[From Litha to Lammas]: Jungles of the Moon, Ginny/Luna, PG
Title: Jungles of the Moon
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Ginny/Luna
Content Notes: Established relationship, travel, not epilogue-compliant
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2500
Summary: Luna has been injured on her latest journey around the world and can’t travel until she heals. Ginny, an Unspeakable working on a secret project, sneaks the project out of the Department of Mysteries to cheer her girlfriend up.
Author’s Notes: Another of my “From Litha to Lammas” fics, for thady, who asked for Ginny/Luna and gave me a few prompts. I picked travel, something new.
Jungles of the Moon
Ginny drew her grey cloak over her head and walked calmly out of the Cloud Room, where shining blue walls watched over silver clouds-or what looked like silver clouds-drifting above the ground and shifting in response to time and the stars. Her colleagues politely averted their gazes. Some secrets Unspeakables held even from each other.
Thus, no one saw the piled silvery material that Ginny carried on one palm.
There was no way to hide it, but there didn’t need to be. And no one noticed Ginny carrying it out of the Department of Mysteries and home.
There had to be some perks to being an Unspeakable, even if you couldn’t tell your girlfriend what you did in any detail.
*
“My ankle hurts.”
Ginny could feel her face softening as she stepped into their flat and shut the door behind her. She’d shed the grey cloak once she got out of the Department of Mysteries, by which time she could also tuck the secret she’d brought Luna in a pocket. “Winky didn’t help you today?”
Luna shut her eyes where she was lying on the couch, her left leg swathed in bandages from ankle to knee. Despite potions and the help of a house-elf who’d served in St. Mungo’s before they hired her, there was only so much that could be done for someone wounded by a Nundu. “She did. It still hurts.”
Ginny pulled up a chair next to the couch and sat on it, stroking Luna’s hair. Luna’s eyes were dull as she peered at Ginny for a second and then turned her head away.
That only strengthened Ginny’s resolve. Luna should never look like that. And she wasn’t normally a complainer, either. But being denied the ability to travel for at least two more months, to not be able to see the landscapes and the creatures she loved or stand on a mountain trail and feel the wind in her hair, was taking its toll.
Any doubts Ginny might have had about bringing the secret home dissolved. Luna needed it so much more than the hypothetical people it would serve someday, especially when it probably wouldn’t be ready for years.
“I brought you something,” she said.
“Oh? Another Muggle book by a naturalist?” That brightened Luna’s face a bit. She did enjoy reading the kind of travel literature that Muggles wrote, given that wizards failed to produce anything of the kind, and she enjoyed circling the places on a map and discussing with Ginny where the Muggles might have seen magical beasts if they had just gone a little further.
“No.” Ginny carefully took out the silvery shimmer of cloth. It trembled and fell, draping over her hand.
“Is that Harry’s Invisibility Cloak?” Luna peered at it. “Does he know you have it?”
“No, this is something that I’m working on in the Department of Mysteries,” Ginny said. “One reason they picked me to work on it was because I knew a little about Harry’s Cloak and how it works, though. But this one transports you places.”
Luna looked up at her with big eyes. Ginny leaned in and kissed her. Merlin, she had missed that look of dawning wonder, as if all the world were a sunrise.
“It-can float me and my leg won’t be a problem?” Luna sounded breathless now.
Ginny shook her head. “It takes you to places that you would otherwise never see. Places impossible to reach without the cloak. The Unspeakables wouldn’t invent something as ordinary as a new means of transport. That would be too pedestrian for us.”
Luna got the joke and laughed. Then she reached out and ran her finger down the cloak, which shimmered as if with moonlight for a moment. “How does it work?”
“The cloak embraces you and me,” Ginny said. “I’d like to go with you. We don’t get to share your journeys that often. And we name a place that we would never get to visit otherwise-like a place that doesn’t exist-and the cloak takes us there.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it. It doesn’t have to be complicated for us to want to do it, just supposedly impossible.”
Luna smiled and looked down for a moment at her leg. “What about this?” Her hand came down to pluck at the bandages again, something Winky had said she was doing all yesterday, and which wasn’t about to let her heal.
