InsaneJournal

NaNo fanfic Part 2
Continued from here. This part rated PG-13 or so, I guess, for adult situations and a curse word.
Pairings this installment: Harry/Luna, past Harry/Ginny

"Shall I get down on one knee again? Or both?" Harry asked, catching her attention, and her hand.

Luna shook her head, still unable to articulate anything of sense. Somehow this moment had always been more playful in her daydreams. His first proposal -- Merlin, had it been two years? -- had been clumsy and impulsive, and Luna had been too drunk to understand what he was telling her until she'd had a sobering draught. At least she knew it had been premeditated; he'd been carrying the ring in his pocket for weeks.

She had never expected such a public display from Harry, who guarded his privacy as much as his job would allow. Seeing the gleeful look in his eyes now, though, she wondered if he wasn't enjoying being the one in control of what people knew and how they learned about it.

"I expect," she managed to say at last, "that if you wanted to leap onto the table and shout at the top of your lungs, you would do so whether I requested it or not." He nudged the table with his elbow as if checking its sturdiness and she had to laugh aloud. "Don't you dare, or I'll name a new beetle after you."

Harry held her left hand steady to slip the ring onto her finger. "Species Pottericus? The Bug Who Lived?"

"Mm. Distinctive markings, but hard to find the genuine article," Luna said, blinking away tears. "Shy and unassuming at first glance, but dangerous when angered. Protective of its own." She reached up to brush his hair out of his eyes, just brushing his scar with her thumb.

"And ravenous, right?" Harry asked, smiling in satisfaction when her pensive mood broke and she laughed. "The Bug Who Lived to Eat." He leaned across to kiss her gently once more, then sat back in his chair and picked up his fork. "I'll demonstrate."

Luna waited for the butterflies to settle in her stomach before following his example. It was easy enough to forget, just for the evening, that there was a world out there waiting to discover just what had gone on at this table. They could face that later. And they would do it together.

* * *

August-October 1999, Ottery St. Catchpole

The first time it happened, Harry was alone. He told himself it was just another nightmare, even though he was in the kitchen of the Burrow and perfectly awake. He curled up on the uneven tiles in front of the sink, clutching his hair, and willed the whole thing to be over. It wasn't like when Voldemort had invaded his mind; it wasn't something Occlumency could stop. It felt like a monster was clawing its way from his gut up his spinal cord, determined to break out the back of his head. All he could think was that some enemy had made it through all the Charms at last, and cursed him. His wand was in his hand and an Unforgivable on his lips when the pain stopped, just as suddenly as it had started. He licked blood from his bitten lip and pulled himself to his feet. Taking deep, even breaths, he told himself that he had just tripped, and gotten knocked out. That was all. Nothing was wrong.

*

The second time it happened, he was in bed with Ginny and woke her with his thrashing. He kicked himself off the bed, which was a good thing because he was afraid that he might have actually cursed her if she'd touched him. As it was, he held both hands, shaking, in front of him to warn her off getting closer. She leaned on her elbow and stared at him, and waited until he had stopped shaking and buried his face in his arms.

"Harry, what is it?" she asked, in that sweet, calm voice that he loved. He loved it, because it meant home, and someone who would always be there to take care of him. She was everything he wanted. He hated to see that look in her eyes, the one that meant she was trying not to let him know she was frightened.

"Nothing. Nightmare."

"Do you want to talk about it?" The Healer she saw every other week at St. Mungo's was always on about talking through nightmares. Harry had heard all of Ginny's dreams recounted too many times for his own good. She always asked if he would rather not listen, because she could talk to Hermione or her mum, and he always said he was supposed to be there for her. And he listened. Every word she said was like a cold hook in his guts, thinking of the things he hadn't done, the horrors he could never fix.

"No. No, I'm just - I'm going for a walk." And he had walked around and around, over the hills and through the streets of Ottery St. Catchpole, and everytime a bird broke cover into flight he had to restrain his wand hand from blasting it out of the sky.

