Heartstrings

The bronze colored box in her open palm has the shape of an ordinary matchbox, and only slightly larger than one in size. A dark, imposing bronze with lighter spots pitted all over its surface. Its edges, inscribed with a charm in latin—a charm she recognizes from her textbook; more like a watchword than an actual charm. An absurd, polysyllabic mess superstitious people used for luck— has a bright golden outline. The colours flexed and mashed together aren’t supposed to make sense by any conceivable reason, but somehow they do.

The contents inside them—thin, plaited blood red threads—aren’t supposed to make sense either.

Pansy clicks open the tiny bronze latch on top of the box again, twists her index around the threads, the colour a bright and bold contrast against her skin, and pulls, again, more carefully than she did the last time.

And again, like the last time, it winds up at the contact, shriveling a moment before coiling around her fingers and settling in the shape of a ring. She narrows her eyes, turns the back of the box in her other hand. The first three words of the heading say—

Red Herring Strings…

The pressure is only palpable in her hand when she looks at it, the presence of the thread is only there when she stares, it gleams, it sparkles, it presses down on her skin and there’s a heat of it, not hot, not even warm, but—something mellower, something more intense, like the shallow, glowing heat of a light radiating from the core of her bones. It reminds her of birthdays and sleepovers at Daphne’s, when someone you love puts a blanket around you and the warmth you feel is one that isn’t from the blanket.

That kind of heat.

She mumbles the charm on the edge of the box. Mumbles the name of the product. She’s been inspecting the box—which somehow caught her attention the moment her eyes caught the boxes stacked neatly like little pieces of bricks—for about ten minutes now. It doesn’t make sense. 

“What are you looking at?” 

The call rings in her ears like a sudden onslaught. Pansy snaps her eyes up to see…

Harry Potter.

The box drops from her hands.

“Oh.” He backs away awkwardly. His eyes trip from her face to her hands and finally, disastrously, to the floor. “I’m sorry. Let me just—”

He bends to pick it up the same instant she does. And her heart is hammering senselessly as she slumps to her knee, her hand shots at the small—and inconspicuous, really—box and his does too and—

Their hands touch. And she wants to pull back, she is about to, but then the strange warmth in her finger glows, melts and spreads to the rest of her hand. Her lips part in an impromptu, surprised oh and in the minuscule scrap of hesitance, Potter notices the string.

And it’s… moving. Flexing. Their hands are touching over the smooth wooden box and Pansy’s eyes narrow in scrutiny, disbelief and a hefty portion of trepidation as she watches the bright red thread twisting open from the ring in her finger and breaking off and… snapping into his. Potter makes a noise, he almost topples back, but the thread is already coiling at his fingers. He stands up, blurting out a too surprised, too soft, “What?”

Pansy blinks up at him, too rattled to say anything. What? What just happened? Her mind reels back to the scribbling on the back of the packet before anything else—before she can wonder why she decided to come here and why would he call her and why the fuck would the thread latch onto him?

Pansy’s throat is parched by the time she gets up, hastily clutching the box and shoving it into her skirt pocket. Potter’s index now shows off an identical ring.

She pushes the box further into her pocket.

He inspects the ring, eyes scrunched up behind his familiar glasses. He pinches at the thread and smiles softly when—she’s sure, she felt it literally a second ago—that warm gush of happiness floods in his skin.

“What is it?” he asks her, finally staring back.

Pansy turns her head, her face flushed. “Nothing.”

“Not nothing.” He blinks at her and the shelf beside her which is—she realises with horror—is full of the little boxes. The name of the catastrophe— Red Herring Strings— is perched all over the stacks. A whole fucking row of them, winking at her, at him and her eyes widen as her heart drums disastrously loud, the world flashes like a blip before and Harry Potter sees it, she’s sure, her panic and how she’s taking a step toward the shelf, as if guarding it, as if she can somehow make the products invisible altogether so he won’t be able to pick any one of the hundred one he likes, lips pressed in a pout as he flips the cover and checks—and checks—

“It really is nothing,” she repeats, dumbly.

His eyes flash with—surprise? confusion? mischievousness?—and it takes her a flipping second to realise he’s smiling, like he’s delighted, at her and her posture and her ridiculous answer. He smiles like she’s ridiculous, amiably ridiculous.

