CHAPTER: Bedside Manner
It had been a month since the battle. Pansy was now Lady Parkinson, Head of the Parkinson Family. When the goblin had read her father's will declaring his single heiress as much, she laughed until she cried. She tipped the goblin generously for witnessing such a shameful outburst. What 'Parkinson Family'? I'm the only one.
She wandered Diagon Alley and picked up the Daily Prophet, DARK LORD VOLDEMORT SLAIN IN ASSAULT ON THE MINISTRY: WHO IS THE MYSTRIOUS GIRL WHO HAS STRUCK DOWN THE VILLAIN?
Pansy chuckled darkly as she fiddled with her signet ring. At least she didn't have her father prostituting her to the Malfoys to look forward to anymore, so there were definitely bonuses of being a newly orphaned young woman. It was lucky the Parkinson inheritance charter didn't have anything against an heiress or heir killing their head of house.
She found herself standing in front of Ollivanders' looking in with real intent since the time she was eleven years old. "Ms. Parkinson! Unicorn hair and Birch wood. What brings you back to my store young lady?"
Pansy twitched at the ancient man in front of her calling her 'young lady' after the hell that she just went through, but she wasn't Slytherin for her hot temper. "My wand was destroyed in a fight with death eaters. I need a new one." It wasn't technically untrue. She deliberately snapped it herself when the Aurors were busying themselves getting Luna and Hermione onto stretchers and to St. Mungos post-haste. Fudge being a blithering idiot, Harry Potter coming back from the dead, and Dumbledore's people running around from room to room looking for other Death Eaters made for articulate distraction. Pansy wasn't naïve. She was sixteen. She'd be a legal adult in less than five months. Casting an Avada Kedavra under any circumstance would likely mean life in Azkaban, which wasn't something she was foolish enough to risk. She just hoped none of the upright and righteous Gryffindors would sell her out.
"I see. Well, I'm sure you remember the process. If you could tell me of any significant and perhaps non-invasive personality changes since you were here last? Events that may have shaped you? Your ambitions in life perhaps may have changed? It might hasten the process a tad. Then again, it might not. I can only direct interaction with the wands, I cannot control it," Ollivander replied genially. Pansy couldn't help but think Ollivander and Luna Lovegood would be good friends.
Pansy only needed the most fleeting of thoughts of Luna to ignite the memory of her screams.
The new orphan Pansy Parkinson didn't sleep a wink. She was in St. Mungo's waiting room for most of the night while they were operating on the youngest Lovegood. She met Luna's father, who was distraught, but greatly relieved when the healers told him first thing that his daughter would survive the night. It really just threw in her face what a monster her own father had been.
"Who would do this to my Luna?" he muttered as he slumped into the seat opposite of Pansy. Pansy, who had Luna's blood all over her, even still.
"My father," Pansy rasped out.
Xenophilius' eyes widened as he acknowledged for the first time the blood-soaked teenage girl in front of him. He noticed the dead look in her eye, and realised exactly who's blood it was that covered nearly half her torso and face in dripping red. Pansy met his eyes for a moment to say, "I got him back worse. I got him back for her," she looked down again. She was unable to keep eye contact with the man whose daughter lay mutilated in surgery.
Pansy's eyes glazed over slightly as she got her traumatic thoughts back in order to consider Ollivander's questions. "I suppose I'm more vengeful," she said lightly. AVADA KEDAVRA. "I…I think some things recently became clear to me. I've gained clarity." Avada Kedavra. Her father's posture slack with surprise, wide eyes in hid dead face. "'Any means to achieve our ends,'" she quoted the Sorting Hat under her breath.
Ollivander observed her for a long, uncomfortable moment before saying, "I think I may have a few wands for you to try Miss Parkinson."
"It's Lady Parkinson," Pansy corrected him. Not snidely, or even unkindly. Her voice was empty as she followed that up with, "My father is dead." For the life of her Pansy didn't know why she was basically on the verge of confessing patricide to this dithering old man.
"My apologies Lady Parkinson, and my condolences as well," Ollivander corrected himself seamlessly and with a sort of Pureblood decorum that he hadn't previously seemed invested in.
Pansy nodded her head wordlessly. Ollivander went back into his shop with a swish of his slightly overly long coat that he probably bought when Victoria was Queen. He returned with a few wands. The first one she picked up looked quite pretty really. It had silver markings like vines running up its length. It shattered as soon a she waved it.
"No, no that one," Ollivander muttered to himself. Pansy gently laid down the quarter of the wand that had a singed unicorn hair sticking out of it.
The second shattered the windows.
The third set fire to the shelf behind Ollivander.
