Magnets

[DAY 6]

“So... you’re saying you’ll have access to all of them?” he asks quietly, fingers tapping against the smooth surface of the burgundy coffee table. His voice is measured, careful, attentive—but there’s a timbre to it, a silent, constricted agitation to the last syllable. “All my memories?”

Pansy takes a careful sip of her coffee. She takes a second longer to answer. “Essentially.”

His lips curl. “Elaborate.” And when she raises an eyebrow. “Please.”

The deep, almost burnt smell of brewing coffee and chiming clatters of spoons against plates and the hushed polite conversation of muggles around them makes everything seem a little preposterous, Pansy thinks helpless. Makes it seem ludicrous.

“What I do is a less traditional blend of Occlumency and Pensieve magic. It partially shipons the memory without storing it. It’s not quite—”

“Legal.”

“ Yes .” She smiles extra sweetly. “Not quite legal. I clutch your consciousness and materialise your memories with you. It’s really like a Pensieve except... you’ll have more control than a mere spectator. You can—”

“Change things.”

“Yes.” She traces the blunt edge of her fork, uselessly trussed inside a pie none of them have tasted. She tilts it, and the cool silver metal of it reflects a pair of striking green eyes. “But not really.”

“Of course not.” The eyes blinked. “But… no consequences, either.”

“Essentially.”

“And I have a say in whether the people there see me or not?”

“You do.”

“But do you have to be with me? I mean—”

“Yes. That’s integral... to your safety.” She ignores the slick, disdainful scoff of the man at the last word. “Because the memories are real enough, but they’re highly bent to your conception. So it’s not… absolute. And even if it was, even if you are truly impartial, there’s no telling how far you’d want to go in a particular scene. There’s no—people are different when they enter a memory. They... morph. Transform. Sometimes they lose balance. Especially when the memories involve magic. And for someone as complicated as you... I assume a lot of your memories are complicated and related to magic, so yes —” She tilts her head to catch his eyes determinedly— “I have to be with you in this.”

His expression ripples. Wary. Contemplative. “What about the memories I am not one hundred percent sure of… or I don’t want to go. Will you have access to them, too?”

“Yes,” her voice is the same brand of sweetness that spells like a near threat. A challenge. She folds her hands and lets him trip to his own conclusion.

“But you won’t use... misuse it?”

“No.”

“Can you peek inside me when I’m not aware? Can you take me to a place without my consent? Can you—?”

“I believe,” she presses in her words with iron-like intensity—she tries to sound crisp and commanding and sharp, and not… brittled. “that all of this is covered quite extensively in the paperwork.”

“I need to hear you say it.”

“I will not do anything to exploit this... partnership—which is exactly what it is—or do anything without your consent.”

“And why would I believe you?”

She shuffles, her hand clenches. She is about to say that the paperwork in front of him—the meticulously crafted, excruciatingly detailed paperwork—is immaculate . It leaves no holes for either him or her to warp this partnership—which is exactly what it is—into anything else. But she doesn’t. There’s a timbre of yearning, of a shudder, of a near-desperate, petulant, childish plea in it. To hear it from her. To have a vocal, verbal promise. Which, really, is quite irrational. Promises not written in stone are expandable, mouldable pieces of leverage to use at your advantage. They are nothing real ; just thin, twisted airflow—seen and unseen. Easy to twist with a higher octave or a changing tone.

“I guess you’ll just have to trust me, Potter.”

He gulps, leans back. His arms are crossed, his expression oddly, inanely anxious. It makes her think back to their schooldays, for some reason. It makes her think back to the boy in shiny robes and patched-up, dorky specs and an excruciatingly bewildered expression whenever anyone called him. Like he had no idea why he was there.

The man in plaid shirt looks disconcertingly familiar.

She says before she can stop herself. “You’ll have to—check, thoroughly check, all the cons I’ve listed.”

“I have.”

“The effects. The temporary effects—”

“Dizziness. Nausea.” He shrugs. “It’s alright.”

She presses her lips together in a frown. There’s something distinctly Gryffindor about his petulance. His indifference to bodily harm and the constant, consistent need for bravado. For proving something to himself. “And the long-term effects.”

“I can read, Parkinson.”

“The memories can blur ,” she insists. “You can forget what happened. Partially or entirely.”

His lips curl and she isn’t—Pansy suddenly isn’t sure she’s reading him correctly at this moment. In this place. Or at all. Because it isn’t like him. Brave, quintessential hero with Gryffindor glory. Usually, surfing into the bleak, immersive depths of memory is a coward’s potion. Usually the people she helps— assists —are the ones too afraid to have made a move when it counted. So they come back. Rinse and repeat and relish in a moment spent right. They howl and bite at the opportunity. For once in their pointless, miserable life, they take . But he isn’t—but Harry Potter isn’t like that. He is the star of the ministry, walking around in his auror robes, on his way to become the youngest person to be elected as head of the auror department. He is a modern day myth. Pansy’s superior already has the statement ready from the Media Coordinator department of the ministry. So this isn’t… logical. And the unignorable rush of the frenzy—electrifying, hysteric—she felt when she saw him at the store twirls in her stomach, rises up up and around her ribcage.

He stares at her and his expression—she realises with… appalt, really—is a muted, blunt bemusement. A private smile, a soft, surprised awareness. As if he’s finally cracked something about her. 

Pansy takes another sip, inadvertently eyes the upper coat of her lipstick smudged on the cup. She’s beginning to feel like she’s at the wrong end of a really, really long tunnel.

“Isn’t that the point?”

She eyes him with the same brand of wary curiosity one would observe a Chimaera. Or a Sphinx. Her throat is parched, her posture is rigid and her spine is straight and she doesn’t quite know what he’s doing here. But that’s not the problem. The problem—the magnanimous, integral crack in her well-rationalised plan—is that she doesn’t know what she’s doing either. After forever, it seems, she nods.

She uncrosses her legs under the table. Settles in her seat a little—just the little.

He eyes the smudged scarlet stain of her lipstick for a moment too long.

[DAY 20]

It’s anger, she realises after the first memory.

It’s what guides him.

The realisation of his reasoning settles in the pit of her stomach like a gruelling, pinpricking awareness. Part of him makes sense with uncomfortable clarity. The petulance, the childish impatience and the mad rush to do everything at once, jump headfirst into the first, most basic memory she’s instructed him to dig out arrange like the patchwork of his character. Too fast and too bold and too fucking reckless.

It’s bottled down, dazed off anger that’s taken too long to be noticed. Slowly rotting under the floorboards.

She touches the back of his head and stares at his eyes with a blinding, single minded-intensity and concentrates. Her lips are moving, mumbling the cautiously forged incantations and her mind is sharp, agile. It slithers through the nooks and corners of his memory and she lets herself push in, dip her magic into the soft, crate-shaped crevices like she’s practised a hundred times on him.

And they go. In a swirling, twisting spin of time and space. She feels a knot, tense and unsteady and unstable, branching and unfurling inside her stomach. It coils, like magic, glitzy and brash, in her abdomen. The world caves in a tight, shuddering gasp for only a moment.

A moment.

He touches her elbow.

It’s gone.

Pansy blinks against the bright light. Her heart stutters, unsteady despite her efforts. But her feet are light and her hands are moving as she straightens up against gravity. She dips her bare toes into the fleet of grass and feels the dew. The grass is fresh, sharp, moist. Recently cut. Vibrantly green. The air is crisp and as she takes a short, measured breath, flitting her eyes past the rows of identical suburban houses, it smells sharp. Like airspray. Or kerosene. They are standing beside a tree. Ancient, she guesses, with its buckle clobbering and flaying in places. No hint of magic in sight.

