One shot: Nothing Like The Moon
Title: Nothing Like The Moon
Word Count: 7,413
Rating: PG
Characters: Luna, Harry/Ginny
Summary: No one - not even she - knew that Luna was one of the most observant people at Hogwarts.
Note: Written for the hpgw_otp Rewrite It! challenge. I took the chapter heading 'Luna Lovegood'.
Mummy likes to work at night, skyclad, palms raised towards the moon. “There’s power in the moon,” Mummy says to Luna, her face silver as she pauses by Luna’s curtains, the moon peeking through the window like a friend bidding farewell. “Power in the moon and in the stars, and the night and our bodies.”
Mummy always kisses Luna on her forehead, and her lips feel cool and her breath feels warm. Mummy’s doing important work tonight, Luna knows, although she does not quite understand it all. Something about drawing power from nature and welcoming it into her body. In the mornings Mummy writes up her experiments, but before she does it she likes to talk through what happened, to get it right in her head. She does this best, she says, when she’s talking to Luna. Luna loves to sit at her mother’s feet, with her mother’s hand moving through her hair, listening to her mother’s smooth voice. She listens to the sounds and rhythms of the speech rather than the words themselves, because quite often Mummy uses words that Luna does not understand. Their cadence thrums in her mind.
When Luna gets out of bed and looks through the window, she sees Mummy dancing at the bottom of the garden, moving her body as though to the rhythm of the words in Luna’s head. She waves her hands high above her, wand held in her outstretched left hand. It looks as though Mummy is trying to reach to the sky itself, which is silly; from Luna’s position the sky and the fat round moon look nearby - as though Luna should be able to reach out of her window for them - but Mummy is standing on the ground and seems far away and so small.
Luna’s body is scrawny and covered up with a nightgown that buttons to her chin, and she’s never understood how there could be power in it. But the light shines on Mummy’s skin, her shoulders and hips roll as she twists and spins. Luna can see the power and beauty in the dance, just as she knows that she would look ridiculous if she tried to do the same. She is just a bud; she cannot bloom under the full moon, but Mummy is like a full-blossomed flower, petals wide and spread and opening. Luna watches for what seems like hours, her skin tingling and her heart aching with it. She opens the window to taste the night air. She feels connected with the night and her mother and the magic that is dancing in their house and garden. It is October, the air is cool, but she does not shiver. She does not notice the warmth of the magic until the flash of light that comes down from the sky and makes the garden white with brightness. After the light the air shifts like a sharp breath. Then Mummy stops moving and the magic turns cold.
People often thought that Luna stared. They thought her odd and rude because of it, and Luna was quite surprised when she first came to Hogwarts and people waved their hands back and forth in front of her eyes after she’d been thinking for a few moments. This made her blink, and whatever she’d been thinking would wash away, leaving Luna looking with surprise into their sneering faces.
She didn’t mean to stare at all, and the people who thought she was being rude were wrong: she didn’t mean to look at them. She didn’t want to look at them, and in fact did not see them at all. But what else was she meant to do with her eyes when she was contemplating something that did not require her to look at things? Quite often Luna was replaying pictures and scenes in her mind. No one - not even she - knew that Luna was one of the most observant people at Hogwarts. She knew things without knowing how she knew them, saw things without knowing what they meant, just as she had heard her mother’s words without understanding them as a child.
This lunchtime Luna had started to think about her Arithmancy homework. She wasn’t sure she’d got the answer to question three right. She’d checked it a few times and had got the same answer, but it still felt wrong. She chewed her broccoli and tried to think it through again, but became distracted when the image of the Gryffindor table flashed into her mind. Judging by the stacks of toast and plates of bacon it was breakfast time. This breakfast time, because Padma’s twin Parvati was wearing that butterfly clip today. Padma was wearing the same one, and the sisters had stopped at the entrance way to the Great Hall and laughed about it. Luna had had to stop and wait for them to move so that she could get past.
But even though Luna could see Parvati Patil and her butterfly clip, she was, as always, more interested in Harry Potter and his friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, who were sitting a few chairs down. As Luna watched, Hermione asked Ron something. Ron turned to his left and started talking loudly to the blond boy sitting next to him. Hermione looked dismayed, and Harry reached across the table to grab the pitcher of orange juice for her. Hermione poured herself a glass and sipped at it, her shoulders hunched forward. Harry was still looking across the table in the direction he’d got the juice from, where Ron was deep in conversation with the blond boy. Dean, whom Luna knew because he was Ginny’s boyfriend, was opposite them, commenting now and again but only ever to the blond boy and not to Ron. Ron and he were avoiding each other’s eyes.
Harry didn’t seem to be noticing this, though. He was looking to Dean’s right, where Ginny was sitting, gesticulating with a piece of toast to Stephanie Solomon, one of the friends that Ginny had told off for calling Luna ‘Loony’.
Harry looked at Ginny, and Luna counted ‘one, two, three’ before he turned away, a pained expression on his face. Most people would think that Harry was just uncomfortable because Ronald and Hermione seemed to be fighting, but Luna could remember scores of scenes where Harry had just stared down at his plate and concentrated on his food when his friends were bickering or ignoring each other. This was something entirely different.
Nerves about the first Quidditch match of the season, perhaps? Luna watched for another few moments. Ginny was on the Gryffindor Quidditch team, but she didn’t seem nervous. Then Luna saw Ginny’s eyes slide over to Harry - and Luna could catalogue hundreds of times when Ginny had done exactly the same thing. She looked over with a bright smile on her face - in case Harry saw her looking, Luna imagined - but when she saw that Harry wasn’t paying attention, her smile changed into something slightly shy, something unsure. Then Harry looked up and Ginny looked away and touched Dean’s hand, smiling at him brilliantly. Harry glowered.
“Have I got food in my teeth or something?”
Luna blinked three times and saw Lisa Turpin’s scowling face.
“Is that a joke? I don’t know. Have you got something in your teeth?” Luna asked. “Or is the next line ‘knock knock’?”
Lisa stared. “You are so weird,” she said. “Why were you looking at me like that?”
“I wasn’t looking at you.”
“Come off it, Loony, you’ve been staring at me for the last ten minutes.”
Luna sighed and looked over Lisa’s shoulder to the Gryffindor table. Harry was sitting next to Ron but Hermione was nowhere to be seen. Ginny was chatting to Neville Longbottom and occasionally poking Dean in the side. Sometimes, when Dean was talking to someone else, Ginny’s eyes drifted to Harry and she’d frown slightly. Then she caught sight of Luna watching and gave her a small wave.
Luna got up, thinking that she didn’t know the correct answer to question three for Arithmancy, but she did know Ginny Weasley’s secret, and Harry Potter’s too.
There is a mirror perched atop Luna’s chest of drawers at home. She often dresses in front of it, catching flashes of white stomach and pale breast - strange, secret, hidden places. Luna tells herself that this is a mirror that tells secrets. She tells herself that if she looks into it for long enough she sees her mother’s face reflected back at her.
Luna’s head was full of music. The trilling cry of the Phoenix, and the lament of the merpeople, the whoosh and thud of the centaurs’ arrows. There was the hum of voices belonging to the departing mourners, songs of sighs and sorrows.
Luna stood just out of reach of the Whomping Willow and watched the students file back to the castle. She watched groups of grown ups head to the gates of the school grounds, some walking briskly, some lingering. She watched Harry Potter and his friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger standing together and talking earnestly. She waited, unseen, until all of them were gone. She wanted to go to Professor Dumbledore’s grave by herself and touch the white marble, to feel the thrum of recent death magic that created it. Funerals to her were beautiful. There was something pure and lovely in grief - in the tears and in the cold tombs. She remembered that at her mother’s funeral, when she felt ripped and scattered and bloodied by sadness, that something within her had changed. It had all become a dream, and she had smelt the leaves blowing in the wind, had seen the pale faces about her, seen the water dropping from the end of her father’s nose and thought that it was all strange and new and beautiful. She had been nine. She had felt very young and very old at the same time, and had taken her father’s hand because his face was screwed up like a child’s and she’d thought he needed comforting.
She took a few steps towards the tomb, imagining how smooth it would feel beneath her fingers. It would feel old and new - the new death of an old life.
Luna didn’t get to the tomb, though, because on her way she caught sight of Ginny Weasley sitting half-hidden by a tree and looking out over the lake. Luna looked at the lake as well, just in case the giant squid was doing anything interesting. It wasn’t, so Luna looked back at Ginny.
