Let’s talk about Pansy Parkinson.
Pansy the only child, an ambitious and biting girl, always on the defense, always ready to fight. She’s ready to lie, cheat, and break down anyone who gets in her way.
She’s a bully, she’s mean and rude, she has a wild imagination that she uses to harm others. She lies to her parents, her friends, her enemies. She likes the glares and the sneers and the stammering she gets for her mean remarks.
She’s fine with it all, she’s fine with the simmering anger just under the surface, fine with the quick bursts of rage that overcome her in moments of weakness, fine with the screaming inferno of terror that builds in her stomach. She’s fine, even if everything feels like it’s falling apart all the time.
Pansy let’s her anger fuel her, lets it drive her, and lets it push her to the edge.
~`~
Tracey Davis is the most beautiful girl in the whole year.
Pansy knows that this is more forbidden than anything else in the world. But her lips are soft and warm and feel perfect against her own. This is forbidden because they’re promised to someone else, they’re promised to two boys that want nothing to do with them.
Pansy’s closer to Draco than she will ever be to Gregory, while Tracey is closer to Gregory than she ever will be with Draco. It has everything to do with their parents and nothing to do with them.
“I love you Pansy,” whispered Tracey as she curled herself around Pansy’s body.
Pansy pushed Tracey’s hair out of her face, and leaned forward to kiss her. She loved her, she loved Tracey Davis like breathing, she was beautiful and funny and sweet. She was nicer than Pansy was, than Pansy could ever be, than Pansy would ever be.
Tracey was what made the world better.
“I love you too,” Pansy told her, letting Tracey hitch her leg over Pansy’s hip.
Tracey giggled into Pansy shoulder and Pansy kissed her forehead, she was head over heels for her. She began kissing Tracey’s face anywhere she could, letting Tracey giggle louder.
Pansy was incredibly grateful for their little private bedroom, Draco was the only one who got to have a private room. But Pansy and Tracey got to have a room to themselves, they got to sleep in Tracey’s bed and curl up around one another all night.
It was very romantic and sweet, Millie and Daphne teased them about it all the time. Pansy loved it, she loved falling asleep with Tracey, she loved kissing her and hugging her and touching her. She loved running her fingers through her hair and wrapping her arms around her.
“I’m so tired,” mumbled Tracey, before kissing Pansy’s neck, “should we pretend to sleep?”
Pansy giggled and pulled her mouth to hers, they both knew what she would say, what she wanted to say. Sleep was hard to come by now, their classes were getting harder, their parents were becoming more expectant of them, and their friends were just as lost as they were.
Giggling and pretending to sleep was as close as they got to feeling at peace.
“Flower,” whispered Tracey and Pansy knew that she was tired, that she could actually fall asleep. “I’m tired.”
“I know,” said Pansy, pulling away from Tracey and letting her tuck her head under her chin. They hadn’t slept in separate beds since Umbridge had pinned badges on them and told them they were better than the rest.
It was the same thing that their parents told them, though they were expected to be quiet and take orders and to listen at a young age. They were daughters of wealthy purebloods, they were expected to be seen, to marry well, to produce children.
They were expected to sit still and be pretty and be quiet.
Pansy was pretty, but she was never one to sit still and be quiet.
~`~
“Pansy?” said Gregory, and Pansy turned around to look at him. He was handsome enough to get by, if handsome meant big and broad and protective. “How are you?”
What is she supposed to answer? Her girlfriend is dead, found in the stream behind her house, the only surviving member of her family her older brother. She’s found with a skull and snake on her arm and in the air above the house.
Pansy knew that it was a brand unwillingly given.
“She’s gone,” whispered Pansy, unable to sneer at him, unable to bite, unable to find a way to curse his name. She’s angry, but even more so, she’s sad.
The war has come to Hogwarts finally, it’s touched her in a way she can’t deny. It’s taken Tracey, and if she’s not careful, it’ll take Daphne or Millie or Draco or Blaise or Vincent or Theodore or even Gregory.
She can’t let it take any of them.
Theodore and Millie are Head Boy and Girl, they smile and sneer and curse and punish as they walk through the halls. They’re all treated like royalty to the Carrows, like they’re all Head Boys and Girls, but no one knows what they’re really doing.
