May 4, 1998
“A lot of people are dead now,” Luna whispers. She sounds wistful. She always sounds wistful. It’s annoying sometimes. Even as she kissed me two days ago and told me to be careful not to die too quickly when we parted ways, her to fight alongside the good people and me to suggest turning over Harry Potter then ‘cowardly’ leading the young Slytherins away. Now, Luna has the audacity to speak about all the death that occurred that night wistfully , dreamily, as though it’s just another random and probably pointless topic she talks about while brushing gentle fingers through my hair. She pauses in her absentminded brushes to point a finger up at the sky. “Do you think they turn into stars? I read a poem a long time ago, or maybe it was a fable.” She hums to herself in thought and drops her hand back into my hair. “I think it was a song actually. It told me that whenever someone dies, they turn into a brand new constellation.”
I shrug, turn my head toward her and nuzzle into her hand that’s now softly scratching along my scalp. “So what if they do? Turn to stars or constellations or whatever other barmy shit your poems and fairy tales say? Why does it matter if they’re dead either bloody way?”
Luna laughs up at the sky, giggles, like there wasn’t a battle barely 48 hours ago, as if the castle they’re still hiding away in isn’t in crumbles, as if they’re not relaxing on a tower that their headmaster was avada kedavraed off of, as if a war isn’t over and never even happened in the first place. “We remember them, Pansy. You look up at the sky and you remember them.”
“I don’t want to fucking remember,” I tell her. I don’t. Honestly. I want to stay up on the Astronomy Tower until it falls apart like the rest of this castle and brings us down with it. I want to keep pretending like a war never happened, like there was nothing to be battled over. I want to become just another one of the bodies scattered around this school. I feel a tear form in the corner of my eye, so I move closer to Luna, wrap her arm around me so I can rest my head on her chest and drape an arm across her waist. “I want to stay up here forever.”
“Forever doesn’t exist,” Luna says as the tear falls down my face and onto her shirt. I watch it make the lightweight white material go transparent. I can see a vague tear splatter-shaped circle of her milky pale skin through the shirt. “We’re gonna come down off this tower, and then we’re gonna come out of this castle, and then we’re gonna come out of this life, and then we’re gonna turn into a star, and then we’re gonna burst into a supernova, and on and on and on. Nothing lasts forever, Pansy.”
“Come down off this tower,” I repeat in a whisper. I hesitate a moment before asking even quieter, “Now?”
I can feel her nod. Her heartbeat quickens under my ear, and this is the only way I even remember that she’s human sometimes. Sometimes, I think she’s not real. Luna talks about things too easily. She always has the same hazy, deep-in-thought look on her face. And the aforementioned wistful voice. She’s beautiful and ethereal and fucking angelic, and I forgot that she’s just as scared to come off this tower as I am.
Sitting up and leaving her embrace, I wipe the remnants of the tear away from my cheek and reach down to grab her hand and pull her into a sitting position with me. Luna’s fingers tighten around mine, and in a show of unspoken agreement, we both stand up at the same time, gracelessly stumbling since we haven’t used our legs in a day at least.
Luna throws her head back with a laugh, eye crinkling and filled with tears clouding her blue pupils that shine through the nighttime darkness. Her mouth is wide open and the tinkling sound of her laugh fills the air around us. Eventually, her laugh dissipates into hiccups and tears are falling down her face and she lets her head fall onto my shoulder, resting there as her body shakes with something in between sobs and guffaws.
“What the bloody fuck is so damn funny?” I ask her, holding back a grin.
She pressed a kiss to the side of my neck before picking her head up off me. “What?” I ask again, and she grabs my face with both her hands, holding me in place as we look at each other. She’s laughing again now, and it’s beautiful so up close. Luna tells me she thought we would be up here forever. “I really did,” she says. She leans in and kisses me, almost as desperate as her laughing.
“You don’t even believe in forever,” I tell her with a grin.
“I believe in everything, Pansy. Maybe even forever sometimes.”
“You half-baked hypocrite, you’re off your rocker.”
“I know,” she says with another, more gentle kiss. “Let’s get off this tower now.” And we do climb down from the tower. The first Auror that sees us Apparates us to the Ministry. We’re separated for questioning and reuniting with our family and then me at least for more questioning. I go see Draco at some point, only for five minutes before he’s brought back to his holding cell. I don’t see Luna for four months.
September 1, 1998
Hogwarts has good memories too. Of course, all the bad memories are raw and itching at the forefront of our heads, making the good memories seem so far out of reach. I wasn’t even in the worst of it during the battle, during the entire war even, yet the walls cracked from spell damage and all the crying kids when we walk into the Great Hall irks me, makes my skin prickle and my chest get tight. I can’t fucking breathe and I’m about to turn around and walk right back out of this cursed castle when a glimpse of blonde hair catches my eye.
