Regulus Black wore big, black sunglasses, and his thick woolen coat had the collar popped up, covering his neck and part of his profile, a knit cap had all his hair tucked up in it, and he kept his head down as he walked. His hand clutched his wand up in his sleeve, ready to use it at the slightest hint of an attack.

He looked closely at every person he passed by. They were mostly muggles, and the one person he suspected might be a witch hadn't paid him a lick of attention.

The grocery shop was at the end of a row of them, each selling various sorts of wares. There was a laundry and a photography studio, a shoe shop, and an old clocks store.  Regulus ducked into the grocery and took up a plastic basket by the door to carry his fetchings. He carried it in the hand with his wand so that the wand was in his fist against the handle of the basket - discreet, but easily armed.

The workers at the counter gave him funny looks as he passed, and he reckoned they suspected he would rob them or something. He felt bad making them nervous, so he took off his sunglasses and the cap, letting his hair shake free, a great clump of curly black shagginess. Mother had wanted to cut it to keep him from being noticed too easily - but Regulus has refused because he liked his hair, and more importantly to him was that both Maryrose Jenkins and Oni Lamm had said they liked it, too, at one point or another.

He walked up and down the aisles, grabbing food and greedily shoving it into the basket. Potatoes and cheeses, meats and boxes of porridge. A pound of bacon strips and two dozen eggs. He took bread and tins of beans. Whatever he thought would last for a good while so he could put off doing this again for a time. Blast whoever it was that decided food couldn't be conjured.

He carried his overfilled basket to the counter and impatiently waited while the girl behind it totalled up the order and put them into brown paper bags. She looked at him curiously when he gave her muggle money that he didn't know how to count, stumbling over how many of the funny coins equalled the paper ones. It didn't make sense that the 2p was bigger than the 5p, even if one was bronze and one was silver, and why did it take so blasted many of the pence to equal a pound? The bloody galleons system was so much simpler, if only muggles knew how complicated they'd made things! He faked what he hoped came off as a foreign accent (something that sounded like muddled German and Scottish mingled together is what came out of his mouth, though, so he reckoned she just thought he was mental more than anything).

"Have a good day," the counter girl said, as Regulus put his glasses back on, and struggled to pick up all the bags. He hated he had to pocket his wand in order to hug the bulging sacks to carry them off to a place he could disapparate from. He felt exposed and helpless as he stepped into the street and walked briskly toward the nearer alley, past different shops than before... a small diner, a small clothing store, a hardware store, and --

A record shop.

Regulus paused and took a couple steps back.

In the window of the record shop was a big picture of that muggle man that Sirius liked so much - Freddie Mercury. He was a most recognizable muggle, and Regulus thought he rather looked like somebody that Sirius would admire. He read the text that ran alongside the photograph. It was an advertisement for a new record. Jazz, it said, was available on November 10th - so it had been released for less than a month. He wondered whether Sirius had it yet or not?

Even though he knew he ought not to do it, he was in a rush after all, Regulus ducked into the shop anyway.

Loud rock music was playing and there were other kids his age looking at bins and bins of records. On the wall hung posters and instruments - guitars and drumsticks, a melodica and harmonicas and big brass cymbals. Regulus felt like he'd stepped into a whole other world.

"I'll watch your bags for you, man, if you need a hand!" a man behind a counter in the back called out, seeing Regulus struggling with the paper sacks. Grateful, Regulus went and put the sacks down. "Anything you're looking for, specific?" The man from the counter asked, appearing at Regulus's shoulder when he didn't seem to know where to start looking 'round in the shop.

Regulus pointed at the window. "That record," he said, "The one with Freddie Mercury on it. Do you have it?"

"Ah yeah we got it right over here..." the muggle man showed Regulus to a big labelled Q and there was a whole load of copies of the record. The man plucked one up and held it out. "Fans say its another good one by them. I think they're a little overrated me-self, I reckon Freddie Mercury could sing the directory and people would pay to hear it."

Regulus wasn't sure what that meant exactly, but he nodded and took the record from the man, looking over the record cover. It was black with white circles and a bright pink JAZZ written in sharp letters coming out of the middle.

"You need anything else?"

Regulus shook his head. "Just this. Its perfect."

As the man rang in the order, he looked Regulus over, as though trying to figure him out. "You a  Bobcat, kid?"

"A what?"

"A Dylan fan?"

Regulus must've looked as stupid as he felt being asked because the man just walked over to the bins and came back.

"Here. Educate yourself."

