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Chapter Text

July 1991

Pansy shouldn’t have dirt under her fingernails.

She’s only ten, but this is rule number one—not because of its preeminence over all the others (and gods, are there others) but because it’s the rule she breaks most often. 

Her parents have left her with a governess stupid enough to keep eating the lavender and valerian-infused biscuits that Theo supplied Pansy with and—just like Nott Sr.—the woman will be passed out cold ’til morning.

Her blunt-cut bob tickles her jaw as she leans over at the waist, resisting the temptation to muddy her white wool tights by kneeling as she delicately brushes the white petals of her diphylleia grayi. Just as Narcissa had described, the tiny green bud at the center of the petals is nestled in by six yellow stamens and each flower comes in a bunch of five or six, sprouting from a singular stem like the world’s most gradual firework.

The greenhouse is making the collar under her jumper cling to her neck as she reaches for the spray bottle, irritation streaking like lightning across her chest at the inefficiency that plagues her every move. In two months, she’ll be eleven. And, with any luck at all, she’ll have a wand in her hand soon after.

Until then, she’s stuck living like a bleeding squib. 

She rests her dirt-smudged finger on the trigger of the spray bottle and her ire drains; the ground soaking it up the way it always does. Pansy stills her chest, aims for the white petals, and pulls.

Her pink lips part in awe as the petals sprawl out, a perfumed stretch and yawn. They turn translucent as the droplets of water dissolve into them and for a moment she wonders if she accidentally did this in a burst of magic, but no. 

This is a skeleton flower. 

The tiny white veins embedded in the petals look like bones made to shatter, but when she pinches one in half between her thumb and forefinger, it bends with ease. 

Small-boned.

Distressingly transparent.

Something foreign wells up in Pansy’s throat so she plucks the petal and holds the impossible object to her chest.

Has there ever been a flimsier mirror?

Curling her fingers around it, she crushes it in her palm.

October 1991

Pansy sits perched atop the armrest of Draco’s chair in the Slytherin dungeon, eyes trained on the black and white chessboard even though her tailbone is smarting and the straps of her training bra dig into her shoulders. 

“Father said it runs in the family, Potions. Reckons I’ll end up teaching Snape a thing or two before I leave this godforsaken place.”

His smirk is a funny-looking thing to Pansy—a pointy-toothed pygmy puff—but she’s sharp enough to keep that to herself. Narcissa hardly allowed Draco to play with anybody but her and Theo Nott growing up, so she’s the only one in present company who can tell what lies beneath the posturing.

Draco’s excited.

Somehow managing to dwarf the deep purple armchair he sits in across from Draco, Marcus Flint’s dark brown eyes glint with something feral in the firelight. 

“Queen to e5.” His queen glides diagonally three spaces to the right, gracefully removing the chair from beneath her and bringing it down upon the head of Draco’s rook with a palpable air of satisfaction. It shatters, debris littering the board. “You’d be hard-pressed to fail Potions. Snape don’t bother pretending he doesn’t love the snakes.”

A flush begins to creep up Draco’s pale neck. 

And, because Pansy can sense Draco’s impending recklessness like a niffler can sniff out coin, she clears her throat.

“Herbology strikes me as a sophisticated subject,” she interjects, chest swelling. “I expect I’ll end up taking the N.E.W.T. for it, come Seventh Year.”

Draco scoffs. 

“If a fat lump like Longbottom can be considered a genius on the subject, you might as well take a N.E.W.T. for the mating behaviors of trolls.”

She takes it for the rebuke that it is, delivered with a drollness that stings like a slap across the cheek. But she doesn’t understand.

“Isn’t Longbottom pure-blood?” 

Draco’s steel grey eyes widen fractionally in warning, but Marcus beats him to it. 

“What, you fancy him?” he says, relishing in Pansy’s obvious discomfort. “You like blood traitors with all the magical talent of a squib?”

Slytherin is paired with Gryffindor for Herbology this year, and Pansy has been to a grand total of four lessons so far. Professor Sprout taught them how to harvest alihotsy without bursting into uncontrollable laughter, and Pansy found herself impressed with Neville’s careful control of his clumsy fingers. He was one of the few who didn’t sound like a hyena by the end of the period.

“Of course not,” she says hotly, eyes riveted on the chessboard. Leaning down, she whispers loudly enough to Draco that it carries. “Knight to g7. Check.”

Then she stands, ignoring the way Draco’s back stiffens and Marcus’s eyes follow her as she moves to sprawl across the velvet black couch closer to the fire.

She is the picture of repose even though her heart beats out a rhythm that bruises her chest from the inside.

The boys finish up their game—quickly, thanks to Pansy—and Marcus grunts something about waxing his broom when he disappears, leaving the two of them alone.

“You reveal your hand too quickly.”

She doesn’t want to hear it.

“He’s four years older than us; shouldn’t he be better at that game by now?”

Draco’s nostrils flare and for a moment, he’s Lucius. She hates it.

“You understand that everything is political here, right?” She doesn’t respond. “Every conversation, every game of chess. Why do you think I was letting him win?”

Pansy pulls her knees to her chest and hugs them. She deserves Draco’s ire for ruining his careful manipulation of the Slytherin Quidditch captain, a connection he’s invested in fostering. 

Even so, she’s a nerve exposed to the air, on edge and ready to lash out.

“Longbottom’s competency in the subject shouldn’t mean he gets to own it,” she says petulantly. “I know loads more than him.”

Draco waves his wand and watches with a frown as the chess pieces flit to their original places, shattered fragments melding back together.

“Doesn’t matter. You put yourself in a position to be his competition if you take Herbology seriously, and the only thing that accomplishes is making you look pathetic.”

Pansy bites the inside of her cheek to keep the vitriol brewing through her veins from spewing out onto her friend.

“He didn’t grow up with any of the traditions that we did,” Draco says, brow finally relaxing. At this moment, detached and contemplative, he looks like his mother. “Doesn’t have anybody expecting anything of him.”

Forcing her fists to unclench, she brings her hands up to hold her chin, thumbs brushing the soft skin under her jaw in an attempt to soothe herself. Whether in reality or memory only, her palms are fragrant like flowers.

One month into her first year at Hogwarts and already the most important thing to her has been taken away. 

It’s not a feeling she’s used to.

A tear drips down her cheek but she makes no move to wipe it—doing so would only alert Draco that she still hasn’t gotten a handle on her emotions. She’s surprised that he hasn’t stood up and left yet.

“You stick with me, Pans.” 

It’s a promise, she knows; his voice firm like he’s trying to coax her onto a broom. Trying to get her to pretend she’s not afraid for just one bloody minute.

“We won’t have to play dumb for long.”

February 1992

Pomona Sprout is the stupidest kind of soft.

She holds cacti and actual flesh-eating plants like a fussy toddler on her hip, bouncing through rows of greenery with a lilting hum. Her face is round with perpetually pink cheeks. Her pockets are deep and always filled with spare mint leaves to tuck into her cheek when the last one loses its savor. Her patience is endless.

She is sharp in all the ways that Pansy’s mother isn’t.

When Pansy grows frustrated with how slowly every other student seems to move in propagating dittany, forcing her hands to move at half-speed to keep from attracting attention, Professor Sprout gives her a wink.

When she “accidentally” snips a bouncing bulb free and nudges it in Longbottom’s direction, Sprout hits the purple growth with a knockback jinx immediately and passes her by with the faintest of tuts.

Class is over on a Wednesday when Pansy takes extra time packing up her belongings, telling Daph and Millie that she’ll catch up with them at dinner. Pomona doesn’t look at her as she waves her wand, floating the mess of soiled gloves into a basin of fresh water.

She pretends she doesn’t see Pansy disappear behind a row of bubotubers as she sinks to the ground, hands covering her face.

Because Pansy has made a severe miscalculation.

She’d spent lazy afternoons at Malfoy Manor with Draco and Theo, imagining what it might be like to finally make it to Hogwarts. Which part of the Slytherin table would they command? Which classes might they despise? Would it be possible to sneak out of bed and have a sleepover in the common room?

The warmth of those memories has grown cold. 

Because not only does Theo keep to himself these days and Draco’s gone and made friends with two of the dimmest oafs she’s had the misfortune of laying eyes on, but she’s stumbled upon the terrible realization that she can’t show her genuine interest in the singular thing she’s good at.

And now she’s failing at everything.

It’s bloody Longbottom’s fault, the blithering idiot.

“A wise choice of location for a bit of blubbering.”

Pansy squeezes her eyes shut at Professor Sprout’s voice. She’s spent weeks mocking this woman’s enthusiasm knowing full well that her hijinks haven’t gone unnoticed, but there’s no meanness in her tone.

“I’d like to be alone,” she grits out, face heating beneath her hands. 

Pomona laughs. It’s a cheery thing.

“Well, now you’ve gone and chosen the wrong place for that, haven’t you? On your feet, my dear. I need an extra wand to move these wiggentrees.”

Dazed at the total disregard of her request, Pansy wipes her cheeks with her wrist and stands.

The trees in question can’t be taller than half a meter, but the pots they sit in are twice as large. 

Despair crumples Pansy’s face once again.

“I’m rubbish at charms,” she says, hating that it comes out as a whine. “Couldn’t keep my sodding feather floating for longer than five seconds.”

Professor Sprout gives her arm a squeeze and winks.

“Then I suggest you lift with your legs.”

October 1993

He doesn’t stumble when nobody’s looking.

Aside from Pansy, of course, but she takes such care not to be noticed that by Third Year she accidentally invents a charm that provides the illusion that her eyes are looking down at her hands when they’re fixated on the stocky blonde boy with a smudge of soil across his forehead.

Still.

His hands are large and generally prone to disaster, but she watches his thick fingers untangle the tendrils of the gurdyroot he’s holding so gently it sends a shiver down her spine.

“Merlin, it looks like Longbottom is diddling himself below the table the way he’s staring at that gurdyroot,” Draco says, smug when the table erupts into laughter. He is much different when he’s tutoring her one-on-one or lounging about the dungeon, but then again, so is she. They both understand the practicality of being able to shed their skin when they need to.

Neville promptly drops the plant, round cheeks hot as he whimpers with shame from the mess at his feet. 

Vicious satisfaction pulses through Pansy to see all of his beautiful progress ruined—she’s been struggling to keep up with him over the past hour and is now the farthest along.

“To completion, it would seem,” she adds, mid-laugh when Pomona’s hazel eyes meet hers in disapproval. 

She stares back, refusing to be cowed in front of her friends.

“That’s quite enough,” Professor Sprout says gruffly, waving Pansy over. “Parkinson, you’ll stay after to assist Longbottom in finishing his repotting.”

Draco automatically flinches away from her, assuming that Pansy’s first reaction will be to elbow him at the unfairness of it all. 

She doesn’t.

Instead, she lets herself move as quickly as she’s been wanting to the whole time and finishes first, patting fresh soil around the newly potted plant.

Her friends murmur goodbyes and sarcastic wishes of good fortune as they filter out and head back to the castle. Professor Sprout begins her routine of levitating the tools and dropping them into the basin to wash, and Neville is already carefully piecing the gurdyroot back together.

She drops to her knees on the cobblestone, a belated stab of guilt lodging itself in her conscience like a particularly sharp crisp jabbing into the gum of her teeth.

“It wouldn’t be half as funny if you laughed too, you know.”

It comes out morosely, as does most everything she says these days. 

When she looks up, Neville is staring at her, lips pressed into a thin line as if he’s concentrating on a living, breathing Arithmancy problem. Pansy follows the curve of his long eyelashes with something like reluctance, appalled to realize that his light brown eyes remind her of earth dappled in sunlight.

Her thoughts must be written across her face because he smiles; a tentative, lopsided thing punctuated by a dimple in his left cheek.

“I guess so,” he says, cradling the gurdyroot to his chest as he stands back up. 

Pansy clenches her jaw and steadfastly pretends she can’t see Pomona smiling over Neville’s shoulder.

July 1994

The dress Narcissa gifts her is powder blue. Silk chiffon. It’s soft and supple, a direct contrast to the gooseflesh on her arms as she runs her fingers from elbow to wrist.

“See? No portkey to Paris necessary, Violet. It’s a perfect fit,” Narcissa says, the corners of her lips pulling up in a subtle smile. She sits straight-backed in the tufted velvet chaise next to Pansy’s mother, whose careful expression of boredom brims with irritation. Violet has toiled away the summer in England, itching to return to their family château in Paris under the guise of finding Pansy a proper gown for the Yule Ball. 

“It’s stunning,” Pansy agrees, exhilarated as she rubs the skin on her arms a bit more vigorously. Malfoy Manor runs notoriously chilly even though it’s the dead of the summer and it drags a concern to the surface. “But won’t I grow cold? I won’t be wearing it until end of December.”

Violet purses her lips in deep thought, but Narcissa stands and makes to brush the nonexistent dust from Pansy’s shoulder when a cascade of warmth suffuses all the way to the tips of her fingers. Narcissa’s gentle correction brings the flashing sting of embarrassment along with it.

“You’ve arrived at the point in every witch’s life when a warming charm becomes as easy as breathing. One should never have to sacrifice their figure to be swallowed up in the monstrosity of a cloak.”

Pansy’s warming charms only last fifteen minutes at most, regardless of Draco’s dedication as her tutor. This dress doesn’t have a wand pocket, either, so she’ll have to teach herself wandless magic to boot.

A practically unheard-of skill among Fourth-Years.

This is what Draco’s been griping about since they stepped foot in that castle, isn’t it? Narcissa has more common sense in her left pinky than almost every other good-for-nothing professor in that damned school. Why hadn’t she thought about practicing before? What else is she dreadfully behind on? 

Pansy will learn to cast wandless magic. She has to.

Lifting her eyes to the mirror, they meet Violet's. For one dizzying moment, it’s like seeing double. Same thick black hair, same upturned brown eyes. Even their frowns match. While Violet’s face is usually a portrait of polite boredom, right now her lips are pressed together, jaw set. She is angry. A second later, the pinched lines of her face vanish like she’s shoved them back into fathomless depths and waits to speak until the surface of the water is still once more.

“You’re right about cloaks, Cissa, but perhaps we can find a fur coat. Charms can be a bother and the Parkinson women have blood that runs colder than most.”

Narcissa concedes the point and sends the elf Belfry to gather her collection so that Pansy might be lucky enough to find everything she needs without leaving Wiltshire, and all the while Pansy herself only just manages to keep from grinning. 

Cold-blooded. Has there ever been a lovelier excuse for hands that shake and never seem to hold their heat? If there is, she hasn’t heard it. 

Belfry returns with a pop! and the creaking of two racks heavy with resplendent fur coats. 

Pansy slips her arms into one with long tawny fur that Violet holds for her, nearly groaning in relief as it comes to rest heavily upon her shoulders. If she closes her eyes, she can imagine the press of its weight to be the warmth of a body. 

Voluntary, fervent affection. 

All-encompassing safety.

A hug. 

Undiluted yearning sweeps through her body in a biting gust of wind, leaving her bones hollowed out and fragile like a bird’s.

Oblivious to Pansy’s internal crisis, Narcissa insists that she keep the coat for herself and becomes distracted with delivering Belfry instructions to return the racks to their room upstairs. In the murmur of voices, Violet drifts close to Pansy, lifting her hand as if to test the coarseness of the fur. Her mum’s touch is rare, so Pansy holds very still, trying not to spook the hippogriff.

She’s scarcely taken a breath before Violet’s hand drops. Her eyes avoid Pansy’s in the reflection of the mirror but there’s a rare glimpse of defiance to her smile when she leans in and whispers, “Sometimes magic doesn’t hold a candle to the real thing.”

September 1995-April 1996

Pansy learns how to grow blue milkweed on the eastern slope of the Black Lake.

She spreads rumors that grindylow venture to the shallows of that shore for mating—spends every free moment she can scrounge crushing up the dried leaves and rolling them into a tight bit of parchment to be smoked—and exhales indigo clouds with a hiss until her mind goes pleasantly numb.

“They hate us,” Millicent cries, broad shoulders quaking beneath her quilted emerald duvet.

Every day, Filch hammers a new ministry decree into stone by order of Umbridge, and every day, she trawls the halls with the rest of the Inquisitorial Squad like a fucking basilisk out for blood. And when they’re not doing the bidding of that toadish bubblegum nightmare, they’ve got O.W.L.’s for which to study and she’s a prefect to boot. Professor Sprout watches her with a frown more often than not and she imagines that Longbottom must scowl at her every chance he gets, but she won’t chance looking to confirm it.

Pansy floats above it all, watching Millie’s chin quiver as she fights to hold back a sob. 

Daphne rubs her friend’s back, equally weary with bruised half-moons beneath her blue eyes as she looks to Pansy for direction.

They always look to Pansy for direction.

“You lot have got to grow up,” she snaps.

It’s a Wednesday when she goes to the Lake with shaking hands only to find a scorched patch of earth where her blue milkweed had been before. 

A tidal wave of nausea crests at her throat, threatening to spill out before she pinches the bridge of her nose and breathes deeply. This is fine. She is furious. This is fine.

By the time she stumbles into Greenhouse Four, Professor Sprout is at her side in seconds, bushy brows shot to the top of her forehead.

“You followed me,” Pansy gasps, too flayed open to care that she’s crying and not making sense. “You followed me—you had—no right.”

Pomona’s hands are calloused and creased with dirt but they’re also soft as they wipe at Pansy’s cheeks, holding her hair away from her face. 

“Breathe, girl. You’ve got to breathe.”

But she can’t. Not when the only thing keeping her thoughts at the acceptable ankle-deep level has disappeared and now she can’t feel the bottom of them.

“I can’t do this.” She’s frantic, clinging onto the woman’s patchwork-covered shoulder. “I can’t do this I can’t do this I can’t do this.”

Draco has his family name to fall back on and a doting mother to give him absolution, but what does Pansy have? Parents who told her not to return home over the holiday because the risk of coming to gather her is too much now that the Dark Lord is rumored to return. They know their scrappy daughter with mud-stained knees and they know she’ll do what it takes to survive. She’s already cast in her lot with Draco—already sold her fucking soul to that arsenic-laced sugar quill personified, Umbridge.

She has no secret passage; no last-minute portkey. Just devil’s snare, all the way down.

Pomona wraps her arm around Pansy’s slight shoulders and digs into her pocket, pulling out a sprig of mint. 

“You chew this, you hear me?”

She obeys, blade of the leaf serrated and cool against her tongue. The flames of hysteria licking up her sternum begin to quell as she chews mechanically.

“The smell clings to you everywhere you go,” Pomona says, rubbing gruffly up and down Pansy’s arm. “For Circe’s sake, I can see the plumes of blue from the window of my quarters.”

Sharp pain at the base of Pansy’s skull dulls to a throb but her brain is like the battlefield of a duel, disorienting pops and flashes of light that make it impossible to think straight.

It’s been eight months.

Professor Sprout must have known the whole time.

“I can’t do this,” she repeats, voice cracking. She is so tired. She digs the heels of her hands into her eyes, not caring if they bruise.

“It won’t always feel this way,” Pomona intones, voice low and smooth like the richest of soil. Something for Pansy to plant her hopes in. “I promise you, it won’t always feel this way.”

Behind her back, she feels Pomona gesture at something and a moment later, there are footsteps and a clear glass of water being extended to Pansy from a large hand with dirt underneath his fingernails, condensation collecting at the bottom.

The hand that holds it is Neville’s and raised on the back of his skin in angry red lettering it reads, I must not tell lies.

Pansy twists and heaves, her sick splattering the cobblestone at her feet.

September-November 1996

She and Draco do the best they can to bear the brunt of their parent's decisions.

“In for a knut, in for a galleon,” she tells him, stilling the fingers that keep scratching at the agitated skin beneath his sleeve. “You will do what needs to be done.”

“Please stay away,” he responds.

They don’t believe each other and neither of them has the courage to cry about it.

People whisper about their dating but what they don’t understand is that they’ve bound their fate together and it isn’t always fraught with romance when you choose the person with whom you’re going to die. It’s the cold press of a hand to your back to keep you standing up straight when all you want is a safe place to rest.

She spends most of her free time in the greenhouses, mint leaf tucked beneath her tongue and trying not to feel guilty about clinging to the only thing that seems to keep her head above the water these days. 

“What might you choose,” Pomona asks one day when Pansy and Neville are helping her feed the venomous tentacula handfuls of chizpurfles, “if you could spend the rest of your life doing only one thing?”

One of the little blue crablike creatures sinks its fangs into Neville’s thumb and he yelps, but Pansy hardly notices.

The rest of her life?

It’s a bit cruel, she thinks, to be asked to take her own desires seriously in times like these—when most nights she lies awake and imagines a ghostly face with red slits for pupils; a flash of fangs and a giant, twisting body that squeezes her heart until it stops beating.

She’s held Draco in the dungeon while he sobs, painting his nightmares on the backs of her eyelids as he tells her of what he’s seen.

Before she can answer,

(she’d like to survive)

Professor Sprout clucks her tongue and bounds out of the room, muttering something about her wolfsbane.

The ease in the air slowly evaporates when Pansy and Neville realize they’re alone.

Will he berate her for all the horrible things she’s said to him and his friends? For being one person around Professor Sprout and somebody completely different with everyone else? 

Or will he threaten to expose how pathetic she was when struggling to maintain her sobriety over the past year? Will he tell people how he witnessed her throw fits that almost always ended in emptying the contents of her stomach at Pomona’s feet?

“If I could choose, I’d do this,” Neville says, carefully plucking a chizpurfle from the sleeve of his crimson jumper before gesturing vaguely around them. “I’d stay here and assist Professor Sprout however I could.”

Of course he would. 

This is Longbottom. He doesn’t have an ounce of venom in his blood.

Before she can erect walls of stone, the idea bursts past her guard and she finds herself considering the possibility.

What would it be like to stay in the warmth of Pomona’s motherly orbit? To spend enough time in the sunshine that she might have to wear one of those ridiculous, flimsy-brimmed hats to protect her delicate skin? To let the earth do its magic of absorbing all the ugliness inside her; to watch Neville’s freckles bloom across his nose as the summer stretches on?

Pansy’s longing is acute enough to cause a toothache. 

“That sounds—lovely,” she confesses, unable to pretend she isn’t completely heartbroken by the idea. 

Because even if she lives, Pansy is no fool.

She keeps count of every bridge she burns even as she sets it aflame; lets the heat of it emboss the truth into her skin: she is not her own.

Hogwarts will not welcome her if she turns out to be on the wrong side of the war.

Distracted by her existential despair, she doesn’t notice that she’s leaned too close to the pot in front of her. Before her eyes register the whip-like movement of Neville’s hand, a toothy branch bites into her shoulder nearly at the same time that it’s dragged—agonizingly—out and away.

“Stupefy!”

And then her face is crushed awkwardly into his armpit and she’s being pulled far away from the newly immobile venomous tentacula. 

“Shite!” Neville curses, large hands carefully rotating her to get a good look at her shoulder.

Pansy must be in shock because she can’t help but laugh. Neville Longbottom, with his nearly supernatural ability to swallow the most stinging of insults without flinging anything back, has let a filthy word pass his plush lips.

“Merlin, you kiss your gran with that mouth?”

He’s too confused to respond. 

Whether it’s a blessing or a curse, the shaking of her laughter finally awakens her to the twinging in her shoulder. She paws blindly at her black jumper, trying to pull it down enough to expose the wound. This snaps him out of his stupor.

“Here, let me,” Neville says, batting her hand away so he can do it. He rips her jumper—hey, that was Andalusian cashmere—to reveal four shallow teeth marks. They seem so small in proportion to the pain. 

Pansy’s head begins to feel like a balloon tied by a string to her neck, but somewhere in the back of her mind, she recognizes that she needs…something, and soon. She can’t quite remember the proper antidote.

“Accio bezoar!”

From the line of drawers on the opposite side of the greenhouse, a small stone flies through the air to land in Neville’s palm. 

“Open,” he commands, taking her jaw between his thumb and the side of his forefinger. She does so for a few reasons, only one of which she’s comfortable with admitting: she knows it’ll quell the sting.

It slides down her throat and she has to fight not to cough it up. She especially tries not to think about the fact that this stone was once in a goat’s stomach with all its digestive juices and—

She gags.

Neville is right there, crouching in front of her face, eyes blazing and fingers tight on her chin. 

“Swallow,” he tells her.

He might as well have imperiused her because Pansy has no choice but to obey. She swallows.

“Good, Pansy.”

His fingers leave her and the string between her head and her neck begins to shorten, floating sensation fleeing.

Neville heaves a breath of relief, casting a quick scourgify to clean the wound. Both of their necks and ears are flushed pink and neither seems to be able to hold each other’s gaze in the aftermath.

“Sit here,” he offers gruffly, transfiguring a spade into a small aluminum stool. It has three legs and is a bit flimsy—a fact that he seems to be keenly aware of as he scratches the back of his head, but it’ll do. The air between them thickens, his embarrassment finally catching up to him.

“I think I read somewhere that essence of murtlap makes the stinging worse,” he says, fixing his eyes fastidiously on her shoulder. 

Pansy is well-acquainted with the bone-hollowing sensation of coming down from a high. She hasn’t felt it in almost a year; the bitter taste on her tongue or the self-loathing that inevitably follows.

But here, staring at the supple strength in Neville’s jaw—noticing for the first time that he’s lost the baby fat in his cheeks and at some point must have undergone a spell to straighten his teeth and correct his overbite—her body tightens with that familiar dread.

“I’m fine,” she says, trying harder than she ever has in her life not to snap as she pulls her tattered jumper back over her shoulder. She’s never felt this naked, either. “That was—it could have been much worse.”

It’s as close to a thank you as she’s willing to skirt. He takes a few steps back, letting her pass with a wary glance at the venomous tentacula to her right. “I’m, er, sorry about your jumper.”

She can mend a jumper. Even an expensive one.

More concerning is the complicated cocktail of hormones and sincerity that he’s managed to dredge up inside her.

“I don’t care,” she tells him. Convincingly. Like she definitely means it.

She’s three meters away by the time he speaks up.

“Why do you pretend not to be good at Herbology?”

Sometimes she forgets that he’s not a Hufflepuff, but it’s moments like these that function as an aguamenti to the face to remind her that he’s very much a Gryffindor.

“I’ve not the slightest—”

“You spend all your free time studying N.E.W.T.-level plants and you have zero problems keeping up with me.” He looks away, annoyed with himself for coming off like a prat, probably. “I mean—that’s not to say that I’m an authority on the subject, but I’ve never seen somebody try so hard to pretend not to love the thing that makes them happiest.”

Pansy glances down at her shoulder, half convinced the jumper is exposing her entire chest.

She could tell him about chess pieces or foolish parents or terrified boys asked to do impossible things, but Neville Longbottom has never been taught to see anything in greyscale; has never been forced to mold himself into whichever shape is most survivable.

“You don’t know anything, Longbottom.”

