Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The noise in the Hogwarts Trophy Room reached its peak exactly fifteen minutes before the start of the celebratory feast for the Day of Liberation from the Mountain Troll. The air hummed with laughter, excited arguments about the latest Quidditch match, and the anticipation of custard pudding. Right in the center of this whirlwind, like two ruby hearts at the core of a tornado, were Fred and George Weasley.

Their red heads were bent together in a top-secret conference. Unable to endure another year under a hail of magical cracker confetti, which, in Professor McGonagall’s opinion, “undermined the foundations of academic solemnity,” they had decided to stage their own, alternative pyrotechnics.

“The dose is precise?” whispered Fred, pretending to adjust his brother’s tie while actually checking an almost invisible seam in the lining of George’s robes, where the main ingredient resided.

“To the milligram, O my brother in folly,” George replied, shining like a copper Galleon. “Professor Snape claims I can’t weigh a mandrake root without ripping my ears off, but for our special recipe…”

“…precision is the mother of unexpected consequences and excellent mood,” Fred finished for him. “The target?”

“To illuminate Filch’s face with the joyful colour of spring foliage. Or, failing that, to make Dumbledore’s hat sneeze a rainbow.”

Their plan was simple and elegant, like a Bludger to the back: one tiny, charmed, self-activating pellet, tossed at the feet of Argus Filch the moment he began his traditional grumbling toast about order and cleanliness. The pellet was supposed to bounce and burst silently, releasing a cloud of colourful, completely harmless, but incredibly bright dust that would dye everything within a five-foot radius in random pastel shades for several hours.

Their first mistake was failing to account for Mrs Norris’s trajectory. The second was that they were unaware of Professor Flitwick’s new passion; he had given a lecture just last week on the unpredictability of magical vortices in enclosed spaces with high emotional resonance.

Fred, with a deft twist, tossed the pellet. Mrs Norris, sensing something amiss (or perhaps the smell of fried trout from the other end of the hall), shot under the table. The pellet, instead of rolling towards Filch, hit a leg of the Gryffindor table and ricocheted straight into the center of the Hall. There, it bounced and burst.

But instead of a quiet pfft, there was a deafening BA-BOOM!, more suited to a barrel of gunpowder exploding. The blast wave, of course, was illusory and harmless, but a powerful vortex of pastel pink, blue, and lemon-yellow dust shot towards the ceiling like a reverse tornado and poured down on the guests in a lush, incredibly sticky rain of confetti that smelled of sweets and… burnt rubber.

Everyone gasped. Then silence fell, broken only by coughing and the bewildered rustle of fingers through sticky hair. Dumbledore, whose beard now resembled rainbow candyfloss, raised an eyebrow with interest. McGonagall paled so drastically that the deadly white colour of her rage showed through the pink dust on her cheeks. Filch let out a howl, scrubbing the sticky blue off his face.

And then all eyes, as if on command, turned to the twins. They stood, trying to plaster looks of genuine shock and innocence on their faces, but from under their pastel-streaked red waves, both pairs of eyes shone with such pure delight at their own grand failure that it could only betray their sheer, childish joy at the chaos.

“WEASLEYS!” Professor McGonagall’s thunderous voice rolled through the hall, making even the sticky confetti on the chandeliers tremble.

At that very moment, on the periphery of everyone’s attention, standing by the exit from the Hall, was Luna Lovegood. Her light hair was tucked under a sort of crown made of butterbeer cork lids and feathers from an exotic bird she called a Blibbering Humdinger. Her robes were also covered in the sticky rainbow dust, but she wasn’t trying to brush it off; instead, she was studying with deep interest how the tiny blue glitter sparkled on the black fabric in the torchlight. She wasn’t watching the explosion, but its consequences—how the magical dust, intended for minor mischief, under the influence of a random vortex and the collective emotional surge of hundreds of wizards, had created something new and beautiful in its absurdity. She saw not a breach of rules, but a transformation of space.

Her wide, slightly protuberant pale eyes slid from the pattern of glitter to the twins. And she smiled. Not a condemning smile, not a patronizing one. But a smile of recognition.

Fred and George, under the crossfire of glares from McGonagall, Dumbledore, and the furious Filch, felt for the first time in a long while not just the familiar excited thrill before punishment, but a slight spark of panic. They were facing something worse than the usual cleaning without magic or a month of detentions. This could mean a ban from Diagon Alley, a letter to their parents threatening the loss of their beloved broomsticks, or worse, holidays under Percy’s unblinking supervision.

