Heartstrings

The pills seemed like tiny, inconspicuous green pebbles on her palm. Pansy squinted her eyes as she pinched the side of it, the remnants came out in powder in her forefinger and index. She thought of smelling the thing, but with Adrian Pucey boring into her body as if she was somewhat of an eighth wonder, she thought better of it. And anyway, beside her, Blaise was sprawled on the camelback sofa in Draco’s room, one leg over her thighs and the other spilling out of the couch. He was staring intently at the pills as he flicked his wand around the opened pouch on his hand, lips pursed in concentration.

“You don’t have to do that,” Pucey, their dealer, sighed in frustration. “These are not dangerous. They just—”

“Heighten your sense of perception, I know,” Pansy answered, her voice more impatient than she’d like it to be. “Releases the feel good hormones of your body. Like dopamine and serotonin.”

Pucey raised his eyebrows, visibly impressed. He’d grown out his hair since they last saw him. After the trials, after he dropped out of school, his whereabouts were largely the gossip of bored schoolgirls. Tall tales about the handsome renegade, the callous rake and how he dragged his tattered heart and frail dignity to Albanian forests, Egyptians pyramids and the Tajmahal , at last.

When Pansy asked him if it was true he had climbed Mount Everest, muggle style, he shrugged, entirely too pleased with himself before offering her absolutely nothing.

So you asked about me? So you thought about me?

Pansy had rolled her eyes in answer.

“I didn’t know you liked chemistry. Or muggle science.” He sat cross-legged on the sandstone floor of Draco’s bedroom. Eyes sparkling with playfulness were set on her. Pansy tried to ignore it as best she could.

“I just like to know what we’re ingesting.”

“I’m impressed.”

“My prayers have been answered.”

He smirked, the curl of his lips bending in that awful rendition of familiar flirtation and Pansy instantly found herself coiling back to her seat. There was something unscrupulous about him, something sneaky she didn’t like. Never did.

She glanced over at Draco, laying on the corner of his four poster, his body half out of the bed, bending over the edge. He was holding a mask, running his fingers all over the dents of the eyes and the sharp jut of the nose and the shiny, dark metal covering everything else. From time to time, he flicked his fingers over the ridges, turned over, toyed with the idea of putting it on, brought it close—disconcertingly close—to his face. The dark satin spilled on the sides of his face, hiding it from them almost entirely.

But then he retreated, went back to inspecting the mask. Pansy felt more and more unsettled each time he did this, felt more onto the edge of something they won’t be able to control, much like before. A prickling discomfort settled in her skin, under her skin and she snapped her eyes to the happy pill instead.

Pansy remembered the terrified jolt of her heart when she first saw it in his hands. He wouldn’t tell where he found it, how he found it, why it was always in his hands. Pansy would guess the house-arrest played some part; arrested in the house seeped and cloaked in what they did, what he did. A manor so drenched in his essence that forty hours of ministry-sanctioned, auror-supervised magical scraping couldn’t wash away the stench of blood. His hands were always deft on the mask, as if it was something blistering, as if it was freezing. And yet he touched. Yet he looked.

“They’re good,” Blaise answered, breaking her momentary sphere of thoughts. Her palm clenched around the tiny pill.The room didn’t smell of blood or snake or skins broiling under incendios. It smelled of lemon zinger and herbs. The freshener charm she sprayed when she arrived burst into reminiscence of their favorite tea when they were just kids.

The guy sitting on the floor was scoffing by the time she could concentrate on the surroundings. “They’re great. I told you they weren’t toxic.”

“Yes, but you certainly are. Now take the money and get out”

Pucey narrowed his eyes, the space between his eyebrows crinkled and the eyes underneath were cold, suddenly, suddenly like those gossipy stories girls gushed at. His lips curled, but before Pansy could draw her wand, before Blaise could draw it, he seemed to relax. Slightly. He smirked and turned to her instead, leaning forward, leaning intently. 

“You know, you don’t have to pay for it,” Pucey purred, dragging his index from her ankle to her thigh, he reached just the underside of her skirt before Pansy squatted it away. His skin felt rough and calloused over her fishnet tights. She tried her best not to crouch or shiver. “I could just give it to you for the pleasure of seeing you unravel.”

Pansy scrunched her nose in distaste. “You mean I do have to pay for it.”

He leaned back again, smirking, undeterred. “Do you know that it increases sexual pleasure?”

