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It’s seventh year when you realise, you’re completely and utterly fucked, because she’s beautiful and kind, and not in the overly saccharine, cloying manner you so often are.
You try to avoid it, as you do everything because you’ve always believed, sentimentalities are best that way - hidden in the alcoves of your mind or felt only behind the comfort of tightly pulled, thick, burgundy bed curtains and the soft magical whirrs of a silencing charm the nights you can’t help but cry as you think of Fred, or Luna when you dare let yourself, or nowadays seemingly anything, really.
You know feelings are better this way, kept. You can’t have others knowing how you’re fairing, because you’re captain of the Quidditch team and in line for the Harpies coming next autumn, if you continue playing the way you have been. You need to be taken seriously because it’s the only career that sets your veins on fire when you think about it, and you can’t imagine yourself doing anything else.
You know it’s better to keep your emotions buried because Fred is already in the ground, and you were raised with six brothers your whole life who saw anything girl in you - and Luna is nothing, if not, girl - and teased you relentlessly for it. You know they meant well; they’d never known better before you came along, but you can’t help but feel stilted emotionally. You don’t have many female friendships, you never have, and you’ve never truly wondered why. Now, you’re almost sure it must have to do with your lack of knowledge on your own wants.
You can’t help but relate to boys more when you get to Hogwarts in first year. Merlin, it only makes sense with the way you grew up: getting scraped knees and muddy trousers in the cornhusk fields behind the Burrow every day and how, if you were being honest, you practically managed flying on a broom before you mastered the art of walking without tripping over your own feet. You relate to their brashness and their abandon-the-preliminaries, cut-to-the-snitch attitude.
You relate, because it’s yours.
It’s never really bothered you in the past, but now, something feels like it’s missing. You feel it when you see groups of witches galavant down the corridors with their pinkies crossed or when two friends are huddled up by the warm, warm fire in the common room sharing secrets that you know you’ll never get in on. It makes a weird feeling lurch in the pits of your stomach. So, you get closer to your few female friends and start conversing with Alicia and Katie after practices to try to fill the void with their girlhood and kinship.
And you date boys. A lot of them. You even venture with a Slytherin boy, for some time, thinking maybe the novelty and practically vetoed nature of that particular inter-house relationship might make you feel more alive, but instead, you never feel emptier.
You feel so hollow, you are surprised you don’t go tumbling off your broom with the slightest wind. Sometimes, you can’t stop yourself from wishing you do fall - not in love, of course, you’re starting to fear that’s already happened, but off your broom to some kind of hopeless death.
You don’t actually want to die, but the idea of nothing is comforting in a way you’re aware it probably shouldn’t be. It would be easier, that you’re sure of, but you know you can get over this.
You have to, like Dragon Pox or some fever you finally seem to break after forever. You’re strong, and you know you can bypass this if you set your mind to it. You have to, you really, really have to, because Mum only had one girl and you’re already far from the soft, feminine ideal you know she’d prayed for. You’re rugged with harsh edges and a sharp tongue whereas other girls are smooth and agreeable and too empathic for their own good.
You have to let her have this. Your father, too. You have to let them host your boyfriend. They’ve done the honours of welcoming too many girlfriends into the family already. You can’t be a girl who plays Quidditch and likes witches as well. The stereotype alone makes you feel small.
You have to forget about her golden, golden hair that reminds you so terribly of those same cornhusk fields you paraded through with resolve all of your youth, and her cerulean blue eyes as bright as the day sky overhead. It won’t do you any good to visualise the faint scar on her chin from one of her invisible creature escapades and the way her wand always dwindles just slightly behind her ear, or how her smile seemingly brightens the moment you walk into a room.
You convince yourself it’s a trick of the light.
By Hallowe’en, you have to snuff the flame out under your feet every time you’re around her, and you fear she’s suspicious of you, even if she has the courtesy of never saying anything. You tread ashes with you in every footstep, like prints in the snow in winter except darker - far, far darker. You can’t help but feel like a murderer, like you’ve remorselessly smothered this precious thing in the wake of fear. You know you shouldn’t, but part of you goes on selfishly glad that the waves of your affection seem docile enough to harbour now, close enough to the bay to be observed carefully.
You watch them happily once Christmas comes, but you should know it was all a mirage; a lull before the inevitable storm that comes down around the Burrow in flurries a few hours shy of the twenty-fifth. You can’t believe it when she’s at your door with her outrageously large boots and tousled locks and scarlet dew cheeks.
