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Part 2 of woodstonight's HP fics , Part 2 of librarian regulus verse
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k's fav fics, AverageFish Discord Recs
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2021-08-01
Updated:
2022-01-30
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28,457
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8/15
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regulus black, librarian extraordinaire

Summary:

When he emerges from the seaside cave unexpectedly alive, Regulus makes a most tactical plan. It goes something like this:

1) Fake his own death
2) Retreat into the Muggle world to pursue his secret passion
3) Destroy the Dark Lord’s Horcrux
4) Become Harry Potter's magical mentor

...Wait, what was that last one?!

Or: Regulus is the best librarian slash accidental magical mentor ever.

(Ft: Regulus doing the ol’ Clark Kent with Orion’s old reading glasses and unflappable confidence in his role [and it actually working]).

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Chapter 1: 1979

Summary:

Wherein Regulus survives the cave, and has to wrestle with the question of what to do next.

(The obvious answer to that question is to fumble through the muggle world until he makes it.)

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

In a seaside cave that smells of death, a figure washes upon the rocky shore. Emerald waves lap at bloody ankles as grey eyes flutter open.

 

Weary and confused, seventeen-year-old Regulus Black realises the impossible.

 

He is, inexplicably, alive.

 

Regulus rolls over and tries to stand, but everything hurts so bad; the gesture is aborted and jerky. His throat is burning and his lungs are full of water and he still feels the ghosts of others’ prising fingers.

 

“Kreacher, return,” he begs, voice coming out as nothing more than a garbled whimper.

 

A pop, and his loyal elf returns. And the last thing Regulus sees before he very gracefully passes out is Kreacher’s shocked face.

 

 

Some indeterminable amount of time later, Regulus dips back into consciousness with a distinct feeling of warmth and blissful numbness. Slowly, he inches into a sitting position, shifting a woollen blanket with hand-embroidered stars such that it falls to his lap. He’s laying upon the leather settee in father’s office.

 

By habit, he looks down at his left arm. The damnable dark mark—the one he’d regretted getting near-instantly—is living up to its name, all dark red ink upon his pale skin, but the claw marks are certainly new.

 

With a shaking finger, Regulus traces the angry pink slashes and comes away with a cool gooey substance on his finger. A slight sniff reveals it to be dittany.

 

“Master should not be touching his wounds after Kreacher patched them up,” says a chiding voice.

 

Startled, Regulus drops his hand guiltily and looks around the room until his eyes meet the elf’s.

 

“Sorry, Kreacher,” Regulus says with no small degree of embarrassment. He worries the hem of the woollen blanket with idle hands, now covered in crisscrossing marks. “Thank you for this; I feel a lot better. Will the claw marks go away?”

 

Kreacher gives him a prideful kind of look. “Kreacher lives to serve the noble and most ancient House of Black, he does. The marks will scar, but Kreacher tried to relieve the pain and minimise appearances for good master."

 

“That’ll have to do, then.” Regulus nods. “And how long was I… in there?”

 

“It’s not been a day since we went to that cave,” Kreacher says.

 

(Assuming nothing has drastically changed in under twenty-four hours, this means mother is alive and well.)

 

“Alright,” Regulus says thoughtfully. Time to plot. “Then I’ll first need you to retrieve my wand from my bedside. Mother will simply have to bury an empty coffin; I’ll be needing it more than her.” He pauses. “Of course, it’s vital everyone thinks I’m dead, so you may have to tamper with the Tapestry. Oh! And could you also fetch a discreet breakfast? And do all this without arousing mother’s suspicions or sharing anything with her?”

 

Kreacher readily nods at the orders. They will surely be much easier for the elf to carry out than the ones that Regulus had thought were his last.

 

After Kreacher disapparates to carry out the tasks, Regulus slumps against the arm of the settee and worries over the future, a foreign luxury he’d not the ability to for the past few years. He’s free to decide for himself now (well, aside from the binding magic of the dark mark, but perhaps he could figure that out with his abundance of free time). Of course, the fact that he hasn’t sat his N.E.W.T.s—and obviously won’t be able to anytime soon—severely limits his options.

 

Regardless, seeing as surviving was decidedly not his intention (no matter what his letter may have implied), he’d better think up a plan of action—and quickly.

