Round up drabble post: HP
Title:Promise Us Everything
Summary: After the war ended, everything was supposed to be good.
Pairing: Draco/Ginny
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 670
AN: For eustacia_vye28, originally posted here.
For the first few years, it was simple enough to ignore.
Ginny’d been ingrained in the black-and-white thinking of her childhood, and during her teen years the presence of Voldemort (his name no longer held power, she firmly told herself) had done little to dissuade her of the notion.
The bad people were gone and the good people prevailed and things were going to be different. That was all she heard, all anyone heard. Harry Potter had saved them all.
Only, Ginny knew Harry Potter. She knew his flaws and his capabilities, and while he was growing into a great wizard, she knew he had little inclination for politics or organization.
Harry Potter is our savior, the newspapers claimed. Harry Potter is helping rebuild our torn nation.
Ginny knew better.
*
Her chosen profession didn’t exactly give her much reason to involve herself in politics - more of her fame came from who she’d dated and the role her family had played in the war than from her Quidditch abilities - but Ginny began to pay attention.
She questioned her brother, Hermione, Harry. She made inquiries about the rebuilding, the newly minted laws and the shape of the new wizarding world that was rising around them.
She wasn’t sure she liked what she saw.
She remembered the fall into Voldemort’s hands, that awful year - the way he’d changed everything with a dizzying foresight. The way that law and order could so easily fall into chaos.
She saw the way the former Death Eaters were being treated, the way the world was reforming into just as narrow-minded and cynical place as it had been before, and knew she had to do something.
*
The friendship with Draco Malfoy surprised all her family, but Ginny was determined to not make the same mistakes again.
She didn’t trust him - she wasn’t naive - but she didn’t turn up her nose like so many others who had either forgotten or never knew the role the Malfoys played in that last pivotal year.
Now Draco was a wizard in possession of a tainted fortune and a rakish reputation, which he accepted and wrapped around himself like a cloak. Ginny thought that could be useful, especially if their alliance wasn’t well known.
Draco, for his part, agreed with her. He knew firsthand how the prejudices were beginning to shift, and also distrusted the shape of the new laws and supposed order.
They were hardly counter-revolutionaries, but what they were doing was important.
*
Without Draco’s money, they never would have managed to achieve the level of power that they did.
Sometimes, late at night, when Ginny thought about it, she felt twinges of guilt, remembering how frustrating it had been to see Lucius Malfoy bend the laws to his own gain while her family struggled to stay afloat.
She never mentioned this to Draco, though sometimes she got snippy with him during their teas together, when they would discuss the options on the table and what they thought the most fair set of legislation would be. Draco recruited several of his former Slytherin acquaintances, his parents, many people Ginny had thought deserved Azkaban or worse just a few years previously, but now...
Now she could see the advantage of having them on her side.
The Slytherins were expert at making things work to their advantage.
*
Sometimes, she thought maybe she was losing herself in the crowds of sharp-tongued witches and wizards who were assuring that the future was brighter than the past had been.
Sometimes, looking at Draco and smiling and feeling comforted by his presence, Ginny remembered her schoolgirl nightmares.
Then she forced herself to remember that the world had changed, and she with it. It was neither good nor bad, it simply was.
Eventually, she no longer wanted to hide. She waited until the opportune moment, a Ministry ball celebrating a new set of anti-discriminatory laws, and took Draco’s arm.
As they stepped into the light of the dance floor, eyes never straying from each other, Ginny could hear the whispers starting all around them.
She kept smiling.
*
Title: To Old Values
Pairing: Ron/Pansy
Rating: PG
Word count: 268
AN: For persephone33, originally posted here.
Pansy pursed her lips. “Ron, that is incorrect.”
Ron dropped the scroll he was holding and let out an impatient sigh. “Everything I’ve done for the past three years has been incorrect. Big surprise.”
Pansy pretended not to notice the way he’d scrunched up his nose to imitate her. “This stack of paperwork was meant to be in the Minister’s office three hours ago, correctly filled out.”
