Heartstrings

[DAY 30]

There’s a damp, salty trace of the wind that is brushing her skin as she swings her leg from the edge of the rock. Everything is clear, bright, sharp at the lakeside. The weather had been thick and clamorous for a few days—wafts of grey clouds, shadowed sky, the nauseating air pressure she always feels in the pit of her stomach when it rains. The sky called too, dark and deep, guttural, for half of this morning before it trickled into the ever unceremonious rain. Chilly, grizzly, unsentimental. It made her miss home, for some reason. It made her cry in the second floor bathroom with the cinereal ghost hanging over her head like a sentence.

But everything is clear in the afternoon. The blue afternoon sky looks positively radiant without even a dot of cloud. And the wind makes a soft, sultry noise, sifting through the unkempt row of trees behind them. Everything is calm.

Well, almost everything.

Pansy picks at the rogue silver thread peeking from the underside of her pocket in vain before dishing out the logic she’s been constructing for five minutes.

“I mean,” she says, “it’s really like the end , right? That’s the point it all leads up to. So when it happens, it is reaching the edge.”

Potter is sitting with his knees flexed on the impromptu blanket he made with his robe. The scarlet edges are dotted with wet, dark flays of mud. He has his hand resting on his knees, looking at the silver ripples of the lake.

“They call it climax for a reason,” she adds, trying not to flush.

He snorts. She eyes the dent on his cheek that appears when he smiles—too high to be a dimple. There’s a trace of faded, lighter skin on the side of it that makes her wonder. She decided that it was probably the result of a poorly healed cut—the too high, too delicious, definitely too something— the dimple. She decided that she would never ever ask him about it. 

“And—what, the movie ends?” he asks, still smiling.

“What else is there?”

He turns his face, eyes wide. “Well… cuddling, for one.”

“You like to cuddle after?”

“Sure.” There’s a hint of peachy pink blush on his cheek. “And before… and during.”

She makes sure she is looking absolutely, unequivocally cool before she—she shrugs.

They are talking about orgasms. Of course they are. Because Pansy is an idiot and Potter is a moron and his cat had been looking too happy—too smug —for a few days. She’s been coming home late and has a weird smell on her and Pansy joked—flittingly, sparingly—if she had finally found the Ice to her Snow and admittedly it wasn’t a very good joke. And admittedly it was some very poor choice of words consecutively, in a row that landed onto them wondering about how much pleasure could a cat get anyway? Do they have orgasms in the uncharted, unexplored field of cat coitus? And—

“Why do they call orgasms tiny deaths, anyway?” Potter wondered out loud. “I never figured that out.”

And now he is blushing and she is scrunching her nose in an effort not to , and she’s picking at her clothes. She’s offering extremely elaborate, suffocatingly thought-out responses so it would seem that it doesn’t affect her. This topic, his smile, the unique, distracting dimple she can’t help but notice every time his lips press, lift, curve .

“And also…” she starts, more uncertain and dizzy than ever. “When it happens… don’t you, sort of, feel the end? Feel your body give up and senses all distorted, muzzled and hazy. And your leg turns to jell-o and you feel—I feel, for a few minutes, at least—that nothing else matters anymore. That it’s okay to feel everything you’ve bottled up to just… burst. So that’s a little like death, isn’t it? In a good way.”

And Potter stares at her—soft;y. The peachy pink flush covers his entire face and it has a gleaming, burning incredulity she has seen more than a dozen times this month. And she’s still playing some game she hasn’t given a name to. She’s still trying to look casually uncaring.

She doesn’t add that it’s all pretty scientific, really. That your brain releases hormones that make you more ready, insensitive to pain or whatever. And that it’s really quite similar to drugs—sex. It’s really just nothing but your body reaching for a release, and death is—seems to be—quite the release, doesn’t it? Is it morbid that she’s learnt all this while scavenging information on Ecstacy?

“Good—uhm—point,” he says. Hesitates. “I feel that, too.”

The afternoon light falls, clear, raw and breathtaking, really.

