author's note: This one's short, sorry. And this will notnotnot be a oneshot. I really want to continue it. Hurrah. Even if nobody likes it or cares. -emoface- (and R&R?)
When Luna's mother had died, she had not spoken for a month and nine days. She was not sulking – how could she be, when she wasn't angry? She wasn't angry at the world for taking her mother away, or at her father for letting her die, or even at her mother for going and dying in the first place. No, Luna was merely mourning her mother. It seemed more fitting than dressing in black. Besides... everyone knew that black attracted Nargles. Luna's father was not angry at her for not speaking and, unlike the teachers at the school she went to, did not attempt to force her to do so. When he found out that Luna had stopped attending school he did not yell at her, but quietly withdrew her from the school. She would be homeschooled. From then on, Luna learnt the muggle subjects from her wizard father; she learnt more from him than she had ever done from her qualified teachers. She was nine years old.
Her first words when she spoke again were 'Tell me about the time you met'. At the time she was dressed in her pyjamas, standing by her father's door with her hair in a matted mess. It was six in the morning Xenophilius sat her down on his bed and they talked and talked and talked about the witch who they had, really, loved an awful lot even if they'd sometimes laughed at her. During the conversation they ate several times, dressed, and went out for brief walks, talking all the while. When they stopped talking it was half two in the morning of the following day. They had been talking for over twenty hours. Luna had known her mother for nine years and Xenophilius for quite a while longer, but they fell four hours short of filling one single day with conversation about her. If Luna hadn't been drowning in sleep, she might have felt guilty.
They were not one of those families who pretends a death has never happened and burns all the photographs. Luna's mother beamed down at her from all over the walls, and Luna never tired of hearing her father tell stories of their various meetings and their eventually getting together, their marriage, everything up to Luna as a toddler. Because as soon as they got to Luna's childhood she would join in. She remembered it all – not her birth, obviously, and not her stumbling around learning to walk, but everything from her first serious injury (her mother tried to put a spell on the swing in the park nearby so that it would swing especially high, but instead the climbing frame caught fire and Luna fell off and hit her head off the ground trying to twist to see it) to a rare heart-to-heart she'd had with her mother when she was seven. They did not just discuss Adrienne's strengths, but also her weaknesses and flaws. At first, she felt slightly guilty to her mother, but eventually they became able to laugh at her faults as if she was there with them giggling too. Luna never thought that she was, for all her odd beliefs. In the wizard world, the dead staying dead might not be a sure guarantee, but Luna hardly ever felt her mother's presence. She didn't, however, think that she was gone. She was somewhere, wherever that might be. Maybe it was just another comforting thought, maybe Luna was on to something – nobody could know.
Luna had practically become a recluse by the time her Hogwarts letter arrived. It wasn't that she'd have been hugely popular at Hogwarts otherwise, and it wasn't because of her mother's death that she was weird. But the fact that she hadn't talked to other children her age for two years meant that her arrival at the wizarding school was even more awkward than it might have been. Luna had no idea what to say to the others, so she sat on her own. The Ravenclaw table was crowded at one end, full of curious, whispering children with bright eyes and interested faces; at the other end was a gap. On one of the very last seats was Luna, and opposite-and-to-the-left of her was a small, freckled blonde boy who was intently picking his nose.
"Hello," she said, vaguely. He looked up at her for a moment before returning to his former occupation, and after a few seconds Luna forgot him and gazed into space again, drifting between daydreams in her mind. She was determined to do well at Hogwarts. She didn't know what she wanted to be, because so many jobs were stooped in conspiracy or secrets or half-hidden lies, but she knew that she wanted to get good results. She'd promised her father that she would try and do her best, even if that wasn't very good. Instead of reassuring her, as a father might be expected to, he had simply nodded.
Luna did not mention her mother's death at Hogwarts – at least, not at first. In the middle of her first night there she threw some robes on over her pyjamas, sneaked out of the dormitory and found the Thestrals. Leaning her weight against them, she looked up at the cloudy sky and wondered why it was that you could never just look up and see the stars. It started to rain, which Luna took as a good omen, and she let the dirty water soak her clothes.
She shivered all through the next day.