Hearts
Title: Hearts
Pairing(s): Seamus/Pansy; implied Draco/Pansy
Rating: NC-17
Summary Seamus is not long for this world, and Pansy knows it.
Word Count: ~4500
Warnings/Content: Angst, a bad habit, worse language, rough(ish) sex, dirty talk, non-explicit mentions of violence.
Author's/Artist's notes: I wrote this for wizard_love, and it ended up as a gift for the community. tania_sings & prongsxwormtail were my betas, and they made this a zillion times better -- thank you, ladies ♥! I love you!
The legendary muscle that wants and grieves,
The organ of attachment, the pump of thrills
And troubles, clinging in stubborn colonies
Like pulpy shore-life battened on a jetty.
Slashed by the little deaths of sleep and pleasure,
They swell in the nurturing spasms of the waves,
Sucking to cling; and even in death itself-
Baked, frozen-they shrink to grip the granite harder.
- from "The Hearts" by Robert Pinsky
Seamus is not long for this world.
Pansy is sure of it. The Carrows have been using him for target practice nearly every day now, and he laughs in their gruesome faces.
His own is equally bad, but it's a different sort of gruesome. He wears it well. His split lip looks like a heart.
Hearts.
She wants to draw them on him; she wants to scratch them into his skin; she wants to paint them on his ribcage in lipstick and lick them into the steam on his washroom mirror and circle his navel with a sticky one sketched in his come.
When Draco comes, he bites the noise in half with sharp teeth, like it hurts his fucking ego to feel so good. Seamus is open-mouthed, and he swears himself into a frenzy; he pulls her hair until her head snaps back and her jawbone cracks against his crooked nose. He wants to hear how much she likes it; he wants her to say how much she fucking needs it; he says ask me for it, and she does.
She asks him to fuck her until she can't stand up, until she can't work her mouth around a cleaning spell, until the world narrows into a point as sharp as a knife and then shatters.
It's never enough.
There isn't enough of him to fill her empty spaces, but she tries. She tries
She gets down on her knees in the lavatory on the third floor, and she takes all of him down her throat. He's big and he isn't gentle, but if she wanted gentle, she'd go find Draco and his cold hands and skeleton cheeks; Draco, who touches her like she's going to crumble and he doesn't want to bother cleaning up the mess.
Seamus likes the mess. He likes her spit and the glitter her lips leave on his cock; he likes to stare down at her with two bruised and swollen eyes and watch the sweat trickle down her temples; he likes it when she scrapes her teeth along his nerves and slides off the end with a pop that echoes off the stone walls. He likes her to swallow; he likes to watch the muscles in her neck move when she does.
He likes to yank her to her feet and push her shoulders into the wall, pinch her nipple hard between his index finger and his thumb and kiss her. He likes to pant into her mouth and drip against her hip and taste himself on her tongue.
His taste is brave and stupid and bitter and brilliant.
He tastes like the things that are going to get him killed, and Pansy worries that she will go right along with him. Her biggest worry, however, is that by the time this is through, she won't mind at all.
_______________
The first time they speak, he is holding onto the edge of the sink, dry-heaving and bleeding into it from a gash in his chin.
Pansy hears him coughing, a jagged sound like parchment tearing, and she thinks it's Draco. She comes anxiously around the corner, and he meets her eyes in the mirror as she skids gracelessly through a puddle of water.
They stare.
The sight of him makes her stomach whirl. He is gory and grimy, like he has been lying on a floor somewhere for a very, very long time. He probably has. She's heard the stories, mostly punctuated with eye-rolling and maybe some laughter, but she never quite believed them. She does now.
"Oh, sorry, Parkinson," he says, finally, wiping his wrist across his mouth. "Did you need the urinal? I'll be out of here as soon as I'm done pissing blood."
"… I thought you were someone else." She sounds moronic. She thinks maybe, somehow, it's her brain that is leaking into the basin.
"I'm not."
Wordlessly, she pulls handful after handful of paper towels from the dispenser and hands them to him before walking out. He holds them in his fists and watches her leave. She feels his eyes all the way to Charms.
_______________
The first time he touches her, they are in an empty classroom on the fifth floor, and he is her prisoner.
Pansy doesn't know what he's done to chafe Alecto Carrow's arse, and by this point, she is only mildly curious, and only because it's him. Playing Dementor is not how she would prefer to spend her evenings, and she is growing ever more resentful every time she's caught by the elbow and instructed to keep an eye on the ingrate 'til I get back.
She has never been made to keep an eye on Seamus before - it's usually some pants-wetting first- or second-year who's made a mistake out of mute terror rather than insubordination - and he is not at all what she is used to. The first thing he does is sprawl out in a chair and prop his feet up on the desk. Next, he pulls a fag out of his side pocket and leans back into the sconce on the wall to light it. He does all of this without saying a word.
Pansy leans against the doorjamb and folds her arms across her chest. The quiet is discomfiting; his posture of nonchalance does not help. She isn't quite sure what about the scenario is so unsettling; certainly she ought to prefer silence to sniveling. Perhaps it is his utter lack of fear. It puts her off-balance. It's not entirely human, maybe. When she can bear it no longer, she speaks.
"Filthy Muggle habit, that," she says, and she wrinkles her nose as smoke curls out of his mouth.
