A/N: I have no idea what I'm doing, to be honest.

Luna's POV

She keeps me grounded. On my best days, I'm like sea fog hanging in the air, too light to stay in one place but too heavy to find happier refuge; my haphazard thoughts leave me in constant limbo, somewhere between this mundane, human world and the better one I strive for, seek to be a part of. Her sensibility, her practical but fierce demeanour, her stubbornness and her courage; Ginny exudes fire from every fibre of her being. I feel lost without her, a hopeless wanderer overtaken by an endless desert.

I breathe. The air smells like wood from the fireplace kindling. It's almost home, but darker, with an air of silence and death and anguish, old souls crying out to be saved, ghosts echoing away in the walls. Ron is confused, scattered, sometimes quiet and subdued, sometimes angry and loud, mired in constant discontent. He screams in the night, "Hermione!" and I hear her pain a mile above me, the terror crashing down like a collapsing roof.

I breathe. I taste chocolate and Butterbeer in the back of my throat. The kitchen table is a mile long, with a skid from a knife, four plates clumped at one end of the table. The conversation sounds muffled, garbled, unreal. I see Harry's mouth moving, see his hand bring his Butterbeer to his lips, but the words he says are lost. Ginny responds. Ron laughs. Everything seems far-away and mechanical, like if I reached out to close my fingers around Harry's wrist he would just dissipate and evaporate like the morning mist.

I breathe. My lungs inflate and deflate like balloons. I look to Ginny to anchor me before I'm gone any longer. She gives me a wide smile, her brown eyes glittering like sequins. When I speak, my voice seems deeper to me. My head is harder to lift up every morning. I look for the light in everybody else's eyes.

The flickering torches in the hallways of Number 12 throw shadows up and down the corridors like leithfolds, dim light dancing across the portraits. The faces watch me when I sit with my back against a corridor wall, writing on endless parchment. I like to work in the hallways because I can glean inspiration from my housemates as they walk by. I pen letters to my father, stories, the beginnings of a memoir that sounds to airy to be real. My words are like faerie dust to me.

I breathe. I kiss Ginny in the hallways when she feels like the last inches of a rope slipping out of my hands.

"We need to consummate soon," Ron says one night. He looms over me, a good foot taller, but his face is conflicted, nonthreatening. I feel strangely safe in his war hero's presence; this is someone who has carried fate on his sore shoulders. People who know pain don't cause it.

"Please don't use that word," I find myself requesting. "It's...it's too cold."

He looks at me for a long moment, blue eyes like burning torches, searching. I am too human for a word like "consummation," too fragile for a word like "fuck," too romantic for a word like "shag." He sees my humanity; I wear it on my sleeve and no one misses it. "Have sex," he tries.

"I know." My voice comes out soft as a blanket but heavy as a boulder, weight pressing on my shoulders, the pressure of not loving and not being loved in return.

He sits down on his side of the spacious bed, back against the headboard, lanky limbs outstretched; he hasn't even grown into his body yet. We're young but we feel old, worn out and overflowing with knowledge and horror and hurt and love and scars and hope. We're anchors holding ourselves down with our sorrow, life rafts lifting each other up.

"We could ease into it," he suggests, his voice low and uncertain, such a drastic change from the cocky, self-assured Ron I know, and this is how I know for sure who he really is, just a tired, inexperienced young man who still doesn't think he's competent. He doesn't know where he wants to be, but he knows it's not here, not with this girl he doesn't love, with this girl who doesn't love him, with this past haunting his head and this future hanging over him like gallows.

"Okay."

His fingers twine in my hair. His lips demand from mine what he is too embarrassed to put into words. We are a refuge for words unspoken, we each think of someone else. When we break apart, he simply says, "I'm sorry."

"I'm not."

"Okay."