Regulus Black x Soulmate! Reader
On his seventeenth birthday, Regulus Black receives a soulmark with the baffling words: "Oh my God I have nothing appropriate to say." He imagines someone polished and articulate—until he quite literally collides with (Y/N) (L/N), a Hufflepuff whose beauty stuns him and whose nonstop chatter leaves him exasperated.
Word Count: 7k
Warnings: none
Here is the rewritten story with all instances of the character name placeholder changed to (Y/N) (L/N) (with the brackets as you requested). I’ve kept the rest of the text identical.
The first thing Regulus Black felt on the morning of his seventeenth birthday was a sharp, tingling burn on the inside of his left wrist. He sat up in his four-poster bed, the green silk sheets pooling at his waist, and pushed back the sleeve of his nightshirt with the careful precision of someone who had been waiting for this moment for years, though he would never admit it aloud.
Words were blooming across his skin in elegant, curling script, dark as ink and faintly shimmering. The soulmark. His soulmate’s first words to him, etched permanently into his flesh by magic far older than any pureblood lineage. He had seen his parents’ marks—his mother’s on her collarbone, his father’s on his ribs—and had been told since childhood that the bond was sacred, unbreakable, and utterly humiliating if one ended up with someone unworthy.
Regulus had spent the last year secretly cataloguing every person he met, measuring their first sentences against the blank canvas of his wrist. He had hoped for something dignified. A witty remark. A declaration of shared intellect. Something befitting the heir of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black.
The words finished forming, and he read them.
Oh my God I have nothing appropriate to say.
Regulus stared.
He blinked, once, slowly.
Then he pulled his sleeve down, smoothed the fabric, and walked to breakfast with the same cold, composed expression he wore every day. Inside, however, a tiny, carefully suppressed part of him was buzzing. His soulmate was out there. Somewhere. Someone who, apparently, panicked at the sight of him. That could mean anything. Perhaps they would be endearingly shy. Perhaps they would be overwhelmed by his presence—he had been told his gaze could be unnerving. Perhaps it was a sign of deep, profound attraction rendering them speechless.
He could work with that.
Three months passed, and Regulus Black did not meet his soulmate.
He attended classes. He patrolled corridors as a prefect. He endured family dinners where his parents dropped heavy, pointed remarks about suitable matches, all while the Dark Mark on his left forearm—new, still prickling with unease—lay hidden beneath his robes. And all the while, the words on his other wrist remained unanswered. He had taken to glancing at them before sleep, tracing the loops of the letters with a fingertip, wondering.
By late October, his anticipation had curdled into a tense, irritable sort of restlessness. He had stopped scanning crowds. The soulmate magic would happen when it happened, he told himself. It wasn’t as if he cared. It was simply a matter of curiosity.
Then, on a rain-lashed Thursday afternoon, he collided with (Y/N) (L/N) in the second-floor corridor outside the library.
Regulus had been walking fast, head bent, thinking about the increasingly impossible demands of his Transfiguration essay and the much darker task he was expected to complete for the Dark Lord before Christmas. He rounded the corner near the stairwell and crashed directly into a small, hurrying figure, sending an armful of books flying in every direction. Parchment scattered like startled doves. A pot of ink shattered spectacularly against the flagstones.
Regulus stumbled back, caught his balance, and bit out the first words that rose to his lips, crisp and sharp with annoyance: “Do you ever watch where you’re going?”
The girl—for it was a girl, bent over now and scrambling to gather her belongings—froze. Her head snapped up.
Regulus forgot how to breathe.
She was, without any possible exaggeration, the most beautiful person he had ever seen. Hair that caught the grey light from the high windows and spun it into something golden-soft, eyes wide and luminous and fixed on him with an expression of dawning, startled wonder. Her lips parted. The ruined books lay forgotten at her feet. She straightened slowly, clutching a soggy bit of parchment to her chest, and for one perfect, suspended moment, Regulus thought: Yes. Yes, this is acceptable. This is beyond acceptable. The universe has done well.
