Chapter Seventeen: Impasse
Why are you so dangerous?
I will lie awake and thinking of you
– "Half Believing," The Black Angels
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
That night was one of the worst of Luna's life, despite the fact that she'd previously spent long, hopeless hours in dungeons far less hospitable than those Slytherin house called home. After Riddle's awful voice chased her out of the common room, she got herself ready for bed as quickly as was humanly possible, ready for the worst in case her dorm-mates and their acid tongues happened to be in an uncharitable mood that evening.
But they didn't come, and neither did sleep. She lay awake, blank-eyed and alone, for the entire night. None of the others ever arrived.
When the sun finally dawned the following morning and light began streaming down through the lake and into the window by Carlotta's bed, Luna had long since decided she wasn't up to classes. Too many thoughts were clattering around in her brain that hadn't had the chance to be soothed away by sleep, and her magical senses felt deadened, making her deeply uneasy about the prospect of encountering Riddle again. A quick glance in Cecily's mirror told her she looked nearly as bad as she felt – skin sallow with awful-looking shadows under her eyes, hair somehow even more scraggly and unkempt than usual, white fingers twining together anxiously in a manner reminiscent of a spider's legs. She stood there for a moment, grimacing at her disreputable reflection and staring into her own eyes until they began to water, then turned away in disgust and began getting dressed. The vivid memory of Riddle's voice mocking her still made her feel ill, but today was not a day to be spent in bed. She'd allowed him the run of the school for too long, and it was not to be borne; something had to be done, and soon.
Instead, she meandered her way to the Great Hall and stood to the side of the entryway, bloodshot eyes tracking faster than usual as they hunted through the Gryffindor crowd for Yancy's face. When she spotted him, she made a beeline for his table and tapped his shoulder to let him know she wanted to talk. After he made eye contact and nodded his assent, she escaped to their usual meeting place in the library.
He arrived fairly quickly, to her relief, reliable as ever. "You look terrible," he noted with a little worried frown. "How much sleep did you get last night?"
Luna waved away the question, fingers twisting into her hair. "It doesn't matter. Listen, I think the Slytherins are up to something real. Riddle's getting bolder, and none of my roommates ever came back to the dormitory last night."
Yancy squinted at her. "Well, but – you do know the house-elves make up the – ?"
"It's not that their beds didn't look slept in. I was awake all night," she grated out. "I know. Please trust me. They're doing something, and we need to find out what it is before someone gets hurt."
After a long moment of consideration, he gave a slow nod. "All right. I trust you." He nodded again, as if to confirm this to himself, then met her eyes. "What are you thinking of doing?"
She bit her lip. "I want to search his things."
Yancy's mouth fell open slightly. "Riddle's things? Luna, are you mad? They'll be covered with alarm spells – even if you could get into the boys' dormitory, it's – "
"Not Riddle's," she amended hastily. "Sorry, I should've been clearer. I meant Selwyn. He's got key information somewhere, he's not paranoid enough to put alarms on his things, and probably not clever enough to notice if someone's been through them."
He was silent another moment, then, "How?"
Luna started rattling off her thoughts as quickly as she could. "It's a variation on the Notice-Me-Not Charm. I worked it out last year, but backwards, because I wanted to reverse-engineer a spell to help me get better at finding – never mind, that didn't work, anyway. This does, though, I promise." It had been a shame to lose that pair of shoes forever, the pair that she'd been doodling on with coloured pencils since she was thirteen, but she figured discovering her new and improved Notice-Me-Not had more or less evened things out. The feeling she'd had when she realised she'd just crafted her own spell (or close enough to it, anyway) had reminded her very much of the look on her mother's face when she had seen Luna's very first artworks in crayon.
She reined herself in before she could get too distracted, blinking back the usual film of tears in time to register Yancy's response.
"Notice-Me-Not won't work," he was saying bluntly, eyes sharp. "Not on a witch or wizard, and especially not on a clever one, not for you. If they've been ordered to keep an eye on you, a mild general compulsion like that won't do anything. They'll spot it right off, just as soon as you start to do anything unusual. Like going into the boys' dormitories, for instance." He was very quick on the uptake, Luna reflected with pleasure.
"I know," she replied patiently, "and that's why I won't be the one doing it."
The tall boy paled. "What – you mean – ?"
Luna favoured him with a bright smile.
