"That fucker; on the first night!" Regulus fumed as he paced in front of his bed the afternoon after Sirius's startling revelation.

Evan and Rabastan, who were sitting on the floor deeply involved in a game of gobstones, both seemed unimpressed.

"I thought there would be, you know, time allotted for wooing a girl. Yesterday I made some good headway with Morgana Eppinet, but he must have just propositioned that girl out of the blue, and to have her agree to it..."

"Would you shut up?" said Rabastan through gritted teeth.

"Honestly, Reg, if you paid half as much attention to girls as you did to being jealous of your brother, maybe you wouldn't be having this problem," Evan said mildly.

"I am not jealous," Regulus said and nodded his head firmly. Evan looked up from the game to stare at him with one half-cocked eyebrow, but Regulus broke the gaze hastily. "But other than that, you're absolutely right." He stopped pacing. "I'm going to go find Morgana."

Evan waved him away, and Rabastan grunted, and neither of them so much as turned as he strode purposefully out the door.

It didn't take him long. When Regulus thought Ravenclaw, he thought library, and and sure enough there she was, writing fluidly as she glanced back and forth between an open book and a roll of parchment on the table in front of her when he found her.

He had been worried he would have trouble coming up with the words, that he wouldn't have the bravado, but he looked at her, with her long blond hair and translucent eyelashes shading round, babydoll eyes, and he didn't feel butterflies in his stomach or a lump in his throat. Surprisingly, he found it easy to sit down beside her and strike up a conversation. She seemed all too eager to be interrupted in her studies, and if she had been waiting for him (though he couldn't imagine why she would choose to wait for him in the library). He was deaf to their conversation, but she seemed to be enjoying herself. She kept tossing her hair over her shoulder, so it caught the filtered, dusty sunlight, and she laughed with a wide-open mouth, rows of teeth somewhat too small, and her spine was straight as a pin, her chest pushed forward. He found his hand on her thigh under the table, under her robes and skirt, and after Madam Pince shot them an evil glare and told them to be quiet for the third time, Morgana grabbed his hand and suggested they go to the Ravenclaw dormitories to continue.

"Won't I not be able to get up to your dorm?"

Morgana smiled and shook her head, little hands wrapping around his to lead him. "The founders thought studious boys wouldn't be forward enough to try to get into the girls' rooms." And then she leaned over and whispered, lips brushing the shell of his ear, "I don't think they counted on ambitious Slytherin types sneaking in."

Regulus couldn't believe how easy it had been. All he'd had to do was show up and let Morgana take the lead. The next day she looked exceptionally proud of herself and whenever she saw him, she smiled and tossed her hair. He wondered if she'd told her friends, and whether that would hurt his chances with the other Ravenclaw girls. He thought he wouldn't be too bothered if it did, most of them were rather mousy in one way or another. Still, he wouldn't want Sirius to have an unfair advantage and reckoned the best way to insure a positive review from Morgana Eppinet was to be as polite as possible, so he returned her smiles as best he could.

Even with all this to worry about, Regulus was sure it was worth it when he announced to Sirius that they were all tied up, and the scrambled eggs on his fork had fallen right off onto his lap.

Sirius hadn't believed it. His fork had frozen midair, and Regulus had smirked triumphantly and infuriatingly before turning and swaggering away.

He'd thought Regulus had been bluffing at first, but Peter, who was dating one of those mousy Ravenclaw girls, had confirmed the horror. Morgana Eppinet had told Camille Levine, who had told everyone who would listen about it. In fact, Sirius had been close to the last person in the school to hear.

Now, in Gryffindor Tower, he was agonizing about it, and his friends weren't helping.

"I can't believe you just, in essence, helped your little brother lose his virginity," Peter said, looking at Sirius with a mystified expression on his face as he lounged across his bed, chin in his hands.

"We don't know he had sex with her!" Sirius snapped, pacing anxiously.

"We don't know he was a virgin beforehand, either," supplied Remus, lying on his back on the floor, staring thoughtfully at the ceiling.

"Not helping, Moony." Sirius glared at him pointedly.

"Not trying to, Padfoot."

"He's a virgin, he has to be. He would have told me if he weren't."

"I think if they'd had sex that would've been mentioned in the gossip," James said reasonably, clearly the only one of the three of them concerned with Sirius's tenuous sanity.

For a moment, Sirius looked considerably brighter, but then Peter popped in with, "Well, Professor Isaacs told us to be quiet before Anne could finish telling the story. She might've been getting to it."

Sirius flared again. "What exactly did Anne say?" he asked, his voice deceptively calm.

