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lomonaaerenTitle: The Earth, the Sky
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Luna
Content Notes: Ignores the epilogue, mild angst, present tense, mention of past character deaths and torture
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 2800
Summary: Harry steps outside on a sunlit morning during the rebuilding of Hogwarts and meets his future.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season” one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice.
The Earth, the Sky
Harry opens his eyes and sees the sun shining outside the window of Gryffindor Tower, and for some reason, what passes through his mind isn’t I should go eat breakfast or even How much rebuilding do we have to do today?, which has been the most common question for nearly a month now.
Or even Should I go fly?
It’s I want to go walk outside and feel the dew on my bare feet.
Harry swings himself out of bed. Only Ron and Neville’s beds are occupied; Seamus and Dean, understandably and for different reasons, didn’t feel like coming back to rebuild the school this summer. Harry slips downstairs and takes off his socks near the fireplace.
He can’t see the sunlight or smell the grass inside the common room. It doesn’t matter. Harry can still hear and feel it calling to him, with a strong, steady voice that makes him tingle with impatience.
He slips out of the Tower and down the steps of the first staircase, wincing a little at the coldness and the slapping sensation against his bare feet. But it still feels right. When he runs out the front door of the entrance hall and stands gaping in the July sun pouring over his face, he knows it’s right.
Harry doesn’t know that he’s ever seen the day around Hogwarts this bright. The sky is blue and polished and looks like the inside of a shell. The sunlight throws gold and grey across the glistening grass, which has dew drying on it. Even the trunks of the Forbidden Forest in the distance look like they’re made of jewels.
Dazed, Harry wanders out across the grass. He thinks too late of bugs and stones that could bite or sting his feet, but nothing does. Harry walks and walks, and the sleepy songs of a few birds stick in his ears. He goes all the way to the edge of the lake and bends down, trailing his hand through the water.
“Hello, Harry Potter.”
Harry jumps and turns around. He recognized the voice, but for some reason, it still surprises him to see Luna standing behind him. He blinks rapidly and scratches the back of his neck. “…Luna? Where did you come from?”
“My mother’s womb.”
Harry laughs despite his confusion, and Luna beams at him and holds out a hand. “I thought we could walk along the lake. If we walk close enough to the water, maybe the Squid will smell-hear us and come out to say hello.”
“Smell-hear?” Harry asks. He takes her hand. It’s scarred and fragile in his own, but Luna drags him along the lakeshore with strength he can’t resist.
“It’s what squid do. Smelling and hearing and something else. Because they’re squid, they don’t call it that.”
Harry finds himself enjoying the walk even more than he did the sight of the grounds when he first came out of Hogwarts. With Luna, he peers into the riffles on the surface of the lake and skips a stone that sinks right away. He mistakes a shadow for the tentacle of the Giant Squid and pulls Luna behind him, but she just laughs at him.
“The Giant Squid doesn’t like eating people like me.”
“Like you?”
“Touched by death.”
Harry shifts in place, a little surprised that Luna wants to talk about it, but Luna just smiles gently at him and trails a finger down his hand for a moment.
“I was near death in the dungeons at Malfoy Manor,” she says. “He visited a lot. And you were the same. You walked into the Forbidden Forest and you really thought you were going to die, didn’t you?”
Harry takes a deep breath. That’s not something he’s talked about in detail with anyone except Ron and Hermione. A lot of people seem to have thought he was faking death when Hagrid carried him into the Great Hall, and Harry has let them go on believing that. It seems like the simplest thing.
“You don’t have to lie to me.”
“It was—it was so—”
“And you don’t have to tell me. I know.”
Harry looks into her eyes and swallows. There are cold shadows behind Luna’s blue eyes, ones that add to instead of diminishing the beauty of the day. She does know, and he doesn’t have to pretend any more than he has to lie or tell.
He reaches out and catches both of Luna’s hands in his. She stands and looks up at him, placid—no, that’s the wrong word, he thinks. Serene. As though someone could throw a stone into her and it would just sink.
“Do you know why it happened?” Harry whispers.
“There was a war.”
Harry nearly laughs, but yes, it’s true, that is the root cause of everything. He wouldn’t have had to walk to his death if not for that. Luna wouldn’t have had to spend time in the Malfoy dungeons.
