So, this was supposed to be for the TL's Hard, Loud, and Fast Challenge, but it exploded over the word limit so,now, it's just a... thing.

Rated M for sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

No Infringement Intended.

Prelude

She shows early for the session, a blue hood and rubber-soled boots squeaking through the door. Mac- because that's supposed to be the model's name, today. A Mac in a mac, Dean will remember thinking- remember exactly- because it's just this sort of banal observation that, so far, always precedes the moment it all goes tits up. A grafittied rucksack and a pair of poodle pink lips puckered around a lolly stick, until she flips back her hood. An un-telegraphed apocalypse shaking off raindrops across the room.

Dean sways. The stab of adrenaline screams fight or flee, but there are already a handful of students clipping paper to boards and sorting through fiddly bits of charcoal. He shoves his trembling fists deep into the front pocket of his sweatshirt and weaves through the easels, face molded into his Instructor's smile. Their re-introduction is slippery, a farce of hand-shaking and exchanged aliases, but she never so much as flinches, never once glances back toward the door. "Big, brass clackers on that girl," Seamus always said, and Dean reckons he's right. When she steps onto the platform and disrobes, it's like the moon dipping closer to earth, pushing its great, pocked self from behind the clouds, demanding to be seen.

Only, Dean can't look. He does his job, monitors the many versions of her altered body taking shape on paper, but he can't shift a glance toward the actual flesh on the platform. And when class is over and he stalls at the sight of her blonde chignon and blue coat on the other side of the door, he hopes the pause is long enough to satisfy Seamus, wherever he is.

She smirks, says, "Daniel," then asks if he'd fancy a cuppa. She flips up her hood, presses a damp shoulder to his dry one beneath the umbrella.

Her knee knocks a steady beat against his own beneath the table, and the fact she's still a shameless, serial flirt is as comforting as the five packets of sugar she just sprinkled into her tea. Sweets and boys. Two things Lavender has always liked very much, and the bound-up feeling in Dean's fingers unwinds a bit. Some things, no matter what happens, simply must endure.

She asks what he's been up to, casual like. Dean's not sure where she wants to begin, so he just shrugs. "Uni, mostly. You?"

"Working. I work a lot."

All that comes after, it's sort of like a first date, only they each already know the others deepest, most terrible secret. And while she's definitely not the same (there's a noticeable absence of giggling, only once does she check her reflection in the window), she's alike enough that the guilt tamps down his laughter, makes him watch her hands instead of her eyes. She asks what he thinks of her piece, his professional opinion, and Dean opens his mouth, tries to call up the details from his student's drawings, but decides, at last, not to fake it.

"I never got a proper look, really."

She smiles, squeezes at the napkin wadded in her hand. "Right. That's what I thought."

"No. I... I wanted to, just..."

"Couldn't."She pulls her empty cup closer. "Right."

This Seamus-sized crater they've skirted all evening- now they've sauntered up to the edge, Dean wonders who will shove whom in first. Neither seem too eager. He lines up the cashed sugar packets on the table. She clears her throat, then lifts her bag from the floor. She stands suddenly, the scrape of her chair lancing down his spine, and he makes to stand, too, but she puts a hand on his shoulder, bends to kiss his cheek. She whispers in his ear, something he loses in the surrounding din, and slips the napkin into the front pocket of his sweatshirt.

For Seamus, Dean thinks, then calls the number on the napkin. Seamus, as he meets her at park gates and under pub awnings and by the mouths of tube stations. They toss bits of bread to ducks and go to galleries and he sketches quick studies of her hands twisting napkins into chord over lacquered tables, covers whole pages with her working fingers, her eyes. Dean asks if she'd ever want to go back to where they'd come from, and she doesn't even think, just says no. He picks up her potion ingredients from her supplier. Double, then triple, weighs the aconite, just to make sure. He listens through the locked door, agony on the other side, then, later, reaches toward her muzzle, hand shaking, breathes when she noses his palm. He blocks out her portrait: the scythes of her shoulder blades, the regal line of her neck. A lobeless ear, the tattooed flowers disappearing under her Dutch braid. He meets her outside the bar in Brixton after closing, brings her frothed de-caf coffees and sugar glittered scones. He walks her home, laughs at her eerily dead-on impressions of Professor Trelawney. She backs him against the streetlight, kisses him weak-kneed before the sun comes up. He follows her down into her flat, touches her moonstone skin as she rocks above him.

