Heartstrings

Everything has a tipping point.

Everything has to move toward something. Some preordained, inescapable fluorescent mark—from where it’s not defined by what it means now and where it’s been leading to a day, a week, a month before. Every event reaches a point where every emotion and decision bottled up into the crux of one’s unruly heart finally melts and spills and bursts and… ruins everything, really. Every incident—eventually, like a slow, inescapable progression, like infection creeping into the gaps between the words—reaches a point where it’s only before and after.

Pansy knows that.

Harry doesn’t.

And yes, it’s Harry now. Mostly. It’s Harry when she sees him first and the call to his name is like calling to another world, another different reality with the crisp lake breeze and dusty, ashen sky and corners of library where neither of them are studying. It’s Harry with her voice caught halfway in a chuckle and they’re laughing too hard and his name in her mouth is both a warning and an invitation. It’s Harry when she’s exhausted and she wants him to stop. Stop rationalising and theorising and making the world a simpler place than it really is. She calls him Harry—when she’s happy or she’s mad or she’s certainly too something and she can’t name it—she’s afraid to name it—and it feels like inching closer to a certain mark—a certain tipping point she’s long prided herself on skipping.

It’s Parkinson, too— when he’s feeling mischievous. When he sees her first and her name sounds like the tail end of a happy smile. It’s Parkinson when he’s half joking, lips perked up and eyes a clear, bright green and specks of unruly gold boring in hers and his hand flexes, and his fingers inch close close… closer but never quite there. her Last name and his last name float like distant reminders of who they’ve been. Who they are going to be.

She feels it—the tight, thick coil of affection blistering her throat whenever he smiles at her. She finds herself toying with the idea of holding his hand when it’s just there—by her side. With nothing but dirt and stone—wet and clammy from dew. With nothing but parchments and bright candy wrappers and quills and her notebook and his quidditch gloves and… excuses, really. She feels tripping over the edge of a high she’s never been brave enough to reach. And Potter—and Harry—is all too willing. To reach to jump to fall.

So yes, everything has a tipping point.

One of them knows it.

He hasn’t asked her to the ball yet.

“Why would someone like me?” she finally asks, absentmindedly—not absentmindedly to Draco. Pansy shifts her weight on her other leg and winches a little as it stings from the sudden change of pressure. She reaches down to scratch her calves, spine jutting against the wall of the main hallway. 

Beside her, Draco is fidgeting as well. He’s standing a little lopsided, clutching his notes and books in one hand close to his chest. The other hand continuously, consistently smoothing out his hair. Pansy takes a deep breath and looks at the other end of the corridor before nudging him, trying to fit the awkward, annihilating question into the fleeting conversation about nothing in particular.

They are standing against the wall in the middle of the hallway, loud and bristling with students, smelling of sweat and grass, waiting for Blaise to show up with whatever absolutely solid gold shit he’s gotten hand of. Pansy is twisting the red string in her pocket. And Draco has that lost, glassy look in his eyes he gets when he’s thinking about the past, or the gaping black hole that he thinks his future is. And that’s the perfect time to get him unguarded, that’s the perfect time to share something unspeakable otherwise.

“Pardon?” he drawls, eyes stuck on the entry door flooded with oncoming students.

“Why would someone like me?” she says again, a little louder, a little pointier.

“Uhm… what?” In her periphery, he is taking a small, cautious look at her face. She tries to look nonchalant. 

She suspects she’s failing. 

“Well, I love you,” he says as a matter of fact. 

She rolls her eyes. A small, inevitable smile splits from her lips like reminiscence. It’s their familiar game of skipping two steps forward from whatever they’ve been talking about. 

“Thanks, dipshit.”  Of course he does. They've never had any other option. “But I was asking in general. Why would someone random—I mean, completely random, none of us know him… or her—like me?”

Draco’s lips twitch. She can scarcely scoff at the gaudy smirk before he says, shrugging, “You’re hot.”

Pansy smacks him. “Great character assessment—”

“And smart. Really smart, though you don’t show.”  He pauses. “And mean, which you do show.”

