Work Text:
“You kiss the back of my legs and I want to cry. Only / the sun has come this close, only the sun.”
- Shauna Barbosa, Cape Verde Blues
“It’s cider,” said Ron. “Not that shite you get in supermarkets, proper scrumpy. Today you become a man.”
Harry sniffed the unlabelled five-gallon plastic jug Ron had handed him with justified suspicion. “It smells like piss.”
“It tastes a bit like piss too,” said Luna, who’d set aside her daisy braid to start rolling another joint. “I think that makes it authentic.”
They were stretched out on the grass in front of the Rook, all alone now that Xenophillius was off on a combined research/rest holiday. It felt a bit like the edge of the world, just them and the yellow-green hills rising up to meet the beating sky. Graduation had spat them out on to Axminster station with half-baked plans for a holiday and a backpack of cleanish clothes. Harry was still slightly giddy from the lack of responsibilities – not just world-saving or funerals, but small things. No homework. No Monday blues eating at the weekend. There was just time, yawning open in front of him. It felt a bit like dressing up as normal teenagers. He’d never wanted to go anywhere but Hogwarts, it was home, but sometimes in the summer holidays he’d walked past Dudley laughing in the sunshine in the park, tinny in one hand and joint in the other, and been just the tiniest bit jealous.
And now he had that, and all it had taken was a war, and a breakup, and the destruction of the little trio he’d relied on most of his life. Hermione was somewhere in Europe, sending sporadic postcards and burying her heartbreak with travel and work. Ginny had kissed him for the last time on the steps of the Burrow and told him it was time to admit it wasn’t quite working. Harry drank and tried not to spit.
“You country people are nutters. This is disgusting.”
“You’re not in the spirit of it,” said Luna. “You were brooding before you took a sip. And don’t think I don’t see you brooding too, Ron.”
“My fiancé dumped me, I’m allowed to brood,” said Ron.
“You’re allowed,” said Luna. “But is it the most productive use of your time?”
Ron smiled, small and uncertain. That was the thing about Luna, you couldn’t help but humour her. The world she lived in was definitely better than yours. “You’re right. What should I be doing?”
“You should ask Harry why he’s brooding.”
“Why are you brooding, Harry?”
He shrugged. “Oh, you know. Trauma. Break-up. General malaise.”
“Sargent Ennui,” said Luna. “Private Melancholy. Admiral Disquiet.”
“Private Melancholy would make a great band name,” said Ron. “Shall we start a band?”
“I can play the triangle,” said Luna. She lit the joint and took a delicate toke, like she was smoking a 1920’s cigarette on the Oriental Express. “But I prefer Admiral Disquiet. It’s so whimsical to be nautical. Shall we go and see the sea tomorrow?”
“Why, is it different every day?” said Ron.
“Everything’s different every day,” she said, passing the joint to Harry.
“Fucking deep.”
The letter from the Dursleys was crumpled up at the bottom of his rucksack in the downstairs bedroom. Vernon must have tried to send a letter to Hogwarts via Royal Mail, and some enterprising soul had attached it to an owl and sent it off to him. It was covered in postmarks and claw scratches and a stain that smelt of droppings from its cross-country travels. Harry had scratched at it until he found the original Surrey postmark. They were back at Privet Drive.
“It’s only as deep as you make it,” said Luna. “Personally, I think it’s a very obvious truth.”
“Everything sounds deep when you say it though,” said Ron. Harry didn’t miss the way he blushed when he said it, or the small, pleased smile Luna aimed at the ground.
“You two are all right, you know?” he said. “You’re lovely. You’re both just really lovely.”
Ron blushed at that as well. “Yeah, you’re not too bad yourself.”
Luna rolled over and kissed him on the forehead as she pressed the joint into his fingers. “You are loved, Harry. You are loved a lot.”
“By you?”
She waved her hands at the cerulean sky, the fairy-tale clouds. “By everything.”
“But also by Luna,” said Ron.
“But also by me. But more importantly, the universe.”
“I love you just as much as the universe.” The weed was hitting him – no, it was sinking into him like a warm bath. He let the sunlight lull him as the soft current of Ron and Luna’s Devon burrs washed around them.
“I want to see the sea.”
“We’ll go tomorrow.”
“I don’t really. I just like the way it sounds in my mouth.”
“Well, we should still go. I hear it’s different every day.”
They never went to see the sea. They never went anywhere, really, except down to the village to pick up more food. They slept in different bedrooms each night, windows open against the heat, and woke at three am to one or the other slipping in through the door to share their bed. The whole summer felt pluralised, a them, a we, not an I. The edges of them blurred together across messy beds and picnic blankets and days in the sun. Though maybe that was just the weed.
They smoked a fuckload of weed.
“Daddy started growing it right before the war,” said Luna, showing them round the greenhouse. It had been built out of windows knocked out of the Rook when they’d been rebuilding it, with a chipped glass chandelier hanging from the ceiling. It felt like an Alice in Wonderland house, like odd-magic, children’s book magic which hung together on a patchwork of belief and rhyme. The air was tropical with skunk.
“Good call,” said Ron, bending down to sniff at it. “Um, if I do become an auror then I never saw this, ok?”
“So do we just – pick it and smoke it?” said Harry.
“No, we dry the buds out first,” said Luna. “We’ve got a whole operation going in the basement.”
“Who do you sell to?” said Ron.
“Come back with a warrant,” said Luna.
“Maybe I will,” said Ron, and he picked her up and slung her over his shoulder, Luna laughing and beating at his back with her fists. “Watch out, boys, we’ve got a real dangerous raid today. She may seem small, but she’s deadly with a wand. Coming through, coming through, someone get the cuffs ready.”
Harry laughed too, but weakly. All the blood in his body was rushing to his dick as he watched Ron twirl Luna around in the air, her long silver hair rippling like glints in a stream. It was almost non-sexual. He didn’t want to touch them, he just wanted – Luna’s laugh, and Ron’s booming voice as he tossed her about like she weighed nothing. There was a painting in the second-floor corridor of Hogwarts, The Hero and the Nyad. A burly, 12th century warrior, mud-stained and broad as a tree trunk, falling to his knees in front of a sylph rising from the waters. It wasn’t sexual – the sylph was covered from the neck down in a sheaf of watery silk, or maybe silky water – but it had felt imbued with sensual energy. Or maybe he’d made it that way. Didn’t that happen in early adolescence sometimes? Your mind got snagged on things, grew them in your head until they were powerfully erotic. Sometimes in his dreams he’d imagined the Nyad letting the silk fall away. In his fantasies the hero never touched her. He’d just fall to his knees in supplication and let the water from her body run over his face, those mountain-range shoulders, his long red hair.
The hero’s hair in the portrait was brown. But.
But if he was being honest with himself, he’d always imagined it as red.
They spent their days moving from patch of sun to patch of sun. Ron turned pink, then red, then finally started to tan. Luna got nothing but a slight gold tinge on her cheekbones. Harry drank up every ray and turned bronze and gold instead of a greying brown for the first time he could remember.
“You look better, mate,” said Ron. His eyes were always tracking Harry when he thought he wasn’t looking, checking for vitamin deficiencies and unacknowledged worries.
