A Lack of Imagination

'Those who say it cannot be done

should not interrupt the person doing it.'

~ Chinese Proverb

~

4: In which pond?

There was a small window set in the side of the stairwell that led up to the sixth-year girls' dormitory, and Luna walked to it late in the evening and looked outside as best as she could, although the stairs were just a little too low beside it tonight for her to get her head fully level with the window frame. (Either the stairs moved or the window did; they'd never been able to determine precisely which, and by the next morning it might be by the landing, or set at ankle-height. It had become a running joke among the other Ravenclaw girls, when returning borrowed objects back to their friends, to claim "Oh, I left it for you on the windowsill!" and watch the other go see if the windowsill was still there at all.) By pressing her fingers into the stonework, she could raise herself on her toes and just manage to catch a glimpse of the moon as it rose from behind the trees. It appeared to be full, but she couldn't remember if it had been properly full last night or was going to be tomorrow. It might be waxing, or waning; neither, or both.

~

It was almost a week after her latest conversation with Luna in the library that Hermione saw the two girls from Ravenclaw approaching the Gryffindor table at breakfast-time, clutching a large tawny owl between them that appeared reluctant to relinquish the rolled magazine it carried. She had been trying not to think about that conversation at all, as it happened; she didn't feel at all comfortable remembering what she had said, knowing that it had upset Luna so badly, and that her attempts at backtracking afterwards simply hadn't worked. And of course, it was just all of a piece with her propensity to make people angry, or upset, when she didn't expect to at all, and she didn't like that about herself but couldn't see how to stop it. She had been right; she wouldn't disagree now with a single statement that she had made to Luna, as they had all been perfectly true. But then - perhaps she should have worked out by now that just because something was right didn't mean it was right to be said.

Still, it wasn't as if Luna had been at all self-controlled -

"It's the fourth time it's tried to deliver it," one of the Ravenclaw girls, whom Hermione recalled as Victoria Flitch - something, said. "And you know the subscription owls, they won't let go of a magazine unless the subscriber's present, and it wants paying as well, of course. And if she doesn't collect it within a week it automatically goes back to the printers."

Hermione saw the second girl nudge Victoria and whisper Well, that's her father anyway, so why should it matter? but she was still thoroughly confused. Did everybody in Ravenclaw have the habit of putting their reasoning before their explanation?

"I'm sorry?"

"Luna's magazine," said the other girl. "The Quibbler. She has it delivered every month, obviously. But she hasn't been at breakfast these last four days, so she hasn't been able to collect it."

"Luna hasn't been at breakfast?" said Hermione, feeling suddenly alarmed. "You mean she hasn't been eating?"

"Oh no, " said Victoria. "She comes down at the beginning of it and collects any food that's movable, you know, toast and things, but I think she takes it back up to the dormitory again and so she's never here when the post owls come. We've already had to pass on one of her father's letters to her, but that was easy."

"Well, why haven't you told her that The Quibbler's here for her?"

"We did. Four days ago. She still hasn't collected it."

"Why are you telling us about it?" Hermione said, and as they both took on apologetic looks, she realised that she had reached the true reason for their appearance at the Gryffindor table.

"Well, you're friends with Luna, aren't you? - More than any of us are. We're a bit worried about her, she's been a little strange these last few days. I mean, I know she always is - "

"What you could say is that she's being normal," the other girl put in.

Victoria nodded vigorously. "Yes, that's it. She's being normal."

"And we thought that one of you should talk to her and see if she's all right."

Hermione, feeling rather strongly that she would not be the best person to manage this, looked to the others seated around her for help. Not one of them appeared to have been listening to the conversation at all. Ron and Harry were involved in Charming fragments of salt and pepper while trying to hold a magnifying glass up to them at the same time to see what they were doing - microcharming was the current topic in class, and one which Professor Flitwick had become very enthusiastic about, assuring them that it was swiftly becoming one of the most useful and exciting applications of Charms. Most of the NEWT class, however, had just found it dull and difficult, and were similarly practising the art of microlocomotion at breakfast in readiness for Charms at nine. Neville had just spilt a cup of tea over his Herbology notebook and was frantically trying to clean it using both magical and manual methods, and Ginny, who might have been the most appropriate person to speak to Luna, appeared to have already left to fit in some early morning Quidditch practice. There was obviously no help to be had.

"Of course I will," she said, putting down her knife and fork. "Although you might as well let that owl go, Luna can always go up to the Owlery and find it herself. I'm not sure you're meant to restrain them."

They had assured her that if she just waited by the entrance to the Ravenclaw common room, Luna would shortly appear from it to attend her next lesson, and she could catch her for a conversation then. Hermione had been doubtful, but as it turned out, she was only halfway up the staircase when Luna appeared from the top and began to descend it.

"Luna!" she said, trying to sound natural, and surprised, but not managing it, "How are you?"

Luna looked towards her for a moment, her eyes oddly - clear (though still protuberant) and then began walking briskly down the stairwell again, saying, "Oh, very well," in a slightly uninterested way.

"I thought I'd remind you - your copy of The Quibbler arrived again today - I suppose you've been quite busy with assignments - I remember what it was like, starting NEWTs, it's quite difficult to manage it all at first. I suppose you haven't had time to read it."

"I don't want to read it, thank you," Luna said.

~

"I don't really see why you're so worried," Ginny said. "You can hardly trust what the Ravenclaws say - a year ago they were still stealing her things and hiding them in parts of the castle that change too quickly for anyone to locate. I don't see why you think that they can tell if she's being normal, or strange, or whatever you want to call it."

"But when I went to talk to her in the library - " Hermione began, looking towards the Ravenclaw table, where Luna ought to be already seated, eating her breakfast; if she hadn't already taken it and left for the fifth day running.

"I don't think it's got anything to do with what you might have said to her," Ginny said. "Look, I've known Luna much longer than you have - she lives a few miles from the Burrow, but the way wizarding families are generally spread about, that's as good as being next-door neighbours - and she's always had these moments when she just - withdraws into herself. It's the way her mind works. It's why we called her Loony in the first place, when we were little, because she'd do things like only wanting to play with us on the odd-numbered days in a week. Victoria's right - just eating breakfast by herself is actually quite normal."

Somebody tapped Hermione on the shoulder, and she looked up to see the face of Victoria Flitchmarsh peering down at her again. "I thought you might like to know," she said. "Luna came down to breakfast today and waited for the post to come, and once the owl had flown down to her and dropped her post by her plate, she picked it up and left again."

"So she is going to read The Quibbler now?" Hermione said with relief.

"No," Victoria said. "Not The Quibbler. That came again just after she left - the owl was a bit slow, I think it's tired of trying every morning - and it just circled around a bit and then flew away again, like it always does. No, it was something else, it looked like an academic journal. From a few years back."

"What now?" Hermione said.

~

It had taken Luna the best part of the week to fully determine what it was that her mother had been researching on the twenty-seventh of July, and, after that, to leaf thoroughly through Madam Pince's index of the latest research on topics of interest, and decide which journal to order. She wanted to know exactly what the results had been of later research on the Small-leafed Draconius plant, which her mother had been so confident would assist in the treatment of certain forms of spell damage. (Unlike her father's topics of research, the plant did at least certainly exist, beyond even Hermione's powers of denial - Luna had looked it up in an index of plants that Neville had kindly lent her.) And now that the journal had finally arrived - the journal that contained the state of the latest progress made with the plant, whether it were useless, or not - she did not want to leaf through the hundreds of thin, closely-printed pages to find the two or three that she needed. You would think that the pages would be marked somehow, that as she flipped through the text, the words that made it up would be written in bold and jump out at her. But they didn't. She had to do this in the researcher's way, in the neat, logical, normal way.

She lifted the journal from the table in the Ravenclaw common room, where she had taken it after devouring her breakfast (two slices of toast and an apple) and opened it at random. Luna had never been very interested in facts reported in this way; the way people trumpeted that they'd found out a new fact, as if there were a limited sum of facts and they had simply to tick them off and then they would know everything. But now it was significant. Now it would make some difference to her what they said.

D. Draconius. Draconius, Small-Leafed. 394. Looking at the page numbers. 392, 396. She peeled two of the pages apart and read through the article, struggling in places with the difficult language, but picking up pace as she read, and the typical, widely-held views of the plant's limited usefulness were refuted one by one, to announce in ponderous tones that it was now forming part of an early testing program at St Mungo's, and the results were, so far, promising in those afflicted with spell damage to the nerves and spine. Nerves and spine... Luna remembered a fragment, aged seven, her saying "Do you have to work again today, Mummy?", and her mother: "Yes I do. Yes, I do, but I'll play with you later, darling, and it's important, don't you see, it might end in making people walk again." And Luna had repeated "Walk again," for a reason she couldn't remember, and giggled, and had stretched out her legs and taken long steps across the kitchen floor, moon-walking, as in that Muggle story she would read four years later about living on the moon, and Celia Lovegood, who had already read it, had grabbed her daughter's hand and taken the steps with her, before going away to work.

