"The Colors of Memory"; Luna Lovegood
Aug. 1st, 2006 12:35 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
slinkiestumble.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
femgenficathonTitle: The Colors of Memory
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
slinkiestumble (I signed up under my RL journal sitonamicrowave by accident, please excuse the error.)
Rating: Mature-ish
Word Count: 1,560
Fandom: Harry Potter
Warnings: Character death.
Prompt: 19. I found I could say things with colors that I couldn't say in any other way -- things that I had no words for. - Georgia O'Keeffe
Summary: Luna Lovegood and the colors of her mother.
Author's Notes: First off, many, many thanks tomad_maudlin for the beta of this. Uber helpful, she was, and I thank her mightily for putting up with my tangents. *wink* The rest of my notes can be found here, because they're not necessarily vital to the story per se, but some people might find them interesting, so who knows. They're long, which is why they're not posted here, you see. Yep, am a rambler, I am. In case you couldn't tell. *grin*
The Colors of Memory
Byslinkiestumble
It was a five walled room, where her mother had worked.
Five walls, evenly spaced, one filled with floor to ceiling books, magical, all of them. One with a desk and a work table, the rare instruments of her mother's experimental craft magically placed in their proper places, save the few she'd been using when the world had gone black and her mother….
Her beautiful mother, who she'd loved so very much, who hadn't known, couldn't possibly have known, that she was lurking at the hidden ceiling entrance to the hidden laboratory under the house, when she'd watched, terrified, as her mother simply vanished into that blackness, mind gone, even if her body had remained, crumpled on the floor for over an hour before she had had the strength to run and fire call her bewildered father from work….
The other three walls were filled with shelves—all full of colored glass vials… memories, the lot of them; her mother's dissected memories.
When her father had come home, he seemed not to notice the shelves at all; he couldn't take his eyes off his dead wife.
When the authorities were contacted (not more than ten minutes after her father had come home… he'd had to throw up a bit before he could fire call, you see), to investigate the mysterious death of a certain Mrs. Lovegood, the vials had simply melted into the shelves, instead replaced with Muggle romance novels, trashy, every single one of them, enough to make the lead Auror—a middle aged woman with dull red hair cropped tight around her face—blush like a school girl when she cracked open one of them and read page one-hundred and four aloud.
Mrs. Lovegood's death was, for all intents and legal purposes, classified as "random magical accident," though the accident itself couldn't be identified… but one little girl—dirty blonde, bugged blue-eyes, bound to be stranger than fiction after witnessing her own mother's demise—knew the truth.
After three months of simply sitting on the middle rung of the ladder that fell down into her mother's laboratory (while her father was, unavoidably, at work and her babysitter, Charlene, was out back in the pond splashing around with boys much older than her), Luna Lovegood finally worked up the courage to take a closer look at every single vial on every single shelf… and that was when she'd learned they were memories… of a sort.
Each one was a different color, none of them quite the same and they were all lined up, not according to date (that was handwritten on the bottom of each vial, however), but according to shade. They started at the bottom of one wall in a murky violet and moved slowly, but surely, through nearly every spectrum of the rainbow, until at the top of the third wall, on the very highest shelf, a row of faintly silver vials rested ominously.
Luna was a Ravenclaw before she was Sorted.
Her mother had been a Ravenclaw (not her father though, he'd been an oddball Slytherin) and it was from her mother that Luna took after most in terms of intelligence.
Her father gave her his looks, his humor, his tenacity, and her mother….
Luna came by her brand of curiosity from her mother.
And a Ravenclaw's curiosity, more than any other House's, was deadly, if piqued.
Luna, the day she very foolishly climbed off that ladder rung, took down a sky blue vial—literally, it resembled very much the sky on a clear spring day, so much so it was rather unnerving—from the middle shelf and pulled the corked lid right out of the vial, before lazily dipping her index finger into the substance inside.
Instantly, she was surrounded by the blue and then… and then the sky really was there, all around her, surrounding her entire body, but also something else: a feeling.
Luna was eight, would be nine in two more months, but she had spent many clear spring days with her mother, watching the sky, hoping for a cloud to appear and pass by, so the two of them could play Luna's favorite game of find-a-liger, or a jerrytellor, or a freshly picked kingfish flower in the cloud's patterns. That hope, exactly that hope, was what the surrounding blue sky made her feel—even while she wanted to feel something else, like amazement at her new discovery.
When the feeling didn't seem like it was going to fade and the sky was not going anywhere at all or changing even a little bit, Luna wondered if she should panic. Within this… within this blue, hope was suddenly overwhelming her, it was crushing her, making her heart speed up and her breathing quicken… and how did she escape?
