Luna drifted silently off the bed without disturbing the world around her. She turned back to look at the mother and daughter sprawled together in deep, oblivious sleep.
She exhaled softly.
They didn't know yet that they had just brushed the very edge of death.
Luna swept the golden strands floating before her eyes back behind her ear, and gazed out the window at the world beyond the glass.
In the gentle wash of moonlight, the hillside grass, cleansed and refreshed by the evening's rain, swayed in soft continuous motion like aquatic weeds beneath a current.
The rushing of wind through the valley below and the rustling of leaves surrounding the hilltop enveloped the whole high place in continuous sound, yet together paradoxically they gave the world a quality of profound and absolute stillness.
Luna stood at the window for precisely as long as she needed to, until the decision had finished forming itself into certainty.
Then she crossed to the potted plant on her desk and with careful fingers dismantled her wand from where it had been hidden in the soil. She cleaned the earth from it with a cloth, checking the plant roots for any damage.
Then she opened her wardrobe and changed efficiently out of her pink pyjamas into jeans and a simple T-shirt.
"Dad. Dad—"
Up in the second-floor workroom, the peculiar printing press continued its autonomous, tireless labour. It ejected pages one by one in a recurrent fog of ink and colour.
The clatter and clack of its interlocking parts was noisy enough in the small round room. But listened to long enough with the constancy of a mechanical heartbeat, it had a way of lulling one toward sleep rather than away from it.
Mr. Lovegood had succumbed. He was slumped across his desk in a posture that showed he'd simply stopped mid-thought and gone under.
Luna gently shook the shoulder of her sleeping father.
"What is it, Luna?"
Mr. Lovegood called his daughter's name before he'd even opened his eyes—reflexive recognition.
When he finally focused and noticed what she was wearing—jeans, T-shirt, wand in hand, his silver-white eyes, identical to Luna's widened slightly with alert concern.
"You're going out? At this hour?"
"I'm going to find Professor Watson."
Luna said it simply.
"Oh?"
Mr. Lovegood glanced at the darkness beyond the workroom window—well past midnight, the kind of hour that belonged to owls and trouble.
"Can't you write him a letter, Luna? A nice urgent letter, addressed personally? By the time the owl delivers it, he ought to be just waking up—he'd see it right in time to act on it."
Luna said nothing. She simply blinked at her father with those silver eyes.
"Ah. Urgent."
Mr. Lovegood understood at once. He asked not a single question about the nature of the urgency, about what had happened.
He simply accepted that it was necessary, and moved to help.
With Luna's steadying hand beneath his elbow, he pressed both palms flat against the desktop and pushed himself up from his slumped position. He shuffled a few steps away from the desk, scratching at the white hair piled atop his head like an overgrown topiary hedge.
"Bryan Watson—a terribly busy man, that one. Let me think about where one might find him at this hour…"
He gazed blurred at the middle distance for a moment, running through possibilities.
"Perhaps the Ministry of Magic is the only realistic place to try one's luck after midnight. Very well. Let me get changed into something presentable—"
"I'll go myself, Dad. You don't need to come."
Luna shook her head.
"I need you to stay here and keep an eye on Yvonne and Bona while I'm gone. They shouldn't wake up alone in a strange house without someone they know nearby."
"Right, of course—"
Mr. Lovegood gave a murmur of agreement. As his mind sharpened further into wakefulness, his eyes grew incrementally brighter.
"Then use the Floo Network for speed. Though our fireplace here has no direct connection to the Ministry. Let's take our chances and hope that my contact at the Transportation Office is on the night shift tonight."
Father and daughter made their way downstairs together in silence.
Mr. Lovegood reached the fireplace first and took the Floo Powder bag from the chimney nook. He tossed a measure of the shimmering powder into the cold grate, producing a flash of green flame, then crouched and thrust his head into the magical fire.
Luna, meanwhile, stood at the kitchen window. She wasn't watching anything in particular through the dark glass—she was simply standing still, present in her body, alert to the night outside.
"Done—"
A moment later, Mr. Lovegood withdrew his head from the fire, blinking away green afterimages.
"Eric says you can use the fireplace to get to the Ministry—he'll keep the channel open—but best to be back before dawn. He says slipping through the back channels without formal paperwork isn't as straightforward as it used to be. Apparently ever since word got around that a new Supervising Department is being formed, everyone across the Ministry has started taking departmental conduct codes rather seriously."
He paused.
"Oh—and I asked around while I had Eric's ear. Watson is currently in his office at the Ministry—apparently he's been there most of the night. Eric says he's in there chatting with a goblin of all things, at this hour."
"Thank you, Dad—"
Luna tilted her face up toward her drowsing, rumpled father.
"You can go back to bed now. I'll take over watching the press for you when I'm home so your article is ready in time. Oh—one more thing before you go up."
She was already stepping toward the fireplace.
"You'd best scatter some Alarm Charms at the front door and around the garden gate before you settle in. Just a precaution—in case a Blibbering Humdinger catches the scent of that Snorkack horn you've got stashed on your desk and wanders in looking for it. The Ministry—!"
With that final word, Luna ignored her somewhat startled father—stepped straight into the warm, crackling emerald fire, and was gone in a rush of green flame.
The sitting room settled back into silence.
Bryan's office at the Ministry was of a piece with his style at Hogwarts.
The room's shabbiness was such that when Barnah walked through the door bearing the sign British Wizarding Development Council, the surprise was obvious enough that even the wrinkles on his face seemed to smooth out slightly in sheer astonishment.
A plain wooden desk, every horizontal surface buried under documents arranged in stacks. A camp bed visible behind a curtain drawn across one corners. A few high-backed armchairs and a low tea table arranged for conversation. A modest bookshelf.
