Head-canon and fugue (variations on TMI) - Luna

[wemyss]

 

1. Luna knows madness when she sees it, and knows herself sane.
2. She’s aware, also, that were her father just a little poorer or just a trifle less well-bred, he’d cease to be ‘eccentric’ and be ‘mad’; actions excused in a literary gentlewizard with antiquarian interests are met with Ministry intervention in a fellow of no consequence.
3. She really cannot see why it is that people fret so over these things.
4. After all, the dead are not so far away, life is only an episode - and a fleeting one - before the Next Great Adventure, people do eventually become one’s friends, and at the end of the term before school break up, people do eventually give one one’s books and things back.
5. People aren’t destined to be evil after all, and few of them really become so. Misguided, yes, desperately unhappy and lashing out in response, but wicked? If only someone kind had taken an interest in them early one … Tom Riddle, poor dear, or Bellatrix Black-as-was….
6. After all, even Cis and Draco did what they could to make things nicer when she and Mr Ollivander and the rest of them were detained at the Manor.
7. She knows that doesn’t make sense to, well, some people (Harry, say, and Hermione); but - well, Harry, to use one example, isn’t really terribly perceptive, he thinks in categories (the military mind, but, then, he is an Auror), and poor dear Hermione, well: she has never quite understood the world she has come into, and things of the spirit, and that there really are more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamt of in her philosophy and neatly docketed in books and indices.
8. She does feel that dear Father did damage - to himself, not to her - by failing to live up to his standards and principles, but that’s in the past, quite forgiven, and after all, he was worried for her and had never really recovered from Mummy’s death - and all because he’d forgotten to take the long view, and let himself be caught up in the shadows of things earthly and transient.
9. Most people do do that, she’s afraid.
10. And it’s all so unnecessary.
11. And ephemeral. Everyone has the Inner Light to guide them, if only they’d see it.
12. (Yes, the Lovegoods of the Vale of the River Otter have been Friends time out of mind. Well spotted.)
13. So much of what seems coldness and unkindness and even wickedness is, truly, simply fear, and ignorance. Laying up the wrong treasure in the wrong place. That is why it is wit beyond measure that is the true treasure.
14. Of course people who mean ill to others must be stopped, restrained, for their own sakes as well as for the good of the community. But they mustn’t be cut off, after, from hope and rehabilitation.
15. That is why Luna has established charities and foundations for humans as well as for beasts and beings. After all, an abused Crup doesn’t realise how to confront the world save with fangs bared; why ought anyone to expect anything else from Witches and Wizards who’ve made poor choices and then been forced to live with the consequences?
16. Harry once - fondly but impatiently - said she’d worse than rose-coloured specs, she’d flowers in her eyes. As a fan of Three Dog Night, that bothered her not at all. Rather perceptive of him, really.
17. It was saddening that it wanted one last spasm of violence and insurgency in their world to drive home the points about forgiveness and rehabilitation she’d tried to make, but even out of that evil had come good. As it ever does.
18. She misses Rolf, as she mourns all the victims. He was peaceful. But she’ll see him again, after all, and she has her sons, and Neville, who lost his Hannah in that same attack, is an excellent stepfather to the twins.
19. Mind, Nev’s not quite as placid as Rolf was. The fashion in which that man works himself up over Lancashire cricket, particularly when they’re playing Yorkshire….
20. At least he’s a good influence at Hogwarts, carrying on where Albus Dumbledore and Remus Lupin left off. Luna is serenely confident that, someday, Gryffindors may yet learn that courage wants an object; Hufflepuffs, that loyalty requires an object, and is too important to be wasted upon persons rather than principles; Slytherins, that ambition is meaningless without a goal; and Ravenclaws, that learning and cleverness is sterile absent a purpose. She has certainly tried to teach this to the children and her godchildren and all the children of the War generation.
21. Faith as a conviction of things unseen has always been her watchword.
22. Sometimes, she wonders that Wizards and Witches, with far less excuse than Muggles, do not recognise that they and their magic are a part of the natural order, Dirigible Plums and all, a link in the great chain of being.
23. Sometimes, Luna is taken aback by the ways in which Wizards and Witches, with far less excuse than Muggles, attempt - and they can but attempt - to cut themselves off from the natural magic, and isolate themselves from it.
24. At which point she rolls up the sleeves of her robes and sets to work again to educate them.
25. Gently. Subtly.
26. In parables and koans.
27. It doesn’t bother her in the least that this is a lengthy undertaking - particularly with the young, full of animal spirits (Lorcan and Lysander specially so) - for she knows she has all the time in the world.
28. That had been where Mummy had erred: she’d been impatient, she’d wished to hurry things, and all she’d done was to hurry herself to the Next Great Adventure.
29. Luna knew better. There was time, there was always time, and so long as there was paper and ink and printing presses, she’d multiply time and tongue by as many thousand fold as wanted, when and as she wanted.
30. Of all the scents she loves, even those of tilth and garden and wood, the best of all is ink.
31. The scent of ink and paper, the coruscating fizz of magic, the rhythm of the printing press, always call her back to her earliest infant days, with Mummy laughing and Father chortling as she played amidst the formes and boxes, chases and galleys, where the composing stick is a wand mightier than any Hallow….
32. There is always time enough. It all comes right at the end. People, she insists, do learn.
33. She has friends, and faith, and these are golden chains that link them all, even as she had painted the links of friendship once upon her ceiling. All else is trumpery illusion - death not least. What can harm her, truly?