“Well, no one’s trying to kill me anymore,” he said, half-joking, and Ron’s grin didn’t meet his eyes.
That night, Harry’s door opened around two. Ron sat on the edge of the bed and ran a hand across Harry’s back.
“Can I get in?”
“Since when do you even ask?”
Ron chewed his cheek. “Because I’m here to talk to you about your feelings, and I want to give you a chance to tell me to fuck off.”
“Oh, come here,” he said, flipping back the covers. Ron slid in next to him. They were both shirtless, and Harry let his fingers dance above the skin of Ron’s chest as if he were painting on the freckles. They went all the way down, disappearing over his belly and then re-appearing in a thick cluster near his left hip. Like sparks from a fire frozen across his body. He wondered if anyone had every tried to map all of them with their fingers, their lips, their tongue.
“Go on then, Harry. Out with it.”
“With what?”
Ron didn’t reply. Well, he’d always had patience in the face of Harry’s bullshit.
“I got a letter from the Dursleys.” He hated the way his voice nearly cracked. “They, uh. They say they’ve still got some of my stuff. I need to come get it by the first of September or they’ll chuck it.”
“What stuff?”
“They didn’t say. I keep racking my brains trying to think what I left behind. A few books, maybe? A blanket? I dunno, it’s just – random crap, I guess.”
“They can’t send it to you?”
“Probably don’t want to waste the money on postage.” He sounded bitter. He was bitter, and he had a fucking right to be. Hermione had once told him that sometimes you had to lose a limb to save a life, and maybe the same was true of the past – he’d wanted to amputate it all, to never have been anyone except the Harry who smoked in a field with Ron and Luna. Like he’d been born under that blue sky.
“It’s your stuff,” said Ron. He put a hand on Harry’s side. “God, I forget how skinny you are, sometimes.”
“Yeah,” said Harry, his voice tight. Ron’s thumb was perilously close to the gentle v in his hips. There was a ghost of this moment laid on top of the real one – Ron’s touch sliding down the indentation of his bones. The thought stopped there, rewound and repeated. A touch that wasn’t happening, and Harry wrestling with the implications.
“If want to go, I’ll go with you. Might do to have some backup.”
“They’re not exactly a threat, Ron.”
“Still.” His hand slid up Harry’s side, clasped his shoulder. “Still. And it’s your fucking stuff. You’ve got a right to get it back.”
It was stupid, all of it. He’d show up, shove his things in a backpack and leave. If he went during a weekday he’d probably miss Vernon completely. They’d probably just chucked it all in the cupboard under the –
The cupboard –
That was what he stuttered on. The little boy in the dark felt like an infection squatting in his mind. Thinking about him while he was here in the Rook felt like jamming pieces from two different puzzles together, the pictures clashing at the seams. A stupid, childish part of him felt that if he crawled back into that cupboard he’d never crawl out again; or worse, that he’d carry it away with him. It had been two years since he’d been back at Privet Drive, years in which he’d felt it ebbing away into the past, a little black boat drifting further out to sea. And then he’d got that letter.
“Do you remember me at eleven?” he asked.
“Nah, I’d completely forgotten that year. Did something exciting happen?”
“I mean, do you remember me at eleven?”
In the moonlight, he could see Ron chewing that over. Almost absent-mindedly he pulled Harry towards him until they were chest to chest. That was how they’d always been; Ron, bopping his head against Harry’s shoulder as they waited for Hermione to be de-petrified, or tugging Harry close to his side on the train back to London after fourth year and keeping him there the whole way with Hermione’s voice like an anchor. At Bill and Fleur’s wedding – Harry, moping at the edge of a conversation between Ron and Fred he wasn’t really listening to. Ron reached for him to pull him into a side-hug without even looking at him, still rattling off slightly tipsy answers to Fred’s questions. He should have known something was wrong on the Horcrux hunt. Ron had stopped touching him. And Harry never reached out to touch him back.
“You were odd,” he said. “And weirdly quiet. You never talked about where you came from. Or actually you’d say something really dark and then just laugh at it, like it was a joke. I never got it, not then. You’d talk about sleeping in a cupboard under the stairs and I – I got that they were bastards, but I guess I just thought ‘huh, I suppose that’s how it is in some families’, I didn’t realise – “
“Hey now, don’t – “ Ron’s hair was growing out past his chin, and Harry buried his hand in it, tucked Ron’s head into the crook of his neck. “You were eleven bloody years old too, Ron, you’re not my protector.”
He felt Ron’s smile against his skin. “Mate, I kind of am.”
They fell asleep like that, tangled together.
When he woke, Ron’s leg was thrown over his, his arms holding Harry tight. His hair was glowing in the sun.
Luna couldn’t cook. Not even in an adorable, “burnt everything even when she tried” way. She just literally couldn’t cook, the way Harry couldn’t speak Mandarin or juggle or stand on his head. He had asked her to get him a frying pan and she’d returned with three different pans and asked him which one was right (they were a grill pan, a braising dish and a sieve).
“How did you manage with your dad?” said Ron. “Xeno doesn’t seem like the cooking type.”
Luna shrugged. “We ordered a lot of take out. And we ate out a lot. Dad can boil eggs, but it was always a bit of a gamble whether he’d actually get a chicken egg. But alligator eggs are quite nice, and he never accidentally cooked a dragon egg – that would be sad – so we got on all right.”
“Because you didn’t have any dragon eggs around, because that would be illegal,” prompted Harry.
Luna shrugged. “Yeah, sure.”
So Harry and Ron cooked, and while Harry was all right – Petunia had only ever made him do simple stuff, she’d never trusted him enough to do fancy meals – Ron was actually brilliant. Clearly Molly Weasley had passed on her talents because this was the best food Harry had ever tasted. Though possibly he was just stoned.
“It’s kitchen witchery,” said Luna.
“Kitchen-wizardry, surely,” said Ron. “If I’m doing it.”
Luna shrugged. “If that makes you more comfortable. I don’t like the whole reclaiming of Witchery by wizarding society. I feel like it’s trying to ungender and neutralise a very specific type of magic. But individual practitioners can be called whatever they like.”
“Nah, fuck neutralising magic,” said Ron. “Harry, we’re kitchen witches now.”
“Kitchen witch club!” said Harry, high-fiving Ron. “Luna, you can be a purely honouree member, because you really can’t fucking cook.”
But the magic was all Ron, really. He would take perfectly mundane ingredients – extra-terrestrial artichokes dug out of the black earth at the bottom of the garden, heirloom tomatoes big as Harry’s fist and streaked with sunset colours, emerald peas popping from their pod like fat little pearls – and come back an hour later saying:
“I just braised them with some mushrooms, white wine and vinegar, I hope it’s not too rustic,” over a bowl of the most delicious, salty-satisfying stew that Harry could remember, or –
“You marinate them with Tabasco, Worcester sauce and olive oil, chuck them in with a good béchamel sauce loaded with cheese and some pasta and it’s a perfect hangover cure,” or –
“It’s white wine, butter and herbs. Honestly, every time you ask how I made something taste good the answer is white wine, butter and herbs.”
“Could you do something with the courgettes down by the greenhouse, do you think?” said Luna. “Me and dad could never work out how to make them nice. I bet you could.”
