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How do we rewrite the stars?
Say you were made to be mine
Nothing can keep us apart
‘Cause you were the one I was meant to find
It’s up to you
And it’s up to me
No one can say what we get to be
Why don’t we rewrite the stars?
Changing the world to be ours
Divination was an imprecise art. Luna believed in it, of course she did, but even the those who practiced it understood its limitations. Or those who knew what it was they were talking about, at any rate. Because Divination wasn’t the understanding of what was fate and what wasn’t; it was the making of best guesses, and of not ruling anything very much out. Which was not as, what was the term, as rock and roll as claiming you knew the future.
Besides, Luna's cards had told her a lot of things. None of them had been very much of actual use these last few months, had they? Vagueness had been the order of the day, and, really, it’d all been about as accurate as a Witch Weekly horoscope.
You’ll find love, her cards had said, and be troubled by it’s absence. Unexpected events lay around the corner. Courage and wit will be required. And that could have applied to almost anything, and so, Luna had almost entirely disregarded it. She’d been skeptical as she’d turned over each card, each black-and-white drawing seeming less and less useful. She’d tried a different deck of cards. Botanicals. Victorian-era wizards had put a lot of stock into the language of plants, perhaps they’d yield more meaning, she’d thought.
The first two had been wormwood and clove, and, at that, Luna had sort of given up. There’d be no portents of any use for that day, Luna had decided, and she’d gone to do something else.
Of course, they had and they hadn’t been of use. Because if anyone had told her of all of this, she’d probably not have believed them, and, well, Hermione had once claimed that Luna would believe anything if the proof was flimsy enough, hadn’t she? And, anyway, rumination on this sort of thing were unlikely to be unhelpful.
So, instead of anything else, she reached for Lily’s hand.
None of it was going to plan, but then, Luna supposed, these things couldn’t be expected to. They probably never could have expected it to have gone any other way. Not if they’d been using logic. So here she was, here they both were, and they’d try, and if they failed, how bad could it be?
“Ready?” asked Lily.
“Could I ever be?”
“No. I don’t think so, not for this.”
“I love you,” Luna said, because it was the only possible thing to say. What else did you say in this sort of scenario? She didn’t know what any of this was, not really, nobody did. But she knew that she loved Lily, and even if that wasn’t enough, it was a start.
“I love you too.” Lily squeezed Luna’s hand, and Luna squeezed back. I’m okay, it meant, I’m okay because I’m with you. “I’m going to love you, no matter what.”
“Me too,” said Luna, as she took the first step forwards, Lily by her side, hands joined. "Me too.”
—
They met for the first time behind a run-down supermarket in Tower Hamlets. A dustbin was overturned onto the concrete floor, the smell of something that didn’t bear thinking about emitting from it. A group of young men wearing leather jackets and toting motorcycle helmets lurked on a street corner just in sight, occasionally one or two of them taking off on a bike, only to return in a roar of smoke. A middle-aged couple argued on their way past, the manager of the supermarket rearranged shopping trolleys outside for ten minutes. It was hardly the place one expected to find their fate.
Luna was trying to look entirely inconspicuous, jeans and a oversized sweatshirt with pattern that anywhere else would have drawn attention, but here, was apparently entirely in fashion. She’d seen three other women wearing the same one on her walk from the bus. Not wearing the same jumper was another woman, who wasn’t trying to look inconspicuous, or if she was, she was failing so badly at it that she might as well not have tried. But she was clearly up to something. Luna knew the look of someone who was up to something. After all, she was somewhat up to something herself.
So Luna, finding nothing of use behind the supermarket, followed her. She was certain she’d seen a wand, and if that wasn’t enough of an excuse, the other possibly-witch looked exactly like Lily Potter, who was dead. Coincidences happened, yes, Luna wasn’t silly enough or unthinking enough to rule them out, but if this was a coincidence she’d eat her hat. Transfigured into a cheese sandwich, of course. Luna followed Lily into the car park, skirting the rest of the shopping parade, and then into a warren-like arrangement of side-streets and housing estates that Luna was certain she’d never be able to find out about.
This following lark turned out to be a terrible idea.
As soon as they were somewhere quiet, the other witch turned her wand on Luna. That solved the question of whether or not it really had been a wand that Luna had seen, but then, that wasn’t really the priority any more.
“Why are you following me?”
“Why are you poking around behind a supermarket? You do know that’s a haunt of local drug dealers, don’t you?”
“You’re not even going to pretend to accuse me of selling drugs. You’re going to explain to me why you’re following me.”
Luna decided it was perhaps better not to argue.
“Luna Lovegood,” she said, also deciding that it wasn't worth a lie. “Investigating the Rift. And you are, too. I’m not entirely sure why, because you’re not with the official investigation, and I’ve never seen you before in my life, but you are, aren’t you?”
