Book Of Wonder And Woe
Luna keeps track of history.
The Daily Prophet had a sidebar, on the last of its special-coverage pages, about the Malfoys being brought low again. The Quibbler, on the other hand, splashed a tragic photo of Narcissa hurrying Draco away from the train station, her mouth set and eyes burning furiously, white hand clenched on Draco's shoulder and white-blonde hair streaming back. Inset, there was an archive photo of their Wiltshire mansion, its gargoyles all gesturing rudely to the viewer.
The headline read, House of Malfoy: Dame Narcissa and the Last of the Line?
Luna keeps a scrapbook for these things. Not just followers of Voldemort, but the beautiful and the tragic of any stripe. A book of wonder and woe, and she likes the melodrama of how that sounds. Her father says she has a journalist's emotional constitution.
She razors out the page from yesterday's Quibbler and pastes it down.
The book is filling up faster than she would have thought possible; the last year and a half alone, she's filled more than half of it, though she has kept the book since she was ten.
Or nine; it's hard to remember. The first picture is of her mother on her exchange year at Beauxbatons, her hair in messy pigtails, laughing as she aimed a baguette like a wand.
Luna doesn't look at that photo very often. Her father let her choose as many pictures and keepsakes as she wanted after Mum exploded, and Luna only looks at them twice a year. Once on Mum's birthday, once on her own. If she looked more frequently, she might drain their magic.
Things have magic, Luna is sure of it, magic well beyond her ability to point a wand and speak Latin.
This picture of Narcissa, for example. She's nearly dazed with grief and anger, her face tight as a death's mask, and yet Luna cannot stop staring, can't look away, can't not admire the beauty. She wonders how something - someone - can be both gorgeous and wrong, beautiful and evil, at the same time.
The entire scrapbook asks that question. Mum's death was wrong; she shouldn't be young and laughing while she's dead. Bellatrix Lestrange's coming-out portrait, all garnet lips and depthless black eyes in a porcelain face, shouldn't make Luna bite the inside of her cheek and crave bitter lemon sorbet. And Narcissa Malfoy should not be glaring over the shoulder of her black linen robe, her mouth twisting knowingly at Luna.
What do the pictures see?
Luna used to think she was just collecting pictures of beauty and tragedy. Over the last two years, however, she's felt much more than just sad when she looks at them. She likes feeling sad, likes the way tears prickle at her eyes and her chest constricts, but now she also likes feeling hot, shifty. Like things inside her, woven through her muscles, are sliding together, sparking from the friction. Like she's giving some magic back, like something warm and syrupy is being drawn out of her by the pictures.
Desire, or lust, that's what it is, and hormones, too, if Hermione's reports of Muggle doctors are to be believed. Strange potions cycling through her body, pushing out breasts up top and hair down below and under her arms and blood every month and this. Hot, bubbly, confusing need.
It's not just the pictures and it's not just her. Nothing comes from nothing, after all, so it's her, Luna, in Luna's body, looking at the pictures. Looking at Narcissa.
On her bed, rucksacks packed for Sweden and lined up at the door like waiting children, Luna leans against the wall with her knees drawn up and the scrapbook balanced on the tented fabric of her robe. She slides one hand under her robe, tickling the inside of her thigh, until it comes to rest on top of her mound, outside her knickers.
Narcissa isn't Mme. Malfoy, nor Draco's mum, not any more. She's something Luna's never known and doesn't really want to know, but she's like a statue. An icon, enraged and glorious and beautiful, and Luna slips two fingers under the elastic of her knickers, scissoring around her clit, stroking the line where her inner lips meet. Those eyes fastened on her, gleaming as Narcissa strides away, daring her to go on, and Luna rubs a little harder. Slick already as she imagines how weightless and cold Narcissa's hair would be in her hand, how the back of her neck is probably as bony and white as her son's, seed-pearls for her spine, what her shoulders would look like as the robe slips off them.
In one gesture, magic and lust, Luna touches herself-touches Narcissa-makes Narcissa touch her. The action and the actors slide and change as she brushes her knuckles over her nipples and one finger into her slit, and it's not about beauty, not anymore. Luna's bringing herself to that terrifying point where she doesn't care - couldn't ever have cared - about right and wrong, pure-blood snobbery set against stout-hearted bravery. That point is sunk in Narcissa's eyes, spread over her cruel smile, and Luna rolls her thumb knuckle over her clit, feeling it throb and thicken, and pushes her index finger against her hole. Wet and aching there, and she can't breathe, and the tears in the corners of her eyes are more than sad, more than fear.
Narcissa's tongue inside Luna would be hot, snakelike, twisting inside like her finger is now, parseltongue shivering through Luna's body, and Luna would clutch at Narcissa's bony shoulders and tilt up her hips, just like this, opening wider and tossing back her head, and she wouldn't care.
She'd be worse than any Death Eater, because she wouldn't believe, she would just need, just like she needs now, need and want and take and give herself and not believe in anything beyond Narcissa's mouth and her glittering eyes.
Narcissa would know all that - she does know that, she's narrowing her eyes in the picture and giving Luna a serpentine smirk that Luna catches in bright fragments as her head rolls and her chest heaves and she pushes two fingers inside herself, where she's wet and clenching and amoral, and she twangs her thumb against her clit, harder and rougher - bad, faithless, loony girl, Narcissa would say, let Mummy help - until she comes.
Coming, pushing her hips and banging her head against the wall, coming and coming, constricting and writhing, pinching her nipple to make it last. Her eyes are closed, jagged stars white as Narcissa's skin zooming past her in the dark, and as the tremors slow, as her body kicks out the spasms and she finishes, cupping herself and catching her breath, she realizes the book has slid off the bed.
It lies facedown on the floor, broken and splayed open, and her arm shakes as Luna reaches for it.
She can't leave for holiday too soon. She won't be taking the book.