Work Text:
The only ones who've ever called him by his real name were his mother and the elder who saved him from death. The list of false names he's used over the years isn't as long as the book of people he's lost, but it's long enough that one would have difficulty tracing them back to Regulus.
He chose the name Dante at the opera, where lustful nobles who knew they could never have the beautiful Dorothea were willing to settle for him. All the sickening caresses and forced kisses, the desks he bent over, the beds he laid bcl on, the songs he sang helped him build the connections he'd need.
A good son did anything for his mother, and the more money he made the better medicine she could get. When she asked, he lied and told her he did odd jobs and fought bandits, no need to worry her more than she already was.
Sebastian the gardener's assistant supposedly died, Count Varley having him beaten to a pulp for getting too close to his only child. Okay, for trying to kill her, and if he'd succeeded he wouldn't have been caught in the first place. Sebastian was supposed to be a liar, a fake, but Regulus developed affection towards the girl and chickened out.
Count Rowe named him Yuri in exchange for a home, a noble name he could claim as his own, and a promise that his mother would be cared for. It was worse than the nobles, because the Count pretended his affections were pure before his true intentions shone though, but it got him into the Officers Academy, so Yuri refused to complain.
And in between there were others, with personas to match. Odd jobs, bandit hunts, heists, assassinations, selling his body. Even when the name Yuri more or less stuck and the Abyss became home for himself and his mother, when he met a mysterious professor and reunited with a childhood friend, the girl he was supposed to kill, resumed his education thanks to said mysterious professor, he would don new names and identities to keep moving ahead and provide for his mother.
Regulus still existed, as a young boy living in the slums with his mother. But Regulus could have never gotten as far as he did without a history of carefully constructed identities and secrets.