Disclaimer: All original characters, situations and plot ideas belong to JK Rowling. I make no profit from this.

Warning: This story is rated M for sexual situations and scenes, language, and darker themes in the story.

A Riven Heart

Chapter 38

August 27th, 2006

They didn't go to Neville's apartment, they didn't go to Pansy's cottage. Instead they Apparated to the outside of The Burrow and ducked in as quickly and quietly as possible as the sun began to set.

Mrs. Weasley was at the stove, stirring a pot that smelled of beef stew. "Oh! Neville! Pansy!"

"Hi Mrs. Weasley. Ginny and Hermione are still here right?" Neville asked quietly.

"Girls!" She called instead of answering. "Staying for dinner dears? I heard there was some ruckus at the Hospital, but I assume everything is okay?"

Ginny and Hermione appeared at the door just a few seconds later.

"Hey Neville! You're out of the Hospital? How do you feel?" Ginny asked, giving him a gentle hug, their friendship evident. Pansy suddenly had a lot more love for Ginny Weasley.

"Is everything okay?" Hermione asked when she turned her eyes on Pansy.

"Can I talk to you two in private?" Pansy directed her question to Ginny and Hermione.

"Of course, come this way."

"Dinner is in twenty minutes girls! Arthur will be home by then!"

"Okay mum! Thanks."

Ginny led them all into the living room, shutting the door firmly behind them and placing a silencing spell on the room. Pansy pushed Neville gently into the nearest chair. He went easily which told her just how hurt he really was, even after two days at St. Mungo's.

"You sit down and relax, you're still hurting. Don't think I don't know." Pansy chided him, unconsciously rubbing at the spot over her heart.

"I'm not hurting as badly as you are. Tell us what's up." He said softly, interlacing their fingers in a move that curled her toes.

Pansy continued to rub her chest, trying to soothe the pains she felt coming through their soul mate bond, Neville's worry for her, Neville's need to protect her, Neville's love for her... it all twisted in a ball of emotion that she could literally feel through the bond... and she wondered what he felt.

She decided to start at the beginning. "My mother Denise has been slowly going insane these last few years, ever since that night… well… I found out tonight that she had the eye, she is - was - a Seer."

Hermione made a noise with her throat. "I don't put any merit in Divination."

Pansy waved her off. " Me either, but according to her... She got the gift from her mother, as I have now gotten it from mine." She admitted to their confused and shocked faces. "She killed herself tonight after wounding me. I guess it was necessary to pass on the gift. The last couple of weeks, I have been dreaming about a room with a shield in it. I passed it off as just random dreaming, but after today… My mother came to me after she had passed away, explaining what she had done, why she had done it. She said the Mirror," she gestured to the item in Hermione's hand. "-can only be worked by a Seer. That whatever Voldemort had my grandmother put in that Mirror needed to be destroyed."

It hurt to think about, still feeling so guilty that she didn't know, that she couldn't help. "But because of her gift and because of what happened to my father, she had been trapped in her own mind, slowly going insane. She told me that's why she passed on the gift to me."

They were silent as they listened, as they digested what she said. Then Hermione said, "You think this shield is in the Mirror… you think it's the last Horcrux?"

Pansy nodded. "I do. But wait, there's more… after I got out of the weird vision I had with my mother, Harry touched my arm and I had my first real vision… In it Harry defeated Voldemort, but it can't happen… not like that."

She knew immediately she had pissed of Ginny.

"What do you mean it can't happen? We've spent most of our lives trying to defeat him, why can't it happen?" Ginny snapped, crossing her arms.

"Because there were dead bodies…" Pansy whispered with horror. "You… your dad… Percy and Theo… Mrs. Malfoy. We were all in the drawing room at Malfoy Manor. You were dead."

Hermione shuddered at the mention of the drawing room and Pansy wondered why, but Ginny just looked uncomfortable.

"I haven't told anyone else. I feel like at any second I'm going to wake up and all this will have just been some horrible dream!" She began to pace back and forth as the other three looked on silently, but she felt too long without Neville's touch. She stopped and interlaced their fingers again.

But there was more, Gods there was so much more.

"Now here's my question, have I changed the future by having the vision, inadvertently causing what I saw to happen… or did I see it so I could change it? Am I changing it now? I came to you because you had the mirror and everyone knows you have experience with a Time Turner…"

Hermione's eye lit up with surprise. "How did you know?"

"Please, how else were you getting to all your classes third year? And Snape was sure you had something to do with Sirius Black…" Pansy replied.

Hermione regarded her carefully. "Professor Snape was a smart man."

"You really did have a Time Turner?" Ginny asked, shocked.

"I did, and Time is tricky… there is no concrete answer to the question you asked. On top of that Time Travel is different from prophecy. I've also never heard of someone having 'visions' as you put it. Most Seers just sprout of predictions, they don't actually see the future…"

"She may not have heard of that, but I have." Neville said, his face passive.

"You have?" Pansy turned to him.

"You have?" Hermione loudly said over her, looking bewildered.

"It's an old German story, about the flowers, pansies actually. I can't remember it word for word. But it went something like this: A witch was walking to town one summer day and decided to take a short cut through a field of pansies. They smelled lovely and they looked beautiful so she took the short cut every day. Eventually, most of the pansies had been trampled by the witch's boots and the remaining pansies grew sad. She told them she never meant to hurt the other pansies and she wanted to help, she had magic she said. She was a witch she said, but she needed something to make the magic work. So the remaining pansies said they would give up their beautiful scent if she could make the other pansies grow again. And so they did. Well a powerful wizard lived at the edge of the field. When the pansies lost their beautiful scent he set out to find out why. When he learned what the witch had done, he cursed her with The Sight so she could always see the consequences of her actions before she took them, but The Sight slowly drove her to madness and she ended up taking her life."

