Magnets

“You look awful, darling,” Daphne muses, impassive enough to sound only vaguely interested, but she’s staring at Pansy from the corner of her eyes. Her eyes, a beautiful periwinkle blue, are set on the Pansy’s left side. She is sure, as Daphne slides her hands to smooth out a non-existent crease on the silk covers of the bistro table, of her friend’s pretty eyes tripping down the slope of her neck.

The pale purple hickey glowers hotly under the scrutiny.

“Do I?” She eyes the guest list. She’s having trouble reading her own handwriting.

An impassive cough. Pansy blinks harder at the parchment.

“Pansy—”

“I didn’t sleep well last night,” she blurts out. It’s the truth. It’s the extent of the truth that Daphne should know. Daphne who showed up in her apartment this morning, unannounced, like an unexpected hurricane.

Pansy was tangled up in Harry, her face hidden in the crook of his neck. She’d woken up half an hour before, feeling the wind rustling their bedsheets. The felt the deep rumble on his chest as he groaned in a sleepy argument when she tried to get up. So she laid, bare, letting her hand clutch to his side and waited for the soft, dozy murmur of his heart lull her back to sleep.

It turned out to be a rather erroneous judgement.

Pansy’s heart jutted up like a howitzer when she heard her best friend call her name. Then everything is a buzzcut of a blurry, disjointed film. A panicked yelp. Harry with bloodshot, confused eyes. Rushing to pick up their clothes and the obvious, clamorous beat of her heart mixed with the trepidation she feels, always feels, when she’s done something wrong. Something improper and shameful, and he—

Pansy couldn’t look at his face. Not when Daphne squealed, a little too respondent, at him. Not when he helped her with the breakfast. Pansy wanted to be still, she did. She wanted to appear noncommittal and wary and unsentimental. Everything her mother always credited her for. But Harry set the coffee and exchanged unfazed niceties with her friend and the unfiltered light of the morning sun was harsh and too real, blinking haphazardly over the mess she made. Harry laughed charmingly at Daphne’s harmless jokes and all she could think was that now Daph realises that Harry knows where she keeps her sugar cubes, that she takes precisely two in her coffee. That—

She pulls herself out of the memory.

“I can’t—I haven’t slept that well in a few weeks, actually,” she finds herself saying.

Daphne takes the parchment from her hand. When Pansy looks up, she sees her scribbling the last minute invitees.

Pansy couldn’t look at him when he touched her hand—casually, habitually, like they were in one of those insipid television shows of people in love—over the table. Her hand was clammy and cold. She felt his thumb sweep over hers.

“Work?” Daphne asks after a moment. A little smoother, more suggestive. Pansy feels this may be a leading question.

Is it work? Her innocuous job at the ministry as junior Media Coordinator? Or is about the other one? Is it about the service she offers to broken, hapless people? Does he even quality as work anymore?

“Harry,” she says, the name clipping off like a bird in the air. It always feels good saying his name, his first name, as if it proves something otherwise indescribable.

Daphne snorts. It takes Pansy longer than she would’ve wanted to realise what it sounded like.

“I didn’t mean…” Her neck grows hot. She fears the purple, nearly fading hickey is suddenly darker, more obvious, more damning.

“What? Didn’t mean that you two fuck or—”

“ No. ” She fights the urge to scratch her neck. Trace the single line of tremble sloping down to her chest. “I didn’t mean that. We do . That. But—”

Pansy doesn’t know why she’s cowering from that word. She’s said it hundreds of times. Fuck. She’s done that more than she could count—

“But he has trouble sleeping. He—” Suddenly the restraint breaks, her heart stutters and the knots in her stomach tightens. Before she knows, she’s spilling out everything she kept trying to bury in her backyard. “He always had nightmares, and at first what we did—going into his memories—” Having sex, sleeping together in the soft blue sheets of her house. “It made him calmer. He felt more in control. And it was good. But.”

“ But?”

The inevitable. “The memories are collapsing. It’s what happens when you’re in the same memory for too many times. You, you don’t forget what happens—not exactly— but there are so many versions of the same situation that you…” she trails off, not sure she knows how to elucidate. “You know people have spatial memories, right? And your hands and your feet and every muscle in your body has memories, too. That’s what makes us run or coil away from dangerous things. Uncomfortable things.”

“Instincts?” 

