Where Luna Lives
i.
Luna lives in a cottage at the bottom of a large hill. The cottage is small, but it is just the right size of small, with two bedrooms and a garden full of roses, and a cellar where her mother does magic things with potions that sparkle in the firelight.
She is happy because sometimes her mother looks up from the potions and smiles at her, a special smile, and sometimes her father sits her on his lap and tells her stories. He tells her about Mistwalkers and Starbringers and beautiful girls with kings for fathers who live in castles and have everything they could ever want. She snuggles in her father’s warm lap and, why do they live in castles, Daddy, when they could live here? she asks, and he kisses her light hair and says, not everyone is as lucky as you, my Luna.
In the winter he wraps her up snugly and takes her out into the night, where the snowflakes fall like Starbringers in the moonlight. Their hands fit together nicely, fingers wrapping around each other like toes wiggling in warm boots that are just the right size of too big, because they’re her father’s, and anything that is her father’s is just the right size for her.
One day her mother takes her out in the morning to look for Mistwalkers before the sun rises. They do not find any, but they dance on the dewy lawn as the sky above them turns pink and gold and brilliant. She has never danced before, and she tells her mother, but, you already know how to dance, her mother says, and spins out into the sunrise, arms raised and white dress swirling about her legs. Luna watches her for a moment and then raises her own arms. The morning breeze is already dancing in the treetops; it caresses her face, whirls her own skirt, and she hears the music of the stars and dances.
That day her mother dies, in the cellar of their little home with just two bedrooms and a garden full of wild roses.
Sometimes Luna remembers the explosion of sound against her eardrums, the blast of hot air (throat raw, the insides of her nostrils burning), the shower of tiny sparks like fireflies, but flaming. Sometimes she just remembers running through the damp grass, feet bare, her mother dancing on the lawn before her, white dress and shining hair, singing.
She and her father still live in the cottage at the bottom of a large hill, but the cottage seems strangely large, so they try to fill up the spaces with stories and Starbringers and lots and lots of love, but there are shadows in places there were never shadows before, and she is older, now.
ii.
Luna lives in a cottage at the bottom of a large hill, but sometimes she lives in a castle, too. The castle has high stone walls and long corridors that echo when she walks down them, one foot at a time, alone. She had never imagined how much empty space could be in a place where so many people live.
They speak to her sometimes, hello Luna and did you do the essay for Charms and we like your necklace did you make it yourself, and sometimes they do not speak to her but laugh, and if she turns her head to one side she can almost see the cottage where her father lives, snow falling, smoke in the chimney.
She wonders, sometimes, why she cannot connect with them – if perhaps she lives in a separate sort of reality, passing but not quite touching. She tries, sometimes, but the space is not the right size, and there is too much room to move around; her words echo in the empty corridors, are lost in the crowded ones.
She doesn’t mind, really, because there is a library full of books on things she doesn’t know yet, and a window by her bed that looks over the forest. Sometimes when she can’t sleep she sits by the window and watches for Starbringers above the trees. She never sees any, without her father there to show her, but she sees other things. Most often it is shadows, dark figures moving through the trees, but sometimes she sees students coming together in pairs, heads together, arms twined in an embrace that makes her ache somewhere deep beneath her ribs.
The first summer back she spends in the cottage with her father. It seems emptier than it was when she left; everything has hard, hollow edges, and there are shadows where there once was sunlight. When autumn comes around again, it is not quite as hard to leave as she had thought.
Enclosed in the stone walls of the castle, the people around her slowly start to become real, or maybe she is the one who is growing realer. The faces and names and touch finally begin to connect, and Ginny is the red-haired girl who borrows quills from her in Charms class, Michael the studious boy who sits near her in Transfiguration. She smiles at them when they pass her in the corridors, and they smile back, and the sometimes-empty, sometimes-crowded castle becomes a little more like home.