Fortunately, Yancy didn't take too much convincing. He knew that the stakes were high, or at the very least that they might be, and that the worst that would likely happen if he were caught would be the removal of his Gryffindor prefect status – news, he informed her wryly, his family would receive with satisfaction rather than displeasure. Luna quickly shared with him her knowledge of Riddle's class schedule, which he looked a little askance at her for having, but he nevertheless agreed to her suggestion that the search should take place at three-p.m. Most of the Slytherin boys in Riddle's cadre who might walk in on Yancy had a free period just before, including Riddle himself, and Luna could watch to be sure all of them were safely out of the way before magicking Yancy, letting him into the common room and making herself scarce. Her comrade was a little concerned that their usual spot in the library might be too easily eavesdropped upon for a subject of this importance, and so the two of them made plans to meet on the edges of the Forbidden Forest early that evening. They parted shortly afterward, Yancy clearly trying to suppress his anxiety, but Luna feeling almost excited. She retreated back to the dormitory and tried to lose herself in building stories out of reading her textbooks backwards, but she couldn't stop her eyes from wandering over and over again to the clock.
Around a quarter to three (she didn't know for certain, because some twenty-odd minutes ago she'd forced herself to screw her eyes shut to stop glancing at the time), Luna made her way down to the common room and curled up in one of the isolated chairs in the corner where she would have an easy view of her housemates when they left to go to class. She noted that Riddle was already absent, although this was no shock given his well-known and slightly mysterious habit of arriving at classes several minutes early. Soon enough, most of the others began to file out as well. Focused as she was on the task of discreetly watching them leave and tracking who was left, Luna was mildly startled when a low, feminine voice at her shoulder addressed her: "Aren't you going to class today, Lovegood?" The tone might have been one of concern, if it hadn't been so dreadfully flat. It was Edith Selwyn.
Luna blinked at her for a moment before the lie came to her lips. "Oh – no. I'm afraid I don't really feel up to it. I've been a bit ill, you know."
"I didn't, actually," Edith responded. Her expression displayed no disbelief or suspicion, but those strange dark eyes were just a little too knowing for Luna to feel entirely comfortable with the interruption. After a moment, the other girl said merely, "I'll see you later."
"Bye," Luna replied, and watched Edith slink away from her and retreat soundlessly into the dungeon hall. At last, the common room was nearly empty, save for a few stragglers playing Exploding Snap on the rug – none of whom were in Luna's year or, to her knowledge, had any close ties to Riddle's inner circle. She quietly put down the book she'd been pretending to read and made her way to the dungeons' entrance, where Yancy was loitering in the hallway half-succeeding at appearing busy. With a quick glance around to be sure no one was paying attention, Luna pointed her wand at him and quietly intoned, "Neamhshuntasach." A fairly simple Irish incantation, but not one that any of the Slytherins would be expecting.
"Bless you," Yancy muttered, his expression hard to make out under the strange Gaussian blur of the magic. Luna snorted.
"It isn't my fault you English schoolchildren only learn spells from Latin," she said airily, and led him into the dungeons.
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
Early evening came and went for Luna, who was waiting by herself just beyond the borders of the Forbidden Forest. Yancy failed to make an appearance, and as time crawled onwards, she became more and more certain that something must have gone wrong. After nearly four hours of fluttering nerves and straining eyes searching the woods for her companion, Luna at last abandoned the massive sycamore she had been hovering behind and braved the trip back to the castle in the waning twilight by herself.
Wondering briefly if he'd somehow forgotten his own plan, she checked the library, but found it empty of all but a few stragglers who were being hurriedly ushered out by the librarian, Mrs. Foster. At last she reasoned that Yancy might simply not have been able to make it out of the castle to meet her, and as it was late he could have just gone off to bed with the intention of speaking with her the following day. She wasn't really able to convince herself of the veracity of this theory; but the absence of any buzz of gossip in the hallways or the dungeons about a Gryffindor prefect being caught in the Slytherin dormitories calmed her a little, and so she went to bed, noting only distantly and through half-closing eyes the continued absence of her roommates which had set off her suspicions to begin with.
Luna woke too late on the following day to manage breakfast, but went through her classes as normally as she could, aware that her increasingly frequent absences and failures to turn in work were becoming conspicuous. Riddle was present in Arithmancy, although he limited his contact with her to one or two unreadable glances, and inexplicably absent from Transfiguration; Luna spent her lunch hour waiting in the library for Yancy, who again did not materialise. When Charms came round at one-p.m. and Luna had a chance to speak to her Gryffindor friends, she asked after him.
"He's fine," said Euphemia blankly. "I saw him five minutes ago at lunch. He was just talking about some prefect business, but not anything out of the ordinary. Nothing seemed wrong to me. Why, did he say something to you?"
