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The castle is large and loud, a tangled labyrinth of hallways. Its quartz floors and oaken walls pulse with a thousand years of whispered confessions, and students enough to add more each day.
Light falls thickly through the west wing’s stained glass. The shifting designs cast a silhouette theater on the floor that has been entertaining a gaggle of Hufflepuff second years for the past hour. Strains of sunset seem to light the display on fire: when a sixth year Slytherin boy passes, a silver badge glinting on his chest, and stomps it all out, the Hufflepuffs leave smudges of ash on the floor in their scattering wake.
Even grasped in tight control, the castle hasn’t lost its magic. If anything, its alliance with the students has only strengthened. And the walls ever whisper with their ancient secrets.
Fate often finds herself drawn here.
It was a sunny day before evening touched the earth, a soft-skied Thursday, a time when most children would be out on the sprawling grass or playing touch-and-go with the waters of the lake, but most are isolated to their common rooms now. With the departure of the Hufflepuffs—Fate watches as one of them frantically tickles a freckled pear in the fruit bowl painting and they all burst inside—the hallways are mostly empty.
But not quite.
The view shifts to a different angle. There is a girl on a higher level, a good distance from her common room and any of those silver-badged orderlies. She is never entirely alone, hasn’t been for the past three years, but from the way her shoulders are curled in, reddish hair a curtain around her, anyone would think the opposite. She looks like the loneliest girl in the world.
Fate drifts down. Closer, it is an odd sight: this student is not the kind of girl to cry where anyone can see, and paired with the tightened noose of control that has fallen over all the students, this tendency has her sending sharp glances down either strait of the hall between hot, resentful tears.
Ginny Weasley is crying again, and she is clearly not happy about it.
Fate is not one to sympathize. If she were, the world would be all tied up in red knots. But she has always had a soft spot for the youngest Weasley child, and the bad hand that, well, she herself had dealt the girl. It is unfortunate, that she can admit. Fate is no monster.
This silent camaraderie does nothing at all to soothe Ginny. If anything, she crumbles further as the minutes pass, until her wet glares become reddish and irritated and she has to press a hand over her mouth to stop the hiccupping sobs.
“Ugh,” she says aloud, straightening fiercely and pressing the heels of her palms into her eyes. “Stop it, dammit. Stop.”
Her voice is a little scratchy, and makes all the frustration buzzing around her much more real. She looks straight through Fate with an intensity that would have made her shiver—if she weren’t an immortal goddess.
The effect is dampened by the sudden springing of tears back into the girl’s eyes, and then Ginny is burying her face roughly into the crook of her elbow, stifling back another torrent of wet anger. A scarlet thread shifts in the evening light at the movement, tied neatly in a bow around her littlest finger and winding down the quartz floor to the turn of the hall.
There are larger evils at play in this castle, Fate knows. Ginny knows too, and she hates herself a little for crying over this. So it isn’t sympathy that guides Fate’s hand to tug the slender red string that only she can see. The walls will crumble from the weight of all these secrets —let them be whispered where they’re meant to go, for a change.
Fate feels it a beat before Ginny does, that familiar aura of mulled sunlight and sweetgrass. She turns an eye to the mouth of the hall, and the girl just floating inside. This newcomer might be a ghost, but for the mass of dirty-blonde hair that frames a sweet face and dreamy eyes that shift in color like the ocean by the minute. Her footsteps are quiet—unnaturally so, an odd match with the way her throat tremors in the notes of a silent song. She keeps blinking oddly, and notices Ginny only with a vague sort of surprise.
She is halfway down the hall before Ginny glances up, and is promptly startled half out of her skin.
“Luna!”
Ginny’s gasp is punctuated by an embarrassing hiccup. If her face wasn’t already flushed and blotchy, it certainly is now.
Luna Lovegood smiles, but does not return the greeting. Ginny doesn’t notice—she’s too busy trying to push back her hair and wipe the tears away surreptitiously. The corridor air is chilly against her wet cheeks; a window down the hall is open, and the evening is curious.
Ginny doesn’t look at Luna. “Sorry. Spring is such a headache.” She stalls, clearing her throat. “I mean, I have a headache. Because of allergies. And pollen.”
She waits for Luna to add on her own theory. Wrackspurts cause headaches. Drink this, it keeps them away. But Luna doesn’t.
