mad mad (love)
hope you will enjoy it (the first paragraph is strongly inspired by the steve/nancy break-up in Stranger Things)
Drunk Pansy was everything like Sober Pansy.
Loud, angry, mean. The only difference was that Drunk Pansy swore a lot more than her alter-ego.
A lot more.
"You are such a dick, Regulus. It's bullshit, everything is bullshit. You think you can be just like…just like your stupid golden brother but you can't 'cause it's bullshit."
"Gimme the towel, Pans'. You are not going to clean anything like that." Regulus said, a patient curve on his mouth and the edges of his face too damn sharp.
He was tired. Definitely tired. Tired of his parents, of his big irresponsible brother, and now, painfully tired of his drunk girlfriend.
But hopefully, Pansy's insults were like a really bad song in the background, just like an annoying pop song heard too many times.
"Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Regulus, this bathroom is…"
He took the towel and began to clean Pansy's dress (it was one of her favorite, black and white stripes, bare back and pricey) with it, scrubbing the wide tequila stain on the tissue.
"Yeah, I know. Bullshit, love." His fist was clenched around this hideous monogrammed towel, and even if his face did not show it (he is the responsible and mature one, he cannot let go of the legacy, of the duties, of the pressure and if he is not enough for this world, for his name and for mom then it will –), he was seriously mad.
Because, yes, somehow Pansy was right. This party was messed up and they should not even be there. But, to be totally honest, he should not even be with her.
September 2009 (a year before the so-called party of the decade)
He was the heir of a fortunate family, a financial student in one of the most successful business school of the Coast (where you had to wear ties and uniform and pressure, pressure, pressure – it was okay)
Regulus Black was perfect under every angle, every light (even boy bathroom's spots): chiseled cheekbones, dark pupils and long eyelashes. He had just a problem in the shape of his big brother's shadow and of the hole left in their family when he has left.
Panic attack (shaking hands, sweaty palms, racing, beating heart and the noise in his head and the pain in his chest and the fear. It was like drowning, deeper and deeper –). Luckily, the boy's bathroom was often empty, washstands in cold tiles, and colder water rushing on his face.
Quiet.
One day, he inspires and expires until the last words of his brother in a short text message stop forming a knot in his stomach. It's like a burn.
Quiet.
He grips the sink and counts up to ten.
Quiet.
Except, someone come in and then, it is not someone but long legs and black eyes.
"What are you doing here, Parkinson?" he asks, short-breathed.
He hoped she did not noticed but she does. She catches a glimpse at him, quickly, in the reflection of the large mirror. She has a high-end mascara wand in her left hand and a red lipstick tube in her right end.
He keeps his head down, hair falling onto his face, but between the locks he is still able to see her. Looking away, focusing on her Chanel mouth, skilled hands and wide grin.
"There is too much trouble and gossips in the girl's bathroom. Makeup requires concentration."
Quiet. Her words are like a blanket.
She finishes painting her upper lip before letting her eyes linger on him, again.
"And you, Black? Why are you here?"
He does not want to answer. She is a Parkinson, one of the biggest familial investor of the Sacred 28, a multinational corporation. Everyone is aware of who he is. A second choice, a second son. The one who has to work harder, faster.
"Concentration." he whispers quickly, loosening his grasp on the marble sink.
"Good"
She nods.
In the blink of an eye she's gone but he's still there. Acid burning in his whole body at the thought of his brother, turning the world upside down in some public college in Manhattan; fear of his own name beating like his pulse and –
He smells the air. Noticing the absence of the usual chemical-detergent-soap odor and noticing the presence of –
Perfume.
She does not talk to him outside of the boy's bathroom, after that. And quickly, it becomes obvious that she does not talk to him in the boy's bathroom neither. (She kisses him on their third meeting. Before she applies lipstick of course. He does not know why and he does not know how. One second, she is looking at him, curiosity shining in her pupils like if he was some insect under her microscope, then the next one, she has a hand behind his neck and he cannot tell the difference between his breath and hers.) "Parkinson" he manages to say, while she is busy, kissing a soft spot under his jaw.
"Yes?"
