Fic: Before and After (Sixteen Going On Seventeen)

[grav_ity]

AN:I blame sache8 for suggesting getting into Luna Lovegood's head.

Disclaimer: Not mine, though I did just give them ten years of my life.

Rating: Kid friendly, no pairing.

Summary: Luna and Ginny talk before, and after.

Sixteen Going On Seventeen

Before

The train was quiet this year. Gryffindor was down two prefects and Ginny never did hear who the Head Girl was, but the Slytherins patrolled the corridors alongside the ugliest witch and wizard she'd ever seen, so there really wasn't much desire for moving once the train pulled out of Kings Cross.

Her anger with Harry had abated somewhat in the weeks between the wedding and September first. Her eyes no longer flashed at mentions of him, her brother or Hermione, but she still nursed a grudge. It hadn't been made any better by her mother's tendancy to throw her out of the room every time the conversation got interesting, but Ginny wasn't raging any more.

The train rumbled along and the food cart never came. Luna sat across from her, reading the Quibbler as always, and didn't say anything as the hours passed. Finally, as Ginny reached up for her robes, Luna folded the magazine away and looked at her with that odd, direct stare she had.

"He couldn't take you with him, you know."

There were two "he-who-must-not-be-named"s now. Voldemort's name brought the Death Eaters down upon your head and saying you knew Harry made it worse.

"I don't see why not." She grouched, thoughts finally put to words. "I'm more useful than Ron."

"But Ron is seventeen," Luna pointed out.

"Yeah, and when he was sixteen he was a blundering idiot as well."

"They can't say his name and they don't know it." Luna said. "They'll have to do magic all the time. If you were with them, you' be as good as wandless. The Trace would have you all caught."

Ginny's heart stopped. They'd been gone so soon after Harry's birthday...

"I hadn't thought of that."

Luna pulled her robes on over her head and straightened her ear rings. The blue tie tucked around her neck shone in the odd light of Hogsmeade station. Ginny's red and yellow just looked a mess of blood.

"We can do magic in the Castle, you know." Luna said it lightly but her face cast in an expression more serious than Ginny had ever seen it. "I imagine there will be a call for it this year."

"That is true." Ginny smiled and meant it for the first time in a month.

"We should talk to Neville then," Luna said, her hand on the compartment door, "It wouldn't make any sense to do three different things at once."

------

After

Luna slept in Gryffindor tower that night. Padma and Cho were the only Ravenclaw girls to stay, and their families had swallowed them up almost as soon as the fighting was over, but Xenophilius never came. So Luna slept in Parvati's bed and Ginny slept in Lavender's and if Hermione was conspicuously absent, no one mentioned it.

Ginny stared at the bed for a while before getting into it. Lavender Brown had kissed her brother once, and now she was dead. Ginny's own bed, indeed the room Ginny lived in while at Hogwarts, had been destroyed in the fighting as it shared a party wall with the corridor where Tonks had died. There were dead people everywhere at Hogwarts now.

"You know," said Luna in a voice that made Ginny realize she'd been speaking for some time, "In a way I feel jealous of you."

"Why?" Ginny's voice still croaked when she tried to use it. Irrationally, she wished she'd stayed in the Great Hall. Moving bodies and talking to family members was what most of her family was doing now. She'd spent enough time separated from them.

"Your family was here."

They were. And now Fred was gone forever. And her mother was a killer.

"It's never as heroic as it sounds."

"Oh, I know that now." Luna admitted. "But when your father told you to stay in the Room of Requirement, I wished my father had been there to say the same thing to me. I'm sixteen too, after all."

"I snuck out at the first opportunity."

"And I would have gone with you." Luna looked up at the ceiling where Lavender's collection of crystal balls hung from brightly coloured strings and glimmered in the moonlight. "I just meant it would have been nice if someone had remembered."

Ginny looked across the room. Luna was odd but, as Harry had pointed out, she did have an uncanny connection to the truth at the heart of the matter.

"That's why you came up here with me, wasn't it?" she asked. "My mother told you to go to bed."

"Yes." Luna said. "She fought that horrible Bellatrix for us, and then she hugged me and sent me to bed. It was very nice of her."

"Your father will come back, Luna, and then you can go off on all the research trips with him you like."

"Father never treats me like a child. Today was the first day I really wanted to be one."

"When's your birthday?"

"June."

"You come to the Burrow before that then. My mum will mother you to death."

"I think I'd like that."

The crystal balls swung gently from the ceiling and Ginny felt herself falling to sleep in a dead girl's bed thinking that maybe, after all of this, the world would turn out all right.

"You do know that crystal balls are the preferred mating grounds of Nargles? I suspect that tomorrow morning we shall find ourselves covered with their offspring."

Ginny laughed.

------

Gravity_Not_Included, July 26, 2007

Part Two: Dance With The Devil In The Pale Moon Light

Comments

[anr]

This is wonderful. Such lovely characterisations of Luna and Ginny.

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

Thank you! This is the first time I've tried (and I had to start with Luna), but I can hear their voices (from the movie) in my head stiil, which made it easier I think.

