An Interference of Portraits

Garden Gnome Party

'Thank you,' he mumbled, but I noticed he did look a bit more relaxed.

'Hey, Ronnikins! Don't put that on the bonfire,' I said to Ron, diverting the attention away from the current conversation and because Ron was levitating the broken bench towards the flames.

I moved away because dealing with exes and their new boyfriends was just awkward even though I'd tried to make it clear I had no feelings on the matter. I temporarily put my efforts into fixing the broken furniture until it matched the bench that Draco was sitting on. We arranged them in a messy circle and I took my place next to Draco again but now with Teddy in my lap, squidged against me.

'When did you get this bit of the garden done?' asked Luna, 'I'm sure it wasn't like this last time I came down to see Dusty. Is the pond and a water feature new?'

'Harry and I had some help from Dusty,' Draco said smugly.

'Actually, I think it's more accurate to say, Dusty did it and Draco and I helped minimally. The pond was hidden under excessive shrubbery. Elf-magic goes a long way when you've got a very proud and determined House-Elf who wants the garden to look a certain way. He's been going around hanging replicas of Nev's ribbons on the trees and bushes he thinks should be kept. And I'm fairly certain he keeps raiding the Goyle's garden when he wants a particular plant. That was were he was previously working, they wouldn't pay him so he came here.'

There were a considerable number of smirks around the group at the mention of raiding the Goyle's garden.

A silence fell. There was an odd sort of dynamic to group because we hadn't quite settled together, perhaps because it was the first time Draco, Pansy, and Blaise had come together with me, Hermione, and Ron. We didn't have a particularly good foundation to build upon and needed to find common ground as a group.

'I hope you don't mind me inviting Lavender, Harry,' Luna said cheerily, probably in a bid to break the awkward atmosphere.

'No, not at all...' I'd kind of given up about who was in my home by that point; I had no idea who or how many people were around.

'Thank you,' Lavender said quietly, not at all like the brash girl I remembered from school when she'd been all over Ron like a bad case Splattergroit.

I looked at her properly and realised she was keeping her head bowed and her hair over the left side of her face. It then struck me: the last time I'd seen her was during the battle, with Fenrir bent over her unconscious body. I seem to remember a stunning spell hitting Fenrir at that moment but it was all such a blur.

'How are you doing?' I asked carefully.

She shrugged, 'it's not easy but Luna is helping me. I'm trying to become a little braver. The scarring...'

'I'm sorry...' I said quietly.

She shrugged again. 'It's not your fault. It's not any of our faults. It wasn't our war, was it? We just did what we could and stood up for what we believed in. We won, that's all that matters.'

'We need to recover too,' said Hermione sympathetically. 'That matters too.'

A silence fell apart from Teddy wheeling his toy digger up my leg and over my stomach and chest as he made 'brrmmm' noises through vibrating lips, oblivious to the serious conversation happening around him. I wasn't the only one that smiled fondly.

'We all experienced different kinds of trauma and it's impacted on us all. Mine's not a special case,' Lavender said quietly, as if trying to divert the attention away from herself. 'It feels good to be with friends, to feel accepted.'

'Are people giving you a hard time?' Draco said, scowling heavily.

'I'm scarred, very visually, by a werewolf. People make judgements. If they know why I'm so badly scarred, they think I've been contaminated. If they don't, they just judge anyway. I haven't been out so much. I get freaked by the attention.'