Lost (Part 1) || Drabble
Seeing Sawyer like that, seeing Carey anything less than her usual bubbly self, being around a load of people, most of whom he barely knew, to mourn a girl he hadn’t known at all: it had all been too much. By the time Finn left he was exhausted, but the last place he wanted to go was home, where there was the much too close a reminder of someone else whose death he might soon be grieving. He apparated to London, but not Kensington. He barely paid attention to where he was as he wandered into the heart of the city, surrounded by bustling crowds with no care for whatever sorrows might weigh on Finn’s chest, and the thought made him feel lighter. His thoughts held no meaning here, amid Saturday shoppers, and so they could drift away.
He didn’t even realise that he had been subconsciously keeping an eye out for the girl he had been looking for over two weeks until he caught himself staring at the blonde girl through the crowd. He shook his head. There was little chance of it being Heidi. Three weeks, they had said, was much too long for a child to be missing and still be found, and today was three weeks exactly. Still, when the girl turned her head, Finn was sure she was the same girl whose picture he had been handing out to random passers-by ever since Dirk had told him of his cousin’s disappearance. His heart was in his throat as he moved closer. He didn’t have the picture on him, but that was her, wasn’t it? He was almost certain, but the thought of making a mistake and approaching a child who was in no way lost made him pause. She turned so that he could now only see her back, moving down the street away from where he stood, but Finn’s eyes continued to follow her. The woman the crowds had now moved to reveal next to her was clearly with her, and though Finn couldn’t see much besides her red hair, he assumed she must just be her mother, her sister, some relation. Only wishful thinking, and her being on the back of his mind having just come from the wake of another friend’s cousin, was to blame for his seeing her features in this girl.
And yet, his feet walked him in the same direction as they headed. He made sure not to get too close, but he kept them in sight all the same. It was as if he had stopped thinking, although his brain was on overdrive. As he got closer, his eyes focused on the small blonde figure, he became increasingly more suspicious that his gut instinct may have been right. Maybe this was her. Maybe it was his best friend’s cousin now walking into the shop. He stopped, hovering even though she was now out of sight, in the doors he hadn’t walked through. But a teenage boy entering a girls’ clothes shop alone would be more suspicious than not, wouldn’t it? Finn bit his lip. Did he really want to go in on the off-chance he was right when the odds were stacked against that theory?