Ginny’s mouth was moving a little as though she were counting under her breath. Her eyes were fixed on the lake, and she hadn’t seen Luna. The thing about Ginny was that she usually seemed so bright and so strong, and yet Luna, who saw things when others weren’t looking, had often seen traces of the Ginny who had been shy and as vulnerable as Luna herself when they were in their first and second year. Luna had never let Ginny know that she had seen through the bright smiling girl that Ginny had become. People should be allowed their shields if they wanted them. But now it meant that Luna didn’t know whether to leave Ginny alone or not; she knew both how liberating and how dreadful it could be to be alone. She’d just decided to turn away when she saw Ginny’s face - which Ginny’d been keeping rigorously still - crumple just as Luna’s father’s had at her mother’s funeral. Ginny didn’t make a sound, but she rested her head on her knees and her shoulders shook.
Luna made up her mind and went to sit beside Ginny, with her back against the tree. Ginny immediately stilled and sat up, her damp face red. She raised her hand to wipe the tears away, looking almost angry, but Luna took Ginny’s hand. She wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, so she stroked the freckled skin on the backs of Ginny’s curled fingers. Ginny’s chest hitched, and she seemed to give in, bowing her head, shoulders rounding.
Luna sat and held Ginny’s hand and felt oddly privileged that she was allowed to see Ginny’s grief.
“I don’t think I’d like to see everyone look so sad at my funeral,” Luna said at last, because Ginny didn’t seem to be about to say anything. “I don’t think Professor Dumbledore would have either.”
Ginny sniffed and tilted her chin. “Most of them,” she said, her voice a little shaky, “most of them weren’t even sad he’d gone. They were just upset because they thought he was our best chance against Voldemort.”
Luna felt the strange little peak of fear in her chest at the mention of his name, but she kept herself still and tried not to react. There was worse to come, she told herself, than hearing his name spoken out loud. She would not be like everybody else and fear the words … not if she wanted to live without fearing the man. Ginny took her hand from Luna’s loose grip and rubbed at her eyes, and Luna looked away over the lake again, trying to guess what mysterious things might be lurking beneath the ripples.
It was very quiet, and Luna wished for one of those comments she sometimes made that were meant to be serious but came out sounding odd and that people laughed at. She never made them intentionally, was often surprised at people’s reactions to them, but wished now that she could come up with something funny on demand - something to break the silence.
Luna knew that she could never be funny on purpose, so she decided to be frank instead.
“I suppose people are too busy being sad for themselves to be sad for Professor Dumbledore,” she said. “Now he’s gone they need someone else to win the war for them.”
Ginny snorted. “Three guesses who.”
“But people were expecting Harry to win the war for them before, weren’t they?”
“Yes.” Ginny scuffed the heel of her shoe against the ground. “Harry expects to do it too. Or to try, anyway. He always did, but now Dumbledore’s gone there’s no one left to protect him, and he’s going to go off on his own and …” She took a deep breath. “Of course he’s going to go off. He’s Harry.”
“He’s not quite alone,” said Luna, although she thought that in some way Harry always had been. He was often surrounded by people and yet had the air of someone who was by himself. “He’s got Ron and Hermione and you and people from the D.A. We want to help.”
Ginny patted her hand. “I know. Harry knows too, he’s just horrible at asking for help. He doesn’t want to put anyone in danger.” She gave a fragile laugh. “It’s just all too stupid.”
Luna frowned. She didn’t see anything stupid about the situation they were in. There was a war, their headmaster was dead, she had fought Death Eaters in the hallways of Hogwarts. She wondered whether to ask Ginny to explain why it was stupid - Professor Flitwick had mentioned in her Career’s Advice session that she needed to work on her people skills. But Ginny was speaking again, her voice quick.
“Luna - what do you think of love?”
Something deep within Luna squirmed. She didn’t know what to think about love. She knew what it was meant to be - what it was in the books and on the radio programmes she had heard her fellow Ravenclaws discuss. She thought of the clinging, quarrelling couples that got together and broke up every other week at Hogwarts. Thought of the romance between Rufus Scrimgeour and Amelia Bones that her father had reported in The Quibbler a few years ago. None of that seemed real to her, and it seemed unreal too that Ginny, who was her age, should be thinking about love - and looking at Luna with that uncertain, doubting face, as though she were really considering it, really wondering if that was what she felt.
“I’m sure love is very nice when it happens,” she said.
Ginny looked a little puzzled. “Yes, but what do you think it’s like, being in love? How do you know?”
Luna had been told she had an overactive imagination. She couldn’t imagine anything like being in love, but Ginny was still sitting beside her and wanting an answer, wanting to know what she thought, so Luna had to try.
She thought of her father’s tears at her mother’s funeral. She remembered watching her mother reading through her father’s proofs for The Quibbler, armed with a red quill and with a half-smile on her lips, while her father brushed and brushed her mother’s hair.
No one had brushed Luna’s hair since Mummy died. She’d asked her father once whether he’d like to, and he’d said he was busy. She had not asked again.
Luna thought of her mother dancing beneath the moon, reaching up as though to grasp it, yet always at a distance.
She looked out over the lake to the far shore, where the sky met the rising bank and where, she had thought as a child, she might find treasure or pixies or her mother’s voice.
“I think love feels like something’s far away,” she said at last. “Like you want to touch something and can’t. Like a quest that can’t end because it’s impossible. Something too high and too far and cold. Like the moon.”
Ginny’s eyes were startled. “Is that what you really think?” she asked, sounding almost awed.
Why would she have said it if it wasn’t what she thought? Luna wondered. She didn’t want to seem rude, so she shrugged. “Why?” she asked, more for something to say than out of curiosity. “Why, what do you think it’s like?”
Ginny drew her knees up to her chin and hooked her arms round her shins. “I don’t know,” she said, her gaze going out to the point that Luna had stared at before. “I don’t know.”
Mummy doesn’t start moving again. It takes Luna a while to realise this - that Mummy not moving isn’t right, and that the magic feels wrong, smells wrong, even though she doesn’t know how she knows this.
It’s suddenly cold, and the sky seems darker, even though the moon is shining just as brightly as before. Its light seems cold, cruel, and Mummy’s figure is still not moving on the ground.
Luna runs, her bare feet against the carpet of the landing, the stairs, the cool tiles of the kitchen, the cold stone of the porch and the damp grass of the garden. Blades of grass brush her ankles like wet fingertips, and she thinks they are trying to pull her back, dragging against her as she scampers across the dark lawn to where Mummy is.
Even though most students automatically managed to steer clear of any compartment Luna sat in on the Hogwarts Express, it was actually very easy for her to go unnoticed. Luna thought that it was because her pale skin, pale eyes, pale hair made her fade into the background like a rather substantial ghost. That or she just wasn’t interesting enough to notice, which she didn’t want to believe. Sometimes she enjoyed her obscurity, and often she wished that people wouldn’t notice her if all they were going to do was call her names.
Hogwarts had opened for Luna’s sixth year, although without many of the students - including Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, who were off doing something secret that would destroy You Know Who. Ginny did come back to school, paler than before and grimmer-faced. Luna could only admire her; the students looked to her, as the last link with Harry in the school, to provide answers and support. Deaths piled up outside the castle’s walls, and Ginny walked the corridors to torrents of questions of where her boyfriend was and what he was doing to end the war.
All Ginny could tell them was Harry wasn’t her boyfriend any more. “I wouldn’t know,” she’d say brusquely. “He dumped me.”
That brought shocked faces and accusing whispers, as well as several overtures from some of the older boys. Ginny ignored them all.
“They’d believe he broke up with you more easily if you went out with someone else,” Luna told her.
“He did break up with me,” Ginny said.
But it hadn’t been real. Luna knew this in the way she knew other things without having to learn them. Harry Potter had not dumped Ginny Weasley as hundreds of Hogwarts students had dumped and been dumped. It wasn’t idle school gossip. Afterwards Harry Potter had left Hogwarts to go and fight You Know Who and Ginny Weasley had sat by the lake and watched him walk away and had tried not to cry, and then had asked Luna what she thought about love.
Harry had cut Ginny off to keep her safe, and Ginny had let him go.
In her sixth year Luna became more visible because all eyes watched Ginny, and Luna was often at Ginny’s side, because - for some reason - popular, pretty Ginny Weasley had become friends with Luna. That was one of the ways war changed things. Ginny, while always friendly, had never sought Luna out before their sixth year. This year Ginny and Luna, with the help of Neville and the other seventh year Gryffindors, had restarted the DA for all who wanted to come. It wasn’t much, but it felt better to be doing something while they were all stuck at school.
That was how it felt. Stuck at school, safe but scared, waiting to go to war or for the war to come to them.
Almost a month into the Easter term, the war breached the castle’s walls - not by force but in a spate of attacks that left the Wizarding world shaking. Hogsmeade was threatened, and the students were told that they would be sent home. Luna walked through the castle on the last day with a sense of unreality. Something was ending, something was about to begin, and she couldn’t know what was to come and whether she wanted it to.
