Fic: "Everest to Kangchenjunga for Afternoon Tea" for such_heights
Title: Everest to Kangchenjunga for Afternoon Tea
Author: ignipes
Recipient: such_heights.
Rating: PG
Character: Luna Lovegood
Summary: They say the yeti is one of the most dangerous magical creatures in the world. Luna decides to find it anyway.
Author's Notes: Many thanks to thistlerose for the beta-reading.
Everest to Kangchenjunga for Afternoon Tea
Luna stood at the entrance of the cave.
"Hello?"
Her voice echoed in the darkness; there was no reply. She frowned thoughtfully and glanced around.
"I'm not going to hurt you," she called, and the echo bounced back: you ou ou ou....
The sun was warm on her back, and she could hear the brook murmuring quietly behind her. It was late in the afternoon -- much too late to be out safely, if she was to believe the villagers -- and her shadow stretched long and spindly into the mouth of the cave.
"I only want to talk. Oh! And--" Luna patted her robes and reached into one deep, charmed pocket and sorted through bits and bobs: magical pocketknife, seven mismatched buttons, a boiled sweet she didn't remember seeing before, a small wooden carving in the shape of a goat, and a thumb-sized The Adventurous Witch's Pocket Guide to Walking in the Himalayas. At the bottom of the pocket, reaching with her arm hidden to her elbow, she found what she was looking for. "I brought biscuits," she said, holding the packet up to the cave. "Ginger. Do you like ginger?"
There were footprints in the soft earth outside the cave. Paw prints, really, with five fat pads and deep gouges from claws thicker than her wand. She knelt and placed her hand in one of the impressions; the big toe was as big as her palm. Many of the prints were fresh, wearing a track down the slope to the creek, tufts of grass and patches of snow packed into the mud.
Standing upright again, Luna adjusted the strap of her knapsack and considered the gaping mouth of the cave. It looked exactly as it did in the drawing she had folded and tucked in her knapsack, down to even the small yellow flowers that grew in tufts out of cracks in the stone. The air from the cave smelled stale but not unpleasant, more like a stuffy old room than the butcher's shop the villagers had led her to believe. There were bones scattered about the ground just inside the cave, and the smooth stone walls were streaked with reddish-brown. She licked her finger and dragged it through the dark stains, touched the tip to her tongue and made a face.
"It's paint!" Luna exclaimed, laughing. "Only paint. You're not even trying anymore."
The cave exhaled a slight breeze, barely strong enough to stir the wisps of hair around her face. She thought she heard a low sound as well, a groan or growl, but she couldn't be certain.
"If you aren't careful," Luna went on, "the villagers will stop being afraid and they'll come to find you."
But of course they wouldn't. The old men in the village had shown her drawings on stones and old books they kept carefully wrapped in silk, and the young men had brought out the torn and tattered skins of animals killed long ago. Crouched around their cooking fires of brush and dung, the women had shared stories they had been telling for generations and would continue to tell until there was no one left to remember, and the children chased each other about the village with their hands outstretched as make-believe claws and their faces streaked with mud. Everyone in the village claimed to know a family who had lost a cousin or uncle or grandmother to the creature, but when Luna asked to speak to these families she was inevitably told that they had moved away, descended from the mountains in grief, left the village to work for the Muggles in the city.
Luna took two steps into the mouth of the cave. "I know the stories aren't true," she called. "I'm going to come in."
There was no doubt this time: the cave growled, a deep rumble that shook in the stones and raised the hairs on the back of her neck.
"Oh, stop." But she swallowed nervously and drew her wand. "Lumos."
The cave began to narrow only ten paces from the mouth, slanting downward into the mountain, and the air grew colder and damper. Luna walked slowly, trying to keep her footing on the uneven floor even while staring at the smooth walls. The pale stone was decorated with red and brown paintings, line drawings of surprising complexity and design, a stunning pattern of dark and light in the soft blue glow from her wand.
She paused to glance back; the sunlight at the entrance of the cave was no more than a speck in the distance.
