loony: in defense of luna lovegood
When Luna got her Hogwarts letter, her father offered to homeschool her with that sideways ceiling twist of his eyes which meant he wanted her to say yes.
Their house was tall and crooked, full of the things her father had found and her mother had made. Luna climbed to the very top. The farther you got from gravity the better your head thought, or so her mother had told her, which was why her mother's old lab was at the top of the wobbly steps.
Luna poked through old notes scattered over the gouged work desk. There was no covering of dust, even though her mother had been dead two years now. Recipes and budget calculations were scrawled beside butchered Latin and geometric spell diagrams. Luna did not know what the markings were meant to be, these half-done spells, except that one of them had killed her mother.
Her father was pacing downstairs, making tea and fiddling with the feathers and bone nubs on the kitchen window.
Luna did not know what these meant, these pages scattered under her fingertips, and that's what decided her. She ran little fingers over her mother's bright scrawl.
They went to Diagon Alley that afternoon and had her fitted for robes. They left a few extra inches for her to grow into.
There is a story about a girl whose feet do not touch the ground; a girl who looked at nightmarish horses and saw beauty immediately, easily, who woke to every pair of her shoes missing and said to the calm morning, "Things have a way of coming back to you." There is a story, or could be, but it is not this one.
When Luna woke from nightmares, she shook under three blankets and the pillow she pulled over her head.
When she woke up and her last pair of shoes had been stolen, she had woken up already to eight other sunrises to find her notebooks, her bracelets, and her books gone from her bedside table. When the last of her shoes were gone, she breathed in, she breathed out, she thought about the adventures of barefoot life.
That first morning, though, she woke up in her new little home of blue and bronze, soft sheets, the home of the wise, the witty, the true--only to find the bead bracelet that kept wrackspurts away had vanished. The books on her bedside were jarred out of place. That first morning, she hid back under her covers.
The farther you were from the ground, the better your head thought, and Ravenclaw Tower was so very high up. Luna ran through every young, bright face in her dormitory, trying to find cruelty in their freckles and earlobes. Where did that hide again? Luna knew humor lay tucked in the crook of your neck, and kindness in your vertebra, but she had never asked her mother where meanness lived.
The first time Luna saw thestrals, she was eleven years old and lost, by other people's defintions of the word. Harry Potter was in a flying car with Ron Weasley and Luna had wandered away from the whispering other first years, following noise and light until she drifted across the place where the older students were disembarking from the carriages.
Skeletal horses, like every scary story she had ever been told, loomed-- tattered wings, a streak of blood on one muzzle. Luna clutched at new, starched robes. But she held her breath. She watched. Peace is not a thing given. It is made.
When the hostlers unharnessed the thestrals, they snuffled at their chests, looking for treats. A little foal slipped out a slightly ajar fence and shot to a thestral at the third carriage, bumping her legs and sneezing with joy.
Luna found her way back to the Hall before anyone missed her amid the gaggle of wide eyes and swishing robes. They ushered them into the main Hall and everything in Luna twisted itself into a rigid line. She wanted, briefly and terribly, to go home. The Hall was a sea of staring faces, so she tilted her head back and looked up--she almost stopped in her tracks. The starry ceiling was velvet black, spreading and spreading, promising immensities. Luna felt something in her chest untangle.
Luna had sat down on the Hogwarts Express and nibbled Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Bean until there was nothing left but streaks of color on her tongue. She had put a Quibbler up in front of her face but hadn't read a word, just thinking. Sometimes your spell will burble green, bubble neon purple and combust in your hands-- that will be the last thing you will ever see. Sometimes your spells will go bad--she had nibbled a pumpkin flavored bean and pretended to turn a page--but the alternative was just a different kind of death.
When the hat offered her Ravenclaw, she opened her hands wide.
