There isn't much about her life Pansy appreciates as of now, but she is proud of where she works.
St. Mungo's stands like a towering mantle of hope. Well, when you get through the broken glass of Purge and Drows Ltd. it is. The shabby department store adequately hides the amplitude of the place, and the contrast is stark. Inside the sanatorium, its walls have centuries of stories locked inside the stony, hard seventeenth century facade. There are corridors dated back to the Goblin rebellion. The walls saw it all - stories of loss, rejuvenation, rebellion. And it still stands, unchanged, but somehow managing to surprise her all the same. Pansy has learned at one point that St. Mungo's has a secret passage, that during the war of the wolves it used to work as a lighthouse, of sorts. Sending aids across the country if any young wizard wanted safety, transporting them, giving them medical care. During the last wizarding war, it served the same purpose again. Serving as the hub of supplies, working discreetly to assist injured wizards at the height of the war in the same, secret chamber.
Pansy imagines that sometimes. A young wizard, hiding and hoping in some corner of the hospital, unbeknownst except for a few people. Pansy wonders if she is hiding as well.
According to her mother she isdoing just that andtrying to fight an enemy that isn't there.
The thought of her mother makes her cringe involuntarily. She takes a small useless breath and gets back to her task of rectifying the Doxie venom she collected yesterday. Straining the pus-like liquid through the distillator, going up and down. It's a tedious process, and the only noise in the room is the muted gurgle of the greenish liquid. The silence in her chamber always unnerves people, and today it is almost deafening to her with all the meaningless thoughts in her head.
Her workplace, otherwise, is immaculate. Like most parts of her life, it was shabby and lifeless when she first came here. Unlike most parts of her life, she'd fixed it into something that spells comfort to her now, even if the flashy white of her room gets to her sometimes. Her things are carefully catalogued, everything serves a purpose. She can trace her hands on the labeled vials on the shelves attached to the bleached wall, and tell, without looking, what they are. She knows when and how she collected them, brewed them, fixed them and listed their uses. She knows It is a silly thing to ravish in such a small achievement, but Pansy cannot help herself. It's probably the only place that's entirely hers as of now.
And it's practically empty of people. Which is not something you would expect at a hospital like St. Mungo's, but she contents herself with what she has. Her affiliations don't allow her to work in the general ward, where her presence could bring unwanted dispute.
Labels, labels.
So she stays at the almost reclusive area in the hospital, brews and rehashes potions, ointments, and helps with the most desperate cases.
In a way she too is categorized like her vials, shoved into the corner like an unwanted, but viable accessory. The way Harry Potter is forced out in the front, bright and optimistic face of the wizarding world.
Potter .
His name brings a torrent of other things to her mind. And unfortunately she has time to indulge.There is nothing else to do but wait on and check if the poison changes in color in the apparatus. Because in earlier life she must have pissed off a god, or something similar that now she is having a lazy day. The few hours of last night are playing in her head, start to finish, pausing at a moment that can be deciphered in a hundred deceitful ways, then again retracting.
And on the back of her head a song is playing low, she thinks. And although she can't recall what exactly, she is sure it's the same tune they played at the ceremony.
I guess I'll be seeing you.
Why?
Pansy tells herself he was just being chivalrous. That this is the sort of thing people tell each other - that he tells others - even if they don't mean it. This is basic conversational etiquette, and she should know, with all the politesse lessons she has had since she was eight. But still.
I guess I -
Fuck that. He had chances to see her. She had chances to see him. Neither of them did. That's done. So it goes. They met at a party and slept together and she had felt… something. Incomprehensible, heavy, raw something . At the pit of her stomach, like - like -
It doesn't matter.
But still. His eyes and his hair and his drunk, cutting smile invades her thoughts. She mixes the names of the potions she has to catalogue today. She confuses the ingredients on the instructions she gives the house elves. Harriet Antigone looks at her in soft caution as she hands her a vial of Living Death when she asks for Calming Draught.
"Parkinson?" She asks in her paper-thin voice. "Are you alright?"
Pansy snaps back her hand just as she snaps out of her daydream. "Yes. I am so sorry. Yes, I'm alright."
"You look feverish," she says. "I know it's a difficult day and if you -"
"What?"
The elderly matron narrows her soft, blue eyes. "This date. I know how hard it was for you when the baby..."
Pansy blocks out the rest of the speech. She feels a stone drop in her stomach. She feels it dragging her down. She forgot. How could she forget?