“All this analysis,” she muses after a moment. “What if we find out it’s named by some sad schmuck who hadn’t had any and just decided to muck it up for the rest of us?”

And Potter laughs.

And it’s—well, it’s a little bashful, a little awkward, too high on the octave—ponderous. Chiming. His eyes bright up and there’s a soft, gleaming flush on his cheekbones like someone spilled the color pink on his already splotchy skin. As if it finally dawned on him— this. This ridiculous conversation and the ridiculous them and he eyes her, as he laughs, as she eyes his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, teasing, lilting. Just like how they’ve been teasing.

Pansy can’t help herself anymore. She chuckles along and something hard and old and… annihilating breaks inside her. A foreboding sense of relief. She can’t help feeling in the tip of her tongue, in the back of her mind that this is wrong. More than that. This is improper. Because she is Pansy, she is a Parkinson. She doesn’t like things that do not go with her last name and her bloodline and the rigid routine she’s been following her entire life. She’s loved ballet since she was nine, she’s loved playing piano, she has loved Draco and she did all of it because she was supposed to. There is a place in the world for her, even after it’s been splintered apart. She shouldn’t be here with Harry Potter, she shouldn’t feel the trickling, senseless exhilaration after making him laugh. She shouldn’t want this. She shouldn’t wait for it like it’s the highlight of her day.

And yet.

And yet.

By the end of the afternoon he’s touching the back of her elbow to guide her out of the wet, pebbled path and her heartbeat is dropping, languid and pressing and before they go back, he leans in, slightly, as if in a habit, as if they’ve been doing this for so long it can’t possibly be anythingelse. And Pansy stops breathing altogether when he presses a short, sweet kiss on her forehead. The evening is dropping with uncharacteristic laziness. She thinks the day is never going to end.

The pressure on his hand—the one that’s in the grip of her palm—tightens. She isn’t sure if he notices.

[DAY 15]

Pansy tries not to laugh as Potter acts out how his cousin ’s tongue rolled over to the floor when one of the Weasley twins slipped him a charmed candy. His eyes glint and his hands spread out while he’s switching to his aunt now, and— they shrieked  and Mr. Weasley tried to fix little Duddykins but they were so ridiculous because they have a vendetta against magic and it’s just, it was funny, right? It isn’t too bad to laugh at that, right?— and Pansy answers that it probably is before bursting out the laughter long lodged in her throat and he flashes a grin as bright as the day like he’s won and that his entire goal of trudging through this memory was to make her smile. Because she seemed troubled and because she wouldn’t tell him that it has something to do with Draco. But he guessed anyway.

She wants to thank him, and she wants to tell him—about Draco and the dark mark and the dark past and how it’s running running and almost winning. At night she imagines Draco pulling the dark, velvety mask out and running his fingers through it and maybe putting it on. Maybe he goes into the archaic, gravelling depth of memory and tries to change who he was… who he is.

Pansy clutches at the chain of thought before it goes too far. She stares, enamored, and before thinking too much, before not thinking enough—she compensates. She tells him part of a truth he deserves, always did.

“Hey, Potter?”

He hmms. Pansy holds her breath.

“I lied. I—didn’t write a letter to Victor Krum.” She hesitates. “Or anyone else, for that matter.”

He blinks, the shutter of clarity comes and goes so quickly that Pansy is half certain he hasn’t caught on to it.

But then he says, “I guessed.”

She nods. Light. Airy. “I lie a lot.”

“I guessed that, too.”

“But I meant everything I wrote to you.”

He stares at her hand. She feels her heart hammering like a fragile bird. “And I am glad—that you read it. That I didn’t… burn it.”

 The slow, gleaming, luminous smile he offers in answer is almost worth the rattling surge of electricity in her heart.

[DAY 10]

The graveled, scaly surface of the pillar digs into her palm as she closes her eyes. Pansy takes a deep breath, lips trembling and crackling and breaking at the edge, the root, and tries to heave out the breath stuck between her rib cages. It barely moves up and out, barely breaks through her lungs and her throat burns, and she thinks fuck and no and it doesn’t even matter. But her closed eyelids flash the color red like the color of blood and the Gryffindor robes and a face twisted in disgust. She has her eyes closed but Seamus Finnigan’s dark, angry eyes are clearer than ever.

