The Paths Chosen (Luna/Ginny, PG)
Title: The Paths Chosen
Rating: PG
Pairing: Luna/Ginny
Word count: ~5,000
Summary: It's a winding road, life.
Notes: written as a pinch hit for thinkxpink in the 2012 femmefest exchange. Thanks to bluemermaid for the read-through :)
The Paths Chosen
Because it was Harry, he didn't make it hard for her, in the end.
Not that he never shouted, or that he understood. Not that he didn't slam doors. Not that he didn't look at her over the tops of their children's heads and his eyes, silent, bright, said all of the this is what you are doing that his lips couldn't.
She wouldn't have expected any less of him, because if there was one thing that was true, it was that he loved her.
But in the end, he let her go. And this, too, she had expected of him. He was lovely, really, the way he always quietly had been - because he was someone who had learnt the hard way to pick his battles, and to accept the punches dealt by life when he knew for certain that fighting back wouldn't change a thing. With age had come the increasing weight of his own trust in himself; he knew what he could do, nowadays, and he knew what he couldn't. He was, unfairly, someone who knew what unhappiness meant in a way that no one ever should, and who was, in the end, not selfish enough to claim his own happiness to the detriment of someone else's.
“You make me happy,” he said to her, after the storms, after the door-slamming, after she was certain. He said it to her on that evening; That Evening, almost, though it really wasn't that special a moment in reality, just the silent, dark space that was their living room, still theirs for now, flickering with firelight on a chilly early summer night, and Ginny did spare a thought to how different things could be even when they took place in the same room, and how it changed everything - the soft tick-tock of the clock that her father made for them as a wedding gift without using magic now sounded accusatory rather than welcoming, the fire was hissing like an old gossip, and Harry was far away from her, even though they were only sitting an arm's length apart; the space between them curved away further than the eye could see, now, and she couldn't be sure that if she put out her hand towards him she'd find anything other than air.
“I mean, you have made me happy,” he corrected, and she was almost proud of how he accepted the failure of language to do anything, because in that moment there was no room for the present tense. “But if I can't make you happy, then I'm not happy, either,” he finished, voice dark in the dark room.
She said in return that he, too, had made her happy, and the word, over-repeated, began to lose its flavour, and the past tense was enough to say whatever it was that she still had to say.
He knew it. He closed his eyes against the giant truth of it. When he opened them again, and looked at her, hurt and wise like a child and an old man, neither of which he really was, his eyes were green and streaked with firelight, and that that didn't really mean anything anymore, except the soft knowledge that things had passed; that was what she remembered most, later.
It wasn't that she hadn't loved him.
It was that she didn't love herself with him.
*
Mostly, people understood or tried to. Ron and Hermione had known far longer what was about to happen than the rest of her family - they might even have thought she didn't know, didn't catch their increasingly sad looks at her or Harry and the subsequent relieved gazes as they looked at each other and found that at least they were still solid. It was all right that Harry had told them, had probably even told them of the issues before they became insurmountable, before things changed so much that it was no longer a problem they could solve - she had Luna and he had Ron and Hermione, and even if that wasn't quite the same she was honestly glad for it. The rest of them - well. What was there to say about her family, the members of which, with all of their systems, all of their chaining and unchaining of links, all of their hang-ups and complexities, in the end just loved her and wanted love for her? She tried to get them apart as much as possible; the Weasleys still flocked to the Burrow for Sunday roast when they could. Her mum cried, of course, said a lot of things about the children that made Ginny's throat seize up, and Molly had to start again several times to get language to do anything, really, but said in the end that they would always love her; and her father was silent and pale and all-too-knowing, and hugged her stiff-jointedly when she came into his Muggle work place later, and they spent half an hour fiddling with electric sockets in a silence that reminded her of summers between Hogwarts, hot and clear and curling up at the edges in her memory. Charlie, far away, had been told before everyone else; his letter in her pocket, a lifeline, was long and sympathetic and spoke mostly of dragons and of taking chances. Bill said nothing in particular when she told him, but whipped up a bowl of strawberry ice cream out of thin air (his one culinary triumph, Fleur often said) and put it between them on the table until it was all gone, and she almost felt fourteen and new again, and undamaged, and a Ginny who was just a bit heart-broken over Harry Potter not noticing her instead of a Ginny whose heart was stretched in different directions. Percy squeezed her shoulder, and said stiffly: “It was a long time coming,” which didn't help, but also didn't make it worse. George said: “Gin, as long as you're happy. And as long as you get me some pictures of you two.” and didn't even try to dodge her fist against his upper arm.
So really, she thought, there was nothing to complain about. Nothing at all.
Luna's small note, that arrived on their messaging coin at the end of her telling-everyone-in-my-family-that-I'm-getting-a-divorce-and-am-in-all-likelihood-a-lesbian was, in the end, the only reason that the flood of tears that had been pressing behind her eyes all day was finally released, because it read: Of course they love you, but that doesn't mean you don't have the right to feel terrible.
The second note, thirty seconds: As long as you don't think that you are terrible. You don't, do you?
Ten minutes later, when she could, again, Ginny sent in response: All I know is that I could've handled this a lot better.
Life doesn't always allow itself to be handled.
And Luna was Luna, and understood that words meant things, and she sent Ginny, barely ten seconds after the last reply: I love you now, and that I loved you before doesn't change that the life you have had makes you exactly you.
*
James, like every sixteen-year-old in human history, was very good at pretending he didn't care, and shut himself up in his room for most of Ginny's moving out period. Ginny could tell Harry was worried about their eldest, but they were too much alike, father and son; a bit stunted, James sharper in the internal fire and anger that had softened in Harry over the years, and both profoundly clumsy with language - and the years that these resemblances would bring them closer together were not quite there yet.
