Firstborn

I. Birth

Parvati is the older twin, the first child, born six minutes before her sister.

* * *

II. Being

Parvati has a best friend. Her name is Lavender Brown, and she sleeps in the bed next to Parvati's in the girls' dormitory in Gryffindor Tower. They stay up late most nights, braiding each other's hair and talking about boys. They've perfected the art of passing notes in class. They whisper and giggle at meals and are otherwise joined at the hip. Sometimes a classmate will ask Parvati where Lavender is, assuming that Parvati knows, and Parvati swells up with a fierce joy that her name is finally, finally associated with someone other than Padma.

Having a best friend sets her apart from Padma, who has no friends at all. She has acquaintances: people she eats meals with, studies with, sits in the common room with - but Parvati knows that Padma's secrets and idle wishes have no ears to spill into. What confuses Parvati is that Padma doesn't seem to mind.

"Aren't you lonely?" she asks Padma one night, curled on Padma's bed. Padma looks vaguely startled.

"Lonely? Why would I be lonely?" She casts Parvati a quizzical glance over the top of her Arithmancy textbook.

That's the difference between them, right there - Parvati defines herself by her associations other people; Padma defines herself by some mysterious concoction whose ingredients Parvati hasn't yet figured out, but which consists mainly of Padma's name.

* * *

III. India

The summer after their fourth year at Hogwarts, Padma and Parvati were sent off to India to spend two months with their grandmother, who was half-blind and rarely emerged from her rooms. They arrived at the end of June. It was the middle of the monsoons.

The house was damp and dim; it smelled of old spices and dust. Strange trinkets filled the low-ceilinged hallways: figurines of large-bellied elephants, tiger skins, many-stringed instruments with ivory inlay. Small lizards lived in holes in the crumbling walls. They darted out unexpectedly to snap up insects with their flickering pink tongues.

Padma promptly secluded herself in an unused room. She studied ancient Sanskrit curses and charms: dense syllables of words designed to protect newborns against evil or keep scorpions out of the kitchen. Parvati snuck furtive looks at Padma's notes, late at night after Padma was breathing gently in their white-sheeted bed. She didn't understand what she read, but the mystery of it drew her back, night after night.

Parvati was scared of the house. She crept around it nervously and spent as much time outside as she could. She sat on the broad porch for hours at a time, watching the rain. After a few days, the village boys joined her, teasing her in a language that returned slowly to Parvati's tongue. She liked how smooth and dark their skin was, exactly like her own. She felt heated and exotic, far removed from the damp chill of her British boarding school.

The long days blurred into each other, eased by the constant fall of rain. Padma's absence bothered Parvati like hunger pangs. She practiced her hexes on the large bugs that crawled along the rotting wood of the porch.

At night, the twins slept in the same bed. Parvati touched Padma's nut-brown thighs, her rounded stomach, her dark fall of hair. Sometimes Padma woke in the night and they exchanged slow kisses, heated and moist, like they used to when they were children growing up in the same house. Sometimes Padma slipped her hand between Parvati's legs. Parvati bit her lip and watched the rustle of the filmy canopy over their heads.

Sometimes Padma joined Parvati on the porch, holding a mango in one hand, and they sat together while Padma ate. The juice dripped down her chin and pooled on her kneecaps. Padma often talked about the places she wanted to visit after school. "You'll come with me, of course," she said, and Parvati smiled and kissed her sister's cheek. Sometimes they held hands, a sticky sweet grip.

That was the summer Parvati knew for certain that Padma was beyond her reach. Padma told Parvati she loved her; laughed; hummed to herself as she washed her hair: everything she did was the same, but conviction sat in Parvati's chest like a stone. Padma was already gone.

* * *

IV. Foreknowledge

Parvati knows her future - has known it for years, even before she read it in her tea leaves. She will marry a man her parents choose for her, someone from a respectable wizarding family. He'll go off every morning to a respectable job at the Ministry and Parvati will raise the children. She will cook, clean, receive a series of postcards from increasingly exotic places: Italy, Tunisia, Vietnam, countries she's never even heard of.

Padma will be the rebel, the sender of postcards. Their parents will cluck reproachfully, but secretly they'll be proud of their daughter, the worldly intellect, the adventurer.

Sometimes Parvati hates Padma because of this. She herself will never inspire anything more than absentminded approval.

Originally Parvati liked Divination because it was an easy out. Here's your future, the tarot cards said - all she had to do was pick them up. Everything was there, already laid out for her, all the glowing roads of possibility. All deception, of course: Parvati's learned that, for her at least, there's only one option, only one way things will end up.

She's found it to be rather reassuring, once she accepted it. There are no hard choices to make. Her life's narrowed down to a straight line. Like geometry, something Parvati remembers as a dim agony: the shortest distance from A to B.

* * *

V. Birth

Parvati is the older twin, the firstborn. She came into the world red and squealing, the herald, the precursor. Padma came six minutes later, awkwardly, trailing behind, her arm reaching out before her, reaching out toward her sister. Parvati is the first, the reached-for. She doesn't understand why she's spent her whole life trying to catch up.