(no subject)
Title: Plateau
Rating: PG-13
Summary: "Three years down the track, at the young age of twenty-five, she felt like she’d been in the exact same situation forever." Lavender gets frustrated with the situation she's in. Complete fluff.
Notes: I started to write this for annemjw's birthday, but that was two months ago or something. Happy Birthday anyway. Complete Zach/Lav fluff - set vaguelly in the Vertick Alley universe, but also vaguely canon compliant.
The thing about starting up a relationship with your best friend, Lavender Brown decided, was that everything got very serious, very quickly, and then plateau'd. They were already living together when it began so they just carried on, although her evenings more often than not ended with sex and snuggling, whereas B.Z. (Before Zacharias) sex was a trashy romance novel and snuggling was piling her bed high with blankets. She knew all his habits and had long since learned to live with them. She knew everything about him. There was the fun stuff, discovering kissing and touching and sex together. But it didn’t take long to know his body as well as she knew her own.
So three years down the track, at the young age of twenty-five, she felt like she’d been in the exact same situation forever.
She was out with the girls and two drinks shy of being utterly inebriated. Mrs. Aidan Lynch, Parvati Patil as was, had ordered a round of Firewhiskey Freezers, mostly in order to flirt with the seriously sexy bartender at the Loaded Griffin. Hermione Granger, a two-drink drunk, was pulling faces at Susan Bones and talking loudly about sex with Ron Weasley, something Lavender was keen to never hear more about in her life. Padma was sipping on Butterbeer, unsurprisingly, and rolling her eyes at her sister over at the bar.
“She knows she’s married right?” Padma muttered to Lavender.
“Sometimes I wonder,” Lavender replied.
Parvati returned with the drinks and Susan stood up, swaying. “I have an announcement.” Hermione tapped the side of her glass with a spoon. “Blaise and I are engaged.” She flashed the small diamond ring around.
Silence. “I think I’m hallucinating,” Lavender said, her tone conversational. “What was in those cocktails, Parvati?”
Parvati stood up. “Congratulations, Susan. It’s about time.” And the congratulations flowed forth. This was something Susan would never have done if she hadn’t been drinking.
It was only later that Lavender thought about it and realised she and Zacharias had been together for the same length of time as Susan and Blaise. The walk home sobered her up somewhat and she arrived home just tipsy enough to be extremely tired. Zacharias was in bed, asleep, but he woke up when she opened the door.
“Hey,” he whispered, blond curls sticking up all over the place. “Good night?”
“It was okay. Susan and Blaise are getting married.” He laughed, soft and disbelieving. Lavender slipped off her clothes and curled up under the blankets with him. “Susan may have been drunk when she announced it.”
He leaned over and kissed her, long nose ghosting her cheek. One thing was for certain, she still got that tingly feeling in her stomach when he touched her. That probably meant it was all going to turn out in the end.
The next day, she woke up and he’d already left for work. Instead, there was a banging on the front door. Lavender pulled on one of Zacharias’s shirts and went to answer it. Susan was on the doorstep.
“What did I do?”
“Um.” Lavender tried to be supportive. “There there. You love Blaise, really.”
Susan lifted her head from her hands and looked at her in surprise. “No, I’m fine about that. I told Parvati Patil.”
“Lynch, actually.”
“Whatever. She writes a gossip column, she’ll tell everyone.” Susan’s dark eyes widened in horror. “She’ll invite everyone.”
Lavender laughed. “Don’t worry, Susan. I’ll help you elope.”
“Actually, I was wondering, would you be my maid of honour? Blaise has Theo Nott as his guy and I thought, well, you’re about the only female I know and don’t regularly want to stick with knives…”
“The sentimentality of this moment is killing me. I’d be honoured to, Suse. Honestly.”
Zacharias was at work, managing the bookshop (although mostly sitting out back and writing his latest novel) but Lavender had the day off. Her manager at the ministry of educational reform had finally promoted her to a consultancy position - purely to stop her whinging. Strangely, she found she missed the research room full of books and papers on education and the long-winded bills she had to edit. She made up for it by being extra mean to poor Rose Zeller, the new girl, who really did try so hard to fill her shoes but was far too sweet and hard-working and straight-edged to do it properly.
