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When Luna got her Hogwarts letter, her father offered to homeschool her with that sideways ceiling twist of his eyes which meant he wanted her to say yes. Their house was tall and crooked, full of the things her father had found and her mother had made. Luna climbed to the very top. The farther you got from gravity the better your head thought, or so her mother had told her, which was why her mother's old lab was at the top of the wobbly steps.
Luna poked through old notes scattered over the gouged work desk. There was no covering of dust, even though her mother had been dead two years now. Recipes and budget calculations were scrawled beside butchered Latin and geometric spell diagrams. Luna did not know what the markings were meant to be, these half-done spells, except that one of them had killed her mother.
Her father was pacing downstairs, making tea and fiddling with the feathers and bone nubs on the kitchen window.
Luna did not know what these meant, these pages scattered under her fingertips, and that's what decided her. She ran little fingers over her mother's bright scrawl.
They went to Diagon Alley that afternoon and had her fitted for robes. They left a few extra inches for her to grow into.
There is a story about a girl whose feet do not touch the ground; a girl who looked at nightmarish horses and saw beauty immediately, easily, who woke to every pair of her shoes missing and said to the calm morning, "Things have a way of coming back to you." There is a story, or could be, but it is not this one.
When Luna woke from nightmares, she shook under three blankets and the pillow she pulled over her head.
When she woke up and her last pair of shoes had been stolen, she had woken up already to eight other sunrises to find her notebooks, her bracelets, and her books gone from her bedside table. When the last of her shoes were gone, she breathed in, she breathed out, she thought about the adventures of barefoot life.
That first morning, though, waking up in her new little home of blue and bronze, soft sheets, the home of the wise, the witty, the true--only to find the bead bracelet that kept wrackspurts away had vanished. The books on her bedside were jarred out of place. That first morning, she hid back under her covers.
The farther you were from the ground, the better your head thought, and Ravenclaw Tower was so very high up. Luna ran through every young, bright face in her dormitory, trying to find cruelty in their freckles and earlobes. Where did that hide again? Luna knew humor lay tucked in the crook of your neck, and kindness in your vertebra, but she had never asked her mother where meanness lived.
The first time Luna saw thestrals, she was eleven years old and lost, by other people's defintions of the word. Harry Potter was in a flying car with Ron Weasley and Luna had wandered away from the whispering other first years, following noise and light until she drifted across the place where the older students were disembarking from the carriages.
Skeletal horses, like every scary story she had ever been told, loomed-- tattered wings, a streak of blood on one muzzle. Luna clutched at new, starched robes. But she held her breath. She watched. Peace is not a thing given. It is made.
When the hostlers unharnessed the thestrals, they snuffled at their chests, looking for treats. A little foal slipped out a slightly ajar fence and shot to a thestral at the third carriage, bumping her legs and sneezing with joy.
Luna found her way back to the Hall before anyone missed her amid the gaggle of wide eyes and swishing robes. They ushered them into the main Hall and everything in Luna twisted itself into a rigid line. She wanted, briefly and terribly, to go home. The Hall was a sea of staring faces, so she tilted her head back and looked up--she almost stopped in her tracks. The starry ceiling was velvet black, spreading and spreading, promising immensities. Luna felt something in her chest untangle.
Luna had sat down on the Hogwarts Express and nibbled Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Bean until there was nothing left but streaks of color on her tongue. She had put a Quibbler up in front of her face but hadn't read a word, just thinking. Sometimes your spell will burble green, bubble neon purple and combust in your hands-- that will be the last thing you will ever see. Sometimes your spells will go bad--she had nibbled a pumpkin flavored bean and pretended to turn a page--but the alternative was just a different kind of death.
When the hat offered her Ravenclaw, she opened her hands wide.
Luna brought her Charms textbook and two additional texts on the matter to her first class in the subject. She'd stared out of the window in Potions, not wanting to get Snape's words under her skin. She'd buried her face in grass in Herbology, inhaled. But for Charms -- she came in with a stack of books in front of her face. It had been her mother's specialty.
She started out with a partner who knew exactly how many points you had to get out of which parts of the spell--pronunciation, movement, focus--but partway into the lesson, Flitwick came over with a small, redheaded girl in tow. She was pale, starkly freckled, and she was looking far too smug to have any spare attention to give to Luna. "Ms. Weasley has so far dented the wall, set my bookshelf alight, and caused three and a half quills to vanish. I thought she might have something to learn from your caution, Ms. Lovegood; and Ms. Weasley may have something to teach you about..." he hesitated, then squeaked, "fervency."
