Chapter Three

The keys of the piano were each a different color, each one deepening a shade from pastels, to angry neon's, and back again to deep throaty colors. A rainbow of buttons attached to strings which made sad sounds that filled the procession; the funeral.

Her father couldn't stop crying and he kept trying to comfort her, because her father loved her and wanted to be strong for his little girl, but Luna couldn't shed a tear and she pushed her father away.

It hurt, it hurt so deep and struck her in her chest, a feeling so profane that it rooted itself right into her soul; and it grew and grew and grew into something dark and sad and twisted.

Luna remembered back to earlier…

There was blood on the ground. Luna put her hands in it to feel its fading warmth and when she looked up she saw her father's eyes. So different from the last time she looked into them, they were joyless, disbelieving, frightened little balls that dug deep into his face and made it look hollow and sunken.

She pressed deeper into the floor, and into where the last bits of her mother lie, in a pool, on the floor, beneath her hands.

Normally Luna was a happy child, she was unusual and smart and saw things others missed, but she had also been excitable and there had been a gleam in her eyes. That glean, that excitement, that fast talking gob, and wonderful jubilance seemed to be suffocating and dying under some heavy presence that took over the girl's body.

Luna made no sound, but tears ran down her face as she twisted her hands in the blood, she vaguely heard what could have been her father's cry.

The room started to buzz, or was that just Luna? The sound got louder and louder; the buzzing, the rumble of rubble, the falling of skies. The sound grew in the room, which was lit only by the fading daylight. The sound blasted through invisible speaker's strait into her brain and she felt like she was being crushed beneath the sound. She clasped her hands to her head and felt the wet remains soak her skin and hair and painted her red, but she was much too distracted to care, the sound was trying it's very best to crush her.

Then the clash of heels burst into the room, breaking the noise, and Luna looked up to see a pink lady, standing short, and cold, and disdainfully.

"Oh look at you, you filthy child. Now, now that's no place for you to be, especially given what has just occurred in this particular room, wouldn't you agree Mr. Lovegood?" The pink women spoke with a small smile and a shrill voice.

"She's dead," whispered the broken man sitting in the comfy chair in the corner of the room, it probably wasn't a response to the rhetorical question, but if it were, then it was the only one he had, for silence fell in the room.

The pink women strolled over to the long wooden table. The table was a mess of different shaped and sized glass bottles and beakers and flasks which each held its own tint; a personality. The table was flooded with magical things and scales and feathers and pretty colored objects and animal parts alike. The table spilled papers and ink and all sorts of writing and studies.

"It's simple really, and oh, yes, very sad," she turned around to say as her finger dragged along the edge of the table, she gave them a frown a frown so practiced and perfected that it was the fakest Luna had ever seen.

"You're wife, Mr. Lovegood, oh did she love to experiment. Not her place, though, a wizard like her. Pardon me, but, a wizard like her, so free and unthinking, an accident like this was bound to happen, this is commonly the outcome when non municipally recommended spell creators, try to write magic," Luna wanted her to shut up with her lies. Luna knew who killed her mother, and she knew that Umbridge (the pink women), knew she knew.

"She's dead," Luna wanted her father to shut up, because, yes we could all see that.

Luna clutched her hands to her chest.

What was happening to her? She thought. There was a darkness inside her. It was trying to eat her up and hide in her body, turn her body into an empty shell.

Luna; so young, so innocent, yet so very powerful; fought back. Luna clutched her chest even tighter and sank into the blood. She closed her eyes and scrunched up her face and let out shallow breaths. She fought so hard against the sound and she thought of her mother, but that made it worse. She thought of her father and that made her sad and weak. She thought of her anger, her hate, her fury, her revenge; but that made the sound stronger. She knew if she kept that up it would swallow her whole. She thought of a boy, and all the things they could have done, and it made her regret, but it also made her want. She wanted it, the friendship and the adventure and most of all she wanted to live. LIVE.

She sucked it all up inside her and made her face a mask, made her feelings a fog, and her expressions cryptic. She made herself less. She made herself more. She felt the sound retreat to inside her heart and she felt alive.

When Luna finally opened her eyes it was several hours later. She lied in her bed and she heard her father's sobs from some distant part of the room. She thought of a boy and smiled. She was alive. She sat up breathed in and her mother was still dead.