Chapter Text

Mrs Norris had been found petrified some months ago, and Luna had been the only student in the castle who hadn't heard. Like a river parting around a stone, rumours passed by her, and though they tended to swirl and eddy in her presence, she didn't notice.

The attack on Colin Creevey had gone by, as had those on Justin Finch-Fletchley and Nearly Headless Nick. Though the school had been buzzing with fear and excitement since then, Luna didn't know anything. She didn't participate in conversations, and was just too absorbed in her own thoughts to notice things other people said or did.

Over Christmas, Hogwarts had been empty, the halls swept clean by fear. Luna had been planning to go home for the Christmas break from the start. After the first train ride to Hogwarts, she had resolved to seek out her crooked little compartment every time, and her peers avoided her, so she didn't even notice that the Hogwarts Express was unusually full.

After the Christmas break, everything was quiet for a while. Everyone was doing what they could to stay safe now, and caution seemed to pay off. There had been no new attacks.

Luna didn't notice. She didn't care about the behaviour of her classmates, be it the strange talismans everyone was wearing or the little mirrors some used to look around corners. Her classmates might as well have been of a different species; she didn't understand them, and had given up on trying to. There was no reason to attempt communication.

Besides, she was busy. Shortly after Christmas, after her talk with Ginny, after her second true encounter with Friend, she had woken up on a pillow stiff with dried blood. She had bled from nose and ears while dreaming of Friend, so much that she had felt slightly faint. In her right hand, she had held a tiny living thing, a tender, brightly green offshoot. She had done it; she had opened a way and dragged something through, something which shouldn't exist in this world.

Within hours, she had found the perfect place for her project: A tiny room deep in the dungeons. The unbroken layer of dust on the floor certified that not even the House Elves came here. The room contained no furniture and had no windows. It was perfect for her needs.

The rest was a matter of herbology, care and patience. Friend had shown her the way to a world in which she was a prodigy as far as plants were concerned, and though she had known that Luna had been a lie, just like the vision of research in the Tower had been, she had used her knowledge.

She spent hours upon hours in the dungeons, pruning and nourishing, cutting offshoots off the offshoot and seeding the room with them, floor, walls and ceiling. Her absence was noted - once, as she went back up to the castle, Dumbledore himself asked her to explain herself. She couldn't afford for her project to be interrupted, so she asked Friend to make everyone forget her, and it did. Suddenly, she was free of all obligations.

She devoted herself to her project. She didn't know what would happen at its end, barred herself from thinking about it, but the plant had to grow. Therefore, she went into the tiny room in the dungeon, content to spend all her time with the plant.

Though her skin had been fair before, she got even paler now, until the skin on the back of her hands became see-through. Her veins seemed green now, no longer blue. She slept dreamlessly several times a day, but never more than half an hour at the time, so her care for the plant wouldn't be interrupted for too long.

She didn't feel hunger anymore, though she was getting thinner and thinner. In some ways, she was happy about it; not needing food meant more time for the plant. This way, she only had to leave the room once every few days, to get more water for the plant.

While on such an errand, a group of Slytherins crossed her path. They were laughing and joking among themselves, but once they saw her, they stopped in their tracks. Pale and frightened, they turned around and ran. Luna got her water and brought it back to the plant, humming to herself. She knew why they had acted such. Luna had seemed like something truly strange, and their limited minds couldn't deal with the unknown.

It was as though they simply couldn't decide what she was; witch, ghost or something in-between, some cursed half-creature, and that fit Luna just right. She had always been different, she might as well look the part. With slight surprise she noted that she could really see through her skin, now, and count not only her veins, but also the vague shadows of the bones beneath.

She had forgotten her wand in her room, when she had last been there, months ago, and not missed it. Even if she had had it, she couldn't have cast any spell by now. She was as sapped of magic as any prisoner in Azkaban.

She didn't mind that the plant was eating her. It had grown so big that it covered the ground and walls entirely, now. Luna had put every last vine and leaf in exactly the right place, a grand design realized as a living thing. It had never so much as lifted a vine against her, and though she knew the exact steps of the breeding program Harry and her other self had conducted, she believed its nonviolence to be a sign of symbiosis with her.

