Luna(tic) (Marauders Era)

28. The Imagination of a Wall-less World

It was a strange thing, that little spark of hope that lit inside Luna. It was, in some ways, bordering on madness. Or maybe it was madness, just of a different sort than Luna was used to. Whatever it was, it was dangerous, of that she was certain. Hope, Luna knew, was a treacherous thing. A fragile thing. It tricked you into forgetting that life was lived on a tightrope. It tricked you into thinking the floor was solid until the moment that you strayed from the straight line and realized the fall had never truly vanished, only been papered over by the imagination of a preferable reality. And that was just the trouble: hope was preferable to truth. It was kinder. It was sweeter. It had a way of making itself wanted.

And God, Luna wanted it. She wanted to believe that strange didn't have to be a bad thing. That even when caught in off moments, in fragments, tied up in knots and tripping her way around a silent stage, she still might not be dismissed. Condemned. Abandoned.

Which was perhaps why, dangerous and foolish and mad as she knew it was, Luna didn't try very hard not to hope.

And on the whole, it didn't seem to hurt. Hesitant though she was about James and his friends, she found herself around them more often, always with Pandora at her elbow, always quiet and always watching, as much a shadow to Pandora as Peter Pettigrew seemed to be to James and Sirius. But both of them were still there. Still included. Still... friends.

And though Luna hadn't forgotten how cruel James's smile could turn, it was easy, when she saw him joking with his friends and laughing with hers, to hope. It was easy, when Severus Snape, who no one seemed to have much good to say about - and certainly not regarding his kindness - had been kind to her. Albeit, in a rather brusque, begrudging way. But it was still kindness. It was still sweet. It was still hope. And, perilous though it undoubtedly was, Luna hung her heart on it.

It helped, she supposed, that nothing even resembling the word insane ever left anyone's mouth for nearly a month. The joke of her insanity remained just that: a joke. And that sunny March day and that moment it had contained was blurred until the only thing any of them seemed to remember of it was that that was the day they had discovered a new passage. And a day Luna had apparently proved herself to be clever.

Luna had doubts about this last, but once James and Sirius discovered it, they seemed unable to let it go, despite Luna's half answers and hiding and Pandora's huffs that they really needed to stop badgering her and Luna really needed to learn to put her foot down.

Only Luna didn't. And really, she wasn't nearly as convinced as Pandora that this was the problem.

The problem, Luna thought, was that she didn't know how to give them the answers they seemed so desperate to have. In Luna's mind, it was simple: magic was magic. She didn't see why her turning eleven and having a wand changed that. It might make it easier to do some things, might offer her the chance to learn new spells and channel and control the magic in a way she had never dreamed possible, but it seem positively silly to think it erased any of the magic she had already learned before that strange day when the man with the starlight beard and vanishing butterflies had come to ask her to attend his school.

James and Sirius and, it seemed, just about everyone else, disagreed. Apparently, Luna had learned, it was common knowledge in the wizarding community that underage magic was volatile and unpredictable and as such, sometimes did brilliantly complex things without the user intending them. When that person got a wand, however, and learned to control their magic, those unpredictable outbursts stopped.

And that was where Luna got stuck in all her attempts at explanation. Because there was the explanation she couldn't - or more accurately, really, wouldn't - give. Because in all Luna's life, she had experienced only one truly unpredictable outburst.