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She’s already there when he wakes up. By the looks up of it, she’s been there a while, too. The grass is splayed out beneath her and her legs are pulled up against her chest, her chin tucked in between her knees. Closer than an arm’s-length away. Closer, perhaps, than he’s ever been to her before.
“Fuck,” he murmurs, lifting his head as much as he can manage, looking down at the sprawl of his body as if to check if it’s all still there.
His mouth tastes like vinegar and his skull is nearly vibrating with pain and Luna Lovegood is sitting beside him like some sort of strange guardian, flower-bound headband and bare feet and all.
“Oh.” Her head tilts to the side as she looks down at him. “Are you up for good, then?”
He blinks against the sparse sunlight. “For good?”
“You were mumbling a little while ago.”
Inexplicably, he feels a prick of embarrassment. Not for his position. Not for the circumstances. Because he was mumbling in his strange, fitful sleep. “What did I say?”
She shrugs. It’s a delicate gesture, but it still knocks the straw-colored hair that’s gathered on top of the seam of her blouse down her back. “I couldn’t really tell.”
He asks, “What are you doing?”
“Right now?” Lovegood settles her chin back between her knees. Her arms seem to tighten around herself. “Thinking.”
“Why—” He grunts, propping himself up on his elbows so that he’s no longer draped inelegantly on his back. “Why are you thinking—right here?”
She looks worried, suddenly. And then he’s worried, too—worried like he’s upset a bird he’s been watching, like she’s some creature he’s managed to get close to who might up and flee if it’s startled.
“I don’t know,” she says, eyebrows knitting together. “Are you alright?”
Theo’s been more alright in his life, certainly. He’s just woke up hungover on the grounds of his school. He’s definitely missing his shoes and his vision is still a little blurry and while there was a time when he would’ve looked at such antics as amusing, as merrily inevitable, he can’t help but feel like in the moment, it’s just sort of sad. The first time he ever got so drunk—back in sixth year, back when the fight was much less about excessive trauma and more about generic angst—he woke up with a flowery-smelling Daphne Greengrass in his arms. Now he’s in the middle of a damp grove of trees with a near-stranger.
A near-stranger who seems to be expressing genuine concern.
Which—he can’t possibly be expected to know how to accept this.
“I don’t remember,” he says eventually.
Lovegood’s expression softens a little. The morning light is tinted and cold and makes her features look so, so pale. He can see the faint impression of a blue vein on her neck, barely-there. He can see her eyelashes turn near-white when they catch the sun.
“It’s not safe,” she says, lowering her voice. “Sometimes it’s not safe to be out here alone. Not like—” She stops, looks down, her cheeks coloring.
He thinks he knows what she was about to say. Not like you were. Not piss-drunk and passed out. She would likely say it in kinder terms—would probably even throw in a vague warning about some invisible creature lurking at dawn, if what he’s heard about her is true—but the real sentiment is still there. It still hangs like a sticky, ugly thread between them.
“Uh.” Theo clears his throat, tries to shake the soreness from it with a stifled grunt. “I’m OK. I can—I can watch out for myself. Thank you.”
“No way.”
It’s a third voice. Both of them twist around.
Pansy’s face is washed-out, almost uneven, the black smudges around her eyes revealing that she’s had about as much time to recuperate as he has. She braces herself with a hand against one of the thin trees and looks between him and his companion. “Really, Theo?”
He understands that this could have several meanings, coming from Pansy Parkinson.
Really, Theo? You couldn’t even make it to your bed?
Really, Theo? You let yourself get this far gone on a Wednesday night?
Really, Theo? Lovegood?
He decides not to dwell on any one of them. “Morning, Pans,” he replies instead, finally pushing himself up onto his feet. His vision swims for a moment and the dew from the grass sticks to his hands, makes his palms feel cold and tacky even after he wipes them across his trousers.
“I can’t believe you.” Pansy straightens herself, almost manages to look well-composed—though the bleary makeup and the strange stain on her skirt still give her way quite plainly. “Let’s go.”
Lovegood is a blur in his vision as he takes his first uneven step. Existing at the edge of his line of sight, still folded on the ground, a cloud of blonde hair and daisies. She doesn’t move with him, and after moment, all Theo focuses on is the back of Pansy’s head as she leads him towards the castle. A part of him can see the humor in the inky black hair of hers that is so neat and finger-flattened next to her face but is sticking out at several odd angles where she neglected it at the back. A part of him wants to curse her for pulling him from the trees so early, but he still follows her. She made it a strict rule a long time ago that Pansy Parkinson doesn’t do Walks of Shame alone.
