Sweet

The news finds her in the middle of the party.

Finds her, as if she was hiding. Finds her, as if she could be hiding anywhere at all. The world is a magnifying glass tracking her every more, sometimes. And some days she is a mere smudged up extra in another person’s daguerreotype. Invisible but for a blot.

The news finds her in the middle of her birthday party. Pansy stares emptily at the letter, gliding determinedly to her in thin air. Its edges are curled in frustration. The chatter of her friends die softly as she reaches out and grabs it. Her fingers shake even before she sees her mother’s initials written on the side of the envelope. 

“Pansy, don’t—” Daphne starts, but she’s already so done with it. Exhausted with it.

The drama, the hiding, the pretending that it’s all right. That she’s still Pansy Parkinson, the only child of Cynthia and Cygnus Parkinson, last true blood of someone, headed towards something significant. That she’s young and she can party with her friends with the ridiculous, pink and frilly birthday cap on her head, that she can cut her heart shaped cake and actually feel thrilled about eating something again. That her life is just as before and not a walking memoranda of war crimes and blood money and—

She opens the letter before Daphne could talk her out of the reality of it all. The page looks empty, for a moment, blurry and beige before the words start pouring into her head. Her mother’s scroll, always so neat and tidy is spiraling out, curling unfashionably into the summary of… of…

“What is it?” Millie asks sympathetically, reaching to touch Pansy’s arm. “Let us see.”

She passes the letter to her friend, slowly, then stands up and sprints outside.

Someone calls her name, maybe Draco, perhaps Blaise, but she’s too far; sliding past the people, the jam-packed, stifling place, almost choking with tears. She pushes the door open, her eyes stinging as the cold air hits her squarely in the face. Pansy crosses her arm over her chest and runs determinedly, her head filled with one numbing and annihilating word.

Acquitted.

She doesn’t know where she is walking to. Is it towards or away from the castle? The chill nips at her heels, frosts on her skin as the chatter from the party is still palpable. Draco and Blaise were arguing about quidditch. She can only imagine what they’re talking about. How many people were there in the Three Broomsticks? They’d all know about it by the morning. They’ll all ask the same thing. Did he deserve it? Pansy finds herself asking the same thing, somehow disturbed by her thoughts. Shaking, she takes a sharp turn just as something hard and sharp jabs at her feet.

“Fuck.” She falls down. Her hands reach blindly to her feet where it burns. She dabs her fingers and the pain shoots through her. Sometimes wet slithers in her fingers.

“Fuck,” she curses softly. “Fuck, fuck.” 

“Hey,” a voice calls out. “Are you—okay?”

Her mind stutters for a moment, a blip before the silence caves in even harder. She recognises his voice, and she wants to not. Not recognise him, or acknowledge him, or anything. Before she can lie convincingly, however, a light shines in her general direction.

“That looks bad,” Harry Potter says, squinting at her feet.

Pansy counts to three before standing up, dizzy despite her best efforts. “It’s alright,” she lies. “I’m okay.”

The light now shines in her face now. And Pansy wants to tell him that it’s rude. It’s rude to point your wand to someone’s face and it’s rude to stare as if you see something alarming.

“Are you really?” he asks again. 

She’s convinced that this is rude, too. 

“Yeah, sure.”

“It’s just that… you’re crying.”

She hadn’t realised that. She reached her face and touched, gingerly, disbelieving. A drop of moisture soaked into her fingers and she gasped in soft surprise.

“I’m okay.”

He’s supposed to go now, isn’t he? Get away from the mess. But he has a look in his eyes that she can’t decipher. Her foot burns and she can feel blood slipping to the gaps of her toes. Something tells her, insanely, inanely, that he knows everything about her.

“I can fix it,” he says finally.

“You can’t possibly,” she replies, only half joking. Still, for some inconceivable reason, she allows him to lead her to the nearest bench. At the back of the shop, there’s a wooden bench looking deserted and small. Pansy sits with her back to the wall, and stays still, against her better judgment when he kneels in front of her and lifts her left foot on his other knee. A surprisingly silly thought pricks her head, she’s glad she decided to wear jeans tonight.

“It can sting for a moment,” he says, wand out and pointed at her bleeding toe, “but then…”

“I know how this—ugh.” She flinches as a sharp, burning sensation shoots at her leg without warning. “You bastard.”

He chuckles. “Hermione taught me that. Surprise makes it better.”

“Ugh. Does it really?” The surprise, still fresh, grates on her nerves.

She feels him get up, and half expects him to move away. It would have been better, easier, and ultimately wise. But all he does is sit beside her. 

“Here, take it.” he says. 

When she stares at his outstretched hand, it’s a candy. A lusciously red, heart shaped thing shining from within the plastic rapper.

She takes it. A slight, warm tingle pricks her skin as her fingers brush against his palm.

“They make me feel better, for some reason.” He shrugs self-consciously. “I was looking for the peach ones at the Honeydukes, but… this is all they have.”

