It’s louder than you remember.

Not just the hum of voices or the rattle of silverware, but the sound of the world moving on—cheerfully, effortlessly—like it never noticed the hole torn into your chest. The Great Hall is golden with candlelight and filled with warmth, laughter, steam rising from platters of roast and bread and buttered roots. A place for comfort. For belonging.

You feel like a ghost at the edge of it.

Your feet carry you forward, the heel of your boot clicking against stone as your gaze sweeps the tables—and there they are. The axis of your ache.

Sirius, wild as ever, sprawled across the Gryffindor bench with all the ease of someone who’s never cared about permission. There’s a grin on his face, too bright to be real, tossed like a dare across the table toward James. His hair is longer now, unkempt and beautiful in that feral way that always made people stare. His laugh cracks out like thunder—sharp, sudden, too alive.

And further down, as if fate enjoyed the cruelty of symmetry, sits Regulus. His back is straight. His tie perfect. He cradles his goblet in one pale hand, fingers curled with surgical precision. There’s no expression on his face, but you know that look—that calm like the still surface of a frozen lake, hiding something vast and dangerous beneath. He doesn’t smile. He rarely does. But his presence is as loud as Sirius’s laughter, in its own quiet, haunting way.

They don’t look at each other. They haven’t in years.

They don’t look at you either.

You hover for a moment, stuck in the doorway like memory made flesh. Not a sibling. Not a student. Just a wound with legs.

And gods, you want to scream. You want to cross the floor and grab them both by the collar, shake them until they feel the hollowness they left in you when they walked away. You want to spit out every night you spent alone at Grimmauld Place with Mother’s screams echoing down the halls and the walls breathing hate around you. The cracked wallpaper. The eyes in the portraits. The silence that tasted like iron.

You were a child.

And they left you there.