Lavender Forever

The Flush

Because Lavender had managed to recover from her cold and no longer needed the other potions (that never tasted like the flavours indicated on the bottle), her mother decided it was safe to give her the usual ones (that indeed tasted like the ingredients indicated on the bottle). She didn't understand why she bothered to get better. Everything bad happened after she recovered. For example, getting a crush on Adrian, who carried her into the main house after she broke her ankle. That self-centred, smug, trollish, disarmingly charming, inexplicably dreamy, Quaffle-chasing Slytherin...

In a potion-filled haze, Lavender decided that balls were stupid. Every morning of one, she would lie there in bed, feeling like she was about to die. Her mother would spend the day off somewhere, getting ready, even though they had spent part of the summer simply looking at fabrics and colours before even thinking of the design for Lavender's dress robes. Stupid, irritating, and a big waste of time.

Which was why Lavender spent most of the evening sulking by the stairs of the club's ballroom with Parvati and Padma, her arms crossed. She was without a date, but she was damn proud, not that it showed on her face. Up in their little cloud, her parents decided to make her wear a shade of orange reserved for lanterns. In addition, a house-elf made Lavender sit still for an hour as her hair was braided to look like a crown, and then placed jewels in it.

She didn't think she wore a complimentary colour to the room. There were no candles; the expansive room had a moonlit glow that turned the normally white room to a warm blue. Small orbs, that floated above everyone's heads, were positioned to be the stars of constellations. The grand staircase was made from clouds, so lush and puffy it was a wonder no one fell through when people walked down them. A fog drifted throughout the room, wrapping around the couples like they were dancing in the sky. The dance floor, resembling the globe, rotated slowly.

It was one of the crummier balls. Lavender knew her mother was going to spend tomorrow bitching about the decorations.

As couples danced, Parvati, Padma and Lavender, quite bored, practiced Astronomy, by pointing out the constellations.

Well, not all of them pointed out constellations.

"That's the Summer Triangle," Padma said, obviously pleased with herself as she gestured at three orbs barely seen through the fog. "Vega, Altair, and Deneb."

"It's winter," Parvati frowned, tilting her head as she looked up.

"Can we see those from school?" Lavender asked, squinting at them.

"I want a star," Parvati said thoughtfully before Padma could reply. "That'd be wonderful."

"Oh," Lavender began sleepily, her mind taking a while to process things. "Oh, that would be. But I think you need to be a hero or something. They're named after heroes, right?"

"And you probably need to have been a hero born three thousand years ago," Padma added.

Parvati shrugged. "Maybe I was, you know. Maybe one of those is named after me."

Lavender bobbed her head thoughtfully. "Maybe."

Contrary to Parvati's decision to not dance with those shorter than her, anyone who asked got a dance. Lavender and Padma laughed, watching the other girl lead a five-year-old through a dance as he stood on her shoes.

With a devilish grin and in robes of blue, Adrian Pucey managed to dance with most of the girls within two years of his age.

Most. Parvati and Padma glared at Adrian when he came close and shot Lavender identical admonishing looks when she skipped happily off to dance with him.

At one point Pansy came for a brief chat before being led away by a boy younger, Lavender noted, and shorter, Parvati observed, than her.

"Look at you three," Pansy said in a tone that came off as haughty. "You look like old hags, sitting there because no one wants to dance with you."

"I bet we could get Adrian away from that dance she wants so much," Parvati murmured, watching Pansy depart.

"But do we want to touch him?" Padma pointed out. "He might be diseased."

"She's wearing purple," Parvati observed. "A royal colour for a royal pain in the-"

Parvati couldn't finish since she was interrupted by Lavender, who erupted into giggles.

As someone approached, Parvati nudged Lavender to stop. The music in the room died down and a murmur went through the room as people searched for new partners. The person cast a glance at the group, his eyes flickering about until landing on Lavender, who looked up in surprise. The noise stopped as music from a lone cello drifted through the air, moving like the fog.

"Lavender," Draco said in mild tones, his nose wrinkled. He jerked his pasty head towards the dance floor and extended an invitation in the form of "You look like a pumpkin. Especially with that round face."

