Hi! I'm back. I'm glad to see you all here.

I don't have much to say besides the fact that I'm working on the Playlist for the fanfic. Besides, some of the other plots are coming to life in my drafts, so I'm excited about them as well. Please, bear with me, because Book Two will be a bit of  a 'too-much-too-fast' sometimes.

LEAVE COMMENTS!

Luna pressed her lips together in a thin line as she passed through the fireplace, cleaning the sooth out of her clothes before stepping on the very expensive Persian rug that the Potters had on the parlour. She shoved her hands on her trousers' pockets and sighed, she was so tired and being caught by the Blacks in their house without a chaperone had been embarrassing enough – she felt dirty and...

There was something on her pocket.

Slowly, already aware of what it was, Luna took the zip-lock bag from her pocket and watched the white powder in it when she squeezed its contents. As soon as her mind caught up to what her body was doing, she let go of it, letting it fall to the ground as she stepped away, unwilling to touch it for longer than necessary.

"Oh, good, you're back," the voice of Sirius Black said.

She turned, surprised at the boy standing in the parlour's double doors, which were only half open.

"They know I went out?" she asked. "I'm sorry, I just –"

"Euphemia knows, nobody else. It took me a while to realise, she told me to keep it shut, so I did," Sirius said, looking at the bag on the ground. He frowned once he realised what it was. "Why do you have that?" he asked, voice colder.

"I didn't realise I still had that with me. I just felt it on my pocket," she admitted. "What... do I do with that?"

Sirius walked further into the room and carefully put his hand on her shoulder, leading her away from the bag on the ground before leaning down and getting it, looking at the guilty substance for everything before shoving it into his own pocket.

"I'll get rid of it, don't worry," he said.

But Luna was worried. It had been so easy for her father to fall victim to something that looked so harmless in that little bag, that was said to be so fun – freely used in some of the parties of her schoolmates, so freely that she had seen it happen before, but never had any interest. And now she feared everything and anything that could look fun, and yet ruin her life like it had ruined her father's.

"Perhaps we should give it up Lady –" she started.

"I'll deal with it," Sirius insisted, cutting her off. "I won't use it, don't worry. I just don't want Remus to know you had it on you, he'll be upset." She nodded, falling silent. "Where were you?"

She raised her eyebrows, looking at him. Her face heat up a bit and she had to force her jaw not to lock in place.

"Why do you want to know?" she asked, trying not to sound as annoyed as she felt.

"Concern for the most part, curiosity for the other," he admitted with a shrug. He put his hands into his pockets. "I have my guesses, but I think asking would be less disrespectful than guessing."

She sighed.

"With Regulus," she answered.

"At Grimmauld Place? Oh, you're a brave one, you are," he said, lip curling at the thought alone. "And you went alone? I'm certain Walburga wasn't happy about it at all."

"She wasn't there."

"Orion?"

"No," she said.

Sirius gave a little smile.

"Unchaperoned with little Regulus, what a pair of rebels you two are becoming," he teased. He didn't seem completely genuine in his happiness, but he seemed eager to cheer Luna up, even if just a bit. "You did well to come back home for dinner, Mia wants–"

"This isn't home," she said, cutting him off with a frown. "At least not for me," she added, looking away.

Sirius froze, not realising what he had said until she had mentioned it.

"Yeah, no. I suppose it isn't," he said with a solemn nod. "It became mine not too long ago, so I don't blame you for being so defensive about it. It can be home for you, too, if you want it to be."

"I don't. I want my mum," she admitted.

Siris frowned, a bit taken aback by her words and about how legitimately final she sounded. And even more than that, it was concerning how Luna young sounded. It was like listening to a child giving the resolution of a very complicated problem with the most obvious of answers which no grown up had thought about.

They didn't want to bother Hope's few days-off in the first time in years that she left the country, per Remus' own request, but Luna wanted her mother, and she wanted to apologise for everything that she had done while blinded by her wilful ignorance, ignoring every sort of clue to her father's problems.

If there was one thing that she was good at, it was denial; and she always would get scorched. Luna had denied to herself that her brother's werewolf form was dangerous, and she had gotten attack. She had denied that her mother had a reason for the divorce because of her silence, and now she found herself to be a bad daughter. She had denied to herself that she was slightly weird, and she had no other good and true friends besides Pandora Rosier. She had denied that Sirius was not interested in her, but in what she could represent, and her heart had been broken. She had refused to believe that her father was a problem, she had denied all the concerning conversations and symptoms that anyone with half-a-mind could've seen – and now her father had gone back under the control of a drug she didn't even think was a problem.

"A few more days, Luna, and she'll be back," Sirius said, as comforting as he could muster.

He wasn't as comforting as Regulus' quiet presence had been.

