Chapter 3
3.
Ron doesn’t come down for breakfast the next day, at least not before Ginny has to leave for Ministry school. The classes are practically empty, especially in Ginny’s age group, eleven years and older, but because of her stupid marks, Mum says she has to go. Ginny writes to Tom through morning classes, dozing with her head leaning heavily on her free hand, only halfway noticing when History turns to Natural World Studies and startling awake just before the end of Literature, only really paying any attention during the fifteen-minute break to listen as Chester Cohen relays increasingly ridiculous stories about Harry Potter that his older sister, a Ravenclaw, has supposedly shared with him. He doesn’t ask Ginny what Ron or the twins have said, so either her brothers are all lying to Ginny or Chester is.
Most of the children at the Ministry school are better off than the Wealeys, and all of them are well aware of it. Tom says it’s thanks to the teachers’ blatant favoritism that those like Chester, whose parents are high-ranking diplomats of some persuasion, get all the encouragement they need to perpetuate their belief that they are better than the girl in hand-me-down boys’ clothing with a father in charge of little more than an under-funded, under-staffed office, a handful of men who are the laughing stock of the entire Ministry for their shared muggle fetish. Comments about that are about as bad as the bullying gets, fortunately, and Ginny always makes sure to give twice what she gets, but the teachers are never on her side. She’s had seven exclusions in her time here. Four in the last year, one lasting two weeks.
Mum had chewed her head off for that. Ginny had spent the two weeks writing to Tom, learning more from him in a day that she would have the entire time at the school, sharing what she knows of history in the fifty years since his memory was trapped. She had returned to earn perfect marks on her quizzes, in part to spite the teachers, and took a certain satisfaction seeing that Eloise Midgen’s nose was apparently refusing to heal straight.
The other students aren’t all bad, sure, but after six years the drama and gossip has grown stale and petty. For lack of anything better to say, she faithfully relays the stories to Tom, who finds Harry Potter interesting, though Ginny isn’t sure he’s not humoring her. In any case, the talk is highly unbelievable, and Tom, like Ron in his letters, suggests that the stories of the Boy-Who-Lived that Ginny and just about everyone else had grown up with were really just stories, things for children.
Ginny doesn’t like being made to feel like a child, though Tom is almost unbearably kind about it. He always knows when she’s trying to act more grown-up, and knows how to get the truth out of her. She can’t lie to him for long, no matter how small the matter; it just feels wrong when he is trapped with only her as company, scared that any others who find him might wish to destroy him. It’d be terribly cruel to lie. He relies on her, he believes that she is a good person, and she wants to be good, for him. Just as she wants to be more mature, like he is—he’s only a few years older than her, in one sense, and though he says he has had fifty years to mature, if Ginny were trapped in a book for fifty years, it would just make her even more sick of everything.
And Tom doesn’t try to make her feel like a child, it’s just unavoidable, with him. Mum, on the other hand, and the teachers and kids at the Ministry school, they just love to make her feel small. And she’s got nothing to prove herself with. No way to rise above them.
Hogwarts will be different, Tom promises. Oh, the people won’t change, and the teachers will undoubtedly still have preconceived notions of her as a Weasley, but she will also learn magic at a place so magical Ottery St Catchpole is comparatively a muggle rubbish dump. Tom promises he will help her with school there, too, so she is not just another Weasley people can overlook, though he does warn her in that gentle way that unless she has some as-of-yet unnoticed prodigal gift it will take countless hours of hard work before anyone acknowledges her. That is how it was for him, after all, and Ginny can’t even imagine being as much as Tom is, and a brilliant tutor is more than he ever had.
And no matter if everyone else is as frustrating as before, at least Luna will be there.
Ron will be, too. For better or worse. When Ginny returns home that evening, she tosses her bag and robe in her room and returns to the kitchen to find Fred and George have dragged him down and are distributing ice lollies.
“Mum’s gone to tea with Mrs Jordan,” George says, handing her one. Explains why they’re down here, and why Mum is not. “She said we’re supposed to keep an eye out for you while she’s gone.”
“Overbearing hag,” Ginny mutters.
The lolly tastes like the strawberries Ginny’d had the chore of planting in the garden in March, but also strangely tinny. Like it had been frozen inside its container too long and started to lose track of what it once was. Slight as it is, now that Ginny’s noticed it, the taste dominates her enjoyment.
“Did you get into much trouble while we were gone?” Fred asks.
“Not nearly as much as you.”
“That’d be the day,” Ron snorts. “I think Mum would murder herself, with a third as bad as you two.”
