Harry Potter: "The Relative Truth" by rotaryphones (2/2)
Title: The Relative Truth
Author: rotaryphones
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing/characters: Luna Lovegood/Neville Longbottom
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and friends belong to JKR, not me
Prompt: 742. Harry Potter, Luna/Neville, It's seventh year and Neville and Luna get to know each other intimately; Luna doesn't quite get why Neville's baffled by what's under her skirts. Luna is MTF.
Summary: Luna knows the truth about who she is and whom she loves, and that's what really matters in times of war.
Author's Notes: Thank you so much to my wonderful beta, killing_rose, and my also wonderful Britpicker, nagi_schwarz. And thanks to the mods for another lovely fest. ~12,000 words
Part 1
***
Stepping into the Forbidden Forest, Luna couldn’t help but feel that this was more of a holiday than a punishment. This was where Luna liked to go - willingly - when she wanted some time to herself. The fact that the Forbidden Forest could ever be considered detention for something as serious as stealing a priceless artefact was quite the mystery.
“Who cares,” said Ginny with a grin. “Maybe he thinks we really hate it here. I say we just count our blessings and enjoy it.”
“Now, don’t think yer gettin' off easy,” Hagrid warned. “Tryin’ to steal that sword was probably the dumbest thing you three have ever done. What were yeh goin’ to do with it, anyway?”
Ginny shrugged by way of answer, and practically skipped down the path ahead of them.
“What do you need us to do, Hagrid?” asked Neville, trying his best to sound contrite.
“You’re goin’ to spread dragon dung for me. Without magic.”
Ginny stopped in her tracks and spun around. “Aw, Hagrid, come on. Don’t you need help capturing some dangerous creature or something?”
“What, and risk you three gettin’ seriously injured? Yeh seem to be managin’ that just fine on yer own.” He gave a pointed stare in Neville’s direction. “Besides, I’ll not have yeh doin’ somethin’ for your detention yeh’ll actually enjoy. Snape might be a right bastard, and I know they’re torturin’ yeh up in that so-called school of yours, but stealin’ a sword? I thought yeh had more common sense than that! What would happen if the Carrows had caught yeh, huh? Yer no use to anyone dead!”
Hagrid’s deep voice shook the canopy above them. Luna had never seen him genuinely angry before, and it made his massive size actually intimidating.
“What, yeh think they wouldn’t kill yeh? ‘Cause yer a student?” He let out a bitter grunt of a laugh. “They don’t give a hippogriff’s beak whether yer a kid or not. Yer either for ‘em or against ‘em, and if yer against ‘em, yer the enemy. Just remember that.”
He paused to let his words sink in. Luna by this point was feeling properly remorseful, and she imagined that Neville and Ginny felt the same. When Hagrid was satisfied by their silence, he handed each of them a spade and a canvas bag of dragon dung, then he pointed to the ground next to him.
“This here plant is a food source for a lot of animals in the forest. It hasn’t been doin’ too well with the changes in climate, so you each need to spread out, and whenever yeh see one o’ these plants, you’re to fertilize it with the dung. Understood?”
They all nodded, and a moment later, Hagrid sent them off in different directions.
Although she knew it was supposed to be punishment, Luna didn’t actually mind the work. It was smelly, and involved a lot of physical labor, but it also gave her some opportunity to think about her decisions. The actual punishment had been the disappointment in Hagrid’s voice. Perhaps their actions lately had been a bit rash. On the other hand, Hagrid was acting as though they were still children, incapable of fighting in an adult’s war. That had ceased to be true a long time ago.
This is what she was thinking, her eyes trained to the ground, when she accidentally bumped into Neville. Neville fell over, and his bag of fertilizer landed upside down.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Neville! Here, let me help you with that.” Luna pulled out her wand and replaced as much of the dung as she could before helping Neville to his feet. His hand was warm despite the damp chill in the air, and permanently calloused from his time in the greenhouses. One look at his eyes told Luna exactly how he was feeling as he thanked her and brushed himself off.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, as they continued together through the trees. “I thought you’d enjoy working with plants.”
Neville didn’t act surprised by the question. They had reached a point where they could read each other quite well. “Yeah, I know. It’s not the work that’s bothering me.”
They stopped at a few dying plants set close to each other, and together got to work on their hands and knees.
Neville took a deep breath and let it out in a huff. “Do you think we’re doing the right thing? I can’t even tell anymore. Maybe we’re just making everything worse by stirring up more trouble.”
As was often the case those days, Neville’s thoughts bore a strong resemblance to her own. Luna suspected thought-transmitting babelwigs in the air. “I think we’re doing the best we can,” she said. “We’re not giving up, and we’re not losing hope, and that’s what’s important.”
“I guess I just always thought things would be a little more . . . simple. When Gran told me stories about the first war, I don’t know - I imagined my parents just going out there and fighting as hard as they could. That’s what I wanted to be like, assuming I was brave enough, of course.” He paused and wiped some damp hair from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Now I’m thinking there’s so much more to it than that. Nothing’s black and white, you know?”
Neville continued talking and working, but Luna had stopped doing either. She sat back on her haunches and watched him as he expertly turned the soil. Working in the mud, covered in dung, talking about the legacy of his parents and his own insecurities - Luna thought he had never looked so beautiful as he did at that moment.
“I mean, Hagrid is right,” he continued. “I wouldn’t put it past Death Eaters to start murdering children, even purebloods. They’ve done it in the past. But you and me, we’re not exactly children anymore.”
“No, we’re not.”
He finished what he was doing, and looked up at Luna. If he was surprised to find her already staring, he didn’t show it, and he didn’t attempt to break eye contact. The short distance between them seemed charged. Luna decided it wasn’t the babelwigs at all; the connection she felt seemed to come from inside of them both.
After a few moments had passed, Neville asked very quietly, “Do you ever think about death?”
“Sometimes,” Luna answered honestly. “When I think about my mum.”
“Does it scare you?”
“A little. Only because there’s so much I've not done yet.”
Neville tilted his head to one side. “Like what?”
Luna smiled just a bit. Her list of things she wanted to do with her life was extensive and improbable. She wanted to hunt the world for the Snorkack, invent a cure for dragonpox, and travel into space like a muggle. She wanted to sing on the wireless and sell paintings in a gallery. She wanted to learn Gobbledegook.
But there was one thing she had always wanted to do for which she now had the perfect opportunity. Without thinking too hard in case she lost her nerve, Luna leaned forward, placing her hands in the earth to support herself, and planted a kiss on Neville’s lips.
Even though she’d seen plenty of students snogging over the years, it was hard to tell if she was doing it right herself. She held her mouth there for a few moments before she pulled back, reluctant as she was to see Neville’s reaction.
Neville looked shocked more than anything. He sat perfectly still, and stared at her with wide, unblinking eyes. “Why did you do that?” he asked.
The answer seemed obvious enough. “Because I wanted to. I hope that’s okay.”
Neville didn’t respond right away, leaving Luna to hover in anticipation. She didn’t expect Neville to return her feelings, didn’t expect that of anyone, really. What worried her the most was whether or not she had hurt their friendship. A broken heart she could survive, but a war without Neville would be a lot harder.
