Red Dust
A/N: The Kübler-Ross is real and widely accepted by the public, it has yet to be validated by research studies. It refers to five stages of grief, describing a series of emotional stages experienced when faced with personal loss. The model was introduced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. I own nothing related to this model.
A would-be Romance found between the pages of a Spanish dictionary.
The Kübler-Ross model refers to the five stages of grief. This story only has four. A wild guess as to which is missing.
Denial. (To not run away).
She's in Barcelona, because apparently this is what people do when they're lost:
They run.
(She's still running).
It's very easy to reinvent yourself amongst the sea of tourists and big, orange buildings that reach into the sky. She stands by the sea, watching kids thrive towards the stars, their handbags matched and shiny plastic gold, and she's quite sure she could be that type of girl, too. The feminine kind, with happy endings and brunch on Sunday-mornings. She wears girly dresses that swirl around her thighs as she twirls down the streets with strappy sandals and her head held high. Dying her hair blonde is just another step in the process; it seems natural in the perspective of things. Because there is definitely a perspective to be had on this. Surely, no blonde girl could ever harm anyone?
Because let's be frank here, nobody wants to continue being a murderous, dark-haired, Slytherin coward.
Not even Pansy Parkinson.
You can forget yourself in big cities, bigger than your heart, bigger than you. You'll fold yourself into the corners of pavement, stepped over by the hurried footsteps of a city that's far, far too occupied with itself to deal with little lost girls, who are missing their fathers.
In between the fumes, a soft notion will wander. She'll think of London, of that place she'd deemed home with its stinging cold air and the smell of excess fumes, as important people burn dead things to reach important places and move onwards in life.
There are beaches here. And promenades, people running for fun, yet going nowhere at all, and she wonders what the point is – what's the point of anything? There are colourful drinks with the umbrellas tilted quirkily on an end. Yet it never rains here.
Not like in England.
Not like in her garden back home where the lush greenery had seemed damp with sparkling dew, condensation on her lips when she'd bend and brush her lips along the lines of stiff jade on those quiet morning before her parents woke. It had been a quiet luxury, listening to the birds quickening, breaking the dawn, bringing it to her.
This place is nothing like home. There's no rushing here, in fact, everything seems to be bellied by a certain notion of nonchalance, almost standing in still-motion. She watches the sun sting her skin, tinting it full of sunshine and she'll almost forget what it is like to freeze in small huts by the British riverside, crouched low in hiding, listening for death. Running for years on no end, the map spelling out one point after another only to lead her nowhere.
It's by one of those small street corner-shops where reality starts hauling its fist at her.
His smile is wider than she remembers; with dimples tugging into his rounded cheeks and a furrow-line parting his brows. The shape of his jaw is the same, though. It's just as angled and hard-set as that image of him she nurtures inside her head, his wand held aloof and a sneer tearing across his face, skin pulled taut across wary bones. There had been fear in his silvery eyes then, too.
Despite herself, she reaches for her wallet and soon, the paper is unfolding into her trembling hands, the pages bending in the balmy heat.
Perspiration beads on her upper lip.
There's the dreadful notion of a grand wedding dancing across the yellow pages. She makes out the words dashing bride and majestic assembly before realization dawns. She reads each word carefully, memorizing each phrase and the hum of a surname that could have been hers.
She allows the whirr of his name to embrace her like an old acquaintance, remembers all the slurred word and the crisp, bitter wind that seems like such a contrast with the softness of this city. It seems impossible for the winds to be the same, as the succulent air presses on her windpipes. It's gets quite sad, Draco's smile chopping off pieces of her that she thought she needed.
It'll be years from now in the quiet of her own house when she won't be able to recall the exact timbre of his voice anymore.
See, forgetting can be a mercy, too.
Still, the days go on, like another flip of an already well-used book. She buys more things; insignificant, weak things serving a purpose for lost girls. Golden and silver coins sift through her fingers, rattling to the ground like silver bells. The sound is a comfort she needn't investigate further.
This is what forgetting looks like. Buying news off the corner of her street, their smiles ancient in their familiarity, stretched across page six. Dressing up for fun and wearing rosy lipsticks, beaming to the world. She'll think of her mother and sister and how all purebloods smile the same way, teeth for lips. Grieving with gold as it runs through their fingertips like water, spreading far, far away. Destruction running rampant in these dusty streets.
