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There was a broom in the corner, and a mop bucket. Some owl food. A plethora of tinned food and bags of onions and garlic.
She could hear footsteps outside --how many more people? She felt her lungs squeeze again, and with a deep breath, reminded herself to focus on sounds. Three more sounds. Celestina Warbeck playing distantly. Pots and pans clattering on the stove. Her foot tapping on the floor.
Smells --roasting turkey, cranberry and mulled mead. Easy. The kitchen was heady with them. One minute everything was fine and festive and the next, the world started to press in on her and now she was hyperventilating in the pantry.
Where had she left off --two? Two. Things she could feel… the cold flagstone beneath where she was crouched on the floor. Her hands threaded through her hair, pressing the sore spots on her shoulders.
She could taste the rising bile in her throat.
This wasn’t helpful. None of this was helpful. She willed her heart to stop hammering, her breath to even out, her mind to stop racing back and forth as to whether to start the exercise again or simply count her breaths instead. She stared up at the small window that looked out onto the Weasley’s garden, seeing only the newly-darkened evening sky from her place on the floor.
And then the door opened again, a light overhead going on suddenly at the movement.
“Oh hello, Hermione,” came a daydreamy voice. “Don’t mind me. Just...getting some onions.”
She couldn’t respond, Luna’s arrival forcing her to count her breaths. She closed her eyes…
“Well then! Boxed stuffing mix. How long have you been here then? Use by...1987. Hmmm…”
Hermione tried harder to focus on her breath. Tried to shut out everything around her until --
“Are you having a panic attack, then?” asked Luna.
Hermione felt the absurdity of the question reach her in a distant manner. She felt too seen, and wished she’d thought to bring the Cloak so she could disappear. Of course Luna would know. Shell Cottage was not so long ago.
With the door ajar, the voices seemed to be moving closer and closer, leaving Hermione feeling more trapped than ever. The pantry was already much too small with just her there. With Luna puttering about as well, the room turned from claustrophobic to tomb-like. Were she given the choice, Luna Lovegood was not the first person she would have wanted with her at this time. Too often they didn’t see eye to eye, and this was no time for a debate. She wanted to tell her to leave, but it was too many words for her stolen breath, and the need to calm herself was more pressing than her own pettiness.
Hermione wanted to bolt, but couldn’t bring herself to move, knowing that in her current state there would be questions from well-meaning friends and loved ones outside. Questions she couldn’t and didn’t want to face, not in front of so many, not when that number didn’t include the two who she’d traveled to Australia to retrieve. It was the first Christmas since the death of Voldemort, and Hermione refused to be the person to bring the war back home. She refused to let her weakness and regret get in the way of letting others heal.
She focused instead on the way the scant moonlight made Luna’s hair glow, how her protuberant eyes were like torches in the night. A part of Hermione was beginning to be glad it was Luna who found her. Luna did not look at her with stricken eyes, did not flinch away from her pain the way Harry and Ron, despite themselves, still sometimes did. But still she shook. Still the world pressed in on her.
Luna shut the door with a flick of her wand and came to sit by Hermione.
“I don’t think you’ll find this helpful, but...If I was ever really sad or worried when I was little, Mum used to tell me ‘Everything is going to be just fine.’ And, to be fair, things are pretty good right now. We’re all here. Harry’s alive --”
“You’re right,” Hermione bit out. “I don’t find it helpful.”
“Sorry,” Luna said.
“I’m sorry too,” Hermione croaked. “You didn't deserve that.”
“It’s alright.”
Everything was far too near to the surface. Her heart was still pounding in her chest, but Luna’s presence and the shut door had muted the crowd from outside. Already, her breathing had slowed and she felt far more in control of her body than she was a moment ago. She let out a hiss of an exhale and slumped closer to where Luna sat -close enough that her warmth cut through the cold around her but not quite close enough to touch.
“This can’t be comfortable for you,” Hermione said, aware that Luna hadn’t signed up for this.
“No it isn’t.” Luna shrugged, her delicate shoulders shifting under plain brown robes. “But Daddy won't ever think to look for me here either. Too many wrackspurts he would say. So dark, they would get you before you knew where to look.”
A strange undercurrent of anger laced Luna’s words, and Hermione could only look at her in wonder. The tone wasn’t unfamiliar. She herself had been at the other end of it more times than she could be bothered to remember. But it had always been in defense of Luna’s father and his magazine and his strange beliefs.
Luna’s behavior was boggling, and the mystery was tantalizing enough to snap Hermione out of her panic almost totally. As she perused Luna’s figure, more puzzle pieces presented themselves. Luna looked… plain. Plain brown robes. No necklace of bottle caps or radish earrings. No ornaments at all. Luna as she was dressed would actually fit quite well in the party outside. And that was not like Luna at all.