“Nobody can make courgettes nice,” said Ron. “God himself couldn’t make them nice. They’re nature’s answer to carboard.”
But he still had a go, shaving them down until they were thin as cotton and then lavishing them with decadent, nutty slabs of parmesan and a veritable lawn of herbs. They ate it from one bowl on the roof of the Rook, splitting half a bottle of gin and a case of tonic between them. It was just past the solstice, and the afternoons now seemed to last for aeons. It could have been one o’clock, it could have been six. The sky was so high and clear that looking into it gave Harry vertigo.
“I knew you could make it nice,” said Luna.
“It’s great,” said Harry. “It all just tastes of parmesan.”
“That’s why the parmesan’s there,” sighed Ron. “To hide the fact that you’re eating fucking courgette.”
Wild strawberries grew around The Rook, a fact that delighted and distressed Ron in equal measure as he tried to work out what to do with them. The answer appeared when Ron came hauling out of the basement, dragging three large copper pans behind him.
“JAM!” he proclaimed at the top of his voice, and Luna screamed “JAM!” from the top of the stairs. Harry raised his fists and bellowed like King Kong. “JAAAAAMMMMMM!”
He and Luna lay on a little hillock in the fields and watched Ron putter around the hedgerows, filling an enormous basket with strawberries. They were drinking scrumpy again. Harry had to admit that it was growing on him. It tasted like the summer; hills golden with hay and the faint clopping of horses up and down the lane past the house, apple trees thick with lichen that flaked under your hand.
“I’m going to make you look like a dryad,” said Luna, braiding leaves and sticks into his hair.
“Don’t get any bugs on me.”
“A true dryad wouldn’t care about bugs. They’d accept them as part of the natural cycle of life.”
“I’d be a shit dryad then. There was a painting of a dryad at Hogwarts, do you remember? No, that was a nyad. I always get them mixed up.”
“The Hero and the Nyad. I liked it. I liked the third figure the most though.”
“I don’t remember there being a third figure.”
“The Forest King. I think he was a bit shy. But I saw him sometimes when I was out late. He stood behind the hero, half in the woods and half part of it, the branches crackling from his hands.” Harry shut his eyes. When Luna spoke he could almost see it in his mind, the curls of leaves, the dark skin like ebony, or maybe it was ebony wood – “He shined so fierce and dark, and you could tell he loved the hero. Almost strange and wild and frightening, but more beautiful than frightening. I think it’s very important to be a myth sometimes.”
“I’ve been a myth since I was born.”
“Not to yourself.”
“Should I be strange and wild and frightening?”
She kissed him on the cheek. “You are, sometimes.”
“I frighten you?”
“You used to. Not in a bad way, in a way that was kind of thrilling.” She shut her eyes, her face twisted up with misery. “Sorry, ignore me.”
“No.” He drew her onto his chest. “Luna, what’s wrong?”
“I didn’t believe you were dead,” she gasped. “When you came out of the forest, I didn’t believe – but you were, weren’t you?”
“Briefly, yeah. But I’m not anymore.”
“I don’t want to cry,” she said, stubborn as a child. “I don’t want to so I’m not going to.”
“Ok.” He stroked her back. “It’s ok to cry sometimes, Luna.”
“I hate it. I hate it so much. It’s not a productive use of my time. I could be being happy, and then sometimes it just bubbles up. I’m too busy to be sad.”
“It can be nice being sad together. Sometimes you have to be a bit sad to make room for future happiness.”
“But it’s stupid. I’m sad about you dying and you’re right here.” Her face was screwed up and red with anger, tears leaking out from under her eyes. “Oh Harry, I’m so glad you’re here.”
He hugged her tight. “Well in that case you’re crying because you’re happy, aren’t you? That’s productive, isn’t it?”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and smiled. “You’re right, Harry. You’ve got such a good way of looking at things sometimes. You’re not like other people at all.”
He shook his leafy crown. “Of course not. I’m the Forest King.”
She was laughing by the time they heard Ron’s tread coming up the hill. Harry had stripped off his shirt to inhabit his role and was booming orders at the deer of the wood, ordering them to worship Luna as their rightful queen and gift her with fruits of the forest. They stopped when they saw Ron standing at the foot of the slope. The sun was setting behind him, his hair bleeding into the crimson horizon. He was breathing hard from his slog, and a trickle of sweat ran across his collarbone and down his chest. The basket had fallen from his hand.
“The two of you,” he said, panting. “Merlin, the two of you.”
Luna was draped over Harry’s chest. They were lolling in the grass like indolent gods, a bag of cherries abandoned next to them. The leaves were rustling in Harry’s hair, and the look Ron gave him was alchemy. Like the crown was growing into him, roots twining into his skin until he was truly the forest king, Luna his nyad queen.
“You don’t know how you look together,” Ron said.
“There’s a castle,” said Harry. “Like, an actual Arthurian castle?”
Ron groaned. “It’s an Iron Age fort. It’s basically just a series of bumps in the ground now. No turrets or anything.”
“But it’s so old. It’s older than Hogwarts, Ron. Come on, that’s cool.”
“Daddy used to try and do rituals there,” said Luna. “He thought the history might increase the potency. One time he came home feeling shaky and was convinced he was possessed by a first-century warrior, but I’m pretty sure he just had a cold.”
“And he kept trying?” said Ron.
Harry bounced up and down. “Come on, I want to go do a ritual in a spooky fort. Come on come on come onnnn.”
It wasn’t spooky, of course. The weather was fresh and clear, with a strong wind that sent angel-winged cirrus clouds racing across the sky. Their shadows moved along the ground like great fish streaking through water far below. The camp itself was two great walls of earth with a fierce dip between them that must have been a moat once. Ancient trees lined the walls now, with tangled roots ready to trip them as they teetered across. In the centre a great flat hollow had been stamped into the earth.
“We should come back next May,” said Luna. “The whole place gets flooded with bluebells. Sometimes fairies lay eggs here.”
“Oh, great,” said Ron, but he was smiling a little as he said it. “Can you believe Merlin would have lived in a place like this?”
“It’s older than Merlin,” said Harry, spinning round to take it all in. “King Arthur’s court was around the fifth or sixth centuries, the sign said this place was built in the first century BC. Can you imagine? It wasn’t just a castle, it was an entire world. There’d have been blacksmiths and butchers and families, a market for farmers to sell their wares in, soldiers and wizards and all sorts all crammed into this space – it’s only, what, twice the size of the Great Hall? And outside that just forest, just nothing. No electricity, no spell-light, just your own fire and the walls and beyond that the wolves and the pixies and the miles and miles of emptiness before the next civilization – “ He stopped, sheepish. “Sorry, I don’t meant to go on.”
“Mate, that was cool as shit,” said Ron. “I didn’t know you knew so much about history.”
Harry rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, this was my favourite subject before Hogwarts. I really liked King Arthur, I guess, and then I just got into the rest of it.”
“It’s strange that he’s kind of a side-note in the Wizarding versions of the myths,” said Luna. “We always focus on Merlin. Or Nimhue, who I think is a tragically underrated figure. What happened to him, Harry?”