May 1998

Pansy has never felt braver.

Because what must you do when a finger is cursed with dark magic? What is the singular way to keep it from spreading limb to limb?

The same thing you do when you first spot the tell-tale purple striations of wraith’s kiss on the leaves of a mallowsweet.

When an orange yew only yields fruit sour enough to shrivel a tongue.

When a daughter becomes a liability.

You sever it.

You sacrifice it because wholeness is a luxury and survival is the only god that nature worships; the only thing that counts in the end.

It’s not personal when it comes to Harry Potter—it’s simple maths. 

She sees Draco and Daph and Theo and Millie and Pomona and Longbottom and for once she isn’t thinking like a chess piece and the courage nearly fills her to bursting.

“But, he's there! Potter's there! Someone grab him!”

It's a mindless torpor that guides Pansy to the eastern slope of the Black Lake; the invisible string of destructive habits pulling her all the way to the edge of the water.

Where last the earth was blackened and singed, she notes with dark amusement that a mint bush has grown over the top. It’s fragrant and green and ridiculous in its sweetness for soothing the smoke that has raked its nails up and down her throat.

“See you’ve found my repurposed garden.”

Pansy doesn’t turn; doesn’t think she can bear to see the kindness in the lines around Professor Sprout’s mouth. She hasn’t shed a tear tonight—not even upon embracing Draco after an hour of searching for him. They had planned for the worst. Gods, maybe even deserved it. But it didn’t happen.

Her concrete heart has pressed preemptive grief like flowers; carefully dried and preserved them just in case her fears turned to reality. They hadn’t, and now it’s ridiculous to carry but she’s stuck with it because it turns out that displaced grief doesn’t much care about where it lands; it demands to be felt all the same. 

A hand, rough and calloused, lands upon her shoulder. It tethers Pansy to the earth.

“We’ve all got a bit of scorched earth to work with now, don’t we?”

She bites the inside of her cheek and looks down at her nails, dirt lined beneath them.

“Don’t,” she says; swallows, “try to make a saint out of me.”

Pomona snorts and bends down to gather a fresh harvest of sprigs for her pockets. 

“That’s quite beyond my pay grade, I assure you.”

Beyond them, the castle grounds are the loudest sort of quiet. Broken bodies and stones and chairs and ceilings are levitated by people too busy to collapse into their grief.

“I wasn’t wrong,” she says flatly. Stubbornly. She hasn’t let herself think about much other than the necessities: where she’ll sleep tonight (Nott Manor, so long as the Ministry hasn’t seized it by then), when she’ll see Draco next (at his trial, whenever that turns out to be). She helped Astoria find Daphne. She learned of Crabbe’s death and only moments later, stepped over the body of his father.

It was all too much.

“You were,” Pomona says firmly, hand placed on her back to ease its aching as she straightens. “Pansy, my dear. You were.”

She closes her eyes, furious to feel the sting behind them. 

“I can’t think that way,” she says, wiping roughly at her cheek with the front of her wrist. It comes away clean; no dirt or blood mingle with her tears.

Holding out a leaf, Pomona waits until Pansy takes it.

“You’re a shrewd girl. Surely you’ve noticed that those who might punish you for changing your mind no longer roam the earth.”

She had taken note of this. It’s a contributing factor to the equation of her baffling sadness; the kind she can’t get a grip on with her fingers because the edges are too flat and the weight too heavy. An awkward shape.

“I’m not what you want me to be.”

Pansy sees Professor Sprout cluck her tongue from her periphery as she stares out at the gently rippling water.

“And what’s that?”

Pansy’s throat tightens and she smiles, untucking the black hair from behind her ear so it can fall in front of her face.

“Good, obviously.”

And that’s that, she tells herself, feeling the phantom vines of devil’s snare begin to skate across her ankles. There is nothing salvageable inside of her, nothing worth replanting or repotting. No room in this new world for her to thrive. She is a thorned, venomous thing and aggressors like her don’t make sense to nurture.

Now Pomona looks at her as if she’s the only other person who can see the vines wind around Pansy’s torso, squeezing her lungs.

“Mmm,” she says, pursing her lips. “I suppose that would be a fine trait to hope for.”

Pansy laughs, though it’s brittle. The way her heart thrashes against her chest, she might as well be standing in front of a Hungarian Horntail that’s just inhaled, ready to melt her flesh in the next breath.

Professor Sprout tucks the sprigs into her pocket and pats them.

“You’ve been many things in your time here at Hogwarts, Pansy,” she says, hand coming back to Pansy’s shoulder to squeeze it. “Few of which have been yourself.”

And she’s wrong, of course, she has to be wrong because what else has Pansy been if not viciously herself? Uncompromising in her selfishness, unbothered by anyone who claimed to have the moral high ground over her. It’s such a nonsensical statement that she turns fully to face her teacher.

“Right,” she says, jaw tingling as she clenches it. “And what makes you think your opinion means a sodding thing to me?”

She’s being mean again and gods, isn’t that the point? So many people have died in the last twenty-four hours and the smell of burnt flesh is still clinging to her nostrils and the muffled sound of a hundred wands turning on her still echoes; bounces around in her mind like a doxy with particularly sharp elbows.

Devil’s snare, all the way down.

“Your heart, dear one,” Pomona says, almost as if she’s sorry to be the bearer of bad news. “It’s not quite as opaque as you might hope.”

And just like that, it’s lumos solem.

She doesn’t return the next year when the offer comes.

Chapter Text

August 2005

Her mother dies two weeks after Lucius Malfoy. The afternoon following his funeral, she’s day drinking and making generally poor decisions at Draco’s flat in Muggle London (the one he bought expressly to get under his parents’ skin a year ago) when the missive comes by owl. Moments before its beak raps on the window, they're bickering over Hermione Granger, of all things.

“What are you playing at? You think just because Granger suffers from a bleeding heart that a single person in her crimson cavalry is going to allow someone like you to drag her down?”

Her voice no longer holds the edge of a whine; it’s been tempered into something less brittle, more sharp and obsidian. Condescending.

Draco is quiet, spinning his black serpentine signet ring between his fingers with an expression that might look blank if his nostrils weren’t flaring.

“I’m not seeking permission,” he says, sliding the ring onto his pointer finger and standing up. Shakes his legs out in agitation. “So why do you act like you've the authority to give it?”

Fury and empathy and terror burn a path from her lungs to her throat and her cheeks turn red because she knows—she knows—that she’s being horrible; hates that she can point to Draco’s pressure points on a map, X marks the spot, here flesh meets bone. 

“You think she’s your redemption.”

Draco turns away from her.

The owl taps on the window, but neither of them moves to open it.

“Lucius is dead, you’ve served your five years, and you think Granger is your ticket out of this viper pit. Well, it’s not. She isn’t. No one will forget what you did and you will not know a moment of peace if you inflict yourself upon her.”

Draco's head tips back. She watches his shoulders tremble from behind, wondering if the blade's edge of her tongue will ever allow either of them any happiness. 

It takes her a moment to understand that he's laughing.

“Salazar’s sake, Parkinson. Can’t stop until you’ve got blood on your fangs, can you?”

And who taught her to bite until she meets the bone, Draco?

His wingtip boots tap out a sharp staccato as he crosses the threshold. Twisting the latch, the window swings open from the top, and a decidedly put-out Great Horned owl leaves its resting place at the sill to drop the scroll of parchment from above.

It lands in Draco’s slender hands and he turns it over, frowning down at it.

“S’for you,” he says, tossing it in her lap as he picks up his glass of whiskey.

The writing is her father’s.

“Eh?” She unfolds it. Her eyes catch on the long slope of his G’s; the cramped but paradoxically elegant script she’s mostly seen on permission slips for Hogsmeade weekends at Hogwarts. 

“And?”

“Mum’s dead,” she answers flatly, reading out a crossword clue from The Daily Prophet more than stating the truth.

He chokes on his whiskey.

“Shit,” he says, eyes squeezed shut and amber liquid dripping from his fingers. “Came out of my fucking nose.”

And it’s not funny—it isn’t—it’s just that he cuffs his knee on the coffee table, dropping to the ground like he took a bludger to the gut, writhing and moaning.

Pansy can’t help the unbecoming snort that escapes her.

“Oh, no,” she says, and it’s so dainty—such an inadequate statement—that she laughs harder.

Draco groans from where he’s at, slowly pulling himself up to lean against his leather armchair; platinum hair flattened on one side. Pinching his nose, he opens one eye and grins at her.

“I’m sorry,” she offers. It’s about more than the whiskey.

“Yeah,” he sighs, retrieving a monogrammed handkerchief from his pocket and pressing it to his face. “Me too.” 

Reed Parkinson is a nervous man. 

When Pansy comes to visit him at his sizable home in Hertfordshire, it takes her approximately fifteen minutes to note that the funeral planning has nearly reduced him to a state of catatonia.

“She didn’t leave any instructions,” he says, voice higher and tighter than Pansy remembered it. He’s no taller than her and as he runs his hands through his thick black hair, she glimpses flashes of gray underneath the glamour. 

Her mum's death by stroke was unexpected, so it baffles her that he would expect any kind of direction from beyond the grave. They’re rocketing to the ground on the same broom and if she isn’t the one to pull up, they’ll end up blown apart like the world’s most estranged father-daughter meteoroid.

“I’ll take care of it.”

The next week is a blur of owls and working in tandem with Codry, her parents’ house elf. He seems convinced that Violet would have wanted to be laid to rest in the gardens of her father’s estate, which is news to Pansy in more ways than one. 

“Mum hated England,” she says, looking out the window and into said gardens with a frown. She hadn’t noticed them until that moment, and though they’re beautifully maintained by the elves her father employs, she can’t imagine her mum spending much time admiring them. Her brain may not be a living encyclopedia on all things Violet Parkinson, but she knows this. “Why not bury her at the château?”

Codry levels her with a look sterner than Reed’s ever dared to mete out. “As the château was one of the many sacrifices necessary during the war, it is no longer in your family’s possession,” he says, summoning a tray of tea and biscuits at the snap of his fingers. If there’s a way to serve tea to an employer while conveying distaste for their attitude, Codry manages it. “And your mother desired to be cremated, not buried.”

Who is Pansy to argue?

They send out invitations on cardstock made of elm, consolidate and shrink her mother’s wardrobe to fit at the very back of Reed’s, itemize the belongings she left behind, and cremate the body.

Privately, Pansy finds it laughable that they’re bothering with a traditional pureblood ceremony in the first place. 

Her parents sold their family estate near Wiltshire to go into hiding in '96 and branded themselves as cowards. Pansy’s reputation and her devotion to Draco are what will bring the guests and—with the kind of irony a heavy-handed poet might pen, the only person to benefit from her litany of sins sits as a pile of ash in an urn hissing with dark magic.

“I’m off to Diagon to see about the flowers,” Pansy says, popping her head into Reed’s study. He’s lying on the deep burgundy chaise lounge, arm thrown over his eyes.

“Ah, Pansy, dear,” he says, not moving an inch. “Codry brought you the boxes of photographs to sort through, yes?”

Pansy taps on the doorway with manicured nails that come to a point, attempting to quell the anger she keeps at a low simmer in the background. 

“I’m not sure I’ll have time,” she says, knowing before it even happens that it’ll throw him into a panic. He jolts up, eyes bloodshot even from where she stands.

“Surely you can find a spare moment to—”

“Yes, alright,” she cuts in, harsh and impatient. “I’ll sort it out.”

By the time her Chelsea boots are kissing the cobblestone in Diagon Alley, she’s of half a mind to abandon the venture altogether and floo back to Paris, leaving her father to sift through the wreckage on his own. He's functionally a stranger to her, anyway; always looking at her like she's one of those spot the difference games but it’s between any random woman on the street and his only progeny. 

The bell at Floriblunders Florist gives a cheery ding when she enters and Pansy is hit with the smell of earth; of petals and new growth.

She breathes in, reaching for the proper indifference in a swell of yearning.  

“Ms. Parkinson!”

Centered, Pansy opens her eyes to see Piers Rosier, a reedy old man she remembers from the occasional Malfoy gala. His eyes are bright with calculated kindness; the sort she always seems to be surrounded by. She doesn’t begrudge him for it any more than she begrudges a blumbumble for not producing honey.

“Mr. Rosier,” she says demurely, curtseying appropriately. 

“I was heartbroken to hear about Violet,” he says, hand over heart. “The Parkinsons have my deepest sympathies, of course.”

There are a set of acceptable responses, so Pansy follows the script.

“Your shop has always been a favorite of hers,” she says, pretending she knew her mother well enough to make such a pronouncement as she glances around. The lighting is moodier than she remembers and the tables are dark walnut, rough-grained, and lined with flowers in their prima donna phase of life; petals curled and stretching like the delicate arch of a ballerina's back. White and purple cobra lilies sway just beneath Pansy's fingertips.

“I am gratified to hear it,” he says gamely, turning about to lead her deeper into the shop. They pass by buckets of pink, yellow, and red roses that boast of being perpetually blooming. “How can I be of assistance today, Ms. Parkinson?” 

“I’m looking for floral arrangements for the ceremony,” she says, staring at the roses with an involuntary bit of distrust. Nothing can bloom forever, after all. It’s not natural.

Another ding pulls her out of her reverie, and she looks over her shoulder even though she knows that Mr. Rosier immediately finds their patronage to be more important.

Delphinia Flint. Marcus’s mother; a woman hell-bent on matching her son to any uterus-bearing pureblood in hopes of taming him.

“My associate is especially suited to assist you in finding what you need,” he tells her, bony hand steering her by the elbow further into the shop. She’s more than willing to go, letting the curtain of her above-the-shoulder black hair fall into her face and willing her fringe to grow past her eyes. “He’s done countless funerals.”

Miffed and relieved all the same, Pansy rolls her eyes at his back and ignores his advice. She probably knows her way around the shop better than his associate anyway.

“Oi, bastard.”

It’s a soft exclamation, followed by the sound of shuffling steps by the red brick archway leading to another room of greenery. 

Running her hands over the velvety petals of a bunch of peonies, she smiles to herself. If she had to guess where the sound came from, a piranha posey must have nipped him. 

She’s staring at the empty brick archway when, abruptly, there he is.

“Jesus.”

Neville Longbottom stands one meter away, sun-dappled brown eyes wide and mouth open.

It takes her a moment to register that her own eyes have gone to her feet before she straightens and squares her shoulders.

“Hiya, Pansy.”

His open mouth has curved into a subtle smile, but it’s his eyes that tell her he’s genuinely pleased. 

That, combined with how obviously grown he is now, hits Pansy like a body-bind curse.

“Longbottom,” she says, dipping in a stiff curtsey so tiny and useless she can only hope he doesn’t notice. Oh, gods.

He looks down at his hands, lifting a small pot with a golden piranha posey peeking out.

“Just repotting these today,” he says, broad shoulders relaxed as he takes her in. His olive green henley stretches tastefully across his chest and shoulders. And Merlin, his hair. When he’d sweat, his dark blonde locks used to curl around the back of his neck, but now it’s all shaved in an even buzz cut that would almost make him look dangerous if she didn’t know his gentle nature.

“No gloves,” she says; the lilt of a question. 

Neville holds up a palm, showing her a reddened, circular bite near his thumb. She takes a hesitant step forward, close enough to see the calluses on his hands and the grit in the creases of his palm. 

“Already paid for it, trust me,” he says, the skin around his eyes crinkling like he’s spent the past six years post-war in the sun. “What brings you in?”

Apparently, she’s been smiling because it melts off her face.

“Funeral flowers,” she says, and the words that Mr. Rosier spoke earlier come back in a rush, like darts enchanted to strike her solar plexus. He’s done countless funerals. “But I’ve already got it sorted, so—”

“I heard about your mum,” he interrupts. There’s no hint of a stammer or discomfort in his voice, but his Adam's apple bobs when he swallows. “I think we ought to have a lifetime pass from having to attend any more funerals, don’t you?”

The simple kindness of pretending that her suffering should qualify her for any kind of mercy is enough to rob her of speech, which isn’t a position she often finds herself in.

“I, er…”

He doesn’t come to her rescue, opting to watch her struggle. And no, his stare isn’t challenging, but irritation blooms behind her ribs all the same.

She clears her throat.

“It’s not a funeral. Just a wake.”

He steps forward and at the same time, accidentally brings the piranha posey too close to his chest. 

Snap.

“Fuckin’ hell!” He pinches the base of the stem with a controlled amount of pressure, handsome features twisted in agony until the steely jaws of the flower slowly release him. Tiny little holes in his shirt form a perfect circle around his—“Bloody thing got my nipple.”

Pansy’s ire drains out of her completely and she has to fight to keep a straight face. In the front of the shop, she hears Mr. Rosier’s promises of a prompt delivery.

“That’s what you get for having such nurturing-looking tits,” she remarks blandly.

He rewards her with a burst of laughter, clearly not expecting the joke. A smirk tugs at her lips at the same time that an emotion she won’t name tugs at her chest.

They stare at each other five seconds beyond politeness when Neville finally sets the pot down on the table beside them.

“Pomona would box my ears if she found out I saw you and didn’t treat you to lunch.”

Pomona. Pomona.

Pansy partially convinced herself that the woman was a figment of her mother-starved imagination. 

“You see her often?” 

Neville nods. “I work here part-time over the summers but during the school year, I take over a few of Pomona’s classes.”

A stab of longing buries itself so deep in her gut she doesn’t know how she manages not to bowl over and hug her knees. Could that have been her? If she’d been braver?

Pomona remembers her.

She might even—Pomona might even still care about her.

This revelation nearly knocks the air from her lungs.

“Just like you wanted,” she says, cold creeping into her tone like a door left open in winter. It’s not his fault. She knows this, even feels guilt begin to close up her throat as his smile falters, but she’s never learned how not to be a bur; how to unfurl without drawing blood from whoever’s palm she sits in.

“Yeah, s’pose so. Good memory.” 

Silence descends on them like a dementor and Pansy folds her tongue, glancing out the window at the afternoon sunshine. 

“Well, pass on a hello to Professor Sprout for me,” she says, refusing to find out whether turning down his invitation has prompted regret or relief to contour the planes of his face. She backs away. “Nice to—I’ll see you.”

Pansy hasn’t even placed her order but the wild, cornered animal of her heart can’t think past the need to apparate as far away as possible. 

“Cheers,” he calls after her, but she hardly hears him. 

Because for the first time since hearing of her mother’s death, Pansy’s got something real to mourn.

Draco drops the dungbomb about the serious nature of his relationship with Granger and a week later, Pansy is summoned to tea with Narcissa. The only surprising bit is that she's looking forward to it.

“I thought we could spend some time in the greenhouse,” Narcissa says, kissing Pansy’s cheeks. She’s got a stunning black gown trimmed with lace and a yellow diamond necklace that would look gaudy on any other person, unerringly elegant in her grief. “I remember how much time you used to spend there.”

What happens to Pansy's insides could be a study of suffering.

“That sounds lovely,” she says, determined to ignore the discomfort of being near a greenhouse again. She places her arm in the familiar crook of Narcissa’s elbow and together, they sweep through the grandeur of Malfoy Manor, passing snobbish portraits and marble busts until they make it to the south terrace. “How have you been getting along?”

Lucius has only been dead for three weeks—dragon pox caught in Azkaban with their cruelly (purposefully) inadequate healing chambers—and Pansy can see the weight of it beneath the glamour under Narcissa’s eyes. She still holds herself with enviable posture, her hair is swept up in an immaculate French hairdo, and an air of practiced disinterest completes the ensemble, but it’s there. The loneliness.

“I won’t pretend to be unaffected by the events of recent months,” she says, looking over the grounds. They pass hedges of masterfully grown roses, all silvery-white. Narcissa’s pride and joy. “I’d grown used to weekly visits with Lucius, and Draco’s theatrics with the Granger girl have been ill-timed, to say the least. It’s been a bit of a rout for the both of us, hasn’t it?”

Pansy sighs. “I tried to tell him,” she says, cutting straight to the point.

“I know you did,” Narcissa smirks, blue eyes glittering with quiet amusement. She opens the heavy white door to the greenhouse with the flick of her pale wrist and a burst of warm, humid air embraces the two of them. Pansy tries not to enjoy it too much. “If there’s one person my son and I can count on, it’s you.”

The praise hits her on the crown of her head like a bucket of water, drenching the rest of her body. She soaks it up, terrified by the hunger it awakens for someone to point out her goodness—no matter how small or insignificant that portion of her may be.

“Well, you’re family,” Pansy says, but it's not a truth so much as it is a yearning.

They walk past rows of narcissus, bright yellow petals suffusing the greenhouse with life and sweetening the air. 

“That’s why I wanted to ask you for tea,” Narcissa says, politely ignoring Pansy’s trembling as they take their seats at a white iron-wrought table set. Fine china cups laced with viridian dragon motifs pop into existence, along with cream, sugar, and honey. “Violet and I met at the same fashion institute you’ve been attending.”

It’s a sore spot for Pansy, but Narcissa doesn’t know that. She’s stretched out what should have been a four-year education and a fast track to her clothing line out into six long years of fabric swatches and misery. 

“She hadn’t told me,” she says, rather politely choosing not to point out that the most extensive conversation she can remember ever having with her mum was about the expectations and standards of pureblood boys. Her connection to Narcissa isn’t surprising because most respectable pureblood heiresses go into fashion—it seems to be a natural transition for girls who grow up knowing how each designer they wear takes their tea.

Narcissa stirs her tea in silence long enough to make Pansy wonder if she’s missing some subliminal text to the conversation.

“Your mother spent most of her life taking rather good care of your father,” she finally says, folding her hands in her lap and leveling Pansy with a single raised brow. The message is clear: there’s something Pansy ought to extrapolate from this statement. It would be uncouth to expect a woman of her status, disgraced or not, to speak straightforwardly. 

Pansy swallows.

“I’ve noticed he has some kind of…neuroses,” she ventures.

Narcissa purses her lips. 

“Indeed. Were you aware that Violet has always seen to the finances for your parents’ estate?”

It’s like the broom Pansy was riding suddenly jerks in the opposite direction, disappearing from beneath her as she keeps hurdling forward with nothing but the ground rushing up to meet her.

“Pardon?”

She’d been expecting her entire time with Narcissa to be spent plotting the downfall of a certain curly-haired witch, not…whatever this is. 

“A non-traditional approach, of course, but Violet never held too tightly to her roots, anyway.”

It’s the first time she’s ever outright insulted Pansy’s mother, which—now that she thinks about it, is an impressive mark of self-possession when the woman practically forced Narcissa to raise a daughter that wasn’t hers.

“No, I suppose not.”

And now Narcissa leans forward, grasping Pansy’s hands with eyes just wide enough to betray urgency.

“It is too soon to be having this conversation, my dear, but the unexpected nature of her death begs expediency,” she says, a compelling enough argument for Pansy’s heart to leap right from her chest. Narcissa pauses, gathering the strength to say something distasteful. “You know the Ministry keeps a tight leash around our expenses, yes?”

Pansy nods, struck silent with terror.

“We were approved to continue making financial contributions to your parents up until Lucius’s death,” she explains, having the grace let go of Pansy's hand so she doesn't have to maintain eye contact. “It was something we were happy to do for our friends. Unfortunately, now that it’s only me who needs the support of a monthly stipend, the Ministry has seen fit to lower the amount. This doesn’t leave enough for you and your father.”

Shame, hot and sticky, sears across Pansy’s chest. It pulses in her stomach and pricks behind her eyes.

“I had no idea,” she says, horrified as she considers the implications. “Narcissa, I wouldn’t have wasted so much time—”

Narcissa holds up a hand, silencing her immediately. 

“It won’t do to ruminate on what is not relevant. I bring this to your attention so that you might prepare yourself,” she says, softening just the slightest bit. “You will do what you must.”

It’s a haunting echo of words she’d said to this woman’s son, years before. It has the blessed effect of fortifying her; strengthening her spine. Pansy's eyelashes are wet against her cheeks when she blinks.

“Thank you,” she says, looking away to ground herself in the purple orchids hanging in draped clumps from the ceiling.

Just like that, the unpleasant portion of the conversation is over.

“Now, tell me how I might weather this Granger girl.”

There is a principle in dark magic that Pansy has always found to be comforting.

No power gathered or gained comes without a cost.

The blackened heart’s version of karma, or something close to it. She may not believe in any gods or end of times or holy scripture, but this is what she’s built a faith around. She laid down the one thing that makes her happy—the only thing that makes her good—and choked it with her bare hands. She doesn’t touch the soil anymore. She doesn’t coax things to grow.

She thought she’d paid the price.

But either the depths of her treachery during the war were worse and with further-reaching consequences than she’s capable of seeing or even the darkest sort of god refuses to comfort her.

Pansy spends all day lying over the covers of her bed after she returns home from Malfoy Manor, (Reed keeps the house hot enough he must be looking to sweat out his demons) casting and recasting cooling charms while she stews.

Her options are few.

One, she finishes her schooling in Paris. She’s got her capstone course left—designing her line—and it should only take another three months. The problem with that, of course, is that she’d actually have to become a designer. For real. No more faffing about, pretending like she has the rest of her life to waste. 

Gods, she hates it. Hates the sore fingers and the late nights and how deeply terrible she is at it. Daph was practically bred for it but no matter how Pansy tries, all her work comes out contrived and uninspired.

So, no. Perhaps that’s not even an option.

Two, she could find a job. But what sort of occupation could generate enough income to support both her and her father? 

Pansy lunges from her bed to pace, lifting the hair away from her sweaty neck. 

She’s absorbed in thoughts so bitter she doesn’t even notice the silver box peeking out from beneath her bed.

“Shit!” 

She hops on one foot for a moment, waiting for the pain in her stubbed toe to subside. Then she bends down and slides the box and its companion out from under the bed, setting them on top of her duvet.

Evil little things. They might as well be the bogeyman because they’ve been haunting Pansy for a week.

Preparations for a pureblood funeral take two full weeks. With that time already halfway gone, Pansy’s made most of the necessary arrangements, including sneaking back to Floriblunders while Neville was out to lunch to place a massive order of white calla lilies, hydrangeas, and roses. All that’s left is the portrait.

Master portrait artists need at least five days to replicate the natural movement and bearing of their subject, always extracted from a selection of photographs of the deceased. Codry’s cleared the space above the mantel in her father’s study and has taken to asking Pansy as politely as possible every four hours or so if she’s made any headway on the photo selection or if she’s chosen which outfit her mother will don for it.

She hasn’t.

Because looking at Violet’s photos means moving close enough to see what she lost, which seems unwise. And currently, with an anxious mind racing to come up with a livable solution for the mess she’s been left with, tumbling face-first into genuine grief is the very last thing she needs. 

She glares at them, knowing she’ll have to buckle down and do it sooner rather than later, before doing a double-take at the clock.

She’ll be late for drinks with Daph and Millie.

