He sat in the swiveling chair behind his plain, wooden desk. It didn’t creak, and was surprisingly comfortable for a thin cushion with wheels. Oh, the things Muggles were missing out on without magic….
He’d begun unpacking his files, parchment, and quills, when a knock came at his door. Harry hadn’t realized he’d closed it. Just as he was standing up to open it again, the knob turned softly, as though not to wake a sleeping person when you enter their room, and a small, pale hand peeked between the doorjamb and door, pushing slightly. A face followed, looking about with a wide, blue-grey eyed gaze Harry would have known anywhere. The question was, what was this face doing here?
“Luna!” Harry said, not unpleasantly surprised. “What are you doing here?”
Luna often visited Harry and Ginny, and had even been the first of their friends and family to tell them that their child was positively going to be a boy. They didn’t know how she’d been so sure, but she was right. And James Sirius Potter was due in late May; Harry was so nervous, for being three months from being a father was both exciting and unsettling. He and Ginny had helped raise Teddy of course, but this was going to be so different.
Jerking his mind back from the future, Harry just caught Luna’s greetings.
“Oh, hello Harry!” Luna said as if he’d surprised her by coming into her office. But she contradicted this conveyed emotion with the statement, “I thought you’d be here.”
Luna hadn’t changed much since Hogwarts: same dirty-blonde hair (now it was past her shoulders however, instead of halfway down her back), wide-eyed stare, and calm, drifting attitude. Her dreamy, mysterious composure could occasionally become wrapped in a gauzy seriousness lately, but the same could be said of anyone who’d fought at the Battle of Hogwarts.
The thing that proved her most to be the same old Loony Lovegood was her current state of dress; a lightly shimmering, pale aquamarine set of robes that were paired with some outfit underneath of the same material, but in a bright magenta color. Somehow, seeing the outfit with the grey-lit hallway as a backdrop, Harry couldn’t help but inwardly admire her unusual, but eccentrically impeccable, taste.
“Hello Luna. Saw my name on the door?” Harry asked, guessing that was how she knew where he was.
“Oh, is it?” She glanced at the door she was still standing near, half behind it. “‘Harry Potter, Head of Auror Office.’ Lovely! And yet your office doesn’t quite look like home yet, does it?”
“No, I was just getting set up. Come on in though, I’m not too busy.”
“Alright.” Luna left the door ajar, which promptly and silently closed itself�”Moody’s charm on it for safety, reckoned Harry�”and took a seat. “Wow, this chair is so comfortable! I wonder if they stuffed it with fur from the Whiffle-Tailed Lemming….”
Harry smiled as he put a few folders in order. “You know, I’ll have to ask. I don’t know.”
“Well, are you sure you’re not busy?” Luna asked, suddenly a little more intently focused.
“Not even a little, why?” Harry supposed this would reveal the purpose for her visit, if there were one at all.
Luna stared about his office for a half-minute, eyes drifting over the mundane Foe Glass and de-cursed artifacts, but lingering on the yellow shadows between papers and studying how the magic staples didn’t wrinkle the corners of even the thickest paper packets.
“I actually need a place for inspiration. Quibbler writing is my job now you know, even though Dad’s still editor and there are other journalists to write stories, I like to contribute when I can.”
“Oh? But how can I help with that?” Harry inquired. He hoped the article would not be about his new job as Head Auror.
“Most times I find someplace I remember something intriguing or infuriating about, then I start getting ideas from what I feel.”
Harry was still not making a connection. But Luna continued, “I was just going to see, if it wasn’t impossible, if maybe I could wander the Department of Mysteries for an hour or so.” She added as Harry thought about this, “With supervision of authorized personnel of course.” Her mouth turned up in a friendly way at Harry.
“You’re going to get inspiration from your feelings about that night?” Harry asked, voice trailing off as he remembered the fear, adrenaline, pain, of that night in fifth year. The night burned into him forever as being the night of Sirius’s death.
“Well, maybe this time not from my feelings but ponderings I suppose might be a better word. From musings that night brought to the front of my mind. You remember….” Luna trailed off the end of here sentence as well.
“I remember.”
Harry managed to get them into the Department of Mysteries. Now they stood in a familiar circular room, full of the same doors repeated over and over all around them. Blue torches flickered; there was no afternoon sun to come through leaky clouds down in this dark place. And there were no windows, even if the light could have penetrated the sidewalks and layers of floor above.
Luna and Harry stood side by side.
“Shall we just try a door and hope it’s the right one?” asked Harry. He honestly had no clue about what anything was down here, much less where.
“That’s the only way I can see to go about it,” Luna replied, not minding having a little search to stall before she found what they were looking for.
Harry opened a door straight across from them, and Luna turned to the one behind. She found the room Ginny had loved that night, with time in a jar. The hummingbird continued its endless cycle, joined now by a small tulip growing in midair from a bulb to a bud, to a flower and then a wilted rag on a twig, and back.
Harry found the room of prophecies. As more and more were recorded each day, they were stored here, and it looked like the collection was just as expansive as before the night where they’d smashed quite a number of them.
The doors closed simultaneously. Harry looked at Luna. “We’d better just choose a door quick, before the walls spin,” he said. They ran at once for the same door. There was a half second left, maybe, but still they paused.
Then the walls began to blur, without warning. Blue stripes of flame swiped past at light speed. A blank space wound up at the spot where their palms had almost pressed a few moments before.
“Well, I’ll try this one, and you try that one,” Luna suggested, pointing at the door to the left of the blank spot for herself to open, and Harry the one on the right.
The large black barriers swished open. Luna and Harry stared into the left door at the chamber of stone steps. In the middle sat an archway with a fluttering, gossamer veil. They walked towards it, step by step descending to the center of the chamber. Whispers floated over their ears.
“I can hear their voices,” Harry said. He didn’t know who the “they” were, but he wanted to find out now as much as he’d wanted to know all that time ago.
“I hear them, too,” Luna reassured Harry, just as she had when they were fifteen.
By now their steps were slow and reverent as they approached the veil. They stopped. The whispers were no louder here than they were from several meters away. Together they circled the arch cautiously. An undetectable breeze from nowhere gently pushed the tattered veil as they came back to their starting point.
Without any more hesitation or discussion, they pushed the veil aside just enough so they could step through.
A/N: Hi! Hope you like this story, it’s my first. (I’ve just written poems so far.) If people like this story, I have some ideas for different ones I may try out as well.