InsaneJournal

A gift for qotc!
Author: ???
Giftee: qotc
Title: Six impossible things (before breakfast).
Pairing/Characters: Percy/Luna, occasional background Weasleys.
Rating: R
Word Count: 5.623 words.
Warnings: Present tense?
Disclaimer: Harry Potter does not belong to me, it belongs to Mrs. Rowling and her publishers. I'm just having fun.
Summary: "Do you want to see something fantastic?" she asks, standing on his landing. She's wearing a bright yellow sundress and blue Wellington boots, and she's carrying an almost-empty basket, with what looks like the handle of an umbrella poking out.
Notes: Thanks to my wonderful beta, J, and my boyfriend, who pokes me and prods me to get me to write. qotc, I hope this isn't too fluffy for you – it kind of snuck up on me.


"Percy," Kingsley had said, low and urgent, "go home. Have a life. Relax. I won't make you take the five months of holiday you've accumulated, but I will not condone your presence in this office for the next four weeks. Is that understood?"

Except home is a one-bedroom flat in a mostly-wizarding building in Clapham Junction, for which he's never bothered to buy furniture nor much of anything else. The top drawer in his office contains take-out menus for every single type of food imaginable, and the people in the deli on the corner outside the Ministry greet him by name and wonder where he is if he doesn't show up for a few days, but in his own neighbourhood, Percy couldn't give directions to the nearest grocery store.

He sets the empty briefcase – Kingsley had made the Ministry security wizards check him for work related papers before letting him leave the building – down on the floor beside his front door and hangs his coat up on the row of coat pegs beside the kitchen door where he also hangs his suits and shirts.

The kitchen is empty, late afternoon sun revealing a layer of dust coating every surface. There's a small shower of dust when he opens a cabinet; he knows he'd bought some very basic things when he moved, but that was five years ago, so he has no idea what to expect, really. He doesn't ever use the kitchen – if he's thirsty, he mostly gets water from the bathroom sink. It's closer to his bed... well, mattress. Pallet.

There is a package of rice on a lower shelf of the cabinet and a box of teabags. There's also a jar of something which had probably started out as marmite but is now both grey and fuzzy – Percy thinks about throwing it out, but then realizes he doesn't have a trash can – and a jar of instant coffee.

The cabinet beside it reveals a chipped blue mug, three water glasses (none of them matching) and, for some reason Percy can't figure out, a set of six champagne flutes.

The faucet makes an unearthly amount of noise, jumps several times and then sprays Percy with water before he feels safe enough to fill the blue mug with water and boil it magically. He shakes some instant coffee into the water, hunts fruitlessly through his drawers for a teaspoon, then shrugs and stirs his coffee with the only thing he does find: a salad fork. Which is about as mysterious as the champagne flutes.

He doesn't have milk or sugar, so he drinks his coffee black, wincing at the taste and calculating time in his head. He's come home, and made coffee. In his kitchen. It has still only been forty-five minutes since Minister Shacklebolt had more or less thrown him bodily out of the office and he has four more weeks to fill.

+++

The slight, blond girl standing on the landing is the last thing he's expecting when he opens the door. Considering that it's three in the morning, he's not sure quite what he was expecting, but he's relatively sure that a young woman holding out a cup and asking to borrow some sugar wasn't it.

"You're Ron's brother, correct?" she asks as she breezes past him. The view of the apartment stops her short and she shoots him a glance over her shoulder, looking somewhere midway between curious and delighted. "You don't have any furniture?"

"I'm… yes," he says, not sure how to respond. "And I have coat pegs," he adds, pointing.

"They're nice," she replies, giving them an assessing stare before bounding into the kitchen and starting to open cupboards at random.

"Do you, I mean, do you often knock on people's doors in the middle of the night, asking for sugar?" Percy asks faintly, aware that he hasn't sounded this flustered for at least five years.

"You were awake; I could hear the pacing. I'm in the apartment below. You've been screaming, too, for the past few nights… Oh, found it!" She emerges from a lower cupboard, holding out the packet of sugar he'd bought from the store last week in a fit of optimism.

"I'm, uh," he says, then rallies his strength. "I apologize if I've kept you awake. I'm home more than usual this month."

"Oh, don't worry. We all have nightmares, you know. War, and all that. Be odder if we never woke up screaming, what with the things we've seen. You were in the battle, you should know. Would you like some waffles?"