Ginny looks at him, perched on the counter with his long legs knock-knock-knocking hollow against the wood cabinets below, and the anger begins to burn—
But Tom is counting on her to bring him a story, so she bites into the lolly, focusing on the tinny taste. “You’re one to talk,” she says as mildly as she can manage. “What was that last night? Don’t see why you bothered to lie, if you weren’t going to try.”
“I didn’t lie,” he lies.
“Pull the other one, why don’t you?” Ginny says—says, not snaps. It almost sounds like the friendly banter they were used to, before Ron left. Tom would be proud.
Ron still gets all prickly. “I didn’t,” he repeats. “Harry probably didn’t tell anyone where he went—and if he told you for some reason, I don’t want to know,” he adds, waving his lolly between the twins. “Don’t think I haven’t seen you harassing him.”
“Just making sure he’s good enough to be your friend, Ronnie,” George soothes.
“And even if we knew, we wouldn’t tell you,” Fred adds.
“Well, good,” Ron says. “Not that he’d…”
He trails off, though, looking out through the window. Ginny turns and spots it quickly: the puffball of an owl that Ron claims Harry Potter gave him after Scabbers got eaten is bobbing through the air.
“Speak of the devil,” Fred mutters.
Ron turns to retort, but catches Ginny’s eye. He freezes. She glances between him and the window, the owl drawing closer—wait for it—
He throws the stump of his lolly at her, the cheat, and uses the beat to leap down off the counter, and he’s not stopped growing for a minute since he left, all lanky limbs and elbows to push her out of the way and grab for the bobbing owl. He holds the envelope up so she can’t reach or read it as he tears it open, scanning the writing.
“Well?” Ginny demands. “Is it him?”
“Harry? No,” Ron says.
“There’s way too many words all together there for it to be Potter,” George agrees, craning his neck. The twins have still got a few inches on Ginny, and a better angle. “Which means it’s either Neville, or—”
“Her-mi-o-ne,” Fred drawls with a grin.
Neville Longbottom, a terribly shy and awkward kid they’ve known for ages but Ron never really cared about, and Hermione Granger, a muggle who Ron’s letters at the beginning of the year referred to as an insufferable bookworm. Somehow by the end of the year the two of them had become Ron’s other two close friends. But Hermione was Harry Potter’s friend a long time before Ron was, so—
“Writing about Harry, right,” Ginny ways, tugging at Ron’s arm. “What’s it say?”
“None of your business,” Ron says. “It’s my mail.”
“But—”
“Hermione’s Ronnie’s girlfriend, Gin,” says George. “You woul—”
“Is not!”
“—hear what romantic nothings they send each other.”
Fred makes a gagging motion.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Ron growls, and shoves Ginny roughly away with a bony elbow.
“You’re awfully chummy for anything less,” Fred counters.
“And you’re awfully chummy with Lee,” Ron says, his neck and ears flushing. “And Angelina. Doesn’t mean anything.”
“Oh, really?” Fred says, raising his eyebrows suggestively.
“Yes, really!”
“If she’s not your girlfriend,” Ginny says, “and you don’t have a big fat crush on her, then why won’t you let me see—”
“Because it’s my bloody letter!” Ron snaps. “You’re so bloody clingy, you know that? Why don’t you go bother your own bloody friends—oh, that’s right, you don’t have any. Because you’re such a bloody brat!”
“Oy,” George says. “There’s teasing, and then there’s—”
But Ginny isn’t sticking around to hear any of this out. “You know what I think?” she shouts back at Ron. “I think you’re a fucking liar. No one in their right mind would want to spend a minute around you, waste their time writing to you—least of all Harry Potter! And Hermione whatever is definitely not your girlfriend, because no girl in a million years would ever be stupid enough to waste their time with you!”
And before Ron can lie to her any further, and before George can cut in, she turns and storms out, out of that stupid, stifling, awful house—
Luna finds her in the orchard, somehow, trampling a path down as she prowls back and forth through the grass. When Ginny spots her, she opens her mouth to spit, to demand that she be left alone, but manages to hold it back, resuming her pacing, not looking at Luna, standing there so calm, so bloody calm—
After a few minutes, Luna moves on, to the edge of the shade, where the grass is shorter, and sinks down into it. She doesn’t say anything, just sits there, watching Ginny, coming in and out of the light as the gentle wind shifts the branches above. Ginny doesn’t look at her, not directly—she doesn’t want to; Luna is calm, always so calm, it’s infuriating; Ginny wants to shout and break that calm as badly as she wants—
She doesn’t know what she wants.
