Curtains Down
A/N: Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter in any sense. This is OOC, just so you know. I mean, cannon Pansy really isn't that great. Please consider leaving a review; that would be such a huge encouragement!
Description: Almost a year after the defeat of the Dark Lord, Draco Malfoy is still unable to forgive himself for the things he has done. He's still living with his family, though they're no longer speaking. Narcissa and Lucius have labeled him as a hopeless case, but he would say that he's just trying to find healing through solitude. A certain pesky girl, however, can't seem to keep her pug nose out of his business. Or at least, that's how he sees things...
WARNING: Might contain very mild triggers for self harm/suicide.
Draco Malfoy hated a lot of things in life. He hated inequitable prats like his father. He hated simpering fools like his mother. He hated a guilty conscience and memories of evil. Honestly, memories in general got him down. He hated himself, and even worse, he hated life itself. Life, unfortunately, was inescapable. Oh sure, he had contemplated suicide, more than once- but whenever he was right at the verge of saying the lethal spell, tipping from his upstairs bedroom window, or bringing the shard of ancient china from one of the ornamental vases down on his wrist, he found himself paralyzed. It was like an invisible barrier had been cast to prevent him from continuing; and the barrier, he knew, was mental.
So he decided that the best way to settle things would be to never again place himself in a situation that needed to be settled. If he never left his room, never presented his weak resolve with a chance to screw things up, he would be completely and perfectly safe. And he was... in a way.
Every morning for a whole three months, Narcissa Malfoy would knock on her son's bedroom door, promising her love and forgiveness, and begging him to open up. Sometimes he would call back, sounding either bitter, sad, or strangely happy. Most often, however, there was only silence. So she would tearfully set a charger of food outside the imposing oak-wood door and creep away to continue with her life. She knew that Draco had to open up sometimes- for the dish was usually emptied of its contents by the next morning, ready for the tears and entreaties to begin again- yet she never caught him at it.
Draco had used to love his mother, but the war had changed that. The woman who he had once respected and even adored quickly became a symbol of everything that he wanted to escape. A beaten down human being, pitiful and weak, yet somehow still alive after the wrongs she had committed. It puzzled him: forgiveness. That's what his family and he had received from the Wizengamot, though he knew full-well that none of them deserved it. But Lucius and Narcissa were now living free while the countless innocents who had suffered at the hands of his family remained dead. And some of it was his fault.
No, he could never go free- never resume his life as his parents had.
He would think about the Manor at which he lived, remembering the torture and death that it had imbibed into its very walls, and he found himself wanting to leave. Yet therein lay the problem; leaving would mean re-entering a world that had been hurt because of him. And so he stayed in his room.
Day after day passed, morning after morning of his mother's tears; but then, quite suddenly, they stopped. The meals still appeared regularly, but he never heard his mother's voice again. She had given up at last, something which Draco had wished that she had done a long time before.
Lucius Malfoy gave up on his son almost instantly. Perhaps he had realized, far quicker than his wife, that a Malfoy's mind, once made up, cannot be changed.
It was a normal, quiet morning: wake up at six, watch the sun rise through the tiniest gap in his heavy bedroom curtains, then light a candle and study at his desk until eleven. He had, in the seven months of living in his room, read every book on his shelf multiple times. That didn't stop him, however, from reading them again and again and again, until the words became so familiar to him that he could simply recite whole chapters. And that's exactly what he did every day, reciting, pondering, writing. Then he would clean his room; rearrange things, blow any settled specks of dust away, reorganize his dressers and shelves.
It was the smallest things that could keep him from losing his sanity, and Draco knew that.
Every day was the same, but full. He had a schedule and he stuck to it, repetitive as it might have been. But this particular morning at eleven thirteen precisely, as he put his books back onto their appropriate shelves, he happened to glance out of the tiny gap in his always-drawn curtains. A short figure was striding down the front walk towards Malfoy Manor. And what's more, this figure was a girl. A girl with a pug nose and hourglass figure; a girl who he had hoped to never see again.
Draco Malfoy hated Pansy Parkinson. She was such a cow, he thought ferociously as he remembered how readily she had run from Hogwarts, how readily she had declared herself "coward". And now, suddenly and unexpectedly, she was striding up the Malfoys' front drive, wearing a pink dress and a grim smile.
He recalled how she had, for all their years at school, chased him. She was a flirt; a clinging, annoying flirt who had never given him a moment of peace. Of course, he had liked it- liked her- when he was in school. What a foolish child he had been, he decided.
But he was being silly. There was no reason to get worked up just because a ghost of his pathetic past had come calling at his parents' house. She would probably never even learn that he was there, let alone come into contact with him in any way. He hadn't left his bedroom in over seven months, and had no plans to do so either. His own mother hadn't spoken to him in weeks and weeks- he was safe.
Four floors below Draco Malfoy's bedroom, Pansy Parkinson stood on the front porch of Malfoy Manor and knocked. She waited a few moments, then put on a brilliant smile as the door was opened a crack by the pale-faced Narcissa Malfoy.
"Hullo, Mrs. Malfoy. I must say, it's been a while." Pansy said brightly, clutching her hands behind the back of her rose-pink dress.