Luna didn’t bother to draw her own wand. She’d never liked the concept of getting involved in a fight, however many times she might have done it in the past, and she certainly wasn’t looking for one now in the middle of a predominantly non-magical area. Not that she was entirely sure what she did want from this. A bit of information would be nice, yes, something to help her. Perhaps an ally. And she’d certainly like to escape from here alive. But in the grand scheme of things very little except the last bit mattered; Luna would keep investigating no matter what else, and she didn’t need this witch. She just wanted to know exactly what she was doing, her name, and possibly to invite her for a cup of tea.
Why that last, she wasn’t sure.
“Possibly.” The other witch didn’t lower her wand, or visible soften at all, but Luna thought that perhaps she had, all the same. “Luna Lovegood. Never heard of you.”
“Some people have,” said Luna. “Some people haven’t.”
“That tells me nothing about you.”
“Exactly.”
The other witch smiled. “Lily Evans,” she said. “In your world, I’m known as Lily Potter, and yes, I’m aware I’m legally dead here.”
—
Luna was not entirely sure how it’d happened, but Lily seemed to be in her house more often than not, these days, and they’d only met a week ago. Luna’s house had never been large, well, except for the odd Extension Charm for events, and it felt smaller with the presence of Lily Evans.
“I don’t need any help,” she’d said, turning up at Luna’s house the day after they’d met. She’d shoved a spiral-bound notebook into Luna’s hand, full of notes scribbled in almost illegible handwriting, and she’d made herself a cup of tea. Luna had let Lily read her notes, just because it seemed like the fairest thing to do.
“You know more than me,” Lily had said, after she’d been in Luna’s house for three hours, and she’d left, but she’d returned the next day, and the day after that, and Luna had decided to accept that this was the new normal. It wasn’t unwelcome, and it wasn’t even like she wanted it any other way, but the house was smaller with her in it, that was for certain.
All they had in common was the Rift. Lily had been investigating it longer, but Luna had the aforementioned larger quantity of knowledge. Even together, they didn’t know very much.
“People disappear,” said Lily, “the ones that return talk about being in an alternate universe, and we don’t know why. Or how.”
“No.” Luna had been careful with Lily. She’d never volunteered any information about how she came to be here, or even that she was, in fact, from one of the alternate universes that the stories claimed existed. Well, Luna supposed, this was the alternate universe if you looked at it from Lily’s perspective. So there was that. But she hadn’t asked questions, and Lily hadn’t volunteered any information, and they’d sort of danced around the subject like a Flobberworm mating ritual. Luna didn’t think that was the metaphor for it, in hindsight.
“Why are you investigating it?” Lily asked, lounging on Luna’s battered corduroy sofa. She was wearing one of Luna’s jumpers, too. Luna wasn’t sure exactly when that had happened.
“Interest.” She barely knew Lily, after all. “How about you?”
“I want to get home.” Lily looked at the ceiling, firmly refusing to look at Luna. “I don’t belong here. I’m dead here. This isn’t my universe, it isn’t even my time period. I’ve got a son, and he’s alive somewhere, but he’s not mine, either. In my world, I’m twenty-two, and I’ve never even gone on a date with his dad, and yet he’s my twenty-two year old son, and so how do I explain that?"
“Magic,” said Luna. “The Rift is well enough covered, if you read the right newspapers.”
“The Quibbler,” said Lily, and for someone who wasn’t even from here she said it with as much disdain as anyone who was.
“My dad edits the Quibbler,” Luna responded, mildly, and rearranged the ornaments on the shelf with a flick of her wand.
“Sorry. It talks about a lot of things that aren’t real, though.” Lily continued staring at the ceiling. “I suppose I should say, they’re not real where I come from.”
“Not everyone believes they are here, either. It’s all a matter of perspective.”
“That’s what Remus would have said.” Lily blinked furiously. “I know he’s dead too, in your universe. Everyone’s fucking dead. I know about your war. We have one too, or we had, anyway. I don’t know what’s happening any more, because I’ve been stuck here for almost six months with no way of getting back. I only came through by accident.”
Luna didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing at all. Instead, she went to sit beside Lily, settling on the floor at the foot of the sofa.
“Remus and I were looking for something, I suppose what doesn’t matter, and we found the Rift instead. He put his hand on the wall, just leaning for a rest, and disappeared. That was when I started my research, you’ll have seen that, the 11th May, 1981. I became obsessed. I don’t know, I think most people would have in the circumstances, everyone would want to know what had happened to their friend, but it took over my life. He was my best friend, you see. And he never came back, and I went back so many times to where he’d disappeared, and I put my hand on the same patch of wall, tried at the same time of day, different times, the same day of the week, date in the month, and then, one day, I disappeared too. And here I am.”