Pansy’s heart sinks to her stomach to realise that it one hundred percent is. 

Ridiculous.

Moronic.

Asinine.

Why the fuck did Draco decided to drag her here?

Harry Potter’s eyes flicks to her and the shelf in an obvious gesture and his eyes are shining, and this would feel like a jolly, lightheaded moment if she weren’t really there, if it was one of those irrefutably awkward moments that seemed to happen to Daphne. But not to her. Not to Pansy. And certainly not with him.

Potter flicks his eyes at her with the obvious question, but when she shrugs, he decides not to push it.

“Hey,” he says.

Pansy purses her lips in a lousy attempt to mimick a smile. She hasn’t seen him since the battle. And certainly not after she—

“Hi.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Nothing. Just… browsing.”

“Yeah? Find something you like?”

Is he smiling? Is he staring at her hand, half shoved in her pocket—the too small pocket of her mini skirt—and glancing at her face and… smirking at her expense?

Her breath stumbles, catches, falls out like a hiss. “I don’t know yet.”

Pansy taps her feet, her sandals make the characteristic plop on the hardwood floor as she involuntarily rests her hand on the shelf. The long line of wooden shelves filled with prosaic amortentia—whose effect comically wanes after a day or two—and nail polishes that are supposed to change colors, and lofty, studded quills—which are preposterously shaped like freaking dildos—for writing love letters. The inside of the shop is congested with gaudy, comical, colorful merchandise, all look silly and inviting and Pansy was thinking that Weasleys might be good on their advertisement that all they supply are cheap entertainment and laughter, but she is also quite sure that none of that matters right now.

A couple of—intensely long, mortifyingly lingering—moments pass. Potter looks expectantly at her, maybe a little breathless, slightly on edge with one hand constantly fixing his stupid, messy hair and his tilted glasses. If Pansy wasn’t so in over her head with the ludicrous situation and the muddled noises in her head and the overwhelming, unignorable heaviness of his presence—like the back of a sun, like a sudden punch to the gut—she might have appraise the fact of how good he was looking.

Tousled.

Intent.

Luminous.

But Pansy is not appraising him, nor is she assessing this situation; none of it was in her logbook and she wasn’t supposed to stumble here and where the fuck is Draco? She should really go and find the tosser, and—

“I need to go,” she blurts out. And she would flush with how awkward she sounds but her voice is almost cut off by what Potter says at the same moment.

“So you’re going to school?” he says quickly. Pansy blinks up at him—Merlin, he’s tall— for a second.

“What?”

“Hogwarts,” he explains. “For our final year? You’re going, right?”

“Um.” She takes a short breath. “Yes, yeah. I’m… yes.”

He nods, a careful smile pulling at his lips—chapped, pink lips. “Great. I’m going, too.”

“Nice… so that’s—wait, really?” She blinks in surprise. “I thought they were letting you into the training program without it.”

He smiles, as if he caught her on a slip, as if he caught her keeping tabs on him—which is not the case. Harry Potter and What is Happening in His Life is essentially national news, he is essentially media personified. The head of the Auror Training Program or ATP has announced only recently that those who fought at the final battle would be allowed to join in the training without their NEWTs. It is supposed to be a lifetime opportunity. Pansy thinks it’s a ridiculous substitute, a piss-poor apology for allowing kids to fight against one of the most ruthless and vicious armies ever.

But what does she know? She’s a disgraced juvenile delinquent assigned to one month of supervised house arrest and a hundred hours of community service for the summer. She’s at the opposite spectrum of receiving Ministry sanctions liquified gratitude. She’s probably just jealous. Or resentful. Or both .

“I read that on the Prophet,” she explains curtly. 

His smile grows wider. He shrugs, leans against the wooden border. His hip sinks into the wood, his expression lights up, suddenly, as if they’re finally starting to have a conversation. As if he’s finally found a topic to talk on.

“I was unsure, you know. About the whole ATP thing. It’s a commitment, it’s an entire lifestyle. And I think it was a more willful idea anyway. That was the only thing I could see myself doing when I was fourteen. I’m not fourteen anymore.” He snorts, he shrugs, he scrunches his eyes, he moves his hands when he talks. Pansy tries—tries, tries— not to notice that and everything else, and everything else. “So I just thought maybe it isn’t a good idea—just, getting into it after I went through… everything.” He purses his lips. 