His chin lifts, and he looks at her, cool and dark as the lake outside. "Sit on my cock, Parkinson," he says, then runs the heel of his hand obscenely down the crotch of his denims and makes a gesture like he is jerking himself.
Pansy narrows her eyes. "You'd like that, wouldn't you? Not seeing much in the way of action now that Loony Lovegood and the little Weasley bitch have run off, are you?"
Seamus is out of his chair so fast that it clatters to the floor behind him.
Pansy draws her wand, but it doesn't even give him pause. She is too startled by this to use it, and then it is too late: he is right in her face; her wand is at her feet, and both of her wrists are pinned to the wall over her head. He still has his fag in his mouth, caught tight between his teeth. The cherry burns close to her cheek.
"Some mouth on you, miss. Think I'll tell that windy fuck Malfoy to do us all a favour; stop kicking yer backdoor in and gag you with it, instead." He says it through the side of his mouth, through the clench of his jaw, and it would be almost comical if this was not happening here and to her and with him.
"You're foul," Pansy grits out, and she hopes he isn't close enough to feel her heart slamming against her ribs. "Get your fucking hands off of me."
Seamus smirks, and his fag bounces between his lips. There is actually a glimmer of humour in his eyes now, and Pansy's blood pounds and pounds and pounds. She is half-afraid (the other half is infuriated or indignant or turned on or something that she can't identify), but she feels alive with it, and she isn't convinced she wants it to stop. There is so little that moves her blood anymore.
"You're gone in the head, you are. Take my fucking hands off you? You were a bloody half-second away from hexing my plums off. Think I'm mental, do you?"
"You must be, if you were thinking I was going anywhere near your cock."
He outright laughs at her this time, low and hoarse, and it stings. Pansy moves to pull her wrists away, but he is much stronger than she is. He leans in close, and she is frightened for a moment that her hair is going to catch fire. "You’d just about give your left tit for it, wouldn't you?"
She stops breathing.
She will never really know for sure what compels her next move. It isn't, perhaps, her brightest moment, but she does it. She stares straight into his face, leans forward, and licks the ash from the end of his fag; swipes her tongue along the blunt end to put it out.
It burns. It tastes like acid and death and chemicals. She can feel her tongue start to blister almost immediately.
He drops the fag from his mouth, crushes it underfoot, and kisses her.
He is all sour, ashy breath and ferocity, and Pansy is sure now that he can feel her heart, because she can feel his. Thudthudthudthudthud in his chest, rabbit-paced, it smashes against her body like a fist. This is the first time she wonders if he might be frightened, after all.
She holds onto that thought for less than half a second before she is entirely consumed by something else.
Seamus pulls his mouth from hers with a dramatic tug, catching her bottom lip between his teeth hard enough to make her whine. He shifts her wrists so that one hand holds them both, and his free hand pushes underneath her skirt.
Her knee jerks reflexively, a startle-reaction more than a protest, and it catches him in the side of his thigh. With his own knee, he shoves back, his hand steady.
Between her legs, he covers her with his palm and fingers her through the fabric, slow and hard. She can tell by the slide how wet she is. She hadn't even realized, has no idea when it happened.
Her eyes are squeezed shut, and she is holding her breath but doesn't realize that, either, until he tells her to look at me. She opens her eyes; her breath escapes in one hard gust, and he is staring directly into her face.
"She's coming back," Pansy says. It's almost a whisper, and even as she says it, she is edging her legs apart to give him room.
"You'll be in trouble then, won't you?" he says back, pushing two fingers right against her clit through her knickers. She jerks against his hand involuntarily. "You'll be right fucked, yeah?"
With one finger, he slides the elastic sideways and slips underneath. He traces the curves of her there with a fingertip, then a knuckle, and she squirms against him, trying to force him into the right spot.
Seamus doesn't blink, and he doesn't follow her directions. Instead, he uses a hip to hold one side of her body flush against the wall.
His mouth is filthy, and if Pansy had the sort of skin that blushed, she would be scarlet. By the time he has worked three fingers inside of her (his fingers are skinny with big knuckles, and they push against a spot that makes her knees tremble), he is muttering steadily.
"You're just wide open for me, aren't you?" he says, and he thrusts his fingers in hard for emphasis, grazing her clit with the knuckle of his thumb just enough to make her gasp. "You were wet before I touched you. You could probably come just from this," he says, curling his palm in on itself and adding a fourth finger. (He's right, she thinks, her head buzzing as she grinds down onto his hand.) "You don't even need this, do you?" he asks, thumbing at her clit again and making her muscles clench around him. "You don't need it, but you want it, don’t you?"
Pansy is throwing her head back and forth now, because it is the only part of her body she can move without interrupting him. Her hair whips across his face, but he doesn't flinch. He doesn't flinch, and he doesn't stop, and he doesn't shut his mouth.
"Do you want me to fuck you like this until you come?"
She doesn't answer, just moves her hips in circles.
"Do you, Pansy?"
He calls her by her name. Her first name, not her last name. It makes her throw her head forward again and stare wide-eyed into his face, which is flushed beneath his freckles. His eyes are boring into her, and she can feel his cock through his denims, pushed against her thigh and big and hard and hard for her.
"Answer me," he says, low, and gives three quick thrusts into her that make her open her mouth and pant.
