“I don’t care who his father is. Riddle is fit,” Ginny says, omnioculars pressed firmly to her face.
Luna can’t think of what would be interesting about watching a boy fly the same loops again and again, but her friend is interested, so she looks. That’s how it is with Ginny. Sometimes she wants to talk broom kits or boys, and sometimes Luna wants to hunt for moon frogs or lie down and watch the clouds go by, and they always make time for both.
The boy in question is dodging a bludger high above them, spiraling in a tight corkscrew that makes her wobbly just to look at. Maybe it’s something in the weave of their Quidditch uniform, or the particular shade of blue. Dizzy-Catching Navy. She’ll have to ask Ginny about it later. She doesn’t have omnioculars so she can’t make out any more details, but one thing's become painfully clear with how he’s flown for the past twenty minutes.
“He has the worst infestation of wrackspurts I’ve ever seen.”
“Really?” Ginny shifts to look at her, eyebrows raised in mild surprise. “He’s flying damn well with wrackspurts.”
She hands over the omnioculars easily when Luna reaches for them. It takes a few moments of fiddling with the dials before the image clears, but then it’s exactly as she suspected. The boy is lying flat to his broom, urging it faster into some sort of dive, but his shoulders are slumped, his muscles weirdly slack, and there’s a hard sort of set to his jaw. His heart isn’t in it. He'd flown at their school, she’s pretty sure, and it had certainly never looked like that.
“Yep. Wrackspurts everywhere. I’m surprised he can even still hear,” she says, nodding once before handing the golden contraption back to her friend. She’d rather not keep ahold of something like that for too long – it records everything you say and will play it back for anyone who asks. A mad thing to keep about.
“Huh,” Ginny says, turning her attention back to the boy in the sky. “I guess you’re right. Gotta be more trouble than he’s worth. Still” –she sighs melodramatically– “at least a girl can look.”
The seeker finishes up his drills soon after, and Ginny is called back to team maneuvers, leaving Luna to her magazine. She’s just finishing up the article on the Firebolt Conspiracy when there’s a clatter to her left and the sound of many feet.
“There’s our little moon!” a familiar voice roars like the sea, and in a moment Luna is looking up into the smiling face of Fennick Bernhus, the rest of the team spilling out of the changing room in ones and twos. She hadn’t even noticed the sky above her was empty.
“You ought to be more careful with that. Hippogriffs get testy when they’re not respected,” Luna says, nodding to the broom Bernhus is leaning on carelessly. Really, why you’d transfigure such a glorious creature into a bit of wood is beyond her, but profit’s all that matters to a company like Firebolt.
“Bah, no need to worry about that, love. This one here’s a diricawl. Docile as can be,” Bernhus says with a wink, tapping his broom affectionately. A diricawl, the only non-human magical creature known to apparate, is a strange choice for a broom, given it could disappear right out from under you. But Bernhus and his transfigured bird seem to be doing fine together, so she leaves it be.
“Well, that explains why you fly like a flightless bird,” Ginny says, bouncing over to land a light punch on Bernhus’ shoulder.
“Diricawls are only said to be flightless because no one has ever seen one fly,” Luna says.
“True,” Ginny agrees, before hauling her up from the stands. “Now, pub time! Who’s in?”
The team, now mostly assembled, turns into a forest of raised hands.
“Aww, you can’t skip out again, Crowley!”
“Mate, I’ve got to-”
“Booooooo!”
“Pub! Pub! Pub!”
The thing about people, is that they are loud. Not loud in the way of elephants or a crumple-horned snorkack. They’re loud like thunder, or the tide in your ears when you’re floating on the sea. Talking over and on top of each other until it all blends together, just a pleasant rumble that buoys you along. Luna closes her eyes, letting the warm clamor carry her.
People are loud, and Quidditch players are especially so. Which is why she notices the pocket of quiet. She spins once all the way around, then stops facing the quiet and opens her eyes.
“Oh.” The boy Ginny called Riddle is standing a few feet from her, watching his shoes like they’re the most interesting play he’s ever seen. “Are you my apparition partner?”
“Huh?” Riddle has bright green eyes and a skittishness to him that brings to mind a wounded hawk.
Luna gestures to where Ginny is shepherding people into apparition groups. “To the pub.”
“Oh. No. I have to go meet my– I mean, I have someone waiting at home.”
“That’s nice,” she says, gazing just below his ear at the way the wind is tugging morse code into his hair. “Having someone to go home to.” Maybe getting back to them will help with all the wrackspurts.
Grief is a funny thing. It’s a shapeshifter, pouring into whatever nooks and crannies it can find in her body and mind. Sometimes, it’s happy to pool there, stagnant like a pond, and sometimes it hardens and expands until it cracks her open again.
