fic: Time Has Come Today (Love Is Patient Remix) (HP; Luna/Ginny)
Title: Time Has Come Today (Love Is Patient Remix)
Author: victoria p.
Summary: Luna is used to waiting.
Rating: G
Disclaimer: Rowling's, not mine.
Notes: Thanks to luzdeestrellas for looking it over. Remix of Of Waiting by quietliban written for remix_redux V.
Word count: 1,210 words
Date: April 22, 2007
~*~
Time Has Come Today (Love Is Patient Remix)
Luna is used to waiting.
When she was little, her mum used to take her down into the laboratory to play while she worked. Luna would play with the ghost that lived in the coal cellar, and then she would color in her coloring books, and when she wanted to tell her mum something, Mum would always say, "Wait just a minute, Luna, please. I'm in the middle of something." And that minute would stretch into an hour or more, and Luna would occupy herself with her coloring and her book of fairytales and her friend the coal cellar ghost.
A minute, Luna knows, can be as long as a lifetime.
*
She's nine when she watches her mother die, the stretch of tile floor between them endless as Mum collapses in a heap, and Luna knows it's not a joke, not a game, but Mum's dead before Luna can reach her, the light gone from her eyes, though her skin is still warm to the touch.
"There was nothing you could have done," her father says, stroking her hair, but Luna doesn't believe that. She's a witch, and what use is magic if it can't stop people from dying stupidly?
"It happened so quickly," she says. "One minute, she was fine, and the next minute, she was gone."
Dad kisses the top of her head, but nothing she does can make that haunted look disappear from his eyes.
A minute, Luna knows, can be as quick as the last beat of a heart or the last breath of a loved one.
*
The year Luna turns eleven, she waits by the window each day after school, looking for her Hogwarts letter.
"It won't come until summer," her father says when he notices. "And anyway, a watched pot never boils."
After that, Luna experiments. She's fairly certain her mother would approve of her use of the scientific method as she sets a pot upon the burner and turns up the heat. Ottery St. Catchpole is a Muggle village, and the house is hooked up to the town gas main, because Mum had been as fascinated by Muggle science as she was by magic.
Luna marks the time down in her notepad, then sits on a stool and watches, careful to keep her hair and hands away from the burner, blinking only when her eyes are so dry they sting.
She learns it takes nine minutes and eighteen seconds for four cups of water to boil at high heat.
She dumps the water out, waits for the pot to cool down--the conditions must be the same each time, she remembers her mother saying, to see if the results are replicable--and starts again. Four cups of water, the burner set to high heat, but this time, she turns away, reads some of the letters to The Quibbler that her father brings home, and doodles a quick sketch of a Blibbering Humdinger in the margins of her notes. The pot is whistling before she realizes it, steam hissing when she raises the lid, and she can't believe it happened so much more quickly, but when she checks her watch, she finds it's been nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds.
Time, Luna learns, is relative, and sometimes all you can do is wait. She still goes to the window and watches, but patiently now, knowing that the letter will arrive when it is meant to, and nothing she does can change that.
*
Luna quickly learns that she's not like the other children at Hogwarts, or that the other children are not quite like her. They call her names and take her things, and she bears it all, secure in the knowledge that this, too, shall pass. At the end of her first year, she puts up signs asking for the return of her belongings, and they trickle back to her anonymously, or in the hands of people who claim to have found them someplace else. She doesn't question, just nods and smiles and thanks them for taking care of her stuff while they had it.
She doesn't really have friends, but she hangs out in the common room with Ginny Weasley, who is always in a rush to go everywhere--to grow up, to play Quidditch, to get Harry Potter to notice her--but who sometimes takes the time out to stop and say hello, to make Luna feel like she exists and is noticed herself.
Ginny never notices that Luna notices her in return. But Luna is content to watch and wait. Ginny is kind to her, and Ron is funny and sweet, and she thinks she might like him, until she realizes that she only has that funny tickle in her belly because he looks like Ginny, instead of because he is himself.
*
All year she waits and watches as Harry finally wakes up and notices Ginny's a beautiful girl, and she ignores the pangs of loneliness and longing that occasionally plague her. She's happy for Ginny, and she will eventually have her chance. She has to believe that.
All year, she waits for the coin to call her to the next meeting of the D.A., waits to feel useful, to feel like part of something bigger, and she's ready when the call finally comes, even if she spends the battle locked in a room with Hermione, the two of them like the two sides of that coin, Hermione with all her knowledge and so little wisdom, and Luna with conviction in her beliefs and her perception; perhaps the slow-growing seeds of understanding have been sown between them.
