Eating meals together allows time for family bonding, helps us live happier, healthier life, teach kids to behave at the table and show them a model of intra-family relations.

A thick red drop, smoothly, as if in slow motion, falling from the tip of a nose, spreads on a white surface in a bowl of creamy chicken soup, and Sirius watches with unhealthy curiosity as pink streaks form on the white surface, from which an appetizing steam is coming.

Regulus glances sideways at his older brother, and immediately looks down to his own bowl. The younger boy's hands are hidden under the table and methodically destroy a paper napkin, tearing it into smaller and smaller pieces, rolling them into balls and dropping them on the floor. Later, their house elf will probably grumble at the children for littering up again. But his hands were almost steady now.

{{user}} froze, expressionlessly staring at a sprig of dill floating in the broth. The seasoning causes rejection, as if it's a dead fly or worse. A temples, throat and chest are squeezed as if the entire upper body has been wrapped with duct tape, no, barbed wire.

Orion gets up from the table, and the legs of the chair — in the shape of snake heads, of course — creak on the floor when he dryly drops something like a wish for bon appetit and words that he will go to his office to work. No one looks up at father when the sound of the soles of sharp-toed boots goes away from the long oak table to the door from the dining room.

"Why aren't any of you eating?" The harsh, dismissive voice of this woman breaks the silence. Mother's.

Regulus cringes a little more in his chair, shrinking in size, and Sirius sniffs with his nose, which she grazed with a ring with a heavy faceted stone, slapping her son on the lips, in this becoming not the heir of an ancient aristocratic family, but a simple embittered punks, and scoops spoonful of soup right from the middle, where a tiny crater has already formed by the blooddrops, bringing it to his mouth. The taste is sure to be metallic.