Luna didn't.
Her legs gave out beneath her suddenly at the very thought of leaving, like they were made of lead and the sky, which seemed so bottomless before, developed a lead magnetic bottom, and plop, she was sitting.
Her eyes felt heavy, so she closed them and then… then she waited.
After what felt like an eternity later—so long, so, so long—she could hear Charlene's slightly worried voice calling out for her, up on the ground floor. Like magic, Luna was no longer surrounded by sky, but by five walls and her mother's entire life's work and her eyes were wide open and shining.
Charlene was starting to shout her name, now, loudly, so Luna hurriedly corked the vial, pushed it back into its place on the shelf, and dashed up the ladder, not wanting to be found in this place, where her father might forbid her to ever enter again if he knew she was in it at all.
That was the beginning of Luna's intimacy with her mother's fragmented memories, though she would not learn that they were fragmented memories until three weeks before her letter from Hogwarts arrived and she finally ventured forth from the walls of vials into the second drawer of her mother's desk, which turned out to be much deeper than it looked and contained dated—and color coded—handwritten leather journals.
She experienced many more colors before the journals yielded their secrets and many more after.
The murky red-black vial surrounded her with nothing other than a school hallway—Hogwart's fourth corridor, she would later learn, right outside the Ravenclaw statue entrance—and felt like pure rage, the red-black burning into the back of Luna's eyelids, so bright, while taunting voices whispered constantly around her, saying the most awful things a nine year old Luna could imagine.
The pale, pale yellow-green vial that placed her on a broom stick with no sky above her (there was no above her, at all, actually) but with a faint outline of grass below, felt like fear, even when she tried to close her eyes against it.
The oh-so-cool white vial (one shelf below the silver ones) placed her knee deep in snow and felt like joy, felt like the moment right before launching into cold snow, to spread legs and arms out in imitation of an angel's body print.
The bright indigo vial felt like laughter. The dull orange felt like hunger. The moldy brown felt like disgust. The shiny gold felt like wonder. The deep blue felt like security. The fire-red felt like passion. The mustard-yellow felt like anxiety. The dazzling pink felt like approval. The dark green felt like rot. The soft purple felt like awe. The dim gray felt like dread.
Every color had its own corresponding image, stuck like glue and immersed completely in one overwhelming emotion—pain, love, excitement, terror, amusement—meant to occupy someone for eternity… trap them, even.
The journals explained, after Luna sifted through them, that each color was an isolated physical representation of the exact emotion Luna's mad scientist mother had been feeling in each fragmented and concentrated memory she'd magically dissected from her mind, for the purpose of close study (those silver vials were non-dissected memories, still fully intact, but Luna never went near them, too scared of what she might find, what memory she might see and not be able to recognize).
Luna's mother had been examining happiness (or so the last appropriate color-coded journal had led her to believe) when she'd exploded in black, when her mind had exploded, completely and absolutely… when she'd left Luna motherless, stunned, and absolutely motionless for fifty-three minutes and seven point six seconds.
Luna's mother died, enveloped in some happy memory Luna would never get to dip her finger into, while Luna remained at the trap door, utterly stricken and completely engulfed in blinding blackness, the absolute mix of every color in existence.
At Dumbledore's funeral, during her fifth year at Hogwarts, when Luna stood beside Neville Longbottom, a sixth year Gryffindor, lemon drop earrings hitting her cheeks and three pairs of socks nestled on each foot, hand-knit, beneath her paisley-imprinted robes, Neville leaned over and asked Luna if she were sad, because he was.
Luna thought of sadness as her mother had left it to her, thought of brick walls and a shallow, pale red, like an unripe apple or a sun-bleached Gryffindor scarf and nodded.
Yes, this was something like sadness, she thought. Something like it, but, no… not quite… it…
For Luna Lovegood, it felt more like exploding black.
Author:
slinkiestumble (I signed up under my RL journal sitonamicrowave by accident, please excuse the error.)Rating: Mature-ish
Word Count: 1,560
Fandom: Harry Potter
Warnings: Character death.
Prompt: 19. I found I could say things with colors that I couldn't say in any other way -- things that I had no words for. - Georgia O'Keeffe
Summary: Luna Lovegood and the colors of her mother.
Author's Notes: First off, many, many thanks to
mad_maudlin for the beta of this. Uber helpful, she was, and I thank her mightily for putting up with my tangents. *wink* The rest of my notes can be found here, because they're not necessarily vital to the story per se, but some people might find them interesting, so who knows. They're long, which is why they're not posted here, you see. Yep, am a rambler, I am. In case you couldn't tell. *grin*The Colors of Memory
By
slinkiestumbleIt was a five walled room, where her mother had worked.
