se nu hur alla dina minnen formas till en magnum 357...
I'm very sorry about the repeated changing of the update date on my profile. I can't guarantee that it won't happen again (I do a lot of things besides writing), but I'll try to avoid it in the future.
FRIENDS
March
Luna gets less than a night's worth of sleep every week. She dreads sleeping now – because if she goes to sleep, she has horrible, horrible nightmares about horrible, horrible monsters that do horrible, horrible things to her. Great fiery creatures made of ash that burn wildly and chase her through her dreams (which are now filled with endless bridges made from her mother's splintered bones that cross over abysmal black chasms). In the end, the monsters always catch Luna and devour her, no matter how quickly she runs, or how loudly she screams, or how much she cries, or how pathetically she pleads for them to stop hurting her.
Every night, she sits on her bed and cries while she makes her FRIENDS paper chains, which help ward off things hiding in the places she can't see, instead of sleeping. It isn't that she cries because she's particularly sad; she already cries enough because of that. No, she sits on her bed every night, all night, and cries because she's so very lonely and so very afraid and she doesn't know what to do.
It's not much better when she's awake, either: the dripping won't go away; the slithering won't go away; there are faces in the walls sometimes now – tortured, agonized impressions like someone behind the wall is trying desperately to break through and escape into the real world. Something is under Luna's bed – she can hear it moving at night, and she can feel it breathing, and she can smell its rancid odor. It follows Luna around, whispering that hah noise and other things she can't make out into her ear. She's afraid to sleep with the curtains drawn now (despite the likelihood of her getting hexed by her dorm mates for existing), because if she does the slithering, tapping, dripping, breathing, whispering creatures are going to kill her. They're going to kill her and eat her body. They're all going to kill her and burn her and torture her. Each time Luna looks in the mirror, or indeed anything reflective enough to count as one, she expects to see not her own face reflected back at her, but some horrid, unnameable creature, leering at her, mimicking her actions, giving her only enough time to realize she can't escape before it lunges through to pull her into whatever hell it lives in.
Between her classes, during which she wears her fake plastic smile, she wanders around the freezing stone halls of Hogwarts, barefoot again (because someone took the new shoes that her father got her for Christmas and she doesn't even know what happened to them this time), eyes unfocused, following Ginevra Weasley, mumbling to herself about things like friendship and tapping and blood and Loony Lovegood and Ginevra Weasley and dripping and slithering and why can't I make friends and My name is Loony Lovegood and please why can't I just have a friend and oh god I wish I had a friend... And then sometimes when Luna has to leave her (former) friend Ginevra, because they've arrived at a class they don't share, she walks around by herself and talks to the air instead, pretending it's Ginevra, and it talks back to her and tells her what a wonderful, wonderful friend she is for never giving up on her and Ginevra's friendship, and that makes Luna feel just a little bit better about her miserable, miserable life.
But only just a little.
On a slightly brighter note, Anders has stopped setting Luna's FRIENDS paper chains on fire. She's stopped hexing Luna, too. In fact, she's stopped doing just about everything that makes her Anders and not an Inferius, save for breathing and crying. Luna hasn't seen her much at breakfast, or at lunch, or at dinner, or indeed at all, and when she does show up for classes, she just sort of ignores everyone and does her work in silence. Somehow, this just makes everything even worse – maybe, Luna thinks, she's just so used to the nasty, belligerent Anders that the subdued, meek version feels as wrong as everything else going on in her life.
But not to worry; there are plenty of other girls picking up where Anders left off. Some of them lock Luna in one of the dormitory bathrooms for several hours, and she panics and spends the entire time hiding in a corner of the room with her hands over her face, because she knows that if she looks at the mirror, her reflection will come out of it and eat her like the monsters in her dreams, and everyone will forget about her, and she will never have any friends ever again...