And at that moment, their gazes, wandering in search of a drop of sympathy in a sea of faces full of judgment, schadenfreude, or fear, simultaneously stumbled upon Luna. Upon her light head, smudged with rainbow dust, and upon that very smile. She wasn’t laughing at their failure. She wasn’t judging. It was as if she saw some hidden, beautiful meaning in it all that eluded everyone else.

George, who had never paid her much attention beyond being his little sister’s odd friend, froze for a second. Fred, always more impulsive, whispered without taking his eyes off her: “Look. Owl eyes. Seems she’s the only one who doesn’t want to tear us apart.”

Luna, catching their gazes, nodded at them as if they shared some secret. Then her eyes dropped to the floor at her feet, where one of the larger pieces of confetti, the colour of wilted lavender, was slowly spinning in place, as if twisted by an invisible hand. She bent down, picked it up, and carefully placed it in her robe pocket.

“Mr. Fred and Mr. George Weasley,” McGonagall’s voice brought them back to harsh reality. “My office. Immediately. And rest assured, the Headmaster will be informed of the scale of… this outrage.”

Whispers and giggles followed them all the way to the doors. Their procession out of the Hall was like a walk to the gallows, if the condemned constantly tripped over sticky colourful flakes and tried to subtly wipe a raspberry hue from their faces.

Passing by Luna, Fred couldn’t resist. He turned his head towards her and with a quick hand movement, as if adjusting his collar, tossed a small, completely clean, unactivated pellet—a spare from his pocket—in her direction. The pellet rolled and came to rest against her scuffed shoe.

Luna looked at the pellet, then at the retreating backs of the twins. She bent down again and picked it up. It was warm from his hand. She turned it over in her fingers, held it to her ear as if listening for a quiet hum inside, and with the same serene expression, hid it in her pocket next to the confetti.

For everyone in the Hall, this incident was just another story about the mad antics of the Weasleys. For Luna Lovegood, it became the first link. She saw how their intention, colliding with chance (in the form of Mrs Norris and a magical vortex), had birthed not a planned prank, but something much more interesting—a temporary, fragile, sticky, but real rainbow in the middle of a grey stone hall. She saw the alchemy of chaos. And it was beautiful.

And for Fred and George, sitting on hard chairs in McGonagall’s office to the accompaniment of her icy tirade, a memory suddenly surfaced—not the angry face of the Headmaster or his shining beard, but a single face with large, light eyes looking at them as if they had just shown her the most amazing constellation in the sky. And it was strange. And somehow... pleasant.

The punishment was harsh but predictable: two months of detention with Argus Filch without the use of magic wands (which was Filch’s greatest joy) and a strict ban on conducting any experiments outside the walls of their Gryffindor bedroom until the end of the school year. For the twins, whose life was one continuous experiment, this was tantamount to a sentence in Azkaban.

Which was why the next morning they were trudging down the marble staircase, hunched over and yawning, heading to the site of their hard labour—the storage closets behind the Trophy Room. The air still smelled of yesterday’s sweetness, and the house-elves were scrubbing with quiet desperation at the rainbow film on the portraits of the knights.

“I can still smell that burnt caramel in my nostrils,” grumbled George, trying to unstick his sole from another sticky spot on the floor. “It’s like a sweetshop exploded inside me.”

“But imagine Percy’s face when he discovered his Prefect badge had turned a delicate polka-dotted pink?” Fred snorted, and a grin appeared on his tired face.

At that moment, Luna Lovegood rounded the corner. She walked, as usual, with a slight waddle, gazing somewhere into the space above people’s heads as if tracking the flight of creatures invisible to others. Around her neck today was a necklace of multi-coloured beads, which upon closer inspection turned out to be buttons. In her hands, she carried a stack of old, battered issues of The Quibbler.

Seeing them, she didn’t flinch or try to avoid the meeting. On the contrary, her face lit up with that same recognizing smile.

“Good morning,” she said in her dreamy, singsong voice. “You’re shimmering. Literally. You still have some of the Aura of Random Jubilation on you.”

The twins exchanged glances. Fred winked at George and turned to her with the most gallant smile he could muster at seven in the morning after four hours of sleep.

“Miss Lovegood! A ray of light in our kingdom of humiliation and decay. You, I see, have avoided the consequences of our… uh… unintended festival of colours?”

“Oh, no,” Luna answered seriously. “I specifically didn’t wash it off. Dad writes in the latest issue that Rainbow Unicorn Pollen, if it settles on the skin, attracts Good Fortune. And the one from yesterday was very similar. Only real Pollen has silver specks, and yesterday’s had more of a golden sheen. Perhaps it was a hybrid species.”