Today’s grief is at a simmer, like a caldron on low heat. Still, but for the occasional burble of escaping heat.
It’s been over nine years since her mom died. Long enough that she doesn’t know the exact number of weeks or months off the top of her head, which she used to think would never happen. Like how it never felt possible that the house would feel like a place her mom never lived, back in the days when the last mug she used sat in the kitchen sink for weeks. And yet it does, not because they cleared her out on purpose, but because a girl grew from nine to eighteen in these walls, and that changes a place the same way it changes the girl.
The mug is washed and used and broken and long since thrown out, and the smiling photograph by her bed with her mother and the girl-who-doesn’t-look-like-her-anymore is too peaceful for the way Luna’s feeling today. She’s restless. The grief isn’t sadness, or loneliness, or longing. It’s a rolling boil, an itch under her left top rib. Luckily, she knows just what to do.
Pandora Lovegood isn’t in the house anymore. But she will always be in the practice, in the act of seeking and finding and building and learning. And her father is out today and won’t be there to fret about Luna following her mother’s footsteps too closely and wandering too far into any experiments.
Luna takes out her wand and her yarn and gets to work.
“I’m telling you, he never comes out with us. Like, ever,” Ginny grumbles the next time Luna tags along to a practice.
“Why would he? There are other places to be,” Luna says, swinging her head so her hair trails along her back like a pendulum.
“You come to half our pub nights, and you’re not even on the team,”
“I like teams. It’s almost like having friends.” Her braid is gaining a momentum of its own now, wagging her head back and forth a little of its own accord. She thinks about the other teammates, how Bernhus and Crowley and Wood go home to empty flats and sore muscles and dirty dishes. “Maybe Riddle doesn’t need friends.”
“Everyone needs friends, Luna,” Ginny says, but her attention is already shifting to her teammates clomping out of the changing rooms. Luna isn’t so sure. She went years without friends, and it was magical in a lonely way, like sunrise on your bedroom wall when you haven’t slept yet.
But, well, it looks like Harry Riddle does need friends. She sees it the minute she spots him, stuck to the back of the crowd like chewed gum. Going home to someone clearly didn’t help. She didn’t know wrackspurts could eat at someone, but he looks smaller than last month. He might’ve lost weight, but it’s more that he looks hollowed out. Or maybe that’s not right either.
“Caved in,” she murmurs. That’s closer to it. Not like someone scooped out his insides, but more like all his energy and spark collapsed in on itself, suffocated and snuffed out under its own heaviness. It’s a good thing she came prepared.
“Wrackspurts,” she says, the moment she's next to him.
“Bless you,” the boy says. He looks startled again, like she hadn’t just very clearly skipped across the paving stones to stand next to him and speak. Some people never seem to notice what the world is up to around them.
“Thank you, but I don’t need blessing,” she says. “And you have wrackspurts. The worst infestation I’ve ever seen.”
“Infestation? Wait, what are wrack–whatevers?” He pats at his coat nervously, like he could somehow swat them away. This is going to take more work than she thought.
“Wrackspurts,” she repeats. “They’re little creatures that float into your ears and make it hard to think. They make your brain all slow and fuzzy, and everything seems much worse than it is.”
His nervous patting moves toward his head, which is at least in the right direction. “My…ears?” he confirms, tugging at a lobe.
“Yes,” she says, nodding encouragingly but carefully in case her hair tries to build up its own momentum again. “They’re invisible, so they can be really hard to track down. Sneaky little things.”
“Huh. So how do you know I have them, then?”
“You walk like a cave-in.”
“Like a…?” Riddle echoes again, but Luna’s already turning away to open the trusty satchel at her hip.
“But that’s the wrong question anyway.” It’s a universal law that the thing you need is always at the bottom of your bag. Now is no exception. She shoves a vial of gnome saliva down her shirt to get it out of the way as she digs deeper in her excavation. “What you want to know is how to get rid of them, and…Ah, there it is!”
All the best things are bright yellow. Sunshine and her favorite teacup and the little muggle airplane that buzzes over the Rookery sometimes. The hat in her hands is no exception, made of the fuzziest, most neon yarn she could find.
“People say wrackspurts are best dispelled with positive thoughts, which is quite unfair. How do you think happy thoughts when something in your head is making you unhappy?” People say the strangest things. “So I brought you something to give you a leg up.”
“Are those…tubes on the ears?”
“Yes, to siphon off the wrackspurts. And the chocolate frog boxes are a repellant. The daisy chain is for picnics,” Luna says, pointing out the little braid of living flowers she’d charmed to the edging. Picnics are bright yellow too.
“I, um, wow. I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything. Wear it. Get better.”
