firstaudrina

quixotic
Harry/Luna, Harry/Ginny.
PG. 4607 words.

Summary: Since his breakup with Ginny, Harry can't help but be boring. Luna is the only one who doesn't seem to mind.

Note: This was originally written for

radish_love, for

galanthus . The quote about nirvana towards the end is by Bassui.

Harry and Ginny broke up for nine months.

Harry didn't know it would only be nine months when Ginny sat him down in the Weasley lounge and told him she wanted to take a break. He thought it was going to be forever.

"It's just," Ginny started, and then stopped. She bit her lip, looking sorrier than Harry had ever remembered her looking. "I have a career to think about. You don't know how hard it is to go into a Quidditch tryout as Harry Potter's girlfriend." She twisted the sleeve of her sweater until it was cutting into her wrist. "I get to hear all about what an amazing player you are and they always ask if you're going to be trying out and by the end of the interview, they don't know anything about me –"

"But once they see you fly," Harry interjected, "it won't matter. You're great!"

"Yeah, I am," she said flatly. "But not as good as you. And I never will be. See, I worked really, really hard to be as good as I am – and you just did it naturally. I'll never beat that." She took his hand, as if to soften her words. It didn't help. In fact, as she continued, Harry felt the gesture only twisted the knife. "So I have to try and distance myself if I ever want to be anything other than Harry Potter's girlfriend. I'm sorry, Harry."

He sent Ginny daisies every day they were apart. He sent her her favorite raspberry crème-filled white chocolates. He sent her self-made singing cards (well aware of the irony), stuffed animals that were bewitched to cuddle up and say, "Harry-bear wuvs his Ginny-winny," and Self-Spelling Spearmints that formed little messages of adoration. He made her a mixtape, which, he heard from Ron, she was so thoroughly confused by she ended up using it as a coaster.

He was ready and willing to try anything, from Witch Weekly's "One Hundred Ways to Win Back Your Witch" to Cosmo's "10 Tips To Take Her Back.”

He even bought a guitar.

When he received nothing in response, not even an Owl, he tracked down Hermione. His intention was to get her help on an old spell that would cause roses and diamonds to tumble from Ginny's lips whenever she spoke. However, upon hearing that plan, Hermione began a feverish diatribe that Harry mostly tuned out, but definitely contained the words "over the top," "making this difficult," "really rather selfish," and multiple, emphatic "honestly!"s. Harry agreed that it was a very apt description of Ginny's behavior.

Hermione expelled a loud sigh. "I don't even know why I talk anymore, it's not as if any of you lot listen to a word I say. You have to stop worrying about yourself and start thinking about her needs. Ginny has quite enough on her plate without you bombarding her all the time."

Harry, as unsatisfied with Hermione's advice as he usually was, decided to seek help elsewhere. Ron refused to get involved, Neville became extremely confused, Seamus' advice was to start shagging around, and Dean gave him a death glare. He had no option left but to turn to Luna.

"I'm very honored you wanted to share this with me," she said serenely. "I have spoken to Ginny a bit about it and she's very upset, you know."

"Nobody made her break up with me," Harry said bitterly.

"I think you ought to just let her alone, really, Harry. Because she does love you, you know, and if you keep up with what you're doing, you're going to drive her to the point of never wanting to see you again." Luna smiled. "Would you like some guava sunflower tea? It's quite delightful, very uplifting."

Harry stared at her. "You can be quite brutally honest, you know that?"

"Yes," she replied. "Neville tells me that quite often."

Harry sighed, slumping gloomily into his chair. "I just don't get it. She spent all that time trying to be with me and now she just doesn't want me? It doesn't make any sense." He took his glasses off and pressed his hands against his eyes, feeling tired and frustrated and oddly directionless. He felt Luna pat his wrist comfortingly.

Harry could tell everyone was getting bored with him, but it wasn't as if he could help being boring. Mrs Weasley kept sending him depressing boxes of treacle and shepherd's pie that he would consume in the middle of the night, standing in the cool light of his open fridge in boxers. The fridge is a necessity, easier than the complex system of cooling charms most wizards used. The telephone is another necessity, purchased on the off chance there was an emergency he could not solve with magic. Only Hermione ever rings him, though.

They were the only touches of Muggle life in his tiny, unassuming flat until the Ginny Debacle. After that, a telly seemed imperative.

So Harry didn't really have it within himself to be interesting and the only person who didn't seem to mind much was Luna. She would drop by with homemade ginger and clove cookies and bags of strange-flavored tea, settling in bedside him on the sofa to watch reruns of American sitcoms. She was fascinated by the television, often sitting too close to it and prodding it with her wand. It made her giggle – its boxy shape, its tangle of wires, the little people moving across the screen.