"I don't know if when she comes back it'll make things better, you know? But I wanted to know," she shook her head, trying to find something to add – what did she want to know anyways? What did she want to ask? "Regardless, I just want my mum."

Sirius couldn't relate to wanting to find comfort in someone like his mum, but it was besides the point. It wasn't about him, and he was trying his very best to understand her side of the story.

"Remus wants Hope as well," Sirius said, a confession between old friends. "Remus is really scared of your reaction after everything today. He went to your bedroom while you were out, and you didn't open the door. I lied, said that you were out with Euphemia, because she was out getting groceries, then I went and lied, said that you went back to your bedroom to take nap before dinner. Euphemia knows, so... just go along with it for your brother's sake, alright?"

Luna nodded.

"Thanks," she said.

Slowly, she went to the sofa and sat on it, crossing her arms.

Usually, Sirius would've gone out of the room at that point and gone to do what he had to do, leaving her to sulk alone, but he lingered. He sighed.

"Are you alright?" he asked.

She looked over her shoulder to him.

"Everybody knew, but me," she said.

Sirius looked at the ceiling, trying to find some way to organise his thoughts and put them into words. He didn't want to be so completely tactless.

"We did know, but for the longest time Remus thought that you knew at least part of it as well, if that's any consolation."

"It isn't."

He pursued his lips before walking over to her and sitting a few seats away from her, watching her carefully.

"Let the dust settle and then talk to your dad, I'm sure that when everything calms down a bit more, he'll have a lot to say," Sirius said.

"Did yours have anything to say when you came here?" she asked bitterly.

Sirius tensed up. "That's not fair, Luna," he mumbled, not looking at her.

She looked down to the ground, aware that her comment had been out of pocket. Still, she pressed her lips together, unsure if she could manage to apologise. She swallowed down her apology at first, allowing her anger to win in the competition against politeness, until she saw Sirius slowly letting go of his breath, as if he had been holding it for a long time.

"I know," she admitted. "I'm sorry."

Sirius nodded once, mouth twitching as if he was holding back something inside of it.

"Addiction is an illness, what my parents are is not something that they have, do you understand?" he said.

"Your father is an addict, Sirius. He's as alcoholic as one can be, and when he's not focused on the bottom of the bottle, he's focused on working. Your mother is one of the unluckiest people I had ever met; forced into a marriage she wasn't ready for and which she didn't want only to be forced to have births when her body wasn't ready for it," Luna said. "Regulus was born when she was eighteen."

"And I when she was sixteen. People do that a lot," Sirius dismissed with a roll of his eyes.

The girl that had tried to imply that her child was Sirius' (which is wasn't, and she had admitted later on the summer, even going as far as telling Sirius that the real father was a Hufflepuff boy, which remained nameless under the threat of legal issues) had dropped out of Hogwarts to give birth and was to come back this year to finish her studies, though rumours said that she had accepted taking tutors so not to be separated from her baby.

Luna frowned, turning to watch him.

"How old do you think your mother was when she married your father?" she asked.

Sirius turned to look at her, confused by her question, but shrugged.

"I don't know," he admitted. It was never something she thought of.

"Your mum was thirteen, he was nineteen. Neither wanted the marriage. Are you truly surprised that they ended up the way they did?" Luna asked. "There's a lot that your brother doesn't tell me yet, but I can gather the pieces he slips out when he's breaking down. Your family is messed up, just like you tell everybody that they are, just... not only in the way you say it."

"You don't know about my family," he said, lip curling and teeth baring.

"I'm not saying that I do, I'm just saying that you also don't," she explained. She got up from the sofa, sighing and pulling on the long-sleeves. She made no comment on the fact that the Potter Manor was far hotter than Grimmauld Place. "You don't need to forgive them and forget it, and you don't need to be the perfect son that you think they want. But you must admit that there's so much more than you allow yourself to see in them."

"My mother tortured me because I said that I had gone on a date with a man, publicly," he said, aghast.

Luna watched him for a second. She didn't know the specifics, but she had understood that much about that night that Sirius had gotten away from his parents.

"I don't know what happened, Sirius, and I don't need to know. But you want to know, write to Regulus. I'm certain that he'll have a lot to say about it," Luna dismissed with a sigh.

"I'm certain that he would," Sirius said bitterly, getting up from the sofa as well in a single movement.

Luna took a step back automatically, a sharp breath taken so loudly that everything seemed to freeze.

Not that she feared Sirius at all – logically she knew that Sirius would never raise a hand towards her, for he was not a violent man, and he most certainly would never hit a woman even in self-defence. Still, the way her heart skipped a beat made her whole body tense up and her limbs start shaking. Sirius wouldn't hurt her, but she thought that neither would her father, and yet the bruised and... --

Her father had hurt her.

And what a shock that had been.

Luna looked at the ground, pretending not to realise that Sirius had taken a seat again, watching her in his frozen state.