Luna is one of the good memories in this castle. The first time she approached me it was in the library, sixth year, I had just slammed my Arithmancy book onto the table in frustration, and she offered to help me with my work. A week later, we went to Hogsmeade, to Dervish & Bange's so she could get her Spectrespecs fixed. When we left, she put those hoax glasses on and told me I had wrackspurts all around me. A week after that Draco was sliced open by Harry Potter. Luna came with me to visit him some time after that, held my hand and made conversation with him about pureblood genealogy in relation to the number of Snorkacks each generation is said to attract. When we left after visiting hours, Luna kissed me nonchalantly, lightly, such that it seemed like something we did often, and told me that she’d had “a lovely conversation and no idea Draco knew so much about crumple-horned Snorkacks through history”.
From there, we kept wandering Hogsmeade, or we would drink tea by the Great Lake. Luna would sometimes read my tarot or my palms in an empty classroom. I taught Luna yoga and meditation. We’d help each other with Arithmancy and Ancient Runes and whatnot, and we’d stay up far too late talking about nonsense and childhood and fairytales and the future. We had sex for the first time on top of the Astronomy Tower. It wasn’t too long before Luna went missing, supposedly at Azkaban but now, because of the trials, we know she was at Malfoy Manor.
I look at Draco beside me, stepping behind Goyle like a small child behind his mother, and I worry for him but I resent him. He should have told me what was happening in sixth year, in seventh year. His entire life. We were friends I thought. When you know someone since you were in the bloody womb, you expect that you’re the type of friends who share everything with each other. I didn’t know anything until the trials were publicized. I don’t know if we’re friends even anymore, but I still brush my fingers against his wrist and nod towards Luna’s bright blonde head. She’s surrounded by Potter, the two Weasleys, Granger, Longbottom, and a couple other D.A. members that either dislike me or completely hate me, and I assume that’s why Draco raises a hesitant eyebrow at me. I shrug and leave to walk toward her.
“Hello,” I say to the group when I reach them. To each and every one of them, I sent letters over the summer, shitty apologies full of too-soon jokes and sarcasm. A written apology to everyone except Luna.
“Hello, Pansy,” Luna says. She’s dressed in something pink that I can see peeking out of her Ravenclaw robes, probably a flowy summer dress even though it’s a cold September in the Scottish highlands. She’d wear a tank top in the middle of winter if she could, and she has worn a tank top. She’s worn less than a tank top, and Pansy well knows it from sixth year when Luna danced naked on top of the Astronomy Tower.
A couple of the others nodded, murmured “Parkinson” with as much respect as they could muster up. I didn’t care much for them, though I’m sure some of them at least have suspicions about me and Luna, but I just have eyes for Luna. I’ve missed her. Even if I didn’t write her or think hardly about her or do anything but lay in bed and down Dreamless Sleep after Dreamless Sleep, I still missed her somewhere outside of the foggy haze that I lived in.
“I—,” I pause before I can tell her in front of her friends that I’ve missed her. “Let’s meet later maybe?”
“As usual?” she says.
I take a deep breath, give her a wry smile, and nod. “Don’t know if usual is the word for it anymore, but yes, as usual.”
“I’ll see you,” Luna says, grabbing my hand and pulling me in to brush a kiss across my cheek.
I noticeably shiver at the contact and try to shake it off. “Need to get back to Draco then.”
“Oh! Tell him I say hullo and that I think I have a tidbit on blondes in aristocracy that he might be interested in,” Luna tells me as a goodbye, even as the people around her stiffen and frown further at the mention of Draco. I hadn’t expected her to be so kind either when it came to Draco Malfoy, the person whose dungeons she was held in.
“I will,” I promise, and I smile stiffly back at her before making my way back to the fellow Slytherin eighth years. Draco pursed his lips when I came back over to him, and he pursed his lips again when I left the Slytherin dorms to go up to the Astronomy tower. He’s scared that one or both of us is going to get hurt if we keep up this casual thing. And it is casual and he might be right, but we started this during a war for Merlin’s sake, and if we can manage not to hurt each other during an actual war, we can probably do the same outside of one. And after all, it is just casual. It’s not enough to be hurt by.
Even despite the lack of meaning I instill in what little relationship we have, I am anxious to see her as I walk up the steep stairs to the tower. When I get to the top, I can see her dancing, hips swaying, arms up in the air, long flowing pink dress flapping around her legs in the wind. For a moment, all I notice is her hair whipping around just like her dress, but then I realize she’s standing on the edge of the tower, balancing barefoot on the stone parapet and still dancing gracefully on the tower’s brink as if she isn’t two hundred feet above a very hard, not-fun-to-fall-on ground.
“Luna!” I shout and start running forward. She just spins and jumps off the edge with a smile on her face. She skips toward me as well, and when we met, she kisses me, on the lips then on my cheek then my neck, my shoulder, behind my ear, above my collarbone. I let it happen for just a few moments before I pushed her away.
I keep my hands on her shoulders, gripping her tight in front of me. “What the bloody hell were you doing up there? Did you want to fall off the tower? Merlin’s sake, Luna, you scared me!”
