Shadow Walks |h.p/h.g|

ch. 5

When Luna unlocked the door to their flat and opened it, using a softly spoken Alohamora, she was more than a little surprised to see Ron sitting morosely on the sofa. A glass of something sat on the coffee table, but the ice had melted completely, and the container itself was now ensconced in a puddle of its own making.

"Hi," she said in a composed voice, trying not to sound curious or astonished at his presence. Her eyes darted around the rest of the room. The flat seemed otherwise empty, and was now darkening, Ron having failed to rejuvenate the fire with his wand.

He grunted something that could have been construed as some sort of greeting.

"Where's Harry?" she asked.

"Back to work," he said succinctly, barely moving his mouth. Her expression modified then, sympathy creeping in to shadow the cornflower blue of her eyes.

"How are you?" she asked, gently emphasizing the pronoun. It was difficult enough to lose a job under any circumstances, much less ones that would be plastered over the front page of the Prophet.

"Not great," he responded, still keeping words to a minimum, and trying to sound disinterested.

"I wouldn't expect you to be. But - but I'm glad you're here," she managed, not really wanting the implied, but unsaid, instead of down at the pub tacked onto the end of her statement.

She set her satchel in the armchair that sat beneath the window, and moved into the kitchen, turning on lights with casual flicks of her wand as she went.

"Maybe Harry'll be back in time for all three of us to have dinner together. It's been a - "

"Somehow, I don't think he will - at least not until late. You know how - you know how he gets at this ... time of year." He sighed heavily. "He's in love with her, isn't he?" Luna looked at him over the counter that separated the two rooms, almost serenely, not looking a bit disconcerted with Ron's use of the present tense.

"Yes. He always has been, I think," she replied. "He just didn't realize it until..." Ron nodded despondently, neither of them bothering to add the slightly melodramatic until it was too late. It seemed to loom large in the room all the same, as if someone had spelled it out in enormous, glowing letters.

There was a long silence, broken sporadically by the rattle and clank of pots and pans, as Luna levitated them into place to begin dinner.

"I told him," Ron blurted abruptly, the words seemingly propelled from his mouth of their own volition. Luna started, and a ladle become suddenly and noisily acquainted with the stovetop.

"Told him what?" she asked.

"What really happened."

Luna abandoned her embryonic dinner preparations and moved back into the living room, her ethereal gracefulness making her appear to glide above the ground.

"What did really happen?" she asked. She had long suspected that something had gone on at the Final Battle that he had not shared with anyone. There had been a few cryptic ramblings from a drunken haze, and the suddenly aborted sessions with a mind-healer at St. Mungo's that had made her wonder. Always striving to maintain the placid exterior and the whimsical demeanor that seemed to calm him, she had waited, placing her shaky faith in the tenet that what was meant to happen would happen, and the universe strove for balance, strove for its own destiny...that someday, he would tell her.

Slowly, in a dry, dull voice that sounded like the rustle of a thousand scrolls furling up at once, Ron related the story that he'd told Harry. Once, during the narrative, he reached for the watered-down liquor on the coffee table, but his hand stopped in mid-motion and retreated back to his lap. By the time he'd finished, he was trembling and his voice was clogged with tears.