Abandoning the boxes yet again, Pansy throws on a short black dress—her design, ironically—and casts her tried and true hair straightening charm. 

“I’m off,” Pansy tells Reed after spending fifteen minutes trying to get her makeup charms right, hovering in the doorway of his study. He’s frowning down at the same mess of papers as before, but now she knows why. Her entire body grows heavier for it.

“Does Codry know?” he asks, taking off his wire-framed glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose. He is tired, she knows, and certainly grieving, but he hardly ever makes any sense.

He might as well have asked the question in Mermish.

“No,” she says, head tilting to the side enough for her hair to tickle her neck. “Was I supposed to ask him for permission?”

Reed doesn’t know her well enough to detect the thick note of sarcasm poisoning her words.

“It would be good to inform him,” he responds, sitting up straighter in his leatherback chair and finally meeting her eyes. The corners of his mouth pinch downwards at the tightness of her dress in a way Pansy imagines she might have been familiar with if he’d been around when she was growing up. “He spends an inordinate amount of time worrying about you.”

A humorless laugh escapes her. Does he see it? Does he see how effortlessly he pawns off the duties of a father to somebody—anybody—else? 

Of course not. 

“The shit you say sometimes is truly unbearable,” she says, voice devoid of emotion. It comes out like she’s been dosed with veritaserum; honest in a way she didn’t even know she was capable of. 

Reed flinches like he's been slapped but she shoves off the doorway and slips from the house before he has the chance to respond.

The pub Pansy meets her friends at is the kind where old men gather to drink. The bar is sticky, the beer is reassuringly shitty, and the windows are frosted for privacy. It’s not their usual dive, and it only takes one glance at all the men sporting leather and jean trousers for her to feel overdressed.

“It’s new,” Millie tells her in apology, referencing her budding relationship by an arm draped around a moon-eyed Hannah Abbott. “You know how it is grabbing drinks at Diagon. Too many old schoolmates.”

Pansy decides to get sloshed.

Not because she cares about inter-house prejudices so many years after Hogwarts, or that they found themselves on different sides during the war. It doesn’t even have to do with Pansy’s newly debunked belief that she and her ilk deserve to pay penance for the rest of their lives; to sacrifice anything that actually makes them happy. A fat load of good that did her.

It’s because she’s tired—the pumpkin-soup-for-brains kind of tired, and if she can’t spend the evening in war council with her trusted friends, then she’s going to spend it making the walls spin until they turn pretty colors.

“Of course,” she says, reaching for the carafe of red. “And you own the Leaky, don’t you?” 

Hannah blushes, a lovely picture of freckles and soft curves, before tucking a strand of strawberry blonde hair behind her ear.

“I do. Tom’s been a family friend for ages, so taking it off his hands seemed like the natural thing when he decided to retire.”

“Oh, bless,” Pansy says, chugging an entire glass of room-temperature wine.

Daph grins at her amusedly, ever observant in her chic sleeveless turtleneck and loosely gathered bun at the nape of her neck. She leans close to Pansy.

“I can see you’re intent on getting plastered tonight, but you should be aware that this is a set-up,” she whispers, nudging Pansy with her elbow. “So, you know. Steady on.”

Pansy’s smile falters for a moment, then resurrects. Her head is spinning like a top—and that’s without the alcohol, but she won’t deny herself a conveniently placed distraction. She squeezes Daphne’s forearm and reaches for her water glass.

“Appreciate the warning.”

They chat about Daph’s upcoming fall collection (an innovative exploration of sheers and ethically sourced dragonhide) and how Millie and Hannah connected (Millie works at a tattoo shop in Knockturn and gets lunch at the Leaky every day). 

Pansy’s head feels a bit clearer by the time he shows up, but no amount of sobriety could have prepared her for how it tilts her world off its axis to see him again.

“Oi, Longbottom!” 

Hannah scoots out of her seat to hug Neville, who’s sporting a lopsided grin and a different colored henley—a nutty cinnamon, this time. Merlin, is that all he wears? Earthy tones? 

“Hello, you,” he says, meeting Pansy’s eyes as he envelopes Hannah in his arms.

To her surprise, even Millie stands to greet him. The result is that their seats reshuffle and Neville drops into the booth beside Pansy.

“Hi,” she says dumbly. 

This close, she can see that though his buzzed hair is dark blonde, the stubble on his jaw is auburn. It goes nicely with his eyes, and Circe’s tits—maybe Pansy is too drunk for this.

“You remember Neville, yeah?” Millie asks, mistaking Pansy’s wide eyes for confusion. “He’s Hannah’s ex.”

Hannah rolls her eyes as if this subject is something Millie often ribs her about. 

“Two years ago,” she says, but Pansy’s eyes are on him. He’s got an easy smile as he stares back at Millie, giving a wink.

“Thank Merlin you saved her.”

As if in explanation, Hannah reaches across the table to place her hand on Pansy’s. “Not every breakup has to be the end of a friendship,” she says, jostling Millie at her side, “no matter what this one says.”

Pansy isn’t sure why they’re all so eager to explain things to her, then remembers that this is a set-up and tries not to be too embarrassed about it.

“Right,” Pansy says, the back of her neck growing hot. “Cheers.”

Daph snorts under her breath.

“You and Nev did Herbology together, right?” Hannah prompts with a smile, glancing between the two of them.

It’s second nature to downplay and deny it after all those years of trying to keep her interest in it under wraps. But just now, the solid warmth of Neville’s thigh presses against hers and she feels the shift beneath her ribs, like latches clicking into place and giving space for her lungs to expand normally for once.

“We did,” she says, letting herself meet his eyes for a fraction of a second.

“He told me you were better at it than him, which I find hard to belie—”

“That’s because it’s not true,” Pansy interrupts, turning to Neville. She raises a brow, feigning confidence when her insides are a twisting, pulsing mess of something with a terribly long wingspan. Pixies? Doxies? A fucking hippogriff? “Are you taking the piss?”

Neville shakes his head, eyes bright with mirth though his mouth stays serious. “No, are you? You’re brilliant. Always have been.”

Against all reason and, you know, science, Pansy’s heart begins to thud painfully slow behind her ribs. There are a million things she could say—rebuttals, jeers, denials—but the need to cry seizes her throat like a boa, twisting and choking all the defenses out of her.

She swallows against it.

“Thank you,” she says instead; quiet, just for him. 

The conversation moves on around them, almost choreographed to give them a moment to themselves. Pansy uses it to clear her throat and shake off the sudden melancholy. If she cries tonight, she probably won’t stop.

“So,” she says, forcing cheeriness into her shoulders as she straightens. “Did you know this was a set-up?”

Bollocks.

She doesn’t know how to chat to a man who’s seen the underbelly of her soul.

“I did,” he answers, nodding solemnly; giving nothing away. 

Pansy can’t bring herself to ask the follow-up question, why did you come then, so she chickens out and turns her attention back to the table.

“I was so sorry to hear about your mum, Pansy,” Hannah calls out, seeing the return of her attention.

“Merlin, you’re sweet,” she says, loose tongue too quick for her brain to keep up with. “But there’s no need, truly. If it weren’t such bad form to cuss out a corpse, I’d be otherwise occupied at the moment.”

Hannah’s light blue eyes widen and she looks to Millie for reassurance.

“You alright, Pans?” Daphne asks in her ear, subtly shifting the carafe out of Pansy’s reach. “You look a bit peaky.”

A nice euphemism for sloshed.

But Pansy’s not as far gone as they probably think. She’s already experienced alcohol dependency after gaining sobriety from smoking and has no interest in diving headfirst into that particular concrete pool. She’s just practicing honesty—and not the brutal kind meant to puncture. It’s without an agenda for once, and she’s curious to see where it can lead her.

“I’ve had a shit day and I’m just happy to be here with you guys,” she says, laughing at Millie’s gaping mouth. “I’m allowed to be earnest every once in a while, alright?”

Daph throws an arm over her shoulders and kisses her cheek. “That’s right.” Then she changes the subject like the clever pygmy puff she is and Pansy exhales a breath she hadn’t meant to hold onto, squeezing Daph’s knee in thanks.

“You never mentioned what you’re up to these days,” Neville says, once again creating a tiny pocket in the universe for the two of them.

“I attend a design school in Paris,” she says, angling her body to better face him. The lights are a bit brighter than the typical pub, mostly for the benefit of older men and their milky vision that makes it impossible to complete a crossword without extra aid. She puts a hand over her eyes for relief from the incandescence, deciding to tack on a bit more information at the last second. “I’m not cut out for it though—most everything I’ve ever designed is dreadful.”

Neville looks at her kind of funny, like she’s sprouted a pair of antlers for the second time in her life.

“Then why do you do it?”

Jesus, why does Pansy do anything?

“It’s tradition,” she says.

Neville snorts, thick brows and long lashes casting a dark shadow over his eyes. 

“What, to waste your talents?”

His tone isn’t mean, per se, but he is not the same Longbottom who would always choose silence rather than contradict Pansy.

This doesn’t prick her ire in the way she feels it ought to.

“And what talents are those?”

He purses his lips.

“Come on, don’t dig for praise you’ve already unearthed. You know I’m talking about Herbology.”

Pansy leans away with her elbow on the table, just enough to get a good look at him.

“Are you angry with me, Longbottom?”

He’s too tan to blush but if she let her hand hover over his cheek, Pansy suspects she’d feel the heat of it. Neville flexes his jaw, taking a deep breath as if to reset.

“I’m sorry,” he says, shoulders drawn tight as a bowstring. “That was unfair of me.”

Emboldened by this silent admission, Pansy leans in a bit closer for privacy.

“You didn’t know it was me, did you?”

He knows what she’s asking and she knows the truth before he speaks it.

“No, I didn’t.”

And even though she’s the one who needled it out of him, disappointment that he hadn’t come on this date knowing it was her makes the hope that had taken up residence in her chest without permission begin to deflate.

“Well, I’ve got quite a bit to do tonight,” she says, cursing her luck that she’s sandwiched in-between him and Daphne. “It was nice to catch up.”

She elbows Daph, who understands the message immediately.

“Are you leaving?” 

Pansy nods, trying to convey the urgency with which she needs to make her escape with the subtle widening of her eyes.

Ever quick on the uptake, Daph begins to scoot. 

“I can get up,” Neville responds, letting a confused Hannah and Millie stay in their seats. He slides out of the booth, letting Pansy through. 

“I’m off, loves,” Pansy says, blowing a kiss with the ever-expanding balloon of despair growing behind her ribs.

“What, already?” Millie asks, narrowing her eyes for a fraction of a second in Neville’s direction.

“Yeah, I’ve got loads of my mum’s pictures to go through for the portrait and I’ve already put it off for too long,” she says, not even having to reach for a lie. 

“I can come with you,” Daphne says, beginning to follow.

“Oh, please. It’s boring old stuff. I’ll see you this weekend at the wake, yeah?” 

If she doesn’t turn tail and get out of there immediately, she’s going to lose her composure. With one last wave, she heads for the door.

In the cool night air, Pansy can breathe again.

What had she been expecting? For Neville to flirt with her like she hadn’t watched him endure the crucio curse at the hands of the Carrows multiple times without intervening? Like she hadn’t been the one to betray one of his closest friends? 

The thought makes her laugh mirthlessly, tucking her hair behind her ear.

Pansy may not have to actively punish herself for her past anymore, but she has no right to expect anyone else to pull their punches.

She makes it to the blue marker of the apparition point and takes a steadying breath, ready to twist on the spot.

“Pansy.”

It’s Neville, of course, and for a split second, she considers apparating away just to avoid the awkwardness.

Instead, she turns to wait for him as he walks to her, hands in his pockets and shoulders slightly hunched.

“I wasn’t honest with you,” he tells her, looking down at their feet when he finally approaches close enough to speak without raising his voice. “Earlier, when you asked if I’m angry.”

She will not cry. She will not cry. She does not deserve to cry.

“Mm,” is all she can bring herself to say around the knot in her throat.

“I don’t know how not to be,” he says, blowing out a breath and withdrawing his hands to rub the back of his neck. “At every turn, you make the most disappointing decisions.”

Okay, maybe she can cry a bit.

She looks up at the foggy night sky, willing her tears to stay put. All she can do is nod.

“And shit, I’m not—this wasn’t supposed to be another opportunity to berate you,” he says, looking down to kick a rock on the ground. “I came to apologize. It’s been years and I can’t hold it against you that you were a scared kid during the war.”

She sniffs a laugh.

“So were you.”

Neville either doesn’t know what to say or it doesn’t bear pointing out the obvious. He shuffles his feet, then clears his throat.

“You mentioned you have pictures to sort through.”

She looks up, puffing out a breath. 

“I—yes. I do.”

Neville puts his hands back in his pockets, looking unsure for the first time that night.

“Would you like some company, then?”

She sneaks him up to her room with little difficulty—another bizarre and belated teenage experience—and spends a moment with her back to him tracing the lid of the first box. It’s silver with enough filigree to brand it an heirloom and cool to the touch.

Setting her shoulders, Pansy brings it over to the green padded bench of her bay window—there’s only so much tension she can take with Longbottom in her room and she’s determined to avoid her bed at all costs. Without having to ask, Neville grabs the other one and sits a healthy distance from her.

“You don’t have to—” Pansy says, supremely aware of the vulnerability the nature of the occasion requires. She’d almost rather he leave so she doesn’t have to pretend that this is no big deal; that looking through her mum’s photos won’t be agony of the acutest kind. 

“I know,” he says, simple and brooking no arguments. He lifts the lid of the other box, immediately reaching in to grab a handful of pictures.

He begins to scan them, but Pansy can’t see what they look like from this angle. She should stop wasting time and look at her own, but her gaze is glued to the topography of his face, valleys of shadow bathing his cheek and throat. 

“Is this you?”

He hands over the photo; a small square where a little black-haired girl stands stoically next to a woman who is unmistakably her mother—they share the same top-heavy lips and ski-slope noses. Violet seems to be telling Pansy to smile but to no avail.

“Mm, yes,” she says, taking in the determined grimness of her younger self. It’s almost like she knew not to get too attached to the woman beside her.

She doesn’t want to see any of the photos from that era. It would be pointless, anyway, because the portrait is supposed to portray her mother’s physique just before her stroke; black hair peppered with gray and lines around her eyes.

“We’re looking for the most recent photos of her,” she says, prim and businesslike as she sets the photo face-down on the cushion beside her. She can persevere if she doesn’t have to look at each one. “Ideally about fifty of them.”

Neville makes eye contact with her for the first time since they got here.

“Okay,” he says, taking back the photo she’d set down. He puts it on the other side of his legs and continues to shuffle through the pile he’d been working on, placing photos on top of the first one every once in a while.

They sort in silence. Maybe it’s not awkward for Neville, but Pansy is about ready to crawl out of her skin. To make matters worse, she catches a whiff of her hair and coughs, scrunching up her nose.

“Merlin, I smell like an ashtray.”

Neville laughs, then roots in his pocket for a moment before pressing something light and flimsy into her hand. 

“Mint leaf,” he tells her, like she doesn’t have an emotional attachment to it strong enough to bring her back from the dead, should someone wave it below the nose of her corpse.

“Pomona,” she moans. 

“Pomona,” he answers; an amen. 

She imagines that they’re her two most devoted acolytes, pockets full of mint and fingernails lined with dirt.

Except she’s not as faithful as he is—her nails haven’t had dirt beneath them since Hogwarts. The sharp tide of despair rises in her once again.

“Maybe you should change,” he says, interrupting her internal crisis. “Get more comfortable.”

Pansy hadn’t even noticed how her dress was digging into the skin beneath her armpits until that moment. 

“Right. Thanks.”

She’s quick to grab shorts and one of Draco’s old quidditch tees from her dresser drawers and disappears into the loo. As she casts teeth cleaning, hair straightening, and odor removing charms, her mind races.

What are they doing?

Why is he here if he doesn’t forgive her? Is it some kind of Gryffindor savior complex?

When she exits the loo, she hovers by her bedpost, not quite sure how to broach the subject.

“It’s getting late,” she says, because apparently she fancies sounding like an idiot. “I’ll probably pick the rest of them at random if you’ve got an early morning tomorrow.”

When he looks up at her, his eyes catch on her legs before they glide to her face. She’s not entirely unused to being checked out, but she is new to the thoughtful crease of his brow like he’s drawing conclusions about a painting instead of a person.

“It’s wrong that you’ve been made to carry this on your own,” he says, not quite a response to her attempt to give him an out. 

If he’s here because of some misplaced sense of pity, she’ll rip out her hair.

“I know you mean well, but I’d really rather you just—not.”

She doesn’t shutter her expression or put on a brave face. If agony is there, it’s plain for him to see.

His shoulders relax but he purses his lips.

“Would you rather talk about why I’m angry with you?”

Taken off guard, Pansy blinks. He looks both ready for a row and completely at ease.

“Absolutely,” she answers.

He exhales long and slow. The tension creeps back into his posture and suddenly Neville can’t meet her eye. Instinct says that he’s peeling back the curtain and letting her peer into a place most people aren’t allowed; like maybe he hides his fury the way she hides her softness.

“Alright,” he says, pushing off his fists to stand up. “We’ve known each other for over a decade now. I’ve got plenty of experience to draw from.”

She takes it for the warning it is and gestures for him to plow ahead. 

“Show me what you’ve got, Longbottom.”

He clearly doesn’t like this answer but nods anyway.

“Where to—let’s start with Hogwarts, yeah? Not only did I watch you play dumb when it came to Herbology—something you’re unequivocally, borderline genius at—but you were doing it for people who didn’t even care about you. If you’d wanted it, you could have chosen better friends. I could have been your friend. And it’s not about—hell, I’m not saying I’m miffed about you not choosing me, my point is that there were options. You always had options.”

He’s begun pacing, running a hand over his buzzed hair while the tips of his ears slowly turn a subtle shade of pink. 

“And it wouldn’t bother me much, I guess, if it weren’t so clear that you’ve got this whole other side to you that is, you know—it's good. Pomona saw it when nobody else did, and you’ve never taken the time to visit her. D’you know how often she brings you up?”

Neville doesn’t pause long enough for Pansy to register much besides the way her jaw actually aches at his double-edged ire. She’s so used to the numbness of indifference in the way she disappoints people, but the fire that licks at her with his every word is more cleansing than consuming.

“And then to hear that after all that blood purity bollocks you’ve cowered behind your whole life, you don’t even end up using the freedom that you’ve got to do what you’re actually good at? Fuck’s sake, Pansy. Wasting all these years on something you can’t even be arsed to finish?” 

His pacing slows down but his breathing is labored, finally meeting her eyes as if he’s come out of a daze. Pansy averts her own, finding the want and fear cloying at her throat to be too paralyzing when he’s looking at her like that.

“I’d have thought you’d still be mad about the volunteering Potter thing,” she says, attempting humor even though her voice comes out small.

Neville huffs a laugh, placing a hand over his eyes for a few moments before shaking his head.

“It certainly makes the top five,” he admits, but the brunt of his anger has passed over and left the both of them standing to survey the wreckage. He looks exhausted, like he’s just had a date with a boggart. “Now, can I tell you that I care about you without you biting off my head?”

His request is so gentle; such an intentional contrast to the barb-tipped words he’d lobbed her way, that the sting they left behind is soothed as effectively as if he’d dipped his tongue in the essence of murtlap. Or honey. Or fucking something that might explain the pleasant twisting of her heart at the moment.

“I’m sorry,” she says. Almost wishes he was a Legilimens so she could prove it. 

He watches her with eyes the rich color of soil she could sink her hands into; could be the grounding force that tethers her to the earth. Finally, he nods.

“I know.”

Another moment passes and then he turns and heads back to the cushioned bench, resuming his work with the photos. The hair on the back of her neck still stands on end, as if there’s a static charge in the room.

“I don’t think I can do any more of those tonight,” she confesses, emotionally wrung out and physically drained.

Neville pauses, hand hovering over one of the silver boxes. 

“S’okay. Is it alright if I go at it for a bit longer? I don’t mind if you sleep.”

She shakes her head, oddly afraid to move or say anything that might provoke him to leave.

“No, that’s fine.”

He gives her a kind smile—one that reaches his eyes more than his mouth—and turns back to the photos. 

For her part, Pansy awkwardly climbs under her covers, self-conscious in the way she curls in on herself when it’s such a massive bed. Neville dims the yellowish light of the lamp and she forces herself to breathe slowly, willing her heart to cease its manic beating.

Maybe it’s because she’s halfway to dreamland already, but it’s suddenly important to her that he knows.

“Longbottom,” she says, only thirty percent convinced he’s still there. “I care, too.”

When Pansy wakes, a sprig of mint and a pile of fifty photos are all that Neville’s left behind.

The wake is a small affair. 

Pansy braced herself for the unpleasant task of accepting condolences on behalf of her father and pretending to feel much of anything, but she didn’t anticipate the involuntary reunions with people she didn’t think she’d ever see again. On the one hand, she’s grateful that Draco and Theo stay by her side and dutifully deflect most of the attention. On the other, it’s because of this that she’s left open to receive Horace Slughorn’s attentions.

“Lovely to see you, Pansy, my dear,” he says, round belly an intricate display of various chains and buttons. “Such dreadful business, of course, terribly dreadful.”

Pansy nods politely, trying not to shake violently like a rag doll as he squeezes her shoulder.

“She would be touched by your attendance,” she says. It’s a wild guess, really, and she suspects she’s wrong. She assumed he’d move away, but he keeps his hand on her shoulder.

“You know, Violet was never in my Potions class but Pomona tells me she was quite accomplished in Herbology,” he says, unaware of how he’s struck her dumb. “She could prune the devil’s snare and walk away without so much as a scratch by Fourth Year.”

It’s like he handed her a baby mandrake without checking to see if she’s got earmuffs.

“Sorry?” is all she can think to say. All critical thought processes have ground to a halt and she can’t understand why this news is so devastating. 

“It’s been a while, Parkinson,” a deep voice intercedes, grabbing Pansy by the elbow and pulling her into a hug. He’s tall enough that she has to pull back to see familiar dark brown eyes and a tightly cropped head of black hair. 

“Ah, Mr. Flint. I believe I heard the young Mr. Nott asking after me…” Slughorn makes a clumsy exit, obviously eager to put several bodies between him and present company.

“Marcus,” Pansy says, lifting a singular brow. She’s seen him around at the various snake gatherings Draco and Theo have dragged her out to, but she's never attempted actual conversation without somebody like Draco or Millie acting as a buffer.

“Looked like you could use an escape,” he says, smirking at Slughorn’s retreating back. “One of the many perks of being a Flint.”

“Cheers,” she says dryly, beginning to look around for yet another savior. Her eyes trip over Neville as he laughs with Draco, wiping beneath his eyes. Then the former turns and meets her stare, giving her a soft smile.

She smiles back.

“There ought to be firewhisky at these things,” Marcus grouses. Pansy refocuses her attention, looking at him fully. He’s always taken up an uncomfortable amount of space, but now at least his skin has cleared up and he’s learned not to part his hair down the middle. Not handsome—not with that combination of teeth too big for his mouth and a mean demeanor—but solid. “It’d make it loads easier.”

“And what, encourage people to socialize even more? Perish the thought,” she responds, nodding at a passing Mr. Rosier. 

Marcus smirks, folding his arms and dropping his voice.

“I came to see you.”

Pansy narrows her eyes. 

The Flints certainly aren’t the most respectable, but they did make quite a bit of money during the war by supplying the Ministry with information via their hollowed-out bludgers and quaffles. She knows Marcus is used as muscle more than anything, and being the target of his interest can’t spell anything but trouble. 

“What are you getting at, Flint?”

He takes a step closer, dark eyes surprisingly serious.

“Heard about your money troubles, and I figured we’ve both got something the other needs.” At her sharp glare, he laughs.

“Chrissake, get your mind out the gutter, Parkinson. I’m only talking about a business deal.”

She’s not a simpleton. She knows the gossip surrounding the Sacred Twenty-Eight is always for sale and it must be common knowledge by now, but to hear somebody from outside that incestuous circle reference her predicament is less than ideal.

“At my mother’s wake?”

The look of skepticism he throws her way is enough to pull a reluctant grin out of her.

“I don’t think we’re fooling a soul with how bored we both look,” he says, leveling her with an amused stare.

Fair enough.

“Alright.”

“Alright?” 

“I’m listening.”

Marcus relaxes, smirk back on his face. It doesn’t chafe as it did before.

“Well, you know I’ve made a fair bit of coin over the years,” he says, folding his arms in a way that makes his muscles bulge beneath his black button-up shirt. Is he so used to intimidating people that it’s on purpose or simply habit by now? “My mum’s set it up so I can’t get anywhere near it until I’m married.”

Pansy clucks her tongue.

“Wise woman.”

He glares at her, obviously waiting for the dots to connect—as if they hadn’t the moment he started talking about their needs.

“We’re not going to get married,” she says, placing her hands over her eyes. “Have I got a sign stuck to my forehead that says I’m up for hearing the most ridiculous shit right now?”

Marcus doesn’t flinch.

“Five million,” he says.

Maybe it’s instinct, but she refuses to show that the number does knock her off balance for a moment. Feigning boredom, she glances away to see Draco watching them, brows bunched together. As soon as they make eye contact, his concern clears and he lifts a brow in interest. 

“That’s how much you’d have when we divorce,” Marcus continues, leaning in a bit closer and lowering his voice. “Your dad could keep his place and you could finish your schooling. Fuck, you could do anything.” 

What’s wild is that pureblood weddings have been predicated on less romance than this. Political favors, scandal cover-ups, pure and unadulterated spite. It’s all been done before, so she doesn’t know why her knee-jerk reaction is the fierce desire to marry for love. She certainly hadn’t been raised for it.

And after a lifetime of either disappointing or simply not mattering to her parents—constantly sneaking out to the greenhouse and skiving off etiquette lessons, damn-near joining a death cult—can she feasibly dismiss it out of hand? 

“You’re assuming quite a lot,” she demurs.

Marcus swallows. 

“I wouldn’t touch you,” he says, rough and quiet. 

Somehow, of all the unwelcome revelations of the day, the realization that Marcus might be offering because he actually has feelings for her is the most paralyzing. She opens her mouth but nothing comes out.

“Think about it.”

With that, he gives a stiff nod and strides away. 

Pansy is left there, standing next to one of the beautiful iron-wrought archways Narcissa loaned them for the occasion, with thoughts so disruptive they clash against each other like drunken pixies in a cage. If another person dares to speak to her right now, she’ll hex them to bits.

With that thought in mind, she makes her way to the circular table groaning with food: gammon and cheese sandwiches, scones with clotted cream, a variety of sponge cakes. She doesn’t notice she’s starving until she bites into a sandwich.

By the time this wake is over, she’s free to leave.

If Narcissa hadn’t informed her of the proverbial sword of doom dangling overhead, she’d floo back to her Montmartre flat in a heartbeat. But knowing what she knows now—that even if she does finish her schooling, she won’t have enough money (or talent, if she’s honest with herself) to launch her own line—Pansy can’t imagine her next move. 

