Chapter Nine: The True Mind Can Weather...
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Luna awoke bleary-eyed the next morning to find, with a glance at the clock, that she'd missed breakfast and would shortly be late for her first class of the term, a double period of Defence Against the Dark Arts with Professor Merrythought. Accidentally sleeping in wasn't anything unusual for Luna, as she tended to stay up rather late as a matter of habit; in summer she tried her best to rise early because she had usually cooked breakfast for her father, but at Hogwarts she often would get caught up in homework or exploring some interesting topic or other and fall asleep at ungodly hours of the night.
That hadn't been the case yesterday evening, however. In fact, she seemed to remember drifting off rather early as she listened to Carlotta and Walburga gossip about two fourth-year boys and a girl who had mysteriously been killed last May.
Luna's eyes flew open. How in the name of Merlin had that not kept her awake? She wracked her brain for any mention of the girl's name — Walsh, Wilson, West… something beginning with 'W'. Woolsey, maybe? No… With a sigh of exasperation at her own carelessness, Luna resolved to get one of her roommates talking about it again as soon as circumstances would allow.
Speaking of which. Luna looked around at the room, noting with pleasure the sparse beams of sunlight filtering through the lake and in through the window, illuminating a few flecks of dust that were floating lazily around her face. All the other beds were empty and tidily made up; the house-elves had almost certainly been through and done some housekeeping while she slept, then, because there was absolutely no way a girl like Walburga would make any sort of attempt at menial labour with her own two hands. Luna smiled to herself, amused, and levered herself out of bed. Aware that the house-elves would probably find her work unsatisfactory and do it all over again, she made up her own bed anyway, then pawed her hair into a semblance of presentability and changed into her uniform and robes. Another look at the clock told her she could still make it on time if she ran, but Luna didn't feel like running into her first class was how she wanted to start the day. She walked instead, and rather slowly, making patterns with her feet and feeling the magic that flowed through the castle. For the first time since Harry, she felt a little like herself again.
As it happened, she arrived to class only seven minutes late, made some vague, vacant noises about having gotten lost on the way, and was graciously excused by Professor Merrythought.
The professor was an old woman with stark white hair, looking to be around eighty in Muggle terms, which in the wizarding world meant she could be anything from ninety to a hundred and five. She wore expensive and comfortable-looking bright pink robes (Luna deliberately did not think of another Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher she had once known) and a very large pair of tinted spectacles that hid most of her face from view.
The class contained only sixth- and seventh-year Slytherin students, so Luna took the empty seat next to Edith, who was sitting in the third row with her usual impassive expression. She also noted Riddle's location where he sat near the front. He was surrounded by a group of boys, many of whom Luna had noticed the other night as they sat near him at dinner, but only one or two of whom she actually knew by name. Walburga was sitting on the outskirts of their little bubble, in between Abraxas Malfoy and a spindly-looking sixth year with shaggy dark hair and bright blue eyes.
"Now that we're all here," said Professor Merrythought with a close-lipped smile that made her look like a bit like a spider pondering her next meal, "I shall continue. The main topics of your Defence Against the Dark Arts instruction for this year are significantly more advanced than anything any of you have been experimenting with thus far." She paused and raised her white eyebrows above the giant spectacles, causing large wrinkles to stand out on her forehead. "Within the bounds of the law, anyway." A light chuckle spread across the room, but Professor Merrythought's eerie smile remained motionless, fixed in place.
Luna liked her, she decided.
"Sixth-years, you'll be focusing on the use of nonverbal spells, spell resistance and advanced offensive magic. Seventh-years, as you all know, you've taken on this course as an independent study. As with all the classes I teach, this course is built around practical instruction and application, so I'll primarily be taking the position of observer rather than lecturer. All of you are free to ask me any questions you think are pertinent and draw upon my stores of knowledge and experience, or not, to whatever degree you consider most helpful.
