This chapter was meant to be part of last chapter, but I thought it would be too long and I was lazy to edit it since I had not finished this part yet. 

LEAVE COMMENTS! I loved last chapter's comments lol.

Alphard's Apartment, Grosvenor Square, London.

July 12th, 1978.

My Guiding Light,

I hope this letter finds you in good health, love of my life, and allow me to start this letter by apologising over the uncomfortable mood the night ended when we last parted. Also, forgive me for my traces of dramatics, my dearest, but my family is in turmoil.

I have taken refuge from the cold war in my house in my uncle's apartment. I fear that one strike of a match might make the whole place blow up. I'm not used to taking my mother's silence and I'm completely taken aback by my father's pathetic begging for attention and forgiveness for something he did not do. Though I, as a man with the possibility of having a woman in my arms whenever you allow me, understand my father's reaction – losing a lover is much harder than giving up one's pride.

Your Miss Patricia Waters – or should I call her Doctor Waters – is the very woman that led my parents into their marriage.

As I told you before, my father had been in love with a muggleborn woman while at Hogwarts, but his relationship was made public in his last year in Hogwarts. My grandsire saw himself forced to marry him off, and my grandfather saw the opportunity to marry my mother off – hence the situation we are in today. They found love in each other much later, after even I was born.

I suppose I can understand my mother's insecurities with the sudden comeback of Doctor Waters. If I heard that someone from your past was back with a child around the same age as your past relationship, I – too – would feel uncomfortable, angry and hurt. However, my father had no knowledge of Florian's existence.

Uncle Alphard has decided I'm old enough to know his guess. Both Mother and I fear he might be correct in his concerning thoughts: Florian is, most likely, my father's son.

While the information in itself is devastating, especially to my own mother, there's also necessity of making you understand my position in this family is now in danger, at least to the public eye, while I know for certain that the Seat will be mine regardless of public opinion surrounding us. As the Heir of the House, I'm the eldest male of the family, especially as the son of the current Head of the House, but some families in Seat might pressure my father into accepting Florian into the House, making him a possible heir and competitor for the Seat. Those families either don't like us and are eager to somehow humiliate us into putting the first half-blood in our family in Seat, or like the muggleborns far too much for my family's tastes. Regardless of the reasoning behind their possible reaction, my claim to the Seat would be weakened and opinions divided, which is not something I can afford... especially now, with such big decisions coming as times get harder.

Do forgive me, my love, I did not expect myself to confess all my troubles to you through a letter, but I did not think viable to try to see you when I'm staying with Uncle Alphard, who is working so hard in keeping everything neat and perfect, so my mother won't insist on me going back home. I'm well here, for the time being. I spend most of my time reading and watching my uncle struggle through painting another young lady's portrait to her future husband; while not as fascinating as I hoped it would be, his talents are undiscussable and I fear I do not possess the same understanding of colour, light and the way eyes are meant to shine, though I can see your exact shade of shining, green eyes looking at me whenever I close my eyes and concentrate enough.

I miss you, even though it has been just a couple of days since I saw you in that disastrous dinner.

I plan on seeing you as soon as possible and shall write more soon, but I must stop this letter here as this is my last piece of parchment and Uncle Alphard is far too busy with getting the exact shade of grey for the young lady's dress for me to dare to ask for his own stash, hidden somewhere in this apartment.

I love you with all my heart, my dearest.

Forever yours, wholly

Regulus.

It was hard for Luna to hold every information she now had open and clear to her to herself when Remus stared at her from his own bed as she folded the letter and put it away under her pillow.

"He wrote you a long letter in the middle of the night two days after you last saw each other. I don't even want to know what's in it," Remus grumbled, closing his book with a thud.

"Then don't ask," Luna was quick to answer, ignoring Remus' nose twitching with disgust because of his own imagination. "It's none of your business anyway."

"Dirty, dirty," Remus accused.

"Nosy, nosy," she retorted.

With the new bed and crib finally set up in Hope's bedroom, Remus and Luna were back at sharing, while Hope shared her own bedroom with Leticia and the baby. It wasn't the most comfortable situation, but they were getting used to it in general, besides Remus and Luna were used to sleeping in the same bedroom as one another.

