May the Best Man Win |×| Fred Weasley | 1 |×|

×| FIFTY-TWO |×

THE NEXT WEEK OR SO CAME IN THE FORM OF QUICK PACED, CONTINUOUS CONUNDRUMS. And even still Evelyn felt the days drag on, as though there was something missing that time just could not move on without. There were moments when she wondered if the clock was still ticking, or if she'd be stuck like a Cornish pixie frozen in the air for the rest of her life, stuck with her thoughts whilst the rest of the world moved around her. It was like she'd spent her days in a haze, and from each day there was very little that had managed to make it past the wall of thoughts that surrounded her attention...

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When Tuesday arrived, it brought with it the first sign that something was going wrong.

Evelyn folded Fred's jumper and jeans neatly, and tucked them under her arm before heading downstairs so that she could return them to their owner. The royal blue and yellow sweater had been terribly difficult to part ways with - after wearing it all day, Evelyn found it must have been the most comfortable and warm thing she'd felt in her life. It smelled of sugar and cinnamon (and maybe a hint of bonfire smoke) and drooped around her shoulders like an ever present bear hug.

In more ways than one it reminded her of its owner.

But she really did need to return it.

And that would provide an excuse to talk to Fred.

So she packed it into a square and carried it with her down the stairs. She'd only made it half way to the ground floor before the warning sign showed:

A few steps in front of Evelyn, two young Slytherin girls began shrieking loudly as buckets of frogspawn and stink pellets tipped over their heads. At the bottom of the stairs, two boys stood laughing giddily as the green-robed girls pushed panickedly past them, the lids of frogspawn jars peeking out from their pockets.

Overall, there wasn't anything too out of place about that, apart from the fact that only one of the boys had flaming red hair, and the other a dark head of dreadlocks. George and Lee. And Fred was nowhere to be seen.

Evelyn caught George's eye and frowned. She received a shrug and an apologetic smile in return. It was extremely strange, she thought, that Fred was not part of this classic scene.

Perplexed and perturbed, Evelyn turned and returned to her dormitory. She pulled the jumper over her head and delved into thought. She could return it another day.

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Thursday started like any other of its kind, but it hadn't even reached lunchtime when Evelyn found her optimism quashed again.

The courtyard was bitterly cold, but Evelyn took no notice, wrapped up in Fred's jumper and a hundered layers of scarves. She noticed how her footsteps made crunches on the snow - the noise deafeningly loud in comparison to Margaux and Léonie's voices beside her. Whatever they were saying, Evelyn just nodded along with it. She'd been doing that a lot lately. Maybe it was some long lasting effect of getting blackout drunk that everybody forgot to tell her about.

Or maybe it was simply a symptom of missing somebody. There certainly had been a gaping hole inside of her for a few days now, although she wasn't certain who or what it belonged to, but least it wasn't there for Ethan, she knew that much was true.

Suddenly she was ripped from her thoughts by the sound of giggles and an 'aww.' Evelyn looked around to see that Léonie had been swept up into George's arm's, and Margaux was squealing excitedly to her right. Evelyn felt a smile settle on her face, realising that that was how romance was supposed to look like.