Sanity

When Luna was nine her mom died, She was there when it happened. Her mom was working on some experimental spell to visualise thoughts when everything went wrong. She lost control of the magic and it imploded into her, her body couldn't handle the overload of magic and she died, was what the healers concluded afterwards. Luna was watching. Her mom was shining so bright, a burning star, and then she imploded. The light extinguished in a millisecond, leaving Luna alone.

At her moms funeral the nargles appear. They keep her company. They are her friends. Sometimes they hurt her, but they are her friends, they protect her. They help her. She needs them.

After mom her dad was lost. His light seemingly extinguished simultaneously. His body was barely anything more than an empty husk. so Luna helped him, and the nargles helped her help him. The house was quiet without her mom and dad laughing and singing, so Luna sang together with the nargles as she took care of it. Her father spent most of his time sitting on the bench behind the house. He would walk there before dawn and spend the day staring into nothingness so Luna kept him company and brought him food. When it would start to get dark again he would kiss her goodnight and lock himself up in his room.

Once in a while he would start on some project and she wouldn't see him for days at a time. His light burning in an almost feverish manner, as if desperately needing to catch up. Luna kept herself busy doing what she remembered her mom doing. Dusting, making some food and gardening, she didn't dare to go into her mothers laboratory though. The nargles told her not to go in there, after all. The nargles were always there with her. Talking to her, keeping her company. Though sometimes they could be mean, ruining her hard work, saying mean things. They even sometimes told her she should stop caring for her father and let him whittle away. She didn’t like it when they said that, and it sometimes made her angry, even though she knew they only said it to care for her, and she loved them, they were always there for her, she could talk to them. They were her friends. Though they sometimes left her bruises, it was better with them there than without them, they kept her company.

When her mother had been dead for a little over a year her father started to act a little more like he used to. He would talk more to her and stopped sitting on the bench as much. He started working on the Quibbler more and more and she started to help him. She loved working on the quibbler. When they were working on an article together they could get so obsessed that they spent weeks barely sleeping to uncover the truth. In those moments her father seemed almost like he had before his wife died. humming along to tunes only he could hear, coming to brilliant conclusions seemingly out of nowhere. When they were like that the nargles disappeared, their presence not needed they faded to the background

When it got time for her to go to Hogwarts the Quibbler had amassed quite a reputation and not everyone believed her fathers articles so people tended to avoid her. So the nargles came back to keep her company. They were her friends. She was placed in Ravenclaw and the nargles told her it was because she didn't fit anywhere and her parents had both been Ravenclaws. But Luna was not really that clever. She just was too cowardly for Gryffindor, not cunning enough for Slytherin and too selfish for Hufflepuff, so the hat just put her in the house her parents had been in. The nargles could be mean sometimes. So Luna became a Ravenclaw.

People thought Luna was weird because her father wrote the Quibbler. Even though the Quibbler told the truth. Her father wrote the Quibbler and he always told the truth so the quibbler must be true, the nargles told her. She had seen him come to the genius conclusions herself, she knew the genius he was capable of, so she knew the Quibbler told the truth.

People thought Luna was weird because she acted "Different". Even though she was just skipping through the halls talking to the nargles because they were her friends.
"People skip when they are happy,” the nargles told her. “And we are happy, right? So you should skip through the halls.”
“Talking to your friends is normal” the nargles told her. "And we are your friends, right? So you should talk to us"

People started calling her Loony instead of Luna so her name became Loony. Even some of the professors called her Loony.
"Because your name is what people call you by, right? and they call you Loony, so your name is Loony.” The nargles told her. “You are Loony.”

People refused to talk to her because she was weird, so she talked to the nargles because they were her friends. She did what the nargles told her she should do because the nargles told her she should listen to her friends, and they were her friends, so she should listen to them.

Loony spent most of her first year at Hogwarts together with the nargles in her dorm room. She had a dorm room to herself because the rest of the first year Ravenclaw girls refused to share a dorm with her.

