for Dom. Named after the Beatles song.

Enjoy, & review?

come together

He runs into her [not literally] at Fortescue's ice cream shop, which is still busy as ever after he's dead. It's two months after…everything. He's wearing long sleeves in the middle of July, and people on the street stare not only because of that.

"Daddy would love to interview you," begins that familiar voice.

Loony Lovegood. At least she's alone and not with any of their mutual acquaintances.

"Not interested," he replies coolly. He must have already turned down every single wizarding magazine and newspaper that exists, and if he ever did consider saying yes, it would not be to the Quibbler.

"You're very interesting, you know. I thought you were going to get vanilla," Luna informs him matter-of-factly.

He considers his melting pink-cream-chocolate stripes. "Well, sorry to disappoint."

Apart from his mother and occasionally his father and a few house elves, he hasn't talked to or wanted to talk to anyone in two whole months. And that really hasn't changed.

She stands there like she wants something more important than an interview.

"Uh," Draco begins, his brain stumbling over the words. "Can I buy you an ice cream?"

It's sunny and it would be a glorious day to roll up his sleeves and he wishes he could just neatly cut off his left arm, once and for all. He isn't exactly sure why he's offering to pay a galleon or seventeen sickles or four hundred ninety-three knuts for whatever flavor Luna Lovegood wants, but it's most certainly not because he feels guilty.

She laughs for a second too long and refuses. He wishes he hadn't offered.

It must be fate or something similarly stupid because he runs into her again next week. Luna closes her magazine.

He gets two scoops of vanilla. She notices.

"Are you still offering?" Luna asks.

There aren't any radishes hanging from her ears, and that might be one of the reasons why Draco opens his wallet and returns, "What do you want?"

He climbs up the stairs to her room and he stares up at the faces on the ceiling with a sour taste in the back of his mouth. It only reaffirms the idea that coming here was a crazy and completely irrational idea. But he doesn't really have an urge to leave, yet.

"What do you think?" Luna asks, like she already knows exactly what he thinks. He gets that feeling a lot around her.

"Pretty," he says shortly. But it's ugly to him, because he's struck with the fact that he's never cared so much about anyone that he'd paint them on his ceiling.

"You're going back to Hogwarts, aren't you, Draco?"

The dreamy way she says his name is almost distracting. He shrugs, because September first seems too far away right now, even though it's just a month and a half, and honestly he's never thought about it.

She picks up a blue and bronze striped tie from the carpet. "I think you should."

He scoffs. "So everybody can stare at me like I'm a freak, like—"

"Me?" she says mildly.

He isn't going to apologize. Luna loops the tie around his neck and knots it looser than he would've. Her fingers just barely graze his throat. "I wonder what would have happened if you'd been in Ravenclaw," she says. "Blue suits you, don't you think?"

She nudges him around to face the mirror, and he has to admit she's right. Just not aloud.

"Did you know there's a special species of wrackspurts who have blue skin? Daddy says…"

Her chatter is completely insane, but somehow it helps keep him sane, and he listens because he has nothing else [better] to do. Draco lies back on her bed, eyes closed so he doesn't have to see their faces, and he wonders, too. She lies next to him, dirty blonde hair fanning across her sheets, and talks about things that don't exist.

When he leaves, Draco doesn't tell her he'll be back, but somehow, it's just understood.

He returns home reluctantly, and his mother asks him why on earth he's wearing a Ravenclaw tie.

She's a girl, but she's just different than any girl he knows or knew. He can't explain it and it frustrates him to no end.

"Daddy never really wanted to interview you," she says, the way she says everything, like it's only another number in a neverending list of facts.

He'd almost forgotten there was ever an interview planned in the first place.

"What are you talking about?"

"You just looked like you could use someone to talk to," she explains simply, not taking her eyes from this week's issue of The Quibbler. He's spent the better part of the afternoon just watching her read.

He holds grudges and thinks it's odd that she doesn't seem to have anything against him even though she spent several weeks locked in the cellar of his house.

As well as every insult he's ever thrown at her.

