A/N: Quidditch League Fanfiction Competetion

Kenmare Kestrels Keeper

Prompt: Write about a dark character exhibiting temperance

Temperance

The Other Woman was a hole-in-the-wall dive—a seedy pub known by the locals to be a bad place to meet worse men. It wasn't the sort of bar that played music or had pretty waitresses. It was a place where a man could leave with less fingers than he came in with. Where you could sell your soul to the devil, who always had a corner booth in the back room. It was the place a man could have a drink in peace even when his face was slapped across posters all over London.

Regulus Black sat at the end of the bar, swaying slightly on a stool with one leg shorter than the other two. At the beginning of the night, he'd been content knowing that, even if anyone recognized him, no one would care. Now, it was he who couldn't care. He'd had enough firewhiskey to drown a house-elf, but the bartender of The Other Woman wasn't the sort to cut a person off when he was too drunk to stand.

And Regulus was nearly too drunk to sit. His stool kept shifting suddenly underneath him, and the world around him was slowly rotating to the right, only to snap immediately back to his left a moment later. He stared—as best he could—into the half-empty glass in front of him, one arm propped on the bar to keep himself from sliding to the floor. He was frowning, and his eyebrows were pressing against each other in the center of his forehead as though they were dials that could re-focus his eyes like the knobs of a microscope.

Images swam in his drink, taunting him for some reason he couldn't identify. Something had been nagging at him, at the very back of his memory, for months. A young girl in a white night dress kept appearing in his mind, dancing just out of his vision. Swimming in his drink.

She was seven or eight, with brown eyes and the blackest hair he had ever seen. Black enough to fall into.

Regulus weaved precariously on his seat and the image vanished while he tried to roll his eyes the right way around in his head once more. Bile built in his stomach, but he forced it down through sheer willpower. He shook his head to clear his thoughts, but it only made him dizzier, and he had to grab the bar with both hands and close his eyes.

There she was again, on the backs of his eyelids, holding a hand-stitched teddy bear with only one eye sewn on it. She was looking up at him with silent, abject terror.

Regulus' eyes snapped open a moment later. He knew what came next in that image, and he didn't want to see it.

But why?

"Why?" he asked out loud to his firewhiskey.

No one answered; no one even looked in his direction. He wasn't the only person mumbling into his drink that night, nor was he the only one looking for answers at the bottom of a glass.

"I'm a bad man," he muttered to his drink and the wibbly image of the child on its surface. "I'm a very… I'm a very bad man, and you… you're dead. You're... dead," he repeated, almost like an accusation.

"I killed you," he told her, his voice soft like a child telling a secret.

As if she doesn't know, he thought dimly to himself. It was a smug voice inside his head, one that the drink helped to drown out, but couldn't entirely eradicate.

As if you have to remind her.

"Shut up," Regulus whispered, putting his head between his hands as though he could squeeze the voice out of it. "Go away."

The voice, compliant, said nothing.

Some part of Regulus knew the voice was simply himself trying to reason out why he had latched on to the memory of the girl in the night dress so firmly. He'd been a Death Eater many years, done many things at the request and behest of his Lord that had earned him a reputation as an evil man. He was a murderer and a torturer, and he was unremorseful in every sin he had ever committed.

Wasn't he?

Do you think so?

The inner voice had returned to mock him. Do you think you have no remorse? the voice asked him. I suppose this isn't happening, then. I suppose you don't see that child whenever you close your eyes. I suppose you don't need the firewhiskey to knock you out so you don't dream of the screams.

I suppose you've cracked, like your bloody cousin.

Now, that was a scary thought. Regulus? The same as Bellatrix? Bellatrix was mad! She was…

A murderer? the voice supplied. A torturer? Unremorseful?

"Stop it," Regulus said, reaching for the glass in front of him that still held two fingers of the stuff that would put the voice back to rest.

It won't ever stop, the voice told him. That girl is going to haunt you until you die. Every second you're awake, and every time you try to rest, she'll be there, screaming. Begging. Dying.

The muscled in Regulus' neck strained in his effort to fight against himself. He didn't understand. He didn't know what was happening to him. He was a powerful man who took whatever he wanted at the very moment he wanted it, and threw it aside the second he wanted something new. He wasn't a bleeding heart. Not a blood traitor like his brother. He was an upholder of pureblood tradition and supremacy! He was a warrior against the Mudblood filth that corrupted the very nature of magic!

And he was… unraveling.

His fingers dove into his hair and—when his hands came back out as fists—clumps of it remained between his fingers.

His hand shot out once more to grab his glass and raise it to his mouth. One more would do it. One more would put him out until morning. On more and he would join the ranks of the blissfully blacked-out.

Firewhiskey can only make you forget for so long. Weakness drives you. Weakness makes you want to forget. Weakness is the reason you can't face her.

Regulus paused with the glass at his lips. He could taste the firewhiskey on the rim, burning his skin in the beautiful, painful way it did.

You know why this hurts.

Regulus pulled the glass just far enough away to speak.

"She was nothing," he said.

She was everything. She was the face of everything you are, and everything you've done.

Regulus glanced down at the glass in his hand. A flick of his wrist would be all it would take, and the lights would go out. He would sleep the sleep of the dead drunk, wake up in the alley behind the pub the next morning and go about it all over again.

Or you could do something, he caught himself thinking.

Do something? Do what? Change his ways? Abandon his beliefs and his family? Start a revolution? What could he do? What was it even feasible for him to do? What was he expecting of himself, truthfully?

Maybe nothing, the voice said. Maybe this is merely a hiccup. Maybe everything goes back to the way it was before, but there is only one way to know for certain.

Regulus didn't move at first. He looked pained, unable to process his own thoughts. Slowly, he lowered the glass and set it down on the bar, examining it curiously, as though it had put itself there.

He wobbled and nearly fell as he dismounted the barstool and stumbled toward the door. In the end, he reasoned, one passed-up drink would probably not make any difference. Men were who they were, and they did not exchange stripes for spots.