As Voldemort drew close, Regulus made a decision: pull the Dark Awakening’s traces back in.

That trick had been enough in front of Bellatrix. But before the thing’s maker, to keep playing the part of a man corrupted by his own product was to bet that Voldemort’s eyes were poor.

His eyes were very good.

Regulus sank his consciousness into the mental space and cracked open the isolation zone of the containment room.

The gray matter flowed back along the channels the Filtration Layer had set, peeling off his magic, receding from beneath his skin, gathering into the Isolation Zone, sealed shut.

Once the gray had drained clean, the look on his face folded back.

Those expressions from before, the flaring eyes, the smile that wasn’t his, all of it had been an act. No need to reel it in piece by piece, no transition. Straight back into place.

Calm, composed, restrained. A little pride to finish, and it was perfect.

He was twelve. He’d just gone head-on and broken Bellatrix Lestrange, using a gift her own master had given her, and burned down her manor while he was at it.

A job that thorough earned pride, even with Voldemort standing across from him.

But pride didn’t mean rudeness.

This was the real leader of the pure-blood bloc, the man working half of Britain’s underside politics, the highest authority over the camp the Black family currently stood in.

He’d thought through the wording too. Not master, that was what the Death Eaters said.

He bowed his head, slightly.

Voldemort stopped four or five meters off.

Bellatrix lay on the broken stone between them, chest rising and falling, lips twitching, eyeballs rolling unconsciously in their sockets. No awareness left.

He didn’t look at her. He looked at Regulus.

He watched the last of the gray drain away, watched that face snap back to normal the instant it registered him, no hesitation, no transition.

Silence.

Fiendfyre smoldered in the distance, even its roar crushed down to a muffled rumble, the three beasts crammed into the corner, balled up tight.

When Voldemort spoke, the voice was soft, every word clear enough.

"Regulus."

He lifted his head, met the dark red eyes for a heartbeat, then dipped his chin. "My lord."

There was no reading temperature in Voldemort’s gaze. Not cold, not warm.

The voice stayed light. A single question. "Doesn’t it work well?"

Regulus caught it. Voldemort was asking why he’d put it away.

What I gave you works, of course. If you put it away, then it doesn’t work, and the problem lies with you.

His expression held. He meant to tell the truth.

Lying was the stupidest move. Before Voldemort, when truth would serve, you told the truth. Truth withstood any test.

"It works very well." His tone was earnest, not a trace of guilt. "But the holiday’s ending, and I’m going back to school. Carrying it to Hogwarts wouldn’t be convenient."

No reaction.

Silence.

Brief. A little more than one breath, less than two.

Regulus knew what came next.

He’d been waiting for it from the moment Voldemort stepped in. Legilimency. Voldemort would use it, no question.

He needed to confirm how far the Dark Awakening had bitten, to see whether Dumbledore had left anything in this boy’s head, to gauge the Black heir’s mental strength and the leanings of his loyalty.

Outside observation couldn’t reach those. He had to go in and look.

Voldemort watched his eyes, and the next moment, with no warning at all, simply watching, he was inside.

Occlumency snapped up at once.

Bellatrix burned deep in his consciousness, the mental space laid over a foundation of Star Guided Meditation, every layer of structure built across the past year and a half raised for this one moment.

He’d expected the intrusion. He’d braced to be torn open by force.

Pain, rending, mental barriers ground to dust. Voldemort could have done exactly that. He didn’t.

A needle, very fine, very cold, slid straight through the outermost layer of defense.

No pain. No tearing. No violent breach.

The way it entered could be called gentle, even, carrying a suggestion that made him want to cooperate.

Regulus didn’t dare slacken. Occlumency unfurled in full the same instant the needle touched the surface.

Stars deep in his consciousness ran steady through the mental space, Bellatrix’s light burning at the very core, stable, constant.

The core sealed shut.

The whole memory of the one who’d crossed over. The principles and progress of Light Source Magic, every detail of spatial magic, the way to summon a Patronus and the form of the Starlight Kite, the development and use records of the Decomposition Curse.

The true nature of Star Guided Meditation, every star in Orion a reflection of his soul, Betelgeuse erupting, Bellatrix guarding, Saiph the cutting edge, the three belt stars holding order.

His complete knowledge of Voldemort’s whole future, the number of Horcruxes, the hiding places, the final undoing.

And all his judgments of the situation, the road he’d chosen, the things truly spoken between him and Dumbledore, the link to Grindelwald.

All of it pressed into the deepest place, layer nested within layer.

Three barriers ran inward, each framed on the workings of Star Guided Meditation.

The higher techniques of Occlumency folded thought itself, so that those memories ran discontinuous across the space’s topology. Turn past this layer, and the door to the next wasn’t where you’d assume.

Operating at the limit.

Holding this structure together under Voldemort’s Legilimency, the mental drain ran like a reservoir with every floodgate opened at once.

But he couldn’t seal everything. To seal everything was to resist, and resistance meant hiding something.

If Voldemort met a wall sealed airtight, his first thought would be that something behind it couldn’t bear the light.

He’d left room on the surface of his consciousness, arrangements already made within the framework of Occlumency: what to leave out where it would be easily found, what to press behind.

Everything set in the outer layer was real.

Forged memory might be possible. He’d never tried, and before Voldemort he couldn’t gamble on it.

False thoughts wouldn’t hold. The texture would be wrong, the grain of emotion wrong, the way one memory linked to the next wrong.

To be caught faking was more dangerous than showing nothing at all. It would tell Voldemort outright that this twelve-year-old was trying to deceive him.

So all of it was real. Only arranged in specific positions.

The needle’s point pushed deeper.

It had a clear target: what the Dark Awakening had actually become inside Regulus.

He saw it.

The Containment Room’s structure stood whole in the outer layer, the gray matter stowed in the Isolation Zone, the Filtration Layer parting the corruption from the usable part.

The observation window stood open, the virtual personality at work inside, research output flowing out through the magic conduit.

The Isolation Zone’s design was plain: he could cut the input at any moment.

In the worst case, destroy the Containment Room and everything in it together. The cost would be a portion of his mind, but the corruption would never touch the core consciousness.

The Dark Awakening Voldemort had sent out, that carefully made mental weapon meant to corrode by degrees and finally assimilate its user, had been taken apart by this twelve-year-old.

Caged behind transparent walls. Treated as research material, like an alchemy lab.

No trace of losing control. No sign of rejection. Nothing of being wholly absorbed.

It simply sat there, stored like a tool to be drawn on, brought out when needed, put back when not.

The safeguards were exhaustive, defense within defense, even the corrupting impurities sorted and handled by category.

The needle’s point lingered there a short while.

Then Regulus felt it touch something else: his own immediate sense of Voldemort’s magic, the thing he was living through right now, perceived in real time.

Vision giving feedback, magical sense giving none, that contradictory dislocation.

Beyond the magical sense, the tremor deep in the bone, the instinctive answer at the level of the soul. There stood a wizard far past the ceiling of what he knew.

That stretch of perception was wholly real, happening at this very moment, nothing dressed up about it.

Here Voldemort could read several things. Regulus’s magical sense was acute beyond measure, able to mark out a suppressed state with precision, able to describe even the method and texture of the suppression.

And in that memory there was wariness, there was pressure, there was rapid analysis and calculation, there was a judgment about his own safety, there were guesses at Voldemort’s intent.

Only one thing was missing. Fear.