Then she opened her mouth.
“Oh my God,” she said, in a breathless rush, “I have nothing appropriate to say.”
The words landed in the air between them like a dropped egg.
Regulus’s brain, which had been busy composing a suitably smooth first address—something about fate, perhaps, or the inevitability of their meeting—stuttered to a halt. He knew those words. He had read them a hundred times, traced them in the dark, imagined them spoken a thousand ways. And now here they were, tumbling out of the mouth of a girl who had just informed him, with apparent sincerity, that she had nothing appropriate to say.
She clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes going impossibly wider. “Oh no. Oh no, that was it, wasn’t it? That was the thing. The thing I say.” She lowered her hand, revealing a grin that was equal parts horror and delight. “You’re my soulmate! You said the thing too! ‘Do you ever watch where you’re going’—that’s on my ankle, I’ve been wondering for ages, it seemed so cross, I thought maybe I was going to be soulmates with a very irritable hippogriff, but you’re not a hippogriff, you’re a person, and you’re—” She paused, tilted her head, and squinted at him. “You’re Regulus Black.”
“Yes,” Regulus said, because his ability to form full sentences appeared to have deserted him.
“I’m (Y/N) (L/N). Hufflepuff.” She beamed. “This is brilliant. I’ve been waiting all summer, you know. I had a whole speech prepared for when I met you, something really profound and moving, but then you were just standing there looking all—” she waved a hand vaguely at his face, “—and my brain went completely empty. Like a flobberworm. A very pretty flobberworm. Not that you’re a flobberworm. You’re more like a—a really elegant, sort of intimidating thestral.”
Regulus felt a muscle twitch in his jaw. She was still talking. She had compared him to a thestral. She was a Hufflepuff. His soulmate was a Hufflepuff airhead who had just called him a pretty flobberworm.
“You’re staring,” (Y/N) observed. “Is that a good stare or a bad stare? Because if it’s a bad stare, I can try saying something else, but the mark only counts the first thing, so I think we’re stuck with it. Oh! Unless you want me to say something else? I could say something else. I could say, ‘Hello, Regulus, I am deeply honoured to be your soulmate and I promise to be a credit to your noble house,’ but that feels a bit formal, doesn’t it? Also I’m not entirely sure what your house is noble for, exactly. No offence.”
Regulus opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
“You,” he said, very precisely, “are going to be the death of me.”
(Y/N)’s face broke into a sun-bright smile. “That’s so romantic!”
It was not. It was not romantic. It was a statement of grim foreboding, and Regulus suspected, even then, that it would prove prophetic.
He walked away.
It was the only sensible response. He walked away, his robes snapping behind him, leaving (Y/N) (L/N) standing in a puddle of spilled ink with a stack of ruined books and a smile that seemed to have taken up permanent residence on her face. He did not look back. He did not acknowledge the curious stares of the students who had witnessed the collision. He simply retreated to the Slytherin common room, sat in his usual chair by the fire, and stared at the dancing flames while his mind replayed the last five minutes on a merciless loop.
A Hufflepuff.
An airhead.
A girl who had, within thirty seconds of meeting him, compared him to a flobberworm and a thestral and then informed him that his death would be romantic.
His soulmate.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, a small, mortified voice whispered that she had also been breathtakingly lovely and that her smile had done something deeply inconvenient to his chest. He crushed that voice with the efficiency of long practice.
He was Regulus Black. He did not get flustered. He did not fall for ridiculous girls who couldn’t string two coherent thoughts together. He had standards. He had dignity. He had a Dark Mark on his arm and a family that would dissect this situation with the cold precision of a potions master dissecting a flobberworm—and he had just compared her to a flobberworm again, Merlin’s sake, she was infecting his vocabulary.
