Bottlecap Scars

Bottlecap Scars

No one ever really notices the jagged bottle cap shaped scars on Luna Lovegood's palms. Stretched and distorted.

***

Luna slips into the underground laboratory in the small manor of the Lovegood family. She lets the door click closed behind her softly, but her mother hears it anyhow.

"Luna darling, mum's busy with her work. Why don't you go outside and play? It's a beautiful day. You might be able to find a Red-Bellied-Juggerlizard," she says in a sweet voice from the far side of the room.

Luna edges her way forward, clutching a toy wand. "Mum, can I watch if I'm quiet?"

Luna's mother sighs with a smile. She takes off her thin wire glasses and looks down at her daughter. Luna is a stick thin girl with long wispy blond hair. It floats about her heart shaped face. Mrs. Lovegood takes her daughter's chin in her fingers and squeezes lightly.

"Alright darling, if this is where you'd rather be. You can pull that stool over here and help me. Alright?"

Luna beams and jumps off to get the high stool from the corner. She drags it noisily across the room to the opposite side of the table and climbs on top. She holds out the toy wand and mimics the motions her mother performs on some cut up plants. Next to them are two small cauldrons stewing with the beginnings of some experimental potions. Mrs. Lovegood adds the plants to the first cauldron and smiles as Luna pretends to add her own to the other.

Mrs. Lovegood wears a long white robe with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. It is spattered with stains and burned in a few places from work she's done in the past. She has her strawberry blond hair pulled back into a half ponytail to keep it out of her eyes as she works. She slides her wand back behind her ear and flips a spellbook she has nearby a few pages ahead.

Luna slides the little toy wand behind her ear also and leans over the table to try to read the book upside down. Mrs. Lovegood starts making some notes on a scroll of parchment. Her writing looks very complicated to Luna, it is filled with symbols and calculations she doesn't recognize. Her mother told her that the things she wrote were all a form of something called arithimancy. She said it was how magic was made.

"Mummy, when will I be able to do real magic like you and Daddy?" Luna asks in a dreamy tone.

"Ah Luna, we've talked about this before. You know you have to wait two more years before you can go to Hogwarts and learn to use your magical abilities properly. All little witches and wizards have to wait until they are eleven to go," Mrs. Lovegood says as she looks over a list of plant properties.

"If I have to go to Hogwarts I'll have to be away from you and Daddy," Luna sighs sadly.

"Darling, you will have many great adventures at Hogwarts. Your father and I went there too when we were young. That's where we met, you know. You'll get to be sorted into a house where you'll make a lot of good friends and you'll get to take interesting classes. Think of all the things you'll learn to do! You know what they say, 'wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure'. And you, Luna, will be one of the smartest witches at Hogwarts. Do you know why?"

Luna thinks hard but is forced to ask, "Why?"

"Because you are so curious! And curiosity is a wonderful asset," Mrs. Lovegood says with a knowing grin.

Luna's mother pats her daughter's hand. She passes Luna a spare bit of parchment and a quill. "Would you like to take some notes as well?"

Luna nods and takes the quill. She starts drawing and writing down spell words she knows. She tries to copy some of the pictures from the book her mother has opened. Her mother gets up and goes to a storage cupboard. She pulls out some new ingredients to work with. It is a strange purplish plant with a lot of little leaves all over it. She begins stripping the stalks of their leaves.

"Mummy, Daddy says when we go to South America next month we'll get to see the Chameleon Saber-Toothed-Sloth if we're lucky."

"Yes, if we're lucky. They're very difficult to spot because they can camouflage themselves and turn into whatever they're standing on. But your father has collected all of the legends about them and knows just where to look. Some of the elder Amazonian wizards say that if you scare them, they'll turn bright blue. That's how we'll catch them."

Luna grins and her little blue eyes shine brightly.

Mrs. Lovegood adds a handful of the leaves to the second cauldron and stirs it vigorously. The potion inside turns a vivid red. Mrs. Lovegood gives it a disappointed look and glances at her notes. She rubs her temple and adds a few sentences to the bottom of the parchment.

"Luna darling, why don't you go get us a few cold butterbeers to drink?"

Luna blinks a few times and nods to her mother. She hops off of the stool and runs out of the laboratory. She climbs the stone steps up into the first floor of the manor. As she walks down the hallway, she hears her father in his study, scratching furiously with a quill. He had a long interview with someone important the day before and wanted to put it in this week's addition of the Quibbler, the newspaper that he ran. She skips off to the kitchen and finds the collection of bottles below the counter. She takes two of the butterbeers and carries them carefully back down the hallway. Her father is talking to someone through the Floo, it sounds like another reporter. They argue.

Luna slowly carries them down the stairs, watching her feet and taking each step one at a time. She pushes open the door with her foot just in time to see her mother pouring the first cauldron into the other.

There is a loud explosion and a cloud of orange fills the other side of the room. Luna drops the butterbeer bottles when she hears her mother scream. Mrs. Lovegood stumbles out of the cauldron fumes with her arms around her face. Her upper body is freezing into purple ice, her head starts to turn into marble stone, stuck in the horrified look she directs at Luna. Her left arm clutching her frozen chest looks as if it were made of green glass, the other arm outstretched toward Luna looks like white ceramic. She starts to fall toward Luna, reaching, her face petrified. Her legs are becoming fluid and fall like water onto the ground. The ice of her body shatters against the wet stone floor.

Luna looks at her.

What's left of her.

Luna cautiously reaches for the porcelain like hand, cut off in shards at the forearm. Luna's hands are covered in butterbeer and her pant legs are splattered with liquid that had been part of her mother only moments ago. Her fingers brush against the bottle cap bracelet wrapped so delicately around the hand that was her mother's hand but could be a doll's - it's so fine like china. The string holding them together to the broke wrist disintegrates at the touch. The bottle caps clatter over floor. Luna is frantic to have destroyed her mother's favorite bracelet, she desperately gathers them into her tiny nine-year-old hands.

It's then that her father bursts through the door.

It's then that he starts crying out. Yelling. Screaming. Noises Luna's never heard her father make. He's uttering disjointed words that sound like her mother's name combined with things that fit in prayers. He grabs her roughly by the tops of her arms and pulls her into him as he staggers backward out of the room.

He slams the door shut behind them. Shut on her mother who's in pieces on the floor. Shut on his wife of thirteen years. He sinks to the floor with his back to the barrier between them and her.

It's then that Luna starts crying. Yelling. Screaming. She wasn't afraid until she realized her father was. She wasn't horrorstruck until she saw horror in his face. His mouth open, tears streaming down into the creases of his skin.

He clutches her too tightly against him. And he tells her of a place just out of reach. Of a place where no more terrible things could occur. He tells her of a place where one day they would all be reunited. He tells her of somewhere he, a man who believed so many things, has never believed existed. He only hopes that she will, and somehow that would make what she saw today a bit more bearable.

Luna clutches her mother's bottle caps too tightly against her palms.