Chapter 58: Mr. and Mrs. Scamander
Luna Lovegood, the new Field Studies professor at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, watched with a peaceful and content smile as her class ended for the day. She ambled along behind her students as they headed back the way they had come through the Forbidden Forest in twos and threes.
Field Studies was a new course being offered at Hogwarts beginning this term, and had been approved by both the Department of Education at the Ministry, the Hogwarts Board of Directors, and Minister Kingsley Shacklebolt himself. The class was meant to provide magical students with the opportunity to study magical creatures out in the field, their natural environment. Luna liked to view it as a more advanced offshoot of Care of Magical Creatures, which Professor Rubeus Hagrid still taught, its emphasis still being on the study and care of magical creatures who were in captivity.
The distinction between the two courses – Care of Magical Creatures and Field Studies – had been the biggest hurdle in getting the latter course approved. Observing magical creatures in the wild always held its dangers, but Luna had the training from the safari she had gone on some years ago with her father….
She blushed. …. and also all the subsequent trips into the field she had taken with her colleague and boyfriend.
Hitting the treeline, Luna cheerily waved to Hagrid where he was seated on the front stoop of his cabin, smoking a pipe. He appeared to be talking animatedly with someone standing just off the cabin's bottom stone steps, and when the gentleman turned, Luna felt her heart skip a beat.
The new Hogwarts Professor drifted closer. "Morning, Hagrid. Rolf."
Her lover turned to her with a bright smile, and Luna felt her heart stutter again. "Hullo, love. Have a good class?"
Luna nodded with a beaming smile, and the pair leaned in gently and shared a kiss. The liplock was chaste and muted, perhaps because it also had an audience. Hagrid merely chuckled, and winked.
"Get on, you two! Your students clearly enjoyed their course today, Luna."
Luna smiled serenely. "There will be plenty more who do, I hope, ideally for years to come." Slipping her hand into Rolf's, she waved a cheerful goodbye to the half-giant and began leading her boyfriend up towards the castle.
"I'm ever so pleased that you came…" she hummed.
"Course! You gave me your class schedule, remember? This is your lunch period." He gestured up towards where Hogwarts Castle loomed. "Do you usually take your meal at the staff table?"
Luna nodded. "I often eat with Neville, actually." She noted, but didn't comment on, how Rolf seemed to almost imperceptibly stiffen at the mention of her best mate. Making a snap, spontaneous decision, as was her nature, Luna suddenly tugged her lover in another direction, out towards the rolling hills of the grounds. "But I'm not feeling very hungry today, actually. Come on – let's go for a walk!"
Luna Lovegood rarely got nervous. She believed she had inherited from her late mother an inherent sense of calm and trust that everything would one day be OK. The Department of the Battle of Mysteries – that had left her scared, especially once the Death Eaters had taken her and her friends hostage. Being held prisoner in the cellar of Malfoy Manor – she had been hungry and frightened, though had done her best to put on a brave face for the sake of her fellow prisoners, Dean and Mr. Ollivander and the goblin, Griphook. The Battle of Hogwarts and the preceding Death Eater occupation were among the scariest times of her life. Why, if it hadn't been for Neville….
She bit her lip, casting a discreet side-eye in the direction of the man she had dated going on….. goodness, nearly eight years now.
Luna Lovegood had never been big on the concept or institution of marriage. That didn't, however, mean she didn't look around and see how almost all of her friends from her Hogwarts days were by now married themselves. A majority of them had even started families. Hell, she even now had a goddaughter herself, a child who would be her responsibility if, Godric and Merlin forbid, anything ever happened to Ginny. Her best girlfriend – now a sports columnist with the Daily Prophet – wrote to Luna almost every Saturday week, and there had also been plenty of teatime dates at the Potters' homestead in Godric's Hollow. Ginny never expressly said so, yet Luna could still sense it: the redhead clearly wondered why Luna had not gotten married yet. Both women had been relieved when Neville had finally tied the knot with fellow DA veteran Hannah Abbott the summer before last.
Luna's thoughts drifted to Lily, her goddaughter. The tiny baby, scarcely a year old, had the same ginger tufts of hair as her mother and her paternal grandmother. Luna adored that little baby, all the more so because Harry and Ginny had seen fit to partially name their daughter after her.
Luna glanced to Rolf again, her mind still on her goddaughter and the future. She had been one of the few Ravenclaws – one of the few students at Hogwarts, period – to like and do well in the Divination course once taught by Professor Trelawny (Padma Patil now filled that post). And though even free-to-be Luna didn't believe in every prophecy, she knew that the future was never fixed. If something cataclysmic happened, Lily Luna Potter would be her responsibility. Well, and Ron's responsibility.
