Pansy finds the pictures later, about six months after he left that last day. She's moving house now (finally—the shit landlord who refused to fix the hole in her ceiling should have driven her out years ago; but then, if he had, maybe none of this would have happened), and beginning to regret telling her mother that she didn't need any help, she could do it herself, thank you very much. But maybe it's still worth it not to have her mother pursing her lips over the state of Pansy's clothes and her London flat, worth it for the lack of snide remarks and sugary offers of "you can always move back in with your father and me, dear. I've always thought your coloring was so much more suited to the country."
But without her, Pansy's not even finished packing up her bedroom, and she's meant to be out the day after tomorrow. So there's that.
She's shifting her dresser away from the wall, first pushing at one side, then the other (despairing as to how she'll ever get it down the fucking stairs, even with movers), when she hears the slip-slide-scrape of paper falling down between the dresser and the wall.
Pansy plops down on the hardwood floor that seems permanently dusty no matter how often she sweeps it, stretches her fingers beneath the dresser. They brush the edge of an envelope and she pulls it out, leaning back against the wall and blowing her dark, heavy fringe out of her eyes.
(After Theo left, Pansy cut off all her hair—decided now was the moment to go pixie, because life was apparently quite short and it felt like there wouldn't ever be any other moments like this one—but now it's grown over her forehead and into her eyes, and she has to either pin it back or shake it out of her face like a member of a boy band during a guitar solo, neither of which she likes, but she doesn't want to cut it again either. Progress is too slow already without slowing it down any more.)
She flips open the unsealed flap of the envelope and sees the photos. And even before she pulls them out, she knows. Oh, she knows what they are, has known since she heard the sound they made against the wall, and she can't decide whether it will be worse to look at them or not to.
She's smearing the edges of the photos with her thumbs before she even completes the thought. It's always better to look, to know, than not to.
xXx
The first photograph is of a hand, lying flat on the quilt that Pansy still hasn't stripped off her bed. But even though it's just lying there, not moving, you can tell there's tension in the hand, that it wants to ball up the patchwork in its fingers till it's crumpled and sweaty, maybe tear it open altogether so drifts of white cotton stuffing come spilling out, till maybe the whole room is covered in the remnants of what used to be whole.
"Hold still," Pansy had told Theo as he reached for the hem of her dress that night, his other hand already sliding down her waist. Her hands were busy with the camera, her eyes on his hand there on the bed. "There's nothing more beautiful than a hand, the way all the tiny parts of it knit together."
He'd flattened his hand upon the mattress, and she saw in her periphery that he was grinning at her, only half his mouth curved up. "I can think of some things more beautiful," he said, and in that second she snapped the picture and in the next she stepped in to him and he pulled her down, and she had to scoot her camera under the bed so they wouldn't roll over it.
xXx
That had been their first date, but it wasn't the first time she'd met Theodore, obviously, and it wasn't even the first time she'd taken a picture of him. He'd always been just sort of there in the background at school—in Slytherin, few boys could outshine the golden brilliance of Draco Malfoy holding court at the dining table or in the common room, especially if you didn't want them to.
And Pansy didn't want them to, obviously, because she'd always wanted the most beautiful thing in the room. She'd always wanted the dress with the most embellishments, the hair potion with the sleekest shine, and she'd wanted Draco Malfoy from the first time she saw him. And it wasn't that he was rich, and it wasn't that he was blond (though neither of those hurt anything), but it was the way the light seemed to shine directly onto him and bounce off again, refracting into a dazzling haze that Pansy couldn't seem to see around.
After they broke up fourth year (if you could call it breaking up when you couldn't exactly call one Yule Ball and three nights sneaking into Draco's bed—only to be disappointed by his kisses and the way he didn't seem to know what to do after that any better than she did—dating), Pansy hadn't noticed his hair or the light around Draco all that much (and by sixth year it seemed to be fading anyway—or maybe Draco was fading, but asking him what was wrong only seemed to make it worse).
