‘Haiku’
The setting sun was turning everything orange. Harry glanced up at Hedwig, who was uncharacteristically still asleep - normally if she was travelling in her cage Harry would occasionally catch her glaring at him, her message very clear: This is your fault, I do not want to be in here. He supposed it came from being in the back of the Anglia that one time, trapped for hours in the air on a bright and air conditioning-less day. For her to still be asleep this close to sunset meant she must be exhausted.
Harry himself wasn’t feeling his own fatigue any more. That morning he’d felt dead on his feet, and had actually contemplated if Ron and Hermione would let him be if he just decided to sleep - possibly curled up on the edge of the seat the same way Crookshanks was right now by Ron’s feet - but right now sleep was quite far from his mind. Watching the Chocolate Frog Luna seemed to be refusing to eat (now perched on her shoulder), Harry remembered he should also be hungry as well as tired, and he couldn’t help a smile.
Hermione, Ron, and Neville were talking - rather, Hermione and Neville were talking and Ron was half-listening, since the subject had just moved to something about cross-pollination, and Ron clearly intended to do nothing that even sounded like schoolwork until he was actually at school - leaving Harry and Luna in relative quiet on their side of the carriage. Luna had finished reading the Quibbler, and was now ripping a couple of pages from it and creasing and folding them, tucking sections into one another with a look of calm focus. Her hands however were active and alive, running fingers down lines, holding folds in place for a moment and making quick little twists, and Harry supposed he should have realised Luna was a crafts kind of person - the cork necklace and ostentatious roaring lion hat should have made it obvious. She took her wand from behind her ear and prodded a section of her project, making something spring out of it, and then took her creation and pried it open with two fingers. It was a hat (not one as complex as the lion hat, and Harry was unsure if the lines of text all over it and a blurry glossy image on the side ruined or enhanced it), and the springy something was a paper feather grown from the folded pages. She placed it experimentally on her head, looking now like a slightly dotty pirate that preferred amphibians to the standard parrot, and caught Harry’s eye and cocked her head a little, her pleased expression making the unspoken question clear: What do you think? Neat, isn’t it?
Harry’s smile, which went unnoticed by the boys (now debating Puddlemere’s chances to qualify this year), was a positive answer: I’m very impressed.
------------------
Something was flying in the sky, and Harry squinted to make it out. It turned out to just be a dull brown bird, rushing off to roost somewhere. Not even of much interest to birdwatchers, he thought, as it became a tiny speck and disappeared amongst the distant trees.
The back door opened, the sound from inside growing momentarily louder, and Harry looked up from where he was sitting to check who it was; it was Professor Lupin, and in the twilight, his face was a mystery, looking old and young at the same time, weathered and spirited, and it surprised Harry for not the first time that this man had been friends with his father.
"What are you doing out here, Harry?" Lupin asked in a conversational tone.
"Waiting for Hedwig." This was the truth, but as Harry said it, he felt like he was lying.
"She’ll know where to find you. You should come inside."
"She’ll be back any minute, I’ll-"
"Then I’ll wait with you." He sat on the back stairs with Harry. Harry’s eyes didn’t leave the skyline, but he knew Lupin was watching the sky as well: he would have felt the eyes upon him.
"Your friends are worrying about you," Lupin said after a few moments of silence, in a different, lower voice than the one he had been using before, and before Harry could think of a response, he continued. "And I have told them I would say something to you. I did not, however, tell them I thought their worry was a little unjustified. Hermione is quite prone to being concerned, and Ron is quite prone to agreeing with her. Would you agree?"
"I guess," replied Harry, unsure exactly where this conversation was going.
"We deal with loss in our own ways," Lupin said after a pause. "You are coping with your loss. And, I think, you are coping as well as anyone could be expected to. Am I wrong, Harry?" Now he was looking at Harry, eyes unreadable in the growing dark.
"No," said Harry, "no, you’re not wrong."
