The Count, Or, One One Thousand

Disclaimer: All recognizable people, places, and events herein are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic, Bloomsbury, and Warner Brothers, Inc. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only. Written pre-HBP.

One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four...

When she was a little girl, before her mother died and her father drowned his sorrows in the ink and heretical gospel of The Quibbler, Luna Lovegood had loved to play hide-and-seek, and that was the way she had counted off the seconds, forehead pressed against the rough bark of the tree, voice quavering with anticipation of the hunt. She had played by herself more often than not-there were few children in her vicinity, and what few there were thought her mad and whispered behind their cupped hands that her lunacy was borne of contagion-but she enjoyed the game all the same, whiling away the hours playing with obliging squirrels or friends only she could see.

She wasn't certain why she loved the game, though she often pondered the question as she searched for things she had misplaced or that had wandered off of their own accord. Things had a way of doing that, she had noticed. She might put a quill down on her night table only to reach for it later and find that it had pulled up stakes and migrated to the foot of her bed. She was hardly bothered by such instances. Just because objects were inanimate didn't mean they lacked a will of their own, after all. She simply squared her shoulders, picked up the item, and got on with the rather eventful business of being Luna Lovegood.

But...the game. Yes.

She supposed she liked hide-and-seek because it was a game of infinite possibility, a piece of childhood idyll swathed in magic older than the earth and potent as the faith of the caster. Even its ageless, singsong chant was fraught with joyful hubris, a call to adventure that could not be ignored. Ready or not, here I come. A proclamation of gleeful derring-do that had passed her giggling lips a thousand times on those torpid summer days when she was the only child in the world and she never knew what waited for her behind the next tree or in the nearest scraggly clump of bracken and underbrush.

And there was the count. She liked that best of all. Its slow, precise cadence was the first spell she had ever learned, equal parts mysticism and order, and its faultless constancy appealed to the part of her that would one day prompt the Sorting Hat to place her in Ravenclaw. Sometimes, even when she wasn't playing hide-and-seek, she would watch the rain outside and count the drops that spattered the window. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four- Constant as time and dependable as breath and oddly reassuring to a child who feared the Glibknock in the wardrobe and the crouching, slavering Pookijinx beneath her bed.

The cherished count had been with her on the day her mother died, anesthetized her with its blessed normality as she crouched in the dusty corner of her father's printing room and watched as the frantic Mediwizards and her white-faced father tried to count life into a body mangled beyond salvation. The Mediwizard had turned scarlet with the effort, and her mother's obliterated, ink-splattered head had bounced and lolled with every fruitless compression of her unmoving chest. To this day, she could still hear the Mediwizard's ragged voice, loud in the sepulchral silence.

One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four. The liturgy of patient futility.

There, unremarked in her corner, she had joined him, a tiny, strangled warble that came in time to the unconscious, pendulous rock of her body and the rise and fall of his hands. They had sung a hellish duet in perfect harmony, and she had kept on singing long after he had departed and taken her mother's body with him, tastefully guarded against the prying eyes of rubbernecking neighbors by a starched, white sheet. She had kept on rocking and counting until her father pulled her from the corner and carried her into her bedroom, and even then, it did not truly stop. When lips wearied, her mind continued the inexorable tick. On and on it went, from one one thousand to ninety-nine one thousand in an endless, numbing cycle until she lapsed into a merciful stupor.

The count had lost its innocence after that, but it remained with her all the same, her faithful, terrible companion. She used it to blot out things she did not wish to see. It kept the Glibknocks and Pookijinxes at bay. Those never left, no matter how hard you tried to banish them. They were rather like memories that way. Whenever they came slouching from the wardrobe or slithering from beneath the bed, she closed her eyes and began the count.

One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four...

Sometimes it worked. Sometimes when she opened her eyes, they were gone, returned to their dark haunts to await the next opportunity. Sometimes they were still there, red-eyed and rapacious, with serrated claws and poison dagger teeth that laid bare her secrets and festering hurts, and when they came for her, she held her breath, kept on counting and prayed to come out of the encounter alive.

Most times, though, she used it to quell the tidal wave of anger and hurt that churned in her gut whenever she was singled out by her Housemates for a prank. It was always her. Of course it was, and why not? She was Loony Luna, with the dreamy, inward-looking gaze and the bottle-cap necklace and unreasoning, unquestioning faith in the impossible. She was the irrational Ravenclaw, the girl whose mother had fallen, not at the merciless, crushing hand of Voldemort, but at the cruel caprice of a batch of printer's ink gone catastrophically awry. She was the odd duck, the Other. Let her be the sacrificial lamb, the one to bear the bitterness and grief of those whose loved ones had died a meaningful, if not dignified, death. It was her penance for not being as they were, and she had no choice but to pay it.