"Luna –" he started.

"I'm going to my room," she announced, voice choked and louder than necessary.

"Luna, please, I wouldn't hurt you," he said, voice calm. He did not move from his seat.

"I know," she said, taking a few steps back. "I know."

He didn't say anything, and he didn't get up from the sofa to follow her. The truth was that it was obvious that she needed a moment to herself, away from him and from everything that Sirius could be representing to her.

At least, she trusted him enough to get rid of the cocaine bag, Sirius' mind supplied when he watched her disappear from the parlour.

Sirius heard conversation outside of the room and slowly he got up, walking to the doors and looking through it to see Remus standing at the bottom of the stairs, talking in low voice to Luna, who was midway up the stairs.

"...sleeping," he said.

"I was. I came down for some water," Luna lied quickly.

Sirius frowned, surprised at how quickly she had gotten into character and how completely smooth she had been with her lie.

Remus, unfortunately, noticed Sirius sneaking at the door of the parlour and exchanged a glance between the two people before giving a stiff nod and a bitter chuckle, shoving his hands into his pockets.

"Oh, a glass of water, is it?" Remus mocked.

Luna looked at Sirius with a mixture of pity and plain... nothingness.

"I don't want him anymore, you can have him, is that's your annoyance. I have something better," Luna said.

"Ouch," Sirius made, but he was ignored.

"Please, don't talk like that about my friends," Remus said.

Luna sighed.

"I'm knackered, alright? And I might start running a fever again soon enough, so let me get this out of my chest at once," she said, turning to her brother and leaning against the banister of the stairs. "I'm exhausted of this 'hot-and-cold' situation, alright? For the longest time I felt like you hated me, and now I find out that you sort of did because I didn't remember something that you did. I love Daddy, I really do, but listen – whatever happened, I don't remember it, so you can't blame me for living my life without that on my shoulders. I'm sorry that you did. But I'm tired of having to find out suddenly if in that specific day you want to my ally or my enemy, because this is very confusing and I have a lot going on in my life, alright?"

"I had to deal with this secret –"

"SO DID I!" she yelled, turning to glare at him. "Do you think it was easy to lie to you about where my scar came from, or be sick while you were sick and be quiet about it because Mum needed to take care of you more than me? Good God, Remus!" she sighed and looked at the ceiling. "I'm done with this shit, alright? I'm done! It's not easy for you, I'm certain. The transformation is painful and the recovery seems to be worse, but it's not easy for me either to hear your screaming your lungs out in pain and be able to do nothing, because the one moment I tried to, I almost died."

"You said it wasn't my fault."

Remus had taken a step back, hands gripping the sides of his trousers to keep them from shaking.

"And it wasn't. It doesn't mean that I don't get to be angry about it."

"You said that it wasn't my fault!" he insisted.

"Fuck's sake, I'm not angry at you, I'm angry that this happened at all! I'm angry that it was my fault!" she exclaimed.

Remus shook his head.

"It wasn't your fault," he said, shaking his head. "It was Dad's. He was the one going against werewolf rights loudly at a pub days before the full moon. He was stupid and inconsequent."

"And I left the fucking window unlatched," she said, raising her eyebrows, a bitter smile coming to her lips.

One last secret spilled.

One that nobody but Luna knew, not even her own parents. One that she held close to her chest for a long time.

Everybody froze. Remus just stared at his sister, confused and shocked over the information that nobody talked to him about. Sirius looked between Luna and Remus, unsure of what to do or who to comfort.

Luna took a step back, climbing one more step.

"So?... what do we do now?" she asked. "Are we even? Will you hate me as much as you think I hate you, or will we pretend nothing ever happened like I have been doing for years? Because I'm really fucking good in pretending."

Without waiting for an answer, Luna turned around and went up the stairs while the two boys stood at the foot of the stairs, unsure of what to say or what to do until the bedroom door slammed closed.

Westminster, London, UK.

Dear Regulus,

I believe too much has happened, and I have not had the opportunity of telling you everything or even admitting to myself everything that happened, but my worst secret has slipped out of my mouth in such a sharp tone that I have not recognised my own voice when I tried to make my brother feel bad – I wanted him angry at me, and I think I just wanted a reason to allow myself to be angry at him as well. But I know that using what I had on my sleeve was a bad decision.

I've grown a mouth with sharp teeth that I seem to have been cutting myself with it for a while without noticing, and I don't know how to hide it anymore. I'm scared I'll cut you as well. I'm running everything anyways, so I thought that you deserved a warning before I did something terrible to you as well.

