Moon

4: Transit

Mark Moon loped languidly along the Royal Mile, past bright and boisterous bars and the last lonely piper. This was fantasy Scotland, the land of tartan and clan and kilt and bagpipes and haggis and whisky. It was a fiction, a confection, but walk down any side road or alley and you were in Old Town, the real city.

He'd walked for miles; for hours he'd strode through the streets of both the old and new towns thinking about everything and nothing. He had talked to himself. He had shouted at the waxing gibbous moon as it sneered down at him, reminding him that it would be full in two days. He had cursed his namesake, that bloated white orb in the night sky, and he had wept.

Nothing had helped. The only things his walk had achieved were to make him more depressed and to give him sore feet. Pain was good; it kept his mind off other things, like how one person could induce so many conflicting gut-wrenching emotions in him.

Who was he? He was the man who'd been strung along for months by the notorious Lavender Brown. He hadn't even got a proper kiss from her (apart from that once, under the mistletoe on New Year's Eve, when her lips had briefly brushed his). He'd told his workmates that they misunderstood her, that she wasn't really like that, but it seemed he'd been wrong. She was.

He had no idea what to do, where to go, so, after some hours, he'd decided to go home.

Normally, he stepped aside for other people; tonight people were getting out of his way, fast. As he approached the side street leading to his flat he glanced at his reflection in a shop window, it brought him to a sudden halt. What he'd thought was a stoic determination to keep his emotions hidden looked more like the angry and explosive scowl of a madman. He would definitely step out of the way of that expression if he saw it approaching.

He looked at his reflection carefully, trying to remember his own face. As he continued to examine himself, the wild-eyed lunatic reflected in the glass finally fled and his expression reverted to one of desperate sadness.

He'd been stupid. Janey had riled him, and he'd allowed himself to be drawn into an argument with Lavender. On the positive side, he'd finally plucked up the courage to ask her out on a real date again. On the negative side, as he'd feared and expected, she'd turned him down...again. On the positive side, that meant that he'd never see her again. On the negative side, that meant that he'd never see her again.

In an attempt to prevent tears from flowing again, he pinched the bridge of his nose between his forefinger and thumb.

'Take a good look; this is the face of an idiot,' he told his reflection.

'I think that you need to look lower, and to the right, to see that face,' Lavender replied. 'You're a difficult man to find, Mark, but everyone goes home, eventually.'

Her words Vanished his stomach; they created an empty void of nothingness beneath his ribs. He stared at her reflection in disbelief. She was, as always, immaculately made up, but there appeared to be red rims around her eyes. Had she been crying, too? For him? He turned to look at her and confirmed what he'd seen dimly reflected in the glass. Her forlorn face and downcast eyes cast a Drought Charm in his mouth; as his tongue and throat turned instantly into parched desert he found himself incapable of speech.

Lavender filled the empty silence which hung between them. 'I'm the idiot, not you,' she said. He tried to form words, to say something, anything. But she didn't give him the opportunity to compose himself. She was talking rapidly and nervously; her usual flirtatious and funny chatter was absent. 'Have you eaten? I haven't, so I picked this up from the New Canton Carry-out, just around the corner. I had a long talk with the girl on the counter. She knew you; she said that you always bought either the Szechuan Chicken or the Satay Prawn. I bought both, and two portions of fried rice. I'll have the one that you don't want, or we could share. Or you can tell me to go away, and I'll leave you alone.' She sounded desperate. For him?

'Why?' he croaked as he finally managed to get his voice working.

'Why did I buy the food? As a peace offering; and because I'm hungry and I thought that you would be, too. Why did I come back? Because I've been stupid and I wanted to apologise.'

'How ... did you ... find me?' He struggled to speak, but finally forced out the words in as neutral a tone as he could.

'I couldn't, not at first. Finding your address easily enough of course, I am an Auror, remember. But you weren't in, so I went off to find your local Chinese; you mentioned it to me once. I thought - hoped - that you might be there. You weren't, but I bought these anyway.' She held up the plastic bag.

'Then I waited at the end of your street. You were limping down the hill, and you stopped here and looked into the window; so I came to see why.'

Mark gazed at her in wondering silence. This was a trick, a trap; it must be. He said nothing.

'I'm sorry, I was rude and nasty and horrible. Can we be friends again?' she asked.

Lavender looked dejected, despondent and desolate. Her remorse seemed genuine, but he reminded himself that he'd seen her at work. She was, as she always reminded him, an Auror; she could be tough, or feminine, or helpless. She could be anything that was required to get the job done.