Ginny looks up at her oddly, and then an entirely new expression washes over her face. Her tightened muscles smooth out into exasperation, her messy, goopy lashes flicking. Luna shifts from one foot to the other, dreamy dissonance breaking just a little. She flicks her thick braid back over her shoulder.
“Merlin’s ballsack,” Ginny swears, grabbing her wand to wave in Luna’s direction. “ Finite incantatem.”
Immediately, a half-completed, hummed progression of the B-flat major scale breaks the girl’s silence. Luna stops abruptly on an off-key E note. “Ah, wonderful. Thank you, Ginny.”
Ginny crosses her arms. “Who?”
“A couple of third years. Apparently I make a good test subject. Well-cast, too, I think they’ll pass quite nicely.”
“Hmm.”
“Unless their essays on the subject vanish mysteriously. Odd how that sometimes happens.”
“Good for you,” Ginny says with a decisive nod, leaning back against the wall again. It’s all the invitation Luna needs, and soon the girls are seated across from each other, backs against opposite walls, knees bent. It’s a slender enough corridor so that Ginny doesn’t seem to mind the way Luna’s shoe lines up with her own, the sides of their soles pressed together.
“And then I couldn’t say the riddle, you see,” Luna continues, once they’ve humored silence for a couple of beats, “to get into the common room.”
“We aren’t anywhere near the Ravenclaw common room,” Ginny responds.
“I did walk quite a bit. Lots of nargles out tonight.”
It's the kind of thing that Ginny usually laughs fondly at, but she barely manages a forced-looking smile tonight. She opens her mouth to speak, but quickly closes it again. Luna looks away with a slight furrow between her typically-benign brows.
Silence cools the stone flooring, echoes and tangles with the spiderwebs in the corners of the ceiling. Neither of them try to break it. Eventually Luna’s large gray eyes come back to Ginny, who doesn’t meet them, but doesn’t seem to be avoiding them, either—she’s picking at a gold thread in the hem of her robe, edges frayed from her hours on the Quidditch pitch.
The thread they share, that brilliant scarlet cord that lies messily between them, clashes gloriously with Luna’s robes while almost disappearing into Ginny’s. But that seems to be where the discord ends. The very air mingling between them slips into a comforting harmony, and even the anger still burning around Ginny like fire cools somewhat—a smoldering house all locked up and let to fade.
Odder still, Fate thinks, is the way that neither of them truly seem to grasp the significance of the other’s presence. It almost seems to be assumed. This cord that has stretched across meadows and hills, a brilliant constant between them through childhood, and now still, as they leave childhood behind.
Ginny shakes her head suddenly, blinking hard. Luna’s expression doesn’t change.
“It’s just so stupid,” Ginny says, frustration tight in her voice. “It’s so stupid. Here I am, crying about Quidditch, when that’s the last thing anyone else is thinking about right now—rightly, too. I mean, so what, it’s canceled? Who cares about Quidditch? Harry got kicked out ages ago, and he doesn’t get his knickers in a twist over it. No, he gets up, and he does something. He forms a resistance. God, imagine what this new restriction means for the DA. ” Ginny pauses, before tacking on an obligatory, “damn-that-old-hag.”
Luna nods sagely. “I know. She confiscated my Spectrespecs yesterday.”
“She just took them?” Ginny latches onto this with an inordinate amount of rage. “See? That cannot be in line with the rules. You can’t just take stuff from students because you don’t agree with their fashion sense. I mean, what did you do? Tell her you’re more of a dog person? And those things are useful, too. You need them for… um… well, anyway, you can’t just take a student’s glasses .”
“I’d have thought anyone would be grateful to know if they have wrackspurts swarming them,” Luna adds. “But Umbridge didn’t like me mentioning it very much.”
There is a suspended silence. Ginny snorts, and promptly dissolves into laughter. The tracks down her cheeks give it a hysterical feel, but the sound is genuine. Her grin creases the freckles smattered across her nose. Luna smiles too, watching her.
“Oh no,” Ginny gets out, when she can speak. “You did not tell Umbridge she’s got a wrackspurt problem up there.”
“Yes, I did,” Luna responds. “I also told her that the best way to get rid of them is to think positively. She seemed quite stressed. I don’t think it helped much.”
“Luna, you’re our best soldier.”
“Really? You’re the only one who’s made a patronus yet. That was wonderful, you know.”