He gets through a shower, through both of his afternoon classes, before he realizes it never occurred to him to thank her. To thank Lovegood. To even say goodbye.
* * *
If Theo expected something from the unprecedented “Eighth Year”, it was a lot uncomfortable conversations and sleep-severed nights. Maybe a sense of whiplash from working on Potions essays so soon after a war has ended. Maybe some lingering fear, too—some heart-halting moments where something sounds too much like the spit of a curse, where laughter is hard to distinguish from sobs.
And he’s got that all. They all have. But he thinks he still might have underestimated the mechanisms of the school, the preternatural ability of the castle to pull situations apart like blocks of taffy, yanking on threads, lumping its messes together, drawing it all out. He thinks he might have been better prepared for it all if he had just looked Draco in the eye a little more, if he had reached out during the trials, if he had not spent the summer after the war watching the sun disappear and imagining the gaunt lines of his father’s face.
He wasn’t prepared. He isn’t. They aren’t. And now they can’t stop hurting themselves.
“What’s the damage tonight?”
Blaise gestures towards a row of several bottles, many of them tall and thin and one odd one at the end that’s as squat as a phial. “Stash is low. You don’t want to know what’s in these guys.”
It’s a new privilege, the private dorms. Tucked in one of the deep wings of the dungeons, still lit by precarious glass windows holding back the green water of the lake, still adorned with House-appropriate green and silver.
The privacy now afforded to the eighth-years is not an overlooked or underutilized advantage. Blaise’s room quickly became the hotbed for their regular conclaves, because Blaise has always been the best at silencing charms and hiding illicit beverages. It doesn’t hurt that he sleeps like the dead and is never disturbed by long-running racket. Or that he has the strongest inclination to supply said illicit beverages.
You don’t want to know what’s in these guys.
Theo doesn’t ask.
It’s eleven o’clock when the buzz contorts into something more consuming, something that turns the lights in the room into bright streaks when he twists his head. He likes this—his body feeling twice as heavy and weightless all at once. He likes that laughter can be pulled so easily from him when his mind can’t wander.
It’s one in the morning when Blaise and Pansy waltz around the room in a sloppy circle, when Daphne accidentally eats a Hiccough Sweet from Zonko’s and doesn’t stop gasping for an hour, when Draco begins his cycle of his eyes glazing over and then shaking his head to clear whatever fog has settled over him.
It’s—well, Theo’s lost track of the time—when most of them are still fighting sleep and Blaise’s bottles have run low.
Theo’s done drinking. He’s fine with sitting with his back against the room’s wall, with letting his limbs settle loose and heavy around him, until he finds the push he needs to move again.
“Fuck,” Pansy mutters at his feet. She’s on her side, halfway-curled up, eyes squeezed shut. “I had Astronomy homework I was supposed to do.”
Theo hums in sympathy, nearly letting his own eyes drift shut when movement catches his attention. Draco’s made his way back towards the bottles, reaches out for the smallest one. He lifts the phial to his nose, sniffs, and then begins to tip it towards his mouth.
“Wait,” Theo says. “What’s in that one?”
Draco stills. Blaise looks to him, then back towards Theo, raising his eyebrows. “That’s Baneberry.”
“The poison?”
“No, no, it’s not harmful like that,” Blaise laughs. “It’s undiluted. Just makes you feel really mashed.”
Theo’s sitting up straight, now. “It’s not a fucking drink, though.”
But Draco is pulling it back towards his mouth.
Theo’s on his feet too quickly. The room spins around him and it feels like he’s thrashing his way through deep water, breaching the distance between him and Draco, but it’s important, still. It’s important that he does this.
He arches forward, and knocks the phial from his friend’s fingers.
The glass clatters unharmed across the floor, but it’s neck spills something dark and plum-red through the pale fibers of the carpet.
Draco looks down at the stain, then turns narrowed and fever-bright eyes towards Theo. “What are you doing?”
“Really?” Theo asks. “We’re not drinking potions ingredients.”
“I’ll drink what I like.”
Theo wants to push him. Or maybe he wants to grab his friend’s shoulders and shake him, rattle the sense back into their bodies. “What is wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with you, Nott?”
Logically, he knows that when Draco’s reverted to surnames, he’s on the defensive in a bargain he understands is wrong. It’s one of many tells Theo’s learned to pick up on.
But at the same time, he feels miles away from logic, like this. He can’t talk through it, can’t even think across the whirlwind of his impromptu panic. His fingers curl and unfurl by his sides, wanting to move, wanting to grasp and to throw.
