Waning
I heard one of the girls get out of bed, I had started to go down the hallway, when Pandora walked into the room. Her loose black curls framed her pale, round face, and her green eyes took in everything, like they always did. She walked straight to me.
"Daddy, when is Mummy coming home?" Pandora asked, tugging at my robes. "I miss being tucked in by her."
I picked her up and held her close. It was always worse for her at night. During the day, she coped, especially when she was with Lily. "We've gone over this, remember? She won't be coming back to live with us, but you'll see her in a week when she comes to pick you up."
"Why did she go? Does she still love me?" She began to cry. I'd been here with her before.
"Shh, it's all right, everything's okay. She still loves you, she'll love you forever and ever. I promise that she loves you and she wants to see you."
I held her until the shaking and crying stopped and she went limp in my arms. She'd exhausted herself crying and had fallen asleep again. I walked carefully to her bedroom and put her in her bed. She stirred as I tucked her in under the blanket with its cats pawing at a full moon and batting it around. I kissed her on the forehead and cheeks and made sure she was comfortable.
"I love you," I said.
I moved to the other bed and checked on Lily. She was still sleeping, her head almost completely covered by the blankets. The rise and fall of the covers showed her steady breathing. They couldn't be more different; Pandora so curious and serious, and Lily so accepting and fun-loving. I could see so much of both Luna and me in them.
Pandora had Luna's curiosity and love of animals, but she had more of my attitude of not putting up with fools and speaking her mind. Once when Ron had accidently slipped and called Luna 'Loony,' Pandora had told him to stop being a wanker. I scolded her for it and sent her back to her room to think about what she'd said and how that would hurt Ron just as much as he had hurt Luna. As soon as she left, all of us just fell about the place. Luna laughed until her sides hurt and the tears flowed down her face, and Hermione laughed at how red Ron had turned, until even he saw the absurdity and cracked up.
Lily had Luna's belief. I mean that when she made up her mind about something, then, well, that's the way it was. She firmly believed that our Kneazle, Kaiya, could read her mind. I told her that Kneazles were really smart and that Kaiya could sense her mood through smell, and that Kaiya could read her body language, but Lily had made her mind up. She was also usually happy, rarely cried, and a super snuggly little girl, who was always seeking out a lap to sit in. She had my sense of justice and if something was wrong, she wanted to put it right. When she'd noticed that I'd taken off the lion ring that Luna had made me for Christmas all those years ago, she made me put it back on.
I kissed Lily also, and told her I loved her and that Mummy loved her and she'd see her soon. Kaiya leapt up on Lily's bed, brushed my hand on the way by to Lily's side and then snuggled up next to her legs, purring happily.
I got up and left the room, closing the door quietly behind me.
Lily was going to be all right, but I thought that Pandora was going to keep having a hard time. This 'divorce' (Luna and I had never actually married) had been a difficult adjustment for her, living mostly with me, and only seeing Luna when she was in England or somewhere safe. Her travels with Rolf would take her to some out of the way places, and we'd both agreed that the girls were still too young for that.
I sighed. I would have liked to hate Rolf, but it just wasn't possible. He was a good man, and he and Luna obviously had more in common than she and I ever did, but it was hard to move on after being with Luna for fourteen years, ever since she saved me from the darkness after the Battle of Hogwarts. It was good that the twins liked Rolf, too. Pandora loved to hear about his adventures and to read about his new finds, and Lily liked that he was gentle and kind. I could tell he loved our girls, too.
I knew that I could raise them, especially with the help of Arthur and Molly, who they considered their grand-parents, even though they weren't blood related, and that if I ever needed anything, they'd both help. Xenophilius also lived close by and was there for me if I asked for it, or even if I didn't. He showed up unannounced quite a bit and the girls always loved when their grand-dad came to visit. It was good to have their grand-parents so close at hand.
I pulled out a report for work and started poring through it, but it was hard to concentrate. Visions of two dark-haired girls who missed their Mummy passed in front of me. A picture of Rolf kissing Luna flashed into my mind, and a hot stab of jealousy pierced me, remembering all the kisses she and I had shared. I saw the girls going off to Hogwarts in a few years, with only me on the platform, having to explain that their mother and Rolf were off in Antarctica or Estonia or wherever.
