Heartstrings

The late afternoon glow has a fawning nature to it. Sundrip, radiant-like glow of the orange sun slipping over everything in sight. Like molten gold. A translucent shield, transforming colors like a coat of wet, water-color paint. The light seeping from the window on their compartment ripple against the glass on the door, the dark leather seats, Draco Malfoy’s enviously blond hair.

Pansy leans against the window, eyelashes fluttering on the glass as she watches, with a faint shudder of excitement, the familiar road to Hogwarts. Blurry trees and rippling lakes, the setting sun peeking through the gaps of the greens, reflecting to a million pieces on the waters. A kaleidoscope of fresh colors greet them—forest green, frozen blue, golden. She exhales deeply, trying to get rid of the clot on her chest. When she inhales back, the sweet, cloying smell of candies make her lean back, calm down, a bit more.

There’s a glaring familiarity to this scene. Her and him and the dense, comfortable silence. Going Hogwarts. Going home . Pansy wishes she felt composed as she promised herself she could be— would be . But the closer they get, the more… uncomfortable she feels. Inside her body, on the outline of it. Her robe feels starchy, rubbing against her bare skin—her clavicle, her kneecaps, her elbow. It’s distracting, it’s not mixing with the rest of the scene, it’s—

“Stop fidgeting,” Draco scowls at her.

Pansy scoffs in answer, fingers still pinching on the bundle of loose threads on her collar. Only slightly embarrassed, only faintly blushing. She shoots him a look—he looks ragged, his hair is swept backways with uncharacteristic clumsiness, the left sleeve of his shirt is rumpled, unkempt—before resuming to her state.

“Seriously, you’re giving me a migraine.”

“You’re the one to talk.” She yanks at the thread. “I don’t know how your cuff’s still attached to your sleeve.”

A terse silence. By the time it catches up to her, she has a tooth sized hole in her new dress robes and Draco has a flush that’s covering his entire face.

She looks up. His fingers flex on top of his left wrist. She purses her lips. Regret rises like a simmering tea, lukewarm, like the heat in this room, but not as bright.

She ought to say sorry. But her teeth mash together, and she stares back at him with the same, unchanging scowl.

“I hadn’t noticed,” he says after a while, terse, bitter, resigned , “that I was doing it.”

“Yeah. Me neither.”

His lips curl. “At least I’m not bollocking with my clothes, wondering about whether I look polished enough or not—”

“Excuse me?”

“Or whether I’m easier on the eye.”

“You—” She narrows her eyes, incredulous, exasperated and so… done . With him and her and the compartment and all of it. “ Gosh , it’s like your jerk-o-meter is flying through the roofs the closer we get.”

He shrugs, lips pursed in that quintessential Malfoy smirk. Except it’s just bitter. Not playful, it’s not apprehensive, doesn’t glimmer like it used to when they were kids and they were lying on the porch of his ancestral mansion. Mansion. Summer air, a misty, sweet smell all around them, an eternity stretched brilliantly—like the fresh, cutting edges of the freshly mowed grass—before them. I’d marry you in that chapel, he said determinedly. They were snuffed from the party going on inside the mansion. We’ll have cakes then. Lots and lots.

And bagels? she inquired.

Lots and lots. And champagne.

The chapel in question was the one his great-great grandfather built for them. It’s burnt down now. Antoine Dolohov was always prickly after five drinks.

The smirk is supposed to be the same. The lofty curl, curving just at the edge of his lips, there are crows feet on the side of his eyes, the only creases in his perfect, porcelain face. The smirk is inviting, let’s throw the words, you tell me my worst traits and I tell you yours. 

He told her she’s the same shallow, superficial bird, caring about her looks while his arm is burning from the dark mark.

She could retaliate with how he’s always so inside his own butt that people around him are just cardboard cutouts of the books he’s currently reading.

Pansy’s just the quintessential, boring mean girl she’s always been.

His hand isn’t burning. He just wishes it was, so he’d have something real to be pissed about.

Pansy purses her lips, squints her eyes. The light is too soft and she can see the entire script playing through as clearly as if it were a picture. The light is too bright and those are lies, anyway. The smell is too sweet and Draco is too familiar and Pansy… she’s just tired.

