NaNo FanFic Part 17
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Pairings this part: Harry/Luna, mention of past Harry/Ginny, Harry/others, Luna/Rolf, Luna/others
Rating: R  (please note the rating.  we may not have anatomical slang, but there is sex, people)
Warnings: sex, PTSD, hurt/comfort
Notes: I cannot even believe I'm posting this.  This is the second sex scene I have ever, ever written.  Ever.  Take that as a warning if you like.
Mad props to E for giving me some ideas for transitions.  Harry's glasses are foggy because of her.  :) 
Since this is a day late, it's twice as long as usual. 

November 2001, Number 12 Grimmauld Place, London

Harry could not pinpoint exactly when the evening had moved from a quiet tea to frantic snogging, but he was not going to complain.  Luna's skin was intoxicating; even the glimpses of her wrists under the loose cuffs of her blouse as she poured her tea had been temptation.  That she welcomed his touch surprised him, perhaps more than it should have. 

He pushed himself up on one arm to catch his breath, trying to sort out the tangle of limbs.  His glasses had gone foggy and sat askew on his face. Her hair fanned out like corn silk on the cushions of the sofa. 

She reached up and traced the line of his jaw with two fingertips. 

He bent his head to press his lips lightly to her temple.  "Stay.  Stay tonight."  Stay with me. Stay forever.  Harry kissed her to shut himself up, but could not stop himself from thinking the words.  How much more terrible would her leaving be if he had been so foolish with his words.    

He felt her smile against his mouth, and her foot slid over his calf, her bare toes inching up under his trousers.  He rolled to the side, into the back of the sofa, pulling her body flush against his until she lay half-atop him.  She gasped at the sudden move, then sighed against his neck as he ran his hand down her back, tugging her blouse free of her waistband just enough to slip his hand beneath to the curve of her back. 

"Mm, yes," she said, lifting her head just enough to meet his eyes.  She had an amazing ability to unbutton his shirt one-handed, and employed it as she spoke, much to Harry's distraction.  "As long as you want me."  

Harry might have wondered about that answer if he had been more coherent, but he quickly lost track of serious thoughts as her hands and mouth explored his torso.  When her teeth nipped playfully at the soft skin of his belly, he groaned and pulled her up into a desperate kiss.  He needed both hands for her buttons, but made short work of them, then pushed the gray silk down her arms and off. 

She sat up, now straddling his hips on the sofa, her hands splayed over his ribs.  Her hair parted at the back of her neck and fell forward onto his chest.  He discovered that even after his years alone, he still remembered the trick of unhooking a woman's bra.  The slip of fabric fell and pooled around her wrists, edges of lace tickling his skin. 

Luna's breath hitched as he threaded his fingers through her hair and cupped her breast in his palm.  He watched the fine gold strands catch the light, revealing tantalizing glimpses of her pale skin between them.  The slide of her hair between his hand and her breast was hypnotic.  His thumb circled gently over her nipple and she gasped.   He looked up and found her staring at his face, her eyes wide and bright, her bottom lip caught in her teeth. 

Her hips shifted, leaving no doubt that she was aware of Harry's reaction; he slid both hands around her waist, pulling her tight against him, and sat up as he swung his feet down to the floor.  Her bra slipped around onto the cushions.  "Oh, God," he moaned against her collarbone as she pushed his shirt down to his elbows and wrapped her arms around his neck.  "Bed. Upstairs." 

He Accioed their wands, holding them under his palm against her back as his other hand gripped the back of her thigh.  Sensing his intention, she tightened her legs around his waist as he stood up.  He got them halfway up the stairs before her kisses made him clumsy.  He let go of her leg to grip the banister, white-knuckled, and her feet slid down his body until she stood on the step above him.  He shed his shirt, popping the buttons on the cuffs.

"This is not the bed," she observed between nips at his ear. 

Harry pulled one of her hands away from his back and pressed their wands into it.  "Hold these."  Then he crouched in front of her, wrapped one arm around her legs just above the knee, and hoisted her over his shoulder as he stood up.  He grinned as she shrieked, then settled, their wands tapping an impatient beat against the back of his knee with every step up. 

He was grateful his bedroom was on the first landing.  He left the door standing open as he crossed the floor, then let Luna fall onto his bed.  She made a beautiful picture, all milky skin, pink nipples, and golden hair against the royal blue bedspread, but the black skirt and knickers definitely had to go.  He stood still, one hand clutching the bedpost, and just looked at her.

"Harry Potter," she breathed.  "You are full of surprises."    She arched her back, reaching over her head to the bedside table, and carefully opened her hand so that their wands settled there between the ironwork lamp and a worn paperback book with a ribbon bookmark halfway through.  Harry found it hard to get his breath as he watched, especially when she pulled her arm back and stretched one foot so that her toes ran up the front of his leg to his hip. 

She slid her hands behind her back, arching up once more, and Harry wondered if this was some seduction ploy that she had learned in that London townhouse.  His brain flashed suddenly to the image of Luna's beautifully slender wrists bound in silk; his fingernails dug into the bedpost as he groaned.  "Harry," she said, her toes ran down the front of his trousers.  "Get rid of those."  She gave him incentive immediately, as he realized her hands had unzipped her skirt and were now slipping it and her remaining underclothes down her hips. 

