Chapter 26

It was someone's idea to give Remus Lupin another chance at talking at me. It wasn't mine. It was just too thorny. It was still painful to think about what he'd said to me, and of course it was worse because although he was half-baked in his thoughts about magic, he was right about what killing did. He benefited from it, but he was sure ready to say that it was a permanent mark on the self. It hadn't occurred to me that it was his self hatred talking, because when you hear an ugly truth it doesn't matter where it comes from, and in fact those we encounter upon our winding paths through life who earn the epithet "asshole" often lack the social graces to stop them from speaking some ugly and wounding verity, and though it's said that our enemies can be our greatest teachers, it's not great to get poked by one.

In any event I think it was my dad. I think he didn't want to think terribly of his old friend, and knew the stuff that regularly gnawed at his being, and wanted to give him a chance at fixing this rift, both because Dad felt that he was obliged to apologize since (as Dad let me know in no uncertain terms) Remus was wrong, and because he felt like somehow this was going to help Remus stop being so, well, Remus-y.

Not that Remus apologized. He wanted to go right into the magic argument again, like my mother hadn't kicked him out over it before, and like he hadn't said I was tainted and ruined. That still hurt to think about. I was a bit slow on the uptake, so it took me a few stanzas of his song, spoken softly and maybe a little hurriedly, like if he snuck it back in it would somehow fly today, to recall that hurt. His yammer was something about how magic, like ambient free-range undirected magic, didn't have instrinsic qualities in and of itself and those were applied by the user externally with its use, but that magic was essentially a neutral force, or something like that, which was on the one hand glaringly obvious because you don't call the weather evil or anyway mean it literally, but on the other hand it seemed like if you called a spell "dark" someone would know exactly what you meant, but that would kind of depend on what you were doing with the spell at the time, like if you were applying a frog-stretching spell there wouldn't be much question about if it were light or dark but if you levitated someone into a ceiling fan then that might not make levitation a dark spell but it might make you somewhat shady, and I was trying to figure out what exactly this had to do with my damaged and filthy soul and coming up with nothing, per usual, but in a rare moment of self-awareness that was actually good for something I realized I was doing a lot of work internally without talking to him about any of it, so I spoke up rather abruptly with the best and most cogent question I could muster.

"Hold on - are you seriously still on about this?"

"We need to talk about the two kinds of magic," he said. "It's important to understand."

"Spells, charms and hexes, and curses, that's four. Is there a kind where you sing?"

"Wh- No, there's none with singing."

"Not anywhere?"

"I - I suppose there is some singing in Druidic ritual," he said. "And there are chants that are used elsewhere…"

"You don't use them, though. I've never heard you sing."

"Well, erm, it's not my strongest - I mean, I am very comfortable with spells, and some don't require any words at all -"

"Can you carry a tune, Remus?"

"We seem to have strayed a bit from our subject."

"It's not my subject."

"It should be," he said. "You need to know these things for your own safety. I'm trying to help you so that you can face what you are up against, to have every. Advantage." He said it like that, with a pause.

"I appreciate this, Remus," I said, wanting to say what this meant to me, his doing this for his friends' son. But I also wanted to say that he was being a real jerk about a lot of it.

"I hope you do," he said, with a little smile appearing around his eyes.

As if the way he said I was ruined inside was just mischief or something.

Nope. Not over that yet.

"We are speaking of light versus dark magic. It's a construct. There's no difference between the two of them. It's the user that matters."

"Oh. Okay. So every spell has a good use."

"Exactly, Deasil," Remus said. He'd placed his hand in my shoulder in one of those gestures I have gathered to mean that I'd got it all right. His rather felt like he was trying to press an uncooperative nail into the floor.

"So the entrails-expelling spell -"

His eyes closed.

"Entrails-expelling curse, Deasil."

"What's that one good for?" I said.

"Deasil," he said, his eyes still closed. "That's a curse."

"So it's not magic?"

"Of course it's bloody magic."

"Look, I just got here a little while ago, but there's meaning in words, okay? Light means neutral at worst, good-intentioned or beneficial at best. Dark means used for harm only. You literally call it a curse. What is the problem with that?"

"Because," he said with some volume, and then he paused.

I waited.

"Because it's misleading to place intent inherently in a process like magic." What. "Magic is a force, that can be guided or used at the will of the person, which is the point I am trying to communicate with you. Magic doesn't want to do things, it's a force used, exerted, by people who want to do things."

"You are talking about magic with a capital M," I said.

