THE COOPER RESIDENCE was situated in a wizard-populated suburbia called Upper Flagely in England. It was comfortable in size and stature but tense in atmosphere so it always gave Reece the feeling of wishing he could live somewhere else (and specifically without his parents) that was always instantly succeeded by guilt about not being grateful enough for the fact that he even had a house with his own room and plenty of space whilst others didn't, like Dris, for example, who shared a bedroom with his little brother when he wasn't in school.
The suburb consisted of stuck-up neighbours who were constantly trying to one-up each other without being 'too obvious' or, Merlin forbid, tacky. This competition mostly consisted of everyone buying ridiculously expensive plants that they stuck into their front gardens and when Reece walked up the driveway to the house with Yrsa behind him, he noticed that indeed two wiggentrees had been acquired since September.
Because of their properties with protecting an area from dark creatures, wiggentrees were toward the pricier end of the garden shrubs spectrum, something all the neighbours must have known about too.
The inside of their house had the carefully calculated balance between being traditionally English and having items purchased abroad so that anybody that stepped inside would know they weren't foreign – or worse, bohemian hipsters – but that they were still 'cultured'. Reece had always found it rather odd that his parents, particularly his mother, cared so much about what every corner of their home looked like considering they hardly ever hosted guests; they always went as guests to visit people more important and of higher status (and wealth) than them.
"Are you hungry?" he asked as he flicked his wand to light the gaslamps in the entrance hall as soon as he had lugged his trunk to the foot of the stairs.
"Yeah, I've eaten all of a bowl of cereal and two pumpkin pasties today but I'm not hungry because I'm not a human being and I don't require sustenance to live."
He glanced at Yrsa, who was unzipping her boots by the door, with a slightly incredulous expression but said nothing; she always got increasingly sarcastic when she was stressed and as much as she would deny it, being at home always made her stressed. "I'll go make something," he said, then added, "Mum and Dad won't be back for an hour at least."
This news instantly relieved at least some of her tension and Yrsa hung her cloak from a hook with a grin on her lips, said, "I'll help," and then walked with a slight bounce in her step to follow him into the kitchen which was somehow clean enough to gleam even though it was dark. "Hello, Rowena," she said, walking over to the Eurasian eagle-owl sitting on a perch at the end of the room to stroke her feathers.
Reece opened up the pantry to see what food there was before pulling out a red onion, tomato puree, and black beans. "You can boil the pasta," he said before a teasing grin grew on his face and he added, "If you think you can."
Yrsa scoffed. "I can handle boiling pasta," she said, stepping away from the owl.
"You say that as if we didn't both know you nearly set the house on fire this summer."
"That's just because an ABBA song came on the radio and I got distracted."
He only hummed in response as he took out a knife to chop the onion with which he then went to caramelise but was quickly preoccupied. "Yrsa, you have to wait for the water to boil first," he chided, watching as she dumped the fusilli into the cooking pot she had just placed on the heat.
"Why?" She spoke as if she was rebelling against some grand authority by refusing to wait for the water to boil.
"It gets mushy otherwise."
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Human Design | Sirius Black
Fanfiction| Human Design | | OC x Sirius Black | | Maurades Era | | Harry Potter fan fic | In his final year at Hogwarts, Reece Cooper had two things he wanted to focus on: Quidditch and his schoolwork. He didn't have time for anything else, that was until Si...