“Please wear it,” a voice says, and when Luna turns it’s to find Crowley just behind her and the whole team behind him, looking at the hat in her hands. “I think you’d look down right smashing in it, Riddle,” Crowley continues, grinning like a moon eater.
“Wear it for the next team calendar shoot,” someone else calls from the crowd.
“Can you make us all matching ones for the Falcons match, Luna? We can confuse them into a win.”
"Merlin knows we'll need the help, with you lot!"
Riddle’s ears have gone bright pink by now. Luna’s pretty sure it’s from embarrassment, but it could be a new and interesting side effect of this level of infestation. If it is, though, he doesn't have to worry. He’ll get better soon. After all, he takes the hat.
Riddle doesn’t come to the pub with them that night, again saying he has to get home for "Tom." But he comes out the following week, apparating over with Luna, and Ginny once it becomes clear neither of them have any idea where they’re going.
Ginny insists it’s all Luna’s doing, getting him out and about. But that’s not true at all. The only person who can fight your wrackspurts is yourself.
October is dabberblimp mating season, so Luna spends it in Mallorca. Or, more accurately, in the sea around Mallorca, roving through the tides inside the biggest bubble charm she can muster. The best thing about being out of Hogwarts is being free to time expeditions around the creatures instead of the school schedule. She doesn’t manage to spot any dabberblimps before they head into hibernation to gestate, but she has a good feeling about next year.
“You have freckles,” Ginny says, the moment she walks into the Rookery. Luna hasn’t even put her bags down yet. She’s not sure if that’s because Ginny was watching their house like a hawk to see when she got back, or because Luna got sidetracked as soon as she walked in and has been staring at the diagram her father has chalked on the wall for too long.
“How can you have freckles? That’s my thing,” Ginny continues, flicking Luna’s cheek gently.
“Maybe they’re catching,” Luna says, frowning back at Ginny’s cheek thoughtfully. “Should I quarantine?”
Ginny’s face breaks into a grin, a couple of her bright freckles nestling into her dimples. “Never. We should spread them. Cause a freckle epidemic.”
“Like the sun,” Luna says around the little giggle bubbling in her throat.
“Well, it’s only fair to share. Not all of us can run off to Spain as soon as the weather turns shit,” Ginny says, prying the bags out of Luna’s hands and starting to haul them up the many stairs to her room. “Speaking of, Saturday’s game was totally miserable. Brennan got blown into a tree, so I got subbed in, and I couldn’t even enjoy it. The weather was that bad.”
“Did you score?”
“Of course I scored. Not that it mattered, with Williams missing the snitch.” Ginny rolls her eyes, but leaves her usual tirade against the Puddlemere seeker implied. Too bad. Luna always finds the swears involved incredibly impressive. “Speaking of,” she continues, “you should come out with us tomorrow night. The team missed you.”
They didn’t, of course. Luna knows that. But it’s Ginny’s way of saying she missed her, and that’s more than good enough.
“Little moon!” Bernhus shouts the moment Luna clears the door. She’s immediately spinning, feet off the ground as the beater swings her around in a motion that’s half hug, half dance-step given how much he’s staggering. “You’re back!”
“Let the kid breathe, Bern!” a voice Luna is pretty sure she recognizes says somewhere above her head, and another pair of hands land on her shoulders, stilling their mad spiral. “You’re a menace to society.”
“I just wanted to welcome her home,” Bernhus grumps, but her feet kiss the floor again and she can finally shake the hair out of her eyes to smile up at Oliver Wood.
“Hey, Lovegood,” Wood says, keeping a hand on one of her shoulders to steady her as she gets reacquainted with gravity. “Have a good trip?”
“Seekers can’t always be finders,” she says contentedly. After all, if you found the thing every time you looked, there’d be nothing to look for.
“That’s certainly Williams’ take on things,” Bernhus drawls loudly.
“Hey!”
“I think that’s our cue to retreat,” Wood says in her ear, and he steers her away just as Williams starts proclaiming something about beaters and Bernhus’s lack of success with women. Honestly, Luna’s not sure what’s so bad about having to take care of yourself.
Wood ferries her to a table in the back corner of the bar where Ginny, Rue Wyerwind, Zoé Toussaint, and Harry Riddle are already a few pints in judging by the glasses cluttering the table.
“Thanks for the rescue mission,” Ginny says, sliding deeper into her booth to make room for Luna.
“No problem. With teammates like that, us reserves have to stick together,” Wood says, but his smile says he doesn’t really mean the sting towards the first stringers.
“Ugh,” Ginny moans, dropping her head back onto the booth. “Reserves. Don’t remind me. Having Riddle benched is practically a form of self-harm.”
“Excuse me?” Riddle says sharply. His fingers play at the edge of his sleeve. The black weave under the navy is clearer when he tugs the fabric taught. It’s a nice effect.
