Protecting Your Home and Family Against Dark Forces.

[amalin]

Title: Protecting Your Home and Family Against Dark Forces
Author: Amalin
Notes: Stef did a gorgeous piece of fanart for this fic. It's at the bottom.

It's a cool summer, wreathed in mist, and Pansy spends it holed up in her room. She gets speckles of ink on her pillowcases from writing letters in bed, and more often than not, she falls asleep with old letters curled in the sheets beside her. But when she sleeps, it's dreamless.

Better to take precautions, Draco writes to her, in the first letter, wrapped around a small bottle of Dreamless Sleep. When Pansy was ten, her cousin told her a story about an army of Inferi, and she had nightmares for a year. She had thought Draco would have forgotten.

That's the first letter, where his tone is so uncharacteristically restrained that she immediately owls him back demanding his favorite flavor of jam, what color pyjamas he wears, and Crabbe's favorite kind of sweets. He promptly responds:

I only like marmalade. Blue. Ice pops.

Stop listening to those infernal Ministry pamphlets. I'm fine. We'll talk soon.

She worries for ten nights in a row until Draco slips into her room just after eleven on one cool, fog-heavy night, so silently she squeaks in terror, thinking he's a ghost. He says, "Oh, honestly, Pansy," and crawls into bed with her, the way they used to do when they were little, Draco sneaking through the Floo after his parents had gone to bed. He smells of milk and cinnamon and for the barest instant, Pansy can pretend they are only ten, whispering in the night about how Hogwarts will be. '

"Draco," she says, her voice smaller than she'd like it to be. "I read in the Prophet. About your things being confiscated."

"Mother's been upset," he says evasively into the pillow. She runs a hand unthinkingly over his hair and he re-settles with a sigh. "It's Scrimgeour, he's determined to look as if he's doing something useful. Father never liked him."

There is a touch of pent-up anger and anguish, tangled together, in the word Father. Pansy touches his shoulder. "They'll be out soon," she says, repeating what he had spat over and over again as they packed at the end of the term. "I wouldn't worry--"

"Not worry?" Draco hisses, something unrecognizable in his eyes as he lifts his head to look at her. She can see the muscles in his neck tensing. "It's not Father I'm worried about, Pansy."

"Who are you worried about?"

"It's none of your business," Draco snaps, so tightly that Pansy recoils from him. After a tense moment, he reaches out and tugs gently on a bit of her hair, falling against her chin. "I didn't--I didn't mean that, Pansy. I'm only--" But he doesn't finish.

"You can tell me," Pansy says, despite the fact that her heart is pounding. There is something steeled and quiet about Draco that has never been there before, and for an instant, the boy lying beside her with his hair falling pale on the pillow is a stranger. "You can tell me anything."

"How do I know you're really Pansy?" Draco asks, one eyebrow quirked, rolling over to look at her. At least he's smiling. It occurs to Pansy she hasn't seen him smile since school.

She sits up, chin on one knee, and looks seriously at him. "Ask me a question, then."

Draco looks irritated. "I was kidding," he says. "Those precautions are for the stupid Order, they're for people worried about Death Eaters, not people like us."

People like us.

"Ask me a question," she persists.

Draco scowls. "Fine," he finally huffs. "Do you remember when we were attacked by your mother's Devil's Snare in the west gardens?"

"That was the Venomous Tentacula, not the Devil's Snare," Pansy says promptly. "And you always sleep on your back with your left arm across your body. And you snore."

"I don't snore," Draco replies, scowling childishly. He pokes her. "Imposter."

"Oh, but you do."

"I do not," Draco says, smiling, and then he looks away. In a tone that makes a chill run up Pansy's spine, he says, "I'll tell you later, Pansy. Right now I don't want to think about it, all right?"

Pansy touches his shoulder again. "All right."

Draco takes up too much room and his feet are cold and he snores. And, just as Pansy is lingering on the borderlands between waking and dreaming, he shudders into her and says distinctly, with distress, "Please don't come closer, please don't, please," and then makes such a noise of fear and horror that Pansy immediately shakes him awake, her eyes wide and panicked in the darkness.

