Sine Nomine

Title: Tangled Webs
Rating: T
Warnings: Uh . . . obliquely mentioned werewolf attack? None, really.
Characters/Pairings: Ron/Lavender, Ron/Hermione
Summary: Everyone knows Lavender Brown. Or at least, they think they do.

Part the First



Tangled Webs - Chapter Two

It was February when Seamus found out. In hindsight, I should have seen it coming. Not Seamus, necessarily, but someone. The Law of Averages and all that. It also didn’t help that Parvati and I were both extremely frustrated. Cling and Squeal had been in operation for more than a month, with very little to show for it, and an extremely unfortunate side effect was beginning to become clear to me. I had been acting shallow and giggly and silly for so long that people were beginning to treat me as if I was, legitimately, all those things. More and more people were starting to look at me the way Hermione did, with revulsion and disgust and irritation. That scared me a little, because I knew that once I’d lost the respect of my peers, it was not going to be an easy thing to get it back. Not to mention the fact that acting so shallow and giggly and silly was beginning to also get to me.

So, yes. Parvati and I were both frustrated, and we weren’t as careful during one of our break periods as we should have been, and Seamus came into the otherwise deserted Common Room just in time to overhear me say, “I mean it, Parvati. I am this close to clocking him over the head with something! He’s driving me mad! If he doesn’t break up with me soon, I don’t know what I might do, because I don’t know how much longer I can pretend to be this sickeningly head over heels for the guy!”

Then I turned in my pacing and came face to face with a smiling and quite dangerous looking Seamus Finnigan.

“Hello, ladies,” he said, crossing his arms, his brogue thicker than usual, which was never a good sign. I could feel the blood drain from my face.

“Seamus,” I said weakly, knowing that this would be a very excellent time for me to say something. Unfortunately, I had no idea what to say. “What are you doing here?” I finally asked, settling for small talk, hoping to distract him, and knowing it wasn’t going to work.

Well,” he said smoothly, never losing that smile. “I suppose I’m waiting to hear from one of you two fine ladies why I shouldn’t take what I’ve just heard up to my dormmate, as I’m sure he’d find it very interesting.”

“Seamus, please don’t,” I pleaded. “I can explain this.”

“I’m listening,” he said, an edge creeping into his voice for the first time.

So Parvati and I did the only thing we could – we told him everything. I’ve always considered Seamus a friend – he did take me to the Yule Ball fourth year, strictly as friends, of course, and we’ve always gotten on well – but I knew that he was a true Gryffindor and, especially after the events of our fifth year, his loyalty to his dormmates was absolute. He would have told Ron what he’d heard, and that would have been a disaster far worse than anything I’d experienced so far that year. No, letting another person in on the secret was far better than the alternative.

I had no idea how he’d take the information. Even after we’d told him, I had no idea. He just sat there after we had finished speaking, watching me. I can’t remember the last time I was under such intense scrutiny. It grew decidedly uncomfortable very quickly.

“Please, Seamus,” I finally whispered, pleading again. “Please don’t say anything to him. I have to see this through to the end.”

“Seems to me that telling Ron about what I’ve just heard would be a fair way to encourage a break up.”

“And completely humiliate Ron at the same time,” I said immediately. “If he finds out about this, he’ll never fix things with Hermione because he’ll be too afraid he’d just be playing into someone’s hands. This has to be his idea, Seamus, or it won’t work.”

There was a long, heavy pause then, during which I’m fairly sure neither Parvati nor myself took a single breath. Then, finally, Seamus spoke. “All right,” he said. I glanced at Parvati, somewhat wary.

“All right?” I repeated.

“I’ll keep your secret,” he clarified. I was halfway through a breath of relief when he said sharply, “But for their sake. Not yours.”

“As it should be,” I said softly, looking away.

As it turned out, Seamus did far more than simply keep my secret. He became a confidant. He became a partner in the scheme. And he lent a new and interesting perspective to the plan, as well. Not only could he keep us apprized of what Ron was saying in the privacy of his own dorm, he could also share insights into the male mind, and tell us what parts of the plan probably wouldn’t work as well as we hoped.

I don’t think I need to mention that up to this point, my relationship with Ron had been almost entirely physical. I mean, aside from the occasional “Won-Won” and the like, we never really talked. That changed with Phase Two.

