Heartstrings

Home is made of memories.

Home is a splash of cold water in the face. Home is waking up at the mouth of dawn, stretching your muscles to the pull of the new day and pondering whether it’s worth anything to get out of the bed. Dreaming, almost still sleeping, Pansy Parkinson decides it may as well be. Home is watching the sky before anyone else, marveling—from the window seat of her dorm—as the sky cracks and splits from the dusky blue to a brilliant orange sunrise. Home is losing track of time. And after Millicent wakes up, shrieks at the clock, and they both hurry to get ready and gather all of their books and walk to the great hall for breakfast, home resembles something close to normalcy.

Except when she enters the hall there’s a kid pointing to her.

Is it her? A chubby Hufflepuff boy. Is that really her?

Pansy freezes in her spot. It takes her ten seconds too long to realize the boy was pointing to someone else. She turns back, stares at Hermione Granger—unkempt, flushed, equally frozen—and the breath that should be a relief leaves more like a strangled cry. Pansy counts from ten to one. Then she walks, very placidly, back to the door.

She takes her breakfast in the abandoned girls’ bathroom on the second floor and it feels better until it feels just as before. Worse than that. There’s the translucent, gray ghost of Moaning Myrtle floating in the near vicinity of her, the ghost’s too big and too curious eyes hover like orbs on the back of her skull. When Pansy shoots her a piercing look and she blushes, it seems—the chunk of her cheeks become murkier. And the tear stains—because of course they are tear stains, she’s always crying—on her face becomes more apparent like scar tissues. Myrtle shrieks away and Pansy remembers how she and Daphne used to throw insults at the ghost. Somehow, breaking something already broken had its own sick charm. The bacon inside her stomach twists horribly at the thought. She feels sick again.

When she goes to the class and the memory timmers, slowly fades as she finds herself in her seat between Blaise and Draco like a habit. It’s Potions, their first class, it’s something she’s always been measly at, and continues to be measly at. The all too familiar mist of lotus roots, rosemaries, gillyweed, mertlop essence cloud her head as she settles in the back, languidly lets the boys argue and fight over whatever assignment Slughorn gave them, and pretends to look interested, pretends to not look around. 

Home is a routine made meticulously for her.

Because there are classes after classes and Pansy thinks there’s a simmering desperation in the way they are handed out so many assignments that she can’t possibly be expected to do anything else. And it’s good really, it’s perfect. The long, boring lessons, the obvious shying away from anything but what’s in the books, the drumming, tiring minutes slipping into hours—it’s almost like before. Before before. It’s only at the end of the day that she realises maybe everyone wants to forget about the war, the good guys and the bad guys. Maybe it doesn’t matter how you got your scar as long as it hurts.

Home is the same three songs, the same three episodes of a lousy show no one bothered to cancel playing over and over again.

Because the days slip and slide and fall out of her grasp and one morning she gets a letter from her mother reminding her—chiding her—to stay poised, stay motionless and stay irrelevant because no one wants to draw any attention to them. Her hands shake and a bitter laugh bubbles at the back of her throat as she gets out of the great hall because god it’s just like before. It’s her mum and Pansy had been feeling so bad, so small, so… nothing that she was relieved—sickly, desperately relieved—to see her handwriting and was later amazed; appalled at her ability to fill up an entire page of parchment without asking for one single time how her daughter was. 

She chuckled a little hysterically, because—of course she is irrelevant. She has been irrelevant all her life. And didn’t it always bring a trickling, grating embarrassment? How she tried to stand out? How she felt the world needed to give her attention because of her name and her blood and how it stung when she realised that no one cared? She tried to tell her mum—too late, it was too late by then—that maybe there is something wrong with her, that the more powerless she feels in her little skin the more hostile she becomes and it felt a certain kind of way, being poisonous, sprouting insults and watching people coil inside themselves had a sick sense of victory. Being mean was easy, easier to make anyone else feel less pretty and less smart and less pathetic than to do any of it by herself. 

I don’t always like who I am, she told her mum.

Walk straighter, was the reply. You slouch too much.

There’s a slow poison in disinterest. It’s like a vanishing charm. The less interest you are shown, the more invisible you become. Until one day you realize that you are hardly a person in your mother’s world. You see that you don’t even have a shadow.

