Title: Winter Like a Balm

Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

Pairing: Ginny/Luna

Warnings: Angst

Rating: PG-13

Wordcount: 2500

Summary: The first winter after Fred's death, Ginny manages to escape into the Forbidden Forest with Luna and her unicorns.

Author's Notes: This is an Advent fic for thady, who asked for Ginny/Luna, something warm and fluffy, preferably winter-themed, something with family. I'm afraid the beginning is angsty and not as fluffy as you'd like, but it does get there.

Winter Like a Balm

"Do you want to come see my unicorns?" Luna asked, on an afternoon when Ginny had wandered away from the school.

Ginny blinked and looked at her without answering. Luna stood in the middle of the field beside her, although Ginny hadn't seen her approach. Her eyes appeared larger than they ever had. Ginny wondered if her face was paler or something, but the wondering died away into nothingness.

A lot of things had been like that for her, ever since she had come back to Hogwarts and realized that being away from the Burrow didn't make Fred's death hurt any less.

"I don't know," said Ginny, and looked over her shoulder. Most of the time, Ron was with her, hovering protectively at her side, keeping away curious and stupid people who wanted to know too much about her part in the war, as minor as it was.

But he wasn't here now. It was just her and Luna here now.

"They want to meet you," said Luna. "At least, they would want to meet you if they saw you. I've told them about you. But unicorns are very choosy, you know. They won't know if they like you until you're up close to them, and they can see and smell you."

Ginny hesitated again. She had classes to study for. A brother to sit and have silences with. Letters from Mum to answer (Mum wrote every day, as if knowing exactly what Ginny was doing every hour shrank the Fred-shaped hole in her heart). Friends who would make a place for her among them, if she asked.

But there was the fact that Luna had come up and asked her. The only people who had done that so far had been the insensitive ones. Ron just assumed Ginny would want to be with him without asking, and Hermione bustled around her, and Harry was brooding about death and funerals and the Hallows, and all her other friends thought she needed space. This was the first invitation she had received to go somewhere in…a long time.

"Yes, all right," Ginny told Luna, and Luna's smile was brighter than before, too, like a burning moon.

"They're ahead, in the heart."

Luna had said that and then begun walking into the Forbidden Forest, heading serenely straight ahead. Ginny assumed she meant the heart of the Forest, and although her skin tingled and burned with more than the cold, she followed.

Actually, the Forest felt safer to her, in a weird way, than the castle did. There were no memories of Death Eaters trying to torture her here. There were no hopeless dreams of Harry returning in time to save certain specific people. There was only the snow, and the quiet of the Forest that suddenly, abruptly, broke in the direction they were walking.

Ginny stopped. She didn't recognize that noise, although she supposed it could be birdsong, sung by a crystal bird or something like that. It was so loud, so shrill, and so heartbreakingly high.

Luna kept moving, though, and that unconcern stung Ginny. She ran after her, her feet scuffing through the snow, and Luna turned around and smiled at her.

"They're here," Luna said. "That's only a first test, you know. They sometimes do it to keep people away. The ones who don't have the courage to walk towards it don't have the courage to meet them."

Ginny looked at her curiously. "I didn't think you had to be courageous to meet unicorns," she said. "Just pure, or lucky. I mean, we did unicorns in our Care of Magical Creatures class. No one had to be brave." After Hagrid's terrifying creatures, unicorns had seemed nice and normal.

"Oh, those unicorns," said Luna.

Ginny blinked. "There's only one kind," she said, voice firm, although she felt as though she had opened a dictionary and seen a word she knew blotted out of it.

"Most of the time," Luna agreed, and infuriatingly kept walking on, never turning her head to make sure Ginny was there.

Ginny swallowed, shivered, licked her lips, and followed some more.

The snow lay piled deep in the heart of the Forest. Not even the centaurs seemed to have been here. There was a sparkling, glazed crust on the top of it that Ginny broke through at every step, and she shivered and leaned against a tree for a moment to rub her arms.