They were the corner of the room that caused Flitwick the most headaches--perhaps that's why he wanted them together, to consolidate his hardest work into one space. Ginny waved her wand and a chunk of plaster fell from the ceiling. Luna reached for her wand and the world burbled green, bubbled purple, and she squeezed her eyes shut.
Luna got a Quibbler in the mail each week and read it at the Ravenclaw breakfast table. It was a bit like letters from home, though she got those too. When the front page had an interview with a exploratory magizoologist, Luna knew the exact order of the tour her father would have pulled the man on through the house, from artifact to artifact. When the magazine had an editorial on Blibbering Humdingers, she knew her father would have spent a whole morning pacing, making little trumpeting noises, to try to 'imagine the subject.'
She sent her father artwork and little articles on the weird things that lived in Hogwarts's walls. She found something in the Quibbler nearly every week that might suggest why Ginny kept blowing off chunks of tables and setting air alight in Charms. "Perhaps you have Gunther's Lax?"
In a few years, Ginny would grin, at a question like that, and say without any mocking at all, "Maybe I do, what is it?" Now, though, she stared and shrugged and flicked a wand that made Luna's quill spark with electricity.
But Ginny blasted things less and less, all that year. She grew paler, frenetic and jumpy at small noises. Spells that had nearly blinded Luna their second week were sputtering out by Christmas.
Luna went home for the holiday and repainted the whole house with her father, by hand, to call in the new year. They chose a spring green. Luna wanted to grow this year--she still tripped over the hem of her robes.
When she got back, she had three missing knick-knacks. They learned Alohomora in Charms and instead of flying (or exploding) Ginny's feather turned to dust. The girl burst into tears. Luna tried to make the dust fly but only succeeded in blowing the cloud into Professor Flitwick's face. He sneezed for a good three minutes while Ginny sucked in breath and scrubbed her face clean on hand-me-down robes.
Luna didn't grow that year. She wouldn't sprout until her third year, when she would gain a steady few inches per year until she turned seventeen. But her first year, at eleven, she didn't grow. She tripped over her robes. Her second year, at twelve, she didn't grow. Partway through their second year, Ginny grabbed her, conjured a sewing kit, and taught her how to hem her robes.
But the ruckus came the end of their first year-- the writing on the wall, the Chamber. They didn't tell the students who had been taken, but Luna saw the Weasleys huddling together. When Ginny got out of the infirmary, Luna tried to catch sight of her. The castle was all bright lights and celebrations. Harry Potter had saved the day; the monster was gone, the girl saved, the peril lifted. Filch had scrubbed down the walls to shining.
There had been a girl, dying, sitting beside Luna for a whole year of Charms. Ginny had been caving in on herself, rock falls under her rib cage and avalanches in the curve of her belly. How had Luna missed the roar and crash of that fall?
Luna didn't see her again until the next year on the Hogwarts Express. Ginny was tucked in a compartment all her own. She was pretty, freckled against her dark robes, her hair a little wild, her gaze a little gone. This was the settling dust, the jagged aftermath. Who was trapped under the rubble?
"Wrackspurts?" Luna asked her as she slid open the door.
Ginny tore her gaze away from nothing. "What?"
Luna drifted down into the seat next to her. "They make your brain go all fuzzy. They flit through your ears and nibble on all the good bits. It's like you can see, yeah, everything's clear--but you can't see, see? There's a grey fuzz over everything (except there's not, really) and breathing is happening in somebody else's body."
Ginny was looking at her now. People had spent the last summer wrapping her in well-meaning arms and calling her "--not okay, of course you're not."
"Yeah," said Ginny. "Wrackspurts."
"They make me think of my mother," said Luna and offered her some Bertie Bott's Beans.
Ginny offered her a corned beef sandwich and Luna took it while Ginny unwrapped a second one. "I stole Ron's," Ginny explained, and it was the first time Luna had seen the girl smile since those first few weeks in Charms.
They were lab partners again their second year. Ginny didn't blast things anymore. Her spells didn't turn everything they touched grey and lifeless, the way they had for the last month before the Chamber, either, and that was good.
Luna stopped bringing so many Charms books to class. She started actually trying the spells, not just saying the words while she tried to keep her magic crammed in her belly. Ginny's spells worked the way they were supposed to-- not loud, not smug, not destructive. Professor Flitwick gave them each a chocolate frog, surrepticiously, to congratulate them on their progress.
Luna was grateful for no more plaster in her hair, or singed eyebrows, but she tied a black ribbon in her hair the day Flitwick beamed and said, "You've come so far." She felt like someone should be mourning the little redheaded girl who had flung her wand with such a grin.