“Happy Christmas,” Luna says gleefully, and you don’t even have time to reply before Mum is beckoning her inside from the cold and handing her a mug of steaming hot chocolate and marsh. You know then, with great woe, that all of your efforts were for nothing. That these feelings are here to stay, despite your wishes.
You rest your tired body in the furthest corner of the sitting room and observe all the festivities from afar, almost as if you’re a stranger. You watch as Fleur and Bill talk to Dad about something animatedly and Hermione and Ron grab seconds, or maybe even thirds, of treacle tart as Harry and Alicia fawn over Teddy. They’ve been dating for a little over two months, and somewhere in the back of your thoughts, you think you should have gone for Harry when you’d been given the chance. Maybe then, everything would be okay.
What you don’t do, what you can’t do, is look over to where Luna and George are whispering in the furthest possible corner from your corner.
You stay like that all night, feigning joy, and here and there, helping Mum with setting more plates of food out long after everyone is stuffed. And knackered. So pissed off Firewhisky, you barely notice when everyone starts going off to bed. It takes a gentle hand on your shoulder to pull you from your drunken stupor.
“Do you want to go outside?” Luna asks, her voice soft and low. You feel your face redden on impact at her words, because your walls are lowered and you’ve been avoiding her all night like a child does their parent after they did something naughty.
You nod faintly, desperately hoping she didn’t see your body’s betrayal.
You stand up and make your way towards the door, grabbing your coat and lassoing your scarf around your neck in haphazard loops. You don’t pay attention to Luna doing the same. Instead, you tap your foot on the floorboards as if you’re impatient and can’t be bothered waiting around.
“Warming charms, girls,” your mother calls from the kitchen as she finishes the last of the cleaning. “It’s cold out there,” she warns as she saunters to the staircase, exhausted.
“Okay, Mrs Weasley,” Luna hums.
“Just Molly, dear,” she says. “And the snow is quite high, melt some of it if you have to.”
“Will do. Sweet dreams, Molly,” Luna utters gleefully, and you can’t help but laugh because it sounds awfully funny off her tongue. And you’re drunk and even Mum is smiling.
And suddenly, this Christmas doesn’t seem too bad at all. Maybe, it really is because you’re too inebriated to care, or maybe it’s simply because you refuse to stomp out the fire of Luna’s joy and your feelings for her, especially on a night as cold as this one. For once, you decide to just revel in it.
“It really is cold,” you say as you both take the first step out, checking the density of the snow beneath your boots. You barely sink, so, you bimble forward until you get far enough away from any potential peering eyes inside, and then, you feel Luna take your hand as she plops both of you to the frozen ground in heaps of outerwear. You laugh, and she laughs. And you think of Luna’s house that isn’t so far away, the one shaped like a chess rook, and how in your youth you both played by the creek in the backyard and dressed up in gowns from your mothers’ Yule Ball days. You feel something deep inside of you twist, and you hate that you can’t spot when everything changed. You question if just maybe, you’d been wrong this entire time. Maybe, you’ve mistaken lack of girlhood for desire.
“Here,” Luna says, swaying her wand in the air as you immediately feel the effects of her strong warming charm. “You said you were cold.”
And when you look up at her, you know, like you know, like you know. She is beautiful and unfathomably kind, and you know, like you know, like you know, that it’s more than desire. It’s love, and it’s so bright and tugs so feverishly at your chest that you can’t help but lurch forward and press your lips to hers. It’s warm and soft and so full of love that you can’t help but let a tear fall down your cheek.
And you know, like you know, like you know, that you will go on tomorrow to call it a drunken accident. And you know, like you know, like you know, that you will marry a man. You’ve always liked boys.
And you know that Luna will marry one, too. You will be her maid of honour, and she will be yours. And you will have children and get drunk on elderberry wine, like you are now, except it will be different, and you’ll speak of them and your husbands and husbands’ family like middle-aged women do. And you’ll be the best friends that played in the babbling brooks as children and survived a war, and mistakenly kissed one Christmas when you’d both been grieving from all the death and destruction that took place not so long ago, and that’s all it will mean.
You won’t stop to study the marking on her chin or the way her hair shines like gold gold gold daylight. You won’t get lost in her empathy-wide gaze or the way her fingers are always twiddling twiddling twiddling with something. You won’t even recognise such details. You’re sure of it.
You know, like you know, like you know, one day, you’ll forget.