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Chapter Text

On the first of April, Pansy Parkinson agrees to marry Ernie Macmillan.

His proposal is satisfactory, if not a bit stale—he calls at a quarter past ten, wielding a diamond-crusted heirloom tiara and a bouquet of exotic hothouse flowers, recites several off-tempo warbling odes to the blue of her eyes and the pink of her cheeks, and then, when the silence between them seems to stretch on, not quite awkward but not quite comfortable, either; he rather abruptly drops to one knee.

For her part, Pansy gasps, presses her fingertips to her lips, and wishes, not for the first time, that summoning blushes were as easy as summoning tears.

“Oh, this is such a shock,” she lies, breathlessly.

Ernie offers her a pained, not entirely genuine looking smile before clearing his throat. “If you need a moment—”

“I don’t,” she simpers.

He doesn’t move from his spot on her drawing room floor. “Ah. Of course.”

“Truly,” she goes on, hands fluttering, “I am overwhelmed by your affections.”

His mouth opens, and then closes, and then opens again. “Indeed,” he says, voice slightly higher-pitched on the tail of the second syllable. “Which is why I would be most understanding if you, ah, required time to reflect—”

“I absolutely don’t,” she gushes.

He stares at his still-bent knee. “Well. That’s—well.”

Pansy supposes he must be waiting for her to say yes—and she will be saying yes; she isn’t an imbecile—but she can’t quite bring herself to do so yet. To put an end to this, the immeasurably satisfying culmination of years of hard work. Dedication. Half a lifetime spent at finishing school, a wobbly tower of encyclopedias stacked on her head, learning how to sit and how to stand and how to bloody well breathe properly with a corset laced much, much too tight. Summers filled with dancing lessons and embroidery hoops and honest-to-god weekly quizzes on the contents of the most recent edition of Debrett’s, a revolving door of faux-French ladies’ maids tugging at her hair and lamenting the too-steep slope of her nose, piles of bloodstained seamstress needles and ghastly tasting teas to lighten her complexion and hours upon hours of chess with her father, gambits and blockades and games she hadn’t had a prayer of winning—

Pansy has earned this.

And Ernie will be an attentive fiancé, when it matters. It isn’t as if she’s sacrificing anything. Whatever deficiencies their relationship might have—deficiencies she wouldn’t even notice if that romantic love-match drivel wasn’t currently so fashionable—well, they can be overlooked. Overcome. Especially with the promise of a castle, and a title, and a victory, because Pansy is going to be a duchess. Which is why—

On the first of April, Pansy Parkinson agrees to marry Ernie Macmillan.

Three weeks later, she meets Harry Potter.

Harry Potter is a bastard.

Not literally, of course—god, the scandal—but he’s messy and he’s handsome and he’s sarcastic and he’s rude, really, unfailingly kind to the people who don’t matter and inexplicably hostile to the ones who do. He looks at Pansy like she’s an annoyance, at best, and a villain, at worst, and his distaste for her, for what she is and who she is and how she fits into the microscopically tiny mold of the world they’re forced to share—it makes her feel transparent. See-through, but not quite fortunate enough to be invisible.

It happens like this:

On a rainy Friday afternoon, Pansy strolls into the lobby of Fortescue’s, passes her primrose-blue parasol back to her maid, and is immediately accosted by Daphne Greengrass. Daphne has a new last name now, of course, but Pansy loathes having to use it. Daphne had married a Weasley, and not just any Weasley, but the youngest Weasley son. Pansy would have to be tortured like a Spanish heretic before she’d ever marry a second son. Or a sixth son, as Daphne had done. What’s the point?

“Pansy!” Daphne squeals, waving Pansy over to a small corner table. Pansy’s pace remains unhurried; Daphne’s enthusiasm isn’t nearly as catching as it had once been. “Oh, this is brilliant, we just got back from the Burrow!”

Pansy has next to no idea what or where a Burrow is, but she replies, “Lovely,” anyway, carefully adjusting the Macmillan ruby pin in her hair. “I hope you had a smooth trip, considering the weather.”

Daphne beams lovingly at the tall, red-haired man slouched beside her. “Oh, Ron made it a very smooth trip, indeed.”

The tops of Weasley’s ears turn pink. “Daph,” he admonishes, not sounding the least bit like he really means it. “You can’t say things like that.”

The untidy man sitting across from them, who Pansy hadn’t even noticed, suddenly snorts. Snorts. As if Pansy, the daughter of an earl—no, the fiancée of a duke—isn’t right there.

