se nu hur alla dina minnen formas till en magnum 357...
Chapter two is significantly shorter than chapter one, but don't worry - they'll get lengthier again as time progresses.
FRIENDS
September (part II)
"Miss Lovegood, please keep up with the rest of the class. You haven't even opened your book."
Luna looks down at her Transfiguration textbook.
"Oh," she says weakly, and opens it so she can stare vacantly at the first page it falls to, not actually taking in any of the words.
It's already three weeks into term and Luna still hasn't got over what Ginevra said to her. The words won't leave her alone; they've been banging on the inside of her head almost constantly, day and night, no matter what she does.
There's only Loony Lovegood in here...
There's only Loony Lovegood in here...
There's only Loony Lovegood in here...
Bang, bang, bang. Rattle, rattle, rattle.
There's only there's only Loony Lovegood in here... here in Loony Lovegood...
The cleverness of this wordplay is enough to distract Luna from her troubles for a few seconds, before she realizes she just called herself Loony Lovegood. No. That shouldn't happen. Her name is Luna. Not Loony. Her name will never be Loony.
No matter how much they call her Loony, it will never be Loony. It will always be Luna because that's what her mummy named her.
Her mummy loved her very much and didn't call her Loony.
Like Ginevra did on the train.
There's only Loony Lovegood in here...
There's only Loony Lovegood in here...
There's only Loony Lovegood in here...
Luna has no friends now. Normally, she'd just trudge on through it, if it were anybody else calling her Loony. But it was Ginevra, which means she has no friends anymore, and having no friends means she has no one to look at and smile at and talk to about the things that are on her mind. Like she sees everyone around her doing. Luna wants to be able to do that again.
But she can't, and she truly doesn't understand why. Is she doing something wrong? Is there something wrong with her? None of her attempts to make friends with anyone else at Hogwarts besides Ginevra have ever worked. She's tried doing everything everyone else does, but none of it gets her anywhere except stuck to the ceiling or locked in broom cupboards.
All Luna wants is to have friends. She loves having friends.
No... She would love having friends. Luna has only ever had a friend, and she managed to lose that one (she's still not sure why Ginevra said that about her. Not knowing why she did it is hurting almost as badly as the fact that she did it).
During the summer, Ginevra said she would introduce Luna to some of her friends (Ginevra is very likeable and has a lot of friends) when they came back to Hogwarts... That's what she said. Luna was so happy when she got that particular letter that she almost ran to the Burrow to hug her. But she didn't, of course, because Ginevra might not take very well to that... And now she's lost Ginevra as a friend.
Luna has no friends. That thought keeps coming back to her, no matter how hard she tries to just go on as if the world were still turning the way it should be.
Even Anders has friends, and Anders is one of the most unlikable people Luna has ever met. Luna tries to think that she, too, is likeable, but nobody else seems to agree. They call her strange, and odd, and Loony. And no one ever defends her when they do it, because no one is her friend. Because she has no friends.
If Luna had friends, she would always defend them if anyone ever did anything to them. She would do anything for them. Really, she would! She would do anything... Friendship is more important than anything else in the world, after all.
All Luna does during the summer is sit on her bed and imagine what she'd be doing if she had friends. And walk around in the forest and daydream about the exciting adventures she would go on if she had friends. And sit up on her rooftop in the evenings and watch beautiful sunsets all by herself because she has no friends to share them with.
And make paper chains that say FRIENDS on them.
In her Transfiguration textbook, she writes the word Friends over and over, because Friends is such a wonderful, wonderful word. She even has a special pen that she uses for it instead of a quill. It's got very pretty gold ink. Luna writes Friends a thousand times, because she wishes she had a thousand friends.
But she doesn't even have one.
By the time she's wandering down the hall, trying to remember what her next class is – because Anders stole her schedule – several pages of Luna's Transfiguration textbook are completely unreadable, the black letters and illustrations obscured by the word she's written over and over, more times than she can count, in shining gold ink: Friends... Friends... Friends...
She spends History of Magic drawing an excruciatingly detailed likeness of Ginevra, her only friend, ever, instead of taking notes like she ought to be. That night, she makes the mistake of leaving it out on top of her trunk, where other people can get to it, for a moment, unguarded, and it's a pile of ash by the time she returns from brushing her teeth.
Although Luna is very used to having her belongings destroyed (the only things of hers that have survived since her first year are her wand and Butterbeer cork necklace, as she's kept them either on her or in her trunk all the time), finding her drawing of Ginevra reduced to cinders hits her almost as hard as hearing Ginevra say There's only Loony Lovegood in here... and so after staring at the mess in silence while Anders laughs at her for a while, she pulls the hangings on her bed shut and cries for the second time that month.
The next day, Luna excuses herself from Charms class and goes into the girls' bathroom so she can cry again, because she's been staring at Ginevra's flaming red hair on the other side of the room and writing Friends... Friends... Friends... in her textbook for almost an hour.
And she does it again a few days later, in the evening, right after dinner, because she just feels so lonely eating by herself at the end of the Ravenclaw table.
All Luna wants is one friend.
Just one. That's all.
That's not asking too much... is it?
Friends... Friends... Friends... Friends... Friends... Friends...
(...Is it?)
If anybody wants a good soundtrack for the rest of the story, look up Shining's V: Halmstad album. Or pretty much any Shining album, for that matter. Personally, I prefer II: Livets Ändhållplats for this fic, but Halmstad is probably more accessible/more listenable to people who aren't used to Shining and associated acts.
As always, TuesdayNovember beta-read this chapter.