Barefooted Heartbreak (HP)

chapter two

Luna's father is physically there but emotionally absent.

He tries not to be. (He does not try hard enough.) He refuses to see a psychiatrist, so Luna can't know for sure, but she thinks he has, what the Muggles calls, "schizophrenia." He can't tell what's real and what's a product of his own fractured mind--

It's manageable. Medication, psychotherapy. But "managing" it takes effort. Effort Luna's father is not willing to put in. Things are easier when things aren't real.

When Luna's home with him, she hides away in her room and tries to ignore the too loud thumping of her own heart. She paints and talks to creatures that are there to her but might not be there at all. She ignores, late at night, her father sobbing is his bedroom.

So being at Hogwarts is a relief. It's an almost entire cutoff from her failed father and it is a relief.

Luna still gets the weekly subscription to her father's newspaper company. The works of which are just as cryptic as the letters he writes to her sometimes daily and sometimes once a month. They are, best put, ramblings.

Luna sometimes wonders, when reading over the chunks of text that have no clear objective, if talking to her sounds like this. Is she a product of her environment, of her blood that unwillingly flows through her? Is she as mentally ill as the father who's there but not?

Maybe. But maybe not. It is not her place to debate such matters, just her place to deal with it. Whether or not the world around her-- the Wrackaspurts, the Nargles, the twitch of her hand when putting on trinkets-- is a fabricated lie crafted by the skilled manipulatior her mind might be is not something Luna likes to not think about. Thinking about it does her no good. She's stuck as is, so she will cope as is.

Luna is sitting with Robin Ravenclaw when the letter from her father arrivies. It had been some time-- three weeks-- since the last one, so its apperance is unexpected. Luna pets the owl that brought her it with an absent touch as she grabs the letter.

She knows relatively what the letter will say. She always does. She knows and yet she makes to open it, as she always does. It's a comfort, maybe. Many things change but the ramblings of an ill father do not.

"Ooo, who's that from? What's it say?" Robin says in that tone that screams that the answer will not be for her ears alone. Luna ignores her and soaks in the ink letter.

Dear Luna Linda Lovely love good Lovegood,

There's a tunnel at the end of the rainbow and sinners must repent. God is Merlin and Merlin says: equilibrium constraint sycophant paltry keyhog hoedown...

It goes on. There's no real meaning and Luna doesn't know if he intended one. Luna addresses Robin, who was staring expectedly at her. "The Wrackaspurts have clouded father's mind," she says simply, cryptic as ever, her tone dreamy and far away. Robin says nothing but she doesn't have to-- she clearly does not understand. She maybe even thinks her crazy.

Like father, like daughter, right, dad? I might be just like you. It's like looking into a fun house mirror. I hope it'll crack.

∆×∆

Sometimes Luna lies in bed and finds it inadequate. Sometimes she does not feel safe in the navy blue sheets and sometimes she feels colder in them than out. Sometimes her purple eye glows dimly and she knows, ever so deeply in that heart of hers, that her dream will not be pleasant that night.

On nights like those, she'll pull herself out of bed and walk softly outside of the dorm, outside the common room and through the tiled hallways. Her eye will glow and she'll always know (from a gut feeling, one she's all too familiar with) which direction to turn to avoid teachers.

She'll make her way to the doors, slip through and simply lie with her back to the grass to watch the stars like there's no better place to be (because there isn't.)

Stars are there when emotionally disconnected father's are not. Stars remain uneffected by deaths of mothers. Stars are everything Luna's father is not. They are a constant if you only allow them to be.

And allow them Luna does; she absorbs the sight and loves every second of it. She does not excell in astrology but that doesn't mean she isn't a stargazer at heart. She knows not of constalations but does one need to know to enjoy them, to relish in the sight? Luna doesn't think so.

If reading her father's letters is a place to not be okay, watching the stars is the opposite. It fills her chest with hope because this is a sight that she can see and all her classmates can, too. Maybe her reality is not as fractured as her father's.

She breathes the air that is thick with the sodden scent of the distant trees and thinks that maybe she belongs here. She belongs there, with the trees as a canopy and the grass as a blanket, more than she belongs with a friend that she's only settling for and a father who she hides from more than she embraces.

But, no matter how much she wishes to stay, she will eventually get up, wipe the dirt off her robes, and skip back to the dorms. She'll face the day when she'd really rather not and do so for reasons unclear to her.

Luna Lovegood is a lot of things. She's a stargazer, a child of a failure of a father, a possible schizophrenic. But she hopes somewhere in that list is the discriptor "real"-- because as she walks through life, shoeless as ever, she can't help but feel that maybe she's not. That maybe more than her perception of reality is fiction; that her reality altogether is fiction.

She, most of the time when this train of thought crosses her path, takes a deep breath and thinks about the stars instead. There's not much else to do, she thinks.