“Oh, Pansy, I’m fine. I was just talking to the moon. The sky, you know,” she elaborates, placing her hands on top of mine. “It’s alive just like the rest of us, and it needs to know it’s doing its best. I don’t think I believe in God like the Muggles do, but I believe in the universe and I believe it’s just as hurt as the rest of the world. It probably needs someone to talk to.”
“I—Merlin,” I say and pull her tight against me. “Next time, talk to the moon off the ledge, will you? If it can be sad like us, it can probably be worried like us that its only friend will fall off a big fucking tower.”
“You were worried I’d fall off?” Luna says, her words muffled against the crook of my neck.
“Yes,” I say into her hair. “Of course I was.”
“You didn’t write me,” she whispers before letting go of me and walking back to the parapet and leaning against it. I sit down beside her and she rests her head on my shoulder. The stone is cool on my back and Luna is warm beside me, but there is something different now. Before the Battle of Hogwarts, our relationship was careless, it was a spot of peace in the war around us that we had no control over. It wasn’t something I felt needed writing back and forth or seeing each other more than once or twice, three times a week at most. I didn’t even feel it obligatory to tell Draco or Millie and Daphne until they all asked me about it. I liked Luna, just as much as I liked any other new but intriguing friend or the younger Slytherins, meaning that I was perfectly okay, even glad, having her in my life but I wouldn’t miss her, wouldn’t not be okay without her.
“I should have,” I tell her. Because things are different now, in a barely noticeable way but in a way that’s still there. I miss her. I wasn’t okay without her.
“Draco and I wrote. He told me you were taking too much Dreamless Sleep,” Luna says, and I snort at the understatement and wrap my hand around her shoulders. “Is that why you didn’t write me?”
I sigh. “Not really. I was...asleep most of the summer because of the Dreamless, but I still had time to write. Your friends must have told you that I wrote them all, apologized for all the shit I did.” I laugh softly. “Mostly for what I didn’t.”
We’re both silent for a second, then I repeat very quietly, “I should have written you.”
One of Luna’s hands was twirling a strand of my hair around her finger. “We both didn’t write, Pansy. And anyway, what does it matter? We’re both here right now. I’ve got this new idea, Pans, wanna hear it?”
“Sure, Loony,” I say, using her nickname since she used mine. We both dislike the nicknames, but not enough to actually speak out about it. It’s something we’ve talked about before. Sometimes, I feel like I know Luna better than anyone else, all these small details about her bounce around in my head and I don’t know this many things about anyone else, not even myself maybe.
“It’s called carpe diem, living in the moment, being present, making the right now memorable, living like you’ll die tomorrow—there’s a lot of words for it. The gist, I think, is that every single second we live is important and we should treat it like it has the potential and the capacity to be amazing,” she finishes. The whole time she’s waving her open hand around to emphasize words while her other hand progressively grips tighter at my hair as she gets more excited.
“I like it,” I tell her. “I don’t think you’re the first to come up with the idea, but I still like it.”
“I know. It’s a bit of Muggle philosophy. Except I do think Nietzche and Dostoevsky at least were wizards.”
“Isn’t Nietzsche a bit nihilistic?” I ask.
“Aren’t we all?” Luna retorts with a smile before she leans in to kiss me. We keep kissing for what seems like forever, but we know forever doesn’t exist. These are just a few small moments that we’re trying to make the most of, because we don’t have long so we might as well make it worth it. Live in the moment. Stop thinking and just do. When we both collapse beside each other nearly an hour later, Luna tells me about all her favorite philosophers, and I ask about their ideas, their beliefs, their lives. We talk until far too late, and it’s almost like it used to be in sixth year. It’s almost easy to not realize things have changed.
December 13, 1998
“I still don’t know if I believe in this stuff,” I remind Luna as she starts shuffling her tarot cards. “Don’t know if I can place my hopes for the future on pieces of painted paper.”
“You know, Pansy, it’s not hard to believe in the possibility of something, even if you can’t believe in the certainty of it,” Luna tells me then shrugs. “And anyway, why can’t it be possible? In this moment, isn’t anything possible?”
She grins up at me, pulling her attention away from the cards. She’s really been on this live-in-the-moment kick, kissing me full on the lips in the Great Hall saying that she wants to make “every second amazing and kissing you is amazing”. Dragging me with her to talk to first years because “I want to meet as many people as I can before I can’t anymore”. Not doing her papers because “it doesn’t make me as happy as reading this book does, and I want to spend all my life being as happy as possible in every moment”. Spending the whole day playing with the newborn Thestrals because “if life does have a purpose, I think it’s to help those who can’t help themselves, like the Thestral babies”. Even right now, we’re sitting in the middle of the library, legs and feet brushing and entwined under the table, and neither of us is trying to hide it at all. The absurd amount of carpe diem actions are starting to overwhelm me, in both good and bad ways. Good because it looked nice on Luna, the way she would seek out things she knew would make her or others happy. Bad because it felt like she was doing it all wrong, like she was forgetting her responsibilities in order to fulfill this constant happiness ideal that was surely impossible—even if it seemed like she was doing it so well.
“Fine, anything’s possible, Luna, but let’s do the short three-card one, yeah? The past, present, future one. Let’s see what my future holds,” I say sarcastically.