I remembered back when she told me she was pregnant. I was happy, overjoyed really, but scared, too, and filled with wonder that we could make a child (children, I found out later; twins) together. I had proposed for the second time then.
"Do you really think we need to get married, Harry?" She asked me. I met her eyes, and as always saw myself reflected back in their silvery-blueness.
"I—it's traditional," I said lamely. "And I do love you and want to spend my life with you." I pulled her closer and kissed her, running my hand through her hair. Her slim body pressed against me, the swell of her belly still too small to feel then.
"I know you said we don't have to be married to love each other," I said into her ear. "But, it shows our commitment to each other, it's symbolic, but more than that, it's a bond. You saved me from my dark time and I love you. You're my anchor to the world."
She turned her head and kissed me again. "Harry, it's just not the right time. I want to marry you because I love you, and I want to marry you to be with you, and I want to marry you because you accept me, and I want to marry you because we're yin and yang for each other, and I want to marry you because we're going to have a child together, but I can't."
I pulled back from her and held her at nearly arm's length. If only I knew then that was really how our relationship worked best; at arm's length. We loved each other, but our interests were so different. I loved how excited she was when she found some new beast or magical species, but I couldn't love the search for it myself. And she loved how dedicated I was to my work, but she worried that it was making me coarse and black in spirit. I grounded her some and she lifted me, but the middle ground was not built on a firm foundation. Love alone couldn't save us. Friendship wasn't strong enough to fill the cracks.
"Why not?" I asked.
"I just can't," she said. "It's enough that we have now. I think we'll have always; I believe we'll have always, but I'm not sure, and you know I'm always sure."
She was always sure. Being certain, unshakable, firm in her beliefs was what defined her. If she believed that Crumple-Horned Snorkacks could be found in Scandinavia, then she believed it forever, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Her core beliefs filled her and resonated from her, like a tuning fork hitting a perfect frequency. They just were. They stayed unchangeable. If she had believed that we would be together forever, then she would have said yes, but there had to be some part of her that said we wouldn't. I didn't understand that at the time, only in hindsight.
We went to bed that night nine years ago together, and made love fiercely. She clung to me in a desperate, feral way that was unusual for her. I held her as she fell asleep, but I stayed up a long time, my mind awhirl with anxieties of our unborn child and where we were going.
It was a couple of weeks later that we found out we were going to have twin girls. It made it so much easier to choose names. I had very much wanted to name our first daughter Lily Luna, and she insisted on Pandora Ginevra, so we each had a chance. We flipped a coin for first choice and I won, so Lily Luna would be the first-born and Pandora Ginevra the second-born. I sometimes wonder if the name made a difference in their personalities; if Pandora had been first, would she still have been so serious, and if Lily had been born second, would she have still been so loving.
Luna had wanted to go to Greece and hunt for a Chimera that had been rumored to be around Mount Parnassus, but I had put my foot down for one of the few times in our relationship and told her no. I could bear the thought of losing her to an accident or a mauling, but not our unborn daughters. I thought she would argue, but she acquiesced meekly which was not like her at all. I think she was afraid that I'd fall back to the dark place I'd been in when she'd saved me; curled up in my room at the Burrow thinking all the deaths were my fault: George, Dobby, Sirius, Snape, Lavender, Dumbledore, and of course Ginny. Hermione had called Luna when she and Ron weren't able to help.
Instead of going to Greece, she stayed with me in our house in Ottery St Catchpole and worked on her first slim treatise of creatures she had discovered (later to be bound into a folio and found in a wizarding bookstore in Stockholm by Rolf Scamander). I worked as little as possible with the Aurors, so I could spend more time with her, and Ron understood why I leaned on him more in the office then. I would pay him back later when Hermione was pregnant with Rose and Hugo by taking on more of his cases.
That spring and early summer, Luna and I went for long walks around Devon, often pulling out a tent and camping overnight in the cool air. We made a trip by Muggle train to the Highlands of Scotland and toured through the mountains and old clan-holdings there. We flew an illegal carpet with a cabin on it to one of the Inner Hebrides and spent a week there in a bed and breakfast run by an old Scottish wizard and witch with accents so strong we could hardly understand them.
I had asked her to marry me again on the beach outside that cabin.
"Harry, please don't make me say 'no' a third time." She said quietly.
"Please, Luna, marry me?"
"No, for the third time and final." She started to cry. I had only seen her cry a handful of times before.