"What?" Percy says, completely bewildered now. She's done with the cupboards and is standing in his kitchen, holding a cup full of his sugar, and not making any sense at all.

"Waffles," she repeats and gestures with the sugar. "With strawberries and cream?"

"Uh," he replies.

Which is how he finds himself in the kitchen in the apartment below, whipping cream by hand – "I've got a computer," she'd said, handing him the whisk – completely bemused as she pours dough into a waffle iron, slicing strawberries while the waffles bake.

He doesn't even know her name, he realizes, and feels immediately guilty. The Wizarding community is small enough that he should know – she can't have been more than three years behind him at Hogwarts, maybe in Ron's year, or Ginny's – but he's spent the past five years within the walls of the Ministry, and whoever she is, he'd wager that she's never even been in there. She doesn't seem the type for bureaucracy.

"I'm sorry," he says, shamefaced. "I didn't quite catch your name?"

"Oh, Luna. Lovegood," she says, distractedly, trying to unstick a waffle from the iron, then helpfully adds, "Ginny's year."

She didn't have to, though; he recognizes her name straight away, and knows that he was right about the bureaucracy but wrong about the Minstry – most of the Wizarding world knows that Luna Lovegood has been inside the Minstry of Magic at least once.

Percy remembers Hogsmeade better than he remembers the battle of Hogwarts. He remembers because when he Apparated into the Hog's Head, it was still filled with children being side-along Apparated out two at a time by a couple of adults. He remembers because upon stepping out of the tunnel inside the Room of Requirement his first sight had been his family, his little sister and his little brother. And then there had been Harry, who was seventeen and Hermione and his first thought had been, "How have we left this war to be fought by children?"

What came after that is a blur, interspersed with snapshots of agony and death and sorrow, images which have been haunting his dreams for the past week.

His thoughts are interrupted by Luna pulling the bowl out of his hands without a word. She smiles when he looks up and gestures with the bowl. "Whisk it anymore and you'll end up with butter, you know," she says. "Some people like butter on waffles, but it doesn't go with strawberries, I don’t think."

"No, probably not," he says lamely, staring at her as she dishes up waffles and cream and strawberries and plonks them down in front of him. He eats with relish – he's been living on his own cooking, which is soulless and tastes like packaged food, no matter what he tries – and the waffles are great. They don't talk much over their early-morning meal, mostly exchanging "mmm's" and "this is great"'s. Ginny always told him Luna was mad as a hatter, but apart from unexpected strawberry waffles at 3 AM and a forthrightness that borders on insouciance, she seems surprisingly normal.

He bids her goodnight when they've done the dishes and goes up to his apartment, where he lies down on his mattress in the corner and falls sound asleep.

+++

"Do you want to see something fantastic?" she asks, standing on his landing. She's wearing a bright yellow sundress and blue Wellington boots, and she's carrying an almost-empty basket, with what looks like the handle of an umbrella poking out.

The boots have little green frogs on them, he notices.

He's just gotten out of the shower, having woken up panting and drenched in sweat barely an hour before, and he's still wearing his respectable navy dressing gown while having a calming cup of chamomile tea and wondering why he's having nightmares now, five years too late.

"Yes," he says, surprising himself. "Give me a moment to dress."

She gives him a radiant smile and he notices that something is dangling from her ears – a pair of miniature radishes.

They make quite the couple, walking down the street. Percy doesn't actually own any clothes that aren't in muted earth colours, so he's wearing grey and brown, while Luna has actually unearthed the umbrella – which is purple – and is twirling it over their heads happily, using it as a parasol in the late summer sunshine.

They walk and walk, occasionally stopping to look in shop windows or browse through the trinkets of street vendors. They buy peaches and a package of cheese in one grocery store, rolls and orange juice in another and Luna darts to and fro, dragging him around, showing him ants carrying away a piece of chocolate fallen to the street, the marks of a creature she calls a veil-skinned terant, and a funny piece of rock she found somewhere in a flowerbed.

She laughs in delight every time she sees a plane, makes funny faces at children in strollers, and stops to look at anything which sparkles, or glitters, or shines. Percy is getting rather bemused, but he's also footsore, and he keeps waiting for her to remember that she was planning to show him something. When she grabs his arm and side-along Apparates them to the middle of a field, he thinks she's finally remembered, but she just climbs over a fence, skipping down a slight incline towards a canal, then pulls a chequered blanket out of the basket, which she spreads on the ground before sitting down primly and pulling out their groceries.

