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The war ends. Nothing else does.
He wakes up every night, drenched in sweat, helpless in that way he has never been able to define. In a way that defies even the brightest patronus, no matter how fiercely it digs its hooves into the ground before the charge.
-
The headlines are relentless. Harry thinks if he never hears the words ‘the boy who lived’ ever again it will be too soon. He thinks that he would give anything to have people stop asking him what it was like; what he saw on the other side; how he fought his way back (and everyone always says fought back, as if he dueled death itself); what he will do now that it’s all over.
They all say that, too: it’s over now.
He can’t find it in his heart to correct them.
-
Months later and Hogwarts is still empty, in the formative stages of rebuilding. The damages to the castle have proven difficult to reverse. Dark magic leaves its mark long after the spells are gone. Structurally sound hallways have a habit of collapsing for no apparent reason; staircases repeatedly spin towards rooms that no longer exist; rebuilt classrooms, to the bafflement of everyone, completely negate any magic attempted within their walls, giving rise to an uncomfortable question: what use is a magic school that refuses to let you use magic?
There are furtive talks of building a new school elsewhere, a different school, on grounds untainted by the battle that ravaged Hogwarts from the Astronomy Tower to the Forbidden Forest. When Harry first hears this suggestion, he finds himself weak at the knees. He doesn’t look at any of the other volunteers—a mix of old students and teachers who have been working day and night to rebuild the place that had been Harry’s home, his only home. He looks down the sloping lawn towards the lake, where the Giant Squid has lain quiet for months; he looks towards the greenhouses, now only piles of glinting glass in the sunlight; he looks at the castle itself, where the Great Hall lies exposed like a cracked-open ribcage, its heart pulsing out blood until all of a sudden it doesn’t anymore.
They take a vote a week later. Harry is the only one who votes against the new school. Construction begins a month after that, but this time Harry is not one of the volunteers.
-
He moves to London. It’s grey and cold that winter. He doesn’t see Ron and Hermione very much at all anymore. Hermione is still in Australia with her parents. Ron left a few days after she did to be with her. Harry is surprised by how little it bothers him.
Everything’s changed.
-
He sees her again in a coffee shop in Trafalgar Square. He’d ducked in to get out of the gloomy weather and spotted her almost immediately, sitting in the corner with a book in her lap, a warm cup of tea in her left hand. The steam rising from it in coils turns her nose pink.
He sits down without thinking, and Luna doesn’t look up.
“Hi,” he says, feeling incredibly stupid. Maybe she doesn’t want to see him. It’s not like they’d talked much after Dumbledore’s Army had fallen apart. He remembers the way she had looked in the Malfoy’s basement, her eyes dark and round and huge, reflecting the light from Ron’s Deluminator.
She puts her finger in her book to save her place, closes it. “Hello, Harry,” she says. Her voice is quieter than he remembers. He wonders what changed—her voice or his memory. He thinks, maybe, that it doesn’t matter.
“Would you like a sip of my tea?” she asks him. “You look quite cold.”
“Uh, no,” he says. “I was going to order something for myself anyway. Which I guess I had better go and do. But—thank you.”
She nods at him and opens her book again. He orders his drink. When he turns to leave the shop, his drink in hand, something stops him. He’s not sure what—and though he’ll look back on it later and wonder, he will never quite know for certain.
But whatever it is—fate or luck or chance or just the simple, plain fact that it’s been months since he’s spoken to someone who might, once, have been his friend—it stops him in his tracks, and he does not leave. He sits at Luna’s table again, and this time she looks up and she smiles.
They talk for hours. Luna doesn’t say anything about the war, or Hogwarts, or Ron and Hermione. Harry, in turn, doesn’t mention Malfoy Manor or Luna’s long weeks in the dark. It’s not until the night eventually closes in around the city outside and the shop closes that Harry realizes Luna hadn’t said a single word about Crumple-Horned Snorkacks or Nargles or Wrackspurts or anything like that, either. Not a word.
-
When Harry asks her about it later, she simply looks at him for a moment, as if uncomprehending. He’s about to repeat the question when she finally says, slowly: “None of that matters much to me anymore.”
He understands that more completely and painfully than he is willing to admit.
-
The next time Harry goes to that coffee shop, Luna is there again. She closes her book and looks up when he walks in, like she’s been waiting for him.
“I saved us a table,” she says when he approaches, which confirms it.
They begin to meet in the coffee shop once every two weeks. Then once every week. Then every day.
“I’m getting tired of the menu here,” Harry says when he sits down at Luna’s table for the eleventh day in a row. “Maybe we should meet somewhere else next time.” It’s the first time either of them has acknowledged what they’re doing, that there will even be a next time; it catches him by surprise after he says it.