Thinking she might appreciate it, Harry took Luna to the cinema. They saw something inconsequential and unromantic. Harry ended up being thoroughly embarrassed by the excited squeals and loud laughs Luna couldn't seem to contain; he managed to convince her to leave halfway through, unable to stand the annoyed looks of the other moviegoers. Luna didn't seem to mind the film being cut short; on the contrary, she spent the walk back to his flat explaining every single detail of what they'd seen with the intensity of a little kid.

The papers had a field day with post-breakup Harry, especially because he kept taking off work to sit around with Luna. They even stepped it up from lengthy, faux-worried articles to candid photos, catching him everywhere from right outside his building to the market or the launderette. Luna was quickly dubbed his "rebound."

At her insistence, they took a Muggle photography class together. She seemed convinced that it would help him understand why everyone took pictures of him all the time.

It didn't.

But as Harry carefully measured out developer and fixer, watched his pictures come slowly into being with a surge of pride, he did understand the joy in taking photos a little better. It hadn't been something he'd ever really thought about – cameras had been constant annoyance to him since the first time Gilderoy Lockhart had dragged him in front of them. It began to seem more like a kind of magic without magic, a wonder he would not have noticed if he hadn't experienced it through Luna. Everything that was new to her became new again to him. He'd been too busy to notice a lot of things.

They went to see a new musical based on his defeat of Voldemort, dressed in cunning disguises devised by Luna. It was horribly inaccurate. Harry was very sure that he had not single-handedly brought fifty Death Eaters down, killed Voldemort, and then swept Ginny up in a kiss set to rising music.

The production values were excellent, however. Wizards really knew how to set up a scene change.

Luna tried to give him a haircut. It was horrible. To make him feel better, she cut herself a matching one. It was oddly flattering. However, they began to look like bizarre twins in negative, so Harry immediately regrew his with a spell.

In an attempt to cheer him that Harry found very kind, Mrs Tonks agreed to let him have Teddy for a weekend. The thought made him feel better than he had in ages. He spent hours tidying his flat, making sure everything was baby-proof and every surface was dust-free. He stocked his fridge with tiny jars of mushy food. The morning of, he woke up so early that the sun was just barely stretching across the sky and spent the time waiting on his sofa, jumping up at every noise.

Luna brought him some of her old toys, turning them over with infectious delight. There were tiny stuffed dogs with realistic barking and tail-wagging, a small broomstick Harry felt a surge of childish jealousy over, a little Potions kit, and several creepy dolls that moved on their own. The dolls made Teddy cry and the other things he had only a passing interest in; what really seemed to fascinate him was Luna herself.

As he solemnly gummed an edge of his blanket, Teddy's large eyes would follow Luna around the room. Whenever she brushed past him, his little fingers would reach out to snatch a handful of long, pale hair. Harry felt rather rejected every time Teddy would reach out for Luna instead of him, though he supposed he couldn't blame the kid. Luna smothered Teddy with kisses and snuck him bits of cookie, she tossed him up in the air and spun him around. Harry could help but smile himself, watching her tickle Teddy's stomach, his babyish giggle mixing with her tinkling laugh.

"I think that one looks like a…er…a beetle?"

Luna squinted up at the cloud Harry was pointing to. "Oh, Harry," she said, "I don't think you're trying hard enough."

"This feels like tea leaves," Harry replied grumpily.

She smiled at him, the clouds reflected in her large eyes. She turned back to them, brow furrowed quizzically as she searched out a cloud suited to her needs. When she spotted on, she lit up. "Oh! See, there, isn't that lovely? It looks like an otter crossed with a caterpillar."

Harry looked toward where she was pointing and had to admit that it did indeed look like an otter-caterpillar. She turned towards him and Harry noticed she looked quite pretty in her Luna way, nestled against the green grass with her newly shorn hair a mess of unexpected waves and compressed curls. "Now you try."

Harry scanned the sky, resolved to impress her. "Alright. See that one, right there? I would say it looks like a Hinkypunk carrying a pizza instead of a lantern." If he squinted, it did sort of look like a one-legged thing holding a circle, but he thought the embellishment would please her.

It did, of course; Luna was as charmed by his description as she was by everything. Harry didn't know how she managed to be so impressed by everything all the time. He was suddenly very glad to have a friend like her, overwhelmingly so, and without meaning to, he ducked forward and gave her a kiss.

