Fic: "Snapshots of the Moon in Orbit" for certifieddork
Title: Snapshots of the Moon in Orbit
Author: jaswanson
Recipient's name: certifieddork
Rating: PG-13
Character(s): Luna Lovegood
Warnings: Character death
Author's notes: Of all your requests, I thought I’d give Luna a try. Here’s hoping you like it!
One.
The day she turns nine, Luna sees a Crinkle-Skinned Horgle peeking out from under the stairwell leading up to the second floor boarding rooms of the Leaky Cauldron. It is rather small and has brown, papery looking skin that hangs in wrinkles from its jowls. She can see where bits of skin flake from its body to form a layer on the floor, and all at once she knows that is where household dust comes from. In a moment of clarity she thinks, all in a rush, that every household in Britain probably has an entire population of Crinkle-Skinned Horgles lurking beneath stairs and under beds and in broom closets - which means there are probably a dozen or more living in her house, too. Luna isn’t particularly good at mathematics, but even she can figure out that a couple of Horgles left unchecked will almost certainly grow into a herd so large that there might not even be enough room. Perhaps one or two of them might like to share her bed if they run out of space.
With this charitable thought in mind, Luna turns to find her father. He is sitting at a table by the hearth, bent over a sheaf of parchment several inches thick. The grey-haired man who’d been having a pint with him is gone, taking his tales of the latest Pixie rebellion with him. Luna knows she’d better catch her father before he starts writing his article, so she hurries over to his side.
“There is a Crinkle-Skinned Horgle under the stairs,” she blurts.
He looks up and his eyes widen in surprise as he smiles the smile he saves just for her. “You don’t say. Surely not a Crinkle-Skinned Horgle. Are you quite certain it’s not an ordinary Horgle?”
“Oh, no, father,” she assures him, nodding vigorously. “It is most definitely a Crinkle-Skinned Horgle.” She points towards the stairs. “Just there. You see?”
Her father stands up - he is very tall - and boosts her into his arms as he squints into the gloom beneath the stairwell. “Ah, yes,” he murmurs after a moment. “There’s no doubt about it. What a lovely birthday gift for you to have discovered a Crinkle-Skinned Horgle. Perhaps it will consent to an interview one day.”
“I think it is quite friendly,” she confides. “Though, since Horgles don’t have any mouths to smile with, I can’t be sure.”
“Well, then, caution is key, my dear. Indeed, we shall have to remember this location for further Horgle-watching in the future.”
Luna beams at her father. Up close, his face is soft looking, with several days’ growth of whiskers. Many lines fan out from the corners of his eyes, which always seem to gleam with an extra brightness Luna finds strangely lacking in others. Maybe that is what makes him so special, she thinks. Maybe that’s why he can see what others cannot.
Two.
The print shop smells lovely. There is the scent of ink that emanates from a large press standing proudly along the far wall, and the crisp odor of too-warm parchment. Citrus wafts in the air, too, but that is because Luna is clutching a dish of Fortescue’s lemon ice-cream, which makes her hands cold and her throat numb when she swallows too much at once.
Luna loves going to her father’s shop because she gets to watch him put The Quibbler together with repeated waves of his wand and the help of the press. He leaves his books lying out all over his desk and inside them she sees the most wonderful pictures. She likes the drawings of creatures the best, because they are always wild-looking and seem as though they leaped out of somebody’s dream and onto the page.
Maybe they did, she thinks.
She memorizes the pictures long before she ever learns to read the words that go with them, so she writes her own explanations inside her head and keeps them there even after she finally manages to read the truth.
Occasionally, the truth is a disappointment. Most of the time, it’s a jumping off point.
Three.
The living room of the Lovegood residence is perfectly appointed, with armchairs upholstered in burgundy velvet and carpets the same brown as the earth after a hard rain. There are many pictures on the walls, framed in gold and full of jolly people, all of whom are dead, and apparently happy enough with their lives as portraits that they never really stop waving and smiling. Luna loves to visit with them, most especially her Great Aunt Mathilda, whose frame hangs in the foyer. She has a lot to say about everything, which suits Luna just fine.
