He has the anger of a child.
A brazen kind of anger, anger that stomps and stupifies and, in the end, just wants your attention.
He hides it well, but still some of it leaks through him sometimes, in unsuspecting moments. When he sees a pair of sharp, icy blue eyes, a ghostly reminder of a certain person. When he eyes the corners of every street they go to like something shadowy is hiding behind them, his jaw is set like a stony armour and Pansy knows the hand she isn't holding has a tight grip on his wand. When they kiss, his face has such staggering desperation it borders on something rough, and she likes that well enough. She just doesn't fully understand where it will go.
She suspects all these signs were already there, when they first had sex, when they met again on the train. But he's hiding less and less. He lets her see the flinch in his eyes when his scar hurts, he lets her touch it anyway to make sure that nothing's the matter. Phantom pain is an obscure field in magical remedies, Pansy lets him know. But she does extensive research on the stuff they do have at Mungo's. Some crystal veil has fallen after he showed her the muggle house, and now it's… intimate.
Pansy turns each moment in her mind. How he grips her hand in the quiet moment at her chamber, how he waits for her to kiss him first, but when she does, how it stirs something in him. He takes a sharp breath each time, he breathes her in. When he pushed her against the wall of the small storeroom of her workplace, swallowing her moans with hungry, hot-headed kisses as he pushed his hand down her robe, his fingers working quickly and quietly to bring her release. Pansy rolled her head against the shelves, she was used to spontaneity, she wasn't used to this sort of burn in someone's eyes. When she came, he pressed his forehead on hers, breathing heavily. "You seemed like you needed a break," he told her.
She leaned forward to pull at his lower lip with her teeth, softly, like she always wanted to. Her hands found their way to his jeans and she unzipped it enough to sneak her hand in. He gasped slightly, letting his head fall on her shoulder when she returned the favour.
"You need to loosen up as well," she replied to his quiet moans. She savoured the moment well, she can still bring back to her mind the exact way his hands enclosed her hips. His heavy, throaty whimper. When he came, his hand left their grip momentarily to rest on the shelves behind them, the vials clinking together, before he backed up to look at her with a dopey smile, flushed cheeks, kissing the corner of her lips.
She has been thinking about going all the way since then. She has been thinking about inviting him to her apartment, she's been thinking about him. Period. She dissects the moments and analyses them like she does with her Persian Pixies. The periwinkle blue creatures are short and stout and complicated. Their venoms are used for making elixirs. But she has to be extremely careful, one drop of poorly diluted venom can kill a person instantly.
Time and precision, she was instructed by the matron in handling these.
"Time and precision," she mutters to herself. She feels like an inexperienced cartographer, maybe the world's first cartographer, charting out foreign territories with her wand and copying her findings on papyrus. An explorer on a tumultuous region, dusting through hidden nooks and corners of a forest writhing against chaos.
Safe to say, indulging in the messy jumble of Harry Potter's mind gives her hardly any time to think about her own. And it's good, it's almost perfect because her mother has stopped writing to her altogether, and the letter she sends to Cynthia comes carrying ice cool replies in handwriting of Ditty. Pansy can wonder if this is how relationships break, if all that takes to disintegrate the invisible umbilical cord between mother and daughter is simple, complicated silence, but she'd rather not.
So when Ditty materializes in front of her shaking and crying, her first thought is, she is finally disinherited. That would be like her mother, sending a message through the elf that brought her up, forbading any other correspondence. Pansy is sure Cynthia would not mean it all the way, but still it would be a small end.
But that isn't the case. Pansy drops the catalogue she's holding to walk to her carefully. Ditty was always a bit melodramatic. But - there's something different.
"Pansy," she cries. "Mistress." She breaks down like a puddle of water. Pansy falls on her knees to hold her up.
"What happened?"
The elf can barely breathe. "Mistress - she - is crying. She is shaking." A sob breaks through her chest and she shakes uncontrollably in Pansy's arms. "She is telling me to tell you to go see your father."
An icy wave passes through her. "What? Suddenly? Why?"
"She is gone to see master today." She hiccups. "She came a moment ago. She was crying and crying and told Ditty to call for you. For you to see him. Pansy, you have to see him."
She lets go of the shaking body, she backs up. "Now?"
Ditty nods.