Pansy holds her breath. Everything. Yes. the war and the dying and the being brought back to life. Everything. She knows she doesn’t fit into any of that, she can’t possibly add anything into that, so she waits for the awkward pause in his speech to speed up, trying to look serene, uninterested, not there.

He lets out a tired, meek strangled breath. He shakes his head, his hair falls more purposely on his forehead. Jesus Christ. “Everything is… not as simple now. I hardly know what I want to do for weekends anymore; it’s no surprise that I dunno what I want to do with my life. So… Hermione suggested that a year at school would be better, for me. It could make me more grounded, a routine might help in… settling. You know?”

She does know. She knows the importance of routines and habits and a meticulously curated logbook to write down her affairs in order so nothing ever goes out any way she hasn’t planned. She knows the stability it offers intimately . What she doesn’t know is why he is explaining all that to her.

“I do.” She glances around at the shop. “So. I should go. Draco is probably waiting for me, and I—”

She takes a step back, he instantly takes one to her. Hastily adds the next line of this totally unwarranted, uncalled for conversation.

“I got your letter,” he blurts out, his whole body juts a little forward with the words.

Pansy blinks. Her lips part, she feels the ground beneath her wobble, slightly, she feels the gravity switching off for a moment.

Yes, the letter.

Why?

“Nice,” she manages to say. “Cool.”

“It was—” he gulps, “ I was… I wanted to talk to you about it.”

“Why?”

“I felt… something. I was—it was not what I was expecting.”

“Of course you weren’t expecting a letter, Potter.” She was surprised herself. But then, she always made headfirst, foolish, imbecilic decisions when she was high.

“No, not that.” His cheeks— flushed, red cheeks—puff. “I didn’t expect what you wrote. Not from you.”

“ Great .”

“Not in a negative way. It’s just that—”

“You didn’t think I’d ever have… a thought?” She shouldn’t feel this sore, she shouldn’t—it didn’t matter what he thought of the letter.

“No, it’s not that,” he stumbles on his words. “It’s just that I—we, this…”

Pansy glances around to see if anyone else was watching, to look away anything else but him. “You really didn’t put a thought in this conversation, have you?” she says quietly.

“What?”

“You’re barely making a coherent sentence.”

“I’m just surprised. I didn’t expect to find you here.”

“Yes. Okay. It’s… nothing. Let’s just forget about it, okay?” Merlin knows she’s far too willing to forget about it.

But she knows— knows— that the guy before her is a tenacious sod. 

“Did you mean everything you wrote?” he says again, the flush on his cheeks are now a deep, red color, and Pansy makes a point to not look at his eyes.

Did she mean it? Everything?

“I did.” More than she should ever care to admit.

Potter lets out a long breath, he seems both glad and terrified about it. “I… Merlin, can we talk? Somewhere away? There’s this ice cream shop—"

“I wrote a lot of letters,” she cuts him off hastily. She feels an unbidden flush creeping onto her cheeks. “I had nothing better to do during the house arrest. You should see the particularly risqué one I wrote to Victor Krum. I’d probably have gotten a marriage proposal by now if I hadn’t signed my name Daniella Dangers. ”

“You didn’t sign a fake name in mine.”

Pansy sighs. He is exhausting. He is determined, he is… earnest? His bright, startling green eyes are set on her, staring through her, with intent. And she recognizes it because she’s seen it, noticed it in the way he flies in Quidditch. Intent and determination. He seems as if waiting for her to prove him something like he bids his time and waits for the golden snitch. Like he wants her to acknowledge that letter for something other than small talk—which he is devastatingly bad at, by the way—but for something more intimate. Personal. Transgressional.

“No I didn’t.”

“Why?”

Pansy purses her lips, taking a step back. There is a restless flutter in her heart, mimicry of an actual heartbeat. She feels hot, scorching, scalding hot and she hasn’t expected him to confront her, hasn’t expected him to stare at her, hasn’t expected him to care.

“Why not?” she finds herself saying. “You would’ve known it was me anyway. I don’t remember anyone else in that hall wanting to sell you up.”

