"I didn't expect you to visit me," Neville says, though half his attention is on his plants. He is fussing over one Luna thinks she should be able to identify, if she could only muster the will to sort through her memory.

Neville never expects very much, and the comment sends a thrill of guilt through Luna. She and Neville are friends – at least, she thinks they are. She thinks he is wonderful; the clumsy toad-boy made into a resistance hero. Without him, she suspects she would not have a Hogwarts to visit. Certainly, it would have been moulded in a different way.

"I wanted to," she answers, and it's the truth. Partly because she knew he would be working at Hogwarts, and she suddenly felt a deep desire to have that connection with a place again. She doesn't have it yet with her new home, constructed after Death Eaters destroyed the old one. Neville is like home as well, comforting and secure. He greets her like a sister, and she has so longed for a family, for so long.

"Dean told me you went to see Ginny's final."

Neville has stumbled into the area she has been trying to get away from. Her thoughts are tangled with Rolf and Dean and work, and she isn't yet ready to sort them out. She's been avoiding Dirigible Plums for this very reason, to the consternation of her father.

She says, "Yes," and hopes that will be an end to it.

"Luna, I know what you're doing," Neville declares, startling Luna. She grips the arms of her chair tightly, wondering how and why, and if he's going to offer her the solution to it all. "You're eyeing up my plants for your horrid animals. I won't have it!"

She relaxes, smiling. "They're safe from me," she says quietly, though now he's pointed it out, she can't help wondering if he has anything with which she might tempt Snorkacks. Perhaps now is not the time to ask. Neville always gets uncomfortable whenever she talks of Snorkacks.

Silence unfurls in the greenhouse, and Luna finds herself soothed by the sight of Neville at work. It strikes her that he is becoming a capable adult, and that Professor Sprout saw something in him that Luna did not.

"Do you think that somebody can change you?" she asks, rocking back in the chair.

He gives her a serious look over some shiny black leaves and she thinks no, Neville changed himself.

"What - who do you mean?"

"Harry," she says, because she means Rolf. "Do you think Harry changed us?"

Neville braces his hands on the desk, and frowns. He is considering her question, which is perhaps more than she'd hoped. "Sometimes I do, and sometimes I think it was the absence of Harry, and sometimes I wonder how much of it was growing up." He shrugs at her. "The Sorting Hat was the first person - thing - to tell me I was brave, so I suppose I knew I had it in me."

The Hat told her she was willing to investigate anything and everything. She sighs. It isn't helpful.

"Anyway," Neville says, clearly beginning to feel uncomfortable. "I heard you turned Dean down."

There it is again. "Dean never asked me anything," she says flatly, wrapping her arms around herself. She has never associated Dean with anything other than friendship - or had never, until people started to talk about it. What is so wrong with Luna that makes Dean not even want to ask?

"Oh." Neville evidently wishes he had stuck with the previous topic. "Well, I guess it's for the best. You're not exactly compatible, are you?" As Luna turns her eyes on him, curious, he begins to get flustered. "I mean - he's so normal, and you're - different."

Right. That's the problem.

She leaves Neville an hour or so later, and heads into Hogsmeade. It does not lighten her mood as she hoped, and she knows she must decide what to do. Dean-or-Rolf-or-neither.

Well. Rolf is not really an option. For the first, he isn't even in the country. But then, Rolf likes her being different, whereas, if Neville is to be believed, Dean would prefer her to be more like him, or at least more like everyone else. But then, Rolf is trying to change her, to contain her in the office or to let her leave it under his guidance.

Luna purses her lips. Perhaps she could try being more like Dean. She might like it. She likes Dean, after all. If it doesn't work out, then she can choose 'neither' with greater conviction.

For a moment, she sits and reflects on Rolf. How he makes her laugh. How he brought his grandfather to the Quibbler's birthday, despite knowing how his grandfather would protest. The way he writes, so that she feels like she hasn't been left behind at all. Luna pulls her knees up to her chest on the grassy verge. How he is always changing his mind, so she is never sure what he thinks of her. How he is never around. How he tries to control her life.

She wipes at her eyes, a little startled to find they are wet.

"I was surprised to get your owl," Dean says, helping her into her seat. She is grateful to be sitting; she thought she should wear a football kit to show Dean her interest in being normal, but the studded shoes aren't easy to walk in, and she doesn't like kicking the ball everywhere. "I, well, I actually thought you were seeing that Rolf guy, from the Quidditch."

Luna flaps a hand at him dismissively. She is trying not to think of Rolf, which is really very difficult when she's still being sent his travel diary entries at work. And when she dreams of him, but she thinks that is the travel diary's fault, too. She has papered over his face in her bedroom, but it hasn't helped. "I've never been here before," she says instead. She privately thinks that's for a very good reason. The cafe is revolving constantly, and spins in the opposite direction every half hour. Everything is a lurid shade of green, and Luna is pretty sure they are infested with pixies.

"Seamus told me about it," replies Dean, looking around dubiously. "He said it was - different."

There's that word again. Here Luna is, trying to look as normal as possible for Dean in her football kit and huge Keeper's gloves that are making it very difficult to hold even the menu. She's tired, and the banshee music is hurting her ears. "Seamus is very perceptive." It's a lie. She doesn't like Seamus particularly, though perhaps it's because she's so enamoured of the other Gryffindor boys in that year. It's true that sometimes Ron has displayed evidence that he'd been exposed to Nargles as a child, but he does make her laugh. Seamus, though, is stubborn, and rude.

Dean snorts, so maybe he knows that Seamus isn't perceptive, and that means Luna isn't blocking him in the pursuit of knowledge. "Did you like the Quidditch game?"

