Soon enough, the pair of them had exhausted their mutual masturbation of the minds, and they sat reveling in the simultaneous glow of having had a fruitful, enjoyable, exciting conversation, while also having been sated by remarkable, heavy, and well apportioned dinner.

"Would you like any dessert," Severus asked, though he felt a hint of redness near his cheekbones as he contemplated that idea.

He was awfully full, but in a way where he felt cozy, roly-poly, and delightfully succored. This was the reason that he overindulged so: this wonderful blissful feeling that everything was right in the world, that his life was worth living, and that practically everything was wonderful. It was a kind of buzzed, he admitted to himself, and it was fantastic, and he loved this feeling. Particularly as he looked at the beautiful, overstuffed woman next to him, who looked just as pretty and tipsy as him.

"Not quite yet," Luna announced, and she yawned in a very delicate and refreshing manner. "I have to let things settle a bit first."

"As you wish, my dear," said Severus, and he felt a little bit of a laugh creeping up his throat. It was so strange that he could use such a turn endearment upon another human being. He had someone to call 'my dear,' and that knowledge sent him into a pleasant plummeting emotion not dissimilar to Alice in Wonderland as she fell down the rabbit hole. He was falling, but it was safe and everything was magical and gorgeous around him.

"You need to grow some flowers here," added Luna softly, staring over the yard with a little bit of a sly smirk. "It lacks color."

"My whole life has lacked color," Severus said, leaving the words unsaid: "...until you."

He felt a slight chill come over him, and he rolled back his shoulders, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath.

"This is wonderful," said Luna, stating the obvious, but he didn't have the heart to be irritated with that. The obvious was acceptable, and quite pleasant actually. He didn't mind feeling like there was something obvious in his life right now. He knew that he needed to rest with these little overanalyzing thoughts, because right now, it was all about feelings. That's what he wanted, and that's what she wanted, and everything would right in the world if he could just *stop bloody thinking.*

In pursuit of this, he joined her in staring up at the sky. They contemplated in silence their own individual sets of thoughts, until finally Luna initiated a distraction: she picked up his hand, which rested on the arm of her chaise chair, and she kissed each of his old wizened knuckles, one at a time.

"You are so beautiful," she said, looking over him with more desire than he ever could have thought possible to feel turned in his direction. "So beautiful indeed."

"I won't argue with you," Severus said, "deluded though you are." He was more delighted than he thought her deluded, however.

Suiting his words, he didn't argue. All he did was watch her, carefully cataloging the sensations in his body, and his mind.

There seems to be no off switch on this fiendish girl, who wanted him so desperately that even so entirely stuffed as she was, she was so eager to try stuffing herself even further with things of his. When one hungry mouth was full to bursting, she insisted on indulging another.

And Severus, at this damned impudence, couldn't argue. He watched as she graduated from slow succulent kisses on his knuckles to sucking slowly at his skin, especially where the bone of his finger emerged from the top of his hand. It felt like she was trying to suck the marrow out of his bones. And it tickled a little bit, when her lips, full and wet, grazed the skin just above the less sensitive knuckles, where instead his nerve endings were splayed and hungry in the flesh of his upper hand. He was soft and tender and extremely sensitive there. Most of the time the only thing he ever felt there was his diabetic neuropathy. At this moment, his hands felt like they were quivering with emotion, like gelatin, and every time a little rough bit of teeth grazed that skin, he found himself shattering inside.

How much of his life, up until now, had been alone? How many times had he insisted that love was never going to be on his table again? How many times had he rejected an advance before it even was offered? How many times had he cried in the night knowing that his life was full of incomprehensible, pain, and telling himself in his heart of hearts that he deserved it? How much of his life had been wasted up until this moment with feelings of bitterness and regret and self-hatred? How much beauty head he missed simply by virtue of focusing on the negative qualities in his life?

In many ways, of course he knew these things that had limited him were reinforced by his circumstances, but it didn't matter now, because he hated himself simply for having hated himself so much. He was nearly sick with desperation to see how far this girl would take him, how much sensual patience she would grant him, and how much tender affection he could squeeze out of this life before the inevitable tragedy of the hellish afterlife.

The calling of some bird in the pineapple guava tree broke him out of his stupor of depression. He realized that Luna was looking at him, eyes wide with worry, as she surfed his emotions, checking in to see how deeply he had lost himself within himself.

