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

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FRIENDS

December

Luna always spends the holidays at home with her father, whom she loves very much. Together, they always decorate a Christmas tree, and drink hot cocoa, and listen to songs on the Wireless. This year, she's both reluctant and anxious to go, since leaving Hogwarts means leaving Ginevra and all the potential friends she could have – but also Anders and Rebecca and the pink toad lady.

She tries to relax a bit on the train home. It's the first time since September began that she doesn't have to worry about Anders hexing her from behind, since Anders isn't going home for the holidays. No one bothers her, for once. Still, the whole trip feels gloomy from the start, and the snowstorm whiting out the sun doesn't help, either. There is no Ginevra on the train, no one to talk to - no one at all except Lonely Luna Lovegood. Luna sits by herself in a compartment and spends most of the trip staring at a page of the Quibbler - an article about something or other, written by someone or other.

For some reason, Luna feels as if her brain is working a little bit faster than it should lately. She has more energy than she can use in one day; her thoughts sometimes get tripped up by each other because she has so many of them; she feels wide awake and fidgets a bit as she gets off the train, despite having slept for about total of, maybe, an hour the night before. This feeling persists even after her father Side-Along-Apparates her to their home, even after she's dragged her trunk up to her room and used it to block the door so she can cry in solitude while making FRIENDS paper chains, even when she's staring up at the far-too-white ceiling that night while wearing her neon-purple pyjamas, trying to sleep.

When her father asks her what she would like for Christmas, Luna says she would like a new pair of shoes, because the giant squid ate her old ones. Privately, she also she asks that if there happens to be some higher being or other controlling fate (and such things of that nature), could they please give her a friend for Christmas? She would be ever so grateful if they did that. She really would.

For her father, whom she loves very much, she digs very deep into her imagination, and also into her father's research, and tries to draw a picture of what she thinks a Crumple-Horned Snorkack might look like, so he can have something to compare when he finally catches one. It takes her quite a bit of time and effort - and a wastepaper basket filled with balled up, scrapped drawings, because Luna keeps drawing things that are too mean-looking, or unhappy-looking, and it upsets her that she can't stop doing it, because the Crumple-Horned Snorkack is most certainly not mean or unhappy! And eventually, because of her frustration overflowing again and bringing her to tears, she also has to push her trunk in front of the door for a while so she can sit on it and make FRIENDS paper chains by herself.

She spends a lot of her evening time gazing up at her very blank and very empty white ceiling over the next few days (which turn to weeks, eventually) because she can't seem to wind down as easily as she used to when it's time for her to go to sleep. When she does sleep, it's often for just a few hours at a time, and then she wakes up and can't back to sleep for the rest of the night no matter what she does. What sleep she does get is pervaded by increasingly strange dreams.

Luna often dreamed, and still dreams, of herself, drifting through Hogwarts. She has friends, and there are people who care about her, and they make sure she knows it, and no one ever calls her Loony Lovegood or steals her shoes and throws them in the lake where the giant squid eats them or sets the raven knocker at the common room entrance to lock her out all the time by giving her gibberish riddles or makes her carve My name is Loony Lovegood into the back of her hand until she feels like she's disgusting and rotten and so horrid and so wrong inside. But sometimes, now, her dream-Hogwarts is replaced with a vacuous parallel otherworld; an empty nothing though which she floats; lonely, starless, and lifeless. It isn't so much a place or an idea as a state of being - or a state of nonbeing, rather. And it's so very cold... Whenever she has this dream, Luna ends up waking to find herself staring at the blank white of her ceiling (which she wishes were some other colour, she thinks one night), unable to sleep again until the next night comes.

During past holidays, she used to go out and play in the snow and in the woods and try to see if she could learn to speak animal languages and go ice skating and make snow forts and run around and pretend to be a Muggle airplane and search for Frozen Forpestulators and go sledding and make snow angels and sometimes she would just sit on her roof and watch the sun go down but now she has no reason to do any of those things because she doesn't have any friends (such as Ginevra who was her friend but isn't anymore because well just because) and none of those things are any fun at all if there's no one to share them with.

To pass the time she's awake when she should be (or wishes she was) playing outside, having hot cocoa with her father (whom she loves very much), eating, sleeping, which is really adding up to a lot of time indeed, Luna makes FRIENDS paper chains and writes a letter to Ginevra. One letter. She tries to keep it short - but because her brain is working just a little too fast for her mind to keep up with, she keeps writing and writing and can't seem to hit the point of what she wants to say, because she has too many ideas and can't spend enough time on any of them, and soon she's writing a rambling, never-ending stream-of-consciousness dissertation on nothing that vacillates between being pleading, apologetic, accusatory, irrelevant, and, at increasingly frequent times, just completely incomprehensible.

