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Ginny, to the best of her ability, was ignoring the letter; she had it pressed like a drying flower between the pages of the book that she'd brought on the ethics of performance-enhancing potions in magical sports. It was something to read, that was all – it was something to do when Luna was out gathering plants and her father was busy in the kitchen. She used the letter as a bookmark, and each morning when she got up she told herself that she would write her answer today.
Every day she read in the book, used the letter to mark her place; every day she drew her finger over her own name in Harry's scratchy handwriting, and then over Luna's. Ginny and Luna, Lovegood cabin, Switzerland, he'd written, and then in a different ink, an afterthought: and Xenophilius.
-
The mountains felt like summer in wintertime, or perhaps the other way around: snow glinting in the periphery of vision, shiny leaf-green pushing up hardy through the thin cracked ice that remained from the cow's mud puddles. The cows were higher up now that the snow had retreated to the peaks. Often Ginny could hear their happy mooing, the far-carrying clanging of their cowbells. Down the valley, where the Lovegood's cabin was, there were summer-flowering plants; Luna only picked up the flowers when they fell down, and wore them in her hair, half-wilted. At times the valley felt like a place out of time, a pocket untouched; there hadn't been a war here. The Swiss magical folk they sometimes met on their hikes only politely inquired after the state of Britain – small talk: like it was a done thing, like it was over.
It was June. Ginny thought of Hogwarts every day: made herself do it, in the morning, like a ritual. She hoped that if she gave it enough thought the castle would stop intruding on her dreams, scatter its ruins everywhere, collapse on her time and time again. She wondered sometimes why she didn't dream about Fred, but instead about the tables of the Great Hall, shining with malevolent brass … the white tablecloth doubling as a shroud, drawn over Fred's face by Madam Pomfrey with a far too practised hand. Sometimes it would rise up in her dream and cover her, try to strangle her, and she would scream, fighting madly, trying to find her brother who was lost inside.
On the fifth day, Ginny found a long, straight branch; she picked it up from the side of a hiking trail, half-thinking that she could try to build a broom, but Xenophilius said: “A stick like this, in this country – when it comes to you, it's a walking stick.” He whittled a handle into it for her without using magic, and inscribed the sides with protective runes. Luna used her wand as a knife and drew two small wings at the base; “For Hermes,” she said, “the protector of the traveller.” They went hiking in the morning for as long as Luna could manage it; sometimes when she got too tired Xenophilius levitated her on the way home, making her hover an inch or so off the ground. To Ginny she looked like a nymph, flitting from plant to plant, feet so light they didn't make contact with the earth.
Every night Luna sat on the wooden back porch of the cabin and massaged her legs with an ointment her father made from Alpine herbs and a secret ingredient he wouldn't divulge. Xenophilius spent many an hour in the cabin's kitchen, peering into steaming pots, experimenting, quieter than Ginny had ever known him to be. The bruises Luna had on her calves weren't the normal kind. Almost six weeks after she'd been hit by the curse during the battle the bruises were still vivid, blooming purple and blue, their yellowing edges ragged. Ginny sat with her every evening while she applied the salve.
“Oh, it's all right,” she said every time Ginny voiced her concern. “I actually think they're sort of pretty, don't you?”
I like you whole, Ginny thought, throat screwed shut with sharp emotion, I like you safe and sound – but yes, the bruises were pretty in their way. Luna said: “I'm lucky; they'll fade in time. It's not bad to have something to look at that reminds you of what happened for a while.” An ugly thing, turned beautiful: Luna could do that.
Xenophilius came out, smoking a pipe, looking tired and pale in the oil lamp's light. “Look at that,” he said, pointing up with the pipe. “The Dyad moon is rising. It's a supermoon tonight. Quite special.”
Ginny looked; the moon always seemed bigger here than it had back home, but now it came peeking hugely over the mountains, full and round and somehow mischievous, rolling playfully onto its belly as it rose. She smiled up at it. “Wow.”