“Oh come on, we all know it. No disrespect to Williams, but you’re golden on a broom,” Ginny is saying.
“Oh," Luna says in surprise. "I thought Seekers were supposed to be observant and quick. Did they change the rules again?” That seems unfair and rather sudden, but the International Quidditch Federation is one of the evilest organizations out there.
There’s a beat of silence, and then Wood coughs like he’s trying to dislodge the quiet from his throat.
“We all have slow seasons," he says, patting Riddle’s back with big, exaggerated slaps. "Merlin knows I still feel like I’m finding my seat in the team sometimes.” He lets out those awful fake chuckles everyone pretends make things better. “But I still remember that dive you did in your first game! Only eleven, and you practically swallowed the fucking snitch!”
The air eases, the way it often does when Luna stops talking. She doesn’t bother starting again, in part because the others spiral off into Quidditch talk and in part because she’s trying to think of a way to fix up Riddle’s flying. He really was quite good at school, but things have gone rather downhill since graduation. It’s like his spirit abruptly died.
(“You and Malfoy were quite the pair,” Wood is saying now. “I didn’t know a Keeper and Seeker could work together like that. I would’ve liked the Quidditch Cup at least once, but you snakes just wouldn’t let up!”)
Maybe she can convince Riddle to do something about his robes. The hat seems to be helping – he’s here, after all, and that has to count for something – but he won’t wear it during games. Ginny said something about league regulations. But if she can get him to weave wrackspurt repellant into his game robes…
(“Don’t you British ever talk about anything that isn’t Hogwarts?” the littlest Chaser, Toussaint, sniffs, but the other players are too caught up in reminiscence to care.)
…spelling the crossweave something cheerier than black would probably do it. A nice, brilliant blue. For Ravenclaw, like her mother, the best seeker and finder of hidden things and lost knowledge she’s ever known.
Riddle was a Slytherin, but seeking out new spells and seeking the snitch can’t be that different. Hopefully he doesn’t mind.
(“Oh, come on. You weren’t so bad when you were still there,” Riddle says to Wood with a sharp kind of humor in his eyes. “Now, once you graduated and you guys got stuck with that McLaggen guy…”)
“Ugh! Don’t remind me!” Ginny sighs, flopping onto Luna’s shoulder. It nearly jars Luna clean off the bench, and knocks her attention back to the conversation. “That time he stole Peakes’ bat mid-game! Literally the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“You needed another Weasley,” she says, scooting more firmly back onto the bench and jostling her knee against Ginny’s affectionately.
She knows it’s the wrong thing to say the moment it’s out of her mouth. Ginny goes tense beside her, her thigh muscles rigid where they’re pressed against Luna’s leg. It’d just felt like a fact in her head, a true statement. The world is down a Weasley, and they feel the effects. But somehow the words went all wrong on their way out.
“You’re not wrong. Weasleys get Quidditch,” Wood is saying, saluting Ginny with his pint. But she’s not looking at him.
“Refill,” Ginny says shortly, opting to slide right over Luna’s lap rather than wait for her to make way. Whiskey slops over the edge of her half-full glass and onto Luna’s robes in her haste.
“What do you mean?” Riddle asks the table at large.
“Oh, our Gin has five older brothers. Four of them were brilliant at Quidditch too. Practically a Quidditch dynasty in Gryffindor,” Wood says, but he’s wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Ginny has six brothers, or four, depending on how you count, but not five. But somehow Luna can’t find the muscles she needs to open her mouth.
(I only have four brothers, Ginny had said the night Percy left, lying on Luna’s bedroom floor under her mural of an empty blue sky. It was the first thing she’d said in hours. They’d just been lying there as Ginny soaked up the silence after all the yelling of you’re no parents of mine and it’s your fault he’s dead and if you’d really loved us you would’ve stayed the fuck out of the war, and when they surfaced into sound again she was as brilliant and wounding as broken glass.)
“Oh right. The twins. Fred and George, right?” Riddle shakes his head. “We never could scrounge up a pair of beaters to match them.”
“True enough,” Wood agrees. “But you and Malfoy put us all to shame anyway. Even Ginny had to fight tooth and nail for every goal she scored on that kid.”
Riddle seems to lose access to his face muscles just then too, his mouth snapping shut and jaw tensing like a spasm. Maybe there’s something catching going around. She liked the epidemic of freckles a lot more than this plague of lockjaw.
“I’m sorry,” Luna says later, when she’s apparated an inebriated Ginny to the crossroads between the Burrow and the Rookery. “I thought it would be good, giving other people reasons to think about him. To make sure he isn’t forgotten.”
