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By November, Harry had learned that peace was not quiet.
Peace was a door slamming two corridors away and his hand reaching automatically for his wand. It was waking before dawn because nobody had screamed, or hearing laughter rise through the Great Hall and mistaking it, for half a second, for the beginning of panic. It was walking into a room and counting the exits before remembering that the war was over, that the castle had been rebuilt, and that there was no longer any reason to know how quickly he could reach the nearest window.
Peace was noisy with all the things Harry had not been able to hear while he was surviving.
That afternoon, it sounded like the wind moving through the bare trees beside the Black Lake.
Harry sat beneath an old beech whose leaves had almost entirely abandoned it. The last few clung to the branches overhead, copper-brown and trembling, while the rest lay damp across the ground, gathering around his shoes and beneath the hem of his robes. Every so often, the wind lifted a handful and sent them skittering over the grass like nervous little animals.
The lake was dark beneath the November sky, though not black. Harry had thought it black for years, but Luna had informed him in September that this was inaccurate.
“Black water doesn’t reflect clouds properly,” she had said.
Harry had looked at the lake, then at her. “What colour is it, then?”
“Today?”
He had not known lakes changed colour according to the day.
“Today.”
“Blue pretending not to be.”
That had been nearly two months ago, and Harry had thought about it more often than seemed reasonable. He had also begun looking more carefully at the lake.
Today, it was grey pretending not to be silver.
He drew his knees closer to his chest and folded his arms over them. His gloves were upstairs in his dormitory, where he had left them beside the bed after deciding it was not cold enough to need them.
It was, in fact, cold enough to need them.
Harry suspected this was the sort of mistake a person made when nobody was trying to kill him: an ordinary mistake, inconvenient rather than fatal. He still did not quite know how to make those.
The grass shifted behind him, and Harry knew it was Luna before she spoke.
He was not certain when he had begun recognising the particular sound of her approach. Luna walked lightly, but not quietly. There was always some small accompaniment to announce her: the clink of bottle-cap jewellery, the rustle of sweets in a pocket, the faint chiming of whatever she had decided to hang from her school bag that week.
Today, it was bells.
Not proper bells. Something softer, like spoons tapping the rims of teacups.
“You’ve forgotten your gloves,” she said.
Harry glanced over his shoulder.
Luna stood several feet away, her pale hair loose beneath a knitted blue hat that was much too large and had already begun slipping sideways over one eyebrow. Three tiny bronze bells hung from its pointed end, although Harry could not see how they had been attached. She carried a tartan blanket beneath one arm and held two steaming cups carefully between her hands.
“I didn’t forget them,” Harry said. “I chose not to bring them.”
“That seems less sensible.”
“Yes.”
Luna considered this before nodding as though Harry had offered a perfectly satisfactory explanation for an unsatisfactory decision. Then she crossed the remaining distance and lowered herself onto the grass beside him.
Not close enough to touch.
That had become part of it.
Luna never crowded him. She simply settled nearby, leaving between them a narrow stretch of grass that Harry had become increasingly aware of over the past several weeks. This time, however, she unfolded the blanket and spread it across both their laps without asking, and the space disappeared.
Harry’s body noticed before the rest of him did.
His shoulder tightened and his breath caught faintly. There was nothing threatening in the movement, nothing he needed to anticipate or defend himself against, and yet he became abruptly conscious of the warmth gathering beneath the blanket and of Luna’s knee resting beside his own.
He turned his attention very deliberately towards the lake.
Luna passed him one of the cups.
“What is it?”
“Tea.”
Harry looked down at the cloudy lavender liquid. “What sort?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You made it.”
“Yes.”
“That generally helps people know.”
“I used several jars.”
Harry lifted the cup cautiously towards his face. It smelled of mint, cinnamon and something faintly floral.
“Were any of the jars labelled?”
“One said thyme.”
“That’s a herb.”
“I know.”
“Is there thyme in this?”
