Sweet

Life moves on, of course. 

Winter melts to summer. A year passes in mercurial disdain. Sometimes it’s a steady drool of consciousness, repetitive and unremarkable. Sometimes, though, life moves too fast. All things happen at once and time rushes in to make up for all the senseless idleness of her mind. It sprints without waiting for her, without even pausing to see if she’s keeping up. The application for her apprenticeship takes forever to get accepted, Pansy rolls around in her apartment, drinks lukewarm tea at noon instead of lunch, she flips through Witch Weekly and tries to write back to her mother. On a pale September morning, suddenly, time rushes in. On the front page of the Prophet is a picture of Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley hand in hand, a large, shiny ring glinting preposterously through the paper. They’ve just announced their wedding date. Pansy blinks, she had been eyeing another news. She was, foolishly, unprepared. The column is right over the news of a Muggle man being finally discharged from Mungo’s, he had been receiving treatment for torture at the hand of death eaters and she tries to drag her eyes away, down down—but—

Chosen One Ties the Knot! 

Discomfort rises like bile at her throat and Pansy is just about to make sense of it—of course, it’s not for Potter, no, it’s for that article about that muggle man—that the mailing charm chimes on. She snaps her head at the sound. Just as she thinks, a letter, a creamy, officious envelope materialises in front of her and Pansy grabs the letter instead of the catastrophe in the newspaper. And time stops as she skims her eyes over the letters. Mungo’s has finally written back. She’s accepted for a year of training. A sharp, prickling pain slathers at her chest. Oh god. She dabs her thumb on the edge of the word accepted, and the d slants down. Her heart picks up the lost pace just as time starts moving, too. She smiles at the smudged letter. Outside, the sun is just starting to rise.

It takes a week, but everything changes. Her days that used to be neutral and unevently, suddenly buzzes with work. Her mentor is a woman of fifty with sagging skin and opaque brown eyes. Non-compromising. Non-conforming. And Pansy appreciates that Ms. Antigone doesn’t seem to notice nor care about her last name. Instead of wondering about someone’s engagement and someone’s heartbreak, she tries to pour her heart into learning spells and wand movements and finding a schedule of sleep that works for her and smile at the receptionist even though he always only sneers and ask for less and be invisible except when needed.

Days end in a blur. Harry Potter announces his wedding date, and then breaks off with Ginny Weasly after exactly six weeks. Pansy doesn’t ask him if he’s happy when she sees him another month later, his left arm in a sling, at the hospital. He smiles—that same exhilarated, open, kind smile—when he sees her in her new life. There is some unspoken confidence in them, she feels. Sweet and heavy, tasting like the kiss they shared on the New Year’s eve. Pansy bites down her smile to smother that memory, though. It hardly matters.

It doesn’t matter. That one blip of astounding clarity grazes at her. It’s a foolish impulse. Pansy reminds herself that he had been half drunk when he kissed her. He probably sank in relief afterwards that he didn’t take it further. And anyway, she’s not right for him, not with her pureblood name and her pureblood past and her very own habit of pulling everything into her genetics. That foolish, sentimental, self-serving guilt marking everyone around her.

So it shouldn’t matter to her when his jacket suddenly materialises in front of her. Except—

Pansy stumbles back, heart hammering embarrassingly loud. She blinks at the cloth, hanging inconspicuously from the corner of Draco’s apartment. She picks up the jacket, runs her fingers on the leather before she can tell herself not to. There is little light in the corridor, and the dark cloth absorbs what little was reflecting from the bulbs. Is is really—?

“It’s mine,” her ears ring with the playful lilt of the familiar voice. She clutches the jacket tighter as she whips around.

The one who’s standing, tall and lean in a gray turtleneck and jeans, has his head tilted at her in reminiscence, eyes crinkled around the edges with warmth. Her head lights up and she can feel the warmth spread everywhere—to her heart and her cheek and her neck, and to his smile. That infectious, bashful smile. Like before. Suddenly, Pansy has a queer, sinking feeling that if she blinks, he’s going to disappear.