By the time sixth year rolled around, Pansy had kissed most of the boys in Slytherin—even Crabbe and Goyle—and a handful of boys from other Houses, and had been bored by them all. By the time seventh year started, especially with all the mess going on in the rest of the castle beyond the Slytherin common room, and in the rest of the world beyond Hogwarts, it was a lot easier (and more fun) to sit in her room poring over the models in fashion magazine spreads, memorizing the way light hit their eyes and shadows danced across their faces, than to find a real live boy to kiss.
It was one evening when she'd emerged from such a magazine-induced reverie that she spotted Theo in the common room, curled up in an armchair in front of the fire, leaning close to read his book by the light of the flames. It was late, and he was alone in the room, and she'd never thought about him enough to care what he thought of her, and so that was probably why she said, "Don't move. I want to get my camera."
She left without looking back at him, and when she returned she was only a little surprised to find him in the same position, only now looking at her with his eyebrows up and a mildly quizzical look on his face. His gaze moved to her hands. "Oh, you did say camera. I thought maybe I misheard you."
"What would I have said instead?"
"I don't know, chimera? I find it's best not to be surprised by anything at this school. I didn't know you took photos. I thought only reporters and Gryffindors did that."
Pansy snorted. "If you're thinking of that whiny Colin Creevey kid, please stop before you compare me to him. I'm not that kind of photographer."
Theo laid his book down across his upturned knees and kept looking at her. Pansy started to feel flustered, and then realized it was because this was the longest anyone had looked at her straight on in weeks. Once she'd outgrown being loud to get attention (which, okay, was just last year, and sometimes she still caught her voice going loud and shrill at parties, but she was trying), people had stopped watching her so much, and Pansy found that she didn't mind being ignored every now and then after all. Sometimes, that was the safest way.
But now Theo was still looking at her, and it wasn't that it didn't feel safe, but it felt like something, something that made Pansy want to duck to the side or lift her camera up to cover her face or at least run back to her room and brush her hair before coming out again. "And what kind of photographer is that?" Theo asked.
"The kind who takes stalker pictures of Harry Potter," Pansy retorted, unsure why she felt the need to retort. "Though I guess that's harder now he's on the run. I only take pictures of things that already look like art."
She regretted this phrase—something she'd been turning over in her mind, something she thought sounded good, sounded right—almost immediately, when Theodore said, "And you want to take a picture of me? Does that make me art?"
If Draco had said the same sentence, he would have sounded sardonically amused, a little mocking, but that wasn't how Theo sounded. Amusement, sure, a little bit, and he might have been going for mocking, twisting the words up at the end of his sentences the same way he twisted his mouth—but there was something under them, some element of real questioning. As though he too had been trying to work out when people looked at him and when they didn't, and what it meant when they did.
Pansy blushed. "The light is just really good right here—your paleness, and the fire's gold."
When Theodore smiled, one side of his mouth rose higher than the other, and his cheeks rounded, making his face if not actually round, at least less hollow than usual.
"All right," he said. "You can take a photo of me."
Pansy lifted up the lens to her eyes, found his face with light licking all around it, and heard something click.
xXx
But it wasn't like that night was the beginning of some great love affair, or that they even became friends after that. True, now there were more smiles when they passed in the hallway (which felt like a pleasant little buzz every time, because Theo had never been one to smile all that much, and it felt like some sort of accomplishment in a time when everything seemed more and more futile) and a few conversations in the common room or before Potions. But for the most part things went on as they always had done (as things usually do) and things were bizarre and scary enough at Hogwarts during seventh year without adding the prospect of her first real relationship to the mix.
After Potter defeated Voldemort, that's when things actually started to change. When the world started to change and made them all change with it. Pansy went home for a year, then went abroad to work for a magazine in France (where fewer people spit at you on the street for being a pure blood with a father in jail and a mother with so much bitterness still in her mouth she was liable to spit right back). It was Draco, funnily enough, who convinced her to come back to England. Draco and Astoria, who had settled in Surrey and who seemed happy (or at least, something approximating that) to live in a world that held no more dark secrets (or at least, different ones).
