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Luna is sharp.
She is sharp like Ginny’s hand as she casts her bat-bogey hex, sharp like the look in Hermione’s eyes when she argues, sharp like Ron’s mind when he plays chess.
She is sharp like Neville’s heart when he readies himself to do something, sharp like Harry when he is unhappy.
Luna is sharp and she lets them all forget it, hides the part of her that’s raw and jagged and likes to come out when her shoes have gone missing.
The stones of the Hogwarts floors are smooth and sanded but she imagines them cutting into her feet, cutting like the edges of her do.
She blinks sometimes because she expected blood and there isn’t any.
People laugh at her for it, look at her and look down, look at this hunched madwoman who doesn’t belong and Luna doesn’t let her sharpened talons strike them.
She tucks her wand behind her ear so she knows where it is, so that it doesn’t get stolen. That’s what they think.
Luna tucks her wand behind her ear like it is the pin on her grenade, so she doesn’t just hex them all. That’s what she tells herself.
She could never bring herself to hurt them, not even these bullies but she tucks that far beneath the jagged edges and they’re already buried so deep she doesn’t think they’ll ever see the light of day.
Sharpness doesn’t always happen naturally.
But she thinks it grew on her, slow and rottingly like fungus. She eats no more mushrooms after that.
Sometimes she likes sharpness, likes the cutting edge. It punctures the way she thinks she might just float into the sky one day.
When Luna was five, she decided to watch the sun go to bed.
She’d tried to drag her mattress out to sit on it but it was too heavy for her so she just went as she was.
Her mother, Pandora, went mad with worry when she forgot to come back, forgot to go to her bed and instead lay down on the yellow-green grass that poked a bit but let her look up at the stars.
She’s never stopped looking up since.
Her mother had scolded her, even as Luna stared at the ceiling of the Rookery and found it lacking.
She hadn’t missed her mother’s sharp edges though and maybe something in her started to shift to match - children learn how to behave from their parents after all.
Then her mother went somewhere she couldn’t follow and she thought about sharpness when she saw her cold, cold body and thought perhaps coldness was sharp too.
So she presses her feet against the Hogwarts’ stones and they aren’t sharp enough to cut but they are cold and maybe that is the same thing sometimes.
Her mother went and she covered her sharp edges.
Her father has no sharp edges that she ever sees, just unspooling ones like when you put on the thread sticking out on you clothes and slowly, one row at a time, they start to unravel.
Her father wasn’t gone and Luna thought that maybe sharp edges were what took you away so she hid hers.
She tried to pull one of her loose threads instead only it didn’t work so she cut a little and then pulled and pulled and pulled.
But there was so much tapestry, so much fabric that she had to stop.
She stared at the ceiling instead, thought of its ugliness and remembered that the blood had stained the stones so there must be some to stain the ceiling. She wasn’t quite ready to use anyone’s but she went looking anyway and found powder.
Luna mixed it with water and it stuck.
It stuck so she tried to make the stars.
It didn’t work and Luna realised that maybe things you saw with your eyes couldn’t be replicated.
Years later, when she plastered her friends on the roof, she drew them as what she could see on the inside, not on the out. It worked well enough that the outside resembled them well too.
She painted her own constellations on the roof instead and her daddy told her about all the shapes they formed, all the creatures that lived so close.
Luna never joined up the dots in straight sharp lines. She let them curve instead, the way lines are meant to.
Maybe she would hear the expression that nature does not have straight lines. Maybe she wouldn’t. But she lived by it anyway, even when her essay lines overlapped ever so slightly.
Years later, she responded to the door knocker that circle had no beginning nor end. Ravenclaw isn’t just the house of wit, don’t forget. It’s the house of wisdom too.
Maybe it was the absence of straight lines that gave her her answer. Maybe she’d just heard the riddle before.
It doesn’t matter.
It certainly didn’t matter to Luna. There are only a few things that do, only a few things that truly mean something.
Luna usually recognises them by an uncomfortable feeling in her chest that becomes warm afterwards.
Take Lily Luna Potter’s name for example. Ginny had winked at her then.
”Harry wants to name her after Remus.”, Ginny says, “And I agreed because I’m naming her after you. He’s chosen enough of our children’s names.”.
Lily Luna Potter grew up with that knowledge, that she was named after Moony but more after Luna Lovegood. She holds it close to her chest but that is Lily Luna’s story, not Luna’s.
Luna’s story is a sad one perhaps.
It’s a story of a girl with no human friends until much later on, a story about a girl who walked barefoot along the cold stones and pretended it was because she wanted to and not because all her shoes were missing.
It’s a story of a girl whose mother died, whose father unravelled and tried to patch himself together with the pages of the Quibbler. It’s a story about a girl who was so far away she didn’t see others slip under the surface, too high up. She liked the Ravenclaw tower the first time she went in, like down being so high above the ground. The higher up you already are, the less scary it feels to go higher.
It’s the story of a girl who got frustrations taken out on her, who riled them up even further without realising it sometimes and knew what she was doing most of the time. They were going to hurt her anyway and she can’t be blame for letting her sharp edges show.
It’s the story of a girl who told the hero wholeheartedly that the DA felt like having friends, who simply wasn’t enough in the light of the rest of them.
It’s the story of a girl that ran a resistance group in Hogwarts, the story of a girl who honed herself enough that she could deliberately rile up Death Eaters to get the attention off the younger ones, something no one realises sometimes. It hurt even though she wasn’t looking for acknowledgment but she buried that too.
It’s the story of a girl kidnapped by Death Eaters as if they hadn’t already done enough.
It’s the story of a girl whose father had sold out their best hope in the war for what he professed to be her sake. It was the first time she’d seen his unravelling and realise that as the threads on the weft pulled away, that left the ones on the warp, sharpened like needles. His unravelling was sharp and it took her a long time to forgive him for that. To forgive him for daring to suggest that she was worth more than victory.
It’s the story of a girl who could not sit still anymore, who had to roam.
It’s also the story of a woman that always came home, of a woman who refuses to roam alone much of the time, of a woman that finally, finally let her sharp edges out.
Maybe that last one should be of a girl because her sharp edges had already emerged slowly over the years. They grew like fungus and they kept growing like fungus.
She starts eating mushrooms again.