[Wednesday One-Shots]: Camelopard Dreams, 4/6, G/L, R
Chapter Three.
Title: Camelopard Dreams (4/6)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Ginny/Luna
Rating: R
Content Notes: Gore, violence, minor character deaths, angst, murder mystery
Summary: Ginny’s a consulting detective called in to investigate a series of strange deaths where the victims appear to have been clawed apart by some sort of wild beast. Unable to identify the beast’s tracks, Ginny goes to Luna for help-only to find Luna’s the next target.
Author’s Notes: The next in my series of Wednesday one-shots, for an anonymous request that asked for Ginny/Luna and Ginny investigating a case where Luna gets involved because of her expertise on magical creatures. This will probably be at least five or six parts.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Four-Wake to Visions
“You should not have used that spell.”
Ginny swam out of darkness, only to immediately turn to the side and vomit. There was little in her stomach, which made the whole situation rather pathetic, she thought. Of course this would happen the first time she used the spell in a year and it actually told her useful information.
And it wasn’t even the gore in the vision that had upset her stomach. It was the sheer stress of the magic. She hadn’t realized how much her body had become accustomed to not using that particular spell.
“You should not have used that spell.”
About to make a rude gesture to tell Auror Wood exactly what she thought of his opinion, Ginny paused. That honestly didn’t sound like his voice. She rolled a little to the side and opened her eyes slowly.
Luna stood over her, hands under her head. Ginny rapidly deduced she was on an expanded table beside the body of Romula Lestrange. She stared at the exposed wound under the Stasis Charm and shivered. It was worse now that she had felt Lestrange’s pain as the camelopard literally tore into her.
“You should not have used that spell.”
Yes, it was Luna. Ginny looked up at her and shook her head in wonder, trying not to revel in how the back of her hair felt against Luna’s fingers. “But why? You said I should use it, that it was important to know the truth.”
“It hurt you.”
“Well, I knew it was going to hurt me. I mean, I feel someone else’s pain. I just didn’t expect the upset stomach I got.”
“It was not a good idea, not if it hurt you. I did not understand, not clearly.”
Ginny reached out to squeeze Luna’s hand. She sounded hard and determined and distraught in a way Ginny had never heard, except for once when a Kneazle kitten she’d been taking care of had got trampled by a unicorn she was also caring for. “I’m sorry, Luna. But I’m okay now, and I do have answers.”
“What are they?”
Ginny started. Even if she felt alone with Luna as they talked to each other, it clearly wasn’t true. She made some effort to compose her face and sit up to look at Auror Wood. Luna continued cradling the back of her head all the way up and kept on doing it once she was steady and upright, too. Ginny coughed to cover her embarrassment and pleasure.
“It was definitely the camelopard. And there was someone with it. A human figure.”
“From what Miss Lovegood told us while you were…busy, I thought that was impossible. That the camelopard would attack wildly and on its own now that its summoner is dead.”
“Its arranger,” said Luna, in the patient voice of someone not used to being heard.
“Call it what you will. Did the person seem to be directing the angle of its attack?”
Ginny shook her head. “I couldn’t see it well enough to make that out. I couldn’t even fully see the face.” She added hastily as Auror Wood frowned at her, “But it was still worth performing the spell, because I could tell that it wasn’t someone trying to run away. It was just someone standing behind the camelopard. Waiting.”
“Waiting?” Wood asked with doubt in his voice, but a moment later he grasped what she meant. “Not running away.”
“Not afraid.”
“It wasn’t worth performing the spell if it hurt you.”
Wood only nodded, but not in response to Luna’s words. Ginny was kind of glad of that, because she didn’t have any idea what to say, either. “That’s something, at any rate. It would suggest that we either have a visitor or witness who somehow knew about the camelopard before it attacked, or someone who came into Lestrange’s house specifically to unleash it.”
“And it’s not likely to be the former.”
“Indeed. I’ll tell you if we need your help again, Weasley. The risks you’ve taken are enough for now.”
