Crescendo ↠ REGULUS BLACK [1]

iv. sweet and sour

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"she was everything

real in a world

of make-believe."

—atticus

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The brief conversation Liri had with Regulus was causing her to have ruminative thinking. Her mind kept replaying his words and the interaction she had with Colette. Was she really a suck up? She stood in the middle of the aisle, until she was startled out of her critical thoughts by an annoyed student.

Liri shook her head to herself, clutching Cécile tightly and moving through the mass of last minute students boarding the steam engine.

No, she decided as she found an empty compartment and slammed the door shut. Regulus just likes to get under people's skin. It's how he's always been.

She wasn't as accustomed to his behavior as she'd been a couple of summers ago. He was silver-tongued in a way that was much more different than his brother. Regulus spoke bluntly without being under the watchful eye of his parents. He was strongly opinionated and to Liri, extremely annoying. The kind of snob that's nose was in the air. He thought he was better than everyone else and it showed. The kind of honesty he preferred was too much for Liri. But what he said this time wasn't the truth. Liri was not sucking up to her sister. It was familial love, and he wouldn't know, considering him and his brother were at opposite poles with each other.

Her fingers were sticky with sweat, the handles of her trunk slipping from her grasp as she tried to lift it. Thinking of Sirius and Regulus's situation made her suck in a cramped breath. Just as she heard the door slide open, did she force herself to stop comparing her relationship with her sister with the Black brothers.

She knew Marlene was entering the compartment even before the door clicked open. It was her gift that could feel the swarm of energies that piled onto the train. Lives hanging on thin threads that could so easily be snipped. It was an intuition that she thought was normal when she was a little girl, until enough of these lives brought her pain with their termination. When she became fully aware of her surroundings, her heartbeat mingled with the many. Energies, to her, were feeling pulses without making skin to skin contact. It was a constant buzz and whirlwind of color if she was aware enough. When a prediction came, it was an early warning of their cause of death.

Liri still never knew where she'd gotten it from. Both sides of her family were apart of pureblood families that were rich with history. When she'd been staying at the Blacks summers ago, Orion's library was filled with texts about every family and their rumors. But she'd never once found anything about her gift or any detailed information about her ancestors. She thought of herself as a harbinger of death. It was a conclusion that never put her at ease, even though that's what she'd been searching for. The mere idea of it kept her up at night. Now, as a sixteen year old she'd gotten used to it. That was until the next prediction came and hounded her body with agony. Who is next?  The question always made her pick at the skin on her arms and thighs — an unhealthy, compulsive habit she could never get rid of.