A Lack of Imagination

'This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.' ~ Sylvia Plath, The Moon and the Yew Tree

~

Prelude: In which Luna is going through a phase

She spent the last night before she was due to depart for Hogwarts looking at the moon. It was a cloudless night, and she could see it clearly, although there was only a sliver of it left now, thinning down to a shadow of itself as the shadow of the Earth ate it away. She knew that the moon was waning, not waxing, because if she held her finger up so it made a vertical line between the two points of the crescent, it made a small d, not a small b. Bridget is waxing, Diana is waning. It was a little phrase that her mother had taught her, mixing mythologies, but it worked, and Luna couldn't imagine that the moon was waxing any more. It would have made her feel better, she thought, if she'd known that tomorrow, when she had to go to Hogwarts again, it would be bigger behind the sky, not smaller, coming out of the shadow, not going into it.

But tomorrow it would be smaller. Not a new moon yet, though. An old moon still, and almost gone.

~

"Now, Luna, you must remember - "

"Yes, Daddy," she said, looking as excited and expectant as when she was a first year, and she didn't know already what he was going to say, and the words meant something. Now they were a ritual, and they repeated them together; "To thine own self be true, or there'll be nothing of you." She said it with as much enthusiasm as she ever had, more, in fact, her eyes widening so far that you could trace the shape of her eyeballs.

Her father smiled back, and Luna shook her eyes. It was the name she'd given to the quirk she'd always had, being able to vibrate her irises back and forth, so they blurred in the middle while the rest of her eye stayed still. She'd picked it up when she'd been four, and Celia Lovegood had learnt the trick from her daughter; Luna had been so proud at being able to teach her clever mother something, she had shaken her eyes on and off for a whole day and been put to bed with a headache.

He should be waving her off now, but Mr Lovegood hesitated. She's the same; she's as sure of herself as she's always been, he thought, as much herself as she was on her very first day, and he shouldn't be worrying that anything could affect her now. Luna had always been so impervious to outside influences that she could sit in the middle of a sniggering crowd, when younger and at the wizarding children's group she had attended for a day and a half, and happily referee raindrop races down the window pane, devising and commenting on a complicated system of taps on the glass to handicap one drop or the other. There was no reason that she should change now, after almost-seventeen years of being herself in spite of the world.

Perhaps the recent difference in her had been just a phase. Mr Lovegood had never thought of using that term before; he didn't like terms that slotted people into neat little categories and explained them away. (He found Muggle psychology infuriating.) But a phase fitted; this was a Luna-phase, different, and it would explain why she had seemed slightly dimmed these holidays, diminished, not quite so quick and unique, and the way that she suddenly wanted to spend so much time at the Burrow. And of course, she had close friends now; she was growing up. The term might be a much-used one, but it was right, and sometimes things were right if not original, though it pained him to admit it.

He smiled more naturally as he watched Luna make her way towards the waiting train. It couldn't be shaken out of her; she'd carry on being herself, and nobody would quite understand everything that she said. To tell the truth, neither would he.

~

1: In which Luna considers friendship, and other difficulties

Luna Lovegood began her sixth year at Hogwarts by travelling five hundred miles north hunched up in the corner of a train compartment, not saying anything at all, although there were plenty of people to talk to. They all assumed that it was another of her quirks; being friends with Luna had given them the idea that she was as predictable as anybody else, if only you could grasp the idea that you should predict exactly what you'd least expect from her. "She makes sense in the end, you know. Luna," Ron had said to Harry near the end of last year. Harry hadn't been listening, because he'd been trying to work out how somebody who'd just produced a perfect Patronus (a porpoise, and looking a little lost) could mess up their next spell so badly that real radishes were now sprouting from their earlobes. But he nodded anyway, because she was their friend now, and dealing with her moments of being spectacularly strange was a bit like dealing with Hermione's moments of being spectacularly bossy - something that you got used to.

They weren't considering Luna, but she was considering them. She was watching the interesting way that their faces seemed to become stranger and stranger to her as the train moved on, until by the halfway point their voices and features were all new, and she was wondering who these odd people were that she was supposed to know. There was Ginny, eating a pumpkin pasty; she was saying something to Neville, but Luna couldn't catch the words. Ron was playing chess with Harry, with the pieces charmed to float in place a centimetre or so above the board; a few, noticeably the pawns, seemed to be enjoying the sensation of not having to stand by themselves, and were shuffling along and groaning sluggishly whenever they were ordered to move. And then there was Hermione, reading a textbook and occasionally scribbling notes in a strange form of shorthand that seemed to go up and down the page as well as left to right. Luna watched them not watching her, and wondered why they had started to be her friends, and why she was sitting with them now, as if they really were.

