A quickly bashed out little… thing. Unbeta'd and only barely proof-read. Sorry. Part of me wants to continue it, but at the same time, I'm not positive on where I want to go without it. We shall see.
Also, as usual I don't own anything related to Harry Potter, and as such make no money from it or this story. If I did I probably wouldn't have to eat so much discount ramen.
Luna Lovegood knew that Bellatrix Lestrange wasn't actually dead, because Luna Lovegood knew quite a bit about stars.
Molly Weasley did not use a killing curse, and Bellatrix Lestrange was not old or weak. Molly Weasley had used a particularly powerful Reductor curse, which did bring an end to the physical walking, talking, wand-waving Bellatrix, but it did not kill her.
Instead, she had responded just like any other star when it "dies."
Luna was very fond of stars, she always had been; she also very much enjoyed moons, asteroids, planets, and any other astral bodies really. She thought it might have to do with her name, but really that meant it probably had more to do with her mother. Her mother was the one to name her "The Moon" after all. But more than just all the pull and wonder that anything to do with the vastness of space held, Luna had a particular fondness for the twinkling beauty and passion of stars.
She was young enough when her mother died to have only a few memories of her mother, but many of the ones that she did still have involved the two of them, and sometimes even her father, lying under the stars as her mother would point out endless creatures and stories drawn out by the little spots of shimmering light.
Even after her mother passed, Luna continued to learn everything she could about stars, their names, their stories, she even read as many muggles books about them as she could possibly get her hands on.
Oh, and muggle science really was quite interesting at times. It was like a muggle type of magic born out of necessity. Granted, like a lot of things muggles did, it tended to miss the point at times, or even get things completely wrong out of a sheer ignorance to the importance of magic in the world, but at least they tried.
Muggle science, with all its faults though, did do something that Luna wouldn't have thought to imagine: it made stars even more beautiful.
The idea that these named living masses of energy as they had become in her mind were giant gobs of fire feeding off of strange air in the vastness of the sky, further away than she could possibly fathom just made them so much more amazing.
They were light and beauty and creation created entirely by fire and destruction. She was sure they had something to do with the very nature of existence, but lots of things did, so she decided to make due with appreciating their wonder.
It was sad to think about them though as well. Their distance was overwhelming. The thought that they were so far away, and that for some of them, their light had to travel so very far to reach Luna that by the time she saw them winking at her, they had already flickered out and died back at their own homes.
That was why she cared so inexplicably about Bellatrix when very few others seemed to.
A star here on Earth, in the flesh, was something to be treasured. She had once tried to tell this to Draco when he came down to the dungeons at the manor once, crying and hating himself, angry at everything. Luna had hoped that of all people he would have understood, but he had other things on his mind. Hopefully he would find his inner fiery dragon some other way.
There were already too many stars going out to just stand by and let another. Luna had felt the same way if not worse back at the Department of Mysteries when Sirius fell through the veil. Luna however did not know nearly enough about the veil and how it worked to think about bringing back Sirius. She didn't know anything about it really.
But a Reductor curse, that was a place to start, particularly with how perfectly Bellatrix and her reduced state mirrored the "death" of a star.
When a star of a certain mass dies it starts to consume all of the gasses immediately surrounding it (mainly something called Hydrogen, Luna had read, but chemistry as the muggles called it didn't make much sense to her. It was like a needlessly complicated version of potions, or alchemy.) As it consumes everything around it in flame, the star grows and becomes ever more unstable, until eventually it grows out of control and begins to pulse, throwing off its outer layers until everything it could possibly feed off of has perished to the ceaseless hunger of the star.
Then the star cools, and collapses, and in its fiery death, very similar to a phoenix, it becomes something new in a white dwarf.
Luna had seen enough of Bellatrix not only at the battle of Hogwarts, but also from their battle at the Department of Mysteries, and her own time spent in Malfoy Manor to know how terribly similar Bellatrix's eventual demise and that of a star burning in the night sky were.
Bellatrix had led a fiery and passionate life from the start by all accounts, and certainly her massive personality seemed to ensnare all around her with a powerful gravity-like pull, whether they liked it or not.
Especially near the end, dazed, and simply confused in Luna's eyes, the years of living so ablaze had started to catch up with her, it must have. So her insanity spread out further and fiercer, as she wildly lashed out, claiming more victims and ranting and raving more and more, as she began to pulse, Voldemort helped her to grow far too large, with much too much power leaving her unstable.
Until she killed so many around her, and grew so large that she crossed Molly Weasley's path, and with one impassioned and well-aimed "reducto", Bellatrix threw off her outer layers, and the sustaining power of Voldemort vanished soon after, leaving the tiny bits and pieces and energy that were all the was left of Bellatrix, floating and pulsing through all of reality.
All she needed now was to be put back together, and she could be something new.
Luna knew it was exceedingly dangerous, something that others would most certainly not approve of.
But there was a chance, a slim one, but a chance none the less, that Luna Lovegood could bring back the star that was Bellatrix anew.