Luna set the journal down on the table again. Her mother had been right. She hadn't been chasing something that didn't really exist. It paid off, sometimes, to chase things. But just as she was about to get up and turn three times around, arms outstretched and spinning, because she liked the way her fingers felt when they cut the air at this speed, she thought, that's a fallacy. It was a word that Hermione might have used to demolish an argument, and Luna, who hated it, found herself adopting it now, as she thought, just because my mother chased something and it worked, doesn't mean it will for me, if I do. Particularly when I believe -

The Quibbler was waiting for her in the Owlery. Why didn't she go and pick it up, open it and read it, if she knew she was right?

She got up quite suddenly and went to the Owlery very quickly, not in her own world this time; not jumping over the flagstones, or stopping in the corridors. When she got there she took the paper from the long-suffering subscription owl, but hesitated, trying to breathe a little better, because for some reason she was hardly breathing at all. This was Daddy's paper. There it was, under the frontispiece; Editor: Robin Lovegood. Why should she not want to read it? She'd always been proud of Daddy, daring to point things out that other papers wouldn't, letting the truth be spoken to a wider audience than would otherwise see it. But -

- What if it wasn't all truth? What if some of it was - was ridiculous, and unreal, and imaginary, and not true at all? Well, in that case, they'd be lying, they'd be - he'd be -

And then Luna stood bolt upright and burst out laughing, one of her long laughs that she liked the most, because she was never sure when they were going to stop, and stretched her arms out as straight as sticks, sending a shower of owls fluttering farther away from her, and a letter or so falling to the floor of the Owlery. He wouldn't be lying, she thought. He'd only be - he'd only be writing wizarding fiction.

And what would be wrong with that? It wasn't as if everything in the other newspapers and journals was pure and established fact. In the very learned journal she had been reading today several other articles had been cited to have been proven wrong, although they had been published in the most proper of publications. Her father was just a little more willing to let people's imaginations run riot. And it wasn't as if everyone just read The Quibbler and believed it; oh, no, Daddy had always been very proud of their vociferous letters page, and the variance in the opinions that were given. Not like the Prophet, he'd say, run by one crowd. And just because you believed in Crumple-Horned Snorkacks didn't mean you had to believe in flesh-eating cabbages.

(She momentarily wondered what questions would be posed for a vegetarian who ate a flesh-eating cabbage.)

And so her father had found a way of making people read fiction, without exactly telling them that was what they were doing. Not, of course, that all of it was fiction, or even most of it, but that was not the point. It was, she admitted, a much cleverer idea than her way of going about it had been. She shouldn't have thought she could just write a piece from the top of her head and expect it to change everyone's views. It was a little short-sighted, a little limited - it showed, to be quite truthful, a lack of imagination. Well, Luna saw how she could go right now. She would practice. And she would practice immediately by writing a beautiful article on the flesh-eating cabbages that the Blacks had once owned.

~

"So you found it?" Hermione said to her, as she came back along the corridor clutching The Quibbler.

"Oh yes, I did," Luna said, suddenly aware that she was hopping over every third crack in the floor. "It was an excellent issue, as well. Mrs Grommit sent Daddy a lovely article about the magical secrets of West Wiltshire. You see, they enchant the ice-cream

vans - "

"I live there," Hermione said. "And - they don't."

"Of course not," said Luna. "But it's a very interesting thought. And you never know when one of the articles is going to be true, like Harry's, and of course, the Snorkack reports. So you have to be careful. You can't just forget to think about it."

"I know," said Hermione. "But Luna - does your father know that you don't believe in some of his articles?"

"Oh, he never does expect anyone to believe in all of them," said Luna cheerfully. But she saw her father suddenly as he sorted through the submissions, holding one up here and there and saying, Can't you see it, Luna? What they keep hidden from us? I don't see how anyone could read this and not see -

"He never does," she repeated more loudly, and went away to write.

~

When she'd finished her sixth year at Hogwarts, and she'd turned seventeen, and she'd got her Apparation licence, and they'd defeated Voldemort and all of that, Luna Apparated to the Yorkshire moors, stood in the nearest pond and concentrated on Hogwarts. Perhaps her original source had been corrupt, for it didn't work at all. But then, of course, she could have been standing in the wrong pond.