He narrows his eyes. “But that’s not all you wrote. You wrote about—about how it felt to—”

“I know,” she snaps, screws her eyes shut. She wrote about loneliness and guilt and a prison made of everything she believed in. She wrote about being out of the wrong end of the tunnel. She wrote about death and defeat and which is which. She wrote—

“I don’t want you to—It’s nothing, okay? I didn’t expect you to actually read it. I didn’t…I’m not— god, why do you care?”

Potter opens his mouth before instantly closing it. There’s a shift of expression in his face. And Pansy stares—wide eyed, glassy eyed—as he glances to her eyes and her lips and lingers, just a moment to her throat. Every part of her is clenched up so tight she feels like bursting out, feels the tears at the edges of her seams. And his face had been incredulous, at first, before his eyes widened and his lips parted and there’s a vague relief in his eyes, there’s a lingering ache of familiarity and finally—finally it sets intently on apprehension.

As if he finally gets her—gets what this is really about. And when he speaks, his voice is soft and low and really, unfailingly kind and all Pansy wants to do is run away from it.

“You didn’t think I’d read it?”

She doesn’t recognise her own voice as she says, “Why would you?”

“Why… why wouldn’t I?”

The laugh that comes out of her throat is unintentionally chirpy. Ragged. A bit hysterical. She can’t help it. “Uhm, because there is literally no reason that you’d care about my apology. Or… what I wanted to say to you. It doesn’t— I don’t matter to you.” She cringes at how pathetic it sounds. “I mean, you hardly matter to me—” Oh Merlin, is she making it worse now ? “I mean—” 

She takes a step away, turns her face away to look at —anywhere else but his earnest face. Her hands land on a glass jar and she fiddles with it, trying to breathe in deeper. The air smells different than it did when she came here.

She realises he smells of mint and cigarettes.

She takes a deeper breath.

“What I meant to say is, you don’t have any reason to wait on my apology, or what I had to say. Apologies are self-serving anyway. So it shouldn’t change… it can’t. You should hate me.”

Because they have hate, don’t they? A plentiful of hate. And abundance from the locked closet they all keep in their hearts. A simpleton kind of hate, an intransigent kind of enmity. It’s all that’s been there between them. Since the very beginning, even before she knew his name and he knew hers there was just this simple, unignorable fact that they are people who are forever at odds, at perpetual strife. When they were kids, hate was a silly, playground word. Full of frivolous things like points and house-cup and Quidditch . But now hate had a lot more gravity to it, has more implications, manifestations and fucking branches. And Pansy tries not to get lost in the coils of words, tries to peek through ribbons of self-loathing and regrets and how she added reasons—real, imposing ones—to give him a right to hate her. More intimately, more purposefully.

So there should be— is— hate. She’s certain.

But the look he gives her is soft, and curious, and a weird, lilting touch of understanding that… that —

She forgets the rest of her speech.

“I don’t hate you,” he says, his voice is just as tender as his face. Then, “Pansy.”

It’s the first time he’s called her that. She can’t say why her mind makes the distinction. Pansy stares at him in wonder, for a moment, before an violent sound pulls her apart—pulls both of them apart—from their little sphere. She looks past his shoulders and sees a pile of Thunder Crackers colliding with its neighboring shelf. One of the boxes bursts open and shoots off and suddenly everything is colliding and crashing and crackling noises and Pansy finally finds enough sturdiness to move.

She takes a step back. “I have to go.”

Potter opens his mouth, then closes it, a silent realisation passes over his face. He just nods.

Her feet feel shaky, wobbly, as if someone transfigured her bones to jell-o and she takes deep breaths, she feels out of water. Her hand clutch to the front of her jumper like it’s a crutch. Her vision settles amid the disproportionate yellow, lavender, turquoise glow of the shop when she finally spots Draco in front of the counter. Talking with… Weasley and Granger? What are the odds?

He jumps in surprise when she clutches his arm, fingers digging into the skin on top of his elbow. 

“Give five sickels,” she says bitingly, only slightly conscious of the impassive stare of the couple on her, on both of her and Draco. They stare and make a face and she’s only half here, overtly conscious of Harry Potter’s eyes on her from the far side of the room. Her neck feels hot, prickling and she only mildly hears Draco splutter about what’s the total cost and she taps her feet on the floor in agitation, she keeps her nails digging into the satin of Draco’s shirt and she swallows the clot in her throat and she passes her eyes on a terse Granger, an impassive Weasley and—

She turns her head.

