Luna Remembers

There are many things that Luna Lovegood believes in that most other wizards and witches find the stuff of fairy tales. Blibbering Humdingers and the Crumple-Horned Snorkack. There are some things that Luna Lovegood believes in that a few others also know to be real. Thestrals, the horcruxes of Voldemort. There are some things Luna Lovegood doesn't believe in that others wizards and witches do. Like sleeping without your wand in your hand. Going into an unfamiliar building without a ready curse on your lips. Trusting the strangers in a crowd not to hex you. Being safe in your own home.

Her friends, the ones who are left, whisper that she has become as obsessive as Mad-Eye Moody used to be. Luna smiles her dreamy smile and pretends not to hear them. She knows that Ron patrols the halls of the Burrow at dawn and at dusk, wand at the ready, without fail, checking for Death Eaters under the bed like a five year old Muggle looking for monsters. She knows that Ginny hasn't slept a full night since the beginning of her first year at Hogwarts, and once had a full-blown panic attack standing in front of a store display of blank books at the age of twenty. She knows that Hermione sleeps with her wand under her pillow and a loaded Muggle gun in her nightstand drawer. She can see the outline of the knives that are sheathed in Harry's boots and at his thigh. She once found the gillyweed and blood replenishing potion that Neville still keeps tucked in his robes, just in case. None of them have windows in their bedrooms. And she knows they can all see thestrals now.

Unlike her friends, Luna doesn't pretend to move on from the War. She inherited The Quibbler when she should have been a seventh year student, when the Death Eaters descended upon the families of every known member of the Order and Dumbledore's Army. She can still hear every night the long-ago cries of her friends in their crowded and dirty Muggle hotel room somewhere in the middle of Germany when the news reached them. The Longbottoms, supposedly safe in the middle of St Mungo's or at the family estate. Every defenseless Creevey Muggle. Two dentists with bushy brown hair. The Weasley grandparents. Even Harry's hated Muggle relatives. Her father. The rest of their families were already long dead, or killed by Death Eaters before this horrific attack, or off on their own assignments as members of the Order or the DA. It was an act meant to hurt, to torture, and it did. They had spent a night when they should have been going over their intelligence sobbing in each other's arms. All except Luna. She had moved amongst them offering a kind word, a hug, a tissue, or when the tissues ran out, the rough toilet paper.

After the War was supposedly over, after the fall of Voldemort and the month-long spate of overdue funerals and memorials and long-winded speeches about the New Era they found themselves in made by those few Ministry officials left, she had gone home for a time, packed up the family house, and sold it. She moved into a room at Harry's house down the hall from Hermione, across from Colin, next to Neville, and started to rebuild The Quibbler staff. She hired Neville to track down interesting magical plants during his summer breaks from teaching Herbology, and convinced Hermione to write an regular column on defensive charms. Ginny shared her research on new hexes every issue. Ron covered sports when he had a moment free of Ministry work, and Colin, the only Creevey left, was her staff photographer. There were still reports on the front page about sightings of fantastic creatures, but over time, The Quibbler became the best English source in regards to recent innovations in defensive spellwork and fighting the Dark Arts. And it didn't hurt circulation that the Boy Who Lived Still had agreed to occasionally write a column for her.

Luna didn't mean for that change to happen, but she knew what now interested her, and as much as Crumple-horned Snorkacks were her first love, she would rather know how to repel hexes or heal wounds. She remembers the flow of blood on her hands from Dennis Creevey's gashed-open chest, and the helplessness she felt when she realized she had no idea how to heal it, for all her Ravenclaw intelligence. She keeps a picture of him on her desk to remind her of an excitable if shy boy, and of the first time her mind truly failed her, and the cost of that failure. Sometimes she sees Colin wince when he comes to give her his latest photographs, but she knows he understands. They all understand. The one picture Colin snapped of the entirety of Dumbledore's Army, himself actually in the photo thanks to a timer, is hung prominently in The Quibbler's main office, many of the laughing faces now dead. She knows that the rest of the survivors have copies of the picture hanging in their own spaces, too. She's seen it on Hermione's mantelpiece, in the Burrow next to the grandfather clock that Ron and Ginny can't make themselves take down even though their parents' hands have been pointing to Mortal Peril for years, in the kitchen of Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, in Neville's office right off the Hogwarts Greenhouse, on Colin's wall.

