Title: Any Way She Has To
Author: Miz Thang
Characters/Pairing: Pansy Parkinson, mention of DM/PP
Rating: FRT
Word Count: 815
Warnings: There are none, actually.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything but the little story's idea. Everything else belongs to who it belongs to.
Summary: Pansy Parkinson wants to maybe be the next Bellatrix Lestrange, but she doesn't know how to go about that exactly. She gets a little help in the form of an owl from Draco Malfoy.
Pansy Parkinson has always done the safe thing. She's never out rightly gone against what, at the time, seems so popular. Never once did she confront Harry Potter or his band of dim wits unless it was that one time, and then, she'd been with Draco so it seemed completely different.
Now, she doesn't even know where Draco is. It bothers her for sure, she knows. Somewhere under her mind running a mile a minute as she tries to comprehend everything that happens within the last few days, weeks, of school, she worries about Draco.
Draco supposed to kill Dumbledore…Snape did it instead…Death Eaters in the school…escaped…funeral to be held…
Her mother calls her home the day before the funeral. Pansy isn't too surprised; her mother lives off the reassurance that her daughter will one day be able to reach into a Malfoy vault. And Hogwarts isn't safe anymore. Neither is Draco Malfoy or his family, but it seems as if that might be the safer bet.The safer bet.
Pansy wants to snort, but her mother's told her that it's not at all lady-like and Draco will decide not to touch her if she does anything of the sort. Pansy doesn't snort while her mother's around.Mrs. Parkinson sits across from her daughter, deeply engaged in a conversation with Narcissa Malfoy. Pansy watches them. She wonders is Mrs. Malfoy has always done the safe thing. Her sister, Bellatrix Lestrange, is a Death Eater, Pansy knows. She walks around wearing one of those black robes with a hood, killing Muggles and mudbloods, blood traitors and idiots like Harry Potter.
Pansy thinks she would like to meet Bellatrix Lestrange.
Later, when Pansy is lying in bed, she thinks about her choices again. Draco told her…a long time ago, that her family couldn't be neutral forever. They'd have to pick a side eventually, and he hoped for her sake that she picked the Dark Lord because there was no way he'd lose to an arsehole such as Harry Potter. A child arsehole, at that. That was the night of the Yule Ball. He kissed her (sometimes she thinks that was a very good night for her).
She dreams about that moment a lot (of course it ends differently). She's not completely stupid, though. Draco Malfoy is a prat and she shouldn't be worried about him, but she is. And this keeps her up all night after she finds out what happened in the astronomy tower, and a couple of nights after that.
A week after being cooped up in her rooms (she doesn't have anywhere to go and doesn't exaclty wand to leave them either), an owl lands on her windowsill. She nears it slowly, because she knows exactly who this owl belongs to and she feels her heart pounding because she almost thought she'd be in her room forever and not have anywhere to go with her life. She was almost comfortable with that.
She needs to live, she needs to have her life and feel free to do whatever the hell she feels like at the time (be the next Bellatrix Lestrange maybe), because she can't sit in her room for days, weeks, and maybe even years waiting for the War to end and the world to be safe again. She's scared of what's outside, what Draco and other people she went to school with are doing, but she knows that they're actually living because they're not sitting in their rooms worrying about what's going on outside.
They're out there.
He tells her that she needs to choose her side, that she makes the decision for her family and he's hoping she'll make the right one.
She sits with the letter for the longest amount of time and wonders whether she'll be making the right choice if she sides with Draco and the Death Eaters. She almost snorts, but then she imagines what her mother would say ("Pansy, darling, you need everything you can to win Draco Malfoy's heart-Merlin knows you don't have flawless beauty. Snorting is not beneficial to the effort of you being the next Mrs. Malfoy, now is it?"). She realizes that she shouldn't care.
She snorts and thinks that she isn't about to get an owl from Harry Potter and his misfits asking her to make a choice.
As if she matters to them.She finds a quill and writes beneath Draco's handwriting, penning out her answer:
Just tell me when. –P.
Pansy watches the owl fly away and sits back with satisfaction. She's made a choice. She's going to fight. She's going to do whatever the hell she wants to. She's going to be fearless. She's going to live.
After all, that's what she was scared of once, right? She had a fear of never living her life, and now she's going to do so.
Any way she has to.