She is about to say she won’t fight, not when it’s useless and everything they’ll say will be kept in the drafts for later use, to modify and mutilate and mutate and—

She is about to say all of it, none of it, but a low, soft meow snaps both their attention to their feet. Her feet. Pansy’s eyes widen as the familiar— familiar —white fur coos at her. So big and fluffy and distractingly white that you sometimes get taken aback when it comes into your view. 

Snow. Her proud face is now pinched in pally adoration as she snuggles closer to a dumbstruck Pansy, nudging her head against the new robes. The only not white spot on her face are the two lines of kohl dark furs under her eyes. It makes her eyes bigger, Pansy thinks. It makes her cuter, Potter said.

“Well, someone is appreciating your looks,” Draco says blithely.

“She knows me,” Pansy snaps, too quick to feel any sort of embarrassment. She bends down and Snow jumps almost immediately on her outstretched arms. There’s a light stench of raw milk on her breath as she licks Pansy’s cheeks. That’s when she notices her collar. And it’s—oh god— the string. The String . Red and stark and obvious… so obvious. Her heart thumps like a fucking howitzer and Pansy involuntarily clutches the cat tighter. 

Draco’s eyes narrow. Before he can ask—what or to whom does it belong to? or worse why do you look so pale?—she jumps up, spine straight, mind suddenly so taut with the dumb awareness that she wonders a second if it can result in a burst vein, slowly cracking under the pressure of the stress, resulting in—

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

She grits the words with acid that’s enough to make him snarl, but she doesn’t wait for it. She moves out, nudging the door close with her heel. The wood clicks shut, and Pansy takes a solid ten steps to the corridor before she finds enough restraint to breathe .

She runs her finger over the thread, identical to hers that she hasn’t yet found the good sense to chuck out. Longer, for sure, and it looks much less inconspicuous on her neck. Of course her owner wouldn’t think too much about it, he doesn’t think too much about anything. But it’s probably not so obvious to anyone else for that matter. Pansy—even though she really, really hadn’t wanted to—checked. Red Herring Strings aren’t as popular, yet. They were a new addition to the Weasley’s merchandise. They hadn’t had good luck with customers.

That’s because they’re probably bullshit, Pansy told herself.

The corridor is too full with students for her to stand in one spot for too long without looking totally fucking weird. Or worse… lost. So she walks on, a little uncertainly, to the forepart of the train where she knows most of the Gryffindors sit together. She runs her hand over the cat— Snow— who is snuggling to her, purring softly at the caress. The thread is not bound like a collar, no nametag, no… nothing. It’s just snug over the cat’s furry, round neck the way it coils around Pansy’s finger like a ring. Prim. Pretty. Like it belongs there.

Snow knows her, for sure. She and her owner have been circling around her small sphere of existence almost the entirety of last month. The concerns of the owner ranged from understandable, legit—

So what should I feed her?

What shots should I give her?

Too utterly moronic—

I think she looks a little pale.

It's a white ragamuffin, shs answered curtly.

She ate an entire mouse.

I doubt it. Cats don’t actually… eat mice.

Sunday afternoons, Wednesday mornings. Friday evenings. And she’d like to say she held up her resolve. That she acted professional and definitely didn’t accept the more than friendly advances of Harry Potter.

But the problem is that… almost no one came into the shop. Diagon Alley is a dingy, small place, trapped in stale air that ricochets from one mouth to another. Her father bought the shop as a joke in the finer days of their lives. Which is suitable, Pansy thinks, which is funny— because now the joke is on them. At first a few customers came to confirm their suspicion, to check the rumors that the death eater Elphias Parkinson really had the audacity to continue the business, and what’s worse, his daughter Pansy was on the job. A publicity stunt, maybe, a cry for help, maybe. Pansy shudders inside her own tight cell when she remembers the first customer walking into the shop with no intention of buying anything. She remembers gritting her teeth and listening to his story about how he lost his left hand and repeating—in her head, in her heart—that she deserved it. She deserved it, she deserves—

So of course it was nice when someone like him came around. Bright eyes, flushed cheeks. Always fumbling, always carrying on anyway as if he didn’t fumble, as if he didn’t smirk and splatter his intentions—plain, obvious intentions—all around everything he did. He doesn’t have a subtle bone in his body. He dishes out thinly veiled excuses to come to her shop as if it’s the most natural thing. He says ridiculous things that make her snort and makes him laugh, in retaliation. In answer.

