Unbroken - Luna's Story - Part 2
Luna took infinitely more care logging this case than she had with any of the others. Her Quick Quotes Quill was discarded and instead she retrieved her best raven's feather quill and her own fine parchment to hand write the list of belongings.
After examining and filing several hundred boxes, she had developed a system that was not detached, not impersonal, but still fittingly brief so that it didn't take all day to log the contents of one box.
For this case she sat and examined each item carefully. She did not write one pair of dress robes, slightly worn as she had dictated so many times over. Instead, she wrote pale blue silk evening gown with pearl detail.
She did not write six pairs of trousers. She wrote faded Levi's 501 jeans - men's 30 inch waist.
She did not write female toiletries. She wrote antique glass perfume bottle, half full, contents lavender scented.
On and on and on; baby toys, clothes, books... photographs, things that surely should have been damaged when the house the Potters had lived in collapsed but maybe she was underestimating the perseverance of the Aurors who had methodically collected these things from the wreckage.
One wand. Appears to be mahogany. Some small scorch marks.
One wand. Appears to be willow. Damage to the tip, but presumed to be in working order.
Red leather bound diary, entries from 1974 to 1979.
Two sets of OWL test certificates. Two sets of NEWT test certificates.
Twenty seven books.
A stack of letters bound with string. Unopened during the process of logging.
One diamond ring.
Small wooden chest. Locked.
It took several hours, but she continued, item by item, with her list.
Only when it was complete did Luna allow herself to cry.
xXx
Auror Watson had granted Luna access to various sources of information should she need it while attempting to locate next of kin. One of these was a log book which detailed which Aurors had worked on each case where evidence had been stored, and it was to this log that Luna headed after she finished grieving.
Since most of the Aurors were at lunch the reference room was fairly quiet; they were also used to her presence now and she was uninterrupted as she pulled the tome from its shelf, then turned to the right month of the right year to locate the names she needed.
From this she could cross reference the names on another list of all the Aurors who had worked for the Ministry in the past six hundred years.
She was upset, but not surprised to learn that the Aurors who had salvaged so much from the ruined Potter house had been murdered by rogue Death Eaters only a matter of days after the house had been cleared.
It went some way to explaining why no one knew that these boxes existed, for surely someone would have attempted to contact Harry Potter and reunite him with his parent's things. It was heartbreaking for her to realise that in 1981 the Potters had no next of kin. There was no one to take in their possessions and keep them safe until they were ready to be passed on to their son.
From what she knew of Harry's history she doubted that his aunt and uncle would have allowed magical objects into their house. And so, with not a soul in the world knowing they existed, the Potter's belongings sat alone on a shelf in unmarked boxes, waiting for Luna to open them.
She needed permission to remove anything from the Auror department but this was not difficult to obtain; a few forms, a few signatures and a document that she would need Harry to sign too to say that he'd accepted everything. If he accepted everything.
There was a part of her that questioned if this was a good idea - Harry had spent most of his childhood reconciling with the fact of his parent's murders. To drag it all up again when he'd just settled down seemed unnaturally cruel... but there was no other way about it. She couldn't forget what she'd learned.
With the boxes shrunk and carefully packed in her backpack Luna left the Auror department early for the day and headed out towards the Atrium. It was fairly quiet, only the intermittent roar from a Floo interrupting her walk towards the Apparition point. She hadn't called ahead. There was no way to prepare him for this.