kol | "...and don't forget the Dandily Lion Tails!"

Well, I went and did it. Here's chapter one of my Luna Lovegood Saves the Day fanfic, my cracklicious take on HP7. The writing is rough, sorry <3!

“...and don’t forget the Dandily Lion Tails!”
A Luna Lovegood saves the universe fanfic. Be very, very afraid.

Chapter One
Zip! Zap! A Loony Jaunt!

Late October, Lovegood Manor

The school is closed, chains and signs and wards all blocking the knowledge seekers from entry, and Luna is glad.

Glad that her favorite knickers won’t go missing for weeks on end, only to be shamefully displayed for all the common room to see. Glad that her hair is safe from rogue potion ingredients, glad that she need not beg for cleansing solutions from the sharp tongued master, brooding over his cauldron while plotting certain treachery. Glad, shamefully glad, to be away from the place she knows she should love more than anything else, but grew to loath in a way that shocks her.

Because of that loathing, it is bewildering to Luna that she does miss Hogwarts. Not the school itself, or anything within the barren walls that marked prison and never offered salvation for her mind. No, it is not even the views from her window that soothed her at night or the dusty library that offered relative safety that Luna misses.

She misses, of all things, Quidditch.

There would have been a match by now, if the school was still open and the wonderful professor was not a chilly tomb.

Luna touches gingerly the corner of her eye, but no tears fell today for the brilliant man so cruely lost. He is sorely missed, it is true, but all grief passes in time, and it seems her mind, silly mind that it is, has moved on. Now, his absence means school is lost, which she was superbly pleased with, but it also means there would be no Quidditch for Luna.

She never was comfortable playing the sport, always looking for magical creatures when on a broom and not interested in the mundane balls one could find at any Quidditch shop. They hurt, too, although not as painful as some of her classmates. Luna missed Quidditch not for what it was, but what it brought to her life.

Six matches, six brief escapes into a world where Luna Lovegood was simple one of the crowd. Six matches, tiny little battles between boys and girls on triumphant brooms, clothes tight against their lean, athletic bodies. A stadium where Luna, for once in her life, fit. With a hat, a toy broom, or the microphone of last year, Luna was able to become a part of the game itself, to fit in with Hogwarts in a way she failed to do in all other areas. Those six matches were the only things Luna missed, and it wasn’t just for the pretty boys and girls sweeping across the sky in rosy glory.

Luna misses belonging.

Her father is rarely at the manor these days, but he trusts her to complete her studies in seclusion. Luna knew her father is simply too busy, what with the news pouring in from all corners of England these days, and she has known all her life that the news is what her father must always attend to first, not his daughter’s endless questions. And she is glad to be away from the books that tell her nothing interesting.

But she wishes, sometimes, for her father to stay with her and guide her through just why a particular potion is meant to turn green at precisely six clockwise stirs and why it turns purple with green spots at one counter-clockwise stir. But Luna learned the hard way her father does not know all the answers. He never did tell her why her mother died. She knew the hows and the wheres and the whens, but not that why, and a father should always be able to answer a why, right?

So her books lay within her bed chamber now, half forgotten, save for the rare moments when her mind stumbles across that curious wish. Luna is very much alone on the Lovegood property, and as she does when cloistered in the Manor, she has decided to seek out anything of the illusive magical sort on the Manor’s grounds.

Since June she has hunted ever nook and cranny of the property. But it is October now, nearly November, and Luna’s patience is growing thin. While Luna has faith that one day the Dandily Lion will pounce its way across her lawn, she has grown tired wait for its arrival.

This past week Luna, tired with missing that part of Hogwarts she doubt she’ll ever recover, has pulled her mother’s dusty broom out and taken to the air. Her broom is so ancient is struggles to rise a meter in the air, but Luna is confident in the broom’s intelligence and sprawls across the badly vibrating surface, floating the length of property for hours at end, lost in the world of her imagining and of creatures she fears only she can see.

Today, there has not been much of interest beyond her imaginings. The day before last she found a nice colony of ants the day before last. Hours she studied them, until her father arrived home and it was time to discover just how much worse this unfamiliar world outside of Hogwarts was. Time to discover if any of her few friends from the secret army were still alive.

She wonders if she can call them her friends. No one has sounded a call for the Ministry Six to rise to battle, and Luna is torn. She is glad to be left alone, because blood and veils and places of death are not for her, but she misses very much being one of the Six. Ginny, despite how close her family lives, has remained mum, and Luna has followed the girl’s lead, although the broom stubbornly points towards that wonderful place on a daily basis.

The broom is floating into the woods, and Luna lets it go, for once. Perhaps it is time to see her friends. It would be nice, she thinks as the broom groans as it twists around a particularly gnarled tree she once was sure housed the eggs of a breeding pair of flightless rock crabs, to see Ronald and his mysterious friends, particularly that Harry Potter. He is a nice boy, if a trifle angry, and she is quite taken by his spectacles. They are so round and tiny and throughly Muggle that they draw her mind towards those funny people who cannot see the beauty of the world because their blood cannot recognize magic.

Some days she wishes she were Muggle. But she has never known a Muggle before; her father has kept her cloistered here, far away from those curious folks, and all she knows of their kind is what her father tells her and the stories those born in that strange world offer at Hogwarts.

Luna is pulled from her thoughts and leans her belly on the broom, blinking. A curious noise, more a throb echoing in her chest than a true sound, breaches her awareness. The tree’s are growing thinner, indicating she is approaching the boundary to Ronald’s ancestral home. She has visited that place only three times, the last was when Ronald’s mother invited her and her father for hugs and baked goods after her mother died.

She is not terribly fond of hugs, but she enjoyed the one’s Ronald’s mother gave, full of warmth and magic and above all else, pies. She has not had a slice of pie since that day.

Luna wonders if her father is allergic. He certainly doesn’t favor hugs, either.

The vibration grows stronger, and the broom glides the a halt, hovering two meters above the ground, and she catches something sinister in that vibration.

Luna sits up, tasting the air, confused. There is something strange at work here, and instantly those nasty hooded figures spring to mind, and Luna wonders if they are here, wonders if a green skull will meet her eyes once the trees fade, wonders if she will find Ronald and his wonderful family, or blood and spirits to mark their final place.

Those eaters of death were not afraid of her wand at the Ministry. Luna has not had Harry Potter as a teacher in quite some time, so she fears they may be correct in their pronouncement of her as a non threat. Her wand is snatched from behind her ear, but she is unsure of what to do with it.

There are no sounds her in the woods, no birds or bees or even a stray Tricorn whispering in the daylight, nothing at all save that curious vibration. It is unnatural and speaks of magic, but that does not mean the eaters of death are there. What to do?

Luna wishes for a moment, shortly, that she had found a Dandily Lion and stolen some of its courage. Or that she was more like her mother, of the house of lions, and not the silly Luna Lovegood, she without claws and barely a hint of the raven within, too frightened to pass out of the woods and join her friends.

Then the first scream began. The broom jerked forward, Luna clinging to the gnarled surface, shocked by the speed of the ancient thing. Her eyes water and she can barely make out the thinning trees. Her ears work just fine, and she is too well aware of the screams.

Four, Five, Six... she counts as the trees die, one by one, and Luna can see the house faded all wrong and leaning sadly to one side. Her eyes, still blurry, can see none of the family, none of the red curls, none of the kisses of the sun.

Where was the family of red lions?