She couldn't do Surrey, for obvious reasons (what on earth did people even do in Surrey?), but when she was twenty-one, Pansy sold her furniture and packed up her clothes and her cameras and found a flat in London that she thought she'd never want to leave. The one she's now leaving.
xXx
Pansy flips to the next photograph. It's similar to the first—by some definitions, probably, exactly the same. The same hand, after all, but this time against a backdrop of white countertop, this time encased in chocolate up to the wrist, a rich brown shell that's just beginning to crack across the knuckles. Smears of chocolate on the counter, but what Pansy remembers is the smears of chocolate across Theodore's mouth.
She'd come into the kitchen from the bathroom. They were making fudge; their first holiday together, their first party together, their first time meeting each other's post-Hogwarts friends, and Pansy could feel all the firsts high in her throat, making it hard to swallow properly.
She'd ducked away for a shower, leaving him to stir the thickening chocolate, and she'd entered to the sight of him sticking a finger into the bowl, bringing it out heaped with still-melty chocolate that dripped down his palm and onto his wrist.
"You promised!" she said, and he turned to face her, looking mischievously nonchalant, but the flicker of his eyes said he wasn't totally sure if she was really mad or not, and he didn't want her to be. It was still early on enough that they worried about making one another angry, worried that if they had a fight it might be their last, might be the end of everything.
It was only three months since the first picture, three months since they'd run into one another at the market and played the game of old friends catching up, gotten a drink and watched the ways the light played across each other's faces, the different angles, the new scars. Stayed for too many drinks to just be friends catching up, asked clumsy questions about boyfriends and girlfriends that they already knew the answers to (even post-school, the gossip mill was in full working order), touched knees and grasped elbows in ways that could still be excused if one party or the other wanted them to be.
Pansy remembered sitting in the bar and thinking, Kiss me, kiss me, goddamnit just kiss me, not wanting to make the first move because somehow that felt the same way as being too loud at a party, the kind of assumption she didn't want to make anymore. But when his fingers brushed her cheek she held her breath and leaned in toward him, too far for any excuses, and when his lips met hers it felt like falling into sunlight.
In the kitchen, three months later, Pansy wasn't angry. She laughed, reached out for his hand and pushed it into the bowl again, covering his fingers and the fine dark hair on the back of his hand, submerging everything. The tips of her fingers got it too, and she laughed as she licked them clean, stopped laughing when he grabbed her fingers with his clean hand and brought them slowly to his mouth, sucked each one.
She breathed once, in and out, eyes locked with his gray ones. "You've got me all chocolate-y," he said, never moving his eyes from hers. "I might have to take that towel off you right now to clean myself up," and Pansy thought that he could take whatever he wanted from her right then and she would let him.
But: "Just a minute," she said, "I want to get my camera first."
The chocolate was already beginning to dry into a crust around his hand, looking like a statue or a Renaissance painting, and Pansy caught it in the photograph, caught it in her mind, just as it started to crack.
After she snapped the photo, Theo fisted his hand together, breaking the chocolate up into bits, making a sound like a movie monster and reaching to grab her and tumble her to the ground, getting chocolate everywhere. Beneath the top layer, the chocolate was still wet, and it dripped down Theo's wrist, threatening to land on her stomach, her chest, her everything now bare as they lay on the floor, towel discarded she-didn't-know-where.
"It's dripping!" she shrieked, as though she didn't already have chocolate all over herself, as though she wasn't already going to have to take another shower, this time hopefully with Theodore.
"Stop moving," he said, quiet and serious. He moved his chocolate-y hand up and pushed her hair out of her eyes. "You look beautiful."
His hair was messy and his shirt collar was over his shoulder and his eyes were on her and his teeth were biting his lip and he looked about to spill over, chocolate and kisses and everything else between them.
