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The staircases moved, and the castle moved with them.

A low groan rolled through stone ribs as the third-floor flight shuddered sideways, dragging a rip tide of students in its wake. Torches guttered, wind pushed from nowhere, and portraits along the walls leaned from gilt frames to witness the commotion—centuries of painted eyes bright with nosy delight.

Pansy Parkinson rode the lurch like a blade rides the whetstone: a steady, controlled glide. She was a study of composure. Chin up. Shoulders back. Every step precise as a metronome. Parkinsons did not scurry. They glided.

Which is why the betrayal struck personal.

A vicious jolt snapped across the steps. Her stack of Arithmancy and Potions texts bucked free, parchment fluttering up like startled white doves. Her heel slipped—just a breath—and her stomach plunged with the staircase as if the castle had opened a throat beneath her.

She twisted on instinct, reaching for the topmost book sliding toward the drop.

She didn’t catch the book.

She caught a chest.

Hands found her waist—warm, sure, scandalously firm through layers of wool and silk. The body attached to the hands braced, absorbed the tangle of her momentum, and steadied them both with a practiced balance that should have infuriated her more than it already did.

A voice bent to her ear, low and indecently amused. “Easy there. Bit early in the day to be falling for me, Parkinson.”

Her head snapped up.

Potter.

Of course.

His hair looked like wind had lost a grudge match to it. His tie hung half-done. There were ink smudges along his wrist and a thumbprint on one lens of his glasses. He wore rumple-like armor and chaos like a crown, and those impossible green eyes were filled with mirth.

Heat slicked her cheeks. Pansy stiffened so hard her spine might have chiseled its own column. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” His thumb grazed her waist before he let go—too light for an accident, too present for anything else. The grin sharpened. “Not everyone gets the privilege of a full-impact collision with the Chosen One. I ought to start charging.”

“You,” she said, crisp as a knife laid on crystal, “are insufferable.”

“Thank you,” he said, and somehow made it sound like they’d traded compliments.

The steps bucked again. She pitched into him a second time, palms planting on the hard plane of his chest. His laugh rumbled through her hands—low, warm, and infuriatingly human.

“That’s twice,” he noted. “Should I keep score?”

“You should start running.”

A jag of stone groaned beneath them; the staircase slewed, overshooting the Charms landing by a clean ten feet. Pansy watched her intended corridor drift away like a ship she would not board now, not in this lifetime, not unless she learned to fly.

“No, no, no,” she said under her breath, and leaned to track the corridor’s retreat with the narrowest tilt of her head—never the body. Control survived in small economies.

“Missed your stop?” Potter asked, leaning one shoulder to the banister as though gravity were his.

“I was distracted.”

“By me,” he supplied, helpful as a brick.

Her eyes slivered to obsidian. “I should hex you.”

“You’d miss.”

She opened her mouth—then closed it, because the steps kicked again. Screams popped from younger years; a suit of armor along the wall clanged with indignation, shouted “Steady, men!” and toppled into silence as its visor slammed shut. A seventh-year Ravenclaw spilled quills like spines down four treads. Somewhere above, Peeves snorted like a broken trumpet.

“Wheee,” the poltergeist caroled, swooping through the rib-cage lattice of stairs with a garland of water balloons. “Stair-doom, despair-boom!”

“Not now,” Harry said without looking up.

“Party-pooper Potter!” Peeves swooped lower, then, with a theatrical gasp, brightened at Pansy. “Oh ho—polished princess on the prowl! Shall I smear a little—”

“Try it,” Pansy said, calm as ice, “and I’ll invent a hex whose only purpose is to make you regret your entire unlived life.”

Peeves leered, delighted. “Nasty-nice! I’m keeping that one.” He dumped his balloons on a gaggle of first-years and cackled away.

The staircase, apparently jealous of the attention, dropped three inches in a malicious shrug. Pansy’s breath jumped. Potter’s hand closed on her elbow—quick, steady, instinctive, not flirtation at all—and the shock of steadiness almost put tears behind her eyes from sheer, ugly relief.

She hated that.

She hated that worse than the laughter in the portraits, worse than the trick step yawning two treads below, worse than the fact that the smell of him—soap, parchment, cold air—was shredding concentration she’d curated to a religion.

“Nightmare,” she said, and if the word came out thinner than intended, well. The stairs had ears. Best to let it know she would be lodging a formal complaint with the laws of physics.

“Could be worse,” Harry said, easily. “You could be stuck with someone you actually dislike.”

“I do dislike you.”

