Disclaimer: I do not own the series Harry Potter. I don't own any other character mentioned within.

Author notes: It's been some time since I've written these two and when nokomis305 (on lj) requested it, I wanted to try. This story hasn't been beta-ed and if there are mistakes, they are my own and you can give me a shout.

Pairing: Tom Riddle/ Luna Lovegood
Prompt: dreamscape
Rating: PG-13ish, nothing that's terribly high rating's worthy.

Never-Never

Chapter 1

They sometimes asked her what it had been like.

Being a prisoner of the most fierce-some Dark Lord that ever was. Ever will be, heaven willing and hell denying.

"Bad, I suppose. I did die there, after all."

The asker would blink and back away, tilting their head in bewilderment as if trying to hear her heartbeat.

In the literal sense, no, Luna Lovegood was still very much alive. In every other sense…well, let her paint you a picture and then maybe you'll understand. If you could stand to do such a horrible thing…

She was brought before Him in the darkest of circumstances, betrayed by her own father. It may have helped Him feel more tolerant of her than usual. He didn't kill her along with the others.

She met him in a cold room by the fire. What was it like?

His long, long fingers draped over the arms of the chair, ghostly white, having absorbed every color in the world. Still not to His liking but tolerable. His eyes weren't blazing as they had been described. They were a deep ember of a soul that was long traveled and had burned out all the unwanted things like a heart.

He was a god. It was like meeting a god. She had never been one for gods, either.

"Do you remember me?"

Was the first thing He said and the last thing she truly remembered. Ironically, she thought with a smile.

"Now I do. From the minute before."

"Ah. It hasn't happened yet. Pity. I had so wanted to speak to you as you will be. No matter."

He looked into her mind and left a bit of Himself. He left a seed that would grow into roots and plant themselves behind her eyes. He took her wonder.

In this self, this vision, there was the world as he saw it. Predictable, full of hate. The only beauty was in magic (and this was the gift) but beyond that, there were voids. Everyone was a void. Life was plain, just sand drifting by a normal hour glass. Yet He.

Yet Himself. He had every color of the world, every emotion in the world (but one—quality over quantity, you do realize). He had the depth of the sea and the moon on the crests; He had the wonder of first sight; He had the most beautiful, astounding works of art that would drive one mad in delirium and the filthiest patches of squalls combined, in his soul.

He was pain and He was pleasure.

Everything else besides Him grew gray and numb and tasteless. The fire was a ghost of itself. The cold air brought no reaction to her body. Sound ceased, her emotion towards the cries of her fellow prisoners ceased.

She looked at Him, the real center of the earth as it was, in pain. Wounded beyond compare and in that, without any basis of comparison. The candle went out.

"I will see you again. I hope you will be…intact for me."

To her recollection, He never saw her again. There would be blank spots in her collections of remembrances, branching out to end up with scratches, a skip of the record.

Instead, she could take the pain like it was quite mundane. Her fellow prisoners would start to cry and scratch at their faces after the month passed. The long hours of being in one place, too long.

She was a great help, a great source of comfort. Because their pain was fire and she was the black hole, her thoughts as plain as dirt to smother theirs.

She lost…everything. When Bellatrix Lestrange journeyed to her cell—their cell—in the guise of her mother, singing a lullaby and offering a suckling, she really…didn't care. In that way, He saved her life. Uninterested and uninteresting, they let her be.

When the war was over, Luna ran, ran, ran to the world where there were wonders. She'd catalogue and search, for hours in bushes and trees, in swamps and deserts. In every corner of the world.

Nothing. She'd write words that were thin as reeds, as empty as Russian dolls. Her words were accurate, nothing more. She was praised for her dry and straightforward presentation.

Then, in the midst of a great Belingers stampede—and yes, she was quite unmoved—Luna met Rolf. She went to dine with him out of boredom. The Belingers could stampede into the sea, for all she cared.

And she didn't.

Rolf came from the life where everything was abnormal, on the fly, and the unusual became that horrible exotic cuisine that needed to be cooked a little longer.

It was obvious why he married Luna. She was so normal that it was love at first sight.


Luna was starting to feel things in bits and doses.

