He had to get her back. Losing a wife and then a daughter was just too much for one man to bear. Although as to getting her back, he knew not how. Not even how to start looking for her. It was this that had kept the welcoming arms of sleep from him since she had thrown herself from his window ledge. He had been so stricken with shock and despair, laced through with fear, that neither movement nor sound was possible. Once the initial shock had worn off, he had flung the thin bed sheet from his legs, pelted down the spiralling stairs and out into the wilderness they called a garden, crying out her name the entire way. Running to the end of the garden, in the direction he saw her silhouette fleeing, he had stopped, blocked by the high stone wall that encircled their garden. Then screamed himself hoarse, calling out after her for what may have been hours. When he could scream no longer he had collapsed, exhausted onto his knees and whispered to the velvet sky;
“Luna, come back to me”
He had sat there, his head bowed, until his tears dried up. The chill of the morning dew seeping through his thin pyjama bottoms, brought him back to him self. Kneeling there would not bring her back, that much he knew, but what would he had no idea. Pushing his weary body up, he walked in a daze back towards the black house, so much like how he saw his existence stretching out before him without Luna; a vast black void. It was all his fault; everything was. It had been his idea to go on the trip that summer to search for the Crumple-Horned Snorkack; he should have been there to protect her, he should have been more understanding of her and not forced things upon her. He had captured a live hare and had made her take it; he could not bear to see her becoming weaker, paler and thinner with each passing day. The guilt of it had borne down on him. He had also, only the previous day, persisted in pursuing the topic of her return to Hogwarts, for when he had broached the subject before, she would only turn her back on him and walk away.
“Luna, we really must discuss what is going to happen at Hogwarts when you return. We can’t put this off any longer. Term starts in a few weeks.” Xenophilius said soothingly, but with an underlying firmness which clearly said he would not allow her to sidestep the issue.
“You seem to have assumed that I am returning, daddy,” she retaliated in a quiet voice, devoid of emotion.
Xenophilius hardly knew how to respond. Luna’s temperament, since that night, was apt to suddenly change from the easy, dreamy way it had always been, to cold and hostile. Not knowing the reaction any reply he made would have, he forced out the first thing that came into his head: “But you must. You have to give yourself a chance at a life!”
“A life? I don’t have one; I don’t deserve a life.” Luna turned away from her father to stare aimlessly through the window. “How can someone like me ever be allowed near normal people?” She added quietly, almost to herself, “What possible chance can my kind have at a life?”
“Luna-” he started to reach out a comforting hand, but something in her cold demeanour made him stop, hand out stretched.
“How can you even ask me to?” Luna’s wide eyes swam with tears as she closed them, as though to block out the hazy reflection of her kitchen, with only the figure of a man in it. “How can you even think of allowing me to return, to roam Hogwarts; I’m a monster!”
With that last proclamation, she spun round and was gone; the only thing telling Xenophilius that Luna had simply run upstairs was the sound of her bedroom door slamming, barely a split second later. Lowering his still outstretched hand, Xenophilius turned and made his way up the winding staircase, contemplating the best way to get Luna to listen.
Reaching her door, he placed his hand against it and pushed, softly calling her name as he did so. But the door would not open. Knowing Luna must be leaning against the other side of the door, as it had no lock, he called out to her by a name neither of them had heard for years, the nickname her mum had for her. He knew it was the only way to get her to listen.
“Xana, please” he begged, his voice wrought with desperation and despair, his palm still flat against the door; he knew it was now or never. “Just listen “ this doesn’t have to be the ending of your life, of your future. Others like you have jobs, a place in the wizarding world, just as you can if you continue with school. If you leave now, without even completing your OWL’s, then you have no chance, no hope of an independent life, one I know you want and one that I’m going to make sure you get!”
He paused and leaned his furrowed brow against the wooden frame of her door. With a sigh he continued, in almost a whisper.
“I’d let you stay here, you know I would. But I can’t let you throw away your life like that, Luna. I know you wanted to do something great with your life and whatever you choose to pursue, I know you will succeed. If I let you just stay here “ in few years you’ll see all those you knew leaving school, going out in the world and pursuing their dreams. I “ I” his voice hitched with barely concealed anguish, “I can’t sit by and watch you do that, Luna, I just can’t.”
The door then opened softly and Luna fell into his arms. He pulled her shaking form, tightly to him and whispered into her pale blond hair, so much like her mother’s.
“I can’t Luna, I just can’t. You’re all I’ve got.”
Sinking to the floor, still clasping Luna tightly to him and gently rocking back and forth, he said soothingly, “I’ve explained everything to Dumbledore; he’s arranging it at school to make it as easy as possible for you, to make everything alright. Everything will be alright.”
They had sat that like for a long while, father and daughter, wrapped in their own despair.
He had been persuading himself as much as he had been persuading Luna. How could he have been so blind, so naïve? She had never actually said that she had changed her mind and would go back to Hogwarts. He had just assumed…
And now she was gone.
Suddenly his head shot up out of his hands and a spark of hope ignited in his eyes. Dumbledore! He would know what to do; he could find her! Summoning a sheet of parchment and pulling a quill from his mass of wild hair he hastily scribbled a note. Folding the parchment in half, he scrawled Dumbledore’s name across the front and attached the note to his rather ruffled-looking owl, which he then despatched out into the dew-soaked dawn. He stood at the open door, still staring at the horizon long after the owl had faded to a speck and disappeared from sight.