“Harry,” Daphne chides him, and she doesn’t sound like she really means it, either. God. What has Weasley been doing to her? “This is my very dearest friend, Pansy Parkinson. Pansy, this is Harry Potter—he’s Ron’s very dearest friend, too, isn’t that wonderful?”

The charlatan—a Potter, apparently—is young, Pansy realizes upon closer inspection. Probably Weasley’s age. Fresh out of Cambridge. Unlike Weasley, however, Potter is…attractive. Darkly so. His skin is tanned a deep bronze-brown, like he’s spent an unfashionable amount of time outdoors, and his eyes are a rather astonishing shade of vivid emerald green. His jaw is square, and his nose is straight, and his mouth is crooked. The sum total of his features is wholly, entirely smug, giving Pansy the distinct impression that she’s being condescended to in some way.

“Pleasure to meet you, sir,” she says, flashing him an admittedly flimsy, tight-lipped smile—which he doesn’t even have the decency to return.

“Pansy Parkinson,” he repeats, tone slightly sour. “You’re engaged to Macmillan, aren’t you? Ernie?”

“Yes, I am,” she replies, lifting her chin. “He proposed earlier this month.”

Potter hums. “We were at school together, you know. Still see him around a lot. Good man.”

“Yes,” Pansy says again, more firmly. “He is. I’m thrilled to be marrying him.”

Potter’s answering frown is skeptical. Exaggerated. “Strange, then, isn’t it?”

She sniffs. “What is?”

“That he’s never mentioned you. Not once.”

Stung—and unwilling to allow Potter the privilege of knowing that she is—Pansy levels him with a politely mocking sneer. “And yet you’re aware of our engagement!” she exclaims, as sweetly as she can manage. Her cheeks are warm. Her bones are brittle. She wants to go home. “What a devoted friend you are, sir.”

Potter clenches his jaw for a glorious, too-brief moment—and then he’s barking out a gravelly, irritatingly masculine laugh, sharp-edged and scornful, shaking his head and diverting his attention back to Weasley—

It’s a clear dismissal.

And Pansy is left standing there, posture perfect and expression placid and rage practically seething, smoldering, simmering in her gut like watery soup in a cast-iron cauldron, before she grits her teeth, scowls at Potter—god, his hair is a disaster, too, who let him leave the house—and instinctively reaches for the enormous sixteenth-century, princess-cut sapphire Ernie had given her the previous day. She twists the ring around and around her finger, reminds herself that she can’t very well plan a wedding while being tried for murder, and then coughs, delicately.

“Oh, is that from Ernie?” Daphne asks, gesturing to the ring.

Pansy relaxes. This is normal. This is what she’d come to Fortescue’s for in the first place. “Mm,” she confirms, holding out her hand so that the sapphire can adequately catch the light. “Queen Elizabeth gifted it to his great-great grandfather.”

Daphne absently strokes the ugly silver locket around her own neck. “Aren’t family heirlooms so lovely for engagements?”

Weasley glances up at that, an appallingly bashful grin spreading across the lower half of his face, and Daphne giggles, a wistful sigh escaping her lips when Weasley just—watches her, looking pleased and surprised and vaguely like he thinks he might actually be dreaming.

Pansy furrows her brow.

She feels strangely off-balance, and wonders if this is what vertigo is—the earth simply tilting on its axis without any warning at all, rearranging latitudes and longitudes and Pansy’s ingrained ability to ignore the things that she doesn’t understand. The things that she doesn’t want or need to understand. Because the dull, grating, somewhat hollow pang reverberating through her chest; it isn’t jealousy, and it isn’t important. It isn’t—

She blinks herself back to reality.

Squares her shoulders, just like her father taught her to.

Chews on the inside of her mouth, abruptly uncomfortable with the happy, harmonious glow that’s suffusing Daphne’s cheeks.

And it’s then that Pansy registers a gaze, heavy with judgment and mostly unfamiliar, boring into the side of her head. Studying her, like she’s a wriggling wreck of a specimen trapped beneath the bottle-thick lens of a microscope. Like she’s been found lacking. Wanting. Useless.

She doesn’t turn to look.

She can guess quite well who that gaze belongs to.

Chapter Text

To Pansy’s eternal consternation, that isn’t the last she sees of Harry Potter.

Daphne’s return to London results in a veritable flood of invitations—there are afternoon tea parties and Japanese garden lunches and shopping trips, museum exhibitions, carriage rides through the park and early morning jaunts to feed the ducks and always, always, always, Daphne arrives with Weasley and Potter in tow.

It’s tedious.

It’s frustrating.