He smooths his thumb over the back of her hand. “Do you think we could go wading and see if the Giant Squid would avoid both of us?”
Luna gives him the kind of smile that seems to go deep into the shadows of her eyes. “I would like that very much, Harry.”
*
Harry ducks the sweep of a tentacle and laughs. Across from him, Luna pats the tentacle rising close to her and then leans over and picks up water in a bucket that she conjured a few minutes ago. She pours the water over the tentacle, which flaps in something that Harry supposes is enthusiasm.
How would he know? It’s not like he’s familiar with squid emotions.
“Harry? Mate, what are you doing?”
Ron is standing on the shore of the lake when Harry looks up. Harry grins and waves. “Bathing the Giant Squid!” he calls.
“It—doesn’t it get a bath just from being in the lake?”
“Water being poured from a bucket is different,” Luna says, and bathes the Squid with another bucket.
“But it’s the same water…”
Harry laughs a little, Ron looks so bewildered. Then again, he probably would have been bewildered himself before this morning. It’s the kind of thing that you have to talk to Luna to understand.
Or not understand. He thinks that’s its own kind of freedom.
“Um, mate, did you have any breakfast?”
“The sky and the water and the light,” Luna says dreamily.
Ron gives her another bewildered look. Harry sighs as his stomach grumbles. His friends will be upset if he skips breakfast. In fact, skipping meals has usually made him anxious, since the year they spent on the run without regular access to food, in a way it never did when it was just his normal life at the Dursleys’.
But he doesn’t feel that anxiety now. He touches Luna’s shoulder. “Do you want breakfast?”
“Will be there be salmon? That is important.”
Harry smiles. “I think we can talk to the house-elves and convince them to make us salmon.”
“Maybe don’t let Hermione hear you request that,” Ron says. He’s leaning against air with his arms folded and mostly seems entertained.
“Hermione knows many things. She can know about salmon.”
Ron snorts. Luna starts wading towards shore, and Harry comes up alongside her to escort her, ignoring Ron’s look. He and Ginny haven’t made an official commitment or anything.
And even if Harry ends up marrying Ginny, Luna is his friend, and always will be.
*
“You on your broom, and me on Merope.”
Harry starts a little. He agreed to meet Luna in the Forbidden Forest so they could fly, and he’s not entirely surprised to see that she’s astride a thestral mare with a long silver mane and silver markings above her hooves that look like scars.
But he didn’t expect the mare to have the same name as Tom Riddle’s mother.
“Is something disturbing, Harry?”
Harry takes a deep breath and shakes his head. It’s probably just a coincidence. And if it’s not, well, Merope would probably have a happier life reincarnated as a thestral than she ever did as a member of the Gaunt family. “Nothing important, Luna.” He swings his leg over the Nimbus broom that he’s borrowed from the Quidditch shed. “Shall we fly?”
“Yes. We shall.”
Luna doesn’t seem to touch or tap Merope in any way, but the thestral unfolds her wings and lifts straight up. Harry soars alongside her. He knows Merope could leave him behind if she wanted, but instead, they circle in silence above the dark Forest.
Not silent for long. Suddenly Luna laughs.
Harry looks over at her, ready to smile, and sees that Luna is pointing at something in the distance. He looks obediently, but he can’t make anything out where she’s indicating.
“There’s a Helioglabulus there!”
Harry still can’t see anything, but he’s startled to discover how little that matters to him. What does is that Luna sees something, and she practically bounces on Merope’s back as she beams at him.
“Do you know it’s there, Harry?”
“I know it,” Harry says, but he has his eyes on Luna’s smile.
*
“I’ve never seen you smile that much, Harry.”
Harry laughs. “You say it like it’s something suspicious, Hermione.”
“No, not at all!” Hermione waves an almost frantic hand at him as Harry sprawls on the couch in front of the fireplace in the common room. “It’s just that—I didn’t know that you thought about Luna like that.”
“Romantically, Hermione, you can say it.”
“I didn’t know if you would stay to talk about it if I did or run away.”
Harry shakes his head. “I’m not the same person I was before the war.” Regretfully, he wonders a little if that’s what makes staying with Ginny impossible for the both of them. Then again, she changed too, and she told him already that she wants someone who knows more about those changes. “And neither is Luna.”