Beside her, Potter is equally silent. His eyes are wide open, equal amount of inquisitivity and disbelief in the lines around it. She knows that look. She’s seen it before. The bewilderment and the fear, the awe and the suspicion. He’s still not convinced, even as he takes a step and sets further into the pristine scene. He’s let go of her hand and the place he touched—griped—has a simmering soft warmth spreading, crisscrossing over her skin like the tail end of a cheering charm. Pansy shoves the feeling away.

A sudden creak, loud enough to snap her attention, splits from the far left side. It breaks into the perfect quiet morning. Pansy turns her head and watches a small child speeding through a driveway. She clenches her hand like an instinct—the absence of her wand morphs into the skin of her palm. She recognises the kid. He’s running, to them, with tear streaks splattered on his face and nest of floppy, messy dark hair and—

Pansy gasps when Potter grips her hand again, jerks her away from the tree. He seems to have caught on, his grip is tight, his face is set hard and unyielding. And she knows she shouldn’t ponder on it. Knows her place in this memory and the sharp and stark uselessness of it. So she takes a step back in her own volition. The lights are sharper now, the scene is now more clear. More sounds come into her senses. The angry growl of a dog and behind the kid; and, like an afterthought, something that doesn’t seep into the scene naturally. Something that scrapes, uncomfortable and obnoxious, the sounds of joyful laughter.

The bulldog chasing the boy that comes into view like a menace. It snarls viciously at Potter before resuming on the kid. On another Potter, when he was—

The boy yelps, unaware of Potter or her.

A small band of people join behind. Two women, a man and a child, almost young Potter’s age, cackle at him, pointing. Their laughter rises like stale air, joyous and nauseating, as the kid ruffles to climb the tree. Pansy takes a gulp, her throat constricted. She glances at Potter to find his expression changing, spiralling from disbelief to disgust into fury.

Potter takes a step.

Pansy takes one back.

[DAY 47]

The memory drips with magic. Pansy shivers, breath hitched and mind alert. He drops her hand the second they land in solid ground. She takes a step back like an instinct. Her other, more poignant instinct makes her grip her elbows to chase off the heat of his palms from under the sleeves of her dress shirt. The place they land in is enshrouded in shadow, although not dark. There’s a rapid, elusive shiver of light, waving through the air like a shield. Translucent, like magic, flexing around them. It settles after a while, and she sees a boy in a sweater—the same boy, him —standing in front of a mirror. His entire face is opened up, gleaming with a kind of unbearable, excruciating happiness. An ache more than a joy. 

The rest of the room resurfaces. Pansy notices the pillars, ancient and Gothic with runes coiling around the stones, branching off and then connecting like vines. The boy doesn’t see them. He’s still smiling, his eyes welling up and it’s only a minute too long into the scene that she sees what’s amiss. The mirror. Archaic and magnificent. Unignorable. 

A soft breeze flows from no perceptible source in the room and she shivers. She realises that the magic she’s feeling, the sparse, electric sparks coursing through her veins, like the high of some hallucinogenic drug… it’s the mirror. There’s something enchanting about it. Something addictive. Like sad songs; like endings and bittersweet, heart wrenching and spell-binding. Like leaving and finding—

Home.

They are in Hogwarts, she realises, much too late.

Potter is borderline immobile beside her. She watches him stare at the boy. Eleven, she thinks. First year. Still a child. She wonders if he’s going to break the mirror. If the wretched, bottom-scraping anger she saw at Private Drive will make a reappearance. If he’ll punch the glass like he punched his uncle.

He doesn’t move. There’s a sticky, cloying smell in the air around them, it swirls around her, around them, like a hand. Like skin. Pansy tugs at her cardigan, she lets him stare at the child, pretends she doesn’t see his hands clenching and unclenching like he’s trying to hold onto something irretrievable. After eons, after a thousand darkened foregone days, he tells her, “I saw my parents.”

And oh. Oh. Something deep and heavy settles between them. Her voice inadvertently comes out like a whisper. “What?”

“My parents... I—.” He stares at her for the first time in that memory. “You don’t know.”

“Know what?”

“Where we are.”

“I know .” She blinks. “Hogwarts.”

“Hogwarts,” he repeats, the name melts off like a sigh. A wish. “Yeah, but. This room. This mirror... it’s different.”

She eyes the mirror, the carved indentation around it. Latin. Incantations twisting and twirling around each other like dancing lady orchids. She isn’t sure if she can read what they are, though. “I don’t—”

“It’s the Mirror of Erised.”

Suddenly, it feels as though a jutted bone is locked into its place. Suddenly, inadvertently, she’s painfully aware of what he’s talking about. Her heart beats faster, a pain spreads like a briar patch on the middle of her chest

“Yeah.” He makes a gesture. His hand, unclenched, points at the mirror. “Do you want to?”

“No.”

He snorts. “Well, that was quick.”

Pansy tries to sound unbothered. “It’s your consciousness. I’ll probably see that I’m married to Draco and showing off a big, obnoxious wedding ring.”

He blinks at her. She feels the tar hot surprise of it, she feels, like shame, like quicksand—an awareness as he stares. “You hate closed spaces.”

Her lips part. “What?”

“You hate closed spaces,” he repeats like a matter of fact.

“How would you—”

“You mutter something every time you’re in one of the ministry lifts. You close your mouth but I can see—” His takes a soft breath. “Your teeth clatter. You hate it. But. But you still do that every morning. You don’t use the stairs, you don’t try to move your office to the ground floor.”

Her hands form a fist on their own. It irks her that she doesn’t know where he’s going with this. It irks her that she’s so transparent to a… a stranger— worse than a stranger. “What’s your point?”

“I think you’re brave in your own obnoxious way.” He coughs. “If this mirror is my projection, it probably wouldn’t show you with… Malfoy.”

Her cheeks blaze. She can’t help but think it’s crooked, what he’s… insinuating. Illicit. She shifts her weight to the other foot, whispers, “I might... sometimes it’s hard to look at what you want,” she finds herself saying, “and then realising how far you are away from it.”

The place, the memory—swirls. The world feels like it’s tilted on the wrong axis, there’s a shift of gravity centre, the tectonic plates basing the earth, guarding it, shielding it, flexes. The light in the room, the effervescent, pearlescent beam, shines in a stream of colours. 

“Okay,” he says, his voice catches. It irks her that she doesn’t know that reason. Not yet. “Okay, I understand.”

[DAY 60]

Sometimes, Pansy pretends she isn’t lonely. She walks around her house, airspray in one hand, a cotton cloth in another and she dusts and sprays and cleans her apartment muggle way. She taps her feet to upbeat songs, talks with her cat, ignores the horrendous, ticking bomb cliché everything about her life is. Tick . She spins around with music. Snow, her ragamuffin, tries to scuttle away before Pansy picks her up, kisses her cheek, takes a long, deep breath in the furry softness of her skin. Tick . She rearranges her wardrobe. Robes from her grandmother, her dress from the Yule Ball, lofty, lascivious coutures from when she was fifteen and visited Paris with her mother. Tick. She taps her feet in her kitchen, hand on her hip, overtly animated as she ponders on what to make for dinner. She tries to not think about the thick, leather notebook with lists of her previous appointments. Tries to press in her mind that it’s all for kicks, anyway. Just a pretend game to get into people’s heads and watch, like a voyeur, their regrets. 