He is not Harry Potter.

“Theo?”

Theodore Nott smiles wider. He is so different. He’s grown up, of course. Shoulders defined, and jaw hardened. He has lines on his forehead, around his mouth that she can’t remember from before. But still there’s a blinding trace in him to the boy she knew. The eyes, as he comes closer, are the same penetrating, brilliant blue. His hair is longer, less shiny, but the familiar breezy waves are tucked against his ear.

He hugs her before she can notice anything else. Pansy buries her head in his chest, lets the wool graze on her cheek, lets herself breathe into him and he says, head inclined to her neck—

“Missed you all… I missed you.”

“Missed you, too,” she whispers back.

She breaks herself away to take another look at him, up close. The scatter of freckles, his eyelashes, the distinct slope of his nose. All like before. She holds his face and he lets her, his smiles cuts into her palm.

“I didn’t know you were back.”

“Yeah…” His cheeks flush with colour. “I wanted to tell—it was all unplanned, actually. The ministry’s finally handed us the deed of the Nott Manor, what’s left of it anyway. And I wanted to sell it, it’s in my name and… and everyone’s dead anyway so—” He laughs awkwardly. So the nervous tick of spilling uncomfortable truths hasn’t left him. ”Anyway, I thought, why not milk the cash cow?”

Pansy stares at him. “You could’ve told me.”

“Draco suggested that—uh, you’d like the surprise.”

“Draco’s a dramatic moron.” She shakes her head, smiling. “It’s nice to see you.”

His smile, like a half moon, brightens his face. It has been six years since she has seen that smile. He left for Japan when his uncle, by far the smartest parent figure she’s ever had, suspected of the second coming of Voldemort. Cygnus Nott fought tooth and nail with Theo’s father to let him go somewhere safe. At the start of their sixth year, Theo had left her with a searing kiss and the echo of a voice hoarse with promises. No smiles then. His eyes alight with desperation. He said— I’ll write to you; I will come back, I won’t last a day without everyone; I love you. I love you.

She couldn’t reply to any of it, crying as she was. She had been practicing all night in front of her mirror to ask him to stay. So finally when the moment came, and she couldn’t—didn’t ask that of him—there was no regret.

On an aimless Sunday morning, Pansy writes to her mother. The reply comes after a week, short and brief, as if there wasn’t enough time, or not quite enough to say. But there was a luncheon to be invited to. 

So here it goes.

Over the sizzling asparagus, Pansy tries to tell her mother of her internship. Her mother, from the other end, listens with a blank expression on her face. Her loose, slik hair is graying on the front, matching gracefully with her seafoam silk gown. Her green eyes have the same inexplicable coldness. Pansy finds herself blabbering more and more as seconds limp forward.

“I have a job now,” she says, her voice breaking a little.

“How eccentric of you,” her mother muses.

There was a ball, somewhere in the vicinity of last week. The rotting heaps of canapes and unopened champagne bottles advised her against asking how it went. She stood in the empty ballroom and thought about the  parties her mother used to throw. Extravagant and useless, shiny bodies waltzing around under the great crystal chandelier. Pansy used to wait up all night, dreaming about the day she’d make her first appearance. But that dream’s broken now, everything is out in the open. The Parkinson fortune chiefly came from mining gold and hard-earned goblin jewels. Brutal working hours and scantily paid wages. Illegal dealings across the sea to evade taxes. The world is no longer mysterious.

Pansy bites down her lips and stares at her plate. It’s beige, hand painted by goblins, perfectly tuned with the marble dinner table, the white walls and the chandelier over their head. The only thing out of place is her.

How eccentric of her.

All of it is old ritual. Every time she tries to share her life with her mother, her accomplishments, a little thing she did right. but it comes out hollow, sounds juvleine. and the things she thought were significant sounds frivolous and foolish.

