Who: Mary MacDonald and OPEN Where: The Owlery When: October second, after classes What: Mary's having Thinky Broody Time that needs to be interrupted.
Mary had never spent a lot of time in the school's owlery; letters to her family at home had never been written frequently, as expressing herself with the written word hadn't ever come naturally to the Gryffindor, and while she loved animals, birds weren't her first choice- she'd spent much more of her free time over the years hanging around the pens where the specimens for Care of Magical Creatures were kept. Those were off limits now, however, and Mary needed...something. The simple comforting straight-forwardness of creatures that weren't human. Owls would do; and so the young girl was perched, cross-legged, on the floor of the Owlery tower, eyes closed and head leaned back against the base of one of the cages, the rustling and occasional cooing or hooting of the birds around her lulling the girl to a relaxation she rarely felt anymore. It wasn't complete- for one thing, she couldn't stop thinking about the dead girl and, more relevantly, her own dead, the mother she missed terribly. For another, being alone in a place other than her own bed was always a risky notion, Mary knew that; underneath her relative relaxation, she was listening hard for the least sounds of human approach, ready to grab her wand and scramble to her feet. Which was why her eyes snapped open immediately and her whole body tensed when someone came in.