“She seems the same.”
“She calls it being touched by death. Someone else might call it trauma. But we’re both pretty close in that respect.”
Hermione swallows. “What was done to her at Malfoy Manor must have been awful. Do you think she should talk to a Mind-Healer about it?”
“I don’t think a Mind-Healer would know what to do with Luna,” Harry says, and smiles, because he can’t keep the fondness out of his voice and he doesn’t want to try. “And that’s all to the good. She wants to heal in her own way, by focusing on what matters to her and moving forwards.”
“What matters to her?”
“Magical creatures. Being happy. Me, hopefully.”
“Oh, Harry. You don’t know?”
“Not right now,” Harry says, and the happy tone in his voice makes Hermione lean down and take a long look at him.
“You’re happy,” she whispers. “The most I’ve seen you since the war. You’re really happy.”
“Told you,” Harry says, and Hermione flings her arms around him and hugs him tightly.
*
“Happy Birthday, Harry.”
Harry blinks and reaches for the blue-wrapped present that Luna is handing him. They went through the Floo to the Burrow this morning, but Harry never thought once about her having a gift for him, because it wasn’t in the pile in the Weasleys’ drawing room.
He wondered why, but it honestly didn’t sting. Luna’s presence with him was enough of a gift.
And since she’s Luna, she might honestly have forgotten, or thought that the way she told his fortune with a trail of her finger down his palm and a promise that he would see a Crumple-Horned Snorkack sometime in the next year was enough.
“Er, thanks,” Harry says, and begins to unwrap the gift. They’re sitting on the lakeshore, and the sunset is staining the sky. Luna folds her ankles under her and sways from side to side, humming a little. The necklace at her throat is made of what look like braided-together and stripped daisy stems.
Harry smiles at her, and then he looks down at the gift in his hands, a small box made of dark lacquer, and forgets to breathe.
There’s a delicate, glimmering thing there. It looks like a small sculpture of a unicorn, but it’s shifting back and forth, pacing inside the box, and then it looks up at him and rears, tossing its tiny horn.
Harry reaches down. To his surprise, he can’t touch it, but it can touch him. It climbs onto his hand and trots up his arm towards his shoulder. Something sharp brushes against his cheek when it nuzzles him.
“What is it?” Harry whispers.
“A Nargle wanted to take that shape,” Luna says. “It wanted to say hello to you. It’ll stay with you and poke you with its horn and follow you around and neigh to you in the morning.” She smiles. “One is with me who sings like a Fwooper.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Oh, no. Because it’s small, you see.”
Harry smiles at her in helpless adoration. That’s really what it feels like, not that he has much experience with adoration. He reaches out and puts his hand on Luna’s, and she falls silent and blinks at him, her eyes and mouth both a little wide.
“Thank you,” Harry whispers. “This is the best gift anyone’s ever given me.”
“But you had a Firebolt.”
“I would rather have this.” Harry carefully shifts around so that he won’t knock the Nargle-unicorn off his shoulder, and then he leans forwards slowly. He waits for Luna to pull away. Maybe she doesn’t like him that way. And he wouldn’t put it past her not to be able to read his intentions.
But although Luna blinks at him a little and puts a hand on her knee as though to catch something he dropped, she doesn’t move away.
Harry gently presses his lips to hers. Luna gasps a little and rocks forwards into him. Suddenly her tongue is pushing against his lips and Harry lets it in with a gasp of his own. Luna scrambles into his lap and kisses him harder.
When he finally pulls back—he’s the one who does it, not Luna—Harry adjusts his glasses and stares at her in wonder. Luna wriggles in place and smiles at him. “That’s kissing. I should have done it long since.”
“Who would you have been kissing?” Harry asks. He really doesn’t feel any jealousy. He just can’t remember Luna going on a date with anyone or acting like she wanted to.
“The air,” Luna says earnestly. “That was one of the reasons that kissing never seemed important to me, you see? Because I knew how the air kisses, and frankly it needs more practice.”
Harry laughs, at least until Luna leans forwards and shuts him up with her lips again. Then he wraps his arms around her, and they learn how to snog each other more thoroughly than air or other people have.
