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

FRIENDS

February

Luna is so tired she can barely remember which way to go for her classes anymore. She's been wearing the same clothes for days at a time; her hair is greasy and unwashed; her eyes are always wide-open; she looks quite mad to everyone, even herself. A few of her professors have commented on her unsightly appearance and taken points for it, telling her she needs to learn to groom herself better. But no one actually pays any real attention to the changes in Luna's behavior because, well, she's Loony Lovegood, after all. She was always strange and weird and dirty and disgusting and crazy and insane, and there's really just nothing to be done about it, and everyone knows it.

Secretly, Luna wishes someone would pay attention. She's so very afraid...

Strange things are going on. She's starting to see things moving in the corners of her eyes; things that vanish when she turns to look at them. There are little noises coming from nowhere, too. Dripping... tapping... slithering noises. When Luna lies on her bed in the dormitory, shadows move around on the other side of the hangings, dripping and tapping and slithering – but when she flings the hanging aside and lights up her wand with the Lumos spell and wakes up the whole dormitory so they can yell at her and call her a stupid Loony retard, there's nothing out of the ordinary to be found anywhere.

It isn't Anders, either. It happens even when Anders gets hexed and goes to the hospital wing for three days.

The lights are far too bright during the day, painfully bright, and at night the darkness seems to roll and undulate like there's something huge hiding just beneath it, pushing against it. Someone is whispering in her ears, but when she looks around there's no one there. It's a strange noise, a very strange noise; Luna doesn't like it at all... It's like a very quiet but sharp breath out: 'Ha-h...' And when she looks desperately for the source, there isn't anything.

Dreams continue to pervade the little sleep Luna does get. Awful dreams. Once upon a time, her dreams went like this: she drifts around Hogwarts, and everyone smiles at her and says hello Luna, how are you today? because they're all her friends and they all love her so very much, and everyone (everyone!) likes her, and nobody ever calls her Loony Lovegood or makes her cut Loony Lovegood into the back of her hand and she has so many friends and her life is absolutely perfect... But now she dreams in vivid colour: of the sharp screams, and the rising flames, and the pointed pieces of broken bones that stick out of the broken body's arms and the legs, and the smell of blood boiling and flesh cooking, and most of all, touching her mother's beautiful red hair for the last time and realizing all she's touching is a pile of glowing red ash and then she's on fire and screaming too and everything isn't hot it's cold it's so cold why is it so cold –

And then she always wakes up with a scream and Rebecca yells at her to shut up.

Luna understands now that there's something very wrong. She needs someone she can tell about all this. But of course, she can't, because she has no friends to tell, and so she sits on her bed instead and makes gold paper chains that say FRIENDS and keeps an eye out for Anders.

Strangely, when Luna happens to glance in the mirror while changing her clothes day, she realizes she doesn't really look like a 'Luna Lovegood' anymore. It's odd, isn't it? That one could fail to recognize oneself in a mirror... After that, she begins to wonder if she's even still Luna Lovegood. Luna Lovegood would never do half the things she does. Luna Lovegood was always a free spirit, wasn't she? But now she hides, and cries, and hurts, and cowers, and mumbles, and wishes she would just dry up and disappear. Is that still who Luna Lovegood is, or is she someone else entirely?

When her hands aren't occupied making FRIENDS paper chains and writing Friends in her textbooks with her pretty gold pen that's almost out of ink and warding off attacks from Anders (who isn't her friend) and wiping tears out of her eyes (because she has no friends), at least one of them is almost always holding onto her Butterbeer cork necklace. Luna doesn't remember how long she's been doing that, but the need to hold onto it is becoming more and more frequent as time passes. A horrid feeling is slowly growing within her that if she doesn't have something of hers to remind herself who she is, she could very well stop being Luna Lovegood and start being Loony Lovegood.

And she's most certainly Luna Lovegood, and not Loony Lovegood! Because her mother would never call her that awful name – Loony Lovegood! Her mother loved her!

...didn't she?

Everyone else has someone who loves them. Luna watches the people around her and realizes she envies them so terribly. Her father's love is compulsive and empty, and her mother is dead, blown to bits, cooked, charred, barbequed, burned alive, and Ginevra called her Loony Lovegood on the Hogwarts Express in September, and no one else has ever done anything that even remotely hints at feelings of affection toward her.

There's a girl called Cho Chang that Luna watches sometimes in the common room when she's not making FRIENDS paper chains or following Ginevra or crying or writing My name is Loony Lovegood or hiding from the scary noises that live in her walls and under her bed. Secretly, she wishes every so often that she could live Cho Chang's life. Cho has so many friends, and all of them are so happy around each other, and she's dating Harry Potter, and she's never had a detention with the pink toad lady in her life, and she doesn't have slithery tappy things living in her wall, and she doesn't sit and cry in bathrooms (well, sometimes she does, when she wants to get sympathy from other people... but if Luna lived Cho Chang's life, she wouldn't want any of that sympathy at all, because her life would be so perfect already that she wouldn't need anything more), and she has friends, and she has friends, and she has friends, and she has so very many friends, and she has so many friends, and Luna wishes she had as many friends as Cho Chang.