When she went home for the winter holidays and they painted the house, they did it in a parchment cream. Every high wind that year swept over the house and painted it a dusty brown. Every storm washed it clean. Before she went back to school, she went upstairs to the highest room and put some of her mother's sketches and notes into a folder. She packed it into her luggage and took the Floo back to school.
She tip-toed into Professor Flitwick's classroom, trying to take up as little air as possible. "Ms. Lovegood?" he asked, his voice higher than hers was at twelve.
"My mother was an inventor," she said. "She was lovely. I don't know enough, but she left these behind." She put the folder in front of him.
"May I ask you something, Luna?"
She nodded.
"The other kids tease you," Flitwick said. "You doing alright?"
"They can't help their earlobes," she said as brightly as she could.
"If you need help," he said. "Or just someone to listen."
"Why do they do it?" she said. She traced over the spiraling lines on her mother's notes. "I don't really think it's their earlobes."
"You're different," he said. "That's as silly a reason as an earlobe. But I never found it helped to know why they did it." Luna looked across the desk at the professor and tried to imagine him as a teenager, pimpled and brilliant, even smaller than he was now. He leaned forward and said, "They have reasons, Luna, but it doesn't matter. They're still wrong. Remember that."
Luna nodded, so Flitwick nodded back and pulled her mother's notes to him. He let out a little sigh. "These are beautiful. She had an eye for balance. This, here--" he traced a line of warping text and then pulled out a pad of sketch paper. "We'll start with some basics."
She came by every week, more than once, but never with any set schedule. She drifted in on different shoes as each pair of them vanished, one by one. A few months in, Flitwick looked down from the stool he stood on, the blackboard behind him filled with sketching. "You show more focus in this than some of my sixth years do in their NEWTs," he said. "Why?"
"I'm trying to find something," she said.
He asked her what and Luna smiled at him. "How would I know? I haven't found it yet."
Luna didn't come to the Gryffindor Common Room when she and Ginny studied together. Ginny broke a dozen riddles on the Ravenclaw steps and smirked each time she got to slip through the opening door. Luna could have gotten the password for Gryffindor, or just had Ginny let her in, but she figured breaking things was good for Ginny, now and then.
They studied up in Ravenclaw's high tower, or, when someone was doing an experiment there that involved flash-bangs or sulphurous smells, they took over a table in the library.
"I've got wrackspurts," said Luna once, and Ginny left their books spread out on the library table and dragged Luna out into the weak sunshine by the lakeshore. Ginny tried to teach her how to skip stones out across the lake, and Luna just kept hurling them out or dropping them in the shallows with splashes and plops.
"I'm alright," Luna said. "I am. Sometimes spells go bad. And it's not like I'll never see her again." She tossed a stone out, flashing. "This isn't it. This isn't all there is, and she's lost not gone." She scrubbed a hand on her cheek, scratching silver-blond hair across the skin. "I know that, I do, I get it-- but then how can I still be so sad about it all?"
"If you're going to just throw rocks and not skip them," said Ginny. "You could at least leave the good flat ones for me."
Luna handed her the round blue-grey stone she'd been tossing hand to hand. Ginny shot it out across the water. "I don't know, Lune," she said. "Maybe-- she's not gone entirely, okay, sure. But she's still lost."
"Do you really think so?" Luna said, digesting the way Ginny had tried to make the 'sure' not curl over her tongue too obviously.
"I think I believe in starker lines than you do. Sometimes, when you lose things you don't ever get them back."
"They got you back," said Luna. A red pebble went plop into the still shallows.
"They got me," agreed Ginny. "But I'm not the girl they lost." She bent to pick up a stone. "I'm sorry about your mom, Luna."
"Me too," she said.
"Wanna bet me I can't hit that patch of water weed out there?"
Sometimes your spells will go bad. She knew that. Luna mounted the thestral to the Department of Mysteries. She put her name down for Dumbledore's Army. When they called her brave she smiled like she knew things that they didn't.
She knew what she was getting into. She knew what she was doing. She drifted because she'd decided to drift, because she thought the best way to live on this earth was to tread softly. No matter how much she liked wrapping herself in whimsy, this was not a whim. It was a choice.
When Harry was grieving Sirius, Luna took his hand. "Things have a way of coming back to you," she said, with no blankets to hide under, with no skipping rocks to hold in cold hands, to hurl away when they felt like they were holding her down. Luna had loss living in the pit of her stomach, yes and always, but she was the only one who got to decide what to do with that. She went out to visit the thestrals with strips of steak in her bag and loved the way their sloping wings looked against the sky.