Everything changes that night, and Luna knows she's not the only one watching the ripples and waiting to see what happens next.
*
Harry leaves right after Bill and Fleur's wedding, Ron and Hermione with him, and Ginny spends what's left of the summer with Luna, the two of them lying listlessly in the sun, Ginny brown and freckled, and Luna swathed in filmy pink scarves and wearing a giant straw hat to keep the sun off her skin.
The grass tickles her bare feet, and the air smells of wet dirt from the morning rain, and Luna has a new issue of The Quibbler to read, but Ginny is restless. She flings herself up into a sitting position, the sun gleaming in her hair, setting it on fire.
"Do you ever get tired?" she asks.
Luna reaches out, runs her fingers through Ginny's hair, which is soft and warm to the touch, nothing like fire and yet everything like it in the heat it raises beneath Luna's skin.
"Yes," Luna answers, "but I'm used to waiting."
Ginny turns, eyes wide and surprised. "I didn't know."
"Now you do." Luna smiles. She hopes Ginny doesn't feel sorry for her, or embarrassed.
Ginny holds her gaze for a long moment, brings up a grass-stained hand, and cups Luna's cheek.
"Now I do," she says, leaning forward and pressing a kiss to Luna's lips.
She tastes of iced pumpkin juice and sunshine, heat and sweetness like Luna's always imagined, and Luna kisses her back with more eagerness than skill.
They're both laughing with the thrill of it when Ginny breaks the kiss, and Luna says, "It was worth the wait."
end
~*~
This was the very last minute pinch hit I wrote on Saturday night at around midnight. There was another pinch hitter who had a whole week, but she never came through and she never responded to my emails, so suffice it to say I will never ask her to pinch hit again.
Every year there is an exceptionally last minute OMG CAN I WRITE IT? pinch hit, and they generally turn out pretty well, possibly because I have no time to second-guess myself, and also because I don't overreach and try to do anything too crazy or difficult.
It seemed fitting with time running out on the deadline to write a story about waiting patiently, since I was not at all patiently waiting for the last of the remixes to come in.
This particular story is an expansion of a very sweet drabble, the events of which make up the last section of this story, except for the kissing. I added the kissing in. I haven't really done any kind of scientific survey (unlike Luna *g*), but I think a large majority of my stories end with kisses. It's a winning formula, so why change it?
Also, I was happy to write some girlslash - well, very mild girlslash, but still - since it is often not very well represented in remix.
Anyway. I haven't written Luna very much, but I do like her, and it was fun trying to come up with some kind of backstory for her. Obviously, she's patient, and she isn't fazed by people treated her like an oddball. She is open to what Mulder would call extreme possibility, and yet I think she has, underneath all that dreamy eccentricity, a solid core of practicality that probably comes from having a scientist as a mother. At least, that's the idea I went with here.
I enjoyed sketching out a backstory given the facts we know - she saw her mother die when she was nine, and her mother had been doing some kind of experiment. I was picturing them as sort of an HP analog to the Murrys, I suppose, with Mrs. Lovegood making hot cocoa over the bunsen burner while Luna chatted about her day and colored in pictures of Snorkacks or whatever. And then something goes wrong and that's all gone.
The theme of patience and time and waiting came from the original story, and made this pretty easy to structure - Luna is good at waiting. She's used to it. She learned it from her mother, and then over and over again. One of the bits of OotP I find exceptionally heartbreaking that has almost nothing to do with Sirius is the scene when Harry finds her putting up signs to get her stuff back. Her placidity and confidence make me cry, because kids are cruel, and they've no doubt been cruel to her, but she accepts it and turns it into some kind of positive philosophy (that will probably get her heart broken at some point) that the things that go away will come back to her in the end, and she'll see her mother again someday. And then in HBP, she spends all that time waiting to be called to action, because being in the DA was almost like having friends. *sniffle*
Even Ginny isn't really her friend; they fall together because they're in the same year and they live in the same town. But Ginny I guess has done her own observations, and it finally clicks into place at the end, that Luna's been waiting for *her*, the way she keeps waiting for Harry, except Harry may never come back, and even when he's there, Ginny's never really sure he's actually *there*. Whereas Luna, for all her woo-woo ways, is a solid presence at her side.
And I wanted Luna to get what she wants, since she spends so much time waiting and so little of it fretting. The time has come (the walrus said, and that was one title I considered, actually, along with The Waiting, and also A Watched Pot, but I liked this one best), and the story ends with a kiss.
