On the Beach at Tinworth
A lonely road, crossed another cold state line,
Miles away from those I love, purpose hard to find.
Avenged Sevenfold – 'Dear God'
I'm not living in an ordinary world,
I'm not your ordinary good girl,
and I don't believe in playing like I know that game.
Emilie Autumn – 'How Strange'
Harry sat on the beach with his head in his hands. He had escaped the bustle of Shell Cottage – which had clearly never been intended to hold eight people and a cantankerous goblin – in the hope of getting some peace and quiet. What few private moments he had been able to snatch since escaping from Malfoy Manor had been spent with Ron, Hermione and Griphook, planning the raid on Bellatrix's vault. He just needed some time to process everything by himself. The people he cared about were on the run, or being imprisoned, tortured or killed, and despite knowing the location of another Horcrux he couldn't help but feel powerless to stop the damage that the war was doing to his loved ones. He knew that he had a long, dark road ahead of him still, a journey that would take him further away from safety and comfort and Ginny, and all to try and accomplish a task that still felt impossible.
After a few minutes sitting alone musing, Harry heard footsteps crunching across the sand towards him. He looked up and saw Luna wandering along the beach in his direction. She smiled and waved when she saw him, quickening her pace until she reached him and sitting down at his side.
"Fleur says that lunch is ready," she remarked after a moment.
He grunted.
"Are you alright, Harry?" she asked, looking at him curiously.
He shrugged.
"I… I don't know," he sighed, "too many people are dying and I can't stop it. I've got a mission to carry out and I've wasted so much time while achieving hardly anything, and now another one of my friends is dead because of me."
Luna blinked.
"Dobby died rescuing us all," she said softly.
"Yeah, but Ron, Hermione and I got caught because I said You-Know-Who's name. And Dobby used to be the Malfoy's House Elf, before he saved my life and helped me work out how the Chamber of Secrets had been opened, and I tricked Lucius into freeing him. He must've been terrified being back there. And you were only there because you and your father publicly supported me."
Luna put her arm around him.
"You can't blame yourself for everything that goes wrong, Harry," she said seriously. "You aren't fighting this war alone, you know. And you must not take responsibility for everyone else's actions, because that will just make you unnecessarily upset."
She smiled, and patted his arm.
"I know that we will win this war, and you will be a hero, and I'm sure you will live a happy life with Ginny."
He shrugged again.
"By the time the war is over, I could be dead. And she'll almost certainly have moved on."
He couldn't keep his voice entirely devoid of bitterness.
Luna gave him a quick squeeze.
"Wait and see," she said in her sing-song voice, "nobody knows what the future holds. Except perhaps the Centaurs."
He couldn't help but grin at that, thinking of Trelawney's catalogue of fraudulent predictions, but then he suddenly grew serious again as he remembered that even she had been right twice.
"I don't know, Luna," he replied, "I have a bad feeling about this war. There are too few of us, and even if there are others who don't support You-Know-Who, they're too afraid for themselves and their families to stand up to the Ministry."
She smiled again.
"All it takes is for them to see that they can stand up for themselves, Harry. Isn't that what the DA was about, in its own way? Showing people that they didn't have to put up with Umbridge? All they need is to see that there is a light in the darkness, and maybe you and the Order and everybody else who is already working against the Death Eaters can be that light. But that won't happen if you let bad thoughts get the better of you. I learned that in Malfoy Manor."
He looked at her with new-found respect. He had hardly considered the damage that her imprisonment could have done to her and how well she seemed to have coped with it. With her dreamy manner, strange beliefs and slight frame, she was an unlikely warrior, but she had helped revive the DA and been on the frontline of the rebellion against Snape - and by extension Voldemort's control over Hogwarts - until her capture. If she could be brave and cheerful through all that, surely he, who had much more experience of fighting the Dark, could too? Such a serious and logically-coherent speech seemed a little out of character coming from the petite Ravenclaw, but it was certainly food for thought.
"I didn't think of it that way," he muttered.
"I suspected as much," she said matter-of-factly. "Perhaps you have become infested with Wrackspurts. That might account for how hard you have found it to think clearly about this."
Harry chuckled. That was more like the Luna he remembered.
She stood up and held out her hand for him to take.
"Come along, Harry. You must be starving."
He took her hand, got to his feet, and walked back into Shell Cottage. Danger awaited him still, but now more than ever he realised that he would not be facing it alone.
A/N: This was written for Screaming Faeries' Lyric/Quote Drabble or One-shot Challenge. The characters I picked were Harry and Luna, my quotes were the ones in the epigraph. I was also very vaguely inspired by Adrian Mitchell's poem 'On the Beach at Cambridge'.