Ginny opened her mouth to ask whether they weren’t going to talk to Luna, but then closed it as Wood spun away and began to bark orders at the other Aurors, who scurried like ants in response. Of course, from the things Wood had already said, they’d spoken with her while Ginny was…busy.
No one seemed to be paying attention to her at the moment, and it was rather creepy to remain beside Romula Lestrange’s body. Ginny started to test her limbs. She was sure she could stand, if-
“Stay still.”
Ginny paused, realizing Luna’s hands still hadn’t moved from the back of her head. “I’m all right now, Luna.”
“You should stay still,” Luna whispered, and then moved around in front of Ginny. Her eyes were so deep and devastated that Ginny reached out a hand. Luna took it and stared at it as if she was about to start palm-reading like Trelawney. “I never knew the spells you invented could hurt you as deeply as that.”
“Well, they don’t always,” Ginny said, thinking of what had happened last year. “Sometimes they hurt other people.”
“Like me.”
Ginny blinked, and felt as if she had too many shadows on her face, too much depth in her lungs. “What do you mean? Did I-did I hit you when I fell?”
“I caught you.” Luna studied their hands for a moment, and then lifted her head. Her face was pale and shining. “Don’t cast that spell again. Tell me before you cast any of the others that you know.”
She squeezed Ginny’s hands once, and released them.
Ginny swallowed a little. There were things she wanted to say, but not in a room crowded with Aurors. And it might be that Luna didn’t mean this the way Ginny thought she did, either. She hadn’t responded when Ginny made far more openly flirtatious remarks.
Then again, would Luna even recognize the way that other people flirt? Maybe I should have been trying to learn her way of flirting all along.
Ginny didn’t get the chance to think about it further then, because Wood stepped back from the other Aurors and nodded to her. “They found something at Rosa Lestrange’s home that they think you ought to see.”
*
Ginny was glad Luna had come with her, because she had no idea what she was looking at. It seemed to be a piece of golden fur, but the longer Ginny touched it, the more it felt like a woven mat of some kind. She finally shook her head and handed it to Luna, who gazed it for only a second before announcing, “It’s a piece of scalp.”
Ginny jerked back in instinctive disgust, but then remembered the way Rosa had summoned the camelopard-or arranged it, as Luan would say. It needn’t be a human scalp, after all. She tried to lean nearer and look interested.
“It’s a human scalp,” said Luna, with a faint frown at Ginny, as if she had guessed what Ginny was thinking and didn’t like it for some reason.
“How closely did we check her books for necromantic ones?” demanded the Auror apparently in charge of this stage of the investigation, a tall woman named Hero Lombardis. She had no-nonsense eyes and a long fall of braided dark blond hair that ended somewhere around her knees. Ginny liked her. “Human body parts are a common tool in a necromancer’s arsenal, of course-”
“This one was used in a different way.”
Ginny turned to Luna. She was the only one who paid her that much attention, though. Auror Lombardis was frowning in a way that probably meant she would go charging off in another direction at the slightest suggestion, and the other Aurors were still chattering in the back of the crowded little evidence room, some of them out of sight behind shelves.
“What do you mean, a different way?” Auror Lombardis asked.
“It was used to make something,” Luna said, and she looked up. There was something hard and heated and cloudy in her gaze, something Ginny wanted to instinctively shy away from. “It was used for a horrible purpose.”
“Do you know what it was?”
“Yes.”
Auror Lombardis drew her breath in as if to shout, but Ginny rested a hand on Luna’s and asked quietly, “Can you tell us?”
Luna turned to her. “Camelopards are innocent. It isn’t the camelopard’s fault.”
“I know that, from what you said. I would never think it was the fault of a magical creature who was used and turned against humans.”
Maybe Luna was remembering some of the other cases they had worked on together, where Ginny had always recommended that the magical creature be treated fairly and relocated to a reserve if possible. She nodded. “I think this is a last remnant of the human whom Rosa Lestrange transformed into a camelopard.”