 

While he’s still thinking, Kreacher returns, balancing a meagre breakfast, Regulus’s wand, and good news. “The tapestry has declared master Regulus dead, so Kreacher did not tamper with it. This is all the breakfast Kreacher could sneak without alerting mistress.”

 

“Brill, Kreacher,” Regulus says with a genuine smile, tucking his wand into a pocket of his tattered robes. He collects the breakfast from the elf and places it on the side table before turning back to Kreacher. “Thank you so much. Now return to her before mother gets suspicious. Remember my orders not to speak a word of any of this to any of the family.”

 

Kreacher bows and disapparates. And Regulus takes a bite of slightly burnt toast and thinks about his options.

 

For one, there’s always France. It would be difficult, but not impossible to escape to the Continent and hang around at one of the Black family properties. And Regulus, of course, speaks fluent French. However, on top of it being risky to go international during wartime, Black family properties are warded exceptionally well against everyone but family. Ergo, he would risk one of his more… unsavoury family members coming across the hiding spot, an encounter he’d no chance at surviving.

 

He could also hide around Grimmauld Place and wait until mother dies before assuming regular occupancy. In his paranoia, father set up wards that keep everyone out but the immediate family, and Sirius would sooner eat his broom than step foot in Grimmauld once more. The only flaw in that is that mother is the most stubborn woman Regulus has ever met (which is certainly saying something), and, like a cockroach, the world will surely be consumed by the expanding Sun before Walburga Black allows herself to be taken by death.

 

Really, the only rational option is perhaps Regulus’s daftest (which is saying something given his near-death experience the night prior). But the hiding-in-plain-sight plan might just have to be it. He could slip easily into muggle London from Grimmauld. And it’s certainly the last place that a Death Eater would deign to enter, much less search for Regulus (if word even ever gets out he’s alive). While far from the most appealing idea, it’s the most easily achievable and the most out-of-character. Of course, he’ll need a clever disguise to pull this off… 

 

Regulus looks at father’s reading glasses beside him on the bedside table and nibbles at the toast thoughtfully.

 

…Well, if it worked for Clark Kent?

 

 

Under Kreacher’s expert care, Regulus slowly recovers. The inferi scars fade to a barely noticeable milky white. And, more importantly, after copious amounts of research, he even manages to use a clever little rune array and some blood to throttle the Protean charm of the dark mark. It’s not perfect, and he’ll probably be wearing long sleeves for a while yet, but it works.

 

Eventually having declared himself recovered enough to make his second escape from Grimmauld (and having said his goodbyes to Kreacher, of course), Regulus stands around in another one of the rooms that mother would never enter, Sirius’s bedroom. He figures that being the great muggle-lover he is, Sirius will have had some inkling of what muggles wear and he could… borrow some of his forgotten clothes to blend in. 

 

Unfortunately, Sirius left the room in quite a state. Regulus has to fish around through a variety of increasingly questionable objects to get to anything remotely useful. He kicks a Quaffle with a large bite taken out of it and decides he really doesn’t want to know what the backstory for any of this mess is. 

 

Eventually, though, Regulus throws together something that resembles what he’s seen Sirius lazing about Hogwarts wearing: a scruffy leather jacket and a tie-dye muggle band shirt. He’s definitely not about to lower himself to nick Sirius’s trousers, so Regulus puts on a pair of his own tartan chinos.

 

He tucks the overlarge muggle shirt into his trousers and throws the jacket over the ensemble. After ringing his eyes with some thoughtful eyeliner and pulling his hair back into a low bun, Regulus decides this is good enough.

 

For the final touch, he returns to father’s study and perches the old wire-rimmed reading glasses upon his nose. Fortunately, the prescription is very weak and has no real effect on his vision. 

 

And, once more, Regulus Black creeps sideways down the stairs in that nearly silent way he’d mastered long ago.

 

Barely sparing a backward glance to the old troll leg or the darkened halls, Regulus exits the gates of Grimmauld once more and disappears into muggle London.

 

 

Having never been forced into the degrading and plebeian position of seeking employment, Regulus is not familiar with the ritual of the ‘interview’ (muggle or magical).

 

Getting the interview is easy enough: blank pieces of parchment with very strong charms on them and a hearty disregard for the Statute can get one surprisingly far. But when it comes to the actual interviewing part, Regulus is completely baffled.