“It’s not that easy, Pansy, and you’re well aware of it,” she scolds me lightly before splitting the deck into thirds and putting the cards down on the table to give her full attention to me. “You decide your own future. The cards just tell you what’s likely to happen if you keep on going like this and sometimes they can give you a bit of advice on what you might be able to change for the better.”
“I think I can figure out my life just fine by myself,” I tell her, and I’m sure it comes out a bit rude and a lot defensive. Luna should know by now I don’t like being told what I ought to do with my life. “I don’t even believe in tarot. Why would I take its advice?”
Luna doesn’t react to the harshness of my voice, just pulls the top card from the three decks and lays them down on the library table face down. “Because you can’t always rely on yourself, Pansy. Sometimes, you need help and when you can’t get it from yourself or other people, you get it from the cards, from tea leaves, from things that are above what we can control, from higher powers.”
I shake my head. “I don’t know how to put that much faith in something I’m not certain of at all.”
“And people are more reliable then?” Luna asks softly, meeting my eyes, Luna knows me better than most, maybe all, and I don’t always remember that until she looks at me like this, with so much knowledge in her eyes and then says stuff like: “Pansy, if you’re not going to have faith in people or higher powers, what are you going to have faith in? It’s a...special time now, and you need to have something to rely on. What’s it going to be?”
“Special is one word for it,” I say with a small laugh. Ignoring the rest of what she said. “Now let’s get on with the cards, yeah?”
“Let’s start in the present then,” she says, thankfully letting me get away with avoiding a larger conversation about feelings and faith and whatnot. Luna flips over the middle card and grimaces at it.
“Well, that’s reassuring,” I say with a grin and crane my neck to see the card. “The tower, right? What’s it mean?”
She places the card down on the table then looks back up at me. “It’s not a very happy card usually. In the present, it means that it feels like the world is falling apart around you or has already fallen apart and you have no idea how to fix it. In reality, it may not be hard to clean up the mess of all these things that seem to be falling apart, but you’re resisting it. You were used to how things were before, and now that things are changing, it’s scary. You need to stop resisting this change, no matter how scary it may seem. Things may seem hopeless or even meaningless now, but give it time and things will certainly get better.”
Luna puts her hand over mine where it rest on the table and looks at me sympathetically. I don’t know if she really believes in these cards or any of the other barmy stuff she talks about all the time, but I know she takes it seriously. I know she believes everything that card said about me, but I don’t know if she believes it because the card said it or simply because she knows me.
“Next card,” I say and turn my hand over so we’re palm to palm.
“Four of cups in the past,” Luna informs me after turning it over. “I like to describe this card as the epitome of discontent. Things in your past were neither great nor terrible, but either way, it wasn’t enough. You wanted more, and this caused you to not notice great opportunities in your life to make it better. You were bored and felt stuck, and some of these opportunities or chances you missed are probably having a negative effect on your life right now.”
“What about opportunities and chances I did take, and they were the wrong ones, or bad ones?” I ask quietly. I haven’t talked to her too deeply about my parts in the war. If she read the trial transcripts, Luna probably already knows, but I really ought to have apologised to her by now for being on the bad side.
She smiles at me and shakes her head. “I don’t know what the cards think, but I at least don’t think you had any control over those decisions. Plus, the card is talking about things you didn’t do, maybe a person you didn’t take a chance with, a job opportunity you missed out on, a person you ignored. Next card then? Let’s see what your future holds.”
“I thought you said it didn’t work like that,” I smirk.
Luna laughs as she flips the last card. “There might be a little bit of truth in it. You’re having a rough go of it with these cards today though,” she adds and nods to the card in question. “Eight of swords, sign of complex problems and feeling trapped and like you have no options. In the future, probably the near future, you’re going to face a decision, and it may seem like there’s only one answer, an answer that hurts and that you won’t want to face. You need to rely on your brain not your heart when you face this decision. Your heart will be misleading, its thinking will be skewed. Your brain will be able to see the right answer, and once you see that answer, you need to go through with it before the choice is made for you. You’re going to feel helpless and trapped, but you’ll have to remind yourself that escape is possible and it doesn’t have to hurt.”
“My future self will definitely take that into consideration,” I tell her with a wink.
“Why can’t you take this one seriously when the other ones were accurate?” Luna asks me softly, as if she’s genuinely poleaxed by my reluctance to accept what the tarot reading told me. “Why can’t you just...give the possibility a chance? Why can’t you believe even a little bit?”
I shrug. “I don’t know,” I admit. “Maybe it’s just that I like to be sure. And all these things you believe in leave too much in the open. I mean, do you really believe in all this? Are you certain?”
“Of course not, Pansy,” Luna says and looks up to the ceiling as if it’s the sky. She sighs dreamily and her eyes get that hazy deep-in-thought look in them. “I’m not certain of anything, but I still choose to believe, to have faith. Without these things, I’d feel lost. I don’t want to be lost until I’m certain they’re impossible. Maybe it’s that! Maybe I’m like you, but different. You can’t believe in things that you aren’t certain of existing, and I can’t not believe in things that I’m not certain don’t exist. I can’t write things off because of no evidence supporting them. There’s no evidence against them either. Does that make sense?”