George snorted, not with malice, but with genuine curiosity. He had always considered her a bit off, a sweet oddball, but now her utterly serious tone, with which she analyzed their failed joke as some kind of natural phenomenon, was amusing and… refreshing.

“So, we didn’t cause chaos, we… spread good fortune?” he clarified, raising an eyebrow.

“In a way, yes,” Luna nodded. “Mr. Filch, of course, is unlikely to feel its influence. He seems to be protected by a powerful field of negative energy. But Professor Dumbledore, I think, will be especially lucky now. His beard absorbs it like a sponge.”

Fred burst out laughing. The idea of Dumbledore now radiating luck thanks to their exploded firecracker was brilliant.

“Miss Lovegood, you are a genius,” he declared. “With one sentence, you’ve turned our crime into an act of charity. We’re not hooligans, we’re philanthropists, distributing fortune!”

Luna looked at him with her clear eyes. “Oh, no. You’re alchemists. You took a boring, ordinary day and turned it into something new. Even if it wasn’t quite what you planned. Sometimes the most interesting things happen that way. Like the Fluffy-Ears Charm that was supposed to make hearing sharper but instead turned hair into popcorn for a week.”

She said this with such sincere belief that they would understand her analogy that the twins looked at each other again, but this time without irony. In her strange logic, there was its own, absolutely flawless truth. They were, after all, truly alchemists—alchemists of laughter, chaos, and surprises.

“We could have used your confidence at our trial with McGonagall,” sighed George. “We tried to prove we meant well, but it turned out… sticky.”

“Professor McGonagall is just afraid of unpredictability,” Luna said thoughtfully. “She believes in clear forms and rules. But the world is much more… flexible. And it’s full of Wrackspurts that love to swirl where things don’t go according to plan. I think they were feasting yesterday.”

With these words, she adjusted the stack of magazines in her hands, and her finger pointed to one of the buttons on her necklace—it was that same lavender colour as the confetti she had picked up yesterday.

Fred noticed it. His gaze became intent, studying. “You… kept it?”

Luna looked at the button, then at him. “Of course. It’s material evidence of the event. And a symbol. Every time something doesn’t go as planned but turns into something interesting, it’s worth marking. Dad says these are signs from above. Or below. It depends on where the Nargles were at the time.”

She spoke of her fantastic creatures with such unshakable faith that it no longer seemed like nonsense. It was part of her world, as real to her as the laws of pyrotechnics were to them.

“We have to go,” George reminded, nodding towards the corridor from where the ominous shuffling and muttering of Filch could already be heard. “It was nice chatting, Luna. You… you are a unique person.”

“Thank you,” she replied simply. “Good luck with Mr. Filch. Try offering him a sweet. They say sugar temporarily weakens the aura of negativity. Not for long. About five minutes.”

She nodded to them and floated on down the corridor, leaving behind a faint smell of something floral and strange, and a nagging feeling of slight envy for her absolute, unshakable world.

The whole day, scrubbing old pots without magic under Filch’s watchful eye, the twins barely spoke. They worked in silence, but their minds were occupied with the same thing.

“She’s not like everyone else,” Fred was the first to break the silence, scraping a chewing gum horn that had been stuck to the floor for what seemed like a century. “I mean… she’s not just ‘odd’. She… sees things.”

“Sees things that aren’t there,” George clarified, throwing a rag into a bucket of soapy water.

“And who decides what isn’t and what is?” Fred remarked philosophically. “For us, Nargles are nonsense. For her, they’re reality. And for some, our Igniting Gum ‘Puking Pastille’ is the height of idiocy. For us, it’s art.”

George thought about it. “Are you saying her madness is… reasonable?”

“I’m saying it’s… consistent,” Fred replied. “It has its own internal logic. Like our best products. Look: we took an idea—to light up Filch. Added components. Got an unexpected result. She didn’t get angry or laugh. She started studying the result. Like a scientist.”

“A scientist who believes in unicorn pollen,” George smirked.

“And we believe our gum can make you float to the ceiling. What’s the difference?” Fred parried.

There was no difference, really. Both phenomena lay beyond the accepted norm. Both required belief in the impossible.

That evening, returning to their room in Gryffindor, dead tired and smelling of copper polish, they found two small bundles tied with silver thread on the windowsill.

One was labeled “Fred,” the other “George.”

They looked at each other. No one except their accomplices Lee and Jordan ever left them anything in their room. And those usually just tossed notes with ideas.

Fred unwrapped his bundle. Inside was that very piece of wilted-lavender-coloured confetti, neatly glued to a small piece of parchment. Underneath was written in a neat, rounded handwriting: “For neutralising Wrackspurts in areas of high negative energy. Attach to clothing before entering the duty teacher’s office. Effects are time-limited.”