It’s cold tonight, the wind picking at their cloaks and chilling the fabric that’s still damp from Ginny’s spilled whiskey, spreading gooseflesh up her chest. Ginny squeezes her hand once and drops it, and that makes things even colder.
“You can’t stop it. He’s already forgotten,” Ginny says, turning towards the Burrow. “I’ve forgotten him. Literally the worst thing that ever happened to my family –to me– and I can’t even fucking remember it.”
Grief doesn’t just change shapes inside you. It shifts between people, reshaping itself from person to person until you can’t recognize the thing that’s wrapped across your friends shoulders even though it's slithering in your own shadow.
Ginny’s grief has always been a knife’s edge, sharpened daily on her mother’s vacancy and the twins’ anger and Bill and Charlie’s absence. And, in the last few years, honed to a deadly point by Percy throwing them all out.
It’s why Luna doesn’t try to make her a hat or give her anything to ease what’s chewing her up inside – Ginny will just cut through it, and probably slash at Luna too, and then feel bad about it later. And it’s why she doesn’t ask Ginny to sit with her in her own grief, either.
Luna’s mother died today.
She may not count the days anymore, but she went to bed on December 19th knowing exactly what kind of day it would be tomorrow. And now tomorrow is today, and it’s just as off-kilter and still as she thought it would be.
Her father will need her so they can close up the house tight and ward all the windows against naggles and wrackspurts and anything else nasty that tries to seep in through cracks and hard feelings. But she’s up with sunrise, and it will be a few hours still until Xenophilius leaves the safety of dreaming. She has time for her own rituals.
She gets up, and takes the extra couple of seconds to find her balance because it’s December 20th and it's always surprising every year that the world is still spinning. She packs the raw meat.
The Hogwarts wards greet her like an old friend, the magic washing over her as soon as she appears before the front gates with a faint pop. Or what she assumes an old friend would feel like. Her only point of comparison is Ginny, and Ginny is many things, but soothing is not one of them. But Hogwarts is soothing. It was a bit mean and unsafe, with all the snickering classmates and nargles stealing her shoes, but there was something so tranquil about the cool mud of the lakeshore between her toes. So free.
Luna doesn’t think about her father then, about the breakfast she will have to spoon into him in a few hours or the little ways she manages herself so he doesn’t worry so much. But she does toe out of her shoes before she steps across the wardline. The snow crunches quietly under her feet, turning her toes a bright, cherry red in minutes. It’s a few days old, stiff from the cold, and it stings a bit against her skin as she breaks through the crust. She takes long, loping steps to avoid it, eating up as much ground as she can on every stride. She doesn’t put her shoes back on.
It’s a bit of a trudge up from the front gates to the forest edge, but it’s a perfect day for it. The winter sky is painted with fluffy whipped-cream clouds, the sun just clearing the tree tops and sending long shadows of the finest twigs spilling across the snow towards her. The entire world is lit up with shapes that seem to hint at patterns her brain can’t quite grasp, like nature itself is whispering its secrets if she could only listen hard enough to hear them. She flops her head back, closing her eyes and listening as far as she can.
“...Lovegood?”
But that is not nature. That’s a human voice, calling her name.
Her eyes pop open of their own accord, head bending even farther back to look behind her, and she’s greeted with the surprising sight of Harry Riddle striding along the treeline. Then she overbalances, the satchel of meat swinging to follow her motion, and she has to twist fast to keep upright.
“Woah, careful,” Riddle says, catching her arm and steadying her until she rights herself, then dropping it quickly.
“Hello, Harry Riddle.” Luna wonders if the cold has soaked all the way up from her feet to her head. Maybe she’s too frozen to touch.
“Hey. What are you doing here?” Riddle’s words puff out of him in a fog, and the color is high in cheeks, emphasizing the dark circles under his eyes. He must’ve rushed a little to catch her. That was sweet of him. “And, er, why don’t you have shoes?”
“They were getting in the way,” she says, gesturing at the sneakers tied to her bag. “And I’m going to see the thestrals.”
Riddle blinks once, hard. “At six in the morning? Why?”
The skepticism seems a bit misplaced, given that he’s also out here at six in the morning. But he looks a bit like a haunted mansion this morning, like ghouls might live in his bones, so she answers sincerely. “I go see them every year. This is the day my mother died. She was a quite extraordinary witch, you know, but she did like to experiment and one of her spells went rather badly wrong.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Riddle says.
“Yes, it was rather horrible.” Is rather horrible, really. But no more so than anything else. “I was nine, so she’s been gone half my life. The thestrals are good company for it.”
“Are you out here alone?” he asks, glancing around her like someone might be hiding in the snow.
“Yes. Why do you ask?”
“I just…You said she died today, right? Your mom?” The word mom comes out a little choked, like it’s sore for him too. Like she said, he’s sweet. Luna nods.