He would ignore her. The soulmate bond, while magically significant, did not obligate him to anything. He could simply… not engage.
This plan lasted approximately fourteen hours.
The next morning, Regulus walked into the Great Hall for breakfast and found (Y/N) (L/N) sitting at the Slytherin table.
She had wedged herself between a very confused seventh-year boy and a glowering Pansy Parkinson, and she was chattering away as if she had been there her whole life. When she spotted Regulus, her face lit up like a lumos charm, and she waved enthusiastically, nearly knocking over a goblet of pumpkin juice.
“Regulus! Good morning! I saved you a seat!” She patted the sliver of bench next to her, which did not exist. “Well, I tried to save you a seat, but then I got here and there wasn’t one, so I made friends with your friends. This is Bartholomew—”
“Bartholomew is not my friend,” Regulus said coldly, sliding into his usual place at the far end of the table, as far from her as possible.
(Y/N) was undeterred. She simply gathered up her plate and her goblet and her very fluffy cat—where had the cat come from?—and migrated down the table to plop herself directly across from him. “Bartholomew said I could sit with you. He was very nice about it. A bit confused, I think, but nice. Do you want some toast? I’ve got extra toast. I always take extra toast in case I meet someone who’s hungry. Or a niffler. You’d be surprised how often nifflers turn up when you’ve got toast.”
Regulus pinched the bridge of his nose. “Why,” he said, very calmly, “are you here?”
“Because you’re my soulmate,” (Y/N) said, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. “And soulmates are supposed to spend time together. Everyone knows that. My mum says when she met my dad, she followed him around for three days straight before he finally gave in and asked her to Hogsmeade. She said perseverance is the key to a successful soul-bond. Also pastries, but I think the pastries came later.”
“I am not going to give in,” Regulus informed her.
“That’s what my dad said.” She bit into a piece of toast, utterly unconcerned. “They were married twenty-three years. He still pretends he’s grumpy about it.”
Regulus opened his mouth to deliver a cutting retort, something about the impossibility of their situation and the vast chasm of intellect between them, but what came out was: “Is that a cat? At the breakfast table?”
The cat, a disreputable ginger creature with one crumpled ear, meowed at him.
“This is Marmalade,” (Y/N) said proudly. “He’s not technically allowed in the Great Hall, but he gets lonely, so I sneak him in under my robes. He’s very flat when he wants to be.”
As if to demonstrate, Marmalade flattened himself against the table, becoming a vaguely cat-shaped puddle of fur.
Regulus stared at the cat. The cat stared back. Something in its yellow gaze seemed to say, You are doomed, my friend.
He was.
Over the following weeks, (Y/N) (L/N) inserted herself into Regulus Black’s life with the gentle, unstoppable persistence of water wearing away stone. She appeared in the library while he was studying, sliding into the chair across from him with a stack of books she had no intention of reading. She waved at him in corridors, regardless of who was watching. She sent him little notes via the Hogwarts owl system—notes that contained such profound observations as “I saw a cloud that looked like your left eyebrow today” and “Do you think mermaids get seasick?”
He did not respond to the notes. He did, however, keep them, tucked into the back of his Potions textbook, for reasons he refused to examine.
She was, without question, the most baffling person he had ever met. She once spent twenty minutes explaining her theory that thestrals were just horses that had mastered the Disillusionment Charm and were really very shy about it. She mistook a suit of armour for a new transfer student and tried to help it find the Charms classroom. She brought a jar of live doxies to Herbology because she’d heard they were good for cross-pollination—they were not, and Professor Sprout had to evacuate Greenhouse Three.
And yet.
And yet, Regulus found himself looking for her in the Great Hall. Noting the empty space where her bright, chattering presence should have been during the one week she was in the hospital wing with a mild case of spattergroit. Feeling a strange, hollow ache in his chest when he walked past the library and didn’t see her bent over a book, hair falling across her face.
He hated it.