I began to chatter. Incessantly. And the topic I most often brought up was feelings. I talked about where I thought the relationship was going and where he thought the relationship was going. I was in no way deterred when he had no answers, nor when he tried to steer the conversation in a different direction or, occasionally, halt it altogether with more kissing. No, I kept stubbornly on track, determined to wear him down to the breaking point.

And it was working. I know it was. He began to avoid me more and more often, or kiss me so hard I couldn’t get a word in. I’d like to take this time to point out that something had at least been accomplished in four months. His kisses were completely unrecognizable from the ones I’d gotten in October. They occasionally took my breath away, and I wasn’t even attracted to the guy.

But the point is, I was wearing him down, slowly but surely, and everything was setting itself up perfectly for the third phase. As March grew ever closer, I became more and more grateful for Parvati and Seamus. We didn’t have a lot of time to be alone together, but we had three free periods a week together by ourselves, and I lived for those hours. They were the only times I could drop the persona that was starting to wear away at me as well. It was such a blessing to be able to sit every once and a while and talk about nothing at all. To have those few hours when I didn’t have to think about Ron. We still did, many times, talk of the plan and how it was going, but the point was, we didn’t have to.

I remember in particular one afternoon break a few days before Ron’s birthday, when Seamus, Parvati, and I were in the deserted Common Room, and we did happen to be talking about Ron and Hermione. Parvati had just mentioned that things would never have gotten this far if Ron and Hermione had been the kind of couple that you could just count on to work out, the kind you didn’t have to worry about. “Yeah,” I said. “This would all have been so much easier if they were more like Harry and Ginny.”

Parvati and Seamus both froze and stared at me. I looked back and forth between them, legitimately surprised at their shock. “Oh, come on,” I said. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”

“Noticed what?” Parvati asked. “Harry and Ginny? There’s nothing to notice! She had a raging crush on him two years ago, but she dated Michael Corner all last year and Dean Thomas all this year. She’s moved on.”

I gave her a very withering stare. I could not believe that my best friend could be so terribly blind. “Parvati,” I said. “I sit here as living proof that just because two people are dating does not mean that they are necessarily attracted to one another. The fact that she’s going out with someone else does not mean she doesn’t still have feelings for Harry.”

The silence from my right became very tense at that, and I suddenly realized what Seamus must have heard. “She’s not leading Dean on,” I said, quickly and gently. “She legitimately believes herself attracted to him. She started dating Michael last year to try and convince everyone that she was over Harry, and she did it so well that she almost believes it herself now. But subconsciously, she knows she isn’t, and that’s why she and Dean are already starting to fall apart; she feels guilty, but on a deep enough level that she’s not even fully aware of it yet.”

I could practically hear them trying to regroup. “Okay,” Parvati got out finally. “So maybe Ginny still has feelings for Harry, but so do half the witches in the wizarding world! That doesn’t mean Harry reciprocates!”

“No, but he does,” I said with confidence, for I’d been watching Harry, and the signs were there if you knew what you were looking for.

“No,” Seamus said immediately. “Lavender, I’m sorry, but I live with the guy, and I can say for certain that Harry doesn’t have feelings for Ginny. He’s never shown anything like –”

“Seamus,” I cut in. “You’re never with Harry unless he’s with Ron or you’re with Dean, and do you really think he’s going to let anything like that show in front of Ginny’s brother or boyfriend? You don’t see it, but believe me, it’s there. And it’s become very distracting for him recently,” I said thoughtfully. By this time, Parvati was shaking her head in bewildered wonder and Seamus was peering at me intently.

“I don’t believe it,” he said finally.

“You don’t have to,” I told him. “Just take my word for it. Harry and Ginny are going to happen, and unless I’m very much mistaken, they’re going to happen soon. And it’s going to happen when emotions are running high and excitement is off the charts. They’re going to come together without thinking, and instinct will take over and that will be the end of that. I’d stake money on it.”

Parvati refused to take the bet, not because she believed me, but just because, as she said, I’d been right about too many crazy things for her to go against me. Seamus, however, took the bet. If they did get together at any point, he owed me five Galleons. If they got together before the year’s end, he owed me ten Galleons. And if they got together before the year’s end and exactly as I’d described, he owed me fifteen. And if nothing happened by year’s end, I’d give him fifteen Galleons.

Silly boy.

But back to what’s relevant, I mention this story simply because it’s one of the last relaxed conversations I remember having that year. Everything changed three days later because three days later, Ron was poisoned.