“These are not very great qualities, ass—”

“Hey there, munchkins! My solid fucking golds!” Blaise calls out, breaking their conversation. Draco gives her a small, private smirk before they run over to him. Pansy hangs back a little in her head, thinking about what he said. The remainders of the words said and unsaid clanks and echos and she—she wonders.

She curls her arm around Blaise’s, letting go of the string. Draco throws his arms around her shoulder, taking one last look at the door. Pansy feels his grip tighten and languidly, wryly thinks about Hermione Granger and the fact that Draco tries so comically hard to pretend that he doesn’t know she takes Advanced Charms with Ravenclaw this time of the day.

[DAY 38]

The mermaids are singing. And it’s cool by the lake. Cold and wet with the characteristically lingering smell of weed and sparse bits of grass sprouting on the sides of the smaller stones by the water. Pansy taps her fingers on her knees, Potter is whistling their school song. A faint, bristing spark of translucent melancholy titters like sand on her skin. And it’s all… logical, okay? It’s perfectly understandable that she feels so cut open now. Because it has to do with the perfect wavelength of the singing mermaids’ voices, the right pitch and the right harmony in their unison and it’s perfectly logical how her heart clenches and there’s a tight strain of electricity going down down the back of her spine and her hands reach out, involuntarily, forward and it flexes.

“Are you OK?” Potter asks.

“I miss her,” she breathes out, hand dropping on her knee.

“Who?” he asks. “Your mum?”

She snorts, she can’t help it. “What? No—” There’s a treacherous coil of complicated words for what she feels for her mother. Missing is never it. “Daphne. My friend Daphne. I miss her.”

“Oh.” He pauses. “Where is she?”

“Ibiza, last I heard.” She shakes off the rubbles of dry mud from her notebook. “She’s—uh, married. Now. She’s enjoying her honeymoon.”

He’s cataclysmically awful at hiding surprise. His silence, the thudding, sparkling awkward one hangs in the air for too long before he offers a measly good for her.

“Yeah.” Pansy shrugs. It doesn’t matter. It’s all turned out perfectly for her. “She’s very fortunate,” Pansy says, not knowing why, “she’s… a perfect match.”

“Good.”

That’s what her mother said as well. Good, with that upward slant, that gracious disdain at everything in general. She would have a hard time having a husband after all this. Forty or not, he will take care of her. The war, her father’s incarceration. Someone has to compromise.

“I used to believe it was all so important, you know,” Pansy says, cringing at her own pitchy voice. “Being married in the right family is a… a shelter.” Cage. “You… have a solid standing in the world. You are secured.”

And it’s the most important politics anyway, her mother said. Men are so easily beguiled. You hitch yourself to one, you bind yourself, you make yourself irreplaceable in his life… and he does what you ask for.

Pansy bites the inside of her cheeks. Halfway torn between blurting out her own confusion at whatever her mum said and whatever she believed and how many hours, days, nights she’s lost at this. Make yourself irreproachable in every way. Make yourself —

“I’m sure you think it’s all bull,” she says instead. Chuckles to hide her embarrassment. “Superficial and elitist and—”

“Hermione is not breaking up with Ron.”

Pansy blinks in surprise. “What?”

“She’s trying to… salvage—no, no, maintain—their relationship,” he adds tartly.

Pansy bleakly remembers them during the summer break, always orbiting around each other. Arms slinging from shoulders, waists, mouth pressed in a sticky, newlywed smile. She remembers Draco scoffing at them, remembers Blaise making some sort of sex joke. 

“Oh,” she says. “Oh.”

“I think she can’t bear the fact that something she thought she wanted since she was thirteen could be wrong for her. For him.”

“I see.”

“ I can’t say it doesn’t seem absolutely suicidal, to be fucking honest, you know.” Pansy snorts. He smiles wryly. “But I can’t make fun of anyone for wanting a life cut out for them. It’s secured, like you said. You know what you’re supposed to do. You know what’s right and what’s wrong and it’s got to feel safer than…” He sighs. “It’s not superficial.”

