February 1996, the fringe of the Forbidden Forest, last light
For a long moment, the clearing simply held them — Harry standing where he had risen, Luna at the treeline where she had stepped out, the two of them looking at each other across a few yards of dusk as though the distance were both nothing at all and the only thing in the world.
And the committee, watching, understood with one shared glance that its work was done.
Nobody announced it.
Hermione touched Ron's sleeve; Ron scooped up the Quidditch Cup with exaggerated care; Draco tipped his head toward the castle; Astoria permitted herself one last, deeply satisfied smirk at the back of Harry's oblivious head; and Neville, smiling his quiet smile, brought up the rear — and five friends melted away up the darkening lawn toward the golden windows of Hogwarts, silent as conspirators leaving a job well finished, giving the two of them the evening.
Neither Harry nor Luna noticed them go.
Harry stood there with his heart going like a Snitch in a jar, and found that every word he owned had deserted him at once.
The shame arrived instead — hot and thorough — weeks of it, the corridor, the recoil, the flat cruel sentence he could still hear in his own voice; and his hand went to the back of his head and scratched, helplessly, the old nervous gesture, while his eyes managed her shoes, her hem, the mud on it, anything but her face.
"Luna, I... that is... I wanted to..."
Luna watched him flounder with her head tilted a little, gentle and carefree as ever — as though the corridor had happened to two other people entirely, or as though it had happened and been weighed and simply kept, the way she kept everything, without letting it curdle and then, while he was still hunting for the shape of the first sentence, she solved the whole problem by walking over to him.
"Would you like to go for a walk with me?" she asked.
And she extended her hand.
Small, pale in the dusk, held out palm-up between them — the same hand he had jerked away from in front of everyone, offered again without hesitation, without terms, without the smallest flinch of self-protection, Harry looked at it, and gave up on words altogether.
'Just follow your heart, kiddo,' said a voice in his memory that sounded like his father. 'It's cleverer than you on the days that matter.'
He took her hand.
...
They did not go into the forest.
They wandered its border instead — the long soft margin where the lawn gave way to the first trees, where the light of the castle windows reached in gold bars across the frost-stiffened grass and neither of them said anything at all.
Luna walked a half-step ahead, the way she always somehow did, her hand warm in his, humming.
It was a tune Harry didn't recognise — rising and falling in odd gentle intervals, some Lovegood melody that had probably never been written down anywhere and possibly changed key according to the weather and he found he was enjoying it anyway, letting it set the pace of his feet, letting the whole of him settle into the simple animal fact of walking beside her.
And somewhere along the treeline, the years folded quietly over.
Because it had been exactly like this the first time — his tenth birthday, the zoo, a strange dreamy girl with radish-red cheeks from the cold who had looked at a lonely boy the way no one had ever looked at him and held out her hand as though it were the most obvious thing in the world — and he had taken it then too, without knowing why.
Perhaps it was her dreaminess. Perhaps it was that serene, unhurried calm she carried like weather of her own, the stillness that made every frightened thing in him go quiet.
He hadn't been able to name it at ten and he couldn't name it at fifteen.
He only knew, then and now and always, that he simply had to follow her.
So he followed, and watched her — the dusk doing what dusk did to Luna Lovegood, which was reveal her: the last light gathering in her pale hair and turning it to something silvered and improbable, the cold pinking her cheeks, her breath a small ghost on the air, her whole unhurried self moving through the blue hour as though she had been designed for it and Harry thought, with the whole of his tired heart, that he had spent weeks being the stupidest person alive.
Somehow, without either of them steering, they came out at the Black Lake.
It lay vast and still under the deepening sky, holding the last of the light on its surface like a held breath, and it was oddly deserted for the hour — the celebration had swallowed the castle whole, Harry supposed.
Far away round the water's curve he could make out a few wandering figures: a pair walking slowly with their heads together; a scattering of solitary shapes at the shore, students alone with the evening.
None of them near.
The whole near shore, the log, the reeds, the great mirror of the water — theirs.
Luna sat down on a weathered log a few feet from the waterline. Harry sat quietly beside her.
And again, for a long while, neither of them said anything.
Luna had found a long strand of dried grass somewhere along the walk, and she played with it now — folding it, looping it, weaving it absently through her fingers into some small shape and unweaving it again — perfectly content, unhurried as the lake.
And Harry watched her hands, and then the water, and then the castle floating gold and enormous on its cliff, all its windows lit, and then her face again, and let the twilight burn slowly down around them while he found, at last, at the very bottom of himself, the words.
The last red had nearly left the sky when he spoke.
"Luna."
She turned to him.
And he made himself hold it — looked at her firmly, fully, the way he had refused to for weeks and she looked back with those same gentle grey eyes, patient as still water, and let him come to it in his own time.
"I'm sorry." His voice came out low and rough.
"Back when I... at the corridor. For all of it. What I said... I didn't mean it. Not any of it. You do understand — you understand more than anyone I've ever — that was the exact opposite of..." He stopped, breathed, started again from further down.
"It was everything I'd been carrying. Pressed down for weeks until it went off, and it went off at you, because you were the one brave enough to stand in front of me and ask, and that's the worst thing I've ever done and I'm sorry."
"I know," said Luna simply.
"And I was scared." Now it was coming, all of it, the seals broken.
