Every Wednesday, Luna would take the floo network to St. Mungo’s and met Albus for lunch at a small café where Neville had once taken her. She would always arrive a half-hour before for their date, go up to the long-term care ward, and visit the Longbottoms. During her regular visits, she would talk to the couple about the man their son had become and make comments about the little mementos that Neville had left behind for them.
On the wooden nightstand by Alice Longbottom’s bed, Luna noticed a small blue ceramic vase holding a single flower with a prominent red blossom. The flower was called Alice’s Trueheart, which was a red heart-shaped flower that Neville had developed as his N.E.W.T. project. He had named and dedicated the flower in honour of his mother. Neville had a precious few of the plant and so he guarded each of them jealously. He had not even trusted Luna or Ginny with a cutting or a sprout yet. Holding back her hair, Luna leaned forth and caught the crimson blossom’s soft sweet bouquet. She looked down at the plant and smiled. The flower in the vase was fresh. The flower meant that Neville was all right and probably in Britain somewhere.
Luna left an engraved wedding invitation for both Frank and Alice. They could not come, but how could she not invite the parents of one of the two men who had saved her life. Especially since, Luna was marrying the other man.
Luna had noticed the cloakroom on the map. She went inside to ensure the room would meet her needs. The room was large enough and centrally located, which made it perfect. As she came out of the room, Moody was staring at straight at her with a look of contempt on his scarred face. Obviously, he thought she was seeking a place to hide once the battle began. Luna looked the old man square in the face and stated, “One should know where one’s going before they need to go there, don’t you think?” And with that, she walked away from the confused Auror.
When the battle began, Luna held back and watched as it unfolded. A triumphant yell erupted from Luna’s left; one of the Death Eaters had kept Moody pinned down while a second one Apparated to Moody’s side. Luna saw the second Death Eater send a spell at Moody that caused him to collapse onto the floor. She rushed from her place of concealment, holding her wand in one hand and in the other some soft, bright green pellets that resembled muggle kitty litter. Luna threw her ‘kitty litter’ into the air over the heads of the Death Eaters and cried, “Incendio!”
The ignited ‘litter’ exploded, and the two Death Eaters crashed unconscious onto the floor. She saw the loose wands of the opponents on the floor, picked them up and shoved them into her robe’s pocket. She quickly performed Mobilicorpus to get the big man off of the floor and up into her arms. Holding onto the rigid and wheezing Moody, Luna determinedly thought about St. Mungo’s Emergency Room number three and Apparated with a loud crack.
Luna arrived in the room trying to regain her balance and keep Moody upright. At the sound, a young doctor looked up and saw her struggling with the much larger man. The doctor used his wand to move the injured man out of Luna’s grasp and onto the examination table. The healer’s wand moved in a blur over Moody’s stiff form. “Some physical trauma from the blow, and traces of spell or spells unknown,” said the medi-wizard to the nurse. “Did you hear the name of spell that was cast?” asked the healer without looking up at Luna.
“No, it was either silently cast or I was too far away to hear,” she answered. “However, I did see the spell hit him,” she added.
The assisting nurse gave Luna’s comment a dismissive little noise in the back of her throat.
“Yes, I saw the spell. It was a violet shade with these little yellow lightning bolts in it,” asserted Luna to the nurse.
The nurse turned toward the healer as if she was going to make a comment, but before she could, she was cut off by his question, “What shade of yellow was it: golden or plain yellow? Did the lightning bolts travel parallel or perpendicular to the spell’s flow?”
Luna closed her eyes to replay the attack in her mind and answered, “Plain yellow and parallel.”
The doctor smiled and moved his wand over the patient with two quick motions. “You’re right,” he said, letting a touch of relief be reflected in his voice.
The young man walked to the small fire in the fireplace, tossed in some Floo powder and said something Luna didn’t understand. Within seconds, an old wizard Apperated into the back of the Emergency room carrying a crystal carafe filled with a green liquid. The doctor poured the liquid into a pewter goblet he had summoned. The doctor spoke an incantation above the goblet, in a language Luna did not understand, raised Moody’s head with his free hand and poured the contents down his patient’s throat. In a matter of seconds Moody’s body relaxed, and he began to breathe normally
Luna emptied her pockets of the Death Eater’s wands by dropping them into the rubbish bin that stood against the wall by the examination table and stepped into the middle of the emergency room. She heard the doctor start to thank her as she vanished.
Luna reappeared back in her cloakroom, ready to join the battle again. She paused at the closed door and listened for sounds of a fight on the other side. Hearing no voices or loud noises, she opened the door. She heard to the right of the cloakroom the unmistakable sound of battle. Luna began to walk as quietly as possible down the right side rag-stone floored hall when she heard sounds that almost froze the blood in her veins. A high-pitched laugh and a shouted word “Crucio” came from the room down the hallway to her right. What followed the unforgivable utterance was the high-pitched screaming of a female voice that sounded very much like Ginny
Luna peaked through an open door into a large room. She saw Ginny standing on tiptoes with her back unnaturally arched, screaming in agony. In the middle of the room, she saw Harry Potter pinned to the floor under a suit of armor and a beam from the ceiling. He was trapped, forced to watch Ginny’s agony.
