Written for the Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition and MC4A
Fill number: 31
Representations: Luna Lovegood; Autism; Sensory Issues
Bonus Challenges: Casper's House; Second Verse (Not a Lamp; Tomorrow's Shade)
Word count: 1,400
Everything you love, you will eventually lose, but, in the end, love will return in a different form. ~Franz Kafka
A young girl with blonde hair sat outside running her hands through the grass to explore the textures. She did this often and it never ceased to keep her mind occupied. Some pieces of grass felt fuzzy and strong while other pieces of grass felt like individual strands of hair. There was the dirt beneath the grass that was sometimes crumbly and sometimes as hard as the stones that were littered through it.
The girl felt her breath catch as she ran her fingers along a fuzzy blade of grass and she knew she would have to avoid touching things that weren't similar to smooth, featureless porcelain for the rest of the day. She sighed and lifted herself up without letting her hands touch anything. Walking back towards the single house on the hill, she wondered what she would do for the rest of the day.
Her father was working in the garden as her mother tinkered with her current invention and the girl had no wish to drag them away from their work purely because her brain had decided to be weird again. There would be no painting (the textures in the paint and the brushes themselves would not be conducive to her continued breathing) and nor would there would be any reading due to the dryness of parchment and paper.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a loud explosion that tore through the walls of her home and the brief, cut-off cry of her mother. The girl ran in the house with her father just a few steps in front of her. There was smoke billowing out of the study door and windows. Half of the wall was gone, revealing the world outside the house.
Dione lay in the middle of the explosion site. She shifted with a painful groan as both her husband and daughter fell to their knees at her side. There was no time for words; Dione gave her family one last smile to comfort them before her last breath left her body.
Luna gazed at the world around her. Ever since her mother had died, she had been able to see small creatures fluttering around that hadn't been there before. Her father hadn't known what they could be when she had asked him about the suddenly visible creatures. All she knew was that they seemed to be passive and only hovered in the air around various objects or people.
It was when her father took her to Diagon Alley one day that Luna started to get an inkling of what the creatures were. There were several types of creatures – the main two types she had decided to call Nargles and Wrackspurts. Those she had deemed to be Nargles flocked around her as she started to feel overwhelmed by all the sounds, lights, people, and movement.
The Nargles were everywhere. They would hover around her; darting between Luna and objects and people in her near vicinity that made her feel particularly overwhelmed. The Wrackspurts hovered in the air between herself and those that made her mind spin. It was almost as if they were protecting her from those that caused her confusion.
After that was when she learned to listen to the actions of the creatures. When there were Nargles, she knew that things would soon grow to be too much and could implement a plan to escape the situation. The Wrackspurts warned her of the confusing people that it would probably be better to avoid if she had no desire to be turned around by the strangeness of people at that point.
By far, one of her favourite creatures were those she had called the Rangles. They were the opposite of Nargles; they showed her where she could calm down. Where there were Rangles, there was calm and she could let her eyes close to slow the whirling void that her brain had become. Of course, there was also the Crumple-Horned Snorkack.
That creature was one of the rarest she had ever encountered. Only one person had them hovering around him and that was the only place she would see them – her father. Xenophilius Lovegood loved his daughter unconditionally and Luna knew that was why the Crumple-Horned Snorkack appeared near him.
Luna didn't know why these creatures showed themselves to her but she was grateful to them all the same. They helped her navigate the confusing world around her and gave her helpful signposts when her father wasn't nearby or unable to help. Sometimes – when she was feeling lonely and missing her mother – the creatures she had dubbed Nidoe rested on her fingertips and comforted her.
The forest was silent in the way a forest could be silent. Trees shifted in the wind, beings moved in the undergrowth and far off places. They were good sounds. The sounds from the celebrating castle had grown to be too much and Luna had quickly made an escape as the Nargles descended on the Great Hall of Hogwarts.
Luna had no destination in mind as she wandered through the Forbidden Forest. She was merely getting away from the overstimulation in Hogwarts. At some point in her walking, Luna decided she had gone far enough and settled down on the forest floor with her back leaning against the trunk of a nearby tree.
She let her hands drift along the earth beneath her as she had done many times before. The grass was the same as the grass in the fields outside her home and the similarity served to comfort her more. Then she felt a texture that was not grass in the least.
It was smooth, cool, metallic. Curious, she lifted the object off the ground and found herself holding a ring with a black stone set into it. Her fingers ran along the band as she twisted and turned it to view it from all angles. It was clearly old and most probably valuable, so why was it lying on the floor of the Forbidden Forest?
A voice made her start. "My dear Moon, how you've grown."
Luna stared at the transparent figure in front of her. "Mum?" she asked, voice breaking as she took in the visage of her long gone mother.
Dione smiled softly. "Yes, Luna, it is me."
"How?"
"The ring you hold is a part of that lovely triad of objects your father is so obsessed with. It is not so strange that a gift from Death grants spirits the ability to manifest in a way the holder can comprehend as them."
Luna turned her gaze to the ring she had been fiddling with. "The Deathly Hallows," she whispered softly. "This is the Resurrection Stone. It brought you back."
"No, my Moon. It merely allowed me to take a form you understand as me."
It was then that Luna realised there were no small creatures hovering around her for the first time since Dione had died. She sent a questioning look at her mother and she nodded in affirmation. All at once, everything made sense.
The reason her father and others had never encountered the creatures she saw on a daily basis; why they had only shown themselves to her after her mother had died in the accident; why they helped her with her life and guided her just as a mother would — they had all been her mother.
"You've always been there with me, haven't you?"
Dione leaned forward and placed a cool hand on Luna's knee, "Yes. I would never leave you, my Moon. I was always there, just not in a way you would recognise as me."
Mother and daughter sat cross-legged in front of each other on the earthy ground of the Forbidden Forest catching up properly for the first time in many years. Hours later, when Luna finally returned to the castle, it was with a smile on her face and Rangles hovering all around her.
Somewhere in the forest behind her, on a random patch of earth, sat a ring that had been sought after by many a wizard. A bowtruckle would find it in the morning and scowl at the bit of metal by their tree before hauling it up to the higher branches for a sharp-eyed bird to see and claim.