Title/Link: The Sweet Smell of Grass
House: Thunderbird
Class/Task Number: Flying: Task 3- Write about saving someone
Bonus Prompts (if used, with the numbers please): 4.[Emotion] Happiness; 15. [Object] Grass
Summary: Lavender gets saved a lot and becoming a werewolf doesn't change that.
Trigger Warnings: Depression, self-hate, references to physical trauma
Word Count: 1391
It had been Parvati (backed up with parchment full of Hermione's facts) that convinced Lavender to seek him out. Lavender had been broken; she had barely seen the sun in a year. She stayed in the basement of Neville's house and cried herself to sleep almost every night.
First, it was the fact that vegetables made her wrench. Lavender had been brought up vegetarian and then quickly switched to veganism at Hogwarts. She hadn't liked the taste of eggs or milk and much preferred to go without honey. The changes had been swift and easy to implement, a culmination of seven careful years of looking out for her diet. Only to have it changed overnight. Spinach smoothies packed with greens and sweet bananas (a staple from her fifth year) made her nose curl with disgust. God, Lavender just wanted the biggest bowl of lentil salad, but every time she dreamed of the soft lentils and sharp onions, her stomach twisted. Physically unable to stomach the food she used to love.
Next was the scars, a collection of deep gashes that, at first refused to heal. Almost as if they wanted to bleed her out for being too weak. When the stopped bleeding, they healed slowly and messily. Jagged webs of raised skin broke her face and made her feel ugly. While this may not have been a good reason for anger. Lavender loved the way she looked. She loved her dark blond hair and tanned skin. It wasn't an exercise in vanity. For her, it had been an expression of self-love and without her looks, as petty as everyone told her she was being, she didn't know how to love herself.
The last in the series of unfortunate and life-changing events was the foggy Inner-Eye. Divination was one of the few things that had made Lavender happy. It was the only subject that Lavender wanted to understand on a deeper level. She loved the simple surety of reading tea-leaves or the more complex stories hidden amongst stars and bones. Lavender liked the certainty that left spaces open for other paths that weren't so sure.
Basically, before the Bite, Lavender had loved being herself and with those things gone, she wasn't sure how to be herself. It was at this point of a long, dark spiral only punctuated by the full moon eleven times; that Parvati took it upon herself to get Lavender out.
"Neville loves you, but he is never going to kick you out and you need to get out of here," Parvati had said firmly, after reading off of the list of reasons and Apparating Lavender to a field at a nod of consent. "This is as far as I can take you. He will be waiting for you and send an owl should you need anything."
Lavender shielded her eyes from the bright daylight. The air tasted cleaner than the air in Neville's plant-filled house. Although Lavender felt weak, too tired to do anything but collapse on the grass, she let herself sink. That unhappy place had become her home, no matter how many therapy sessions Neville had gently shuffled her to.
The grass was the good kind. The kind that sustained life and Lavender curled upon it, smelling its sweet scent. The wolf seemed to like the grass too. The excitement they held for it was puppy-like. The commands that it wanted her to follow fired at her synapses. Even from the deepest point of her sadness, Lavender could hear them question:
"Run? Play? Please?"
They were happier when she was happier. They were also younger than Lavender. They whispered how they liked her name and that they were pleased to be a part of her. Maybe that's why accepting the Bite had been so hard for Lavender. She had clearly remembered Lupin talking about the werewolf as a monster. But they were anything but ravenous and power-hungry. Sometimes they had unreasonable demands, but they had settled themselves so uncomfortably deep in Lavender's soul that she wondered if she would ever be ok living life without them.
The full moon rose and with it a shift that promised to be painful every time. Her body shifted to accommodate them. She could almost feel them eager to please and the remorse that came with every shift.
"I am sorry," they said. "But we are so hungry."
Lavender did feel sorry for their hunger. That was her fault. She had made it more difficult for them to get nutrients in the form they craved. Lavender still couldn't get herself to touch meat as a human and while they were grateful for the eggs, soya porridge and vitamins that she took, it would never be satisfying.
When Lavender wasn't in control, she reminded them of the rules. Ones that they and she had set out over a week where everything hadn't felt so heavy. People talked about the troubles being a werewolf had brought them. While it fundamentally changed her life, they had never been something bad that had come out of this.
She wondered if they represented a child-like portion of herself that the war had taken away too soon or did every werewolf go through this phase. It was more than being youthful, it was an attempt to reclaim a childhood she never had any chance of living.
The field and adjacent forest held what was the largest back in Great Britain. The war had created so many werewolves, many of whom belonged to Fenrir Greyback. Greyback was the monster that made the grass under their feet warm. Lavender cautioned them and why would they listen to her, when the closest thing they had to a parent said otherwise.
That night they ran further than they had ever run before and when Lavender asked them for a name; they laughed and replied that they liked Lavender's Tarot cards, but they were not separate from her at all. They had liked the thick, raised brushstrokes of the cards that Dean had made for Lavender what seemed like a decade ago. They followed Greyback and hunted rabbit, shutting Lavender down as they feasted on organ meat.
Mornings surrounded by other werewolves reminded Lavender too much of drunk mornings in her Gryffindor dorm room. If she closed her eyes, she could picture it: Hermione reaching out and rummaging through Parvati's drawers for anything to take away the pain. Parvati frighteningly rosy with a mountain of greasy food and electrolyte-filled energy drinks. The way the grey shifted across their colourful room that held too many gods and even more hopes and dreams. How Hermione and Parvati would eventually pile onto Lavender's bed to sleep another five hours; curled up the way they had been in first-year when Lavender was too scared of the night to go to sleep.
Sleeping next to Greyback felt like that. Something she was too old to do, but it brought her the peace she needed. Slowly Lavender learned how to rebuild her life and while Greyback was one of the most difficult teachers she ever had, he was also the most straightforward to please.
He had looked way past his years when she took the mantel from him a year later. The Alpha of Great Britain. The one who would have to present the needs of their people to the Wizarding World and hope someone would listen.
Lavender visited his cell often. Always for new advice and probably out of a twisted sense of loyalty. While the days where she sunk low to the ground still felt terrible. The grass under her feet, the presence they made against her soul and the thousands of other werewolves that relied on her to keep it together somehow cobbled themselves together in a version of happiness Lavender could live with.
Maybe that's the story Lavender would tell when the first-years at Hogwarts' asked how she lived with herself, with her scars, against her moral fibre and mentored by the man who had attempted to kill her. Lavender would then tell them about the people who went out of their way to save her: from the darkness of the night to as she lay on sweet-smelling grass. She would teach them that sometimes it was ok for other people to do the saving. That being saved was sometimes the bravest thing you could do for yourself.