"Why do you keep staring at me?" Cho asks her one night in the Ravenclaw common room, when Luna is sitting in a chair by herself wearing clothes she put on three days ago and gazing off into space with glazed eyes. Luna, who hasn't spoken directly to another person in longer than she's been wearing her clothes, flounders for a moment before answering.

"I-I'm ju-just – I mean, I'm jus – I-I'm trying to fig-figure out – how, how y-you make so many f-f-friends!" she squeaks pathetically. Cho smiles sweetly at her. Luna almost thinks maybe she might actually take pity on poor Lonely Loony (NO NO NO) Luna Lovegood and tell her the secret of how to make friends.

"Don't bother," says Cho smoothly, and Luna wants to cry at how flawless the older girl sounds in comparison to her. "You'll never have any friends anyway."

And she goes back to her friends on the other side of the room to talk about Harry Potter.

One night, near the end of February, Luna comes across that one girl who's made her life worse than all the others put together, Allison Anders, alone in a classroom. Anders has been missing all evening, which is unusual for her because she usually likes to be loud and obnoxious at the Ravenclaw table whenever she can. Luna wonders if maybe Anders got a detention for doing something bad – even her fast-talking hasn't been quite enough to get her out of trouble with Filch and the pink toad lady this year.

In any case, Luna is locked out of the common room by the raven head knocker again, and so she wanders around until she finds an empty, unlocked classroom she can sleep in, assuming Filch doesn't catch her and bring her to the pink toad lady, who will give her more detentions. She's been doing this a lot lately – sleeping in classrooms, and also getting caught by Filch, and also serving detention with the pink toad lady, but she was already doing that before. The only problem with this is that tonight, there's already someone inside the classroom.

Anders is hiding under a desk, wide-eyed and white-faced. She's shaking, disheveled, and if the tear tracks and redness around her eyes are any indication, she's been crying. A lot. Luna tentatively approaches her, because she tries to be as nice and helpful to everybody as she can. When she gets closer, she sees Anders's glasses lying on the floor near her shoe; Anders isn't wearing them because they don't have any glass in them anymore.

"A-Anders?" she asks, kneeling down and hoping very much that Anders doesn't set her on fire. "What's th'm – what's the matter? Are you... hurt...?"

Anders turns her head slowly toward Luna, though she stares right through her. When she speaks, her voice is much higher than usual.

"I don't know," the smaller girl replies detachedly, confusedly. "I don't know, I don't know what I think... I... I don't remember what I'm supposed to think... I don't know..." She starts crying again – sobbing. "I want my mummy... I want my mummy... I'm scared... I want my mummy... please..."

Luna hesitantly places a hand on Anders's shoulder. Anders looks down at it, her eyes widening further, ballooning with psychotic rage, and then she very suddenly snaps back and recoils from Luna with such violence that she overturns the desk she was hiding under.

"Get your fucking hands off me, you fucking freak!" she screams. "Don't touch me! I'll kill you! Don't fucking touch me!"

"I'm sorry!" Luna cries, backing away as quickly as she can. "I just wanted to hel–"

"Get out!" Anders shrieks in a voice so loud and shrill Luna thinks it has to have done permanent damage to her vocal cords. She points something at Luna with a trembling hand – it's her wand, but it's been broken in half, the top part hanging by a string of red. "I'll kill you, I swear I will! I'll kill you, Loony! Get out! Get out or I'll kill you!"

By the time Luna makes it out of the classroom and the door slams behind her, Anders's threats have been reduced to incoherent screams. Luna doesn't understand what she did to deserve her fury, if anything, but whatever it was, it must have been terrible.

She doesn't even see Anders for a long time after that. Not in class, not in the halls, not in the dormitory – not until Anders comes to dinner a few days later, cowering instead of posturing, and eats quietly and quickly instead of competing to be the loudest, most obnoxious person in the Great Hall like she used to. Luna hears someone crying in the Ravenclaw girls' dormitory later that night, and she thinks – knows, really – it's Anders. She wonders why Anders would have to cry about whatever happened by herself. Anders has a lot of friends she could go to for help.

But then, no one bothers to comfort her when she cries, as far as Luna can tell. Rebecca tells her to shut up, and the rest ignore her.

So maybe Anders doesn't have as many friends as Luna thought.

Even the worst of us are still human. Anders is a Dutch word meaning 'alternative'; I don't actually expect anyone to guess the symbolic significance of that on their own, since it's very obscure, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

This chapter was beta-read by TuesdayNovember, to whom you should give your thanks and respect for making it awesome.