FICLET: Summer is past... (George/Luna)
Title: Summer is Past...
Character Pairing: George/Luna for rarepair_shorts
Prompt: Internal dysfunctions
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1,324
Summary: Luna is drifting through her thoughts about George, Ginny keeps her company awhile.
Author's Note: Okay, so when I said I'd be posting a ficlet every Friday in February...well...what I *meant* was...um, yeah. Look, we all know: my fail was EPIC. Work has been crazy and I've had too much fic to write and far too little time to do it in, 'nuff said. Plus, I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote this one...and I'm still iffy about parts of it. Thank you all for hanging in with me, and I hope there are some of you out there still interested in this. I won't make any promises this time...but the next one (which shows how George is dealing with their separation), is quite well underway already...This is 6/13 and takes place three weeks after "Hey, Jealousy!" so around about mid-November, 1998.
Link to Prompt Table: Click here!!
“I’m so sorry.”
Luna sighed, drawing her legs up in front of her and wrapping her cloak more securely around them. She propped her chin on her folded arms, which were in turn resting on her knees, and gazed out over the lake from her vantage point under an ancient, spreading oak tree that was in the midst of shedding its leaves in preparation for the rapidly oncoming winter.
George’s last words to her reverberated through her mind as clearly as if he’d spoken them mere moments ago, rather than three weeks. She took a deep breath of the crisp fall air, holding it in her lungs in an attempt to stave off yet another bout of tears. Crying was not how Luna usually handled upsetting events, yet since that fateful Hogsmeade weekend she’d done more of it than she’d ever wanted to do in her life.
She grasped for her usual sense of rational calmness…she always relied on it, and there were very few instances in her life that she could recall when it had failed her as utterly. Her mind raced over the only three other events that could even compare. Her mother’s death had been more violently traumatic, and her imprisonment at Malfoy Manor had been more terrifying. But she actually thought that George’s rejection hurt more than the colossal, out-of-character row she’d had with her father late last spring over his choices during the war - mainly because she’d made amends with her father fairly quickly. And even during their awful argument, she knew her relationship with her father would always find a way to survive…but she had no such certainty about George.
His dismissal was devastating.
Just when did he start to mean so much to me? Was it during that DA meeting when he praised my charm-work? Or at the Yule Ball, peeking in through the doors to the Great Hall and seeing him twirl by with Katie Bell? Or the day in my third year when I discovered I could tell him apart from Fred effortlessly? Or that evening, not long before he left school, coming upon him in the library…sleeping slumped over his books with the lamplight glinting off his hair? Luna cast her memory back, recalling these moments and a host of others, and realizing that beneath the recent tentative beginning they had made with one another, there was a deep wellspring of longing in her. Truly, she had been slowly falling in love with George Weasley for a very very long time.
And she had no idea how to help him now. She’d been so hopeful, but…she couldn’t even reach him.
Her heart sank and she finally lost the battle with her self-control. The tears spilled down her cheeks silently, cooling rapidly in the autumn wind.
~*~
“You want me to send him a Howler?”
Ginny’s voice broke into Luna’s thoughts and she startled slightly, having been so lost in her own contemplation that she was unaware of anyone approaching her. Luna tilted her head to the right and gazed up at her red-headed friend through the blur of her tears and the wisps of hair that fluttered around her temple. She gave Ginny a look as the other girl plopped down on the ground beside her and mimicked Luna’s pose.
The two girls sat shoulder-to-shoulder and hip-to-hip, cloak-wrapped and staring ahead of them into the deepening twilight of the late fall afternoon. Luna quickly dried her eyes on the edge of her sleeve and noted that the trees across the lake were almost completely barren now, standing like spindly gray needles made even more ghostly by the fading light.
“No, Ginny. Thank you, but-”
“Well,” Ginny cut in, “I suppose it could wait a bit…till the next time I see him…I’d be happy to box his ear for you.” She grinned at Luna mischievously and nudged her shoulder.
Luna responded with a faint half-smile. She knew what Ginny was trying to do, and she was grateful for it - truly. Neville had been wonderful the last few weeks as well…though he hadn’t tried to talk to her much about what had happened with George. Rather, Neville had instinctively understood that she needed this time to be silent and try to sort through her own feelings, and he gave her company in that silence.
Sometimes they studied together in the library and never spoke a word, other times Luna ventured out to the greenhouses while Neville worked on assignments for his advanced Herbology apprenticeship and curled up on one of the wide benches lining the greenhouse walls. Simply having the presence of a true friend nearby without the expectation of conversation was soothing.
Ginny wasn’t as good with silence as Neville, but she too had been there for Luna in her own unique way, lifting Luna’s spirits with a joke or swooping in with a quick hug or - as she just had done - offering to perpetrate bodily harm on her own brother…in the most supportive way possible, of course.