Usually, my destroying instincts have been aimed at myself, and it's the first time that it was so openly aimed at somebody that I loved. I'm good at destroying myself – I find particularly creative ways in it; I don't eat, or I don't take my medicinal potions, or I pretend that I'm not as sick as I truly am until I cannot bear it anymore and I ask for help... or until help finds me when I'm unable to ask for it, either way the feeling of weakness makes me feel somewhat useless or at least harmless. If I'm harmless to myself, I'm harmless to others.

I'm not a violent person, but I have caught myself with the oddest of intentions.

I have slapped James Potter once and I had to hold myself back from pulling Remus' hair not too long ago. Perhaps it was due to the fact that I knew that James would never hit me back or the fact that I knew that Remus would somehow find a way to hurt me back, even if in a lesser scale from what I wanted to do with him, but I held myself back. At least physically, because I cannot hold back my tongue.

I think that everything that happened to my brother was because of me.

Or at least a huge part of it.

My brother was bitten on my birthday, did you know that? I was turning four. And it used to be exciting turning a year older, because there are a few weeks of wonderful moments that Remus and I are the same age – he's just months older and he couldn't tell me what to do on those moments, because we were equal. And then he was older again, and all privileges were lost, so I had to enjoy every moment of it. That's why I unlatched the window in our nursery. I opened it just enough for the sun to hit me when it was raising in the sky, and then I'd be able to wake him up and annoy him and he wouldn't be able to scream at me.

I woke up with him screaming in the middle of the night.

It wasn't loud of anything like that, it was mostly like a little whimper before a yelp. Because of the werewolf on attached to his neck, he couldn't really scream out, there was too much blood, and he was choking on it. That's why I screamed.

Mum says that it my scream that saved his life. I warned everybody in the bloody street from how loud I screamed.

I was really small at that age, so the werewolf most likely didn't think me to be a threat, especially because I wasn't supposed to wake up with such a little noise, but it was like I felt the danger that I had allowed into our bedroom, our refuge. So when the werewolf turned to look at me, he looked so... delighted – I'll never forget it, how absolutely happy he was that I had seen it. It was almost a human reaction, his eyes seemed to understand everything happening, it wasn't just an animal attacking out of instinct, but he didn't have time to attack me, too, because Daddy ran into the bedroom and the thing jumped out of the window. Everything was so quick, but it still felt like a year-long attack.

My brother almost died. Had it not been my mother's wonderful healing hands, he would've died. It's a miracle, really, that he speaks normally – his neck was too small, so the could've easily lost his voice completely, but Remus was always strong.

What other secrets do I have to share before I turn them into weapons, I wonder?

Well, I'm scared of dogs.

I'm scared of the total dark.

I'm absolutely terrified that I'll lose you to my tongue as well, even if I think through every word that ever leaves my mouth from now on, because my brother is no longer talking to me.

Lady Potter doesn't understand completely what happened, and she doesn't have the heart to ask me outright just yet. What she knows, it was Sirius that told her – an argument, he called it apparently, trying to smooth down my mistakes and not tragically break the relationship I built with her. He can be good sometimes, I suppose. At least occasionally.

I'm sorry that I became this twisted monster. It wasn't what you agreed to fall in love with.

From the girl in love with you but will understand if you're not in love with her anymore.

Luna B. Lupin.

Great London, Grimmauld Place, Number 12.

My dearest Luna,

I'm in love with you. I have been in love with you from the moment your heart opened up to me just enough for me to know you.

I know your mind and I know your heart. I have not been in love with a lie, I know who I fell in love with, and I have never thought you to be anyone but who you really are. When I accepted my falling for you, I knew that I was prepared for every part of you – and you were open to everything in me as well.

Contrary to you, I am a violent person. And you accepted me through it as well.

You are not a bad person, as you seem to think yourself to be.

Keep your eyes on me, know that I'm worse than you think yourself to be. Find comfort in knowing that I'm a worse person than you'll ever be, no matter what happens.

From your partner, even through our darkest moments,

Regulus Black.

PS: I'm scared of a lot of things as well, so don't worry. First of all, I'm scared of my father when he's drunk. I'm scared of the weight that my father puts on intimacy, and the fact that I know next to nothing about sex. And while I'm not afraid of it, I'm not a huge fan of dogs as well, so we can just not stay close to dogs together from now on.

Luna slept with the letter over her heart, and she did not cry to fall asleep.

Euphemia walked into the bedroom to wake her up and decided to let her sleep through lunch the next day but left a deep plate of soup with a warming spell on the coffee table on her bedroom. Still, it was only half-eaten when she walked into the bedroom again to check on her.

Some letters and the relationship between the Lupin siblings shedding some more light in Luna's life. Are we understanding her a bit better now? I hope so. I remember when I first said that I made her life worse than it needed to be - this is one of the very reasons I said so. I'm sorry for Luna, but this was decided much before I started posting this. 

I'm waiting for my moment to do my driving test now, my classes are done. Now it's just the internships and uni classes to make my life difficult at the moment.