Soul Love ~ ( Remus Lupin )

Chapter four

Marigold's dinners had slowly started to be interrupted. It had started a couple weeks ago, when Crouch had decided to sit next to Regulus, and by default, her. Then Nott joined a couple days of the week, then, finally, Rosier came to sit with them.

She almost felt glad for Regulus, he obviously was enjoying becoming friends with the Slytherins, but she felt she was losing him. Sometimes, she would skip lunch to walk around the grounds, just so she didn't have to see it happening.

All three of the boys were sat on one side of the bench, Marigold and Allegra on the other – something she found to be quite intimidating. Unfortunately, the group had started talking about the dark lord. Speaking against him was far too bold for Marigold, so staying silent was all she felt she could do.

'He came over to ours over summer,' Nott was saying, his voice hushed. Everyone hunched over to listen in a suspicious looking way, 'obviously, I wasn't even allowed on the bottom floor, but I heard voices.'

Marigold thought they all seemed far too interested in the subject, running her tongue around her mouth.

'What about you, Black,' Rosier leaned back haughtily, 'heard your parents were favourites of his.'

Regulus shrugged.

'If he did, I didn't hear or witness it.'

'On second thoughts,' the other boy continued, 'perhaps not with a brother like yours.'

She watched as her friend's jaw tensed, her own doing the same.

'He's barely my brother.' He muttered out.

Marigold felt something tug on her heart. The subject of Sirius was dropped quickly.

'Well,' Crouch said, turning his head to Mari, 'Abernathy, how about you, you heard anything of him.'

Marigold quickly wondered if they were ever going to address him properly, or whether the pronoun would suffice for the entirety of the conversation.

'No, I don't see why the dark lord would bother visiting us.' She answered shortly.

'I dunno,' Allegra cut in, 'they've all been having more and more meetings recently.'

'They' being almost anyone who was over the age of seventeen, and in the sacred twenty-eight.

Were they? Certainly not any that Marigold knew of, but she spent almost all her time at home in her room, so would she even know. She often wondered how often her parents left for meetings but had never bothered thinking about whether Voldemort had actually been in her house. She blocked the thought from her mind in hopes of not throwing up everything she had eaten.

'That'll be us soon.' Rosier promised, his gaze going past all four others. His voice was heavy.

When he looked at her, Marigold felt her stomach flip at the darkness that shone in his eyes. She knew how cruel he could be, but whatever he was wearing on his face seemed more merciless than she had believed he could be.

His words left an eerie sort of stillness in the air, eventually broken by weak hums and nods of agreement.

*

Every conversation that Marigold had had recently with Rosier seemed to refuse to leave her mind. Hogwarts had never been perfect, but it had been an escape, however the way he looked at her, and the words he spoke all seemed to be reminders of home.

Sat in her history of magic class, she flicked through each interaction they had shared in the four weeks she had been back. They seemed to all be centred around the same things: death-eaters, Voldemort, mud bloods or their parents. Luckily, Professor Binns seemed to enjoy listening to his own mundane voice and the scratching of chalk on a black board more than he did making sure his students were listening. Almost half the class were asleep, and everyone else seemed just as zoned-out as Marigold.