Misunderstood
by Verok

Synopsis: Luna Lovegood has loved Harry Potter ever since the end of her 4th year. Harry, however, being taken with Cho Chang and unwilling to sympathize with the unpopular Luna at the risk of his reputation, cold-shoulders her affections. Harry is merely in denial at what he truly feels - but the sensitive Luna misinterprets his subtle rejections as hate. Her health, which has always been precarious, begins to deteriorate rapidly; and by the time Harry can come to terms with his feelings and act on them, it is already too late to make amends.

Rating: PG-13 for heavy themes and the like.

Disclaimer: Nothing in Harry Potter fandom belongs to me. Nor am I making money out of this. Do not send prosecutors to knock on my door.

Author's Note: Or, better put, warning - if you've come looking for light-hearted, sugary fluff, sap and a happy ending, you've come to the wrong place. But if you've come here for pure angst and a good dose of anger-inducing injustice, look no further. This fic is, for the most part, dismal, dark, and (later) disturbing - it's not supposed to be happy at all. If you come out of reading this feeling fresh and springy as if you've woken from a good nap, I've done something really wrong. However, if your perfectly happy and delightful day has been ruined by reading this, chances are, I've succeeded in doing just what I wanted to do.

And...

Another Author's note, on the ship: This is a Luna Lovegood/Harry Potter story. If that particular coupling bothers you, well...sorry.

Please peruse on.

Foreward - No Dawn

Luna Lovegood was not what you could call an ordinary girl.

It might have been her disposition - dreamy, vague-minded, immune to the tumult of the harsh reality that surrounded her…as if she were worlds and worlds away, or simply a rootless phantom that strayed amongst the living.

It might have been the way she looked – hair, scraggly and too long, as if it was never cut; her hands and feet, tiny and delicate; her form, slight enough to be taken with the wind – or her eyes, huge and pale, as clean and unsoiled as the stone bottom of a pool shining up through clear water.

It could have been the way she talked, so outspoken and so spontaneous, as if she didn't care at all what other people would think of her. Or, it could have been the pure faith with which she believed in a whole array of wild and fantastical things.

But whatever it was that made Luna Lovegood un-ordinary, she was despised for it.

At school, just from her very first few weeks, her peers and seniors had started calling her by a rude mutation of her name – Loony Lovegood. They called her Loony because they thought she wasn't exactly right in the mind; or, because they thought she insane, or wild, or, quite simply, loony. When they could, they took advantage of her absentmindedness, stealing her possessions and hiding them, jinxing unguarded pieces of homework and making all the words on her painstakingly written History of Magic essay scramble up. Other times, fouler moods providing, they would openly deride her in busy corridors. There wasn't really anything Luna had done to offend them, or to give them incentive to put her down thus; it was, more or less, because she existed in their lives.

But because of Luna's nonchalance towards existence in general, no words could maim her self-esteem; no practical jokes or tricks could dampen her spirit. When they made fun of her, she would laugh along with their jeers. When she returned to her dorms and to another jinxed piece of homework, she would only shrug, smile faintly, and write it out again. That which made her a target in a world obsessed with normality also, ironically, guarded her.

That had been the case until 4th year.

She had known Harry Potter before then; of course not personally, but in name, at least, and in appearance. Certainly she had heard all about the Boy Who Lived; his fame, popularity, stellar Quidditch talent, all the mad trouble he'd get in at the end of every school year. But to her, Harry was, back then, an unreachable thing; simply another far-thrown speck in the world that she long learned to ignore, another star in the night sky, albeit one that shown more brightly than all others. Maybe she in awe of his fame; perhaps she admired him a little for that reason – but, other than that, he was just a name, not a real person. And she didn't care about it at all.

Harry himself had never as much as glanced in her direction until the day he somehow set foot in her compartment on the train ride to Hogwarts. Luna remembered how she had felt the moment she saw him come in: not a great leap of her heat, or even a slight jolt in a stomach, but just mild surprise at seeing the famous Harry Potter choose to sit in the very same train carriage as her. Just a name, she thought; and because of that, she had treated him just like she would have treated anybody else – speaking generically, voicing thoughts as she pleased, and not minding a whit whether he thought it was weird how she was reading the Quibbler upside-down. Perhaps, then, she still didn't care. And perhaps, because of this, Harry didn't get a very favorable first impression of Luna Lovegood.

Her nonchalant attitude toward him, however, would soon change.

When word of how Harry had stood up to the hag Umbridge traveled throughout the school in September, Luna had been impressed, along with everyone else, by how he had gauged up the guts to yell in the toadish professor's face and call her a liar. But this time, she was more than just mildly impressed, as she was usually when she saw him perform death-defying free falls after a zooming Snitch on the Quidditch field. Standing up for what you believed in was far more important and admirable than being able to do a pretty swoop on a pretty broomstick and catch a pretty ball. Not only had Harry stood up for himself; he had also for Luna, because his story about the Dark Lord's return and Cedric Diggory's death was the story Luna believed in.

