The first step when Luna was down or had a major problem was to step away from it until distance had made the pain less fresh and more approachable. She had now accomplished that with the mysterious and dangerous girl, even if she continued to think about her the majority of the time. She should give it a little bit more time and distance, but something told Luna that the two encounters they had were not going to fade into the background of her life, no matter what she tried to do about them.

That meant that she might as well move on to the second state, figuring out what exactly the problem was and how she should go about addressing it. She had some ideas still, taken from her encounters with the girl and her conversation with Ginny, about what some of the problem was, but she was afraid that this was one of those problems that was only going to be solved with human advice that would be uncomfortable to ask about.

Still, she was a Ravenclaw and that meant the first step to solving the problem was going to the library and seeing if there was any more information to be gained. She dropped her bag and her robes at a table and set off through the stacks, looking for any books that might be likely and then returning to her stuff to settle in and figure out what she could learn.

Unfortunately, there were very few books in the library that even seemed like they might be useful in making a girl like you and not think you were crazy, or in telling whether your father loved you and was a good man, for that matter. Apparently these were not normal subjects of inquiry within the school, or if they were, the information was in the restricted section. She had heard love referred to as the most dangerous of all magic before, but that concept made no sense to the blonde.

Soon, she was flipping through the last book, with no useful information gained. A wave of frustration worse than she had faced in years gripped the Ravenclaw, and she began banging her head down into the useless book, entirely unaware of the angry and pitying stares she was getting, or the girl who was currently coming over to try and help her.

It was becoming very typical for Felicity to spend most of her time in the library with magical and muggle medical texts open before her along with a stack of parchment and two quills (just in case one broke) with a full inkwell. She took many notes about integrating the two sciences, as Harry had suggested during one of their more recent chats. Perhaps she could actually make a bigger difference than she’d ever imagined. The idea that she might be able to make a name in the medical community was truly inspiring, especially when there was always a chance that someday the magical and muggle worlds would be more accepting of each other. Then they’d really value all of her hard work!

This had her determined to make a lot of progress before graduation, and led to the extended hours spent coming up with new theories that might just get her an in at St. Mungos. Today, the blonde sat with her hair in messy French braids, blowing her shaggy bangs out of her eyes as she chewed on the tip of her quill. Ink stained her lip, but she didn’t even realize as she studied a diagram of the human brain in her precious Gray’s.

She was shocked out of her thoughts when another blonde girl started slamming her head against a book just a table away. That was rather concerning, and the Hufflepuff couldn’t help but quickly gather her things and wander over to the girl in the hopes of stopping her from doing any real damage. Her skirt was riding up and her shirt was wrinkled in a terrible manner, tie fallen somewhere near the chair she’d abandoned- probably would be good to find it before she left the library. Felicity didn’t much care about her appearance, however, as she slid into a seat across from the other girl and smiled at her, gently sliding her hands out to stop her head from hitting the tome so that maybe she wouldn’t give herself brain damage.

”Hey, you really need to stop that. The blood vessels in your brain don’t like pressure like what you’re creating. If they swell, you’ll get an awful headache. See? It’s all right here in my book,” she said softly, turning back to the page she’d had open before and showing the girl the diagram. ”It’s not good to upset your brain, you see. It is essential for you to be you, and it’s very difficult to fix.”

Felicity looked at the younger girl with concern in her eyes. Something must really be bothering her to cause such cranial abuse… ”I’m Felicity Taylor. Um, I don’t mean to be intrusive but… is there something I can maybe help you with?” She really hoped this stopped the girl from trying to damage herself any further. Felicity hated violence, especially the self-inflicted kind.

Luna’s head shot up as soon as it hit the soft flesh of someone’s hands instead of the hard paper of the book. She found herself face to face with another blonde girl, though not one that she ever remembered seeing or noticing before. Luna was taken aback at this stranger stopping her from venting her frustrations on her skull, causing her to sit in silence, only half comprehending the scientific lecture she was getting.

“What if I don’t want to be me anymore?” Luna asked in her smallest voice. “Can I continue banging my head in that case?” It wasn’t like Luna to be so defeatist about her problems, but then it wasn’t like the library to have no answers for her at all. She had known this was probably a problem for a person, but she had hoped that she could at least tell which person to go to once she had read a little bit more. She had tried Ginny’s advice, and that had only made things worse, but her instinct told her Ginny was probably her best bet again, just with new or better information. Harry, her other confidant, had never had a father after all, so he probably couldn’t tell her much about her own father.

The problem was, it seemed like she only had a longer list of problems, and that none of the new information was of any real use. That meant that Ginny was going to be unlikely to give her any more help from a logical standpoint. Professor Flitwick always said that his Ravenclaws should come to him with any and all problems they had, but she couldn’t tell a professor any of this. If she told him she thought she was crazy and wanted to get better, he’d have to send her to St. Mungo’s, and if she told him she was worried her father was a terrible man and that he might not really love her or anything else, he might get sent somewhere even worse.

