It is just after the Battle of Hogwarts. Ron and Hermione have just gotten together. Ginny and Harry also got together. After the battle, Neville said he liked Luna. He just told her when she sat down next to him on the Hogwarts steps. She was just going to sit down next to him because she wanted to check on him and see if he was doing OK after all that fighting. They were great friends after all. Luna was thoroughly confused when he said that. "Really?" was her response when he told her. "Yes," he said. "I've been thinking about it a lot and I think this is how I feel," he said. She was shocked. She didn't know he felt that way, let alone how she felt. "Can we just be friends for now?" she asked. "Sure," he said, looking defeated. "I'm sorry. I just don't know how I feel yet. I need some time to figure it out," she said, touching his shoulder. "OK," he said. He put his head on his knees. He got up and went to comfort Ron and his family, who were still grieving Fred's death.
Luna watched him go. She did care about him. She just didn't know if it was in a friendly way or a romantic way. She didn't want to lose him as a friend. She valued his friendship too much. She had known him since she came to Hogwarts when she was eleven. Neville had been one of the only people that was nice to her. She cherished his friendship because it was usually hard for her to make friends. She had portraits painted of Neville, Ginny, Harry, Ron, and Hermione on her ceiling with the word "friends" under them. Then there was the time when she had gone with Neville, Ginny, Ron, Hermione, and Harry to the Department of Mysteries because Harry had seen Sirius getting beaten up there by Nagini. It turned out to be a trap. Voldemort had put that image in Harry's mind of Sirius to lure him to the Department of Mysteries so he could get the prophecy for him. There had been Death Eaters there waiting for them. Luna was still impressed by the Levicorpus spell she had used on one of them.
Then there were the meetings for the DA or Dumbledore's Army that she had attended with Neville. She and Neville had both improved so much during the meetings. They had both mastered their patronuses. Her patronus was a rabbit but she didn't know what his was. Harry had taught the meetings because they were not learning anything in Umbridge's Defense Against the Dark Arts class. They were not even allowed to do magic. The Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge, refused to believe that Voldemort had come back so he had forbidden them to do magic. She and all her friends thought this was dumb so Ron and Hermione convinced Harry to teach them magic. She had really been enjoying the meetings until Marietta Edgecomb, Cho's friend, ratted them out to Umbridge. Marietta got warts all over her face for that. The ministry didn't want to admit that Harry and Dumbledore were right about Voldemort.
This past year she had started the D.A. up again while Harry, Ron and Hermione were off hunting Horcruxes. She, Neville and Ginny started it up again because the Carrows, Voldemort's Death Eaters, were the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher and Potions teacher. They were brother and sister. Neville started leading kids to resist them. They wanted to control Neville so they went after his grandmother. After this, he had to go into hiding so he went to hideout in the Room of Requirement. A lot of other students joined him to escape the Carrows. The only problem was that there was no food and there was a law against transfiguring food in the room. However, a passage to the Hog's Head, a pub in Hogsmead (a neighboring village), opened up and the pub's owner, Aberforth, started feeding them food. This also allowed members of the Order of the Phoenix (Organization to fight Voldemort) to enter the school to help fight off Lord Voldemort without setting off the Caterwauling Charm (a charm that sets off an alarm if any unauthorized person comes within a certain area) on the village.
The Carrows punished a student severely every time they disobeyed. The old potions master, Snape, was headmaster now. She did not know what would happen to the school after the Battle of Hogwarts. The school was all in ruins now. There were pieces of glass everywhere and everything was broken. Filch would probably clean it up.
