i don't wanna keep on hoping (forget what i had in mind) : // robin

Wasn't really a day for the books.

... (No pun intended.)

The sun was shining outside, though, and while Emily usually preferred a rather dreary landscape, the occasional dose of vitamin D could be a good little boost. Pick me up. What have you. So were new books, on an even higher note. Most of them weren't for her personal pleasure, but she'd picked up some material for the shop from some pretty naive sellers in Hogsmeade. She usually had decent luck with that here -- in London or Dublin or anywhere faintly more metropolitan it was a little more difficult to trick the booksellers into basically giving rare tomes to her that were priced heinously low for their value. Emily thanked her lucky stars, few of them as there were, that she'd mastered that art after several years. Her employees always did a good job, but they were employees -- and not the owner -- of the store for a reason. She supposed that could be construed as a rather pompous opinion by other people, but it didn't matter.

Eximius didn't have too many visitors in terms of volume -- it wasn't for everybody, because everybody couldn't be interested in intellect and culture. The population was skewed the way it was because the percentage of really capable, intelligent people on the earth was dismally low. Thus, it was no surprise when people hadn't heard of it -- but the few regular customers it had kept the money coming in. There were still enough people on the planet who could appreciate ancient rarities.

She sipped on a mostly-champagne-less-orange-juice mimosa lazily while she thought about all of this, clear plastic straw, having been gently chewed on, hanging idly out of the corner of her mouth.  Her sneakered feet were propped on the thick cast-iron wire tabletop, and she couldn't even feel the edge of the bistro table digging into the skin on her ankles. The subject of an intelligent elite was too enthralling to pay attention to external things like that. It was no surprise, then, that she visibly (and audibly) jumped when someone touched her back, some of the liquid she held leaping out of the glass it had been in onto her shirt.

"Well, shit." At least it hadn't been the books.

Emily popped up quickly, shoving the bookbag under her chair further out of the way and using the white napkin laying on the table, gently fluttering in the slight breeze, to wipe what she could off the front of her shirt. It didn't work very well, and most of the liquid had already made a nice orange, absorbed home on her clothing. Thankfully she'd remembered to wear a bra that day. She'd almost forgotten to greet the unprecedented source of the commotion, so she looked up dejectedly from her disaster of an outfit, forgetting for a minute that she had a wand for messes like this.

"Sorry. I promise, I'm totally lucid, I'm just a klutz."

( @Robin Byrne-Davidson )

Robin liked familiar. He wore the same clothes for years and years, he ate the same things every week. Sometimes it would even sink to the level of pure routine, doing certain things just because it was Saturday and not because he just felt like it. There was something in that that was comforting. For so many years, after all, he’d been kidding himself that he thrived in chaos because chaos was all he had. But he’d needed a direction, something stable, something dependable. Or maybe he was kidding himself now. He really had no idea. He wished there was somebody to just tell him what he was about because most of the time he didn’t have the slightest clue, besides that he hated this sort of introspection.

It was Sunday so he was here, but as he looked over his menu, he decided in some kind of fit of contrariness to get something he wouldn’t have. When the waitress came around he asked for a salad. It wasn’t often that Robin ate vegetables. Usually when he started feeling soft around the middle he’d just eat less junk until the mood passed; rarely would he sink to the level of ingesting anything he didn’t like. But it also wasn’t often that he started hanging around a woman who made all his juvenile habits feel embarrassing. Surely Fflur was the last person who’d judge him. But somehow, that knowledge didn’t help.

The distraction of the menu now gone, Robin found himself looking at the girl at the next table. She seemed familiar. A lot of people in Hogsmeade seemed familiar, of course, given the size of the community, but it didn’t frustrate Robin any less when he couldn’t place names to faces. When his food arrived he tried to distract himself again, but he’d already gotten too bothered for that. He abandoned his salad to get up and tap her shoulder.

She leapt about a foot when he touched her and it made him jump too. "Oh—damn—sorry!” he stammered, retracting his hand quickly and reaching for his wand. “Here, I’ve got that—sorry.” He cleaned her shirt off and tried to regain his bearings as she apologized. “No, my fault,” Robin said, smiling awkwardly. “I was just going to ask—“ He was realizing now that he was closer that she was younger than he thought, and he hoped she wouldn’t think he was being weird. “Tell me where I know you from?”

While usually quite icy in interactions with strangers, the situation was too funny not to laugh at. "It's quite alright." She assured the young man, who genuinely seemed apologetic for having caused such a chain reaction. "Right." Emily pursed her lips and nodded, tucking her thumbs awkwardly into her jeans pockets as she stood and looked at him. "I've got a wand. You'd think after being a witch for so many years, I'd remember, but muggleborn habits die hard, I suppose." And it was true. Emily liked manually cleaning her house, manually shelving books, manually doing... so many things. Manually writing, too. Doing things with her hands seemed to heal. They were talented hands, anyway, and she relied on her talents to determine her self-worth.

It was still strange to be able to say the word muggleborn out loud and to use it to claim her own identity. Times were changing, and for the better. She was pleased. The whole world could know her name and her brilliance as one package in the coming years, and it was something she looked forward to -- her real name being associated with her work. During the war, that hadn't been the case. Emily still wouldn't publish any fiction or poetry unless it was under a pseudonym, but, it was a start. Her bright yellow-green eyes surveyed him carefully, and the witch shifted her weight, listening to him stammer and stutter about. It was kind of endearing, actually. "I'm not sure. I've worked with a lot of people in the past," She told him, chewing on the corner of her lip before a little light in her head seemed to flicker on.

"Wait," Idly, she pointed toward him, narrowing her eyes as she spoke through her thought process. "Maybe I know you from school? I mean, from when I was in school," The Ravenclaw clarified, understanding because she possessed a pair of working eyeballs that he was a little older than she was. Not too old. Was there such a thing as too old where Emily was concerned? That was a hefty question she wasn't really prepared to address during such a casual encounter as this one. "My name is Emily. I frequented Hogsmeade alone pretty often when I was in school. Was a bit of a wreck. Didn't ever bother to condition my hair, didn't color it, wore baggy clothes, always had my nose in a book." She laughed, big smile lingering for just a second before she continued. "Ringing any bells? I think I recognize you. Tell me your name?"