Author: Lyta Padfoot
Category: General, Angst
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Harry Potter is the property of J.K. Rowling. Characters and situations are used without permission, no infringement is intended.
Summary: Those in love with the night and its creatures are often misunderstood during the day.
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As a child she attempted to bottle moonlight so she could hold it in her hands like water during the day. The night suited Luna, her parent's choice of given name may have predisposed her to an affinity for the night, but she chose to surround herself with symbols of the darker half of the day and tolerated the sunlight hours. The night and her creatures sang to her until she became one of them. She was not a creature of darkness but one of those rare souls who reflected the paler light of stars and moon instead of the blinding sun favoured by most.
Even before Hogwarts she knew the patterns of the constellations and their histories. The seven sisters of the Pleiades were her favourite stars - many were the hours she leaned outside her bedroom window, squinting up at the ink-black sky to make out the faint seventh star. Her books told her the seventh star was dim because that sister married a mortal; Luna sympathized with Merope's treatment, her mother's family did not regard her half-blood father with warmth.
Though she owned a telescope, Luna preferred her own eyes for the stars. She did not want to see their pale light through anything else. For years she believed nothing could touch her like the beauty of the stars, then the moth danced across her field of vision.
She was with her father, when she saw the delicate green creature flutter over her head and into the concealing upper branches of a tree. Its beauty captured her and she felt privileged to share her name with the ethereal luna moth. She sat still for hours hoping for just another glimpse, before her father finally felt compelled to break with his usual custom and send her off to bed. Luna seldom had to deal with enforced bedtimes; her parents believed sleep a personal thing whose quantity was a thing best left ungoverned by outside wishes.
Its time with her was not even a grain in the hourglass of her life and yet she missed it dearly. Back at home, when her mother asked what flowers they should plant in their back garden, the girl with the misty eyes suggested night-blooming jasmine in the hope that the moth would come to rest on the flowers. The fragrance clung to her mother's clothing and after her death the girl would bury her face in an old robe of her mother's and remember that conversation. No delicate pale green moths graced the Lovegood garden, but Luna never gave up her hope that someday they would.