George found a small dried flower in his bundle, resembling a daisy but bright orange. The note read: “Sun-Snake Flower. Improves mood. Recommended for sniffing during breaks between detentions.”

They silently looked at these gifts. This wasn’t a declaration of love. It wasn’t even a hint of flirtation. It was… support. From her point of view. She didn’t write “hang in there” or “I’m sorry.” She gave them specific, albeit utterly insane from an ordinary person’s perspective, tools to deal with the problem.

George tentatively sniffed his flower. It smelled of honey and pepper. Surprisingly, his mood did improve slightly.

Fred pinned his piece of parchment to the inside of his robe. “Just in case. Mrs Norris was looking at me suspiciously today. Like she could sense the source of chaos in me.”

They looked at each other again. And this time, their gaze held not just bewilderment or curiosity. There was respect. And a budding, strange, new thought.

Perhaps the maddest idea that had ever entered their heads. The idea that the quirky Luna Lovegood, with her belief in Nargles and Rainbow Unicorns, could be… one of them.

Chapter Text

...And this time, their look held not just bewilderment or curiosity. There was respect. And a budding, strange, new thought. Perhaps the maddest idea that had ever entered their heads in all their years. The idea that the eccentric Luna Lovegood, with her belief in Nargles and Rainbow Unicorns, could be… one of their own.

The thought hung in the air of their bedroom for several more days, like the persistent buzzing of a forgotten Fanged Frisbee. It manifested itself in the lulls between their detentions, which had become their new, dreary routine.

“I wonder,” Fred started one evening, examining the dried orange flower that George, on Luna's advice, occasionally sniffed to improve his mood. “Does she even understand what ‘one of our own’ means? In our understanding?”

George, lying on his bed and trying to mentally invent a self-powered cauldron-scouring brush, opened one eye. “In her understanding,‘one of her own’ is probably someone who sees Wrackspurts or knows how to tell Rainbow Unicorn pollen from our exploded firework. Specific criteria, I must say.”

“But we fit them, don’t we?” Fred persisted insistently. He stood up and began pacing the room, radiating energy that had no outlet in Filch’s closets. “She said we were alchemists. She saw art in our failure. She wasn’t scared or judgmental. She… appreciated it.”

“Appreciated the consequences,” George clarified, sitting up. “Not us ourselves.”

“But is that not the same thing?” Fred stopped opposite him. “For us, our creations are us. Our extension. Our essence. If she likes what we create, even when it goes out of control, then…”

He didn’t finish, but George understood. They had always been one whole, two halves of a single concept. Their identity was inextricably linked to their creativity, their mischief, their ability to turn boredom into chaos. And if someone accepted that, they accepted them. Truly.

“We need to test this,” George declared decisively, and a familiar fire lit in his eyes. “Empirically. Like with new Skiving Snackboxes.”

The plan was born quickly, as always. Their next detention was scheduled for Saturday – cleaning the Trophy Room. A place boring to the point of toothache, dusty, and filled with the ghosts of past achievements staring at you with glassy eyes from plaques. The perfect testing ground.

The point was not another prank. A prank would be too simple, too expected of them. No, they wanted to create something… else. Something that Luna would appreciate. Something at the intersection of their craft and her world.

They spent all their evening hours working stealthily in their bedroom. Supplies retrieved from a hidden compartment in their trunk, several parchments with calculations, and complete silence, broken only by whispers: “No,green won’t do. Green is the color of envy, and there’s already plenty of envy towards the Ravenclaw Cup there.” “What about silver?Like moonlight.” “And blue.Like her eyes.” “You’re already choosing a color to match her eyes?”George smirked. “I’m choosing a color to match the concept,brother mine. The concept of the invisible, yet beautiful,” Fred retorted, but the tips of his ears turned pink.

Their creation was modest in appearance – several glass ampoules filled with a shimmering liquid and a complex system of almost weightless silver threads, resembling a spiderweb, that could be stretched between the display cases.

On Saturday morning, they arrived for detention with the air of martyrs. Filch, rubbing his hands with glee, pointed them towards the cabinets with polish for the plaques and the vacuums for the cobwebs (magical, but powered by muscle force, and with a hose that jammed periodically).

They obediently got to work, but their eyes kept darting towards the doors. They knew Luna had a habit of going to the library on Saturdays, and her path led right past the Trophy Room.

Their calculation proved correct. About an hour later, the door opened a crack, and the familiar blonde head with a crown of butterbeer caps appeared.

