It was time to settle this once and for all. Luna was determined to figure out which bits of her father’s life plan for her was good sound advice and which bits were hurtful because he was a bad daddy and maybe a bad person. She wanted this done before Christmas break, that way she could take the final list home and tell her daddy just what she thought of the way he was treating her, and she didn’t really know just how long the process would take. Maybe she could even convince Sibesy to come home with her for moral support.

First, she had to figure out just what it was that she needed to talk about. To this end she was in the Room of Requirement, which was easily the size of a ballroom today. Her list was on the floor in front of her. Actually, three lists were on the floor in front of her, giant sheets of parchment with “Truths, Lies, and Not Yet Certain” written across the top of them in bright red paint. This was how she was keeping score on her father and the bad that he had done.

The morning had started out with every single thing she could ever remember her father saying to her on the middle parchment, the one with the heading of Not Yet Certain. Some things easily moved lefts to the Truths parchment. These included things like “animals are sacred and should be respected” and “goblins are tricky blighters, steer clear of them”. These things she either knew to be true from personal experience or had heard from other, more reliable sources after her father, so it was easy to wave her wand and make the words rise up and fly over to the truth list. Other things just as easily went the other direction, to Lies. These included things she had already talked about with Felicity Taylor, like “a lady should never eat unless and until the men present have eaten” and things she had discovered for herself to be lies, like “the only good centaur is a dead centaur”. It was a rather gruesome list, all in all.

That wasn’t what troubled the blonde when she finally stopped to lunch on the sandwiches and juice the room provided after she had been working several hours. The thing bothering her wasn’t even that almost everything she had looked up in the books the room thoughtfully provided (where were these books the other day when she was in the library?) went against her father. No, there were two things that really caused the inquisitive girl to sigh and fret. There were two things that bothered her more than anything else.

The first thing was that while the Lies sheet grew steadily longer and now had more things on it than the Not Yet Certain one, the Truths sheet had basically stopped getting any longer a couple of hours ago. The second, even more troubling, thing was the parts of the Truths and Lies sheets that actually disagreed with each other. For example, near the top of the Truths sheet was “you see things that other people don’t, because you and special and have a gift”. She knew this was true because her mother always said it too, and her mother was no liar. That was also on the Truths list somewhere. Near the bottom of the lies list was “you think you see things that aren’t there because you are useless and ask too many questions”. There was more to that lie, but she couldn’t even bear to write the rest. Besides, she knew that she was not useless, and that there was no such thing as too many questions. Still, it was puzzling that there was a truth and a lie about the exact same part of her personality.

The door clicked open, but Luna didn’t even look up. She had made it very clear to the room that she wouldn’t mind some company once she had gotten a decent start, but only from someone who already knew her well and was going to help her. That left only a handful of options, none of whom Luna minded seeing her in an old muggle shirt of her mother’s and the short hiking shorts she had worn the first time she had hunted Sibesy down. Still, she was a highly curious girl, so when the door clicked shut without her guest saying anything she called out “Who has come to help me with my project?” with her eyes still on the plate of food.

Ginny Weasley had never been known to keep her nose out of other people’s business. In fact, the opposite could be, and had been said. She stuck her two cents into just about everything, which was why she was searching for her blonde Ravenclaw friend. If the whispering around the school was anything to go by, she’d been in the library having some sort of heart to heart with a Hufflepuff Harry had been spending a lot of time with- she was a whole other story though.

At the moment, Ginny was more concerned about what Luna had broken down about. Apparently the Lovegood patriarch was a right piece of dung, and the fiery redhead wanted to make sure her friend knew just how lovely she was. Of course, to reassure the girl Ginny had to actually find her.

The redhead had gotten desperate enough to convince her Ravenclaw boyfriend to check their tower for her, and he came back telling her someone had seen Luna pacing where they both knew the Room of Requirement to reside. She’d given the boy a hard kiss before sprinting away toward the ‘secret’ room, leaving Riley looking a bit dumbfounded outside the Ravenclaw tower.

The room let her in and Ginny grinned, trainers smacking soundly on the floor. She’d snatched one of her boyfriend’s paintball tees and it hung baggy and comfortable over her jeans, surrounding her in his scent. Of course, he’d been completely confused to see her wearing it, but she had her ways. The youngest Weasley worked hard to earn her prankster title. She wasn’t about to reveal her secrets.

At the sound of Luna’s voice, Ginny bounded over to the girl and slid to a stop right beside her, looking down curiously at the lists. ”Ginny Weasley, at your service,” she said with a grin. The redhead looked at her friend’s face and furrowed her brow. ”What’s wrong, Luna? You look upset. Is it whatever you were talking to Taylor about with your dad and whatnot?”

Okay, so maybe she shouldn’t be so blunt about everything. She made a mental note to work ont hat particular personality trait and got down to sit on the floor with her friend. ”Oh, and what is this that I hear about a ‘tigress’? Has somebody been hurting you?”

Ah, so it was Ginny who had come to see her. She should have known that it would be. The redhead always took great pains to make sure that Luna was okay. That was what made her the blonde’s best friend. And Luna had probably made a little bit of a scene in the library, what with the banging her head on the table until Felicity Taylor had come to her rescue. That had likely set a clock ticking until the redhead managed to track her down and check on her, and apparently the clock had run out now.