He hated that she made him feel anything at all, let alone this creeping, inconvenient warmth that had begun to seep through the carefully constructed walls around his heart.
The first crack in those walls came on a grey November afternoon, during a combined Potions lesson with the Gryffindors.
Regulus was partnered with (Y/N)—not by choice, but because Professor Slughorn had beamed at them and said, “Soulmates! How delightful! I’m sure you’ll brew something marvellous together!” and Regulus had been too well-bred to argue.
The assignment was a complex Dreamless Sleep Potion. Regulus had brewed it successfully before, alone, in under an hour. With (Y/N) as his partner, they were forty-five minutes in and had achieved a cauldron full of something that was currently fizzing ominously and had turned a shade of purple not found in nature.
“I think,” (Y/N) said, peering into the cauldron, “that we might have added the moonstone a bit too early.”
“You added the moonstone while I was measuring the valerian,” Regulus said through gritted teeth. “I told you to wait.”
“You did, but then I thought, ‘Oh, it’s probably fine, potion ingredients are very forgiving,’ and I was wrong, they’re really not forgiving at all, are they? They’re quite grudge-holding, actually.” She prodded the fizzing liquid with the end of her stirring rod. The potion burped, emitting a small cloud of sparkly smoke that smelled strongly of burnt sugar and regret. “Oh dear. That’s not supposed to happen.”
“It is decidedly not supposed to happen,” Regulus agreed.
Before he could stop her, (Y/N) reached for a vial of powdered ashwinder egg—an ingredient so volatile that the textbook specifically warned against adding it to an unstable brew—and tipped the entire contents into the cauldron.
The potion erupted.
Regulus’s reflexes, honed by years of Quidditch and the constant vigilance required to survive a pureblood household, kicked in before his brain caught up. He grabbed (Y/N) by the waist, yanked her away from the cauldron, and spun them both behind the heavy oak worktable just as a fountain of violently purple foam shot into the air. The foam splattered across the table, the floor, and—judging by the startled shriek—the back of a nearby Ravenclaw.
(Y/N) was pressed against his chest, her hands gripping the front of his robes, her face tilted up to his. She was covered in a fine dusting of purple sparkles. There was a smudge of foam on her cheek. She was grinning.
“You saved me,” she breathed.
“I prevented you from being dissolved by a catastrophically misbrewed potion,” Regulus corrected, his voice slightly hoarse. His heart was pounding. He told himself it was adrenaline. “That is not the same as saving you.”
“It felt very heroic. Very soulmate-ish.” Her eyes were bright, warm, utterly unguarded. “You’ve got a bit of—” she reached up and brushed a sparkle from his cheek, her fingers lingering for a moment too long.
Regulus let go of her as if burned. He stepped back, straightened his robes, and fixed her with his coldest stare. “You are a menace,” he informed her. “A walking, talking, potion-related catastrophe.”
“Thank you!” (Y/N) beamed as if he had just paid her the highest compliment. “You say the sweetest things.”
“That was not a compliment.”
“It was for me.” She scooped up Marmalade—who had, inexplicably, appeared from somewhere and was now lapping at a puddle of purple foam—and tucked him into her bag. “I’d better take this to Professor Slughorn and explain. Don’t worry, I’ll say it was my fault. You were very valiant.”
She bounced off, leaving Regulus standing amid the wreckage of their workstation, sparkles settling in his hair, his carefully cultivated composure in tatters.
That night, he wrote the incident in his journal—purely for record-keeping purposes—and did not smile while doing so.
The second crack happened three days later, in the courtyard.
Regulus was walking to his Arithmancy lesson when he heard laughter—sharp, cruel laughter, the kind he recognized from Slytherin common room parties where the wine flowed too freely and the jokes turned mean. He rounded the corner and stopped dead.
(Y/N) was standing near the fountain, her books clutched to her chest, her face pale. Three Slytherin boys—Mulciber, Avery, and a seventh-year whose name Regulus didn’t bother to remember—had her backed against the stone edge. Mulciber was sneering, his wand dangling loosely in his hand.