Pansy doesn’t write a reply.

She finds the mask by accident.

She was trying to find the bottle of Chardonnay she’d brought in Draco’s trunk and her hand involuntarily skipped to something else. Pansy narrowed her eyes to the feel of the smooth, dented metal piece before gasping, she realized what it was. She pulled her hand away as quickly as she saw the stretch of a silver eye peeking through his clothes. She took a step back, then another, gasping louder, horribly. It was like some distinct shadow that was lurking in the shadows finally apparated in front of her. Watching a death eater’s mask felt as frightening as watching a death eater himself.

She hurried back to her room, splotches of angry tears pooling in her eyes.

Home is the one broken record player always skipping to the track she wants to forget about.

It’s no doubt that their second weekend is a mess.

Someone suggested a party. Everyone else jumps on the fucking wagon too quickly. Pansy, much to her embarrassment, was one of them. Because there’s a gap in her consciousness she’s too eager to fill it up. There’s a tiny red string in her drawer between her clothes and there’s something much, much sinister in Draco’s drawers and she’s all too eager to forget about them without doing the trouble to chuck them out—she guesses she is her mother’s daughter after all.

So there’s music blasting in the common room, the walls almost vibrate with each thump of the base. The usual pallid room is awash in golden light that makes everyone look pretty, different, glowing. There are people singing along with ridiculously off-tuned voices and there are people dancing with equally ridiculous off-tuned steps and she’s standing against the wall, trying to let the music and the laughter and everything else seep in her skin like the beats of the songs. Marcus beside her is droning about his broom—which may be a euphemism for something else entirely, but Pansy is too busy staring at Draco to pay any attention.

Draco looks... happy. Unusually happy. He has his arms around Tracy and his mouth in the close vicinity of hers and it’s so odd, so uncharacteristically strange that Pansy can’t find in herself to be angry with him for a moment. She’s spent the better part of the week hoping so much that he’s feeling bad and when he actually does look the part—part of a washed up criminal vowing to complete the circle—it feels like a wish half-fulfilled. And she has tried to reason with the unreasonable decision of his keeping the mask, but—didn’t he understand what would happen if anyone else found out about it? Doesn’t he realize how unstable the world is for them? Doesn’t he realize that there are eyes—angry, resentful eyes—following them wherever they go and they are just waiting for him to make a mistake? And they need to be proven right. Didn’t he realize that staring at the face of his regrets won’t turn back time?

By the time Draco’s finally got his mouth around Tracy’s breasts—on the sofa, in front of everyone—Pansy starts feeling sick. The air cloys in around her and the sound is too loud—finally seeping in, finally rattling her—and before she knows it, she’s flying past Marcus and Blaise and everyone else and there are calls to her name for her to come back and there’s a robust cheer for something else and the world is blur. It’s hazy, it’s fast and it’s too much.

She’s able to breathe when she gets out of the castle.

And it’s… She hadn’t decided to go out. She was halfway through the dark, dusty trapdoor when she realized where she was going. And the rest happened on its own. She counted on her feet to work in the familiar rhythm, like a circadian mechanism, finding the end of the narrow pathway behind the portrait of a goat on the first floor, just beside the staircase. A cool, dark path moved downward until she came out of the castle through the backdoor. 

The cold nips her skin and she clutches the half empty Chardonnay in her hand like it’s a shawl. Her breathing slowing, she finds her way through the few discrete rows of trees, the moonlight flickering capriciously through the leaves as she walks carefully in the sloping ground. She’s aware of the slippery carcass of dead leaves and pine cones under her feet; rouge barks of littering trees scratch her arm, her knees and she cusses silently on such a poor choice of skirt, her poor choice of top and her poor choice of everything else in general. A lark is singing above her and she thinks what an odd—

“Pansy?”

She whips back.

And—it’s him. Of course it is. It’s embarrassing how quickly she realizes it. His presence. 

He stands a few feet away, shadowed, and Pansy makes a point to straighten her shoulders before she replies… except she doesn’t reply. She’s clutching at the bottle in her hand tighter and she’s registering his presence like a punch to her gut, like an itch on the inside of her ribcage and she forgets to speak. Was he following her? How did she not hear him before? 

