Chapter Text
“Do you wanna – wanna go out with me, some time?”
Luna should have seen it coming. She had noticed that Neville had feelings for her a while ago. She had not thought he had realized that too. No matter how lovely and kind people were, they still were not used to seeing her under that light. It was fine, she was quite in peace with the way her friends saw her.
She agreed to date him, of course. Neville was expressing a desire of his, the least she could do was to encourage that kind of behaviour. And truly, people like him should be encouraged more to express their minds more – they had truly wonderful thoughts. The agreement did not come from any altruistic part of herself, though (don’t interpret it like that). As it happens, Luna had been in love with him since her fourth year. She was also in love with all their other friends – a different kind of infatuation for each of them, all of the feelings falling into the same range of emotion. Hence, she agreed to date Neville because she was enamoured of him, but in her mind, she knew she would have agreed to Ginny, Harry, Hermione or even Ron, if they asked her. Thankfully, they had those feelings for each other because she did not think any of them were ready for a polygamous relationship.
It was not that Neville was not special, because he was very much so. He brought an unwavering sense of presence to them, devoted and steadfast in face of her curious nature. He was always there, willing to support her in each of her inquiries – and those traits were solely his, in all their singularity. It was what made their intimate moments so good, his keenness to bear with everything she proposed at least once. It was also what made their conversations so interesting, the way he opened up to her in whatever subject. There was nothing as exquisite as seeing his own self enlarging beneath his skin, and she was very grateful to have such a close view.
The thing is: for Luna, there was no difference between romantic and friendly love. Actually, there was one (just one) and that was the disposition of the opposing side to pursue one over the other. Desire was an exercise of trust and exploration, which could be born from every relationship of affection. Not many people were of that mind, but then more often than not, the general consensus differed from her own. That was rarely a deterrent to her yet, in that case, Luna decided stating her views would do more harm than good. She doubted she would ever be able to express that opinion, in a way others could understand with their fuzzy thoughts.
Sometimes, she could hear her mum giggling beneath the veil of life. My darling, you didn’t have any sense, to begin with. Luna knew that upon seeing her and her dad, people assumed her mum to be quite similar to them. She was not – Pandora was an extraordinary woman, still, very different from them. Luna blamed the wrackspurts for the common misconception.
Luna understood all that. What she could not put her mind around was what Neville really wanted from her. At first, she thought it was liberation. Her friend was a shy young man, despite all the confidence he had found in the past years, and he could use a safe place to explore the person he had become. Luna had also welcomed the opportunity, and they had delightful moments together. But she had reckoned by the time she was supposed to leave for Hogwarts, they would have grown used to it. It had not been like that. Nevertheless, they had grown a lot into their bodies by that time – and then she had thought they would turn distant, as she focused on her studies and he on catching criminals. That also had not happened: twice a month, she would return home with Hermione for the weekends, and every other day, she would receive an owl from her boyfriend. He wrote several essays on magical plants, using their friends as a comparison, as she replied in a similar fashion. It was nice – exchanging love letters. After he introduced her to his parents, Luna thought for a moment he wanted her to look for the Alethian treasury with him – but he had never heard of it.
She finally realised what he was after when he took her out to that palace, where Muggles kept the portraits they had frozen imprisoned. It was a Sunday in February, and all their friends had gone out too – Harry and Ginny to somewhere in the seashore, Hermione and Ron to the country. The streets of London were filled with couples, and the shop windows displayed hurricanes of hearts everywhere. It was a couple’s day, and Neville was taking her out because they were a couple.
That was also one of the things she should have guessed, her mum’s voice pointed out in her mind. She hadn’t.
There was nothing wrong with them being a couple. Luna would have gladly carried on with their liaison for years and years but, upon realizing the truth about what they were, it was also impossible to avoid the fact that Neville wished to be a very different kind of couple. He wanted to be like Hermione and Ron, who had gone from living in the same tower to living in the same barrack to living in his brother’s house, to end up living in the same house, without ever taking a break from their presences, without anybody batting an eye. He wanted to be like Ginny and Harry, who had barely two months into their rekindled relationship before speaking of their future babies in a casual, humorous manner. But Neville and her – they were never going to be like that.
Thus, as April approached them, Luna made sure to babble about overseas opportunities she was looking into, in the postscript notes of her letters. Neville also replied positively to them, so she guessed he understood that they would not become more, after her graduation. Still, when she told him about the reply she had received to one of the letters she had sent to India, from Magizoogist Naaz herself, he had looked at her crestfallen, as if Nargles had stolen every token of his. Then, he had plastered a mild smile on his face and imbued his voice with fake cheer:
“That’s wonderful, Luna!”
And that was all he said.
There were times Neville wondered, what madness had befallen him to make him believe he and Luna would have grown old together. And then, there were times in which that seemed to be the only option for his future.