Potter seems to take an incongruous measure of delight in irritating Pansy. He interrupts her when she speaks, delivers smoothly cutting non-sequiturs that she can’t possibly respond to, not if she wants to keep her reputation intact, and he chuckles, not a little meanly, whenever she’s congratulated on her engagement to Ernie. She hates it. She hates him.

She showers him in slyly backhanded compliments—“That cravat is much less singed than usual”—and he asks her deliberately invasive questions about Ernie’s proposal—“Did he really recite poetry, or was it just a glorified contract negotiation?”; she discovers he has a weakness—if a permanently tender, still-gaping wound can even be described as such—after drolly remarking, “Your parents were rather lucky that they never had to meet you,” and he flinches and he glares and he pushes, pokes, needles and needles until he hisses, “Don’t you have anyone else to follow around? I can’t imagine how Daphne’s put up with you for so long,” and Pansy—Pansy crumples, almost, doubt blossoming like a bruise against the inside of her ribs.

And yet.

The sniping and the bickering and the viciously volatile tension that strings all their discord together—it’s interspersed with odd, electrically charged moments that on their own don’t make any sort of sense, no, but when placed side by side, one on top of the other, seem to paint a picture that Pansy doesn’t particularly like to consider the ramifications of.

Because there’s the callused heat of Potter’s hand around hers as they collide during a dance at Almack’s—and it is a collision, nothing graceful or easy or pretty about it, no—and there’s his coolly mocking sneer of amusement, callous and smug, when she can no longer put off bringing Ernie around—and, god, hadn’t that been a nightmare, a slow-motion montage of stupid jokes and friendly pats on the back, Pansy relegated to the role of outsider, awkwardly superfluous—and there’s the unerring, inescapable fact that they keep being thrown together despite her best and most manipulative efforts to avoid him, to ignore him, to pretend that he isn’t there and he isn’t real and he isn’t—

Potter watches her, sometimes, from across crowded ballrooms and significantly less crowded patisserie tables.

She only knows because she watches him, too.

Pansy is red-faced and sweaty by the time she arrives at the Vanes’ for their annual summer dinner party.

It’s an unpleasantly warm, unseasonably humid evening. Her dress is an elegant column of pale mauve silk, airy and light, and her hair is pinned back in a sleek chignon at the nape of her neck. Her brow is dewy with perspiration, and the scalloped lace border of her chemise is scratchy where it touches her skin. She’s tired. She hopes it isn’t obvious.

“Smells like rain,” someone comments as the rack of lamb is served.

Potter is seated across from Pansy, strategically placed next to Daphne’s younger sister—who he’s grimacing at, the cad, much the same way he always grimaces at Pansy. Although. Although. Pansy can’t help but notice that he seems to be being a bit kinder about it with Astoria. More subtle. Less like he’s counting down the seconds until he can be blessedly, blissfully free of her presence.

The thought settles badly.

Pansy stabs a slice of lamb with the tines of her fork—it’s rare, too rare, it’s practically still bleeding—and takes a long, perfectly unfeminine gulp of sherry. She’s allowed sherry now. She’s going to be married. She’s going to be a duchess.

“Macmillan isn’t accompanying you tonight?” Potter asks, head cocked in what can really only be a challenge, but—

She takes another determined sip of sherry. “No,” she replies, bluntly. “He’s busy. Couldn’t make it.”

“Well, I’m sure he’s gutted,” Potter says, smirking down at his plate. “You two don’t get to spend all that much time together, do you?”

Pansy clutches the stem of her glass tightly enough for her fingertips to turn white. “Yes. Well. It’s like I just said—he’s very busy.”

“Of course,” Potter demurs.

She swallows yet another mouthful of sherry. “He plays an incredibly important role in Parliament,” she continues.

“Indeed.”

“Really, they’d be lost without him.”

“Naturally.”

“And I support Ernie in all of his endeavors,” she goes on, dimly wondering why she can’t seem to stop talking. She shrugs. Sherry sloshes uneasily in the pit of her stomach. “All of them.”

“I can tell,” Potter assures her with not even a shred of sincerity.

“Thus, marrying him is essentially an act of patriotism—”

At that, Potter starts to cough rather uncontrollably, thumping his fist against his sternum and wildly reaching out for his wineglass. He has his chin ducked, splotches of bright, sizzling pink staining his cheeks, but Pansy can see the grin, wide and helpless, splitting his mouth wide open, exposing a neat row of blindingly white teeth and transforming his face from merely handsome—appealing on a basic, almost boring level—to something else. Something fascinating.

She’d made Harry Potter laugh.

She’d made Harry Potter laugh.

He glances up.

Their eyes meet.