“I’m glad,” Neville said. His eyes were dark and his hands perfectly still. Luna looked at him hard and decided that he must only be trembling on the inside. “I’m ready to fight.”
Luna didn’t feel particularly ready to fight, but she supposed she would when the time came. It was comforting, at least, to know she could.
Three weeks later she sat in an armchair that smelt of dust in number twelve, Grimmauld Place. There were several of them there: not many, but some. Luna liked being part of something, even though the planning and conversations sometimes made her head spin until she thought back to being a little girl, hearing her mother talking about her experiments and stroking her hair. Often she fell asleep during these meetings, but when she woke up she saw more clearly than the others - tired of talking in circles - what could be done, so they never reprimanded her for it.
It was nearly March. Luna had watched snowdrops grow in the chilly soil. There were no flowers at Grimmauld Place, but it was easy to sink back into the memory of her childhood in Devon, to see the small white flowers like bowed heads on their slender stems. Luna helped Mrs Weasley and Ginny with the household chores, she sat in lessons with Professor Lupin, she was taught defensive and offensive spells by Tonks. She shared a bedroom with Ginny and talked or was silent, slept well or wondered about the house in her nightgown, watched the moon or blocked out the stars, felt half-child and half-soldier. When Harry and Ron and Hermione came back, Luna listened to the conversations the others had with them and was touched when Harry talked to her, but mostly she sat to one side and listened and watched - the present and the past. It did not feel as though there was a future in the house, even though Luna knew they were moving into it, perhaps by inches, perhaps at the speed of the Hogwarts Express.
Luna was often overlooked, as though she was part of the fabric of her habitual chair. She was sitting there one evening, the second after Harry, Ron and Hermione’s return, after most had gone to bed. She hadn’t noticed the room emptying one by one until there were only three of them left. Ginny was lying on her stomach on the rug by the fire, her cheek pillowed on one outstretched arm. She was digging her fingertips of the other hand into the weave of the rug, smoothing and ruffling it over and over again. The small movement of her fingers was the only sign she was awake. Harry was sprawled on the sofa - he’d gained more of it as Hermione and then Ron had left, so now he lay with his legs bent, toes touching one arm of the sofa and his shoulder propped up on the other. He was flicking restlessly through one of the defence manuals he had taught from when he lead the D.A.
Luna saw this, but was in actual fact thinking of Draco Malfoy at the Yule Ball. She had not been at the ball, of course, but she had watched Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson parade down the corridors once it had been decided that they’d go together, and had heard Pansy talking about her dress with brash excitement. Luna had thought then that pink would probably not be Pansy’s colour. They’d been talking about Malfoy earlier, about whether he could be found, whether he was a willing Death Eater, whether he was worth trying to save or seduce into spying.
Ginny got up and went over to the sofa, sitting herself in the crook of Harry’s legs, and Draco Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson in her unflattering dress robes pirouetted out of Luna’s mind.
“Oh. I can move,” Harry said, already beginning to shift on the sofa, but Ginny shook her head.
“No, don’t move. I’m comfortable.”
Harry leant back against the arm of the sofa and looked over at Ginny for a long moment, his eyes slits in the pale light. “Are you all right?” he said at last.
“Of course I am.” Ginny let out a huff of breath. “I’ve really missed you, you know.”
He smiled briefly, but to Luna it made him look more tired. “You shouldn’t.”
Ginny swatted him on the stomach. Her hand lingered there, white against the dark blue of his jumper. Luna tried to guess whether Ginny would move first or Harry; she was expecting Ginny to withdraw her hand - could almost feel the itch of it in her own hand, the woollen jumper slightly scratchy against the skin of her palm - when Harry rested his hand on top of Ginny’s.
Harry, Ginny, and Luna in her corner, stared at the joined hands.
“I’m sorry, Ginny,” Harry said. “We still can’t … I’m nowhere near destroying him.” He sounded defeated. “I’m not even close.”
“Shush,” Ginny said. Her voice was soft, more of a sigh. She curled her body down so that she lay half-against the back of the sofa and Harry’s chest. “I know, I know. It’s all right. But can we just pretend? Just for a few minutes.”
Luna knew that she could not come out of the shadows. She watched as Harry slid his arm round Ginny’s back, twining his fingers through her hair and then smoothing it with his thumb. He closed his eyes. “All right,” he said, his lips close to the top of her head.
With ghost-soft steps, Luna slipped out of the room and made her silent way upstairs and into her room. She undressed quickly, trying not to look at her body as she pulled her night gown over her head, and slid into bed. Hermione was already asleep; her rhythmic breathing was in Luna’s ears as she buried her face in the pillow. For the first time since leaving school and coming to Grimmauld Place she felt its desolation, the yawning aching chasm where something good should be. She felt shudders wrack their way up her chest, painful and involuntary, humiliating, but somehow necessary. She pressed her mouth down on the pillow, letting the cry come out as breath but not sound. It felt as though the scene she’d witnessed had changed something within her - she’d never experienced anything like it and possibly never would, but would fight bitterly to protect it. The spasms in her throat passed, but she hugged the ache to her as she drifted into sleep.
Luna’s run up and down the garden hundreds of times, but this feels different. It’s night time; there could be monsters hiding in the dark. Daddy tells stories of Nargles and Flitgibbets, things that are brillig and slithy lurking in the undergrowth.
She stops a few feet away and approaches Mummy slowly, taking cautious little steps to where Mummy is sleeping on the ground. Luna kneels. She is cold, and Mummy must be cold as well, because her skin is bare against the evening air and damp grass.
She rests her cheek against Mummy’s curved shoulder, snuffling her nose into the soft skin, taking in the smell of night and lemons. Mummy’s skin is metallic in the moonlight and feels cool to the touch. Luna presses her body close against her mother’s, feels the faint warmth of blood beneath the skin. Feels the blood turn cold.
It was one of the nights when Luna couldn’t sleep. The moon was full, hanging bright in the sky. Luna rarely slept at the full moon, even before. Mummy had said that it was because of the connection Luna had with what she had been named for. Luna thought of this sometimes when she was with Professor Lupin. She had been mildly surprised to find that his illness at school had not, as she had supposed, been caused by a Blibbering Humdinger hiding under his bed. Luna wondered whether Professor Lupin thought of the moon when he saw her because of her name. She wondered whether he too looked out of his window at times and saw the moon growing growing growing, rounding out like a spreading flower. Did he ever lift his hand to cup the waxing moon and try to hold it there, contain it trapped between his palms?
The moon was his curse, and Luna’s too.
And as the moon drew the wolf from her otherwise restrained Professor, so it drew Luna to it - she spent full moon nights bathed in bright silver, staring out at the cold, hard face of it. Tonight the moon was itchy, under her skin, and she longed to be outside, to stretch up to it, to feel its touch on her arms and legs and breasts. She knew now why her mother danced skyclad, knew too that she was old enough to do so, and that she could not bear to do so.
The grass is damp under her bare feet. She blinked. There was no grass in the tiny garden of Grimmauld Place. It was simply a dozen square paving stones with hopeful weeds growing in the cracks. The garden was shrouded on each side by black trees, their branches stretching inwards like long-armed lovers reaching for each other’s hand.
“Hi, Luna.”
Luna blinked. When she refocused she saw that the trees weren’t black, but speckled with grey light, and looked far more like trees than lovers. The small plot was suddenly far less mysterious, and the sky seemed lighter and less threatening. She also saw that Harry Potter was standing less than two feet away from her.
“Hello, Harry,” she said, giving him a smile. “I didn’t see you there.”
He grinned. “I didn’t think you had.”
“I don’t often not see people,” she said, still feeling surprised at her own surprise. “At least, not the interesting ones.”
He shuffled a little at that. Harry, for all he had grown in the time Luna had known him, had still not become comfortable with or reconciled to the draw he had over people.
“It’s quite late,” she said.
His eyes flicked up to the sky. “It’s the full moon.”
They were both saying things the other knew - a comfortable conversation, Luna thought, if not a very interesting one.
“I never sleep when the moon is full,” she said. “It reminds me of my mother.”
He nodded as though he understood. Luna wanted to take him by the hand, or hug him or beam at him, because she felt as though he did understand, and it was so rare a feeling for her to be understood. She’d always known Harry Potter was special.
“It reminds me of my dad,” Harry said. “He and my godfather were friends with Remus, you know, and when it was the full moon they used to keep him company.”
“That’s nice,” Luna said. “Were they werewolf tamers?”
Harry sniggered, but it was a companionable sound and not like many of the sniggers she’d heard at school, so Luna didn’t mind. “No, they were Animagi.”