This time, Luna stopped and waited beside her. The smile she gave Ginny was so brilliant that Ginny relaxed in spite of the cold and the worry that had begun to pour through her.

"I'm so happy you're here," Luna whispered. "I tried to share this with my father, but he's been more afraid and distant ever since the war." Abruptly, she rose up on her toes and held out one arm straight in front of her, so that Ginny could sight along it. "There! See them?"

Ginny turned to look, but had to shake her head. "No. Sorry." She wasn't sorry she'd come, though, even if these unicorns turned out to be creatures like Wrackspurts that no one except Luna could see. Being here lifted her spirits and made her feel less like someone who was lacking a limb because she lacked a sibling.

Then Luna took her hand, and the warmth seemed to pour up her arm. Ginny gasped, and watched the shadows shift and melt as Luna patiently guided her hand until it was pointing in the right direction, and this time, Ginny sighted along it.

A unicorn stood next to the trunk of a tree, watching them. It looked stronger, sturdier, less fragile, than the delicate white creatures Ginny was used to thinking of by that name, and more horse-like. Its coat was a shining, ethereal grey, and so was its horn. It looked like the horn was made of pearls, or opals. It moved forwards at a trot that brought its hooves into floating contact with the crust of snow, but never breaking through.

It halted in front of them, and ignored Luna for the moment. It seemed intent on examining Ginny, for things that Ginny wasn't even sure she had. But she lifted her head and tried to return the stare innocently, instead of defiantly.

A second later, the unicorn bobbed its head, mane rippling, and turned to look over its shoulder. Behind it, from the trees, trotted other grey unicorns. Ginny noticed that, as each one appeared, the shadow of some tree she had been watching disappeared.

She licked her lips, and smiled more widely. Luna crowded closer to her side, shoulder soft and welcome against Ginny's. Ginny leaned back, and watched as the unicorns gathered and moved into a ring, until there were fourteen of them-thirteen in a waiting, expectant circle around a central one, the first unicorn that had approached Ginny.

Ginny didn't know what she expected. Maybe one of the unicorns to turn and spear them. Or to let them-or at least Luna-ride on their backs. Or Luna to walk into the center of the ring and conduct a sacred, timeless ritual.

In fact, what happened was that the unicorn in the center of the ring rose to its hind legs, and a second later, a thin line of light appeared, connecting its horn and the star that the horn was aimed most directly at.

Ginny had to cover her face against the intensity of the light radiating along the line. It was a pure, brilliant white, a few shades brighter than the snow, which was enough to make her eyes water even through her hand. The unicorn appeared transfigured into light when she finally felt she could look again, all the shadows that made up its body leached into whiteness. It leaped into the air once and came down, still perched delicately on its hind hooves.

Then it began to turn in a circle, all the while balancing, its forelegs not folded against its chest in the way that Ginny imagined most animals would do when they were standing on their hind legs, but simply held up and cocked. It didn't look silly, turning like that. It looked as though it was doing the sort of thing that grey unicorns were born to do.

At the same moment as it started to turn, the unicorns in the circle stamped their right forehooves, all simultaneously, and began to gallop slowly and majestically around the standing one in the center. Their legs drifted like snowflakes. Their manes lifted and flew more slowly behind them on the wind than their sheer pace could account for. There seemed to be a long interval of time between when Ginny first saw a leg move and when she heard the solid thump that was a hoof connecting with the ground.

Luna, meanwhile, turned in place, completing one circle before she extended a hand with the same dreamy slowness that ruled the unicorns' pace.

Ginny stepped forwards and grabbed hold of her hand.

Then they were both turning those dreamy circles, their vision spinning between grey unicorns, still galloping like a wheel around the slowly turning hub of the unicorn in the center, and the line of light between the star and the horn, and the snow that wafted up in glittering flakes and drifted down again, and the trunks of solemn great trees in the Forest that all seemed lit by the same unearthly gleam.