She went up to talk to him, but respected the large no that was his closed door.
“Hey,” she said through the wood, through the barrier. “I'm going.”
Silence.
“You could at least come and see me off.”
He pulled open the door with a sharp intensity, and the face that came to meet her was her own in its unrestrained fury, and Harry's in every other way.
“You're leaving us,” he snapped.
“I'm really not,” she said, firmly, a bit too loudly because she needed to get these words across, leaping over the instant ache that sparked in the pit of her belly, and found herself having to look up a fraction to look into her sixteen-year-old son's eyes. It was that, strangely, that made something hot and regretful flare in her chest. “I'm really not,” she repeated, because sometimes things bore repeating not because they were untrue but because they were true in a way that was hard to grasp.
He deflated a bit, his young muscles releasing some of their tension.
“Look,” she said, and realised very suddenly, very starkly, that he wasn't a child, he was her child, yes, their child, still, because that would never be undone - but as he looked at her he reminded her of Harry, again, like he so often did; understanding things that he shouldn't at his age, and putting up a resistance to that because it wasn't fair, being that fair all the time. “You understand why I'm doing this, don't you?”
“You love her,” he said, through clenched teeth, as though his body was trying to stop him from getting it out.
It was touching; this boy, this young man, this person so formed and yet so still in the making, looking at her from inside the dark sanctuary that was his room, and saying a word that he already seemed to grasp, and that he would learn could grow, and change, and flow away in different directions.
“I do,” she confirmed, squashing the urge to reach up and cup his jaw - because he wasn't a child, and there would be stubble under her fingers, and he would twist away from her touch. “But you and Al and Lily come first. Always. Do you know that?”
He said nothing, was a lot like Harry.
“I'm never far away,” she said.
He looked a bit doubtful, but then gave the smallest of nods and the largest of trusts.
*
She hugged Albus, who, fourteen, would have pushed her away if they weren't in the situation they were in now, and kissed Lily, and her children were beautiful and quietly sad. It was far from goodbye, but it wasn't without meaning, the way they parted.
Harry, standing half inside their home, the open front door around him like an armour, didn't look the saddest she'd ever seen him. He rubbed a hand across his cheek, shaded bluish with stubble and a fatigue of a peculiar kind.
“Well,” he said. His shoulders were slumped, and she was struck by how all of the fight had left him. She could make a count in her head of the ways he could have shouted at her in this moment, or could have cried, or could have said nothing, and she felt oddly grateful for the fact that he had seemed to run out of shout and cry and nothing, or had at least stored those things away for now.
He had been so utterly unable to let things go when they'd met and even more so when they'd fallen together for the first time, still children; he had been so sure that he was meant to do this one thing and then fade away. She remembered with the sharpness of knives how he had struggled to accept that he was alive and had choices to make. He'd never had choices before. He had been so utterly fixed in what he was supposed to do that he'd had to learn, later, the hard way, that there were parts of life that weren't written out. It was a lot that he was standing there, letting her go.
Still, it was remarkable how sure she was of what she was doing. He was all of the man he was, and it was so much, but she had so much more to do, so much more of herself to uncover, so much unexpected love to taste and try to parse; a love different from the concentrated form of distilled fear and quiet understanding of loud things and a shared, deep need for normality that had held them together for a long time.
She managed a smile, daunted by the strength of the hot ball of things, of inextricably linked emotion, that was coiling itself up in her chest. “I'll be by tomorrow, all right?”
“All right,” he said, grateful for the way those words could mean something to them despite their nature, and she knew this because she knew him, and how he struggled around words sometimes. His eyes flicked away from her, and he looked past her, maybe at something that wasn't there or that at least she couldn't see, and repeated: “All right.”
It wasn't, not really, but it was a lot already.
*
Ginny thought at one point that if Luna were to message her on their coin if she could come over during that first evening in her new flat, she would probably say no.
Luna knew this, and didn't message, but just showed up, and it was only when Ginny opened the door to her standing small and looking light and the doorstep that she realised how much she wanted Luna there.
“Hello,” Luna said with a slow smile, and didn't kiss Ginny yet, though her blue eyes were large and reflected the unfamiliar light in the unfamiliar small kitchen. Instead, she gave the flat all of her attention - she opened all of the kitchen cupboards and inspected what little there was sitting in them (noodles and wine, mostly), she trailed her fingers slowly over the wall and the corner of the door that led into the living room, as though the passage from one room to the other was very important. Ginny wandered in after her, and watched as Luna traipsed with her hands moving against invisible things in the air through the small room, still mostly boxes and bare walls and one ratty sofa that had been there far longer than Ginny had been alive.
“Well, yes,” Luna said, as though she were responding to something.
“You like it?” Ginny asked, half-smiling, leaning against the doorway, the dull ache of nerves and nausea in her gut settling almost inexplicably, quieting into a barely noticeable hum at the sight of Luna in the middle of her sorry-looking new living room.
Luna spun around and fixed her with a soft look. “It has a good kind of feeling about it.” She was silent for a moment. “It still has a long way to go. But that's all right.” She stepped up to where Ginny was hanging against the wall, and her smile was half-full, not half-empty, and Ginny didn't know what she had been thinking when she'd thought she might have said no. “Homes are never finished, anyway,” Luna said, and only then leaned in and kissed Ginny's mouth, a light pressure of lips on lips that was more like asking permission than laying a claim.
