Entry tags:

100quills, fanfiction, fic: far away as moonshine

FIC: Far Away as Moonshine 26/28
Title: Far Away as Moonshine, Part III: Seven Years Later
Author: zephre
Rating: PG (R for whole fic)
Prompt: 100quills table 50.2: Passion
Word Count: 2,098
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*
Concrit Wanted? Sure! Please alert me to typos or errors of continuity.

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 8: In which Draco finds that reality is quite different from dreams.



 That same evening in August, 2005
Wiltshire

Draco gripped the door frame and stared, unable to move or even think for precious seconds. He had had this dream before, of coming home from some wild flight and finding her waiting for him. In the dreams, though, she was barely changed from the schoolgirl he had last seen in the courtroom of the Ministry, pale hair in a waist-length tangle, wand behind her ear, all her edges softened by nostalgia. 

The woman now getting to her feet before him was a stranger. Her hair was still pale, yes, but cropped into short curls. No wand was in evidence, and her robes, rather than the dreamy confections she had favored when she was sixteen, were styled after dueling costume, with tight sleeves and open sides over trousers and boots.

He could kill his mother for giving him no warning when she told him he had a guest. He had known she was in the country, of course; no wizard with half a brain could miss the coverage in Witch Weekly of Luna and Potter out in Muggle London. Even if Draco had been hiding under a rock - or flying above them, as the case may be - Potter had made certain by sending a copy of the column with a note explaining that the magazine had got the wrong end of the broom yet again. Draco had considered framing that note. How often would Potter be apologizing to him, after all? In the end he'd simply tossed it in the bin, trying to forget the surge of relief he'd felt at Potter's denial of the magazine's story.

"Hello, Draco," she said.

Her voice recalled him to the room, to the present. He stepped inside and closed the door, setting a silent ward to warn him if anyone approached. For a moment, the mere five steps between them presented an impossible obstacle. He stared, hungrily rewriting his mental image of her to match the presumed reality before him. Still, he wouldn't know for certain, would he, until she did not dissolve into smoke at his touch.

Luna moved first, reaching for him, and Draco met her halfway; she was real, and her arms clung just as tightly to him as his to her. "Luna," he whispered into her hair. "Luna, Luna."

She was shaking, and he could feel wild magic sparking against his hands as she lifted her head from his shoulder. "I missed you," she said, cradling his jaw in one hand. "I missed you so much, Draco. I'm so sor-"

He cut her off with a kiss, smothering the rest of her apology. He did not need it, did not deserve it, and it was so much more important to hold her, to press her as close as he could, to forgo breath as long as possible. He worried he might crush her,  but when he began to loosen his hold, her hands wound into his hair and pulled him back. His vision was just beginning to blur around the edges when she finally let go and allowed a tiny gap between them.

"Wow," she said when she caught her breath. "I didn't expect that, either." 

"Either?" he asked.

"You Malfoys are just full of surprises." She ran one finger along his bottom lip. "Getting past your parents was rather like running a gauntlet of lethifolds."

"Merlin, you didn't have to face them both?" He wondered if he would experience this level of lightheadedness around her all the time.

She laughed. "I did. They drove me to drink."

That explained the taste of brandy on her tongue. "My hero," Draco murmured as he bent to press a kiss to her brow. Before his lips touched her, the magic that had been tingling along his fingers leaped like lightning from her skin to his.

She jumped at the shock, and he took hold of her shoulders, carefully moving her a few inches away. He ducked his head to meet her eyes. "Luna," he said, feeling their moment of pure joy unraveling. "What's happened to your magic?"

He saw the shock in her face, perhaps as she realized what he was feeling. He let one hand drift bare millimeters above her shoulder, and the energy crackled in the space between. She took a deep breath and, with an abruptness that made Draco hiss in shock, all of the wild energy that had been swirling around her vanished.

"It got away from me for a moment," she whispered. "Strong emotion, you know."

He tilted her head up, braced for another shock to his fingers but feeling nothing. "No," he said, "I don't know. Tell me."

She looked around, and gestured toward the chaise by the window. "Can we sit?"

"Of course." Draco led her over to the chaise, but no sooner had he made himself comfortable than she jumped to her feet and began pacing in front of him. "Luna?" he asked quietly.

"It was the scars," she said, rubbing her arms as she walked in a tiny circle on the carpet. "Traditional mediwizardry insisted that they were just physical marks, the same as those made by a knife. They weren't the same as curse scars, you know? But they were destroying my magical core."

Draco reached for her, but she stepped away from his hand.

"No," she shook her head and faced him. "I'm fine - or I will be fine. But when my spells started backfiring, I tried to live in the Muggle world, hide from it. Then Rolf came up with his mad idea to send me to Mongolia. That's where I've been, since June."

Draco listened with increasing horror and admiration as she explained just how erratic her magic had become, and the extremely unorthodox treatment she had found in the red desert. To think of undergoing such a ritual when her magic was already depleted, chaotic - and all alone! When she started unbuttoning the cuffs of her robe, he reached out again, to stop her.  "You don't need to do this -" he began.