As she started forward again, the cave growled. It was fiercer this time, prolonged and angry, and she felt the reverberation in her bones.
"It won't work," she said, speaking over the noise even though her voice shook.
The growl only grew louder.
"I'm not afraid of you."
Luna thought there might be words in the sound, but it was no language she could understand. She started walking again. She could see nothing beyond the light from her wand, but she heard what sounded like scratching and thumping somewhere ahead in the darkness.
"I don't care what they say. I know you're not going to hurt me."
Silence fell abruptly; the echoes faded.
"That's better," Luna said. "Now, may I come in?"
There was the soft scrabble of claws on stone.
"I'll come back tomorrow," she went on conversationally, "and the day after, and the day after--"
"Oh, bother." The voice burst from the darkness, rough and rich and ancient. "Go away!"
"There's no need to be rude," Luna scolded. "I've only come to visit. I know you must be lonely here by yourself."
Silence.
Luna waited, tapping her foot idly on the ground.
Then, grudgingly: "Would you like to come in for tea?"
She smiled. "I'd love to. It's very kind of you to invite me in."
This time, the growl that rolled through the cave sounded suspiciously like an annoyed sigh.
Not far ahead the cave opened up from a narrow tunnel to a wide room with rough walls and a low ceiling. As Luna neared the other side, she saw there was a doorway in the stone. The warm orange light shining through the opening was momentarily blocked by a large, hulking shadow. Luna hesitated, a shiver of nervousness running through her.
"Hello?" she called.
At the doorway, she paused. It opened into another stone room, smaller than the one behind her but much more inviting. Threadbare but colorful woven rugs covered the floor, photographs and drawings on the walls, and pieces of furniture scattered around beneath piles of books and scrolls of parchment. There was an old-fashioned camera on a tripod in one corner and a pile of blankets that was likely a bed in another. The room smelled faintly musky and mostly smoky, like a damp dog come in from the rain, sleeping on a hearth.
The creature was crouched in the corner. It was bent over a small stove, and Luna could hear the metallic clatter of a kettle.
The yeti looked, Luna was surprised to see, exactly as the books and stories said it would: covered from head to toe in shaggy, matted fur that was probably white beneath the mud and dirt, shaped like a very tall man with long arms and a strangely small head. It had to stoop to avoid bumping the ceiling when it stood, and its piercing blue eyes stared at Luna from behind a fringe of tangled hair. Its hands were massive and its claws were as long as knives, but it was holding a dented kettle in one hand and a pair of metal cups in the other.
"What do you want?" the yeti asked. "How did you find me?"
"It's not hard to find you," Luna said. "Everybody knows the stories. Boys from the village even offered to show me the way."
"I could kill you. You know the stories." Its English was perfect, cultured, more like a professor or a scholar than a bloodthirsty creature. It added, somewhat petulantly, "Everybody else believes the stories."
She smiled. "I only believe true stories. Aren't you going to offer me a seat?"
The yeti looked around for a moment; there were chairs in the room, but they were all piled high with books and parchment. Finally, it reached down and shoved a stack of thick books off the edge of a steamer trunk and gestured for Luna to sit, before turning back to the stove in the corner. A crooked, cracked stovepipe wound up the wall and vanished in a hole in the stone, but most of the smoke seemed to spill into the room anyway.
"Do you take sugar?" it asked.
"Yes, please."
"Well, I don't have any. Nor any milk. My goat ran away."
"Oh." Luna crossed her hands primly on her lap and wondered how she was supposed to respond to that. She reached into her knapsack and found the tattered drawing of the cave. "This is how I found you," she said.
She unfolded the parchment and smoothed it on her knee. She had every detail memorized, she'd examined it so many times: the delicate, detailed line drawing of the cave splashed with points of color, the sketched map in the corner, the elegant words in familiar handwriting. There was one jagged edge; she hadn't dared bring the entire journal with her, lest she lose it, and she knew she could repair the page in its proper place when she returned to England.