"It's secret. You and I. I cannot be –"
She bites him and he knows that it is definitely not a mistake. However, his words may be.
"Associated to my name?" she teases, her lips moving from him so she can look him in the eyes and observe how bad he deals with criticism. "You are nothing, Black. Behind this door, there is plenty of boys like you. Boys who look at my lips when I speak and at my ass when I walk."
There is a silence. He waits for her to leave but she does not make a move and they stay too close to step back. He knows who she is behind this shiny door too. A girl who wants the best, desire and crave for a career made of gold and champagne.
"I like you." He confesses after an intense minute of listening to the cycle of his thoughts running in circle and the sound of his blood hitting against his temples. "My family is complicated and…I must not be distracted by your lips or your butt or your hands or your scent… not in public."
She smiles. He could say that it is because she knows him but she doesn't. However, she reads the economic newspaper so she has to know about the almost bankrupt of his family's company.
"I don't do secret relationship" she lies without even trying to make it convincing.
It makes him laugh and he puts a hand before his mouth like if he was afraid of being happy or being expressive, or being honest.
But her –
Oh god, her. She feels in her body the urge of destroying his shell and his name and of conquering him. She does not find it cute. It is not like if he was shy (he's ruthless during exams, writing and writing and writing tons of pages. Joking with Rosier and Mulciber to acquire a good network.)
"Liar." He claims. "You are a secret, Parkinson. They think you have spent holidays in a resort in Rhode Island with mummy and daddy but you and I, we know the truth, don't we? How were summer nights with Malfoy? Chilly?"
She smiles wider, like it is no big deal at all that he knows her from before, that he has heard of her, from this summer, while he was a novice in this whole Black-heir thing and her, a novice in shining. He presses her closer.
"He's a friend." She laughs against his mouth. "I helped him to propose to Astoria, jackass"
"To practice kissing?" Regulus jokes.
She cups his pale cheek with her manicured hand, white nails brushing his lips.
" You're the one who need practicing, secret lover." She whispers lustfully in his ear.
She draws him into a toilet, locks the door behind them and begins to kiss him. His back is rigid against the toilet wall and it's narrow and he's obsessed by the paper toilet stick to her shoes, he cannot get out of his mind the reaction of mom and dad if they learned that he was practicing instead of winning and succeeding.
"You need to let go, Black" she murmurs, softly.
He freezes. She notices.
"Only if you stop calling me Black."
"Right." She plays with his belt, waiting for him to choose what they will be doing the next hour. "I thought that you were proud of it. Your name."
"I am." He says after only a micro-second of hesitation. "But it also comes with a lot of complications and duties that surely does not involve kisses in a bathroom or anything outside studying and being the best heir that I can be. So, I am Regulus. You know me, I'm uncomplicated."
He tries humor too hard and it's bad. He can almost feel the giggles of Sirius's acid and generous laugh under the edges of his pathetic joke. Regulus is cold.
She laughs, bare lips and white teeth, but she does not say anything. She does not say out loud how their situations are similar or how much she is afraid that this, their bathroom bubble, could only be a distraction from the fear.
She just laughs, it is bright and it resonates on the walls and in the end, he hears something really different, he hears everything that she does not express and –
Everything that she hides.
After that, she is no longer a secret for him. Instead, he is one of the things that she hides from them.
./
Pansy Parkinson is cunning and coward and criticized. She wears suits in school like the hallways were some sort of fashion week, she wears diamonds but only twice a week. She hates a lot of people.
He is not one of them but she will break his heart.
"What are you thinking?"
"I am in love with you" he realizes.
She digs her nails into her palms. It would be a lie to say that she has not expected this fatal moment. She has thought about it over and over and over and –
She has imagined and planned a lot of different settings: on a rooftop with a wine glass in her hand, in the intimacy of his boy's room in which she sneaked out discreetly, at the other end of the phone with her eyes closed.
Not between two classes, the day when she has a headache and it is raining outside.
In this cursed bathroom.
"Okay" she articulates loudly without stopping her hand from lining the pout of her mouth with a red flame lipstick. Like it does not matter, like she can prevent his heart from bleeding on her and staining her mind.