“It’s terrible, really. What people are doing under one another’s noses these days. Why, just yesterday, when I was visiting Winifred in the upstairs hall - oh! - have you seen her painting? It’s lovely. Don’t you think it’s lovely?”
Luna nods and keeps her mouth closed because she knows a question is not generally an invitation for talking, so long as it is her Great Aunt Mathilda speaking.
“Yes, I quite wish I could live in Winifred’s portrait instead, because the background is a very flattering color. What do you think it would take to get the background changed on my portrait? Quite a few galleons, I’d expect,” she says, and pauses to collect her thoughts. “But that has nothing to do with noses, now does it. Where were we?”
“Things under noses,” Luna replies helpfully, crossing her legs beneath her on the floor.
“Yes, that’s right. You must be very careful, child. You nose could be your downfall, on account of how it sticks out from your face.”
Luna crosses her eyes to look. And that’s when it happens.
A great bellow of alarm rises from the other room, followed by a muffled thud and series of strange, hoarse cries that seem as though they are being wrenched from a man’s throat by force.
She looks up at Great Aunt Mathilda, who shrugs and moves into the frame of the portrait next to her own.
Luna shuffles toward the hallway at the far end of the foyer, Mathilda moving with her, and creeps toward the sound of her father’s voice saying no-no-no over and over again. Other figures begin to scurry through the portraits above her head. Don’t go in, child, turn right back around, they say. Luna ignores them and draws closer to the archway that leads to her mother’s solarium.
Her father is there, kneeling beside her mother’s writing desk which is angled toward the window. His hands are fisted in the full blue skirts Luna recognizes as her mother’s favorite dress, and his face is pressed into her mother’s shoulder. Luna absently wonders why he is crying, if her mother is only sitting there watching the garden gnomes play out-of-doors. But then Luna sees her mother’s pale white hand hanging over the side of the hardback chair, fingers curled stiffly and dripping with something she can’t identify. Drip-drop-drip it goes, dribbling in perfect pearls onto the shiny blonde planks of the floor. Her father leans back then, and drags Luna’s mother with him, hugging her to his chest and weaving one hand into the hair at the back of her head, pressing her close. His hand is sticky and red. Luna stands there, transfixed, as her mother’s hair pulls back from her face, revealing two glassy, unseeing eyes against translucent skin and a trickle of red at the corner of her mouth. A wand clatters from her mother’s lifeless lap to the floor.
“Father?” Luna calls hesitantly. He doesn’t seem to hear her, only keeps rocking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
Eventually, people come to the house - people Luna doesn’t know - and bustle about uttering words like spell damage, accident, and experiment. They take her mother away under a white sheet and her father goes with them.
Luna isn’t sure how long he is gone and she’s afraid to move in case she misses something.
When he finally comes home, she is sitting underneath Mathilda’s portrait in the foyer, so he mimics her posture as he sinks down to sit beside her on the carpet. They lean against the wall together, heads tipped back against the plaster.
“Your mother’s had an accident,” her father manages in a ragged voice. “She won’t be coming back.”
“Oh,” Luna says, and thinks hard as tears well up in her eyes. “Was it a Goblin?”
Her father shakes his head. His cheeks are wet.
“Was it a Ghoul?”
He sighs.
“A Green-Billed Octopreus?”
He closes his eyes for a long time and Luna falls silent.
“It was a Hermitus,” he tells her finally.
Luna has never heard of a Hermitus before. “Are Hermituses dangerous, then?” she asks with a hiccup.
“Very.”
“Oh.”
“You must stay very far away from them,” her father warns as he wipes a hand across his eyes. “Never get close to a Hermitus, Little Luna.”
“I won’t, Father. I promise I won’t ever go near one.”
“Good,” he rasps. And they sit there through the night, maybe even through the entire next day, not saying anything else.