No. "I have to - I should talk to mother." Pansy stands up. Calls for Peony. Tells her to take care of the other elf.
Ditty shakes her head vigorously. "Mistress tells me he is alone. The visiting hour is gone. Almost. Pansy. You have to go."
She feels like a child. She feels the crippling fear of a child asked to stay in the darkened wardrobe. Hears the nagging of her own voice. Feels the bone deep shame. This is her father. She is being asked to see her father.
She gulps down the excuse stuck in her throat. It's rough and hard and leaves a dent. She takes deep breaths as she watches Peony making the other elf sit down, drink water, patting her on the back.
"I didn't know we had a visiting appointment. Why didn't she ask me to go with her?" she asks.
Ditty looks up at her apologetically. "She is angry with you. She says she can't make you live with her."
Understandable. Pansy takes her bag, her wand without another word. Apparates, almost, before her eyes fall on the piece of paper on her table.
"Tell Harry I'll be late," she says to Peony. On another thought - "Don't tell him where I am."
She apparates.
The tight knot in her abdomen leads her to the prison island. She lands on the brink of the beach. Splashes of icy waves are crashing on the rocks, a continuous biting assault as she walks to the towering black height. The sight of the fortress takes her back to the last time she came, and the time before that, and beyond that too. It's an unchanged, stony facade for a penitentiary. In her mind, it's more like a torture chamber, an ever lasting feast for the dementors inhabiting there since forever.
She looks up at the Azkaban and shivers. For all the words she knows and the places she's been, there is no other word to describe the towering gaol as anything but cold. Bone chilling, bone crushing cold. She waits before the foreboding gate, entirely made out of stone and enchanted by Ekrizdis himself. It takes a second before the face of a guard materializes on the gate. She tells him her name.
"Parkinson." He scoffs. "Of course."
She grips her wand involuntarily as the gates open with a crackling noise. The guard in his grey, depressing robe stands before her. He stares at her, his eyes going up and down as if he is sizing her up. An uncomfortable smile on his lips makes her clutch her wand tighter.
She starts to speak, "My mother -"
He scoffs again. "The other Parkinson. She left a while ago. Got scared off. Come."
She follows him through the open field. The sound of waves crashing almost blinds her ears. She walks quickly to match his pace, her fingers still on her wand that feels like glass now, the vials she keeps categorized in her shelf. She knows her father is at the southeast corner. On levels of criminal offense, her father was a big fish only because of his name. He is in much better condition than Lucius Malfoy, she's been told many times. The northern area where Draco's father is kept is the most brutal part of the whole fortress. Even fully trained aurors are afraid to tread there, the dementors on that part have been there since the birth of this place. They witnessed muggle sailors being tortured, they feasted on innocent civilians, they enjoyed one of the most infamous dark wizard, their once master Gellert Gindleward.
All these histories mean absolutely nothing when she enters the grey visiting room and sees her father at the center of it. Pansy feels hot tears in her eyes at the sight of him. He is crouching at the floor, his face hidden as his body shakes in convulsions. Above him, a dementor floats languidly. As Pansy moves closer, she sees the shadowy ripples of its clothes nearly touching him.
Her voice chokes in on itself. She barely squeaks, "Why is it so close?"
The man's voice is sour. "He was being naughty."
Naughty. So crude. So unlike her dignified father. He was a chess grandmaster. He was wizarding world's champion for eight consecutive years.
It seems as though he hasn't showered since they last met. His prison robes are flayed in different places. It seems he has bunched some of it to his groin to rid him of embarrassment. Pansy blinks to get rid of tears and calls him, as nonchalantly as she can, "Father?"
He looks up at once. What she notices aside from the green snot running from his nose is his eyes. Bloodshot and wide open. It reminds her of the putrid center of a Doxy bite. He looks deranged. Even when he isn't making any noise, silent tears run down his face from his eyes, mix with the snot. She shivers inwardly when she offers him a hand.
He eyes the hand suspiciously. Considers it. Doesn't take it.
"Where's Cynthia?" Surprisingly, his voice is still his own, though there is a breaking edge to it. She knows this. This is the voice that taught her the first incantation she ever did.
Lumos.
"She's sick," she answers. "I'm Pansy, father."
He tries to straighten up a little. The dementor floating behind him wobbles. "I know who you are," he says a little too crossly. "My daughter."