“Are you okay? Pansy?”

“Yes,” she croaks out, so soft even she barely hears it.

Potter certainly doesn’t. And he’s closer now, ruinously so. She can make out the lines of his glasses.

He repeats the question, carefully soft.

“Were you following me?” Her voice is pitchy and demanding and… confused. Through the blurry burn in her chest and the thick, dark, silly betrayal she feels, she can detect wonder. Apprehension. Confusion. At him. At his uncanny ability to be at the right (wrong) place all the fucking time.

He hesitates for a moment.

“Were you?” She doesn’t know if she wants it to be a yes or no. She isn’t sure she’ll like the answer in any case.

“Yes, I was.” Then he adds quickly, “But only because you seemed upset.”

Everything feels a little shaken, like a bowl of candies stirred and the color red is suddenly at the bottom. Her sense of speech is suddenly at the bottom. And panic, and anxiety and confusion are all green and white and blue and it’s all she musters, for a second. she shouldn’t really care, should she?

“Are you okay?”

She snorts. Some of her motor functions finally come back and she takes a short sip from the bottle to calm her fucking nerves. “No. Are you?”

He smiles. And god they are too close. Much too fucking close because she can see, even in the dim, blunt moonlight, as he smiles she can see the crinkles around his eyes and she can detect that he isn’t happy, really, he’s amused, he’s just a little bit on edge.

She feels the ever uninvited and ever inevitable shiver down her spine.

It’s a beautiful night.

The thought occurs rather belatedly, only after she’s seated on one of the larger stones on the edge of the lake. She can see him in her periphery, the heel of his palms are pressing on the stone like he’s balancing himself, like he’s contemplating hopping down and heading back. Pansy thinks they both should be heading back, but her thoughts are blunted on the edges, cracking on the sides and illogical, nonsensical thoughts such as how pretty and round and imperfect the moon is, and how the light shimmers on the lake and how she can just, just see the ripple far away from them on the water—and wonder what it was, a group of Grindylows or the giant squid that once let her touch its tentacles—are what seems important now.

“You’ve been avoiding me.”

Pansy is too tired to be surprised when he states— states, doesn’t ask, doesn’t wonder politely—this. And she’s too tired to act coy. It probably doesn’t even matter. “I didn’t think you’d notice,” she replies.

“I wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t waited for you to…” He sighs, trails off. He stops and lets Pansy fill in the blanks.

Pansy takes a short, shaky breath.

“You’re pretty good at it. Ignoring.”

“Thanks. It’s hereditary.”

There’s a laugh. Short and dry. He taps his fingers on the stone. She’s been adamant on not being around his general vicinity in a room, no matter how many classes they had. She thought she was being coy, she thought she made it easier for him to ignore her. She thought —

“Why do you do it? With me?”

“I— I guess… I realised how different we are after we came here.”

A pause. When he speaks, his voice is velvet soft, almost soft enough to hide the resentment, “Funny how it happens. I look at you now, and I can’t stop thinking how similar we are.”

“You don’t know me.”

There’s no velvet in her voice to hide the sharp, bitter words. She doesn’t know why she does it. Why it feels embarrassing afterwards. Why even the concept being known feels like a betrayal to herself. Potter doesn’t question it, doesn’t reply. He takes the bottle from her hand and takes a big gulp himself and the silence stretches uncomfortably.

After forever, he says, “This place suits you.”

She can laugh, she feels so silly. This place is ridiculous. All cold and frizzy and really fucking hard on the senses with the relentless green—fresh, lively color on the newly sprouted shrubs in the edge of the lake, mouldy, dead palate on the ones that have been crushed by incomers, yellowed and splattered—and the cutting, sharp smell of grass and weed. There’s no harmony here. The place is too unkempt, someone let it hang in there without care for far too long. Everything is a carcass, everything is growing on top of another thing. It’s a mess, it’s an… unholy mess and the worst part is not how it smells or how it looks or how many memories hover at the surface of the cold, slimy lake.

The worst part is that she can’t stop coming back.

Pansy decides that If Harry Potter thinks it suits her, she doesn’t want to know what it means.

So she shrugs. 

“It’s nice,” he says, and she can hear him smile skirting along the ends of his words. “Everyone should have a place.”