Regulus looked at the man on the record and could see why the clerk was asking. Regulus had on the same glasses as the man on the cover, and he had a very similar hair cut. The clerk probably thought he'd done it on purpose. "Oh. No, thank you. I don't have a record player myself... This is for my brother. He's in love with Freddie Mercury."

The clerk made a funny face, put the Dylan record aside, and rang Regulus out without anymore questions.

Regulus left the shop with the record balanced on top of the sacks, and hurried the rest of the way down the street to the corner where he ducked into an alley and disapparated.

He reappeared in the woods, miles and miles and miles away. He couldn't see the safe house, of course, bring outside the charms, but he knew it was right up over the ridge from where he stood. He put the sacks of groceries down on a rock and sat down on the ground beside them, taking the record off the top and studying it for a moment.

Oh Mother would never approve, Regulus thought, smirking to himself when he saw the back cover - a picture of a naked girl on a bicycle. He laughed at the thought of his very, very, extremely gay brother's reaction to that photo and thought he might hand it to him that way up when he got around to giving Sirius the record, just to see what he would do.

Regulus really, really hoped Sirius didn't have the record yet. He wanted to be the one to give him something important like this. He wondered when he might be able to see his brother. The longer he waited to go and see him, the more likely it was Sirius would have gotten the record... So he needed to go sooner than later. He needed to see James and Lily, too, before their wedding to let them know he wouldn't be able to come... he worried about going to the flat in east London, worried there might be a trace on him, much less to the wedding, where loads and loads of wizards would be invited for the festivities. Not only would it compromise his own safety, but, worse, it would compromise everyone else's, too.

Sighing, he stared off over the distance before him. It was a nice view here... high up on a cliffside, overlooking the sea, the forrest to his back. It smelled of salt and trees.

Walburga had chosen a nice place to settle for a couple days. He worried where they might go to next. She said that they would move safe house every 2-3 days to avoid detection and tracking down. They weren't allowed to use the name of the Dark Lord, deferring to the common practice of calling him You Know Who, if they bothered to speak of him. But Walburga seemed eager to forget that he existed. Instead, she had been making a very concerted effort to seem homey and loving in a way that made Regulus uncomfortable. Mother had never been like that before. At least once a day she mentioned Sirius, as though she thought he would just show up at the door like he'd been out just the afternoon, and not run away for years on end.

Orion had made the safe house, Walburga told him. They'd meant it as something to offer You Know Who, she said, should ever there come a time when he had to go into hiding. But they'd never told anyone of it... Fate had kept them from giving it away, she supposed. It was a full size house that packed up like it was a tent and carried with it all the things they should want or need - apart from food, of course. The safe house could only be accessed by first knowing where it was quite precisely, and secondly it was protected by anti-detection spells, and spells that repelled the nose and mind and by shields and charms of depth and intensity. Walburga said that Orion had put so much of himself into creating the safe place that he may as well have been there, physically protecting them.

That made Walburga feel a good deal safer than it did Regulus. When she thought of comfort, she thought of her husband... Regulus had a very different idea of comfort. It features blankets and muggle telly programs and a black fluffy dog.

Walburga told all this to Regulus like it was a long lost family legend, like his father had been gone for decades; or maybe Regulus just felt as though he gad because of the fading... He found that he had a hard time of it remembering his father clearly as more than narrative, like the way he could remember characters from books - as though his father had been someone that existed largely in his mind, rather than flesh and bone, with imagery and sound.

Sometimes, memories and time play funny tricks like that.

Regulus hated that the man he had personally known was gone, replaced by the version of his father known by the world, by other death eaters, by Sirius. Regulus had had a different father than Sirius, not in blood of course, but in spirit... and as time trotted on and Orion faded more and more from Regulus, even the memory of that man faded more and more away.

Maybe the man Regulus thought Orion was never really had existed. Maybe that's why he was in narrative instead of picture. Maybe it was all just stories Regulus had told himself about Father. He couldn't be sure anymore between the myth and the truth... and it was hard now for Regulus to remember Orion as anything other than the inferius form he'd seen in the cave...

Regulus pushed the thought of caves out of his head. He'd had too many nightmares about caves already without pulling in the thought of Orion.

He checked his watch and realized he'd been gone much longer than he'd told Mother he would be. He got up and looked at the record again before stuffing it into his enchanted coat pocket so that Mother wouldn't see it. He didn't want her to know he'd bought it. He wasn't sure how he would get it to Sirius, but he'd have to figure it out, and Mother didn't need to know that seeing Sirius was a possibility.

Regulus took up the sacks of groceries and walked up the hill, vanishing beyond the safety line as he muttered incantations.