“Pansy!” The call comes—desperate, hurried—along with the heavy trump of feet running on the mostly empty corridor.

She doesn’t answer.

Potter still comes. She feels his shadow blocking the filtered, red gleam of the sun before she opens her eyes. She screws her jaw shut.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

Pansy leans back against the pillar. “Yeah.”

“I’ll talk to Seamus. What he did wasn’t—”

“You already did.” And she’s not sure if she’s accusing him. Of defending her, of admitting—declaring, professing—that he’s over the age old animosity to his classmate who cornered her in the hallway.

“He was just angry.” He runs his hand through his hair. It flops back on his forehead. “The article… fucking Prophet—”

“It’s good publicity,” she says, clamps her hands together. “Stroking the fire.”

“Yeah, it’s… disgusting.”

Pansy marvels a moment at the bitter, rancid anger in his voice before saying, “You didn’t have to do that.”

“What?”

“Confront him.”

“What was I supposed to do, then?”

She doesn’t answer. It’s obvious. It’s crystal cut, stone cold, obscenely obvious. He was supposed to pretend like he didn’t know her. He was supposed to act like the one who cheated death twice had no reason to give two shits about a measly article affecting a measly death eater’s offspring.

She wants to ask him if he thinks Finnigan would tell anyone about it—she’s pretty sure that he doesn’t care.

“It just… won’t do any good,” her voice is bitter. Thick and coarse. She hadn’t realised that she was angry. Ashamed and disconcerted and… angry. “Some people can’t handle complexity. It fucks up their chubby little mind. Finnigan is one of them.”

It occurs to her that she used to think about him that way. Potter. Who is now squaring his jaw, staring at her like he understands her anger, her bitterness and it—it makes him unwind. He touches her shoulder.

“It’s not fair.” He hesitates. “But Seamus… he’s a good person. He’s just suffered a lot. Being a half-blood—”

“Yes, of course,” Pansy breathes out peevishly. “I know.”

He lost a finger and his peace and his friends. Pansy doesn’t mention her father, doesn’t try to weigh it all out and compare and contrast and count.

And she would stay silent and take the passive blame, the tar black complaints and the stingy guilt no one else is willing to take responsibility for. But Potter keeps talking, awkward and intense and trying to offer faux reconciliation, trying to balance out something that will not ever— can’t ever —be balanced. It’s like he’s on autopilot and the plane is destined to crash and burn and on its own weight, on gravity and she can’t stop him. He says, stutters, “His finger and… and last year, with the Carrows…”

“What?”

“You know.”

“No.” She bites the inside of her cheeks. They attended that blasted year together. “I don’t know.”

“They tortured the students who wouldn’t perform Cruciatus on the younger students. Seamus and Neville… and a lot of other Gryffindors—they got into a lot of pain for that.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“They didn’t hurt the kids even when… they’re just. Well, they are good people and if you give them—”

She feels like throwing up. “What do you— I didn’t hurt anyone.”

He blinks. His lips part and he—blurts out, “No, of course—not. I mean—”

“I acted like I couldn’t perform it. Unlike your moron friends I had… subtlety.”

His silence hurts even more than the assumption.

“Three people cursed the kids. Out of fifty in our class. One of them was a Ravenclaw. I didn’t—my friends didn’t.”

“I didn’t—know.”

“Of course you didn’t.” And she doesn’t mean to spit out the next sentence, she doesn’t , but— “The world isn’t filled with just good people and death eaters, Harry.”

Something strange, something indescribable passes over his face. He closes his eyes. “I know. I know. I’m sorry.”

“I’m just… I could’ve done better. I—I could’ve been different. But I didn’t hurt anyone. I’m not— I didn’t choose everything . I was—it doesn’t matter.” 