Fugue

Mid-crowd, her mouth pouts under a blue hood.

Seamus pops the snare, and thinks of war.

No, no. Not this. Not now. Not while there's a cycle to complete. A pattern to lose himself to behind the kit. Don't think, feel it through. Sick and shock, they dilute into the rhythm, the triplets. Keep the beat. The cycle, the circle. Moira's voice, striking their skins like a rubber hose. A voice that snags the hair from the root. Moira at the mic, eyes closed, Seamus knows, as she holds out her hands.

Keep the beat, drive the rhythm.

I stayed, prayed for your kiss

Lit the lights, held the Host on my tongue

You went, spoiled those pretty wrists

Faithless, faithless

What have you gone and done?

Fuck, that's grim.

Cycles. Circles.

He always knew he'd see her again.

He pounds the toms, and wonders: how many songs are there begging questions of the dead?

…..

Lav sits cross-legged between them on the big, green sofa, tray on her knees, crushing tiny, red-speckled spheres into powder with a butter knife. Seamus smashes out his third John Player Blue and nods at Dean's story about his sister's new bloke. A "shady geez", Dean says, old enough to thump up to the curb- 'ridin' low', he calls it- driver's seat all but horizontal in a beetle-blue death trap. Dean's wee sister. Barely shed of her baby fat. The same age Seamus and Lav were when he taught her to inhale, and she taught him to crook his fingers, just so.

A woman's husk of a voice, half-woken and wet, slides from Dean's speakers. Seamus drags his eyes off Lavender, looks at the flash of the muted telly, instead. The urge to stand and pace and scream, 'Why?' is strong and ill-timed, and he fakes a long, wheezy cough, then scratches behind one ear. There's a strange tint in the air here in Dean's flat tonight. An umber haze. A clog in the rhythm. As the conversation stutters, Seamus charts the movement in the room; Lavender, cheek bulged around her lolly, scooping a tiny pile of powder onto the blade of the knife, Dean, idly stroking his knuckles over her spine, Seamus, himself, twitching as Dean touches her, tapping another cigarette from the pack.

Come back with us, Dean had said. Lav says she has a bit of a treat, yeah.

A treat. Yeah.

Seamus is staring, again- he can't stop staring- and, this time, Lavender meets his eyes, tilts a long, indecipherable look his way. She pops the lolly, a smooth ball of bruise purple, from her mouth, and says, "No one is ever so attractive as the boy one's family can't stand," then draws the inside of her middle finger over the wet centre of her tongue. Seamus pauses mid-breath, holds it, as she strokes the lolly, building up a gloss coating, then arranging a fat line of powder from fingertip to palm. Her arm unfolds toward his throat. She cocks a brow, offers.

"What's this, then?" Doesn't matter. He'll do it. Soon as he's sure how.

Lavender smiles, licks her lips. A thousand arrows shred his heart.

"Runespoor eggs," she says. "Fresh from the middle mouth."

Any old Muggle pharmaceutical would've done, but this…

"That's... highly illegal."

She lifts her hand, shrugs. "I'm highly illegal"

Fair point.

Seamus leans forward and takes the line, its vessel, into his mouth. She pushes in, presses way back onto the soft palate, let's him roll her up in his tongue like a genie in a carpet. Past the bitterness of the powder, a boozy tingle of dark wine. He watches her watch him, lolly clicking against her teeth as her tongue ferries it from one cheek to the other. Now he knows what she'd taste like, and Seamus is just thinking he'll never drink a decent Port again without going half-mast, when Dean strokes her spine, and she takes back her finger, sucked clean, and all the old, grey wounds are open and weeping, but Seamus is, after all, asking for it.

Whatever this game, he will beg to play.

