Loony for Luna

Disclaimer: Of course I don't own Harry Potter or else this piece would be several hundred pages longer. She Who Created This Series is grand and lovely and too rich to sue my poor butt. Enjoy!

He absolutely refused.

Harry Potter thought that he was a pretty reasonable guy. He had an archenemy before he had a driver's license and he was okay with it. Cold- hearted self-absorbed Muggles had raised him for eleven years of his life before he had discovered what he was and he had really accepted it. He could even wrap his mind vaguely around the concept of his godfather dying and God knows that was the hardest one of all.

But he refused to fall for a girl nicknamed Loony. It wasn't that she was a bad sort, Harry reasoned reasonably. It was just that she was very odd. It was bad enough that he had to be the savior of all wizarding kind, but did he really have to develop crush-like feelings for a girl who wore vegetables in her ears? That just wasn't normal no matter how magically inclined you were.

Besides he already had the girl he wanted to moon over picked out. Cho Chang was pretty, smart, athletic, and didn't read the newspaper upside down. So she liked to cry a lot. Who didn't have something wrong with them? Hermione liked to form organizations with unfortunate acronyms and Ron still absolutely wanted "to just be friends with her". Like anybody believed that.

To get back to the point, Cho was supposed to be his girlfriend. She was the Ravenclaw that was supposed to make his stomach twist into knots and other parts leap to attention at her passing by.

Maybe he was under some sort of spell. Maybe this last confrontation with Voldemort had left him completely crazy himself, making Loony seem positively normal by comparison.

Or maybe it wasn't so crazy. Sure, Loony had her quirks. Her many, many quirks. But she was a very pretty girl. All blonde and blue-eyed and prone to tucking her wand behind one of her cute little ears while she did that very nearly sexy little walk-wobble around the school. And the way that she would talk to herself as she did that walk could be considered quite adorable under the right circumstances.

Harry guessed his biggest problem was that his growing awkward feelings for Loony weren't just physical. With Cho it had all been about how gorgeous and sophisticated she was. Actually spending time with her hadn't been as pleasant as he had imagined it would be. But he actually liked talking to Loony. He could hold an odd conversation with her and not just be looking at the way her nose would crinkle up in the sweetest way.

This was a big problem. How unfair was it that not only did he have to live an abnormal life of danger and fear, but he also had to discover real grown-up feelings for a girl who was close to crazy due to her own weird life. Didn't he deserve a girl who had been raised in a boring family environment?

A girl like Loony made it real for him. He didn't think he would be able to stand it if his life actually got real. An insanely powerful man had killed his parents when he had been a baby in order to get to him. Cedric had died when he should have. Sirius was gone because he hadn't been heroic enough yet to save him. There was no reason for him to think that he would survive against Voldemort.

Loony brought that all home for him. She looked at him, all sharp- eyed and perceptive and he knew that she believed he would win. How horrifying was that when there was no way that he could.

A boring girl would beg him not to fight Voldemort. She would tell him that he would be killed and maybe even run away with him to some tropical island where he would drink loser drinks and pretend like he wasn't miserable.

Loony would want to help him. She would throw herself in the middle of danger because she believed in him. He would live every moment terrified that she would be the next to die for him. To die instead of him.

Losing Cho would hurt. She was a good person and good people shouldn't have to fight predestined evil. But people he had cared for before had died and he had eventually moved on.

He knew that if he fell for Luna, losing her would be the thing that finally killed him. He would spend the rest of his life waiting for Voldemort and thinking about how she believed in him. Not because he was the Boy-Who-Lived, but because he was Harry Potter the boy.

So it wasn't going to happen. Loony could just go on being absolutely gorgeous and clever and slightly out of her mind and he just wouldn't care.

He absolutely refused.

Unless she asked him out, of course. After all, he didn't want to be rude.