se nu hur alla dina minnen formas till en magnum 357
och jag tror du vet...

Two months left after this one. What do you think of the cover art? I have no artistic talent/am lazy, so I went for something minimalistic. We're all just spots in the dark, anyway.

April

Struggling to please the people around her has replaced Luna's schooling almost completely now. The professors have all but given up trying to make her participate in class because she doesn't listen to anything they say, and they have better things to do than talk endlessly at a psychotic retard, don't they? So instead of doing her schoolwork, Luna makes a desperate (absolutely pathetic) effort to make someone, somewhere, happy enough that they'll be her friend.

Even if it means she has to sacrifice all her own happiness and every shred of dignity she has left.

Cho Chang and her friends seem to understand this very, very well. The worst part is that Luna can't help but fall into their traps, even when she knows deep down that they're traps – because she's just so desperate to believe one of them might someday be her friend that she can't resist going along with whatever they tell her.

They've discovered that if they say things like, "Make my bed for me and I might talk to you again tomorrow," or "Do my homework, Psychowhore! Maybe I'll be your friend if you write a good essay!" or "You should wash your hair! Nobody'll want to be friends with you if your hair is that greasy!" Luna will do anything they want her to without hesitation.

Of course, they always have her make their beds right before they go to sleep in them, defeating the purpose; and all the homework Luna tries to do for them is two years above her own so she doesn't even understand most of what she's supposed to be writing about and can't risk looking it up because she might fall asleep if she tries to read (and besides, they already wrote their essays...); and the time they get her to agree to let them wash her hair, they trap her in a bathroom and won't let her out until she washes it in the toilet. After that last incident, Luna stops crying in bathrooms and starts crying in empty classrooms instead.

She wishes Anders would come back and torment her instead of spending her time hiding in the dormitories and crying and being very un-Anders-like. Anders never pretended to be Luna's friend or anything horribly confusing like that. Anders liked to hex her, but Luna thinks getting hexed is a bit better than getting called what Cho and her friends call her when they're not pretending to be nice to her, which is always some variant of 'whore'. They don't insult her at every possible opportunity the way Anders did, though; no, they talk to her like she's a human being, a real person, until Luna almost feels safe, and then they pull the floor out from under her and leave her even more uncertain than before.

And then, one evening at dinner, Cho Chang tells her she and the other girls will (grudgingly) let Luna tag along with their group (not quite as a friend, but maybe someday...) if –

"–and only if, you go to the Gryffindor table and pass out Muggle condoms to every boy there."

Luna stares at her, trying to understand. She supposes the combination of her being retarded, not eating, and not sleeping makes it harder, because she just can't understand.

"I didn't have to do that when Ginevra was my friend," she says in an almost-whisper.

Cho gives her that horribly perfect smile again – the one that makes Luna feel as if she's unworthy of existing near the older girl. "Ginny was just pretending because she felt bad for you. You're going to have to do different things to make real friends because you're a retarded whore and no one likes you."

"Oh."

The revelation that Luna never had any friends at all (not even Ginevra...) makes it far easier for her to do what Cho and her friends want her to. Maybe, Luna thinks as she heads toward the Gryffindor table in a daze, step by step, with Rebecca's box of condoms in her hands, it just hurts so much she can't feel any other kind of hurt anymore. Somehow, Luna finds it easier to accept what Cho tells her than to try to fight it. Cho might be her friend someday if Luna follows the rules (she's learning...) and that's what's important.

Besides, Cho is smarter than she is anyway.

It's not so bad at first. Luna is used to people calling her crazy and stupid and retarded and Loony, and it doesn't really bother her all that much anymore (because maybe they're right so she should stop getting upset about it and just accept it?). She's used to feeling humiliated and very small and wanting to sink into the floor. But she's not at all used to some of the disgusting things the Gryffindor boys are saying to her now, and she's not used to the looks they're giving her. The yucky, rubbery things leave an oily film on her hands, and she can't wipe it away because she doesn't want it on her clothing; the knowledge of how low she's sunk clings to her in the same way.

The slithering and the tapping and the moaning and the distant screaming get louder with each one she gives away. Someone, or something, starts mumbling endlessly from behind an invisible veil, saying things Luna can't understand, but they never take a breath and it begins to scare her, and she herself begins to shake. The sound of a mistuned violin seems to play in her ears, amplified with a booming, screeching Sonorus Charm.