"Yes," she says, and he circles her clit with his thumb, pushing hard, and her muscles are pulling tight around him, and the sensations are stacking on top of one another, climbing her spine, ready to topple her…
… and then he stops.
He puts his fingers into his mouth one by one, sucks them clean, and steps back, leaving her tottering on the edge of something she wants more than she has wanted anything in months. She wants to grab his throat and squeeze, or at least grab her wand off the floor and practice her motherfucking Crucio; polish it to a shine that would make Alecto Carrow rub her gnarled hands together in delight.
If she could breathe, she might.
She can't breathe.
Before she can pull words out of the abyss of her brain, he smiles a wicked smile - the fucker has dimples - and says, "Finish yourself."
Pansy balks. Her hands are free, and her instincts are all over the place; she wonders briefly if she can bring herself off with one hand and reach her wand with the other. She decides that she can't. Seamus is watching her like he can see her dilemma; like he already knows which one she'll choose.
He's right.
Pansy narrows her eyes into a glare that would stop Draco where he stands. It has no effect whatsoever on Seamus, whose smile has ebbed a little, but nothing more. Her brain is firing at random, white-hot sparks, and she wants to swear at him until he turns to ashes, but she can't make her mouth work.
She doesn't want to look at him while she does this, but she doesn't really think she can help it, so she makes her face as haughty as she can and jams her hand between her legs. The haughtiness is gone in a flash, and it doesn't take much - six quick circles with her ring finger - before the back of her head slams hard into the wall and her knees start to wobble.
When she opens her eyes, Seamus is palming himself slowly through his denims, and he is close again, yanking her skirt down over her hips with his unoccupied hand and smoothing it out. The gesture is oddly tender, and Pansy recalls, for a moment, her father; his broad hands straightening her Christmas dress, and she wonders where he is.
"Like to watch, do you, you filthy fucking pervert?" she mutters, finally, but she doesn't have the energy for venom.
Seamus just nods. "I do."
His eyes dart towards the door, and that, not the sound of footsteps, is what alerts Pansy to Alecto Carrow's imminent return.
To her shock, Seamus leans down and retrieves her wand. He shoves it into her still-shaking hands and lopes back to his seat, his erection obvious.
Pansy's thoughts are wild. She hardly waits for the door to open before she rushes through it. Once out in the corridor, she stands temporarily frozen and disoriented. The door is still ajar, and through it, she hears two things: a dramatic, drawn-out unzipping, and Seamus's voice: "Hungry, Professor, or has Amycus already given you dinner?"
Pansy bolts.
She hides in the shadowy stairwell and tries to shake it off. She can't. In the space of a few minutes, he has acted both to enrage her and to get her off; to humiliate her and to protect her. He makes no more sense now than he did when he first strolled in, silent and casual in the face of his own annihilation.
She imagines him dying right there in that stupid fucking chair, and the only way she can stop that is to imagine what his face might look like when he comes.
The most pressing need in her life becomes finding out.
_______________
She observes him in the corridors, or across the Great Hall during mealtimes.
He is a constant provocation. He starts food-fights; he crashes suits of armour to the ground or charms them to dance in a line and block passage; he uses permanent sticking charms to tack lewd pictures to the walls. It's juvenile, and it's dangerous, and it works.
So much time and energy is required to deal with his fuckery that some of the others get off lightly. He ramps up the behaviour when there are younger ones around, trying to shield them by making himself a target.
The only reason they haven’t killed him yet, Pansy decides, is that they must be under orders not to, because they are itching for it. When He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named regains control - and he will; Pansy is sure of that, too - their reward for following these orders is going to be rich. And it's going to be Seamus.
Beside her at the dining table, Draco eats slowly and eats little. Between sips of tea, he shakes his head and watches. "Go smack the shite out of Finnigan," he says one day as biscuits explode into glittery D's and A's at the end of Seamus's wand, "before I do. Colossal fucking tosser."
Draco looks ill. Draco has looked ill for months. He recoils from her now, cold and remote and lost in thoughts he won't share.
Pansy eyes him sidelong and chews. She has the sudden urge to smack the shite out of him instead, but resists. "No," she says, simply.
Draco raises his thin eyebrows. "Wouldn't want to break a fingernail, would you, Pansy darling?"
Pansy pours her tea over his tray and stalks out.
_______________
One night, he sneaks her up to the Gryffindor boys' dormitories. It isn't difficult. Most of the portraits are in on the mutiny, and the Fat Lady smiles placidly and does not bat a single painted eye when Seamus gives the password and Pansy crawls through behind him. It is clear to Pansy that Seamus is trusted implicitly.
He opens the door, and they stand in silence. Then, he begins pointing to beds, going around the room clockwise and slow. "Ron. Harry. Dean. Neville." His finger pauses at the last bed, and Pansy notices that his hand is trembling. "Me. All alone in here, a rún," he says, looking at her with his head tilted.
Her face must look confused, because he translates. "My dear."
Pansy shakes her head. "I'm not your dear," she says quietly.
"No, you're not," he answers flatly. "You're Malfoy's dear, aren't you?"
"Not really. Not that he'd ever call me that if I was. Doesn't matter anyway. He doesn't want a dear."
"What does he want?"
"Fuck if I know. What do you want?"
