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The first Quidditch match since the war arrived under a sky so painfully blue that Harry suspected it had been arranged by someone with a vindictive sense of humour. The air held the sharp, clean bite of early February; the grass below the stands glittered with frost that had not quite decided whether to melt, and every student in the castle appeared to have found an excuse to be loud before ten in the morning.
Harry stood in the Gryffindor changing room with one hand curled around the handle of his broom and listened to the noise outside swell and break against the old stone walls. Someone was arguing about tactics in the corner, while someone else had enchanted the team's water bottle to sing a vulgar song whenever it was opened. Ginny, who had spent several minutes pretending this was beneath the attention of a captain, had finally begun laughing with everyone else. It should have been ordinary. It almost was.
"You look ill," Ginny said as she stopped beside him, her red-and-gold kit immaculate and her expression distinctly suspicious. "Not in the usual way. In a flying way."
"I'm fine."
"Right. That is famously what people say just before they faint dramatically in front of two hundred spectators and leave their captain without a Seeker."
Harry continued looking at her until Ginny lifted both hands. "I'm only saying, it would make the match memorable." She caught one glove between her teeth and pulled it tighter before adding, "You're going to win, though, because I have spent the last three days explaining to you that Davies always feints left before he actually goes left."
"I know that," Harry said.
"You were thinking about something else when I said it the first two times."
The new captain's badge caught the light when she moved, and Harry thought again of the afternoon in September when Ginny had found him leaving the greenhouses and asked whether he wanted his place back on the team. She had asked, which mattered. She had not told him that Hogwarts needed its famous Seeker, or that playing would be good for him, or that everyone expected their old captain to return as though the missing year between one match and the next could be crossed by mounting a broom. She had only stood with the badge pinned crookedly to her robes and given him somewhere he was permitted to want to be. Harry had said yes before fear could interfere because, whatever else the war had changed, the air had always been the place where he was happiest.
Ginny was right, however. He had been thinking about Luna in the library the evening before, her feet tucked beneath her in one of the armchairs by the window while she stitched something bright blue and silver in her lap. When he had asked what it was, she had looked at him with immense serenity and said, "A support structure."
He had not understood, which was not unusual. Luna had smiled and pressed a kiss to the inside of his wrist, as though that answered the question better than words could have done; now, with the crowd roaring somewhere above them, he wished he had asked again.
The walk from the changing rooms to the pitch was too short. As Harry stepped through the entrance, his fingers settled more naturally around the broom handle and his body tilted almost imperceptibly towards the open air, already answering the familiar pull of height and speed. It had always happened, even before he had known how much of his life would become a spectacle. Flying made his body remember that it belonged to him.
The stands erupted when the Gryffindor team emerged, a blur of colour and sound lifting up around them. Harry did not look at the faces. He had learned, after the war, that too many eyes could turn a room into a trap. Even now, months later, he sometimes caught himself seeking the quietest corner in the Great Hall or reaching for the Invisibility Cloak before he had consciously decided to leave.
When Madam Hooch released the balls and the whistle cut through the morning, however, there was room for nothing except the game.
The first ten minutes passed in the bright, brutal rhythm of speed. Hufflepuff's Chasers moved well together, close enough that they seemed joined by invisible threads, and one of Gryffindor's Beaters took a Bludger to the shoulder hard enough to make Harry jerk his broom a few inches off course before she swore at the player responsible and carried on. Ginny intercepted a pass, shot from halfway across the pitch and missed by inches. The crowd groaned. Harry rose higher, circling, searching for the tiny flicker of gold among a hundred moving colours.
Up here, the pitch rearranged itself into distances he understood. The castle was a dark, familiar shape against the horizon; the lake shone like a sheet of hammered metal; the stands blurred into a restless ring around the pitch. Wind pulled at his hair and filled his lungs until he felt painfully alive.
During a lull between one attack and the next, he looked down and found Luna without having meant to search for her. She had never demanded to be found or waved her hands in front of the world and insisted that it look at her; she simply appeared where she was meant to be, as quietly inevitable as moonlight.
Harry saw her in the Gryffindor section, seated between Hermione and Neville despite the blue edging of her robes — because nobody who knew Luna could have expected her to support a House when she had come to support a person.
Hermione was watching her with an expression that was half fondness and half a very determined effort not to laugh, while Pansy, seated on Neville's other side in a red scarf she wore like evidence in a criminal trial, tracked Ginny's progress across the pitch with ferocious concentration.
Luna was wearing a cape.
It was not a proper Hogwarts cape, nor anything anyone sane would have worn to a Quidditch match. It fell from her shoulders in the loose, dramatic sweep of something intended for a very small and extremely glamorous superhero, and it was made from a soft blue material that caught the light whenever she moved. Silver thread had been sewn along the hem in looping, uneven lines. Across the back, in large gold letters that must have taken her hours, was written:
POTTER 7
For a moment, Harry forgot to breathe. The fabric was not exactly the same as their blanket. It could not have been; that blanket had been old when Luna first spread it over both their knees by the lake, blue gone soft with washing and weather, the wool smelling faintly of tea leaves and whatever impossible herbs she kept in her pockets. Yet it held the same colour and the same worn gentleness, and with them came the remembered weight across his lap and Luna's knee resting beside his own.
She lifted one hand when she saw him looking, and the cape slipped sideways to reveal a red-and-gold ribbon tied around her wrist. Then she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted something that vanished beneath the crowd, although Harry knew what she had said anyway.
I see you.
It was ridiculous that he knew. She had probably said something about the Snitch, or warned him that Wrackspurts became agitated in competitive environments, yet the certainty entered him with the clean force of a spell.