He has that aura of confidence, the soft kind, the kind that seeps in your skin and rattles the cold bones and makes you wonder how it would feel to be like him. A laugh crackling in the white tiles in her petshop when she told him he should get his cat to a vet and get—fucking hell—contraceptions and… well, she blushed. He laughed. They fell into the awkward silence that always seemed to stretch and stretch and bend and touch her. Her and him and all the unanswered, unasked questions they haven’t gotten to contront. The words denses, coils and crystallizes before she has to take a step back.

A moment later he asked her about where to take his cat, and if she could accompany him. He had his arm spread across the counter, his fingers tapping on the wood, an inch from where her arm—short-sleeved, bare to touch—was resting. He smiled, eyes crinkling at the edges.

“It’s just that I’m so bad at this... I’ll probably laugh my ass off or run away from the place. Either of these two. Both of these two.”

Pansy swallowed the dry breath. “I have to be here till—” It didn’t matter. No one would come anyway.

“Come on. Please?”

Someone ought to really smack his stupid grin off someday. Maybe she will.

Maybe someday.

But in the meantime, she followed him to the stupid vet.

So yeah, Snow knew her. She knew her blushing and panicking and oddly, uncharacteristically softening.

Pansy stood at the edge of the cabins in the frontier. She contemplates on succumbing to the mortifying ordeal and trying to find Harry Potter amidst the pack of loud, righteous Gryffindors. Out on the real world, it made a ripple, when she went out with him. Once. A small gasp. A hasty cough. But even if there were other times, she could arrange the meeting in her planner, she could bid the time when the shops are less crowded. And in the worst case scenario—exposure—she could explain the situation there. She was a professional and Potter was a customer and all it did was speak volumes about how dedicated she was to her job. And anyway, it wasn’t as if everyone on the outside knew about the Great Hall, the Great Regret.

But Hogwarts was a different story. Everyone knew—

“What are you doing?” 

About her.

One of these days her jaw is going to be permanently shut with all the gritting she does. She grits her teeth, flushed, and turns around to the pitchy call to find Ginny Weasley. She’s narrowing her eyes at her, looking down because—because of course— she’s taller. Luna Lovegood stands beside her, a bemused expression on her face.

“I, uh—” 

But Weasley is already looking past her face to her hand already, with a blunt suspicion, and then cometh another shriek. “It’s Harry’s, isn’t it?”

The way she says his name rattles Pansy a bit. It’s habitual, sort of forceful. Territorial. It makes her question exactly what the fuck she thinks she’s doing there.

“Yes.” Pansy holds it up as a proof, or a shield. She’s not sure. “I was just… giving her back.”

“How do you know—?” She shakes her head, brushes aside a few errant strands of coppery red hair to the side. “Whatever. You can give her back now.”

She’s hardly felt so uncertain in the presence of them. Her classmates, people she used to banter, fight, cuss with everyday since she was eleven.

But it’s different now, she realises as she hands back Snow—who only meows in slight disgruntlement before coddling to Weasley. The brunt of their enmity, the implications, are deeper. In that hall, in that moment, there once had been a terrifying possibility that they would duel—Pansy’s pretty sure Weasley had her wand out, and with a stroke of their wands, with just a flick they could—

“She’s lovely,” Lovegood coos.

“Yeah,” the redhead replies haughtily. “Harry loves her.”

Pansy tries to seem neutral. Lifts her chin up just an inch before sliding past to her side of the line— carriage, world — but then the blonde girl mutter a soft, languid thank you and Pansy turns back and

Well—

It’s a new year, a new her and she had decided—wistfully, silently—that she was going to make some changes, shift some boundaries and try to… be alright. Take a breather. Try to be nice.

So she nods. And after a brief pause, adds, “I read your last installment on Bowtruckles. I think it was good. Very informative.”

She’s mildly aware of Weasley’s dry scoff, and it’s a little awkward, a little unsure, how she stands with her feet already backing away, already out of the conversation.

“Thank you!" Lovegood beams. Actually, visibly glows, the tips of her blonde hair illuminates a mellow light, a reflection of the now fading sunset. “They are so hard to find, hard to pet. I had to keep mine a month before she let me near her to inspect her thorns.”

Pansy feels her eyebrows pushing together in disbelief. “You had one? Aren’t they illegal?”