And she sits still, trying and trying and trying, to no avail, to catch her breath, to remember that she hates him, hates how he makes her feel, hates the chaos and the confusion and the futility of that single, solitary emotion—and he’s nodding at her, the edges of his smile twitching up and then down, sheepishly, like he’s conceding defeat, just this once, and—

She drains her glass.

After dinner, the ladies retire to a tastefully decorated drawing room while the men wander off to drink whiskey and smoke cigars and discuss horses in the library.

Pansy isn’t drunk.

Not really.

She’s willing to admit that she’s perhaps a bit misty-headed, shoulders relaxed and cheeks flushed and movements marginally wobbly as she collapses on a burgundy jacquard settee—but she isn’t drunk. She’s too refined for that. She’s going to be a duchess.

“Pansy?” Astoria asks, peering at her with thinly veiled concern. “Are you quite alright? You look…”

“I’m excellent, darling, thank you,” Pansy says, clearing her throat around a hiccup. “Is there—where is—god, why do we do this?”

Astoria blinks. “Do what?”

Pansy flaps her hand. “Separate.”

“From the men, you mean?” Romilda Vane puts in—daft, daft, daft Romilda Vane, with her dark eyes and her luscious hair and her seemingly impenetrable air of mystery. Pansy hadn’t even been talking to Romilda Vane. Why would she be? Romilda Vane was never going to be a duchess. Not like Pansy.

“Yes, from the men,” Pansy drawls, wrinkling her nose. “Who else have we separated from tonight, Romilda? The footmen?”

Astoria’s eyebrows fly up towards her hairline. “I’m sure no one here needed to be separated from the footmen, Pansy,” she insists with a nervous sounding giggle.

Romilda hums. “Unless there’s something you’d like to tell us, Pansy?”

Pansy snorts, much to Astoria’s visible horror. “Not unless you’re finally going to confess to those hugely embarrassing love letters you used to write to Lucius Malfoy.”

Romilda gasps. “How do you know about—”

“Oh, no!” Astoria exclaims, swiftly rising from her spot on the settee. “There’s a tear in the hem of my skirt! Excuse me, ladies, I really must attend to this.”

Pansy rolls her eyes. “Fancy that.”

Astoria scurries towards the door, shooting Pansy a worried glance. “I, ah, might…require some assistance? With the tear?”

“That’s what the maids are for, darling!” Romilda trills. “Now, do be quick about it, we’ve planned a pantomime for later!”

Astoria smiles weakly as she exits the room, and Romilda waits a precisely perfunctory thirty seconds before speaking again.

“Can you believe how positively tragic it is that Daphne Greengrass—oh, I suppose that isn’t her name now, is it—actually went through with marrying Ronald Weasley?”

Pansy stiffens. “Why, exactly, is that tragic, Romilda?”

Romilda lowers her voice. “It’s just—he isn’t just poor, is he? He’s the youngest son. He’ll never inherit anything. Not unless there’s some kind of epidemic.”

Pansy presses her lips together. “Yes, well, Daphne is quite pleased with the arrangement, so—”

“And those freckles, god, hopefully they don’t have children—”

Pansy’s thoughts on Daphne’s marriage are have always been identical to Romilda’s. Hearing them spoken aloud, though—hearing them emerge from vile, vile, vile Romilda Vane’s mouth—it strikes an unpleasant chord in Pansy’s conscience. Pansy knows Daphne; knows all the best parts of her and all the worst. Pansy is allowed to think that Daphne could’ve done far, far better than Ronald Weasley. Pansy isallowed to criticize Daphne’s choice in husband. Romilda Vane isn’t. Romilda Vane is an interloper. Romilda Vane doesn’t know anything.

“Romilda,” Pansy suddenly coos, overloud and impressively sharp. “Tell me, is it true that your father’s gambled away your dowry again?”

Romilda freezes. “Gossip is an ugly distraction,” she grits out. “Surely you know better than to engage in such frivolity.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Pansy hastens to add, deceptively sweet, “I’m sure it’s not the only reason you haven’t had any offers yet.”

Romilda glowers at her, outrage close to palpable, and then sputters, “You—I haven’t—”

“Anyway,” Pansy cuts her off, swaying regally as she gets to her feet. “It’s neither here nor there. There’s someone for everyone, darling. Chin up.”

The drawing room door swings shut behind her, and the snick of the lock as it echoes through the quiet semidarkness of the hallway—it’s beautiful. It’s poetry and it’s music and it’s a soaring sense of accomplishment, of righting a tremendous wrong and reclaiming control over her own happiness. It’s the most herself Pansy has felt in weeks.

Of course, Harry Potter has to ruin it.

Of course.

Because he’s standing just outside the door—lurking, really—and she runs into him. Barrels into him. Trips into him.