Ginny's hands came up to tangle in her long hair, drawing her closer, fingers slotting into the peculiar curves of skull and all that it hid. The relief in her stomach was almost like a physical wave, though she couldn't have articulated exactly what it was she was so relieved about; something about how Luna was there, how she had looked at the space that would be Ginny's now, and had accepted it, had moved around it, had left something intact in the shipwreck of life that had finally been able to pull into the harbour that was this moment.
And if it wasn't their first kiss that was just as well, because that would have felt too heavy, maybe, too full of destiny; it was already enough, that this was the first time Ginny could fully allow it, and that she had walked a path that had had steep cliffs plunging down on both sides, traps, missteps, and that she had still made it and was here now: in this sad living room that contained a life in boxes, carefully untangled from another life that had been linked to hers, and not all of it was wrong, a lot of it was right, and the kiss was a lot.
They broke apart, and Luna nestled her forehead against the dip just above Ginny's nose; a strange pressure, a pressure of thoughts that bounded into each other and slipped away. “How are you?” was a thing that she said, and from Luna Ginny could accept it when she wouldn't have been able to from anyone else, because it was actually a question.
“James said I was leaving them,” Ginny whispered, and the breath that carried her words came back to her, bounced off Luna's face, so close.
“You can't blame him,” Luna whispered, a warm rush of air and truth.
“I don't,” Ginny said, frowning a little. “But it's really not true.”
“You'll have to prove yourself to him,” Luna said, and pulled back. Her face was soft. “It's no more than fair that you should, you know.” Kiss. Soft, short. “And,” she continued, not far from Ginny's mouth, “you are going away in a sense, in the sense that children usually only do to their parents, not the other way around.”
Ginny sighed against the soft press of Luna's body. “Find someone else to love,” she filled in, quietly.
“They're your children,” Luna breathed, “and they can't know what that means. It's up to you to show them that they're not getting replaced.”
Ginny traced the skin stretching over Luna's jawbone, blurring down into the softness of her throat, where muscles jumped and played with life when she swallowed against Ginny's fingers.
“Will you stay?” Ginny asked softly.
Luna pulled back. “There are ways that spaces adapt to people, did you know?” Her eyes were wide and bright and not-blue, not any colour that had a name. “Most people aren't sensitive to the way a new home has to feel its way around them as much as the other way around.”
Ginny looked at her, replayed her careful hello to the house; an acknowledgement of the things that happen between walls, the ghosts (real, imagined, all real in the end because ghosts were always part imagination), the creatures that only Luna could see even now, the time that gets stuck between brick and wallpaper, the words that cloud together against the ceilings, stopped in their journeys upward.
“I want it to feel its way around you,” Ginny said, truthfully. “It has to adapt to you as well.”
Luna's smile was like a new source of light, and when she pressed her mouth to Ginny's neck, there was the transfer of heat, as though she were really misnamed, and she wasn't a cold celestial body trapped in an eternal orbit but a hot core of star where elements were fused together and got radiated into a new, hesitant space.
*
Going to bed together for the first real, unambiguous time was particularly breathless, as though the house was still so new it was without oxygen, and Luna spent a long time just breathing, blowing air against every piece of skin she exposed.
Ginny felt drunk on nothing but air, and there were no curtains yet, and what beat down on them was the white light of moon and star falling through glass, filtering into a sanctuary in the making.
“There are constellations in your freckles,” Luna murmured, “if I squint.”
And squint she did, and Ginny found that she could draw in enough breath to laugh.
*
During the night, Ginny woke from a fitful sleep filled with James and Albus and Lily and the regretful presence of a ghost of Harry, and found Luna sitting on the floor next to the bed, a gentle flame flickering in the cup of her hands.
“What are you doing?” she mumbled.
“Making friends,” Luna responded in a low voice, and her face was painted in high contrasts of fire and night.
*
Morning dawned utterly normal, and Luna fixed the handle on Ginny's frying pan with a flick of her wand before putting it away to cook the eggs she'd apparently brought, tucked away safely somewhere in the many pockets of her coat.
“Using magic to make breakfast isn't wrong,” she hummed when Ginny was amused, “but there's nothing quite like some manual work to get time to start flowing.”
And yes, Ginny realised, it wasn't the same; none of it was, the eggs did taste more spectacular than they had any right to, and Luna was wonderfully leggy wearing only a shirt that reached mid-thigh, and the spark that burst hot and real through Ginny's abdomen as she watched her drag her finger over the plate to catch the final bits of yolk was unexpected.
“I've never,” she began to say, then stopped to wonder if this wasn't stupid, if this wasn't a moment that was perfect already, and anything she could add to it in clumsy words that captured nothing whatsoever would only dim some of its light, that was hard to stare into. I have never felt this way? How could that ever express what it was, the road that lay behind her and what she was starting to glimpse of what might lay in front?
Luna blinked, a vision of blonde hair and pale skin and a red smear that was a remnant of Ginny and teeth, plunging down into the neck line of the shirt. “Me neither,” she said, and she was so serious and full of wonder that Ginny let their legs pool together under the table, a mingling of limbs, skin, the soft hairs on Luna's legs that Ginny hadn't had time to study up close yet, but were presumably light and blonde against the smoothness of Ginny's skin.
*
The house yielded fairly easily. Luna insisted that Ginny decorate it to her tastes and not to Luna's - “We're not living together yet,” she said, though they really for all intents and purposes were, but Ginny knew what she meant - and most of it Ginny did the Muggle way, which felt strange and right at the same time.
Luna came over to help with the painting, and didn't point out that the shade of blue they were splashing onto the bedroom walls was as close to the colour of her eyes as Ginny had been able to find - there was no telling if she even noticed, or if she understood the extent of Ginny's rush of emotion when Luna turned to her, paint smeared up her cheekbone all the way into her hair, and she looked so much as though she were part of the picture that it was a bit hard for Ginny to let her step out into the living room again.
