"sous les paves, la plage" - Luna says it was Cho who started it all, yes, indeed, but this game is all Luna’s idea.

For verstehen who asked for 'Ravenclaw sexual sadism' as a fan_the_vote request. If she wants it, that is. Er. I attempted to oblige, dear, but I don't know if this is exactly what you wanted. Cho/Luna, set mainly during OotP. I suppose it's somewhat hurt/comfort, but, really, more appropriate warnings would be for sexual sadism and edgeplay. I'm going to give it an R rating, even though it isn't terribly smutty.

ETA: Was also terribly influenced by icarusinwax's lovely dark and creepy and quirky Luna drawings, especially this one of Luna and Dumbledore's army. Look! There's Luna and Cho and Marietta! :)

The poetry quoted is all John Donne. ‘death, thou shalt die’ is from his sonnet ‘Death be not proud’. The other two quotations are from ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’. ‘Say die and I will die, say die and watch me die’ is once again, adapted from Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. I’ve used the quote before, but I simply cannot help myself. ‘If she laughs or cries, or both’ is also from her. The parts about ‘no heroes to pain’ etc. is influenced by Orwell’s 1984.

In all likelihood, my math logic sequence is grievously wrong. I apologise. It was never quite my strong suit.



cleverness before common sense

From inability to leave well alone;
From too much zeal for what is new and contempt for what is old;
From putting knowledge before wisdom, science before art, cleverness before common sense;
From treating patients as cases; and
From making the cure of a disease more grievous than its endurance,
Good Lord, deliver us.

Sir Robert Hutchinson (Medical Litany)




She sits underneath the lamp and mashes her strawberry ice-cream mashes mashes and thinks vaguely that it’s the colour of human intestines.

*

Luna says that it was Cho who started it all, yes, a long time ago. The year before Cedric died. Word games played by the blue firelight of the Ravenclaw common room translating into mind games twisting underneath the sheets. Of course, it was Cho who picked her out with her Seeker’s eyes. Luna: curled up, covered in gold, wings fluttering, caught between thumb and forefingers. A hundred-and-fifty-points to Ravenclaw, applause, adrenaline. Well, no applause. Cho picked her out with her Seeker’s eyes as alone, lonely and added one plus one and came up with-

Perhaps four?

Soft and soft-hearted, their play then. Delicate laughter, chess moves; cradled against the chest and cooing.

Hushed.

Cho comes back from Quidditch and fucks Cedric up against the locker room walls, but with Luna it’s always rocking rocking rock-a-bye baby, lullabies curling like smoke around their limbs. Fairy-tales and fantasy, making love on spread out editions of the Quibbler and when Luna’s on top she reads out articles over the edge of Cho’s forehead.

So, when the other Ravenclaws or maybe the Gryffindors and sometimes even the Hufflepuffs laugh at Luna at breakfast Cho very calmly stabs her fork into her sausage and rips it into even, careful shreds. One, two and three, and then she proceeds to eat each one. At some point, she apologises to Luna, mumbled, half-sheepish. Luna blinks, pushes the hair out of her face and says, “For what, exactly?”

*

When Cedric dies Luna tells her about her mother, and about watching her die. And how it’s all quite peaceful really, if you’re into that sort of thing. Giant blankly staring dolls, if you really want to know. Cho starts to cry when she says that, in a horrible, shuddering, shaking way, and Luna sits and watches, and finally, licks off her tears.

Luna says it was Cho who started it all, yes, indeed, but this game is all Luna’s idea.

She slides in pain where their laughter used to be, pins down Cho underneath the stands, straddling her. She mutters a charm and the buttons of Cho’s Quidditch uniform pop off and she’s lying on the grass with a few bars of sunlight slitting her body and Luna traces the edges of the light. A strange smile flickers on her lips and then before Cho can react she says diffindo with her voice harsh against Cho’s shoulder and the skin along that line just opens up. A clean, almost surgical cut and Luna nods and says that her uncle was a Healer at St. Mungo’s you know, and she maybe got her hands on some of his old manuals.

Cho grits her teeth and squirms but she’s used to pain, being a Quidditch player, being an outdoors hiking adventure-sports sort of girl. Luna says, “You wanted to know about death, didn’t you?” and then chants, “Petrificus Totalus! Petrificus Totalus! Petrificus Totalus!” and all Cho remembers is thinking, well, that’s a bit redundant isn’t it? but then the tip of Luna’s wand glows hot against her neck and there is no more thought.

Luna nods and fusses assiduously and says, “The first thing is to realise that pain harbours no heroes.”

Pain breaking up her words into alphabets and then lines, lines, a two-year-old’s scratches on the wall and all the Shakespeare or Donne or whoever in her head regresses back to the cavemen and a few pictures mimic epic poetry.

When Luna lifts the spell, kissing her like in that old Muggle fairy-tale, as if it’s their touch and not a complicated thread of magic that does it, Cho wakes and says, matter-of-fact and monotone, And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

Our two souls therefore, which are one
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion
Like gold to aery thinness beat Luna recites, her voice sing-song.

A touch of the wand seals her skin back together and there are no scars and it all slips into the background, unfocused, removed. That grey blur at the corner of your eye, sitting and waiting and breathing slow and deep.

“I haven’t read that one,” Cho says, absently pulling on her jacket and not crying not crying at all, so maybe she’s better is what Luna thinks.

“A Valdediction: Forbidding Mourning.”

“Quaint.” Cho grimaces.

Luna shrugs. “Appropriate,” she affirms.

*

It’s nothing short of amazing, you know, Luna says conversationally. What you can do to the human body.