They must be her friends, she decided, there wasn't any question about that. They fulfilled all the requirements of friendship that she'd ever noticed in all her years of not having friends, such as buying her presents on her birthday (although she still couldn't understand why Hermione had thought she would need a copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, especially when it was so biased and incomplete) and letting her join in their conversations, and occasionally listening, and not skirting around the compartment that she was sitting in, and even sometimes saving seats for her at tables. Yet she thought there must be more to it than that.

She thought there must be more to it, because otherwise, surely, she would feel like them, and look like them, and be like them, too, and even though Luna Lovegood had never felt or looked or been like anybody else in her life, somehow she thought that friendship might do the impossible. She thought that there must be more, because if she was part of the group Hermione Granger wouldn't make her angry any more, and she'd be able to laugh properly and know she didn't need to take her comments seriously, and that they could be on equal terms. Perhaps it hadn't been the best thing to do, challenging her about her fixed ideas about no Apparation or Disapparation at Hogwarts. She wouldn't have mentioned it if they hadn't been talking about Godric Gryffindor anyway, but she'd simply had to say something about the ingenious system he'd devised so he could Apparate into Hogwarts by standing in his local pond in the Yorkshire Moors. Of course she'd known that Hermione wouldn't see the evidence in quite the same way, but there'd been no need for her to be quite so exasperated about it. It was always better to be calm, Luna thought, staring serenely out into wild gouts of rain, her hands having been folded on her lap for so long she had forgotten all about them.

Of course she still liked Hermione. There were plenty of reasons to like her, such as the way she'd completely changed her mind about the Quibbler, and the way she'd taken time at the beginning of fifth year to teach Luna that lovely Locator Charm which she had placed on all her belongings. Now if she did require something urgently, she could borrow it back from the person as easily as anything. She didn't quite understand why her possessions usually came back with something of the person's who had taken them sticking irremovably to them for at least three days after the charm had been cast, but thought that it must be a little bonus that Hermione had added. Which was another reason to like her. And of course, there was the way that she often made a mess of things in front of people or made them angry or annoyed at her, and that happened to Luna, too, so she sympathised and thought that they could be friends after all.

But they weren't friends, Luna realised, her train of thought suddenly and conclusively giving her an answer as the real train drew in at the station and the lights of Hogsmeade were all around them. None of them were her friends. If they were, she wouldn't still feel like a vacuum-sealed kettle inside, longing to let off steam every which way and blow her very self apart. She was quite proud of that use of terminology, vacuum-sealed and kettle. She'd been terribly surprised with her O in Muggle Studies, when she'd opened the results this summer, although she'd already decided to take the subject on this year. It had been the only O she'd got, although she thought that Potions had been a close call; if only she hadn't said that those dragon scales could have easily come from a Grinch with a certain mutation she might have managed a better mark on the questioning section of the practical examination. She hadn't liked her exams; feeding out the right answers had been so boring, and she'd failed Divination almost on principle. It had been a horrible disappointment of a subject; she would never choose anything else again just because everybody else had hated it.

"Aren't you coming, Luna?"

Ginny had paused at the door of the compartment. She was clearly getting impatient, and, looking around, Luna realised that it was ten minutes since they had stopped, and she might very well be the only one left on the train.

"You'd better not get into this state in McGonagall's class like you did before," Ginny informed her as she gathered up her bags, "you might be sharing it with the Slytherins this year, and I won't be there to wake you up when she picks anybody who isn't listening to volunteer for human transfiguration demonstrations."

"I wouldn't mind," Luna said thoughtfully, and waited for Ginny to take a few steps away from the train before she stepped onto the platform herself. She would like to be alone for a little while. That was another trouble, having friends. They started to have expectations of you, and when you didn't meet them, it bothered them. So you tried to meet them, and that bothered you.

They were waiting in a carriage for her, all these people who weren't her friends, and so she joined them for the journey up to Hogwarts. They seemed to allow her to be a little more mad, by their standards, each year; so far, but no further. Of course, it had moved on a lot since fourth year; several of them could see Thestrals now.