At last, she gives up her pacing and falls into the grass beside Luna. She wants Tom, for lack of whatever the other thing is. He’s always so sympathetic when she’s angry. Not pitying; he always knows just what to say, and while he’s usually too polite to say so outright, she knows he sees just how irritating her family is. But she'd left the diary with her bag at home…
Luna’s her only other friend, and their friendship is just, just… different. Both close, only, not the same way. Ginny can tell Tom anything, and he’ll commiserate with her. Half the time she thinks he’s the only person in the world who could possibly understand her madness. Luna will… listen. Offer advice, a path to figuring out what’s really wrong. Talk her down.
Ginny doesn’t want to be calmed. She wants to stew.
“Your brother George called our floo,” Luna says quietly. “He didn’t know where you went, and your mum is expecting you to help with dinner tonight.”
“I’m not going home,” Ginny says.
“Okay,” says Luna. “That’s just what he said.”
“My brothers are all gits.”
“All of them?”
“Bill and Charlie, they’re never there, so what does it matter?”
“Oh,” says Luna. “I’ve not got any brothers, so I guess I wouldn’t know.”
“You’re just that lucky. They’re just, I don’t know. Company forced on you when you’d rather be alone. You know?”
“You’d rather be alone?”
“No,” Ginny says, biting back her frustration, because worse than being with other people is being entirely alone. “You’re not like them—not a git, I mean. Or a controlling nag, like Mum.”
“Oh,” says Luna, and the rest goes unsaid, which in some ways is worse, especially as the silence stretches. Ginny can’t bring herself to look away from the grass she’s ripping up from the earth, anxiety breaking through her anger, the same dread that she feels when she’s gone on too long without Tom replying. Luna’s right at home in the silence, so maybe it’s a one-sided awkward spell. Or maybe it’s pointed, Luna’s rare anger being a cold thing.
Or maybe she’s quiet because she’s thinking about her mother, who’s dead. Way to go, Ginny. Complain about family to the girl who lost her mum!
Before Ginny can say anything else to stuff her foot further up her arse, Luna stands. “If you’re not going home yet,” she says, offering Ginny a hand up, “I’ve got something to show you.”
Luna leads the way, skirting the edge of the Diggorys' woods. The Lovegoods' house is well clear of the trees, a round, tower-like structure that stands out from any house Ginny’s ever seen, including even the Burrow. It’s on the shady side of the hill, the front gate a stone’s throw from a creek that flows from the woods down to the village, so it’s always pleasantly cool, the bright sun of summer soft and filtered. Luna’s dad doesn’t seem to be home, as it is incredibly quiet when Luna lets them in. They leave Ginny’s trainers and Luna’s boots by the door in the kitchen and Luna leads the way up the winding staircase. Not to Xeno’s cluttered ‘office’ on the first floor, nor Luna’s room or the den on the second, no; they go right up to the top, the fourth floor, a door Ginny’s never even seen before. Luna opens it and beckons Ginny in after her.
It is, quite clearly, a workroom, open and airy with sturdy counters and cabinets around the rounded outer walls, windows covered by faded yellow curtains in between, a sturdy, heavy-looking wood workbench in the middle. Most of the room is dusty, but opposite the door there’s a bigger bay window with the curtains tied aside looking out towards the Diggorys’ woods. It smells, despite the closed windows and still air, like a summer day heating up after morning rain, warm stones and drying earth. In the patch of golden sunlight before it sits a small cauldron, a thin, swirling steam rising out of it.
“Um, Luna,” Ginny starts as Luna goes over to the cauldron, but she doesn’t know how to say, Didn’t your mum die in her potions studio? Besides, it’s… kind of thrilling. In a morbid way.
She follows Luna over to the steaming cauldron, peering inside. Luna’s flipping to a page of a book with yellowing pages that she’s got marked with an oak leaf. She passes the book to Ginny and opens a nearby drawer, glass and metal clinking under her rummaging fingers.
“Balm of Sunny Days?” Ginny reads from the neat handwriting within. She’s never heard of it, but then, the only things Mum brews are cleaning supplies and weak panaceas, nothing interesting. “Luna,” she realizes in amazement, studying the diagram of what she knows must be potions shorthand, one of those topics dreaded on the OWLs and NEWTs at Hogwarts. “Are you brewing? I mean, actually brewing?”
“Only a few simple things.”
“Wicked,” Ginny breathes. “Mum would murder me if I— The twins tried to brew swelling solution in their room last summer, for some reason, almost burned the house down, and they’ve got a permanent lump in the floorboards from where it boiled over.”
“It’s probably not a good idea to brew in a bedroom,” Luna says. “There are all sorts of charms that go into building a potions lab, to contain explosions and fumes and the like. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t have a house anymore.”