“—and she actually thought the Giant Squid was a transfer student from Durmstrang,” Mulciber was saying, his voice thick with mockery. “Honestly, it’s embarrassing. The Blacks must be mortified. Imagine being soul-bound to the biggest idiot in Hogwarts.”
Avery snickered. “I heard she tried to knit a scarf for the Whomping Willow.”
“I was just being friendly,” (Y/N) said, her voice smaller than Regulus had ever heard it. “It looked cold.”
“It’s a tree, you moron,” Mulciber said. “Trees don’t get cold. They’re trees.”
Regulus didn’t remember drawing his wand. He didn’t remember crossing the courtyard. One moment he was standing at the archway, the next he was between (Y/N) and the three boys, his wand pressed to Mulciber’s throat, his voice a blade of ice.
“Say one more word to her,” Regulus said, very softly, “and I will hex you so thoroughly that St. Mungo’s will name a ward after you.”
Mulciber’s eyes went wide. “Black—we were just having a laugh—”
“You were being cruel to my soulmate.” The words came out before Regulus could stop them, possessive and fierce and terrifyingly true. “You will not do so again. Do you understand?”
The courtyard had gone very, very quiet. Students were staring. Avery had gone the colour of old parchment. Mulciber swallowed, the motion pressing his throat more firmly against Regulus’s wand tip, and nodded once, jerkily.
Regulus stepped back. “Leave.”
They left, practically tripping over each other in their haste. Regulus sheathed his wand, his hands trembling slightly—with rage, he told himself, only rage—and turned to face (Y/N).
She was staring at him with an expression he couldn’t quite name. Her eyes were wet, but she was smiling, a small, wobbly thing that made his chest ache.
“You called me your soulmate,” she said. “Out loud. In front of people.”
“I was making a point.”
“You hexed Mulciber for me.”
“I did not hex him. I threatened to hex him. There is a significant difference.” He paused. “Are you all right? Did they hurt you?”
She shook her head, a single tear spilling down her cheek. “No. They were just mean. People are mean sometimes. It’s fine.”
“It is not fine.” Regulus’s voice was rougher than he intended. He fumbled in his pocket and produced a handkerchief—embroidered with the Black family crest, because some habits were impossible to break—and pressed it into her hands. “You are not an idiot. You are… unconventional. There is a difference.”
(Y/N) sniffled, dabbing at her eyes with the handkerchief. “You really think so?”
“I would not have said it if I did not.”
She looked at him then, really looked, and something in her gaze softened. “You’re not as cold as you pretend to be, Regulus Black.”
He had no response to that. He stood there, stiff and uncomfortable, while she dried her tears with his handkerchief and Marmalade wound around her ankles, purring loudly. The courtyard was still staring. His reputation as an untouchable, emotionless heir had just taken a very public blow.
He found he didn’t care.
The third crack was not a crack at all. It was a full, catastrophic collapse.
It happened in the Astronomy Tower, in the small, sleepless hours of a December night.
Regulus had been dreaming again—the same dream that plagued him every few nights, of darkness and cold and a mark that burned like ice on his arm, of a voice that whispered terrible things in his ear. He had woken gasping, his sheets tangled around his legs, and had fled to the one place in the castle that always brought him a measure of peace.
The Astronomy Tower was empty—or so he thought, until he stepped onto the open parapet and found (Y/N) already there, wrapped in a patched quilt, Marmalade curled in her lap.
“You couldn’t sleep either?” she asked, without turning around.
Regulus hesitated. Every instinct told him to leave, to retreat behind his walls and deal with his demons alone, as he always had. But his feet carried him forward, and he leaned against the stone railing beside her, looking out at the star-scattered sky.
“Bad dream,” he said, because it was the truth, and he was too tired to lie.
