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You wait around, at first. It's before the war is a real thing.
You wait around for him to notice you, because you're a frail twelve with freckles and red hair. You know how to fight, but you assume that comes after.
It doesn't come after, as it turns out.
*
The war hits you like a bullet in the head. Suddenly there are too many people to grieve and not enough hearts to grieve them, suddenly you have to take a wand and defend yourself. Suddenly your boyfriend is the Boy who Lived and it means something.
So you fight. There's no choice, so you fight, there's no second-guessing yourself, no waiting around anymore. You lock your childish dreams tight in that ribcage of yours and you chide yourself for being so selfish when they come buzzing on your lips, begging to be said.
Harry leaves. He tells you it's over before he does, and you can't think, your head is blank, there are only two sentences there, each of them spectacularly inadequate.
How can he think about that when he's about to go save the world? and
It was over long before now.
*
Luna just happens to be there. You're a hot-blooded girl, full of rage, affection, flirting and twirling and throwing hexes at Deatheaters. Luna is a cold shadow and you're there, sizzling. She's your friend. There's nothing else to rely on, now.
The first time she kisses you it's before a battle, you couldn't tell which. She steps forward, the end of her wand is digging into your side. She kisses you. Her lips are cold. You look down; it's a blessing.
"Don't die," she says.
You don't.
*
It's not a real thing, either. If it wasn't a war, you wouldn't sneak in her dorms at night and kiss her pale stomach, try to make her moan as loudly as you can. She knows it. She allows it anyway.
She knows what it's really about: if you let the adrenalin cool down, if you allow yourself to rest, just a second, to think, you won't pick yourself up. Your family is good at hope but you've always been the odd one out, the smart one. You know a hopeless cause when you see it.
Luna knows that. It's the only reason she kisses you back every time.
*
She's next to you when Harry comes back dead in Hagrid's arms. It's probably ironic that you're the one it shocks the less: you've counted him dead since that day he left. You're running on borrowed hope.
Luna flinches. For once, instead of being the one that's comforted, you become the one who comforts; it feels wrong, slipping an arm around her neck, telling her, "It'll be okay."
She looks up at you, her eyes gentle. "No it won't," she says.
You're not the one who comforts, you realize then; you're the one who fights until she can't, because she has to, because there's nothing else left.
*
And then it's a whirl.
Harry isn't dead, everyone holds their breath and suddenly it's Voldemort instead of him on the ground, his back hitting the stone. The One Who Must Not Be Named. Dead.
You turn to say something to Luna, anything, because it's the last scrap of war you've got and there won't be time for telling her after. She's not there.
You go to your friends instead, and you let them tell you how you won, and you don't tell them that they're wrong.
*
The last time you saw her was at your wedding. Harry was standing in front of you, handing you a ring and the bulk of his frailed edges like he thought you could fix it.
You looked him in the eye. Then you looked where you knew she would be, standing with her back against the door, her chin high.
"I do," you said.
She smiled at you. It was like she was saying it in your place: Another war you can't win, and you nodded.