She opened her mouth to ask, but suddenly there was a thud from outside, and a general cry of approval. Hermione tensed once more as footsteps echoed from behind the door. In a second, she had stood wand at the ready, her mind racing to figure out the spells best to get both her and Luna out, nearest apparition points, Harry and Ron --
“George, did you buy the place out of mead?” Bill’s voice came muffled through the door. Bill. Just Bill. Her heart kept racing anyway. Hermione heard the doorknob turn, but no creak of the hinges.
“Hermione, I think we’re stuck,” said Luna, still squatting on the floor.
The line made Hermione’s lip twitch in a feeble smile. All it would take is a vanishing charm on the door really, and they would be good to step out of the room. But Luna rearranged herself to a more comfortable sitting position, and if mere footsteps were enough to startle Hermione into action, she dreaded to think what would happen if she attempted to leave now.
Luna was still staring up at her as she decided what to do. That the Weasleys decided to block the pantry door meant that they had no plans of getting anything from it any time soon. They weren’t looking for her either, and with the mead pouring, it was unlikely that they would think to look for her anytime soon.
Hermione sighed, fatigue clinging to her bones. There was peace and quiet in the pantry. No triggers. A ready exit in case of intruders. And there was Luna - wondrous, baffling Luna - who in her newfound normalcy had somehow managed to be even more confusing than when she embraced her oddities.
She was still pondering on it when Luna’s voice cut through the growing silence.
“If we had a little more light, we could probably prevent the --”
Her words trailed off. Much too curious despite herself, Hermione finished her sentence for her. “The wrackspurts?”
Her eyes flashed in anger, startling Hermione once more. But she did not continue speaking. When the silence had gone on for too long, she sighed and began collecting little jars from the pantry shelves. One by one, she filled them up with her bluebell flames and let them float about. In the cool lighting, Luna’ looked even more ethereal than before.
“How is Mr. Lovegood?” Hermione asked with trepidation. “He was allowed free wasn’t he? Right after the battle ended?”
“He was, yes.” Luna’s voice was surprisingly non-committal, and she gave no further answer.
“And you’re both getting on well with living here?” Hermione pressed. A strange and saddened look passed across Luna’s face.
“We’re getting on well here, but we’re not getting on with each other.”
This was most strange.
“It’s hard to be away from home,” Hermione offered. “Especially when that home’s getting rebuilt. That must be stressful. How much longer do you think it’s going to take?”
“Last I heard it was another month,” Luna said. “Something about getting the right quality of timber for the floors.”
“I suppose you want it just the way it was?”
Luna shrugged in response.
“I feel I should apologise for the damage I caused there.” “What, to the floors?”
“Yes. When Harry, Ron and I were there, talking to your dad, and the --” Her heart started to thud and her chest tightened at the memory. “When we had to escape, I wanted to make sure that Harry was seen so that they’d know your father was telling the truth and keep him alive and...well, anyway, that involved me blasting through the floor so that we all fell through and landed within plain sight of the...intruders.”
“You saved my father?” Luna’s voice was small. Her brows knit together, her large eyes blinking furiously. And then, more pointedly than Hermione would have thought possible, she asked, “Why?”
If there was any trace of the panic attack left in her, Hermione couldn’t feel it.
“Because he was protecting you,” she said to Luna. “Luna, he was distraught. He was so afraid they’d kill you --”
“That he was willing to sell out the entire war to save me,” Luna said simply. “I saw the leaflets when we went back to see the house afterwards.”
“But if he hadn’t have done that, they could have tortured you,” Hermione insisted. She had only spent a few minutes under Bellatrix Lestrange, and it was enough to mark her forever. The idea of someone she loved having to endure that was utterly unbearable. She knew, deep in her heart, that she would break, and it was for this reason among many others that she had sent her parents so far away, erased herself from their minds. They would break her.
“They already did,” Luna reminded her. “I was doing enough on my own already, dealing with the Carrows. I absolutely didn’t mind that he was speaking out against the Ministry and supporting you three.”
“It was so brave of him...perhaps a bit short-sighted when it came to you. But he wanted to do everything he could to make sure you weren’t impacted by his actions,” Hermione reasoned, a note of desperation creeping into her tone. “Luna, I’m sure he’s sorry --”
“No, Hermione, listen: he threw the three of you under the proverbial Knight Bus for my sake. If things turned out differently, I would have lost some of my dearest friends after so many years of loneliness.Yes, I may have survived, but at what cost? The world may have fallen to Voldemort, and I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself, knowing it was a consequence of my father saving me.”