Luna sighed again.
“No,” she said firmly. “Thank you…I am grateful…I just don’t think it’s the best way to go about it….he’s not going to change his mind if he’s pushed…he’ll only dig in his heels.”
Ginny fixed her with a sharp look, and though she seemed very much to want to speak, she stayed quiet. A few more heartbeats passed in silence before Ginny could contain herself no longer.
“Luna…he’s hurting, we’re hurting. But how can his keeping us all at arms length help him heal? I just…he wouldn’t talk to me much before I left to come back here and…Mum and Dad were having such a hard time themselves, so they couldn’t…not how they normally would…and he went and pushed Percy around…something happened that first time back at the shop….”
Luna was rather startled. “You know about his fight with Percy? He told you?”
Maybe confiding in me really wasn’t significant. I hardly know what to think anymore…
“No…I saw Ron not long after and he told me bits and pieces.”
Luna nodded, but stayed silent. Her mind drifted to the recent summer and the long walks she and George had taken in the fields stretching between her house and the Burrow. It feels like a different life…They had spent the warm, lazy days talking and exploring the countryside. Luna had thought…had hoped…that opening up to her during these wandering days had been good for George…but now she wasn’t certain of anything. Her insides twisted sharply, making her feel slightly ill, as she remembered something he’d told her one particular day.
“I don’t know if I’ve got the right words for this, Luna, but…it’s like…it’s…I think about Fred every day…mostly I hurt, but sometimes I’m so…I think I’m angry at him, and I hate that I feel that…and I can’t see past all this. I don’t know how I’ll ever feel anything normal again. And I try to tell them…but it’s like I can’t. It’s like I’m suffocating in that house…I…so bloody mixed up…I feel…everything the wrong way round…I itch to get away… and I don’t know how…how to be me anymore.”
Coming back to herself, she turned to Ginny and smiled sadly. She wasn’t sure what she could say to her friend; Ginny was George’s family, but the things he’d shared with her were solely his to reveal. However much she was hurting now, she couldn’t betray his confidences. She thought for a moment, then said softly, “I think…I think he thinks he has to be on his own for a bit…like he’s not really healing unless he does it alone.”
“But, but that’s…that’s daft-” Ginny sputtered. “-we just want him. To talk to us, be with us…just be there…”
“I know Ginny…” Luna sighed once more, her gaze falling back across the surface of the lake, now reflecting the sunset in burnished red-gold waves nearly the color of George’s hair.
…so do I.
Character Pairing: George/Luna for rarepair_shorts
Prompt: Internal dysfunctions
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1,324
Summary: Luna is drifting through her thoughts about George, Ginny keeps her company awhile.
Author's Note: Okay, so when I said I'd be posting a ficlet every Friday in February...well...what I *meant* was...um, yeah. Look, we all know: my fail was EPIC. Work has been crazy and I've had too much fic to write and far too little time to do it in, 'nuff said. Plus, I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote this one...and I'm still iffy about parts of it. Thank you all for hanging in with me, and I hope there are some of you out there still interested in this. I won't make any promises this time...but the next one (which shows how George is dealing with their separation), is quite well underway already...This is 6/13 and takes place three weeks after "Hey, Jealousy!" so around about mid-November, 1998.
Link to Prompt Table: Click here!!
“I’m so sorry.”
Luna sighed, drawing her legs up in front of her and wrapping her cloak more securely around them. She propped her chin on her folded arms, which were in turn resting on her knees, and gazed out over the lake from her vantage point under an ancient, spreading oak tree that was in the midst of shedding its leaves in preparation for the rapidly oncoming winter.
George’s last words to her reverberated through her mind as clearly as if he’d spoken them mere moments ago, rather than three weeks. She took a deep breath of the crisp fall air, holding it in her lungs in an attempt to stave off yet another bout of tears. Crying was not how Luna usually handled upsetting events, yet since that fateful Hogsmeade weekend she’d done more of it than she’d ever wanted to do in her life.
She grasped for her usual sense of rational calmness…she always relied on it, and there were very few instances in her life that she could recall when it had failed her as utterly. Her mind raced over the only three other events that could even compare. Her mother’s death had been more violently traumatic, and her imprisonment at Malfoy Manor had been more terrifying. But she actually thought that George’s rejection hurt more than the colossal, out-of-character row she’d had with her father late last spring over his choices during the war - mainly because she’d made amends with her father fairly quickly. And even during their awful argument, she knew her relationship with her father would always find a way to survive…but she had no such certainty about George.
His dismissal was devastating.