But why does it hurt ? Why doesn’t the ever insipid, pulsating guilt stop ? She bleakly thinks about the time she tried to hand him over. The rancid fear, the flesh-eating despair. “But I know I was selfish and I—I’m tired of being selfish. I want to be nothing, now. Nothing.”

She can’t read his expression, because there’s a chain stupid, uncontrollable tears falling from her eyes and it stings. Her eyes, her palm, the fact that Harry Potter genuinely thought that she’s used Cruciatus on fucking first years and through the ordeal of it all—the anger, the shame and the innocuous dread creeping behind (how did she live her life if he thinks she’s even capable of that?)—she can’t distinguish when he’s hugging her. And she can’t be certain why or how she lets him.

“I’m sorry,” Harry Potter says, his voice trembles.

And his voice—the tremor, the guilt—permeates her skin. It prickles her like the starling warmth of his body against her. It breaks her as she clutches his shirt in her fist, breathing on his chest. “I’m not evil ,” she says like a child.

“You’re not. I never thought—I’m so—”

“And I am sorry. For every cruel thing I’ve done.”

“I know, Pansy.” He pulls her closer, he rests his chin on top of her head. “It’s all—it feels staged sometimes, doesn’t it? Us assuming the worst of each other?”

It feels like a cage, it feels like the unwritten law of tragedies ending in travesty. It feels as unavoidable as the sharp, lacerating fate of a curse.

She grips him tighter.

[DAY 7]

The sweet, syrupy—almost manufactured sugary—aftertaste of the strawberry doesn’t leave her mouth long after they’ve finished their ice creams. Pansy runs her tongue over her lips, on the inside of her teeth and tastes the thick, grizzly sweetness and sighs in content. Eyes closed, back against the dewy rock with her notebook and quills almost forgotten on her side. She’s supposed to be doing that blasted essay on Wolfsbane. But it doesn’t feel as important anymore. Not when Potter is sighing in the same sort of husky, lingering content and the second time since the first night she knows what he tastes like. The rogue, straight bangs trickle her forehead and she thinks she can hear them again, the merpeople. They sing almost in a routine just at the tail end of dusk. The sky, she knows, is a kaleidoscope of deep orange, a soft, dusty pink and the evening blue all mixed up and perfect and she wonders for a moment if that’s enough evidence to believe in gods. The beauty of it. How it stays and lingers and persists even when the world crumbles. She remembers the sky, gleaming, bright and bold, the day after the final battle. And how it seemed so cruel, then. How magnificent it feels now.

“I never realised just how beautiful this place was,” Potter says from beside her, stunned.

Pansy nods in answer. She says—like an afterthought, “Do you—remember how you were talking about everything seeming pointless the other day?”

He hesitates for a moment. “Yeah?”

“I’m just saying, that’s reason enough, isn’t it? Being able to enjoy… I don’t know—shitty ice creams and sunsets.”

“I thought you liked strawberry—”

“My point ,” she persists, smiling, “is that there doesn’t have to be any other point of being alive. At least not for you. You’ve… done enough. You should just get to enjoy all the magnificent sunsets.”

She opens her eyes, turns to face him and he—well, he looks breathtaking. With the glint of the last orange light of the sun falling on his face. He tilts his head, biting his lips as he stares at the gap—or the obscene lack of—between their hands on the ground.

“It should be, yeah.”

She nods a little too encouragingly. A little too hopefully.

Because she had this epiphany, this soul scorching, earth-shattering revelation when she was sixteen, when Draco started wearing full sleeves, surreptitiously guarding his cuffs no matter what the weather was and Blaise was talking about diplomacy and war crimes in a hushed voice in their usual hiding spot behind their potions classroom and how she was hopeless, aimless, trudging around from Draco to Blaise and Daphne because she wasn’t sure when it happened, when their lives wound up and took such a sharp turn that she could barely remember it. Suddenly stakes were higher, grittier, life and death, good and evil and she couldn’t—couldn’t play coy anymore, couldn’t design meticulously themed parties anymore and it all seemed so silly, so fragile and meaningless. Her designer couture’s and her trust fund, her mansion and her mother’s precious china, and her father’s morbid interest in Nazism. Nothing was permanent or important or safe . She remembers the revelation hitting her in the guts when one morning she noticed—she’d suspected it, of course; she’d known it in the depth of her mind that he had taken it, he had to—the splotch of tar dark ink on Draco’s forearm. A curved, sinewy letter.