“I think the Minister is far enough behind on his own paperwork that he won’t even notice,” Ron replied.
“That is not the issue,” Pansy said.
“Of course it isn’t,” Ron replied, prodding a scroll in her neat pile, sending them rolling around the table. Pansy glared and whipped out her wand, straightening them with a flick. “It never is.”
“Then what, pray tell, is the problem?” Pansy said. They’d shared an office for three years now, and though Pansy had come close to killing him several times, they generally tended to get along so long as they didn’t speak or acknowledge the other too much. Today, however, it was unavoidable.
“You! You are the problem!” Ron snapped.
Pansy raised an eyebrow and crossed her arms, waiting.
“You and your bloody... you!” Ron said.
“Eloquent,” Pansy said, unimpressed. A few seconds later, though, her eyes flew open wide as Ron kissed her.
She pounded on his chest, and he pulled away. He looked at her, red-faced.
“Not until after you finish that paperwork!” she said, straightening her sleeves unnecessarily.
“And then?”
“Then, we’ll have dinner,” she said. “Honestly, Weasley, were you truly reared in a barn?”
*
Title: And What Went Wrong
Pairing: Draco Malfoy
Rating: PG
Word count: 150
AN: For anon, originally posted here.
When Draco went back, he felt ill every time he looked around Hogwarts and saw all the changes as if for the first time.
Other braver students rebelled openly - he saw Longbottom hauled out of class more times than he could count - but Draco couldn’t. He had too much to lose.
It wasn’t a matter of saving face or pride. He knew better than anyone the extent of what the Dark Lord was capable of.
His Housemates seemed naive now, and Draco could scarcely remember the boy he’d been just the year before.
It took everything he had to keep silent and meek, rather than trying to save his friends. Tell them exactly what their Dark Lord was, what he would do to them.
He’d tried, once, with Pansy, who’d turned her nose up at him. Told him he was weak, he was a disappointment.
He’d never felt so alone.
*
Title: Eminently Practical
Pairing: Pansy Parkinson
Rating:PG
Word count: 320
AN: For bloodrebel333, originally posted here.
After it all, there was a strange feeling in the air.
Pansy didn’t quite know what to do with herself in the frenzied post-battle rush, so she just stayed out of the way. She didn’t regret what she’d done - regret was for the weak, and Pansy Parkinson was above all else not *weak*. She made mistakes and she might have picked the wrong side, but she had done what she thought was right at the time.
That’s all anyone could do, really. Keep their own head above water.
She passed Draco and his family in the Great Hall, and he didn’t meet her eye. She didn’t know who he was ashamed of: her, himself, his mother or his father. Draco regretted, she supposed.
She found an empty table and sat, folded her hands neatly on her lap and waited.
She didn’t look at the dead. She thought it was ghoulish, putting them on display. She didn’t look at the celebration or the mourning. She stared at her own hands, at the familiar woodgrain of the tabletop, and tried to figure out what was next.
She’d completed her education; Hogwarts held nothing more for her. She could travel, she supposed - the Parkinsons had been prudent in their investment in the war - but that, she thought, would be missing out on a opportunity.
Their society was about to go through an upheaval, even more so than it already had.
Pansy knew when to look for weakness, and wizarding Britain stank of it. Pansy knew how to exploit weakness, and she had the feeling that this was going to be the greatest opportunity she could hope for.
She would have to accept the paradigm changes, but really, all things considered, that wouldn’t be too difficult.
With everything she’d ever known to be true collapsing around her, Pansy looked to the future.
There were always new opportunities for those who sought them.
*
Title: Down to the Shore
Summary: A picnic, taking place during the events of Rumrunner
Pairing: Argus Filch/Gisella
Rating: PG
Word count: 458
AN: For tritoneclarinet, originally posted here.
The picnic had been Gisella’s idea.