Five walls, evenly spaced, one filled with floor to ceiling books, magical, all of them. One with a desk and a work table, the rare instruments of her mother's experimental craft magically placed in their proper places, save the few she'd been using when the world had gone black and her mother….
Her beautiful mother, who she'd loved so very much, who hadn't known, couldn't possibly have known, that she was lurking at the hidden ceiling entrance to the hidden laboratory under the house, when she'd watched, terrified, as her mother simply vanished into that blackness, mind gone, even if her body had remained, crumpled on the floor for over an hour before she had had the strength to run and fire call her bewildered father from work….
The other three walls were filled with shelves—all full of colored glass vials… memories, the lot of them; her mother's dissected memories.
When her father had come home, he seemed not to notice the shelves at all; he couldn't take his eyes off his dead wife.
When the authorities were contacted (not more than ten minutes after her father had come home… he'd had to throw up a bit before he could fire call, you see), to investigate the mysterious death of a certain Mrs. Lovegood, the vials had simply melted into the shelves, instead replaced with Muggle romance novels, trashy, every single one of them, enough to make the lead Auror—a middle aged woman with dull red hair cropped tight around her face—blush like a school girl when she cracked open one of them and read page one-hundred and four aloud.
Mrs. Lovegood's death was, for all intents and legal purposes, classified as "random magical accident," though the accident itself couldn't be identified… but one little girl—dirty blonde, bugged blue-eyes, bound to be stranger than fiction after witnessing her own mother's demise—knew the truth.
After three months of simply sitting on the middle rung of the ladder that fell down into her mother's laboratory (while her father was, unavoidably, at work and her babysitter, Charlene, was out back in the pond splashing around with boys much older than her), Luna Lovegood finally worked up the courage to take a closer look at every single vial on every single shelf… and that was when she'd learned they were memories… of a sort.
Each one was a different color, none of them quite the same and they were all lined up, not according to date (that was handwritten on the bottom of each vial, however), but according to shade. They started at the bottom of one wall in a murky violet and moved slowly, but surely, through nearly every spectrum of the rainbow, until at the top of the third wall, on the very highest shelf, a row of faintly silver vials rested ominously.
Luna was a Ravenclaw before she was Sorted.
Her mother had been a Ravenclaw (not her father though, he'd been an oddball Slytherin) and it was from her mother that Luna took after most in terms of intelligence.
Her father gave her his looks, his humor, his tenacity, and her mother….
Luna came by her brand of curiosity from her mother.
And a Ravenclaw's curiosity, more than any other House's, was deadly, if piqued.
Luna, the day she very foolishly climbed off that ladder rung, took down a sky blue vial—literally, it resembled very much the sky on a clear spring day, so much so it was rather unnerving—from the middle shelf and pulled the corked lid right out of the vial, before lazily dipping her index finger into the substance inside.
Instantly, she was surrounded by the blue and then… and then the sky really was there, all around her, surrounding her entire body, but also something else: a feeling.
Luna was eight, would be nine in two more months, but she had spent many clear spring days with her mother, watching the sky, hoping for a cloud to appear and pass by, so the two of them could play Luna's favorite game of find-a-liger, or a jerrytellor, or a freshly picked kingfish flower in the cloud's patterns. That hope, exactly that hope, was what the surrounding blue sky made her feel—even while she wanted to feel something else, like amazement at her new discovery.
When the feeling didn't seem like it was going to fade and the sky was not going anywhere at all or changing even a little bit, Luna wondered if she should panic. Within this… within this blue, hope was suddenly overwhelming her, it was crushing her, making her heart speed up and her breathing quicken… and how did she escape?
Luna didn't.
Her legs gave out beneath her suddenly at the very thought of leaving, like they were made of lead and the sky, which seemed so bottomless before, developed a lead magnetic bottom, and plop, she was sitting.
Her eyes felt heavy, so she closed them and then… then she waited.
After what felt like an eternity later—so long, so, so long—she could hear Charlene's slightly worried voice calling out for her, up on the ground floor. Like magic, Luna was no longer surrounded by sky, but by five walls and her mother's entire life's work and her eyes were wide open and shining.
Charlene was starting to shout her name, now, loudly, so Luna hurriedly corked the vial, pushed it back into its place on the shelf, and dashed up the ladder, not wanting to be found in this place, where her father might forbid her to ever enter again if he knew she was in it at all.
That was the beginning of Luna's intimacy with her mother's fragmented memories, though she would not learn that they were fragmented memories until three weeks before her letter from Hogwarts arrived and she finally ventured forth from the walls of vials into the second drawer of her mother's desk, which turned out to be much deeper than it looked and contained dated—and color coded—handwritten leather journals.