Eventually, Professor McGonagall leaves the Head Table to see what the commotion is about. Luna panics and just leaves the Great Hall, even though she knows she hasn't finished doing what Cho and her friends want her to do, because the thought of more detentions terrifies her and anyway she just can't stand the sound and the tension any longer. The noise follows her into the hallway, up the stairs, through corridors. The walls begin to swell and undulate bizarrely as she passes them. There are footsteps behind her, eyes upon her, making her squirm; the slithering and tapping and incoherent babbling from nowhere are nearly drowning out her thoughts.

Luna finds an empty classroom and locks herself in it. Sitting in the mostly darkened room – the lights, now, just don't seem to be enough to illuminate the whole room properly – in the very center, nearly mesmerized by the sight of the walls bulging and rippling with whatever's moving around behind them, and takes some of her pretty gold paper out of her bag so she can make her FRIENDS paper chains, because doing that always calms her down (if only a little bit). She's done it so many times now that she can do it perfectly without even looking.

Something is growing more and more tense, and it's going to snap soon, and it's going to hurt so very terribly. In the far distance, there's laughter, and sobbing, and chatter, and all manner of noises, and the screams of Luna's mother as she dies, and footsteps, and the word Alohamora and the sound of the door opening –

It's a boy with short, light brown hair and green eyes who makes Luna's stomach flip-flop involuntarily because he's very handsome. Then she starts when the door shuts behind him – softly, but it seems to generate an enormous bang, and the walls swell to ever-greater proportions.

"Hello," the boy says to her. "You're Luna Lovegood, aren't you?"

Luna nods, her eyes darting nervously around the room before she focuses on him again. "Yes, that's me," she replies, smiling her stupid, retarded, fake smile at him. "You're Cormac McLaggen."

"Yes." Cormac takes a few steps in her direction. "You're not very popular."

"No," she agrees sadly, nodding her head again, "I'm not."

"You don't have many friends."

She nods yet again, feeling tears prickle at the corners of her eyes at the reminder of her seemingly endless failure. "No, I don't."

There's something very wrong with Cormac McLaggen, she realizes as the walls swell yet again. His face shows the half-smirk most people express when talking to Luna these days, but his eyes are shining with a kind of ghoulish excitement she's never seen before.

"I can do whatever I want to you, and no one will care."

"W-what?" Luna stops working on her half-finished FRIENDS paper chain. "What does that-What does that mean?" she squeaks.

"Oh, come on," scoffs Cormac. He leers at her. "You figure it out."

"I'm not-I'm not-I'm not a whore! I'm not!" Luna protests, dropping the FRIENDS paper chain altogether because her hands are shaking so badly all of a sudden she can't even hold it, and the reason her hands are shaking so badly all of a sudden is that she's just realized what Cormac means by 'whatever I want'.

"'Course you aren't," the sixth year snickers, advancing toward her.

"Please don't..." is the only resistance Luna puts up to his assault. She waits in the middle of the room on her knees, crying, because the walls are screaming so loudly at her that she's paralyzed and can't even think, and her brain is broken and there's blood dripping down everywhere and things are crawling out of the cracks between the stones and all the desks are laughing at her and the chairs are calling her Loony Lovegood and the door says she's going to be a real whore now and the ceiling says it wants a turn with her next and OH GOD SHUT UP WHY WON'T YOU ALL PLEASE JUST SHUT UP!

It's violent and brutal, and it hurts. In every way imaginable.

Luna has never really been a particularly sexual person, so when she occasionally imagined what it would be like to have sex for the first time, it was always something sweet and romantic and beautiful, like an extension to the ending of a fairy tale. Not... this. Half-naked on the stone floor with Cormac McLaggen's hand choking her so badly she's afraid she might pass out and not wake up, having her head bashed against the floor every thirty seconds, listening to the stream of filth he's spouting from his mouth-the most oft-repeated two words in which are 'Loony' and 'whore'.

And then it happens: the wall bursts open and its contents spill out in a great heaping orgy of blind, slithering worms and half-transparent three-legged spiders that look like moving water and human cockroaches and quivering gelatinous blobs of bloody flesh without features and a thousand other awful things. When Luna sees what she now shares her world with, she screams. And screams. And screams. And screams.

