Author's Note: This is a side fic of "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" and if you haven't read that you will be dreadfully confused.
Two pale haired children sitting at the edge of Black Lake, both staring somewhere off into the mid-distance, having that strange unseeing almost blind look to them, although neither were quite blind enough to justify such an expression. Closer the castle, first and second year school girls eyed the pair and giggled to themselves about the cute Albanian, and wasn't it too bad that he always seemed to be hanging around Ellie Potter's looney cadet, Luna Lovegood.
Of course, they didn't realize what Ellie Potter really was either. Or, rather, they couldn't seem to decide, but in their bickering her true nature never entered the conversation. Sometimes Luna thought that Ellie, Eleanor Potter, was nothing more than a shell that the real nameless Ellie liked to sleep inside sometimes.
Right now she was curled up deep inside the green eyes and red hair of Ellie Potter, but if you held your ear close, you could hear the universe breathing inside that small frame.
They were all cadets in Ellie's great conquest against the destruction of the world, against the falling into nothingness, sameness… Luna, had rarely thought of the state of the universe before she'd met Ellie Potter. Well, she'd had the occasional thought, but they were such fleeting things, and the world was so wide and strange that even blinking might cause her to miss a moment.
The world had seemed like such a large place before Hogwarts, but Hogwarts had shrunk Luna's horizons, and she had been frankly told by the god resting inside of Ellie Potter that the world was hardly what it seemed.
And that it was so terribly, achingly, fragile.
And beautiful, also beautiful.
"Lepur, can I ask you a question?"
The thing that rested inside Lepur Rabbitson, once Rabbit, was a nameless terror that was the dark side of Ellie Potter, something Luna had once suspected was the dark lord Voldemort, if only because of the unseen connection between the two, but then… Rabbit was a shadow far older and darker than Voldemort's. No, like Ellie herself, Rabbit too seemed as if he had been compressed into this mortal form, and that it didn't always fit.
Rabbit didn't blink, didn't shift or twitch, gave her no acknowledgement at all and yet she imagined he had given as much consent as an elder god, Ellie Potter's true blue nemesis, could.
"More than one question, actually I have too many to condense into one… Do you ever feel like that? I think you must, not being human, it must be quite difficult to find the words you want. Or are there words at all for what you wish to say?"
His dark eyes, so dark it was almost as if he had no irises at all, stared beyond the Black Lake and all of England to the stars that had yet to shine through the sky and perhaps beyond even them to the mirror that reflected all that existed back onto itself.
"I imagine you are perfectly aware that Hogwarts is under attack by the heir of Slytherin, and that our own brave general has descended once into the depths and returned with your own mysterious half-brother… I suppose I wanted to know what you make of that, of that other Rabbit, of the things that happen to Ellie Potter when we aren't looking?"
She paused, waited for Rabbit to uncollect himself, to let loose a syllable here or there that would form the winding path to his true opinions, and it took time but eventually Rabbit stated solemnly, "For something that should not exist, he has some nerve."
"Should not exist?" Luna prompted, as she had never been aware of why something should exist or not exist and had always felt that Rabbit was of the 'not' category as Ellie was of the 'is', surely, he would be sympathetic to something that 'should not' exist.
Rabbit turned his gaze from the lake to meet Luna's eyes, and they bored into her, darker and deeper than Ellie allowed hers' to be. For all that Ellie's act of humanity stumbled from time to time, for all her slips, Rabbit's ability to mimic human behavior was far more amateurish. One might state that it wasn't there at all.
"It is said that demons are born of mankind's greed, suffering, hatred, fear, and love. These are things, agreed upon, that should not exist. He easily falls into this category and does not even have the shame to recognize it."
Luna pictured the newest member of Default in her mind, his white-blonde eyes, his high cheekbones and fine features, and those pale blue piercing eyes, so different from Luna's own dazed gaze. Strange, wasn't it, how he also seemed bigger than his twelve-year-old body? Of course, it wasn't quite like Ellie Potter or Rabbit even, if it was different, as if he should have been a man or something closer to a man than a boy where Ellie…
Ellie seemed out of place on Earth itself, especially inside of Hogwarts… Hogwarts did not suit her, it hadn't since the moment Lily had first met her, and it seemed as if it was only a matter of time until Ellie left Hogwarts and then England altogether.
"And if he had the shame to recognize it? Would you like him then?"
"I neither like nor dislike him." Rabbit responded, but it was strangely colored for him, tainted dark with bitterness and a sharp whip like anger.
"But you… feel about him, don't you?"
For a moment, Rabbit said nothing, returned his gaze to the distance, but this time there was something dark and burning inside of his eyes, "He is one man, one single flash of light, there for a moment and blink and he's gone, for all his stretching and all his toils and mortal coils he is nothing more than this. And yet… And yet for all that he isn't this, for all that he burns and shines, it is because she stares at him. Simply by catching her eye… he burns."
"You mean Ellie?"
"Perhaps, but not as you mean it, not in such human terms as names. Like hats, strange, mortal, overflowing and colorful things, that she switches out for the other when it suits her. As it always seems to suit her."
So then, there was no true way to define her, Luna had thought as much. Just as there had been no house to define her within Hogwarts, Ellie blazed forth remaking everything in her image, from Hogwarts to the heir himself, but even so it would never truly fit.
Still, there was no greater cause or glory than to follow eagerly behind.
"That was a grand metaphor, Lepur, you're improving."
Rabbit said nothing, did not even give a hint of having heard, still Luna suspected that he did, that he always did, even if he did not go so far as to show it.
Certainly, with Ellie, he listened to everything she said and everything she didn't. He was always listening to and for Ellie, even now, when he wasn't even near her or looking back at the school where she was. Ellie haunted his vision.
There was more she could ask.
She could ask if he truly meant to devour Scotland, she could ask why he had come, why he stayed, why he went through this charade of student just as Ellie did, she could ask why he seemed to want whatever Ellie Potter secretly was so badly, she could ask why he explained anything to her at all, she could ask if he was perfectly indifferent to all of this or if sometimes small bubbles of emotion would fizz up like a shaken soda.
She could ask many more things, a thousand and one perhaps, but she didn't.
Instead they listened to the distant tittering of school girls spying on the Albanian refugee, whispers of Looney Lovegoods Ellie Potter's less charismatic and just… less second coming, tales of lying girls who lived who petrified those when no one was looking for her own rather dubious entertainment, and the slithering of Slytherin's heir out of sight and mind but never truly gone from the castle walls.
And it was a fine Saturday on the shores of the black lake.
Author's Note: Written for the 3400th review of "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" by Lioness1988 who asked for a fic where Luna and Rabbit have a conversation by Black Lake. So here we are, another Rabbit fic... My god, he gets a lot of character development off-screen. He gets really chatty when Lily isn't looking... He'll talk more in the main fic soon.
Thanks for reading, reviews are much appreciated.
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter