Entry tags:

100quills, fanfiction, fic: far away as moonshine

FIC: Far Away as Moonshine, 22/28
Title: Far Away as Moonshine, Part III: Seven Years Later
Author: zephre
Rating: PG (R for whole fic)
Prompt: 100quills table 50.2: Miracle
Word Count: 2,030
Summary: For Draco Malfoy, the war was one endless nightmare. Until Luna Lovegood gave him a reason to hope. Can he find his courage, make his luck, and become more than a pawn to those in power?
Warnings: (for whole fic, highlight to view) *mature themes, imprisonment, mention of rape, abuse, battlefield violence, various canon and other character deaths, sexual situations*
Concrit Wanted? Sure! Please alert me to typos or errors of continuity.

Chapter Index:
Part I:   1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 ||
Part II:  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 ||
Part III: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 ||
Epilogue

Chapter 4: In which Luna gets a tattoo.

Early August, 2005
Somewhere in southern Mongolia


It had been a long time since Luna had been so quiet, or so still. After so many weeks of talking, first to Elder Tymas and then to the desert itself, it felt odd to say nothing for so long. Tymas had been quite insistent, however, that the silence must be kept.

"Sit here, child, and meditate on the change you wish to make. You must decide tonight whether or not to go through with the ritual.  Sit. Keep silence until it is time to speak. Keep still until it is time to move."

"How will I know when that is?" Luna had asked, getting comfortable at the top of the pillar of red rock. She was winded after the climb to the top, but settled quickly into the breathing patterns she had been taught. 

Tymas had smiled, just before Apparating himself back to the camp, his last words lingering in the air. "You will know." Sometimes the old shaman reminded her disconcertingly of Professor Dumbledore.

   


When she first arrived in June, after blowing all of the fuses in her muggle hotel when she tried to cast a simple shrinking charm on her trunk, she had known nothing but the blinding fury of her impotent magic. She could not remember any time in her life so full of chaos, so utterly beyond her capacity to cope. In the past, she had been able to see beyond the immediacy of things, into present and future, into distance, even into soul. She had known such wonder once.

The memories brought no nostalgia now, only deepening despair.  
    


"Nasai Luna, we must take down the ger*," her hostess Aramte told her, brightly cheerful at dawn in that first week.

Luna turned away, curling into her own misery. "Go away."

"Nasai Luna, it is time to make the meal," Aramte said gently, in the evening, after they had all walked miles to a new place, one practically indistinguishable from the last place to Luna's clouded eyes.

"I'm not hungry," Luna replied, jerking herself out of the woman's grip and moving to the very edge of the fire's light.

"Nasai Luna, it is time to brush the horses," Aramte said softly, holding out a wooden comb.

"I don't care," Luna said, crossing her arms as she continued to sit, listless and useless, in the shadow of the woman's loom.

She spoke to no human but Aramte and Tymas, in that first week, and looking back upon it Luna knew that she had deserved no kindness.
   


Tymas sat in his tall ger, awash in the overlapping scents of incense, sour milk, and horse. There was a foal inside, in fact, whinnying every so often to interrupt the sorry tale Luna told him. Well, perhaps 'telling' was too gentle a word. She shouted much of the time. She cried, too. He gave her cloths to wipe her eyes and face, he gave her ayrag** in a bowl to moisten her throat, and perhaps to loosen her tongue, for her magic may be disrupted but it was not gone, and ayrag was a powerful potion.

When she paused to drink after a long rant about the battle, Tymas spoke very quietly into the silence. "Tell me about the marks on your skin."

Luna choked, sputtering ayrag onto the soft blankets at her feet. "I can't."

Tymas nodded, serene. She contemplated the merits of throwing the bowl of ayrag at him. "Very well. We will begin again tomorrow. Go out into the desert tonight, and speak of these things to the rocks if you can."

   


It went on like that, Tymas listening as Luna talked her way through her mother's death, years of hazing at school, fighting in a rebellion at Hogwarts, then being a prisoner, then fighting in the battle. She told him about her father and the Quibbler, about Harry and Neville and Ginny, about the baby coming, about Rolf and the bridge in Ireland. When July was just beginning, she told Tymas about the letters from Draco.

When she heard herself speak of it, the events changed. Her mind reshaped them with every repetition, and Tymas's desert exercises forced her to hear the reality of her own voice. It was better than a Pensieve in some ways.

By July, she woke with Aramte at dawn to take care of their horses, she cooked and wound balls of fine yarn and learned to mend leather. By July she was able to think about herself as someone other than a broken witch, useless in either magical or muggle worlds. By July she could think about the war and see more than horror. In mid-July, she told Tymas about the cellar, and showed him the runes carved into her skin. He examined them gravely, and touched, with her permission, the one between her shoulder blades. Then he leaned back and spoke no more that day.



It took her weeks to say Dolohov's name. Tymas was quite patient.

"He is the one who wrote the spell upon you," the shaman said, when at last she had uttered the name.

"Yes," Luna whispered. "It was a cutting curse, simple enough I suppose, but what he had behind it-"

"Malice," Tymas interrupted, "rage, lust, and envy. Despair, too, and shame. I can see them, in the scars."

Luna blinked.

