(no subject)
Title: Rooms and Voices
Author: fuschia
Written for: shagsthedustmop
Pairing: Hermione/Luna, working at the ministry
Length: approximately 1900 words
Rating: R. (My apologies - I couldn't quite make the NC-17!)
Warnings: Angst
Briefest of Summaries: Hermione seeks out Luna in the Department of Mysteries.
1.
Hermione finally found Luna Lovegood in the Death Room, sitting on a steep step, head cocked towards the veiled doorway, her wand, as ever, tucked behind one ear, its tip lost in the sea of her straggly hair.
“Don’t you have a desk?” Hermione asked, exasperation sharp in her voice. As no one from the Department of Mysteries seemed to know where Luna worked - or, for that matter, what, exactly, it was that she did there -Hermione had finally gone down there herself, spending a good portion of her lunch hour revisiting blank-walled hallways she had long hoped to forget.
Luna turned her head slowly towards Hermione, wide eyes unblinking; except for the scratchy trail of white, waxy scarlines that latticed the right side of her neck, she looked much the same as she did ten years ago, a girl-woman with unkempt clothes, her robes mismatched even now, a near-featherless quill protruding from behind her other ear.
“Oh…hello,” she said, softly, her face open, unsurprised, “You got my notes, then?”
“You mean these, I suppose?” Hermione asked, brandishing a fist full of parchments that still bore the creases of their airplane-passage through the halls of the Ministry.
Luna stared at the papers for a while, then smiled slightly. “Good,” she said, slowly, before turning her body back towards the doorframe.
“Luna,” Hermione said, more crossly than she had intended, “I have some things to ask you about these. Didn’t you get my memos? I am not about to add Crumple-Horned Snorkacks to the proposal for the magical creatures bill of rights! It’s been hard enough getting anything like this passed without adding on things that don’t exist-“
“They do exist,” Luna said, faintly, still not turning back to Hermione.
Hermione puffed out a breath in exasperation. “Luna, don’t you think-“
“Shhh…I’m listening.”
“Listening to what?”
“To them.”
Hermione didn’t ask who; she never asked who anymore, unwilling to hear names she had last seen engraved in headstones, some of which stood over empty graves, no bodies left to be found. Her colleagues in the Ministry had learned to stop mentioning certain names to her; even Ginny avoided the subject when they saw each other, strained, over lunch. How could she say to her best friend that her face was too familiar, that even the ember-shade of her hair shone too red, too close to that of another’s? Hermione did not want to talk to anyone about how it felt to wash your best friends’ blood from your body. Although Hermione had never asked Luna why she had kept her scars, she didn’t have to. If she could have borne marks on her own skin, outside of herself, she would have done so without hesitation. That much pain should not be left without a mark of its passing, of its presence; it should have crossed her skin like a map, compass lines of suffering, of witness, of remembrance.
Instead, though, she survived, unmarked, and the room, to her, was silent; whatever Luna heard then, she could not.
“I don’t hear anything,” she said, finally, softly.
“That’s because you’ve decided not to,” Luna answered, matter-of-factly, though not unkindly.
After a few long moments of silence, Hermione left Luna’s letters on the nearest steep stair, and returned to her office. On the long elevator ride back to her own department, she did not cry.
2.
When Hermione, returning, found Luna’s desk, it didn’t surprise her that Luna was not there. It also didn’t surprise her that no one else had a desk anywhere near hers; Luna’s small office lay wedged in a corner alcove far beyond the halls of prophecy, beyond even the warren-maze of the thought-rooms. As at Hogwarts, at the Ministry Luna was looked at with skepticism, with a sort of mocking laughter Hermione could see in her coworkers’ eyes when she asked about her. You weren’t there, she thought at them, none of you were there. She wanted to tell them of Luna as she was once, blood-stained, embattled, fierce. Didn’t any of them know the risks she and her father had taken in continuing to print the Quibbler once the Prophet had been silenced?
The only photo on Luna’s untidy desk showed her and her father somewhere in the far north, smiling their similar, uncertain smiles against a backdrop of tundra land and endless daylight, a black form hovering, indistinct, in the distance. HL and LL with a Crumple-Horned Snorkack, read the caption, written in Luna’s overly looped handwriting.
Did she hear her father, then, when she listened at the veil?
Hermione’s own father had died of a heart attack in the midst of the war; Hermione could not even attend his funeral. Even if she had wanted to, she would never be able to hear his voice beyond the curtain - the veil, she had learned, only led to the death-worlds of wizards. Why should her father’s voice be silenced? The unfairness of this situation, she told her colleagues, reeked of wizard prejudice and superstition, and for this reason, she claimed, she would not accept the veil as anything more than a portal to another realm - quite scientific, really,- and not a door to death at all. Even she knew, though, that this was only half of the truth, a conviction laid down like a layer of sand to cover the bare bones of all that is inconsolable.