"Precisely -"

"But that's some far off abstraction you don't have to be near. It's like if we were talking about a - a gun like it was just a piece of metal without any malign purpose. If there weren't people there wouldn't be guns. We made them to kill other creatures with. That's what they do. They have that purpose. You can't disconnect them from their purpose. You are talking about them like they are just metal."

"How am I -"

"You are talking about spells as if they're just Magic, but you know they aren't just that. Didn't you tell me about unforgivable spells a while back?"

"Yes, but -"

"Those spells don't just happen in the wild. They don't come flying out of trees that are sick of having squirrels in their hair. People made them. Like they made guns out of metal. Sure, guns can be used to hunt, which is considered a benefit, but that isn't why they were made - the why is that they kill what they are pointed at better than other things do. And there are guns that are not in any sense made for hunting, just like there are spells that are not made for anything but killing, no matter what you use them for. Someone might use them for that, but it would kind of look like they thought that, I don't know, deer were trying to steal their land or something. But a gun isn't just a thing, it's like a - a hard spell, an idea given form. Look, it's perfectly obvious that your culture thinks that some spells are unacceptable - that makes them dark in the eyes of people. It's an effective use of language to describe the intent behind their use. Why you don't think the entrails-expelling curse is also unacceptable is beyond me."

"It is unacceptable -"

"But it isn't unforgivable, apparently."

"The whole point of unforgivable spells," he said, "is that people know they shouldn't ever, under any circumstances, use those. That the penalty for those is death. That there's no justifiable reason for using them under any circumstances. The entrails curse was invented by a wizard who raised cattle, to hasten the meat preparation process. It's cast only when the beast is dead. It has a use, Deasil."

"Then why does it have 'curse' in its actual name?"

"It's a curse when it's used on people."

"Are you sure it was invented for that purpose?"

He looked like he had a mouthful of something that tasted bad.

"Yeah, it's the same spell," I said. "A person made it and it's the person that's the problem in that situation. It's like - like killing someone with a garden rake. I don't even know what we are talking about anymore. Okay, so, wait, but what if you needed to, I don't know, control someone's mind so they didn't hurt someone or themselves?"

"There are other ways to do that."

"But the Imperius works from a distance and doesn't hurt the person, and doesn't affect anyone else around them. I mean, couldn't you use it to get people to learn about their depression or face a phobia or something?"

He took a breath to say something, then let it out while he considered something. The thing he already had in mind, however, looked like it won out because it was there first. "There's too much possibility for abuse," he said.

"Sounds like any of these spells. Or any potion, or any medicine. You have a stick that helps you do anything you can imagine. Surely there's a great possibility for harm there."

"I don't know what you want me to say," he said, breathing a little heavily, "it's how we are. Our society knows how to manage these different…kinds of magic. It's part of being here - part of growing up in Wizarding England. We understand this. It may or may not be the same in other places, but how we use magic is part of who we are."

"That is very true. That's the truest thing you've said to me all day. What bugs me is that since magic is generated and defined by intent, there are some things this culture just doesn't want to accept responsibility for. You are classist, racist, elitist and inexplicably conservative when you can literally change anything around you. People suffer unnecessarily and you have terrible leaders and you all just let this go on. I really can't make any sense of this place."

He was staring at me as if there were a wolf inside him trying to get out.

"You could just leave, if you dislike us so much," he said, chewing the words like a bone.

"But it's really pretty here," I said.

He turned rapidly and walked out of the room, and, if my hearing served, the house.

"Why should I have to leave?" I said out loud to the room. "This is supposed to be my home. Things can't get better without ruining everything for you? Everything's got to stay the same just so you can feel comfortable?"

"It is your home," came Luna's voice from behind me.

I didn't turn just yet but looked out of the window a little longer, kind of wishing that I were out in the pasture, sun-blind, hearing those little whistling flowers and being alright with that, instead of always being fresh from some argument. "Seems like he thinks it's more his than mine. And I don't know that I want to be in this thing that he wants to preserve."

"He's afraid," she said. I heard her steps just barely as she came around the couch I stood in front of and then settled herself on it. "He doesn't have much luck talking with people who don't accept what he believes."

I thought about that.

"You know all about that, though," I said.

"It's the weather around me," she said.

