In Between

Fourth year

It was like having friends. There was laughter and talking, not behind her but all around, smiles and seriousness, and she could just talk and laugh and it was all right and expected. It was regular, in a whimsical appropriate way and Ginny was there and smiled at her. She got to know Hermione Granger who lived off books and wanted everything to run according to her plans, which she managed a lot of the time; and Harry who was nice when he was not angry or trying to impress Cho Chang; and Ronald too. Ronald fascinated her, so alike and so different from his sister. They had the same sense of humour but Ginny was kinder most of the time. He shared her hair colour and her freckles but on Ginny's face they were softer in harmony with her brown eyes and short, soft body.

Later, Luna remembers the chaos; how everything else disappeared from her mind until fighting and running and holding on was a straight path in her head, the only possible way to follow. The air was singing with magic, bright and malevolent. There was nothing else to do but run and duck and curse and survive. But in a far-away corner of her mind the feelings registered and they came back to niggle at her later; Ginny's hard fingers around her upper arm when she was about to fall, the softness of her hair and the sharpness of her elbow in Luna's side as they were running.

*

Summer

The girl speaks slowly, like she is weighing every word on golden scales. It sounds almost like singing, the slow lilting syllables.

Luna sees her pale brown eyes that look like the ones she would recognise anywhere. She tries to see through them to find out what is hidden in those depths, but that certain sparkle she knows so well is missing. There is no point in trying.

"We are searching for the Crumple-Horned Snorkacks," Luna's father says.

"Snorkacks," the girl repeats as if tasting the word. She turns around and looks at the man by the fire, the blue-eyed man with a kind look about him. He must be her father. He nods to her and she continues.

"They are not... important. The dragons are growing restless. There are whispers..."

Against the red-orange sky of midnight sun they see the dragons high up on the mountain. Twisting and turning, stretching their wings and twirling around each other like leaves in a whirlwind, their pale blue bodies are gigantic mirrors of the sky, trapped by human confines. Her father's big grey eyes mirror the sky and Luna knows that her own do the same, prickling with tears and a longing to fly off.

*

Fifth year

Luna keeps her golden Galleon in a pocket in her robe. She's sewn a new one in this summer, so that it'll never fall out. When she's thinking she slips her hand in and fiddles with it. In History of Magic she traces the edges of the coin with her fingertip, and she knows all the uneven spots by heart. No matter how long she keeps the golden metal pressed between the palms of her hands, it does not grow warm.

Ginny is still nice to her but in an absent-minded way, making small-talk after classes before she rushes away to meet with Dean Thomas or the other Gryffindors.

When Harry asks her to come to Slughorn's Christmas party she is delighted, and she doesn't colour her eyebrows even though she thinks that it really would have been a fascinating experiment. When her brain goes fuzzy at the thought of spending an entire evening at a party where Ginny will be, she tries to bat away the Wrackspurt but without success. It has apparently already managed to crawl inside her head - it shows up whenever Ginny does, and makes everything go fuzzy as Wrackspurts tend to do.

When her coin finally does grow warm it feels like she is transported a year back and the path in her head is straight and obvious, but this time they are patrolling familiar hallways and the golden liquid luck makes the spells miss narrowly time and time again. At first Ginny's right there, they are walking and running, right next to each other, but there is something absent in Ginny's eyes, there is frustration in the way she tugs at her robes and swishes her wand. Then they split up and for long hours Luna is just waiting, talking and wondering about the turn of events next to Hermione in the dungeons, until little Professor Flitwick comes with news and Snape rushes past them and out of sight.

Later in the hospital wing there is a strange calm in the air despite the madness they have landed in. The worried crease in Ginny's face smoothes out and relaxes only when she returns with Harry's hand in hers. Seeing that makes Luna's chest hurt a little but she is not sure why.

Luna thinks that the phoenix's song is perhaps the saddest sound she has ever heard, reminiscent of broken laughter and left behind flowers and fantastic revolutionary experiments gone wrong. Fawkes cannot know that Professor Dumbledore is waiting for him. He's just behind the fluttering veil, whispering 'Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!'. Luna knows, but the fact that Professor Dumbledore is no longer here with them still hurts and worries her. There are things to be done, people that need to be rescued.

*

Sixth year

The next year, the school is almost empty. Hogwarts misses its students, Luna thinks, because the difference can be felt in the whole castle. The humming of magic in the walls is quieter, and the hallways are darker and lead you to places where you don't intend to go.

