Chapter Text

This time, when she strode through the golden oval, a single thought and wish filled her mind.

-~O~-

"I want to be needed"

-~O~-

"To be honest, I wasn't sure if I should assign anyone to this. It's been my private project for years; something I could just tinker with on my downtime, when other work seemed too tedious."

Luna, still a bit disoriented, kept on walking. Though Harry wasn't particularly tall, his determined steps still ate large amounts of ground. It was hard to keep up with him, especially here, in the deeper recesses of the Tower, where corridors were tight and twisting, and steps broke up the ground at seemingly random intervals. These rooms paid the price for the geometric excesses of the more public rooms, whose shapes were designed for maximum effect, not compatibility with the triangular shape of the Tower's base. Only Harry was really familiar with them.

"Are you still with me, Miss Lovegood? I honestly cannot tell whether you are listening to me."

"Yes, I am."

Why was he so distant? He shouldn't be calling her Miss Lovegood, not after all they had been through together. Not after Dumbledore's Army and the battle at the Department of Mysteries, where they had stood together as friends. Not after the hunt for the Basilisk, when she had served as his agent in a school that had forgotten him. She shook her head as if trying to clear it. Those timelines were mutually incompatible, and didn't fit with this one either, where Harry had had better things to do in his second year than hunting a mythical monster. Now, she was a researcher at the Tower, and though she had attended the Hogwarts Science Program Harry taught parts of, he hadn't had much personal contact with her.

Harry was opening the fifth door in a row, this one round and set into the wall a foot off the floor. "Well, here we are."

Luna looked into a small, polyhedral room that was horrendously unorganized. Workbenches and tables stood where the irregular walls permitted it, all of them filled with muggle devices and wizardly knick-knacks, most of them partially disassembled and stacked a foot high. The floor was not better off; whoever worked here hadn't cared about having space enough to walk. Once Luna saw through the chaos, she noticed the burn marks: Flames and explosions had left black marks on the stone of the chamber. She breathed in deep and wasn't surprised at all when her nostrils tingled with the residue of wild, untamed magic. Images of her mother came to mind.

While she was studying the room, Harry studied her. "It's somewhat embarrassing to have to show this mess to someone. What do you think?"

"It is messy."

Harry laughed. "No, I didn't mean to ask about the room. You might have noticed that I've neglected to tell you the nature of the project you'll be working on. So, what do you think you'll be doing here?"

"Is this a test, Harry?" Luna asked. Those who had graduated from the Science Program knew to expect the unexpected as far as tests were concerned.

Harry looked at her. She couldn't tell if he was taken aback by her familiar tone. "Oh, no, Miss Lovegood. This won't affect your employment at all, it's just to satisfy a private curiosity of mine."

Luna nodded. "I'll walk you through my deduction, then. This room," she walked into its middle, making a sweeping gesture, "contains piles of muggle devices. Though I don't recognize all of them, the electronic parts seem as sophisticated as anything I've seen in the Science Program. There are also some magical objects here, though they are rather unsophisticated; an enchanted lamp, a pocket with an extended space in it, some others. All objects not in either of those categories are planar in shape, or form containers. Now, from the fact that complicated muggle devices are near magic, here, and the way those other objects could be interposed between them, it seems obvious that these are experiments into preventing the breakdown of muggle devices near magic."

Harry was smiling, now. "Excellent."

"Oh, I wasn't finished. I've not taken the two most complex and mysterious objects in this room into account."

"Which would be?"

"You and me. You have been working on this for some time, or so the debris would suggest. Yet, you clearly haven't had a breakthrough by now. In hope for that breakthrough, you've hired me, and not a muggleborn, who would have understood the muggle devices in this room far better than I could. Also, I am aware of my poor grades in the Science Program."

Harry nodded. "Have you considered that I might just be short on staff and unwilling to commit those with better marks to a private project?"

"I have, and it's a boring explanation. Boring explanations have never gotten anyone anywhere interesting. You've hired me because of my tendency to think sideways. In the Science Program, I failed a lot of times, but I never chose the path that seemed obvious to others."

Again, Harry nodded. "So this is your answer, then? I brought you in to generate new, non-obvious hypotheses for this project on which I have exhausted the conventional approaches of research."