She looked up to meet her friend’s eyes, trying to force her face into a smile that would make Ginny not worried and apparently failing to do so. That probably wasn’t all that surprising considering everything that was going on. The full weight of her father’s crimes was weighing on her soul. It had to be weighing on her face as well.

She waved absently at the three giant parchments, taking another bite of her sandwich as she did. “I am trying to make an actual score of how bad my father is and how much damage he did to me, so that I will know what he deserves as punishment when I go home for Christmas, and what I need to get better.” That sounded kind of terrible when you said it out loud, even to the very matter of fact Luna. Had things really gotten so bad that terrible things were going to just become normal? She rather hoped not.

Rather than trying to figure something so complicated out and potentially having to deal with consequences that she didn’t want to, she decided to focus on the other questions she had been asked. She gasped in surprise and laughed a little bit, even though she didn’t mean to. “Tigress is an excellent name for her, I suppose,” she mused, making a note to trying calling Sibes that and seeing if the wonderful Slytherin liked the term. “She is not hurting me in any way, though. She is the girl I told you about before, when we decided that I should pursue her romantically. It just took me longer than I thought it would to be really ready to do that.”

She paused, unsure of how much to tell the Gryffindor, but this did seem like the kind of things that best friends talked about. “We had sex. Right after Felicity Taylor helped me figure things out about my father some. It was good.” She paused, noting that the other girl was wearing a much too big shirt that she was sure she had recently seen on one of her house Prefects. “It looks like you might know something new about that lately, too?”

”P-punishment? Luna… what do you mean by punishment?” Ginny asked as she pulled the lists closer to herself and looked them over. Wow. There were definitely some strange and disturbing things on these lists. The redhead wasn’t exactly sure what she could do to help her blonde friend, but she desperately wanted to help her in some way. She tilted her head and looked quizzically at Luna, processing everything the girl had said.

She had romantically pursued the girl that was called a ‘tigress’ by most of the student population, and she’d actually had sex with said girl. And wasn’t that girl a Slytherin? Well, maybe Ginny shouldn’t worry so much about that, since one of her best friends now was a Slytherin as well, but still… she was a bit more than a bit worried about her typically strange friend. She blushed slightly when the girl mentioned her own newly acquired knowledge dealing with sex.

Clearing her throat, Ginny fought the blush away and focused on her friend once more. ”Well, I’m glad you found someone who makes you happy then, Luna. And, yes, I do have a bit of experience in the romantic world now I suppose. But we aren’t really talking about me here. I want to know what is going on with you. I mean… these lists. Some of these things are really horrible! And I heard you were crying when you left Taylor in the library. I mean…” she tilted her head and looked at her friend with concern clear in her eyes. ”Luna, are you okay?”

Somehow Ginny doubted it was as simple as ‘yes’ or ‘no’ when that question left her lips, but she couldn’t help it. She was worried and didn’t know how to make things better for the blonde who had been her friend since sometime their first year in Hogwarts. ”I’m worried about you. Talking about punishing your father and getting emotionally flustered then running off to have sex with some unknown Russian girl who seems a bit darker than I’d ever imagined you’d go for. I mean… I know it’s not my place but… Are you sure this is what you want, Luna?” Ginny was being a bit of a mother hen, but she couldn’t help it. She was truly worried about her friend. Was that really so bad?

Luna blinked in confusion at her friend’s question. Where there a lot of things that punishment could mean? She was only aware of a few and they all boiled down to the same basic idea. She wasn’t sure why clarification on that part would be needed, especially considering that her father’s crimes were plain to see all over the floor of the room.

The question made her stop and thinking, and everything made a little more sense. Still, she took type to carefully think about it before she answered. She did not want to tell her friend one thing and then it turn out to not be true. Even if she would not be actually willfully lying, it was still close enough to what had driven her to this room that it needed to be avoided.

Finally, when she had considered everything carefully, she spoke. “I am probably not all the way to okay, but I am working my way there. I am certainly better than I was when I was crying in from of Felicity Taylor. I still have more things to work through before I will make it all the way to okay. The lists today are one of them.” Probably, most of the things that she needed to work through were only a problem because she had avoided them, pushed them away, and hidden them from herself for so long. She wasn’t doing that anymore, though, so they would have to be dealt with properly.

Her other question was more difficult to answer. Not because she was unsure about any of it, she was just so inexperienced that it made finding the proper words hard, and she wanted her best friend to understand. “Tigress is what I want,” she said slowly, weighing each word carefully. “She makes me feel strong and powerful, and right somehow. She does have darkness in her, but she also has many other things, and I know that her darkness will not hurt me, because she would not let it.”

That left only the question of punishment and of Luna’s father. Now that it was really time to deal with it again, the blonde really didn’t want to, but Ginny had asked twice, so she must really want to know. “I am not sure what form the punishment would take. It may be as simple as removing myself from his life and him from mine for a while.” Sadness filled her eyes as she gestured to the lies list. “I cannot simply ignore all of the hurt that he has done me, though. It would not be fair to myself and it would hurt me as a person, I think.”

That answered all of the questions that she had been asked, but she was not sure if her answers were actually good enough or not. Concern filled Luna’s large eyes as she gazed at her friend. “Did I explain myself properly or do I need to try again on some of it? I know a lot of this is weird and confusing, and I want you to understand where I am coming from and what is going on. You’re my best friend, after all.”