Harry Potter
Harry lay on his stomach with his cheek pressed into the pillow and listened to his own breathing for a while.
The dormitory was cold, the way Scottish stone always was in late November, even with the fire in the common room two floors down doing its best to push warmth up the staircases. The four-poster smelled like the laundry charms the house-elves used. His curtains were open.
His back was complaining, sometimes feeling he had a new heart in his back and was beating every few seconds. The burns weren't going to scream at him now that he was horizontal. They were just going to sulk. He could work with sulking.
He closed his eyes. The conversation downstairs returned to his head. Terry's voice cracking on I'm sorry. Padma with the brightness pouring out of her like water out of a leaky kettle. Mandy's shoes. Stephen's folded arms unfolding. The handful of older students he'd caught looking annoyed, like he'd ruined a perfectly nice party by being unreasonable about a month of being called a cheat.
Some of them aren't sorry, he thought, with no particular feeling about it.
He was halfway into something that wasn't sleep but was a near relative of it when the door creaked open.
He didn't bother to look up. There was a small whisper of bare feet on stone, a soft thump that was probably a person sitting down cross-legged, and then the rustle of paper.
"You smell like the Hospital Wing," Luna said.
"That's because I've been in the Hospital Wing."
"It's a particular smell. The potion they use to clean the floors. I've always thought it smelled a bit like very tired mint."
"That's possibly the most accurate description of Pomfrey's mopping I've ever heard."
He cracked an eye open. Luna was, as advertised, sitting cross-legged at the foot of his bed with her shoes off and her radish earrings catching what little light came through the high window. Her robes had what looked like flour on one cuff. She was holding a paper bag that smelled, even from where Harry was lying, like a bakery had exploded inside it.
She held the bag out. "Lovegood Pastries. Made them myself this morning. The kitchens let me borrow an oven and a stretch of counter. The house-elves are quite generous about it if you ask properly. I asked properly."
Harry levered himself up onto his elbows, which was a project. He took the bag. Inside were three pain-au-chocolats still warm enough to have softened the paper at the edges, two scones with raisins in them, a wedge of something cheese-and-pastry-shaped, and a small jam tart sitting on top of the pile like a coronation jewel.
"You made these."
"I did."
"All of them."
"Yes."
"This morning."
"Yes. I started at five. The dough has to rest, otherwise the layers don't separate properly, and pain-au-chocolat without proper layers is just chocolate trapped in bread, which is a tragedy."
Harry stared into the bag. "Luna."
"Mm?"
"I'm not entirely sure how I'd survive without you."
"You wouldn't have to find out, probably," Luna said serenely. "I'm planning to be around for a long time."
He took a pain-au-chocolat out, broke off a corner, and put it in his mouth. The pastry was still flaky enough to make a noise when he bit it, and the chocolate exploded in his mouth, dark and just barely bitter at the back of it, and it felt like drinking a hot chocolate on a cold day. He chewed slowly and watched her watch the room.
"Luna."
"Mm."
"You're an amazing cook."
She tilted her head, the radish earrings clinking softly. The smile on her face was worth more than all the pastries in the world.
"Thank you. It's one of a few things my mother taught me. Before...she started reading too much. She used to bake on Saturdays. She said the trick to good pastry was that the butter had to be colder than the cook's patience, which I thought was a riddle for a long time and then realized was just a recipe instruction. She was funny like that."
Harry stopped chewing.
"She'd have liked these," he said, after a moment. He chose his words carefully. "If she taught you. She'd have liked these."
"She would have," Luna agreed. "She was very particular about pain-au-chocolat. She'd have approved of the layers, I think. The jam tart she would have made me redo, because the pastry is slightly too thick at the corners, but she'd have eaten it anyway and pretended not to notice."
"The pastry is perfect."
"It's slightly too thick at the corners. But thank you."
He broke off another piece of the pain-au-chocolat and put it in his mouth and didn't say anything for a little while. Luna pulled a scone out of the bag, broke off a corner of her own, and ate it with a look of relief.
"Lovegood Pastries," he said eventually. "That's the brand, is it."
"It's the brand," Luna said gravely. "When my mother and I were small we used to talk about opening a shop together. Lovegood Pastries. The sign would have been a radish, because my mother thought radishes were funny. She'd have charmed the bread to hum the customer's favorite song while they ate it. I was going to do the books, because I liked numbers."
"That sounds like an extremely good shop."
"It would have been. It still might be, one day. I haven't ruled it out."
"Put me down for a standing order of pain-au-chocolat."
"I have you down already. As of this morning. Standing order, three a week, free of charge in perpetuity, on account of services rendered to the cause of friendship."
"That seems financially unwise."
"That's why you'll do the books. I'm bad with sums when the sums get above twelve."
He laughed, and his back didn't quite forgive him for it, and he didn't care. Luna's small private smile widened. She watched him eat for another minute in the comfortable silence that had become the standard mode of operation between them.
"How are the Wrackspurts," he said, after a moment.
"Thick today. Mostly around everyone else, though. Yours have cleared up considerably."
"What does that mean."