She was mature. She was above this childish behaviour he was displaying. She was calm, collected, and had more colour than ghosts. "Draco, you look nice tonight," she said pleasantly, standing up.

Damn arse made it so difficult.

As they arrived near the centre of the ballroom, he held her waist and hand with straight arms, keeping a great distance between them. When she tried to move closer, he moved back until he nearly ran into a wall.

"What are you doing?" she asked quietly, beginning to get miffed as a few people stared at them.

"You're sick," he said simply as they rotated stiffly. "I might catch something."

"First off," she hissed, "I'm better now. Secondly, it was a minor cold, not some disease. And thirdly, you're wearing gloves and-"

"Could you try to not breathe?"

That wasn't all. He kept complaining about her cold, and then insisting that they were only dancing because their parents were watching until she finally snapped that he resembled a squat bucket in his grey dress robes and she was only dancing with his pasty ass because of the hope that she might throw up on him.

Cedric came and asked them all for a dance, and so they took turns being taken around the dance floor during the course of a song. Lavender could easily name some better dancers, but he was decent. Of course, one had to forget the point where she almost got rammed into someone.

Vincent and Gregory both took her around and mostly kept grinning and spinning her in circles, which under normal circumstances, she adored. Although she felt this hidden menace behind Gregory's spins… After the potions and the food she had for dinner, seeing blurs of blue, stars, and people caused her to tug her hand away and run from the room, covering her mouth.

From the powder room, Lavender could hear Helena MacDonald announce that it was the last dance before the New Year and the last song Celestina Warbeck was performing. There was polite applause. Not that it mattered to Lavender. The woman only performed two other songs anyway and Lavender didn't like either of them.

Lavender sighed, looking at her reflection. Her mother told her that she just had to keep drinking the purple potion for the next few months and by summer, her hair would be an nice, even golden blonde, as opposed to having brown hair at her roots. A little more of the pink potion and the orange cream at nights and her freckles would be gone. Her blue eyes were fine, they said, though Theo claimed that her eyes were freakishly big and bulging to the point where they resembled those of his basset hound's.

Near the end of the ball, their parents began rounding them up. After a few pictures, including one of Lavender and Blaise mugging for the camera and elbowing each other, Draco and Adrian sneering at the camera as Pansy dreamily looked on from the side, and Parvati and Padma exchanging looks as Gregory and Vincent beamed, everyone's parents insisted on having a group picture, just like before. If Theo had been there, he would have successfully pulled Lavender out of it. She was sure.

While standing there, waiting for Draco's mother to stop fussing over his dress robes and Lavender's mother to finish frantically spraying water at everyone's hair to tame the flyaways, Lavender realised how much she missed Theo.

This was the same brother of hers that, for her birthday, found a way to tape a real fish on her back, yelling out, "Poisson d'Avril!" at her. Every flipping year. She swore he recruited someone in the club to do it, since Pansy had to pull it off even after Theo went to Beauxbatons. And when she found the recruitee, she was going to kick that individual. For her ninth birthday, he just abandoned the fish altogether and managed to get home from school to egg her as she Flooed from the club. Her mother, ever the optimist, told Lavender to leave it in to make her hair more shiny.

Bloody hell.

Lavender knew how the photo was going to turn out. They would be staring stone faced at the camera, except for Vincent, who'd be smiling with one arm around Pansy and one arm around Lavender. Keeping a gap between themselves and the group, Parvati and Padma would look bored. Gregory would stand behind Vincent, looking pissed off, with his gaze shifting between Lavender and Pansy. Draco would stand in front, arms crossed, with a look of disdain on his face. Blaise would be running into the picture and pausing next to Draco, pleased.

She wondered how it would look next year.

--

The Vampire, or vampyre, resides in the caves of Uzbekistan, where the buffalos roam. So happy together. They don't come out during the day because they don't like seeing creepy little people with turbans who should get the hint about buying something for the smell when people take the time to enchant snowballs to bounce off of said turban. And after students make enough complaints about the smell to the point where they want to open the windows in the dead of winter, well, if that isn't a big enough hint, then Merlin help us all.