"I'll show you the basics of all these concepts in a series of lectures over this first week and a half — Seventh-years, you are excused from these lectures unless you wish to attend, as I'm sure you're all eager to begin work on selecting a topic for your independent studies. After that, sixth-years, you'll be spending your time honing your skills as duelists and potential future Aurors, in the company and with the assistance of your seventh-year peers." Merrythought's smile cracked into a genuine, slightly wolfish grin and she adjusted her spectacles. Luna hid an involuntary smile.
The spindly boy next to Walburga raised his hand. Without turning her head toward him, Professor Merrythought said, "Mr. Black." Luna did her best not to make any sudden movements or indications of her surprise; it hadn't occurred to her that another relative of Sirius might be in school in 1943, although in retrospect it probably should have.
"Professor, we're still missing somebody," Black intoned, "Selwyn isn't here."
The magnificent snowy brows came down. "What are you talking about, Black? She's right there, behind you."
The blue-eyed boy glanced backward at Edith, his eyes skating past Luna as if she wasn't even there.
"Marcus Selwyn, Professor," Black clarified, placing faint emphasis on the first name.
"I'm afraid you are mistaken again, Mr. Black," Merrythought said casually. "Miss Selwyn's prodigal twin has elected not to remain in my class for his sixth year of instruction at Hogwarts. How he expects to graduate, I do not know, but I'm told students are allowed to make their own decisions. As well as cope adequately with the absence of their best friends from a single class." The chilly porcelain smile was back, and Black sank into his chair, sulking. Luna saw Walburga lean over, touching his arm briefly and anxiously whispering something consoling. She thought she might have heard the words official business and not his secret to tell, Orion.
"If that's all over and done with," the professor went on, "I'd like to have a little demonstration for our first day, to give you all an idea of what we are dealing with. I'm sure you've all heard of the Unforgivable Curses by now."
A wave of murmured yeses and nods came in answer. Professor Merrythought continued more slowly, her tone serious.
"Now, I am certified to use these curses in a purely didactic and educational capacity. I am also required to inform all of you, before I teach you about them, that the use of any one of these is considered unforgivable for a reason. They are fundamentally amoral and cannot be used without violating the inherent rights and human dignity of another."
Luna watched out of the corner of her eye as Riddle tapped his fingers quietly on his desk, obviously bored and impatient.
"For this reason, any witch or wizard who is found to be using or to have previously used an Unforgivable Curse within the three-year statute of limitations will almost certainly be slapped with a life sentence in Azkaban. And the Dementors do not grant any privileges for good behaviour." Behind the tinted spectacles, Merrythought's gaze was almost tangible in its sharpness. "Am I understood?"
The same quiet, vague chorus of positive responses followed again.
"Am I understood?" Merrythought repeated, her gnarled hands gripping the edge of her wooden desk and the knuckles fading white.
"Yes, Professor," said a single voice. Luna didn't need to bother looking for the source; it was Riddle.
There was a moment of tense silence as the professor flatly stared at him. Evidently the uncrowned king of Slytherin House had begun testing his limits in other areas.
After a moment, apparently having found no firm grounds on which to base any sort of direct accusation or reprimand, Merrythought relented and went on with her lecture. She hid her annoyance with impressive aplomb, although her silver aura was crackling with agitation and unease.
"There are three Unforgivable Curses," Merrythought said at last, continuing as if the moment of friction had not happened. "They are the Imperius Curse, the Cruciatus Curse, and the Killing Curse — sometimes better known by its incantation, which I hope most of you will never hear uttered outside of this classroom.
"I will demonstrate only one of them today. As it is the least frightful to witness, if not to ponder, I'd like to begin with the Imperius Curse. Might I have a volunteer?"
She waited, smiling pleasantly, as the room sat in complete silence. Everyone seemed to be waiting for Riddle to say something or make some sort of indication, and Merrythought was obviously aware of it.
Luna considered this for a moment. There were advantages and disadvantages to what she was about to do. Openly rebelling against Riddle's authority would draw a certain unwelcome kind of attention to her, although she might later claim ignorance when confronted on it (this would add to her growing list of white lies). On the other hand, Luna genuinely liked her new teacher, and the thought of sitting passively while Riddle silently humiliated Professor Merrythought — as composed as the woman would undoubtedly remain in the face of such awkwardness — was deeply uncomfortable to her.
