In the midst of war and chaos, Eve struggles to find and keep her true love - but also herself.
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Eve and Regulus desperately wish to find their way out of their siblings' shadows - but they might just find that the darkness is the best place to be...
"Being second best to her brother was fine - being second best to her brother's best friends, however, hurt a little more."
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THE MORNING AFTER went like this:
"Thanks for healing me, Lyn," Sirius had said awkwardly at the family table in the morning.
Eve froze with her waffle half chewed. Sirius had never once said thank you to her in her entire life, and she'd known him - if only by passing glance - for practically all of it. Not even when she had - stupidly - taken the blame for a prank he had done against Filch. Some naive part of her, that little Eve back in second year, had had this hope that if Sirius was James' best friend he was almost hers, too. She got three weeks of detention for it, and for the rest of the year ignored him like the plague.
"Er," said Eve, and swallowed her waffle piece. "You're welcome, I guess. It was no problem."
That was a giant, fat lie. Despite what people thought, healing was a lot more complicated than just spelling some skin shut or taking away shivers. Healing quite literally transferred some of the patient's pain into the healer's own skin, so; Eve had spent most of the night awake, her face stinging from a nonexistent slap and legs spasming. Still, even though Sirius Black was a giant prat, she wouldn't ever tell him it had hurt her.
Then they stopped talking about it; they didn't ever talk about it again, though Eve had walked into her living room more than once to see Sirius with his head in the fireplace. She supposed he was talking to his cousins, as really, there was no one else for him to call except his friends, and he wouldn't do that without James.
She wondered about his brother a lot. Regulus Black was also in their year, as Sirius' fraternal twin. They looked alike, but also incredibly different; Regulus had the slim, muscular lean of a seeker while Sirius had the muscles-everywhere body of a beater. They both had the same black hair, though Sirius' was much longer and reached his collarbone, and while they both had the same striking grey eyes, Sirius' were alight with mischief, while Regulus just looked tired.
They were two of the most popular boys in the year, even if Regulus was in Slytherin, and more then once Eve's study groups with some of the girls had turned into 'Black Brothers are Adorable: a Discussion'. Whatever the case, her whole point was that she worried for him. They had never really talked, but the healer's instinct inside of her worried if he had the same scars as his brother. She tried to put it out of her mind, and she never once brought it up to anyone.
By the time mid August pulled around, everything had mostly blown over. Sirius' mother finally stopped sending daily howlers (though that might've disappointed the boys, as they were having loads of fun creating new way to light the red envelopes on fire) and Sirius now had his own room - one of their many guest rooms, unfortunately on the same floor as Evelyn's room, which meant she was awake more often than not listening to her stupid brother and her stupid brother's best friend as they created explosions and yelled through the walls at 2AM.