So they laid out a picnic blanket and ate Ron’s strawberry jam on thick crusty bread fresh from the village baker while Harry told them about Camelot, about Lancelot and Guinevere, about Mordred. About Excalibur, which had always stuck in ten-year-old-Harry’s memory as the coolest part.
“I always wanted to go and find it,” he said dreamily, his head in Ron’s lap. “I imagined, you know, pulling it out of the stone in the middle of Trafalgar Square where it would magically appear, and then the Dursley’s all falling to my feet and begging forgiveness as I got crowned King of England.”
“As they ruddy should,” rumbled Ron.
“Yeah.” He covered his eyes with his hand. That was probably the stuff the Dursley’s had packed up for him – the pitiful selection of books that Dudley had received as gifts and immediately handed to Harry. King Arthur and the Round Table and Women of Camelot and Life in Anglo-Saxon Britain, all faded and worn with their crappy early-90’s textbook illustrations. They’d seemed so full of life to him then. There was one that had stuck with him; an ariel view of a village, the roofs of the houses half cut away so you could see the people inside forging weapons or thrashing hay or raising their children. He’d wondered back then what it would be like to live in a place where everybody knew your name. Well, he’d gotten his wish, hadn’t he?
Luna stroked his ankle. “Are you all right, Harry?”
“The Dursley’s sent me a letter. The family I used to live with. They want me to come and pick up some stuff I left there.”
“Oh,” said Luna. Her face was creased as if she was puzzling something out, and Harry realised with a start that she didn’t know.
“They were bastards to me. Utter bastards. I don’t want to see them again.”
“Then don’t,” said Luna, shrugging. “It’s stuff you’ve lived without for two years. Losing it seems a small price for freedom.”
She was right, of course. None of it mattered, and if he really wanted another copy of Life in Anglo-Saxon Britain he could just go out and buy one. But. He imagined that shabby pile of books, mouldering in a bag in that awful cupboard. It felt like he was leaving his ten-year-old-self there to rot in the dark, surrounded by spiders. Lose a limb to save a life, yes, but he had been a child, someone should have saved him. And if the only person left to do it was himself, a decade in the future – didn’t he still owe it to that boy he had been to try?
“Yeah, probably,” he said. “Hey, you know how most of our spells are Latin? What did they use before the Romans invaded?”
“Old English or Celtic,” said Luna. “Wait, actually – has anyone got any quartz or obsidian?”
“Shockingly, no,” said Ron.
“Don’t worry,” she said, fumbling through her purse. “I always carry some spares, just in case of emergency. Wait here.” She dashed off towards the centre of the clearing, leaping nimbly over a fallen tree stump.
“She’s magnificent,” said Ron, shaking his head. “Truly magnificent.”
“Yeah,” said Harry dully. The sourness from thinking about the Dursley’s was still curdling in his stomach.
“She’s right, you know.” Ron stroked his hair, and Harry let his eyes close. “You don’t have to go back.”
“I know.”
“You would have made a great King Arthur though.”
“Yeah? Would you have been my loyal Lancelot?”
“Hopefully with less girlfriend-stealing.”
“It’s ready!” called Luna. “Come see!”
She’d formed a circle of the quartz around a tree stump right at the centre of the clearing. It was just big enough for all three of them to stand on if they squeezed in, Luna’s toes digging into Harry’s instep and Ron’s hip wedged against his own.
“You need to hold some magical tension in your body,” she said. “As much as possible. Build it up like you’re about to cast and then don’t.”
“Feels weird,” said Harry. “Like I’m holding my breath wrong.”
“It’s only for a second,” said Luna. “Now – Kosoleth.”
And everything stopped.
The clouds racing along the sky, the birds, the faint hum of cars from the road – all of it froze. The trees were caught mid-gust, leaves hovering in the air with their pale undersides flipped to the sun, the grass around their feet bowing low. Even the sunlight seemed frozen into pillars of gold that staked the earth. The air was thick and grass-fresh in his mouth. He looked at Ron and the sunlight shining across his freckled skin – no, through him – no, out of him. Ron was glowing from within in peach and butter-yellow and vermillion, and the form Harry could see was just stained glass. Every freckle was a burning ember.
On his other side, Luna seemed hard and glittering, her pale eyes cloud-striped. The sunlight bounced across her skin in iridescent rainbows that shattered across her joints. She was shining so fiercely that it almost hurt to look at – not out of herself like Ron but as if the light was caressing her.
There was light rising from the ground. It curled in gold strings in the air, tangled and danced and twined itself around Harry’s hand. He thought he saw it take the shape of a hammer coming down, then a rearing horse, a leaping fire. Were there faces in it now? Or bodies? No, they were leaves – floating upwards through the air, dancing round each other to the rhythm of the blood in his veins, tessellating faster and faster until they were whirling and rushing up towards the sun, and the trees moved as one and the world waved like water and the magic came rushing out of the three of them all together in a flood that crashed out across the clearing. He collapsed on the stump, heart hammering with joy that forced its way out of his throat with a shout. Ron was laughing deliriously.
“Oh my god, Luna,” he said, breathless. “Oh my god, what was that?”
“It was us, wasn’t it?” said Ron. “Or the past, or the earth or – “
“It’s a connection,” she said. “It makes everything quiet so you can see the hidden things, or maybe souls, I don’t really understand it – “
She was staring at Harry with a wild, disbelieving smile. “Did you see yourself?”
“No, why?”
“You were covered in stars. Dripping in them.”
Ron slid off the tree trunk, still gasping for breath.
“You were beautiful,” said Luna. She was looking at him as she reached out and touched Ron’s head in benediction. “You were both so beautiful.”
The thing was, when Ron and Hermione had got together, Harry had felt – uncomfortable. He was happy, of course he was. But it was always going to be a bit weird, going from being part of a squad to the friend of a couple. And they’d been so into the idea of being a couple – Ron as much as Hermione, which had surprised Harry. Date nights and snogging and holding hands everywhere, and at a certain point it was just -
He was just expendable.
Ron and Luna were going to get together. It was obvious, Luna running her hands over Ron’s shoulders at every opportunity, Ron leaning in seriously to everything she said. The weird thing was that it wasn’t weird. Yeah, at some point they’d hook up, possibly permanently, but Harry could tell that there’d be a place for him. When they danced round the kitchen to too-loud records – Ron and Harry dancing, really dancing, for the first time, because this was just three friends in the moonlight and the point was the joy of the music and not looking cool – he’d lost the thread of his thoughts again. When he found it again they were on the sofa, shipwreck survivors clinging to the last lifeboat. He vaguely remembered Uncle Vernon’s face – “Marijuana will melt your brain, Dudley!” – and he giggled and pressed against the warm mass that turned out to be Ron’s shoulder.
“You ok there, Harry?” said Luna, reaching across to stroke his hair.
“Just chill,” murmured Harry, and she stroked his face and kept murmuring to Ron.