Reflexively, he grabs her elbows to steady her.

She doesn’t move.

He doesn’t let her.

Instead, he stares at her like she’s a stranger again, like she’s unexpected and unsettling and god, god, how dare he, how dare he look at her like that when she can feel the roughness his palms and the swirling warmth of his breath against her lips and his eyes, his eyes, his eyes are greener than the bloody wallpaper, it isn’t fair—

He’d heard what she’d said, obviously.

“Care to take a turn around the gardens?” he asks, somewhat stiltedly.

Chapter Text

They wind up in the hedge maze.

The silence between them is heavier than it normally is, a dead weight that feels crushing enough to cripple the atmosphere, drag down the impeccably manicured walls of the maze, bury them both beneath the barely-there glow of a dangling crescent moon. Pansy is dreading the coming conversation, the inevitability of having to explain herself to Harry Potter—because he’d heard her, heard what had to have sounded like an impassioned defense of, dear god, of Ronald Weasley— and Potter was going to have questions about that. In fact—

“Why did you do that?” Potter blurts out, jaw clenched at what appears to a quite unnecessarily aggressive angle.

“Do what?” Pansy drawls, mulishly determined to make this whole encounter as uncomfortable for him as she possibly can. She doesn’t owe him a thing; least of all, an answer.

“You hate Ron,” Potter states, flatly.

“Mm,” Pansy agrees. “Vehemently.”

“Then why did you defend him?”

“I didn’t defend him,” she huffs. The towering bulk of the hedge maze now feels vaguely oppressive, like it’s closing in on them from all sides. Coming here had been a poor choice. “Don’t be absurd.”

Potter’s eyes narrow. “What’s your game?” he demands.

“Are you even listening to yourself?”

“No, but I did listen to you back in that drawing room, and—”

“Why are you so paranoid about this?”

“Not about this,” Potter retorts. “About you.”

Pansy sighs, inspecting her fingernails with feigned nonchalance. “There’s no conspiracy. Perhaps I simply despise Romilda Vane. Perhaps it isn’t about Weasley at all.”

“Look, if you’re trying to—”

“Trying to what?” she exclaims. “Tear apart Daphne’s repulsive love match? Spare me.”

“Then what—”

“He’s Daphne’s,” Pansy interjects, rather harshly. She rubs the fabric of her skirt between her thumb and forefinger, abruptly relieved that it’s a bit too dark to catch the dull, multifaceted gleam of her newest Macmillan ring. She doesn’t want to lie to Harry Potter. She hates that she doesn’t want to lie. “Weasley is Daphne’s.”

“What does that have to do with—”

“Weasley is—important to Daphne,” Pansy says, talking right over Potter’s frankly willful lack of comprehension. “I will likely never understand why, but that doesn’t—negate that. An insult to him is an insult to her. To me.”

“So, it’s about you, not—”

“Don’t be an idiot, Potter,” Pansy scoffs, impatient and almost—well, almost disappointed, if she’s being honest with herself. She pauses. Sniffs. Scowls up at the sky, at the mess of stars and clouds and velvety midnight blue. She detests being honest with herself. “I wasn’t defending Weasley. That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it?”

Potter grunts, crossing his arms over his chest and drumming his fingers against the bend of his elbow; he has his shirtsleeves rolled up, revealing a smattering of wiry dark hair and corded lines of muscle. Pansy’s throat goes dry. A thrumming sort of tension twists at her insides.

“You were defending Daphne,” he says, slow and syrupy.

“Yes.”

Potter licks his lips, and the unfamiliar knot in Pansy’s lower abdomen—it tightens. “Because…” he trails off, mouth slanted with a smirk that’s summarily, uncharacteristically cruel. “Because she’s your only friend. Do I have that right, Parkinson?”

Pansy swallows, and then swallows again, dimly recognizing that the curdling coil of nausea suddenly churning in her gut must be humiliation. Humiliation. She’s humiliated. It’s a curious sensation, and she wonders if this is what Romilda Vane had felt—god, less than half an hour ago. Pansy had been so proud of that. Proud of how neatly she’d handled her. Handled the situation. Cold, clinical detachment—that’s what’s required to get ahead. To stay ahead. Pansy possesses it in spades.

Unless Potter is around, apparently.

“God, you are such an ass,” she eventually snaps, skewering him with a furiously unimpressed glare.

His eyes widen. “An—an ass,” he repeats, disbelievingly. “I’m an ass.”

“Yes!” she bleats, shoving at his chest with the heel of her palm. It’s grossly inappropriate for her to be touching him like this. For her to be shouting at him like this. She’s never cared less. “You are an ass. Do you really think I’m not aware —painfully, excruciatingly aware—of how unpopular I am? Of how intolerable everyone finds me?”

