Magnets

[DAY 288]

Pansy knows she shouldn’t stare.

But.

The lights are mellow and fluorescent-like when they fall in fleets over the bodies dancing in the ballroom. The lights are mellow and romantic, reflecting over the bone white drapers around the room and the pristine, crystal chandelier hanging above them. The music simmers in the background like a long lost incantation. It’s tasteful to a fault. It’s perfect . Nauseatingly, excruciatingly perfect.

So is he.

Pansy tells herself she’s not staring, per say. She’s keeping tabs. She’s clocking the time and space and the electrifying, unbreachable gap between their bodies, because everything is so unlikely anyway. Harry Potter sauntering around the ballroom full of prideful purebloods. Harry Potter smiling with grudging politeness at her mother. His dark hair is slicked back with a sparse, renegade piece of hair flopping back endearingly on his forehead, his specs are high up the bridge of his nose and he—he’s wearing the dark, tailored silk robe she knows he absolutely hates. He stands straight, rigidly formal, too polite, unable to blend in and Pansy wonders—not for the first time, not the second—what he’s doing here.

His date… however.

Pansy doesn’t mean to stare, but she’s tall and curvy and has a ringing, high pitched, good-natured laugh that’s been clanking around the back of her head since she heard her laugh appreciatively at Theo. She has her arm sling around the crook of his and the way it’s just there—careless and easy with the slope of her elbow resting over his and the smile she has on her lips is delicate and gracious when she taps taps taps her index against his thumb—pricks at something deep and dark inside her.

She’s afraid to name it.

In the midst of the crowded room filled with people—flashy people, important people, familiar people—her gaze catches—like a hook to an eye—on the girl she doesn’t know.

Pansy speaks with the curator and checks and rechecks on the artefacts supposed to be auctioned tonight. She downs her third glass of champagne and pretends to be interested in Blaise droning about the new piece of land he’s acquired for a summer home.

The colour of her arm length hair is a bright, tumultuous red that blooms on the sleek, silvery silk of her floor length evening gown.

“You’re staring awfully hard, my love,” Daphne whispers, a little too conspicuously, in her ear.

Pansy’s breath catches in her throat. “I’m not—”

“Yeah, you are.” Daphne kisses her cheek. Her palm smooths over Pansy’s shoulder before she stands right in front of her. Her face is full of that insipid, pre-wedding glow that only highlights 

the knowing smirk she has plastered. Pansy purses her lips tightly and in the scathing, saccharin smile of hers before answering she has no idea what Daph’s talking about.

“Her name is Rose Gilbert,” Daphne says as a matter of fact, twirling a strand of her sun-blonde hair.

“Who?” Pansy twirls her glass, the bottom of it bubbles for a second before it fills up again.

“She’s the last descendant of—”

“I don’t—”

“Incredibly into archaic pieces.”

“— care.”

“ And she’s planning to bag that Parthian amulet of yours.”

This stops her. There’s an extremely uncomfortable, glaringly imprudent weight in the middle of her throat. It’s one of her most prized collections. It… it shouldn’t matter . “I didn’t know,” she says quietly.

The smile on her best friend’s lips grows wider. She leans in, completely unperturbed by Pansy’s stupor or her total lack of general decency, and whispers coyly, “Bet you didn’t know another thing.”

Red fucking hair.

“What?”

“He’s staring, too.”

There’s a slick, studding moment of silence. Her thoughts, ringing and glaring, stop and click in the back of her head, like bolts and screws. Pansy feels a telltale heat in the back of her neck and before she knows what she’s doing, she tilts her head to the side.

Across a sea of people, their eyes meet.

Pansy forgets to breathe.

