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

We're halfway through the year. Joy.

FRIENDS

January

The end of December marked the end of... something, though Luna isn't sure what it is. But she knows she misses it terribly and wants it back. January heralds the beginning of something else; again, Luna isn't sure what, but she knows it's not a nice something else. She doesn't like it at all. When she gets back on the Hogwarts Express and returns to school, she doesn't read The Quibbler at all. Instead, she sits in her seat and stares out the window, fidgeting and tapping her foot on the floor, from the time the train leaves Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters to the time it pulls into Hogsmeade station.

What started as a little bit of trouble sleeping and focusing during her winter holidays gradually gets worse and worse. Luna hasn't been sleeping too well at all, and it's showing: her skin has grown even paler than its natural colour, which is quite pale indeed; there are ever-growing dark circles under her eyes, which are bloodshot and red-rimmed (and not just from crying anymore). She barely gets two or three hours of sleep a night. Instead, she's made hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pretty gold FRIENDS paper chains. She's started skipping entire classes just to sit and make more FRIENDS paper chains in her dorm. Anders keeps burning them all up when she's not looking and Luna has to replace them or something very, very bad will happen. She doesn't know what.

In class, when she does go, she's a wreck. She sits in the back of the room and scribbles Friends on scraps of parchment paper she finds in the trash (because between all her classes, the holidays, and Anders destroying some of her textbooks, she has nothing else to write on), and usually taps her foot nonstop the entire time she's in the room. She fidgets, she contorts herself up in very strange ways, she even pulls strands of her hair out sometimes, because she just can't sit still – even though it feels like she has to wade through an ocean of mud to think at all, like someone's cut the top of her head off and poured a lot of tar inside before putting the top back on again. When the pink toad lady calls on her to answer questions in Defense Against the Dark Arts class now, it takes a long, long moment for her to even process the questions, then more time to find the answers, and then even more time to switch back to the real world, and then still more to remember how to open her mouth and make noises, and by then the pink toad lady is already giving Luna another detention for ignoring her.

Luna dutifully attends all her detentions, of course. The hours and hours spent in the pink toad lady's office start to blur into a kind of greyish temporal goo whose only features are the jagged red letters of the words she keeps writing on parchment paper (there are enough of her lines to make a book with now, she thinks – with some effort because it's like someone cut off the top of her head and poured tar in and put the top back on) with the very sharp red-inked quill that hurts her a lot.

It's all so hypnotic that Luna fears she may fall asleep during one of the detentions – though she never actually does, because her brain won't turn off, and she just can't sleep during a detention anyway, because that's very bad, and the pink toad lady says (in response to her yawning all the time even though her eyes are opened far wider than usual) if Luna goes to sleep in the office, she'll get her fingers crushed with magic to wake her up, and we don't want to have to do that now, do we, Miss Lovegood?

No, no, we don't, Professor.

Dinner is the only meal she actually attends, and she doesn't really eat very much then, because she's never hungry anymore – her mind isn't, at least, because she just can't think about food when she could be thinking about friends. Her body is always hungry now, though, because she never eats, and goes through every day with almost nothing except the occasional Not-Gumball jawbreaker to sustain her. It's not really very important (not in the way it seems to be to the other girls, anyway), but Luna starts thinking after a while that she might be getting a bit thinner, since her clothes feel bigger than they did in September, and that's sort of illogical because Luna is a teenager, and teenagers are supposed to grow, not shrink.

Near the end of the month, Luna receives a letter from her father. Its arrival makes her shake with fear and relief, because she knows what it means. He's pulling her out of Hogwarts – he has to be. Luna doesn't know if it's because of what she said to him during winter break, or if it's because of what just happened with Sirius Black (who Luna now understands is not Stubby Boardman of the Hobgoblins) helping those Death Eaters escape from Azkaban, or something else totally unrelated, but she doesn't want to leave, and she wants to leave so badly, and it's all so confusing and overwhelming that she almost bursts into tears right there in the hallway where her father's post owl found her.

For once, though, Luna manages to hold herself together till she can find an empty classroom and lock herself in it. Then, when she opens the letter, unfolds it, and begins reading it, she does more than cry – she sobs. Laughs hysterically. Screams.