Theodore has always been good at making trouble disappear, he makes first years disappear in classrooms, makes fourth years disappear behind bookcases, makes Dumbledore’s Army members disappear behind corners. They distract, and Theodore makes them disappear, he sends them out to Daphne’s home or sometimes to Tracey’s, as the mansion is empty now.
They’re all fighting two wars, one with their parents and another with the whole school watching.
Then the war really does comes to Hogwarts.
~`~
Pansy will always be mean and selfish, she will always bite and ask later, she will always curse and scream and get what she wants. Pansy grew up hearing her name as a curse, from parents who wanted a son and got a daughter, from parents who wanted her dead but kept her barely alive.
She spent her life fighting, so when the war came to Hogwarts, she tried to avoid the finale.
“What are you waiting for? Someone grab him!” screamed Pansy, she was still in her uniform, her skirt rumbled, her shirt stained from Herbology still, her tie loose around her neck. Millie had been braiding her hair, but it had fallen out on the walk from their common room to the Great Hall.
The last time she saw her parents, they had skulls and snakes where they never had before.
She felt Gregory grab her more than the crowd pushing her away, she felt Blaise and Theodore press against her more than saw their dark hair and shoulders, she felt Millie and Daphne hold her hands as they were forced out of the hall. She had never once been welcomed by anyone other than her fellow Slytherins, and even they didn’t always like her.
She was mean, she was selfish, and she was determined not to die tonight.
Harry Potter had brought the war to her home, to her door step, and to her family. She would defend it the best way she could, with Daphne and Millie at her side, with Gregory and Draco and Blaise and Theodore and Vincent within reach.
She would die for her brothers and sisters, but first they would need to find her, need to come after her.
She would’ve died for Tracey too if she had the chance.
~`~
Millie had the best shield charms, she had cloaking them all year.
Daphne can stun anything within her sight, she had been practicing on the Carrows all year.
Pansy knows every curse she had ever read about, she had been reading for a long time.
Tracey had a snipers range, but she isn’t there to help them now.
Blaise goes up high, he is a sniper in his own sense.
Theodore makes the younger students disappear, Millie had told him to send them to their empty homes.
Draco and Gregory and Vincent leave them to find something, they return later with empty hands and no Vincent.
Pansy already knows that she’ll be the one to comfort Millie when it’s all over.
The Battle comes in flashes and screams and curses, they survive because of Millie’s shield and they make it out to the grounds because of Daphne’s stunners. Pansy curses Death Eaters, she watches their masks fly off and tries to stand tall even when she recognizes their faces.
She kills Thomas Davis, Tracey’s older brother because he tried to kill her first. He gets his words in still, ‘a filthy ugly lesbian slag’, and Pansy remembers Theodore cursing the word faggot of Justin Flich-Fletchley’s face the year before.
The war ends, but it doesn’t end at the same time.
~`~
Gregory knows that she can’t love him like she is meant to.
But the sex is easier than she expects and getting married is easier than she expects. Having a baby though, that is murder. The pain is like nothing she ever imagined, a pain that keeps her awake late in the night, and keeps her frozen.
Finding out she was pregnant was easy, but carrying her daughter is hard.
Gregory is a rock though, he stands beside her and loves her and tell her that everything will be okay.
Pansy is ready to have a son, a little boy to love and mold and shape into a good person. A little boy who will be smart and funny, who will look like Gregory, who will be quick-witted and have her sharp tongue.
She isn’t ready for her daughter.
Samantha is beautiful. She looks like Pansy, but has Gregory’s chubby cheeks and bright eyes. She grows quickly and everyday Pansy sees Tracey in her.
Tracey who was sweet and kind and naïve, who lived in a world that didn’t love her as much as Pansy did.
“She won’t be like us if we teach her different,” whispered Gregory as Pansy curled up tighter into herself. They’re not the first to have a baby, Theodore has two sons now, but they have the first daughter.
Daughters are meant to be married off, their meant to be quiet and seen and keep to themselves, their not meant to curse the world as Pansy once had. She was sold to the Goyle family at four months old, sold to the highest bidder in a world where money ruled above everything else.