“Ah,” Luna said.
“Yeah, so Dad and Sirius and Remus would spend the full moon together. Sirius used to stay with Remus when they lived here together too, but Remus won’t let me in the room with him when he’s transformed, even though he takes the Wolfsbane Potion.”
“But you’re staying up with him anyway.”
Harry smiled. “I was just going to sit on the other side of the door, but Tonks is there.”
“So you’re here.”
Luna sat down on the back door step, tilting her head back against the wood. Harry stood for a few seconds longer before joining her on the step.
“Aren’t you cold?” he asked.
Luna rubbed the material of her nightgown between finger and thumb, then peered at the fine white hairs on her arms which stood straight up from her goose-pimpled skin.
“Yes, I rather think I am,” she said.
Harry began to pull off his jacket. Luna watched him with wide eyes. Was he showing how silly she was to be cold by gesturing that he was too hot? No, she discovered. He was offering her his jacket.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s quite all right. I don’t mind being cold.”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said, draping the coat over her shoulders.
She turned her head to sniff at the lapel. It smelt of man and salt and outdoors, and also faintly of the brand of washing powder Mrs Weasley used.
“Thank you.” Luna felt awkward: she had seen Harry pace inside rooms. She had seen him stand a resolute two feet from Ginny. She’d seen him cover his eyes and run his hand through his hair in the middle of a conversation. She knew he was tired and restrained and putting up a front. That night with Ginny was the last time Luna had seen Harry look relaxed. Maybe he needed time to himself. “It’s a good night for thinking,” she said. “Do you want to be on your own? I can go.”
“No, it’s fine,” he said. “I’d like your company.”
“Really?” A request for her company was still a novelty to Luna.
“Really.”
Luna turned to look at him. Harry was sitting with his forearms resting on his thighs, his hands clasped between his knees. His shoulders were set, and he stared down at his knotted fingers.
“It doesn’t matter that you don’t know what to do,” she said. “It’ll come when it comes.”
He jerked his head up. “How did you know I was thinking that?”
Luna opened her mouth, but found no words to explain how she knew. The jumble of images and snatches of conversations that made up her knowledge would fragment and fall apart if she tried to make sense of them. “You can’t think about anything else,” she said instead.
Harry leant back. “You’re right there,” he said.
How could people think about other things when the war was hanging over them all like the executioner’s axe about to fall? Luna felt as fragile as a snowdrop. But Luna did think of other things, even though her mind usually drifted back to what was to become of herself, her father, her companions, her world. Harry on the other hand … he closes his eyes as he strokes Ginny’s hair, he mouths words into the shadows, he tosses aside the paper which screams the words ‘The Chosen One’ … To kill or be killed - Harry might be wondering what would become of his soul.
“I hate not knowing what’s going to happen, and when it’s going to happen, and what I can do about it.” Harry sounded as though he was talking to himself. Luna wasn’t sure if it would be rude to answer or ruder to ignore his words. She didn’t understand hating a lack of control. She had decided, years ago, to take control of her feelings by letting herself drift through the world - by ceding her control over life, staying dispassionate. Nothing hurt when it was too far away.
“I wish I could help,” Luna said, “but I’m afraid I was dreadful at Divination. Professor Trelawney said I had an unmystical soul.”
Harry snorted. “You should bring that up with Hermione.”
Luna liked people who felt things - ones who cared, perhaps too much. It was why she liked Ginny, and Harry too. Even though she found that being around them too much started to crack her shell - she felt more when she was around them, tender and raw as she hadn’t felt since the night when she’d watched her mother die and had been able to do nothing to stop it or to bring her back. After that she’d watched her father immerse himself in a wonderland that seemed so real, and had decided to join him there.
Sitting outside on a moonlight night, talking and not talking with Harry Potter, sitting in the peace of the middle of a war, Luna felt more real than she had ever done.
“Sometimes you just have to let go a bit,” she said, watching the edges of dream sweep away through the faintly-brushing branches on the garden’s dark trees. “But not too far.”
Changing in front of her mirror, Luna sometimes watches her reflection, the shedding and replacing of clothes, the quick glimpse of truth beneath. Once or twice she’s stumbled, hopping on one leg to take off her trousers, wriggling about as she pulls up her top. When this happens the mirror shakes, reflecting back a chaotic world. It only lasts a moment, but when the image is settled once more nothing is quite what it was. War is like this, Luna thinks.
“Lovegood, stop staring at me,” Draco Malfoy hissed.
Luna blinked and put down her fork; she must have been holding it halfway to her mouth for a few minutes.
“I wasn’t staring at you, Draco,” she said. She looked at him now, and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He was wearing a set of dress robes that looked rather uncomfortable; with a collar that high Luna was surprised he managed to swallow his food at all. She glanced at his plate and saw that he hadn’t eaten much. Maybe that was why.
Or maybe Draco Malfoy’s lack of appetite was linked to the beads of sweat Luna could make out on his brow and underneath his nose. It certainly wasn’t the fault of the food - the house-elves had outdone themselves in celebration of Harry Potter’s defeat of Lord Voldemort. Luna, along with many other members of the Order of the Phoenix, was sitting on one of the higher tables, although not the high table, where a scowling Harry was sitting next to a beaming Rufus Scrimgeour.
Draco Malfoy had recently been outed as spy for the Order - they had decided he was worthwhile after all - and as such was sitting with Order members during the meal. Considering how assured he had always seemed at school, Luna found his nervousness fascinating.
“Will you stop staring at me?” he growled.
Luna had been staring that time, so she merely smiled at him. Over his shoulder she saw narrow-eyed people turning around to point accusing fingers at him. “Quite a few people are staring at you, Draco,” she said pleasantly. “One more can’t hurt.”
Draco glared at her and pushed his peas around his plate in little circles.
Luna wondered briefly what kind of ugly dress robes Pansy Parkinson would have worn had she been on the side that got to hold a Victory Feast. Then she piled a little bit of everything on her plate onto her fork, transferred the lot into her mouth, and returned to her original contemplation of the top table.
She wasn’t very interested in Minister “for how much longer” Scrimgeour - he clearly hadn’t been the same since he’d had Amelia Bones killed in a fit of jealousy and blamed it on the Death Eaters. Harry certainly didn’t seem to like sitting next to him very much, but Luna thought that Harry Potter was probably deriving more pleasure from the person sitting on his right. Ginny looked very pretty today; her hair was swept up off her shoulders, and she was wearing new dress robes which, while Luna thought could have done with a few more spangles, were made from a beautiful pale material. Luna thought Ginny looked rather like a candle.
She certainly seemed bright - and whenever Harry looked at her his face brightened too. Luna imagined that it was obvious to anyone in the room how happy the pair of them were to be together, and it surprised her that more people preferred to stare at Draco Malfoy because he’d been a spy than stare at Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley because they were in love.
Luna still didn’t know what she thought of love - had no idea what it would feel like for herself. She remembered Ginny asking her on the day of Dumbledore’s funeral, and decided that Ginny couldn’t have known quite what love was then, because it was unmistakable now. She watched Ginny turn her head towards Harry, closing the gap between them so that their faces nearly touched. Harry said something, and Ginny gave an irrepressible laugh that carried through the banqueting room, provoking a ripple of amusement from the guests. Ginny buried her face in her napkin, her whole body quivering with laughter, then straightened up and tried to stab Harry with her fork. Harry gave her an unrepentant grin.
Luna beamed up at them, feeling full of food and contentment. Harry caught her eye and nodded to her.
Her own words came floating into Luna’s mind. “You just have to let go a bit. But not too far.” It was funny how she had been talking about more things than she’d realised.
Yes, she thought. That was far enough.
“Good lord, Loony, are you talking to yourself now?” said Draco Malfoy. “I’ve heard that’s the first sign of madness, but in your case …”
“Excuse me,” Luna said. “But you have food stuck between your teeth.”
“Look, darling, isn’t it beautiful?” Mummy says, pointing up to the night sky and tilting her face to it until she’s caressed with silver light. Then she looks down at Luna and crouches, pulling Luna tight against her body.
“Both my moons,” she says into Luna’s neck. “Both beautiful.”
Why, Luna asks, was Mummy always longing for the moon that was out of reach? Was she, Luna - named so that Mummy could cradle her grail in her arms - not enough?
No, Luna knows - has known, always did know. Mummy was brilliant. She was extraordinary. The ill-fated experiment was just part of her work. The moon in the sky held Mummy’s curiosity; Luna held her love.
And now she knows that love is not a distant light. It is not cold and cruel and unreachable. It does not abandon, does not mock. It does hurt. Brings life, brings death, takes in and takes out.