"Sorry," he says, without looking at her, and settles back to sleep again without another word. He has two more nightmares. At the end of the last, Pansy tiptoes to the bathroom and upends the bottle of sleeping potion down the sink. Her reflection has a mess of snarled hair and her eyes are dark with exhaustion, but she thinks if Draco can battle his nightmares alone, so can she.

It's mid-August and the sun is out for the first time in three weeks, pale and filtered. They are in the garden at Malfoy Manor, shoulders bumping companionably, and Draco says suddenly, "Do you think it's very cold, Azkaban?"

"I," Pansy says, startled.

"Don't answer," Draco interrupts before she can even continue, and his voice is hard and desperate. "I don't want you to answer." There's scarcely a pause. "I went to Knockturn Alley yesterday."

Pansy stares at him. "Alone?" The idea of Draco, weaving alone through Knockturn Alley and its few unsavory visitors, scares her more than the dream she's had for four consecutive nights, which is of so many Inferi surrounding her she cannot see anything else, their decaying, cold hands reaching out for hers. In the cool sunlight, she shivers.

"Yes, alone." Draco flicks his hair out of his face impatiently. He has a strange look on his face, some glowing look of pride and fear all at once. "It's been empty lately anyway. No one wants to be seen associated with the Dark Arts. I just had to check something. I've got to go back, and I'll go alone then, too. Things are happening, Pansy--bigger things--important things--"

Pansy means to say, "Oh, be careful." Somehow, she ends up kissing him instead.

Draco kisses her back with strange precision, as if he is preparing a difficult potion. It is something new about him, this horrible air of restraint, and she is so upset by the sudden thought of it that she reaches over and seizes his forearm, pulling him closer.

Draco hisses and leaps away from her the instant her fingertips graze his sleeve. She is left cold and staring, and he spits, "Don't touch me!"

"I'm--" Mortified, she can only look helplessly on his frantic expression. She shouldn't have kissed him, Pansy thinks, she always knew Draco was strange about being touched. But then Pansy sees his knuckles white from gripping his arm, the look on his face.

"Oh," Pansy says very faintly. "But Draco--but you're only sixteen--"

"And I'm very useful," he says coolly, as if it is something to be proud of. "It's an honor."

"Have you met--" Pansy begins, and finishes with an entirely different question. "Can I see it?"

"Yes. No." Draco's eyes are inscrutable and she thinks she has never known him less. How can she have known him for sixteen years and yet not recognize this strange, brittle boy before her? "I don't want you to see it."

"Did it hurt?" Pansy asks softly.

"A bit," Draco says. He sounds too airy for her to believe.

"Draco--"

He looks up at her, eyes suddenly ablaze. "My father would be proud," he says, determined. "Don't you think? He'd be proud of me." When Pansy doesn't have an answer, he reaches out for the nearest flower--pale white, curled in on itself--and picks it apart without seeing it. It's suddenly cold in the garden. Pansy wants to touch him again, maybe slip her hand under his, but she doesn't.

After a cold, awkward moment that stretches on for what feels like ten, as if nothing has passed between them, Draco says with forced cheer, "Mother had Fenrir Greyback to the Manor last week for supper, you know. She quite enjoys entertaining, even with--with Father gone."

Pansy eyes him skeptically. "She enjoys entertaining a werewolf?" she whispers. "But I heard--I heard he took tea with Isadora Wilkes and ripped three of her house elves apart--with his teeth--"

"He's a friend of the family," Draco says, though he looks as if he has heard the same story. "He's been very helpful, you see. To the Dark Lord. He's quite important. Like me."

"I heard he likes eating children," Pansy says, still whispering. Draco looks at her with scorn.

"Oh, grow up," he tells her, something cruel and tight in his voice, and Pansy has to look away so that tears don't spill from her eyes. The night after they heard about the arrests at the Ministry, she had crept into the boys' dormitory and curled up in Draco's bed with him, pretending not to see the silent tears shining in his eyes. He'd wrapped his arms around her when he finally fell asleep.

She hasn't really felt warm since then. Shivering in the mist, Pansy says irritably, "When did you?"

Draco doesn't answer. He slips his hand over hers, and his fingers are cool, clammy, like everything these days. Pansy tries not to lean into him.

They're on the brink of something, she thinks. She just doesn't know what, yet. She isn't sure she wants to know, or if she even wants to move beyond this day, this hour, this cold garden on a gray, sour afternoon.

