fic: the past
The past.
Pansy hates it. Hates talking about it, hates people bringing it up, hates thinking about it on a rainy afternoon, stuck inside the unfeeling Slytherin common room, when there’s nothing better to do than think.
It always leaves an icky feeling in her stomach. Cold and greasy, tinged with regret and guilt and betrayal and pain.
It’s the story of her life. Always has been, ever since she was five years old when she’d begged for her father to buy her that muggle toy … Barbie doll she thinks it was called, she can’t quite remember. She remembered seeing a girl in blonde pigtails with one tucked under her arm, on one of the rare occasions when she was out with her father in muggle London. She remembers the glorious smile stretched across the young girl’s face and the entrancing rosy glow which tinted her cheeks. Anything that could make someone that happy, she had thought, was surely worth having.
So she’d begged her father. Pleaded and nagged for him to buy her one. For three long weeks she hadn’t asked for anything else. So he did. On her birthday, she can still remember the elation she’d felt at opening that meticulously wrapped box only to find the cheery stepford-smile of Malibu Barbie grinning back at her. She remembers how she’d shrieked and clapped her hands together with joy. She remembers thinking that he was the best father in the world.
That was before his cheery smile had morphed, horrifically into a sneer of disdain as he hit her across the face, calling her names that she’d never heard before in her short life. Names that even today she didn’t hear often, even in the least civil of company. Then he’d thrown the silly plastic doll in the fire and made her watch as its perfect latex skin melted into a gooey mess amongst the flames. She can still smell the pungent odour of artificial hair burning.
Weak, he’d called her. Pathetic. Pathetic little bitch. He told her he wouldn’t tolerate having a muggle lover living in his household. It’s bad enough that she was a woman, as tainted and impure as her slut of a mother, let alone that she would reduce herself to mingling with that inferior race. He told her that if he ever caught her so much as look at a muggle or one of their worthless, inferior contraptions again, he’d kill her.
She was five years old. Yet she’d understood. Understood the way his cruel black eyes had pierced her very soul with an anger that wasn’t red hot like the fire which was mottling and consuming the repugnant, unrecognisable gunk that had been her doll, but freezing and icy like the black pit which existed inside his heart.
She was five years old. And for the first time in her life, she’d understood fear.
It wouldn’t be the last.
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Pansy hates it. Hates talking about it, hates people bringing it up, hates thinking about it on a rainy afternoon, stuck inside the unfeeling Slytherin common room, when there’s nothing better to do than think.
It always leaves an icky feeling in her stomach. Cold and greasy, tinged with regret and guilt and betrayal and pain.
It’s the story of her life. Always has been, ever since she was five years old when she’d begged for her father to buy her that muggle toy … Barbie doll she thinks it was called, she can’t quite remember. She remembered seeing a girl in blonde pigtails with one tucked under her arm, on one of the rare occasions when she was out with her father in muggle London. She remembers the glorious smile stretched across the young girl’s face and the entrancing rosy glow which tinted her cheeks. Anything that could make someone that happy, she had thought, was surely worth having.
So she’d begged her father. Pleaded and nagged for him to buy her one. For three long weeks she hadn’t asked for anything else. So he did. On her birthday, she can still remember the elation she’d felt at opening that meticulously wrapped box only to find the cheery stepford-smile of Malibu Barbie grinning back at her. She remembers how she’d shrieked and clapped her hands together with joy. She remembers thinking that he was the best father in the world.
That was before his cheery smile had morphed, horrifically into a sneer of disdain as he hit her across the face, calling her names that she’d never heard before in her short life. Names that even today she didn’t hear often, even in the least civil of company. Then he’d thrown the silly plastic doll in the fire and made her watch as its perfect latex skin melted into a gooey mess amongst the flames. She can still smell the pungent odour of artificial hair burning.
Weak, he’d called her. Pathetic. Pathetic little bitch. He told her he wouldn’t tolerate having a muggle lover living in his household. It’s bad enough that she was a woman, as tainted and impure as her slut of a mother, let alone that she would reduce herself to mingling with that inferior race. He told her that if he ever caught her so much as look at a muggle or one of their worthless, inferior contraptions again, he’d kill her.
She was five years old. Yet she’d understood. Understood the way his cruel black eyes had pierced her very soul with an anger that wasn’t red hot like the fire which was mottling and consuming the repugnant, unrecognisable gunk that had been her doll, but freezing and icy like the black pit which existed inside his heart.
She was five years old. And for the first time in her life, she’d understood fear.
It wouldn’t be the last.
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