For years, people had looked at Harry because they wanted something from him. A symbol. A weapon. A miracle. A story they could own until it no longer resembled the boy who had survived it.
Luna was looking at him because he was Harry, and for the first time since he had stepped onto the pitch, he drew a breath that reached the bottom of his lungs.
A flash of gold cut beneath the Gryffindor goalposts.
Harry dropped into a dive before he had fully registered the glint, the world narrowing to wind, broomstick and the small bright beat of the Snitch's wings. Above him, he heard another Seeker shout. The stands became noise; the grass rushed closer; his scar twinged once with the old phantom memory of danger and then fell silent beneath the rush of blood in his ears.
The Hufflepuff Seeker came alongside him just as the Snitch darted left. Harry pushed harder and followed, skimming so close to the ground that the toes of his boots brushed the frost-silvered grass before his fingers closed around something hot and trembling.
For one suspended second, there was only the beat of wings against his palm.
Then the stadium exploded.
Harry pulled up sharply, and a laugh broke from him before he could contain it. Gryffindor had won. Ginny was somewhere below him, screaming loud enough to wake the dead, while in the stands Pansy had abandoned all pretence of dignity and was punching the air with both fists. Red-and-gold banners surged above them. Students stood on benches. Headmistress McGonagall, seated in the staff box, had risen to her feet and was clapping with the severe approval of someone who would deny it later.
Harry should have flown to his team; he saw them turning towards him, brooms raised and mouths open in triumph. For a few seconds he hovered above the pitch, the Snitch still warm in his fist, while a dozen old instincts told him exactly what to do: smile, wave, give them the version of himself they had paid to see, and then get away before the attention became unbearable. Instead, he looked towards the Gryffindor stands.
Luna stood on the bench with her cape snapping around her knees in the wind, clapping slowly and smiling at him as if he had done something she had expected all along, something lovely and entirely unsurprising.
His mouth curved before he could think about who might see it.
Then he turned his broom.
There was a moment of confusion below him, perhaps only because nobody expected the match to end with the Seeker flying away from his own team. He heard one of the Beaters call his name. Ginny, quicker than the rest of them, followed the direction of his gaze and began to laugh.
Harry rose over the low wall separating the pitch from the stands and came down awkwardly on the narrow strip beneath the Gryffindor section. Students were already leaning over the railings, shouting, pointing, craning their necks, and the familiar weight of their attention prickled across the back of his neck. Harry kept his eyes on Luna.
Luna climbed down from the bench and came towards him, her hair lifting in the breeze. Up close, he could see that the silver stitching around the cape's edges had been done by hand. Some of the letters in his name leaned slightly. The number seven had a small, crooked star beside it.
"You made that," he said, because it was the only useful sentence he could find.
"I did." Luna looked down at herself. "It is a Quidditch support structure, although Neville says it is technically a cape. He is very particular about categories, but I think the distinction is rather arbitrary."
Harry laughed and heard the breathlessness still caught in it. Luna reached up and smoothed a thumb over the smudge of dirt on his cheek; her skin was warm despite the February air, and his attention narrowed to the slow, careful pass of it.
"I thought you might need something familiar," she said. "The first time you played after everything. Crowds can be very hungry creatures when they are frightened, and they have been frightened for a long time."
Harry swallowed. He had not told her that he had almost not played, that he had stood outside the changing room that morning with his broom in his hand and thought of walking back to the castle, despite the yes he had given Ginny months before, despite the early practices and the clean relief that came every time his feet left the ground. Luna had known anyway, or perhaps she had simply made room for the possibility, which was different and somehow kinder.
His gaze dropped to the blue fabric again.
"Our blanket," he said quietly.
"The blanket is still our blanket," Luna replied. "This is only its cousin. I asked for something that felt like being safe, but in colours suitable for victory."
There was a laugh in her voice, but her gaze did not leave his. Harry looked at her, really looked: at the cape too large for her narrow shoulders, at the red-and-gold ribbon tied around her wrist even though she was wearing Ravenclaw blue beneath it, at the little star sewn beside his number, and at Luna herself, who had told the school he was her boyfriend with the same calm certainty with which she might have announced that rain was expected on Thursday. She had never once made him feel as though he owed her a performance in return.
He spoke before he could decide whether the truth was too much.
"Merlin, you're perfect."
For once, Luna looked almost startled, her smile gone small and soft.
"I know," she said, and then, because she was Luna and because she understood the difference between vanity and truth better than most people understood either, she added, "But I am glad you think so."
Harry kissed her.
The crowd made a sound like the pitch itself had exhaled. Somewhere nearby, Hermione gave a delighted little gasp, immediately followed by Neville saying, "Well, obviously," in the tone of someone whose predictions had been ignored for too long. Harry heard none of it properly.
Luna's hands came up to his face. Her cape brushed his wrist, soft blue against the red and gold of his Quidditch robes, and he kissed her slowly enough to remember it. He had spent so much of his life bracing for the moment when joy became dangerous, when someone reached for him and the world took it as permission to pull him apart.
Luna kissed him as though there was no part of him she meant to take.
When he drew back, the stands were still there: hundreds of faces, noise, banners, laughter, the whole bright mess of Hogwarts watching.
Harry could have stepped away then. He could have turned towards Ginny and the rest of his team, made a joke, found the narrow path back to safety.
Instead, he tucked a strand of Luna's hair behind her ear and kissed her again.
This time, he heard the cheering.
It rose around them, distant and warm. For once, the sound carried no demand and built no cage; it passed like weather over a place he had finally decided to call home.