A soft gust of wind rustles past them. Pansy flattens her palm on her knees.

“Do you remember the… charm they had on the boxes?” she asks softly. “The box of the red strings?”

There’s a ripple in his posture, she sees from her periphery. He sits up straighter. “Yeah?”

“It’s a charm Irish witches used to chant for finding… Well, they believe each of our atoms are made from another set of atoms—copywork, really—and if a caller is concentrating and… truly, intensely waiting for it, they can call the other set. It’s… soulmate stuff, they called. And—” she adds quickly, without pausing, without breathing, “it never worked. There is no discernible evidence to point out it ever did but still—”

“People try it out?” he asks, with a flicker of his infectious smile.

“I tried it out.” She licks her lips.“I was trying to find out if Draco was my soulmate.”

He pauses. “And?”

“He was… is—in so many ways. Just… not how I wanted. I think I knew it then, at fourteen. I knew it was useless.”

“But didn’t you—”

“Yeah. Well… I have a habit of ignoring things that aren’t good for me. Knowing I didn’t love him like that wasn’t good for me. So I… pulled the same stunt as Granger, I guess.”

“Everyone does,” Potter mumbles. “Sooner or later.”

The mermaids keep singing. The cold and the wind and the lake settles in the heavy limestone silence between them.

“Draco?” She draws out his name like a question itself. His mattress dips inward as she props herself up on her elbows, taps on her parchment with the blunt end of her quill. She sees him hmph in answer. Waits another moment before she carefully lays out the question as she looks up to find him staring at his essay. Hunched back, narrowed eyes, the perpetual hollow sneer clamped on his face.

“We are going to the ball together, aren’t we?”

His lips curl. “What the fuck do you mean by that?”

The sudden hostility feels like a splash of cold water. “What do you mean what I—”

“What kind of a question is that?”

“I was just asking.”

“Why are you asking?”

“Because… you never asked me,” she clarifies, feeling dumber by the moment. No one had asked her. Not even... “If I wanted to go with you.”

“Why would I ask you?”

“So we’re not going together?”

“Pansy.”

“Draco.” She holds his stare. His half-perturbed, half-bored, condescending stare. It’s startling how much this one boy makes her resort to violence as the only conceivable option.

Finally he says, flipping his hand, “Well, of course we’re going together. I mean… unless you’re mouthing out free blowies to the geek at the library you’re always hanging around now and he’s suddenly decided he wants to go to the ball with you.”

“What do you—” she practically gapes; practically heaves as she sits up straighter. “You—I’m not—why are you being so mean?”

“Why are you being so difficult?” he bites back.

“I’m not being… you are being a jerk. And I’m—” 

“Of course we’re going together, Pandora. Who else is going to go with us?”

He tries to sneer, tries to mask the grating, uncomfortable truth with the same old uncaring scoff. But he fails. He straightens his shoulder and snaps his quill in half and lets the ink pool on the reading table like it makes some sort of a fragile point.

“Well, that’s just great,” she seethes. “Just because you have low self-esteem from giving free blowies to—I don’t even know—Filch, for all I fucking care, that you get to insult—”

“Come on, sweetie, we all know that’s your speciality.” He pauses, narrows his eyes and—“Has anyone actually asked you?” 

It feels like she’s been slapped. The answer, the truth, clots from her stomach to her chest and it hurts when she pulls it out against her wishes. It grates. “No.”

“So?”

“Oh fuck off, Draco,” she spits. “Fuck right off.”

Draco continues to gauge her. Pansy gets up, wordlessly, gathers her books and the pages strewn over the bed and tries to—to not cry, or scream, or—

“I didn’t ask you to the yule ball either,” he says like he’s the sensible one. He shakes his head and a flop of perfect blond hair falls on his forehead. Asshole. “It’s always been clear with us, hasn’t it? So it’s really —”

And Pansy decides that’s it.

Fucking hell.