Potter’s expression flickers with something, a loosely guarded sort of regret, she suspects, but it doesn’t matter. He can’t take back what he’s said. She can’t take back who she is.

“Do you think I don’t know that Macmillan—that Ernie—only wants me because he’s a bloody, a bloody do-gooder who can’t abide not being the best-gooder and he needs my father’s Lords vote to achieve that? Really, Potter?”

Distantly, Pansy is conscious of the fact that she should shut up, should stem the torrential flood of words she’d never meant to let out in the first place, but it’s difficult to locate the source. Somewhere, there’s a wound to cauterize. A cut to stitch. A scrape to bandage. It’s unfortunate that blood has always made her a bit queasy.

“So—yes, alright, yes, Daphne is my only friend, and there isn’t—she knows me, and she likes me, and it’s not—” Pansy breaks off, squeezing her eyes shut. She’s been able to cry on demand since the age of twelve. This isn’t that. It isn’t. “An insult to Weasley is an insult to Daphne,” Pansy says again, on an audibly shaky exhale. “And an insult to Daphne is an insult to me.”

Potter doesn’t immediately respond, but his scrutiny is razor-sharp and thorough, even as his lips part and his tongue darts out and his features soften, completely at odds with the almost ferocious intensity of his gaze—but there’s that same familiar undercurrent of anger, too, the one that she thinks used to be there because he hadn’t understood her, no, not at all; the one that she thinks is there now because he does.

“Pansy,” he starts, and no, no, no, surely he’s never said her name before, not like that, not like this—

She isn’t afraid to admit to what she does next.

She leaves.

She flees.

Several weeks pass without incident.

Pansy continues to see much, much more of Potter than she’d like to.

Something changes, of course, after that night in the hedge maze. It has to. When Potter speaks to her now, his voice is carefully modulated, accent crisp and tone congenial, and their arguments—still petty, still biting—take on a cadence that feels…not affectionate, no, and not fond, certainly, but not quite antagonistic, either. Pansy smirks at the state of his shirtsleeves, badly ironed and unevenly cuffed, and his answering smile is rueful rather than scornful. It’s—friendly, almost. Tentative.

Weasley doesn’t treat her any differently—any more pleasantly—and she assumes that Potter hasn’t told him that she’s been running around town as the latest and most unlikely of Weasley champions. Vindictively, she thinks that Potter must not want Weasley to like her. Wistfully, she thinks that Potter must be respecting her right to privacy. To secrecy.

Pansy doesn’t have any good secrets.

Except—

Except she does, she supposes, because surely it’s a secret, the way Potter looks at her. Surely it’s for her, for her, for her and no one else, how his gaze positively sears into her skin, hotter than the sun, hotter than is technically tolerable, surely, and surely she isn’t meant to share his curiosity, his interest, with anyone other than herself, surely the lingering touches and the expectant silences and the steadily, steadily increasing pressure of his thigh against hers during midmorning carriage rides—

Surely.

Surely .

Surely what happens next, at Almack’s, is more than just a secret.

Pansy is tucked into the corner of the ballroom with Potter, nursing a mostly full cup of watery lemonade, head tilted back and lips turned up in a wince as the boning of her corset digs mercilessly into the curve of her ribs.

It’s after ten, and the crowd is suffocating.

“May I have this dance?” Potter suddenly asks, the formality emerging awkward and slightly wooden; unpracticed, like he hasn’t had cause to use it very often.

“I can’t waltz with you, Potter,” she replies, staring at his outstretched hand, ostensibly nonplussed—even as her heartbeat stalls, skips, starts up faster, practically in time with the string quartet. One-two-three. One-two-three. It can’t be healthy. She must be ill.

“Why not? You have permission,” Potter says, just as blandly.

“To dance with my fiancé.”

“Curious,” Potter murmurs, not lowering his hand. “I don’t see him here right now. Do you?”

She shakes her head.

Potter still doesn’t lower his hand.

“A walk, then,” he presses. “To the balcony.”

She doesn’t immediately respond—but then she’s nodding, accepting his proffered arm with a hesitance that feels significant, in some way, and letting him guide her around the perimeter of the room. They pass gilded Grecian columns and elaborately decorated pilasters, classical medallions studding the walls in between enormous oval mirrors. The sensation of being presented with the edge of a cliff, of swaying on a dusty bed of crumbling rocks and peering down at clouds and smoke and uncertainty; it’s overwhelming. She’s never been one for jumping.

