Delay was trying to get Luna's part just right. She's hard to write if you assume that her insanity is both a cover and not a cover and she actually has something to say.


Chapter 8


Harry opened his eyes and blinked several times as his drowsiness vanished. He stared up uncomprehendingly at the ceiling of his four-poster canopy for a moment, then he sighed unhappily.

Unfortunately the first time wasn't the charm, as Harry had discovered that Sunday afternoon after reducing Snape to a mindless husk with an accidently overpowered Obliviate. He had considered just killing Snape to cover up the botched Obliviate and trying to ride out the fallout of the murder, but the thought of Dumbledore scouring the castle looking for the culprit was daunting enough to make him decide to restart.

It was actually probably a good thing in the long run though, since Harry needed to find Luna and ask her some questions.

He had respected her wish to stay away for the two full days of the last loop, forcing himself not to go tearing off to find her. He had noted her presence at breakfast, devouring a tower of pancakes like they were going out of style, but other than that he had respected her wishes. However the longer he thought the more her words echoed in his mind and the larger his suspicions grew. She had asked him to stay away until he was 'less hopeless', but Harry didn't actually know what that meant, and he needed to get information from somewhere!

He also really needed to spend a loop or two finding somebody nearby to practice the Obliviate spell on, since it took far too long to locate someone that he both wouldn't mind Obliviating into a drooling mess if he messed up and who he could actually subdue.

He couldn't use Hermione, even though he was sure that she would be willing to let him try with minimal effort, because it hurt to imagine her as a drooling vegetable because of something he did, even if it wasn't permanent. It just felt wrong to him to even think of destroying so pure and honest and trusting a soul as Hermione was for such a base reason as spell practice. No, she couldn't help him for this (well, she could, but Harry didn't want the nightmares it would cause).

He could try asking random Gryffindors, but they would probably say 'no way', and trying to subdue one would require subduing the whole tower. Doing that without killing them was impossible for one guy, no matter how much preparation time you had.

Malfoy was all the way down in the dungeons, plus Harry didn't know his schedule so finding him if he'd left the Slytherin common room before Harry could get down there would be difficult.

Snape was constantly in the presence of a few seventh years and a sixth year on Saturdays, working on potions research, so getting him alone was impossible, and even the slightest mistake in approach would set the man off. Harry remembered how fast the man had moved with less than a half-second of warning in the last loop. The only reason Harry had succeeded capturing the potions master the first time was because Snape hadn't thought him capable of such decisive action and had dropped his guard for a few seconds.

After that sobering experience Harry had resolved to train up a bit more before trying his veritaserum plan on the headmaster.

Harry groaned in frustration.

If it weren't for the need to subdue or persuade his subjects, Dumbledore would be a prime candidate for the Harry Potter vocational school of Mind-wipers, but Harry couldn't think of anyone else who-

Ron.

Harry sat up and looked over to the bed across the way to watch the snoring redhead.

Ron was perfect. He trusted Harry at the moment, so he'd be willing to let Harry try the spell on him, plus Harry no longer thought of him as a friend. After he had abandoned Harry after his name came out of the goblet several times, Harry had lost all interest in being his friend. It just wasn't the act of a true friend to abandon another when something terrible happened, especially if you had faced death together as many times as they had.

He wasn't a friend, not really. It had taken Harry far too long to realize it, but Ron was a jealous and small person who only associated with him in order to bask in the reflected glow of a fame that he hated with a passion. It didn't help that he was envious of Harry's inheritance too. Really, the only things they had in common were the fact that they were both in Gryffindor and they were the first people both of them had met on the train to Hogwarts, and it wasn't like someone could choose that, could they?

Harry paused as he considered that.

"Everywhere else is full." Ron had said.

'The train is never full.' Harry thought with a sinking feeling, 'We always have to pass half-full compartments and occasional empty ones when we get on right before the train leaves. Why did he lie? Maybe he wanted to get close to the 'Boy-Who-Lived' even then?'