"I love you," he said, and Pansy closed her eyes, tasted him sweet and felt him heavy and never wanted it to end.
xXx
Pansy has often questioned what made her fall for Theodore Nott (What was the moment? How can you ever be sure?), what makes her keep loving him over and over again every time she swears she'll stop. With his dark hair, dark eyes, angular face, narrow shoulders he is too much like herself, dark and twisted into corners that she can never seem to get the cobwebs out of. But instead of twisting her tighter, when she was with Theo Pansy felt herself unfolding, getting lighter, like there were kite wings attached to her frame and she could spread her arms and lift up into the sky with the right breeze.
The third picture is the hardest to look at. It's the only one of the two of them. The only one she took, anyway—there may be candids from parties and work events gathering dust in somebody else's photo album, but Pansy can't even picture what those would look like. The only one she can see is this: They're sprawled on the floor, up against this very dresser, Theo's back pushed uncomfortably against a drawer handle, Pansy leaning back against his chest.
They look like they've just fallen over because they have. She was trying to take a picture of just him, playing with angles, leaning over at the waist and shooting him through her legs—bare, since she was only wearing one of his oversized shirts—trying to capture the look he sometimes gave her when she climbed on top of him and kissed him or as he lay over her and thrummed a rhythm inside her or sometimes just when he looked up from his cereal in the mornings and smiled his one-sided smile before standing up, heading to work because he was already late.
Four months in, and by that time Theo was practically living in Pansy's flat, and the part of her mind that wasn't flooded with happiness and endorphins and good sex was buzzing with the worry of too soon and a disapproving voice warning about fast women that she knew belonged to her mother and so tried extra hard to banish.
It hadn't worked, obviously, taking a picture upside down and balanced precariously in her bare feet, the soft, crisp edges of her hair brushing across her nose and cheeks. When she overbalanced, she leaned the other way and grabbed on to him, caught his shirttails and pulled him down with her, and she was already laughing when she hit the floor. Even as she heard him groan and even as her right knee slammed into the wall, and she knew she'd find the dark bloom of a bruise there tomorrow, she couldn't stop her breathless laughter.
She'd cradled the camera against her chest, and Theodore's chest had cradled her, taking the brunt of the impact against the dresser (and he had bruises too, a big one in the center of his back and several more splotching out around it, like misshapen lily pads, and she had once had photos of those too—him laid out on the bed, sharp contrasts everywhere), his lips pressed into a thin line against the pain, but still he kissed her laughing mouth.
She unfurled the camera along her arm and held it out straight in front of them, pointing back toward their faces, and clicked. Her arm was shaking and the photo is blurry and neither of them are looking at the camera, both looking down at themselves or at each other or at some secret thing in the middle of it all, and looking at it now Pansy thinks she's never taken a photo more beautiful than that one.
xXx
That was four months—by five things had changed again, and there wasn't even a Dark Lord to blame it on this time. There wasn't anything to blame it on, really. There wasn't anything bad. There was only the blush of first months fading, and finding out that Theo's singing in the shower could get annoying (as could his hairs in the sink), and that he had slept with Padma Patil only three days before they'd gotten together and hadn't bothered to tell her till now.
There was just Pansy snapping at him when she was tired (which felt like all the time) and wanting to gossip about their mutual acquaintances and feeling miffed when Theo rolled his eyes and said, "Do we have to? We're not seventeen anymore," and making her feel like he thought her too immature for words. There was Theo getting busier at work and Pansy getting decidedly less so. Getting fired, in fact, and the freelance work she relied on for extra income not nearly enough to sustain her on its own.
"Maybe you should move in," she suggested about a week after this development, after days of crying and having Theo hold her, then shouting about the injustice of the magazine industry and having Theo let her, then drinking and having Theo kiss her until she started pressing her hands along the inseam of his trousers and he said, "Not tonight, Pans, you're drunk," and then it was back to shouting again, but this time at Theodore, and him spending the night at his place for the first time in months.
