Okay Movie-world, you were only allowed to change DH2 if it meant I got more R/Hr kisses, so instead you blocked the whole thing with the back of Ron's head. Grr.

But I guess hooking up N/L was pretty cool. Or rather, stinkin' precious!

Pshh, Hannah Abbott who?

D: Not mine.

Enjoy!


Once upon a time, she thought it might be nice to have friends.

But then again, the things that some people might call "nice" weren't really so nice at all.

And so, as it were...

Nice, but not necessary of course. After all, blibbering Humdingers lived in complete solitude from the moment they emerged from their fireproof cocoons to the point where their dingers fell off and they ceased to blither. They were beautiful, wondrous creatures, and certainly they didn't suffer from the absence of their peers...although, some did suspect that this was due to the female humdinger's propensity for cannibalism. But still, life as a humdinger didn't seem all that bad.

Nice, but not likely. Her father had always told her that to maintain an open mind was most imperative for one to truly experience everything the natural magical world had to offer. She wasn't negative in her perspective, it was just a something she was at peace with. People had never seemed to understand her family, but they didn't have to, and that was okay. For the most part, she didn't quite understand them either.

Being by herself was not a bad thing, and she was really quite used to it, Her mother had died so very long ago, leaving only her and her father, who was always busy working on the Quibbler, that without any siblings or even close neighbors, her childhood had been a quiet one. Not to say that it was boring, or even uneventful. She had plenty of adventures to fill her days, even if they weren't the sort of adventures other children might have had. They were still just as exhilarating. Only quieter.

Quiet was nice. It helped one to listen for any bothersome wrackspurts that might be sneaking about. And she was superb at picking up on them by now.

And so when her letter came, she didn't exactly hope for friends to spend her days with, but she kept her mind open to the idea (just like her father had taught her) and so she thought it might be nice. Hogwarts was nice, oh yes, and so was being in Ravenclaw, though even among her own house she was still a bit off. By any means, it didn't bother her as much as it seemed to bother the other students. She enjoyed school and its curiosities thoroughly, but if she had been hoping for a confidant within the castle walls, she would have been thoroughly disappointed. So it was rather lucky that she wasn't.

Until, that is. Of course there was an "until" when she was a bit older, which held a lovely little surprise in the form of Dumbledore's Army. The D.A. was rather loud and almost chaotic, colliding with the peaceful, dreamlike state in which she had spent most of her life most explosively. And she rather enjoyed it. The biggest change of all was just how crowded it was, what with loads of other children all packed together in the room of requirement and so busy practicing spells that there was hardly any time for teasing her at all. It was different from anything she had ever experienced, and racing her patronus with Pavarti's was so much fun that it was almost like having friends. And then, all of the sudden, it was like having friends, because Harry Potter had said so. He was her friend, and Ginny too, and maybe even others. It was so very nice, and she felt terrible for the humdingers, for not having any friends to spend their days with.

Once upon a time, she never thought she'd ever fall in love.

She knew love, how it felt to love someone. Her childhood and her own heart were filled with it, a deep bubbling of something spectacular deep within herself she experienced every time she beheld the wonder of the world which lay just outside her back door. Love was magnificent, love was natural, and she loved to love.

She loved her father, who would do so much for her, had done so much for her already, and she knew that he loved her as well. She loved Hogwarts, which taught her so much more than she had ever hoped to learn, and so it followed that it took only moments for her to love the misfit group of children who had become the friends she never thought she'd have. She wasn't sure if they loved her back, but they liked her enough, and it was all very, very lovely. But it wasn't like falling in love.

She knew that that was another kind of love, but it wasn't for her. That was of an entirely different sort, not a kind she wasn't interested in...just unattached to. It was beautiful to watch it happen to other people, but for herself?

It just wasn't something she dwelt on.

She had love, and it was enough, she was sure.

Once upon a time, she never dreamed of 'Once Upon A Time.' She never wished for her own knight in shining armor, never longed to have a man gaze at her like...

Well, like he did.

Because he told her she was beautiful, and no one had ever said it before. It was during that horrible time when Hogwarts wasn't really Hogwarts in her sixth year, before she had been taken away by the death eaters on the train home for Christmas. The two of them had just received another cruel punishment at the hands of the Carrows, this time for helping a first year who was being tormented by Goyle. He was helping her try to heal the deep gash on her cheek, when suddenly the hand that held the wet cloth against her bleeding skin stilled. He told her then, in a voice almost a whisper but still seemed to echo loudly in the empty room of requirement, that he thought she still looked beautiful. She had never really thought of the word that way. She wasn't beautiful. The sky was beautiful at daybreak, or a newborn thestral, or the sound of raindrops falling on windowpanes in the springtime, but her? She was confused by his words, and just as she always had, she wore the emotion on her sleeve. She furrowed her perplexedly, taking in his features as they rapidly acquired an almost painful hue of red while he sputtered and pulled away, but still she stared, looking for something that might make her believe...

Because something in his eyes reminded her. Of a memory, of a family she could barely remember, with a mother and a father, and dancing in the kitchen on a warm summer night. And laughter, and that word, 'beautiful.'

He was standing by that point, tripping over his own feet as he scrambled back towards the door in a curious hurry to leave. He mentioned something about checking on the little boy they had helped, and before she could ask to go with him, he was gone. She wasn't sure if he even saw the smile she had given him. Because she realized it was very, very nice, the way she felt when he called her that. She thought he was beautiful too.

She thought he was even more beautiful, some time later, when he found her in the midst of the battle raging inside of Hogwarts. With a single blast he knocked the masked man she had been fighting out of their way and over the stairs to pull her into an abandoned classroom and she followed without a moments hesitation, despite the chaos that surrounded them. His face was bruised, bloodied, streaked with soot and yet even so, she could tell in the dim moonlight that he was blushing again. They were very close to one another, and her heart felt rather strange, but not exactly in a bad sort of way. Taking a deep breath, he opened his mouth with some great effort to speak and that odd feeling in her chest grew to what felt like a breaking point as his lips began to move. However, whatever words he had hoped to say were drowned out instantly as the horrible sound of Voldemort's voice pierced the air.

When it was quiet once more it was too quiet, and he wasn't blushing any longer. His eyes were shining with something that was both intensely powerful and a little bit frightening, and he was gazing off towards the source of the vanished voice with clenched fists. The curious constricting behind her breastbone broke, and the most overwhelming feeling spilled out from it, filling her to her very fingertips with something far too wonderful to be anything except falling in love. She pushed herself forward on unsteady legs and flung her arms around his middle, pressing her face into fabric of his singed jumper and holding on for everything she was worth. Which wasn't much, she knew, but she had a feeling it would be enough for him. His own arms wrapped tightly over her shoulders, and she felt him rest his cheek against the top of her matted head.

It turned out, he didn't have to say anything at all.

Once upon a time, she thought friends and love might have been nice, but she was wrong. She had a friend, and she a love, and she had them both in him, and he was so much more than nice, more she ever could have dreamed. She had her own 'Once Upon A Time' and it was perfect, even if it ended that night just as abruptly as it had begun.

But it didn't.

It didn't end after a pleasant silence the next dawn as they sat close to one another in the Great Hall, or with a feather-light first kiss in the forbidden forest the following week. It didn't end with meeting his parent's or re-settling her father, and with a slight twinkling bauble on her left hand several years after, it seemed to only have just begun.

And so in the end, she got her Happily Ever After...and it wasn't until then that she realized how much she had always wanted it all along.


Getting inside Luna's head was considerable harder than I thought, whew!

I've always had a thing for N/L, but the stories out there always seem to fail to do them justice. Just throwing out out my take!