Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Luna woke up.

1. A Teenager Awake and Out of Bed Before Dawn

She took stock; she was alive, well, and had not been abducted by Unspeakables looking for new subjects to use in classified illegal experiments.

Which was always nice.

She took her journal out of her bedside table and carefully noted down what she could remember about the night's dreams. A few years ago, she'd been worried about doing this; one only remembered dreams by focusing and reviewing them upon waking, and she had feared that she might become confused as to which of her memories had actually happened, and which were dreams (the odd events may have been a tip-off for Muggles, but Luna was a witch, and odd things happened to her all the time). But still, she'd wanted to review her dreams, because she'd heard once that they were the subconscious answering a question you hadn't asked yet. Luna was fond of answers, so she'd eventually realised writing her dreams down was the best method - it let her examine her dreams and at the same time provided a record she could use to establish whether a particular memory was dream or reality.

Assuming she was awake, of course, but there wasn't much she could do about it if she wasn't, so she didn't worry about it.

She got out of bed, wincing as her feet hit the chill floor where her slippers used to be. She checked under her bed, and in her trunk, just in case she'd moved them in her sleep, but they were nowhere to be found. She added them to her list of missing items, shifting the weight from the ball of one foot to the other. The floor was awfully cold; she supposed she could have stayed in bed and gotten up at what the masses felt was a more reasonable time, but she rather liked this time of morning - the relaxed, shadowed moments of promise before the world was filled with noise and people and chaos. It was just her - she didn't think anybody else got up this early, although Ginny had once mentioned something about Harry getting up at absurd times when he'd stayed at the Burrow that summer -

Interesting. Time from waking up to thinking about a boy: Five minutes. That was much shorter than usual. Unusual, too, in that it was Harry. Or was it? She absently reviewed her boy-related musings of the past few weeks and realised that, yes, Harry was more frequently featured than Ronald these days. Curiouser and curiouser.

Anyway. What had she been thinking about? Oh, right.

It was just her and the castle, and she liked it that way. She just liked it a whole lot more when her feet were snug in her slippers, that's all.

She slipped into a pair of socks - better than nothing - collected her clothes and a towel and padded to the bathroom. An added advantage to being up so early was that there was no risk of her towel and clothing being stolen while she was in there. It had only happened once, but that once had been -

No. No point in thinking about it; it had happened, it was over, it was silly to dwell on what couldn't be changed.

She stepped into the shower, taking care to keep her hair out of the jet of water as much as possible. She supposed she should wash it more often, but it just got so heavy when it was wet, her neck would start to ache, and it took forever to dry. Sometimes she thought about cutting it, but it would just grow back; once it had gotten to her waist it had pretty much stopped growing, so why waste time attempting to replicate with scissors an event that had happened naturally?

Besides, her mother had always loved her hair.

2. Communing with the Dead

When she was done showering, she dressed and put on her glasses. They weren't corrective lenses - her eyes saw just fine. Maybe even better than most since other people wasted all their time blinking instead of seeing. Supposedly, these glasses allowed the wearer to see Chamelids - her father had given them to her to test after a man sent them to The Quibbler, looking to get advertised. She suspected the glasses were faulty, actually - she hadn't seen any Chamelids in all the time she'd been wearing them - but she wore them anyway. She felt they made her look brave. (She'd mentioned this feeling to Ginny, who had for some reason given her a sympathetic smile and wished her luck).

Tucking her wand in its usual place behind her ear, she left Ravenclaw tower. She felt a little like humming, but couldn't settle on a tune. Weasley is my King seemed... inappropriate, since Ronald had made it clear he wasn't interested in her that way (I mean, uh, you're a good sort and all, I just, um, don't really think it would... work, y'know? I'm sure there are loads of blokes who would, though. Better ones than me - oh, there's Hermione and Harry. Hey, Hermione, you were, uh, going to help me with that Defence essay, remember?) . She considered The Lay of Godric's Hollow, but decided that it didn't particularly suit her mood.

Besides which, she'd heard Harry swear to hex blind the next person to sing, play, or mention that song again. She didn't much fancy being blind, on the off-chance she ran into him.

As she was going down the stairs, the Grey Lady drifted through a portrait in front of her. The canines paused in their game of Gobstones to shiver, then resumed.

"Miss Lovegood," she said, "you're up."