Realizing he was perhaps being slightly inappropriate, Harry pulled back and bit his lip. "Oh. Er. Sorry. That was…I just –"

Her eyes were very wide at him. "It's quite alright. It was very nice."

"So you're not…mad, or anything? I didn't mean anything by it, I just –"

She beamed at him. "Oh, I know. It was a nice gesture, Harry, although I'm not so sure Ginny would like it."

It was like passing through a ghost; ice washed through him. He hadn't thought about Ginny in ages.

"Do you think I'm spending an inordinate amount of time with Luna?"

Ron raised an eyebrow at him, shuffling Basic Blaze Boxes from one shelf to another. "I dunno, mate. Do you and I spend an inordinate amount of time together? It's just Luna."

"I think you mean 'the poor, wayward girl caught in Harry Potter's bottomless spiral of depression,'" George interrupted, gesturing with a jerk of his thumb to the space above the register where he and Ron had tacked all the recent articles about Harry.

Ron snorted, then caught the anxious look on Harry's face. He turned serious. "You know Gin doesn't take that stuff seriously. She has a laugh over it, like all of us do."

Harry nodded, but that wasn't what he was worried about. And the fact that he wasn't worried was what did worry him. It was enough to send anyone into a bottomless spiral of depression.

He didn't dare bring the question up to Hermione, because he knew she would guess exactly what was bothering him.

At the park Teddy gurgled happily, kicking his little legs as Harry gently pushed him in a baby swing. The brisk autumn wind kicked dead leaves around Harry's ankles and he paused to make sure Teddy's hat was secure. "Loo-loo," Teddy informed him.

"She's over there," Harry told him, glancing over to where Luna was hunting for red and orange leaves amongst the fallen brown ones.

"Loo-loo," Teddy insisted.

"She'll be back in a minute, mate, I wouldn't worry about it," Harry said. "And if you throw a fit about it, I'm just not going to push you in this swing anymore."

Teddy kicked forlornly, but perked up when Harry moved behind him to push again. He perked up even further when the object of his affection returned bearing multicolored leaves.

"What do you think of this one, Teddy?" Luna asked seriously, holding up a flame-red leaf. He made a face like he was about to sneeze and the tuft of hair sticking out of his cap turned a matching shade. Luna kissed his nose as a reward.

"Have you spoken to Ginny recently?" Harry asked, kicking the toe of his shoe awkwardly along the ground.

"Mmm," Luna said. "Just yesterday. She didn't say anything about you, in case you were wondering. But I think that speaks better for you, really, because I think Ginny keeps the most important things to herself."

"Oh," he replied, never quite sure to handle Luna's bursts of information. She was always so honest. "Luna…can I ask you something?"

"Of course you can!" she said earnestly.

"What did you think of…you know, of me and Ginny as a couple?"

Luna looked very thoughtful; she took ages before answering. "This is a very difficult thing to answer," she said finally. "I don't think I can. Because, you see, if I tell you want you want to hear, it might not be very honest. But I think the truth is much too complicated and would make you much too sad."

"What do you think I want to hear?" Harry said softly. Considering he himself didn't know, it would be great if Luna could illuminate it for him.

She gave him a sort of sad, wistful look and kissed him on the cheek. "I can see the Wrackspurts even without my Spectrespecs."

Harry tried to write off kissing Luna as a friendly gesture. It had barely lasted a second. It was a peck.

But he had never tried to kiss Hermione, had he?

He was beginning to learn that the best way to find out what Luna was thinking about something was just to ask her. It was a deceptively simple idea. Ginny had always seemed to be silently begging for him to magically understand her, but Harry didn't think a spell existed to stop him from being thick about girls. A legal one, anyway.

"What do you think of me?" he questioned her as they traipsed the garden behind her odd, cylindrical house, watching her pick flowers.

"I think you ask a lot of questions," she said. Harry blushed, then realized Luna wasn't making a joke; she was just being her usual, truthful self.

It was somehow easier to ask her difficult things knowing she would say exactly what was on her mind. Even if what she said was sometimes hard to hear, she was never intentionally hurtful. "No, I mean…I don't know what I mean. Do you think about me, ever?"

"Of course," she said, seeming surprised. "You're my friend."

He pushed his hands deep in his pockets, huddling up against the chill in the air. "No, Luna, you don't get what I'm trying to say."

She paused, holding handfuls of bright blue and orange blossoms. Harry didn't know flowers like that bloomed in such cold weather. Her pale eyes were curious. "What are you trying to say?"

