Changing for the Better

This is for the Draco in Leather Pants part of the Tropes and Cliché challenge run by Coding Gengar. It's about someone on the side of the villains having a platonic/romantic relationship with someone on the side of the heroes who tries to change them (and possibly fails). Additional prompt was 'Old Battery'. I don't own Harry Potter.

"And what's this thing?" Pansy Parkinson asked half sneering, but also sounding mildly interested.

Harry peered into her open palm, to see what she was holding. "That's a battery." He replied.

"What's it good for?"

"It holds an electrical charge to power devices that need to be portable and cannot be connected to an electrical line." He looked at the battery again. "Well, not that one probably. That one's old and it's charge has been used a long time ago."

Pansy's eyebrows rose. "They aren't reusable?"

"These days some of them can be recharged. But not all."

"Seems like a waste to produce those that can't be recharged if rechargeables are available."

Harry couldn't help but grin. "You seem quite interested for someone who professes not to care for Muggles."

"How could I not? When my boyfriend is such a Muggle lover." Pansy shot back.

Harry snorted, but then smiled at her warmly, receiving an equally warm smile back. Boyfriend. Right. If someone had told him that fifteen years ago, he'd had laughed them out of the room.

"If I confess that I may be more interested in Muggles than I claimed, would you introduce me to your relatives?" Pansy asked in a mockingly sweet voice.

"Definitely not." Harry responded without losing a beat. Pansy may no longer hate Muggles or Muggleborns, but Harry's relatives seemed to be the exception to the rule. And Harry would be the first to agree that his girlfriend could be rather vicious with people she didn't approve of.

Pansy pouted. "Then forget it." She started twirling the old battery around in her fingers and continued looking around in the knickknacks inside Arthur's shack. They'd come here so Pansy could take a short breather from the Weasleys. They were quite a handful and Pansy didn't have the years of tolerance built up that Harry had. At least that's what she said.

Observing his girlfriend with a smile, he remembered how he'd first met her again after Hogwarts. It had been five years after the battle.

Flashback

Harry took a relaxing cup of coffee in his office in the DMLE when he heard a shout.

"I need to see Harry Potter." The voice belonged to a woman and sounded somewhere between urgent and panicked.

"Ma'm, why don't you tell me what this is about and I will see whether Auror Potter is the right person to address."

"No, I don't trust you. I need to speak to Potter personally."

"Miss Parkinson…" Harry's eyebrows rose in surprise when he heard the name, "… I'm afraid I need you to calm… no, Miss Parkinson you can't just…"

Bang! Bang! Bang!

"Potter, are you in there? Please, I need your help! Please!"

Harry hesitated for just a moment. After all the last time he'd heard Pansy Parkinson's voice it had been to advocate handing him over to Voldemort. But Harry had never been able to ignore a plea for help, so after just a second he quickly strode towards the door of his office and opened it.

The scene he came upon was in no way reconcilable with the image of the snobby, entitled girl Harry remembered hanging on Malfoy's arm. Her face was dirty and tear stained. There was a cut on the back of her right hand and large bruise on her left cheek. Two Aurors stood behind her, about to grab her arms to pull her away from his door while a third one was in the process of drawing his wand. Harry was confused. The Auror she'd been talking to had been a Slytherin pureblood. Why had he tried to stop her and why did she claim not to trust him?

Making a quick decision he looked at each of the three Aurors. "I'll take it from here." He said firmly.

The Auror manning the desk didn't seem happy, but he didn't say anything. Harry filed that away for later. He was just about to ask Pansy into his office, when she started pleading with him again.

"Please, you have to send people to my parent's house. They've kidnapped a Muggle family and they'll kill them as soon as they notice I'm gone. There are two little children there. I tried to get them out myself but I couldn't get past my father's wards. Please."

Harry blinked. He was about to give the order, but then he stopped himself. It could be a trap. Darkmoor Castle (the home of the Parkinson family) was large and it could easily hide an ambush. Before he could question the woman in front of him any further, she quickly added "I'll take Veritaserum, swear an oath, whatever you want. Just do it now."