Oh. Were they exchanging statements of the obvious, then? "Grey Lady," said Luna, "you're a ghost."

That reminded her; she hadn't ventured a theory on the Grey Lady's identity yet this week. "In fact, you're the ghost of Agnes deWitt, a minor member of French nobility who, several hundred years ago, came to Hogwarts seeking the secret of the Philosopher's Stone from Nicolas Flamel who was a resident at the time. The intent was to use the gold-producing capabilities of the Stone to destabilize the economy of French wizarding society, for devious reasons I have not yet been able to establish. Possibly you were under the Imperious curse at the time. You entered, Polyjuiced to look like a student, tricked Flamel into revealing the location of the Stone, but unfortunately let yourself be kissed beneath a sprig of Mistletoe hanging on these very stairs, whereupon a Nargle leapt upon you and you tumbled down the stairs to your death, after which you became a ghost and haunted Ravenclaw tower for reasons that, again, I have not yet deduced."

Luna took a breath. Several, in fact. That had been a very long sentence. She wondered idly if that was why Hermione was irritable all the time; lack of oxygen resulting from constant outbursts of lengthy exposition.

"Agnes deWitt?" asked the Grey Lady.

"A spinster who stayed at a now-defunct inn at Hogsmeade and then vanished. I found an article in the newspaper archives about her. The death of a student on these stairs happened - they use it as a warning for Ravenclaw first-years to be careful - but as no student is listed in the Hogwarts records as having died upon these stairs I can only assume the death was of someone disguised as a student."

"Hence the Polyjuice."

"Exactly."

The Grey Lady considered her for a time, then smiled. "Alas, dear, I am not French and I did not fall down a flight of stairs. I must say, however, that it is nice to see someone actually trying to figure it out - most of the students these days simply badger those in the know to let them in on the secret. And such an entertaining theory - you come up with the best ones, I feel, since... well, since your mother was a member of my house."

"Did she ever get it right?" The Grey Lady was silent, and for a moment Luna wondered if she had spoken too softly. Then the Lady smiled, a gesture as mysterious and insubstantial as the rest of her, bowed ever-so-slightly and drifted past Luna up the stairs.

"Do mind yourself on the stairs, my dear."

Luna watched her go, and then walked carefully down the stairs. At the bottom she wandered absently towards the eastern side of the castle, to see if the sun came up this morning.

She absently trailed her hand along the wall as she went - Sophie Morrow claimed that there was a false wall along this corridor somewhere, and Luna was quite fond of secret, hidden places. Sophie had also said that you could only pass through the wall to the room beyond if you ran straight at it, but Luna wasn't about to run straight at a wall without any indication that it would give way. There was always the possibility that Sophie had been wrong, or trying to see if Luna could be goaded into running flat-out into a wall. Luna imagined some would consider that an amusing sight, although she couldn't figure out why. Ginny had once mused that 'Some people find bad things happening to good people funny, and some find bad things happening to bad people funny. I mean, if one of those horrible girls in your house tried to take one of your things and it turned into a giant spider when they tried to pick it up, that'd be funny, right?'

Luna had considered this for a time, and then asked 'I don't know. Would the spider tell jokes, or is it just a funny-looking spider?' Ginny had laughed at that, then hugged her and said she was most definitely 'good people.'

Luna still wasn't so sure. She had to admit that sometimes - reaching for her towel and finding nothing - wincing as her feet met cold floor where her slippers should have been - she wouldn't mind so much if something bad happened to certain people. Which made her feel somewhat upset at herself - they weren't bad people, they were just mean people.

No, that still wasn't fair, was it? They were nice enough to each other, most of the time. Not mean people, then, just people who did mean things. Everybody did mean things, occasionally. Even Harry had, once or twice, and he was perhaps the most suited to the title of 'good people' out of anyone Luna knew.

She thought about the way he snapped 'Don't call her that!' whenever he heard the word 'Loony' and felt quite cheered, although that was probably nothing more than Harry being Harry.

Still... the most recent time it had happened, Ginny had heard and given her a grin and a thumbs-up behind Harry's back.

She reached a corridor on the eastern side of the castle, took out her wand and tapped a brick in the wall - it slid out of the wall a couple of inches, as did several other bricks in a line above it. Luna climbed up the makeshift ladder to the hidden balcony above. Well, it wasn't exactly hidden - the balcony was in plain view, it was just that nobody ever looked up.

