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Luna Lovegood’s early childhood was filled with love. Everywhere she turned, there were people who cared for her. Though, everyone showed it in different ways.
Her mother would charm her hair to braid itself on a windy day and magically vanish the dirt off her nose after playing in the garden. Her father would pull her onto his knee and tell her stories of fantastical creatures until way past her bedtime. Her grandmother told her to sit up straight when drinking tea and taught her always to speak with brutal honesty. Mrs. Weasley, the short lady who lived up the hill, fed her mince pies and peanut butter apples. Mr. Weasley would forget that she wasn’t one of his own children.
But, Ginny Weasley, the youngest of all the rowdy Weasley boys, her love had always felt different from any she’d experienced.
Ginny was the kind of girl who would play in the mud while wearing a princess dress. She would convince Luna to help her steal her brother’s teddy bear for ransom lollies and feign innocence when caught by her father. Every time she jumped in the creek, it was a cannonball. She would chase chickens to try to hug them but was never fast enough. When stole her brothers’ brooms, she somehow convinced Charlie to give both Luna and her a flying lesson when caught in Mrs. Gotherton’s apple orchard. She played hard, tired quickly, and slept soundly.
Luna knew that Ginny loved her because she was the only one who was privy to these private adventures played out at breakneck speed. Everyone else saw her outside person.
Ginny’s outside person was small, meek, and shy. She let her mother dress her in dainty pink dresses with big hair bows. She never talked, only listened at her crowded dinner table. She took ballet lessons with Luna in the muggle town down the hill.
Luna never understood this dichotomy in Ginny. Luna was always just herself, and Ginny was the only other kid who understood her.
They went hunting for moon frogs in the dead of night. The day after she told Ginny about the magical properties of gnomes, Ginny showed up in her bedroom window with a bag full of them and suggested they have one bite each finger for an experiment. Luna saw wrackspurts in Ginny’s path of flight when soaring on stolen brooms, and Ginny adjusted to avoid them. Ginny floated on her back in the creek during the summer, her wild red hair fanning out around her, dressed in a t-shirt and knickers because who needs a swimsuit, and asked her question after question about heliopath causality. She was kind and serious and passionate about everything.
So, Luna guessed, she had always been in love with Ginny Weasley.
Love in childhood is easy. It’s saving a biscuit to share instead of eating it yourself. It’s having nothing to do when they’re away on holiday. It’s sleepovers and pretend games and swingsets and laughter.
Love gets harder when you’re older.
It was tested with separation.
They took the same boat on their way into Hogwarts and held hands all the way from the train platform up until the stern lady called her name. She had to wrench her hand out of Ginny’s vice like grip, but only after bringing it up to her mouth and giving it a soft kiss, like her mother always did before letting go of her hand.
Luna knew that the hat would shout “Ravenclaw!” as soon as it touched her fanciful head. She knew that Ginny’s inside person was courageous enough to rival Godric Gryffindor himself. But, it tore her heart in about seventeen places (she counted that night) when she walked toward the table full of cheering students in blue ties and Ginny walked in the opposite direction, away from her, and wedged herself in between her elated older brothers.
From the day of the Start of Term Feast, Ginny hardly ever even looked at her outside of class. Luna didn’t know what she’d done wrong to make Ginny suddenly hate her. It couldn’t have been the Sorting Hat’s decision, right? Ginny must have known that Luna could never have the guts of a true Gryff.
That whole year was horrible. The Chamber of Secrets opened and terrorized the school. The basilisk petrified the first friend she was starting to make, Colin Creevey. He was the only one who listen to her about blithering humdingers.
Even though she was pureblood, she worried. “Enemies of the heir, beware” That line scared her because everyone here seemed to really dislike her. She wasn’t stupid. She heard their comments about believing in the man in the moon and making fun of her quetzalcoatl feather quills. She thought Artemis would really dislike the first comment. The moon was definitely not a man.
When she heard that Ginny had been taken into the chamber, Luna raced to Gryffindor tower and pleaded with the fat lady who guarded the entrance of the tower to let her in. She needed to hear what happened straight from the Weasley brothers, the only other people who cared about Ginny as much as she did.
But the fat lady refused to open for a Ravenclaw with no password, and no one entered or exited the common room, so she couldn’t even slip inside.
Luna couldn’t sleep that night. She tossed and turned, staring through the crack in her hangings out the window at the stars. There was no moon that night, always a bad sign in her book.
She was wide awake with worry when the door to her dormitory squeaked open, her hangings rustled, and Ginny’s head appeared.
She was white as a sheet with dark blue bags under her eyes. As far was Luna could tell, she was unharmed, or, at least, not physically.
Luna launched herself out of bed and wrapped her arms around Ginny. They sat down on the bed, still gripping each fiercely, and Ginny told her everything.