Luna is different to her mother. For her, love is nothing like the moon.
Word Count: 7,413
Rating: PG
Characters: Luna, Harry/Ginny
Summary: No one - not even she - knew that Luna was one of the most observant people at Hogwarts.
Note: Written for the hpgw_otp Rewrite It! challenge. I took the chapter heading 'Luna Lovegood'.
Mummy likes to work at night, skyclad, palms raised towards the moon. “There’s power in the moon,” Mummy says to Luna, her face silver as she pauses by Luna’s curtains, the moon peeking through the window like a friend bidding farewell. “Power in the moon and in the stars, and the night and our bodies.”
Mummy always kisses Luna on her forehead, and her lips feel cool and her breath feels warm. Mummy’s doing important work tonight, Luna knows, although she does not quite understand it all. Something about drawing power from nature and welcoming it into her body. In the mornings Mummy writes up her experiments, but before she does it she likes to talk through what happened, to get it right in her head. She does this best, she says, when she’s talking to Luna. Luna loves to sit at her mother’s feet, with her mother’s hand moving through her hair, listening to her mother’s smooth voice. She listens to the sounds and rhythms of the speech rather than the words themselves, because quite often Mummy uses words that Luna does not understand. Their cadence thrums in her mind.
When Luna gets out of bed and looks through the window, she sees Mummy dancing at the bottom of the garden, moving her body as though to the rhythm of the words in Luna’s head. She waves her hands high above her, wand held in her outstretched left hand. It looks as though Mummy is trying to reach to the sky itself, which is silly; from Luna’s position the sky and the fat round moon look nearby - as though Luna should be able to reach out of her window for them - but Mummy is standing on the ground and seems far away and so small.
Luna’s body is scrawny and covered up with a nightgown that buttons to her chin, and she’s never understood how there could be power in it. But the light shines on Mummy’s skin, her shoulders and hips roll as she twists and spins. Luna can see the power and beauty in the dance, just as she knows that she would look ridiculous if she tried to do the same. She is just a bud; she cannot bloom under the full moon, but Mummy is like a full-blossomed flower, petals wide and spread and opening. Luna watches for what seems like hours, her skin tingling and her heart aching with it. She opens the window to taste the night air. She feels connected with the night and her mother and the magic that is dancing in their house and garden. It is October, the air is cool, but she does not shiver. She does not notice the warmth of the magic until the flash of light that comes down from the sky and makes the garden white with brightness. After the light the air shifts like a sharp breath. Then Mummy stops moving and the magic turns cold.
People often thought that Luna stared. They thought her odd and rude because of it, and Luna was quite surprised when she first came to Hogwarts and people waved their hands back and forth in front of her eyes after she’d been thinking for a few moments. This made her blink, and whatever she’d been thinking would wash away, leaving Luna looking with surprise into their sneering faces.
She didn’t mean to stare at all, and the people who thought she was being rude were wrong: she didn’t mean to look at them. She didn’t want to look at them, and in fact did not see them at all. But what else was she meant to do with her eyes when she was contemplating something that did not require her to look at things? Quite often Luna was replaying pictures and scenes in her mind. No one - not even she - knew that Luna was one of the most observant people at Hogwarts. She knew things without knowing how she knew them, saw things without knowing what they meant, just as she had heard her mother’s words without understanding them as a child.
This lunchtime Luna had started to think about her Arithmancy homework. She wasn’t sure she’d got the answer to question three right. She’d checked it a few times and had got the same answer, but it still felt wrong. She chewed her broccoli and tried to think it through again, but became distracted when the image of the Gryffindor table flashed into her mind. Judging by the stacks of toast and plates of bacon it was breakfast time. This breakfast time, because Padma’s twin Parvati was wearing that butterfly clip today. Padma was wearing the same one, and the sisters had stopped at the entrance way to the Great Hall and laughed about it. Luna had had to stop and wait for them to move so that she could get past.
But even though Luna could see Parvati Patil and her butterfly clip, she was, as always, more interested in Harry Potter and his friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, who were sitting a few chairs down. As Luna watched, Hermione asked Ron something. Ron turned to his left and started talking loudly to the blond boy sitting next to him. Hermione looked dismayed, and Harry reached across the table to grab the pitcher of orange juice for her. Hermione poured herself a glass and sipped at it, her shoulders hunched forward. Harry was still looking across the table in the direction he’d got the juice from, where Ron was deep in conversation with the blond boy. Dean, whom Luna knew because he was Ginny’s boyfriend, was opposite them, commenting now and again but only ever to the blond boy and not to Ron. Ron and he were avoiding each other’s eyes.
Harry didn’t seem to be noticing this, though. He was looking to Dean’s right, where Ginny was sitting, gesticulating with a piece of toast to Stephanie Solomon, one of the friends that Ginny had told off for calling Luna ‘Loony’.
Harry looked at Ginny, and Luna counted ‘one, two, three’ before he turned away, a pained expression on his face. Most people would think that Harry was just uncomfortable because Ronald and Hermione seemed to be fighting, but Luna could remember scores of scenes where Harry had just stared down at his plate and concentrated on his food when his friends were bickering or ignoring each other. This was something entirely different.
Nerves about the first Quidditch match of the season, perhaps? Luna watched for another few moments. Ginny was on the Gryffindor Quidditch team, but she didn’t seem nervous. Then Luna saw Ginny’s eyes slide over to Harry - and Luna could catalogue hundreds of times when Ginny had done exactly the same thing. She looked over with a bright smile on her face - in case Harry saw her looking, Luna imagined - but when she saw that Harry wasn’t paying attention, her smile changed into something slightly shy, something unsure. Then Harry looked up and Ginny looked away and touched Dean’s hand, smiling at him brilliantly. Harry glowered.
“Have I got food in my teeth or something?”
Luna blinked three times and saw Lisa Turpin’s scowling face.
“Is that a joke? I don’t know. Have you got something in your teeth?” Luna asked. “Or is the next line ‘knock knock’?”
Lisa stared. “You are so weird,” she said. “Why were you looking at me like that?”
“I wasn’t looking at you.”
“Come off it, Loony, you’ve been staring at me for the last ten minutes.”
Luna sighed and looked over Lisa’s shoulder to the Gryffindor table. Harry was sitting next to Ron but Hermione was nowhere to be seen. Ginny was chatting to Neville Longbottom and occasionally poking Dean in the side. Sometimes, when Dean was talking to someone else, Ginny’s eyes drifted to Harry and she’d frown slightly. Then she caught sight of Luna watching and gave her a small wave.
Luna got up, thinking that she didn’t know the correct answer to question three for Arithmancy, but she did know Ginny Weasley’s secret, and Harry Potter’s too.
There is a mirror perched atop Luna’s chest of drawers at home. She often dresses in front of it, catching flashes of white stomach and pale breast - strange, secret, hidden places. Luna tells herself that this is a mirror that tells secrets. She tells herself that if she looks into it for long enough she sees her mother’s face reflected back at her.
Luna’s head was full of music. The trilling cry of the Phoenix, and the lament of the merpeople, the whoosh and thud of the centaurs’ arrows. There was the hum of voices belonging to the departing mourners, songs of sighs and sorrows.
Luna stood just out of reach of the Whomping Willow and watched the students file back to the castle. She watched groups of grown ups head to the gates of the school grounds, some walking briskly, some lingering. She watched Harry Potter and his friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger standing together and talking earnestly. She waited, unseen, until all of them were gone. She wanted to go to Professor Dumbledore’s grave by herself and touch the white marble, to feel the thrum of recent death magic that created it. Funerals to her were beautiful. There was something pure and lovely in grief - in the tears and in the cold tombs. She remembered that at her mother’s funeral, when she felt ripped and scattered and bloodied by sadness, that something within her had changed. It had all become a dream, and she had smelt the leaves blowing in the wind, had seen the pale faces about her, seen the water dropping from the end of her father’s nose and thought that it was all strange and new and beautiful. She had been nine. She had felt very young and very old at the same time, and had taken her father’s hand because his face was screwed up like a child’s and she’d thought he needed comforting.
She took a few steps towards the tomb, imagining how smooth it would feel beneath her fingers. It would feel old and new - the new death of an old life.
Luna didn’t get to the tomb, though, because on her way she caught sight of Ginny Weasley sitting half-hidden by a tree and looking out over the lake. Luna looked at the lake as well, just in case the giant squid was doing anything interesting. It wasn’t, so Luna looked back at Ginny.