*
“Harry.”
Harry blinks and turns over. He fell asleep on a couch he Levitated to the Great Hall tonight, thinking about the aftermath of the battle. It’s something that hasn’t haunted him for a few weeks, but it did tonight, and he couldn’t face going up into Gryffindor Tower and thinking of memories of Colin and Lavender all the way.
Luna is standing over him, tapping her foot, her face imperious. The minute she sees that he’s awake, she hauls on his arm and pulls him off the couch with surprising strength. “Come along. It’s running.”
“What is—”
“The time! The time!”
Somehow, Harry finds himself running breathlessly with Luna through the entrance hall and out onto the grounds and towards the Forbidden Forest. A half-moon rides overhead, and the clouds hurry past. Harry takes a deep breath of the fresh wind and ducks among the trunks after Luna without hesitation.
They continue through the woods at a pace that means branches slap them in the face and they have to leap over roots. But to Harry, it doesn’t matter. He whoops quietly. It’s the nearest he’s ever come to flying while on the ground.
And he knows it has everything to do with Luna’s hand in his, her making his heartbeat speed up and thrum in his ears.
They finally come to a stop in the middle of a thicket, and Harry pulls himself up, panting. Luna claps a hand over his mouth and then tosses her head in the direction of a huge tree that has half a dozen holes in the trunk. “There, Harry.”
Harry looks. He can’t see anything except faint echoes of moonlight and—
And something dark shifting on it. It turns its head towards him, and he thinks it looks a little like a goat with a fish tail instead of legs. Its hooves clank on the trunk, and Harry sees eyes like old silver coins.
“It’s a Crumple-Horned Snorkack,” Luna says breathlessly.
Harry stares, and watches the shadow-creature bleed into nothingness and vanish. He looks down at Luna, and she’s looking up at him, eyes wide and wild and wise, more beautiful than anything else in the Forest.
“I told you you would see one,” Luna says. “I told you!”
“Yes, you did,” Harry breathes back, and he kisses her, windblown and wonderful, his beauty, there in the middle of the Forbidden Forest with the moon shining down on them.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Luna
Content Notes: Ignores the epilogue, mild angst, present tense, mention of past character deaths and torture
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 2800
Summary: Harry steps outside on a sunlit morning during the rebuilding of Hogwarts and meets his future.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season” one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice.
The Earth, the Sky
Harry opens his eyes and sees the sun shining outside the window of Gryffindor Tower, and for some reason, what passes through his mind isn’t I should go eat breakfast or even How much rebuilding do we have to do today?, which has been the most common question for nearly a month now.
Or even Should I go fly?
It’s I want to go walk outside and feel the dew on my bare feet.
Harry swings himself out of bed. Only Ron and Neville’s beds are occupied; Seamus and Dean, understandably and for different reasons, didn’t feel like coming back to rebuild the school this summer. Harry slips downstairs and takes off his socks near the fireplace.
He can’t see the sunlight or smell the grass inside the common room. It doesn’t matter. Harry can still hear and feel it calling to him, with a strong, steady voice that makes him tingle with impatience.
He slips out of the Tower and down the steps of the first staircase, wincing a little at the coldness and the slapping sensation against his bare feet. But it still feels right. When he runs out the front door of the entrance hall and stands gaping in the July sun pouring over his face, he knows it’s right.
Harry doesn’t know that he’s ever seen the day around Hogwarts this bright. The sky is blue and polished and looks like the inside of a shell. The sunlight throws gold and grey across the glistening grass, which has dew drying on it. Even the trunks of the Forbidden Forest in the distance look like they’re made of jewels.
Dazed, Harry wanders out across the grass. He thinks too late of bugs and stones that could bite or sting his feet, but nothing does. Harry walks and walks, and the sleepy songs of a few birds stick in his ears. He goes all the way to the edge of the lake and bends down, trailing his hand through the water.
“Hello, Harry Potter.”
Harry jumps and turns around. He recognized the voice, but for some reason, it still surprises him to see Luna standing behind him. He blinks rapidly and scratches the back of his neck. “…Luna? Where did you come from?”
“My mother’s womb.”