“Did you find him?”
“No.” Lily was still blinking furiously, but to less avail. Luna reached up and stroked her arm, some vague attempt at comforting her. “I don’t even know if this is the same alternate universe that he was in. I’ve asked around, but people think you’re talking about the Remus Lupin that died, and they just point you to his grave. His life was shit here. It wasn’t much better in our world, but it’s shit here too.”
“So that’s why you’re hanging around behind the supermarket.”
“Yeah. It isn’t a supermarket in my world. But it’s the same map point, if you look at the coordinates. I bought an Ordinance Survey map. And I’d written the coordinates down, back in my world, but I’ve memorised them, too.”
“I can help you look,” said Luna, softly.
“I don’t need help,” said Lily, pulling herself to her feet. "I’m going to go.” And she stalked out the front door, leaving it to swing shut behind her, her ponytail swishing. Luna sat on the floor for twenty minutes. She didn’t much want Lily to have left.
—
Lily was back the next morning.
“I’m sorry,” she said, standing in the doorway with a carrier bag hanging from her left wrist, Luna’s jumper folded over her arm. “I’ve brought cakes. And your jumper back. I shouldn’t have stormed out when you offered to help.”
“I understand,” said Luna. Or she thought she did.
They shared the cakes, fairy cakes from the bakery a few streets over, iced with blue and pink icing. They talked about things entirely unrelated to the Rift; Hogwarts houses, favourite subjects there, their shared grudging love of Quidditch. Safe topics. Lily had been a Gryffindor in her universe, as she had been here, and a Potions fan. Severus Snape was mentioned in a way that implied they were still friends. Luna wasn’t going to risk asking. She didn’t want to upset Lily, and, less importantly and far more selfishly, she didn’t want this pleasant conversation to end.
Luna wondered if it was advisable to have a crush on a woman from an alternate universe, who was clearly looking for her way home, but then, if these things were inadvisable, would it stop her anyway? An etiquette book was unlikely to cover the scenario, she supposed. It was what it was.
It was unlikely to be reciprocated.
“I want your help,” Lily said, halfway through a cup of tea to wash down the cakes, and catching Luna entirely off guard. “I think we should work together.”
“Okay.”
“But first, you’re going to tell me why you’re working on it too.”
And so Luna told her. The story she’d never really told anyone before, about how it had been sort-of but not quite her fault that she’d lost a friend, too. Lily listened. Halfway through, without Luna realising at exactly what point, Lily’s hand had moved across the kitchen table to a place next to Luna’s, and then, somewhere at about the three-quarter point of Luna’s story, on top of Luna’s hand.
“I think they thought,” said Luna, “that because I’ve spent rather a lot of time talking about things that swathes of the wizarding population think don’t exist, they assumed that perhaps this didn’t. And I don’t think that maybe they did it on purpose, but there you are. The net result, as it were, was that nobody listened. And nobody looked. By the time that the Ministry took it seriously, I think perhaps it was too late. I should have done more, for Neville.”
“I believe you,” said Lily, squeezing Luna’s hand. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Of course you do,” Luna replied. It wasn’t that she felt ungrateful. “You’ve experienced it.”
“It isn’t that.” Lily stood up, the wooden chair scraping back across the stone kitchen floor. “It’s that people ought to listen to what others have to say. You’re not mad or anything. They should have listened to you.”
“Did they believe you?”
“It was war,” said Lily, leaning back against the kitchen cupboards, glaring down at her trainers. “People disappear. Does it really matter where a werewolf goes?”
“It wasn’t your fault, either.”
“Never said it was,” said Lily, but Luna knew that she appreciated hearing that, anyway.
—
Lily would call that the beginning of their work together; she liked clear-cut rules and set-out beginnings. Luna thought that, really, it had begun when they’d first met. Or, if one wanted to trace the threads back, some time before, when Remus and then Neville had disappeared. That was where their fates had begun to collide.
She drew the cards, still, most mornings, and they still didn’t show anything of much use. It was habit. It was something that Neville had taught her to do, and maybe it was really more about that than the hope she’d see anything of use. Luna spent enough time in introspection, though. She had things to do, and this, at least, helped her think about the decisions she had to make.
“What are you doing?” Lily asked, wandering over and peering over Luna’s shoulder. She was here again. Luna continued to deal cards, each pastel-toned picture saying less and less of any actual use to her. She had to think. “Divination?”
“It isn’t as inaccurate as people say.” Merely unhelpful right now.
“Never paid it any attention. Always felt I had enough problems without knowing about more that were coming.” Lily put her hand on Luna’s back. Luna felt as though she might stop breathing. “There was a war coming. I dunno, if I’d known what might happen, would I have fought? Would any of us have volunteered?”
