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More Than A Love Song – Fireflight
Luna Elizabeth Lovegood was alone from the beginning. An only child, she had never really spent time with people close to her age and wasn't sure she wanted to. Adults knew more and, more importantly, took her seriously. She wasn't crazy; she was just different.
She was taking her mother's tragic death a lot better than people had expected. It didn't really seem to have affected her the way it would have affected any ordinary child. Though she missed her mother, she was still the same girl. Always the same, never changing – that was Luna at age ten.
By the time she was thirteen, Luna had changed a bit more than anyone would have guessed. She'd done decently in school – not particularly good, but passing everything at least. The only thing her father would have changed if he could have was her social life or lack thereof. You see, Luna was always alone.
Her fourth year of school started with the invasion of her life. First a girl she knew in passing and some of that girl's friends sat in her compartment on the train. Two months later, that group decided to take a stand against a particularly nasty teacher by starting a secret practice group. Despite her instinct that she'd end up in trouble, Luna joined immediately.
That year, and the year after it, was relatively peaceful. The other people who had been in the group, for of course it had disbanded after the teacher left, looked out for each other. Luna found that she wasn't being called nasty nicknames quite as much anymore, and then not at all. Being looked out for, she decided, was a good feeling.
Then came the dreadful time that was her sixth year. Her least favorite teacher was now headmaster, and the two new teachers were pure evil. Out of fear, she pretended to be ordinary, although she became a particularly favored target of one of the new teachers. But the group she had been part of re-formed, and she was an active part until the Christmas holiday.
The three months after Christmas were the worst part of Luna Lovegood's life. Because of something her father had done (she never found out what), she was taken captive on the train and taken somewhere. She wasn't certain where she was exactly, but she knew it had a dark basement (that was where she was nearly all the time) and a room in which she was tortured several times. It was hellish for her, she who had always been different and was now being tormented for it.
On what she later referred to as the best day of her life, some of her friends came to the rescue – by mistake, but they still saved her nonetheless. What followed was a two-month blur – first she was at the oldest Weasley brother's house for three weeks, then she was shunted off to their great-aunt for two months. She returned to reality for the battle, but hid as much as she could.
On June 28, Luna finally returned home. She was in need of a peaceful place, lonelier than she had ever been before, and, most importantly, very conflicted. That was Luna Elizabeth Lovegood on her seventeenth birthday.