Coup de Foudre [Fred Weasley] [7]

⚡️ Chapter 12 ⚡️

Phineas Nigellus was evidently spending the night in the headmaster's study at Hogwarts.

Vega and Harry continued up the stairs until they reached the topmost landing where there were only two doors. The one facing them bore a nameplate reading Sirius.

Neither of them had entered this bedroom before. Vega watched as Harry pushed open the door and she held up her wand to light it up, looking inside.

The room was spacious and must once have been handsome.

There was a large bed with a carved wooden headboard, a tall window obscured by long velvet curtains and a chandelier thickly coated in dust with candle scrubs still resting in its sockets, solid wax banging in frost-like drips.

A fine film of dust covered the pictures on the walls and the bed's headboard; a spider's web stretched between the chandelier and the top of the large wooden wardrobe, and as Harry moved deeper into the room, Vega head a scurrying of disturbed mice.

The teenage Sirius had plastered the walls with so many posters and pictures that little of the wall's silvery-grey silk was visible. Vega could only assume that Sirius's parents had been unable to remove the Permanent Sticking Charm that kept them on the wall because he was sure they would not have appreciated their eldest son's taste in decoration.

Sirius seemed to have long gone out of his way to annoy his parents.

There were several large Gryffindor banners, faded scarlet and gold just to underline his difference from all the rest of the Slytherin family. There were many pictures of Muggle motorcycles, and also (Vega had to admire Sirius's nerve) several posters of bikini-clad Muggle girls.

Vega could tell that they were Muggles because they remained quite stationary within their pictures, faded smiles and glazed eyes frozen on the paper.

This was in contrast the only Wizarding photograph on the walls which was a picture of four Hogwarts students standing arm in arm, laughing at the camera.

"Harry, look..." Vega spoke, pointing at the picture.

Harry immediately moved forward to look at it and Vega followed behind him to have a look, too.

At once, Vega recognised Harry's father, as he looked identical to Harry, his untidy black hair stuck up at the back like Harry's, and he too wore glasses.

Beside him was Sirius, carelessly handsome, his slightly arrogant face so much younger and happier than Vega had ever seen it alive. And it was now, seeing him in this version, that Vega realised why she was sometimes compared to Sirius – they looked alike.

To Sirius's right stood Pettigrew, more than a head shorter, plump and watery-eyed, flushed with pleasure at his inclusion in this coolest of gangs, with the much-admired rebels that James and Sirius had been.

On James's left was Lupin, even then a little shabby-looking, but he had the same air of delighted surprise at finding himself liked and included or was it simply because Vega knew how it had been, that she saw these things in the picture.

"Can't you get it off somehow?" Harry asked he tried to take the picture off from the wall but it would not budge. "Any spell?"

"I'm not sure," Vega replied. "If it wasn't brought off for so long..."

"It's okay," Harry said.

The sky outside was growing brightest. A shaft of light revealed bits of paper, books, and small objects scattered over the carpet. Evidently Sirius's bedroom had been reached too, although its contents seemed to have been judged mostly, if not entirely, worthless.