Before Ron was poisoned, the war was something that happened to other people. I mean yes, Cedric Diggory had been killed, and a bunch of Gryffindors and Harry had had some kind of adventure at the Ministry of Magic, but none of that had really directly affected me. I hadn’t known Cedric, and none of the Ministry bunch had been lastingly hurt, and it wasn’t as if anyone talked about any of that, not really. The war didn’t happen to me, and the war didn’t happen to people I knew, except for Harry, and come on. He was Harry Potter; he was automatically an exception.

But when I heard that Ron had been poisoned, all of that changed. The war was thrown sharply and cruelly into my face, and I couldn’t really ignore it anymore. That was one of the worst days of my life. Because it didn’t matter that I hadn’t slipped him the love potion or poisoned the mead, and it didn’t matter that I was in no way responsible for anything that happened to him. It was still my fault. Go ahead, call it irrational. It’s nothing I don’t already know. It was completely irrational for me to blame myself over what happened to Ron. But I did it anyway.

I’d like to take a moment here and clarify something important. I’ve kind of ragged on Ron a lot over the course of this narrative, and I may have given the impression that I was, at best, apathetic toward the guy. That’s not true at all, not in the slightest. I care about Ron a lot; I still do. I want him to be happy; he deserves to be happy, for all that he had somehow come to believe that he didn’t. At some point in his life, it had been drilled into him – unintentionally, without a doubt – that he would probably always have to settle for things, and that’s one of the reasons we went out as long as we did. And that’s one of the things that was so frustrating – he deserved better than me, but he didn’t realize it! I wanted him to realize it. I wanted him to realize that he deserved the best, that he deserved someone who wanted him, and that he didn’t have to settle.

Ron’s an incredible person – I thought so then, and I still think so. He is fiercely loyal, and that was one of the other reasons he wouldn’t break up with me. As much as he didn’t much like me, as much as he was in love with someone else, and as much as he wanted our relationship to be over, he viewed breaking up with me, at least in part, as a sign of disloyalty to me, and he wasn’t willing to do it. And as frustrating as that was, it was also one of the sweetest things anyone’s ever done for me.

It takes a special kind of person to be able to live Ron Weasley’s life. It takes a special kind of person to be able to live in a household with five older brothers and a younger sister where, even though you’re never asked to measure up, you’re constantly being asked to measure up. It takes a special kind of person to be best friends with the Boy Who Lived and the brightest student Hogwarts may have ever seen. It takes a special kind of person to live with all of that and not only feel that ridiculously stubborn loyalty for all of them, but also to hardly ever give in to the jealously that should be a natural human reaction.

Ron and I may not have spent much of our time together talking or getting to know one another, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t grow to care for him, or that I didn’t come to know him far better, I’m sure, than he would ever imagine. It’s one of my biggest regrets that Ron and I didn’t get to become friends. I think he needs more friends who genuinely believe in what he himself can do, friends who see him as more than the twins’ younger brother or Harry Potter’s best friend.

I genuinely care about him, and the night that he was poisoned, I left Gryffindor Tower, after curfew, made my way down to the Hospital Wing, performed a Freezing Charm on the wards, put a Silencing Charm around his bed curtains, and told him everything. I admitted everything to him that night, everything I’d done, every mistake I’d made, everything that was wrong in his life at that moment that was my fault. I told him all of it, came clean, and didn’t hold anything back.

Of course, he was unconscious at the time, and so didn’t hear a word I said, but that didn’t matter. I told him. I sat next to him and held his hand and, crying, admitted the whole of what I’d done.

One of the worst parts about it was that no one had thought to tell me what had happened to Ron. I found out from Parvati; she had known before I did. I’ll admit, I would hardly have expected to be the first person notified; hell, with a family as large as his, I wouldn’t have even expect to be the sixth or seventh. But I do have to say, I would have expected to find out before the rest of Gryffindor Tower, from Harry or from Ginny or from someone who thought of me as Ron’s girlfriend who should know what had happened to him. But I found out from Parvati, after making an offhand comment about the weirdness of being brushed off that morning in favor of Romilda Vane. That’s how I learned that my boyfriend had almost died.