Luna sighed, back against the wall as she focused on the letter, frowning at the content and wondering what to say.

Remus watched her for a second before looking at the ceiling.

"You know, Sirius wrote last night. He's been concerned with Regulus with the whole thing going on," he said, trying to sound casual. Luna looked up at him before looking back at the letter without answering. "Do you know anything about it? I thought I'd ask."

"Sirius already asked me if I knew anything, and I answered then," she said.

Slowly, he sat up on the bed, frowning as well. He seemed taken aback by her answer and deeply concerning by her meaning, especially because Luna didn't seem interested enough to look at him in her answer.

Still, they were thinking different things for different reasons.

The truth was that she couldn't look at Remus because he'd know there was more to her answer than the truth. While technically true, Luna's answer and Regulus' situation had changed since Sirius had asked her anything, which made the whole situation awkward. Then, Luna had answered that Regulus had nothing to do with that silly school group and had no intentions on joining anything to do with the war once school was over, but now Regulus was a member of the Knights of Walpurgis and the Death Eaters were expecting him to officially join within the year, most likely before his own birthday.

"When did you two talk?" Remus asked.

"A while ago. He caught me on a corridor, we... caught up," she said.

She wondered if Remus could find out how literal the sentence 'caught me on a corridor' might be.

"Well, he thinks that Regulus' family might pressure him into fighting the wrong side of the war," Remus said.

"I don't think there's any pressure from them. Lord and Lady Black have no wish with dealing with a war. They are busy enough with their own private problems as it is," she said, raising her eyebrows at the letter. She folded it and put it beside her. "In their opinion, this war couldn't come at a worst time, that's for certain."

Remus scrunched his eyebrows together. "What's happening?" he asked.

"Marriage is hard even for posh, minted people, apparently," she answered, trying to continue as vague as possible. "It makes you wonder, doesn't it? If marriage it worth it at all, after everything that we hear about it."

Remus scoffed. "Marriage is bollocks anyway," he shrugged.

Luna sighed. "Even with the right person?" she asked.

"There's no way for you to know it's the right person, and if they aren't – you just lost a whole fuck load of years on them, wasted it away on fucker that doesn't care," Remus said, face far too pinched. He seemed to be talking to Luna directly, staring into her eyes to make her understand. "Harbouring hope about love and marriage is bollocks unless you know, for certain, that something will work out. And, even then, you might as well just... settle."

Luna rolled her eyes.

"You're so pessimistic," she grumbled, putting the letter away.

"I'm realistic," Remus said, lying down in bed again and watching her move around the room. "I'm well aware that there's very little someone like me can do about love. Had I any control over my feelings, I wouldn't be queer – it's far too difficult. Marriage, divorce... those are, mercifully, not an option for me at all."

"Who needs marriage when you can just live as a married couple regardless of a piece of paper!"

Remus scoffed condescendingly, as if Luna's words were childish.

"Sounds like something a mistress would say about her married lover," he said in a warning tone.

Luna turned off the main lamp of the bedroom, leaving the beside lamps on as she moved back to her bed in silence, focusing on not stepping on anything thrown around the room.

There it was. Exactly where Remus had been trying to get at through that conversation. He wanted to remind her that any hopes of eternal love, marriage and a happy life beside Regulus were schoolyard fantasies that she wouldn't be allowed to fulfil in the real world, no matter how their swears of love sounded truthful and honest. Genuine or not, Regulus would never belong to her in the way any other man could.

"Maybe when Regulus leaves me, I'll find a good girl and settle down with her in the same way you'll settle down with Sirius," Luna said, sitting on her bed.

Remus raised a single eyebrow. "A girl?"

Luna stared at him for a moment. "Oh?"

"'Oh'? I must be the one to say 'oh'!" he said.

"I thought you knew. A lot of people are aware of my interest in both girls and boys, Regulus. I'm quite sure I had enough girls kiss me in public to imagine it would get to you at some point," she admitted. She shrugged. "You might count me lucky for being able to be safe and like boys as well, but I managed to fall in love with the one boy that can never be truly mine in the eyes of the law and his world."

