.:Taceo:.

It was not a peaceful sort of silence.

Luna slept.

This was not a bad thing. Luna liked sleeping, and the screams of the dead girl in the wall next to her bed sometimes didn't let her get enough of it. This had been the case the night before.

The night before. Yes, the problem raised its purple, pimply head. It was morning. The sun was hiding behind darkly angry clouds, the snidgets chattered in their nest in the rafters, and gremlins mischievously knotted Luna's dirty-blonde hair.

The air was tense with the impending storm.

Luna slept.

Hogwarts sighed. He loved watching her sleep, but she was going to be late for class.

Luna rolled over with a mumble of, "Sniggleruffs."

Hogwarts rolled his (figurative) eyes. That is, if Luna had been awake then she would have gotten the impression of an eye-roll.

Luna slept.

But not for long. Her mattress dumped her out of bed in a strangely emphatic way.

"Socks!" Luna screamed.

And blinked. She sat up slowly, but she knew she wasn't bruised. Hogwarts could never hurt her.

Hogwarts Castle was in love with Luna.

"Hogwarts?"

A feminine voice echoed in Luna's head, saying, "Yes?"

"I know the gremlins were knotting my hair, but is there any good reason why you woke me?"

A hysterical boy shrieked, "Bloody hell, we're going to be late for class!"

She blinked once more. "Ah. Of course. Please don't use a memory of Ronald's voice again. It's rather unpleasant."

Hogwarts used a calm boy's voice this time. "Of course."

Luna winced slightly. "Or Harry's. It hurts, sometimes, when I'm not expecting it."

An older girl tutted. "Oh, he's not good enough for you."

Luna closed her eyes as she stood. "I really don't have a choice. Some things are tied at birth, and some knots don't come undone." She swayed over to the mirror and stared at her tired reflection. "…Hogwarts, do you think I should just give it up as a bad job and get dread locks? The gremlins are being very persistent. I think it's a hint."

"You do have a choice," a determined man pleaded. "Choose me." And then an old woman said, "I think that would look lovely, dear."

Luna smiled a real smile, one that wasn't dreamy at all. "All right, then I need to ask Lee Jordan what that spell is. And you don't understand what I'm talking about. Every human is born with a red string around their finger that leads to the one they will always love. Sometimes they die before they find each other. The lucky ones don't. I see the strings. Everyones. The threads are everywhere." She paused. "They're rather pretty."

Hogwarts used a little girl's voice. "I know." Luna felt an acute sense of age, of two thousand years of watching children grow and learn and laugh and cry and hate and die.

She didn't like it.

"Please don't do that, Hogwarts. I'm human."

The little girl's voice came again. "I know." A mischievous man said, "It doesn't matter. I love you."

The sense of age was gone, and Luna very carefully didn't grin at the castle's borrowed words. Who doesn't enjoy being told they're loved?

Luna hadn't heard those words from anyone except Hogwarts in a long time. She knew no one else would ever say that to her again, excluding, perhaps, her father. It just wasn't in her cards.

But she refused to encourage him.

"You. Are. A. Castle." Luna said this slowly, as if speaking to a toddler. Hogwarts – "…Hogwarts, did you just snort at me?" Luna giggled dreamily. "That's not very decorous, you know. I expect that from the jiggerwags, but not from you."

A loud "Ha!" resounded in her head.

Luna sobered. "But you can't expect anything that would never happen between us to work. I shan't be here my whole life."

A man sneered coldly, "I know how humans work." A husky whisper: "I can give you gratification beyond anything you could ever have." Luna felt stabs of intense heat in her groin as flashes of sensations and memories – slammed against the dungeon wall, he hiked up her skirt and ripped her panties before plunging into her; she bit his shoulder and screamed with pleasure – went through her mind and vanished just as quickly, leaving her trembling on the floor. Her knees had given out.

A young man laughed and said, "I can protect you, feed you, clothe you, and shelter you for the rest of your life. Moreover, I want to. Let me."

Luna stood shakily. "You've made your point. Let me get ready, or I really will be late."

Satisfaction emanated through Luna's mind.

"You smug dropknorf," she muttered. She wasn't angry. Luna didn't remember having ever gotten angry. She was incapable of it.

"I'll head off McGonagall. Hurry," a teen whispered furtively. Then Lee Jordan's voice said, "Like my dreads? I used this really wicked spell - Imunda Vibro."

Luna smiled softly. "Thank you. Watch out for the quashinks, by the way. They're terrible about eroding stone, and they so rarely listen to me when I tell them to leave you alone."

Hogwarts turned his attention elsewhere.

Luna didn't sigh. She looked in the mirror. A girl with light whiskey eyes, tangled blonde hair, and pale skin looked back at her. Her reflection said, "Let him love you."

Luna replied without pause, "Sol, I will hurt him."

Sol nodded. "I pity him for loving the moon. It's rarely all there and is as fickle as shadow."

Luna said nothing.

"Don't be selfish, Luna. Let your thread rot away – Harry is for another. Let Hogwarts love you," her doppelganger pleaded quietly. "We can be happy. We can be happy. I want to be happy. Don't you?"

Luna said nothing. A tiny fairy carried Luna's wand to her, panting.

"Imunda Vibro."

It was not a peaceful sort of silence.

A/N: And this was Her Royal Banditness's reward fic. She asked for a mix of III and VIII from my fic Muet, and this was what resulted. Tell me what you think. I'm not sure I pinned Luna as well in this one as I did in Muet - which this is a sequel to, by the way.

As always, the first to correctly guess what the title means and which language it is gets a fic of choice.

Edit 1/16/07: I've written another fic in this verse - it's titled Avsaknad. It's not Luna-centric, but... Yeah. I'm not really very happy with it, but check it out if you feel like it.