She turned to look at Hermione then, and her eyes were like steel even as tears pooled in them.
“He was wrong, Hermione. I believed in him. I’d always defended him! But when it mattered, Daddy was wrong. I don’t know how to believe in him anymore.” From the hardness, Luna’s voice petered out into whispers and then nothingness. Hermione opened her mouth to reply, but no words were coming to her.
“So that’s why things have been tense between Daddy and me lately,” she said, attempting her normal, daydreamy tone.
There was a strange hollowness now where Hermione’s heart was racing before. Luna, who had never faltered in faith, had surrendered the part that she kept for her father. She remembered quite clearly the way Xenophilius Lovegood shook, how his voice rattled as he pleaded for his daughter. Whatever faults the man may have, failing to love Luna was not one of them. And yet here Luna sat with her, in the dingy pantry of the Burrow avoiding the father who loved her enough to throw the war away for her safety.
“I sometimes think that’s what my parents think of me,” Hermione blurted out, the confession both chains and freedom all at once. “That they don’t know how to believe in me anymore.”
Immediately, shame bubbled within her, her making Luna's pain all about herself. She moved to stand and apologize, but Luna reached out and embraced her instead, the moonlight and the floating jars of flame casting their ethereal glow. She felt Luna’s tears on her shirt, and her own started sliding down her cheeks once more. Unlike the desperate tears that had her looking for shelter in the lonely pantry, her weeping was quiet now, tired and hollowed out as she was at Luna’s revelation. Once more, she was left to plead the case of a fallen father figure for a disillusioned friend. And once more, she could only quiet down the tiny drowning part of herself who wanted to plead her own case too - to ask for absolution because her guilt was as certain as the sunrise.
“It’s not your fault Hermione,” Luna whispered.
“What do you mean?” she asked, her voice cracking. Luna pulled back from the embrace.
“I wish my father could have made the choices you did,” she said, her voice having truly regained its dreamy quality once more.
Luna kept looking at her with those unnerving eyes, and Hermione found herself mesmerized, both relieved and burdened by the absolution of someone who had no right to give it - absolution that was entirely undeserved.
Hermione had hidden wishes too. Little mournful moments of weakness that she was ashamed to admit to. But there was something akin to admiration in Luna’s eyes, and it was just as undeserved as the absolution.
“I wish I could have made the choices your father did,” she whispered. There it was out in the open, the foolish wish that had only grown more and more desperate over the months in the face of her parents’ coldness and rejection. She looked defiantly at Luna, waited for her expression to fall, for the loathing and condemnation she so dearly deserved.
But Luna’s face was bare of any expression outside of mild contemplation. “You would never have,” she said. “You can't, I don't think.”
Luna said the words with her usual mildly interested tone, and it was perhaps the matter-of-factness that turned such simple statements into knives in guts - red hot rods twisting and twisting in her stomach until the pain was nothing less than all-consuming. What could she say to that? What refutations exist that would not be dripping in lies?
Indeed, she would never have. She thought about standing in the sun as her parents told her how Christmas at the Burrow might suit her better. How they liked the Australian sun, how the snow and the British rain no longer felt like home. She remembered their wary eyes, how they tracked her hands and flinched when she moved too quickly.
And here Hermione sat, half a world away from the parents she sacrificed to win a war. Parents who for months she filed away in a folder in her mind neatly labelled as neutralized liabilities. Whose minds she messed with as part of a half-mad contingency to ensure they would not be made tools in war.
Tools for the wrong side, Hermione thought cynically.
You can't, Luna had said. And indeed, Hermione couldn't. She would have never chosen differently.
A dissonant clanking of bottles sounded from outside the door, followed by a soft thud as they landed a distance away.
“I do believe there’s still a party going on,” Luna said.
Hermione acknowledged this with a hollow chuckle, but made no move to leave.
“I wish I could have loved my parents as your father loved you,” she whispered.
“You loved them enough,” Luna answered.
After a moment she climbed to her feet, and offered her hand to Hermione, who hesitated. It would have baffled her how Luna could be so sure, but now she understood: Luna’s capacity for faith, especially when it came to her friends, was inspiring. In a world where children were turned into soldiers, perhaps loving her parents enough that they could be kept safe and away was good enough.
Hermione reached for Luna’s hand and got to her feet, feeling much calmer than she had only a short time ago. Luna smiled at her.
“Shall we?” Hermione asked, taking a deep breath as the smell of more mulled mead wafted in.
“Let’s,” Luna agreed, and together they left the pantry to rejoin the festivities.