Pansy tells herself that she does it for the senseless thrill of it. Not for picking up on other people’s failures, to wade through someone’s mind and let herself realise, heart-ached and feet sprinting, that there’s an incurable ache, a cotton picking loneliness to all of them.

She doesn’t let herself think of that. Instead, she stands in her kitchen and consults with her cat on what to make. She smiles at Snow’s grumpy scoff. She stops, surprised, when a knock pulls her from her act.

She hasn’t expected anyone.

The room is shadowed in moonlight, bright and silver, filtering through the drapers. Her feet are bare, the soft, overused fabric of her cotton shirt trickles her collarbone when she opens her door and finds—

“Potter?”

Harry Potter is leaning against her door in his auror robes. A large brown bag on hand. She can see the head of a bottle peeking from its side.

He smiles awkwardly, a little apologetically. “Hey.”

She clutches her shirt at the collar. “What are you doing here?”

He breathes out a chuckle, still awkward. Apologetic. “I—uh—you didn’t come today and they… they told me you took a few days off? And I don’t—well, I wouldn’t, but—I don’t think I’ve ever seen you take a day off so I thought —actually, I didn’t think. But I just wanted to—see you.”

“I—yeah, I took a break.

He stares past her, into her living room. “You don’t have a guest, do you? Any plans or—"

“Oh no. No plans.” Her voice comes out more pitched, more breathless, than she wanted. “Unless you count crying in front of the cake as the clock strikes twelve as a plan, so.”

He smiles politely. His eyes look lighter than they do in the morning. They’re more attractive than they are in his memories.

She’s almost embarrassed by how clueless he looks. “It’s my birthday… a hour later.”

He blinks, a noticeable splotch of colour rises on his cheeks. “Oh god. Oh. I didn’t know.”

She shifts her weight on her other foot. “It’s okay. Not everyone can have a national holiday on theirs, so… The majority of us are okay with people not knowing their birthdays.”

“Yeah. Well.” He stares at his watch. The golden astronomical one she’s seen on the wrist of every guy she knows. Not one of them was this battered, though. “Forty five minutes.”

“Yeah.”

A breeze, soft and silent pass through them. Potter helplessly glances at the packet in his hand, the apple stuck in his throat bobs.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he confesses.

“Yeah, I gathered that.”

“But—” He takes a gulp. “Since I’m already here— doesn’t it… doesn’t it seem like it means something?”

“I don’t think reality works like that, Potter.”

He chuckles. “No… I didn’t think you would.”

“Why are you here?”

She taps her feet on the ground. His eyes linger, briefly, flippantly, on the deep violet of her nails.

“I—I was thinking about you.” He closes his eyes. “Not just today or—I… I just. I think about you, okay? When I’m working or when I’m about to eat or sleep and… And I don’t know—I’m not sure what to do with it.”

Her mouth goes dry. “Potter, I—”

“It’s not just me, right? You—you feel it, too? This tension between us.”

The silence, tinged with electricity, answers for her.

He chuckles in relief, it comes out like an oncoming hysteria. “I don’t know if it’s because you’ve seen the worst of my memories and you still look at me like I’m… I’m not some tragedy. Like you understand . So I—I just came here. Because, well, it just seemed better than the alternative.”

She stares at him, flushed, breathless. Entranced. She understands. She knows. The painpricking memories, the anger and how it makes you callous, scabrous. Sandpaper skin. Rusted eyes.

Her voice comes out in a whisper. “What’s the alternative?”

His answer is quick. Drop of a stone. “Going mad.”

And Pansy keeps feeling that she’s somehow making a disastrous mistake. The one thing she’s sure of, that she’s learned to be sure of in the few weeks of meeting with him, bristles between them like premonition. She’s met with him a hundred times. Secretly. In crowded places. Amidst unknown people. In their workplace at the ministry, in his office with nothing but officious, innocuous words between them. She’s learned that he’s desperate. And it’s a default of his—the rush of it. The pain of it. Like an indent in his bones. Like an instinct, born and bred and foolhardily protected. 

He’s desperate now, at her door, waiting for her to break it open. Waiting for her to understand.

And she does.

She’s not sure if it’s better or worse.

“I hope that’s Chinese.” She points to the packet. “And if that firewhiskey is anything younger than fifteen years you can shove that up your—”

He laughs. The helpless, cheerful breath rustles on the walls. For Pansy, it sounds like the beginning of something sinister. Something remarkably dangerous.

She smiles.

[DAY 86]

There’s blood on his clothes.

There’s blood all over him.

Pansy’s heart makes an uncomfortable, entirely unprepared backflip. Her fingers dig into the Styrofoam cup and she gasps before she can stop. The first frantic, horrified thought is —there’s blood over him , and it plays and plays like a crescendo, alert as she stands up, feet wobbly, everything uncertain. But then he takes a step to her and she takes a breath, a torrent of sharp air and she thinks— whose blood? Because he isn’t hurt—isn’t staggering or gasping or falling. He’s—the blood is splattered over his shirt in sickening scarlet. It’s plastered on his forehead. He comes closer. The salty smell of fresh blood floats in the air—the air between them—and she sees his hair, messed up, matted into his head. And...

She’s thought and thought about what he wanted to do with the thirty minutes of recluse he asked from her—pleaded from her. She couldn’t say no.

It’s jarring now, the sight of him. Bloodshot eyes and the crazy, restless and bright. He stares at her and there’s a shift in the air, quiet and bristling and heavy with realisation. Thick and coarse realisation that howls at her and grates her and grazes at the thin skin of her neck and her face. Takes a large chunk of her brain and her throat because she can’t think, at this moment, can’t speak.

“Harry,” she finds herself whispering. “Harry.”

The dark, syrupy long trail of blood trickles down his arm. It pools at the tip of his index before plopping, with a sickening telltale sound, into the ground. The white linoleum of the floor changes its colour from the tar-like black into a vicious, vivacious red.

Another drop trickles down from his finger. Pearl-shaped red.

“I killed someone,” he says when he finally reaches her, eyes bloodshot like the rest of him. 

She touches his face. He leans into her palm and the tips of her fingers graze on the crystalline trace of drying blood on his cheekbone.

“I killed someone,” he repeats, his voice shuddering, creaking like misplaced wooden steps at the last word.

There’s a staggering, crippling desperation in the rest of him, too. How he’s holding himself up against gravity, how he’s leaning on her. His eyes are wide with alert, there’s a thudding guilt, great and beating and alive. Blood rushes down to Pansy’s throat as she realises that he is—in his own, messy way—asking something from her. Something irretrievable and delicate like forgiveness. Sympathy. Reassurance.

Pansy recognises the fear in him, too.

The inside of the cafe is still warm and filled with the smell of melting brown sugar and caffeine and no one else seems to notice him coming in. No one else looked back at the welcome bell ringing with mechanical sweetness at his arrival  and no one else noticed the bright red splotches on the front of his shirt and no one else is gasping—suddenly, Pansy feels with absolute certainty—because maybe there isn’t anyone else in the world.

“We need to get out of here,” she says quietly.

He nods, he doesn’t move. Instead, he closes his eyes and leans further into her touch.

She wonders who it was. She wonders how it felt. If it can ever add up to the hole inside him.

“No consequences, right?” he says tightly when he opens his eyes. Forest green eyes. Bright and striking even when he’s tired to his bones.

She doesn’t want to lie. Not to him, not like this. But the world stills and everything stops and he grabs her hand now, fingers grasping her elbow like he does when they apparate in his memories—like he isn’t sure where he’ll land but he trusts her anyway. She can’t bring herself to say that the memory of your worst self never leaves you. She can tell him that the mistakes we make haunt us even if no one else notices. She… she—

Pansy kisses him instead of answering.

