A Sure Cure for Loser's Lurgy by Herminia

Rating: PG13
Genres: Romance, Humor
Relationships: Ron & Luna
Book: Ron & Luna, Books 1 - 6
Published: 19/02/2006
Last Updated: 19/02/2006
Status: In Progress

In the darkest days of the Second War, Ron and Luna have depended on each other's comfort
and companionship, but Luna Lovegood hardly dared to believe that they would ever be any more than
"just friends." This was written to accompany my Year Seven (H/Hr) fan fic, but it's
not necessary to read that for this one-shot to make sense.




1. untitled
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So I'm finding out how hard it is to get Luna's characterization spot-on. She's
probably too Hermione-ish, but I figured that it would be better to err on the side of logic than
on the side of “OMGLuna-has-the-intellectual-wherewithal-of-a-five-year-old.” Suggestions for
pinning down a better Luna are appreciated :)

Oh, and I should say that this was a twenty minute writing spurt that wrapped up at 2:01 AM CST.
I'm beat. Seriously, I'm posting this and crashing for the night.

* * * * *

From a distance, Luna Lovegood spied a shock of red hair, an outcrop of color against a sea of
browns, blacks, and flaxen blonds. It was Ronald Weasley, sitting on the bottom step of the
Entrance Hall staircase while the crowds surged uncaringly past him. She waited. She was good at
waiting - waiting for lost things to return, waiting for the laughter to die down, waiting for some
indescribable *something* that she had yet to chronicled find within the covers of The
Quibbler. At long last, the crowd dissipated and she trooped down the stairs two at a time.

“Loser's lurgy?” she asked softly - knowingly, sitting down beside him and drawing her knees
up under her chin.

“They're gone,” came the response. Ron Weasley stared blankly out at the House hourglasses
and Luna, who watched him evenly, knew that he was not seeing the hourglasses at all. He was seeing
beyond…or within. “He didn't even say a word. Not one. Not to his best friend - me—” he added,
as though he needed convincing of the fact that he was still Harry Potter's best mate.

“You're afraid Harry and Hermione won't need you anymore,” she said sagely, reaching
tentatively out to him.

Ron jerked away from her touch. “I'm not afraid they won't need me,” he said in a voice
whose every syllable hinted at hurt feelings.

“It's not selfish to want to be needed, Ronald,” she said soothingly, placing her hand on
his shoulder.

“I can't believe he - and *Hermione*, she just—” his jaw was working furiously now -
“But I haven't a right to be mad at them. Not when they could be dead or disencumbered
or—or—”

“Or trampled by a herd of rabid heliopaths -- vicious as they are, this time of year. It's
their mating season, didn't you know?” Luna said fervently, caught up in the moment and nodding
with a kind of fierce pride.

“They—what?”

Luna stopped short as she remembered that the average human being did not consider heliopaths a
credible threat to life and limb. “I just got carried away. But Ronald, sometimes you just have to
have a little faith that everything will turn out alright in the end. It always does, you
know.”

“How do you believe in these things, Luna?” Ron buried his face in his hands.

“Nargles and moon frogs?” she asked, suddenly disheartened without knowing quite why. It
wasn't as though she was unused to having her firmly-held beliefs abused; most of her
classmates had made a regular habit of doing just that.

“No, not that. You - you still believe in the *good*…”

“The world's an ugly place if you don't believe in *good*, Ronald,” she replied,
gazing at him quizzically and thinking nonsensical thoughts. Did he know, for instance, that the
effect of his vibrant red head bowed into his broad Quidditch Keeper's hands was undeniably
“Quaffle”? Or that when he was close at hand it was as though a flurry of wrackspurts had nested in
the blonde corona of her hair, making her thoughts go strangely fuzzy?

“…even after all that's happened to you. It's a rare gift, that's all. You're
really something else.”

*Something else.* Luna turned the words over in her head, taking in the sound of them.
Whatever he meant by it, it was certainly better than other things she'd been called.

“Some people think I'm odd, actually,” she said, taking a brave stab at her normal
absentminded languor even as her breath hitched uncomfortably in her throat.

“Does it bother you?”

She looked up with a start.

“Does it bother you?” he repeated, standing and pivoting on the spot so that they were
face-to-face. No one had ever asked her *that* before. No one had ever looked at her quite
like that before either.

“It doesn't matter, not really, anyway,” she said in a rush. They weren't supposed to be
discussing her, not with Ron's best friend and former girlfriend gone decidedly AWOL. She tried
to change the topic but he rebuffed her attempts to sidetrack him. There was genuine affection in
those blue eyes.

“They shouldn't be the ones to judge—they don't *know* you—”

“Do you?” she asked, quietly, hopefully.

“I really like you, Luna.”

“As friends,” she said automatically, the same litany she'd repeated the previous school
year, when she'd attended the Christmas Ball on Harry Potter's arm. “Not as more than
friends.” The look in his eyes as they searched her face suggested something along the lines of
“more than friends,” and she shivered. For her, the concept of love was much more abstract and
unknowable than heliopaths and nargles. *Love*. Love was harder to get her mind around.

And then - suddenly - it wasn't just some wishful abstraction, some feeble construct born of
an overactive imagination.

Funny—

—ironic, really, that she'd long been in the habit of wandering around - aimlessly, by all
outward appearances - in search of a glint of a silver lining in the clouds or a flicker of wings
or a whoosh of air to suggest some paranormal presence when what she needed above all was the
simplest of things, offered up in the most tangible of ways. A kiss.

Sometimes, all you need is a little faith in *good*.

* * * * * *

A/N: And just to love and be loved in return, of course ;)


So? Was it horribly appalling? Was Luna completely OOC, mostly off, partially off, somewhat
correct?

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