Ginny’s inside person came exploding out of her. Ginny told her about Riddle, about how he wormed his way little by little into her mind, slowly becoming the one in control. She told her what it was like to strangle the life out of a rooster, to wake up in unknown places not knowing how you got there, to have your own tongue speak a language you do not know, to be locked up inside your own head, screaming for a release.
She did not cry. She wasn’t sad or scared; she was mad. Not only was she mad that Riddle had taken away her free will, she was mad because no one noticed that something evil had taken up residence in her head.
But Luna protested. She had been noticing how distant and strangle Ginny had been all year. How could she have overlooked the fact that her best friend had suddenly been turned into a shell of her former self?
From then on, Ginny was never the same. Her inside person her only person. No more hiding behind a veil of silence. She was as loud and rambunctious as she had been during their secret childhood adventures.
Ginny’s drastic change meant their loved changed as well. Or, rather, the way that Ginny loved Luna changed. And, the way that Luna loved Ginny changed too.
Luna’s life was no longer filled with easy love, as it had been in childhood. In fact, her world felt rather devoid of such a lovely concept at times.
Children are mean to people who are different. It’s a human instinct to be wary of the unknown.
But, Luna thrived on the unknown, the weird, the absurd, the unproven. The queernesses of life fasicated her. It was a worldview she inherited from her parents and practiced at all times.
One would think that Ravenclaws would celebrate this originality, this open mindedness and this curiosity, but they didn’t. They saw her as more of a nuisance and a madwoman. They acted as if she was intentionally interrupting class rather than asking meaningful questions or crazy for daring to believe in the seemingly impossible.
Ginny showed her love for Luna by punching those people in the nose. Luna did not condone violence herself. She found it exhausting and counterproductive, but, if she was being honest with herself, she relished seeing Zacharias Smith hit the floor not once, but three times in the span of one week.
Miraculously, Ginny never found herself in too much trouble for all this muggle brawling. McGonagall found it surprisingly fair to punch a bully in the face and the other teachers tended to turn a blind eye or fell prey to Ginny’s greatest skill from childhood, feigning her way out of trouble.
Luna did what she could her her friend, but it never seemed like enough. The Yule Ball dress she helped pick out, the help with Charms, and reading of tarot cards never seemed like enough.
Luna was bad with words. Not in the sense of actually speaking. She spoke too honestly and frequently for most people. Luna was really bad at using words to describe her emotions, so she used actions
And perhaps she used a lack of action too. She didn’t tell Ginny how much she disliked Michael Corner. He casually supported the incessant bullying and pestering from her peers. Sometimes she thought the people who saw cruelty and didn’t act against it were worse than the perpetrators themselves.
But Ginny seemed so excited. Her face shone with happiness when she talked about Michael.
While Luna wasn’t excited about her best friend’s tumultuous relationship in their fourth year, that school year was significantly improved by the existence of Dumbledore’s Army. Yes, Voldemort was back and Umbridge had a vice like grip on the school but she had friends. Or, something adjacent to friendship. No one was outright hostile to her at the meetings. People asked for her help with shield charms. They started acknowledging her in the hallway. They chose her for partnerwork in class. It was such an amazing feeling.
It was a great offset to her growing discomfort around Ginny and Michael. Every time she saw them together she would cringe internally. She hated attempting to give Ginny dating advice. She actually felt sick the first time Ginny mentioned the idea of sex with him.
Luna didn’t know what it was wrong with her. At first, she thought wrackspurts, but they only disoriented and dazed. There had been no mention of a nauseous feeling by any of the affected people she had talked to. She spent more time in the library than usual that year researching person specific diseases or magical creatures that targeted teenage girls who only had one friend.
She stopped going to the library when she found Ginny and Michael kissing in the school archive section. They were far too obvious for their own good. The wet sounds could be heard from two stacks away.
The way Michael’s half open mouth seemed to envelope Ginny’s, and his greedy hands pressed flat on her lower back disgusted her. She seemed so small in his grasp, like a porcelain doll in the hands of a reckless child.
The whole scene felt so, so wrong. Her brain was screaming it’s discomfort in every way. As she surveyed them together, Luna understood Artemis’s vow more plainly than ever before. She never wanted to feel like a possession to be coveted and groped.
A sadness settled on her after that day. It was a subtle kind, easily forgotten until she thought about it. Every time she saw a boy and a girl on a date on Hogsmeade, hold hands in the hallway, or even just smile lovingly at each other, she would remember it. She would remember that she was not made for their love.
She started to wonder if she was made for love at all. Had she used up all of her supply when she was young? Where had it gone? Was it even love to begin with?
Her answers to those questions, in order, became: definitely not, nowhere, and a resounding yes the day she fought Death Eaters in outer space.
