Warnings: mentions of sex, blindness, eating disorders
Inspired by various other Lavender-themed things I've written in the past, so if it seems familiar, that's why. This is for the Make it Angst or Make it Fluff Competition, where you're supposed to write either the angstiest thing you can with a fluffy prompt, or vice versa. Obviously, because I am twister, I picked angst, and my prompt was the song What Make You Beautiful by One Direction. Which I interpreted very loosely. Ah well. Here you go.
Privately, Lavender thought of the darkness that now enveloped her as her darkness. She belonged to it now (though she suspected it would never quite belong to her).
Cruel irony that she, of the blonde hair and the red lips and the pink bows and of every other colour in the rainbow, would have been blinded by a black curse that hadn't even been meant for her – she'd been left for dead by Greyback in the rubble, and it had hit her quite by accident. The best healers had tried everything they could to bring back her sight, but if Trelawney had taught Lavender one thing, it was that some things were meant to be, and others were not.
Sometimes she'd rather have died.
After, Parvati had said how wonderful it must be, the silver lining of it all, to not care about what you looked like anymore. Like it was a weight off Lavender's marred shoulders. But no, it was not. She felt the lines on her cheek, the raised scars on her body, and it hurt more than it should, because she knew she was ugly.
Blaise had assured her, over and over, that he did not love ugly things, and he loved her, so she must be beautiful. Her hands still remembered how to braid hair, so she had taught him to do hers, and he was right, he did only love pretty things, therefore she trusted him with her locks. But he was also a Slytherin, and a good liar, and her face was not so easily made pretty anymore, she knew. It was unreasonable to ask Parvati to come do her makeup every day, just as it wasn't right to keep asking Blaise to tell her she was beautiful when she woke each morning, and when she brushed her teeth, and when she ate dinner, and before she fell asleep.
He told her so anyway, and he showed her where all their things were in the new flat, and he bought her a piano so that she could retrain the muscles in her fingers to play without the help of her eyes.
Sometimes she was glad not to have died.
The worst of it all was that she remembered his face. He was beautiful, it was what had attracted her to him in the first place, and she could still see his black-brown eyes and perfect cut jaw and broad shoulders and the o of his full lips when he came. And he knew what he looked like, that his body was the one good thing his mother had given him, and he used to it to get what he wanted in restaurants and banks and clothing stores and the court rooms where he worked. It always made Lavender giggle.
But there were times when she could not remember what she looked like. Well, she knew her eyes were blue, but she could no longer imagine which precise shade of blue, and she knew her nipples had been pink, but she could not remember quite what they looked like against her cream skin. Add to that her new werewolf-hewn and Death Eater-created blemishes, and she may as well have been a whole new person.
She should have spent more time looking at herself in the mirror.
When she had told Blaise that, one hot July night when it was too warm to be touching but he held her close anyway, he had laughed and said that she was still the fairest of them all, and just because she didn't believe it, it did not make it any less true. In fact, that her unawareness of the effect she had on others made her all the more lovely. She hadn't believed him, but it was a nice lie nonetheless, and feel of his hands against her skin after was nicer still. Blindness had sharpened her other senses incredibly (if not her sense of self-worth).
She realized now how much she had relied on her beauty to give her control over her life. Makeup, clothes, hair, sex. Control. And now – darkness, scars, nightmares, love. There was no control there. She missed it, and desperately. It grated terribly on her nerves every time she needed someone to guide her around such petty obstacles as kitchen tables and rubbish bins and shoes. She had never been the type to read novels for pleasure, but the simple act of reading was something she had never thought she would miss so much (there were spells of course, that helped, and would read things aloud for her, but she had never before understood the intimacy of reading something to yourself until now). Trusting Parvati to buy all her clothes and Blaise to cook all her meals was something that was sure to drive her slowly mad, even if Parvati had excellent taste and everything Blaise made tasted excellent.
Her piano was a comfort, and she was a better player now than she'd ever been, despite (or maybe because of) her blindness. But it was not enough. She needed to regain her hold on her life somehow, and she found the idea on the tips of her fingers one night when she was standing in the bathroom alone, touching and pulling her new skin again, like had become her routine.
She thought now, if she could not be beautiful, then at least she could be thin.