Peter's brows knitted in concentration and his mouth hung open. "Well..." he began, "she said... Well, she said Camille said Morgana said she'd brought Regulus to the dorms last night. And then that... Well, you know, the entire chain said how Regulus did something really nice with his tongue, but Anne didn't mention where Morgana said he did it..." Peter reported all of this with a perfectly straight face while Sirius's grew redder and redder and Remus didn't even bother trying to stifle his laughter.

"People are talking about my brother's tongue. This is neither acceptable nor funny. Moony." Sirius wheeled on Remus, who was enjoying himself too much to be wary of his friend's ire.

"I bet you're wishing you'd listened to me right about now," he said, smugly.

"What?"

"What could go wrong? I'll just win some money and humiliate my little brother. It's a foolproof plan." Remus's imitation was uncanny, really, which only served to incense Sirius all the more.

"I - this - what-" His face was growing a startling shade of red. Peter and James looked on with fascinated trepidation, and even Remus had stopped laughing quite so hard.

The next Hogsmeade weekend, Regulus was determined to capitalize on the relative freedom afforded to them and the perfect date setting to rack up some quick and easy points. Hogsmeade would be a mission in quantity rather than quality, which somehow seemed like cheating to him, but these were extenuating circumstances, and he couldn't afford to be picky about girls. If he had to snog some of those mousy Ravenclaw girls, then so be it. Better them than the Hufflepuffs, anyway.

So, he'd already had Morgana Eppinet, easily the best looking of them. What was left was Camille Levine, Celia Lewis, and Anne Locksley, in his year, and he wanted to work through as many girls his own age before he had to start resorting to fifth years, as sexually manipulating fifteen-year-olds seemed a little despicable even to him. They'd be a last resort.

Right now, he was standing outside Zonko's, lost in thought, when he noticed tall, gangly Celia coming out of Honeydukes alone. He glanced around surreptitiously - looking for what, he didn't know, he'd already shaken Rabastan and Evan, giving them some shady excuse that, judging by Rabastan's eye-roll, they'd seen through immediately - and, satisfied that the coast was clear, hurried after her.

She hadn't seen him yet, which was good, because halfway up to her, he realized that hadn't exchanged any words with her since last year in Divination when he had predicted she would die a lonely old spinster surrounded by diseased cats. He doubted that was a statement conducive to building a good rapport with a girl.

So, what could he do to convince her that he'd changed? Matured. That he was a wholesome young man who respected and appreciated her as a person and other nonsense? He didn't get the chance to waste too much energy on his admittedly difficult quandary because Celia slipped on an icy patch in the road and fell flat, her Honeydukes bag flipping over and sweets spilling across the street.

Regulus saw his opportunity and took it. "Oi, are you okay?" he called, jogging to her, trying to appear nonchalant and concerned at once, which was a tricky combination of expression and body language to pull off.

"Y-yes," she stammered, looking up at him, her cheeks red with either chill or embarrassment.

Regulus got down on his knees in front of her and began gathering her sweets back into the bright red bag. She seemed stunned into silence (probably at the sight of Regulus Black doing something apparently considerate for someone else), so he kept talking. "That looked like a pretty nasty fall there, you sure you're all right?" He dropped the last holiday-striped piece of chocolate into the bag and handed it back to her.

She laughed nervously. "I'm okay. My backside'll be a bit sore."

He laughed in what he hoped was a warm, friendly-sounding way and stood up, offering her his hand.

She hesitated for the briefest of moments before accepting it and letting him pull her to her feet. "Thank you."

"You're welcome. It's Celia, isn't it?"

"Yeah."

"I'm Regulus."

The tip of her nose turned even brighter red. "I know."

Well, of course she did. "Are you sure you're okay?" He didn't really know what else to say to her. Sadly, he hadn't thought to memorize their History of Magic textbook, and he couldn't imagine what else Ravenclaws liked to talk about. He was trying to call to mind all of the various uses of wormwood to introduce as a topic of conversation when he realized she was halfway through a sentence.

"...might go to the hospital wing when we get back to school, but I'm sure I'll be fine. So... Thanks for your help and all." She shifted her bag back and forth between her hands and didn't quite meet his eyes.

"Say, I was just about to nip down to the Three Broomsticks for a butterbeer, but my friends are all off on dates... or, er... other things-" the idea of Rabastan or Evan on a date with a girl was simply too ridiculous, and precisely what other things they might be doing remained a mystery, "-so, would you like to join me?" He glanced around to make sure no one was watching.