She feeds Dean a line off the same finger, rolls her lolly through the remnants. She sets the tray on the floor, and Seamus lights his cigarette, leans back out of Dean's line of sight, and waits. He watches Lavender's jaw crunch through what's left of the lolly, taps out a beat on the sofa with his thumb, rolls the smoke around behind his teeth for old times sake.

Old times. Lavender's weight on his chest, and Seamus barely breathing, she'd peer down. She liked the way he could catch smoke, the way he'd let it swirl, languid, boding, from his open mouth. Like mists clearing from a crystal ball, she'd said.

Smoke. Her hair sweeping across his knuckles. Dissolving tendrils, there, then gone. The first wave starts in the tips of his fingers, the voice from the speakers rasping over his skin like a warm, woolly blanket. Seamus closes his eyes, tries to define this thing he craves, utterly still, suddenly weightless, buoyed by the perfect placement of all other things present between these four walls. He perceives Lavender move then touch Dean in some way at the other end of the sofa, and when he opens his eyes, his gaze meshes with hers, his whole body sensing the summons before she even asks, "So, Shea... I'll show you mine, if I can see yours." She fingers the neckline of her dress, unveils a peek of ink. White ghosts shimmer above her hands.

Seconds drip through each other, mix, turn inside out, then unravel. Lavender shifts onto her knees, crawls his way, hips swinging with each sink of the sofa cushions. She plucks the lit cigarette from the corner of his mouth with two fingers, gently rolls the cherry out on the ashtray instead of smashing it down.

"I wanna see..."

Seamus' t-shirt lifts, skims the contours of his face, then is cast to the side. And he's so sunk into the black ripples of Lavender's eyes, he's not sure whose hands did the lifting, not sure if the tingle in his lips is residual sensation from the tug of his collar, or, rather, localized cellular anticipation, molecules whizzing wild with the idea of finally latching onto her skin.

"'S nothin' too special," he says, tongue thick. "Knot work, and..." The strangeness of his own voice. It clatters around his brain pan, a big Tri-lite marble splotched with emerald and gold and St. Patrick blue. Her gaze drifts down, crosses his collarbones, stills over his chest.

"A Tree of Life," she finishes for him

And one more, he thinks. A little, hidden tribute he was sure she'd never see.

Cycles.

Circles.

The cruelest trick in Totality; Nothing is ever truly finished.

Lavender peeks up through her lashes, locks her eyes on his, and it's so much like that last bit of sixth year, Seamus can almost hear Binns droning in the background, can almost taste her sugar quill, the strawberry stain rubbed from her lips to his moments ago in the corridor outside the classroom. He knows what's coming, and, still, he sags with relief when she finally touches him, tracing the vein from the inside of his elbow down to his wrist. Her thumb dips into his palm, seeking, following his heart line along to the place where it begins, then pressing in, digging hard with the nail. X marks the spot. Her fingertips hook into his, drawing him with her as she maneuvers backward. She turns, and he is bereft of her face. Dean's hands circle her waist, then slide down, slow. Her head falls forward as Dean's face turns up. They kiss.

Plum muslin swallows Dean's wrists, bunches, clings over the bell of her arse, then glides away. Her skin. A thousand brilliant colours reaching. A bright forest, bundled and gnarled. A wolf wrought in flowers. She kneels between them, bared, vincible, and, when Dean reaches around her for Seamus' flies, Seamus lifts into his fingers, understanding Ceremony enough to know that this is how they all must be- the only true, pure way to commune.

The haze has faded to pink. The ink in Lavender's skin pulses electric, arrhythmic as the beating of Seamus' own flustered heart, and he tilts forward, dizzy, grips onto her to steady himself. A whip of vine slithers up his wrist when he touches her hip. Datura blossoms unfurl along her spine, quiver under his breath. He nestles his face into the patch of purple shamrock bedded on one shoulder, sets off a rustle of butterfly wings. He bucks against her, snaring the hair that trails below his navel in the fronds feathering the small of her back, and all he can think is he wants to burrow deep into this moist terra, let her break him down to skull and bones. Dean guides her back, Aengus hands spread, perfect, over her breasts, then disappears down. Warm breath ghosts the damp tip of Seamus' cock, then Lavender gasps, and her hips roll, and Seamus is there, rooted, sunk in. Her scars are cool, slick ropes laid in sun-warm silk, and he traces each one, breathing the fluorescent vanilla wafting from her cleavage. One hand winds into her hair, grasps gently, how she used to like, right next to the scalp. She relaxes into his grip, and Seamus holds her in place, makes sure she hears when he whispers her chosen name in his mother tongue.

