Crushing
Disclaimer: Don't own any of the characters, obviously.
Once upon a time, there was a princess...
Well, not a true princess in that she lived in a tower (more a tumbledown house) or that she could feel a pea through several mattresses (she slept through anything and snored) but a princess all the same.
Princesses only speak to other princesses.
Luna knew that was why she sometimes didn't talk to her or sit by her in Care of Magical Creatures.
More often than not, she didn't mind, if the sun played on the princess' hair better from the western windows or if the princess asked to borrow her quill, then so much the better.
Sometimes, she felt a heaviness inside her, as if her heart was made of lead and her body was made of clouds and she would feel it sinking, slipping from her, leaving her numb inside.
The day the princess met her prince, Luna couldn't help thinking she had caught a toad, but princesses are magical and their kisses change people.
Eventually the princess threw the toad back in the pond, saying it wasn't True Love and never was. Somehow, that didn't seem what a princess would say but the toad had been short on daring deeds and long on boring Quidditch practice so Luna let it pass.
One day, Luna met her prince. She didn't think much of it at first, knowing that she wasn't a princess and never would be. Fathers who were Kings liked to call their daughters 'their little angel' or 'their little princess' but hers called her 'daddy's little girl'.
He didn't act much like a prince, true, but he was the brother of the princess and even the Slytherins, ogres and beasts and dragons that they were, recognised his royal peerage.
The day she realised, was in late November as he walked from the Quidditch field to the school, the Quaffle slipped from his fingers and rolled down the slope into the lake.
It bobbed merrily on the bank as she rescued it, wrapped up in earmuffs and a scarf and mittens, he could only hazard a guess at who she was but he headed over, red-faced and hands stuffed into his pockets.
She couldn't remember how long it had been since a person had approached her or talked to her without intending to be mean or spiteful.
"Thanks" he said, taking it from her before jogging back up the slope. Somehow, Luna felt like he had missed the point and that it wasn't supposed to be like this. Princes were different from princesses. They fell in love with maidens all the time.
Once upon a time, there was a maiden...
She loved and drifted and knew she had fallen much harder for the prince because her heart didn't slip away or leave her alone.
And it when she saw the prince with his princess it hurt like a knife, to see him so desperate to win her favour and her kindly but firmly spurning him away.
No-one writes fairytales about how much love hurts; no-one writes the part where the prince who rescues Rapunzel decides he doesn't like long hair or the part where the prince thinks he preferred Snow White sleeping because that doesn't make a good story. It just makes a human one.
She whispered at night to another one of the girls in the dorm about the pain and how she worried sometimes that it might be literally breaking, like it said in the stories.
The shrieks of laughter that spread through the room for days afterwards didn't bother her.
All stories have a grain of truth in them.
And her story doesn't end with an unmasking or a marriage or a transformation because she knows it won't end, this falling in love.
The story may seem different, but it's always the same old one.