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The next time he sees her, she is in the spotlight.
It's fitting, all of it; how every eye in the Hufflepuff common room is drawn to her, the glinting gold accents of her jewelry reflecting little beams of light as she spins around on the spot, the glow of her smile burning brighter than Regulus imagines the sun can. He never makes a point to look right at it, and he thinks, as he watches Lyra, that this is something of the same.
The only difference is that the sun burns you when you're too close. Lyra only showers you with warmth, and there's no such thing as getting too close to her, apparently. Nobody has gotten more than an arm's length all night.
But not just in the physical way. Since their shared detention, since she read him to filth without missing a beat, since she dug into his deepest soul and unearthed things he hadn't even told his closest friends—since all of that, Regulus has had Lyra on the mind. He couldn't help it. She was a parasite in his head, something he couldn't get rid of no matter how hard he tried. She had snaked her way into his thoughts and poisoned him with her glowing eyes and quick tongue.
He'd tried tracking her down. Well, not her, literally, but the idea of Lyra North. Who she is within Hogwarts walls and out of them. Why he hasn't known her all these years.
But what he gathered, from all his sleuthing: Lyra is a ghost. She's something of an anomaly. Nobody—not even those she shares a dorm with, her roommates of six and a half years now—know her past her exterior. She's the same way she had been with Regulus; a whisper in the wind lost over the rush of a stream, or the shred of dandelion that is carried away and forgotten.
Lyra is forgotten once you've done with her, people say. You walk away from the conversation and think how kind she is, how easy to talk to; and then you find yourself wondering what you learned from that conversation. What the point of it was.
You find yourself giving up your secrets to her, and you walk away empty-handed. She walks away with her pockets full.
This intrigued Regulus, admittedly. He'd tried letting it go originally, doing his best to forget about her like apparently everyone else is able to do so easily once they leave her, but she was there every time he closed his eyes. Burned into his eyes like fire. He couldn't lose her no matter how hard he tried—and that was swift to replace his intrigue as unabashed frustration.
"So nobody... knows her?" he'd asked Pandora just this morning, two days after his original detention. Two days of Lyra on his mind, nonstop and torturous. "How does that work?"
Pandora hummed her assent to his first question, sitting cross-legged in the courtyard, back against the corridor wall Regulus was sitting on. The cold never bothers Pandora, and it always bothers Reg, so ages ago they reached an easy conclusion for him to be able to stay in the warmth of the charmed hallways and for her to be able to enjoy the winter's snow.