A paper ball hit him squarely in the face, followed shortly by Draco’s disdainful moan. He’d finally stopped dissecting the mask. His face was set at them upside down as he leaned from the side of the bed, blond hair almost touching the floor. “Stop being such a creep, Pucey.”

“Stop inhibiting my courting, Malfoy.”

“This isn’t courting,” Pansy answered. “This is borderline harassing.”

He crossed his palms on his chest in answer, pouting, his face set in such a mock solemnity she couldn’t help but snort. “You know that hurts me, Pansy, that really does.”

Blaise let out an impatient groan. He settled further in his seat, spread his legs over hers in a borderline territorial way before waving his wand. A tiny pouch dropped in front of the guy. Pucey pressed his lips in a thin line, he never liked the careless indignity. But money was money. He picked up the leather pouch, pulled at the strings, peeked at the contents with narrowed eyes.

Then he dropped the bag.

“That’s less than what we agreed on,” his teeth grated on the words.

“That’s twice as much as the muggles pay for these,” Blaise drawled, nonplussed. “I checked.”

There was a twitch in his eyes that could be read as disgruntled respect, niggardly appreciation, but Pansy chose otherwise. His face puffed up, a curiously blunt shade of red covering his cheeks. Pucey gave her a terse nod before getting up, the pouch already in his pocket, and apparating without another word. The acidic brunt of their exchange hung in the air, densing it, almost thickening it.

“Did you have to egg him on?” Pansy asked Blaise the moment he vanished.

“He’s a belligerent pervert who’s probably getting off on the images of your thigh.” He snorted. “Yeah, I have to egg him on.”

“He’s dangerous.”

“He’s a pest.”

“What if he tells everyone he’s been selling to us?”

“He’ll have three less customers and me on his rough side. Plus.” He narrowed his eyes. “He was flirting with you.”

“I can handle myself.”

“Can you?”

Pansy’s cheeks puffed on their own accord. “Maybe you’re just jealous he flirts with me instead of you.”

“Oh how did you know?” He slid off his legs, pushed himself up with his elbows. He lifted his eyebrows at Draco, far off the two of them, sitting straight by then, with a bleakly fond expression on his face. Blaise twirled the pouch with a flick of his fingers, the pills hung on thin air for a moment. Then two.

There was a terse silence before Draco nodded, his blond hair falling flat on his forehead. There was a lack of luster in him, the way he moved, the way he kept a distance from her and Blaise. Draco used to always take everything with a grain of salt, and now he didn’t take anything at all. He stared, he calculated, he dropped his hands and let life take its due. His eyes a flaccid, incurious grey. It reminded Pansy too much of the past— their past. It made her want to scream, it also made her want to curl up against him. During the war, after the sandstorm, what came out was both the distorted shadow of her friend and his inevitable reflection. The bleak suspiciousness, the tireless hatred at everything. He came out just like he was before, he was nothing like he was before.

Draco got up and dragged his body to them, his friends, who couldn’t let him trip alone, who couldn’t let him be well enough alone. He sat with his legs crossed in front of the couch, face a mask, as lifeless as the one he was inspecting a minute ago.

Blaise threw a blue pill at him. “They call it a Molly,” he said, smirking. 

Draco raised his eyebrows.

“Come on, man. We’re essentially doing Molly.”

Pansy snorted, popping it in her mouth. The weight of it was barely perceptible before she gulped it. Draco’s lips finally curled into a half smirk. “Better not tell Weasley about it, then.”

It took a while for them to get high.

They laid on the bedroom floor in a circle. Pansy’s head was nestled between the two boys’, all their elbows touching as if they were preparing for a ritual. From time to time she could feel a small burst of warmth in peculiar places of her skin—the inside of her ears, the hollow of her throat. Her stomach. Her hairline. She pinched her eyes shut in concentration, trying to touch that feeling, trying to run after it, only bluntly aware of Blaise’s voice, zoning about all the muggle drugs he learnt in his house arrest, and his mum, and her upcoming marriage.

Her breath deepened, ebbed and flowed. She wanted to ask how long it would take, she wanted to ask if it could take away the dull scratch of her nails inside her ribcage, she wanted to ask if it would make her forget about him.

Before she could give in to the foolish impulse, Draco started talking, thank Merlin. His voice was gruff, somber. His words tripped and fell and Pansy would feel sorry for him if she wasn’t feeling so intensely, pathetically sorry for herself. 

“Did you know…” he started, his hand beside her made a sudden movement, gripping hers as if they were running. “Did you know that the Greeks used to put masks on a pillar to act as the face of Dionysus when they prayed before him.”