He expects Luna to give him a strange look, perhaps ask him what it is, exactly, that he thinks they’re doing here. He expects her to raise an eyebrow, possibly walk away. He expects her—if he’s lucky—to maybe smile and suggest a restaurant for lunch tomorrow, or perhaps that night.
Luna doesn’t do any of those things. Instead, she looks down at her hands lying on the table, and Harry becomes uncomfortably aware of how easy it would be to touch her.
She says: “Do you want to run away with me?”
He considers. It doesn’t take him very long. “Hell yes, I do.”
-
When she kisses him later, he gladly parts his lips beneath hers, like he’s been waiting for her.
-
They don’t tell anyone that they’re leaving. They don’t tell anyone where they’re going, either, because they aren’t exactly certain themselves. Somehow, it doesn’t seem to matter much. Not anymore.
Harry withdraws a significant amount of his money from Gringotts, instructs the rest to be donated to the construction of the new school, and has his withdrawal exchanged for Muggle money at the front desk. The goblin who makes the transaction looks at Harry like he’s gone mad, his eyes flicking up to Harry’s scar, then down to where his hand is linked with Luna’s.
“Have a good day, Mr. Potter,” the goblin says, somewhat dubiously, when the transaction is finished.
“You, too,” Harry says, with more genuine cheer than he’s felt in a long time.
When he and Luna are standing on the marble steps outside, blinking at the sunlight, Luna says, “You know, I’m a bit disappointed that I didn’t get to leave on a dragon.”
Harry laughs.
-
They wander, mostly. Neither of them particularly cares where they go, so long as it’s somewhere they have never been.
By some unspoken agreement, neither of them uses magic. On the fifth day, Harry stuffs his wand in the bottom of his bag and leaves it there.
-
Luna starts to write some nights, when Harry is trying and failing to sleep and she is sitting curled in the chair of whatever hotel room they’ve rented for the night. He catches her at it, the pen held tightly in her fist, her long blonde hair getting in her eyes. He remembers, for one painful moment, the sound of a quill on parchment; the creative ways that he and Ron had always tried to get around the length requirement on their essays in school. The memory passes.
“What are you writing?” he asks her, sitting up. He’s surprised; he thought he'd been about to say come to bed instead.
Luna doesn’t look up. “Stories,” she says.
And so they are.
-
“Do you believe in magic?” the boy asks.
“Let me tell you a story,” says the girl. “It starts with a question just like that one. It ends with a rampaging Crumple-Horned Snorkack.”
“A what?” the boy says, alarmed.
She tells him.
-
“Will you publish these?” Harry asks some time later, when he reads her stories again.
She shrugs. “Perhaps.”
(When she finally does, years from now, she sells the stories to Bloomsbury Publishing. They are one of Britain’s major publishers of children’s fiction.)
-
In a tiny little town called Northdale, they see a ‘for sale’ sign in a run-down building on the main street. Harry asks the owner about it and learns that it used to be a pub, with an apartment on the floor above.
“What do you think?” Harry asks Luna, who is looking around the now-empty pub with something like interest.
“I’ve always wanted to own a bookstore,” she says after a moment, and Harry tells the owner that they’ll take it.
+++
One day, years after they leave their lives behind and travel the country and open a tiny little bookstore in a Muggle villaged named Northdale, a young woman comes into their store, hand-in-hand with her son, who is five years old and quiet in the way that most young boys aren’t.
Harry watches the young woman point at Luna and say something to her son that Harry can’t hear. The boy hides behind his mother, who sighs and walks him over to the shelf where Luna is checking the books against the store’s inventory.
“Excuse me, miss,” the young woman says. “Are you Luna Potter?”
Luna turns around. “I am,” she says.
The young woman’s face breaks into a warm smile. “It’s so nice to meet you! This is my son, Joshua. He loves your books. Tell her, Josh.”
The boy looks up at Luna, wide-eyed and starstruck.
“He wanted to ask you something,” the young woman says, “but I suppose if he’s not going to do it, we’ll have to leave, won’t we?”
This snaps Joshua out of whatever trance he’s in. He mumbles, resentfully, “It’s a stupid question.”
Luna kneels beside him. She’s smiling a little now, but her gaze is very far away. “There’s no such thing as a stupid question,” she says.
Joshua nods. “Okay.” He chews at his lower lip for a moment. “I like your stories a lot. I made a Crumple-Horned Snorkack puppet with my friends. It’s pretty bad but I like it.”
Luna smiles. “Thank you. I would love to see it. I’m sure it’s lovely.”
Joshua blushes. “I just wondered, miss, where you got your ideas from. They’re so….” He trails off.
Luna doesn’t answer right away. Instead, she turns, and she looks at Harry. Her eyes are pained, and bright.
“If you try,” she says now, to Joshua, “you can find magic anywhere you look.”
-
They call the store Lumos, of course.
Their wands, crossed, decorate the shop’s front window. Neither has cast a spell in years.