Harry dreamed of green flashes, or whispering mirrors, and Luna dreamed of purple rumbles. She would wake and sit cross-legged on her bed, trying to figure out if she could get to the dresser without touching the ground. She was afraid if she put her feet down she would feel the ground was shaking after all.
She wondered what Ginny dreamed of. She wondered if Neville ever woke up screaming.
They didn't have Dumbledore's Army the next year and Luna missed it. It was, she told Harry, almost like having friends. She and Ginny still did Charms together, sat holed up in the library. Neville showed up one afternoon; he was the year above them, but he was firming up his basics. They practiced in empty classrooms, but Neville stayed, after they'd gone, and kept on. He'd been the same way about learning to dance, in Luna's third year with the Yule Ball. She wondered if it was that way for most people--that they were the same way in love and in war.
Luna and Hermione both helped Ginny prep for her dates--which meant only that Hermione studied in the corner, occassionally giving careful wisdoms and practical advice, some of it oddly Muggle in ways that made Luna and Ginny stare--birth control was a particularly interesting conversation. Luna tucked a radish earring in Ginny's thick hair like a bangle. "Keeps the nargles off," she said and Ginny grinned while Hermione rolled her eyes and sighed.
Hermione and Luna had fought Death Eaters together, but somehow the closest they'd ever been was sharing knowing, relieved looks the first time Ginny held Harry's hand. Harry flushed bright red and Luna and Hermione leaned into each other to keep from laughing. The smug smile on Ginny's face was so familiar Luna almost checked her hair for plaster.
Ginny was the same, too, in love and in war--she charged after what she wanted, her hair a battleflag in either field. She was a single soldier, but people flocked in her wake. They would in Dumbledore's Army, when the war really hit the halls of Hogwarts, but that was years from now. Well, months. Right?
Years later, Luna was never sure what moment to point out as the day the war started. When Harry crashed down onto the overgrown Quidditch field, crying over Cedric's corpse? The year eleven-year-old Ginny collapsed in on herself and no one noticed? The fight in the Astronomy Tower, the day they lost Albus Dumbledore? To Luna, who was watching the gathered crowd and not the body, not the body, it looked like every one of Dumbledore's centuries had risen up at his death and settled on the shoulders of the children in the courtyard. They were not children. Maybe the war started there.
With the money from Harry's interview, Luna's father had taken them both to Sweden for a summer to look for the Crumple Horned Snorkack. "We'll find it, Luna," he said. "Imagine the front page -- " The sun only went down for a handful of hours each night, less and less the further north they went. They didn't find what they were looking for--well, they didn't find a Snorkack at least.
That winter, in the middle of Luna's fifth year and Harry Potter's sixth, they painted the house a deep red, to match the Swedish copper paint so common in the countryside. They meant it to be a reminder of a summer full of light, but when Luna came home for break, fresh off having seen Dumbledore's shattered body on the Hogwarts flagstones, she thought of other red things.
There was a war on. She made tomato sauce and candy apples so she could sink her teeth in and remind herself there were parts of this color still untainted.
Luna's mother's name had been Pandora. Luna did not know the story that went with that name -- it was a Muggle one. Ginny, a proud Weasley, didn't either-- her father's interest lay in Muggle tech, objects, knickknacks, not its old stories. But an eight year old Neville Longbottom had been certain he was a Squib, and certain he would be tossed out of his grandmother's storied house and onto the hard Muggle streets as soon as his Hogwarts letter failed to arrive by owl. He had studied for it. Neville knew what a rubber ducky was for, and how to use a telephone, and one late sleepless night tucked into the Room of Requirement he told Luna the story of Pandora.
A girl was given a box and told not to open it. "I think she was a Ravenclaw," Neville said solemnly. He had scars on him now, hard lines of muscle and a rigid spine, but he still wore the careful earnestness of the round-faced first year who'd drawn his wand on his friends when he thought it was the right thing to do.
A girl named Pandora had been given a box and she had opened it and let out every horrible thing, because curiosity does that sometimes. It burbles green, bubbles purple, and the whole world goes dark.
"But tucked into the bottom of the box," Neville said, glancing at the kids who had gathered close. He was thoughtful, not uneasy. People flocked close when he talked now. He would never ask for the attention, but the boy would always shoulder any burden handed to him. "Tucked in the bottom was hope."
"Is that a happy ending?" Luna asked.
"I've never been sure," admitted Neville.
Harry had taught them how to conjure Patronuses in his Dumbledore's Army lessons, Luna's fourth year. She thought about that, as Neville moved on to telling about other Muggle mythologies: dinosaurs, Mickey Mouse, and the Beatles. The kids giggled and stared. Luna thought Patronuses were you throwing your best days into your worst.