"I don't think we'll be seeing much of Potter tonight," Draco smirks as he settles his fork back on his plate, poking disinterestedly at the remnants of food there. Already there have been several empty seats in the Great Hall, but Pansy had not noticed Potter's as one of them. Now she looks up at Draco, and at the sound of Potter's name, several heads turn towards him, too. Pleased, he continues, "I don't expect he'll be joining us, if you know what I mean."

Pansy puts down her goblet of pumpkin juice, but Blaise is faster. In a tone of both disdain and reluctant curiosity, he says, "What have you done?"

"It's hardly your business what I do," Draco says. He's speaking loudly so the whole table can hear, showing off. "I'm trusted with certain things, you see, and it wouldn't do for just anyone to overhear the Dark--"

But before he can even finish his sentence, both Harry Potter and Professor Snape appear in the entranceway to the Great Hall, and the entire table quiets to watch them enter. Conversations are dying all over the Hall, though several spark back up in whispers at the sight of Harry Potter's face covered in blood. Fingers brushing Pansy's as he reaches for his cup, Draco smirks.

"That's what I've done to Potter," he says with relish. "And as for the Dark Lord--"

"Come off it," Blaise says irritably. "You can't even defend yourself against the Weasley girl, what would he want with you?"

"Oh, there are things." Draco surveys the table and, finding several people staring at him with mouths agape, looks satisfied. "There are plenty of reasons he wants me specifically--I've always said the Malfoys are important, haven't I said that--he values the Malfoy name--"

"I shouldn't think the Malfoy name is worth much these days," Theodore Nott says from beside Crabbe, raising an eyebrow. If possible, he's grown thinner and more sullen over the summer, and he quirks an eyebrow at Blaise as he speaks. "Now that your father's got himself shipped off to Azkaban, the Ministry's practically teeming over the Manor, aren't they? They dropped in for a visit the other day, but Mother assured them there was nothing to see."

"Your father's keeping mine company," Draco says pointedly. "At least I'm doing something about it. What are you doing?"

Nott doesn't have an answer to that. As the table begins talking about when Urquhart will hold Quidditch trials, Draco leans over Pansy for the bowl of potatoes. His forearm bumps her shoulder as he does, but his face doesn't change.

"It stops hurting," Pansy says, almost to herself. Draco gives her a sharp look.

"What?"

"Your arm. It doesn't hurt anymore, does it?"

"Not right now," Draco says. He looks at her for a long moment, as if he doesn't quite recognize her, or perhaps as if he doesn't want to. She stares back, not knowing what to say, when suddenly his eyes refocus and he looks away from her at his plate. "These potatoes are disgusting," he says. "There's too much butter, it's making me sick."

If Pansy were younger, she would reach out for his hand; even as recent as the end of last term, she might have done, in a moment of fear or uncertainty. But now, she doesn't dare. She doesn't touch him unless he touches her first.

The day Katie Bell accidentally handles the necklace and goes to the Infirmary, Pansy is not at Hogsmeade. She is in the back of the library, copying her Charms homework in a script that is meant to look like Draco's. He hasn't asked her for it, and she knows he'll only protest, but she can't think of anything else to do.

Pansy forgets about Charms, however, when she enters the Slytherin Common Room and finds Draco surrounded by Theodore Nott, Daphne Greengrass, and Malcolm Baddock. Crabbe and Goyle are lurking, as ever, behind Draco.

"Pansy," Daphne exclaims, immediately getting up from where she's sitting beside Draco, as if she knows she's out of line. "Have you heard what happened to Katie Bell?"

"Who?" Pansy says, settling into Daphne's former seat. Draco spares her a look, but says nothing.

"Some Griffindor," Blaise drawls, wandering into the room from the boys' dormitories. "Got herself put in the Infirmary from a cursed necklace. Rather stupid, if you ask me."

"She was under Imperius," Nott points out.

Blaise snickers. "You're only saying that because you fancy her."

"Excuse me, I do not."

"You do," Daphne interrupts, "but the point is, everyone's going mad about it now, as if Hogwarts is suddenly under attack. What kind of idiot would try and slip a cursed necklace into Hogwarts? Even that Squib with his detector would have caught it immediately."

Blaise shifts his eyes pointedly towards Draco.