“No. The jar contained buttons.”
Harry turned to look at her.
Luna had already raised her own cup to her lips. The hat had slipped farther over her eyebrow, and one of the bronze bells now rested against her cheek.
“You know,” Harry said, “most people would be concerned that they had no idea what they were drinking.”
“Most people are concerned about all sorts of things.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re wrong.”
“No.” Luna blew gently across the surface of her tea. “It only means concern isn’t usually very original.”
Harry felt the beginning of a smile and hid it by taking a drink.
The tea was surprisingly good.
Luna returned her attention to the lake, and Harry found himself watching her instead.
He had been doing that more frequently since the beginning of term. At first, he had thought he was merely checking that she was still there.
Luna had developed a habit of finding him in places where no one else thought to look: behind the greenhouses, on an unused staircase near the old Charms corridor, in the owlery after midnight, halfway down the road towards Hogsmeade despite the fact that students were not permitted outside the grounds.
She never asked why he had gone.
She simply joined him.
Sometimes she spoke, and sometimes she did not. Once, she had spent almost forty minutes explaining that the suits of armour were beginning to form political factions based on helmet shape. Another time, she had sat beside him in complete silence until Harry realised he had been breathing in time with her.
He had told himself she was helping him.
That was true.
It was simply no longer all that was true.
Harry noticed her now. He noticed how the ends of her hair curled when the air was damp and the faint crease that appeared between her brows when she was genuinely confused, which happened much less often than people assumed. He noticed that she wore three rings on her left hand and none on her right, and that one of them turned the tip of her finger blue whenever it rained.
He noticed her mouth when she smiled.
That was inconvenient.
Luna turned towards him, and Harry immediately looked down at his tea.
“There’s something on my face,” she said.
“No.”
“There must be.”
“Why?”
“You were looking at it.”
Heat moved suddenly into Harry’s cheeks.
He had faced Voldemort without a wand. He had walked willingly towards his own death. He had stood before the entire wizarding world while people argued over which parts of his life belonged to them.
None of it had prepared him for Luna Lovegood calmly noticing that he had been staring at her mouth.
“I wasn’t,” he said.
“You were.”
“I was looking at your hat.”
Luna lifted a hand to touch it, and the hat slipped entirely over one eye.
“Oh.”
One of the bells chimed.
Harry laughed before he could stop himself.
Luna peered at him from beneath the blue wool. “It’s quite practical.”
“You can’t see.”
“I can see half of everything.”
“That’s not usually considered an improvement.”
“It depends which half.”
Harry reached towards her, then stopped.
His hand remained suspended stupidly between them while Luna looked at it with quiet curiosity. For a moment, he considered lowering it again and pretending he had intended to inspect the air. Instead, he caught the edge of her hat between two fingers and pushed it gently back into place.
A strand of pale hair snagged beneath the wool. Without thinking, Harry freed it, his knuckles brushing her temple as he drew it loose.
Luna went still.
Harry felt the contact travel all the way down his arm.
He withdrew his hand too quickly and nearly knocked over his tea. “Sorry.”
“For fixing my hat?”
“For—”
He stopped.
He did not know what he was apologising for. Touching her. Wanting to touch her. Realising that he wanted to do it again.
Luna tilted her head. “You apologise before you know whether anything has gone wrong.”
Harry stared into his cup while the steam rose and fogged his glasses. “It usually has.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It is.”
Other people told Harry he was allowed to rest, but there was always an invisible instruction beneath it. Rest so that you can recover. Recover so that you can decide. Decide so that you can begin becoming whatever everyone expects next.
Luna never treated him like an unfinished task.
She did not seem to believe he was late for his own life.
Harry dragged the edge of his sleeve across his glasses. They only became more smeared.
“Give them here,” Luna said.
“What?”
“Your glasses.”
“You won’t be able to see through them.”
“I’d like to check.”
Harry hesitated, then removed them.