Luna's Patronus was a rabbit. It was quick. It knew how to run. Luna had made herself a little metal charm, rabbit-shaped, and now she wore all her hopes on her sleeve.
When Luna could get the Quibbler through the Hog's Head passage, she did. She still read it like it was letters from home, because it was-- this editorial on the totalitarian state probably got her father fired up enough to tear through his paper with his quill at least twice. To get this interview, her father had made some unsafe choices, and she was very proud of him. Sometimes when she woke from nightmares, nestled in the cozy, snoring dark of the Room, it was her father's face she had seen wreathed in burbling purple, going dark.
Fred and George's radio shows were like that, too. It was information, tactics and news, but they all huddled close with the Creevey brothers' hot chocolate and listened like it was the owl post, letters swooping down and dropping in their laps. When the news was bad, Luna would squeeze her eyes shut and just listen to the sounds of the voices. Then she would squeeze her eyes open, her ears open, and try to parse it together after all.
One week, the Quibbler didn't come. The holidays were on them, so Luna snuck on the Express to find her way home, and that's where they caught her. Dumbledore's Army had three generals--the prophesied could-have-been, a girl who had once carried a sliver of Voldemort in her chest, and Luna. From the way the snatchers talked about her-- Lovegood's--she thought this was not about their quiet war.
They took her to the Carrows, then into a Floo that tossed them out onto the fine carpet of an elegant room. Luna caught one sight of Draco Malfoy's pale, pointed face before they dragged her down stairs, to a dank, low place. They locked the door, and that almost bothered Luna less than the cold weight of the earth walls. She didn't have her shoes, her bare feet pressing into shaking earth.
"Luna?" said a voice and big dark hands grabbed hers--ah, the ground was not shaking. She was.
Dean Thomas squeezed her hands. "They got you, too? I thought you were at Hogwarts."
"Easier to find that way," she said. There was no light except for the faintly glowing mold on the walls. There were puddles on the ground, here and there, and the ceiling curved up over them, bore down. "My father. I think they're trying to..."
Dean squeezed her hands and she squeezed back, hard, until his hands must be aching, the tips of his fingers tingling. They barely knew each other, just caught glimpses across classrooms and crowded halls. He held on tight.
"Ah, young lady," said another voice, older. "Lovegood-- ten inches, wasn't it? Unicorn hair and yew. I called it powerful and your father looked surprised." The older man moved toward them, circling a puddle. "And I say that, and now Dean looks startled too. Mm." He extended a hand. "Ollivander, of Ollivander's. We have met."
Luna let go of Dean's and took his.
"Luna Lovegood," said Dean.
"Mm," said Ollivander. "And this is Griphook."
Luna turned, and blinked, at the third person in the room. "Hello, sir," she managed and the goblin gave a considering humph, like he thought she might be mocking him.
They brought them food twice a day and came to gawk, or taunt, whenever they had the inkling. When Bellatrix was in residence, it was the worst. When Draco came down to hover at the edge of the steps and peer at them, Dean called sharp twists of mocking up at him until he went away.
Luna took off her robes and just wore her thin trousers and t-shirt. It was chill, but Ginny had given her a pocket sewing kit for Christmas, so Luna made herself some poorly shaped socks to go over her feet, a hat for Griphook and Ollivander's old heads, and then used the rest to cover up with at night.
They slept in the dryest corner, near the back, Luna tucked between Dean and Ollivander, and Griphook snoringly tucked up against her curled knees. They took turns keeping watch, even if it didn't do any good. If Bellatrix or any of the others came down to take one of them away, they wouldn't be able to stop her. But at least they would know. On her watch, Luna listened to each of them breathe, each of their lungs pushing in and out, each of their own private little wheezes and snorts.
Luna told stories about her father's many weird acquaintances. She told them where kindness and humor lived and checked each of them for it. She told Griphook, "Your earlobes are not nearly as mean as they seem," and asked him about himself. She missed Professor Flitwick. She thought about the kind of bullies Flitwick had faced, as a wizard, and wondered what things Griphook had lived through.
"My wife is a baker," Griphook said. "She makes jam tarts to rival anything."
They heard their saviors before they saw them. Excitement and struggle sounded down the narrow hallway. When Luna finally got a good look at them, in the light of the windswept beach, Harry kneeling over Dobby's body, she wanted to get pylons and scaffolding and try to hold their crumbling infrastructure up. The circles under Hermione's eyes looked like they belonged there, like red wine stains on carpet, like pits under your feet. When Harry stumbled over words, burying Dobby, Luna stepped forward and he squeezed her hand in gratitude, like she was helping hold him up after all.
