrant that it rivals even that of the locket, and all that hate boils over into a perfect, strong "Avada Kedavra!"

The locket resists, but cracks ever so slightly. Just a hairline fracture, that's all. It's enough.

Draco takes a few steps forward and reaches down, picking up the locket and testing its weight in his hand. He looks around. One of the trees surrounding him is a massive oak, solid and ancient. His eyes narrow, judging the distance, and then he pulls his arm back and hurls the locket at the oak as hard as he can, finishing the job his cousin Regulus had begun sixteen years ago.

*

He doesn't hurt anymore. It's such a relief.

*

For some people, death comes as a fanfare. It's loud and glorious, an exclamation point marking the end of a vibrant life. It's shouted to the heavens and told and retold throughout the world of the living, a story for the ages. Men like James Potter and Albus Dumbledore die in a flash of greenish light, and their survivors wail their grief to the empty skies. Harry will die someday, too, sooner or later, before or after Voldemort, and his death will be proclaimed to the world, and the world will mourn him.

But for the rest of us, death is a sigh, a whisper, just eyes widening in recognition and the soft hiss of the final breath. This will be Lucius Malfoy's death, his last rattling gasp in a decaying cell in Azkaban. This was Regulus Black's death, alone and defiant and forgotten.

This is Draco's death, the Horcrux exploding malevolently in a silent, blinding flash, muting his scream and stopping his heart. No one notices because no one is there, and no one will find his body, still and pale under the fallen leaves.