"I don't know why you're looking at me," Draco says, returning the sneer. "I'm only doing the job I was told to do. I'm busy with the Dark Lord's direct orders--"

"Oh, does he come to you in dreams?" Theodore mocks. "Or are you having personal meetings now? It's not as if he might have better things to do than coach you through some secret, special task--"

"Perhaps I'm more important than you know, Nott," Draco snarls.

Theodore only raises an eyebrow at him.

"Oh yes," Draco barrels on, though Blaise and Theodore have already lost interest and Malcolm Baddock is busy poring over somebody else's Potions notes. Daphne, at least, is listening, and Draco flashes her a lofty sneer. "The Dark Lord trusts me very much. We've got--an understanding--"

And that's when Pansy knows.

She goes to him after the rest of them have cleared away, Blaise and Theodore arguing tirelessly about the fourth ingredient of Pepper-Up Potion as they step towards the sixth year boys' dormitory. When their voices fade, Pansy catches Draco's arm.

"He'll kill you if you don't," she says, very softly. "Right?"

Draco looks at her in the silence. After a long moment, he nods, as if he doesn't trust his own voice.

Pansy says, just as softly, "Are you scared?"

Draco doesn't say, "Of course I am." Nor does he say, "Of course I'm not."

"Goodnight, Pansy," he says, and kisses her on the forehead. She watches him until the door shuts behind him, and even then, she must stand there, alone, in the shadows, for several minutes before she can leave.

That night, she stops dreaming about Inferi. She starts dreaming about Draco. Dying.

Draco stops socializing, so Pansy does too. She starts skipping breakfast, or dashing in at the very end, when she can grab a piece of toast and be off. Even Blaise, who used to keep her company when the others went out on midnight broom rides, goes out with them now, while Draco is the one who stays behind.

And when he sits in the common room, after the others have gone to bed, she sits beside him, even when she's exhausted and finished her schoolwork hours before. Sometimes he snaps, "Leave me alone, Pansy," and she does, going off to the other corner to read for Charms. It's never longer than half an hour before he sends a wadded up ball of paper whizzing at her head in apology. Sometimes, when she unfurls it, he's written things like, What's your favorite sweet?

Peppermint toads, she scribbles back.

After a minute, when he finishes the sentence he's writing, he gets up and comes to sit next to her on the window seat. "Liar. You've liked sugar quills best since you were five."

Pansy turns her nose up at him. "We've all got to grow up sometime," she intones mockingly.

Draco snorts and tosses the wad of paper in her lap. "You can't change your favorite sweet without telling me. I'd start thinking you were Imperiused and we'd have to send you to Azkaban."

"Shut up."

"You could share a cell with my father," Draco says generously, as if this is some kind of coveted prize. Pansy thinks about sharing a cold stone room with Lucius Malfoy and shivers, though the fire on the other side of the room is still burning. Not noticing, perhaps by choice, Draco adds, "I'd even send you sugar quills. You could share."

"Draco." She shoves at his elbow, which is resting on the arm of her chair. "Stop, that's not funny."

"All right," he says. "My father doesn't even like sugar quills, so it doesn't matter. Anyway, I'd never let them take you to Azkaban."

Pansy hates that she feels comforted by this. To make herself feel better, she throws the wad of paper at him again. "You weren't at Quidditch yesterday."

"How would you know? You didn't go."

"I'm not deaf," Pansy retorts. "Harper wouldn't stop going on about it, Potter this, Potter that." She snickers. "He sounded a bit like you, now that I think of it."

Draco scowls. "I felt sick."

"You felt sick enough to pass up the chance to beat Harry Potter at Quidditch? You don't seem to be dying. Your arms and legs look intact. Draco--"

"Look," Draco says angrily, "I don't have time for stupid games anymore, all right? Maybe Potter has the time to play Quidditch, maybe it's all fun and games for Potter and his precious parties, but I don't have time for that sort of thing anymore."

"Because you're doing more important things," Pansy says, softly, half-skeptically.

Draco looks away.

"Do you have time to eat, then? Or sleep?" When he doesn't answer, she pushes on. "Draco, you're getting so thin, you need to eat more. You can't keep skipping dinner. You have to take care of yourself."

"If I don't take care of him," Draco says, his voice thin, "I won't have to worry about taking care of myself, will I?"

