A/N: This is a companion piece to Ugly. It's recommended but not required that you read that first. Pansy's backstory will make a lot more sense if you read Ugly first. Also, From Mudbloods to MuggleBorns will be in four stand alone pieces within the same universe.

From Mudbloods to MuggleBorns
Part One: The Blushing Hero


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It's her first dead body. The only dead body that she's ever seen. At the end of the war, she stayed as far away from the battle areas as possible and when her and Potter brought her Headmaster's body back to the castle, Pansy buried her head in Potter's shoulders so she wouldn't see. She still thinks it's strange that he let her, but she thinks that maybe Potter knew she was only ever on Snape's side.

It begins with sketches. They're drawn roughly at first, quick one minute sketches drawn with broken quills and bits of charcoal. Pansy doesn't fool herself. These aren't great works of art. Her own mother would be the first to state how terrible they were.

For all her fears of dead bodies, she can't stop drawing her old Head of House. Dead. The vision of his dead body plays over and over again in her head. At times, it's comforting; Pansy has no wish to ever forget the man who made her Hogwarts years bearable. So she draws his body from various perspectives with various items. In true Slytherin fashion, she grabs whatever's around, whatever's closest. One drawing was created messily with mud. Parchment covers the walls of her small flat. Quills are buried in the carpet. Ink and charcoal smudges coat the few spaces left clear of parchment. At other times, the repetitive image is maddening. She hides those drawing in her closets and shoves them into drawers. She tramples on them and crumples them up. Every now and then she tosses them into the rubbish bin only to furiously grab them out and smooth them clean.

The war's been over for a year. Severus Snape had been dead for a year. And Pansy knows that she is safer than she's ever been. It helps, really, living on the edge of the muggle world and wizarding world. Here she is safe from magic's constant threat and yet in rage of easy treatments for the muggle world's constant physical woes. But there's no Snape. No man to silently guide her. No partner in equally undesirable looks.

There's a constant ache in her chest. A constant gnawing at her stomach. She finds herself on her knees most days, sketching her terrible drawings and tacking them onto the wall with magic. She never uses magic on the drawing themselves; she still can't bear to see the sight of glistening blood.

The day Potter visits, Pansy is kneeling on the sitting room floor working on a particularly large sketch, rubbing her charcoal covered hands on the paper doing her best to get the wrinkles in Snape's face as good as possible. She'll be damned if she turns her professor into some ridiculous white knight. He would hate it.

Pansy turns her head up curiously at the hesitant knocking. She frowns and rubs a hand across her face, accidentally blackening her cheek, before standing up and walking to the door. When she turns the knob and opens the door the first thing she thinks is that Potter still doesn't look like a hero. In fact, he stands in her doorway with perpetually messy hair, shifting from foot to foot. He opens his mouth to speak but nothing comes out. He looks rather fish-like.

And everyone says Gryffindors are brave.

Pansy is tempted to ask him if he would like some gillyweed to go with that gape. Instead she raises an eyebrow and tries to maintain an aloof demeanor.

"Er…" Potter begins.

Pansy tries to pick up the slack in the conversation, but she doesn't know what to say. The time has passed for a witty remark. She leans against the doorframe and crosses her arms, waiting for Potter to find his famed bravery.

"Er…Uhm…Well, I don't actually know why I'm here," Potter finishes in a rush.

Pansy crunches her eyebrows but is silent.

"The thing is, someone mentioned you the other day, and uh, they said you live around here," he said, motioning with both hands.

Potter is the most awkward that Pansy has ever seen him.

It's strange, really, how much Pansy likes him this way.

There's a snarky comment on her lips that involves congratulating him on his sense of direction, but she quickly quashes it down. Not trusting her ability to speak without insulting, Pansy moves out of the doorway, allowing Potter entrance into her home. Uncrossing her arms, she rubs her hands on her skirt. For some reason, she's still wearing part of her Hogwarts uniform. Checking quickly, she's relieved when she finds out for certain that she didn't put the whole uniform on, just the skirt. With luck, Potter won't even notice.

If Potter notices, he doesn't say. He looks around the room with a gaze that's just as curious as Draco's but far less exacting. Suddenly, Pansy is all too aware of all the plates of moldy food that she had left out over the week and forgotten to eat. Potter steps forward and grimaces as a loud crack is heard.

