explain yourself || barty & regulus
Since the beginning of his fifth year, after his lessons for the day were completed Barty would almost always occupy the same secluded corner of the common room to study for the OWLs and complete his astronomical amount of homework. Anyone who disturbed him better have had a good reason to. Barty was sitting in his typical corner, surrounded by a small library of books. He was attempting to simultaneously write three essays, all of which were due in the morning. He also had a few extra books that he thought may contain useful information about the forest. He was struggling with explaining why muggles had multiple forms of communication. If a telephone existed, why would they still have mail service? He still needed to include information about news communication as well… Barty sighed and glanced up. The common room had a few people mulling about. Giving up on Muggle Studies for the moment, Barty switched over to his half complete potions essay.
The next time he looked up was because Regulus had somehow fallen. His essays were completed, but he still had twelve arithmancy problems to complete. Judging by the state of the common room, it was quite late. It was only him and Reg. Barty hadn’t even noticed he was in there with him. “You alright?” Barty asked from across the room with a laugh and a small smirk. It disappeared immediately when Barty got a good look at Reg. It was replaced with a small look of concern. Reg looked like shit, to put it frankly. Barty couldn’t remember seeing him looking much worse. It was painfully easy lately for them to exist in the same house without seeing much of each other. Has he looked like this for a while? “What’s wrong?” Barty asked, putting his books into piles but not looking away from his friend for long. “Something’s up. You like sleep too much to still be up.” A lucky guess, as Barty had no idea what time it was.
Regulus heard Barty’s laughter and he grimaced as he pushed himself up off the floor, brushing off his pants as he did. Of course Barty was still in the common room, he certainly wasn’t surprised. The other always seemed to be up late. Regulus didn’t know how he could stand it, sleep was such a beautiful thing and for the love of Merlin, he just wished he could go to sleep. But he supposed that Barty being up to laugh at him was better than no one being up and him being left to his own thoughts. He glanced over at Barty, forcing a smile when he saw the other lose his smirk. Did he really look that bad? He knew that the bags under were getting darker by the day and some first years had been giggling about how he looked like a zombie. He supposed he was looking bad.
He just shook his head at Barty though. “Nothing, nothing, I’m fine,” He lied, picking up the book that had also hit the floor with him. “I’m just catching up on some reading is all,” He murmured, moving to sit down on the couch instead of the arm of it. Regulus knew that he couldn’t really like to Barty but he certainly wasn’t going to tell him the truth.