She comes back to herself, looking down again from the library ceiling and over at me for assurance. I nod and reiterate, “Neither of us are certain, and for you, that makes you believe in the possibility. For me, it makes me assume the impossibility.”
“Exactly, Pansy,” she says wistfully. “Exactly. We’re not so different you know. The D.A. thinks we are. I sometimes even think we are, but we’re not. We work with each other. I think...Nevermind, but we’re not so different, you know. We really aren’t.”
“I suppose, Luna, maybe we’ve got more in common than anyone ever realized,” I agree after barely a moment of hesitation. We really aren’t that different, even if it seems like it in times like this.
June 23, 1999
I nudge Luna to wake her up. She’s humming in her sleep again and it’s not as annoying as it should be to me. It’s almost calming, even if whenever I ask her about it, she only looks at me odd and says it’s “people inside me trying to tell me something I need to know” which should be a bit terrifying to be around alone and late at night in the dark, but because it’s Luna, it’s not scary but just another weird quirk she has that makes her so intriguing to me.
I’m not waking her to tell her to be quiet though or ask what the people are saying or tell her I want to get out of this dank dungeon classroom that she decided to fall asleep in. For the past hour that she’s been asleep and I’ve been looking at her and combing through her silky blonde hair and and brushing my fingers against her pale cheeks and pressing our palms together and watching her lips open and close with occasional words of the song she’s humming, this thought has been itching at me. This night, this last night at Hogwarts, there won’t be another surprise year after it, and it feels like ending. This night, with Luna sleeping and humming in this damp smelly room on this cold stone floor, feels like the last time.
We didn’t even do anything special today, just talked about our plans (or lack thereof) for after school, about Luna’s still-strong need to live in the moment, and, additionally now, to not focus on the past or the future because now is what really matters, and about my skepticism of these particularly philosophies. It was too normal for the last time, for an ending. And more so, maybe I don’t want it to be an ending.
It took awhile for me to admit that to myself. In the months since the beginning of the school year, I forgot I could miss Luna, that I would miss her. Luna though is so careless. I think anything could happen, and she would try to forget about it. “It’s done and gone now,” she would say and then go to stargaze or dance on the Astronomy Tower or skinny dip in the Great Lake or explore the edges of the Forbidden Forest or ride the Thestrals or study a book on philosophy or read the younger years’ palms. This year could be over and we could be over, and she would just say, “it’s done and gone now, time to move on to the next moment”. She would act like nothing even happened, like she didn’t remember it. Like it wasn’t important.
Luna’s important to me in a way I never expected her to be. In a way where I still don’t quite know why she is so important to me. I’m sure it has something to do with her being my friend, with her being open with me and me with her. And it probably has something to do with so many late nights together doing nothing but talking about mundanes and other more important occurrences. Maybe it had to do with her being the only person who doesn’t think I’m terrible for what parts I had in the war. It might even be about me and her right after the war, in denial. It could even be us right now, a year after the war and still in denial probably. I don’t know why , but I do know it’s happened—she’s become important to me.
“Hey,” I say and nudge her again with the heel of my palm against her upper arm. She stirs, mumbles and hums softly, before blinking her eyes open.
“Hmm, wha…,” Luna mumbles. “‘S it mornin’?”
I shake my head but her eyes are still half-closed and glassy, so I add, “No, I just had a question.”
“Oh,” she mumbles. “‘M cold.” She grabs my wrist to wrap my arm around her and snuggle closer to me so we’re chest to chest. She hums contentedly and sighs into my neck. “You can ask now.”
“This is our last day,” I tell her. “Do you think—I don’t know… For you, is it our last day? I mean, us? Is it done now? Are we ?”
I feel vulnerable. My skin prickles with the obviously desperate question, just like it always tingles when I tell Luna a secret or a story that hurts or something that makes up who I am so greatly. It’s a good feeling, the type that lifts a weight off my shoulders, but it’s also bad in that I sometimes don’t quite feel like I belong without that weight.
She bends her arm to curl her fingers into my hair. It’s shorter now and lighter. The product of a bad box bleach job and a last-gasp attempt at dying it to a dark dark brown, barely a shade off from my natural black. When that didn’t satisfy, I talked Luna into cutting bangs and a bob by spew some twaddle about “not worrying about it because we’re living in the moment, right? No need to worry about how I’ll feel about it in the next moment. I could just shave it.”
“Pansy, It—it scares me when you act like I wouldn’t be there for you, because I would be,” Luna says, leaning her head away to meet my eyes. “I would always be there for you. For goodness’s sake, Pansy, you could owl me ten, twenty, a hundred years from now, and I would be there. Don’t you know that?”
I shrugged and tightened my grip around her. “I’m not good at having friends. I thought Draco was one, but he didn’t tell me about...anything. And he’s the only person I’ve ever thought of as my friend, and...we did it wrong in Pureblood tradition by not making it all about politics and then we did it wrong in regular terms by not being open. I don’t know how to be friends in the right way.”
