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Brooding Stare

"Happy birthdaaay!"

Kate grinned, throwing her arms open to greet her late arriving friends, but stopped on spot suddenly, squinting.

"Thank you...Parvati Patel?" she tilted her head, teasing.

"It's Hermione, for God's sake!" her friend, Jess, impatiently replied, shooting her boyfriend a glare, who shifted guiltily, "why has everyone been thinking I've been cosplaying as someone else the whole damned day?"

"Well," Kate kept a straight face, "perhaps because she's one of the few Indian characters in the book..."

"What!" Jess shrieked, whipping her long, dyed strawberry blond hair over her shoulder to glare fully at Mark, "Why didn't you tell me there was an Indian in Harry Potter? I could have gone as her instead!"

Kate tried not to laugh. She was well aware that Hermione was, absolutely, Mark's first love, and the idea of watching his girlfriend cosplay as her had been his lifelong dream.

Not that Kate hadn't gone with him to his countless conventions dressed as Hermione time and again--he was her childhood friend, and her one time boyfriend as well--but with Jess, he had finally found true love, and she knew he couldn't have resisted putting her in the costume. Jess, who hadn't read even a single book in the series, had gone along with it only after being assured profusely by both Mark and Kate that cosplaying was 'sexy'.

"Anyways, you're late." Kate said, grinning at her friends who were hissing furiously at each other. Mark quickly hurried to her, pulling her in a hug, no doubt to avoid the disagreement, and dislodged his red wig slightly.

"Happy birthday, Kity Kat! Here, we got you a full set of action figures as a gift!" he said enthusiastically.

"Thanks..." Kate trailed off, deciding not to remind Mark that she already had a stash somewhere in her old house--being his friend as a child had done that.

Jess was looking around the elaborate birthday party, starting to look gloomy. "Look at how everyone's dressed." She moaned, "Dresses and heels...and there's us--"she shot Mark a glare--"surely we could have gone to some other convention when it wasn't our mutual best friend's birthday? In, oh, the most luxurious hotel in the city?"

Kate rolled her eyes at them, letting them have at their bickering. No one who knew Mark and Jess as well as she did would ever suspect that the two of them could be good for each other--in fact, she hadn't suspected it either, until she had walked in on them in the apartment she shared with Jess, going at it like animals.

Mark, her best friend from school, hadn't seemed to age since high school, and still looked the laidback type that hadn't fit with the nerds nor the jock, with ruffled dark hair and understatedly handsome features and a deep passion for reading a good book. It was difficult to pin him in a type--he had always been the sort of person who could hang out with anyone, affable and easy going, and Kate considered herself extremely lucky that he had chosen to spend all of his time with her instead.

Kate had discovered Jess due to proximity more than mutual interests--they were in the same college and shared a few classes, but hadn't really spoken until they had answered the same ad for a rental apartment. Kate had been slightly doubtful about the ditzy Jess, with her dramatic good looks and knack for always being the center of attention after being the spoiled only daughter of am aging Indian couple. However, a few days into moving in, she knew she had made the right choice. Under all that superficial facade, Jess was a fiercely loyal friend.

Mark had come to visit Kate in her new apartment for their regular favorite movie marathons, and he had left with his glasses askew and a decidedly ruffled look to him after Jess's constant interruptions, muttering in Kate's ears, "Your roommate is nuts."