The Boy With Black Eyes

Mellifluous

Vesper returned to her late, her feathers glossy, eyes bright, even behind the scaring in her eye. Melissa welcomed her owl with a soft treat, which she preferred, and a few moments of cuddling as she opened the letter from her friend across the Atlantic. 

It was a nothing letter, one of those update letters that just kept the channels of communication open to the pair of them. It had been written in stages, she could tell, as a rather large and rather good doodle of a pair of black roses took up the corner hunk of parchment. It ended with an affirmation to meet her in Hogsmeade again, this coming weekend, at the same table, at the same time. Vesper took the letter and tugged it out of Melissa's fingers, wanted to be petted with both hands, have all the attention. 

A soft little hoot had Melissa carefully smoothing out fluffy feathers, sleeking down a few that stuck up from a long flight. Vesper cuddled close to her mistress, Turul flapping down from the chandelier to sit on Melissa's shoulder, watching the door and the window, perched carefully. Surrounded on all sides by her animals, knowing that her father and his girlfriend were safe, Melissa relaxed, slowly but surely, in a soft chair in front of the fire. 

She jerked awake when the first rays of sunlight struck her across the face. The morning had dawned crisp, cool and clear, with a sheen of half-melted ice crusting the first few layers of snow, everything sparkling and silver and gorgeous. The sunlight breaking through the periwinkle sky was beginning to dye the landscape in shades of copper and gold and sienna. Vesper hooted sleepily as Melissa moved her from her lap to the velour of the chair seat, Turul having moved at some point in the night to the lower left-hand post of her four-poster. There were a few errands she had to run before ducking into The Three Broomsticks for eleven thirty, and one would involve her getting cold and miserable. 

After a quick breakfast in the Great Hall, a few peices of fruit and a half-serving of eggs, she hurried back up the stairs to bundle up to face the cold. Her winter coat went on, as well as the calf-hugging winter boots, a hand-knitted scarf and hat that matched in the same obnoxious shade of cyan blue. Back down the stairs, following the excited babble of people that wanted to go to the village just beyond the castle grounds. 

Before she followed them down the well, trodden path to Hogsmeade, Melissa strayed onto the path less travelled, one that wound its way down to Hagrid's hut on the edge of the Forbidden Forest. 

Later in the day, the groundskeeper discovered a wreathe of white tulips on the forest edge of what was going to be his pumpkin patch later in the year. Something was jogged, in the back of his memory, something about tulips and that particular hunk of soil being fruitful for a long stretch of time before turning to a barren area about four feet across.  The lumbering hulk of a man shrugged, and left the flowers there. They weren't bothering nobody. 

**********

She was early again, and instead of drinking herself sick on cider, she frayed the thin rope-like string that kept the package she'd picked up from the post office tied shut. The extra long men's scarf in an colour of green-pewter so dark it was almost black, had to be special ordered from the Gladrag's Headquarters in Paris. After some digging for his name in the stacks of Hogwarts records, Melissa discovered that an Augustus Littlewood had been a Slytherin Prefect more than ten years ago. Apparently he was legendary for finding the Gryffindor prefects shirking their duties, and knew the dark tunnels in the dungeons really well, as many Gryffindor detentions mentioned being found by Mr. Littlewood. However, his name only appeared in the records after the Sorting of what should have been his fourth year, alongside names she recognized. Weasely, Malfoy, Goyle, Potter, Granger, Longbottom. 

She had not dug deeper, as she realized how incredibly creepy it was to be looking up someone's entire life based around their name and their name alone. She continued to fray the strings of the package, turning the neat little loops into a tangled fluff ball. The clock behind the bar continued to tick down the time to when he was supposed to meet her here, at the couple's table by the window, where she watched what seemed like an outrageous amount of couples wander back and forth through the streets. Everyone was holding hands with somebody else, all sorts giggling and nearly tripping over themselves to get into Madam Pudifoot's.