Narcissa blanched. There hadn't been a single person calling at the Manor in over two years, let alone a young woman. "Pansy Parkinson?" She had meant her statement to come out as way of greeting, but somewhere between her brain and her mouth it turned into a question.
"Yes." Pansy's bright smile almost doubled in size. "May I come in? I won't stay long, but I was in the area and thought that I'd visit my old friends."
"O- of course," Narcissa nodded almost distractedly, opening the door and allowing the younger girl to step inside the grand manor. "Tell me," She added, leading the way to the parlor, "How have you been?"
"Rather well." Pansy sat in the offered armchair, crossing one leg over her knee and folding her hands in her lap. "You know, after the War, I moved to France for a while to study fashion." Narcissa nodded again in polite interest, secretly wondering if the other witch could have ulterior motives for coming. "But I'm all finished with my course by now, and have even secured an internship with Madam Malkin in Diagon Alley. She's still around, fancy that!"
"You don't say. Would you like some tea, Pansy?" Mrs. Malfoy rose quickly, trying to busy herself with some menial task in order to take her mind off of the shock of the other's arrival.
"No, it's quite alright." The younger woman rose as well, her smile still firmly fixed onto her heart-shaped face. "I was actually wondering if Draco was in today? I haven't seen him in ages. It would be nice to catch up, you know?"
In that moment, Narcissa's dying spark of hope for her son flared up just a tiny bit, and she decided to tell the truth. "Y- yes... yes, he's home, but I must warn you, Pansy, he's not himself." The brunette witch raised her neatly penciled eyebrows slightly, and the blonde seized her hand in a fit of sudden motherly passion. "You were close at school, were you not? Please, maybe you could help him!"
Less than ten minutes later, Draco Malfoy froze at the sound of heels marching up the staircase leading to the fourth floor. Even worse was the sound of a smart rapping on his bedroom door and the hard yet youthful female voice issuing from outside.
"Draco!"
No response. Pansy narrowed her brown eyes and screwed up her face, waiting for a sound- any sound- to greet her. She tapped her foot impatiently, finally resorting to banging her fist against the wood a second time.
"I know you're in there, so there's no use pretending that you're not." She snapped, smirking slightly as a distinctive groan came from the boy in the bedroom.
"I'm busy." His voice sounded raw, as if it hadn't been used in quite a while and was beginning to get painful and rusty.
"So I've heard." She said pertly. "Very busy. For a solid year."
It felt almost good to have someone to talk to. Not just someone to come and cry over him, but to actually boss him around, treat him as if he was normal. "You don't understand, Parkinson, and you wouldn't. So you can waste your life standing outside in the hall, and I won't give a crap."
"Oh, trust me, it's not me who's wasting their life. Now will you speak civilly to me, or will I have to do things the hard way?"
Another short silence, then a grudging reply. "Someone sent you to do this, didn't they?"
"Oh, no." The brunette said sweetly, leaning against Draco's bedroom door. "Though I was talking to some of your old mates the other day. Theo Nott, Blaise Zabini... You do remember them, don't you?"
Nothing.
"They told me that they hadn't seen you ages, which I found funny, considering that you boys were practically inseparable at school. And since I was coming through the area, I thought I'd see what the issue was myself."
No reply.
"I must say that I'm horrified. You're being really immature, locking yourself away like this. There's a whole world out there- a world that you should be part of. Now come on, you're cleared. Pardoned- forgiven, don't you understand? We've all made stupid, stupid mistakes," She almost laughed, "But those mistakes will never be fixed unless we do something to make up for them."
Sitting cross-legged on his bed, Draco resisted the urge to call out to her, to make her understand that he was making up for his mistakes. What better way to atone than by ceasing to need atonement?
"Alright then." Pansy Parkinson said coolly, loosing a long pin from her bobbed hair and beginning to twist it into shape. "We'll do things the hard way."
His light grey eyes narrowed, Draco stared at the bedroom door. Pansy's bossy voice had been replaced by a sound that he hadn't heard in a long time- a noise which he could not, for the life of him, place.
Click. Click, clack. Click.
The bedroom door shuddered open to reveal a pink-cheeked girl of nineteen, her short plump legs slightly bent and a straightened bobby-pin in her hand. "I knew that you must not have placed an Imperturbable charm on the door, because you had to open it at some point to get the food your mother left, and it's a hassle to remove. Besides, the charms not very common knowledge now, is it?" Pansy said simply, placing her hands on her hips. "But of course, you would have enchanted it so that the typical unlocking charms would be ineffective. Therefore, it was back to the classic Slytherin stand-by: pick the lock. Surprised your mother never thought of it." She dusted off her hands, glancing around at the room with an expression of distaste. "Good Lord, it's dark in here."
She smiled swiftly at the pale, platinum-blond young man, before marching over to the window and thrusting the curtains wide open. For the fist time in over seven months, sunlight flooded the green-papered room.
"Much better."