Ginny’s mouth was moving a little as though she were counting under her breath. Her eyes were fixed on the lake, and she hadn’t seen Luna. The thing about Ginny was that she usually seemed so bright and so strong, and yet Luna, who saw things when others weren’t looking, had often seen traces of the Ginny who had been shy and as vulnerable as Luna herself when they were in their first and second year. Luna had never let Ginny know that she had seen through the bright smiling girl that Ginny had become. People should be allowed their shields if they wanted them. But now it meant that Luna didn’t know whether to leave Ginny alone or not; she knew both how liberating and how dreadful it could be to be alone. She’d just decided to turn away when she saw Ginny’s face - which Ginny’d been keeping rigorously still - crumple just as Luna’s father’s had at her mother’s funeral. Ginny didn’t make a sound, but she rested her head on her knees and her shoulders shook.
Luna made up her mind and went to sit beside Ginny, with her back against the tree. Ginny immediately stilled and sat up, her damp face red. She raised her hand to wipe the tears away, looking almost angry, but Luna took Ginny’s hand. She wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, so she stroked the freckled skin on the backs of Ginny’s curled fingers. Ginny’s chest hitched, and she seemed to give in, bowing her head, shoulders rounding.
Luna sat and held Ginny’s hand and felt oddly privileged that she was allowed to see Ginny’s grief.
“I don’t think I’d like to see everyone look so sad at my funeral,” Luna said at last, because Ginny didn’t seem to be about to say anything. “I don’t think Professor Dumbledore would have either.”
Ginny sniffed and tilted her chin. “Most of them,” she said, her voice a little shaky, “most of them weren’t even sad he’d gone. They were just upset because they thought he was our best chance against Voldemort.”
Luna felt the strange little peak of fear in her chest at the mention of his name, but she kept herself still and tried not to react. There was worse to come, she told herself, than hearing his name spoken out loud. She would not be like everybody else and fear the words … not if she wanted to live without fearing the man. Ginny took her hand from Luna’s loose grip and rubbed at her eyes, and Luna looked away over the lake again, trying to guess what mysterious things might be lurking beneath the ripples.
It was very quiet, and Luna wished for one of those comments she sometimes made that were meant to be serious but came out sounding odd and that people laughed at. She never made them intentionally, was often surprised at people’s reactions to them, but wished now that she could come up with something funny on demand - something to break the silence.
Luna knew that she could never be funny on purpose, so she decided to be frank instead.
“I suppose people are too busy being sad for themselves to be sad for Professor Dumbledore,” she said. “Now he’s gone they need someone else to win the war for them.”
Ginny snorted. “Three guesses who.”
“But people were expecting Harry to win the war for them before, weren’t they?”
“Yes.” Ginny scuffed the heel of her shoe against the ground. “Harry expects to do it too. Or to try, anyway. He always did, but now Dumbledore’s gone there’s no one left to protect him, and he’s going to go off on his own and …” She took a deep breath. “Of course he’s going to go off. He’s Harry.”
“He’s not quite alone,” said Luna, although she thought that in some way Harry always had been. He was often surrounded by people and yet had the air of someone who was by himself. “He’s got Ron and Hermione and you and people from the D.A. We want to help.”
Ginny patted her hand. “I know. Harry knows too, he’s just horrible at asking for help. He doesn’t want to put anyone in danger.” She gave a fragile laugh. “It’s just all too stupid.”
Luna frowned. She didn’t see anything stupid about the situation they were in. There was a war, their headmaster was dead, she had fought Death Eaters in the hallways of Hogwarts. She wondered whether to ask Ginny to explain why it was stupid - Professor Flitwick had mentioned in her Career’s Advice session that she needed to work on her people skills. But Ginny was speaking again, her voice quick.
“Luna - what do you think of love?”
Something deep within Luna squirmed. She didn’t know what to think about love. She knew what it was meant to be - what it was in the books and on the radio programmes she had heard her fellow Ravenclaws discuss. She thought of the clinging, quarrelling couples that got together and broke up every other week at Hogwarts. Thought of the romance between Rufus Scrimgeour and Amelia Bones that her father had reported in The Quibbler a few years ago. None of that seemed real to her, and it seemed unreal too that Ginny, who was her age, should be thinking about love - and looking at Luna with that uncertain, doubting face, as though she were really considering it, really wondering if that was what she felt.
“I’m sure love is very nice when it happens,” she said.
Ginny looked a little puzzled. “Yes, but what do you think it’s like, being in love? How do you know?”
Luna had been told she had an overactive imagination. She couldn’t imagine anything like being in love, but Ginny was still sitting beside her and wanting an answer, wanting to know what she thought, so Luna had to try.
She thought of her father’s tears at her mother’s funeral. She remembered watching her mother reading through her father’s proofs for The Quibbler, armed with a red quill and with a half-smile on her lips, while her father brushed and brushed her mother’s hair.
No one had brushed Luna’s hair since Mummy died. She’d asked her father once whether he’d like to, and he’d said he was busy. She had not asked again.
Luna thought of her mother dancing beneath the moon, reaching up as though to grasp it, yet always at a distance.
She looked out over the lake to the far shore, where the sky met the rising bank and where, she had thought as a child, she might find treasure or pixies or her mother’s voice.
“I think love feels like something’s far away,” she said at last. “Like you want to touch something and can’t. Like a quest that can’t end because it’s impossible. Something too high and too far and cold. Like the moon.”
Ginny’s eyes were startled. “Is that what you really think?” she asked, sounding almost awed.
Why would she have said it if it wasn’t what she thought? Luna wondered. She didn’t want to seem rude, so she shrugged. “Why?” she asked, more for something to say than out of curiosity. “Why, what do you think it’s like?”
Ginny drew her knees up to her chin and hooked her arms round her shins. “I don’t know,” she said, her gaze going out to the point that Luna had stared at before. “I don’t know.”
Mummy doesn’t start moving again. It takes Luna a while to realise this - that Mummy not moving isn’t right, and that the magic feels wrong, smells wrong, even though she doesn’t know how she knows this.
It’s suddenly cold, and the sky seems darker, even though the moon is shining just as brightly as before. Its light seems cold, cruel, and Mummy’s figure is still not moving on the ground.
Luna runs, her bare feet against the carpet of the landing, the stairs, the cool tiles of the kitchen, the cold stone of the porch and the damp grass of the garden. Blades of grass brush her ankles like wet fingertips, and she thinks they are trying to pull her back, dragging against her as she scampers across the dark lawn to where Mummy is.
Even though most students automatically managed to steer clear of any compartment Luna sat in on the Hogwarts Express, it was actually very easy for her to go unnoticed. Luna thought that it was because her pale skin, pale eyes, pale hair made her fade into the background like a rather substantial ghost. That or she just wasn’t interesting enough to notice, which she didn’t want to believe. Sometimes she enjoyed her obscurity, and often she wished that people wouldn’t notice her if all they were going to do was call her names.
Hogwarts had opened for Luna’s sixth year, although without many of the students - including Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, who were off doing something secret that would destroy You Know Who. Ginny did come back to school, paler than before and grimmer-faced. Luna could only admire her; the students looked to her, as the last link with Harry in the school, to provide answers and support. Deaths piled up outside the castle’s walls, and Ginny walked the corridors to torrents of questions of where her boyfriend was and what he was doing to end the war.
All Ginny could tell them was Harry wasn’t her boyfriend any more. “I wouldn’t know,” she’d say brusquely. “He dumped me.”
That brought shocked faces and accusing whispers, as well as several overtures from some of the older boys. Ginny ignored them all.
“They’d believe he broke up with you more easily if you went out with someone else,” Luna told her.
“He did break up with me,” Ginny said.
But it hadn’t been real. Luna knew this in the way she knew other things without having to learn them. Harry Potter had not dumped Ginny Weasley as hundreds of Hogwarts students had dumped and been dumped. It wasn’t idle school gossip. Afterwards Harry Potter had left Hogwarts to go and fight You Know Who and Ginny Weasley had sat by the lake and watched him walk away and had tried not to cry, and then had asked Luna what she thought about love.
Harry had cut Ginny off to keep her safe, and Ginny had let him go.
In her sixth year Luna became more visible because all eyes watched Ginny, and Luna was often at Ginny’s side, because - for some reason - popular, pretty Ginny Weasley had become friends with Luna. That was one of the ways war changed things. Ginny, while always friendly, had never sought Luna out before their sixth year. This year Ginny and Luna, with the help of Neville and the other seventh year Gryffindors, had restarted the DA for all who wanted to come. It wasn’t much, but it felt better to be doing something while they were all stuck at school.
That was how it felt. Stuck at school, safe but scared, waiting to go to war or for the war to come to them.
Almost a month into the Easter term, the war breached the castle’s walls - not by force but in a spate of attacks that left the Wizarding world shaking. Hogsmeade was threatened, and the students were told that they would be sent home. Luna walked through the castle on the last day with a sense of unreality. Something was ending, something was about to begin, and she couldn’t know what was to come and whether she wanted it to.
