II
His vision clears to focus into at least a dozen glittering eyes and several pairs of hands prompting to pick him up. His head buzzes in contempt as takes one, feeling the rush of cool, whooshing blood in his head. The hand is soft and small, and the evenly manicured nails dig in the side of his thumb with a shocking remembrance. He smiles imperceptibly as she lifts him up against gravity, he knows it’s her before he looks.
“Hey,” Pansy says—oddly, uncharacteristically—smiling.
“Hi.” He looks around at the curious faces. The curious people are asking if he’s alright. The waiter is apologising frantically. Harry shakes his head, mutters sometime imperceptible and obviously false before he stares back at her, embarrassed. “I was planning to look suave.”
“I see.”
“Cool and calculated.”
“You were pretty calculated. Got me here, didn’t you?”
He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. His neck burns and he can feel the rest of the people scattering back to where they came from, like smoke, like they didn’t exist at all. Pansy raises her eyebrows in a question. ‘Now what?’ she’s asking, like always.
Now what?
“Hey,” Harry says weakly.
Pansy narrows her eyes, the smile gone now, leaving a faint, begrudged smirk as she looks down at the entirety of him. She’s wearing the silky, glistening lavender dress he remembers seeing before, a century ago, maybe, paired with the same earrings and the same ballerina heels and the same smirk. He remembers how it bundled on the floor of his bedroom, in a neat, smooth heap. The colour looked different in the moonlight. It was almost blue. He kept seeing it in the same place even after she had gone away.
“You have glasses in your suit,” Pansy is saying presently. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
He follows her without question to wherever, really. There’s a curious bundle of people eyeing them, he’s sure, but nearly an equal number of people seem to avoid them too. Pansy glides along the people, quick and sure, and leads him to a quiet and shadowy room in the corner. Harry can see a broken mirror ball and heaps of shiny, transparent fabric before Pansy yanks at his tie.
“Ouch.”
But she doesn’t listen. She tilts her head, brings out her wand, and there’s a buzzing of all sorts of changes. The glasses disappear, the seams of his robe stitch up. Harry looks down and watches with a bemused frown as his shoes change, from brown to black leather, with sharp, pointed ends.
“I liked that shoe.”
“You’re entitled to your shitty choices.” She shrugs. “That was not real leather.”
“I didn’t know,”
“I know.” She rolls her eyes rather meanly. Harry would feel offended if her eyes didn’t seem brighter in the dim light, or if he didn’t like her so much. “Your assistant should really do better. I know black goes with everything but green is your colour. And that bowtie is ridiculous.”
Harry blinks at her, loss for words. The air between them hangs like a question. Pansy doesn’t smile, doesn’t step back, doesn’t acknowledge the sinking, aching hole they’re floating over. It seems too much like before.
“Jenna’s alright,” he says finally, and the heaviness settles in even more. “She selected the perfect wine I donated. Draco praised it.”
Pansy sighs, a blunt disdainful breath. Almost as if she’s disappointed.
She looks around, all over him again, in aimless scrutiny, it seems. But Harry knows better. Harry knows her better. She’s trying to shift something unmovable. Or convince herself something that she’s never mentioned to anybody. Seconds pass. She’ convincing herself to get out of this room.
Pansy has a face that’s always too careful, too aware of how proportionate her forehead is with the slope of; the angular jut of her cheekbones that almost never soften. The hair framing her face are never out of place. She’s never out of practice, but Harry knows that he throws her off her game.
She shifts to his side to get to the door. “You’re all set it seems. So I’ll just go—”
He wants to say, that—of course not. He’s bristling into a million sharp pieces, stung with stupid, childish jealousy. And there’s another part of him that wants to deny it all, with stupid, childish stubbornness. She sighs again, and this time he can’t decipher it at all as she leans forward and raises her hand. He feels the sizzle of electricity, heat and buzz, before she slides her fingers into his hair. And then everything’s warm. So deliciously warm.
“Pansy—” he starts.
“You should go. I’m sure your secretary is somewhere in the party with another pair of those ridiculous faux-leather shoes.”
“I hated those shoes,” he says.
She laughs, her hand slips further into his hair. “Okay.”
“And that bowtie. Ridiculous.”
“Yeah… Harry, you should… act better out there. Don’t drink like an alcoholic in parties where you’re supposed to receive the unofficial news of your promotion. Okay?”
There’s an easy, breathtaking familiarity to this. Ot them. Them hiding away in the midst of others. He’s been to a dozen parties like this, he’s been to almost a dozen room like this. Pansy would find an excuse to fix his appearance, or slip him a revised note for his speech, or he’d complain about the banality in mundane, the soulless routine of bureaucracy and they would be huddled together, the sound of the soulless party playing in the background.