'Luna-flower!', it reads, 'It is with great delight that I inform you of the most probable location of the fabled and elusive Crumple-Horned Snorkack... it is said to be a well-hidden cave about four miles outside of Halmstad, Sweden! We shall journey there this summer, of course. I hope you are as excited by this news as I am, for the lead is quite a credible one indeed. I hope you are well; we must both be in good health and spirits for this adventure, which will surely be demanding at times...'

The letter itself is four pages long, but Luna doesn't get past the first paragraph before she takes out her wand and lights it on fire, unconsciously arranging her face into her now-automatic fake plastic smile – though it's trembling at the corners and her eyes are leaking tears. She lets it burn, watching the words disappear into the blaze, until the fire scorches her hand as well. Then she proceeds to scream herself hoarse and throw herself against the walls and hit the stones until she can barely speak and her head hurts and her hands are bleeding and her clothes are torn...

In the end, she huddles in the corner of the empty classroom and just cries softly.

Once upon a time, she enjoyed communicating with her father and talking about their creatures – the Nargles, the Wrackspurts, the Umgubular Slashkilters – but after all that's happened, after all the crying in bathrooms and the cutting My name is Loony Lovegood into her hand with the red-inked quill and the having no friends and the feeling like a complete failure for months and the wanting so very badly to leave Hogwarts yet not wanting to leave at all because then she would never ever have any friends would she... The magic is gone. Luna doesn't look for Nargles in the mistletoe or tell people she thinks they have Wrackspurts in their brains or anything of that nature anymore because the magic of believing is all gone.

Something's changed, and it's awful.

But, Luna reminds herself days later, as she sits in the freezing cold with the Thestrals (who are quite friendly to her when she brings them things to eat), all of those things would be all right if she had friends to help her put herself back together. The only obstacle in her way is the fact that no one seems to want to be her friend. Still.

"Why doesn't anyone want to be my friend?" she begs of the nearest Thestral. "Do I not get to have friends?"

The Thestral snorts at Luna, who desperately takes it as a no because she always tries to be optimistic wherever and whenever possible, and also she simply can't imagine a world without friendship.

"I wish Mummy were here... She would know what I ought to do..." Luna tosses the last of the raw meat she brought with her to the Thestral, which catches before it hits the ground. "I suppose I wish a lot of things that aren't possible, though..."

She stares at the distant castle, blinking to try to clear her dizzy, fatigued, slightly blurred vision. Ginevra is somewhere inside Hogwarts with her new friends (who are all much prettier and smarter and more likable than Luna is. Luna is very glad Ginevra is happy, even if she herself is lonely and miserable and sad and friendless now).

"...We were very good friends, though, you know," Luna tells the Thestral wistfully when she turns back. "We used to do all sorts of nice friend things together. We used to walk together in the forest and talk about things, and she would never laugh at me for anything I said, and it was ever so wonderful, and oh I would just give anything to have a friend again..."

Before she knows it, she's crying, and also laughing a little, for some reason she can't really understand. Try as she might, Luna can't find anything humorous about the situation at all.

"Ginevra said she'd never call me L... She'd never... s... never call me that name... Why did she do it? We were friends... Friends aren't supposed to do that... break promises... like that... It hurts..."

The Thestral trots over to her and nuzzles her a little. Luna presses her face into its mane and sobs. Eventually, she ends up clinging to the Thestral's neck, crying, unable to voice any of the things she's feeling because her mind won't slow down long enough for her to form a coherent sentence.

"I wish you were people," she finally blurts out. "You could come to the... the castle... be my friends... I could have friends... be wonderful... amazing... I wish... oh... I wish so much..."

For what seems like hours, she hugs the winged reptilian horse and cries and wishes Thestrals could talk to her and say Luna I'll be your friend don't cry but they don't because they're just Thestrals and nothing more and unfortunately she can't pretend otherwise anymore because the magic is all gone and she can't get it back because she has no friends to help her. And then, eventually, one by one, the Thestrals leave, even the one that came to comfort her – because even though they look like skeletons, they're still alive, and they're cold-blooded reptiles and can't stay out in the freezing cold winter snow for too long.

And then Luna is all alone again.

Not-Gumballs are something from an earlier, scrapped story I started. They're multicoloured jawbreakers you can talk around without sounding like you have candy in your mouth.

Praise my beta-reader, TuesdayNovember. Just do it, man. Don't question the voice of god.