It wasn't a particularly big balcony - just a small platform jutting out of the side of the castle, overrun with vines. Luna was fond of it nevertheless; it was silent, and it was peaceful, and no-one could take it away from her, since nobody else knew about it.

Nobody human, at least; there was a bee buzzing about. Bees communicated by dancing, didn't they? Luna essayed what she felt was a welcoming sort of shimmy, but the bee flew off.

She hoped she hadn't said anything insulting. She leaned over the railing to watch it go - the railing that had been eaten away by rot and vines -

3. Falling An Extended Distance Without Coming to Harm

- the railing that wasn't there anymore.

She toppled, arms wind-milling. Frantically grabbed at a vine, fingers barely grasping it.

There was no way it was going to hold her weight, and she was too far over to recover her balance.

The vine was going to give. Soon. Every object falls at nine point eight metres per second per second. She had no time. Think, Luna. What did one do in this sort of crisis?

What would Harry do?

The vine gave.

Not fall.

Her wand - safely and conveniently behind her ear - was in her hand in an instant. Could you levitate yourself? No.

Right, then. She pointed her wand at her shoe - tried not to look at the sky falling away beneath her, avoided calculating how many seconds till she hit the ground - and said "Wingardium Leviosa."

Her shoe promptly slowed and then stopped. So did her foot, snugly inside said shoe.

Everything went dark, and for a moment she feared that the blood had rushed to her head, burst something in her brain and left her blind. Then she looked up - down - and realised it was just that her robes had fallen over her head.

The ground was still reasonably far away. Time to spare, then. Still, she wasn't about to do that again.

She pushed her robes back down - up - lowered herself nearer to the ground, and considered how she was going to get right-side-up again. She could just release the spell, she supposed, but then she'd probably land on her head, which didn't sound particularly appealing. If she levitated her shoe down and backwards, maybe she'd spin? No. More likely her head would drag along the ground as she descended; levitation charms wouldn't move her fast enough to spin. Or she could -

Someone was calling her name. An anthropomorphic representation of death, angry at her escape from its clutches, perhaps? Unlikely, since she probably wouldn't have died so much as broken some bones, but still possible -

- if Death looked like Harry Potter. Possible, but unlikely.

"Luna? Are you - who did this?" He looked around. "Did they just leave you here?" He was practically smouldering with indignation; Luna felt a little rush of vertigo in her stomach. She wondered if that was a flashback to the fall, but decided it probably wasn't, since it hadn't been that traumatic. Upsetting and scary, yes, but not nearly as upsetting and scary as things that had happened to other people.

"Oh, nobody left me here. We're the only people up at this time of morning." She smiled, although possibly it was actually a frown since she was upside-down.

"Then - who - ?"

"I did it."

Harry stared at her. She did the polite thing and stared back. It wasn't hard, as Harry was quite pleasant to stare at. In fact, she was starting to feel quite... flushed, although the blood rushing to her head probably had something to do with that. Best to correct the situation. "Harry? Could you help me down?"

"Oh, yeah. Sorry." He stepped up to her, then seemed a little unsure of how to proceed. "How should we ..."

Luna considered. "Well, I cast the spell on my shoe since I couldn't levitate myself, but there's nothing to stop you -" she gestured, unfortunately pointing her wand away from her shoe in the process. The spell broke, and she fell.

Harry caught her. Which was nice, and not only because she'd avoided an unpleasant smack into the ground.

He set her gently on her feet, and after the blood in her head rushed back to where it was supposed to be and world stopped spinning, she looked through her hair - much of it had fallen in front of her face at some point in her fall and recovery - at Harry. She realised they were standing very close - if they had been any closer they would have bumped noses. Unless she tilted her head to the side, in which case -

Oh dear. She mustn't have fully recovered from her time spent upside-down; her stomach felt as if the world was tilting slightly beneath her.

She expected him to step back; Harry didn't often do what people expected, but she felt this was one time when he most likely would. So she was surprised when, instead, he brushed a clump of hair away from her face, his finger getting caught in a tangle as he did so. He carefully unsnarled the lock, then abruptly flushed, dropped his hand and stepped away.

Luna couldn't help but feel there was another, much better way that could have ended. Perhaps if she had reacted a different way - reacted at all, even, instead of thinking all the time ... what would someone who was good at this sort of social behaviour have done? What would Ginny do?