The world softened immediately. The trees became dark shapes, the lake dissolved into light and shadow, and Luna blurred beside him into pale hair, blue wool and muted gold.
Her fingers brushed his as she took the glasses. Harry could not see her expression clearly, but he watched her raise them to her face.
There was a pause.
“Oh,” Luna said.
“What?”
“You really can’t see.”
“I’ve mentioned that.”
“I thought you meant it in the ordinary way.”
“What’s the ordinary way?”
“When people say they can’t see something that is directly in front of them because they’ve already decided it isn’t there.”
Harry turned towards the blur of her. “And what way do I mean it?”
“You literally can’t see.”
“That is generally why I wear the glasses.”
Luna leaned closer.
Without his lenses, Harry could not distinguish the exact colour of her eyes. He could only see their brightness, close enough now that he could feel the warmth of her breath against the cold air.
“You look different without them,” she said.
Harry became painfully aware of his face. “How?”
“Younger.”
He did not know whether that was kind, though he suspected Luna had not meant it as kindness or cruelty. Only truth.
“Is that good?”
“I don’t know.”
Harry smiled despite himself. “You’re not very reassuring.”
“I could say yes.”
“But you don’t know.”
“No.”
“Then don’t.”
Luna smiled, and even blurred, Harry saw it.
She folded the glasses and held them carefully in one hand. “You’ve been better lately.”
The words should have comforted him. Instead, they tightened something in his stomach.
Everyone was watching for improvement. Professors. Friends. Ministry officials. He had become another damaged part of Hogwarts to be repaired, polished and eventually admired.
“I’m not better,” he said.
Luna’s expression did not change. “I didn’t say you were.”
“You just did.”
“I said you’ve been better lately. Sometimes you’ve also been worse.”
Harry turned towards the lake, although without his glasses it was little more than a long silver stain beneath the sky.
“That sounds contradictory.”
“Most true things are.”
The wind passed over them, stirring the blanket across their knees and setting Luna’s bells chiming softly. Somewhere across the grounds, a group of students shouted.
Harry reacted before he could stop himself.
His back straightened. His hand moved towards his wand.
Then came laughter. Only laughter.
He forced his fingers open again.
Luna had not looked towards the sound. She was still looking at him.
“You don’t have to pretend you didn’t do that,” she said.
Harry swallowed. “I know.”
He did not.
But he was learning.
That was the strange thing about Luna. She allowed him to notice himself without immediately trying to correct what he found.
Harry had spent his life acting. Acting brave because someone needed him to be. Acting calm so other people would not panic. Acting angry because fear was too dangerous to show. Acting certain because people followed him whenever he sounded as though he knew where he was going.
Even grief had become something he performed in private and with great care, as though there were a correct way to fall apart without inconveniencing the dead.
He did not know what feeling looked like when it was not attached to action.
Lately, beside Luna, he had begun to find out.
It looked like cold hands beneath a tartan blanket and the faint mist of tea gathering between them. It looked like noticing the shape of her mouth. It looked like wanting to move closer and having no idea what he was supposed to do with the wanting.
“Ginny and Pansy were arguing at breakfast,” Luna said.
Harry blinked.
The change of subject was so abrupt that, for a moment, he wondered whether he had missed part of the conversation.
“Were they?”
“Yes. Pansy thinks marmalade is vindictive.”
Harry waited. “And Ginny disagrees?”
“Ginny thinks marmalade is misunderstood.”
“That sounds serious.”
“It became quite heated.”
Harry laughed softly.
Ginny and Pansy.
At the beginning of September, the sight of them together had seemed almost offensive in its improbability. Ginny was bright and fierce and impossible to contain; Pansy was sharp-edged and immaculate, behaving as though affection were an insult she had not yet decided how to avenge.
Harry had watched them across the Great Hall and waited for jealousy to arrive.
Some of it had.
Not enough to mean what he thought it should.