"It is a subtle magic, and one forbidden by your Ministry, I believe. Like an Unforgivable Curse - unforgivable by whom? Did you never wonder?" Before Luna could process the tangent, Tymas waved his hand and returned to his subject. "It is like the disease of the Muggles, that eats away at flesh from within. The scars carried the curse, your magic fed it, and now it is tangled like a thread within you."

Luna pulled her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms around them. "Can it be healed?" she asked.

"This Dolohov - he is dead, yes?"

Luna looked away. "I killed him."

Tymas grunted, perhaps in surprise. "Hm. Death unbinds some magics. It may be that will be of benefit. We cannot pull the thread free without killing you as well, but we can control it, do you understand? Bind it from your heart and from your aura. But you will not be quite the same as you were. You will never be that young self you seek to recover. You must find that part of yourself that you lost, accept the part of you that has died and will never return, and give up that part of you that harms yourself. Then you will be reborn."

Luna shook her head, unable to respond.

"I will leave you to think on that. Tomorrow, we will talk of ink magic, and the ritual to cleanse you from the killing you have done."

Cleansing. Rebirth. Luna said nothing, as Tymas left, but she felt hope.




Luna had once found the silence of the desert oppressive, but now it held a remarkable warmth. She was comfortable in her own skin for the first time since her sixth year at Hogwarts, and there was no need to distract herself with another body against hers, or with punishing exertion, or with unreasonable risk.

She still did not know what Tymas expected her to discover out here, but she trusted that there was something.

The air before her eyes shimmered. She blinked. Something fluttered gently as a moth's wing against her wrist where her hands lay open on her knees. Her fingers twitched, and the air above her arm rippled, as if it were underwater. Luna saw faint colors glowing in that distortion, and realized she was looking at the translucent carapace of a shaapthek. She had thought them mythical.

The long, many-legged creature looked rather like a giant centipede made of glass, and it wound itself around Luna's wrist and up the inside of her arm. She moved without thinking, lifting her hand, spreading her fingers as a second shaapthek appeared against the back of her hand.

In folk stories the shaaptheki appeared as guardians of some sort, usually for a youth on a hopeless quest. The descriptions made them out as monstrous, though, massive, insectoid creatures with no true understanding of human affairs, only a bond with their chosen human. Luna saw nothing monstrous in the delicate beings that now covered her arms. They were beautiful.

She had forgotten Tymas's promise that she would know when to break silence, until she laughed out loud. The sound of her voice startled her, and the shaaptheki shivered in the air around her.

"I know what he meant now," Luna said. "I can have both the pain and the wonder. All will be well." Even as she spoke, she knew that she had made her decision. She would accept the offered magic, forbidden though it was by most Western traditions. She would let Tymas and his magi create healing from ink and blood and flesh.



Tymas smiled when she told him about the shaaptheki. "They come to those in need," was all he said, as if he had expected her to encounter a creature so rare and strange. 

Luna returned his smile with a lightness of spirit that made her giddy. "I will accept the ritual, Elder."

"Then we must begin at once." Tymas called his magi to him, called the spirits of tribe and place to witness, and gave Luna a bowl of ayrag laced with calming potion.

"There will be pain," he warned her, as he bound her wrists to a pole to hold her immobile. "Such is every birth."

He had been correct, of course. Luna did not know what a normal Wizarding tattoo felt like, but this was an exquisite agony accompanied by barely-controlled bursts of wild magic. Each time the mage's inked needles crossed one of the rune scars, the curse fought not to be contained. By dawn the following day, every rune Dolohov had carved into her body had been broken by a tattoo of flowering vines in ink the color of red wine. She slept almost the entire next day, and when she woke, Tymas was there beside her, with her wand in his hand.

She took it from him with trembling fingers, and stared at it for a long time.

"It will not cast a spell by itself," Tymas chided quietly.

Luna firmed her resolve and pointed the wand at a skein of Aramte's yarn. "Wingardium Leviosa." The yarn floated into the air, and nothing broke or tumbled. Her power felt anchored once more, flowing according to her will. She turned to Tymas with tears in her eyes. "Thank you."

Tymas laid his hand over hers. "You will have to fight this battle again, but I think it will be easier now, with the ink. Yes, it will be much better. You will see."

Luna took a deep breath, feeling the newness of it, and nodded. "Yes."

   

It took another week before Luna was quite ready to leave the wild country and the nomadic life. She found herself giving away much of the goods she had brought from her life in Prague, and collecting into her knapsack the evidence of her rebirth here in the red desert. Tymas held a bonfire the night before she left, and as her offering Luna had Aramte cut off the long blond braid she had worn since her girlhood. When she threw the loop of hair into the flames, she knew that something important had ended.

The next morning she tucked Otto behind her ear, pulled her knapsack over her shoulder, and started walking west. She would Apparate, eventually, to a city with an International Floo, but for now she wanted to walk and think alone. Something had ended, yes, but she believed, thinking of the letters Tymas had posted to England for her a week ago, that something bigger, and infinitely more terrifying, was about to begin.

Next Chapter

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*ger is the Mongolian word for a yurt, a traditional circular dwelling among various Central Asian nomadic groups
**ayrag is fermented mare's milk, a traditional beverage among the Mongolian nomads, which in its Muggle variant has a very slight alcohol content.