Pansy let out a sigh as some heaviness settled on her skin, from the tips of her fingers, a jittering sensation passed over to her limbs, quickening at all the periphery skin before settling, trembling at her sternum. Dionysus. She knew about him. She thought about the dark mask carefully discarded at his desk. She knew Dionysus, and as her senses kept dulling, she grasped onto the first thought. She knew Draco. She knew where this was going.

“Dionysus. The mad god of madness,” Draco mumbled. “The devotees all wore a mask and it was sort of a test for them. If they were able to show complete devotion, they could take the mask off their faces and live their lives blessed with bounty.” Pansy felt Blaise drop his head softly on her shoulder, his breath falling unevenly as he stretched out his arm and touched hers. 

“But if they showed fear and denial, the god they worshiped would curse them to be just like him . Mad, the slow affliction of psychological leprosy eating them out.” He glanced at the mask on the table. “I wonder if he thought that, too.”

Draco didn’t have to explain who he was.

“The Greeks did have a peculiar idea about godliness,” he kept talking, his voice kept falling as if it was tired, or bored, or close to nothing at all. “It wasn’t split into good or evil. The gods were mighty, powerful and simple, really. Profoundly simple. They took their ambrosia and they stayed away from the humans and their emotions were… so simple. Jealousy, rage, love. They believed that a god was a god because he wasn’t so constrained like a human. Wasn’t plagued by morality or regret. What a god did was what he was and it was… absolute. Implacable love and hate and fear and absolute monstrosity.”

A warm breath brushed her neck as Blaise huffed, “No goodness or wretchedness in them, then?”

“They just didn’t see it that way.”

“That’s why Eurepidis used the golden crane for Medea when they first acted out the play.” Blaise mused. “I always wondered. This child murderer… among the gods. Maybe that is divinity. Maybe it’s not good or bad… just the opposite of being a human.”

Pansy licked her bottom lip. It was parched, every part of her was parched and hot and unavoidably on the verge of something spectacular. Something remarkable. She felt at the edge of shattering. Perhaps that was why the next sentence cracked out of her throat. All the nonsense about godliness and foolhardiness and things that couldn’t matter in her life broke away from her throat.

She said, “The Greeks used to believe the closest a human can reach to divinity is at the moment of death. When you… complete your cycle, you fulfill your destiny, and death awaits at the end” —because it’s always death that’s waiting. Death and darkness and this… eternal chain of giving and taking and flaying your skin in the hope that there is some light at the end of the tunnel. Only the light is harsh. Only the light can be harsher than life.

Draco nodded, he was closer now, his breathing shallow. “They believed that in the moment of death, a person is closer to the gods—closer to being a god himself than any other time.”

“Do you think he felt it then—Potter?”

“ Potter?”

Her breath hitched, partly from the throbbing in her spine and partly from the drumming realisation that she’s blurted out a piece of her mind. The piece she tucked away far, far away. Her heart slowed, picked up its pace, and made a massacre of her thoughts.

She didn’t answer. It’s all she thinks about. From the moment she screamed his name in the hallway he was perched in her head like a rotting parasite. When you say something, sometimes it gets jinxed. When you say someone’s name, sometimes it’s a charm on its own. And after he testified for Draco…

It was bad.

It was turning into a condition.

The silence stretched.

Blaise mumbled something, his lips dry against her neck. She pretended not to hear it. 

“I don’t know, Pansy,” Draco said after a lifetime. “I don’t know. Maybe you have to be a god to kill a god.”

“Maybe.” 

“It’s sad, isn’t it? Being him?”

Yes. It was sad and unfair and absolutely, undeniably cruel. She wondered how it felt to have his life snatched away. If Avada was painless as they said. If from the journey to the darkness and back was safe or littered with the debris of all who died before. She wondered if he came back whole, or if parts of his were rotting away at graveyards like Draco’s. Like hers.

Draco gripped her hand more tightly, his fingers filling in the gaps of hers. He dropped his voice, as if it was a secret, the next part, as if he didn’t want to say it.

“So perhaps he was a god. He… Voldemort. Maybe he was the last prophet like he claimed.”

“What are you talking about?” Pansy asked, eyes closed so tight that colours bloomed in the darkness. She didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to think, but she gets his mind, she gets his fears. They were a burning reflection of hers.

“The mask,” Draco breathed. “The one my father wore. The one all of his followers wore. If he gave us masks because he felt that we had to submit ourselves without a recluse.”

“But a mask hides.”

