A/N: Well, I know I said it when I first posted this story, but this is the first thing I've had up in a while and I'm still a bit iffy about if I'm doing well on it. There have been some really nice reviews, but...not many. This story HAS gotten some followers, and to everyone who is following it, thank you! It means I'm doing something right. Still, it'd be great if you new followers could leave some feedback. I might not reply to everyone, because a lot of the time I post as soon as I finish writing and then I have to up and go do something else immediately, but I really appreciate any kind of review on the story, so if you guys could just leave those...well, I'd appreciate it a ton. And now on to our regularly scheduled fanfic.

Luckily, when Ever walked into the owlery, the boy was facing away from her. The trimmings of his robes matched hers—red and gold—but that didn't mean anything; he could easily be a prefect, or a tattle-tale, somebody hoping to get in a teacher's good books and have her in trouble in an instant, and she felt her heart catch in her throat as she stumbled backwards. A quick glance at the map told her his name—Oliver Wood? She'd heard that name before, but she couldn't remember where—and before she could creep back the way she came, he had turned around and was staring right at her.

"Oh—hello," he stammered, and Ever couldn't help relaxing a bit; the boy was obviously as surprised to see her as she was to see him. "Er...got a letter to send, then?" he asked, nodding to the map in her hand. She glanced at it, biting down on her lip, before tucking it into her pocket and withdrawing the letter.

"Yeah, but um...those were just directions to get to the owlery," she fibbed, feeling a bit guilty as she did so. Wood seemed like a nice enough guy—he wasn't running to turn her in, anyway—but she couldn't just tell her the secret of the map...that was for the four of them. "I got a prefect to write them down earlier, 'cause I've never been up here before and my memory for directions is dreadful, you see, and I got a bit lost so that's why I'm up so late..." She was babbling, she realized, and managed to cut herself off, nibbling on her thumbnail. "Sorry. I'm Ever."

"Oliver," he said easily, turning back to the owl in front of him and struggling to knot the tie on the bird's outstretched leg. She walked up beside him and found another bird, coaxing it down. It blinked at her, rather indignantly, before swooping down to rest in front of her and ruffling it's feathers. The boy beside her chuckled, and she glanced up at him as she started tying her note to it's leg. "The birds here don't like to be rattled later than they're used to," he explained, finally getting his letter tied on and leaning back on the window sill as the owl took off to deliver it. "I know owls are usually, well, night owls, but these have been trained to be up during the day so students aren't up here past curfew."

"Except you," Ever observed, biting back a smile as her own bird took off. She hopped up to sit on the window sill beside him, kicking her feet idly.

"Well," he mumbled, ruffling his hair. "Quidditch practice ran a bit late, and my mum goes mad if she doesn't have a letter every Tuesday morning—she's liable to come down to the school herself just to check on me—so I had to come up and send it tonight so it'd be there with the morning post."

"You play quidditch?" Automatically, she was interested. The first years had their first flight lesson scheduled for the following afternoon after lunch with a woman called Madame Hooch, and Charlie had informed her that, while the instructor was nice enough, the woman took no nonsense...and she hadn't really heard anything about quidditch, other than the conversation with Angelina and Alicia outside of Transfiguration on the first day of term. "What's it like, flying?"

"Oh, it's like anything else, really." Oliver shrugged, folding his arms over his chest, and she noticed that, now that the conversation was on something that the boy was interested in, he seemed much more confident and at ease. "Y'know how the muggles have that saying, it's like riding a bicycle, you never forget?"

"Yeah..."

"It's a bit like that. Once you get on a broom you don't forget how flying feels. It's quite a bit different from a bicycle though." He grinned, his eyes—green, they were, a sort of pale green that was quite lovely—crinkling up around the corners. "It's like, you take off and at first everything but your stomach leaves the ground. Eventually it catches up a bit, but the faster you fly the more you feel like it's being left behind. It doesn't come back until you hit the ground for more than five minutes, and then you're likely to lose your lunch if you're not used to it, but it's a great feeling once you are. Well," he said, shooting another little grin in her direction, "it is for some people. You're a first-year, aren't you? Haven't had flying lessons yet?"

