~How It Feels To Reach Too High~

They had fought before, but never like this. It had never become a shouting match, with flushed cheeks and pure rage in the bloodstream. Harry didn't remember how it had started. They'd just found out Luna was pregnant for the second time the day before and emotions had certainly been running amuck, but he couldn't understand why it had come down to the two of them screaming at each other.

Poor little Edward had to be witness to his parents' outburst. He'd been eating cheerios in his high-chair and babbling happily to himself when it happened. Harry was just home from work and Luna was putting her wasabi chicken in the oven. Ah, that was it. Harry had had an absolutely awful day at the Ministry and coming home to his wife cooking something so outlandishly disgusting was the last straw.

"I'm not eating that," were the first words out of his mouth.

"Why not?" Luna asked. The innocence in her voice irritated Harry—was she really so thick?

"Why not-? Bloody hell, Luna, what even is that!"

"Wasabi chicken. I found the recipe online." She sounded quite pleased with having used the internet.

"Looks like roadkill!"

"Really?" Luna tilted her head and examined the dish. "It doesn't look so bad to me."

"I hope you're not planning on feeding that to Ned."

The first angry huff: "Don't you raise your voice at me like that, Harry Potter! He'll be just fine, he likes wasabi."

"He likes-! Luna, you have no idea what he likes and doesn't like!" Harry shouted. He stepped around her to turn off the oven but she shoved his arm away at the last moment.

"I am his mother." Her voice was that eerie calm before the storm, her eyes alight with fire. "And I am with him every day. I know him like I know myself. He is mine."

Harry started really yelling at her, then. Telling her that she had no idea what she was talking about and that just because she was around Ned more than he was didn't mean he didn't know his own son! Her words hurt him; stung him the way physical wounds did not and in places magic couldn't touch, so he fought back with words he knew would hurt her. Words like 'loon' and 'daft' and 'unkind.' She fought him back just as cruelly, bringing his family into it and working invisible claws around the sewn threads of his boy-who-lived heart.

"You're the most selfish person I have ever met!" Luna looked ready to throw something at him. "Get out of my house!"

Ned started crying and something in the air shifted. Harry's anger left as quickly as it had come, but it was too late to apologize. He mumbled under his breath words meant to comfort rather than to hurt and stumbled out the door.

"I hope you trip on your way out!" Luna's breathy voice followed him outside where he let go of his anger and pounded his fists against the wooden fence they had made the year after purchasing the house. He nursed his wounds in the dewy grass and cursed himself for being such a dirty, filthy, prick of a husband. Eventually he found his way to the car and drove a little ways to town and ordered a drink at the local pub. After downing several drinks, a familiar redhead sat beside him.

"What happened?" Ginny asked, signaling the bartender. She didn't look at him but he could feel the curiosity in her posture. How were girls so good at reading him? Was he that much of an open book? Were they all born with some sort of emotion-reading magic?

"Hello? Earth to Harry!" Now she was looking at him and her freckles seemed to glare into his soul. He thought of Luna and he thought of Ned and he thought of words.

"I messed up, Ginny. I messed everything up." He imagined the words came out garbled and choppy, but in actuality his voice was steady and made Ginny raise an eyebrow.

"How?"

He lost his nerve. He tended to do that a lot around Ginny. It was one of the reasons they never worked.

"Nothing. Never mind."

"Oh really?" Ginny laughed and the bartender slid her drink over, "It was that bad?"

Actually, it was that bad but Harry didn't need to talk about it with her. It wasn't her business and besides, men weren't supposed to go around talking about their feelings to anyone who asked.

"How's Ned? I haven't seen that little bugger in a while," Ginny casually changed the subject. She had recently returned from a business trip overseas (which Harry suspected was not a business trip but rather an impromptu vacation with her boyfriend, Dean Thomas. The two of them had dated on-and-off for years, and Dean was always talking about her. They had dated for a time at school and rekindled their relationship shortly after things went awry with Neville Longbottom, whom Ginny dated for several months after breaking up with Harry. Neville was happily married to Hannah Abbott now, but Ginny and Dean were taking their time with marriage, preferring to keep things less serious).

"Harry!" Ginny snapped her fingers and Harry's glasses nearly fell off his face from jumping so suddenly in his chair.