It wasn’t a letter. Her blood curdled inside her chest. Her heart congested into a fist.

She realised then, suddenly, belatedly, dumbly , how much she loved him and everyone else. The tip of his pointy nose red when they laughed, the careless drawl of Blaise’s voice when he couldn’t care less what anyone thought of him, Daphne and her fever-crusted dreams of fame. Ice creams, Sunday mornings, flunking classes and cheap firewhiskey. How she thought it would last forever right up until she realised it— won’t .

So she tells Potter, “Little things. Normal , boring things, Potter. They’re the most important.”

[DAY 20]

The salty breeze from the water trickles her nostrils as they work in silence. Pansy, leaning on her parchment, trying to tie up her assignment on the morbid affects of weather alternating charms, twitches her lips as she eyes her paper up and down. 

She would almost not notice his eyes on her.

Almost.

But she does and lets the silent, thick molasses-like awareness of his presence jostle her and gives herself ten solid seconds before she looks up and meets his eyes.

He blinks instantly, as if he is breaking a daze, as if he has been stuck in the same translucent sphere she finds herself inside when he’s around. He blushes, he smiles, he doesn’t look away.

“Your earrings,” he explains, “are pretty.”

Her hand involuntarily shoots up to her ear. She flinches a little as the tip of her quill scratches the shell of her ear and she hiccups, suddenly shy, suddenly too aware. She had picked this because the color contrasted prettily with her eyes, she picked it hoping he wouldn’t notice, wouldn’t know it was—in a way, under a plethora of frivolous excuses—for him anyway. She hadn’t realised just how rattled she’d be if he did.

“Thanks. They’re my grandmother’s,” she says finally.

He nods, the smile widens and… becomes more lopsided. She thinks for a moment if she should add that the stone was picked by her grandfather for her grandmother. She wonders if it would curb some of the embarrassment… or worsen it.

But she doesn’t get to do any of that. Potter clears his throat and finally turns away, and says, quietly, “They light up your eyes. You look… perfect.”

She can’t explain, she can’t think, most of the times, about exactly why it is that she feels drawn to him when she should leave this be. Yet she knows in her bones that it’s not something fleeting, or simple like a crush. It’s complicated. He is complicated. Not a dot at the end of the sentence. A question mark or an asterisk, maybe. Something that requires more reading, more of her attention, more of her.

The smile comes involuntarily.

[DAY 35]

It takes her three weeks to ask him about the string around Snow’s neck. 

And well, she tries— tries— to do it subtly. To act as if it didn’t matter that much—if not at all— that his precious pet, who runs to Pansy too much in the busy hallways, who looks just a little bit too comfortable around her, unnerves her. Holds up a stringent mirror of the piece of red she has tucked away under her dresses.

“Oh, I just thought… why not? What if it helps her find her soul—” He hesitates. Doesn’t finish the sentence. It reverberates in Pansy’s head anyway.

“You really believe that?”

It’s Sunday morning. Pansy bleakly realises she should be getting ready for Hogsmeade, she shouldn’t have followed Potter when she saw him in the Great Hall. But it’s cold, and they’re settled closer at the top step of the spiral staircase no one uses, and she is warm, so warm that it’s hard to care about anything but the fact that he’s brought a muggle cigarette and they’re sharing it. Their fingers brush every time it’s passed out, and Snow snuggles to her in a vain attempt to catch Pansy’s attention. She’s dumping them all to the boy beside her.

“Yeah, I do,” he answers primly. Certain. Almost haughty.

“You—well, really?”

“Yeah.”

“But how can you—” she stammers. “It’s from a joke shop.”

He turns to her. It still surprises her how sharp and clear and green his eyes are. Up close. “You really can’t put a little hope on fate, can you?”