There was one more option, as little as Luna liked to admit it, and it was sitting right in front of her, trying to make sure she didn’t do anything stupid to herself apparently. Almost every encounter she had with a stranger in her life had been somewhere between embarrassing and torturous. Then again, Ginny and Harry had been strangers once, and it seemed unlikely to someone trying to save her from injuring her brain would steal all of her possessions or call her names right afterwards.

“I’m Luna,” she said finally, after she realized she had been sitting here and staring at Felicity for what was probably several minutes without saying anything. “Do you really want to help me with my problems?”

”Oh, honey,” Felicity cooed, holding the girl’s chin and petting her blonde locks. ”You should always want to be you. Even if it seems really hard to do, you have to embrace who you are. It’s what makes you special.” She offered the girl a sad smile as she let go of her chin, looking at her in a way that said she wasn’t allowed to hurt herself while the older witch was present. It might be a silly thing to get upset over, but Felicity hated when people hurt themselves. Perhaps it was the fact that she worked so hard to fix people that had her angry when they tried to break themselves.

Smiling at the girl, Felicity focused on memorizing the name with the face. Luna. She was sure she’d heard of the girl, though she didn’t remember it being Luna. She scowled at the thought that people had called this girl ‘Loony’ and the older Hufflepuff hadn’t even realized what they were doing or tried to stop them. She felt very bad about that now, but figured it wasn’t worth bringing up when the girl was so obviously asking her for help.

Instead, Felicity simply smiled at the girl, closing her books and focusing intently on the Ravenclaw. ”Of course I’ll help you. Now, what exactly can I help you with?” she asked, friendly tone to her voice. She hoped she could actually help the girl with whatever was bothering her. It would be nice to make a friend and help that friend in the same moment, especially when she’d done so much lately to make people mad at her.

Luna’s face broke into a sad smile at the older girl’s words. She should want to be her, even when it was hard. This other blonde seemed to know what she was talking about in that area, which only further cemented what she needed to ask for help with. She steeled her nerves, forcing herself to go on. She wanted to fix this very badly.

“Well you see,” she began, but then stopped. This was even harder than she had thought it would be. Luna felt like it might be a good thing that she was asking a stranger and not a close friend for help with her rather embarrassing problem. She drew in a deep breath, pushed it out slowly, and tried again.

“I think my father is a bad person and that I shouldn’t believe everything he has told me growing up,” she said, rather apologetically. “But I don’t know how to be sure about that or what things I should continue listening to and what things I should start ignoring. And this stupid library doesn’t have any information on how to tell if your father is a great man or a terrible one so it is no help at all.”

She was breathing heavily when she finished, like she had run a race, but the Ravenclaw had no idea why. Sure, it was hard to talk about her father, and even harder to say mean things about him, but she hadn’t done anything physically demanding like exercising. Her body should be completely normal. As she calmed down, she realized she had left the important second part of her problem out completely and needed to fix that before the other girl started trying to help her.

“And I really like this girl, but I’m not sure how to make sure I’m good enough for her.” That was really the bigger problem anyway. Luna only wanted to figure out what was wrong with her relationship with her father and fix it because Sibes had told her to. Otherwise she would have stayed the way she was, even if it hurt sometimes. Still, it worried her how much was wrong. “Is that too many problems for you to help with?” she asked the other blonde pleadingly. She really needed help here.

It was distressing to see the girl before her in such obvious turmoil. Felicity desperately wanted to help somehow, but she wasn’t sure exactly how. As soon as the younger blonde had mentioned that this had to do with her father, Felicity had nearly crumpled in on herself and shut down. The more this Luna talked, however, the more upset it had the Hufflepuff. She was sure her own daddy would give anything to be there for her, had he known she existed. How could some other dad be hurting his daughter? It was just… wrong.

She looked at the girl with a sadness in her gaze. ”I’d say you already know the answer to that if you even think it may be true, honey. But, just for the sake of things, why don’t you tell me about the things that make you question his… intentions. And I’ll give you my opinion. It’ll stay between us. Just between friends, you see? That way I can help you figure things out. I think that’s the only way you’ll really know the nature of his person or his words.”

Felicity hoped the girl might trust her with her worries enough for her to help solve some of them. She hated to see someone so wrought with pain and confusion in their mind. It wasn’t good for the body or the soul. The next ‘problem’ didn’t seem like a problem at all to the Hufflepuff, and she actually grinned at the girl before shaking her head. ”Not too many problems at all, Luna,” she answered softly, pushing her bangs out of her eyes.