You'll never get it back, you know. Love is a face. She knows it by heart, as she stares into her father's cold eyes. Love is kind. Love is brutal. Love is the taste of metal in her mouth.
There could have been other stories than this, you know.
The world has ended and begun anew and even though she can still feel the ground beneath her feet, she's certain the soil is no longer the same. It cannot possibly be the same, not after the rumble that shook the earth, the crash that took it all away.
See, there's a notion she's been missing:
War sucks. And when it ends, it blows
(up)
Draco once told her that succeeding is a choice between winning and losing, between trying and giving up. In these red-coated streets, with red dust inside the crook of her elbow, the shell of her ear, Pansy's never really had a choice. She comes to wonder, if she's missed the opportune moment, when all her so well thought-out choices turned into dust inside her palms.
That's what her life looks like. Red dust.
It slips through her fingers, scatters through her palm, blown by the wind before being swallowed whole by the ocean. She watches it paint the water red inside her shower as it swirls down the drain; red tears sliding down her calves as she remembers powdered smiles and broken limbs.
Draco grew into a man before her eyes before shrinking back into a lost boy again. She remembers many things about him in her urge to please, to satisfy. How he liked his tea scalding, how he never touched bacon and preferred reading the newspaper a day late, finding time to do it in those late afternoons by the alcove of the tower, straining to read in the fading light. He said he liked appreciating the feeble rays, feeling their importance.
She never got that until now. Now, she's left with no choice but to appreciate the little things.
She likes walking into bookshops, imagining herself reading all those thick-bound novels, telling romantic quests where the hero ends up with the girl and the baddies die. Funny, she never imagined herself as the villain before. She tries to remember why it's fair that the winners write the history, how anyone could ever opt for truths when all you'll ever get are half-truths, the white missing black in quiet sincerity.
They're all living in Technicolor nightmares, and she's living the part of the villain. You never get it until later, until it's too late. And now red dust is her only companion.
She's never opened a novel in her life, opting for watching people and crafting her own tales, bewitching people with the intricate details of their lives. See, lies can be a beauty too.
But it's inside the crammed books-shop on the corner, between Marco's cafe and the hairdressers where she likes to go, where she first learns about the Kübler-Ross model.
She'd passed a large row of books on her usual trip around the store. Everything had been the same, even the tilted books, the slight shimmer of dust that Mr Sanchez hadn't quite managed to clean around the corners of the shelves.
It's not quite clear how it happened. Pansy doesn't even know how it happened.
She'd been walking, eyes raking across the shelves. And just like that, a book had fallen from one of the shelves, falling open right in front of her. One moment it had been on the shelf amongst the other books, the next, on the ground, slightly bashed in, dented and bruised.
The book was one of the older editions, a faded Psy along its spine was still visible, its blue corners faded. It had been no extraordinary book. But for some reason, she'd opened it. A puff of red smoke had swirled up as she'd flicked through the pages, dust drizzling onto the floor.
Despite everything, despite her thoughts and misdeeds, she'd sat down on the floor of the bookshop and read about the The Kübler-Ross model.
The Kübler-Ross model refers to the five stages of grief. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.
This story only has four.
A wild guess as to which is missing.
2. Anger
His smile is the kindest one she's ever seen.
She honestly can't believe it when it happens. There's no telling really if it's fate's playful game that has them all twisted up in a web of strings or if there's no sense to it all. But she finds him between the glasshouse and the forest, standing as if he owns the place. Sunlight is playing in his hair, painting it golden against the mosaic.
"It's famous, you know," she tells him and takes the small book from his hands. He doesn't seem surprised to see her and she guesses that… She guesses that nothing can really surprise them after that.
"They built it for him," he says, pointing towards the tower in front of them. It rises high above them, bending to the universe, striving towards the sky in impossible swirls. Almost like magic, she thinks.
They'll build something for them, too. Someday.
With red dust swirling through the air, tattooing murmurs into her skin, she turns to him.
"Let's have coffee," she says. And that look in his eyes, icicle blue and warmth in one, it pillows her, like fluffy pillows in a crappy hotel room, like sudden strangers you never expected to save you, but he will, he will, he will.
The foam is balmy against her lips, the aftertaste a bitter sting of coffee as she tips the cup back.
He's watching her across the top of his newspaper. Mathilda Magpie is zooming in and out of page nine, half folded across the half-eaten croissant on his plate. A tentative smile curves along her lips, her lashes dipping low to brush against her cheek as she orders another batch of cake. He watches her eat it all, his eye intent on her.