Ginny reached out and gently took her hand. “We’ll be inside the cloak and invisible and imperceptible to whatever we run into. If we really want to touch or collect something, we can step outside it, but until then, nothing will be able to see or smell your wound, and you won’t have to move.”
“Let’s go.”
Ginny smiled. She should probably insist that they eat dinner first, if only to spare Winky’s feelings, but she wasn’t hungry, and Winky could keep the food under a Stasis Charm. And she knew that Luna was bored of the part of healing where she ate and rested and took care of herself and did nothing else.
Ginny swept the cloak up into the air. A wink like starlight came from among the folds, and then it shook out, far wider than Harry’s Invisibility Cloak could ever be, and settled around her and Luna. It was like being inside a small tent at a fair.
Luna gasped. Ginny gave her a curious glance and saw her eyes following the pattern of the magic winding around them in silver spirals, which Ginny had assumed she wouldn’t be able to see.
Then again, when had Luna ever done the expected? Even their first kiss had been that way. Luna had simply walked up to Ginny one day not long after they’d left Hogwarts for good, announced that she thought Ginny could use a kiss, and leaned in and done it.
Good thing she did, too. Who knows if I’d have got up the courage?
The spirals reached up to the top of the cloak and then back down, and the world outside it started to blur as if someone had drawn curtains across it. Luna leaned forwards intently. “Why isn’t it going anywhere?”
“We have to pick a destination. Remember, a place that’s impossible to visit, or doesn’t exist.”
Luna smiled. “I always wanted to visit the jungles of the moon. My mother used to tell me stories about them when I was younger.”
Sadness touched her face like the brush of a dark feather. It always happened when she mentioned her mother. Ginny leaned close to her and said, “Then that’s where we’ll go.”
The cloak shifted around them, and for a moment, Ginny heard a loud buzzing noise. She grimaced. She was supposed to work her magic silently, and the projects she was assigned to were supposed to do the same thing, but she was a young Unspeakable, still, and it was hard to get rid of the notion that magic was supposed to produce some-indicator. At least her projects didn’t tend to flash with brightly colored lights anymore.
Luna’s eyes were brilliant. Ginny clasped her shoulders and enjoyed the feeling that she was alive again, and then the cloak swept them away.
*
Luna opened her eyes and gasped. The stories had come out of her head and into life, and she could smell the crisp morning scent that her mother had only sometimes described seeping through the cloak that sheltered them.
The landscape in front of them was a soft, brilliant white, under a silvery sky that might have been an Earth sky if it was overcast. Luna could see the subtle differences, though, the traces of breezes that swept the white sand into patterns different from those left by Earthly winds, and the undershimmer to the sky that was nothing like you would find even on a rainy day on Earth.
And the scent!
Luna tried to walk out of the cloak’s embrace in pursuit of it, and felt Ginny’s hand come down on her shoulder. “You can leave, but then you’ll be visible,” she whispered. “And the cloak can’t give you back the power to walk.”
Luna clenched her hands on her shoulders and told herself not to cry like an imp. She’d managed to forget that, for one moment, and the reminder was as bitter as Muggle coffee.
But as soon as the bitterness came, it washed away. Because the sand was rolling and sprouting and glowing into new shapes, and Luna leaned forwards to watch them and see if they matched what was waiting in her imagination.
They did.
The nearest lump of sand became a swaying, many-sided object that looked strange until it shed the sand, but Luna knew what it was. It was a great tree, and when it was revealed in its gleaming blue and crystalline beauty, she felt tears come to her eyes. Its roots cast across the earth like silver ropes, diving down into the sand and mingling with the reaching roots of the other lumps.
Those were beginning to whirl into shape, too, to shed the sand. Luna found herself staring at fringed leaves of deepest cobalt, and trunks that looked like they were made of shining water, and crowns of green on the edge of black that were so big they could have cradled a hundred sleeping versions of her, and fugitive sparks of gold on the roots that reminded her of Heliopath eggs.
Luna could have gone on looking at the trees forever, but something more wondrous than that happened, suddenly. The forest filled with a haunting sigh so faint it was more like a ripple in the air than sound. But it built, and built, and the birds of the jungles of the moon came soaring into sight.
They were as she had always pictured them-long-legged as herons, long-winged as eagles, clad in white feathers like floating snow, with swept-back silver crests and beaks that looked carved of obsidian-except more beautiful. And they hurtled through the rays of the rising sun, and they sang.