He kisses her back.

[DAY 90]

She expects the kiss to transform into something like a warning sign. Like electricity, like magic, slithering inside her veins and her sinews every time she sees him after that. After kissing him, after him kissing her . Breath stuttered, a moan, a choked, ached sound from the back of his throat reverberating inside her own. It took her a moment to realise that he wasn’t touching her. That his hands were still clenched and fisted and resting like stones beside him.

“I don’t want to—stain you,” he says, whispering like a secret. “My hands... his blood. His—I don’t even know who it was, I just—”

He stops, his words—the shame, the regret—clips off in the air when she takes his hands, grips his wrist and leads them to her shoulder, her cheek, up to her hair.

“I don’t care.” her breath fans on his glasses. The blood was thick on her neck, her face. It didn’t matter. “I don’t care.”

She’s always been drawn to desperation, the raw, embarrassing needs of the human heart. She’s always been a little drawn to him —the boy who lived and died and lived and died in so many circles. She’s always wondered about him, privately, like a luxury.

The kiss—the memory of the kiss haunts the back of her mind, hovers over the senseless routine of her ordinary life. Making coffee. The way he touched her hair. Feeding Snow. His breath was like mint.

She expected it all to resurface, in excruciating details every time she sees him after that. And it does—but it also... blends. It blends in the air and in her words and the way he seems to find excuses to touch her now. Pansy callously wonders if she should feel spent out, if she should feel embarrassed, she should—

She doesn’t, that is the thing.

He doesn’t either.

It’s easy. To forget about the memories for a while. To settle in habitual silence with someone who seems to have the same low ends as you. It’s easy to line the scars on his hand and it’s easy when the quiet melts away. It’s crazy, it’s maddeningly easy to scoff at his jokes and make a note on the shadowed crates under his eyes and the hollow jut of his collarbone and ask him about what he’s eaten since the morning. It’s easy to care for him. It’s easy to want to keep caring; it’s crystal clear—the resemblance. The boy in front of the mirror and the boy behind the desk in his auror robes. Flying off, saving people, hating the fact that he can’t save himself. Loving the part that is still the child. Small and helpless. Hating the man who is addicted to the memories he can change, the ones without consequences.

He has a mean streak, a callous sense of humour. He gets righteously offended when someone badmouths Quidditch. He loves too much sugar in his tea. Pineapple in his pizza. He has a helpless, bemused frown every time she reminds him the risks of being too reliant on only one defense charm. He has a deep, tender kindness that doesn’t make a deal of it. He listens to people. He likes to stare at her when he thinks she isn’t looking.

She’s always looking.

Because there’s a part of her she hates—the scared, mean girl. Always at a war with being kind and being logical. Always blurring the line between self-preservation and isolation. She doesn’t understand him. She doesn’t get his innate tenderness but she understands his grief, the harsh and scabbing cancer. She gets his desperation. She gets why he wants to kiss her after they come back. She feels his exhaustion and his ragged breathes. 

She fears when he falls into a backward spiral of disorientation when they come back, sometimes. She waits with her heart trapped in her chest and beating ferociously, violently against the ribcage until his eyes clear and sharpen and his hands are stable enough to pull her in.

His memories are too complex. There are consequences.

He likes the thrill of going on raids. It has a perverse, gratifying sense of worth to him. He likes to touch her shoulders. He likes to act as if she wasn’t the girl who wanted to send him over to death for her safety. Sometimes he requests her to do something terribly invasive… and she agrees every time.

Sometimes she’s afraid that’s all she can ever do for him.

“Will you take me to one of your memories?”

She takes him to the first one that she could think of. A room brightened with candles. She had a rare skin disease when she was nine. She couldn’t go out in the sunlight. Her father used to come into her room every night to read her bedtime stories. One night, he taught her chess.

“He’s serving ten years. I—” She takes a deep breath. The smell of melting candle makes her feel like she’s still a child. Still naive, pristine. “I miss him.”

She feels a soft, careful touch on the back of her elbow. It’s tentative. Like he’s dealing with flowers. Something too damaged to touch. Or something very alive. She wonders, she fears, if she’s said too much. If the tremble—the ever-present, desperately hidden tremble slithered to the surface of her voice and he heard it. If he recognised it.

[DAY 113]

Her head burns with a splitting migraine when she finally reaches the threshold of her house from Azkaban. The apparition leaves her stomach in a surfeit of uncomfortable knots, twisting and pinching her sides with a ferocity that matches the pain in her head. Her nose burns when she takes a deep breath, stumbling on the edge of her door. Suddenly, a shot of nerves, of electricity, makes her spin and the world is dizzy, it’s senseless, it’s moving without waiting for her. She spins along with it and falls—no, almost falls, almost because there’s a hand, warm and masculine and familiar that anchors her back.

“Pansy,” Harry calls her. “Shit. Shit . Pansy, can you hear me?”

She mumbles something indistinguishable. A half hearted resistance, a misplaced question.

“I was worried about you,” he breathes out. There’s a shuffle and her bag is out of her hands. He finds her keys, holds her back against the warm, warm leather of his jacket.

“Why didn’t you call me? I told you to call me.”

Pansy can’t answer. She feels herself leaning against the only piece of warmth in the entire frigid world. She feels grateful. She feels—feels

She can’t name it.

He helps her to her living room. She bleakly listens to the sound of utensils clinking against each other. Bleakly realises that he remembered the date of her father’s visit. She told him a week ago. Bleakly realises that her heart shouldn’t jump at the thought. Shouldn’t burn.

But Harry Potter isn’t anything if not a contradiction. He isn’t anything if not a force of nature—too bright to ignore. Too beautiful to not love.

Pansy sits straighter. Her lips parched. The memory of her father in soiled gray robes juxtaposes with the warm blue light of her living room. Her entire life is a contradiction. A piece of tar black blinking from a kaleidoscope, blocking the view. The sounds stop and he comes back with a mug of steaming hot chocolate. Her lips tremble.

“You don’t have to… I’m not fragile,” she says weakly.

“You are not.” In her haze, she thinks he says another word.

“I’m not lovely either.”

“Well,” he licks his lips. “You are, Pansy.”

And she already knows what’s going to happen. The movement—or better, no, no worse —and the tremor of the moments—inevitable, inescapable moments—sliding and colliding on top of each other and making a messy, erratic picture of the future that shouldn’t make sense by any conceivable reason. But somehow it does. It does make sense, she thinks, surprised by her own thoughts. By the coiling, surefooted intensity of it. Harry leans forward and Pansy freezes on her spot, unable to move, unable to make herself want to move. And he touches her shoulder to brush away a strand of hair. She sways to him, her movement jerky and fragile but sure. She’s sure what she wants and she’s sure in the banality of it all how it makes her mad— her blood simmer and her knees shake and her heart an aching, pumping fist. She gives in to her instincts, the paltry surrender that never feels like a defeat.

She doesn’t remember falling asleep.

She remembers the dream, though. 

[DAY 160]

The light filters through the glasses of the greenhouse in a million little crystallines. It flickers on like ribbons, with a lazy sense of serendipity, on the flowers. The shop is small and vibrant and vivacious with the stark, chaotic abundance of flowers that smells sweet—a soft, molasses like sweetness from the air trapped inside the glass walls. It covers the shop, it sneaks into her senses.