Well, no, that wasn't it. But it would be much better if a passage like that were actually written in her textbook. That way, she might have done better on her Defense Against the Dark Arts homework. For a supposedly meek teacher, Quirrell sure didn't hesitate to give her mediocre marks.

Lavender tapped her foot impatiently, unable to concentrate on the train. As the express sped away from London, the sky decided to snow and everything was covered in white. Everyone's helpful parents decided to dump their children in the same compartment again. Half of the people passed out by the time they left the station and the rest were gone an hour in. Lavender hoped to wake any one of them by sighing loudly, though several of them were snoring away.

When all that got was Draco to stop snoring (a small victory), Lavender sighed again.

Snores.

This usually worked when she stared at an item she wanted in a store. After several sighs and a long, lingering look at it, her father would understand and buy it for her. She wanted them to stop snoring. Was it any different?

Then, with a nudge, she tried, "Parvati?"

"Shut up," Parvati mumbled, shifting in her seat.

"I'm bored," said Lavender in her most pitiful voice.

"Then sleep." In an afterthought, Parvati added, "Or shut up."

"I can't. I ate too many Sugar Quills."

"Oh, Merlin, he even sneers when he's asleep," Parvati muttered in disbelief, staring at Draco. She shook her head and closed her eyes again.

Lavender tilted her head, trying to examine him. His blond hair had fallen over his face as he leaned against the window, but she could still make out a small smile playing on his lips. "Parvati?"

Parvati let out a disgruntled noise. "Lavender, try out the Glasgow Coma Scale on him or something. Go play with his mind. Make up weird ideas that you can whisper in his ear and we'll bug him and ask him about his dreams later, alright? Because right now, I'm trying to sleep."

Lavender gave her a wounded look and stared out the window again. Must be what the mental ward at St. Mungo's looks like, she mused, idly ravelling a strand of hair around a finger. Casting a last glance at the people around her, she stood up, dumped the book on the floor and opened the door of the compartment.

Quietly sliding the door behind her, Lavender strolled down the empty hallway, idly wondering how to find someone she knew without throwing every door open and peering in.

Suddenly, there was a noise a few compartments down as the door slid open and a sandy-haired angel of mercy stepped out to save her from her boredom. Lavender beamed. She just couldn't stop smiling.

"Oi, have you seen the cart lady?" Seamus asked, looking left and right down the hallway as he absentmindedly mimed the motion of pushing a cart.

"No, but I'll help you look for her," Lavender said enthusiastically.

"Great. Thanks," he said with a smile as he started to go back in.

"Wait," she called, grin fading as she walked a few steps towards him.

"Oh, sorry about that," he murmured distractedly, fishing in his robes. He pulled out a few knuts and handed them to her.

Lavender looked the coins in her hands, then at him, then back to the coins. Boys. She counted the knuts, eyebrows rising. "What do you want?"

With a shrug, he said, "Some boxes of Beans. It doesn't really matter. We just need some. They can be bad flavours for all we care."

Giving him her brightest smile, Lavender repeated, "We?"

Seamus shrugged once more. "Just me, Dean, Neville and a few Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws. Some of them are teaching us Muggle games."

Muggle games? When Exploding Snap existed? Nonetheless, rocking from the balls of her feet to her heels and back, Lavender asked hopefully, "Can I come in? After I get the stuff?"

"Sure. I don't see why not." With that, he stepped back in. "Oh, I'll leave the door open so you remember where it-"

"Thanks, Seamus," she chimed before racing down the corridor.

As she returned, a few boxes of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans in her pockets and a few Cauldron cakes that she bought with her own money in her arms, she could hear one voice asking, "Alright, so is a flush higher or a straight higher?"

Lavender managed to get inside in time to see a curly-haired boy, sitting on the ground beneath the windows, replying, "Flush."

Upon seeing her, Dean placed his cards down and stood up from his spot by the door, moving aside. " ‘Lo, Lavender. This is Lavender Brown," he called to those in the compartment. "She's in Gryffindor."

"Hi, Lavender," came a rather monotone and distracted greeting as the people around looked at their cards.