Three days later, the stone they place in the garden reads, Solstice Lovegood, A Victim of Unfortunate Events Who Shall Always Be Loved.
Four.
The tree branches outside Luna’s bedroom window wave their bare fingers in greeting then scratch at the glass as though begging permission to enter. Luna rolls over to face the wall, but it is like seeing an opaque reflection because spidery shadows sway across the rose-colored walls, from left to right and back again. With a gusty sigh Luna slides from beneath the covers and pads over to the window to draw the drapes.
The hallway is dark when she slips out her door for a drink of water, because no one ever bothers to light the sconces anymore. Shuffling along carefully is the best strategy for avoiding collisions with furniture or other things that tend to pop up unexpectedly whenever she attempts to navigate the house at night. Something with tiny feet scurries along the floorboards beside her and brushes against her cotton gown. As she draws closer to the stair, muffled voices drift up from the direction of her father’s study.
“…can’t expect her to survive like this, Alfred!”
“I know that,” comes the tired response.
Father?
“It isn’t healthy for little girls to be closed up in offices all day long, helping their fathers write ridiculous articles about creatures they’ll probably never even see. She should be outside playing with other children, instead.”
“Amelia, she likes-”
“Oh, posh. You like her there.”
“So what if I do? Her mother’s just died, and I like knowing-”
“Suffocating her isn’t going to help. Have you spoken to her about the incident?”
“Yes.”
There is a pregnant pause.
“And?”
“And, what?” her father roars. Then it is silent as the pendulum of the grandfather clock at the top of the stairs swings back and forth a few times. Luna imagines her father covering his eyes with one hand the way he does when he runs out of patience. Eventually, he speaks again.
“I’m doing the best I can. Just takes some getting used to, is all.”
“Perhaps she could spend the day with friends…”
But I don’t have any, Luna thinks desperately. Is that wrong?
“I’m not sure that she has any.”
I don’t. But that doesn’t matter. Does it? I’d rather stay with you. Panic begins to claw at her throat.
“Well, then. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to let her make some,” Aunt Amelia says and Luna wants to scream.
The house creaks, which makes her jump. She lies down on her stomach at the edge of the top stair and strains to hear the rest of the conversation. Finally, the sound of her father’s heavy sigh carries all the way up from downstairs. He says something undistinguishable and a few moments later, the front door opens and closes as Luna’s aunt leaves.
Her father wanders into view at the foot of the staircase and stands still, poised with his head bowed and one hand at the back of his neck. After several long thuds of Luna’s heart, he shakes his head, gives another gusty sigh, and wanders off in the direction of the kitchen. Luna follows him with her eyes then folds her hands and rests her cheek against them, face turned toward the wall. Beside her, a pair of golden eyes glow in the dark. Above her, the portraits are silent.
No one seems to have anything to say anymore.
Five.
As they leave the offices of the Quibbler late one night, Luna stops dead in her tracks. Her father stops, too, and glances down at her with raised brows. Luna doesn’t say anything, only points at the buggy standing in the street in front of Madam Malkin’s. There, standing between the braces of the Malfoy carriage, was a creature unlike any Luna has ever seen before. Black skin stretches tautly over its sharp-edged skeleton, and ebony membranes framed by bone form its wings. With eyes that glow like fire and grey smoke blowing in spurts from its nostrils, it might have been terrifying if she wasn’t so very curious. Her father follows her line of sight and hunkers down next to her.
“That’s a Thestral,” he tells her. His voice sounds very strange.
“Thestral,” Luna repeats hesitantly. Then, more confidently, just to make sure she gets it right, “Thestral.”
It’s beautiful, she thinks rapturously.
And in its own strange way, it is. Everything but the thought of having her mother back pales in comparison as the Thestral tosses its bony head and makes a strange, haunting sound. Luna stands there for a long while, clutching her father’s hand and watching the creature breathe in and out, in and out, in and out.
Six.