“It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing people should do alone.” He sighs, raking a hand through his messy hair. His ears are bright pink again, matching to her toes. “Would you like some company?”
When Luna was twelve, on the first day of her second year, she remembers climbing out of the carriage after her first ride up to the school. She remembers how Cornilius Harper went out of his way to smack her magazines out of her hands, and how, once she finally got them all picked up, she looked up to see Harry Riddle, the Consul’s son, hanging back to pet the neck of the thestral who pulled his carriage and whisper thanks.
Which is why she says, “Yes.”
She doesn’t ask why he can see them, mostly because it doesn’t seem important. And the list is probably a bit long given who his father is. Instead, their walk into the forest is quiet. Riddle seems to be mostly focusing on matching her skipping, loping gate. They’re well into the forest, the snow giving way to slushy mud beneath the thick trees before either of them speaks.
“Why do you come see them? Don’t people usually go visit graves?” he asks, wedging himself between two gnarled yews.
“Graves are just rocks and dirt.” She can feel eyes on her in the dark now, and slips a hand into the satchel to pull out a strip of meat, swinging it through the air beside her to spread the scent. “Thestrals are living proof that there’s magic in death. That frightening things can be gentle and kind. That there’s not just nothing, after.”
“Er, there’s not?” he says, then winces. “I mean, I just… I’d never heard that.”
A pair of luminous eyes just appeared in the dark, taking in every scrap of light and throwing it back until they seem to glow with a pearly light all their own. The beauty of it sends a rush through her core that feels a bit like poetry. Anyone who can see this and think dead is just a cold corpse clearly isn’t paying attention.
She presses the strip of meat in her hand into his, then pulls out another, holding it out toward the shining eyes. A young mare steps forward, the faint light illuminating her sunken face and graceful bones.
“Oh, come on. There are ghosts up in the castle. There’s an archway in the basement of the Curia where you can hear the whispers of the dead.” The mare takes the meat right from her hand, holding it delicately in her fangs before tossing it upwards and snapping her jaws shut. “I don’t know what’s next, but it can’t possibly be empty.” A second thestral has emerged by now, nosing inquisitive at her pack before diverting to Riddle.
Riddle is staring at her skeptically, and takes another piece of meat instead of answering. That’s alright. Most people are very committed to remaining wrong.
Though maybe that’s uncharitable to Riddle. He seems to keep thinking about it even after he raises his eyebrows, which is more than can be said for most people. They lapse into quiet, the only sound the faint munching and sharp clicks of the thestrals as they snap their teeth together, until whatever question he’s waiting on finally decides to arrive.
“Are you afraid of death? Of dying?” He says the words in a rush, like maybe he can slip them by her if he talks fast enough, but he still has to get them out either way.
“Oh, yes,” she says immediately. The answer is instinctual, something deep in her gut and a prickling behind her eyes. “Very.”
“Oh.” This is clearly not what he expected her to say. “Why?”
“After you die, this part’s over. You don’t get to do it anymore. And there’s so much left to do.” Her mom had so many notes, so many unfinished spells and scribbles. (So many moments left to have with a girl who wasn’t ready to let her go. Who’d never be ready). “Are you?”
“I don’t think so? I shouldn’t be.” He lets out a huff of breath, and Luna’s thestral snorts at him, offended. “I don’t really have the right, with how many people I’ve gotten hurt and killed.”
“I don’t think that’s really how anything works,” Luna says, but Riddle isn’t listening.
“I’m dangerous to other people. Dangerous if I’m here, dangerous if I’m gone, dangerous if I’m dead,” he continues, warming to his subject. His voice is more animated than Luna’s ever heard it, the light baritone flickering over the words like flames, flaring up and sputtering on a whim. “Sometimes it seems like I should just get it over with, if it’s all going to blow up either way.”
And that doesn’t make any sense at all. Not that one should really expect sense from someone wrackspurt infested.
“I don’t think there’s ever any rush,” Luna says. She holds out a handful of steak, but Riddle just stares at it. She shoves the meat into his hands again, because she’s not going to be responsible for a testy thestral, then returns back to her own little flock. “Death will happen someday. That’s unavoidable. But in the meantime, we can do literally anything else.”
“But what if you can’t do anything else you want to do?”
“There’s always something else I’d want to do.” The morning is finally making it to this patch of gloom, filtering through the dense leaves to illuminate a thousand subtle shades of gray, from deep charcoal under roots to silvery trickles of dew dripping down bark. “I don’t know what comes after. What if we don’t feel things the way we do now, and I don’t get to be sad ever again, for the rest of eternity? In that case, even just sitting and feeling horribly sad is something I’d rather do, just for the novelty.”