He's happy to sit down though, and there's no denying the spot is nice: dappled sunshine shining through the trees lining the canal, the water lapping at the edge, grass smooth as velvet beneath the blanket. She even brought glasses so they wouldn't have to drink the juice out of the carton, and he stares in puzzlement at them; only Luna would bring crystal to a picnic, to drink orange juice.

When they've polished off the last of the peaches they just sit there, in companionable silence. All day Luna has been chattering at him about nature and its flora and fauna – some of it he recognizes from his schooldays but some of them she has to be making up as she goes along – but now she's leaning back onto her elbows, face turned towards the sunshine, looking completely relaxed. Percy copies her, trying to find some level of calmness in the afternoon sun, and ends up succeeding so thoroughly that when he wakes up later, shaking from another nightmare, the sun is low and the light is slanting.

He's disoriented for a moment, not sure where he is. His head is cradled gently in someone's lap and there are fingers carding through his hair, a low voice shushing him softly. When he finally shakes off the disorientation and looks up, he sees Luna's face above him, gilt with the last rays of the afternoon sun. She's looking at him appraisingly, one eye closed, and he holds his breath for a moment.

"People look weird from this angle," she finally says, and it's so unexpected he bursts out laughing.

When he can breathe again he finally asks what he's been wondering all afternoon. "I thought you were going to show me something fantastic?"

She looks thoughtful for a minute, then tilts her head. "You're right," she says. "We haven't really seen anything truly fantastic yet. We have to keep looking!" And with that she pushes his head out of her lap, jumps up and bounds away, presumably to search for something fantastic enough to fill her criteria.

+++

He's standing in the vegetable aisle of the local grocery store, trying to figure out which of the produce he doesn't want the least, when his eye is caught by a box of strawberries. After a moment of indecision he puts them decisively into his cart, along with a net of onions and a bag of carrots. They're bright red in the gloom of his still-empty kitchen when he unpacks his shopping, and he puts them in the fridge feeling a little foolish, then slides in the champagne bottle next to them.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time; the only proper glasses he has are champagne flutes, and he'd already gotten the strawberries, but he thinks he'll probably end up throwing out the berries when they go bad and the champagne will probably languish in his fridge until he can find a legitimate reason to give it away.

In defiance to his dire predictions, he picks two of the glossiest, biggest berries out of the box and eats them right away, savouring the taste.

Then he takes a deep breath, goes downstairs and invites Luna out to dinner. She looks a little bit bewildered, which is no wonder, because Percy too feels extremely bewildered, but it's dinner, at a nice restaurant, which is the done thing when one has met a girl who has, in less than a week, somehow succeeded in turning one's life upside down.

+++

The robes she is wearing are either a greenish blue or a bluish green – Percy can't entirely tell, since they're covered in spangles which glitter mesmerizingly in the low light of the restaurant. She's pulled her hair back and looks a little less odd than usual, though very shiny on account of all the sparkling.

The food amuses her endlessly, and Percy blushes madly when she comments on the layout of the dishes and the composition of the food, like she's critiquing modern art rather than their dinner. The waiters scowl at her, because she can be heard throughout the restaurant, and because with the way she glitters, nobody can stop looking at her. Percy has never felt as exposed and vulnerable in his entire life, and he's ridiculously happy that he chose a Muggle restaurant where they're not likely to run into anybody they know.

She's wearing heels, which suit her very well, but make it necessary for them to Apparate to and from the restaurant, and they're not exactly practical for the waterfront stroll he'd been planning on. He wonders if he should take her out for a drink somewhere afterwards, but the evening has been utterly confusing and he's pretty sure he should quit while he's still more or less ahead.

She looks at him oddly when he offers her his arm for side-along Apparating back to their house, which he's been told is the gentlemanly thing to do, but she takes it without comment. He spares a thought to wonder whether she even realizes that they've just been out on a date, but shakes it off – at least she had fun at dinner, even if fun wasn't quite what he'd been aiming for.

He leaves her at her door, hesitating too long over whether to kiss her goodnight, but in the end choosing not to. He can still feel her hand on his arm after Apparating both of them into the side-room off of the foyer used by the Wizards living in the building.

He pulls off his cravat as he climbs the stairs towards his apartment and wonders precisely what went wrong. She'd had fun, he was sure of that, because she'd laughed and smiled and generally been happy, but he himself was not so pleased with the way things had gone.

