Luna(tic) (Marauders Era)

39. A Banquet to a Girl Who's Lived on Crumbs

Luna picked at her lunch. She knew she should be eating but she felt more nauseous than anything else and the slight gnawing at her stomach was far from the point she would have called properly hungry. Besides, with Pandora sitting next to her, the silence between them, even if it made perfect sense in the middle of a meal, had started to beat on Luna's ears, a hollow pulsing to go with the too rapid staccato of her heart.

It was making her wish she'd never left that comfortable little closet with its lovely views. Made her wish she was still sitting tucked in those tentative moments at the break of dawn, with a sky streaked in red and orange and a world that wasn't quite dark but wasn't quite light. A world that felt balanced in a way Luna envied. In a way that never lasted.

Sighing, Luna picked at the bread of her sandwich, pulling a bit of it off and rolling it between her fingers until it made a little ball of almost-dough. She'd seen the children do it in the cafeteria at school, back before she'd started finding excuses to slip away to the bathrooms or back halls for the lunch period. They'd roll up little balls of bread and flick them at each other when the teachers weren't looking, playing with their food. Wasting it.

Luna had never joined in. Even when she had bread, when they'd been luckier or when someone had taken pity on her, she never played with it. Never wasted it. She ate every crumb. But now, here... there was a pile of sandwiches on a platter in front of her and no one was even touching them. It was so much food. So much waste.

It made her want to look at Sam and laugh with him at the madness of it. At the injustice of it. And the joy of it. It made her want to grin and shake her head and then flick this little ball of dough his way to see if it really was as fun as the other children had made it seem. It made her want to do stupid, foolish, fun things. Made her want to be a child again but do it right this time.

Instead, she just stared at her plate, pressing the ball into a flat paste between her fingers, waiting for that heart-beat silence to break.

And it did, but not with the questions Luna had been waiting for. Not with the demands for explanations she had been dreading. It broke, quite simply, with a sigh.

"You should eat, Luna," Pandora said quietly. Luna glanced over. Pandora's own plate was nearly bare now, the remnants of her sandwich visible in the crumbs and drops of tomato juice left behind.

"I'm not hungry," Luna replied, dropping the little pancake of ex-bread onto the plate next to her barely touched sandwich. "We can go now, if you're done." Not that Luna wanted to go. Or rather, she didn't want what happened when they went. But, she reasoned, even facing an awful conversation that had her stomach all twisted up in knots would be better than this sitting here in a half-empty hall, desperately not looking at the only person who understood why lunch was a complicated event. Why a pile of sandwiches, even after months of seeing it in this castle, still made her chest go tight and her heart wind into a tangled ball of too many trains of thought.

So it would be better to go. It was better to go, as Luna kept reminding herself even as they went, Luna trailing behind Pandora and feeling a little bit like a lost puppy, wandering aimlessly after the last person who had shown her kindness.

Together, they wandered all the way up the shifting staircases, down the portrait-lined halls, and into Ravenclaw tower, through the library-quiet common room and up to their dormitory.

Luna glanced around when they got there, her eyes skimming for any detail that could catch her thoughts instead of letting them turn to Pandora. To the conversation now only seconds away. Not that there was much to catch her attention. The place looked like it always did, Kendra's tidily made bed with her bedside table neatly organised in stark contrast to the chaos of Pandora's twisted sheets and the jumble of objects on her nightstand, at least half of which Luna couldn't have possibly named the use for. And of course, there was also Luna's own bed, which looked bare, the bedside table empty, the only sign that anyone slept there in the form of the trunk at the foot of the bed.