Honestly, I was kind of angry about this. You hear people say things like this - "If you hate it so much here, why don't you leave?" And it really feels like they are saying "I need this to stay like it is, no matter what." Oh, when pressed they'll say that of course, some things should be changed, but it winds up being something that stops some other part from changing. "I don't want these ideas around me and my children." "I don't want to be around these new people." "We should make a new rule that nothing changes" is what it amounts to. (And instantly in my mind there is that shouting voice, without sound but somehow possessing tone, that says "making new rules is change, you gibbering knobwobble!" Or, I don't know, whatever yours says.) Remus wanted to show me the wonders of the magical world as he saw it and wanted it to be, and anything else discomfited him because it wasn't what he saw. It was really weird to me, but also made a kind of sense - he had been bitten by a werewolf, and changed into one every month, and his whole life was about change, so I guess he wanted as few other things to change as possible.

Which is why I also thought it was weird that he was with Tonks. I wasn't expecting much in the way of ease in that relationship. He cared about her very much, but he also had this manner of, I don't know, sort of always benevolently wanting her to see the error of her ways, only her ways were not only what she did and thought but what and who she was, and it's relevant to note how amazing that is about someone, that they are who they are so utterly and comfortably, and I guess you'd have to be if you could literally change stuff about yourself from moment to moment, but anyway so it wasn't actually benevolent of Remus, was it, but that's the thing about people sometimes when they think they are being benevolent about pointing out how your whole situation and you in it are wrong, and it might be good that I don't think I'm being benevolent and I just blurt stuff out like a mostly empty squeezy mustard bottle, because otherwise I might be considered to be a bit of an ass, and maybe I actually am that, but since we judge ourselves on what we think and others on what they do, I don't always know because in spite of all the monologuing I don't know what the hell I'm doing or thinking most of the time.

Her voice was a wisp of smoke in the air. "You keep trying to put down roots with him, as you do with everyone else."

"I don't know," I said. "Might be fruitless."

"You don't think so," she said.

"No, I don't," I said. "I'm sort of…well, I am a little worried that he would think so, somehow. Even though -"

A Luna pause. "You think he's wrong, but he's a part of this world."

"Yeah," I said, "and if he's wrong but he's right about how this world sees itself, then whoever is saying I don't belong here is maybe right."

"Who's saying that?" she said.

I am, I said to myself.

"Your world here is small," she said. "It's not wrong that it is - everything begins that way. But you know how different people can be from each other, and every day you see more."

In a manner very much similar to that if a wall-to-wall carpet hoisted itself up to a peak in front of me and smacked me in the face and then settled itself back down to a comfortable position, a thought occurred to me.

Extremely similar to that, in fact.

I turned around and took her in at her spot on the couch, in the manner she had of belonging where she settled, shoulders relaxed under robes of a fine aubergine fabric that contained moving embroidered images of massive frogs riding clearly unwilling bucking goats in circles, and I sighed. "I'm sorry I'm being an idiot. You have lived this entire thing."

"You'll not need to apologize to me ever," she said, her pale face calm but somehow, via something that happened maybe with her mouth that I wasn't sure about, letting me know that I'd made more of a mistake by apologizing than by forgetting how long she'd lived with otherness.

"Besides, I come and go. When I feel that I belong here, that's where I find that I am, and when I belong somewhere else…" Her eyes went to the left. "I'm off."

I guess I gave her a Deasil pause. Then when she didn't spring up and leave, I said, "oh. Thought you were about to, uh, well."

"Oh, no," she said, "we were going to talk about Hermione and I needed help, and then there was the bank bit."

"What was the - never mind," I said.

At that moment, red and green and Ginny appeared in the doorway. "What about Hermione?"

"He has been wondering about her and needs to understand why she is as she is," Luna said.

"Well yes I have and what?" I said.

Ginny looked like her cat had jumped in someone else's lap. "He's just giving away points to you then?"

I said, "Wouldn't you?"

Ginny tipped her head and raised an eyebrow in acknowledgment and I was reminded in full and visceral force down to my feet on the floor how unbelievably beautiful she was. She wore a green jumper that either Arthur or Molly had made her with a large "W" on the front that both accentuated her form and made her look like she was the heroine of something. She settled by Luna and I just had to count to something though I forgot what it was because it didn't work at all.

"What about Hermione?" she said, smiling I think because it was fairly obvious that I, well, fancied her, Ginny, Ginny Weasley.

"Hermione is a bit weird," Luna said.

Ginny looked at her friend sideways, before saying, "well, yeah."

"And Deasil was along for the Greyback mission, and she was kind of odd - not anything unusual, just how she is, and Deasil is trying to make sense of her."

"What Greyback mission?"