Harry couldn't quite put his finger on why he was so caught up with what Luna thought of him. He knew she liked him. He sighed, frustrated. "I don't know. I never know what I'm saying. I'm so crap at saying things."

"Oh, no, Harry, I think you're quite good at saying things, actually," she reassured him. "Remember when you told Neville and I that we were cool? That was a very nice thing to say and you said it at the exact moment you should have said it."

"Okay." He took a deep breath. "Then I'm going to say something that I probably shouldn't."

She nodded encouragingly. "Please do."

Harry, feeling oddly afraid and very stupid, freed one hand from his pocket, placed it on her cold cheek, and pulled her close for a kiss. She smelled like flowers, though not in the way Ginny did; Ginny smelled like soft, feminine perfume and Luna smelled as if she'd rolled around in a flower patch. It was earthy, fresh and sweet.

"Oh wow," she breathed when they parted.

"Yeah," he said.

She looked up at him through pale eyelashes like quill feathers. "That was an action," she said sincerely. "Not a statement."

Harry laughed. "Yeah, I s'pose so."

Luna was very sedate. "I'm really very certain that Ginny wouldn't like that at all."

He frowned. "Well, Ginny broke up with me. It doesn't matter what she would like."

Luna opened her mouth to protest, so Harry kissed her again. A moment later, he felt her push up on her tiptoes to kiss him back, cupping his face with her small cold hands and crushing the blossoms she held against his cheeks.

Harry knew he should be worrying about Ginny – Luna was one of her closest friends after all and, breakup or not, he knew she would feel betrayed. At the same time, he didn't really want to give up Luna.

It wasn't just the kissing – which was very nice, because she crinkled her nose and kept her eyes open, smiling into his mouth, her hands fluttering over him like Fluttering Imaginary Things, landing only for the briefest of seconds on his collar, his shoulder, his cheek. It was also watching videos with her and naming clouds and bravely slurping down her nettle tea. It was her complete unselfconsciousness. Ginny was bold and forceful and he loved that about her – she knew what she wanted and she went after it. Luna waited patiently for him to figure out what he wanted. It was different and difficult, but he liked that too.

They lay side by side on his bed, fully dressed. Luna tangled her fingers in his hair, his head pillowed on her shoulder. She was wearing a short, airy white dress and royal blue leggings, a mismatched collection of beaded bracelets stacked up one arm and her bottle cap necklace firmly on her neck. He fidgeted with the frilly lace edging on the hem of her dress. "Have you?"

"Oh, just the once."

"Who was it?"

"Neville," she said simply. Harry craned his head back to stare at her. "Well, we were all quite excited after that final battle at Hogwarts and I did want to get it out of the way. Neville was quite obliging, though a bit more nervous than he needed to be."

"I was a wreck," Harry said. "Ginny had to talk me through it. Literally step by step."

They'd reached a weird place where they could talk about anything as long as their relationship didn't leave the privacy of each other.

She wriggled down until they were nose to nose. "Would you like to?"

"Well, yes, obviously," he said. She smiled. "But it seems like…I don't know…a step. Maybe not a huge one, but certainly a step."

"I would like to," she said.

He curled an arm around her waist. "Are you sure?"

She gave him a quick, soft kiss. It was getting less disconcerting to kiss with his eyes open. At first it was strange to open his eyes and see her silvery ones already staring back at him, but it had grown on him. It was absorbing to watch the play of emotions across her face. "Well," he said, breathing loud in the silent room, "Color me convinced."

He and Ginny had only slept together a handful of times, having limited alone time, and it was usually with one eye on the door, terrified a wayward Weasley would walk in on them.

His time with Luna felt separate from reality, appropriately enough. It made it easy to forget other people existed, easy to forget how hurt Ginny would be by what he was doing. Luna was delicate and pale; the only sounds to escape her were gasps and the rare, "Oh, that's very nice, Harry." And always the unnerving but wonderful eye contact.

Afterwards, she'd smiled at him lazily and said, "My aura is all full of sparks."

Two days later, he received an Owl from Ginny.

He had a minor heart attack before realizing she couldn't possibly know about what had happened; she'd been in France with the team. She hadn't spoken to Luna, she hadn't found out. He pried the envelope open carefully and found a very Ginny letter: short, concise, to the point.

Harry –
I've been almost overwhelmingly idiotic. I'd like to see you.
Gin

Despite its length, Harry found himself staring at the note for ages. He began to laugh because of course, of course, all it would take for Ginny to want him back was for him to think he didn't want her anymore.