The next summer her father takes her to Nepal in a quest after the Shrieking Blackbird, and he tells her he is selling the cottage. He says it is because he is not there enough, but she knows that it is too big for him, too big for the both of them, and she only cries a little.
iii.
Luna lives in a castle, and she spends her summers traveling the world. She sees Bangladesh and Singapore and Greenland, and the world, she finds, is a very large place, but together she and her father fit into it quite nicely.
She is beginning to fit into the castle as well; not all of it, but she finds Luna-sized places here and there, and she has more people to smile at now. In the mornings she walks by the forest, thinking of Crumple-horned Snorkacks and Mistwalkers, and in the evenings she meets the others (Ginny and Michael and Harry and Dean) in a hidden room – sometimes there, sometimes not – learning to help save the world.
She knows, now, that there is a lot of world out there to save – there are Shrieking Blackbirds in Nepal, Snorkacks in Sweden, and people right here in the castle (Neville and Ron and Terry and Seamus), and she wants them to go on being where they are. There are special spaces for all of them, and she has had enough of emptiness.
Thestrals smell like death (throat raw, insides of her nostrils burning), but she can see them and they are living (like Fred and Hermione and Susan and George), and as they are flying she thinks that maybe those are Starbringers in the sky above them.
Afterwards, the veil whispers secrets to her in her mother’s voice, and she comforts Harry and adds another name to the list of the fallen. Mum, Cedric, Sirius – the names of the living take longer to say; she says them to herself (Padma and Lavender and Hannah and Colin), and if they do not fill the holes left behind, they have made places of their own.
The castle is broken, besieged, and Dumbledore falls; the list of the dead grows longer. Even after the war is over, as the world tries to put itself together again – and there is so much world to put back together – the stones of the castle lie forgotten on the ground; even the ghosts have left them.
She can still hear them singing (Michael and Susan and Terry and Lavender), beyond the veil, in her dreams.
iv.
Luna lives in a tent, in a hotel-room, in a warm sleeping bag under the stars. She travels in search of Starbringers and Mistwalkers, and she carries the list of her dead with her wherever she goes.
In a wide field, her father holds her hand and points to the sky. No castle in the world is more beautiful than this, he says, and she thinks she agrees. Listen, he says, and in the distance she thinks she can hear the music of the stars.
Her father dies in a grassy meadow, feet bare, face to the sky.
She wonders later what happened to her father’s boots. Perhaps they are sitting on some stone hearth, basking in the firelight; perhaps they have been put into a warm, dark closet. She likes to think of them being loved, somewhere.
Afterwards she keeps wandering; she sees mountains and castles, and even a king, but the castle she lived in was torn to pieces and she does not know how to rebuild it.
In the end, it is almost like a fairytale. She can hear her father’s voice telling the story: once there was a girl who wandered so far that she found herself at home again. She is searching for the elusive Brown-webbed Wingrider when she finds herself at the bottom of a large hill, before a small cottage that is nearly covered in rose bushes.
There, in the mist of the morning, she hears the music of the stars, and it is the song that the people behind the veil sung in her dreams. The cottage door opens and a man walks out; she holds out her arms to him and asks him to dance. I never learned to dance, he says. You already know how, she tells him, and they dance together to music they both can hear.
v.
Luna lives in a cottage at the bottom of a large hill. The cottage is small, but it is just the right size of small, with two bedrooms and a garden full of roses and a cellar where her husband paints magic paintings that speak and move.
Sometimes at night she takes her daughter out to watch for Starbringers, and sometimes they wake up early in the morning to dance on the wet grass, surrounded by mist. Somewhere across the country a castle is being rebuilt, spell by spell, stone by heavy stone, and one day her daughter will go there, but for now they are rebuilding their own lives right here.
She can still hear their voices (Seamus and Cedric, Mum and Daddy), singing out from the stars beyond the veil, and she thinks that someday she would like to sing with them. Someday, but not too soon, because right now she has Mistwalkers to look for and roses to take care of and a daughter and a husband to love, so for now she is content to sing their names and dance to the music of the stars.