“Some people say forewarned is forearmed.”
“People say a lot of things. Most of it’s utter rubbish.”
“Oh, yes,” said Luna. “That’s definitely the case.”
“What does it say?”
“Same thing it’s been saying for a while. Love and unexpected events. I suppose most of this counts as unexpected, so it’s making more sense than it did to begin with.”
“Love,” said Lily, who was right behind Luna, so close that Luna could feel the occasional brush of Lily’s movement. “Funny thing, that.” She wandered off to make a cup of tea, and Luna felt that she knew so much less than she did when she had started turning these cards. She considered shuffling the deck and beginning again, but, instead, opted to get up and to follow Lily into the kitchen.
—
“Do you think I should try to meet him?” Lily asked, and it was a question that made so little sense with anything else they were doing that Luna took quite a while to work out who Lily was talking about. They’d followed a lead to a cave in the south of France, and Lily had paused halfway through investigating a promising looking patch of wall. Her wand still pointed at it, the last of the spells she’d used still sizzling on the stone. Her other hand rested on her hip, clad once again in one of Luna’s jumpers.
“Harry?” Luna confirmed.
“Yeah. I feel like I should,” Lily eyed the wall with suspicion, once again refusing to make eye contact with Luna. She did that when she wasn’t confident, Luna had noticed. Lily Evans didn’t like to have doubts, but, well, everyone had them, didn’t they? “He’s my son. But at the same time, he isn’t at all my son at all. I was friends with his father, in the end, but that’s as far as it ever went. Harry won’t ever exist in my universe. This Harry isn’t my son. She’s some other Lily’s son.”
Luna waited for Lily to say what she needed to. This was always going to have come up. And Luna might be asked her opinion, which would be difficult to give, seeing as Luna wasn’t entirely sure if she even had one. What would she do in this scenario? She’d perhaps have to consider shagging a man in order to get herself into it, which was a step too far. She supposed there were other means of acquiring children. But that was a diversion, to avoid thinking about what advice she could give Lily, and it really rather wasn’t the point.
“What do you think?” Lily asked. Luna maybe did have some advice.
“I lost my mother when I was nine,” she said. “I always thought I’d have wanted to see her again, even for an hour. Now I think that would be rather hard, just to have an hour, and then to have her leave, with no guarantee that I’d ever see her again. And Harry’s seen you, you know. He briefly held the Deathly Hallows, - do you have those in your universe? - and he conjured a shade of you, and James, and Sirius and Remus too. And I think it did help him. But I know he found it hard when you left, and he dropped the stone in the forest, so that he’d not be tempted to look for you again.”
Lily’s wand now pointed at the floor, but she was looking directly at Luna, standing awkwardly in the middle of the cave. Luna continued talking, even if it felt a bit like twisting a knife.
“And you’re looking for a way home."
“I am.” Lily’s eyes returned to looking at the floor. “I’m looking for a way home because it’s what I’ve been doing for months.”
“To find Remus, and to go home.”
“I don’t know if I want to.”
Luna hasn’t wanted Lily to leave for a while now, if she’s honest. But it’s not something she was ever planning to say anything about. She knows exactly why she doesn’t want Lily to leave, and, well, she shouldn’t assume, but Lily had married a man before. It doesn’t mean she isn't interested in girls, but Luna doesn’t like to pin her hopes onto it. She doesn’t think it’s personal, but the vast majority of girls she’s ever been interested in haven’t returned the sentiment. Probably because they were almost all exclusively interested in boys.
And, really, when you have a sort-of house guest that’s from an alternate universe (because Lily doesn’t seem to actually go home any more), you don’t really open conversations with ‘hello, are you gay?’.
Maybe she should have. It’d save a lot of pining.
“Why don’t you want to go home?” Luna asked.
“Remus won’t be there. I came to find him, and I failed, and how do I know if I’ll ever find him? If he did go to another universe, it might be this one, but chances are it’s one of however many there are.” Sparks flew from Lily’s wand as she gestured with her hand; she stuffed it into her jeans pocket. “We’ve been trying long enough to find a way home for me, maybe I can’t do it, anyway. So I don’t know if it’s worth it. But I want to see Remus again. I want to see Severus. And there was a war on back there, so who knows, by the time I get there the entire Order could be wiped out - Severus, James, Marlene, all of them dead. I don’t know what I’d even be going back to!”
“We don’t have to decide now,” said Luna. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
“I don’t know what I want to do!” Lily shouted, her voice reverberating off the walls of the cave. “How do I know if I want to?”
Luna would sit down and think it through logically. Lily wouldn’t.
“I’m not going to tell you it’s going to be okay,” said Luna. “But we can work this out.”
“Merlin’s beard,” said Lily, angrily. She refused to look at Luna, but Luna could see the tears forming in her eyes. “I can’t do this now. It isn’t bloody here, anyway.”
