Note: Written for a crossover prompt that gave me the pairing Luna Lovegood/Mike Jackson. Mike is from P.G. Wodehouse's novels Mike, Psmith in the City, and Psmith, Journalist, but none of that canon is very important for this fic.
Old-Fashioned Romance
Luna has a boyfriend.
He's a secret. None of the other girls know about him. They think Luna's all alone in the world, except for her father, but Luna knows better.
She keeps an album with clippings from his cricket games. (And that would scandalize them all, she knows. To be courting an older muggle boy, one who plays sports for a living!) She opens it, sometimes, when she's sprawled out on her bed with her curtains drawn.
All the columns are old and yellowed. Brittle. But that's all right. She uses acid free paper, and doesn't let glue touch them. She knows how to preserve things.
There are interviews with him, in that album, and she thinks she can almost hear his voice, low and soft and kind. Not dreamy. Nothing about him is dreamy. He's solid and practical, almost to a fault, but that's why Luna likes him so. He's so real, and honest, and when she sits up late, thinking of him, she can hear the perfect crack as he finishes off his first double century of the season. He's brilliant at cricket. There's just no doubt.
If she were another girl, she might be tempted to brag, but she is herself and she likes her privacy, as he likes his.
She runs her fingers gently over the elegant dates on the clippings. Nineteen hundred and nine looks so lovely written in the old news script. The London Times has let its quality of printing go down. It's a shame.
But he's beautiful, between the lines.
Luna loves her secret.