”The girl problem is an easy one to solve, though. See, all you have to do is be yourself. You are good enough for anyone, and probably too good for way more than you think. If for some reason she doesn’t think you are good enough for her, then she is sadly mistaken. You can’t do anything about someone being mistaken, you see?” She gave the girl an encouraging look as she let the words sink in. ”So now that we’ve established how you should keep being you because you are an amazing person who anyone would be lucky to have… Tell me about your dad?”

Luna’s brow furrowed at the Hufflepuff’s first comments about the problems. She supposed if she had any doubts at all, that was true, but what if those doubts had been put there because Sibes followed a different set of rules than everyone else and in the real world her father was in the right? Even if that was true, what if she would rather follow the dark girl’s rules? Did that make her a bad daughter or just a strong person like the Slytherin girl?

The answer to the girl question was infinitely easier to deal with, even if it was hard to believe. “Are you sure?” It probably wasn’t clear at all to the other girl what Luna was asking about, but it didn’t really matter. Enough people told her to just be herself and not worry about her merits that she would have to try it. Well, maybe she would try to be a her that listened to Sibes more than her father, but other than that herself.

That brought her back to her father. “Well,” she said, and then stopped and took a deep breath. It was hard to talk openly about this when she had spent her entire adolescent life saying nothing at all about home. “He spends a lot of time telling me exactly how to be a proper lady and what I can’t do and then he punishes me to make me do better if I don’t do things the way he says it right.”

The blonde realized that didn’t exactly paint the picture right. In fact, it sounded exactly like what a father was probably supposed to do, so why did it feel like hers was doing it wrong? She paused again, trying to figure it out. Maybe she needed to think of things more specifically. Maybe all fathers sounded exactly the same in a general sense.

“Like, he says a lady never eats more than any of the men present. So if he’s not hungry, because he’s sad, or busy with work or something, I can’t eat. Or he uses a spell to force the food back out of me. He says it’s the only way I’ll learn to be a proper lady and if I’m not a proper lady no man would ever touch me. And he says if I can’t find a man he has other ways to get rid of me, and I don’t want to know what those are.”

Yet again, it felt like she had just run and lost a race. It was entirely possible that she needed to go see the nurse when they were done figuring out what she should do. She must be broken somehow. First, she looked at the other girl pleadingly. “That’s not normal for a daddy to do, right?” If that was normal, Luna wouldn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to be a bad daughter or a bad lady, but she couldn’t survive another summer like the last one. It was too hard.

Felicity listened to all the girl had to say before letting herself respond, but she couldn’t help the small gasps and whimpers that slipped through her lips as the younger blonde spoke. It just sounded so horrible! How could a parent do those things to their child? It was just so wrong and cruel. She wanted to hold the girl in her arms and rock her soundly until it all went away, even though she knew it would never actually go away.

”No, sweetie, that’s not normal daddy behavior,” she said sadly, looking at the poor girl with such sad eyes it might break someone’s heart. ”You shouldn’t believe those hurtful things he’s said to you. There is nothing that makes you a good or bad girl except being true to yourself. If you are true to who you are, then you are doing what is right. If you are denying the real you, hiding yourself from the world, or changing yourself to match some definition of perfection like that which your father told you about well… That’s when you are being bad.”

There was nothing the blonde hated more than people judging others based on silly things like their looks or their weight or stupid material things that didn’t matter a lick. ”Listen, honey, you could be anything you wanted to be and it would be perfect, because it’s what you want to be. If you wanted to be a male hippo who loved ballet it would be perfect, too. Because it was what you wanted to be. Do you get it, Luna?”

Felicity really hoped the girl understood. She just needed to be herself and tell anyone who didn’t like it to go away. That was what Felicity tried to do. Sure, she wanted to be liked by everyone, but… well, it wasn’t worth losing herself in the process. She just hoped this other girl could learn that hard lesson as well. Even family wasn’t worth lying to yourself.

Luna gave the older girl a watery smile when she confirmed that there was something wrong with the way her daddy was treating her. She had no idea when she had started crying, but she suddenly didn’t even want to reach up to wipe the tears from her eyes. She didn’t think she wanted the tears to stop until they were ready to stop on their own. Stopping the tears only made pain hurt more.

On the other hand, she wanted to move forward now that she knew what she needed to do. Of course she couldn’t just run off without saying anything, no matter how badly she wanted to. That would be rude, and not being rude to others was one of the lessons from her daddy that she thought she should keep.

She got up, leaving most of her possessions abandoned where they were for now, hugging herself to the Hufflepuff. “Thank you Felicity Taylor,” she said, both happy and sad at the same time. “I will do my best to always be myself and be a good girl from now on.” With that she let the girl go and practically ran out of the library, not even stopping to notice if that upset anyone else. She had a certain dark Slytherin to find.