Seamus's gaze travels around the room, stopping to rest at each of the empty beds. He doesn't need to answer, but he does. "Them. Alive. Me, alive."
"You are alive," Pansy says with a scoff, and tries to ignore the voice inside of her head that adds, on borrowed time.
"That's what you think. What do you want?"
Pansy chews her lip. She looks at the walls. Beside Seamus's bed, there is a line-drawing. It takes her a moment to realize that it's of him. He looks like a baby, and his head is thrown back into a laugh that she doesn't recognize: open-wide and palpably joyful, even in two dimensions. There's a name scrawled at the bottom - it starts with a D, but she can't read the rest - and a date. Last year.
"Me. Alive," she finally says.
He looks as fierce as he has ever looked when he says, "Come on, then," and shoves her down onto the duvet, but it's different this time.
It is slow, slow, slow; it is slow and it's still hard, but she feels everything. The sensations don't blur together; they are sharp and distinct and separate. She remembers all of her muscles, all of her nerves, all of the spaces in between. Usually, they fuck to forget things - Pansy isn't stupid; she knows that's what he's doing; what they're doing - but this time, it makes her remember.
And still - still - there is not enough of him to fill all of the empty space. But she tries.
Afterwards, he sleeps, and she doesn't. She wipes her sticky thighs with the bed sheets, props herself up on an elbow, and watches him. She is tempted to wake him to say goodbye, but she doesn't.
This is the first time she has seen him look peaceful. Calm, confident, brave, disinterested, unflappable - yes. But there is no peace in that; it is all a careful charade, designed to unnerve and incense.
There are no lines in his forehead now; there is no stony set to his jaw. He looks his age, maybe even younger. Pansy can almost - almost - reconcile this Seamus with the one in the drawing. His face is all Irish-milk skin, freckles, eyelashes that go on for days in the flickering shadows. The darkness hides his bruises, mostly, except for one that slants across his cheekbone.
The darkness can't hide hers.
She kisses his hair - it smells like sweat and smoke and shampoo - and draws a heart on the curve of his bicep with her finger before she gets dressed and leaves. She doesn't want to see his face when this dream morphs into a nightmare.
_______________
A rún. My dear.
It sounds like ruin.
If she is his ruin, he is also hers.
They don't ever get caught, mostly because they have both become experts in stealth. It came naturally to her, but Seamus has had to learn it. He is a quick study.
But it’s ruinous, anyway.
Not that it matters.
Everything she has been told she can rely upon is crumbling. Blood - and the purity thereof - cannot rescue Draco from his own darkness, cannot rescue Vince from his own temper, cannot rescue her from the ghost of missing pieces. She wonders what value it holds, really, aside from being the one thing that might save her life in the end, if they ever did get caught.
Maybe that's enough, then. If that's what it's worth - her life - then she supposes that's enough.
_______________
The night before Hogwarts explodes into madness, Pansy grips the pipes on the lavatory floor with white knuckles and moans, her voice pushing hard against Seamus's Silencing charm and her body pushing hard against his.
She doesn't take it this time; he kneels behind her, and she shoves herself back onto him with such force she can feel things inside of her jostle and bruise. It's good. The angle is perfect. There is nothing for her to bite into when she comes, and she's glad, because she wants to scream.
He is starting to unravel. Pansy has been watching him fray. There are circles around his eyes that are not from being beaten, and there is a sharpness to his body that wasn't there before. She can feel the bones in his hips as they pound against her arse. He and Draco are beginning to resemble one another.
Maybe he knows this, because tonight is the first time he has ever asked her to say his name.
Say it; say it; SAY IT, and he sounds desperate, and that scares her a little, because he is never desperate.
But she does say it; she says it over and over and over like she is incanting a spell; says it like it's a Protego: Seamus, Seamus, Seamus, and it dissolves into incoherency when her orgasm hits her like a blow to the back of her neck.
She is still reeling from it, and she barely notices when he pulls out of her and comes across her bowed back with a howl, hot and guttural and wounded.
Oh, fuck, Pansy he says, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, and she sits back into his lap and wonders vaguely if his spell has held, or if their noise, this time, was just too much.
Nobody comes running. No hero, no villain, no one. They are as alone as they have ever been.
The walls tremble with the pitch of their breath. Their skin sticks together. He mouths her shoulder and sinks his teeth in to steady himself.
Pansy is rubbish at Divination, but she knows, somehow, that this is the last time, and she can't bring herself to tell him.
_______________
Seamus is not long for this world, and Pansy knows it.
With the culmination of their ruin upon them, Pansy thinks maybe she isn't, either. But she wants to be. Of that, at least, she is sure.
So when the Dark Lord calls for Harry Potter and promises mercy for the obedient, it just makes fucking sense to do it. Pansy is angling for mercy, because it is all that will prove her wrong.
(Seamus's concept of sense and her own are quite different, and he will never understand that this is her version of heroics.)
Nobody listens to her, though, because nobody ever listens to her, and so she is shunted away - out the door and into history - as That Bitch Who Tried to Kill Harry Potter. She doesn't give a rat's arse about Potter - whether he lives or whether he dies - and she never did. But herself? Yes. And Seamus?
Yes.
And so when she is ignored, she marches out with her head up and her chest closed like a vise around her heart, because she is not going to watch him die, and he is not going to ask her to.