When they finally step outside, she can’t remember why she’s there—with him, like this, surrounded by all the ingredients to a scandal and simply…holding her breath.

“I didn’t like you when we first met,” Potter says, haltingly, apropos of absolutely nothing.

Pansy quirks a brow. “The feeling was quite mutual, I assure you.”

“You weren’t different,” he goes on, as if she hadn’t spoken. “Until…”

“Until?”

His answering grin is lopsided. Endearing. Magical. “Until you were.”

She chokes out a laugh. “I didn’t like you when we first met,” she tells him. “I still don’t, really.”

“Really,” he echoes, pointedly skeptical.

“Really,” she whispers, trying not to smile. “You weren’t important at all.”

“And then?”

She pauses. Registers the air tremble, before going very, very still. “And then you were,” she confesses.

The kiss, when it comes, isn’t a surprise.

It’s slower than she’d thought it might be—not that she’d thought about this, about kissing Harry Potter, she’d never—unhurried and relaxed and deliberately, disarmingly gentle. It isn’t desperate. The world doesn’t end. Because there’s nothing, really, nothing but his lips brushing hers, up and down and up, the motion hazy with a tantalizing sort of reverence, like he can’t quite believe that she’s real. She can’t quite believe that he’s real.

It’s her first kiss.

She melts into it.

And it’s warm, so, so warm, the feeling that spreads out from her fingertips, following the course of her veins and burrowing deeper, seeping lower, a treacle-sticky lurch of want enveloping her abdomen and seizing her lungs and oh, she wants this, wants him, wants this moment and the next moment and a hundred, a thousand more, wants his smiles, crooked and half-cocked, wants his hands at her waist and his mouth against hers and that electric punch of adrenaline, excitement, his side and her side and the tremendous thrill of having to clash, having to compromise—

She wants to be understood.

She wants to be treasured.

Potter breaks the kiss.

His eyes are—dark. Fathomless. She wonders if she could drown in them—dive in and sink straight to the bottom—but then reminds herself that she knows how to swim.

“Pansy,” he says, voice cracking, and it’s guttural and it’s wavering and it’s imperfect and it’s—

Reality.

Reality .

She stares up at him, unable to reconcile the version of her that had mussed Potter’s hair and clutched Potter’s shoulders and wished for more, god—and the girl she’s always seen in the mirror. Because that girl, the one in the mirror, she’s engaged to someone else. She’s so close to—to something. Something she’s craved for ages. She’s going to be married. She’s going to be a duchess.

And before Potter can speak again.

Before he can ruin everything—ruin her—

Pansy’s stumbling backwards and she’s tripping down the balcony steps and she’s outside, she’s heading for the gardens, she’s running.

It starts to rain, of course.

Chapter Text

He chases her.

Harry Potter is nothing if not determined—the sort who isn’t about to postpone getting what he wants, not now that he’s figured out what it is.

Pansy isn’t like that; isn’t like him. She bides her time. Plans, and schemes, and tricks.

Harry grabs. Harry risks. Harry takes.

“Pansy!” he shouts, and it’s a bit of a miracle that she hears him at all over the roar of the rain. “Pansy, stop!”

She doesn’t stop.

She reaches a corner—the garden path loops back around to the balcony at some point; perhaps she can be back inside and covered in a blanket and ushered out to her father’s carriage before Harry can catch her—and the flimsy sole of her slipper skids on a wet cobblestone. She gasps, flails her arms, and feels a pair of strong, capable hands grasp her elbows, effectively preventing her from tumbling into a nearby flowerbed.

She spins around.

Wrenches herself backwards.

Is unaccountably—infuriatingly—relieved that Harry doesn’t move towards her again.

“Why are you running from me?” he asks, sounding exasperated.

Pansy’s entire face twitches with indignation. “To escape the torment of your presence,” she returns coolly, flicking water out of her eyes. “Evidently.”

“Really? Because I think that you just wanted to be dramatic.”

“You’re the one chasing me into a rainstorm.”

“As if you didn’t know I would catch you!”

“I didn’t!”

“Oh?” Harry drawls, somewhat acerbically.

“I didn’t,” she insists, stomping her foot into a puddle. An icy deluge of water soaks her all the way up to her ankle. She barrels on. “How was I to know you’re—you’re some kind of athlete?”

“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it didn’t require any outstanding feats of athleticism to catch you, the eighteen year old girl in a dress—”

“Regardless,” Pansy half-shrieks, “this eighteen year old girl in a dress doesn’t want to speak to you right now, so if you’d—”

He cuts her off with a disbelieving scoff. “Yeah, alright,” he mutters, raking a frustrated hand through the sopping wet mess of his hair and then pursing his lips, abruptly demanding, “Why are you marrying him?”

