se nu hur alla dina minnen formas till en magnum 357...

Sorry this is a day late. Real life got in the way. Enjoy.

FRIENDS

October

Last year, Ginevra was very nice and always took the seat next to Luna when they had classes together, so the Wrackspurt-infested bullies wouldn't be able to sit next to her and harass her by calling her names like Loony Lovegood. But now, Ginevra sits with a fellow Gryffindor girl whose name Luna doesn't remember. Whoever she is, she certainly has a lot more friends than Luna, who has no friends.

Now Luna spends the beginning of each class playing musical chairs to get away from people like Anders (particularly Anders). She almost always ends up sitting alone in the back of the room. Sometimes, when Anders has to sit with someone she doesn't like, she waits for Luna to excuse herself to cry in the bathroom and then switches their things so that when Luna comes back, she has to sit next to whoever Anders was sitting with before and Anders gets to sit by herself. There are a few times when Luna simply leaves and doesn't come back at all; she doesn't feel any real motivation to return to the classrooms for some of her classes, with what's waiting for her there.

In the beginning, before casting a Silencing Charm becomes automatic for her upon entering a stall to cry, students sometimes come in and hear Luna crying, and they ask if she's all right, and she says that no, she's not all right, because she hopes that maybe they'll talk to her and they can be friends, and they're sympathetic and offer to help her, but then when they finally recognize her voice as belonging to Loony Lovegood, they stop caring and leave her to cry by herself, sometimes laughing a little at her first.

Luna has never cried this much before in her life, not even when her mummy died. Were she a different kind of person (the kind who judges others) she might compare herself to a soppy, over-emotional girl like Rebecca – crying every other day in the middle of the common room over a lost boyfriend, or because her favourite singer got engaged – but this doesn't feel like it's the same thing at all. Luna feels like crying all the time lately; it's just that most of the time, she's able to stop herself. Increasingly, though, little things that shouldn't affect her are shattering her self-control for twenty or thirty painful minutes at a time.

If she were to draw a picture of herself (like she did with Ginevra, who used to be her friend), she imagines would probably draw a big black cloud raining on her head, because that's how she feels nowadays.

In order to distract herself from the way everything seems to be so very bleak and cold and blue and unhappy, Luna starts up her arts and crafts hobby again. In the evenings, she sits on her bed and makes her paper chains that say FRIENDS on them. While she does this, Luna can think about what she'd do if she had a thousand friends instead of how she doesn't actually have any real friends, and the miserable, oppressive feeling inside her goes away for a little while.

Anders thinks it's hilarious, and sets the FRIENDS paper chains on fire whenever Luna isn't around to protect them. Luna just makes more. And more. And more. Some of the tension goes away each time she finishes one. But she still cries just as much as she did before.

If Luna had a friend who would hold her when she cries, she would never ask for anything else, ever. Having a friend would make everything feel so much more right again, like it was before everything fell apart on the first of September, and then Luna wouldn't have to get so upset over little things that shouldn't upset her and end up crying even more after she finishes crying because she has to sit by herself and think about how she doesn't know what to do or how to fix what's wrong with her life or why people don't like her or why Ginevra called her Loony Lovegood on the Hogwarts Express or why she can't stop crying.

It becomes a struggle to keep up with her homework while crying in bathrooms all day and making her FRIENDS paper chains all evening and not actually learning anything in class because she's busy writing Friends in her textbooks with her pretty gold pen. Most of Luna's homework is burned by Anders before it ever reaches the classroom anyway, and this year Luna just can't find the energy to do it over again each time. Luna, who has always been a diligent and dedicated student, suddenly has nothing to turn in most of the time, in any of her classes.

As for the classes themselves, they're quickly becoming terrifying instead of fun and educational. Luna used to pretend she was speaking to Ginevra whenever she answered a question in class so the laughter and whispered jokes about her off-key voice and strange way of speaking wouldn't bother her. But now she's speaking to a professor and a classroom full of people who are all laughing at her, so she suddenly feels very small and very vulnerable whenever she's called on to speak, and her voice is always reduced to an inaudible mumble after only a few words.