*

The sixth time, he was at training and almost killed Ron when he micast a charm. He ducked behind one of the concrete obstacles and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes until he saw stars. Even then he couldn't keep his wand hand steady, and every other charm after the first fizzled before it got a foot from him. Every crack of apparition made him jump, and finally Mathison had ordered him home to get some sleep. He could claim fatigue once, but the next time, and the next?

He started to get a reputation for erratic performance, and for insolence. Ron stopped him in the corridor after his fifth dressing-down and told him point-blank, "You're getting chances because you're Harry Potter, but that won't work forever. Get it together, mate."

He tried, he really did, but the day that he turned his wand on a twelve-year-old girl with a firecracker thinking she was a Death Eater, he started to think maybe there was something wrong with him.

*

He took a leave of absence from the Auror Training Program, citing illness. Kingsley signed off on it. He spent all day in bed for a week, only getting up when Ginny forced him to swallow soup before she left in the morning and when she got back at night. He clung to her while she slept, and if she woke in the night he seduced her because sex at least left him drained enough not to dream.

Sometimes he tried to make his own lunch, but he inevitably ended up vomiting it up in the bathroom and passing out in the mess. He felt drunk all the time, but he never touched a drop. What difference did it make whether or not he got up in the morning? There were too many dangers out there, too much uncertainty. The only things he needed were right here in this little flat, and Ginny was always there to cling to in the night.

He started talking to his parents and Sirius in September, when he had nowhere to go and nothing to do. Sometimes it was his mother that gave him soup in the mornings instead of Ginny. He thought perhaps mothers were supposed to do things like that, so it was okay. His father and Sirius showed him new and inventive wards and jinxes to protect the flat, and he spent hours one Tuesday layering so many on the door that Ginny had to call Ron who called Bill to help take them down so she could get in.

He tried not to remember the things she yelled at him when those things happened, concentrating on the soft feel of her in his arms and the smell of her hair.

Then one day he woke up to the smell of smoke, and all he could see was the jagged wall of rocks coming down and the blood and bodies crushed beneath it and he shot a hex blindly as he scrambled down and into the corner. He heard the scream, and it echoed in his head, mingling with so many others. He huddled there until the screams stopped and the smoke cleared and he realized he was not at a ruined and broken Hogwarts but in his own bedroom, alone, with a burn mark on the wall.

Ginny didn't come back for three days.

*

"Harry."

He opened one eye. The other was stuck somehow, but he couldn't really be bothered. There was a blur of red and green quite close to him. Ginny. She was the only one who could get through the wards.

"Harry, this can't go on. Get up. You need to get out of here. It's been three months."

He closed his eye. As long as he had his wand nothing could get him. That was the important thing. Don't leave the flat, don't let anything else in. He reached for the soft red and green blur he could sense was still nearby, and pulled her down to the bed. She smelled of sweat and leather and grass. Just back from practice, then.

"Mm. Missed you, Gin," he murmured.

She squirmed out of his arms and shook his shoulder. "Sit up. I refuse to talk to you like this."

"So don't talk. Come back to bed."

"You stink. You're a mess. The flat looks like a hurricane went through it. There are probably things growing in that mattress that I don't even want to think about."

She took hold of his feet and dragged them off the bed, and he groaned and rolled half-upright. "All right, all right. I'm up." He felt around for his glasses.

"Reparo. Here." The blurs cleared as Ginny set his glasses on his face. She had a smudge of dirt on her nose. It was just a few shades darker than her freckles. He was certain he had never seen anything so lovely in his life. He loved that smudge.

But Ginny moved away again when he reached for her, and he dropped his arms to the bed with a sigh.

"Harry. Honey. What are you doing to yourself?"

He was starting to feel tense. Ginny wasn't supposed to be questioning him. "I'm fine. Just fine. No problems."

She sighed. It was such a lost, lonely little sound. "Harry, look at me. Right at me - come on, I'm right here."

