)O(

Well, the keen observer will remember other werewolf cases that they have heard of—the Lupins sank all their money into finding a cure, until their boy Remus had been seen by every quack in England and their coffers were utterly empty. When Madhuri Patil was bitten, at the age of fourteen, she quit Hogwarts and retreated from the world, until her sister Nisha was her only lifeline (Nisha Patil currently works at the Werewolf Ward at St. Mungo's, and you know her daughters, Padma and Parvati).

All this is to say, everyone reacts differently to the bite. As I said, Luna took to the wild. As for her parents, well.

Xenophilius had sunk himself into numbers. He had drafted charts and tables centering on the multiples of three—a number with considerable magical promise. Xeno had charted each of Luna's transformations, and paired it with numerical significance—they had just passed number twenty-six, which was thirteen doubled, and Luna had been particularly ill afterwards. The numbers didn't lie, everyone knows thirteen is unlucky.

And Pandora regarded his notes about the number twenty-seven: nine tripled, or three times three times three. If three is a glimpse into all things—(past, present and future; heaven, earth, and underworld; body, mind, and soul)—then how complete is the understanding of three cubed? This was a powerful moment. This was a chance.

And four days until the full moon.

Boil water. Pandora set their trustiest pewter cauldron on the burner, filled it halfway, and asked Luna to fetch some fresh water from the stream. When Luna left, Pandora sent off another letter to her friend at Dover, requesting bottles of seawater as soon as could be managed, please and thank you.

Pandora hunted over the tower for heirlooms that had never been unpacked since they'd moved. A teapot, still with the stains of tea inside. A tablecloth. The November 1981 notebook. A cloak, black and stained and slipping in her vision.

"Mummy? I'm back. And, er…"

Luna held out the bucket, dripping and full, in one hand. In the other she gripped a few feathers, brown and white stippled. "I thought they were pretty…" she said, a little nervous. "Should I put them back?"

Pandora took the bucket from Luna, and gave the feathers an odd, thoughtful kind of look. "No, moonbeam," she said, "I think they're perfect."

)O(

So. Sacrifice.

Pandora had her ideas, but she did not want to die, exactly. She would sacrifice for Luna, and the power of a mother's sacrifice would give a good oomph to her magic, but Pandora was not thinking in terms of giving up her life. She would give up her mobility. She could get by with one working arm, one working leg—Xeno would help her. She would never bear more children—if she and Xeno wanted more, they could adopt. She would never dream again, maybe she'd give up her ability to say the words "beautiful," "love," "interesting"… she'd give up anything for Luna.

But her life entire? Leave Luna without a mother, Xeno without a partner?

Pandora hoped it would not come to that.

She sat by the pewter cauldron, filled with rainwater and springwater. With a large pair of scissors she cut apart the black cloak that had been soaked in Deflecting Drafts, cut it into manageable triangle pieces, and fed them into the water. She stirred it with the feathers that Luna had brought, and tossed them in, too.

The notebook from 1981—what a happy time that had been. Everyone had believed in a new, brighter future. Pandora tore out pages and dropped them into the water. The ink melted into the water, the paper turned into mush. She asked Xeno to fetch their silver ladle, but it was Luna who brought it—"good girl," Pandora said, "what a sweet girl you are." Luna smiled, and rubbed at her hands—the silver stung her a little. Werewolf blood took badly to the moon's metal.

Pandora stirred it up, and set the heat to simmer, and let it cook down for awhile.

The next morning, she received an owl—actually two owls, carrying a case with two bottles of seawater, and a friendly Christmas note from her old friend. Pandora added the seawater to the cauldron, and gave it another vigorous stir.

By the potions-making counter, Pandora reviewed their dwindling potion supplies. In a mortar and pestle, she crushed ironwood bark with snow-apple peels. She reached for the shrubby jasmine, and eventually just took one blossom, and added it into the pestle. Moth wings. As she added it to the cauldron she was uncomfortably aware that she was making this up as she went along. One scant unicorn hair—she draped it on the simmering potion, which began to froth and put out blue-white bubbles.

She cautioned Luna to keep away from the cauldron, but asked Xeno if he could please give it a stir now and again. Pandora moved into the living room and studied their tablecloth.

It had been a wedding gift from her father. Pandora and Xeno had been married in autumn. By that point, Pandora was visibly, accidentally pregnant. Up until then, neither she nor Xeno had thought about marriage, but they'd decided to give the whole family thing a shot, anyway, with the war on who knew when they'd get another chance? So they'd gotten hitched, a bit of a rush job, but the Ollivanders were no strangers to eccentricity. (Xenophilius of the self-chosen name had not spoken to his family in years.)

And Pandora's father had presented them with a tablecloth, an old, old family heirloom. It was exquisite lace, hand-worked, and he said it was spell-woven for good health and good luck. Pandora had cried a little (she'd been pregnant and would cry at the drop of a hat, but it was genuinely moving) and hugged her father, Garrick.

The tablecloth had never actually graced a table at the Lovegood's home. Instead, Pandora had strung it into a canopy, and had hung it over Luna's cot, with a moon and stars made of silver paper for a mobile.

She'd never taken a scissors to it. And Pandora decided she wouldn't start now. She folded it carefully and fed it into the pewter cauldron. The potion took on the color of old lace, of parchment that had been touched and read often. As the tablecloth unraveled, strange images danced on the potion's surface—blooming flowers, wine and champagne toasted over and over. Pandora took notes on this, and decided to let it rest for the night.

When she rose early the next morning, the yellowed-ivory color had deepened and brightened to gold. Pandora decided that was a good sign.

In a smaller cauldron, she prepared an emetic potion, according to their most trusted recipe. Just in case… just in case… a little medical preparation, in case Luna had a bad reaction.

But what next? What next? Think, Pandora, think…

She asked Xeno to look after the potion (again), kissed Luna on the forehead, and headed out the door. Apparated to Diagon Alley. The apothecary, Missus Vetiver, had known Pandora all her life, and invited her for a spot of tea and a chat, to catch up, but Pandora shook her head, said another time, and made her purchases. The herbs cost more than they should have—well, it was Midwinter, Missus Vetiver said, hard to get anything fresh—but it would do. The potion would change things.

Missus Vetiver rang up Pandora's purchase, and tucked in some homemade candy. It was beet-sugar red and tasted like gingerbread and winter holidays. Pandora said she couldn't afford it, but Missus Vetiver insisted it was a gift—"for your little girl," she added. "I'd love to see her sometime."

Pandora almost cried, but swallowed down the lump in her throat and said, "She's growing up well. She's going to be a brilliant woman."

"If she's your daughter, how could she be anything else?" And Missus Vetiver waved Pandora out of the shop.

Pandora went home, presented the candy with due ceremony to Luna, and then went right back to the potions-making counter. She'd bought a bundle of wolfsbane, wrapped up in twine, and Ixora berries, imported from Thailand. There were herbs more familiar to English soil—avian-fennel, fallen-angelica. Plants harvested in the wild, like feral rose and the elusive gasping-thistle. Time to chop it all with silver blades, chop it into equal-sized pieces so they would all cook at the same time. Into the potion. Add more water. Good.

Almost. Almost.

She took up the teapot and dusted it. It was a fine bit of jasperware, light blue with a trim of white flowers. She remembered she'd bought it at an estate sale, just a week after she'd moved into her first flat, out of her parents' house. Hogwarts' fight song was still in her ears, and she'd been full of hope, eager to meet her future. She stared at the teapot a moment, remembering.

An appropriate symbol, she decided. She was working to salvage Luna's future.