"So, what brings you out here?" She asks with an air of politeness.
He gives her a peculiar look, his head tilted to one side. "The same as you, I suppose."
"I thought Gryffindors were supposed to be brave?"
"And I thought Slytherins were supposed to be villains."
He tastes like the last day on earth.
She figures they'll watch the burning of their world together, watch the towers crumble to ashes. They'll bathe in the ashes of the dead, yearning for mornings after and not the months, years passed following this point of no return.
His fingers find tracks on her skin no one's seen before. He recurls her toes and lifts her smiles. It's easy. She's never noticed how easy it can be before now.
He likes his coffee black, she likes hers milky and sweet. No one said they'd be compatible.
"You ought to return."
It slips out, sometimes. Some times. Only sometimes.
With the balmy heat and there's a sudden intake of breath; an exhale for what seems like eternity. Like waiting for the world to stop, to halt in this moment.
"Not much to return to, now is there?"
She doesn't ask. Nor does he. Mourning is not a coat to be worn for longer than a day, yet they've made black their daily greeting to the sun. The shine strings to their charcoaled coats, toasting them alive until all that will remain is ash and dust, red dust.
She'll pretend the deep scars cutting across acres of her skin are maps written in a language she has yet to master. That there is some kind of wisdom to the dents and curves trapping the shape of her hip, in a broken pattern. Once denied, twice denied, thrice attempted murder.
She'll stand in front of her bathroom mirror, gazing into her reflection's eye at that stranger who has come to share her name. Those old scabs on her knuckles have healed and the bruises along her neck, shoulders and thighs have all faded into a yellowish hue. The lick of the fire remains, burned like a shrine behind her eyes. Those are the invisible murmurs of war that play lullabies to their nights.
She wonders if they'll built hills on these ashes of theirs, too.
Even amidst the desert there shall be heartache, too.
"If it's so horrible, you can just –"
Run.
That's not fair to say.
She knows this, brushing a red-dusted hand across her forehead, trying to look at him, trying to meet him half-ways. Always half-ways, gazing at his stubbly jaw, the soft pucker of his lips. Counting freckles or ickle smiles that never seem to convey what she needs.
He's silent. She'd always thought her father's thundering anger was the worst kind of malice, but she was wrong. It's the silence. It's the naked silence, falling between them. Filling these empty rooms and hallways, where sorrow pit-patters in with the maid.
He stares out the window, his blue eyes acid like the naked sky. Like open windows, opening out to the streets, embracing the world – embracing her.
"It hasn't rained here for months, you know," he says then.
The space between them is always empty. The white linen of this traitorous bed stretches across the room, touching both of them. She eyes it, silent.
"It always rained in England," he wears half a smile, picking apart a napkin. "It never stopped raining there. I always wished for it to stop raining, yet now I think the blazing heat is worse. There's dust everywhere.".
Her lips are tight, a wide-eyed murmur.
"Sometimes dust can be nice."
He flashes a half-smile, the void vacant of words. There are red-blown shades crinkled in the corners of the linen on the bed.
He leaves the clothes in his suitcase by the door.
As if something or someone is keeping it from making its way across the room to the bed. Their apartment is a colony of felonies, of postwar ghosts lounging amongst the red-dusted rubbles of their lives.
He brings out his name in the open, talking over dinner and joking with it into corners. She scrapes back the floorboards and dusts him into the cracks; spreads his name to the wind. She refers to her, not by name but by the flutter of her eyes, clearing her throat dryly. He leaves her name hanging everywhere, on tapestries, across his heart, slewn hazardless against the corporal bodies lying on their living room floor, which they step over every morning upon waking.
She's not sure he knows how hurtful it is. Her name is like pain, rising in her throat, like red dust coating her fingertips, dusted into the cracks of her shoes for decades. They carry it with them everywhere, scattering it amongst them. He fills her backpack with dust, she sprinkles it across his side of the bed, on his morning toast.
People say thanks for the memories, but she's not sure they realize how hurtful they can be, how they pester and evolve in your head. There's dust in her mouth, her throat dry as the desert.
"Hey love," His lips smudge across her jaw, then pick up again, a heart beat against her neck. She tries to absorb the murmur, trying to bring herself to meet his eyes. Flecks of dust prickle her cheekbone, needle pricks against her mouth as she closes her eyes to the warm timbre of his voice.
