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The timeline was impeccable, her research concrete. Luna dips her fingers into the basin of tears that she had so diligently collected every day for a year, the waters of sorrow shed for the fallen. She traces the last of the runes that would guide her through the Veil, the pads of her fingers sparking with magic unused for hundreds of years.
Closing her eyes, she visualizes him, the flea-bitten, too thin canine that she had started to feed in her second year. The ache in her chest that always comes with thought of him, intensifies. Her thumb and fingers rub together, trying to recall the softness of dark curls, the scent of an ever grateful wizard, the uplifting joy she felt each time one of his letters found her in her school girl seclusion. The one man that she had come to fixate upon, to love in the way that only Luna could, with the entirety of her.
Beside her, Harry shifts, the nervousness evident in the tap of his foot, the twitch of his strong fingers.
“It will work, Harry,” she whispers, pressing a kiss to his stubbled cheek.
—--------------
There’s sand in her toes, each tiny grain a reminder that she’s exactly where she wants to be.
A burst of citrus dances across her palate as she eats a mandarin, segment by segment, luxuriating in the taste of a well-earned holiday. Beyond the beach, the water is calm, peaceful, ripe with the shades of a setting sun. Her skin is warm and bare, her natural state the only one allowed in such a place.
Down the beach, the sound of a barking dog lifts her mouth at the corners. Luna stretches, laying back on the beach to await her very favorite person, her companion through thick and thin, her everything.
They’d been separated for too long.
A joyous yip signals that finally, he has spotted her. She closes her eyes, letting the orange light filter through her eyelids. It’s been such a long time.
A soft whine sounds against her neck, a wet muzzle making her cringe and giggle.
“Sirius,” she breathes his name out, sliding her fingers into the scruff of his neck. He changes beneath her fingers, his body elongating, his black fur shrinking beneath his skin and lengthening from his head.
“Dovie,” his voice is warm, devastating. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
He’s completely naked, something that should be uncomfortable or embarrassing, but that hardly seems to faze either of them.
“No, I s’pose I’m not, am I?” She lifts her fingers to press her thumb to the line between his furrowed brow. “But I’ve spent quite a lot of time trying to get you back, you see.”
Sirius seems to really look, to really take in the changes in her since last they met. She’s older, her face less round and her eyes filled with the type of knowing that came from leaving childhood behind. They hadn’t seen each other in ten years, though no doubt, time moved differently here.
“How long-” he coughs, his voice rough from having no one but himself for company. “How long has it been?”
“Ten years to the second,” she whispers, trying and failing to hide her pain. “I had to get it just exactly right, the magic of the Veil is quite finicky, I find, but Harry is waiting for us on the other side.”
“Harry,” Sirius runs his hand through his hair, his smile broad and boyish. “He made it out, then? Is the war-”
“Over.” Luna finishes, popping another slice of fruit between her lips. “Harry is well, happy. He and I live in Grimmauld Place, actually.”
Sirius smiles softly, looking down at his tattooed hands. “I don’t think I am allowed to go back, Dovie. I’ve tried. Merlin, have I tried. I’ve seen the others. Remus.” His voice is choked with pain as he says his old friend’s name. “He walked the beach with me but couldn’t stay. I am stuck.”
Luna tilts her head, her heart exploding in her chest with the gentle impact of her cheek on his bare shoulder. She knows he is not hers, not yet. He hadn’t had time to see the woman she became, that the girl that he remembers is no longer. But he would, in time, he would see. Because finding Sirius Orion Black again had been as simple as following the bond that already existed within herself. A golden unbreakable thing, not of her own fanciful imagining, it was tangible. It was real.
“Not anymore,” she slips her fingers between his, lacing them together for the first time. “I am taking you home.”
—------------
Sirius’s clothes are a bane to his skin, too tight, too constricting. Even his most worn muggle t-shirts, chafe. He tries to remind himself each day that the discomfort is a reminder that he is alive, escaped from the in-between, living in his old house with two people that are not quite strangers.
It’s been two months. He tells himself that things are getting easier.
The clatter of dishes in the kitchen draws him, the new and very real need for sustenance also a constant thorn in his side.
“Good morning, Sirius.”
Dovie, his Dovie, is at the stove, wearing only one of Harry’s Quidditch shirts and a pair of ridiculous fuzzy pink socks. There are parts of her that are exactly the young sprite that had aided him at his lowest, that had become a constant and a friend, despite the inappropriate age gap between them. He had cherished her then, like a bauble of light, untouchable and innocent.
Something low and ugly twists in his gut at the name, POTTER, splayed across her back. There is more than the desire for food that drives him now, and it feels like a betrayal of the worst kind. If he closes his eyes, he can remember her on the beach like a dream, hazy and indistinct. Supple curves, the peak of a pale pink nipple, dark curls. It haunts him. He is sick with it.