She experienced many more colors before the journals yielded their secrets and many more after.
The murky red-black vial surrounded her with nothing other than a school hallway—Hogwart's fourth corridor, she would later learn, right outside the Ravenclaw statue entrance—and felt like pure rage, the red-black burning into the back of Luna's eyelids, so bright, while taunting voices whispered constantly around her, saying the most awful things a nine year old Luna could imagine.
The pale, pale yellow-green vial that placed her on a broom stick with no sky above her (there was no above her, at all, actually) but with a faint outline of grass below, felt like fear, even when she tried to close her eyes against it.
The oh-so-cool white vial (one shelf below the silver ones) placed her knee deep in snow and felt like joy, felt like the moment right before launching into cold snow, to spread legs and arms out in imitation of an angel's body print.
The bright indigo vial felt like laughter. The dull orange felt like hunger. The moldy brown felt like disgust. The shiny gold felt like wonder. The deep blue felt like security. The fire-red felt like passion. The mustard-yellow felt like anxiety. The dazzling pink felt like approval. The dark green felt like rot. The soft purple felt like awe. The dim gray felt like dread.
Every color had its own corresponding image, stuck like glue and immersed completely in one overwhelming emotion—pain, love, excitement, terror, amusement—meant to occupy someone for eternity… trap them, even.
The journals explained, after Luna sifted through them, that each color was an isolated physical representation of the exact emotion Luna's mad scientist mother had been feeling in each fragmented and concentrated memory she'd magically dissected from her mind, for the purpose of close study (those silver vials were non-dissected memories, still fully intact, but Luna never went near them, too scared of what she might find, what memory she might see and not be able to recognize).
Luna's mother had been examining happiness (or so the last appropriate color-coded journal had led her to believe) when she'd exploded in black, when her mind had exploded, completely and absolutely… when she'd left Luna motherless, stunned, and absolutely motionless for fifty-three minutes and seven point six seconds.
Luna's mother died, enveloped in some happy memory Luna would never get to dip her finger into, while Luna remained at the trap door, utterly stricken and completely engulfed in blinding blackness, the absolute mix of every color in existence.
At Dumbledore's funeral, during her fifth year at Hogwarts, when Luna stood beside Neville Longbottom, a sixth year Gryffindor, lemon drop earrings hitting her cheeks and three pairs of socks nestled on each foot, hand-knit, beneath her paisley-imprinted robes, Neville leaned over and asked Luna if she were sad, because he was.
Luna thought of sadness as her mother had left it to her, thought of brick walls and a shallow, pale red, like an unripe apple or a sun-bleached Gryffindor scarf and nodded.
Yes, this was something like sadness, she thought. Something like it, but, no… not quite… it…
For Luna Lovegood, it felt more like exploding black.
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-01 04:25 pm (UTC)I like the lemon-drop earrings and the three pairs of socks -- such a perfect tribute.
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Date: 2006-08-01 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-01 05:02 pm (UTC)I'm off to read your notes, then. :)
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Date: 2006-08-01 08:09 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2006-08-03 07:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-04 06:51 am (UTC)I had tears in my eyes at the end, and the lemon drop earrings were a great touch.
Again, great job.
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Date: 2006-08-04 07:00 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2006-09-06 03:13 pm (UTC)I loved the details, so vividly described, the feelings. I can sense a story of gigantic proportions here, inside this is a biography. You made that beautifully evident.
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Date: 2006-09-08 06:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 12:17 pm (UTC)This was wonderful, a really beautiful look at the way a child deals with bereavement. The whole concept of assigning colours to emotions is really evocative - quite synaesthetic.
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Date: 2006-09-14 04:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 02:23 am (UTC)That is a gorgeous beginning. Because it seems so simple, but... five rooms? So right away I was pulled in.
and how odd that her father wouldn't notice the shelves, only his dead wife? <3 <3
Gah, and your turns of phrase in this are just outstanding:
Luna was a Ravenclaw before she was Sorted.
and …a Ravenclaw's curiosity, more than any other House's, was deadly, if piqued.
There are just all these elements of interesting characterization, presented as fact, if you will, that make this such an engaging read. ♥
and the timing thing? Of course there would be an exact figure to the motionlessness.
Oh, god, this was beautiful. Seriously. I love when people write Luna, and this was so beautifully on. THank you for linking this. This will stay with me for a while. ♥
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 06:08 am (UTC)I'm particularly proud of this piece, because Luna really came alive for me, when I was writing it. That's always the best part for me, when the characters come alive, let's me know I'm headed in vaguely the right direction.
Plus I just love Luna to bits. :)