Her feet made almost no sound on the charred oak floor, the high stacks of forgotten or unneeded belongings surrounding her like a protective shield. The ceiling was much too high for her liking, too high for her to see the sky, and this she definitely did not like. Her fingers brushed the spines of a group of forgotten and neglected books stacked on a desk carelessly, and she paused to swing herself up onto the desk beside them, peering at them with narrowed grey eyes curiously. Her humming filled the room once more and she plucked a blue book from the bottom of the pile, causing the rest of it to topple over, but she didn't seem to care much – she only flicked her wand and the books flew back into the air, the pages folded like wings, to replace themselves in the same place they'd been before.

Luna's eyes skimmed the pages before she sighed and curled her legs up, planting her feet firmly on the desk and setting the book against her knees. She hummed a tune that she remembered from long ago, an old lullaby her mother had once sang to her, and she relaxed almost instantly. Her shoulders sagged and her pale skin was flooded with colour once more, her cheeks a pale pink that she would normally have detested.

You see, Luna was definitely not like the other girls she shared a dormitory with, or any other girl in the whole school. She was fourteen years old, as were many of the other pupils, but she also believed in things they didn't, creatures they couldn't see, things they didn't dare to think were real. But to her they were, and that was all that mattered. She could be who she wanted to be and none of the others needed to care, in her opinion, and many people chose to ignore her opinion.

When she was a young girl, her mother, her sweet, level-headed, calm mother, had been killed in an accident – the printing machine her father had set up for the Quibbler had blown up and sent her down the stairs; the bloodstains had been three feet high on the walls – but the lullabies she sang had always remained in her memory. No matter how much life threw at her, no matter how many more days she lived, that lullaby had been stubborn enough to remain her mind, taunting her day after day that her mother no longer belonged to this world, that she was alone to sing to herself and to no one else. Her father cared more for the Quibbler then he did for her, but he was rather odd in her opinion, and she didn't mind one bit. He mostly ignored her and that was the way she liked it.

She hummed to herself as she pushed herself off the desk, folding the top of the page over and tucking the book under her arm. Luna liked this new discovery, and she would read it until she finished it, like she did with every other, but then she would tuck something of her own in there in the hopes that someone would find it in the future, and then hide it in the stacks. It was a strange ritual, but it had become a part of her agenda ever since she had first done it when she was eleven. Her mother had taught her to make sure people remembered her, and this is precisely what she was doing. No one seemed to bother her about it, so she usually assumed that people never knew about her endeavours in the Room of Requirement, and she quite liked it like that.

Her feet began to skip easily along the hard wood floor, her grey eyes leaping from alcove to alcove, trying to decide where she would hide a new book of hers. She couldn't hide it on the shelf above the bust of Rowena Ravenclaw, because she had already done that with the muggle book ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, but she could always tuck it into the bust's arms. She figured that Rowena Ravenclaw – the Founder of the studious house – wouldn't mind if she was pictured holding a book, it was her forte, after all. "I do hope you don't mind, Lady Ravenclaw," she said politely as she reached the bust, holding up the book in her arms and looking somewhat apologetic. "Would you mind holding this for me until I come back, please? Oh, I love the diadem, by the way."

Luna felt no need to alert anyone of finding Ravenclaw's Lost Diadem, because she figured it had been lost for a reason. If Rowena had wished it to be lost, then she'd better respect her wishes, and for that reason she would have to be somewhat respectful to the dead Founder's wishes. "Why, thank you," she said respectfully as she pulled back, adjusting the book so that Lady Ravenclaw's arms were wrapped around the book tightly enough. "I do hope you don't mind so much, but I will find another place to put it if you wish so when I return." She smiled dreamily at her House's founder before standing on the desk beside Ravenclaw to inspect the diadem atop her head. "You're a beautiful thing, aren't you? And you look nothing like Daddy's prediction. Perhaps he's got it wrong," she rambled dreamily, her grey eyes floating to the ceiling. "I wonder if you created this room, Lady Ravenclaw. I would never be able to manage something as intricately magical as this – you and the others must be very proud of your ability."

The bust seemed to smile a little as Luna adjusted the diadem atop her tamed curls, her tongue sticking out slightly in concentration. "Thank you, Luna," a voice told her from the distance, and Luna did not think it strange at all for a disembodied voice to be talking from nowhere.

"You're welcome," she murmured as she hopped off the desk and beamed up at the bust before turning and skipping out of the room, the door sliding smoothly shut behind her.

This came to me when I read a Luna fiction where she went back to the Founders' times and she was more respectful to Rowena than all the others, and the inspiration for the diadem's presence was the Deathly Hallows, which has been on repeat since I got sick on Tuesday. A one-shot - there are no pairings, but this COULD link into a new story of mine that I'm working on and hoping to post when I've finished Maybe When We're Done. She is the main character and Fred is her other half. Hope you don't mind the foreshadowing when it won't be posted until perhaps March, but thank you for reading.

Love,

Marlene