"What's wrong, Loony?" Cormac laughs. "You finally lose your mind completely there?"

"Please – oh god, stop!" Luna sobs when she's able to speak coherently again, and when Cormac isn't cutting off her air supply. "Please, please, please, please, please, please, stop! I want to die! I want to die! Please just kill me! I want to die now – just stop!"

"Funny thing," says Cormac, grinning at her, "Anders said about the same when I fucked her. It took her a lot longer than you, though."

An hour and a half later, Cormac finally finishes violating Luna and walks out of the classroom without saying another word to her, laughing like the whole thing is some big, hilarious prank he's just pulled off. Luna puts the clothes he took off her back on and fixes the rips with her wand – Cormac didn't even bother taking it from her – and then she curls up in a tight ball on the floor and cries among the monsters that came out of the wall and the dripping blood and the laughing desks and the chairs that call her Loony Lovegood and the door that says she's a real whore now and the ceiling that says it's going to fuck her next.

"I can't do this anymore," she whispers to no one in particular.

Early the next morning – very early – Luna limps down to the gargoyle that guards the Headmaster's office, having decided, finally, that she's going to ask if (maybe) she can, (if it's not too much trouble) leave and go somewhere else because she's really just not meant for Hogwarts, after all, is she... But when she reaches the stone gargoyle at the entrance, there's already someone there: the pink toad lady is in front of the gargoyle with her wand out, shouting at it and trying to make it move aside for her. Luna's stomach turns over nauseatingly as the two beady little eyes fall on her, and she instinctively jams her mutilated right hand in her pocket to hide the hideous words cut into it.

"And what are you doing here, my dear?" the pink toad lady enquires with feigned, very forced sweetness.

"Was just... going t'see..." Luna mumbles, looking intently at the one of the stones on the floor.

"Speak up, girl. No one will ever be able to understand you if you mumble all the time."

"I need to see P-Professor Dumbledore..." says Luna. She's shaking now, beginning to regret her decision to go up and talk to the Headmaster, and everything hurts and maybe she should have taken a shower instead because she still feels so disgusting after everything that happened the night before and being stared at like she is now makes it even worse –

The pink toad lady smiles, showing her pointy little needle teeth. "Professor Dumbledore is now wanted by the Ministry of Magic for the crime of sedition, and has fled the establishment. Whatever would you possibly need to see him for, my dear?"

Luna mouths silently for a moment, unsure what she's supposed to say and not wanting to admit the truth.

"Well?" The question is more forceful this time, and what little resistance Luna had crumbles.

"I want... I want to drop out of... s-school..." she whispers.

She spent the entire trip up to the Headmaster's Office contemplating how she would word her request, but the answer comes out all wrong when she says it because she's not talking to the kindly, gentle, grandfatherly Professor Dumbledore, she's talking to the cruel, sadistic pink toad lady who likes to watch her cut herself up every evening like Muggles enjoy watching television from their sofas, and anyway she's a retarded whore so of course it was going to come out wrong, and why did she ever think otherwise?

"Well," says the pink toad lady after a moment's silence, "as the new Headmistress of Hogwarts, I can tell you that most certainly won't be happening. Whatever would possess you to want to leave Hogwarts, Miss Lovegood? Now that the Headmaster is gone, the Ministry will surely ensure the very highest standards of learning; you should be thankful for your good fortune in being enrolled here. Detention, by the way – for your behavior last night. In fact, I think you deserve detention for the rest of the year."

Still smiling, she bustles past Luna, in the direction of her office, seemingly cheered enough by the encounter to forget that the gargoyle at the door won't move for her.

Luna just stares at nothing for what seems like ages. Something seems to bubble up from within her and bursts out in a torrent through her mouth. But it isn't the sound of crying; it's laughter.

Terrified, hysterical, desperate laughter.

There was originally a rape warning at the top, but I took it out because 1) the rape isn't graphic, just emotionally traumatizing; 2) the warning detracted immensely from the impact of the story; and 3) Friends is supposed to be upsetting, not 'safe'." You should feel awful after reading this, not just sad. If anybody has a serious problem with (which I doubt will happen), PM me and we'll talk about it.

Many thanks to my beloved beta-reader, TuesdayNovember, who helped me figure out how to rearrange the last four chapters of Friends in a far more dramatic way.