She thinks that if her friends had really moved on, they would start to live alone. There is the cluster of the orphaned at Grimmauld Place - Harry, Hermione, Colin, Neville and herself - with Remus and Tonks in the attic keeping watch and the portrait of Mrs. Black still fastened to the wall, screaming of mudbloods and traitors every time the blanket over her comes loose, though the rest of the house is now cleaned and painted in cheerful colors and the stuffed heads of house-elves have been buried in the yard underneath a small fountain they installed. Ron and Ginny live at the Burrow where their surviving brothers visit every Sunday for a family supper, and no matter how crowded the table is with friends, significant others, and children, they leave a seat empty for their parents, draped in her last unfinished knitting project and the Muggle music box he had been tinkering with.

It took them a month after the fall of Voldemort to even sleep in separate rooms. They had spent almost the entire war as one group, moving across the world amongst the Muggles, spending the good nights huddled on dingy hotel beds charmed to fit them all, spending the bad huddled in a pile in a small, drafty tent. From the worst of Muggle hotel rooms and battered tents in deep forests they'd based their battle against Voldemort. Between invisibility cloaks, potions, apparition, and charms, only one person had checked them in each night but between six and ten had fit into the hotel rooms when they were near enough to civilization. The core of Dumbledore's Army had gotten so used to close quarters that once they could return to England full-time, they hadn't known how to sleep without someone else's elbow in their ribs, or the quiet breathing of their friends around them. They'd tried, that first night, but none had slept well if they could even sleep, some screaming themselves awake from nightmares and others bursting into their friends' rooms at the noise, wands at the ready. For a month, they'd crammed into the former master bedroom that Sirius had once shared with Buckbeak before slowly moving to other rooms. With their family inheritances and the multitude of job offers each of them had gotten, no one needed to stay at Grimmauld Place. They could each afford a house if not a mansion. But no one had felt safe except in the hidden and charmed Black family house - their one sanctuary during the War.

While Luna spent the first six months after the war concentrating on rebuilding the staff of The Quibbler, her friends who hadn't yet chosen from among their job offers spent the time cleaning Grimmauld Place and redecorating. Harry burned the Black family tree off the wall after giving up on unsticking it. They repainted, like Muggles, to pass the time. Old furniture was thrown out and then replaced from a mix of Muggle and Wizarding stores; they borrowed a charmed van to move it in. It became the home Harry said he wished he could have had with his godfather - even though no charm, hex, jinx, or even a Muggle chainsaw would remove the portrait of Mrs. Black from the hallway. It became a bright and comfortable house to which the few employed residents returned contentedly at the end of the day, finally being able to relax a tiny bit from the myriad stares of strangers and coworkers alike, finally being able to believe that those around them weren't hidden enemies.

Ron and Ginny took a year before they dared to move back to the Burrow, and could only do it together. As a group, the D.A. had checked every cupboard and drawer for hidden dangers, and each had laid their own specialties of charms, runes, spells, and defensive jinxes on the house. Neville even surrounded the house with a protective magical hedge. Once the house was deemed almost as safe as Grimmauld Place, the youngest Weasleys returned for good. Dumbledore's Army was truly split for the first time after the War.

Now, five years later, despite flourishing careers, they still stayed in their safe houses, refusing to live too apart from their comrades. There were daily check-ins between the groups, though many saw each other in the course of their jobs. All still carried the DA galleons in their pockets, now charmed to alert the others in case of emergency, or unconsciousness, or the Imperius Curse. The first time Harry was badly knocked off his broom in practice, they had all Apparated immediately to the field, wands drawn. When Neville forgot to put on earmuffs while teaching his second years how to repot Mandrake Root, they had all arrived in less than five minutes at the greenhouse, after running from the Hogwarts Gates. Their coworkers accept their eccentricities. They were heroes, after all.

Luna doesn't feel like a hero. She did what she did for her friends. Because the people who were kind to her were in the thick of the fight to save the world. Because it was right, and someone needed to do it. Now she wonders if her friends will ever feel safe again. She wonders if she'll ever again think about nargles first upon waking, instead of the Death Eaters she killed, or Dennis Creevey's blood on her hands. Luna wonders about a lot of things still. In the mornings, she tucks her wand behind her ear as she washes her face, puts on the butterbeer cap necklace she made once for her mother, and steps out into a world she doesn't trust. Because Luna remembers too much of death to fully believe in life again.