To her, the confined room seemed infinite. Its size was not external, but within, a microcosm, sprawling scenery contained in the smallest details of the plant. She had explored so much of it, had charted so many details and mapped so many shades of green in the darkness, and yet there would always be more to find.

Above her head, the last blank spot of ceiling would close, soon. Only a few days and she would have created a space entirely free of magic, deep within Hogwarts. Then she could begin with the final, unknown phase of her plan.

The last leaf grew in minutes, accelerated by a sudden burst of ancient magic reverberating through the castle walls. Luna didn't know about the outside, about Hermione, who was petrified, or Aragog, not even the plight of Ginny, who was, by now, even farther away from the world than Luna. She didn't know that the Chamber of Secrets had been opened and wouldn't have cared. Her singular purpose had been achieved: Her tiny room was closed.

She had never felt as she did, right now. It was a feeling of elation, of completeness-in-lack, of asceticism brought to the cusp of ascendancy. With twitching, shivering fingers she could barely control anymore, she dug around in a pocket of the rags she wore, finding her most well-hoarded treasure.

Ten pills were left of the hoard Friend had gathered for her from the Medicine Cabinet. She took them all. Just before she faded, she knew what she wanted and hoped for: Without the interference of any magical background radiation, with her body a whisper on the wind, she could step halfway through the door, stay in the real world and be with Friend in the world-between-worlds at the same time. She didn't want to be alone anymore.

"Welcome, Luna."

Was it her state of delirium, that made her hear it speak in words for the first time? Maybe her dying brain put the pictures he always showed her into words. But maybe, just maybe, he was actually speaking to her.

And how intriguing his voice was! He took the ordinary words of English and formed them into worlds themselves, with jagged peaks higher than the highest clouds and deep, verdant valleys. There was life in his voice, ecosystems in a single world, a thousand species coming into being and vanishing just so he could make a single point.

Luna opened her eyes, and where the world-within-worlds had been a distant gray before, dull enough that she had never even noticed not noticing it, it shone from itself now, with subtle variation testifying to a long and varied history. She knew she saw Friend's soul reflected in his world, just like his metaphor of the mirrored sphere had always suggested. Her soul opened and sang with joy just as her heart struggled with its last feeble beats.

Finally, her eyes chanced upon him, and a black spear, jagged and terrible, drove into her open soul. She had seen him before; his iridescent claws, the inky pool of his blackness and the many things squirming within. Many things in the world-between-worlds had been lies, or only half-true, but this wasn't.

Suddenly, she felt so fragile, so cold and so small.

"Why?" She knew she didn't need to be specific. He would answer all questions at once.

"To get to this point. Every time you came here, I took from you and your world. Every time I did your bidding, our pact deepened. As I was the key to your chains, you will be to mine."

Suddenly she saw, hidden inside his darkness, a golden chain wound tightly around his squirming self. It was worn out and weakened, but it still held. In the center, buried deep within his mass, was a lock.

Luna wasn't surprised when she saw that the index finger of her left hand was a key. It wasn't a recent development. In opening the medicine cabinet for the first time, she had made it such, though she hadn't known at the time. It began moving towards the lock of its own accord, which wasn't surprising, either.

Power for power, and a key for a key.

And understanding for understanding, if she had her way.

"My mother pulled you free. But why did I see you in my dreams before you came?"

"My kind doesn't exist as simply as yours does. Echoes ripple across the world at our slightest movement. Have all of you forgotten whence your power comes, wizard child?"

"Wisdom is always fading. The magic all around us, even things of power... In another reality, I remember standing near a golden mirror, high above the earth, working my will. Yet I didn't notice that it felt as your touch did; the worlds rearranged as I wish."

Her finger was entering the lock.

"I had not known of that prison. You may ask of me one last reward, in fair exchange."

She smiled at Friend then, a bright outward smile. "That's not how friendship works." With a thought, her wand materialized in her right hand, pulled from one of the many worlds, and she cast as her mother once had; a spell in a spell, ad infinitum.