"Your wand, what make is it?" Harry from behind his teacup.
Luna flushes red. She can feel herself flushing red. She hates that she's flushing red.
"My wand?" trying to sound innocent. "Funny you should ask. Truth is I don't recall."
Harry sets his free hand on the table, palm up. "You don't mind, do you?"
She grins nervously. "Not at all, it's just…" Her eyes fall now to her own teacup—Darjeeling something-or-other, a little strong for her tastes. "Well, I seem to have misplaced it."
Harry turns up an eyebrow. "Accio ring a bell?" He sounds confused. "Where'd you see it last?"
"Harry, it's been ages," she says flatly. "With any luck it's lining the nest of some poor bird in Rotherham. Cold this time of year."
At once Harry's smirk melts away. He lowers his cup. He clears his throat.
"I'm sorry, I don't think we're," drawing little hills in the air with the tip of his finger, "on the same wavelength."
"Perhaps not."
"You're a witch, Luna."
"That I am."
"Witches use wands. Wands perform magic."
"And yet," suddenly lifting her gaze, "muggles perform magic every day."
"What're you on about?"
"Muggle history, do you know it? Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, ever heard of them? The great muggle cities—New York, Chicago, Shanghai, Tokyo, Dubai—have you seen them? Have you stood in buildings taller than mountains, buildings constructed by muggle hands? Have you stood in the footprints of the muggle men who walked the surface of the moon?"
"Luna, please."
"Even the worst of us," she hammers on, flushing redder, "even You-Know-Who doesn't compare to the worst of them—tyrants who slaughtered millions, burned entire continents to the ground, enslaved whole races of people—"
"Luna, you're shouting!"
She can feel her heart throttling her ribcage. She bites her tongue. Her eyes flit quickly around the café—all those faces gaping quizzically over the square edges of laptops and newspapers and iPhones and trendy glasses. Gaping at her.
For a moment she feels like she's right back at Hogwarts.
"Thanks for the tea," she manages, dropping some muggle money on the table. Then she shoulders her bag, smooths back a loose strand of hair and makes for the door.
She used to use her wand to tie her shoes and make her bed. Her father used to use his wand to light his pipe. Now she uses her hands and fingers to do those things and her father is long dead.
For the last two months she's been shacking up at a ski resort near Konkordiaplatz. During the day she hikes down to the glacier with her Canon EOS and takes pictures of the ice, then she clambers back up to the hotel and sits alone in the dining hall and eats a hot meal. She tries not to make eye contact with the other patrons. She must look so pale.
At night she sits illuminated in front of her computer, hair down, half-dressed, legs folded up under her, sucking the salt off pretzel rods while her right hand obsessively crops, color-corrects, airbrushes, organizes and labels every photograph.
When she's done she breaks out her oil paints and a bottle of turpentine and throws open the shutters and peers out at the moonlit spike of the mountains across the valley and tries to reconstruct them by hand. She fills entire canvases with mountains, canvases purchased with muggle money. Money earned from flipping photos online to postcard companies and tourist websites and other outfits. The paintings she sells on eBay—a few Euros here, a few Euros there, room and board and the occasional cappuccino.
Late one night a knock sounds at the door. She flinches. She sets down her pallet knife and wipes her hands on a wet rag and paces silently across the dimlit room amid a second round of knocking, louder this time. She unhinges the deadbolt and opens the door.
"Enchanté!" she beams.
A small man with a bald head stands meekly before her, fist poised as if to knock again.
"Ch-charmed, I'm sure," he stammers, quickly slinging his hand behind his back. "Dreadfully sorry to disturb you, ma'am, but the front desk," flattening his upper lip and sniffing the air, "the front desk has received numerous complaints this evening. Regarding the… the smell."
Luna smiles without showing her teeth. "Turpentine," she nods. "Emits a most unpleasant odor. Fortunately I think I'm immune to it."
"Indeed," he replies grimly. "It seems, however, that your neighbors are not so fortunate."
"Please, come in."
He hesitates. "Ma'am?"
"I've been painting, that's all. Let me show you." She steps back from the door, waving an arm. "C'mon, I'm no witch."
Reluctantly he enters the room, hands still folded behind his back. She lets the door swing shut behind him.
"I've just started this one," she explains, leading him to the window, to the gesso-smeared canvas by the window. Her face and her clothes and her bare feet are all stained different shades of purple.
He looks.
"I used to obsess over the details," she says, "when I first took up painting. Everything had to be just so. Put every rock, every tree, every blade of grass in its proper place. It was torture. Had to learn to shut me brain off, if you know what I mean."
"Very good, ma'am," he murmurs. "Very good."
She watches his eyes, watches them mutely trace the mess she's made of his hotel room. Plastic trash bags piled up on the dresser, stuffed with empty Sennelier squeeze tubes. A big blue tarp spread out on the floor beneath her easel. Golden polymer varnish. A bushel of used brushes soaking in paint thinner. And of course the smell.
"Quite impressive."
He doesn't even look at the painting. Doesn't even look at the vast, towering mountain range she's lifted up out of nothing, purple clouds draped around its peak, a great shimmering sliver of moon and space for still more mountains below.
He turns back toward the door. He tells her, in so many words, to call it a night, and she accepts that.
"Can I ask you something?" Luna watching him go.
He pauses for a moment, one hand on the doorknob.
"How's it no one complained last night? Or the night before? Or the night before that? About the smell, I mean?"
"What makes you think they didn't?" he mutters.
"Aren't you cold?" Neville asks, gripping his mug between mittened hands.
They're sitting out on the patio, mountains squared up all around them. The sun and the sky are almost white and a thin layer of new snow coats the surface of the table between them. As they sip their hot chocolate an attendee shuffles rigidly back and forth sweeping snow off the floorboards with a decidedly non-magical broom.