“Yeah? What’s yours, then?”

He doesn’t miss a beat. “A room. Inside the castle.”

“Does it suit you?”

“It suits everybody.”

She takes the bottle back and asks what it means.

“It can’t really be explained if you haven’t seen it… I’ll show you someday.”

And her stomach takes a backflip. She can feel the wine sloshing against the walls of her gut, and the heedy rush of it reaches straight to her head. He says it— I’ll show you— as if they’re going to do this again. This. Sitting side by side in a place neither of them should be in right now. Sipping from the same bottle. Silently contemplating on what the other person is thinking. And worse— worse —is that it sounds so much like a promise, so much like a string she wants to hold onto, because doesn’t it feel… nice? The too cold air and the feel of the clammy rock, and wondering about the dew that’s setting on to every piece of rock except the one they’re sitting on, and how they’re leaving a dent, a change in the lonely landscape and—

“I’m really not that upset,” she blurts out to drown her thoughts. “I’m just… bummed.”

A pause. Then—as she turns to him—a too slow, too skeptical nod.

So she tries again. “Maybe a bit more than that. Aggravated. Annoyed . I’m annoyed . If I wanted to see Draco trying to go to second base with Tracy or Blaise balancing a stack of cards on his nose I would’ve stayed at Leaky Cauldron.”

He snorts at this. “Those Saturday nights, right? When they offer free drinks for half an hour?”

“There have been no worse hours. You’d think they were hobos suddenly showered with unlimited liquor.”

“I think I’ve seen Zabini trying to fight with one of the girls serving there.”

“I’ve seen him trying to hook up with her later.”

Potter laughs. “He was always a chaos, wasn’t he?”

“Always.” And a short strip of memory runs through her head. Blaise in the sparkling golden robes, levitating on top of her and Draco on a stage. And she blurts without thinking, “You know… he always used to be the god, whatever it was, when we played.” 

“What?”

A pause. A reflecting skin snaps off her wrist. “I mean… we used to act out these famous Greek plays when we were kids. Sophocles, Euripides… whatever. And he would always be the deity or the oracle, hanging off the roof and shouting commentaries, always going off the script.” The hot burn of the sun on the side of her face when she looked up at him in awe, giggling, laughing, breaking her character. “We all… I don’t know.” It’s one of the best parts of her childhood. Whatever.”

“Sounds fun.”

“Yeah.” She licks her lips. She doesn’t know why she’s still talking. “Narcissa used to sponsor all of it.” Pansy let out a bleak chuckle. “I guess she indulged in our literary pursuits before realising being the dark lord’s pawn offered more prospects.” 

A terse pause. The ponderous brick weight of the words fall on the ground almost as instantly as she regrets them.

“I mean. Whatever. She was nice. She was… the only one of our mothers who was interested. ” In what they did, what they didn’t do, what they liked, who they liked. But then she regrets this as well. “I mean my mother wasn’t a… she didn’t—she’s not a monster.” Why did she use that word? The liquor sloshes inside her. She licks her lips again. “I mean, she just doesn’t know how to…” 

Harry Potter stays silent as she trails off, fumbles, at first, then lets out an angry groan. She isn’t—she can’t— be the sort of person who splits open their heart for any stranger who is willing to listen. Because he is exactly that. A stranger. Nobody. This must be the champagne. This has to be. The rough edges of the words said and unsaid makes a clump in her throat, its grip scaly and scalding. So she takes another gulp of alcohol, takes a deep breath, and straightens her back before offering it back to him.

“It doesn’t matter.” She watches him out of the corner of her eyes. “You were raised by muggles, no? What did you do when you were a kid?”

In her periphery, Potter shifts uncomfortably. Good. Let him feel that. “I don’t, uh, have anything specific.”

It’s like she’s on autopilot now. She says, “That’s the sort of answer I’d expect from Granger. You don’t seem like the type to not play.”

He lets out a chuckle that sounds more chirpy than it’s normal. It sounds grating. Humourless. “I used to play with my cousin’s toys. He uh—well, I liked to collect action figures, I guess. And Dudley had at least three sets of everything, in three different colors, so I used to collect them. But they were his so—I don’t know—I never developed any specific interests. It was whatever that’s at hand.”

