Lavender’s words sent a chill across Padma’s skin, making her shiver. She wrapped her arms around herself and held on tightly, as though the icy January winds had somehow come reaching in through the castle’s layers of stone and enchantments to find them here. Dying for? Of course this was dangerous, of course it was hard – but die? Padma hadn’t thought about that, not really. Oh she had wept over Cedric of course, they all had, and Professor Dumbledore’s death had had her waking up in her sister’s bed with nightmares for a week after they’d gone home last year – but die? Them? They were students. They might be punished, might be scolded, might even be tortured – but none of them were going to die.
The idea was ridiculous – so why couldn’t Padma shake this chill?
She cleared her throat. “Lav, they aren’t going to…” she started, but Lavender’s next words hit her like a slap across the face and she shrank back in her chair, feeling small and wounded. “I do think for myself!” Padma said hotly, feeling an answering flush grow in her cheeks. “I’m not just some – some stupid helpless puppet trailing in Parvati’s wake like a niffler after some shine!” And so what if she felt safer, more comfortable, more sure of herself when she was? That didn’t mean she couldn’t break in her own direction when she wanted to, if she wanted to. Weren’t her last six and a half years in Ravenclaw Tower proof of that? “I’m here because I want to be. Because I think it’s important. Just because Parvati maybe figures things out faster, it doesn’t mean I have to just agree with whatever she says. If I couldn’t – wouldn’t think for myself, don’t you think I’d have been plopped into Gryffindor with Parvati instead of in Ravenclaw on my own?” Part of Padma couldn’t help but wish she had been, even now – but she hadn’t. That had to mean something.
She sat forward, scowling. “Do you think I just sit around up there waiting for Parvati to call me? I have a life outside the two of you, you know!” And a good thing that was, too, given how little her sister and her best friend had been able to spare time for her this year… “Nobody ever gave the Weasley twins this kind of grief,” Padma muttered, folding her arms and sagging sulkily in her seat. “And they were together every minute. It’s a double standard, is what it is…”
But perhaps, a distant part of Padma realized through the sulk, that wasn’t the whole story. Asking would mean admitting something that she didn’t want to admit even to herself, but… “Has Parvati been pulling away from you, too?” Padma said, her voice little more than a whisper. She had thought that her sister was just too busy with her Gryffindor friends, too busy running around being reckless and bold with the core part of Dumbledore’s Army, to be able to leave much time for her shier, slower sister. But maybe she wasn’t the only one feeling left out by Parvati’s revolutionary fervor – or whatever it was that was keeping her sister so busy these days. But if whatever that was didn’t involve Lavender either, then… Padma swallowed. “I thought it was just me,” she said softly.
Lavender was dumbstruck by the sudden outburst that her mouth nearly hung open in shock. Padma rarely spoke her own opinion on something, but at least she could take some kind of criticism without being stepped on. Unfortunately that was probably the worst Padma’s had to deal with as far as insults; Slytherin House was more than happy to make sure that Lavender didn’t wander the castle without hearing how worthless she was under Voldemort’s rule.
Lavender didn’t want to explain how the Weasley twins were different. If they were a coin, they would both be heads; regardless of which one you got, the result would be the same. Meanwhile Parvati was heads and Padma was tails – if you were hoping for one, it would be a disappointment to get the other. Lavender didn’t think of it like that so often, since they were different but surely equal – though Lavender wasn’t entirely sure that Padma was telling her was true.
“I mean – you never really talked about anyone in Ravenclaw…” Lavender had to stop herself from asking what life it was exactly that Padma had in Ravenclaw Tower, and she overestimated her own listening skills. Had Padma mentioned anything about her own house, and Lavender just wasn’t paying attention? Lavender’s words cut, but Padma’s logic didn’t sound… right though. Just because she supposedly wouldn’t think for herself, it didn’t mean that she didn’t choose otherwise.
“Anyway. Parvati knows how to fight her own battles.” She didn’t want to immediately agree with Padma – doing so would mean admitting to something that Lavender didn’t want to even consider: perhaps she and Parvati weren’t friends anymore because of this?
“And Parvati knows how not to get herself killed. Maybe you do too. But if I can’t figure out how to avoid being used as a practice dummy during Muggle Studies, then I have no idea how to get out of it once they start using something worse than a Cruciatus.” Did Padma really believe that it wasn’t going to get worse? If she and Parvati were going to use their pureblood privilege to fight back, then fine. But did she really believe that everyone was suffering in the same ways? “Do you think they’d be punishing you the same amount if you were halfblood – or less?”
Or less was really in reference to Lavender herself – she was much closer to being a muggleborn and was only separated from the rest by a lucky sliver of the Brown family bloodlines.