"No." At this point, Luna was having fun. "That still wouldn't take all the hints in the room into account. My answer is a question: What do you think is the nature of spells?"

"Ah. Your deduction seems to be missing a few steps, there." But the stern tone was a bad cover for the wide grin that had split Harry's face.

"Call it free association, if you wish." She had known since she had smelled the magic, but it had been fun to spin a large, roundabout tale of deduction. "Also, I couldn't fail to notice that your shielding materials have begun to gather some dust, though you have still been destroying muggle devices for a while. You've started to try magical shields, and that means you are asking yourself sophisticated questions about the side effects of spells. Before I can help you further on this path, I want to know what you think the nature of a spell is."

"A spell is a burst of magic shaped to effect a change in the world."

"You've sidestepped the question. What do you mean by magic?"

"It's energy." Harry's tone was pensive.

"But everything is energy, in the end, isn't it? Try to be more precise. What assumptions went into your attempts to block the side-effects of spells using magical shields?"

"Ah, I see what you're getting at. It's waves."

"Yes. You tried to abuse interference effects, but it was unpredictable, wasn't it? There was a random element in your results which no amount of careful calibration could eliminate. Your problem was that magic doesn't consist of waves, though it behaves similarly to them in some ways."

Harry chuckled. "Do you mean wave-particle duality?"

Luna took a second until she remembered the term. It had been explained in the Science Program, but only once, and like three quarters of the class, she hadn't really understood it. "Ah, no. The important word was 'behaves'. Think of it as a living thing, or more appropriately, an infinitely large number of living things, like an ecosystem that's so finely grained it might as well be continuous." In fact, that was not quite how she thought about it, but it seemed closer to the type of thinking Harry employed.

Harry folded his arms and raised his eyebrows. She remembered that gesture from one of his more condescending incarnations; it meant that he was pretty sure she was talking bullshit, but considered himself too polite to actually say so. When he didn't interrupt, she continued.

"There's a lot of those tiny things that behave in somewhat unpredictable ways. Though they might obey natural laws, they have free will. At the macro level, their tiny disputes fall away, revealing clear patterns, like history seen from a distance. The effects of a spell are deterministic. The side-effects, though, might not be."

Harry nodded, though he still hadn't lowered his eyebrows. "That is an interesting hypothesis, but for you to be presenting it as a matter-of-fact theory, there are some more holes to fill. Also, I can't help but wonder why I've never heard anything about this particular view from any of the numerous experts I've consulted."

Luna smiled an inward smile, and this one was deviously sweet. "Let's say that I've got the inside scoop on this." This was the closest she had come to mentioning Friend to anybody, and she knew that she was treading a thin line. "And I'm sorry, but you're not paying me to spill the beans on the nature of magic, you're paying me to solve the problem of destruction of muggle devices by magical side effects."

"What does your perspective provide in the way of experimental approaches, then?"

"We're dealing with a biological problem. There are two ways of warding off an infestation: The first is applying an appropriate poison, the second is introducing a sufficiently non-discriminating predator. I think we should just try to find something that eats the little guys."

"Yes, I tried that. The only creatures that are reputed to just eat magic are chizpurfles, and I've eliminated them as a solution since they only live as parasites and could never reliably shield an entire device."

Luna nodded, looking thoughtful. "I don't think those are our only option, though. I'll have to think about this. Oh, by the way, I don't think I'll need this laboratory, or any room in the tower, really. I'll just get back to you when I've found something."

"That's rather unorthodox, isn't it?"

"Oh, it is, but isn't that why you've hired me? I expect I'll find something within the week."

Luna left quickly. Had she stayed longer, she might have seen Harry's contrary posture fall away, revealing a wide, satisfied smile.

Within a day, she had thought of fourteen different candidates to test out, until she had remembered that she should constrain herself to beings that were already found, since they had to begin testing within a reasonable time frame, and there was no telling how long it would take her to find something like a Crumple-Horned Snorkack. Suddenly, there weren't any candidates left. The established field of magizoology was, as she knew, painfully narrow.

This left her with the interesting and unusual task of hypothesizing about creatures everyone else already thought they knew everything about.