“It isn,’t eccentric. I am…” Somehow she can’t get the word important out of her mouth. It gets stuck, somewhere between her teeth and the tip of her tongue. “Yesterday I fixed an ulna—it’s a bone in your forearm.” She resists the urge to raise her hand and show her impassive mother exactly where the bone is. “She held my hand and I… fixed her. Harriet told me it was brilliant. She hadn’t expected me to mend it so perfectly. She keeps assigning me to night shifts when it’s obviously less workload. But after yesterday I really think I earned her respect—”

“Pretty earrings.”

Pansy blinks, the ending of her sentence hangs stalely in the air before she gulps them down and nods. “Thank you. Theo gifted them.”

“They complement your eyes.”

“Yes, I know—”

“How long is he here for?”

“I’m not sure.”

Her mother hums, turning the fork in her hand. “I adore the color of your eyes.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your eyes. They are the clearest lapis blue. When you were a child, I used to spend hours looking at you. In certain light, they looked violet. Your great-grandmother had them, you know. After you were born, I was… so afraid that they’re going to get darker when you grow up, mutate somehow, as our magic sometimes changes our appearance. You were nothing like her, not with her grace and effortless charm, but those eyes… they passed two generations before they reached you.” She takes a small, graceful sip from her glass, eyes locked onto Pansy. “And yet you never cared for them.”

She purses her lips, both comforted and ouffputed by the softness in her mother’s voice. “That’s all I did when I was young, mother.”

“No, no. You never accepted your gifts. You never seemed to use it for anything worthy.”

“My gifts?”

“Assests, really. And after your monthly cycles started—you were fourteen, no?—your hips narrowed, your body did become more mature. Leaner. Not that petite figure you had, not that I particularly disliked it, no, but it gave an aura of—”

“Magda used to say I was malnourished.”

“Oh. Your governess was a saphead. You know, darling, women are defined by how much they can shed. It takes a lot of shedding to be perfect. You become a woman after you start bleeding. It is poetic like that.”

She grazes her finger on the edge of her butter knife. “Nothing about what you did to me was poetic, mother.”

Her mother swishes her hand disdainfully. “Oh you children like to make up monsters. We had it—”

“Worse, I know. I fucking know, mum.”

Her mother’s eyes flashed. “Don’t swear. We gave you a life of luxury, you never had to worry about anything, you never had need for anything. Always the most expensive clothes and jewelry and—”

Pansy shakes her head in disbelief. “I’m not talking about that. I…” She stares around helplessly, she hasn’t come here for that. She was supposed to be moving over from that stuff. Yet, Pansy opens her mouth and she knows before anything that she’s sucked right into the middle of it all. “I am talking about you hurling your shoe at me because I broke your china vase by mistake—”

“You were running around at the house when I told you not—”

“Or making me serve your guests food because I asked for something else—”

“It’s not polite to ask for food you didn’t make, Pansy, I had told you—”

“You glued my mouth because you caught Theo and I kissing—”

“It was unladylike. And I wanted Draco to court you, not—”

“We were twelve! We were just kids! I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t scream, I couldn’t even breathe! All day I was waiting for you to come and fix me. I waited and you didn’t come, mother. You sent Magda to lift the curse the next day.”

“You were thirteen and it was not a curse. My mother had used that many times and I had never—”

“I was afraid you’d never fix me again!”

“It’s ridiculous. Why wouldn’t I fix you? I am your mother.”

“Exactly!” Her voice breaks off despite herself, sounds screeching, pleading. “You’re my mother and I… love you. I still fucking love you. And what’s even more pathetic—I want you to love me. Don’t you see? I have a job now, an apartment and there are people who know me—people who have nothing to do with you. I’m… I do all this but I… I’m still twelve and crying soundlessly in my room, waiting for you to come and fix me.”

“Oh god.” Her mother stares at her, incredulous. “So this is what it’s all about?”

“What?”

“You are unhappy.”

A moment of silence. Doubt ricochets in her mind. She is happy, content. She has come here to flaunt it all. 