A large brown owl brings her Hogwarts letter on a warm Sunday morning in July. Luna stares in wonderment at the envelope sealed with red wax that drops into her lap. It is addressed to L. Lovegood, which makes her heart pound because she’s never received mail before. The letter comes with a book list, which she hesitantly hands to her father. He smiles the smile he saves just for her and places his hand on the top of her head when he tells her how proud he feels.
Seven.
School is much different than she expects. Though there are many other children her age, she feels older than a lot of her year-mates, which is rather puzzling. The other students don’t believe in half of the creatures she talks about and that seems to be most of the problem as far as Luna is concerned. The rest of the problem is that all the other little girls don’t wear lentils dangling around their necks or keep their wands behind their ears. Instead, they keep their wands inside their robes and stick tiny gold hearts in their earlobes and never ever speak to her unless it is to ask to borrow a quill.
Luna learns that she apparently has a knack for stating the impossible, the improbable, and the absurd. Often, other people grin when she says something, and occasionally Luna wishes she could take back whatever she said, but she can’t. There is no filter on her brain, no thin screen that catches the things she shouldn’t-couldn’t-wouldn’t say if she knew better. And even though she does know now, she only ever truly thinks about it after her mouth has gotten away from her again. After she has told ten more people about the Crumple-Horned Snoracks. After those ten giggled in front of her, or behind her, or off to one side. They think she doesn’t know how they laugh, but the truth is she doesn’t particularly care.
The truth is that she knows they only laugh because they are uncomfortable around her, around the idea that there are some things that have to be believed in order to be seen.
Even in a world full of magic there are rules and Luna has never been very good at following them. She forges her own path and it is winding, round-about, and so long that it doesn’t even have an end destination. She walks and talks and thinks that path through life. It never really occurs to her that there is another option.
For this reason, she spends much of her time alone. Seven years pass and Luna uses the time to dream of Horgles, Thestrals, Crumple-Horned Snoracks, and everything in between. She dreams of faraway lands, arctic expeditions, and African safaris. She dreams of discovering new species and having friends and being accepted.
Every once in a while, she dreams of her mother, too, but that is somehow the most impossible dream of all, even when everything else comes true.
Author: jaswanson
Recipient's name: certifieddork
Rating: PG-13
Character(s): Luna Lovegood
Warnings: Character death
Author's notes: Of all your requests, I thought I’d give Luna a try. Here’s hoping you like it!
One.
The day she turns nine, Luna sees a Crinkle-Skinned Horgle peeking out from under the stairwell leading up to the second floor boarding rooms of the Leaky Cauldron. It is rather small and has brown, papery looking skin that hangs in wrinkles from its jowls. She can see where bits of skin flake from its body to form a layer on the floor, and all at once she knows that is where household dust comes from. In a moment of clarity she thinks, all in a rush, that every household in Britain probably has an entire population of Crinkle-Skinned Horgles lurking beneath stairs and under beds and in broom closets - which means there are probably a dozen or more living in her house, too. Luna isn’t particularly good at mathematics, but even she can figure out that a couple of Horgles left unchecked will almost certainly grow into a herd so large that there might not even be enough room. Perhaps one or two of them might like to share her bed if they run out of space.
With this charitable thought in mind, Luna turns to find her father. He is sitting at a table by the hearth, bent over a sheaf of parchment several inches thick. The grey-haired man who’d been having a pint with him is gone, taking his tales of the latest Pixie rebellion with him. Luna knows she’d better catch her father before he starts writing his article, so she hurries over to his side.
“There is a Crinkle-Skinned Horgle under the stairs,” she blurts.
He looks up and his eyes widen in surprise as he smiles the smile he saves just for her. “You don’t say. Surely not a Crinkle-Skinned Horgle. Are you quite certain it’s not an ordinary Horgle?”
“Oh, no, father,” she assures him, nodding vigorously. “It is most definitely a Crinkle-Skinned Horgle.” She points towards the stairs. “Just there. You see?”
