Comedy of Errors

"I have one thing to say. This mess really was all Padma's fault. If she hadn't disguised herself as Parvati (which must have been bloody easy), snuck in here, and seduced me, none of this would have happened," a very upset Lavender was talking to Hermione, of all people. Where Harry Potter was the Gryffindor Seeker, Hermione was the unofficial Gryffindor Shrink, and Lavender had found that her own general reputation had quickly slid from that of True Seer to Talentless Slut in the matter of one very confusing night. Needless to say, being Lavender, she did not take it very well.

"Wait," said Hermione, probably the only person in Gryffindor who was too preoccupied, her nose buried in Numerology and Grammatica, to notice the consternation until it ended up on her bed. "You'll have to back up. I didn't even know there was a mess..."

"Well there is! Oh, I knew I should have turned straight back around when Millicent Bulstrode's cat tripped me up last week!"

Hermione had come to expect anything from her roommates as far as nocturnal escapades, remembering the endless comings and goings of Lavender and Parvati during the previous year. She seriously doubted that any of the guys had really asked those two over to tutor them in Divination, and yet all of a sudden a very different kind of nightly adventure began occurring, and had disturbed Hermione's fragile peace ever since. The implication that Padma Patil would have bothered seducing Lavender, however, came as a surprise. That sort of frivolity just didn't sound enough like a large and dusty tome to interest the finnicky Ravenclaw, unless she was trying to prove something about genetics and people's taste in women. Who knew? "So explain what happened, from the start, would you, minus omens, portents, and shadowy premonitions of the Inner Eye?"

"Well..." Lavender blushed adorably. "Parvati... um... wanted..." A false coughing fit suggested that she really was rather embarassed to be telling Hermione anything about her sex life, let alone what Parvati was like in bed. Unpredictable, she thought. Oddly enough.

"That's okay. You don't have to tell me what she wanted. It's pretty obvious. In fact, you two started to get a bit hard to miss right around six months ago, especially if anybody was trying to study in the dormitory. Haven't either of you ever heard of a silencing charm?" To be quite frank, Hermione was not in the mood for this. Arithmancy was tomorrow and she had to turn in her extra credit so she could beat Draco Malfoy by an even greater margin. Lavender's hysterics and Parvati's stony silence, punctuated with mutterings that sounded suspiciously like "But why my sister? Why not Cho Chang or something? " and tightly drawn curtains just were not conducive to mathematical reasoning.

"We have heard of a silencing charm," sniffed Lavender. "We thought you were too immersed in your books to notice."

"Oh, waxing all considerate now?" said Hermione, without meaning to sound so harsh. On the other hand, she couldn't really blame them for thinking all she cared for was studying. It was, wasn't it? "Sorry. Sarcasm's just a reflex now."

"That's all right," Lavender said with another loud sniff.

"So Padma pretends she's Parvati and you two are shagging...And then Parvati walks in on you?"

"Worse. We were in her bed. She opened the curtains on us."

"Okay, first of all, Padma's not that stupid. Are you absolutely certain it was her?"

"Well she and her boyfriend deny the whole thing, but nobody else looks exactly like Parvati, obviously. Who else would it have been? Or did I somehow miscount the Patils at this school?"

Something dreadful occurred to Hermione at that moment, aside from the fact that Lavender was so awful at Arithmancy that she wouldn't put miscounting the twins past her. "Now, how long had you two been at it when she saw you?"

"How am I supposed to know?"

"I thought you might. I've just had an awful idea."

"Well, about half an hour. Now what's this awful idea?"

"Polyjuice potion."

Lavender stared at Hermione as though she were a complete nutter. Then a horrified expression crept across her features.

"God, I live for that look of dawning comprehension," said Hermione, suppressing the accompanying snicker. "That could have been anyone. The potion's effects last about an hour. The ingredients are in Snape's private stores..."

Lavender squealed in terror. Hermione let her shoulders sag despondently, This was going to be a very long evening.