“Mm.” He looked at her the way a seeker looks at the glint of gold: easy, intent. “Funny way of showing it.”

Her cheeks flamed so fast she wondered whether torchlight had discovered new angles. “Don’t be obscene.”

“I’m trying very hard,” he said solemnly. “It’s not my natural state.”

“Tragic.”

“Disaster, really.”

The steps shimmied like a dog out of water. A Hufflepuff lost his satchel and went pale as the straps slithered between moving treads; two Gryffindors from lower years clung together and yelled. Pansy, sighting ahead, calculated that their current angle would carry them side-on past three landings, one of which led to the boys’ lavatory—no thank you—and one to the fourth-floor corridor with the vanishing cabinet (absolutely not), and the last to a dead end where a disgruntled witch in a portrait spent entire afternoons knitting insults.

They were trapped. By architecture. How humiliating.

“Let go,” she told Harry, flicking a glance at his hand on her elbow. “I can stand.”

“I know,” he said, and removed his hand anyway, which only annoyed her more.

“I’m late as it is,” she said, because information is a weapon and she’d rather hold it than leave it lying around. “If Slughorn decides this means he needs to tell me his story about Ambrosia Spinks and her crystal decanter collection again, I shall transfer schools.”

“Good news,” Harry said, eyes smiling. “This terrifying carnival ride is also a shortcut to Slughorn’s office if it feels like it. Might drop you in his lap.”

“If it does,” Pansy said, “I am dragging you down with me. And you can listen to Ambrosia’s decanters for an hour while imagining your life choices.”

He pretended to ponder that. “If I say I like the sound of ‘dragging me down with you,’ do you hex me or buy me a butterbeer?”

She shot him a look that could have frozen a blast-ended skrewt mid-blast. “Where would I find the time to both hex you and demean myself?”

“Fair point,” he said cheerfully. “Hex first.”

A boy two flights above slipped and dropped to one knee, half-vanished into a trick tread. Panic thinned his voice. “I—I’m stuck! I can’t—”

“Don’t struggle,” Pansy called up before she thought better of it. The directive rang clear, precise, almost bored—which is how you speak to panic if you want it to obey. “Stop moving. Someone pull him by the shoulders.”

“We’ve got him,” a sixth-year said, bracing the kid’s arms. He glared at the step and yanked. The stair squealed and let go like a sulky dog. Cheers fluttered down. The staircase, as if sulking for real now, swung wide and low, skimming the edge of the ground-floor well with a sickening dip.

Harry leaned, measuring the arc of their drift. Pansy watched his mouth soften into that focused line it wore in mid-air—during matches, when the world telescoped to wind and instinct. The stairs threw a tantrum; he looked like he’d been born on their back.

“Why aren’t you bothered?” she snapped, because vexation had cornered her and needed to bite something.

“Practice,” he said. “Living with Weasley twins gives you good balance.”

“Gods preserve me,” Pansy muttered.

“I thought you didn’t believe in gods.”

“I believe in revenge.”

His grin unwound a notch into something like delight. “Good. You’ll love Quidditch.”

“I would rather gargle flobberworm mucus.”

“Pity. You’d look good in scarlet.”

“If you say that word to me again in public—”

“You’ll hex me,” he said blandly. “We’ve covered it.”

The staircase jerked. She grabbed for the rail with gloved fingers; her book slid, and Harry snatched it mid-drop with a seeker’s reflex. He handed it back without flourish. She caught it without thanks. Their fingers didn’t brush. Neither of them pretended that didn’t matter.

“Tell me,” he said after a beat, conversational as a corridor whisper. “Did you switch staircases at breakfast to avoid me?”

She stared. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Then what was that little detour behind Greengrass when I waved?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Mm. Convenient.”

“Selective,” she corrected. “Try it. It’s very therapeutic.”

“I prefer persistence,” he said, and that was the first time his voice carried weight under the grin—something steady, something that didn’t care whether she laughed at it.

The stairs made a resentful sound and stalled mid-air. All motion went out of them—no lurch, no groan, only a terrible stillness over the open well. You could see down five floors if you wanted to be sick. The castle held its breath. Even Peeves, twenty feet off, hovered quiet as a dropped note.

“Marvelous,” Pansy said into the sudden hush. “We’ve died.”

Harry leaned out over the rail. “I don’t think—”

Below—far below—Argus Filch’s voice flayed the silence. “MOVE, you useless slabs! MOVE, I say! RUSTY HEAPS!”

The staircase—out of spite—shuddered forward an inch.