“It hides your true face. What if that’s what he wanted? Because if you hide behind a mask you can do terrible things, things you wouldn’t dream of. before. I think… if I wore a mask that day I would’ve killed him. Dumbledore. I could’ve. Maybe that’s what Voldemort wanted. Maybe it all was a gigantic, meticulous power surge and he was the god and we were the masked servants with our knees folded and hands stretched and head empty. Heart empty.”

“He made you wear masks because you had to hide your identity. Not to take part in a grecian ritual,” Pansy heard herself saying blithely. But even she has a hard time believing it. The death eaters were all too eager to show the world who were beneath the masks. The masks were a sign of prestige in the close knit group of sycophants.

“I don’t think so. I think it’s because he wanted us to be a single entity. Something simple like a single celled organism, just doing what they’re told.”

Pansy trembled. A violent rush of something—ecstacy? Euphoria? Trepidation?—burst from her toes to her abdomen. Looking back, she thinks she moaned, almost, she thinks she cried. 

“When did you wear the mask?” she asked. He never talked about it in detail. She didn’t know if he ever wore a mask, went into cruising, tortured someone.

“At the branding.” He lifted his hand up to touch his face, the outline of it, as if he was still wearing the mask. His fingers shook and shivered and comparing his flushed face with her rapid, beating heart, she knew that the drug was quickening. Suddenly, she was very, very afraid where it would take them.

“I don’t think I ever took it off, Pans. I think he… infected me. Because I resisted, because I was scared. Mad god of madness.”

She would’ve answered, she would’ve turned around and kissed him long and hard on the lips and said it was okay, to be sacred and doubtful and to be wretched. The world was a wretched place anyway. And nothing mattered in the long run, everything was destined to die and rot and perish like it never existed. It didn’t matter. They didn’t matter.

But the pills finally paid their dues. And she doesn’t remember most of what happened after the money bought the happiness they haggled for. Her body floated in the air, the stony floor of her friend’s beige bedroom was replaced with the wood of her first treehouse. Her dress was replaced with what she wore on her eighth birthday. There was laughter, suddenly, and her father and her friends and she was young. She hadn’t made any mistakes. She wasn’t a disintegrating shell of a girl. She was named after a flower with heart-shaped petals. She was a girl. She was an idiot—but at least she wasn’t rotten.

Looking back, she thinks they sang a lot that night. The Hogwarts school song, the songs Daphne used to sing to them the time she attended a voice lesson for a month, harboring a secret dream about opera and life on stage and stars on the ground . She thinks they danced, she thinks they cried. She knows every bit of it felt as good as it ever did. She thinks she scratched on the surface of her psyche that hides Harry Potter with a vengeance. She thinks it was dawn when she finally came with something she wanted to say to him.

When she woke up in the morning with a dull headache and a glaring burn in her chest, she saw Draco and Blaise sleeping on the far end of the room, on the floor, their arms around one another. It took her a while to realize that her hand was aching, dotted with ink and when she walked over to Draco’s desk, a letter was there. Her writing, inarticulate, blunted cursives filling the page.

It began with a name she tries so hard not to think about. She couldn’t read it over. He finger stretched over the parchment, the ink bled a little on her thumb. She let out a shaky, disgruntled breath, it fanned over the yellow page.

She decided to burn it. 

She never burned it.

“What?” she scowls to the sound of the bell chiming. “It’s lunch break,” she says without looking up from the Quibbler.

The customer hesitates, and Pansy keeps her eyes glued on the sparkly spikes of Bowtruckles on the page and listens to the slight tap on the linoleum floor of boots and wonders about the oncoming migraine assault this one is going to be.

“I’m sorry,” he says after a moment, and she snaps her head because—because yes she recognizes the voice, the characteristic trip over the rs, the rasps and yes it’s him.

“Oh.” She snaps the magazine shut, shoves it into the counter drawer like a reflex. “It’s nothing.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t—,” Harry Potter says, twisting his wrist to glance at his watch. “It’s eleven thirty.” His cheeks turn pink. “Do you—you take your lunch that early?”

Pansy blinks once, twice—her mind is all white noise, for a moment, comically blank. She stares at Potter, bluntly realising that she’s been caught lying or sulking or whatever, by the worst possible person and—

“Yeah, no, it’s nothing.” Pansy shakes her head, hoping she doesn’t look as warm and stunned as she feels. “I was—just deflecting. I had a customer who was—not nice.”

“Oh.” He purses his lips. “So should I go—”

“No.” She smiles, or tries to, as she stands up. “What do you want?”

