Author's Note – Quidditch League Round 5 Entry

Team: Tutshill Tornados

Position: Chaser 2

Prompt: Character flaw – Jealousy

Additional prompts: dangle (word), bronze (colour), friendship (genre)

Word count: 1,008

Trigger warnings: None

FYI: AU fic (aren't they all?)

Green tinted energy/Hides hints of jealousy

Luna had never had friends before she met Harry and Hermione, coming out of the library on that fateful Autumn day. She had just spent another frustrating morning, searching for yet another pair of missing shoes, when she had quite literally stumbled into the two Gryffindors. She had been too distracted by the sighting she'd caught of her favourite pair of trainers, dangling from a nook in the ceiling, just beyond the entryway.

"Oh, sorry about that, we didn't see you," Harry said, meeting her eyes briefly as she looked back down, only to look back up once again. "Then again, I don't see much on the best of days."

That had been an attempt at humour, Luna was sure of it. Harry's companion seemingly confirmed it, "is that all the renowned Potter charm amounts to these days?" She didn't observe a response, for she was now carefully levitating the shoes off their perch and towards her.

"Luna, what are you doing?" Harry asked, startling her enough that she lost concentration and she lost control of the still dangling shoes. The three of them had jumped apart in quiet shock, looking amongst themselves and the perpetrators of their surprise, before Luna responded in a quiet voice.

"Y-you know my name?" she asked him, eyes wide as she stared at him, gold hues shining from his aura like rays of sun, dancing on the surface of the Earth. Harry radiated friendship in an almost ethereal manner, loyalty and light shining from his being, despite the dark spot at his center. Momentarily distracted by such a sight, she almost missed what he said next.

"Of course we do Luna," he said, smiling warmly. "You live near the Weasleys and you're friends with Ginny, right?"

"Yes, that's me," she said, smiling just as warmly back.

"If you don't mind me asking, Luna, why were you levitating shoes from the ceiling?" Hermione asked, breaking the seemingly impenetrable bubble her mind had placed around Harry and herself.

"People like to take them and hide them," she responded, turning to face the curious Lioness. "But it's alright, I always end up on an adventure trying to find them."

And so began the next new adventure of Luna's schooling life. Neither Harry nor Hermione had taken well to the idea that she would be so bullied by her own housemates, and so had adopted her into their exceptional duo. A duo, incidentally, which had stayed as such after Harry and Hermione both gave Ron the cut direct following the foolishness of the Goblet of Fire. It served Ron right in her opinion – he had always been rude to her as a child and so she felt no sympathy for him.

Perhaps that might've been her first hint that all was not right. For she had not always held her current disposition. Indeed, when she had first started studying the fine art of aura gazing, began interpreting the feelings people conveyed by exuding their own spirit and presence, she had possessed a lilac aura. But the more time she had spent around Harry and Hermione, included as their friend and yet still held apart from their friendship, the promise of full immersion into their bond always dangling just in front of her, the more her once innocent lilac aura began to show shades of green.

At first it was gradual, hinting at the change within her spirit. It fit – Hermione had never claimed ownership of Harry's friendship, there had been no untoward signs to tell her that was not fully accepted as she was. It was in the slight hesitance to share information, the continuance of a conversation based on the presumption that she understood the shared joke. Nothing intentional per say, but enough to make her notice that she was not Harry's particular friend as Hermione was.

Then there was Hermione's own aura, which, from the first moment she'd taken to study it, was a lustrous bronze colour. Rich, full, like the very devotion she laid so humbly at Harry's unknowing feet. It was true that Hermione's bronze aura exemplified her character so well. Even in her jealousy fueled thoughts she could acknowledge the actions Hermione had taken in the years past spoke only of her strength, support and reliability as a friend for Harry. But now that she had begun to develop her own friendship with Harry, she saw the boastful nature of a bronze aura, she couldn't hide from the tight-fisted grasp the colour had on those around it of a more submissive nature.

And so the lure of being Harry's particular friend, the possibility that was once just dangling in front of her, seemed to move further and further away with every luminescent shine of Hermione's giving heart. What was once attainable, where she once may have been Harry's best friend, that role was taken forevermore by the effervescent Ms. Granger. She saw it in the way she helped him study, the time she spent researching topics from transfiguration to potions to questionable areas of dark magic – anything that might give Harry an edge over the enemy they all knew he would one day have to face. And it wasn't as though she sat idly by, she too was supporting Harry as best she could. But it just wasn't the same. The more Hermione began showing her friendship to Harry, the more she could feel the jealousy in her own aura grow, until her whole being was a stunning, vibrant emerald green.

It was that, more than anything, that allowed her to rationalise her own jealousy in her head, even when she was presented with examples of Hermione's goodness, of her uplifting, comforting, bronze aura. It couldn't be jealousy, she told herself. Jealousy wouldn't shine such a bright light, so close in colour to the exact hue of Harry's penetrating gaze. It couldn't be jealousy.

Far be it from her to point out, with the sensible part of her psyche, that beneath her green tinted energy, lay the roiling depths of jealousy.