Then, when Harry had announced the Defense Association – a direct defiance to Ministry of Magic policy and despotism – Luna had leapt with unparalleled vociferousness on the opportunity to join. It wasn't just that she wished to learn practical Defense Against the Dark Arts for future use; she was, this time, not just very impressed, but in complete admiration of Harry's confidence and determination to change things. Being a fourth year student who really hadn't put all that much effort into her studies, she had started out clumsy, unskilled, a klutz in firing Disarming Spells and Impediment Jinxes – but Harry, her coach and mentor, would always appear by her side when she was in danger of chucking aside her wand and throwing herself upon the floor in despair. He would help her pronounce the incantations, practice her concentration, perform her wand movements; his patience with her was so that he did not give up on her until she had fully mastered that particular concept she had trouble on. And she had never forgotten the one occasion on which Harry had guided her wand movement by taking her hand in his and waving it with him. Boys had touched her before, but never did she feel suddenly hot, or tingly in the skin, so glaringly self-conscious, as when Harry had touched her that once. For the first time in her life, she had gone giddy over a boy.

But it wasn't until the climax of the year's rumblings and troubles, the storming of the Department of Mysteries, that Luna had finally and fully realized her feelings. Most of what had happened in those dreaded rooms and labyrinths were recalled as a blur of sightless images and endless melees in her head; what she did remember, with painful clarity too, was what happened after everything had taken place. She didn't see Harry again on that fateful night; but she did see him the day after, wandering aimlessly along the empty corridors of Hogwarts in a daze, like a person who had been quite suddenly severed from life and now had neither purpose nor intent to fulfill. Her heart bled upon that sad sight, but she decided not to disrupt him, letting him come to her instead, if he so desired. Come he did; she was posting notices for her lost possessions yet again when he appeared at her side, having run into her on accident around a bend. When Luna had looked into his green eyes, stormy with grief and bitterness, it was as if her mother had died all over again. All the pain that she had lived, relived, then shut up and bottled up in some dark recess within her, burst out from seeing Harry's anguish, and she almost lost her composure in that moment. Miraculously, though, she was barely able to control herself, forcing her lips to smile, holding the tears back from the rims of her large eyes, and though her voice had been a bit softer than usual, it did not crack while she spoke.

But at last, during that painful conversation, she sensed that she could not hold herself together any longer – so, instead of Harry leaving her, like it had always been for Luna, Luna left Harry first. As she retreated down the corridor, she could feel his eyes trained on her back, burning the nape of her neck, as if he were scouring her parting form for all the agonizing questions that lay unanswered in his head. When she turned the far corner, out of sight, the first tears brimmed her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. Throughout the whole year, she had seen it in a myriad different forms, but never its real one: awe, admiration, respect, gratitude…the nouns would have gone on forever. But in the end, it was one word that stayed, one word only that came to her head.

Love.

So no longer was Harry Potter just a name, or even just another popular figure in Hogwarts society. He was someone who had seen death, lived through danger and strife and overwhelming grief…someone who had, at one point, been ridiculed and disillusioned by everyone else around him. Someone who had gone through all that Luna had gone through. Because of that, he could understand her pains, sorrows, her innermost secrets. He was her kindred spirit. And because she realized, after ten months of endless pondering and agonizing, that Harry was her kindred spirit, Luna Lovegood finally admitted to herself that she loved him.

Then there came the catch.

Harry might've become a friend of hers during the course of that tumultuous year; but even that mere allusion – "friend" – could only be because he had come to know Luna more personally than before. He talked to her, every now and then. They had shared risky episodes. And, just recently, he had even learned how to pity her, somebody who truly deserved more compassion than spite. But beyond that, there wasn't anything more. When life came back to normal, Harry would never wave to Luna as they rushed past each other in corridors, late for their next class. Harry would not cross over to her table at lunchtime every now and then to chat about the weather. Harry would not even come back to her for answers to the questions that he so wanted to be explained. He didn't like her in the way that real friends liked each other. And, certainly, he did not love her back in the way she loved him.

This time, Luna Lovegood could no longer accept their estrangement, and ignore it fitfully as she had always done.

For the truth had arrived at her. When it came to Luna Lovegood, Harry Potter, famous, noble, Saint Harry Potter, was merely like everybody else. He thought her strange. He thought her unworthy of socializing with. And since it was too far below him to taunt her like many others did, he simply ignored her, forgetting that she even existed.

Finally, Luna's thick armor that had guarded her against everything else began peeling off, layer by layer. For the first time in her life, she was defenseless. She finally saw with opened eyes how terrible and harsh the real world was like. And now, when she was trampled upon, the insults pierced straight into her heart, and she cared that people had insulted her.

She was hurt. She was miserable. She was completely alone. And she was living through all this with painful awareness.

It was truly remarkable, how quickly her entire life had fallen from a mundane dream to a violent nightmare. Everything around her began collapsing, and all the evils that she had heretofore ignored, now gnawed away at her from the inside out: the derision of her fellow classmates, the gaping hallow that was most certainly her dead mother…and the aloofness of Harry Potter.

But one thing had not escaped Luna just yet. It was something she was born with, something that she so often felt and tested and stretched that it finally became what she was, her definition, and could not be sheared from her at any cost. This was what made her believe so ardently in the Crumple-Headed Snorkack and the nargles that infested the mistletoe plant. It was hope.

She hoped that some day, one glorious day, a dawn would pierce the clouds of her nightmare and lift the shreds of darkness, and Harry Potter would finally look into her pale blue eyes and see the truth, bare and unflinching, waiting for him there.

But, as it would turn out, there would be no dawn for Luna Lovegood.

A/N: Well, ahem...I apologize sincerely if I've bored you to tears with all of this bland philosophical narrative, no dialogue or anything to liven it up. Only the foreword is going to be like this though, so now that this is done, you can expect some good Harry/Luna coming up in the next installment! And oh...could you review? Pretty please? Pretty, pretty please? Even if you hate the pairing?

I love you, my readers. See ya later.