Rating:
G
House:
The Dark Arts
Characters:
Luna Lovegood
Genres:
General Humor
Era:
Multiple Eras
Spoilers:
Prizoner of Azkaban Order of the Phoenix
Stats:
Published: 04/18/2004
Updated: 04/18/2004
Words: 1,329
Chapters: 1
Hits: 1,350

Shades of Purple

Daphne23

Story Summary:
'How did he get in?' When Sirius Black breaks into Hogwarts for the first time, the students are exiled to the Great Hall and purple sleeping bags. Amongst them Luna Lovegood, who is quickly formulating her own theories...

Posted:
04/18/2004
Hits:
1,350
Author's Note:
This fic was inspired by


'The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go past them into the impossible.' ~ Arthur C. Clarke

It was the most fun Luna Lovegood had had in a long time. First things first, she had always loved the Great Hall. She hadn't taken her eyes off the enchanted ceiling once during breakfast on her first day, following the raindrops from the point where they fell through the ceiling to the point several feet below where they faded out into nothing but dust. Three hand-waves in front of her face, two sniggers and a badly-aimed forkful of scrambled egg later, she'd finally recognised it was time to process to Herbology, and dropped her eyes at last. However, she hadn't yet grown past the desire to stare up and up at the ceiling, burying herself in the stars, not tracing old constellations, but seeing smiling faces of her own.

Secondly, there was the purple sleeping bag. Luna couldn't think how Dumbledore had known that she had always wanted a purple sleeping bag. In particular, one as cosy as this, a roll of thick soft velvet, the silky edge whipping past her fingers as if it were hardly there. Only somebody as truly mad as Dumbledore could have thought of it, she thought happily. And there were hundreds upon hundreds of them, spread the full length and breadth of the Great Hall, heads and purple sleeping bags, heads and purple sleeping bags. Luna was just another one among them. There was something comforting about that. She'd always stood out from the rest of them; she didn't mind at all, she'd never tried to change, but now, for once, she looked like everybody else. She snuggled deeply down in the sleeping bag and didn't even let her ears show. Keep your ears warm, her mother had always told her when she couldn't sleep.

Of course, this whole situation couldn't have come about at all without the third thing, and that was the invasion of Hogwarts by Sirius Black. "How did he get in?" they were whispering around her, words moving from mouth to mouth, eyes darting to the doors, a general atmosphere of expectation. They'd all been flicked out of their routines, and now anything could happen. Luna loved that feeling most of all, and before she knew it, she was popping out of her sleeping bag again, not able for even five minutes to keep still and quiet and conform. "I know what he did!" she said, loudly, as she always did when an idea burst into her head, showering her with sparks.

No-one asked her to continue, no-one was really listening, but it didn't matter to Luna. When she'd worked out something so important, she just had to get it into words, and it was much less vital who heard them. "Maybe he knows how to Apparate," she said, not bothering to explain this part in much detail. It wasn't terribly interesting. "Just appear out of thin air, you know. And then once he was inside - "

"You can't Apparate into Hogwarts," said somebody else, trying to look clever by echoing Hermione Granger's objection from a few feet away.

"Oh yes you can," Luna said. "Daddy says Hogwarts, A History had it all wrong, and it's silly to rely on just one book for the whole history of somewhere like Hogwarts. If you look properly you can easily find out that Godric Gryffindor didn't like riding up and down the country very much, searching for students, so he made sure that if you went up to the Yorkshire Moors and stood in a pond you could Apparate perfectly well."

Still no-one was lending half an ear to her, but Luna wasn't about to stop now, when she'd reached the true heart of her idea. "And once he was inside," she continued, "then all he'd have to do is turn into a Hibiscus syriacus. He can, you know."

"What on earth is that?" said a Hufflepuff nearby, sitting in a little crowd of Hufflepuffs. Luna had never liked the way they went around in herds. It must be so very boring.

"It's a type of flowering shrub," she said, watching them with her eyes wider than ever. Perhaps one of them would show a spark of originality. You never knew. "He can turn into one, that's how he got in. They're quite unobtrusive, if they're small. Nobody would notice one hiding in a corner, it would be quite easy for him."

"Oh, I like that idea!" said Hannah Abbott, turning back to the herd.

But it wasn't satisfying Luna any more. She had loved the idea of a hibiscus bumping its way along the corridors of Hogwarts, but they couldn't really move, could they? No, it must be a mutant form, she decided, with tendrils that could wind round things and pull. She could see it now, she thought happily, swinging its way from chandelier to chandelier...

The teachers were trying to quieten the Hall down now, though the sea of purple sleeping bags showed no sign of settling, and still moved and whispered as if the tide was coming in. Luna stayed very still again. She liked being very still. It took a lot of effort not to twitch in some way. She saw Professor Lupin patrolling the hall, taking his turn on the hour to check on the students. Poor Professor Lupin. Luna had felt sorry for him even since she had noticed the way that he was always ill around the full moon. It must be so difficult, being a Selehydran, although apparently the condition was fairly easy to control nowadays, and they didn't need to drink dew that had been in the full moon's light nearly so often. Still, it was never good, having to be different. Nobody liked you for that, did they? Luna beamed up at the professor as he passed, but he didn't notice her.

She looked around the Hall again and saw a door left open. In a moment, it would be safely locked again, but in that moment, Luna decided to act. The purple sleeping bag was perfect. She rolled herself tightly inside it, and knew that at whatever point she was seen in the mass of purple sleeping bags, she couldn't possibly be out of place. It was nice to fit in. She moved her way across the breadth of the Great Hall, slowly progressing towards the door, unaware of causing amusement for the students around her as she wriggled her way forwards. The patrolling teachers, however, did not see her go.

Luna stuck her head out of her sleeping bag when she reached the open door, and waited in utter stillness again. She was now at the very edge of the mass of purple, which was beginning to settle down, the continual whispering dying into an ebb and flow of sound. Red and gold, green and silver, blue and bronze, yellow and black, they were all submerged today in purple, and Luna liked that very much.

She heard soft footsteps a little way away from the door she was watching at, and clutched the silky hem of her sleeping bag in excitement. Perhaps they had caught Black, or rather, the Hibiscus syriacus. But no, they weren't footsteps, but pawsteps, a soft brush of fur against stone, the click of claws, the huffling sound of a dog's breath. Luna slipped deeper inside her sleeping bag, only her eyes peeking out, and didn't breathe for a moment. This is an empty sleeping bag, she thought dreamily, an empty one. I am not here. In the next moment the dog passed the door, a large dog that had been proceeding stealthily until now, but made a sudden bound for it and sped away.

The next day she told everyone who would listen that Sirius Black could transform himself into a great black dog, but nobody would believe her.


Author notes: Please review. I’m terribly critical of Luna fics myself, mostly because she’s one of my favourite characters, so I think I deserve any concrit I get.