"Luna –"

"No, listen, Remus," she said, lying down facing him. "You don't need to remind me that he won't marry me. I know. His parents are keen on talking about it whenever we are alone together, away from Regulus' ears. I'm enjoying the time I have with him, because I'm far too aware of the ticking clock over our heads – we won't have forever. It's impossible for us to have forever." She reached for her lamp's cord and pulled it, letting it grow dark. "Perhaps you're the lucky one to fall in love with your best friend, because it certainly doesn't feel as scary to know you'll always have someone waiting for you to come home. I won't have that forever. I might never have it at all after Regulus leaves me."

Remus hesitated in his answer, knowing that his words had hurt her more than he intended. He tried not to sigh out loud in annoyance with his own words, so he just bit his bottom lip for a moment before finding the most comforting words he could muster.

"You'll find someone new then," Remus said.

Luna turned in bed, giving him her back, but he heard her answer regardless.

"What if I don't even want to?" she mumbled towards the wall.

Remus lied in bed with his lamp on for another moment, watching his sister's back going up and down in her breathing – she was still awake, but she didn't move when he called her name after a few minutes.

He turned off his lamp as well.

Just as he was falling asleep, her head her sniffing. And though he wasn't sure she was awake, he knew that she was crying.

Patricia laughed at Hope's joke, leaning forward as she tried to swallow the shrimp in her mouth without choking. She even had to sip some of the soda in her cup to help it go down smoothly in her throat.

And Florian laughed at his mother, throwing his head back, shoulders shaking – a loud, sudden noise. Almost like a bark of laughter of someone that tried to hold it back for too long before it bubbled over.

Luna couldn't stop watching them, even though she knew that if she was caught it would make things awkward.

She could see a few similarities between mother and son, though they were subtle at first glance. The arch of their brows was the same and the refined symmetry of their features in their oval-shaped faces, large and expressive eyes, though the colour of them were different. But that was where the similarities stopped – eyebrows, eyes and face-shape. Otherwise, now that she was aware, it was easy for Luna to see the Black in Florian's face. The light eyes, the hair texture and colour, the angular jawline and the bridged nose.

She was glad that Remus was out with Peter, trying to get jobs since James and Sirius were in their first day of training, because it was easy to watch the guests when Leticia was distracting Florian so well in teaching him some Spanish and Patricia was happy to laugh at Hope's horrible jokes (which she stole from some patient).

"Luna, sweetheart, do pass me those potatoes, please," Florian said, making a hand gesture to get Luna's attention away from his mother. He was still smiling from his conversation with Leticia. "Those are wonderful, Mrs Hope. Love them!"

"Oh, of course, dear," Hope said, turning to him. "But I wasn't the one to make them. Luna is a wonderful cook."

Florian turned to Luna, who was still getting her bearings after her thoughts were interrupted. He watched curiously as she reached over to get the potatoes to pass them over the table, but said nothing right away. He smiled when their eyes met though.

"Had to learn how to cook you, did ya? Same here. It's hard being the kid of a doc, right? But we figure shit out," he said, sympathetic.

"Actually, Remus was just really bad at it, and I thought it was better to take over," she admitted, chuckling. "Mum often left us food ready, or sometimes asked the neighbours to feed us. If money was good, she left us enough to get a pizza."

"Pizzas in here are such a rip-off! I gotta show ya'll some real American pizza. I went to Chicago once and –" Florian said.

"Pizzas here are just fine, thank you," Luna was quick to cut him off.

Florian laughed at her, but was polite enough to stop talking.

"You lived here your whole life, right?" he asked.

"Most of it, but we moved a lot when I was younger," she said. Her eyes immediately turned to Remus' empty seat, finding a way to blame him even though he wasn't there. She looked away in shame of her intentions quickly. "Settled over in Bristol after a while, though. Not too bad. We've been in worse places."

Leticia, eager to participate in the conversation, leaned forward. She rested her chin on her palm and smiled at Florian.

"I like Bristol," she said.