Percy is used to caring what other people think, and it's a hard habit to get out of. Even as she made hilarious comments and tried to draw him into conversation, Percy had been feeling the eyes of every other person in the restaurant on him, wondering what they'd think about him, this girl, their anecdotes… It was a respectable restaurant and laughing out loud would have been improper, so he'd swallowed his amusement when she'd grabbed his salad bowl and given him a Trelawney-esque prediction about his future from the few soggy leaves at the bottom, even if all he wanted to do was break out into giggles.

He's standing at his kitchen sink, remembering all the times during the evening when he'd wanted to laugh but didn't when there's a timid knock on his door. He knows who it has to be, but he can't figure out why she's here after he'd ignored her attempts at levity the entire night.

She's still wearing that dress with all the spangles, still in her high heels, even, though her hair is falling down around her face – and she's carrying her basket.

"Chocolate-pepper ice cream?" she says, holding the basket out to him. "I brought spoons."

His knees almost go weak with relief at the fact that Luna is probably the oddest girl he's ever met and he wordlessly opens his door wider to let her in, even as he wonders how they're going to eat ice cream in his still empty apartment.

She's thought ahead for that, though; when he follows her into his bedroom she's spreading the chequered picnic blanket in the middle of the floor, pulling out ice cream and the promised spoons and then she kicks off her shoes and sits down, giving him a wide smile.

She'd talked about chocolate-pepper ice cream during the evening, he remembers, something about how it was weird but good, and it's an odd sensation to have ice cream that mostly tastes of chocolate which makes his mouth burn with the strength of the spices. They polish off an entire tub and he lets her talk, only occasionally asking a question or egging her on in her completely ridiculous explanations. She's telling him about something called the Rotfang conspiracy and he's listening seriously and nodding, but her eyes are dancing and her mouth is quirking up at the corners, like she's waiting to see if he'll try to tell her he doesn't believe her.

The ice cream is gone and even if Percy's stomach is aching, he wishes there was more so that he'd have an excuse to keep her here – and then he remembers. "Just a moment," he says and goes to the kitchen, fetching the box of strawberries and the bottle of champagne, and two dusty champagne flutes. He gives them a cursory polishing charm while Luna figures out how to pop the cork, almost shrieking with glee when it shoots across the room, and they settle down to munch on the strawberries and drink the bubbly.

"Don't you ever need furniture?" she asks, looking around her curiously.

He shrugs. "I need a bookshelf," he says, "but beyond that, I don't know what to do with a big empty room like this."

She tilts her head, thinking about it, then struggles to her feet, giggling. "I have an idea," she says, pulls him to his feet and pushes the blanket out of the way, then teaches him to dance the foxtrot across his big empty floor.

Percy's hand is warm where it clutches hers and he can feel every inch of his skin, hypersensitive to her presence. When they stop, breathless and smiling, she gives his hand a squeeze before letting go.

She kisses him on the cheek when she leaves and the next morning when he wakes up, he can still feel her lips burning on his skin.

+++

She turns up at his door the next Saturday, this time wearing bright turquoise, and they end up spending the day searching for something fantastic. The closest they come is when they find a family of foxes living under a tree in the forest – Percy's not sure which forest, since Luna did the Apparating – but only after Percy empathically insists to her that invisible things obviously don't count.

He goes home afterwards and falls asleep easily, but wakes up from another nightmare barely two hours later.

He feels like he's rattling apart. With nothing to do, he spends most of his time in idle escapism, reading or listening to the radio, occasionally going out with one of his siblings but rarely making it past midnight. The nightmares come steadily: images of battle and death and gruesome victory, bought at a price he hadn't been ready to pay. He doesn't have many friends outside of work, never has, and his face feel unused, rusty, because he's wearing the same neutral expression most of the time, not smiling at his colleagues or grimacing at the year-end reports.

He never had nightmares, not even the first week after the battle. His body has always done what he asks of it, resting when rest is required, feeling hungry when it was time for a meal, but now he seems to be out of sync and nothing obeys his will anymore.

He can't sleep without dreaming and he can't dream without remembering. So he elects to stay awake, but in his state of exhaustion the word barely applies; he's in a fugue state, lost somewhere between dream and wakefulness, shuffling through his days like a man suffering from a permanent version of Impedimenta.

The only thing that breaks the barrier that seems to have been erected between his mind and the external world is Luna. Somehow, ridiculously, all her primary colours and odd segues have made quite an impression. But in a way, she's more confusing than all the rest of it put together; she won't be categorized, won't adhere to a standard, won't fit rationally into what Percy has come to think of as the real world.

