"For A Wish"
by Christine Anderson
aka Lilly Malfoy

He tells his students to be careful what they wish for.

They seldom listen, of course. They're still young enough that they think they know everything. Wishes can't hurt, surely, he hears them say to one another. The old man is simply indulging his paranoia again.

He isn't, though. He knows exactly what he is talking about, and one day when he's tired of listening to them laugh off his warnings, he sits them down to tell them the story.

When he was young, before the war, he had spent a summer holiday with his friend Joshua Lovegood, and Josh's grandfather. His students laugh when he begins this story- they know the Lovegoods, they say, and everybody knows they're a bit... off. Moody waves them to silence. They might be a bit off, too, if they'd been through what that family had.

Josh had been dying of an illness the healers couldn't cure. They'd taken most of his pain, though, so that he could spend his last days in relative comfort, running off adventuring with his grandfather and his friend.

It had been a good summer, until the end. They'd traveled all over the place, visiting old Mr. Lovegood's friends... And then one of them had given Lovegood the genie in the bottle, and things had gone so terribly wrong.

Josh swore later that the wish he had meant to make was to be cured of his illness, but what he said was, "I want to live longer."

Moody's students aren't laughing anymore. Finally one of them gathers the courage to ask how long Josh had lived.

"Three months longer than he should've, and it was a mercy it wasn't more."

They don't ask for details and he doesn't offer them. But every time someone says wishes don't matter, Alastor Moody remembers the summer he was fifteen, and the friend who could have died in peace, and didn't, all for a wish.