He looks small, sitting beside her. Pansy wants to fling her arms around him, but Draco is peculiar about being touched lately, and he has only let her hug him twice in her life. She mentally searches her trunk for Pepper-Up Potion, but she sold the last of it to a third year whose mother had been killed when she needed a few Sickles, and all she can do is look up at him, hoping that he knows.

"Are you close?" she says hesitantly. "With the, the project?"

"I'm working on it," Draco snaps, his lip lifting slightly at her terminology. "I'm working--it's coming along, I've just--" He looks very pale. "I'll do it, I'm closer, I know I am."

Pansy bites her lip. "Do you need help?"

Draco's response is instantaneous. "No," he snarls. "I don't want you involved--you already stand guard on Tuesdays -- nobody can help me, Pansy--nobody can--"

"Potter suspects you," she says quietly. "About the necklace. I overheard him and the Mudblood whispering in the library yesterday."

"I don't care what Potter thinks," Draco says, his face drawn and sharp. "He doesn't know a thing, thinks he's so special. Just wait until Dumbledore drops dead, then we'll see how great he thinks he is."

"Your Transfiguration marks are slipping."

Draco whirls on her. "Enough, Pansy! Who are you, my mother? Why should I care about Transfiguration? I might not even be here next year, so I don't see the point. The Dark Lord needs me--"

"And otherwise, he'll kill you," Pansy whispers.

Something twists in Draco's face. He says, pained, "Don't."

"What happens when he doesn't need you anymore, Draco? When he hasn't got a use for you?"

"I'm a Malfoy," Draco snarls, "he'll never be tired of me, I'm--I'm a Malfoy--"

He looks furious and frightened all at once, flushed in the last light of the fire, and she wants to say something fierce that will make him look at her, like, "I'll protect you from anything." Or maybe "I love you," if it comes out as grittily and harsh as it sounds in her mind. But she says neither; both fitting clumsily around her tongue, and by the time she even tries, Draco is not looking at her anymore.

"What happened when we went to the shore when we were six?" Pansy says, rather than attempt anything else.

"You ate too many sandwiches and were sick all over my mother," Draco replies, and the corner of his mouth twitches upwards in spite of himself. They ask these questions every now and then, not out of suspicion but out of a strange sense of comfort; at least, Pansy thinks so. Draco touches her hair and says, "What's my favorite tap in the Prefect's bath?"

"Ice foam, of course," Pansy smiles. She leans into his touch. "Draco--if you don't succeed--"

"I'm going to," Draco hisses. "I'm almost there. Soon they'll see. I'm cleverer than them all. "

Pansy doesn't look at him. She leans against him and says nothing.

She hears from Snape, in the middle of finishing her chocolate pudding, where Draco is and what has been done to him. She doesn't remember how she gets to the Infirmary, or what anyone thinks as she dashes past, only the way the sun is setting just so as she skids in the door, the last rays streaming in through the window and nearly blinding her.

"Draco?" she gasps out. On the furthest bed, near the window, a still figure lies. Pansy flings herself towards him.

He looks more vulnerable than ever, lying there in a hospital bed, gaunt and pale; he is still shirtless, and there are scars running from his chest to his face, though even as she watches, they seem to grow less noticeable by the minute. "Draco," she whispers, and reaches out, almost nervously, for his hand.

"The scarring will subside," Snape says from behind her, and Pansy jumps. It occurs to her that she is kneeling on the tile floor, still breathing hard from her mad dash here. Snape, however, merely continues coolly, "He will be fine, though you can be assured that Potter will suffer for his actions."

Pansy looks up at him. She has never felt any particular closeness with Snape, always felt slightly resentful of the way Draco talked of him and a bit scared of him after Potions, but now she recognizes that Draco is right: Snape is Slytherin's only protector here. He stands before her, his hair hanging greasily around his sour expression, and she wants desperately to hug him. After a second, she realizes that she has tears on her cheeks.

"I'm--I'm sorry," Pansy mutters, wiping at her face furiously. She has never cried in front of anybody but Draco, except for her sixth birthday party when Tracey Davis pulled her hair and stomped on her birthday cake, and she is horrified to find that she can't stop. Draco has always told her that crying makes her weak and vulnerable, that she should never be seen like that. "Oh god," Pansy sniffles, "I don't--I shouldn't--"

Snape only looks at her for a moment, which is better than any attempt to comfort her, and finally hands her a small jar of yellow salve. "You can rub this on his scars," Snape says. "It will help the healing process along."