Ginny scored paintings and carpets on flea markets and told Luna that everything they didn't have, she wanted to get from somewhere that wasn't a store but a story; while travelling, or just while meeting someone who had something to offer.
Luna looked at Ginny's latest acquisition, a rendition of the Andromeda Nebula on the wall - oil paint on canvas, a sixteen measly Galleons, and Ginny had strangely felt like crying looking at the delicate smear of all possible colours against the richest of blacks, and a lightness of touch that had the stars looking as though they were sparking off the painting - and smiled.
*
As soon as the children's rooms were ready, they came to spend the night. Up until then they'd only spent afternoons in the new flat. Lily chattered about Harry, feeling painfully aware of his absence, but relaxed into Luna's genuine interest in how her father was; it almost made Ginny uncomfortable, the way Luna allowed Harry a place in the conversation, but when she glanced over to her sons, munching silently away on Luna's lasagna, she could see in their faces that it was the best possible thing Luna could ever have done.
It helped, of course, that they knew Luna and had known her all their lives, and even James couldn't fight the torrent of genuine, strange charm that was Luna Lovegood, and was even moved to do the dishes, switching between talking to Luna unhurriedly about how much he was looking forward to going back to Hogwarts and suddenly snapping his eyes to her in confusion, as though he'd only just remembered why she was there.
Ginny observed them silently from the living room, and felt a strange mix of affection and guilt that she didn't quite know what to do with as she saw her eldest son accept a light touch from Luna on his shoulder.
Her children. They were extraordinary, really. Albus sat closer to her than he would have if there had been anyone to see it, and told her in his usual, restrained way about the new bit of Muggle equipment his granddad had let him fix the week before.
*
Luna went to her own place for the night. “Still only a guest here,” she said, smiling, and Ginny was grateful for it, for her, for the way she knew exactly how to wash forward and fold back like a wave, giving space to the heavy presence of Ginny's children.
“I don't know how I feel,” Ginny said, truthfully, as Luna tied her cloak around her.
“You don't need to know how you feel to feel,” Luna said, and dropped a kiss on her head.
*
In the morning James was bleary-eyed and grumpy, and Albus quiet, and Lily mildly cheerful, and it was almost completely the same.
“Slept well?” Ginny asked them. James scowled, a bad sleeper at the best of times, and the other two shrugged with varying degrees of conviction.
Well, Ginny thought, it did take a while for space to adapt to people. She slipped scrambled eggs onto their plates.
*
“It doesn't seem fair,” Ginny said one evening, when Luna sat reading and scribbling notes in the margin of an old book about childhood and imagination against her legs, back pressed to Ginny's shins.
“What doesn't?” she responded absentmindedly.
“That I should have this and Harry has no one,” she said slowly, not sure what to think about the words even as they manifested themselves.
Luna turned her head against Ginny's knees, but it wasn't an angle in which they could have eye contact. Still, the increased pressure of Luna's head against her legs was steadying, already.
“There are lots of things that aren't fair,” Luna said. In the silence that followed Ginny knew they were both thinking about the war, and the different terrors they suffered. “In the end you're being fair to yourself,” she added, almost as an afterthought, and snapped her book shut - as though thinking and reading were irreconcilable.
“It's not exactly fair to be selfish, is it?”
“It's fair to be happy,” Luna hummed, and if it didn't help in any practical sense that was all right, because it helped in every other sense, and Ginny threaded her fingers through long hair until she reached the soft-hard frontier of skull.
“He's all right, you know,” Luna said, arching up into the touch.
“That's what he says,” Ginny responded with a small frown.
Luna's exhale of air was long and soft. “He's hurting, but he's all right. It is possible to be both.”
Ginny didn't see it, but there were things she didn't see and Luna did, and maybe this was one of them.
“We should invite him along for dinner with James and Al and Lily next time,” Luna said.
Ginny thought about it. “I really don't know,” she said, and it was a bit strange to admit.
“All right,” Luna said lightly, “maybe not yet.”
“Yeah,” Ginny agreed quietly. “Not yet.” And it was nice how that kept doors open, how there were still breezes coming in from windows. There were choices and sometimes Ginny forgot that she, too, had had trouble coming to grips with that after the war. That she had been so spectacularly bad at reimagining her own life on different terms was what had got her here. But they had been taken, those choices, some of them, and that had got her here, too, and sometimes she didn't think it could have happened any other way.
“We should go to Argentina,” Luna said from around her knees.
“Why Argentina?” Ginny said with a smile that Luna couldn't have seen.
“I want to see where it changes into ocean in little steps, like it's saying goodbye to being land,” Luna sighed.
“That sounds... so nice,” Ginny said, a bit surprised at the intensity with which she meant it. “We should definitely go.”
They sat in a spot of silence. Luna had closed her book around her finger, and now allowed it to fall open again.
“I'll make chilli tonight,” Ginny said.
“Good,” Luna hummed, “Al loves that.”
Ginny smiled another smile that Luna couldn't have seen; there weren't a lot of words that could do anything to improve this situation, to make it more of an island of calm in the rest of life. It was so much already.
The only thing she could do, in the end, was this: “I love you,” because she'd been saving those words for a special moment, but special moments didn't present themselves that way and often only became that way afterward, and the way all of Luna's vertebrae were pressed to her legs was enough to warrant this moment being special.
Luna's head fell back against her knee again. “I love you too,” she hummed, and then, quietly, “now we're home.”
Ginny smiled, and she was sure, in a way that she wasn't often anymore, that Luna was too, though she couldn't have seen, she couldn't have known, and that it didn't matter - that was a lot, that was everything. They were home, indeed.