“Oh,” Luna said in her airy voice, surveying the room. “You’re here. I felt a strong concentration of Feferels here. They feed on the dust of oblivion and boredom.”

Filch, hearing her, grimaced. “Lovegood! Don’t disturb the prisoners serving their punishment! And stop spouting your nonsense!”

“She’s not disturbing, Mr. Filch,” Fred reported cheerfully. “On the contrary, her presence… inspires diligent work.”

Filch muttered something and retreated to his cubbyhole to gloat over their torment from there.

Luna entered the room, her wide eyes curiously examining the shelves. “You’re working very hard. There’s almost no aura of suffering coming from you. That’s rare for this place.”

“We find inner harmony in monotony,” George declared with feigned importance, polishing a plaque with the name of some long-ago winner of a potion-making contest. “It’s a meditative practice.”

Luna nodded, completely serious. “Yes. While the hands are busy, the mind can soar. My dad often comes up with the best headlines for The Quibbler that way.”

She moved closer to them, to the very display case between the stands where their invisible net was stretched. Fred caught George’s eye and nodded almost imperceptibly.

George pretended to accidentally kick the invisible trigger line, activating the mechanism.

It happened instantly. With a quiet, gentle rustle, like the flapping of a tiny bird’s wings, the silver threads trembled and became visible, tracing a complex, iridescent geometric pattern in the air for a moment. And at the same time, the ampoules hidden above burst.

But it wasn’t an explosion. It was the birth of a nebula.

A cloud of the finest, weightless dust, shimmering silver and the softest blue, began to slowly descend, as if in zero gravity. Thousands of tiny sparks swirled in a beam of light falling from a high window, collided, formed temporary constellations, and slowly settled on everything around – on the display cases, on the plaques, on their hair and shoulders, on Luna’s outstretched hand.

The Trophy Room was transformed. It looked as if a moment of birth of a small, private galaxy had been frozen inside it. The dust was completely dry and not sticky; it simply lay like a sparkling coating, turning boring trophies into artifacts from a fairy tale.

Luna froze with her hand outstretched, watching the sparks settle on her palm. Her eyes were wide open, and her face was illuminated by such pure, unbridled delight that the twins felt their breath catch. This wasn’t just interest or approval. This was recognition. Acknowledgment.

“Moon dust,” she whispered, and her voice trembled with excitement. “Did you procure moon dust? Or is this… shards of dreams? They caught the light… they weave it into patterns…”

“We called it the ‘Boredom Nebula’,” Fred said quietly, not taking his eyes off her. “It activates when the boredom level in a room reaches a critical point. Neutralizes it with beauty.”

“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Luna said, turning to them. Sparkling dust lay on her eyelashes like teardrops of light. “You didn’t destroy the boredom. You transformed it. You found a door in a different part of the wall.”

At that moment, Filch burst out of his cubicle. “What’s that noise? What’s that shimmering? You again, Weasleys?!”

But his shout sounded muffled. He looked at the hall covered in a sparkling veil, and his face, usually twisted with anger, expressed only dumbfounded bewilderment. Even his innate hatred for all things magical and beautiful short-circuited before this quiet, non-aggressive magic.

Luna turned to him. “It wasn’t them, Mr. Filch. It was the Feferels. They ate too much boredom dust and couldn’t handle it. This is the result of their metabolism. A positive one.”

Filch opened his mouth, closed it, and stared again at the sparkling display cases. Something in Luna’s utterly sincere, utterly guileless tone and the absurdity of her statement made him doubt reality for a second. He muttered, “Metabolism… Feferels… Lovegood, stop talking nonsense!” but without the previous fury. He turned around and went back into his cubicle, slamming the door.

Silence fell in the hall, broken only by the quiet rustle of settling dust. The three of them stood amidst the sparkling chaos they had created together – two by hand, one by her presence, by her faith that had disarmed even Filch.

And then Fred, without a word, reached out his hand to Luna. Not to shake it or to help her up. He simply opened his palm, which was also covered in a shiny coating. George, standing beside him, did the same. It was a gesture. A question. An invitation into their shared, mad world.

Luna looked at their palms, then at their faces. Her gaze moved from Fred to George and back. She didn’t see two separate people; she saw a single whole, a double star radiating warmth and chaos. And she understood. Her world, full of invisible creatures and strange theories, had never been lonely. It had just been waiting to meet another world built on the same paradoxical logic – the logic of reasonable madness.

She slowly placed her hand on top of their palms. Her fingers were cold, and theirs were warm. Three hands, three worlds, intertwined under a shimmering silver-blue rain.

“Do they really think it’s Feferel metabolism?” George asked quietly, not wanting to break the moment.

