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“Thanks so much, Aunt Gin. Uncle Harry.” Cate kissed each of them on the cheek as they stood by the door to the Roman-era apartment in which Cate had grown up. “It means so much to Mum.”
Cate's godparents glanced at each other, and then at Cate. “Wouldn't have missed it,” mumbled Harry. Aunt Ginny smiled, catlike as always.
She smiled at them. Though each's hair might be streaked with grey, Cate had always loved them as a study in contrasts: Ginny fair, bright and fiery; Harry dark, silent and intense. Of course, the thing Hecate Lovegood loved them for most was their devotion to her lovely, lonely Mum.
Who seemed even now to be occupying their thoughts. Harry stared over Cate's right shoulder while his partner—not wife, never that—glanced around Cate's left. Ginny's quick gaze flew back up to Cate. “You're... spending the night?” asked Ginny.
“Oh, yes. In my old room.” Cate leaned forward and whispered. “I hadn't planned to but... She's been so odd all day. Even for her,” she added, as if these two needed to told that. Which they didn't.
“Odd?” asked Harry, face pinched with concern.
“Broody one moment, giggly the next. She spent two hours in the toilet this afternoon, after we'd finished with the food, and she'd cast an Impervious on the door, but I could swear she was screaming at one point.”
Cate's godparents blinked and looked at each other again. Ginny glanced back, the careful mask over her usually expressive features a sure sign that she understood Cate's concern. “Cate, luv. We could stay with her.”
Harry nodded briskly. “We'd be happy to.”
Again Cate was flooded with affection for this wonderful, magical couple. Again she kissed them. “No, please. I'll take good care of her. I promise. I've hardly seen her this past year, while I've been off with the Tokoloshe.”
“Yyyes,” said Uncle Harry still looking fretful.
Concerned for her mother as she was, Cate couldn't help laughing. “We'll be fine! Now off, you two, and get your beauty sleep!”
“All right, dear,” sighed Ginny. “Don't hesitate to Floo if she... if you need us.”
As she turned back toward the apartment, the smile that Cate's godparents had evoked in her slipped.
Luna Lovegood was by no measure old; this was only her fifty-eighth birthday, and her face was as unlined as ever. Yet Cate—who had grown up with her mother as her entire family—could not help but feel a twinge of dread that time and solitude might at last be pushing her mother over the edge at which she had always seemed to totter. “Mum?”
The only response was singing; that at least seemed to be normal. Cate followed the strains of her favorite lullaby, “St. James Infirmary,” to the kitchen.
There she was greeted by a site that was far less comforting: her mother cleaning the dishes at the sink, voice wafting, hips swaying... Nary a stitch of clothing on her. “Mum!”
Cate's mother turned and owled at her for a moment before returning to the dishes. “I didn't expect you, Hecate, my-nghu.”
“I was just seeing Aunt Gin and Uncle Harry off.”
Cate's mum stopped and turned again, her face now set in an expression that Cate couldn't ever recall seeing before: a pout. “Harry and Ginny have... left?”
“I sent them home. Well,” Cate improvised when her mother's look of disappointment deepened, “you're none of you spring chickens any more!”
“Chickens?”
“Young. You're not as young as you used to be.”
“Of course we aren't, Hecate, dear. How could we be? Even with Time Turners....”
Cate forced a laugh as her mother turned back to the dishes. “In any case, I thought maybe you and I could have a girls' night, like we used to. Do our nails. Tell boring ghost stories....” Talk. They had always talked.
“Oh.” Her mother turned back toward her, a reassuringly vague smile on her face. “That would be lovely.”
###
As they sat and chatted, Cate realized that she was doing all of the talking—that that had somehow always been the way of it. She had talked. Her mum had sat there, listening blithely. As she was doing now, even as she transfigured one of Cate's nails into a Hippogriff talon.
Cate blathered on, drinking the cocoa that tasted like nothing else but nights when she'd had bad dreams, twittering about how difficult it was being back in England in the autumn, about the Tokoloshe, about how the tribes had changed since her mother first first studied them nearly three decades before. About the irony that she was studying a species of magical creature whose answer to any problem was sex, when Cate herself was living a life of nun-like, mostly blissful solitude.
As her mother had done, all of her days.
“Does it...?” began Cate, and then bit her lip, not wanting to exacerbate whatever it was that was bother her mother. She sipped from her cocoa mug, trying to close the conversation.
“Does what, dear?” asked her mother, moving to the next fingernail, which she was Transfiguring into a Wyvern claw. “And what does it do?”
