Sirius Black's Twin

Truth

Lyra would send owls to her kids every day, but she got no owls in return. She wondered if they were even reading her letters, or if they were chucking them in a bin for the house elves to clean up.

She scowled into her small bowl of pudding. It was her fifth one, and she poked at her slightly bloated stomach. She only ever ate chocolate pudding when something was really troubling her, and all this eating was getting poor Nick nervous.

"You want lasagna?" Nick asked, poking his head into the kitchen.

"No thanks," Lyra said airily. "I'm fine with just my pudding."

"Are you sure?" Nick said.

Lyra just stuck another spoon of pudding into her mouth and quirked her eyebrow at her husband, as though to say, 'duh.'

"Alright," Nick shrugged, and sat across from Lyra, eying the pudding cups distastefully. They were all empty and licked clean.

"Something troubling you?" Nick asked.

"No," Lyra said, though a frown was appearing on her forehead.

Nick glared at her. "We've been married a long, long time, Lyra. If I didn't know your worried habits by now I think we'd have a problem."

"I'm tired of problems," Lyra said grumpily. "Why can't you just sit there and pretend everything is fine?"

"Oh, like you're doing?" Nick snapped, feeling a bit of anger rise. "You've been stuffing your face with pudding ever since the kids left. It's not healthy, Lyra."

"What, you wouldn't like me if I was fat?" Lyra snipped.

"No," Nick said, making Lyra's eyes widen with indignant anger. "Because I know you wouldn't like you if you were fat. And I don't think I could love someone who didn't love themselves. So stop eating those damn pudding cups already and actually talk to me for once, yeah?"

There was a silence as both grown ups glared at one another. They hadn't fought since Nick came back, so the temperature in the house was dropping to below zero degrees.

"You haven't talked to me about anything important since I woke up, Lyra," Nick snapped. "And I'm tired of being treated like a stranger in my whole house. You think I want to go on all those Order missions? No! But I feel like I have to, I don't know, give you some family time with our children. They don't even look at me like I'm their father, for goodness sake-"

"I wonder why that is," Lyra said cooly. "They've only just met you."

Nick looked like he'd been struck in the face, but Lyra didn't feel an ounce of guilt. She felt triumphant and satisfied, finally glad that she wasn't the only one who could get hurt. She smiled nastily at him.

"You haven't been there for any part of their life, Nick," she continued. "When they look at you they think of their mother's boyfriend - not their father. Their father was nothing but a dream to them - and it still is."

Nick stared at Lyra, who was now on her feet, her beautiful face twisted in silent victory.

"Satisfied yet?" Lyra hissed. "Finally got what you were looking for? Why I don't talk to you anymore or why your children didn't ask why their father wasn't there to say goodbye to them on the platform three weeks ago? Is this what you wanted to hear from me, Nick?"

Nick looked up at his wife silently, his face cold. "Are you satisfied yet, Lyra? Glad that you're not the only one hurt now?"  Nick shook his head in disgust. "You're not the same woman I remember, Lyra. What happened to you? You used to be fair and full of happiness; now you're filled with nothing but resentment and anger."

Lyra sneered. "That was before everything got ripped away from me."

With one last shake of the head, both Nick and Lyra left through seperate doors. Nick feeling betrayed, and Lyra feeling nothing but grim pleasure.

"Let him hurt," she said to herself. "Let him hurt just as much as he hurt me all those years."

She closed her eyes and she saw the memory clearly. Nick staring blankly up at the Saint Mongos' ceiling, his fragile hands pressed in her's. Not responding as she told him that their son just got his Hogwarts letter, or that their daughter had lost her last baby tooth.

Lyra curled into herself, wrapping her arms around her thin legs. And for the first time in three long weeks, she cried.