RP: Sleepless When: February 26, 2004 (early hours) Who: Lavender Brown, Richard Summerby Where: Richard and Lavender's flat, Clink Street Private/Public: Private Rating: All ages Summary: Lavender's insecurities get the better of her in the early hours.
It was half past three. She had to get up in a couple more hours to get ready for work, but she was awake now. This was ridiculous; that meant she'd only slept for three hours. She was pretty sure that Friday had been the only night she had slept all night in the last week and a half. In hindsight, that was probably just because she had been so emotionally exhausted, too. Now, she seemed to have moved past emotional exhaustion to numbness. The stability and clarity that she had felt on Saturday had lasted only a couple of hours before it had come crashing down around her ears.
She had always been so much better at showing how she felt than telling and maybe that was the problem. She'd never felt something as huge and intense as this before. Everything had just been too much for her to handle and it had all gone so wrong. At the same time, one of the first things she and Richard had promised each other when they had decided to live together was that they were going to tell each other if their feelings changed. Somehow she'd been left feeling in the wrong when she had actually expressed that. Now, in the early hours, her insecurities were getting the better of her. Getting back to sleep was seeming less and less likely.
Lavender had tried so hard all last week not to fall apart, relying so heavily on Rich to keep her from breaking down. Perhaps she'd been a fool to think that she was really ready to talk about weapons and roles and the like. The conversation with Harry had been different, but it had only been the day after the event. She'd been almost disconnected then, not quite there. Talking to Richard and Susan together had been so much more real, so claustrophobic, as though there was nothing odd with having a dozen weapons spread out on the dining table or announcing that your brother thought it was easier to throw a knife if you kept it in your boot.
Padding barefoot to the kitchen, Lavender pulled open the fridge. She sighed, staring at the contents as the light spilled out into the kitchen.
Her head had been in entirely the wrong place for that conversation. Oliver and Alicia dying together like that had set her thinking about people and relationships and how life was too short not to tell someone you loved them. She'd tried to be strong because that was what was expected, wasn't it? Only she couldn't meet those expectations. She wasn't that witch. She was the witch who got overwhelmed by her own emotions, who'd always fluttered from relationship to relationship because making no emotional ties was better than putting herself in a position to get hurt.
Wasn't it?
Only she'd meant what she'd said when she'd been fighting back tears on Saturday. If it were just the two of them, she knew in her heart that she was prepared to commit to him. But it wasn't just her and Rich and, for all her Gryffindor heart, Lavender was the product of two Ravenclaws. So it was her head that was giving her grief now.
Lavender stared at the bottles of beer in the fridge. They'd been tempting her the last few days. It would be so very easy to drink, to make her minda little fuzzy around the edges. That was what she needed right now, something to stop her thinking so much, to quieten down her thoughts for a while.
She pulled out a bottle and opened it on a reflex. Her legs were cold from leaving the fridge door open so long and Lavender closed it. The bottle felt odd in her hand. The last drink she'd had was half a glass of wine on the beach in Marseilles with Richard. Lavender sighed, sinking down onto the floor right there in the kitchen, her back against a cupboard. She stared tiredly at the bottle in the dim light. She wasn't going to find an answer to all her worries in the bottom of it, she knew that much.
Surely the hard part should have been opening the bottle, breaking her resolve. Only now Lavender couldn't seem to lift it to her lips. She needed to stop thinking so badly. She needed to sleep without dreaming, without the nightmares. Especially without the nightmare that she'd been having since everything had gone so wrong on Saturday. It wasn't Oliver and Alicia that she pulled up out the river, it was Richard. He had blue eyes, too. She could picture them so clearly. So lifeless.
Her throat felt like it was closing up and Lavender looked at the bottle almost angrily now. It was just a bottle. It hadn't done anything. But right now she hated it. She hated herself for throwing herself in at the deep end like this. She hated that there wasn't anyone outside this that she could talk to properly - she could already imagine Seamus' reaction and Parvati could barely get her head around the fact that she was living with a man she wasn't married to. She hated that she was so stressed that her appetite had all but disappeared: with her metabolism it was already showing. She hated that the stress was making her almost illiterate, words and letters jumbling up more now than they had for years.
Her grip tightening around the bottle, she had a moment of panic, picturing the bottle breaking in her hand like the mug had the other day. With a growl, Lavender threw it across the kitchen. It broke, crashing loudly against the counter, glass and the contents spilling onto the floor.
Lavender hugged her knees up to her chest, trying not to cry. That resolve didn't last long, either.