She tries to touch him to get up to the steel chairs with strings out lead coiling around the manchette arranged for them. When he flinches away from her touch, she crouches down next to him. She can feel the dementor shift a little. Nausea rises up in her throat like bile. The smell of the creature and her father mingle together into some sort of awful stench they don't have a name for. It's good she hasn't eaten anything today.
"How are you?" she asks.
He looks sideways at his captor. It doesn't need answering.
"Do you want me to tell her something?"
"Who?"
"Cynthia. Mother."
He considers this as well. Doesn't answer again. But when she reaches forward to scrub the snot off him with her sleeve, he lets her. She does a silent, nonverbal spell to calm him and tries her best to talk in her practiced healer voice.
"Do you know what I was doing? I was categorizing some potions today for the patients, numbering them based on their effectiveness. I work at St. Mungo's, did you know?" She doesn't expect him to answer. He stays immobile, looking at her with some kind of aching wonder. "It's funny, you always disliked hospitals. Anyway, I noticed something very interesting. The potions that are the most effective are the one made from the most dangerous poisons. For example, the drug for magicked neural cyst is made from viper's venom. But if a viper bites you -" She hesitates, her heart constricts painfully. This may not be the topic of choice to talk to your unbalanced father while a soul-sucking creature is hanging above you. But nothing else comes to her. She doubts if there are any topics in the world suited for this occasion.
But somehow, her father makes a movement, he pulls at the sleeve of her dress and she almost jumps. His eyes are glassy and nor entirely there, but she thinks she sees a sliver of something, a flutter, almost, at the corners. And her throat feels so dry at the sight of that recognition that she does the thing she has always been strictly asked not to, ever, in the presence of her father's captors. The godforsaken dementors.
Her mask breaks and she cries.
It takes a split second, and her father is already gone, far from the snippet of recognition. He slaps her hand away and shakes vigorously. She tries to reach for him through her blurry vision, but something else comes into her view. Pansy feels the dementor's shadow creeping on the side of her cheeks. Has the room gotten colder?
There is another dementor in the room, suddenly. Pansy stands up with shaking knees, her wand out. She whispers the spell before she can recall a memory in her mind.
"Expecto patronum."
Nothing. Worse than nothing. The dementors roll gleefully at the bead of silver light at the edge of her wand. Pansy takes a step back. Her eyes are blurry but she can tell her father is crouched at the center again, beating his head against the floor.
She tries to remember a memory, while telling herself it doesn't matter if she can't, surely, a guard is coming?
A memory comes to mind. A shadow of a memory. The room is colder and she wills herself to feel the warmth of the Hog's Head where she and Blaise used to hang out.
"Expecto patronum!"
A patch of silver mist bursts out. Pansy looks at it with precipitation as the the light materializes into the ears, dents like eyes and the long nose of her deer -
The frigid waves snap her out of her hope. She almost falls down. Why isn't anyone coming?
"Guards?" No answer except for the loud slurping sound coming from the man at the center. She takes a step to him, but the dementor in front of her stops her dead.
It's even closer now. The rotten laces of skin blow despite the lack of any wind. Pansy watches in horror the empty mouth of the creature.
She takes a feeble step back raises her wand again.
"Expecto pat - pat -" she whispers. Happy memories, she tries again. Surely she has happy memories. Strong, happy memories. Things that happened to her that have the power to take her away from this dreary place. Memories warm like candles, or porridge pudding her mum used to make. Pudding. That's it. Her father's favourite. He always had a sweet tooth.
She tries to recall Christmas mornings. She closes her eyes, tries to picture their dining room in green and red.
Expecto -
But suddenly the coldness presses on her. The room is green and red but the tree is missing. And she sees him. Waxy, bald face with two slits for his nose. It reminds her of a snake, he hisses like a snake.
She hears her father whimper. She offers him her hand but he slaps it away.
Another memory then. Her first day at school. She's ecstatic. She is writing to her mum that she's been sorted into Slytherin with Draco and Blaise. She twirls the quill in her hand. And Harry Potter is -
Her head is heavy, so heavy. She feels another dementor floating over her.
Red and Green.