Harry thought back a little further. Something Mrs. Weasley said that he had almost forgotten popped into his head with sudden clarity.

"Poor dear- no wonder he was alone, I wondered. He was ever so polite when he asked how to get on the platform."

Why would she accept the fact that he was alone that easily? Wouldn't the fictional Harry Potter that everyone had believed was living happily with mysterious guardians and learning powerful ancient magic have some sort of minder or bodyguard to help him get to the platform? And even if he didn't have one, wouldn't his guardians have made sure he knew how to get to the train regardless? Why would the 'Boy-Who-Lived' need to ask how to get on the platform? Surely it wasn't that hard to explain considering that all the new muggleborns made it on consistently year after year?

He was starting to get veeeerrrryy suspicious about some of the things he had taken for granted.

He shook his head. He'd worry about things like suspicious friendships later, but for now…

'For now,' Harry thought, lying down with a smile, 'Ron is perfect.'

He'd get some more information on Luna in the morning from the other Gryffindors, talk to her during breakfast and ask some of the questions that were starting to burn holes in him, then he'd ask Ron to act as a target for Obliviation practice. A few day-long repeats and he'd have plenty of practice on Obliviation and he'd hopefully have gotten some answers from Luna. That was a reasonable plan.

Harry rolled over and went to sleep.


"Hello Harry Potter." Luna Lovegood said dreamily as Harry opened his mouth to speak, "I'm glad to see you're keeping the wrackspurts away."

Harry blinked a few times as he tried to figure out how she saw him at all, considering that he had approached her from behind and she hadn't turned to look at him. She continued slathering whipped cream on the towering stack of pancakes before her like icing on a cake. He decided to ignore the fact that she seemed to be ignoring him and continue with what he was going to say originally.

"Hi Luna, can I speak with you?" He asked politely, moving around the table and looking across it at the tiny Ravenclaw while eyeing the titanic stack of pancakes with concern. He wasn't sure where she was going to put all of them.

"You would know." Luna said as she leaned back to admire her creation. "Is being dumb awful?"

Harry once again paused for a moment before continuing, taking that response for consent.

"I know you told me to stay away, but I really need to ask a few questions and you're the only one I know who might have answers."

"42, but if that wasn't the answer you needed you might want to sit down while I eat these." Luna said calmly, picking up a fork in the manner of a knight picking up a sword before a great battle. "One never knows when they'll get to eat pancakes again, so it's best to take every opportunity."

Harry winced at the poorly-veiled insinuation and sat as she started eating her pancakes.

He watched for a while, but after the eighth level of pancakes he started fidgeting. Politeness only went so far. He opened his mouth and-

"We'll talk after the pancakes are gone." She said between bites, again somehow knowing what he was doing without looking at him.

Harry closed his mouth and waited as she slowly worked her way through the pile of pancakes. Eventually, much to Harry's shock, she finished the pile successfully. She dabbed her mouth daintily with a napkin, and then belched like a sailor. Harry nearly laughed at the incongruity.

Luna then turned to Harry and he shivered as her silver eyes suddenly focused onto his green ones. He suddenly felt an intense sensation of deadly crisis, like a sleeping ancient dragon had woken and turned a slowly waking eye upon him, or perhaps like a huge and unstoppable attack was about to be mounted against him.

'THIS is 'Loony' Lovegood?' Harry thought with disbelief.

How the hell did people dare to call her that to her face? He had thought she was scary when she had been angry at him outside the Gryffindor portrait hole, but this controlled intensity made that short blaze of anger look like a two year old whining! What made it worse was the fact that she still somehow emitted an ambient innocence that made the laser-like focus and iron will clearly contained within her eyes extremely unnerving.

"I can understand that you are a bit confused about this whole thing, and my little rant the other day can't have helped, so I'm going to give you a bare minimum walkthrough on what is going on, and you are going to listen quietly." Luna looked at him with an amused look and a raised eyebrow, "Kay?"

Harry nodded quickly.

"Good." Her expression suddenly went dreamy and she smiled brightly, "Because I would hate to have to set the wrackspurts on you."

