Lavender Forever

The Egg

In early December, two owls arrived for Lavender, carrying a large, heavy, painful package that landed in her lap. Inside, she found several stacks of half-filled Christmas cards and a long list of names with little notes scribbled beside them, such as “writing tutor. Good penmanship as well as grammar”, “French tutor – APOLOGIZE AGAIN FOR FAILING”, and “DO NOT SWEAR AT YOUR BROTHER”. And so, in between the homework and the slacking off, Lavender spent time penning greetings.

Then came the urgent messages that she should hurry up and send them back. Those arrived twice every day.

It was pointless. Who actually read the Christmas cards that Lavender sent? Most of them were illegible and it wasn’t as if someone would comment on something written in there anyway. Her parents believed in substance, and Lavender added substance. It was just that she thought no one would care. As a matter of fact, some of them were so substantial they contained the notes she accidentally took in them during classes. So her brother got a nice message about vampires, and her dance teacher had something about… something. Heck, she didn’t recognise half the people on the list. She sent them back a few days before the trip home for the winter vacation.

She spent the train ride in a compartment with Hermione, Parvati and Padma, mainly eating, using the money from Parvati’s unnamed-Slytherin Jar, and squealing about Harry Potter. Well, Parvati and Lavender squealed and his new name among the two was “Harr-eeeeeeeeeeeee!” Padma and Hermione were studying and looking annoyed.

When a voice came over the train, saying that they were arriving at Platform nine and three-quarters in five minutes, three of them scrambled out of that compartment and ran to the compartment Draco, Vincent, Gregory and Pansy were in. Lavender banged her knee on the side as she ran in and half-limped off the train with Parvati and Padma supporting her. Outside wasn’t any better.

“Lavender, Draco says that you’ve been eating sweets. What do you have to say?” her mother demanded, hands on her hips as she glared at Lavender.

“Draco,” Lavender began gently, then raising her voice with each word, “I find it bloody scary that you pay more attention to what I eat than I do.”

“Lavender!”

“Oh, don’t flatter yourself, Lavender.”

“Draco!”

After a portkey and carriage ride, where she was lectured on the next day’s events, she plopped onto her bed and went straight to sleep. Though it didn’t do much. She woke up at ten at night, fully energized and hungry. A house-elf gave her a handful of fruit and nuts, which she brought back to her room and ate.

Around eight in the morning, three owls showed up at her window. She threw on her cloak and opened it. One was a Christmas card from Parvati and Padma, enchanted to sing a tune that Parvati knew annoyed her to no end, and a silver watch. Lavender sent back a brand new radio for them. Another arrived with a postcard from Switzerland wishing her a Joyous Christmas, her brother and his friends from Beauxbatons waving merrily at her near Lake Geneva. Arse. The third owl, an eagle owl, carried a note and a horribly wrapped package that, without touching it, Lavender could see it was a poetry book.

Lavender reached out to get it, then snatched her hand away when the owl snapped its beak. She stared at it suspiciously, backing towards the door. Glowing orange eyes looked back at her menacingly.

Hesitantly, she extended her hand again and the owl hopped towards her, then tried biting her again. She considered hitting it over the head with something, though if she hit it too hard, she would spend Christmas Eve explaining herself to its owner.

The owl snapped its beak a few more times and glared at her before dropping the letter and the present and flying out.

Lavender opened it hesitantly.

Don’t flatter yourself. Blaise gave the damn book to me. Should have known better than to give me a book filled with Muggle and Mudblood poets. Draco.

Sure enough, when she opened to first page, in the space for the ‘To:’ “Draco” was crossed out in favour of a messily scrawled “Lavender” and in ‘From:’ “Blaise” was nearly completely erased and “Draco Malfoy” was written over it. Brat.

Scowling, Lavender shoved it into her cloak and dug through her closet for a moment. Finding a box of half-eaten chocolates, she wrapped it up neatly. Then wrapped it again. She used up several sheets of parchment and a lot of Spellotape before she went looking for her father’s owl. Before sending it off, she wrote neatly, “To Draco. Lots of love, Lavender. XOXO.” That would certainly drive him insane.