Luna made some excuse and dashed out of class ten minutes early so that she could be waiting outside of his Muggle Studies class when the hour ended. She finally caught him trying to sneak past her by hiding behind a rather burly-looking seventh-year boy, utterly failing to disguise his ungainly height. It would have been funny if she hadn't been furious.
"Yancy Bulstrode," she clipped, trying her hardest to pitch her airy voice lower to avoid softening her tone, "come and talk to me right now, please."
When his eyes darted to hers in something like confusion, she found her anger fading into unease. He trotted over to her obediently enough and asked only, "What's wrong?"
Luna could not hide the disbelieving scowl that came over her features. "What's wrong," she echoed incredulously, not even bothering to inflect the statement into a question. "What do you mean, what's wrong? You were supposed to meet me yesterday, after – what we talked about. Where were you? And why haven't you contacted me at all today?"
He just stared at her for a moment, and said at last, "Oh – that. I didn't think it was all that important."
Luna was nearly beside herself. "What?"
Yancy shrugged. "Well, I didn't find anything. No evidence of any suspicious activity at all, actually. I think we really might have been barking up the wrong tree on this one."
She scrutinised his face for any trace of fear or a hint that he might have been lying, and found none. Her lips worked numbly for a moment before any sound came out of them.
"Yes," she said finally, hearing her own voice as if from somewhere far away. "I'm sorry for shouting at you. Perhaps I was… overreacting a bit. How silly of me."
Yancy flashed a grin at her, apparently failing to register the sardonic deadness of her tone. "It all seems almost funny now, doesn't it? Happens sometimes, though. I'm just glad we didn'treally have anything to worry about. I'll see you around, Luna."
She stood there in the hallway by herself long after he and all the other students milling around had left, completely numb. Had Yancy really not found anything? She knew that Riddle was dangerous, that he had been toying with her and threatening her all this time – or had it really all been in her head? Perhaps Voldemort had just stumbled into the practice of making Horcruxes by accident, as a boy, and that had been what had broken his psyche beyond repair. Had she just been reading too much into Riddle's brilliant charm and transmuted it by herself into dangerous charisma? Had she simply over-interpreted his odd interest in her, turned it into a sequence of bizarre psychological torments that in reality had never existed?
Was this just another one of Loony Lovegood's imaginings?
The thought dangled in her head for a moment, fully formed and almost appealing in its harrowing simplicity, before she firmly dismissed it. No. Of course she hadn't just been making it up. Years of others constantly questioning her sanity occasionally took its toll on her confidence, but now was not the time for might not have found anything, but that didn't mean the evidence of her eyes and ears had been leading her astray.
As a matter of fact, now that she thought about it, it wasn't at all unlikely that he had in fact discovered something incriminating – or been on the edge of it – and had his mind summarily wiped and turned against him by whichever Slytherin happened to be on hand. That would certainly explain his bizarre manner and the complete one-eighty he'd done since their last conversation. The more she thought about it, the more convinced of this theory she became.
She knew for a fact what kind of person Riddle was, and that he must be doing something. She would just have to find out what it was by herself, now. That was fine. She had realised from the moment Ron had vanished before her eyes, after all, that she would be alone.
Being alone did not, however, mean that she had no resources at her disposal.
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
In the evening two days later, having waited so as not to call attention to a habit of leaving the castle late at night, she stole back out of the dungeons and made her way into the Forbidden Forest. She was more careful than ever to avoid being seen, but by now unconcerned that any of her dorm-mates would take special note of her absence. Following her memory as best she could and being careful to keep her wits about her, she made her way into the depths of the forest.
Reaching the borders of centaur territory took longer than she had expected, although she supposed that last time she had been sufficiently distracted that it hadn't occurred to her to track how long she'd been wandering through the trees, not to mention that she had first stumbled upon the centaur lands by accident. Her success became apparent at last when, as she wound her way through the thickening trees, a large hand gripped her shoulder and turned her roughly around. It really was astonishing how silently they managed to move.
Luna deliberately did not reach for her wand, instead slowly raising her hands in front of her in a gesture of non-aggression. "I just want to talk," she said steadily.
"What would a little witchling have to say to us that we might wish to hear?" snapped a low and unexpectedly female voice. Luna squinted, just barely able to make out her interlocutor's shape in the weak moonlight.
"I spoke to one of your kind named Solarn," she said carefully. "Might I be permitted to see him?"
The centaur-woman scoffed, long fingers twisting restlessly over the massive longbow in her hands. "My father? I think not. You must return to your castle, witchling. He will not speak to you."
