Characters not mine.

(Originally written for a free-for-all challenge on comment_fic. Prompt was "Something to believe in." And one of these days I will stop writing inner-monologue-type things. One of these days.)

Hermione has always gravitated towards facts and figures, provable data and things that might work. She has since she was little and capable of doing things that were, in the world she knew at the time, impossible. She remembers carefully classifying bouncing from a several story fall and being able to bring out-of-season flowers into bloom simply because she liked the color as dreams when she was as young as five. The summer she was eleven had opened up so many interesting possibilities, now that she could classify the memories that tugged at the back of her brain as the sort of things that were possible.

At the same time, the idea that the impossible had suddenly become the possible didn't come with belief. Things that had once been dismissed were now provable facts, that is all. Hermione has never actually been good at belief, she's preferred logic and experimentation and the things she can look up in books. She works in shades of knowledge, in knowns and unknowns and the thought that nothing is unknowable. To a mind like that, belief is not necessary.

Luna is exactly the opposite.

Luna grew up in a world where Hermione's impossibilities were every day occurrences. Nothing was ever dismissed as a dream to her mind, nothing was ever deemed an impossibility. In a world where the improbable and the magical can be noted and classified and written down neatly for studies and books, Luna wanders in a sea of faith. If it's impossible, you merely haven't worked out how to do it properly yet.

Luna doesn't need facts in precisely the way Hermione requires them, because she runs on intuition and the kind of belief that could move mountains. Or at least, could move mountains if she were less dreamy and more determined to do it. But because Luna believes, she doesn't need proof for herself and she shouldn't need to prove it to you.

They are two sides of the same coin, and it's no surprise that they get along like oil and water.

But on those occasions, like during the battle at Hogwarts or when a wizarding naturalist and a Magical Creatures rights activist find themselves defending the same creature or reserve, that Luna's something to believe in and Hermione's something to prove line up together, they are a force to be reckoned with. And occasionally, they both seek the aid of the other.

Because one's facts and the other's faith pack a hell of a lot more punch when they're forged together into one sword.