Expec -
But now the dementor is over her. And suddenly her father isn't there. No one is. All that's left in the rotten world is this cold, flat nothingness. She topples over her own feet. She falls flat on her back. The dementor hovers over her, it's ugly head tilted. And she's not here anymore. She's a child again, puffy faced and sneering at another girl. Calling her ugly, pig nosed. Dirty. Mudblood.
A whimper breaks through her lips. No, she wants to say. I'm not her. Please.
But there's another memory. She's slapping an elf. She's whispering in Daphne's ear. Penelope Clearwater is a whore.
She can't say anything. It is her. The girl looks like her, the words she says have the same scratchy disdain.
The dementor is at her nose and she hears the howling of the mother of a nameless child. Dead. She held him. A boy. The dementor breathes on her face. The raw stench of corpses fill her senses and she feels the weight of the child on her chest.
A scream. Hers. Not hers. She can't tell. It's tearing her insides. She wants to match that howl but her body betrays her. Everything betrays her. It's cold and dead and dark inside her. She feels the dementor place an icy hand on her cheek and tilts her head. Almost like a lover. Almost like someone else. She forgets his name. She hears a cruel laugh in her head and she cannot remember his name.
She can smell the dementor like it's imprinted in her brain. It's like an open graveyard. It's the most awful smell in the world. It's nothing. Her head is so heavy that it doesn't matter that someone is screaming again, so loud that he must have flayed the insides of his throat. She thinks about the kiss that's about to happen, and how wonderful it must be. Nothing, nothing and nothing. Endless nothingness. She welcomes it. It's certainly better than whatever the world has to offer, whatever she has to offer to the world.
A finger pulls at her lower lips and she opens up willingly. Lovely dark. Lovely, lovely dark welcomes her.
"EXPECTO PATRONUM!"
She gasps horribly. The cold is blown away from her hand, in darkness, with closed eyes she reaches for it, but it only burns her hand. The promised emptiness betrays her too. A titular warmth engulfs her and that's what tips her over the edge. She rolls to her side and cries, tries to cross her arms around her numbed body in a fetal position. She wishes she had never been born.
"What the FUCK?" A voice booms in anger. She screws her eyes shut and tries to block out the useless noise. But still it invades her senses.
"WHO WAS IN CHARGE?" A hand scoops her up. She thinks she wants to fight this pair of arms, she thinks she wants to stay on the ground, let the cold seep in, let the dementor kiss her - but no one asks her what she wants. The man is talking gibberish as he moves her closer to his arm.
She wants to sleep. But the tears keep coming, it clogs her throat. It mixes with snot running down her nose and she can't sleep.
"I - I -" What?
"I'm so sorry, love," the man says. She looks at him and cannot recognize him.
"Let me - let -"
She wants him to let her go. But the words don't come out.
"I'm so sorry," he says again. 'It wasn't supposed to happen."
It wasn't. She was supposed to have died.
"But we can't have you here. I'm taking you to St. Mungo's. Hold on. You'll be alright, missy."
A bitter laugh bubbles up with the tears. She doesn't know why this is funny. She thinks she should know.
She is convulsing with repeated bouts of laughter and howling cries when the man apparates with her. She thinks she hears a piercing call of her name, though she isn't sure she knows her own name.
"Oh Merlin!" A woman shouts. "Take her there!"
Where? Does it matter?
She thinks they change places again. Thinks there's another shout of her name. She feels another set of arms coil around her, wrenching her away. The hands holding her are shaking, but they are warmer. The change of berth makes another slurp of cry rise from her throat.
She thinks she is named after a flower.
" What has happened? "
She knows this voice. She knows the cold rage teeming around it.
Another bouts of gibberish. Nothing matters. She hears the angry angry voice of a boy but there are other noises in her head screaming dirty, useless words. When someone sets her in a bed, she tries to pull her legs closer to her chest. She knows this is called the fetal position. She knows this is the primitive response to any danger known to man. This means comfort because this is the way we are kept safe in our mother's wombs.
Mother.
She is named after her mother's favorite flower.
Even though nothing matters, even though her heart shrinks in size until there is nothing, when a tender hand cups her cheeks, she breathes in the bitter smoke and smiles.
"Pansy?" She knows this man. She thought of him when the dementor touched her face.
She smiles despite the heavy dark void calling her to nothing.
"That's my name," she whispers.