Ron was lucky. Luna was beautiful – so small and delicate, with those bird-like hands and her way of moving like water. They’d look good together, Ron’s long freckled back covering her, his big hands on her hips. Just the size difference was enough to make his mouth water and oh, that was new. It wasn’t Ron’s size in itself that was hot, it was the combination of that and his gentleness, the way he touched – the juxtaposition, all that strength contained into something soft – there was something there, something tender and secret –
But no, that was wrong, because Harry had been thinking about Luna and how small and bright she was, and the way she never stopped moving. She’d undulate under Ron like a wave. Or over him. Riding him, one hand on his neck – not pressing, not a warning, just a reminder of the control she had -
But maybe he shouldn’t be thinking about either of them at all. He tried to think about other people he’d found fit. Ginny – so harsh and fast when she’d been fucking him. Her bright, tight body – but it hadn’t been right anymore. Once upon a time he’d loved her anger, loved the way they raced up against each other and crashed. But he didn’t want that anymore. He didn’t want harsh edges and rubbing each other raw, and maybe Ginny didn’t either. Ron was steady. If he and Ron – if he put his hands on Ron – he was angry, yes, but not fierce, and they weren’t angry at each other, not anymore -
“I’m sorry about fourth year,” he said to Ron. “I was a right cock.”
“No you weren’t. I was.”
“No, I was, I was – you know, busy being Harry Potter.”
“Yeah, well. I was fourteen. Or fifteen. Can’t remember. Everyone’s shit when they’re fifteen. What were you like at fifteen, Luna?”
“I had a crush on you,” she said, sinking across his lap to lie half-over Harry. “And then on Harry. Then Ginny. Then Harry again. Then both at the same time. There was a Draco Malfoy phase. And then I got really sad and had a crush on Hermione for a bit.”
“All in one year?” said Ron, genuinely baffled, and Harry laughed so hard it hurt.
“What about you, Harry?” she asked, pushing his hair out of his eyes.
“I mean, there was Cho. And Ginny. But I think - “ He worked his lower lip. “Maybe there was also Cedric Diggory? And maybe Lupin. And Oliver Wood. And Dean.” He took the joint. “Also I possibly wanked to Draco Malfoy in sixth year.”
“I was with you till that point,” said Ron.
“You were?”
“Krum,” said Ron mournfully. “I mean – shoulders. And he asked Hermione - “
“You were jealous,” said Harry. “And you – thinking about how they must have looked together - “
“They didn’t,” said Ron. “She said he was a gentleman. Didn’t like her like that. But – yeah. I was angry and confused and I – “
“Yeah,” said Harry. “I know the feeling. I mean – shoulders are great.”
“They are,” said Ron.
“You’ve got shoulders.”
Ron blushed, and Harry remembered that his thoughts were meant to stay inside his head. “I just meant - “
“You meant that Ron has nice shoulders,” said Luna, giving those shoulders a firm squeeze. “You like them.”
“I do,” he said, meeting Ron’s eyes, too high to lie.
“I used to think about you and Ginny together,” said Luna. “You-Harry, not you-Ron. That would be - “
“Gross,” said Ron. “No one is thinking about my little sister. You had a crush on her?”
“I like freckles,” said Luna, and winked. “I think Harry does too.”
“I do like freckles.”
“I’ve got freckles,” said Ron. “Freckles and shoulders. A lot of things you like.”
“I like almost everything about you.”
“Almost?”
“I don’t – Actually, I think I like everything. That just sounds like – too much liking, you know? I didn’t want to say it.”
“I like everything about you too,” said Ron. His eyes were so blue. Ginny’s eyes had been pale, flecked with brilliant green. Caribbean seas on a postcard. Ron’s eyes were darker, steadier. Ultramarine, the curled edges of irises.
“I’ve never seen anyone else with eyes like yours,” he said. Ron’s mouth was very close.
“I think you should kiss,” murmured Luna, but they already were. Ron’s lips were surprisingly soft. The hand on the back of Harry’s neck was tender, Ron’s thumb rubbing gentle circles into Harry’s scalp. It felt like they had been kissing all their lives. Everything else, all eight years, had been one long inhale and this was them finally breathing out.
He pulled away. Ron’s lips were still touching his. They kept their eyes open, examining each other from close up. The freckles blurred together into one sunset sweep across Ron’s face.
“Luna,” said Harry, “what should we do next?”
“Kiss again,” said Luna, and Harry did, eyes still open, watching from one breathless minute to the next. It didn’t feel like something you could face with your eyes closed. You needed to keep looking, to witness this.
“I thought you wanted to kiss Luna,” he said.
“I did,” said Ron. “I do. Can I?”
“I think you should.”
Luna lifted herself up like a moonbeam, pressed herself to Ron’s mouth. Her hands skated across his hair, down his shoulders. They looked like twilight coming up to meet the sunset, and Harry’s heart hurt with how beautiful it was.
“You’re so small,” he whispered. “He could pick you up.”
Luna turned and kissed Harry. He stroked his hands across her back and traced the contours of her tiny waist.
“Do you want him to pick me up, Harry?”
“Yeah.” He licked his lips. “Yeah, I’d like that.”
In his head, it had been – not rougher, but more urgent. But this was better – Ron cradling Luna as he lifted her across his lap. His hands spanned her rib cage. Luna trailed her lips down his neck. She was making soft little noises between every breath like a satisfied cat.
“Am I dreaming?” said Harry.
“Probably not,” said Ron, and he took Harry’s sleeve and hauled him in – he was so strong, when had he gotten so strong? “I want to see you kiss her.” His voice was hoarse. “Is that – Harry, is that - ?”
“Yeah.” He kissed Luna again, and the two of them kissed Ron’s neck together until he was squirming, his blush rising on his neck with every lick, every bite (Luna’s), every noise.
“You’re beautiful,” said Harry. He felt close to tears. He didn’t know who he was talking to. “You’re – you’re really fucking beautiful.”
“We’re beautiful,” said Luna. She shed her top in one fluid motion. Her tits were small and soft. Harry and Ron reached out at the same time, fingers almost brushing skin, and she laughed like crystal. “I wouldn’t take them out if you weren’t allowed to touch them.”
“Bloody hell.” Ron’s face was almost pained. “Bloody hell.”
“You can use your mouth if you like,” she said. Ron knelt forward and put his lips on her nipple, one hand moulding round her other breast. Harry – didn’t. His whole chest burnt with a feeling, close to misery or happiness but too strong to be placed as either. The beauty of Ron encircling her, of Luna rising above him like a Catholic saint. And he was invited, he was part of it, and he wanted to so much. But. It was the paradox of a field of freshly fallen snow. You wanted to throw yourself into in, run across that perfection, but the second you did you’d ruined it.
“Oh, stop worrying,” said Ron, and then he was kissing him, shifting Luna onto Harry’s lap so the two of them could twine around her, pressed in on each side. Ron’s arms were either side of Harry’s head, pillars holding up the sky. Luna was kissing Harry’s throat, and Ron was kissing his mouth, and he couldn’t breathe for happiness.
He woke next to Luna in the first streaks of dawn, his head still muddy with booze and weed. She was curled up into a ball, head almost touching her knees. It reminded him of the way her face had looked as she insisted she wasn’t going to cry. There was a hardness to her that came from self-protection. A fierce happiness. For a moment, he felt how exhausting it must be to live like Luna lived – always demanding the right to do things the way you wanted, be the way you wanted. You couldn’t let yourself be anxious if you lived like that, could you? Otherwise the voices outside you became the voices inside you as well.
