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Velvet & Lace

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Chapter Thirty-Six | You Can't Exist in Two Times

Narcissa was discharged from hospital the following day, a day which had seen Pansy awake - momentarily basking in the blissful ignorance that she was granted for a few short seconds encased in Regulus's arms, before the memories of the previous day presented themselves at the forefront of her mind, repeating themselves on something of a sick and twisted loop.

Regulus, when he awoke, hadn't been his usual chatty, and admittedly cocky, self. Instead, his face was bereft of anything that didn't resemble concern.

"Are you okay?"

His eyes hadn't met hers when he'd nodded, and it was only when they did, that he allowed the truth Pansy knew neither she nor he wished to either hear or say known.

"No," he said simply, "but I need to pretend to be."

"Oh."

She felt him take her left hand in his right. "I need to go back home."

"Oh," Pansy repeated, failing to keep the sadness from her voice.

"I need to-agh!"

She didn't need to ask, just as she'd never had to when Draco had said the same agh, she'd always known, just as she had the first time she'd seen Regulus Black attempt to keep his face from contorting in pain whenever his Dark Mark burned in the skin of his forearm.

"Shit-I," Regulus looked around frantically before summoning his robes from the floor.

Raising his right hand to her cheek, she felt the briefest of brushes from his fingertips.

"Pansy, I-"

"You need to go," Pansy hissed, gripping the top of his wrist as she remembered the injuries he'd faced due to lateness. Lateness that was her fault, just as this lateness would be too.

"I know," he replied hastily, "I am. I just...I need to take the Time-Turner with me."

Pansy's eyes must have mimicked the sudden fear that erupted in his chest.

"After whatever he," Regulus gestured to his right forearm, "I need to take it home and..." he trailed off.

Not trusting herself to say anything to the contrary, or to start screaming at him that he had no business doing exactly what she knew he was going to do with the Time-Turner, exactly what that pompous arse of a portrait had obviously instructed him to do once he'd ushered Pansy rudely from the room.

If you want my two knuts, that's what he'd said. It was months ago, but it felt simultaneously like both hours and years, from what I gather about Time Magic, which isn't a lot mind, is that usually, things will happen because they already have

Which meant that whatever he was going to do to the Turner, Pansy couldn't - and knowing him, wouldn't - stop.

No matter how much she were to protest.

Instead, she simply nodded as he wiped away the solitary tear that had began to make its way down the side of her face.

"I'll be back as soon as I-" he halted mid-sentence and flexed his arm, clearly in pain again.

"I love you," Pansy said. "Go!"

"I love you too," he replied, before rushing from the room.

His departure felt like a tangible and physical hole.

A hole of fear, and truths she didn't want. A hole she despised.

A hole she despised even more when the realisation that the date she'd been focussing on - Draco's conception, probably wasn't the one she ought to have been.

Swinging her head around wildly, Pansy's eyes eventually focussed on the small desk calendar sitting innocently atop the vanity. Rushing towards the small item, Pansy picked it up and, with a series of No no no's, threw it against a nearby wall.

The realisation itself was entirely too much as she sank to the floor. This time there were no sobs, perhaps she had none left to cry. Instead, she felt a numbness unlike anything she'd felt before.

As though a part of her had already gone.

"Talk to me, Pansy," Narcissa said from a nearby sofa, where she was lying beneath a large squashy duvet, at Lucius's instruction. He wasn't, unlike Regulus and much to Pansy's worry, absent, and was insisting on buzzing around the living room with the persistence of a lost fly, tending to any and every need his wife may have, most of them fruitless.

She was dimly aware of Narcissa's voice. "Lucius, darling, could you give Pansy and I some time alone?"

Pansy barely heard Lucius's response.

"Pansy, talk to me," Narcissa repeated, her tone firmer this time.

When she opened her mouth Pansy found she had very little idea as to where her words were heading when she started to speak. Somehow though, they found their way, and poured from her like a faucet.

"He's taken the Turner, he took it this morning...and I'm not an idiot, I know what it means - maybe I always knew it'd be after something like...like this," Pansy spoke barely knowing if any part of what she was saying made any sense as she gestured towards Narcissa's laying form. The other witch didn't speak, only listened as Pansy rambled, and for that she felt gratitude, through the fear. "I saved a Black, I saved you...and Draco I suppose indirectly. That's what the Healers said Narcissa, they said it was because of me you were saved and I'm so so glad you're okay. My life, or what will be my life, well...not my life but the life of the me that's going to be born, is so so much better for having you and Draco in it.

'I wouldn't change it, this, I want you to know that...as much as I love him and as much as losing him will break me far far more than I'm already broken...I-I wouldn't change it. I wouldn't…"

It was at that moment Pansy's voice cracked and what tiny scrap of resolve she'd been clinging to shattered entirely, and that was the moment she broke down harder than she perhaps ever had.

"Pansy," Narcissa's voice was steady, though tinged with emotion Pansy wished she couldn't hear. "Perhaps it's not as soon as you-"

"It is!" Pansy cried, hugging her knees as she rocked back and forth. "It is because...I was so focussed, so fucking focussed on Draco's stupid conception date I only realised this morning that in two days time...it's my birthday."

"Y-your birthday, but that means-"

Pansy nodded, feeling a fool. "It means in two days time I'll be born."

"But…"

For the very, very little she knew of time magic, despite feeling like some kind of strange human experiment for it over the past few months, Pansy was entirely certain of one thing:

"You can't exist in two times."