Perhaps that is why she fascinates him. The real world, after all, has been made up of policy briefings and interoffice memos and unwieldy subordinates and international conflicts. He is used to thinking logically, and Luna just doesn't fit.

She brings him a rocking chair one evening, and Percy used to hate his mother's rocking chair when he was a child, but somehow sitting in this one, with Luna happily perched on his mattress, he rocks and rocks and finally he rocks off to sleep. When he wakes up it's the next morning, he's been covered with his duvet, and he hasn't had a single nightmare.

+++

He buys a bookshelf, eventually. He could afford stylish furniture from a designer but he somehow feels that he's better off with an empty apartment than an apartment decorated with things someone else thinks are pretty.

The one he does buy is a huge, old fashioned bookcase with a loose shelf and glass doors with cracked glass. He fixes it himself, with a bit of assistance from Luna, and piles all the books he's been buying recently onto its shelves. It's a bit dominating in the mostly empty room, despite the fact that he has a rocking chair and a mattress, so two days later he buys a desk off an antiques dealer down the street.

The desk doesn't even come close to matching the bookcase, so he paints it dark blue, to match the pillows on Luna's rocking chair.

"You bought a bookcase and a desk before you bought a bed," Luna says, sounding delighted and the next night she brings him a lamp for the desk and offers to teach him sewing charms in case he wants to make his own curtains.

Even with the bookcase and the desk, there's still plenty of room on his floor for dancing. They've moved from foxtrot to quickstep to salsa to samba, and while he still doesn't have any pots or pans, Percy now has proper wine glasses as well as the champagne flutes.

Luna takes him out again the next weekend, in the search for something fantastic. They end up sitting on the roof of the Battersea Power station, watching the sun go down. It's almost fantastic, but not quite.

They pack up their picnic blanket and their crystal glasses in the growing dark, and Percy tries to ignore the heat in his arm where Luna leaned against him, glad for the dusk that hides his blush and wondering what to do next.

+++

He finally buys a frame for his mattress just so that he doesn't feel like he's still sleeping on the floor. He doesn't want a four-poster; he's fairly certain he'd feel like he was back at school.

Ron gives him a print in a frame, having heard about his decorating project. It was obviously chosen by Hermione, but she's always had taste and Percy ends up hanging it above his bed. At Sunday lunch at the Burrow, two weeks into his holiday, his mother has taken the opportunity to clear out some of her kitchen cabinets and Percy suddenly inherits a mishmash of plates and mugs and sauce boats, none of which match.

Fleur, graceful as always, hands him a miniaturized pot and a skillet, and Charlie, being Charlie, shows up at his flat with a set of kitchen knifes so sharp that Percy's cutting board is a loss after the first time he uses them. George comes for a visit, tells Percy he likes what he's done with the place, then falls asleep in the rocking chair. He doesn't give Percy anything, but he notices after his brother is gone that the faucet no longer leaks, the pipes have stopped making mysterious clunking sounds, and he doesn't have to lift the door on his biggest kitchen cupboard to open it any more.

Then Ginny proves that girls are scary and they obviously share some sort of hive mind, by giving him a waffle iron and an electric whisk.

Percy decides not to be bothered about this; instead he enlists Luna's assistance as a teacher in the art of making waffles. She has an old, mechanical whisk which she uses to whip cream, and finds the electric version enchanting. So enchanting, in fact, that they end up barely able to stand up from laughter and Percy finds himself having to gently disentangle the beaters out of Luna's long hair.

It takes a while, which he doesn't mind; he's sitting on a kitchen chair and she's sitting on the floor in front of him, leaning back against his legs. Even through two layers of clothing she is warm and alive, the contact raising his heart rate and heating his cheeks.

He's not used to casual touches except from his family, and even they have learned to keep their distance. His colleagues never catch his elbow to make their point and none of his friends are the kind who sling an arm over his shoulders or sit close enough to touch. Percy has never liked it – he's always preferred handshakes and perhaps a kiss on the cheek for his mother – but Luna, being an anomaly in everything else, seems to be exempt from this as well.

He's been cataloguing her touches, so he notices when they start to linger.

+++

He comes back from an afternoon walk, trying to find equilibrium after yet another nightmare, to find Luna already in his apartment. She's playing music, something he suspects she intends to teach him to dance to, and there's a bottle of red wine breathing on the kitchen counter.