A few moments passed, and Luna had her answer. Looking unsure of himself, as he so often did, Neville scooted just a little bit closer so that he could hold her face in his dirt-stained hands and bring their mouths together again.
This kiss was very different than the one before. Neville’s hands were there, for one thing, cupping Luna’s cheeks and guiding her mouth into place. She realized that she, too, was allowed to touch Neville with more than her lips, and began running her fingers through his soft hair. There were also tongues involved this time around, and a lot more saliva. Eventually, Luna stopped trying to analyze the snogging process for future reference and simply let herself appreciate it.
Neville finally pulled back looking flushed and shy.
Luna smiled at him. “Thank you,” she said.
They stood up, collected their canvas bags, and cordially walked hand in hand deeper into the forest.
***
From what Luna could see through the crack in the door, her mother was bent over her desk, writing something on a piece of parchment. Luna tried not get caught as she secretly watched, but she had forgotten that her mother was nearly impossible to sneak up on. “You can come in, Lucas,” she called from her seat.
Luna stepped inside and shut the door behind her, making herself comfortable on a rocking chair as old as she was. This was her favourite room in the whole house, partly because it was the most off limits. They called it her mother’s office, but it didn’t much resemble an office at all; it was more of a tiny sitting room, with parchment strewn all about, and blast marks that scarred the walls. The carpet was stained with so many different coloured potions that it was difficult to tell what the original colour had been. “What are you working on?” Luna asked.
“I’m doing some calculations,” her mother replied without looking up from her papers. “But you know I usually don’t like you in here when I’m experimenting. Or spying on me through the door, lad. I’ve told you it’s dangerous.”
“I wasn’t spying,” Luna lied. She rocked back and forth a few times then asked, “What are the calculations for?”
Her mother finished what she was writing, then sat up and turned her chair around, smiling as she tucked a stray hair back into her ponytail. “If I tell you, it won’t come true.”
“Not fair! That’s just for wishes.”
“Well, right now that’s all it is. When my wish is granted and the spell works, you’ll be the first to know. Deal?”
Luna crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes before answering, “Fine. Deal.” She picked her feet off the ground and tucked them underneath her on the chair. “I told Eric today about your Chocolate Charm, and he didn’t believe me. He said it was impossible.”
Her mother snorted. “That’s just because Eric doesn’t have any imagination. No one in that family does.”
“That’s what I said. But Eric told me you were lying to me and that I was stupid enough to believe it.” Luna didn’t like Eric very much, so the comment hadn’t bothered her at the time. Seeing her mother’s reaction, however, made her wonder if maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned it.
Her mother sighed, and brought her seat closer to the rocking chair. “Listen to me, sweetheart. You are a very bright young boy; you know that right?”
Luna shrugged and nodded. Again, she'd not taken his words all that seriously. She heard much worse on a frequent basis. Even so, “Eric’s right, though. You and dad believe a lot of things that other people don’t.”
“Yes, that’s true,” her mother conceded. She clasped her hands together and brought them to her chin, meaning she was about to explain some sort of grown up concept. Luna loved these moments, and leaned forward in the chair with full attention. “Have you ever heard your father say that ‘truth is relative’?” her mother asked.
“Maybe once,” said Luna. She thought she remembered him saying that to one of the Quibbler’s reporters years ago, but she hadn’t understood what he meant at the time. All she could think of was her Aunt Janice living up north, and her cousin Scott in the States, and she couldn’t figure out what either of them had to do with the truth.
“Well, what he means is that what’s true for one person isn’t necessarily true for another. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
Luna nodded. She knew exactly what it was like to know one kind of truth, while everyone around her knew another. Perhaps this was the moment she’d finally find the answer she’d been looking for. She could feel excitement bubbling inside of her as she asked, “How do you know something’s true, then?”
Her mother smiled. “That’s something you have to decide for yourself. It all depends on what you believe in and how you see the world. But you have to be careful, because some people think their truth is the best truth, and they’ll try to force it on you.”
“Like Dad?”
Her mother threw her head back and laughed. “No, not like Dad, although I can see why you’d think that. Just remember, your father doesn’t force his views on anyone. His goal is to simply remind people that there are a lot of truths out there to choose from. And that, Lucas, is one of the reasons I love him.”
Luna smiled. She knew how fortunate she was to have the parents she did, a mum and dad who loved each other and believed that the world was full of different truths. That’s the way she wanted to be when she was older. She wanted to remind people that there was a lot of truth out there, and show people things they had never seen before.
She wanted to discuss the truth about her gender right then and there with her mother, but her mother stood from her chair and waved her off with a dismissive hand. “Now, shoo. I have a lot of work I want to get done. Go bother your father at the press.”
***
Luna could hardly believe her good fortune. She was officially going out with Neville Longbottom, and Neville didn’t even mind if the other students knew about it. He had been a little nervous when they told Ginny, but Ginny said that they were sweet together, and that there ought to be more happy couples like them.
So that was that: she and Neville were a couple. They walked to classes together, they studied together, they planned rebellion together. Despite the war, they rarely failed in their attempts to make each other laugh, which was always Luna’s favourite part. She tried her best to teach Neville not to doubt himself so much, while Neville in turn gave Luna a feeling of safety and acceptance that was entirely new to her. If she’d known what she was missing, she would have snogged Neville long ago.
Neville also spent most of his nights with her in the Room of Requirement, although they never did more than kiss. This was the only part of their relationship that gave Luna any anxiety. She could sense that Neville wouldn’t mind going further, but Luna was terrified that he would touch her uninvited only to immediately discover her magically stuffed bra, or that her body didn’t curve quite right. She certainly didn’t let him anywhere near her hips.
Fortunately, however, Neville was just as shy as she was cautious. It was a well-avoided issue until one night shortly before the winter holiday. They were lying together in an overlarge hammock that the Room had provided, when Neville turned to Luna out of the blue and asked, “Why can’t you sleep in your room anymore?”
Luna felt as though she had been dunked in the Black Lake. It wasn’t that she'd not planned to tell Neville eventually - she just wasn’t prepared for it to be at that very moment. She could hear her father’s voice in her head, telling her that “honesty is the basis of any relationship.”
“Why do you ask?”
Neville shrugged where he lay. “I was thinking about what Dumbledore’s portrait said to you. It had to have been something he knew about before he died, right?”
Sometimes Neville was brighter than Luna gave him credit for. “I told my roommates that my bed had a nargle infestation,” Luna offered by way of stalling.
“Yeah, but that’s not true, is it?”
Luna shook her head slowly, before lifting herself to a sitting position. Neville sat up as well so that they were facing each other with their legs crossed.
Luna’s heart was pounding very loudly. She was worried about upsetting Neville, but at the same time, she was thrilled at the prospect of finally telling her secret for the first time. She shared her father’s disdain for withholding the truth, especially her own. She just didn’t know how to say it. She'd not had any practice.
Neville was nothing if not patient, and he waited silently while she fiddled with the hem of her robe, sorting it out. Eventually he reached out to touch her arm, and said, “Hey, it’s all right. Whatever it is, you can tell me.”
It was the look of growing concern on his face that helped Luna reach her decision. Neville cared about her, and she was sure that something as silly as gender wouldn’t stand in the way of that. “Have you ever been inside the girl’s dorm?” she eventually asked.