Harry laughs despite his confusion, and Luna beams at him and holds out a hand. “I thought we could walk along the lake. If we walk close enough to the water, maybe the Squid will smell-hear us and come out to say hello.”
“Smell-hear?” Harry asks. He takes her hand. It’s scarred and fragile in his own, but Luna drags him along the lakeshore with strength he can’t resist.
“It’s what squid do. Smelling and hearing and something else. Because they’re squid, they don’t call it that.”
Harry finds himself enjoying the walk even more than he did the sight of the grounds when he first came out of Hogwarts. With Luna, he peers into the riffles on the surface of the lake and skips a stone that sinks right away. He mistakes a shadow for the tentacle of the Giant Squid and pulls Luna behind him, but she just laughs at him.
“The Giant Squid doesn’t like eating people like me.”
“Like you?”
“Touched by death.”
Harry shifts in place, a little surprised that Luna wants to talk about it, but Luna just smiles gently at him and trails a finger down his hand for a moment.
“I was near death in the dungeons at Malfoy Manor,” she says. “He visited a lot. And you were the same. You walked into the Forbidden Forest and you really thought you were going to die, didn’t you?”
Harry takes a deep breath. That’s not something he’s talked about in detail with anyone except Ron and Hermione. A lot of people seem to have thought he was faking death when Hagrid carried him into the Great Hall, and Harry has let them go on believing that. It seems like the simplest thing.
“You don’t have to lie to me.”
“It was—it was so—”
“And you don’t have to tell me. I know.”
Harry looks into her eyes and swallows. There are cold shadows behind Luna’s blue eyes, ones that add to instead of diminishing the beauty of the day. She does know, and he doesn’t have to pretend any more than he has to lie or tell.
He reaches out and catches both of Luna’s hands in his. She stands and looks up at him, placid—no, that’s the wrong word, he thinks. Serene. As though someone could throw a stone into her and it would just sink.
“Do you know why it happened?” Harry whispers.
“There was a war.”
Harry nearly laughs, but yes, it’s true, that is the root cause of everything. He wouldn’t have had to walk to his death if not for that. Luna wouldn’t have had to spend time in the Malfoy dungeons.
He smooths his thumb over the back of her hand. “Do you think we could go wading and see if the Giant Squid would avoid both of us?”
Luna gives him the kind of smile that seems to go deep into the shadows of her eyes. “I would like that very much, Harry.”
*
Harry ducks the sweep of a tentacle and laughs. Across from him, Luna pats the tentacle rising close to her and then leans over and picks up water in a bucket that she conjured a few minutes ago. She pours the water over the tentacle, which flaps in something that Harry supposes is enthusiasm.
How would he know? It’s not like he’s familiar with squid emotions.
“Harry? Mate, what are you doing?”
Ron is standing on the shore of the lake when Harry looks up. Harry grins and waves. “Bathing the Giant Squid!” he calls.
“It—doesn’t it get a bath just from being in the lake?”
“Water being poured from a bucket is different,” Luna says, and bathes the Squid with another bucket.
“But it’s the same water…”
Harry laughs a little, Ron looks so bewildered. Then again, he probably would have been bewildered himself before this morning. It’s the kind of thing that you have to talk to Luna to understand.
Or not understand. He thinks that’s its own kind of freedom.
“Um, mate, did you have any breakfast?”
“The sky and the water and the light,” Luna says dreamily.
Ron gives her another bewildered look. Harry sighs as his stomach grumbles. His friends will be upset if he skips breakfast. In fact, skipping meals has usually made him anxious, since the year they spent on the run without regular access to food, in a way it never did when it was just his normal life at the Dursleys’.
But he doesn’t feel that anxiety now. He touches Luna’s shoulder. “Do you want breakfast?”
“Will be there be salmon? That is important.”
Harry smiles. “I think we can talk to the house-elves and convince them to make us salmon.”
“Maybe don’t let Hermione hear you request that,” Ron says. He’s leaning against air with his arms folded and mostly seems entertained.
“Hermione knows many things. She can know about salmon.”
Ron snorts. Luna starts wading towards shore, and Harry comes up alongside her to escort her, ignoring Ron’s look. He and Ginny haven’t made an official commitment or anything.
