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‘Loony Luna’, they call her, pointing to how she speaks to trees and how when she trips into streams her clothes never get wet. She shrugs and carries on; if she cares what anyone thinks, it never shows.
She sidles right up to Isabella Swan on her first day, as she’s moving in, and tells her, “You’re going to win, you know, so there’s no need to worry.”
In hindsight, she may have been a few years too early.
--
Bella is a wildcard. Luna’s friends around her house say she has visitors in the form of the vampires from the house in the middle of their territory; Eegzilah claims it’s the bronze male who’s so far been unaffiliated to any other mate, and Luna isn’t sure what to make of that. She sees a future of impossibly quick battles and of a child who grows faster than all but one other, she sees Bella with pale, pale skin and friends who change their shape without choice.
She sees a tiny vampire with eyes like a pensieve, a vampire with scars like the scorched earth, and so Bella’s attachment to her own vampire doesn’t seem so strange.
--
She doesn’t attend school. Ever since her second year of middle school, when a boy locked her in the boy’s bathroom on a dare, her father has never let her go back. He found a website that teaches based on how you learn and how fast you learn and left her to it. She doesn’t view it as a loss; now, she can do her schoolwork surrounded by her friends, and right over the fence is Isabella Swan, the girl who’s going to introduce her to the two who will never leave her alone.
--
The first time Edward invites himself over, she’s sitting cross-legged on Bella’s couch, smiling at Charlie’s potted fern that he lets her water when he’s busy. Charlie’s awkward without meaning to be, but in a small town full of everyone who’s heard the stories of ‘Loony Luna’, he’s nicer than most.
Edward is polite to a fault, though there is a moment where she’s just replied to the fern’s question of who is this human in my human’s home? And he hears the fern’s reply: well, even if they are a vampire, they better treat my human’s seedling right. She smiles gently in the general direction of Edward’s dumbfounded face and says, “Not to worry, he’ll do his best to keep her safe from her .” and that’s almost the end of it.
--
Bella lets herself into Luna’s yard most days. They’ve become fast friends, what with Luna being the only other non-vampire in Forks who knows about the vampires. Xenophilius is of the opinion that Bella’s fnixles are the good sort, so he generally doesn’t mind her presence. He’s even slipped and done magic in front of the girl, but Luna has assured him that Bella finds it fascinating and isn’t in danger of having her mind read; the girl’s the most powerful natural Occlumens Luna’s ever met. The vampire’s not getting anything out of her.
--
Bella doesn’t leave town with James on her tail. She kisses Edward goodbye, runs inside to smile at Charlie, yell that she’s sleeping over at Luna’s for a few days for a holiday Luna wants to celebrate, and packs her bag for a few days. She vaults over the back fence, rolls into Luna’s yard, and is carefully cradled by Luna’s friends.
“Bella!” says Xenophilius, crouched by the raspberry bush he’s cultivated in one corner. Luna doesn’t say anything; she just smiles.
Soon? Asks her own roses, lining the fence facing the street, wild and hungry, and Luna’s smile grows.
Oh, very.
--
James snarls at the fence, able to see and smell Bella but unable to step through Luna and Xenophilius’ wards. Luna smiles gently to him as Hatteline drops a shopping bag from a branch into her waiting hand.
“It’s not your fault, you know,” she says to him sympathetically. “This would have happened no matter what you did.” It’s a feeling she’s had.
She realized at the age of five that her ‘feelings’ were never wrong.
--
Luna likes long, draping dresses that fit well, with skirts down to her ankle. She swings through trees in them, likes how they slide through the air and drape over anything shorter than she is. In the small, childish part of her that’s slowly evolving into the larger, mature, magical person she’s becoming, she admits that it’s because it makes her feel powerful, like an ancient queen.
Xenophilius teaches his daughter anything she wants to know, any magic or plant or person. She knows why they fled their home in Britain, who Voldemort was, exactly how his torturers liked to use their toys on their victims. She also knows about plants that are carnivorous in nature, how there’s a root plant that lies in wait for something malevolent to pass overhead before all the tendrils of the plant attack from below like a sand spider, how the right plant could tear a vampire into tiny, burnable pieces and then set itself alight, only to sprout, days later, in a larger, wilder patch. Wixen call them Sleeping Evils and Daybreak Flowers, and Luna plants them all throughout her property as soon as she sees the vampires coming to Forks. She hides them everywhere inside the house, in the case of the wards failing: in her bedroom, beside the window in a decorated pot; in her father’s special greenhouse, next to the doors and by all the windows; beside the mailbox; hidden in little sprouts inside her rosebushes for added protection. She sows a button-hole in the collar of every shirt and dress she owns and pins a bloom of each inside, dull brown and whispering silver right beside each other.
--
She steps into the field delicately. She wore her favorite white dress. Its thin fabric billows in the light wind, and the slits up the legs make for an interesting breeze.
