Luna,

If my suspicions regarding the nature of your relationship with Harry are correct, I'm afraid this feeling is something you'll have to get used to. Harry Potter is my best friend. I fear for his safety every day, and I have since first year. You'll find, I think, that there's something (pardon the phrase) magical about him. He survives, despite it all, every time. In the midst it isn't much to lift the burden, of course, but it's something.

You needn't apologize. I'll be your escape, if you'll be mine. Ron is hopelessly obtuse, and I've been waiting years for someone who understands.

Asher (who is, by the way, adorable) tapped on my window mere minutes after I finished a special edition of The Daily Prophet. I've just read nine pages of articles covering, of all things, a Dementor attack in Little Whinging, the tragic death of a muggle boy, Harry Potter's extraordinary survival, his emergency trial of before the Wizengamot, the sudden revelation of corruption at the highest ranks of the Ministry, and the Minister's pending resignation.

That is to say, you've caught me off balance.

I'm sorry to disappoint you, Luna. I am not the brilliant, loyal, powerful witch you describe. She would be a fearsome thing to behold. What I am is a skeptic. If I can see it, if I can break it down, if I can gauge its effects, if I can understand it and manipulate it — in a word, if it makes good logical sense to me — that I'll believe.

Hence when I first learned of magic, I exerted every effort to understand it. I read anything I could get my hands on, theory or practice, history or philosophy. To be honest, that pursuit was driven less by fascination than desperation. I must understand, you see. I feel lost in a world I cannot wrap my mind around.

So when you told me about your Sight, I was sincerely at a loss.

The notion that a series of events that haven't yet happened might be accessed and understood in the present has always felt (forgive me for saying it) absurd. The idea that an event contingent upon the decisions of free agents might be foreknown — not forecast in a broad sense but comprehensively accounted for in the strictest sense — shakes my conception of the relationship between will and action, determination and liberty, the very nature of time.

Yet everything you saw — every detail of your vision, seemingly without exception — unfolded precisely as you said it would.

Luna, my paradigm has been shaken violently, and I'm genuinely unsettled.

I've always accounted for magic as a set of laws — a clean, logical system of relationships that may be comprehensively understood and manipulated. Clever witches and wizards merely intuit the relationship of these forces more readily than others. The mental calculus, conscious or subconscious, requisite to rightly account for the relationship of this principle to that accounts for the distinction between a more or less powerful witch or wizard.

In a word, magic was physics to my mind. A neat box with clean boundaries.

That isn't the way you speak about magic. You speak of forces, indeed, but with the implication of will, personality, imagination behind them all. You speak of beauty and power and purpose. You speak of magic as the arena of light and darkness, of hope and despair. Perhaps most disruptive of all, you speak of magic as wonderful, inaccessible mystery.

A world that I cannot know terrifies me. Could there be such a thing?

And yet, you've seen.

Some aspect of you has encountered, as fact, a series of events contingent upon tens of thousands of variables. You saw, as fact, that which was merely possibility. And you were right. As I write this, I tremble.

You ask whether I want to believe?

I confess that part of me longs for a taste of the wonder that saturates your mind and your heart. Part of me longs to trace expressions of breathtaking beauty to an articulation of profound purpose. That part of me wants to be like you, Luna.

Yet I do enjoy the occasional neat box with nicely drawn boundaries.

If I'm to go, you'll have to lead me there.

Yours,
Hermione Granger

Hermione,

You're a clever witch, and any efforts to dissuade your curious intellect from piecing together the nature of my relationship with Harry would be, I regret, pointless. For reasons that will perhaps become clear, I've attempted to keep as much from Harry as possible. I cannot help but hope you've seen through that veil. I'm alone in my thoughts, and I'd welcome your kind counsel.

I will be your escape, Hermione Granger, 'til those happy days beyond any need for one.

As far as I can tell, skepticism comes from one of two directions: distrust of people, and distrust of possibility. I can accept, and in some contexts I can even endorse, the former. If my experience has taught me anything, it's that people can be awful — and those that aren't awful are often confused and biased and more often than not wrong.

It's the latter that troubles me. The gut instinct to reject a notion as impossible merely because it hasn't been personally experienced seems to me an expression of profound hopelessness. This sort of skepticism is categorically distinct from the other, because if anything the history of humanity has taught us in every age that what past generations dismissed as impossible was merely beyond their reach, or (in the worst cases) beyond the limits of their imagination.

To the degree that you withhold judgment against the backdrop of mankind's frailty, I welcome the hesitation. Beyond this, I hope you'll consider the lessons of the Enlightenment, of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, the development of the field of Physics. Consider Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. The history of humanity is a catalogue of impossible discovery.