“Should I bring her body over and put it in front of you so she can die like your worthless Mudblood mother?” mocked Voldemort.
Luna saw Harry desperately reach for his wand that was just inches out of his reach. She quietly made a swish and flick motion with her wand at the wreckage and thought, “Wingardium Leviosa.” The weight that pinned Harry to the floor was lifted. He rolled over to his wand, picked it up and fired a spell at Voldemort. The spell caused a bloody gash to suddenly appear on Voldemort’s wand arm. As Voldemort screamed in anger and pain, Ginny fell forward onto the floor.
After seeing Ginny fall, Harry seemed to have momentarily forgotten where he was and even made a halting step toward her before realizing his mistake. Voldemort saw his opening and began to cast a spell. At the last moment, Harry turned to try to parry the spell. Out of Voldemort’s mouth came the last words many a wizard had ever heard, “Avada Kedavra.”
Just as the green light burst forth from Voldermort’s wand, a shield flew from the side of a suit of armor by the wall and blocked the killing curse from hitting Harry. The green light clanged as it struck the shield, bounced off, and lightly fell upon Ginny’s face. Ginny instantly dropped the wand, which she had just used to save her beloved, and began convulsing.
Luna screamed, “No!” and started running toward Ginny while she fired spell after spell at the hooded demon.
Harry screamed Ginny’s name and then turned the fear of losing the love of his life into rage as he began an almost blind attack. He threw curse after curse toward the dark wizard. Bruises and gashes opened up on the Dark Lord from Harry’s silent spells, and Voldemort Disapperated shrieking in pain.
Luna was the first to reach Ginny. She was still breathing, but her whole body seemed to vibrate as if it was trying to shake apart. Luna looked up at Harry.
“She’ll be all right, I promise,” assured Luna because it just had to be true. Luna took off the butterbeer cork necklace from around her neck and placed it around her friend’s neck. Next, she placed her wand behind her ear, lifted Ginny’s twitching form, and disappeared with a crack.
When Luna arrived back in Emergency room three, Moody was gone. However, two older gentlemen had joined the young healer and his nurse. Luna carried Ginny over and placed her quickly onto the examining table.
“She was struck by a deflected Avada Kedavra curse from Voldemort. You must do something!” she cried in a voice that was full of anguish.
No one in the room moved to help them. The older men just recoiled from Ginny’s gyrating form with looks of horror on their faces. Luna pulled her wand out of her hair and pointed it in turn at all of the onlookers. The wand made them focus on her and when they did, she locked onto each of them and summoned forth a Wrackspurt. The Wrackspurt showed that the older two men’s thoughts were full of other people they had seen die slow and painful deaths from similar occurrences. The nurse was just beginning to panic at having a strange girl point a wand in her face. The Wrackspurt on the youngest healer revealed the face of a talking Albus Dumbledore. Luna noted the young healer’s furrowed brow and his darting brown eyes.
“What did Professor Dumbledore tell you?” she demanded.
“How did you know I was thinking about him?” spoke the startled physician”.
“No time for that, what did he tell you?” urged Luna.
“When I decided to try and become a healer at St. Mungo’s, Professor Dumbledore talked with me about all of his medical experiments with dragon’s blood. He had a last experiment that he never got ministry approval to use. It was his thirteenth and he thought most important use for dragon’s blood. It’s just that I can’t remember all the details,” protested the frustrated healer.
“Since you can remember when and where the conversation occurred, I can help. I must warn you that I’ve never done this charm on another person though. Are you willing to try to help save her?” asked Luna. She reached out and touched Ginny’s hand, “She’s my best friend and her name is Ginny Weasley Potter. She and Harry were married last night. I promised him she’d be all right,” announced Luna in a soft sad tone.
The mentioning of Harry Potter and Luna’s awful sadness seemed to bring a determined look into the young man’s eyes and he whispered to her, “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
“First take my hand. Now I won’t know when you have everything you’ll need, so when you’re done just squeeze my hand once hard followed by two quick squeezes. When I get that signal, I’ll stop the spell,” she instructed as she heard the sound of Ginny retching onto the floor.
Luna took the young doctor’s hand into hers and began the incantation for her mother’s memory charm. Suddenly the hospital melted away, and Luna found herself at Hogwarts in Madame Pomfrey’s office. Dumbledore was speaking to the young man who was wearing Ravenclaw robes and a prefect’s badge. Dumbledore was calling the young man Albi and as he spoke to the boy, the school nurse was lovingly smoothing out the wrinkles from the shoulders of his robes. Luna felt a sharp pain erupt behind her eyes. As long as she tried to eavesdrop on his memory the pain persisted. She closed her eyes experimentally and found that if she ignored the memories, the pain eased.
