Boom. Smash. Crash. Scream. Run, run, run. "Mom, Mom!"
Stop, shocked. Watch the fire. Hear her scream. I scream too. "Mom, Mom!"
Head turns. Skin is burned off. It's gruesome. So, so gruesome. Breath catches. Eyes bulge. Throat whimpers. "Mom?"
Creature breathes, shaky breath. Footsteps behind me. Turn, anything to not see. Hands grab me. I'm lifted. He's crying. I'm crying. Creature's dying.
Look back, watch. Watch it die. Cry. Beg to be put down. Scream. "MOM!"
Voices. She's dead. Brief explanations. Spell gone wrong. Accident. So sorry for you loss.
They know nothing. Mind snaps. All I hear is my own cries and the dying breath. She died. She died. She died that day. And I watched.
Cold sweat greets my waking moment. Bringing myself up into a sitting position, I look around the room, noticing that I had kicked off the covers as I slept. The blue quilt with the bronze embroidery lays haphazardly on the floor, just waiting for my roommates to slip on it. I entertain a quick fantasy of Alodie or Jesimae falling on their heads and crying out for help, and who would be there? Me. And then they would stop with that atrocious nickname. Or I could just watch and wait.
Eyes stare down at alabaster skin. I slowly try to calm myself, reminding myself that she had died so long ago, that her skinless face was not staring at me now.
Every night this nightmare comes.
It torments my sleep and keeps me constantly reminded of the most terrible thing ever to happen to me. It keeps me in a state of constant hiding, knowing that at any time my mind will turn the false smile on a classmate's face into the charred one of my mother, or turn the screaming of the Quidditch fans in the stadium into her scream of pain as the fire licks away her life.
And so I spend every day in a glazed stupor, commenting on things from my father's magazine, The Quibbler, and all together not showing my true self, instead showing the basic outline, the one that brings the least amount of pain into my life.
They call me crazy. They are blind.
I stare at my hands, and my state of alertness awakes a girl from across the room. She groans as she sits up. My eyes already adjusted to the dark, I can easily pick out her light skin and pale brown hair. She blinks at me sleepily. I manage a slight smile in return.
"Every night, Luna," she murmurs, her voice a high reaching soprano that makes my heart tremble, as it is just what my mom's was. "Every night you have this nightmare and you wake up, and then I wake up. Every night for four years."
Wrong! I scream inwardly. Every night since she died. Every single damn night! But outside my mind I put on a senile face and smile and nod. "Sorry Cassie. Get back to sleep."
She turns over and relaxes her mind again. I stay awake.
I am Luna Lovegood and I go to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I am in Ravenclaw house, in the middle of my fourth year. I excel in charms. I am a fantastic student, and if people took the time to get to know me, I know that I would be a good friend.
Most people that interact with me call me Loony Lovegood. They say that I'm crazy. They don't know that I am emotionally traumatized, putting up barriers of relaxation and calm in order to keep from screaming and crying and all together breaking down day in and day out. They haven't seen crazy.
My mind works differently than others, at least from what I've heard. I think in flashes and words, as in my dream. The same dream I have had every single night since the experimental spell my mother was working on went wrong and burned her alive. I can barely remember my life before that. Back when I thought in sentences and vivid imagery. Now it is all brief flashes and fragments and terrifying memories.
The dream is my life.
No one can understand me, not unless they have seen things and been through things just as horrible. There is only one person I can think of that might share the same burden that I carry. Only one person who I think I might be able to confide in, if he ever stops looking at me like I am completely unstable and unreachable, like everyone else does. I only met him officially at the beginning of this year, but of course I knew of him before.
Harry Potter.
Still staring at my hands, I think about what I have heard recently. Our Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher is useless and evil. Professor Umbridge. We will never learn anything of use from her, and if what I have heard from Harry and Ron and Hermione and Ginny… if all that they say is true, and I have no doubt that it is, then Voldemort is out there. We need to be prepared.
I need someone to talk to. I need someone who will understand me if I show my true self. And I know that person can only be Harry. And first things first. I heard that he was going to be putting together a group in order to keep us prepared if He Who Must Not Be Named comes.
I need to join this group. I need to prove that I can be trusted.
I'm going to burst.