Ink in Paper - Regulus Black

Chapter Eight

LEAVE COMMENTS. I'm learning all the songs from Spring Awakening, and I think I might be auditioning for Wandla. I'm terrified, but I'm so excited!!

Forcing down her breakfast as best as she could, Luna Lupin focused mostly on not throwing up her guts all over the Great Hall table or to not fall asleep over her plate of breakfast (if one could call the half-eaten toast that she had on her plate, breakfast). While she had promised to Remus that she would eat, she had not promised to go to sleep. She slept, at best, three hours the night before.

"Oh, Luna, you got to eat more than that," Pandora said, watching her friend's plate. "At least the whole toast, please. It won't be enough to keep you fed until luncheon."

Luna nodded, looking down at the toast in her place once more.

"I don't want to throw it back up," she whispered. Pandora nodded in understanding, but said nothing else, clearly still wanting her to finish at least a whole toast. Luna did. "What did you tell everybody?"

"The girls and I agreed to only talk to Flitwick and Madame Pomfrey, but they also talked to you brother," Pandora said. "I didn't tell anyone anything, but they lied, saying you were sick. I think that everybody thinks you were sick the last couple of days."

Luna nodded again, rather thankful that nobody would dare question anything that Marta would say because she was terrifying. Other than that, her constant 'being sick' had helped people to actually believe that she was sick even when she wasn't.

Madame Pomfrey had come to visit her the night before, after Remus had forced her to eat something, and said that she was pretending to believe that she had been sick during the past two days and would give her a note, but only if she went to classes the next morning, otherwise she would have to go to detention. That meant that now Luna was sitting in breakfast with some anger against the wonderfully nice matron brewing under her skin. She knew that Madame Pomfrey had done more than many other nurses would do, but there was an egoistical side of her that had hopped that the woman would just tell her to stay in bed for another day or so.

Flitwick, loyal as the Head of House ought to be, agreed not to bring that up to the headmaster, making the man accept Madame Pomfrey's note. He had not gone up to see Luna, after all he had never walked into any of the female student's dormitories for any reason at all, he wasn't going to start to. Still, he had called Pandora, Marta, Rosalie and Amanda for a talk, asking about Luna at the end of classes.

"Come on," Pandora said as soon as Luna had taken her last bite, "we got Herbology first thing."

Luna sighed, getting up and taking her bag from the ground, throwing it over her shoulder. She watched Pandora do the same. They both started walking to the Great Hall's double doors together.

"We're studying this new plant that often allows fungus to grow in the same earth as it, so we'll see a lot of mushrooms as well," Pandora said, happily. "I do love some mushroom, of course. And I think they greatly appreciate that the plant shares its nutrients with them."

"I'm sure they do," Luna said, looking at her bag. Had she gotten everything she needed? "Will we have to dig?"

"Probably," Pandora said.

Luna sighed again, the idea of having to smell the earth already churning her stomach. She hated planting and growing things, but she needed a good enough grade in Herbology if she wanted to go into Alchemy – it was much intertwined with Potions, therefore if one was good in Potions, one needed to be good in Herbology; though if someone was good in Herbology not always was going to be good in Potions, especially in the practical sense, though the theory might be clearer than to someone that wasn't any good in either.