Her eyes, involuntarily, like a hook into a fish falls on him, again. He is still standing there. He’s not leaning in a casual conversational stature anymore. He stands, rigid, straight, with only his head bent to look at the product in his hand. She doesn’t  have to squint her eyes to see what’s in his hand. Her own palm brushes over the outline of the box in her pocket.

Draco fumbles, stutters, as does Granger about school and final year —is that all they have left to talk about?—and

She can’t see his expression but she sees—with a glaring, sudden jolt—as he lifts his hand to his face and she doesn’t have to see his ring, she feels hers burst with an invasive jolt anyway. And suddenly, suddenly, he snaps his head from the packet to her . Her breath catches in her throat.

Pansy tightens her grip on Draco. He jumps apart.

“Ow, Pans!”

“I have to go.” She snaps her eyes away from him. “ We have to go. Let’s—” she snatches him before he has a chance to object and… there’s a splutter of excuse, her head is ringing , and her eyes water in embarrassment and she can hardly take a fucking coherent breath before they get out of the shop, before she drags the both of them a few block farther away for good measure. The air outside is cooler, crisp and fresh and Pansy drops her grip, she smooths down her long hair, she pretends to look cool.

She is ninety percent sure she doesn’t look cool.

“What the fuck was that?” Draco cries. Pansy opens her mouth, contemplates on the answer and if she even has any, then closes it again.

“Well?” He is rubbing on his arm over his shirt, the cloth on his forearm where she touched is rumpled. His face is pointier, and as she cools down a notch—just a notch—she realizes he is flushed, too.  A bit breathless, a bit like her.

“Nothing,” she says coolly—relatively coolly. 

“Yeah? Because you acted like—”

“Why are you all… flushed?” She purses her lips, tries and fails at smiling. “What were you and Granger talking about?”

He straightens up, his lips fall into a thin line just like hers. “Nothing.”

The smile comes naturally now. “Right.”

“Right.”

She shakes her head, the smile turning into a knowing snort. A breathy, easy chuckle. Her heartbeat is steadying down, it’s easier to roll her eyes in the uncaring, passive-aggressive way. It’s easier to act like her. Draco recognises it, whatever the hell they’re not saying to each other, and begrudgingly, belatedly, offers a curt smile of his own.

“I really hate you sometimes, you know,” he says.

“The feeling is mutual, my dude.” She wraps her arm around his, tugging him to the corner. “Come on, now, I have to pick some robes from Madame Malkin’s.”

The afternoon is clearer, crispier than the hotness of noon suggested it would be. Diagon Alley is alive with chatters of people sprinting, walking, to shops. there’s laughter, and there are calls of names of people they don’t know. Pansy smells the delicious hot chocolate on their way to the Madame Malkin’s and absentmindedly wonders if she should just act like nothing happened the next time she sees Potter. Because it’s really nothing. It’s a letter she wrote while high on muggle ecstasy and it’s a product from the shelf of a shop that once rhymed You-Know-Who with U-No-Poo.  

Draco speaks when they’re about to enter Madam Malkin’s. His voice is pointed and bland, something that’s truly, entirely him. “It’s not something really serious, though, is it?”

“No.” Pansy says coolly. “What about you?”

“Nothing… but I’ll tell you if it turns out—which it won’t, because there’s really no—”

“I get it.” She pauses for a second. “And… yeah, okay. Likewise. I’ll tell you, too.”

He nods, drifts his eyes away from her as they enter into the trapped coolness of the mostly empty shop. Pansy instantly goes for the counter, and as she takes out her slip of order from her pocket, her fingers nudge against the wooden box. Her breath hitches.

She traces the inscription at the back of the packet. She can tell what it says without looking. She can picture it as clearly as she saw half an hour ago.

Pansy keeps her face straight and uncaring and characteristically uninterested as she follows Madame for trying out her dresses. Her fingers are deft and smooth as she inspects the seams, the fitting, the texture. The older woman keeps talking and Pansy keeps her eyes on the robes and she keeps picturing Harry Potter’s face, and how it must’ve looked when he finally read the description at the back of the box. 

Red Herring Strings—find your soulmate!