An Impossible Thing After Breakfast In The Bottom Of The Garden

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Summary: Young Luna Lovegood has a strange visitor in her garden. However, it's no stranger than anything else she's ever seen. One shot.

A/N: I realise the magical systems of these two worlds are very different, but somehow I think the characters in question would be able to deal with it. Notes on the canons follow the story on the off-chance that someone reading is unfamiliar.

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There were Tinkering Pixies in the bottom of the garden, past the forest of tall Giantess Grasses that grew just above Luna Lovegood's seven-year-old head, across the perfectly drawn line of miniature blue rosebushes accidentally grown from a spilled group of Blueskin's Cure and Floralegimus potions, past the ivy curtain that hung on the old ash gate with the wood that peeled away in long thin splinters, through the small white flowers over the whispering-honey vines and taking one sip from one blossom for luck and eyesight, to the edge under the weeping willow tree's long forested curtains and at the mossy banks of the small stream that marked the ending of the Lovegoods' garden, next to the tall moulding fence bent under the weight of the branches of more willows that lay across the stream and curled and criss-crossed over by clambering mermaidgrass, small Dirigible Plums floating in the water.

Luna listened carefully for the tinkers, as she always did when it was a day that had a t in it and there was yellowness in the air. Yellowness was lemons and fresh butter and the Polaris Star and unripe apples all in one, the touch of the breeze when something special would happen that day. Luna looked in-between the clambering mermaidgrass and its fronds that looked like the sea people. Daddy told her about an old friend of his who had placed a Bubble-Head Charm over his whole body and gone down to the bottom of the sea in a place called Marianas, once, and found the tailbone of a Chittering Icharrot. Then Luna had asked if Chittering Icharrots needed their tailbones, and Daddy explained how every fourteen changes of the moon because the moon and the tides can be felt at the bottom of the sea, the Chittering Icharrot takes out its tailbone and uses it to start to build a home, and then they grow the bones again. Then, Luna remembered, once they're so big that they don't need to build homes any more, anyone can go down to the bottom of the sea and find the tailbones they put away, like hair coming off when it grew too long. Luna liked her hair like Mummy's, and though it was in her face sometimes she liked that when Mummy stopped experimenting and sat down on the plum-patterned sofa Luna would sit down too, and when their hair touched nobody could tell which belonged to which, as if they were still part of each other like they had been long ago.

Luna looked down into the stream running across gold and brown pebbles at the bottom of it and wondered if Chittering Icharrots knew about streams. Then she thought that the water in the stream wasn't very different to the water in the seas. When the three of them in the house had gone to the seaside one day she had seen a lot of blue water in the sea, and water was water was water everywhere even though it wasn't always salty. Daddy had told her how a wizard had stown away on a ship with a Never-Ending Salt Shaker and that was why the seas were always salty, and even Muggles told that story because they could still remember it. Luna had seen Muggle boys and girls at the seaside, some in bathing suits just as bright as her butter-yellow and Daddy's lime-green. They were nice but they were quite strange. Luna looked again through the mermaidgrass and willow fronds for the tinkers, who would be mending pots and pans and swords for gnomes and Cornish pixies, who never did their own mending because they liked pesking instead.

There were no Tinkering Pixies here, but it was still a yellow day where anything might happen. Luna looked at the mermaids on the mermaidgrass and wondered if they could talk to each other through the noises of the wind. It might be difficult to explain what you wanted for dinner if you could only talk through the wind. She sat down on her favourite smooth stone by the stream, her loose bootlaces falling into the water, and opened her eyes wide so she would be able to see anything that happened down here at the bottom of the garden. Then Luna turned and saw that there was a strange boy behind her by the old ash gate. The old ash gate had been a gate to the air ever since Luna's great-grandmother Xiphophilia Lovegood had wanted to buy the land up to the stream and slightly beyond it. Perhaps the boy had come from the old ash gate, or perhaps he had come from behind the Dirigible Plums' thick leaves. If he had come from the air he could have come from anywhere, Luna thought. The strange boy was looking at her but not saying anything yet, and Luna knew it was polite to say hello when you had guests, even if you had been expecting Tinkering Pixies and the guests were a strange skinny boy who came from thin air.

"Hello," Luna said politely. "Are you a Weasley? I don't think you have red hair enough to be a Weasley, and their youngest boy is Ronald, but he's older than me and very tall." The strange boy was quite tall, Luna decided, but she didn't think that the strange boy was as old as Ronald from the Burrow. His clothes were wizarding clothes, because he wore a light green robe that didn't seem to fit him very well over an untidy shirt and grass-stained trousers. His hair was very messy and a dark yellow that could have looked a little red if the light was different. His eyes were as green as the freshest out of Mummy's pickled toads. "My name is Luna Lovegood, but since you're in our garden you might know that already, strange boy."