The pink toad lady thinks Luna's doing something with Harry Potter that's against the rules. She says someone (she won't say who, exactly) told her Luna is part of a group Harry Potter started that's plotting to overthrow the Ministry of Magic, and Luna had better tell her all about it or she'll be in a lot of trouble. Luna tells the truth and says that no, she isn't doing something with Harry Potter that's against the rules, like plotting to overthrow the Ministry of Magic. Being part of a tight-knit revolutionary group made up of her peers, she patiently explains, would be a bit like having friends, and she doesn't have any friends or anything close to them.
The pink toad lady smiles with her pointy little needle teeth and gives Luna more detentions for lying to her, even though Luna told her the truth. She says she'll keep assigning more detentions until Luna tells her the truth.
Which Luna already did.
From that day forward, Luna spends every single evening, from the time she leaves the Great Hall after dinner until the time she gets into her bed and cries all night, carving My name is Loony Lovegood into her right hand while the pink toad lady watches her. Before the month is halfway through, she starts serving detention in the daytime, too. Luna spends more time in detention now than she does in class, and during every detention, the pink toad lady finds a reason to give her more detentions, so she'll come back again and cut My name is Loony Lovegood into her hand again and again and again the next day, and the next day, and the next day.
More detentions. More lines. More pain. More humiliation. More blood. More. More. More. More.
My name is Loony Lovegood.
My name is Loony Lovegood.
My name is Loony Lovegood.
There's so much blood now. Pages and pages of bloody lines that say My name is Loony Lovegood, and there's so much blood. There's more and more of it every night. The smell of it is invading Luna's dreams; she can smell blood every time she nods off, and sometimes she smells it during the day, too, when she's awake – when she's in class, she smells blood, and she doesn't know why.
There's so much blood. There's so much blood. Luna is drowning in an ocean of blood.
Her own blood.
There are so many detentions now – so many that it quickly becomes difficult to follow Ginevra between classes, and still the pink toad lady assigns more because Luna can't come up with the correct answers to her questions about Harry Potter. But she keeps telling Luna to tell the truth, and Luna is telling the truth, and even if she wasn't being told to tell the truth, Luna still wouldn't lie and make up something to stop the detentions, because it's wrong to lie. Luna's mother taught her that. It's very, very, very wrong to lie, and Luna won't do it, for any reason at all. Rowena Ravenclaw sort-of agreed with that when Luna asked her about it, too.
One of Luna's new hobbies is staring at the bust of Rowena Ravenclaw near the door in the common room. This is much less uncomfortable than staring at herself in the mirror and waiting for her reflection to eat her because the Rowena Ravenclaw bust isn't going to eat her. Luna talks to the Rowena Ravenclaw bust as well – it's as good as anything else to talk about her problems to, since she doesn't have any friends to do that with.
"...and I still can't figure out who's talking to me... If I had a friend I could stand back-to-back with her (or him) and the next time I heard the noise, my friend would be able to see them since they're always behind me..."
She even gesticulates when she talks to the Rowena Ravenclaw bust.
"Sometimes I think that the whole world is right and maybe I am Loony Lovg... Loony Lovegood. Isn't that... isn't that... Hmm. My name is Loony Lovegood... My name is Loony Lovegood... Ohhh... I can't be Loony Lovegood... I have to be Luna Lovegood... but... I don't know, I don't know... why does it say My name is Loony Lovegood...?"
Each time the word Loony falls from her lips she feels like retching. She is Luna Lovegood, NOT Loony Lovegood! But something inside her keeps telling her: if it's important enough that she must write it hundreds and hundreds of times each day, in her own blood, on the back of her own hand, forever, then she ought to practice saying it out loud as well, just to be sure she doesn't forget it.
Rowena Ravenclaw agrees. Luna fidgets anxiously.
"My name is Loony Lovegood... My name is Loony Loveg... No it's n-not, no it's not, what... But it says my name is Loony Lovegood... But I'm Luna Lovegood..."
Maybe, Luna thinks, the whole world is wrong and right at the same time. Maybe it's better if everything is foggy and obscured and we don't know anything. It hurts less that way, most certainly... but then again one can't possibly think that way forever, or one would never have any friends. Friendship is right. Friendship is always right...
