Not Alone After All

Chapter XX

The winter had come and gone, and Laura Potter hadn't played a single quidditch match yet. They had two matches scheduled in November, but Malfoy was able to postpone them until spring so that his 'injury' could have more time to 'heal'.

Laura was sitting outside with Fred and George, watching the water running in the fountain. Hermione's cat was also there with them. He was running around, following birds, until the birds go too close to the water and he ran away, back towards the trio.

"Are you even listening?" George's voice pulled her away from her thoughts.

"What?" Laura asked him. She was most definitely not listening to a thing they were saying.

"What's making you so anxious that you're not even paying attention to the pranks we're trying to pull?" Fred asked her. Laura and George made a face. "You're doing the thing where you fidget with that necklace of yours," Fred pointed out. Laura looked down at her hand. She hadn't even realised she had been holding the necklace. It was a white gold chain with a small ruby in the center of a David's star for a charm. It had been Marnie Angelo's mother's necklace. She had been one of the few Jewish survivors that had escaped the concentration camps, and she had decided to give it to Laura before she passed away.

"I'm just thinking," Laura told the two.

"About?" George asked her, closing a small notebook he had in his hands, the one the two of them shared to write down their ideas and blueprints for their future pranks.

"Quidditch," she lied. In reality, she was thinking about the fact that Sirius Black had been living in the Shrieking Shack for the past couple of months. She had been sending him some food by owl, but she still felt guilty for not visiting him as often, even if he had spent twelve years in Azkaban for having betrayed her parents.

"Hey, you played really well," Fred tried to reassure her. Laura scoffed.

"You still won. You won 180 - 60. We only scored six times."

"And you scored 4 of those," George reminded her. "And we only scored 3. We're lucky we have Harry around, otherwise you'd have beaten us to a pulp." He smirked, obviously proud of his Beater pun. Laura decided she wouldn't laugh at that, not to encourage them, but Fred immediately cracked up, which made her lips curl into a smile before she was laughing along with them. 

"Don't worry, little Potter, I'm sure your house thinks you were great," Fred told her. 

--

That night, Laura had decided she was going to visit Sirius. She guessed he must have been feeling very lonely after all of this time with no visitors. She grabbed her wand and whispered 'Lumos", as she walked out of her dorm room.

She followed the corridors of the castle, freezing when she heard a noise behind her. At that moment, she wished she hadn't landed Harry the Marauder's map so that she could see if there was someone behind her, for the small source of light from her wand was not enough to light the whole corridor. She could hear her heart beating in her ears as she whispered 'nox', to turn off the light. That is until a hand landed on her shoulder.