Written for the Crafty Cooking Cocktail Corner: Neville/Luna, the Writing Club - Character Appreciation: Write about hiding, Shannon's Showcase: Happiest Minute of the Week - Write about the happiest minute of a character's week, Book Club - Tucker Beaumont: (word) protective, (setting) closet/storage room, (dialogue) "No. I'm as brave as soggy potato salad.", Showtime: Mister Cellophane - (character) Neville Longbottom, Days of the Month: True Confessions Day - Write about someone confessing something, Count Your Buttons: "You know that we will.", Permission, Lyric Alley: Oh, the storm is raging against us now, A Year In Entertainment: dust, Sophie's Shelf: frenzy, pleasure, tighten, impale, guttural, filthy, Caffeine Awareness: Expresso - Write about something you don't want to end, Jewel Challenge: Topaz - Ring: Write about a Ravenclaw, Bracelet: Write about a cowardly person doing something brave, Necklace: Write about the lumos spell, Library Lovers: The Foxhole Court - Nora Sakavic: (Sexuality) Demisexual, (Plot point) Sacrificing yourself for the people you love, (Physical characteristic) Scar, the Wizarding Geography Assignment: Task #1: write about meeting in secret, the Insane House Challenge: Character - Neville Longbottom, the 365 Prompts Challenge: Sexuality - Demisexual.
For theywillliveon, happy (early) birthday!
Word count: 1890
tonight we radiate
The first time Neville and Luna meet in a cupboard, it's entirely by accident.
He's hiding, see — 'someone' set off a Dung Bomb in the Carrows' office and they're in a frenzy over it, and Neville would rather avoid getting a detention with them tonight. The wounds from his last one are still healing, and he knows the Carrows would delight in reopening all of them.
He will let them have him if he has to, because if the choice is between his pain and someone else's he'll always go for his, but he's the only one the Carrows should be after tonight, even if they don't know who he is yet.
And so he dives into the first supply closet he finds. It's not the greatest hiding place in the world, as it's pretty filthy, but it's better than nothing — and nothing was all that Neville had before now.
He closes the door behind him and leans against the wall, shoving off a mop that trails dust across his face, and tries to catch his breath.
"Hello, Neville."
In the half second before his brain recognizes the voice, Neville panics and almost throws a curse, heart racing in his chest.
"Luna?"
Instead of answering, his interlocutor whispers a Lumos, and a soft white glow fills the enclosed space, casting off odd shadows that make her eyes appear even bigger than usual. Her hair looks silver in the dim light, but radishes hang from her ears, and there is literally no one else she could be but Luna.
"What are you doing here?" Neville asks, incredulous, even as he instantly relaxes.
Luna shrugs, head tilting up to look him in the eyes. "I was hiding from the Nargles," she says with a slight frown. "There really are a lot of them around this year."
Neville chuckles, almost surprised at himself for the sound. "Yes, there would be," he replies, half-sad, half-amused.
It's weird, how Luna's very own brand of… Luna-ness always makes him smile.
They stay there, in quiet silence for a while. Neville is almost asleep when Luna speaks again.
"I think we can leave now."
Blinking his eyes open blearily, Neville startles and bangs his head against the top shelf of the cupboard.
He rubs the sore spot, wincing, as they finally exit the cupboard. He instantly tenses up, checking both sides of the corridors.
"Don't worry," comes Luna's quiet, lilting voice. "We're alone." Her hand rests on his arm for an instant, featherlight and only there to grab his attention before they come to cup his face gently.
Her hands are cool against his skin, and it takes him an embarrassingly long moment to realize that it's because he's blushing.
"What are you doing?"
Luna gets up on her tiptoes. "Bend down a little, please. I'm trying to check your head."
"Oh," Neville says as he obligingly bends his knees a little.
Luna's fingers prod around the bruise softly before she checks his eyes, brow furrowed a little.
She looks cute like this, and the thought surprises him so much that he almost stumbles away from her, heart suddenly racing in his chest.
He misses it when she lets go of his face, smiling as she says, "You're perfectly fine. Though you seem to have acquired a small infection of Wrackspurt in the last few minutes… What were you thinking about?"
Neville huffs out a laugh. "Nothing," he lies, because if he's not ready to think about the way he just found her cute, he's definitely not ready to tell Luna about it.
But the blonde girl frowns, blue eyes looking up at him worriedly, and he can't resist giving her another answer. "I'll tell you when I figure it out."
Luna hums softly, and they part ways quickly after that.
But it becomes a thing, after that. Secret meetings nobody else knows about.
Something just for them.
.
Neville starts to suspect Luna has insomnia by the third time he finds her in some empty, abandoned classroom, lying on a desk and looking at the ceiling.
He wonders if her sleepless nights are for the same reasons as his — the Carrows' guttural laughs as he screams, the war, everything he's been trying so hard to protect being destroyed and everyone dying — or if she's always been like that.
He wants to hope for the later, but he's not been very good at hope lately.
He drags another desk next to hers and lies down on it.
Their hands find each other almost of their own accords, and Neville spends the rest of the night tracing the small scars there, trying to ignore how protective and angry it makes him to have this concrete proof that someone hurt Luna.
That someone dared to touch her.
.