In the spare bedroom at Shell Cottage, Ollivander made Luna a new wand. They hiked, slowly, through windswept bluffs until he found a tree he approved of.
"Willow?" Dean asked. "Or reed? I mean, it's Luna, she's kinda bendy, isn't she?"
Ollivander went on Transfiguring his toolset out of bits of driftwood and sea glass. Luna smiled back, wide.
Bend and bend and never break. She could almost touch the tip of the wand to its hilt, when he was done. Ollivander gave her some oil to rub into it to keep it supple and one day, after the war, Luna curved it into a perfect circle. She held it up to her eye and thought about the last riddle she had ever used to open up Ravenclaw's tower. A circle has no end.
After the war, Luna went home to a broken house. The paint--red, still, her father hadn't redone it when she never came home for the holiday--was gouged and chunks of house were lying in the garden. Her father was waiting on the front step with eyes only for her. Luna felt loved and she felt guilty, because three children had almost died right on this lawn because this man loved his daughter.
Luna applied to the magical part of Oxford, for magizoology. Harry had joined the Aurors, Ginny was flying, Hermione was taking the Ministry by storm, but Neville applied with her. Herbology. They both wanted to spend their lives learning about things that lived. Her father offered to let her stay at home and commute by Floo, with that sideways ceiling twist of his eyes, but she got a dorm on campus, packed her things and left.
They put her on the sub-ground floor. The sunlight shafted through the window in the morning, all the same angles. It traced along a wall that was washed with plaster, not mold, but all the same. Luna spent most of her first year curled up in Neville's bed, in his second floor room. His room was still filled with earth, fertilizer samples and blooming things, but she stopped feeling buried.
Neville had an odd little wheezy rumble in the back of his throat when he slept. Luna tried to pay attention to the way her friends breathed. It seemed important, to listen to how they filled themselves up, emptied their lungs out.
Neville took Luna to visit his parents once. He would take Hannah, later. He would never take Ginny, Hermione, or Ron-- they would not understand. They would be kind, or try to, but that wasn't what Neville was looking for. Mrs. Longbottom gave Luna a shiny, crinkled gum wrapper. Luna dug into her pockets and gave her a soft hank of magenta wool she'd been supposed to do an analysis on.
Neville looked everywhere but at her when they left, so she dragged him to a Floo and then up all the wobbly steps of her father's house. The Death Eaters had damaged the lab some, but her father had put back every paper of her mother's he could find. She and Neville spent the whole afternoon sifting through them, trying to decypher what kind of spells her mother had been dreaming of. They found Luna's tiny fingerprints pressed to the pages in colorful paint.
Hermione and Ron came to visit, between Hermione's high-powered meetings and Ron's existential crises. They went out to get coffee and muffins from a sagging gazebo and drank while they wandered. Luna watched Hermione look with buried envy at the old stone around them.
"My parents' got their bachelors at a little college in their hometown," said Hermione. "Blocky concrete buildings painted beige. A library that barely warranted the name. I always thought--"
"You could," said Luna.
"You'd like it," Ron said, stealing a chunk of Hermione's muffin. She batted at him absentmindedly.
"I have things to do," said Hermione. "Oh, I don't mean you don't, Luna."
"I know."
"But getting a degree wouldn't make me any more influential in the Ministry. It would just take time and evergy away from the things I mean to change."
"Things don't have to be useful for you to do them," Luna said. She nibbled on her paper cup's edge, then resumed blowing on the liquid. She lifted her head briefly and added, "This doesn't have to be for anyone but you."
Ron rolled his eyes, grinning at Hermione. "Yeah, I'd say you've saved the world enough times to have things for yourself, hey?"
Luna went home for Easter and painted eggs until her whole front was just streaks of color. They hid them every year for the Grankle-Snorts, but Luna would look out the window on Easter Day and watch the village kids sneaking around the house and gathering them up, giggling glee. When they were done, she'd pull her father outside and grin at him beaming at their empty yard.
But this year, she just painted eggs. She barely looked at him, though she tried. After a few hours, he said, "Why are you mad at me? Are you? I was just trying to save you. All I was doing was helping."
She finished one last careful stroke of sky blue. Open horizons. They should paint the house again. “I didn’t want that from you," she said. "I know why you did it, papa. I know you love me. But you need to think about my loves, too, my wants. You did it because you love me, but that was still about you, papa.”
