The Great Snorkack Migration
Disclaimer: None of these characters are mine.
Written for: Wand of the Woods Challenge at govt_stole_toad
Title: The Great Snorkack Migration
Prompt: Honeysuckle
Pairing: Neville/Luna
Rating: G
Genre: Romance
Word Count: 2,500
Summary: There are some momentous events that only happen once.
Warnings: A couple small DH spoilers!
“Good Morning, Neville.”
The ethereal voice ~ sweet, light, unmistakable ~ made Neville drop the box of pots he was tucking under the planting table. It hit the ground with a tinkle, but Neville hardly noticed, straightening up to stare at Luna Lovegood in astonishment.
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” She leaned over the table and peered down at the box. “Did I startle you?”
“Don’t… don’t worry about it,” he said absently, still gazing at her. “Nothing a Reparo won’t fix.”
“Well, I’d offer to do it myself, but that’s rather why I’m here. I need to borrow your wand.”
Neville tried to catch up. He didn’t know whether to say “Hello, Luna!” or “Of course you may.” or “Where have you been the last four years?”
“What happened to yours?”
“Oh, it was broken during the Battle of Hogwarts. Don’t you remember, Neville? You were there.”
“I… you…. I remember, but… that was so long ago,” he stuttered, aghast. “Surely you haven’t been without a wand all this time?”
“Yes, but it’s been no trouble. Things have been very quiet since then, haven’t they? And I’ve been traveling on assignments for Father, so I’ve been in the Muggle World quite a lot.”
“I didn’t know you were still writing for the Quibbler! I’ve been checking for your name on all the bylines…” he trailed off. No need to tell her he’d been subscribing to the paper for ages now, much to his Grandmother’s annoyance every morning at breakfast.
“I’ve been using a quill name,” she explained. “Phillipa Phetlock, that’s me.” She smiled at him.
“Luna, why haven’t you gotten a new wand? Ollivander opened his shop again years ago.”
“I know that, Neville,” she said patiently. “I’ve been by to visit him several times. But he’s dreadfully busy, so many people needed new wands after the battle, and there are children entering school every year, and most of his stock was destroyed or stolen, and I just haven’t wanted to put any further burden on him. He’s very old, you know. When he’s all caught up I’ll see about getting mine replaced. Meantime, though, I need to do a little spellwork, and I thought you might be kind enough to help me.”
“Of course, Luna. Anything you need.”
“Why don’t you come to dinner, then, and we’ll discuss the details. I’m afraid Father is out of town, he will be sorry to have missed you. Seven o’clock?”
Neville nodded. “Seven,” he repeated, and watched as she strolled out of Greenhouse Three as if she walked in and out of its doors every day of the week.
*
Neville showed up at the Lovegood domicile at six fifty-five, with a large and untidy bundle of flowers in his arms.
He wasn’t sure what had made him choose honeysuckle. With all the Greenhouses available to him full of exotics and traditional favorites, he’d found himself at the border wall outside Hogsmeade, which was covered in the rampant, sweet-smelling vine. The vibrant flyaway blooms had just seemed to suit her somehow.
Luna gave him a warm smile when she answered the door and waved him through. “Do come in. I’ve almost finished with the parsnip roulade.”
It was a strange house. There were many pots and pans and cauldrons bubbling away on the stove, Neville was reminded rather forcefully of Potions class on project days.
“You look busy,” he offered, “Can I put these in water for you?”
“Please.” Luna handed him a vase shaped like a woman with a hat on her head.
Neville filled it up at the sink and put the stalks in the water. The clay head’s clay hat was now topped with a riot of bright orange flowers. Keeping his opinions on tacky crockery to himself, he simply went about casting some good preserving charms while Luna floated around pouring things into tureens and platters.
Luna began to lay the table with a mismatch of silverware and colorful chipped plates. Neville was aware he was staring at her, but he couldn’t help himself. She was very different from the girl he remembered. She’d been so petite and frail in school that Neville had never really ever been able to picture her as growing up. But she was certainly a woman now, her dark blue dress draped in places from soft curves, and none of them were hidden any more by baggy cardigans or cloaks. She still had a porcelain-pale complexion and was a trifle too thin for Neville’s entire peace of mind, but her hair was fuller, a darker, clearer shade of gold, and she seemed more focused.
He watched her light the candles by puffing on the wicks. “You’ve gotten very good at wandless magic,” he observed.
