Glass Houses

Chapter two

The lunch room was stifling.

Sirius sat next to Mulciber, and across from Regulus and Barty as though he was being interviewed. His foot tapped nervously, and he checked his wristwatch. Twenty minutes until the tests. Twenty minutes until some simulation told him where he was meant to spend the rest of his life. Glancing around the room, almost all of the other tables were chatting, nervous energy making them rowdier than usual, even the abnegation students talked softly to one another, as opposed to their usual silence Sirius always noted.

Startled by a loud crash, he turned, seeing a girl in a baggy grey dress on the floor beneath a seething Avery, her eyes wide and afraid as Avery kicked her fallen lunch tray to the side.

"Watch where you're going Stiff," Avery snapped, walking to their table, seemingly unaware of the eyes on him.

The silence broke soon after, and Sirius looked behind him to see two Abnegation boys helping the girl off the floor. She was crying.

Sirius sighed as Avery sat next to Rodolphus, flicking his hair out of his eyes and shoving an apple slice in his mouth, chewing loudly.

He met his gaze and swallowed, "Something the matter?"

Sirius clenched his fist, willing himself not to shout or say something stupid. "You made that girl pretty upset Avery."

The boy in question smiled, showing crooked white teeth, "I know, deliciously easy to get them riled up isn't it? What animals."

Sirius closed his eyes for a second, a wave of shame at even being seen with this boy making his stomach churn. Avery popped another apple slice in his mouth like the Abnegation girl wasn't still crying at the table behind them

"What do you reckon the test will tell you Barty?" Sirius asked easily, not wishing the conversation to go down the 'poking fun at Abnegation' route any more than it already had.

Barty puffed his chest out a tad, "Definitely Erudite," he said, "There's no other logical faction that I'm suited for."

Sirius pressed his lips together and nodded distractedly. In truth, he thought Barty was right in his judgement. He couldn't see the boy in a dauntless training center, nor in a black and white suit, and definitely not in the fields picking vegetables.

Sirius remembered the first time he had openly admired another faction around his mother. They were going into the Erudite labs together so his mother could show him his 'future workplace'. Sirius remembered seeing a group of Amity wandering about the city, one of them with a guitar hanging to his back by the strap. He looked at them and saw absolute happiness and peace. Sirius, being around ten at the time, had tugged on his mother's sleeve.

"I like his guitar, mother," he had said, "Do you think I could learn the guitar?"

Sirius remembers the sleeve fabric being ripped away from his grasp, a hand encircling his wrist hard enough to bruise.

"And take time away from your studies?" had come the reply. "Are you hoping to be a farmer Sirius? Do you wish to go through your life with no education, no purpose other than frivolities such as music?"

Yes, Sirius had thought.

"No mother," he had said instead, trying to block out the sound of the Amity boy's laughter.

"And you Sirius?" Regulus asked, pulling him out of his reverie. "What faction do you think the test will say you belong in?"

Although Regulus kept his eyes firmly on his lunch as he asked the question casually, Sirius could see the tension in his brother's shoulders, the tight grip on his fork that told him the question held much more weight than Regulus wanted to let on.