"Thank you," Pansy whispers, but Snape is already halfway out of the room.

Pansy quietly unscrews the lid of the jar. It's beginning to get dim in the Infirmary, and all the other beds are empty; long shadows are starting to stretch, languid, across the walls. She wipes her face again with her arm, then takes off her robes, rolls up the sleeves of her blouse, and dips her fingers into the salve.

Draco still doesn't stir when Pansy presses her fingers onto his warm skin and smoothes them over his chest. For some reason, she is profoundly grateful that he is warm; she had feared, perhaps irrationally, that his skin would be clammy and cold, like the dead. He looks pale enough to be: his face is hollower, and his skin a bit greyer. In the cool, darkening room, Pansy could almost trick herself into believing he was dead, or even an Inferius. She shivers. She has to remind herself that it's Draco, only Draco, and his skin is as smooth and warm as it's always been.

At that moment, Draco's eyes flicker open and he says hoarsely, "I don't let just anybody touch me. What's my favorite Quidditch team?"

"Norwegian National," Pansy says, resisting the urge to kiss him. She has never been so happy to see those eyes, open, looking at her. "Your favorite match is from October 9, 1993, when Knudsen scored two hundred points single-handedly."

Draco's eyebrow quirks minutely. He still looks faded. "This from the girl who fell off her broomstick," he whispers. "I bet Granger could fly better than you do."

"Excuse me?" Pansy says crisply. She waves the tube of salve at him. "Do you want me to put this on you or not?"

"It smells," Draco sniffs, wrinkling his nose. It does smell, acrid and sour, but she persists all the same.

"Fucking Potter," Pansy snarls, when she screws the cap back on and sits it on his bedside table. "They let him get away with everything here, don't they? When I think--he could have killed you, Draco--"

"Yes," Draco says, but he doesn't sound as if his heart is in it. "I hate Potter."

"And he--you could have died--was it terrible?"

Draco still looks a bit green. "Lots of blood," he says. "I've never seen that much blood."

Pansy tries to imagine him pressing his wand into Dumbledore's long, white beard and shouting the Killing Curse. She can't. It worries her that she can't keep this image in her head, while every night she sees people pressing their wands into Draco's throat, saying the words with ease.

"Hey," Draco says. "You've been crying."

"I have not," Pansy says, looking away from him. "What? I haven't been!"

"You have," Draco insists. "Over me, even." He gives her a smirk. "All of Slytherin House is likely in hysterics over the potential danger to my life, I'm certain. I'll bet Millicent's threatened to jump off the Astronomy Tower at least twice."

Pansy snickers. They both know that most of Slytherin has tired of hearing Draco's boasting by now, and in any case, he hasn't been boasting as much lately. Crabbe and Goyle, for their part, care little about whether the House currently favors Draco or not, but neither are too happy, Pansy knows, about routinely turning into girls.

"I'm sure Theodore and Blaise are already after Potter," Pansy reassures him. "He's probably beaten to a pulp already. He'll be up here to keep you company in no time."

Draco gives her a sour face. She laughs.

"And if Slytherin isn't in an uproar," Pansy says, a little softer, "I'll just go stir things up a bit, shall I? Move them along?"

"That's my girl," Draco says proudly.

She kisses him on the forehead when she draws up the sheet and leaves him to the dark. In the next week, at least eight Slytherins get detention for going after Potter. She isn't sorry.

Pansy only hears the story later, when it's gone through the rumor mill and been chewed up and spit out. By then, she is furious at Draco for telling her nothing, for leaving her behind. He must have known, of course, that the sounds of fighting would not reach them in the dungeons; she woke several times that night, uneasy, but heard nothing of concern. And he didn't tell her. She imagines him, leading the Death Eaters out of the Room of Requirement, head held high, brimming with pride.

Were you scared? she thinks. Even then?

She finds Potter the day before Dumbledore's funeral, sitting in the library with Granger and Weasley. "Get out," Pansy snarls at them. "I need to talk to Potter."

"No," Granger says, eyes meeting Pansy's, her tone just as tough. "If you can say it to Harry, you can say it to us."