In a moment—the next moment—she finds herself stuttering a bleak, surreptitious excuse. She finds herself running back, sliding past people with her sanity clutched like the purse in her hand and it’s really nothing, she just needs a moment to rationalise and compartmentalise and fucking breathe because—

Because it’s really nothing. It’s none of her business who he’s with, especially since—

The door of the study slams with a force loud enough to almost ground her. She drops her purse to the floor as the woods bangs in its place. Her heart stutters, creaks and stomps as she walks shakily to her desk. The room is dead silent except for the slow, syrupy sound of the music wafting from the ballroom—a frail reminiscent. Still too loud—too bright. She still can’t rationalise why he’s here, why he didn’t politely decline when she gave him the chance—why, after all this time, all the little pieces of her he set in, it still feels surreal. He seems like the bright, vivacious drop of colour in the pale landscape and it grates—the dissonance. The difference between her and him is too stark and rough in that room, with her beside Draco and him with his homely date with her down-to-earth laugh and brilliant red hair and taste enough to buy Pansy’s most prized collection. The difference… the contradiction settles something she’s never been brave enough to attempt.

Pansy takes a deep breath, takes two and lets the familiar scent of old books and sharp ink settle in her, brew into something like comfort and—

“Hey.”

She snaps back. She inadvertently leans against the edge of her desk. Like a habit, the weight in her chest dissolves a little as her lips part in surprise.

She doesn’t answer as Harry locks the door with a flick of his hand.

He takes a step, and it’s as if she can really—for the first time tonight—appreciate how good he’s looking. The muscular slope of his shoulder, the blunt out, barely there dents under his eyes. The light of the lamp—golden, illuminating—shines on his face and reverts the usual olive tone of his skin into something spectacular, something remarkable, something—

“You look—” he can’t finish, because Pansy has already breached the few steps between them and thrown herself over him.

She feels him topple back, feet stuttering, hand bracketing her back, bare with low cut of her dress, with an uncertain kind of softness. It takes him a moment to respond, his fingers drum on the sliver of bare skin of her back before she moans into his mouth, parts his lips with her in urgency. He tastes the same as before. Mint and wine and the synthetic nicotine of the electric cigarettes she bought him. His hand sneaks up to touch her braided hair, and it’s soft, it’s sweet despite the gravelled beat of his heart under her palm and she—

Normally she loves it.

But the image of the girl in silver and her arm between his makes a glitzy, technicolour shot in her head and she bites his lower lip. She pushes against the gravity and they’re back against the wall. Pansy blames jealousy, hot-headed and senseless, useless jealousy as she cranes her neck, pushes her hand past his trousers to touch him, already half hard. Harry groans, his breath falls, hot and heavy on her neck and he asks if she’s okay, if it’s okay to—

“Where do you want me to take you?” she blurts out.

He stops. His hands come to a shaky halt and there’s a dead beat second of absolute silence when he pulls back, just a little, just enough, to look at her inquisitively and—

Pansy instantly regrets asking it. Her palms rest on his shoulder and he… he— halts and their breaths, indrawn, pushed out, deep, melt and swirl between the barely there gap of their mouth and she hopes, haphazardly, foolhardily, that he’ll say no—there’s no need. I’m already right where I want to be.

But his eyes settle into something solid, something harsh and decisive and he tells her—

“Fourth year, the great hall, when the Goblet of Fire—”

He doesn’t need to finish. Pansy digs the heel of her palms into the crooks of his neck and her fingers push in his hair. She knows this memory, she’s taken him there a dozen times. It’s a routine, it’s a trip; the tips of her fingers find the most delectable point of his head like memory, like a charm itself and she only has to concentrate a second on the gold flakes in his eyes before the room contorts and snaps and disintegrates between them. The time twists; she feels colder when they land.

They’ve been doing this for a while now.

The hall is colder and the silence is more deafening than ever and he doesn’t leave her hand when the cool, blue ball of fire bursts in orange. Pansy’s been here many times, she’s seen this particular scene—and the dozen different ways it can go, it did —memorised well. Yet, like every welting page of his history, she watches. The hall falls into the stone heavy silence of surprise for a moment, before, their headmaster calls out—

“I’ve seen enough,” Harry says tightly.

She swallows. The hand he isn’t holding forms a fist. “Yeah?”

In answer he tugs her back, back away from the first uproar of brawl rise up. She hears the shrill voice of Madame Maxime call out, screech like the dying croak of an eagle and she—

She doesn’t care.