Jane’s seething eyes slip towards her, lighting up in a single moment, and Bella cries, “Luna! No!”, reaching with one hand towards her wispy little neighbor. Alice twitches, and Jasper stumbles in Luna’s direction, staring.
Luna smiles gently in that way she has, and when Jane’s stabbing power hits the edges of her mental shields she lets the branches of her friends wrap around her and lift her to safety. She settles like a child on a rope swing and sway back and forth.
“You’ve been called back,” she says quietly, letting the wind pull her words to Jane’s ears. “On counts of arson and bloodletting in the southern district of Heresy.” Heresy is a town of only vampires regulated by the Volturi. Arson and bloodletting are serious crimes; arson because fire is one of the only things a vampire can be destroyed by, and bloodletting is a dangerous way for a vampire to lose control and reveal them. Jane stares at her blankly for a moment, but soon a runner is coming up to her side and reporting the very same dutifully.
Luna has been petting a tree nearby and inspecting its leaves, but at that she says, “You’ll want to go back now, Jane Little,” and Jane shrieks in anger, starting to leap across the field towards her.
Luna turns back to her and pets the tree’s trunk again. Vines erupt from the earth, Venomous Tentaculas and Horned Fangs and Wild Hepshibah, and Wendolyn’s Weed curls feathery tentacles among the grasses like a tentative threat. Jane falters. The seedling of Daybreak Flower in Luna’s collar sprouts and extends sharpened roots like wings.
Luna smiles. It’s not gentle at all this time. “You’ll want to be going now, little Jane,” she says, and Jane’s stepping back now without even meaning to.
When they’re gone, Luna whispers to each plant and watches it sink back into the dirt like a trap. When she turns, Alice and Jasper are standing there, watching her, and Bella’s grinning with relief.
“Luna!” She says, “I’m so glad you could make it!”
“I always arrive exactly the time I mean to,” she says with a curtsy, and allows her mates to loop arms with her and lead her off the field.
--
EPILOGUE
--
Luna waves a palm over the ground of the clearing, growing a lovely little stool of vines and flowering man-eaters, and sits primly. She’s wearing a new dress today, a shy lavender with Creeping Death and Wendolyn’s Weed seedlings sewn into the hem and the ends of the sleeves. She doesn’t wear shoes (she lost patience with finding them years ago), but braided into her long blonde hair is a net of Wild Hepshibah, a plant extremely sensitive to magic that glows softly when sensing any form of magic around it. She wears rings of seedlings on her fingers and toes for extra protection, and before settling she scattered seeds throughout the clearing that need only a pulse of her magic to awaken.
The Battle of Hogwarts and Draco’s basement have prepared her for this one last stand, and she intends to do her very best to prove it.
Their group of misfits is staggered around her, and when Bella’s shield goes up around them she smiles and taps her toes against the loam of the earth.
“It’ll begin soon,” she assures her plants, and around the clearing, her friends shiver in anticipation.
--
Bella is loading Renesmee onto Jacob’s back when Luna says, “Oh, dear, there’s no need for that, look,” and Alice steps onto the field with Jasper behind her. Trailing last is a pair who glance nervously around at the gathered and their fighting forces. They begin to speak to the Volturi, but Bella’s barely listening. Luna looks as though she’s daydreaming, a twist to her mouth and a fade to her eyes reminiscient of Alice’s during her visions.
Luna’s smiling her mysterious little smile again as the crowd parts for Alice and Jasper to stand sentinel at her shoulders, and Bella can Aro’s eyes widen at the sight of the little witch, with her untameable hair and vines growing on her feet and hands and tearing through her clothes to create a living, breathing wild thing made of huge glowing orange flowers and small pinpricks of white light. Luna crosses her legs and places her hands on the armrests of her throne and says clearly for all to hear, “There’s no need for that, Bella dear. We’re all reasonable here.”
Aro stares at her, fingers twitching across all that space, and she stares back, challenging without making a single aggressive move.
He nods, signals, and the whole of the Volturi runs away.
Choreographically, of course. They must have their dramatics.
--
Luna writes Neville later.
Thank you for your gifts , she says, especially the Daybreak Flowers. They came in quite handy.
I’m glad to hear everything is going to plan , he writes back jokingly, aware as he is of her ‘feelings’, and with the letter comes a seed.
It’s called Empty Cradle , he says about it , it blooms when you’re in love, using your own magic as a sensor.
Alice and Jasper walk through her doorway at that moment, and Luna giggles when the little bell-shaped plant blossoms like an erupting volcano, blooming green and gold and the color of sunbeams through a window. Every bloom is unique because it represents you and the one you love, all together.
She, in true Luna fashion, doesn’t explain for many years why she never takes her little rainbow out of her button-hole. Eventually they stop asking.
That is, of course, when she answers.