The yeti turned around; it seemed to be more comfortable on its haunches than standing upright, and it moved with surprising grace for a creature with its knees bent up near its ears and arms that dragged on the floor. Luna held out the drawing, and the yeti accepted it after a moment's hesitation, handling the parchment carefully so as not to tear with its claws.
"My mother drew that," Luna said. "She was here."
The yeti shrugged. "A lot of people have been here. Not as many as there used to be, but still too many for my liking." Its blue eyes fixed on her in a pointed glare. The rest of its face was hidden behind fur.
"This would have been a long time ago. Twenty years or more."
A strange noise escaped the yeti, and Luna realized after a second that it was laughing. "Twenty years is barely an afternoon," it said. "I was here long before you Englishmen first brought your ice picks and ropes to these mountains, and I will be here long after."
"Are you--" Luna paused, suddenly nervous under the creature's inscrutable expression. "Are you the only one?"
"What does it matter, if every man who meets me claims to see another?"
"Oh." Luna took the parchment back from the yeti and tucked it away. "That's terribly sad. I didn't know."
It huffed in response and turned again. Steam rose as it poured the tea, and when it faced her again it was clutching a small metal cup between two claws.
Luna took the cup, holding it by the rim to keep from burning herself. "Thank you."
The yeti poured its own tea and settled against the bookshelf in front of Luna, looking rather like a very large ball of white yarn that somebody had tossed aside.
It said, "You want to know if I remember her."
Luna sipped her tea. "Do you?"
"I remember all of them, and I remember none of them," the yeti said.
"That's nonsense," Luna replied.
"I'll remember you when you leave, and I'll forget you immediately."
"That doesn't even mean anything."
The yeti laughed again. "Perhaps not. But you wouldn't be here, in defiance of stories that everybody knows are true, if you were overly concerned with sense."
For a moment the yeti sounded so much like Professor McGonagall that Luna couldn't help but smile.
"Why are you here?" it asked, and this time the question was more curious than accusatory. "Wherever you're from, this is a long way to travel for nothing more than a memory that may not exist."
Luna didn't answer immediately. She thought of her mother's journal, notes and stories and drawings and ideas, a record of a life kept right up until the morning she had one idea too many, and she thought of her father, chasing myths and legends across oceans and continents, spinning conspiracies so complex even he couldn't follow all the threads anymore. She thought of schoolmates and friends, neighbors and strangers, all of them telling her in gentle exasperation: those things aren't real and everybody knows that's not true and that's not how the real world works, Luna.
"Everybody told me this journey was a mad idea," she said finally. "That seemed like a good enough reason to go through with it."
The yeti lifted its cup and drank all of its tea in one swallow. It was looking past Luna, just over the top of her head, its blue eyes scanning back and forth as though searching for something. Then it stopped, and it nodded almost imperceptibly.
Luna twisted around. The wall behind her was covered with pinned-up maps and photographs, so many that they overlapped in a jumbled mess. Some of them were quite old, and all of them were Muggle photographs, frozen in sepia and gray. It took several seconds for her to find what had caught the yeti's attention.
The photograph was stuck between a picture of a man in a tweed coat standing on a mountainside and a landscape of a blue mountain lake. Luna stood and walked over to the wall, stepping carefully through the piles of books and scrolls on the floor. The picture was in color, but the hues were muted and soft. A fair woman was kneeling on the ground outside the cave, laughing and squinting in the sunlight. She wore a simple dress like the women of the village, and beside her a small black goat was tethered to a stake and staring at her in with a look of abject bewilderment.
"I suspect she was here for much the same reason you are," the yeti said.
Surprised, Luna glanced over her shoulder. "She was?"
Instead of answering, the yeti continued, "But she had much better manners than you do. Not only did she wait to be invited in, but she also shared her biscuits before the tea had gone cold."
"Will you tell me what you remember?" Luna asked.
"Ginger, you say?" the yeti replied. "I do like ginger biscuits."
Luna reached into her pocket and brought out the biscuits. "Yes, ginger."
"Wonderful. I'll make more tea."
Laughing, Luna turned back to the wall of pictures; she stood on her toes to see more closely. The woman in the photograph was younger and more beautiful than she recalled, more like a fading dream than a memory, but her smile was the same.