A loud crack, and Lily had disappeared. Luna wasn’t entirely sure what to do. She stayed for a couple of minutes, and no Lily, she went home, and no Lily there, either. Luna didn’t know where Lily lived, when she wasn’t staying at Luna’s, and she could hardly walk around the wizarding world asking if anyone had seen her. Most people didn’t believe in the Rift, or inter-universe travel of any kind, and Lily Potter was dead here. It wouldn’t help.
So Luna waited. She went back to the supermarket. She cleaned her bathroom, something that she never did willingly. She visited Ginny, who she couldn’t of course tell any of this to, and she tried to forget about Lily Evans, in case she didn’t come back. But it was becoming quite clear already that forgetting about Lily would be something that was far easier said than done.
—
It was a week later, in the fuzzy grey light of the early morning, that Lily appeared again. She was on the sofa when Luna came downstairs for water, just past six o’clock, scrunched up into the same jumper she’d been wearing when they’d left. Just as if she’d never been gone.
“I’m sorry,” she said, before Luna could even speak. “I know I’ve done this before, but this is going to be the last time I have to apologise for storming out on you.” She fluffed her ponytail. “I shouldn’t have done it once. I definitely shouldn’t have done it twice.”
“I’m not going to say I understand,” said Luna, sitting on the spare bit of the sofa, leaving a respectable amount of space between her and Lily. “I don’t. I don’t know what it must be like to be trapped in a universe that isn’t the one I’m from, but that’s similar enough to be confusing, with a man that’s the son of the other me somewhere around, with everything else. But I’m willing to listen.”
“It isn’t just that,” said Lily. “I want to stay because of you.”
“What?” Luna thought there was likely to be something far more dignified to say in this scenario, but there she was, she’d said that, hadn’t she?
“I want to stay with you. I want to kiss you. Is that alright?”
Luna didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. All she could manage was a nod, and that seemed to give Lily the response she needed, because she leaned in and kissed her. Their lips met for a few seconds before they parted, but it was all Luna needed to know that yes, this was it for her, and yes, Lily Evans was most definitely interested in girls.
“When did you know?”
“You and your cards. You pulled ones that talked about love. It’s fate. But I felt it before that, I think. I fancied you as soon as you leant me that jumper.”
“That’s why you keep taking my jumpers.”
Lily pressed her forehead up against Luna’s. “I return them. So, therefore, it’s borrowing, isn’t it?”
“Is it? Even if you don’t ask?”
“Find yourself a dictionary,” Lily suggested. “I don’t think the definition of borrow mentions anything about asking.” She kissed Luna again, and Luna decided that she didn’t much care about the semantics of the word borrow, not right now, at any rate. She could do this forever.
“You were trying to make it home,” Luna said. Not that she wanted to introduce doubts at this point, but how could she not say it?
“I don’t have to,” said Lily, tugging gently on Luna’s hand, and Luna didn’t even really try to resist. “I don’t have to go home. Nobody says I have to. I want you, I want to stay here with you. It’s too soon to make that decision, I barely know you, but I don’t have to go home.”
“I don’t know if it’s as easy as that,” said Luna, as her head snuggled in onto Lily’s chest, and Lily’s soft hands began to stroke at her hair. “Is it really up to us?”
“We make our own destinies,” Lily replied, firmly. “Do you want to try this? Us?”
“Yes,” said Luna. There was something niggling away at her, nothing to do with a Nargle or anything else that might be trying to involve itself in her life, but a feeling. It suggested that there was something, not wrong, but not right, either, about all of this. But she couldn’t lie to Lily; no, despite whatever the feeling was, she wanted this, and was it so bad to want this?
“See,” said Lily. “We both want this. We’re both here, now, even if I didn’t start off here. And even if this isn’t fated to work, can’t we just enjoy it? For however long we have?”
Luna didn’t really have a comeback to that, did she? She tried to allow herself to forget about all of it, allow it just to be her and Lily, here, where nobody or nothing could tell them that they couldn’t have this. However thin the probability was, it didn’t matter here. The rest of the world didn’t have to exist if they didn’t want it to.
Lily pressed her lips to Luna, and Luna didn’t even have to try to forget everything any more.
—
Work on their discoveries around the Rift did slow down a little. It seemed to be slightly less of a priority compared to trying to discover everything about the other one, all the little things that’d never seemed important when they’d been strictly partners in a academic endeavour, acquaintances working on a project, whatever it was their loosely defined relationship had been. Not that they’d spent a lot of time defining this new version of them, either. It was what it was. Luna liked it, and Lily seemed to like it, and that was enough.
