Chapter Text
The sun broke out from behind the clouds as Rolf walked out onto a rather empty bazaar street. The heat of it nearly made him want to take off his jacket, but he knew he would be punished for it by the wind of the cold desert. He watched as the sunlight danced across the towering ochre mountains that were lining the horizon. There were few streaks of snow glistening right at their summit.
“Rolf!” Charlie’s voice snapped him out of his trance, and his gaze found his friend: waving from the end of the street with papers in his hand. He jogged towards him, ignoring the half-hearted calls of the few street vendors braving the winter to sell potatoes.
“Did you get it?”
Charlie thrust the hand drawn trail towards him and pointed at a route sketched between what looked like badly drawn cliff faces. “It’s this village here, probably three hours of walk into the valley-”
“That doesn’t look like a walk.”
Charlie waved him off impatiently. “Their sheep have been attacked. The Muggles believe it was the snow leopard-” he cocked his eyebrow. “But unless this leopard can breathe fire, I say we are looking at a rogue Chinese Fireball.”
“No chance of Muggles setting fire to their flock after the leopard attack?”
“And why would they do that?” Charlie asked.
“Some superstitious belief about dead livestock would cover it,” Rolf shrugged.
“You really don’t think it could be a Chinese Fireball?”
“Most Chinese Fireballs we know of are cooped up in the Brazilian reserve. I highly doubt that’s the creature we will find.”
“And what would we find?”
“With my luck? The most ‘fantastic beast’ we would see is a Niffler,” Rolf said dryly.
“The most fantastic thing about that - it’s in the wrong country.”
Rolf rolled his eyes. “Have you contacted the reserve?”
Charlie sighed. “With all their dawdling, I might as well take the dragon -” he corrected on seeing Rolf’s sceptical expression “- on the off chance it is one - back to Romania. But they said they will be here soon. Very lax about the whole International Statute of Secrecy, that.”
“Says the person who smuggled Norberta on the say-so of his little brother,” Rolf grinned at him. He surreptitiously pulled out his wand from his khaki trousers and tapped the small bag he had slung on his shoulder. It expanded into a rucksack.
“Thank Merlin’s most baggy Y-fronts that you didn’t say this in front of Ministry employees this time,” Charlie folded the hand drawn maps and gestured towards the street turning. They walked into a square full of rickety taxis, hemmed in by mud houses that were caked with white paint.
“He is your brother.”
“You clearly don’t know Perc-” Charlie stopped in his tracks and gawked. “Luna?”
Rolf’s heart stopped at the sight of a young woman with long dirty blonde hair, wearing a long woollen robe (which could be her attempt at recreating local clothes), reading a magazine near the kiosk labelled “Tourist Information Center."
It couldn’t be.
But it was her, right down to the radish earrings that clashed horribly with her robes. She looked up at Charlie’s call, her already large eyes widened and she hastily stuffed the magazine into her beaded bag.
"Hello Charlie," her voice had the very same sing-song quality of wood nymphs (gentle creatures, unless threatened) that Rolf remembered. Her face had the same remarkable serenity, a dusting of pale eyebrows over her faraway sky-blue eyes. “Hello Rolf,” she added.
“You know him?” Charlie asked, surprised.
“We met at a naturalist conference a year ago,” Rolf managed to croak.
“We slept together,” she told Charlie, fiddling absentmindedly with her beaded bag and not paying mind to Charlie’s bemused expression.
Rolf’s insides squirmed. “We were drunk,” he floundered to provide his best friend some context.
“Does Ginny know about this?” Charlie asked her.
“Of course not, it was only once-” Rolf started, but Luna interrupted with: “Yes, she knows him as the one with the nice smile.”
“A nice smile?” Charlie turned to face him. “Dazzle me, Rolf, c’mon.”
Rolf reddened. “I think we’re straying far away from the-”
But Charlie, who was enjoying this far too much, asked, “So what about his smile?”
“When he smiles, I see his inner child,” Luna said, utterly unconcerned with his embarrassment and oddity of her observation. “I can imagine what 15-year-old Rolf might look like.”
“How super specific,” Charlie grinned. “What about you, Rolf?”
“What about me?”
“What was it for you? The smile, the eyes?”
“I’m not going to answer that,” Rolf said. He turned to her. "You are a long way away from home. What are you doing here?"