"Cold is relative," Luna says, not insincerely.
She's wearing short sleeves and jeans rolled up at the ankle and her pale blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. Her cup is mostly marshmallows.
"Luna, what's gotten into you?"
"Nothing," she says. "Nothing's gotten into me. It's what's gotten out of me wot seems to worry you lot."
"Spoke to Harry last week. Said he paid you a visit."
"That he did. Portkeyed all the way from London."
"Said you lost your wand. Said you've not been practicing."
"That's one way to put it."
Neville arches an eyebrow. "How else would one put it?"
She doesn't immediately answer. She sets her mug down on the table, melting a like-sized circle in the snow, then she picks up her spoon and dips it in her hot chocolate and scoops out a small mound of marshmallows and shovels them into her mouth.
"You can talk to me, Luna," Neville says after a while. "Depression? Is it depression? Are you depressed?"
Again she doesn't answer. Now she's swirling her spoon around the cup and the spoon making little clinking sounds against the porcelain.
"I was never any good at magic," she says finally, lifting the cup to her lips.
Neville snorts at that.
"Sure, I could do the spells," she shrugs, "cook the potions, recite the incantations. But that's not magic. Not real magic. I was never driven, not like Harry and his friends. Some people get everything they want, whether they deserve it or not. They get the jobs they want, the friends they want, the husbands and wives they want. Some of us won't ever get those things. For some of us it's a struggle just to raise our voices, just to make ourselves known. When I was a little girl I wanted to be a magizoologist—can you believe that? I used to love animals. Still do. But loving animals won't buy hot chocolate with Neville. Loving animals won't buy access to this wonderful, magical world and all the wonderful, magical things in it. Neither will a wand. Neither will the Patronus Charm. Neither will a thousand oil paintings, no matter how lovely."
Neville fidgets in his chair. Luna finishes off her hot chocolate.
"C'mon," she says. "Let's go for a walk."
It's a long walk down to the glacier. Luna's got her camera slung around her neck and Neville glancing nervously over one shoulder as countless skis, sleds and snowboards come racing down the slope after them, their riders sometimes waving or calling out to them in French or German as they hurtle past, kicking up great skids of snow.
"You're sure this is safe?" Neville asks at one point.
Luna shoves her hands in her jacket pockets. "Would you feel any safer if I said yes?"
Eventually the pass levels out and a stand of enormous bluegreen pines sprouts up before them. They're alone now, Luna leading the way through the trees, their boots crackling over the tangle of twigs and dry nettles littering the ground.
"How long," Neville between breaths, "were you planning on staying here?"
Luna stops abruptly. She tilts her camera toward the treetops. Neville nearly crashes into her. She thumbs the zoom, squaring a little bird into frame, a little kestrel sitting perched on a crooked branch way above her head. Something about the color contrast. Something about that low angle and the posture of the bird and sun shining through. She couldn't explain it to Neville if she tried.
She takes the picture. She takes another one.
"How long?" she repeats. "Not much longer, I suspect."
"Will you come back? To England, I mean?"
She lowers her camera. She looks at Neville and smiles.
"Maybe," she shrugs. "Would you like it, Neville, if I came back?"
Neville snaps a twig underfoot. He gazes down at the ground, then he gazes back up at her. Then he gazes past her.
"Maybe I'll travel a bit more," she says. "Somewhere warmer, perhaps."
Past the forest now, trees giving way to a sudden steep dropoff. Below them lies the glacier, a vast ashen mantle of grooved ice, ice as hard as stone. Together they edge their way down to the ice, holding gloved hands.
"Isn't it gorgeous?"
"Breathtaking."
Down here the mountains seem closer than ever. Luna imagines gripping the pallet knife, pushing hard, etching those blue ridges into the canvas, then with a softer touch layering on the snow, watching it break, leading with her wrist. Like magic.
Again she raises her camera. She can feel the sun warming her back. The ice they're standing on is a deep, dark blue. She hesitates, then she turns and offers the camera to Neville.
"Here, take my picture," she grins. "Don't worry about making me look pretty. It's impossible."
Neville takes the camera. He lets it fall into his hands.
"Luna, c'mon, you're—"
"Shutter's right by your finger," she cuts him off, walking backwards. "Make sure you get the mountains in-frame!"
Neville lifts the camera to his face. Luna stands with her knees together. She folds her hands at her waist. She smiles without showing her teeth. She must look so pale.
Neville clicks the shutter, and for an instant the screen goes black. There's a loud crack, the sound of ice splitting and rending apart, and when the camera refocuses she's gone.
Last night she dreamt about magic. Real magic. She'd always been good at magic, and everyone knew she was good at magic.
She dreamt she was a great and powerful witch, more powerful than even Professor Dumbledore, and in the dream she stood at an arched window high up in Ravenclaw Tower wearing blue and bronze robes and her hair was very long and her skin very pale.
From the window she could see the Great Lake and the Forbidden Forest and through the trees she could see smoke lilting up from Hogsmeade Station and beyond that the mountains, mountains like crumpled parchment in the bright afternoon sun.
She could move those mountains if she wanted, make them bigger or smaller, flatter or taller, rounder or sharper. She was powerful. She didn't need a wand, didn't even need to speak. She could make the sun drop lower in the sky, make it shimmer on the water. She could push the clouds aside. She could make the trees turn colors. She could make the land shift and undulate as she wished.
Or she could leave it as it was. She could close her eyes and pretend she was nothing. Maybe it'd be safer that way. Maybe that way she wouldn't worry anyone, not even herself.
For SM