A/N: Luna cuteness comin' right up! I love her.
To Believe
I turned over in bed, still not able to sleep. I peeked at the clock on my bedside table. It was 2:43 A.M.
Sighing heavily, I turned on the lamp. There was no use trying to sleep.
I got out of bed and slid into my favorite pair of slippers. They were blue, and Daddy always told me they were made out of spotted-tail-clorkey fur. Daddy was like that. He told me stories of beautiful places that didn't exist, that I could never understand.
I peered out the window, and saw what most people would call a falling star. But not me. No, Daddy had taught his little Luna better than that. I knew it was the voice of a singing-schlumpka, shining, traveling down to earth, where all could hear what it had to say.
I listened. I really did. I even grabbed my wand from under my pillow, where it was safely stored throughout the night, and put a Muffliato spell on the room. But I heard nothing. No singing-schlumpka sang to me.
Even though I couldn't hear it, I knew it was true. Daddy had always told me that sometimes the things that are more real than anything else are the things that can't be heard or seen or felt.
"Like love?" the five-year-old Luna had asked.
"Like love," Daddy had replied. And that had satisfied me.
But when I was a bit older, I hadn't been so sure.
"But Daddy, how do you know it's there?" I had asked on the eve of my eighth birthday.
"You don't," he answered, "you just have to believe."
Only to believe. I had always believed in my father, never doubted his mystical creatures or fantastical tales. And look where it had gotten me. Me, "Loony" Lovegood, the outcast, the one whose shoes were always being stolen. The crazy one. The one with no friends.
And then Harry Potter had come along, the one who could see the thestrals. Before him, everyone else always thought the thestrals were just another of my nonexistent theories, another dream, another illusion. Another reason to mock me.
To see the thestrals, you must have seen death.
So what about the rest of them, the spotted-tail-clorkeys, the crumple-headed-snorkacks, the singing-schlumpkas? What did you have to see to be able to see them?
"You don't have to see anything," Daddy told me tonight before I went to bed. "You just have to believe."
And so I believed. I scrunched my eyes up and believed. And I heard the voice of the singing-schlumpka, and shivered when I spotted a Nargle outside the window outside of my Transfiguration class.
And they could call me loony, and they could take my shoes, and they could mock me and think I was crazy. But really, did that change a thing? Should that make me stop believing?
"No," Daddy told me. "If you want something, if you want to see it, if you want it to be real, you must always remember to believe."
~KaleidoscopeKate