The song struck Luna to the core. She found herself weeping and Ginny leaning near in concern, holding her shoulders. But the song was like a phoenix’s turned to sunlight instead of fire. How could Luna explain that?
The flock swept overhead, and the birds began to settle in the trees, plucking at small cerulean fruits Luna hadn’t noticed, sticking their beaks beneath their wings to preen themselves, flapping in the crystalline pools. Luna stared at them with her heart full. Then one landed right in front of them.
And turned its head to stare at them through the cloak. Its eyes were as piercing as the sun.
“It shouldn’t be able to see us,” said Ginny, in the kind of voice that meant she was frowning.
“Well, you said the cloak was experimental,” Luna murmured, but she knew what she thought it really was. The birds of the jungles of the moon could see through any deception, any concealment. The stories that Luna’s mother had told her always had them teaching the truth to humans who had lied to themselves, or dissolving the camouflage of predators climbing up to their nests.
The bird walked closer on its long legs, stalking stately, walking wild. Luna stretched out her arm. She couldn’t move much because of her leg, yes, but her hand could get through the curtain-like vapor of the magical cloak, and her fingers twitched and beckoned the bird on. She wanted to touch, to hold, to caress.
But only on the bird’s terms. When it stopped and slowly lowered its head so that the tip of its beak was resting in her hand, Luna’s entire chest warmed. She smiled. “Hello,” she said. “What is it like to fly through the jungles?”
“Could the birds in the stories speak English?” Ginny asked.
“No, of course not,” Luna said. “That would have been strange, when they live on the moon.” She was more focused on the warm nibbling sensation moving along her skin. “But that’s no reason not to be greet them.”
“That’s why I love you.”
Luna thought that greeting birds was a strange reason to love someone, but she’d heard stranger. She held absolutely still and let the bird nuzzle and feel her palm, and then she felt something else. The pain throbbing up from her leg had disappeared.
She blinked back more tears, this time of wonder. Even though she suspected the healing was temporary and confined to their time on the moon, it didn’t matter. It was still a gift, and one that the bird hadn’t needed to give her.
The bird took a long step back and snapped its wings open, beating them once with a sound like a muffled drum. Then it turned and took off, to join two others bathing in a shining pool.
Luna sighed and closed her eyes. And she decided that she had to accept the bird’s gift, as well as the gift that Ginny had given her by bringing her here. It would be ungrateful otherwise. She’d wasted enough time in her life being ungrateful, and lying around on the couch.
She stood up, her bandages fluttering to the ground.
Ginny gaped at her. Luna knew that without looking. The gaping, at least, was familiar. Everyone did that to her all the time.
She turned around and held her hands out to Ginny. “Won’t you come and dance with me?” she asked, while the breeze around them smelled of morning.
And Ginny, her fearless Ginny, came forth from the shelter of the Unspeakables’ magic, and held out her hands for Luna to take.
*
This isn’t the way it was supposed to work.
But Ginny had more ear for Luna’s laughter than the confused mumbling of her own Unspeakable voice in her head.
It’s experimental. Who knows for sure how it was supposed to work?
Ginny clasped Luna’s hands, and felt their coldness, and their smooth skin, and the way that they grounded and centered her more than all the sights of the jungles of the moon had. The place had been beautiful to her, but alien. She’d never heard the stories that Luna’s mother had apparently told her.
This, though, crystallized the jungles, and made the crooning singsong of the birds familiar to her.
Luna smiled the way she always did, the way she hadn’t since she had been wounded, and bobbed her head to the right and to the left. Ginny recognized the signal of the dance they had performed together at the last Ministry gala-well, the last one that Luna had been home for and Ginny could nag her to attend-and laughed herself.
“Will you dance, my lady?” Luna asked.
Ginny curtsied to her, or at least as best she could without letting go of Luna’s hands. She didn’t feel like doing that right now.
Together, they danced amind the crystalline ponds and the white birds and the endless jungles and the sweeping silver curtains of the cloak that had brought them to this place that it wasn’t supposed to.
Ginny knew that when they returned home, the wound would probably be back on Luna’s leg and this would only be a memory. But it didn’t matter.