Luna shook her head, and sparks fell from her eyelashes. “No. But it’s a much more beautiful truth than simply admitting to creating another prank device. And a beautiful truth is always more important than a boring one. That’s what my dad thinks.”

From that day on, everything changed. Detentions with Filch didn’t become less nasty, but they were now brightened by Luna’s presence, who found the most incredible explanations for what they were doing and the most ordinary things around them. She could spend half an hour explaining how the house-elves had made a deal with the ghosts about distributing dust to different corners of the castle, or that Filch’s grumbling was actually a forgotten language of stone gargoyles.

The twins listened to her, first with a smirk, then with genuine interest, and then with a real thirst to understand her universe. They began to notice that behind her strange words often lay astonishing depth and a non-standard perspective. She saw magic not in spells and potions, but in the very fabric of the world, in its imperfections and oddities.

They, in turn, showed her their blueprints, shared their ideas. And she gave them advice. Strange, mad, but almost always working. “If you want the gum to sing,you need to trap a sunbeam in the resin. But only one born at the hour of dawn.” “This eavesdropping device will work better if you add a feather from a Cackling Tit.They can hear silence from a kilometer away.”

Their friendship did not go unnoticed. At first, it was just surprised looks in the corridors: “Look, the Weasleys with that… well, Lovegood. Found their match, did they?” Then came the whispers behind their backs. The Gryffindors, generally treating Luna with condescending goodwill, didn’t understand what two of the funniest and most popular guys in their house found in her. “Are they making fun of her?”Dean Thomas asked once. “Doesn’t look like it,”Ron replied, frowning. “They’re whispering about some blueprints with her. And she’s advising them. I heard once – about some tit. Total rubbish.”

The Ravenclaws, proud of their individuality but still considering Luna too strange even for them, looked on with suspicion. “They probably want to use her for their experiments,” one of Luna’s classmates suggested.

But the strongest storms, as always, brewed at home. Or rather, their echoes arrived via owl post.

A letter from Molly Weasley arrived a week after their strange friendship began. It was written in her most sprawling, agitated handwriting.

“Dear Fred and George!

We received a letter from Professor McGonagall about your… er… unsuccessful experiment in the Hall of Fame. Bill, of course, laughed, and Percy is outraged, but that’s not the main thing. Ron wrote to us that you are spending a lot of time with that poor girl, Lovegood. He says she’s… well, not quite right in the head. And that you might be teasing her. I hope that’s not the case! It’s awful to laugh at those who are different. And besides, she’s Ginny’s friend! You should be kinder to her, not use her quirks for your pranks. Please behave decently and don’t confuse that girl. She’s strange enough as it is, poor thing, without your interference.

Lots of love and waiting for your reply. Your mother.”

The twins reread the letter sitting on the windowsill in their room. “‘Poor girl,’”Fred mimicked, crumpling the parchment. “‘Not quite right.’ She’s more right than all of us put together.” “They don’t understand,”George said simply. “They only see the shell. The strange earrings, the talks about non-existent creatures. They don’t see what’s inside.” “And what’s inside?”Fred asked, looking at him. George thought for a moment.“Stubbornness. Firmness. And… silence. Such a deep, calm silence where the maddest and most brilliant ideas are born.”

They wrote a short, reassuring reply to their mother, assuring her they weren’t making fun of Luna but were just friends. They didn’t go into details. It was useless.

The letter from Percy was harsher and more condemning. He wrote about reputation, about how their association with “such an odious and simple-minded individual” cast a shadow on the entire Weasley family, and especially on him as a future Ministry employee. The twins didn’t try to calm him down. They just pinned his letter to the ceiling above George’s bed as a target for dart practice.

The only one who reacted calmly was Arthur Weasley. In his letter, which arrived separately from Molly’s, there were just a few lines: “Boys, about that dust incident – be more careful next time. About Miss Lovegood – Xenophilius, her father, is a brilliant and highly underrated man. If you are friends with her, try to get to know both her and him better. You might find much in common. Your loving father.”

This support, albeit implicit, was what they needed. But their main support became Ginny. Seeing the three of them in the library (Luna was explaining something, drawing diagrams on parchment, and the twins were listening, open-mouthed), she didn’t mock or express surprise. She walked over, looked at the blueprints, at her brothers’ serious faces and her friend’s radiant face, and simply sat down next to them. “Explain it to me too,”she said. “I’m falling behind the times.”

And they explained. And Ginny, with her sharp mind and sense of humor, understood everything immediately. She became their kind of ambassador to the world of “normal” people, defending their strange union from Ron’s attacks and others.