She has no power but an incredible poker face (thanks to growing up neck to neck with a group of dangerous and charming and lonely boys).
"It's all that you are saying."
At first, she thinks that it is a question but then she bitterly understands that he is wiser than that. He sees her and he hears her and somehow, he gets her.
He knows her. And somehow, it terrifies her because to be known by someone (furthermore, by a rich-ass spoilt Black) makes you accessible, vulnerable.
"It's all I'm saying, Black. I'm not cut in the girlfriend-material."
.
He leaves before she can give the right answer to what he does not ask (she knows how to pass a test with A+ grades, she knows how to lead a video conference meeting and how to turn a budget-cut to her benefit.)
How do you love when you are not lovely?
How do you become lovely when you are not in love but madly want to be?
How do you become in love? (she's mad that there is not a textbook about it. Alcohol is what has always comforted before, when she failed the only exam of her life. It helps her, this night, when she loses the only mad love of her life.)
.
It's better after all. They keep making out. Quickly, no hands involved and no feelings. She notices he hangs out more with the boys of the sacred 28: Mulciber who does not know how to wear a tie, Rabastan and Rodolphus who are ruthless at calculus.
She doesn't approach them. She has always preferred to look from afar. Draco speaks to her, sometimes, so she knows enough of their mind games and of their business strategies.
Regulus does not know how he ends up to Sirius's party with a red cup in a hand and a fear of drowning, sinking, dying all over his body.
The Potter's house is big, bold and overcrowded. He should be revising the new trade theory while sipping a glass of chardonnay. Not a cheap beer cup.
He notices his brother dancing with his friend, a messy-haired black man wearing a psychedelic t-shirt and a skinny and tall man with terrible postures and manners and a thin smile.
Regulus Black does not know how to exist by himself in a crowd so he imitates. He dances and dances and dances, until his back is aching and his bones are burning and his head is spinning from too much poor-quality-drugstore-alcohol.
He falls on a couch when the music runs in his veins and when his brother is nowhere close to being seen.
Except, he has forgotten one lethal component. Her.
"Hey, secret boy, you're enjoying the party?"
She sits next to him and he feels everything deeper. Like if the music were suddenly reduced to nothing, he hears each of her words, of her moves and of her looks.
Except, she's drunk. So, she's far more dangerous and ethereal behind his eyes.
"Pansy." He nods, like she's no one.
(A girl with red lips and a dress and black hair, and curves, and sharp silences, and a beer-induced smile that is like a siren call for his own intoxicated lips)
"What are you doing here, Pansy" he asks.
She points a finger (black, dark nail) on his torso. He can feel her whole body tensing and shaking and struggling.
"I – I am enjoying myself! I drink and it's dis – disgusting." She stutters.
She approaches the paper cup to the corner of her mouth. She winks and he can almost hear a whispered "cheers" blossoming in his memories.
He catches her cup before her second gulp. On the moment, it's a mature, reasonable, Regulus-Black kind of idea.
But it's Pansy (loud, mean angry and angry and mean and loud).
"Bastard! You're such a mommy boy with your heartbreaker face and your stupid legacy!"
It was the truth, the bright and blinding truth but it was not a shotgun in his heart not even a mosquito bite.
(Because it is almost word to word what Sirius had said to him – sober and angry, a backpack on the shoulder and the front door opened carrying frozen wind – when he was sixteen and innocent and not so lonely)
She tries to reach her stupid cup like it's some pricey jewelry that he has stolen. Like it matters. More than him, more than them.
She seems truly mad, for what it matters – and it makes him more determined to keep her drink from her because if he is not able to make her react, this can do the trick – with her dark hair around her angular face and her pupils dilated as two big pieces of charcoal.
But she's drunk and lost in a sea of public university student and she's in front of the only person that has more ambition that she does. (the only one who has not stabbed her, killed her, lied to her for a place of CEO in Parkinson Industries and she is shaking and she can almost touch it –
Touch him. She can almost touch him.
Almost.