“I’m glad,” Neville said. His eyes were dark and his hands perfectly still. Luna looked at him hard and decided that he must only be trembling on the inside. “I’m ready to fight.”
Luna didn’t feel particularly ready to fight, but she supposed she would when the time came. It was comforting, at least, to know she could.
Three weeks later she sat in an armchair that smelt of dust in number twelve, Grimmauld Place. There were several of them there: not many, but some. Luna liked being part of something, even though the planning and conversations sometimes made her head spin until she thought back to being a little girl, hearing her mother talking about her experiments and stroking her hair. Often she fell asleep during these meetings, but when she woke up she saw more clearly than the others - tired of talking in circles - what could be done, so they never reprimanded her for it.
It was nearly March. Luna had watched snowdrops grow in the chilly soil. There were no flowers at Grimmauld Place, but it was easy to sink back into the memory of her childhood in Devon, to see the small white flowers like bowed heads on their slender stems. Luna helped Mrs Weasley and Ginny with the household chores, she sat in lessons with Professor Lupin, she was taught defensive and offensive spells by Tonks. She shared a bedroom with Ginny and talked or was silent, slept well or wondered about the house in her nightgown, watched the moon or blocked out the stars, felt half-child and half-soldier. When Harry and Ron and Hermione came back, Luna listened to the conversations the others had with them and was touched when Harry talked to her, but mostly she sat to one side and listened and watched - the present and the past. It did not feel as though there was a future in the house, even though Luna knew they were moving into it, perhaps by inches, perhaps at the speed of the Hogwarts Express.
Luna was often overlooked, as though she was part of the fabric of her habitual chair. She was sitting there one evening, the second after Harry, Ron and Hermione’s return, after most had gone to bed. She hadn’t noticed the room emptying one by one until there were only three of them left. Ginny was lying on her stomach on the rug by the fire, her cheek pillowed on one outstretched arm. She was digging her fingertips of the other hand into the weave of the rug, smoothing and ruffling it over and over again. The small movement of her fingers was the only sign she was awake. Harry was sprawled on the sofa - he’d gained more of it as Hermione and then Ron had left, so now he lay with his legs bent, toes touching one arm of the sofa and his shoulder propped up on the other. He was flicking restlessly through one of the defence manuals he had taught from when he lead the D.A.
Luna saw this, but was in actual fact thinking of Draco Malfoy at the Yule Ball. She had not been at the ball, of course, but she had watched Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson parade down the corridors once it had been decided that they’d go together, and had heard Pansy talking about her dress with brash excitement. Luna had thought then that pink would probably not be Pansy’s colour. They’d been talking about Malfoy earlier, about whether he could be found, whether he was a willing Death Eater, whether he was worth trying to save or seduce into spying.
Ginny got up and went over to the sofa, sitting herself in the crook of Harry’s legs, and Draco Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson in her unflattering dress robes pirouetted out of Luna’s mind.
“Oh. I can move,” Harry said, already beginning to shift on the sofa, but Ginny shook her head.
“No, don’t move. I’m comfortable.”
Harry leant back against the arm of the sofa and looked over at Ginny for a long moment, his eyes slits in the pale light. “Are you all right?” he said at last.
“Of course I am.” Ginny let out a huff of breath. “I’ve really missed you, you know.”
He smiled briefly, but to Luna it made him look more tired. “You shouldn’t.”
Ginny swatted him on the stomach. Her hand lingered there, white against the dark blue of his jumper. Luna tried to guess whether Ginny would move first or Harry; she was expecting Ginny to withdraw her hand - could almost feel the itch of it in her own hand, the woollen jumper slightly scratchy against the skin of her palm - when Harry rested his hand on top of Ginny’s.
Harry, Ginny, and Luna in her corner, stared at the joined hands.
“I’m sorry, Ginny,” Harry said. “We still can’t … I’m nowhere near destroying him.” He sounded defeated. “I’m not even close.”
“Shush,” Ginny said. Her voice was soft, more of a sigh. She curled her body down so that she lay half-against the back of the sofa and Harry’s chest. “I know, I know. It’s all right. But can we just pretend? Just for a few minutes.”
Luna knew that she could not come out of the shadows. She watched as Harry slid his arm round Ginny’s back, twining his fingers through her hair and then smoothing it with his thumb. He closed his eyes. “All right,” he said, his lips close to the top of her head.
With ghost-soft steps, Luna slipped out of the room and made her silent way upstairs and into her room. She undressed quickly, trying not to look at her body as she pulled her night gown over her head, and slid into bed. Hermione was already asleep; her rhythmic breathing was in Luna’s ears as she buried her face in the pillow. For the first time since leaving school and coming to Grimmauld Place she felt its desolation, the yawning aching chasm where something good should be. She felt shudders wrack their way up her chest, painful and involuntary, humiliating, but somehow necessary. She pressed her mouth down on the pillow, letting the cry come out as breath but not sound. It felt as though the scene she’d witnessed had changed something within her - she’d never experienced anything like it and possibly never would, but would fight bitterly to protect it. The spasms in her throat passed, but she hugged the ache to her as she drifted into sleep.
Luna’s run up and down the garden hundreds of times, but this feels different. It’s night time; there could be monsters hiding in the dark. Daddy tells stories of Nargles and Flitgibbets, things that are brillig and slithy lurking in the undergrowth.
She stops a few feet away and approaches Mummy slowly, taking cautious little steps to where Mummy is sleeping on the ground. Luna kneels. She is cold, and Mummy must be cold as well, because her skin is bare against the evening air and damp grass.
She rests her cheek against Mummy’s curved shoulder, snuffling her nose into the soft skin, taking in the smell of night and lemons. Mummy’s skin is metallic in the moonlight and feels cool to the touch. Luna presses her body close against her mother’s, feels the faint warmth of blood beneath the skin. Feels the blood turn cold.
It was one of the nights when Luna couldn’t sleep. The moon was full, hanging bright in the sky. Luna rarely slept at the full moon, even before. Mummy had said that it was because of the connection Luna had with what she had been named for. Luna thought of this sometimes when she was with Professor Lupin. She had been mildly surprised to find that his illness at school had not, as she had supposed, been caused by a Blibbering Humdinger hiding under his bed. Luna wondered whether Professor Lupin thought of the moon when he saw her because of her name. She wondered whether he too looked out of his window at times and saw the moon growing growing growing, rounding out like a spreading flower. Did he ever lift his hand to cup the waxing moon and try to hold it there, contain it trapped between his palms?
The moon was his curse, and Luna’s too.
And as the moon drew the wolf from her otherwise restrained Professor, so it drew Luna to it - she spent full moon nights bathed in bright silver, staring out at the cold, hard face of it. Tonight the moon was itchy, under her skin, and she longed to be outside, to stretch up to it, to feel its touch on her arms and legs and breasts. She knew now why her mother danced skyclad, knew too that she was old enough to do so, and that she could not bear to do so.
The grass is damp under her bare feet. She blinked. There was no grass in the tiny garden of Grimmauld Place. It was simply a dozen square paving stones with hopeful weeds growing in the cracks. The garden was shrouded on each side by black trees, their branches stretching inwards like long-armed lovers reaching for each other’s hand.
“Hi, Luna.”
Luna blinked. When she refocused she saw that the trees weren’t black, but speckled with grey light, and looked far more like trees than lovers. The small plot was suddenly far less mysterious, and the sky seemed lighter and less threatening. She also saw that Harry Potter was standing less than two feet away from her.
“Hello, Harry,” she said, giving him a smile. “I didn’t see you there.”
He grinned. “I didn’t think you had.”
“I don’t often not see people,” she said, still feeling surprised at her own surprise. “At least, not the interesting ones.”
He shuffled a little at that. Harry, for all he had grown in the time Luna had known him, had still not become comfortable with or reconciled to the draw he had over people.
“It’s quite late,” she said.
His eyes flicked up to the sky. “It’s the full moon.”
They were both saying things the other knew - a comfortable conversation, Luna thought, if not a very interesting one.
“I never sleep when the moon is full,” she said. “It reminds me of my mother.”
He nodded as though he understood. Luna wanted to take him by the hand, or hug him or beam at him, because she felt as though he did understand, and it was so rare a feeling for her to be understood. She’d always known Harry Potter was special.
“It reminds me of my dad,” Harry said. “He and my godfather were friends with Remus, you know, and when it was the full moon they used to keep him company.”
“That’s nice,” Luna said. “Were they werewolf tamers?”
Harry sniggered, but it was a companionable sound and not like many of the sniggers she’d heard at school, so Luna didn’t mind. “No, they were Animagi.”
