Disclaimer- I don't own Harry Potter.
Hello! I'm writing something quite different this time, for The Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition as a member of The Falmouth Falcons. The prompt was a Padma/Lavender enemy fic, which I had way more fun writing than I expected. Huge thanks to two four twelve for their invaluable advice and beta-ing this!
Enjoy! :)
Padma Patil did not hate Lavender Brown at first sight. She looked at her and saw another eleven year old girl, one just as frightened as she was to walk into the Great Hall and face whatever the Sorting Ceremony had in store for them. Lavender was small and freckly and slightly pudgy. They could have been friends.
Then Padma was Sorted into Ravenclaw, and everything changed.
If she was forced to stop and think about it, about the very first moment the seed of hatred was sown, she would have to say it was watching Parvarti step down from that infamous stool and join the throng of brawny, brainless Gryffindors cheering for her sister. It was the impossible fact that Parvarti was smiling; that she did not glance over to Padma once, not even to give her supposed other half a sad smile as she accepted her new family. It was, in the end, witnessing her sister sit down and turn to that small, freckly, slightly pudgy girl she had so barely noticed and see them latch onto each other in instant friendship. In that moment, Padma Patil lost her sister, and she never forgave Lavender Brown for it.
"If you're going to be such a bitch about it, go and apologize."
Padma glared at Lisa, who smirked in reply. Lisa was sewing what looked like a large midnight-blue tent that she claimed would eventually become a set of beautiful new dress robes. Padma didn't believe this for an instant.
"I don't need to apologize," Padma muttered, tapping her fingers on the armchair, idly watching Terry Boot and Anthony Goldstein engage in their near-nightly practice of divination through cracking eggs. "I didn't do anything wrong."
Lisa waved her wand a tad too smugly, causing the next stitch in her tent-dress to pull too tight and nearly tear. Loony Lovegood, who was passing, smiled dreamily and said, "Oh my, that's rather terrible, isn't it? You should fix that."
Then she glided on by, nearly stepping on one of Terry's yolks.
Lisa, now wearing a distinctly disgruntled expression, ripped out the stitch and said grumpily, "You don't always have to be wrong to apologize, Padma. We both know that, we're Ravenclaws."
"She's the one who said she didn't want me to sit near her at lunch," said Padma, who had meant for her voice to come out huffy and angry but ended up sounding small and alone. "She told me that she didn't want me there."
"To be fair," said Lisa. "It's rather unusual for a Ravenclaw to want to sit with a bunch of Gryffindors."
She said 'Gryffindor' the same way one might talk about a beloved old cat's accident in the kitchen. Faintly disgusted, but resigned.
"She's my sister!" Padma protested, but her heart sank. It was true, after all. No one wanted a glimmer of blue in a sea of gold.
She turned away from Lisa so she wouldn't see the tears that had quickly risen. Parvarti had stared at her like she was insane for wanting to spend as much time as possible with her sister. She had dismissed her with sharp words under her breath and returned to her new best friend, never pausing to even consider her twin sister, born seventeen minutes apart.
What did Lavender have that she didn't?
She'd thought their friendship had been born out of sheer proximity, because they shared a dorm and all their classes. She'd hoped they spent so much time together because they had nothing in common with that Hermione Granger and just didn't want to befriend the boys. Now she was being forced to reconcile herself to the idea that they liked each other.
She didn't like it one bit.
"I'm going to bed," said Padma sharply, rising out of her chair.
"Bye!" said Lisa cheerily. Padma didn't really like Lisa, when it came down to it.
"You have an atrocious sense of fashion," she said clearly before stomping upstairs.
Lisa rolled her eyes and said quietly, "Not my fault you have the personality of a cornered badger."
"I'm spending the holidays with Lavender. Sorry, sis."
Padma swallowed hard, maybe to stop the bile she felt was rising in her throat. Sorry, sis? Was that all she was worth? A fake smile and a sorry for ruining a trip they'd been planning since they were nine?
"It's fine, whatever," she muttered. She took her eyes off her shoes in time to see Lavender's smug smile as she bounced away with her curly, blonde locks, her arm slung through Parvarti's.
Parvarti had never hated anyone more than she had in that moment.
If she were a Gryffindor, she would have punched Lavender in the mouth and they would have forgiven each other and things would have been understood between them. If she were a Hufflepuff, she wouldn't hate Lavender in the first place. She would accept it and move on and smile once and a while too. If she were a Slytherin, Lavender would wake up with snakes for hair and find the majority of her orifices filled with something nasty.
As a Ravenclaw, she took deep breaths and she calmed down and she did nothing.
Or maybe that was just her.
When the fight was over and Voldemort was dead, Padma sat down on the steps and caught her breath and didn't cry. She felt too empty to cry. She had passed by the dead bodies of people she knew, people she'd grown up with and passed in the hallway and smiled at and known. Fred Weasley, Colin Creevey. Even Professor Lupin had shown up to die.
Lavender Brown.
She walked down the corridor and walked through a broken archway, the stone pillars blasted apart. A suit of armor lay moaning beside it, a centaur's spear piercing its helmet. She kicked it aside as she stumbled past, wishing tears would form.
She took refuge in an empty classroom and leaned against the wall, clutching herself and breathing heavily. She was alive. Voldemort was dead.
She was alive.
She squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them, she noticed a huge mirror standing in front of her. She was too drained to take in the words on the gilded frame, too drained to think.
She raised her gaze to the reflected image and saw, with a pang of dull shock, Lavender's reflection staring back at her.
She started crying.
The other prompts I used were jealousy, a mirror (named, Erised), and fashion. I put that at the bottom because I didn't want to give it away. Reviews are love! :)