Human Design | Sirius Black

x. New Years, Same Disappointments

ON NEW YEAR'S Eve, Reece made his decision to return to school early. Maybe it had been Frank's 'man you're really missing out' that had caused the nagging to appear in his head, constantly telling him that he was missing out, that everything good was happening somewhere else, and that everybody else was having more rewarding experiences that he was absent from. And thus, shortly after noon, he had his trunk packed and was pulling it out of his room. He stopped by the door to the library. Part of him had expected for it to be locked but once he turned to handle it, it fell open without a sound and he saw Yrsa sitting at the desk, quickly writing. There was a stain of ink on one of her cheeks. She didn't seem to notice him so he said, "Hey," to announce his presence and Yrsa looked up.

Her eyes quickly fell from her face to the trunk behind him. "You going somewhere?" she asked.

"Yeah, I'm heading back to school."

Turning her head back to the parchment, she tried to hide her disappointment, or maybe it wasn't quite disappointment but something quite significantly worse. "Oh." Even though the word was barely a word at all but simply a phoneme, her voice cracked through it and Reece got the feeling she didn't dare to speak more.

"I reckoned since it's my last year and last opportunity, I want to experience Hogwarts during the holidays; I don't want to graduate and regret never staying. Since I told Mum and Dad it's because I need the school library to study, they're okay with it," he said. "Anyway, you should come too. I'm taking the Knight Bus so we can go together."

"I can't," she said, pausing for a moment to write another sentence of her notes before lowering her quill and looking to him again, her eyes hollow and expression blank. "Reece, you know I can't. If I leave, that'll be the last straw; they won't pay for my Apparition classes or they disown me completely, and I'm not of age yet so technically I'm still supposed to listen to them. And even if none of that was a problem, Mum has my wand and I struggle enough at magic with one, I'll hardly be a master of it wandless."

Reece felt his eyes open a fraction more as his feet suddenly filled with an uncomfortable prickling as if his socks weren't made of cotton or any other wearable material but had been sown from thistles, pins and needles working their way all the way up to his ankles. "Mum still has it?" he asked and Yrsa gave a hum of agreement, having already returned to her studying (which was highly uncharacteristic of her because generally, she latched onto any excuse to pause for at least ten seconds like a lifeline). "Since that day in the kitchen?" She only nodded this time. "But usually she gives it back at the end of the night." Reece wasn't sure why he had felt the need to state it out loud as if this fact of history would somehow change the present just by being professed out of his head.

If he had expected her to be surprised – or really, emotional in any sense at all – he was faced with a disappointment because Yrsa only shrugged and said, "Not this time. She said she's not giving it back until we're at King's Cross – if they even let me go back to school at all; I heard them talking about finding a private tutor and homeschooling me the other day. If I hadn't skived off all those French lessons we had as kids, they'd already have transferred me to Beauxbatons but they know the language barrier wouldn't exactly help my grades, would it." He wondered if she was just so brave that none of it intimidated her at all, that she genuinely couldn't care less, or if she was somehow ridiculously capable of suppressing her true feelings toward it because he saw no hint of fear, not even a trace in her body.

But he was afraid. The coils in his stomach had started to twist again causing him to tighten his abdominal muscles and Reece tilted his head right and then to the left to attempt to ease the tightness in his neck. "You know, maybe I should just stay –"