The silence bristles, almost. It prickles uncomfortably on her skin like the crisp lake air as Pansy takes another sip, her head is lighter than it was a second ago. 

“So you nagged your cousin’s toys?” she tries to sound breezy, like it didn’t matter. “You criminal.”

He chuckles. “I was pretty good too. Got caught only once.”

She could ask him about his life, his childhood, something she was always so intensely, privately fascinated about. But her throat catches up at the splinter of information. It’s cruel. It’s… just. Her own childhood was so extravagant, so unnecessarily filled with things she didn’t need that the things she wanted felt like imprudence. With weekly tea parties and hand sewn party dresses and a room full of dolls she used to talk with… it’s hard for her to imagine him having to do with what was at hand. Pansy feels a heaviness in her throat—a stone, a word stuck and bleeding —that has nothing to do with alcohol.

“What did you get caught for?” she asks.

“One of those—god, it was ages ago—really cool, really chic Nintendo games. Game Boy. It was so cool. It was—” He hands her the bottle so he can show, with palms spread and fingers pinched, the size of it, the weight, how it could last for an entire day without recharging. If it wasn’t so dark she thinks she could see his pupils dilate and cheeks pink with excitement.

It’s hard not to get unnerved by him, it’s harder than she convinced herself a day ago. It’s hard when even in the dark she can see his boyish, shy smile while describing a toy he never played with.

“It had seven games. It was royalty stuff. If you had one it meant you were it. ”

Pansy listens, lips pursed. It may be the champagne but she realises that it’s hard to focus on anything else when he talks. Like this. Reminiscent and excited and… so open. He doesn’t have a subtle bone in his body. He is so easy to read. And after all the damn lessons her mum made her attend—a wide ranging etiquette basics like talking and smiling and walking and… existing, she thinks. It was supposed to be there, too—it’s a habit of her, being aware. Keeping pointers from a person to put it in a draft paper in her head, inspecting and deducting what it means. 

Except she isn’t doing that—or she shouldn’t be doing that to him.

But he’s so earnest. And sloppy, and he’s telling her about that popular kid who had a Nintendo and was nice enough to let him hold it. And it makes her think back to how he always seemed so surprised—when they were kids—and in awe of his friends, of Ronald Weasley and his gigantic family, of the fact that everyone knew his name. She thought he was arrogant. He wasn’t. He wasn’t haughty… he was surprised.

“You were lonely, weren’t you?” she asks softly, staring determinedly at the water. “When you were a kid?”

She doesn’t turn to look at his face, even though she really, intensely wants to. There’s the obvious tension that’s hanging in the air, and she takes another sip, ignores the fact that his lips touched the same spot that hers are touching now. The smell is sweet orange. The taste, tangy and sweet and—

“Yeah, I was.”

Pansy doesn’t think about the fact that she knows—in this place, at this moment—she knows how he tastes.

“Didn’t it unnerve you when you came here and found out that… everyone wants to be around you?”

She expects him to scoff in embarrassment, in denial, because he has that habit. Sometimes. But as silence follows, a hollow, dense silence, she realises he isn’t going to deny it. There’s a distant sound drifting on top of them, the singing of a lark, soft and melodious. Wistful.

When she turns, finally, feeling—something distinctly like fear and also something completely opposite—that she has crossed a line. Finally. Blessed boundaries. But she turns and he is… looking at her. Unblinking. Soft, light eyes that shimmer in the moonlight. Eyes that make her unnerved, exposed, electrified.

He doesn’t have to answer her. It’s obvious what it is, and it is the time to gloat in her introspection or offer something even more damning—like, And you haven’t gotten used to it, and You still don’t know if you love it or hate it— but it’s him and there’s no joy in reading him out because he never plays coy. Not when he’s picking at excuses to see her, not when he binds the fucking soulmate string around his cat’s throat, not when he follows her into her secret place because she seemed upset.

He’s so fucking earnest. And Pansy knows he wants answers, about the letter and about her and about the fucking strings, but she doesn’t have any. All she has are party tricks. Read people out, know what they want, absorb and reflect. She doesn’t have answers, she doesn’t even have any important questions. So what she’s doing—satiating his interest, keeping tabs on him to feed off her own childish, schoolgirlish crush— is selfish. Self-serving. Vain.