It’s like she’s staring into a yawning abyss, knowing that she’ll fall inside in the next few seconds with nothing to brace herself against.

Beatrice Shafiq approaches, so Pansy maintains eye contact and aggressively stuffs an entire scone into her mouth. The middle-aged witch halts. Swallows. Then looks away as if witnessing something impolite against her own will and changes course.

She could take up a regular job.

Something like Neville’s got with Floriblunders. Or Millie, at the tattoo shop. She doesn’t have many marketable talents, but she’s a smart woman; she can sort most things out.

It simply wouldn’t be enough.

When she first came to Hertfordshire, she’d thought that her parents hadn’t been living there for long since they’d never invited her over, but the longer she stays the more she learns that it’s Reed’s home. He doesn’t have much keeping him grounded and to take it away would quite possibly break him.

Trapped. She’s trapped.

Reaching for a cup of tea to soothe her dry throat, she turns her gaze to Reed. Her father is standing alone in front of Mum’s newly unveiled portrait, thumb caressing the frame with dry eyes. Pansy hasn’t seen it up close, but she squints involuntarily at the background of the painting from where she’s at. Is all that green supposed to be plants? 

Why didn’t Pomona tell her?

Overwhelmed in a way she hasn’t felt since the first throes of withdrawal during Fifth Year, Pansy reaches into her pocket. She hadn’t planned on bringing the sprig of mint Neville left on her pillow, but she’s glad she did as soon as it touches her tongue.

Breathing in deep, tension bleeds from her jaw, neck, and shoulders.

“I hate to be the one to inform you, Pansy, but did you know that you snore?”

Pansy turns slowly, giving Neville a healthy amount of side-eye. 

“That’s an entirely inappropriate thing to say to a lady, Longbottom,” she says, cheeks growing hot beneath his straightforward gaze.

“I’m lucky my gran’s not around. Reckon she’d swat my bottom.”

She swallows. Her brain is too muddled for this. She knows—thinks she knows him well enough—to know that he doesn’t have some great plan to seduce her, and in fact would likely find the idea of touching her to be right up there with squeezing bubotubers for their pus. But it’s been nearly a week since a switch flipped in her mind and suddenly, she’s imagining what it might be like to trace the palms of those hands that only ever seem steady when he’s holding something fragile.

“What’s this?” She asks, pointing at the terra cotta pot he’s holding and opting to pretend her thoughts haven’t gone completely off the rails. 

But then it hits her.

“Skeleton flower,” he says, looking a bit embarrassed as he runs a hand over his buzzed hair. “I thought you’d find it funny, but I’m thinking maybe it’s bad form for a wake.”

She hardly breathes as she takes a delicate white petal between her fingers, rubbing it softly. Then she takes her wand from her dress pocket and with a smooth flick, the air around them turns dry as all the water condenses into a tiny rain cloud above the pot. 

“I don’t think it’s funny at all,” she says, droplets of rain slowly painting the petals translucent. A tear from her eye barely travels to her cheek before being lifted like a dandelion floret in the wind, drifting to the cloud. 

When she looks back up, Neville is watching her with something dangerously close to understanding.

“Thank you,” she says, expelling the cloud and returning her wand to her pocket. “This is—I’m going to take care of it.”

Curiosity is spelled out across his forehead because he doesn’t know about the self-loathing this innocent plant used to evoke. Now, instead of the sludge of shame, a surge of protectiveness fortifies her.

Maybe small-veined things with see-through hearts deserve to be in safer hands.

“We could get married.”

Pansy snorts, thinks about it some more, and then full-on laughs. 

“And keep you from your fairytale ending with Granger? I think the fuck not. Pawn to b7.”

Draco is draped across his favorite armchair, lazily nudging his knight three spaces in response.

“It wouldn’t be a legitimate union, obviously, but we could draft a clause in there that would give you half my assets when we divorce.”

It’s the end of summer and still technically too hot of an evening to have the fireplace going, but it’s an unspoken agreement that they’d both rather cast cooling charms on themselves than sacrifice the soothing hypnosis of the flames.

“Brilliant. Can’t wait to hear how your paramour feels about being the other woman.”

“She’s the one who gave me the idea, you numpty.”

Pansy sighs. She’s going to be forced to admire Hermione, isn’t she?

“I can handle Marcus,” she says instead, moving her knight to c3.

It’s Draco’s turn to snort. 

“Yes, I seem to recall you handing him his arse in chess at eleven years old. I don’t doubt it.”

Then he sits up, a serious look knitting his brows together.

“He’s not as rough a bloke as he looks,” he says, scratching at his knee. “He fancies you. Always has.”

“What, so I owe him my hand in marriage?”

“No,” Draco says patiently, sliding his rook forward two spaces. “You’ll find a way, Marcus or not. If it is him, though, he cares about you. It’s a start.”

Ever the politician.

Not for the first time that day, a well of resentment opens up inside her; deep and hollow and cold. 

She never expected to get what she wanted, but she had hoped for something livable. A day-to-day existence she could weather without too much fuss. But now the walls are pressing in and Pansy can only see one window of possibility.

“Maybe you’re right.”

She takes his rook with her bishop, foul mood compelling her to destroy his defense.

“Maybe,” he allows, but then a grin he’s trying not to show peeks through. Suspicion makes her scalp tingle. “But perhaps we’ve not exhausted the limits of our imaginations.”

She could throw her queen at his forehead. 

“For once in your bleeding life, say what you mean.”

And because it’s Draco and the dust of her mother hasn’t even settled, his entire demeanor softens.

“Longbottom,” he says. Then he sweeps her black rook with a celerity that belies his gentility.

Pansy blinks.

“What about him?”

Draco huffs a laugh, sharp grey eyes too perceptive for comfort.

“You fancy the bloke,” he says, like he’s speaking to somebody particularly slow. 

It’d be pointless to deny it, but she still doesn’t see what he’s getting at.

“Doesn’t mean anything,” she says, returning her focus to brutalizing his lineup. “He’s got a position at Hogwarts and even if by some miracle I was allowed back there, working alongside him would hardly be enough for me, let alone my dad.”

Draco smirks as her queen slashes through one of his pawns with her chair. “You’ve thought about it.”

Not voluntarily, no.

“If it were just me to take care of,” she swallows, “I’d stay. But it’s not, so…”

Too late, she sees that his white knight is lined up to shatter her queen. He prods it forward.

“Bloody hell, Pansy. You’re not daft enough to enter into a betrothal with one man when you’re pining after another.”

Black fragments of her queen litter the board; a shard falls onto her lap.

“I’m also not daft enough to think that prioritizing the way I feel is a luxury I have in the first place,” she replies hotly. “And it’s all nargles, anyway, because can you imagine? I’d break him to pieces without even lifting a finger.”

Draco presses his lips together.

“And that’s the version of reality you’re sticking with?”

She frowns, a flash of diphylleia grayi bursting behind her eyes; Neville’s tired ‘I know’ in response to her apology.

“I’m not going to beg him for a chance.”

Pansy moves a rook in front of her king, but it’s no use. The white queen decapitates him from the side in a spray of solid ichor.

“That’s my point, Parkinson. I doubt you’d have to beg.”

Chapter Text

October 2005 

Pansy returns to Paris.

It’s only long enough to pack her belongings, withdraw from her program, and weather a forty-seven-minute (eerily well-thought-out for how last-minute it was) presentation on the cornucopia of Pansy’s disappointments from Monsieur Aubert.

Codry arranges her trunk at the base of her bed at her father’s house but leaves the room otherwise untouched, per Pansy’s request. 

She doubts she’ll be staying long.

Now that their income isn't being split two ways, Pansy meets with Grimdock, her family's account manager at Gringotts, and acquaints herself with their finances. It's a relief to learn that the sacrifice of her Montmarte flat is enough to give them months, not weeks, to make a button out of a beetle.

When Marcus invites her for drinks in Diagon, she obliges. It’s not as awkward as she expects and, as the leaves begin to change and fall unfurls its chilly cloak, Pansy finds herself enjoying the time she spends with him. 

He’s funny. He doesn’t mean to be.

Obsessed with muggle rock music, he compulsively applies chapstick to his lips and more than twice (which is enough to make it a thing), he’s become emotional over the idea of owning a dog.

“Purest things in the world, dogs,” he tells her as they stroll arm-in-arm through a Hogsmeade Saturday market. It was her suggestion, obviously, but Marcus doesn’t seem to mind as they wend their way through the various stalls, passing pumpkins enchanted to bob and float above rows of glass cider jugs. “Couldn’t buy their loyalty if you tried.”

“Why not get a crup?” she asks, stopping to admire a display of fizzing whizzbees. They’re suspended like pastel blobs of sherbet, popping and hissing with magic.

Marcus scowls; an expression that might’ve frightened her if she didn’t know him so well. “I’d have to get licensed,” he says, wordlessly handing over a few sickles to the wizard vendor in exchange for the sweet. It glides over to Pansy with a napkin floating beneath, catching its sticky drops. “And they’re too aggressive with muggles. Can’t have one biting the balls off my employees, can I?”

So he employs muggles? 

She licks the sherbet, creamy coolness exploding in little sparks off the top of her tongue. It makes her shiver.

“What is it that you do, again?”

He raises his brows, overtly skeptical. They’ve traversed this particular path many times by this point, each one ending in Pansy’s retreat. 

“You really want to know?”

She nods.

Pansy’s been operating from the assumption that the less she knows, the better off they both are. It can’t be legal. But she also hasn’t forgotten about his proposal—with each passing day, she’s less and less inclined to deny it. 

Wiser to know what lurks beneath the water before she decides to wade in.

“I run a network of informants,” he says, watching her wearily like he’s a fly caught in her web. She knows where his hopes lie; how desperately he wants her to return his feelings. “We keep our ear to the ground and then sell the information we find.”

Pansy chews on the inside of her cheek.

“So, blackmailing,” she says.

Marcus nods, not bothering to downplay it. “That’s about the gist of it, yeah.”

He’s recently buzzed his hair and when she sees him in her periphery, a microburst of disappointment zaps her like a stinging jinx. 

“Are your clients generally…wealthy?”

“Bit spread across the spectrum, to be fair,” he says, firmly pulling her out of the way of an elderly witch with coke bottle glasses. “We don’t always trade in money. There are more valuable things.”

More valuable things? Like blue milkweed and drugs of that sort? Poisons? Cursed objects?

“Anything you specialize in?” She asks, fully intent on pressing her luck even though her tone is careful. Marcus is paradoxically easy to read for a man who makes his living in secrets.

“Loads of stuff. Not bogged down by any one thing, really,” he says, looking amused at her inquisitiveness. “Suffice it to say, if you need something, there’s a good chance I could get it for you.”

Her Slytherin brain files that away for later use. 

“Oi, Pansy!”

She whips around, accidentally taking Marcus along with her. 

Standing about three booths away, Neville leans his head out from under a tent that houses crates of herbs and plants. A vendor here, apparently. 

She tugs Marcus forward without a thought. 

Pansy hasn’t seen Neville since Hogwarts began another school year three and a half weeks ago, but they exchanged precisely two owls before then (it was his birthday and he thanked her for remembering). As they draw nearer, a mop of curly grey hair yanks her heart right up through her throat. 

“Professor Sprout,” she cries, untangling herself from Marcus to—to do what, hug her? She isn’t sure, but Pomona’s open arms swallow her indecision. 

“My, don’t you look a picture!” She says into Pansy’s hair, holding her tightly and rocking back and forth for a moment before releasing her. “Stunning girl.”

Pomona is mint and perfectly aerated soil and petrichor all at once.

“I’m so pleased to see you,” Pansy says, letting her expression be as earnest as it wants.

“And good morning to you, Mr. Flint,” Pomona adds, glancing between the two of them with zero tact. 

Marcus is loose and disinterested beside her, chin lifted in a smug approximation of boredom. 

“Alrigh’,” he grunts. 

She nearly rolls her eyes at how easy it is for him to transform into a thug.

“You two are vendors here,” Pansy says.

Pomona lifts a large bucket of gillyweed onto the table next to her hip, briny aroma tickling Pansy’s nose with nostalgia.

“Aye,” she says, breathing heavily at the strain. “We’ve got herbs growing out of our gills up at the greenhouses. Longbottom suggested we sell the overgrowth.”

She hadn’t meant to avoid his gaze, but Pansy learns that’s what she’s been doing as soon as their eyes meet.

“Brilliant,” Pansy says—breathes, really, because her lungs have collaborated and unionized and decided to make an arse out of her. She chalks it up to well-deserved revenge over her smoking phase. 

The corner of Neville’s mouth quirks up and Marcus shifts beside her.

Acutely aware of the cosmically horrid imbalance of affection existing between the three of them, Pansy glues her eyes to Pomona, grateful to see her beaming smile.

“I’ve been hoping you might come to visit for quite some time now,” she tells Pansy. The words sink like stones to the bottom of Pansy’s gut. “You ought to see the wiggentrees you helped to graft. Positively crawling with bowtruckles these days.”

She can’t help it. Pansy darts a glance at Neville. He’s watching her, steady light brown eyes eternally measuring her every move even though his posture is relaxed.

“I’d love to,” she says. Because she’s no longer refusing herself things that might bring her joy.

“Why don’t you take them, Pomona? I’ve got a handle on things here,” Neville says, grabbing two pots of dittany from her hands. “And careful, Pansy, that’s just about melted through.”

She startles, remembering the fizzing whizzbee hovering to her left. It’s almost entirely melted, napkin flagging underneath. 

“A marvelous idea,” Pomona praises, giving Neville a hearty pat on the back. She turns her no-nonsense positivity on Pansy and Marcus. “You’ll come?”

“Of course—"

“I’m off,” Marcus says firmly, looking down at Pansy. He’s uncomfortable, looking to her for reassurance. “Catch up later, yeah?”

“Yes,” she says, pressing up on her toes and pulling him down for a kiss on the cheek. It’s an apology, and a poor one at that. “I’ll see you.”

He grins down at her, looking smugger than is strictly polite, then turns without so much as a nod in the others’ direction. 

Once again, Pansy finds she would rather box a bouncing bulb than look at Neville. 

Alright, she thinks, levitating the remains of her sherbet to the waste bin a few meters away. Take me home.

Pansy didn’t know about the stained glass.

Didn’t know about the holes in the domed roof that were punched through during the Battle of Hogwarts, or how it nearly decimated what had been the wizarding world’s largest collection of wolfsbane. 

“A lovely idea, that was,” Pomona tells her, leading the way while Pansy’s mouth stays parted in awe at the kaleidoscope of colors painting petals and leaves alike. “Mending all the broken bits with art.”

It’s a patchwork mural of twisting vines and, if the eye follows from the front to the back of the greenhouse, it depicts the journey from seed to blooming flower in verdant greens and mauveine purples. Breathtaking, when the sun shines through it.

At least somebody came out of the war better for it.

“D’you have any trouble spotting wraith’s kiss with this sort of lighting?” She asks, kneeling close to a mallowsweet and trying to differentiate between the purple shade cast from the windows and the thin violet stripes that might spell trouble.

Pomona laughs, hearty and warm, then shakes her head.

“That’s the first thing Longbottom said after they were installed if you can believe it.”

She stands with her hands clasped across her apron, giving Pansy a moment to take it all in.

If not for the tinted light bathing the plants below, everything looks remarkably unchanged. Here, the mandrakes mature in their massive ceramic pots, and there, the dittany flows over the wooden table in bundles of furry leaves. Had she really spent so much time under this roof worrying about Draco's first-year warning? It strikes her as such a microscopic problem that she wonders how she dredged up the energy to fling herself across her four-poster bed more than once over it.

Pansy inhales.

“What do you see,” she finds herself asking, “when you look at me?”

The question has lived in the attic of her mind since she was eleven, haunting her. Taunting her.

“You won’t appreciate my answer, dear girl.”

Fair enough. Not all exorcisms can be pleasant.

“Well I’m not going to wither away if that’s what you’re worried about,” she says, making a conscious decision to uncross her arms. They hang at her sides, fingers twitching before she puts them to work smoothing down her peacoat.

Pomona places a calloused hand on Pansy’s back and rubs it affectionately, jostling her from side to side. Maybe it’s a rough kind of love, but the fact that it doesn’t require tiptoeing around is enough to make Pansy’s eyes burn.

“No, I don’t suppose you will,” she says, reaching into her pocket for a mint leaf and wordlessly handing it over to Pansy. “You take after your mum. She was extraordinarily gifted at Herbology, you know.”

“You never told me,” Pansy fires back, accusatory and bordering on petulant.

Pomona laughs. 

“How d’you imagine it would’ve made you feel, dove? I’ve taught at this school long enough to spot a neglected child all the way from the pitch. And you forget, Pansy, that I knew what she was like.”

She may be twenty-five years old, but this fatal curiosity is a spell all its own that whisks her back in time. She’s standing outside her parents’ suite, fingers splayed across the solid wood. Voices murmur inside. A laugh, a sigh. Warmth. All goes quiet when she knocks.

“Tell me,” Pansy whispers. The muscles and tendons of her throat have seized, convinced that if they hold still, she won’t come completely undone.

Pomona tucks her own mint leaf into her cheek and she summons two metal stools so they can rest their legs.

“You’re everything she wanted to be,” she says, care-worn palm resting on Pansy’s knee before giving an apologetic squeeze. “And what a waste for the both of you.”

Pain. It spreads through Pansy’s chest like one of those mindless funguses that intuitively find the most efficient pathway to sustenance, only this time it’s Pomona’s words that find their target in the chinks of Pansy’s armor. 

“I might be convinced of that if she’d been around enough to know me,” Pansy says. 

Pomona laughs, though it’s gravelly. 

“She was quite wrong about you,” she says. “Though, I suspect most people are.”

The classic patchwork of Pomona’s apron blurs like someone’s run a paintbrush through the very fabric of reality, but Pansy’s chin doesn’t quiver. “And how’s that?” 

“You were meant to do much more than just survive.”

At the turn of a galleon, Pansy’s exasperated. How has this cheery woman always been so sure of Pansy’s ability to take the lead in her own life when it’s a possibility she’s only begun to wake up to?

“But you know,” Pomona continues, a twinkle in her eyes, “I’ve never faulted a flower for being planted in the wrong soil.”

Pansy scoffs.

“I’m not a flower. I’m a—a monocarpic nightmare, just—a fucking briar patch so twisted up inside myself that no sane person would bother detangling it. Just thorns and blood and...and poison.”

Steep her in a cup of tea and sip. Feel your heart seize. 

Rather than deny it, Pomona taps her lips with brows pulled together and nods. 

“Excellent point,” she says, hopping off the stool. “Well, come along, then. If there’s anyone who ought to be cheered by my latest failure, it’s you.”

Once again cowed by Pomona’s refusal to indulge her theatrics, Pansy has no choice but to follow. They walk to the last greenhouse where all the most dangerous plants are kept. The venomous tentacula were quietly moved there after her incident in Sixth Year even though she ended up spending most of her time with the perilous greenery anyway.

When Pomona uses her hip to bump the aged wooden door open, Pansy’s struck with how much smaller the collection is.

“Where did everything go?” She asks, staring at too many rows of empty dirt, interspersed with gigantic pots of this and that. 

“D’you know, my first job was on a muggle farm? They grew herbs. Rosemary, thyme, sage, mint,” Professor Sprout says, ignoring her question and poking her tongue against her cheek. “It was my first experience caring for a living thing.”

They pass an overgrown bunch of mimbulus mimbletonia; the only thing that seems to be thriving so far.

“The longer I’ve spent in the field, the more a pattern has emerged. I have access to magical plants with fascinating properties, but at the end of the day, it’s a relief to tend to the little herb garden I’ve got growing in my window.”

Pansy sidesteps a small bubotuber, unsure of what to say.  

“Of course, a specialty in herbs is rare. Same goes for Longbottom’s interest in dendrology. Point is, we all find our niche. And yours, Pansy Parkinson, has never been flowers.”

They come to a stop in front of a haze of black mist, stretching from floor to curved ceiling. It twists around in itself and two wicked-looking tendrils extend to Pansy’s cheeks, leaving her skin damp from its caress.

“Is this—”

“Devil’s snare,” Pomona provides, muttering a quick expansion charm. The mist consumes every bit of light and a chill explodes its way up Pansy’s spine at the sudden loss of orientation. “If you give it a moment, your eyes will adjust.”

Heart trampolining up to the base of her throat, Pansy goes still. Like emerging to groggy consciousness after a stupefy, dark shapes and negative space begin to reveal themselves, separating the ground from the ceiling. At her feet, a mere meter away, movement catches her eye.

Writhing vines.

“You’re keeping it in a greenhouse?” Pansy asks, scandalized by the danger it must pose for the unsuspecting first-year whose curiosity gets the best of them.

“This castle houses objects so sinister it makes the devil’s snare look like a pile of strings,” Pomona responds, tone flat enough to make it clear she doesn’t appreciate the skepticism. “Besides, even First Years know how to disengage should they ever find themselves in a tangle.”

“They’re agitated,” Pansy says. She senses their restlessness like it’s a part of her skin; cracked and itchy. “Dried out, too.”

Pomona’s smile is a light source all its own.

“I’m afraid neither Longbottom nor I have the touch when it comes to our beastly friend here,” she says, voice brimming with suggestion. 

Does she mean for Pansy to come to Hogwarts to take care of it?

“I’d be run off the grounds if any student’s parents caught wind of my presence,” Pansy replies. For once she’s not trying to be dramatic, but practical. Her actions on the day of the Battle of Hogwarts have been impossible to shake even though she’s attended two dinner parties with Potter present and managed to refrain from offering his life on a platter again.

“They need dense forest, my dear, and the centaurs have requested that we not introduce the devil’s snare until more of the Forbidden Forest’s native vegetation has a chance to repopulate. It’ll languish here until we find an acceptable place for relocation.”

The thick treeline at the end of her mum’s garden with trunks tall enough to dwarf this greenhouse flashes through her mind.

“I could take care of it,” she says.

Foolish. She can barely take care of herself these days, but the offer is out there before she has a chance to second-guess it.

The expansion charm is dispelled and the mist shrinks away, leaving Pansy changed. Pomona’s eyes are soft. Fierce. Immensely proud.

“There you are.”

Neville assists her in relocating the devil’s snare to her father’s estate in Hertfordshire. 

They make stilted small-talk because her brain stutters to a halt every time her eyes catch on the sleeves rolled up to his forearms, chest glistening with sweat while he pulls the wagon down the path to Hogsmeade. 

It’s obscene. How dare he undo the top two buttons of that fucking oatmeal-colored henley.

The trees nestled along the path and over the hillside are at the zenith of their leaves changing and if it weren’t for the immense amount of concentration it takes to move a dense black cloud of mist at the same speed as the wagon, Pansy might even call it picturesque.

“I might’ve made a mistake in declining Hagrid’s offer to borrow a thestral,” Neville huffs, pausing to wipe his forehead with the hem of his shirt. A tanned expanse of skin greets her eyes and Pansy instinctively casts her homemade charm so she can stare at the beginnings of a green tattoo that peeks from in-between his rib cage without him knowing.

What, she thinks, the fuck.

“There’s got to be an easier way to do this,” Neville continues, Pansy’s lack of response prodding him to fill the silence. “‘Course, it probably involves arithmancy or runes of some sort and I’m useless when it comes to that stuff. I’ve only ever been good with my hands.”

She looks at them, braced against the creaking weight of the wagon. He’s white around the knuckles. Red and streaked with fine lines of dirt everywhere else. It should evoke disgust, this habitual disregard he seems to have for a proper manicure, but it doesn’t. 

It makes her burn.

“You do that often,” she says. Accuses. Because he can’t keep getting away with it. “You say something heinous like ‘swallow’ or ‘Good, Pansy’ and then somehow I’m the one who’s made it sexual.”

Neville nearly loses his grip on the wagon as his feet slide forward, spraying bits of gravel.

“When did I—”

“You said, and I quote, ‘I’ve always been good with my hands,’” she throws back at him, voice pitched deep in an attempt to mimic his timbre. It’s undignified and delicious to slip back into the cloak of their old dynamic; a protego against the onslaught of uncomfortable feelings bubbling up the left side of her chest. 

He finds a divot in the cobblestone path and digs in both heels, using the strength of his thighs to stop the slow crawl of the wagon. 

“I’ve told you to swallow?” 

His laugh is hoarse. She can’t look at him even though the concentration required to maintain her shroud spell is much less now that they’ve stopped moving.

“Just the once,” she says tightly. A handful of dark tendrils burst in her direction like a solar flare of self-preservational magic intent on covering up the twin spots of pink on her cheeks. She turns away, desperation driving her to dig out the monstrosity in her pocket.

“Is that...a mobile phone?” 

“Your awe is misplaced, I assure you. Granger’s got Draco tap dancing at will like he’s been imperiused and he believes in his right to make me suffer along with him,” she says, raising the phone with her chin raised. If he sees the tastefully placed rhinestones on the back, he doesn’t say anything. “Besides, there’s a little snake game inside. I’m very fond of it.”

Granger’s on speed-dial out of practicality. Not friendship. They really aren’t friends. 

“Oh, Pansy! I was just about to text you,” Hermione says, and the heat in Pansy’s cheeks ratchets up another notch. “I’ve been invited to have dinner with Healer Thomas and his wife, and I have an inkling that this might be about the promotion I was telling you about. Which dress do I wear? I’m hardly ever out of scrubs as it is, but I was thinking the lavender with that strappy bit around the neck or—”

“I'm sending a howler if it's not the maroon with a peekaboo back,” Pansy says, lowering her voice in hopes that Neville won’t be able to hear the fondness that robs her words of any bite. “Pair it with the ankle-strap heels we bought last week.”

Granger must be rushing about, as usual, because she’s all blustery on the other end. “I worry that dress makes my shoulders look too—”

“Stately? Sophisticated? Don’t be thick, Granger, it’s not a good look on you.”

“Oh, alright,” Hermione laughs. “But that’s not why you called.”

Right. One quick glance at Neville and he’s grinning at his feet.

Pansy ignores the sticky sweetness of pleasure that beats behind her ribs and describes their predicament to Hermione. 

“No, you’re right. There’s got to be a better solution,” Hermione says, brilliant brain probably halfway through puzzling it out already. “Can you give me five minutes? I’m sure I can sort this out.”

When Pansy hangs up, the silence stretches out and yawns between them. The vague sense that he’s seen her undress weighs down her limbs and nowhere feels safe enough to rest her eyes. 

“Granger’s on it,” she says, fixing her gaze on the shrouded wagon. Neville slips again and Pansy takes the place beside him and digs in her heels, too. Rough wood meets her fingertips as the wagon comes to a standstill once again.

