Mortal Once More... ☽ Regulus Black ☾

☽ THREE ☾

Thankfully after my run in with McGonagall she had let me go with just a few house points taken from me. I don't think I could handle spending my first week back clearing out classrooms with Filch or going into the forest with Hagrid.

I had better things to do... like shopping for a new dress.

Alecto, Leila and I had walked the whole distance of Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley, only finding an outfit for Leila. She was the brighter friend, that was for certain. I'm convinced her parents had bribed the sorting hat into placing her in Skytherin because she was undeniably a Hufflepuff at heart.

So when she had set her eyes on a cute little lilac sun dress, we knew she had found her dress for Friday.

That just left Alecto and I. Alecto only ever worse black, if it wasn't a requirement to wear her house tie and badge, she probably wouldn't be seen in any other colour.

I only dabbled with darker colours, with a resting bitch face on top of the famous Malfoy platinum hair, I didn't suit lighter colours. I'd almost always be found wearing some type of forest green and black combination, which didn't stray far from my uniform.

We had one last option, Knockturn Alley. That's exactly where a couple Slytherin's would find a dress to die for. It was either that or venturing into the muggle towns and I didn't fancy covering for Alecto when she would eventually crucio a muggle for walking too slow in front of her.

We turned down the dark alleyway that led into the lane of moody shops that were so obviously fronts for an array of wizards that divulged into the dark arts and wanted to make a pretty penny from it. Knockturn alley was the one place you could find anything you ever needed, for a price much grander than galleons.

We arrived in front of Madame Laveau's, a popular dress shop which carried modest and less-than modest clothing for all types of dark witches. Which included a lot of the Slytherin girls.

From generation to generation, mothers would bring their daughters here, fitted for extravagant balls and parties. It was the staple dress shop for pureblood witches, you would only ever find the best here.

Madame Laveau was a very old witch, it was rumoured that she had done many terrible things to stay around as long as she had. Concocting various potions which included the bones of infants was apparently one of them, but I highly doubted that to be true.

For a woman working in knockturn alley she was always a lovely woman, handed sweets out to us as kids when we would come to get our gowns fitted. Always thrown in a decent discount for any member of the sacred twenty-eight and would always have our outfits made within hours of paying.

I pushed open the creaky old black door as the bell above it chimed, alerting Laveau that she had customers.

"Just a second, dear!" We heard her shout from the back room.

I was always gobsmacked whenever we entered the store. It looked very old and worn out from the outside, as if the place would collapse at any second. But the inside was very different.

The walls had a deep red damask wallpaper that was spotless, not a spec of dirt as if it had just been pasted onto the wall even though it had been that way for years. The rows of gowns were hung up around the store, colour coded so you could find exactly what you liked and created an open floor plan.

There were several black ornate chaise lounges and a centre circular stage of the same colour, three large mirrors stood just in front to show all angles of the gown the customer was trying on. A large desk stood to the side, which is where Laveau barely ever sat, she was always on her feet and preferred to keep herself busy. Hiring no staff, she did everything herself because she could never trust anyone to carry out her work.