“There is no right way, Pansy,” Luna tells me sleepily and burrows her head back into the crook of my neck. “We don’t have enough time in this life to worry about if we’re doing it right anyway. You can;t worry about if you’re saying the right stuff or being the right amount of open or closed-off. You should just...be. Whatever you are, Pansy, it’s good. It’s great. You’re great.”
“Fuck, Luna,” I whisper into her hair as I feel her drifting to sleep. “You’re bloody great too.”
August 21, 1999
It’s a while before I finally owl Luna. Two months almost. And I write the letter out while my body is shaking with silent tears that fall on the scroll and smudge the ink. I’m only crying because I broke the one goddamn rule: live in the moment.
Draco and I finally got a flat together, and he’s out of the Manor and I’m out of my parents’ house. We’re free and the future is bright. Except I haven’t thought of the future since before the war. At that time, the future was the hope that someone would finally win the war and things would finally go back to normal. Then things went back to normal, and Luna had this idea of not worrying about the future and living for the right here and the right now. I went along with it because why wouldn’t I? I was in the moment and that moment was with Luna, and it’s all so fucking dumb now. Because Draco is working at an apothecary and Blaise is taking over his mother’s estate and Millicent is accounting at the Ministry and Daphne is a secretary in the DMLE and even Greg is working behind the bar in a pub. But I haven’t thought about it at all. I thought about Luna and sex and reading and listening to a muggle stereo and playing Exploding Snap with Draco and teasing Greg and sleepovers with the other Slytherin girls. While everyone else was planning for the future, I was jerking off with someone who doesn’t care enough about me and who I don’t care enough about to owl once in a while.
So I owl her. I owl Luna, and I write my floo address and “please come” on it and I send it with Draco’s snappy owl that bites me and leaves me bleeding. I’m cleaning up the cut when I hear the Floo flare up and someone stepping through. Thank Merlin for Draco and his demand for open concept living spaces, because when I turn to look over my shoulder, I can see Luna, tall and ethereal, and my frustration blazes up again after having dissipated with the owl bite.
“Is everything okay?” Luna asks me. She sounds wistful. So fucking wistful like always and it’s so goddamn annoying.
“No, Luna!” I hiss throwing my arms up in the air. “Nothing is okay and it’s your fault and I’m tired of this nihilistic shit charade that you made me believe in and now I have no idea what’s happening!”
Luna stiffens. Her face is rigid and her shoulders are tense, and this is a look I have never seen on her. Luna is all softness, fluidity and flowing elegance, graceful movement, and never ever inflexible and taut. I realize that Luna doesn’t ever openly feel anger or frustration. It’s all just dottiness and philosophical bullshit and fairy tales. She’s always at this peaceful neutral, and seeing her finally not at that neutrality makes me hope, for a second even believe, that she’ll understand.
“What do you mean?” she says, clipped and soft. Lacking the normal dreamy quality of voice she has. It should be terrifying, but I just can’t stand her right now.
“I mean that you infected me, Luna! With these barmy ideas of not thinking about anything or anyone or any stuff that I should be thinking about because we don’t live in a bloody fantasy world !” I shout at her. I’m sure the neighbours can hear me through the walls, but I’m too upset to care. “We’re people who have responsibilities and futures and things that we need to worry about! I was on the wrong side of a war, Luna, and then I did terribly on my bloody NEWTs because I ‘wasn;t worrying about the future’,” I mock in a dreamy lilt and toss my hands up beside my head to form air quotes. “I don’t have any plans for a job or—or a life because I didn’t think about it. What am I supposed to do now?!” I ask then laugh near hysterically. “What the bloody hell are you doing with your life, Luna?”
“Drinking tea and spending time with my father and friends,” she answers stiffly.
“Got a job then?” I sneer. “Got any idea what to do with your life? Got a 5 year plan? Hell, a one year plan even? A way you plan to pay for that bloody tea once you run out of money? Do you, Luna?”
She looks away from me, focusing on the cabinets behind me, so I say louder, harsher, “Do you?!”
“I don’t want to think about this,” Luna says, still soft and still not meeting my eye but now there’s an edge to her voice, and I revel in it. Finally just a bit of emotion.
“Of course you don’t,” I huff and roll my eyes. “Because that would mean thinking about the future, and you don’t bloody do that! And—and us, fucking us , Luna! We could be something, if we just took the time to fucking think about we could be if we just tried. But you don’t try in a nihilistic fantasy world, do you? You just jerk off all the damn time and hope things work themselves out on their own.” I feel hot tears on my cheek and for a moment wonder where they came from before wiping them away. Softer, with a desperate high-pitched note to my voice, I tell her, “Life doesn’t work like that, Luna. It just...doesn’t.”
“I—,” Luna begins before stopping and shaking her head. She presses the heels against her eyes and takes a deep unsteady breath. She doesn’t continue.
