Submission for Round Five of the Quidditch League
Seeker for the Chudley Cannons
Prompt: Cowardice
Word Count: (not counting epigraph) 1946
I DREAM'D in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the
attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth;
I dream'd that was the new City of Friends;
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust
love—it led the rest;
It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of
that city,
And in all their looks and words.
— Walt Whitman
"Mummy!"
Her mum came running into her room seconds later, flicking her wand to turn the lights on. Luna, huddled in the middle of her bed and surrounded by a tornado of blankets, looked up at her mother in relief, unable to stop the tears streaming out of her eyes.
"Luna? What's wrong?" Her mum asked, sitting on the bed and drawing Luna into her arms. Luna gripped her robes tightly, needing the physical reassurance that her mum was still there.
"I had a dream," Luna said tremulously.
"Was it not a very nice one?"
Luna shook her head into her mum's tummy and burst into more tears. Her mum rubbed her back and whispered soothing platitudes until she stopped shaking.
"You were in it and you died!" Luna blurted out, as soon as she could speak again.
"Oh, darling," her mum said. "Is this about last week?"
Luna's mum invented spells and wrote books about them, and sometimes she let Luna watch her from a safe distance. Last week, one of them had gone wrong, and her mum had been hurt for a few days.
But Luna hadn't dreamed about last week.
"No, it was different, you were doing a — a 'speriment," Luna stumbled over the big word, "and there was a gold spell, and it esploded."
"Luna," her mum said, "it's alright, that was just a dream."
"It felt real," Luna protested. "Don't do any gold spells, please, mummy?"
Her mum smiled. "How about this: you can come watch my 'speriments' tomorrow and make sure nothing 'esplodes'."
Luna nodded, although she still didn't feel completely reassured.
"Okay, mummy."
Luna flew awake with a gasp, choking back the urge to call for her father. Shivering despite the warmth of the room, she pulled her blankets in tighter and tried not to think about her dream, but failed.
In the dream, she was in Diagon Alley, in Flourish & Blott's, and she was watching as a man with long blonde hair, straight as a pin, slid a small black book into a red-headed girl's cauldron.
It was the first time since her mum's death that she'd dreamed something so real, and she was afraid. The last time, she'd told her mum about the dream, and it hadn't changed anything. Worse, Luna had watched it happen again in real life and been unable to stop it.
"Mummy! Mummy, that's the gold spell!"
Fifty paces away in the meadow, her Mummy turned her head and smiled vaguely in Luna's direction, not taking her eyes away from the building gold swirls emerging from her wand.
"It's alright, darling!"
"Mummy, stop!"
Another twist of Mummy's dancing wand, and the air exploded.
"Mummy!"
Luna stifled a sob. What good had it done, knowing what was going to happen, if she couldn't change it? Or, what if telling her mum what was going to happen had caused it to happen? At least this time she didn't know any of the people in her dream, she thought in relief. Maybe this time it really was just a dream.
"Already up?" Her father's voice startled her. "You must be excited for our trip to Diagon Alley!"
Luna had completely forgotten that today they were going to get all her school supplies for Hogwarts. She'd get her wand today, and new robes, and potions ingredients and… books. From Flourish & Blotts.
"Luna?"
She looked up at her father, and despite her growing feeling of dread, summoned a smile. "Yes, I am!"
By the time they got to Diagon Alley, Luna had managed to actually feel excited — after all, it was a big day, and she was finally getting a wand — but when they headed to Flourish & Blotts it quickly faded, and she was practically dragging her feet as they walked in.
It was like walking right into her dream, just like it had happened two years ago with her mum. It was crowded in the bookshop, but as the people shifted around, she saw it happen quite clearly: the blond man, saying something with a nasty look on his face, slipped the little black book into the cauldron of the girl with the lovely red hair, unnoticed by anyone but Luna.
The man left when he was done speaking, pushing his way out of the shop with a sneer, with a boy following behind him that looked like a miniature version of himself, and for a few moments, Luna was left with the perfect opening to walk right up to the girl. But Luna didn't even know what she would say to her, or if it would even do anything. Besides, she told herself, nothing bad really happened in the dream. Sure, in the dream the book had given off an aura of malevolence, but now it looked rather ordinary. Perhaps it was harmless?
The window of opportunity began to close, people pushing forward to fill in the empty space, and Luna felt a sudden urge to rush over to the girl, but she couldn't make herself move, and then it was too late.
"Where do you suppose we'll find your books?" Her father asked, and with guilty relief Luna turned her attention to finding her textbooks.
Hogwarts was amazing, Luna thought, watching from her seat on the boat next to Hagrid as the glowing castle grew nearer. She was so excited to be Sorted and meet all her new friends — because she was sure that everyone in her House would be nice and kind, and they would get along immediately.
