Author's Note: I wrote this as the Kiss part of Emmeebee's Kiss Marry Kill challenge at HPFC. Happy reading and let me know what you think! ~Jazz
Muggle art was Theo's guilty pleasure. He never told anybody about it but Granger had figured it out from a couple of offhanded comments he'd made the first time they collaborated on a paper. Thankfully she knew how to keep her mouth shut. It turned out she was an enthusiast herself and the two bonded over their mutual dislike of Andy Warhol.
Granger had a good eye for contemporary art and, what was more important, she had a way of finding out about new exhibitions. The two Unspeakables quickly developed a habit of spending Saturday afternoons together in muggle Britain. The witch would take Theo to one gallery or another and would then spend the next couple of hours lecturing him on different aspects of Muggle culture. He was slowly getting better at differentiating actual facts from her own views and sometimes they even had proper discussions.
Granger's one fatal flaw was that, for all of her apparent genius, she wasn't quite able to wrap her head around the concept of maternity leave. She'd recently given birth to a baby boy and as a result tried to balance a career at Mysteries with looking after two children in addition to the manchild that was her husband. Her weekly meetings with Theo were fairly low on her priority list and he didn't think much of it when one week she apparated him to the gallery and then disappeared with a vague promise to be back as soon as possible.
Theo looked around. He was in the mostly empty lobby of a gallery in Oxford. It was the opening night of an exhibition by some Muggle zoologist named Selena Agape. Whoever she was, she didn't seem to be too popular. The few visitors Theo could see were all strangely dressed muggles in their early twenties and that was never a good sign. One of the first thing he'd learnt about muggle art was that the good stuff tended to attract a respectable middle-aged audience.
He entered anyway. There was a drinks reception to his immediate right and he was handed a glass of what looked, but most certainly did not smell or taste, like red wine. He put the glass down on the first available surface and turned his attention to the paintings. And then he gasped in surprise.
The paintings were static, yes, but they were most certainly not muggle.
It wasn't just that they depicted unicorns, hippogriffs, erklings and a selection of other creatures that he didn't recognise but that looked decidedly magical. There was something about the vibrancy of the colours that sent shivers down his spine. It made the paintings look slightly out of place, as if they were that little bit too bright and wild and alive.
He returned back to the drinks reception to look for the artist. He asked a member of staff, who handed him another glass – this time of white wine that seemed marginally better but that he still had no intention of drinking – and pointed towards the far end of the gallery.
Theo must have been visibly distressed. The muggles around him – because they were most definitely muggles – gave him strange looks. They didn't seem to find anything that odd about the paintings. After the initial shock subsided a but, he started wondering whether Granger even knew she was taking him to see a wizarding exhibition. She usually knew a daunting amount about the artists they went to see, and it was unlikely she hadn't done her research. On the other hand, however, she never said anything and she was a remarkably bad liar.
Theo found the artist in the very last room, looking at a painting that was hidden from his view. She was dressed even more oddly than the visitors. She was barefoot and wore a loose beach dress with floral prints. Her most distinctive feature was her long dirty blonde hair. It was decorated with colourful beads and held in a messy ponytail that reached well below her waist. It put even Granger's curls to shame. Sensing that she's being watched, she turned towards him.
There was something about her heart-shaped face and large grey eyes that Theo recognised. He couldn't quite pinpoint where from. Perhaps she'd been at Hogwarts with him, and he'd crossed paths with her occasionally, or perhaps he'd seen her at some Ministry event. In any case, he couldn't link the face to a name.
"Miss Agape," he greeted, suddenly not knowing what to say. I'm sorry but do you happen to be a witch? Is showing your art to muggles even legal?
"Please, call me... Selena," she greeted in a dreamy voice and headed towards him.
"My name is Theodore Nott," he introduced himself and offered his hand. He was surprised when she smiled, obviously recognising the name.
"You're Hermione's friend! The one she doesn't tell Ron about."
He'd certainly never heard himself be described like that before. The woman's tone wasn't malicious but the statement was still rather unpleasant. At least it showed that Granger knew full well where she'd taken him. He made a mental note to give her a good stern talking to when she arrived.
"I'm sorry," the witch in front of him said and initiated a second handshake. "My name isn't Selena, it's Luna. Luna Lovegood."
