The details from last night are hazy, but the warm glow of the sun through the curtains combined with the knowledge that her teenage dreams have just come true and she's just spent the night with Dean Thomas mean that when Padma starts to stir, she's in good spirits.
She's slightly surprised, however, to find that he's already sitting up on the other side of the bed, partly dressed and buttoning up his shirt agitatedly.
"Need to rush off?" she asks him brightly, trying hard to mask the confusion in her voice. It isn't a good sign that he's so eager to leave.
"Yeah," he says, avoiding her eyes and reaching for his wand from the bedside table.
Padma waits for further explanation but none comes. "Don't you want a shower first?" she presses, trying to fill the gaping silence between them. "It's just down the corridor on the left, I can—"
"Nah, I'm already late for work," he says, cutting across her abruptly. "Can I Floo from here?"
Padma flinches: the first proper words he's said to her that morning, and they're about how he can get out. "Um, yeah. Fireplace in the living room."
"Cool. Thanks." He starts to leave, but turns back around and pauses, standing in the doorway. At least now he has the grace to look at her.
He seems to have nothing to say to her. "Dean?" Padma asks tentatively. "Um... when can I see you again?"
Her words linger in the air.
Dean sighs. "I'm so sorry, Padma," he says, and her heart sinks. "I owe you an explanation. You're a lovely girl, you really are, but... I thought it would be the same, and it's not. It's Parvati I'm in love with, not you."
Padma feels her throat constricting but forces herself to withhold the tears; she's going to keep her dignity if nothing else. "Right."
"I really am sorry." Dean looks pleadingly at Padma. "I shouldn't have taken advantage of you like that."
Padma shrugs. "It's fine," she says, but it isn't fine. It really isn't. "So... I guess this is goodbye, then?" She's unable to keep her voice from cracking on the penultimate syllable.
Dean checks his watch. "Yeah, I guess so... I'll see you around, Padma."
She waits for the bottom of his robes to sweep around the corner and his footsteps to disappear before she allows the tears to fall.
Parvati. Padma loves her sister, but she's spent most of her life living in her shadow. Padma is the clever one, but Parvati is the confident one, the quirky one and the one that everyone notices. The one that everyone falls in love with.
They live in different cities now, so things are slightly better for Padma now that she has more of an opportunity to be her own person, but there's one thing about the Wizarding community: it's small. Rarely does she meet people that she didn't at least vaguely know at Hogwarts. She's sick of being known of by association. Padma can't see her, but Parvati is always there. It's as if she's died and her ghost has come back to haunt Padma.
She loves him. As a child, she dreamed of a faceless prince whisking her away from her family and into the limelight. As a teenager, the prince transformed into Dean, and the dreams became altogether less innocent.
She hadn't seen him since the battle, and she thought she'd got over him. But apparently she was wrong.
The events from last night are starting to come back to her and she can't believe she was so stupid. Her thoughts were so blurred by the alcohol and the music and the euphoric atmosphere in the Wizarding nightclub that she didn't think anything of it.
"Parvati?" he shouts over the music, grinning as he fights through the crowd of sweaty bodies to reach her.
"Padma," she corrects him automatically, and her drunken mind doesn't register the brief flash of disappointment that passes over his face before he quickly recovers.
"Of course. It's been ages, how have you been?" he asks loudly, and Padma starts to say something, but he just grabs her hand and says, "Let's dance." Padma exchanges excited glances with the two friends she came with, basking in the feeling that for once in her life she's been noticed. She doesn't see them again that night.
The tears continue to sting her eyes, but now they're tears of humiliation, not of disappointment. He must think she's so naïve.
She isn't naïve. But she sometimes likes to pretend, because it hurts. It hurts to think that throughout the night of dancing, of kissing and of heated lovemaking, all he was thinking of was her sister.
Love hurts.
A/N: Well that wasn't fun to write... :P I was assigned this pairing and for some reason this plot bunny decided to assault me, so there you go.
For the Impossible Love Challenge and the Pairing Diversity Boot Camp, both on HPFC. I'm not JKR, and I own nothing.