"Mac...

Mac tire."

Her head lolls back on his shoulder. Now she knows that he knows, she brings a hand up, cups his cheek, slides her knees a little wider. And nothing's been this good since those nights behind his curtains, Neville gone off who-knows-where and the otherwise empty dorm tomb silent around them, when Seamus learned how to make her whine, and jerk, and clench, and arch...

Dean's hands wrap then squeeze around the backs of Seamus' thighs, and, tonight, with the powder still bitter in the back of his throat, it's just another thing- one more thread stringing the three of them through the same wet dream. Seamus closes his eyes, weighs the heft of Lavender's breasts in his wrists, but keeps his thumbs in check. No one's mentioned the rules, but, somehow, Seamus knows there are things he's not allowed, not until she says. Favorite things: Her nipples, the three inches of belly just under her navel, her lips.

Her legs are trembling, and she's touching them both, but she says Seamus' name, a misty breeze of a sound. And it doesn't matter that Dean's down below, lapping like a kitten at a saucer of milk, because Seamus is inside, and, fuck, but she's the only one who's ever fully grasped this rhythm. The only other absolute master of his up-thrusts and down-strokes.

The thought pings up the length of his cock, a spike of unh ohyeah, and, for a second, Seamus is one held breath from grinding into the blue. He lifts his head, opens his eyes, focuses on the light from the telly scribbling along the pulp of her lower lip, a glistening dance of quicksilver dots and dashes, a code he can't quite decipher.

Six years, she's been gone.

There should be another in the wide world this works as well with, but Seamus hasn't found them, yet. He wants to tell her. He wants to hold her still, pinned against his shoulder, hand plastered across her forehead like a cool cloth over fevered skin, and hiss it into her ear- I searched for you, woman. I looked for your face.

His limbs are dead heavy, and his eyes suddenly sting, and Seamus knows for sure he's staggered about five beats in the wrong direction. He sniffs her hair, tears gathering, and he's just thinking he might be better off- all mashed and maudlin- by himself somewhere, when Dean tugs his thighs which drives him into Lavender who swerves over Dean, and they all groan and sigh together. Three voices- Seamus' Tri-Lite against Lavender's pink Galaxy against Dean's Tiger Eye- all whirling around each other into the haze.

Lavender squeezes around him, whispers, "Just like that, yeah...," her lips brushing his jaw as she weaves her fingers between his, anchoring both his hands to her body. "You... oh, you... just like that."

Her heat, and their rhythm, and her soft parts, so heavy in his palms. This, Seamus thinks. This will be all right.

He presses his lips to Lavender's temple, allows his thumbs free reign.

Coda

The fog she made still clings to the window, its feathered edge neon, a pretty trick of the morning light.

Lavender backs away from the glass, counting, her thighs raising goose flesh at the brush of the t-shirt draped over the arm of the chair at the foot of the bed. It's more clothes dump than anything, but Lavender climbs into where the seat should be, anyway, throws her legs over the side, nests into the scent rising off Dean's pea-coat and jumper topping the pile. Fifty, and Seamus should be at the foot of the stairs. Sixty, and the door to the building should be swinging shut behind him. She tweezes the unlit cigarette from between her lips and stares at the sheet of silver mist glazing the pane, wills it to somehow refract the force of her gaze down to the pavement, up the street, and into the back of Seamus' head. Just a gentle beam of a feeler, really. A telepathic poke to make him turn and see where she had stood.