He kissed her forehead. She stirred sleepily and he stroked her hair until she stilled again. Then he padded out to the kitchen and flicked the kettle on. Down at the end of the garden Ron was fiddling about with three old bicycles that Xeno kept chained up near the fence. Harry took a cup of tea out to him. The world was dew-chilled and strange. His head felt light.
“Have you slept?” he said.
Ron shook his head. “Couldn’t. Luna says these used to fly. Her mum charmed them for her when she was eight.”
They sat on the steps together and watched the sun come up. Everything was so peaceful and so beautiful, but there was a flaw in it. A black fly buzzing in Harry’s soul disturbing the quiet.
He was, he realised, very worried about what Ron was going to say.
“I can leave if you want,” he said. He could do it, he could go back to Grimmauld Place and try and fix the whole thing up. Maybe he could pop down at weekends sometimes, soak up some more Devon air. “I don’t want to get in the way of you and Luna.”
Ron put down his mug of tea and placed a hand on Harry’s knee. “Mate,” he said, genuinely baffled, “what exactly about last night suggests that anyone wants you to leave?”
“I couldn’t – “ His voice caught. “I couldn’t have this and then lose it. So if I’m not going to have this – “
“You’re going to have this,” said Ron. “If you want it. You do have this. Um, I mean we probably need to ask Luna. But I’m actually pretty sure she orchestrated this with her mind magic.”
“That does sound like Luna.” He knocked his head against Ron’s. “Will you come back to bed? You should really sleep.”
Ron bit his lip. “I was worried I’d wake up in the morning and you’d be gone. Like, you’d just leave a note. Last night was fun, hope this doesn’t make anything weird, xoxo Harry Potter.”
“You’re right. I would definitely sign my full name on a note like that. Best to make things official, don’t you think?”
“You’re such a knob,” said Ron fondly.
“And it’s Harry James Potter, I think you’ll find.”
“Harry James Potter, Boy Who Lived – “
“Brackets twice.”
“Indeed. Boy Who Lived (Twice), formerly known as The Chosen One – “
“Formerly?”
“Currently known as an anxious berk who can’t accept a good thing to save his life – “
“You’re the worst,” said Harry, shoving his head into Ron’s shoulder. “I love you a lot, you know.”
Ron blushed crimson. “Yeah, yeah, pillock. I love you too.”
Nearly ten years ago, you showed me what it meant to have a friend. He’d never mattered to anyone before Ron. That little eleven-year-old-boy he’d left in a cupboard had been saved, not all-the-way saved, but as well as Ron could. And then Hermione, and Neville, Ginny, Luna – each one saving him as much as one child could save another. He locked eyes with that little boy across the years and saw his approving nod.
“I’m not going to go to the Dursley’s,” he said, and Ron just nodded and said “Yeah, Ok.”
Luna wanted to go to the folk festival happening in the Muggle village in the next valley, and Luna must be appeased. They apparated over late in the evening as the sky was turning the glowing blue of twilight. Through the trees they could see strings of lanterns floating over the barn. The sound of fiddles came reeling through the air, and Luna jumped onto a fallen tree and twirled around and round and round with her skirt a cloud of blue. The forest was violently alive with birdsong, so thick it was almost discordant. There was old magic here, in every leaf and every breath and every pump of his heart. They came out of the woods into the light.
“Jesus Christ,” said the ticket man. He was about seventy, lined with age and with an honest-to-god tweed flatcap. He put his hand over his heart and laugh. “You just about gave me a heart attack.”
“Sorry, mate,” said Ron. Harry caught Luna’s eye and the sharp little edges of her canines in her smile. She took his hand.
“Never bother. It’s two quid a ticket.”
“Er.” Harry dug in his pocket. Two sickles, a knut. Twenty muggle pence. Ron and Luna just shrugged at him.
The man scoffed. “Young people. Forget your head if it wasn’t screwed on.”
“We’ll just – “
“Now, don’t you worry. I reckon you gave me your money, don’t you?” He winked at them. “Take your tickets. Each one gets you two drinks and a pork sandwich.”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” said Luna, jumping and dancing through the doors, and Harry and Ron grinned and thanked him and ran after her. The music was like a wall slamming into him and a spell gripping his body all at once. They clasped hands all at the same time, a human wheel spinning onto the dance floor so fast that Luna was lifted off the ground.
At the start of the next song, a dance caller came up on the stage and told them to get into pairs and stand in rows.
“Er,” said Harry. He shrugged at Ron. “Shall we take turns?”
“I’ll dance with you,” said a pretty girl with dreads tied back in a ponytail. She held out her hand to Ron. “I’m a third wheel too. I’m Sam, by the way. Do you know how to do this?”
“Not a clue,” said Ron.
“It’s going to be a travesty,” said Harry.
“Don’t worry,” said Sam. “It’s really easy. Just follow the leader and look at me if you don’t understand what to do.”
“Hmm” said Luna. “I’m probably going to follow my heart.”
But there was some witchcraft about dancing in a group – you stopped just being yourself and became part of a larger organism. You could almost see the patterns you were making together in your mind’s eye – swinging your partner first one way then the other, swapping and swapping back, then the four of you spinning in a circle together. A machine of people all working together just as bees worked to make a hive. They raised a cathedral of hands and Ron and Sam raced through, laughing like newlyweds. The reel came round again, the singer crooning about a love he’d lost who was light as a bee’s wing.
“There was animal in her eyes,” he sung, and Harry looked at Luna spinning on his arm like a kid at a carousel. Under the spell at the fort she’d looked less than human, or maybe more. A girl with the heart of a fox.
They were up at the edge of the column, right next to the stage and about to run down through the other couples when the power went out on the stage.
“She was a – ah, shite.” The singer groaned, just loud enough for Harry to here. “Sorry, ladies and gentlemen! Give us a minute, technical difficulties – “
“It’s buggered, Marcus,” called one of the techies.
Luna stepped on Harry’s foot.
“Well give it a try, John, and see what happens.”
“Give what a try, Marcus?”
“I don’t know! Turn it off and on again!”
“It is bloody off! It’s staying off!”
“Just play as loud as you can!” yelled someone from the crowd.
Luna trod on his foot, harder.
“What?”
“If only there was some way we could amplify the music without power,” she whispered.
“Luna – “
It was illegal. Extremely illegal, and very stupid. Probably not even necessary – there were even odds they’d get everything fixed up in a minute.
“Go on,” said Luna. Wild and strange and frightening. He shook his wand from his sleeve.
“I’ve done something,” said John. “Doubt it’ll work. Give it a go.”
“Sonorous,” whispered Harry, and the sound of the guitar crashed over the audience. Everyone cheered. The music started up again properly, and Harry gripped Luna’s arms and they raced down away from the scene of the crime.
“Don’t think I didn’t see that,” Ron whispered once they joined him, but he was smiling.
They danced all night. They drank all six of their free cups of cider and then, as the people behind the bar rapidly ceased to give a shit, went up and got more. They ate a pulled pork sandwich so fatty and juicy that it nearly moved Harry to tears. He kissed Luna as he spun her around on the dancefloor and dragged Ron behind the stage to kiss him too.