Ginny’s grin fades a smidge, and she glances away. “Thanks. You’ll get it soon, too.”
“Harry is an excellent teacher. I think everyone will get it.”
“Yeah, Harry’s great at a lot of things.”
Fate doesn’t think that Ginny means to allow quite so much bitterness into her tone. The words linger a minute between them.
“I mean, good for him. He’s been through a lot. It’s amazing, honestly, he’s the only chance we have at winning this war, and he’s doing an amazing job. Like he does at everything. And I’m not jealous. That’s my brother’s job.” She gives a short laugh, which seems to hang in the air. A minute passes. “Yeah, that was mean.”
“Quidditch,” Luna observes, poking at the rubber of Ginny’s shoe somberly.
Ginny sighs. “Quidditch. Yeah. I mean, I’m good at it, you know? All summer I’ve been training, and before that too, and I just… well. I’ve always loved Quidditch. I was so sure I’d get on the team this year, and then Harry got kicked out, and I was sad about it of course, sad for him and the twins, but… a little happy for me. Like, there’s my chance. And I got in, but…”
Luna waits as Ginny hesitates. Eventually, she just shakes her head, shrugging. “I don’t want it like this.”
“You deserve it,” Luna says. “The position. You are good at it.”
There’s a pause as Ginny blinks, then pushes a hand through her hair, gathering it over her shoulder. The blotches of red on her skin have almost disappeared, but seem now to totter on the edge of returning.
“You’ve come to, like, two matches.”
“And I enjoyed them very much.”
“Thanks,” Ginny mutters. She clears her throat. “Well, anyway, that’s old stuff. Quidditch is properly abolished now. But we had our last practice this morning, and I don’t know what was wrong with me, but Angelica was yelling at me the entire time. I mean, I was horrible, I could barely fly straight. And now that’s all she’s going to remember for the entire year!”
Luna hums. “You left for the pitch with twenty minutes to spare before Care of Magical Creatures. The practice can’t have been more than fifteen,” she points out, quite logically.
“Nations have been toppled in less,” Ginny groans. “My reputation is ruined. Ugh, but it doesn’t even matter, either—there’s a war going on, and here I am upset about Quidditch. God… I’m sorry you have to listen to this. I’ll get over it, I just needed a minute. The Tower’s crazy right now. ”
Now, she is avoiding Luna’s eyes. The atmosphere loses none of its comfort, but some undercurrent sharpens between them, a needle shoved into an unfinished hem. Luna has stopped tapping Ginny’s shoe, and now looks up at her with a mild chastisement.
“I like listening to you.”
Fate smirks as Ginny transfigures herself into a tomato, gaze darting back up to meet Luna’s. “Oh-h. Well—”
“And I like watching you fly, too.”
The half-dried tears on Ginny’s cheeks seem at odds with her current expression.
“But you’re not only good at flying—you’re good at a lot of things, like charms, and the DA, and keeping the nargles away.” Luna is tapping again, and this time, Fate thinks that Ginny notices. “And making people feel lucky to know you. No matter how unlucky you are at seven in the morning on the Quidditch pitch.”
Sunlight paints a vibrant strip of gold between the girls. Articles of dust hang suspended in the air, lit up like raw magic made visible to the human eye for a fleeting moment before the sun trades places with the moon. Fragments of light blink in Luna’s braid and catch on Ginny’s constellation of freckles, while the thread between them weaves from one hand to the other in a flaming promise: a sweet reminder from Fate.
“You make me feel lucky, too,” Ginny whispers.
When Luna smiles, Ginny notices then, Luna smiles with her entire self. Visibly glowing—like the moon. How she hadn’t noticed that before is a mystery for the ages. She thinks she’s fine without ever solving it, just as long as that smile never leaves her future.
Tears are dried, and Fate is satisfied.
She leaves the shadows, tracing a fingertip along the wall as she goes. There is something other than magic in the air—something binding. A barrier has been broken, a new tie knit, and Ginny and Luna remain whispering and laughing in that corridor until curfew tightens its noose. She supposes it’s her fault when both of them get detention.
Fate is unsympathetic. (She pulls a few strings.)
Magic and secrets whisper down corridors, pool in empty classrooms, and tug along strings to try and control the current of destiny. The castle is as loud as it ever was.
But there is a certain peace to be found in the confessions made tonight.