"Oh," Luna said, and looked a little nonplussed. "Did you have lunch with Ron yesterday?"

"Yeah, I went round the ministry. He had a pet sloth in a cage on his desk, of all things. I tried to pet it but it took a swing at me. Not much of a swing, really - saw it coming a mile away."

I was covering my face with one hand.

"Well, anyway," Luna said, "Deasil was there for the capture of Greyback and he -"

"Wait a moment," Ginny said. "Why did they take him - take you along?"

"I, uh, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time," I said.

"Greyback is a mass murderer," she said. "He could have -"

"He didn't," Luna said.

"Well, obviously," Ginny said, and then as she looked at me, I felt that she appeared torn, like a sheet of paper stood up on its end, sagging because of the tear in it, or maybe in the other way, like she was about to jump up, and I wasn't sure if it were to find and harm Ron and Hermione or hug me, or harm me for that matter.

"Look, getting back to the point," I said to a Ginny so filled with disbelief that I would just change the subject like that that she just let it happen, "Hermione is a good person and I like her. But she does some stuff that I don't understand entirely."

"Like what?"

"She's fair to everyone but herself."

"That's - well, that's true, isn't it?"

"She wants things to be even for everyone but she is so, you know, oblivious to what she needs herself, or something - I don't even know. Like the other day we were talking about elves and she was saying that it was hard hearing them speak in that weird way they have, and I said their brains are kind of doggy."

"Dodgy?" Ginny said.

"No, like they are little so their brains are like the size of a dog's, and since dogs can't even talk I thought that elves were doing a pretty good job, but then she said that she'd heard Pella talking and that she never talked like other elves did, and then I said something stupid."

"I doubt it was stupid," Luna said.

"No, it was, because first I said that maybe in the way that elves leech magic off of humans that they also leech intelligence, and then I made a joke about elves struggling to get some of hers because she was always using it, and it wasn't that funny, and then she started thinking like she does and then she said maybe that was why they almost always talked about themselves in the third person, because when they borrowed the intelligence they also borrowed a bit of how people see them, and then I said that Molly always saw Pella as another person instead of a servant, and then Hermione got really upset, because she said that all this time she had been trying to help them and give them rights and yet she must have always been just pitying them and looking down on them just because they needed help, and I said that she clearly did want to help them and that feeling sorry for them was not a bad thing and maybe she saw them as they saw themselves, and somehow it didn't get any better from there and she wound up leaving to get back to work in a hurry, and what the hell? I can't say anything around her."

"See?" Luna said. "Not stupid."

Ginny's eyes kind of looked like they didn't play for the same team for a moment, before she looked back at Luna. "That's a really amazing thought. You two may have really explained something for the first time - that elves talk like that, because - because -"

"Because people are shits?" Luna said.

It was so surprising that Ginny and I both snorted similarly, though she might have been a little louder than I. And I know if she ever reads this there will be a price to pay for that.

"Well, you aren't wrong," I said.

"Hermione has been through a lot," Luna said. "She had a lot to prove to all of the magic-using people who looked down on her. I think she was used to being set apart for being smart, but at least that was a benefit, and then when she came to Hogwarts she found that it wasn't enough to be smart about some things- you also needed to have magical power, and political power, and a host of other things she knew nothing about. It's no wonder that she was so eager when Professor McGonagall gave her a time turner in second year."

"She what?"

"Gave her a time turner," Luna said, adding a bit of volume as if I'd only misheard her. Ginny snickered.

"Is that what I think it is?"

Ginny said, "Who could know what you think anything is?"

Luna said, "It's a little device that lets you travel backwards in time, not a huge amount, but enough to cause problems with causality if you aren't extremely careful."

Extremely…. "So what did she do with it?"

"She took extra classes."

"Extra…"

"She took classes that wouldn't fit into her schedule."

"So she… added hours to her day. Like every day?"

"Five days a week," Ginny said. "I think it was about five hours a day because she wanted to have time to do the revising."

I was imagining a mountain of chaos. A kid, doing kid things, only they could wreck the whole, I don't know, system of things happening after other things. "Were these uh, appliances, commonly available?"

"Well, no, it was a secret that she had one."

"But, but what happened at the end of the year and she had credits for classes she didn't have time for?"

"I don't know," she said, "nobody really noticed. People who shared classes with her thought that's where she was, so…"

"Deasil is wondering about her health, I expect," Luna said.

"Well, yeah," I said, "I mean she had twenty-nine-hour days for five days and then two twenty-four-hour ones. She must have had no idea what time it was ever."