They turned, and they turned, and Ginny thought she could feel the seasons turning around her, speeding past as they had done relentlessly since Fred's death. Her breath came short, and tears pounded in the corners of her eyes, because all the time that had seemed so long and agonizing since his death dragged short now. The seasons would go on passing, the earth would go on spinning around the sun, and in the end, she would live more years without Fred than she had lived with him.

But the turning reminded her, too, of the way that the spring would return, and how much Fred had loved the spring because it gave him a chance to try pranks outside more often instead of the four walls of the Burrow where Mum would yell at him, and the heat of summers back from Hogwarts when he would play Quidditch with her, and the rush of autumn when he would depart on the train and promise her a toilet seat. And then she had gone with him, and she had been with him for a few short years before his death.

Too short. Too short.

But the turning time didn't have to be a burden. It could be a blessing. The memories passed through her like the line of light, like a dance, like the slow movements of the unicorns that soared in a stately celebration through the winter night.

The dance would go on. Fred wouldn't participate in it, but Ginny could keep the memory of him alive, and remember all the dances he had been there for.

How long had the grey unicorns been turning like this, to celebrate a star and a season in the depths of the Forbidden Forest? And the dances passed, but none ever ceased to exist because it didn't exist right now. The past lay there like the gleaming snowfall, and the star shone, and the dance went on. She was part of it. Fred was part of it.

Not dancing now, but not forgotten. Never to be forgotten.

Ginny stopped she didn't know when, hands locked to her face in what felt like a painful freeze. Her skin was burning cold like the first touch of deep water on a hot summer day, and Luna leaned against her, and the snow in front of them was trampled and glowing.

The unicorns were gone.

Ginny had known they would be. At least, she told herself she had known they would be. It didn't explain the way she turned her head to the side and felt a few tears squeeze out of her eyes, and she dashed them off impatiently. They weren't tears of fear or anger or dread the way she had been crying since Fred died, anyway, which made them less hurtful, if no less important.

"Ginny?"

Ginny glanced at Luna. Luna was leaning close to her, and her face had all the warmth that had been missing from Ginny's skin when she first stopped dancing.

"The unicorns liked you," Luna told her seriously. Her face was warm, but not smiling. "They would never have let you see the way they danced if they didn't."

Ginny was afraid that her responding smile was mechanical, but almost anything would have felt that way, after the dance. "I'm glad."

"I like you, too," Luna said, and leaned in and kissed her.

It was slow, coming towards her, the same dreamy way that the unicorns had moved in their galloping ring; Ginny had plenty of time to consider what she was going to do. And what she did was accept, leaning in and meeting the challenge the way she had decided to meet the challenge of living with Fred's death.

All of this was part of the dance. All of this was part of the same path of life that included, although Ginny had never known it included, a grey unicorn reared under a star in the middle of a Forest.

A life that could include Luna, maybe, if she let it, and if Luna let it.

Luna was smiling when she stepped back from Ginny and executed a neat little bow to her amidst the snow. "That was well-danced," she said.

She could have been talking about the kiss, or the actual dance. Ginny didn't care. She was warm now, her hands tingling in a way that made her feel as if she'd been running them up and down the trunk of a burning tree, and she caught and clutched Luna's hand close, so close. "Let's go in," she said.

Luna was happy to follow her lead into Hogwarts as Ginny had followed hers into the Forest. While they walked, Ginny turned her head to the side now and then, considering Luna, and considering the unicorns, and considering everything.

But what she thought most of all was Luna's hand in hers as they spun through the dance, the complete acceptance of it, and the way that Luna had circled and Ginny had reached out and taken her hand, following an invitation, but participating wholeheartedly after that.

"Tomorrow," said Luna, "we need to make some nests for the Egghatchers. They get cold in the winter."

"Yes," said Ginny, and tightened her hold. "Let's."

The End.