"Harry, don't you know the power of saying no three times? When you deny something three times, it's forever." She turned her head toward me and I kissed the tears away.
She pulled back from me. "We'll never be married, but we can enjoy what we have now."
She rose and went back to the cabin. When I came into bed later, she pretended to be asleep and I let her. I spooned up to her and lay awake almost all night. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of Bellatrix killing Ginny again and again, the scene replaying in my mind over and over. The dark, ruby jet of Bellatrix's spell hitting Ginny in the wrist as she pushed Luna away.
The girls had been born late in the fall, in October, and we settled into parenthood pretty quickly. Luna stayed home for the first five years of their life, only occasionally going on a search for a creature. I took a supervisory desk job, so I could be home at a set time most nights. We didn't know it then, but as we raised our girls and fell into a routine, that we were starting to crack even more; being together too much was pushing our relationship toward an edge it couldn't pull away from. Looking back, I should have given Luna more space. Keeping her too close was trying to change her; trying to tame a wild hippogriff who's never known a human's touch. She would never had said it, but she was chafing. It wasn't that she didn't love me or the girls, she did. But she also loved the hunt, the chase of the unknown.
One year ago, almost to the day, was when she told me she'd met someone else.
I'd been waiting with Pandora and Lily for her to come home. We'd set up a table in the garden with a small picnic on it and had drunk strong tea with milk. Lily looked at my watch every few minutes, pestering me incessantly with, 'what time is it? Is she here yet? How much longer?' Pandora wandered the garden in her Wellies, looking for gnomes and other small creatures. Luna Apparated with a crack and the girls ran to her with great shouts of, "Mummy!" Her long pale hair was wind-blown, and mud coated her jeans up to mid-calf. She wore a plaid men's overshirt that had been a gift to me from Charlie.
I let the girls greet her first with many hugs and kisses, then I moved to her.
"Welcome home, love," I said, as I traditionally did when she came back.
She put the girls down and hugged me. I kissed her, but there was a strange tension in the kiss she gave me back. To an outsider, it would have looked just like a reserved English kiss, but that wasn't Luna. If she wanted to kiss you, she'd give you a great kiss no matter who was looking.
"Everything all right?" I whispered in her ear.
She shook her head barely imperceptibly. "No. I'll tell you later after the girls go to bed."
That also wasn't like Luna. She was never one with a mystery. If she had something to say, she'd say it, so I knew that whatever it was, was serious.
I wanted to know what was wrong, but the girls were excited to have their mother home, especially Pandora. We went into the kitchen and sat at the table. Pandora showed Luna her latest obsession: black dogs. She eagerly showed her Mum sketches of all the famous legends of black dogs of Great Britain and Ireland: The Grim, The Barghest, and funnily enough to me, Padfoot. Lily waited patiently while Pandora showed Luna drawing after drawing and when Pandora went back to her room to get more, Lily climbed up onto Luna's lap clung to her.
"Mummy, you're upset," Lily told her. "What's wrong?"
Luna kissed Lily and hugged her even closer. "Nothing's wrong, Lily-love," she lied. She never lied.
"Don't tell a lie, Mummy," she scolded. "What's wrong?"
"It's something for Daddy and I, Lily-love, okay?"
Lily nodded, but looked dubious. She turned on her mother's lap and looked at me. "Make it right, daddy." She got down from Luna and headed toward her and Pandora's bedroom. I saw Lily meet Pandora in the hallway, another sketchbook in her hands. Lily grabbed Pandora and dragged her off to their bedroom, whispering to her the whole time. For a moment I thought they were using the 'twin-speak' of their toddlerhood that only they could understand. Luna moved to sit on a chair near me and took my hands in hers. She was trembling. She didn't lie and she didn't tremble; ever. Something was seriously wrong.
We both heard the click of the bedroom door closing.
Luna pulled her wand from behind her ear. "Muffliato."
I arched my eyebrows. I had never before heard her use that spell.
"What is it?" I asked, breaking the silence first.
"I met someone," she said simply. "We got married."
"You got married?" I whispered. I thought wildly of George and some of his pranks over the years for a second, but I knew, absolutely knew that Luna would never do something like that. "What—How—Who?" I sputtered.
"His name's Rolf Scamander, and he's the grandson of Newt Scamander. I met him just outside of Kathmandu. He'd seen my folio in Stockholm and bought it, and was trying to track me down in Nepal, where he'd heard I gone." She released my hands.