Ginny, Hermione, and Pansy all looked at him for several seconds after he stopped talking.

"Did you just make that up?" Ginny asked as Hermione stood up, and left the room without a word.

"What? No. Grams used to tell it to me all the time when I was growing up. I think the real story is about bulls, but Grams changed it so I could 'learn a valuable lesson'."

Neville looked up to Pansy, catching her other hand with his. And all that worry, all that need she had been feeling melted away. Neville just wanted her to be okay, a sense of stability rose up through the bond and settled on her heart.

"My mother said to me that our soul mate bond would protect me from the madness that came with the gift. She said it took a long time for her to get you and me together…" and didn't that just irk her? Is that the only reason she and Neville had gotten together? So he could save her from her own destiny? This Gift? This Curse? It had only been a month, their lives clicking together to quickly, their magic sparking together familiarly. She had thought them lucky...

But it was just... what? Predestination? The work of a mad mother. "My mother..."

His eyes flashed briefly at the mention of her mother, at what she spoke of. "I never thought…"

"I almost hate this Neville… I never put much faith into Divination."

"We have something in common then." Hermione said, walking back into the room with a giant, brown book. She slapped it down on the table and beckoned them all to look. She flipped open and found the page she was looking for.

"Pureblood genealogies?" Ginny scoffed. "Didn't they declare this book was a load of crock?"

"Not this one, this one accurate. Now, see here." She pointed about half way up one page.

"That's me! And my parents." Pansy said, following Hermione's finger.

"Yes, see Denise and Bernard. Of course Bernard comes from the Parkinson's which continues on on a different page, but your mother, Denise Parkinson maiden name Greengrass, was born to Astraea and William Greengrass. Now here's the funny thing about that, Astraea was born a Greengrass, William took the Greengrass name when they married because he wasn't Pureblood. You won't find that information anywhere else, would you? Now if you continue on, Astraea was born from Leo and Aquila Greengrass, those two were actually brother and sister and please don't get me started on how gross old Pureblood families can be. So again, the Greengrass connection continues on through the maternal side. And if you look, Aquila's mother's name was Cassandra Greengrass maiden name Fawley."

Pansy sucked in a breath, along with Ginny and Neville.

"Pansy, you're a direct descendant of a famous Foreseer," Hermione continued. "Not predestination, just good genes."

"Good genes?" Pansy asked as she looked over the family tree Hermione had found. "Hermione, look at the date of death for them… Cassandra died when she was 27 barely a mother herself, Aquila was 25, and Astraea was 30. My mother is the only one to live longer than that and she didn't make it very far, she was much younger than my father… Gods, can you imagine how young they were when this curse was passed to them, I mean what reason could they have had to pass this on? Also… are you saying Daphne and Astoria Greengrass could potentially be Seers too?"

"See, the genes are there… but they get their Greengrass name through the Paternal side of the family, your mother's brother David."

She sat down with a huff, sinking into the overly fluffy chair and putting her hands over her eyes. She kept her eyes closed, but she knew Neville had stood and began pacing back and forth. Then she felt a small hand pat her shoulder in a comforting way.

And the darkness faded. She was standing in Malfoy Manor again, in the drawing room. Harry, giant gashes where dark magic had opened his skin decorated his face and arms, stood over Voldemort's deformed, dead body, the golden shield lay cracked into pieces on the ground… right next to a dead Draco Malfoy and Neville Longbottom. She turned and there stood Dolohov, stalking through the doorway with his wand drawn pointing directly at Harry Potter.

"Noo!" she jumped, wrenching herself from the vision, and Ginny's comforting touch, panic attacking her nerves. She cried out.

Neville knew the instant something was wrong, a zing of emotion traveling down the soul mate bond, and took two giant steps in her direction, catching her in his arms. "What? What happened?"

"It's changed. Oh Gods it's changed." she panted, on the edge of hysteria.

"What changed, Pansy?" He clutched onto her tightly. "Pansy, it's okay!"

"No one else was there, just you and Draco and Harry and you were d-d-dead."

Just saying the words were hard enough, she felt her face crumble into dread, her teeth hurt, her fingertips went numb… Neville dead? No. Not that. Not ever.

"Pansy, no. Pansy I'm here and I'm fine." he did what he did best, wrapped his arms around her entire frame, pulling her deep into a hug. She in turn, buried her nose into his shirt and let the scent of him wash over her before the hysteria could firmly take over. Neville's unblinking, lifeless eyes stared at her. Flashes of her dead father and her dead mother assaulted her… she tried to shake it off only for it to be replaced with the fuzzy image of Theo's dead body. No... no. Not that please not that.

Lemongrass, earth, and faint echoes of St. Mungo's. It melted away the panic, a line forming in her mind's eye.

This is how she would be able to separate the images in her mind. The future from the present. Neville's bond to her, his very scent cleared her head like nothing else could.

"Pansy." His voice was hard, but she needed the cutting bite it carried. "I won't leave you, I can't. I just found you."

She listened, because she knew, knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that Neville didn't lie, not to her.

"You can't die." she said, raising her face to look at him, their soul mate bond wide open with emotion. Need, love, panic...

He was silent for a long minute, holding her gaze. "Not without you."

A/N: The story Neville tells is an actual story about pansies, with a lot of twist. I found it when I did some research for this fic. Two chapters left! :D :D :D