Chapter 29.5- Doom Days

It wanted me to have it, to put it to use, to draw out its potential.

“Good. I have some ideas. Harry, do you think we could design the best duelling training room the world has ever seen?” He asked, drawing me into their conversation again.

“Depends. Nothing can really compare to the place, you know?” By the place, I meant the Room of Requirement but advertising its existence to someone who didn’t know wasn’t high on my list of priorities and I tried to convey that to Sirius with my eyes alone.

“That’s fair. But I think I’ll manage to make do”

“A duelling room, Mr Black. I did not know you had aspirations of one day competing on the circuit” If there was ever a competition for which sentences changed the shape of history, then that one would have been a top contender. There was an instant light in Sirius’ eyes that would not bode well for the duelling circuit, or even the world at large.

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The atmosphere in the train station was a muted one as families said tearful goodbyes and children were ushered to join their mates with more reluctance than I’d ever seen. I did not care for this at all, but even with how little I cared for rules, I couldn’t just be publicly seen flouting them for long. The consequences would have to arrive at some point, and I’d rather not face said consequences for skipping a train ride of all things.

And so that was why I kept a straight face and walked past the crowd, careful not to draw undue attention to myself, but also unwilling to hide and skulk about like a common rogue. Time spent in Greece had given me the space to do some thinking about how I handled things, and I realised how stupid I had been. It was just my luck that the newspapers weren’t already calling for my imprisonment in Azkaban.

People were always going to be curious and I knew how to manage and deal with that curiosity in my first life. The key was to give them enough that they didn’t care to look for more. That was the exact opposite of what I was doing here. By basically becoming a complete shut-in, I’d made sure that the only news that spread about me was negative. Negative stories sold better as a basic fact, and since I was being uncooperative, the media had all the justification they felt they needed to just more or less make things up and peddle them to the public.

No more. This was to be the first of many ways I repaired what I had broken.