A Lack of Imagination

3: In which Luna confronts her nemesis, and Hermione has a few things to say to her, too

It felt a little odd to be going to talk to somebody; she didn't seem to have spoken to anyone for such a long time. Perhaps the last time had been Hermione, in the library, when she'd torn up the draft of her story and thrown it away. She couldn't even remember which story that had been now. There had been so many stories, so many strokes of ink on paper, and they had all wandered away through her mind until they felt more real than the world around her. She seemed to be surrounded by blue mountains and green rivers.

Her mother had been like this once. She had died on July the twenty-seventh; Luna remembered it because the clouds had formed a silly shape in the sky, something like a teapot pouring bubbles, and she'd run inside to tell her mother and her mother had said I'll just finish this, I'll just finish this, although the clouds had already been moving away. But for two weeks before that date, Luna had hardly seen her, because she had been chasing something that neither Luna or her father understood, something at the bottom of her cauldron that could change the world. Afterwards it had been said that the cauldron had been faulty, too thin-bottomed and rickety to contain explosions as it should have done. Dangerous foreign imports, they'd said. Luna hadn't understood that, either. She'd thought that her mother had been chasing something all along, and now she'd finally found it she was out of sight, and down the rabbit-hole.

Where had she been going? Oh, yes. To talk to Hermione. She'd been standing still in the middle of the corridor for ages, but everyone seemed to have simply walked past her. It was as if she'd been playing that game she'd played once at wizarding playgroup; pretending that she had an invisibility cloak. It had always worked, because as soon as she'd whispered to herself I am invisible, nobody had ever come to talk to her, or asked her to play Quidditch with toy broomsticks, or even seemed to notice she was there.

~

"I think that we should make the newsletter more interesting if people are to buy it and I think we need to make them think properly and I think what we need is a story that they can read and become more imaginative because they all think in lines." Luna paused for breath.

"Sorry?" said Hermione.

"I have written a story and I think that we should put it in the newsletter." That was the problem with the newsletter, the reason why it had only sold seventeen copies out of one hundred printed; a lack of imagination. The Quibbler had always been inventive; they'd even had that technicolour edition once, where every letter flashed a different colour, changing with the wave of a wand. It had looked wonderful on the stall in Diagon Alley, where you'd been able to see it along the length and breadth of the street, and even when you went down a side alley you noticed a faint rainbow glow somewhere between the tops of the buildings and the beginning of the sky. Daddy had had a record number of complaints that time, she considered happily. (Since the fuss over Harry's article and the subsequent rise in sales, Mr Lovegood had been using complaints as a measure of success.)

She gave Hermione the three sheets of parchment which she had copied out carefully, and watched while she read them. It was an uncomfortable feeling, like somebody staring at her very hard. She knew that anybody who read this story would understand her at last; they'd see why she was Luna, and why she wasn't mad, and then they'd be sorry.

Hermione was smiling when she lifted her eyes from the page, but she was trying to hide it. With an effort, she straightened her lips into a neutral expression, then opened them to speak.

"Why are you laughing?" said Luna.

"I wasn't laughing."

"It's not meant to be funny. It's meant to be quite sad at the end, you know, when we had to leave - "

"Well, I - thought there was a positive note to it. With the new hatchlings and the Crumple-Horned Snorkack society being set up - "

"I didn't think of that," Luna said, "but there is another layer. I think that makes it more realistic, don't you?"

Hermione didn't seem to be able to suppress another laugh, which came on quite suddenly as she glanced back down at the paper.

"But it's not funny," Luna said, feeling suspicious again.

"No, I wasn't laughing at the content - more at the - lack of commas?"

"What commas?" Luna said.

"Exactly," said Hermione.

"Why do they matter?"

"It's just that it makes it quite hard to read, you know, particularly in the part when you're describing the wonder and - and mysticability of seeing the creatures for the first time - in fact I don't think you ever finished that sentence."