Being someone you're not never gets you anywhere. Nowhere pleasant, anyway. Ginny had said that to her once. A new question was required, then. What would Luna do? This was somewhat easier to answer, since she was probably the foremost expert upon the subject. Not that it was easy to answer, fraught as it was with circumstance and possibility and subconscious.

"How did you end up like that, anyway?" Harry asked.

"Oh, I was up in that balcony, and then I fell. There was a bee," she said. For some reason she felt not even a pang of worry about Harry knowing about her private sanctuary. Of course, she probably wasn't going to use it again, it being so hazardous and all. Maybe some repairs could be done. She wondered if Harry knew anything about construction charms.

"A... bee?"

"Yes, a bee." He still looked a little baffled, so she added, "They're yellow and black. They buzz a lot, and hang out around flowers."

"Oh, you mean Hufflepuffs."

What? No, she meant bees. She'd even said so, and then she'd described them...

...in non-specific terms that Harry had chosen to misread as being descriptors of Hufflepuff students. That struck her as clever, so she laughed. "Oh! That was clever."

His lips twitched at that, drawing her attention. Harry had very nice lips. She wondered why she hadn't noticed this before. There was a certain sort of logic, to it, though; he had a very nice voice, so it stood to reason it would issue from a nice pair of - full, pink and quite soft-looking - lips. She wondered about his tongue, and then wrenched her mind away from the thought and wondered if he sang instead.

Speaking of singing, there was something she wanted to ask, although she was worried it might upset him.

"If you don't mind, I'm going to ask you a question." Luna was quite proud of this phrasing - it let the person she was speaking to decide whether they wanted to answer her question, without forcing them to answer one in the process, the way 'Can I ask you a question?' did. It also meant people couldn't be clever and say 'You just did!' although sometimes they did anyway, because they weren't listening to what she'd actually said.

"I don't mind."

"It's about your godfather."

Harry's almost-smile disappeared. He looked away, swallowed, and then looked back at her. "...okay. Yeah, you can - what do you want to know?"

"Did he secretly have a singing career under the alias of Stubby Boardman?"

4. Making Harry Potter Smile During a Conversation About His Godfather

Harry stared at her for the longest time. One side of his mouth curled upwards. Now, all she had to do was make the other side do the same, and he'd be smiling. He deserved to smile, and he looked very good doing it. (Of course, these last couple of weeks she'd begun to suspect he looked good doing anything, which hardly seemed fair). She resisted the urge to reach out and push the other side of his mouth into a smile - that seemed like it would be cheating, somehow.

"No," he said, "I don't think he did, I'm afraid. I think The Quibbler was wrong on that one. That woman said she had dinner with him, right? When he confronted Pettigrew?"

"Yes. But Sirius was innocent, you said so yourself."

"Yeah, but he was there. Pettigrew framed him for the murders, but Sirius was there. So he couldn't have been having dinner with..."

"Doris Purkiss."

"...yeah. So I reckon she must have been ly... wrong."

Luna thought about this for a time. "Unless... maybe she was having lunch with an impostor? Someone pretending to be Stubby Boardman."

"Why would they do that?"

"Some people are awfully nefarious. He was probably trying to get Doris to... to... pay for his lunch. Because people don't let down-on-their-luck celebrities pay for things."

"Or... maybe he was an actor hired to keep the real identity of Stubby Boardman coming out. I bet Sirius's mates would have hassled him something rotten if they found out he had a singing career." Harry's voice was playfully conspiratorial; he didn't seem to be taking this theorizing seriously, but Luna found she didn't much care.

"Was he a bad singer, then?"

"Well... he did a pretty good rendition of 'God Rest Ye, Merry Hippogriffs.'" Harry said. And then he smiled. Luna suddenly had a very odd feeling somewhere in her stomach that merited further investigation. Later. When she was alone. "So I guess it's not impossible," he concluded.

Well, that was just silly. "That's just silly. Being impossible is no reason to assume something never happened. I've experienced," she calculated, "four impossible things already this morning."

"Luna, if you did them, they're not exactly impossible."