"I know weasels but no Weasleys," the strange boy declared after a long moment of thought. He walked toward her with a long, odd step rather like a rabbit's hop. Luna thought that although he was a wizard his clothes were strange, because the cloth was different to the robes she usually saw and his shirt had no proper buttons on it. "I've been seven years old since Uktar," he said. "How old are you?"

"I know all the names of the months and I've been seven for six months," Luna said, "but I don't know when Uktar is."

The strange boy smiled as if he liked that she didn't know, which Luna didn't think was very nice, but he told her in a rhyme. "Uktar the Rotting, when the witches all come down; then Nightal the Drawing, with the winter in white gown!"

Luna nodded; the winter wore a white gown made of snow and ice when it came, but she thought the other part of it needed explaining. "I'm a witch and so is Mummy," she said. "Why do the witches come down?"

The strange boy shook his head wildly, and went to stand next to the stream with her. "I don't know. My mother says that some people don't like witches. But she could be a witch if she wanted. And I'm going to be a wizard." The boy looked around Luna, not at her but through her, through the fronds of the willow tree and into the things you could only see if you moved your eyes in a certain way, like when she could look at a small pattern on the wallpaper or in a tree and let her eyes make a transparent copy of it float in the air in front of her face, or like Daddy when he was writing and thinking at the same time and if you said anything to him he didn't notice until at least six minutes of the turnstable clock later. "Do you know any magic yet? I know some magic."

Luna didn't have a wand yet. "I'm going to have a sceach and unicorn hair wand just like Mummy," she said, because she'd already decided what she was going to have from the wandmakers' when it was time to go to learn magic at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, "and I know all the magical creatures from the Abominable Snowman down to the Bowtruckle in Daddy's Bestiary of Strange and Wonderful Beasts. He's the editor of the Quibbler Magazine," she added in case the strange boy didn't know.

"What's a maggy zine?" he said. He reached down into the stream, getting the sleeve of his robes wet up to the elbow, and picked up a small glassy rock and looked at it. "And I don't know about bowtruckles either. But I've seen snowmen and they can be abominable if you want."

"They are abominable," Luna said, remembering and taking the opportunity to tell the strange boy since he didn't seem to know, "they come from Deepest Tibet and they have dark brown fur all over their bodies, and sometimes they save Muggles who get caught in snowdrifts, and they hate it when wizards take photos of them, and one day Daddy and Mummy and me are going to go to China together and cross over to Deepest Tibet and Daddy can write new stories in the magazine. It's a good magazine," Luna said.

The strange boy threw the glassy rock into the stream, and he made three skips with it, which Luna thought was quite clever and made the water look rather like three bubbles had burst in one of Mummy's Clearness Potions.

"Luna, Lunae, Lunaris, Lunare," she heard him say, "Lunamus, Lunatis, Lunant, Lunarem, Lunabo, Lunabis, Lunabit, Lunabimus." It was her name, but it was different.

"It means moonlight," she told him, "and you should tell me your name, strange boy."

The strange boy turned his head; Mummy liked to tell her that it was always polite to look at people when they talked to you. Luna didn't think that she would quite say that the strange boy was polite. "Moonlight and shapes," he said, "crescere, cresco, crescimus." The shape of his wet sleeves was a moon when there was a bite out of it. Daddy told her the story of the black cat in the skies who chased the moon because it was a black cat who liked cheese and was silly to think the moon was made of cheese, though of course it was only a story and not real like the Crumple-Horned Snorkack was. "The magic's around your head, and it's stopped being threads in the air. It's yellow. I know all the right words and I know how to weave the threads, but it's changed here. But it's not the changes that hurt my head."

"I know it's yellow," Luna explained to the strange boy, "a lot of magic is. When Daddy does spells to make paper fly it's bright butter-yellow like cheese and canary wings, and when Mummy does spells to rock my bed at night it's a silver yellow like the moon and stars." Magic was a word and a wand and a colour and even a smell, sometimes like sweet orange peel and sometimes like warm bread. Luna didn't know the way to explain it properly that the magic just had to be that colour and shape because it couldn't be any other way even while Mummy saw different colours and shapes, but they loved her and her father thought she was perceptive, a long word.