He had realized he was in love with her on a rainy morning at the beginning of November, back in ‘97. On rainy days, a dim light washed the corridors of Hogwarts, silence reigning over before daybreak, the sound of drops hitting the slate roof of the cobblestone pathways like a singular silent symphony. It would have been too early in the morning for him and Luna to be in each other’s presence if they had not spent the night together in the Room of Requirement. They were not alone – Michael, Hannah, Ernie, Seamus, Lav, Ginny were also there, none of them willing to be seen returning their dorms past curfew, after charming Dumbledore’s Army: Still Recruiting on the walls of every corridor of the West Wing. Still, they were alone in a spiritual sense – two awakening souls before the crack of dawn, in the midst of a drowsing sea.
Luna had been drawing something on the ground with her wand. It took him a while to understand it was the imprint of their sleeping figures, bundled together with a bunch of pillows provided by the room. When asked about what she was doing, she had answered:
“A makeup experiment, for the Room. It’s very nice of her, to change herself for what we need. I asked her if she could change it, but she didn’t know how to answer. I offered to do her makeup, like Lavender does hers, and though I’m not very good at it, she said yes,” she smiled, her eyes scrutinising the floor, where she had charmed their silhouettes with a zillion of colours.
An experiment. It seemed very reasonable for most of it. It was Luna who had found the permanent charm they had used on their wall writing. People were always surprised by her cleverness as if quirkinesses had anything to do with foolishness. But she was incredibly intelligent, Luna. She was, after all, a Ravenclaw.
“Have you found out the answer?”
“It seems that anything I paint will only stay in this room, though. I suppose we should call it the Friends Room.”
Neville found himself charmed by her so-called experiment and by her, a smile sitting on his lips. Soon after that, they left to change into clean robes for a school day. It was only when he was back to his dorm that he realized the day’s date: 4 November – the day which his parents were attacked by Death Eaters. He had not been awoken by that thought for the first time in many years.
That alone told him he had feelings for her. He had not said anything at the time, not sure what was he supposed to do with them. And then, it was too late – he would be forever haunted by the memory of the Death Eaters dragging her struggling form away from the Hogwarts Express. There was nothing worse than the panic he felt inside his body, frozen by the stunning spell that day at the beginning of the winter break.
They had no news of Luna for the next four months, and each day he had to make do with the understanding that they would have heard something if she were already dead. Neville had never experienced relief as great as the one he felt when Ginny sent word on their mutual friend over the spring holidays. Next, Ginny was gone too – and he was the last of their trio, fighting what had felt like a lost fight.
He had no idea how long he would have been able to keep at it, if Harry had not shown up in the Hog’s Head. Not long, most likely.
After the battle, it had seemed infeasible, not to ask her out. It was their moment, the time of victories, the season of good winning over evil. Those, who were nearly beaten, had turned triumphant, and he was infected by the spirit.
She was enchanting, his Luna. He truly believed that there would be no other soul in the world that complimented him as much as hers. But she was also free, freer than he could ever claim to be. So, when she told him she had to go, he opened the door of her cage and let her fly away. Beautiful, impossible creatures were not meant to be kept hidden.
Those first months were hard – not only because he lost his girlfriend to India, but also because thousands of miles had been put between him and his best friend. That was what Luna would always be for him: all his firsts. The first time he went on a date. The first time he took someone to meet his parents. The first time he was taken to meet hers, one in a house, the other in a hospital. The first time he cried in the arms of a woman different from his grandma or his mum. The first time he kissed someone. The first time he told a woman he loved her, and the first time he made that love into a physical connection. The first time his heart was broken – by nobody else but fate, which had made love be born from people who wished for different futures.
Neville had a hard time, trying to explain what he and Luna were to each other, even after many decades lined with pure friendship. Many years from now, when age has sunken into their flesh and turned their bones brittle, he will ask her about it. She will reply, with the most vacant of the expressions:
“The Persians have a term, nimeye-gomshode. It means the lost half. I always liked to think of us like that.”
“What would that make my wife, then?”
A smile will bloom unadorned, like all her best always are, together with a reply:
“It’s clear, isn’t it? Hannah is the part of your soul that you found.”
And that will make him believe he should have asked his best friend sooner.
The truth, the barest truth of all, is that he was ready to love Hannah. To build a life with her was the easiest of the tasks, like breathing, or eating – and just like those, it was paramount for living. He could live without the part of his being that was lost to him, but he could not live without his wife. It had just taken his other best friend getting married for him to find out that; after nearly twenty-one years on this Earth.
They were all mad, he suspected.
Hannah had known her husband for twenty-three years (so she was told by her grandmother-in-law) before she got around actually marrying him. Hell, they had lived under the same roof for nearly ten years (first, at a castle and next, at the same house) before they even kissed. By all accounts, any relationship that might have blossomed between them should have done so a long time ago, and yet, they had spent most of that period as distant acquaintances rather than anything remotely resembling a friendship.
