Accidents Happen
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Tatiana was sitting at a desk in the front of the empty classroom, her quill poised above a half-finished essay she ought to pass by tomorrow morning that already looked like a battlefield of ink blots and countless crossed-out sentences. She had been at it longer than she meant to, so long enough that the afternoon sun coming through the window had already shifted across the parchment, washing out half her notes.
Honestly, she didn't even know why she stayed behind in the first place. The assignment wasn't that impossible to begin with, it was just irritating, and she knew that she could've finished it back in the common room, too. But the common room meant noise, people chatting, and someone accidentally spilling something and today, she was not in a mood for that.
She tapped the end of her quill against the table, eyebrows knitting together as she tried to figure out what the paragraph she was reading meant. It wasn't that she hated the work, she just kept getting distracted. Her thoughts were drifting somewhere else whenever she tried to focus, and the fact that her notes were unreasonably messy and her handwriting so slanted it looked like it was trying to escape the page didn't help either.
Tatiana exhaled softly and pushed back a strand of hair that kept falling forward. She dipped her quill again, muttering under her breath as she scribbled a line. She paused for a moment, scribbled another, then frowned at the result. It looked even worse by then.
She leaned back against the wooden back of her chair, stretching her fingers and rolling her shoulders. The classroom was so quite that you could hear the faint scratch of her shoes against the wooden floor. Dust mites drifted lazily in the sunlight every now and then, and for a moment, Tatiana just watched them, letting her mind still. Maybe she'd like to redo the whole page, or maybe she wouldn't—but either way she wasn't sure.
She bent forward again, her quill resting in her hand, just starting to write when she heard the faintest creak near the hallway, the sound bouncing off the room's quiet walls. She didn't look up, just kept her quill hovering near the parchment, waiting to see what would happen next.
@Rafal Devereux
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