“Clear?” she says, feels the word crawl out from the empty space under the hollow of her throat. It crackles, it simmers.

Everything has a tipping point.

Draco taps his fingers on the wood, and says, flippantly, “Yes.”

“Because we’ve always been clear with each other, right, Draco?”

He reels back. His jaw clenches and shoulders straighten and there’s a distinct shift of pressure. The world caves in and constricts to the size of her body and him and the space between them. Pansy waits a moment, then she runs.

His trunk is locked, of course it is. Pansy shoots her wand at it and mutters venomously just as Draco grabs at her elbow.

“What are you—”

“Because we have no secrets, do we?” She jerks away, falls to her knees, her hands shoving into the pile of clothes before her legs even hit the ground.

“Pansy—”

She doesn’t hear it, her ears are ringing, bursts of firecrackers builds up up to a crescendo and she barely registers Draco yanking her away, barely feels the sting when he calls her a—a—

“You’re pathetic, you little—”

Her palm brushes against something cool and hard and dented. Her breath hitches as she yanks out the metal.

His face is red. He heaves, staring from her face to her hand. She is shaking all over, and it takes a mountain of will to not coil from the stark hatred in his eyes, it takes even more to keep her hold onto the blasted mask.

“Clarity?” she says. “Fuck that, right?”

The silence, as it stretches, would be unbearable if she wasn’t so busy catching her breath. She’s starkly aware of the heat of Draco’s eyes, bluntly conscious of what he’ll say next and preparing her skin to absorb whatever he’ll spew out. The velvet cloth of the mask tickles her wrist.

“I need that to—" he says softly, his lips trembling. “I just do. I need that.”

“If they find it—”

“No one’s going to find it unless you blurt it out.”

“I’m not going to,” she snarls. “I would never. But this is downright fucking—”

“Shut up.”

“Stupid.”

“You don’t get to fucking tell me that!”

“What, stupid? What else do you want me to say? Irresponsible, moron, fucking amateur—”

“And what are you?”  he curses loudly. “Kiss ass?”

Pansy throws the mask at him. He flinches as it hits his chest. “Because I saw you giving borderline fucking chummy with all your classmates. Loony Lovegood? She’s your best friend now?”

“I was just—”

“I know, Pansy. I fucking know.”

“I’m trying—”

“Don’t you think they find it funny? Pathetic? You used to call half of them ugly sluts and the other half—” He chuckles mirthlessly. “But it’s all good now because you read Quibbler? You moron. You don’t think the Weaselette notices when you eye-fuck her boyfriend—”

Pansy stands up, her legs shaking violently. She gaps in relief to find that she can still walk in the blurry haze of vision. Everything shakes and stirs and she’s not crying—she’s not. Her chest constricts and she bites her lips and she pretends she doesn’t hear what Draco spits out, just as she sprints through the door.

Her tipping point from whoever she was before to… whatever disgruntled joint of a person she is now was—of course—when she called out Harry Potter’s name in the Great Hall.

She’s certain about that.

It was the nauseating realisation, creeping up behind her like some invisible reptilian—slithering into her back, coiling her neck suddenly, with sharp, disgustingly clear certainty—of how much she’s allowed herself to be compromised. It was the deafening screech of her own scared voice ringing like a mismatched crescendo. Everyone was scared, but hers was the only voice in the dark room.

It still haunts her.

The only occupied Gryffindor locker room shower is spraying in full motion. The rest of the room’s empty—she knew it would be empty because he told her he liked to come an hour early to their afternoon practice. He likes to clear his head with no one around him. As Pansy gets closer, she hears the familiar hum of Harry singing. All you need is love. She thinks it’s a little preposterous how much it suits him and how bad he sounds.

Pansy doesn't know what she’s doing here. 

She still attempts to find an answer, though. She can’t exactly blame anyone else for sprinting, tears in her eyes, her mind a deafening cacophony of I see you, Pansy—a gnarled, twisted voice of her friend—as she ran, quite preposterously, insanely, to him.