The strange boy nodded as if he understood. "And you can't stop seeing!" he added. "Mice tails twitching and rabbits jumping and the sharp things that cut you. It starts moving and that's when it hurts—I hate that and I don't want them to send me away—grey coats take away—go away—"

Luna wasn't sure that the strange boy was talking to her any more. Sometimes she talked to things in the air, too. Sometimes she thought she saw the shapes in the air of Grey-Eyed Athena in all the drapes she wore blowing in the wind, and the Animagus Morgan Le Fey with big black wings like long black hair, and Flammetta Filbertson, the famous cousin of her mother's grandmother whose talking portrait hung in the kitchen and always told her to eat up her Locomotive Carrots, and she found it easy to talk to the witches and to tell them things. "Do you see the Flitterpating Hummingsinger up in the clouds?" Luna said, pointing. Of course it was not a real Flitterpating Hummingsinger, since those had turquoise feathers and red-spotted eyes and the clouds were only white with blue on them, but it looked exactly like the Flitterpating Hummingsinger pictures in Daddy's best bestiary with the glittering pictures that took up pages that were bigger than Luna's head.

He stared up at the sky, and said: "Yes. Wide wings and two beaks and a lemon-shaped head!" Which was, Luna thought, exactly what a Flitterpating Hummingsinger was supposed to look like, so he could see it. She decided to show the strange boy around the garden, because he mustn't have been very long inside it to have a chance to see it all. Mummy had told her once that not all strange witches and wizards were nice, but that was more about grown-up witches and wizards, Luna thought, the Nibblers who wore white masks and had used to do very bad things before she was born and who Mummy and Daddy didn't like very much to talk about. The strange boy hadn't even offered her sweets or combs with poison on them or apples or anything.

"You can come and see the Dirigible Plum bushes," Luna said. "Daddy says that you can eat them to help you see the extraordinary, but you don't need any help with that, do you, strange boy? Can you see the Floating Stephanogulches in the willow tree?"

Luna took the strange boy around almost all the garden, deciding to slightly skirt the path that surrounded the way up to the cottage itself, and explained to him about all the things you could see and all the things she hoped that someday she would see in it, about how the old ash gate covered by ivy was a gate to the air and how Daddy grew their own Locomotive Carrots, the ones that wriggled with caterpillar legs and how Mummy was going to think of a potion that made Locomotive Peas that wriggled themselves into your mouth too. The strange boy saw Jiggling Gapknuts in the blue rosebushes with her, Heckaminny Humdingers whispering in the strands of the willow tree, and he even pointed out to Luna a strange new kind of creature called the Zygomorphic Magmin, which was like a tiny Heliopath in among the bright-coloured daffodils and was on fire, and he also told her that Black Puddings were very big and very dangerous when they got loose and they ate people with acid like ink. Luna didn't think that some of the things the strange boy saw were very nice. But if Black Puddings ate people then that was a reason why she shouldn't eat them any more at Great-Aunt Ernestina Emmeline Phipp's house at Christmastime any more, which was good because she had never liked to eat them and only did so because it was polite.

"—Giant black horses that are all bones with big black snapping teeth and wings and faces like bad dragons!" Luna heard the strange boy say, looking into the air around her head again. "You're going to see those. I know. It might be soon." Luna thought that she saw a flash of cold white around the strange boy's face. She wasn't sure if it was the good kind of white like cream she had over pomegranates and all their seeds, or the bad kind of white like when she had tried to eat some white paint that Daddy was using when she had been five years old.

"I don't like bones," Luna said. "I don't think that sounds nice." But she remembered that Daddy liked to say that she should never be scared of anything new, and that even if Giant Bimblopaths were huge and had teeth as big as Luna herself and their skin was like dead treebark they were kind and gentle on the inside and loved to meet new people.

The strange boy bent down to the ground, and put his hands inside the stream again and dug into the mud. "Then would you like to see this," he said, and he held something white and beaked too close to her. Luna squeaked.

"Calvaria, calvariae, calvariam," the strange boy said, moving it closer and closer to Luna even though she was stepping away from him, and with the way he held it and put his fingers up and down inside it the bird's beak opened and closed. "Do you like it? I like bones. Lots of spells have bones in them."

"Stop it!" Luna said. The strange boy wasn't being at all polite, and she knew that she didn't like skulls at all. "Put it down!" At first she thought the strange boy was not going to do it. She could always go into the cottage and tell on him, Luna thought. But she couldn't tell on the strange boy if he didn't have a name.