"It's lovely to meet you, Luna." This explained why she looked so familiar. He'd seen her face in the papers after the war alongside Granger and the other DA members. One tiny mystery solved. "I thought there was something rather unusual about your paintings."
"I like adding a little dragon blood to the paint. It gives the colours a rather nice depth and is said to attract pixiepuffs, though I haven't seen any yet."
Theo had no idea what pixiepuffs were but he didn't dare ask. He vaguely remembered Granger mentioning that one of her friends was a magizoologist and didn't want to risk embarrassing himself in case Lovegood was that friend.
"I believe I've seen a similar technique in my grandfather's work, though he always enchanted his paintings. Would you care to show me around?"
"Sure," the witch smiled at him. She had a nice smile. It wasn't like Astoria's polite little smiles when she was entertaining guests at Malfoy Manor, nor like Granger's manic grin when she made a sudden discovery in her work. No, it was a warm, soft and very gentle smile. He caught himself staring as she led him back to the very beginning of the exhibition. Thankfully, she hadn't noticed.
They spent the next hour walking around the gallery, with Luna telling him a little bit about each painting. The whole experience was oddly familiar, perhaps because he was so used to it from his trips with Granger. Unlike her, however, the blonde witch didn't talk about techniques and influences. Instead she told him stories about where she'd seen the depicted creatures. A lot of them were from Hogwarts – the hippogriff, for example, was the same one that had once attacked Draco. There were some she had found on trips with her father and several she had discovered throughout her travels. Theo, who realised he knew far less about magical creatures than he did about art, enjoyed her tales immensely.
Eventually they reached the end of the gallery. It was the same spot they had first met at, although this time Theo actually looked at the painting that hung there.
It was about two, perhaps even three times the size of the other paintings and depicted a thestral preparing for flight. It stood on one of the Hogwarts lawns, with the Forbidden Forest in the background and a clear blue sky above.
Luna had gone quiet and Theo didn't feel like engaging in a conversation either. He felt like he'd intruded into something very personal, a secret that was painfully exposed to the world to see. Although, he thought, everyone here was meant to be muggle. They had no way of knowing what the painting really meant.
He started examining the picture more closely in order to delay speaking about it. There had been a war. Many people had died, especially in that last battle in Hogwarts. She was a war hero, after all, and he really shouldn't have been that surprised that she could see the ghostly horses.
He'd mostly managed to calm himself down when he spotted a distinctive pattern on the thestral's partially unfolded wing. The angle made it difficult to see, but he recognised it. He'd spent a lot of evenings throughout his third year walking the grounds at night, and that particular thestral would often keep him company.
He only realised he'd lifted a hand to touch the wing when Luna caught it. She had tellingly good reflexes.
"You recognise her, don't you?" Luna asked, but mercifully didn't wait for an answer. "She carried me to the Ministry of Magic once. You know, I never believed thestrals were bad omens. Then again, Sirius Black died that night, so perhaps I was wrong."
Theo's throat suddenly went dry and he swallowed painfully. So she'd been at the Battle of Mysteries. She'd been one of the children his poor excuse of a father had hunted at the order of the Dark Lord. Their names hadn't been mentioned in the papers at the time and Theo always thought of them as Harry Potter's faceless friends. Of course, on a rational level he knew that Granger had almost definitely been one of them, but she was always so careful not to mention the war. He wondered whether she saw the family resemblance when she looked at him – people used to say he took after his father.
"It was all a long time ago," Luna said, tearing him from his thoughts. All he could do was nod. "Her name is Tes-aletha, by the way, and in her language it means Spider Web."
"I didn't know thestrals had a language," Theo said, desperately clinging to the change of topic.
"Oh yes, they do. I learnt a bit so I could ask her to pose for me. While I was painting she told me the story of a young boy who would sometimes visit her in the Hogwarts grounds. She said he always brought her food."
Any self-restraint that Theo may have had up until that moment left him. Tears pooled in his eyes and when this strange, unfamiliar witch pulled him into a hug he sank in it gratefully. He couldn't remember ever having talked about his past. His two closest friends were even more haunted by demons than he was.
Theo stayed in the gallery with Luna until it closed later that afternoon. He then offered to take her to dinner but she insisted on cooking for him instead, which was how he ended up in the colourful mess that was her house. It took him three days to leave.