“A pet.”

She glances around the room full of kneazles, owls and rats. “Really?”

He laughs. There’s a tint of flush to his cheeks that makes this admirable, makes her want to laugh with him and not at him. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and he smooths his hair and pulls at the ends of his denim-blue jacket. Pansy gets out of the counter, she rests her weight on the side of the desk as he fumbles discomfitingly. He looks almost on the verge of talking, of asking something. And Pansy lets the silence hang, lets it become awkward because she knows the question and she knows the answer. It’s just… she is cultivating a habit of not answering anything before someone does the asking part, okay? She is trying to say less and be less and—

“I hope this isn’t weird.”

She blinks. “Oh, no,” she lies. Or doesn’t lie. Whatever. “No.”

“Because you left that day—”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says quickly before he can bright up the likes of red strings and soulmates and stupid jokeshop merchendises. “You’re a customer.”

He nods, the smile dimmed by a notch. “I wouldn’t have guessed that you worked here,” he blurts out. Takes a moment to glance at the entire shop before adding, “Or anywhere.”

Pansy’s tongue grazes the inside of her teeth, not answering. Her eyes narrow instinctively and she wants to spit out the venom bubbling inside her since the woman—small and stout and full of righteous venom—snarled at her like she was the poison. It isn’t his business to know what she’s doing—it isn’t anyone else’s business. He taps his feet before getting further inside the shop, letting his gaze wander. The sharp, almost clinical white tiles of the wall, shinning pointedly with the individual lights on the glass boxes separated in different categories. Pansy takes pride in redecorating the pet shop, Pansy feels downright stupid about everything else, suddenly. And as she stares, begrudgingly, she gauges his stare and the half, awkward, curious smile he gives like the question isn’t invasive, like he’s just making conversation. 

And Pansy shouldn’t care that her insides melt a little on the edges when she sees that he isn’t smirking, isn’t condescending. and she doesn’t make a silent note to add on to the truckload of reason he is an inherently nice person.

She doesn’t.

“It’s my father’s shop,” she answers, softer than she meant to.

“Oh.”

“I had a month of community service at a pet clinic and after that I just… got used to being around animals.” She snorted. “They seem to like me too.”

The smile makes a reappearance. “I’m sure.”

The crawling pang of warmth rises again like the reaction of an allergy—a reaction to his smile, and Pansy purses her lips because she will not allow this— whatever this is. She shakes her head and gestures to him in the cages. She is a professional and he is a customer and this is precisely a—

“I had an owl,” he started. Because of course he has no regards for professionality and propriety  and whatever the shit is important for Pansy and her state of mind.

He had a pet bird. It was a magnificent snowy owl and he called her—

“Hedwig,” she says. “I know.”

His mouth parts a bit and really, this is ridiculous. Ridiculous is the state of her mind and her blabbering mouth and the fact that he acts surprised at such a simple, inconspicuous little knowledge. Ridiculous is that he forgets that they’ve been attending the same school, running around in the same mass of space since they were eleven and of course Pansy noticed the Chosen One. Of course she knows about Hedwig and that he has a natural streak for DADA and that his best friend is Ronald Weasley who was the thing he’d miss most during the Triwizard Tournament. Of course she picked up on these. There’s nothing special about that.

“Yeah, well.” He’s flushed, again. And breathless. Pansy is starting to think it might be a condition . “She died. I didn’t think of getting another pet but I—Hermione said it might be a good idea. To have something to get attached to, take care of.”

She nods, turns her back to him and walks towards the cages. Her hand skims over the glass cages they keep the kneazles and the fluttering in her heart is loud and clear and inescapable.

“Did Hermione tell you what pet you need too?”

“No.” And she can hear the beginning of an effervescent smile in his voice. The smile is so clear in her mind, so excruciatingly sharp that she feels the burn of it. It’s before he catches the snitch in the field, just at the moment of the realisation that he’s winning, he’s already won. Still a dimmer version than he offered to Ginny Weasley in the corridors of their school. She could feel the brunt of it on the back of her neck. She could hear the end of her sanity. “I thought you could help me with that.”

She wants to tell him that the letter was sent not on impulse, nor with her full consent.

It was just the constant tapering of the piece of parchment on her desk. It was the grueling beating of her fingers when she couldn’t bring herself to destroy it.

It was there. And Pansy didn’t want to look at it, didn’t want to chuck it out.

It was there, then suddenly, one morning, she decided to hell with it.

He wouldn’t read it anyway.