"Friendship is always right," she confirms out loud to the Rowena Ravenclaw bust, which agrees with her again. "If I had some friends, everything would be all better, b-because friendship is always ri–"
"What in Morgana's name are you doing?"
The exclamation comes from Marietta Edgecombe, one of Cho's friends. Luna attempts to give her an explanation, but can't because she doesn't want to admit she's talking to an inanimate object because she's so lonely because she has no friends, because explaining that would be humiliating because everyone else has friends and she doesn't because she's Luna Lovegood and everyone else isn't Luna Lovegood.
"I don't know," she finally says in a vacant, toneless voice.
Apparently it was a rhetorical question, because Marietta gets even more irritated when Luna answers it. "Of course you don't know anything! There's nothing going on in your head, Loony! You're a fucking embarrassment to Ravenclaw house, that's what you are!"
"I sup... I suppose... I am..." Luna mumbles.
"She doesn't even deny it," another of Cho's friends, Mandy Brocklehurst, cries, sounding astonished and even a little bit outraged. "Did you hear that? She didn't even deny it!"
"In the Muggle world," says Rebecca Tanneth, "there's a term for people like Loony, you know."
"What is it?"
"Mentally retarded," Rebecca replies, very slowly, very loudly, and very deliberately, looking at Luna instead of at her friends while she speaks.
A few of the other girls snicker. Luna bites her quivering lip and stares intently at the Rowena Ravenclaw bust, trying her very best to block out the taunts (truths?) and also the growing buzzing sound in her head, and also how nauseous and ill she feels. The walls of the common room start to bend and distort oddly in the corners of her eyes. It looks like they're made of rubber, and they're waving back and forth, but when she actually looks at them straight on, they're just walls. Weird walls. She can almost hear them laughing at her. That's not normal, is it...? Walls aren't meant to laugh at people. Even if those people have no friends and get called Loony Lovegood and believe in unusual things and look rather odd. No, other people are meant to laugh at those people...
"It's funny how she talks to that statue like it's her friend, or something," says Cho Chang suddenly. "I think the real Rowena Ravenclaw would have run her out of Hogwarts a long time ago if she were still alive."
"They didn't tolerate brain-damaged retards in the olden days," Rebecca agrees solemnly, though still loudly enough that Luna can hear her. "That means you, Loony. You should never have been in Ravenclaw to begin with."
Later that night, while sitting up and making FRIENDS paper chains and listening to the slithering, tapping, dripping things and the ha-h noises and the faint screaming behind her wall and the buzzing in her head and Anders crying and the other girls telling her to shut up and let them sleep, Luna decides Rebecca and her friends are right – she should never been Sorted into Ravenclaw, because she isn't much of one at all.
She isn't very rational at all, is she? If she were, she would have figured out how to have friends by now. She's not very interested in learning, is she? If she were interested in learning, she'd be doing her homework and going to class instead of crying in bathrooms and making FRIENDS paper chains. She isn't very clever or witty, is she? If she were clever and witty, she would know what to say when people talk to her and when she's called on in class and when the pink toad lady wants answers about Harry Potter.
When she considers it, Luna doesn't think she'd fit into any of the other houses, either – she's not very brave (or else she wouldn't freeze up and want to sink into the floor every time someone speaks to her), or cunning (or else she would have been able to find a way out of her endless detentions a long time ago), or hard-working (or else her grades wouldn't be as terribly low as they are now).
No, Luna decides, she isn't any of those things. She's actually just kind of useless and dumb, isn't she?
Secretly, in the very back of her irrational, dumb, stupid, brain-damaged, retarded mind, Luna sort of wishes somebody actually would run her out of Hogwarts like Cho said. Maybe then she would be able to go someplace where she could make friends like herself. Maybe, she thinks, there's a place for people like her, and she just got sent to the wrong school by accident. Maybe if someone ran her out of Hogwarts, she could find a place with some other brain-damaged retards like her if she looked very hard. And then she would have some people like herself to be friends with.
Wouldn't that be wonderful?
Praise my beta-reader, TuesdayNovember. Praise her. Praise her. Praise her. Obey. Obey. Obey.