Author: ignipes
Recipient: such_heights.
Rating: PG
Character: Luna Lovegood
Summary: They say the yeti is one of the most dangerous magical creatures in the world. Luna decides to find it anyway.
Author's Notes: Many thanks to thistlerose for the beta-reading.
Everest to Kangchenjunga for Afternoon Tea
Luna stood at the entrance of the cave.
"Hello?"
Her voice echoed in the darkness; there was no reply. She frowned thoughtfully and glanced around.
"I'm not going to hurt you," she called, and the echo bounced back: you ou ou ou....
The sun was warm on her back, and she could hear the brook murmuring quietly behind her. It was late in the afternoon -- much too late to be out safely, if she was to believe the villagers -- and her shadow stretched long and spindly into the mouth of the cave.
"I only want to talk. Oh! And--" Luna patted her robes and reached into one deep, charmed pocket and sorted through bits and bobs: magical pocketknife, seven mismatched buttons, a boiled sweet she didn't remember seeing before, a small wooden carving in the shape of a goat, and a thumb-sized The Adventurous Witch's Pocket Guide to Walking in the Himalayas. At the bottom of the pocket, reaching with her arm hidden to her elbow, she found what she was looking for. "I brought biscuits," she said, holding the packet up to the cave. "Ginger. Do you like ginger?"
There were footprints in the soft earth outside the cave. Paw prints, really, with five fat pads and deep gouges from claws thicker than her wand. She knelt and placed her hand in one of the impressions; the big toe was as big as her palm. Many of the prints were fresh, wearing a track down the slope to the creek, tufts of grass and patches of snow packed into the mud.
Standing upright again, Luna adjusted the strap of her knapsack and considered the gaping mouth of the cave. It looked exactly as it did in the drawing she had folded and tucked in her knapsack, down to even the small yellow flowers that grew in tufts out of cracks in the stone. The air from the cave smelled stale but not unpleasant, more like a stuffy old room than the butcher's shop the villagers had led her to believe. There were bones scattered about the ground just inside the cave, and the smooth stone walls were streaked with reddish-brown. She licked her finger and dragged it through the dark stains, touched the tip to her tongue and made a face.
"It's paint!" Luna exclaimed, laughing. "Only paint. You're not even trying anymore."
The cave exhaled a slight breeze, barely strong enough to stir the wisps of hair around her face. She thought she heard a low sound as well, a groan or growl, but she couldn't be certain.
"If you aren't careful," Luna went on, "the villagers will stop being afraid and they'll come to find you."
But of course they wouldn't. The old men in the village had shown her drawings on stones and old books they kept carefully wrapped in silk, and the young men had brought out the torn and tattered skins of animals killed long ago. Crouched around their cooking fires of brush and dung, the women had shared stories they had been telling for generations and would continue to tell until there was no one left to remember, and the children chased each other about the village with their hands outstretched as make-believe claws and their faces streaked with mud. Everyone in the village claimed to know a family who had lost a cousin or uncle or grandmother to the creature, but when Luna asked to speak to these families she was inevitably told that they had moved away, descended from the mountains in grief, left the village to work for the Muggles in the city.
Luna took two steps into the mouth of the cave. "I know the stories aren't true," she called. "I'm going to come in."
There was no doubt this time: the cave growled, a deep rumble that shook in the stones and raised the hairs on the back of her neck.
"Oh, stop." But she swallowed nervously and drew her wand. "Lumos."
The cave began to narrow only ten paces from the mouth, slanting downward into the mountain, and the air grew colder and damper. Luna walked slowly, trying to keep her footing on the uneven floor even while staring at the smooth walls. The pale stone was decorated with red and brown paintings, line drawings of surprising complexity and design, a stunning pattern of dark and light in the soft blue glow from her wand.
She paused to glance back; the sunlight at the entrance of the cave was no more than a speck in the distance.
As she started forward again, the cave growled. It was fiercer this time, prolonged and angry, and she felt the reverberation in her bones.
