Disclaimer: Harry Potter and the characters and situations in it belong to J. K. Rowling, not me. Furthermore, this fic is based off the plot of a music video which is copyright to a record company whose name I cannot find out. If anyone knows then could they please tell me? I want to disclaim properly... :)
Challenge Name: The Sheherazad Challenge
Challenge Issuer: Sinistra Black
Where?: Harry Potter Fanfiction Challenges Forum
Challenge: It changes every day, and all responses must therefore be completed and posted within 24 hours. I took day 17's challenge, 'Music Videos' Storyline', in which I was given a music video (Crazy Love Song by Seeya) to base a fic off. You can find it on YouTube with English subs if you look (though the lyrics didn't really play a part). I asked for a pairing and was given Harry/Pansy.
Notes: Originally I put this on my lj because I was nervous about it... Harry sure is difficult to write! And a day isn't much time to write and fully edit a story in, not when you consider the fact that I can't possibly have been working on it for 24 hours all told. But let's see what you think of it. I'd be interested to hear any comments you may have. All reviewers are much loved, so please do review! I hope you enjoy it.~
"A patient really shouldn't be smoking when she wants to get better," said Harry, automatically taking the cigarette from her hand. He held it up and stared at it; briefly, he wondered whether he should put it to his own lips.
Pansy scowled as she watched his clear hesitation fade away. He was smoking her cigarette... but her whispered admonishment was soft. "Just give me one puff..."
It wasn't his fault.
The dark night and the wheels on ice and she was walking in the road.
His car came to a sharp halt, the screaming tires nothing to the pounding in his ears as he failed to comprehend what had just happened. He had hit someone.
It wasn't his fault... was it?
She'd been walking in the road.
Might not walk again now.
If he got up now, it wasn't his fault.
If he got up now, she would be okay.
If he got up now.
If he got up NOW.
Her eyes, though, they're accusing. He's stayed by her side as she's lain in hospital, wrapped in so many meaningless words from the Healers, protected and monitored by magic he can't even begin to understand. All he knows is she's still breathing, still living, and maybe she'll wake up and tell him what he wants to hear.
As long as he stays here, and doesn't get up.
But her eyes are accusing, when she wakes up, even when he blurts out "I'm sorry" and "Please can we talk?"
"Why didn't you... just let me die instead?" is all she says, and, in that moment, Pansy Parkinson is more exposed than he's ever seen her.
He doesn't know what to say. Just as long as he doesn't get up and leave her. Because if Harry had a saving people thing, Pansy Parkinson had just proved herself as a person. As a person needing to be saved.
Ginny comes round and it's such a relief, but he barely even notices her words. Just that she is there.
And then they're forced to leave.
He's got up and Pansy's still there, and all he can dream of is her blood on the pavement and his shoes, and him just walking, walking, walking away.
"You're here again," she says, and there's a hardened tone to it now, the tone she developed to stop her surprise showing through in her voice when he kept coming back. "Don't you have anything better to do, Potter?"
Harry shakes his head. "This is why I didn't let you die."
She closes her eyes, and the hardness dwindles, a little. "To... annoy me?"
"No. To give you the cigarettes you asked for," he says, and offers one to her lips. He frowns as he does it, but still he does it.
"And slowly kill me," quips Pansy, brown eyes opening but staying locked on the ceiling. "Smart, for you."
They pass the time quietly as he helps her to smoke, but soon she tires, even of that. "Perfect Potter... really doesn't have anything better to do? No one to save?"
"I'm saving you," he says, before he knows it. He'd meant to say, "I'm not the saviour everyone thinks I am."
But Pansy obviously knows that anyway, because she gives the kind of sarcastic laugh she'd perfected at school and tells him to leave her alone again.
She slaps him.
Molly Weasley slaps him.
She says she wants to snap him out of it, snap him out of whatever is possessing him to spend so many of his days in hospital helping to care for someone who has never liked him - whom he's never liked. She tells him that Pansy is just using him because she needs his help. She tells him that Pansy is using his guilt over the accident to control him, change him. She tells him that he is hurting everyone.
She tells him that he is hurting Ginny most of all, even more than he already has.
Harry flinches, and then he feels like an idiot, but he can't think of an answer back other than the honest truth - and that has always had a tendency to sound stupid whenever he says it.
Still. "Do you know where I was going the night I ran over Pansy?"
She's still now, too. "No."
"Neither did I."
And he walks out of the party.
He can't look at Ginny, but he feels her gaze on him. Always, these days.