The twelfth wand turned Pansy's clothes omlette yellow. "Not this one either," Pansy muttered. She fucking hated yellow.
Ollivander looked around at the scars his shop would now bear from this session alone. He looked at the girl in front of him and his eyes narrowed before he went back to retrieve what would be wand number thirteen. Pansy slumped onto the bench that was normally reserved for those waiting. But the wandmaker couldn't really blame the girl.
He went back to retrieve another wand. Frankly by this point Pansy didn't feel very optimistic and wondered if she should try to find a wand that worked for on the continent. What was that other wandmaker's name? Gregorovich. "Well, I'm sorry for wasting your time like this Mr. Ollivander. Send my estate the bill for all the ruined wands, I'll reimburse you," Pansy said with a frown.
"Wait! That's all well and good, but I have fantastic feeling about this one. My elder sister made this wand when she was in her thirties and nobody's claimed it. It's also never come to damage when others fail to claim it…unlike all of these ones," he gestured about the wand graveyard Pansy had inadvertednly created.
Pansy raised an eybrow at the ancient man's explanation. She'd never known he even had siblings and would never had asked. "I figured you built all these wands," she replied lamely.
"You wouldn't be the only one. Most believe that as a matter of fact. While most of these certainly were crafted with these hands," he did a little jazz-hands gesture. "There are at least a dozen of them that were made by family of mine, if not in England, then sent in from their shops abroad. This wand, the one I hope will choose you, dear God," he muttered as an aside, "This wand was made in America for instance and sent here from my sister's shop on Manhattan Island."
"What's the harm?" Pansy muttered to herself.
She reached out to take the wand from its box after Ollivander laid it out on his desk. It wasn't the prettiest wand. It had an odd form for a wand. The hilt was curved slightly, and the wand's body had an odd zig-zag like pattern carved into the wand's body.
Pansy Parkinson knew the moment the wand settled perfectly in her fingers that she had found her new wand. It felt cold rather than warm, but the feeling sped up her arm and settled around her heart like a cooling charm on a sweltering day.
"Fantastic!" Ollivander crowed. "This is a hybrid wand in more than one way. The hilt is Yew, while the body is Snakewood taken from a very specific tree that lives on the Ilvermorny Campus. The cores extend into the hilt, Unicorn hair, and Thestral Hair, intertwined. This is a special wand, Ms. Parkinson, and I dare say that you'll do wonders with it. Something you should know, Ms. Parkinson," Ollivander called after her as she turned the door handle to leave. "This wand's twin is here as well. Would you like me to notify you when it's sold?"
Pansy tilted her head and thought for a minute. She recalled her father sayPansy smiled slightly and handed over the normal seven galleons. "Send me the bill for the others and have a good day Mr. Ollivander."
"And to you as well dear. My condolences about your father. My brother supported Grindelwald. If you ever want a friendly ear you're welcome to come in for a talk."
Pansy looked back and gave a non-committal nod and left the shop. On the way to St. Mungos she ran into Draco. "Hey, I'm sorry about your dad," the blond-haired boy said.
"I'm not. Would you like to join me going to St Mungo's?" Pansy replied smoothly. Draco looked at her with wide eyes. He looked like he was trying to remember something. The walk was thankfully short. St. Mungo's was on the same side of Diagon Alley that Ollivander's was so the walk there took less than five minutes.
"Why would you say that?" he asked after minutes of thought.
Pansy stopped just outside the door and nailed him to the spot with a dark look that melted into something entirely lacking emotion. "Didn't anybody tell you? I'm the one who put him down." Draco just looked on as she referred to her father as if he were nothing better than an insect she trod on. He knew she didn't exactly get along with him, even after what she confessed to him and Delphi about his crimes. But the man was dead. Delphi said he'd remember what Luna went through, but he didn't. Did she do the spell wrong? He followed Pansy who was being led to the Spell Damage Ward. "I'm with her," he told the middle-aged man behind the desk who checked her in.
Pansy palmed her wand and whispered the incantation to conjure a small bouquet of violet pansies which she carried deftly in one hand until she pocketed her wand to hold it with both. She turned to Draco and said, "This is Lovegood's room. I'd like privacy. Granger's a couple doors down if you want to check on her. I think Dolohov got her with something horrid."
Draco considered and realised that calling out his best friend for her strange new attachment to the blonde-haired silver eyed Ravenclaw would result in a stay in this hospital for himself. "I'll see Granger then," he said quietly. Pansy nodded before opening the door, stepping into Lovegood's room and left her fellow Slytherin standing awkwardly in the hallway.
