Harry can taste the blood.
It’s spilling from some indecipherable corner of his mouth. He can taste the salty, metallic zing just as well as he can smell it. There’s a ringing sound in his ear, sloshing of blood against his eardrums in defiance. How is he still standing? With each step of his, shots of pain rushes to his chest, his stomach, his head. And there’s nothing there but a blunt, chiding anger, pushing him forward into the night. He even sees red with that one eye that’s still working. Blood red. Blood. Sometimes he feels that’s all he’s made up of.
Harry doesn’t quite understand how it happens, but through the pain and the burning, bruising inferno in his head, he always manages to crash against her door. It makes a thudding noise, sending shocks of pain to his brain.
“Open up,” he says weakly, more blood spills from his mouth.
There is a sound of something breaking, a loud curse—the door slides open. He falls in pathetically, to the only source of gravity in the world.
“Harry,” Pansy whispers. “Harry, what happened?”
He mumbles something against her neck. She holds him up, lets him thrust his weight to her as she leads him inside. With his brain only a bundle of nerves and his entire body alight with them, he follows her blindingly. After hours, it seems, she sits him down and goes away. The world’s cold again. He wants to reach for her but his shoulder burns. What had happened to it? He tries to open his eyes to see, but there’s only one yellow light blurring everything else.
Still he knows it’s her kitchen.
“I’m here,” Pansy says as she comes in again. Something levitates in front of his nose. A strong smell of ginger. “Drink this.”
He does. It burns as it passes through his throat. But after he coughs and curses her through it… he stops shaking. His eyes clear a little. He’s right, it’s her kitchen. With the wooden counters, the overhead yellow light, the french press whizzing mechanically all hours of the day. Pansy is standing in front of him in her pearly silk nightshirt, watching him the same way she always does—with undivided attention. Her hair is pulled up in a half-bun with her cheek flushed and indignant. Her eyes look a clear, lapis blue. If she weren’t so mad at him, he would tell her she’s beautiful.
“You should see the other guys,” he says weakly.
“I dare not,” she says impassively.
Harry fidgets in his chair. “Well, I fought.”
“You fought.”
“With a bunch of idiots.” He coughed, and it shot a stab of pain in his chest. “Ugh. It felt good before it went to shit.”
“Okay.”
Harry feels, with a desperate rush, the inadequacy of that sentence. He fears that she wouldn’t understand. “It felt good, Pansy.”
“I understand.”
He tries to hold onto the tone, the tune of her voice. There’s a tender pang hanging in the end of it. There’s a question there, too. Before he can ask that, she’s closer, her fingers trace over the cut on his forehead, the underside of his left eye, his right cheekbone, and the pain sizzles with her touch. He wants to sleep in this warmth. He could sleep forever if he wasn’t in so much pain.
“You lost a fucking tooth,” she’s saying, pulling him out of his mind, prodding at his busted lips to see. “Where is it? Did you swallow it?”
He moves around his tongue to figure it out, and catches the lone, blunt stub with his tongue. He spits it out as Pansy hurries over with her first-aid kit. He watches her quietly, riddled with ache, as she washes his wounds, sponges over the scratches. There were four guys, he tells her. Large and beefy. One of them left in a wheelchair. Pansy nods dissociatively, sweeping her cotton ball over his right eye. Her eyelashes flutter—he’s too close to her again. Too close to her button nose, the heart shaped lips, the mole on the edge of her cheek.
The world shrivels from his view. It bends on its hinges, screeching a desperate, useless question at him.
“Hey,” his voice catches from her proximity. Pansy doesn’t say anything. “Hey, why are you alone?”
“Uhm, Daphne is at her—”
“No. No—it’s not about… Why are you alone?”
Pansy blinks, slowly moving away from his face. “I’m not alone.”
“Everyone’s alone,” Harry says. “You, me, Ron, Hermione—”
“You’re not alone.”
“Oh no.” He laughs pathetically. “I’m fucking alone.”
Her eyes sweep over him—all over him, and he feels himself shrink. She takes his hand, suddenly. He winches. “I think something’s dislocated here.”
“Harry,” she says as if she isn’t listening. “I’ve been thinking… about us.”