The Susan crisis averted, Lavender went for a walk, met up with Seamus and Parvati for brunch. Parvati had brought little Emily along. “Aidan had to head to Ireland for the week, intensive Quidditch training, and Emily just wanted to see her Uncle Shay and Auntie Lavvy-poo, didn’t you sweet pea?”
Seamus pretended to vomit into his eggs but Lavender found herself completely and utterly under Emily’s spell. The nine-month-old just widened her dark eyes, flashed a dimpled grin and Lavender was sold. Emily didn’t leave her lap the entire time they were eating.
She didn’t normally react like that. Normally she viewed Emily with the sort of detached interest of someone faced with the prospect that her best girlfriend won’t be at her every beck and call anymore.
Parvati thought it was cute. “It’s about time you developed a maternal instinct, Lav.”
I’m only twenty-five. I don’t want children.” Lavender knew a lie when she heard one and what she’d just said was a whopper.
Parvati could tell too and grinned. “A little baby girl, three-bedroom house in the country. Domesticity would suit you.”
Seamus scowled. “Lavender is not going to the dark side. It was bad enough when we lost you, Parvati.”
Parvati ignored him. “Imagine a little Zach-Lav baby. It would be just about the cutest thing ever. Blonde curls, big brown eyes and it would toddle about breaking things and being sarcastic all day long. You could call it Lachie!”
Lavender frowned, trying to block the images Parvati had created for her. Seamus banged his head against a spare space on the table. Parvati preened. Little Emily gurgled and threw a fistful of scrambled egg in Seamus’ hair.
Lavender was out of sorts for the rest of the week. The ministry was working her hard, preparing for a trip to Beauxbatons to see how the French educated, which was leaving the next day. Zacharias had writer’s block, which meant he whined a lot and used things like reading Lavender sordid romance novels and cooking fancy dinners as procrastination. Their latest in a long string of flatmates since Susan had moved in with Blaise had stopped paying rent. Susan tried to stab Parvati with a stiletto heel at a gown fitting. And Lavender couldn’t get babies off her brain.
Damn Parvati. Damn Emily. Damn the lot of them.
She was home late from work that night. The house smelt empty so she gathered Zacharias had unblocked and was holed up at his desk, writing furiously. She should’ve been pleased, he had a deadline looming and she always liked it better when he wasn’t moaning, but instead she only felt cross and hungry.
She was working out her inner tension on some poor, innocent vegetables, when he resurfaced.
“What’d they do to deserve that fate?” he asked, as she chopped a carrot so ferociously, it bounced into the air and landed behind the oven.
“I hate orange.”
“Never before with such a passion though.”
She turned around, knife still in hand. “You could’ve got this started.”
He raised his hands in mild protest. “Hey, that’s not fair. I’ve cooked all week, including on your days off.”
“As a form of procrastination. Don’t act all self-righteous with me.”
“Lav, calm down. It’s no big deal. I’ll clean up after dinner.”
“Whatever.” She shrugged and turned back to chopping vegetables. Then she put the knife down and took several deep breaths.
“What’s really wrong, boo?”
“I’m sick of this. We’re stuck in this utterly comfortable kind of lifestyle and I’m only twenty-five and I want hot sex. And I want to have a baby and a puppy and get married and live in the country and I want it all now and why won’t you give it to me?” She clapped a hand over her mouth in horror at what she’d just spewed out.
Zacharias shook his curls and bit his lip. “Wow. Um, that’s a lot to process in ten seconds.”
“Never mind,” she said, too quickly so it was blatant that, really, she did mind. “Bad day.”
“Okay.”
Dinner was a silent affair. Zacharias cleaned up without protest while Lavender sat awkwardly on the couch by the fire, flicking idly through discarded pages of Zacharias’s latest drafts. Times like this she really wished Susan still lived with them - or anyone who’d be around in the evenings occasionally. Jenna, their latest flatmate, was a bartender.