She taps her feet on the floor. The room is both just the same and monumentally different from the one for Slytehrins. Broom cabinets stacked with grass stained, muddy brooms, small mountain of soiled Quidditch robes piled in a corner. She’s just in the middle of the room and the light coming from the opened window reflects on the drapers of gold and scarlet, and Potter is still singing and she—and Pansy—

She doesn’t know what she’s doing here.

“Is someone there?” he asks, and Pansy can detect the off-charted pitch, as if he’s the one who got found doing something absolutely nonsensical.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me,” she says, unsure. When he doesn’t reply, she closes her and curses silently. Of course he wouldn’t instantly know that it’s her. Just because she has his voice memorised like a well traced path—when he’s angry when he’s laughing and when he’s something more, something less, something she can’t define—doesn’t mean that he—

“Pansy?”

—would know her voice.

Except.

“Yeah.”

“What are you—wait—” A soft rustle, and his face peeks from the side of the shower room door. Bright scarlet of the wood cuts against his own flushed cheek. His hair, dark and wet, is chapped against his forehead. “Hey,” he says, breathless, and smiles.

Pansy doesn’t know what she’s doing.

“Hey.” She doesn’t try to smile, no. That would be ridiculous. That would be just the perfect getaway for the flood she’s trying to shut out.

“What are you doing here?” She tries weakly, eye burning, deflecting already. “Are you following me?” 

He snorts. “Yeah, right. Just wait a minute.”

She tries to shake her hands, from the shoulder joint up to the fingers—trying to shake off the feeling of disconcertion. She can’t run away now. She listens to the sound of Potter getting dressed hurriedly and ignores the terrified, dreadful jolt she felt while running away from the Slytherin dormitory. It’s getting thicker by the minute, grubbier, more callous. And by the time he’s standing in front of her, still wet hair, bare from waist up, she’s still trying to convince herself that it was a hasty, sudden decision… less than a decision, because—

Pansy doesn’t know what she’s…

Except.

Except she does.

“Why are you here?”

“I—nothing.” She’s here for comfort. Because he feels like comfort—apparently. He feels like there’s something funny about her that isn’t pathetic. He stares at her, he says—doesn’t say… but he insinuates—things like I see you like it’s not shameful, or embarrassing, or—

“You’re—” He narrows his eyes. He’s not wearing his glasses. “You’re crying.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She sniffles.

He takes a step, carefully—so carefully—as if the floor is made of glass, as if she’s made of something even more brittle. “What happened?”

“Nothing.”

He opens his mouth before promptly closing it. It’s a boldfaced, embarrassingly thin lie. Pansy takes a short breath, wipes the rouge tear escaping from her eye and squares her shoulders as she watches him raking his eyes over her—all over her—again and he blinks, after. After he’s done looking. After he’s done gauging the defection and damage and perhaps deciding if he’s ready to take it. If he’s even willing to. 

“C’mere.”

Pansy blinks. Another tear falls.

“Come here, Parkinson.”

“Why?”

He sighs. “You’re not going to crack and shatter, Pansy. I’m just going to give you a hug.”

“Then I’ll definitely shatter.”

He waits for her. A moment passes, and the wind outside ruffles against the glass of the small, cubic windows and Pansy shivers, she sighs. She gives in. The small few steps of the gap, the small, indolent chasm between them is nothing—is less than nothing—because it takes absolutely no effort once she takes the first step. She walks and she stutters but then he’s right there, his arms are around her body, her shoulders, her hair and she buries her face in the crook of his neck, the gap that looks perfectly made for this purpose only. Pansy sniffles and wraps her arms around his chest. His chin rests on her head and she—she feels the dampness of his body, the breathless sigh that ruffles the top of her hair—perfectly made, always—and the warm, warm jolt of relief that slathers over her chest. She arches her back, stands in her tiptoes to melt further into him. He smells of soap and detergent and… mint, yes. And cigarettes.

“What happened? Is it about… some new article?”

“No.”

“Pansy—”

“I just… I fought with Draco.” 