And at first, it did seem to be going that way. Her new Ravenclaw Housemates were friendly during the Feast, the Prefect made sure they weren't lost on the way to Common Room and showed them how the password for the door was to answer a riddle. Luna was fascinated by the door — how many different questions did it know, she wondered, and how many different ways could the questions be answered?
Luna was having the best day of her life, until she was in her dorm room with her new friends, setting up their beds and hanging up their clothes, and suddenly her vision got dim for a moment, and then she saw something completely different.
It was the red-haired girl again. It was hard to make out the surroundings at first, but soon Luna was able to see that she was sitting on a bed covered in red sheets, with similarly colored curtains pulled almost all the way shut around it. This must be the Gryffindor dorm, Luna reasoned, because nowhere else would have this much red, and it looked similar enough to the Ravenclaw dorm rooms.
The girl was alone, and was sitting bent over on the bed with a quill, scribbling something in the same black book that Luna had seen before. She made a few small noises as she wrote, and abruptly Luna realized that she was crying. Luna tried to move closer, because she couldn't help the urge to comfort the girl, but she couldn't get her legs to step forward.
And then, suddenly, the vision was over. With a small gasp, Luna could see her own dorm again, draped in Ravenclaw blue, and all her roommates staring at her.
"Luna," said one of them — Connie, she was pretty sure, "what was that? You just kinda…" She waved her hand vaguely about instead of finishing her sentence.
Luna hesitated for a moment. The truth was that before now, Luna had been able to convince herself that they were only coincidental dreams, her active imagination running wild in her sleep. But this time, she'd been awake.
She could tell them, of course, what she suspected, which was that the long-dormant Seer blood in the Lovegood line was active and alive in her, and that she was getting visions of a red-haired Gryffindor girl, but she was afraid. Being a Seer wasn't exactly normal, and she was scared that she'd lose her new friends, that people would bother her about what she was Seeing, and she was scared of what would happen when she finally admitted the truth to herself.
"Oh, you didn't hear that?" Luna said, trying to smile, "I just thought I heard someone crying." It was sort of the truth.
Connie and all the other girls looked completely confused. Luna hoped they'd just brush it off and forget it, but then Reginia said, partly under her breath but loud enough that everyone heard it anyway, "Loony Lovegood."
The other girls laughed and turned away from Luna, their exclusion of her like a deep, wide chasm.
Luna took to spending time in the library, where nobody called her anything as long as she was quiet, and none of her things went mysteriously missing. The library was also where she saw the red-haired girl again, always studying by herself at the same empty table.
Despite what Luna had Seen, in real life she never saw the red-haired girl crying and writing in the little black book. She didn't know what to make of that: was it different since she saw it while she was awake? Had it still happened even though she didn't witness it? There was no way to tell.
She watched the red-haired girl when she was nearby in the library, but she seemed perfectly ordinary.
That is, until one day just before Hallowe'en, when the red-haired girl came rushing loudly between the stacks, and practically threw herself into her usual chair. Luna glanced over carefully from behind a curtain of her own hair, and saw that the girl's eyes were wet, and her face a bright red. She wasn't quite crying, but she seemed to be on the verge of it.
Luna continued to watch as the girl pulled things out of her book bag haphazardly, leaving them strewn across her table as she went until at last she smiled, evidently having found what she was looking for, and her hand emerged triumphantly holding the little black book. Upon seeing it, a vision slammed into Luna so hard that she nearly lost her breath.
She Saw only fragments this time, many small things: the red-haired girl going down to Hagrid's and wringing rooster's necks, dipping her fingers in the blood and drawing on the castle walls, hissing at a sink in a bathroom, closing her eyes as a colossal snake emerged and bowed before her, and finally, crying and shaking as she tried to write in the little black book again.
Luna regained her senses again only to find that she was trembling and breathing shallowly from the intensity of what she'd Seen, and that the red-haired girl was staring directly at her with wide eyes, quill poised over the open pages of the little black book.
Luna felt like she'd been caught and froze, thoughts racing. The girl had no way of knowing that Luna had Seen anything, she was just staring because Luna was acting very oddly. She could probably just pretend nothing had happened and go back to her Charms essay. But what if, said some quiet part of Luna's mind, what if she went over and talked to the girl? The last time she'd told someone what she'd Seen it had still happened anyway, but she was older now; she had a wand, and she could do something.
No, Luna decided, getting up from her chair, she wouldn't tell the girl anything about her visions. She gathered her things and walked over to the other table, pulling out a chair and smiling at the girl as she sat down directly across from her.
Luna would be her friend.