Lily hated jam, not even a dislike, a real, proper hatred of the (to Luna) fairly inoffensive substance. She slept curled up, her knees near her chin, and she was bright and cheery in the mornings. Transfiguration, despite her NEWT in the subject, baffled her. She was the most beautiful woman Luna had ever seen.
Luna was beginning to understand why the cards had talked of love.
But she still, well, the niggles hadn’t disappeared. They knew the most of the Rift in the whole of the wizarding world, at least in this universe, and none of it said anything about what would happen if someone stayed in a different universe. It might be fine. But then what would happen? Sooner or later, they’d have to come out of this bubble they were in, the bubble they’d made for themselves in this house, surrounded by their paperwork and their research and their quiet solitude. And then what would Luna say? How did one go about introducing their girlfriend from another universe entirely without causing some kind of issue, if not a thousand all at once?
“How much do they understand of the Rift, in your universe?” she asked Lily, their bodies intertwined on Luna’s bed. Lily’s fingers traced the stems of the flowers on the quilt.
“Honestly,” said Lily, “not a lot. It was talked about, you know, in sort of hushed up circles, but nobody took it very seriously. There was a war on, after all. It’s the same here, isn’t it? We talked about it when we were sharing research.”
“Yes,” said Luna, and considered what she was going to say next. “That’s the thing. If you stay, how do we explain it?”
“The truth,” replied Lily, at once. “Why would we say anything different?”
“Would you believe one of your friends if they came up with a partner in tow, claiming them to be from an alternate universe?”
“Yes!” said Lily, firmly. “Of course I would!” She paused, thinking about it. “I don’t know. If I’d never experienced this, it’d be strange. It wasn’t the first thought I had when Remus disappeared, because why would it be?”
“See.”
“Maybe we don’t have to leave here then. Not yet. If we introduced the idea slowly to the world, what have you told your friends about what you do? We could try to get some things published that make it seem real, couldn’t we, and anyway, it’ll all work out in the end. Even if it doesn’t, we’ve got each other. People will come round.”
Luna had never been known for her optimism.
“I don’t know if it’s that easy.”
“I never said it’d be easy. I said it was possible.”
Luna smiled. “I suppose you didn’t, no.”
“Just look at it this way. Why are we here? The two of us, here, in this universe. Isn’t it vanishingly unlikely, if you look at it from a statistical point of view? How did I end up in this alternate universe, where I married James Potter, for fuck’s sake, and why did I find you? Of all the people I could have found? It means something, I know it does.”
“I don’t think we’re supposed to know the answers to everything,” said Luna.
“Exactly.” Lily’s hand traced patterns on Luna’s stomach. “We don’t know the answers to everything. Maybe it’s just fate.”
Love, Luna’s cards had said. Love and unexpected events. And maybe, even though it was far too soon for any of this, maybe this fit both of those. And maybe she didn’t much care. Luna had always been quite good at letting something go, perhaps that was all that she needed to do here. Perhaps it didn’t matter where Lily came from, or how it was that they’d ended up together.
“And anyway,” said Lily, reaching over to brush hair from Luna’s face, “I don’t know if I care, anyway.”
No, Luna didn’t much care either, she supposed. She tried to forget about her niggle, the sinking feeling, the misgiving, or whatever else it was that she could have called it, by wrapping herself into Lily. It was there, though, and she’d have to deal with it at some point, wouldn’t she? Just not now. Now was for the feel of Lily’s hair in her fingers, for the press of their lips together, for the losing of themselves into one another. It was for the certainty of the beauty of the situation they’re round themselves in, not the potential for pain.
“We should go back to France,” said Lily, afterwards, with their naked bodies curled in and around each other until it was difficult to say which part belonged to which of them. “When we don’t have to poke around for the Rift any more. We could go to Nice. I’ve always wanted to see the Alps, as well.”
“I’d like to go to Iceland,” said Luna. “The Aurora Borealis is supposed to be beautiful, and magical.”
“Not as beautiful as you,” Lily said.
And Luna believed all of it, everything that they promised the other that they’d do. She believed that all of it would be possible, that the world could be anything they wanted it to be, just for them.
—
This worked for two weeks or so. Two weeks of curling up in Luna’s house, working on their research, of going on expeditions out to places they’d identified, of listening to music and playing a card game and just being next to each other. Two weeks of something that Luna would have quite liked to have lasted forever.
Until Lily began to be ill.
“It’s just a stomach bug,” she assured Luna. “Probably picked it up in Edinburgh.”
They’d been to a pub, after investigating somewhere they’d thought was connected to the Rift. It’d seemed nice from the outside, but, inside, had been rather more disgusting than they’d thought. Lily had insisted on staying. So it seemed to make sense, and Luna didn’t think any more on it.