"What are you doing here?" came the rough voice from the ginger sitting at Luna's side. Pansy calmly ignored the angry girl and conjured a small vase for the flowers she brought. "She wouldn't want you here, your father did this," Ginny almost snarled.
. "She saved my life. You saw it yourself," Pansy said coldly as she pulled up a chair to sit by Luna's unoccupied right side. The side with a bloody stump wrapped in self-cleaning bandages. "Besides," Pansy said as her voice became positively glacial, "I more than bought the right to visit Luna with my father's life in change." Pansy's voice was quiet and cutting, but from Ginny's reactionary flinch, Pansy might as well have screamed at her instead.
"I…I'm sorry. That you had to do that," Ginny got out as she visibly struggled with what to say.
"I'm sorry your brother's dead. I didn't know him well, but he seemed loyal to the end," Pansy said in a tone approaching kindness. Ginny didn't reply, but Pansy didn't have to try very hard to imagine the harrowed girl clenching her fists as she looked upon her downed friend. "Is Granger going to make it?" Pansy honestly didn't know what else to say.
"Yeah. She had to have one of her breasts fixed up since the spell cut almost clear through it. She'll have a big scar, like a sword cut her from shoulder to hip," Ginny said in a tone that sounded almost rehearsed if also painful to say aloud. "Healers said she'd need potions for the rest of the summer, but she'll be mostly alright when school starts up next."
Pansy nodded. There was an awkward silence as Luna breathed peacefully between them. Feeling a little too much of a voyeur, the Slytherin cast her eyes about until she landed on the dark blue book with a pen attached to it that was off by where Ginny had laid down her purse. "That's good. Is that a diary?"
Ginny started, eyes flying to Pansy's but she didn't find any condescension or mockery there. "Yeah. Um. Yeah it is." Ginny forced herself to remain calm.
"That's alright, you don't need to be embarrassed. I keep one too. Well, not as much this year. After the thirtieth day in a row that was just shite, I decided to give it a rest this school year for the most part," Pansy mused.
"Shite? I thought you Slytherins had it pretty good with Umbridge around?" Ginny asked with some genuine confusion mixed in there with some resentment.
Pansy let out a dark chuckle, "Do you really think we learned any more than you did? She was an abomination of a teacher. You lot had your Slytherin Exclusion Club, but we had to fend for ourselves, like usual. Is it any wonder to you that some of us used the fact our families are aligned with the Dark Lord just to scrape by in our O.W.L.s? Most of us are older now and seeing our parents licking the boots of anyone is disturbing."
"Malfoy seems to like his father well enough, and he's the chief Death Eater," Ginny retorted.
"Malfoy's father is now going to Azkaban for the rest of his life for trying to kill us. Also, Draco's a fucking idiot about his hero-worship of his father. It's a wonder Narcissa didn't just poison Lucius years ago honestly," Pansy said flippantly.
"Is that what you think?" Ginny asked, appalled.
"Yes," Pansy said calmly. "To save her son from growing up to become a bootlicker, to a fucking half-blood no less. You know what they say about Slytherins regarding 'means and ends."
Ginny shuddered at the type of mentality that would generate murder as a legitimate solution. But then again, she couldn't help but feel so relieved when Pansy fired that Avada Kedavra into her own father. Pansy killed her own father. For Luna. It was just too much to wrap her head around. Ginny would have to bring it up in her next session with her new therapist Fleur Delacour. "I had him in my head you know, Tom. Lord Voldemort."
Pansy looked up from Luna's sleeping form to meet the fierce doe eyes of the youngest Weasley. "I didn't know that. When?"
"Chamber of Secrets. He possessed me with a diary he enchanted when he was about your age actually," Ginny said softly. If somebody were to tie her to a chair and ask her why the hell she was suddenly confiding in Pansy Parkinson 'the Queen of Slytherin' no less, she would have no satisfying answers for them.
"Damn," Pansy whispered. She looked back to Luna, who shifted slightly in her sleep, but remained firmly in the world of dreams. "You're brave, for telling me. Hell, for telling anyone."
"Well, he's dead now." Ginny said. As if that were an answer. She looked up at Pansy, who was still looking down at Luna with something intense but undefined in her gaze. Ginny let out a small chuckle before rising to her feet. "Well, I have an appointment I need to go to in ten minutes. I'll leave Luna in your hands."
"Oh, alright," Pansy said with a little surprise.
"I don't know why she saved you, but you damn well make it up to her somehow, you hear me?" Ginny said firmly. It wasn't an accusation exactly, but Pansy flinched all the same before fortifying herself
"I think I'll spend most of the rest of my life doing exactly that Ginny," Pansy met Ginny's gaze with an intensity the Weasley had never seen from the Slytherin girl before.