It struck me in that moment just how frightening a situation I was in. What I had been so terrified would happen had happened. My peers no longer had any respect for me, and as far as they were concerned, my relationship with Ron was already over. And as I sat by Ron’s bed that night, I really did become frightened that I was never going to recover from that year. And so I sat, his hand in mine, and begged him to end things, begged him to just get it over with and break up with me, for both our sakes. I begged him to follow his heart and forget about my feelings or about hurting me. I begged, and I could only hope that, somehow, he’d hear me.

And when I left, just before the sky started to show pink around the edges, I pressed one kiss to Ron’s lips, vastly different from any I’d ever given him. For the first time in our four and a half month old relationship, I kissed him tenderly, chastely, with real emotion.

I don’t know whether he heard me that night or not, but I do know that as soon as he regained consciousness, he began to avoid me, at least, as much as it’s possible to do with one of us confined to a hospital bed – he began to be “asleep” whenever I stopped by. And though he never knew it and probably never will, I left each of those visits hiding a smile.

I also think I truly got on Harry’s last nerve during that time. Deprived of Ron to chatter at, I began to chatter at Harry instead, asking him about Ron’s “feelings.” In-depth. Excessively. Every chance I got. I really should write him an apology someday. I ambushed and abused him, and normally I’d say such behavior was beneath me, but at the time, I was desperate.

Harry must have said something to Ron after that, because once he got out of the Hospital Wing, he began paying more attention to me, but it was grudging and I could tell. He made it quite clear that he’d rather have been with Harry and Hermione – with whom he had made up over the course of his illness. I allowed myself hope.

His ever-clearer preferences enabled me to begin Phase Three, which was the hardest yet for me. I became possessive. I made him account for every moment of his day that he didn’t spend with me. If he spent any time at all with any other female, he heard it from me. For almost three weeks, I became the kind of girl I had always sworn I never would. As I never gave him a moment’s peace, he found more and more excuses to be away from me. It had been weeks since we had snogged, we hardly spent any time together, and the times we were together, I nagged and pouted the whole time, and still he hung on! Still he refused to be the one to end it.

And then came the night when he came down from the boys’ dorm with Hermione Granger. Alone.

There was no other way I could have reacted. None. Not after what I’d spent the last month setting up. Not after they came down the stairs directly in my line of vision. Not after Ron had never taken me up to his room.

I wish I could say that what happened that night was a blur. I wish I could say I barely remember any of it. But I’ve sworn to be truthful, and the truth is, I remember that night far too well. I remember everything that was said and, more importantly maybe, everything that wasn’t.

When I shrieked “What were you doing up there with her?” he did not say, Discussing the best way to tell you that we’re together now.

When I said “Do you realize what this looks like?” he did not say, I know exactly what it looks like, and that isn’t far from the truth.

When I said, “I’m supposed to be your girlfriend; I’m supposed to be the one you spend time with privately,” he did not say, You aren’t my girlfriend anymore, Lavender. We’re done.

When I said, “I know exactly what this is. You think I haven’t noticed? You think I haven’t seen how distant you’ve been? So, tell me. How long have you been spending time alone with her? I think I have a right to know!” he didn't say, You don’t have a right to anything of the sort.

When I said, “What does she have that I don’t? What on earth makes that stuck-up, prissy little know-it-all bookworm more worth your time than me?” he did not say, Don’t you dare talk about Hermione that way. She is ten times better than you can ever hope to be, and if you ever say one more thing against her, you will regret it for a very long time.

And when I said, “Well, I won’t stand for this, Ron Weasley. I won’t be made a fool of, not by the likes of you! It’s her, or me, so make your choice. It should be obvious,” he did not say, I choose her. Can you imagine any scenario where I would choose you over her? Even when I chose you, I was really choosing her. I choose her, and you and I are done, Lavender. For good. He didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything. He just . . . stood there, not looking at me, and not saying anything.

“I’m done with this,” I said in one of the most dangerous tones that I think has ever come out of me. Ron looked up at that, and so did Hermione, and the reason for it was simple. In that moment, I wasn’t the Lavender they thought they knew. The reason for that is simple, too. In the last few moments of that break-up, I finally, finally, dropped the act. “Yeah. Yeah, Ron Weasley, you hear me? I am done. With this and with you. After everything I have done, after everything that has happened, how you can still just sit there and not make what should be the most obvious choice of your life when it is shoved in your face is completely beyond me!”

