Little Lost Things

Disclaimer: I do not own, or else that, that thing calling itself an epilogue would have cement shoes at the bottom of the Thames.

Author's Note: Yes, I should be updating Denial. But I have good reason: this is a birthday!fic for EverVengeful, my totally amazing best friend. The woman puts the `fun' in `funkyadelic'.

This is set the morning of Dumbledore's *cough*FreakinBastard*cough* funeral, but said event has already occurred in my timeline. I was intrigued by the way Luna talking in the films about people stealing her things as “all being in good fun”, and I seriously wondered if she could be that delusional.

Obviously, I decided not.

And since EverVengeful asked for Ron/Luna for her birthday . . .

Here you go.

~

Little Lost Things

~

The Ravenclaw girl's dormitory was silent to the point of obscenity. Diamond-paned windows were propped open to diffuse the musty air - such as one expects of an old castle on the brink of summer - but no sound came from the grounds framed by the mahogany windowsill, no breeze to flutter the dusky navy hangings over the neatly made beds.

It was unnaturally neat, for a room housing teenage girls. The heavy trunks, overflowing with robes, spare bits of quill, and reference books were gone from the base of the four-poster beds; the small bags of powder puffs, lip glosses, and eyeliner were cleaned from the tops of the bedside tables. In fact, a slight blonde girl and the odd arrangement of knickknacks lying across the bed on which she perched were the only non-school-issued objects in the room.

She moved softly enough that when she fingered the topper of a crystal perfume bottle, the bright yellow fabric of her shirt barely crinkled. For a moment she looked at the empty bottle, the look on her face inscrutable, before picking it up and settling it into the lumpy leather shoulder bag at her feet.

Following it was a single earring built of a series of oblong, milky green stones wrapped in thick silver wire. They spluttered a weak glow as they disappeared into the warm darkness of her bag. Next was a thinly striped wool shawl of purples, pinks, yellows, and greens, each row ending in a brush of unraveling fringe.

Finally, a series of books; Area 51: Revenge of the Crumple-horned Snortnacs, The Divination Conspiracy, What the Ministry Doesn't Want You to Know about Rubella Wethersfield, and All the King's Horses: a Comprehensive Analysis of the Curse of Assylvian Meadow Fleas.

Her lost things. She'd put up sheets of parchment for them a week ago, listing everything that had disappeared during her fifth school year, along with two books she still hadn't gotten back from third and fourth year. When she woke that morning, early so she could dig out a soft black skirt that she'd last worn to her aunt Rubella's funeral, they were sitting on top of her trunk, the abashed pile of objects of obscure interest taken over the past school year from Ravenclaw's foremost object of obscure interest.

One hadn't been returned at all.

Luna Lovegood sat on her neatly made bed, looking between her crossed ankles at her leather bag, and told herself that it was probably lying forgotten by its kidnapper in a dusty corridor of the school. She had found earrings in the mortar between stones before, and shoes looped over cast iron light fixtures; it wasn't an unusual practice for her lost things to be found in the strangest of places.

But . . . everything was different now. Luna had known, ever since a be-speckled boy had erupted out of an endless maze telling of the rebirth of darkness, that times were changing around her. She knew that next year, when she returned to Hogwarts as a sixth year student, the corridors, the students, the professors, would be different. War was building around her, and Luna knew that Hogwarts would be a ground of contention; the attack only days ago had proven that the darkness coveted Hogwarts School. Luna knew determination when she saw it, and she saw it in the same be-speckled boy, out on the lawn breaking the heart of Ginny Weasley. He would not let Hogwarts fall undefended.

In all likelihood, he would not be back for the coming school year. Luna had observed, quietly, that he seemed to be preparing himself for not returning; Hermione Granger hadn't been to any of the professors, as she went every year the night before leaving on the Express, to ask about extra reading for over the summer. If the Trio left, then the protection of the school would be left in the hands of the DA's remaining members. Luna's quiet friend, Neville Longbottom, had the potential, for all of his stumbling, to be a capable leader the coming school year.

Admittedly Luna and Neville had been objects in the minds of most of Hogwarts for their six years attending school there. They were more object than human, the loony girl and clumsy boy who were looked at with obscure interest and occasional pity. Neville had potential inside of him, a Gryffindor courage that would show itself in the coming year; Luna knew that. But they didn't - and wouldn't - understand her, and she was just as much a lost little thing in their eyes as the pendent and perfume bottle that had been belonged to her mother.