She opens her mouth to reply—and nothing comes out.

Rain continues to fall, splashing the cobblestones, obscuring her vision, but his eyes are still so green. So very, very green, and that shouldn’t be possible, she thinks, a distant sort of dread beginning to settle in the marrow of her bones. She shouldn’t be able to see him so clearly. He shouldn’t be so vivid, so fully-formed and intensely present, not when the rest of the world is such a blur. It shouldn’t be possible. And she wonders, can’t help but wonder, if it’s the same for him; if he looks at her and sees everything.

“That’s how you want to start this conversation?” she bleats, shoulders slumping.

“Why—are—you—marrying—him?” Harry repeats, carefully enunciating each word.

“I’m—we’re—he’s—”Pansy stumbles over her usual responses. I’m happy. We’re in love. He’s everything I’ve ever wanted. They feel inadequate, all of them, and she marvels at the fact that she’d never noticed before. “Don’t do this.”

“Why?” Harry presses, more harshly. “Why are you marrying him?”

“I don’t know,” she lies. “I—I’m supposed to, aren’t I? Marry him? He’s a duke.”

Harry tilts his back and yanks at the knot of his cravat. It’s already rumpled, of course. He really should get rid of his valet. “That’s it, then? The title?”

She fidgets uncomfortably. “Why do you care, Potter?” she asks, a bit meanly. “Do you want to marry me?”

He shrugs. “Maybe.”

Pansy gapes at him, visibly taken aback, but then—slowly, slowly, so slowly—anger begins to eclipse surprise. And she thinks. She thinks about how dreadful Harry had been to her that night at the Vanes’, about how his face had been concealed by skyscraping hedge maze shadows and hers had been illuminated by the shining sterling silver of the moon—and she swallows a laugh she can’t be sure wouldn’t emerge biting and bitter.

“Well, I don’t want to marry you,” she snaps, lifting her chin. It’s a mistake.

Harry’s expression softens. Maybe. It’s difficult to tell, really, when her gaze is darting every which way but his. “Pansy.”

She sniffs. “Yes?”

“You can’t marry him.”

“My engagement—”

“Can be broken.”

Her lips tremble. She tells herself it’s from the cold, but it isn’t. It isn’t. “The scandal—”

“Will be worth it.”

She stares at him, helpless and numb. She has never been uncertain about the shape of her future before. Not like this. “I’m—I’m supposed—I was going to be a duchess.”

A grin suddenly twitches at the corners of his mouth. “Was going to be a duchess.” It isn’t a question.

“I—of course I didn’t mean—how can you—why are you so calm about this?” she bursts out.

“Because.”

“Because,” she repeats, shaking her head, flinching at the sensation of rainwater being flung from the ends of her hair, dripping down the nape of her neck.

“Because you aren’t going to marry him,” Harry informs her, and he sounds confident and he sounds satisfied and he sounds smug and—

Oh , Pansy remembers now.

Remembers why she’s always wanted to prove him wrong, no matter the subject, no matter the consequence. Remembers why the thrill of fighting with him, indulging in a swift, albeit scathing exchange of insults while desperately, desperately ignoring the pounding penetrating ache behind her breastbone—she remembers why she’s been chasing that and not a wedding date. She remembers.

“And you’re certain of that, are you?” she finally asks. “That I’m not...that I’m going to call it off.”

“I am,” he declares, and then he’s taking a step forward, heavy and deliberate, not giving her a chance to deny what he’s doing, what he’s saying, even without the benefit of words—

And she could move, she knows. She could hike her skirts up and turn around and run all the way back to her father’s house and her fiancé’s castle and a long, fruitful, interminably boring life as a Macmillan. As a duchess.

She doesn’t move.

She doesn’t run.

She can’t, she can’t, she can’t.

“And what if you’re wrong?” she manages to whisper.

He reaches out, palm hovering above her cheek, and the heat of it—of him—it’s scalding. Searing. “Well, I imagine I’ll have you there to point it out,” he says, wryly, and Pansy—

Pansy laughs.

And then, obviously, she kisses him.

On the twenty-ninth of June, Romilda Vane agrees to marry Ernie Macmillan.

It’s a satisfactory proposal, if not a bit stale, and most of London commends her for stepping in after that ghastly Parkinson girl had broken the poor man’s heart. Romilda isn’t particularly bothered about that—for god’s sake, Macmillan had yawned during her acceptance speech—but she is rather quick to send a note to the Potters’ afterwards.

Because Romilda is going to be a duchess, and Pansy is going be a bridesmaid.