“Living alone,” whispered Cate. Knowing that her mother would have patiently, calmly clawed it out of her. “Not having... a partner.” It occurred to Cate, not for the first time, to wonder what gender her mother preferred. If any. After all, Auntie Pentheselia and Auntie Daphne were two of her mother's closest friends—next to Harry and Ginny—and they were positively poster children for alternative lifestyles. Cate tried to imagine her mother kissing a woman—Venus-ample Daphne Greengrass, say. That was almost as difficult for her to visualize as the image of her kissing a man—though there was a story Cate vaguely remembered about her mother dancing for Uncle Ron....
Of course, she knew her mother had had lovers—else where had she herself come from?—but it was impossible for Cate to imagine, even as a twenty-eight-year-old. Even as a research witch.
“Partner?” asked her mother, putting down her wand. She fixed Cate in the steady, diffuse gaze of her enormous eyes—enormous as Cate's own were supposed to be, though so pale blue as to look almost silver next to the frog-green of Daphne's own irises.
“Someone to spend your life with,” Cate whispered, feeling very young and foolish. “Someone...”
“Ah.” Her mother smiled, and it was the heartbreaking smile that was so uniquely Luna Lovegood.
“Mum,” said Cate, reaching out and taking her mother's wand hand, “I... I'm worried. About you.”
“Worried?”
As always it devastated Cate to think that her solitary, wistful mother, who had spent the whole of her adult life studying Love as an Unspeakable, should be so utterly, completely isolated. “I'm worried that you are so... alone.”
“I am not alone, Cate, dear. I have you.” She squeezed Cate's fingers lightly. “And I have Ginny and Harry. And Daphne and Pansy. And Dean and Tien. And Neville and—”
“But...” groaned Cate. She wanted to scream, Those are all couples! but she knew from long experience that screaming at her mother was an absolutely unsatisfying experience. It was like screaming at the sky. “Aren't you...? Haven't you ever wanted someone who was just yours? Who you could share everything with?”
Her mother cocked her head. “Are there any nice wizards on the project team?”
Cate groaned again. “Yeah, a couple, but none who...” She shook her head to clear it of the fog that was her mother's voice, took another sip of cocoa. “And we're not talking about me.”
Her mother sat up, naked breasts bouncing. Cate had always hated her mother's lack of modesty, but had long ago given up trying to change her. “Are you concerned about my sex life?”
Merlin, thought Cate, we had to go there. “Not just—”
“I have a quite satisfactory sex life, Hecate—”
“Mum! I don't need to know... specifics. I mean, that's nice and all....” Cate found her ever-unrepentant imagination weighing whether her mother meant simply the collection of ancient magical marital aids from around the world that festooned the tables and walls of the sitting room of their apartment, or...
“You simply do not wish me to be lonely.”
“Yes. No.” Sleep and her mother's bewildering logic were weighing down Cate's brain.
“I see.” She kissed Cate's hands—each finger sporting a claw from a different magical creature. “I am not lonely. I was not speaking lightly before. I am very close to a number of quite lovely people. It is perhaps not a terribly conventional life, of the sort prescribed by romance novels and magazines, but it has always been a wonderful one.”
“But if I weren't here—”
“If you weren't here, I would have missed you terribly. But I should not have been lonely. I believe that Ginny and Harry had planned on keeping me company tonight.”
“Oh.” They had offered to stay, remembered Cate. “Oh.”
“You look terribly sleepy, dear. Perhaps we can save boring ghost stories for another night.”
“Hmm.” Indeed, Cate's eyes were drooping.
“Do you need me to tuck you in?”
“No. Thanks, mum. For everything.” Cate wiggled her nails, but they both knew she meant far more than that. She kissed her mum’s cheek, feeling, as she always did, very young around her mother. And very lucky.
Once she'd toddled off to bed, it occurred to Cate to wonder for the first time whether her mother had put something in the cocoa. And to wonder too, if she had expected Harry and Ginny to be spending the rest of the evening, why had her mother been cleaning the dishes in the nude?
Soon, however, sleep took her, and she wondered no more.
###
As her lovers climbed out of the Floo and onto her bed, Luna felt a pang of guilt at having spiked her daughter’s cocoa with EZ-Kip. Then again, her daughter did look quite tired, and no wonder: she had taken an international Portkey in just that morning. She was still on Southern Hemisphere time, the poor thing. “I’m so glad you could join me,” sighed Luna, as they removed their clothes.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” said Harry, dipping his head to begin exploring her left foot with his mouth.
Ginny began kissing the big toe on Luna’s other foot. “Haven’t missed ever missed a birthday, have we, Luna, love?”
“No,” she gasped as they began to please her in all of the ways in which they had grown so skilled over the years.
Oh, she thought, it’s a good thing that Hecate didn’t come home early, on Halloween. I might have had to miss celebrating Pentheselia’s birthday. And next week is Tien’s, and, oh...
Oh.
Oh.