Five minutes later Pansy had sworn an oath, repeated the story under Veritaserum and had even given a memory for later review. Now Harry was in the Head Auror's office, giving his emergency report. Twenty minutes later the Aurors had taken Darkmoor Castle and rescued a family of six Muggles, one grandmother, two parents and three children, two of whom were not even eight.

Flashback ends

It later turned out that Pansy had first written a letter to the department, but whichever Auror received it had tipped of Pansy's father instead of checking the lead. That resulted in Pansy's injuries and her distrust of pureblood Aurors. Naturally, the Head Auror took on Pansy's case personally, and Harry only saw her again briefly during the ensuing trials. Pansy's family, without Pansy, got long sentences to Azkaban and nearly all of their assets were seized. There was also a sweep through the Auror office, resulting in fifteen discharges and later sentences ranging between gross negligence and treason. At the time it was one of the largest scandals of the post Voldemort Ministry, though interestingly, Pansy's name had been kept out of the media.

After the trials, Pansy vanished again from Harry's radar, but Harry didn't pay it much mind. It took three years before he met her again. He'd just stepped out of a pub in Nocturne Alley, where he'd met with an informant.

Flashback

"A knut, please?"

Harry turned towards the pitiful voice coming from the ground between two heaps of waste. There were many beggars in this part of Nocturne, but the voice had somehow drawn his attention. It took him a few seconds of looking the filthy woman in the corner up and down, before he realised why.

"Parkinson?"

The woman's eyes shot up in surprise. It was clear that she hadn't looked at who she was begging from.

"Potter…" She acknowledged after a moment.

"What are you doing here?" Harry asked, still in shock.

Parkinson sneered at him. Which, given her current looks and position, Harry found to be quite an impressive feat. "What does it look like, Potter?" She spat.

The colleague Harry had come with stepped in front of him. "You can't talk to him like that."

Parkinson just raised an eyebrow, as if asking what the man thought he could do to her. Harry put a hand on his colleague's arm and pulled the guy back. It had been a stupid question after all and if he was honest, Harry liked that Parkinson didn't treat him special. These days even his old pureblood enemies like Malfoy tended to walk on eggshells around him.

"What happened to you, Parkinson?" Harry asked the woman.

"What do you think? After the Ministry seized all my family's possessions I had to get a job. Turns out however, I can't get one."

Harry frowned. "That can't be right. You were one of the best in our year in Potions and there is always a shortage of brewers." Probably Parkinson just couldn't get a job because she thought herself to good for what was available.

However, his statement was met with another sneer. "Don't play stupid, Potter. I tried everything, even a job as a Maid. Half-Bloods and Muggleborns won't hire me because of my last name, and purebloods won't do it because of what happened three years ago. And my so-called friends decided that it was too dangerous to associate with a social pariah like me." She chuckled bitterly. "Turns out you're all the same, just with different prejudices. Now move along and leave me. I don't want your pity."

Harry looked at Parkinson closely but he couldn't see any deception in her face. He knew he was under no obligation to help, but it didn't sit right with him that she ended up like this because she had tried to do the right thing. That wasn't supposed to happen. So he made a snap decision.

"Get up." He ordered.

"Huh?"

"Get up. You can clean up and crash at my place tonight. Any of the seven guest bedrooms is yours. And tomorrow I'll take you to the Ministry and we'll find you some sort of job."

Parkinson looked up at him with eyes as wide as saucers for a few moments. Then she seemed to get over her shock. "Are you crazy?"

Flashback ends

It had taken Harry more than an hour to talk Pansy into agreeing with his plan. She had claimed she didn't want pity, and that she could comfortably sleep in the corner with copious amount of cushioning and warming charms applied and many other things to convince Harry to go away. Eventually though, when evening came and the air grew colder, Pansy had relented. Why Harry had cared so much, he couldn't really say. It was mostly that feeling that if you do the right thing, you shouldn't be punished for it. He was never good at ignoring such injustices.

After cleaning up and a good nights sleep in an actual bed, Pansy had looked much better, though good had still been ways off. He took Pansy to the Ministry, certain that using his name he would be able to find her some sort of job as an assistant. If she flunked out of that because she wasn't prepared to do work, then at least his conscience would be clear. It turned out much harder than he expected. Like Pansy had said, the more progressive Ministry workers didn't want to be associated with anything to do with the Parkinson name and the more traditionalist ones refused to employ Pansy for various pretend reasons, but it was clear they were cross with her for the sweeping of the Auror office. Her state of being underfed and generally sickly hadn't helped much either.