Pansy blames the dizziness she feels on this specially. The intoxicating smell. Soft and sweet and inviting.  She walks along the line of Casablanca lilies, bright and psychedelic. Behind her, there’s a gentle rustle of the flowers as he inspects them.  Potter can’t help himself here as well. He touches, fingers soft and careful but inquisitive, curious when he flits his hands over the petals, his fingers flex, as if he’s touching the colours. As if he believes if he’s careful enough, there will be traces of it when he pulls back. She blames her light, flurry traces of their kiss left in her head for the smile she can’t seem to be able to shake off on Harry Potter, specifically. 

Pansy would like to say that she doesn’t know what he’s doing here. But she does. With an embarrassing, single-minded clarity and an exhilaration desperate enough to match him, she knows.

Her heart is a light, soft ball and her blood is simmering, not a heady rush of senseless nerves but a slow, syrupy surrender. She can feel the feathery thudding of it when she talks with the florist. It feels like giving in . Because she can’t stop him chasing after her, and it’s too bright in the day, with the too crisp air and cloying, sweet smell to pretend that she ever wanted to. So she surrenders, she walks alongside him. She tells him the flowers she chose for the venue of Blaise and Daphne’s wedding, the significance of it. How everything has to have a meaning. Her favourite flower and his least favourite one and the juxtaposition, the imbalance, the chemistry despite it all. Despite—

“What’s your favourite flower?” he asks.

Her thoughts trip. Because —well, nothing. He is always asking these basic, unassuming questions and she’s always flustered by the colourful simplicity of it. Twenty questions, he calls the muggle game. It’s a simple, easy game that always leaves her with a skin too bare.

“Irises,” she answers after a moment. 

He hums. Casual, contemplative. She purses her lips, has merely the chance to feel the warm centre on the back of her neck when he steps back to the nearest pot and picks up, without a pause, violet iris. And it should be casual enough, should be a coincidence or a snarky humorous jerk of happenstance, because there is no reason he would know. No reason—but he’s smiling that half-fond, half-incredulous smile, like he’s a child, like he’s hopelessly, inadvertently wishful— of acknowledgement and—

“How did you know?”

“That your favourite color’s purple?” His smile blooms in full. And Pansy has only a moment to marvel in it—the fondness, the incredulity—before she shivers. His hand lifts, index pointing, following the spot from the crook of her neck, down the slope and dips in—just as the silver chain drops in her cleavage—and presses at the single, ornamental drop of violet. A heart-shaped petal. A pansy.

She is breathless when he pulls away. “We’ve been playing this game for weeks, love.”

“I didn’t—realise—”

“That I noticed.”

“Well.” She hesitates, turning away and focusing on the baby pink orchids blooming halfway through. “Yes.”

She can hear his smile when he says, “ Well, Parkinson, your favourite colour’s purple, you take two sugars in your coffee, you rely way too much on your horoscope than you’d ever admit. And you’re infuriatingly punctual. You’ve actually set every clock in your house fifteen minutes backwards.”

She rolls her eyes. “As opposed to being—what? —twenty minutes late to everything? Even your own promotion?”

“Ah. So you do observe me.”.

“I observe everything.”

“Because it makes you feel like you’re in control.”

Her scoff is half dried in her throat. Parched but for the steady, pulping centre that’s ready to sink. “I don’t—”

“Something about risk management and pre-conceiving bad decisions and projecting that formula… What’s that stupid, pessimistic law of yours? Mason’s—”

“ Murphy’s ,” she corrects him. “It’s Murphy’s law.”

“Yeah.”

The smile— his smile—that he reserves for these moments when he’s caught her flustered is too hearty to be proud, too lovely to be anything but an invitation.

“Okay,” she finds herself saying. Hands on a bouquet of Carnesia, mind on him. “ Okay . You—you’re too sweet. You take too much sugar in your tea and you always bet on the hippogriffs that look the least athletic in the racetrack. You like collecting muggle action figures. And you love that watch, even though you’re guilty about wearing it.” She stares pointedly at his wrist, his hand flexes in discomfort. “Am I right?”

He stares at her for a moment before answering quietly, quieter than she expected, “It’s—uh, it’s a gift from Mrs. Weasley.”

She blinks . “Oh.”

“Yeah, we had a—not a falling out , not exactly, but it’s hard to keep calling on her house when I broke her daughter’s—” His voice cracks a little. “Heart.”

She remembers them having a sudden break up. She remembers the papers not letting it rest until everything, every gritty, personal detail was out in the open.

He tilts away from her and mirrors her hands, checking on the flowers. Pansy stares at him, his lips pressed into a thin, pained smile that does something to her that she probably shouldn’t allow. 

But by god , she does.

“I was engaged to Draco,” she blurts out. “For a month.”

He glances at her from the corner of his eyes. “How did you end it?”

“He did. I’m glad about it, really am. I’d never have the courage to—” She sighs. “You know.”

He shouldn’t. He’s never had a chance he didn’t take by the throat, even the ones that went terribly wrong. But he reaches out his hand and there’s a split second of dissonance before she takes on the offer. He threads their fingers together. His skin feels like paper; she makes a point to look straight in his eyes.

“Pansy?”

She inhales. His eyes are almond shaped, perfect green.

“Do you… go to your memories, the way I do mine?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you change things, like I do?”

“Everyone does, Harry.”

“One of my worst one is at the Dursley’s. The dog… His name was Ripper . I don’t—I was just a kid, you know. I was… so humiliated. And I hadn’t even realised what they were taking from me. What I—what I lost. ”

“I understand.”

“What’s yours? The worst one?”

The chuckle comes out dry. Panicked. A screech piercing through the silence in the Great Hall. The terrible, unbearable sound of her breaking down. Calling a name for slaughter. His name. “You know.”

“I do?”

“You’re in it. You are actually the focus of it.”

To his credit—or discredit— he looks genuinely surprised. But he catches on, of course he does. Because their history—what little there was—had really one pivotal point. 

His eyes widen. They always look prettier in the daylight. “Pansy.”

Her spine disintegrates, it’s suddenly very hard to hold onto gravity. It hasn’t even occurred to him .

He touches the stray band of hair and she inhales and his smell—mint and cigarettes and something more, something significant— clogs her airspace and she’s light—so so light. He touches her lower lip and it seems the same with flowers—as if he’s expecting, hoping that some semblance of herself would come off. 

“That was a lifetime ago,” he says.

“No.” She shakes her head. “It really wasn’t.”

“I don’t want you to—”

“You don’t know how… sorry I am.”

“I forgive you.”

“If I could—”

“You can’t.” He hesitates. “You don’t have to.”

Like an afterthought, like something barely thought about, he’s touching her cheek and it’s so stark, so obvious that he means it.

And all their meetings, his memories and her memories and his anger and her regret are boiling up to this moment, this significant, unchangeable moment. It seems tangible, almost, the propensity. The possibilities. So it’s really not her fault that she reaches up just as he cups her cheeks with more insistence, more surety and presses, carefully, like a charm, his lips on hers.

The kiss is warm like this day, like the sunlight shining on them through the glass walls of the conservatory. The kiss is soft. She melts into it.

But when they break apart, she’s gasping.

His one hand is at her hair—he likes messy, she realises half drunkenly, as he pushes his hands up, up to her perfectly done hair and—the other on her throat. Her own hands skim over his chest, and the loud, fluttering, unsteady, unheedy, chaotic beat of his heart does it for her. She decides, she… concedes. She tilts her head and kisses just below the hollow of his throat and she tells him—tells him—

“Wanna make a bad decision?”

