It's easy to find Luna, since she doesn't really try to hide. Other
Hogwarts students find her sitting by the lake, contemplating the
beauty of the Earth and everything else that makes her life possible.
She sometimes skips stones, and occasionally Harry Potter comes to toss rocks with her, their coexistence silent except for the soft plunk of flat chunks of the lithosphere gliding smoothly over the water.
If it's dark and lonely, Slytherins sometimes come to be with her, sitting rigidly on a rock and glaring as if to say, 'Don't you dare tell anyone I was here with you,' or perhaps, 'Why can't I see the world the way you do?'
Although she's never explained it to anyone, Luna knows about the great cosmic beauty of the place and how it knew somehow that she belonged there.
The ripples on the surface of the lake were meant to happen, in the same way that the fish that had created them knew their purpose. Animals understand reason better than humans. Instinct tells them how to maintain the balance of their lives and the lives of everything else, and this makes them content.
The more human a creature is, the more it struggles to understand. Centaurs study the stars to find their purpose. Diviners study tarot cards and crystal globes. Giants and giantesses express their confusion about it all with violence.
Humans are so lost that they don't know where to begin.
Not Luna. She smiles when others don't see any reason to and laughs at the birds in the sky because it's all so amazing and senseless.
She can appreciate everything. When she sits by the lake and watches the squid splash students by the shoreline and the clouds crawl across the sky with the wind and the owls delivering messages to their owners and the bugs in the sand scuttle frantically to where they want to be, it works exactly right, even though it makes no sense. Luna thinks that it's really lovely, and she's glad she's a part of it, a small grain on a ten thousand light- year long beach with no footprints on it.
There was never a being that would have guessed the universe would turn out quite the way it did. Tightly unified by the most basic characteristics, but blind and deaf to the fact.
Not Luna. She understood how the Earth revolved and how the solar system spun and how the galaxy traveled and how the universe was suspended in a barely comprehensible expanse of mystery. It was beautiful, moving in a reckless and uncontrollable way. Four billion years ago, she would have considered the possibilities and imagined Planet Earth to look just the way it did four billion years later.
At the times when most people would wrinkle their noses and proclaim something was going wrong, Luna would grin vaguely and gaze off into space, wherever that happened to be. When the world was at war, that was acceptable because it was the simple course of things. Luna speculated that when the world started to understand the way she did, there would be peace and tolerance, and that would be okay too, since it was, after all, the simple course of things.
Luna's seen life and she's seen death. It's all a great large pattern to her, the way water evaporates and precipitates. It's meant to happen when it does, and will probably stay that way for a very long time. How long, Luna isn't sure, because she is only human.
It's silly of Voldemort, really, to want to rule the world. If he manages to win, all it would take to crush him would be an accurate idea of just how much there is that he's missing. It just isn't worth the bother.
Luna could rule the universe if she wanted to. When she closes her eyes and imagines it, she knows she's the only one who can.
---
Please review.
She sometimes skips stones, and occasionally Harry Potter comes to toss rocks with her, their coexistence silent except for the soft plunk of flat chunks of the lithosphere gliding smoothly over the water.
If it's dark and lonely, Slytherins sometimes come to be with her, sitting rigidly on a rock and glaring as if to say, 'Don't you dare tell anyone I was here with you,' or perhaps, 'Why can't I see the world the way you do?'
Although she's never explained it to anyone, Luna knows about the great cosmic beauty of the place and how it knew somehow that she belonged there.
The ripples on the surface of the lake were meant to happen, in the same way that the fish that had created them knew their purpose. Animals understand reason better than humans. Instinct tells them how to maintain the balance of their lives and the lives of everything else, and this makes them content.
The more human a creature is, the more it struggles to understand. Centaurs study the stars to find their purpose. Diviners study tarot cards and crystal globes. Giants and giantesses express their confusion about it all with violence.
Humans are so lost that they don't know where to begin.
Not Luna. She smiles when others don't see any reason to and laughs at the birds in the sky because it's all so amazing and senseless.
She can appreciate everything. When she sits by the lake and watches the squid splash students by the shoreline and the clouds crawl across the sky with the wind and the owls delivering messages to their owners and the bugs in the sand scuttle frantically to where they want to be, it works exactly right, even though it makes no sense. Luna thinks that it's really lovely, and she's glad she's a part of it, a small grain on a ten thousand light- year long beach with no footprints on it.
There was never a being that would have guessed the universe would turn out quite the way it did. Tightly unified by the most basic characteristics, but blind and deaf to the fact.
Not Luna. She understood how the Earth revolved and how the solar system spun and how the galaxy traveled and how the universe was suspended in a barely comprehensible expanse of mystery. It was beautiful, moving in a reckless and uncontrollable way. Four billion years ago, she would have considered the possibilities and imagined Planet Earth to look just the way it did four billion years later.
At the times when most people would wrinkle their noses and proclaim something was going wrong, Luna would grin vaguely and gaze off into space, wherever that happened to be. When the world was at war, that was acceptable because it was the simple course of things. Luna speculated that when the world started to understand the way she did, there would be peace and tolerance, and that would be okay too, since it was, after all, the simple course of things.
Luna's seen life and she's seen death. It's all a great large pattern to her, the way water evaporates and precipitates. It's meant to happen when it does, and will probably stay that way for a very long time. How long, Luna isn't sure, because she is only human.
It's silly of Voldemort, really, to want to rule the world. If he manages to win, all it would take to crush him would be an accurate idea of just how much there is that he's missing. It just isn't worth the bother.
Luna could rule the universe if she wanted to. When she closes her eyes and imagines it, she knows she's the only one who can.
---
Please review.