The golden and foaming drink splashes all over her dress before she realizes that the cup is laying on the floor (stamped by so many feet, so many bad dancers)
Regulus seems genuinely horrified. It makes her laugh.
Then it makes her cry.
A hand on her back, he leads her to the bathroom.
She cries harder once the door is closed. They are not alone: a festive girl, with short black hair and leather boots is on the floor, eyes closed, sleeping.
He wonders if it's Marlene, the artist student, or Mary, the girl who likes everyone but the good guys. (Sirius had a bold life, before, and no secret for him under the blankets.)
It's what Regulus dream about. A Black night.
But, for now, she fills his daydreams and he needs to take care of her when she is stuck in a nightmare of tears and stained dresses.
He doesn't know if it's enough for both of them.
She's grasping his arm, her big eyes full of tears glaring at him, her mouth articulating a silent but mad prayer.
He doesn't know if it's enough.
(He sincerely wants to help because if he does not, no one will. He cleans her dress while she swears that she will end the world and him and his family and the World Trade Center. He calls her "love" and it's a half-truth and an old-truth.)
She wants it to end. Her head pounds and her chest hurts, and she wonders if it is possible to have a heart attack at such a young age. Probably not. For that, she can thank her parents and their wonderful immune system.
"Why are you laughing?"
She throws a hand at him. On the tip of her tongue, she stills taste the tangy flavor of lemon and of tequila, it's warm and comforting.
"I'm quitting, Regulus"
He does not get it, at first. The brain has a strange and funny way to work things out because the first things it remembers him is the day his brother has decided to leave. The door wide open and the blurry silhouette drifting away – I'm leaving Reg'
"Do you even listen to me?"
He sighs and he can feel her skin crawling back, all her muscles tensed and he smiles because maybe she will slap her for his impertinence. But she does not and he keeps himself to say that at least he is disappointed.
"I'm dropping school," she says with a shrug "I have learned whatever I needed to learn."
"What have I taught you?"
Love, Rage, Danger, Weakness. He fears her answer as much as he dreads her joyful silence because, for a while, she is the only one to know what she wants to say.
Suddenly, she kisses him on the forehead. Violently soft.
"You have taught me to never look back."
.
.
She leaves the room, and she leaves the party, and later that night, she leaves the town.
It does not even come to his mind to run after her.
They briefly exchange texts before he goes to bed, all-dressed-up and so tired he is not sure he will one day wake up.
P.P: At the airport. Will send you the bill.
He manages to write a clumsy series of ?. Is she charging for emotional distress? For a long second, Regulus has never been more frightened by twenty-something business women.
P.P: for the dress.
His phone's screen is so damn lit in the damp darkness of his dorm room that he almost wants to throw it up across the only window, pack up and go where the postmen won't find him.
She is going to destroy him.
1 year after this pity party known by the newspapers as "THE PARKINSON HEIR FLY THE NEST: A BRIGHT FUTURE IN MILAN?
In the end, Regulus Black has paid the bill. She sent him a gorgeous selfie right away: her throwing in the air a huge bundle of cash. Smiling.
He never responded.
When she comes back to New York, with Draco and Astoria and Blaise and Daphne (Milan is lonely, okay?) she is craving for food – good food and not this shit they serve in airplanes that tastes like chewed cardboard – so she goes toward the nearest McDonald and they all indulge warm fries and chicken nuggets.
All except Draco who judges her. He has never been fond of fast food to be fair but if she is honest, she has never been fond of pleasing him, so.
"Tell me that cold French fries were not the only thing you missed about the united states"
"That and pollution."
It makes Daphne laugh. When they leave, their hands are greasy and their lipstick (burgundy is trendy) is smeared all over her face.
She is home. But somehow, it does not feel good.
Being home has always meant fighting the way to the top, crawling and digging and being the best and pushing back.
Being home means being angry and violent and to have to prove something to the NYC upper-class, and it is a strange feeling to wandering up these streets with all this soft skin around her hips and a fresh rose tint on her cheeks and a minted breath instead of the ache of whiskey-flavored acid coming through her throat.
She is sober for a year now, and she wears a high-waist Versace skirt that brightens her skin complexion, so she is allowed to smile, right?