“Stop being an idiot, John,” said one of the techies. “It’s clearly working – “
“Is it? Is it? Put your ear to that speaker and tell me there’s a damn thing coming out of it.”
You’re an idiot, mouthed Ron, flattened against a wall in their hiding place.
“All right,” said the other techie. “So it’s coming out the other – “
“Is it? Is it? Do you need me to drag you over there and shove your ears against that speaker as well? I have no bloody clue what’s amplifying them, but it’s not this pile of crap.”
They stumbled out once John and the other techy moved away, flushed and guilty, and found Sam with two jugs of cider in her hands and a knowing look on her face.
“I was going to ask you if you wanted to take a walk,” she said to Ron. “But it looks like you’re not such a third wheel after all.”
Ron scratched his neck. “Yeah, sorry. We’re more of a tricycle.”
“Well, take a drink anyway,” she said, kissing his cheek. “You’re a weird ‘un, but a good ‘un.”
The last band finished at two, and they stumbled out into the night air, giddy with drink and dancing and too pissed to apparate. Harry and Ron both took Luna’s hand and pulled her along, singing as they went. Ron and Luna seemed to know the words to every song they’d heard that night, and Harry joined in on the choruses. They weren’t good singers – actually, with all the cider in them they probably sounded bloody horrific – but it felt like a spell against the dark shadows of the country lanes.
“Are we lost?” said Ron at one point. “I feel a bit like we’re lost. You two are idiots, have I mentioned that?”
Luna jumped up to perch on top of a stile. “It was worth it. Everyone had such a lovely time.”
“They’re going to be talking about it for years,” said Ron. “The time three weird kids appeared out of the woods who no one had seen before and then the music lasted all night without any electricity – “
“I hope they do,” said Harry. He jumped the stile and swung Luna down, his hands on her waist. “I hope they write a bloody ballad about us.”
Luna started laughing. “I’ve just realised – we didn’t tell anyone our names. We’re nameless apparitions, Harry.”
Back at the Rook they fell into bed together, rubbing away the night chill with each other’s body heat. Ron’s feet were freezing. He rubbed them up and down Luna’s legs while she kicked and laughed and squealed. Harry held her hips down to help Ron with his torture, and then he dropped his head down and kissed her on her cunt until she stopped squealing and started moaning.
“You taste amazing,” he said. “She tastes amazing, Ron.”
Ron knelt next to Harry and kissed Luna in the same place. “Fuck, you really do Luna.”
“I’m so lucky,” she said, breathless. “I’m so, so lucky. I’m about to get everything I want.”
Ron fucked Luna while Harry ate her out until she was inarticulate, writhing on Ron’s cock like a mess. The taste of the two of them together was gorgeous, Luna soft and salty and Ron musky and thick and unmistakably male. She came twice, each time louder than the last, and then she pulled Harry up and put his cock in her mouth. Harry stroked her hair and kissed Ron, sloppier each time until he came in her mouth, spilling over her lips with a shout, and Ron gripped his back and shuddered and came too.
“Fuck me,” said Ron, panting. Luna moved and he twitched and gasped. “Oh, fuck me. That was everything.”
“That was beautiful,” said Harry, looking at the three of them tangled together. His little court, all joined up in this bed. “Let’s do that forever.”
He felt embarrassed as soon as he said it – it was too much too fast, even if he’d almost said as much to Ron before – but Luna reached out and stroked his face.
“I’d like that,” she said, and Ron ducked his head and mumbled “Yeah, that would be all right.”
He woke in the morning to the sound of Ron whistling in the kitchen. Luna was curled around him, using his chest as a stand for her book. It was the soft rustling of pages that had woken him up.
“You’re making good use of me.”
“You’re very useful, Harry. Stay still, I can’t focus on a line with you moving.”
“Oh, all right then.” His eyes slipped closed. He was so warm.
“Don’t fall back asleep,” she said. “We’ve got a big day today.”
“Oh yeah?”
“We only really did it one way last night. I can think of several more combinations that I want to try.”
“Well, if you insist.”
“I’m glad you’re not brooding anymore. It does look very good on you, but so does happiness.”
He tried to shrug without jostling Luna’s book. “I decided not to go back to the Dursleys.”
“Good.”
“You think it was the right call?”
She shut the book. When he opened his eyes, she was staring into the distance, chewing on a strand of her hair.
“I don’t think there is a right call,” she said. “I think it’s a bit like picking your favourite colour. It’s just a choice, you know? Not everything has to be these big, important crossroads. Sometimes you take a different route home. Sometimes you pick up a new brand of milk. It doesn’t matter, it’s just the little stuff that makes up a life.”
The Dursleys not mattering. He could pop in and out of Privet Drive for the last time, or he could not. If Vernon thundered at him, if Petunia shrilled, if Dudley menaced he could just shrug and come back here to Ron’s latest culinary escapade and Luna’s extensive record collection. Nobody would care – he’d barely care.
“What is your favourite colour?” he asked her.
She had gone back to her book. “I always get torn between orange and green.”
She was so clever, sometimes. Dancing with words, letting her meanings slide around in your head, riddling people until she had them exactly where she wanted. And then there were moments like this where she let that all fall away, or as much as she knew how, and gave you a peek inside her mind. Maybe she’d never come out and say exactly how she felt about him and Ron. They’d just pick it up in little clues, in odd turns of phrase and meaningful looks. Or maybe she would, in the dark so they couldn’t see her face screwed tight with feeling as she said the words. Either way would be just as nice.
“Luna,” he said, “is there actually a third figure in The Hero and the Nyad?”
She shrugged. “There should be, don’t you think?”
“Oh thank fuck,” said Dudley, when the door opened.
Harry, who had been prepared for literally any reaction except that, dropped his hand and blinked.
“Mum and Dad are out,” said Dudley, “and also, you know, you’re alive.”
“Um, thanks?”
Dudley shrugged. “I figured you were when they let us go home but, y’know. There’s alive and there’s alive, innit? Did you kill that Lord then?”
“Er, yeah. Yeah he’s dead.”
“Sick.”
“I just came to get my stuff. Your dad sent a letter.”
“Sure, yeah, come in.” Dudley stomped inside, and Harry followed, looking cautiously around the new, improved hallway of Privet Drive. The magnolia had been replaced by an ecru, or maybe the other way round. It was a different shade of mildly-tasteful off-white. Who fucking cared. The cupboard under the stairs had been hidden from view by a mid-century sideboard, adorned with two Precious Moments figurines and a crystal lamp.
“I packed it all up,” said Dudley, waving at a brown carry-all. “It’s just some books and stuff. A blanket. There were some letters there as well that came for you. Do you want a cup of tea?”
“I’m good, thanks.” He picked up the bag and shifted it onto his shoulders. Was this going to be it? Standing here in the hallway, two steps from where he’d slept as a child. It didn’t feel possible that he could just walk out of this house and never come back here.
“My girlfriend’s pregnant,” said Dudley.
“Congrats,” said Harry. “Um, I think.”
“Yeah.” Dudley shoved his hands in his pockets. “I don’t want dad to think he’s a freak, you know?”
“What?”
