He had known the Lovegoods were neighbors in the abstract way he knew many things about Ron's life — the accumulated background of a childhood that wasn't his, the specific geography of Ottery St. Catchpole and the houses that orbited each other in that particular corner of Devon. He had not, in the busyness of the summer, thought carefully about what that neighborliness meant in practice. He found out from Ginny directly, in the second week of September, when he had gone down to the second-year section of the library and found her already there with someone beside her — a girl he didn't recognize immediately, small and pale with hair the color of dirty straw, reading a copy of The Quibbler with the focused attention of someone who found it entirely serious.
"You know Luna," Ginny said, looking up.
It was not a question. And he realized, placing the geography, that he should have.
"Lovegood," he said. "Your father runs The Quibbler."
Luna looked at him with the wide, unguarded attention of someone who had no particular investment in managing their own impression. Her eyes were very pale. She looked at him the way the Hippogriff had looked at him on the first Care of Magical Creatures lesson — assessing, without agenda, arriving at a conclusion at her own pace.
"You're the one who was in the Chamber," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"That must have been very loud," she said, with the specific matter-of-factness of someone stating an observation rather than asking a question. "Basilisks make a sound that disrupts the Nargles quite severely. The colony near our house hasn't been the same since one passed through in 1987."
He thought about this. "That would make sense," he said.
Luna appeared to find this acceptable. She returned to The Quibbler.
Ginny was watching him with the expression she wore when she was assessing how someone had handled something. He seemed to have passed, because she went back to her textbook with the ease of someone who had been prepared for the interaction and had found it adequate.
He sat down with his own work, and the three of them occupied the table in the library in the specific comfortable quiet of people who had established, without discussing it, that this was a workable arrangement.
He raised it with Ginny directly, a week later, walking back from Care of Magical Creatures.
"Luna," he said. "How long?"
"Since we were four," Ginny said. "She was always just — there. Our garden and theirs, there's only the field between them. We used to find each other in the field." A pause. "She's different at Hogwarts. People here don't know her the way I know her. They just see the—" she stopped.
"The Loony," he said.
Ginny looked at him.
"I know people call her that," he said. "People in our house. I haven't — I didn't say it. But I heard it and didn't say anything, which is close enough." He looked at the path ahead of them. "I'm sorry. She's your friend and she's a good person and the name is unkind."
Ginny was quiet for a moment. It was a particular kind of quiet — the kind that had something in it that needed a moment before it could be expressed.
"She knows," she said finally. "It doesn't stop her. But she knows."
"I know she knows," he said. "That's not the point."
Ginny looked at him sideways with the expression she had been developing since Egypt — the one that was still updating its model of her brother and finding the updates consistently surprising. "You're different," she said.
"The Chamber," he said.
"Everyone keeps saying that," she said, but not unkindly.
"It's true," he said. "Everything looks different when you've been somewhere like that." He paused. "Luna is good for you. She sees you clearly and she doesn't make it complicated. That's worth protecting."
Ginny walked for a moment in the specific quiet of someone deciding how much to say. "Last year was — I don't remember most of it. And the bits I remember I can't always tell if they're mine or—" She stopped. Then, more quietly: "Luna doesn't treat me like I'm about to break. She just treats me like I'm Ginny."
"You are Ginny," he said.
"I know," she said. "It helps when other people know it too."
He thought about that for the rest of the walk back.
The following Sunday, he introduced Luna to Harry and Hermione at dinner properly — not as an incidental arrival but as a deliberate introduction, with the deliberateness of someone making a thing official.
Harry received her with the open willingness of someone who had developed a broad category for people who defied easy classification and had decided the category was generally good. Luna sat at the edge of the Gryffindor table with her Quibbler upside down and her Pepper Imps and her complete unselfconsciousness, and Harry tried the Spectrespecs and reported back on what he saw near Madam Rosmerta's hat, and Luna nodded with the gravity of someone receiving field research.
Hermione watched this with the expression of someone running calculations and not yet arriving at a settled output.
"She's interesting," Hermione said to him later, which was significant revision.
"She is," he agreed.
"She said my aura was organised but had too many edges." A pause. "I'm not sure whether to be offended."
"I think it was accurate," he said.
Hermione looked at him. "That's not the same as it not being offensive."
"No," he agreed. "It isn't."
When the bullying came — and it came, because it always came, the specific cruelty that gathered around anyone who was visibly different in a way that invited it — it found a changed landscape than it had expected.
It was a Ravenclaw corridor incident, third week of October, that he heard about from Neville rather than from Ginny. Someone had taken Luna's shoes again. Someone had written something on her Charms notebook. The specific low-level sustained unkindness that was hard to report and easy to dismiss and which required, for the person on the receiving end, a very particular kind of resilience to endure without diminishment.
He went to find the shoes. He found them on top of a suit of armour on the fourth floor and he returned them to Luna's dormitory with the note that they had been misplaced and he had found them, which was a version of the truth that preserved her dignity and didn't require her to perform gratitude for something that shouldn't have been necessary.
He said nothing to the people responsible directly.
What he did instead was be visible.
Luna walked with them to the Great Hall for meals. Luna sat at the edge of their table and talked about Nargles and Wrackspurts and the properties of the Crumple-Horned Snorkack and Harry asked questions and Hermione made increasingly sincere efforts to apply rigour to the answers and Ginny walked beside her in the corridors with the ease of someone who had always done this and was simply now doing it where more people could see.
The calculation that the bullying required was a specific one: the return on the cruelty needed to exceed the cost of the retaliation. When the retaliation was a Weasley twin who had opinions and a long memory and indefinitely available tools, or a couple third-years who had survived a basilisk and would not forget, would not act immediately, and could not be predicted — the calculation changed. Not because of anything explicit. Because of the way certain people were watched, and the way certain watching communicated that the watcher had noted, and the way being noted by that particular set of people produced a recalibration.
He had done nothing directly. He intended to continue doing nothing directly unless something required it.
The shoes stayed on Luna's feet.