Lovegood shrugs, still gleaming. But Ginny Weasley speaks up, rough and scaly. “Yes they are. So what?”

“Nothing.” Heat rises to her cheek. She hadn’t meant to sound accusing. Did she sound accusing? “I just—I mean—”

“There you are.” Draco’s voice snaps her from her panicky reply. “I was looking for you.”

“Oh.” She takes a step behind, her back falls against his chest. She feels him touch her shoulder, the heel of his palms are heavy. Protective. And softly, with a thudding warmth, it occurs to her that he’s followed her, that he’s saving her now. From the confronting, suspicious stare of Weasley. She leans back to him.

Ginny Weasley pulls Lovegood away by the collar. She can hear their faint giggling—or scoff—as they go further away. She isn’t sure if they’re amused or appalled. She isn’t sure if she wants to know.

Draco doesn’t ask her what she was doing, how did she know the cat on Weasley’s arms. Her heart hammers stupidly, wondering how much he’s heard or seen or guessed. Did he hear her try to start an awkward conversation with the girls, did he realise why she tried it? Did he find it funny or just pathetic?

She lets him hold her hand, drag her away from the scene of the crime and when they reach their compartment, in silence, in thudding embarrassment, they find Blaise waiting for them with the tequila he sneaked in the train.

“Where the fuck were you?” he asks Pansy.

“We had a fight,” Draco answers for her.

Blaise narrows his eyes, following them as they sit down side by side. “You two aren’t shagging again, are you?”

Pansy shoots him a glare. Draco just shrugs. “Not for my lack of trying. She won’t let me near her.”

“Great.” He offers them the shots. “Because you both become insufferable when you do.”

“Thanks.” 

Blaise scrunches his nose at her snark, rubbing his arms, the sleeves of his robes ridden high. He lets out a tired groan.

“Is it me, or does it feel fucking weird wearing our robes?”

“Just you,” Draco says without a pause. There’s a soft, barely there nudge on her elbow as Blaise grunts in annoyance.

“I feel like I’m too grown-up for this. For identical uniforms and classes and whatnot.”

Pansy shrugs, a smile, involuntarily, begrudgingly forming on her lips. “I feel fine.”

They have their differences and their banters and their bitterness, but she really does love him. They take the drinks, gulping them at the same time. Pansy cringes at the rawness hitting her throat. Her eyes water as takes the slice of lemon. 

“Cheap?” Pansy asks, her voice chafed.

“The cheapest, darling.” Blaise muses. finishes it in one gulp, then groans again. “They hit the hardest.”

“Your liver, I think, is what they hit the hardest.”

Draco snorts. Blaise thrusts his middle finger up in answer.

“We didn’t toast,” he says.

Pansy smiles at him, a soft, growing smile. A fond smile. The light in their compartment is dimmer now, close to sundown, the shades of the sky are more purple and pink then orange. And it doesn’t reflect anymore. It lingers.

The year… it’s going to be different. Perhaps a bit good, lot of it horrible and riddled with ghosts of her past and new, gritty with mistakes she hasn’t yet made. But at least her friends are here. At least. She tries not to think about him. Potter, that is, Harry Potter. It doesn’t matter if he’s there with her or around her or for her because she isn’t counting on him. She is trying not to be too hopeful or too wistful or too much.

A brief pause, then she says, glancing at the both of them, “To the new year.”

But Draco smirks at her, the same smirk he offers before he—

He does something absolutely cunty.

“To the new friendships,” he draws, sly and intent. 

God . She fucking hates him.

“You—you don’t really still believe that, do you?” Potter asked hoarsely, eyes crinkling around the edges and a bemused, helpless frown smudging his features.

Pansy tipped her chin up. “ Yes,” she answered haughtily. “I do, actually.”

His mouth—His lips; pink, distracting lips, the curve of it, the cushion of it—falls open and he looks down on the piece of parchment he spent the better part of an hour drawing diagrams and writing theorems, letting out a terse, pained sigh. Pansy can’t help herself, she smirks at the paper, drags her fingers across its side before sliding it to her, lifting it—deliberately slowly—and pretending to gauge at it.

They had been playing that game of hers where she sprouts out controversial opinions about a topic the other person is clearly way too passionate about and watches in amusement as they scramble for argument.