She pretends not to hear the sarcasm. “It’s named Red Herring strings, Harry. You know what it is, grammatically, right?”

He shrugs. “A metaphor for something that distracts you?”

The puffs erupt like tiny, translucent clouds from his mouth and Pansy has lost count of how many times they’ve tasted the same thing at the same time.

“ Yes . So?”

“Love can be a distraction, can’t it? In fact, it can be argued that it’s the greatest distraction.”

And the word— love— tender and sweet and dangerous, hangs between them like a charm itself. It takes her a minute to reply, in uncertainty—

“What if something goes wrong?” She takes the cigarette, almost finished, the tip of it cherry red and nicotine feeling like a plaster over her chest. “What if it… binds uhm—bind Snow— to… I don’t know, something entirely different. An owl? What if it snaps from her throat and settles on the neck of an owl—she’s fascinated by them, right?—and it leaves them both in this… conundrum—this mess— they won’t be able to get out of?”

He takes her hand, the open one, and spreads his palm over hers and she is... marvelling, really, because she gets what he’s doing—laying each of his fingers one top of hers in perfect symmetry—just like he understands that it’s not about Snow or even the strings. It’s her. It’s always been her.

“I think… if something matched them—Snow and the Owl, that is—then maybe they’re not as different as everyone thinks they are.” He hesitates a moment, “And also... things don’t always end up the way you expect. Look at Ron and Hermione. I don’t know if it’s better or worse that he decided to not come.”

She pressed her lips, stares at their hands in perfect unison. Perfect. Absentmindedly, she rubs her thumb over his. Time stops, backtracks, seconds and minutes and hours collide on top of each other.

They don’t go to Hogsmeade.

[DAY 40]

By the end of the month, the entire castle is humming in the spirit of festivity. Pansy stares at Daphne and Tracy smoothing out their gowns, tittering about who’s asked them to the ball and who they’ll reject and she tries to not think about Potter mentioning it to her, in passing, that it probably won’t be as bad as he’s expecting. That the Ministry would probably just want a speech with complex words and simple meaning and how he doesn’t have a date. Yet.

Through the corner of her eyes, she saw him looking. Steadied herself to not look back.

“You’re going with Draco, aren’t you?” Tracy asks pointedly.

Pansy licks her lips, dry, parched. Say the same thing Draco begged her to tell the blonde girl, “Of course. Who else?”

[DAY 26]

Harry Potter has nightmares. 

Of course he does.

She finds him at their usual space when he misses class. Face crushed inside his palm, his spine hunched in a curve as he sits almost like a statue, unmoving. Too close to the water that Pansy can see the front of his robes drenched in cold, downright freezing water as she goes closer. Wordlessly, she offers him her hand. Wordlessly he takes it. When he gets up and Pansy dries his clothes before looking him in the eyes and looking through the hollow, depressing dents below them, her palms only momentarily brush against his cheeks before she drops them. Takes a step back.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “About all of it.”

He shrugs, stares at him feet. “It’s not your fault.”

“Not yours, either.”

He laughs shakily. His skin looks so pale that he’s almost glowering, bright and unignorable. “I uh—used to take sleeping pills. Muggle stuff. Enough to knock out an elephant, but Hermione—she chucked them out.”

She doesn’t tell him that it was probably for the best.

“Do you want to tell me what you saw?”

He shakes his head. She understands.

“I… it’s so stupid. I make up memories when I see—what I see. I think of… things that might’ve happened to me when I was—with mum and dad. Before you came I was trying to picture my first steps. I don’t know—it should be a pretty good memory, right? They were—” He stops, takes a shaky, uneven breath. “They were probably proud of me.”

“Yeah. That’s—yes.” She tries to sound casual. No sympathy. Nor pity. He deserves better. “Unless you were one of those insufferable kids who knocked over everything. They could’ve been scared, too.”

He laughs. A small, inconspicuous tear runs down his cheek. “Fuck, I was—they probably were.”