Zacharias sat down beside her and she stiffened. “I’m off to France in the morning.”
“That’s right.”
“So I’ll be away all this week and the next. I’ve paid my share of rent in advance. I did some grocery shopping yesterday but they’ll need to be replenished.”
“I’m more house proud than you, dear.”
“Right. Okay.” She drummed her fingers against the arm of the couch. “I should go to bed, get an early night.”
“I’ll be in soon.”
She pretended to be asleep when he came to bed. He kissed her forehead, turned out the lights and they both lay awake for hours, side by side, without saying anything. When she left the next morning, he was still asleep, light hair sticking up every which way and frown lines creasing his forehead.
Two weeks later, after a rough time in the international portkey system, she returned to the flat. France had been wonderful but exhausting, mostly because she’d spent the trip fretting about the stupid things she’d said.
The flat was empty. Lavender let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. Then she noticed the box on the table by the door. Do not under any circumstances open this box, Lavender was written in Zacharias’s spiky writing.
She swore. “Think you know me soooooo well.” She picked up the box to throw it across the room and felt the familiar pull at her belly button. “Oh you bastard,” she muttered before she found herself pulled off to Merlin only knows where.
She landed on her stomach in the dirt. She scrambled up, brushed down her front and sighed. “One set of work clothes ruined.” She looked around. She was sitting in someone’s vegetable patch. A few paces away was the back door of a cottage, slightly ajar. She got up, limping due to the fact her heel had snapped during landing and walked inside.
She barely had time to recognise her surroundings beside noting that it was small and dark and smelt like freshly-baked bread because Zacharias stood up from the rocking chair in the corner of the room. He was impeccably dressed, making Lavender all the more aware that she had only one working shoe and dirt stains all down her shirt.
“What the hell is this?” she hissed.
He smirked. “Knew you’d try to open the box.”
“I didn’t try to open the box. I tried to throw it across the room, you bastard.”
“Semantics. Got you here, didn’t I?”
“Zacharias Smith, I am tired, covered in dirt and armed so if you don’t want me to inflict some serious harm…”
He strode across the room and enveloped her in an embrace, kissing her more forcefully than she could remember in a long time. He broke away from her. “I had some time to think while you were away about that list of what you wanted…”
“Oh God. Oh god oh god oh god.” Lavender bit her lip. “You’re never going to let me forget that, are you?”
He glared. “Don’t interrupt. Anyway, I pulled a few strings with your boss and you have the next week off work. At this cottage with me, if you’re not dumping me.”
“Of course I’m not…”
He put a hand over her mouth. “You’re terrible at letting other people talk, you know that, right? Anyway, I figure that will take care of your ‘living in the country’ bug for a while and,” he smirked, “it’ll hopefully take care of the ‘hot sex’ problem as well.”
She stuck out her tongue and slobbered all over his hand and he pulled away in disgust. “I seem to recall those weren’t the biggest issues in that list really.”
“Right. Well, I would’ve bought you a puppy but I was pretty sure you didn’t actually want one.”
She rolled her eyes.
“So, how about it then?”
“What?”
“You, me, the whole ‘vows’ thing. How about it? I don’t think I could handle not having you around for as long as we both shall live.”
“That’s romantic. How about it? Seriously.”
“Pfft. You want me to go on one knee? Lav, I love you, I want to grow old with you and have children with ridiculous names with you and listen to you snoring every night.”
She grinned. “Don’t go overboard.”
“Is that a yes?”
“I suppose I couldn’t really do without you either.” She could feel the grin expanding until she thought her mouth couldn’t get any bigger. “Seamus will never forgive me.”
“I think I’ll be able to live with that.”
She rolled her eyes. “Now, about that other part of my list… I’m pretty sure I’ve ruined these robes beyond repair. I would not be adverse to your ripping them off me.”
