Because Father is always right, Luna is neither frightened nor surprised when the corridor wall pulses warm against her back. The two sixth-years, a knot of wild-flying fists, grunts, and elbows, crash to the floor in front of her, but Luna just steps over their flailing feet, her fingers still tracing, gentle, curious, along the veins of mortar. Professor McGonagall rounds the corner, lips thin, wand raised, and Luna flattens her palm to the humming stone, a promise to return, before she is forced to move along with everyone else.
"It is a sort of creature you shall live inside, so be aware," Father had said, drawing her to him one last time on the platform. "Remember, life breathes all around. The tips of your fingers can tell you more than any old professor's lectures."
At first, it's disappointing to find her fellow Ravenclaws aren't at all curious about the warmth of the wall in the seventh-floor corridor. Her dorm-mates, it seems, are a bit disappointing in shoot odd looks at her necklace, even after she's explained about the Nargles, even after she's offered up the vanilla-sweet caps for them to smell. Luna feels sorry for these children with no sense of their five senses- their sleepy eyes only ever focused on what's right in front of their faces, their mouths only ever tasting what their toddler tongues told them they liked. She lies awake at night and wonders how they sleep so soundly within these crisp white sheets, how they can possibly prefer silence to the night sounds outside. She thinks of home, and Father, and the soft rustle of the Dirigible Plum bush under her window. She goes alone to the seventh-floor corridor, day after day, weeks on end, the warmth of the wall her own private puzzle.
Her fingertips grow callused and her robes are loose from skipped lunches before the stones finally give her the door. She doesn't ponder too much on whether she should walk through it, or not. One observable behaviour of Hogwarts: It will alter one's intended path, but the new journey often holds more instruction than one could find in a dozen text-books. The building is an old and wise organism, built to teach, and Luna trusts that it will not lead her to harm. Or, rather, no lasting harm, at least.
Proof is that the room behind the door is filled with wonderful things, broken, discarded, and dusty. She walks amongst the stacks, not daring to touch, now, because, though it is still Hogwarts, this is a precarious place, the magical and the mundane obviously having been piled together by all-too-human hands. Still, there is something here that she needs to find, and she is debating the wisdom of reaching for a tall wire cage resting atop a doorless wardrobe when she catches the glint of colour from the corner of her eye.
She pushes back the singed tapestry hiding the blue, then slowly sinks to her knees. Reflected back is herself, her body dressed in butter yellow pyjamas, sitting cross-legged in the cool ocean colours of her own bedroom. Her paints are spread beside her on the floor, and her father sits on her bed, smiling proud over the sun-swirled top of the three-legged table she'd left half painted in September. Only, in the mirror, the table is finished. Perfectly lines are much finer, and the pigments are brighter than anything Luna's ever managed mix on her own, and the oranges and yellows swirl just how she's always wanted to charm them to swirl. Father bends to kiss her forehead, carries the table away, and then Mirror Luna is navigating her necklace over her hair, hanging it on the bedpost, crawling between her own soft, worn sheets, and laying her head on her pillow.
No doubt, this is the thing she was asking for. The thing she was meant to find. She takes a deep breath of vanilla-sweet, settles against the stone floor to watch the shifting of her curtains in the night breeze.
…...
She picks the Bald Heads on her way back from visiting the Thestrals in the forest. Five she will owl to Father, the last she shall keep to herself. The whole school has been buzzing for weeks about the tournament, and the Champions, and "that cheat, Harry Potter", and the constant noise feels like lake mud sloshing in Luna's head. It's been almost two years, but tonight she will find the warm spot in the wall, again. She will sit alone in the peace and quiet, just herself, her Bald Head, and Herself in the Mirror.
The dried mushroom doesn't go down easily, and Luna wishes she were a little further along magically so she could conjure a glass to hold water. She settles for attempting to shoot a spray directly into her mouth, which proves messy and rather unsatisfying, but soon her dripping hair and dry throat don't matter at all, because the land inside the mirror has opened up wide and water, or indeed any other earthly element, is the last thing on her mind.
Behind her, across the expanse of green and blue, the creatures lumber, fly, hop, crawl. All the unfound things her father talks about: The Snorkack, the Moon Frogs, the Heliopaths, the Blibbering Humdingers. Every elegant and awkward form. Their eyes peer over her shoulder, their claws tangle in her hair, their teeth nibble at her bare and wiggling are everything she's ever imagined. Every flank of flesh, every wing, and horn, and scale, and beak she's ever drawn or painted, only so much more because these things are sentient, alive, breath-ruffling-her-robes-real in time and space.
These things, they are True Things.
The sky in the mirror swirls golden bright. She smiles as the menagerie nudge their faces into her hands.
….
It's been ages, but tonight, she's finally able to find the warm spot on the wall.
It's not her private puzzle, anymore. Every member of the D.A. and the Inquisitorial Squad could get into her room if they knew the right way to ask. And the wall has been cold every time she's come to the seventh-floor this year, so Luna suspects that someone has long known exactly what to say.
She doesn't really want to be here, alone again, doing three passes in her bare feet on the cold stone floor. But these last few weeks, her mind has become disarrayed, her restlessness grown out of all proportion, and she craves the clarity of the images in the mirror- the cool blue of her bedroom, the creatures that come out to play. She hopes for these things, even as she acknowledges their unlikelihood. She wonders what the mirror will do with the notion that tonight, more than anything, Luna desires to know the desire of her own heart.
She finds the candle stub she'd once hidden in the drawer of an old desk near the door, lights it with her wand. then pads down the stacks, pyjamas shifting loosely around her heels. Blue pyjamas, now, the butter yellow long outgrown. The room seems different, somehow. Used. Lived in. Not quite as much her's as it is someone else's.
As she walks down the aisles, it feels like mourning. It feels like Hogwarts, the living thing, might have stopped breathing.
When she's finished here tonight, she will not come again.
The tapestry, she is glad to see, remains undisturbed, the singed edge draped exactly how she left it. She pushes it off to the side, then sits cross-legged on the floor, like always, and waits.
She stares into the reflection of her own eyes, the flicker of the candle illuminating the grey to dirty yellow. Behind her, a figure walks out of the dark. Luna closes her eyes, turns away, gives the figure time to settle in next to her in her mind, knowing now without a doubt what she'll see when she turns back to the mirror.
In the dark, Ginny's hair falls rose petal red over Luna's shoulder. Their intertwined fingers rest in a bright spear of light on Luna's knee.
It tugs at her heart, her fingers nestled sweetly between the ridges of slim tendon and bone. It feels both right and wrong to have the image present itself so. Right in that, now she sees it, she can't deny it, and wrong because it is covetous and invasive. She has no right to bring Ginny into the mirror. No right to imagine the skin on the back of her hand, its texture and temperature under her fingertips..
And so this is it. The reason nothing feels quite whole anymore. Luna stands, leaves her Ginny looking up at her from the floor, then pulls the tapestry over the mirror, lifts the candle from the floor, extinguishes the light.