Dine and Dash-Luna Lovegood

[black_hat]

Disclaimer: All characters you recognize belong to J.K. Rowling.

Author notes: Another sort of humor thingy: will return to more Tom/Luna drabbles ;)

Dine and Dash

When people described her, Luna noticed that they always used the three D’s.

Dreamy is one. Dotty is another. And Detached is the last of the triplets. So Luna decided to start thinking purely in the third dimension from now on. Yet how did one go about thinking in 3D?

Professor Flitwick suggested that she merely use her imagination. Well, Luna thought, I already use an awful lot of that. Professor Vector pointed out that technically she was already living in 3D. For she wasn’t as flat as a piece of parchment, he explained. Luna thought that was a bit boring, truth be told. Professor McGonagall suggested that she set her mind to more practical matters. Luna wondered how her inquiry wasn’t perfectly practical and shared her point of view with the Transfiguration Professor. It hadn’t been well met.

Professor Trelawney had another suggestion all together.

“My dear girl,” the woman said wisely. “The trick to living in 3D is to open your third eye.”

“You mean like having an eye in my forehead?” Luna considered the possibility. Then she peered at Trelawney’s head wrap curiously.

“No,” Trelawney said, pursing her lips. “I meant the celebrated art of gazing into the future.”

“Is there any other way?” Luna asked, remembering her incident with the tea leaves.

“I suppose. It’s a technique for the less gifted,” she replied, giving Luna a narrow look. “Astral Projection.”

“Could you teach me?” Luna chirped. The woman looked a bit embarrassed and quickly declined. Luna supposed it must be something one had to learn on their own.

Astral Projection was quite tricky, Luna discovered. The books she had borrowed from the library all cited different methods of how to go about it. The more she read, the more she began to lose hope.

“What will I do, mother?” she had finally asked the portrait on the window sill. “I did so want to project myself.”

“Remember—if you set your mind to it, you can do anything, dear heart,” the portrait had responded, smiling gently.

Luna resolved to do just that. Put her mind to it. Or out of it. But she needed a certain place where she could really let her mind wander.

During History of Magic class would be perfect.

Sitting near the back of the room, Luna listened as Binns droned on and on. It’s working, she thought sleepily. I’m being bored into submission.

Now for the great escape.

The next thing she knew she was floating far above her body. It was as if she were a great balloon. She took to spinning around the room in great swirls. If she moved her hand quickly enough, she could spell out her name in mid-air. To her surprise, Binns suddenly looked up.

“Lupin, get back in your body this instant!” he croaked, straightening his spectacles in agitation. For once, Binns had everyone’s attention. The class muttered and mumbled, and seemed to be in a general state of chaos from their professor’s odd command.

She shook her head, shivering at the thought of a continued lecture of doldrums, and promptly jumped out the window. She had no intention of ending her experiment just yet.

“So you’re all so disinterested in history that you’re now dying in the middle of my lectures, eh,” Binns said, throwing his ancient textbook to the floor. “And I skipped the afterlife for this. Well, I’ve had it.” He floated out of the room in a stew and rethought his priorities.

Meanwhile, Luna Lovegood was having a high time of it. Quite literally. She skipped across the clouds, leaping from the one that looked like a great big fish to another that resembled a mongoose. However, she did wish to go somewhere. She could only have her head in the clouds for so long, you know.

And somewhere near rather than far since this was her first trip out of her body.

She decided to let fate decide. She dove off the edge of the whiskerneil cloud and descended to the earth once more. She marveled at how the earth looked so brilliant when she technically wasn’t using her eyes to see it.

She really didn’t mind when she went through a roof of a rather old manor. It was quaint to descend through the layers of plaster and old pipes. The rug tasted horrible though. Really, really fishy. Nevertheless, it tickled going through metal and she laughed lightly.

Who would be in this old house, she wondered brightly. She stopped herself from dropping into the cellar just in time. It seemed like there were different levels of being real. But she was a bit tired already.

Yawning, she wandered down the hallways, stopping to look at a portrait or two along the way. For some reason, the portraits snubbed her, refusing to response to her greetings. She turned a few of them backwards in reprisal and put one in the rubbish bin near the kitchens.

Already, Luna mused, the company in this household is rather poor. Then she heard voices coming from what must have been the dining room of the house. She brightened and quickly floated through the door.

“How many did you torture today, my lad?”

Luna skidded to a non-existent stop and stared. She recognized Lestrange from the Department of Mysteries incident. The Malfoy boy she knew from school. She didn’t know the man on the other side of Lestrange. Nor the one who had the oversized axe on the table. She tsked at the clear lack of manners. One should never leave a bloody axe on the dinner table.

“Would you mind putting that thing away, Mulciber?” the man near Lestrange inquired, apparently echoing Luna’s sentiments.

“Light weight,” Mulciber responded but placed the weapon under the table.

“You had best not soil our Lord’s tablecloth,” Lestrange said, glaring and spearing a piece of meat viciously with her fork.