Again, there was a strange disconnect between his body and his mind, because he had no idea how he managed to get himself out of the rest of his clothes, but by the time Luna had dropped her skirt over the edge of the bed they were both naked.  He let her pull him down over her, and at that first intoxicating touch of skin on skin he almost lost control and brought the proceedings to a premature end.  It had been so long.

There was something about Luna that brought out a mischief Harry had not known in bed since Hogwarts.  After so long fearing his own emotional response, it felt incredibly good to simply feel, to enjoy, to laugh with a woman who did not expect him to be the hero. 

Their first coupling was quick, messy, but not as clumsy as Harry had feared.  He thought perhaps she understood how close to the edge he was, because once he had come down from the initial high, she coaxed his body into further pleasure. She was gloriously responsive, and not at all shy about giving him direction, which was quite a change from Harry's few previous girlfriends.  Not even Ginny had been so comfortable issuing orders in the bedroom.  As he learned the intimate curves and planes of Luna's body he set himself a goal to see her composure shatter, as she had shattered him. 

As the first time had been quick, so the second was slow, languid, with careful attention to detail.  Harry learned the particular breathy moan Luna made when he pleasured her with his tongue, and she surprised a shuddering groan from him by sucking his fingers into her mouth one by one.  He crawled slowly up her body, leaving a path of kisses and bites on her belly and breasts.  When he was close enough that her face came into focus, she was smiling a wicked, wanton smile around his index finger.  Harry braced himself above her on one elbow, watching her fellate his finger with bone-melting skill.  Her legs wrapped around him, pulling him inside her.  He eased his hand away from her mouth and settled his weight on both arms, moving as slowly as he could.  She dug her fingernails into his biceps and gasped his name.   "H-harry.  Move!"  She tilted her hips and took hold of his hair to tug him down to her mouth.  He could not hold on to his control for long after that, and gave her what she wanted.

This time, Harry got what he wanted, too; he found the rhythm and the angle, and by the time Luna had shuddered beneath him the second time she was incoherent and babbling syllables that may have been his name, or curses, or just random sounds of pleasure.  He did not last long enough to finish her the third time, but she was so close that his fingers managed the job, her cry swallowed by his kiss.  

Luna was the second woman in his life to sleep the night in his bed.  At school there had never been more than brief flings in secret corridors or hidden rooms, always with the threat of point loss for being out after curfew.  Not until after the war, when Harry had found himself in possession of a flat of his own, had he ever experienced that intimacy. 

He woke during the wee hours of the morning, jolted from sleep by a blood-drenched nightmare.  He was startled to find himself held in a warm embrace.  He remembered then, and turned his head.  He could just make out Luna's face in the near-darkness, peaceful in sleep, on the pillow next to his shoulder.  He slipped out from under her arm and leg, taking his wand and silently summoning his dressing gown, and padded down to the kitchen barefoot.  In a matter of minutes he had a cup of tea cradled in both hands as he leaned against the counter. 

What did this mean?  He recalled the words he had not said to Luna.  Stay forever.  Was it just the experience of making love after so long that had made him think so foolishly?   Or had such thinking started long before, before he had seen her at the Floo Atrium, even, over the course of months?  She was still the Luna he knew from school, yet she was so much more now.  Adult, experienced as he was not, but she did not seem to hold that against him.  She had never seemed the type for casual lovers; hadn't she and her naturalist been together almost a year, even if Harry had not been aware of why she lived in London?     

The look on her face as she had looked at Harry.  On the sofa, then in bed - had that been new?  What had she been thinking, or had she been thinking at all?  Harry did not know if he wanted her to tell him it was just a fling between friends, or if he wanted her to stay, to see if the changes in him in the last year matched the changes in her. 

He set his empty cup on the cabinet and went back upstairs.  He had closed the bedroom door as he left, not wanting to wake Luna with any noise.  When he opened the door again, the room was no longer silent.  He saw Luna, now illuminated by the dim light from the corridor, the long line of her back gleaming white while her hair fell over her shoulder on her other side.  She had her arms wrapped around blanket-covered legs, her face buried in her knees.  She was shaking, and the soft, almost animal noise Harry heard was her whimpering. 

Before he really knew what he was about, Harry had climbed onto the bed and pulled her into his arms.  She gasped as he touched her, then melted against him, her hands curling tight in the fabric of his dressing gown.  "Harry," she whispered, her lips leaving feathery kisses on his chest.  "Harry, Harry, you're here, Harry." 

"I'm here," Harry confirmed, stroking her hair.  She was not crying, but her whole body shook with the kind of tremors Harry remembered from his flashbacks.  "Luna.  What's wrong, love?" 

She shook her head, pressing herself even closer against him, and he swung his leg around her as well, trapping her against him as he leaned them back against the headboard.  After a few minutes her trembling eased, and she pulled back from him.  He eased his hold, and she fell back to the pillows, staring up at him.  "I'm sorry," she whispered, and turned her face away. 

