Title: Luna

Summary: How Luna Lovegood decided to master legilimency.

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I do not do this for profit. yadayadayada...

This has been hanging around my mind for a while, and I decided to write...this. Luna is supposed to be a writer, an artist.

Hope you enjoy it!

Luna shook her head, trying to get the strange buzzing sound out of her ears.

For the past ten years she had striven to master the art of legilimency, and now, at last, she had enough finesse and ability to enter even Dumbledore's well-protected mind.

And she was so very disappointed.

She could still remember, with startling clarity, the day she had decided legilimency was a necessary skill in her life. She was seven, a bright, happy young child. Even her mother's death hadn't managed to cripple her, because she had been too small to remember, and she still had her father, and that was enough for her.

She had moved past the stage where she had to think of each individual letter when writing, and she was quite proud of the number of long, difficult words she knew.

Her father had decided, for some reason or another, to take her to Ginny Weasley's birthday party, and she had so been forced to socialize with a great number of children who were reunited at the redheaded's house.

It was an unsettling experience for her. She had never before had prolonged exposure to people her age –well, not many people at all- and she had found the little witches and wizards incomprehensible.

They felt completely alien to her, as if the world they were living in were somehow different than hers. Their arbitrary interests and their complete disregard over beauty, over the simple pleasure of contemplating the masterful flight of a crow across the sky; it felt so wrong, so cold, so hollow.

That very day, when she came back home, exhausted and relieved the whole ordeal was over, she picked up her pencil and starting writing, the worlds getting tangled in each other until not much was recognizable. She had never before attempted to write something other than the assigned writing her tutor gave her, and she found the experience exhilarating. Little by little, as she wrote, her confusion and distress had settled, and now all that remained was a light scratch of doubt and curiosity.

As the years passed, she wondered more and more about the world other people saw. She just couldn't understand how she could look at the same thing her peers did and still get completely different impressions. How could they not marvel? How could they refrain from staring open-mouthed at the wonders of the world, at the beauty of it, however twisted it may seem? How could they refrain from taking a quill, a brush, an instrument, and creating their best eulogy to it?

It was that feeling, the feeling of being alien to her own race, unable to process the same stimuli they did to produce the same answers, that drove her to legilimency. She just had to see for herself how different other people's minds were, how they could be so blind to the world around them.

And what she found made her wish she had never tried.

Because their minds, which should be vibrant and full with colors, and textures, and sound, and feelings and images all tangled up in one massive, overwhelming whole, were anything but. They were grey places, devoid of all life, ruthlessly uniform and routinarious. Endless, grey barren planes.

It was a horrible sight, one that bought tears to her eyes as she shivered with the void of beauty, that all-encompassing absence of meaning, of aesthetic pleasure.

Well, that certainly explained some things.

It wasn't that her mates were purposefully ignoring their own souls' whispers, but that there was nothing to be heard.

What a pity.

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R&R? pretty please?