Thanks for the reviews yesterday!
And yes, Intermission before the chapter proper. This was supposed to fit in earlier, but it didn't, so I'm putting it here.
Intermission: Where Only Love Can Carry Her
The first time Pansy knew how someone else was going to die was the day before the trial of Harry's parents.
She was hurrying towards the Great Hall, since she'd awakened slightly late for breakfast. She passed a Hufflepuff first-year at the top of the stairs from the dungeons, also heading towards breakfast, yawning and rubbing at her eyes.
Pansy turned her head, and her eyes skimmed over the girl's face. And then she couldn't be uninterested any more, because she saw shards of wood decorating her, and saw the blood, and her heart thumped in mad fear as the knowledge tucked itself inside her head, as undeniable at this point as her knowledge of the alphabet.
The girl would join her House's Quidditch team, and die in a fall from her broom when she was seventeen.
Pansy took a deep breath, and realized the girl was staring at her. She shook her head and hurried on. For a moment, she'd nearly yielded to the temptation to gasp or shriek aloud in shock, and of course she couldn't do that.
She'd stepped further into necromancy on Halloween night. After that, she'd finally had to give up going with her left arm bared, though the rest of the Slytherins still did. She had to hide her body behind the wraps, except for her hands. It was necessary, to distance herself from the physical world around her and step into the world of spirits. Pansy had known that as surely as she had known that she couldn't let hatred of Harry drive her any further into this study.
It had to be love, passion for working with the dead, and nothing else.
Pansy had spent hours kneeling in a rune circle Halloween night, before she finally wrestled her way through the conflicting impulses and realized that hatred for what had happened to Dragonsbane hadn't been her primary motivator for a while now, if it ever was. She really did love the dead. She really did want to follow her father. And as the new knowledge came flooding in, she knew she couldn't blame Harry for his death.
Death was an honor. Death was the supreme moment of communion with life, in fact, the moment when the necromancer tasted it for the last time before leaving it and becoming one with the dead. Harry had been part of her father's death, and Pansy should have questioned him about it earlier, so that she could know more about what it felt like for the necromancer involved.
Luckily, he was one of her Speakers, so she still could. She had given up talking to everyone else now.
She slid into place at the Slytherin table, and Millicent nodded to her. Pansy kept her eyes on her oatmeal, not sure that she wanted to look up and see how her friend was going to die.
"Pansy? Are you all right?"
It has to be faced. It must be faced. Pansy reminded herself of that, and lifted her head, gaze locking on Millicent's face.
She relaxed. Millicent was going to die at a decent age, nearly a hundred, in fact, in the arms of her third husband. Pansy snickered into her hands in sheer relief, and Millicent's face both eased and tightened.
"Are you sure you're all right?" she demanded.
Pansy nodded, and then turned back to her oatmeal. Her gaze moved out across the Great Hall as she did so. She had made the hardest decision on Halloween. She had known that necromancers had to see the deaths of other wizards and witches, and never tell anyone about them. She had the example of her father to show her the immense courage that living with such a thing took. Pansy was no Gryffindor, but she had accepted this burden, so she had to live with it.
She saw the bright spots of illness, the grayness of age, the visions of accidents amazing or mundane. There was quite a lot of blood, and the motionless green flashes of Avada Kedavra. Pansy winced. It seemed that many of her classmates, and some of the teachers, were going to die in the War.
But she didn't feel the temptation, any more, to tell anyone of what she had seen. She nodded at each death, if not physically, then inside her head, and her tension eased, and her determination grew. What necromancers saw was inevitable, unlike what Seers who predicted the future said; it could not be changed, or manipulated, or turned aside. It happened. Pansy closed her eyes.
It's no wonder that necromancers are forbidden to speak of it. It's a sacrifice so the dead will trust us, but it's also something the living would never want to know. They hate death. They don't understand. They'd question, want to know the utmost limit of their days, and then blame us for telling them. They'd live lives bounded by their ends, instead of in that glorious uncertainty.
Pansy ate her breakfast. It was Wednesday, and she had History of Magic, always a boring class. If she didn't fortify herself with food enough to become sleepy, then she was likely to start talking to one of the half-formed ghosts that hovered in the castle, and everyone but the Slytherins in the class would become hysterical.
She'd finished most of what she could eat when she saw a trio of people come through the doors of the Great Hall. Pansy glanced up at them.
Her breath caught. They were Harry, Draco, and Harry's brother, and as she watched, Potter peeled off from the other two and went towards the Gryffindor table. Harry and Draco proceeded on towards the Slytherin one, conducting an argument that was low-voiced until Harry snapped something and pulled away from Draco, walking the rest of the distance alone. His face was white with strain. Pansy wasn't surprised, given that his parents' trial began tomorrow.
But it was the vision she had seen as she watched the three of them together that was overwhelming her.
I want to tell them.
But that would break her vows, and even if she could still talk to Millicent and Harry, she couldn't tell them about her visions. Pansy tried to lower her eyes back to her plate and forget what she'd seen.
She couldn't.
She watched Harry and Draco as they settled into place—still next to each other, for all their arguing. Harry ignored Draco entirely as he piled sausages on his plate and started eating, though the bright hive cobra around his neck and the Omen snake on his shoulder both seemed as willing to eat from Draco's hand as Harry's. Meanwhile, Draco went right on staring at Harry.
Pansy managed to eat a bit more, but the food was harsh ashes in her mouth. She rose at last and left, her garments moving about her in directions that the wind of her speed couldn't account for. The ghosts were beginning to catch hold of her and play with her clothes, since she was partially in the everyday, sunlit world and partially in theirs.
She leaned against the wall of the first floor corridor and closed her eyes. She had a few minutes before History of Magic began.
I don't even know what a vision like that means.
But she knew that she did, and that last protest was just the instinctive bleat of a child trying to get out of something difficult.
Pansy straightened, took a deep breath, and turned towards class. She would keep her vows. She would not tell Harry, or Draco, or even Potter, who would surely get the vision wrong even if he tried to repeat it to the others.
She would hold straight and true to her course.
The knowledge and vision of her own death had also come to her on Halloween night, and she had spent some time in tears. If she could overcome that, she could overcome anything she saw for anyone else.