Her father stands up - he is very tall - and boosts her into his arms as he squints into the gloom beneath the stairwell. “Ah, yes,” he murmurs after a moment. “There’s no doubt about it. What a lovely birthday gift for you to have discovered a Crinkle-Skinned Horgle. Perhaps it will consent to an interview one day.”
“I think it is quite friendly,” she confides. “Though, since Horgles don’t have any mouths to smile with, I can’t be sure.”
“Well, then, caution is key, my dear. Indeed, we shall have to remember this location for further Horgle-watching in the future.”
Luna beams at her father. Up close, his face is soft looking, with several days’ growth of whiskers. Many lines fan out from the corners of his eyes, which always seem to gleam with an extra brightness Luna finds strangely lacking in others. Maybe that is what makes him so special, she thinks. Maybe that’s why he can see what others cannot.
Two.
The print shop smells lovely. There is the scent of ink that emanates from a large press standing proudly along the far wall, and the crisp odor of too-warm parchment. Citrus wafts in the air, too, but that is because Luna is clutching a dish of Fortescue’s lemon ice-cream, which makes her hands cold and her throat numb when she swallows too much at once.
Luna loves going to her father’s shop because she gets to watch him put The Quibbler together with repeated waves of his wand and the help of the press. He leaves his books lying out all over his desk and inside them she sees the most wonderful pictures. She likes the drawings of creatures the best, because they are always wild-looking and seem as though they leaped out of somebody’s dream and onto the page.
Maybe they did, she thinks.
She memorizes the pictures long before she ever learns to read the words that go with them, so she writes her own explanations inside her head and keeps them there even after she finally manages to read the truth.
Occasionally, the truth is a disappointment. Most of the time, it’s a jumping off point.
Three.
The living room of the Lovegood residence is perfectly appointed, with armchairs upholstered in burgundy velvet and carpets the same brown as the earth after a hard rain. There are many pictures on the walls, framed in gold and full of jolly people, all of whom are dead, and apparently happy enough with their lives as portraits that they never really stop waving and smiling. Luna loves to visit with them, most especially her Great Aunt Mathilda, whose frame hangs in the foyer. She has a lot to say about everything, which suits Luna just fine.
“It’s terrible, really. What people are doing under one another’s noses these days. Why, just yesterday, when I was visiting Winifred in the upstairs hall - oh! - have you seen her painting? It’s lovely. Don’t you think it’s lovely?”
Luna nods and keeps her mouth closed because she knows a question is not generally an invitation for talking, so long as it is her Great Aunt Mathilda speaking.
“Yes, I quite wish I could live in Winifred’s portrait instead, because the background is a very flattering color. What do you think it would take to get the background changed on my portrait? Quite a few galleons, I’d expect,” she says, and pauses to collect her thoughts. “But that has nothing to do with noses, now does it. Where were we?”
“Things under noses,” Luna replies helpfully, crossing her legs beneath her on the floor.
“Yes, that’s right. You must be very careful, child. You nose could be your downfall, on account of how it sticks out from your face.”
Luna crosses her eyes to look. And that’s when it happens.
A great bellow of alarm rises from the other room, followed by a muffled thud and series of strange, hoarse cries that seem as though they are being wrenched from a man’s throat by force.
She looks up at Great Aunt Mathilda, who shrugs and moves into the frame of the portrait next to her own.
Luna shuffles toward the hallway at the far end of the foyer, Mathilda moving with her, and creeps toward the sound of her father’s voice saying no-no-no over and over again. Other figures begin to scurry through the portraits above her head. Don’t go in, child, turn right back around, they say. Luna ignores them and draws closer to the archway that leads to her mother’s solarium.