"I'm so sorry," he says and bends down to clean up the pieces of charcoal. He continues to apologize, and Pansy can't help but feel that his apologizing is extraordinarily over the top for a small bit of coal.

"It's just charcoal," she forces out. It's hard to speak to Potter without insulting him. And here he was making it so easy.

She sees that the mess, including the dust and subsequent black streak is cleaned up. It took only moments.

"What were you some sort of house-elf in a past life?"

The words slip out before she can take them back and there's a pang in her heart as she remembers Dara.

Potter blushes furiously. "Something like that," he says, standing back up and holding out a hand. "Where's your rubbish bin?"

"I know you were muggle-raised, Potter, but aren't you a wizard?" Pansy asks.

Potter looks pointedly at Pansy's mussed appearance and blackened hands. Pansy bites the corner of her lip and waves to the rubbish bin in her muggle-style kitchen. Potter deposits the remains and wipes his hands over the trash.

Finally unable to quell her own curiosity, Pansy asks, "So, Potter. Why are you here?"

Potter winces at the harsh tone. "You can call me Harry," he says slowly. Looking at Pansy's face, Harry hastily adds an, "if you want to, of course."

There's a hundred thoughts running through Pansy's head but they're so interconnected she can't seem to make a single one out.

"But we're not friends," she finally says.

Potter says nothing and stares into her eyes. Flashes of her past week fly by and ending with yet another image of her Head of House.

Potter gasps. "I'm sorry," he says quickly.

Pansy begins to tell him to stop sniveling; the great Harry Potter was in her flat and doing nothing but apologizing, but Potter continues.

"I didn't," he swallows heavily, "I didn't mean to do that. Not without your permission."

What?

"What did you do?" Wait. No. He couldn't have.

"I'm sorry." He sounds pathetic. Helpless. Ashamed.

"You went through my mind? Get out. Get out now."

"It was an accident, I'm sorry. I don't quite have control over it yet."

"GET OUT!" Pansy hurls the first thing she can grab at him and she's ashamed to say it's one of her broken quills. The stupid Gryffindor doesn't even bother ducking.

"I'm sorry," he says one last time before quickly running out the door.

With a broken scream Pansy throws a mug at the closing door. Breathing heavily, she looks around her place. It sucks. She knows it. She hates everything about it. She hates the combination of magic and muggle. The two worlds just don't fit. And for the first time, she truly hates the drawings tacked on her wall. She begins going through her kitchen drawers. There's no rhyme or reason to it. She doesn't know what she's looking for or if she's looking for anything at all. But slamming them closed? That feels brilliant.

When she's slammed all the drawers, Pansy heads to the living room. She swears she can smell the stiffness of the parchment and it is overbearing. With a lunge she attacks the walls, shredding the parchment to pieces. When she's done, she waits for the ragged bits to fall to the floor, but nothing happens.

Magic.

Right. She had forgotten. She takes her wand from her pocket. How long since she had used it? A week? Two weeks? What for? What was the point?

She grips her hand around the wooden handle. It's become unfamiliar in her hand. She tries to remember the words to reverse the sticking charm. Her head is blank. The words aren't even close to the tip of her tongue.

There's a strangled sort of shriek.

Was that her?

The wand is gripped on both sides with both of her hands. The wand is trembling. No. Wait. That's her. She can see her knuckles whitening as her grip increases. She can feel magic twisting unnaturally beneath her fingertips.

It's the loudest CRACK she's ever heard. It deafens her ears and there's a strange sort of light fluctuating around the broken pieces of her wand.

The door bangs open and Potter runs into the sitting room where he looks wide-eyed at her in shock.

Pansy is frozen. The only thought that comes into her mind is that Potter finally looks like a hero with his swaying hair, aggressive stance, and a ridiculous plan forming behind his eyes. It's about time she gets to see this.

"Drop the wand, Pansy!"

Pansy. She likes hearing her name roll off his lips.

"You need to drop the wand!"

Was he an auror? He sounds as if he had done this sort of thing a lot. She hears Potter curse and race toward her. What was he doing? She feels him slam her to the ground. Well that was going to leave a bruise. Wait, why was he prying her hands open?

A piece of wood slides out of her hand. Potter hisses in pain. That's right. The wand. She finally lets go of the other piece and Potter drags her up.

"Where are we going?" she asks dazedly.

