Chapter Text
If any one had bothered to ask Lavender Brown, which people did far less often than they should, she would have told them that tonight was going to be a disaster.
To be fair, it was the day before the thirteenth anniversary of The Battle of Hogwarts.
That was always a difficult day that bled sorrow into the days before and after it.
But this morning when Lavender read her tea leaves— which she did on occasion— she should have just gone back to bed with the wise plan to not come out until May third.
The symbols in her cup were both perplexing and alarming. A clock. Grim. An ouroboros. And, oddly enough, a snitch.
Lavender knew— she was a Divination Master, after all— that she should treat the day with even more caution than usual. She should try divining more details with her tarot deck, or clarify the information with her pendulum. Anything besides walking blindly out her door, mind too fogged by remembered grief— it never did get easier, not even after thirteen years— with a vague promise to herself to look into it more later.
Elowen Vale— Lavender’s divination master— had told her to NEVER ignore her intuition. This was a rule that she typically followed with the determination of a niffler after gold.
But not today, when her third eye felt so clouded, despite it being near Beltane— the veil between worlds should have been thinner and her sight clearer as the equinox approached.
Getting utterly drunk on Fire Whiskey and high on Hannah's new herbal concoction had also been a terrible idea. Lavender would like to blame what happened next purely on the substances and the grief of the day, but she tried not to lie to herself.
Not after the Final Battle, where truth and trust could have saved lives.
Sneaking into the veil room in the Department of Mysteries that night— well, Padma let them in, and she worked there— had seemed like a good idea at the time. Sit in front of the veil at midnight, welcome another bittersweet Bletane, mourn their losses, and smother their pain however they could.
Pansy had been talking about how their third year at Hogwarts was the one where everything went wrong. Before that, she insisted, Tom Riddle— they refused to call him by his made up evil villain name— could have been defeated without the massive loss of life his defeat ultimately cost them.
Pansy’s business was information, and she had almost obsessively researched the war and the events leading up to it in the years following the Final Battle. If she said third year was the breaking point, then Lavender believed her.
But, sitting in front of the Veil, mind somehow both muddled and sharp with clarity— Padma started saying a little prayer about loss and regret and change. Lavender and the other girls joined in, after lighting some candles so no one tripped and fell into the Veil, or something. Lavender hadn’t even registered that they were sitting in a loose circle until it was too late.
As their voices faded, the candles flared alarmingly, and the Veil began to shudder— as if an impossible force was reaching out.
Or looking to drag them in.
A thousand ghostly voices seemed to talk over each other and the girls were engulfed by a dark flare that burst from the Veil.
They clutched at each other's hands, and Lavender had thought that this was it, their end.
And they died doing something stupid too, on the anniversary of the day that had already seen too much death.
But then— light.
When Lavender opened her eyes, she was tangled in her bed sheets on the floor of her bedroom.
Except, it didn’t look like the room in her flat, but rather her old childhood room in the home she had sold off once her parents died.
Lavender staggered to her feet, blindly grasping for her wand. Her head was pounding, her mouth was dry, and the memories of last night were still…blury. She eventually found it on the nightstand— even though ever since the war she slept with it under her pillow— and cast a quick tempus to reorient herself.
Her wand... it was the wrong one. The old one—the one from before the war changed her irrevocably.
Lavender’s mind suddenly cleared— all of the shattered details slammed into horrifying clarity once she saw the date.
June 21st, 1994.
I passed out on Beltane in 2011, and woke up on Litha in 1994! Lavender stifled a hysterical giggle at the thought.
Suddenly, she remembered.
The tea leaves. The clock, the Grim, the ouroboros, and the snitch.
While the snitch was still a mystery to her, the other symbols were starting to make a terrible kind of sense.
1994.
The summer before fourth year.
The quidditch cup of terror.
The year she started her period and got her first zit.
Well, fuck.