Rating: PG
Pairing: Luna/Ginny
Word count: ~5,000
Summary: It's a winding road, life.
Notes: written as a pinch hit for thinkxpink in the 2012 femmefest exchange. Thanks to bluemermaid for the read-through :)
The Paths Chosen
Because it was Harry, he didn't make it hard for her, in the end.
Not that he never shouted, or that he understood. Not that he didn't slam doors. Not that he didn't look at her over the tops of their children's heads and his eyes, silent, bright, said all of the this is what you are doing that his lips couldn't.
She wouldn't have expected any less of him, because if there was one thing that was true, it was that he loved her.
But in the end, he let her go. And this, too, she had expected of him. He was lovely, really, the way he always quietly had been - because he was someone who had learnt the hard way to pick his battles, and to accept the punches dealt by life when he knew for certain that fighting back wouldn't change a thing. With age had come the increasing weight of his own trust in himself; he knew what he could do, nowadays, and he knew what he couldn't. He was, unfairly, someone who knew what unhappiness meant in a way that no one ever should, and who was, in the end, not selfish enough to claim his own happiness to the detriment of someone else's.
“You make me happy,” he said to her, after the storms, after the door-slamming, after she was certain. He said it to her on that evening; That Evening, almost, though it really wasn't that special a moment in reality, just the silent, dark space that was their living room, still theirs for now, flickering with firelight on a chilly early summer night, and Ginny did spare a thought to how different things could be even when they took place in the same room, and how it changed everything - the soft tick-tock of the clock that her father made for them as a wedding gift without using magic now sounded accusatory rather than welcoming, the fire was hissing like an old gossip, and Harry was far away from her, even though they were only sitting an arm's length apart; the space between them curved away further than the eye could see, now, and she couldn't be sure that if she put out her hand towards him she'd find anything other than air.
“I mean, you have made me happy,” he corrected, and she was almost proud of how he accepted the failure of language to do anything, because in that moment there was no room for the present tense. “But if I can't make you happy, then I'm not happy, either,” he finished, voice dark in the dark room.
She said in return that he, too, had made her happy, and the word, over-repeated, began to lose its flavour, and the past tense was enough to say whatever it was that she still had to say.
He knew it. He closed his eyes against the giant truth of it. When he opened them again, and looked at her, hurt and wise like a child and an old man, neither of which he really was, his eyes were green and streaked with firelight, and that that didn't really mean anything anymore, except the soft knowledge that things had passed; that was what she remembered most, later.
It wasn't that she hadn't loved him.
It was that she didn't love herself with him.
*
Mostly, people understood or tried to. Ron and Hermione had known far longer what was about to happen than the rest of her family - they might even have thought she didn't know, didn't catch their increasingly sad looks at her or Harry and the subsequent relieved gazes as they looked at each other and found that at least they were still solid. It was all right that Harry had told them, had probably even told them of the issues before they became insurmountable, before things changed so much that it was no longer a problem they could solve - she had Luna and he had Ron and Hermione, and even if that wasn't quite the same she was honestly glad for it. The rest of them - well. What was there to say about her family, the members of which, with all of their systems, all of their chaining and unchaining of links, all of their hang-ups and complexities, in the end just loved her and wanted love for her? She tried to get them apart as much as possible; the Weasleys still flocked to the Burrow for Sunday roast when they could. Her mum cried, of course, said a lot of things about the children that made Ginny's throat seize up, and Molly had to start again several times to get language to do anything, really, but said in the end that they would always love her; and her father was silent and pale and all-too-knowing, and hugged her stiff-jointedly when she came into his Muggle work place later, and they spent half an hour fiddling with electric sockets in a silence that reminded her of summers between Hogwarts, hot and clear and curling up at the edges in her memory. Charlie, far away, had been told before everyone else; his letter in her pocket, a lifeline, was long and sympathetic and spoke mostly of dragons and of taking chances. Bill said nothing in particular when she told him, but whipped up a bowl of strawberry ice cream out of thin air (his one culinary triumph, Fleur often said) and put it between them on the table until it was all gone, and she almost felt fourteen and new again, and undamaged, and a Ginny who was just a bit heart-broken over Harry Potter not noticing her instead of a Ginny whose heart was stretched in different directions. Percy squeezed her shoulder, and said stiffly: “It was a long time coming,” which didn't help, but also didn't make it worse. George said: “Gin, as long as you're happy. And as long as you get me some pictures of you two.” and didn't even try to dodge her fist against his upper arm.
So really, she thought, there was nothing to complain about. Nothing at all.
Luna's small note, that arrived on their messaging coin at the end of her telling-everyone-in-my-family-that-I'm-getting-a-divorce-and-am-in-all-likelihood-a-lesbian was, in the end, the only reason that the flood of tears that had been pressing behind her eyes all day was finally released, because it read: Of course they love you, but that doesn't mean you don't have the right to feel terrible.
The second note, thirty seconds: As long as you don't think that you are terrible. You don't, do you?
Ten minutes later, when she could, again, Ginny sent in response: All I know is that I could've handled this a lot better.
Life doesn't always allow itself to be handled.
And Luna was Luna, and understood that words meant things, and she sent Ginny, barely ten seconds after the last reply: I love you now, and that I loved you before doesn't change that the life you have had makes you exactly you.
*
James, like every sixteen-year-old in human history, was very good at pretending he didn't care, and shut himself up in his room for most of Ginny's moving out period. Ginny could tell Harry was worried about their eldest, but they were too much alike, father and son; a bit stunted, James sharper in the internal fire and anger that had softened in Harry over the years, and both profoundly clumsy with language - and the years that these resemblances would bring them closer together were not quite there yet.