“Of course not,” said Neville. “Boys can’t get up there, can they?”
Luna held his gaze for a long while. “Exactly.” When Neville said nothing in response, she added, “That’s why I can’t get into my dorm.”
The confession should have been a load off of her shoulders, but Neville was still staring at her blankly as though he’d been attacked by a wrackspurt. Luna realized she would have to be fairly blunt to get through to him.
“Dumbledore used to place an Exception Charm on the girls’ dorms for me so I could sleep there,” she explained. “The most recent charm wore off about halfway through the term. So that’s why I can’t sleep there anymore. The castle still thinks I’m a boy.”
Neville snapped out of his stupor, and furrowed his eyebrows in confusion. “Why would the castle think you’re a boy?”
At this point, Luna just wanted to the confession to be over with. She settled on the simplest explanation, even it wasn’t strictly true. “Well - I am a boy, Neville.”
Saying those words for the first time in her life had a strange effect on Luna. It was as though she had stepped out of her own skin, the skin she had worked so hard to feel comfortable in over the years. She saw herself as she imagined an outsider might see her - confused, fraudulent - and it frightened her, because she couldn’t remember the last time she had felt so vulnerable.
Maybe it was because, of all the people in the school, it was Neville’s judgment that meant the most to her. She watched nervously as his expression turned stony. “That’s not funny, Luna.”
She couldn’t imagine ever joking about such a thing. “I’m not being funny.”
“So what are you being? Is this another one of those messed up ideas your dad put in your head?”
Now Neville was starting to sound angry, something that Luna had never heard from him before. His accusation stung, but she was determined to maintain her calm no matter what. “My father doesn’t put messed up ideas in my head,” she explained. “I was born as a boy. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”
Neville scrambled off the bed and stepped a few paces away from her, as though afraid to catch some disease. Of all the reactions Luna had expected, she never anticipated such hurt, such anguish written all over his face.
“So what are you telling me?” he asked, crossing his arms protectively over his chest. “You’ve been a boy all this time?”
“I suppose, in some ways,” said Luna. “But I’m actually a girl in most ways. In the ways that count.”
“What - what does that even mean?” cried Neville, sounding more frantic by the minute. He searched Luna’s eyes for whatever truth he thought he’d find. “Just - be straight with me, Luna, will you? Do you - I mean -“ He took a deep breath and set his jaw, looking determined. “Down there. Are you a - a girl or a boy?”
Luna chewed on her lower lip. She couldn’t lie to Neville, but the truth was more complicated than he was allowing for. “Boy,” she said quietly. The word sounded like a death sentence. “But Daddy says he’ll help me pay for the change once I’m older.”
Neville’s face fell. Disgust and outrage were washed over with an overwhelming grief. Luna wanted nothing more than to hold him in her arms and make him feel better, but she knew instinctively he wouldn’t allow that. Not anymore.
Shaking his head slowly, looking as though he were on the verge of falling apart, Neville said, “All I ever wanted was a normal life. That’s all I want. Why does everything always have to turn to shit?”
It was the first time Luna had ever heard Neville swear. She watched as he gathered his things as fast as possible without sparing her a glance, as though she were no longer in the room. It was clear that Neville had made his decision. It wasn’t a decision Luna understood, but there was nothing she could do about that now. All she could do was hug her knees to her chest and remind herself that at least they had spent the last several wonderful weeks together. She planned to keep the memories of that short time close to her heart.
Before he stepped through the door, Neville paused without turning around. “I can’t believe you lied to me,” he said in a quiet voice that echoed through the room.
***
Luna’s mother died on a chilly afternoon in late October. Luna had been spying again through the slightly ajar door, and maybe if her mother hadn’t been concentrating so hard on her new spell, she would have sensed Luna’s presence and sent her away. As it was, Luna was there to witness the entire event. The small but lethal explosion, viewed as a sliver of an image framed between the door and the doorpost, would be forever burned into her mind.
Her memory of what happened immediately afterwards was patchy at best. From what she could piece together, she was the one who had located her father, and he in turn had flooed St. Mungo’s. After that, the house was overrun by Healers, shouting medical things and casting strange spells over her mother’s body. She remembered her mother being apparated to the hospital, leaving her office scarred and empty. She remembered the paralyzing, all-consuming fear most of all.
Her mother stayed in St. Mungo’s for two days before she finally passed away. The funeral took place the following week. Luna had no recollection of who was there, or what was said at the ceremony, but she distinctly recalled the exact colours and shapes of the floral arrangements, the scratchy black dress robes she was forced to wear, and the feel of her father’s hand crushing her own.
She also remembered the exact moment during the ceremony when she decided she couldn’t handle pretending to be a boy for one more day.
***
Luna wasn’t afraid when the Death Eaters came onto the Hogwarts Express to take her away. All she could think about was her poor father, and how he would manage without her. She wanted desperately to send him some sort of message, just to say that she would be fine and that she wasn’t afraid of dying and that he shouldn’t give in to the Death Eaters’ demands, but of course her wand was the first thing they took from her.
They apparated Luna to several locations, always handing her off to someone new, before finally arriving at Malfoy Manor. Between being blindfolded and the constant jumps in space, she was feeling too nauseous to resist by the time they threw her in her cell. She landed in a heap on the floor and waited for her captors to leave before picking herself up, brushing herself off, and adjusting her eyes to the dark.
“Who’s there?” asked a dusty, underused voice from the corner.
“Luna Lovegood,” she whispered.
“Ah yes. Nine inches, willow, unicorn hair,” came the mournful reply.
Luna smiled brightly in the dark. “Hello, Mr. Ollivander! I’m so glad you’re all right. We were all worried about you.”
She crawled in the direction of the voice, and stopped when she was nose to nose with the man and could suddenly see his face. He looked worse than she could have imagined. He had clearly been underfed, tortured by magical and non-magical means alike, and by his odor he'd not bathed in months. But the worst part was the look in his eyes. Mr. Ollivander might have been alive in the physical sense, but his eyes made it clear that he had given up long ago.
Luna didn’t know what she could possibly say that would make the situation any better, so instead she leaned forward and cradled him in a hug. When his bone-thin arms lifted to weakly hug her back, she knew they would be okay.
Life in that cell wasn’t nearly as terrible as it could have been. Luna was tortured a few times in the beginning, but when it became clear that her father had no idea of Harry Potter’s whereabouts, they threw her back in the cell and mostly forgot about her. Thanks to Mr. Ollivander’s company, she was also lucky enough to escape the torture of loneliness. Since he wasn’t much of a conversationalist, Luna took it upon herself to do most of the talking as they sat together in the dark. She mostly described the different creatures she wanted to study when they were both free and the war had ended. Sometimes, when there didn’t seem to be anyone around who might overhear, she also liked to sing.
If her voice began to wear thin, or if Mr. Ollivander was asleep, Luna’s time in captivity gave her plenty of opportunity to think. She often thought about Neville, which in turn made her think about her own body. For the first time in a long time she found herself examining her decisions, even doubting them. Neville’s parting words rang in her ears, his accusation of lies never told.
“What’s true for one person isn’t necessarily true for another,” her mother had once said.
