Author's Note: So I dunno how I feel about this. I'm probably disgustingly unqualified to write Luna, but writing Luna was one of my prompts, and I thought this was kind of an interesting scene. Painting giant faces on your room is really something that only Luna could possibly make anything other than really creepy, right? I'm sure I've written her out of character at least a bit. I also set this after Order of the Pheonix, but I suppose everyone has their own ideas as to when Luna painted the faces.
This was written for the Globetrotter Drabble Competition on the Harry Potter Challenge forum posted by percychased for the prompt #17- Oslo.
Thanks to TheHaloFreak and NiftyGirl for listening to me whine and continuing to motivate me. I do not own Harry Potter.
The paint swirled on Luna's brush, mixing blue and yellow at just the right proportions to give her the exact green of Harry's eyes. It had taken her a few tries to capture the essence of him in the color. The first try had been had too dark, too somber and dead looking. The next few attempts had all been too full of yellow or watery. But at last she raised her brush to Harry's iris-less face and filled in his most distinctive feature.
She took a small step back to admire her work. They weren't exactly perfect. She had painted a few too many freckles on Ron's face, made Neville's cheeks a bit too round and Hermione's hair too uniform in color; but she smiled to herself thinking that she had captured the most important thing about each one.
Placing a dollop of golden paint onto the end of her smallest brush, Luna touched the bristles gently to the wall between Harry and Ron's faces. She wrote the word in quickly, as small as she could, and at once they seemed to come alive around her. 'Friends,' they had all been connected by the word long before she had conceived of painting it around them, but it seemed fitting to her that someone should have it physically recorded.
With their images all here, bound by their love for each other all around her, she felt a part of it. Their friendship included her as well now, if only in the sense that she had fought with them all to protect it, and likely would fight again. She didn't feel the need to connect her own face to theirs with the word as she connected each of them. It was enough for her to know them, to know that she had shared something with Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny and Neville that no one else in the world would.
She couldn't remember ever having had a true friend before, but she imagined that it would feel like the way they had all fought to protect each other at the Ministry. She moved around the room completing the words between them, and when she fell back into the middle of the room to examine her work she could almost feel them smiling at her.
She looked at each of them: Harry with his messy hair, Ron and his crooked smile, Ginny's fiery eyes, Neville's kind expression, and Hermione's knowing eyes. She hadn't done really done justice to them.
Still the pictures gazed warmly around at her, almost as if they were welcoming her. Luna smiled back at them. Maybe when school began again, their adventure together would make a difference and they truly would be friends.
They were already her friends, she reminded herself. Quietly she stepped forward and accepted the warm invitation of the painted faces, grazing her fingers across the golden word.