Big Boy Bites (Brooke)

Guest

(TW: Swearing, duh)
It was a weird and unusual feeling, being held to a set schedule and itinerary for eight years and having it vanish all of a sudden into a single moment. All of the learning and writing and dueling and tomfoolery had built themselves as steps in a staircase on the way from his childhood into his future. The possibilities were now limitless.

What bullshit that was! Joshua would be damned if sitting in lessons for almost a decade would become the key to all of these new adventures he was to have in life. The only new opportunity he had now was the opportunity to tell people that he had a big boy education. Why, he now stood at the entrance of Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlour with a dickish grin on his face, waiting for his first victim.

A Hufflepuff girl, a year or so younger than he, walked past on her way to whatever normal person things she'd planned to do that day. Joshua grabbed her arm (gently, of course) and he brought his face close to hers.

"Wanna know something, blondie?" He asked, not that it was a question.

"Blondie?" The girl scoffed.

Joshua nodded. "Like one of those brownies, y'know. Blondies? Your hair isn't quite brunette but you're also not fully blonde, so therefore you're like the blondie brownie of hair colours." The girl's eyes grew wide. This had not been the explanation she'd expected.

"But that's not what I wanted to tell you," He said. Joshua's eyes narrowed, as if it was her fault that he'd been interrupted.
"I," he started. "Am now a fully educated man."

The girl scoffed and walked away.
Laughing, Joshua opened the door to the ice cream parlour and walked to the counter.

"Chocolate chip cherry ice cream with walnuts, bananas, peanut butter, and chocolate jimmies." The counter man all but held his disgust back into his throat. But Joshua was a big boy, so he could order anything he wanted.

"Jimmies," the counter man repeated.

"Sprinkles." Joshua rolled his eyes. Did nobody here know what jimmies were?

Once in custody of his ice cream, Joshua went to sit beside a girl he noticed a few tables from the counter; a brunette. She seemed familiar, but not familiar enough to a point where he'd know her name.

"Mind if I sit here?" He asked. "Well of course you don't. I'm a fully educated big boy now."

Guest

The start of summer holidays meant freedom to be with family and by herself without the pressure of school, not that there was much pressure. She'd gone back for the last couple weeks of term just to get back into the whole swing of things; she'd go back to the fourth year when term next started, to redo what she had missed. Her letting out of school had been celebrated with a trip to Diagon Alley, where she spent half the morning alone picking out some new books for both her and her daughter while Colby moaned about her and her inability to choose.

As the afternoon drew near, Brooke left Colby, who'd bumped into a group of his friends, insisting she'd be fine by herself, and went to get an ice cream. The next term was to be his final term, and the idea of him graduating was odd. She was so use to sitting on the couch of their common room with him or seeking him out when she had a particularly nasty nightmare. In just one year, she wouldn't have that comfort of knowing he was there. Still, hopefully, in a year's time, she wouldn't need that anymore.

One could always hope, after all.

Her purchases on the chair beside her, she started on her ice cream, a single scoop of strawberry. She was still thinking of Ceyal and their conversation. Perhaps it was typically Gryffindor of her, but she desperately wanted to help him find his sister. He wasn't a close friend, and she had indeed just officially met him, but it had always been a problem with her -- wanting to help people. She was that way before the incident, and besides the depressive period, she was still that way after.

Her mind was pulled out of figuring out how they could find one girl amongst millions (the number suddenly seemed so large and impossible to work with, despite what she'd said to him) when someone sat opposite her. She startled a little, looking up with just a little alarm in her eyes, free hand moving towards her wand. It was stupid, but whenever a male voice startled her, the panic started to rise, and she fought against it for a few seconds, forcing herself to breathe and return her hand to the table.

She recognised the male before her as a Hufflepuff. Or rather, ex-Hufflepuff; he'd been a seventh year, so that would mean he was graduated, right? It was then she remembered he'd asked her a question, and she flashed him a smile. It was somewhat wooden as the panic still lingered, but it was a smile nevertheless.

"Sure!" she replied, genuinely. "I could always use the company." She paused, then added, "I'm Brooke, by the way. You're... I'm sorry, I don't think I know it. You're graduated though, right?"

Guest

Almost immediately, Joshua wrote off the girl before him as being plain and predictable. He was not foolish enough to assume that this girl did not have some baggage to deal with, but whatever it was she hid it well behind shopping bags and strawberry ice cream. And that was the next thing; strawberry ice cream. What person in their right mind would order strawberry ice cream? Strawberry was the flavour that people avoided in a tub of Neopolitan.

"Tsk tsk," Joshua said, shaking his head in exaggeration. No context came with this out of place gesture and he quickly moved on in his train of thought.

As soon as the girl agreed to his company, Joshua smiled. He hadn't expected her to say no, but it would still have been rude to not show some sign of gratitude. She had given up the peace and quiet of her afternoon, after all.

"Why thank you, kind lady." he smiled.

The girl introduced herself as Brooke. The name sounded familiar to him. Flashes of information coursed through his mind like a database of Hogwarts gossip had infiltrated his thought-waves.

Brooke. There'd been a girl named Brooke who had disappeared for a year or so, having to retake a full year of classes due to the absence. There had been a million different ideas of where she'd gone or what had happened. Perhaps the truth had been in one of those rumours, but it was the principle of the grapevine that nobody ever knew what was true.

The most popular rumour he remembered hearing was that she'd gotten pregnant and chosen to keep the child. If that'd been true, he wondered why a teenager would ever choose such a thing. How could a teenager choose such a thing? He could barely choose what colour socks he wanted to wear to the gym on Tuesday.

Every part of him wanted to ask her if she was the Brooke of the grapevine, but even Joshua knew that it wasn't his place.

Instead, he simply extended a hand and said, "A pleasure, Brooke. The name's Joshua Abbott; Hufflepuff alumni as of a month or so ago. The time really seems to fade once you don't have to pay attention to it anymore, eh? Honestly, it could be Christmas of next October and I'd have no idea."

He paused for a brief moment only to gesture towards the bags near her seat.
"Function or pleasure?" He questioned.

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