With Pansy’s help, Neville doesn’t have to grip it with both hands. Releasing one of them, he plunges the other into his pocket and pulls out a scrap of rubbish.

“Hermione works in the ward where my parents live at St. Mungo’s,” he says, smoothing out the candy wrapper against the plane of his thigh. “She showed me how muggles fold wrappers like this into a bracelet.”

He folds the small rectangular paper lengthwise until it’s little more than a thin line, then takes a zig-zag chain of them from his other pocket and begins folding in the new addition.

“I assume those two things are somehow connected and you don’t make a habit of walking around with pockets full of rubbish for no reason,” Pansy says, transfixed by the careful maneuvering of his thick fingers. Crease and press, crease and press.

Neville smiles, just shy enough that his younger self peeks out for a moment.

“I visit my parents every week,” he says, taking out another wrapper and giving it a similar folding treatment. “Mum doesn’t know who I am, but she likes the sweets I bring. Gum’s her favorite.”

She looks down at the cartoony pop of blue from Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum, throat tightening around emotions that don’t want parsing. His loneliness is a living, breathing thing with cold fingertips that press against her jaw, beckoning her to look it in the eyes; to recognize its familiarity and all the ways it mirrors her own.

“She likes to give me gifts, too, but her mind’s not...she doesn’t realize they’re just wrappers,” he continues, gesturing for her to do something with her hand. She’s too devastated to think clearly so when she doesn’t get the hint, his fingers wrap around the place where her pulse thuds in her wrist. He holds it out in front of him. “I’ve kept them all.”

The thought of Neville always having them on hand tightens her lungs into a corset. Did he smooth them between his thumb and forefinger as he walked to the Great Hall for dinner? Were his pockets full of these tiny offerings when he knelt alongside her and harvested vervain in Third Year? Would he have fisted one in his palm while a cruciatus ripped through his body, terrified the Carrows might turn him into his mother?

The zig-zag bracelet is chilly against her skin but every brush of his fingers is warm as he works on closing the circle around her wrist. She shivers. He sees it.

The words leave her lips before she has a chance to dam them. “I find it difficult to accept that you're real sometimes." 

When he rolls his eyes, it sends a shock of delight spinning through her. Windswept, windows-blown-out kind of wreckage.

“Don’t do that, please,” he says, looping one wrapper through another with a frown. “I’ve been put on enough pedestals to know I'll only end up falling on my arse when I try to get down.”

He’s baring his neck to a fanged predator and for once in her life, Pansy’s inclination to bite has nothing to do with the desire to draw blood. No, she’d like to caress. To press her lips close enough to feel his pulsing terror; to confirm to herself that it matches the beat of her own.

He misinterprets the heat in her cheeks as wounded silence.

“Sorry,” he says, shaking his head. “I didn’t mean to jump down your throat. I just—I like that you’ve never been one to handle me with kiddie gloves.”

She wonders what shape his lips might take if she tells him that she finds his fury comforting; that she's stumbled through life without a compass and she suspects that if she follows the smoke of his fire with her scabbed up knees, it might lead her all the way to goodness. Would he stop apologizing? Would she become the kind of person who wouldn't want him to?

"No, I, er..." Pansy trails off. Afraid. His vulnerability is a stretch of wet concrete before her, daring her to take a step forward without ruining everything.

The mobile in Pansy’s pocket rings against her side just as Neville’s hands withdraw from hers. She looks down at her slender wrist, loose bracelet with jagged edges wedging its way into the muscle of her heart with the kind of clumsiness guaranteed to make it bleed.

“Here,” she says, beginning to slip it off. A flippant remark about how it wouldn’t match any of her outfits doesn’t even have a chance to grab a handful of floo powder before it burns to ash on her tongue. 

Neville’s fingers halt her progress, sweeping a thumb across her palm before he drops it.

“It’s for you,” he says, with no trace of embarrassment or lightness in his expression. Like he’s confident she knows this isn’t just an intricately folded ring of gum wrappers.

And gods, Pansy's nothing more than a bottomless pit, isn't she? With every offer of warmth or acceptance, she has to convince herself not to unhinge her metaphorical jaw and swallow it whole. A snake in the most distressing sense.

With trembling hands, she holds the phone up to her ear.

“Alright, Granger. Tell me how to get out of this mess.”

She does, and she doesn’t.

November 2005

Millie’s tattoo parlor is a godsend.

It’s got plush waiting sofas, walls covered with ink designs that shift seamlessly into different pictures if you stare long enough, and it smells like soap and incense. A veritable paradise in the bowels of Knockturn Alley.

Best of all, Pansy doesn’t have to spend any money and she gets to watch other people make poor decisions this time.

“Oh, this one will be my pleasure,” Millie tells the bloke whose buttocks are about to sport Harry Potter’s chocolate frog portrait. “I’ll even throw in a discount because, really, you’re doing me a favor here.” 

Pansy rolls her eyes as she flips through a two-month-old edition of Witch Weekly, only half paying attention to an article on “Five Different Ways to Use a Broom in the Bedroom.” Millie’s got a budding friendship with Potter now that she knows he hates the fame that’s always hounded him and adores making him blush from all the “Chosen One” rubbish.

“Number three is how I got this scar,” Marcus says, pointing to a nick on the underside of his jaw as his hip presses against hers on the sofa. 

He’s been doing that lately. Sitting closer, speaking softer. Taking risks. It’s all disorienting, this tentative friendship lined with panic all along the edges. How many of these intimacy breadcrumbs can he say are anything more than incentive for her to take the deal?

“Isn’t that from when you ripped your mole off?” Millie asks without looking up from her fleshy canvas. “You’ve had that since Fourth Year.”

“Careful, Millicent. You forget you’re not the only one with a good memory,” he says. Everything about his body language portrays ease, but Marcus hasn’t built a business on empty threats.

“Anyway,” Millie says, smirking as she wipes the beading blood away from her client’s clenched buttock. “Draco mentioned you’d have a story for us, Pansy.”

Pansy’s eyes flick to the young man laid out in front of Millie. 

When children learn about the Battle of Hogwarts from Professor Binns, her name will never pass his transparent lips but they’ll grow to know her from the whispers. Her betrayal of their savior has followed her through headlines and purposefully jostled shoulders and there is no such thing as being too careful.

The buzz of the needle fills the air until Millie looks up in askance. Her eyes follow Pansy’s, where understanding dawns.

“Myles,” she says, reaching under her arm to grasp her wand on the side table. “Pat my leg if you need me.” Then she casts a muffliato around the three of them before he can protest.

Cool relief smooths out Pansy’s hunched spine.

“Turns out Granger’s stubbornness is actually quite glorious when it’s employed on your behalf,” she sniffs. “All I had to do was mention that Professor Sprout entrusted her devil’s snare to me and suddenly Potter and an actual, honest-to-god Weasley were digging a pit for it on my family’s property.”

She might have refused their help if it weren’t so enthralling to observe Draco play nice (or passive-aggressive, really) with his new honorary in-laws.

“My hands are so delicate from never working,” he’d goaded Weasley, casting a subtle heavyweight charm on the shovel before handing it over with a wink in Pansy’s direction. “Go on, then. Embarrass me in front of my fiancée.”

Marcus and Millie blink back at her, mouths open and eyes wide.

“Hang on,” Millie says, setting down her needle gun and dusting off Myles’s attempt to pat her leg. “Sprout just gave you Hogwarts’ supply of devil’s snare?”

Defensiveness rises up like a poorly-trained crup.

“It can’t thrive in a greenhouse,” she says, leashing her inner thirteen-year-old. “And I’m quite capable with this sort of thing.”

“This sort of thing?” Marcus repeats, looking dazed. “Circe’s tits, you haven’t told anyone, have you?”

His stern tone brings her back to Lucius Malfoy’s lectures on the impropriety of a pureblood lady with grass stains on her dress.

“What, you think I shoved it into the floo and sent it on its merry way?” she snaps. “Longbottom had to help me transport it and Draco brought along the Gryffindor circus.”

“Look, capable or not, they’re rare enough that people have been avada’d for less. D’you realize what kind of price devil’s snare can fetch on the market?” Marcus asks. Even with the assurance of an effective muffliato, his eyes dart to Myles. 

It doesn’t take much to trigger Pansy’s leftover survival instincts. Her pulse trips and she breathes out slowly, waiting for her heart to stop holding its breath.

“I’m not selling it,” Pansy insists. “And it’s not dittany. It can’t be propagated because the vines will strangle you before you get the chance.”

Myles reaches to tap Millie again but she deftly moves her leg out of the way.

“What sort of nightmare would want to buy it, anyway? It’s not a pet,” Millie says, wiping her forehead with the back of her arm.

Marcus chuckles darkly. 

“I know plenty of them,” he says. “And they’ve got valuables that need protecting, security for their massive estates, a hands-off way to dispose of bodies who get in their way…”

“And these are your clients?” Pansy asks.

The question takes on a life of its own; an entire entity digging its elbows into their ribs to make the space between them uncomfortable. Not because it’s intrusive, but because it’s obvious.

“Yes.” 

Marcus asks a different question with his eyes—one Pansy still doesn’t know how to answer.

A muffled cry from Myles severs the tension as Millie resumes her work. 

“What d’you reckon it sells for? Ten thousand galleons?” Millie asks.

“Try that by the dozens. Nobody knows what the supply looks like because if a bloke is thick enough to prattle on about it, they’ll be showing up to the pitch without any beaters,” he says, pausing to wipe the sweat that’s appeared at his forehead. “And like Parkinson said, it can’t be propagated. When a finite market meets a demand like that, it’s a bloodbath.”

This new information leaves Pansy weak. 

“You’ve warded your place, yeah?” Marcus continues, giving her a stern look. She’s used to the safety of looking at Marcus from down her nose but his expertise on the matter makes that impossible. “Appointed a secret-keeper?”

“A secret-keeper?”

The bell above the door jingles. Pansy takes it as a reminder to breathe, and when Draco steps inside, he clocks her distress immediately.

“Are we gossiping?” he says, watching Millie cancel the muffliato. Two brown paper bags dangle from his fingers and he holds one up.

“Is that for me?” Millie asks, reaching for it. 

Draco’s dragonhide boots strike the tile and echo with each step as he hands it over. “Tell your beloved I’m not a pack mule,” he says, corners of his lips twisted down in a herculean effort not to smile. He’s terrible at hiding his fondness these days.

And for all the slender grace he inherited from Narcissa, Draco plops into the chair across from Pansy with none of it. His grey eyes move from Pansy’s magazine to Marcus’s leg pressed against hers with boredom, then snap back to something near her lap. From the mischievous lift of his brows, it can’t be good.

“What’s this, Pansy? A new family heirloom?”

He’s drawn attention to her zig-zag bracelet and Marcus’s eyes land heavy on her wrist.

“Yes,” she says. Too stiff to be nonchalant. 

Draco pounces.

“I happen to know that Longbottom is a particular fan of Drooble’s,” he says, resting an ankle atop his knee and tapping the black scales of his boot to an upbeat rhythm. “Hermione’s mentioned it.”

“How quaint,” she says, cursing him for being such a skilled Occlumens. Slicing through his mind to show him the things she could do to him if he doesn’t shut his mouth would be delicious retribution.

“Mm, I thought so,” he agrees, not bothering to hide his grin as he digs into his own lunch.

Her guilt is baffling. She and Marcus have not spoken of their potential arrangement since the day he made the offer. They’ve not kissed, touched, or made any promises, but he’s gone rigid beside her.

She focuses her attention on the ill-advised sex article. 

...stress the importance of finding a smooth polish, of course. Bonus points for a tapered tip!

The bracelet scratches against the sensitive skin on her wrist at the slightest movement, drawing her gaze once more. She’s been forced into stiff dresses with hemlines that etch red strokes of irritation every time they brush her calves and blouses with cold buttons that press against her throat. Always a doll to be dressed.

She finds that choosing the discomfort makes all the difference in being able to tolerate it. 

“Wasn’t joking about the wards,” Marcus says quietly, pulling her out of musing with lips that brush against the shell of her ear. “Gryffindor is a house of loudmouths.”

Offense clips her like a bludger to the broomstick, sending her spinning over when, exactly, she’d grown to care about them enough to be wounded on their behalf.

“Come on,” he says, heaving himself off the sofa. “I’ll walk you out.” 

Pansy watches him straighten his pants and stalk to the door without bothering to say goodbye to the rest.

Myles coughs, eyes darting to the three friends remaining.

“Best of luck,” Draco drawls, taking a massive bite of the ham and cheese sandwich she suspects Hannah was kind enough to pack for him. Pansy shrugs on her coat and waits until he’s about to swallow before sending a stinging hex his way, then shuts the door just as he chokes.

The world is colder out here. As she adjusts her scarf to better cover her throat, Marcus steps out from beneath the dark metal awning.

They set off together without saying a word. Magic-warmed cobblestones keep the weblike streets of Knockturn clear of ice, but flurries drift past their faces and stick like tiny constellations in Pansy’s hair. The white twinkles against the midnight black and she is a sky unto herself, filled with enough hazardous tales to start her own mythology. 

“You were pleased to see Sprout the other day,” Marcus says. Dressed in a thin jumper with no scarf, the tips of his ears and nose pay the price.

“You weren’t,” Pansy says. There’s always a scale to balance when it comes to conversations with Marcus. If he wants to prod but not ask, then she’ll respond but not answer.

He snorts.

“No. Couldn’t leave Hogwarts fast enough, teachers included.” 

Agreement is automatic and loaded on the tip of Pansy’s tongue, but she holds it in; gives herself a chance to taste it before deciding.

“You don’t know Professor Sprout,” she finally says.

Marcus’s gaze drops to the wrist concealed in her pocket before wrenching it away as he bumps into a thick-waisted wizard with a wide gait.

“They’re all the same,” he says, sending the poor man a scathing glare behind his shoulder. “Blowing smoke up your arse, talking a big game about your potential. Then the moment you decide you don’t want to become a fuckin’ Ministry dog, you’re a menace.”

“And what did you want to be that had them sounding the alarm, Marcus?”

He accepts her arm that she’s looped through his, agitated as he wipes the corners of his mouth with his other hand.

“Nothing,” he says. “That’s the point. All those jobs sounded dull as fuck and after the war, I wasn’t going to be welcomed to them anyway.”

An ache she’s well-acquainted with spreads within her like a dungbomb, misting her eyes and choking her throat. It’s difficult enough for a young person to find their place after being thrown into the real world, but add in existential questions about reparations, a familial reputation that’s impossible to shake, and you’ve got a potion for misery-thick sludge that Pansy swallows down every day.

“No,” she says, shivering as a particularly cold gust of wind sweeps the hair off her neck. “You’re probably right.”

They fall back into silence, boots clicking on dry cobblestone, and Pansy paddles hard to keep her head above the rising tide of desolation. She’s spent years treading water—even dipping below the surface for months at a time—and she knows how swift the current runs beneath; how easily one can be dragged into the undertow. 

“If you could go back,” she says, forming words before she even knows the gravity of what she’s asking. “If you could do it again, would you make different choices?”

Marcus barks a laugh, immediate and sharp.

“No,” he says, lips twisted in a scowl. “We survived. Wouldn’t fuck that up for the world.”

She takes his reasoning and tries it on for size, letting it warp the world around her. 

Pansy remembers prowling through the halls, afraid to walk too fast lest it look like she’s running from something. Taking every opportunity to wear Narcissa’s fur coat because she never quite figured out how to live as a cold-blooded girl in a world that offered very little warmth.

She stood on the shore of the Black Lake, clinging to the only tale that might redeem her: You had no other choice. No other choice.

It’s one of her favorite stories; the kind that’s always silenced that quivering child inside who’s not so convinced she’ll ever learn to play the lead in her own life. Or that she should. There are always actors more qualified, wiser, braver. 

More.

They make it to the apparition point and Marcus has relaxed enough to remember why he volunteered to accompany her in the first place.

“I’ve got an appointment this afternoon but set the wards as soon as you can,” he says, not bothering to step away when she retrieves her arm. “Use salvio hexia at the very least, and I’ll drop by tomorrow to do the rest.”

His nose is crooked and his teeth cause his lips to protrude a bit, but what Pansy sees when she looks up at him is something solid. Maybe even good. Their potential sprawls out before her, a swath of tepid moments that gradually warm and melt like frost gone soft from sunrise.

A life of thawing out; of warming up.

Pansy’s made plenty of bad choices, but she suspects he wouldn’t be one of them.

“Marcus,” she tells him, “my answer is no.”

January 2006

A strange pattern establishes itself in the Parkinson household.

In the mornings, Pansy and her father breakfast together according to Codry’s preference to serve them at the same time. Their spoons and forks scrape porcelain in silence that crackles like static. He eats four boiled eggs. Four boiled eggs.

And they don’t talk about the garden.

While Codry clears away the plates, Reed retreats to his office. How he spends his time in there is a mystery Pansy’s only moderately curious to solve, but eventually, she can’t help but notice it’s not silent behind the door.

A low murmur of voices. Soft exhales, then easy laughter.

He’s talking to the portrait of her mother.

She stops listening after that; stops feeling sorry for the way his eyes trip over her every time she walks in the room and disappointment sets in.

Her mum’s garden is the wilting step-sibling she never asked for, but she has to pass by it on her way to the devil’s snare. Today, in a foul mood after checking the vines only to find that they’ve withered further, Pansy finds Reed pulling entire herbs out by their roots. Mistaking them for weeds.

She yells at him. 

“Your mum always told me what to do,” he panics, dabbing the sweat from his brow with his navy blue handkerchief. “So tell me.”

She resents him for trying to care for something he doesn’t understand. Resents her mum’s indelible fingerprints all over the careful landscaping of the flowers and herbs; for making it the first time she’s ever felt like an unwelcome stranger around greenery. They stare at each other in the middle of this foreign patch of earth enchanted to melt any snow or cold that drifts through its barriers.

“No,” she says. “Observe and infer. After that, you can ask your questions.”

The words are hers but the tactic is Pomona’s. Even here, hundreds of miles away from the greenhouses of Hogwarts, she offers Pansy deliverance.

Reed has never been a proud man. Perhaps that’s why Lucius rarely invited him for a cigar after all those dinner parties, loathe to spend time with such a poor patriarch. Regardless, he offers no retaliation and watches her drop to her knees, scooping up a discarded handful of belladonna with its violet berries fit to burst.

“It’s poisonous,” she says, because he has to understand. “But that doesn’t mean it’s a weed.”

Pansy could explain that there are gardens for the masses, gardens for utility, and gardens for horror. That beauty and usefulness don’t always go hand in hand, and even the boils meant to blind have their lovely reasons. 

“How do you spend your time within those trees?” he asks, like this is a question he’s been gathering the courage to push past his lips. “Is it dangerous?”

Between his dependency on the house-elf to find out Pansy’s whereabouts and this selective audacity to play the part of a concerned father, she has no patience for it.

“Ask Codry to help you with this,” she says coolly, standing and brushing the dirt off her knees. The words are short and clipped in her mouth because if she lingers on them, the magic boiling through her might take it as instruction to punish. “I’m not here to clean up every mess she left.”

She doesn’t make it to the staircase before she finds Codry waiting for her, supernaturally aware that his name has been invoked to harm his most favorite Parkinson.

“Mr. Parkinson isn’t well,” he tells her, as close to censure as he can get without crossing the line of propriety. “Gardening with your mother was good for his health.”

“Why don’t you do it, then?” 

Codry levels her with an unimpressed stare. 

“Elves may be skilled by nature, my lady, but we have our specialties. Mine have never been related to greenery.”

Aware that her behavior is more than a bit regressive, Pansy makes a decision. 

“Fine,” she says, turning around.

Her anger burns blue all the way back to where she left Reed moments ago, standing like he doesn’t know what to do with his hands.

“I’ll teach you how to garden,” she says, “but if you want your wife back, you can get a shovel and a bucket because I refuse to play the part.”

Pansy waits for guilt to trickle down her back like a bead of sweat but it doesn’t. She is accustomed to whittling harmless words down to points and sticking them on the spear of her tongue, but she’s finding that the truth cleaves with a sharpness all its own. She wields it recklessly; a toddler with a wand. 

Reed’s face is clean-shaven and his clothes are impeccably tailored, but there is a rumpledness to him that not even Codry’s nimble fingers can manage to iron out. He’s too thin and tired.

“I do,” he admits. “I do want her back. Violet’s the solitary reason I’m not in St. Mungo’s, living potion to potion. She knew how to make me better. She—we didn’t know how to do both. Take care of you and ourselves.” A sigh, full of longing. “But your mum, she loved me so well.”

His honesty is ruinous; like father, like daughter. To learn that her mum was capable of such devotion is a subtle sort of cruciatus. 

“I’ve spent my entire life convinced that I deserved two absent parents and every bit of shit that’s come my way,” she says, coming apart at the seams. “You should have seen it. You should have seen me.”

Reed’s small eyes fill with tears he’s wise enough not to shed.

“I’m not asking your forgiveness, Pansy.”

And he isn’t. He’s simply standing there, looking for all the world like a ship without an anchor.

For someone who has said a plethora of horrid things in her life, Pansy hasn’t thrown the weight of meaning behind many of them. They’ve mostly been ornamental; sparking and popping decoys designed to distract. This, however—speaking the truth with her whole chest—is brutality she can’t regret.

She nods. Swipes at the wetness on her cheeks.

“Good,” she says. “Because you won’t get it.”

Over the course of the next two weeks, Pansy’s mood grows steadily darker. 

She wakes up every morning convinced there’s an erumpent on her chest. Between the gaping hole in her social life that Marcus left behind, the snare’s ongoing refusal to thrive, and being too ashamed to continue her correspondence with Pomona, cold mist rolls in and blots out the lights of Pansy’s life.

And then there’s Neville fucking Longbottom. 

He’s grabbing drinks for the table at the Leaky. He’s replenishing Millie’s stock of the homemade healing balm he customized for her customers. He’s making it impossible for Pansy to avoid him.

There are ingredients in potions that require isolation lest they contaminate the whole batch. Juice of bulbadox, for instance. One has to handle it with dragonhide gloves and submit to thorough cleansing spells before they can touch anything in an effort to avoid an abundance of boils. 

There are people, too, not meant for mingling.

Neville has his students, his love-worn henley’s, his warm companionship with Pomona. He’s got visits with his parents, easy laughter over pints, and it’s all peace he’s so carefully cultivated that she can’t bring herself to contaminate it. 

But the snare is dying.

Its vines are meant to be thick ropes of verdant green that writhe with undulating grace, but her increasingly lethargic beast covers the pit they dug with only occasional gossamer twitches. She’s spent hours in the Malfoy family archive researching solutions and experimenting with her findings. Pinching out the vine's terminal buds? Doesn't work unless you get under the snare, and that's only possible if you know how to get back out. Spelling the air to be more humid than a grotto? Not as effective as you'd think.

Covered in enough scratches and purple bruises to look like she's lost a fight with a kneazle, Pansy resigns to the truth that the last thing she has left to try requires a depth of knowledge she doesn't possess. 

She owls Neville about it on a Monday.

Longbottom,

It seems I have run into a complication in my care of the plant you helped me transport two months ago. After thorough research, I’ve come to the conclusion that the answer lies in being able to find a way to provide shelter that blocks out light while allowing for breathability. Specialized pleaching seems to be the wisest course of action.

While I understand the concept, I find my expertise lacking in the area of biotecture. Please advise.

-Pansy Parkinson

An hour later, a small barn owl arrives with his answer.

Pansy,

Is this how you write to your friends? Genuine question. If you like pretending that we have secretaries that secretly pen our letters, I’m all for it—only thought I should clarify.

I am free for a consultation anytime this Saturday afternoon. Let me know if this works for you and your people.

Regards?

Neville F. Longbottom

She reads and rereads the letter until she can do so without smiling. It’s like she’s stuck her finger into one of those sock-it’s at Draco’s flat and every inch of her is electric, buzzing with energy she hasn’t felt since Fourth Year when Cassius Warrington put his clumsy hand up her shirt beneath the quidditch stands.

Longbottom,

She stares at the even loops of her letters, biting the inside of her cheek. Keeping it professional is the easiest option. Doesn’t require any overthinking. Doesn’t force her to acknowledge the hunger she’s so used to shoving into the shadows when it comes to Neville.

This is how I talk.

One swipe of her quill scratches the whole line out and she reaches for another sheet of parchment. Licks her lips.

Longbottom,

My secretary’s name is Edith. She has lovely penmanship, wouldn’t you agree? 

Right. Short and sweet. Could even be mistaken for mysterious. 

Pansy’s avoiding the question—or the invitation, technically. Neville’s offer to take a look at it on Saturday fills her with panic that’s impossible to stem because she doesn’t know where it’s bursting from. The danger that he’ll tell Pomona of her failure? Worry that she’s on her way to developing a habit of leaning on him? Fear that he’ll show up in another god-awful henley?

She signs her name and sends it off.

His response doesn’t come until morning, right in the middle of England’s most dysfunctional breakfast club. She almost knocks the silver tray out of Codry’s hand when he pops by to deliver the letter.

Edith,

She doesn’t take any honey or sugar in her tea. A bit unhinged, if you ask me, but I thought you ought to know. I'd hate to see you hexed.

Cheers,

Neville

Silly that her heart should attempt such acrobatics this early in the morning. Playfulness has always been dulled by power dynamics or propriety in Pansy's experience, but Neville's response is like a whetstone to her inner child; the girl who delighted in the ridiculous. He sharpens a bit of her that never had the chance to shine.

Once she makes it deep into the tree line to check on the snare, shade and shadow are her companions. The knee-high snow turns to frost-covered ground and pine needles crunching. She's contemplating the inevitable futility of the visit when she hears a muffled struggle.

Cursing, she picks up the pace. If a deer stumbled upon the snare, its weight might force the whole thing to collapse in on itself. 

“Hold still,” she mutters under her breath, stepping into the shrouding spell and losing every bit of light. 

"Pansy!"

Her entire body freezes; a caricature of confusion. She hasn't heard her father panic enough to be sure it's him, but who else could it be?

She hears them, then. The vines. They're writhing and twisting and she can sense more than actually see her father choking.

“Don’t struggle! You’ll hurt the vines if you thrash,” she says, vaguely aware that her priorities might be coming out a bit crossed.

The calamity of blind panic and jostling vines continues, though his yelling is fainter. It’s unclear if that’s a good thing. 

“Hold still," she commands, considering casting an imperio. Absurd calm keeps her hands steady but the pulse in her temples is deafening.

The thrashing ceases. She honestly can’t tell if it’s because he’s dead or if the severity of her tone finally cut through the fog of panic. 

He falls in a muted thud and now she's faced with a problem. Indecision has her hovering at the edge of the vines, imagining her father in a heap of twisted limbs at the bottom.

Two steps back and she flings herself into the void.

Impact punches the breath from her lungs and it only devolves from there. Vines curl around every limb, moving up her neck like a snake and wrenching her neck at an uncomfortable angle. She stops struggling. Goes limp. 