Pansy wakes up with a clear head, despite all. She blinks to adjust to the darkness in the room. The air is heavy with the sweet smell of incense. When she tries to get up, she almost hears the crunches in her joints.
Quick footsteps in her direction. Her hand reaches for her wand reflexively, but then she sees him.
"Oh thank god," Harry almost breathes the words.
She watches him like he is a character from a book. He comes closer, sits on the corner of her bed. "How are you?"
She blinks and tries to search for the answer. She touches the center of her chest. She feels the steady beating of her heart. Too steady.
"Am I drugged?" she asks.
"A little. Maybe." He scoots closer. His hair is messy. She thinks of combing her fingers through them. She leans back instead.
"How's my father?"
He purses his lips. "Better. I - uh, I talked to the guard who brought you. I made sure he's been seen by a healer. No more dementors for him until -" His cheeks darken. "Dementors aren't supposed to be acting as guards anyway. Kingsley has been trying to - well, it will take a few months but I - but we're hoping they'd be able to scoop off dementors from Azkaban permanently. How are you feeling now?"
She is feeling nothing. There is a distinct lightness in her chest that must mean she's missing something important, something visceral. But it doesn't matter.
"I'm alright."
He nods appreciatively. "Good. Good. I'll call Harriet."
Pansy watches the matron check her up in quiet statis. Harry stands beside her at an arm's length. He doesn't try to touch her, which is good. She can't say how she will react to something like that. After a while, Harriet smiles at her and tells her she's been very strong, she is currently under a strong mind easing potion and that it will take a while to burn off its effect, that she should probably stay at her home, or someplace comforting because that's what she needs. She nods and nods, staring at the witch's warm gaze and trying to feel something .
It doesn't work.
Harriet points her wand and changes Pansy's hospital robes into normal clothes. Then Pansy sits on a chair and watches Peony help Harry pack her things. Harry touches her carefully before they apparate. She is thankful that he lets her go as soon as they are done.
He instantly conjures a chair and she sits on it. The air in the room is stuffy, but comfortable. As she looks around she realizes that he's brought her to his muggle house. Number four, Private Drive. This is the kitchen. She flexes her fingers to see if they work. She feels no joy to see that they do. As she's busy trying to move every one of her joints, she hears him working behind her. Clatters of plates, pots and glasses. Smells something savory and then sweet. After what it feels like hours, he places a mug on the table and sits on the chair next to her.
She looks down at the steaming mug. Hot chocolate.
She places her palms on either side of the mug, feels the heat seeping into her numbness and feels something similar to being grateful. The drugs are starting to wear off, then. That means she can feel gratitude and an amplitude of other things. She drinks, turning over thoughts in her head. She looks up from the mug only after she's finished half of the contents, and sees him looking at her with a mixture of tenderness and something that aches. Something she doesn't know the word to describe.
He has been exceptionally silent this entire time. She can feel tenderness in that too.
But other thoughts are in her head, picking at the gray matters of her brain, the white fibers inside them are passing mean, broken words. She puts her palm around the mug again, then slides it until it's on the edge of the table. Slides it further. The glass drops and shatters, and then she realizes how she's feeling. How any of this mess feels like.
The words don't fully form inside her head until she dishes them out, and it's cold, colder than the waters at Azkaban, colder than the godforsaken dementors. She puts her palm over her eyes and a sour laugh gets stuck at her throat. Her hands still haven't warmed up.
She says, "Why are you so nice to me?" And in another world this would sound nice, this would sound lovely, coaxing, like a soft hum to a beloved. But the way she says it comes out flat and ruthless, like a man succumbing to his impending death. Like a man who's already dead.
She can't see his expression, but she improvises on his silence. He's not sure how to answer.
Alright. Understandable. She will wait a few seconds and then-
"I don't understand where you would want to go from there."
"Wherever the tide takes us, love. I'm not prancing around this - us, any longer. Why are you here? Why are you making me fucking hot chocolate?"
"Because - I - I want to."
"You are aware that my father's a death eater? You know he's serving a decade there. Do you know what for?"
"Pansy." He sighs. "I don't care."
"Don't care that my father tortured and interrogated muggleborns? Or do you not care about anything at all now?"