“From your excellent school records, I’d say—”

“Fuck off. I’m a model student.”

“The same way Skeeter is a model reporter, maybe.”

He laughs, a few more tears drop. Pansy pushes her hair back with her hand and watches him with a tense, terse knot in her stomach. A hundred conflicting emotions jostle in her head, in her heart.

“What were you like when you were a kid?” he asks, gruff, soft. “Were you always this mean?”

“Meaner,” she replies without a pause. “My mum used to try to ship me off with my grandparents and try for a son in peace, but grampy didn’t like my nose, so.”

A coarse silence continues. Potter raises his eyebrows and it takes a her a minute too late to realise that he is waiting for her to day that she’s joking, which—

She just shrugs.

He looks at her, eyes scrunched in scrutiny, perhaps, incredulity, maybe. His specs perch on the bridge of his nose and Pansy tilts her head just the minuscule amount to catch his eyes—bright green eyes—without the glint of the morning sun on the glasses. He seems wistful, as if he’s holding his breath, as if he’s waiting for something. A punchline, maybe. Maybe he’s waiting for her to tell him it gets better, or more bearable, or more— something. Not the barren string of days, tethering one after another with only the restless screams of nighttime. The days trudged up, stacked up one after one after one in a monotone. Everything is boring, Pansy knows— understands . And everything is a copy of another thing. Grief is nostalgia is heartbreak is love. Pain is memory is a wish is a plea. And it’s tiresome, it’s senseless, it’s boring. Even the loneliness—more than being stingy and unshakable and depressing—is boring.

“I can’t tell when you’re being serious or not,” Potter breathes, finally. His face a cute, subtle pink, his hair mussed up as if he’d just had someone mess it up—someone in her tiptoes, because she’ll really have to get on her tiptoes to catch his hair, his wistful face, his lips —

Pansy blinks, determinedly, to get rid of the rest of the sentence. “I can’t tell sometimes either, Potter,” she says, only partially joking.

[DAY 1]

The classroom is in chaos. There are sparks flying from the tips of Blaise’s wand and the air is thick with fumes of golden, ash, turquoise glow. Pansy thinks she smells something distinctly like tar and… sandalwood? She tries to ignore the inevitable mayhem that was bound to happen. What gave Slughorn the near imbecilic idea to set then in groups anyway? Inter-House unity, for Merlin’s sake. She just clutches her spatula and stirs the pot. Beside her Luna Lovegood is talking dreamily about the alternative approaches to Wolfsbane. Pansy thinks the other girl even dropped her own hair in the mix.

She turns her head, two tables away, Draco is hissing near passionately with Hermione Granger, pointing venomously at their cauldron. The girl’s face is puffed up, bright red and Pansy—snorts in the ridiculousness of the situation. It’s been a while since Draco has shown this sort of passion in anything.

“Harry is looking at us,” Lovegood’s voice chimes like a fucking siren. Pansy jumps, stares back determinedly at her cauldron, a bubbling, sizzling grotesque that’s surprisingly accurate to what Slughorn said it would be.

“Is he?” she says blankly.

“Yes. I wonder—”

Pansy tuns off the stove. Taps her feet in an attempt to look unbothered.

“You’ve got Wrackspurts in your hair, Pansy,” she says, breaking off, completely unfazed. “You are dizzy. ”

“No.” Yes, she is . “ Why would I be—”

It’s not as if they’ve decided anything. It’s not as if Pansy has any plan to meet him again in the afternoon like he said ( just… for homeworks, maybe, he said, the arse). It isn’t as if everything from last night floods in her brain like an instinct, like a reflex. It isn’t and she isn’t going back or talking to him or —

She snaps her head. 

He’s still looking. His partner, Ernie Macmillan is enthusiastically waving his wand at their cauldron. Pansy gulps, she can’t see his expression —on from the other side of the room, but she can see, frozen at her spot, when he waves his hand. 

She looks down at her desk.

This is ridiculous, she hisses. The world around her is clamorous, off-beat and just a notch short of mayhem.

She knows she’ll be returning to the lake.