Symphony || Remus Lupin

XXXVI

Warning: Mentions of abuse and harm

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Up until right before the Christmas breaks, Myra's sessions with Regulus have been steadily improving. He seemed to grasp the concepts of previous years and she was starting to reteach the spells that Flitwick was teaching him in class. She enjoyed watching him progress in his spellwork and watching him bring her his 'O' graded essays.

However, she did notice the signs. She didn't want to, but she did. He started coming to the extra sessions later and later, always saying that he was held back by a teacher even though before he used to be right on time, sometimes coming even before Myra. He started to seem less and less interested in their time together. When she asked what was wrong, he always brushed her off with an 'I think I should work more on my wandwork'.

What hurt her was that she thought that they were some sort of friends. They were rarely able to meet beyond the spare classroom, with his friends and her friends, but when they did meet, they would always joke around and tease each other. They would talk about their day, Regulus would tell her just a little bit of who he liked and Myra would try to guess (she's close, she can just feel it).

One topic that they refused to talk about was You-Know-Who. Myra knew that, with his friends, he would have some sort of opinion on the entire ordeal and she knew that he expected her to have some sort of negative opinion, being a Gryffindor who defected against 'her family'. She didn't want their sessions to end with any hostile or tense air between them so she never brought it up.

She thought the same until a week before the holidays.

"Myra?" Regulus had asked her and she looked up at him. "I need to tell you something."

"Yes, of course. Is it about the Summoning Charm or have you understood it?" He shook his head.

"That's not what I wanted to tell you." He sat down at one of the desks they had pushed to the side. "You do know that I'm a Slytherin, right?" Myra nodded warily, immediately getting dangerous vibes from the direction the conversation was taking. "And that means that we're supposed to be enemies, right?"

"But we're not." When he didn't do anything to indicate his understanding, she felt the warning signs start to slap her in the face.

"My friends found out about our sessions." Myra felt her heart stop and clenched her fists. "And-"

"And they're asking you to stop, right? Because they don't want you to be around a Gryffindor like me, am I wrong?"

"Yes, but-" She stood up and faced him, her fists at her sides.

"I'm not letting them interfere, Regulus. This is your studies. They can't do anything." He sighed heavily and Myra could tell that he was slightly irritated.

"No. They said that if I keep going, they'll start bullying you again. They stopped because you started hanging around the Marauders, but if we don't stop meeting up, they'll start hurting you again."

"Well, let them." Myra could see his eyes harden at her statement. "I won't stop. You're my friend, Regulus." He shook his head.

"It won't be like before. They know more spells now. Dark ones. They can really hurt you."

"But I don't want you to—" Myra saw his jaw clench and widened her eyes in shock (and slight fear. She didn't know what his friends had taught him).