Here's your Seamus/Lavender, Emma! Angsty as promised. Hope you like it! Sorry if you don't!
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That night marked the first time in weeks that Lavender had woken herself with her own screams.
Skin soaked in a cold sweat and breaths escaping her in hard, labored pants as though she had been running, it took Lavender some time to calm down. Soon the terrible images that plagued her sleep faded from her mind, though they still lingered, and she realized that Parvati wasn't there. The caring girl and her soothing murmurs were gone.
Lavender felt a strange emptiness that came with the absence of the Gryffindor's hand clasped over hers.
With her breathing having slowed to what could be considered a normal rate, though it still trembled as it tumbled past her parted lips, Lavender made to swing her legs over the side of the cot. Resembling a sloth in her movements, she quietly slid off the tousled sheets and stood tall in the eerie silence.
Then, barefoot as a badger, she tiptoed across the ice-cold stone floor. Walking past several empty, unmade cots, she wondered how many people she had roused with her screams. The thought had her shrinking down from her previously tall posture from the guilt.
The unforgiving darkness offered little help concerning where Lavender was going, but the path was one she had walked thrice too many times to count. Memories of many stolen nights guided her along like a lantern in the dark.
After a lot of groping at empty air, Lavender finally came to a little crook where two towers of suitcases and white pillows parted. Though it was pointless, she glanced around quickly before slipping past the crack.
It opened up into a little area the size of a dormitory. A lantern sat in the center, illuminating the place with its flickering, warm glow. The dormitory-of-sorts had four cots pushed to one corner, with a table in the center where the lantern sat and a vast map of the castle hanging on the wall adjacent to the cots.
The moment Lavender stumbled in, the sandy-haired, blue-eyed, and bruised boy lying in the farthest most cot looked over and met her eyes. In the few seconds they were locked together, an unspoken agreement passed between them. Lavender promptly scurried over to where Seamus lay and curled up into his spread arms. There was no need to accomodate for her; she fit perfectly with him.
No words passed between them. They weren't necessary. At no point did their eyes not meet, speaking words they couldn't say.
The flickering lantern threw them into a warm, orange light. In it, Lavender noticed the bruise painted along his jaw, the cut on his lower lip. With a trembling hand, she ran a finger across each and Seamus grimaced in response.
They did this to him. After he refused to torture those first years, she thought miserably.
Though her lips did not move, and her eyes did not waver from his, Seamus seemed to have understood her. He took the hand that brushed along his lip into his. Instead of being discouraged, Lavender just brought it to her lips. She soaked in as much of Seamus as she could. Everything from the roughness of his hand against hers to the warm scent of pine and cinnamon that she breathed.
The silence was replaced by the sound of his heartbeat; the constant tha-thump, tha-thump. The thought that thdy were still alive, still breathing was all that mattered.
Through the nightmares and screams and pain and scars worse than bruises, painted on the inside, they would survive this war.
Together.