you always told me the way to make friends was to be myself Ginevra I am being myself I always am myself I don't think I could be anybody else very easily so I am being myself but nobody wants to by my friend why don't they want to be my friends I just want to have friends I'm going to die if I don't have any friends I hate my life if I don't have any friends what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong

when I am myself nobody knows who I am but I know who I am I'm Luna Lovegood not Lxxny Lovegood because Mummy loved me very much she knew I am Luna Lovegood and not Lxxny Lovegood I live as Luna Lovegood and I AM just like everyone else but I don't know if I'm the same as everyone else they're all not like me and I'm the same as them but I don't know if I'm like them why aren't I like them I think about it when I'm watching the sunset sometimes even though I haven't watched it this year and oh Ginevra it's beautiful I wish we were still friends so we could watch it together this year, it's so beautiful and I'm so lonely and I wish I had a friend and I don't want to be alone and I hate being alone...

why did you call me Lxxny Lovegood on the train why did you let the pink toad woman make me cry in front of everyone why are you letting me hurt like this why are you hurting me what am I doing wrong why can't you see how much this hurts why did you call me Lxxny Lovegood why did you call me Lxxny Lovegood why did you call me Lxxny Lovegood why did you call me Lxxny Lovegood why why why why why why why why why why why why why

When Luna isn't writing or drawing her father's Snorkack picture or making FRIENDS paper chains, she lies on her bed and stares at the blank white ceiling and thinks about how if she had friends, she would paint their faces up there in very perfect lifelike detail, with the same detail she used to draw Ginevra's face in September before her housemates burnt her drawing to ash and made her cry for the second time that year. She imagines how wonderfully comforting it would be to have her friends looking down on her as she sleeps, watching over her, reminding her that they love her, and how she would use her very special, very pretty gold pen to write the word Friends around each face like a chain linking them together, so that each and every person who ever came into her room would know that they were friends forever, and none of them would ever call her Loony Lovegood, and she would never have to cry in another bathroom again or wish she could sink into the floor when she was called on in class or ever ever ever ever ever feel lonely again...

Luna would paint Ginevra's face on the ceiling right now, if only Ginevra were still her friend. But she isn't. They're not friends anymore. Luna has no friends. And she's so very lonely. The only person on earth who still talks to her civilly is her father.

On Christmas day (for which she does not have to awaken early, as she did not sleep much at all the night before) her father gives her the pair of shoes she asked for, and it reminds her of how much she loves him, because she does love him so dearly. After a lot of hard work, Luna eventually managed to produce a decent drawing of the Crumple-Horned Snorkack, which she gives to her father, who is overjoyed at this and hugs her, and she almost cries into his shoulder for absolutely no reason at all other than that it's the first gesture of affection anyone has shown to her since he hugged her when he saw her off on the first of September. Then he happens to ask her how she's been faring at school, which he hasn't had a chance to do because he tends to forget things very easily ever since his wife's death (and Luna has been holed up in her room most of the time since she came home, anyway).

School has been excellent, Luna replies with a watery smile. She has learned many new things- which is the point of going to school, after all. There has been a recent infestation of Wrackspurts around the castle, but luckily she has managed to avoid getting one in her ear. She thinks Anders might secretly be an Umgubular Slashkilter.

Also, she blurts out, she's lost the only friend she ever had and she's been crying in bathrooms every day and she's terrified of going to most of her classes and she's been cutting 'My name is Loony Lovegood' into the back of her right hand as punishment for things she can't help and she has no friends and she's unbearably lonely and she's started to hate going to Hogwarts at all and doesn't want to do it anymore because they all call her Loony Lovegood and steal her things to feed them to the giant squid and burn her drawings and lock her out of the Ravenclaw common room and she doesn't want to go back she wants to go somewhere else and she wants to make friends somewhere else and oh why can't she have a friend all she wants is a friend...

Her father stares at her with a rather dazed and shellshocked look on his face - the one he wears whenever something is too distressing for him to handle - the one that he wore for weeks after Luna's mummy died, when he kept forgetting she was dead because maybe he didn't want to remember and Luna had to keep reminding him of it because she couldn't forget even though she wished (and still wishes) she could. It's a long time before he speaks, and when he does, he sounds more distant, more confused, more helpless, than she's ever heard him since then.

"I'll... give you a... a charm to ward off the Umgubular Slashkilter, then... shall I...?" he says. "Should help... Should make things... better... Must be the Wrackspurts causing... everything else... yes... I'll give you some material on Wrackspurt removal... It's very important to get them out of your classmates' brains... as soon as possible... Things should return to... to normal once the Wrackspurts are gone... Everything should be fine... when they're gone... Yes... Thank you for the Snorkack drawing, Luna-Flower... I should go update my research... Thank you..."

He wanders away, barely paying attention to what's ahead of him, nearly tripping over a chair in his dissociated stupor.

"You're welcome," Luna says after he's gone, pasting her big, fake, plastic smile on her face and feeling lonelier than ever.

http:/ /www. youtube .com/ watch?v= gEtxrn7169U

Yttligare Ett Steg Närmare Total Jävla Utfrysning... Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock.

It is impossible to overstate how completely badass and awesome my beta-reader, TuesdayNovember, is.