She's wearing her yellow sundress again, but between Percy's mismatched furniture, the bright turquoise curtains, and the emerald green bedcovers – a gift from Luna herself – she no longer stands out in his apartment.

On the contrary: she looks like she fits.

He'd only given her the key the day before and he's secretly pleased at how soon she used it. "Just for emergencies," he'd told her.

"Or surprises," she'd added.

He'd surprised himself by smiling and telling her that yes, it was for emergencies and surprises.

He takes her hand and twirls her around to say hi, and she laughs and twirls herself right back into his arms. "How do you feel about tango?" she asks, and Percy knows he'll barely be able to breathe for the next hour.

The music is sultry and rhythmic, and she steps closer to him, until she's quite impossibly close, far too close for comfort, except Luna's never really been about comfort, as much as she's been about the search for something improbably fantastic in increasingly unlikely places.

Percy thinks that of all the unlikely places she's found, his flat must be the least promising when it comes to the improbably fantastic, but somehow she's still there and she keeps coming back. He moves his feet to the music, stepping on her toes at least twice, but he's too distracted by her proximity to remember to apologize.

The song ends on a high note and Percy, who hasn't been paying much attention to the music, stops moving abruptly, Luna still pressed against him. She's staring up at him, a small smile playing over her face, and her hand feels scalding hot on his shoulder.

"Why so serious?" she asks, voice barely above a whisper, but she doesn't pull away.

"I'm..." he says, then stops to take a deep breath. "You…" he tries again, but every time he opens his mouth, he's forgotten what he meant to say.

It feels like they've been standing there for an eternity when she suddenly grins and moves her hand from his shoulder and up to the nape of his neck, pulling him down for a searing kiss.

As kisses go, he thinks it is relatively chaste – not that he's been kissed much – but he's still breathing hard when she pulls away.

"All right?" she says, an inquisitive tone to her voice, and Percy knows better than to try to speak, nodding instead to show that yes, he's all right, he's fine.

She pulls her hand out of his and he's disappointed for a moment until she winds it around his back and uses it to pull him even closer, and then it occurs to him that he's allowed to touch her back.

He leans down to kiss her again and this time it's deeper, darker, and they've barely done anything but Percy is aching - for touch, for her, for more - and they shuffle backwards, falling sideways onto the bed, laughing at the way they almost bounce.

She climbs on top of his hips, then pulls him towards her so that she can pull his shirt over his head, and he's glad that she seems to know what she wants to do, because as far as he's concerned she's a force of nature and all he wants to do is let her lead him along.

She's smoothing her hands over skin that no one else has touched for years and he can't understand how he lived without this, without gentle strokes and heated caresses and her body rocking against him, pleasure spiralling out of control, his hand in her hair and her breath at his temple, and then something inside him breaks apart and he buries his face in her neck as he drowns in pleasure.

He almost forgets to breathe and his vision is tinged with black when he realizes that she's still touching him, still pressed against him, and she hasn't even taken off her clothes. He's embarrassed and flustered, and loath to admit that while he has considerable knowledge of a variety of subjects he is at loss for what to do next. She leans back to pull her dress over her head, and then she takes his hands and shows him precisely where she wants them. She's warm and alive and gorgeous, and she's there in his bed, arching under his touch, mapping his skin with her hands, pulling him closer and drawing him in.

They fall asleep still entwined, after Luna has spent an hour mapping constellations in the freckles on his chest.

He wakes up whimpering from another nightmare later and barely feels as if he's slept at all. Luna's eyes are almost luminous in the twilight of his bedroom. She's carding her fingers through his hair and doesn't say anything while he tries to breathe normally.

"Why now?" he whispers, turning his face into her shoulder.

"It's been long enough," she answers quietly.

Her reply doesn't make any rational sense, but somehow he understands her perfectly.

"Move on," she adds, breathing it against his temple, kissing him gently, lips scorching his skin.

He gathers her closer and holds her tight against him, knowing that he already has.

+++

He wakes up alone, but he can hear Luna in his kitchen, singing something about bats and bacon. She's wearing one of his shirts, her hair held up with the handle of a spoon, stirring something on the stove that smells like porridge.

"Sleepyhead," she says, smiling at him, "should we go out today and look for something fantastic?"

He doesn't even stop himself from grinning back. "If you want to, but we don't need to," he replies, taking her face in both hands and kissing her soundly.

The porridge burns, but it's still the most fantastic breakfast he's ever had.