No one was willing to turn down her suggestions anymore, not for something as simple and silly as a picnic, and so the crowd of them gathered on the lake shore and had sandwiches and lemonade.
Argus spent most of his time smoking with the men, listening to Giulio’s brash stories and Treetop’s jokes, which oddly followed the same tired formula as most wizarding jokes he’d heard his father tell over dinner as a child. It gave the scene a strange sense of familiarity, like he was back across the sea and these people were his family.
They gave him the same strange proprietary looks as his family, and he felt the same sort of strange isolation as he always had at home, but these Muggles were, in many ways, kinder and more inviting than his kin.
He knew the viciousness that lay under the veneer of civility, and that, too, was familiar.
Gisella was flitting from person to person like a hummingbird, touching their arms and laughing like each one was the most important person in the world, and Argus felt a strange sort of happiness, watching her.
She always drifted back to her husband, who smiled at her as though she were a fond companion.
Argus would never think of her as something he was fond of. He couldn’t.
Eventually, she made her way to him.
“I love the summer,” she said, looking out at the lake and resting her hand casually on his arm.
“It’s warm,” he said, looking at her, then looking away quickly. Her hand burned on his arm as though it had been bespelled.
Icepick was watching them, eyes squinted against the sun.
“Your husband is waiting,” Argus said, because he was, and because he wanted to say the words aloud. They still felt strange and like a foreign concept, that Gisella really and truly belonged to another.
“Let him,” Gisella said carelessly, and that recklessness shone through as it always did. Argus wondered when it was going to get him killed.
He took a step back, back stiff and feeling as though they were the center of everyone’s attention, though the only one paying them any mind was Icepick.
Gisella sighed, though she barely let her smile falter, and said, “Fine.”
She flounced off, skirt blowing tight against her body in the cool breeze, and Argus turned away, staring instead at the play of light on the lake, thinking of the time he nearly drowned back home.
There was a bit of powder on his sleeve now from Gisella’s fingertips, and he brushed it off, eradicating all evidence of her touch.
It was too dangerous to hold onto sentimentality.
Summary: After the war ended, everything was supposed to be good.
Pairing: Draco/Ginny
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 670
AN: For eustacia_vye28, originally posted here.
For the first few years, it was simple enough to ignore.
Ginny’d been ingrained in the black-and-white thinking of her childhood, and during her teen years the presence of Voldemort (his name no longer held power, she firmly told herself) had done little to dissuade her of the notion.
The bad people were gone and the good people prevailed and things were going to be different. That was all she heard, all anyone heard. Harry Potter had saved them all.
Only, Ginny knew Harry Potter. She knew his flaws and his capabilities, and while he was growing into a great wizard, she knew he had little inclination for politics or organization.
Harry Potter is our savior, the newspapers claimed. Harry Potter is helping rebuild our torn nation.
Ginny knew better.
*
Her chosen profession didn’t exactly give her much reason to involve herself in politics - more of her fame came from who she’d dated and the role her family had played in the war than from her Quidditch abilities - but Ginny began to pay attention.
She questioned her brother, Hermione, Harry. She made inquiries about the rebuilding, the newly minted laws and the shape of the new wizarding world that was rising around them.
She wasn’t sure she liked what she saw.
She remembered the fall into Voldemort’s hands, that awful year - the way he’d changed everything with a dizzying foresight. The way that law and order could so easily fall into chaos.
She saw the way the former Death Eaters were being treated, the way the world was reforming into just as narrow-minded and cynical place as it had been before, and knew she had to do something.
*
The friendship with Draco Malfoy surprised all her family, but Ginny was determined to not make the same mistakes again.
She didn’t trust him - she wasn’t naive - but she didn’t turn up her nose like so many others who had either forgotten or never knew the role the Malfoys played in that last pivotal year.
Now Draco was a wizard in possession of a tainted fortune and a rakish reputation, which he accepted and wrapped around himself like a cloak. Ginny thought that could be useful, especially if their alliance wasn’t well known.