Pairing(s): Seamus/Pansy; implied Draco/Pansy
Rating: NC-17
Summary Seamus is not long for this world, and Pansy knows it.
Word Count: ~4500
Warnings/Content: Angst, a bad habit, worse language, rough(ish) sex, dirty talk, non-explicit mentions of violence.
Author's/Artist's notes: I wrote this for wizard_love, and it ended up as a gift for the community. tania_sings & prongsxwormtail were my betas, and they made this a zillion times better -- thank you, ladies ♥! I love you!
The legendary muscle that wants and grieves,
The organ of attachment, the pump of thrills
And troubles, clinging in stubborn colonies
Like pulpy shore-life battened on a jetty.
Slashed by the little deaths of sleep and pleasure,
They swell in the nurturing spasms of the waves,
Sucking to cling; and even in death itself-
Baked, frozen-they shrink to grip the granite harder.
- from "The Hearts" by Robert Pinsky
Seamus is not long for this world.
Pansy is sure of it. The Carrows have been using him for target practice nearly every day now, and he laughs in their gruesome faces.
His own is equally bad, but it's a different sort of gruesome. He wears it well. His split lip looks like a heart.
Hearts.
She wants to draw them on him; she wants to scratch them into his skin; she wants to paint them on his ribcage in lipstick and lick them into the steam on his washroom mirror and circle his navel with a sticky one sketched in his come.
When Draco comes, he bites the noise in half with sharp teeth, like it hurts his fucking ego to feel so good. Seamus is open-mouthed, and he swears himself into a frenzy; he pulls her hair until her head snaps back and her jawbone cracks against his crooked nose. He wants to hear how much she likes it; he wants her to say how much she fucking needs it; he says ask me for it, and she does.
She asks him to fuck her until she can't stand up, until she can't work her mouth around a cleaning spell, until the world narrows into a point as sharp as a knife and then shatters.
It's never enough.
There isn't enough of him to fill her empty spaces, but she tries. She tries
She gets down on her knees in the lavatory on the third floor, and she takes all of him down her throat. He's big and he isn't gentle, but if she wanted gentle, she'd go find Draco and his cold hands and skeleton cheeks; Draco, who touches her like she's going to crumble and he doesn't want to bother cleaning up the mess.
Seamus likes the mess. He likes her spit and the glitter her lips leave on his cock; he likes to stare down at her with two bruised and swollen eyes and watch the sweat trickle down her temples; he likes it when she scrapes her teeth along his nerves and slides off the end with a pop that echoes off the stone walls. He likes her to swallow; he likes to watch the muscles in her neck move when she does.
He likes to yank her to her feet and push her shoulders into the wall, pinch her nipple hard between his index finger and his thumb and kiss her. He likes to pant into her mouth and drip against her hip and taste himself on her tongue.
His taste is brave and stupid and bitter and brilliant.
He tastes like the things that are going to get him killed, and Pansy worries that she will go right along with him. Her biggest worry, however, is that by the time this is through, she won't mind at all.
_______________
The first time they speak, he is holding onto the edge of the sink, dry-heaving and bleeding into it from a gash in his chin.
Pansy hears him coughing, a jagged sound like parchment tearing, and she thinks it's Draco. She comes anxiously around the corner, and he meets her eyes in the mirror as she skids gracelessly through a puddle of water.
They stare.
The sight of him makes her stomach whirl. He is gory and grimy, like he has been lying on a floor somewhere for a very, very long time. He probably has. She's heard the stories, mostly punctuated with eye-rolling and maybe some laughter, but she never quite believed them. She does now.
"Oh, sorry, Parkinson," he says, finally, wiping his wrist across his mouth. "Did you need the urinal? I'll be out of here as soon as I'm done pissing blood."
"… I thought you were someone else." She sounds moronic. She thinks maybe, somehow, it's her brain that is leaking into the basin.
"I'm not."
Wordlessly, she pulls handful after handful of paper towels from the dispenser and hands them to him before walking out. He holds them in his fists and watches her leave. She feels his eyes all the way to Charms.
_______________
The first time he touches her, they are in an empty classroom on the fifth floor, and he is her prisoner.
Pansy doesn't know what he's done to chafe Alecto Carrow's arse, and by this point, she is only mildly curious, and only because it's him. Playing Dementor is not how she would prefer to spend her evenings, and she is growing ever more resentful every time she's caught by the elbow and instructed to keep an eye on the ingrate 'til I get back.
She has never been made to keep an eye on Seamus before - it's usually some pants-wetting first- or second-year who's made a mistake out of mute terror rather than insubordination - and he is not at all what she is used to. The first thing he does is sprawl out in a chair and prop his feet up on the desk. Next, he pulls a fag out of his side pocket and leans back into the sconce on the wall to light it. He does all of this without saying a word.
Pansy leans against the doorjamb and folds her arms across her chest. The quiet is discomfiting; his posture of nonchalance does not help. She isn't quite sure what about the scenario is so unsettling; certainly she ought to prefer silence to sniveling. Perhaps it is his utter lack of fear. It puts her off-balance. It's not entirely human, maybe. When she can bear it no longer, she speaks.
"Filthy Muggle habit, that," she says, and she wrinkles her nose as smoke curls out of his mouth.