Upon seeing him, Ginny jumped up to hug him, but Harry flinched and, looking wounded, she shrank back in her seat. They were in the brand-new lounge of the brand-new flat she was sharing with another teammate.

"Hey," he said, settling uncomfortably in a chair across from her.

"So…how've you been?"

Harry's immediate thought was happy and it took the shape of several memories – going searching for Nargles, eating homemade lemon-cherry cake at midnight, making love. In an attempt to stop himself from saying something he shouldn't, Harry didn't answer directly. "Why'd you want to see me, Gin?"

Seeming to screw her courage to the sticking place, Ginny launched into a very rapid diatribe where she called herself dumb several times and looked generally tearful. Harry listened, eyes carefully trained on the floor, and didn't interrupt. When she finished, he said, "I don't know what you want me to say."

"You don't have to say anything," she said. Her voice was thick from restrained tears, but a thread of hope ran through it. "Just kiss me. We'll pretend these last few months didn't happen. I know this is what you want, Harry. It's what I want too."

She stood and stooped to press a chaste kiss to his unresisting mouth. Underneath her delicate perfume was a hint of cinnamon, a tiny detail about her Harry had forgotten about entirely. He did have admit that he missed her; it was a low, consistent ache that had been getting easier and easier to ignore, but it was there.

Ginny was a straight line leading to the rest of his life. With her, he knew exactly how his future would turn out and, before, that knowledge had been more comforting than anything else in his life. Finally, there would be no more surprises, his world would never again be turned on its head, and he would be safe.

"It's not fair for me to ask your opinion," Harry said. "But…what do you think?"

Luna wasn't making eye contact, too busy fiddling with a loose curl. Harry felt unaccountably mean, but he'd gotten so used to getting Luna's opinion on things that he couldn't not ask. "I think," she said slowly, "that you shouldn't be asking me this."

"I know." He ran a hand through his hair. "I know, I know."

He felt Luna's hand reach out to scratch at his scalp. When she finally met his eyes, she was resolved. "I care quite a lot about you," she told him tranquilly. "So I think we shouldn't see each other anymore."

Harry found himself at a loss for words yet again.

"This has never been very fair," she continued, getting up to leave. "I'll see you soon, Harry."

He sprang to his feet. "What, that's it then? No fighting for it, no working for it, just 'see you soon, Harry'?"

"If you wanted me, you would choose me," she said simply. "And if you wanted Ginny, you would choose her."

"It's not that easy," he insisted.

She absently twirled a feathery earring. She had said it was from a Samjoko bird. "It isn't, really. You're only making it difficult on yourself."

"No," Harry said, nearly shouting. "Don't you think I would rather not make this decision?"

"Yes, but you –"

Much like their first kiss, Harry just grabbed her and yanked her close, trying to put into the kiss everything he was feeling. His hands caught in her soft, coarse hair, which had grown out considerably but was nowhere near its former length. He suspected the kiss wasn't very good; he was being too forceful and sloppy, there was the clacking of teeth and her arms were sort of trapped beneath his. When they parted, they were panting. Luna's wide eyes were not very dreamy at all.

"You know," she said, "you're not supposed to get drunk on nirvana." In a whirl of her many-tiered teal skirts, beaded fringe clacking, she was gone and out the door before Harry could even catch his breath.

Luna did not answers his Owls, nor send any of her own. When he went out to the pubs with everyone else, Luna no longer joined them. He didn't send her flowers or chocolates. It only took a month or so for him to run out of reasons to not see Ginny again. Everyone kept pestering him about it and he couldn't give the real reason, so he just stopped giving any. A few weeks after that, Luna started coming around again, diaphanous and spacey. If she spoke to Harry less, no one noticed.

She wasn't cold to him, or even that distant, just slightly shut off. She still smiled at him, and patted his hair sometimes.

Harry took Ginny to the cinema and she liked it, but she was less delighted and more surprised. He liked her reactions, often funny and sarcastic and smart. It didn't feel the same, but it was comfortable enough, even if Ginny made him straighten up when she walked into a room. Maybe that was a good thing.

"Are you sorry?" Luna asked him once, ages later, at someone's wedding. Her question was full of genuine curiosity.

"Sometimes no," Harry replied. "Sometimes yes."

She nodded thoughtfully. "I think sometimes things are beautiful and then they go away and it's for the best. Like seasons."

"That's a nice way to look at it."

Luna beamed. "Thank you, Harry."

Harry and Ginny broke up for nine months. When they got back together, he was content. He was mostly happy. If he ever missed Luna, he kept it to himself and, eventually, it passed.