A.N: For my own challenge, The Deadly Poisons & Common Cures on the HPFC forum. Het#26: Zacharias Smith & Pansy Parkinson, and the ingredient: Cinnamon.

Summary: Pansy was a contradiction; a false mask over what Zacharias knew was a sweeter centre.

My Cinnamon Secret

oOo

There was something about the arrogant Slytherin girl that just pushed all of Zacharias Smiths buttons. Pansy was rude, and not even in a cheeky kind of way. She was blunt, abrasive, ignorant and downright vulgar. She sneered at other people in the corridors, openly scanning them up and down with her glittering green eyes, staring them down menacingly and cackling widely at her fellow schoolmates after she had just publicly and unashamedly taunted or embarrassed them. She was a demon; a cruel, vivacious demon that thrived off the misery of others, even more when that misery was caused by her.

Zacharias hated her, like he hated most people at Hogwarts. He hated her with an intensity that burned his insides and made him feel sick to his stomach. She was the epitome of people he disliked. He hated that she was so impolite to him, though he didn't care much how she treated other people. But when she caught hold of him with her grasping gaze, her thin mouth stretching into a smirk, he hated her most of all.

But hell, he couldn't resist her.

She crashed into his single four poster bed in the Hufflepuff common room in their sixth year, that same, smirking mouth on his. She crashed in an ocean style all around him, overwhelming him with a furious passion. She was a contradiction. She sneered and scorned and scoffed at everyone around her, albeit her beloved Slytherin fellows, but when she was in his arms, she was different. She was cinnamon; savoury through the day, but by night she became as sweet as the day was long.

She would lay there in the milky moonlight, her thick, straight black hair fanned out on his pillow. She became gentle, soft in his arms, would kiss him with a tenderness that was unknown of her, would love him with a lust so passionate, something no one would ever expect of her. When she was here, asleep in his bed, Zacharias was reminded that no matter how much he disliked her, he was still happy enough to drink in her cinnamon flavoured aftertaste, watching her as she slept in his bed, and waiting for the sun to rise, when she would return to her savoury splendour once more.

oOo