Still, when she found Luna there again, she did not turn and leave, but took a seat on the highest step. For a long time, they sat together, unspeaking, their silence, to Hermione, broken only by the whisking of the veil as it moved, agitated by the rush of an unknown wind.
3.
After a month or so, Hermione had grown so used to spending her lunch hour sitting with Luna Lovegood in the Death Room that she felt somewhat cross not to find her there. The room, without Luna’s placid company, seemed danker, closer; Hermione could see it as it must have been in its days as an execution chamber, grim-faced wizards and witches gathered around the dais. Hermione left immediately, chiding herself for her irrational worries; without Luna there, though, serving as a designated listener, a designated mourner, Hermione feared that she would begin to hear voices that had been silent to her for years. For the first time in a while, she sensed the empty space on either side of her as she walked, alone, along the long corridors.
She has almost reached the elevators when Luna appeared from a doorway on the left, walking slowly, her body drifting as though unanchored to gravity, unmoored from the realities of the world; her face, goggle-eyed, was cast over with tears, but her wide mouth softened into a smile when she saw Hermione.
“Oh,” she said, and nothing more, and reached out to take both of Hermione’s hands in her soft, pale fingers. Hermione’s own fingers had grown calloused from endless writing, marred with ink-stains dark as bruises, dark as the circles worn into the skin beneath her eyes. ”Oh, “ Luna said again, pressing Hermione’s hands, pulling her closer, “You’ll like this room much better.”
4.
The room was smaller that Hermione had expected, almost intimate; the bare walls were covered with a dark, soft fabric that shimmered slightly in the dim light of ever-burning candles held in sconces near the low ceiling. At the room’s center, mid-air, a rounded glass container floated, bubble-like, bobbling slightly up and down, or drawing small circles, drifting as though in orbit. At the center of the glass a nova of light lay pulsing, shifting through spectra of unexpected colors, emitting a melodious sound that seemed to float in and out of hearing range.
“Luna,” Hermione said, standing on the threshold, “how did you get access to this?”
“Oh, they let me go wherever I want….so long as I leave them alone.”
Having freed one hand to open the door, Luna now tugged at her with the other, pulling her inside. Hermione took a deep breath as they tumbled in together, not certain what to expect, but the room containing the most powerful force known to the wizarding world turned out to be surprisingly peaceful. In the shifting light, Luna’s face shone, prismatic with drying tears.
“We shouldn’t be in here,” Hermione said, “No one knows what this does-“
“That’s because it doesn’t do anything. It just is,” Luna answered, and before Hermione could stop her, she grabbed her wand from behind her ear and muttered, dreamily, “mobilispherus.” As the glass bubble dissipated, the light within it pulsed more rapidly, licking outwards like a flame, and Hermione doubled over with the sudden force of emotion rising within her.
It did not feel at all like the effects of a love potion, or like the nightmarish distance of the Imperius curse, her body and emotions tainted at the surface while her mind, rational, screamed from within, desperate to break through. Instead, love, her own love, the truth of the emotion, swelled up from within like a rising wave. Standing there, holding Luna Lovegood’s hand, she found herself crying with unexpected joy, remembering details she had long forgotten, seeing clearly again the faces of those she had loved, of those she loved still. She felt as though the light she saw before her was now streaming from within her, too, pouring from every unseen organ of her body, uncontainable.
When she looked at Luna, she saw that she, too, was radiant.
5.
They did not begin to kiss in the Love Room, but in the hallway, their limbs still vibrating with the force of what they had felt. Their faces, still wet with tears, slid against each other as they embraced; when Hermione pressed her mouth against Luna’s, their tears, intermingled, tasted of the ocean, salty as blood. Afterwards, Hermione would think that their first time together was like making love on a broken battlefield, overcome as they were with loss and with the sudden sense of their own living bodies, of their own capacity for love. Luna’s ungainly body, all angles and overlong limbs, arched into hers as they clung to one another, their bodies pressing together in rushed urgency, as though they sought to meld into one being, conjoined at the stomach, at the breast, at the hip. In the silence of the dim hallway, Hermione kissed Luna’s scars, following the tracery of white along her neck, her clavicle, slipping down along the side of her breast, along the sharp protrusions of her ribcage. Luna drifted against her like a doll, like an awkwardly strung marionette, and soon their hands were tangled in one another’s hair, and they were laughing as much as they were crying or crying out.
As she flooded to orgasm under Luna’s tongue, Hermione’s mind filled with a sudden rush of noise, as though a crowd of voices had begun to speak to her all at once.
6.
Afterwards, they lay together in silence, as they would so many times in the years and the decades to come, their bodies tangled together like the bodies of castaways washed up on an uncharted beach, lost at sea, but not alone.
