Disclaimer: I do not own these characters. JK Rowling, ask her.

15: Lavender's Ghost

"I've heard from Katie that you were in town!"

Lavender Brown stirs her tea with the porcelain tipped teaspoon with a fuzzy pink bauble at the end. Her manicure is colorful, to put it mildly, with each nail sporting a different rune of the temperments. How do I know this? My memory is buzzing like it has never been before. I feel like I had just opened up a very old tome of forgotten pictures. Some of the pictures are faded and obscured, while others, though still opaque, leaves an impression on my mind as though I am revisiting a place I've been to before. It all seems familiar, but cautiously so.

We're sitting in a brewery in that part of town that I wouldn't dare visit. The maitre d' made a fuss at the door, but, not as much as to offend Lavender, yet only enough to make her note his displeasure at her companion's attire. I probably look like a heroine junkie, which, to be fair, is what most of my neighbors are. Lavender has pink long hair combed over to one side, and a dress that seems to have popped out of a fashion magazine, consisting of geometric patterns, that to the uninitiated eye wold seem merely haute couture, but to a distant memory tells me that those patterns have hidden runes that were dissected into jigsaw patterns to form a magical shield of some function or another.

Again, I am amazed at how my memory seems to perk up rather surprisingly well right now. Perhaps because she is a friend. Her name was definitely one of those that I had retained.

"I was just taking some time off," I reply, as calmly enough as I was actually quite excited / terrified. Who was she? A friend? A lover, perhaps? I couldn't actually place whether or nor I was straight or gay in my past, but from the propensity of names that were mostly feminine I supposed that there was a distinct possibility that I had been gay, and this Lavender person had been my lover.

"The girls were practically anxious about you," Lavender continues. "How've you been?"

I shrug.

I am already reeling from the little speck of fire that I had conjured in the alley. To say nothing of this person from my past popping up, and these slew of memories flooding in, telling me that I was once a member of some occult wiccan study group. She is ditzy, as far as I can tell. I look about the tea house, rather secured little place with low lying light shades illuminating mostly the tables, while obscuring the denizens. The couches with their high back rest hides everyone within a low rumble mumble, with windows covered in heavy drapes. This place is designed for privacy, I conclude.

A memory passes by of some similar place, a tavern full of hooded figures and dread. I whisk my cigarette out, toying with the idea of lighting it, and recalling that I didn't have a light. Should I try the spell that I had just used? What was it I said? Incendio?

"I seem to have lost my light," I mumble. Does this Lavender person know of my magical past? I fidget about, while my peripheral vision watches her closely.

Lavender squints at me for a moment and raises her hand, snapping her fingers. For a moment, my breath is held, imagining that she might conjure up a small flame of her own. But momentarily, the waitress appears with a match box and an ashtray.

As I light my cigarette, Lavender's face flickers before the small orange burst of light, and for a moment I catch a glimpse of a hard measuring look behind cold eyes, as though her bubbly demeanor had been a mask. It is only for a second, and as the light dies out, and my cigarette gives off only a small glow, her face returns to a vapid expression.

"How are the girls?" I ask, nonchalantly.

"Whom do you mean?" Lavender replies, evenly. Her demeanor has changed noticeably. Her words are terse and tight, ending abruptly. I can feel a sense of defensiveness about her.

"You know," I stare at her evenly. There is definitely a game set afoot here. I wish I had some time to reflect on the dizzying chain of revelations that my unearthed memories were tossing at me all of a sudden, but we don't get to choose what life brings us. If I may seem rather well composed and surprisingly suspicious for someone who might have met an old friend, trust me, my past year of having lived out of the gutter as an amnesiac hasn't improved my trust of human nature. "Katie."

"Katie," Lavender smiles faintly, but her eyes don't seem to be blinking. "Katie is her old self."

"She doesn't miss me?" I ask, incredulously, as though hurt.

"Oh," Lavender laughs. "She misses you a lot. She's always asking about you."

Whatever my answers may have been to her, she seems to have grown more and more confident from them. Her eyes are off me now, and I get the feeling that I've dropped several notches in importance to her. Even without the aid of my lost memories, I am familiar with the feeling; It's the feeling you get when someone decides you are less of any significance that they might have doled out for you on a first impression. It's like the look the manager gave me when I began showing up for work in the same clothes a week in a row.

She is now fidgeting around in her purse, and I get the distinct impression that her attention is no longer on me. I don't seem to matter to her any more.

This is curious. And no, it's not heart breaking. It's not hear breaking when you can't remember the face that one of the few names you remember discards you as insignificant. It's not heart breaking when you think that the person across you holds the key to your lost life that has locked you out in the cold and poverty.