They still sleep in their old dormitories, but after the first few days of seeing her students sitting so far apart, spread out over the Great Hall, McGonagall makes the whole school sit at one large table. Luna decides that she likes it, and she often sits next to little Rose Zeller from Hufflepuff, who writes letter upon letter at every meal. Luna gives her parchment when she's run out of supplies, because Luna is sure that a written message for worried parents is better than no message, even if it cannot be sent.

Some days Ginny comes and sits down next to her, and Luna tells her stories from the Quibbler. Most times they make her smile a little as she pushes the food around on her plate, but her freckles and the dark circles under her eyes still stand out as clearly against her pale skin.

When the Christmas holidays start, the empty spaces at the dinner table are more numerous than ever and the castle grows cold. On Christmas morning Luna goes up to the owlery. The windows there have a lovely view over the grounds and the owls are nice company for thinking. But when she steps over the threshold there's someone in the room already. Ginny is sitting on the windowsill, holding a crumpled paper in one hand. The knitted jumper she's wearing leaves her bony wrists bare, and it's frayed around the edges. When she turns her face towards the sound of footsteps Luna sees that Ginny's eyes are a bit red.

"Luna," she says. "What are you doing up here?"

"I like the view. And owls are good listeners, didn't you know that?" She steps carefully over the owl droppings and stands by the window, and her head is at the same height as Ginny's.

"Listeners! I suppose that's something," Ginny says and turns back towards the sky. Suddenly and violently, she squeezes the letter in her hand into a hard ball and throws it out through the window with all her might.

"There's no one I could send it to anyway!" she says, and Luna is quiet.

By mid-January those who went home for the holidays still haven't come back, and the teachers start eating at the students' table. The newspapers stop coming, and Luna starts spending most of her free time in the Gryffindor common room.

Physical comfort is just another thing most people need.

They spend long evenings on the couch in the Gryffindor common room. Ginny's dormitory is too empty and the Ravenclaw common room is cold this winter.

The evening grows later and the room colder, and the two of them lean closer and closer together. Maybe it's just for warmth or for comfort, but it makes Luna's body tingle. The fire in the hearth turns to ember, the rest of the students disappear off to bed and Ginny falls asleep with her head in Luna's lap. She looks peaceful with her eyes closed, the worried line on her forehead is smoothed out and her freckles stand out sharply against her pale skin. (There is no Quidditch this year, and therefore there has been no tanning and no commenting.)

She has a little speck of chocolate at the corner of her mouth. Luna wipes it away with her thumb, and leans a little closer. In the dimmed light that sneaks through her curtain of hair, she studies Ginny's mouth. Her lips are chapped and she has a freckle just above the left corner of her mouth that matches the one on her right eyelid. She leans closer and closer until their lips are touching. There are no fireworks. Ginny's eyes open and meet hers and she sees that they've got small golden flecks mixed in with the brown that she never noticed before. The startled second stretches and stretches until Ginny grabs Luna's upper arms with her strong chaser's hands and pulls herself upwards and closer.

They have many winter nights to spend, and empty dormitories to keep warm in. One Saturday morning in March, Ginny wraps herself in a spare blanket from the empty bed next to Luna's and stands in the middle of the floor.

"You know, I used to dream about being rescued. But I think I might not want to," she says.

"You don't have to make it up to him," Luna says and pulls the quilt off her again. She marvels at the constellations of freckles on Ginny's naked skin, the Northern Crown starting on her hipbone and disappearing down under her knickers, Cassiopeia sitting just beneath her collarbone.

"Everything has a story to tell if you connect it in the right way." She takes Ginny's hand in hers and gets her back to bed. "I want to find the story of your freckles," she says and Ginny's eyes turn bright and she does not seem cold as Luna finds the endless variations of stories waiting to be written with cold black ink on Ginny's stomach and chest and shoulder blades. (On her right ankle is a small rabbit that lost his mother to a fox but found the way to the fairie realm.)

The snow thaws and the atmosphere tenses. Rose Zeller has stopped writing letters at the dinner table, and there's a history of war to be read in the lines around McGonagall's eyes.

They're sitting by the lake and Luna wonders where the squid has gone because the lake is far too still and quiet. She also wonders what's on Ginny's mind today, because she's the opposite, she's restless and jerky and this has been a year of quiet desperation.

"I don't think I can be the same anymore," Ginny says. "I mean, later. It's just too..." She makes some vague gesture with her hands and looks to Luna for confirmation.

"Of course you can't be the same. Everything changes, all the time." Ginny stills and Luna brushes a strand of red hair off her forehead before she continues. "But do you really want to?"

Ginny traces the shape of Luna's mouth with her finger and says "Maybe not".