The punch drunk beat of their heart is audible, palpable in his oncoming silence. Her bottom lip trembles, scared, as always, before he makes the next move, sweeps her up and catches her in the kiss that dilutes her already fragile reality into nothing more than dream.

[DAY 211]

Grief is amputation.

It’s the absence of something vital, something visceral. It’s the emptiness the absence brings, the phantom pain itching and scabbing at the base of a raw wound. The edges chafed and worn out and tired.

Or maybe… grief is a cancer.

It’s a poisonous bundle of tissue. Thick and lobulated, growing and gnawing at the body from inside, eating a person out one cell at a time.

Grief is selfish. It’s lonely.

Harry takes her to his memories etched and painted with all his grief and loneliness and the insane, inane persistence to keep feeding it, to keep watching it as if it means something else. To look for details. Memory is a small world in itself. Forever unfurling and constricting and diffusing in itself. Layers one top of another and another. Details emerge, unscrupulous and unwarranted. Misleading details. Details leading to places no one should ever wander. The colour of the sky was a pale, sickly yellow the evening that Dobby, the house elf dies. Sulphurous clouds and carbon black flecks cover the sky in a thick, grainly sheet. 

It’s a tar black nothingness the night Cedrig Diggory dies. Dies —present tense. Because his memory is a present, and ever unfolding episode of misery. So the colour of the sky is black, even though it makes no sense. Everything is clear in the graveyard. A sweltering, uncomfortable heat prickles along the hairs in her arm and she watches him snatching his younger version away from the mess. Her head burns—the place, the graveyard is thick with magic and as he casts his first disarming charm—the only one he uses, always—the shadowed cemetery bursts into a brilliant scarlet. His jaw is set in a rough, single-minded determination and his eyes are mean—meaner than she’s ever seen. And when he disarms the other wizard—the dark one, the Unmentionable one—and she finally has the courage to look at him, she finds him scared. Frightened. As if he’s seen something much, much sinister than old ghosts. Harry takes a step to him, kneels to watch the other one squirm away. His mouth doesn’t move when he casts the final killing curse. A scathing green hits his heart and then it’s silent. 

Somehow, Pansy finds it in herself to walk to him. Offer her hand and her heart, beating loud, aching —as if she’s the one disarmed. Harry spits on the ground next to the creature and the tense, unmoving muscle in his jaw loosens as he clutches her hand. 

The tear running down his cheeks is not just anger, she thinks as she wipes it away. It’s grief, too. Unwarranted and pointless. 

___

She takes him to the gravelled pavement in the blazing summer heat. A younger version of him—not a child, but barely anything else—humiliates his cousin, who bites back—more viciously, violently, meanly —in return. He’s seen this memory scores of times. Most of the time, he walks up and puts an arm around his younger self. Most of the time he hits his cousin. Pansy hates watching this more than she would ever admit. She hates the cracking knuckles and ugly slurs and the bitterness rising from the fact that this doesn’t make it better. The gaping hole, the cancer eating him out is still there. He stays immobile sometimes. She hates it even more. He stays by her side and holds her hand while they watch the same memory play to a different end. He watches his younger self being hounded, hunted by the oncoming dementor before—

The grip tightens. They don’t talk.

They fuck in the next alleyway. Like some primal, prehistoric creatures, moved by only instinct. Pansy hears gasps of people who walk past them. Pansy doesn’t care. He drops down to his knees and parts her legs. she fists her hand in his hair and lets him bunch up her sundress, kiss her cunt over her knickers before pulling them down. His fingers are rough. His tongue pushes deep and Pansy melts into it. Into him while wondering—fearing—

He makes her come twice.

He stands up, the tip of his index taps on her clit before he drags it up up and the wetness— her wetness—leaves a sticky trail up her stomach. She’s barely coherent as she helps him out of his jeans. Bleaky, when he moves, all harsh strokes and grunts scratching out from the pit of his stomach, she wonders what they must look like.

Shameless. Desperate. Ravenous.

She likes the thought of that. She rolls her hips forwards, makes him look at her, how he makes her feel. How good and hot and—

They both come at the same time. The walls of the tunnel ricochets the sound of them, shameless, desperate, ravenous— like the tail end of a dream.

She shoves aside the sharp, rational voice in her head telling her— chiding her—that this isn’t good and it’s not helping him and you’re not good for him.

She holds onto him tighter than she should be allowed to.

[DAY 262]

The shutter of the camera ticks off in three successive clicks. In the airsprayed fresh air in her office room, it clinks in Pansy’s ear like the heartbeat of some deadbeat insect. A beetle, maybe. Pansy settles in her chair with her eyes fixed on the parchment in front of her. She grazes the edge of it with her index and a small, inconspicuous cut blooms on her finger. Her expression is blank and her spine is straight and imagine an insect, a beetle crawling up along the height of it. She doesn’t move, pretends to have a say in the matter, pretends it all makes sense anyway as she strikes through the words on the paper with her quill.

Another click. The flash bursts in front of her with a clear sheet of dust floating in the air.

“Perfect,” Tristan her PR, says. “ Perfect, Pansy.”

She presses her lips in a scathingly polite smile. “Lovely. So we’re done?”

He scratches behind his ear. “I was wondering, if you’d just look more relaxed we’d have—”

“I thought you said I was perfect.”

“You are, of course, but—”

“So there is no point in—”

Her half-perturbed, constrained argument gets cut short by the novelty sliding of her door. Pansy puts her hands on top her files as Harry Potter saunters in, staring at the paper in his hand and saying, loudly, amiably—

“ Seriously, Parkinson? There can’t be that many mistakes in—oh.” He looks up, blinks a little too slowly at Tristan and his camera, before staring back at her. “I didn’t know you had company.”

Pansy feels a hot rush of blood to her cheeks. “I—”

“Mr. Potter, it’s an honour ,” Tristan chirps in, rushing to his side. His lips slanting into an oily, overtly gratifying smile. He offers his hand to Potter, flushed, his eyes sparking. 

Potter coughs. A similar splotch of pink—that Pansy can never stop being fascinated by—splayed on his face now. He takes the hand. “Thank you.”

“I’m Tristan Katz. The Parkinson’s media consultant.”

At this Pansy jumps up, embarrassed. “What do you need, Potter?”“

“I—uh, my speech—”

“ Oh . You work with her?” He looks back from Potter to her, he does a double take , as if he’s checking its authenticity with every goddamn syllable. “Pansy—why didn’t you… we could, if he’s willing, of course—?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snaps.

Harry hesitates. “Willing to… what?”

Tristan hurries before Pansy opens her mouth, “Say something about her. Her work ethic, her persona, her general aura, if you will. Anything, really.” Before Pansy can stop him, Before she can comprehend how to, the moron adds, “We’re having an article in the Prophet, about purebloods settling into the public workforce, and if you say something nice about our Pansy, it will be great for her—”

“Of course he will not .”

“Love to,” Potter says, cutting her off. He actually takes a step towards Tristan and his greasy smile.

Everything goes downhill from there.

Pansy blames her stunned embarrassment, of being found out, of being caught red bloody handed—that she finds unable to stop either her PR or Potter. Within twenty minutes she’s tucked in his side, her face as blank as she can make it. She tries to press her lips and not scream murder at Tristan, or him. Her head is tense and burnt and at the edge of—

Potter touches her waist.

She stops breathing.

Just as the first shutter clicks, she feels her breath quicker, snap and shut like the heartbeat of a deadbeat insect. He stares straight at the camera, his smile is warm and appreciative. His expression is polite; his hand, however flexes on her back, his index flits along her spine. More than that. It lingers . No less insidious than an invisible beetle. The blunt edge of his nail grazes her back and Pansy shivers, wills herself to look as blank as possible, wills herself to not settle into it— him.

