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Camelopard Dreams	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > FemSlash - Female/Female Views: 4045 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Three—Dusk
“Ginny! Ginny, I know you’re there! Come on!”
Ginny groaned and tried to wrap her arms around her ears. She was going to a meeting with the Aurors about the camelopard killing, and later Luna, but not until noon. One quick glance at the clock she had hanging on the wall showed her it was a minute shy of eight in the morning. Why was someone Flooing her now?
“Ginny!”
Not just someone. It’s Mum. Old habit got Ginny out of bed and made her smooth down her hair with a charm even though she’d been sleeping alone (and Molly would probably be thrilled if she thought Ginny was sleeping with someone else, anyway). Maybe something had happened to Charlie or George. Or even Dad, who was supposed to be going on a raid to recover Dark artifacts today.
“What is it? Is someone hurt?” she asked, as she ran into the drawing room where her fire was.
She stopped when she saw her mother’s coy smile and the face that hovered beside her in the flames. Stopped and groaned before she could arrest it, and watched as Harry’s welcoming smile turned down at the corners.
Harry isn’t stupid, Ginny thought, wearily, and for the four hundredth time in the last four years. He must know I don’t fancy him anymore. I don’t know why he never tells Mum no.
“No, of course not!” Mum laughed and winked at her, then glanced at Harry. “Harry just had the most wonderful idea. He thought he’d take you out for a breakfast near the Hogwarts lake, and then you could go to Diagon Alley. Just the two of you,” she added, as if Ginny could possibly have missed the emphasis.
And then she winked.
Oh my God. Ginny’s first thought was how glad she was that Luna wasn’t here to see this. Then she wished Luna was, because she wouldn’t understand anyway and would probably remark on the dust caught in Molly’s eye, and then Ginny would have something to laugh at instead of stand there with a squirming stomach about.
“Ginny?” Harry’s voice was husky and uncertain, and Ginny stared at him. If only his hair had been longer, if his voice had been huskier still, if he had long fingernails and breasts and made her laugh…
If he was a girl, I could at least pretend.
“I have meetings with the Aurors and Luna today,” Ginny said abruptly, knowing she had already lingered too long. “I can’t go. Sorry.”
“But Harry came especially to take you out,” said Molly, and then glanced at Harry and put a hand over her mouth as if she had blurted out a secret. “I’ll let him talk to you,” she concluded hastily, and disappeared from the fire before Ginny could do more than open her mouth in protest.
Left “alone” with Harry, Ginny looked at him glumly. He was smiling again, but it was so small that she knew he didn’t have much hope.
“Listen,” said Ginny. She wanted to tell him the truth, but on the other hand, she had no guarantee that her mum wasn’t listening somewhere just out of sight. “I don’t want to go on any more outings with you, Harry. Please.”
“Your mum thinks we’re perfect for each other.”
“And what do you think?”
He hesitated, and Ginny pressed her advantage the way she would in a duel. “I want to know what Harry Potter thinks. Not what his fans do, or what the Boy-Who-Lived does, or even what my mother does. Do you really want to date me?”
Harry looked at her steadily. For an instant, Ginny thought there was hope. His eyes seemed to soften, and she thought he was looking at reality, maybe at the past few years when they’d drifted apart from each other.
But then Harry firmed his lips and said, “You’re the only girl for me, Ginny. Maybe other people thought of it first, but I’m thinking of it now.”
He’s probably just too afraid to lose the rest of us the way he thinks he would if he lost me, Ginny thought, and hardened her heart. Her days of dating someone out of pity were long past. And how sad was it that Harry, handsome and brave in so many other things, thought he was reduced to dating his best friend’s little sister?
“The answer’s no. I already have plans for the day.”
“We could just have a breakfast and walk through Diagon Alley right after—”
Ginny hid a smirk at the thought force-marching him through Diagon Alley just because her mum wanted her to, but it died at the look on Harry’s face. She shook her head, and thought of Luna talking about camelopards and how they thought their children were the clouds. Ginny would have wanted that even if Harry was a woman.
Luna would probably never understand the way she came first with Ginny, because she never did. But Ginny could still honor that dream of happiness the way Harry wasn’t honoring his.
“No, I have other plans. I have a career. And I know you’re in Auror training, Harry.” Ginny let her voice soften. “Don’t you have plans for a Thursday morning, too?”