Draco, for his part, agreed with her. He knew firsthand how the prejudices were beginning to shift, and also distrusted the shape of the new laws and supposed order.
They were hardly counter-revolutionaries, but what they were doing was important.
*
Without Draco’s money, they never would have managed to achieve the level of power that they did.
Sometimes, late at night, when Ginny thought about it, she felt twinges of guilt, remembering how frustrating it had been to see Lucius Malfoy bend the laws to his own gain while her family struggled to stay afloat.
She never mentioned this to Draco, though sometimes she got snippy with him during their teas together, when they would discuss the options on the table and what they thought the most fair set of legislation would be. Draco recruited several of his former Slytherin acquaintances, his parents, many people Ginny had thought deserved Azkaban or worse just a few years previously, but now...
Now she could see the advantage of having them on her side.
The Slytherins were expert at making things work to their advantage.
*
Sometimes, she thought maybe she was losing herself in the crowds of sharp-tongued witches and wizards who were assuring that the future was brighter than the past had been.
Sometimes, looking at Draco and smiling and feeling comforted by his presence, Ginny remembered her schoolgirl nightmares.
Then she forced herself to remember that the world had changed, and she with it. It was neither good nor bad, it simply was.
Eventually, she no longer wanted to hide. She waited until the opportune moment, a Ministry ball celebrating a new set of anti-discriminatory laws, and took Draco’s arm.
As they stepped into the light of the dance floor, eyes never straying from each other, Ginny could hear the whispers starting all around them.
She kept smiling.
*
Title: To Old Values
Pairing: Ron/Pansy
Rating: PG
Word count: 268
AN: For persephone33, originally posted here.
Pansy pursed her lips. “Ron, that is incorrect.”
Ron dropped the scroll he was holding and let out an impatient sigh. “Everything I’ve done for the past three years has been incorrect. Big surprise.”
Pansy pretended not to notice the way he’d scrunched up his nose to imitate her. “This stack of paperwork was meant to be in the Minister’s office three hours ago, correctly filled out.”
“I think the Minister is far enough behind on his own paperwork that he won’t even notice,” Ron replied.
“That is not the issue,” Pansy said.
“Of course it isn’t,” Ron replied, prodding a scroll in her neat pile, sending them rolling around the table. Pansy glared and whipped out her wand, straightening them with a flick. “It never is.”
“Then what, pray tell, is the problem?” Pansy said. They’d shared an office for three years now, and though Pansy had come close to killing him several times, they generally tended to get along so long as they didn’t speak or acknowledge the other too much. Today, however, it was unavoidable.
“You! You are the problem!” Ron snapped.
Pansy raised an eyebrow and crossed her arms, waiting.
“You and your bloody... you!” Ron said.
“Eloquent,” Pansy said, unimpressed. A few seconds later, though, her eyes flew open wide as Ron kissed her.
She pounded on his chest, and he pulled away. He looked at her, red-faced.
“Not until after you finish that paperwork!” she said, straightening her sleeves unnecessarily.
“And then?”
“Then, we’ll have dinner,” she said. “Honestly, Weasley, were you truly reared in a barn?”
*
Title: And What Went Wrong
Pairing: Draco Malfoy
Rating: PG
Word count: 150
AN: For anon, originally posted here.
When Draco went back, he felt ill every time he looked around Hogwarts and saw all the changes as if for the first time.
Other braver students rebelled openly - he saw Longbottom hauled out of class more times than he could count - but Draco couldn’t. He had too much to lose.
It wasn’t a matter of saving face or pride. He knew better than anyone the extent of what the Dark Lord was capable of.
His Housemates seemed naive now, and Draco could scarcely remember the boy he’d been just the year before.
It took everything he had to keep silent and meek, rather than trying to save his friends. Tell them exactly what their Dark Lord was, what he would do to them.
He’d tried, once, with Pansy, who’d turned her nose up at him. Told him he was weak, he was a disappointment.
He’d never felt so alone.
