Post by Sabine Montgomery on May 25, 2009 21:17:15 GMT -5
(WHEN SHE'S ALL ALONE)
IT FEELS LIKE IT'S ALL COMING DOWN
It was about noon, and most of the students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry were inside, enjoying their lunch. The usual sampling of excellent food washed down by pumpkin juice had probably appeared on all of the tables by now. She wouldn't know. Sabine had stayed behind at the end of Care of Magical Creatures to wash her hands. It was one of those classes that she hated to have right before lunch. Everyone's minds were on their stomachs and they knew they had a long trek back to the castle when the class was done, so towards the end some people could get careless. It wasn't intentional, they just wanted to get up to their food. One of her friends in the class had been handling their bowtruckle roughly, trying to shove it down into the trough in their haste to get to lunch. She had realized that something bad was going to happen, one of those moments where everything seemed to slow down. Some called it intuition, she called it being observant.
The point was, she had realized that the bowtruckle was about to fight back, and had snatched it up, intending to drop it back in the trough before it attempted to gouge any eyeballs out, when it grabbed her. She still had thin purple marks on her thumb where the creature had gotten a grip. The twig-men had looked harmless when they first approached. When it grabbed her, the idea that they had very strong fingers despite looking like passing breezes could snap them didn't seem silly at all. The professor had sorted things out, getting the bowtruckle off of her thumb as the class laughed while they watched. She supposed it must have looked fairly amusing when she was waving her hand in the air in an attempt to shake it off. Didn't mean she was any happier about being laughed at. She'd stayed behind to wash the small cut it had given her, not wanting to add 'small wound getting infected' to the list of things that had gone wrong today. She had somehow managed to give her hedgehog a bonnet when they were supposed to be turning them into tea cozies in Transfigruation.
But as embarrassing as all that had been, things could still be worse. Linette hadn't tried to set anything on fire as far as she'd seen, no one had tried to drown Polly in the lake (it could happen), Iris hadn't punched anyone, Madga hadn't made fun of her for becoming a prefect for their year, and Tabitha hadn't been making as much fun of her as she normally did. It had rained last night, leaving patches of mud in various spots on the front lawn, one of which she had just stepped in. Her left shoe and sock were now slightly muddy, but things could still be worse. She'd just have to miss lunch to change her socks, so she wouldn't go through the rest of the day with her shoe squelching and risk some sort of foot disease. Plenty of people went without eating lunch, and there would be dinner later. No problem.
The castle was still a ways off from where she stood. Sabine looked up at the overcast sky, still cloudy from last night's rain. She wasn't going to get there by wishing. She sighed, pulled her heavy book bag up on her shoulder, and began to trudge towards the castle again, pausing every few steps to shake her left foot off in the hopes that the mud would just fall away. It didn't. She continued that way until, halfway between the edge of the forest where class was held and the front doors of the castle, "Huh?" She reached up and wiped a drop of water from her nose. Must just be water that had collected on leaves of a tree last night and was still falling down. Water, from a tree...the nearest of which was about twenty feet away...yeah, that was definitely it.
Another drop fell on her hand, then another landed on her bag, trailing along the waterproof leather. "Oh perfect," she sighed. It looked like the rain was back, and in a moment it was coming down in proverbial buckets. Damn it all. She did her best to hustle it to the front doors of the castle and get out of the rain, sliding in patches of mud and seriously envying everyone who was warm and dry in the Great Hall. She was sopping wet when she finally took a tumble when she slipped. Her long hair, usually framing her face with a light curl, was plastered to her head and her bag had landed several inches away in the mud. Maybe optimism isn't my thing, she mused, wiping mud from her cheek. Well, at least no one was here to see her fall on her face in the mud. She could freeze to death with some dignity. Wait - that was more optimism. She groaned and reached for her fallen bag. It really couldn't get much worse at this point though.
--
tag; allee! ^_^
notes; i had to write this twice
because chrome crashed and it's
stupid. (but ff can't keep up with my
typing speed, so it's stupid too >>)