“I’m… I am happy. Happier than I’ve ever been. I am doing important things and I am more than my name and I— Maybe you are the one who’s unhappy, maman. You didn’t think I’d be able to live on my own and now you are left alone because father’s never here, is he? You are bitter and—”

She stops, suddenly feeling everything turn red and hot and blinding. It’s done, a pernicious voice in her head calls out. She’s finally crossed the line she never had the guts to do. Now she doesn’t know what else to say at all. Ever.

On the other end of the table, her mother smiles. And it’s such a cold, sadistic expression that Pansy recoils back, parts her lips for a shaky, hasty apology.

But then.

“My darling,” her mother says calmly. “If you want my condolences then you are knocking at the wrong door. Because I don’t care for that sugar coating nonsensical sentimentality. All I offered you was truth.”

“Maman, I—”

“You are plagued by self-doubt and fear, and all your life you have been running from how unpleasant it makes you.”

Pansy gapes at her, apology stuck to her throat. 

Her mother smiles as if she can feel it, too. “Somewhere along the way you decided to turn that unpleasantness into a trait of yours. But I gather that was never successful, either. All your efforts to install fear and respect has only ever made you the object of other people’s hatred and worse, their pity. Do you really think you can just saunter back here and blame me for all the failures of your life? Girls at your school didn’t like you, never being the one for any academic achievements, and Draco Malfoy never loved you—and why? Because I’ve been such a beastly mother? I gave you everything and someone else would have been grateful!”

It feels as if someone had plunged her mercilessly into cold water. As if a freezing hand has just clasped at her slippery heart. No sound, nothing on the other end. Monstrous emptiness.

“Someone else would have been grateful to get all your fortune, your beauty, you blood and they could have made a life out of it and be content for every single second of it. We gave you everything you needed to be happy and it is not my fault that you cannot see that. That you’ve never been capable of that.”

When she around the ballroom, Pansy imagined the last party she attended. The blood money and tainted legacy and a hundred thornes nestled in her skin. Hers to own, to fix, to break. She cowers down to what she can tell is going to be the last fight with her mother for a long, long time.

“I gave you everything,” Cynthia says, and her voice sounds so far, from another room, maybe, from another life. Pansy realises the closure she wanted from her mother doesn’t exist, never did.

So she tries to hold herself together for one more second. She says, calmly, “Yes, mother, you did.”

After hours, Pansy Parkinson finds herself apparating to the Nott Manor, the east wing where Theo has settled himself as he breaks down the rest of it. She doesn’t think twice, or even once. There is a sense of inevitability in how Theo seems to blend into her life. Effortlessly. As if he had never left.

He is reading when she apparates in the middle of his library room. He stares up, eyes muffled with exhaustion. Pansy walks to him like a scared cat, afraid he might disappear if she runs. Afraid that the befuddled softness will disappear if she is not careful enough. Wordlessly, she sits beside him. Theo sets down the book and she leans down, rests her head on his thigh. 

“Not how you expected?” he asks as he runs his fingers through her hair.

“Exactly how I expected.”

He whispers that it’s alright and Pansy nods impassively, her cheeks grazing the slik fabric of his trousers. Something in his voice, the deep, engulfing, compassionate hum brings her back to the earth, body and soul. All through the afternoon, she was floating in and out of memories. Running around somewhere between her mother’s closet and Diagon Alley, the corner of her bedroom and the corner of the dining room, waiting to be called into reality. She calls his name to push herself forward. “Theo?”

“Yes, love?”

“Why did you like me?” His hand stops but she doesn’t let herself be distracted. “Wasn’t I intolerable? Always fussing with… everything. My dress, your hair, laughing when I shouldn’t, being mean and nasty, always asking you if everything was perfect and getting offended if you answered in the negative. Wasn’t I always scared? Wasn’t I exhausting?”

“That’s not how I remember it,” he says, and there’s that softness there, familiar and hers, that she can feel spreading slowly to her scalp. 

