The bird in the picture has a soft, heavy look on her face. It’s a small, plump bird covered in grey and brown feathers. It’s balancing its light body on top of a feeder. The bird has a sort of bewildered expression on its face. And something else, something that Pansy noticed before she realised it was a bird—a shock of golden feathers on her wings.
She stands bright against the white background with her head turned just the slightest. And the bird looks so enchanted, so thick with longing that it took Pansy a few minutes on the first time to realise that her bony, thin leg was chained to the blue feeder she was standing on. That she wasn’t moving at all.
Pansy has been inspecting the painting for the last ten minutes and the edges are starting to get blurry this time around. Her heart feels heavy and it’s making her wonder again—what’s the bird looking at? What is the strange, wonderful thing beckoning her from the other side?
Pansy doesn’t turn when Harry walks into the room, calling her name.
“What do you reckon she’s staring at?” she says.
“The open window.” She hears him setting the tray on the bedside table. There’s a dip on the side of the mattress as he slips back into the bed—his bed—and sits beside her.
“What’s outside the open window?” A lot of things, she thinks inadvertently. Sunlight, air, other birds—larger, meaner crows and hawks and eagles—humans with cages and guns. What’s so great about outside anyway?
Harry’s voice surfaces over her thoughts like a charm. “Something desirable.”
Something out of her reach. She wishes it wasn’t a muggle painting so she would move—with wings fluttering in the sunlight, stuttering in her flight. Pansy tilts her head. It never striked her as odd that he’d have a muggle painting in his bedroom. Of course, she had thought. He has muggle things all over the house.
“You want tea?”
She nods without turning. The smooth patch of golden on the bird’s wing is alluring, for some reason. The bird stands lonely and proud. Is she turning back, though? Or will she snap her head away at the last second, afraid of the light?
He calls her name again.
Pansy turns her head back to reality.
Harry has the befuddled softness of someone who’s still not quite awake. The dark circles under his eyes glow in the sunlight. The cut under his lip is healing to a purple patch. Sunlight is pouring out of the open windows and it’s making it harder to stare at him. So Pansy leans in to touch his forehead against hers, shutting off the rest of the view. His eyes are familiar and forest green. Hazy without his glasses. Blurry.
He hums against her lips.
There’s a soft, simmering electricity growing at the pit of her stomach. It’s acid. It’s him. It’s interminable longing for something not quite real. She wants to kiss him, over his bruised lip, carefully, softly so as to not hurt him further. But she will hurt him further.
“For the record, I was not surprised that you came last night,” Harry says slowly. She can hear the careful question in his voice.
“I was,” she says. “I was surprised.”
“Where have you been?”
“At Draco and Hermione’s.” She hesitates. “I thought my apartment would be swarming with reporters.”
“I promised you I wouldn't let that happen.”
“I know.” She purses her lips in guilt. “Lack of faith is… hard to overcome.”
“How are you?”
The way he tiptoes around her makes her more cautious. It’s a rare opportunity, finding someone whose heart is as mangled as hers. Pansy wants to make good use of her luck. She wants to take in the dazzling morning light, the smell of earl grey tea and washed cotton sheets and smother herself with the warmth of the boy who loved her. She wants to wonder at how they tiptoed around themselves for so long to end up in the same room and the same bed.
But she’s weak and anxious and faithless. So instead different thoughts rush in. Like—dirty slurs, racist parents, generational trauma. An uncle incarcerated for manslaughter just a week ago.
“You know you can’t run out on us for a week every time there’s a bad article,” he says.
It wasn’t just that. She lifts her hand and pushes his hair backwards. The scar on his forehead gleams in the morning light. He smells like cigarettes and coffee. “You punched that columnist in the middle of Diagon Alley, Harry.”
He purses his lips. She can feel the argument playing in his head. It buzzes against the gap between their skins. But finally, he only says, “You can fight with me about that, okay? But you can’t run away.”