Harry hesitated. Then he threw his chest out a little, or at least Ginny thought he did, as far as she could tell from him being crouched in front of the fireplace. “I do. But I told Ron and the others that I wanted to court someone, and, well, they agreed.”
Ron only agreed because he knows it’s me. Ron and Hermione were as enthusiastic about her and Harry as Molly was.
Ginny was tired of it all. Once, she had thought Hermione would figure her out because she was so perceptive. Once, she had thought Ron would know there was a serious reason she wasn’t dating Harry because they had grown up together and been close, like it or not.
She still would have to tell all of them she preferred women. But she would do it on her own time, not be forced into it.
“I don’t want to, Harry.” He opened his mouth, and she added, “Find someone else to date,” and shut the Floo.
Then, even though she wanted to pace the floor and brood and ask the walls why her luck was this way when she hadn’t done anything too bad in her life, Ginny went back to sleep. And if she did dream of Luna and wake wet between the legs, that wasn’t yet anyone’s business but her own.
*
“I’m glad you’re here, Ginny.”
Ginny paused and blinked when she saw Luna striding across the meeting room to greet her. Like all the rooms in the Ministry that could be used for any kind of meeting—the Minister might welcome foreign diplomats here one day and the Aurors might interrogate a prisoner the next—this was bare and drab, with a fireplace to order food on one side and a table in the middle. It was up to the people in it to decorate it with illusions or banners or the like to give the impression they wanted.
Luna was the brightest thing in it. Ginny reached out and took her hand, even though she felt it was unreal.
“I thought I was seeing you this afternoon.”
“The Aurors invited me when they knew I’d been attacked.” Luna eased up beside Ginny, along the same wall, so that they stood more shoulder-to-shoulder than Ginny would have dreamed of moving. “And because they found out I was coming anyway.”
“You were coming anyway?” Ginny murmured, and worked to keep her lips from trembling.
“Of course I was,” said Luna, and gave her a confused glance. “Why wouldn’t I be? They were going to talk to you about the case. I have to be there.”
Ginny sighed and nodded. “Of course.” She should have known Luna wanted to be here for the camelopard and maybe the woman who was killed, and not because of Ginny.
“What was her name?” Luna asked, walking over to the table and sitting down. She glanced in several directions as if waiting for someone to appear and ask her what she would like to eat. Then she sniffed and drew her wand. In a second, banners of a bright sunflower-yellow draped the walls.
Ginny reached up and felt one. Her fingers passed straight through. It was only an illusion.
“The woman who was killed?” Ginny shook her head and sat down beside Luna, feeling absurdly more cheerful even with what Luna had said. The banners really did shine as if they were sunlit. “They didn’t tell me. The Aurors called me in, and then they sent me home and took over the house. And the next time I talked to someone was, well, my mum, and then you.”
“Hmmm.” Luna slid lower in her seat, watching the fireplace with a frown, as if she thought someone was more likely to Floo in than walk through the door. “I think they’re keeping her name secret for a reason.”
“What reason?” This was Luna, who thought the Ministry was prey to the Rotfang Conspiracy, Ginny reminded herself a second later. She didn’t necessarily have a good idea that would stand up to scrutiny.
“I think the letters in her name would tell us something about why she summoned a camelopard. And the Ministry has always been threatened by name-readers.”
Ginny only hummed, a fond smile on her face. The good thing about the fact that Luna never took a hint—even when Ginny had practically shouted in her face—was that this way, Ginny could get away with being charmed and amused by her, and Luna would never suspect her.
“Ginny? Are you listening to me?”
“Of course. What about name-readers?”
Luna gave her a long, esoteric lecture on how important it was to be able to manipulate the letters in someone’s name. If Ginny had been able to listen and retain as much as Luna wanted her to, she would probably be an expert.
But Luna hadn’t even reached the part where it was dangerous and the Ministry would want to prevent it when the door opened and several Aurors entered the room. Ginny stood up before she thought about it.
The Aurors carried a body between them. It was a woman—a different woman from the one attacked last night, Ginny realized, though also blonde—in a Stasis Charm. She was draped over what looked like a board, and which couldn’t be very comfortable. Ginny winced and moved around the edge of the table.
There was a deep, bloody wound in her side, like the one that Ginny had healed on Luna. Not hooves, but it might have been caused by horns.
