Perhaps because the Lovegood house sat nestled in the cozy cleft between two gentle slopes—the wind up here was, paradoxically, gentler than it was at the foot of the mountain.
Night had fallen draping itself over the countryside like a dark cloth pulled edge to edge across the sky. And with the darkness came the stars. They emerged in their thousands, in their millions.
Wisps of thin mist drifted across the mountaintop on the soft breeze, trailing through the star fields like gauze curtains drawn across a window. They gave the sky a dreamy, tender characteristic.
Same stretch of earth, same turning planet beneath their feet, yet the world above the mountain and below it could not have been more different.
Yvonne stood in the Lovegoods' small garden, face tilted upward, gazing at the stars with an expression that had drifted far from the present moment.
The beauty of the night sky had drawn her out of herself, pulling her melancholy thoughts loose from their moorings.
Bang!
The sudden explosion jolted Yvonne out of her reverie. She spun around with a startled cry. The explosion had come from the second floor of the house. Shredded paper rained down through the open sitting-room windows in lazy, swirling falls. Some drifted all the way out through the open front door into the garden.
"What happened, Mr. Lovegood?!" Yvonne cried out in alarm, already moving toward the house.
"There's no need to panic, Yvonne." Luna's voice reached her. The girl had been crouching in the garden among the peculiar plants, showing Bona how to identify different species in the darkness.
At the explosion, she had glanced briefly toward the house. Her silver eyes caught the starlight and seemed to shimmer with their own otherworldly glow.
"Is it the printer again, Dad?" After waving a reassuring hand at Yvonne to hold her back from rushing through the doorway, Luna straightened up and called toward the second-floor window herself.
"Do you need my help with it?"
"Cough, cough—!" A lengthy fit of coughing erupted from somewhere within the second-floor room, followed by more distant clanking and banging.
"Just a small technical problem with the presses, Luna! I can manage perfectly well on my own—you and young Bona carry on with your research out there—"
Mr. Lovegood's voice echoed down from inside the room.
What surprised Yvonne was that the girl took her father entirely at his word without hesitation. She gathered the hem of her nightgown skirt to keep it out of the damp grass, crouched back down beside the low shrub she'd been examining with Bona, and resumed picking small, carrot-shaped orange fruits.
After a moment, Luna squeezed juice from one of the plump little fruits between her fingers and dabbed it onto Bona's nose, painting a bright clown's dot there in orange.
Bona stared cross-eyed at her own nose for a moment, then dissolved into giggles
"Luna, are you truly certain Mr. Lovegood doesn't need any help up there?" After hesitating for a conflicted moment—the clanking and banging from upstairs showed no sign of stopping—Yvonne couldn't help asking again.
Luna, still crouching among the plants turned and looked up at Yvonne. The pure clarity in those large silver eyes made Yvonne's thoughts blur for a moment.
"If Dad needs help, he'll tell me. He hasn't said anything, so there's nothing to worry about,"
Luna said simply. Her voice floated on the air like the thin mist drifting above their heads.
"Bona—" Luna clapped her small hands lightly together and rose to her feet, gathering her nightgown skirt.
"Go wash your nose," she said cheerfully. "I'm about to teach you how to make carrot earrings."
"Okay, Sister Luna—!" Bona sprang instantly to her feet. She shot through the garden gate and into the house in a blur of ponytails and bare feet, rushing to the kitchen to scrub both nose and hands.
"Yvonne—"
Luna remained standing in the garden, loose strands of hair having escaped her casually tied ponytail and drifting against her cheek, which bore a small smudge of garden dirt. Those silver eyes settled on Yvonne.
The moment that perceptive gaze landed on her, Yvonne felt her heart quicken unexpectedly.
"W-what is it, Luna?" Yvonne was aware of being slightly nervous, which was absurd.
"Is something troubling you?" Luna's hands rested naturally at her sides. The serene smile at her lips was simple and genuine—and yet struck Yvonne as faintly mysterious.
"Oh—what? N-nothing, I don't—" Yvonne looked away quickly, breaking the eye contact. But almost immediately a flicker of her pride rose in her chest. This was just a girl in her teens, after all.
"I'm only—I'm just not sure whether Bona's father can manage to cook a decent meal for himself and his friends tonight," Yvonne said quickly, filling the silence with the first plausible explanation her mind produced.
"You know how it is—not every man is as capable in the kitchen as Mr. Lovegood clearly is. Most of them can't manage a properly fried omelette without burning it or undercooking it."
The lie was not particularly convincing, even to Yvonne's own ears.
Luna's gold lashes fluttered once. She kept her small smile exactly as it was and turned back to the shrub, resuming her selection of the little carrot-shaped fruits.
After turning two of the best specimens in her fingers for a moment, she pressed her thumbnails into the thick stems precisely, and they split neatly into natural forks. Luna hooked the two small orange carrots over her own ears where they dangled.
Noticing that Yvonne still looked unsettled, Luna gave her head a light shake.
"That's all right, Yvonne. You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to."
And Yvonne's face went red—brought to an embarrassed blush by a girl barely in her teens.
She watched Luna crouch again and begin working on what appeared to be a second pair of earrings for Bona's tiny ears. Yvonne's lips parted, then closed. Then parted again.
Unable to hold back what was gnawing at her any longer, she finally asked: "Luna… those things you told us this afternoon—about Professor—about Mr. Watson—were they all true?"
She watched the girl's face carefully for hesitation.