But the most important things were happening between the three of them. Their relationship didn’t develop according to standard laws of attraction. There was no jealousy, no choice, no attempts to divide the indivisible.

For Luna, the concept of “dating” someone was as absurd as the idea that a person could have only one friend or only one favorite star in the sky. She saw their connection as a triple star system, where all bodies revolved around a common center of gravity, bound by mutual attraction. Fred and George were two suns, bright, hot, inseparable. And she was their moon, cold, mysterious, reflecting their light and refracting it into something new, no less beautiful. They weren’t “boyfriend and girlfriend.” They were a trinity. Satellites.

Her signs of affection were as unique as she was. She might give Fred a dried paw of an unknown creature found on the edge of the Forbidden Forest, “for protection from Nargles in your pockets.” And George – a piece of glass that, according to her, was a shard of a shattered rainbow, “so your ideas are always colorful.” She wove them bracelets from herbs that were supposed to ward off Professor Snape’s anger and read aloud the maddest articles from The Quibbler while they repaired their products.

And they, in turn, gave her not flowers and candy (though they gave candy too – their own, with the most unexpected effects), but their attention and their protection. They became her shield against mockery and sidelong glances. Their mere presence nearby made bullies from Slytherin and even some from their own house think twice. They didn’t pick fights; they just stood nearby, two red-haired sentinels, and their mocking grins were more eloquent than any threats.

They included her in their world. Now their “laboratory” in the Gryffindor bedroom was open to her. She sat on George’s bed, swinging her legs, and watched them tinker with new inventions, offering her amazing advice. “If you want this pastille to make your voice sound like a mermaid’s,you need to add not sea water, but dew collected from a spiderweb at dawn. A spiderweb is a net; it will catch the right notes.”

And they listened. And it worked.

They created together. Their joint project was the “Mirror of Reverse Perspective” – a small hand mirror in which you saw yourself not as you are, but as others see you. It didn’t change your appearance; it changed… your aura. Luna insisted on adding buttercup pollen collected during a full moon, “to soften the harshness of self-perception.” The mirror became incredibly popular among older students wanting to understand how they were truly perceived.

They were happy in their small, strange world. But the outside world wasn’t asleep. The climax came just before the summer holidays.

A rehearsal for the graduation ball for the older students was taking place in the Great Hall. The twins, as usual, had dodged their duties but dragged Luna along to watch the hustle and bustle. They were sitting on the Gryffindor table, swinging their legs, and Luna was showing them how to predict who would dance with whom by the dust motes in the light beam from the stained glass windows.

They were spotted by Zacharias Smith, a portly and smug Hufflepuff who always held a grudge against the Weasleys for their jokes and against Luna for her “abnormality.” “Look,”he said loudly to his friends, “the triple freak show has gathered. Two clowns and their bug-eyed girlfriend.”

Before, they would have just ignored such comments or brushed them off with a joke. But now something snapped. Maybe it was the tense week, maybe the fatigue from the constant whispers, or maybe they just couldn’t bear it directed at her.

Fred and George jumped off the table in sync, like one creature. Their faces didn’t show their usual cheerfulness. They were cold and serious. “Repeat that,Smith,” Fred said quietly. “What did you say?”

Zacharias, feeling the support of his friends, mustered courage. “I said you’re a trio of freaks. What, the truth hurts? Or has she already addled your brains with her Nargles?”

He didn’t get to finish. There was no spell, no signature Weasley product. There was just a quick, precise punch from Fred to the nose and a trip from George. Zacharias crashed to the floor with a thud, clutching his face.

Silence fell in the hall. Everyone froze. The Weasleys were fighting? Seriously? No jokes? It was as unthinkable as if Dumbledore had started lecturing on the benefits of Dark Arts.

Fred and George stood over the sprawled Smith, breathing a little faster than usual. They didn’t look angry. They looked… calm. As if they had done a necessary job.

“Never,” said George, and his voice, usually full of laughter, sounded firm and clear, “never insult her in front of us. Understood?”

Luna walked over to them. She didn’t look frightened or shocked. She looked at Zacharias with mild curiosity, like an interesting but unpleasant insect. Then her gaze shifted to the twins. “You hit him,”she stated. “Physically. That’s very straightforward. And not very creative.”

Her words diffused the situation better than any spell. Someone chuckled restrainedly. The tension vanished.

Fred wiped his fist on his robe. “Sometimes straightforwardness is the only language some people understand. Especially if they have a pumpkin for a brain instead of a real one.”

The incident, of course, reached McGonagall. This time the punishment was even harsher – they were banned from going to Hogsmeade on the last weekend and had to spend it clearing out junk in the farthest wing of the castle.