The minutes seemed crawl by so slowly, and Ginny was dying as they were reliving the young man’s memories. After about ten long minutes, Luna felt a hard squeeze followed by two quick ones. She broke the spell, took two off balanced steps and fell back against the Emergency Room wall with the inside of her temples on fire and her ears full of ringing.
Albi was all action. He seemed to have been invigorated by the challenge. The young doctor threw Floo powder on the fire and yelled, “Medical Supplies, I need one half flagon of Hungarian Horntail blood and a quarter flagon of Norwegian Ridgeback blood.”.
While waiting for the supplies, the young doctor used his wand to summon a small black bag from a cabinet. As he opened up the bag, he asked the other healers if either one of them had ever used a Muggle syringe. The older men looked at Albi like he had insulted them by suggesting that they might have used such a primitive device. The nurse, in spite of their reactions, admitted that she had been trained in many Muggle medical practices and knew how to use one.
Luna saw the young doctor look up at her as she leaned against the wall for support and opened her mouth trying to clear the ringing from her ears. He pointed at her and said, “Well if you can’t help me, could you at least see to the other girl.”
The older of the two doctors came over and began looking into her eyes, but Luna pushed him away. She only wanted to see Ginny get better; her small pains could wait. The nurse began to prepare her patient for the procedures by starting to lift her necklace from around Ginny’s neck.
“No! That stays on her until she’s out of danger,” she yelled, pointing her finger at the nurse. “Only she can remove it, understand,” Luna added. The nurse pulled her hands back and looked at the young doctor for instructions. “The necklace is charmed,” Luna spoke to no one in particular.
The young doctor signaled the nurse to let the necklace be for the moment and from a bin he took a Gerdie Root and with a silver knife cut off a razor thin slice of the root. He took the dragon blood from the doctor who had delivered it and sat the two containers on the counter top. The young healer placed the slice of the root into a small silver cup and poured, as Dumbledore had once instructed, the blood in turns into the cup. After each round of adding the blood, Albi picked up his wand and made three separate, silent gestures over the cup. Finally, he took two of the Muggle syringes and filled them with the mixture that he had just created. Albi gave instructions to the nurse that Luna could not decipher through the ringing in her ears. The nurse pointed her wand at Ginny and the sleeves of Ginny’s robes and jumper disappeared. The young doctor next moved his wand over her arms and all of the veins became visible through her skin. The doctor pointed out a spot on Ginny’s right arm to the nurse. He walked over to her left arm and began counting. At three, the two of them pushed on the top of the little plastic devices, and Dumbledore’s legacy was sent flowing into Ginny’s body.
After a couple of excruciatingly tense minutes, Ginny’s body stopped its convulsions. “You saved her!” said a grateful Luna.
“No, I just bought her time. If Dumbledore’s theory is correct, she will need to continue to take additional injections of this mixture. Eventually, she will probably need fewer and smaller injections. And maybe in months or years, she will be truly out of danger,” explained the young doctor to both of his astonished colleagues and to Luna.
As Luna started to get up and get back to Harry with her good news, the young doctor stopped her. He looked in her eyes as he gently turned her head from side to side with his strong hands. After the examination, he waved his wand above her head and the throbbing behind her eyes and the ringing in her ears disappeared.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked. Luna nodded her head in the affirmative. “By the way, could I have your name and address? It’s for the hospital’s records,” he added with a slight smile.
Luna returned his smile and remarked, “We’ve done so much good here together, and the first thing you say to me on your own is a lie.”
The young doctor’s smile seemed to shrink at her comment. She was suddenly worried. Luna had meant her comment to sound witty and clever, but she had obviously failed.
Starting again, she just answered the doctor’s original question, “My name is Luna Lovegood. I’m a seventh year Ravenclaw at Hogwarts.” She smiled hoping her response would help to ease his look of hurt. “I’ve got to tell Harry about what you’ve done for Ginny. He was fighting against Voldemort when I last saw him,” Luna uttered, taking a deep breath. And without thinking, she reached up with her left hand to touch his face and lightly kissed the young medi-wizard’s cheek twice. “That’s for Ginny and this is for me,” she whispered.
Luna was shocked at her own boldness and she felt the temperature in the room rise by several degrees. She took two quick steps back from the startled young healer, waggled her fingers at him, thought of the little cloakroom and nothing happened. She closed her eyes and cleared all thoughts of what had just happened out of her mind and tried again. This time she disappeared with a familiar crack
Albus Dumbledore Pomfrey stood there for a second touching the spot on his cheek where Luna Lovegood had kissed him. He wondered what his mother would say if her son, the intern healer, asked a seventh-year out on a date.