Harry's mouth fell open and he gaped as she seemed to morph from 'most dangerous thing in the room' to 'slightly loopy underclassmen' in moments.

Lunas' smile turned dreamy and she looked around with a sort of bewildered curiosity, seemingly genuinely interested where she had found herself and in several empty patches of air.

Harry waited, watching the (seemingly far more unstable than he had at first thought) Ravenclaw warily.

She eventually blinked a few times and refocused on Harry with a much more serious yet still bemused on her face.

"Before I start with the main topic, I'd like to apologize. The today that was two todays ago I was a bit frazzled from the fast repeats. That's why I confronted you like I did. I am sorry about yelling at you like that, but usually when someone does something like that in a loop I have no idea where they are, so I can't complain, only bear with it." Her smile was more of a grimace now and the happy look darkened.

"This time however, I knew that YOU were the anchor for the loop, so I decided to get some satisfaction. It also didn't help your chances that usually people only do repeats that short for around 30-40 loops at most before they are finished with whatever they are doing. Even very determined suicidals end up quitting after around 60-70 loops usually." She frowned, "Your 201 is the third most that I have ever had the misfortune of experiencing, and unfortunately you also picked a length that was extremely frustrating. It was a little too long to remain in bed, yet not long enough to get to the pancakes. It was quite annoying."

She released a very happy grin.

"Fortunately, two full meals of pancakes mellows me right out!"

She cleared her throat and took a sip of pumpkin juice.

"Now that that is out of the way, let me give you the standard rundown." Her smile became much more professional before abruptly taking out a set of glasses with one blue lens and one red lens and perching them on her nose like an old librarian. She then took on the air of a professor speaking a lecture to a class that she had made many times before and began her explanation in a sing-song voice.

"You are in a time loop. This is not a joke. It was not created by your enemies to punish you, nor was it created by your God or gods to reward you. Destiny and Fate are real people and you are a 'Chosen One' of Destiny. Unfortunately for you, you died before you could complete your destiny. Because Destiny hates to change her plans and Fate hates to get yelled at by Destiny, Fate pulled your soul and memories out of time and stuck them in a time loop to try and solve the problem. Doing this allows him to beef you up a bit metaphysically speaking, without requiring major effort or interference on his part. These time loops, regardless of how long they actually are, are always long enough that the subject, you, is capable of changing your fate to better match your destiny within that time."

"If you are an unlucky person and you still die in spite of your foreknowledge, the loop will repeat again and again until you either survive the tribulation that killed you (whatever it was) or complete your destiny. Those are the only two ways to end the loop."

"Though you WILL succeed in ending the loop one way or another, you may not necessarily come away from it alive or uninjured. Your performance on the successful, and final, loop is what determines your injuries and whether or not you survive. If, for example, you complete your destiny and then expire from your injuries the loop will not reset. You will be dead. Do not pass go, do not collect 200$; dead."

"A person can also have more than one destiny, so if you are one of those unfortunate people, your loop might reset in spite of completing your destiny within the loop if you die from injuries gained during that completion. With those, you need to either survive the loop or complete both destinies to get out, there aren't any shortcuts like doing a suicide run to complete your destiny in order to escape."

Luna relaxed and sighed, taking off her blue-and-red glasses and putting them back in her pocket, "I hate giving that explanation… its' too dusty."

She chugged the rest of her pumpkin juice rapidly.

"Anyway… now we can go onto specifics about your situation Harry!" She grinned happily, bouncing, "Isn't it exciting?"

Harry wasn't sure whether he was allowed to talk yet, so he nodded.

"I only get a little information about specific loops, so if I say I don't know, I really don't. I'm telling you this now because many of the loopers who meet me eventually decide I'm holding out on them and try to wring information out of me. It won't work, both since I'm immune to such things for a couple of reasons and because I don't actually know, but they still try sometimes."

Another dreamy smile spread across her face, but this one had a hint of sorrow.