And then it happened again, and again. Lily maintained each time that there was nothing wrong with her, everything was fine, but Luna decided that she didn’t believe a word of it. She wasn’t sure Lily did, either. The days passed. Nothing much changed, and Luna went to her research. She went through her notes, through Lily’s notes, but there was nothing that gave an explanation for anything like this. They could hardly go to St Mungo’s, not without a lot of questions, and, besides, Lily refused to go.
“I don’t exist here,” she said, sitting on the sofa looking pale and exhausted. “And St Mungo’s is hardly the place to show up and start trying to make me exist.”
“They wouldn’t ask that many questions,” said Luna.
“I’m not going.”
Luna considered taking her anyway, of course. There were days when Lily was absolutely fine, doing everything she’d done before. That wasn’t the problem. It was the days when she wasn’t, and Luna found it next to impossible to watch.
“Is there anything you’re not telling me?” she asked Lily, one day when Lily was fine. They were outside, in the tiny garden attached to Luna’s house, pruning a Flutterby Bush that Neville had given Luna two years ago.
Lily lopped at a part of the bush. “Why would I lie to you?”
“I didn’t say you lied,” said Luna, levitating her shears to the floor. “I asked if there was anything you’re not telling me. I think you know something about why you’re ill lately.” The signs had been there. Not wanting to go to St Mungo’s had been the start of it, but then there had been refusing Luna’s remedies, brewing potions Luna had never seen before in the kitchen, taking short trips out of the house without any reason for where she was going.
“I,” Lily began. “I found Remus. That week I stormed off. I didn’t tell you because, well, you’d have tried to send me back.”
“I just want to know.”
“Remus is dead.” Lily hacked at another bit of the shrub, taking a far larger piece out than it looked like she’d intended. Luna took the shears from her. “I found him before he died. He’d ended up in this universe, too, and he’d been nearby all along. But he was dying, Luna. To begin with I thought it was something that’d happened, an injury or something, but he hadn’t been injured. And it didn’t seem like it was linked to the moon. Then I found an old book, in the wizarding library, when I was trying to find something to match his symptoms. I think he’d been here too long. That we can’t live in another universe, not for long.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this?” Luna’s stomach was churning, or perhaps it had dropped into her trainers; whatever it was doing, there was an awful feeling in it. She wanted to cry, or hack at the bush, or run screaming into the house. This couldn’t be what she was being told, even if it felt something like she’d known it all along.
“Because I didn’t want to leave. You’d have tried to send me back.”
“Yes,” Luna admitted. “I would have.”
“But I don’t want to go. And we don’t know how, anyway. That’s why I’ve been brewing, trying to find something that might work.”
Luna didn’t want to ask. “Have you?”
“No. But I might yet.”
“How long do we have?”
“I don’t know exactly. Maybe a few more months. Based on Remus. But he’s a werewolf, fuck, was a werewolf, and these things can be different. Nothing I brewed for him worked, not in the long term, but I found some things that eased the symptoms.”
Luna sat down, the grass damp even through her jeans.
“I’ll help you,” she said. “In whatever way I can. I love you, you know. I’ve loved you for a while.”
Lily sat down next to her. “I love you, too. I still can’t help but think it’s going to be alright. It’s fate. We were meant to find each other, the odds are too small for it to have been any other way. We can make this work."
Luna just smiled. “Yes. Maybe we were supposed to find each other.”
—
None of it was working. If it hadn’t been going to plan before, it certainly wasn’t now. Luna researched, scribbled notes on every flat surface in the house, books propped up wherever there was space. Cauldrons haphazardly piled themselves in the kitchen, brewing. She investigated, and she, well, she wasn’t too proud to admit that she cried more than once, as well. She’d even returned to the cards, the deck of plant-themed ones Neville had given her, and they hadn’t told her anything. Love and unexpected events. Wormwood and clove. Love, and the absence of it.
She had some success, too, but it wasn’t the right sort of success.
“I’ve found you a way back,” she told Lily. “Back to your universe.”
“Okay. That’s good.” Lily was taking this better than Luna had assumed that she would. “We have a back-up plan.”
It was because she didn’t realise what Luna was proposing.
“I don’t think it’s a back-up plan.” Luna stood awkwardly in the middle of the living room, the recipe of her latest failed potion in her hands. Lily lay on the sofa. “I think it’s the actual, real, proper plan.”
“No.”
“Lily. I don’t know if we can solve this.”
“We can, though. It’s just like a puzzle. We’ve got to work out the issues, we know what the problem is, and it’ll all work then. It’s got to.”
“Has it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Not everyone gets their happy ending, do they? I just can’t see that it adds up. We’ve tried it so many different ways, and it doesn’t work. Or not that we’ve found, and it’s sort of coming close to running out of time now, don’t you think?”
“But, say that it could. Say that it’s possible to make this formula do what we want. You said it yourself, we were meant to find each other.”