You say you feel lost in a world you don't fully understand? If my suspicions regarding the nature of your relationship to the Universe are correct, I'm afraid this is a feeling you'll have to get used to.

Perhaps our world is indeed governed by a system of relationships between forces with clear boundaries and logical relationships. Perhaps laws and mathematical principles are the most appropriate framework to understand these relationships. I fail to see why beauty and power and purpose, will and personality and imagination shouldn't saturate them all.

Your keen eyes have seen the trembling leaves, the dancing branches, the soft sway of the ancient oak. You've heard the whispers of the breeze, yet your heart won't allow you to call it "wind."

You ask, "How?"
I ask, "Why?"
I can't help but believe we need each other.

Yours,
Luna Lovegood

My dear Luna,

A moment ago I dipped my quill in ink and hesitated. We've just spent hours together, and surely you'd like to rest before heading directly to my place first thing tomorrow morning. But then I remembered that I'd just spent a solid twenty hours away from you (in a cold cell, no less), and I was suddenly certain you'd forgive any attempt to make up for lost time.

I miss you, Luna. This evening wasn't nearly enough.

It's also worth noting that when we were together this afternoon, we didn't do much talking. I actually quite like when we don't do much talking, by the way. I mean that only in the most suggestive sense.

I am at this moment thoroughly exhausted, but I have so much on my mind.

I didn't sleep much last night, of course. I couldn't stop thinking about Dudley. Even now, his death haunts me. I've decided to call it "death," by the way. Whatever has been left behind, it isn't him.

The thing that bothers me so much is that I hated him, and I think I was almost right to do it. He was truly awful to me, since we were young boys. I have no memory that doesn't involve his brutish violence. Yet it's there that I'm shaken — in the notion that he's always been this way. It's another way to say that he's been raised this way. His environment, his family, his inherited values. Had he any choice in the matter? Had he any opportunity to be merciful or kind?

I honestly don't know the answer to that question. His soul is gone, and I wonder whether he truly had a chance. It's left me overcome by something like pity.

Malfoy. I keep thinking of Malfoy. He is the spitting image of his father, in more ways than one. And I wonder now whether, given a real opportunity, he'd make a different choice. I wonder whether Dudley would have made a different choice. Malfoy and Dudley. They're so tightly associated in my mind, because I know of each of them only animosity. Yet something about Dudley's death has cast shades of grey between the black and white I've always thought I saw clearly.

Is there anything in Malfoy to be redeemed?

I think, to this point, I've thought about it all as "us" versus "them." Good guys and bad guys, fighting till the end. It seems muddier now. I'm wondering whether we've drawn lines in the sand too quickly, whether we've set ourselves at war against victims.

I must believe. I must believe that change is possible, that hope can transcend the darkness. Or else what are we fighting for?

A moment's reflection has made me certain. Mere weeks ago I was desperate — fighting despair and overwhelmed with dark isolation. Bitter hate haunted the dark corners of my thoughts, and I was spiraling.

But you spoke to me. You saw me and you heard me, and you met me in my fear and pain. In your kindness and hope you led me out of that darkness.

So I must believe in redemption. Because I've met you, Luna, and it's changed me forever.

You are, Luna Lovegood, a piercing light. You've taught my heart to hope.

And I am,
Yours,
Harry Potter

P.S. — I've just noticed a letter on my window sill. The moment I saw your script, my heart leapt. You have a power over me that I wouldn't have thought possible. Merely the hint of your affection moves me.

Harry Potter,

I can only attribute your reticence to overwhelming exhaustion, as I've given you every indication that your attention is welcome at any hour. Wake me as you please, Harry Potter. I rest in your words.

I'm sorry, Harry. I grieve with you for your cousin's life.

Violence infects. It's the way of the darkness, to capture and transform and destroy. Yet we are free, and darkness has no power over freedom. I cannot help but believe that we act as we will.

Did he have any choice? I think he did, or I don't know what to make of the world. We are not merely the product of our influences. Yet influences matter. Opportunity matters. If there is judgment on the other side of the veil, I must believe it accounts for opportunity.

Dudley was free, and therein lies the tragedy of his death.

Malfoy is free, and therein lies the hope for his life. Hope for him can drive away the darkness. Hope for him, fostering kindness and mercy and relentless goodwill, is an invitation. It's an opportunity. You have within your power to grant that opportunity.

I believe, Harry. I believe in the power of the light over the darkness. And I believe in you.

You, Harry Potter, have my fullest confidence.

And, as it happens, my fullest attention. When might I have your… fullest attention?

Yours,
Luna Lovegood

P.S. — Your touch, Harry Potter. It radiates and captivates, and I cannot stop thinking about it. More, please.