Zacharias grinned and pulled her towards a door she presumed (hoped) was the bedroom.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: "Three years down the track, at the young age of twenty-five, she felt like she’d been in the exact same situation forever." Lavender gets frustrated with the situation she's in. Complete fluff.
Notes: I started to write this for annemjw's birthday, but that was two months ago or something. Happy Birthday anyway. Complete Zach/Lav fluff - set vaguelly in the Vertick Alley universe, but also vaguely canon compliant.
The thing about starting up a relationship with your best friend, Lavender Brown decided, was that everything got very serious, very quickly, and then plateau'd. They were already living together when it began so they just carried on, although her evenings more often than not ended with sex and snuggling, whereas B.Z. (Before Zacharias) sex was a trashy romance novel and snuggling was piling her bed high with blankets. She knew all his habits and had long since learned to live with them. She knew everything about him. There was the fun stuff, discovering kissing and touching and sex together. But it didn’t take long to know his body as well as she knew her own.
So three years down the track, at the young age of twenty-five, she felt like she’d been in the exact same situation forever.
She was out with the girls and two drinks shy of being utterly inebriated. Mrs. Aidan Lynch, Parvati Patil as was, had ordered a round of Firewhiskey Freezers, mostly in order to flirt with the seriously sexy bartender at the Loaded Griffin. Hermione Granger, a two-drink drunk, was pulling faces at Susan Bones and talking loudly about sex with Ron Weasley, something Lavender was keen to never hear more about in her life. Padma was sipping on Butterbeer, unsurprisingly, and rolling her eyes at her sister over at the bar.
“She knows she’s married right?” Padma muttered to Lavender.
“Sometimes I wonder,” Lavender replied.
Parvati returned with the drinks and Susan stood up, swaying. “I have an announcement.” Hermione tapped the side of her glass with a spoon. “Blaise and I are engaged.” She flashed the small diamond ring around.
Silence. “I think I’m hallucinating,” Lavender said, her tone conversational. “What was in those cocktails, Parvati?”
Parvati stood up. “Congratulations, Susan. It’s about time.” And the congratulations flowed forth. This was something Susan would never have done if she hadn’t been drinking.
It was only later that Lavender thought about it and realised she and Zacharias had been together for the same length of time as Susan and Blaise. The walk home sobered her up somewhat and she arrived home just tipsy enough to be extremely tired. Zacharias was in bed, asleep, but he woke up when she opened the door.
“Hey,” he whispered, blond curls sticking up all over the place. “Good night?”
“It was okay. Susan and Blaise are getting married.” He laughed, soft and disbelieving. Lavender slipped off her clothes and curled up under the blankets with him. “Susan may have been drunk when she announced it.”
He leaned over and kissed her, long nose ghosting her cheek. One thing was for certain, she still got that tingly feeling in her stomach when he touched her. That probably meant it was all going to turn out in the end.
The next day, she woke up and he’d already left for work. Instead, there was a banging on the front door. Lavender pulled on one of Zacharias’s shirts and went to answer it. Susan was on the doorstep.
“What did I do?”
“Um.” Lavender tried to be supportive. “There there. You love Blaise, really.”
Susan lifted her head from her hands and looked at her in surprise. “No, I’m fine about that. I told Parvati Patil.”
“Lynch, actually.”
“Whatever. She writes a gossip column, she’ll tell everyone.” Susan’s dark eyes widened in horror. “She’ll invite everyone.”
Lavender laughed. “Don’t worry, Susan. I’ll help you elope.”
“Actually, I was wondering, would you be my maid of honour? Blaise has Theo Nott as his guy and I thought, well, you’re about the only female I know and don’t regularly want to stick with knives…”
“The sentimentality of this moment is killing me. I’d be honoured to, Suse. Honestly.”
Zacharias was at work, managing the bookshop (although mostly sitting out back and writing his latest novel) but Lavender had the day off. Her manager at the ministry of educational reform had finally promoted her to a consultancy position - purely to stop her whinging. Strangely, she found she missed the research room full of books and papers on education and the long-winded bills she had to edit. She made up for it by being extra mean to poor Rose Zeller, the new girl, who really did try so hard to fill her shoes but was far too sweet and hard-working and straight-edged to do it properly.
