分卷阅读4（1 / 2）

He takes Harry’s silence as a yes. He sighs, stares at the floor. “Man, I still don’t like him, but. I can’t say I’m happy about what happened to him.”

This time, Harry closes his eyes, and lets Malfoy’s trembling shoulders appear behind his eyelids. “Yeah.”

“D’you reckon he’ll come back to Hogwarts?”

“I don’t know. I think it…it depends.”

Ron nods, understands what he doesn’t say. “Mrs. Malfoy wrote for us to tell you that you can come back.”

Harry nods, shame making his cheeks burn at how he just simply turned tail and ran from the Manor. “Thanks, Ron.”

“You’re coming back, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright.” Ron looks like he still wants to say something, and he almost does. He’s still looking at the floor, eyebrows furrowed, teeth worrying his lower lip, and his hand in a loose fist, but Harry sees the exact moment when he decides not to. “Alright, Harry.

“Come on,” Ron says, and his smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes, because he still doesn’t agree about Harry’s obsession over Draco Malfoy, and Harry doesn’t like it himself either, but he’s still thankful that Ron’s trying.

Ron stands up, stretches, and gives him a little grin. “Aren’t you hungry?”

Harry isn’t, not really, but he goes and eats as if he is anyway.

Hermione’s in Australia, reacquainting her parents with the daughter they forgot they had.

Harry and Ron are worried. Her letters talk about things that are okay (her parents are in good health, they know who she is now), but avoids talking about the things that are not (why they haven’t come back to England yet, and how much do her parents know? How much of their memories were returned?). They know she’s purposefully keeping it from them, because they’re all going through something, and the last thing she wants to do is to add to that.

It has been three months since they last saw her, and it’s like something’s missing when she’s not here. They both want to see her, but Harry knows that Ron wants that in a way that’s different.

He knows that something happened during…well, during, and that’s what they talk about while eating Molly’s roast beef and mashed potatoes.

It’s been three months since the end of the war, since whatever happened between Ron and Hermione happened, but it’s the first time Harry has asked, mainly because it didn’t seem the right time then to talk about such things when Fred’s dead and Remus’ dead and they had to arrange all those funerals.

After, when Harry’s back in bed and Ron’s gone and Kreacher’s cleaned all the plates, Harry thinks to himself that maybe why Ron isn’t angry at him for busying himself with Malfoy so much is because he understands what it’s like for all your thoughts and attention to be consumed by one person.

Harry doesn’t know yet if he likes that parallel.