"It was a good result," Luna says vaguely, squashing down her thoughts of Rolf. Her thoughts of the game are so entwined with the memory of the argument that she has trouble separating them. "Dean - I - I'm not sure I want to eat here. That table's meal is moving, and I don't think it's because of the rotations."

Dean leaps up, and scatters a handful of coins on the table. "Er. Yes, let's leave. The bloke behind me has been growling for the last five minutes, anyway."

Luna flicks a glance at the table behind, and falters. "I think that's a troll," she says to Dean in an undertone, and he takes her by the elbow and steers her outside immediately.

"I'm going to kill Seamus," Dean announces, but after that, the conversation shrinks down as they walk through the street, until they are making the smallest of small talks.

This is simultaneously the worst and the best date Luna has ever been on, but solely by virtue of being the only date she's ever been on. It is not going to work. She steers Dean to a bench, and tells him so, and thinks he is probably grateful for the reprieve. She, certainly, takes the first opportunity to transfigure her shoes into something she can actually walk in.

Now they are officially no longer on a date, the conversation flows like normal. She tells him about her problems at work, and he casually lays an arm over the back of the bench. He makes her laugh with stories about Seamus, and the time he and Seamus attempted to have a "lads' night out" with Neville, Ron, and Harry (Luna is not surprised to hear that Harry had trouble being off-duty, and even made an arrest at the pub). This is why Dean's face is painted on her ceiling, why it comforts her to have him and her other friends watching over her whilst she sleeps.

The trouble is, Rolf keeps floating to the forefront of her mind. She wonders where he would have taken her, whether they would have been conscious of it being a Date. Luna supposes the problem with Dean is that she never really wanted their relationship to change, but (if all things were equal) she would quite like things to change with Rolf. For the better, this time, though things could hardly get worse.

Since they are just friends chatting, Luna considers asking Dean's advice. She doesn't usually get time to herself with Dean, and of all her friends, she thinks he might be best able to help. "Dean. Do you - do you think it's possible to be in love with somebody, but they don't know it?" She chews on her lip, concerned that she's worded it poorly. She means, she supposes, that she can't see how she can feel so much for somebody without Rolf being able to at least sense the charge of emotion.

Dean's fingers have been drumming a tattoo on the back of the bench, but they stop rather abruptly. She finds him looking down at her, and she can't put her finger on why he would look so sad. "Yes," he says quietly, and pulls her in for a hug, dropping a kiss on the top of her head. "Yes, Luna, I do."

Work after that is unappealing, but Luna makes herself dress in her brightest outfit anyway, and takes care to adorn herself with Dirigible Plums. Dean told her that he liked her because she was different, and Luna thinks that there is no point in forcing herself to be otherwise.

"Luna," Macauley, an intern, whispers. "Luna, come here."

Luna frowns at him, but makes her way over. A box on Macauley's desk - it is Rolf's desk, really, and the fact makes her heart twinge - is moving and... barking?

"Crup pups," Macauley says happily. It changes his entire face; she is suddenly aware she has never seen him smile before. Perhaps she isn't the only one who dislikes being trapped in the office. "They were dumped outside. McGilligan's gone to find out what he can do with them."

Luna reaches into the box, where there are four young Crups. She pulls one out, and it licks her hand in earnest. "Who could have left you?" she murmurs, checking the pup over. She shoots Macauley a concerned look. "Nobody severed the tails. This one is ten weeks if he's a day."

Macauley nods. "Could have been a Squib. Whoever it was is going to hope that McGilligan never catches up with them."

She sits on the table, and holds the pup in her lap, where it wriggles, and tries to lick her face. "Settle down, little one, or you'll go back in with your brothers and sisters." It is an empty threat. Luna feels calmer than she has in months with the Crup on her lap.

"Do you think we'll get to keep them?" Macauley asks, leaning over the box again.

"Crups don't tend to take very good notes," Luna says dryly, tickling her pup behind the ears. "I think they have worse handwriting than Scamander."

Saying his name aloud is a sort of relief to Luna. It is okay to talk of Rolf in this setting, and she does it casually sometimes, just because she can. Macauley laughs, because even though he's never met Rolf, Rolf's handwriting is somewhat of an office joke. "You've got a whole new batch of scribbles to decipher, by the way. Came in this morning."

There is no mistaking the flutters that awaken in her stomach. Luna carries her new canine friend over to her desk, and sees that there is indeed a new journal. She pictures Rolf curled up with this by the campfire, writing well into the night. She would wake up in Albania sometimes, to find he had not gone to bed as promised, and was still making notes. Back then, she was able to join him, sometimes with her own additions, sometimes content to watch him work. Now, of course, she has only the journal.

The pup wriggles in her clasp, aware, perhaps, of her change in mood. She sits down and sets him on her lap once more, stroking him as she opens the first pages.

She declines going to lunch with the others, and instead flips through the diary. McGilligan has allowed her to keep the Crup for the time being, until they can find permanent homes for the litter. They have had their forked tails severed, to enable them to mix with the Muggle world, and her pup obviously did not relish the experience.

Suddenly, Luna sits up in her chair. There, in Rolf's diary, is a page addressed to her.

Luna,

I have started this letter a thousand times in my head.

I cannot tell you how much I regret our last conversation. It plays over in my mind, and occasionally I manage to convince you that I'm in earnest. Mostly, I make myself wise enough to not mention it. It is always easier to be wiser after the fact.

The trip has been successful so far, but the rest of the journal will tell you that. Luna, I'm coming home on a break soon. I wanted to prepare you, because I've had the advantage of discussing this with you in my head several times already. I assure you, every time, you give me a thorough ticking off.

I understand if you don't want to see me, but I hope that you do.

Rolf