The Last Gryffindor (Sirius Black)

Chapter XII: To See Things As They Are Not

• — • — •

After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.
-OSCAR WILDE

• — • — •

There's a peculiar feeling people get, almost instinct, when they walk into a room and whispers sink into heavy, weighted silence. It's irritating when it happens once, but Lia was positively hostile after a month of such greetings, sick and tired of being the source of never ending gossip.

So, so tired.

This time, though, Lia wasn't sure it was necessarily a bad thing when she stepped into the Slytherin Common Room, upon Regulus' invitation, to experience that exact same phenomenon again.

Alecto, Amycus, Severus, Barty, and Regulus huddled in front of their fire on the chilly October morning, whispering furiously. Alecto noticed Lia enter first and put a quick end to their conversation.

"Oh, there you are!" she exclaimed, aiming a discrete, albeit sharp, nudge into her brother's ribcage. "I was beginning to wonder if you'd ever arrive."

With hands clasped tightly together and what was probably supposed to be a friendly smile, she flitted her way through their circle, stalking towards Lia in an almost predatory manner.

Fixing her own expression into a mask of earnestness, Lia said, "I hope I didn't come at a bad time. All Regulus said over breakfast was that he wanted to see me before class started. He gave me the password to get inside..."

Leaping forward with evident delight, reminiscent of a puppy about to receive a bone, Regulus jumped in, "As long as you got here, it's okay. We were just getting ready to leave actually."

"Leave?" she asked.

Severus shot Regulus an irritated look. "You didn't even tell her?"

"I was going to tell her when she got here!" Regulus defended.

Severus sighed in apparent exasperation, but let it slide. Luckily, he warmed up to Lia after the incident with James and Sirius, if you could call going from frigid, subarctic temperatures to just a casual snowstorm warming up.

"Idiot," Barty muttered under breathe, looking pointedly at Regulus.

Unfazed, Regulus hopped over the back of a couch into a sitting position.

Looking slightly guilty, he began, "I sort of lied."

Immediately, Lia's hackles rose. She didn't trust a single one of them as far as she could throw them, and knowing that the only one she put one scintilla of faith in had lied was hardly comforting.

He continued, "When I said I wanted to see you before class, I guess I wasn't clear enough. We actually aren't going to class at all today."

"And... why is that?" she asked slowly.

Alecto drummed her long, blood-red fingernails impatiently across a large wooden table, huffing, "Since Regulus won't get to the point, I guess I will." She walked towards the entrance of the Common Room and flung it open. "Yesterday, Severus spotted his filthy blood-traitor brother," she nodded at Regulus, "climbing out of a mirror in the bathroom on the second floor. We're going to go see where it leads."