A blind, electric panic currents through him. He feels his heart thump painfully. “What?”
“I’ve thought about us,” she says, and it feels too sudden. Even after all this time, he’s not prepared.
“No, Pansy…”
“The way we’ve been—” She’s bending down, now, on her knees. “The way we are —”
“Pansy— ugh!” A sharp, overwhelming pain stabs at his arm as she pushes up his index. It burns for one moment in his hand before he feels it cross his arm, spread to the rest of him. “ Fuck!”
“It’s okay,” Pansy says quickly. “It was dislocated. I’ve fixed it.”
“ Fuck!” Spits dribble out from his mouth. “Fuck you!”
Her expression flutters from careful to hurt, but he can’t bring himself to look away. He didn’t mean that. She knows. She has to know. Scared people are often careless. And they don’t realise it until it’s too late. He opens his mouth to say sorry but only a groan comes out. It’s loud, it rustles all over his mouth, and it ends in a helpless, guttural cry before he has a chance to swallow it.
“Oh god. Shit. ” He looks down, a sob crawls up from his throat. “ Jesus Christ. I’m all—I’m all fucked up.”
His throat burns as he cries. After a minute, or a thousand harrowing nights, Pansy wraps her arms around him, not making a sound. He holds her waist, heaves into the silk, breaks out in a million pieces and almost asks her to never let go.
After five years of the battle at his old school, he’s back in that forest. The cold surrounds him, the flash of wind, the trees rustling in premonition and the bone-deep surety that there wasn’t anyone left in the world anymore was not done with. It heaves into him now, at Pansy’s voice. It clamoured inside him when those morons at the bar asked him how it felt like to be the luckiest person in the world.
“How are you feeling?”
“I don’t want to say in pain, but—” He sighs, wistfully listening to her chuckle at him. It feels soft. It feels right. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
His body aches in all the places it shouldn’t. All he’s able to do is tilt his head, and she’s there. Here. Already looking at him from the other side of the bed. The moonlight always does inexplicable things to her skin. She glows, pearly and white, like a translucent dream.
Harry whispers, “You weren’t like this when we met, were you?”
“What was I like?”
“A storm.”
He wonders if she understands what he means. He means—a storm. The dark, inscrutable blue of it, fifty fathoms deep in the Pacific. Wild and capricious and iridescent. A dazzling splash of something remarkable in the bleak reality of his life. Something destructive. There were no weather charts warning him of Pansy Parkinson. Nothing had told him that he’d follow her to ridiculous places. Empty parking lots, the skeletons of abandoned homes, crowded beaches in Malibu, and her very personal, strikingly lonely kitchen, lost of every sense and every time. She was born to be admired. Not trussed up in silks and satins, with that practiced smile and insincere small-talk at charities like her mother had wanted. No, she was born to be admired in her chaos, her brittle laugh, the way her eyes shone, a drop of sea at storm. She was alive in a way that scared him and enthralled him.
She’s smiling and he moves closer. Does storm cover the rush of it? Like driving a hundred miles per hour on a secluded, barely visible road; cupping his face with a smile too bright, too brilliant and promising that nothing else matters but the two of them, fucked up and furious, howling at the world. ‘They messed us up. And we’re going to be angry about it till the day we die, Potter. I promise’ .
“And what am I now?”
He remembers how that promise felt. How it feels now. “Safety.”
She blinks. Her face opens up in surprise. Pansy opens her mouth, almost saying something. Something. But then decides against it. She slides closer. Holds the side of his face. There’s an inkling of pain but he makes sure to not flinch. It feels good anyway.
“What changed you, Pansy?”
She considers it for a moment. “A lot of things. A few people, too.”
“Do I know these people?” he whispers, but really, he thinks— Can people change each other, really? Sometimes he fears that all there is to the fact that people cling to one another, scratch at each other, try to fix, too. Like relocating a jaw, sewing a cracked lip; like holding back someone’s hair while they vomited their guts out on the balcony, or not letting them fall off a cliff while they’re driving.