“Or she, I mean. I keep saying ‘he’ automatically and Sandra keeps whacking me round the shoulders and reminding me we could have a girl.”
“Right.”
“But, I mean, I don’t know how to tell her that he – fuck, she, whatever – might be, you know.” He was staring very hard at the ground. “I mean, your mum was magic, wasn’t she? And, like, my mum isn’t. So. It’s possible, innit?”
“Oh,” said Harry, feeling a little dizzy. “Yeah, yeah. It’s possible that – yeah.”
Dudley chewed his lip. “What do I do if she is?”
“There’s no way to stop it, Dudders.”
“Yeah, dickhead, I know that. I mean, like, you helped a snake escape from a London zoo. You can’t exactly get a toddler leash that’s going to stop that kind of shite, right?”
“I don’t know,” said Harry. “I don’t really know a lot about any kind of babies. Magical or not.”
“Right.”
“But I can find out. I’ll send some stuff over.”
“Not here,” said Dudley. “I’ve got a new place. Lemme write down the address.” He tore a scrap off an envelope and scribbled on it. “You could come over for tea some time. Sandra’s well nice.”
“Yeah, I might.”
Dudley shrugged. “I know there’s, like, stuff to say. I’m not great at saying it, though. I’d probably get it all wrong.”
“You’re doing all right, Big D.”
“Yeah, all right.” He grinned down at the ground. “You got a girlfriend, Harry?”
“Might do.”
“Yeah?”
“Might have a boyfriend too.”
“Sick,” said Dudley. “I’m glad you’re good.”
Harry smiled for what felt like the first time ever in Privet Drive. “Yeah, I am. I’m glad you’re good too.”
Dudley reached out and clasped his hand. Maybe the past wasn’t always a rotting limb you had to amputate. Maybe it was more like a skin you shed, something that fit you once that you had to grow out of. Parts of it could still be good. You didn’t have to leave it all in the dirt in order to move on.
“A girlfriend and a boyfriend,” said Dudley, snickering. “Tell Dad if you ever run into him. He’d go fucking spare.”
July slunk into August. Harry and Ron both got postcards from Hermione that rattled with dates and details and the names of famous European cities she was seeing. Say hi to Luna from me, she’d written, and they read it with twin guilty looks on their faces.
“What if she thinks we’ve replaced her?” said Ron.
“We haven’t,” said Harry. “Have we? I mean, this isn’t – this wouldn’t have happened with Hermione.”
“We should tell her,” said Ron. “I should tell her. I’ll write her a letter.”
Harry left that task to him. Ron would know what to say better than he would. But it ate at him. She was a part of his life, had to be, but the threads binding her to him where different than with Ron and Luna. And it wasn’t just the Luna of it all. It was him and Ron being together that worried him the most. Would she think he’d been hanging on the side-lines waiting for them to breakup so he could swoop in? Or worse, she’d feel unwanted. He did want her here in the sunlight with them, laughing and talking about her travels. He just didn’t want her in his bed.
Ron cut his hair short in preparation for Auror training. It made him look older and more sophisticated. Harry loved running his fingers through it while Ron blew him, the copper contrasting with the bronze of his skin.
“He’s so good,” said Luna, watching them with her hand between her legs. “So eager.”
“He’s wonderful,” said Harry. He ran his nails across Ron’s shoulder, and Ron moaned and leaned into the touch.
Neville came to visit for a few days, on a break from some herbology project he’d been doing all summer. Harry was so used to their threesome now that they forget to tell Neville until they stumbled out of the same bedroom in the morning, sleepy-eyed and littered with love bites, to find him standing in the corridor with a tea-tray.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh! Uh – the three of you?”
“Er, yeah,” said Harry.
“And that works?”
“It works for us,” said Ron, in a tone that brooked no argument, and Neville blinked and offered them all a cup of tea. He didn’t bring it up again, but sometimes Harry caught him looking at the three of them and smiling like he was proud.
And then the day came when Harry went outside and saw a woman in a trench coat, her dark hair in two elegant braids, standing on the hillock with her face turned towards the sky. She looked a bit like Hermione as he got closer, but it couldn’t be Hermione because she definitely didn’t dress like that – and then she turned, and of course it was.
“Hello Harry, my best friend of eight years and counting whose life I have saved multiple times,” she said. “You wouldn’t happen to know who’s dating my ex-fiancé now, would you?”
“Er,” he stammered. “Are you mad?”
“No,” she said, her arch tone falling away until she was just soft and fond. “I already got an extremely guilty letter from Ron.”
“Europe’s been good to you. You look amazing.”
“Yeah.” She bit her lip. “Yeah, it was. But I want to be here now. Is that ok?”
“I’d say it’s about bloody time.” There was Ron, looking cowed. “Um, good holiday?”
“The best!”
“Ron!” There was Luna coming up the path, wheeling the three bicycles behind her. “I’m pretty sure I got the front wheel to float for a little bit, but then – oh.” She went completely still when she saw Hermione. That was how Luna dealt with problems she really couldn’t handle. She’d stop moving, stop talking, shut down like an animal hiding from a circling bird of prey.
“I’m just here for a visit,” said Hermione. “Really, just a visit. If I’m welcome.”
“Of course,” said Luna, still goggling. “I’ll turn down the guest bedroom.”
“Please, don’t bother for me.” She knelt down to look at the bikes and cast something quick and non-verbal that lit up a lattice of spellwork around the wheels. “This is fascinating. What have we here?”
“They used to fly,” said Luna.
“I can see that. Something’s got caught in the spellwork – it must have been a curse from when – well, never mind when. Here.” She took out her wand and started to chant, low and sweet. There was a bang and a puff of green smoke. The bicycles swivelled their wheels, as if unsure about this latest development. Then one by one they rose into the air, unsteady as new colts at first but gradually seeming to gain confidence. The bells chimed like a three-gun salute.
“I think they’re saying thank you!” said Luna. She threw herself at Hermione in a bear hug. “And I am too! Thank you, thank you, thank you so much! You can have first ride, seeing as you fixed them.”
Hermione side-eyed the bikes over her shoulder. “You know what, Luna? Why don’t you three give them a test ride first.”
“Using us as Guinea pigs?” said Ron, slinging himself over the seat of the largest bike.
“Absolutely,” said Hermione, sticking out her tongue. Luna was already maybe five, six metres high, excitedly calling out things she could see.
“You getting on, Harry?” she asked as Ron wobbled up to join Luna.
“You sure you don’t want a go?”
“I’m not getting on a flying death-trap, no matter how solid the spellwork.” She squeezed his shoulder. “Is it really all right, me being here? I don’t want to get in the way.”
“Of course it is,” said Harry. He was thinking about Merlin, apart from Arthur’s court but always part of it. Never staying, always returning. “Stay as long as you want.”
“I’ll probably want to go back to Europe soon. But – until then.” She smacked his arm. “Go on, then. I want to see you fumble around in the air.”
“Cast a cushioning charm if I fall!”
“Harry,” called Ron. “We can see the fort from here! It looks well cool from above.”
“Coming!” Ron and Luna were as high as the roof now. From below, it looked as though they were cycling laps around the sun. Harry said a prayer for luck and good balance, and then rose up and up and up to join them.