The freckles on her cheeks were uneven, but that was endearing. She had a tiny scar above her right eyebrow. He hadn't noticed it before. How could he have not noticed it?

"Harry Potter!" Her hands took hold of his face, her nails pressing into his scalp. "Look me in the damn eye!"

So he looked. All of her nightmares were there in her eyes, he could see the memories just below the surface, threatening to bubble up. Those months of torment at Hogwarts. The weeks of lonely exile. The loss and pain that he had been helpless to prevent. He couldn't help the tears that spilled down his cheeks at what he saw in her eyes.

"What is it?" she asked, her thumbs gently wiping away those tears. She didn't know what he saw. She didn't know how much he knew. "Harry. Harry, sweetheart, you can't go on like this. I can't go on like this. It has to stop. You need to get help."

He shook his head frantically, trying to pull away from her hands. "I can't. They're out there, they're just waiting for me to make a mistake." His hands dropped to the bedclothes, pulling them out of the way. "Where's my wand?"

Ginny let go of his head to grab his hands. "Harry, you don't need your wand. You need to see a Healer. They can help you, so you can work. You want to be an Auror, don't you? You want to protect people?"

"I need my wand." It was harder to get loose from her than he remembered. She was strong. The glass of water on the night table shattered, and she leaped back, letting him go.

"Harry, please, try." There was so much sorrow in her voice, and in her face when he managed to look at it again.

His wand was under the other pillow. Once it was in his hand, he seemed to think more clearly. Her pleading surprised him, but then he looked, really looked, at the state of the room. The burn mark was still on the wall, and he remembered quite abruptly that he'd thrown a hex at her last time they'd been together. He took a deep breath. "I can see. . . that something isn't right. What should I do?"

"Let me take you to a Healer. Not St. Mungo's, I know you don't want to go there. But we can still get you good help."

"Will you stay with me?"

There was a long pause, and Harry felt his heart contract.

"Harry. You and I. We can't keep on like this. You don't even know me anymore."

"That's not true!"

"Tell me what I like to read. Where I like to go after games. How do I even like my eggs, Harry? Have you ever known those things?"

Harry wanted to tell her all those things, but he couldn't. He clutched his wand and stopped himself from finishing the motion for a simple proximity ward.

"And I'm bad for you, Harry. Look at yourself. Before we moved here, you weren't this bad. You look at me now and it's like I'm not even there. You're seeing something else, and I don't know what it is but it's killing you, Harry. Oh, Merlin, I wish I could make you better myself but I can't. I have to go."

"But - I love you."

Now she was crying, and her face was red and blotchy and the smudge of dirt had been scrubbed away. "No, you don't, Harry. I wish you did."

Harry didn't think she could know what he did or didn't feel. He hunched his shoulders around the growing pain in his chest, and wondered what it would be like to know that somebody really loved you. Would he even realize it? "Leave, then."

"Let me take you to a Healer."

She kept going on about the Healer! She was leaving him, and hearts didn't heal with potions and charms. She was leaving him, and he was going crazy. The Boy Who Lived, ha. Not much living going on here.

"Harry?"

"I don't care. Do what you want."

And what she wanted, it became clear, was to go into the kitchen to make tea and cast a Patronus that went galloping out the window. Then she watched him drink two cups black, and pulled a jumper over his head, and took his arm. He thought he had been more coordinated once, but he seemed to trip with every other step. "We're going to go outside now, Harry," she said quietly as they reached the door. "There will be Order members flanking us the whole way." Good, that was good. Precautions. Constant vigilance.

But that hadn't been enough for Moody, had it? He stopped on the threshold. "I - "

"Just a few steps, Harry, and we'll apparate together, " Ginny said in his ear. "Bill is here, and Ron, and Hermione. The whole route has been cleared."

"They're still out there."

"We know, Harry." Ginny held his free hand tight in hers. "We know. We'll get you there safe."

And they did.

* * *
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