She was brought up to be mean to those who are different than her.
“How do we teach her different?” asked Pansy, resting a hand on the slight bulge of her stomach. Another baby, another mouth to feed, another mind to change and build and create. She didn’t want her first, so a second is even scarier.
“We think before we act.”
The rest was unspoken, ‘we think before we speak, we teach them to be good, we teach them how to be better than us.’
There was a lot of work to be put into action, a lot of fighting they would need to hide, a lot of anger they would need to squash. Pansy would need to learn to bite her tongue, to teach her daughter that she was beautiful and kind and smart, that she could be anything that she wanted to be.
She could be what Pansy wasn’t allowed to be.
~`~
Calvin is two when they decide to live the lives they want.
Gregory gives her a gift by handing her already signed divorce papers. It was always unspoken between them that they wouldn’t last long. Her parents died in Azkaban three years ago, his father had died in Azkaban one year ago, his mother is long gone, her heart had been broken a long time ago for an angry man with a skull and snake on his arm.
Samantha is eight, the twins Mira and Jacob are five, Calvin is two. They’ll have to spend the rest of their lives ferrying their children back and forth,
She hates the thought and tries to sabotage Gregory’s efforts, but then it becomes clear that it isn’t him or herself that she’s hurting, it’s her children. Samantha comes crying one night about missing Gregory and then Jacob follows with the same short sobbing cries.
Her children are better than her, smarter, kinder, and gentler than she could ever be.
She stops fighting against Gregory and realizes that they can be friends. They can be friends and co-parent their children and be okay.
She can move on from Gregory because she didn’t love him like she was supposed to, like her parents were paid to make her love.
“I’m sorry,” whispered Pansy, as she stood in the doorway of Gregory’s home, their old home. “I was being selfish Gregory. I thought I was hurting you, but it was actually hurting them.”
“It’s not me you need to apologize to Pansy,” said Gregory with a hint of a smile, a laugh. “Our children are not chips in a poker game, we’re not selling them to the highest bidder for the best price. I was never going to let us be our parents.”
Pansy looked up at him, meeting his eyes, Gregory had bright eyes even during the darkest moments of the war. He wasn’t an angry person, not like her, but instead he was cool and calculating and incredibly intelligent. He was smarter than he let anyone think, no longer playing stupid.
“Thank you, Gregory.”
~`~
Samantha is a Ravenclaw. The twins, Mira and Jacob, are Slytherins. And then Calvin is their Hufflepuff.
Each of them have their own skills, their own defining traits, but one thing they all have in common is their kindness. They’re nice and sweet and kind to those they love, to those that give them the chance to be themselves. Her children don’t need her biting tongue and anger, they don’t need to be mean unlike Pansy at their age.
Samantha still sneers and curses those who try to call her stupid for loving Devansh Nott. She bites and screams at the world for calling her stupid after getting pregnant four months before she graduates.
Samantha grows mean to those who judge her.
Mira has always been mean, she had always known how to fight. She screamed when she was born and she didn’t stop in the years after. She loves with a cruel heart, and she loves a girl the same as her, Olivia Perry was as natural to Mira as Tracey Davis had once been to Pansy.
Mira has always been mean to the world.
Jacob is quiet, only using his voice to bring down judgement, to show his true nature. He let’s his anger simmer and grow, he uses his face more than his words to show his anger. He is ruthless, he is cruel hearted as Mira had taught him and he had learned to be.
Jacob uses his silence to be mean.
Calvin watches his siblings grow mean, he watches their faces change, their mouths sneer and bite and throw anger. He watches and quickly learns that being mean is a way of survival. He grows mean in a way that confuses others, he grows mean to survive and grows mean to only those who underestimate him; Alexandra Wood doesn’t underestimate him at thirteen and doesn’t underestimate him any day after.
Calvin has always been trying to survive and that turned him mean.
~`~
“Alex is twenty-one and I’m twenty-three, we’re getting married whether you approve or not!” yelled Calvin, and Pansy sat back in her chair, holding her wine glass tightly in her hand. Gregory sat beside her, when it came to dinner with their children and their significant other, they had decided to be an undivided front together.
