(no subject)

Is it a blessing or a curse to be reunited with those who are gone?

The question has been much on Kate's mind since she returned to this place and found her Harry here, seemingly alive -- and yet, as he told her, trapped in this purgatory, unable to move forward or back. So Kate finds herself in a position no widow has ever been in: she may have the enjoyment of her dead husband again, but not the keeping of him. Should she leave this place at the end of the world, he dies to her again. And she's not sure she has the strength to lose him more than once.

They're heavy thoughts, but she can cast them off for hours at a time in Harry's bed. They only begin to creep up on her when she slips out of his room while he sleeps. (He looks too much like the dead Hotspur of her nightmares, then, still and quiet. She used to love sleeping beside him; now she prefers him awake and laughing.)

So evening in Milliways finds her in the common room, dressed again in her mourning black -- the only clothes she has here -- and splitting her attention between brooding glances at the fire and fascinated people-watching.