As the Cardinal Flies

In which Luna Lovegood prowls through darkest Hogwarts with wand and costume(s), hunting a very particular lion.
 

The actual assigned match was on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with several other fandoms listed in the request, but a quick look through the available Buffyverse material didn't reveal any particular piece that spoke to me.  The other officially offered fandom I thought I could write was Shakespeare's Henry IV -- I saw a fascinating staging of Part I this past summer, and likeadeuce has rung some very intriguing changes on the play in several different works.  However, my reference copy of Shakespeare is still awaiting unpacking (which is, in turn, awaiting the promise of built-in bookcases -- must remember to follow up on that this week), and I didn't feel up to reworking Shakespeare -- especially Shakespeare already re-visioned as thoughtfully as is done in these stories -- without my library in proper hand.

So I started spelunking through a large swath of other material, pausing briefly in a couple of parts of the MCU -- when I happened across the above-referenced Harry Potter story.  And I was immediately both charmed and inspired; the author's hand with the core relationship was light but sure, the story was ideally suited for a POV flip -- and Luna happens to be one of my favorite of Rowling's secondary characters.  Never mind that the only other core Potterverse fic I'd written was a tiny comic ficlet (featuring Hermione and Ron), unless one counted a brief Stargate SG-1 remix set in the Potterverse.  Never mind that I mostly write in smallish fandoms or on the fringes of larger ones.  Luna was calling me, and this was a remix that felt both worthwhile and entertaining.

I set out, initially, to do the story as a fairly close scene-for-scene POV reversal.  Which was fine as far as it went, but became more challenging as matters progressed.  I did a good bit of Web-crawling when I got to the scene at Professor Slughorn's party, in order to keep myself as canon-compliant as possible.  I made a deliberate nod to one of the commenters on the original story during Luna's appearance costumed as Wonder Woman; of course she included a tiara and a golden lasso -- which in turn introduced a new plot point that proved absolutely essential to the remixed climax.  The additional detail also tilted certain other aspects of the relevant scene in a different direction from that of the original story, which in turn rippled forward into later sequences.  As a result, the back end of "Hunting the Lion" is markedly more direct about its characters' intentions than its source tale...which is, I suppose, part of what makes it a remix.