His mouth twisted up, the opposite way from his smile. "I don't know if that's a good idea, Pansy."
"Why not? You practically live here anyway."
"Practically isn't the same as actually. And I don't want to do it just because you've lost your job. I feel like we can find a better reason than that. And aren't you afraid that we'd drive each other crazy?"
Pansy was afraid of that, but she didn't want him to be. She didn't want this to feel like a fight, either, but it did. By that point they'd had plenty of fights, but only the kind that could be fixed with apologies and sex and maybe a broken dish or two. Even though neither of them was yelling, this felt bigger than that. Maybe it was because of their calm voices, maybe it was because of the way Theo reached both hands out to take hers and she saw the way his fingers looped over her own, squeezed in a way she had memorized—maybe that was why the fear came back, that if they fought now, it would all be over.
So Pansy pulled her hands away. And then was angry that she had, and then was angry at him for being so calm, and so reasonable, and for not wanting to live with her and save her and do what she wanted, damn the consequences. It wasn't fair, Pansy knew she wasn't being fair, and so she hated Theo for that too. For the way they'd spent too long only seeing what they wanted to see in each other. "Fine," she said. "I guess you'd better go warm up your cold flat then."
And most of all, she hated him for the way he didn't argue with that, the way he said, "We'll talk tomorrow," and kissed her forehead and walked out of the room. But not before she grabbed up her camera and took a picture of his retreating back, robes swishing, hair mussed from the times he'd pulled his fingers through it, hand reaching back behind him to close the door gently. She'd've rather that he slammed it. At least then she would have known he cared.
xXx
Pansy pushes down the urge to crumple that fourth picture right here and now. It wasn't that Theo didn't care; Pansy knows that. They were too similar, too scared, and too unsure that love would be enough to cement them when everything else was a precarious balancing act with different things coming out on top every day. It wasn't that she didn't love Theo. It wasn't that Theo didn't love her. But how can you be sure that that's enough? When is the moment of knowing?
Theo did come back the next day, and they talked for what felt like days after that, talked about all the annoyances they'd tamped down, the problems that could come up, and the more they talked, the more every possibility sounded negative.
And then Pansy's old editor from France owled, said she was retiring and could put Pansy up for the job, but only if she relocated immediately, and Pansy dropped everything that had started to feel so heavy she was sure she was going to collapse under the weight of it. Dropped Theo. And went to France.
Only to find that the editor had put about fourteen people up for the job, and they weren't taking outside applicants anyway, and the trip had been for nothing and it started to feel like her whole life had been for nothing.
When she caught herself getting that dramatic, Pansy went to visit her mother.
Her mother twisted her mouth from side to side, the same way Pansy did—one way in which she and Theo were different, at least, mouths going in opposite cardinal directions. "I never liked that boy," her mother said. "The Notts may be pure bloods, but they're not of the best stock," and Pansy rolled her eyes and tried to infuse ice into her voice as she said, "Mother, that's offensive and also stupid," but it felt good to have Theo badmouthed anyway.
Mother gave her some money, and Pansy got another job eventually, until she found herself right back where she'd started. Living alone, ostensibly fulfilling her dreams (because it wasn't like her job didn't make her happy, because it did, but it couldn't fill up everything), bored of kissing strangers in clubs, sitting on the floor waiting for something to happen and hating herself for it.
xXx
Pansy makes to shove the photos back into the envelope, but her fingers hover along the edges of them, jumbling them together, making the edges straight. Theodore's hand, staring right at her. If hands could stare, which of course they can't.
These aren't the only photos she took of Theodore, of course, but most of them she burned in the weeks following their breakup—in a fit of anger that she thought would lead to catharsis but never did. She must have forgotten about these, or pretended to forget, the same way she pretends she's moving because of the stove that only works on one burner and the shower water that goes cold every weekend, instead of for other becauses. Because of everything, but maybe most of all because it feels good to be moving something, anything, for a change.