Ten seconds later, the snare loses interest and she lands so hard on the ground that her knees collapse.

Pansy can’t see him in the thick blackness of the pit but Reed’s rapid breathing is an immediate comfort. His lungs only ever seem to inflate without exhaling, like one of those balloons Hermione made her blow up for Draco’s birthday, latex stretching thinner and thinner until it bursts.

The ground is cold. Her thoughts are moving pictures and sensations more than fully formed sentences; the crush of vines against her neck, the surprising terror of hearing her father helpless yet again. Her hip throbs. 

It has to be close to ten minutes before she comes back to herself.

“Do you know how to get out?” Reed whispers, like the vines will come after him if they hear.

He doesn’t ask her why she came down and she doesn’t ask what he was doing so far from the house.

Pansy’s fringe sticks to her forehead even though it’s only marginally warmer down here than it is on the wintry surface. She spreads her hands to the wall of tightly-packed dirt in front of her, fingertips tripping over the occasional root. 

“As I’ve never been daft enough to get myself snared in the first place, the answer is no.”

Eyes open or closed, it doesn’t make a difference. She shuts them because her nerves can’t handle staring into the fathomless depths just now.

When she takes a step to the left, she stumbles. Judging by Reed’s yelp, it was his foot she stepped on. 

“There’s a spell,” he says, missing measured and calm by a kilometer. “Violet used to take care of vines like these, and she said—there’s something, heat? They can’t bear it.”

Pansy makes a rude gesture because there’s no one to witness her childishness.

“Absolutely not,” she says, tilting her head back. “It hurts them and they’re in rough enough shape as it is.”

Pansy braces her back against the wall, sinking into a crouch.

They won’t die from this. At some point, Codry will come back from his errands and come looking for Reed. They could summon him if either one knew how to cast a patronus, but regardless, she knows he’ll come. Then he’ll call for Pomona or Longbottom and even if it took hours, food could be dropped and wands could take care of waste.

It’s not the circumstances that are unbearable. It's who she's stuck with. 

“Where did they come from?” he finally asks.

“The vines?” she says. He grunts and his shoe knocks against the side of hers as he slides down to the ground. “Professor Sprout.”

No context, no helpful details. He will find a return equal to his investment in her.

“Ah,” he says, as if she’s explained the deep emotional connection she has with the woman. “Your mum admired her.”

It’s Pansy’s turn to grunt.

“Violet and I used to take our lunches in the greenhouse,” he says, clearing his throat. 

She squeezes her eyes shut even tighter, trying not to picture the two of them in a place she’s always thought of as her own. Like she was the first to discover it; the first to find solace there. Those greenhouses belong to her.

“You think it came from nowhere,” he says, confusing her for a moment. “Your love for plants. You don’t remember lying in a bassinet next to Violet while she dug through the dirt, planting this and trimming that.”

Something ugly rears its head from the magma-hot pool of resentment inside her and she is so confounded by his audacity that words escape her.

“We didn’t plan on having a child,” he continues. “Violet wanted to travel and study for the rest of her life. She would have, too, if she and I didn’t have familial obligations.”

A pang of curiosity hits her and Pansy wonders if this ache for somebody who didn’t want her will ever stop feeling like betrayal.

“She fell pregnant before we were married and there were…expectations,” he says, fully gone to the nostalgia. “But then you were so much more than we anticipated. A serious little thing—no one could get you to smile.”

“I don’t remember anyone trying,” she rasps.

Reed pauses. He probably wasn’t convinced she was listening until he heard the tremor in her voice.

“She wanted the best for you,” he says, a touch of desperation making him speak faster. “And it came so naturally for Narcissa, the pureblood etiquette and knowing how to best prepare you for your future. Violet wanted you to fit in.”

All those afternoons at the Malfoy manor take on a distorted hue; long shafts of golden sunlight filtering through the Malfoy greenhouse turning gray. Was she forever to be hoisted upon people who didn’t want her? Does Narcissa resent the time she spent rearing a daughter who would never truly be a Malfoy?

“It doesn’t change anything,” Pansy says, and it’s not until the words have left her lips that she believes them. “So she was scared. I can’t think of a person who isn’t.”

Reed sighs.

“You’re like her, Pansy,” he says. “Her love was fierce and all-consuming. It was the privilege of my life being the focus of it, but she tried for you. She tried in the best way she knew how.”

Comparisons to her mother were never flattering, but this one felt like a curse. 

“I’m not,” she says, finally able to consolidate her rage into fully-formed thoughts. “I don’t only choose one person and forget all the rest, and if I had a child, I would make myself love them. Even if I didn’t feel it—especially if I didn’t feel it. Because that’s not their fault. It’s mine. And I would let them get dirt on their stockings and I’d let them borrow my wand before they turned eleven and I’d answer the fucking door when they knocked.”

Her shoulders shake and salt lines the seam of her lips; the only way she knows she’s crying. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, tired and hoarse. 

These are words Pansy has waited years to hear, imagining them so many times it must have been like licking an acid pop over and over again because her tongue—and the thing behind her ribs—is numb. 

“I’m sorry,” he repeats. “This is all we have left.”

Her head feels heavy atop her shoulders and it’s nearly impossible to speak around the lump in her throat, but she does.

“You spend all day locked up in your office with her portrait,” she says. It comes out whiney in a way that hasn’t happened since she was back at Hogwarts.

Reed pauses.

“It’s not her,” he finally says. “Every time we speak, I’m waiting for it to feel like she’s with me, but you can’t paint that. Magic can’t capture it, either.”

An image of her mum watching her own reflection in the mirror comes to mind.

“Sometimes magic can’t hold a candle to the real thing.”

“Exactly,” Reed agrees, like maybe it’s something Violet had repeated often. 

Pansy wipes at her nose, grateful for the dark. She can’t imagine what Pomona will think when she climbs out of the pit, sweaty and shivering. Or what her mother would have thought, for that matter. If one of them were in her position, would they have found their own way out by now? 

Pansy squeezes her eyes shut once more and rifles through her brain, turning over boxes and trying to remember any tidbit about the snare that might prove useful.

Nothing, and then:

“She could prune the devil’s snare and walk away without so much as a scratch by Fourth Year.”

How did her mum do that? There must be some way to paralyze the vines. A poultice? A spell?

“Hang on,” she says, echoes of Slughorn’s oily voice bouncing through her head as she gets to her feet. Her hands are slick with a mixture of tears and sweat so she wipes them down her coat and reaches into her pocket. “I’m going to try something.”

Pansy points her wand above her head.

“Immobulus.”

The subtle sound of their shifting goes quiet, though not completely. Pansy barely breathes as she reaches up a hand in quest of a vine.

When it doesn’t immediately toss her in the air like a rag doll, an exhilarated laugh escapes her.

"Oh my gods,” she says.

"What is it?" Reed asks, perking up.

"I might be too heavy," she mutters, giving the vine a tug. A brittle snapping sound reverberates through her ears and she curses as it falls to her feet.

One vine is too weak, but could she combine them? Twist them together? 

"We've got to plait them," she says, pawing blindly until she finds a new vine. And another. The third one she grasps tries to wriggle from her grasp. "I don't think the spell will hold very long, but I'll keep recasting. Help me with this."

Reed bumps into her side.

“I don’t know how to plait.”

She guides his hands to the vines she’s been holding and hands them over. “Twist and weave, then. Just do your best to tangle them.”

They work in frantic silence for ten minutes, quickly finding that not all of the vines are perfectly docile. Reed is slammed against the wall twice and they land in a heap together once, so by the time their hands can no longer find the vines that hang down, they’re both aching and bruised.

“Okay,” she says, tugging the largest plaited section. It sways and squirms in her hands. "Immobulus."

"Will it hold?" Reed asks.

“I think so," she says, hoisting herself off the ground. "When we get to the top, a small amount of light should make an opening to climb out of.”

Whatever response he might have had, Pansy doesn’t wait for it. 

She puts one hand after another, pulling herself to salvation. With each lunge, the vines wriggle the slightest bit beneath her palms, swinging her gently from side to side like a pendulum. Reed’s grunts and the pulse pounding in her ears are all she can hear.

“Lumos,” she whispers once her head brushes the top. It nearly pains her to watch the snare attempt to detangle and scramble away from it, offering a small opening that she can squeeze through. 

Once she gets to the other side, she holds her wand behind her, allowing Reed to escape as well. Together, they crawl on their bellies until they make it to safety, rolling over and collapsing in heaps of exhaustion.

“Merlin's beard,” Reed says, putting his hands behind his head. Pansy meets his eyes and the absurdity of the situation tugs at the corners of her mouth. “That was brilliant.”

Pansy looks back at the dark mass of vines that are writhing back together, a sense of wonder chasing away the numb panic that’s kept her going all this time.

“I assume you’re not talking about the bit where we fell in,” she says.

“No,” Reed agrees, breaths coming steadier and steadier. “I meant what you did to get us out. How you managed to keep us all in one piece.”

Pansy wasn’t lying to Pomona; she is not a flower—has never been a flower, despite her name—and the full weight of this truth has always sat against her chest, pressing her to shrink and wither. But flowers only bloom for such a very short time, after all, and perhaps she was created more for roots than petals, and—the glitter of a golden snitch—

She freezes in place, sifting through her thoughts for the fluttering of tiny wings.

Pansy’s breathing quickens, her lungs taking in air faster than expelling it and she’s off-balance and light on her toes and oh gods, oh fuck, this is hope. This is hope.

Longbottom,

Edith has evacuated her position effective immediately, but I assure you that it was all above board and, most importantly, on her terms. Moving forward, I am pleased to assure you that I have set aside the time to take over any and all correspondence pertaining to our friendship.

With regards to your offer to visit on Saturday: what if I need you sooner?

W̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶l̶o̶v̶e̶,̶

A̶f̶f̶e̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶a̶t̶e̶l̶y̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶s̶,̶

However the fuck friends are supposed to end these things,

Pansy

Chapter Text

January 2006

The cusp of brilliance looks a lot like madness and poorly maintained hunger, in Pansy’s experience.

She spends sixteen hours grinding up poultices, mixing valerian and octopus powder and belladonna and every other drugging herb she can scrounge from her mum’s garden, dragging out her school cauldron for the first time in nearly a decade. She’s flipped through spellbooks and found a charm that might illuminate heat so she can see the heart of the vines without shining any light. She’s dropped her bruised body into the snare more times than she can count only to drag herself back out after failed attempts to prune or propagate. 

There’s a reason, she’s found, that it’s a rare plant. 

Somewhere between three and four in the morning, she has the bright idea to add flobberworm mucus to her brew to act as a binding agent. It transforms the lumpy blue potion into a smooth violet paste that mocks her in its reminder of her mother. She bottles it up and takes it with her on her final descent into the pit.

More crushing lungs. Ripping hair. All becomes background noise, really, when she applies the paste to the mutinous vines and they go perfectly still. Using her thermal charm, she can see through to the roots of the vines; can find exactly where they need to be snipped for propagation.

By dawn she’s delirious with relief and adrenaline.

Even though her discovery is perhaps the most brilliant thing she’s ever accomplished, disgust and self-loathing have taken turns crooning the most demented things in her ear. Do you remember what you were a part of? A weak cruciatus is still agony for a child. For children. There were more than one—more than you’re willing to remember.

 But her fledgling hope has branded her as surely as Draco’s Dark Mark branded him; skin sizzling and veins writhing beneath in agony from this foreign invader. It turns out, wanting something that isn’t pre-approved by anybody but herself feels a bit more like a catastrophe than growth.

Even as she thinks it, the term ‘wanting’ doesn’t convey the brutality of emotion throbbing behind her sternum. Yearning might do the trick if it sounded less pathetic. Because Pansy’s wanted things before—has arguably navigated the dank underground tunnels of Wanting like a starving rat—but she’s always done it in secret. A shameful pastime. 

And here she is about to let Neville watch her scurry.

“Is this a doormat conversation?” he asks, hands shoved into his trousers as he stands on the doorstep.

Right.

From the moment she opened the door to find him standing on the other side, her words had come out like slugs she’d been cursed to vomit.

“No,” she says, stepping aside to let him in. “Follow me.”

It’s odd showing Neville through the house in daylight. If she’d stared into a crystal ball at age ten and seen Neville stepping over the threshold, she would have thought he was there to speak with her father about courting. He is pure-blood, after all, and that was the only kind of future she could have dreamed for herself at the time. 

She used to look at the massive grandfather clock in their sitting room with its whirring cogs and imagine her life working with the same seamlessness: tick, she marries a pure-blood boy—the massive cogs twist away from each other—and tock, she gives him black-haired babies. Preferably a son on the first try so she doesn’t have to warm her husband’s bed more than necessary. On they spin in slotted, jointed harmony, fulfilling the measure of their miserable creation.   

But nothing about the trajectory of her life has been smooth and now that she’s older, now that she’s wiser, she can admit she’s always been more gravel than grease; that her rough edges were made to bring cogs grinding to a halt. 

“This was my mum’s,” Pansy explains once they make it to the garden, waving at the neat rows of greenery. She sits on her hands on a cold marble bench and watches him wander as he nods.

“I recognize it from the pictures.”

He crouches to push his fingers through the soil next to a cluster of orange jewelweed, leaving Pansy to ruminate on the fact that he already knows more about her parents than she does just from looking at a collection of photos.

“You can be honest with me,” he says, back turned to her. “Am I here to help you bury a body?”

Pansy blinks.

“The body of a certain charming secretary?” he tries again.

“Yes, Longbottom. Of all the unscrupulous people in my life, you’re the one I figured would take no issue with helping me dispose of a corpse.”

His answering smile over his shoulder is dopey and dimpled.

“Can’t blame you. I do have a way of making impromptu eulogies my, er, bitch.”

The urge to laugh holds her throat hostage. For a man who’s always acted like a puffskein who wants his belly scratched, it’s thrilling to get a glimpse of those sharp teeth every once in a while.

“You like it when I curse,” Neville observes, wrinkling his nose. “I never feel like I’m doing it right.”

His innocent admission has Pansy putting the metaphorical carriage before the thestral, because all she can think about are the different ways to stroke and lick that might teach him.

He straightens, brushing off his knees and taking a seat next to her. “Are you going to tell me what you want, or should I be checking the bottom of my tea for answers?”

Pansy’s eyes go wide.

“I didn’t offer you tea,” she says, appalled at her lack of sense. Running on an hour of sleep has turned her into a dreadful hostess. “Would you like some?”

Neville purses his lips to keep from smiling, rightly guessing that she wouldn’t appreciate his amusement. “No, Pansy. I’d like to hear why you wrote to me.”

His gentle insistence is a gift for a coward like her.

Pansy lets out a slow breath, fiddling with her bracelet under the sleeve of her dark plaid wrap coat. He is not cruel, she thinks. He’s had so many reasons to be, and this won’t be one of them.

“Sixth Year. The question Pomona asked us—I have my answer.”

“Sixth Year…”

“If I could do one thing for the rest of my life.”

“Was that when—“

“You ruined my jumper.”

“Amongst other things.”

Heat flares beneath Pansy’s cheeks at the same time that Neville’s eyes widen.

“Saving your life, I mean.”

An exasperated huff, then:

“I’m telling you I know what I want.”

And she does.

“I want,” she says, fingernails clawing to hang on even though she’s already thrown herself off the ledge, “a shop. For rare and dangerous plants.”

The urge to take it back is swift and sharp.

Spoken aloud, the dream sounds crude. Ridiculous. Pansy’s never worked a day in her life, much less learned how to manage money until the recent months. She has yet to make a decision that’s aged well along with her. 

Neville’s throat, she thinks. Focus on that. 

“Rare and dangerous,” he repeats, testing the words out. His tongue moves to his cheek, pondering, and then the corners of his lips lift. “Fits you like a glove, doesn’t it?”

She doesn’t want to be excited. Not until he understands the moral implications behind her decision. Still, a very small part of her thrills at his recognition; that he sees the potential.

“They’re too often overlooked,” she tells him.

For all the defensiveness she’s radiating, Neville doesn’t react to it.

“I carried around a mimbulus mimbletonia like it was a pet for three years,” he points out. “I know.”

And he does. She’s seen Neville cower before a group of snot-nosed Slytherins in Second Year, but he’s never been afraid of a plant, no matter how snarled or thorn-ridden it’s been.

“Where would you get them from?” he asks. 

Telling him the truth might destroy whatever respect he has for her.

“Marcus Flint has some contacts,” she says, doing it anyway. 

“Okay,” he nods, brow furrowed. Nothing about his posture is mocking or alarmed. Only curious. “Alright, so he’s got friends who can provide the plants.”

Pansy swallows.

“Not friends,” she says. “Clients. And he’ll connect me with buyers, too.”

The distinction between the two finally clicks for Neville.

“Oh,” he says, rubbing a hand across his stubbled jaw. He looks away from her. “So, Flint—he’s a fence?”

Gods, Gryffindors really just say what everybody else has the decency to skirt around.

“Yes,” she says, ignoring her instinct to minimize the truth. “It wouldn’t be completely…legal.” 

And then she holds her breath. 

“Okay,” he says.

That’s all.

Okay.

“I haven’t even told you the worst part,” she says.

Neville turns to face her, resting his arm against the bench and giving her his full attention.

“Nobody knows how to propagate devil’s snare,” she says. “The demand for it is far above the supply, but I’ve cracked it. I’ve figured it out and I could be the world’s primary seller. I could shape the entire market.”

They’re not thirteen anymore but Pansy feels it in the boastful nature of her words, in the satisfaction she gets from his widened eyes.

“Pansy,” he pauses, searching her face. “You’re not joking.”

She shakes her head. She’s like a child poking about her governess’s cauldron, sweating over the fear that a pinch of this or that will spoil the whole potion. How honest can she be about her endeavors before Neville decides she’s morally reprehensible for even considering them?

Neville laughs. It’s exhilarated and brief and full of wonder.

“You’ve learned to propagate devil’s snare and you think that’s anything short of amazing? What am I missing?”

She blinks.

“This won’t be another Floriblunder’s. The plants I would sell can kill people.”

“And obviously that comes with a host of issues you’ll have to sort through,” he says, nudging her shoulder with his knuckles, “but let’s not diminish your accomplishment, yeah? Devil’s snare is endangered and you’ve single-handedly ensured their survival as a species. That’s—that’s not even close to being bad news.”

The golden snitch in her chest knocks against her breastbone. If she allows herself to fully invest in the idea, it’s over for her. Too much hope can stop a heart.

“I’d operate in Knockturn,” she says, flinging out every reason this should be a poor decision. The more she talks, the more her shoulders inch upward, like she’s expecting the impact of a bludger. “The shop I found is dilapidated but it’s got a basement I could turn into a grow room with hydroponic pumps and—”

“Is it the one that’s across from Millie’s tattoo shop?”

Every question is like pulling teeth. She clenches her hands into fists.

“Yes.”

“That’s a great location,” he says.

“Don’t baby me, Longbottom.”

At this, Neville sighs, looking up at the cloudless sky. 

“I don’t know what you want from me, Pansy.”

Several avenues of thought attempt to push their way past her lips all at once.

“I want—” she stops. Forces herself to tread carefully even though there’s a mountain troll inside stomping about and making a mess. “I want to stop making decisions like I’ve got a wand pointed at my back. I want to know if it’s…okay to want this.”

Her words are gritted out and she’d rather drink a whole vat of Skele-Gro than repeat herself.

Neville frowns, the unexpected sternness between his brows setting Pansy’s already-speeding pulse off to a sprint.

“Are you asking permission?”

Her entire face grows hot.

“Of course not.” But she is. She is.

Her vehement denial tells him the truth. They stare at each other, Neville’s skepticism barely visible in the downturn of his lips.

“That’s good,” he finally says. “Because you don’t need it.”

Pansy nods as if she’s already come to this conclusion herself. Like his refusal to cooperate doesn’t dredge up that familiar itch to smoke again.

“D’you remember how you used to move extra slow in order not to finish first during Herbology?” he asks, scratching along his jaw. 

She thinks about denying it but the lie would be pointless, so she shuts one eye and looks away. Into the sun. Away from his perceptive gaze.

“Yes.” 

“Was that a modified impediment jinx?”

A bee hovers beside her ankles when she crosses them, matching the buzzing in her head.

“I didn’t think it was noticeable,” she says stiffly.

An extended pause.

“It probably wasn’t,” he says, words measured and careful. “But you’ve been doing that for a long time. Slowing yourself down, I think. And hearing you talk about this plant shop is the first time I’ve seen you moving at a pace that suits you.”

Pansy has the sick premonition that every version of herself was born to unravel; that even wrapped in the blanket of softer circumstance, the thread would get caught on her barbs and she would thrash. In the face of his acceptance, she thrashes one more time.

“You’re not going to tell me I shouldn’t do it,” she says. Surely this man who’s wielded the sword of Gryffindor will recognize that she’s just another snake to be cleaved down the middle.

“If you want a way to sell your plants and feel good about it, you’ll find it,” he says, shrugging. “Stop pretending you’re not clever enough to have it both ways.”

He offers his support like it’s a foregone conclusion instead of something she convinced herself she’d have to trick him into. 

“Now,” he says, clearing his throat, “do I get to see this new propagation method in action or would you have to kill me?” 

She won’t say it, but Pansy wishes he’d let her bask in the warmth of his belief in her a little longer. She’d like to memorize the way his dimple sinks into his cheek and the sun paints his eyelashes with frosted light.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Longbottom,” she says. “You’re only here to bury a body.”

“Don’t look at it like that.”

“Can you actually see my face?”

“No.” A pause. “Doesn’t mean your attitude isn’t palpable.”

He laughs. 

“Sorry. You said it was sickly but Merlin, it sounds like it’s barely moving.”

She rolls her eyes in the darkness.

“That’s why I wrote to you.”

Cold mist from the shrouding spell spins around them. It clings to the hairs at the nape of their necks and draws shivers like a long fingernail up the spine.

“So, we jump.”

“That’s the idea.”

“No light.”

“Correct.”

“And we won’t be able to see once we get down there.”

“The vines are too frail to chance any light.”

“There won’t be any way to—”

“Will you be needing a push, Longbottom?”

Pansy feels around for the length of his arm, secures his elbow, and lunges forward.

Their bodies hit the vines with a symphony of cracks and writhing ropes. Her hand is awkwardly pinned to her clavicle, her rib cage feels like it’s about to shatter, and yet she is still aware of the soft brush of Neville’s buzzed hair against the back of her neck.

Her feet hit the ground in a jolt that reverberates from the balls of her feet to the top of her head. Neville clips her shoulder on the way down, falling on what she can only guess is his arse.

“Blimey,” he says, shifting to his feet. “Sorry.”

They take a minute to orient themselves in the dark, straightening their clothes and tentatively checking for broken bones.

“This is going to be underwhelming,” Pansy warns him. “It’s—it’s not particularly elegant.”

“Ah, well,” he says cheekily. “Looks like I’ll be heading out, then.”

Pansy presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth and takes out her wand.

“Immobulus.” She slides it back into her pocket. “The snare will be sluggish now, so I’m going to take out a paste I made and rub it into the vines so it’s safer to plait.”

Perhaps she should mention that classifying it as ‘safe’ is a bit of an exaggeration. Like describing a doxy as merely ‘petite,’ or herself as anything other than an acquired taste. 

When she reaches up to search for a tendril, it takes a second too long to notice that the spell must’ve been weakened by her exhaustion and hasn’t worked quite like it did the day before. 

A rogue vine snakes all the way down her arm and twists itself around her throat, yanking her off her tiptoes.

Panic.

It floods her system because fuck, none of them have actually snuck up on her like that before and fucking Circe’s tits, her larynx is being crushed. She can’t even make a choking sound as she kicks her legs wildly.

One of them connects with something soft.

“Christ!” Then, “Pansy?”

Neville’s hands feel around frantically until they squeeze her thighs, and then his head is under them and he’s tall enough to let her rest on his shoulders. No longer worried her own neck is going to snap, Pansy heaves a shuddering breath and goes still in a bid to convince the snare of her death. Slowly, ever so slowly, the vine uncurls and slinks away, leaving Pansy a gasping mess.

She coughs. Her fingers test the burning ring around her neck, finding it tender to the touch. She could have died—would have died, were she alone in this pit.

That’s when she realizes she’s not on Neville’s back. 

He’s pressing her front to his face with two large palms curved around her arse. Her entire front. Just—chin to quim. 

And she can’t fathom how to get down without making a fool of herself.

“You alrigh’?” Neville’s voice is muffled by her actual cunt and her growing awareness of his hot breath against her is a problem.

Pansy’s instincts fail her. In an effort to move away, she causes them to lose balance and Neville falls back, spine thudding against the dirt wall.

“Hang on,” he says, his chin nudging Pansy further into insanity. “Go slower.”

She goes still. Allows him to do the shifting until her thighs are off his shoulders and hugged against his chest. 

“That’s it,” he coaxes under his breath. 

Like one of Professor Sinistra’s telescopes magicked to sense supernovae, Pansy’s universe shrinks to the tiny little explosions between her body and Neville’s. With every inch she slides down, new stars are born; a collapse of something like restraint and a violent expansion of its opposite. His hands burn through her clothes, branding galaxies between her ribs.

Pansy’s fingers link together around his neck, stopping her progress right as her thighs come to rest above his hips.

Is he smiling? Is the structural integrity of the lump beating in his chest just as compromised as hers? She’s heard that hearts have chambers but suspects hers have since collapsed into nothing more than crawlspaces. Is that the sound of her panting? Is that the sound of him wanting?

Tentative fingers make a quest from her spine to the crooks of her knees, anchoring her there.

“Pansy?”

His breath banks across her nose and cheeks, cool mint and low as a whisper.

So he’s not smiling, then.

Her eyes are wide open and searching for his face, for anything that might hint that he’s also been caught in this strange magnetic riptide. What stares back at her isn’t a face so much as a suggestion of one. Here, the sloped line of his neck and there, the faintest gleam of his eyes, starlight so far away it stands on its tiptoes to reach her. 

“I’m fine,” she says. Whispers. Because Neville is concerned. Pansy was just throttled by a vine and she should probably spend more time contemplating the fleeting nature of life but the terror of that moment already seems irrelevant.

Instead, she contemplates this: the stubble of his jaw beneath her palm, the press of her thumb against the shallow divot at the center of his chin.

Neville sighs.

Thick eyebrows, the tickle of curved lashes. A subtle dip between his eyes, the slight bump at the top of his nose; the warmth of his face in her hand when she finds the corners of his mouth.

The irrational fear bubbles up that he’ll be able to read her better than a Legilimens if he kisses her lips, like a tactile transference of knowledge. Would he know she’s burned in her four-poster bed at Hogwarts as she slipped her fingers beneath her knickers to thoughts of him? Of his kind eyes and hands that know how to be careful even with what’s determined to break him?