She looks for Regulus Black, an early morning when she says to the other that she must drop by her parents'. Surprisingly, he is particularly difficult to find.
First, she goes to their old elite-school-for-rich-kids-with-relationship-problems. The secretary is a pretty bitch and she keeps on repeating that these info are confidential. The only thing that she can pry from her is the fact that, indeed, Regulus has graduated.
Such a relief, she thinks sarcastically.
Then, she goes to Sirius Black's home – it's quite interesting because she is sure it is here (same green backyard, and warm brick walls) but she now remarks that there is like zero mention of Sirius Black. It's the name Potter engraved on the mailbox – she knocks twice.
A tall and bit of a mess kind of guy opens the door. Green eyes, nerd glasses and is it a tweed jacket? She clears her throat, twice.
"Are you here to sell us something we do not need because, and I don't want to seem pretentious, but we already have a ton of shit we don't need."
Oh, she remembers now. James Potter is an entitled brat.
"Do I look like a basic door-to-door seller to you? Is Black here?"
She crosses her arms and all is do is laugh. It is irritating.
"My housemate or the ton of shit we do not need?"
He takes a step back and she is able to enters into the Potter-Black frat cottage. It is nothing like she used to remember it. It is empty and quiet and there is a lot of drawings and sketches and industrial designs on the walls and in the bins and, literally on every available surface.
But she notices him immediately. Not because she is looking for him but because she was not looking for that: asleep on the beige pullout-sofa is a skinny man with a suspicious 3-day beard and –
Drooling –
"He is here since last week."
"Sleeping?"
"No! What kind of weirdo spend a week sleeping?" he exclaims "Getting under our feet, mostly"
Her kind of weirdo does.
"What happened?"
"A bunch of gothic romantic shithead have bought his company. He could as well be dead."
Pansy Parkinson does not gasp, she does not shout and she does not pity him because…
"But he has money, hasn't he?"
Money can buy happiness, a one-way ticket to Milan with her best friend to start over and eat delicate homemade pizza and a trail of colorful skirts for when you want to show off but people are boring.
What takes a growing-up man as far as crashing on the couch of his estranged brother?
"But he says he doesn't know what to do with it!"
She goes past him, towering over a sleepy Regulus with the same sharp lines and curved lips and –
"I assure you, I know."
She screams her name with her most high-pitched tone and to it's frankly more awesome than screaming the name of your homeless/jobless asleep ex-boyfriend should ever be.
I raise on his feet in a record time. The loose end of his shirt gives a hint of muscular abs and pelvic bones and –
"Pansy? What are you doing here?"
There is something of disbelief in his voice.
It's comforting.
It's refreshing, even.
She observes how his body reacts to her: the cautious movement he tries to hide when he searches for balance, the knot in his throat he tries to swallow, the rough hand he passes in his hair.
"I'm taking the trash out. For free on top of that."
"I'm no trash!"
"Yes, you are" they say in unison.
He is, in fact, trash and they do not need to repeat themselves: his clothes (surely borrowed to one of the legal owners of this place) hangs on his skin as if you could fit another crownless heir inside it. His skin is pale and it's terrifying because she takes a better look at him, and she can see so much of the little veins that runs across his cheeks and his hands and – she wonders if maybe it's her fault.
He does not seem to resent her, anyway. He puts a clean sweater and a jogging pant – fashion choices she judges are awful, but she has not been fired last week so she cannot tell what is fired-from-my-own-company appropriate – and he follows her outside.
"What are we going to do?" he asks.
A year ago she would have answered with a smirk, and suggested that make-out was probably the best solution for both of them but, right now, Pansy is at home and it's so weird being back and being this new self who does not want to hurt and to push and push till everything slaps back.
So, maybe it is a form of violence uncalled for but while she waits for a cab, she remembers how badly she wanted to punch Rosier in the face, the day he decided her boobs were his to touch.
She grants Regulus Black with a devilish smile. He can't help but smile back, a bit frightened, and oh god it turns her on so much.
"We are going to take your society back. Then, I will tell you about Milan and maybe we will go out on a date."