Years later, the smell of coffee still stirs her, the tick of her heart halting for the sound of it. She'll wonder, if it had been the suitcase's fault all along, for their demise.
Thanks for the memories.
Loverboy likes his eggs sunny, the coffee black and her smiles ancient.
She'll hate him because it's the only thing she's ever been able to do with him. It's affection of the past as much as it's a habit. She sure isn't one for promises.
Neither is he.
She makes him eggs the sunny side up. He likes it that way and she likes to keep him happy. Their affections are simple like that.
She still can't get rid of the dust inside the apartment. His suitcase is still unpacked, by the door.
She sprinkles red dust across his eggs. He likes it that way.
For a time, so does she.
"Hey there." His smile presses into the nape of her neck, a sweet murmur into her skin.
They like living in glasshouses. He presses smiles against her skin, searing smiles that may light up her soul. The walls may crumble to red dust here, but at least they're see-through.
They'll see them coming for miles.
3. Bargaining
She didn't see her coming for miles.
Her smile hadn't been the worst part. Nor had it been the way her hand would linger a moment too long on his arm, evading memory. She hadn't screamed and she hadn't cursed.
There had been very little things she had actually done.
She remembers inconsequential things like the weather and how the blueness of the sky had burnt through his eyes, the exact tremor of her lips and the muted pause after his name left her lips.
Then it had all sped up quite quickly after that.
It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment when it changed. When yes became no, and bruised promises became distant promise lands of long lost survivors. And just like that, the rescue boat had come.
In the boat, there had only been room for two.
And that spot has never been hers.
She swears that suitcase had moved on it's own. She's certain the dawn has never looked as lonely as it did on those early mornings when she woke to find the bed still empty and untouched, his shadow far away.
And every morning, she moves it back to its spot again.
This city is kind, its arms a warm embrace of red-dusted murmurs. It may be solidarity, it may be sadness.
They don't talk about the unkindness. They don't talk about the moon or distant islands. They don't talk about anything, really.
In the end, there had been very few words said. There had been very few things left to consider. This thing, which they had shared, had been washed away with the shore, erasing everything in its wake.
"Pansy," he had said, and even then it had sounded too sincere, even for him.
They never did sadness, they never did reality. Their world was red-coated glasshouses with no black horizon in sight and no darkrooms to hide in.
The crime scenes aren't found here. The stale smell of death is barely masked by the flowers she's planted in the window. There's a graveyard in the corner of their bedroom which they both have to cross every morning.
She can't really blame him that he sought away.
"Ron," Hermione had said, her mouth a rosy flutter of malice nectar.
You didn't expect her to be all good, now did you?
She used to be a murmured grace across their kitchentable, a skeleton amongst the rubble of their battlefield. Now she's become the bruise on his neck, an unbuttoned shirt and the constant smell of betrayal that seemed to overpower every other smell in the room.
Even the smell of death.
It's a distant memory, the end of them.
There could have been meaner words said. There could have been sadder words. Lost touches. But let's not pretend that this is love.
Maybe, in the distance of pride, she'd say the room had gone cold when he'd stepped inside it. That her heart had stopped when he'd smiled that crooked smile at her, Hermione strewn across his unbuttoned shirt.
"Hello."
"Hello."
Pansy doesn't know how to end things, only how to begin again, and again. So when Ron says so long, sugar, all she can do is nod. She doesn't know what to do with that.
There isn't enough air in the room to circulate the dust, and it hangs in suspended animation, backlit by the small window behind his shoulder. His eyes are wide, honest in a way, she supposes but she's lost sight of simple things like these. Something flickers in his eyes, something she doesn't understand- doesn't want to understand. Like reverence, like she's a china doll and beauty and he can't possibly see something like that in her.
"She doesn't look very different," she comments at the ceiling.
His voice is slow and stale. "She isn't –" He pauses and she hears him smack his lips, thoughtful for a second. "No. She's not very different. That's what so great about her."
The red particles hang suspended in the air between them, stirred slowly by their exhales. There's a red coat of powder across the bridge of his nose, the furrow in his forehead clear.
"Pansy -"
He murmurs her name like a soft brush of breath against the sticky side of her forehead. She closes her eyes and listens to the beat of this city, her lips dry and drained of dust.
"Ron."
The wholeness leaves her the moment his fingers slip from her skin and she's back then, chasing his touch like a puzzle, giving her life meaning. The warmth of his breath feels like the summer breeze and the flutter of his eyelashes against cheeks feels like salvation. His stuttering breath feels like surrender. Red coated in their surrender.