It's curious when someone from your past picks you up from the street, treats you to an expensive outing, answers nothing and asks more questions, and finally seems to have pegged you to the waste bin of your mental subscribe button.

At last she draws a stick, the length of a paint brush, ornamental and fancy, like a solitary chop stick. She's pointing it at me, purposefully. Does she want me to grab it?

"What are you doing?" I ask, an uneasy laugh escaping my lips.

Her face now seems to hold back no contempt. She looks at me over the tip of her nose, as though I had spilled some on her designer shoes.

"You know, Parvati," she rolls her eyes, "I wasted a whole year of my life chasing you. Everyone feared that you would survive the curse. Petrificus Totalus."

The last word caught me off guard. I felt my limbs go stiff, and my breath become shallow. Air still trafficked my lungs, but otherwise, I couldn't seem to budge a muscle. My heart, however, pounded loud enough to hear my pulse. If I could, I would have tinkled a bit, too.

Immobilization spell, I remembered, as absurd as remembering something like that was.

"You don't even remember Lavender, do you?" she sneered. "I had to take some polyjuice from her rotting corpse to make sure you didn't suspect."

Polyjuice, my mind raced, and my ridiculously alert memory responded like a clerk worried about getting fired at the eleventh hour, informing me of a slew of detail, from how to create it, it's magical properties, its substitute charms, its weaknesses, its limitations, the nature of its powers, its magical orientation, its history, blah blah blah, and all the useless information that all suddenly flooded out into the open like a wikipedia entry.

I think I might have been pretty smart.

"Diffindo," she flicks her stick casually.

I could definitely feel the pain, as though she slashed me with a sharp object on my cheek. I can feel a trickle of blood congealing on my face.

"Lavender Brown," said the woman who openly admitted she wasn't, "you don't know how much I despised her, do you? Then again, you don't remember anything, right? We suspected as much. We hoped as much. At least that the potions in your drink would have cursed you for as much."

Some people wonder why comic book villains take so long to monologue. It's become a trope, these days. People imagine how efficient it would be to just go ahead an kill someone like a cold blooded assassin. People aren't actually like that, though. I can see it in her eyes. How she wants to gloat about something. She wants me to know how she deserves this revenge. No doubt, in her eyes I am the villain.

"She used to just scream her head off at me," the woman, not Lavender, wells up in tears, her fists bunching up. I prepare for another spell to hurt me, and predictably enough, the same spell comes flying at me, this time across my chest. One of my buttons drops on to the table, sliced neatly in half as my shirt begins to soak in blood. "Told me how worthless I was. Told me that I would end up no where. Well," she laughs bitterly, "she was right! I'm nobody! No one remembers me! But at least now, I don't have to care. I don't have to go to work where pretty little strumpets like Giselle would look down on me like some loser. I don't have to wonder why I don't live the life like some Ginny Weasley! I don't! I'm free! You know how relishing this freedom is?"

She's working up some emotion. She's preparing for something big. But despite my building anxiety, another bout of 'Diffindo' slashes at my left arm. I can see out of the corner of my eye that the wound has cut deeper than I thought.

Diffindo... my memory vomits up another bout of useless information. Yada yada yada. History; use as a weapon in medieval ages where ancient Wizards fought beasts and men with swords. Prohibition laws and weakening in the face of more disturbing dark arts that were later developed. It now passed as something of an amateur weapon, like wielding a knife in an age of guns. Worthless. Worthless. Not when I can't even move my mouth!

"And you had to come and try to ruin it for me!" she spat, vehemently. "Just when I was feeling good about myself. Lavender Brown was dead! And the f***ing Aurors didn't know who did it! I was scott free and you had to come and snoop around. Well, Parvati, you stuck your big nose too deep this time."

Big nose! My anger surged all of a sudden. It was a surprising belch of anger that rose like some uncomfortable indigestion. Was that who I used to be? Someone who felt more anger at a critique on my looks than the disturbing thought of being slashed while immobilized? Geez.

"But you DA types are all the same, aren't you?" she sneers. "You all think you're some great hero! Well, news flash, Parvati. You're a nobody! No one remembers you! She made sure of it! Just as She set us free, She erased you from existence. Not even your mother remembers you. Not Padma! No one! How does that feel? Do you feel like a hero? Do you feel like Harry Potter?"

Another slash, this one at my throat. My heart begins to pound worryingly faster, and I feel blood gushing out from my neck.

"Well," the woman smiles, smugly, "You can stop worrying, Parvati. You will be forgotten."

She is rising from her seat. This was what she was planning, to leave me slowly bleeding to death. The waitress approaches. And for a brief moment, I wonder if she would notice me. But this time it's no magic. Just indifference, as I am left deserted in obscurity to die.