notes: Thanks to everybody who read the previous chapter!
our dancing days
ii. silver lining
lunarolf
He meets her on a train to Quebec, of all places.
"Luna Lovegood," she tells him, holding out her hand. "I don't suppose that anyone's told you that you look an awful lot like your grandfather." And there it begins. They talk of wild, exotic animals and their schools days and Quebec, and they pointedly avoid mention of the wars and heroes, or lack thereof.
"You have very beautiful eyes," Rolf tells her in a moment of madness.
And they are beautiful. They're a clear grey-blue, so light that, at some angles, they appear simply silver. Her eyelashes are long and there are shadows underneath them and lines at the corners. They are wise eyes; liquid pools of the silver lining you find on clouds.
"Thank you," she replies to him airily. She folds the paper in her hand into a little origami phoenix. She picks it up, studies it, and mutters an incantation that turns the phoenix gold.
Performing a few more intricate charms, she raises the origami animal up to his eye-level, where it sits on the palm of her hand. Suddenly, it flies into the sky, beats its wings, and promptly bursts into glittering, shimmering flames.
"Oh dear," Luna says dejectedly. "That wasn't meant to happen." One more phoenix lasts long enough to start singing, but it explodes after hitting a rather miraculous high C. So instead, they play a simple, childish word game.
"Christmas," she offers, and Rolf smiles.
"Mistletoe," he counters, and Luna laughs, blushing. He could listen to her laugh forever - it even sounds silver, like chiming Christmas bells or sickles falling.
"Nargles," she replies, and she laughs harder at his odd look. "They infest mistletoe plants; always be wary that their nests don't fall on you." Their game stops soon after, because they are laughing too hard to properly form a response.
The woman on the train smiles at him, with her halo of gold for hair and silvery pools of light for eyes. She tells him she'll see him again, then takes the pair of reading glasses that had been residing on her head for the entirety of the train journey and puts them on to walk away.
He sighs after her, then whistles as he wonders away, secure in the knowledge that Luna Lovegood won't get away that easily, despite the cold and the dark and the frost. Every cloud has a silver lining, and all that.