Because Harry has backed her away to a deserted corner on the far end of the hallway. It’s shadowed into a crate as she lets him push her back against the wall. She gasps, partly from the harsh cold of the stone setting into the fabric of her dress and partly because his hand is already sneaking through the slit of her gown, fingers tapping along the ribbon-like, upturned skin of the old, old scar. He plays with the strap of her garter; she clutches onto him harder, harsher. Her breaths come out like pants in the shell of his ear as she pushes her body forward with an urgency that’s not new. Not after all this time. Not when—

He is leaving a wet trail of kisses past her neck, toys with the idea of breaking skin, his teeth grazing, lilting, teasing her. “Still want me, baby?”

She hates him. Him with his smirk that’s never smug enough or mean enough or anything else, really. Too sweet, too him, almost a smile— soft and tender and genuine and she hates it when he stares at her as he slides her knickers and dips his finger inside her. She’s so wet he slides in fully, without a stop and she whimpers at the contact. Her hand finding the front of his trouser—his cock a hard line against the zip as her walls clench and his fingers go deep deep deep and there’s the sparse bit of friction when the pulp of his thumb rubs on her clit and she thinks she’s hazy, she’s half gone, it’s—

It’s got to be jealousy. 

She helps him get out of his trousers before he bunches up her dress, a fistful of lavender silk in hi hands, up and up. Enough to guide himself inside her. He slides her leg up as the burn of the stretch, the hot, sticky point where they meet is too much and too good. She yanks at his collar to pull his face on hers, feels the hot, moist breath whirl on her cheeks when he groans, tells her it feels good, so good and moves—and moves—

And the people the lights the sounds his date floats away like dust, like they never mattered. The long, aching strokes, his grip on her waist, the friction—not in rhythm, not in sync, not in anything enough—on her clit when they move, when he moves just how she likes, every moment drawn out and it’s soft and slow just before he picks up his speed and she whimpers. The scene—the memory around them melts into nothing, into a thin, blue sphere and she tries, like all other times, to focus. Too keep them both in the simulation enough to—

It doesn’t matter.

“I want you to come first,” he whispers in her hair.

She nods desperately. Yes, she’d like that. She’d really—

Long, rhythmic strokes. His fingers flatten on top of her cunt and he taps on her clit and Pansy—she comes with a helpless cry.

Her arm hangs loosely on his shoulder when they fall out of the memory. Her come makes a slippery, sticky noise when he moves for the last of his hasty, erratic strokes. Pansy cups his cheeks, makes him look at her before moving up, catching his lips. And the hiss, the helpless sigh that melts on her open mouth is rough, scaly like something ancient, something raw and bitting and it… it sounds like Parseltongue.

But she doesn’t let the trail of her thoughts wander too far.

No; she lets him finish. Lets his body, hot and heavy fall on her in the familiar weight. She feels the warm and soft trickle of it—the high, the ache, his come—down her thigh. He’s still inside her when he rests his forehead against her, noses bumping—a hazy, post-coital flush on his cheeks. He’s smiling.

Her heart does something entirely unsanctioned.

It slows down.

He bites his lower lip, stares at her with the expression—bright eyes and the easy slant of his lips like he’s in on some joke she doesn’t have any idea about. He drags out the words, “You look—”

“Pretty?” 

“No.”

She snorts, her throat suddenly tight with a sharp shooting shrapnel in the middle of her chest. “Now, now , Potter, just because you’ve come with a perfect young—”

“What?” he scoffs. “It’s not—”

“Who even is she? I don’t—”

“ —what I meant.”

“ —know her. So—”

“Pansy.”

“What?”

“You don’t look pretty.”

“Again? Potter—”

She can’t finish. His lips, soft and wet, press on top of her and she kisses him back before she can tell herself not to. Before she reminds herself that whoever the girl is—it’s his date and his choice and decidedly none of her fucking—

“You look more,” he breathes out when he finally lets her go.

“What?”

“More than pretty.” He traces his finger on her frame, pushes back a hair that’s twisted off from her braid. “Or beautiful… You look like someone who shouldn’t exist... You’re unreal.”

Pansy blinks. The world begins to melt again, disintegrate into some sort of a translucent dream. Like a fairy tale stupid girls like to read. The music drifting from the cracks of the closed door of her study feels like a background music to some stupid, senseless film. She grips on his collar. I hate you, she wants to say, not meaning it, meaning something entirely, breathtakingly opposite.

In the end she’s not brave enough to say either of these.