"True enough, I suppose, but impossible is a bit of a nonsense word, really. Sophie Morrow once told me gullible wasn't in the dictionary. I checked, and it was still in mine, so she must have been using a different dictionary. If different dictionaries have different sets of words and definitions, then some of them must be wrong, mustn't they? I feel that 'impossible' is probably one of those words; everybody thinks it means 'can never happen' when all it really means is 'very, very unlikely.'"

Harry frowned. "But... there are things that are impossible - the original meaning of impossible, I mean. Things that can never happen."

Luna felt that was a rather odd thing to say, coming from a wizard who played a sport that involved flying about chasing and being chased by animated balls. "Like what?"

His brow wrinkled as he thought. "Uhh... flying without a broom?"

"Magic carpets. Those boots with the wings on. Muggles have those big metal bird-things - oh, and if you were a bird Animagus -"

"Okay, what about... " He trailed off.

Luna smiled. "See? Dictionaries were for the most part written by Muggles, so maybe that's where it comes from. Add magic into the equation, and you can't think of a single proper impossible thing."

"Me beating Voldemort."

They'd both stopped smiling. He looked lost, almost pleading with her. Make this not impossible, his eyes asked.

5. Induction

Luna considered what Harry had told them about the prophecy until the sun, just cresting the horizon, gave her the answer she needed. "Is the sun going to come up tomorrow?"

Harry looked at the sun as if it was going to answer for him or explain the purpose of the question. When it failed to answer, he turned back to Luna. "Yes?"

"How do you know?"

His mouth worked soundlessly for a moment, then he ventured, "Because it always does?"

Gotcha. "That's called induction; arriving at a global rule from specific examples. It's bad logic. Just because the sun has always come up doesn't mean it always will."

His gaze skittered to the sunrise, then back to her once he'd been assured that yes, the sun hadn't exploded when he wasn't looking. "What does this have to do with ..."

"Well, the thing is, though we can't say for sure that the sun will rise tomorrow, we can say that it very likely will, because there's an established pattern." She looked about, then knelt down by a patch of dirt. She poked a hole in it with her wand. "One point makes ... well, nothing. Two points, and even three," she added two holes in a line with the first, "don't really tell us anything. If we were Muggles, then they might, but in magic two and three incidences tend to form discrete units. Pairs and triangles, you see? Because they're prime numbers; those are very important in Arithmancy. But four ...?" She added a fourth hole, then drew a line in the dirt connecting the points. "Four points make a pattern."

He knelt down beside her and traced the line she'd drawn with his finger. "Four times... so you're saying..."

"You-Know-Who has tried to kill you repeatedly and never succeeded. You've never tried to kill him, though, so we have no idea how likely or unlikely that is."

"But... I was lucky, those other times..."

"Four points, Harry. Five, even: Godric's Hollow, Quirrell, the Chamber, the Third Task, and the Department of Mysteries. You have very reliable luck."

Harry stared vacantly into space for a time. "Okay. So... maybe not an impossible thing. Just... an unlikely one."

They sat there in comfortable silence for a while. Luna wondered if Harry wanted to be left alone with his thoughts, but decided to stick around; Harry seemed to be thinking just fine with her there, and she found herself reluctant to move away from him.

Eventually, he spoke. "Did you say you'd already done four impossible things this morning?"

"I rather think it's five, now."

"Well, what impossible things did you have planned for the rest of your morning?"

She giggled. Then wondered at herself; that didn't seem a very Luna thing to do, and she'd already decided not to act like anybody else. Still, she hadn't thought about it, so maybe it was just a new kind of Luna thing to do. "One doesn't plan impossible things, Harry. Otherwise they wouldn't be impossible, or even unlikely."

"Oh. That makes sense, I guess. But... what impossible things would you like to happen, then?"

There was something she'd quite like to happen. And it was very, very unlikely. She spoke out, feeling very impulsive and daring.

"I'd like to run into the boy I fancy and then kiss him."

"Oh," said Harry. He sounded slightly downcast. "Is this unlikely because you're not going to run into him, or because he wouldn't..."

"I've already run into him, but I don't think he wants to kiss me."

"Who else was up at this time of...?" Harry stopped abruptly and swallowed. "Oh." His gaze dropped to her lips. "I, uh, I don't think that's particularly impossible."

"...you don't?"

He moved closer. "No. Um. Likely, even."

She tilted her head to the side.

6. Being an Excellent Kisser Despite Minimal Experience

Luna was late for breakfast.