It made Luna think that she ought to have a stable home prepared. She recalled the conversations she had had with the little girl's father, so long ago, about Sirius. She chanced a glance at Rolf again, catching him glancing quickly away from where he had clearly been studying her.
Coming over the crest of a hill, the couple turned to each other at the same moment. It happened so in sync, it could have been choreographed. As it was, it was merely serendipitous.
And those moments of serendipity, Luna thought, were some of the best moments.
"Will you marry me?" Luna and Rolf asked simultaneously. A loaded beat, and then the pair broke out into laughter, before they then embraced and dreamily kissed.
Even their answers were delivered together:
"….. Yes."
Harry Potter sat uncomfortably in the folding chair out on the grassy hillside. He glanced down when his son tugged on his suit coat sleeve.
"Da-deeeeee…. Can I have a Chocolate Frog, please?"
"May I have a Chocolate Frog, please?" Ginny corrected the boy, from where she was next to him and bouncing his sister, toddler Lily, in her lap. At her husband's amused look, the former Quidditch star shrugged. "Hermione's always said you have to teach children proper grammar."
"Aren't you supposed to be getting her ready?" Harry gestured to their daughter, dressed in a cute and frilly dress. "You're going to have to help her down the aisle, you know!"
Ginny smirked. "Harry, Luna's wedding isn't going to come to a crashing halt because the Flower Girl wasn't early. Lily Bear will be on time for Auntie, won't you, sweetums?"
"Auntie!" Luna shrieked, babbling. Harry sighed and turned back to where Albus was still pleading with doleful eyes.
"Sorry, mate. I didn't bring any Chocolate Frogs with me." And the young father turned out his pockets to show the boy. "Besides, it's such a warm day, the frogs would melt!"
It was a warm day in late May, the sun shining over a stunning vista of the Devonshire countryside. From here, in the Rook's front yard, you could see forever, even better than you could see from the front garden of the Burrow a stone's throw away.
For himself, Harry wasn't sure why Luna had chosen the outbreak of summer to finally wed her long-time partner, Rolf Scamander, although he knew that her break from teaching at Hogwarts Castle had something to do with the scheduling. Harry just didn't wish….. This was the second time in the span of a month that he and Ginny had needed to traipse their three small children to an event that all of them would be patently uninterested in. The twelfth (!) anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts had been observed some weeks before, Harry reading off the names of the dead just as he always had.
There was a small bustling commotion at the top of the aisle, and then Ron and Hermione and their two children came dashing down it. As always, Hermione looked together even as she was balancing a toddler of her own on her hip. Hugo seemed mercifully quiet, for a little boy of not quite two. At nearly four, Rose (short for Rosalind), on the other hand, was crying into her dad's shirt collar. Ron sent a stressed and tired grimace in the direction of his brother-in-law.
"You gits almost never beat us to events like this!" he joked, self-deprecating as he leaned into the Potters' row to give his sister a hug. Hermione sashayed into the row ahead of them, bouncing Hugo on her knees while casting a smile back over her shoulder.
"We're not late, are we?"
"No, but for you, my dear, this is cutting it close!" Ginny quibbled.
"Too right!" Ron laughed, the sound strained as he maneuvered himself and Rosie into a seat next to his wife. "Sorry about that – we overslept!"
"And who's fault was that?" Hermione quipped, though there was an almost amused twinkle in her eye. Her husband grimaced sheepishly.
"Mine?"
"Correct! You're learning…." Beaming, Hermione leaned in and gave him a soft kiss on the mouth.
"Wow," Harry shared a look with Ginny. "I would have been expecting a row…"
His sister-in-law heard him anyway. "Oh, we hashed that out back at the house," she prattled. Ron turned as red as his hair. Directly behind him, Ginny was smirking….
…. at least until orchestra began playing the processional.
"Gin!" Harry called out a warning. Flustered, Ginny began racing back up the aisle to take her place as both Matron of Honor as well as assistant to the Flower Girl.
Luna's bridesmaids came up the aisle first, Ginny bringing up the rear at their head. Awws percolated through the congregation as Ginny gently coaxed not-quite-2-year-old Lily into casting about the flower petals in her little basket. By the time mother and daughter both returned to their seats, Ginny seemed winded.
"Dad-eee…." Albus whined. "Can I go say hi to Uncle Neville?"
