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Luna Lovegood sits under a great ash tree with a handful of glass beads.
Her dirty blonde hair is tangled with brambles and flowers plaited sporadically through messy tresses. In the sunlight, it glints like the tarnished, golden candelabras of the Great Hall of Hogwarts. If Luna is an angel, her hair is her halo and the weaved plants are her robes.
She breathes softly. The air of the Forbidden Forest is thick with magicks— the world is so much clearer when she sits in the mossy underbrush, bare feet digging into the rich soil. Conflicts of humanity become so mundane in comparison to the overwhelming comfort of the whispering gusts of wind and the creaking of the ancient trees.
Magicks lace around her fingers and imbue the beads glimmering in her palm with a wildness so unlike the sombre lilting of the Lovegood Family Magicks. The wildness is like a tempestuous storm, a feral coyote, or perhaps a burr clinging to an animal’s pelt; it seeks another host to cling to, corroding all that it touches, a parasite of complete neutrality. Neither benign nor malicious, it seeks power to satiate the soils of the forest.
The Lovegood family is long gifted with magicks most arcane, and Luna is another bearer of the gifts. She hears the murmurs of the rocks beneath her bare feet, the cries of the wildflowers in the summertime, and the song of all the winds around her. Her hands are caked in mud, knees scraped, and dress torn, but she is one with the woods. She listens to the austere utterances of the dead with one ear that she adorns with generations old strange earrings to protect her soul from tarnish.
Beads fall from her palms, scattering in the thick greenery around her. Luna shudders, her pale shoulders falling back as if pulled by invisible ropes. And there may be ropes, spun of aeons of human misery, that tie to each of Lovegood blood and soul. Or perhaps Luna is simply a baby bird who has fallen from the nest before she can fly, struggling to bear the weight of her own wings.
Sharp talons grasp her body and wrench her head upwards to the sky. Her mercury eyes glow bright in the dim light of the forest, illuminating the undersides of leaves and the crevices of the spindly trees. Luna does not speak, but her mouth opens in the horrific image of a dreadful scream. The only sound that exits her throat is a raspy inhale, long and drawn.
Some might compare the sound to the death rattle of the Dementors, but the Lovegoods know it as The Calling.
Around her, spectres appear with a dull blue light. Their presence brings waves of sorrow that latch onto anything living. The leaves of surrounding plants shrivel in distress, but the great ash tree remains unaffected. If one were to record the exact moment the first spectre appeared, they might find that the ash tree shifted with the influx of spirits, leaves brighter than ever.
Nobody else of the living realm is near, and the trees do not speak their secrets— not even to Luna, with whom they share the rumours of the root systems and their daily woes.
Luna returns to the mortal plane, falling to her insouciant state once more. She looks around the clearing at the women who stand in various states of despair. They fix her with a similar gaze to that of her reflections in the mirrors of the Hogwarts washrooms; their eyes are wide, mouth slightly parted, and looking just past her.
She smiles mournfully at her ancestors, tugging at her corkscrew necklace.
“Who will speak to me on this night?”
A moment of silence passes, and the forest waits with unusual quiet for the monthly verdict. Birds that normally squabble over lovers and over nesting branches sit in quiet curiosity while foxes in the underbrush look with intelligent eyes towards the gathering.
A girl sinks to her knees, head bowed. The other spectres’ heads jerk to the sky before vanishing with less than a gust of air against Luna’s lightly freckled cheeks.
“Lovegood Calling is received,” she whispers, brown hair falling in ringlets around her elbows.
Luna cocks her head, staring at the other girl. She is several years older than Luna, though not much taller. She wears a tattered dress of patchwork, colours muted in the monochrome glow of her presence. Ashes and scorch marks stain the patterns.
When the girl looks up, Luna is met with tearful eyes and open palms with a glass bead much like those scattered across soil and plants. She meets Luna’s eyes and begins to speak.
“Centuries past, our family was gifted magicks unknown to humans. The stars crossed the night sky of Hallows Eve and when we lit our fire to eat, our fingertips began to thrum.” Her voice cracks, but the girl does not shift from her kneeling spot in the moss.
“The fire bloomed like the dandelions of the spring, climbing until their home was nothing but cinders.”
Tears run down cheeks stained with ash.
“I am Patience Lovegood, daughter of Verity Lovegood. I speak of our ancestral mother, Jejune Lovegood. She is the beginnings of our traditions.”
Luna is still watching the girl— Patience— with keen eyes. Her fingers trail along her own forearm with unconscious motion, unaware of the anxiety burning within her.
