Parallel Universes • s.black

XXIII

-Sirius Black-

Stella Hart has always been a mystery.

From the day the Sorting Hat took one whole minute to decide where she belonged, to the day we realised she had known about Remus' Werewolf curse all along, to the day Peter and I caught her kissing a sexy Ravenclaw girl at a party and she told us that 'lips are just lips until they're not anymore, to the day she sent an anonymous letter to my mum telling her to 'piss off' after she found a collection of bruises on my back after the Christmas break in third year, to where we are now.

She's a ghost.

For the first couple days of our sixth year at Hogwarts Stella Hart is no longer a mystery. She's a god damn paradox box keeping all of her secrets, thoughts, emotions locked up inside with no way in and no way out.

After that fleeting moment of contact in the hallway- well, I wouldn't call it contact since we didn't touch, not once- we haven't spoken since. Remus managed to corner her in the bathroom and seemed to get a fair bit more out of her than I did, but he hasn't spoken to her since then either. None of the others have spoken to her either, not even Lily.

She's like a stranger, she's liker her mother. Respectable, formal, distant and the emobodiment of Slytherin with her gorgeous hair tucked away into a tight bun.  And where there's Stella, there's Bellatrix and Narcissa which makes Lily want to actually hurle and I don't blame her. But through it all, she's still Stella, our Stella and we can't give up on her, now more than ever.

Voldemort is closing in.

I don't know how I know, but I know. The others feel it too. It's like this darkness, lying in wait around the heart, threatening to consume. That's the only way I know how to describe it. I wonder if Stella feels it too? She must, it can't just be her mother that's making her this way, because her mother has always been this way, always been cruel, but she's never turned away from us before, not like this. She must feel it too.

And that's why I have to save her. We. Why we have to save her.

So now we're at the bottem of the steps leading to the astronomy tower at about half eleven at night. We're saving Stella. Because she didn't go back to her room with Bellatrix and Narcissa tonight, no, she went to the astronomy tower.

Now, here's the thing about Stella Hart and the astronomy tower. It's her place. The place she goes when the world is falling apart and when it isn't. The place she goes to think about things and the place she goes to stare at the sky and not think at all. That's why when Lily came rushing into the Common Room, just in time for curfew, saying that Stella didn't go to her room tonight, we realised there was still hope left for our shooting star of a girl.

So we snuck through the castle, all five of us which was an achievement in itself, and we made it all the way to the pull ladder that would lead us to Stella before we hesitated.