The door at the top of the stairs slams open, and Luna blinks, unaccustomed to the grey light that suddenly illuminates the cellar. It's been days since she's seen any, and for the wildest second, she thinks they've come to feed her, but then a burly Death Eater descends the steps and her heart sinks.
She glances towards Mr. Ollivander, curled up in the corner. She thought it was only yesterday that they tortured him yet again, can they really be back for more so soon? It had gone on for hours, and Voldemort himself had been present. She had heard his high, cold voice penetrate the door, as though he had stood beside her and laughed as the wandmaker told him whatever it was he wanted to hear.
But the man doesn't head to the corner. He heads straight for Luna. She blinks, confused. They've left her alone, for the most part; her value as a hostage and a bargaining tool requires her to be relatively intact. But this time, they've come for her, not Mr. Ollivander.
Rough hands clamp down on her shoulders, and then she's being dragged up the steps. She twists her head and gets one last glance at Mr. Ollivander before the door swings shut.
The Death Eater marches her into the sitting room. Bellatrix Lestrange is standing there, stone-faced, with Lucius Malfoy hovering at her elbow. He looks slightly put off, Luna notes, at being shunted aside in his own home. But she finds, unsurprisingly, that she doesn't much care.
"Hello," she says mildly once the Death Eater has stopped dragging her. "It's a nice day, isn't it?"
Bellatrix's eyes flash and she looks even more murderous than usual. "Do you know what you're doing here?" she says impetuously. When Luna doesn't respond, Bellatrix jerks her wand at a few other Death Eaters, who are standing subserviently behind the couch. One of them flinches as the wand points directly at his eye for a split second.
"Your father called them to your house today." Bellatrix informs her coldly. "And what do you suppose he offered in exchange for his precious daughter?" Her voice is dripping with sarcasm, heavy with derision. "Do you think he had some great prize? Do you think he was offering up Harry Potter himself in exchange for your sorry head?"
"Your old man tried to trade you for some blasted headdress," the Death Eater holding her snarls loudly, giving her a shake for emphasis.
"Oh, yes, the diadem of Ravenclaw." Luna says it conversationally, as though they're discussing the matter over tea. But tea is a rare commodity here. They had given her a weak cup on Christmas, and the irony had not escaped her. Give the prisoners tea while you keep them in the cellar. Treat them before torture.
"I don't care what you call it!" Bellatrix shrieks. She looks mad, absolutely mad, when she does that, Luna thinks. When she hears Bellatrix shrieking or screaming her laughter or torturing Mr. Ollivander for hours on end, Luna isn't surprised that she's Voldemort's second in command.
Luna is trembling inside, but she schools her face into a look of serenity. She doesn't want to let them know she's afraid. She wants to be a dignified prisoner.
This seems to infuriate Bellatrix more than anything, and suddenly she's pointing her wand right at Luna and she's saying the curse and Luna's legs jerk up to her chest and the Death Eater drops her arms and then she's writhing, writhing on the floor as screams bottle up inside and come spilling out of her lips despite her best efforts to say silent.
Time passes in short jerks and bursts. Bellatrix is looming over her and there is a momentary relief, but then it starts all over again. Luna is vaguely aware that the Death Eaters behind the couch have left. Lucius goes somewhere, does something, and then comes back again. Faces swim in front of her, splitting into double vision, then merging into one.
Finally, it's over. The same Death Eater as before pulls her to her feet. She can barely stand as he drags her to the cellar door and yanks it open. He gives her a push and she stumbles on the steps, tripping halfway down and crashing to a stop on her back.
"You'd best hope, for your own sake, that your father doesn't get any more bright ideas," he snarls, then slams the door.
Luna lays on the floor, motionless. The pain is in her muscles, her veins, her very bones, and she can't go limp enough. Everything feels squeezed together and stretched apart all at once. She keeps her eyes closed, as though she can make everything disappear just by squeezing her eyes shut and wishing hard enough.
"My dear?"
She shifts towards the hoarse voice and her head lolls of its own accord. She winces as bits of crumbled brick cut into her scalp.
"My dear, my child, are you all right?"
She can hear the old wandmaker crawling over to her, shuffling painfully slowly over the uneven cement floor. Tears begin to leak out of the corners of her closed eyes, but she doesn't reach up to brush them away, just lets them roll down her cheeks and past her ears. She smells the salt as they drip onto her matted, tangled hair.
She wants to laugh at the absurdity of his question. They're never "all right"; he hasn't been since last year, and it's been months for her. Or maybe it's been longer. Maybe none of them have been all right since the end of her third year, since Harry came back clutching that cup and Cedric and swearing up and down that Voldemort had returned.
"My dear?" Cold, withered hands pat her cheeks, and she cracks open an eyelid to see Mr. Ollivander peering down at her. It hurts too much to keep it open, so she lets it shut again.
"I'm all right," she croaks. She knows he knows that's not true, but he accepts it and leaves her be. The cold of the floor is soaking into her bones, and it's numbing the hurt. She focuses on her breathing, inhaling slowly, then exhaling through her nose, like she learned from her mother. It's calming, almost cathartic.
Neither one of them says anything for a while. She can hear Mr. Ollivander shifting around, and assumes he's leaning against the wall, tired from his strenuous crawl. He's frailer these days, can't even manage the few shuffling steps he once could to stretch his atrophied legs.
"Mr. Ollivander?" she whispers, after minutes, or maybe hours. He mutters noncommittally, and she hears bricks crunching as he readjusts his legs.
"I've finally figured out why they're so cruel."
She opens her eyes and sees that he's staring at his knees, not her. Or maybe his eyes are closed. It's hard to tell through his scraggly curtain of unwashed hair. But he's stopped moving, so she can tell he's listening.
"Their heads are full of Wrackspurts. That's why."
She hears Mr. Ollivander's watery laugh and closes her eyes again.
"Maybe they should have taken Daddy up on the diadem. Then they wouldn't have that problem anymore."
She doesn't know why she's still talking, she only meant to share that one thought, her epiphany, but suddenly the floodgates are open and she's babbling everything that comes into her mind.
"He added the Wrackspurt siphons, you see, to make sure they can't get in. The twisty tubes confuse them, and they fly away."
Mr. Ollivander murmurs his assent. Then quietly, so quietly she almost misses it, he croaks, "Tell me about it."
And so she does. She rambles on and on about the Wrackspurt siphons and the billywig propellers and the Dirigible Plums. And as she talks, she finds that telling him numbs the hurt. It doesn't make it go away, nothing can do that, but it makes her focus on something else. The sharp pain recedes to a dull ache, and that's good enough. In their circumstances, it's all she can hope for.
AN: Timeline-wise, this takes place a little while before the Golden Trio are taken to Malfoy Manor and rescue everyone. It's based on the line, "Remember last week? When you wanted to swap your daughter for that stupid bleeding headdress?", spoken when the Trio are at the Lovegoods' house.
And of course, all characters belong to JK Rowling, not me! I don't think I said that for A Famous Library, so it goes for that too!