But still there’s the sodden, blunt out thrill—unbidden, not entirely comfortable—the way he finally settles on her lower back, lower than polite, lower than friendly, even. Pansy coils in the heat and the weight and the childish, irresponsible rush of it—of him touching her in broad daylight—the audacity of it. Her heart is unbearably, ridiculously fast even when they finally leave each other’s side, and it’s still rushing and thumping when Tristan starts talking again.

“Did you know that we’re also hosting a...”

Her heart sinks.

She finds him in his office an hour later.

“You don’t have to go,” she says determinedly, sounding a little more hysterical than she did twenty minutes ago—when she practiced this conversation in her office—as his door clicks shut.

He raises his eyes, somehow not perturbed—something she envisioned twenty minutes ago. “What?”

“The fundraising ball.” She straightens up. ,“You don’t have to go.”

He chuckles. “I think I do have to go, Pansy. Tristan nearly lost his marbles trying to—”

“I’ll handle him.”

His smile drops. He straightens up in his chair. “You—really? You don’t want me to go?”

“I—” She blinks. “I imagined you wouldn’t want to go anyway. It’s—like the photoshoot. It’s—”

It’s a ballroom full of immaculately dressed, suffocatingly perfumed people droning about nothing. It’s flashes of camera and music and the pathetic, horrendously desperate attempt to bury the past. It’s PR. Like her photoshoot and his interview and the plethora of publicity stunts her mother has set up to get back on the good graces of the greater society.

The good they do for the werewolves have to be multiplied by hundreds for themselves otherwise it’s going to be a wasted evening.

Pansy didn’t realise he wouldn’t find it as disturbing as she did. 

“I’d like to go,” he says softly. 

She has her hands placed on her stomach, a frail attempt at holding still. The jittery, insidious flock of butterflies are still flying haphazardly in there—they hadn’t stopped fluttering since he touched her back in her office. She used to think he’s as far away from her other life as he could be. She still thinks it’s for the best.

She nods grudgingly, staring at him in the other end of his cramped office. He’d refused when they wanted him to take on a larger one.

He smiles. His voice sounds louder and chirpier than usual when he says, “Hey, didn’t he say I can bring a date, too?”

[DAY 337]

The chimes on top of her window panes sway softly, ringing and clicking against each other every time a gust of wind presses from the outside. The sky is a dark, ashen blue outside of Pansy’s bedroom. The rhinestones shaped like one moon, one sun and countless miniscule stars shine and twinkle in the pale moonlight.

Harry Potter gasps from under her. “You mean you never—”

Pansy arches her eyebrows. She sits a little straighter, her back arched as she straddles him. The taut muscle of his abdomen clench and loosen when she runs her palm over them and he— well, his breath hitches and the hands cupping her sides tighten and he gasps again.

“Never?” his mouth falls open in disbelief.

“I don’t get it why it’s so surprising.”

“It’s Berti Botts .” He shakes his head. “I’ve never met anyone who never had a bad one.”

“It’s easy.” She squints her eyes, her hips roll in a lazy, heavy sweep. “It’s about planning a strategy.”

“It’s about the thrill of it!” His fingers pinch her sides. “It’s about the guessing. It’s about the uncertainty before you take the first bite. Pansy, Berti Botts is about not knowing… And I still don’t believe that you could get it right.”

She laughs. “We’re still talking about candies?”

“It’s Berti—”

“ Yeah, okay, my prince.” She tilts sideways and picks up the half empty packet of candies. She makes a point of being slow at opening them. There’s a thin line of sweat beads sprouting in her hairline. It’s hot, despite the wind. She has no idea why either of them are still fully clothed.

She takes out a candy. 

He raises an eyebrow.

“Do you know what flavor it is?”

He takes a short, cursory glance. “Blueberry, I say.”

Pansy rolls her eyes. She pinches at its sides. It’s too clear to be a blueberry. A sharp, azure blue. Almost translucent. “It’s a mouth freshener,” she announces.

“You’re too specific. You’re supposed to guess a generic flavour.”

“What’s your argument, exactly? I can’t call it or I lose if I call it?”

“I’m just saying, Parkinson,” he says playfully, accentuating every fucking syllable of her name in a slow, thick lilt. She pretends it doesn’t make her clench on nothing . A low drool of wetness pooling in her cunt. She shivers. Why are they still fully—

“What?” she says.

“I said , that there’s a specific kind of pleasure in giving in. In letting yourself be wash over the oncoming tide.” His finger trails up the cleft of her ass. “You know that, don’t you?”

She whimpers despite herself. “ You are a menace. And I am right .”

“You don’t know that.”

“But, baby, I do.” She leans in to catch his lips—pulled open in surprise—and pucker hers to mimic, just mimic, a kiss. The breath that leaves his mouth is rough and jagged and his grip on her waist tightens, and then stutters, falls below. “What will you give me?”

“What?”

“If I’m right.” She rolls her hips against his zipper. He’s already hard under it, and if she could just— “About its flavour.”

His voice breaks. “Anything you want.”

“Yeah?” She leans in. Makes a point of fanning her breath over the shell of his ear when she explains, in graphic detail, what she wants. Pansy shifts her hip, the smallest slide and gasps at the friction. The soft, cloudy remnants of heaviness in her stomach coils in, drops down. She bites her lips to stifle a moan.

“Yeah.” He shifts under her. “Yes, god.”

Pansy pulls back, smirking. She pressed the candy in her hand. “Trust me?”

His eyes are fixed on her face. “Yeah.”

And it’s the way he says it—instantly. Like it’s the obvious thing. And the reality of it, of the truth of him and her in this room on her couch and how there’s only one explanation of it, rattles her. Her hands shake and her ears ring and suddenly the world shifts out of focus. His eyes look lighter, prettier in this light. The flush in his cheeks are two darker shadows on his skin.

She puts the candy in her mouth. There’s a split second of wonder—the thrill, not unlike what he described—scuttles along her clenched jaw. And then there’s the sharp, jutting freshness covering her mouth. It slathers around her gums, a rough, chasing flavour. And she’s thinking that winning feels good, feels satisfying, feels—

“So?” he asks, his lips pulling on a half, dozy smile.

But not as good as this.

She gulps down the candy. Leans down to breach the gap between their faces. Head a nest of butterflies, feet off the ground. She may have sprouted her own wings in the meantime.

She whispers, “You win.”

She kisses him, slipping into the habit, into him like a memory. Her hands and her tongues know exactly where to touch and what to do and it’s all playing like flashes inside her head. He groans against the pressure on his length, jerks his hips up to meet her. His hands pull at her tank top and Pansy can only restrain herself enough without giving in completely . Before even starting on what she wants. So she pulls away, moves his hands from her back and slips from between his legs before he groans in argument. Her hands rest on his thighs for leverage as she looks up. The flush in his cheeks are darker, more prominent, more lush. He cradles her cheek when she pulls down his trouser. His cock is hard when she fists her hand at the base of it. He jerks into her clutch, a bead of precum gathers on the spongy, red head of it.

He rasps, eyes closed, head tilted back, “Darling, are you—”

“Your turn to get the prize.”