“Another one?” Ginny asked, stepping forwards. Luna seemed frozen beside her, and for all she knew about magical creatures, Ginny thought suddenly, she would have seen very few casualties.
“Not a murder, thank Merlin,” said the Auror leading the way, a tall man with shaggy brown hair and tired eyes whom Ginny had first met years ago. His name was Kellen Wood. “We saved her from bleeding out. But now that we know who she is…”
“Who is she?” asked Luna.
“Who was the first woman?” Ginny asked, her mind skipping past several unlikely suppositions to fasten on the most likely one: that this living woman was connected to the dead one.
Wood inclined his head. “They both go by the name of Pallas. This woman calls herself Isola Pallas, and the one who died, well, she was Isabella Pallas. But when ‘Isabella’ died, some of the spells she’d worked to change her facial features and hair ended. She was really dark-haired, a pure-blood instead of the half-blood she presented herself as, older than she looked…”
Ginny cut him off. Wood had made his name looking into the minutiae of cases, which was fascinating for him, but not always for his audience. “Her name?”
“Her true name was Rosa Lestrange.”
Ginny hissed in spite of herself. After the year she’d spent at Hogwarts with Neville, she could never think of the Lestranges neutrally again. “I understand why she went into hiding. But surely she wasn’t a sister of—”
“No, the whole main family line died out,” said Wood, his own mouth tightening. He’d lost people in the war, too. “She was the daughter of a minor branch.” He glanced at the woman under the Stasis Charm, whose lips were slightly parted. “This is Romula Lestrange, not actually a sister, but a cousin.”
Ginny nodded tightly. “How did you know she was dying in time enough to save her?”
“Coincidence, mainly.” Wood moved out of the way so the other Aurors carrying the board could put it down on the table. His face still had that indefinable tightness as he watched them. “Someone found a list of Floo addresses in Rosa Lestrange’s effects. They thought to contact the woman who was supposedly her sister, to find out what she knew and inform her of the death. He got no answer, but a strange message instead of just finding out the Floo was closed that made him suspicious. He took a team of Aurors and went to her house, and, well, we found her.” Wood nodded to Romula. “She must be wearing some powerful Dark artifact that healed her enough for her to survive. She’d been bleeding for hours by the time we found her.”
Ginny moved slowly around Romula’s outstretched body. Her hands dangled, and she wasn’t even breathing because of the Stasis Charm. Still, Ginny had spells that would let her sense certain things without disrupting the charm.
She turned to Wood. “Do I have your permission to perform that one spell the Minister hates?”
Wood hesitated. “Weasley.”
“Just this once.” Ginny lowered her voice coaxingly. The other Aurors were ones who worked with Wood all the time, and the minute she’d made her request, they’d started speculating loudly about possible Dark artifacts that could save lives, so they were no longer “listening.” “You know I haven’t done it since last year.”
Wood gnawed his lip. Then he nodded and turned away to join in the conversation, raising his own voice louder than all the others.
“What spell don’t they like you doing?”
Ginny jumped. She’d almost forgotten about Luna, who’d come forwards and was staring at Romula as though she could make out every mark of the horns that had gored her. “A variant of the True Sight spell,” she said. “But it only takes me back into the past, not the future. It makes me see whatever a victim’s greatest cause of pain was in the last week.”
Luna blinked slowly. “Why wouldn’t they like you using it?”
“Because it doesn’t always reveal the face of a murderer,” Ginny said bitterly, thinking about the ugly secrets dragged to light last year. “Sometimes the victim died painlessly, and we find out this way that their husband was abusing them or something. Or a relative of the Minister tried to kill them even though he didn’t actually succeed.”
“But it’s important to know these things.”
Ginny smiled quickly at her, loving the way Luna stood outside all politics. “Of course it is. But also embarrassing sometimes.”
“What does that matter?”
Luna probably has no idea what embarrassment even is, Ginny decided fondly as she raised her wand and cast the spell. “Dolor verus tuus.”
There was a moment of intense vertigo when Ginny felt the world dance around her, assuming swirling colors of green and grey. She had time to draw in her breath for one warning to Luna before the pain grabbed her, and she saw—
The looming shape of a camelopard, and this time, a human figure behind it—
And something lashed her in the side so hard she screamed, and collapsed to the floor, without even the foresight to cast a Cushioning Charm.
She found out later that Luna’s hands were the ones that had kept her head from merciless impact with the floor.
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Camelopard Dreams