For Sam.
WC: 546
It's kind of funny how they ended up like this, because they first bonded over talking about boys. Rather, Lavender found Parvati a good ear, and Parvati loved to listen. Anything for her friend. She had always had this sort of mentality, and she imagined that Lavender had the same feelings towards her. Over the years, she had accumulated a collection of Lavender's secrets.
"Okay, so I was walking down the hallway and he was talking to Harry Potter, and he said, 'Blimey, you're colder than a morning frost!' which I thought was kind of poetic," Lavender said, her eyes sparkling.
Parvati nodded. The youngest Weasley brother was the latest target of her affections. Secretly, she hoped it wouldn't work out, but she hated herself every time she had those feelings. "I'm sure it did sound poetic."
"Yes!" Lavender leaned back into the couch she was sitting on and propped up her legs on the Common Room table. Parvati tried to avoid peeking up her pajama skirt and instead studied her fingernails, suppressing a shiver. If Parvati looked, a real storm of feelings would well up inside her, and it wouldn't be pretty. "Thanks so much for listening to me," Lavender said with a smile.
"What are friends for?" Parvati tried to return the smile, but her muscles felt plastered on her face. The smile felt half-hearted; half of her heart belonged to Lavender and Lavender didn't even know to take it.
"Why do you even hang out with me?" Lavender said, looking towards the sky and waving her hand dramatically. She adjusted a clip in her hair. "You're too good for me."
Parvati's stomach sank. Lavender was asking a question she had long asked herself.
Why did she hang out with Lavender, anyway? Padma had told her again and again that being friends with Lavender would only hurt her. There were plenty of single, sapphic girls at Hogwarts, and she'd get over Lavender if she just stopped being around her, really.
But Padma had also insisted that Parvati come out to Lavender and their family, so Parvati wasn't sure if any of Padma's ideas were good. Padma said that their parents would accept her, but Parvati didn't want to deal with it.
She snorted. It was almost a rite of passage as a lesbian to fall for a straight girl. She'd rather have bathed in the fires of a thousand suns, but here she was, and it didn't feel nice.
In first year, Parvati was desperate for a friend besides her sister, and Lavender was the friendly girl who reached out first. But since first year, Parvati had grown into herself, felt she knew her own limbs and her own mind. And yet, Lavender still had her heart.
Maybe Parvati was too quick to love, too quick to look into each movement that Lavender made and say, "is this is a sign?" Of course it wasn't a sign. Lavender never showed any inclinations towards girls.
Parvati shook her head and exhaled to shake away the thoughts running amuck in her brain. She tucked them away into a box in her mind and slammed the cover shut. With a lock and key, she bolted it and smiled at her friend as brightly as she could muster.