She was delighted to be part of a Ministry break in to begin with, and even more delighted to see the insides of the Department of Mysteries. (She supplied her father with months worth of Quibbler articles in one visit.) But, the thing that delighted her the most was the most obvious realization of her life. She spent so much time searching for the fantastic that she had missed something vitally important that was right under her nose.
Perhaps Luna needed to be in mortal peril more often because she had never had a clearer head than when running for her life, and the world dropped out from beneath her feet.
She, Ron, and Ginny were thrust into a scale replica of the Milky Way complete with zero gravity and twinkling stars. The open door hanging open above them and the pressing absence of sound gave the room an eerie feeling,
Time seemed slower too. The Death Eaters tumbling through the open door slowed, falling head over heel into the abyss.
Ginny reacted first, launching herself off of the side of a planet, away from the open door, towards the faint rectangular outline on the very far side of the room. Luna, Ron, and, soon after, the Death Eaters, followed suit.
It became like a rather bizarre playground bouncing game with everyone trying to collide with anything in an attempt to win the race to the exit.
The Death Eaters were not fair players in this game. They shot nonverbal multicolored spells in every direction, barely missing the three of them as they ducked behind asteriods and swerved around comets.
Still though, the three made good time. They were pulling farther and farther ahead and were feet away from the door when Ginny stopped dead in the air and motioned for Luna and Ron to get behind her.
She had a fierce blaze in her eyes amplified by her wild red hair framing her face. Her jaw was set in a scowl as she faced the approaching enemy with her wand at the ready. A vengeful goddess ready to attack.
The scene held for a split second, and in that second, Luna believed that Ginny could destroy entire armies with one glance. She and Ron stood in the open doorway and watched as the illusion shattered.
She shot two rapid fire spells in succession and blocked the first few spells that came at her, but a stinging hex got through her defenses and caught her in the neck. This allowed one Death Eater to shoot a spell at Ron, who collapsed, and another to grab Ginny’s ankle and roughly jerk her towards him as she cringed in pain.
Luna screamed and launched herself back into the void, back towards Ginny. The sound reverberated in the room behind her, and, at the same time, was swallowed by the vacuum in front of her. She screamed, and the strongest Reductor Curse she’d ever cast blast out of her wand.
She screamed because Ginny Weasley was being taken from her. Her Ginny. The girl with muddy princess dresses. The girl who believed in Wrackspurts. The girl of stolen childhood adventures. The girl who killed part of herself to become stronger. The girl who was kind and serious and passionate about everything.
Because, Luna Lovegood had always been in love with Ginny Weasley.
Luna caught Ginny’s outstretched hand and heard a sickening crack and Ginny’s face contort in pain a moment before her Reductor Curse hit the planet right next to the Death Eater’s head. The blast pushed the two girls sprawling through the open door, one over the other, until they came to a rest in the center of a bright white room that was painful to look at after the darkness of the previous one.
Luna sat bolt upright to spell the door tight shut before the Death Eaters could pursue them.
Pluto. She had blown Pluto to bits. Destroyed death itself in the name of love.
Later that night, after the pain was over and battles won, Luna was half asleep in the bed next to Ginny. Madame Pomfrey had insisted everyone involved must stay at least for the night in the hospital wing.
She looked over at Ginny who was asleep in bed. Her cheeks were flushed and her hair was freshly washed, hanging over the side of the hospital bed in sheets of red, orange, and blonde. The school issued nightgown dwarfed her frame, making her look small, but in a good way his time. Different from the powerful goddess of a few hours before, not porcelain fragile, but more real, more of the girl Luna knew and loved.
But, Luna had seen the way Ginny looked at Michael, seen her gawk at strong Quidditch players, knew how she felt about Harry. Ginny could never love her in the way Luna loved her, right?
So, she way Luna showed her love to Ginny did not change. She still commiserated Ginny’s break up with Michael and encouraged her new relationship with Dean. She still read tarot cards that always seemed to read of love, and helped Ginny with her wand movements for Charms.
But sometimes she couldn’t help herself because her feelings were almost too much to ignore. A brush of the wrist here and there. Running her fingers through red hair everytime she got the chance. Sharing a bed, so they woke up together. Small things that made her heart do flips in her chest. Because she yearned for something more with Ginny. For Ginny to look at her, just once, with the same adoration Luna’s eyes must betray everytime she looked at her.
Their love had changed over the years. It had risen and fallen. It had been tested and had adapted to face any problem life could throw at them.
But could it survive this? Luna’s ache to touch, to kiss, to love Ginny in such a vastly different, yet profoundly familiar way. The progression from friend to admirer had felt so natural that Luna couldn’t help but hope that Ginny would, someday, begin to feel the same way about her too.
So, Luna waited. She hoped it wasn’t in vain.