Even so, Luna wondered. What if she had lost the ability to tell the difference between truth and lies? She had lived with her secret for so long that deception had become frighteningly natural. Was being true to herself the same thing as being true to others? At what point did privacy turn into secrecy?
Maybe it was because her cell seemed to consume optimism like a dementor, but Luna would sometimes catch herself fantasizing about being happy as a boy. It certainly would have made life simpler. No magical hair removal, no careful control over the sound of her voice, no changing behind closed curtains, no unwelcome erections, no future of expensive magical treatments and a lifetime of explanation. She tried imagining that sort of existence, but found the task impossible. It was like imagining a life without magic, or a world where You-Know-Who was a nice bloke.
She had always been the way she was, and she always would be. No one knew her better than herself. Once she and Mr. Ollivander escaped Malfoy Manner, as she knew they would, she was determined to find Neville, sit him down, and make sure he understood her own version of the truth.
One day, Luna was startled out of her thoughts when the door was opened and a many-headed creature was shoved into their cell. For a terrifying moment Luna thought the monster was there to finish them off once and for all, until one of the heads started crying out Hermione’s name over and over.
A second head said, “Be quiet! Shut up, Ron, we need to get these ropes off -“
“Harry?” she whispered. “Ron? Is that you?”
“Luna?” the second head replied.
Warmth spread through Luna’s limbs. As terrible as it was for Harry to have been captured, she immediately sensed that together they would finally finish this war once and for all.
***
It took about a month after her mother’s death before Luna’s father snapped out of his mourning to discover that he no longer had a son, but a daughter.
He quietly knocked on Luna’s door one day before stepping inside.
“Hi Daddy,” she said.
Her father cleared his throat. “Lucas, don’t you think it’s about time you stopped wearing Mummy’s robes around the house?”
Luna looked away, her face set. She had been preparing for this conversation for a while now. “I don’t have any robes of my own.”
Her father looked over to her wardrobe, as though expecting it to have vanished overnight. “What are you talking about?” he asked when he saw that it hadn’t. “You have an entire set of robes. Do you - do you need more? Are they too small for you?”
“I don’t have any girls’ robes,” she clarified.
This brought her father up short. He looked at Luna with that absent stare she’d so often seen since her mother’s death, then moved to sit down next to her on the edge of the bed.
“I know this has been very difficult for you, Lucas. It’s been difficult for me as well. And I - I know I've not been the best father lately.” In fact, Luna had barely seen him at all over the past two weeks, obsessed as he had become with his work. The stories being printed in the Quibbler were becoming increasingly bizarre and unsettling, as though the entire world had been thrown out of balance along with her own life. “But I want you to know that I’m here for you now, and we’re going to get through this together, all right?”
Luna nodded solemnly, and her father continued, sounding a little more sure of himself.
“Right. Let’s start by getting you out of these robes and into something more appropriate.”
Luna nodded again. “Girls’ robes,” she insisted. Her father’s face crumpled into an expression of distress, and she felt a momentary pang of guilt for adding to his burden. She was determined, however, to see this through. “I’m not a boy.”
“What are you talking about? Why not?” said her father, seemingly at a loss for words.
“I don’t know. I’m just not.”
Her father continued to stare at her blankly, and she wondered what he saw. Surely if he loved her he would be able to tell who she really was, and that he had merely made a mistake for all these years. It was perfectly understandable - she was in the wrong body, after all.
“You - you want to be a girl?” he intoned.
“I am a girl,” she corrected.
He shook his head slowly. “Lucas, no. You’re not. Where did this idea come from?”
“It didn’t come from anywhere. It’s just the way I am.”
“No, you’re not. You’re my son. You’re my Lucas.” Suddenly, he grabbed both her arms in a painful grip, and turned her so that she was looking directly at him. There was desperation in his eyes now, the haunted look he had worn at the funeral. “You can’t change that. You can’t become someone else just because you want to be, do you understand? You’re all I have. . . .“ His voice choked, and he loosened his hold without letting go. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Lucas. Look, we’ll work through this together. I know things are difficult now, but we still have each other. Nothing’s going to change that.”
Luna had the beginnings of tears in her eyes, but she angrily blinked them away. “I’m not trying to change things. I just want to be a girl.”
“I know things are difficult-” he repeated.
“And it’s not because Mummy died, either - I’ve always been this way. You only think I’ve been a boy all this time.”
Her father searched her eyes for confirmation, or perhaps to discover where he went wrong. “Why are you doing this to me?” he asked softly. “Why now?”
Somehow Luna knew the answer immediately, even if she had never before put it into words. She removed his hands from her arms, and held them in her own. “Because you and Mummy taught me to be true to myself, even if the truth was something no one else could see.”
Finally, she could tell, her words had got through. The distress, the confusion, the anger - it was still there in his face, but what Luna saw on top of that was dawning comprehension. He took a deep breath and ran his fingers affectionately through her hair.
Neither of them said anything for a long while. Luna suffered through the silence with muscles tensed, waiting for her father to pronounce her fate. Part of her simply wanted to end the anticipation as soon as possible, while another part desperately held onto the moment for fear of what would follow. She came close to laughing and telling him it had all been a joke, that she would be whomever he wanted her to be as long as he continued to love her.
That was when he reached back down to take Luna’s hands in his own. “I don’t know what your mother would do if she were here,” he said. Luna was unused to hearing such uncertainty in his voice, but as he spoke he gradually began to sound more confident, more like the father she remembered. “But you’re right. You’re absolutely right. That’s exactly what we’ve taught you, and it - it would be an insult to your mother’s memory if I went back on that lesson now.”
With a tearful grin, Luna leaped forward and caught her father in a tight embrace. When he hugged her back, she could feel his own tears on her neck.
***
“Oooh, look, a Blibbering Humdinger!” Luna cried. She watched with a smile as Harry disappeared under his cloak, gathering Ron and Hermione on his way out the door.
Now that he was taken care of, there was one last thing Luna needed to do. She walked over to where Neville was sitting, the Sword of Gryffindor - the actual sword - gleaming on the table in front of him. Admirers swamped him just as they had Harry, but Neville didn’t seem to be aware of their presence. Luna kindly shooed them away before sitting next to him on the bench.
She cleared her throat and smiled. “I like a boy with a big sword.”
Neville looked over at her, completely startled. She could see him coming back to the present moment, slowly registering her face. He suddenly let out a peal of laughter that caused quite a few heads to turn, and when the laughter had subsided, a look of intense relief took its place. Without warning, he wrapped his arms tightly around Luna, surprising her with how much strength he had left.
He pulled back to arm’s length and studied her eyes, her face, her body. “I missed you so much,” he said, sounding almost apologetic.
“I missed you, too, Neville.”
Before she realized what was happening, Neville had leaned in and was kissing her passionately - without hesitation, without uncertainty. Luna let out a little squeal of surprise before placing her hands on the back of his head and reciprocating the kiss.
She didn’t mind that other people were watching. She didn’t mind that she'd not had a chance to explain herself properly, because she knew there would be time for that later. All that mattered was that Neville was here, and that he cared about her, and that the war was over and they were both safe. Everything was finally as it should be. And Luna knew that her mother, wherever she was, must have been very proud of her.
