Neville/Pansy (crying, comfort)
Pansy hates crying.
It ruins everything: her makeup, her carefully cultivated persona, her control.
That he’s caught her in a moment of weakness makes her ashamed and as always, it comes out as anger.
He doesn’t discretely slip away, though — quite the reverse. He opens his arms.
And though she was certain her feet were taking her out of the room, to privacy, she ends up walking into him.
His chest is a different sort of privacy when her face is buried in it but even so, she feels exposed.
Crying in his arms is more vulnerable than sex, more intimate, and for a terrifying moment, she can’t find a single word. She grits her teeth to contain the very not-word-shaped sounds that want to escape her in lieu of English and forces herself to breathe.
But right when she’s almost found one — and a polite one, at that — he presses a soft kiss to her hair and she loses them all over again.
“There needs to be rain sometimes,” he murmurs into her hair. “It can’t always be sunshine.”
She’s never been sunshine in her life and the fact he thinks otherwise kills her; absolutely slices her open.
“Go on, Pans,” he tells her. “I can take it.”
Fine. If she can be rain with him then she’ll be a storm; a hurricane.
He’s a strong man.
He can absolutely take it.