She jerked and shook through the rest of egg painting and hid them in the garden in a steady rush. Then she kissed her father on the cheek as warmly as she could manage and went to sit on Ginny's apartment couch and tell her about subsets of magical lichen on the Himalayan slopes.
"I'm going to see them someday," Luna said. Ginny flipped through her pocket calendar absently, snapped it closed and got up. Luna kept talking. If Ginny wanted her to stop, she would say so. "And the spores--" Luna called down the hallway, gesticulating with her hands to the empty room-- not quite empty.
"Luna?" said Harry, stepping inside. "Are you--practicing for a presentation?"
"I'm listening," Ginny hollered down the hallway.
"The spores!" Luna called.
"Yes, mm!" Ginny called back. Harry shrugged and made himself a cup of tea.
Luna was onto seasonal blooming when Ginny came back and tossed her a worn flight jacket meant for high-altitude chill. "I packed for you, too. You got anything you can't miss for the next couple days?"
"School--"
"Excellent," said Ginny. "Put that on, make us both sandwiches, and let's go. We've got a long way to fly if we want to make it to the Himalayas tonight." She kissed Harry on the cheek mid-sip. "Don't miss me too much."
For her second year of university, Luna moved out of student housing. She found an apartment in the city and painted constellations on her ceiling. She painted it over and over, like Neville learning to dance, until it looked like the Great Hall ceiling, that first day she walked in, drenched through, and chose to have her eyes open all her life.
She went down to Ollivander's shop now and then and had ice cream with him and Dean, who he had taken on as an assistant. "His eyes were old already," Dean confided once. "But now his hands shake .He had a harder time than either of us." Luna bought the old man warm fingerless gloves for Christmas. She still bent her wand in circles on bad days, to remind herself that she was not a person who broke.
Luna attended every one of Ginny's Quidditch games. Ron asked her to commentate, so she did.
When announcing on a Quidditch game the important thing to note is the shape of the most interesting cloud.(All clouds are interesting. Look up. That one? Right there? You've never seen it before, I promise. You will never see it again. Go on, blink--it's not quite the same.)
Neville came too--he was the same in love and war, in learning and friendship, steady and dedicated. They teased him about Hannah, as they began that slow, shy courtship. Sometimes they went out with Ginny and her team afterwards, with all the whirlwind cheer of women who were at the very top of their game--though they celebrated just as hard when they lost. But often, Luna would slip away and instead wake up a groggy Ginny the next morning with coffee and a hangover potion.
She and Dean went camping together, once a year, went out as far from people as they could get and slept on the ground outside their nice big wizard tent. They put up shedding spells if it rained. They had both spent enough nights together with things above their heads that blocked out starlight.
"You're funny, you know that?" Dean said fondly around one campfire while she paid careful and close attention to how she ordered the meats on her skewer.
"So are you," she said, removing a sausage and tentatively adding a onion slice and then squinting at the end product. "Unbalanced," she mused, and added a meatball.
She collected castoff fur and scales in little bags and asked Dean about when he was going to take Seamus home to his parents. He rolled his eyes, joked about it tellingly, stammered, and looked for good saplings or branches to bring back to Ollivander. The wandmaker said Dean had a knack for the trade. Good hands.
Luna read Collin's book--or Dennis's book. Which? Both their stories ran through those pages. Collin's pictures, the moving and the not--you could follow not just his journey but his gaze, all the big and little moments this boy had thought to record.
But Dennis's grief and love was everywhere in the book--annotations and captions, but also in the pictures chosen: Collin's fair few self portraits, looking so young; pictures with lens flare or a bit of Collin's thumb, imperfections fondly recollected. Dennis picked out quiet shots, easily overlooked, chose them and printed them up big and beautiful so every eye would be forced to stop, to really look, and see them.
"He's lost," Luna whispered into the binding. "He is not gone."
She said the same thing to Ginny once, curled up on her bed while Ginny sat cross-legged on the floor, missing Fred. It wasn't an anniversary of anything, or a birthday, but it didn't have to be.
Ginny went rigid. "That doesn't help me, Luna. I know it's good for you. I know it's true for you, okay? But it's not for me. Fred's gone. He's lost. We don't ever get him back." She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the mattress.
"Sometimes I thought Fred almost ought to have been in Ravenclaw," said Luna. "Not really, not all of it, but-- he paid attention. "
Ginny didn't open her eyes, but she turned her head so her cheek rested on the blanket.
"He had a good eye for detail."
"The joke shop," Ginny agreed. "That bet at the World Cup."
"No, well, yes, but..." Luna trailed off, thinking. "They'd always find the kid who needed them most, in the DA."
Ginny opened her eyes and looked over at her.