"I'm fine," he said, trying to convey as much stability as he could. "I really am."

He thought about the two of them, and the way that they related so closely together, orbiting in tandem like a planet with another planet, Or actually,…

"What sort of celestial body do you think I am," he said softly, "to go back to that conversation we just were having?"

There is no question in Luna's eyes, and she clearly had already thought about this extensively. "Saturn," she said, plainly and without judgment.

This wasn't exactly a surprise, but he didn't have to like it. "Why," he asked, as he looked up at the sky again, trying to see if he could see the blinking light that was such a planet in the sky at that moment. He couldn't, but he also knew that he wasn't very good at astronomy.

"Many reasons," said Luna, and she listed them one by one.

"There is a certain largeness about you that always has seemed to be a part of you," she said, "even when you were my teacher and very physically small. Your size did not correspond to the amount of presence you had a room.

"But I don't think it's something you were born with," she added conversationally, as if discussing the weather and not his psychological profile. "I think it something that you grew into, something that you had to adopt out of necessity. And so most of it is actually just gas," she said, her eyes twinkling at him, "helium and hydrogen coming together in a noxious brew of sadness and depression that have affected your whole life."

He almost withdrew his hand from her at that moment, because he was so startled by the way she saw him. Particularly he was startled by how accurate and real it was, and how well it aligned with his own view of himself. He so often put her on a pedestal that it didn't occur to him that she didn't also do the same. In truth, as he'd indicated earlier in the conversation, he thought it impossible a girl like Luna could like him without being delusional.

How could a girl like her, who saw him so clearly, want him despite all his faults? *He* wouldn't want himself, if he were her. He had no clue what made her attracted to him.

Luna grasped his hand more tightly, almost harshly. "You make yourself seem very big," she went on sensing that she had scared him, "as a way of keeping other people away from you. Because you know that you are full of these bad feelings, and you don't want them just to be shared with anyone else.

"You've been so hurt by your own self," she elaborated softly, "you can't bear to trust others won't be as hurt by you as you were hurt by yourself. And perhaps with good reason you create these barriers, or rings, around you."

Her voice became heavier, as she added, "Because you have hurt people. People who never deserved to fall into the toxicity of your orbit. But they did anyway," she observed, staring at him with so much love in her eyes that he couldn't stand it, "and they suffered the consequences, and you hate yourself for having hurt them. But you can't stop hurting them because you were just a giant ball of gas spinning endlessly around our universe, hating yourself and wishing you were dead. Anybody who dares to get close to you comes down to your level, and it gets them destroyed.

"Except," she said, even more softly, "I suppose, for me. I'm not affected by these gases, and these fumes, and these noxious feelings that you have, that drive you nearly to insanity. For some reason, I suppose I'm immune to them."

"What does that mean, exactly?" asked Severus, feeling quite lightheaded, and like he wanted to cry.

He desperately wanted to put up barriers, to snap and rage at her for speaking such disgusting truths about him, to forcibly make her to forget those things she'd just said, to distract her by leveraging his anger. If he were a Muggle, it would have been easier - he could have branded her as a witch out of sheer terror, and then be done with it.

Of course thinking this didn't help his situation much. Given that he knew that she was a witch, and all. And that this magic she was using had nothing to do with actual magic, but came from some deeper well of human knowledge.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and bit his tongue. Despite himself, the image of Saturn and its many rings came to the forefront of his mind, but he forced himself to merely observe his emotions float by like one of the planet's sixty-odd moons.

He counted them carefully, taking a deep breath as each one passed him by in his mind's eye, and then he had a bit of a brainstorm. Refusing to open his eyelids, but bravely taking a step towards greater emotional honesty, he suggested, "I think the reason you're not affected... is because *you are a moon.*"

After saying this, his eyes snapped open, and he looked at her. Luna's eyes widened, and her face brightened, and she looked incredibly happy at the prospect.

"That's an idea," she said. "Do you know how many moons that Saturn has?"

"Around sixty," grumbled Severus, regretting this tactic somewhat. He tried to make himself smaller in his chair, not succeeding at all.

"62," corrected Luna, warming to her topic. "Saturn has 62 moons, and none of them even sneeze while in the presence of so much noxious gas."

She grinned, triumphant.

"And back to your point about consistency," Severus added, hating the fact that he was digging himself in deeper, "to Saturn, his moons are very consistent. Because they're in his orbit."