She nods without answering. The word peach cloys in her throat. Wordlessly, Pansy tries to chew on her candy, the sweetness bursts into her mouth as she looks out into the night. Vaguely out of breath, she tries to remember what year it was. Her mother’s letter flashes before her eyes. The word acquitted. And the word war.

There was a war and now there isn’t. Pansy keeps getting the tenses wrong. Past collides with the present and sometimes she isn’t sure. Did it end? Is this really the great and honorable peacetime? Was that the sound of firecrackers or the annihilating, earth-shattering sound of Confrigo ripping the atmosphere? Is that girl eyeing her dress or pondering whether or not snitch to Carrows about how she had deliberately failed to perform her Cruciatus charm.

But no. The war is over. She had been a small and inconsequential part of it. Her family hadn’t chosen a side, hadn’t been branded by the Dark Mark. Most of what her father had done could be safely and reasonably compartmentalised into shock, and hysteria, and self-preservation. Her family’s lawyer had been determined to prove that. And now he has.

So why does it feel like it’s still raging, just as harsh but veiled clumsily.

Harry Potter’s warmth, his presence gleams for a moment beside her. Without thinking, Pansy blurts out, “I know you must hate me.”

“I don’t hate you.”

“My father, he… got acquitted.”

“Oh.” 

Pansy’s mouth is hollowed by the saccharine. Your father is acquitted, her mother wrote. The war is finally over, my sweet.

Something ripples in his voice. “Shouldn’t you be happy about it?”

Was it confusion? Anger?

“I… I should. I—am,” she says, exasperated, an exhausting mixture of shame and raw nerves bubbling helplessly inside her. “I am happy.”

“Why are you crying then?”

“It’s just that… I— it’s not simple. I was simple before. Loving my father was simple, and now—” 

Is he shifting beside her? She feels colder. More helpless tears come, her heart falling out of rhythm. Her voice is soft, almost not there as she finally gets the words out, “Sometimes something happens and you know that this is it. Sometimes people cross a line and they can never go back. It’s all shit and all fucking consequences. If I’m happy because he’s cleared, aren’t I the same?”

Her father had assisted in the pillage. It was self-preservation. He never did have the knack for violence, however vain he’d been. Does it make anything better, though? Because somewhere along the way, she knows he finally gained the ability to throw an Unforgivable at someone undeserving of it.

It may have been forever that it took for her to breathe normally. After ages, silently, he slips his arm behind her. She hardens up, a second, before leaning into it. She shouldn’t, but the world is too cold, sharp and agile like a reptilian, following her through every one of her bad decisions, every blot in her pureblood name. And he’s so warm. A sob breaks out from her throat. She could imagine it.

After she’s cried out and he’s absorbed it, do the other senses reluctantly come back. Pansy pushes herself out of the embrace, stares at him in embarrassment.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t tell you—ask you to understand. But.  Don’t you ever feel—” and she cringes even as she says the word, even as she thinks about it—because the word, that word, is both intense and awkward. It’s at the same time magnanimous and childish, ponderous but so fucking belittling to her ingrained inability to be vulnerable. It’s the one thing she’s ever felt and it is, surprisingly, ferociously, nothing at all. 

“Feel what?”

“Like this—like… lonely and broken?”

His mouth falls open, a little, and there’s a flush on his cheeks that couldn’t really be the impact of her silly, nonsensical question, could it?

“You don’t have to answer. I don’t know why I…”

She trails off, embarrassed, not finding the right words. He doesn’t reply to this, which is good. Pansy lets out a shaky breath and stares out into the night, tries to concentrate at the slight shapes forming against the darkness, rectangular lights flooding out of the windows of the shops, pooling like some distant and dimmed star. She tries to seep into the scene, be done with it, be absorbed in the light and the dark and the cool, sharp air smelling of Marshmallows and butterbeers and cigarettes. It’s not until a dry, but deceptively warm palm touches her wrist ever so softly that she’s pulled back into the present.

“Sometimes I feel like I don’t exist, like I’m invisible to everyone,” he says softly, and even though the sentence is, well, preposterous, something in his voice tells her that he is telling the truth—his truth.

Pansy can’t think of anything to argue with him. Really, what could she say? Certainly not that he is the sun, the unignorable and bright, something burning with its own light. That he’s all she ever notices ever since she saw him at the lake. At the back of her head, Harry Potter has made a safe nest nettled with his thoughts. He moves along his friends but she sees him more and more at the library, along, his eyes skipping in the pages he never turns over. Or at classes, he sits at the back, eyes glassy and not present. She sees him in his quidditch robes, the snitch in hand, his smile too wide and sharp to be real.

“You’re not invisible,” she says, not knowing how to let him know she means it.

His hand grips hers now. She resists the urge to lean back into him again. Something tells her if she does, she might never let go. 

“You’re not broken,” he says finally. A great sweeping tide of something closely like relief, sweet but stinging, passes her. Pansy holds on to the tenderness in his voice. And despite all the contraries, she wills herself to believe it.