She looked over to see Luna and her dad looking at each other, exchanging information without words; they did that sometimes.
Seeming satisfied, Xenophilius leaned on the wooden porch banister and looked out over the valley, painted liquid by the rising moon. “As long as you're careful for your old father,” he said, and pulled on his pipe.
-
Ginny cleaned her teeth in the tiny bathroom while Luna absently ran a comb through her long hair; their elbows brushed occasionally.
Ginny spat, straightened. “What did your dad mean just now?”
Luna smiled at her in the mirror. “Would you like to go out and look at the moon later tonight, when it's risen?”
Ginny tilted her head. “Oh,” she said. “Yes, why not?”
“Supermoon is a point of contact,” Luna said. “Full moon, close to earth. Mummy always used to take me out when it came; it's the best healing moon. Mummy always did like the moon. She wanted to call me moon, but Daddy made her change it to Luna.”
Ginny looked at her in the mirror, pale, still very much recovering from whatever unnamed things had been done to her when she'd been kidnapped; she still hadn't said what, exactly, and Ginny was, in all honesty, scared to ask. The thing was, really – Luna was good at dealing with being singled out, with being targeted; she'd had a lot of practice at it. Ginny, by nature, rebelled against it, against different treatment because she was the only girl or because she liked sports or whatever stupid reason anyone came up with that they thought meant she shouldn't be allowed to do things her own way. Luna didn't rebel. She just – didn't engage, and to Ginny that sometimes felt too much like acceptance, like defeat; that was why she couldn't help defend Luna, why she stopped people calling her names, even when Luna told her she didn't mind, that she didn't spare those people any thought.
The problem, selfish as it was: she hadn't been able to defend Luna this time. And it felt a bit wrong, how unchanged Luna seemed, how serene and vague and gentle, as if nothing had really happened.
“Daddy could use some supermoon magic too,” Luna said, her eyes going a bit absent, running her fingers through her hair once more.
“Is he coming?”
“No. Not this time.” She looked away from the mirror and looked directly at Ginny. “If you want – it's a Dyad moon. We could do some balancing magic.”
“Sounds good,” Ginny said.
-
In their little bedroom with the twin beds, where everything was made of wood, Ginny dropped off to sleep despite her intention to stay awake. Luna shook her gently; when Ginny opened her eyes, surfacing from an uncomfortable dream of rubble and smoke, she looked at Luna for a long moment without knowing who she was: this young woman with her eyes lit, washed white by the moonlight that was coming through the window.
“Are you ready?” Luna asked gently, and in that off-kilter hour she slid her hand over the side of Ginny's face up to her hairline. Ginny shivered.
“I think so,” she said, blinking up at Luna, the waking world still resolving itself around her. The dreams were – they were intrusive sometimes, they didn't always have the decency to end when she woke up. She was scared, for a moment, that she and Luna were at Hogwarts, in the dungeons where they'd been fighting, hiding under one of the columns as part of the vaults collapsed around them – but the cabin was wood-warm and steady around them. As this realisation became clearer she relaxed, Luna's fingers still in her hair.
“You were sleeping so deeply, I didn't know if I wanted to wake you.”
Ginny stretched. “Hm, I'm glad you did. I think my dream was about to turn into a nightmare.”
Ginny was not yet of age, and despite the fact that she was sure the Ministry had other things to do at the moment than discipline an underage witch for an unauthorised Levitation Charm, she let Luna do the magic. They had a small copper cauldron, kindling for the fire, sage for cleansing. And, in their pockets, the slips of parchment on which they had written what it was they needed from the moon. The Dyad moon, Ginny knew, was the moon of wanting: the moon of reaffirming and balancing spiritual and physical desire.