"Don't be sad," he shifts, icicle eyes embodying her. "Don't be… sad."
There's an assumption here and she feels the anger curl in her stomach before the words are out.
"Don't kid yourself," she snaps and the words sound like a lie to both of them. The sounds of his footsteps and the door shouldn't scare her, but they do.
The next day, the suitcase is gone.
She still avoids those damn mirrors.
4. Depression
Time is patient. Time is kind. Time puts everything in perspective, turning it around and then remerging from the shore like a distant, lost lost friend.
She's not sure they would ever have built that hill for them.
She'll buy postcards, the whimpering smiles all screaming wish you were here, and she'll pretend there's someone at home to tell that to.
Love disappeared slowly, like baby teeth, like forgotten warriors and the tide, taking things she thought she needed.
It finds her, at a wedding.
It's the pinpoint sarcasm when the thunder rolls in amidst the party. There had been a tent, old English mastiffs and the faces fuzzy, but familiar.
He's in the bobbles of her champagne-flute, bubbly like nostalgia, rampant like her heart. And each time she moves, he's in the curve of her jaw, the jab of her knee against white tablecloths, the dab of dust coated on her upper lip.
It's all about him and he's not even there. It's the murmur of his voice in the violins and his laughter on the radio.
It's never saying goodbye, eerie empty apartments and goodbyes they never said.
When they end, it's in London.
She's been rushing along the cobwebbed streets, glancing at windows and buying things she doesn't need until his feet come into view.
He's kind of annoying like that.
"Hey."
"Hi."
It's drizzling and the streets are a tight buzz of twirling umbrellas, yet neither of the two carry any. It's the soundtrack of drizzle and dribble and puddles with rainboots, yet she's wearing strappy sandals and a sunhat.
She thinks she catches a nostalgic smile at her shoes.
"You look well." Her voice fails to carry any malice, her murmur soft and warm.
He leans sideways, his body heavy against the marble building, his hair sticky against his forehead.
"You don't."
"Well," her hands wrap around her coat, the fur sticky and tight and choking with heat. "Can't have everything, now can we?"
"No," Ron says, quiet and dark, "We can't."
It surprises her sometimes, just how much she remembers.
5. Acceptance
Yeah, this isn't happening.
Barcelona is like Sunday morning after a large hangover. Stale, and churning to the stomach.
She's in that café again, thumbing through newspaper smiles. It's those games she plays, these strangers she meets and greets. Sometimes, when walking those balmy avenues, she finds her eyes lingering on redheaded tourists, her heart jumping in a pit-patter for seconds.
Then it passes.
There are stories here to be had, she knows this, thumbing magazines and papers. It all continues in a blur. Even stories like her own. The war-stories have settled down now. No more horrible reminders of rubbles and grey-matted faces adorn the pages. Now it's a void of colour. It seemed impossible, but the grey everyday life settles into newspaper edits, finally, like a blessed wind circling overhead. Like sunshine etched onto print.
Until one day.
His smile is the kindest one she's ever seen. Then it washes away. Those blue icicle eyes that turn the page. A signal perhaps, a large signal. She doesn't have to read it, the message sticks clear, like Monday morning bliss and his coffee breath.
Wedding bells and puffed out powdered pies. She doesn't close the paper, but studies their picture, mapping his hair and one wrinkled grin. She even taints it with coffee, leaving her mug resting on them, for safekeeping so that the wind doesn't pick it up and carry it away.
There's red dust collecting in the corners.
Her throat itches. Dust swirls in the wind.
Red dust.
fin.
A/N: Apparently this is what happens to me when I go to Barcelona: I write sad post-war Pansy Parkinson fics? This was while I was twirling in my forest green dress down in the metros of Barcelona, feeling all too impossibly beautiful and whole. I have a tan now, for the first time in a year, a feat mastered only by sheer will and determination. I think I could live like this forever. Skin-cancer be damned. I've painted my nails turquoise; it's an ode to the eighties. It seems I'm always making these small tributes. As I'm writing this, a stuffed giraffe is staring at me from the apartment across mine. It's ruining the mood the teeniest bit; angst does not cope well with stuffed animals.
I'm watching Barcelona pass me by, which is very noisy I must say, and full of excess fumes and cameras. Anyways, inspiration hit me down below these streets of this dusty city, clear like a lightening bolt. So this is basically what came out of me in between sunscreen and Hemingway.