Again, the response to this was surprisingly wonderful - quietliban liked it, and so did a number of other people, and that makes me happy, because I like it, too.
~*~
Author: victoria p.
Summary: Luna is used to waiting.
Rating: G
Disclaimer: Rowling's, not mine.
Notes: Thanks to luzdeestrellas for looking it over. Remix of Of Waiting by quietliban written for remix_redux V.
Word count: 1,210 words
Date: April 22, 2007
~*~
Time Has Come Today (Love Is Patient Remix)
Luna is used to waiting.
When she was little, her mum used to take her down into the laboratory to play while she worked. Luna would play with the ghost that lived in the coal cellar, and then she would color in her coloring books, and when she wanted to tell her mum something, Mum would always say, "Wait just a minute, Luna, please. I'm in the middle of something." And that minute would stretch into an hour or more, and Luna would occupy herself with her coloring and her book of fairytales and her friend the coal cellar ghost.
A minute, Luna knows, can be as long as a lifetime.
*
She's nine when she watches her mother die, the stretch of tile floor between them endless as Mum collapses in a heap, and Luna knows it's not a joke, not a game, but Mum's dead before Luna can reach her, the light gone from her eyes, though her skin is still warm to the touch.
"There was nothing you could have done," her father says, stroking her hair, but Luna doesn't believe that. She's a witch, and what use is magic if it can't stop people from dying stupidly?
"It happened so quickly," she says. "One minute, she was fine, and the next minute, she was gone."
Dad kisses the top of her head, but nothing she does can make that haunted look disappear from his eyes.
A minute, Luna knows, can be as quick as the last beat of a heart or the last breath of a loved one.
*
The year Luna turns eleven, she waits by the window each day after school, looking for her Hogwarts letter.
"It won't come until summer," her father says when he notices. "And anyway, a watched pot never boils."
After that, Luna experiments. She's fairly certain her mother would approve of her use of the scientific method as she sets a pot upon the burner and turns up the heat. Ottery St. Catchpole is a Muggle village, and the house is hooked up to the town gas main, because Mum had been as fascinated by Muggle science as she was by magic.
Luna marks the time down in her notepad, then sits on a stool and watches, careful to keep her hair and hands away from the burner, blinking only when her eyes are so dry they sting.
She learns it takes nine minutes and eighteen seconds for four cups of water to boil at high heat.
She dumps the water out, waits for the pot to cool down--the conditions must be the same each time, she remembers her mother saying, to see if the results are replicable--and starts again. Four cups of water, the burner set to high heat, but this time, she turns away, reads some of the letters to The Quibbler that her father brings home, and doodles a quick sketch of a Blibbering Humdinger in the margins of her notes. The pot is whistling before she realizes it, steam hissing when she raises the lid, and she can't believe it happened so much more quickly, but when she checks her watch, she finds it's been nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds.
Time, Luna learns, is relative, and sometimes all you can do is wait. She still goes to the window and watches, but patiently now, knowing that the letter will arrive when it is meant to, and nothing she does can change that.
*
Luna quickly learns that she's not like the other children at Hogwarts, or that the other children are not quite like her. They call her names and take her things, and she bears it all, secure in the knowledge that this, too, shall pass. At the end of her first year, she puts up signs asking for the return of her belongings, and they trickle back to her anonymously, or in the hands of people who claim to have found them someplace else. She doesn't question, just nods and smiles and thanks them for taking care of her stuff while they had it.
She doesn't really have friends, but she hangs out in the common room with Ginny Weasley, who is always in a rush to go everywhere--to grow up, to play Quidditch, to get Harry Potter to notice her--but who sometimes takes the time out to stop and say hello, to make Luna feel like she exists and is noticed herself.
Ginny never notices that Luna notices her in return. But Luna is content to watch and wait. Ginny is kind to her, and Ron is funny and sweet, and she thinks she might like him, until she realizes that she only has that funny tickle in her belly because he looks like Ginny, instead of because he is himself.
*
All year she waits and watches as Harry finally wakes up and notices Ginny's a beautiful girl, and she ignores the pangs of loneliness and longing that occasionally plague her. She's happy for Ginny, and she will eventually have her chance. She has to believe that.
All year, she waits for the coin to call her to the next meeting of the D.A., waits to feel useful, to feel like part of something bigger, and she's ready when the call finally comes, even if she spends the battle locked in a room with Hermione, the two of them like the two sides of that coin, Hermione with all her knowledge and so little wisdom, and Luna with conviction in her beliefs and her perception; perhaps the slow-growing seeds of understanding have been sown between them.