“You mean, because…”
Luna produces a vial filled with dried yellow flower petals, uncorks it, taps several into her palm, carefully selects seven, and returns the rest to the vial. Then she takes up a glass stirring rod and drops the petals in one at a time, stirring three times anti-clockwise with each addition. At last she taps the stirring rod three times on the rim of the cauldron and returns it to a gnarled piece of petrified wood in the window that must serve as a stand.
There’s a wand there, too, but it’s so charred it can’t possibly work anymore.
The steam’s gotten a bit thicker and lazier, and the potion’s taken on a sheen of cerulean blue, such that for a moment, peering down into the cauldron is like peering up into the summer sky. But then, maybe it’s just reflecting the window.
Ginny looks down at the book again and closes it just enough to check the title. The cover is simple, formal. Collected Publications: Revisions and Adjustments, Volume 3. June 83 - March 84. Pandora M Lovegood.
“Mummy used to brew this every summer,” Luna says, stepping back and pushing herself up to sit cross-legged on the workbench, paying no attention to the stools tucked neatly under it. Ginny comes and sits next to her, letting her feet dangle, Luna’s knee brushing up against Ginny’s thigh. “It was one of the first potions she taught me to help with.” She pauses, and her voice drops slightly. “Daddy thinks I’m making soap. I have made soap in here before, for his birthday. But then I realized Mummy’s books were still in the cabinets.”
It’s strange that Ginny hadn’t noticed before, but aside from some plants and things hanging in bundles from hooks around the set-up where Luna’s brewing her balm, there’s no clutter in this room. Xeno’s workspace is so filled with books and knick-knacks and printing equipment you can hardly get through it without gymnastics training. The cabinets here, painted a deep forest green with fading embellishments, a more delicate hand than the ones Luna has applied to her room and most of the house, must have some of those protective charms Luna mentioned, and any extra stuff must be tucked safely away.
“Would he stop you, if he knew?” Ginny asks.
“No, I don’t think so. But he’d worry. I don’t think you’ve seen Daddy when he’s really worried or sad. He gets nargles tying him up in knots, and can’t think his way through it. He’s really much happier when he doesn’t think there’s anything to worry about.”
“But aren’t you worried?” Ginny asks. Your mother died here. “I mean, at the Ministry school they always tell us that potions should only be brewed by… people with wands, who know how to stop disaster.”
“Plenty of children are taught a good deal of magic before they get their wands. Including potions. And there are plenty of squibs who brew, too.”
“Still…”
Luna’s quiet for a moment. “Mummy loved potions,” she finally says. “She made all sorts of wonderful things, potions to help people from hurts the healers say are hopeless. Balm of Sunshine for winter when the world’s so grey some people can’t get out of bed without it. Sweet Dreams for a boy whose nightmares from the war were so bad he was afraid to go to sleep. Potions for clearer communing on Hallow’s Eve, and teas to close the mind to unwelcome intrusions. She was even doing studies with squibs to categorize which potions remain effective in the absence of wand-compatible magic.”
Ginny doesn’t really remember Pandora Lovegood. Ironic as it seems now, what she does remember is that she was always the most protective adult Ginny had met. Mum always had to talk her into letting Luna go off to play outside with the other kids when there was some gathering, and whenever anyone ran into Luna in the Diggorys’ woods, Pandora was out with her. Maybe it was only different for Ginny because she’d had older siblings to look after her, but Ginny can’t imagine her Mum ever running around the woods with them.
“She sounds amazing.”
“She was,” Luna says. “And I miss her every day, still. And she let me brew with her because I enjoyed it, but she made sure to teach me how to be safe about it. Besides…” She gestures back behind them, filled with taller cabinets. “The dangerous ingredients, the ones that are corrosive or explosive, are locked up, and I’d need a wand to get at them. I can only brew with what I gather, which means nothing too dangerous.”
“I thought you needed a wand to brew, too,” Ginny says, glancing at the charred one in the window. Mum had locked up Fred and George’s wands after the swelling situation. They’d been right miffed, though you aren’t supposed to use a wand outside of Hogwarts until you’re of age anyways.
“For some things,” Luna says. “But a lot can be brewed with intent, especially the ones Mummy liked to make. She taught me about ones that need wands, too, and she did the casting at the end, but she said we mostly learn that sort at Hogwarts.”
“Oh.” Ginny isn’t really sure what to make of that. Maybe Tom knows what ‘brewed with intent’ means. She looks down at the book. “I can’t imagine my Mum teaching me any sort of magic.”