*

She watches Cho burst into tears at mealtimes, in the loos, outside classes and studies her intently intently because Cho never cries when they’re together. Even when she’s slicing into her skin, when she’s kissing the wound and then Cho’s mouth and filling it with the taste of her own blood.

So maybe she isn’t better after all is what Luna thinks.

*

The next time they meet, Cho says, “I’m so pleased you’ve made me your experimental subject” but she’s there isn’t she, so there’s a logical fallacy in her sarcasm. Which Cho would have realised, had she been less occupied with, well, Cedric and kissing Harry Potter and feeling guilty and jealous and stupid on top of it all. Of course, as every Ravenclaw knows, that’s half the battle. Indeed, Loony Lovegood becomes loonier and loonier with each passing day, with each passing name because names are invocations.

Luna says, “The second thing you have to realise is that we are all eventually betrayed by our own bodies.”

Screaming, screaming, shreds of dignity plastered to bone.

Luna flips a page in the Healer’s text she pulls from her trunk and drones a numbing charm is used before the the incision is made laterally to expose the gluteus-

*

Luna thinks it’s all about catharsis. And fear, maybe, and the way to rid yourself of fear is to plunge yourself into it, stare into it’s eyes, take it by the horns. Cliché, cliché say the whispers in Luna’s head but she’s trying so hard so mend the spring, screw in the bolt that must have just come loose from Cho’s head, push the stuffing back into the straw girl. And a little pleasure, maybe. Logic, cool and unperturbed; Gryffindor red lines of blood and flesh bending to Ravenclaw blue precision. The mysteries of the world reduced into the slant of an eyebrow, the swell of a lip and the slowly blossoming bruise. Oh yes. Cause-and-effect, reason, order.

Pain can make you believe in God, if you’re into that sort of thing, Luna says sometimes.

Though of course, sometimes its only true of inflicting pain.

*

Maybe she’s crying because corpses don’t/can’t cry and she can, she can, so that must prove something after all.

Propositions

p: Cho does cry.
q: Corpses do not cry.
r: Cho is not a corpse.

(p ^ q) => r

if P and Q, then R.

if Cho does cry and corpses do not cry, then Cho is not a corpse.

Test.

Instead of truth tables Luna traces a wand down her skin, presses down, marks a response, an observation and repeats. Games, games.

*

There’s a few strands of Cedric’s hair in a locket underneath Cho’s pillow, and all in all it takes a month to procure the Potion. Luna has the money and the connections, both thanks to her father, and the next week it’s owl-posted in marked elderberry jam or something equally silly like that. Luna carefully puts the hair into the potion and shakes it.

“You wanted to know about death, didn’t you?” She asks, again, and when Cho nods, wearily warily she points to the orange liquid in a bottle marked ‘drink me’ sitting on the desk. Cho’s hands tremble but she downs the potion in two, three gulps and then she’s clutching her stomach and watching her hands thicken and feet break out of her shoes and her chest flatten--

Luna conjures a mirror from the air and Cho sees Cedric staring back at her.

Luna holds her wand out in front of her and asks, “Do you want to know about death?”

Luna says Avada Kedavra! and Cho/Cedric/he/she/they/all all all fall back even though there is no green light, no power behind the words-

Oh, but there is.

say die and I will die, say die and watch me die

Words and the tip of a wand, life death pain heaven hell at the tip of a wand.

Luna is trying to say, look at how powerful we are but death seems to grow underneath Cho’s eyelids and clamp its hands around her like a lethifold.

Magic cannot bring back the dead.


Cedric wakes and Luna draws patterns of blood on his chest.

*

Cho takes to looking straight ahead and not responding unless somebody says her name or snaps their fingers. Marietta Edgecombe sits next to her every lunchtime and places the spoon in Cho’s hands and counts as Cho takes each bite, and soon Cho can’t swallow without the sound of numbers in her ears.

When Marietta’s by herself outside Advanced Arithmancy or Ancient Runes or something Luna sneaks up behind her, runs a warning hand up her back and says, “Learn the rules before you play the game.”

Marietta stares at her. “What?”

“Playing at puppet-master, are you little girl?” She breaks into peals of laughter, so hard she starts to sob right there in the corridor.

*

Luna looks at Cho and thinks: if she laughs or cries, if she laughs or cries or both but at this point there’s just the blankly staring doll. Death around the eyes.

For the first time Luna thinks that maybe this game of death has gone too far.

*

Experimental procedure. White coat. Gloved hands. Carefully blank expression. The walls are white, white so white and Cho is simply the sum of her nerve endings, her gasps, her skin.Luna is peeling it away and peeling it away and soon she will find an empty space where her lungs, liver, heart should be.

*

No.

*

Luna’s fingers close around Cho’s heart, beating, beating, fluttering like a snitch between thumb and forefinger.

Luna leans close to Cho’s ear and whispers, “See. I told you that you were alive” and how can you really disprove flesh flesh, your own flesh in someone else’s fist?

Some games tumble into reality, and if you die in a game do you die in reality is one question but the real one is if you live in a game can you come back to life?

We are all betrayed by our own bodies, and Cho is dead on the outside slow-breathing unliving a giant doll but her heart pushes blood in circles around her body and her muscles propel her forward, forward, into the endless spin of days.

Cho’s eyelids flutter shut and she sort of deflates against the cool summer grass and Luna heals her with a touch of her wand.

Ravenclaw games of logic and proof, death and paradox.

She wakes her with a kiss, like in those old Muggle fairy tales and Cho opens her eyes and says Thy firmness makes my circle just
And makes me end where I begun.

Cho wakes up and takes Luna’s hand and begins to cry.

Luna does not try and stop her.




*


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