This Time, Last Time (A Harry Potter Universe Fanfiction)

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Nostalgia reigns over reason to change,

What we know, what we've always known.

-"Don't Know Me," Natalie Holmes

---

June 2018

James strolled into the hospital wing after his last class ended. The castle, with the window hangings drawn back and the sun shining in, seemed unusually bright that day. It gave him a new spring in his step. Of course, he attributed his good mood too other factors, too. Most importantly, he had finished trying to jam information into the impenetrable heads of hormone-ridden tweens leaving him free for two entire months. All that remained of the school year was to sit in silence in his classroom a few hours at a time until exams were through. He had come to understand, in his tenure as a teacher, why schools did not run into the summer. He really enjoyed his job, and even believed himself good at it (kind of), but that two month reprieve felt even more necessary now that it ever had as a student.

James found Raigan sitting at her desk halfway down the infirmary, opposite the currently empty row of stark, white cots. She had piled the surface of the desk so high with papers and filing folders that he could barely see her beyond them.

"Hey, Rai," he said, perching on the one corner of her desk that was relatively free of papers.

She looked up at him, glasses perched on the bridge of her nose, framing her round brown eyes. She'd tied back her brown hair in a sloppy ponytail, all sorts of loops and bumps on the top of her head. The combination of the hair and the glasses, which she rarely wore anymore, made him think of when they'd been in school and she had been the only girl he could stand to spend time with without trying to make a move. They'd been friends twenty three years now and he'd only kissed her once, but that, they both agreed, had been a mistake and they never spoke of it.

"Hey," she said, looking down again. She dragged her finger along a list of something or other, stopping three quarters of the way down. She tapped the line with her wand and it highlighted in bright yellow.

James waited patiently while she continued to turn pages, occasionally highlighting something or jotting down notes in the margins. He watched her some of the time, but mostly he looked out the open window on the other side of the ward. The breeze kept blowing the blind forward and back and the plastic piece on the end of the pull cord made a dull clack every few seconds when it hit the wall. Among the many things James had always loved about Hogwarts, the fact that the view from every window was nothing short of glorious topped his list. Certainly he felt partial to the mountainscape view of his Ravenclaw tower's great, tall windows, but the point was, you couldn't make a bad choice if you were looking for a scenic view for a little contemplation.

This time of year, this kind of air, it always made him a little nostalgic. He'd not been a student now for - though he hated to admit it - closer to twenty years than fifteen, but the end of the school year still felt the same. He'd had the urge for a few days now to pull out the old photo albums, maybe show Piper. She'd seen them all, but she always got a kick out of it. Especially all the embarrassing pictures of James' mop of black hair, always too long and getting his eyes. He used to shake it out of his face all the time and Raigan would make fun of him for acting like a dog, but secretly he'd thought - at the time - that it made him look cool.

Raigan closed the manila file folder she'd been working on and set it on top of a pile to her left. "This is a nightmare this year," she said, slumping down in the wooden swivel chair she sat in.