Author: fuschia
Written for: shagsthedustmop
Pairing: Hermione/Luna, working at the ministry
Length: approximately 1900 words
Rating: R. (My apologies - I couldn't quite make the NC-17!)
Warnings: Angst
Briefest of Summaries: Hermione seeks out Luna in the Department of Mysteries.
1.
Hermione finally found Luna Lovegood in the Death Room, sitting on a steep step, head cocked towards the veiled doorway, her wand, as ever, tucked behind one ear, its tip lost in the sea of her straggly hair.
“Don’t you have a desk?” Hermione asked, exasperation sharp in her voice. As no one from the Department of Mysteries seemed to know where Luna worked - or, for that matter, what, exactly, it was that she did there -Hermione had finally gone down there herself, spending a good portion of her lunch hour revisiting blank-walled hallways she had long hoped to forget.
Luna turned her head slowly towards Hermione, wide eyes unblinking; except for the scratchy trail of white, waxy scarlines that latticed the right side of her neck, she looked much the same as she did ten years ago, a girl-woman with unkempt clothes, her robes mismatched even now, a near-featherless quill protruding from behind her other ear.
“Oh…hello,” she said, softly, her face open, unsurprised, “You got my notes, then?”
“You mean these, I suppose?” Hermione asked, brandishing a fist full of parchments that still bore the creases of their airplane-passage through the halls of the Ministry.
Luna stared at the papers for a while, then smiled slightly. “Good,” she said, slowly, before turning her body back towards the doorframe.
“Luna,” Hermione said, more crossly than she had intended, “I have some things to ask you about these. Didn’t you get my memos? I am not about to add Crumple-Horned Snorkacks to the proposal for the magical creatures bill of rights! It’s been hard enough getting anything like this passed without adding on things that don’t exist-“
“They do exist,” Luna said, faintly, still not turning back to Hermione.
Hermione puffed out a breath in exasperation. “Luna, don’t you think-“
“Shhh…I’m listening.”
“Listening to what?”
“To them.”
Hermione didn’t ask who; she never asked who anymore, unwilling to hear names she had last seen engraved in headstones, some of which stood over empty graves, no bodies left to be found. Her colleagues in the Ministry had learned to stop mentioning certain names to her; even Ginny avoided the subject when they saw each other, strained, over lunch. How could she say to her best friend that her face was too familiar, that even the ember-shade of her hair shone too red, too close to that of another’s? Hermione did not want to talk to anyone about how it felt to wash your best friends’ blood from your body. Although Hermione had never asked Luna why she had kept her scars, she didn’t have to. If she could have borne marks on her own skin, outside of herself, she would have done so without hesitation. That much pain should not be left without a mark of its passing, of its presence; it should have crossed her skin like a map, compass lines of suffering, of witness, of remembrance.
Instead, though, she survived, unmarked, and the room, to her, was silent; whatever Luna heard then, she could not.
“I don’t hear anything,” she said, finally, softly.
“That’s because you’ve decided not to,” Luna answered, matter-of-factly, though not unkindly.
After a few long moments of silence, Hermione left Luna’s letters on the nearest steep stair, and returned to her office. On the long elevator ride back to her own department, she did not cry.
2.
When Hermione, returning, found Luna’s desk, it didn’t surprise her that Luna was not there. It also didn’t surprise her that no one else had a desk anywhere near hers; Luna’s small office lay wedged in a corner alcove far beyond the halls of prophecy, beyond even the warren-maze of the thought-rooms. As at Hogwarts, at the Ministry Luna was looked at with skepticism, with a sort of mocking laughter Hermione could see in her coworkers’ eyes when she asked about her. You weren’t there, she thought at them, none of you were there. She wanted to tell them of Luna as she was once, blood-stained, embattled, fierce. Didn’t any of them know the risks she and her father had taken in continuing to print the Quibbler once the Prophet had been silenced?
The only photo on Luna’s untidy desk showed her and her father somewhere in the far north, smiling their similar, uncertain smiles against a backdrop of tundra land and endless daylight, a black form hovering, indistinct, in the distance. HL and LL with a Crumple-Horned Snorkack, read the caption, written in Luna’s overly looped handwriting.
Did she hear her father, then, when she listened at the veil?
Hermione’s own father had died of a heart attack in the midst of the war; Hermione could not even attend his funeral. Even if she had wanted to, she would never be able to hear his voice beyond the curtain - the veil, she had learned, only led to the death-worlds of wizards. Why should her father’s voice be silenced? The unfairness of this situation, she told her colleagues, reeked of wizard prejudice and superstition, and for this reason, she claimed, she would not accept the veil as anything more than a portal to another realm - quite scientific, really,- and not a door to death at all. Even she knew, though, that this was only half of the truth, a conviction laid down like a layer of sand to cover the bare bones of all that is inconsolable.