"It won't work," she said, speaking over the noise even though her voice shook.
The growl only grew louder.
"I'm not afraid of you."
Luna thought there might be words in the sound, but it was no language she could understand. She started walking again. She could see nothing beyond the light from her wand, but she heard what sounded like scratching and thumping somewhere ahead in the darkness.
"I don't care what they say. I know you're not going to hurt me."
Silence fell abruptly; the echoes faded.
"That's better," Luna said. "Now, may I come in?"
There was the soft scrabble of claws on stone.
"I'll come back tomorrow," she went on conversationally, "and the day after, and the day after--"
"Oh, bother." The voice burst from the darkness, rough and rich and ancient. "Go away!"
"There's no need to be rude," Luna scolded. "I've only come to visit. I know you must be lonely here by yourself."
Silence.
Luna waited, tapping her foot idly on the ground.
Then, grudgingly: "Would you like to come in for tea?"
She smiled. "I'd love to. It's very kind of you to invite me in."
This time, the growl that rolled through the cave sounded suspiciously like an annoyed sigh.
Not far ahead the cave opened up from a narrow tunnel to a wide room with rough walls and a low ceiling. As Luna neared the other side, she saw there was a doorway in the stone. The warm orange light shining through the opening was momentarily blocked by a large, hulking shadow. Luna hesitated, a shiver of nervousness running through her.
"Hello?" she called.
At the doorway, she paused. It opened into another stone room, smaller than the one behind her but much more inviting. Threadbare but colorful woven rugs covered the floor, photographs and drawings on the walls, and pieces of furniture scattered around beneath piles of books and scrolls of parchment. There was an old-fashioned camera on a tripod in one corner and a pile of blankets that was likely a bed in another. The room smelled faintly musky and mostly smoky, like a damp dog come in from the rain, sleeping on a hearth.
The creature was crouched in the corner. It was bent over a small stove, and Luna could hear the metallic clatter of a kettle.
The yeti looked, Luna was surprised to see, exactly as the books and stories said it would: covered from head to toe in shaggy, matted fur that was probably white beneath the mud and dirt, shaped like a very tall man with long arms and a strangely small head. It had to stoop to avoid bumping the ceiling when it stood, and its piercing blue eyes stared at Luna from behind a fringe of tangled hair. Its hands were massive and its claws were as long as knives, but it was holding a dented kettle in one hand and a pair of metal cups in the other.
"What do you want?" the yeti asked. "How did you find me?"
"It's not hard to find you," Luna said. "Everybody knows the stories. Boys from the village even offered to show me the way."
"I could kill you. You know the stories." Its English was perfect, cultured, more like a professor or a scholar than a bloodthirsty creature. It added, somewhat petulantly, "Everybody else believes the stories."
She smiled. "I only believe true stories. Aren't you going to offer me a seat?"
The yeti looked around for a moment; there were chairs in the room, but they were all piled high with books and parchment. Finally, it reached down and shoved a stack of thick books off the edge of a steamer trunk and gestured for Luna to sit, before turning back to the stove in the corner. A crooked, cracked stovepipe wound up the wall and vanished in a hole in the stone, but most of the smoke seemed to spill into the room anyway.
"Do you take sugar?" it asked.
"Yes, please."
"Well, I don't have any. Nor any milk. My goat ran away."
"Oh." Luna crossed her hands primly on her lap and wondered how she was supposed to respond to that. She reached into her knapsack and found the tattered drawing of the cave. "This is how I found you," she said.
She unfolded the parchment and smoothed it on her knee. She had every detail memorized, she'd examined it so many times: the delicate, detailed line drawing of the cave splashed with points of color, the sketched map in the corner, the elegant words in familiar handwriting. There was one jagged edge; she hadn't dared bring the entire journal with her, lest she lose it, and she knew she could repair the page in its proper place when she returned to England.
The yeti turned around; it seemed to be more comfortable on its haunches than standing upright, and it moved with surprising grace for a creature with its knees bent up near its ears and arms that dragged on the floor. Luna held out the drawing, and the yeti accepted it after a moment's hesitation, handling the parchment carefully so as not to tear with its claws.