"We have to get out of here!" Potter shouts. He wraps his arm around her and Pansy thinks that he's actually holding her up and helping her walk to the door.

"But I already threw you out."

Potter trods on the mug shards from earlier and pushes her out the door first and follows behind her. Potter looks at her small home and swears. Pansy tries to turn around and catches a glimpse of her house filling with a large bright light.

"Go!" Potter yells. "Run!"

But Pansy can't. She can't take her eyes off her home.

Potter slams her down to the ground, covering her body with his. Pansy tries to lift her head to tell him that she doesn't know him that well, but Potter growls and shoves her head back down.

The house explodes.

Shards of glass, dust, and large slivers of wood rain down on them. Pansy is suddenly grateful that Potter is on top of her. It feels like forever, trapped under Potter's skinny, warm body. She can count Potter's heartbeat while laying on the ground. One thump. Two thump. Three. Four.

It stops.

"Potter?" she asks cautiously.

Not again. Not again. She can't do this. She can't have another dead body in her head. She doesn't want green and black eyes fighting for dominance in her mind.

Potter coughs and shifts his body slightly, but he's still on top of her.

His heartbeat thrums.

It must have just skipped a beat.

Though she'll later deny it, Pansy giggles.

Potter finally peels off of her and carefully helps her up. "Are you okay?" he asks.

Pansy looks from him to her house. What she means to say is 'no you foolish Gryffindor, you just destroyed my house' but what comes out is, "you're a mess."

Potter grins. "I'm not the only one. And I'm really sorry."

And although Pansy was trying to pin the blame on him, she really can't see exactly why Potter felt the need to apologize.

"Are you going to do anything besides apologize today?"

"But it's my fault your house is, well…" he trails off and gestures to the collapsed house.

Suddenly, Pansy is sick of Potter apologizing. "Look Potter, I am more than capable of tracing your culpability in this matter, but as I am the idiot who deciding snapping my wand would be a terrific idea, I think your culpability is far less than my own."

"Do all Slytherins talk like that? I always thought it was just Snape."

Pansy winces at the mention of her dead professor.

"I'm—"

"If you say sorry one more time, Potter, I'm going to find another wand and snap it with you trapped inside."

"Harry," Potter says.

"What?"

"It's Harry, please."

It was the please that did it. "Harry then," Pansy acquiesces. "And I suppose since you just had to save me from an exploding building and then shield me with your own body, you can call me Pansy."

Harry smiles and moves off his knees and wipes away a spot of dust so he can sit. Pansy sits up and turns slightly so that she's facing the wreckage of her home.

"How's your girlfriend going to take it when she learns that you just risked your life for a Slytherin you barely know?"

"She's not," Harry replies simply.

"Oh? You're going to pretend that you did nothing at all today?" Pansy never took Pott—Harry for a liar.

"She not going to take anything because I don't have a girlfriend."

"Oh." Oh. She debates about prying. Something had to have happened with the Weasley girl. But something thrums excitedly in her chest and she decides not to pry.

Harry looks relieved at the lack of questioning.

"I do hope you plan on treating me to dinner, as you are partly culpable in the loss of my house."

Harry smiles sweetly. It's an expression Pansy is unused to being given. "If you're not opposed to a muggle restaurant…" he trails off.

He's testing her. She wonders if he knows how badly she once wanted to go to the muggle world.

"Foreign cuisine could be a unique experience," Pansy answers.

The sweet smile broadens. She could get used to that smile.

Harry shakes rubble from his head as Pansy smoothes her skirt. After they're as cleaned up as they possibly can be (Pansy doesn't ask why he doesn't use his wand), Harry looks at Pansy awkwardly and hesitates before holding out his arm.

"Oh please, Pott—Harry," she stresses his name carefully, "we were just in a rather intimate position, I think I can handle joining arms."

Potter blushes. Pansy's grin is wide; she really enjoys seeing him blush. Now he looks the picture of the blushing hero that everyone raves about. For the first time in a year, Pansy sees something besides death. She sees life. Harry holds out his arm and Pansy wraps her own around his and they head off to the muggle world, their steps remarkably light for just escaping an exploding house. And if Harry left his arm too long on Pansy or if Pansy stared at Harry for just a bit longer than average, neither mentioned it.

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Reviews, comments, and constructive criticism are loved.