“I think,” said Luna, trying to stop her voice from cracking, because she didn’t want to be saying any of this, “I think I was meant to find you, and you were meant to find me. But maybe we weren’t supposed to be able to keep each other. Maybe that’s not supposed to be the plan.”
“Fuck the plan,” said Lily. “I know I was the one going on about fate to begin with, but fuck it. We can make our own plans. We don’t have to listen to what anyone, any fucking universe or set of cards or crystal ball, or anything else, has to say.”
“We don’t have to listen, no. But that’s easy to say, here in this room where it’s the two of us and everything is happy and well. It might not work out.”
“I don’t care,” said Lily. “I don’t care what it means. I’ll stay here for you.”
Luna took a deep breath, feeling as if her stomach might twist in on herself, as if a Doxy had it. “I care,” she said. “I’m not going to sit by here and watch you,” she had to say it, she had to, “die.”
“It could still be fine,” Lily insisted. But Luna thought that, now, they both knew that it wouldn’t be.
—
Love, Luna decided, couldn’t work all of the things in the world out. They weren’t ready, but they didn’t seem to have any other choice.
“I’m sorry,” said Luna, as they stood behind the supermarket where they’d first met, the harsh streetlights competing with the moon to illuminate the concrete.
“It isn’t your fault.”
“I couldn’t fix it.”
“Neither could I.” Lily dropped Luna’s hand and pulled her into hug. They stayed there for a while, not long enough, but Luna knew it couldn’t last. Someone would come around the corner if they weren’t lucky, a drunk staggering around for a pee, someone looking to complete a drug deal, someone just looking for a reasonably dry bed for the night. Someone else investigating the Rift.
And, besides, not even these moments could last forever.
“I’m still sorry,” she said. Nothing she could say would get even close to what she wanted to. “I thought we were supposed to be together.”
“But not to keep. That’s what you said. We were fated to be together, but we weren’t fated for each other to keep.”
Luna didn’t want to cry. She wasn’t going to ruin this with tears.
“I’ll think of you every day,” Lily promised. “Will you think of me?”
Luna nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Her throat felt like it had closed up.
“We could pop back through,” Lily said, as if she was clutching at straws. “I could get well, and then I could come back. I don’t know how long I’d have to be home for, before I’m well enough to return, but I’ll try to do it as soon as possible, and we can do France then, and Iceland, and all the rest of it. It doesn’t have to be the end.”
“What about Neville?” Luna said. “And Remus. They’ve fallen through by accident, what if more people have?”
“You’re not going to suggest that,” said Lily, firmly. “You can’t be suggesting that.”
“I am. It makes sense, doesn’t it? To make sure that nothing bad can happen to anyone else, not even by accident.”
“We could open and close it whenever we want, then. Just for the two of us.”
“But if we can’t?”
Lily sighed. It wasn’t the best of places for a big goodbye, this, the concrete floor seeming to have become stained with a black, tar-like substance since they were last here, a crisp packet skittering around.
“If we can’t then we can’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
Lily smiled, a sad smile that didn’t at all reach her eyes. “I’m sorry, too. I kissed you. I shouldn’t have ever done this.”
“No. You should. Even though I can’t see another way this could go, I’m still glad it happened. Even if we couldn’t bend fate to do what we wanted, I had fun.” That didn’t cover it. “I love you, Lily, and I’m not sure that I ever won’t love you. And even if this is how it has to be, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”
“Me neither.” Lily hugged her, seeming to Luna like she was trying to bury every feeling she’d ever had for Luna, and every feeling that, if fate had done what they had wanted of it, she would have had over their life together, all into one hug. Luna clung on in return. “I suppose this is it,” Lily said, into her shoulder. “Shouldn’t delay it, it’ll only make it worse.”
“Yeah.”
“Will you stay with me? Right up until I have to go?”
“Of course.” Luna dug in her bag. “Wait. I have something for you.” She handed over the bundle, not wrapped, but she’d found a ribbon to tie it with; it’d have to do.
“The jumper.” Lily scrambled into it. “Thanks.”
“I didn’t know what else to give you.”
“I haven’t got you anything.”
Luna blinked furiously.
“Ready?” she asked.
“No. But we have to.”
So they walked together up to the wall behind the supermarket, the unassuming brick looking far more menacing than any wall had the right to be. Lily reached her hand out, before pulling it back, and reaching for Luna’s lips one last time.
“I love you,” she said. “I hate that I’m doing this.”
“Me too,” Luna replied. “I love you.”
Lily bit her lip, grimaced, and reached out once more, and with that, she was gone. Luna understood the cards now. Wormwood and clove.
You know I want you
It's not a secret I try to hide
But I can't have you
We're bound to break and my hands are tied