Luna laughed lightly. "I realize," she mused, "that there's only one reason that we here on planet Earth think that the moon is so changing and fickle. I suppose it only seems so because of the way that we sit on this earth, looking up at her; our world is changing, not other way around."

"Precisely," said Severus. Luna seemed quite cheered up, though it seemed to be at his own expense. He didn't really mind, though.

"Yes," Luna chattered, "the moon never changes, really, because it is the Earth that is rotating and changing and making it very difficult for the moon to keep up. She's doing her best. It's the Earth that is the problem, not her. It's not her fault she's too close that she can't get her bearings and seem that she is only moving in tiny fractions. In viewing her, we do her a disservice, and we never see the whole picture of what she is or what she looks like. Because we are just little creatures upon the earth.

"And Earth is quite an overpopulated place," she went on. "Whereas Saturn, it exists in a world of its own, with very few look upon it. But it has such a collection of moons, that are there to love it and care for it, and It is only because it is so far away from us on Earth that we have any association with Saturn and sadness.

"There is no reason Saturn must by definition be sad," went on Luna, entering the final triumphant conclusion of her extemporaneous lecture. "Saturn has a kind of glory that can't be appreciated by us here on Earth, and so because it does seem to move slowly around the Earth, in its own world, in moves quite fast, and we are just too far away for us to see how well it keeps to itself, and brings its own definition of love and caring to the table."

"I was also thinking of Saturnalia," Severus said, feeling his stomach expand and contract with relief. "God of Agriculture. Lots of feasting and celebration and all that rot."

"Yes!" enthused Luna, and she pressed a delighted kiss upon Severus' hand. "You are so brilliant. Yes. I love it."

Severus smiled thinly, because his ears seemed to ring with the unspoken (but deeply heard) words "*I love you.*"

"Are you at all feeling ready for a swim?" he asked, not moving a muscle, not looking anywhere but in her eyes, not willing to break the spell.

"Just a quick dip," Luna agreed, and she tugged at the hem of Severus' t-shirt. "You're not wearing that in, are you?"

"Oh. Erm." He felt self-conscious, but as Luna expectantly gazed at him, he tentatively peeled off the garment.

"There we are," Luna cooed, "There's my large and lovely man." She wrapped herself around his sweaty bare midriff the moment she spied it, and her soft breasts were sticky with heat. It was rather uncomfortable, actually, for their bare skin to touch, given how hot it'd been that day, so Severus gently disentangled his body out of her grasp.

"Let's get in," he prompted, kissing her upon the head, and with stiff steps he plodded to the rim of the pool, grasped the rail in the shallow end, and eased himself down the steps until he was up to his waist. Even though the day had been hot, the water was cool and refreshing from the cold of nighttime, and he shivered as his flab protested the sudden onslaught of cold.

But soon enough he was floating on his back, relishing the ridiculous buoyancy of his well-insulated body, and relaxed into the feeling of seamless weightlessness.

The quiet of this moment was only disrupted by the crashing of Luna's body as she dived into the water, as agile and graceful as a dolphin.

She popped up out of the water, and hiccuped cutely. "Perhaps not as ready as I thought," she confessed, and paddled over to him. "You seem to have the right idea."

"Careful not to fall asleep," Severus said dreamily. His ears were just below the surface as he bobbed in the water, and he was noticing the total relaxation of his whole body other than his tightly packed stomach. He was both speaking from experience and also from noticing his own body's current state.

"I won't," Luna promised, already spreading out her limbs on the surface of the water like a beautiful alabaster starfish. "And if I do, you have my permission to wake me."

"More like, your nose full of water will wake you first," Severus chuckled, "it's not pleasant. Chlorine burns the sinuses."

"We'll be careful," Luna agreed, and she reached out to touch his hand. He grasped it desperately, wanting to convey just how important it was that she be careful.

Severus wanted nothing more than to protect this beautiful girl from all the horrors of the world. Including horrors that were mere annoyances, actually. Luna Lovegood, in return for loving him, would never want for comfort, and any thing that brought her displeasure, he would dispense with immediately. He would walk to the ends of the earth, large and ungainly as he was, just to prevent her from experiencing something mildly unpleasant. She deserved this, and more. And he didn't care if this was putting her on a pedestal or not.

...

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