"Tell me your name," Luna said bravely, trying not to be afraid at the bird skull from the stream that clacked and chittered at her face.

Then the strange boy stopped, and threw down the skull again. Luna thought that she would put in her memory that if you asked people their names they would stop making bird skulls talk at your face. "Names? Spell names! In nomine Dei but I don't remember the rest yet. True names! In a story it's a witch and a ball of string and a house out of honey and spells use words that give the right name! I won't do it if you don't like it. Xzar."

It was a very wizardly sort of name, Luna thought. X, like her father Xenophilius. "Where do you live, strange boy?" She would have to remember to call him by his real name now.

"The place with the threads in the air," he said, moving his head and his eyes to look around the garden once more. "There was a door. I can't see it. But maybe I have to go back."

Luna looked up at the sky. The sun was going toward tea-time, but with her hands to look at where it was in the sky she could see that it wasn't quite the right time yet to run up to the house for tea. Mummy liked it when she came back to the house at the right time for tea, because she said that it helped Daddy to remember too. "We have tea," Luna said, "but I don't know if I can bring you if you weren't invited. Do you have tea in the afternoon?"

The boy scrubbed a muddy hand across his face, all dirty from going into the stream after the skull. "Sometimes. If my mother's there. Maybe she'll call me back. Maybe she won't let me go away to where there's no magic. I don't tell them when my head hurts any more. Things happen that aren't supposed to and I can't stop seeing the threads dancing. It hurts when you look at all the colours."

Luna thought that was like one of her father's books on his high shelf that he didn't read much. There was an illustration in the big brown book with the dull gold clasp that was all bright red and black and orange in a lot of patterns that zig-zagged on the page in a picture of something bad happening to a person, and the way those colours looked on the picture tasted like bad liquorice, and so she never wanted to look at that bad book again. "I think you're green," Luna said, speaking about the colours of magic. "Not green like a leaf, but like Mummy's Buzzing Fizzler potions. Green and a lot of bubbles flying everywhere." And the potions melted keys and copper wire, too, if you put those in the potion cauldron, but Luna didn't feel like she wanted to tell that part to the strange boy, although she liked it when Mummy showed her how exciting it was when that happened. "Would you like me to help you look for your way home?" Luna said. She would miss Mummy if she'd travelled to someone else's garden through a door in the air. "It can be hide and seek." She had never played hide and seek with anyone before, though she had read about it in The Story Of The Young Witch Ezzie Macintyre And All Her Young Friends, and Mummy read it to her sometimes as well.

The boy nodded. "I hide, you seek!" he said. "Or you hide, I seek! Or both hide and both seek!" And then Luna saw him start to run in his long-legged odd stride, behind the willow tree and through the blue roses even though they tore his robes and scratched him. Luna knew she couldn't run quite as fast as the strange boy could, but she knew all the places in the garden, so she went through the Giantess Grasses after him and through the yellow-and-green Morgana's apple trees. Ezzie Macintyre could have had the same amount of fun, Luna thought, but not more. It was fun to chase after and to play with a strange boy who could see everything that needed seeing, not like Great-Aunt Ernestina Emmeline Phipp or her parrot Captain Higginbotham that would only repeat your words to him. She played proper hide-and-seek with the strange boy the colour of Buzzing Fizzler potions who thought that magic came in threads, and they found all the secret corners of the garden. Running made you fizzy yourself, Luna thought. Once you did it for a little bit it didn't matter that you did more of it. They were coming back to the old ash gate to the air and the ivy that covered it, and the boy was panting and letting Luna catch up to him to find him. The wind blew the curtains of ivy up from the old ash gate, and then Luna saw the bright-coloured door in thin air, just as she could also hear Mummy's voice calling her for teatime.

"Can you see it?" she whispered to the strange boy. He turned around, and his torn robes blew in the breeze too. He nodded.

"That's it," he said. Then Luna saw him take a step through and into it, the light surrounding him, and she still saw something that wasn't the Lovegood house garden any more. She could see tall dark-coloured trees that looked like the sort of trees that pretended that they were pine trees, a grey sky with greyer clouds in it scudding far above the boy Xzar's head, and tangled and browning grass and thick black bushes that looked as if they had a lot of thorns on them. If it was a garden it wasn't like the Lovegood garden at all, Luna thought. Perhaps it was a forest instead. A cold wind blew from it, and Luna shivered. Then she looked again, and she knew that the strange boy had told her the truth about the magic that was in his home. It was all in threads in the air.

