fic: i am where you left me (harry potter | ginny/luna | t)

[fiachairecht]

elasticella keeps making these excellent ficathons and I keep not having as much time to write things for them as I want to! But, here: I thought I had a fannish to-do list and then this prompt grabbed hold of me and wouldn't let me go until I'd written it all. If you're interested in faerie stories, check out the November Nymphs and Nixies ficathon (November still has some time left in it, I insist, desperately trying to ignore that Time Passes).

Title: je suis là où tu m'as laissé (i am where you left me)
Fandom: Harry Potter (books)
Characters/Ships: Ginny/Luna
Rating/Warnings: T, body horror
Summary: Luna doesn't come back from her expedition. Something else does.

The rattling of the doorknob drags Ginny back to wakefulness slowly. At first she thinks it part of her dream - she's busy organising enchanted quaffles that won't stay in their box - but as it continues, she realises it's her actual door.

Must be Luna forgotten her keys or the password - or both - again, she thinks as she drags herself out of bed, but - hadn't Rolf's last owl said they were still at least a month out? She fishes her wand out of her nightstand and shoves her feet into her slippers as she makes her way quietly to the stairs.

Not that she's not thrilled at the prospect of seeing her wife again sooner than she'd thought, and not that Luna or Rolf were ever brilliant at thinking about time, but ... it's Luna. It's probably Luna. There's still no such thing as being too careful, even now.

The rattling ceases as Ginny approaches the door, and Luna's familiar voice filters through the wood instead. "Ginny, love, you home? I lost my keys somewhere on the flight, and you know the door's never much liked me..."

Ginny glances through the window. It is Luna outside, silvered and even pale in the moonlight and positively drenched, but she looks ... haggard, in a way Ginny's never seen, and Ginny runs through the locks and spells as quickly as possible. Luna flops limply on her in a half-hug as soon as she's through the door, dripping and reeking of the sort of charged air one only finds when flying dangerously high, and Ginny nearly drops her wand trying to get her arms around her.

"What happened? Why are you -"

"Long story," Luna murmurs, burying her face in the crook of Ginny's neck. "Storms on the way back. Rolf went home and the wrackspurts in the clouds stole some of my belt pouches."

Ginny strokes her damp hair and doesn't mention that she thought it was nargles who were the thieves. "Want to head up to bed? I'll put the kettle on and we can talk in the morning, if you like."

"Beautiful," Luna says, and presses a kiss to Ginny's cheek before drifting upstairs. Ginny watches her go, the bits of scarf and cloak floating around her more tattered than usual, and can't shake the feeling that something is very, very wrong.

The ritual of making tea calms her momentarily, even though it's usually Luna's job - she takes the extra time to boil the water on the hob, and rifles through Luna's herbs looking for the most calming ones she can find. It's enough that when she takes the two steaming mugs upstairs and finds Luna curled up under the blankets in their bed, newly dried out and in blue flannel pajamas, for a moment she thinks she was imagining the wrongness downstairs.

But then Luna sits up, and the movement ripples through her entire body, and her arm bends backwards as she takes the mug, and -

And nothing. It's Luna, tired and whole and here, and Ginny places the mugs down and slides into bed beside her.

"I'm still cold," Luna sighs, pressing back against Ginny. Even under the pajamas her skin feels thin, like Ginny could trace individual bones if she tried.

"Drink up," Ginny says, and wishes she'd thought to add gin or a warming tonic to the tea. "It'll look better after sleep, isn't that what you always say?"

Luna rolls over, her eyes blank and glimmering with tears. "Will it? I've been gone for so long."

"Hey, hey." Ginny sits up to better look her over, fighting the urge to pull her into her arms once more. "You're back, aren't you? You always come back from things, you don't have to leave again, it's ..." She trails off, wondering which one of them she's trying to convince.

"It's not that simple," Luna says, and there's an edge of desperation to her voice that leaves Ginny feeling entirely unequipped to handle the rest of the conversation. "It's not just me, you see, it's where I've been, and where Rolf's been, and what they did. What I'll always do."

Ginny's no stranger to Luna's rambling, has, over the years, developed something approaching fluency in Luna's half-languages, but this is so unlike her usual she hardly knows where to begin. "Maybe we should talk about this now, then," she says carefully. "Whatever it is we can figure it out, yeah?"

Something that might have been a smile pulls at the corner of Luna's mouth. "You and Luna would figure it out," she says. "But for now, it's just - me. And you."

Me and - oh. It's not so much a realisation as the last wrong thing sliding home over a distorted image, finally giving words to the dread that's been draped across her shoulders since she woke up "You're not Luna, are you?"

Not-Luna's fingers crumble away as they stroke Ginny's face, dried mud scattering into the bedsheets and revealing the bits of antlers that are all that remains instead of bones. "No," she admits. "I wasn't very well made. I stopped believing I was even before I got out of Romania."

"Then." The cold of bone is almost comforting against her cheek: with it there, she can't get too lost in thoughts of what might have befallen Luna. She has never hated comfort more. "Then Luna is -"

"In the twilight. Seeing everything she's ever believed in unfolding before her." Not-Luna smiles, and the sound of her skin stretching is the sound of a thousand breaking branches. "It's very pretty there. She would love it if you came."

There's a hollow echo to the words, like the thing isn't so much saying them as it is pulling the memory of Luna saying similar words out of the past, and Ginny can hardly speak past the knot of anger in her throat.

"You've killed her. You..."

"No!" Not-Luna looks wounded at the thought. "I'm a fetch. I've come to fetch you, bring you back to her. I don't kill."

Part of Ginny thinks there's no real difference, but part of her - the part that's always run forward no matter the cost - jumps at the possibility. "Can I see her?"

"I can take you to her," the not-Luna fetch-thing repeats, and it's not an affirmation but it's close enough. Not-Luna points to the door, and in the time since Ginny last walked through it, it has begun to shed dirt and leaves onto the threshold. "We'll walk through and then you'll see where she's gone."

The wood ripples, and Ginny thinks for a moment of the veil hidden deep in the Department of Mysteries. Except she knew what had lain beyond that door, this transformation of her house was something entirely different. "Right," Ginny says with a bravado that she's not sure she feels. "I'll just get my coat then, shall I?"

She swings her legs over the side of the bed and begins to gather her things. She looks back only once, and the patched together lump of dried wheat and bone and dirt in the nest of blankets hardly looks human shaped anymore, much like Luna. It looks, Ginny thinks with a flash of dark humour, rather like a mandrake baby.

Had Luna disappeared so quickly on the other side of the door?

"This might not fix anything," the fetch says. "You should know that. I don't like saying that, if it makes it better, but it's what I am."

"I'll fix things," Ginny says firmly, and even though the fetch no longer has much of a face to speak of, she's sure it's laughing at her. "Just - take me to her, okay? I need to see her."

The fetch shambles its way over to the door, every step a rush like wind through tall grasses. It holds out its hand. "Remember that you wanted this," it says. "That you came willingly."

"Questionable," Ginny says with as much venom as she can muster. But with one hand on her wand and one in the tangle of antlers that used to be a hand, she lets the door back to Luna open wide.