Closed Afternoon Shadows

[Freddie Lagowski]

Nobody had warned Freddie that big school would be so exhausting. Forget classes - even getting around the place required all his concentration, lest he take a wrong turn and find himself hopelessly lost in a maze of near-identical corridors. More than once he’d been looking for the Hufflepuff common room and found himself in some sort of overflow library. It didn’t help that the places he accidentally wandered into were often so interesting; by the time he remembered he was supposed to be elsewhere, he was already late.

The grounds were slightly easier to navigate. Freddie liked being outdoors - nobody ever asked him why he was loitering when he was outdoors, or told him he was in the way. He was still trying to adjust to the fact he’d almost completely skipped winter, and that he probably wouldn’t see much winter at all for the next seven years, but that was a happy thing to have to adjust to, on the whole.

As he passed the greenhouses, he took a left turn down toward the lake. He wasn’t looking for Audrey Beauchamp, but, well, he’d spotted her sitting by the water on his first circuit of the lawn, and he was kidding himself if he hadn’t spent most of the second circuit working up the courage to say hello. Just hello, of course. He wasn’t deluded enough to think the coolest girl in the school would want to hang out with a little kid like him. But there was something very exciting about the possibility of her smiling at him again, and so he kept walking, against his better judgement, toward the lakefront, hoping she would still be there, hoping she wouldn’t, and wondering if he was about to make a complete idiot of himself.

She was still there. Freddie lingered by the tree for a moment. The only thing more scary than the idea of saying hello was the idea of her turning around to see him lurking there, so he pulled himself together and emerged from his hiding spot. ”Hey,” he said, squinting a bit against the afternoon sun. He swung his arms, not quite sure what to do with them. “Whatcha doin’?”

 

[Audrey Beauchamp]

Audrey knew she'd look really foolish if her feeling about her animagus potential was off. But if she doubted herself, then surely Professor Pirrip would doubt her, and she'd be right back to square one. Going off of a feeling was not the strongest start, admittedly, but she had felt so at home in the water when she'd tried using gillyweed. More than she felt in the air, or possibly on the ground. That had to mean something, surely. She sat on the edge of the lake, kicking her feet just under the surface and humming a few notes to herself. Was this helping? No, probably not in the slightest. But she liked the idea that it was, so that was probably good enough.

"Hm?" Audrey was a little surprised to be disturbed, and supposed she should pretend she was doing some serious meditation or study and definitely not just getting distracted by the mental image of becoming a shark and scaring people for a good laugh. She turned to see the boy she'd spoken to at the start of the year feast, Freddie, and smiled. Not the smile of a shark, thankfully. "I'm planning on fishing up the giant golden eel and making it into a pie," she said very seriously, before giggling at her own comment. "Nah, it's too nice an afternoon to be inside, so here I am." She shrugged, wishing she'd brought some sunglasses. "How are you finding it so far? Haven't gotten stuck on any staircases?"

 

[Freddie Lagowski]

Giant eel? There was a giant eel? In the lake? Freddie allowed himself to smile, hesitantly. There was obviously a joke in there somewhere, but he didn't want to laugh before the serious part (if there was one) had ended. Better for him to look a bit stupid than for Audrey to think he was laughing at her. He could safely agree that it was a nice afternoon though, so he nodded. A bit cold when the wind blew, but the bright sun made everything feel warm, even if it wasn't.

He stopped swinging his hands and put them in his pockets. "Yeeaah," he said, in the non-committal tones of someone who hasn't decided how they feel yet, actually. "No, not on the staircase - but I did get stuck for ages behind a statue-door. It gave me the hardest riddle ever. Do you get it? It went, um… ‘One night, two wizards and a princess were on a boat. The boat crashes. The wizards jump off first, then the princess. Who jumps off after her?’” Freddie threw up his hands. It had clearly been plaguing him for some time. “There’s no-one else on the boat! He let me out after like an hour, because I was late for Herbology, but I still don’t get it.”