The fifth time, he's bleeding and awkwardly trying to patch up the wounds on his back when Luna walks into the room.
He doesn't even hear her come in, only notices her when she's standing next to him and takes the gauze from him. She doesn't even bother with permission, just plucks it straight out of his hands.
He doesn't startle, but it's a near thing.
(And what does it say, that he recognizes her by the touch of her fingers now?)
"You're very brave," she tells him, and he forces himself to ignore the way his heart tightens, just a little, upon hearing those words.
"You're brave too, you know," he counters, because she is. Just yesterday, she stared down Snape until the man merely scowled and left.
Luna scoffs. "No. I'm as brave as soggy potato salad."
"Must be some pretty brave potato salad, then," he retorts with a smile. He quickly loses it into a hiss when Luna presses a little too hard on one of the wounds she's cleaning.
"Sorry," she says, her hands halting against his skin suddenly.
Neville sighs. "No, it's fine. You just took me by surprise."
To his surprise, Luna throws down the blood-soaked gauze violently. When he turns around, she's scowling.
"No, it's not alright," she says, eyes blazing fiercely. "None of this is 'okay'. You're my friend, you shouldn't be hurt!"
Awkwardly, Neville reaches for her hand and squeezes it a little. "I know it's not. But I'm okay." When Luna's glare only gets darker, he quickly corrects himself with, "I'll be okay. These will heal." He smiles at her, a quick comforting grin that's all he feels like showing right now. "And you don't have to… You don't have to help me with these if you don't want to."
Suddenly, Luna throws her arms around him. "It's not fair," she says, voice mumbled against his bare skin.
Neville shakes his head, trying not to inhale Luna's hair. Hesitantly, he hugs back. "No, it's not. It's really not."
They stay like this for a long time, and though Neville's back still stings as blood slowly trickles down his skin and he needs to take care of that, he also doesn't want to move.
Luna is warm and soft in his arms, and he doesn't want this moment to end.
.
It hits him another night, as she uses a Healing spell she somehow learned — he isn't quite brave enough to ask her if she did it for him — that he likes her.
No, he loves her. He wants her.
That's never happened to him before.
.
People notice. It's bound to happen — the DA is stuck with each other in one room more often than not, and though the Room is amazing, even it can't create infinite space.
So they notice that Neville disappears some nights, and that he smiles a little more.
"What's up dude?" Seamus asks him one morning, grinning as he wiggles his eyebrows. "Met someone special lately?"
Neville thinks about Luna. Last night, they had stayed up at the Astronomy Tower for a while, legs hanging above the void as Luna described constellations to him. He hadn't recognized a single one of them, and just the memory sends a shot of pleasure through his veins, making him smile.
"No," he replies, and it's even the truth. He didn't 'just' meet Luna. They've known each other for a while now.
Everyone thinks he lies anyway.
And the questions don't stop there.
"Come on, Longbottom, who is it?" Ernie asks him one evening out of the blue. Zacharias, by his side, seems to want to be anywhere but here, and for the first time, Neville finds himself sympathizing with the boy who's otherwise more of a thorn impaled in his side, a tick he can't dislodge.
"None of your business," Ginny intervenes, swooping in with a gleeful smile that promises retribution, and Neville exhales a sigh of relief.
It dies a premature death when he finds himself looking into curious brown orbs.
"I won't ask," Ginny replies in a laugh as Neville tries to catch his breath from his coughing fit. "As long as you're happy, you can do whatever you want. Are you happy?"
"Yes." He doesn't even have to think about it.
Even with everything going on right now — the war, the Carrows' 'detentions' that leave scars on too many people's skins (his most of all, because he will spare everyone whatever pain he can) — he's happy right now.
And he has to tell Luna about it.
About why he's happy.
Because somehow, happiness has become Luna's smile, Luna's laugh, her voice as she tells him "You know that we will," when he asks her if she thinks they'll make it out of this alive.
"I have to go," he blurts out. He feels Ginny's amused and curious gaze on his retreating back, but he focuses on figuring out where he could find Luna instead.
It's not until he's toured all of their hiding places that he recalls that she left on the train earlier.
She had been so excited to see her father again that he can't even find it in himself to be disappointed.
Besides, he can always write her a letter.
Or wait, he thinks when he recalls his terrible penmanship. He can wait.
She'll come back.
She has to.
She's the one thing that makes him happy in this place.
She'll come back.
(She swore she would.)
.
Neville shows up to the Hogsmeade in January, grinning as the train pulls into the train station.
His grin lasts until the door opens — because no familiar blonde head stands out against the browns and blacks.
Ginny's hand, as it falls on his arm, feels like a brand. "She's not coming back," she says, voicing the thought Neville wouldn't.
"She has to," he hears himself say, voice small and broken. He feels like the world dropped underneath his feet.
Again.
"I love her," he confesses, and it's to the wrong person. It doesn't feel anywhere as sweet as he had imagined it would.
"I know." Ginny's voice is so soft it hurts. She squeezes her arm once. "I know you do. But…" She licks her lips, blinking tears away rapidly. "We'll get through this. Somehow." She turns to face Neville, a wobbly smile on her lips. "Won't we?"
"We will," Neville replies, but these aren't his words.
This isn't his belief.
Not today, anyway.