“Isn’t she trying to teach you to cook?”
Ginny scowls, some of her earlier temper returning. “That’s not magic! And why am I the only one who’s had to learn to cook? Six boys and one girl, and guess who’s stuck learning her way around the kitchen.”
“Because she wanted to share something she enjoys with you?”
Ginny rolls her eyes. “No. It’s ‘cause she’s got all these ideas about what a girl’s supposed to be, that’s why.”
Luna’s quiet. She probably doesn’t want to push Ginny on Mum, knowing Ginny will just whine about her. God, Ginny’s such a git, when they’re sitting here talking about how much Luna misses her mum…
“Is that why you’re so angry?” Luna finally asks. “Because you’re treated differently from your brothers?”
“I’m angry because my family’s ridiculous,” Ginny grumbles. “Nine people, and half the time we’re all miffed with someone else. If not everyone else. And then people start picking sides…”
“Sounds complicated.”
“It’s a nightmare! I can’t stand them.”
“I thought you were looking forward to Ron and Fred and George coming home for the summer.”
“I was,” Ginny says. “But now they’re here, and, and Ron’s turned into such a git. He’s even— Harry Potter’s gone missing, did you hear? And Ron won’t tell anyone where he is.”
“He knows?”
“He’s not worried, so he either knows or he’s even more of a git than I thought!”
“Then maybe Harry Potter isn’t missing.”
“He even— What?”
“If people know where Harry Potter is, then he’s not missing,” Luna repeats. “He’s either been kidnapped, or run away, or in hiding. Who says he’s missing?”
“Dad and Charlie and Perce… I mean, the Ministry.”
“Well, if he’s not a criminal, then he doesn’t have to tell them where he is. And if Ron knows, then he’s not missing, he’s just enjoying his privacy,” Luna says. “There was an article last issue, about how the Ministry is trying to use the Trace on wands to track all the school-aged children in the country so that the cult behind the Department of Magical Games and Recreation can sacrifice us all to pagan gods to increase the speed of brooms. I wouldn’t be surprised if Harry Potter wants to avoid all that. Or he was kidnapped and sacrificed already, in which case he’s dead, not missing.”
That’s terrifying. “They’d have to know if he was dead,” she reasons. “And if it were a cult with a Ministry department, then they’d know not to look for him.”
“Maybe.” Luna hums, turning to look at Ginny more directly. “I think it’s more likely he’s looking for privacy, in any case. If you went missing, as much as your family would worry, the Ministry would hardly be in an uproar, would it? And if I went missing, while Daddy’s off in Sweden, I don’t think anyone would notice for quite some time. But Harry Potter doesn’t get that luxury. You’ve seen the papers this last year.”
I would notice, Ginny wants to say. But her mouth is suddenly so dry, those wide, watery blue eyes staring earnestly into hers. They’re so close, she could almost—
She could, couldn’t she? Here with Luna, she feels almost like herself, confusing as that thought is, and she doesn’t want that feeling to end. It already feels like it’s trying to slip away—like she’s caught water in her hands, and by its nature it will not stay— She steels her nerves and leans forward, squeezing her eyes shut—
When she opens her eyes again, Luna’s are right there in front of her, too close to avoid, open wide in surprise. Ginny jerks back, hand jumping to the soft warmth in her lips. Luna blinks at her, mouth parted ever so slightly, and her head tilts to the side, hair slipping forward off her shoulder.
The silence comes rushing in, her heart the tide pounding against her chest. Ginny jumps to her feet. Her face is burning. It might actually be on fire.
“Mum will be home soon,” she says quickly. “And—dinner. I…”
She’s never once thought she was a coward, but she runs.
Not to the Burrow, not directly. Not when Ron is holed up in his room with his letter from Hermione Granger and maybe she really is his girlfriend? And if she is—why haven’t they told anyone? Don’t they want to see each other? Have they snogged? And did it feel like that? Because Luna—
Luna’s halfway around on the shady side of the hill, right now, maybe exactly where Ginny had left her, and—
And there’s nowhere else Ginny would rather be but back there with her. There’s no one else quite…
She looks around for the diary, though she’s alone in the empty orchard, and there’s no way it could be here. Tom—he would know what to do. He would be able to explain the way her eyes are stinging with unshed tears, whether happiness or fear or… whatever it is—she doesn’t know, he would know, he always knows—
But Tom isn’t here. And if he were, could she really tell him? Who can she tell, about what she’s gone and…
She’s… she’s kissed Luna. She kissed Luna. Why did she…
She can’t be… in love with her best friend? Right? Because Luna is… Luna is…