Pansy solves the problem for him. She steps between them both, fixes Theo with an impressively awake and blindingly fierce glare.
“Hey,” she says quietly. “That’s enough.”
Theo glances once more at Draco’s sullen scowl, at Pansy’s fixed and pointed expression, and then he turns around and leaves the dorm.
He has his own bed, his own space to decompress, but his fogged mind seems to urge him towards a longer ramble. He wants to move. Like those fish who can’t stop swimming or else they’ll suffocate.
So he leaves the castle.
The sky is a pale grey, slowly waking up. The air is thick and warm and makes him uncomfortably aware of the sweat at the nape of his neck, at the small of his back.
The stretch of the grounds is wedged between a thick line of trees and the strange mirror-sweep of the Great Lake. He turns towards the water and walks, drawn somehow to its pale reflection.
It’s not long before he spots the figure on the rocks. He’s moving towards it before he’s even registered that it’s her. Though even from a distance, the colors give her away quite plainly. Bright, loose hair and an outfit made up of honey-orange and green.
If she hears his footsteps, she doesn’t show it. Doesn’t offer a single bit of recognition, bent over the edge of the stone and waving a hand above the surface of the water.
“Lovegood,” he says weakly.
She straightens herself. Twists her head to look at him, and as soon as she does, her face seems to twist up in concern, a frown carving itself deep enough to push into her cheeks.
He knows he likely looks rough. He knows he’s looked worse—knows, even, that she’s seen him worse. Still, he feels suddenly vulnerable. Defensive. Even if he was the one to approach her. “What?”
She shakes her head lightly. “Nothing. I just—I think you need to wake up.”
Theo thinks…. He thinks he should go to sleep. It’s already dawn and he hasn’t even thought of his own bed yet. He could go back now and apologize. Smooth things over enough to get some quiet for the day.
“Theo?” Lovegood tilts her head to the side. “Did you hear me?”
“Yeah—yes. I did.” He tries for a smile. “I’m awake, Lovegood.”
She nods.
And then she turns back around, lifts one foot, and steps forward like she’s intending to walk. Instead, she slips neatly off of the rock and into the glassy water below.
“What the fuck.” Theo rushes forward, cranes his neck to look straight down, past the moss and the stone. He can see the outspread ribbons of her hair, suspended in the water, but past that it becomes too murky for him to see. All he can watch is this vague imprint of her, the rocking of the water above where she’s fallen.
Several long, uncertain moments pass. Theo’s close to reaching in and trying to grasp her, closer still to diving in himself and checking if she’s stuck. But then a pale hand breaks through the surface and hooks around the edge of the rock. Another comes up beside it, unfurling its fingers to reveal a fat, yellow-green toad, blinking its wet eyes dispassionately up at Theo.
Lovegood’s face comes next. Her hair is plastered around her cheeks, darkened locks wrapped around her neck. “Sorry. I’ve been looking for him. For a friend.” She smiles, bobbing in the water. “You could come in, you know.”
Theo stares down at her. “I can’t—I can’t do that.”
“That’s alright. Could you help me up?”
He’s not sure why he hesitates, but it takes a few quiet seconds before he finally lowers himself to his knees and reaches down. Lovegood flattens her hands against the stone and finds purchase right beneath her arms, halfway-submerged, and together, they lift her out of the water. He fumbles before he lets go, rising once more to his feet and stepping instinctively backwards.
He’s vaguely aware of a small squelching sound, and the small blur of green leaping around at the edge of his vision.
“Your friend’s toad is…leaving,” he says.
“Oh. I think he’s fine, now.”
It comes out of him before he can register the words. Spilling like everything in his system has lowered every dam, every filter: “Why are you always alone?”
Lovegood blinks back at him. “I mean,” she says carefully, kindly, “I’m not alone right now.”
“No, no, you’re not.” He wants to backtrack. He wants to walk away and think long and hard about where that question came from. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that like—I didn’t mean for it to be rude.”
“It wasn’t. Do you still feel awake?”
The truth is, Theo feels very awake.
Because he knows he has a thousand things he wants to say to Draco, to Pansy, to the rest of them.
Because he wants to keep moving, he wants to keep carrying what he’s been given, and that alone is something he didn’t know he’d ever get back to.
Because Lovegood is standing in front of him with water-soaked clothes. Because she’s tugged on her shirt to straighten it out but it’s hard for him not to focus on the way the fabric bunches up around her elbows, the way it lays heavy across her shoulders, the way her limbs are like bright, gleaming columns, sparkling with the lake’s water.
