I don't own Harry Potter and sadly this means that I don't own Luna. The title of this fic is a quote from TS Eliot's poem, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, which suits Luna, I think. I always saw Luna to be a fan of classical music.
Music From a Farther RoomLuna Lovegood was odd.
It was the first thing anyone thought when they met her, and even the ones who dared go further into conversation inevitably came to the same conclusion. There was simply no way around it; Luna Lovegood was odd. Luna would smile at this assessment; it was correct, after all, and when they called her dotty she wore clothes with coloured spots, and when she was declared batty plastic bats dangled from her ears. When one of the girls in her dormitory, a Muggle-born named Rebecca Gillespie, said she was a fruitloop, Luna was confused, as she did not know what a fruitloop was, but she wore radish earrings in response because she always did prefer vegetables to fruit.
While the other girls sung along to Weird Sisters hits on the wireless, Luna Lovegood listened to classical pianists with foreign sounding names while she perused a biography of Uric the Oddball. When other girls dreamed of their husbands or their careers, Luna simply dreamed. When her fellow Ravenclaws were still deep in slumber, their pillows over their heads to block the sun, Luna sat on the windowsill with her cheek pressed against the glass, watching as the dawn bled over Hogwarts, seeping into every crack and crevice, staining every brick and every shingle with a pale, rosy hue. She always was the first to shower and she turned the hot water up until her skin was a steamy lobster pink and the bathroom thick with fog, and the other girls complained that they could not use the mirror. At breakfast she declined from eating bacon and scraped quince marmalade onto her toast.
She hummed strange melodies of her own devising, and when people gave her quizzical glances she either smiled or pretended not to see them. She complimented Rebecca on her new red jumper, calling it 'autumnal', she listened to Padma tell stories about the Yule Ball and lent Ginny Weasley her quill. When she went to Hogsmeade she stuck the umbrella from her Gillywater behind her ear and watched the owls in the post office window.
She returned to find that someone had stolen her collected copies of the Quibbler and her favourite pair of socks.
The next morning she stayed in bed and showered last. She kept the water at lukewarm and did not fog up the bathroom. When she was finished the dormitory was deserted, and she stood freezing in the middle of the room, shivering and wrapped in a towel, cursing that she had missed the sunrise. Then she went the Great Hall and had bacon and eggs for breakfast. In the evening she found that more of her things had been taken.
So Luna Lovegood watched the sunrise, gave strange compliments and collected Butterbeer corks, and when her father questioned her about her friends that Christmas Luna smiled and said she was happy enough. It wasn't a lie- she wasn't miserable. Her father nodded slightly and turned back to proofreading an article or polishing her mother's portrait, and Luna opened her new book on Heliopaths.
She found her Uric biography in the dormitory when term commenced, but her bat earrings never reappeared. She wore the radishes instead.
It was a sunny afternoon and every other Ravenclaw was enjoying themselves on the grounds, leaving Luna with the dormitory to herself. She was listening to a piano symphony by a Muggle composer called Tchaikovsky on Alice Cotton's magical gramophone. Luna curled into an overstuffed chair, conducting an orchestra in her mind.
The music was too beautiful, too grand to be enjoyed by only one person, and to deprive her fellow classmates of such a wonder felt like a disservice. The notes swelled with emotion until they became impossible to contain in one small room, and on impulse Luna threw open the window and stood with her arms spread wide, letting the melody float over the turrets, the lake, the forest, until the world was full of music and everything was spinning in time.
"Bloody Lovegood, she's playing that old music again!"
"Aww, Loony, cut it out!"
Luna dropped her arms. "Unappreciative of beauty," she mused philosophically to the drapes. "Badly brought up. I should show them…" She contemplated letting the music flow, but the shouting from the grounds continued.
She shut the window.