The light in Luna's eyes was still perfectly clear, untouched by any unnecessary complication. She nodded.
"He is the finest professor Hogwarts has had. And the wisest, most formidable wizard currently, I think. With him there, I don't worry much about You-Know-Who."
Yvonne's heart clenched with a sharp squeeze that left her slightly breathless. She thought of John, down at the foot of the mountain, and his friends—and whatever they might be planning.
The worry on Yvonne's face deepened, indecision was obvious in her expression. But Luna asked nothing more. She simply watched Yvonne quietly.
"The thing is—"
Yvonne's low voice was swallowed by a sudden gust sweeping up the slope.
"Mum! Sister Luna!"
Bona came bounding back through the garden gate, her nose scrubbed vigorously to a rosy red glow, her little ponytails were bouncing enthusiastically with every step.
"What are you two talking about?!" The child's bright, demanding voice shattered the moment.
Yvonne drew a breath and pressed on: "I know whether John is really—"
"Your mother was just saying she forgot to bring your pyjamas, Bona—" Luna's quiet deflection arrived between one of Yvonne's words and the next.
Luna rose and pressed the freshly made carrot earrings into Bona's eager, reaching hands. "I'll just run down the hill and fetch them for you. You go have your bath with your mother first—I'll be back very quickly."
Yvonne had no time to protest or redirect. Luna was already jogging lightly across the garden toward the house.
"Dad, I'm stepping out for a moment—back very soon—"
Luna paused at the foot of the staircase inside the house and called up to her father's floor.
"Should you take your wand with you, Luna?" Mr. Lovegood's voice drifted down through the clanking and banging.
Luna's silver eyes gleamed with a brief, particular light for just a fraction of a second.
"No need, Dad."
A flash of light—
And Luna appeared inside Yvonne's cottage at the foot of the hill.
"Bona's pyjamas—"
John, bewildered, blinked at the girl standing before him. Then he caught up.
"You're—oh, Luna. Mr. Lovegood's daughter, from over the mountain, yes?"
That voice drew Luna's attention. Her gaze travelled to the young man who had spoken, dark-skinned, with an exhausted face that bore a resemblance to Bona's round eyes.
Completely ignoring the two wands that had appeared at her arrival as well as the general hostility that filled the cramped room, Luna nodded pleasantly to John.
"I'm Luna Lovegood, Mr. Cena. Yvonne sent me to fetch Bona's pyjamas."
Across the room, Angris's eyelid gave a single faint twitch.
Slowly, he lowered his wand. As if a mask had slipped and been immediately replaced with a different one, the sharp alertness in his expression transformed itself into warmth.
He pressed a hand to his forehead in a gesture of embarrassment and shook his head with an apologetic, self-deprecating smile.
"Ho—I thought for a moment you'd been sent to collect a debt from someone here. Creditors have been calling lately, I'm afraid. My business has just suffered a rather complete collapse. I couldn't scrape together a single Galleon to save my life at the moment."
He paused, head tilting slightly. "By the way—why didn't Yvonne come down herself?"
"She's giving Bona her bath—"
Luna said simply. Her gaze drifted back to John.
"It's getting cold over the mountain, Mr. Cena. I should get back quickly or Bona will catch a chill waiting."
"Oh—right! Of course, of course!" John snapped to attention. He offered a quick, mumbled apology to Angris and dashed up the wooden stairs at speed.
Thump, thump, thump!
The sound of his feet on the old boards filled the silence.
Watching him go, Luna turned back to the sitting room. She opened her eyes wide and studied each face within the room in turn with open, unself-conscious curiosity. Seemingly completely oblivious to the tension in the air.
Her gaze travelled from face to face without hurry. It paused—for just a fraction of a second on the grey-eyed wizard standing at the door, wand still in his hand.
Then her gaze moved on, drifting back to Angris.
"Are you all having a chat?" she asked again, with perfectly maintained innocent persistence.
"Just a gathering of failures, venting about this wretched world—"
Angris said with a genial smile.
"Care to join us, lovely young miss?"
"I'm afraid we'd never reach an agreement on the important things—"
Luna said pleasantly.
"I think things are actually quite all right at the moment. Though of course, they'd be even better without You-Know-Who making a nuisance of himself."
John burst back out of Bona's room, snatched the pyjamas from the foot of the bed, and came dashing back downstairs, breathless.
He was startled to find Angris chatting warmly with Luna. Hadn't Angris looked absolutely terrifying just moments ago, when Luna had walked in?
"Goodbye, Mr. Cena—" Luna took the pyjamas from John's hands with a smile, tucking them under her arm. She raised a cheerful wave to the room at large.
Then she skipped lightly over to the fireplace, humming something soft and tuneless to herself.
Under Angris's deep, incomprehensible gaze, Luna picked up the nearly-empty Floo Powder bag from the chimney nook. She gave the bag one vigorous shake, pushing the last few specks of powder from its depths and tossed them into the flames.
Her figure vanished in a burst of emerald fire.
Yvonne had been pacing anxiously in front of the Lovegoods' fireplace in the bright little sitting room ever since Luna had disappeared.
The moment Luna stepped through the green flames; Yvonne rushed forward.
"Nothing happened at all."
But before Yvonne could say a single word of the dozen she'd prepared, Luna was already speaking.
"Just a few people letting off steam," She handed over the pyjamas. "It's late, Yvonne. You should rest now. Tonight, you and Bona will sleep in my room."
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