Neville had first changed categories in her mind at their first year – from a barely recognisable kid in the parties of her dad’s family to barely recognisable boy in some of her classes, childhood friend of the girl she was becoming fast friends with. For the next four years that would be the summary of his existence in her eyes: the chubby blonde boy Susan would exchange small talk within passing, who also held the dubious honour of rooming with Potter, therefore a good person to ask about when the Boy-Who-Lived (or his two cronies) would be leaving the Hospital Wing for the zillionth time (which was kind of a recurring subject on the Hufflepuff dorm).
The fact is: her view would not have changed much had not been for Dumbledore’s Army and Cedric’s death, and Hannah absolutely hated that she owed Umbridge in some way for that. Even so, it was impossible not to grow close with him, once exposed sufficient hours to his presence. He was a boy disarmingly different from most others, and quite different from your average Gryffindor – a real klutz, too. They were on friendly terms throughout the whole year, yet she had even noticed how much until he sought her out on the Hospital Wing, that day she broke down in Herbology class at the end of the year.
“You’re really brilliant, y’know that?” He had told her, his presence extending the effects of the Calming Draught for a long indefinite time.
“I’m stupid! I can’t even – Professor Sprout’s talking’ and talkin’, and I have no idea what she’s sayin’, all I can think about stupid mandrakes screamin’ in my ears off.”
“Hey, no – I’m here for you, ok? And as it happens, I’m the best of our class in Herbology, lucky you,” he had said in an overtly arrogant tone, ill-fitted enough to elicit laughs everywhere. The humour, however, had allowed her mind to wander to the next problem:
“Oy vey, I made a fool of myself – everyone’s sayin’ awful things, aren’t they?”
“Well, yes. But you’ve faced worse, you got this – we got this. Let’s just take one thing at a time, ok?”
In the end, her breakdown solidified their friendship like nothing else could have achieved. Neville had joined her friends in a common effort to see her through the O.W.L.s, each of them playing to their strengths and, as it happens, he was a wonderful teacher.
Falling for him though, was a gradual thing. He was one the first ones to reach out to her after her ima’s death in what was supposed to be their sixth year if she were not back at her aunt’s. He was probably one of the few people who actually understood what she was feeling and, when he did not, he was eager to listen in. They had exchanged several letters that year, exhausting a poor owl between Hogwarts and Toulouse, and with each letter, she felt the beginnings of a crush strengthening in her heart.
When his seventh year (or her sixth) came, her crush was well-solidified. But romance had been the last thing on both their minds at the time – him too busy leading a rebellion on school grounds, her too busy fighting among his maquis ranks and keeping their fighting spirit – so she had pushed it away. Crushes were something easy to ignore if they remained just that. That one hadn’t. When the fight was over after they were already living together at 12 Grimmauld Place, Hannah realised she loved him, a little, a lot, tenderly, passionately, madly – all the options of a children’s rhyme, but the one that said not at all.
He was dating Luna at the time, though. Watching them together at home had been painful, for they were of truly complementary characters – not as painful as watching him let go of her, so she could pursue her dreams.
Hannah often thought of Luna, back in those days. She admired the way the girl never wavered in her convictions, the manner she did not think twice before asking someone to take her as an apprentice, moving all the way to Asia to study magizoology. She also envied the other. Hannah didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life, not after everything that had happened. She had not returned to Hogwarts for her seventh year – it was simply too disturbing, to be taught at the same place her classmates and friends had died. Sometimes, she wondered if that made her weak – Ginny had returned, and so had Hermione and they had suffered more than anyone.
The job at Leaky Cauldron had been a good distraction. It was an easy walk from 12 Grimmauld Place, for when she was in a more contemplative mood, preferring a walk over an Apparition. People were always coming and going through the pub, a good portion of those turning into customers seeking a listening ear, yearning to share their woes. Tom was a great boss to have, introducing her to patrons as one would to a group of friends. It was also a great place to come across familiar faces – everyone passed the place to get into Diagon Alley, meeting her friends on the job was part of her daily routine.
It was also there that Hannah allowed her imagination to run wild. Neville developed the habit of dropping by for a pint of butterbeer in the evening and, on those occasions, it was easy to imagine them together – the presence of Luna fainter outside of their home, which was full of little reminders. In the wake of their separation, his appearances grew even more frequent, longer too, a number of times he would stick around until after she was finished closing up, mind set on escorting her home. For the next year and a half that would be all there’s to them: drinking companions, close friends sharing their secrets and every thought conceived by their brains, except those that mattered the most.
Perhaps, they would have carried on like that. Perhaps, she would grow tired of waiting for him to move on. Perhaps, fate would have smiled upon them even if Harry and Ginny had not decided to tie the knot.
As it was, they went to their wedding together – as friends, of course. They went home together too (obviously, as they lived in the same house). They had repeated that same routine countless times over the years by then, nothing uncommon about it. But that time, they woke up in the same bed, and there was something very special about that.