She went up to talk to him, but respected the large no that was his closed door.
“Hey,” she said through the wood, through the barrier. “I'm going.”
Silence.
“You could at least come and see me off.”
He pulled open the door with a sharp intensity, and the face that came to meet her was her own in its unrestrained fury, and Harry's in every other way.
“You're leaving us,” he snapped.
“I'm really not,” she said, firmly, a bit too loudly because she needed to get these words across, leaping over the instant ache that sparked in the pit of her belly, and found herself having to look up a fraction to look into her sixteen-year-old son's eyes. It was that, strangely, that made something hot and regretful flare in her chest. “I'm really not,” she repeated, because sometimes things bore repeating not because they were untrue but because they were true in a way that was hard to grasp.
He deflated a bit, his young muscles releasing some of their tension.
“Look,” she said, and realised very suddenly, very starkly, that he wasn't a child, he was her child, yes, their child, still, because that would never be undone - but as he looked at her he reminded her of Harry, again, like he so often did; understanding things that he shouldn't at his age, and putting up a resistance to that because it wasn't fair, being that fair all the time. “You understand why I'm doing this, don't you?”
“You love her,” he said, through clenched teeth, as though his body was trying to stop him from getting it out.
It was touching; this boy, this young man, this person so formed and yet so still in the making, looking at her from inside the dark sanctuary that was his room, and saying a word that he already seemed to grasp, and that he would learn could grow, and change, and flow away in different directions.
“I do,” she confirmed, squashing the urge to reach up and cup his jaw - because he wasn't a child, and there would be stubble under her fingers, and he would twist away from her touch. “But you and Al and Lily come first. Always. Do you know that?”
He said nothing, was a lot like Harry.
“I'm never far away,” she said.
He looked a bit doubtful, but then gave the smallest of nods and the largest of trusts.
*
She hugged Albus, who, fourteen, would have pushed her away if they weren't in the situation they were in now, and kissed Lily, and her children were beautiful and quietly sad. It was far from goodbye, but it wasn't without meaning, the way they parted.
Harry, standing half inside their home, the open front door around him like an armour, didn't look the saddest she'd ever seen him. He rubbed a hand across his cheek, shaded bluish with stubble and a fatigue of a peculiar kind.
“Well,” he said. His shoulders were slumped, and she was struck by how all of the fight had left him. She could make a count in her head of the ways he could have shouted at her in this moment, or could have cried, or could have said nothing, and she felt oddly grateful for the fact that he had seemed to run out of shout and cry and nothing, or had at least stored those things away for now.
He had been so utterly unable to let things go when they'd met and even more so when they'd fallen together for the first time, still children; he had been so sure that he was meant to do this one thing and then fade away. She remembered with the sharpness of knives how he had struggled to accept that he was alive and had choices to make. He'd never had choices before. He had been so utterly fixed in what he was supposed to do that he'd had to learn, later, the hard way, that there were parts of life that weren't written out. It was a lot that he was standing there, letting her go.
Still, it was remarkable how sure she was of what she was doing. He was all of the man he was, and it was so much, but she had so much more to do, so much more of herself to uncover, so much unexpected love to taste and try to parse; a love different from the concentrated form of distilled fear and quiet understanding of loud things and a shared, deep need for normality that had held them together for a long time.
She managed a smile, daunted by the strength of the hot ball of things, of inextricably linked emotion, that was coiling itself up in her chest. “I'll be by tomorrow, all right?”
“All right,” he said, grateful for the way those words could mean something to them despite their nature, and she knew this because she knew him, and how he struggled around words sometimes. His eyes flicked away from her, and he looked past her, maybe at something that wasn't there or that at least she couldn't see, and repeated: “All right.”
It wasn't, not really, but it was a lot already.
*
Ginny thought at one point that if Luna were to message her on their coin if she could come over during that first evening in her new flat, she would probably say no.
Luna knew this, and didn't message, but just showed up, and it was only when Ginny opened the door to her standing small and looking light and the doorstep that she realised how much she wanted Luna there.
“Hello,” Luna said with a slow smile, and didn't kiss Ginny yet, though her blue eyes were large and reflected the unfamiliar light in the unfamiliar small kitchen. Instead, she gave the flat all of her attention - she opened all of the kitchen cupboards and inspected what little there was sitting in them (noodles and wine, mostly), she trailed her fingers slowly over the wall and the corner of the door that led into the living room, as though the passage from one room to the other was very important. Ginny wandered in after her, and watched as Luna traipsed with her hands moving against invisible things in the air through the small room, still mostly boxes and bare walls and one ratty sofa that had been there far longer than Ginny had been alive.
“Well, yes,” Luna said, as though she were responding to something.
“You like it?” Ginny asked, half-smiling, leaning against the doorway, the dull ache of nerves and nausea in her gut settling almost inexplicably, quieting into a barely noticeable hum at the sight of Luna in the middle of her sorry-looking new living room.
Luna spun around and fixed her with a soft look. “It has a good kind of feeling about it.” She was silent for a moment. “It still has a long way to go. But that's all right.” She stepped up to where Ginny was hanging against the wall, and her smile was half-full, not half-empty, and Ginny didn't know what she had been thinking when she'd thought she might have said no. “Homes are never finished, anyway,” Luna said, and only then leaned in and kissed Ginny's mouth, a light pressure of lips on lips that was more like asking permission than laying a claim.
Ginny's hands came up to tangle in her long hair, drawing her closer, fingers slotting into the peculiar curves of skull and all that it hid. The relief in her stomach was almost like a physical wave, though she couldn't have articulated exactly what it was she was so relieved about; something about how Luna was there, how she had looked at the space that would be Ginny's now, and had accepted it, had moved around it, had left something intact in the shipwreck of life that had finally been able to pull into the harbour that was this moment.