“But I thought you said that couldn’t happen,” Ginny breathed in horror, even as her mind raced. Her visions didn’t always tell the straight truth. The way they hadn’t told her that Luna was reaching out her hand in that house to break a vision, not to ward off a physical danger.
Maybe the vision she had had of the attack on Romula didn’t mean someone had been there directing the camelopard in its attack. Maybe it meant that there was a human in the past, behind the camelopard.
Ginny wished more than ever that she could have seen the figure’s face.
“I think the Lestranges accomplished a great deal they would never have wished for anyone to know,” Luna said, and bowed her head forwards. “Including, perhaps, a way to transform a human into a camelopard.”
Ginny said nothing. She was wondering whether they would have to look through missing persons cases to find someone the Lestranges could have taken captive and turned into their monster.
“Do you think the camelopard still knows?” she asked. “Is that the reason why it attacked Lestrange and her sister?” Auror Lombardis was listening, she saw, but with a sharp frown between her brows that worried Ginny. She didn’t know if the Auror was taking this in or not.
“I think the camelopard knows something,” said Luna. Her voice was still low; she still looked at her hands, not up at Ginny. “But not enough. It attacked me, when I had nothing to do with the transformation.”
“And let’s grant that this whole thing is true,” Auror Lombardis interrupted, seemingly unable to stay silent now. “Why go and attack the other Lestrange sister? We couldn’t find any evidence of recent contact between them.”
“They would have needed years to plan this,” said Luna, in a voice just enough like her usual dreamy one to make Ginny feel achingly sad. “They would have needed to trade books and contact experts and hunt for rare ingredients.”
“You know how they did it?” Ginny asked her quietly.
Luna ran her fingers over the section of scalp as if she was calling up the memories locked inside it. “I know, based on this, how they must have done it. Not the details. That it would have taken more than one person, and a long time.”
Ginny nodded. She wished she could understand all the complexities of mourning in Luna’s face, and how to make her feel better. She didn’t even know for certain if Luna was saddest about the transformation, or that a magical creature wasn’t actually a creature but a tormented human, or that a camelopard was still out there, running around, hideous and lurching and prone to strike anywhere next.
They don’t give up prey once they have it, she said. It must have thought Romula Lestrange was dead, or she wouldn’t still be alive. It’ll come back and attack Luna again.
Ginny moved in front of Luna and took her hand. Luna looked up and shook her head a little. “I don’t need to be shielded from the Aurors.”
“I know. But I want to protect you from everything.”
Luna’s sadness dropped away as if it was a mask that she’d pulled on, and she let go of the bit of scalp. She reached out with a hand so light that Ginny didn’t feel when her fingertips rested on her forehead; she saw them, instead. She blinked, and Luna’s fingers slid down a little, and she gave a shaky laugh.
Before she could say anything, Auror Lombardis demanded, “And what should we do now? Can we come up with some plan to cage this camelopard or destroy it?”
No matter that she did like this particular Auror, Ginny wished at the moment that she was somewhere far away and under a Silencing Charm. Luna’s hand faltered, and she turned a blanking gaze on the rest of the room.
“Kill it? It was a human being.”
“It’s not now. We have to think about ways to protect the people who are still people.”
“But it is a creature. It deserves to be treated well.”
“You said they dissolve into magic all the time anyway. I don’t see why we should have to worry that much about preserving its life.”
Luna looked so distressed that Ginny moved in front of her. “Why don’t we talk about this later?” she asked, only looking at Auror Lombardis, so the woman would feel more compelled to look at her in turn. “We can come up with a plan for when we actually locate the camelopard.”
Auror Lombardis paused, then inclined her head. “In the meantime, I am going to look into this more closely and see who Rosa Lestrange knew, who might have been sacrificed.” She spun away to yell at her Aurors much the way Wood had.
Ginny didn’t have time to sigh in relief before Luna’s hand closed on her shoulder. She didn’t let Ginny turn around, but bent down and sighed into her ear, “I think you and I both have some things we should discuss.”
And damn if that didn’t start Ginny’s heart dancing like a drumstick. But she nodded. “Of course.”
Chapter Five.
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