Walking the trail, their footsteps muffled by pine needles, they were silent. Ginny stole looks at Luna, unwilling to stop doing it, nevertheless aware that she knew this feeling very well, and that it was … not a good time, now, when all of them had lost so much of themselves. And there was still – Harry, and Luna's increasingly unnerving calm, and the fact that Ginny had all but run away from her family because she could hardly stand it, their fractures: George like a ghost, mum crying in the mornings when she thought no one was awake, dad locking himself in the shed, and Ron only still standing upright because he was taking propping Harry up very seriously –
Luna turned towards her, eyes large and reflective. “You're thinking quite loudly,” she said.
“I'm just thinking that there is a lot of balancing I need from this moon,” Ginny said.
“That's all right. A supermoon means abundance.” She smiled and linked her arm with Ginny's, easily falling into step with her. “It has a lot of balancing to give.”
Ginny felt her heart tightening at Luna's proximity. “Do you really … I mean, do you really believe that the moon can manifest healing like that?” Ginny had stopped taking Astronomy after third year, when the practical basis had been covered and the course aim had shifted closer to Divination. But Luna had always continued to take it, even in years when it wasn't even part of their optional course load.
“Yes,” Luna said simply. “But it can't do it alone. Just like we can't always do it alone.” She pointed. “That looks like a good spot, don't you think?”
It was a little grove with a clump of hardy mountain pines on one side, and a large open sky on the other, where the moon was suspended, blushing redder than usual. Luna and Ginny lit some of the sage, breathed in the fragrant smoke. Ginny felt her lungs tingling. Luna set up the cauldron and started the fire inside it with her wand, made it crackle red and blue in turn. She stood quietly for a moment, moon-washed, her hands folded; her mouth was moving, though no sound came out.
“Who are you talking to?” Ginny asked before she could stop herself.
“Mum.”
“Oh.”
“It can be anyone,” Luna said. “Anything, anyone you'd like to be watching.”
Ginny looked up at the moon, at the expectant way it hung there, suspended from the velvet of the sky. She copied Luna and folded her hands. When she closed her eyes, the moonlight was still there, behind her eyelids. Fred, she thought, and then had to stop, because immediately tears welled in her eyes and she had to blink, hard, to force them back. But it was enough to make her feel – like he was there, sort of, like he was on the brink of mocking her for praying to the moon.
“Would you like to go first?”
“Do I – read it, or –?”
“You don't have to, if you don't want to,” Luna said calmly. “Just think about it if that feels better.”
Ginny focused on her piece of parchment. She'd written: the fear that stops me from answering Harry, asking Luna, thinking about Fred, and helping my family
“Be gone,” she whispered, had to blink back another prickle of tears, and dropped her slip of parchment into the cauldron fire. It flared as if it had been fed a gust of oxygen. The little piece of paper caught immediately, and as they watched it curled into blackness, and then into ash.
“Well done,” Luna said, smiling. She took out her own parchment, didn't read it out loud either, simply looked between it and the moon for a long moment. “Be gone.” She dropped it into the flames; they crackled happily.
Ginny watched Luna as she brought the ritual to a close: feeding some of the cleansing sage into the fire, thanking the moon. It was hardly magic in the strict sense, but she felt as exhausted as if she'd just performed a dozen Stunners in a row. She wished, quite suddenly, that Luna had told her what she'd written, but that was hardly fair, was it? She hadn't told Luna either.
“Can we stay here for a bit longer?” Luna asked. “It's quite nice.”
“Sure.”
Luna sat down on the grass; Ginny plopped down next to her. The fire still burning inside the cauldron cast a nice warm glow. They both sat watching the moon.
“Do you think it will work?” Ginny asked.
“It probably already has,” Luna said.
“I don't feel different.”
“You don't need to feel different to do something different.”
Ginny looked at her; she could feel the fear she'd just asked the bloody moon to balance still churning in her gut, but – well, Luna was right, wasn't she?
“I still need to write back to Harry,” she made herself say.
“Oh. I'll help you,” Luna said, “if you want.”