“Oh, parlor tricks,” she demurred, settling herself into her chair and gesturing for him to do the same. “Now… for the exciting bit!” She clasped her hands together like a girl at a birthday party.
“The parsnip roulade?”
“The Crumple-horned Snorkacks!”
“We’re not having them for dinner, are we?” Neville asked nervously. “I thought you were a vegetarian.”
“They’re migrating!” she announced.
“I see.”
Neville had heard a great deal about these mythical creatures from Hermione and Ron over the years. It was something of a running joke between the two. He was careful to keep a neutral expression on his face.
“I’ve come into some very reliable information that they will be migrating through Wood’s Pass on the evening of the summer solstice this year,” Luna explained. “There will be a moment, when the full moon is at the proper degree, when they will be visible to a Revealing spell, which is why I need a wand. You’re welcome to come with me, of course. Imagine, a whole great herd of them, Neville, and we can be there!”
He supposed he could do with a bit of a holiday, and an evening with a lovely woman under a full moon didn’t sound so rough, he could bring a picnic for while they waited and then be ready with a comforting shoulder when these snorkack things failed to show up….. “Sorry, what?” He realized she’d been mumbling something about wine.
“I forgot the wine.” She bit the corner of her lip. “It’s… in the cellar.”
It was the smallest of hesitations, but Neville caught it all the same. “I’ll get it,” he offered, rising from his chair. He stood looking down at her for a moment, at the candlelight flickering in her luminous eyes, and for a moment he was suspended in a maelstrom of emotion ~ admiration, pity, sorrow, and rage. The Malfoys might like to pretend they’d been innocent victims in the war, but Neville had never, and would never, forget what had happened to Luna in their house. It still made him reel to think he hadn’t known, hadn’t been able to help.
Luna blinked up at him calmly. “A nice claret?” she suggested, snapping him out of his thoughts.
“Right.”
*
“Mind if I practice a bit with the wand?” Luna asked him suddenly, as they were clearing away the dessert plates. Neville obligingly handed it over.
She gave it an experimental little wave in the direction of the chandelier, illuminating one, two, ten of the lights above. “Oh, that’s lovely. Cherry wood, is it?”
Neville nodded. “And unicorn hair.”
Luna tried a few more spells, Transfiguring her earrings into apple blossoms and Neville’s cufflinks into sunflowers.
“Excellent!” she declared happily, and handed it back to him.
“Keep it for now,” he insisted. He couldn’t bear the thought of her without a wand. “You can give it back to me after the migration.”
*
Neville set the picnic basket on the big flat rock overlooking Wood’s Pass and sat down a few feet from Luna and her tripod. He watched her fiddle with the enormous telescope and make notations in her notebook. She was mumbling things he vaguely recalled from Astronomy class.
The moon looked as big as an ice rink overhead, lighting Wood’s Pass as if it were a river.
He spread the blue and white checked tablecloth out across the rock. “Apricot tart?”
“How can you be thinking of tarts right now, Neville, it’s almost time!”
“There’s plenty of time. Could you come here a second?”
“I just need to fortify the area between here and the edge of the road to protect us from any flying debris.”
“Before you do that, Luna, I have a … a gift for you,” Neville ventured, taking a long, thin box out of the picnic basket.
Luna froze for a moment, then came over beside him and knelt down. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Please don’t be angry. I went to see Ollivander, and he was really upset that you hadn’t come to him sooner for a wand. He said he would have moved you directly to the head of the line if he’d known.”
“I know,” she said softly. “That’s exactly why I didn’t tell him.”
“Well, it’s settled now.” He handed her the box. Luna took the lid off, revealing a wand of dark, smooth wood with a number of knots and nodules.
“Honeysuckle vine,” Neville explained. “The woodbine variety to be precise. Lonicera periclymenum if you care about the Latin name. Gwyddfid if you prefer the Welsh. Ollivander put a letter in there with the other particulars.”
She picked up the supple wand very tenderly. “Honeysuckle has recently become one of my very favorite flowers,” she remarked. “I know some people consider them nuisances.”
“I would call them… survivors.”
She smiled. “All over the place and off the wall. Just like me.”
Neville laughed. Before he could reply to that, the telescope interrupted them with a warning chime.
“They’re coming!” she cried. She paused long enough to kiss him on the cheek, then rushed back to the edge of the rock. Poised on the edge, Luna cast the revealing charm with her new wand, and a great wash of white splashed across the pass. Quickly she pressed a pair of Omnioculars to her face and peered off down the road.