Author: rotaryphones
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing/characters: Luna Lovegood/Neville Longbottom
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and friends belong to JKR, not me
Prompt: 742. Harry Potter, Luna/Neville, It's seventh year and Neville and Luna get to know each other intimately; Luna doesn't quite get why Neville's baffled by what's under her skirts. Luna is MTF.
Summary: Luna knows the truth about who she is and whom she loves, and that's what really matters in times of war.
Author's Notes: Thank you so much to my wonderful beta, killing_rose, and my also wonderful Britpicker, nagi_schwarz. And thanks to the mods for another lovely fest. ~12,000 words
Part 1
***
Stepping into the Forbidden Forest, Luna couldn’t help but feel that this was more of a holiday than a punishment. This was where Luna liked to go - willingly - when she wanted some time to herself. The fact that the Forbidden Forest could ever be considered detention for something as serious as stealing a priceless artefact was quite the mystery.
“Who cares,” said Ginny with a grin. “Maybe he thinks we really hate it here. I say we just count our blessings and enjoy it.”
“Now, don’t think yer gettin' off easy,” Hagrid warned. “Tryin’ to steal that sword was probably the dumbest thing you three have ever done. What were yeh goin’ to do with it, anyway?”
Ginny shrugged by way of answer, and practically skipped down the path ahead of them.
“What do you need us to do, Hagrid?” asked Neville, trying his best to sound contrite.
“You’re goin’ to spread dragon dung for me. Without magic.”
Ginny stopped in her tracks and spun around. “Aw, Hagrid, come on. Don’t you need help capturing some dangerous creature or something?”
“What, and risk you three gettin’ seriously injured? Yeh seem to be managin’ that just fine on yer own.” He gave a pointed stare in Neville’s direction. “Besides, I’ll not have yeh doin’ somethin’ for your detention yeh’ll actually enjoy. Snape might be a right bastard, and I know they’re torturin’ yeh up in that so-called school of yours, but stealin’ a sword? I thought yeh had more common sense than that! What would happen if the Carrows had caught yeh, huh? Yer no use to anyone dead!”
Hagrid’s deep voice shook the canopy above them. Luna had never seen him genuinely angry before, and it made his massive size actually intimidating.
“What, yeh think they wouldn’t kill yeh? ‘Cause yer a student?” He let out a bitter grunt of a laugh. “They don’t give a hippogriff’s beak whether yer a kid or not. Yer either for ‘em or against ‘em, and if yer against ‘em, yer the enemy. Just remember that.”
He paused to let his words sink in. Luna by this point was feeling properly remorseful, and she imagined that Neville and Ginny felt the same. When Hagrid was satisfied by their silence, he handed each of them a spade and a canvas bag of dragon dung, then he pointed to the ground next to him.
“This here plant is a food source for a lot of animals in the forest. It hasn’t been doin’ too well with the changes in climate, so you each need to spread out, and whenever yeh see one o’ these plants, you’re to fertilize it with the dung. Understood?”
They all nodded, and a moment later, Hagrid sent them off in different directions.
Although she knew it was supposed to be punishment, Luna didn’t actually mind the work. It was smelly, and involved a lot of physical labor, but it also gave her some opportunity to think about her decisions. The actual punishment had been the disappointment in Hagrid’s voice. Perhaps their actions lately had been a bit rash. On the other hand, Hagrid was acting as though they were still children, incapable of fighting in an adult’s war. That had ceased to be true a long time ago.
This is what she was thinking, her eyes trained to the ground, when she accidentally bumped into Neville. Neville fell over, and his bag of fertilizer landed upside down.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Neville! Here, let me help you with that.” Luna pulled out her wand and replaced as much of the dung as she could before helping Neville to his feet. His hand was warm despite the damp chill in the air, and permanently calloused from his time in the greenhouses. One look at his eyes told Luna exactly how he was feeling as he thanked her and brushed himself off.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, as they continued together through the trees. “I thought you’d enjoy working with plants.”
Neville didn’t act surprised by the question. They had reached a point where they could read each other quite well. “Yeah, I know. It’s not the work that’s bothering me.”
They stopped at a few dying plants set close to each other, and together got to work on their hands and knees.
Neville took a deep breath and let it out in a huff. “Do you think we’re doing the right thing? I can’t even tell anymore. Maybe we’re just making everything worse by stirring up more trouble.”
As was often the case those days, Neville’s thoughts bore a strong resemblance to her own. Luna suspected thought-transmitting babelwigs in the air. “I think we’re doing the best we can,” she said. “We’re not giving up, and we’re not losing hope, and that’s what’s important.”
“I guess I just always thought things would be a little more . . . simple. When Gran told me stories about the first war, I don’t know - I imagined my parents just going out there and fighting as hard as they could. That’s what I wanted to be like, assuming I was brave enough, of course.” He paused and wiped some damp hair from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Now I’m thinking there’s so much more to it than that. Nothing’s black and white, you know?”
Neville continued talking and working, but Luna had stopped doing either. She sat back on her haunches and watched him as he expertly turned the soil. Working in the mud, covered in dung, talking about the legacy of his parents and his own insecurities - Luna thought he had never looked so beautiful as he did at that moment.
“I mean, Hagrid is right,” he continued. “I wouldn’t put it past Death Eaters to start murdering children, even purebloods. They’ve done it in the past. But you and me, we’re not exactly children anymore.”
“No, we’re not.”
He finished what he was doing, and looked up at Luna. If he was surprised to find her already staring, he didn’t show it, and he didn’t attempt to break eye contact. The short distance between them seemed charged. Luna decided it wasn’t the babelwigs at all; the connection she felt seemed to come from inside of them both.
After a few moments had passed, Neville asked very quietly, “Do you ever think about death?”
“Sometimes,” Luna answered honestly. “When I think about my mum.”
“Does it scare you?”
“A little. Only because there’s so much I've not done yet.”
Neville tilted his head to one side. “Like what?”
Luna smiled just a bit. Her list of things she wanted to do with her life was extensive and improbable. She wanted to hunt the world for the Snorkack, invent a cure for dragonpox, and travel into space like a muggle. She wanted to sing on the wireless and sell paintings in a gallery. She wanted to learn Gobbledegook.
But there was one thing she had always wanted to do for which she now had the perfect opportunity. Without thinking too hard in case she lost her nerve, Luna leaned forward, placing her hands in the earth to support herself, and planted a kiss on Neville’s lips.
Even though she’d seen plenty of students snogging over the years, it was hard to tell if she was doing it right herself. She held her mouth there for a few moments before she pulled back, reluctant as she was to see Neville’s reaction.
Neville looked shocked more than anything. He sat perfectly still, and stared at her with wide, unblinking eyes. “Why did you do that?” he asked.
The answer seemed obvious enough. “Because I wanted to. I hope that’s okay.”
Neville didn’t respond right away, leaving Luna to hover in anticipation. She didn’t expect Neville to return her feelings, didn’t expect that of anyone, really. What worried her the most was whether or not she had hurt their friendship. A broken heart she could survive, but a war without Neville would be a lot harder.
