Chapter Text

At first, Luna had been all too content to write the two boys' behaviour off as something she just wouldn't ever understand, but halfway through dinner, she changed her mind. That kind of attitude was just wrong, no matter what it was about. Curiosity was to be sated, and giving up just because you didn't understand yet was the height of weakness.

Back in the common room, she sat cross-legged on her bed. It was the posture in which she always fought her most complicated mental battles; not because of any inherent geometrimystical properties of crossed legs, but simply out of habit. Now that she thought about it, though, maybe crossed legs had geometrimystical properties. It would go a long way towards explaining why she had won so many of those complicated mental battles. She started on a few mental sketches of geometrical classifications of different postures containing crossed legs, until she noticed that she was distracting herself and decided to put it off. She would think about it first thing next morning, she decided. After all, if she didn't, it would distract her every time she crossed her legs, which was, after all, when she had to fight her most complicated mental battles.

She closed her eyes, breathed deeply and tried to slow her pulse. Finally, she felt she was ready, and pulled up her memories on what happened in that corridor. She remembered not looking where she was going, when she had walked into one of the boys, just a bump with her shoulder. He'd said "Hey!", and as he'd looked at her, there had been a moment of realization on his face. Okay, that was something to work with.

He had realized something right as he looked at her, had had some kind of idea.

Luna was at a loss for how to find out what kind of idea he had had. There was an almost infinite scope of possibilities there.

How could she know what kind of idea someone else had gotten? Well, how did she know when she had an idea herself?

When she had an idea herself, she would know more after the idea than before, and usually think about something different, which would, most likely change her actions as well. Luna smiled an inward smile. It didn't show on her face, but it felt warm and fuzzy anyway. She deserved it because she had figured out something by assuming other people thought like she did, and yet it felt right. This was a rare thing to happen, and when it did, it reinforced her feeling of companionship to humans in general in a most pleasing way.

Now, before the idea the boy had said "Hey", and afterwards he had complained about for a long time about how Luna had hurt him by walking into him. This was somewhat confusing, since Luna really wouldn't expect to hurt anyone by walking into them. So the boy was either exceedingly fragile, or he had been lying.

Lying had always been a rather difficult topic for Luna to wrap her head around. For her, there weren't many intermediate steps between thinking and saying something, and the thought of thinking about what you were saying beforehand to create untruths was just weird. In this case, though, it seemed the more likely hypothesis.

So the boy had been lying when he had complained. Why? He had expected to gain something from it, but you couldn't gain a lot by speaking. Basically, you could only influence people. And since Luna was the person he had been talking to, he must have been trying to influence her.

What had he been trying to get her to do? He'd asked for an apology shortly after talking to her, but he hadn't been content with it, anyway, so that couldn't have been it. After that, both of the boys had pushed her around while calling her names, behaviour Luna still found more than puzzling.

She wasn't getting anywhere with this, and she was getting upset thinking about it. In fact she had half a mind to just stop this whole train of thought now. She might have even done it, if the other half of her mind hadn't remembered her mother's words in that exact moment. "Think longer about thinks and you'll understand them."

And her mother had been right. If Luna hadn't started to think longer about things, she never would have found out about so many things. Basic, boring facts that she had badly needed, at first, like how to cook, clean and do the other housework which her mother had used to do. Then, as she invested more time, she had arrived at such wonderful things as the anatomy of the Crumple-Horned Snorkack, which was truly improbable and her pride and joy. Once, she had even understood a deep secret, namely, why her father always looked so disheveled since her mother was gone.

She was frustrated, and she was angry at herself, and she might even be a little sad, but there was a way out of these bad feelings, and it went through understanding. So she began to think again, and this time, by some instinct, she started in the middle. The boys had pushed her around and called her names. Luna was always bad at remembering faces, so she didn't know what sort of expressions they had worn while doing that, but she was good at remembering sounds, and she remembered laughter in the air. Since she clearly hadn't been happy, it must have been the boys. If they had been happy, what they had been doing had probably been their purpose from the beginning.

Now, pieces of the puzzle fell in place. Luna still didn't understand the first thing about the things the boys had said before that, or why the one she had walked into had pretended to be hurt, but she knew what it was called when people found enjoyment in pushing others around and calling them names. It was bullying. She had been bullied.

With that word, she understood so much at once that she barely had time to notice it all. She understood how she herself had felt, both directly after what had happened and when she had forced herself to think about it. She understood why the few people walking by at the time had pretended not to have seen anything, and she even understood why Professor McGonagall had talked about bullying while they had been in her office.

The elation faded when she combined her realization with what she already knew. The boy she had walked into had recognized her and bullied her afterward. So he probably wouldn't have bullied anyone else. She remembered what Professor McGonagall had said: "They'll grow bored of ignoring you." So this was it, then? They had grown bored of ignoring her already and so she was a target now.