"She did look a bit worn," Luna said, as Ginny smacked herself in the forehead, and as she was wont to do this I wasn't overly concerned about her health.

"Her sleep must have been really awful."

"Merlin," Ginny said.

"Whose idea was this?" I said.

"Minerva McGonagall's," Luna said. "She didn't want to discourage such a promising student who I think she looked at as severely disadvantaged."

"How is Hermione…"

"Non-magical parents."

"And, um, I hate to ask this, but had these been offered to other …"

"No, nobody else had access to this before her, as far as I know - certainly not anyone from the old families."

"Old fa- never mind. Why not?"

"I can't say for sure, but I know that the professor could not have given one to a child from one of the old families. It might represent a threat to the continuation of the line," she said.

"So it's… it's almost like a kind of experiment," I said. "Something Hermione could try out to see what the effects might be on someone, but without the consequences of doing it with someone who's, I don't know, related-to-themselves full magic?"

Ginny cursed loudly.

"Gesundheit?" I said.

"McGonagall wouldn't be able to get one of those on her own. They are highly regulated," she said. "She'd have needed access to the Department of Mysteries."

"The what? Never mind."

"She wouldn't have that. But the headmaster and head of the Wizengamot would."

"I have really had it with that - wait, the head of the what? Never mind."

"No, Deasil, I mean this is quite serious. That kind of act could see him stripped of his positions."

"I don't want to think about either him stripped or any of his positions."

Luna laughed.

Ginny was slumped over, and from what I could see of her eyes they were angry and sad. Though I didn't go looking for anything, I didn't have to do that to see she was full to the top with regret, and I was guessing she was feeling stupid for not seeing something about Hermione, who she loved and had been through so much with.

I was feeling stretched thin by this - her turning inward with guilt, her feeling she'd let someone down because of selfishness or being self-absorbed l, as if someone who'd been through everything she had didn't have a bit of a right to be self-absorbed. It made me angry at this place again - and kind of ignoring her own part in going that way instead of blaming the magic world for being so obtuse, and maybe there was a part of me that was saying "she didn't have to do that, and don't take away her ability to choose for herself what she does, and she can make mistakes too", but at the moment I wanted that part of me to get stuffed, although every image of that I had was fairly problematic in some way, but I wanted to break this tension very, very much. But Luna beat me to it by asking me something apropos of nothing, which is funny because on many levels Luna is apropos of everything.

"Why don't you ever have to cut your hair?"

I paused, and tried to think of a suitable answer, and instead came off with something else. "Every once in a while I pull on the other end."

As Ginny looked up blankly at me, Luna first looked up at my scalp, then somewhere down below my waist.

"What's it like down there?" she says.

"Like a young Dumbledore," I said.

"With a bit of a funny nose," she said.

"No, not on the front side," I said.

"Then very like an old Dumbledore," Ginny said.

Luna regarded Ginny with her blessing of a placid face. "Nothing defeats you for long."

Ginny was still for a moment. Then she leaned over and hugged Luna close.

"Bank bit?" I said into this warm atmosphere.

"Yes," Luna said. "You have an appointment in a short while to go to Gringott's, to claim your vault that your parents had set up for you."

"I have to go be in a vault now?"

Ginny made a sound that indicated realization, but I don't remember what it was. "Lily and James set up a vault for you when you were born, to put away some money and things for you when you were old enough. I suppose that when you… well."

Luna's piccolo took over where Ginny's cor anglais paused. "When you vanished, they couldn't bring themselves to close it down. My father did the same when my mother was killed - he left all manner of things in her name, as if somehow if he only ignored it then she would return to pay a bill or be my guardian at Hogwarts."

"That's - that's, uh, well, that's kind of terrible," I said.

"It didn't make things easier, but it was nice to hear her name said as though everything were normal," she said.

Ginny hadn't yet let go of Luna and now she was showing no signs of ever doing so.

"My friends are such kind people," Luna said. "But I was saying that they left it there, the vault I mean, and it was being managed by the goblins, and since there was no report of your death they continued to invest on your behalf, so it's probably worth significantly more than it was. So James thought you should go down and have a look at it today and take possession of it, because he thought you might find it useful. He wanted to take you but his own business has him tied up at the moment. You got his patronus?"

"What's a patronus?"

"My life," Ginny muttered.

"What? Never mind."