Neville, coming up behind her, waited silently. He saw nothing coming up the road, nor had he really expected to. Just when he was about to suggest the tart again, a tiny flicker of movement at the border of leaves on the edge of the road caught his eye. He squinted at it in the moonlight. What he had first taken to be a line of ants was actually a row of tiny hoofed mammals. There must have been a thousand of them, running for all they worth through the silent sand in an undulating row. Each one had a miniature set of rounded, curled horns on its head, white and whorled, like the tiny shells he’d found on the beach when he was a boy.
“Luna?”
“Where are they?” she asked anxiously, still staring down the road and adjusting dials. “Shouldn’t the ground be trembling by now?”
Neville gently took the Omnioculars from her face and pointed down.
“Oh!”
For the next half hour they lay on their stomachs on the edge of the stone and watched the parade go by.
“Wasn’t it fabulous?” she breathed, when the last one had disappeared into the field.
“You’re not disappointed?”
“That was the best thing I’ve ever experienced in my entire life!” She looked over at him. “To date, of course. I’m so glad you were here to share it with me,” she said earnestly.
“Me, too,” was all he could think to say.
*
Neville woke in the pearl gray of an early dawn. For a moment he couldn’t place where he was, blinking at the odd blue and white checked blanket that covered him and the strange wooden slats that wove across the walls. What was he doing in this crude hut? Then he remembered, he wasn’t in a hut, he was in an overturned picnic basket, and last night…
“Luna?”
“Out here!”
He stepped out of their makeshift shelter, seeing that Luna was already packing up her telescope and other equipment. “Good Morning,” she said cheerfully. “I was going to let you sleep in, but I’m glad you’re up, I have to be on a plane in a couple hours.”
“A plane?”
She glanced at him then, and he could see the glimmer of regret in her eyes. “Phillipa Phetlock has places to go,” she said softly.
“I see.” Neville busied himself with reversing the Engorgio spell on the basket, when it was back to its proper size he began packing up their scattered cups and dishes and silverware. When he finally straightened up, he found Luna in front of him, a pair of aviator goggles around her neck.
“This has been a marvelous trip, Neville, thank you for coming with me. I’ve decided not to write about the migration for the paper, though, so don’t bother looking for it in the coming issues.”
“How come? You got pictures and everything. You can prove it to everybody.”
“They’re safer this way. I hadn’t realized they would be so small and vulnerable. Imagine if the whole pass was full of tourists and people trying to catch them. It could make them figments of imagination for real.”
“Spose you’re right. Secret’s safe with me.”
“I know it is, Neville.” She reached up and put her arms around his neck and said brightly, “I shall come and visit you every summer solstice, to commemorate the Great Snorkack Migration!”
He let his hands come to rest on her hips, but resisted the urge to try and hold her. “Come back to Hogwarts, Luna. We’ll find a place for you there.”
She could only manage the faintest of smiles now. “Oh, Neville. I love Hogwarts, I do, but I had to leave it in my seventh year. Too much stone. Too many dark places. I can’t … I can’t bear to be enclosed.”
“Whenever you’re ready, Luna, remember all my houses are made of glass.”
*
“Professor Longbottom, can we go now?” whined a petulant Third Year. The boy and his accomplices were only about 200 seedlings into a 500 repotting detention, but the day was wearing on, they were all late for dinner, and Neville had mail he wanted to read. Besides, they were making a hash of the project, and Neville was going to end up working late to re-do it all himself anyway.
“Fine, go. But don’t ever let me catch you using Fanged Geraniums in a prank like that again. They aren’t toys, and someone could’ve been seriously...”
His students were already clattering noisily out the door, jostling each other in their haste to get away. With a slight chuckle, Neville made his own way back to his office.
There was someone sitting at his desk, however, leafing through his still-unread copy of the Quibbler. Someone with a sprig of honeysuckle tucked over one ear.
“Luna?” He stared at her in surprise. “What are you doing here, it’s only April…”
She laid the paper down and smiled up at him. “Hullo, Neville. I had a vision that there was about to be an opening for Divination Professor.”
“I… really?”
“Yes. And I see that I will be applying.”
Neville felt himself begin to smile. “Did you see anything else?”
“Well, there were some things that were a little foggy,” she admitted, standing up and approaching him. Her fingers were light upon the collar of his dark green robes.
Neville’s much larger hand enfolded hers gently. “Anything I could help clear up?”
Luna’s blue eyes met his without flinching. “Is there still room in your glass house for me?”