She borrowed a copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find them from the Hogwarts library, technically illegally, since she wasn't a student anymore. Some might have scoffed at her choice of reference, since calling it an introductory text would have been generous, but she didn't particularly care that it was short and written in a comparatively simple style. She had no use for long-winded paragraphs of description in flowery prose. In fact, she just needed a list she could tick off, so that she could be sure to have considered all options.

After three days of free association, she had her most promising candidate. She just had to look for creatures with improbably restrained eating habits, since those were the most likely ones to supplement their diet with magic. The Devil's Snare had stood out both for its likely capabilities of absorption and its ease of handling. At least, it had always seemed easy to handle to Luna; after all, it wouldn't be able to strangle anything which was bright enough.

Harry had been thrilled with her find, but somewhat reserved at her countermeasures, opting for a breeding program.

He had asked her to demonstrate the plant's powers of absorption. It felt weird, at first, to apply the experimental method to her own hypotheses, since she had done just fine with pure theorizing her entire life, but she recognized its use when she saw how quickly people were inclined to believe her.

Harry asked her to help him on another project right away. That project was followed by another, bigger one, and before she knew, she had subordinates, people who actually did what she told them to.

For the first time since her mother had died, she felt truly appreciated.

-~O~-

Luna was standing before the golden oval again. From the dream she had just lived, she had taken more than just memories. A deep sense of understanding filled her.

"It's a lie."

Question.

Friend was good with images; it could convey abstract concepts with its golden oval that Luna couldn't even imagine trapped in a picture, and when the picture was gone, she couldn't quite remember what it had been like. Sometimes, there was more meaning to be derived from the concept, like this time: It had asked a question, but it was up to Luna to find out which one. She assumed it had been a simple request for clarification.

"It's not real, this world I was/been/will be in." Her own speech was strange, sometimes, too, in this world between worlds. "This Luna has walked the path of the underdog. She has been ridiculed and underestimated, with bad marks slapped on her when no one understood just how clever she was. Then, she was given an opportunity to prove herself, and passed with flying colors. She has won the respect of that Harry, but that is not how it should have been.

It might have been like that for me, had I been in that situation, but the Luna that should have been there would have been different, and would have gotten praise and respect from the beginning of the Science Program. She wouldn't have needed to lessen Harry, and so he would have had the idea to investigate the Devil's Snare, and for a more robust reason than hers. This world is twisted, and this Luna is pitiful."

Three identical women in poses of agony and madness.

"Yes, I know, there is only one of me, and talking as though I were many fosters misconceptions. Yet my point still stands. I shouldn't change that world to contain such different paths to satisfy my own hunger for respect won against adversity."

Peas in a pod, each slightly different.

"Though it is a valid choice, it shouldn't be mine to make."

The peas were gleaming silver now.

"And we've been over that, as well. I still don't think I'm ready."

Golden chains, shattered on the floor.

"I... I don't understand." Sometimes, that happened, when Friend thought an unknown concept familiar to her.

Freedom.

"Yes, that much I had gotten. But who? How?"

Friendship.

Friend was probably growing impatient now, since it didn't like explaining himself. There were two entities Friend could mean with the notion of Friendship; Luna, who was its friend, or itself, because it knew how she thought of it. Luna steadied her thoughts and found the most probable option: It meant them both. Every conversation with it had to be taken in all possible contexts, if possible, interpreted in all different ways and seen as the sum of those. That was just the way it thought, and the highest barrier to true communication with it.

Choices, accomplished through Willwork, a prison shattered. Freedom for Friend, or friendship through freedom, or even freedom from friendship, as twisted as that sounded. After all, a golden chain could represent many things.

No matter what, Friend wanted her to act now, instead of waiting until she felt ready. And it would be discourteous to refuse; it had caused many good things to happen to Luna, likely at a cost to itself. It was time for her to return the favor.

The last question left was the How. It was ephemeral, though, before this golden oval. With conviction, Luna opened the door through which she had gone earlier, and let time flow. She saw what became of the Devil's Snare, once the breeding program had tamed it. It was little more than a potted plant that ate magic, and in fact, a potted offshoot of it stood in the greenhouse where it had been bred. It was an easy thing to reach through and take it.

Luna would go back, now. She knew that the time the five pills had granted her was almost up. But she would take this little plant with her and free herself, so that she might free Friend.