Before she can stop him, he pulls away; before she can process anything else but gasp, his palms are engulfing her face. His hands are cold. Pansy shivers—from the chill, the skin on skin, from the gut twisting proximity of his breath and hers. Because—

His hands are cold. His eyes are not.

“Are you—”

“It’s OK,” she lies. “I’m OK.”

He narrows his eyes. And something—something solid, like determination, like… tenderness simmers—begins to settle and she shakes her head. She reaches up and touches the back of his palms. Her hands shake but she tightens her grip, holds his hands in place. She inhales, exhales, almost feels his tremble because it feels as if it’s suddenly clear just how close they are. His breath smells like mint and remembers—trips back to the memory of a few days back—that she’s gifted him a pack to get rid of the charlike nicotine. They shared a cigarette. She knew how he tasted at that moment. And if she thinks—and she thinks—she can guess, now, she can imagine—

Harry inhales sharply, distinctly, when she tilts her head. He has that look again, the effortless softness, like it’s easy… to—adore her.

Harry adores her—she knows it. Because he’s so earnest. And he—

He parts his lips, he whispers—her name— and their noses bump and she—

And he—

“What the fuck?”

Pansy almost falls down from surprise as the near banshee-like scream pulls them apart—and away. Harry’s hand drops to her elbow like an instinct. She blinks as he draws her closer before turning, before they both turn and find Ginny Weasly staring at them in sheer disbelief. Pansy feels heat rise to her neck, her chest as Harry goes limp beside her.

“Hey,” he says after a moment, his voice gruff. “We were just… talking.”

The redhead scrunches her nose, actually looks at Pansy like she’s trying to decide which species of creature she is. “Talking,” she says tartly.

The unsteady, loud drumming of her heart is near unbearable. Pansy shakes her hand away from Harry’s grip, touches the front of her dress like she’s—trying to regain balance. Because this scene—Weasley’s stare, Harry’s silence seems—feels like—

Her boyfriend—

“I’ll—” The words form an invisible, invincible clot in her throat. She can hear Draco’s snarl again. She’s right in the middle of what she ran from.

Her feet feel like air, like a storm. She runs past the door and another sneer-like accusation, bitter and rancid float in her ear—

“This isn’t the place to have a suck session, Ha—”

It feels like someone finally poured a bucket of cold water on her body and she’s jerked back to reality. It feels worse than she’d anticipated.

The axis of her relationship—no, not relationship. It’s not anything concrete—or friendship—no chance because friend’s don’t actually wonder about how they taste, do they? They don’t spend hours, stupid, useless hours dreaming about the next time they’ll meet and exchange nonsensical bickering only to end in adoring chuckles. It’s… mellower than friendship, yet something more indicative, something dangerous. 

The axis of her entanglement with Harry Potter tips over the edge as she runs, again, away from him and his not-girlfriend—she knows they’ve broken up, she knows somehow it’s not enough—her eyes are blurrier, the world is more unsteady, more liquid, more treacherous and she almost doesn’t hear him cry out her name.

Almost doesn’t stop.

But he catches up with her.

“Stop.”  She shrieks as a yank, expected, anticipated, pulls her against his chest. Pansy closes her eyes determinedly, with a force in her throat and a growing, groveling burn in her eyes. She feels the cotton of his shirt grazing the nape of her neck. He wasn’t wearing this when they—

“What?” she snaps.

Pansy feels his hand creeping down, settling on her wrist. “I’m sorry about Ginny.”

“You’ve got to stop saying sorry for… everything.” She presses her lips together. “Not your fault.”

“Not yours either.”

“That’s debatable.”

“Pans—”

“Yeah. OK. Whatever.”