“As if that were a mystery,” Neville replied.
Written for: Wand of the Woods Challenge at govt_stole_toad
Title: The Great Snorkack Migration
Prompt: Honeysuckle
Pairing: Neville/Luna
Rating: G
Genre: Romance
Word Count: 2,500
Summary: There are some momentous events that only happen once.
Warnings: A couple small DH spoilers!
“Good Morning, Neville.”
The ethereal voice ~ sweet, light, unmistakable ~ made Neville drop the box of pots he was tucking under the planting table. It hit the ground with a tinkle, but Neville hardly noticed, straightening up to stare at Luna Lovegood in astonishment.
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” She leaned over the table and peered down at the box. “Did I startle you?”
“Don’t… don’t worry about it,” he said absently, still gazing at her. “Nothing a Reparo won’t fix.”
“Well, I’d offer to do it myself, but that’s rather why I’m here. I need to borrow your wand.”
Neville tried to catch up. He didn’t know whether to say “Hello, Luna!” or “Of course you may.” or “Where have you been the last four years?”
“What happened to yours?”
“Oh, it was broken during the Battle of Hogwarts. Don’t you remember, Neville? You were there.”
“I… you…. I remember, but… that was so long ago,” he stuttered, aghast. “Surely you haven’t been without a wand all this time?”
“Yes, but it’s been no trouble. Things have been very quiet since then, haven’t they? And I’ve been traveling on assignments for Father, so I’ve been in the Muggle World quite a lot.”
“I didn’t know you were still writing for the Quibbler! I’ve been checking for your name on all the bylines…” he trailed off. No need to tell her he’d been subscribing to the paper for ages now, much to his Grandmother’s annoyance every morning at breakfast.
“I’ve been using a quill name,” she explained. “Phillipa Phetlock, that’s me.” She smiled at him.
“Luna, why haven’t you gotten a new wand? Ollivander opened his shop again years ago.”
“I know that, Neville,” she said patiently. “I’ve been by to visit him several times. But he’s dreadfully busy, so many people needed new wands after the battle, and there are children entering school every year, and most of his stock was destroyed or stolen, and I just haven’t wanted to put any further burden on him. He’s very old, you know. When he’s all caught up I’ll see about getting mine replaced. Meantime, though, I need to do a little spellwork, and I thought you might be kind enough to help me.”
“Of course, Luna. Anything you need.”
“Why don’t you come to dinner, then, and we’ll discuss the details. I’m afraid Father is out of town, he will be sorry to have missed you. Seven o’clock?”
Neville nodded. “Seven,” he repeated, and watched as she strolled out of Greenhouse Three as if she walked in and out of its doors every day of the week.
*
Neville showed up at the Lovegood domicile at six fifty-five, with a large and untidy bundle of flowers in his arms.
He wasn’t sure what had made him choose honeysuckle. With all the Greenhouses available to him full of exotics and traditional favorites, he’d found himself at the border wall outside Hogsmeade, which was covered in the rampant, sweet-smelling vine. The vibrant flyaway blooms had just seemed to suit her somehow.
Luna gave him a warm smile when she answered the door and waved him through. “Do come in. I’ve almost finished with the parsnip roulade.”
It was a strange house. There were many pots and pans and cauldrons bubbling away on the stove, Neville was reminded rather forcefully of Potions class on project days.
“You look busy,” he offered, “Can I put these in water for you?”
“Please.” Luna handed him a vase shaped like a woman with a hat on her head.
Neville filled it up at the sink and put the stalks in the water. The clay head’s clay hat was now topped with a riot of bright orange flowers. Keeping his opinions on tacky crockery to himself, he simply went about casting some good preserving charms while Luna floated around pouring things into tureens and platters.
Luna began to lay the table with a mismatch of silverware and colorful chipped plates. Neville was aware he was staring at her, but he couldn’t help himself. She was very different from the girl he remembered. She’d been so petite and frail in school that Neville had never really ever been able to picture her as growing up. But she was certainly a woman now, her dark blue dress draped in places from soft curves, and none of them were hidden any more by baggy cardigans or cloaks. She still had a porcelain-pale complexion and was a trifle too thin for Neville’s entire peace of mind, but her hair was fuller, a darker, clearer shade of gold, and she seemed more focused.
He watched her light the candles by puffing on the wicks. “You’ve gotten very good at wandless magic,” he observed.
“Oh, parlor tricks,” she demurred, settling herself into her chair and gesturing for him to do the same. “Now… for the exciting bit!” She clasped her hands together like a girl at a birthday party.