Just because they didn’t raise their children under one house, it didn’t mean that they weren’t there for them together.
“I take it the Woods didn’t take it well?” asked Gregory as he held his glass of whiskey in his large hand.
“My mum and my older sister, Katie were opposed to the idea,” said Alexandra, playing with a lock of her light hair. “I thought my brothers would be more opposed, or even my dad.”
“Well we we’re expecting this discussion three years ago when Alex graduated,” said Pansy, before taking a sip of her wine, “You’ve been dating since Calvin was fifteen and Alex thirteen, and you didn’t flutter when you were separated for two years. In fact you did better than Sam and Devansh in my opinion.”
Pansy was only honest to a handful of people, her children, Gregory, and her closest friends. A small, small circle of people she could trust.
But Alexandra Wood had always been easy to trust, in a way that Pansy found deceiving.
There was something Slytherin in her, something hidden behind her blonde hair and blue eyes and kind smile. Maybe it was how she played Quidditch, ready to take anyone out of the sky with a single hit of a bludger.
Pansy remembered her mother once saying that if a girl played Quidditch, she better not have a in her hands. Alexandra Wood was a dainty girl, she looked like a single wind could blow her down, but Pansy had seen her play, seen an anger, a fury, a familiar mean sneer on her face that she recognized in the mirror everyday.
Calvin would be fine with Alexandra, she would help him when he fell, when the world crushed him, she would fight the world for him.
Twenty-three wasn’t too young to get married anyways, neither was twenty-one.
“Do you have a ring?” asked Pansy, setting down her wine glass and pulling the engagement ring that Gregory had given her what felt like a full lifetime ago.
“Mum,” said Calvin as Pansy held her hand out to him, the ring resting in her palm. “I can’t take your r-“
“Calvin Draco Parkinson,” said Pansy, glaring at him and sitting forward in her chair. “You will not fight with me, you will take this ring, I was always going to give it to you or Jacob, and like always you were faster than Jacob.”
“It’s not that hard,” said Calvin, plucking the ring out of Pansy’s hand and examining it carefully. “Jake is running after dragons and Cara doesn’t care for marriage, she hasn’t even told her parents that she’s in China.”
“Bloody Americans,” grumbled Gregory, before finishing off his whiskey. Pansy rolled her eyes and sighed, she liked Cara, she was a vibrant girl, but she also understood Gregory’s well-hidden concern, Jacob their most unexpected child.
“I told you we didn’t have to worry,” said Alexandra and Pansy took a sip from her glass to hide her smile. “You’re too quick to judge.”
“I remember when Sam told us she was pregnant,” said Calvin, sitting back in his chair, his own wine glass in hand. “Jacob broke a lamp, Mira screamed for nearly an hour, and Sam yelled at all of us, and that was mild compared to mum and dad.”
“Calvin you’re the youngest,” said Gregory, with a roll of his eyes, “we don’t care anymore.”
“I wish my parents we’re like this,” said Alexandra with one of her kind smiles, the one that made her eyes light up. “They’ve seen nearly everything, and yet they always act surprised when any of us tell them something. They were surprised that I wanted to marry Calvin, as if the last eight years didn’t count towards anything.”
“That’s because their Gryffindor’s Alex,” Pansy told her, letting her cruelest smile show through.
Alexandra didn’t even flinch, instead she matched Pansy’s smile with one of her own.
Calvin had definitely done well with this girl.
~`~
“You know,” said Tracey with a smile that made Pansy’s knees go weak. “You don’t have to be so mean Pansy, they’ve all known us forever.”
“I know,” said Pansy, already thinking of how she would make it up to their friends without having to apologize. “But it’s more fun.”
“That mouth is going to push the world away from you, Pansy,” whispered Tracey as she wrapped her arms around Pansy’s neck.
“As long as you stay close to me…I don’t care.”
“Just try for a little kindness,” whispered Tracey, her mouth brushing against Pansy’s with every quiet word. “For me…please?”
“I’ll always be kind as long as you’re in the world,” said Pansy, before grabbing Tracey’s face and pressing her mouth to hers.
The only time she was ever nice, ever kind, was when she was with Tracey.
Otherwise, she was just mean.