She was Lavender Brown, the werewolf, the only living Auror to have despatched a vampire.

She might be lying, but she might just possibly be sincere. His nerves afire, he decided to risk believing her. Could she possibly make him feel any worse than he already did? He wasn't certain. "Can we be friends again?" she'd asked. He decided not to answer her question, he needed time to think.

'I've still got that bottle of 25-year-old Firewhisky you bought me for Christmas,' he offered. She nodded, accepting his non-answer.

His nerves jangling, he strode briskly off down Black Friars towards his flat. Lavender scampered rapidly along behind him. The only noise was the hurried tap of her stilettos on the cobbles. Normally, he'd slow down for her; normally, he'd offer to carry her bags. He was being rude, deliberately rude; but it wasn't in his nature. He stopped, turned, and waited for her to catch up.

'Sorry,' he apologised, 'I'm forgetting my manners; shall I carry the food for you?'

She smiled and offered him the bag. He'd done nothing more than he usually did. It was simple politeness. He'd been taught to respect "the fairer sex," though he knew that most people thought that he was terribly old-fashioned. As he took the bag from her, their hands touched. He imagined that she prolonged the touch and that her fingers softly stroked the edge of his hand.

It wasn't his imagination, it was really happening. She was lightly stroking the edge of his hand.

He was struck by a sudden desire to drop the food and grab her, to force himself upon her. This lustful desire was gone in an instant, hauled back into its cage and replaced by a feeling of overwhelming guilt. How could he think of such a thing, he asked himself, even for the merest fraction of a second?

He shook his head to try to clear it and glanced surreptitiously at Lavender. She looked concerned, but still held his hand.

Merlin, what if she could read his mind; perhaps she was a Legilimens. Did she know what he'd been thinking...had she guessed? She betrayed no sign. What was that look on her face? Pity? Worry? Contempt? She said nothing. He was safe, and so was she; he was a gentleman, he reminded himself. He would be polite, reserved and quiet. He would never give in to desire.

He lifted the bag from her hands and broke contact with her. They continued silently on their way. He shortened his strides to allow her to keep up. They said nothing. He wondered if her silence was because she was as nervous as he was.

He thought back to their parting, their argument. He'd been rude to her. She'd been rude to him, too, but he should not have risen to Janey's barbed comments. Janey Scott had started this argument and then walked away and left them to it.

They turned into the close leading to the grey stone tenement which was his home. She'd never been to his flat, and he'd never been to hers. She wouldn't even tell him her address. That was part of the deal, too. He'd never tried to find it, in case she discovered that he'd looked. But she'd tracked him down and called at his flat. She'd been looking for him. Was that a good sign?

They were going to his flat - together. Suddenly, his mind switched to more mundane concerns. Had he done the dishes? How tidy was the living room? He'd left his clean laundry on the kitchen table. He began to panic. Could he make an excuse, dash ahead, and tidy up?

In his romance-riddled dreams he'd hoped, with no encouragement at all from her, that he'd eventually get her back to his place. But in those dreams he'd spent days getting the place tidy before she arrived. Increasingly worried, he opened the gate to the tenement block and strode towards the door. As they approached Lavender opened the front door with a wave of her wand. He stood aside and allowed her to enter first.

'My flat's on the top floor, and there isn't a lift,' he apologised. 'The place isn't very tidy, either, sorry.'

'Don't worry, Mark,' she assured him, 'I'll have seen worse, I'm sure.'

He followed her into the dimly lit stairwell and she scampered up the narrow stairs ahead of him. Her black-stockinged legs carried her upwards with a fluent and fluid grace. Her backside was soon at his eye height, and her skirt was short. He watched her skirt hem flapping and dancing in front of his face as they rapidly climbed the four storeys. It was exquisite torture.

He tried to ease his anguish by looking lower. Her calves were curved and well formed muscles moved rhythmically with every step. He became fascinated by the regularly repeated deformations and longed to reach forward and touch them. He looked lower still and discovered that he could even find pleasure in watching her slender ankles and the flexing of her Achilles tendons.

When they finally reached the top landing, and his head finally rose to be above hers, he heaved a sigh of relief.

'Are you out of breath?' Lavender asked, concerned. 'Are you tired? You've been walking the streets for hours, haven't you?'

'Yes,' Mark nodded, thankful for the excuse. He pulled out his key and opened the front door.