Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.

Hello there! After a long while of inactivity, I've decided to open up a Harry Potter drabblefic that takes on strange pairings. Just recently I've discovered some peculiar pairings of Harry Potter that I've really enjoyed, so I thought I'd do some experimenting of my own here. This first pairing is Draco x Luna, which is a personal favourite of mine. Depending on what I feel like doing next or if I get any prompts/requests/what have you, I can't guarantee whether the next pairing will be just as odd. (I draw the line at stuff like Dobby x Karkaroff or some such thing. Ew.) I might even stray into canon on occasion.

Enjoy!

Draco Malfoy frowns at his reflection.

Even his self-absorbed fellow Slytherins have begun to take note of his increasingly skull-like appearance. His eyes glared out from beneath the platinum-blonde strands of his hair, not that he was actually intending to glare. But the bags under his eyes have given his face a certain gaunt intensity that makes people abruptly stop speaking when he enters a room. People are avoiding him these days; his moods are becoming increasingly more erratic as days crawl by. Activities he once was interested in now seem frivolous, childish and a waste of time. Even Quidditch had lost its previous appeal, winning just didn't seem all that important now.

The black and silver cabinet sits before him, its presence giving Draco the same looming and foreboding feeling that he always gets upon close proximity with it. He knows its twin rests in Knockturn Alley, but the ever-present possibility he might fail to fix the wretched thing.

Draco suddenly slams his fist against the side of the counter, enjoying the sound of protest the wood makes as his fist crashes against it. He isn't very good at hitting things - his knuckles sting and throb, but it is one of those rare moments where pain almost feels good.

Almost, anyway.

In the relative quiet of the Room of Requirement, a noise makes Draco look up. He hears the fluttering of wings.

Draco turns.

For a moment, he cannot see her face, just a peculiar silhouette with long hair and its head tilted at an angle as if assessing him and finding him lacking. Draco just stands there for a minute, quietly observing this figure standing above him, particles of dust swirling every which way. No doubt the stranger bathed in sunlight has disturbed some of the older items, climbing atop the endless piles of junk. The cracked, dust-ridden painting she is standing on tilted forwards at that precise moment, however and, disdainful though he was- is- of her, there was no mistaking those enormous, silver-blue eyes. They've always reminded him of a doll's eyes and they look so large, as if they might pop out of their sockets at any moment. Her lips twist into a smile and Draco sniffs, packing as much contempt into it as possible.

"What are you doing here?"

Draco narrows his eyes.

He has no idea how long she might have been there- he cannot remember hearing the door opening or closing. He doubted even if it had he would have noticed, his mind focused on the one solitary task of fixing the vanishing cabinet. His mind has been like this for a while now. Anything that doesn't involved saving his own neck is irritably dismissed. He stays up later and later with boring textbooks, trying to find the right spell to do the job. Draco hardly has the energy to antagonize Potter anymore, even with the "Chosen" rumors floating about the place.

For the first time in Draco's life, he is alone, at the very edge of a breakdown and he just does not know how to handle it.

Luna Lovegood appears to be unfazed by his iciest of glares, though. Draco has long since learnt to switch off his compassion- Luna has long since learnt to shrug off the ill-will of others. Any harsh words he throws at her will bounce straight off. His practiced cool indifference will do nothing to dissuade her if she decides to host a conversation with him. He knows that, and decides that ignoring her entirely is the best course of action.

Rolling his shoulders, Draco turns back towards the vanishing cabinet.

"On second thought, don't bother answering that."

He makes to stride away, but Luna's voice floats to him and he pauses.

"You come here a lot now," she observes. There is no accusation in her voice, or curiosity. She is just stating facts. "But you never take anything out of the room, either, or not that I've seen anyway. So that must mean that you require something else..."

Draco eyes Luna. Evidently, the Lovegood oddball isn't quite as dimwitted as she appears to be.

"So?" he retorts, feeling childish, but old habits die hard. "Unless you've got anything useful to say, Lovegood- which I very much doubt- then get out."

"I was in this room a lot last year," Luna answers, and he almost wants to hex her because that slow, dreamy smile of hers just grates uncontrollably on his considerably frayed nerves. "When we had Dumbledore's Army, you know."

Draco flinches at the mention of Dumbledore's name, then mentally curses this moment of weakness. He blames it on his frequent bouts of insomnia he has been experiencing lately, but he knows that Luna saw him. Luna has now moved into a sitting position, her hair spilling down her small shoulders. It catches the light that spills into the room, making it look a more golden-blonde than it really is. He wonders if her mentioning of Dumbledore's Army is actually a thinly veiled threat, and his hand itches to reach for his wand, but her calm expression doesn't even flicker and he decides she isn't going to attack.

"Well?" Draco says, sharply. Luna blinks at him and he stumbles over his words as he hurries to elaborate. "Why are you still here?"

A normal person would get offended at being spoken to like a particularly stupid house-elf, but Luna simply awards Draco with a little chuckle as though she finds his bluster amusing, then turns and points into the distance. It's hard to believe the size of the Room of Requirement- the walls can hardly even be seen with all the assorted objects in the way, but from the inside it could easily rival the Great Hall.

"Oh, my things have been hidden in here again," Luna says, airily. "I've tried a summoning charm, but it seems there is simply too much in here to do it that way."

She tilts her head as she gazes at nothing in particular, although a fanged Frisbee does make a half-hearted growl as it drifts overhead.

"Or maybe I just haven't quite mastered that one yet…"

"Really," Draco snorts, not bothering to conceal the fact he thought that was highly likely.

Luna, still smiling for some unknown reason, lifts her arms into the air like a ballerina and points at the ground with her wand, muttering something Draco cannot quite make out. The next moment, she gleefully leaps from the veritable mountain of left behind items and, just as Draco braces himself for the impact, bounces easily from the floor, landing unsteadily on her feet. She is smiling with all the glee of a child on Halloween.

Draco's confusion swiftly gives away to exasperation. Ah. A cushioning charm. Of course.

He blinks, surprised. Exasperation is not too far away from irritation, yet there was something almost pleasant about it, like rain after an endless blizzard.

"I'll come back a bit later, I think," Luna says as she passes Draco, and he decides it really is ridiculously long hair as it trails behind her, a golden tendril gently brushing against the skin on his forearm. "Perhaps they've hidden my shoes near Hagrid's again…"

Luna reaches the door, then seems to remember something and glances over her shoulder.

"Oh, you know, you really should go to the hospital wing. Those shadows under your eyes, and your twitching…you have all the symptoms of having an Insidiring Welsh Parasite."

With a nod, as though affirming her confidence in her diagnosis, Luna leaves, taking the swirling dust particles with her.

Draco merely shakes his head and turns back to look at the cabinet again. When he leaves the Room of Requirement much later, he happens to glance out of the window to see a tangle of blonde hair walking back from what looks like the Pumpkin Patch.

That night, he falls asleep straight away, for the first time in weeks.

He isn't sure why.

If this fic doesn't work out, I guess I can always change the summary and create another Draluna fic. Nice to have a backup plan, I guess. :D

Thank you for reading!