Chapter Text
She’s venturing out of the wardrobe, thinking of getting down to the Great Hall for dinner early, when he descends on her. His hands span her entire middle.
Weasley marches her out of his room, holding her at arm's length, and her little heart patters rapidly against his fingers. “Whose cat is this?” he demands, spits out cat like it’s a dirty word.
Those currently occupying the common room look up long enough to clock the situation before turning away with disinterest. A smirk erupts over Blaise’s face, but he remains silent.
“No one?” Weasley tries again.
“Maybe Katie,” Longbottom suggests. “She was saying something to me about wanting a cat.”
Weasley bends down just slightly and then lets her go, half a meter from the floor. “Stay out of my room,” he mutters.
She darts away before anything more terrible can happen.
✦
She shouldn’t be back here. He’ll just kick her out again.
She aims for beneath the bed this time—he won’t expect it. She huddles there, eyes closed but ears pricked, and is immediately alert when she hears his entry. He shuts the bedroom door firmly behind him. Shit, now she can’t leave whenever she wants.
He’s rummaging around for ages. His shoes get kicked off, and then his pants and his white shirt and Gryffindor striped tie. Pansy wriggles further forward, feeling like a voyeur but not guilty enough to stop. He has nice legs—from all the quidditch, she guesses. His back is quite lovely too, broad and smattered with freckles like the sun couldn’t stop kissing him. He pulls on sweatpants and then leaps onto the bed. She flinches—it protests loudly under his weight, but holds.
She relaxes, her mind quieting to a hum instead of a calamity. Her eyes half lidded, she listens to the sounds of Ron breathing. There’s a lot of sniffing happening.
Her attention catches on movement on the floor.
Just as there are plenty of places for a cat to hide in Weasley’s room, there are even more for bugs, the amount of items scattered over the floor creating a million tiny crevices.
The way the spider moves enraptures her, tickling some part of her brain. She wants to swipe at it. Jump on it. Bat it sideways and chase it. With long, skinny black legs it climbs the slope of a discarding clothing pile and disappears over the other side. Pansy can’t help herself, she leaps out from under the bed and on top of the spider.
“Fucking shit!” Weasley yelps. “I shut the door, how did you get in here?”
Pansy looks at him, wondering if he’s stupider than she’d ever suspected. It was open before he came in, wasn’t it? Beneath her paw, the spider wriggles.
Her attention drawn back, watches it with fascination. One of its legs is trapped by her paw, the other legs futilely attempting an escape. Can spiders survive with seven legs, she wonders.
Weasley leans off the bed to see. His eyes are red rimmed and blood shot, his cheeks blotchy with red pigment; he’s been crying again. “What have you got?”
She lifts her paw out of the way.
“Oh god, a spider?” His voice immediately rises an octave. “Did you bring that in here?” he asks, horrified.
She flicks a look up at him. Did he really think that’s what cats spent their time doing?
“Kill it, ohmygod, where’s my wand? Have to kill it, fucking Merlin.”
While he’s scrounging for his wand between his ghastly quilt and dark red sheets, Pansy lifts her paw centrally over the black eight-legged apparent-miscreant, and then firmly squashes it. Chances were low that it was the animagus form of anyone she knew.
“Did you just kill that spider for me?” Weasley asks. She looks up again to see his face painted with awe. “You are so much better than Crookshanks.”
Pansy preens—it’s a high compliment to receive. Crookshanks was a fearsome cat.
Ron flops back down on the bed, heaving an epic sigh. He rolls his head to look over at her. “You can stay, if you kill all the spiders.”
Pansy feels like smiling, but cats aren’t really capable of such expression. She heads back under the bed, closer to him than the wardrobe and that feels important for some reason. He doesn’t ask her to leave.
Some time later, his head hangs over the side of the bed. The crying is less evident now, only a faint redness to the whites of his eyes. “Still here,” Ron confirms out loud. “I’d wondered if you’d disappeared, since it seems like you can get through closed doors.”
She blinks at him to say no, you idiot. You left the door open.
Still hanging upside down—his face looks odd, freckled cheeks squishing up slightly against his eyes, his bright hair stretching out like gentle flames to the floor—he reaches out his hand. It’s a lot of skin, long-healed scars wind up his forearm to his bare shoulders like a Devil Snare grew around him until it was forcibly removed.
She sniffs his fingers; it feels like the cat-like thing to do. He seems satisfied, letting his hand drop to the floor.
“I’m going down to dinner. Should I bring something back for you?” They watch each other for a moment. Pansy’s not sure what she thinks—it’s kind of nice of him, isn’t it? She can’t remember the last time someone offered to bring her something back from the dining hall. Maybe Theo, but it’s always something with a bite taken out of it. No one who didn’t already have an obligation to her, no one who maybe just liked her for who she was. (A cat that killed spiders?)
“Only to say thank you,” he says. “For the spider.”
A knock on the door and then; “What are you doing?”
Pansy startles at the unfamiliar voice. Ron drags himself back up.
“Nothing. I’m coming.”
“Put a shirt on, will you?” Granger complains.
“I was in the privacy of my own room,” Ron retorts, but he’s of course pulling a jumper over his head, shoving his slides on.
He follows Granger out of the room, turning back as if to look at her, but she can’t see his face from this angle beneath the bed. He pauses a moment, then slides the door almost all the way shut.
“Just in case you can’t walk through doors,” he murmurs, and then he’s gone.