Fic Post: and i'm a goddamn coward (but then again, so are you)
Title: and I’m a goddamn coward (but then again, so are you)Pairing: Justin Finch-Fletchley/Pansy Parkinson
Prompt: for what it’s worth
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2023
Summary: “Am I a bad person?”
Author's Notes: 8/13. Title from “The Lion’s Roar” by First Aid Kit.
It’s a Tuesday night and Pansy is dancing with Draco in the Malfoy’s temporary residence in Bristol, spinning out across the living room’s carpet and then back into her best friend’s arms, an old Hobgoblins album wailing on in the background. The house is small but overcompensatingly ornate: there’s a Caravaggio propped against the wall behind them, the lid of a baby grand piano littered with vases and candlesticks, all the trinkets Draco and his mother could carry out of the Manor and into their ongoing house-arrest strewn across the room. If Pansy closes her eyes, she can trick herself into thinking that she’s thirteen again, hiding out with Draco from some grand charity gala, tipsy on pilfered champagne and dancing, unsupervised, in some hallway off the party.
It’s been a bad week - a bad month, really, but what can you expect from a March that came in like a lion and made the world its den: wind roaring at the windows, rain coming down in heavy sheets with no sign of stopping. Draco turns her, hand at the small of her back, and Pansy presses her forehead against his shoulder, trying to shift her focus. She’s still thinking about it, even though she doesn’t want to: Justin and Susan and last night at the Leaky, the painful awkwardness she felt when they walked through the door. Pansy recognized him before she even realized it was actually him, Justin Finch-Fletchley’s absence from her life suddenly as tangible to her as the rain beating against the Cauldron’s windows and roof, the sick, unexpected jolt she felt when she realized it wasn’t just Penelope Clearwater and her Weasley husband dripping all over the hardwood floor, but Justin - Justin soaking wet and shaking, Justin struggling to close his umbrella, Justin with Susan Bones’s arm looped through his.
Now, well after the fact, Pansy hates that her first thought when they walked through the door was, they’ve finally come to flaunt it.
Hannah greeted him with a hug before she took them to an empty table and Pansy hid behind the bar, trying to look busy, trying to keep her hands from shaking. It had been exactly a month since she’d seen him in person: Pansy gave herself one day to wallow in her self-indulgent misery and decided to never speak of the Incident again; the events of February 14th, 1999 have been struck from the record, burned off the calendar, the mere mention of it a crime of the highest order.
It’s better this way, she told herself afterwards, repeating it internally like a mantra while she cleaned tables, passed out menus, helped Tom and the vendors carry in the morning deliveries. As awful as it was to finally admit it, Pansy knew deep down that a clean break was the best medicine for this kind of hurt - there’s no use in letting herself getting worked up over silly Muggle nonsense, inconvenient infatuations, not after this. Better to stick to what she knows. She boxed up his records and mailed them back, Thank you for the lesson enclosed on a folded piece of parchment tucked between Rumours and Blue.
This was the first she’d seen him since it happened; they hadn’t spoken yet, they hadn’t even made eye contact, and already she was cursing her stupid, racing heart. Hannah backed off to the register and Pansy brought over menus with as much strength as she could muster; in the space between the bar and the corner booth Pansy managed to tack on a placid smile, raise up forced courtesy, the false persona she sometimes has nightmares about. They’re all dressed nicely, respectably, clearly only stopping in after a fancier evening elsewhere; Penelope and Justin were seated at the center of the booth, deep in conversation with Percy Weasley and Susan Bones bookending them, and it’s the latter two who took notice of Pansy’s approach. Weasley took the menus with a tight-lipped smile; Susan looked her over with raised eyebrows and laid her hand possessively at the base of Justin’s neck. The line of his shoulders tensed, but his attention never wavered from Penelope; they spoke in low tones, soft voices, the conversation clearly meant for the two of them alone.
“We don’t need the specials,” Weasley said to her then, “But some waters would be nice, and maybe - Penny -”
Weasley touched Penelope’s arm and she jumped like he’d burned her, whirling on her husband with a startled look that wasn’t assuaged by his asking of what she’d like to drink. “Red wine,” is all she said, her voice deeper than Pansy expected. She immediately turned back to Justin, the two of them picking up the thread of conversation as if they’d never been interrupted.
“Red wine,” Weasley echoed, and then ordered a vodka tonic for himself; Susan ordered firewhiskey, neat, and she leaned in close to Justin when it came to his turn, thumb brushing over the edge of the Azkaban tattoo at his neck as she tried to get his attention. Justin didn’t flinch when Susan touched him but there was a definite tremor of nervous energy settling over the table - he turned slowly, like it wasn’t Susan behind him, but the Grim, and he rubbed at his eyes with his knuckle when Pansy repeated her request for his order.
When he lifted his head to look at her it was so unlike him, just - so sad, his expression so flat and so tired that it looked like it was more than long nights at the Ministry taking all the spark out of him. “The usual, Panse, if you don’t mind,” he said, and Pansy left without another word, a cold wave of dread washing over her as she did.