"That's what it all was, underneath. I kept thinking... everything's getting worse, Luna, every day, the papers, the school, Ilvermorny, the war's coming, it's so close I can feel it under everything... and I kept thinking about what could happen to you. All the what-ifs. What if I can't protect you. What if he learns what you are to me and comes after you because of me, because that's what he does, he finds the thing you love and he... and Cedric was standing next to me and it nearly... and I thought if I just... if I made myself not... then you'd be outside it, you'd be safe, and it was so stupid, I know it was stupid, I sat there and reasoned my way into hurting the person I most... and I..."
He was crying by then.
Properly — tears and, humiliatingly, snot, the whole undignified catastrophe of it, weeks and years all draining out of him at once on a log by a lake and he was still trying to talk through it, hiccupping out fragments of what-if and I'm sorry and so stupid...
...and Luna chuckled.
Lightly. Softly.
An angelic little sound, bright as a bell over water, and it snapped Harry clean out of the spiral mid-sob — he looked up, blinking and blotchy, entirely wrong-footed — and felt his face go scarlet to the ears.
"You're laughing at me," he said thickly.
"Only a little," said Luna serenely.
And then she reached up, and gently took his glasses off his face, folding them in her lap — and produced from some pocket a handkerchief with small embroidered Snorkacks along the border, and began, with unhurried care, to wipe away his tears. And then, matter-of-factly, the snot.
"You always cry so completely," she observed, in her dreamiest voice, dabbing at him as though restoring a painting. "Most people cry from the eyes. You cry with your whole face. It's very thorough. I expect it's healthier, really... nothing left over to go bad..."
"Luna." His face was melting under her touch and he had nowhere to hide it; he lowered his head, trying and failing to preserve some final scrap of dignity, and felt her small cool fingers tilt his chin back up anyway.
And then she hugged him.
Both arms, close and warm, her cheek against his shoulder, the handkerchief still crumpled in one hand at his back — and she spoke into the fabric of his robes, quiet as the lake, and her dreamy voice had gone perfectly clear.
"I'm happy," Luna whispered.
"That's the thing you don't know, so I'm telling you. I'm so happy... that you thought of me that much. That all of that terrible arithmetic you were doing in the dark for weeks... it was all for me, every wrong-headed piece of it."
Her arms tightened. "I knew, you know. In the corridor. That what you said wasn't truly yours... it had someone else's fingerprints all over it, and fear's besides. But it still hurt, Harry. Hearing it in your voice. It hurt very much, and I cried in the forest where the Thestrals could keep it secret, and I'm telling you that too, because you should know that you can hurt me. That's what you are to me. That's the price of it."
She drew back just enough to look up at him, and her eyes were shining. "But it doesn't matter now. None of it matters now. Because here is the only thing I came to say, and I said it once already and you weren't ready, so I'll say it again now that you are."
Her voice didn't waver at all. "No matter what happens... no matter what comes, war or worse... I will be here. With you. Just like always. I don't want safe, Harry. I want with you. That's all I've ever wanted."
Harry felt his heart skip a beat. Memories of Luna flooded his mind from the first moment they met, the time they wonder about everything in an apartment in London, all the time they were together.
Her smile, her laugh, her pouting face, her stubbornness that times they argue over something, also her crying, her warmth, her everything... flashed his green eyes.
Then it came back stronger — beating hard and high and certain, certain the way he had been certain of almost nothing in his whole careful catalogued life and everything he had never said, the thing four years of memory held no record of, the asking that had never been asked, rose up in him all at once and would not wait one heartbeat longer.
With all his might, Harry took Luna by the shoulders and turned her gently to face him full on — her eyes going wide and grey and wondering in the very last of the light and said it.
"Luna, I... I..." One breath.
The whole of him behind it.
"I love you."
Time stood still.
The twilight seemed to settle over the two of them and simply stay — the lake without a ripple, the castle golden and far away, the first stars caught mid-arrival — as though the evening itself had decided this moment was worth stopping for, and might reasonably be kept forever.
Luna's eyes had gone very wide.
And then they brimmed — filling fast and bright, happy tears, tears with light in them and her whole face bloomed into the brightest smile Harry had ever seen her wear, brighter than the lion hat morning, brighter than anything, and she leaned in and rested her forehead against his, her hair falling around them both like a curtain against the whole world, and whispered, calm and clear and sure:
"I love you too, Harry."
Something sparkled in Harry's eyes — the last light, or the first stars, or something that was neither and then the smile broke over him, helpless and enormous, brighter than he had smiled in the whole of a grey and terrible year, and the joy simply lifted him: he stood, and took her up with him, hands at her waist, and swung Luna Lovegood clean off the ground and twirled her once, twice, lightly round in the blue evening air while her giggles spilled out silver across the empty shore and an offended moorhen departed the reeds at speed.
He set her down.
And they stood there at the edge of the Black Lake, his hands at her waist and hers come to rest against his chest, looking into each other's eyes dearly — no distance left, none wanted, years of walking half a step apart arriving finally at none at all — while the very last of the twilight burned down to its embers around them.
Then, within the final moment of it — unhurried, inevitable, gentle as everything she had ever taught him — the two of them leaned in together, and shared a kiss.
The first, ever, for either of them.
Nothing practised, nothing grand; just a deep, soft touch of two lips, warm against the February cold, brief as a heartbeat and vast as the lake — and it was, Harry thought, with the small distant part of him still capable of thought, the most delightful feeling the whole wide magical world had ever produced.
The stars came out over the water.
Neither of them noticed for quite some time.