Portraits tutted. A gray lady drifted across a span of air three flights down, her translucent veil combed by wind that wasn’t there. “Children,” she breathed. “Every century they scream the same.”

A tingle crawled up Pansy’s spine. Not fear—never in public, never—but the narrow feeling you get when the room notices you instead of the other way around. The castle watched. The stair listened. Balance is a pact and they’d violated it by existing too confidently.

She set her jaw. “We’re not staying here.”

“Agreed,” Harry said, already scanning the lattice of struts and pivot points and anchored chains like a puzzle he meant to beat by smiling at it. His hand brushed the rail. “If we time the swing, we can hop to that cross-landing when it passes.”

“There is no swing,” Pansy said through her teeth.

“Yet,” he said, and whistled, a soft, goading note like a challenge. “Come on, you horrible thing.”

The staircase, with the petty vindictiveness of old magic, obliged. A tremor, then a sway—barely a breath at first, then more, a pendulum beginning to remember it had once been free.

Students muttered. The little Ravenclaw who’d lost her quills earlier clutched the banister so hard her knuckles went sunlight-white. “I want to get off,” she whispered.

“You will,” Pansy said, not unkindly. “Keep breathing. Do not look down.”

The staircase swung harder.

The cross-landing—a narrow bite of stone with an iron newel—skimmed toward them like a dock toward a skiff. Harry’s eyes tracked it. “On my count.”

“Absolutely not,” Pansy said. “I will not be the reason a first-year splatters.”

“We go last,” he said. “Count for them first.”

She opened her mouth to argue and heard her own mother’s voice in her head: if you have the power, you have obligations—the kind you don’t name out loud but fulfill whether anyone sees or not. Pansy swallowed. She raised her voice.

“Listen very carefully,” she called, crisp, cutting clean through the tremble and the squeak and the horrid breath of silence. “We are going to step off onto that landing when it comes close. We will not push. We will not panic. We will move like we are worth being saved. Understood?”

The Ravenclaw nodded too hard. The Hufflepuff with the satchel set his jaw. Nods cascaded like a wave along the stair.

Harry’s voice threaded into hers, steady and low. “All right—first row. On three. One… two… now .”

Feet hopped. Hands grabbed. A teacher in tartan—Professor McGonagall herself, sharp as a drawn line—appeared on the small landing with wand out and palm open, bracing students off with a grip that looked like gravity hadn’t met her before. “Good. Very good. Next group.”

They moved in pieces. Older students folded around younger ones. Harry counted. McGonagall caught, placed, nodded. Portraits clucked or cheered. Peeves sang something awful about stepping in time with doom. Filch bellowed a splendid oath from below that would have peeled varnish if there had been any.

At last there were only three left riding the stair: Harry, Pansy, and a third-year who shook like a windy curtain.

“You next,” Pansy told the boy. “It’s not a suggestion.”

He gulped and nodded.

Harry met Pansy’s eyes. “We go together.”

She didn’t argue this time.

The stairs swung. The landing skimmed close. Harry’s hand hovered—not touching, not presuming—just there, a promise rather than a command.

“Now,” he said.

She moved.

Boots met stone. The landing jolted through her bones. McGonagall’s hand clamped her shoulder with tempered iron and then let go again at once, a warmth that allowed no nonsense and no fear. The last third-year tumbled safely through and collapsed boneless with relief.

McGonagall’s mouth thinned, then softened a fraction. “Well done. Mr. Potter, Miss Parkinson—compose yourselves. We will proceed to the fourth-floor landing in an orderly fashion and then—”

The staircase, jealous that it had no lines left, crashed petulantly into its hinge, swung too far, and slammed the landing’s rail with a clang like a bell.

A chain snapped.

Everyone felt the way the air changed—sudden, hollower, the way a room does when someone breaks the one chair you didn’t think about needing. The landing tilted a hairsbreadth to the right. Students squealed; McGonagall’s wand flicked; iron shrieked.

“Back,” Pansy said to no one and everyone at once, though there was nowhere to go back to. The landing was a throat. The castle leaned in to hear.

Harry had already moved. He vaulted the low rail and caught the broken chain where it flapped like a tongue, hauling hand-over-hand for leverage, boots skidding, shoulders bunching under wool. The metal bit deep; his face went white around the edges. The landing’s tilt eased a little.

“Hold—” he managed through his teeth.

McGonagall’s magic flared—silver nets over iron, a lattice of force that dragged the runaway geometry into order. The landing steadied. Students breathed. The chain stopped its hungry rattle.

“Enough,” McGonagall told the staircase in a voice carved from bedrock. The magic held.

