Disclaimer: Characters all belong to the lovely Ms. Rowling.

She cocked her head to one side. Then stretched it farther until she nearly overbalanced. "But, daddy, I don't see anything!"

"Look harder, just squint your eyes and open your mind."

Luna puffed angrily before doing as she was told. After a minute or two of stretching, squinting, bending and twisting, she finally found it.

"It's there! Over in the back!" She exclaimed eagerly jabbing the far corner of the picture. Her little finger landing squarely on the Nargle tail in the background. "That's it isn't it?"

Xenophilius beamed down at his daughter, "You found it. I told you it was there didn't I? A gorgeous specimen he was. Just look at all the feathers you can see!"

Luna pulled the faded photograph so close it was brushing against her nose, "wow..."

"You do know all the things nargles can do don't you?"

"Well they…" Luna pulled back from the picture and looked up at her father, biting her lip thoughtfully, "they can um… they can do things. Magical things."

Xenophilius smiled, "They can do more than just magical things you know. They hide in mistletoe at Christmastime and whenever you kiss someone they'll hop out and climb right into your head through your ears."

Luna clamped her hands over her ears with a gasp, "what do they do then?"

"Well then they crawl into your brain and mess around with all your emotions."

"That doesn't sound very nice at all."

"It isn't, but sometimes they do nice things. They can make you fall in love, that's why they stay in mistletoe."

Luna stared from her father to the picture in her hands. "So are nargles bad or are they nice?"

Xenophilius thought for a moment, "I suppose it depends on how you'd look at it. After all, they aren't trying to be bad or good, they're just trying to be nargles."

"What do you mean?"

"Well they aren't trying to hurt people, or make their lives better, nargles are just trying to do their job. And their job is to mess with emotions. Sometimes it turns out nicely for the people they mess with, sometimes not."

"Hmm." Luna contemplated the picture some more.

"Creatures aren't like people. They don't set out to do harm, they merely want to live and do what they were made to do. It's people who make choices and try to make their own lives better by knowingly hurting others."

Luna looked up from the picture into her father's face. He looked sad. His eyes stared into the picture, but they didn't really seem to see anything, "Why do people hurt each other?"

Xenophilius smiled sadly, "I wish I knew. People are cruel Luna. They think of themselves first, and everything else second."

Luna looked back down at the photograph, she brushed the nargle tail with her hand. If what her father said was true, then Luna wasn't sure she wanted to be like a person. She'd rather be like the nargle, doing her job and not knowing what hurt she might incur.

But Luna wasn't a nargle. She wasn't able to float through life and not comprehend the consequences of her actions, no matter how hard she tried.

As Luna grew up she found the truth in her father's words. She saw the cruelty of humanity directed at everything that made the world beautiful. People preyed on joy. The unbridled joy that Luna saw in the creatures her father favored was often quashed by the cruelty of humans. The small amounts of happiness that people found in each other was just as likely to be destroyed by the actions of those same people.

Luna watched happiness be won and lost time and time again. All because people didn't seem to understand the concept of putting yourself last.

So Luna tried.

She tried to be the person who thought first of others. She brushed off how people treated her and replied to the teasing and taunting with kindness and understanding. When her things were, once again, stolen from her dormitory, she kept going, smiling just as much when she ran out of shoes as she had when she still had several pairs.

When she met Harry Potter she thought she had found the person who was almost perfect. He wasn't of course, he hurt others and crushed dreams just like anyone else. But he seems to want to atone for any suffering he caused. It was a nice change from some of the children Luna had come to know during her time at Hogwarts.

So when Harry Potter needed help, Luna didn't stop to think. Sure she didn't understand why Harry wanted to go save a mass murderer, but he must have had a reason. Luna was happy to help complete a mission that was for the benefit of someone else. Her own safety wasn't the important part here.

She knew that someone might be hurt along the way, herself included, but that didn't matter. Luna liked to live like creatures do. She never set out to harm anyone, just finish a job.

AN: Luna is one of those conundrums that is very hard to understand. On the outside it seems like she would be a pacifist, yet Luna willingly puts herself in danger time and again and has shown she is very willing to fight for the greater good. I think that Luna is very much like the creatures which she loves. I'm not sure that I got Luna right in this story. But she's really hard to pin down. Tell me what you think of Luna, am I off base here? Did I get too philosophical and miss the point of Luna? It isn't hard when writing the Lovegoods, they are strangely deep and thoughtful.