LUNAR (A Harry Potter Universe Fanfiction)

Twenty Eight. First Draft.

Evelyn sat across from Sean at the kitchen table. Her heart was pounding. It had felt easy, obvious even, to hug him while he cried in her room, to say they should come back here and talk. It was considerably less easy to know how to begin a conversation that was long overdue, not just belated the week since they had fought and she had left, but for the last half a year.

Sean's eyes were puffy and he still sniffled every few seconds. She had never seen him like this and it made her feel odd, equal parts unsettled and relieved.

"I don't know where to start," he said finally. His voice was thick with ghost tears. "I don't know how to fix this."

Evelyn raked her fingers through her hair, scraping it all over to one side of her head. She looked away from him. She couldn't stop thinking how long it had been since they had had a real conversation of any kind, even an inconsequential one. The "talking" they had done in the last six months barely resembled a conversation.

She felt like she didn't know him anymore.

"Just tell me about your job," she said.

Though she hadn't looked back at him yet, she could feel his reluctance and hesitation to talk about it, could feel that he was gearing up to make some excuse like he had every time she'd tried to talk to him for months.

"I need to understand," she told him. "I need to know how it got this bad." She turned to him now and when they made eye contact, Sean seemed momentarily frozen.

For almost a whole minute, he stared at her with his mouth hovering open, taking these slow, but somehow shallow breaths that only seemed to fill the top of his chest. Then he began to talk. He told her all about how he'd come to get the job through an acquaintance of his father. He told her how it had seemed like a perfect opportunity, a better starting job than most new Hogwarts graduates could ever dream of. He told her how he had been so lost in the first few weeks and no one had offered to help show him what he was supposed to be doing, how his boss had been a world class jerk who purposely put him in situations to make him look stupid, who created schemes that would force Sean to "mess up." How his idea of a joke has been making gross and degrading comments about women. He told her how the seemingly endless hours he'd worked were his attempt to keep above water, to avoid going into yet another meeting to be humiliated. He told her how no one in the office took him seriously, how his boss called him Champ all the time and had made him regret every minute of the Triwizard Tournament, made it feel like some stupid kid game he was overly invested in still.

He told her how the only thing that sometimes got him through the day was when Jenny found an excuse to pop by and they could complain together about the mundanities of office life after seven exciting years at Hogwarts, but how he had never fully opened up to her about just how bad a place he was in, because her perfectly normal entry level position as a secretary (which she had received proper training for as part of her onboarding) was nowhere near the stress level he was experiencing every day. He told her how he had been afraid to complain to Evelyn at first, because she was so worried about finding a job at all and he had this new career that seemed so great on paper. He was afraid of telling her for fear it would get back to his dad who'd gotten him the job in the first place and then he'd look ungrateful at best, or worse, like he wasn't cut out for it which would make his dad look bad to the acquaintance who'd given Sean his in.

He told her how he'd been afraid of admitting to anyone that it was hard, that he needed help, that he didn't know what the hell he was doing any of the time, and not in the overly dramatized way he had sometimes panicked about the tournament, but for real.

He told her how he had been unprepared and naive, and he had been taken advantage of. He had been teased and belittled and used. He had been set up for failure and made to feel so ashamed of himself for not knowing what he was doing that he had cut himself off from the people who might have been able to put some perspective on the situation, or at least who might have recognized that he needed to get out of there much sooner than he had.