She had died, as all of us inevitably find we do. By rights, she should be at rest or facing judgement. It wasn't that the woman was particularly desirous of oblivion, but Petra wasn't an idiot. The doctors had said her kidneys had failed. Her lungs had been struggling for months, and she hadn't spent a day without some form of pain for years.
That's what happened when you grew old. Your body gained new aches and pains, certain muscles became harder to stretch, weaker and less able to support your own weight. Organs shut down, and you have to learn to adapt and adjust to those changes.
Petra had drifted to sleep with the help of a morphine drip, doing her best to squeeze the hand of a grandchild. She had opened her eyes to an almost nauseating amount of clarity, made all the worse for the disjointed nature of it.
Her eyes were burning, far too much light having seared her retinas, and she was crouched with what felt like her hands covering her ears. There was so much wrong with that, from the awkward way her legs tucked in under her, to the fact this wooden room covered in chalk and ink and fluttering pieces of some material too thick to be paper. It reminded Petra of vellum, of the wedding invitations she'd helped pick out for her son. Pleasant as that might be, it was not the hospital room she had been tucked into for hospice care; it did not hold any of her loved ones or anything she recognized.
She had been at peace, as much as she could be. Ready to pass on and leave her mistakes and accomplishments alike behind. Petra was sure that she had died. A certain awareness that she couldn't quite explain insisted that she had. It was over.
But nothing was over, was it?
Because she was in a strange room with either too tall furniture or a too small body. A room that just being in felt like coming out the wrong end of a kaleidoscope. So she itched at her skin, toosmall, and studied the strange, pale hands moving at her command.
It looked as if she had been holding bird feathers. Perhaps even a bird or a pillow, Petra couldn't remember what goose down looked like to be sure, and she didn't think she wanted to know. Jerkily, she let the feathers go, watching them trail through the room on an air current she couldn't see or feel.
The feathers tickled her skin and hair as they left, and Petra wanted to vomit. Both from the overstimulation and because she finally noticed the body.
The listless long haired blonde couldn't be much older than her Cassia, but her skin was burnt and still burning. The fire in her bones made as little sense to Petra as anything else, which meant it also made as much sense.
Whoever she was or had been, Petra cried for her. For the sheer impossibility of it all, for finding herself in a room while a young woman slowly turned to ash in utter silence. Petra tried again to find her feat, to stumble to anything resembling an exit. It was almost a relief when she fell through the trap door.
Why would she have thought to look down?
Her relief was short lived, because instead of actually falling, she floated. This time, she screamed.
.
.
Descending through the air as if she were on an elevator aside, Petra couldn't say she had any better idea of where she was now. It didn't seem like any afterlife that she'd ever heard of. The spiral staircase she landed gently on aside, the room in front of her was just as perfectly circular as the one before.
The circles of hell from Dante were never described quite like this. It had been decades since she'd read Dante's Inferno, but even if the first room was a parody of a Circle of Fire, this room was much more… homely. Cluttered with overstuffed couches, animated figures on the ceiling, children's books, and sheaves of papers. Some of which, when approached, appeared almost holographic as the images moved.
Except they moved all on their own, not just at the tilt of Petra's head.
She was too old for this. Too old to be quite this small, this pale, this young. If this was reincarnation, then why wasn't she a babe? Why was she wandering around a nonsensical house alone? And who had that woman been?
Petra sifted through the books, magazines, and newsprint that covered this floor, only recognizing a few of the titles. It was the paper, in the end, that answered her question the best. The Daily Prophet it's tagline proudly bore, with the number two and a symbol she assumed must be for knuts in the top right hand corner. The date, she noticed rather belatedly, was the 22nd of August, 1990.
She'd been sorted into her children and grandchildren's favorite world for her afterdeath? The term afterlife felt wrong when Petra was sure she felt very much alive. Even if she was in the past and in a world quite different from her own.
Some of Petra's questions would never be answered. Was this real or a hallucination after hearing her daughter wax on about all of her favorite stories or watching her grandchildren and grandniblings act out various scenes over and over. Was her situation normal? Or was What Dreams May Come slightly more accurate in everyone having their own heavens and hells than she'd ever given it credit for? When she died in this life, would she stay dead? Reunite with her own family members?
No, those were not questions Petra would have answered for quite a long while yet, if ever.
The newly minted young girl did learn some things, however, when a beanpole of a man whose hair was just as long and scraggly blonde as her own billowed in and went from cheerful smiles to concernedly searching the building. Petra crouched low, hiding behind a bookshelf as the stranger loped up the stairs.