Her father is there, kneeling beside her mother’s writing desk which is angled toward the window. His hands are fisted in the full blue skirts Luna recognizes as her mother’s favorite dress, and his face is pressed into her mother’s shoulder. Luna absently wonders why he is crying, if her mother is only sitting there watching the garden gnomes play out-of-doors. But then Luna sees her mother’s pale white hand hanging over the side of the hardback chair, fingers curled stiffly and dripping with something she can’t identify. Drip-drop-drip it goes, dribbling in perfect pearls onto the shiny blonde planks of the floor. Her father leans back then, and drags Luna’s mother with him, hugging her to his chest and weaving one hand into the hair at the back of her head, pressing her close. His hand is sticky and red. Luna stands there, transfixed, as her mother’s hair pulls back from her face, revealing two glassy, unseeing eyes against translucent skin and a trickle of red at the corner of her mouth. A wand clatters from her mother’s lifeless lap to the floor.
“Father?” Luna calls hesitantly. He doesn’t seem to hear her, only keeps rocking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
Eventually, people come to the house - people Luna doesn’t know - and bustle about uttering words like spell damage, accident, and experiment. They take her mother away under a white sheet and her father goes with them.
Luna isn’t sure how long he is gone and she’s afraid to move in case she misses something.
When he finally comes home, she is sitting underneath Mathilda’s portrait in the foyer, so he mimics her posture as he sinks down to sit beside her on the carpet. They lean against the wall together, heads tipped back against the plaster.
“Your mother’s had an accident,” her father manages in a ragged voice. “She won’t be coming back.”
“Oh,” Luna says, and thinks hard as tears well up in her eyes. “Was it a Goblin?”
Her father shakes his head. His cheeks are wet.
“Was it a Ghoul?”
He sighs.
“A Green-Billed Octopreus?”
He closes his eyes for a long time and Luna falls silent.
“It was a Hermitus,” he tells her finally.
Luna has never heard of a Hermitus before. “Are Hermituses dangerous, then?” she asks with a hiccup.
“Very.”
“Oh.”
“You must stay very far away from them,” her father warns as he wipes a hand across his eyes. “Never get close to a Hermitus, Little Luna.”
“I won’t, Father. I promise I won’t ever go near one.”
“Good,” he rasps. And they sit there through the night, maybe even through the entire next day, not saying anything else.
Three days later, the stone they place in the garden reads, Solstice Lovegood, A Victim of Unfortunate Events Who Shall Always Be Loved.
Four.
The tree branches outside Luna’s bedroom window wave their bare fingers in greeting then scratch at the glass as though begging permission to enter. Luna rolls over to face the wall, but it is like seeing an opaque reflection because spidery shadows sway across the rose-colored walls, from left to right and back again. With a gusty sigh Luna slides from beneath the covers and pads over to the window to draw the drapes.
The hallway is dark when she slips out her door for a drink of water, because no one ever bothers to light the sconces anymore. Shuffling along carefully is the best strategy for avoiding collisions with furniture or other things that tend to pop up unexpectedly whenever she attempts to navigate the house at night. Something with tiny feet scurries along the floorboards beside her and brushes against her cotton gown. As she draws closer to the stair, muffled voices drift up from the direction of her father’s study.
“…can’t expect her to survive like this, Alfred!”
“I know that,” comes the tired response.
Father?
“It isn’t healthy for little girls to be closed up in offices all day long, helping their fathers write ridiculous articles about creatures they’ll probably never even see. She should be outside playing with other children, instead.”
“Amelia, she likes-”
“Oh, posh. You like her there.”
“So what if I do? Her mother’s just died, and I like knowing-”
“Suffocating her isn’t going to help. Have you spoken to her about the incident?”
“Yes.”
There is a pregnant pause.
“And?”
“And, what?” her father roars. Then it is silent as the pendulum of the grandfather clock at the top of the stairs swings back and forth a few times. Luna imagines her father covering his eyes with one hand the way he does when he runs out of patience. Eventually, he speaks again.
“I’m doing the best I can. Just takes some getting used to, is all.”
“Perhaps she could spend the day with friends…”
But I don’t have any, Luna thinks desperately. Is that wrong?
“I’m not sure that she has any.”
I don’t. But that doesn’t matter. Does it? I’d rather stay with you. Panic begins to claw at her throat.
“Well, then. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to let her make some,” Aunt Amelia says and Luna wants to scream.