She had brought the world to Luna, and Luna brought joy to her, every day.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Ginny/Luna
Content Notes: Established relationship, travel, not epilogue-compliant
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2500
Summary: Luna has been injured on her latest journey around the world and can’t travel until she heals. Ginny, an Unspeakable working on a secret project, sneaks the project out of the Department of Mysteries to cheer her girlfriend up.
Author’s Notes: Another of my “From Litha to Lammas” fics, for thady, who asked for Ginny/Luna and gave me a few prompts. I picked travel, something new.
Jungles of the Moon
Ginny drew her grey cloak over her head and walked calmly out of the Cloud Room, where shining blue walls watched over silver clouds-or what looked like silver clouds-drifting above the ground and shifting in response to time and the stars. Her colleagues politely averted their gazes. Some secrets Unspeakables held even from each other.
Thus, no one saw the piled silvery material that Ginny carried on one palm.
There was no way to hide it, but there didn’t need to be. And no one noticed Ginny carrying it out of the Department of Mysteries and home.
There had to be some perks to being an Unspeakable, even if you couldn’t tell your girlfriend what you did in any detail.
*
“My ankle hurts.”
Ginny could feel her face softening as she stepped into their flat and shut the door behind her. She’d shed the grey cloak once she got out of the Department of Mysteries, by which time she could also tuck the secret she’d brought Luna in a pocket. “Winky didn’t help you today?”
Luna shut her eyes where she was lying on the couch, her left leg swathed in bandages from ankle to knee. Despite potions and the help of a house-elf who’d served in St. Mungo’s before they hired her, there was only so much that could be done for someone wounded by a Nundu. “She did. It still hurts.”
Ginny pulled up a chair next to the couch and sat on it, stroking Luna’s hair. Luna’s eyes were dull as she peered at Ginny for a second and then turned her head away.
That only strengthened Ginny’s resolve. Luna should never look like that. And she wasn’t normally a complainer, either. But being denied the ability to travel for at least two more months, to not be able to see the landscapes and the creatures she loved or stand on a mountain trail and feel the wind in her hair, was taking its toll.
Any doubts Ginny might have had about bringing the secret home dissolved. Luna needed it so much more than the hypothetical people it would serve someday, especially when it probably wouldn’t be ready for years.
“I brought you something,” she said.
“Oh? Another Muggle book by a naturalist?” That brightened Luna’s face a bit. She did enjoy reading the kind of travel literature that Muggles wrote, given that wizards failed to produce anything of the kind, and she enjoyed circling the places on a map and discussing with Ginny where the Muggles might have seen magical beasts if they had just gone a little further.
“No.” Ginny carefully took out the silvery shimmer of cloth. It trembled and fell, draping over her hand.
“Is that Harry’s Invisibility Cloak?” Luna peered at it. “Does he know you have it?”
“No, this is something that I’m working on in the Department of Mysteries,” Ginny said. “One reason they picked me to work on it was because I knew a little about Harry’s Cloak and how it works, though. But this one transports you places.”
Luna looked up at her with big eyes. Ginny leaned in and kissed her. Merlin, she had missed that look of dawning wonder, as if all the world were a sunrise.
“It-can float me and my leg won’t be a problem?” Luna sounded breathless now.
Ginny shook her head. “It takes you to places that you would otherwise never see. Places impossible to reach without the cloak. The Unspeakables wouldn’t invent something as ordinary as a new means of transport. That would be too pedestrian for us.”
Luna got the joke and laughed. Then she reached out and ran her finger down the cloak, which shimmered as if with moonlight for a moment. “How does it work?”
“The cloak embraces you and me,” Ginny said. “I’d like to go with you. We don’t get to share your journeys that often. And we name a place that we would never get to visit otherwise-like a place that doesn’t exist-and the cloak takes us there.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it. It doesn’t have to be complicated for us to want to do it, just supposedly impossible.”
Luna smiled and looked down for a moment at her leg. “What about this?” Her hand came down to pluck at the bandages again, something Winky had said she was doing all yesterday, and which wasn’t about to let her heal.
Ginny reached out and gently took her hand. “We’ll be inside the cloak and invisible and imperceptible to whatever we run into. If we really want to touch or collect something, we can step outside it, but until then, nothing will be able to see or smell your wound, and you won’t have to move.”