“I’ll just blame him,” he said, pointing at Draco who paled. “Now about the torture. How did it go?”

Lestrange spoke again. “It was…fair. He’s making progress. As the blood of my blood should…”

Mulciber looked amused. “You were sick again, weren’t you,” he said, sneering at Draco.

“No,” Draco said, looking uneasy. As disgusting as the dinner conversation was, Luna noticed the food on the table looked delicious. She realized that having an out-of-body experience made one rather hungry. She crept closer.

“Do not answer such an insulting question,” Lestrange told her nephew imperiously.

“It’s not like it’s a secret,” Mulciber argued. “Everyone knows about it.”

“Mere rumors,” Lestrange responded, looking combative. “Unfounded rumors. Our Lord is pleased with Draco’s progress.” Luna reached carefully towards a goblet.

“Or he is as amused by it as I am.”

“How dare you!”

The mystery man started to move his plate and goblet out of the way, clearly planning ahead. She brushed the man’s shoulder, reaching for a piece of bread. Her mission was a success, and she smiled, nibbling at the piece happily. It fell on the floor. She frowned.

“What?” the man asked, peering around.

“…What?” Lestrange barked back.

“You just touched me.”

Mulciber started to laugh. “I most certainly would not lower myself to touch the likes of you,” Lestrange retorted.

“But you did, you just tapped me on the shoulder.”

“No, I did not touch you, Travers.”

“Well, someone tapped me,” he protested, looking around wildly.

“Blame your hallucinations on the boy,” Mulciber answered in a casual tone. “That’s what we all do, you know.”

“…And who exactly blamed my nephew for something recently?” Lestrange inquired dangerously. Mulciber grew thoughtful.

“I blamed him for that decapitation mishap. I know Nott blamed him for the shoes that were left on the stairs. You know, the pair our Lord tripped over.”

“That was Nott?”

“Wormtail accidentally swept Nagini into the rubbish bin while he was doing the house work. He blamed it on Draco.” Lestrange turned beet red.

“Then there was that badly cooked chicken incident…then the time I switched Amycus’s wand with a joke wand…and then there was-”

“Enough!” Lestrange bellowed, slamming her hands on the table. “I will listen to no more! My nephew is the pride of the Dark Lord.”

There was a moment of silence while everyone thought about this declaration.

“It would very sad if that were true,” Travers piped up. “I would have to become a turncoat. But everyone knows the truth anyway.”

“No. They. Do. NOT.”

Luna took this opportunity to reflect.

“Even I know about it,” she said thoughtfully. “Really, Draco’s nice underneath it all, I’m sure. He’s just full of hot air. However, I would have thought he’d be bit better on a broom considering all the air, you know. I’m ever so glad his big feet compensate for it.”

“L-Lovegood?” Draco sputtered. Luna raised an eyebrow. Apparently eating made you as real as you could get in this state.

“Well, the day just got a little more interesting,” Mulciber observed, drawing his wand.

“I hate to dine and dash,” Luna said. “But I just remembered I had a previous engagement that is rather pressing.”

Lestrange let out a bloodthirsty howl and leapt to her feet. Luna threw the unfinished bread at her and fled. Really, the woman must have been starving to scream like that.

She reached the kitchen and found a brooding Snape staring down a sink full of dirty dishes. Which meant he was quite all right, in other words.

“Hello, Professor,” she called as she fluttered past him.

“No running in the halls! That’s five points from Gryffindor!” he yelled back, flinging down his dish rag.

She zoomed up the stairs, listening to the stampede of feet that were in her wake.

It’s very hard to be unconcerned and worry-free when people are throwing dark spine-ripping curses at you, Luna noticed. She tried to float a little faster by padding her arms as if she were a boat. In fact, she felt rather like a tug boat in the face of a rapidly approaching hurricane.

She turned the corner and to her embarrassment, sailed right through a person. How terribly rude of me, she thought sadly.

“Oh, dear me,” she began her apology then stopped. Oh. My.

He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named. She had just floated through You-Know-Who.

Usually, she supposed he would be more horrifying, but it’s always a surprise for a girl to burst out of your middle. It would rattle anyone’s nerves, she supposed.

They stared at each other for a moment. “Well…” Luna said. “Um, terribly sorry about that.”

His scarlet eyes narrowed. “You’re rather pale,” she pointed out. “And you have no nose, did you know?”

“Are you alive?”

“Yes,” Luna answered.

“Good,” he hissed and raised his wand. Then all her pursuers caught up with her—or them. There was a bit of a collision. It was quite messy, but Luna didn’t stay around to inquire after anyone’s health. She floated calmly through the roof and happened to overhear a little more of the discord in the house.

“Who is responsible for this debacle?!” the cold voice shouted.

“…Draco, your father would be ashamed!”

Needless to say, when she returned to her body, Luna decided to put the astral projection experiment on hold for the time being.

For now she had several things on her agenda. To get into a warm bed. To write her father about the brilliant new story she had for the Quibbler.

And to send some eye-drops to You-Know-Who post haste.