Spare. REGULUS BLACK

chapter nine

chapter nine, which witchy witch?

" and it's my whole heart, weighed and measured inside. "
which witch - florence + the machine

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The week passed by in a blur of minor squabbles with Barty Crouch in Potions, non-stop girlish gushing from both Gerry and Alys about the diamond-encrusted flowers Regulus had given Veronika, and somewhat silent lunches with either her friends or Black and his.

By the time Saturday came around, Veronika felt itchy. Every inch of her bony little body felt like it was covered in something, like an overbearing wool blanket, poison oak, or cat hair. The girl just kept scratching at these mysterious little itches on her neck, chest, and hands. It was making it difficult to get ready for the long day ahead of her.

"Will you stop scratching?" Alys snapped as Veronika began to go at chest again, her unfiled nails ripping at her tan skin. "You're literally going to rip a hole in your skin and that's going to be disgusting."

Veronika shot a very unpleasant glare to her friend, but she did lower her hand to her lap despite the burning desire to dig her nails into her skin as far as she possibly could.

"I can't help it," she told Alys.

She was sat at her vanity, staring staring at her reflection in her bulb-lined mirror. Her skin where she had itched was red and blotchy, clearly irritated by Veronika's persistent assault on the rash-like texture of her skin. It looked almost like she had developed hives, but she wasn't allergic to anything. She was in a nice little blue and white checkered dress with a collar and a beck neck. She wore a white shirt underneath to keep the outfit more on the modest side than not, and had spent nearly an hour painstakingly blowing out her hair. Both Gerry and Alys had reminded her ( multiple times ) that she could just magically blowout her hair, but it never looked the same. Her hair would fall flat, or the magic wouldn't work exactly how Veronika wanted it too, so she went about it the old fashioned way — with different sized rollers and a muggle blow dryer her father didn't know she had. Of course, she had painted her face with her creams and powders, and she looked quite good if she did say so herself.

"Leave her alone," Gerry ordered from where she lay on her bed. She had spent the morning painting her nails, and was now laying on her stomach, her feet stuck up behind her, toes squished into a piece of foam that kept them separated from one another to encourage the awful-smelling polish to dry.

"It's obnoxious," Alys groaned. She was sprawled out on her own bed, eyeing a Muggle magazine sporting a set of rather handsome looking men on the cover.

"She's anxious, for heaven's sake!" Gerry looked to Veronika sympathetically, and all the brunette girl wanted to do was looked away and not be pitied by one of her very best friends. "You would be too if you were going to meet your future mother-in-law."

"I don't have a future mother-in-law because my parents didn't find it necessary to marry me off before I was of legal age."

Veronika glanced from her reflection to the Digglry girl quite sharply, her dark eyes narrowing in slits. What did she know about any of it? Nothing. Alys would never understand. Alys got to live a boring, unaffected life. She got to wake up every morning and be friends with whomever she chose to and use any sort of hair product and wear Muggle-made clothes. And yet here she was, running her mouth about things she didn't even begin to understand. It was infuriating.

"Alys." Gerry said sharply, berating her like a mother, but Alys was on a roll, and very set in her ways.

Alys tossed her magazine aside and sat up a little straighter, gesturing to Veronika like she wasn't a person, but instead an inanimate object without thoughts or feelings of her own. "I'm just saying. It's crazy! She's sixteen! She shouldn't be planning a wedding, she should be reading novels and braiding flowers into her hair! It's ridiculous — her parents literally only had her to carry on their name -."