And at the centre of the room, a large draped shape—some massive object covered in black cloth that suggested a table of considerable size.
The whole room had the air of a warehouse recently cleared for use.
"No one would say a word if you were to bring in a few more furnishings, Mr. Watson—"
Barnah shook his head with a regretful smile once his initial astonishment had passed.
"You really needn't perform such…... austerity."
"One can never be certain of that, Barnah—"
Bryan, who had been running on no sleep for days on end, showed remarkably little physical fatigue. His posture was still straight. Only the occasional sharp gleam that crossed his eyes had grown more unsettling with the accumulated sleeplessness.
He led Barnah to the sitting area, then turned to the fireplace to begin brewing tea.
A faint smile appeared on his face as he worked.
"The Daily Prophet published a rather interesting piece two days ago," he said, back still turned.
"It accused me of corruption—specifically, it alleged that my recent measures—the confiscation of Death Eater vaults, my role in brokering the agreement between the Ministry and your organization for the joint redevelopment of the Diagon Alley site, the punitive fines levied against certain non-compliant workshops—that all of it was nothing more than a mechanism for lining my own pockets."
He turned, carrying two plain cups of tea.
"So, I find it strategically valuable to project a visible image of incorruptibility. This office serves that purpose admirably."
"You could simply order them to be quiet, couldn't you?"
Barnah accepted the teacup Bryan handed him and leaned forward slightly in his chair.
"You have sufficient political capital at present. Even Fudge's Ministry—considerably less popular than yours had the practical means to silence the Prophet when it became inconvenient."
"I have to let people speak, Barnah."
Bryan shook his head, settling into the armchair opposite.
"Minister Bones has stated, on multiple public occasions that Voldemort's speeches about restoring the supposed glory of pure-blood wizards and letting wizardkind finally stand tall before Muggles were nothing but a lie—a pretext manufactured to justify personal dictatorship over the entire wizarding world."
He paused.
"Given that position, if it were to emerge that the Ministry itself was suppressing the press—it would rather look as though we were contradicting ourselves at a fundamental level."
Barnah pressed his thin lips together. His expression conveyed that he found this argument technically sound and personally uninteresting equally.
"Then—"
Bryan flicked his wand with a casual movement. Several plates of small cakes appeared on the low table between them.
They spent several minutes in the pleasantries that every significant conversation required as support—exchanging opinions on the quality of the tea leaves, on the relative culinary abilities of the house-elves currently employed by various Ministry departments, on whether the Ministry's kitchen staff had improved since the change in administration.
Then Bryan settled back into his chair, cup resting on his knee, and looked at Barnah with a composed smile, watching the goblin who appeared to have resolved to outlast him in patience..
"How have things been going, Barnah? Your relocation plans, specifically—I imagine they haven't been met with too much resistance?"
"You already know the answer to that, Mr. Watson—"
As Bryan had expected, the old goblin launched at once into his performance.
He sighed heavily, deploying both short sighs and long sighs with variety.
"We published a brief announcement to the effect that we would be transferring a portion of our operations from Paris to London."
He shook his head sorrowfully.
"This provoked an immediate and exceedingly fierce reaction from the French Ministry of Magic. They appear to have suspected all along that we intend to relocate our headquarters to London as well."
His dark-green fingers drummed once on the arm of his chair.
"You will understand the situation clearly, I think. Our presence in Paris represents an enormous amount of tax revenue for the French Ministry, as well as significant employment for French wizarding citizens in various supporting industries. The prospect of losing that presence is, from their perspective, a genuine economic catastrophe.
Frankly, if they were to send Ministry enforcers to blockade the Paris branch's doors and physically prevent our personnel from departing, I would not be the least bit surprised."
"You could lodge a complaint with the International Confederation of Wizards about the French Ministry's potential overreach. I'm confident Vipor would deliver a fair and impartial ruling on the matter."
Bryan said it pleasantly, like a cloud of soft cotton absorbing Barnah's opening thrust without a sound.
"The International Confederation of Wizards."
Barnah's dark-green face darkened noticeably further. He shook his head.
"That is an extraordinarily sensitive issue for all parties involved, Mr. Watson. As I'm certain you are already aware, Britain and France maintain a great many existing commercial ties. If the goblin relocation is not handled with care, it could very well strain those pre-existing partnerships and I would go further and say it could exacerbate Britain's already critically high unemployment rate within the wizarding community."
Bryan raised his teacup toward Barnah—a silent apology for the joke he'd just made.
"I have always maintained—"
Bryan refilled both their cups, his smile easing slightly.
"That patience is essential in all significant things, Barnah. The French Ministry's concerns are entirely legitimate, and their reaction while inconvenient is entirely understandable given what they stand to lose.
I, too, have no wish to further fracture the official and unofficial cooperation between the British and French wizarding communities at a moment when conditions across wizarding Europe are already so precarious. So yes—the French Ministry will need to be given something that genuinely settles their anxieties."
"Forgive my limited understanding of your thinking, Mr. Watson—"
Barnah frowned.
"We have already stated that it is only a partial transfer of operations. Is that statement not sufficient?"
"That sort of explanation will never fool the French, Barnah."
Bryan set down his cup and raised the hand that had held it, pointing toward the large draped shape at the centre of the room.
"Gringotts has entered into a partnership with the British Ministry of Magic, providing vast financial support for the rebuilding of Diagon Alley.
In order to oversee an investment of that magnitude, would it not be entirely natural—entirely reasonable to establish a Gringotts branch of higher calibre and broader function right here in London?"
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