Time Gone But No Longer Lost

Date: 05/25/25

The air in the spring was fresh, the sort that held only a hint of summer with it. Warm enough to straighten out the kink in your shoulders, but not warm enough that you would want shade. Mikey had spent hours in the library, rewriting supposedly, but really he had read the same sentence so many times than he'd actually memorized it. Finally, the walls were closing in on him so he gathered up his books and thought that a turn around the courtyard might help to clear his head.

The cobblestones were sun warmed, and the students' voices poured in from all directions. Some playing games of chess, others lying in the grass with shoes off. He took it all in, until his eyes landed on a familiar figure seated beside one of the stone benches. He knew that girl. Piper the girl he got lost with back in the first few months of school.

She was curled up in the corner of the bench with a book perched on her knees, her shoulders relaxed that way people do when they're reading an extra interesting page. They'd last spoken in October, when they'd both been between lessons and ended up at Defense Against the Dark Arts by some stroke of luck. Since then. just nods as they went past, perhaps a wave on the odd occasion. Life did have a tendency to go through months you weren't even noticing.

Mikey didn’t want to intrude, but then she looked up, and there was an instant of eye contact. He smiled and waved with a little gesture before proceeding. "Hi," he said, walking to stand alongside the bench. "Can I join you? Been, what. eons since we last talked? Figured I'd check in with you about your year before summer sweeps us all away."

He put down his bag and sat at the far end of the bench, leaving her plenty of room to continue reading if she desired. "The last time we actually talked, we were lost," he grinned. "So… did you ever get to the bottom of the Hogwarts maze, or are you still just banking on good old-fashioned luck?