Sitting on the window seat by her bedroom window, Luna was perched on the flowery print at four in the morning. She hadn’t slept yet--how could she? The previous day’s excitement in receiving the letter from Neville had not yet worn off and today itself was one of her favorite days: Christmas. She had promised her father not to wake him until six, so here she sat. Waiting.
The glass frosted over and when Luna touched her face against the window pane, cold cooled her cheeks and she lifted her head away. Smiling, she saw the wind whipping flakes of white dust around outside the walls of her home. Then a devious idea threaded its way through her mind. In a flash, Luna had opened her room, and her room was now alive with dancers and they spun around her room, landing on her furniture and floor.
Despite her shivering in her pajamas, Luna didn’t seem to feel the cold that crept through the room like a looming beast, ready to devour her whole. Instead she danced along with the snow as it cascaded in funnels over her, sticking in her golden locks and crunching beneath her slipper-clad feet. She did not feel the keen sting the beast created as it blew its breath in her face. She simply walked on, gazing at her newly-frosted room.
That was when she decided to stop her flouncing about. When all of a sudden she could feel the cold; feel the beast breathing down her neck. But she had been too late. The beast had already ensnared its victim. And there would be no escape. Though she did not know this yet.
Brushing the dusty white off her bed covers, Luna sank into the mattress, piles of blankets laid upon her. Yet she shivered still. But finally, Luna drifted off to sleep, the chill still biting at her toes.
- - -
When she woke, she couldn’t move. Alarmed, she struggled desperately to call out to her father, but her lips would not part. The only signs of life in her still form were her shallow breaths and wide eyes. Fear crept through her, the beast of cold eating her up from the inside out.
She should not have opened that window.
She should not have invited the beast into her home.
She should not have been so foolish!
Disguised as a pleasurable flurry, her sacred safe haven had been penetrated by that horridly lovely beast’s wintery grasp. And now she was paying for it. Dearly.
She lay there, her voice punching her frozen lips, begging them to release their hold. And finally, a piercing, mangled sound sprung from her closed lips from deep inside her throat. To Luna’s cold ears the noise sounded quiet as a whisper, but soon she heard the sound of a chair falling in her father’s room and a banging as his door flung open.
And he was standing there, his bath robe billowing in the cool air the still-open window threw at him.
“Luna!” he gasped as he appeared by her side, worry creasing his forehead and fear biting his bottom lip. With the wave of his finger, the window slammed shut and the piles of snow disappeared from sight. Then, he touched her ice-cold cheek, recoiling at its frigid state. Instantly, he scooped her up in his arms, blankets tucked into the crook of his arm and surrounding her, and he dashed down the stairs to the kitchen. Gently propping her up in a chair, he threw a flame from his wand into the wood stove and turned up the heat.
Relief flooded his eyes when at last Luna’s lips parted in the slightest. She wanted to tell him. She wanted to tell him so badly what awful thought had just occurred to her, but as she drew an intake of breath to speak, her frail body was wracked with a coughing fit.
As she recovered, her father worked furiously at boiling a large kettle of water.
“Daddy,” she croaked in a rough, used voice. And there he was, his hands on her knees, staring at her gleaming blue eyes with his silvery gray ones. “I don’t think this is just ordinary Muggle hypotherm-” she stopped mid-sentence as more jagged coughs coursed through her. Her father waited patiently, anguish clear in his worn features. “Hypothermia,” Luna restarted. “I think it’s something…more.”
Her words hung in the air as silence followed. And then her daddy sighed. A great, heaving sigh. One that could only come from deep exhaustion or unpleasantness. Mr. Lovegood seemed to be experiencing both.
And as the father and daughter regarded each other fearfully, the teakettle whistled at its boiling point. But neither one heard its cry.
YOU ARE READING
Luna Lovegood
Fanfiction[BOOK ONE] Loony Lovegood--the girl everyone made fun of. The girl with more to her than what meets the eye. She's different, you know (although I presume you already figured that out for yourself). She's special, and she has a story, too. Foll...