"Are you..." She knotted her brow and squinted her eyes slightly. "Do you want to ask me about Morgana or something? Because if that's it, I don't know anything about her business, and I don't want to know, and if you ask me, she is-"

"Celia! I'm not interested in Morgana, honestly," he said, surprised by her sudden breathless onslaught. "I just thought, since I'm alone, and you're alone, we could just get a friendly drink, so we wouldn't have to be er... alone." Though now he was feeling a little uncertain about the time commitment involved with this potentially crazy bird.

"Oh. Okay, well sure." She brightened up again, brushing her pin-straight fringe out of her eyes, and smiling.

"Right, then," he said, turning warily and-the effort might've killed him-offering her his arm. "We don't want you falling again, do we?" he asked, smiling in what he hoped was a warm way that intimated he was only fondly teasing.

She laughed nervously and wrapped her mittened hand around his upper arm. God, if Evan and Rabastan saw him, he might as well go find a rock to reside under for the remainder of his years at Hogwarts.

Luckily, they made it to the Three Broomsticks without encountering anyone whose opinion he cared about, and once inside, the gently swinging torchlight about their table did interesting things for Celia's otherwise plain, flat face.

He bought her a butterbeer and a basket of chips, and even complimented her scarf, which he reckoned entitled him to at least a little tongue action, but Celia was even shyer than he'd counted on, and he could barely say anything without her blushing awkwardly and stuttering out something monosyllabic and mundane. In fact, the most animated she got was when she saw one of her friends, at which time she would wave madly and mouth things at them that he was perfectly aware were about him. He wasn't sure whether it was anything to do with him in particular or just that she was out with any boy. Well, it couldn't hurt that it was with him, he was sure.

He pushed his hand through his thick black hair and tried to reassure himself that in the end, this would be easy, and over soon. Just think about the scoreboard, he told himself. 2-1. Fuck you, Sirius. When he won, as he was sure to, it would be better than winning a thousand quidditch championships.

When he saw Evan and Rabastan push their way in the door, he was reminded that it was a sure thing only so long as Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum were prevented from interfering, and decided to act quickly.

"Well, gee," he said, quickly draining his butterbeer and scooping up the few remaining chips at the bottom of the basket. "Look at the time. I've got a Potions essay that I just have to work on, what do you say we head back to the castle?"

"But, we don't have a Potions essay this week."

"Right, well. I didn't turn mine in last week, so you can see why I really have to work on it."

"Oh, okay," she said, cocking her head to the side, clearly unsure what he was on about.

He spun his head the other way when Evan glanced in their direction, trying to look as though he was fascinated by something happening out the window. When he finally hazarded a glance back over his shoulder and reassured himself that Evan and Rabastan were now fully occupied harassing Madam Rosmerta for firewhisky, Celia was giving him a bewildered and inexplicably embarrassed look.

"Right, just... There was a-anyway, let's go." He grabbed her hand and nearly dragged her to her feet and out the door, tossing a handful of coins on the table as he went and throwing her coat over her shoulders.

That close call left him feeling flustered, and as Celia was clearly no good at conversation in even the best of circumstances, their walk to the castle was a silent one. Luckily, he saved it from being a total wash halfway back, when he had the wherewithal to grab her mittened hand and squeeze it affectionately. That had to count for something, anyway. A quarter, maybe half a point?

As they walked across the thick carpet of snow, he looked over at her. She was staring studiously (or so it seemed to him) ahead, and in profile her chin looked nonexistent, and he didn't think it was possible for her nose to be any redder. But she did have nice big eyes and thick eyelashes and her mouth was small and bow-shaped. He could do worse, really, if only he could get her to interact with him in any way.

"Celia," he said, stopping in his tracks and pulling on her hand. She turned back to him, lips parted in surprise and he stepped forward and kissed her. He was mortified that he had to tilt hishead up to do so, but it was only a slight incline.

Her lips didn't move at all under his, and though he would have liked to prolong the moment and open the discussion in the direction of going somewhere private (and maybe getting some third base action), he couldn't just keep trying to put his tongue in her mouth if she wasn't going to give him any feedback. So he pulled away, only to find that he'd been wrong before: her nose could and had gotten much redder.

This, in turn, perturbed him, and he could feel the back of his own neck going red, though that was due in large part to rage. "Sorry," he said.

"Oh, don't be! I mean-I'm sorry, I-I-oh, fuck it all." And then she grabbed the sides of his face and planted her lips on his. He toppled over and they feel in the snow, where they remained until they were alerted by a group of fourth years giggling as they trundled past.