The pink toad lady who took over the Defense Against the Dark Arts position calls on Luna to answer questions a lot.

Even though Luna never raises her hand.

She starts following Ginevra around between classes. At a distance, of course, because it's too painful to even think of talking to her; there's no telling what she might say if Luna actually tried to make conversation with her. She's not sure why she's following her, beyond simply feeling a driving need to be near her – near the only friend she's ever had.

At first, Ginevra doesn't notice, and then she pretends not to have noticed, but then she starts acting rather frightened, and suddenly her twin brothers are accompanying her everywhere. Still, Luna feels like she has to follow her whenever she can. She has to be near her. They were friends once, and that's more than what Luna has with anyone else right now.

She needs the familiarity of Ginevra Weasley, even if they're not talking or even interacting at all.

Once, Luna follows Ginevra to the Hog's Head Inn during their Hogsmeade weekend. There's a meeting going on there. Harry Potter has called it. Luna thinks Harry Potter is kind of nice; he's never called her Loony before, and that's almost like having a friend as well. But not quite, so it doesn't offer much solace when she cries in bathrooms and walks around with a huge cloud raining on her. She's feeling unusually brave today, for some reason – maybe because she's avoided enough people to only have been called Loony Lovegood twice so far (all day!) – so she drifts into the tavern and sits down with everyone else. In the very back, of course, where she won't be noticed. That's very important.

The old Luna, the one who didn't mind what people thought of her, is long gone. The new one feels like everybody's always watching her and whispering about her. Every laugh is aimed at her. Every glance that happens to catch her eyes makes her look quickly down at her bare feet. Just being in the presence of so many people generates an almost unbearable tension within her.

Hermione Granger and Harry Potter talk about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named for a while. Luna zones out, feeling less and less human and more and more like an alien here, as people talk and she has things to say but can't figure out how to insert them into the conversation without interrupting anyone. It's like being on the outside of a snow globe and having to look in at everyone inside celebrating Christmas together.

(You can look, Loony, but you can't touch!)

The Hat put Luna in Ravenclaw for a reason, despite her inability to solve the riddle of friendship. She's reasonably intelligent. She knows what's going to happen when she eventually, inevitably, becomes the center of attention in this meeting, even if it's only meant to be for two seconds - something like:

Student: "What's Loony Lovegood doing in here with the normal people?"

Ginevra: (sighing) "She must have followed me in..."

Everyone: "Get out, Loony! Nobody wants you here!"

So before they can hurt her like that, Luna quietly gets up and makes her way out of the Hog's Head. She walks back to Hogwarts with her Quibbler magazine held up awkwardly in front of her face – ostensibly because she's reading it, but really because she's using it to hide the fact that she's crying and doesn't want anyone to know. Luna is awake until almost three in the morning that night, making FRIENDS paper chains. She wonders if anyone would have talked to her nicely and been her friend if she'd stayed in the Hog's Head. Maybe. There might have been very, very, very, very slim chance of it happening, maybe, perhaps.

But if someone did talk nicely to her, Luna wonders, what would she do? She has so very many important things to say, but doesn't know how to communicate them in conversation short of awkwardly blurting them out as she thinks them, which many people seem to find rude. So all she's ever managed to talk about with anyone besides Ginevra is... nothing. If Luna had friends, friends she could just blurt out her thoughts to without worrying about them being angry with her for it, she would talk about lots and lots of things with them. She would tell them about herself, and about her father, and about her mother, and about things that matter and are far more private to her than Crumple-Horned Snorkacks and Wrackspurts. If she had friends, that's what she would do.

But the only friend Luna ever had was Ginevra, who is no longer her friend. Which, of course, is why she follows Ginevra everywhere and needs to be near her. It's a little bit like having a friend again, you see.

But only a little bit.

Many thanks to my beta, TuesdayNovember, who cleaned up a lot of errors and made this infinitely more awesome.