A few moments passed, and Luna had her answer. Looking unsure of himself, as he so often did, Neville scooted just a little bit closer so that he could hold her face in his dirt-stained hands and bring their mouths together again.
This kiss was very different than the one before. Neville’s hands were there, for one thing, cupping Luna’s cheeks and guiding her mouth into place. She realized that she, too, was allowed to touch Neville with more than her lips, and began running her fingers through his soft hair. There were also tongues involved this time around, and a lot more saliva. Eventually, Luna stopped trying to analyze the snogging process for future reference and simply let herself appreciate it.
Neville finally pulled back looking flushed and shy.
Luna smiled at him. “Thank you,” she said.
They stood up, collected their canvas bags, and cordially walked hand in hand deeper into the forest.
***
From what Luna could see through the crack in the door, her mother was bent over her desk, writing something on a piece of parchment. Luna tried not get caught as she secretly watched, but she had forgotten that her mother was nearly impossible to sneak up on. “You can come in, Lucas,” she called from her seat.
Luna stepped inside and shut the door behind her, making herself comfortable on a rocking chair as old as she was. This was her favourite room in the whole house, partly because it was the most off limits. They called it her mother’s office, but it didn’t much resemble an office at all; it was more of a tiny sitting room, with parchment strewn all about, and blast marks that scarred the walls. The carpet was stained with so many different coloured potions that it was difficult to tell what the original colour had been. “What are you working on?” Luna asked.
“I’m doing some calculations,” her mother replied without looking up from her papers. “But you know I usually don’t like you in here when I’m experimenting. Or spying on me through the door, lad. I’ve told you it’s dangerous.”
“I wasn’t spying,” Luna lied. She rocked back and forth a few times then asked, “What are the calculations for?”
Her mother finished what she was writing, then sat up and turned her chair around, smiling as she tucked a stray hair back into her ponytail. “If I tell you, it won’t come true.”
“Not fair! That’s just for wishes.”
“Well, right now that’s all it is. When my wish is granted and the spell works, you’ll be the first to know. Deal?”
Luna crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes before answering, “Fine. Deal.” She picked her feet off the ground and tucked them underneath her on the chair. “I told Eric today about your Chocolate Charm, and he didn’t believe me. He said it was impossible.”
Her mother snorted. “That’s just because Eric doesn’t have any imagination. No one in that family does.”
“That’s what I said. But Eric told me you were lying to me and that I was stupid enough to believe it.” Luna didn’t like Eric very much, so the comment hadn’t bothered her at the time. Seeing her mother’s reaction, however, made her wonder if maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned it.
Her mother sighed, and brought her seat closer to the rocking chair. “Listen to me, sweetheart. You are a very bright young boy; you know that right?”
Luna shrugged and nodded. Again, she'd not taken his words all that seriously. She heard much worse on a frequent basis. Even so, “Eric’s right, though. You and dad believe a lot of things that other people don’t.”
“Yes, that’s true,” her mother conceded. She clasped her hands together and brought them to her chin, meaning she was about to explain some sort of grown up concept. Luna loved these moments, and leaned forward in the chair with full attention. “Have you ever heard your father say that ‘truth is relative’?” her mother asked.
“Maybe once,” said Luna. She thought she remembered him saying that to one of the Quibbler’s reporters years ago, but she hadn’t understood what he meant at the time. All she could think of was her Aunt Janice living up north, and her cousin Scott in the States, and she couldn’t figure out what either of them had to do with the truth.
“Well, what he means is that what’s true for one person isn’t necessarily true for another. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
Luna nodded. She knew exactly what it was like to know one kind of truth, while everyone around her knew another. Perhaps this was the moment she’d finally find the answer she’d been looking for. She could feel excitement bubbling inside of her as she asked, “How do you know something’s true, then?”
Her mother smiled. “That’s something you have to decide for yourself. It all depends on what you believe in and how you see the world. But you have to be careful, because some people think their truth is the best truth, and they’ll try to force it on you.”
“Like Dad?”
Her mother threw her head back and laughed. “No, not like Dad, although I can see why you’d think that. Just remember, your father doesn’t force his views on anyone. His goal is to simply remind people that there are a lot of truths out there to choose from. And that, Lucas, is one of the reasons I love him.”
Luna smiled. She knew how fortunate she was to have the parents she did, a mum and dad who loved each other and believed that the world was full of different truths. That’s the way she wanted to be when she was older. She wanted to remind people that there was a lot of truth out there, and show people things they had never seen before.
She wanted to discuss the truth about her gender right then and there with her mother, but her mother stood from her chair and waved her off with a dismissive hand. “Now, shoo. I have a lot of work I want to get done. Go bother your father at the press.”
***
Luna could hardly believe her good fortune. She was officially going out with Neville Longbottom, and Neville didn’t even mind if the other students knew about it. He had been a little nervous when they told Ginny, but Ginny said that they were sweet together, and that there ought to be more happy couples like them.
So that was that: she and Neville were a couple. They walked to classes together, they studied together, they planned rebellion together. Despite the war, they rarely failed in their attempts to make each other laugh, which was always Luna’s favourite part. She tried her best to teach Neville not to doubt himself so much, while Neville in turn gave Luna a feeling of safety and acceptance that was entirely new to her. If she’d known what she was missing, she would have snogged Neville long ago.
Neville also spent most of his nights with her in the Room of Requirement, although they never did more than kiss. This was the only part of their relationship that gave Luna any anxiety. She could sense that Neville wouldn’t mind going further, but Luna was terrified that he would touch her uninvited only to immediately discover her magically stuffed bra, or that her body didn’t curve quite right. She certainly didn’t let him anywhere near her hips.
Fortunately, however, Neville was just as shy as she was cautious. It was a well-avoided issue until one night shortly before the winter holiday. They were lying together in an overlarge hammock that the Room had provided, when Neville turned to Luna out of the blue and asked, “Why can’t you sleep in your room anymore?”
Luna felt as though she had been dunked in the Black Lake. It wasn’t that she'd not planned to tell Neville eventually - she just wasn’t prepared for it to be at that very moment. She could hear her father’s voice in her head, telling her that “honesty is the basis of any relationship.”
“Why do you ask?”
Neville shrugged where he lay. “I was thinking about what Dumbledore’s portrait said to you. It had to have been something he knew about before he died, right?”
Sometimes Neville was brighter than Luna gave him credit for. “I told my roommates that my bed had a nargle infestation,” Luna offered by way of stalling.
“Yeah, but that’s not true, is it?”
Luna shook her head slowly, before lifting herself to a sitting position. Neville sat up as well so that they were facing each other with their legs crossed.
Luna’s heart was pounding very loudly. She was worried about upsetting Neville, but at the same time, she was thrilled at the prospect of finally telling her secret for the first time. She shared her father’s disdain for withholding the truth, especially her own. She just didn’t know how to say it. She'd not had any practice.
Neville was nothing if not patient, and he waited silently while she fiddled with the hem of her robe, sorting it out. Eventually he reached out to touch her arm, and said, “Hey, it’s all right. Whatever it is, you can tell me.”
It was the look of growing concern on his face that helped Luna reach her decision. Neville cared about her, and she was sure that something as silly as gender wouldn’t stand in the way of that. “Have you ever been inside the girl’s dorm?” she eventually asked.