The Susan crisis averted, Lavender went for a walk, met up with Seamus and Parvati for brunch. Parvati had brought little Emily along. “Aidan had to head to Ireland for the week, intensive Quidditch training, and Emily just wanted to see her Uncle Shay and Auntie Lavvy-poo, didn’t you sweet pea?”
Seamus pretended to vomit into his eggs but Lavender found herself completely and utterly under Emily’s spell. The nine-month-old just widened her dark eyes, flashed a dimpled grin and Lavender was sold. Emily didn’t leave her lap the entire time they were eating.
She didn’t normally react like that. Normally she viewed Emily with the sort of detached interest of someone faced with the prospect that her best girlfriend won’t be at her every beck and call anymore.
Parvati thought it was cute. “It’s about time you developed a maternal instinct, Lav.”
I’m only twenty-five. I don’t want children.” Lavender knew a lie when she heard one and what she’d just said was a whopper.
Parvati could tell too and grinned. “A little baby girl, three-bedroom house in the country. Domesticity would suit you.”
Seamus scowled. “Lavender is not going to the dark side. It was bad enough when we lost you, Parvati.”
Parvati ignored him. “Imagine a little Zach-Lav baby. It would be just about the cutest thing ever. Blonde curls, big brown eyes and it would toddle about breaking things and being sarcastic all day long. You could call it Lachie!”
Lavender frowned, trying to block the images Parvati had created for her. Seamus banged his head against a spare space on the table. Parvati preened. Little Emily gurgled and threw a fistful of scrambled egg in Seamus’ hair.
Lavender was out of sorts for the rest of the week. The ministry was working her hard, preparing for a trip to Beauxbatons to see how the French educated, which was leaving the next day. Zacharias had writer’s block, which meant he whined a lot and used things like reading Lavender sordid romance novels and cooking fancy dinners as procrastination. Their latest in a long string of flatmates since Susan had moved in with Blaise had stopped paying rent. Susan tried to stab Parvati with a stiletto heel at a gown fitting. And Lavender couldn’t get babies off her brain.
Damn Parvati. Damn Emily. Damn the lot of them.
She was home late from work that night. The house smelt empty so she gathered Zacharias had unblocked and was holed up at his desk, writing furiously. She should’ve been pleased, he had a deadline looming and she always liked it better when he wasn’t moaning, but instead she only felt cross and hungry.
She was working out her inner tension on some poor, innocent vegetables, when he resurfaced.
“What’d they do to deserve that fate?” he asked, as she chopped a carrot so ferociously, it bounced into the air and landed behind the oven.
“I hate orange.”
“Never before with such a passion though.”
She turned around, knife still in hand. “You could’ve got this started.”
He raised his hands in mild protest. “Hey, that’s not fair. I’ve cooked all week, including on your days off.”
“As a form of procrastination. Don’t act all self-righteous with me.”
“Lav, calm down. It’s no big deal. I’ll clean up after dinner.”
“Whatever.” She shrugged and turned back to chopping vegetables. Then she put the knife down and took several deep breaths.
“What’s really wrong, boo?”
“I’m sick of this. We’re stuck in this utterly comfortable kind of lifestyle and I’m only twenty-five and I want hot sex. And I want to have a baby and a puppy and get married and live in the country and I want it all now and why won’t you give it to me?” She clapped a hand over her mouth in horror at what she’d just spewed out.
Zacharias shook his curls and bit his lip. “Wow. Um, that’s a lot to process in ten seconds.”
“Never mind,” she said, too quickly so it was blatant that, really, she did mind. “Bad day.”
“Okay.”
Dinner was a silent affair. Zacharias cleaned up without protest while Lavender sat awkwardly on the couch by the fire, flicking idly through discarded pages of Zacharias’s latest drafts. Times like this she really wished Susan still lived with them - or anyone who’d be around in the evenings occasionally. Jenna, their latest flatmate, was a bartender.