I rose and began to pace around the kitchen.
"I don't understand," I said, my voice starting to raise. "How could you get married to someone you just met?"
She kept her head down, but her eyes followed me around the kitchen. "I—We knew it was right for us. I knew it was right for me. Please know that I didn't want to hurt you, but I've told you before that I have to be true to me."
"And what about Pandora and Lily? Don't you have to be true to them?" I was starting to shout.
"They'll understand eventually." She was so calm outwardly, it just made me angrier. I wanted to see some reaction, I wanted to have a row.
"Lily will understand first and help Pandora, I'm sure of it." She continued.
"After the three times I proposed, you married him with just one proposal?"
She shook her head. "No, I asked him. I invited him along on my observations of the Yeti, to see if they were still causing issues with tourists. He shared my tent and we talked all night about what we'd seen. He'd read my folio and then looked up my other work. I asked about his grandfather and we got to know each other. He said he'd felt as if he knew me his whole life."
She paused and met my eyes. I saw my reflection in their moon-sphere, but this time it was distorted by the shadows of the kitchen.
"I knew. That next morning after we'd talked all night, I knew he was the perfect one. Soul-mate sounds so trite, but it's the only right term. He's my soul-mate. I wish it could be different. I wish it could have been you, Harry."
My anger grew and then it just dissipated. I think somewhere deep, deep inside that I knew we weren't 'soul-mates'. "Yeah, I wish it, too."
I sat back down. "How do we explain to the girls?"
"The truth is always best."
We talked all through that afternoon, Pandora and Lily safe in their room. Sometimes I shouted. We both cried and held each other. Then, together we went to talk to the twins.
One year. Hard to believe it had been just one year. One long, painful year of learning how to cope, how to live again. Ron and Hermione helped, but really it was Molly and Arthur who were my rocks. If I needed anything, Molly was there instantly with hot tea and a hug. Arthur seemed muddled to someone who didn't know him, but to me, he was a father. He could hear anything and was a great sounding board. He had a way of repeating back to you what you'd just said, so you could hear how you sounded and it really let me dig deep into how I was feeling. Plus, he adored the girls and spoiled them outrageously, as is the wont of grandparents.
Molly would watch the twins while I was at work if Luna wasn't around for them, or Xenophilius would sometimes step in. He loved Rolf, but I could tell he was upset by my pain. He offered me a lot of home remedies, almost none of which I would touch.
I sighed and picked up the report again. This time I made it two pages before I felt eyes on me. Lily was watching me from the door of her room. I put it down and motioned her to come to me.
She stepped out into the hallway. Her hair was rumpled from sleep and she yawned hugely as she walked. Kaiya kept pace behind her.
"Kaiya wants a treat, Daddy, and I want some water, please." She said as she entered the kitchen.
I got Kaiya a fish treat from the cupboard and gave it to her. I rubbed her head and she purred and marked me before turning her attention to the treat. She nommed it happily as I filled a glass of water from the sink.
"No, I want wand-water, please?" She made it a question. She loved water made from the 'Aguamenti' charm.
I chuckled and poured out the sink water, then refilled the glass from my wand.
"Thanks, Daddy." She took the glass and sat at the table, being careful to not get it on the closed folder.
She drank her water slowly, watching me as I watched her. With Pandora, it would have been a tense silence, but with Lily, it was a peaceful togetherness. When she'd finished, she put the glass on the counter, then came back to me.
"Up." She said, holding out her arms.
I picked her up and put her in my lap. She hugged me close and kissed my cheek.
"You need to shave," she said, "you're all stubbly." She giggled.
I rubbed my cheek. She was right.
"It's okay." She said suddenly.
"What's okay, Lily-love?"
"Everything. It's all okay."
"If you're here with me, it is." I hugged her tighter.
"That too, but what I mean is we'll be good, you and me and Pandora." She thought for a moment. "And Mummy and Rolf, too. They'll be okay, too. I'll help Pandora and you, and I promise it will be okay."
And that's when I knew it really would be okay. When my eight-year old girl told me it would be. It might take a while, even years, but we'd all get through it as a family.
This story is a sister story to 'Waxing' for Dirigible_Plums's AU challenge. It tells the story of how Harry and Luna got together in the first place.