Human Design | Sirius Black

i. The Bet

PRIVACY WAS NOT a word that Reece Cooper knew.

He had absolutely no respect for boundaries or secrecy – it wasn't that he was a gossip or anything, he didn't care about people he didn't even know, but people he did know. Well, that was a different story. 

He was just a curious person, that's all he reasoned. 

He couldn't help but stick his nose everywhere it didn't belong, a trait that suited well with him being in Ravenclaw, he constantly had a thirst for knowledge and well if he happened to find out things that didn't involve him. It wasn't really his fault.

For example, at that very moment, he was a letter that hadn't at all been addressed to him. He sat on a chair beside his sister's bed, snow flying about behind the windows of the hospital wing (like the gods were begging him not to have a second Quidditch practice on the same day), reading a letter she had left on her nightstand -- which was as he noted quickly right out in the open -- and she was currently too busy having a conversation with her best friend to even notice he was reading it – really, she made it too easy for him to snoop around, it was her own fault.

"I missed love potions?" Yrsa asked irritably, crossing her arms over her chest. "How is that fair? Of course, I miss the one potions class that would actually be fun. Now I'll never know what the love of my life smells like so how am I supposed to find him?"

"What, you can't ask the crystal ball to show you what he looks like?" was Ashley's cheeky response.

"Piss off."

Reece recoiled in surprise as he read the signature at the end of the letter and his eyebrows knotted before he looked up, interrupting the girls' conversation. "Since when have you been pen pals with Noah Ackles?"

"I owled him to ask if he'd be at the Ministry Christmas party this year –"

"No, actually, she owled him to ask if he was single and used that as an excuse," Ashley corrected and Yrsa rolled her eyes though then shrugged unabashedly.

"Well, he is single but he's not coming," she said with an air of conclusion. Then shook her head. "Because apparently he's still going to be in Albania – who the fuck goes to Albania? Either way, he's not an option either anymore then."

"I thought you fancied Colin Meadowes?"

She started at him in a way that he could have expected him to just make an argument that the sun was actually just a really large lamp that the government levitated into the sky every day and then took back down again – not only incorrect but stupid too. "That was last month, Reece." 

 Reece sighed. It was really hard to keep up with his sister sometimes, especially when every other week Yrsa had a new boy who had taken up her fancy and he was expected to keep track of it all when he could hardly remember his own name sometimes.

"As much as I would much prefer to stay here, I was supposed to meet Marls and Em in the library to study," Ashley said as she stood up and threw her bag over her shoulder. "Love you, babe, I'll see you in the Great Hall for breakfast tomorrow." She grinned and then left.

"You're getting discharged?" Reece asked once she was gone.

Yrsa nodded, grinning in a very similar nature to her friend. "Yep," she said, bouncing a little on her bed with excitement. "Pomfrey reckons I'll be good enough – though I thought I was good enough today."

"Great, that's brilliant. Try not to get bit again."

"Thanks, amazing advice 'cause I was really planning on heading to the greenhouse, finding that venomous kenaf vine and asking please sir, may you bite me again because I really get off on having a forty-two-degree fever."