"Come if you want, Luna Lovegood," the boy said; he raised a hand to put it halfway through his door in the air, halfway through her garden. "You can see them too, can't you? I can't stop seeing them. You're a wizard like me."

Luna looked inside some more at all the colours of the strange boy's magic. There was yellow inside Daddy when he used his Diricawl-feather-and-alder wand, and silvery-yellow inside Mummy when she stirred her potions with her sceach wand, but here there were threads of all the colours in the rainbow and at least four colours that Luna didn't know the names of, and she only had to move her head or blink her eyes to see that they could change colour. The magic was outside people. When she looked at it, it made her think that perhaps she could braid the threads together like Mummy braided her hair, and taught her how to braid old cloths together: over the middle one, over the middle one, over the middle one, plicatus if Mummy took her wand, if she went inside that door in the air. They were beautiful colours, Luna thought.

"Luna! Come back to tea!" she heard Mummy calling her from the door for the second time. That decided her.

"No," she said, "I can't today. I have to go to tea-time." It would worry Mummy if she had to go and look for her.

The boy called Xzar only moved his thin shoulders up and down; and then he turned and ran quickly away back into the cold place of his home, as if it was tea-time for him too. "Goodbye," Luna told him, as Mummy had told her that she should say when she was meeting strange children. "It was nice to play with you."

Then Luna stepped away from the door in the air by the old ash gate and back to the path up to the house, and then she couldn't quite see where the door was any more. But there was Mummy waiting for her with Luna's favourite fennel and raspberry-leaf tea and a thick slice of brown bread with butter on half of it and her wand tucked behind her ear as usual, and Daddy with ink all over his hands and even in his hair from all the writing he had to do, and it was time for her to wash her hands and sit down with them.

"I saw the door into thin air by the ash gate," Luna explained. She took the first bite of her bread on the side with the butter on it. It tasted as good as the colour yellow, although it was yellow as well as the good brown that was almost the colour of new-laid eggs from the chicken house on their rooftop. She would have liked to introduce the strange boy to her favourite hens, Luna thought, the white hen Tenebrousa and the black hen Alba and Timpaniarrion the loud cockerel. "And I nearly went through it, but I knew you were calling me, Mummy." Then Luna remembered what Daddy liked to say about finding new things. "Should I have gone to it, Daddy?" she asked anxiously. "I wanted to find out about it, but I knew I had to come back for tea."

She saw Mummy and Daddy turn their heads to look at each other. They looked at each other for some time, and Luna took the time to eat another bite of her bread and think about how it came to be, from how yellow seeds grew in the ground and then ripened and turned into white flour, and it was all just so that witches and wizards and Muggles could eat bread in the end. She wondered if Grinding Grebnacks ever helped to make wizarding flour, because they could use their large snouts to help to grind it. She imagined that she could taste the grains growing in the sunlight as well as the bread baked in the hot oven and the yellow butter on top that had come from a white-and-brown cow in a grassy green field with Bowtruckles in the trees.

"Luna," Mummy said to her, Mummy's face slightly straightened out in a way that seemed strange, "as your—as your father likes to say, it is good to seek new experiences and knowledge." Mummy sought knowledge all of the time, Luna knew, with all the special experiments and research she did in her workroom, and Daddy always sought new creatures to help other people to believe in them. "But you have to be home by tea-time, always," Mummy said, and she reached her hand across the table to pat Luna's arm.

Luna nodded. "Did you know about Zygomorphic Magmins, Daddy?" she asked, trying to get the words exactly right from the strange boy telling her about them, and then her father let her tell him all about them while the three of them sat at the small round bumblebee-yellow table. Luna loved finding new things in the garden, but she loved sitting with her mother and her father just as much, and when she grew up she would always tell them both about the strange new things that she could find, Luna thought.

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Canon notes:

- Uktar and Nightal are the names of two Faerunian months.

- Black Puddings are indeed considered as monsters in Faerun, whereas in the world of Harry Potter they are simply one of many dishes upon the menu at Hogwarts.

- Thestrals, in the Harry Potter universe, are skeletal black winged horses that are considered a death omen and can only be seen by characters who have experienced death.

- Magmins exist in Faerun and are indeed creatures close to small Heliopaths, though they do not necessarily have sub-varieties.

- Dungeons and Dragons gives few explicit instructions on the verbal components of Realms spells, but based upon the limitations of Baldur's Gate there is no reason why it could not bear a suspicious resemblance to Latin.

- The Diricawl is a dodo-like bird with the ability to vanish in a burst of feathers, believed by Muggles to be extinct.

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