"Because the mysticability never finished," Luna said solemnly.

For some reason, Hermione pressed her lips together very hard at that point, although they were still turning up at the corners, and then opened them a little to say "I'm sorry, but can't you see that you can't just - make up words - like mysticability - and - and - " She scanned the page again, as if to select another suitable example, and all of a sudden burst out laughing as if she just couldn't hold it back any more.

Luna looked at her.

"Like - like excitapation - "

Luna looked at her.

She stopped laughing. "You must know we can't possibly print this."

"But didn't you see?" Luna said.

"See what?"

She couldn't put it into words. She'd thought that it shone through her writing, all the feelings she'd had on that summer holiday in Sweden. She saw herself again, carrying a bag of recording equipment and a pocket full of sugared violets - "Tempts them out like nothing else does," her father had said. She felt the little thrill at laying a trail, and waiting, and waiting, and the mist rising up at four o'clock and the world becoming a quiet and magical place. And then her father had heard the calling, the strange sounds of horns that the Snorkacks used to call to each other. And she'd known they were there on the other side of the mist, just out of reach. Later that day she had examined the grass for tracks, and they'd followed the herd for days. They hadn't really found any hatchlings, though. But there would have been some, they just hadn't seen them, and so they were there, they were true. And the Crumple-Horned Snorkack society had been real, even if they'd only had two other members besides themselves, and those had been tourists too drunk to remember anything the next day. She'd set that all down in the story, the anticipation of flying over on Muggle transport because her father wanted to experiment, the excitement of chasing after the Snorkacks in the sun.

"It's too late for you," Luna said. "You'll never see now." She found that her voice was fracturing. "Why can't you see? You're a Muggle, well, you spent eleven years being one anyway. I thought they understood things like that."

"But they're mythical creatures," Hermione said, her voice rising. "I know that you believe in them, but you can't expect that anybody else would. And you didn't really see any, did you?"

"We didn't go there for proof," Luna said proudly, but the last word felt solid and prickly in her throat. Because they had; otherwise what had all the recording equipment and film and measurements been for? Her father had said that it was enough to know that they existed, and it was better that wizards didn't believe in them. They would only persecute them if they did. But he'd wanted to prove to the world that he was right, all the same. And so had she.

"Well, that's always been the problem, hasn't it?" Hermione said nastily. "It's all very well to say there are plenty of things that are outside my mundane mind, but no-one's ever gone very far towards proving that, have they?"

"You should believe in Crumple-Horned Snorkacks, if anyone does," Luna said, a new idea grasping her by the shoulders and lifting her from the ground.

"For the last time, Luna, there isn't some kind of Muggle gene that makes us gullible!"

"I didn't mean that at all," Luna said. "I meant that you didn't believe in Hogwarts and wizards and magic, did you, before you got your letter, I expect you thought it was all silly superstitions. But it's all real and now you're in the middle of it, and you still don't believe that there could be anything more. That there could be another new world that you don't know about. Because you like to know things," she added as an afterthought, "and you hate it when you don't."

"So you're saying that the Snorkacks have formed a secret society to hide from us?"

"No," Luna said, then, considering, "They might have, though."

Hermione looked completely exasperated, but she didn't seem to be at a loss for words. She seemed to be arranging and sorting some sentences in her head, weighing up whether she should speak them or not. Luna got in first.

"And Muggles believe in all sorts of things that they don't have any proof for. Like the Loch Ness Monster, and the yeti. They go on expeditions, and find footprints and things. And they've even scanned the waters of the loch with electricity to make shapes of anything that's under there."

"They never found anything," Hermione said.

"No, but they're there, aren't they? There's a kelpie in Loch Ness, but it turns into harmless things when Muggles come by, like an otter. And the yeti have been living in Tibet for thousands of years. It tells you everything about it in that wonderful book you gave to me for my birthday. Fantastic Beasts. And Where To Find Them."