"It's a spectral image of an animal that varies based upon who creates it, that can carry messages or ward off some dark creatures - wraiths, dementors, venalids, and many others, possibly. They will appear in front of you and deliver a message and then vanish."

"Oh. That's what that was."

Ginny was cracking the beginnings of a smile. "What, err… what happened with that?"

I was in the bathroom, actually. It was one of the few places where nothing really weird was likely to happen. The toilet didn't talk to you or, worse, offer any assistance; it wasn't that kind of mirror; nothing like that. I had, I thought, a reasonable expectation of peace and calm in there, unless the twins had snuck something in my food, and I'm not at all going to talk about that except to say they were going for a similar effect to one of their sister's spells, but anyway I was at peace and contemplating in all likelihood not a single solitary thing when all of a sudden there was a large deer or something made of shiny smoky stuff bounding around me in a space not large enough to hold me and any sort of large cervine creature I hadn't personally invited. So any murmuring it might have done using whatever it might have had to push air with was probably drowned out by my yelling, tripping over my underpants, hitting my elbow on the sink, yelling a bit more, stumbling over to the bathtub, barking my shins on the edge and falling into the bathtub where I was immediately submerged in warm soapy water, thrashing about like an idiot and then clambering out just in time to see the thing vanish with a little shimmy of its tail. And no, I didn't tell anybody because I was getting a little numb to this kind of thing, really. Not to banging my elbow or my shins, though - that still hurt.

"Mmm-mm," I said, shrugging my shoulders, though when Ginny held her gaze on me I think my eyes widened and I began to look at other stuff in the room.

"That must have been unsettling," Luna said.

"It livened up my morning a bit," I said.

"So you didn't get the message, then?" Ginny said, suppressing as much of a grin as she could.

"Nope."

"Well, anyway," Luna said, "James said you needed to be there by half two, and it's not long to that now."

"One?"

Ginny just barely stopped herself from saying "what" and instead wound up with a constricted-sounding "hmmmm?"

"Half of two is -"

"Think 'half past two', D," Ginny said.

"Ongoing?" I said.

"What? Shite," Ginny said, shaking her head in disgust at herself at giving up her paltry ten.

"Like half-two is half of two being done with. So like two thirty is half of two gone, and when it's all gone it will be three."

She had a long look at me, and it felt like her deciding that she still liked what she saw in spite of things like that being emitted from me on occasion. "I think you have it. Or something."

"Okay."

"Do you know where Gringott's is?"

"Big stone building with the big wrapper stairs in Diagonal Alley where Bill works?"

"Wrapper stairs?"

"They kind of wrap around the front part."

"That's the one, near enough."

"Okay."

"D'you want company?" she said.

"Yes, but also no. I need to get out more on my own, I think." I thought about it, looking at these two wonderful people that looked out for me in very different ways. Ginny was still sitting close to Luna, and for a moment, the thought of them heading out into the world together to do something that would find them both laughing was almost blinding in its sweetness. Friends are beautiful.

"In that case, I need to talk to someone," Ginny said. "I mean I'm talking to people but I need to talk to someone else - D, you are making me say and do 'you' things and I'm not entirely glad about that right now."

"Well, let me know when you might - never mind."

"I. Won't," she said.

"You won't mind?"

"Stop looking hopeful. It won't do. Luna, do something about him." She got up and then paused, and then leaned over to me and kissed my head. "No, don't stop looking hopeful." She went and tossed some stuff in the fire and went in after it.

"That doesn't stop being weird," I said.

Luna said, "I imagine pecks on the head would be rather nice, actually."

I regarded her.

"Yes, I know," she said.

"I would like to see you both after," I said. "Is there like a magic pizza we could get?"

Luna slowly shook her head. "It would only make you sad."

A/N: New York pizza is singular. It's not like the pizza in Tuscany - it's distinct. And there's definitely pizza to be had in London and Chicago. But if you want one thing in particular…

I should have before, but I have someone to thank at this moment. My daughter was born during the previously published chapters (23 and before) and so much time has elapsed since then that she became old enough for me to read this to her. I may have skipped some parts initially, but now she's heard it all. Many times, at her insistence. Of all the gifts I might have received, that this is now a part of our family tapestry is something I really don't have the words for. Having her say "ten points" to me out of nowhere is hilarious. And my efforts at doing all of the voices while reading have always been rewarded. (I always read Dumbledore as Richard Harris. Far better for lunacy.) So in thanking her I also want to encourage parents to make things up for their kids when possible. It's family glue. And even appears to survive the teen years, so far.