His chin lifts, and he looks at her, cool and dark as the lake outside. "Sit on my cock, Parkinson," he says, then runs the heel of his hand obscenely down the crotch of his denims and makes a gesture like he is jerking himself.
Pansy narrows her eyes. "You'd like that, wouldn't you? Not seeing much in the way of action now that Loony Lovegood and the little Weasley bitch have run off, are you?"
Seamus is out of his chair so fast that it clatters to the floor behind him.
Pansy draws her wand, but it doesn't even give him pause. She is too startled by this to use it, and then it is too late: he is right in her face; her wand is at her feet, and both of her wrists are pinned to the wall over her head. He still has his fag in his mouth, caught tight between his teeth. The cherry burns close to her cheek.
"Some mouth on you, miss. Think I'll tell that windy fuck Malfoy to do us all a favour; stop kicking yer backdoor in and gag you with it, instead." He says it through the side of his mouth, through the clench of his jaw, and it would be almost comical if this was not happening here and to her and with him.
"You're foul," Pansy grits out, and she hopes he isn't close enough to feel her heart slamming against her ribs. "Get your fucking hands off of me."
Seamus smirks, and his fag bounces between his lips. There is actually a glimmer of humour in his eyes now, and Pansy's blood pounds and pounds and pounds. She is half-afraid (the other half is infuriated or indignant or turned on or something that she can't identify), but she feels alive with it, and she isn't convinced she wants it to stop. There is so little that moves her blood anymore.
"You're gone in the head, you are. Take my fucking hands off you? You were a bloody half-second away from hexing my plums off. Think I'm mental, do you?"
"You must be, if you were thinking I was going anywhere near your cock."
He outright laughs at her this time, low and hoarse, and it stings. Pansy moves to pull her wrists away, but he is much stronger than she is. He leans in close, and she is frightened for a moment that her hair is going to catch fire. "You’d just about give your left tit for it, wouldn't you?"
She stops breathing.
She will never really know for sure what compels her next move. It isn't, perhaps, her brightest moment, but she does it. She stares straight into his face, leans forward, and licks the ash from the end of his fag; swipes her tongue along the blunt end to put it out.
It burns. It tastes like acid and death and chemicals. She can feel her tongue start to blister almost immediately.
He drops the fag from his mouth, crushes it underfoot, and kisses her.
He is all sour, ashy breath and ferocity, and Pansy is sure now that he can feel her heart, because she can feel his. Thudthudthudthudthud in his chest, rabbit-paced, it smashes against her body like a fist. This is the first time she wonders if he might be frightened, after all.
She holds onto that thought for less than half a second before she is entirely consumed by something else.
Seamus pulls his mouth from hers with a dramatic tug, catching her bottom lip between his teeth hard enough to make her whine. He shifts her wrists so that one hand holds them both, and his free hand pushes underneath her skirt.
Her knee jerks reflexively, a startle-reaction more than a protest, and it catches him in the side of his thigh. With his own knee, he shoves back, his hand steady.
Between her legs, he covers her with his palm and fingers her through the fabric, slow and hard. She can tell by the slide how wet she is. She hadn't even realized, has no idea when it happened.
Her eyes are squeezed shut, and she is holding her breath but doesn't realize that, either, until he tells her to look at me. She opens her eyes; her breath escapes in one hard gust, and he is staring directly into her face.
"She's coming back," Pansy says. It's almost a whisper, and even as she says it, she is edging her legs apart to give him room.
"You'll be in trouble then, won't you?" he says back, pushing two fingers right against her clit through her knickers. She jerks against his hand involuntarily. "You'll be right fucked, yeah?"
With one finger, he slides the elastic sideways and slips underneath. He traces the curves of her there with a fingertip, then a knuckle, and she squirms against him, trying to force him into the right spot.
Seamus doesn't blink, and he doesn't follow her directions. Instead, he uses a hip to hold one side of her body flush against the wall.
His mouth is filthy, and if Pansy had the sort of skin that blushed, she would be scarlet. By the time he has worked three fingers inside of her (his fingers are skinny with big knuckles, and they push against a spot that makes her knees tremble), he is muttering steadily.
"You're just wide open for me, aren't you?" he says, and he thrusts his fingers in hard for emphasis, grazing her clit with the knuckle of his thumb just enough to make her gasp. "You were wet before I touched you. You could probably come just from this," he says, curling his palm in on itself and adding a fourth finger. (He's right, she thinks, her head buzzing as she grinds down onto his hand.) "You don't even need this, do you?" he asks, thumbing at her clit again and making her muscles clench around him. "You don't need it, but you want it, don’t you?"
Pansy is throwing her head back and forth now, because it is the only part of her body she can move without interrupting him. Her hair whips across his face, but he doesn't flinch. He doesn't flinch, and he doesn't stop, and he doesn't shut his mouth.
"Do you want me to fuck you like this until you come?"
She doesn't answer, just moves her hips in circles.
"Do you, Pansy?"
He calls her by her name. Her first name, not her last name. It makes her throw her head forward again and stare wide-eyed into his face, which is flushed beneath his freckles. His eyes are boring into her, and she can feel his cock through his denims, pushed against her thigh and big and hard and hard for her.
"Answer me," he says, low, and gives three quick thrusts into her that make her open her mouth and pant.
