A Sure Cure for Loser's Lurgy

So I'm finding out how hard it is to get Luna's characterization spot-on. She's probably too Hermione-ish, but I figured that it would be better to err on the side of logic than on the side of “OMGLuna-has-the-intellectual-wherewithal-of-a-five-year-old.” Suggestions for pinning down a better Luna are appreciated :)

Oh, and I should say that this was a twenty minute writing spurt that wrapped up at 2:01 AM CST. I'm beat. Seriously, I'm posting this and crashing for the night.

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From a distance, Luna Lovegood spied a shock of red hair, an outcrop of color against a sea of browns, blacks, and flaxen blonds. It was Ronald Weasley, sitting on the bottom step of the Entrance Hall staircase while the crowds surged uncaringly past him. She waited. She was good at waiting - waiting for lost things to return, waiting for the laughter to die down, waiting for some indescribable something that she had yet to chronicled find within the covers of The Quibbler. At long last, the crowd dissipated and she trooped down the stairs two at a time.

“Loser's lurgy?” she asked softly - knowingly, sitting down beside him and drawing her knees up under her chin.

“They're gone,” came the response. Ron Weasley stared blankly out at the House hourglasses and Luna, who watched him evenly, knew that he was not seeing the hourglasses at all. He was seeing beyond…or within. “He didn't even say a word. Not one. Not to his best friend - me—” he added, as though he needed convincing of the fact that he was still Harry Potter's best mate.

“You're afraid Harry and Hermione won't need you anymore,” she said sagely, reaching tentatively out to him.

Ron jerked away from her touch. “I'm not afraid they won't need me,” he said in a voice whose every syllable hinted at hurt feelings.

“It's not selfish to want to be needed, Ronald,” she said soothingly, placing her hand on his shoulder.

“I can't believe he - and Hermione, she just—” his jaw was working furiously now - “But I haven't a right to be mad at them. Not when they could be dead or disencumbered or—or—”

“Or trampled by a herd of rabid heliopaths -- vicious as they are, this time of year. It's their mating season, didn't you know?” Luna said fervently, caught up in the moment and nodding with a kind of fierce pride.

“They—what?”

Luna stopped short as she remembered that the average human being did not consider heliopaths a credible threat to life and limb. “I just got carried away. But Ronald, sometimes you just have to have a little faith that everything will turn out alright in the end. It always does, you know.”

“How do you believe in these things, Luna?” Ron buried his face in his hands.

“Nargles and moon frogs?” she asked, suddenly disheartened without knowing quite why. It wasn't as though she was unused to having her firmly-held beliefs abused; most of her classmates had made a regular habit of doing just that.

“No, not that. You - you still believe in the good…”

“The world's an ugly place if you don't believe in good, Ronald,” she replied, gazing at him quizzically and thinking nonsensical thoughts. Did he know, for instance, that the effect of his vibrant red head bowed into his broad Quidditch Keeper's hands was undeniably “Quaffle”? Or that when he was close at hand it was as though a flurry of wrackspurts had nested in the blonde corona of her hair, making her thoughts go strangely fuzzy?

“…even after all that's happened to you. It's a rare gift, that's all. You're really something else.”

Something else. Luna turned the words over in her head, taking in the sound of them. Whatever he meant by it, it was certainly better than other things she'd been called.

“Some people think I'm odd, actually,” she said, taking a brave stab at her normal absentminded languor even as her breath hitched uncomfortably in her throat.

“Does it bother you?”

She looked up with a start.

“Does it bother you?” he repeated, standing and pivoting on the spot so that they were face-to-face. No one had ever asked her that before. No one had ever looked at her quite like that before either.

“It doesn't matter, not really, anyway,” she said in a rush. They weren't supposed to be discussing her, not with Ron's best friend and former girlfriend gone decidedly AWOL. She tried to change the topic but he rebuffed her attempts to sidetrack him. There was genuine affection in those blue eyes.

“They shouldn't be the ones to judge—they don't know you—”

“Do you?” she asked, quietly, hopefully.

“I really like you, Luna.”

“As friends,” she said automatically, the same litany she'd repeated the previous school year, when she'd attended the Christmas Ball on Harry Potter's arm. “Not as more than friends.” The look in his eyes as they searched her face suggested something along the lines of “more than friends,” and she shivered. For her, the concept of love was much more abstract and unknowable than heliopaths and nargles. Love. Love was harder to get her mind around.

And then - suddenly - it wasn't just some wishful abstraction, some feeble construct born of an overactive imagination.

Funny—

—ironic, really, that she'd long been in the habit of wandering around - aimlessly, by all outward appearances - in search of a glint of a silver lining in the clouds or a flicker of wings or a whoosh of air to suggest some paranormal presence when what she needed above all was the simplest of things, offered up in the most tangible of ways. A kiss.

Sometimes, all you need is a little faith in good.

* * * * * *

A/N: And just to love and be loved in return, of course ;)

So? Was it horribly appalling? Was Luna completely OOC, mostly off, partially off, somewhat correct?

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