Pansy keeps her eyes fixed on the bright patio. She keeps picking at the side of her index with her thumb. “Yes and no. Instincts are innate, you have them by birth. But what your body does after it’s been in the earth—in the familiar surroundings and around familiar people, it evolves. That’s why we are so different. That’s why we react to things as we do.

“So Harry—because he’s been in the same memory dozens of time, because he’s changed it dozens of time—his instincts are fucked. His perception is fucked. His hands shake and his eyes burn and he—he can’t remember what to do, Daph. Or what he even wants to do. The changes he made in the last time or the time before that confuse his body . He acts like it’s fine but I know. I know .”

After a minute, after a quiet contemplation, Daphne asks in her motherly, sweet voice, “So what will happen if he doesn’t stop?”

“He’ll forget what happened. Partially or completely.”

From the corner of her eyes, she sees Daph nodding as if she’s coddling a child. Pansy holds her breath like she was a kid.

“So stop it,” Daph says softly. “Tell him what’s happening.”

“I did.” She isn’t that selfish. “But he keeps saying that—” She sighs. Thinks about conniving words like damage control and trauma and bargaining.

“It actually doesn’t matter what he says. I agree with him every single time. I—I can’t say no to him. I just. I can’t.”

She feels her best friend’s hand slide on top of hers. Daphne twirls a strand of her hair, fingers soft and careful. As if Pansy is brittle—as if she is breakable—

“What’s happening with you?” she asks. “I mean, relationship-wise. Where are you with him?”

Pansy chuckles. It sounds like a sham. Chirpy. Self-deprecating. “Well. He isn’t my client anymore. I think. He stopped paying me once we started sleeping together. He’s—he’s noble like that. He wouldn’t want me to think he’s paying me to have sex with him.”

She remembers waking up. Her body soft and malleable for a moment, a minute, as she grappled with her consciousness, golden bright light of the sun peeking through his curtains. Her heart jumped violently, however, when she turned and saw the familiar lilac envelope he always gave her after their exchange. Her fingers trembled and her tongue went dry because—what if it’s money? What if it’s more than the usual because she offered body as well as her mind, she did—

The envelope had a note.

My shift is early. Didn’t want to wake you. There’s coffee in the kitchen.

—Harry.

“Or maybe he thinks that it’s evolved into something more. Maybe it’s as simple as that.” Daph shrugs. Away from them, there’s a ringing sound of the staff laughing. “Maybe he didn’t even think about the… financial aspect of it.”

“Maybe.”

“It was never about the money for you, anyway, whenever you helped a person.”

Pansy’s insides clench at the word help. She doesn’t look back at Daph. “No.”

“He knows that, right?”

“I don’t—know. Daph. I—” She stares straight back at her friend, the question that had been rotting at the back of her throat finally breathing through. “ Why did you set him up with me? I don’t think you ever told me.”

Her lips tremble. Her eyes widen and there’s a flush of rouge on her cheeks and she—she always looks prettier when she’s embarrassed. “Oh, honey, he just looked so helpless when he came to me.”

“How did he—”

“Oh you know, words float. He heard it from another guy you helped—” She always says helped. “—and he just… looked so sad. I know how particular you are about your clients and I knew you always had a fascination with him… I knew you probably would decline if I told you straight ahead. So I just sent him to see for yourself. He just—”

“What?”

Her lips purse. The blush darkens. She looks apologetic, almost. “He reminded me so much of you.”

Because they are similar, Pansy knows that. There’s a steady patch of tender scar tissue growing at the middle of her chest to prove that. They are similar, but they’re also so very, very different.

He has the strength to break away from Ginny Weasley, to offer her a better future than he could give, even though it broke Molly Weasley’s heart. She attends quality luncheon with possible suitors every other Saturday and makes herself go through the awful, disintegrating routine of making herself presentable, marriageable and by all means—fuckable, to not embarrased her mother.

There’s a certain act to it—being classy. It’s not easy. Nor simple. She has to ready and be elusive. Confident but malleable. She can be lush but not lascivious. Exude sensuousness, he mother had said, but be wary. Untouchable and wry. Your smiles are currency.

These were lessons when she was a young girl, tittering at the edge of adulthood. Confused and hostile to her own confusion. Feral on her body and how the world around her changed when it did.

After her breasts got fuller and her hips got wider and her skin finally started to make sense, there was this discomfort—perpetually felt, connivingly hidden—barring its feline teeth at her abdomen—was when the advice evolved, the more scrupulous advices came about.