And even if Harry ends up marrying Ginny, Luna is his friend, and always will be.
*
“You on your broom, and me on Merope.”
Harry starts a little. He agreed to meet Luna in the Forbidden Forest so they could fly, and he’s not entirely surprised to see that she’s astride a thestral mare with a long silver mane and silver markings above her hooves that look like scars.
But he didn’t expect the mare to have the same name as Tom Riddle’s mother.
“Is something disturbing, Harry?”
Harry takes a deep breath and shakes his head. It’s probably just a coincidence. And if it’s not, well, Merope would probably have a happier life reincarnated as a thestral than she ever did as a member of the Gaunt family. “Nothing important, Luna.” He swings his leg over the Nimbus broom that he’s borrowed from the Quidditch shed. “Shall we fly?”
“Yes. We shall.”
Luna doesn’t seem to touch or tap Merope in any way, but the thestral unfolds her wings and lifts straight up. Harry soars alongside her. He knows Merope could leave him behind if she wanted, but instead, they circle in silence above the dark Forest.
Not silent for long. Suddenly Luna laughs.
Harry looks over at her, ready to smile, and sees that Luna is pointing at something in the distance. He looks obediently, but he can’t make anything out where she’s indicating.
“There’s a Helioglabulus there!”
Harry still can’t see anything, but he’s startled to discover how little that matters to him. What does is that Luna sees something, and she practically bounces on Merope’s back as she beams at him.
“Do you know it’s there, Harry?”
“I know it,” Harry says, but he has his eyes on Luna’s smile.
*
“I’ve never seen you smile that much, Harry.”
Harry laughs. “You say it like it’s something suspicious, Hermione.”
“No, not at all!” Hermione waves an almost frantic hand at him as Harry sprawls on the couch in front of the fireplace in the common room. “It’s just that—I didn’t know that you thought about Luna like that.”
“Romantically, Hermione, you can say it.”
“I didn’t know if you would stay to talk about it if I did or run away.”
Harry shakes his head. “I’m not the same person I was before the war.” Regretfully, he wonders a little if that’s what makes staying with Ginny impossible for the both of them. Then again, she changed too, and she told him already that she wants someone who knows more about those changes. “And neither is Luna.”
“She seems the same.”
“She calls it being touched by death. Someone else might call it trauma. But we’re both pretty close in that respect.”
Hermione swallows. “What was done to her at Malfoy Manor must have been awful. Do you think she should talk to a Mind-Healer about it?”
“I don’t think a Mind-Healer would know what to do with Luna,” Harry says, and smiles, because he can’t keep the fondness out of his voice and he doesn’t want to try. “And that’s all to the good. She wants to heal in her own way, by focusing on what matters to her and moving forwards.”
“What matters to her?”
“Magical creatures. Being happy. Me, hopefully.”
“Oh, Harry. You don’t know?”
“Not right now,” Harry says, and the happy tone in his voice makes Hermione lean down and take a long look at him.
“You’re happy,” she whispers. “The most I’ve seen you since the war. You’re really happy.”
“Told you,” Harry says, and Hermione flings her arms around him and hugs him tightly.
*
“Happy Birthday, Harry.”
Harry blinks and reaches for the blue-wrapped present that Luna is handing him. They went through the Floo to the Burrow this morning, but Harry never thought once about her having a gift for him, because it wasn’t in the pile in the Weasleys’ drawing room.
He wondered why, but it honestly didn’t sting. Luna’s presence with him was enough of a gift.
And since she’s Luna, she might honestly have forgotten, or thought that the way she told his fortune with a trail of her finger down his palm and a promise that he would see a Crumple-Horned Snorkack sometime in the next year was enough.
“Er, thanks,” Harry says, and begins to unwrap the gift. They’re sitting on the lakeshore, and the sunset is staining the sky. Luna folds her ankles under her and sways from side to side, humming a little. The necklace at her throat is made of what look like braided-together and stripped daisy stems.
Harry smiles at her, and then he looks down at the gift in his hands, a small box made of dark lacquer, and forgets to breathe.
There’s a delicate, glimmering thing there. It looks like a small sculpture of a unicorn, but it’s shifting back and forth, pacing inside the box, and then it looks up at him and rears, tossing its tiny horn.