“Me too.” She stroked Marmalade’s ears. “I dreamed I was trying to teach a herd of hippogriffs to tap-dance. It was very stressful. They have no rhythm whatsoever.”
Despite everything—the nightmare, the weight on his chest, the looming terror of the choices he had made and could not unmake—Regulus laughed. A real laugh, rusty and surprised, dragged out of him by the sheer absurdity of the image.
(Y/N) turned to look at him, her expression bright with delight. “You laughed! I made you laugh!”
“You are utterly ridiculous,” Regulus said, but there was no bite to it. There was, in fact, something that sounded perilously close to fondness.
“I know.” She bumped her shoulder against his. “That’s why you like me.”
He should have denied it. He should have pulled away, rebuilt his walls, reminded her—and himself—of all the reasons this could never work. The Dark Mark hidden beneath his sleeve. The family that would never accept her. The war creeping closer with every passing day.
Instead, he said, “I do. Like you. Against all logic and reason.”
The words hung in the cold night air, fragile as frost.
(Y/N) went very still. “You do?”
“I have tried very hard not to,” Regulus said, his voice low and strained. “You are a disaster. You have no sense of self-preservation. You befriend dangerous creatures and startle easily and say the most incomprehensible things I have ever heard. You once tried to send a howler to a suit of armour because you thought it was lonely. You are, without doubt, the most infuriating person I have ever met.”
“This is a very strange declaration of affection,” (Y/N) whispered, but her eyes were shining.
“And yet,” Regulus continued, as if she hadn’t spoken, “I cannot stop thinking about you. I look for you in every room. I keep your ridiculous notes in my textbook. I threatened my own housemates because they made you cry.” He turned to face her fully, his heart pounding so hard he was certain she could hear it. “I do not understand it. I do not understand you. But I have stopped trying to fight it.”
There was a long, suspended moment. Then (Y/N) set Marmalade gently on the stones—the cat gave an indignant meow—and stepped closer, so close that Regulus could feel the warmth radiating from her patchwork quilt.
“You know what I think?” she said, her voice soft.
“I am almost afraid to ask.”
“I think you’ve spent your whole life being told what you’re supposed to be. A perfect son. A proper pureblood. Someone cold and controlled and untouchable.” She reached up and touched his cheek, her fingers feather-light against his skin. “But that’s not who you are. Not really. You’re the boy who saved me from a potion explosion. The boy who threatened Mulciber with a hex because he was mean. The boy who gave me his handkerchief and didn’t even ask for it back.”
“I did want that handkerchief back,” Regulus muttered, but his voice cracked on the last word.
(Y/N) smiled, that sun-bright, impossible smile. “You can have it back. But only if you admit that you want to kiss me right now.”
Regulus’s breath caught. His hands, moving of their own accord, settled on her waist, drawing her closer. The quilt bunched between them. Marmalade, somewhere below, made a sound that might have been encouragement.
“I want to kiss you,” Regulus said, and it felt like surrender and victory all at once. “I have wanted to kiss you since the moment you called me a pretty flobberworm.”
“I called you a very pretty flobberworm,” (Y/N) corrected, her eyes dancing. “It’s an important distinction.”
He kissed her.
It was soft, at first—tentative, almost questioning, as if he couldn’t quite believe this was real. Then her arms wound around his neck, and her lips parted beneath his, and something inside him that had been frozen for years cracked open and flooded with warmth. She tasted like peppermint and starlight and all the ridiculous joy he had never let himself want.
When they finally broke apart, both breathing hard, (Y/N) pressed her forehead to his and whispered, “I knew you’d give in eventually.”
“You are insufferable,” Regulus informed her, but he was smiling, a real smile, one that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made him look years younger.
“And you’re my soulmate.” She kissed the tip of his nose. “The universe picked me for you. The universe thinks you need someone insufferable.”
“The universe,” Regulus said, pulling her closer, “has a truly terrible sense of humour.”