Before she knew it, her hand had drifted into the air of its own accord. When Professor Merrythought nodded to her and said, "Miss Lovegood," every head in the room turned toward her as if they were all seated on a horde of sinister wind-up toys. Luna caught one or two baleful glares as she rose from her seat and strode to the front of the room, but most of the looks she saw were more befuddled than angry. She deliberately didn't look at Riddle, as she was suddenly and absurdly afraid that his eyes would be like Voldemort's. Would they flash blood-red with malice now, the way they would inevitably do some day in the future, if she were to fail?
The thought made her hands begin to shake, but she held them still. Professor Merrythought directed her to stand by the blackboard and face the class. Luna looked straight ahead, allowing her gaze to grow fuzzy and unfocused. Back in her own time, when she had done this, a thousand faint little phantoms would begin to flit about in her vision, just waiting to be seen and studied properly with the correct set of magical tools. Now, there was nothing; just a wall, a few magical knick-knacks, the skeleton of some large beast, and a sea of blurry faces.
"I am going to cast an Imperius Curse on Miss Lovegood," Merrythought was saying. "The spell, in this instance, will inflict upon her a strong compulsion to walk backwards around the room with one hand upon her nose. She will attempt to resist and remain motionless. Are you ready?" This last was directed, in a lower tone, at Luna. She nodded, smiling slightly and twining her hands together.
Merrythought pointed her wand at Luna and intoned, "Imperio."
Luna had never been placed under an Imperius Curse before, not in all the days before nor during the war. She had been tortured many times, of course, mostly by the Carrow siblings, although Bellatrix Lestrange had also taken a turn or two when Luna had been imprisoned in the Malfoy house. A few avada kedavras had also been shot her way during some of the battles at Hogwarts, and one had been a rather near miss. Fortunately, however, superior aim did not appear to be a virtue possessed of most of Voldemort's Death Eaters, and most of the time Luna was agile enough to avoid direct and highly visible shots like the bright green Killing Curse. She was familiar with the feel of it, however; when that one near miss had seared past her head, she'd felt its verdant, electric malice reaching for her with eager fingers, and only just falling short. The Killing Curse was a shudder-inducing horror, an abomination against nature, a seething demon in a bolt of emerald light. The Cruciatus was just pain; there was nothing else to be said about it, really. It was the centre of the universe when you were in the midst of it, and once it was over it immediately ceased to matter.
The Imperius Curse, however, was somehow unlike both of them. Luna felt it swamp her mind like fog, making her thoughts hazy and unfocused and faintly pleasant in a way that was somehow unbearable, until she felt that if she opened her mouth a cloud of sickly-sweet vapour would pour out instead of words. And what was in the vapour was walk backwards round the room with one hand on your nose, won't you please, dear? It would be so nice and so easy and you would be so happy if you'd only walk round the room backwards with just one hand — just one hand! — on your nose.
Instinctively and immediately, without forethought, she reacted against it. The cloying and subtle instruction was creeping slowly into the corners of her mind, so she simply dropped her restraints and let it — as it was forever longing to do — expand. Her thoughts spun out of joint like helicopter seeds, floating this way and that, rising up into the air and out of the room and through the glowing blanket of the sky and up into the cosmos. Luna's mind was vast; she'd known this since she was a little girl, but she rarely allowed herself to really explore this aspect of her consciousness, this ability to let herself soar at speed into the realms of dream and nightmare, whenever she wanted, wherever she wanted, and seek the truths of the universe. It wasn't practical for living in the world, and so she held back her flights of fancy and saved them for times when she could really be alone and not have to worry about anybody else.