She fought the urge to cackle madly as she watched the owl fly off. Funny. She noticed it went in a peculiar direction. Oh, well. She half-skipped from her father’s study to the breakfast room. “Mum,” she called in a singsong voice as she reached the threshold. “I had the most strangest dream. I was being chased by these rabid squirrels and had to be rescued by-” She stopped abruptly, her face falling.

“Go on,” Draco said, eating eggs while sitting in Lavender’s seat. “Don’t mind me.”

Her brain had gone on vacation and she had forgotten about his visit. “Don’t you have a home of your own?”

He started to answer, though was interrupted by a knock on the window. Draco and Lavender both turned to look at the source and found the barn owl there, clutching a neatly wrapped package. Her muscles tensed as she recognised it right away.

“Lavender, could you get that?” her mother called from one of the adjoining rooms.

Tapping her foot wildly, Lavender considered her options for a moment. She could redirect the animal and have the present sent to his home, though she didn’t know the gift-opening customs for the Malfoy family. What if Lucius Malfoy found the package, read the card and opened the gift? And opened it. And opened it. And opened it. And got pissed off. Sure, she had her family and their prestige, but if he didn’t throw her off a cliff, she was sure her own father would. The fact that Draco gave her a ratty gift wouldn’t justify her actions in most adults’ eyes. And if her mother found Draco struggling to get to the actual gift, only to find a half-full box of Chocolate Frogs Lavender shouldn’t have, well, it’d be off to the cliff again.

The owl knocked on the window again, a little more urgently.

“Lavender,” her mother said more firmly, “get the mail.”

Making an agitated noise, Lavender stomped to the sliding door and threw it opened. She stepped out and slammed the door back shut.

“Lavender!”

Draco watched her as she animatedly yelled at the owl, waving her arms and pointing at the sky. Of course, the door was charmed to keep noise from coming in, so she looked even more stupid as she turned red, her mouth opening and closing. Finally, she snatched the package from the owl, opened the door, closed it and stormed through the room. Casting him a glare, she trudged out to the hallway with the object in her hands, leaving a trail of melting snow behind her.

She ran to her room and began looking around. Plush animals that greeted her lay in one corner, some seated by the window and staring outside. He’d probably torture one of them. Cotton was around somewhere, but there was no way in Merlin’s name was she going to give up her rabbit. Walking to her bookcase, she looked at the contents. A few trashy romance novels whose spines were bent out of shape, a few French books, a row of Quidditch books, some study guides, spell manuals… She could give him a potions manual. After all, he seemed to enjoy the class quite a lot.

If the teacher adored you and hated everyone else, you’d probably like that class too.

Well. Be that way.

However… her parents must have already bought gifts for his family! But that might mean that his family would have gotten them gifts. This gift, even though it was basically a hand-me-down gift, was from Draco. And if her parents got wind of this, she would be disowned and banished to the Sierra and be forced to hunt scorpions for food, only to be rescued by Frenchmen on vacation, though it isn’t called rescue if said Frenchmen will take her and sell her on a Dark Arts market, and she’ll probably end up being sold to someone in the Great North and she’ll become a slave child making crappy toys and objects non-stop in a sweatshop, owned by the evil Muggle overlord in Theo’s stories—Sanka Kause. And from there, she’ll become a-

Melodramatic bint? Oh! Wait, you already are one.

Shut up. Oh, but he liked Quidditch. Lavender pulled a few out and leafed through the front pages. Most of these were autographed, “To Lavender, Our #1 Fan.” Of course…she could pretend she hadn’t received the poetry book yet. It wasn’t as if she had mentioned that, oh, his eagle owl tried to bloody kill her. She could Floo to Diagon Alley, get something and-

Why was she making such a big deal out of this?

Because his father looks like he eats children for breakfast?

Oh, yes. That. Adrian Pucey once told her she was too pretty to die, so there. Draco was getting the stupid box of Chocolate Frogs and that was final… But what if Adrian Pucey found out she gave Draco, who basically his protégé, a rotten box of chocolates?

Draco’s a sociopath.

Adrian Pucey.