But he was laughing again, quiet and warm, and when Marmalade climbed up his robes and settled on his shoulder like a very flat, ginger parrot, he didn’t even complain.
Three weeks later, they went to Hogsmeade together.
It was the last weekend before the Christmas holidays, and the village was dusted with snow, the rooftops glittering under a pale winter sun. Regulus had never been one for Hogsmeade weekends—too much noise, too many people—but walking through the cobbled streets with (Y/N)’s hand tucked into the crook of his arm, he found he didn’t mind.
She was wearing a scarf that she had knitted herself—it was lumpy and uneven and at least four feet too long, trailing behind her like a banner—and she was talking, as she always did, a bright stream of commentary on everything they passed.
“—and I think Honeydukes should make a flavour called ‘Regret,’ for when you eat too many sweets and feel bad about it afterwards, but also it would taste really good, like toffee and poor decisions—”
“That is the most absurd thing I have ever heard,” Regulus said.
“You love it.”
He did. Merlin help him, he did.
They stopped at the Three Broomsticks for butterbeer, and (Y/N) insisted on ordering two extra mugs because “Marmalade might be thirsty, and also the barmaid looked like she needed a drink.” The barmaid, a tired-looking witch with ink stains on her apron, gave them a third mug for free and told (Y/N) she was “a rare sweetheart.”
Regulus watched his soulmate charm the entire pub without even trying, and something fierce and tender swelled in his chest.
When they walked back to the castle as dusk fell, the sky streaked with pink and gold, (Y/N) tugged him to a stop near the gates and turned to face him, her breath misting in the cold air.
“I have something for you,” she said, and dug into her bag, rummaging past what sounded like at least three different kinds of animal treats and possibly a live creature. She emerged with a small, neatly wrapped package. “It’s a Christmas present. Early. Because I’m impatient.”
Regulus unwrapped it carefully, the Black in him instinctively preserving the paper. Inside was a handkerchief—his handkerchief, the one he had given her in the courtyard, except now it had been embroidered with tiny, slightly crooked stars along the border. In one corner, in silver thread, were two sets of initials: R.A.B. and (Y/N) (L/N).
“I know it’s not much,” (Y/N) said, suddenly uncharacteristically shy. “But I wanted you to have it. So you’d remember. That you’re not just… that.” She gestured vaguely at his left arm, the arm where the Dark Mark lay hidden. “You’re also this. You’re starlight and handkerchiefs and someone who laughs at terrible hippogriff tap-dancing dreams.”
Regulus looked at the handkerchief. Looked at her. She was biting her lip, her eyes wide and anxious, and she was still wearing that ridiculous scarf, and Marmalade had poked his head out of her bag and was regarding him with that same knowing, yellow gaze.
“I am going to marry you,” Regulus said.
(Y/N) blinked. “What?”
“Not today,” he clarified, because even in the grip of overwhelming emotion he was still, at his core, a pragmatist. “There are logistics. My family will be insufferable, and I have… obligations… that will need to be untangled.” The Dark Lord, the Mark, the war—all of it loomed at the edges of his mind, but for the first time, he felt like there might be a way through. A way out. “But I am going to marry you. Eventually. If you’ll have me.”
(Y/N) stared at him for a long, breathless moment.
Then she launched herself into his arms, nearly sending them both tumbling into a snowdrift, and kissed him soundly.
“Yes,” she said against his lips, laughing and crying at the same time. “Yes, you ridiculous, wonderful, thestral-like man. Yes.”
Marmalade meowed, long-suffering and resigned.
And Regulus Black, heir of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, bearer of a Dark Mark he was beginning to think he might one day defy, stood in the snow outside Hogwarts with his soulmate in his arms and thought that perhaps, just perhaps, the universe’s sense of humour wasn’t so terrible after all.
She had been right, that first day. She had had nothing appropriate to say.
And it had been perfect.