“The parsnip roulade?”
“The Crumple-horned Snorkacks!”
“We’re not having them for dinner, are we?” Neville asked nervously. “I thought you were a vegetarian.”
“They’re migrating!” she announced.
“I see.”
Neville had heard a great deal about these mythical creatures from Hermione and Ron over the years. It was something of a running joke between the two. He was careful to keep a neutral expression on his face.
“I’ve come into some very reliable information that they will be migrating through Wood’s Pass on the evening of the summer solstice this year,” Luna explained. “There will be a moment, when the full moon is at the proper degree, when they will be visible to a Revealing spell, which is why I need a wand. You’re welcome to come with me, of course. Imagine, a whole great herd of them, Neville, and we can be there!”
He supposed he could do with a bit of a holiday, and an evening with a lovely woman under a full moon didn’t sound so rough, he could bring a picnic for while they waited and then be ready with a comforting shoulder when these snorkack things failed to show up….. “Sorry, what?” He realized she’d been mumbling something about wine.
“I forgot the wine.” She bit the corner of her lip. “It’s… in the cellar.”
It was the smallest of hesitations, but Neville caught it all the same. “I’ll get it,” he offered, rising from his chair. He stood looking down at her for a moment, at the candlelight flickering in her luminous eyes, and for a moment he was suspended in a maelstrom of emotion ~ admiration, pity, sorrow, and rage. The Malfoys might like to pretend they’d been innocent victims in the war, but Neville had never, and would never, forget what had happened to Luna in their house. It still made him reel to think he hadn’t known, hadn’t been able to help.
Luna blinked up at him calmly. “A nice claret?” she suggested, snapping him out of his thoughts.
“Right.”
*
“Mind if I practice a bit with the wand?” Luna asked him suddenly, as they were clearing away the dessert plates. Neville obligingly handed it over.
She gave it an experimental little wave in the direction of the chandelier, illuminating one, two, ten of the lights above. “Oh, that’s lovely. Cherry wood, is it?”
Neville nodded. “And unicorn hair.”
Luna tried a few more spells, Transfiguring her earrings into apple blossoms and Neville’s cufflinks into sunflowers.
“Excellent!” she declared happily, and handed it back to him.
“Keep it for now,” he insisted. He couldn’t bear the thought of her without a wand. “You can give it back to me after the migration.”
*
Neville set the picnic basket on the big flat rock overlooking Wood’s Pass and sat down a few feet from Luna and her tripod. He watched her fiddle with the enormous telescope and make notations in her notebook. She was mumbling things he vaguely recalled from Astronomy class.
The moon looked as big as an ice rink overhead, lighting Wood’s Pass as if it were a river.
He spread the blue and white checked tablecloth out across the rock. “Apricot tart?”
“How can you be thinking of tarts right now, Neville, it’s almost time!”
“There’s plenty of time. Could you come here a second?”
“I just need to fortify the area between here and the edge of the road to protect us from any flying debris.”
“Before you do that, Luna, I have a … a gift for you,” Neville ventured, taking a long, thin box out of the picnic basket.
Luna froze for a moment, then came over beside him and knelt down. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Please don’t be angry. I went to see Ollivander, and he was really upset that you hadn’t come to him sooner for a wand. He said he would have moved you directly to the head of the line if he’d known.”
“I know,” she said softly. “That’s exactly why I didn’t tell him.”
“Well, it’s settled now.” He handed her the box. Luna took the lid off, revealing a wand of dark, smooth wood with a number of knots and nodules.
“Honeysuckle vine,” Neville explained. “The woodbine variety to be precise. Lonicera periclymenum if you care about the Latin name. Gwyddfid if you prefer the Welsh. Ollivander put a letter in there with the other particulars.”
She picked up the supple wand very tenderly. “Honeysuckle has recently become one of my very favorite flowers,” she remarked. “I know some people consider them nuisances.”
“I would call them… survivors.”
She smiled. “All over the place and off the wall. Just like me.”
Neville laughed. Before he could reply to that, the telescope interrupted them with a warning chime.
“They’re coming!” she cried. She paused long enough to kiss him on the cheek, then rushed back to the edge of the rock. Poised on the edge, Luna cast the revealing charm with her new wand, and a great wash of white splashed across the pass. Quickly she pressed a pair of Omnioculars to her face and peered off down the road.