Just when did he start to mean so much to me? Was it during that DA meeting when he praised my charm-work? Or at the Yule Ball, peeking in through the doors to the Great Hall and seeing him twirl by with Katie Bell? Or the day in my third year when I discovered I could tell him apart from Fred effortlessly? Or that evening, not long before he left school, coming upon him in the library…sleeping slumped over his books with the lamplight glinting off his hair? Luna cast her memory back, recalling these moments and a host of others, and realizing that beneath the recent tentative beginning they had made with one another, there was a deep wellspring of longing in her. Truly, she had been slowly falling in love with George Weasley for a very very long time.
And she had no idea how to help him now. She’d been so hopeful, but…she couldn’t even reach him.
Her heart sank and she finally lost the battle with her self-control. The tears spilled down her cheeks silently, cooling rapidly in the autumn wind.
~*~
“You want me to send him a Howler?”
Ginny’s voice broke into Luna’s thoughts and she startled slightly, having been so lost in her own contemplation that she was unaware of anyone approaching her. Luna tilted her head to the right and gazed up at her red-headed friend through the blur of her tears and the wisps of hair that fluttered around her temple. She gave Ginny a look as the other girl plopped down on the ground beside her and mimicked Luna’s pose.
The two girls sat shoulder-to-shoulder and hip-to-hip, cloak-wrapped and staring ahead of them into the deepening twilight of the late fall afternoon. Luna quickly dried her eyes on the edge of her sleeve and noted that the trees across the lake were almost completely barren now, standing like spindly gray needles made even more ghostly by the fading light.
“No, Ginny. Thank you, but-”
“Well,” Ginny cut in, “I suppose it could wait a bit…till the next time I see him…I’d be happy to box his ear for you.” She grinned at Luna mischievously and nudged her shoulder.
Luna responded with a faint half-smile. She knew what Ginny was trying to do, and she was grateful for it - truly. Neville had been wonderful the last few weeks as well…though he hadn’t tried to talk to her much about what had happened with George. Rather, Neville had instinctively understood that she needed this time to be silent and try to sort through her own feelings, and he gave her company in that silence.
Sometimes they studied together in the library and never spoke a word, other times Luna ventured out to the greenhouses while Neville worked on assignments for his advanced Herbology apprenticeship and curled up on one of the wide benches lining the greenhouse walls. Simply having the presence of a true friend nearby without the expectation of conversation was soothing.
Ginny wasn’t as good with silence as Neville, but she too had been there for Luna in her own unique way, lifting Luna’s spirits with a joke or swooping in with a quick hug or - as she just had done - offering to perpetrate bodily harm on her own brother…in the most supportive way possible, of course.
Luna sighed again.
“No,” she said firmly. “Thank you…I am grateful…I just don’t think it’s the best way to go about it….he’s not going to change his mind if he’s pushed…he’ll only dig in his heels.”
Ginny fixed her with a sharp look, and though she seemed very much to want to speak, she stayed quiet. A few more heartbeats passed in silence before Ginny could contain herself no longer.
“Luna…he’s hurting, we’re hurting. But how can his keeping us all at arms length help him heal? I just…he wouldn’t talk to me much before I left to come back here and…Mum and Dad were having such a hard time themselves, so they couldn’t…not how they normally would…and he went and pushed Percy around…something happened that first time back at the shop….”
Luna was rather startled. “You know about his fight with Percy? He told you?”
Maybe confiding in me really wasn’t significant. I hardly know what to think anymore…
“No…I saw Ron not long after and he told me bits and pieces.”
Luna nodded, but stayed silent. Her mind drifted to the recent summer and the long walks she and George had taken in the fields stretching between her house and the Burrow. It feels like a different life…They had spent the warm, lazy days talking and exploring the countryside. Luna had thought…had hoped…that opening up to her during these wandering days had been good for George…but now she wasn’t certain of anything. Her insides twisted sharply, making her feel slightly ill, as she remembered something he’d told her one particular day.
“I don’t know if I’ve got the right words for this, Luna, but…it’s like…it’s…I think about Fred every day…mostly I hurt, but sometimes I’m so…I think I’m angry at him, and I hate that I feel that…and I can’t see past all this. I don’t know how I’ll ever feel anything normal again. And I try to tell them…but it’s like I can’t. It’s like I’m suffocating in that house…I…so bloody mixed up…I feel…everything the wrong way round…I itch to get away… and I don’t know how…how to be me anymore.”
Coming back to herself, she turned to Ginny and smiled sadly. She wasn’t sure what she could say to her friend; Ginny was George’s family, but the things he’d shared with her were solely his to reveal. However much she was hurting now, she couldn’t betray his confidences. She thought for a moment, then said softly, “I think…I think he thinks he has to be on his own for a bit…like he’s not really healing unless he does it alone.”
“But, but that’s…that’s daft-” Ginny sputtered. “-we just want him. To talk to us, be with us…just be there…”
“I know Ginny…” Luna sighed once more, her gaze falling back across the surface of the lake, now reflecting the sunset in burnished red-gold waves nearly the color of George’s hair.
…so do I.