"Yes," she says, and he circles her clit with his thumb, pushing hard, and her muscles are pulling tight around him, and the sensations are stacking on top of one another, climbing her spine, ready to topple her…
… and then he stops.
He puts his fingers into his mouth one by one, sucks them clean, and steps back, leaving her tottering on the edge of something she wants more than she has wanted anything in months. She wants to grab his throat and squeeze, or at least grab her wand off the floor and practice her motherfucking Crucio; polish it to a shine that would make Alecto Carrow rub her gnarled hands together in delight.
If she could breathe, she might.
She can't breathe.
Before she can pull words out of the abyss of her brain, he smiles a wicked smile - the fucker has dimples - and says, "Finish yourself."
Pansy balks. Her hands are free, and her instincts are all over the place; she wonders briefly if she can bring herself off with one hand and reach her wand with the other. She decides that she can't. Seamus is watching her like he can see her dilemma; like he already knows which one she'll choose.
He's right.
Pansy narrows her eyes into a glare that would stop Draco where he stands. It has no effect whatsoever on Seamus, whose smile has ebbed a little, but nothing more. Her brain is firing at random, white-hot sparks, and she wants to swear at him until he turns to ashes, but she can't make her mouth work.
She doesn't want to look at him while she does this, but she doesn't really think she can help it, so she makes her face as haughty as she can and jams her hand between her legs. The haughtiness is gone in a flash, and it doesn't take much - six quick circles with her ring finger - before the back of her head slams hard into the wall and her knees start to wobble.
When she opens her eyes, Seamus is palming himself slowly through his denims, and he is close again, yanking her skirt down over her hips with his unoccupied hand and smoothing it out. The gesture is oddly tender, and Pansy recalls, for a moment, her father; his broad hands straightening her Christmas dress, and she wonders where he is.
"Like to watch, do you, you filthy fucking pervert?" she mutters, finally, but she doesn't have the energy for venom.
Seamus just nods. "I do."
His eyes dart towards the door, and that, not the sound of footsteps, is what alerts Pansy to Alecto Carrow's imminent return.
To her shock, Seamus leans down and retrieves her wand. He shoves it into her still-shaking hands and lopes back to his seat, his erection obvious.
Pansy's thoughts are wild. She hardly waits for the door to open before she rushes through it. Once out in the corridor, she stands temporarily frozen and disoriented. The door is still ajar, and through it, she hears two things: a dramatic, drawn-out unzipping, and Seamus's voice: "Hungry, Professor, or has Amycus already given you dinner?"
Pansy bolts.
She hides in the shadowy stairwell and tries to shake it off. She can't. In the space of a few minutes, he has acted both to enrage her and to get her off; to humiliate her and to protect her. He makes no more sense now than he did when he first strolled in, silent and casual in the face of his own annihilation.
She imagines him dying right there in that stupid fucking chair, and the only way she can stop that is to imagine what his face might look like when he comes.
The most pressing need in her life becomes finding out.
_______________
She observes him in the corridors, or across the Great Hall during mealtimes.
He is a constant provocation. He starts food-fights; he crashes suits of armour to the ground or charms them to dance in a line and block passage; he uses permanent sticking charms to tack lewd pictures to the walls. It's juvenile, and it's dangerous, and it works.
So much time and energy is required to deal with his fuckery that some of the others get off lightly. He ramps up the behaviour when there are younger ones around, trying to shield them by making himself a target.
The only reason they haven’t killed him yet, Pansy decides, is that they must be under orders not to, because they are itching for it. When He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named regains control - and he will; Pansy is sure of that, too - their reward for following these orders is going to be rich. And it's going to be Seamus.
Beside her at the dining table, Draco eats slowly and eats little. Between sips of tea, he shakes his head and watches. "Go smack the shite out of Finnigan," he says one day as biscuits explode into glittery D's and A's at the end of Seamus's wand, "before I do. Colossal fucking tosser."
Draco looks ill. Draco has looked ill for months. He recoils from her now, cold and remote and lost in thoughts he won't share.
Pansy eyes him sidelong and chews. She has the sudden urge to smack the shite out of him instead, but resists. "No," she says, simply.
Draco raises his thin eyebrows. "Wouldn't want to break a fingernail, would you, Pansy darling?"
Pansy pours her tea over his tray and stalks out.
_______________
One night, he sneaks her up to the Gryffindor boys' dormitories. It isn't difficult. Most of the portraits are in on the mutiny, and the Fat Lady smiles placidly and does not bat a single painted eye when Seamus gives the password and Pansy crawls through behind him. It is clear to Pansy that Seamus is trusted implicitly.
He opens the door, and they stand in silence. Then, he begins pointing to beds, going around the room clockwise and slow. "Ron. Harry. Dean. Neville." His finger pauses at the last bed, and Pansy notices that his hand is trembling. "Me. All alone in here, a rún," he says, looking at her with his head tilted.
Her face must look confused, because he translates. "My dear."
Pansy shakes her head. "I'm not your dear," she says quietly.
"No, you're not," he answers flatly. "You're Malfoy's dear, aren't you?"
"Not really. Not that he'd ever call me that if I was. Doesn't matter anyway. He doesn't want a dear."
"What does he want?"
"Fuck if I know. What do you want?"
