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Luna marries someone by the name of Rolf. You don’t recognise him apart from his last name - Scamander - that was plastered on one of your school books growing up. You reckon it must be his father or grandfather, and you don’t care.
You tell yourself it doesn’t change anything.
Harry tells you over supper with Alicia when you’re twenty three. You still live at your mum’s, having had a slew of failed boyfriends, and you force yourself not to look up from your cuppa. Don’t show a care, you think to yourself.
You feign nonchalance so hard; it’s too good. Harry asks if you’re happy for her, and that’s right; you’re supposed to be friends. You’re supposed to care about what happens to her - whom she marries, whom she doesn’t, what country she’s currently venturing across.
You nod enthusiastically.
They met in north Albania on some special retreat to find a creature whose name Ginny couldn’t remember even if she forced herself to. He’s supposedly so much like her; Harry said so himself, and you don't care.
Another year passes and you don’t think of her.
You’re twenty-four when she comes back to Scotland, ring on her finger. She shows up at the Burrow and wraps her arms around your neck when she sees you, and you’re reminded of her scarlet dew cheeks and abnormally large boots.
You don’t stay after that night. You don’t watch her get married in a tent right outside like Bill and Fleur did, because you don’t care and why stick around?
You make it to the muggle world when you’re twenty-five. Luna lives with Rolf in her giant chess rook house, the one right across the cornhusk field and up a few hills. She inherited it after her father died a few weeks after her wedding. You didn’t go to the funeral either, and there’s really no excuse for that. You sever any potential lines of friendship that may or may not have still existed.
You can’t stay. You couldn’t even before Xenophilous died.
You marry a muggle when you’re twenty-seven. You have been in the muggle world for the last two years, and you met him six months in at a market in Prague. He’s kind and loving, and he makes you laugh until your sides hurt. You don’t tell him about your magic. You don’t tell him that you don’t care about Luna.
You leave it all behind. You don’t look back.
You know your mother hates you. She’s tried to reach out so many times, and you disappear any time she gets close to finding you. You make stories of stalkers and an abusive past to your husband, so he’s willing to get up and move at any moment’s notice.
You know Ron doesn’t understand, and Percy blames himself somehow, and Charlie doesn’t come home from Christmas as much and spends all his time in Romania because you were always his favourite, and Bill believes you’re dead because the alternative of you purposefully never watching Victoire and Dominique and Louis grow up is too much for him to bear, and George… you know he manages to find a way to make all his new inventions for Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes be about you, or Fred, and it hurts.
You don’t even know what Fred would feel if he was still around. You don’t even try to imagine how your father feels about his only little girl leaving him.
You don’t want to.
The only one that finds you is Harry. He doesn’t give up, and with his auror training, you’ll be damned trying to evade from him forever.
When he finds you, you’re twenty-nine, and his beard already has greys, and you want to cry. Because it shouldn’t be this way. He’s so young. He hugs you, and you question why you left, even if you also know you won’t come back.
It’s been too long. You can’t.
You try to have kids. You try so hard, and it doesn’t catch. Your magic is poisoning you. It’s fighting back. It won’t settle for small spells once every few weeks when you’re alone or your husband is turning a blind eye. You know it’s battling against any chances of you getting pregnant, and you shouldn’t be happy about that, but you are.
You can’t be a mother, not when you have lied about everything. Not when you call your mom Molly around your husband (to keep up the charade of a horrific childhood), but inside your head your brain screams mum, mum, mum on repeat.
Your husband is patient, and you try for years and years and nothing works. You never get pregnant. The last years, you pick up smoking and drinking, and you become bitter. You let some of your lies slip through the crevices of your fingers, and your husband doesn’t trust you anymore. Because who lies about trauma?
What he doesn’t know is, the truth is so much worse. You have been a soldier from fourteen onwards, and it’s never really left you.
He leaves you when you’re thirty-four. You think you have always been pushing him into it. You never even wanted any of this, and you feel terrible because he’s genuinely a good man despite the words he screamed at you in the end.
You deserved them.
He tells you about the chess rook girl. You didn’t even know he knew about her. You must of brought her up drunk, and you hate him for speaking of her. You don’t care for her. She’s a fragment of the past. She’s childhood and adolescence and all those terrible years you wish you didn’t have to recall.
Harry finds you later that year. You’re almost dead on the bathroom floor of your tiny one bedroom flat you downgraded to after the divorce, and he threatens that he’ll break the unbreakable vow you made with him so many years back when you’d made him promise to never tell anyone anything about you. You’d threatened suicide.
He swears he’ll break it. He doesn’t even care if he dies. He tells you that you need to come with him right now. You don’t have any fight in you left to deny him.
He brings you home, and when you get there, there are gasps and tears. There aren’t screams like you imagined. Everything is blurry. You’re so sick. You’re vomiting in one of your mum’s bins, and Merlin, she’s got wrinkles and she still looks at you with all the love of the universe in her eyes, even despite all of your differences. Your father sobs, and George and Charlie are rendered speechless. The others linger when they get there, but Ron, well Ron, he almost dies on the spot.
Hermione has to hold him from falling. They look so bloody in love. They have children, and you hate yourself. You know they did, but it’s not the same seeing them. Hugo and Rose know your name. They call you aunt almost instantly, and you’re crying. You’re crying so hard.
And when she hears your home, Luna comes running. She comes running as if no time has passed at all, and she’s wrapping her arms around your neck and her hair is still akin to the corn husks and age has only made her more beautiful.
You can barely look at her, because she’s so beautiful.
She’s got a little girl, and Rolf and her had an amicable divorce a few years back. And Harry is no longer with Alicia. He came out a couple months ago and is with Malfoy of all people. Part of you wonders why he never told you, and you feel bad that every time he visited you he forever made it about you, because you couldn’t handle hearing of the wizarding world or the people in it.
And you all walk together, Ron and you and Hermione and Harry and Luna, and you can’t help but think this is war when you see Hermione’s fingers tremble. When you hear of Luna’s divorce because even if Rolf had went to Hogwarts he was never on the frontlines and he couldn’t understand what it was like. It makes you understand why Harry is with Malfoy, and why Hermione and Ron cling to each other like somewhere deep, deep down they’re afraid they might still lose each other.
These are the effects. The ricochets. The casings.
You all meet with each other every day for months when you come back, and then it skips a few days but it’s consistent. You learn to fit in again. You learn to wield your magic in a way you never thought you’d be able to again. It cures part of you. Your joints unfurl and something even deeper in your chest does too.
Something that still always seems to tighten when you’re around just Luna, though.
You’re thirty-six when you’re walking with her by the creak in her garden. Her daughter is fast asleep inside, and you’re smoking a fag leaning back against a tree. You haven’t been able to shake that horrible muggle habit you picked up yet. You tap your foot pretending you’re impatient or you can’t be bothered.
But you’re so bothered.
It brings you to Christmas night when you were seventeen.
She looks at you like no time has passed at all, and you feel so young. You feel the adrenaline and the youth and the want.
She gets closer and looks up at you.
“When has it been long enough?” she says, as if it’s the most simple thing in the world.
“For what?” you whisper.
“For me to tell you that I know you love me, and I love you too,” Luna whispers as she stands up on her tippy toes and presses her lips to yours.
You kiss her back.
Because you know, like you know, like you know.
And you know, like you know, like you know, this time, it will be different.
This time you know, like you know, like you know, you won’t let the war, internal or other, win.
This Christmas, you’ll snuggle with her on your mum’s couch and won’t let go.