*
Title: Eminently Practical
Pairing: Pansy Parkinson
Rating:PG
Word count: 320
AN: For bloodrebel333, originally posted here.
After it all, there was a strange feeling in the air.
Pansy didn’t quite know what to do with herself in the frenzied post-battle rush, so she just stayed out of the way. She didn’t regret what she’d done - regret was for the weak, and Pansy Parkinson was above all else not *weak*. She made mistakes and she might have picked the wrong side, but she had done what she thought was right at the time.
That’s all anyone could do, really. Keep their own head above water.
She passed Draco and his family in the Great Hall, and he didn’t meet her eye. She didn’t know who he was ashamed of: her, himself, his mother or his father. Draco regretted, she supposed.
She found an empty table and sat, folded her hands neatly on her lap and waited.
She didn’t look at the dead. She thought it was ghoulish, putting them on display. She didn’t look at the celebration or the mourning. She stared at her own hands, at the familiar woodgrain of the tabletop, and tried to figure out what was next.
She’d completed her education; Hogwarts held nothing more for her. She could travel, she supposed - the Parkinsons had been prudent in their investment in the war - but that, she thought, would be missing out on a opportunity.
Their society was about to go through an upheaval, even more so than it already had.
Pansy knew when to look for weakness, and wizarding Britain stank of it. Pansy knew how to exploit weakness, and she had the feeling that this was going to be the greatest opportunity she could hope for.
She would have to accept the paradigm changes, but really, all things considered, that wouldn’t be too difficult.
With everything she’d ever known to be true collapsing around her, Pansy looked to the future.
There were always new opportunities for those who sought them.
*
Title: Down to the Shore
Summary: A picnic, taking place during the events of Rumrunner
Pairing: Argus Filch/Gisella
Rating: PG
Word count: 458
AN: For tritoneclarinet, originally posted here.
The picnic had been Gisella’s idea.
No one was willing to turn down her suggestions anymore, not for something as simple and silly as a picnic, and so the crowd of them gathered on the lake shore and had sandwiches and lemonade.
Argus spent most of his time smoking with the men, listening to Giulio’s brash stories and Treetop’s jokes, which oddly followed the same tired formula as most wizarding jokes he’d heard his father tell over dinner as a child. It gave the scene a strange sense of familiarity, like he was back across the sea and these people were his family.
They gave him the same strange proprietary looks as his family, and he felt the same sort of strange isolation as he always had at home, but these Muggles were, in many ways, kinder and more inviting than his kin.
He knew the viciousness that lay under the veneer of civility, and that, too, was familiar.
Gisella was flitting from person to person like a hummingbird, touching their arms and laughing like each one was the most important person in the world, and Argus felt a strange sort of happiness, watching her.
She always drifted back to her husband, who smiled at her as though she were a fond companion.
Argus would never think of her as something he was fond of. He couldn’t.
Eventually, she made her way to him.
“I love the summer,” she said, looking out at the lake and resting her hand casually on his arm.
“It’s warm,” he said, looking at her, then looking away quickly. Her hand burned on his arm as though it had been bespelled.
Icepick was watching them, eyes squinted against the sun.
“Your husband is waiting,” Argus said, because he was, and because he wanted to say the words aloud. They still felt strange and like a foreign concept, that Gisella really and truly belonged to another.
“Let him,” Gisella said carelessly, and that recklessness shone through as it always did. Argus wondered when it was going to get him killed.
He took a step back, back stiff and feeling as though they were the center of everyone’s attention, though the only one paying them any mind was Icepick.
Gisella sighed, though she barely let her smile falter, and said, “Fine.”
She flounced off, skirt blowing tight against her body in the cool breeze, and Argus turned away, staring instead at the play of light on the lake, thinking of the time he nearly drowned back home.
There was a bit of powder on his sleeve now from Gisella’s fingertips, and he brushed it off, eradicating all evidence of her touch.
It was too dangerous to hold onto sentimentality.