“Of course not,” said Neville. “Boys can’t get up there, can they?”
Luna held his gaze for a long while. “Exactly.” When Neville said nothing in response, she added, “That’s why I can’t get into my dorm.”
The confession should have been a load off of her shoulders, but Neville was still staring at her blankly as though he’d been attacked by a wrackspurt. Luna realized she would have to be fairly blunt to get through to him.
“Dumbledore used to place an Exception Charm on the girls’ dorms for me so I could sleep there,” she explained. “The most recent charm wore off about halfway through the term. So that’s why I can’t sleep there anymore. The castle still thinks I’m a boy.”
Neville snapped out of his stupor, and furrowed his eyebrows in confusion. “Why would the castle think you’re a boy?”
At this point, Luna just wanted to the confession to be over with. She settled on the simplest explanation, even it wasn’t strictly true. “Well - I am a boy, Neville.”
Saying those words for the first time in her life had a strange effect on Luna. It was as though she had stepped out of her own skin, the skin she had worked so hard to feel comfortable in over the years. She saw herself as she imagined an outsider might see her - confused, fraudulent - and it frightened her, because she couldn’t remember the last time she had felt so vulnerable.
Maybe it was because, of all the people in the school, it was Neville’s judgment that meant the most to her. She watched nervously as his expression turned stony. “That’s not funny, Luna.”
She couldn’t imagine ever joking about such a thing. “I’m not being funny.”
“So what are you being? Is this another one of those messed up ideas your dad put in your head?”
Now Neville was starting to sound angry, something that Luna had never heard from him before. His accusation stung, but she was determined to maintain her calm no matter what. “My father doesn’t put messed up ideas in my head,” she explained. “I was born as a boy. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”
Neville scrambled off the bed and stepped a few paces away from her, as though afraid to catch some disease. Of all the reactions Luna had expected, she never anticipated such hurt, such anguish written all over his face.
“So what are you telling me?” he asked, crossing his arms protectively over his chest. “You’ve been a boy all this time?”
“I suppose, in some ways,” said Luna. “But I’m actually a girl in most ways. In the ways that count.”
“What - what does that even mean?” cried Neville, sounding more frantic by the minute. He searched Luna’s eyes for whatever truth he thought he’d find. “Just - be straight with me, Luna, will you? Do you - I mean -“ He took a deep breath and set his jaw, looking determined. “Down there. Are you a - a girl or a boy?”
Luna chewed on her lower lip. She couldn’t lie to Neville, but the truth was more complicated than he was allowing for. “Boy,” she said quietly. The word sounded like a death sentence. “But Daddy says he’ll help me pay for the change once I’m older.”
Neville’s face fell. Disgust and outrage were washed over with an overwhelming grief. Luna wanted nothing more than to hold him in her arms and make him feel better, but she knew instinctively he wouldn’t allow that. Not anymore.
Shaking his head slowly, looking as though he were on the verge of falling apart, Neville said, “All I ever wanted was a normal life. That’s all I want. Why does everything always have to turn to shit?”
It was the first time Luna had ever heard Neville swear. She watched as he gathered his things as fast as possible without sparing her a glance, as though she were no longer in the room. It was clear that Neville had made his decision. It wasn’t a decision Luna understood, but there was nothing she could do about that now. All she could do was hug her knees to her chest and remind herself that at least they had spent the last several wonderful weeks together. She planned to keep the memories of that short time close to her heart.
Before he stepped through the door, Neville paused without turning around. “I can’t believe you lied to me,” he said in a quiet voice that echoed through the room.
***
Luna’s mother died on a chilly afternoon in late October. Luna had been spying again through the slightly ajar door, and maybe if her mother hadn’t been concentrating so hard on her new spell, she would have sensed Luna’s presence and sent her away. As it was, Luna was there to witness the entire event. The small but lethal explosion, viewed as a sliver of an image framed between the door and the doorpost, would be forever burned into her mind.
Her memory of what happened immediately afterwards was patchy at best. From what she could piece together, she was the one who had located her father, and he in turn had flooed St. Mungo’s. After that, the house was overrun by Healers, shouting medical things and casting strange spells over her mother’s body. She remembered her mother being apparated to the hospital, leaving her office scarred and empty. She remembered the paralyzing, all-consuming fear most of all.
Her mother stayed in St. Mungo’s for two days before she finally passed away. The funeral took place the following week. Luna had no recollection of who was there, or what was said at the ceremony, but she distinctly recalled the exact colours and shapes of the floral arrangements, the scratchy black dress robes she was forced to wear, and the feel of her father’s hand crushing her own.
She also remembered the exact moment during the ceremony when she decided she couldn’t handle pretending to be a boy for one more day.
***
Luna wasn’t afraid when the Death Eaters came onto the Hogwarts Express to take her away. All she could think about was her poor father, and how he would manage without her. She wanted desperately to send him some sort of message, just to say that she would be fine and that she wasn’t afraid of dying and that he shouldn’t give in to the Death Eaters’ demands, but of course her wand was the first thing they took from her.
They apparated Luna to several locations, always handing her off to someone new, before finally arriving at Malfoy Manor. Between being blindfolded and the constant jumps in space, she was feeling too nauseous to resist by the time they threw her in her cell. She landed in a heap on the floor and waited for her captors to leave before picking herself up, brushing herself off, and adjusting her eyes to the dark.
“Who’s there?” asked a dusty, underused voice from the corner.
“Luna Lovegood,” she whispered.
“Ah yes. Nine inches, willow, unicorn hair,” came the mournful reply.
Luna smiled brightly in the dark. “Hello, Mr. Ollivander! I’m so glad you’re all right. We were all worried about you.”
She crawled in the direction of the voice, and stopped when she was nose to nose with the man and could suddenly see his face. He looked worse than she could have imagined. He had clearly been underfed, tortured by magical and non-magical means alike, and by his odor he'd not bathed in months. But the worst part was the look in his eyes. Mr. Ollivander might have been alive in the physical sense, but his eyes made it clear that he had given up long ago.
Luna didn’t know what she could possibly say that would make the situation any better, so instead she leaned forward and cradled him in a hug. When his bone-thin arms lifted to weakly hug her back, she knew they would be okay.
Life in that cell wasn’t nearly as terrible as it could have been. Luna was tortured a few times in the beginning, but when it became clear that her father had no idea of Harry Potter’s whereabouts, they threw her back in the cell and mostly forgot about her. Thanks to Mr. Ollivander’s company, she was also lucky enough to escape the torture of loneliness. Since he wasn’t much of a conversationalist, Luna took it upon herself to do most of the talking as they sat together in the dark. She mostly described the different creatures she wanted to study when they were both free and the war had ended. Sometimes, when there didn’t seem to be anyone around who might overhear, she also liked to sing.
If her voice began to wear thin, or if Mr. Ollivander was asleep, Luna’s time in captivity gave her plenty of opportunity to think. She often thought about Neville, which in turn made her think about her own body. For the first time in a long time she found herself examining her decisions, even doubting them. Neville’s parting words rang in her ears, his accusation of lies never told.
“What’s true for one person isn’t necessarily true for another,” her mother had once said.
