Welcome to Gaia! ::

[preview:]

Six hours later the portrait hole to the Gryffindor Common Room opened and I slipped inside.

“Where were you, Evans?” called a voice I knew too well the instant I set foot in the common room. I sighed. Who else, but James Potter, the boy I had exploded at earlier. He sounded more anxious than anything else, so I decided to face him and explain myself as calmly as possible.

“I was cooling down my temper,” I said shortly. I surprised myself with my own coolness. Apparently I was still quite mad at Potter.

“How?” burst out Potter. “And where?”

I tilted my head and thought for a moment. “I’m not exactly sure where I was; I’ve never been there before.” I admit I was being extremely vague, on purpose. I felt that he should be as vexed as he made me be.

A wave of satisfaction washed over me as I saw that Potter looked as exasperated as I had felt.

“I looked everywhere for you, Evans. Everywhere. I even —” Potter cut himself off, biting his lip nervously.

“Even what?” I asked, curious now.

“Even, er, went to Hogsmeade to look for you,” admitted Potter in a half-whisper.

To my intense curiosity, one of Potter’s mates, Peter Pettigrew, opened his mouth to say something, but Sirius Black, Potter’s best mate, trod on his foot. Now, I wondered as Pettigrew winced, what brought that on?

Realizing suddenly that Potter was looking apprehensively at me for a response, I hesitantly asked, “Why did you look for me in Hogsmeade?”

Potter let out a muffled sigh, of relief, I suppose. Then he shrugged and started rambling, “Well, you weren’t in the castle anywhere. I thought that maybe you had found one of the secret passageways to Hogsmeade. But you weren’t there either. You disappeared so completely that I started to worry that you had been attacked and died.” By this time, Potter had grown so agitated that he began to pace in front of me. I watched in dazed horror as he babbled on. “I thought that perhaps you had gone into the Forbidden Forest, so I g — ran around for ages looking for you in there. I asked Hagrid to look for you. I even asked Filch to look for you, but he just stared at me. I think he thought —”

I had raised my hand to stop the overflow of information, and he caught sight of that gesture and cut himself off mid-rant, to look at me expectantly for my explanation.

“Hang on. Back up Potter,” I said. “Of course I was in the castle.”

“But you weren’t,” insisted Potter. He is rather stubborn. “I looked everywhere for you.”

I held back a smile as a thought occurred to me. “Even the girls bathrooms?” I asked skeptically.

I expected him to start in surprise, or look guilty or ashamed that this had slipped his mind; I never expected him to nod firmly and say, “Of course I did.” I must have shown my shock and surprise, and perhaps the odd looks his friends gave him contributed, for he added, “Well, Myrtle helped me with the girls bathrooms.”

“Moaning Myrtle?” I asked weakly.

“Of course. She, kind of, fancies, er, Padfoot. It comes in handy sometimes,” replied Potter.

“Get to your point, Prongs,” encouraged Black. “Not everyone needs to know about who Myrtle fancies.”