But they didn’t regret it. Sitting in a dusty room cluttered with broken desks and old globes, they didn’t feel punished, but… victorious.

“Was it worth it?” George asked, digging out a stuffed three-headed dog from under a pile of junk. “Of course it was,”Fred replied. “We drew a line. Everyone knows now.” “Knows what?” “That we are three.That three is us. That if you hurt one, you deal with all of us.”

The door creaked. Luna stood in the doorway. In her hands was a basket covered with a napkin. “I brought you reinforcements,”she said. “Sandwiches with fried bacon. And tea made from spider legs. It gives you energy for cleaning junk saturated with the aura of the past.”

She came in and sat on an upturned crate, watching them eat. Then her gaze fell on the stuffed three-headed dog. “Oh,Cerberus,” she whispered. “Only he’s not three-headed. These are three brothers who got stuck together in early childhood due to a failed unity potion experiment. They hate each other but can’t separate.”

The twins looked at each other. And laughed. Not at her. But with her. Their laughter echoed in the dusty room, sweeping away all the anger and misunderstanding of the outside world.

The summer holidays were going to be a test. Separation. Returning to The Burrow, under Molly’s supervision, to a world that didn’t understand them.

On the last evening before departure, they met by the lake. The sun was setting, painting the water crimson and gold. They sat silently on the shore, watching the hippogriffs drink on the opposite bank.

“We’ll write to you,” said Fred, breaking a stick and throwing the pieces into the water. “Every day. By owl. Or two.” “I’ll be waiting,”Luna nodded. “And collecting samples for you. Dad says Mooncalves are in our forest. Their horns, if ground into dust, help objects become invisible not to the eyes, but to attention. It might be useful for your products.”

George smiled. “You’re already thinking about our shared business.” “But isn’t it shared?”she wondered.

They fell silent again. It was quiet; only the lapping of water and the cries of birds could be heard. It was time to say something important. To define what was between them. But how do you define the undefinable?

Fred was the first to start. “You know, Luna… what’s between us… It’s not quite… an ordinary story.” “Of course not,”she agreed. “Ordinary stories are boring. They have one prince and one princess. But here…” She looked at both of them. “Here there are two suns and one moon. Or… two jokers and one dreamer. Or…” She fell silent, searching for the right words. “Or just us,”George finished for her. “Fred, George, and Luna. Full stop.”

Luna nodded. “Full stop.” Then she added, looking at the sunset: “To me, you are like two rays that always travel together. And I’m glad they illuminated me too. I don’t want to choose one ray. I want to bask in the light of both. It’s… right. As right as the fact that Director Dumbledore has a long beard, and Professor McGonagall has a strict hat.”

She said it with such simplicity and such unshakable certainty that all doubts, all fears of their family’s misunderstanding, dissipated like smoke. She didn’t need conventional definitions. Her universe was wider, and there was room in it for their strange, triple connection.

Fred took a small box out of his pocket. “This is for you. For goodbye. A joint work.”

Luna opened it. Inside, on a velvet cushion, lay a pendant. A silver setting in the shape of a circle enclosed not a stone, but a tiny, intricate mechanical construction of gears and wires that slowly rotated, catching the last ray of the setting sun and reflecting it in a thousand glints.

“It’s a model of our system,” George explained quietly. “Three satellites in one orbit. Us. Eternal. Inseparable.”

Luna looked at the pendant, and tears welled up in her eyes. But they were tears of happiness. She never cried from sadness. “It’s beautiful,”she whispered. “It caught our sun.”

She put the chain around her neck, and the pendant came to rest on her chest, sparkling in the twilight.

They walked her to the doors of Ravenclaw Tower. The parting was light because they knew – it wasn’t the end. It was only the beginning of their shared orbit.

When they returned to the Gryffindor common room, questions and sidelong glances rained down on them again. But now they were absolutely indifferent to them. They walked through the hall, shoulder to shoulder, with identical grins on their faces, and their eyes shone with the same light – the light of someone who had found their home not in a place, but in the hearts of others.

Ron, watching them, shook his head and sighed: “Well, that’s it. They’ve both completely lost it.” But Ginny,sitting next to him, elbowed him in the side. “Shut up,Ron. They haven’t lost it. They’re happy. Truly. Have you ever been like that?”

Ron fell silent. And the twins went up to their room, where parchment and ink for the first letter were already waiting on the table. They faced a summer full of difficulties and misunderstanding. But they knew they now had a secret weapon. A shared moon shining on them both from the sky, and a small model of their universe hidden on her chest.

They were a trio. They were against the whole world. And that was exactly how it was supposed to be.