"Not right now, son, we have to get through the wedding…." Harry whispered.
Ginny smiled wanly. "Don't be too hard on the boy, Harry – Nev is his godfather…."
"True, and if you had had your way, he would have been godfather for our little girl too…"
Ginny flushed with what might have been embarrassment. "It wouldn't have been that awkward to have Nev and Lu co-godparent…."
Harry didn't bother to correct her; he was too tired to.
Just then, the processional reached its crescendo.
"Oh….. Oh, my….." Hermione was turning all the way around in her seat.
Ginny followed her gaze – and winced. "Oh, Godric… good heavens! What….. what on earth is she wearing?"
Luna Lovegood (soon to be Scamander) now came gliding with blissful serenity up the aisle in truly the most…. unique wedding gown Harry had ever seen. The bodice and skirts were decorated with rainbows and spangles. To top off the ensemble, a tiara of unicorn horns adorned Luna's golden curls, which were now in ringlets. At her arm, Xenophilius looked proud as punch.
Harry chanced a glance back at the altar, where Rolf now stood with a shocked and gawping expression on his face.
Ron leaned into his brother-in-law as the bride passed their row. "Bet the bloke didn't expect her to give her vows in that get-up, did he?" In spite of themselves, the men had to fight to keep from roaring with laughter. In truth, they shouldn't have been so surprised: they should have known that Luna would get married her way. Honestly, the most excitement Harry had pondered was whether or not Neville would stand and object in a fit of pique. No such halt of the proceedings occurred, however, and when Rolf and Luna kissed after being pronounced wed, even Ginny leapt to her feet and cheered.
At the reception, the new Mrs. Scamander was effusive and gracious, wiggling Lily's toes and cooing to her about how she was so proud of her little goddaughter. "You cast those petals splendidly, Lily! Auntie is so proud of you!" Luna turned to the girl's parents. "I'd advise you to check her skin for Nargle bites later. They like to burrow in flowers, you know."
Harry and Ginny shared a bemused look with each other, then haplessly shrugged. That was just their Luna's way.
Lily and Albus grew tired during the reception (the former especially after sharing a dance with her godmother and auntie); sensing it was naptime for the children, Harry and Ginny left the party early, Potkeying back to Godric's Hollow.
"Did our Luna seem….. pregnant to you, in that dress?" Ginny murmured quietly to her husband, who jerked sharply.
"No," he stared at her in surprise. "What makes you say that?"
Ginny allowed herself a soft smile. "Call it a woman's intuition…." She leaned into him. "I think she's expecting. She had a certain… glow about her today, even more than usual….."
Her musings trailed off as the five Potters approached the village cemetery, just as they were about to make that final turn for home. On a stone bench just beyond the graveyard wall, the little family could make out a blonde woman hunched over and sobbing into her skirts.
Recognizing who it was, Ginny immediately stiffened. She looked like she was considering gathering up the children and passing the scene entirely by, but Harry held her back. Holding up a silent hand to tell her to wait, the Chosen One drifted closer.
"Daphne?"
Daphne Greengrass, their neighbor, glanced up sharply, sucking in a startled breath. Moisture was pooled behind her eyes of ice blue, and she sniffled.
"What's the matter?" Harry lowered himself into a seat beside her on the bench.
"It's…. it's my sister….."
"Astoria? What's wrong?" Harry pressed, genuinely concerned. "Is the baby all right?" He shouldn't really be referring to Draco's son as a baby anymore; as Harry recalled, the lad was about the same age as his middle son.
Daphne sniffled again. "She's…. she's been diagnosed with a blood curse!" The last part almost came out in a wail and Daphne buried her face in her skirts and sobbed again.
Awkwardly, Harry put an arm around her. Noticing his wife's frown of disapproval from a short distance away, Harry mouthed to her 'Family Emergency.' She softened, but only the tiniest bit.
For a time, Harry sat with his neighbor and work colleague, letting her cry until his dress shirt was damp from her tears. Noticing, Daphne drew away, sniffling.
"Sorry," she mumbled. "I didn't mean to…." she faltered. "You look rather smart in that dress shirt."
Harry chuckled, rubbing her back. "Just came from a wedding. I wasn't even the best dressed there! The real fancy dress was on the part of the bride….!" And he was off, telling Daphne about Luna's truly…. well, loud wedding dress that had made such a statement. Just as he hoped, by the time he got to the end of the tale, Daphne's disconsolate frown had upturned into a wet, weak smile.