His gentleness will ruin her.

“Hey,” he says, hardly loud enough for her to hear.

She can feel him growing hard beneath her, his swelling cock urging her on.

Pansy only lets her thumb skim across his top lip, holding her breath and tracing the lines of his arm until she finally reaches his hand, sliding hers over his larger one. She guides it over her thighs, past the curve of her hips, up to her ribs. Just below her breast.

Neville exhales roughly and squeezes as if to anchor himself.

This is the point where Pansy should say something. Ask for what she wants; ask him if he wants it too. But if there’s anything she’s learned about affection, it’s that it cannot bear to be looked in the eye. It only approaches if you hold very still, if you don’t give it a name.

So she doesn’t speak.

Doesn’t remind him of who she is and who they’ve always been and leans forward to press her lips to the soft skin beneath his ear.

“Pansy,” he says, and this time it’s a plea whispered to the vine and lattice-covered sky above. 

It’s kindling, the space between them. She finds his shoulders and urges his body closer, pulls him flush, striking a match with her fingers that drag up his neck.

They burn.

His other palm moves from her thigh to her arse and he leans back against the wall, giving her the balance she needs to let go of his neck and explore him with both hands.

“Gods,” he groans when her teeth find the lobe of his ear. His skin is smooth and his short hair is soft against the tip of her nose.

While she kisses a line across his jaw, his Adam’s apple bobs beneath her fingers. 

“Let me—” he says, no longer questioning. Neville moves his hand from her ribs to pull at her hair, elongating her neck and exposing the sensitive skin along the column of her throat. His lips press against it once, twice in reverence, and then she gasps at the hot slide of his tongue as he licks a long stripe to her jaw.

Pansy blooms in pinks and reds; a veritable garden of desire. 

She grinds down on his cock, delirious and frightened by the sharp need buried in her cunt. In the way she’s writhing and he hasn’t even kissed her.

When his lips finally meet hers, it’s too slow. Too measured and careful.

She tightens her legs and rocks against him, determined not to be the only one operating outside her mind. His hand flies to her waist—ostensibly to make her stop, but it only rests there a second before gripping her tighter, the press of his thumb against her hipbone urging her on.

A desperate noise escapes her throat and she swallows the other half of it down.

I’ll stop reminding you it’s me, she promises, repeating it with the conviction of a First-Year trying out a homemade spell. I’ll stop reminding you it’s me.

“Hey,” he says, struggling to pull away long enough to speak. “I’m right here.”

She shakes her head, nose brushing against his. Kisses him quiet.

Pansy finds herself clenching around nothing over and over again, a steady rhythm building below her clit as she grows more and more frustrated with his coherency. Desire and terror are a Fiendfyre inside her, burning up every word that makes it to the tip of her tongue.

She’s a mess. Eternally consumed by the things that scare her most.

Neville doesn’t mind, though. He tastes like mint and his tongue fucks her mouth like he’s trying to show her how he’d savor it if he ever had a chance at her cunt. Careful, precise strokes with a laziness that pulls her nipples tight.

“Here,” he says, pausing their kisses to drop her onto his thigh as he wedges a leg between hers.

Her answering moan of appreciation turns into a gasp when he grabs her arse in his palms and kneads it, pushing and pulling her back along his thigh to a rhythm just slower than what she’d choose for herself. Pansy is frantic with wanting and fuck, fuck, what if this isn’t enough? How can she possibly ask for more when she’s already far past the limit of what she deserves?

“Take it,” Neville pants, breaking through her internal spiral. It’s a plea. “Gods, you’re so beautiful. Take what you need.”

She doesn’t think about it. Pansy reaches below his cable knit jumper to find the warm expanse of his stomach. He inhales sharply against her frigid fingers, letting her explore the muscled topography of his chest. Is she imagining the slight ridges of his tattoo beneath her fingertips?

Then she finds the rapid pounding of his heart, gratified to find that it matches her own.

Her restraint snaps.

“Please,” she says, finding his hand and guiding it to the junction between her thighs. There’s no dressing it in an overcoat of casualty as she scrambles to undo her trousers. The shape of her desperation is so stark, not even polyjuice could disguise it. 

Neville’s thick fingers push past her knickers to press against the hood of her clit. Her hips jerk forward, already chasing the promise of his firm touch. 

“Fuck,” he breathes, low and choked. Part of her wants to tease that he doesn’t seem to have trouble cursing under these circumstances. The other part is acutely aware that she’s soaked his fingers. “You want this too.”

Her rhythm stutters.

There is no bottom to the fathoms of her desire for him—she’s always known this instinctively; has been drowning since the day she met him—but it’s his acknowledgment of it that makes her feel naked in the worst way.

Unable to read the devastation on her face, Neville makes up for it by taking over. He shifts her back to his center and his clothed cock drives against her, keeping her close with two possessive hands on her arse.

Pansy’s mouth falls open.

Even now, with the undeniable evidence of her effect on him, she keeps quiet when she comes. She collapses and expands, collapses and expands until she’s nothing more than a burning core of heat and metal, cooling into something half as bright as before.

Her forehead falls to his chest, fighting the strange impulse to cry. She wasn’t wrong about it not being enough. She is a snake with an unhinged jaw, ready to swallow him whole because fangs are not made to savor.

He rocks against her for a few more beats, easing her down from the high without knowing she’s already crash-landed.

The silence that stretches taut between them is punctuated by the sharp rising and falling of their chests. Pansy is frozen, scared now more than ever of spooking the gentle man that holds her.

Eventually, his fingers thread their way through her hair, bringing their foreheads to rest against each other.

“You are good.”

He says it with such feeling, such conviction that her heart turns into a murderous thing; it throws itself against her chest, acting out its violent disagreement.

“And so are the things that you want.”

She squeezes her eyes shut against the unholy relief that swells within and breathes deep, imagining herself pouring into the ground; roots and soil sending everything that’s good in her back up the stalks. 

Baptism through dirt.

February 2006

Right when she needs him, Marcus proves impossible to get a hold of.

In the time it takes her to find the address of Flint’s office, Neville owls to let her know that he’s already begun his pleaching project in earnest, growing branches in the shape of a dome to serve as shelter for the snare. She’s too mortified after the pit incident to respond with anything witty, so she mails back her thanks and tells herself to leave it at that.

The night air presses down on her with all the weight of the clouds above, swirling around with cigarette smoke, enticing Bengalese food, and neon lights. She passes several storefronts with flats above them, ignoring the group of young men calling after her from their perch on a set of crumbling stairs.

She’s a witch. She’d like to see them fucking try.

In Pansy’s opinion, Marcus ought to be embarrassed by the cliche of running covert operations out of a literal warehouse, but then subtlety has never been his preferred form of cunning. To the untrained eye, it might look like a moldy brick building with foggy windows, but the faint glimmer of darkness that clings to it can’t be anything but magic. He wants this place to inspire uneasiness.

Ignoring the urge to look behind her shoulder, Pansy bangs on the padlocked door.

“Oi!” A voice barks to her left. A tall figure strides from the side of the warehouse, breath puffing and wreathed in shadow. “This is private property.”

She shoves her hands into her pockets, fingertips brushing the smooth grooves of her Hawthorn wand. His shoulders are hulking and as the orange street lamp throws his face into sharp relief, she’d guess he’s one of Marcus’s grunts; there to intimidate with his crooked nose and jutting brow.

“I’m here to speak with Marcus,” she says, deeply bored by the machismo. “So I’ll just follow you then, shall I?”

Those deep-set eyes take a quick perusal down her body with amusement. 

“He’s got other priorities at the moment,” he tells her, folding his arms and leaning against the building. “But maybe I can help you.”

He doesn’t see her hands in her pockets as a threat, so he’s no wizard. Every inch of him betrays the kind of witless arrogance Crabbe and—

Pansy stops that thought right there.

They could be here a while.

To hurry it along, she flicks her wand inside the tight confines of her pocket and utilizes one of her favorite tricks, one that she mastered in Seventh Year on the Carrows: firmitus torcularus. His eyes go wide for a split second and he shifts, betraying discomfort from the sharp pressure she’s put on his bladder.

“Good God, I’m running late enough as it is. Let’s go,” she hisses, moving past him in the direction he first approached her from.

The combination of his pressing need to pee and Pansy’s snarling confidence is enough to convince him of her importance but it’s a moot point, anyway, because the shape of Marcus’s broad figure emerges from the shadows.

“Angus,” he says, lifting his chin for a moment. “Take a break. Get some Macdunno’s or something.”

He trips over the word just subtly enough that his associate has to frown in order to keep from smiling. He doesn’t argue, however, and with a brief nod to Pansy, he’s off in the opposite direction.

“Should I be worried he’s waddling like he’s about to piss himself?” Marcus asks.

She takes her hands out of her pockets, apprehension drawing her shoulders up by invisible tenterhooks.

“Depends,” she says, glancing at him. His domineering stance loosens now that they’re alone but his hands dangle awkwardly at his sides. “Where’s the nearest toilet?”

Marcus sighs.

“Cheer up, Flint. I could have targeted his sphincter.”

They stand a meter apart, staring at each other in relative darkness. Without a word, Marcus turns and beckons her to follow, taking her through a side door with squeaky hinges. 

They step into warmth.

“Oh.” It comes out involuntarily. “You’ve got one of those water dispensers.”

“It’s a water cooler.”

“With tiny little cups.”

“Don’t care about the size so long as I don’t have to pay full price.”

“Hang on. Do you have a tiny cup dealer?”

“Parkinson.”

The space is large and divided by a massive black sheet, industrial lights bathing the collection of cubicles in bright white light on one side. A few people sit at their desks, phones pressed to their ears and talking in low, fervent tones.

“What’s on the other side?” Pansy asks, walking to the water cooler. She pulls a cup from the top and presses down the latch, watching with an unholy amount of amusement as it fills with water.

“More of those tiny cups,” he says, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Come on. My office.”

She follows him the short walk to the door in the corner.

“Why does it smell so good in here?” she asks, breathing in spices she can’t quite place. She’d expected the tang of metal, cigarettes, or petrol. 

“Incense,” Marcus says. His large hand twists the knob and he steps inside before remembering his manners and retroactively holding the door for her. “Imported from Bangalore.”

“Mm.”

It’s smaller than she expects. His desk takes up most of the space and it’s free of clutter, save for the bottle of whisky and the two cross-hatched glasses at its center. 

“What can I do for you?”

He sits in the black leather chair, drawing a line in the sand. This is a business interaction. 

“Just wondering how long you’re going to pretend we’re not friends anymore,” she says, taking a seat and folding her hands on her lap. 

Marcus sinks into his chair, kicking up his legs and crossing his ankles at the edge of the desk.

“We were prospective business partners,” he says lazily. “Not the same thing.”

Pansy considers this for five whole seconds, then smacks his feet off the ledge.

“Don’t be a twat.”

Marcus sits back up and jabs a finger in her direction.

“I’ve fancied you for years. Ever since you made me look like a tosser in front of Malfoy. D’you really think I want to see your face right now?”

Righteous anger is a boggart that bursts into confetti.

“I gave you space for three months,” she says, folding her arms in an effort to stay cross. “Which was incredibly generous of me considering all that I’ve got going on.”

His laugh is incredulous but he doesn’t say anything, just leans back and shakes his head. 

“You ought to learn to like what won’t burn you,” she says. He rolls his eyes. “But maybe I can still get you your money.”

Pansy would be more offended by his skepticism if she didn’t stink of desperation. 

“Right,” he drawls.

“I figured out how to propagate devil’s snare.”

Marcus’s eyes flick to hers.

“I’m told it’s a lucrative market,” she continues.

His fingers don’t stop tapping against his leg until he grabs the glasses and pours two fingers of whisky each, sliding one across the desk.

“Not the easiest clientele to track down, though,” he says.

Pansy takes the glass, tracing the grooves on its surface. 

“No,” she says. “I imagine one might need the right connections to reach them.”

They sip in silence.

“You’re playing with Fiendfyre here,” he says.

“I thought we already established that’s sort of my specialty.”

“A market like that would be too easy to flood.”

“So we don’t. Only one or two sales per year.”

“You’ll run this out of Hertfordshire?”

“Obviously not. I’ll open a shop in Knockturn for rare plants and conduct the less savory business in the basement.”

“And where do you plan on getting these rare plants from?”

She fists her hand under her chin, propping her elbow against her knee.

“Do I need to spell it out or are you clever enough to follow the hinkypunks all the way to the bog?”

His lips curl into a smile but it holds no warmth.

“I don’t reckon you know the sort you’re asking to get mixed up with.”

Pansy takes a large swallow, narrowing her focus to the way it burns down her throat. Deep breaths in. Out. In. Out.

“There will be stipulations, of course,” she says. “I’m only selling to collectors.”

Marcus snorts.

“Not many of them to go around,” he says.

“If what you said is true about the value of a devil’s snare starter, I won’t need to part with more than a few.”

His smile widens, crooked teeth lending a bit of menace to his amusement.

“Hang on,” he says, palming the top of his glass and pointing a finger her way. “I’m gonna tell you what I think’s happening here and you’re gonna tell me if I’m wrong, yeah?”

She keeps her expression passive.

“Do enlighten me.”

“Alright,” he says, setting down his glass to lean forward. “I think you’ve been running around with insufferable war heroes long enough to convince yourself you’re one of them, that you’re safe by proximity or whatever the fuck.” 

His observation itches at her secret fears like a breakout of dragon pox. 

“We don’t have the luxury of clutching our pearls. They don’t throw fuckin’ banquets in our honor when we break the rules,” he says.

“I’m not asking for a banquet,” she bites out. 

“Yeah, but you want the profit from selling a deadly plant. You don’t get to pretend like there’s some kind of sorting hat that’ll tell you which customers shit rainbows and which ones murder muggle-borns.”

And just like that, Pansy hits her threshold for being talked down to.

“You misunderstand,” she says, smiling viciously. “I’m not asking you to find a colony of wrackspurts. I’m telling you to find collectors. Whether you use traditional means of investigation or invasive Legilimency isn’t my concern.”

Marcus considers this, wiping at the edges of his mouth. His condescension mellows into something closer to pride.

“You had me going for a minute there, Parkinson. Almost thought you’d changed.”

Tendrils of guilt creep their way to her lungs but it doesn’t take her breath away. She’s getting used to the squeeze of vines.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

June 2006

Knockturn Alley is a dusty window with its shutters blown wide open. Sunlight streams through, illuminating silvery cobwebs and corners so shadowed the darkness seems to have a pulse. 

Still seedy, from its wares to its patrons, it’s swept by the broom of Ministry Aurors once a week to clear out the lingering filth. Rumor spreads that it’s safer these days, and people who had restricted their shopping solely to Diagon begin to poke their heads into shop windows as if expecting them all to be abandoned. Commerce bustles like it did before the First Wizarding War—or so Pansy is told.

Her shop sits across from Scarr’s Indelible Tattoos, where Millie works. Pansy bought it with the money from selling her devil’s snare starters and still had plenty of funds left over for renovation. Once she scrubbed down the floors, she found original stonework from the seventeenth century and a trapdoor that leads to a chilly, damp basement—perfect conditions for several of the plants she plans on selling once she’s cleaned it out. The ceiling on the main floor is vaulted with windows that let in natural light and the desk where she’ll put the register has a mean-looking tabby cat that lives in the bottom drawer and swipes at her every time she gets too near.

It’s sort of perfect.

Despite his milquetoast promises to send his associates to help with the renovation, Marcus himself has shown up every day to move in plants and help her organize. He’s out to lunch when Narcissa pops by.

“Draco thought you might find this useful,” she says, handing over a thick tome. “It’s a rare plants encyclopedia and it was only collecting dust in the Manor.”

Pansy examines it, admiring the cracked leather of the cover. 

“Thank you,” she says, emotion clogging her throat. As far as she knows, Narcissa hasn’t visited Knockturn since before the War was over. Aurors and journalists alike follow her around, waiting for the slightest misstep with bated breath. “It’s so kind of you to come.”

Too aware of the thin film of dust on the windowsills, self-consciousness makes it difficult for Pansy to maintain eye contact.

“Of course,” Narcissa says, placing a hand on the beaded silver bag hanging from her elbow. “I found a few other items that might be of interest lying around the guest room where your mother used to stay from time to time.”

“Oh?” is all Pansy can think to say.

Curiously, the wound that never seemed to scab over when it came to her mum has since cauterized. It can take a poke and a prod, and she wonders if it’s because of the catharsis that comes with saying all of the horrible things she’d always thought. In the place of easily provoked rage are the still waters of apathy.

“Violet used to help in our greenhouse from time to time,” Narcissa says, pulling out three emerald green notebooks. Their pages are yellowed and the edges worn, like they’ve been shoved into bags and drawers and maybe even left lying on the gritty surface of a greenhouse table. “I believe this is her record from those visits.”

The barest glimmer of interest makes its way to the surface of Pansy’s mind. She’s seen her mum’s handiwork in the garden at home; seen how carefully labeled each plant is and how thoughtfully they were organized according to their soil preference. 

“Have you begun cleaning out the Manor?” Pansy asks. It’s been a topic of discussion ever since Lucius passed but Narcissa’s been spending so much time with her sister that it’s been placed on the backburner indefinitely.

“Yes,” she says, giving a pursed-lip smile. “Andromeda’s been gracious enough to offer her help, so it’s been nice not to do it alone.”

“I can imagine,” Pansy says quietly. Staring is rude so she turns her gaze to the notebooks in front of her. “My mum stayed over often enough to have her own drawer?”

“Her own closet,” Narcissa corrects. “Violet didn’t enjoy returning home for the holidays.”

It brings Pansy’s old room in the Manor to mind; right next to Draco’s in the east wing. How odd that a house could be so perfectly suited as a haven for the wicked.

“How is Reed adjusting?” Narcissa asks, wandering over to a ghost orchid. When the back of her hand brushes against its pale petals, the scent of apples surrounds them.

Pansy considers the best way to answer. Where she used to only guess, she now has a fairly solid understanding of her father’s neuroses. For instance, she knows it’s essential for him to take walks after breakfast, that he has to eat some kind of protein with each meal or his equilibrium is thrown off and he starts bumping into things. She knows his deep loathing for handwritten correspondence because of the terror owls inspire in him and he hates the smell of their treats. 

“You know my father,” she answers wryly. “He’s a man of many peculiarities.”

Whether from good breeding or necessity, Narcissa’s body never betrays her true feelings. She doesn’t play with her hair or tap her fingers against her bag or awkwardly adjust her robes. The only thing that acts as a signal of her discomfort is the tightening of the skin around her eyes.

“Pansy,” she begins, eyes flashing with blink-and-you-miss-it emotion. “I thought it prudent that I might apologize for the harsh manner in which I spoke about your father the last time you visited the greenhouse.”

She could have confessed her deep, abiding love for the Hogwarts administrators and Pansy might have found it less surprising.

“Lucius has been gone longer than he’s been dead and it’s difficult to watch Draco wrestle with his feelings about his father,” she says, each word enunciated carefully. “He doesn’t remember the good as often as I’d hope.”

Defensiveness for Draco and the impulse to count all the reasons his feelings are valid rears its head but Pansy tamps it down. It isn’t often that Narcissa softens enough to speak so boldly.

“I sometimes wonder,” Narcissa says, intense blue eyes going out of focus, “whether we might miss out on the good that people have to offer when we only see them according to the roles in which they’re cast. In Lucius’s case, he played an ideal father only on occasion, but as a husband? He was exquisite—clever, forgiving, devoted.”

Pansy thinks of Draco, of the roles he’s played. She thinks of the brand on his arm and his head cradled in her lap, tears soaking through to the skin beneath her pyjamas. She can close her eyes and she’s back in his childhood playhouse at the edge of the Manor’s grounds, fashioning a crown of twigs for his beautiful blonde hair.

Perhaps she can’t see the duality in Lucius, but she can see it in his son.

“It’s no excuse for his failings,” Narcissa says, lifting her fingers to her lips, “but we’ve got to do something with the love he’s left behind.”

According to Reed, Pansy was once a babe in a basket.  Maybe her mother knelt at her side and tickled her nose with petals, introducing color in the form of flowers. Her fat hand might have fisted tufts of grass and maybe her mum laughed when she tried to bring it to her mouth.

She doesn’t know how much of these memories she’s making up and how much happened in reality but they cover her shivering body like a blanket that Reed shares with her, inch by inch. The careful dance they do around the subject of her mum is clumsy more often than it’s beautiful, but it gives her something essential, something real to hold onto: context. She’s taken the baby photos Neville so thoughtfully organized by age and looked at them one by one, warming her hands in the glow of memories that would hurt to lose and filling in gaps left when the anger stopped taking up so much space in her body.

That’s what this is, then, she thinks. Something like love.

July 2006

Heart in her throat, Pansy’s ankle-strap heels click and echo against the stone hallways of a deserted Hogwarts. 

Her ribs are too small for her lungs and the walls make her feel like one of the absurdly large porcelain dolls she used to shove into her fairy playhouse. Has the ceiling always been this low? Is this the same clumsiness a puppet feels when their strings are cut?

Six months of successfully dodging anything more than polite conversation with Neville came to a screeching halt when he owled that his pleaching experiments have borne fruit at last: he’s finished growing the structure that will cover her snare. She agreed to meet him in his quarters to discuss the particulars.

“Pansy,” he says, breathless. Distracted. He has a smudge of flour across his chin as he stoops to kiss her cheek. “Come in.”

He immediately whirls around and disappears into the kitchen, so Pansy shuts the door behind her and hovers at the threshold, unsure of what to do. She lets herself get acquainted with the space in front of her, biting her inner cheek to keep from smiling at how well it all suits him.

It’s got the kind of clutter she’s always envied. 

Burgundy and maroon Persian rugs overlap each other to cover the stone floor, an array of hand-knit blankets are draped across the plush brown sofa, and greenery lines every windowsill and side-table. The mantel of his fireplace is crowded with frames, each photo a breathing snapshot of joy.

In one of them, his gran stands behind him with her hand on his shoulder. He must be ten or so, with chubby cheeks and teeth that look a bit too big for his mouth. 

Another shows him sandwiched in-between the Weaselette and Lovegood. They’re all laughing as they struggle to keep their hats on while snow swirls around them. Next to that one, she watches Hannah come up behind him and throw her arms around his shoulders. His delighted surprise replays on a loop and witnessing their easy affection sends a tear of jealousy as tangible as the swipe of a dragon’s claw through her gut.

“Make yourself at home,” Neville calls from the kitchen. “I’ve just got to take this cauldron off the heat and dinner will be ready.”

Dinner?

She had only prepared for surface-level pleasantries and a quick hand-off, not the enticing smell of sautéed onions and prolonged eye contact. There was comfort in the idea that he wouldn’t have too long to analyze her; to read the shame in her posture.

She’s pretty sure she accosted him in the pit.

Her self-control had met its end in a space where Neville hardly had the option to reject her advances. She basically dry humped him and the worst part is—what keeps her awake at night—he didn’t even get off. 

He hadn’t exactly sought her out, either. In all the weekends they met up with their mutual friends, Neville made it easy to maintain space between them, and Pansy suspected it wasn’t just for her sake.

“Those are my parents,” he says from behind her. She jumps. In the photo he’s pointing at, two young people hold each other’s faces, foreheads touching as they laugh. The woman’s dimples are identical to her son’s. “They still do that, sometimes. Not the laughing, so much, but the holding each other. It’s my favorite.”

New grief takes her by the hand; squeezes until her bones nearly break.

“I can see why,” she says.

Neville gestures at the couch. 

“Sit. We’ll eat at the coffee table.”

When he vanishes from sight this time, Pansy sets her hand on her diaphragm and inhales. It’s warm. Fire pops and nestles beneath all those photographs. She’s always thought a home needed to be crowded with children in order to be a welcoming place, but Neville’s managed it all on his own. 

When she sits down, thick ceramic bowls float haphazardly over to the coffee table, sending squash-colored soup sloshing over the sides.

“Bollocks,” Neville curses. He emerges from the kitchen with two plates, a tray of crostini in his other hand, and his wand between his teeth. Placing the crostini in the center of the table, he sets the rug to rights with a stain-removing spell. “Saw that going better in my head.”

“I’m not accustomed to showing up empty-handed to dinner. I wish I’d known so I could have at least brought wine,” Pansy says.

Neville scratches the side of his head sheepishly.

“Actually, Draco’s got that covered,” he says, summoning a blood-red bottle of elf-made wine. It streaks to Neville’s waiting hand so quickly Pansy almost ducks. “He, er, sent this over when I told Hermione you’d be popping by.”

Her face turns hot for no good reason. Is this what it’s like to have a meddling parent? She studies her bowl like it’s got tea leaves at the bottom.

Neville pours the wine into gold-rimmed crystal goblets that he physically walked into the kitchen to fetch. They’re absurdly posh considering the patchwork feel of everything else he owns, so they must be heirlooms. 

Whether it’s Draco’s unparalleled taste in wine or the urge to sip away the silence, both of them drink more than they’ve eaten by the time Neville gathers the dishes and levitates them to the kitchen. It’s a quiet meal with a series of inoffensive topics that slowly unwind the tension in Pansy’s shoulders: how is teaching? Have you visited the new potion shop in Hogsmeade? Where did you learn to make pumpkin soup? 

There’s a pleasant weight to her limbs and the frantic beat of her heart slows enough for her to notice. She does a lot of noticing, actually. Like the way Neville holds his knees together as if he’s hyper-aware of how much space he takes up on the couch; the singular eyelash in his right eye that points downward. What would he do if she used the pad of her thumb to brush it in the right direction?

When he comes to sit back down, Neville extends his hand, revealing a small dome made of what looks like twigs grown together. They criss-cross in precise patterns like a woven upside-down basket. 

“It’s taken a few months, but I worked with Filius—Professor Flitwick—to create a shrinking charm that would make it lighter and easier to transport. Set it over the snare before you cast the expansion charm—it’s too heavy to drag or levitate.”

Pansy inspects the delicate structure, marveling at the level of skill with which it was clearly grown. 

“You mean I won’t have to awkwardly shove it into a train compartment?” she asks. 

Neville grins, eyes flicking from his palm to her and back again. “No, it won’t be quite as adventurous as transporting the snare.”

It’s quiet for a beat and despite the alcohol warming their blood, the silence of the past six months animates between them, coming to life in the form of eyes that don’t meet and fingers flattening against thighs.

Pansy reaches for her goblet. She tries not to think about the desperate loneliness that made her hands clumsy as they plaited the vines together in the pit all those months ago. It was quiet then, too.

“I didn’t anticipate it taking quite so long,” he says, setting the dome between them. The edge of his trousers flirts with the fine hairs on her thigh. “To be honest, I wasn’t sure if you’d forgotten you asked me to work on it.”

She swallows another mouthful of wine, wiping the corners of her lips with her thumb and forefinger.

“I assure you, the wilting vines have served as a daily reminder.”