Luna said nothing, looking down at the shrimp and rice in her place. She wasn't hungry. She felt nervous for no reason. She hated knowing secrets that were important to other people, even though they didn't know anything about it – it was like carrying her parents' secrets from Remus all over again, like hiding her scar from her own brother (her own attacker) again. She hated the feeling with a burning passion.

Florian and Leticia went back to a conversation between each other, and Luna went back to watching.

While she knew Orion very little, she had managed to pick up on some of his manner of speaking. While he was more formal than Luna or Regulus, he was less formal in his speech than his wife, choosing a grey-area that made Luna think he had a problem of being understood in his job sometimes. That awkward, but forceful politeness and formality was not something that Florian had in him given the number of curse words and slangs that fell out of his mouth in the short conversation he had with Luna.

However, one other thing that Luna had seen in Orion was the way his eyes carried around the room every few minutes of conversation. For a while, she had believed that it was his way of noticing where everybody in his family was or trying to see if something important was happening in the room he was in, but Florian did the very same thing. Both Orion and Florian had the awful mannerism of looking too deeply into somebody's eyes – Luna had thought that Orion was just a wonderful mind-reader, but Florian (who had not dared to attempt a breach on her mental fortress) had the same deep eyes and nothing of the bad intention his possible father had, which made Luna pay attention to that mannerism. They had probably both learned that their eyes made people uncomfortable and had started looking around every few minutes to not spook anybody.

Perhaps she was trying to find things in common between Orion and Florian, but it was a problem was that she could find them at all.

"You are awfully quiet tonight, Luna," Patricia mused, leaning towards her in interest, eyes narrowing. "Did something happen?"

"She always gets like this when she comes back from her boyfriend's house," Leticia said, rolling her eyes.

"You're just bitter you don't have a boyfriend," Luna answered in a sharp tone automatically.

Leticia turned her whole body towards her younger cousin.

"And I'm happier like this, because now I have a whole human being to take care of because of that –" she said, stringing a long and complicated sentence, badmouthing her ex-boyfriend with gusto.

Luna might know more written Spanish than spoken due to the letters she exchanged with her grandparents, more often when she was younger and didn't need to send her letters to her mother so she could send them to Spain, but she loved the wonderfully creative ways the language managed to insult people in detailed manner. Nowadays the process of writing to her grandparents was too great and the expenses too big to be ignored, so she often just read through the letters of her mother and her parents.

She was lucky enough that her Nain was a witch, lived nearer to Scotland and paid for the owls. Asking for another whole set of grandparents was asking too much with the sort of family she had.

"If that's what you have to say to sleep at night," Luna said, cutting Leticia off and looking away.

Leticia opened her mouth to retort, but decided to stop herself before she could utter a single word.

Florian hummed in disapproval.

"Oh, lovesick people are disgusting!" Florian complained.

"Leave the girl to her daydreaming, son," Patricia said, laughing a bit at the girl. "Had you kept a single girlfriend for more than a couple of months, you might understand the feeling of being in love."

Luna's face flushed.

"I'm not daydreaming. I'm just... thinking," Luna said.

Hope chuckled. "Of your future together?" she teased.

Luna's flush darkened, but she looked down.

She hadn't been chastised, and yet she felt the same sort of shame climb her chest.

While she would admit that the whole 'Patricia-Orion' circumstance was in the forefront part of her mind, her thoughts did – shamefully – wander towards Regulus and the possible future they might have, comparing their situation to the generation before them with constantly growing tension and frustration. She hated and feared history would repeat itself and she wouldn't be able to do anything to stop it, and that Regulus wouldn't want to do anything to stop it in honour of his family's values and decisions.

"Or the lack thereof," Luna admitted.

That caught Hope's attention.

"Did Regulus say anything?" she asked.

Patricia frowned, but said nothing.

"No... his..." Luna hesitated in her lie, "his dad did. He usually does."

She glanced at Patricia, waiting for a reaction, but nothing came. She merely looked curious over the story, but not recognition came to her face, but her eyes were shining and her ears attentive to the maximum – she was not Occluding.

"What did that man say?" Hope said, lip curling as she said 'man'.