It’s fun when the other person doesn’t know the rules.

“I think Victor Krum is a brute,” she said dismissively. “Sure, he’s fast and agile but he’s too dogged to notice the game, you know. The players around him.”

At one point, particularly exasperated and distinctly excited, he charmed his piece of argument, so the dots which were supposed to be players were moving, glitzing, buzzing across each other. Pansy pretended not to be impressed, by the charm, by his passionate chiding… by all of it. She thinks she’d done a good job.

The scarlet red dot—titled K—makes a heady run for the golden dot—titled S.

“You see, here.” She pointed to the paper. Potter begrudgingly stared down. “Look how he’s straight at it… he could knock anyone down.  I remember him knocking one of their beaters off their brooms at that infamous match in Morocco.”

It’s better that in this case she had a point . Potter gapped. “Well—that was… once . That was his hundredth snitch!”

“That was also the game that made them lost entry to the semifinals in that tournament… it regionals, no? It wasn’t that important like… you know.” 

He did.

She claps. “Like the world cup. And—and let’s not forget about that.”

“Oh please, Bulgaria was gone before he caught the snitch. He just saved themselves from further embarrassment.”

“The team or himself?”

He contemplated. He hesitated. “Both.”

She giggled before she could catch herself, before she could care. “Well if you see it like that .”

He stared at her, eyes narrowed, lips pulled in a thoughtful pout. And it was after a few languid seconds that he finally straightened up, pushed his hair back and asked her, “You… you don’t actually believe all this, do you? You just want to rile me up.”

Pansy hummed in no particular answer, her chest is buzzing with a stupid, unguarded lightness. “And, I also think that Arnold Vogler—”

Potter groans, actually screws his eyes shut. “No, no, no, don’t finish that sentence.”

Her answering laugh chimed in the air. And she tries to stop herself, really did, but she felt so silly and funny and light and it had been a while since she felt so easy and careless without using liquor or—Merlin— narcotics and her hands coiled around Snow who jumped on the counter. And she wagged her tail and Pansy’s laugh haltered, bridled, melted into giggles, she caught the sight of him… no—no, she noticed him. Not for the first time, not even for the first time that afternoon but the first time he looked—he looked

Wistful.

Fond .

He had his arm draped over the wooden counter, leaning back into his seat and he had that soft, surprised, incredulously fond look, like he’d just seen her. Or at least, seen her wearing something new, being someone new. And it was like he’d suddenly realised where he was and who she was and he couldn’t believe it, suddenly, couldn’t… quite come to terms with it. Instead of being appalled or disgusted about it… he looked enthralled. Enamoured. 

And normally Pansy would be wary, and would offer some dry, crude remarks to cut away the softness. But she looked at him then, and Snow nestled closer and she couldn’t—for the love of god—find a single reason to burst their bubble. She let the silence seep in like the warm summer air bled into the store from the glass window, the slightly opened door and anywhere it found a gap. Let it hang in the tense few feet between their bodies. They hadn’t mentioned the letter or the strings or anything else, really, in the last two weeks. Time wafted like vapor, like reminiscence and Pansy liked it too much for her own good. The shop smelled like furs and cat food and the thick, sweet smell of strawberry essence from the ice cream he brought. It came in sudden wafts, it floated like an afterthought. Warmth leaked into her and she was sure she looked flushed and he looked breathless and she didn’t care. She didn’t care.

Pansy remembers the first time she crossed the iron entrance of Hogwarts. Remembers being enthralled, tongue-tied at the magnanimity of it. All of it. The stone guards, large and overpowering with a deep, dark bronze tint because they’ve probably been there since millenniums, when it was built. A thousand years of sunlight. And the courtyard stretched open and wide and so alive. Everything was alive and teeming and buzzing with ancient, deep, dark magic. She’s heard about it, she’d planned and dreamt about it for so long and it wasn’t even close. It was all so great and big and… remarkable, really. Vibrating. Alive. She’d been around magic all her life but it never felt so… purposeful. So unique. So hers. 

She’d decided right then and there, that it was hers. This place, this… magic. Suddenly she wasn’t afraid of staying so far away from her old home, the familiar mansion where it was too silent, too plaintive. This was her home. 