"You can try if you like, but I won't be friends with you anymore if you Crucio me into insanity. Even if it is only temporary." Harry stared with growing horror as she continued, "You can use it a little if you want, I won't mind. In my opinion the Cruciatus is like wasabi, good in small doses but it leaves a terrible aftertaste in large ones…"

She paused, then muttered a little to herself.

"…or maybe wasabi is like a Crucio, painful at all doses… I can never remember which of those is right… Ah, well, let's get started!" She finished loudly with a blinding smile.

Harry felt ill.

Luna- airy, generally bewildered, always happy, tiny and incredibly blond Luna- had been hurt.

Luna, who reminded him of cute puppies and little children with her half-intense and half-confused personality, had been tortured.

Horribly so.

Harry suddenly felt a burning rage that made his memories of Voldemorts' insane wrath pale in comparison. He had just met her the other day and he already wanted to find whoever did that and rip out their eyes and carve his vengeance on their bones, he wanted to flay and boil them alive, he wanted to-

Luna's sudden loud clap startled him from his nascent thoughts on vengeance.

"Pay attention Harry." She said with a faintly admonishing tone and an ever so slightly disappointed expression.

His emotions roiled and he wondered through his embarrassment how she managed to take him on such an emotional rollercoaster with only three words.

"Your loop," She stated firmly, now that he was paying attention again, "sucks."

Harry waited for a continuation.

It didn't come.

"What do you mean, 'Your loop sucks'?" Harry asked cautiously after a nearly five full minutes of silence, "In what way does it suck?"

"Hmm?" Luna said, turning back to Harry as though suddenly remembering he was there, "Oh yes, it sucks a lot."

"I'm really sorry Harry, but it seems Fate was in a bit of a bad mood when he started your loop, so he stuck you into a loop with two destinies that both need to be fulfilled to get out." She looked at him with a sort of immense pity that made Harry extremely uneasy.

"Unfortunately when you died it was just a tribulation that killed you instead of the actual fulfillment of one of your destines, and your destinies weren't meant to be fulfilled yet. That means that you're going to have to do all the preparation to complete your destines from scratch instead of already being ready for them when they come along like people do in a normal destiny."

She shook her head, "I don't know what you did to annoy Fate so much, but it's clear he has it out for you. The last person to annoy Fate enough to get something like this was Hercules, who was really meant to do those twelve tasks over the course of his entire life instead of twelve years. The only reason he actually succeeded was because his loop was twelve years long. I mean really, who would think to divert a river to clean out a stable? Who could do it in a day? Nobody, that's who, unless they'd already been preparing for it for several years like Hercules did."

"Anyway that doesn't matter." She said, waving her hand, "What matters is your destinies. Your first destiny is that you need to kill Voldemort. You probably already guessed that one."

Harry nodded. He'd guessed that killing Voldemort would end the loop for the wrong reasons apparently, but he had guessed it.

"That one should be easy enough," Luna continued, eyeing the sausages with a speculative look, "Since your magic is part of your soul and that is part of what gets 'beefed up' by being in a time loop. You really just have to train and grow for a few years within this loop and you'll probably be up to where you can face Voldemort like you were supposed to in the original plan."

She started filling her empty plate with sausages, nabbing a biscuit and some jam as well.

"Your second destiny is to 'untangle the web of lies that surrounds his life'. You're probably going to have a tough time of that though, since you were supposed to complete that one in twenty or so years, so there might not be much to go on at this point." Luna pursed her lips as she started spreading the jam on the sausages instead of the biscuit, making Harry double-take.

"Fortunately, information is one thing that is incredibly easy to gain in a time loop." She continued blithely, unaware of the distress Harry was experiencing at the perversion of good food, "You're on the right track, Obliviating people and resetting the loop when things get tough, but you need to realize that you need to figure all of the lies out, and whatever or whoever is lying be more far-reaching than you might imagine."

Luna took a big bite out of her jammed sausages and made a happy sound of satisfaction. After a moment, she swallowed.