Straighten your back. And—on sex: you must never get down on your knees, or let him turn your face away, or—god fucking forbid ( this was the first time she heard Cynthia curse)— let him come inside you when he hasn’t put a ring on your finger. You are not a common whore.

No, she’d thought. I’m a high quality whore.

Simple.

Uncomplicated.

Her mother would be scandalised if she knew what Pansy has done with Harry. What she lets him do to her.

He is a relentless lover. Experimental. Attentive. Shameless when he pries his fingers inside her knickers in muggle clubs when she’s ordering drinks. Attentive when he waits, waits and waits with her walls squeezing tight around his length and her voice reduced to a hoarse whisper—to hit that one place that makes her see stars in closed spaces. Experimental when he takes her in front of her heirloom mirror; Pansy steadies herself on the frame of the mirror, there’s a soft, effervescent snow-white clouds forming on the glass from their breaths. Look at you, he gasps into her ear. Look at us. So fucking perfect. Can’t fucking believe... His speech gets muffled when they really pick their pace though; Pansy likes watching the scarlet flush on the nape of his neck and their faces—contorted into helpless, relentless bliss. Moans like gasps. Her skirts bunched up with his hand sneaking in her shirt, palming her breasts, he is naked.

He is relentless.

Yet he’s tender in a way she’s never seen a man be. When he learned that she lost her virginity to Draco at fourteen and hadn’t wanted it, his face was set in bland, unreadable solemnity. His head lying on her thigh, the rogue, dark hair trickling the soft skin exposed just below the linen of her shorts.

“He didn’t know,” she said quickly, sitting up straighter on her bed. “I actually made it sure that he wouldn’t know.”

His eyes always look smaller, brighter, more sentimental without his glasses. There was a faint flush on the skin of his neck as he reached to cup her face. “Why would you do something like that?” 

For a moment she wasn’t sure if he was angry at her or for her.

She stammered. There was something to be said, she knew. There was something fundamental to be communicated. Her fears and her anger and her insipid, childish impulse to be, always be, whatever the person in front of her reflects. Her mother and Draco’s mother and the bucket list Pansy still has hidden under her socks drawer. Something about her arrogance and her disdain and her shitty fucking perspective and how it never felt right, what she did, what she said, yet she followed the dent of Cynthia’s footsteps anyway.

But she said—all that could be said was, “I was such an idiot, Harry. I was an idiot.”

In her darkened room, without Harry’s firm body beside her, she plays back the last of her meeting with Daphne. She thinks about the perfect, spotless wedding venue.

The venue Daphne chose was the place her mother and father had been married in. She likes the idea of familiarity, her best friend. She likes the idea of continuity, consistency. She likes, has always found comfort in, following other people.

Pansy only vaguely remembers feeling that way, too. It feels as distant and elusive as another lifetime.

“Hey, Daph?” she asked before they went their separate ways, with unsurety scratching the back of her throat like a menace. 

Daphne was reviewing over the menu. Her face pinched shut. “Hmm?”

“Do you remember when Draco used to get high on those muggle drugs—Oxycontins?”

A pause. “Of course.”

“I remember one day, when he relapsed for the third time, Blaise said that—that addicts aren’t real people. They’re a smokescreen, a ruse.” Her tongue felt dry. “He said that they are whatever they have to be to get what they want.”

She felt Daphne slide towards her. “Honey—”

“What if that’s all that we are? What if he’s with me because he can get me to… do whatever he wants? I never tell him to stop getting inside his head when I am the fucking reason—”

“But you’re going to. You’re going to tell him to stop—”

“What if—”

“—and he’s an adult. You’re not the reason for every one of his bad impulse, please—”

“What if—when I tell him to stop doing it… he’s going to find another one. Another memory bender. Another… another body and…”

“Pansy.”

“I’m not saying he doesn’t care for me, or that he’s manipulating me. He never lies. But—what are the actual possibility of this being anything… What if he’s—we are—just junkies latching onto each other like needles? A poisoned, infected needle.”

There was a pathetic, wry beat of silence before Daphne started speaking. And in that moment, in that silence, she knew—in her heart and her blood and her bones—that it was no use. Whatever Daphne was going to say, her mind was going to deflect. It’s a sick, twisted game. Insidious in its rules. Dull in its repetitiveness. Yet she plays. And loses. The cycle goes on to eternity and binds her with Harry Potter, the boy who lived. The one who has nightmares. The one she loves. The one who probably just finds her convenient.

Pansy stopped listening before Daphne even opened her mouth.