“I remember you spending hours reading about the history of corsets, or the ocean, the space… I remember you spending an afternoon crying about that Russian dog that was sent into space by muggles.”

“Lyka,” she mumbles, and feels him nod.

“When Draco broke his arm you stayed up all night to help him with his homeworks. I remember you dragging me through people whenever I was having a panic attack. And yeah, you used to fuss over my shirt and my hair to make sure we matched, always. But I never minded.”

“Why?”

“Because… whatever the party, you used to make sure I never fell back, or that I wasn’t forgotten in the back. Or that we never missed dancing in a slow song. That’s why I loved you… That’s why I love you.”

“But I was so mean.”

“We were all mean.”

“Not you.” She feels herself coaxing into this room, his thigh, the smell of mulberry and cedarwood. Theo had never been a permanent part of their group, always floating and adjusting to their sharp perfection, rattled by their rigid superiority. It was Pansy who used to tether him down, or snatch his attention to reality from whatever book he had been reading. 

“You were always so quiet,” she says.

“Passive aggression is still aggression.”

She nods. The smell of Theo’s cedarwood perfume, the dark mahogany of the walls. Her heart is heavier now, but more hers. She says, softly, “I thought I was finally over all this… friction. I thought she couldn’t hurt me anymore. I thought I had been surviving. What I was really doing was playacting. I’m always stitching myself up, stopping from collapsing entirely. I feel so heavy, Theo. Always. Every moment. I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid mum’s right about me, all of me.”

“How can I help?”

Pansy sits up, and with a moment of pricking hesitation, turns around and kisses him. He takes a short, sharp breath of surprise before he leans in, quick and heavy, to catch her from falling. His book falls with a thump as she straddles him, bringing her body closer until there is no space, not a speck, for thoughts of failure and disappointment and loneliness. His hands move to her hair and even as she moans into his mouth, grips on his collar, he is soft. And careful. Sweet. 

Their bodies move with their own rhythm. Her hands find his shoulder, sloping down to feel his heart then, fluttering and fidgeting, almost. Pansy grazes her fingers on his collarbone. He kisses her neck. “I’ve found so many things once I’ve upturned this place. From when we were kids, Draco’s old broom and Blaise’s bassoon. I’m sure we’ll find something of ours, too. Do you want to look around? How about we take the tour at my house, too? Feel like trespassing two haunted mansions in a row?”

“Not trespassing if you own the place, Theo.”

“Quite the opposite, baby. It owns me.”

His voice is playful enough, but she can feel the tremble in his fingers as she brings their entwined hand to her lips. He stops breathing. As she kisses them, carefully, on the tip of his fingers, she can feel his eye piercing into her, trying to picture her in the past just as she’s trying to picture him. And it’s becoming easier by the second. He is more and more familiar by the second.

“Cynthia loves you, too, you know. In her own terrible way.”

She considers it for a moment. “I don’t know what I want from my life, Theo. But I’ve had enough of love that feels like domination. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” he whispers, and kisses her again.

When they break apart, Pansy lifts her hand to smooth his hair, takes off his reading glasses before leaning forward to kiss him again. This time, on every new line she doesn’t recognise.

“I didn’t want to leave,” he says quietly. She kisses him on the forehead, his cheeks, the shallow dents that are never quite the dimple he wanted.

“We all should have left.”

“I know, but—everyone is different now. You’re different.”

“Different how?”

He holds her gaze. “I can’t name it. But… you don’t laugh. You have this habit of dozing out of a conversation now. You have this habit of checking every corner of a room you get into, like you’re afraid someone might apparate right at that moment, you—”

“You noticed,” she whispers, blinking hard to keep out tears.

“I always do. And I… I love you, this you—that you… I just hate myself for not being a part of it.”

“It’s okay. We’re here, that’s all that matters.” Then, catching her breath, feeling the weight of their history hover over them like a halo, she breathes out—

“I love you, too.”