"Personally, I'd start with Gringotts and Dumbledore since they typically know more about what is going on than most other people and they'll probably be able to point you in the right direction if they don't know for sure. If they don't know anything at all, which I sincerely doubt, then you'll want to try the Hall of Records in the Ministry for Magic. There is probably some sort of paper trail if this 'web of lies' is extensive enough to warrant actually being a destiny."

"Since we've gone over that now, it's time to ask questions, but only interesting ones." Luna took another bite of sausage, "I was actually a bit serious the other day about you not bothering me until you were less hopeless."

"Gathering information about the situation and the people around you is one of the most basic things loopers need to do. You haven't done that yet, so you're like a baby- completely uninteresting to talk to about things. You're a 'frog in a well', to borrow a Chinese saying. You haven't got any perspective to make interesting observations. You've actually got even less perspective than a normal person for some reason. All those things I mentioned the other day were prime examples of things that you should have gotten the full story on as soon as possible even before the loop, but which you did not for whatever reason."

Luna looked at him and squinted her eyes, trying to see something, "Honestly, I'm not sure whether you were being surgically Obliviated and subtlety Compulsed to ignore the strangeness of the situations, or whether you were just being a blind idiot to not realize that normal people don't have crap happen to them like you do. Killing a basilisk at twelve? Really? How is that even close to normal? Did you even consider wondering why there wasn't a huge uproar about it? That alone should have clued you into suspecting Dumbledore's motives even outside the loop."

She shook her head as she dissected her biscuit into cubes and began to eat it with a fork, like one would cut up and eat sausages.

"Now… questions?" Luna smiled happily, stabbing her biscuit chunks with a fork. "Remember, no boring ones." Luna suddenly got a focused and almost bloodthirsty expression on her face.

"You get three free passes on boring or inane questions before I don't answer any more from you… ever. It makes it much more fun to make it into a game. The stakes take the excitement up."

Questions? Yes, he had a few questions, but were they important enough to warrant risking the loss of a huge potential source for information?

"I have two destines- 'Kill Voldemort', and 'Unravel Lies'." Harry started slowly. He paused.

"That wasn't a question, smart." Luna said with a grin.

"And going through the loop makes me grow magically." Harry said, almost (but not quite) questioningly.

Luna nodded.

"Yes, and that's one strike down." She said with an evil grin.

"But I didn't ask a question!" Harry protested. "That was a statement! Just like the first one!"

"You were trying to use me as a sounding board. That counts a question. Don't try to find loopholes, I make the rules in this game." She stabbed another piece of biscuit with an almost vicious smile.

Harry thought for a minute or two.

"Why are you in the loop? You obviously know what is going on but the impression I got was that the loop only had one person in it?"

Luna swallowed.

"I'm not." She said, "In the loop that is. Not really. I experience the loop yes, but I don't grow magically in the same way as you. My mind goes back but my soul does not. I can't hone my skills in a time loop in the same way as you can, I'm merely an observer, not a participant."

"My mother was working on a new spell and it went wrong. It killed her, but it disconnected my mind from time. I experience ALL the loops worldwide. The first time through, I experience each of the shorter loops. When I'm in a longer loop like yours that envelops the time that other loops went on, I do not experience any of those shorter ones. If you somehow interfered with the result of one of those shorter loops, your loop would reset to prevent a paradox. That's one reason I don't like to help with completing your destiny, because… you know what? Nevermind, the ramifications of that are too hard to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it."

"Oh by the way, good for you, that question was smart. You still have two chances."

Harry thought for a minute as Luna finally finished off her biscuit.

He stood abruptly.

"I'm not going to ask any more right now. It's too risky. You answered some of my questions, but others you seem to want me to answer for myself." He grimaced, "Losing you as an information source is too dangerous to risk without proper preparation. I'll go do some investigating before I risk losing another chance."

"Come back anytime!" Luna called happily as Harry started to walk off to meet Ron for Obliviation training. "If you ask a really interesting question I might just let you earn a strike back!"

Her bubbly laughter, very much at odds to the dark nature of the humor contained within, chased him from the hall.