“Ah,” Luna said.
“Yeah, so Dad and Sirius and Remus would spend the full moon together. Sirius used to stay with Remus when they lived here together too, but Remus won’t let me in the room with him when he’s transformed, even though he takes the Wolfsbane Potion.”
“But you’re staying up with him anyway.”
Harry smiled. “I was just going to sit on the other side of the door, but Tonks is there.”
“So you’re here.”
Luna sat down on the back door step, tilting her head back against the wood. Harry stood for a few seconds longer before joining her on the step.
“Aren’t you cold?” he asked.
Luna rubbed the material of her nightgown between finger and thumb, then peered at the fine white hairs on her arms which stood straight up from her goose-pimpled skin.
“Yes, I rather think I am,” she said.
Harry began to pull off his jacket. Luna watched him with wide eyes. Was he showing how silly she was to be cold by gesturing that he was too hot? No, she discovered. He was offering her his jacket.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s quite all right. I don’t mind being cold.”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said, draping the coat over her shoulders.
She turned her head to sniff at the lapel. It smelt of man and salt and outdoors, and also faintly of the brand of washing powder Mrs Weasley used.
“Thank you.” Luna felt awkward: she had seen Harry pace inside rooms. She had seen him stand a resolute two feet from Ginny. She’d seen him cover his eyes and run his hand through his hair in the middle of a conversation. She knew he was tired and restrained and putting up a front. That night with Ginny was the last time Luna had seen Harry look relaxed. Maybe he needed time to himself. “It’s a good night for thinking,” she said. “Do you want to be on your own? I can go.”
“No, it’s fine,” he said. “I’d like your company.”
“Really?” A request for her company was still a novelty to Luna.
“Really.”
Luna turned to look at him. Harry was sitting with his forearms resting on his thighs, his hands clasped between his knees. His shoulders were set, and he stared down at his knotted fingers.
“It doesn’t matter that you don’t know what to do,” she said. “It’ll come when it comes.”
He jerked his head up. “How did you know I was thinking that?”
Luna opened her mouth, but found no words to explain how she knew. The jumble of images and snatches of conversations that made up her knowledge would fragment and fall apart if she tried to make sense of them. “You can’t think about anything else,” she said instead.
Harry leant back. “You’re right there,” he said.
How could people think about other things when the war was hanging over them all like the executioner’s axe about to fall? Luna felt as fragile as a snowdrop. But Luna did think of other things, even though her mind usually drifted back to what was to become of herself, her father, her companions, her world. Harry on the other hand … he closes his eyes as he strokes Ginny’s hair, he mouths words into the shadows, he tosses aside the paper which screams the words ‘The Chosen One’ … To kill or be killed - Harry might be wondering what would become of his soul.
“I hate not knowing what’s going to happen, and when it’s going to happen, and what I can do about it.” Harry sounded as though he was talking to himself. Luna wasn’t sure if it would be rude to answer or ruder to ignore his words. She didn’t understand hating a lack of control. She had decided, years ago, to take control of her feelings by letting herself drift through the world - by ceding her control over life, staying dispassionate. Nothing hurt when it was too far away.
“I wish I could help,” Luna said, “but I’m afraid I was dreadful at Divination. Professor Trelawney said I had an unmystical soul.”
Harry snorted. “You should bring that up with Hermione.”
Luna liked people who felt things - ones who cared, perhaps too much. It was why she liked Ginny, and Harry too. Even though she found that being around them too much started to crack her shell - she felt more when she was around them, tender and raw as she hadn’t felt since the night when she’d watched her mother die and had been able to do nothing to stop it or to bring her back. After that she’d watched her father immerse himself in a wonderland that seemed so real, and had decided to join him there.
Sitting outside on a moonlight night, talking and not talking with Harry Potter, sitting in the peace of the middle of a war, Luna felt more real than she had ever done.
“Sometimes you just have to let go a bit,” she said, watching the edges of dream sweep away through the faintly-brushing branches on the garden’s dark trees. “But not too far.”
Changing in front of her mirror, Luna sometimes watches her reflection, the shedding and replacing of clothes, the quick glimpse of truth beneath. Once or twice she’s stumbled, hopping on one leg to take off her trousers, wriggling about as she pulls up her top. When this happens the mirror shakes, reflecting back a chaotic world. It only lasts a moment, but when the image is settled once more nothing is quite what it was. War is like this, Luna thinks.
“Lovegood, stop staring at me,” Draco Malfoy hissed.
Luna blinked and put down her fork; she must have been holding it halfway to her mouth for a few minutes.
“I wasn’t staring at you, Draco,” she said. She looked at him now, and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He was wearing a set of dress robes that looked rather uncomfortable; with a collar that high Luna was surprised he managed to swallow his food at all. She glanced at his plate and saw that he hadn’t eaten much. Maybe that was why.
Or maybe Draco Malfoy’s lack of appetite was linked to the beads of sweat Luna could make out on his brow and underneath his nose. It certainly wasn’t the fault of the food - the house-elves had outdone themselves in celebration of Harry Potter’s defeat of Lord Voldemort. Luna, along with many other members of the Order of the Phoenix, was sitting on one of the higher tables, although not the high table, where a scowling Harry was sitting next to a beaming Rufus Scrimgeour.
Draco Malfoy had recently been outed as spy for the Order - they had decided he was worthwhile after all - and as such was sitting with Order members during the meal. Considering how assured he had always seemed at school, Luna found his nervousness fascinating.
“Will you stop staring at me?” he growled.
Luna had been staring that time, so she merely smiled at him. Over his shoulder she saw narrow-eyed people turning around to point accusing fingers at him. “Quite a few people are staring at you, Draco,” she said pleasantly. “One more can’t hurt.”
Draco glared at her and pushed his peas around his plate in little circles.
Luna wondered briefly what kind of ugly dress robes Pansy Parkinson would have worn had she been on the side that got to hold a Victory Feast. Then she piled a little bit of everything on her plate onto her fork, transferred the lot into her mouth, and returned to her original contemplation of the top table.
She wasn’t very interested in Minister “for how much longer” Scrimgeour - he clearly hadn’t been the same since he’d had Amelia Bones killed in a fit of jealousy and blamed it on the Death Eaters. Harry certainly didn’t seem to like sitting next to him very much, but Luna thought that Harry Potter was probably deriving more pleasure from the person sitting on his right. Ginny looked very pretty today; her hair was swept up off her shoulders, and she was wearing new dress robes which, while Luna thought could have done with a few more spangles, were made from a beautiful pale material. Luna thought Ginny looked rather like a candle.
She certainly seemed bright - and whenever Harry looked at her his face brightened too. Luna imagined that it was obvious to anyone in the room how happy the pair of them were to be together, and it surprised her that more people preferred to stare at Draco Malfoy because he’d been a spy than stare at Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley because they were in love.
Luna still didn’t know what she thought of love - had no idea what it would feel like for herself. She remembered Ginny asking her on the day of Dumbledore’s funeral, and decided that Ginny couldn’t have known quite what love was then, because it was unmistakable now. She watched Ginny turn her head towards Harry, closing the gap between them so that their faces nearly touched. Harry said something, and Ginny gave an irrepressible laugh that carried through the banqueting room, provoking a ripple of amusement from the guests. Ginny buried her face in her napkin, her whole body quivering with laughter, then straightened up and tried to stab Harry with her fork. Harry gave her an unrepentant grin.
Luna beamed up at them, feeling full of food and contentment. Harry caught her eye and nodded to her.
Her own words came floating into Luna’s mind. “You just have to let go a bit. But not too far.” It was funny how she had been talking about more things than she’d realised.
Yes, she thought. That was far enough.
“Good lord, Loony, are you talking to yourself now?” said Draco Malfoy. “I’ve heard that’s the first sign of madness, but in your case …”
“Excuse me,” Luna said. “But you have food stuck between your teeth.”
“Look, darling, isn’t it beautiful?” Mummy says, pointing up to the night sky and tilting her face to it until she’s caressed with silver light. Then she looks down at Luna and crouches, pulling Luna tight against her body.
“Both my moons,” she says into Luna’s neck. “Both beautiful.”
Why, Luna asks, was Mummy always longing for the moon that was out of reach? Was she, Luna - named so that Mummy could cradle her grail in her arms - not enough?
No, Luna knows - has known, always did know. Mummy was brilliant. She was extraordinary. The ill-fated experiment was just part of her work. The moon in the sky held Mummy’s curiosity; Luna held her love.
And now she knows that love is not a distant light. It is not cold and cruel and unreachable. It does not abandon, does not mock. It does hurt. Brings life, brings death, takes in and takes out.
Luna is different to her mother. For her, love is nothing like the moon.