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She noticed that her mother was awake during her funeral.
Excitement punched through her. She tugged at her father's hand as he crumbled beside her, his chest heaving with sobs. Luna wanted him to see what her mother was pointing at, her fingers still stained blue, a mark of the spell that had gone wrong. She was whispering something, but the song of the congregation drowned her words out: “I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be. I’ll lead you all in Dance, said he.”
Her mother’s eyes closed; her body pressed into her coffin by the sound of the hymn. So, Luna looked in the direction her mother had pointed, and saw a Flitterby glowing among the kaleidoscope of colours from the stained church window, the white light of the sun framing the scarlet of its wings..
She tugged her father’s hand again, but he paid her no mind.
Luna felt a flicker of irritation - he was behaving as if he would never see her again, but if he could really see... If everyone would just listen …
She looked back into the coffin again, her mother was asleep.
When the coffin was being lowered to the ground, her mother hidden from her in a box, the Flitterby returned, flashing in the sun. It fluttered over the coffin, whispering and returned to Luna. It sat on her shoulder and told Luna of the earth being poured on the coffin, the sound it would make through the polished coffin wood.
Thud, thud, thud …how it would disturb her mother’s sleep.
Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…
The funeral sealed her mother into the darkness of the earth below her. On her tombstone, it said: O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
Her father’s tears dried. He finally returned the pressure of her hand, but not to turn to her, but to turn her away with him and out of the graveyard.
It was years until she heard the whispering again.
In the large stone room drowned in silence, it was all she could hear. It seemed to be coming from the old archway, sunk deep into the navel of the room. A tattered black veil hung from it, severed from the earth of the dais, floating in the stillness.
A fevered excitement burned through her veins as she moved down the stone benches. She could hear the rumbles from the archway... They are hiding, lurking out of sight …
“Who’s there?” Harry’s voice, echoing in the room, startled her. She could see he had gone on ahead of her, beneath her, at the bottom of the sunken pit. The veil, above him, in front of her, rippled in answer...
He can hear it too… A stem of hope flowered. It tangled with her excitement, and rooted her within her own body, to the presence of friends surrounding her. She descended to the bottom, near Harry, gazing up at the ancient archway.
“Can’t anyone else hear it?” Harry demanded, his eyes wild with confusion.
“I can hear it too,” she breathed her excitement. Her father had a different memory of her mother’s funeral. But here, with Harry, in whose eyes she had seen the reflection of Thestrals, she could share a memory, a feeling of what lies beyond the veil. “There are people in there!”
And although Hermione dragged Harry away from the dais in anger and fear, she found an understanding underneath the unsettled confusion when she met Harry’s bright green eyes.
I know you, she thought to herself.
It was his eyes she noticed first.
Dark eyes, that were both there and not there. As if he was straddling two worlds, one in the present, and one very deep within him. A part of him hidden underneath the film of a veil. But when he spoke of his grandfather, his smile extended to the crinkle in his eyes, which crushed the borders of the two worlds he inhabited, and there he was. She could see, with sudden clarity, who he was - a boy fossilised under the layers of adulthood.
I know you , the thought bloomed in her. It was the second time in her life she had felt she had known someone deeply. Instinctively. But it was the first time that knowing came with other feelings - new feelings.
When she watched Rolf Scamander present his paper at the naturalist conference, she felt envious at the uncomplicated affection with which he spoke of his grandfather’s work. But underneath the envy was her awareness, prickling awareness of how he towered over everyone with his sun-darkened limbs, the way his dimples caught the shadows of the light falling on him.
It was as if she woke from a long sleep, suddenly alive, suddenly present to the people around her as she watched him.
Two Flitterbys glowed past him, dancing in the air. He stopped talking for a moment to watch them darting around each other, their scarlet wings flashing. He then returned to his paper sheepishly, “So sorry, where was I?”