Harry reaches down. To his surprise, he can’t touch it, but it can touch him. It climbs onto his hand and trots up his arm towards his shoulder. Something sharp brushes against his cheek when it nuzzles him.
“What is it?” Harry whispers.
“A Nargle wanted to take that shape,” Luna says. “It wanted to say hello to you. It’ll stay with you and poke you with its horn and follow you around and neigh to you in the morning.” She smiles. “One is with me who sings like a Fwooper.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Oh, no. Because it’s small, you see.”
Harry smiles at her in helpless adoration. That’s really what it feels like, not that he has much experience with adoration. He reaches out and puts his hand on Luna’s, and she falls silent and blinks at him, her eyes and mouth both a little wide.
“Thank you,” Harry whispers. “This is the best gift anyone’s ever given me.”
“But you had a Firebolt.”
“I would rather have this.” Harry carefully shifts around so that he won’t knock the Nargle-unicorn off his shoulder, and then he leans forwards slowly. He waits for Luna to pull away. Maybe she doesn’t like him that way. And he wouldn’t put it past her not to be able to read his intentions.
But although Luna blinks at him a little and puts a hand on her knee as though to catch something he dropped, she doesn’t move away.
Harry gently presses his lips to hers. Luna gasps a little and rocks forwards into him. Suddenly her tongue is pushing against his lips and Harry lets it in with a gasp of his own. Luna scrambles into his lap and kisses him harder.
When he finally pulls back—he’s the one who does it, not Luna—Harry adjusts his glasses and stares at her in wonder. Luna wriggles in place and smiles at him. “That’s kissing. I should have done it long since.”
“Who would you have been kissing?” Harry asks. He really doesn’t feel any jealousy. He just can’t remember Luna going on a date with anyone or acting like she wanted to.
“The air,” Luna says earnestly. “That was one of the reasons that kissing never seemed important to me, you see? Because I knew how the air kisses, and frankly it needs more practice.”
Harry laughs, at least until Luna leans forwards and shuts him up with her lips again. Then he wraps his arms around her, and they learn how to snog each other more thoroughly than air or other people have.
*
“Harry.”
Harry blinks and turns over. He fell asleep on a couch he Levitated to the Great Hall tonight, thinking about the aftermath of the battle. It’s something that hasn’t haunted him for a few weeks, but it did tonight, and he couldn’t face going up into Gryffindor Tower and thinking of memories of Colin and Lavender all the way.
Luna is standing over him, tapping her foot, her face imperious. The minute she sees that he’s awake, she hauls on his arm and pulls him off the couch with surprising strength. “Come along. It’s running.”
“What is—”
“The time! The time!”
Somehow, Harry finds himself running breathlessly with Luna through the entrance hall and out onto the grounds and towards the Forbidden Forest. A half-moon rides overhead, and the clouds hurry past. Harry takes a deep breath of the fresh wind and ducks among the trunks after Luna without hesitation.
They continue through the woods at a pace that means branches slap them in the face and they have to leap over roots. But to Harry, it doesn’t matter. He whoops quietly. It’s the nearest he’s ever come to flying while on the ground.
And he knows it has everything to do with Luna’s hand in his, her making his heartbeat speed up and thrum in his ears.
They finally come to a stop in the middle of a thicket, and Harry pulls himself up, panting. Luna claps a hand over his mouth and then tosses her head in the direction of a huge tree that has half a dozen holes in the trunk. “There, Harry.”
Harry looks. He can’t see anything except faint echoes of moonlight and—
And something dark shifting on it. It turns its head towards him, and he thinks it looks a little like a goat with a fish tail instead of legs. Its hooves clank on the trunk, and Harry sees eyes like old silver coins.
“It’s a Crumple-Horned Snorkack,” Luna says breathlessly.
Harry stares, and watches the shadow-creature bleed into nothingness and vanish. He looks down at Luna, and she’s looking up at him, eyes wide and wild and wise, more beautiful than anything else in the Forest.
“I told you you would see one,” Luna says. “I told you!”
“Yes, you did,” Harry breathes back, and he kisses her, windblown and wonderful, his beauty, there in the middle of the Forbidden Forest with the moon shining down on them.
The End.