That made Ginny smile; Luna would be good at it, writing a letter to Harry. She'd be able to make him laugh. “Thank you, but I think – it might be important to him to hear what I think.”
“Okay,” Luna said easily. “If you want me to ask you if you've done it, just tell me.”
“Yeah,” Ginny said. “That would actually be nice.”
For a long while, they were silent. The moon, engorged, cast quiet, unmoving shadows; there was no wind, and the world almost seemed frozen in time.
“I asked,” Luna said suddenly, quietly, “for balance in pain, and for balance in patience.”
Ginny frowned. “Pain, yeah, okay – but you're one of the most patient people I know.”
Luna turned towards her. “Not for this,” she said. Ginny felt a little shock at her expression; Luna looked frightened.
“Not for what?”
They stared at each other. Ginny's heart stuttered. “Oh,” she said weakly.
Luna dropped her look, ducking into herself; she looked petrified.
“Want to know what I asked for?” Ginny said. She licked her lips; her mouth was dry. “I asked for balance in fear.”
Luna gave her a funny sideways look. “You're never scared.”
“I'm scared all the time,” Ginny said, and touched Luna's cheek, drew her face towards her, and kissed her on the mouth: it felt simple and difficult at the same time, and equally fast and slow, as if the distance she had to cross between them was full of unseen pockets and traps that she had to navigate, but –
Luna kissed back immediately, her arm coming up to clutch at the side of Ginny's shirt; she kissed back hard, as if she'd been balancing on the edge of doing this, and had now been pushed in.
Ginny drew back, wild happiness blooming throughout her body; but Luna slid her hand around her nape and pulled her back in. Ginny started laughing, kissed her, laughed again, kissed her again, did both at the same time, and felt something flooding inside her, warm, cold, scary, safe –
“Merlin,” she said weakly, when they'd finally managed to stop.
Luna, flushed in the pale light, said: “Merlin's got nothing to do with it, has he? Thank the moon.”
-
On the way back, they kept stopping to kiss, to embrace; something had been unlocked and Ginny was overwhelmed by it, by this desire to be as close to Luna as possible at all times. It was frightening too; Ginny felt a bit stupid under the onslaught, felt her brain struggling to keep up with everything, and more than once she broke away, gasping, because it was just – a bit too much.
“Look, we've got to,” she tried to say, kiss, “we've got to – take it easy, we're,” kiss, “we've just come out of a terrible time –”
Luna pulled back. The light was in her eyes. “Is that any reason not to?” she asked.
“I don't know,” Ginny said, still reeling a little. “No, it's not, but –”
Luna stroked her thumb across Ginny's cheek. She was smiling. “I think it's a very good reason to.”
-
In bed, with Ginny's head resting on her arm, Luna said: “A lot of people think the full moon is the end of the cycle, like it's a sort of death, in a way. And that the new moon is a new start, an empty space." She paused. "I don't think they're right. The full moon is the largest blank space. It's about writing off what you want to go away."
“Mmm," Ginny said, her mouth pressed against Luna's shoulder. "Suppose they're close together, anyway. Can't start something new without getting rid of the old, can you?" Harry came clearly into Ginny's thoughts at that moment; how much pain he was in and how little of it he could show her. It felt remote now, in this place so far from them, but she'd – she'd actually felt jealous of Hermione and Ron, for the way Harry gravitated towards them in any room, taking a place between the two of them as if that was the only way he felt safe.
Luna gave it a long moment's thought. “Maybe, but letting go of isn't the same as getting rid of.” She pulled Ginny closer.
“Right,” Ginny said. After a silence: “Will you ask me tomorrow if I've written to Harry?”
“'Course I will.” Luna kissed her temple. “I've got a sketch to send along, if that's all right. I've been working on something for him.”
“He'll like that.”
They were quiet for a long time, the moon peeking through the window, glazing the wooden floor in light.
“I'm – gonna drop off like this,” Ginny mumbled.
“That's the idea,” Luna breathed.