Short chapter of Consumed and life in a nutshell
I know, it's been like eleventy million years since I've updated. All my love to everyone. That's generic, isn't it? I totally suck. Do I owe any drabbles to anyone? Do tell me if I do. Life has been a little weird lately, but it's okay! Weird in a good way. Just busy.
I applied for a new job. Cross your fingers. I really need it, and it's a good job with GREAT benefits and maybe not as high an incidence of crazy in the workplace.
All right, then. A short chapter. When last we left our heroine, she was listening as Ginny and Draco announced their impending parenthood.
Pansy was, for once in her life, completely stricken into speechlessness. Fortunately for her, the room burst into motion and sound around her.
"Oh, honey, my baby," Molly said, pulling Ginny to her and crooning while she patted her hair, then pushing her daughter away from her to splay her hands over her stomach.
Arthur looked a bit shellshocked, but was nodding and grinning happily. "A grandchild!" he kept repeating in a musing tone.
The boys, Pansy took in with wide eyes, had started tossing Galleons among themselves. They'd been betting?
That surprised a laugh out of her, and she finally met Draco's eyes across the table.
"What?" she said with a smile, not bothering to speak loudly enough to be heard over the melee. "Surely you don't expect congratulations for being potent."
"It would be asinine," Draco drawled, leaning down even as Molly planted a huge, smacking kiss on his cheek, "To expect congratulations for something I never doubted."
"Take all the credit you want," Ginny said, squeezing Draco's hand and looking at Pansy. "You're welcome to do it here in nine months or so when I feel as though I'm being bloody tortured and want to tear your head off your shoulders." At his shocked look, she gave him a quick kiss on the lips. "It's a pretty head, though."
"Now you I'll congratulate," Pansy said, finally standing and leaning across the table to brush her lips across Ginny's, the gesture a combination of true affection and a wish to be just a little exhibitionist in front of the Weasleys. Right man, indeed.
"Total satisfaction," Ginny whispered into Pansy's ear. When the brunette leaned back, her eyes were narrowed, and Ginny nodded.
That was why she had wanted Pansy here for this. There had to be some merit, she thought, in showing her what a family could have, what two people could make. At the moment, Arthur had Molly on his lap, his arms wrapped around her as she sniffled and they both took in the sight of their only daughter in one of her happiest moments.
Total satisfaction, Ginny thought.
And though it might have been idealist and naïve of her to think everyone could obtain it, she truly felt they could.
They just had to want it.
~~~
She would have left immediately, would have slipped out in a rare show of subtlety and sensitivity and left the family to celebrate. But Molly Weasley had shoved a plate full of sugar cream pie into one of her hands and a thick, tatty, leatherbound volume in the other. "Look!" she said, fanning her eyes with a corner of her apron. "My children are so beautiful!"
And before Pansy could ask her what in the hell that had to do with anything, she had wandered off, pressing kisses to her kids' foreheads and making more than one young man extremely embarrassed. In a corner of the room, Arthur was using circular logic to try to explain to Draco the wonderful points of parenthood.
And Draco, Pansy noted with a mixture of horror and amusement, was taking it.
This house should have been uncomfortable for her, she thought as she settled into a mammoth brown corduroy chair that should never have been allowed to exist. This was Ron's home, after all, and though she was a woman of few scruples, she knew damned good and well she had no right to be here.
But it was cozy, and despite the fact that she'd nearly been to blows with Molly Weasley-- well, perhaps not quite that drastic, but nothing to sniff at-- they still welcomed her as though she belonged.
As though she wasn't the outcast or the too-plump witch or the tart.
She could see why Ron Weasley had grown up as he had.
Frowning, she settled her plate of pie on the arm of the chair, forking up a bite of it as she opened the book Molly had handed her.
And then she saw why Molly had said her children were beautiful.
There was no order to the pictures at all-- a shot of Bill Weasley as an adult, scuffed and casual, winking and toying with his earring, was crammed next to a shot of all the children, dressed up in their best robes, grimacing and pulling at their collars and ducking as hands flew and they all tried to swat one another.
There was Ginny in her first set of school robes, a little bit gap-toothed and ready to face the world her brothers had tried to conquer for her, and there was Percy sitting at a desk, hair tousled, glasses laid aside.
And then there was Ron.
He was bashful in his pictures as a toddler, but completely recognizable anyway. The smiles, the gestures, the movements. He struggled with a gnome in one picture, hugged his sister tight while she squalled in another, posed with Potter and Granger in a bevy of them.
There was Ron on a broom, and Ron getting on the train, Ron on his father's lap trying to snatch a handful of the hair Arthur was losing even now.
And then there was Ron, looking not much different than he did now, Ron in the first bloom of adulthood, holding a broom and a Quaffle.
And he was wearing a Chudley Cannons uniform.
"What in Merlin's name?" She reached a finger out to touch the picture, and he moved a bit with a grin on his face, making room for her to set her finger on the surface of the photograph. He looked, she thought, like nothing in the world could get him down.
"Oooh, he'd have kittens if he saw--"
"--That Mum had kept that picture."
She looked up at the twins, snatching her hand away from the slick surface of the photograph. "What?" she asked, trying not to sound as terribly guilty as she felt. "Why?"
They exchanged a look and, once one of them-- no bloody way would she ever be able to distinguish them, not that she'd have any need to-- had moved her pie, they each took a seat on an arm of the chair.
"Well, he tried out for the Cannons, you know--" Fred started.
"Even though they're bloody awful," George interjected. They shared a nod and Pansy smiled a bit, knowing if Ron were here, he'd thump their heads together.
Not that it mattered.
"Go on," she urged, sitting back and watching the two of them.
"Just after the war was over."
"No," George corrected, "Just after Voldemort died."
"Right," Fred agreed. "And of course he made it, because he really turned out brilliant by that time--"
"Bloody miracle."
"But the war wasn't over," Pansy said. No, it had gone on for nearly a year after that. A short time for a war, she supposed, but a long time for a young man-- and a young woman, she remembered well enough-- to wait to get on with a life.
"She's a bright girl!" Fred said, sounding surprised as he looked at his brother.
"And a Slyth, to boot. Who knew?" George's delivery of the last two words was so loaded as to be ridiculous, but only Fred heard it, and only Fred understood.
"So… he just quit, and never went back?" Pansy had gone into hiding for a year, but had gone directly back to study once it was over, for the most part, she realized now, completely unaffected.
"He said he'd spent his entire school career and a year besides fighting beside his best friend. The last thing he could think of doing was competing with him."
George waited until Fred stopped speaking, not willing to interrupt, but not able to let it stay so sober. "I think we could have convinced Harry the Cannons were the right way to go."
But his jest, flat though it was, fell on deaf ears.
Pansy was looking at the picture again.
"So Saint Potter got what he wanted, and Ron just… stepped aside?" Typical, Pansy thought. Really fucking typical.
She completely missed seeing twin eyebrows shoot to identical hairlines.
"What would you have done," another voice entered the mix, softer around the edges, emotional. "If you had spent your entire life competing with 'Saint Potter'? I can hardly think you'd choose to do it for the rest of your life."
Ginny brushed her hair away from her face and looked at the tableau, her brothers and Pansy poring over the big book of pictures. Hormones, she thought, were making her a wreck.
But her words had silenced them all, the sheer truth of them.
"It's time to go home," Ginny said quietly to Pansy. "If you think you're ready."
A nod was as much as she cared to manage.