But Potter raises a hand. "Hermione, it's fine," he says. "You can go sit over there. I'll be fine."

"We'll be watching," Weasley says tightly. Pansy wrinkles her nose at him as he walks away.

Potter looks tired. She looks at him, for a second, and wonders: she has never had a conversation with Harry Potter, only exchanged insults with him from Draco's side, and surprisingly she's never been this close to him either. His glasses are as old and pathetic as Draco says. His eyes are also as green. She clenches her jaw.

"Potter," she says.

"I suppose you're looking for Malfoy."

She looks down at the table for a second, hating that she has come to Potter, of all people. "There are a lot of rumors," she finally mutters. "I wasn't sure what to think."

Potter shrugs. "Gone. I don't--I don't know where. Snape took him and ran off with him."

"Oh," Pansy says. She thinks of the way Snape stood in the middle of the Infirmary and watched her cry over Draco's still body. She thinks, Draco, you idiot. Why did you have to try and protect me? Why didn't you tell me?

After a second, she gives in and asks, "Is it true, then? That Draco--that he--"

"He couldn't kill Dumbledore in the end," Potter says, squinting at her, as if he is unable to tell whether the look on her face is relief or disappointment. "He was--he was scared."

"I know," Pansy says softly. They both are silent, looking at each other. She says, "I still hate you for almost killing him with that horrible spell."

"I didn't--"

"You didn't have to mean it. You nearly killed him."

After a silent moment, Potter looks out the windows, out across the grounds. The sun is shining. For some reason, that makes Pansy want to cry. Potter says quietly, "If he wants--you know. I bet the Order could work something out. Dumbledore said so."

Pansy looks at him, the serious set of his jaw, the way his eyes blaze at some point beyond her. She says, stiffly, "I'll tell him," before walking away.

She doesn't want to admit to Potter that she might never speak to Draco again.

It's a cool summer, wreathed in mist, and Pansy spends it ripping up flowers in the garden, sulking. She yells at her mother to leave her alone every time she's approached, and after the first week or so, her parents leave her to her own devices. This mostly includes lying in bed, sleepless, and waiting for the dawn to come. Sometimes she writes letters to Draco, then burns them afterwards. There's little point in keeping them around.

Blaise Zabini visits one day, Apparating in and coming up to her room without asking. "Hey," he says, sitting next to her. He's brought her a pack of sugar quills, which he tosses on her desk with something like scorn. But she turns restlessly away from him when he puts a hand on her shoulder.

"Don't," she says. She doesn't much like when people touch her, these days.

They go down to the gardens and sit. "I ran into your mother on the way up," Blaise says, a bit contemptuously, when Pansy doesn't speak. "She told me to stay for tea."

Pansy snorts. "I don't even take tea with her. Or anything else. I don't want to look at her."

They're quiet again. After a pause, Blaise takes the flower from her hand before she can tear the petals off. "Pansy," he says. "You can't just--wait around."

"I know," she says furiously, and looks away from him. "Is that what you came here for? To check on me? To tell me I'm being a little idiot?"

"Look, I don't know what to do either," Blaise snaps. "And Mum's marrying again. You'd think all the men she'd consider eligible would be off, you know, with--"

"Right," Pansy says, but she isn't paying attention. There's a dark shape coming towards her out of the sky. An owl, growing nearer and nearer. It's clutching a roll of parchment and despite herself, despite how angry it makes her at her own stupid emotions, hope wells up in her. Blaise is silent now, too, watching as the owl flaps towards them and finally distributes the little scroll in Pansy's lap.

"Who's it from?" he says, inspecting his fingernails, his manner a bit too uninterested to hide his real curiosity.

Pansy shrugs as she unrolls it. It's only a line, a single question, but it makes her break into a smile. Blaise peers at the parchment until Pansy realizes he's looking and stuffs it quickly into her pocket. He manages to see part of it, however, as he folds his arms and drawls, "What happened in Beaulieu-sur-Mer?"

"My first kiss," Pansy says airily. She can feel the parchment folded in her pocket, and she slips her hand in beside it, holding it between her fingers. The day, gray or not, is suddenly full of light.

Suppressing a smile, Pansy stands up, one hand still holding her letter. "Come on," she says. "Mother's expecting us for tea."

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