Still he walks away.
He comes in with flowers, because she hasn't got any, but when he gets into the room Pansy already has a visitor. One of her first apart from him, as far as he knows. That would explain the lack of flowers, anyway. ...Well, he hadn't liked to ask.
It's Ginny, though. The red of her hair stands out so clear in that dull room. Flowers seem vague and watercolour beside it.
So he stands in the doorway, just watching them talk. Ginny doesn't seem angry. Neither does Pansy. Pansy... proud Pansy, still in bed, still unable to walk. And Ginny, so free and loving... loving of him.
At first, he just felt like he wanted to save Pansy - no one else would. Now he's not so sure. He wants to help her walk, even if that means she walks away from him.
I want to be with her till the end, he thinks, and then he thinks, Do I even know myself any more?
Pansy notices him first, and her expression is guarded as always... more guarded. More closed-off than she even first was.
Ginny stands up, slowly, her eyes locked with Pansy's in a gaze of understanding as she tells him that she needs to talk to him for a moment. Harry leaves the flowers by Pansy's bedside and he last sees her staring at them, not with an expression of disdain as he'd half-thought she might (Harry doesn't know any of the language of flowers, so he wouldn't really know what was suitable), but with something that looks like loneliness.
"Harry," says Ginny when they get outside, "she had a miscarriage."
Involuntarily, his hand moves to her body and covers her stomach for the briefest of moments. But then she flinches back and he thinks, Do I even know Ginny anymore?
"She's hurt because of her love for another man," argues Ginny, willing him to understand that she really means herself in that statement.
But he doesn't. "She's hurt because of a loss she needs to overcome, Ginny," Harry says, with such a knowing tone that she thinks he must know, after all.
But then she remembers the war and all that Harry's lost and all that she - no, they, have lost and she stands aside and lets him pass her. Perhaps when he has helped Pansy, she reasons, he will be able to help himself.
She will just have to walk unaided until then. They have to help themselves before they can help each other - she knows that.
Still tears sting her eyes.
"I don't know anyone," Pansy denies.
The hardness in her voice is no longer there, but then it's been four months. Four months of slowly trying to understand each other. Of slow recovery. Of standing up and stepping forward, only to have to lean on him again.
She's still proud. She hates how much she depends on him, especially as he's him. She hates how little she understands why he is doing this - because it can't just be because she needs saving. She hates that Draco and Daphne and Blaise never stayed an inch of the time that Harry has, and how Theo... well, Theo had taken his mile and did what he did best. Run from his problems.
At least Harry's gaze challenges her. At least he keeps her alive.
"I don't know anyone anymore," Pansy denies again, and she especially hates that she's saying all this to an empty house and silence.
"I'll love you till the end," he says to her, and Ginny can't help but shake.
"I loved him, you know. Like I loved you," she says, and everything seems vague and watercolour now.
Harry fights to keep his anger in check. "You still haven't told me who it was."
"It doesn't matter," Ginny whispers. "Because this is the end. And you will only love her beyond that end."
They're both shaking now. "I don't even know who I am anymore, Ginny."
"She does."
Just a moment ago smiling.
He loved to make her smile. Not the scornful smile of school days, but the genuine, you-still-surprise me kind of smile. If she could make him do that, he wanted to be able to do that to her, too.
Just a moment ago smiling, and he'd wanted to believe the smiles were his fault, that he could make her forget how Nott had ran out on her, how her family had disowned her for being pregnant out of marriage then welcomed her back again when the baby died. How she was still trying to fully recover from her accident despite the Healers telling her not to bother, how she would always feel that lingering 'If...'
Just a moment ago smiling at how beautiful she is.
But then she's tumbling. Down, down, down, and he can only stare after her and then down at her and then think, If she moves now.
If she moves now.
If she moves NOW.
But she doesn't.
...
He follows her, walking on that same road that he never really asked her why she chose.
Just a moment ago smiling, and the end is just one moment among many.
Again Harry said, "The patient shouldn't be smoking," and took another drag.
Pansy's scowl did not leave her face as she this time demanded it back.
"Potter."
The surname was enough warning and the cigarette left his lips. He pressed it to hers. A kiss. "Starting tomorrow, I will be beginning your new task," he told her, firmly.
He would help her walk, and no amount of pride on her part would stop him. Nor would any amount of wondering whether she would just walk away when she could, much as that pained him.
Instead of speaking further, lying to each other and sharing false smiles, they simply shared that cigarette. Their kiss.