Dry Spell
On the first week of the summer without rain, Lavender Brown squeezes lemon juice in her hair, pulls on a tiny blue t-shirt, cuts her oldest jeans off so high her mother shrieks, and runs outside to spread a towel in the soft green grass at the edge of her father's field.
It's lovely and warm, the sun is bright, and after the way the school year had ended Lavender is quite ready to forget about wands and spellbooks and drab mediaeval robes for a while. She thinks about the brownness of her skin, the lightness of her hair, and the way Seamus's eyes will goggle when he sees her, when she goes back to the world of wizards in September.
She thinks about those things, and very little else.
***
On the fourth week without rain, Lavender throws on the cut-off jeans, her grubbiest old shirt, and follows her father and uncles out the back door before dawn. They work for hours, silent and tense, dragging the giant irrigators from crop to crop, field to field. Fingering a leaf here, a stem there, watching with lips pressed in tight lines as precious topsoil floats away on the breeze, fine as sand.
Lavender stands with her father at the end of the day, their eyes fixed on the water that spills from the great metal caterpillar arms stretching into the sky. "I can't magic rain, dad," she says finally, softly.
"I know." He squeezes her shoulder, his voice half sad, half proud. "I know."
***
When the rest of the house is asleep, Lavender rummages deep into her school trunk and closes her fist around a small, perfect globe. It's not really big enough or crystal enough, just a little something Parvati gave her for Christmas last year, but it'll have to do.
She places it on her desk, lowers the lights just so, and settles down to gaze into the swirling white mist, to find the future. Rain, thunderclouds, bolts of lightening; she strains her eyes to see just one of those things, but nothing comes. She looks until her eyes blur, until her world is only drifting white clouds, formless, shapeless.
And then, a break in the fog.
Lavender rubs at one eye, then the other, but the picture doesn't waver; she grips the edge of the desk and stares, barely remembering to breathe.
Red lights, burning through the mist with a cold fiery intensity that sends chills up her spine. Two of them, flat and sinister, like the eyes of some animal, some reptile.
Lavender shivers, snatches up the crystal ball, tucks it back in her trunk. She hugs her arms to her chest, and wonders why she's thinking of Harry Potter, all of a sudden, and why she has a strange urge to owl him, to tell him what she's seen.
She shrugs, and heads off to take the quickest of hot showers.
Just enough to wash the dust away.
*******
A/N: Written in honor of Blame Somebody Else Day, so hey, if later canon proves that Lavender's not Muggleborn, not my fault! I hereby blame Shayla for betaing, and Lizbee and Stacy for making encouraging Lavender-as-Muggleborn noises.