"What?" he said stupidly.

"I asked about Ned!" Ginny tsked' and shook her head, "Maybe I should be asking about Luna. Is she what's got you so knackered?"

"I called her loony," Harry admitted.

"Really?" Ginny snorted, "What'd she do, feed your boxers to the Nargles?"

She didn't sound at all concerned that he had called his wife a terrible nickname from her school days.

"Ginny, I was really terrible to her. I—" he bit his lip and fought back a sudden surge of tears to his eyes. Ginny watched his reaction and took a sip of her drink.

"So apologize," she said,

"I…I don't know…it was a really bad fight…"

"So? Couples fight, Harry. They fight all the time."

"I was really angry."

"I'm sure she was angry, too." Ginny took another sip and nudged his shoulder, "Go home. Talk it out. Make some love. Everything will be okay."

Harry wanted so badly for that to be true.

"We've never fought like that before," he said.

"Harry." Ginny smiled at him and kicked him in the calf, "Go home."

So Harry went. He was starting to feel nauseous, anyway, drinking on an empty stomach. Wasabi chicken was starting to sound good.

The porch light was on when he got home-the only source of illumination in the night. He tried to be quiet but he ran into the trashcan on his way upstairs and almost knocked over all of Ned's train tracks. He passed his son's bedroom and peeked in. Ned was already asleep, wrapped up in the quilt Mrs. Weasley had made him for his first birthday. He still liked the feeling of being swaddled.

He heard the sink running when he opened the door to the bedroom. Luna was finishing brushing her teeth but when she heard him approach she looked up and smiled.

"Oh, good, you're back," she said, "I want to read you this passage from A Little Princess." She had been reading her way through all the children's classics because the classics for adults simply weren't as fun or nearly as magical. She picked up the book from the nightstand.

"Luna—"

"Hush, dear. Listen to what Mrs. Burnett has written: 'When you will not fly into a passion people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage, and they are not, and they say stupid things they wish they hadn't said afterward. There's nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in-that's stronger.'"

Harry didn't know what to do. The passage was obviously about him and how he hadn't been strong enough to rein in his emotions. He scratched the back of his head. Luna stared at him with her grey eyes and her hair was still wet from a shower and a shade darker. His heart skipped a beat and his stomach started growling.

"Luna, I'm sorry. I didn't mean what I said. I—"

Luna started laughing. "You never got something to eat?" she said, interrupting his apology.

"Uh," he said.

"You're adorable." She sat down on the bed and her fingers twitched nervously against the duvet and against the frayed edges of the book. She was nervous.

"I'm sorry, Harry. I'm sorry I couldn't be strong enough for the both of us. I should have realized you wouldn't like that kind of supper after a hard day at the Ministry."

She…what?

"I said some awful things to you. Things I didn't mean. I didn't mean them, Luna. I love you." Harry took a seat next to her on the bed, close but not close enough to touch. He wanted to give her space but he could smell her lilac shampoo and his head was spinning from the alcohol. Maybe.

"You're strong enough for all of us," he continued. He was having trouble making sense of things. Her hands were so small and her pajamas were falling off her shoulder and the skin there was so pale.

"I know." She opened the book again. "I said some awful things, too."

"You said I was worse than Voldemort," he said.

"You called me loony," she said.

"You aren't mad?" He was still trying to figure out what the consequences of this would be. He placed a hand on her thigh and thought he might throw up.

"Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it.'" She recited another sentence from the book and closed it, "Do you know the language, Harry?"

He thought he did, but he would have named the language Luna because her nose was inching closer and he could feel the heat from her legs.

"It's love, Harry," she whispered, "There will be lots more fights, you know, but that's the way we get through them, and-" she abruptly pulled away.

"Are you drunk?" A question.

"No." A lie. Maybe.

Luna laughed again, and this time it was real: "You were that upset about it? It's okay, I forgive you!" She kissed his cheek and slipped under the covers and looked up at him with adoration, not anger. This. This was why he loved Luna. She didn't forget but she always forgave.

"Weren't you upset about it?" he asked.

"Well, of course for a little while, but then I started eating the chicken and learned the second-best language of the world." She snuggled into the pillow.

"Which is?"

"Food!"

Notes:

Quotes taken from A Little Princess by Frances Hodges Burnett