“Let’s go.”
Ginny smiled. She should probably insist that they eat dinner first, if only to spare Winky’s feelings, but she wasn’t hungry, and Winky could keep the food under a Stasis Charm. And she knew that Luna was bored of the part of healing where she ate and rested and took care of herself and did nothing else.
Ginny swept the cloak up into the air. A wink like starlight came from among the folds, and then it shook out, far wider than Harry’s Invisibility Cloak could ever be, and settled around her and Luna. It was like being inside a small tent at a fair.
Luna gasped. Ginny gave her a curious glance and saw her eyes following the pattern of the magic winding around them in silver spirals, which Ginny had assumed she wouldn’t be able to see.
Then again, when had Luna ever done the expected? Even their first kiss had been that way. Luna had simply walked up to Ginny one day not long after they’d left Hogwarts for good, announced that she thought Ginny could use a kiss, and leaned in and done it.
Good thing she did, too. Who knows if I’d have got up the courage?
The spirals reached up to the top of the cloak and then back down, and the world outside it started to blur as if someone had drawn curtains across it. Luna leaned forwards intently. “Why isn’t it going anywhere?”
“We have to pick a destination. Remember, a place that’s impossible to visit, or doesn’t exist.”
Luna smiled. “I always wanted to visit the jungles of the moon. My mother used to tell me stories about them when I was younger.”
Sadness touched her face like the brush of a dark feather. It always happened when she mentioned her mother. Ginny leaned close to her and said, “Then that’s where we’ll go.”
The cloak shifted around them, and for a moment, Ginny heard a loud buzzing noise. She grimaced. She was supposed to work her magic silently, and the projects she was assigned to were supposed to do the same thing, but she was a young Unspeakable, still, and it was hard to get rid of the notion that magic was supposed to produce some-indicator. At least her projects didn’t tend to flash with brightly colored lights anymore.
Luna’s eyes were brilliant. Ginny clasped her shoulders and enjoyed the feeling that she was alive again, and then the cloak swept them away.
*
Luna opened her eyes and gasped. The stories had come out of her head and into life, and she could smell the crisp morning scent that her mother had only sometimes described seeping through the cloak that sheltered them.
The landscape in front of them was a soft, brilliant white, under a silvery sky that might have been an Earth sky if it was overcast. Luna could see the subtle differences, though, the traces of breezes that swept the white sand into patterns different from those left by Earthly winds, and the undershimmer to the sky that was nothing like you would find even on a rainy day on Earth.
And the scent!
Luna tried to walk out of the cloak’s embrace in pursuit of it, and felt Ginny’s hand come down on her shoulder. “You can leave, but then you’ll be visible,” she whispered. “And the cloak can’t give you back the power to walk.”
Luna clenched her hands on her shoulders and told herself not to cry like an imp. She’d managed to forget that, for one moment, and the reminder was as bitter as Muggle coffee.
But as soon as the bitterness came, it washed away. Because the sand was rolling and sprouting and glowing into new shapes, and Luna leaned forwards to watch them and see if they matched what was waiting in her imagination.
They did.
The nearest lump of sand became a swaying, many-sided object that looked strange until it shed the sand, but Luna knew what it was. It was a great tree, and when it was revealed in its gleaming blue and crystalline beauty, she felt tears come to her eyes. Its roots cast across the earth like silver ropes, diving down into the sand and mingling with the reaching roots of the other lumps.
Those were beginning to whirl into shape, too, to shed the sand. Luna found herself staring at fringed leaves of deepest cobalt, and trunks that looked like they were made of shining water, and crowns of green on the edge of black that were so big they could have cradled a hundred sleeping versions of her, and fugitive sparks of gold on the roots that reminded her of Heliopath eggs.
Luna could have gone on looking at the trees forever, but something more wondrous than that happened, suddenly. The forest filled with a haunting sigh so faint it was more like a ripple in the air than sound. But it built, and built, and the birds of the jungles of the moon came soaring into sight.
They were as she had always pictured them-long-legged as herons, long-winged as eagles, clad in white feathers like floating snow, with swept-back silver crests and beaks that looked carved of obsidian-except more beautiful. And they hurtled through the rays of the rising sun, and they sang.