“Harry this… You can’t have associations with people who shoot unforgivables in a bar fight. This entire thing fucks up your credibility. As a man of law. As—”
“As the Chosen One, you mean?” He always says the word like it’s a curse.
“They’ll come at you. The papers said that my uncle got a reduced sentence because you—”
He shakes his head. “No.”
“Harry.”
“We can’t drop this because some people don’t know anything about our penal code, Pansy. I—this is ridiculous.” Harry bites his lip, then winches at the pain. “Listen, Pansy, my entire life is a giant hoax. I’ve been prophesied beforqe I was born. I’m the Chosen One because Tom Riddle chose me, I had to fight horcruxes and die again because Dumbledore trained me. I haven’t had power over my life for one second until you. I chose you, deliberately. So fuck my credibility as the Chosen One. Our relationship can’t be a collateral for the sodding prophecy.”
Pansy opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. So she stares at him instead. The sharpness in his eyes, the strip of purple cut in his lips, the slight curve of a dimple on his cheeks
“I choose you. I love you. You have to have faith in me,” he says. “Because there’s going to be a lot more of those bad articles and we’ll go through all of them until we choose that we don’t love each other.”
The sharpness in his eyes, the strip of purple cut in his lips, the slight curve of a dimple on his cheeks.
“Alright,” she whispers, a shock of nerve makes her shiver even in the warmth.
“And other problems. There’s going to be a lot of them.”
“Of course.”
He smiles, slightly relieved. “For example, your parents hate me.”
“They don’t hate you, hate you. They disapprove. They think you are out of my league and have the power to drive me further away from their influence. It’s jealousy, pride and confusion.” Pansy settles her hands on his neck. “It’s Mrs. Weasley who hates me.”
His hand finds her free one and he pulls her in, closer, no gap for air or sunlight or angry parents. Just them.
“She’ll come around,” he says.
“I know.” She doesn’t. Outside the world stirs into wake. The world is hostile and full of chaos. Pansy used to wonder why she fell in love with a person who snatched her into the thick of it. But then there were moments like this. Where the light is soft and the smell is fresh and he’s so full of the senseless, childish hope that despite everything, everything will be alright.
It makes her have faith in the world a little. It makes her have faith in herself a little. Despite the prophecies and nightmares and crawling suspicion that the war hadn’t truly ended, Harry liked to believe in the light at the end of the tunnel.
“I’m already in love with you,” he whispers.
Her heart backtracks. She tried so long not to love him that when she fell, she fell all over. “I know that.”
“So everything else is background noise.”
“I love you too.”
“I know.” He smiles tiredly, leans in with his eyes closed and kisses her. Pansy breathes in his smell as she kisses back and the present scene contorts like a dream. This here is the centre of time and space.
When they break apart, Harry smooths down the side of her hair. “You know I thought of you when I bought that painting?”
“I didn’t know that.”
He shrugs. A faint, barely-there blush spots his cheeks. “The bird reminded me of you. You have that same look, fragile and elusive. All that time, before, we were screwing around I wondered… if I could ever touch you—that darned middle spot in your heart. You were always running. I wondered if you’d ever stop to turn back. Stay.”
So he too wonders about the open window, the possibility of freedom. She wants to ask if he too was scared to stare at them—the reality of them—at first. If he keeps this room locked like a treasure box. Like she has since the first time he brought her here. It’s safer than anywhere else, he promised. And anyway, what we feel in our business only. Pansy has held onto that. When they sneaked in abandoned houses and drank through the nights and haunted graves of nameless people. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t define them. They had a room in the world that superseded time and dimension. And there was a painting that made her hope. A bright, sun-struck instance that lived on forever.
“I won’t run,” she hears herself promise. A thin sling of a chain breaks off from her heart. Harry smiles in relief and she’s so unbelievably light. “I’ll stay.”
Pansy knew when they first kissed that there were would be a hundred obstacles before they could well enough be. That the passage to reality was thorny before it was anything else. But what she realises, this instant, that on the other side of all that there is love. Shockingly alive, vibrant and real with one surprising sweep of sunlight. Like a goldfinch.