Desperate, Harry remembered that Hermione, who was working in the Magical Creatures Office, was looking for an assistant. It took him the whole afternoon, but he managed to get his best friend to agree to try out Pansy ("This is the worst thing you ever made me do ever, Harry."), and the rest of the evening to get Pansy to agree to take the job ("I cannot believe you think it's a good idea for me to work for Granger of all people."). In the end, however, he was successful and Pansy started the next week, spending most of the time in between in Grimmauld Place trying to get into some sort of workable shape.

How he and Pansy had ended up as roommates, Harry to this day didn't really know. At first it had been necessity. Pansy had no savings, virtually no possessions and her job didn't earn her a lot. Since she insisted on paying her share of the food, it took five months for Pansy to get together everything she needed and to be able to start saving up any kind of money. And even though Harry had offered to loan her the deposit for a small flat after the first two months, Pansy had flat out refused, not wanting to take any more charity from him. Really, she was too prideful for her own good, but then again Harry wasn't really one to talk.

Somewhere along the way, Harry had come to enjoy Pansy's presence. She was brutally honest and treated him in a normal way. Possibly the only person who did so, save the ones he'd been close to before the second war. Thus when the time came that Pansy could have gotten her own flat, Harry simply neglected to throw her out. Pansy, it turned out, wasn't in a hurry to leave the luxury of Grimmauld Place either and so she eventually simply started paying him rent for her room.

His friends weren't particularly happy. Even though Hermione was begrudgingly impressed with Pansy's work, those two had fought one battle too many in school times and Harry knew it would take a lot of time for any sort of private relationship be possible. And of course Ron and Slytherins had never been any good together. But his friends allowed him to do his thing, and so Pansy became his roommate rather than charity project.

Being on a more even footing, they soon settled into a new, very comfortable routine around each other. Many evenings were spent discussing Muggles and Muggleborns and their place in society, and ever so slowly Pansy, who had mostly tolerated them out of necessity after the war, became more open to Harry's arguments about equality. On the other hand Harry started to understand some of the less extreme purebloods, who simply wanted the people who came into their world to understand their customs without judgement. It took over a year, but eventually they acknowledged their mutual friendship to each other.

Soon after that, around two years after Harry found Pansy in Nocturne Alley, they were for the first time confronted with the possibility that there was more than friendship between them.

Flashback

Harry woke up with the mother of all headaches. It was extremely bright in his room, the sun shining into the window as if someone had paid it to make him miserable. The day before, he remembered, he had finished a very long and trying case and he had visited the three broomsticks with some other Aurors to celebrate. Remembering also that he had the day off, Harry decided to go back to sleep. However, as he turned onto his side and away from the sun, Harry's hand landed on something soft. And round. That smelled nice. And seemed to sigh when you squeezed it.

Harry opened his eyes. Blinked once. Blinked again. Blinked a third time. Then his mind caught up with what he was seeing.

"WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

Flashback ends

Needless to mention, Pansy had not been happy being woken by his scream. Especially since, if possible, she had been even more hung over than Harry. However, when she realised where she was and that both of them were naked, she quickly got over her annoyance and opted for horror instead. Pansy quickly ran out of the room and when the two of them met in the kitchen for breakfast an hour later, cleaned up and dressed, there seemed to be a silent understanding never to mention that morning again.

At first that strategy seemed to work rather well. Until half a year later, after successfully completing the investigations for another hard case, Harry found himself in nearly exactly the same position again. Quarter of a year after that, it happened again. And then again two months after that. While he did his best to ignore it, the increasing frequency of those 'mishaps' did not elude Harry. Neither did the fact that the two of them lingered in bed a little while longer every time, before one of them would get embarrassed and leave.