Even so, Luna wondered. What if she had lost the ability to tell the difference between truth and lies? She had lived with her secret for so long that deception had become frighteningly natural. Was being true to herself the same thing as being true to others? At what point did privacy turn into secrecy?
Maybe it was because her cell seemed to consume optimism like a dementor, but Luna would sometimes catch herself fantasizing about being happy as a boy. It certainly would have made life simpler. No magical hair removal, no careful control over the sound of her voice, no changing behind closed curtains, no unwelcome erections, no future of expensive magical treatments and a lifetime of explanation. She tried imagining that sort of existence, but found the task impossible. It was like imagining a life without magic, or a world where You-Know-Who was a nice bloke.
She had always been the way she was, and she always would be. No one knew her better than herself. Once she and Mr. Ollivander escaped Malfoy Manner, as she knew they would, she was determined to find Neville, sit him down, and make sure he understood her own version of the truth.
One day, Luna was startled out of her thoughts when the door was opened and a many-headed creature was shoved into their cell. For a terrifying moment Luna thought the monster was there to finish them off once and for all, until one of the heads started crying out Hermione’s name over and over.
A second head said, “Be quiet! Shut up, Ron, we need to get these ropes off -“
“Harry?” she whispered. “Ron? Is that you?”
“Luna?” the second head replied.
Warmth spread through Luna’s limbs. As terrible as it was for Harry to have been captured, she immediately sensed that together they would finally finish this war once and for all.
***
It took about a month after her mother’s death before Luna’s father snapped out of his mourning to discover that he no longer had a son, but a daughter.
He quietly knocked on Luna’s door one day before stepping inside.
“Hi Daddy,” she said.
Her father cleared his throat. “Lucas, don’t you think it’s about time you stopped wearing Mummy’s robes around the house?”
Luna looked away, her face set. She had been preparing for this conversation for a while now. “I don’t have any robes of my own.”
Her father looked over to her wardrobe, as though expecting it to have vanished overnight. “What are you talking about?” he asked when he saw that it hadn’t. “You have an entire set of robes. Do you - do you need more? Are they too small for you?”
“I don’t have any girls’ robes,” she clarified.
This brought her father up short. He looked at Luna with that absent stare she’d so often seen since her mother’s death, then moved to sit down next to her on the edge of the bed.
“I know this has been very difficult for you, Lucas. It’s been difficult for me as well. And I - I know I've not been the best father lately.” In fact, Luna had barely seen him at all over the past two weeks, obsessed as he had become with his work. The stories being printed in the Quibbler were becoming increasingly bizarre and unsettling, as though the entire world had been thrown out of balance along with her own life. “But I want you to know that I’m here for you now, and we’re going to get through this together, all right?”
Luna nodded solemnly, and her father continued, sounding a little more sure of himself.
“Right. Let’s start by getting you out of these robes and into something more appropriate.”
Luna nodded again. “Girls’ robes,” she insisted. Her father’s face crumpled into an expression of distress, and she felt a momentary pang of guilt for adding to his burden. She was determined, however, to see this through. “I’m not a boy.”
“What are you talking about? Why not?” said her father, seemingly at a loss for words.
“I don’t know. I’m just not.”
Her father continued to stare at her blankly, and she wondered what he saw. Surely if he loved her he would be able to tell who she really was, and that he had merely made a mistake for all these years. It was perfectly understandable - she was in the wrong body, after all.
“You - you want to be a girl?” he intoned.
“I am a girl,” she corrected.
He shook his head slowly. “Lucas, no. You’re not. Where did this idea come from?”
“It didn’t come from anywhere. It’s just the way I am.”
“No, you’re not. You’re my son. You’re my Lucas.” Suddenly, he grabbed both her arms in a painful grip, and turned her so that she was looking directly at him. There was desperation in his eyes now, the haunted look he had worn at the funeral. “You can’t change that. You can’t become someone else just because you want to be, do you understand? You’re all I have. . . .“ His voice choked, and he loosened his hold without letting go. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Lucas. Look, we’ll work through this together. I know things are difficult now, but we still have each other. Nothing’s going to change that.”
Luna had the beginnings of tears in her eyes, but she angrily blinked them away. “I’m not trying to change things. I just want to be a girl.”
“I know things are difficult-” he repeated.
“And it’s not because Mummy died, either - I’ve always been this way. You only think I’ve been a boy all this time.”
Her father searched her eyes for confirmation, or perhaps to discover where he went wrong. “Why are you doing this to me?” he asked softly. “Why now?”
Somehow Luna knew the answer immediately, even if she had never before put it into words. She removed his hands from her arms, and held them in her own. “Because you and Mummy taught me to be true to myself, even if the truth was something no one else could see.”
Finally, she could tell, her words had got through. The distress, the confusion, the anger - it was still there in his face, but what Luna saw on top of that was dawning comprehension. He took a deep breath and ran his fingers affectionately through her hair.
Neither of them said anything for a long while. Luna suffered through the silence with muscles tensed, waiting for her father to pronounce her fate. Part of her simply wanted to end the anticipation as soon as possible, while another part desperately held onto the moment for fear of what would follow. She came close to laughing and telling him it had all been a joke, that she would be whomever he wanted her to be as long as he continued to love her.
That was when he reached back down to take Luna’s hands in his own. “I don’t know what your mother would do if she were here,” he said. Luna was unused to hearing such uncertainty in his voice, but as he spoke he gradually began to sound more confident, more like the father she remembered. “But you’re right. You’re absolutely right. That’s exactly what we’ve taught you, and it - it would be an insult to your mother’s memory if I went back on that lesson now.”
With a tearful grin, Luna leaped forward and caught her father in a tight embrace. When he hugged her back, she could feel his own tears on her neck.
***
“Oooh, look, a Blibbering Humdinger!” Luna cried. She watched with a smile as Harry disappeared under his cloak, gathering Ron and Hermione on his way out the door.
Now that he was taken care of, there was one last thing Luna needed to do. She walked over to where Neville was sitting, the Sword of Gryffindor - the actual sword - gleaming on the table in front of him. Admirers swamped him just as they had Harry, but Neville didn’t seem to be aware of their presence. Luna kindly shooed them away before sitting next to him on the bench.
She cleared her throat and smiled. “I like a boy with a big sword.”
Neville looked over at her, completely startled. She could see him coming back to the present moment, slowly registering her face. He suddenly let out a peal of laughter that caused quite a few heads to turn, and when the laughter had subsided, a look of intense relief took its place. Without warning, he wrapped his arms tightly around Luna, surprising her with how much strength he had left.
He pulled back to arm’s length and studied her eyes, her face, her body. “I missed you so much,” he said, sounding almost apologetic.
“I missed you, too, Neville.”
Before she realized what was happening, Neville had leaned in and was kissing her passionately - without hesitation, without uncertainty. Luna let out a little squeal of surprise before placing her hands on the back of his head and reciprocating the kiss.
She didn’t mind that other people were watching. She didn’t mind that she'd not had a chance to explain herself properly, because she knew there would be time for that later. All that mattered was that Neville was here, and that he cared about her, and that the war was over and they were both safe. Everything was finally as it should be. And Luna knew that her mother, wherever she was, must have been very proud of her.