She slides the photos into the envelope, creases the top as she folds it over. She could rip it in half right now, stick it in the bin along with so many other remains of the life that used to be here, but instead she pushes it back onto the top of the dresser. She can decide what to do with it when she's finished cleaning the rest.
xXx
Hours later, she's still not done, but she's getting there. Everything looks empty and dusty and windswept, like it should be a moor instead of a living room. The boxes can be dunes. Give Pansy another few minutes and she'll be the wailing maiden, no problem.
Thankfully, the impending wails are forestalled by a knock on the door
Though not for long, because standing outside, leaning an arm against her doorframe, in a long jacket with his long legs, is Theo.
She opens the door, crosses her arms, decides not to lean for fear of falling, fear of getting too close. "Hi."
His hair's gotten longer too, and he peers at her through thin fringe she wants to push back off his forehead. "Hi," he says. And then, "My mum heard from your mum that you were leaving the city."
"My mum hates your mum," Pansy says, surprised enough to tell the truth without thinking about it. "They don't even speak. And I'm just moving across town, not out of the city."
Theo's forehead creases. "No, I'm sure that's what she said. At the Ministry donors' brunch last week. I was there."
"My mum wouldn't lie," Pansy says. "Why would she?" She can't think of any reason. Unless it's to torture Theo by making him think he's driven Pansy away. That would be a surprisingly nice move on Mother's part. But Theo being tortured would only work if he cared whether Pansy were there or not.
But if he doesn't care, then why is he here?
"Why are you here?" she asks.
He rakes a hand through his hair, then rests it back on the door frame. Is he leaning closer now, or is that just her imagination? "I wanted to see you again, one last time, if you were really leaving."
"Well, I'm not leaving, so there you are, then."
She steps back, realizes a moment later that she's done it mostly to see whether he'll step forward.
He does. "Pansy. You know what I mean. Nothing was ever settled with us, not really. I wanted to talk to you."
Pansy feels something melting inside of her, like runny chocolate. She didn't want to be like this, didn't want to feel herself warming to him so quickly. She's afraid that she'll erase all his flaws in her mind once she gets close enough to smell his peppermint-y scent; the minute his hand touches hers, she'll melt entirely.
But no, she still remembers the way he pulled away, the times he never told her what he was thinking, the way he made her feel impotent without even trying, and how that was the worst part—that he wasn't even trying to hurt her, yet he managed to do it anyway.
But even with all that, she looks at the lines of strain in his neck, the way he's standing on her doorstep in his work clothes, and she takes another step back. "Come in," she says. "It's funny that you're here, actually. I wanted to show you something."
When she places the envelope in his hand, it feels right. Yes, this is the right place to dispose of these photographs. This is where they belong. She watches him flick through them, once, twice, his smile curving up his cheek, turning sad at the end but not leaving his face.
He flips back to the one of the two of them, gestures it toward her. "This is a good photo of you," he says.
"Of you too."
"Yeah, it is."
She laughs. "Oh, so you think you look good, do you?"
He laughs. "Well, how do you think I look?"
He's looking at her, and suddenly Pansy feels seventeen again. "Like art," she says, and feels a thudding starting in her rib cage and working its way up.
Theo rubs the photograph with his finger, along the edge of photo-Pansy's cheek. The Pansy in the picture leans toward the hand, closes her eyes. Theo looks down at the picture, then up at Pansy. "Art. Yeah. Too bad it's a bit blurry." His voice is uneven, but his eyes are steady on hers.
With Theo, whatever's happening on top of his face, there is always something underneath as well. And the trouble—maybe a reason, but certainly not the whole reason, for everything falling—was that Pansy could never say for certain what it was. She could ever only guess, and she guesses now.
She smiles, leans in, her hands braced against the counter between them. No matter what, they still have a lot to talk about, but Pansy finds that this is the thing she wants to say first. "Maybe, if you wanted, we could take another shot."
Theodore is already reaching out his hand.