It isn't an apology, the ghost on the window. No. More a nod to their perpetual 'almost, not quite'. She waves the cigarette under her nose, replays the last half-hour in her head, tries to find the tweak that would have stalled their tendency to... misalign. Tea leaves and crystal balls may be a load of old rot, but Lavender still believes in vibrations– in synchronicity and resonance, in imbalance and discord, in sympathetic oscillations and inevitable harmonic convergence with certain other souls.

Some people, read 'she and Seamus', are simply meant to cycle in and out of each other's lives until they get it right.

She remembers trying to tell him so last night, Dean's arm heavy around her waist, and her and Seamus' fingers linked under the duvet, grasped tight, like a couple of Firsties hiding their held hands beneath the table in the Great Hall. His head had touched hers, and she placed the cigarette they were sharing between his lips and asked if he ever thought about the sky. And she was about to say something applicable, something about compulsory forces and shifting orbits, when she was suddenly distracted by the tiny speck of light on the tip of the cigarette. This light that could travel through the window and past the atmosphere and on through space. This light he's making when he takes a drag, that tiny speck of an orange flare, it will go on and on, a little bit of this single point in time where they are here in this bed, holding hands and smoking, on and on, for as good as forever. And Seamus said something between "wow," and, "whoa," his voice gritty with smoke and the late hour, and Lavender drifted asleep to the sound, its echos mutating gently in the powdered, pink fuzz of her dreams.

Then, this morning, she woke to the smell of fresh-lit cigarette. Seamus sat on the floor by the door, shirtless, denims unbuttoned and feet bare, flicking ash into the heel of one of Dean's trainers, the prat. She stared from her pillow in the middle of the bed, her palm flat on the still warm spot where he'd lain, and he shot a loaded sideways glance toward the door, then fixed his gaze on her, and waited.

And this is where it all went pear-shaped. There, in the first grey glint of morning. She and Seamus- always best in the dark. Always hearing each other better in whispers. What he wants to know, now, what he wants to hear her say, are all the things that can not bear the light. All the bits about the night she left St. Mungo's- the misdiagnosis, how she hurt herself during the change. How the "Patient Liaison" from the Ministry's kennel club had sat, thin, placid, unmarked, while Lavender bent so they could shave her head to treat the wounds, black rage crackling in the lengths of her teeth as the blood streaked coils fell to the floor. How she'd understood she was dead, then, that her skin was a dead girl's skin, so she ran so no one could touch it. How, sitting for her ink, every punch of the needle had burned her back to life, millions of divine sparks. How, with her name, it's him in her head every time someone says it. How it is, sometimes, one can decide exactly what pain they want to feel.

The Why he wants to hear, it's not meant to be spoken with legs tucked up on the green sofa, morning cuppa steaming in hand. But Seamus was waiting, and all she could do, then, was shake her head "no," and reach over the bed, palm up. Seamus tilted his head, took a long, silent drag, and- just like that- they slipped back into a familiar vernacular of smoke signals, fast blinks, and bitten lips. Wholly inadequate expressions for all the reasons she'd had to go, and all the reasons this is where she will stay.

Dean's leg stretches, his form split in two by the drape of white sheet over his bum. He grasps his pillow in his sleep, throws out an arm, muscles jumping under his skin like serpents writhing through sand, and Lavender is tempted to launch herself upon him, to crawl up his body just to scrape her teeth over the smooth, round cap of his shoulder. Instead, she rests her cheek against the chair-back, buries a nostril in his scarf. If she could bottle this, this mix of coffee and icing-sugared crepes, graphite dust and a hint of petrol, if she labeled it something esoteric and two-syllabled (like Minus, or Bauxite, or Quattro), she could easily make a mint. It trips something inside her every time, this scent, but this morning especially, she wants to wrap her head inside it, wear it like a hostage hood and smother in his fumes. The rest of the room still reeks of sex. She still reeks of it, and the goddamn dog part of her wants to lick the stink from her fingers, to taste last night all over again.

"Lav?" Her name. Her heart squeezes at it smushed into Dean's pillow. "Lav, combattabeh."

She smiles, rolls from her nest, takes two steps then kneels on the tangle of bedding, lays cool hands over the backs of his warm heels. Just skin, there. His beautiful, un-stained skin, rising up in sharp ridges. She thinks of Seamus' heels, the bright sprig of lavender drawn over the tendon of the left. Ink so old it's begun to bleed.