And if it wasn't their first kiss that was just as well, because that would have felt too heavy, maybe, too full of destiny; it was already enough, that this was the first time Ginny could fully allow it, and that she had walked a path that had had steep cliffs plunging down on both sides, traps, missteps, and that she had still made it and was here now: in this sad living room that contained a life in boxes, carefully untangled from another life that had been linked to hers, and not all of it was wrong, a lot of it was right, and the kiss was a lot.
They broke apart, and Luna nestled her forehead against the dip just above Ginny's nose; a strange pressure, a pressure of thoughts that bounded into each other and slipped away. “How are you?” was a thing that she said, and from Luna Ginny could accept it when she wouldn't have been able to from anyone else, because it was actually a question.
“James said I was leaving them,” Ginny whispered, and the breath that carried her words came back to her, bounced off Luna's face, so close.
“You can't blame him,” Luna whispered, a warm rush of air and truth.
“I don't,” Ginny said, frowning a little. “But it's really not true.”
“You'll have to prove yourself to him,” Luna said, and pulled back. Her face was soft. “It's no more than fair that you should, you know.” Kiss. Soft, short. “And,” she continued, not far from Ginny's mouth, “you are going away in a sense, in the sense that children usually only do to their parents, not the other way around.”
Ginny sighed against the soft press of Luna's body. “Find someone else to love,” she filled in, quietly.
“They're your children,” Luna breathed, “and they can't know what that means. It's up to you to show them that they're not getting replaced.”
Ginny traced the skin stretching over Luna's jawbone, blurring down into the softness of her throat, where muscles jumped and played with life when she swallowed against Ginny's fingers.
“Will you stay?” Ginny asked softly.
Luna pulled back. “There are ways that spaces adapt to people, did you know?” Her eyes were wide and bright and not-blue, not any colour that had a name. “Most people aren't sensitive to the way a new home has to feel its way around them as much as the other way around.”
Ginny looked at her, replayed her careful hello to the house; an acknowledgement of the things that happen between walls, the ghosts (real, imagined, all real in the end because ghosts were always part imagination), the creatures that only Luna could see even now, the time that gets stuck between brick and wallpaper, the words that cloud together against the ceilings, stopped in their journeys upward.
“I want it to feel its way around you,” Ginny said, truthfully. “It has to adapt to you as well.”
Luna's smile was like a new source of light, and when she pressed her mouth to Ginny's neck, there was the transfer of heat, as though she were really misnamed, and she wasn't a cold celestial body trapped in an eternal orbit but a hot core of star where elements were fused together and got radiated into a new, hesitant space.
*
Going to bed together for the first real, unambiguous time was particularly breathless, as though the house was still so new it was without oxygen, and Luna spent a long time just breathing, blowing air against every piece of skin she exposed.
Ginny felt drunk on nothing but air, and there were no curtains yet, and what beat down on them was the white light of moon and star falling through glass, filtering into a sanctuary in the making.
“There are constellations in your freckles,” Luna murmured, “if I squint.”
And squint she did, and Ginny found that she could draw in enough breath to laugh.
*
During the night, Ginny woke from a fitful sleep filled with James and Albus and Lily and the regretful presence of a ghost of Harry, and found Luna sitting on the floor next to the bed, a gentle flame flickering in the cup of her hands.
“What are you doing?” she mumbled.
“Making friends,” Luna responded in a low voice, and her face was painted in high contrasts of fire and night.
*
Morning dawned utterly normal, and Luna fixed the handle on Ginny's frying pan with a flick of her wand before putting it away to cook the eggs she'd apparently brought, tucked away safely somewhere in the many pockets of her coat.
“Using magic to make breakfast isn't wrong,” she hummed when Ginny was amused, “but there's nothing quite like some manual work to get time to start flowing.”
And yes, Ginny realised, it wasn't the same; none of it was, the eggs did taste more spectacular than they had any right to, and Luna was wonderfully leggy wearing only a shirt that reached mid-thigh, and the spark that burst hot and real through Ginny's abdomen as she watched her drag her finger over the plate to catch the final bits of yolk was unexpected.
“I've never,” she began to say, then stopped to wonder if this wasn't stupid, if this wasn't a moment that was perfect already, and anything she could add to it in clumsy words that captured nothing whatsoever would only dim some of its light, that was hard to stare into. I have never felt this way? How could that ever express what it was, the road that lay behind her and what she was starting to glimpse of what might lay in front?
Luna blinked, a vision of blonde hair and pale skin and a red smear that was a remnant of Ginny and teeth, plunging down into the neck line of the shirt. “Me neither,” she said, and she was so serious and full of wonder that Ginny let their legs pool together under the table, a mingling of limbs, skin, the soft hairs on Luna's legs that Ginny hadn't had time to study up close yet, but were presumably light and blonde against the smoothness of Ginny's skin.
*
The house yielded fairly easily. Luna insisted that Ginny decorate it to her tastes and not to Luna's - “We're not living together yet,” she said, though they really for all intents and purposes were, but Ginny knew what she meant - and most of it Ginny did the Muggle way, which felt strange and right at the same time.
Luna came over to help with the painting, and didn't point out that the shade of blue they were splashing onto the bedroom walls was as close to the colour of her eyes as Ginny had been able to find - there was no telling if she even noticed, or if she understood the extent of Ginny's rush of emotion when Luna turned to her, paint smeared up her cheekbone all the way into her hair, and she looked so much as though she were part of the picture that it was a bit hard for Ginny to let her step out into the living room again.