"There have been reports of Bigfoot in the mountains here. I’ve come to investigate," she said.
Charlie seemed determined not to catch his eye, so he blurted, "Which reports? It was listed extinct in latest edition of Fantastic Beasts -"
“Never mind,” Charlie said hastily. She had clutched her bag closer to her and her posture had gone rigid. “So which part of the mountains are you headed to?”
She pointed towards the tallest mountain on the horizon behind them, an unmissable sight guarding the sky. A towering near-black mass wearing a crown of snow and ice. “There. That’s the highest mountain here - I think Bigfoot would be there,” she turned to Rolf. “There are plenty of things listed extinct in Fantastic Beasts that are still there in the natural world-”
“Like what?” he asked, his tone a tad impatient.
“Like the Bigfoot,” she said, anger robbing her words of the dreamy wood nymph quality.
“That mountain is inside the snow leopard reserve. We would be going to trails near there as well,” Charlie offered. “We are looking for a mysterious creature-”
“Wasn’t it a Chinese Fireball?” Rolf interrupted. Charlie looked at him as if he missed a point somewhere, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.
“It could be Bigfoot,” Luna insisted.
“I don’t think I recall any research showing Bigfoot breathing fire. Do you?” Rolf shot back.
“I don’t think so,” Luna answered seriously. “I could not find any records of Bigfoot behaviour, although Daddy says-” Her words suddenly hovered in the air, before she let her sentence trail off. Her face crumpled and Rolf felt like he had tripped over Occamy eggs.
More to cut the awkward tension than anything, Charlie unfolded the map. As she moved closer to examine it, so did Rolf, although he had already seen the map. “This is where we are going,” Charlie told her. “Do you want to come along?”
Her lips curved into a smile that lit her face. “I would like that,” she said. “Would it be a problem? I don’t have much supplies on me-”
“Rolf has packed for three nesting dragons. We’ll be fine,” Charlie assured her. Luna looked at him for assent, and Rolf nodded.
-
On the taxi ride to the trail head, Rolf sat shotgun, exchanging stories with their cheerful driver, Rigzin. He could see Charlie in the backseat, obsessing over his notes, and Luna watching the dry landscape rush by her from the rearview mirror. He watched as the wind untangled her blonde hair, bright like the sun in a desert.
He had met Luna a year ago, inebriated at the post conference party. He hadn’t been in the mood to party that day. His grandfather had a cardiac arrest a few days before the conference, and the Prophet had covered it with glee: “Newt Scamander collapses while bowing to pet Hippogriff." Rita Skeeter had pitched outside St Mungos to give live updates on his grandfather’s condition, while he had to present his (quite frankly, tedious) findings at the conference. There was also a ridiculous inquiry set up to investigate Helen, their pet Hippogriff. His grandmother had put an end to that farce. It was a day filled with confusion, anxiety and grief but Luna was there, and she had a graceful column of neck like a Phoenix… and her eyes invited him to a universe away from his own…
She caught his eye in the rearview mirror, and he was startled back into reality from his recollections. She leaned forward, crouching near his seat. “Over there,” she pointed at the sand dunes rising in the valley under the shadow of the snow-clad mountains. “If it snowed on a beach, that would be what it looked like.”
“Snow on the beach?” he couldn’t help smiling at her turn of phrase.
“Or snow on the moon!” she said brightly. “It looks like we are on the moon.”
“It does look like that,” he agreed, strangely relieved that they had moved over their little spat. “Muggles refer to this place as the roof of the world.”
“You know a lot about the place,” she observed, and the tone of surprise didn’t escape Rolf.
He looked out of the window to watch the dunes. “It comes with the job description, doesn’t it?”
“I haven’t seen many naturalists making an effort to learn about the place they go to. Especially if they believe they won’t find anything.”
“Then they are bad at their job.”
He could feel her presence drift away from him. He turned to look at her lean back into her seat. “How come you are in a new country all by yourself?”
She smiled, her eyes distant and unreachable. “I’m not alone. Not now, anyway.”
“That’s not-” he tripped over his words. “I mean, before Charlie and I. Have you travelled out of Europe before?”
“No,” she said. “But no one was commissioning my work, so I had to do it alone.”
“Why?”
“I spent 5 years looking for the Crumple-Horned Snorkack,” her voice uncharacteristically wry. “And all I did was prove it didn’t exist. No one is giving me money after that.”