Also, ever since reading the book and starting to think about Ginny, I've had "Sixteen Going On Seventeen" in my head. In "The Sound of Music" it was a kind of meaningless barrier, and that was the point, but in HP it was everything.

[pellucid.livejournal.com]

This is the very first piece of HP fanfic I've ever read--and it's utterly lovely! I really, really wanted more of Ginny and Luna and Neville in the book, and this is a perfect look at Ginny and Luna.

So you think Lavender died? I re-read that part several times trying to figure out if she was dead, newly a werewolf, or just injured. 'Tis ambiguous, I think.

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

No on ever said anything about the moon (I think...), so I don't think she's a werewolf, which means she's either like Bill or dead. I went with dead for dramatic effect, really.

I think I may have got a few more ideas for this fic...at least Lupin anyway, but I imagine Neville will be along. And also George. Which may kill me. Thanks for the review, though. I was quite nervous writing it!

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

Also, this is random, but you always leave the best reviews for the fic I write in five minutes on a whim and think "Man...I am really not sure if that worked" when I am finished.

[pellucid.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I wonder why that is? Because usually I'm a big fan of people having things betaed and all that.

At least in this case I think it's probably largely that I've never been interested in HP fic, have always been a little scared of HP fandom, but then when it's right there on the flist from a trusted source I thought I'd give it a try. And then it really touched on one of the main things that I would have wanted to read fic about, were I to read fic, and not only that, did it well. So it was just so much serendipity!

[sache8.livejournal.com]

Hee! I love having fic blamed on me. *G*

There were two "he-who-must-not-be-named"s now. Fun, lol. Making that into a plural was probably fun too. ;-)

"We should talk to Neville then," Luna said, her hand on the compartment door, "It wouldn't make any sense to do three different things at once." *grins like an idiot* A friend of mine referred to Ginny, Luna, and Neville as the second trio. It's a nice, and I think more or less accurate, thought.

I love how Luna points out to Ginny the practicality of the Trace being the most important reason she couldn't accompany Harry. It was strangely sensitive and comforting. Reminds me of one of my favorite scenes in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles when Mendanbar tells Cimorene that if she's going to go dragon questing that he's going to have to go with her. She gets all huffy-ala-feminist on him and when he gives her a perfectly sound, sensible reason why he's volunteering himself, she kind of stares at him dumbly for a minute.

"Oh. I'm sorry. I'm so used to people telling me I can't do things because they think I shouldn't. It never occurred to me that you'd have a real reason."

(You really should read that series, btw, if you haven't. It's not quite as deep as HP, but the whimsy and intelligence are just as magical.)

I kind of presumed Lavender was actually just fine, but unconscious, actually. I think because in that scene I wasn't focusing so much on Lavender as I was on Hermione. In Malfoy Manner, it was Hermione who was the object of Greyback's lusting, and for me the scene was about her getting the chance to retaliate, and gave her an extra, ingrained instinct to protect Lavender from what she knew was going on in Greyback's head. Or whatever his name is.

I would point out that even though I read it twice, I still seemed to have missed entire details about the whole ending battle. Like the fact that Ron and Hermione got down to and back up from the Chamber of Secrets via broomstick. I was falling asleep last night wondering how the heck they got out without Fawkes and today Laura said, "But Ron had his broom; didn't you notice?"

That being said, dead or alive, I loved the touch of Lavender's crystal balls.

Anyway, WOW I digress. Great ficlet, splendid title, and thanks for the Luna goodness. :-)

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the battle scene was hard to follow sometimes. I was talking with a friend about it, she was annoyed at some of the omittances, and I pointed out that there has never been a scene in any of the books that Harry was physically present for (even if he's reading about it or using a Pensieve). So that's why we missed so much of the the fighting and the entire year at Hogwarts: Harry didn't see it and neither did we. It's annoying, but at least it's consistent.

I do think that Lavender is alive in the same shape that Bill was in at the end of HBP. However, since she might be dead, I capitalized on it for dramatic effect. :)

Thanks for the review! Part two came to me last night (and the second half of part three), so I'll be posting more in a bit!

[genamarie.livejournal.com]

This is utterly lovely and touching. I imagine Luna's head must be quite interesting and wildly colorful, don't you think?

And her mother was a killer.

That one line packed a punch for me and I had to stop for a moment just to absorb what Ginny must be feeling. What *all* of the Weasley kids must be feeling about that.

I really enjoyed this and look forward to seeing more in the series, even if they do tend to bring me to tears!

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much! I am not entirely positive, but I think Molly is the only Good person (Snape aside) who kills someone on screen (as it were). And it even sounds like she used the Avada Kedavra, which you have to mean. I still don't like her very much (book five pretty much killed any warm thoughts I had about her), but she is kind of awesome.

I have the first three parts up in lj and I am working on 4 and 5.

[cnidarian.livejournal.com]

There were two "he-who-must-not-be-named"s now.

Really liked that line - though initially I thought it was more to do with Ginny not wanting to mention his name, and less to do with the climate of fear. I'm also rather impressed that you wrote it at all. Fiddly punctuation scares me. *bows to you*

"Father never treats me like a child. Today was the first day I really wanted to be one."
Oh, Luna.

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

Thanks for reading! I am glad you are enjoying them.