"It means you know who you are. Other people are still figuring out who they pretended to be for the last month, and Wrackspurts feed on that sort of thing. There's an entire flock of them stuck to the back of Padma's head. They're going to give her a headache by lunch."
Harry made a small noise into his pastry that wasn't quite a laugh. The thing about Luna was that she always sounded as though she was telling you the literal truth, and somewhere around the third or fourth thing she said you stopped fighting it and just took her version of events at face value. It was easier on everyone, including the truth itself.
She didn't ask him how he was feeling. She didn't ask him about the common room. She just sat at the foot of his bed and watched him eat a pastry, and the silence between them did the thing it always did, which was settle into a shape that fit around both of them.
His back ached. He chewed. The fire in his shoulder blades did its slow dance. Luna pulled a scone out of the bag, broke off a piece, and ate it.
"Cedric's been asking after you," she said. "Three times yesterday. Twice this morning already. He's worried you're going to do something brave and stupid before lunch."
"He's known me for too long."
"He has. We have lunch to arrange."
"Right. Lunch. Yes. Lunch."
"The four of us. You, me, Cedric, Susan. Somewhere that is not the Great Hall, because the Great Hall has become a kind of theatre, and you have been performing in it without your consent for some weeks now. I thought the fourth-floor classroom. The one you've been using."
He raised his eyebrows at her over the pastry. "How do you know about that one."
"You walk back from it with chalk on your sleeve."
"There's no chalk in there."
"No. There's transfigured chalk. You've been practising Conjuration with surfaces that look like classroom slates, because Tonks said you should drill the wand movement in a context that doesn't feel like duelling. Then you wipe your hand on your robe without thinking, and you come down the staircase with white smudges on your sleeve. I've been watching for a month. It was lovely."
Harry stared at her.
"That's. Genuinely impressive."
"Thank you. I keep notes."
"I'm not going to ask."
"That's probably wise."
He worked his way through the pain-au-chocolat and started on the second. The second had crystals of sugar baked into the top crust, and crunched. Luna ate her scone. The fire in his back retreated by inches.
"Will you come?" Luna said, after a while. "To lunch."
"Yeah. Of course I'll come."
"Good. I told Cedric you would. He needs it as much as you do."
"Why? What's going on with Cedric?"
Luna tilted her head, the radish earrings clinking softly. "His house has decided he is already going to win the Tournament, and it has made him very tired. He doesn't say so, but he is. Also, Smith said something this morning."
Harry's eyes narrowed. "What did Smith say."
"I wasn't there. The Hufflepuffs are very loyal to each other, so the version that reached me has probably been polished. But I think it was about you. And Cedric told him that if he said it again he would sleep in the corridor for the rest of the year."
"Cedric said that."
"Cedric said that."
"Bloody hell."
"Yes. It seemed a very Cedric way of putting it. Quiet, and also entirely serious."
Harry shifted on the bed and immediately regretted it. He settled back down onto his stomach and rested his cheek on his folded arm. "Where are we meeting?"
"The classroom. One o'clock. Susan is borrowing sandwiches from the Hufflepuff table. Cedric is procuring butterbeer. I am bringing fruit, because fruit is medicinal and you have been pale for weeks."
"I have not been pale for weeks."
"You have been a little pale. It's been quite poetic. But it's gone on long enough."
He laughed. It hurt his back to laugh, which he was used to by now, and the laugh came out a little flat, but it was a real laugh, and Luna's face did the small private thing it did when she'd successfully made him do something she'd been trying to make him do.
"Sleep for a bit. I'll come back at quarter to one."
"You don't have to."
"I know I don't have to. I'd like to. Sleep, Harry."
She slid off the end of the bed, stuffed her feet back into her shoes, and drifted toward the door. At the threshold she paused.
"Padma still likes you, you know. She just liked the version of you who was easier than the real one."
"That's not very flattering."
"It wasn't meant to be flattering. It was meant to be true."
The door clicked shut behind her.
Harry lay in the quiet for a while with his cheek on his arm and the half-empty bag of pastries within reach. He thought about Padma. He thought about Cedric. He thought, briefly and without permission, about Fleur saying zank you, properly, and about the grey-blue flecks in her eyes. He thought about the four-day countdown, the five-day no-magic prescription, the gap between them, and the lie he was going to have to tell Madam Pomfrey to bridge it.
He thought about Daphne Greengrass for the first time in days. About the sound the word parents had made in her mouth when she'd said it to Susan on that platform. The casual cruelty of it. The fractional, satisfied curve of her lip after.
A small cold thing settled neatly into place.
Right, he thought. Fine. Whoever the Hat hands you, fine. But if it's Greengrass.
He didn't finish the thought.
He closed his eyes and slept for an hour and a quarter without meaning to.
The dormitory was empty when he came back to himself. The light through the high window had moved, and there was a folded piece of parchment on the pillow next to his head that hadn't been there when he'd shut his eyes. He unfolded it carefully.
Quarter to one. I'll bring you down. Don't try the stairs alone. L.