“Must’ve been a bummer of a double date,” she said to Hannah, her tone one of forced jokey indifference, reaching for the bottle of Pinot Noir chilling in the cooling cupboard and fumbling for a corkscrew. “Where d’you think they went, Rita Skeeter’s book signing? Or for a free helping of food poisoning over at the Toadstone?”
Hannah shook her head sadly, pulling down the Draíochta from the shelf. “They’ve come from a funeral,” she told her quietly, “Lisa Turpin, remember her? The Healers stopped their care on Sunday.”
Pansy scanned quickly through her mental rolodex and came up half-empty: a mousy brunette with glasses like Potter’s, Ravenclaw knee socks, a few borrowed quills in Charms. The dread settled more firmly in her chest, and she glanced back at Justin, his hand still clasped in Penelope’s on top of the table, Susan looking uncomfortable beside him.
“Lisa Turpin?” she echoed, “What happened?”
Hannah set down the bottle with an impatient sigh. “Suicide. She overdosed on pain potions, and there’s nothing more anyone could do for her.”
“But wasn’t she… I mean, I thought all the prisoners were, you know, like…”
Pansy trailed off and the hard stare Hannah gave her made her wince. Still makes her wince, thinking back on it. “You were wrong.” Hannah looked back at Justin’s table, then stacked the drinks on her tray. “Not everyone was that lucky.”
Hannah left Pansy alone at the bar and that was that: it was clear that Pansy was excused for the night. Guilt burns her up as she thinks back on it, because how could she be so short-sighted? How could she not realize that something was wrong?
There were only a handful of survivors that made it to St. Mungo’s, when the war finally ended - Justin and Penelope were the sanest ones among them, and Rita Skeeter was the one who called them the “King and Queen of Azkaban,” a name that has, unfortunately, stuck. The photographs of the two of them in the closed ward were the first thing printed after the Pottermania died down, Penelope propped up in her hospital bed, Justin sitting beside her, skeletal fingers linked tightly together. They were lucky to have each other, they kept saying then, and in all the interviews they’ve given since: lucky that there was a gap in the wall between their cells, lucky that they were able to keep each other sane.
There were articles in the Prophet all through February: an exposé on the inner workings of Azkaban prison, an editorial on the long-term effects of unrestrained Dementor exposure. Another, on the suicide rates of former inmates. Pansy didn’t read them. She couldn’t.
No, she thinks now, the song ending, the record skipping on the track. It wasn’t that she couldn’t read them. She didn’t want to. She didn’t want to think of the others who were not like Justin, not like Penelope, didn’t want to think about the people who went mad beyond all hope of repair. The others, who were made into wretched shells of their former selves; sticklike wraiths who hid in the dark corners of the closed ward, brandishing stolen knives at their caretakers and curling into themselves, howling, afraid. The others, who suffered in a way that no human being should ever have to suffer, whose misery Pansy couldn’t bring herself to try and understand.
Of the many things that people call her, coward is the one that hurts the most, if only because Pansy knows that it is true.
Draco lets her go to fix the record player, leaving her alone in the middle of the floor, and Pansy wrings her hands together nervously before sinking down onto the nearby sofa. They’ve both done their best to try and distract each other tonight: Draco from his upcoming parole hearing, Pansy from her guilty conscience. It hasn’t really worked, for either of them.
“Am I a bad person?” she asks, and Draco sighs as he takes the seat beside her. A new record is playing - something bluesy, an old torch song winding its way through the room - and he’s rolled up his sleeves, the Dark Mark visible on his forearm where it rests along the back of the couch, stark and black against his pale skin. Pansy reaches out and traces a fingertip along the curve of the skull, down to where the jaw unhinges and becomes a snake. Draco doesn’t flinch when she touches him. He’s getting better at it.
“Do you want a real answer, or one that will make you feel better?”
“Neither,” Pansy says, “Both.”
Draco sets a hand on her knee and Pansy looks up at him through her eyelashes. “You’re not a bad person,” he tells her, “But you’ve done bad things.”
Pansy almost laughs at that, and the corner of his mouth turns up.
“For what it’s worth, though, so did I. And I think it matters, for both of us, that we’re trying to learn from the things we did wrong, and to make amends for it, and to be better than we were. So yes, Panse, you were a bad person.” Draco leans in and moves so that his arm is around her shoulders, pulling Pansy close, his chin resting on top of her head. “But you won’t always be.”
Pansy closes her eyes and thinks back to last night: the very end of the evening, closing down the Cauldron, Justin coming up to the register to pay their bill despite Hannah letting them put their tab on the house. Tell him you’re sorry, she’d thought to herself, taking his money, coins falling into the till in an unmusical patter of clinks: Tell him you’re sorry about his friend, tell him something, anything, you stupid bint, just say the words, say ‘I’m sorry,’ say it, say it, but the words wouldn’t come. Justin looked at her before he left, eyes dark and lost and sad, and Pansy couldn’t even tell him that she was sorry for his loss, sorry for what happened between them, sorry that the world kept falling down around them in ways they couldn’t help or stop.
You’re a terrible person, she’d thought then.
“Do you promise?” she says to Draco now.
“I do,” he says, and they stay like that for a long time: listening to the music, listening to the rain.