Luna(tic) (Marauders Era)

44. Bullets, Blades, and Papercuts

The summer was a blur of sunshine and ease of the sort Luna couldn't remember ever having before. The world seemed light and bright and simple. And sure, sometimes it bordered on something old and familiar and lonely, but then an owl would come with a letter from Pandora and the feeling would fall away and be replaced by a sort of wonder Luna wasn't sure she would ever lose.

It was, Luna thought, almost perfect. She visited Pandora five times that summer, each time carefully deflecting her friend's suggestion to come to her own home. It was a silly thing, really, but Luna didn't want Pandora to see the place she'd grown up. Not when Pandora's house was big and bright and beautiful. Not when Luna's was tiny and cramped and had the sort of worn down air to it that came not just with time, but with memories. Not when that house, and her room in it, was somehow, inexplicably, Sam's place. And no one else's. Because no other friend had ever set foot in that room. And somehow, that made those four walls a haven. One she had no wish to test the strength of.

And she didn't need to, anyway. Sam was waiting at home and Pandora was waiting just a letter away and her mother was always home in the evenings with a smile on her face that seemed freer than Luna could ever remember seeing it. She tried not to think about why because why didn't matter. It mattered only that her mother was happy. It mattered only that the smile was there. Not that it had bloomed in months when Luna was away.

It was one of many strange things about going home. Things like remembering how empty the house got when her mother was at work. Things like laughing with Sam without worrying. Things like the particular emptiness of a stomach while waiting for a dinner that was the first meal of the day.

Of course, what was truly strange wasn't just the echoes of a life that had been easy to set aside when she was surrounded by friends and strangers and the comforts of a castle that never seemed to want for anything. What was truly strange was the way those echoes were only echoes. Not memories. Not a return to the life she'd known. Just whispers of it. Because she was hungrier than she'd been at Hogwarts, but the meals were bigger than Luna remembered. The house was empty and silent compared to the castle but the silences weren't as loud and as lonely and Luna recalled. The world was different and it left Luna with a feeling like looking down off a cliff edge: not a fear, quite, not a lack of safety, but a quiet knowledge that there was an edge there, a fall, and it didn't take so very much to end up with feet hanging over thin air.

And yet, despite the strangeness, the lurch in her stomach when Luna caught herself thinking about it, the coming of the new term and the ending of the summer weren't quite relieving either.

It came in little moments, in pains like paper cuts. In the familiar falling of her mother's face. In Sam's silences starting to stretch, in the blooming moly in the back garden that was just beginning to wilt. It was the knowledge of a life made up of too many patchwork pieces and the seams were fragile. But the patchwork itself... well. Luna loved it. It was an amalgam of a million things and half or more of them clashed but God it was beautiful, to be surrounded by such variety. To imagine, in moments, that she could paint herself every color under the sun and it would turn out anything other than messy.

And sometimes, Luna did believe it. She believed it hopelessly. She believed it desperately. She believed it even when those fragile seams were stretched. She believed it even as they stood on the train platform, Sam looking somehow more transparent than ever as first one, then two, then a dozen people passed through him without noticing at all. As she herself was stretched, torn between the old agonies and sympathies and the excitement as she searched for her friends in a crowd, as she prepared to return to a place where it had felt, in those last few months of terms, like she might just belong.

"Luna!" Pandora's excited cry cut through the hustle and bustle of the platform like a knife. Like a lifeline. Like a mercy Luna hated herself for wanting. For taking.