 

This bafflement is only compounded by the fact that he’s never actually interacted with a muggle before, and he’s still rather concerned that they’ll tie him down and steal his magic. 

 

“Well, Mr Black,” says his first interviewer, a middle-aged woman with greying brown hair in a blue cardigan, “It says here that you have graduated with a Master’s Degree in Library Science. And you’ve a very impressive record.”

 

Tapping his fingers against his knee, Regulus nods and pretends he’s done absolutely any of that. And that he’s not just watching the muggle shuffle around blank pieces of parchment.

 

“You do seem young, and I won’t pretend to be privy to the youth’s fashion. But I do believe it goes without saying that, if hired, you’ll be coming to work in more… professional attire.”

 

Regulus frowns minutely. What could possibly be wrong with his muggle outfit?

 

“Of course,” he reassures her. “I’m just borrowing my older brother’s clothes because I recently… lost all of mine in a… fire?”

 

“I see.” Her expression softens a bit. “Well, it was very kind of him to take you in, even if he couldn’t supply proper interview clothing.”

 

“Oh, no, he didn’t take me in,” Regulus corrects her, “I nicked them. The last time I saw him, he said in no uncertain terms that he’d blast me to smithereens if we ever met again.”

 

 

“Why do you want this job?” asks the fourth interviewer.

 

“I like books,” Regulus says exasperatedly. 

 

 

“And just how old are you, exactly?” 

 

Regulus curses his babyface. “Seventeen.”

 

A pause. “How could you have possibly earned all these qualifications by seventeen?”

 

“Er… I am a very advanced student?”

 

 

“These documents all seem to be in order,” the muggle says sceptically. Regulus is used to scepticism by now, seeing as this is his eleventh interview. “A few questions and we’ll consider you for the position. First, what is your experience with, and philosophy regarding, customer service?”

 

“Oh, I know a whole lot about service, trust me.” Regulus nods agreeably. “I served in a fantastical murder cult for about a year, balancing that with full-time enrolment. As for my personal philosophy?” Regulus pauses to think. “I say the more painless the better. My cousin Bellatrix is fond of torturing her victims before killing them, and don't even get me started on Barty’s fascination with turning people inside out. But I think the best way to serve the customer’s desires is to kill them as painlessly as possible.”

 

 

By the time his seventeenth interview comes around, Regulus is incredibly frazzled. Who knew it was so hard to land a job with no qualifications or experience whatsoever? Definitely not him.

 

And that’s why, as he’s being led into the break room for an interview, Regulus apologetically flicks a Confundus charm at the wizened old muggle woman.

 

“Dear me,” the would-be-interviewer says faintly, touching her forehead with the back of a varicose hand. She turns to Regulus in a daze. “What are we doing back here? What’s happening?”

 

“We were just wrapping up our interview,” Regulus offers. “You were very impressed with my qualifications and offered me the position on the spot.”

 

“Oh, of course.” She nods a bit stupidly.

 

“And, um, you were so impressed that you hired me at double the advertised rate?”

 

“Yes, of course,” the muggle says absently. “That sounds about right… Thank you…?” She pauses for his name.

 

“Regulus Black.”

 

“Welcome, then, Mr Black, to the Little Whinging Library.”

 

“Thank you.” Regulus shakes her outstretched hand. “I’m sure I’ll enjoy it here.”

Notes:

Hey everyone! Back with my second multi-chap fic (woo hoo)! Updates every Sunday, length is still to be determined(...?), but I have 20k written so far. Chapters are sitting anywhere from 2k to almost 5k each; scenes will be longer in future chapters. If you're here from monachopsis, this will be... quite different in tone (i.e. actually light-hearted, maybe even a bit humorous, dare I say). I hope you stick around, though!

P.S. I'm working on a canon-compliant Sirius-centric story right now, too, but Regulus just won't leave me alone. So! I hope you enjoy Reg in the muggle world with the world's best disguise.

P.P.S. Okay, but imagine you're a librarian. You're holding job interviews, and this delicate beanpole of a boy waltzes in wearing fancy tartan chinos, a tie-dye band shirt, and this huge leather jacket, looking to get the job. Somehow, he is fully qualified (he brought papers, you checked). He does not look a year over fifteen. He opens his mouth to speak, and out comes the most obnoxiously posh accent you've ever heard in your life. Lol.