A boy and a girl with Ravenclaw crests sat in the corner closest to her, peering at a large amount of cards in the girl's hands. The boy on the floor had a Hufflepuff crest on his robes and was staring at his own cards, rearranging them every so often. Seamus and two other Hufflepuffs grouped together on the other bench, all looking between cards held in each other's hands. The number of cards in each of their hands seemed to be a quarter of what everyone else had.

"So what's a flush again?" Seamus asked, fingering through a Hufflepuff's cards.

"That's Terry Boot and that's Lisa Turpin," Dean whispered, indicating the Ravenclaws. Then the Hufflepuff on the floor, "Justin-"

"Finch-Fletchley," the boy said, cheerily. "And it's five cards, same suit."

Dean gestured to the two Hufflepuffs with Seamus. "That's Hannah Abbott and-"

"Ernie Macmillan. Do you have the Beans?"

"Oh…right," Lavender said, handing Dean the cakes in her arms before emptying her pockets. "The cakes are for you all."

All of them stared at the amount of packages now on the floor, then at her. "Seven knuts got you all those?" asked Justin, eyes wide.

Lavender pressed her lips together, sitting on the other side of Seamus. "I didn't know what you wanted them for."

"Can we play Blackjack again?" Hannah ventured after a beat, one hand holding cards, one hand holding a cake that Dean passed around. "I don't like Big Two. Especially not with two decks."

"No, they keep counting the cards," Ernie whispered loudly, casting a glance at the Ravenclaws who pretended to not notice.

Justin placed his cards down and started opening the boxes, picking out some beans and putting others on the floor.

Terry muttered, "You're counting them too slow," and scooped the pile of bad flavours from Justin.

Ernie peered at the cards. "And what's a full house?"

"Three of a kind and a pair," Justin said, rearranging his cards once more.

"Kind of what?" Seamus asked, frowning.

"Like numbers kind of thing."

"Dammi-err, I mean good…"

Lavender watched the group as Terry distributed the Every Flavour Beans.

The game commenced.

"This looks like a good hand," Ernie declared, throwing some of the Beans into the centre of the compartment.

"What are you doing?" Seamus hissed, scrambling to get them back.

She didn't know how it worked and she didn't plan to ask. All Lavender knew was that the cards weren't exploding or doing anything else except for making Terry utter a curse every so often and causing Seamus, Ernie and Hannah to gather together, frantically glancing at the cards between the three of them.

With a smile, Justin flung some cards onto the ground at the centre of the compartment.

Lisa laughed as Terry pointed at a few cards while playing with their large pile of beans. She plucked the cards out and threw them into the growing pile. "That's just…I don't know what it is," she commented, eyeing the tiny bit of beans the trio had left.

Dean added his own cards before it reached the team's turn.

For the Merlin knows how many –eth time, Lavender leaned over to peer at their cards as they whispered between themselves. A sigh escaped from Dean and the Ravenclaws—just like every other time it was the trio's turn. Lisa had given up telling them to hurry a long time ago.

"We can-" Hannah began, reaching for a card from Seamus' hands.

"No, that won't beat it," Ernie whispered, slapping her hand back.

"How about a flush with this one, this one, this one, this one and this one?" Seamus asked, brows furrowed.

"That doesn't make a flush," murmured Ernie.

"Yes, it does," Seamus hissed back.

"No, just because it's red, it doesn't mean it's a-"

"Shhh! What's a flush again?" Hannah asked loudly, turning to Justin and smacking Ernie in the face with a blonde pigtail in the process.

Justin placed his cards down and began getting onto his feet. "I'll stop playing and help-"

"No, no, no," Ernie insisted, rubbing the side of his face where the hair got him as Hannah waved a hand for Justin to sit back down. "We're fine. What's a flush?"

"Yes, we are fine!" With a flourish, Seamus threw five cards onto the pile.

They all leaned forward.

"What's that?" Terry asked, eyebrows raised.

Seamus looked around the compartment at the expressions on everyone's faces. "It's…not a straight," he said, gathering the five cards back up and putting them back in their respective hands.

Nonetheless, Lavender spent the rest of the train ride with them.