Right now, she was not worried about anybody else. She was not even worried about herself. Perhaps Luna would be happy if she walked backwards round the classroom with a hand on her nose, but she was not Luna any more. She was hovering by the side of her sister, the moon; witnessing the death of an owl through the eyes of a mouse; following people into alleyways, into cellars, into the depths of their own minds. She looked at the planet from above and saw the flashing and flickering souls of its billions of inhabitants, bright as stars from the lonely darkness of space. The fog was far from her, tiny, trying in vain to expand to match her magnitude. She knew it would not catch her, not ever. There was too much out there for her to explore, too many far extremes she could reach in a heartbeat. She was bigger than a spell.
In the classroom, Luna's blank, relaxed face brightened slowly into a small, secretive, and positively beatific smile. From the outside, she watched as the lips somehow moved and the bell-like voice rang out: "Professor?"
The bright-souled, silver-shrouded creature that was Galatea Merrythought stood silently for a second, dumbfounded. After a moment she seemed to return to herself and muttered, "Finite incantatem." In her lower mind, Luna felt the fog dissipate and vanish. With significant effort, she drew herself back in, reeling in all the pieces of her soul that had wandered out or gone astray, piecing herself back together. When she felt whole again — or at least close enough — she turned toward Professor Merrythought. Luna stood silently as the woman reached up with trembling hands and removed the tinted spectacles. Her eyes, wide with shock and intrigue, were mismatched; one of them was a warm honey-brown, the other a stark yellowed off-white with veins of bright blue that spread out from the inky pupil like little pale rivers. Luna dearly wished to ask her about it, as she was certain the tale would be singularly diverting, but she knew that now was not the time.
"My dear girl," said the professor, "do you understand what just occurred?"
Luna was unsure how to respond, and simply looked at her.
"Have you had training in resisting the Imperius Curse? Have you been placed under it before?" Merrythought pressed. Luna shook her head at both questions, beginning to grow uneasy.
"I've seen others resist the Imperius Curse before," breathed Merrythought, her attention shifting from Luna until she appeared to be speaking more to herself than to anyone else in the room. "But never so completely, never without training of some kind… Certainly never for as long as you just did… and a student…" Her attention fell back on Luna. "My dear, I would love to discuss this with you, if you perhaps have a free period sometime today — ? But for now, I'm afraid we must consider the enrichment of your fellow students, and repeat the demonstration with another volunteer. Sit down, Miss Lovegood. If I might ask another student?"
A flock of hands shot up into the air as the other students promptly forgot their reasons for avoiding volunteering and grew eager to test the strength of their own wills against that of the vacant-eyed new girl. Luna moved to return to her seat.
As she was doing so the realisation hit her abruptly, with a sick shock, that Riddle had undoubtedly observed the whole thing. As though under a compulsion more insidious than that of imperio, she felt her gaze move wide-eyed to where he sat. Those intelligent green eyes stared sharply back at her, but the expression contained within them was not anger, or confusion, or suspicion, or any other emotion she might have expected. Instead it read to her like some strange amalgam of surprise, fascination, and… awe. As she watched, the look of admiration shifted and morphed hideously into unabashed avarice.
A wave of disgust passed through her. He was coveting this power of hers, this mysterious invulnerability. Probably he would assume it was a kind of magic and try to get her to teach it to him. She'd never tried to teach it to anybody else, but if it was capable of being taught, he would be the last one who would be able to learn it. True, his magical abilities were prodigious, but his mind was disgracefully narrow, confined to the plots and cares and petty revenges of his own little world. She doubted he was even capable of noticing a world outside of himself, much less reaching into it. Averting her eyes, Luna walked calmly back to her seat and sat back down next to Edith, who neither said nor did anything to acknowledge her.
The rest of the lesson passed uneventfully. The other student selected, a girl with mouse-brown hair and spectacles, walked the circuit of the room almost reverently, as if she were leaving the throne room of a king and could not turn her back. The hand on her nose was a mere afterthought, resting so delicately that she merely appeared to be artfully covering her mouth. The other students were laughing, but Luna found the whole spectacle rather somber. The girl never batted an eyelash, and when the professor released her from the curse, she returned to her seat looking as if she had already forgotten about the whole thing.
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A/N: I'm done with finals and have moved out of my dorm, so I figured you guys were left waiting long enough. xo shai