Hatred was a useless, blinding emotion that cost more than its meager value, and so she did not hate them, those students who dogged her steps and hid her quills and her homework and ground her oft-assaulted dignity beneath imperious heels. Hatred poisoned the blood and soured the bile in your throat, and in the end, it left you weak and wasted and clinging to your crushed hopes with broken fingers. Hatred brought the Glibknocks and the Pookijinxes from the dark places where the sun never shone.

No, she did not hate them, but she did resent them, and sometimes when the nights were cold and her namesake crept in through the window and painted the world silver, she lay in her bed, the heavy velvet hangings drawn round her bed to trap the heat, and played a wistful game of "What If?" What if her mother had never died? What if a Crumple-horned Snorkack emerged from the Forbidden Forest and lumbered across the castle green? What if Marietta Edgecombe and Cho Chang were crushed to powdered bone and quivering viscera beneath its oblivious, avenging tread, victims of a justice more sublime than she could dare hope? The possibilities were endless, and she followed their tantalizing threads until her eyes grew heavy, unspooling them with eager, inquisitive fingers, and in the morning, it was always better.

But of all the winding paths of maybe she had ever fashioned for herself from wistful longing and moonlight, this had never been one of them. Her nocturnal meanderings, no matter how melancholy, had always been threaded with a pragmatic hope, a single strand of gold among the black and grey of bitter disappointment, but there was no hope here, no spun gold, only blood and smoke and the high, sickly-sweet stench of rot and despair. She had come at last to the end of forever, and in place of peace and sweet vindication, there was only dull-eyed confirmation of her worst suppositions.

She had often thought of the day the War would come. She supposed most of the children who lived uneasily beneath its looming shadow had, but over the years, the leaden sense of dread and swooning inevitability in the pit of her stomach disappeared. The War was for later, a nebulous threat on a distant horizon. Fear of Dark Curses and skulking Death Eaters with venom in their hearts was supplanted by the more immediate terrors of adolescence-lessons and boys and the illicit knowledge to be found in whispering, damp corners known only to Peeves and garrulous Filch. Vigilance was for a tomorrow that would never come, if they were lucky.

Time and the fabled luck of the young had run out at last, and the War they had so studiously ignored had fallen upon them in a crushing wave of pestilential black. Doors that had stood for a millennium had been cast down with the grinding roar of splintering wood, and the Great Hall had become an abattoir filled with the blood of the woefully unprepared. Slack-jawed students and stupefied professors alike had fallen, fingers scrabbling for wands they would never reach. Sprout and Trelawney had fallen before anyone had the wherewithal to scream, and then the pregnant, incredulous silence had exploded in a cacophony of sizzling Curses and panicked screams.

She had watched the pandemonium around her with inexplicable detachment, a sloe-eyed golem rooted to her seat. Padma Patil, overcome by an excess of common sense and a finely honed sense of self-preservation, had dived beneath the table with a despairing cry, and Luna had shivered at the sudden rush of displaced air that marked her abrupt departure, but she did not follow suit. She merely sat, hands folded primly in her lap, and counted as her Housemates fell and the frozen stone floor grew slick and warm with blood.

One one thousand. An errant Curse shattered a goblet of pumpkin juice; its cold contents spilled into the blood pooled on the floor in a slow honey drizzle.

Two one thousand. Lavender Brown was nearly severed by a well-placed Severing Charm as she fought to gain the doorway. Luna had watched her shattered ribs expand through the gaping, ragged hole in the girl's back, and then Lavender Brown had toppled to the floor without so much as a whimper. The lion met her end with the silence of the lamb.

Three one thousand. Professor Snape hurled himself in front of the Killing Curse meant for the Headmaster, his penance come in the dazzling green of his House, and his life debt paid in full. He crumpled at the Headmaster's scarlet-booted feet, feet no longer distinguishable from the lifeblood beneath them.

Four one thousand. A Death Eater toppled, brought low by the true aim and serrated teeth of a Badger.

Then Ernie Macmillan had seized her by the collar of her robes, his fingers smeared with blood and stinking of copper and fish oil. The laconic stoicism had vanished, replaced by cold fury and a roiling giddiness. The worst had come, and she had met it unbowed. The Death Eaters had profaned her sanctuary, her cloister against the bitter past and the uncertain future, and for that, she would exact her price. She had fought them once before, with novice magic and a child's swaggering braggadocio, and she had driven them out. She would bring them to their knees again. They would not take this ground. Her lips drew back from her teeth in a feral, triumphant snarl, and she drew her wand.