"My mother drew that," Luna said. "She was here."
The yeti shrugged. "A lot of people have been here. Not as many as there used to be, but still too many for my liking." Its blue eyes fixed on her in a pointed glare. The rest of its face was hidden behind fur.
"This would have been a long time ago. Twenty years or more."
A strange noise escaped the yeti, and Luna realized after a second that it was laughing. "Twenty years is barely an afternoon," it said. "I was here long before you Englishmen first brought your ice picks and ropes to these mountains, and I will be here long after."
"Are you--" Luna paused, suddenly nervous under the creature's inscrutable expression. "Are you the only one?"
"What does it matter, if every man who meets me claims to see another?"
"Oh." Luna took the parchment back from the yeti and tucked it away. "That's terribly sad. I didn't know."
It huffed in response and turned again. Steam rose as it poured the tea, and when it faced her again it was clutching a small metal cup between two claws.
Luna took the cup, holding it by the rim to keep from burning herself. "Thank you."
The yeti poured its own tea and settled against the bookshelf in front of Luna, looking rather like a very large ball of white yarn that somebody had tossed aside.
It said, "You want to know if I remember her."
Luna sipped her tea. "Do you?"
"I remember all of them, and I remember none of them," the yeti said.
"That's nonsense," Luna replied.
"I'll remember you when you leave, and I'll forget you immediately."
"That doesn't even mean anything."
The yeti laughed again. "Perhaps not. But you wouldn't be here, in defiance of stories that everybody knows are true, if you were overly concerned with sense."
For a moment the yeti sounded so much like Professor McGonagall that Luna couldn't help but smile.
"Why are you here?" it asked, and this time the question was more curious than accusatory. "Wherever you're from, this is a long way to travel for nothing more than a memory that may not exist."
Luna didn't answer immediately. She thought of her mother's journal, notes and stories and drawings and ideas, a record of a life kept right up until the morning she had one idea too many, and she thought of her father, chasing myths and legends across oceans and continents, spinning conspiracies so complex even he couldn't follow all the threads anymore. She thought of schoolmates and friends, neighbors and strangers, all of them telling her in gentle exasperation: those things aren't real and everybody knows that's not true and that's not how the real world works, Luna.
"Everybody told me this journey was a mad idea," she said finally. "That seemed like a good enough reason to go through with it."
The yeti lifted its cup and drank all of its tea in one swallow. It was looking past Luna, just over the top of her head, its blue eyes scanning back and forth as though searching for something. Then it stopped, and it nodded almost imperceptibly.
Luna twisted around. The wall behind her was covered with pinned-up maps and photographs, so many that they overlapped in a jumbled mess. Some of them were quite old, and all of them were Muggle photographs, frozen in sepia and gray. It took several seconds for her to find what had caught the yeti's attention.
The photograph was stuck between a picture of a man in a tweed coat standing on a mountainside and a landscape of a blue mountain lake. Luna stood and walked over to the wall, stepping carefully through the piles of books and scrolls on the floor. The picture was in color, but the hues were muted and soft. A fair woman was kneeling on the ground outside the cave, laughing and squinting in the sunlight. She wore a simple dress like the women of the village, and beside her a small black goat was tethered to a stake and staring at her in with a look of abject bewilderment.
"I suspect she was here for much the same reason you are," the yeti said.
Surprised, Luna glanced over her shoulder. "She was?"
Instead of answering, the yeti continued, "But she had much better manners than you do. Not only did she wait to be invited in, but she also shared her biscuits before the tea had gone cold."
"Will you tell me what you remember?" Luna asked.
"Ginger, you say?" the yeti replied. "I do like ginger biscuits."
Luna reached into her pocket and brought out the biscuits. "Yes, ginger."
"Wonderful. I'll make more tea."
Laughing, Luna turned back to the wall of pictures; she stood on her toes to see more closely. The woman in the photograph was younger and more beautiful than she recalled, more like a fading dream than a memory, but her smile was the same.