Dammit, just give him the box!

Lavender ran to the breakfast room, where Draco was reading a book. Nonetheless, she marched straight up to him and dumped the package in front of him. “Here you go.”

He stared at it as if it repulsed him. “What’s that?”

Cripes, he hadn’t even opened it yet. Despite all the layers, Lavender thought she did a rather nice wrapping job. Unlike the mess he obviously and purposefully made. “It’s your Christmas present.”

“I’ve already got a Christmas present from your family.”

“And I’ve got one from your family, but you still sent me that reject.”

He rolled his eyes. “Maybe,” he began in a low voice, staring straight at her, “I was being nice.” He paused to let it sink it. “Maybe I thought you might like a poetry book. Maybe I knew, even though I disagree, that you’re tolerant of Muggles and Mudbloods. I could have just thrown it away.”

“Maybe,” Lavender muttered begrudgingly, looking away.

“And besides, I refuse to open that box. It’d blow up in my face for all I know.”

“You give me too much credit.”

“I know.”

Lavender’s mother walked briskly into the room, clapping her hands. “Let’s go to the club. Remember, Lavender, a fitting at eleven, eat something light, then meet me at the front at two.”

“I haven’t-”

“Hurry up.”

--

Though over a foot of snow fell outside during the night, plants thrived all around in the brightly lit room; the temperature matched one of a tropical atmosphere. Shining through the glass, the cold sun was already at its zenith. The place wasn’t humid—simply warm. In the middle of the jungle, boardwalks lead up to several couches surrounding a coffee table.

He sat on a couch, leaning over the table with his back facing her. Rustling noises made their way over to the doorway where she stood, watching him. His mother said he would be there. Lavender could see his dark hair over the back of the seat, and thought he probably wore his usual expression on his face. His ‘thinking face’, she called it. They had all laughed.

Quietly, she made her way over to him, clamping her hands over his eyes from behind, drawling, “Guess who.”

“You sound like Draco, but Draco wouldn’t go around, putting his hands over people’s eyes,” Gregory reasoned slowly. “You could be just about any one from our little group, since we do go around mimicking people. But your hands are small, so I have to say Lavender Brown.” At that, he removed her hands from his eyes and shifted around to smile at her.

“And they say you’re stupid,” Lavender scoffed, a hint of a smile on her face as she leaned on the back of the couch. Tilting her head as subtly as possible, she tried to get a look at the objects on the table.

He let out an uncomfortable laugh. When he noticed her gaze on the contents, he grabbed a large, flat object and awkwardly stuffed it into his robes. “And they say that you’ve got a big heart, but small mind. Everyone should know after all these years that you’re actually a royal bitch.”

With a shrug, she smiled, running a hand through her hair as she walked around and sat next to him. “What was that?”

“Your Christmas present.”

Lavender beamed, then her brows furrowed. The gifts on the table had been divided in to three separate heaps, two of them wrapped neatly and one of them half-wrapped. “Why do you have all those different piles?”

“I’m wrapping some for other people,” said Gregory, cutting some paper.

Lavender snorted to hold back a laugh. “What’d they promise you?” she asked, ripping off a piece of tape for him as he began wrapping a box of Chocolate Frogs.

“Some sweets. Some other things,” he answered noncommittally.

There was a pause.

Lavender cleared her throat. “We haven’t talked in a while.”

“I was awake on the train this time.”

“Oh.”

“We could have talked then.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

A beat.

With a sigh, Lavender changed the topic, trying to catch his gaze. “Are you excited about the ball tomorrow?”

Gregory stared pointedly at the present he was wrapping. “Not really.”

“You’re smiling!” she insisted in accusing tones, leaning forward.

“I’m not,” he shot back, looking at the wrapping paper with newfound interest.

Lavender raked through her mind for names, then said sharply, “Padma!”

The paper and the box crumpled as he gripped the object in his hands, blushing furiously. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Pansy would kill me.”

Lavender laughed, hoping that it sounded as if she was joking. “Who cares what Pansy thinks?”