It was one and a half year after the first time he woke up next to Pansy, when Harry was promoted to Auror Captain, next in line to be Head Auror. He'd come home that evening in order to invite Pansy out to celebrate with him and some other friends. But as soon as he had mentioned his promotion and, crucially, before he could mention the celebration, Pansy had hugged him tightly and before either of them knew what was happening, they were kissing heatedly. No alcohol was consumed that night, but plenty of calories were burned. The same was true for the following morning. And the night after that.

So, maybe understandably, Harry had been surprised about Pansy's response when he asked her out officially.

Flashback

"Are you out of your mind? The Boy-Who-Lived cannot go out with Pansy Parkinson."

"Why not?" Harry asked, not really knowing what to make of Pansy's answer. After their drunken and sober activities, he'd been sure she would agree to an official date. In fact, he'd thought she would expect one.

"Because you are a local hero and since what happened with my family the name Parkinson has overtaken the Malfoy name as the most villainous name in post-Voldemort Britain."

"Who would care?"

Pansy snorted. "I can see the headlines now: 'Boy-Who-Lived Presents Parkinson Daughter as Girlfriend! Is Our Saviour Going Dark?' or maybe 'Dark Witch Seduces Boy Wonder: He Saved Us and Now We Must Save Him!'"

"But you are none of those things."

"I was. In school, I was. Harry, I wanted to hand you over to the Dark Lord. Even when I reported my family, it wasn't because I thought they shouldn't torture the Muggles. I didn't care about them at all. I just couldn't bear to think about the little children."

"You're not like that anymore. You changed." Harry contended stubbornly.

"Maybe, maybe not." Pansy shrugged.

"Don't pretend, Pansy. Hermione and I are best friends, you know? I know you've been working closely with her to get laws for the protection of creatures passed and that you helped her with Muggle and Muggleborn laws as well when she was lend to that department. She tells me half the laws would have failed without your political know-how."

"It's my job. That doesn't mean I necessarily support those laws we passed."

"So do you?" Harry simply asked, waiting for the answer feeling more nervous than he wanted to admit.

It took a long time, but eventually Pansy shrugged again. "I suppose our discussions may have helped change my views." Then she shook her head. "But it won't matter to anyone."

"It matters to me." Harry objected. "And it matters to Hermione, too, I know."

"It would destroy your reputation. I won't do that to you."

"You know I don't give a damn about my reputation, Pansy." Pansy opened her mouth again, but before she could say something, Harry quickly pulled her into a kiss. For a second she didn't react, then she started kissing him back. Before it could get heated again, like the evenings before, Harry pulled back. "If you don't want to go out with me, that's fine. But don't try and find excuses. I tried that the last six months and I'm out of excuses now."

Pansy looked uncertain. "It will be hard."

Harry grinned at her. "Harder than defeating Voldemort?"

Pansy blinked a couple of times. Then she nodded. "Fair enough." With that, she started kissing him again.

Flashback ends

A smile spread on Harry's lips as he watched his girlfriend of the last three years twirling the old battery in her hand. There was a small clang sound whenever it hit the small gold band on her ring finger. Her eyes were still taking in all the bits and pieces of Muggle equipment in Arthur's shack. It was nice to know that these days even all the Weasleys accepted his fiancée, even though some did so grudgingly. Finally she turned around and grinned.

"Mister Weasley really has no idea how most Muggle things work, does he?"

"Nope." Harry agreed. "I guess you have more of an idea than he by now."

Pansy rolled her eyes. "Great, now I'll have to give back my pureblood club card."

"On the other hand, you get to keep me." Harry offered.

Mockingly, Pansy tipped her finger against her chin and pouted a little in consideration. Then she nodded. "I suppose that is a fair deal." She looked at the battery in her hand for a couple of seconds, then back at Harry. "So, I thought it might be good if our children go to Muggle primary school. I don't want them to come in here by accident and swallow something. And since you insist on being friends with the Weasleys, there is a real danger there."

Harry snorted. His fiancée would say anything in order to be able to pretend she held no private interest in Muggles. "Sure." He deadpanned. "Whatever you say."

Pansy nodded. "Most assuredly whatever I say." With a flick of her wrist the battery was thrown back into the basket Pansy had taken it from. She sauntered over to the door and towards Harry. When she arrived, pulled Harry down into a long, loving kiss, before she took his hand and led him out of the shed.

All was well.

I hope you enjoyed :)