Silence. When she finally looks at him, he is almost like a marble statue. She sees his eyes stare with her with careful consideration, and she hates him. She wants him to answer her bitter questions with the same amount of acidity. So something of her rage would be justified. So they can both scream and she can finally convince herself that this is a broken, broken thing, what they want to build. And there's no use. They're bad for each other. She waits for him to realize she's bad for him.
But when he finally speaks, it's still calm. "Pansy, you need to rest. I'll fix up a room here for you. You'll feel better later, I promise."
And god is it worse.
" No." It comes out like a hiss. He doesn't budge at her voice, doesn't recoil in distrust. "Go away," she says again, deadlier. "Go away, Harry. I don't want you here." Then, "I don't want you at all."
And it hurts him, she knows it does. Because that's the thing he fears, right? That's what she has patched together after spending irreversible time with him these few months. He's scared of his own needs. He is scared of tainting someone with his needs. If someone sees how desperately he is holding on for dear life, how his scar still hurts, how if he wakes up in the dark he is terrified that Voldemort is still somewhere inside him, they will turn away, they will see he isn't a saviour at all. Just an angry boy who never got to be a child. Then they'd leave.
Pansy knows all of these, and these were facts she learned in privilege of knowing him. And these are weapons she uses against him.
"You are not my saviour," she hears herself say. "I - I am a death eater's daughter. And I will always be. Do you know how much I wanted to take him away? If I could, I would destroy the fucking Azkaban to get him out. I am a death eater sympathizer. The papers are right. I haven't switched sides. So this is ridiculous. The idea of you and me. And this -" she gestures her hand to the empty, cold air between them. "Whatever you want from me, I can't give anymore."
"I don't want anything from you," he says, there is an edge to his voice. A tightness. Good.
"Of course you do." She scoffs. "You want to fuck me."
God, it is a dirty word. And she uses this too.
"It was intense, right? When we fucked? Wasn't it the first time you felt that someone gets you? Under that - that fucking facade? Well, I'll tell you what happened, you were drunk. I was drunk. You had a nightmare and I used magic to get into your mind. There it goes. That's the connection you think you have with me. It's just magic. And you know the best part? I can even teach it to someone else. Why don't I pay a visit to Ginny Weasley and teach her how to do it so you don't have to wander back to me? I'm no good anyway. I can't - don't have enough of myself to give to you. I'm a lost cause. And you're just being ridiculous."
"You don't mean any of these, Pansy." And something about hearing him say her name makes her feral. She almost fumes.
" Yes , I do. I mean everything. I meant everything I said at school too." She leans back against the chair and a memory that came to her at the Azkaban makes another appearance. She wants to laugh again but a cry breaks from her throat. She talks through the warm tears, unflinched, feeling her breaths go heavier anyway.
"You remember the word that we used? The word they've banned now? Mudblood? My mother still says it when she's drunk. So -" she gulps. "So let's not pretend that we - that this is anything - that I am someone - that we…" She loses her chain of thoughts altogether. "Fuck. Fuck this fuck all of it fuck you. Just go away. Just go go get the fuck away from my house." She takes a few heavy breaths and then remembers where she is. Gods really do hate her.
She hiccups and tries to stand. Her vision is blurry from tears and her own zagged mind. When she sees Harry his expression is a stone. His hands are fisted over the table and when he turns to her she sees the same rage brimming under his eyes. The rage she is beginning to recognize. Good.
I'm going, she tells herself. This is done.
But then. She reaches the door and another realization creeps in -
"I can't - can't apparate right now."
She stands for a cold five seconds before she hears the squake of the chair. She looks ahead at nothing when he takes her hand. But then her knees buckle, so he puts it around her shoulder to steady her and apparate.
She has no strength left in her, not even to decline Harry when he takes her to her bedroom. She collapses on the bed, her entire body one incompetent pile of nerves. She hears him walking around, fumbling through her things. She hears a clink of a glass beside her. Then he moves her up again, his hand tender and strong, to her pillow. Feels the heat of him replaced with the duvet he spreads over her. His palm linger over her head for a second, before he sighs and moves away. When she hears the almost unintelligible pop of his apparation, the tears come again. She realizes she smells of him and the cries hollowed out of her are like the frigid waves crashing against the rocks at Azkaban.
The room is colder and darker, and it swallows her whole.
hey. im so glad that people are reading this story :))) and if you've made this far i'd really love to know your thoughts on the characters an where this story is going.
stay safe and have a nice day !