"Please," Luna insisted. "It's about – " She hesitated a moment, and took a gamble. "It's about Firenze."
The centaur stilled. "And what would a little witchling know of my cousin?" she asked, her haughty tone suddenly dangerously blank.
Luna hardly breathed. "Has something happened to him?"
The other slowly stepped closer and leaned down, until her face – still difficult to make out in the darkness – was mere inches away from Luna's. There was a long silence.
"If you do not know that," she said at last, "then you know nothing. I will hear no more of your poisonous little serpent-tricks. You think we do not know of the serpent house, and your hatred of our race?" She turned away. "Leave our lands. Do not return."
"Please," Luna nearly snarled, blinking back tears of frustration. The centaur did not reply, only flicking her tail briefly as she disappeared back into the forest. Luna was by no means foolhardy enough to believe that any attempt to follow her would not be met with a far more firm response than words.
Out of options for the moment, she was forced to make a tactical retreat. She made her way back through the forest as silently as she could, her own anger and loneliness seeming to snap at her heels and drive her through the trees much more quickly than she had come.
So, an educated guess: something had indeed happened to Firenze, who was in fact Solarn's nephew. The centaurs' extreme reactions to her mentions of him indicated that he had either died, or was indisposed in a similarly dramatic manner. His death seemed astronomically unlikely, given that he was still living in her own timeline; might her and Ron's arrival have caused some sort of problem for the centaurs?
She put this idea aside as feasible, although it made her very uncomfortable to consider that their time-travelling efforts might have negative consequences not only in her present but in the current past as well.
Before she knew it, her feet had carried her back to the castle and she was able to slip back in without much difficulty. Her trip back to the dungeons was equally uneventful, and she entered the common room expecting that it would be empty, given that it was now approaching two in the morning.
There was, however, someone waiting for her. One pair of intelligent dark eyes watched her come in, and as she made for the girls' dormitory a pale hand reached out to clasp her wrist.
"Luna," said Edith.
Luna turned, and Edith released her wrist.
"I know you've been looking into Riddle. What he's up to." Her soft voice was entirely neutral, but Luna stilled in surprise nevertheless, not having expected a direct confrontation of this kind. She decided fairly quickly, however, that there was not much point in evading the accusation.
"Yes, I am," she replied at equal volume, her own expression just as bland.
"I like you," Edith confessed, blinking at her, "perhaps against my better judgment, but that is beside the point. I am concerned that this investigation will get you into trouble. The current actions of his inner circle are above my caliber, such that even my own brother will tell me nothing." She paused. "Even if you do succeed in discovering what it is he is doing," the subject was made obvious by her emphasis, "I doubt he will react well, and I'm sure it is clear to you by now that the consequences to such may be dire." She stared at Luna, her gaze earnest. "I would urge you to desist, for your own sake."
Luna looked back at her, silenced by her surprise. That was the longest speech she had ever heard from Edith, and such frank expression of thoughts and feelings was just as unusual from the other girl. She was also rather touched by Edith's concern, although at this point there was little that could possibly sway her from her goal.
"Thank you," she said after a long pause. "I appreciate your warning, and I will keep it in mind."
"But you will not stop," Edith muttered, seeming to speak almost to herself.
Luna smiled at her. "No."
The taller girl waved a long hand in acceptance. "Do as you wish. I did not really think I could change your mind. I simply wished to do all I could for you."
In spite of all her self-assurance, the words sent a chill down Luna's spine. Even so, she accompanied Edith to the dormitory with her smile still in place.
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
Thursday, October the 16th, 1943. 1:07 pm.
My research is progressing at a much faster pace now that I do not have to worry about that fool Bulstrode sniffing around in my affairs. Lovegood, too, seemed to be fairly easily cowed once I gave up that façade of friendliness and let her see how it really is; I wonder if she might continue making a pest of herself, but there is no chance that she will discover the source of my findings.
If I can master this new magic, once and for all gain true control over space and time and dimension, I will be more powerful than any wizard in history.
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
A/N: Hi guys, it's been a little bit! I know this chapter is incredibly late. I've had a very difficult time the past six months or so, some pretty unpleasant medical issues that came up out of the blue and were obnoxious to deal with (I'm ok now though!), so thanks so much for all your patience. I'm very sorry that it's taken so long to publish this one. We're almost at the end of the first arc now (only one more chapter), so the action picking up should make writing a little easier from this point on.
Thanks so much again for your readership. Even those of you that just read and don't review or favorite, I really appreciate your attention and time. 3 Love you guys, and hopefully the next chapter will be on its way sooner rather than later.