"They start tomorrow," Ever murmured, feeling a bit more nervous about the prospect than she had previously. "Is it really so bad?"

"Nah, you just get a bit nervous. I would suggest eating a light lunch." She nodded, tucking her feet underneath her and feeling the cold concrete bite into her bare ankles. There was a lull for a moment, both of them lost in their own thoughts, before she managed to jerk herself out of it.

"What position do you play?"

"What? Oh. Keeper." He stretched his arms over his head with a little yawn. "I would've been playing last year, except my mum wasn't ecstatic with my Transfiguration marks and she figured I'd better wait until they were up a bit." Ever grinned, and he rolled his eyes, smirking at her. "Yeah, yeah, very funny. They're up now, in any case, so I tried out and I made it. Charlie's a great quidditch captain too, he knows exactly what he's doing on the pitch—"

"Is it called a pitch, then? I thought it'd be a court, or a ring, or a course—" Oliver blinked at her, and she sighed. "Never mind. Is quidditch the only sport in the wizarding world, then?" He snorted, shaking his head.

"I figured you were muggle-born before, but now I know you've got to be," he said, and she scowled up at him. "Oi, it's not an insult! You've just come up with all these words I don't know, it's not a very hard deduction!" She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back against the window frame, cocking an eyebrow at him as she did so. "Right, well..." The boy sighed, tugging on his earlobe as he thought. "There's shuntbumps, where people try to knock the other players off their brooms—"

"But people could get hurt doing that!" Ever exclaimed, shocked; first there were the bludgers in quidditch, as if that wasn't awful enough, but now people knocked each other to the ground?

"Well, they could, and they did when it was a real sport, but now it's mostly a kid's game played on toy broomsticks and those only go about three feet up." Oliver shrugged, sliding his hands into the pockets of his robes. "Then there's a broom race in Sweden, they hold that every year, and there's swivenhodge, where you hit a ball back and forth over a hedge..."

"Like tennis."

"What's that?"

"It's a muggle sport," the girl began slowly, gauging his reaction; some wizards were avidly fascinated with muggle things, and some scoffed at them. He seemed to be somewhere between the two with politely interested. "You've got a net strung up across the court, which is rectangular, and rackets, and you hit a yellow ball about this big," and she demonstrated with her hands, "across the net, back and forth. If someone misses, or it goes out of bounds, like across the lines that are drawn out for the court, or if the ball bounces more than once, the other person gets a point."

"It's a bit like that, yeah." He nodded, rubbing at his eyes. "Only if the ball in swivenhodge hits the ground at all, it's a point, since it's meant to be played on brooms, and the ball is a bit smaller, more like..." He put his fingers together, and the only thing she could think of to compare the size to was a hackey sack. "And instead of rackets they use their hands."

"Well, maybe after I learn to fly we can play," said Ever, chewing on her bottom lip thoughtfully as she hopped from the windowsill. "But I better be getting back..."

"Yeah, me too," said Oliver quickly, pushing off from the ledge with a grin. "I'll walk you so you don't get lost again."

The walk back to the common room was cautious, with the two of them constantly on the lookout for anyone patrolling, but went by quickly and quietly, and eventually the two of them were clamoring through the portrait hole after a very stern look from the Fat Lady. Oliver said his goodbyes and quickly joined his friends, while Ever made her way toward the twins and Lee in their usual spot.

"What was that all about?" Fred asked as she sat down in her chair, passing the map back to him. Ever shrugged.

"Met him in the owlery and told him the map was instructions to get there and I was late because I'd gotten lost."

"Well, it wasn't exactly a lie," Lee pointed out, yawning. "You were following a map, after all."

"I hadn't exactly thought about it like that...but I guess you're right," said Ever, with a yawn as well. Within the next five minutes, all four of them were yawning, and with a quick joke about how yawns were meant to be contagious they headed up to their dormitories.