Notes: Written for Ashleigh's Monthly Competitions. Write about your first OTP. Harry/Luna.
Title etc. is taken from Aviators ft. Glaze: "Shadows."
I'm still looking for the truth, still hoping to find you
Somehow, I've got to find what's right
Scared I will run away, I'm losing hope today
I can't tell the shadows from the light
Harry's going mad.
Such a simple statement, the plainest of facts, and when it would have terrified him even last week, now he simply accepts it as yet another thing that has returned to haunt him. He's going mad, and it couldn't happen to a nicer person.
Umbridge knows it, too. The smirk that graces her plump, smug face no longer has the power to terrify or infuriate him. Not even the savagely rending power of the Blood Quill does anything more than produce a slight grimace on his face as the blood soaks his handkerchief. At the end of each detention, she tuts and ahem's, peering into his eyes as if she wants to know his soul, and he lets her. She can't see anything. No one can but Him.
Voldemort plunders his dreams and almost every night now, he jerks awake in a cold sweat, listening to his heart pound in his ears and wondering if this is the night the Dark Lord comes, if this is the night that it all finally ends. Ron snores obliviously on in the next bed and it takes ages for him to fall asleep again, curled up in the icy center of his bed.
Hermione and Ron are oblivious, lost in their own subterfuges. Propelling him to be the head of Dumbledore's Army. How can he tell them he doesn't care anymore? It doesn't matter. Let them have their petty battles, their Stupefy's and their Protego's. He already knows how it will end. Just him and Voldemort, locked together, pieces of the same puzzle. Mirror images. The dark and the light, only Harry's not so light anymore, is he.
He can feel himself changing. He's angrier now than he ever used to be. What used to roll off his back now infuriates him, makes him snap at hapless bystanders until he feels like a monster. Hexes and curses spring to his tongue, barely swallowed back. He hurts, and he wants to make people hurt with him.
There is only one person he can spend time with, without feeling like his entire world is crushing him to death, and that's Luna. He never thought he could say that about "Loony" Lovegood. But she's a calming presence, the one light in his life he understands when everything else has turned to grey and shadows and brilliant, poisonous green threading through it all.
She doesn't pressure him to talk. Doesn't pressure him to do anything. He can be whoever he likes with her and more often than not, he wants to be just Harry, just plain Harry with very untidy hair, scuffed trousers, and a wand smudged with fingerprints. Not the Boy Who Lived. Not the world's saviour. Not the scapegoat of the Ministry or Dumbledore's golden boy, when the Headmaster can bother to remember he exists.
Harry takes to escaping with her, wandering through the edges of the Forbidden Forest with pockets full of scraps for the thestrals and thistle blooms for the blibbering humdingers Luna insists live in the ivy that dangles from the trees. Harry can't see them, but doesn't care, though the thistles prick his fingers.
"They don't know, do they," Luna states calmly one day, as they sit on a rather large boulder overlooking the school grounds. A baby thestral pokes its skeletal head over Harry's shoulder, looking for tidbits, and he absentmindedly feeds it.
"Know what?" he asks, looking at her. Placid grey eyes look back at him.
"You," she says, leaning back and kicking her bare feet in the air. It is freezing outside, but she doesn't seem to notice.
"No," Harry says after a moment of contemplation, barely feeling the thestral nibbling at his fingers. "No, they don't."
Luna's hand creeps out and takes gentle hold of his other hand, squeezing his fingers so lightly it is like she's not even there. After a moment, he squeezes back.