"If only Hagrid decided who gets the money," Charlie piped in, stuffing the bag with his thoroughly inspected notes. Evidently, he had been listening in.
"Hypothesis gets proven wrong all the time. That's no reason for anyone to not fund you," Rolf said, bewildered.
"You are here because no one else gave a shit when I talked about a rogue dragon," Charlie pointed out. "Even if you don't believe we will find one."
"How else do you test all kinds of possibilities of a hypothesis? Failing to find evidence is not necessarily a failure," Rolf said.
“Do you believe that?” Luna asked, quietly. For a moment, Rolf thought he saw tears gathering in her eyes, but then she blinked, and it was gone. He felt an urge to reach for her hand, but reminded himself that it was a work trip. It wouldn’t do to act familiar because of their brief encounter. He had already slipped up in front of her.
He tried to think of what to say, working through words of comfort without stepping over a boundary. He opened his mouth ready to speak when Charlie answered for him. “The world is a big place. There is plenty of stuff you are going to be wrong about.”
The smile she gave Charlie was laced with tears she didn’t shed.
“Although not all of us are Newt Scamander’s grandson, so we can’t afford to be wrong a lot,” Charlie added thoughtfully.
She laughed, but his own heart clenched. Although his grandfather recovered at St Mungos, his name casually thrown in conversation still unsettled him.
“Hey!” Rolf exclaimed, feeling unreasonably nettled at what he knew was a fair assessment. Before he could register his protest, the taxi tumbled to a stop. Before them was a scattering of mud houses, sitting on folds of the mountain. A vivid blue-green stream cut through the valley, ice lining its banks. They climbed out of the taxi and waved goodbye to Rigzin. Rolf stretched his legs. The taxi had made him feel cramped.
The road had broken off into a downward slope of loose mud and shale. They could see the village trail below. “Reckon we can get away with magic?” Charlie asked, looking at the drop.
But Rolf hadn't been listening, without thinking he bent down and grabbed the strings of undone shoelaces on Luna's shoes. He tugged slightly, making sure they were secure before tying a knot suitable for the walk. He looked up and saw that she was surprised - she hadn’t noticed that her laces were undone. She didn’t think anyone else would either. It was as if she believed she floated through the world like a translucent creature of the ocean - expecting to be unseen.
Rolf straightened up and patted his hands together at a job well done. He looked over at Charlie. "Thanks Mum," Charlie said before sticking his own shoe out as an invite.
Rolf came to him, pointedly ignoring his shoes. “She has bad shoes. Bulky, she would’ve twisted her ankles on those.”
“Thank you,” she touched his arm as she found space to stand between them. He smiled.
"So, magic?" Charlie ventured to ask again.
"The houses are too high up. We will be spotted," Rolf said.
"Why are they high up?" Luna asked him.
"They want to use all valley land for farming," Rolf said. He tested the loose mud with a tentative placing of a foot. “I think we can slide down.”
“You’re on!” Charlie grinned. He turned to Luna. “Do you need help?”
“I’ve never done this before,” she admitted, although her face was shining with excitement. Both Rolf and Charlie held out their hands. She took both. He noticed, not for the first time, how her hand completely disappeared inside his palm.
“Ready?” Rolf asked. The other two nodded as they stood like participants of a three-legged race. They skated down the loose mud of the slope, Luna giving a gleeful shout and Charlie swearing. Rolf let go of her hand when they hopped onto the village trail.
His heart expanded as he took the view in front of him. They were in the bowl of the valley, the houses dotted on folds above them like haunted spectres, and bare poplar trees struggled to break the wind near the stream. Not a rustle was to be heard, and yet Rolf knew the wind was blowing. The silence pressed onto him like an embrace.
“See?” Luna’s voice broke him out of the reverie. She was talking to Charlie, whose hand she was still holding. “That’s the smile.”
“Ah, it’s the dimple,” Charlie nodded solemnly, an odd gesture with his face still flushed from excitement. “I see it.”
“And the crinkle around his eyes. It makes me feel warm,” she said.
“Shut up,” Rolf advised them, although he couldn’t help but grin. “We have a Niffler to find.”
“A Chinese Fireball-”
“A Bigfoot.”
“A Galleon for who wins?”
“This is a bet now?”
“Can I revise my position on the Niffler?”