Entry tags:

100quills, fanfiction, fic: far away as moonshine

FIC: Far Away as Moonshine 16/28
Title: Far Away as Moonshine, Part II: The Battle of Hogwarts
Author: zephre
Rating: PG-13 (R for whole fic)
Prompt: 100quills table 50.2: Overturn
Word Count: 1,277
Summary: For Draco Malfoy, the war was one endless nightmare. Until Luna Lovegood gave him a reason to hope. Can he find his courage, make his luck, and become more than a pawn to those in power?
Warnings: (for whole fic, highlight to view) *mature themes, imprisonment, mention of rape, abuse, battlefield violence, various canon and other character deaths, sexual situations*
Notes: The title is from the song, "Street of Dreams" by Oysterband.
Concrit Wanted? Sure! I just wrote this on my lunch break, so please alert me to typos or other weirdness. It may, in fact, make no sense whatsoever.

Chapter Index:
Part I:   1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 ||
Part II:  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 ||
Part III: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 ||
Epilogue

Chapter 7: In which there is a terrible pause.


It was disconcerting for Luna to realize how little she had thought about Harry until she saw him struggling with the Dementors. The sight of him reminded her why she was fighting, reminded her of the burdens others carried. She was never alone here.

Harry was faltering under the assault of the Dementors, and Ron and Hermione did not last long beside him. Luna snagged Seamus's sleeve as she ran past him, directing his attention to the other three.  He spun on his heel, pulling Ernie up as the other boy stumbled, and the two almost overtook Luna as they pushed to reach their friends in time.

The three Patronuses, the hare, the boar, and the fox, ran ahead and gave the students some room to breathe.  Harry looked over at Luna as she came to stand beside him.

"That's right," Luna said, trying to find words that would break through the chill and shock to inspire Harry's strength. "That's right, Harry.  Come on, think of something happy."*

"Something happy?"* Harry repeated, sounding dazed.

Luna realized that he needed something more. She leaned closer and whispered the only thing she could think of. "We're all still here," she said, although her throat threatened to close at the thought of the bodies they left on the lawn. "We're still fighting. Come on, now..."*

Something in her words, or perhaps the presence of members of the DA, broke through to Harry, and his stag Patronus burst into existence. Dementors fled before it, and Ron said something, something Luna did not clearly make out before a giant burst from the Forest and she ran for cover.

When she looked up again, the others were all gone, and she was on her own.

She looked toward the castle, and resolved to make her way toward the Entrance Hall, in hopes of finding shelter or at least learning where the tides of battle had turned. That there were malevolent creatures and Death Eaters between her and her goal merely fed her determination.  

She knew more hexes to make the Carrows proud, after all.

Luna was in the midst of defending herself from an arrow-hex when Voldemort's forces were withdrawn. An hour's respite, he said, for Harry to give himself up.

She fell to her knees in the grass and caught her breath.

A flash of color in the moonlight caught her eye, just beyond a boulder that had probably been part of the castle that morning. She crawled over to the rock and found on the other side of it a young man she did not recognize, wearing the much-hexed remains of Auror's robes. His hand clenched and unclenched convulsively, but she could see that his wand was on the ground, and broken.

He tried to speak to her, and began coughing. Luna reached out and helped him to sit up.  "Come on," she said, bracing herself to pull him to his feet. "Let me help you."

She did not know if the Infirmary was even still there, but where else could they go? Holding his arm across her shoulders, they began to limp toward the castle.

The Entrance Hall was partially gone. Luna went up the steps out of habit, even though there was a perfectly servicable hole in the wall through which others were clambering. Madam Pomfrey and three others in lime green robes - not standard St. Mungo's robes, but transfigured school robes - were directing the wounded to different parts of the Great Hall.  Luna saw that one part had already been designated for the dead.  Professor Lupin and his wife were there.

She left the wounded Auror in the care of someone who might help him, and followed Madam Pomfrey's directions to go out and find others to bring back.

"Luna!" someone called from behind her. She turned her head.

Dean came jogging up from the far side of the Entrance Hall, the side where the wall was still standing.

"Dean," she said, in relief. One of her friends was still alive. She had not dared to hope for much, and her heart seemed constrained by bands of steel until she knew for certain who had died.  

"How are you with levitation charms?" he asked, sober and controlled. Luna could see the way one of his eyes twitched, just slightly, and he kept pushing his hair back with his free hand, even when it wasn't actually in his eyes.

"Show me where," Luna replied, lifting her wand. She wondered if the wand knew what kind of curses it had cast, if the wood would feel melted and scarred after this night's work. Levitation would be a relief to it.

Dean led her into the corridors, past fallen suits of armor and abandoned portraits, until the corridor ended in a pile of rubble. It looked like someone had overturned a dozen statues on the landing, then the staircase had collapsed. Fleur was there already, her magic glowing blue around a dozen rocks moving slowly from the pile to a cleared space in a nearby classroom.  The bands around Luna's heart eased to see the other woman, battered but very much alive.  
"Start over there," Fleur instructed without breaking her hold on the rocks.  She tipped her head toward the gap in the rubble, just a sliver of shadow now but quickly growing as debris shifted. After a few minutes Seamus came up on Dean's other side and silently added his charms to the effort. The gap widened.

Fleur called out to the pile of rocks, "Everyone well? Hannah? Roger? Stay awake - talk to us."

From beyond the pile of rubble a small voice called, "We're okay - we're here. The - the Auror back here won't wake up."

Bill came jogging up out of the shadows and gestured to Fleur. Luna looked into his face and had to turn away; there was a pain there so raw that she knew someone must have died. She could not face it yet.

Fleur choked on a sob and turned to Dean. "I must go - there are three, here is the position - " Her wand sketched a complicated design in the air, and three human-shaped silhouettes lit up on the rocks, so that Dean, Luna, and Seamus would know where to keep digging.  "I'll send help."

It took time, so much time that Luna had no idea how close it was to midnight by the time Roger and Hannah climbed out of the debris, the body of the injured Auror hovering ahead of them. Two more adults had come to help clear the corridor and move the wounded, so Luna leaned against the wall as the stretchers floated toward the Great Hall.

After a moment she followed them, and her hand tightened on the doorframe as she saw the Weasleys before her, gathered on the side of the room that held the dead. She dared not look.

Her gaze fell on other corpses, though, and she could not face any of them.  When she turned away, she found Neville behind her, hollow-eyed and tired. She reached out as if to touch him, even as she thought to herself that there was nothing she could do.

She could no longer even remember why they were here. What were they waiting for?

And then the voice spoke from the sky, a thunderclap of doom that shook Luna to the core. Her heart, banded as it was by grief, turned over in her chest, perhaps it even stopped for a while. She was not aware of much after the first terrible words echoed over the ruins of Hogwarts.

"Harry Potter is dead."*

---
* dialogue quoted directly from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows  

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