Morning encounters

It was the begging of the weekend early in the morning. Stephen had strangely woken up early that Saturday and there was no way for him to fall asleep again. Just a couple of minutes more would have been nice considering it was weekend but his brain didn't really allow him to.

Getting up he got himself ready for the day and headed out of the dormitory without being noticed by any of the other boys for they were still fast asleep at that hour. Exhibitionists... He crossed the empty common room, the ghostly corridors and the moving stairs trying to avoid certain steps and staircases from prior knowledge that it wasn't so pleasant to be stuck anywhere at this time of the day and finally reaching the Great Hall. He didn't long much there; only taking time enough to grab a few toasts and cookies and taking some bites randomly on what he had taken, he headed out.

Wandering around for a while, Stephen ended up in the courtyard. It was a rather nice day and he decided to hang there until he decided what he was going to do that day. Stephen chose a bench somewhere in the corner under the shade of a tree and sat there. He placed a napkin there and above it the rest of the toasts he was still carrying. Once in a while he picked one up randomly eating them in between the cookies.

When he was finished with them he took the napkin cleaning the extras of butter from his fingers and leaned back against the back of the bench. It was usual for him to carry around any books, either studying or story books. That morning he only had the story book we was currently reading, a Muggle by chance for his mother had a bunch of them back at home and Stephen thought them to be rather funny to read, especially the fantasy ones since it had taken the writer a greater deal of imagination to write about something they have never seen. Stephen looked for the marker and opened the book in the page he was reading. It didn't take long to find the paragraph where he had stopped and continued from there occasionally grabbing a cookie to bite.

Time went by and students started coming out to the corridors and the courtyard but Stephen didn't mind them being used not to be talked to by any of them.

Gretel was still trying to settle in at Hogwarts, and she knew she needed to flesh out her social circle. Even if she was being selective about the inner circle, she knew that being known and liked by more people was going to serve her in the long term. She was relatively unknown still, and while she didn't want to be notorious, she certainly didn't want to disappear. As much as her mother and aunt might want that for her.

She was up early, as usual, because she was a disciplined young woman. Breakfast was light and early, she slipped upstairs to finish up a letter before sending it off, and then she took her private stroll through the castle. The idea was to know the castle forwards and backwards and still play the lost innocent lamb. It had worked so far.

As she made her way outside, she began to withdraw her journal, planning to find a spot to sit, when she saw a boy she recognized as her age. How fortune smiled on her.

She approached him. "Excuse me," she said, her Russian accent weighing down the syllables. "May I sit here with you? It seems to be the sunniest spot."

**

Being completely taken by the plot at that part of the book, his surrounding became foreigner to him as his world became that motion picture that took over his brain as the words was as hastily eaten as the cookies he still had left on his pocket. Even the burst of morning breeze and the smell from the cookies as well as the plants that made that foreign environment were strange and almost unreal.

Stephen was finally swept back to the real world when he heard someone calling him. He looked from the book and up to the caller seeing a girl who seemed to share the age with him, more or less. Slowly the picture of a dragon stopped in his mind being frozen and slightly faded as that world was slowly left.

"Of course" Stephen claimed and took his feet off the bench. How did they get there anyway? When had he started sitting like this? He seriously had no clue but he moved to a normal human sitting position. "It is rather nice out here, yes" he nodded. He usually sucked at starting conversations and the fact that he was talking about the weather kind of proved that.