Disclaimer: Not mine.
Breathing
"Sometimes--there's God--so quickly!"
Blanche Dubois in "A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennessee Williams
Young death twists Pansy's heart into a tight knot and makes it hard to breathe. When her father died, she was three years young for about two weeks. "He had a heart condition," Mrs. Parkinson said, "it wasn't unexpected." But when death comes early, it is so sudden and things like swift, almost hasty death leaves Pansy with uneven palpitating heartbeats that go too fast and too strong. When her father died, she was afraid that her chest might explode. The pain in her heart makes her blubber like she has a scraped knee. Her mother calls this mourning.
When Pansy discovered that Johnny, her beloved puppy dog, drowned in the lake while Pansy was away at her Grandmama's, her mother's piece of blueberry pie à la mode dumped itself in her lap. Pansy only gapped at Mrs. Parkinson with her mouth hanging open, trying to get breath into her child-sized lungs. "Mummy," she whined, "Mummy what have you done?" Mrs. Parkinson, with purple stained robes, only glared at Pansy with her mouth pursed in anger. She pushed away Pansy's small scrabbling fingers and ignored her cries of, "Mummy, Mummy it hurts. Make it stop, make it stop!"
When Pansy's best friend disappeared off the face of the earth, Pansy knew that Death had come to interfere in her life once again. Pansy waited and waited for the pretty doll-faced girl from the village nearby her home to show up at their secret meeting place for two weeks before she broke and screamed at her mother to tell her where Camille had gone. Mrs. Parkinson replied with a shaking finger and a scolding, "Don't play with the muggles Pansy darling. They'll dirty your mind and sully your name." Pansy threw up a little, but dashed away from her mother before she could anymore. She ran to the oak tree on the outskirts of the Parkinson land and tried to inhale the air living in the tree. Camille had said that trees gave off oxygen, hadn't she? She sagged in grief alongside the oak and scratched her fingertips raw on it's bark with hope of drawing strength from it. Pansy never again went near any muggles. It hurt her too much to do so.
When Pansy went to Hogwarts, she was confident that death couldn't touch her there. She was right until her fourth year when her right became a wrong when that goddamned Hufflepuff had to go and get himself killed. Pansy stayed away from the leaving feast, there was bound to be mention of Cedric Diggory's untimely death. Instead she stayed in her dorm and wiped with one hand her salty, damp cheeks and with the other, she thumped at her chest to try to get her heart to start beating at a calmer pace. It didn't calm until she cried herself weary and found tentative, ephemeral peace that comes with sleep.
Now Pansy watches Draco's every move because Draco, despite being sorted Slytherin, isn't the calculating type. He acts before he thinks and gets himself into loads of trouble that one day could lead to more harm than Pansy is willing to let happen. Pansy keeps track of him with wide open eyes and wishes for a nose less resembling a pug's so that her breathing doesn't get so difficult every time Draco does something stupid to get himself hurt. Pansy is determined that she die before Draco does because if he dies Pansy is afraid that her heart might actually explode and dribble out her nose and mouth and ears. Her mother says to Pansy to "stop worrying, it's never going to happen", but Mrs. Parkinson said that her father had heart problems and Pansy remembers red thick blood drip dripping from the natural holes in his head.
Now Pansy's eyes shine out behind her dark fringe as Draco eggs Harry Potter on. He sneers out vulgar things about the volatile boy's parents and Potter being rightfully defensive whips out his wand and spits out a spell that Pansy couldn't hear over the loud erratic thumping of her heart. But Pansy did see Draco fall and his eyes close and she felt her head throbbing as she screamed and screamed and screamed. Then her heart stopped. And as she clawed at her chest and as her vision blackened, she saw Draco's chest lift up--and breathe.
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