Ginny scored paintings and carpets on flea markets and told Luna that everything they didn't have, she wanted to get from somewhere that wasn't a store but a story; while travelling, or just while meeting someone who had something to offer.
Luna looked at Ginny's latest acquisition, a rendition of the Andromeda Nebula on the wall - oil paint on canvas, a sixteen measly Galleons, and Ginny had strangely felt like crying looking at the delicate smear of all possible colours against the richest of blacks, and a lightness of touch that had the stars looking as though they were sparking off the painting - and smiled.
*
As soon as the children's rooms were ready, they came to spend the night. Up until then they'd only spent afternoons in the new flat. Lily chattered about Harry, feeling painfully aware of his absence, but relaxed into Luna's genuine interest in how her father was; it almost made Ginny uncomfortable, the way Luna allowed Harry a place in the conversation, but when she glanced over to her sons, munching silently away on Luna's lasagna, she could see in their faces that it was the best possible thing Luna could ever have done.
It helped, of course, that they knew Luna and had known her all their lives, and even James couldn't fight the torrent of genuine, strange charm that was Luna Lovegood, and was even moved to do the dishes, switching between talking to Luna unhurriedly about how much he was looking forward to going back to Hogwarts and suddenly snapping his eyes to her in confusion, as though he'd only just remembered why she was there.
Ginny observed them silently from the living room, and felt a strange mix of affection and guilt that she didn't quite know what to do with as she saw her eldest son accept a light touch from Luna on his shoulder.
Her children. They were extraordinary, really. Albus sat closer to her than he would have if there had been anyone to see it, and told her in his usual, restrained way about the new bit of Muggle equipment his granddad had let him fix the week before.
*
Luna went to her own place for the night. “Still only a guest here,” she said, smiling, and Ginny was grateful for it, for her, for the way she knew exactly how to wash forward and fold back like a wave, giving space to the heavy presence of Ginny's children.
“I don't know how I feel,” Ginny said, truthfully, as Luna tied her cloak around her.
“You don't need to know how you feel to feel,” Luna said, and dropped a kiss on her head.
*
In the morning James was bleary-eyed and grumpy, and Albus quiet, and Lily mildly cheerful, and it was almost completely the same.
“Slept well?” Ginny asked them. James scowled, a bad sleeper at the best of times, and the other two shrugged with varying degrees of conviction.
Well, Ginny thought, it did take a while for space to adapt to people. She slipped scrambled eggs onto their plates.
*
“It doesn't seem fair,” Ginny said one evening, when Luna sat reading and scribbling notes in the margin of an old book about childhood and imagination against her legs, back pressed to Ginny's shins.
“What doesn't?” she responded absentmindedly.
“That I should have this and Harry has no one,” she said slowly, not sure what to think about the words even as they manifested themselves.
Luna turned her head against Ginny's knees, but it wasn't an angle in which they could have eye contact. Still, the increased pressure of Luna's head against her legs was steadying, already.
“There are lots of things that aren't fair,” Luna said. In the silence that followed Ginny knew they were both thinking about the war, and the different terrors they suffered. “In the end you're being fair to yourself,” she added, almost as an afterthought, and snapped her book shut - as though thinking and reading were irreconcilable.
“It's not exactly fair to be selfish, is it?”
“It's fair to be happy,” Luna hummed, and if it didn't help in any practical sense that was all right, because it helped in every other sense, and Ginny threaded her fingers through long hair until she reached the soft-hard frontier of skull.
“He's all right, you know,” Luna said, arching up into the touch.
“That's what he says,” Ginny responded with a small frown.
Luna's exhale of air was long and soft. “He's hurting, but he's all right. It is possible to be both.”
Ginny didn't see it, but there were things she didn't see and Luna did, and maybe this was one of them.
“We should invite him along for dinner with James and Al and Lily next time,” Luna said.
Ginny thought about it. “I really don't know,” she said, and it was a bit strange to admit.
“All right,” Luna said lightly, “maybe not yet.”
“Yeah,” Ginny agreed quietly. “Not yet.” And it was nice how that kept doors open, how there were still breezes coming in from windows. There were choices and sometimes Ginny forgot that she, too, had had trouble coming to grips with that after the war. That she had been so spectacularly bad at reimagining her own life on different terms was what had got her here. But they had been taken, those choices, some of them, and that had got her here, too, and sometimes she didn't think it could have happened any other way.
“We should go to Argentina,” Luna said from around her knees.
“Why Argentina?” Ginny said with a smile that Luna couldn't have seen.
“I want to see where it changes into ocean in little steps, like it's saying goodbye to being land,” Luna sighed.
“That sounds... so nice,” Ginny said, a bit surprised at the intensity with which she meant it. “We should definitely go.”
They sat in a spot of silence. Luna had closed her book around her finger, and now allowed it to fall open again.
“I'll make chilli tonight,” Ginny said.
“Good,” Luna hummed, “Al loves that.”
Ginny smiled another smile that Luna couldn't have seen; there weren't a lot of words that could do anything to improve this situation, to make it more of an island of calm in the rest of life. It was so much already.
The only thing she could do, in the end, was this: “I love you,” because she'd been saving those words for a special moment, but special moments didn't present themselves that way and often only became that way afterward, and the way all of Luna's vertebrae were pressed to her legs was enough to warrant this moment being special.
Luna's head fell back against her knee again. “I love you too,” she hummed, and then, quietly, “now we're home.”
Ginny smiled, and she was sure, in a way that she wasn't often anymore, that Luna was too, though she couldn't have seen, she couldn't have known, and that it didn't matter - that was a lot, that was everything. They were home, indeed.