Not a place for a suck session. She waits a second, lets her senses acclimate with him on her side in this open, wide open corridor before she opens her eyes. Bright, stretched out hallway, embarrassingly bare. She clutches her cardigan, presses her lips together. Harry notices it, of course he does, and silently guides her to a corner, behind a large stone pillar, partly shadowed from the light. Pansy silently curses herself, determinedly looking nonchalant. She gauges her words before she speaks—

“So… Weasley…”

“She shouldn’t have—”

“It’s OK.” She shrugs. It’s not. There’s a rapidly calcifying clump of words stuck in her throat to prove that. She wants to ask him if it’s OK that his ex saw them. She wants to ask if it’s really that obvious that she looks at him during classes, between classes, in Quidditch when she should be supporting the other team.

She can’t. Draco’s words clamp and clatter in her head. Harry’s got his glasses on now. His eyes always look brighter, larger behind the lenses. His face is softer. He leans down, one hand bracketing the side of her face; the other, quite preposterously, brushing her hair out of her face. He asks her if she wants to talk. She replies in the negative. He asks if she wants to go somewhere else and she replies in the negative, the sight of fresh disgust on Weasley’s face stark and clear in her mind. 

Eye-fuck her boy—

“Would you go to the ball with me?” he asks.

She blinks in surprise. Which… which shouldn’t come as a surprise, because, well, she’s been thinking—wondering—since last week that it was odd—wondered if maybe she read the signs wrong. Maybe there hadn’t been any signs. She remembers feeling stung, and aghast about the fact that she even thought she had enough ground to be stung. Specifically when he hasn’t—when they aren’t anything at all.

She was stung at the possibility.

Now, though.

Now he’s looking, staring, invading her privacy—again. And she somehow equally mesmerised and disgruntled by his unwavering frankness again and it’s… it’s—terrifying. Pansy leans back against the hard pillar.

“What?” she says.

“The ball.” He smiles awkwardly. “I’m, well, a bit late, but—”

“No,” she blurts out. 

“I—What?”

“I can’t go with you.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she bites on the words. Because of the way Ginny Weasley stared at her. She thought the only reason Pansy would even be in the close vicinity of Harry Potter is she offered—

Not unless you’re offering free—

“Just because.” She purses her lips. “It’s stupid. The ball. Why—why would you even want to—”

“Because you said I should try and enjoy normal things,” he replies. Something like accusation, something like confusion laces around his words. 

“And?”

“This is a normal thing.”

Is he daft? “It’s not normal,” she all but seethes. “Not when it’s you and me.”

“Are we seriously back on this again?”

“It’s–”

“Do you want to go with me?”

She’s silent. She’s aghast. They’re too close again.The light reflects on the scattered golden flakes of his eyes.

“Is this about keeping everything a secret?” he asks.

“No.”

“Because I think it’s about time we—”

“Why don’t you ask Ginny Weasley?”

He takes a step back. “Whywould I ask her? I just told her off because she was—”

“What?”

“Rude to you.”

And Pansy regrets the words even before she says them out loud.

“I didn’t ask you to.”

His expression breaks. Pansy watches with dread coiling in her stomach as he narrows his eyes,

hurt and confused and angry. He doesn’t have a subtle bone in his body and these are the times she absolutely loathes it.

“Everything is a goddamn ordeal with you,” he hisses, finally, and Pansy swallows the air she is sure has been stuck since she saw him—not today, not yesterday, but since the visit at the jokeshop. Sunday afternoon, pearlescent, incandescent sunlight and autumn air and a clot in her heart as big as a planet. 

Pansy swallows the clot and the claw of her impulse because he pulls away—a bit, a momentum—and she wants to reach her hand, fist his shirt and pull him close, to her space and her privacy and kiss him so hard that she’ll finally be able to convince herself this is real. He is here and he is interested but—

But she doesn’t do that. She flips her hair, tries to ignore the lightheadedness. The ground is split in the middle and the sky is dusty and the only thing that doesn’t make sense is how hard Harry Potter tries to bridge the gap between them.

“I thought you’d be used to it by now.”

He is right. Everything is an ordeal with her. Everything is a battle and a war and vengeful fingers with long, clawing nails dragging her down.

Everything is an inevitable passage to a sure, certain end.

Pansy loses track of the moment she tips over the edge.