“You’re among them, you know,” she’s saying. “You changed me. I was so angry for a time… I didn’t know if I could live with the guilt of my name. Or the indignity. I thought I’d die if I wasn’t running. But that’s not true. There’s plenty of things to stick around for. Plenty of things I can still fix.”
“Like a femur?”
“Like a femur,” she agrees. “Or an ulna. Or just relocating someone’s joints. Really. Anything. I can still do good, regardless of what I did before. You showed me that.”
He wants to ask how, or why, or when. But he only lets the gratitude permeate his skin. It feels warm. “I knew Mungo’s would creep up on you.”
“You did. I dare say you knew more about me than I did.”
“Because I know you, Pansy. I know your heart.”
He wants to touch her there, her heart, brittle and resilient and lovely and full of contradictions. But he doesn't. There's always this sparse bit of friction between them. They've touched each other, sure, on various breathtaking occasion with them operating under different levels of inebriation. But he holds back for a moment and eyes her as she smiles, transfixed by some age-old spell. “I know I’m not alone. It’s just that I think —I can’t stop thinking if I didn’t take the train. When I died again. Maybe I should’ve just stayed there. Maybe it would be less complicated.”
“It would be less complicated,” she allows that. “But you wouldn’t have met me again.”
“Yeah.” The corner of his lips twitch. “That would’ve been a shame.”
She chuckles breathily. “And also, I wouldn’t have met you either. I wouldn’t know that I have a knack for healing if I hadn’t spent all those hours trying to fix your busted lips, dislocated bones, cuts and Merlin knows what else—”
“I get it. I was a train-wreck.”
“And I wouldn’t have known,” she presses on, eyes soft, “that I could actually laugh, or care for someone. Or that someone could really care for me. That I had the capacity to do something good, something that’s not superficial, or selfish, or riddled with self-hatred. I don’t know if I can ever pay you back, but you changed me life, Harry Potter. My life... my stupid life is infinitely better because you chose to board that train.”
Harry can’t speak for a minute, can’t really think either. Could it be, really? Has he really done anything other than mess up her plans for her life, as she’s joked a hundred times? Did he shift that space in her that used to be guilt, to something better? Was he capable of that? Or, more than anything, could Pansy feel all these things about him and be oblivious to how he feels for her?
“So there’s plenty of things to stick around for, Harry,” she says. “We’re not all alone, I promise.”
I promise . It’s so different from when she first said it, but still it hangs like an echo. Like a long forgotten incantation.
Can she really not see that there’s a shine rippling in the spaces between them. That every time they're together, the feeling that this could not be quite real wells up in him like a great, twisting tornado? “When you said you thought about us… was it just to fix my hand?”
Pansy shakes her head. “Don’t worry about it.”
“No. I…” If he leans in, he can kiss her. “I want to worry about it.”
There’s a trace of hesitance in her eyes, as well as it should be, turbulent as they’ve been. Wild and chaotic and dazzling. He wants to tell her he knows what she’s feeling, because he feels it as well. Words are fickle, though. And scared people are often careless. He doesn’t want to rush it, but oh he wants to kiss her. Her pale, pink lips in the moonlight. The bun has come apart from its centre. If he reaches out, he can run his hand through the length of her hair.
Harry can taste the sweetness.
It’s spilling from some indecipherable corner of his mouth. Of her mouth. As if the space between their faces suddenly liquified. As if in extraordinary storms, in unfathomable depths of sea, lonely people can really find each other. He can taste the sugar-drip anticipation just as well as he can smell it. There’s a ringing sound in his ear, her promise vibrates through him in a daze.
“Harry,” she says, her breath fans on his eyelash. “It wasn’t just to fix your hand.”
He can’t help the smile stretching on his lips. It’s so wide it almost hurts his face. And there’s nothing there but a soft, wistful dream pushing him forward into that space. Now he can only see her, the face glimmering in the moonlight, eyes the bright, impossible sea at storm, hands anchoring his face. Pansy could find something in him to stick around for, he can see it. He can see that inexplicable something in her, too. Even though the pain in his body reminds him of all the people out into the world, the ones who don’t understand, the ones who never would, who are alone just like them. But at this moment, in this room, the trace of the inexplicable in her is enough.
It’s all he wants to hold on to.