It was the first time Luna had ever presented an argument properly in her life. She was feeling rather proud of herself. Of course, she had tried to argue at the debating club, but it had gone rather wrong.

Hermione seemed to be speechless.

"You can't just look at things and say they're true or not true," Luna said. "There's more to it than that, there is, and I don't care if you don't believe it. I believe it. I believe in everything."

She had won, she thought, just as firmly as she had lost at that formal debate. It wasn't her fault they had made them argue 'for the motion' or 'against the motion'. It hadn't meant anything at all to her, and all the arguments were convincing, so she'd swayed back and forth between the two sides. When they'd told her off for not conforming to the rules, she'd decided that she might as well try to fit in for once. So whenever she changed her argument, she'd walked over to the other side of the room. After two or three crossings-over, everyone had started laughing, and Dumbledore had smiled benignly over it all, taking the role of the chair, and when the debate came back to order again it was too late to go on with it.

"But you can't believe in everything," Hermione said.

"Yes, you can," she said. "I wish you were in Ravenclaw."

"Oh, honestly, Luna, haven't you worked that out by now?" Hermione said crossly, taking this as a subtle insult. "The Sorting Hat doesn't put you in Ravenclaw because you're intelligent. It puts you there if you value intelligence more than anything else."

"That's what I mean," Luna said. "You don't."

Hermione appeared to quiver slightly for a few moments, and then the sentences she had been preparing earlier came to fruition.

"You think I'm stupid, don't you?" she said. "What was it you said - oh, yes, narrow-minded. But have you ever stopped to think about the problems with thinking in the way that you do?"

"No," Luna said happily. She always answered rhetorical questions.

"Well." Hermione had been robbed of her dramatic pause, but she didn't seem to think it important. "It's just that - you can't believe in anything and everything, you can't just believe with no reason at all. Otherwise it's not a belief, it's - it's like being brainwashed. If you never decide what's worth believing, then you'll waste your life chasing after things that aren't really there, and you'll never do anything worthwhile. You might laugh at SPEW, but well - I tried, didn't I? I tried to do something. And you won't ever - "

She was unconsciously fiddling with her Head Girl badge as she paused, making it catch the light. The H and the G spun in front of Luna's eyes, confusing themselves with the conversation, and she knew that was the image she would remember later when she thought back to this. They were her initials too, she realised. Hermione's. How funny. How much easier it was to think about that than to listen very hard.

"Sometimes you need to be able to think critically about things, because that's the way the world is sometimes. I know that you're as much against Voldemort as I am, but the Death Eaters - How do you think they got that way?"

"By being narrow-minded," Luna said promptly, but her fingers were trembling.

"Yes," Hermione said. "But also by believing. They didn't question what they were told, they just took it to their heart and believed it. They didn't argue or ask for proof or rule things out before they made up their minds. They just decided to believe in it."

She paused for a moment, but Luna had nothing to say back to her. The trembling had spread into her legs and arms. It was the same way that she had felt when coming up on the train to Hogwarts, but this time she had stepped apart from herself as well, and she didn't even know who she was meant to be. She didn't know why she was here. In a moment she might blow away and there would be no more Luna Lovegood any more.

"And Luna - if you never do question anything, then one day, I can't help thinking that someone will come along with a subtler idea of how to change the world, and you'll just go along with them. And that might be a good thing. But it might not," said Hermione, finishing neatly on the full stop.

There had been a clear structure once. There must have been. A few minutes ago, she would have been able to say exactly why she was right, and they were wrong, and why she'd said - but there wasn't anything there now. She tried to summon up the way she'd felt when finishing that sentence about Fantastic Beasts, but it already felt transparent and unreal. She wasn't even sure if she believed in Snorkacks any more.

"Oh, Luna - " Hermione said, looking horrified, "don't cry - "

She wasn't like her mother now, she thought. She'd chased something right to the very end, but it had not exploded in her face, she'd simply lost touch with it, and now it was gone.