I’m crying now, and my throat hurts from shouting. I want this conversation to be over before I get snotty and hiccupy. I take the deepest breath I have and exhale loudly, trying to continue on calm but still stern, still serious. “We could have been something, but I want to think of a future with you. I want to worry about making a good impression on your friends and dad. I want to talk with you about our plans for jobs and flats and whatnot. I don’t want to be a nihilist with you any more.”’
“I’m not a nihilist, Pansy!” Luna says loudly. It’s not a shout, but it may as well be compared to Luna’s usually quiet soft-spoken words. Even a slightly raised voice sounded like a scream for her. “I’m an existentialist, and I—and I’m happy!”
“You’re not, Luna. You’re not happy, and even if you are an existentialist, you’re doing it wrong. You cry in your sleep, you have nightmares from the war, you act like you want to fall off the Astronomy Tower, and you don’t care about anything . It’s not healthy, Luna. You need help. You need to get better. I wish I could have done that for you, but I just played along. I did it too. I’m guilty too. I’m sorry. Fuck , I’m so sorry, but I—I can’t do that—can’t do this anymore,” I say and gesture weakly between. I gulp and try to wipe away the onslaught of tears rushing down my face. The tears keep coming and I give up, slouching down against the counter. The edge digs into my skin, and I’m suddenly so glad for the island separating us when I look up at Luna. She’s finally meeting my eyes and hers are filled with tears, blue irises bright and watery. I want to walk to her and hug her, give her a kiss, tell her it’s gonna be okay. But I won’t because I just can’t anymore. I can’t do this anymore.
“So we’re over?” she asks and her voice cracks. “We’re done?”
“I don’t think there was ever a ‘we’,” I say with a small wet smile. “Nothing ever began, not really. We’re just not gonna start now.”
“So this is done? And it was nothing?” Luna says, her voice numb, devoid of inflection.
“It wasn’t—You just—well, I just—,” I shake my head, trying to put my thoughts together, trying to make a sentence that she can understand. “It didn’t feel like it mattered because, you know, nothing matters, right?” I laugh softly. It’s not funny. All of this is such shit, but in a way, I expected it to end. It was inevitable. I just wasn’t thinking about the future back then.
“I—I need to go.”
With that, Luna leaves, throwing dust into the Floo and disappearing. Once she’s gone, I collapse on the floor and put my head between my knees. I can’t breathe. No matter how hard I try to inhale and exhale normally, it keeps coming out shaky and choked. At some point, I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I let out sob after sob.
“Pansy, it’s me, Draco. What’s wrong?”
My body trembles with sobs and my knees and face are wet with tears. “We didn’t even say goodbye. It’s like it didn’t even matter.”
January 1, 2000
I’m hungover from the New Year’s celebration. All the Slytherins got together last night and barhopped, going from club to club. Stopping a couple times at pubs for cheaper drinks. I don’t remember midnight at all, but I’m sure we were up far past the first minute of the new year. I vaguely remember Blaise trying to set off a firework in the middle of a London street. He almost did it too but I’m nearly certain that Draco vanished the firework before it could go off.
My head is pounding, my mouth tastes like alcohol and cigarettes, my skin is sweaty with dried sweat, I think I’ll throw up if I move even a little, and overall, I feel pretty shite. My only saving grace is the cool bed beneath me, the light blanket tangled around my feet, and the fact that I have today off from work. So of course, I’m a bit upset when I hear a knock on my door and the handle twisting open.
“Someone’s hear for you, Pans,” I hear Draco say.
I groan. “It’s the first day of the new year, Draco. Tell them to let me sleep in a bit at least.”
“It’s ten in the morning, and I think you might be interested in this person.”
“If it’s not the aurors here to arrest me or my parents to tell me they want to give me back my trust fund, then I just wanna sleep,” I tell him, muffed against the pillow.
“It’s Luna,” he says, softly, hesitantly. As if he thinks he’ll break me.
I sit up quickly in bed, making the nausea swell and my stomach twist. “Why?”
He shrugs gracefully. “I’m not certain. She didn’t say.”
“I—I’m naked,” I murmur, looking on the ground for my clothes.
“You have a bra on, underwear I hope,” Draco says before walking to the closet. He grabs me a black turtleneck, corduroy skirt, grey blazer, and my black and white docs. “Get dressed. You’ll look lovely. Try not to sick up on her when you apparate.”
“Why would I ap—” I start to ask, but he’s already left and closed the door behind him. I hear him saying to what must be Luna that I’ll be out in a moment. I quickly get dressed, brush my teeth and hair, which is back to its normal black colour but is still cut into a bob and straight bangs.
“Hello,” I say when I meet her in the kitchen. She turns to me and her eyes widen.
“Hi,” Luna says softly. “It’s been a while.”
I don’t tell her it’s been nearly four and a half months. I definitely don’t tell her I think about her almost every day because despite knowing that exact amount of days and the consistent remembrance, I think I’m moving on. I have a job, I spend time with my friends, I came out to my parents, and I have goals for the future. So instead I just say, “Yes, a while.”