She might grill Dean about it later. Right now, she leans forward, hands splaying over the backs of his calves, then his thighs, then his arse under the sheet. Lavender sweeps her thumbs over the inside spot where thigh suddenly blooms into bum and Dean grunts, snorts, makes a half-hearted attempt to crawl away.

"Oi! What's going on back there?" A half-open eye, and his top teeth, white as the pillow bunched under his head. Dean has a smile that untucks all her soft, frayed edges, then tickles at the fringe.

"I was just thinking," she says, pushing the sheet aside and settling astride his arse, "of a boiling hot shower, and the full English at Mae's." She leans forward, sniffs her way up his spine, her front pressing to his back, before she rolls to lay beside him.

"Hungry?" He smiles, again, guides a lock of hair from her face, then lifts his head from the pillow, scans the room. "Table for two, then?" He settles back down, gaze locking onto hers, gauging, and Lavender remembers: Dean and Seamus, they were first. She just has a knack for showing up when either one or the other happens to have gone away.

"Yeah."

Dean smirks, glances over her shoulder at the empty doorway, then back into her eyes. "Did he bother to say goodbye, or just bugger off while we were sleeping?"

She lifts the cigarette Seamus slipped under her pillow, an odd item to exchange for the long, soft suckle he'd taken from her bottom lip before he walked out.

"He said goodbye in a fashion."

"Filthy habit," Dean says, mock gravitas flashing over his brow, and Lavender knows they could keep moving along like this, and it might be easy for today, but she can't see it stretching as far as next week, and the fear is abrupt- heavy knots beating in her throat, her chest, behind her eyes,..

"Dean, I... I didn't..."

"I know." He lays his hand in the curve of her waist, long fingers light on her scars, a touch, despite everything, she feels zip down her thighs.

"I can't lie... It was amazing , and you were brilliant, but, it wasn't..." She looks at his chest, breathes deep. "I don't..."

He shifts closer, tilting her into the dip of the mattress, into him. "Look," he presses his forehead to hers, "that stuff got all over us, yeah?" He swallows. "Wasn't exactly the ice-breaker we'd thought it'd be." He smiles, the tip of his thumb stroking the bow of her rib, slow, soothing.

"Ice-destroyer, more like." She wrinkles her nose, and Dean laughs.

Dean laughs, and Lavender thinks of one of their earliest outings, back when Dean would not laugh, when the idea of Seamus was still a firm wedge, an expanse so wide they could each barely make out the other's form from their opposite sides. The gallery had been quiet, only their weight creaking in the floorboards and the muted rush of the city outside, and they had stood and stared at what appeared to be a murky canvas until, always along the edges of true centre sight, seemingly formed from the dark, she could see trees iced with snow and black wings unfurling, slashes of green bursting into red mists, a sweep of moon-coloured hair and the blink of far-away, grey eyes.

And when she'd asked, What do the Muggles see?, he'd told her they sense the shifts, but can't find the details. They feel the feeling, but they can't say why. And when Lavender didn't ask, What feeling?, it was because they each already knew what the other knew. So, she'd offered her hand, and, for the first time, Dean had taken it, and she'd thought how nice it was to just be still with someone who understands what it's like to have to run.

The fog on the window has cooled to nothing. Lavender moves closer into Dean as he threads his fingers through her hair. She thinks of the full moon next weekend and the ash in his shoe. She kisses his shoulder, eyes open, wishing she had his talent for saying a thing in pictures. If she'd only carved a column of hieroglyphs through the haze- a fractured heart, a four leaf clover, a pair of puckered lips, a spunking dick (because, Seamus has always been predictably laddish about the spunking dick)- if he'd only looked back, maybe he'd have received the message, loud and clear; I will carry you with me, darling, the best way my fumbling heart knows how.

.FIN.

A/N: Mac tire is Irish for "wolf".

I'll be honest: this thing... I just don't know.

Thank you for reading. If you'd like to share a thought, I'll share some back.