Zacharias sat down beside her and she stiffened. “I’m off to France in the morning.”
“That’s right.”
“So I’ll be away all this week and the next. I’ve paid my share of rent in advance. I did some grocery shopping yesterday but they’ll need to be replenished.”
“I’m more house proud than you, dear.”
“Right. Okay.” She drummed her fingers against the arm of the couch. “I should go to bed, get an early night.”
“I’ll be in soon.”
She pretended to be asleep when he came to bed. He kissed her forehead, turned out the lights and they both lay awake for hours, side by side, without saying anything. When she left the next morning, he was still asleep, light hair sticking up every which way and frown lines creasing his forehead.
Two weeks later, after a rough time in the international portkey system, she returned to the flat. France had been wonderful but exhausting, mostly because she’d spent the trip fretting about the stupid things she’d said.
The flat was empty. Lavender let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. Then she noticed the box on the table by the door. Do not under any circumstances open this box, Lavender was written in Zacharias’s spiky writing.
She swore. “Think you know me soooooo well.” She picked up the box to throw it across the room and felt the familiar pull at her belly button. “Oh you bastard,” she muttered before she found herself pulled off to Merlin only knows where.
She landed on her stomach in the dirt. She scrambled up, brushed down her front and sighed. “One set of work clothes ruined.” She looked around. She was sitting in someone’s vegetable patch. A few paces away was the back door of a cottage, slightly ajar. She got up, limping due to the fact her heel had snapped during landing and walked inside.
She barely had time to recognise her surroundings beside noting that it was small and dark and smelt like freshly-baked bread because Zacharias stood up from the rocking chair in the corner of the room. He was impeccably dressed, making Lavender all the more aware that she had only one working shoe and dirt stains all down her shirt.
“What the hell is this?” she hissed.
He smirked. “Knew you’d try to open the box.”
“I didn’t try to open the box. I tried to throw it across the room, you bastard.”
“Semantics. Got you here, didn’t I?”
“Zacharias Smith, I am tired, covered in dirt and armed so if you don’t want me to inflict some serious harm…”
He strode across the room and enveloped her in an embrace, kissing her more forcefully than she could remember in a long time. He broke away from her. “I had some time to think while you were away about that list of what you wanted…”
“Oh God. Oh god oh god oh god.” Lavender bit her lip. “You’re never going to let me forget that, are you?”
He glared. “Don’t interrupt. Anyway, I pulled a few strings with your boss and you have the next week off work. At this cottage with me, if you’re not dumping me.”
“Of course I’m not…”
He put a hand over her mouth. “You’re terrible at letting other people talk, you know that, right? Anyway, I figure that will take care of your ‘living in the country’ bug for a while and,” he smirked, “it’ll hopefully take care of the ‘hot sex’ problem as well.”
She stuck out her tongue and slobbered all over his hand and he pulled away in disgust. “I seem to recall those weren’t the biggest issues in that list really.”
“Right. Well, I would’ve bought you a puppy but I was pretty sure you didn’t actually want one.”
She rolled her eyes.
“So, how about it then?”
“What?”
“You, me, the whole ‘vows’ thing. How about it? I don’t think I could handle not having you around for as long as we both shall live.”
“That’s romantic. How about it? Seriously.”
“Pfft. You want me to go on one knee? Lav, I love you, I want to grow old with you and have children with ridiculous names with you and listen to you snoring every night.”
She grinned. “Don’t go overboard.”
“Is that a yes?”
“I suppose I couldn’t really do without you either.” She could feel the grin expanding until she thought her mouth couldn’t get any bigger. “Seamus will never forgive me.”
“I think I’ll be able to live with that.”
She rolled her eyes. “Now, about that other part of my list… I’m pretty sure I’ve ruined these robes beyond repair. I would not be adverse to your ripping them off me.”
Zacharias grinned and pulled her towards a door she presumed (hoped) was the bedroom.