It’s disconcerting how similar it all feels. She walks through the door and the stone guards are still there, except they are worn out, broken. Hanging onto precarious gravity with parts of them missing. A hand of one. A sphere of another. They’d fought at the battle like everyone else. They lost pieces of their history like everyone else. The backbreaking effort to restore the school is evident. In the freshly mowed grass and the colorful banners to temporarily hide the cloying walls, the debris of some of the structures are left out in the open, too heavy to move for the time being. She’s read all about it in papers, but seeing is different entirely. 

Pansy feels calm, she feels, strangely, like a ghost. Just a ghost passing along real people. The great hall is beautiful, like always. Hundreds of levitating candles and feasts for days and flashes of green and blue and red and yellow amidst coils of white and black and—

She sees him.

And—

She pretends she doesn’t.

Her hand is trussed into the pocket of her robe and she twirls the strand of thread—inconspicuous to everyone else… almost everyone else—and her breath hitches, catches, falls at the heat of it. Bright and hot and unlike what she’s felt in the past couple of weeks. He looks the same as he did a week ago, which is pretty—which is hauntingly pretty. Dark crates under his eyes, his bright green eyes and hollow cheeks and a winning, contagious smile. The string twitches again and it’s lovely, it’s radiating from her fingertips to her palm to the tight knot of tendons in her knuckles and she feels steadier as she joins others at the Slytherin table.

Pansy pretends that it doesn’t feel like relief.

She pretends that she doesn’t know that it means he saw her, too.

There are promises of rehabilitation, of building a better future and of learning from the past. But the ratty, ancient Sorting Hat’s still sorting everyone and she still sees the same flat designation on the few people it puts in Slytherin.

Thankfully, the cheap shots they did in the train are still making her cloudy. So she’s half there, staring at the dias at the far end of the room, listening to promises and speeches and there are two new teachers joining to fill up for the ones who got killed off. Everything seems illuminated, glowing, flickering. There are promises are of unity and everything going back to normal and everyone is at their feasts now, digging the knives and the forks into foods that always tasted better than it did anywhere else. Pansy spins her knife around her piece of turkey, cutting it, not eating it. She still has her hand inside her pocket, still feels the glowering, unignorable spark shooting up her arm from time to time. And she’s afraid to look up and to the left because she knows— just from a glance, a momentary slip of gaze—that he’s there. And maybe… maybe he is touching his thread as well. There’s no logical explanation for this—this connection, this flimsy piece of charm any other way… 

Or is she already too drunk? Ginny Weasley said his name with a force, with confidence, like it belonged in her mouth. Pansy’s never done that. She is never going to do that. 

There’s the buzz of conversations about classes and games and the ball that’s going to be on Halloween. It’s a celebration, Headmaster McGonagall has announced, to truly show the spirit of Hogwarts and they hope everyone is as excited as she is.

Pansy wants to believe it. So much. So bad but the cloying resentment is stuck in her throat. The bitter taste of the past is still there and it has been since a long, long time and she doesn’t think it’ll ever go away. It’s the great hall. Seems smaller because there are tables now, tables that weren’t there when she did that—screamed his name. Offered him for slaughter. She notices people are eyeing her, even the Slytherins, and she doesn’t look up, doesn’t catch anyone’s stare because she already knows what she’s going to find there, doesn’t she? Draco touches her hand and Blaise pats her on her head and it’s just like before. It’s nothing like before.

She doesn’t even take off her robe when she flings herself on her bed. Unmoving, flat on her belly, she scrambles for her pillow and chokes down a cry. She screws her eyes shut, ordering herself to just shut it. Stop thinking. Beside her, Millicent is shuffling around her things. Pansy tries to picture her, fixing the table, stacking up book, opening the drawer and stuffing her dresses, making sure to hide the sweets she brought from home.

The room smells of roses, the scent the four of them—when Daphne was still here—decided on. Daphne got married a month ago, Daphne is living off in Costa Rica, in her husband’s beach house, spending his money, living the good life and convincing herself this is what she’s always wanted.

She thinks it’s been eons after Millie’s shuffling stopped. Then she feels, like a dream, a soft weight on the side of her bed.

“I feel bad, too,” Millie says. “It’s all so… strange.”

“Yeah.”

“At least we’re home, right?”

“Yeah.” She snuffles, screwing her eyes so tight colors burst into the darkness. Red and blue and green. “Home.”