A/N: This is the Chudley Cannons Captain checking in for Season 10 Round 1 of QLFC.
CAPTAIN: A black cat – Write about seeing through someone else's eyes.
Word count (before A/N): 2,017 words
TW: dark themes, mentions of suicide
Thank you to my teammates Arty, Jinx, and Soph for betaing!
Bzzz. Bzzzzzzz. Bzz. Bzzzz.
She watched the moth approach the light again, its fuzzy body twitching ever so slightly as it touched down on the bulb. When would it realize it was playing with fire?
Bzzzzzz.
Lavender took a deep breath, turning away from the idiotic creature. She couldn't watch the inevitable. The final zap, the fall to the ground, a farewell twitch. Dead.
It would happen, sure, but just out of sight, and because of that, out of mind too.
Instead, she adjusted her book and pulled both her legs up onto the porch swing, her bare feet resting against the uneven wood as she slowly glided back and forth, the moonlight dancing on the desert floor in front of her, making her feel like she was sailing across an endless ocean.
Not thumbing her way through another romance novel on the front porch of her Nevada home.
Nevada.
Even the word felt wrong in her mind.
She opened her book, trying to get back to its fantasy world, trying to escape the desert night chill and the moth fizzling out overhead. Anything to block out this new life she somehow found herself living.
The front door creaked open.
"You've got a package."
Lavender looked up at the shadow, backlit by a yellow glow coming from inside. Tatum shifted, letting the light reach his face, the sharp cheekbones, the square jaw, the gentle tilt of his brown-almost-black eyes. He was shirtless again. Lavender willed herself not to blush.
"A package?" She set her feet back on the ground, shifting to face her roommate. "Did an owl come?"
Tatum grinned, white teeth against tan skin. He must have been carved from marble, maybe, formed from the nectar of Olympus. A gift from the gods.
You'd almost miss the three identical claw marks etched across his face.
"You Brits have the owls. We've got coyotes." He turned, letting the swinging screen door slam behind him. Lavender jumped, a hand instinctively reaching for her pocket. It was so quiet in the desert. The nearest neighbor was miles away, too far to see even in a world so flat it made paper look thin. Any sound, even small, had her reaching for her wand.
Giving herself a moment to collect her mind and her book, Lavender soon followed Tatum back into the combination living and dining room. Caleb was on the couch, drinking a beer and watching telly. Some sports thing with a ball and bat, but nothing like a Beater on a pitch. Cassie stood behind the half counter that led into the tiny kitchen, her head swiveling between a cookbook and a glass bowl filled with dry ingredients.
When she saw Lavender, she smiled. "I hope you like chocolate chip cookies! I haven't baked in ages, but I think this is the recipe I used last time. They were good. Right, Caleb? They were good?"
Caleb grunted, his eyes glued to the screen in front of him.
Lavender gave Cassie a small smile and walked past, careful to keep her gaze away from the raw red scars lining the other woman's arms and neck. Lavender had caught Cassie after a shower once, they shared a room, after all, and she found that the scars ran the length of Cassie's torso and back. An angry roadmap with no clear destination.
She slipped into the hall, toward her bedroom. Tatum didn't say where her package was, but she had a feeling. He was waiting by her desk when she arrived.
"I thought no one knew where you were." His words stung, even though Lavender could hear the gentleness in his voice. She'd thought so, too. After the battle… she had to get away.
Eight months had passed. Eight agonizing months. Voldemort was dead, and the wizarding world was safe. But hell had found Lavender. It crept through the veins in her body; it weighed against her heart.
It called her at every full moon.
When the Healers told her she had been bitten by Fenrir Greyback, she'd laughed. No way. No way. And yet.
They suggested several treatment options, several courses of action to help alleviate the call of the beast, but she couldn't stomach the idea of being conscious of herself in another form, in another body designed to be her own and other at the same time. Why would anyone want to see through a monster's eyes?
So she did her research. She scoured the library, scoured St. Mungo's texts, scoured the world for an option she could stomach.
The first full moon nearly brought her to the brink, and she really considered taking the easy way out.
Then she found Nevada. She found Tatum and Cassie and even dumb jock Caleb, all of whom had gone through similar attacks. They weren't all wizards, just her and Tatum, actually, but even the Muggles had become a piece of her in a short amount of time. She'd latched onto them and to America and to escape. She'd never told a soul where she was going, not even her mother.
She looked up at Tatum now, his sweet face, his muscled arms. "Why are you always shirtless?" she asked before she could stop herself.
He barked out a laugh. Lavender had to think for a moment to remember what he'd said before, but memory got lost in his mirth.
"Because it's hot in the desert," he said, eyes still dancing. "Can I see what's inside?"
For the first time, Lavender looked down at the parcel sitting on her desk. It wasn't big. It's packaging was littered with stamps and stickers.
It had traveled a long way to get to her.