And she really doesn’t want to be like that—like her —any longer. She doesn’t want to give him hope. With a determined shake of her head, she pushes her palm into the cold stone and gets up, feet wobbly, shaken, unprepared for the weight of gravity. But she catches her balance before he gets up to help her. 

“Where are you going?” he rasps, like he’s catching his breath.

“Back.” Her teeth grit on the acid of it. “I don’t— we don’t… we shouldn’t, Potter.”

“What?”

“Have these conversations, stake each other out and… whatever we’ve been doing.”

“Why?”

She chuckles, she can’t help it. Her throat burns. “Because it’s you . And it’s me.”

“That’s not a reaso—”

“Yes, it is. The best.” She contemplates a moment before turning around, moving her arm with a practiced spin and flinging the bottle at the lake. It falls with a characteristic plop. She takes a step back. But then—

“Please, don’t go.”

“Potter.”

“Pansy.”

“I don’t want you to tell me something you’ll regret.”

“Why would I regret it?”

“Because it’s me!”

“I still don’t—”

“For fucks sake, of course you understand. I screamed your name in that room. I wanted to hand you over to him! ”

“But I forgive you! I forgave you the minute I read your letter.”

“The letter.” She lets out a hopeless cry. “The blasted—I only sent that because I couldn’t burn it.”

“Why did you write it?”

“Because I couldn’t—couldn’t say it out loud.”

“What—? Pansy—”

“Potter,” she closes her eyes. The tears she won’t let fall make a mess of her. “I’m not like you. I’m a coward. And I was scared. Of saying those things, or thinking about it or about you or… It doesn’t matter anyway. Don’t you see? What I think doesn’t change what happened to you or with you and we’re… we’re— different. Or not. It doesn’t matter. This isn’t—” She starts speaking haphazardly, latching onto any word that comes. Words like bad decisions and mismatched people and loneliness and how it makes you vulnerable and how being vulnerable is the gateway to being breakable and it doesn’t do you any good because once you break there’s no way back to being fixed or normal or… right.

But then he says, almost screams, “But don’t you see? You’re right! You’re so right about me. It’s… it’s got to mean something.” His voice is bitter. And he speaks without stopping, without waiting for her to respond or even catch up. The words sound like they are forced out, like he was clutching onto them for so long they’re dented with trauma. “I never felt normal. I used to think… I always thought there was something wrong with me. And when I came here I thought Hogwarts would be the answer. It wasn’t. Still I was picked out and separated. The heir of Slytherin. Parseltongue. Triwizard Tournament. It’s all… so much. For me. I didn’t realise it then but I wasn’t ready for it. For any of it. Then I thought, since I was destined to die… death would be the answer.”

So she was right. About that. About him waiting for it. The end of the tunnel. The perpetual darkness at the end of all this humane darkness.

“I saw… so much death. Around me, for me, I—I thought it would finally be over. I thought, I’d pay all my dues and it would stop. And it isn’t stopping. I am still here and I am still not normal and I don’t know what to do—how to fix it. I have this hole inside and it’s scraping everything else out and I—you’re the only person who seems to understand it.”

She stares at him. Unable to talk or breathe or move her hand. If she was able to, she thinks she’d hold him. His hands are shaking, his hands are begging to be held.

“You’re the only one who seemed angry about it. And that’s how—that’s when I realised what I felt.”

There’s a panicked, exasperated look in his face that does it for her. Breaks her argument. Doesn’t let her run. The bird is still singing. In a castle far far away, away from reality and consequences and away from her, there are people she loves and understands and they may be waiting for her. There’s her home and her grave and her shovel she used to dig it. She thinks of making a run for it. The familiarity.

She doesn’t make a run for it.

This is a bad idea. But what are nights and incredibly cold and aloof lakeside stone seats are made for anyway if not to blurt out gnawing, uncomfortable truths.

So she walks slowly, as if gravity is just as capricious as luck and—with her heart in her hand, squeezing, pulling—sits down next to him and offers her hand. It looks pallid in moonlight, her palm, it looks pretty.

He takes it instantly. Slots his fingers between hers and squeezes, holds on to it.

Pansy realises she was begging to be held, too.