"Good. That’s good." The two of them sat for a few moments more, watching more stars emerge, before one of them spoke again.
"I am somewhat familiar with burdening my friends without a good reason," said Lupin as he stood and moved for the door, in a tone that suggested he was saying it as much to the gnomes (or Crookshanks) as he was to Harry, "and it took me a very long time to learn not only how not to do it, but that I shouldn’t do it in the first place. You have two very good friends inside, Harry - don’t worry them."
The light from the doorway showed Lupin’s shadow more clearly now, and Harry watched it for a second, unsure if it would disappear into the night as the door shut or wait, wait until Harry stood up to go inside too, but it actually did neither; instead, it raised an arm, pointing.
"I think that’s Hedwig. See you inside soon, Harry."
"Okay, Remus."
------------------
Neville was sitting next to him, chewing on something that smelled like it had peanuts in it (must have been what he was buying on the train, Harry thought, and berated himself again for not getting anything himself), and Harry tried looking around for something else that would keep his attention occupied until the Sorting was over. Unsurprisingly, there was very little attention-occupying variety available - most students either had their eyes forwards or were disinterested like Harry, and from where he was sitting all of the teachers seemed stoic and unanimated.
He did see Luna at the far table, spotting her newsprint piratey hat first. After a little while she saw him as well, and gave Harry a quick wave before clapping as a new student (someone Seacombe) was sorted into Ravenclaw. Harry had to catch himself, realising he was about to start clapping too, which would have been slightly awkward to explain at the Gryffindor table.
------------------
"It’s okay," said Luna in a hushed tone, as if one of Umbridge’s lackeys could have been eavesdropping, "they’re all very noisy. At this time of night they’ll disturb all the Nocturn Worms that are feeding - I’ll know if they’re coming." And with that, she closed the door, leaving Harry with the task of picking up cushions with Ron and Hermione.
"Nocturn Worms," Hermione muttered, and rolled her eyes. "Ron, have you ever heard of a Nocturn Worm?"
Ron looked like he was about to answer and then thought better of it, stacking up some open books and letting Hermione continue.
"Ravenclaw’s meant to be the clever House, not the... not the tinfoil hat House!"
At the slightly blank looks from Harry and Ron, she changed tack a little. "How does it not bother you, all that nonsense?"
"Luna’s harmless," said Ron. "Everyone’s got at least one funny idea - I mean, you’ve met my dad." Mr Weasley had been a source of frustration for Hermione and much amusement for Ron during the summer - when he had no immediate business with the Order, he had taken to asking Hermione about anything she knew about plugs, wires, and electricity. His questions were so numerous that Hermione had owled her parents, asking them to send her a book on the subject so she could give him better answers. They had sent a weighty textbook on physics, with the chapter on circuits bookmarked, that had been laboriously carried by both Errol and Pigwidgeon, exhausting the pair of them, and Hermione had stayed up late to give herself a crash-course on how to explain electricity in terms of wattage, volts, ohms, and amperes - terms which were completely lost on Arthur Weasley, who kept mixing them up and couldn’t really understand how they related to the wires slung from towers over all the houses in the Muggle suburbs. Ron had found the cross-talking they were doing for hours remarkably comical; Hermione, significantly less so.
"Maybe they’re not that funny, as far as ideas go," suggested Harry. "I wouldn’t have believed in unicorns, or that I could talk to snakes or anything like that, until I did it."
"Alright, but Nocturn Worms? Heliopaths? Blithering Blazekites, or whatever else the Quibbler prints. Common sense should say none of those things are real, if nobody outside the Quibbler’s readers has ever seen one." Hermione waved one of the pillows she was holding to accentuate her points.
Harry shrugged, noncommittal. Ron had the same ghost of a smirk he had had when Hermione was talking about the resistance of a circuit to his father.
"Useless, the pair of you!" she exclaimed, and tossed the pillows into a corner.
------------------
Someone was touching his arm and everything was out of focus.