The house creaks, which makes her jump. She lies down on her stomach at the edge of the top stair and strains to hear the rest of the conversation. Finally, the sound of her father’s heavy sigh carries all the way up from downstairs. He says something undistinguishable and a few moments later, the front door opens and closes as Luna’s aunt leaves.
Her father wanders into view at the foot of the staircase and stands still, poised with his head bowed and one hand at the back of his neck. After several long thuds of Luna’s heart, he shakes his head, gives another gusty sigh, and wanders off in the direction of the kitchen. Luna follows him with her eyes then folds her hands and rests her cheek against them, face turned toward the wall. Beside her, a pair of golden eyes glow in the dark. Above her, the portraits are silent.
No one seems to have anything to say anymore.
Five.
As they leave the offices of the Quibbler late one night, Luna stops dead in her tracks. Her father stops, too, and glances down at her with raised brows. Luna doesn’t say anything, only points at the buggy standing in the street in front of Madam Malkin’s. There, standing between the braces of the Malfoy carriage, was a creature unlike any Luna has ever seen before. Black skin stretches tautly over its sharp-edged skeleton, and ebony membranes framed by bone form its wings. With eyes that glow like fire and grey smoke blowing in spurts from its nostrils, it might have been terrifying if she wasn’t so very curious. Her father follows her line of sight and hunkers down next to her.
“That’s a Thestral,” he tells her. His voice sounds very strange.
“Thestral,” Luna repeats hesitantly. Then, more confidently, just to make sure she gets it right, “Thestral.”
It’s beautiful, she thinks rapturously.
And in its own strange way, it is. Everything but the thought of having her mother back pales in comparison as the Thestral tosses its bony head and makes a strange, haunting sound. Luna stands there for a long while, clutching her father’s hand and watching the creature breathe in and out, in and out, in and out.
Six.
A large brown owl brings her Hogwarts letter on a warm Sunday morning in July. Luna stares in wonderment at the envelope sealed with red wax that drops into her lap. It is addressed to L. Lovegood, which makes her heart pound because she’s never received mail before. The letter comes with a book list, which she hesitantly hands to her father. He smiles the smile he saves just for her and places his hand on the top of her head when he tells her how proud he feels.
Seven.
School is much different than she expects. Though there are many other children her age, she feels older than a lot of her year-mates, which is rather puzzling. The other students don’t believe in half of the creatures she talks about and that seems to be most of the problem as far as Luna is concerned. The rest of the problem is that all the other little girls don’t wear lentils dangling around their necks or keep their wands behind their ears. Instead, they keep their wands inside their robes and stick tiny gold hearts in their earlobes and never ever speak to her unless it is to ask to borrow a quill.
Luna learns that she apparently has a knack for stating the impossible, the improbable, and the absurd. Often, other people grin when she says something, and occasionally Luna wishes she could take back whatever she said, but she can’t. There is no filter on her brain, no thin screen that catches the things she shouldn’t-couldn’t-wouldn’t say if she knew better. And even though she does know now, she only ever truly thinks about it after her mouth has gotten away from her again. After she has told ten more people about the Crumple-Horned Snoracks. After those ten giggled in front of her, or behind her, or off to one side. They think she doesn’t know how they laugh, but the truth is she doesn’t particularly care.
The truth is that she knows they only laugh because they are uncomfortable around her, around the idea that there are some things that have to be believed in order to be seen.
Even in a world full of magic there are rules and Luna has never been very good at following them. She forges her own path and it is winding, round-about, and so long that it doesn’t even have an end destination. She walks and talks and thinks that path through life. It never really occurs to her that there is another option.
For this reason, she spends much of her time alone. Seven years pass and Luna uses the time to dream of Horgles, Thestrals, Crumple-Horned Snoracks, and everything in between. She dreams of faraway lands, arctic expeditions, and African safaris. She dreams of discovering new species and having friends and being accepted.
Every once in a while, she dreams of her mother, too, but that is somehow the most impossible dream of all, even when everything else comes true.