The song struck Luna to the core. She found herself weeping and Ginny leaning near in concern, holding her shoulders. But the song was like a phoenix’s turned to sunlight instead of fire. How could Luna explain that?
The flock swept overhead, and the birds began to settle in the trees, plucking at small cerulean fruits Luna hadn’t noticed, sticking their beaks beneath their wings to preen themselves, flapping in the crystalline pools. Luna stared at them with her heart full. Then one landed right in front of them.
And turned its head to stare at them through the cloak. Its eyes were as piercing as the sun.
“It shouldn’t be able to see us,” said Ginny, in the kind of voice that meant she was frowning.
“Well, you said the cloak was experimental,” Luna murmured, but she knew what she thought it really was. The birds of the jungles of the moon could see through any deception, any concealment. The stories that Luna’s mother had told her always had them teaching the truth to humans who had lied to themselves, or dissolving the camouflage of predators climbing up to their nests.
The bird walked closer on its long legs, stalking stately, walking wild. Luna stretched out her arm. She couldn’t move much because of her leg, yes, but her hand could get through the curtain-like vapor of the magical cloak, and her fingers twitched and beckoned the bird on. She wanted to touch, to hold, to caress.
But only on the bird’s terms. When it stopped and slowly lowered its head so that the tip of its beak was resting in her hand, Luna’s entire chest warmed. She smiled. “Hello,” she said. “What is it like to fly through the jungles?”
“Could the birds in the stories speak English?” Ginny asked.
“No, of course not,” Luna said. “That would have been strange, when they live on the moon.” She was more focused on the warm nibbling sensation moving along her skin. “But that’s no reason not to be greet them.”
“That’s why I love you.”
Luna thought that greeting birds was a strange reason to love someone, but she’d heard stranger. She held absolutely still and let the bird nuzzle and feel her palm, and then she felt something else. The pain throbbing up from her leg had disappeared.
She blinked back more tears, this time of wonder. Even though she suspected the healing was temporary and confined to their time on the moon, it didn’t matter. It was still a gift, and one that the bird hadn’t needed to give her.
The bird took a long step back and snapped its wings open, beating them once with a sound like a muffled drum. Then it turned and took off, to join two others bathing in a shining pool.
Luna sighed and closed her eyes. And she decided that she had to accept the bird’s gift, as well as the gift that Ginny had given her by bringing her here. It would be ungrateful otherwise. She’d wasted enough time in her life being ungrateful, and lying around on the couch.
She stood up, her bandages fluttering to the ground.
Ginny gaped at her. Luna knew that without looking. The gaping, at least, was familiar. Everyone did that to her all the time.
She turned around and held her hands out to Ginny. “Won’t you come and dance with me?” she asked, while the breeze around them smelled of morning.
And Ginny, her fearless Ginny, came forth from the shelter of the Unspeakables’ magic, and held out her hands for Luna to take.
*
This isn’t the way it was supposed to work.
But Ginny had more ear for Luna’s laughter than the confused mumbling of her own Unspeakable voice in her head.
It’s experimental. Who knows for sure how it was supposed to work?
Ginny clasped Luna’s hands, and felt their coldness, and their smooth skin, and the way that they grounded and centered her more than all the sights of the jungles of the moon had. The place had been beautiful to her, but alien. She’d never heard the stories that Luna’s mother had apparently told her.
This, though, crystallized the jungles, and made the crooning singsong of the birds familiar to her.
Luna smiled the way she always did, the way she hadn’t since she had been wounded, and bobbed her head to the right and to the left. Ginny recognized the signal of the dance they had performed together at the last Ministry gala-well, the last one that Luna had been home for and Ginny could nag her to attend-and laughed herself.
“Will you dance, my lady?” Luna asked.
Ginny curtsied to her, or at least as best she could without letting go of Luna’s hands. She didn’t feel like doing that right now.
Together, they danced amind the crystalline ponds and the white birds and the endless jungles and the sweeping silver curtains of the cloak that had brought them to this place that it wasn’t supposed to.
Ginny knew that when they returned home, the wound would probably be back on Luna’s leg and this would only be a memory. But it didn’t matter.
She had brought the world to Luna, and Luna brought joy to her, every day.
The End.