Harry gently took hold of her chin and turned her back to look at him.  She did not resist, but he was startled to see something like shame in her face.  He bent to press his lips to her forehead, then her mouth.  "Luna, love.  What frightened you?  A nightmare?"  Merlin knew Harry had enough of those to understand. 

Luna shook her head, and a single tear did now run down her temple and into her hair.  "No," she said.  "I woke up alone in the dark."  She hugged herself, shivering now, but Harry thought it was nerves more than cold.  Even so, he tugged the blanket up over them both, and settled down beside her.

"Tell me," he whispered against the soft curve of her ear, sliding his arm and leg over her in echo of the way she had held him in the night. 

"I always sleep with a candle, ever since the war.  Or with someone else.  Or both."  She clasped her hand around his.  "Even just a hand to hold.  There is so much pain in the dark." 

Harry waited for her to elaborate, to tell the tale as he had so often heard others do in their efforts to heal.  But she remained silent.  Harry pressed a kiss to her temple, and held her, and thought of the secrets that only his Healer knew.  At the same time that he did not want to know anyone else's horrors, Harry felt a deep longing within himself to be the one trusted with Luna's confidence.   And was that not a revelation, then, of what he truly wanted of her, of this relationship?  He wanted to say something to encourage her to speak, but he remembered too well the way he had felt when his friends pressed him for words he had no wish to say.

"Let me find a candle," he said instead, and took up his wand again. 

When he turned back to her, a cathedral candle in its stand now burning happily beside the bed and spelled not to blow out or tip over, the look on her face was wondrous.  She ran her fingers down his cheek, then behind his neck, pulling him down to her kiss.  "Full of surprises," she whispered as they parted.  "And unexpected kindness." 

"Unexpected?" he repeated, startled.  "What's unexpected about lighting a candle?"  It was a simple enough problem to solve.  Luna required a candle.  Harry provided one. 

Luna's smile was sad, and tender, and wounded all at once.  "Not everyone in the world would do that for me."

Harry wondered if she meant her previous lovers, and felt a protective rage at the thought.  But not everyone had war wounds that would never heal, as Harry and his friends did.  He tightened his hold on Luna, letting his face drop into the curve of her neck.  He expected that to be the end of the matter, for now, as Luna's breathing settled into a calmer rhythm. 

She spoke, though, in a whisper, her fingers caressing the inside of his wrist.  "Draco brought me candles to keep away the dark, the first week I was a prisoner. He could do so little to help me, or to help himself, but he did that much." 

Harry carefully did not move, keeping his body relaxed around her. This was not the story he had expected. 

"There were such terrible things in the dark.  And the pain only made it worse, after the Cruciatus.  I thought I was going mad, and perhaps I was.  The candles helped.  Mr. Ollivander helped, when he was there, but he was taken away so often.  Then the candle was put out."  Her breath hitched again, this time on what sounded like a sob, but after a moment she continued.  "I slept when there was a human hand to hold, and when there wasn't I stared into the dark seeing monsters until I passed out.  It took me a month, I guess - time was not so clear in the dark, either - to learn to cast a wandless Incendio strong enough to light a candle." 

Suddenly many things about Luna's relationship with Draco, and the birthday present he had given her that year, became clear to Harry. 

"I went to St. Mungo's after the war, Harry.  I'm not - well, I suppose everyone always thought I was a little crazy, didn't they?"   Harry pressed a kiss to her throat, feeling her pulse against his lips.  "But sometimes, I wake up alone in the dark and I'm back there, and you never came, and Dobby never rescued me, and just for that one moment, that split second in the dark, it feels like it will never end."  She took a deep breath, letting her free hand comb gently through Harry's hair.  "Does that make any sense?" 

Harry lifted his head so that he could look her in the eye.  "It does," he breathed, gently pulling his hand from hers so he could comb the stray curls away from her face.  "You don't have to explain to me, Luna.  You could have a dozen candles, if you wanted them.  Next time, I'll wake you before I leave the bed." 

She smiled and tilted her head to kiss his chin.  "Next time?"

Those two quiet words shattered Harry's inner composure, but he kept his face as calm as he could.  "If you wish."  He tried to keep his voice steady against the crushing disappointment.   And her next words, once more, surprised him, and intoxicated him, and made him dream dreams far out of his range as yet.

"You - Harry.  I'm not - there's no - you want a next time?"  Her smile didn't falter, but it still had that tender, wounded edge, as if she were already mourning a loss. 

He pulled her bodily against him, claiming her mouth in a bruising kiss, one hand tangling in her hair, the other winding around her waist.  Her fingers tightened in his hair, her nails bruising his scalp, as she surrendered to the kiss.  Harry broke away only when he was forced to breathe, and even then kept his forehead pressed to Luna's.  "Luna Lovegood," he breathed against her mouth.  "I want you to stay.  Tonight, and tomorrow night, and as many nights after that as I can claim." 

Her eyes were huge in the flickering candlelight.  "Oh," she said, when she had caught her breath.  "Oh."  Harry felt her smile.  "Yes.  I'll stay."  

He relaxed his hold on her just enough to let them rest in comfort.  There were hours yet to sleep, before the day began.  The first day of something new. 

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