“Do you want to go get coffee?” Luna asks suddenly, nervously.
“Um, sure,” I agree, a bit hesitantly but I think that this might be the closure I need to truly move on if nothing else. “Side-along me?”
“Yes of course,” she waves goodbye to Draco, who’s sitting quietly behind the counter, watching our encounter with a raised brow. It’s just a delicate wiggle of her fingers, half a jazz hand, but hell, it’s more than I ever got as a goodbye. I let her grab my hand and apparate me to an alley behind a cafe. It smells like coffee even all the way back here and somehow that familiar smell calms my nerves. My job at the coffee shop a couple blocks down from my and Draco’s flat isn’t my dream job. In truth, I think I’d like to own the shop one day and buy the store next door to it and make it a joint bookstore coffee shop. That’s the dream. And I have a plan for it too, Things could work out, and all it took was a bit of future-thinking.
We sit down and order our drinks, my stomach and head is reeling from the hangover and the fact that Luna Lovegood is sitting here in front of me.
“Why are you here, Luna?” I ask when the barista sits our drinks down.
“I got a job,” she says, which is not the answer I was looking for but is interesting nonetheless. “At a magizoo, the only one in London at the moment. It’s very ethical, don’t worry. I’m taking a philosophy course at a Muggle university. And I’ve been seeing a Mind Healer, every Tuesday morning. I still don’t like thinking about the war or what I’m gonna be doing with my life, but I do it now because I know I should. And I need you to know that I still wouldn’t mind falling off the Astronomy Tower, but I’m also working on it.”
“Luna,” I say. “You don’t need to tell me th—”
“No, Pansy. I do need to tell you this, and I want to too,” Luna tells me. “I was wrong to hold onto you like I did. I shouldn’t have forced my...skewed philosophical beliefs onto you.” I opened my mouth to disagree with her ‘forced’ statement, but she held a hand up, shook her head, and kept going. “I was using real philosophies to validate myself in my unhealthy habits. I was wrong, and I was even more wrong to stand by while you followed my lead. If I wasn’t going to change for me, I should have at least changed for myself because…” She takes a deep breath. “Because I loved you. I—I still do love you and I’m sorry for bringing you down with me last year.”
“I’m working at a muggle coffee shop,” I tell her, also choosing not to reply to what she probably wants me to reply to. “It’s nice. The owner, Linda, took a chance on me, and she’s helping me get papers, the type of papers you need to work and own a place in the Muggle world. LInda’s hoping to retire in the next couple years, and she might sell the place to me. I’m not seeing a Mind Healer or going to university, but I’m doing well, pretty great even. I loved you too, Luna, but I’m not sorry for breaking your fantasy or leaving you. You didn’t force anything on me that I didn’t want forced on me. I liked not caring just as much as you did, and once I realized I didn’t want that any more, I cut you off. We both made mistakes and had fucked-up philosophical ideals, but we’re here now. So...why are you here?” I repeat my question from earlier.
“My Mind Healer told me I should apologize to people I may have hurt,” Luna says. “They actually told me that a while ago, and I apologized to a lot of people already, and I was a bit scared to confront you. I have a lot of pride, you know. And a reputation for being a good person above everything else, and last year, during Hogwarts and the summer before, I wasn’t. And you more than anyone else were there for that. I really am sorry, and I, uh, I miss you. I didn’t really think I would miss you, so it was weird. I never thought about how important you were to me until it was over. You know that Muggle phrase? You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. That really applies, I think.”
She’s rambling, and somehow the nervousness is grounding. It makes me know that she’s feeling things now, other than numbness and carpe diem giddiness. Luna finally is expressing actual emotions, and it makes me really believe she’s getting better.
“So you’re here to say you’re sorry and you miss me?” I raise an eyebrow. “Well, I accept your apology and I miss you too. Is that all then?”
Luna shakes her head quickly. “No! There’s another thing. I was wondering… I just—”
I put my hand over hers where it rests on the table beside her untouched coffee. She looks down at it with wide eyes and I feel her fingers press up against my palm, as if to make sure it’s actually there and not a strange figment of her imagination. She finally looks back up at me and says, “I want to start over with you. I still want you, but I want to do better this time. I know you might not want that, but I—you know, I’m ready to actually try and, how did you say it, worry about impressing your family and talk about our future together. I want to do that with you. I want you. If you want it too.”
I’m quiet for a long moment, and now, I’m looking down at my hand over hers. I rub my thumb in a small circle over her wrist and feel her shiver as I take a small sip of my coffee. I take a deep breath. “Luna, do you want to go on a date with me?”
The brilliance of her smile when I look up at her almost hurts my eyes. Her eyes are lit up and teary, and she nods frantically. Her hand turns to intertwine our fingers. She squeezes my hand and I squeeze back. I don’t know if it will work out between us, but I believe Luna when she says she’s trying to get better. I believe myself when I say I want her with me for as long as we both are happy with each other. Somehow, I even believe with complete certainty that I love her and she loves me. We’ve been through a war and the aftermath of a war together. I want to go through some peace with her too.