Mostly, he had felt displaced. Not from Ginny’s life exactly, but from the future he had once attached to her. The Burrow. Sunday dinners. Children with red hair. A safe, ordinary life waiting for him at the end of everything.
He had loved that future before he understood that Ginny was not the same thing as it.
They had ended the relationship in July beneath an apple tree behind the Burrow, sitting close together without touching while the evening insects hummed in the long grass. Neither of them had cried until afterwards.
Ginny had kissed his cheek and told him she thought they had been trying to return to people who no longer existed.
Harry had known she was right.
That had not made it hurt less.
“I don’t mind,” he said.
Luna held out his glasses, and when Harry took them from her and put them back on, the world sharpened around him.
There she was again.
The blue hat. The silver-grey eyes. The faint pink the cold had left across her cheeks.
“I know,” she said.
Harry frowned. “You know?”
“You don’t look at them the way you used to.”
“How did I used to look at them?”
“As though they had taken something.”
“And now?”
Luna considered him, her head tilted slightly beneath the crooked hat. “As though you’re wondering whether you ever wanted it.”
Harry turned back towards the lake.
“I did want it.”
“I know.”
“I loved her.”
“I know.”
“But maybe—”
The rest would not come.
Maybe he had loved Ginny and still been wrong for her. Maybe love did not prove permanence. Maybe the ending did not make what had existed false. Maybe he could want something else without betraying the person he had been when he wanted her.
Luna waited.
She was good at that. Not the impatient silence of someone expecting him to finish, but an open silence in which he was permitted not to.
Harry wrapped both hands around his cup.
“I don’t know what I want now,” he said.
“That must be nice.”
He turned towards her. “Nice?”
“You’ve spent a long time knowing what you had to do.”
“That isn’t the same as wanting.”
“No.” Luna’s voice softened. “It isn’t.”
Harry looked at her.
She watched him in that direct, unsettling way she had. Luna was airy, yes. She drifted through conversations, wandered away from paths and believed in creatures nobody else could see, but she was not absent.
When she looked at Harry, she was entirely there.
He sometimes thought that was why other people found her uncomfortable. Most attention skimmed the surface.
Luna’s did not.
“I don’t think I’m very good at wanting things,” Harry admitted.
“You wanted the treacle tart at lunch.”
“That doesn’t count.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s treacle tart.”
“It still wanted to be wanted.”
Harry laughed. “You make everything sound alive.”
“Most things are, in one way or another.”
“What about the things that aren’t?”
“They’re often the loudest.”
He shook his head, while Luna smiled into her tea.
Harry watched her again.
This time, when she noticed, he did not look away quickly enough. Her gaze moved over his face, curious but not surprised.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Is it the hat again?”
“No.”
“The bells?”
“No.”
“My face?”
Harry’s throat tightened. Luna waited.
He could lie. Harry had become excellent at lying by omission. Fine. Nothing. Tired. It doesn’t matter.
He was trying, however clumsily, to stop turning every feeling into a secret simply because he did not know what to do with it.
“Yes,” he said.
Luna blinked. “My face?”
“Yes.”
“What about it?”
Harry had no idea.
Everything, perhaps.
The pale sweep of her eyelashes. The wind-reddened curve of her nose. The tiny scar near her chin that he had only noticed the previous week and had since found himself searching for whenever she turned her head.
His own heartbeat felt unfamiliar.
He had spent years trusting fear because fear always told him what to do. Fight. Run. Hide. Protect.
This feeling offered no instructions.
“I like looking at it,” he finally said.
The words emerged more quietly than he had intended.
Luna’s eyes widened slightly, and heat flooded Harry’s face. He looked down so quickly that tea nearly sloshed over the rim of his cup.
“Right,” he muttered. “That sounded—”
“Like you like looking at my face?”
He risked glancing at her. “Yes.”
“Did you mean something else?”
“No.”
“Then it sounded correct.”
Harry stared at her.