Neville, coming up behind her, waited silently. He saw nothing coming up the road, nor had he really expected to. Just when he was about to suggest the tart again, a tiny flicker of movement at the border of leaves on the edge of the road caught his eye. He squinted at it in the moonlight. What he had first taken to be a line of ants was actually a row of tiny hoofed mammals. There must have been a thousand of them, running for all they worth through the silent sand in an undulating row. Each one had a miniature set of rounded, curled horns on its head, white and whorled, like the tiny shells he’d found on the beach when he was a boy.
“Luna?”
“Where are they?” she asked anxiously, still staring down the road and adjusting dials. “Shouldn’t the ground be trembling by now?”
Neville gently took the Omnioculars from her face and pointed down.
“Oh!”
For the next half hour they lay on their stomachs on the edge of the stone and watched the parade go by.
“Wasn’t it fabulous?” she breathed, when the last one had disappeared into the field.
“You’re not disappointed?”
“That was the best thing I’ve ever experienced in my entire life!” She looked over at him. “To date, of course. I’m so glad you were here to share it with me,” she said earnestly.
“Me, too,” was all he could think to say.
*
Neville woke in the pearl gray of an early dawn. For a moment he couldn’t place where he was, blinking at the odd blue and white checked blanket that covered him and the strange wooden slats that wove across the walls. What was he doing in this crude hut? Then he remembered, he wasn’t in a hut, he was in an overturned picnic basket, and last night…
“Luna?”
“Out here!”
He stepped out of their makeshift shelter, seeing that Luna was already packing up her telescope and other equipment. “Good Morning,” she said cheerfully. “I was going to let you sleep in, but I’m glad you’re up, I have to be on a plane in a couple hours.”
“A plane?”
She glanced at him then, and he could see the glimmer of regret in her eyes. “Phillipa Phetlock has places to go,” she said softly.
“I see.” Neville busied himself with reversing the Engorgio spell on the basket, when it was back to its proper size he began packing up their scattered cups and dishes and silverware. When he finally straightened up, he found Luna in front of him, a pair of aviator goggles around her neck.
“This has been a marvelous trip, Neville, thank you for coming with me. I’ve decided not to write about the migration for the paper, though, so don’t bother looking for it in the coming issues.”
“How come? You got pictures and everything. You can prove it to everybody.”
“They’re safer this way. I hadn’t realized they would be so small and vulnerable. Imagine if the whole pass was full of tourists and people trying to catch them. It could make them figments of imagination for real.”
“Spose you’re right. Secret’s safe with me.”
“I know it is, Neville.” She reached up and put her arms around his neck and said brightly, “I shall come and visit you every summer solstice, to commemorate the Great Snorkack Migration!”
He let his hands come to rest on her hips, but resisted the urge to try and hold her. “Come back to Hogwarts, Luna. We’ll find a place for you there.”
She could only manage the faintest of smiles now. “Oh, Neville. I love Hogwarts, I do, but I had to leave it in my seventh year. Too much stone. Too many dark places. I can’t … I can’t bear to be enclosed.”
“Whenever you’re ready, Luna, remember all my houses are made of glass.”
*
“Professor Longbottom, can we go now?” whined a petulant Third Year. The boy and his accomplices were only about 200 seedlings into a 500 repotting detention, but the day was wearing on, they were all late for dinner, and Neville had mail he wanted to read. Besides, they were making a hash of the project, and Neville was going to end up working late to re-do it all himself anyway.
“Fine, go. But don’t ever let me catch you using Fanged Geraniums in a prank like that again. They aren’t toys, and someone could’ve been seriously...”
His students were already clattering noisily out the door, jostling each other in their haste to get away. With a slight chuckle, Neville made his own way back to his office.
There was someone sitting at his desk, however, leafing through his still-unread copy of the Quibbler. Someone with a sprig of honeysuckle tucked over one ear.
“Luna?” He stared at her in surprise. “What are you doing here, it’s only April…”
She laid the paper down and smiled up at him. “Hullo, Neville. I had a vision that there was about to be an opening for Divination Professor.”
“I… really?”
“Yes. And I see that I will be applying.”
Neville felt himself begin to smile. “Did you see anything else?”
“Well, there were some things that were a little foggy,” she admitted, standing up and approaching him. Her fingers were light upon the collar of his dark green robes.
Neville’s much larger hand enfolded hers gently. “Anything I could help clear up?”
Luna’s blue eyes met his without flinching. “Is there still room in your glass house for me?”
“As if that were a mystery,” Neville replied.