Seamus's gaze travels around the room, stopping to rest at each of the empty beds. He doesn't need to answer, but he does. "Them. Alive. Me, alive."
"You are alive," Pansy says with a scoff, and tries to ignore the voice inside of her head that adds, on borrowed time.
"That's what you think. What do you want?"
Pansy chews her lip. She looks at the walls. Beside Seamus's bed, there is a line-drawing. It takes her a moment to realize that it's of him. He looks like a baby, and his head is thrown back into a laugh that she doesn't recognize: open-wide and palpably joyful, even in two dimensions. There's a name scrawled at the bottom - it starts with a D, but she can't read the rest - and a date. Last year.
"Me. Alive," she finally says.
He looks as fierce as he has ever looked when he says, "Come on, then," and shoves her down onto the duvet, but it's different this time.
It is slow, slow, slow; it is slow and it's still hard, but she feels everything. The sensations don't blur together; they are sharp and distinct and separate. She remembers all of her muscles, all of her nerves, all of the spaces in between. Usually, they fuck to forget things - Pansy isn't stupid; she knows that's what he's doing; what they're doing - but this time, it makes her remember.
And still - still - there is not enough of him to fill all of the empty space. But she tries.
Afterwards, he sleeps, and she doesn't. She wipes her sticky thighs with the bed sheets, props herself up on an elbow, and watches him. She is tempted to wake him to say goodbye, but she doesn't.
This is the first time she has seen him look peaceful. Calm, confident, brave, disinterested, unflappable - yes. But there is no peace in that; it is all a careful charade, designed to unnerve and incense.
There are no lines in his forehead now; there is no stony set to his jaw. He looks his age, maybe even younger. Pansy can almost - almost - reconcile this Seamus with the one in the drawing. His face is all Irish-milk skin, freckles, eyelashes that go on for days in the flickering shadows. The darkness hides his bruises, mostly, except for one that slants across his cheekbone.
The darkness can't hide hers.
She kisses his hair - it smells like sweat and smoke and shampoo - and draws a heart on the curve of his bicep with her finger before she gets dressed and leaves. She doesn't want to see his face when this dream morphs into a nightmare.
_______________
A rún. My dear.
It sounds like ruin.
If she is his ruin, he is also hers.
They don't ever get caught, mostly because they have both become experts in stealth. It came naturally to her, but Seamus has had to learn it. He is a quick study.
But it’s ruinous, anyway.
Not that it matters.
Everything she has been told she can rely upon is crumbling. Blood - and the purity thereof - cannot rescue Draco from his own darkness, cannot rescue Vince from his own temper, cannot rescue her from the ghost of missing pieces. She wonders what value it holds, really, aside from being the one thing that might save her life in the end, if they ever did get caught.
Maybe that's enough, then. If that's what it's worth - her life - then she supposes that's enough.
_______________
The night before Hogwarts explodes into madness, Pansy grips the pipes on the lavatory floor with white knuckles and moans, her voice pushing hard against Seamus's Silencing charm and her body pushing hard against his.
She doesn't take it this time; he kneels behind her, and she shoves herself back onto him with such force she can feel things inside of her jostle and bruise. It's good. The angle is perfect. There is nothing for her to bite into when she comes, and she's glad, because she wants to scream.
He is starting to unravel. Pansy has been watching him fray. There are circles around his eyes that are not from being beaten, and there is a sharpness to his body that wasn't there before. She can feel the bones in his hips as they pound against her arse. He and Draco are beginning to resemble one another.
Maybe he knows this, because tonight is the first time he has ever asked her to say his name.
Say it; say it; SAY IT, and he sounds desperate, and that scares her a little, because he is never desperate.
But she does say it; she says it over and over and over like she is incanting a spell; says it like it's a Protego: Seamus, Seamus, Seamus, and it dissolves into incoherency when her orgasm hits her like a blow to the back of her neck.
She is still reeling from it, and she barely notices when he pulls out of her and comes across her bowed back with a howl, hot and guttural and wounded.
Oh, fuck, Pansy he says, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, and she sits back into his lap and wonders vaguely if his spell has held, or if their noise, this time, was just too much.
Nobody comes running. No hero, no villain, no one. They are as alone as they have ever been.
The walls tremble with the pitch of their breath. Their skin sticks together. He mouths her shoulder and sinks his teeth in to steady himself.
Pansy is rubbish at Divination, but she knows, somehow, that this is the last time, and she can't bring herself to tell him.
_______________
Seamus is not long for this world, and Pansy knows it.
With the culmination of their ruin upon them, Pansy thinks maybe she isn't, either. But she wants to be. Of that, at least, she is sure.
So when the Dark Lord calls for Harry Potter and promises mercy for the obedient, it just makes fucking sense to do it. Pansy is angling for mercy, because it is all that will prove her wrong.
(Seamus's concept of sense and her own are quite different, and he will never understand that this is her version of heroics.)
Nobody listens to her, though, because nobody ever listens to her, and so she is shunted away - out the door and into history - as That Bitch Who Tried to Kill Harry Potter. She doesn't give a rat's arse about Potter - whether he lives or whether he dies - and she never did. But herself? Yes. And Seamus?
Yes.
And so when she is ignored, she marches out with her head up and her chest closed like a vise around her heart, because she is not going to watch him die, and he is not going to ask her to.