Luna’s cheeks had grown pinker, although that might have been the cold. She lifted her cup but did not drink, holding it near her mouth instead, and Harry thought she might be hiding a smile.
The possibility made his chest feel too small.
“Do you like looking at mine?” he asked before good sense could stop him.
Luna lowered the cup. “Yes.”
Harry forgot the cold entirely.
She said it without embarrassment, as though he had asked whether she liked the lake.
“Oh.”
“Especially when you’re about to laugh.”
“I don’t think my face changes much.”
“It does.”
“How?”
“Your eyes know first.”
Harry did not know what to say to that.
He had been called brave, reckless, arrogant, powerful, damaged, chosen, dangerous and miraculous. Nobody had ever told him that his eyes knew when he was about to laugh.
Luna leaned a little closer. “Your ears have gone red.”
“I’m cold.”
“You weren’t cold a moment ago.”
“I was. I told you I forgot my gloves.”
“You said you chose not to bring them.”
Harry gave her a betrayed look. “That seems unhelpfully precise.”
“I remember most things you say.”
The air left his lungs.
Luna appeared not to notice what she had done to him. Or perhaps she noticed and did not think it required rescue.
She set her cup down in the grass beside her, then reached beneath the blanket and took one of his hands.
Harry stopped breathing.
Her fingers were cold too.
That should have made it ordinary. Practical. Two people warming their hands beneath a blanket in November.
It did not.
Luna turned his palm upwards and bent over it with quiet concentration.
“You have a small cut.”
Harry looked down. A thin red line crossed the base of his thumb.
“I caught it on a quill.”
“The quill was probably frightened.”
“Of me?”
“Of being used.”
She traced the air just above the cut without touching it, and Harry could feel where her fingertip might have been.
“Luna.”
“Yes?”
He did not know what he meant to ask.
Do you know what you’re doing?
Do I?
Is this friendship?
Has it stopped being friendship?
Instead, he said, “You’re holding my hand.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to.”
The simplicity of it struck him harder than any clever answer could have.
Harry looked at their hands beneath the edge of the blanket. Luna’s fingers rested loosely around his, leaving him room to pull away.
He did not.
His whole life had been shaped by things he had not chosen. The cupboard. The prophecy. The Horcrux. The war. Even love had often arrived tangled with expectation, memory and the need to believe there would be something waiting for him afterwards.
This was only a hand.
Luna’s hand.
And Harry wanted to hold it.
So he closed his fingers around hers.
Luna looked up at him, and the movement set the bells on her hat stirring softly in the wind. Something passed between them then. Harry did not think he would recognise certainty in this, even if it appeared. It felt less like an answer than a door opening somewhere neither of them had been standing guard over.
Luna’s thumb brushed once across his knuckles.
Harry felt it everywhere.
“I think,” she said thoughtfully, “you’re learning.”
His voice came out rougher than he intended. “Learning what?”
“To notice when something is happening to you.”
Harry looked at her. “And what’s happening?”
Luna’s smile was small and luminous.
“You are.”
For a moment, he could not speak.
The lake moved behind her, and the November light caught along its surface, turning the water silver between the shadows.
Harry had survived because he knew how to act.
This was different.
There was nothing to defeat here, nothing to solve, nothing he could save by stepping forward at precisely the right moment. There was only Luna beside him, her hand in his, looking at him as though he was not an answer, a symbol or the end of anybody else’s story.
Only Harry.
He shifted closer, not much, only enough for their shoulders to meet, and Luna let hers settle against his as though she had known all along that he would eventually make his way across the little space between them.
Neither of them mentioned it.
They remained beneath the nearly bare tree while the wind carried the last leaves across the grounds. Harry’s tea cooled in his free hand, and Luna’s hat slipped sideways again, the bells chiming whenever she moved.
For once, Harry did not think about what any of it meant.
He let himself feel it before deciding what to do.
Beneath the blanket, where no one could see, Luna threaded her fingers through his.