"No, you should see," she insisted, and once the cuffs were undone she started on the front.

She was wearing a thin camisole beneath the robes, at least. As she turned to lay the discarded garment over the back of a chair, Draco leaned forward despite himself. He could see, quite clearly even through the fabric, dark flowering vines tattooed the length of her back, curling around her right shoulder and arm, running up her spine almost to the nape of her neck. The ink wrapped around her torso in two places, and disappeared beneath the waistband of her trousers over her left hip. Draco could tell, as any educated wizard would be able to tell, that these were not the simple painted tattoos that echoed Muggle body art. These were infused with magic, likely blood magic, and they represented a wild departure from approved Ministry spells.

When Luna turned back to face him, he could see that the vines continued over her belly, and curled under her bra. He lifted his hand so that it hovered near her waist, and he could feel the ink's power in the palm. He let his hand drop, with a good inch of air between them still, and was certain that the tattoo wrapped around her left leg as well. "Who else knows about this?" he asked, then kicked himself for sounding so harsh.

"I showed some of them to Mr. Ollivander, of course," Luna said, and laced her fingers with his. She pressed their joined hands to the strip of bare skin exposed between camisole and trousers. He could feel the tattoo's warmth under his fingers.  "And," she continued, "Harry knows about them."

"You showed -?"

Luna cut him off before he even finished the question. "No, he hasn't seen them. He could just tell that they were there."

"Figures," Draco muttered.  "Bloody powerful prat." He tugged gently at her hip, and as she sat down beside him she released his hand.  He kept hold of her, slipping his hand beneath her camisole to follow the vine up her back with his fingertips.

She closed her eyes and held very still as he traced the curliques of ink, pausing every few inches as the smooth skin of her back was broken by a ridge of scar tissue. When he found those, he traced the lines of the scar, as well. He recognized the patterns as bastardized runes used for some dark spellcasting.

He had just reached the rune set between her shoulder blades when he realized that there were tears on her cheeks.     He lifted his hand away from her skin. "Am I hurting you?"

She shook her head, leaning back into his hand. "No. It doesn't hurt."

Draco pulled her close and put his other arm around her. She swung her feet up across his lap and laid her head on his shoulder. With so much more of the tattoo touching him, Draco felt its power touching his own. He was no spellcraftre, at least not yet, but he knew enough to make a few educated guesses about the shape of the spells he felt in the ink and her flesh.

"This binds more than just the curse, doesn't it?" he asked, running his hand over the vine on her shoulder.

He felt her nod, and she curled her body closer to his. He did not press for explanations, but he knew when she shivered against him that she could feel it when he traced the edges of the spell with his power. She spoke no warning or protest, and he encountered no magical resistance at all.

He traced the web of energy for a while longer, learning its shape and its purpose, and when he came to the end of it he sighed, "I'm so sorry," into Luna's hair and just held her. The tattoo was its own prison, binding back the malice in the runes, yes, but in the process catching Luna's living magic in its web. He could not tell for certain what she had lost, but that there was loss was undeniable.

"I knew it would happen," she said softly, to his surprise. "I knew, Draco, before I entered the ritual. It's all right." She lifted her head to look at him, and he knew he hadn't been able to hide the horror he felt when she tried to push herself away from him.

"No, don't." He held on more tightly. "It's just ... a shock." 

She smiled and shrugged one shoulder. "I never wanted to be a Healer anyway."

"Will it get better?" he asked carefully.

"Perhaps some things." Luna relaxed against him again. "My fine control will get better with practice, but some things I won't ever do. Advanced Transfigurations and Healing spells will always be exhausting. Certain curses and jinxes hurt to use, and Tymas thinks that casting something at the level of an Unforgivable would probably kill me." She actually laughed. "Good thing I have such a sunny disposition, isn't it?"

Draco smiled, even though he ached for her. "A very good thing." He could see those restrictive patterns in her magic, now that she'd said it. She could do little more than magical first aid now without hurting herself; she would never be an animagus. She would never teach, either, not in any official capacity. He could not help imagining what she would have been if she had never come to this house seven years ago.

She must have heard the pain in his voice he could not disguise, because she reached up and turned his face toward her. "You have spent too much time brooding, Draco." She leaned up and pressed a gentle kiss to his lips. "Let's not think, for a while. Come," she shifted back into the corner of the chaise and beckoned him to lie beside her. "I want you to hold me, and be still. Don't make plans, or assign blame, or worry about tomorrow. Just that  - will you?"

Draco stretched out beside her, and found that despite all the years and changes somehow she still fit beside him. He was now fairly certain that this was not a dream, and that the shape of his future had changed once more.

Luna laced their fingers together over his ribs, and Draco felt a strange elation, something he had not felt in years. He kissed Luna's forehead and whispered, "For you, Luna, anything."

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