Imperfections of Perfection

Added note/disclaimer: I also use quotes from other places. If you find a quote that wasn't cited, please notify me.

"When you are born, you cry, and the world rejoices. When you die, you rejoice, and the world cries. "

XIV

A Light in the Dark

Death is a curious thing. We don't all face it the same way and we never have the same look at it again.

When my mother died conducting an experiment and I watched her die, I was not horrified by it. Not really - perhaps I was, and I now say I was not... I really do not know.

We all found out just how sick Draco Malfoy was on Monday morning. It was the beginning of it for us all. We'd been living in a golden bubble - those of us who'd survived the war with Voldemort and his Death Eaters... living under the idea that just because we had survived there would be no more deaths.

Yet, Professor McGonagall stood up and announced that Draco Malfoy was deathly ill. That we could all go and see him if we wanted - to hope that he lived... to watch him die ... watch him fade away.

I think it was worse for Harry.

Harry always took life a little too seriously, a little too passionately. He lived with everything. His power lay in the fact that he was capable of feeling. He was capable of loving, of forgiving... of knowing what was right and what was wrong. He had these flashes of insight sometimes that would make anyone weep.

Except Harry wasn't here. He was told by Professor McGonagall to attend his classes and Draco himself had told him to go to class. Even he didn't want Harry to fail and not finish school in order to become the greatest Auror the world would ever know.

"Draco," I said, sitting in the chair next to his bed.

"Luna?" he said, turning his head toward me. I looked at him - he looked bad.

He was anorexic - I knew it, but I doubt that other people knew it. I'd known it for a very long time. Except he didn't want me to talk to him about his illness - or ask him how he was feeling or anything, which was why I asked him, "Have you ever heard of the heliopaths?"

"What?" he asked me. And so I told him of all the magical creatures I knew about. I told him about these beings the burned everything in their path, I told him about other things - creatures like the leviathan. I told him about my mother - what I remembered of her.

I told him things I remembered about him, too. He hadn't known I'd noticed him.

"I notice everyone," I told him lightly. He looked at me strangely, but he smiled and said, "Maybe we need to think about you again."

I smiled at him and told him other obscure myths until he finally fell asleep.

Then I let myself take in just how bad he looked.

He was on something they called a parenteral nutritional support. They were feeding him through an "I.V." I'd heard Hermione Granger explaining to Ronald. It was feeding him because he couldn't eat. He could barely move at all now.

I know it was a Thursday I went to see him - three days after they announced he was sick - maybe dying for reasons I can't remember. I think it was the way the moon was.

The moon is a silver light in the darkness - an emblem of hope in the midst of despair. The moon is what every one wants - a light in their darkest nights. I hoped Draco Malfoy would find it.

It doesn't matter whether someone lives or dies. I believe there are two sides to the phenomenon known as death, this side where we live, and the other side where we shall continue to live. Eternity does not start with death. We are in eternity now. And whether Draco Malfoy found his light in his darkness by dying or by managing to claw his way from death's grip... either way, he'd be stronger for it. Or we would be stronger because of his dying.

People change other people. It's the way things are. Sometimes they are like Tom Riddle who changed people for the worst, tapping into their dark madness. Sometimes they're like Harry Potter who inspires us to do things only heroes would do. And sometimes they're like Draco Malfoy...

He wasn't strong, he wasn't brave. He was human. And that's what mattered that he was human.

It didn't matter that he only had a small chance of survival, seeing how sick he already was. Sixty percent of anorexic bulimics make it and only forty percent die. Looking at him now, he'd have to fight hard if he wanted to make it to the sixty. That's what I'd managed to find out by listening.

But most people had resigned him to his death. And it's funny, because whether you live or die, it doesn't really matter. What matters is what you do in between. It's how you live that really counts, not how you were born or how you died. It's only how you live that affects the world with the usual exceptions.

- Saying

A/N: Ah, Luna! Well, I don't know if I do her well enough... sometimes I think I probably don't, but whatever - it's fan fiction.

Citation/Disclaimer(s)/Reference:

1. "I believe there are two sides to the phenomenon known as death, this side where we live, and the other side where we shall continue to live. Eternity does not start with death. We are in eternity now." - Norman Vincent Peale.

Oh, and for your information, the term "parenteral nutritional support" basically means intravenous feeding. It's just a fancy way of dressing it up.