On some level, I was aware that we were in a crowded Common Room that had just gone completely silent, that about thirty or so people were currently listening to every word I was saying. On some level, I was aware of it. It just wasn’t on any sort of level that had any control. I’d kept it in for too long; it kinda had to come out.

“When you’re asked to choose between one of the most important people in your life and someone who has only ever hurt you, you don’t sit there like a lump!” I screamed. “You make your bloody choice! For Merlin’s sake! This should be one of the easiest things you’ve ever done!”

He didn’t look at me once through all that. And I stood there, breathing hard, glaring at him in disgust, and dealt the final blow. “Yeah, you sit there, Ron. And you know what? You can have your bloody life back. I don’t want to be part of it anymore. I cannot believe I spent so much of my time, my energy, my life, caring about such a monumental idiot!”

And I stormed up the girls’ staircase, to disappear into and wreck my dorm room in such a blazing rage like I’ve never experienced before. That’s the part of the night I can’t really remember clearly. I just know that when Parvati came up, she found me sitting on the floor at the edge of my bed, in the midst of what had once been bedcurtains, sobbing harder than I can ever remember sobbing, out of – god, anger and anguish and frustration and hurt and a million and a half other things I don’t even come close to having words for. And failure. Overwhelmingly, failure. I had failed. I had failed. Myself and my plan and Hermione and most of all Ron. Everything I’d been trying to do, everything I’d hoped to accomplish . . . all just shattered into a million pieces right in front of me.

And when Parvati came in, she didn’t say a thing about what had just happened or about the state of the room. She didn’t try to make me feel better. She simply came over, sat next to me, and put her arms around me. I don’t know how long exactly we sat like that; it was not quite long enough for me to cry myself sick, but that was only because of what happened next.

There was a knock at the door. Under normal circumstances, my mind would have been whirling, making lists of all the possible people who could have knocked, figuring out game plans for how I would deal with each of the different possibilities, that sort of thing. But in this instance, I was too numb and miserable to care about any of that.

With a light pressure on my arm, Parvati stood and crossed to the door, opening it just wide enough to communicate. I couldn’t see who stood on the threshold, but I didn’t even care, not really.

“What do you want?” Parvati asked whoever it was.

“Please, I just want to talk to her,” came the reply in a voice I knew well and should have anticipated.

“No,” was Parvati’s immediate response.

“Parvati –”

“What good do you expect it to do, Hermione? What could you possibly have to tell her that she’d want to hear?” In some inner recess of my mind, I felt a faint surge of gratitude for Parvati.

“I want to explain! It’s not what she thinks,” was Hermione’s forceful answer. Parvati shifted slightly and waited. “I – we weren’t up there alone. Harry was with us, he just – didn’t come down at the same time. Nothing happened.”

“Then why couldn’t Ron have told her that himself? She gave him plenty of opportunities.”

“Please let me talk to her.” In any other situation, I would have smiled at Hermione’s not-so-obvious attempts to avoid the question.

“No,” Parvati said again. “She’s resting.”

“Will you tell her at least?” Hermione asked, a hint of irritation creeping into her voice.

“Why is this so important? Am I supposed to believe you suddenly care about Lavender?”

“Look,” Hermione said then, and I could tell she’d lost patience with the whole thing. “This isn’t about who I care about or don’t care about; this is about correcting misconceptions. And nothing happened between me and Ron. I don’t want anyone thinking that Ron is disloyal or unfaithful. It didn’t mean anything. And if you could pass along that message, I’d appreciate it.”

The door closed and I heard footsteps echoing away down the staircase, but apart from noticing those things, I showed no sign I’d taken in anything that had just happened. Until, that is, Parvati came back, hesitantly. Watching her shins approach – because that’s all of her that was in my line of vision – I suddenly couldn’t stay in that room anymore. Hermione’s words were echoing unbearably in my head, and I had to get out.

“Lav–” Parvati tried to say, but I had already pushed myself up from the floor.

“It didn’t even mean anything,” I said as I pushed past her, out the door.

Where Hermione had gone down, I went up. It was rare that anyone ever went up in the tower higher than their dorm, but I went up. I went past the seventh year dorms and the first and the second until I reached the top of the tower, where the staircase ended in a trap door. And I pushed the trap door open and went up on the top of the Gryffindor parapet. I stood up there, letting the still-fierce April night air whip my hair around my face and dry the lingering tears on my cheeks. I braced my hands against the rough stone and leaned over and just tried not to think at all.



Part the Third