Canto VII
"You're right," she immediately replied, her voice pregnant with profundity. "I am impossible."
Fascinated with the macabre, as a masochist, he paused, almost eager to see the horrifyingly bizarre way she had misinterpreted his harsh words.
She went beyond his expectations by leaping backwards into the air and hanging there, via what he supposed to be a levicorpus.
Odd, that she was seemingly capable of enacting the spell while her wand remained tucked behind her ear, odder still the uncomfortable feeling of his that he could not recall some devastating experience he had in which he was also upside-down.
It was probably one of the many bad memories he had extracted and hidden away in bottles to make his tenure as the Head of Hogwarts more endurable, and he felt a sudden pang of fear that someone might uncover them, locked away though he knew they were.
"I am impossible," Luna went on sweetly, methodically counting her points on her fingers, "for it is impossible that I should exist. It strikes me as too great of a coincidence that all these things in me...fire, water, earth, air...should come together of their own accord and create something as un-fire, un-water, un-earth, and un-airlike as me. At least, unless such a thing were an anomaly. But since there are so many other people on earth, I presume I am not an anomaly, so that means that something has compelled these elements-"
"-Miss Lovegood," Snape said, the combination of his fear at being reminded of his vulnerability and his impatience for her antics manifesting in his long-suffering tone, "this is far from appropriate behavior."
Something about watching his former student make cavalier use of a spell that had, at some point, caused him much pain, made him feel strange. He felt like Prometheus, who had suffered much for the sake of fire, watching a child light a candle for a doll's tea-party. This was beside the fact that there was a certain discomfort at the idea that her skirt might, at any moment, respond to the pull of gravity and give him a view he did not want to behold.
"I would agree with you, Professor," Luna Lovegood said, quite successfully living up to her nickname 'Loony,' "except for the fact that I suspect your frown is an honest one. If you were happy and frowning, then I would not question what you just said." Her gaze upon him was one of a knowing mother, albeit upside down. "Then again, from where I am, your frown looks more like a smile."
This was a disconcerting position for Severus to be in, and before he could think of something better subject for conversation, the words spilled out of his mouth, "Where did your story go?"
She seemed to have lost interest in her narrative, however, and she just shrugged, her dirigible-plum earrings jangling and her wand falling lightly to the ground. "I don't remember. I do think a hungry Whisterfingle has got it."
Before he could express his opinion on the existence of Whisterfingles, she went on, "But my father, he used to go and study the Legriv people of long ago. He told me that their storytellers used to say, 'the way the twig is bent, that is the way the tree inclines.' Though what do you think that means?"
She paused, but he returned her look of askance with a stony glare, so after a brief moment, she asked, "Could you pick up my wand, please? I think it's time we return to the castle."
He did not think twice about returning it to her hand, though he said, in a reactionary fashion under his breath, "Some trees have many crooked twigs, pointing every which way, and thus the trees do not know which direction to lean."
"I suppose by twigs, he meant branches," Luna said, landing on all fours but springing up again like a cat.