The house was quiet.

Sirius and Liz were watching Manda. Manda was trying not to cry and yell and scream. Harry was awkwardly sitting at the top of the stairs with the other kids in the house. George was tapping his foot quietly against the carpeted floor, waiting for some sort of noise to indicate how everything was going in the closed off living room. He wanted more than anything to be able to be in there and make sure that she was okay but he knew better than anyone that this was a conversation that she needed to get through by herself. He would just be more than ready to be by her side the second that she needed him.

"So who are we counting in this family?" Manda asked quietly, her hair turning a dark blue as she avoided eye contact with her parents. She knew everyone else was on the other side of that door listening in but right now she didn't care. Everything that she had feared was being confirmed.

Sirius and Liz shared a look before they turned their attention back to Manda. Sirius let out a shaky breath. "You, us, Noah, maybe Remus if he wanted, and Harry. He needs a family. Someone who actually cares about him and that would be us."

"Fine. Whatever, it's not like I get a choice in the matter," Manda pointed out and ran a hand through her hair. There was no point in her arguing this. She was the child. She didn't get a say in these things. "Can I just ask something that's been bothering me though?"

"Of course. What is it?" Liz asked her daughter with a slight frown on her face. To say that she was worried about her daughter was a little bit of an understatement.

No one really knew what was going through Manda's head right now. George barely even knew. Honestly, Manda only knew that she was hurt. That she was completely and utterly hurt by pretty much everything that was going on. The only other thing that she could possibly think of was that she was sick of always having to prove herself to everybody around her. To prove that maybe she didn't have to be the second choice.

"If Harry hadn't been in trouble, would you ever have bothered to try and find me?" She asked them, raising her eyebrow. "Or to break out of Azkaban to find me?"

Again, there was that awful silence.

It was starting to get painful. Whenever Liz and Sirius had imagined their lives after graduation, they had never imagined that their home would be filled with silence. They had always imagined laughter and happiness and their friends popping in and out whenever they had the chance. They had never imagined that their house would be filled with silence. That out of the four people that they had expected to visit, two of them were dead, one of them was a traitor and the fourth was even more unhappy than he had ever been. It was meant to be the three of them against the world but now it was just Liz and Sirius with Remus sometimes a part of the picture. Then again, they had also never imagined that they would be living in Grimmauld place but instead in the house that Sirius had built for them near Hogsmeade when they'd found out Liz was pregnant.

But things didn't work out that way so they were left with the silence.

Sirius sighed and ran a hand through his hair, looking over at his daughter. "No. No, I probably wouldn't have," he admitted.

Manda's hair turned black, the darkest shade of black that anyone had ever seen her have. Sirius went to say more but Manda didn't want to hear it so she cut him off. "Okay... well then I guess you'll be happy to know that you won't have to put up with me much longer because I leave at the end of the week to stay with the Zabinis for the rest of the holidays."

She got up and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear as she fled the room, pushing past the kids on the stairs and slamming her bedroom door shut behind her.

This time there wasn't silence.

All you could hear was Manda sobbing in her room and everyone quietly talking in the kitchen. Everyone but George.

George was sat outside Manda's bedroom door. He would be there as long as he needed to be. Whether it was that she asked for him or that she decided to leave her, he would be there for her when she was ready to be around someone else. He listened to her try to muffle her sobs with what he was assuming was a pillow. He listened to her pace as she tried to get her breath back and calm down. He listened to her grab a suitcase from her wardrobe and start to pack it. He listened to her sniffles as she locked the suitcase and stashed it under her bed.

He knew her too well to know that it was way too soon for him to go in. She needed to feel in control, like she actually had a say in something. Him just going straight in would ruin that for her.

George knew that better than anyone else.

Then again, George knew her better than anyone else anyway.