She thought to warn him of the body, but then he'd see her. So she stayed hidden and listened guiltily to the shocked tears, flashes of light she assumed were spells glinting through the ceiling as he tried to revive her.
Later, as the man tossed the house with all the desperation of a whirlwind, Petra discovered her new name was Luna, and that she had come into this world on the heels of the greatest grief her new father had ever faced. Grief he clearly did not know how to handle, for as the days passed he forgot to eat or sleep. The man barely moved unless she encouraged him. There was only so much she could do on her own, in a magical household she barely knew anything about, surrounded by books on cryptozoology and conspiracy theories as much as proven fact.
Petra – Luna? – could keep an open mind; this was her second life, it would be hypocritical to do anything otherwise. What she did not know how to do was convince Xeno to bury his wife's body and to at least go through the motions of his daily routine. It was difficult enough figuring out how to start tea and find where they kept their food.
Her saving grace was Molly Weasley, someone she had almost forgotten was neighbors with the Lovegoods. The kindly matron came over to check on Luna after she missed a preplanned playdate with her daughter Ginny. A daughter that Petra knew terribly little about at this age. Luckily, she didn't need to. Once Petra solemnly informed Mrs. Weasley that 'Daddy won't leave Mommy's body', the woman took over instantly, leaving her terribly grateful. She was soon bundled off to spend the night with the Weasleys – 'You're getting too skinny, dear. We'll have you back in no time, don't you worry.' – while Arthur was sent back to talk some sense into the mourning husband and father.
It was so good to eat hot food again. Petra trailed Mrs. Weasley throughout the kitchen, watching what an actively magical household looked like. She didn't want to speak too much, which unsettled the young girl she knew must be Ginny, but it would be better to say nothing than to admit how little she knew.
Stranger things happened from grief in a young child than selective mutism.
That did not mean she was in anyway incurious. But as the one night became two, then a week, she'd managed to listen in on a number of unsettling conversations, and set off more than a few pranks from the twins who were determined to either cheer her up or make her talk to Ginny.
Their plan worked, in a way, because she did find herself sneaking out with the young girl and watching her practice flying. Petra was silent as Ginny drilled herself, but she hadn't missed the occasional looks precisely where she stood.
When the would be Chaser landed, she offered her a small smile. "You're quite good, you know."
Ginny almost tripped but caught herself, then offered Luna – her name was Luna now, and she really needed to remember that – a tentative smile of her own. "You won't tell anyone, will you?"
Luna shook her head, and they walked in companionable silence back to the house and to Ginny's room.
"You're going back to your dad's tomorrow, aren't you? To the Rookery?"
This time, she nodded.
They remained in the quiet together, staring into the dark silence where they could imagine another girl's face might be on the adjacent bed.
"I'm really sorry, Luna." Ginny didn't say what for, but the other girl could guess. She said nothing, turning over and clinging to her pillow instead, because she was sorry too. Sorry for the death of Luna's mother. Sorry for her father's grief. Sorry that when she had been ready to let go since all of her friends and siblings had long passed on, she ended up in the body of a nine year old. She no longer felt her actual age. Neither the age she had died at or the age she physically now was.
"Do you think," Luna asked quite a while later. "That we can make a better future?"
"What do you mean?"
The blonde turned back over, pulling her hair out from under her shoulder where it had gotten trapped, before sighing. "I'm not sure," she admitted. "Just… better. Different."
She could hear the sleepy smile as Ginny mumbled, "Go back to sleep, Lune."
And while she hadn't been sleeping, she did drift off, wondering as she often did about how she was in the past in a world so full of magic and wonder she didn't know how long it would take to grasp it all.
.
.
A/N: Short little start of a plot bunny that's been nibbling at me for a while. I've seen some beautiful OC insert into a canon character stories across so many fandoms (although I believe Magical Me, oc as Lockhart is the one I associate most with the Harry Potter fandom. I have not personally seen anyone do something like it with Luna. I'm going to be feeling this out as I go, and if it doesn't work out to be something worth continuing than it doesn't. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say.
I wanted the OC - Petra - to have died from old age rather than a sudden trauma like a car wreck so she had lived a long, full life. That said, I am not, myself, old enough to necessarily fully capture that and while I may delve some into the body horror of skinjacking with Cynthia occasionally and/or in the future in INI, I am going to have Petra/Luna settle much smoother. This new Luna will just quite literally be an old soul that's had one helluva preview on what might be and could have been.