The nargles told her that because she was loony she should be invisible. Because no one wants to see the loony. So her room should be invisible so she painted everything green. The nargles told her that then only she would be able to see it.
“You can’t see the forest for the trees, right? And the trees are green, so green makes the forest invisible.” The nargles told her.
“Looneys should be invisible, so your room should be green”

The nargles also took her stuff away because she didn't need it. They helped her like that. They told her she shouldn't wear shoes on Mondays, so they took her shoes away. She would find them again when she would need them again. Even though her feet would sometimes be cold, she trusted the nargles would know best, because they were her friends. Friends know best, right?

Sometimes people would get angry at her when she followed the nargles' advice. Like when the nargles told her she should dance with the teacher during potions class. They had heard from one of her classmates that he would like it if she danced with Professor Snape. If they liked it it would make them happy, and if they were happy they would be nice to her, and that was what she wanted, right? So she danced with professor Snape. Professor Snape got angry at her when she danced with him, even though the nargles told her people liked dancing. The nargles told her she must have danced wrong. And to make up for it she had to do detention with Professor Snape and the nargles told her that she should start practising dancing every night.

So Loony started dancing with the nargles every night, but they kept telling her that she must be doing it wrong because people were getting angry with her, and people got angry with her when she danced wrong. If she would dance better people wouldn't be getting mad at her anymore, so she needed to practise.
So Loony danced through her first two years of Hogwarts while the nargles kept her company. They still hurt her from time to time but she loved them and they loved her. Other people usually ignored her, having simply accepted she was just Loony and should be invisible, and the teachers had given up on “correcting” her when she danced to the halls. Overall Loony was happy with the nargles.

Then she met a girl, someone just as Loony as her. People also ignored her, and called her mean things, but the girl was nice. The girl wanted to spend time with her, told her she wasn’t Loony, just Luna, and Luna liked the girl, she liked Ginny. Ginny told her that she was nice. That she knew what it was like to be different, that someone used to talk in her head, just like the nargles that talked to Luna. It felt so powerful to hear: “I saw them too.” She taught Luna that she didn’t always need to listen to them. That even friends could lie and be mean to you too, even the nargles. Gradually the nargles faded into the background because Luna didn’t need them anymore. Luna was with Ginny. They were not her only friends anymore.

Luna was happy with her friend, Ginny didn’t care that Luna was weird, she told her that they could be weird together, so they were weird together, and no one cared to bother them. In her fourth year they made some new friends.

Ginny introduced them to her on the train. They didn’t seem to care that she was weird, they didn’t even call her Loony, she could be Luna. They were nice to her, and Luna felt so happy. She felt like she could float away, so good it felt to talk to them. She would be just as good of a friend to them, as Ginny had been to her. So when Harry seemed scared of the Thestrals she told him what Ginny had told her too. It felt so great when Ginny told her she wasn’t the only one who saw them, confirmation she hadn’t been crazy.
“I can see them, too.” She told him. “You’re just as sane as I am” then she smiled at him as he followed her into the carriage.

During the feast Luna was so excited that she felt ready to burst. She had made new friends, she had done it. It felt like sunshine flooded her soul, she was ready to burst with excitement. How nice had they been to her. How she longed to be at the Gryffindor table together with her new friends. “But you are too cowardly for Gryffindor” The nargles softly whispered in her ear. But that didn’t matter anymore, she had made friends, they were nice to her even if she wasn’t Gryffindor.

Luna was bouncing in her seat enthusiastically thinking of ways she could support her new friends, so happy she completely missed Dumbledore's speech or what the new pink woman was saying. She had made friends. She decided she would make necklaces for them all that night, Harry, Ron, Neville and Hermione. If she did nice things for them they would want to be her friends. Ginny was the best thing that ever happened to her and now Ginny had helped her make even more friends.

When she got to her dorm room that night there was a pink note on her bed from the pink lady. The note told her that she had detention with Umbridge that night, which was strange, she wasn’t sure what she had done wrong. She skipped down to the pink lady's office.