Riddle really ought to wear the hat she made him, if not for these thoughts, then at least for the cold. He looks chilled all the way through, and thestrals have many good qualities, but they aren’t exactly warm. The breath puffing onto their hands as they hold out meat is even colder than the surrounding air.
The thestrals are ravenous, as is their wont, and they devour the rest of Luna’s offerings in a few minutes, the most optimistic colts sniffling at her hand and bag to no avail. They seem to have decided she and Riddle are alright, though, because the herd doesn’t melt back into the shadows once it’s clear the feast is done. They mill about, twining through the yews like smoke and dreams.
Luna is combing her fingers through one of the older mare’s manes, carefully braiding last season’s fallen leaves into the silky threads, when Riddle speaks again.
“Why isn’t Weasley with you?” he says abruptly, then seems to think better of it. That’s what people always call it, anyway, when you second guess what you’ve said. Luna’s never known why. The second thought is rarely better. “I just mean, well, I haven’t seen you without her before. I thought you two were attached at the hip.”
“If we were attached at the hip, I don’t think they’d let her fly in games. Unless I subbed in for someone. Maybe Williams. That might be fun,” Luna muses, voice at its dreamiest, and Riddle snorts. “And Ginny doesn’t like thestrals.”
“What’s not to like about creepy skeleton horse bats?” Riddle says, then quickly holds his hands up to the stallion nearest him. "No offense."
“Nothing. But she doesn’t know they’re horse bats.” Luna bends to pick up another leaf. This one is a vivid orange, with brown spots of rot starting to form along the veins. “She can’t see them. It bothers her.”
“Why would anyone want to see them?” Riddle says, which seems a bit unfair. The thestrals have been really lovely companions all morning, and a lot of it would’ve been lost in not seeing them. But she hears his point.
“Ginny had a brother who was a year older than her. Your age, I suppose. He died in the war,” she starts, pulling the mane strands taut around the leaf’s stem. “It was quite devastating for all of them. One of her older brothers, Percy, never forgave their parents for it. He disowned the whole family. Ginny was there when he died, but she was too young for it to stay with her.” The next leaf is a pale, pale yellow, like all the color has slowly bled out into the frigid ground. “I think it bothers her that she can’t remember him. And that she can’t see thestrals. It makes it feel like her grief counts less.”
Riddle, who’s been staring at her for the past minute, lets out a pained hiss, snatching his hand towards his chest. The thestral foal prancing around him seems to have decided to sample his finger to see if it tastes as good as steak. It didn’t hurt enough to make him stops staring at her, though, so it’s probably not worth any worry.
“He died? But the war ended when we- when I was six. How could he have…?”
Apparently Riddle doesn’t taste very good, because the foal snorts with disgust and gives up on him, trotting over to a mare haunting the thickest part of the glade. She's not surprised. He's sounded very bitter for much of today, and that can't taste great.
“The Weasleys were what people used to call ‘blood traitors,’ and known supporters of the resistance.” Luna shrugs, because where that road led was fairly obvious. “Some Death Eaters took exception to it and burned their house down. They couldn't get Ronald out in time.”
She runs out of mane to braid, tying it off with a slow-fading charm. The thestral shakes her head experimentally, then nickers, shifting to present her tail for the same treatment.
“Does it bother you?”
“What?” Riddle asks, sounding like he was jarred out of a thought. It doesn’t seem like he has many pleasant ones, though, so she doesn’t feel too bad.
“That your Tom killed so many people.” There were only three students in Luna’s Care class who could see thestrals, but that was down from a high of seven three years before.
Riddle’s shoulders shoot up to his ears, his back suddenly very straight. “I don’t know what you think you’re-” he starts, rounding on her, but then stops. Looks at her. Keeps looking. Luna just blinks back. Waits.
Whatever he sees, all the fight seems to go out of him at once, his posture deflating again into its usual tired sag. Luna’s not particularly fond of either version, actually. They both look bad for the spine.
“Yes,” he says simply after another beat. “‘Yes, it bothers me.”
“Yes,” Luna agrees. “I don’t know quite what I’d do.”
“Don’t you?”
“Hmm?” Luna hums inquisitively. “What would I do?”
“Hate him? Leave? Something?”
She considers it for a moment. Closes her eyes to really picture it – if Xenophilius was a mass murderer. If he was directly at fault for the little half moon scars on Ginny’s arms where she’s dug her nails in to keep from crying. She shakes her head. “It’s never quite as simple as all that, is it?”
“It should be," Riddle says. "You know I was going to leave once? Him. I had someone who– Anyway, the point is, I didn’t. I thought about what it would do, how everything would just fall apart, and I couldn’t leave Tom. I was supposed to pack my bags and meet someone in the woods, but instead I just wandered out there in my pajamas to say goodbye, like an idiot.” He laughs, though there isn’t much humor in it. There never is, really, with Riddle. “Of course, the other bloke wised up too. Realized I wasn’t worth the risk. Bloody good for him.”