Neville sets his goblet down and leans back, letting his knees venture apart, nudging hers.

“You were able to propagate it anyway,” he says. “That’s brilliant.”

It was, actually. Devil’s snare is rare enough that hardly anybody knows what a healthy one looks like, so none of her clients had given Marcus any trouble. 

“You didn’t attend the grand opening of my shop,” she says.

Neville looks at her sideways; pushes the sleeves of his forest green jumper up his forearms.

“I didn’t think I was invited, to be fair.”

She scrunches her nose.

“Everyone was. Bodies are what make a grand opening grand, Longbottom.”

His exhale is an exasperated laugh.

“You tripped over Millie in an effort to get away from me the first time we saw each other after…after that day in the pit.”

Pansy readjusts on the cushion, folding her legs beneath her and turning to face him more directly. 

“Two-way street, I think,” she says. It’s a bluff and not entirely fair, but then this was the girl who’d spent her Hogwarts career as reigning Exploding Snap champion because of a simple duplication spell. Fairness was never her virtue.

Neville considers her relaxed posture in the warm glow of the stained glass lamp shaped like a peony behind her head. 

“Guess I needed time, too,” he admits.

Dread blisters across her chest and she knows she’ll bleed for this, but she has to ask.

“And now you don’t?”

His gaze follows her fingers as they trail back and forth over her calves before returning to her eyes. 

“No,” he says. “Not anymore.”

He won’t offer more unless she asks, but there’s a measure of comfort that comes from only suspecting your inadequacy rather than having it confirmed point-blank, so Pansy pivots.

“Does Pomona know you made this to help me?” she asks, pointing to the tiny dome. 

He stares at her like he knows exactly what she’s doing and has no intention of letting her off that easily. 

“If you won’t visit, you ought to respond to her letters,” he says. 

Pansy glares at him.

“You get cross with me every time Pomona is mentioned,” he says, tilting his head with a challenging grin. “Are you sure you want the answer?”

“I do not get cross,” she says.

“Okay.”

“Oh, fuck off,” she says, folding her arms. “I’ll write to her when I get home.”

Neville laughs. 

“Is it jealousy?” he prods. “I’d find it odd if it is, because you’re the one who chose not to stay in touch.”

Shame burns at the back of her throat like bile. He doesn’t know how many letters she drafted in her Montmartre flat; the number of quills snapped and parchment burned because, ultimately, she couldn’t convince herself that Pomona would want to write back.

“Are you sure you’ve not projected your own feelings onto Pomona?” she asks, unable to resist needling him. 

He taps the strong line of his chin with his thumb, eyes moving over her features like he’s trying to spot a niffler in a Gringotts vault.

“Why weren’t we better friends?” he asks. She almost chokes on her drink, the inclination to laugh negated by her inability to breathe properly.

“Is that a trick question?”

He nudges her with his knee again.

“We’ve got plenty in common,” he says. “Just two kids trying to make it through without our parents until Pomona grabbed us by the scruffs of our necks and tucked us under her wing.”

The imagery has her pressing her lips together to keep from smiling.

“There was another factor or two to the equation, if you’ll recall,” she says.

Neville grins.

“Irrelevant.”

His hand shifts to squeeze her knee. The heat from his palm tingles through her skin as it lingers before returning to his lap, the domesticity of the touch calming Pansy down like a crup being scratched behind its ears. 

“You’re not the same boy you used to be,” she says quietly. She’s just drunk enough that if she lets her eyes go unfocused, she can see the unruly tufts of blond around his ears; the gangliness of his limbs. Grace had a flighty romance with his hands, only ever enamored when he was holding something liable to fall apart without the press of his palms keeping it together. “You’re tougher now. Even a bit mean when you want to be.”

Neville frowns, troubled.

“S’funny you mention that,” he says, finger tracing the golden rim of his glass. “Pomona and I accidentally got sloshed at the last staff Yuletide party and borrowed the Sorting Hat from McGonagall’s office–”

“Accidentally sloshed? Borrowed? ”

He waves his hand in dismissal.

“We take care of her plants, so it wasn’t exactly a break-in. And we felt bad because Hagrid made his own cider and nobody was drinking it. Anyway, we decided to see if we could re-sort ourselves.”

The idea of being able to shrug off the weight of a judgment passed on her as a child fills Pansy with a strange sort of longing, but the heat of it cools in the frigid biome of her chest before it has a chance to take root. In her case, the judgment was just. She’s got the many skins she’s shed to prove it.

“Pomona’s a true Hufflepuff but when I was eleven, the hat told me I could choose between Hufflepuff and Gryffindor. I wanted to make Mum and Dad proud even though they couldn’t remember what the Houses were or who I was, so I chose Gryffindor.” He pauses, blowing out a slow breath. “But this time was different. The Hat hadn’t even touched my head before it sorted me into Gryffindor, no question about it.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” she says.

Neville shrugs, squinting up at the ceiling like it’s got the answers carved there in fine print.

“I sometimes worry that the War killed something good in me,” he says. “Something compassionate.”

Pansy shakes her head and the blunt line of her hair brushes against her shoulders.

“It couldn’t,” she says, her alcohol-addled brain sluggish in coming up with the right words. “That’s like…cutting the roses off a rosebush and expecting it to start growing lilies.”

Her clumsy metaphor makes him smile.

“I can’t be that with anybody else, you know,” he says.

Pansy’s laugh bursts from her throat.

“What, you mean I’m the only one you can tell off without feeling poorly?”

He covers his face with his hands, letting out a small groan.

“No, I do feel poorly, but that’s not what I was getting at.”

Pansy stays quiet, doxy heart making a mess behind her sternum. 

“You’re the first one to notice that I’m angry,” he says, throat bobbing on a swallow as he stares at her. “The first one not to pretend it’s not there.” 

She looks away. Kind words always have the ring of dishonesty to Pansy’s cynical ears. 

Surely he found a safe place to land in Hannah, the sweetest witch she’s ever met. Draco has talked to her about Hermione’s anger, about the bitterness of being a child with the weight of the Wizarding World’s expectations resting on her shoulders. Pansy, more snare than safe, can’t be anyone’s haven.

“Pansy,” Neville says.

She refuses to look but he plows on, anyway, blowing right past her wards.

“Why can’t I have you?”

The plea in his voice is so unguarded, so full of yearning that it actually hurts. Tears sting her eyes and warp his face as he moves closer.

“You deserve somebody soft,” she says, proud of the way her voice doesn’t waver. “I’m—I’m trying to get better, but I’ll never—I can’t stop being me. I won’t.”

Neville watches her with such affection that she finds it hard to trust. His cool breath bathes her neck as he leans in, lifting her chin with his knuckle.

“Is this not soft?” he asks, pressing his lips to the underside of her jaw. She exhales shakily. His fingertips turn her like she’s made of glass that won’t cut him and he tucks her hair behind her ear.

“Is this not soft?” His teeth capture her earlobe before he gently laves it with his tongue, lips parting around it in a kiss.

Pansy’s fingernails bite into her palms as everything inside her blooms with heat and tension.

“And this,” Neville says, lowering his head to the juncture between her neck and shoulder as his lips whisper against her skin. “Is this not soft?”

She didn’t realize her eyes had drifted closed until he pulls her onto his lap by her wrist. The tightness of her skirt around her thighs makes it difficult to straddle him properly and she’s stiff with reluctance.

“I don’t want gentle, Longbottom.”

“We’ll see about that,” he says, hands flexing against her hips. 

Every panicked thought at the forefront of Pansy’s mind freezes like they’ve been struck by an immobulus. It all hangs in a tantric balance between them, her mind going fuzzy as her focus narrows to the need pulsing in her cunt. 

She leans forward, their mint-kissed breaths mingling.

“I’ll hurt you,” she says, searching his eyes even though they’re blurry this close. She brushes her finger along his eyelashes, righting the one that caught her attention earlier.

Neville rakes his hands up her skirt, shifting it to give her legs the room to spread. She obliges, bringing their bodies flush with a gasp.

“Then I’ll bleed,” he says roughly. 

Pansy finds she doesn’t have a rebuttal to that.

So she kisses him.

This time she can see the curve of his lashes against his cheek in the abstract; the kind of vision that duplicates and warps when you’re so close to somebody else that their tiniest details become your whole universe. Her eyes stay open as their tongues twine together, lips pliant and hips rocking.

As much as she wants to sink into him, Pansy keeps her spine straight, her nails digging little crescent moons into the back of his neck every time he tries to slow down their pace.

If he wants to bleed, she’ll be the knife.

“Take this off,” she says, tugging at the bottom of his shirt. He smiles against her lips.

“I’m not going to make love to you on my couch, Pansy.”

She bites his bottom lip.

“Then fuck me on the floor,” she growls, taking the initiative to pull off her own shirt. There’s a seed of recklessness that’s growing in her chest at such an alarming rate it can’t be anything but a weed, can’t be anything but brambles, because it’s cutting her up from the inside and making it hard to breathe. 

Neville’s hand snakes its way up to the base of her skull and he very gently pulls her hair there, creating enough space to kiss the skin between her shoulder and collarbone. His fist clenches in her hair when she whimpers and it sends a shock of heat flooding to her center.

“I think you forget,” he says, lips moving in a whisper above her breast. It fucking tickles. “I’m used to things biting back.”

Pansy clenches her jaw, reaching behind her to unhook her black lace bralette. It falls away and she’s gratified by his intake of breath. His fingers are gentle as they trace around her nipple, watching in awe as it stiffens beneath his touch.

“I thought about this,” he groans, licking a stripe from her nipple to her sternum. Her pulse stutters and he rests his forehead against her breastbone. “The way your skin would taste. Even before I was supposed to.”

Desperation has her grinding against him like she’s a teenager making the most of a broom cupboard in between classes. He kneads her arse and kisses her for a few more minutes before her patience snaps.

“Longbottom,” she pants angrily, “I don’t need the foreplay, my knickers are soaked. Just fuck me.”

His hands come around her waist and he lifts the both of them, Pansy clinging to his front. She thinks he’s going to pull down her knickers when he shifts her in his arms, cradling her sideways against his chest in a tender position that makes her feel like his bride.

“What are you doing?” she asks, alarmed. They start to move. “The couch. Fuck me on the couch.”

The couch is neutral.

The couch is less likely to torture her in the months and years to come, when all she has left of this moment are memories.

“I’m happy to do what you want most of the time, Pansy,” he says, kicking the bedroom door open with his foot. “Gods, I swear it. But we’re not going to pretend like this time was an accident, too.”

She’s dropped onto the patchwork quilt of his bed, sending the cluttered shelf of potted plants shivering all the way through to their vines. Neville throws off his shirt and follows her down, the smooth expanse of his broad shoulders cast blue in the evening light filtering through the gauzy curtains of the window. 

He lifts her knickers from beneath her hips and pulls them all the way down her legs, dropping them to the ground. When his palms spread her knees apart and his head lowers with intent, Pansy scowls.

“If you’re not going to fuck me how I want, then at least let me get on top,” she says.

“Hush,” he says, grinning as he pulls his wand out of his pocket. While one hand gathers Pansy’s wrists and pins them above her head, the other whispers an incantation she’s unfamiliar with. There’s rustling behind her and she twists her head to look at its source, seeing the vines hanging down from the shelf above his bed slowly twist themselves around her wrists. Cool leaves brush past her cheek and wind around her throat, giving just enough pressure that she has to focus on taking deep breaths.

“Try not to move,” Neville says, pocketing his wand and returning to his position of kneeling between her legs at the foot of the bed. “They’ve been growing for four years now and if you snap them I’ll be very cross.”

Her chest heaves as he drops kisses on her inner thigh, soft and slow with the kind of patience she’s seen him use to coax flowers to bloom.

Then he lays an open-mouthed kiss directly at her center, ripping a gasp from her lungs. He captures her lower lips between his own, sucking with a groan that vibrates straight through to her core.

“Merlin, you were worth the wait,” he says, tongue delving deeper.

She nearly tugs her wrists against the vines when she remembers his warning and opts to bite her lip instead, channeling all the frustration he’s causing into her teeth as her jaw clenches. She flexes her fingers and closes her eyes, refusing to watch him eat her cunt like they didn’t already have dinner.

Between the onslaught of his mouth, the tension winding tighter and tighter between her thighs, and the conflicting emotions bumping into each other behind her breastbone, she wouldn’t be able to find the right words if they were physical objects she could accio. 

She finds the wrong ones instead.

“You said you needed time,” she pants, clinging to coherency as the vine around her neck curls just a bit tighter. The edge of no return approaches as he reaches up to tweak her nipple and his nose bumps against her clit. “After you halfway fucked me under the devil’s snare, you—oh—you didn’t reach out. Didn’t write to me.”

His head bobs between her thighs as he licks and sucks her all the way to orgasm, not letting up for a second until her knees are shaking around his ears. 

Lips wet and cheeks flushed, Neville sits up and traces her folds with the blunt length of his fingers.

“We have history, Pansy. Difficult history that I couldn’t—” he watches his fingers disappear inside her tight channel and groans. “—I didn’t want to ignore.”

He’s talking about her mistakes. About her, the person she’s always been to survive.

“Then what are we doing?” despair has her asking, completely out of breath. Her heart twists and flails as his fingers coax her up the steady incline of arousal, like she’s been dropped from a broom all the way above London. She won’t survive the impact.

“Choosing,” he says, kissing her inner thigh as he finds the spot deep inside her that unravels every nerve. Like it’s simple. “Letting go.”

The kindness in his expression is the only thing that convinces her he’s not trying to be cruel. 

Letting go. As if he’s given up trying to cling to his morals so he can wade into the filthier waters of pleasure that she promises.

She’s sober enough to know that she’s twisting his words and whittling them down until they’re sharp enough to penetrate the softness of her belly; knows her own self-consciousness serves as a whetstone. 

When she comes, it turns her inside out and guts her all the same. 

“Longbottom,” she says, furiously blinking back tears. Her chest is brewing with a mix of emotions potent enough to shatter a cauldron. “Please.”

He gives her cunt one last kiss, laving his tongue there like he’s still got an appetite. When he stands, the veins in his forearms flex as he undoes his belt. He watches her from behind lust-heavy lids, moving slow enough to get under her skin.

Normally she’d entice him to hurry up by threatening to take care of it herself but Neville has gently tilted the balance of power between them so completely that she’s at his mercy. 

He steps out of his boxers and Pansy ogles him unashamedly.

“You’ve got the prettiest cunt,” he says almost shyly as he climbs over her, eclipsing everything else with the firm press of his body. She wraps her thighs around his, pulling him close.

Feeling too much isn’t typically a problem Pansy has during sex.

She never remembers the stretch of her hips; the quiet laughs when two imperfect bodies line up imperfectly. She doesn’t think about symmetry or her lover’s devotion to it, doesn’t think about the kisses placed against the soft skin inside the elbow. 

All her previous rendezvous obediently laid down in the coffin of her disinterest once the finish line was crossed, but she’s run out of luck in Neville’s bed. Every press of his fingers is a resurrection of something she’d long thought dead; something she’s been desperate to keep buried.

“We’re idiots,” Neville says, lips moving against her ear as he pushes into her with a groan. “Could’ve been inside you ages ago.”

He stays there, buried to the hilt in an effort to help her adjust to his girth. It’s exactly the kind of tenderness she can’t afford and because she can’t rake her nails across his back, she settles for digging her heels into his arse, urging him to move.

“Are you going to make me wait another decade or are you going to fuck me?” she growls.

His laugh is a puff of air that stirs her fringe. 

“Is that what you need?” he asks, dragging his cock out before slowly sinking back in. “A rough fuck?”

The moan he pulls out of her at his next harsh thrust would be embarrassing if she were coherent enough to care. Her hardened nipples brush against his chest as he rocks into her, his arm reaching for something she can’t see. 

A moment later, the vines unravel from her throat and wrists, setting her free.

“Leave your mark, love,” he grunts, breathing already ragged from the punishing pace Pansy’s heels have set. “Do your worst.”

Pansy punishes him with the scrape of her nails across the back of his neck and Neville takes it all. He drives into her just the way her body demands, warm brown eyes witnessing her unravel with awe so transparent she wishes absurdly that she had a mantel on which to place it in a photograph. 

Pushing against his chest, Pansy flips over onto her knees and sighs in relief when Neville sinks back into her from behind. There’s so much she can’t recover from already—the least she can do for herself is miss the face he makes when he comes inside her.

“This isn’t a one-time thing,” he says, commanding tone both foreign and fitting in a way that has her clenching around his cock. The slap of their skin pushes Pansy to the brink. “This is everything.”

Neville reaches around her, pressing his palm against her lower abdomen. Somehow the added pressure allows him to hit the elusive spot inside her that only fingers have ever been able to find and she unfurls beneath him, a flare of burning, sparking satisfaction. 

She’s never come from penetration alone.

Exhausted and limp, Pansy collapses on the bed. Neville has no problem taking over, holding her hips as he thrusts up into her. 

“So—fucking—beautiful, Pans.”

Fingers gripping her jaw, he turns her face to meet her lips in a kiss that’s equal parts soft and deliberate and like the self-destructive fool she is, Pansy keeps her eyes open to watch him fall apart.

He pumps into her a few more times, both of them breathing hard by the time his nose drops to her shoulder. Neville’s fingers trace the curve of her spine and Pansy holds herself together by biting her lip until it bleeds.

“I’ll grab my wand,” Neville says, leaving her with a kiss on her shoulder. 

Moments later, the pleasant tingle of a cleansing charm followed by the momentary chill of a contraception spell spreads between her legs. She curls on her side and Neville moves the quilt to cover her before lying on his stomach.

She knows he’s watching her with those eyes that see right through her, so Pansy seeks distraction in tracing the freckled expanse of his back, fingers pausing when she finds a tattoo on his shoulder.

“This used to be between your ribs,” she says, pressing into the elegant dip of light green wings.

Neville sits up to give her a better view.

“Millie charmed it to fly, but it’s slow,” he says. 

A moth with one brown dot each on its wings extends to the bottom of his shoulder blade, crisscrossing like ribbons on a kite. It’s perched on a bunch of flowers—English roses, if she had to guess. 

“Mum used to grow silkworms from all over the world, but her favorite was the comet moth. They’d sprout these wings with dots that look like eyes on them and she’d joke that every time I wandered off, she was watching me through their wings.”

The ache in her breastbone intensifies. 

“That’s what Gran says, anyway,” he says, lying back down and pulling her close with an arm around her waist. She knows him well enough to know he’s picking up on her desire to avoid eye contact and giving her an out by tucking his chin over her head. “I don’t remember any of it.”

“Is everything about you vomit-inducing levels of thoughtful?” Pansy asks the hollow of his throat.

Neville laughs, planting a kiss at the top of her head. He holds her for a long time—long enough that the sun has gone down outside and all that’s left in the room are shadows.

“I could love you,” Neville says into the quiet. “Think I could be quite good at it, actually.”

Pansy holds very still, something sickeningly sweet mucking about in her chest. She waits and waits for him to take it back, to withdraw as soon as she reaches out her hand to grab it, but he doesn’t. 

“I might believe you,” she whispers.

October 2006

Pansy shouldn’t have dirt under her fingernails. 

She’s wearing a silken lilac dress with a leg slit that Neville hasn’t been able to keep his eyes off since she put it on and in her palm sits a dug-up snake’s head.

A flower.

The stem droops and its deep purple petals hang down in checkered patterns like an upside-down cauldron. Looking around at the various tables filled with guests from the ceremony, Pansy covertly transfigures her napkin into a pot and delicately sets the flower inside.

“Is ’nip to the loo’ code for stealing the Granger’s wildflowers?” Neville asks, coming up behind her and giving her hips a squeeze.

She leans into him, turning her head to the side so his lips can brush against her throat. 

“This is not a burglary,” she says, shivering in the mild coolness of the evening as he wraps his arms around her torso and pulls her flush against him. “It’s a rescue. I saved it from the weeds.”

“Very brave,” he says. His voice stirs the hairs around her ear. “Further proof of my suspicion that the only reason you don’t want another go at the Sorting Hat is because you know you’re a Gryffindor at heart.”

Reaching behind, she pinches his arse.

“Oi,” he laughs, releasing her. Pansy hands off the pot to him and scrubs her hands together, trying to remove the excess dirt before casting a cleansing charm. Holding them close to her face in the moonlight, she scowls at the grittiness left behind in the creases of her palms.

“Come on,” Neville says, taking her by the hand and pulling her back in the direction of the music. “They’re clean enough.”

Somehow (not because she and Hermione talk every day and spend most weekends together), Pansy was invited to the Granger’s vow renewal ceremony. Their time in Australia gave them a new lease on life and Hermione was determined to move past any awkwardness and celebrate every bit of good that came from such a horrible situation.

With the subtle assistance of magic, glowworms light up every tree, the drinks stay perfectly chilled, and the two-tiered cake has a charm that zaps any insect that dares fly near. Running down the center of each table like a lavish carpet are expertly arranged flowers twisted with foliage: light pink roses, purple and green eucalyptus, scabiosa, plum peonies. A garnet bouquet.

“It’s not that I don’t know how to dance,” Draco is telling Hermione when they reach their table. “I was waltzing before I knew how to read—it’s that I don’t know how to do that kind of dance.”

He flings his hand lazily in the direction of the black and white checkered dance floor where people thrust their pelvises in harmony beneath the glow of string lights. 

“It’s the Thriller,” Hermione says, cheeks pink with fondness and exasperation. “Are you seriously telling me you’ve never heard of Michael Jackson?”

Neville pulls out a chair for Pansy and sets the pot at her feet after she slides into it. 

“I haven’t either,” he says, coming to Draco’s aid. “Looks like a riot, though.”

Granger tucks a wild curl behind her ear, her eyes lit up with excitement. “Oh, Neville! Let me teach you,” she says, standing up and smoothing down her olive green dress. “Pansy, convince Draco to come dance, would you?”

“Ooh, Millie, let’s join,” Hannah says, pulling a reluctant Millicent behind her.

Neville drags the flute of champagne he’d grabbed for Pansy while she was gone so it sits in front of her, tipping her chin up.

“Hermione’s going to need you to rescue her toes in about ten minutes, okay?” he whispers against her lips before pressing into them with a light kiss. Pansy does her best to roll her eyes as he walks away but it’s difficult when such genuine affection robs her of the ability to find his cheesiness offensive.

“Merlin,” Draco says when they’re left alone at the table. “I’m worried for your gag reflex.”

“You ought to be. He’s huge.”

Draco nearly spits out his drink as he glowers at her. Pansy grins from behind her flute of champagne and takes a sip.

“Circe’s tits.” She grimaces. “This champagne’s awful.”

He takes a swallow and winces almost imperceptibly, distracted by a passing guest’s wave.

“Keep it down,” Draco hisses from behind a plastered smile. “It’s her parents’ favorite.”

He looks smart in his black suit, a horizontal silver pin nestled into the collar of his white shirt. His cufflinks are slightly less refined than the rest of the ensemble and Pansy doesn’t have to ask to know that they were a gift from Hermione. 

She watches Granger attempt to coach Neville to move his hands through the air like a werewolf clawing its prey, a laugh bubbling up at the back of her throat. He throws himself into it with zero reservation.

“Moving in before marriage,” Pansy says, tapping her finger against the table. “I might as well take over Trelawney’s post for Divination because I saw your mum’s invitation for brunch coming from a quidditch pitch away.”

Draco rolls his eyes.

“You put more effort into explaining away my decisions to her than I do,” he says. “And you’re one to talk. You’d be doing the same if Longbottom didn’t live at Hogwarts.” 

Pansy shakes her head.

“I couldn’t leave Dad,” she says, a truly shocking lack of vitriol behind her words. They spend one night a week going through her mum’s catalogue that Narcissa gave her, trying out the wisdom scrawled inside its pages. “Or the garden, for that matter. He’s still a menace with a trowel.”

If Draco notices she doesn’t call him Reed anymore, he doesn’t comment.

“Longbottom would move in with you,” he says, taking another torturous sip.

She’s come to think of the brush of wings behind her ribs as moths that Neville’s particular brand of light seems to attract. They flutter now, stirring up hope so potent she has to breathe it out to make sure her lungs don’t pop.

“I will admit, I’m surprised he hasn’t got two left feet,” Draco says, lifting his flute to point at the dance floor. Neville holds his arms out on either side of himself and shakes his hips to the beat while Hermione beams and claps.

He looks smart, too, in a navy blue suit that’s tailored to his broad shoulders and tapered waist. Her stomach does a little flip like she’s turned upside down on a broom.

“You don’t remember him at the Yule Ball?” she asks, taking a sip of her drink and immediately remembering how wretched it is. She sets it back down. “Those two danced the whole night.”

Draco sends her a knowing look that she pretends not to see.

“It’s been that long for you?” he asks.

Pansy leans back in her chair, tousling her fringe to perfection.

“I’ve no clue what you mean.”

Her oldest friend spins the thick silver ring on his middle finger, eyes soft as he watches his lover join in and shimmy her shoulders. 

“Come on,” he says, snapping out of his reverie. Draco holds out his hand. “Let’s dance.”

Pansy shakes her head. “No fucking way am I doing that,” she says, gesturing to the organized mayhem on the black and white checkered dance floor.

Draco digs in his pocket for his wand and with a subtle flick, Thriller ends and transitions into a slow song, confusing both the DJ and the dancers.

“Granger’s going to kick your arse,” she says, standing up and brushing off her dress before she takes his hand. 

“I know,” he says. “Problem is, I enjoy it.”

Pansy scrunches her nose in faux disgust and moves to the outer edge of the dance floor with Draco. With one hand on his shoulder and the other in his palm, they move together with the ease of two people who’ve had a lifetime of anticipating each other’s next move.

From over Draco’s shoulder, Neville catches her eye and mouths next dance. Not a question, but an inevitability. Pansy bites her lip and grins at him.

Yes.

“It’s difficult, isn’t it?” Draco says, voice lowered as he leads them in a turn. “To let them choose us.” 

Pansy’s tightening throat makes it impossible to respond, but she doesn’t need to. He knows. He always knows.

Laying her head on his shoulder, Pansy gathers herself.

“For a long time,” she says, “I thought the only redeemable thing about me was how perfectly I loved you.”

Draco pulls her up and close, like he can’t even feel her thorns.

“It’s certainly my favorite quality of yours,” he says gruffly.

She laughs, turning back to watch Neville when she finds his eyes already on her. It’s sun-dappled love even in the moonlight, the kind that’s not easily startled.

“We don’t deserve to start over,” she says.

Draco pulls back, light blue eyes shining from the bulbs overhead. A grim smile overtakes his lips.

“No,” he says, “we don’t.”

Her bottom lip starts to tremble so she blinks rapidly and clears her throat to speak, focusing her eyes on their feet as they drift: black square, white square, black square, white.

“But who’s going to stop us from doing it anyway?”

fin