But Ernie had drawn her away from her stand and her good death. Survival was not only a Slytherin desire, and he had no intention of being led to a martyr's death, and so he had fled, pulling her in his wake like an unwieldy kite. As they had lurched onto the castle green, wands clutched in sweaty fingers, she had found herself counting off the paces in that same implacable cadence.

She had reached fifty one thousand when the Burning Hex struck Ernie in the shoulder and turned him into a living candleflame. He had screamed until the fire blackened his vocal cords, and as his grip fell away from her singed nape, she saw that the narrow tips of his fastidiously clipped nails had begun to run, strips of greasy tallow.

She had reached ninety-three one thousand when the screaming stopped.

At ninety-eight one thousand, she had planted her feet in the muddy, sucking earth and turned to make her stand.

Her wand had burned with magic and with righteous spite, and from her lips had come the breathless lyric of the doomed. Incendio and Immobilus and Stupefy and lastly, the crowning jewel in her arsenal, Avada Kedavra. The Forbidden Curse that had made her shudder as a child, the ultimate Thou Shalt Not. She sang its harsh, guttural syllables in a frenzied paean, and it amazed how easily the taboo became the mundane once the line was crossed. The curses had rained down, green and red fire, and she had fought, a harpy with moonfire hair and charred flecks of a fallen comrade beneath her skin.

She had fought for it all, for honor and for dignity, for the fallen who would go unremembered after the ashes had scattered and the blood had soaked into the blackened soil. .

She had battled bravely and well, but in her haste to mete out justice from her trembling hands, she had forgotten. Yes, she had learned in the two years since her first encounter with Death Eaters in the damp, labyrinthine corridors of the Department of Mysteries, but as her knowledge had grown, so, too had their malice and cunning, and those beneath Voldemort's merciless banner had never been burdened with pangs of conscience.

Her laxity had cost her dearly, and now she watched events draw to their inevitable conclusion propped against the trunk of an oak tree on the perimeter of the Forbidden Forest, her left leg a crumpled, bleeding ruin beneath her. Blood and ivory against the black of school robes and bruised flesh. The air was hot and stale in her chest, and her lips were heavy and numb, the onset of shock, she supposed. She might have been mangled and dying, but the Ravenclaw in her would not go peaceably.

The air resonated with the screams of the dying as they discovered the truth she had always known. There was no heaven, only Hell.

And the end, of course. Always the end.

Evidence of it blanketed the castle green in a sea of shifting bodies and windblown robes. Ernie Macmillan's corpse smoldered on the grass, and the somnolent breeze sent him heavenward in a lazy spiral of smoke. Hermione Granger sprawled ten yards to her left, stiffening hand reaching for a wand forever fallen silent. Never again would she wander the towering, swaying stacks of Flourish and Blott's in search of indisputable superiority.

I don't know, Luna thought dreamily as the cold in her lips spread into her chest like a leaden weight. Perhaps she will, after all. Maybe she'll meander through the familiar confines in a whisper of white and frozen breath. They say the spirit returns to the place it loved best. Or maybe she'll remain here and join the ranks of the Bloody Baron and Nearly Headless Nick, prowling the corridors and waiting to dispense the secrets of the well-meaning swot to unwary firsties.

That made her smile. That would be a good fate. Better than the ignominious end of becoming a repast for blowflies. If, perchance, she returned as a spirit, she knew where she would dwell, where she would go to spend her eternal tomorrows. It wasn't a place, but rather a time, when she was but a child and the counting of the seconds had been a child's winsome game and not a dreadful compulsion she could not resist. She was counting even now, counting to the rhythm of her stuttering heart.

Yes, the end had come. Of that there was not doubt, and if she needed any more proof, she had only to turn her gaze to the barren patch of earth where Harry and Voldemort danced the last waltz, wands raised and feet moving in a seductive, serpentine box step. Harry's eyes were a vivid green behind his cracked spectacles, green as envy and the blinding, jade flare of the Killing Curse. He was almost smiling. He knew it was the end, one way or another, and he was glad.

They said that when you died, your life came full circle, not a linear thread, but a turning wheel, and sitting against a tree with the rasp of bark against her back and the smell of scorched green in her nostrils, she thought that was true. After all, she was a child again, playing hide-and-seek one last time. Only this time, she was not seeking. No, she was hiding, dodging Death's eager grasp until she saw the end with her own eyes.

Harry's wand arced upward, and against her will, she began the count.

One one thousand

Two one thousand

Three one thousand

Four...