Everyone knows that Neville Riddle went missing after his fourth year. Everyone with a thinking brain knows missing is a polite term for ran away. And Luna remembers the following year – the disappearances. The tension. The creeping certainty that something had gone irrevocably wrong. It makes it hard to keep the tension of her braiding steady.
“Thank you for staying,” she says, and means it. “I think a lot of very bad things would happen if you hadn't.”
Riddle sighs and runs a hand through his hair. She hadn’t even noticed he’d started looking a bit vicious until he stops. He’s quite changeable from moment to moment. A bit of a shapeshifter himself.
“You’re right about that. I don’t have much of a choice about sticking it out, do I?”
Luna looks at the boy beside her. He’s not an aquifer the way Luna is, slowly filtering and holding and shifting her sadness, and he’s not a knife's edge like Ginny, sharp and honed and precise. He’s like a supernova, or a black hole. Massive and impactful and best viewed from far, far away.
She steps out from behind the thestral, letting the braided tail unravel, and takes his hand.
“Choices can be overrated. I never would’ve chosen for my mother to die, and I’d undo it if I could. But I rather like how I turned out all the same,” she offers with a small smile.
“I don’t think I do. Like how I turned out, that is.” He sounds very, very tired. Bottomlessly so.
She got it wrong. Riddle isn’t infested with wrackspurts. He’s a breeding ground for them, someone so steeped in hurt that it spawns and flies off into the world. It’s a fascinating phenomenon. No one has ever been able to track down how wrackspurts reproduce before. Maybe she should write a paper.
“You’re the strangest person I’ve ever met,” she says sincerely.
And Riddle laughs. It’s choked and wet and the closest to genuine amusement she’s ever heard him. He squeezes her hand.
“Funny, I was just about to say the same about you.”
“Yes,” Luna agrees. “That’s probably true.”
She walks him to the Hogwarts gates, or maybe he walks her. Either way, she was not going to leave him alone in that forest today. Today, December 20th. The one day of the year when she would be here. The world has a funny way of working, sometimes.
“Why were you here today, Riddle?” she asks when they clear the gate. They’re standing several feet apart to keep out of one another’s aparating radius. If they both stretched their arms as far in front of them as they could go, their fingers might just brush. They don’t try.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Harry says, with a small smile that almost reaches his eyes. Or maybe it does reach his eyes, and it’s just a very sad smile.
When she sees Harry Riddle again, he doesn’t talk about death.
It’s her birthday, though she can’t imagine why Harry would have reason to know such a thing. He must have asked Ginny, though, because he’s leaning on the doorframe of the Rookery with his broom in one hand and a box of slightly-smashed cupcakes in the other. He looks better than she’s ever seen him. Still pale, still sleep deprived, but there’s a stubborn set to his shoulders that wasn’t there before that she likes.
“Weasley will be over tonight with a full cake, but Tom and I have a Curia dinner thing,” he says, trying to gesture at the cupcakes with the hand that’s holding them. It’s not going very well. “Do you want to go flying?” And of course she says yes.
Luna’s never been much for broom flight, but sitting on the back of Harry’s firebolt, arms wrapped firmly around his waist as he spirals upwards and upwards until dropping them into dives that would put a bird of prey to shame, she can see the appeal. It’s like falling in a world without landings – like being immortal.
“Is this how you won the last match?” Luna shouts into his ear after a particularly daring drop that makes her stomach do an impressive impersonation of a blibbering humdinger. He’d gotten air time after Williams took a bludger to the nose and proceeded to end the game in seventeen seconds flat. Luna would be sad to have missed it if she hadn’t caught sight of the tail end of a dabberblimp as it swam away that very same day.
“Nah, if you want to see that move we’ll need to put down the cupcakes,” he shouts back, but they’re already climbing again.
They end up sitting on the roof of the old abandoned barn that’s just far enough from the Rookery that Luna used to feel daring for hiking to it. The cupcakes are thoroughly flattened at this point, but they taste as good as ever, and Luna licks the dense chocolate off the cardboard with gusto.
They don’t talk about death. They talk about their best birthday cakes of all time, and whether Harry is going to make a bid for the first-string spot in tryouts next year, and the detailed geometric patterns on dabberblimps. They talk about love, briefly, and the way he says the word makes Luna think of dark caves and rock falls and no way out. But mostly the afternoon is the merits of German Chocolate Cake, and whether or not there are really small magical creatures that look like coconuts with legs running around an island in the Pacific, and what they would name them if there were. Luna thinks it does both of them good.