While it hadn't happened in that night, Luna wanted to use some truth in her lie.

"That my blood irks him, and that had I been a pureblood it wouldn't break Regulus' heart so," Luna said.

Yes, she was still bitter over that comment at the wedding. It haunted her and made her chest ache when she thought too much of it before going to sleep.

Patricia gasped as if the mere words were sacrilegious.

"He did not!" Patricia said.

"He did."

"Asshole," Florian grumbled, eating a bit more.

Hope shook her head.

"Is this about the whole 'muggleborn' and 'halfblood' thing?" Hope asked. "Why does it matter?"

Patricia's face darkened a bit as she turned to her friend, waiting for Luna to speak, but when the girl hesitated once more, she took over the conversation.

"Some families are known for following the Pureblood Supremacy movement. They believe that magical children coming from magical families are stronger and by far more powerful than children born from muggle families. Which is a lie, of course. I know wonderful witches and wizards are born from non-magical families and live to see greatness!" Patricia explained. "In some of the more radical and traditional families, that... hatred might become violent. They can be dangerous."

Luna shook her head, taking a deep breath and preparing for the worst part of the conversation.

"Regulus would never hurt me, though," she said, voice firm. "And thought Lord Black might speak openly of his discomfort with my blood relations, there is no reason to believe he would stoop so low."

She glanced at Patricia, hoping for a reaction.

And a reaction she got.

Patricia looked like a sheet of paper, pale white and wide unblinking eyes looking like a terrified deer cornered and staring at a starving wolf. She looked horrified with the name alone, let alone the implication that Luna was courting someone from that family openly.

"... what did you say?" she whispered.

That was all confirmation that Luna needed.

Florian Waters was actually Florian Black.

"Lord Orion Black, the duke," Luna said, tasting the name and title in her mouth as she said it. It was bitter. "He's Regulus' father and Head of the House of Black."

"You are courting a Black family member," Patricia said as to confirm the information.

"Yes. I'm openly courting its heir," Luna said. "I'm in love with him and he's in love with me."

Patricia shook her head, eyes never leaving Luna's. She seemed to have forgotten to blink, and her eyes were threatening to tear up – either from the shock or from the way her eyes were growing drier by the second.

"That is a terrible idea, Luna," Patricia mumbled.

Florian watched his mother's reaction and looked at Luna, measuring the tension in the room in silence, trying to figure out what was happening. He was openly confused about the interaction, but he was growing concerned with the way his mother's hands were shaking and she whole body was straight as a rod.

"Mama, you good?" Florian asked, frowning in suspicion.

Patricia ignored him completely, leaning forward as her hands grabbed the edges of the table in desperation for some grounding.

"You are not understanding, dear, those people are dangerous. That's the sort of traditional, crazy family that I was talking about," Patricia said, eyes widening even more, eager to make Luna see the truth within them. "It doesn't matter he's the Heir of the House. He'll have no power over his father's decision when the time comes, and the Head of the House doesn't care for you or for anybody he doesn't share his blood with – they will leave you to rot if the situation calls for it."

The words were alarming. Her tone was a sire blaring out warnings.

Hope was frowning so deeply that she feared her face would never go back to normal.

"What are you talking about, Patricia? They are 'dangerous'? You are scaring me!" Hope said.

Patricia turned to Hope.

"That family tried to kill me. I had to run away to America to get them away from me," she said. "They are crazy. They kill whatever and whoever is on their way."

Luna felt her stomach fall to her feet.

Without much prompt, she jumped from her seat and walked away, unable to control her body other than to tell it to run to the bathroom before she could vomit the little she ate on the ground.

So, exposition will come next chapter and I'll have to admit that I wasn't too creative about it, but I'm so busy with all university things that I'm too lazy to think of something else.

My musical season is done, it's been a long month, but now I have enough money to keep myself for a while. Also, I'll start teaching English as well, and though it's an informal job, it'll keep me fed alongside my psychological residence in the hospital (which pays internship rates, so... barely pays at all), also my patients/client from the private internship will start paying me too, since I'm in my last year. With some luck I'll be able to buy a car soon.

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