"I'm OK," she breathes out, her lungs tight and still pressing down on her ribs.
The healer knows better than to argue. When she leaves with a sympathetic smile and a few other sincere enquiries, Pansy lets out a shaky breath and flops on her chair.
That's why Harriet gave her so little work. Damn her concern. Damn her own useless, empty hours.
She looks through her blurry vision at the eight beds kept in her supervision. Show pieces almost. She's only ever had one patient come here. They're mostly for emergency purposes. Only needed when there are more people than they can handle.
Like after the war.
St. Mungo's hadn't been much help up front during the war, just like the ministry, or even Hogwarts. The places had been there doing lip service in the name of safety. But the real battle had been in the shadows, real people who fought were named outlaws and bandits.
But after the final battle these paper places exploded. After the Dark Lord was gone, the empty guts and insides on these places were laid bare. Pansy remembers reading in the paper in her Slytherin common room that thousands of people came to St. Mungo's for treatment. Some had recent injuries, some from long ago, the after effect of an Unforgivable. Some people had been at the receiving end of dark spells the death eaters invented during the last year of Voldemort's reign. And he did reign, albeit from the shadows. His stifling presence was all that could be felt during the last year of war.
Staring at the bed, Pansy can swear she feels it even now.
She felt it when she saw a baby born from a woman who was pregnant during the war. The only patient she had in her reclusive chamber. The woman had been a death eater helself. And she received one too many Imperious from her husband. Pansy was treating her during the last few months of her pregnancy. The curse did something insidious to her brain, she no longer thought she was a person who could think independently, and acted violently on her thoughts. She was showing improvements though, as her delivery was approaching. Pansy had hope, desperate and staggering hope.
The woman was cured completely when the baby was born. It took a while for them to understand why. Pansy felt the air knocked out of her body when Harriet informed her that the baby had absorbed the toxins of the curse, that it probably started from the beginning but peaked at the third trimester. Pansy could never have guessed how much the war can take. How many lives are forever twisted from it's clawing grip.
Pansy takes a deep breath to calm down, her cheeks wet despite herself. She really should take a new chamber, not the one haunted by the silence that replaced the dead baby's cry.
Useless, meaningless hours.
She cannot believe she forgot. It was a boy. He didn't have a name. He lived in excruciating agony for an hour.
He should've had a name.It takes a few hours for her poison to fully detoxify, a few hours alone in her white, silent room, almost enough time to think till she catches dementia. When she's finished tidying her portion with shaky hands, she gives an extra set of instructions to Peony, the elf that takes over from her in the night. Peony gives her a sympathetic smile as well, though she doesn't notice. Her head is hazy as she steps out of the room; it is a swirling chaos of lifeless fetus, cries like howls, her own disappointed mother, and somehow, inexplicably - windswept hair and green green eyes.
So when the bearer of these eyes materialize in front of her, almost silently, it takes a while for her to stop in her tracks and look, to make sure she was not dreaming.
There he is. Leaning against a wall in the mostly empty hallway, just near her eyesight. Flirting with a nurse. One of his arms is in a sling. Pansy looks at him in almost disbelief.
He hasn't noticed her, which is good, which is enough time to take up the tattered remnants of her mind and get away before he sees her, before she cries in front of him. But something - her stupidity, of course - keeps her glued to the spot. She stares at his eyes. The bright light of the lanterns falling on his face, on his eye shining with mischief and loveable, forgivable recklessness as he looks down on the girl - Ariana Poller, Pansy recognises her. He is laughing at something she's said and the sound has a winning ring to it, and no wonder girls love him. He is a Chosen One through and through.
Enough, she tells herself and wheels back. Almost. But of course he notices her just then, of course. It's a cliché, like all the romance novels Daphne reads. Like in a novel he catches her looking just then and he stops in his tracks. Pansy feels embarrassed all of a sudden. Not just because she was prying - she was - but also because there's something unfortified about her right now. She's wearing her lime green healer robe, her hair is in an orderly and dutiful plait, and she was almost crying about a baby that wasn't even hers. How is it he always finds her unmasked?
The girl looks back to follow his eyes and when she sees Pansy, her face falls for a moment, but then contorts into the same smile she had on, hurriedly looking back at him and gesturing her hands to something afar. He jumps from surprise and takes his eyes away for a split second to the girl, and Pansy takes her chance.
With her heart dropped to her stomach and brain dizzying like warm firewhiskey, she apparates.