"Harry? Maybe you want to sleep in a bed tonight-"
He went to rub his eyes, disoriented.
"-Instead of in the armchair. I’m sure it’s comfortable, but it’s not exactly proper."
And he remembered where he was: he had been sitting in the corner with Ron and Hermione (surely it was their corner by now, since the three of them managed to claim it with ease whenever they were doing homework together), and they had been talking about something he hadn’t been interested in, and the fire had been very warm, the chair very comfortable, and his eyes very heavy.
"It’s not so comfortable. The Quidditch team’s meeting tomorrow - they might kick me off if I fly with a stiff neck."He was able to focus on Hermione now, and the rest of the room as well; it seemed they were the last two still awake. Hermione was smiling - a mischievous un-Hermione smile - and the smile remained as Harry stood to stretch.
"What," he asked, adjusting his glasses, "my hair a mess?"
"I saw you."
"Saw me where?"
"On the train. The carriages. In the Great Hall, not paying attention to the Sorting or Dumbledore’s speech." She listed the places off on her fingers.
"Oh." Harry considered. "I thought you didn’t really like-"
"What? No! Don’t be silly," she said, surprised, and still smiling. "Does she know?"
"I don’t know," said Harry, dropping his gaze to the floor for a second. "Does he know?" he asked, turning the question back on her. Hermione was still for a second, unprepared.
"Does anyone know?" she replied, sighing, and they laughed together, a comfortable laugh that felt to Harry like it had been out of use for a long time.
------------------
Hedwig rattled her cage again. Harry dragged himself to sit upright, thinking he would let her out and continue to try to fall asleep. However, while crossing the floor to the desk where Hedwig’s cage sat, something better occurred to him.
"Wait, girl," he said quietly, "I want you to take something." He dropped to one knee in the dark to find a quill and some parchment in his trunk, and placed them on the desk.
Harry sat and picked up the quill, and stopped. Who was he writing to? Neither Ron nor Hermione seemed right - he could imagine their responses (so what was the point in writing, then?), and they would be wrong like everything here; it wasn’t their godfather who died. He briefly considered Professor Lupin and decided he didn’t want to be lying in bed not sleeping and thinking of Sirius’ old friend and feeling nothing but terrible guilt. He considered Dumbledore for an even shorter time; Harry could still see the hurt in the great man’s eyes from when they spoke last, and the image was not pleasant.
Harry rapped his fist on the desk, not loud enough to make much noise, but hard enough to make Hedwig glare at Harry, as if to ask why she wasn’t out hunting field mice right now. What he really wanted was to write to someone who didn’t know Sirius, someone who wouldn’t use all the kinds of words he had kept hearing - sad and noble words that were all in past tense. But there wasn’t anyone like that!
Except, there was.
Harry began to write, quill darting across the page: Dear Luna...
------------------
A figure was coming toward Harry, someone who wasn’t in Quidditch robes. It was Luna, and she was making her way down from one of the lower levels of the stands. To combat the chill of early morning she wore a scarf, a technicolour monster that looked like it had been looped around her neck more than once and yet still managed to hang near to the ground. To Harry it seemed very briefly like a scarf Luna had not just made but had somehow imagined into being.
"Have you been here long?" Harry asked, momentarily feeling guilty he hadn’t noticed her while flying. Luna shook her head.
"Will there be any DA meetings this year?" she asked.
"Um." Harry was taken aback; that hadn’t been something he’d given any thought to after seeing Umbridge in the hospital wing. "I don’t know. I’ll use the coins if there will be."
"Okay." Luna seemed satisfied with that answer, and she moved on to her next order of business in the same way Harry thought she might if she had another question for a professor about that night’s homework. "Would you like to go to Hogsmeade next weekend? The notice was just posted."
Harry found himself smiling. "Sure. Yes. I would."
"Good." Luna was smiling also. "I’ll see you then, Harry."
Harry watched her walk back to the castle, the rising sun making both their shadows long on the neat grass, her scarf cheerful and happy.