He’s been here before. The scratch of her nails in his scalp as she runs her fingers through his hair, parting it sideways. The way he tries to not breathe into the smell of her, that deep and feminine lavender. It was moments like this that fell into them, into him with such a drastic force he couldn’t quite tell since when he’d been looking forward to this. When did it start? When he saw her four years after the battle? Or when she saw him wild and panicked, desperately trying to breathe behind the closed door of his office? When did she first scold him? When did he first kiss her? When did he feel that overarching, stupid gravity like a cannonball?
“I should go,” Pansy says, standing still like a statue. She doesn’t turn back. Doesn’t move at all. It’s been a long time since she’s allowed him to stay this close.
It takes him back to the night of Malfoy and Hermione’s engagement. The last time. How he reached through a mile of darkness to touch her hair. The room was pitch-black because she liked to sleep that way. And he hadn’t been comfortable with darkness, but still liked the idea of them separated from the world, unseen and unheard, stirring quietly in his bedroom like two ghosts—and it wasn’t anyone else’s business at all.
But Pansy shakes her head now, tilts back. “Are you alright, Harry?”
“Your hair’s beautiful,” he says.
Pansy has a look in her face that’s helpless incredulity. “I should hope so. I spent two hours on this.”
“Right.” He purses his lips. “Pansy, we need to talk.”
Something too similar to blind panic curves her features. But it passes just as quickly. “Can it wait?” she says quickly. “I really have to—”
“No it can’t.” He looks over her shoulder to think of everyone outside the room, Adrian Pucey and the rest of them. All of them. He could feel the eyes of the people in the room like a beetle on his neck. Scrupulous and uncompromising. “And no, you don’t really have to.”
“What do you mean I don’t really have to?”
“It’s not important.”
She raises her eyebrows in faux pride. “Do you mean my job isn’t important, Harry? Is that what you’re—?”
“Oh, Pansy, don’t pick a fight now, please. I’m telling you—”
“I’m not picking a fight. I’m just asking—”
“Nothing is as important as this.” He vaguely gestures to the unbreachable gap between them. Pansy huffs shaking her head.
“Oh, right. If Mr. Potter says so—”
“I’m in love with you,” he says, or rather snaps. Because everything is too familiar. The way she rolls her eyes and pretends to be annoyed, the way he can’t help but be pulled to her, like gravity. He snaps his confession because everything is overwhelming. It always felt right to think about it in the quiet corner in his brain. Because she looks breathtaking when she’s flushed, indignant, and maybe a little bit enthralled by him, too.
But she looks away, stubborn as ever. Harry’s heart thrums inside his chest. Still he stops himself from tilting to stare at her face, or make her look at him. The air stings now, heavy with the same longing, and her silence. A moment passes, or twenty minutes before she turns her head, eyes too red, too frustrated. When she finally speaks, her voice breaks, “Where is that coming from?”
“Come on.” Harry grips her hand, the one he hadn’t let go off. “You know.”
“What is this? I saw you with Draco. What did he tell you?”
“This has nothing to do with Draco,” Harry says, indignant. He expected a lot of things going wrong, a lot of different lines of offense, but fantastically, not this one.
“What did he tell you?” she snaps. “Did he tell you I was broken and—”
“Nothing. No, Pansy. He… he just shoved a bottle of whiskey in my face and told me to tell you.” He gulps. It’s coming out fascinatingly wrong. “Because I do. I love you.”
Stupidly, he expects her to go still. Harry’s well aware of the world outside this room, now. But still. For a brief moment he’s allowed this. He touches her hair, the silky smooth length of it, and smiles. Pansy’s mouth falls open, in wonder, maybe. In the same electrified chaos bubbling inside him like alcohol—like acid—like—
“It’s you?” she says in disbelief.
“Yes,” he says like a drunkard, as if he can’t help crashing into the heel of gravity, “it’s me.”
What he means is, of course, I’m the one. I love you. Now you know.
But she yanks back, away. Her eyes widen like she’s watching something terrible. “Oh no.”
“Pansy… what?”
“Oh, my god. Harry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do it.”
“What did you do?” He looks over his shoulder. “Did he propose? Did you say yes?”
“What? No. It’s not about Adrian—”
“Okay, good. So nothing—”
“No.” She runs her hands through her hair, staring at him in panic. “No, it’s not that. Harry.”
“What?”
“You don’t love me.”
“Oh, come on—”
“He’s slipped you an amortentia!” she shrikes. “Or I have, in ant case. It’s all my fault.”
Something falls and breaks in the other room with a great, blaring sound. Harry can feel the wine in his head, his stomach, and face, sloshing over his insides, filling him up with a fever-warm thickness. It’s love, he thinks. Or is it?