Harry let the slack go by inches. His palms were raw and bright with scrapes when he dropped back over the rail.

“You are,” Pansy said, heart-thunder and fury mixing into something uglier she didn’t want to name, “an idiot.”

He flexed his hands once, and didn’t wince. “You’re welcome.”

“Points to Gryffindor,” McGonagall said, like she was annoyed to be proud. “And if any of you ever attempt a similar stunt without an adult present, I shall—” Her eyes speared Peeves, who had appeared upside down with a pirate’s spyglass and an expression of prayerful glee. “—turn you into a rug.”

Peeves, stricken, clapped his hands to his heart. “Oh, professor, how your love wounds me.”

“Begone.”

He blew her a kiss and zipped away.

McGonagall turned once—one of those full, assessing pivots that measure and weigh—and then lowered her voice. “Take them down to the fourth floor,” she told Harry and Pansy, as if they’d asked for the responsibility and had been granted it. “Slowly. If it lurches again, call.”

“Yes, Professor,” said Harry.

“Of course,” said Pansy, before she could think better of training her tone into obedience.

The landing attached itself to a new hinge with a reluctant thunk. Students trickled along its spine toward lower, safer flights. Harry and Pansy moved together in the corridor of motion like a matched pair of magnets that refused to admit to physics.

“You all right?” he said without looking at her.

“Perfect,” she said, and despised how breathless it sounded.

He glanced. His eyes dipped to her hands. She’d clamped the Potions text so hard the leather spine had left its design in her palm. He didn’t comment. Infuriatingly kind of him.

Halfway down the next flight, the stairs changed their minds again. Not with malice this time, nor attention-seeking—more the exhausted twitch of an old dog curling onto a gouty paw. The treads slurred underfoot; Pansy’s balance compensated; Harry’s shoulder brushed her sleeve as he reached to steady a second-year who wobbled.

“Nearly there,” he told the younger student, easy as if this were a queue for a sweet shop.

Pansy didn’t say nearly there. She only watched the angle of the hinge below, the way it accepted weight, the way iron carried sound, and calculated whether she would be humiliated again today by gravity.

They reached the fourth-floor landing with the odd solemnity that follows surviving a joke that wasn’t funny. McGonagall swept the last stragglers down and away with the precision of a general who had never once lost a war to architecture. The stair above them creaked one last time and sulked into stillness.

Silence, then, if you didn’t count the thundering in Pansy’s chest. Students’ voices retreated down corridors. Portraits settled into their canvases with satisfied sighs. Somewhere distant, a bell chimed the hour and the castle seemed to nod. Yes. That happened. We live here.

Harry wiped his palms uselessly on his robes, then gave up on neatness as a concept. He turned, found Pansy beside the newel post, and smiled—less show now, less flash, more of the thing under the thing.

“So,” he said, as if they had merely walked side by side out of a mildly interesting class. “About earlier.”

“No,” she said immediately, because it cost less to say it fast.

He laughed. “You don’t know what I was going to say.”

“You were going to say something insufferable.”

“Probably.” He rocked once on his heels, hands in pockets, green eyes shameless and—worse—sincere. “But also this: you still haven’t answered my question.”

A breath snagged behind her ribs. “What question?”

“The one I asked,” he said, and there was no flounce in it, no performance—just a line laid on the table between them, clean as a wand. “About a date. Hogsmeade. Butterbeer. Something not involving near-death by bad carpentry.”

Her mouth went dry. “My silence was the answer.”

“Or,” he said, softly, because the landing was empty now and the stair listened like a gossiping aunt, “maybe you didn’t trust yourself to give the honest one.”

She should have flipped her hair and skewered him with a witty cruelty. She should have said absolutely not, Potter, and walked away with every vertebra singing victory. She should have. The entire architecture of her life was built on should.

Instead, Pansy held his gaze a heartbeat too long. The castle hummed around them—stone warm from the friction of chaos, iron humming with tired energy, torches writing restless light on the wall. He stood there like the eye of a storm: wrecked hair, raw hands, ridiculous grin that hadn’t deserted him even when the chain had bit.

“What would you do,” she said, cool as she could make it, “if I said no?”

“Ask again tomorrow.”

“And if I said no then?”

“Thursday’s free, too.”

“You do realize persistence is not a virtue; it’s a symptom.”

“Probably,” he said, that smile tugging rueful at his mouth, like he knew exactly how absurd he sounded and meant it anyway. “But I’m not giving up.”

“Spare me your heroics.”

