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An unplottable mountain-side, Norway
25th September 2003
“Do you think we’re going on the right direction, Harry?” Neville pants from right behind me.
“You should… ask… Luna… that,” I return, briefly looking up at the swaying, rucksack-laden back of our female companion, already quite a few paces up the trail. “Never knew… she’s… so strong! And I… played Quidditch….”
A wheezy chuckle answers me, from several paces behind, or so it sounds. “She’s… used… to that,” Neville, who has been in several wilderness expeditions with her, elaborates, a few beats of pause later. “With… her dad. Some… times, a few… places, they… dun like… foreign… magic. So… can’t… Ap’rate… or… ‘key.”
My own responding chuckle sounds even more pathetic than his has just been, unbelievably, choked into forced silence by lack of breath mid-sounding as it is.
Now that the day’s ending soon, we’ve been trying to find a way back down to the Norwegian hunting lodge of the Blacks, my haunt for this Teddy-and-Andy-free weekend. However, what we’ve achieved, it seems, is getting further up the mountain, instead; through thicker, darker woods and slimmer, harder-to-spot animal trails, at that. We treated it as an adventure, at first, but that’s two hours ago. Apparently, our energy and enthusiasm are very finite things.
At least it’s that way for me and Neville; the Gryffindors and the males in the group, ironically enough.
And right now, I don’t think I have enough breath to go on, especially further up.
Lacking the breath to speak or whistle, and lacking the inclination to do either of those all the same, I give Luna’s shoulder a somewhat uncontrolled nudge with my magic, which has thankfully fared better than my physical body.
Just as I trip over a mouldy root barring the way, unfortunately.
And it turns out to be sharp, even more unfortunately.
And, most unfortunately, Neville, who can’t stop right on time, falls on top of me, rucksack and all.
“We’re close to the home of the blue angels, Harry. Come on….” Luna hovers over me, a note of impatience and eagerness in her voice, even as Neville scrambles away from on top of me with lots of apology, and accidentally drives my calf deeper into the thorny root trap. “Don’t you want to go home?”
Go figure…. “I meant home as in the lodge, Luna, not somebody else’s home,” I whinge, although it sounds much more like a pitiful whimpering plea than what I’ve aimed for. An even-more-pathetic groan swallows the rest of my words, as Neville gingerly tries to coax my calf away from the jabby, prickly, pesky root.
“Why a blue angel, anyway? Harry doesn’t look like an angel to me,” Neville, maybe trying to distract me, maybe asking an earnest question, pipes in nervously. He sounds even a little bit apologetic, for some reason. Although, I don’t pay much attention to the said reason, because, finished with detaching a human limb from a vicious bit of plantlife, he arranges it so that I can rest a while along a patch of non-jabby, not-so-prickly, not-so-pesky other plantlife.
Tempered with my groan because of the movement that the calf has to suffer so soon, only to end up resting on a neighbouring knobbly root anyway, Luna jabbers about a society of blue-skinned giants living in and around water and ice, who always behaved nicely to a little girl whenever she encountered them, whether in dream or reality.
There’s so, so, so, so much to unpack from that explanation. – Where “in and around water and ice” is it? How could people overlook blue-skinned giants living so near? How could Luna speak as if dream and reality are like grassy meadows that she can cross by some easy strolling? And these are just some of the things. More thinking along this line, and I believe it might do the job that the natural trap I’ve just been freed from didn’t manage, namely sending me into unconsciousness.
Long after she has fallen silent and Neville likewise, I speak up, while still being horizontal on the bed of knobbly roots, “Now, how do we go home? And I mean home, the lodge, not the home of the blue giants.”
“It’s far closer to Ice Land than to the lodge, Harry,” Luna argues.
In the deepening gloom, I can faintly see Neville’s lips move, perhaps mouthing “Ice Land?” as I am also doing. The name is… catchy: not “Iceland,” as in the country of Iceland, but “Ice Land?”
Well, regardless, “I’d rather go home. We could always explore when we’re prepared, you know. There’s still tomorrow. If the land’s all ice, we aren’t in warm enough clothes, for one. And I can’t walk far with this leg. It needs to be treated, and none of us knows good healing spells.”
The world is truly upside-down, now, apparently. A Gryffindor being more sensible than a Ravenclaw…?
“Neville can heal you,” is the simple rebuttal, even as Luna’s petite form steadily lifts my upper body up, till I end up resting in her arms. “I don’t know if we can come this close tomorrow. The alignments are the best in so long today. We can always put a Warming Charm on ourselves, too, in addition to our cloaks, and we can find useful things in our bags. Your house-elves did pack so many just-in-cases. Besides, it takes longer to go down than to go to the doorway, and it’s nearly dark already. Don’t you want to go home, Harry? Who knows, maybe you could meet your other parents there?”
“But I’m not a blue-skinned giant, Luna,” I whinge, pointing out the blatant fact to her, even as I struggle to sit up properly and look at my wound. “Not Neville, and not you either. Don’t you think it’d be odd for three humans going there purposefully? And how if they like only little girls, not little boys or young men like us? Maybe they’re like the unicorns? I had no desire to be gaured by a unicorn for getting too close, and I don’t, still.”
Neville snorts with laughter, the traitor. But, well, he’s helping me clean the few puncture wounds on my calf, so I guess he’s just a friend who relishes the suffering of another friend so much.
The longer we banter with each other, though, the heavier my heart feels. The phrase “your other parents,” coupled with “home,” feel so bizarre yet so wonderful….
And when we go on, when we reach a space between two trees that just feels different, when we step past it just to see a new vista entirely, when my foot firstly steps on an alien soil, with the other one still on earth….
Inexplicably, I feel like I’m home, at long last.
And even as both Luna and Neville shiver hard, even as they frantically put double measures on their Warming Charms, I stretch my hands up to the twilit sky above and beam at it, relishing in the returning, whole sensation of being enveloped by the cocoon and accompanied by my cocoon-mate; something that I have never achieved fully even in my deepest meditation all these years, ; something that I received only by being drunk right out of my mind all those years ago.
I’m home!