Her prim voice was strange to him, but not entirely unpleasant. He had never thought that he would appreciate the rays of the warm morning sun again, nor that he would have let a single soul gain access to his room so easily. He could have stopped her- he could stop her now, send a hex her way that would ensure that she never returned... But part of him almost didn't want to. He didn't say a word as the short witch proceeded to open his windows, sending a gust of warm spring air into the musty chambers.
"Why are you doing this?" He finally asked, so softly that she almost didn't pick up on the faint words.
"Because I care for you." Pansy came slowly over to the bed, settling down on it beside him. "You know, you were always very funny and full of life during our first five years of school... but in nineteen-ninety-six you came back a different person. It looks to me as if that new person hasn't left yet... though I wish that it would. Come on, Draco! Tell me how you feel; open up to me and I promise that it'll help."
"Really? You honestly think that some little feeling fest is going to fix everything that I've done?" Draco said quietly, eyeing her with disgust. "You're only saying that because you're a girl- you don't really know."
Pansy Parkinson seemed to grow five feet as she drew herself up, fire in her brown eyes. "Oh, honestly? You really think that me being a girl has got anything to do with the cold hard truth? That's just waffle, young man, and I am not afraid to hex you for that!"
The blond rolled his grey eyes, snorting slightly. "Yeah, whatever."
"I'm not kidding. A witch is every bit as good as a wizard, you know!"
Relenting for the first time in ages, Draco raised his hands in a weak attempt at playful surrender. Pansy softened slightly, her eyes losing a bit of their maniacal glint. "All right, I take it back." The young wizard said softly, turning on the bed to glance out of the open windows and into the sea of blue, green, and golden light beyond.
"Draco, do you forgive Voldemort for what he made you do?" Pansy broke the silence with a touch of defiance in her voice.
The blond started, clearly shocked that she had used the name of the Darkest wizard of all time. "You-"
"Said 'Voldemort'? Yeah, yeah I did. He's dead and gone, and so are the things that you've done. But answer my question. Could you forgive him- or any of the others who ever wronged you, for that matter?"
Draco thought for a while, unsure of how to answer. "Well... Well, yeah. I guess I could. I mean, I'm not holding any grudges, really."
"Well," the brunette said slowly, allowing herself to smile, "Love is forgiving and moving on. If you can't do that for yourself, then you can't do that for anyone else. So you've got to make a choice; it's one or the other. You could live in misery and darkness for the rest of your life... or you could forgive and allow yourself to be forgiven." Draco Malfoy was silent for several moments, his grey eyes half-closed.
"How can you just move on, Pansy?" He added in a rather different tone than before.
The witch shrugged, sobering a bit. "Well, to be honest, it was hard. But then I had to admit that I had been a total berk, and just move on. I promise to you, it may seem like when you're walking down the street, everyone who looks at you is judging you for the stuff that you did... but they're really not. People find it a lot easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right, and since both of us were wrong, I find that to be a comfort."
"But you were never a Death Eater!" Draco persisted, "You were a cow, sure, but you never actually tried to murder anybody."
"What I did was just as bad as what you did, Draco, and let me tell you why. I hurt people simply for the sheer joy of making them feel bad. You might have done a bit of that too, but most of the witches and wizards you hurt, you did not injure by choice. I'm not excusing your actions- and you shouldn't either- but you did have a death threat hanging over your head. Just something to think about."
"Yeah, but-"
"Listen to me." Pansy Parkinson's brow furrowed, and she placed her hand on his knee. "I'm done arguing with you. I've torn your curtains down, let you have a good look at the wonderful world outside, and given you a good talking-to. I'm going to say one last thing, and then I'll leave. The best way to escape from the past is not to avoid or forget it, but to accept and forgive it. Do you want to go free? The choice is up to you." And with that, she rose to her feet and glided from the musty bedroom, leaving the door open behind her.
Draco sat on his bed, staring after her. He couldn't believe what had just happened... yet the open windows and unlocked door were undeniable proof.
Downstairs, Pansy Parkinson kissed Narcissa Malfoy on the cheek, gave her hand a quick squeeze, marched back down the front walk, turned on her heel, and Dissaparated without so much as another word.
As he watched her vanish through his newly open window, Draco couldn't help but notice that his heart felt much lighter, and the continual sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach was gone. It was a beautiful day outside, he thought. Perhaps the most beautiful he had ever seen in his entire life.
Slowly, shakily, as if learning to walk for the first time, he slipped from his bed and made his way across the room. He paused for several moments at the doorway, staring out into the darkened hallway beyond. Somewhere in the house, Lucius Malfoy was reading. In the parlor, Narcissa sat drying her eyes on a lace handkerchief.
Draco took a step, and then another.
And then he was running, running like he had never run before, loving the noise of his stockinged feet on the wood floor as he stumbled down flight of grand steps after flight of grand steps. He stopped right outside of the closed parlor door, listening for a moment to his mother crying within, before opening it wide. Narcissa Malfoy looked up with tears in her wide blue eyes, her pale face slowly breaking into a look of joyous disbelief.
Draco smiled at her, and she smiled back. "Good morning, Mother." He said.
"Good morning, son." Narcissa whispered. Then she ran to him, threw her arms around his neck, and burst into tears.
Finis