Will you still love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful? Will you still love me when I've got nothing but my aching soul? Lana Del Rey, Young and Beautiful

Pansy drank a great deal of wine. Her family's cellar was stocked full with it; for all of her parents' sins, they had never touched liquor. It was dirty. It was primitive.

Pansy had no such qualms.

Her parents couldn't scold her now anyways, wasn't death the ultimate silencer? They had died in the war, clever enough to side with the strong, not clever enough to survive. They left their estate to their only child, the sole heir to the Parkinson name.

The Mansion was a respectable size, as was their Gringotts vault. Enough money to support a lone witch hell bent on drinking every drop of wine in the cellar.

So Pansy Parkinson, the social butterfly of Slytherin House spent her days; slinking through the Parkinson mansion in her long sheer robe with the ever present glass of wine in her hand.

Maybe people thought she had lost it, shuttered up on her family's ancestral grounds, all but a hermit. They wouldn't be totally wrong.

Pansy was a creature of darkness and the night in all of its beauty; a lover of sin and transgressions. Those things entranced her. After The Dark Lord's defeat, her world had been cruelly exposed to blinding light. There had been no corner or crevice to hide in.

And like a proverbial snake, hadn't she shied away from it like the cold-blooded creature she was?

Others had learnt to embrace the new world and the light that came with it. Blaise Zabini had made a fortune helping to rebuild the Wizarding World, restoring all the damage and destruction. Even Draco Malfoy, the Slytherin Prince, had learned to adapt.

He was doing quite well, engaged to Astoria Greengrass now. Not that that meant anything to her, she didn't feel forgotten or betrayed, Pansy was just fine when she received the news. It was only Draco Malfoy, the only person she could truly trust to stand by the old ways. Her heart wasn't rotting inside of her, and if it was, then any pain had long since been dulled.

Everyone else had moved on to embrace the world that Harry Potter, the Fucking Boy Who Lived, had made possible.

Not Pansy. The light was merciless, leaving no shadows for Pansy to wrap herself in. It exposed everything.

The new world said that the old ways were wrong, outdated and ludicrous. Tradition and ceremony were tossed out carelessly like broken toys that had been outgrown.

All the things that had lifted her up during her school days now tore her down. All that had made her bright and special now ceased to exist. Pansy felt like nothing.

She had never been beautiful, Pansy knew this, but the Parkinson name carried more weight than some and that had given Pansy something to cling to; to build upon. It stood for tradition and a vault full of gold, these things lifted her up.

She had been popular, in her own charming, terrible way. There was a kind of power that she wielded then. When she spoke, girls had listened, the things she said carried weight. When she had stood up before the Battle of Hogwarts to expose Potter, had not the Great Hall turned to her?

Now, no one called on her. At first there had been a pathetic handful of letters but then her solitude had been self-imposed. When she finally emerged she found that no one had waited for Pansy Parkinson in the changing world. She had been forsaken and left to wither in nostalgia. The pedestal she had built during those seven years at Hogwarts had come tumbling down and she was left with dust and ashes.

But that had been nothing compared to the feeling that overcame her when she had looked to the newspaper and seen photos of Draco Malfoy, her Draco, with little Astoria Greengrass. Together.

All those years at Hogwarts with him had fallen to the wayside. Maybe she had lost him when the Dark Mark appeared on his arm when they were sixteen; maybe not. Perhaps Astoria Greengrass had replaced Pansy; but hadn't he known that he had been her entire world? Theirs was young love, first love, everything new and exciting and oh-so grown up. But then, they had all grown up too fast.

Hadn't Draco known that he had been the shooting star that illuminated her otherwise plain life? Hadn't they been perfect together? He had been her whole world. Maybe he had forgotten. Or maybe it had never meant that much to him.

She didn't know which was worse.

It tormented her really. Her whole being seemed to strain to go back in time; to delve into the past and discover where their paths had started to separate.

But she couldn't.

So she sat alone in her vast house with her wine glasses and tortured herself with questions until eventually she became too numb to even recognize the sharp pain of heartbreak. Or anything else for that matter.

Sometimes Pansy wondered if that was the reason she had locked herself away. She wasn't sure if she could bear to casually run into him on Diagon Alley. Pansy knew she was a coward; but then Slytherins weren't known for their bravery.

She thought that facing the actual reality of his indifference would be unbearable.

Pansy had at least thought that Draco would be as unchangeable as she was; that their natures were reflections of each other, they were so similar. Two halves in a whole.

But she had forgotten how Slytherin he was. Slytherins adapted, putting all their cunning and ingenuity to the sole task of surviving before rising to the top; self-preservation was the highest rule. And he had always been the most Slytherin of them all. Pansy had realized all of this and loved him more as she began to despise him.

In her stiff defiance of the new world full of change that was emerging around her, Pansy kept everything the same.

But no one cared.

What a sick joke.