[DAY 399]

Pansy feels his hands—warm and calloused—slowly tracing her face as if he’s making a map. As if he’s keeping tabs to memorise and paint out later. The sunlight pours in his room through the drapers. He grazes his thumb over her lips, the cushion of it, before moving upward, a fleeting, sparse touch like a margin on the slope of her nose, her hairline, her eyebrows. She stares, half-drunk, half so insanely, insanely relaxed, at him. His eyes, clear and bright and puffed up from resting, are set on hers.

“Wanna figure out the colour of your eyes,” he says as he cups her cheeks, his voice raspy, relaxed—reminiscent of what they’ve been doing. Sleeping in late, hands twisted to set in the crooks of the other’s body, lazy, sloppy morning sex with the day’s newspaper forgotten on the side of the bed. They’re still naked under the covers, his leg is trapped under hers, knee brushing over the tender skin of her thigh.

Pansy chuckles, abashed.

“What? Why?”

“ Because .” He purses his lips, leans in. His eyes look smaller without glasses. His face more rounded than sharp.

He squints his eyes.

“Green?” Pansy offers. Still hazy, deceptively warm as she settles further in his arms, trying to ignore the shrill electric blush creeping up her neck.

He rolls his eyes. She chuckles.

“Okay. Okay. Mossy green?”

His thumb flicks below her eye as he picks up a rouge eyelash from her cheek. “Getting warmer.”

“Murky, mossy green and—”

“Reminds me of a pool.”

“A pool?” Pansy taps her index on the hollow gap between his clavicles. “Pretty sure pools are not—”

“A very particular pool.”

“A particular pool… with dead leaves?” she tries, still unable to keep the flush away. Unable to keep the smile—the post-coital, cheery, cheeky, dumb smile—away. Her mind retracks, positions back with a sort of hazy helplessness. He kept his hand over her stomach to keep her in position when he thrusted inside her from the side, the bed rocking with a lazy, Sunday morning sweetness.

She blushes at the memory, and she’s blurting out the rest of the speech without thinking, “I’ve been told that my eyes are the precise colour of rotting leaves—you know, the day before they rot, they have this very plump, murky middle. The starting point of decay. The worms love it. The birds, however—”

“ Who have you been talking to?” His eyes widen, pupils dilated. His fingers taps on the tip of her nose, stops there and she—

She shrugs. “You know, people.” 

“ No ,” he says determinedly, like it’s an entire sentence.

“No?” 

He runs his thumb over her lip as if he’s still contemplating kissing her. “I was visiting Luna at her house. It was around Christmas, I think. And her dad was trying to grow these pearls they saw in the Pacific, in the back of their house. So, Luna was giving us a tour and we saw that they had set this really large pool set in the back, magicked, filled with waters of the South Pacific. It was large but… shallow. And the water was so clear you could easily see the bottom. When I looked down, I saw hundreds—and I mean hundreds —of oysters with multiple pearls just hatching in the centre, more pink than white. They were catching onto the morning lights and when they reflected they had this—a kaleidoscope of colours, just catching onto the surface and the edges and the moss—the soft green moss surrounding it. It was… transgressing, you know? It was—it was like suddenly getting blindsided with a force of nature. And magic, too. And…” He chuckles at this. Arduously. Casually . As if he hasn’t—as if he isn’t continuing to—turn her world wrong-side up, as if he isn’t twisting something soft and ruinously feral in her chest. “Well, Luna explained later that it was supposed to be the main ingredient of a calming draught they were making for the thestrals in Hogwarts.”

His eyes are calm and lovely. Pansy can’t even begin to imagine how she looks.

“That’s what your eyes remind me of. The shallow pool of moss covered pearls. The magic, the… everything else.”

Pansy holds her breath, suddenly scared. Suddenly awestruck by her insane, inane inclination to be scared. Of the wrong thing being said, by either of them… both of them. Of taking a breath and fresh air into her lungs and brains and maybe quickstarting the day, maybe breaking the dream, finding out that this is just post-coital, pointless talks. She touches his jaw, scared to the bones of ruining the moment. Maybe he’ll chuckle it off, maybe he’ll cough awkwardly and tell her to forget about it. Something so perfect shouldn’t exist for her.

But he only says, “Breakfast?”

[DAY 1]

The place, as usual, smelled like antiseptics. 

Pansy never liked that.

Almost like a hospital. The tangy, artificial zing of lemongrass—the stem snapped in the middle. A hint of citrus, sharp and medicinal. She waited for the moment the sharpness would die down, she waited for the moment everything —the smell, the light reflecting starkly, glaringly on the white linoleum floor, the bone-white edges of the shelves—would blend, seamlessly, irretrievably with the surroundings as she trailed along the shelves of the grocery store, packed with cleaning equipments for the moment.

A minute ago she was at the bakery aisle, trying to look interested in edible colours and powdered sugar with a recipe for the perfect crème brulee constructing half-consciously on the back of her head and a growing, itching irritation prickling on the nape of her neck.

He was late.

Pansy disapproved of it intensely.

There was a place and time for everything and everyone and lateness, tardiness is clear disregard to the steady mechanism of it all. The rules . Her rules.

Like always, Pansy contemplated on apparating back. Her eyes flicked to her watch, the lime green dots of the hands blinked inauspiciously at her. It doubled down on the slow simmering uncomfortableness she’d been feeling since she stepped into the place. Not unlike before, though. There was always something gritty about meeting new people—new clients— in unassuming muggle places wearing unassuming muggle clothes, pretending to be someone else, someone less, someone uniquely, empirically more.

And it was mostly the thought of this moreness, this all encompassing, self-serving argument was what made her wait for the new client with the unimpressive tardiness. Because in the end, it was also for her , wasn’t it, what she did? It was for shovelling up the—

“Hey, I think I— Parkinson? ”

Pansy stops. The words—guilt and repression and hope—clanked and clamoured in her head and it was half for the surprise of hearing it, and half for the embarrassing realisation that she’d recognised it, that made her clamp down her feet on the tiles. Pansy froze .

Because there was a time and place for everything and that… that voice—in that time and place with her in it — it wasn’t… it wasn’t .

She turned around hoping, against her judgment and her logic and her shaking fucking hands, that she’s wrong. That he was not—

But of course she wasn’t. She’s never wrong.

Harry Potter stared at her as though she were a unicorn, or a sphinx… or—

A snake.

“You—” he stammered. “But—w-what are you doing here?”

She took a long, measured breath and realised, with disdain, it didn’t help. Her teeth still clattered despite the hard weight of her lips pressing on each other. Screwed shut, as to say. Wired shut.  There really was nothing to answer.

He realised too. Which was why the next words, the next sentence, tumbles out of his mouth in a hoarse tone, slightly higher than whisper; like a dissonance. “This is—” He blinked. His specs, the huge, dorky ones, sloped slightly on the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry, are you the one?”

Pansy stared at him, abashed, suddenly, and quite certain that she was —the one he was looking for. He was wearing  muggle clothes, jeans and a white, bland shirt—something she demanded because Daphne had told it was someone she didn’t know—and she wasn’t sure how she looks in the plaid skirt, white top. But she was sure, as he pushes his specs up, that Harry Potter wasn’t the sort of person who met with morally ambiguous dealers in inconspicuous muggle stores for something quite clearly not legal .

She blinked and the world moved in motion—slowly, languidly, but still starting— and there was a sharp dissonance in the air. The smell of the sanative lime grass hadn’t blended. It burned her nose.

There were a thousand ways this could go, and the gnawing, pitchy voice in the back of her head reminded her that each and every one of them were wrong.

He still stared at her. Maybe she was a sphinx in this scenario. Maybe she should pose riddles, because nothing she could say would ever come out right. Not to him.

Her lips parted.