And God, he must be turning insane, because he can now explain [in minute detail] how to identify all six subspecies of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks, and he almost [really] wants to just run away with this girl who's chasing monsters. Imaginary ones.

"Draco?"

"I've got to go," he says brusquely, and runs out the door before he can admit to himself he's grown to like the revolting taste of Gurdyroot infusion. Only with half the sugar jar stirred in is his weak attempt at justifying it.

He lies in his own bed and his ceiling feels too blank.

He pushes up the sleeve of his white button-down shirt. The left one. And holds his forearm out to her.

"You've got a ridiculous way of looking at things. And people, I suppose." He swallows. "But you can't see this as anything other than what it is."

[he'll eat death forever.]

Luna gingerly traces the faded skull and serpent with her finger, and there's something so private about the way she does it that he feels exposed. She looks up at him with her big blue eyes and he has no idea what she's going to say.

"What are you so afraid of, Draco?"

"I don't know," he says. But one thing he is sure he's afraid of is her, because she's painfully honest when he isn't and she's [slowly but surely] changing him into something he's not sure he wants to be.

He's half disgusted for wanting to kiss her, to crush her mouth with his and taste the [endearingly] insane words on her tongue.

The lovely thing about Luna is that she's innocent, and he can't bring himself to be the one who ruins her.

"You're not afraid of me, are you?" she asks lightly. "That's silly."

"Easy for you to say," he mutters, sliding down his sleeve.

"It was easy," she says simply. Draco sighs. It's already August and he still doesn't know what the hell he's doing with his life. "I don't hate you," Luna adds. "You were horrible to my friends and I should, but I think it's generally better to not hate anyone except people who really deserve it."

"I don't hate you either," he says, because he's never apologized in his life except to his father and he's not going to start now. He inhales the clean smell of her sheets. Her fingers are so close to his that he wants to take them and doesn't.

"And I understand you. It's hard to hate someone you understand." Draco stays silent. "Are we friends?" Luna asks, at last.

"I don't know," he repeats, truthfully. "Who cares? Friends are stupid."

She laughs at him. Her ceiling smiles with the teeth of four people he would be happy to never see again.

His father finds his stack of glossy Quibblers; it wasn't as if he'd even really attempted at hiding them.

"So what if I'm reading it?" he says irritably.

Lucius Malfoy proceeds into a rant about blood statuses and nobility and why the Daily Prophet is leagues above Xenophilius' shit. Draco wishes he wouldn't, ignoring the fact that he parroted the same ideas for the last ten years.

The Sorting Hat had barely settled on his head, but it whispered, in the two seconds it was there, You've got some potential bravery, you know—

No!

Well, then— "SLYTHERIN!"

"I know it's trash, okay?" he finds himself saying. "I just wanted a laugh. I'll cancel the subscription."

He and Luna talk about the upcoming edition the next day, sitting beside the narrow river, a fishing pole stretched upwards. The songs drifting out of the wireless are more static than music, and while it gives him a headache, she hums along like it doesn't matter. He can't bring himself to feel an ounce of guilt when he comes home much later, the freshly-printed Quibbler disguised as the Daily Prophet.

It was incidentally the very same spell that hid a certain person's face from the same magazine.

His father claps him on the back. Draco almost feels like pasting its pages over his [green and silver] wallpaper.

Permanent sticking charm, of course.

September first.

"Did you change your mind?" she asks, and he doesn't miss the hopeful quality to her voice.

Platform nine-and-three-quarters is crowded, unlike last year, and he feels old. But the sight of the train isn't terribly nostalgic. Draco holds out her blue-bronze tie and lets her down curtly.

"No, I didn't."

But his sleeves are crinkled carefully at his elbows, and she smiles wide and curls his fingers back.

"Keep it."

He isn't sure how to say he thinks he'll miss her. So Draco rubs his left forearm and says, "Don't paint me on your ceiling." He doesn't feel like he belongs with the rest of them, or deserves to, and still doesn't want to belong with the rest of them, anyway.

Luna kisses his cheek.

"Of course not."