Luna was quite acclimated to being lost. When she was little, her father would lose her at times in the crowded aisles of Flourish and Blots, or the Ottery St. Catchpole market. She learned to stay very still when he disappeared, to look for the odd creatures that went unnoticed by the adult shoppers around her, until he found her a hour or so later. He would be disheveled and absentminded as he reproached her for vanishing.

Neville better understood her strangeness and penchant for seeing things when others were too busy to do so - he listened, while the others didn't, or only pretended to - but his grandmother's protective grip was tight enough that he had never had time to become lost amongst grocery shoppers with pitying glances.

“Luna?”

She started quietly at the sound of a hesitant voice, and found herself looking at Ronald Weasley. She felt a little warm flush of recognition for the fact that he had found his way past the question at the entry to the common room.

“Hullo,” she said after a moment's pause consideration of whether or not to query as to why he had come up to the dormitories in the first place. He was here, and his reason would come eventually.

He looked around the room for a moment, his tall shoulders hunched in the doorway. As his eyes flickered to the bathroom door, his ears burst into a lovely shade of maroon. Finally, his eyes settled on a spot above her left shoulder, and he asked, in a peculiar, strained voice, “Are you taking the train?”

“Yes,” she replied, not attempting to catch his eye, choosing instead to simply watch him. He was a strange boy, Ronald. There was something in him that was lost, just like her - as though he, too, had been forgotten by his parents in the Ottery St. Catchpole market.

“Erm,” he said, and then repeated it. He shuffled his feet for a moment, and then his eyes came to rest jerkily against hers. Luna had noted previously that their eyes were a similar shade, but hadn't appreciated the fact before. There was something - not just the color - about his eyes that gave her the feeling that she was seeing her own reflected back at her. “Do you want help carrying stuff out?” he finally asked, and blinked his eyes away to the fall of the bed hangings behind her.

“The house elves already took my trunk,” she replied, her hands reaching to pull her small bag into her lap. She made the observation that he was skirting whatever it was he came there to say, but once again decided that it was not worth voicing. “It's very nice of you to offer,” she continued, and stood.

“I can, take that,” Ronald offered hesitantly, his body folding into itself even as he pulled his left hand out of the pocket of his slacks.

“I'm fine,” said Luna, and then asked, sliding her bag over her shoulder, “Why do you make yourself smaller?”

He automatically spluttered a protest, but then stopped speaking for a moment, considering the answer. It made Luna appreciate her original assessment of Ronald Weasley; he was a strange boy who thought more often than most people assumed from his faulty grades and lack of appreciation for homework. Luna was a Ravenclaw, and she knew that intelligence couldn't always be shown in schoolwork. She began to leave the dormitory and he fell into step with her, still considering. “I guess,” he finally answered slowly, “it's because everyone around me is small in comparison.”

She accepted this slowly. “Harry isn't small,” she pointed out as they arrived in the empty common room with its huge windows looking out over the grounds. As they passed the statue of Rowena Ravenclaw, Luna reached into her bag absentmindedly to ensure that the sketches she had made for her father of the diadem were still inside. Ronald had halted at the doorway, waiting for her, and together they passed out onto the staircase sticky with summer heat. They made it to the bottom of the staircase in silence.

“Harry makes me feel small.” It was said in the voice of a little lost thing, someone like Luna who had been lost and found enough times that the newness of the Sickle had been rubbed off. His eyes caught hers as they turned a corner, and Luna could see her reflection again, the part of her that could feel lonely even as she sat in a train compartment full of people.

“Here.”

He held out his hand, the one that had been fisted in his pocket during their entire exchange, and in it was her missing gold pendent, the tiny glass bottle of ashes lodged into the crease between his index and middle finger. The chain, looped around his fist twice, and deep enough that the flesh rose on either side of it like mountain tops, was blinding for a moment as it caught a flash of sun from a nearby window. “This is yours, right?”

She unwound the light chain from his hand, slick with beads of moisture and flecked on the back with pieces of lint. She waited until she had slipped it over her head and settled it against the dip in her collarbone before replying. “Yes,” she said.

They reached the entrance hall again in silence, and they slipped together past Filch, who gave them a cursory run with his Sneakoscope before sniffing and turning to glare at three giggling Gryffindors. They walked into the flash of sunlight and murmuring of classmates together, two little lost things.

~

Whaddya think? A plausible missing scene?

And god, knowing what happens in the future definitely assists when writing reflective pieces ruminating said future.

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