Underneath, in smaller letters: the Wrackspurts in the common room are starting to disperse. You did good work this morning.
Harry folded the parchment again and put it in his inner pocket, next to Tonks's drawing and the still-untouched vial of pale blue potion. He sat up by inches. He swung his legs off the bed by further inches. He stood.
His back informed him that the standing was an unreasonable demand. Harry told his back he could file a complaint with the management. The management was Madam Pomfrey, and she had already heard the complaint and offered a vial.
He took the vial out, looked at it, considered, and finally uncapped it. The potion went down cold and tasted like peppermint and old iron, exactly the way it had at six in the morning. Within a minute the burn down his back retreated from sulk to something more like grumble. He'd take grumble.
He looked around the dormitory. Four-posters in a neat row, trunks at the feet of beds, the window slightly fogged with the cold outside. Anthony's bed with its perfect house-elf corners. His own with its disreputable blanket. The room he had shared for three and a half years with four boys he had, until last month, considered something close to friends.
His eyes moved past Anthony's bed to the other two.
Michael Corner's, on the far side of the room by the window. The bed was made in the slapdash way Michael always made it, the duvet pulled up unevenly and his pillow half-on and half-off the mattress. There was a Quidditch poster pinned to the inside of his bed-curtain that hadn't been there at the start of term. Michael, who had laughed when Harry walked into the dormitory the night after his name came out of the Goblet. of course it was you, of course you did this, you can't help yourself, can you. Michael, who hadn't spoken to Harry since, except to ask once if Harry would mind not using the bathroom first thing in the morning because it made everyone late.
Stephen Cornfoot's bed sat between Michael's and Harry's. Stephen had at least had the decency to look uncomfortable about the whole thing. Stephen had not, however, ever said so to Harry. Stephen had passed him in this exact dormitory for thirty-one nights and not said a single word about any of it. Until twenty minutes ago, downstairs, when he had unfolded his arms with what had clearly cost him something and said I was a coward about it. I knew I was being a coward at the time. Harry believed that part. He believed Stephen had known. That was, in some ways, the worst version. Anthony and Michael had at least had the bad faith of conviction. Stephen had just been too tired to push back against the room.
Four boys. Three and a half years. One month.
Not one of them had come to his bedside in the Hospital Wing. Not one of them had sent a note. Not one of them had asked Luna how he was when she came down from the dormitory on the morning of the First Task with a face that must have given the game away to anyone with eyes.
He stood there for a moment, taking it in.
I'll come back to this room every night for the rest of the year, he thought. And I'm going to do that without pretending the last month was a misunderstanding. They can live with it. Or they can rearrange.
He turned away and went to find his shoes.
Luna was on the landing outside the common room at quarter to one. She'd swapped the flour-dusted robes for a clean set, and she was reading what looked like the most recent Quibbler with a dreamy expression.
"Pastries set you up?" she said, without looking up from the magazine.
"Pastries saved my life."
"As intended."
She tucked the Quibbler under her arm and offered him an elbow. Harry took it. He was perfectly capable of doing the spiral staircase by himself, in theory. In practice, the elbow was a kindness. Luna kept her pace steady and matched his. They went down the tower together with her shoulder occasionally bumping his good one, and the bronze eagle knocker didn't bother either of them with a riddle on the way out, which Harry appreciated.
The corridors were quieter than they had been at seven. Most of the school was at lunch.
"How's Cedric, properly," he said, as they turned onto the fourth-floor corridor.
"He's tired. He's a kind person being asked to be a hero for a great many people who don't actually know him, and that's a wearing job. He'll be better in an hour with food and friends and a butterbeer. Most things are better with a butterbeer."
"And Susan."
"Susan has been telling herself she lost on purpose so it counts less. She hasn't, and it doesn't. She needs to hear from people who like her that she did well. She especially needs to hear it from you."
"Why especially me."
Luna glanced sideways at him. "Because she thinks you're brilliant, and your opinion has more weight in her head than yours does in yours."
He didn't have a good answer for that.
The empty classroom was halfway down the corridor, the door he'd come to know better than most of his classrooms over the past month. Luna stopped him a pace short of it and turned him gently by the elbow so he was facing her.
"One last thing."
"Mm?"
"You don't have to be funny in there. Not the whole time. You can be tired. They'd like you to be tired in front of them. It's their version of being trusted."
Harry looked at her for a long moment.
"Right," he said.
She smiled and pushed the door open.
Inside, the classroom had been transfigured for lunch. Cedric was in the act of conjuring a tablecloth onto a desk he'd dragged into the middle of the room, his left arm still moving stiffly. Susan was kneeling on the floor unpacking a basket whose contents looked suspiciously like half the contents of the Hufflepuff lunch table. Three bottles of butterbeer stood in a careful row on what had until recently been Professor Babbling's lectern.
Cedric looked up. His face did the thing it did when he saw Harry...which was a big stupid smile. "About bloody time."
"He took the stairs slowly," Luna said.
"I took the stairs alive."
Susan looked up from the basket. She held up a sandwich at him in salute.
"You look terrible," she said.
Harry laughed.