Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, etc through 64th cycle. Now cycle 65!

"One Day You Were Lost"
10yo Mike & Tina
Chang Squared series
(all series now listed under the communities tab in my profile)

He'd been looking forward to this day all week. As much as he would say that he liked his classes, the idea of a field trip was ten times better than to sit there and do math. Most of the school was coming on this trip, which had meant several buses, chaperones, and instructions. And still, despite all that, someone had managed to get lost. He'd become aware of it when he spotted one of their group's chaperones walking by and counting heads, with a concerned look on her face like she knew it wouldn't come to the right number. Then she would check her list, look at their faces, and finally it was confirmed.

"Has anyone seen Tina?" the woman called out to them, and everyone would either shake their heads or shrug.

They had continued on with their tour with the other chaperone, while the woman went looking for Tina. They wouldn't see either of them until they got back to the buses, and there Mike had seen the woman, with a sad-looking Tina by her side. When they got on the bus, he felt so bad for her, he'd told his friends he would sit elsewhere and, after they'd passed, he stopped at her seat.

"Can I sit with you?" he asked. She looked up at him, confused.

"Sure, I guess," she wiped at her face. He sat down just as the bus pulled away and started on the road.

"What happened to you?" She stared at him, almost too ashamed to say. "I won't tell anyone if you don't want me to," he assured her.

"I got… distracted," she finally admitted.

"Distracted?"

"There was a bird, up in a tree, and it was beautiful," she went on. "I stopped and I stood there and looked at it, and then when I turned around… the group was gone. I tried to find it again, but I couldn't. So I stopped, like my mother said to do."

"Mine says the same thing," he tried to cheer her up. The success was only minimal, and he almost couldn't stand it. So he tried to find something else to say. "You want to know what happened the rest of the time?" he offered. She looked at him, thinking, and he took this at first as her not wanting it. "Or I don't have to, I mean…"

"What happened?" she finally asked, and he sat up, thinking back.

"Well… Oh!" he remembered. "Noah climbed one of the trees," he told her. She looked at him, like she wasn't sure how interesting that could be. "Miss Diaz freaked out, she was calling to him like 'come down, Mr. Puckerman, come down!' he imitated the teacher's nasal voice, and it got a laugh out of Tina, while he looked around to make sure the teacher hadn't heard them.

"Did he come down?" Tina asked, still smiling.

"Not at first. I think he was pretending that he couldn't hear. He kept going up until he got to the top, and then he came down. He got down to the last branches and then he kind of let go, like he fell." Tina looked shocked, and Mike shook his head. "He was okay, but he pretended like it was hurt so Miss Diaz wouldn't punish him and she'd just be scared. Don't tell anyone, okay?"

"I won't," she swore. "What else happened?"

"When we got to the lake, there was a man there and he talked about the fish and the other animals from around there. We got this thing," he reached into his bag and dug out a colorful pamphlet before handing it to her. Tina flipped through the pages, reading out a bit of what it said as she went. "You can keep it if you want," he told her.

"But it's yours…"

"I don't mind," he shrugged. It was probably going to be there at the bottom of his bag for weeks and weeks until the end of the school year, when his mother would always clean out his backpack and find things he'd forgotten were there. If Tina could get more use out of it than him then she should have it.

"Thank you," she smiled, looking back at the pamphlet.

"Want to hear what happened after?" he asked, and she nodded anxiously. "Rachel Berry fell in the lake." Tina gasped, turning her head to search out the brunette girl. She spotted her, long hair still wet and pout still on.

"How'd that happen?"

"I think someone told her she'd be too scared to touch anything in there. There were frogs near one side, and she tried to get close enough to pick up one of them. Should have seen her face," he put on a frightened sort of face, making Tina laugh again. "The second her hand got on the frog, it croaked, she screeched, and then she fell with a huge splash," he mimed, and Tina's laughter grew stronger, drawing a few eyes. "Miss Diaz went to get her out, she was freaking out," he laughed along.

"Miss Diaz or Rachel?" Tina asked.

"Both," Mike nodded. "It's too bad you missed it," he said, and he wished he hadn't said it when he saw the sad look show itself again. "But… you have a story, too," he pointed out. "Even if it wasn't funny."

"Yeah… I saw a bird and I got lost. It's not a big story."

"I thought it was okay," he told her with a reassuring smile, and it got him a smile back from her.

"I think… I saw a nest up there," she provided to her own story. "I would have climbed up, but I didn't want to scare the mom bird away."

"That's cool," he beamed. "How many eggs do you think there would be?"

They would spend the rest of the trip talking about the nest, and the possible eggs, possible birds. Tina wasn't sad at all.

THE END

A/N: This is a one-shot ficlet, which means that signing up for story alert will not bring you any alerts.
In the event of a sequel, the story will be separate from this one. And as chapter stories go, they are
always clearly indicated as such [ex: "Days 204-210" in the summary] Thank you!