He’s awake. He is.
But the world could be brighter.
“You won’t tell anyone about this, will you?”
She smiles again. “Not a word.”
He holds his arms in an outstretched V near his sides, palms out, fingers splayed, because it feels right. He closes his eyes because that feels right, too. All he can hear is the gentle brush of the lake’s water and the drip-drip-drip coming from Lovegood’s sodden clothes.
He breathes in, and then tips himself forward.
* * *
Theo tries the Great Hall first, and earns himself strange looks from every member of the famous trio when he squints too forcefully in their direction. Then he walks past Ravenclaw Tower, takes a few detours around the nearby corridors, but in the end, he finds her near the Greenhouses, walking between rows of toadstools.
“Hello, Theo.” She looks up at him as he approaches, even waves like she’s greeting a friend. “You look awake.”
“This is before the booze, Lovegood,” he says. “Come with me.”
“What?"
“We’re going out. You should—you can come with me.”
She’s quiet for a few beats, and he’s briefly afraid that he’s overstepped, that he’s thrown at her some strange energy that she can’t or doesn’t want to reciprocate, but the she says, “Do I need to change?”
He almost laughs. She’s wearing something long and drapey and sage-green and he can see the glint of her odd earrings buried in her hair. Part of him wants to see what she’d choose if he said yes. If she’d emerge from her tower with ribbons and even puffier sleeves.
Theo shakes his head. “No. You’re—you’re good.”
“OK,” she says quietly. “Yeah—OK.”
When they want a place to haunt beyond the castle, they go to The Sapid Serpent in Hogsmeade, because they don’t know if they’ll ever be served at The Three Broomsticks again and they’re too nervous to find out. It’s far from a nice place, but Pansy likes the excuse to dress up. The rest of them like placing bets on who gets lost trying to get back to the castle.
He’s too aware of Lovegood by his side as they walk. Hyper-focused on the sound of her footsteps in line with his own. He can’t stop glancing over at her, can’t stop wondering if her eyes are wider than usual, if she’s quiet because she’s Lovegood or she’s quiet because she’s upset. Hogsmeade emerges in layers: first the glow of it beyond the hill, then the gabled roofs of its squat buildings. When their feet hit the first step of rough cobblestone, Theo stops walking.
“I don’t know what I was thinking. This—it’s not your thing,” he says. “We don’t—you don’t have to come. I didn’t mean to pressure you or anything. You don’t have to go inside. Really.”
She looks back at him and he finds it hard to look away, even when she’s so unnervingly silent. She takes a step closer. “Do you know—” She pauses. Glances quickly away and then back again. “I haven’t kissed someone before.”
He blinks at her, unsure if he heard her correctly. “What?”
“I mean—like this. I haven’t kissed someone like this,” she says. “I thought I’d let you know.”
And then she leans forward, and touches her mouth to his own.
He might have expected her to pull away, to stop it short, but as soon as he lets his hands settle against her waist, she seems to press in with more force. And for all of her self-proclaimed inexperience, Theo finds that there’s not a single bit of the sensation that he doesn’t enjoy.
I’m kissing Luna Lovegood.
The thought is so potent, so thrilling, that he doesn’t want to have to let it go. He wants this to stay. He wants this. He pulls her closer. He lowers his arms and hooks them where it feels safe, like she’s a stanchion he needs to grip onto so that he doesn’t slip away, and without really realizing it he’s lifting and pulling more and Lovegood has cleared the ground and it’s no effort at all, it’s more like a declaration, it’s more like he’s trying to say something, trying to say, I’m so fucking awake.
She lifts her head, her lips still parted, her hair falling like a curtain around them both. Her fingers are curled tight around his shoulders. Fixed in place.
And Theo can’t believe it. He can’t believe he’s holding this piece of the world.
“Sorry,” she breathes out. “And—I won’t say anything. I know you wouldn’t—I just promise, OK? Not a word.”
Theo realizes he’s been quiet for too long, that somewhere along the way, she’s misinterpreted his silence to mean discomfort. “Lovegood.”
“You can let me down.”
“Don’t promise that.”
There’s color on her cheeks now, and she’s blinking rapidly, and Theo realizes with a distant sort of glee that this must be what flustered looks like on Luna Lovegood. “Really?”
He nods.
She nods, too. “I’d like to go in,” she says.
“OK,” he replies. “You—we can. We’ll do that. I’ll take you there.”
And he will. He’ll bring her proudly.
But he’s going to hold on to her for a little bit longer.