Everything changes that night, and Luna knows she's not the only one watching the ripples and waiting to see what happens next.
*
Harry leaves right after Bill and Fleur's wedding, Ron and Hermione with him, and Ginny spends what's left of the summer with Luna, the two of them lying listlessly in the sun, Ginny brown and freckled, and Luna swathed in filmy pink scarves and wearing a giant straw hat to keep the sun off her skin.
The grass tickles her bare feet, and the air smells of wet dirt from the morning rain, and Luna has a new issue of The Quibbler to read, but Ginny is restless. She flings herself up into a sitting position, the sun gleaming in her hair, setting it on fire.
"Do you ever get tired?" she asks.
Luna reaches out, runs her fingers through Ginny's hair, which is soft and warm to the touch, nothing like fire and yet everything like it in the heat it raises beneath Luna's skin.
"Yes," Luna answers, "but I'm used to waiting."
Ginny turns, eyes wide and surprised. "I didn't know."
"Now you do." Luna smiles. She hopes Ginny doesn't feel sorry for her, or embarrassed.
Ginny holds her gaze for a long moment, brings up a grass-stained hand, and cups Luna's cheek.
"Now I do," she says, leaning forward and pressing a kiss to Luna's lips.
She tastes of iced pumpkin juice and sunshine, heat and sweetness like Luna's always imagined, and Luna kisses her back with more eagerness than skill.
They're both laughing with the thrill of it when Ginny breaks the kiss, and Luna says, "It was worth the wait."
end
~*~
This was the very last minute pinch hit I wrote on Saturday night at around midnight. There was another pinch hitter who had a whole week, but she never came through and she never responded to my emails, so suffice it to say I will never ask her to pinch hit again.
Every year there is an exceptionally last minute OMG CAN I WRITE IT? pinch hit, and they generally turn out pretty well, possibly because I have no time to second-guess myself, and also because I don't overreach and try to do anything too crazy or difficult.
It seemed fitting with time running out on the deadline to write a story about waiting patiently, since I was not at all patiently waiting for the last of the remixes to come in.
This particular story is an expansion of a very sweet drabble, the events of which make up the last section of this story, except for the kissing. I added the kissing in. I haven't really done any kind of scientific survey (unlike Luna *g*), but I think a large majority of my stories end with kisses. It's a winning formula, so why change it?
Also, I was happy to write some girlslash - well, very mild girlslash, but still - since it is often not very well represented in remix.
Anyway. I haven't written Luna very much, but I do like her, and it was fun trying to come up with some kind of backstory for her. Obviously, she's patient, and she isn't fazed by people treated her like an oddball. She is open to what Mulder would call extreme possibility, and yet I think she has, underneath all that dreamy eccentricity, a solid core of practicality that probably comes from having a scientist as a mother. At least, that's the idea I went with here.
I enjoyed sketching out a backstory given the facts we know - she saw her mother die when she was nine, and her mother had been doing some kind of experiment. I was picturing them as sort of an HP analog to the Murrys, I suppose, with Mrs. Lovegood making hot cocoa over the bunsen burner while Luna chatted about her day and colored in pictures of Snorkacks or whatever. And then something goes wrong and that's all gone.
The theme of patience and time and waiting came from the original story, and made this pretty easy to structure - Luna is good at waiting. She's used to it. She learned it from her mother, and then over and over again. One of the bits of OotP I find exceptionally heartbreaking that has almost nothing to do with Sirius is the scene when Harry finds her putting up signs to get her stuff back. Her placidity and confidence make me cry, because kids are cruel, and they've no doubt been cruel to her, but she accepts it and turns it into some kind of positive philosophy (that will probably get her heart broken at some point) that the things that go away will come back to her in the end, and she'll see her mother again someday. And then in HBP, she spends all that time waiting to be called to action, because being in the DA was almost like having friends. *sniffle*
Even Ginny isn't really her friend; they fall together because they're in the same year and they live in the same town. But Ginny I guess has done her own observations, and it finally clicks into place at the end, that Luna's been waiting for *her*, the way she keeps waiting for Harry, except Harry may never come back, and even when he's there, Ginny's never really sure he's actually *there*. Whereas Luna, for all her woo-woo ways, is a solid presence at her side.
And I wanted Luna to get what she wants, since she spends so much time waiting and so little of it fretting. The time has come (the walrus said, and that was one title I considered, actually, along with The Waiting, and also A Watched Pot, but I liked this one best), and the story ends with a kiss.
Again, the response to this was surprisingly wonderful - quietliban liked it, and so did a number of other people, and that makes me happy, because I like it, too.
~*~