"He's not gone," Luna said. "I remember him. So do you."
"Is that enough?" said Ginny. She didn't move. Her head was leaned against the bed and her thumbs were hooked together in her lap. "I'm pregnant," said Ginny, her voice thin and exhausted.
Luna blinked at her, big gray eyes wide.
"My mother's worst fear was losing her children," said Ginny. "That's her boggart, the thing that shattered her most--" Ginny shook her hand. "I can't promise my kid a safe world. They couldn't promise us one. The shit we've been through, Luna-- I wouldn't wish it on anyone."
"Are you going to have the baby?" Luna said.
Ginny closed her eyes. "I'll let you know."
Luna watched the curve of her hands. "Harry's looked frayed at the edges recently."
"A Potter boy and a redheaded witch, having a baby," Ginny said, wearing something like a wry smile. "He's got a whole different set of fears." When Luna looked back, Ginny had flicked open her eyes and was staring up at the ceiling. "No one's going to give my kid a poisoned diary, Luna," she said. "No one's going to--" She shook her head. "I know I can't promise that. I can fight for them, but I can't save them."
"Ginny," said Luna.
Ginny sat up and shook her head. "Just gotta figure out if we're brave enough for this. God knows we're scared enough." She pulled Luna to her feet and they went down to the kitchen, where Harry was making dinner. They talked about Quidditch and Ministry politics, Luna's classes. Luna fell asleep on Harry's shoulder and woke up, tucked under a blanket on their couch, just in time to make it to her field studies class.
A week later, Ginny showed up on Luna's apartment stoop, broom in hand, soaked through and windlashed, grinning ear to ear. She loved getting storms in her teeth. Luna stepped aside to let her in, then set about boiling water for tea. "Get out of those or do a drying spell, I don't care which," Luna called.
"Since when are you a worrywort?"
Luna poked her head back out and said with a precisely straight face, "I think I have a fennersbee infestation. They're intransient, but they spawn in water." Ginny snorted and Luna added, loftily, "Also you'll catch a cold and die."
"We're having the baby," said Ginny, and Luna put down the tea kettle, which she had been pouring, turned off the stove, and went into the living room to hug her tight. "We haven't told everyone yet," Ginny said. "Mum's gonna freak, so we'll wait a bit. But if it's a girl-- I want to name her after you."
Luna would never find a Crumple Horned Snorkack. Neither would her father, but he would look for one all his life. She would not.
They took her on as a researcher at the university. Luna spent a year doing data entry and lab work, digging through old records and getting coffee for renowned magizoologists while Ginny got rounder and rounder, got more and more smug on the good days. It was a boy, and they were calling him James.
On the bad days, Ginny and Harry went out flying. (The doctor made them promise not to accelerate too hard.) She and Luna curled up on the bad days and told stories about their war--frightened children and the scars they bore up under, crying first years and staring fourth years, watching a fourteen year old kid case a room for dangers before he stepped inside. Harry brought them tea and they talked about Seamas making doe-eyes at Dean, love in war, about hot chocolate and radio shows, about the day Cho had filled the Room with illusions of shining butterflies that showered you with confetti if you caught them and the sight of their weary soldiers chasing them, leaping, laughing.
They sent Luna out on her first solo field mission, to gather stool samples from a herd they'd been tracking. She found the highest place she could on the hilly plain to go to sleep on. It was cold enough that Luna wore her Weasley sweater inside her cozy sleeping bag.
Waiting out in her future were so many things—a young man with a curiosity as stubborn as hers, near death scientific adventures, a goddaughter with a knack for blasting ceiling plaster into people's hair—but when Luna woke in the morning she felt like she was sitting on top of the world, welcoming in the sun. Luna stood, still wrapped in her sleeping bag, and shuffle-jumped closer to the edge of her little cliff. Light was spilling over the folds and folds of earth.
There were worlds in front of them, all of them. Ginny went pale some days, cold as wet stone. Hermione went hard, a girl raised in a war, too ruthless for peacetime. Luna would wake up in the middle of the night, feeling buried, and fight her way out from under her covers until she could curl up on top of an empty sheet and shiver her way back to breathing.
Life goes on, even when you don't think it can. Sometimes spells go bad, but what are you here for? Sometimes they go right. Sometimes you get to stand at the top of the world, looking out.
Luna still expected the ground to shake, but her best friend could fly. All of them, sometimes, were crumbling ruins, collapsing caverns, but they had lived through so many aftermaths, the dust rising in the still air. Luna would always expect the ground to shake but, after it did, she knew she would pick herself up from the smoking rubble and she would not do it alone.