Author's Note: I do not, and never will, own Harry Potter.
Written for the Vocabulary Challenge. Prompt: velleity (a wish not strong enough to lead someone to take action; a flimsy wish).
(Yes, I fudged around with ballet a little to make this work.)
She's lost to the world when the music box plays. Up on her toes, arms splayed up, the movements come as naturally to her as the decorated figurine atop the music box her mother had left her. It's all she has left.
The Muggles call it ballet. Luna calls it home. The dormitory is peaceful in its emptiness, the winter sunlight splashing across the four-poster beds, the plush blue carpeting. Someone's stolen her pillow again, but she can't bring herself to care. The music tinkles on, something light and airy, with lots of bells.
She's been dancing for years, since she was five or six. When her mother was alive, she paid for lessons at a Muggle gymnasium. Luna had been painfully shy, awkward and clumsy in her Muggle leotard and bright pink spray of tutu. She'd fallen down a lot when she started. But the smiles on her mother's face had been more than enough reward...
The music box winds down. Luna drops her feet flat as the world comes crashing down on her again. No gold-and-silver-painted ballerina, with flowing locks and diaphanous tulle. She is messy, clumsy, her en pointe shoes are scuffed and tattered. Her hair falls into her eyes, and her robes unfurl around her ankles.
Mummy, I want to dance, that's all I want to do, I don't care about magic, I don't! Eight-year-old Luna's words had been so vehement, delivered with an accidentally generous spray of spit and tears in the corners of her eyes. The lady down the hill had told her she was a Muggle-loving fool and her parents would be wise to bring her back into the magical fold. Luna had kicked her in the shin as hard as she could and fled to the refuge of her mum's lap.
Dance, my love, her mum had whispered into the dirty blonde cloud of her hair. Dance for all the stars...
But her mother is dead, and her father can't bear to see her so much as pirouette anymore, and she has forgotten so much already.
There is noise, coming up the stairs, and Luna deftly tucks the music box away in the very bottom of her trunk, in the secret compartment she begged Xenophilius to create at Christmas break her first year. Her en pointe shoes go next to it, and she wiggles her bare toes into the carpet as the first of her year-mates crashes into the room, eyeing her radish earrings with subtle distaste.
Dance, her mum said, but Luna can't.
She's not the ballerina figure affixed to the music box, but she's still trapped.
