Diary of a Dead Man

Death. Pain. Nothingness.

Death, for him, does not involve a light at the end of the tunnel. Death is pain and death is terror, death is the cold, clammy hands of its servants dragging him further and further into the murky, suffocating depths. Death is life being ripped from his lungs. Death is the great destroyer, the ultimate annihilator, and it takes great pleasure in its work as it crushes him, ruins him, makes him nothing. His only comfort is that at least he knows now that he was more than nothing before.

The sharp, sudden numbing of his pain brings no relief, for instead it brings the knowledge that the end is closer yet and though he knows that there was never another way, and though his life was never a good or a pleasant one, he dreads to lose the few treasures that he had, he fears the choking grip of the solemn hour as it drains him... of everything. Not since he was a child, since before he started school, has he been so terrified of the loneliness. Of being alone.

Through the bleariness of horror, the preoccupation of pain, he manages to realize that he can no longer see. He can no longer hear. He can no longer move, or make a sound. It is difficult to think at all. And some time later, even the pain disappears and he ceases to feel anything but cold.

A second goes by and he thinks it is a year. But the important thing is that he has come to understand that this is death.

No more pain. No more terror. No more Regulus Black.

A few memories.

"Please, Sirius," the young boy begged, his face pale and his limbs frozen. "Please, don't."

His older brother laughed. "Slytherins are all cowards," he taunted and feinted with the spider once more. It was large, unnaturally large, and proof that Sirius had been practicing his spellwork again. At least he had not been practicing it on Regulus this time, but the child couldn't help but sympathize with the poor, terrified spider, having been through much the same experience barely a week before. It was fear for the spider that petrified him, not of it as Sirius assumed, but how was he to explain this to someone as bitter and brutish as his brother? Regulus never tried to explain anything to Sirius anymore.

"I'm not a Slytherin yet," he reminded him instead and Sirius hesitated for the longest of moments.

"You will be this September," he said finally, decisively. "A sneaky little coward like you couldn't go anywhere else." Regulus accepted this statement without question. He was a sneaky little coward and this September he would become a Slytherin as well. Sirius often said so and Sirius was always right. But if he had looked a little harder, he might have noticed that his brother's resolve appeared to have been shattered. "Never mind," he muttered, and then something about boring old spiders and pesky brothers. The spider landed at Regulus' feet and the boy quickly retrieved it. For a moment he stood with indecision, balancing the advantages and disadvantages of releasing the spider as it was or having his mother fix it first, and landing Sirius in even more trouble. Then he clasped it a bit more tightly and hurried down the corridor in the opposite direction of Sirius' receding figure. The spider won.