“What happened between you and Pansy anyway?” he blurted out, as if he had wanted to ask the question for a long time. Alright, obviously the laugh didn’t come out the right way. “You two are barely talking to each other and when you do, you’re dissing one another.”

There was silence. “Nothing happened,” Lavender finally said, scowling.

“This is Pansy,” he pressed, putting down the box. “The one with the three of us from the very beginning. The one who told us where babies come from, that thunder and lightning don’t come from clouds colliding-”

In a joking manner, Lavender interjected, “I didn’t believe you and Vincent for a second about that storm cloud thing.”

“If it’s Adrian,” he continued, still serious, “he’s not worth it.”

“Adrian has nothing to do with this,” insisted Lavender.

“What happened at the lake?” he pressed.

Lavender scowled, shifting irritably in her seat, looking at the glass ceiling. Clearing her annoyed expression for a neutral one, she asked, “What are you talking about?”

“Mid-summer. You were at the lake with Pansy. What happened?”

Lavender rolled her eyes impatiently, keeping them trained on a cloud. “I wasn’t at the lake with them. Why would I be at the lake?”

“I saw a bunch of you coming back,” he insisted, almost angrily. “And you two looked damn-”

“Can we just drop this?” Lavender snapped, looking back down at him.

He stared straight across the coffee table, at the opposite wall, an irritated look on his face. “You know, Vincent still thinks we’re all-”

“We are.”

“We’re not hanging around each other as much anymore…”

“That’s because we’re all in different houses,” Lavender mumbled lamely, staring at a point past the top of his head.

He snorted, shaking his head as a smirk lingered on his face. “Bollocks.”

“It’s true,” she said in a flat tone.

“You didn’t want to be in there,” he said, checking off his fingers. “Your parents didn’t want you to be in there, and not even the school. Even Vincent knows you didn’t want to be in there and that you don’t care. Only maybe Parvati Patil wanted you to be in Gryffindor and that was because she’s in there. And right now, you probably wouldn’t care if your common room got burnt down anymore than you’d care if our common room got burnt down.”

Lavender shook her head furiously, then stopped and looked at him darkly. “I might not have any of that House pride crap, but you do. You wouldn’t hang around me. You’re too busy laughing it up with-”

“He’s not that bad,” Gregory snapped. “You liked him perfectly fine when-”

“I was basically four or five! And then he’s basically gone the next few years and I see him once or twice. He never went to the events, didn’t come for dinner. Hell, I even saw his parents more than I saw him for a while. And then the next time I see-him-see-him, he’s a total asshole. And what’s more, he’s an asshole to everyone around him.”

“You mean he’s an asshole to Potter.”

“That’s not-”

“If you’d get your head out of that ridiculous Potter cloud, you’d realize that some of the things he points out are true.”

Lavender rubbed her face with her hands in frustration. When she opened her mouth to speak, Gregory abruptly reached into his robes and shoved a box at her, then stood up and gathered up the piles.

“Here’s your present. I don’t know. I don’t want to sit here anymore,” he said, throwing things in a bag and storming out.

Lavender sat still on the couch, staring after him. With a sigh, she closed her eyes briefly. Gritting her teeth, she opened the plain, brown box he hadn’t begun wrapping yet and dumped the contents on the seat he occupied.

A picture frame came bounced onto the couch. It was made from seashells, all polished and glittering brightly as if they had been just picked from the ocean. Some spirals, some flat, some fan-shaped, forming a circular frame around a picture of Lavender, Pansy, Gregory, Vincent, and Draco huddled together after a ball. The five of them were in a group hug, Lavender and Pansy in the middle of it. Draco was making a fuss, having to be wedged between a sleepy Vincent and a beaming Lavender, though a smile was working its way on his face.

Gregory had to choose this moment. Four of them must have enough photos of them altogether to fill a closet. Lavender scowled, picking it up. It was after their first winter ball together, and the ocean had been the theme that year. The group stood on what looked like to be water, and around them, the walls were thick glass, clear, with fish swimming by. That year was after Draco’s parents started bringing him to the club with them again, and just before Parvati’s family joined.

Lavender slid it back into the box and stood up, walking to another room for the dress robes fitting.