Somehow, this made Luna intensely angry. She didn't think she had been that angry before, and she didn't even know what she was angry at. Part of her was angry at everything, part of her was angry at the bullies, but that wasn't the biggest part. The biggest part was angry at herself. She couldn't help shake the feeling that she was different, she knew she was different, and that was what had made them bully her. The complex dance of social interaction had never been something Luna had understood very well, and with the way she had just ignored all conventions, people had probably singled her out from the start. In other words, she had made missteps. She had tread on others' feet and ignored the rhythm entirely, and when she had finally literally walked into someone, that had been the step that broke the camel's fetlock.

In simpler words, it was her fault.

Oh, it wasn't entirely her fault, she wasn't that arrogant. A lot of the share of the blame lay on the two boys' shoulders, and a lot of others had enabled them. But Luna had been the one to take the first step outside of social convention, and when you did something different than a whole lot of people, there was always a chance you were just wrong.

That thought broke her out of her misery. It was just so, so entirely unlike her. When she was different than others, she wasn't necessarily wrong. She didn't think many people thought as intensely about things as she did, and she was quite sure, at the risk of sounding arrogant, of being the world's foremost authority on Crumple-Horned Snorkacks as a result. Before she could assign any blame to herself, before she could even think about changing herself, she had to think about it longer.

And in her haste, she had failed to consider something quite important. At the end, the boys had run away, and she knew now that this was out of the ordinary. They had been scared off, though Luna hadn't done anything. Therefore, there had been a third entity at work. Now, she supposed it could have been a teacher, but that seemed unlikely judging from Professor McGonagall's reaction. It could also have been a student, but she hadn't seen anyone do anything, and who was she even kidding?

There could have only been one third entity, and it was the one that had blown up a Chocolate Frog on the train. There was one coherent explanation for all its actions: It had wanted to do her a favour.

This, at last, reassured her, and a warm glow spread through her body.

Without thinking, she spoke softly: "Thank you, friend."

As she opened her eyes, she saw that the other Ravenclaw first-year girls had by now arrived in their dorm room and were, one and all, staring at her. She saw Lea's face twist in open disgust and knew that she had to say something to explain herself that would also seem brilliant and funny, but her mind was racing in circles and she just had no clue at all.

Before she could think of anything, bright lights exploded behind her lids and she faded away.

She awoke in a hospital bed, and it was already morning. Looking around, she saw that it was too small to be St. Mungo's, and therefore had to be the Hogwarts hospital wing. She hadn't expected to make it into the hospital wing within the first five weeks.

Something on a chair beside her bed stirred, and it took her a second to recognize Lea. She stared at the girl in open-mouthed surprise. Why was she at her hospital bed?

Lea cleared her throat. "I'm only going to say this once, so you better listen up. When the other girls and I brought you in, Madame Pomfrey told me you had some kind of mental illness. I have no idea how much of your", she scoffed, "behaviour is really excused by that, but I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. If you promise to stop acting weird, I'll give you a second chance."

Luna took a second to process that. Maybe she was still asleep, since she hadn't understood at all what Lea wanted to say. "A second chance at what?"

Lea lifted her eyebrows as though the question was beneath her, but Luna, who had seen Professor McGonagall lift a single eyebrow, was not impressed and just waited until Lea spoke.

"A second chance at being friends with me."

Luna smiled an inward smile. She was pretty sure that she knew, now, what friends were. "I don't think it's really friendship if it comes with those kinds of strings attached."

Lea scowled at first, then shrugged. "Suit yourself, Loony. See you tomorrow in class, then."

Luna had no idea what she should do with the rest of the day, now that she was sitting here alone in the hospital wing with an entire day of lying in bed before her. She could think about something, but she could do that at any time when she didn't have anything else to do, like in History of Magic. It took a few seconds of thinking about thinking until she had an idea. She had a friend now, so she could just as well contact it.

Hey, she thought. Don't try to answer me on this, or I suppose I'll get knocked out again. I have an idea to circumvent that, but I guess you'd know. If you think it's a bad one, feel free to interrupt me with a seizure.

Luna waited for a few seconds, since she had noticed that interval with the earlier incidents. After there was no seizure forthcoming, she snuck out of bed, treading lightly.

Luckily, there was no one else in the hospital wing. Even Madame Pomfrey seemed to be away right now, and it was a short trip to the medicine cabinet. Of course, it was locked, since Madame Pomfrey was likely one of the most sensible persons in Hogwarts, but Luna knew just what she could do about that.

She put two fingers on the lock and willed it to open. Five seconds later, it sprang open with a click. Luna giggled to herself. This was almost as though she could do magic.

She looked over the bottles of potions and pills carefully, until she had found the one she wanted. She had no idea how she had known this was the one, but she was so used to correct conjectures just feeling right that she didn't even question it. She crushed three pills and took them with a glass of water. She knew, somehow, that this was a strong dose, but it would work just fine.

She barely made it to her hospital bed before she collapsed. Her last thought before everything went dark was that she had left the medicine cabinet open, but she trusted her friend to take care of that.