She chose to ignore Tatum's request, letting her silence be her answer as she tore the brown paper away. She was careful to ignore the scars on her hands, nail marks embedded into her skin from where Greyback had grabbed her and pulled her close. She hadn't really paused to look at them longer than to acknowledge they were there. The thought of accepting them felt like a burden. She couldn't bear it, couldn't bear accepting Greyback's curse like that. It was like crawling into someone else's skin.
She shook him off, her eyes focusing on the picture frame in front of her. There was a small piece of parchment covering the glass, a note.
Hopefully this finds its way to you, wherever you are. — P
She felt like she was choking on her own heart. That was Parvati's handwriting. She knew it better than her own. What could possibly be…
Lavender removed the parchment. She sucked in a breath.
In front of her, a fourteen-year-old Lavender and Parvati posed for the camera. Colin had taken it right before the first task of the Tri-Wizard Tournament. They were giggling, the lens was out of focus for a moment before clearing. Her hair was frizzy, but she remembered tamping it down with Sleekeazy's. Parvati had two braids, one hanging from behind each ear. They were so close, Lavender could practically still feel her friend's breath tickling her neck.
This was before the war. Even before Cedric. When their worst fears had been centered around boys and the next month's star reading from Trelawney and if their bums looked good in their school uniform.
She was brought back to that day, to the dragons flying overhead and the sound of raucous cheers in Gryffindor's stands. Oh, how things had changed.
How her view on life had changed.
Lavender, the one standing in her tiny two-person bedroom in the desert, held back the laugh-sob caught in her throat. She watched over and over as she and Parvati came in and out of focus, her eyes trained on the smile, the unblemished skin, the way her younger body flowed in its movements.
She wasn't anything like that now.
A hand rested on her shoulder.
"I—" she started, tears starting to spill, blurring out her words. She swallowed. Hard. "I think I forgot what she was like."
She had a funny feeling Tatum knew she meant herself and not the other girl in the picture.
Tatum squeezed her shoulder gently. "I suddenly feel like I should be wearing a shirt."
Now she barked out a laugh. A wet, wild sound. She hadn't laughed like that in ages, even before the attack. She turned to Tatum, and soon he was laughing, too, the act only slightly reminiscent of a grinning wolf. For once, Lavender embraced the comparison. She realized something was falling off of her, like a snake shedding its skin. Except it was sweeter than that, like brushing off a layer of snow after making a snow angel in the Hogwarts courtyard.
She laughed and Tatum laughed and the room glowed just a little brighter. Could electricity even do that, she wondered, but the thought was pushed away by more laughter, and before she knew it, she'd forgotten why she was laughing at all.
Lavender wiped away her tears, a combination of the shock of seeing such a memory and the aftermath of all her laughter.
"This is Parvati," she said, pointing to the picture. Tatum leaned in. "She's my best friend. Or, was. Who knows now."
Then she explained where they were, what was happening. Her eyes stared at the girl she once was, and as she talked, Lavender realized her heart was breaking for that girl. Not because of what was to come, but because she had tamped down that girl as soon as something horrible happened.
How could she have done that?
How could she have let herself swallow up the parts of her that had meant so much?
Did Parvati know what something like this would mean to Lavender? Of course she did. Parvati knew everything.
For the first time in a very, very long time, Lavender paused to take in her surroundings. The house wasn't much, an abandoned shack Tatum renovated to take in strays. But it was home now, wasn't it? It felt like comfort, like solace. But it lacked Parvati. It missed the remnants of a home she had, for eight months, kept out of mind. It was like blinders were lifting from her eyes.
"Coyotes, you say?" Lavender asked, coming to a new resolution for herself. "Do they carry letters too?"
After Tatum left, she got to work, writing the longest letter she'd ever written. She was careful not to mention her exact location—there was a reason she and her roommates were off the grid. They wanted solitude. They wanted a refuge where they could turn without medication or potions. They wanted to be in the middle of nowhere, a place where no one would be hurt by them—though she did say she had gone to America and found herself a pack.
An hour later, she walked back onto the porch. A little brown coyote was waiting at the bottom of the steps, as if he had known all along she'd need him. She attached the letter to a thin string around his neck, careful to keep it loose enough so he could breathe. Lavender watched as he ran into the darkness.
Bzzz. Bzzzzzzz. Bzz.
"Oh, you." She cracked open the screen door and reached for the light switch. After flicking it off, the moth slowed in its frantic movements, momentarily lost without its beacon. Instead, it fluttered toward the door, the call of the lamp light inside its new target.
"No you don't." She reached for the poor creature, her hand cupping around its powdery body like a cage. She walked to the edge of the porch, held up her hand, and let it go. She watched the moth fly in a loop before heading off into the darkness, her hand still outstretched.
She took a deep breath, her eyes catching sight of the scars again. But this time, she looked at them. Really looked. Scratches in the back of her hands, lines racing up her arms. They looked incandescent under the light of the waning moon.
Suddenly, it seemed her world was coming into focus for the first time.