Still, when she found Luna there again, she did not turn and leave, but took a seat on the highest step. For a long time, they sat together, unspeaking, their silence, to Hermione, broken only by the whisking of the veil as it moved, agitated by the rush of an unknown wind.
3.
After a month or so, Hermione had grown so used to spending her lunch hour sitting with Luna Lovegood in the Death Room that she felt somewhat cross not to find her there. The room, without Luna’s placid company, seemed danker, closer; Hermione could see it as it must have been in its days as an execution chamber, grim-faced wizards and witches gathered around the dais. Hermione left immediately, chiding herself for her irrational worries; without Luna there, though, serving as a designated listener, a designated mourner, Hermione feared that she would begin to hear voices that had been silent to her for years. For the first time in a while, she sensed the empty space on either side of her as she walked, alone, along the long corridors.
She has almost reached the elevators when Luna appeared from a doorway on the left, walking slowly, her body drifting as though unanchored to gravity, unmoored from the realities of the world; her face, goggle-eyed, was cast over with tears, but her wide mouth softened into a smile when she saw Hermione.
“Oh,” she said, and nothing more, and reached out to take both of Hermione’s hands in her soft, pale fingers. Hermione’s own fingers had grown calloused from endless writing, marred with ink-stains dark as bruises, dark as the circles worn into the skin beneath her eyes. ”Oh, “ Luna said again, pressing Hermione’s hands, pulling her closer, “You’ll like this room much better.”
4.
The room was smaller that Hermione had expected, almost intimate; the bare walls were covered with a dark, soft fabric that shimmered slightly in the dim light of ever-burning candles held in sconces near the low ceiling. At the room’s center, mid-air, a rounded glass container floated, bubble-like, bobbling slightly up and down, or drawing small circles, drifting as though in orbit. At the center of the glass a nova of light lay pulsing, shifting through spectra of unexpected colors, emitting a melodious sound that seemed to float in and out of hearing range.
“Luna,” Hermione said, standing on the threshold, “how did you get access to this?”
“Oh, they let me go wherever I want….so long as I leave them alone.”
Having freed one hand to open the door, Luna now tugged at her with the other, pulling her inside. Hermione took a deep breath as they tumbled in together, not certain what to expect, but the room containing the most powerful force known to the wizarding world turned out to be surprisingly peaceful. In the shifting light, Luna’s face shone, prismatic with drying tears.
“We shouldn’t be in here,” Hermione said, “No one knows what this does-“
“That’s because it doesn’t do anything. It just is,” Luna answered, and before Hermione could stop her, she grabbed her wand from behind her ear and muttered, dreamily, “mobilispherus.” As the glass bubble dissipated, the light within it pulsed more rapidly, licking outwards like a flame, and Hermione doubled over with the sudden force of emotion rising within her.
It did not feel at all like the effects of a love potion, or like the nightmarish distance of the Imperius curse, her body and emotions tainted at the surface while her mind, rational, screamed from within, desperate to break through. Instead, love, her own love, the truth of the emotion, swelled up from within like a rising wave. Standing there, holding Luna Lovegood’s hand, she found herself crying with unexpected joy, remembering details she had long forgotten, seeing clearly again the faces of those she had loved, of those she loved still. She felt as though the light she saw before her was now streaming from within her, too, pouring from every unseen organ of her body, uncontainable.
When she looked at Luna, she saw that she, too, was radiant.
5.
They did not begin to kiss in the Love Room, but in the hallway, their limbs still vibrating with the force of what they had felt. Their faces, still wet with tears, slid against each other as they embraced; when Hermione pressed her mouth against Luna’s, their tears, intermingled, tasted of the ocean, salty as blood. Afterwards, Hermione would think that their first time together was like making love on a broken battlefield, overcome as they were with loss and with the sudden sense of their own living bodies, of their own capacity for love. Luna’s ungainly body, all angles and overlong limbs, arched into hers as they clung to one another, their bodies pressing together in rushed urgency, as though they sought to meld into one being, conjoined at the stomach, at the breast, at the hip. In the silence of the dim hallway, Hermione kissed Luna’s scars, following the tracery of white along her neck, her clavicle, slipping down along the side of her breast, along the sharp protrusions of her ribcage. Luna drifted against her like a doll, like an awkwardly strung marionette, and soon their hands were tangled in one another’s hair, and they were laughing as much as they were crying or crying out.
As she flooded to orgasm under Luna’s tongue, Hermione’s mind filled with a sudden rush of noise, as though a crowd of voices had begun to speak to her all at once.
6.
Afterwards, they lay together in silence, as they would so many times in the years and the decades to come, their bodies tangled together like the bodies of castaways washed up on an uncharted beach, lost at sea, but not alone.