It started with disillusionment.

That was the beginning of her life after she had had her first child. Strange. She had never known fear before. There was those times of immense loneliness where she'd be too desperate to be kind, to used to being out of the loop to find the capability of putting her foot back in.

She imagined it would be like stepping into a trap and she'd dangle. There were times in school where she felt like the world had moved on without her, her dreams, remaining just that. Fancies. Sometimes she thought she wasn't quite real when no one responded to her, or acknowledged her.

Imagine, then. The horror of finding out you could be loved and you could love. In that way. Oh, it was the good kind of fear. Or so she had heard. You never notice anything so much when you lose it.

This, though. This was the very bad kind.

When her first son started to show, she admitted to puzzlement. She had watched animals give birth, and that was the first sign of fear…though the storm hadn't hit yet. It was going to hurt, very badly.

"Nonsense, love-dove," Rolf said, holding her closely, tightly in a vise, when she confided to him her impending sense of doom. "Nature takes its course. You will be going without magical aid but I feel it's the manner in which we were all meant to be born."

And who said being a mother would be easy? The pain was just the beginning. She didn't quite like Rolf then, but she didn't want to go back on her word, on her observations that aided magical birth was unimaginative. That the act of giving life was the true trick, that transformations and journeys were always painful. Why start off on the wrong foot?

To her credit, she didn't think he'd actually hold her up to it.

"I think…rather, I wonder if Ginny will let our son live with her. Harry always seems so happy with his children," she replied, being honest.

"Pardon?" Rolf asked, stepping back.

"Oh, don't make such a face. Ginny's a very good mother. She yells a bit here and there, but the Lyriks will be mating in the spring. If I can get on with this, we can still make it to observe. I hardly think a screaming baby will match up to the appropriate calls."

"That's…unspeakably cold." Unlike his wife, Rolf believed in social lies, social niceties. This time he was being honest, though.

"But…the experiment was a once in a lifetime opportunity. I know my son is a little late, but he'd surely be-."

"I won't hear another word of this. It's not funny."

Rolf left, and the puzzlement turned into the feeling a mouse might have if it were caught in a trap. Pain, but the general 'how in the world did this happen?' She still had dreams. She had survived Hogwarts to have those dreams that people had degraded her for speaking about.

Now, she couldn't.

Later, Rolf reconsidered. One can't ignore one's wife forever. Pregnancy hormones, he decided. Poor, dear Luna didn't know what she wanted.

"It's not about what we want anymore. He's the one who calls the shots now," Rolf told her kindly. "It's time for us to be adults."

She had never thought of herself as an adult. She wasn't into age-isms. Yet it certainly threw her situation in a harsh illumination. She wasn't going to be a good mother. She was hardly an adult herself.

Her life was over at the ripe old age of 22.


Luna wanted a way out.

More importantly, she wanted someone to give her a way out. She slept throughout the day longer and longer; any effort to getting out of the bed seemed like the last respects of a caged animal. She was expected to get out of the bed.

Well, then, she was not going to do so.

However, she equally hated the bed. That's how this whole mess had started. Rolf began to think about things differently. He wouldn't touch her anymore, as if the ice inside of her would grow legs and walk on over to a warmer climate.

Luna knew that was impossible and made no sense. He could at least have the courtesy to pretend to be polite while she was housing an insider, an intruder who probably knew how cold his mother's heart had become, just by being near.

Oh, he thought he knew so much, this little person! He didn't know the circumstances and that was important. Oh, Luna would show him. She'd pick the most ill-fated name in history. Hello, Brutus. Hello, Benedict. How are you, Peter?

Possibly Tom. For You-Bloody-Well-Know-Who. That will show them.

Oh, yes. She'll get him when the time was right. She'd have to wait months. Simply months. She started at the ceiling, memorized the walls. The designs grew into forests with no end in sight, and she had a bad moment of thinking they would attack her, the beasts inside of it.

Bad in that she welcomed it.

Luna simply wished for a way out. She listened to Rolf bumbling around in the kitchen and had dark thoughts.

She closed her eyes. Wished for a way out of the chain and ball with a soul and cute grin.

For the first time in years, she closed her eyes and dreamed.