“Not heroics,” he said, voice dropping low, steady enough to cut through the stairwell noise. “I go after what I want. And I don’t stop until I have it.”

Her breath hitched before she could help it. Her chin snapped higher, spine straight as a blade. “And you think that makes you admirable?”

“I think it makes me honest.” His eyes held hers, unflinching. “And right now, what I want is you.”

He breathed a laugh. It loosened something in the landing’s shadow, as if the stair had been waiting to see whether the conversation would drop like a brick. “Come on, Parkinson. One butterbeer. If it’s awful, you can hex me on the way out and I’ll call it square.”

The image tried to make her laugh: hexing him in the cobbles outside the Three Broomsticks while Madam Rosmerta pretended not to see. She lowered her lashes to hide the treason of it.

“Absolutely not,” she said, and surprised them both by meaning parts of it and not other parts. “I have standards. High ones.”

“Tragic,” he murmured. “I’m very tall. It’s my only qualification.”

Her lips twitched—nearly, almost, dangerously close to a smile—but she spun away instead, voice sharp as glass. “An underappreciated flaw.”

“My best one.”

“Debatable.”

“You have ink on your glasses.”

“You have a bit of stair dust in your hair,” he said gently, and lifted a hand without thinking.

She went very still. The pad of his thumb hovered—then, meticulously, deliberately, he brushed a gray grit from one glossy strand near her temple. The touch was not intimate. It was barely a touch at all. It still shorted three thoughts in a row and left her internal voice blinking at static.

“There,” he said. “Perfection restored.”

She stepped back, a calculated inch to reassert geometry. 

The silence that followed wasn’t hostile. It was terrifying. It was full of choices.

A handful of first-years barreled past at the far end, relief carrying them in a bubble of giggles. Peeves’ distant song drifted like bad pipe music: “Step, step, tip, trip, doom doom doom…”

Pansy fixed her gaze on Harry’s raw knuckles. “Your hands.”

“They’ll live.”

“Obviously.” The word arrived too sharp; she dulled its edge. “You should conjure a salve.”

“I was going to wash them first.”

“Good,” she said, because permission cost nothing and worried her less than gratitude would have.

“You still haven’t answered me,” he said, just above a whisper, persistence wrapped in gentleness. 

She could say no and be safe. She could say yes and be ridiculous. She could keep her silence and let him make a joke of it until it wasn’t a joke anymore and something had changed without her consent.

All of those choices felt like letting the staircase move her.

Pansy lifted her chin. “One condition,” she said.

Harry’s brows shot up. The grin threatened and hesitated; something else—wariness, maybe hope—cut through it. “Name it.”

“If you ever tell anyone I agreed to this,” she said, and each word landed with surgical precision, “I will hex you where you stand. I will create a new spell for the occasion and make footnotes in the text. Do we understand one another?”

His eyes lit—too pleased by the threat, the fool—and then softened in something like relief. “We do.”

“And,” she said, because control is a structure and she could build this one herself, “it will not be a date. It will be reconnaissance.”

“Reconnaissance,” he echoed dutifully. “Strictly professional butterbeer between sworn enemies.”

“Precisely.”

“With a walk by the lake if we require additional intel.”

“Don’t push it.”

His grin broke in earnest; he couldn’t hold it anymore. “Right. Not a date. Just two people who survived the worst staircase in Britain, testing whether butterbeer tastes better after disaster.”

“And if it does,” she said, cool again because cool had saved her life more than once, “I will not thank you.”

“Understood.”

“Good.”

They stood there a moment more, like two chess pieces that had both chosen to move and were surprised to find themselves on the same color square. The stair above them cracked its knuckles quietly and settled. Sunlight slipped through the high windows and made a bright, ridiculous halo in Harry’s hair that he would never deserve.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

She did not say yes. She did not say no. She gave the smallest nod a person can give without committing any legal trouble.

He saw it anyway. Of course he did.

Pansy turned first, because victory lives in the turn. She walked as if she had never nearly fallen, never nearly said yes, never nearly admitted that the world had tilted and a boy had stood like the true horizon. Her heels sketched the rhythm of a march. Her books tucked to the exact degree they would not slip again. Her hair lay perfect, because he had made it so and she refused to think about that.

Harry watched until the last dark shine of her hair slid out of sight, then leaned back to the newel post and breathed out a laugh that wasn’t for an audience. He glanced up at the sullen hulk of stairs.

“Thank you,” he told them.

The staircase—ancient, contrary, temperamental—creaked in a way that might have been a shrug.

Or a blessing.