When Time Travel Goes Wrong | MWPP

Chapter Five

Regulus was sitting inside the Great Hall at the Slytherin table, waiting for his brother and his idiot friends to make an appearance for perhaps the third time since dinner last night. But only the chubby one named Pettigrew was there, eating with Lily Evans and the other fifth year girls. Regulus tried to make it not seem like he was staring, but he was.

Sirius was nowhere to be found, James Potter was nowhere to be found, and the other Gryffindor prefect was nowhere to be found. He tried looking around the hall for any appearance of a girl that supposedly looked quite like him (for Sirius had said so and Sirius wouldn't lie, not about that), but he couldn't see one. He should have asked what house she was sorted into. The body in the hospital wing had been wearing Ravenclaw robes. Maybe she was a Ravenclaw?

The fact that Regulus even had a sister (a half-sister, really) that was younger than him was strange enough, but the fact that she was supposed to be in his year was just awful. He'd already looked over the Ravenclaws he knew to be his year-mates and there wasn't a single girl that looked like she remotely belonged to the Black family among them.

Because Regulus knew what someone had to look like to be a Black. And what someone had to look like to be a Malfoy. Or a Parkinson. Or a Goyle. And the Ravenclaws just looked common.

So no Ravenclaw, then, Regulus thought, scanning his eyes over the Hufflepuff table. I don't want a Puff for a sister, please don't let me have a Puff for a sister...

There wasn't a Black among them.

His eyes flickered nervously to his cousin at the far end of the table, sitting with the seventh years. Narcissa looked like she was absorbed in a rather important conversation with the Head Boy, Theseus Parkinson.

Regulus had been ever so pleased when cousin Cissy had been chosen for Head Girl, because it meant that he could get away with whatever he wanted. But he didn't know that it would just make her ignore him. She had been very kind to him over the years, and she was definitely his favourite cousin, because apart from Bellatrix and Andromeda, he had none.

Do I? Regulus wondered, frowning and scanning the hall again. I had a brother and a sister and I never knew.

He kind of felt like crying, but he pushed the well of tears back down inside him, because Blacks don't cry.That was something he'd been ingrained of from the very beginning, but now mother is gone and father kicked her out and there's a dead boy who's supposed to be my brother and a girl who's alive somewhere and she's supposed to be my sister...and Sirius has been missing for hours...

He took a deep breath. Blacks don't cry. And another. Blacks don't cry.

But how could he tell himself that now, now that he'd seen his father sob over someone he didn't even know? Blacks don't cry.

How could he tell himself that now, now that he'd seen his brother sob into his father's robes? Blacks don't cry.