“G’morning.” He very purposefully keeps his eyes away from the long lean lines of her bare legs. “Sleep alright?”
Luna is an Unspeakable, and has become a formidable and powerful witch since he left. Harry works at a record shop, something that delights Sirius to no end. He assumes that the two are together, they certainly move around each other with the sort of ease that only comes between two that have shared space for a long time.
“No, actually.” She turns, her long blonde hair spilling over a shoulder.
“Harry stayed with Theo last night, and I always sleep worse when he’s gone.”
Sirius sits with the words, chews them, spits them out. “Who is Theo?”
Luna raises an eyebrow, smiling softly. “Theo is Harry’s boyfriend. He travels a lot for work, so when he is back in the UK, I don’t see much of Harry.”
Sirius frowns, trying and failing to summon the coffee carafe. Luna snags it, walking it over and filling his favorite mug, still left from years ago.
“Are you and Harry not? I just assumed.”
She hums, filling her own mug and settling across from him. “No. I suppose we let you assume, we let most people assume. Harry is my best friend. After you-” She stops, hiding behind her first drink of caffeine. “You were gone, we got closer. We were both rather weighed down. The grief of it made it easier to bear when we leaned on each other."
Sirius can’t imagine two people caring that he was gone, not after Azkaban, after everything. The idea that he had left those two sweetlings, that he had failed them and they had still come back for him.
“I’m sorry, Dovie.”
Luna traces the back of his hand, each one of her fingernails is a different shade of blue. There’s something tragic in her sky blue eyes and not for the first time, she looks to be somewhere else, somewhere Sirius can’t follow.
“Don’t be. In the end, we all survived.”
He shouldn’t ask, it has nothing at all to do with him. “So you aren’t- you don’t have someone?”
She looks at him like she always has, as though she can see through to the heart of him, see the man inside the dog, the wizard beneath the grime and desperation. She shrugs and one sleeve falls revealing the delicate line of her collarbones.
“No. I unsettle people, you remember.”
But Sirius doesn’t remember. He recalls warmth and comfort and chocolate eclairs stolen from the Great Hall. He remembers cruel pranks, hidden trainers, and forgotten birthdays. He remembers being handled gently after a decade in a dank cell.
—---------------
The first time he crawls into her bed, he does so as Padfoot. He promises himself it is for her, that Harry was with his boyfriend and that Luna needs comfort. She doesn’t speak, only winds her little fingers into his fur and curls around his back. When he wakes he’s nestled between her thighs, head pillowed onto her soft belly like it was made for him. Her scent fills his mouth with saliva and he hates himself for it.
—--------------
It becomes an unspoken agreement. If Harry is gone, then Sirius takes his place, but he doesn’t push for more. Luna is beyond him, much too young, with too much history painting the pages between them. Her warm breath on his furry neck is more than enough.
—-----------
Until it isn’t.
“Sirius,” his name escapes her lips on a sigh, and he’s roused from a light sleep. She’s dreaming, her eyes moving listlessly beneath her lids. The scent in the room is thick, all her, wet and wanting and wrong.
He whines, nosing at her neck in an attempt to wake her. A blush crawls down her neck, her chest heaves as she bows like a flower to the sun. He should leave, go.
“Can I see you? I want to see you, the real you.”
He’s shocked to see moonlight brightened eyes when he pulls away. The world is leached of pigment through these eyes, and he longs to see her in full color. He cannot deny her, not after everything she’s done for him.
The feeling of her hands on his skin is more salvation than any he has felt before, the slide of her tongue into his mouth, a nirvana he’d never dared to dream of. His Luna has wings enough to carry them both, and he might be damned for hell for it, but at least he would go with the taste of her dancing across his palate.
—----------
“Luna, we can’t-” he gasps, even as his hands pull her closer, grasp her tighter. He doesn’t speak her name often, and the sound of it vibrates through her like a ringing bell.
“We can,” she grinds down, chasing his touch, the headiness of finally having all of him to herself.
“You’re young.”
A laugh, quick and sharp, bursts from her chest. “I’m twenty-five.”
“I’m- we aren’t this.” His mouth says one thing and his body says another.
“We can be this now.” How many times had she woke, desperate and alone, her body reeling from phantom touch.
“Fuck, Dovie. I can’t -”
Luna slows her hips, lifting her hand to lay it over his heart. His pulse thrums, proof that he is there, real.
“Can’t you feel it? I found you, I found you and brought you back.” The words are as much declaration as she can give, and she hopes he can hear her unspoken plea.
His next kiss is bruising, tinged with disbelief and desperation, but Luna doesn’t mind. When their bodies finally come together, when she sinks down on his length and takes her pleasure unapologetically, it’s with the knowledge that every miserable moment of her life had brought her there. Sirius Orion Black’s arms were her freedom, and she would never let him go again.