Patience opens her mouth to speak further, but she chokes. None of the spectres of her family she has met previously has ever been incapable of storytelling, and Luna’s heart wrenches.
“Jejune Lovegood was burned at the stake by her own husband a week after. I am her daughter in magicks.”
The Forbidden Forest has never seemed so quiet until now, and Luna reaches out to Patience with soft fingertips. For an awful moment, she wonders if her hand will simply pass through the girl like everyone passes through the other ghosts of Hogwarts. Her hand meets the warmth of Patience, and Luna sobs.
Another onslaught of raw emotion is like a knife to her side, or perhaps her chest. Luna is not quite sure where it hurts the most. She ducks her head and leans into Patience and her shuddering form.
Stars glimmer above them by the time their tears have stopped falling. The trees cast shadows upon the girls sitting beneath the ash tree, but the shadows are welcomed. They do not speak for many moments, choosing to sit in warm company a while longer.
Luna looks at Patience and she finally speaks. “Do you forgive her?”
Patience wrenches her head backwards, fear clouding her hazel eyes. Her lip is quivering and Luna meets her expression evenly.
“I,” Patience begins. She freezes and ducks her head.
She doesn’t know, and Luna does not blame her. Luna doesn’t know if she would forgive Jejune Lovegood for their gifted curse. She doesn’t know if she would forgive the girl who killed her.
Forgiveness is a complex thing, and perhaps Luna knows it best, the oddity of her school and town. Her father had wanted to homeschool her, as all Lovegoods had been until Pandora Lovegood. Something in her mother’s death shattered him, and then he no longer held the same drive to share all the world’s delights with his daughter.
She does not forgive Xenophilius Lovegood for diving into the same magicks that took her mother. They took him just as much as they did her, and Luna has never had anyone to fend for her except for the family magicks that drive her from all normalcy of other children.
Barefoot Loony Lovegood with dirty hair and bruised limbs is seen among the tall grasses near Ottery St. Catchpole, just out of reach. She does not trust anyone, not even Molly Weasley, known to be kind to any person in need, for they all regard her with the same pity mixed with disdain.
In so many ways, Luna has been spared from the same feud as her ancestors, her mother running away at twelve and ending up in England. She will never have to speak to an Abrams like Patience, her mother, her grandmother, or her great grandmother have, living on a property next to their long time nemeses. She will never face the town’s pointed fingers when someone dies, even if she faces their disdain while collecting fish at the creek by her house.
And in the end, she is still so lonely, as all Lovegoods are; Lovegoods are born together and die together, and Luna does not have the family to surround herself with. She turns to the family magick that her mother tried to push away so desperately. They grant her the family she does not have, the family that has deserted her for reasons she wishes she understood.
No, she does not forgive her parents; forgiveness hurts in ways that bullying never will. She does not expect Patience to forgive either, for sometimes it is easier to hold a grudge or simply forget.
So she sits. She waits. Luna and Patience, side by side under the stars.
Eventually Patience looks at the beads clutched in her hands, and she utters several words that make her far stronger than Luna will ever be.
“I forgive her.”
Luna smiles at her and offers one of her own beads. She does not say anything and she thinks she wouldn’t know what to say even if she wanted to speak. Where her classmates might try to fill an awkward silence, Luna lets it fill itself. Sometimes human speech is simply incapable of conveying the emotions she wishes— this moment is one of those moments and she simply lets it pass.
“I forgive Cassie Abrams for my death.” After a pause, she adds, “I forgive Jejune Lovegood for my curse.”
She smiles back at Luna and they sit a while longer. As the sun begins to rise, Patience grows less and less corporeal, eventually sliding through Luna’s own body. Patience stands up then, and she nods to herself. Her hair bobs slightly at the movement.
“Luna Lovegood,” she says softly, “I will return the next time you call. I will be next to you, always.”
“I will miss you, Patience Lovegood. You are family whom I love dearly.”
Patience smiles again. Her hands that hold the glass beads are the only part of her that remains opaque. As her face and body begin to disappear completely, she tosses the beads into the air.
“Until next time, little Moon.”
The Glass Beads scattered on the floor glow brightly and Luna begins to collect them, one by one. She thinks this is the best day of her life, perhaps even better than the day that Ginny Weasley cursed the boy who stole her bag with all its peculiar contents.
Luna has a family again, and she awaits the next new moon with bright eyes and a rare joy. A string of beads, Patience’s beads, join the corkscrew necklace that she never removes. The next time she sees her reflection in the polished trophies, the scrubbed glass panes, or the mirrors of the washrooms, Luna is proud of her blood and family.