Yours, Luna Lovegood

Hope

For a time they sat in relative silence, on the other side of a square meal and a solid laugh. Hermione broke the silence, her eyes set on Harry.

"What are you thinking?"

He'd been lost in into awareness, he turned to her. "I'm sorry?"

"You were gazing into the distance." She set her attention full on him. A moment later, "What's taken you there."

At this, Luna's eyes shifted to Hermione's curious gaze, and she smiled.

"Right. Sorry." Harry paused, and his emerald green eyes traced the contours of the room. "It just - I don't know - it just feels as if everything has changed."

She didn't answer, merely tilting her head in fascination.

"Defeat." He looked down, and then slowly raised his eyes to meet Hermione's directly. "That's what this summer felt like. Voldemort is back; Cedric is dead. I was alone. And I felt alone. And lost, and powerless."

Something about the room shifted as he spoke, and Hermione began to suspect that Harry's connection to his home was innately magical.

"And then suddenly everything changed." He stole a glance at Luna, full of meaning. "I mean, look at us." He gestured to the potions lab. "Imagine the possibilities."

He turned his attention to Ron. "Not three days ago, Ron, you've have vomited at the notion of devoting your full attention to an obscure text."

Just then he halted, struck by an idea. "And I despised the very suggestion of potions work."

A pause, and then he whispered. "Everything's changed."

He leveled his gaze, narrowed his eyes, and met each of them with a determined expression, capturing the room altogether.

"A war is coming." He paused, his brow furrowed, until a long breath left his lips. "A war; with violence and darkness and death in its wake."

They sat before him, struck by the notion, so clearly expressed, that had haunted them in abstract impressions for months, perhaps years.

"For a while it was all I could think about. I'd failed, and Tom Riddle returned, and before him lay a clear path. I couldn't shake the thought that it was over - that this was the beginning of the end."

The gravity of his words, born upon confessions of fear uncomfortably anchored in very real possibility, sobered them altogether. For a moment, not a breath was heard.

"I'll tell you something I've never told anyone." He was looking down again, determined. "Since my first year at Hogwarts, I've been convinced that I was going to die. From the moment Quirrell turned to dust in my hands."

Something about him trembled at the thought.

"I saw him that night. Some disembodied shape, all rage and violence. Yet he was there, slipped through death's fingers. And he was after me. He was after all of us, really. And the darkness behind him was there too, ready to stifle all that I love. All that was good." He took a breath. "I knew I'd die at his hand."

A tear slipped from Luna's left eye, and her chin trembled. She laced her fingers through his hand.

"I felt that moment's inevitability." He halted at this, shaking his head. "Inevitability. The notion itself is a working of the darkness. I see now what I couldn't dare to hope for, then."

At this, he shifted his gaze, looked up, an expression of unflinching courage behind his eyes.

"We can fight him."

Something about the room stirred at this. Ron, leaning forward, set his jaw in noble determination. Fred shifted his gaze to George, and they shared a meaningful glance. When their eyes turned back to Harry, they nodded with unwavering support. Hermione and Luna merely watched him, full of affection, leaning into the expression of that future to which they'd given themselves without hesitation.