Fic: Saturday As Usual
Fic: Saturday As Usual
Author: taffetablue
Rating: R
Summary: Pansy dreams more than most people do. (Pansy, Pansy/Draco)
Notes: For niuserre via a_humumentathon. Thanks to ninjajab and yeats for beta.
It wasn’t until Professor Vector asked them to open up to page five-thirteen in their textbooks, please, and begin taking notes on the entropic algorithm coefficients for memory charms that Pansy thinks, oh. She dips her quill in black ink and begins to copy.
++
Pansy dreams more than most people do, she thinks - every night, almost; a little less in winter and a little more in summer.
In her dreams she hides in the clump of violets behind rose bushes, plays hide and seek in lacy lavender robes and white pinafores, touches rain-covered windows with small hands and pulls them away to see four foggy handprints and twenty skinny fingers splayed out like petals. She learns to play the pianoforte, sitting on only half the bench; a second musician accompanies her stuttering melody, a reedy voice in counterpoint to her own. When she takes tea at a small, child-size table, the chair across from her is empty. She looks away, and back, and half a sandwich is gone.
++
After the Yule Ball their fourth year, she lets Draco kiss her clumsily on the lips, too uncoordinated and stiff and uncertain (it seems the right thing to do - this is what all the older girls whisper about in the bathrooms, and they will be married soon, after all) and lets him palm her breasts through the soft fabric of her robes, and lets him undo the ties at her back, fingers shaking. Pansy unbuttons his dress robes, runs her hands along his pale chest, and he looks at her, terrified and wanting.
They’re elbows and knees, angles, too sharp - she can count his herring-bone ribs, and he rubs his thumb across the protruding edge of her collarbone over and over. So rich they’re starving, but it feels so good to touch, shivering and unaccountably warm in the drafty dorms before anyone else has returned.
Draco’s eyes shut tight when he comes, gasping brokenly against her neck, and Pansy threads her fingers through his hair as if he were a child.
++
Her bed is in the nursery, headboard painted with flowers, big, like she’s still five years old. It’s dark, and she can hear someone else’s light sleeping breath. If she squints, she can make out a small, dark-haired girl flickering in and out of being in a bed across the room.
++
She receives letters from her mother twice a week, on Tuesdays and Saturdays, detailing the social events of the past few days, and discussing Pansy’s impending Ball (three years isn’t much time at all, her mother reminds her, and they need to begin thinking of colours and table settings, and centerpieces of flowers or fruit) and asking after Draco. Her father sends her missives once every two weeks, on heavy cream parchment, asking after her studies. To his, she promptly replies.
When she was very little, she threw a tantrum and the house shook, and her father was pleased.
++
It’s her sixth birthday, and she’s kneeling on a heavy chair in the dining room, hair pulled back from her face with small rosebud barrettes. Her cake is iced with small purple flowers, and Happy Birthday Pansy in flowing lavender script on a sheet of sugary white.
She turns her head, and to her left, another girl kneels, laughing - a white cake in front of her, decorated with roses, and she looks almost exactly like Pansy, eyes slightly smaller, bluer, her nose a little rounder at the tip. Pansy’s mother brushes the girl’s hair back from her eyes and kisses her forehead, murmuring: rose, rose.
++
The Easter holiday is spent attending teas and garden fetes and three forgettable dinner parties. Pansy’s mother makes her wear gloves - thin lace, white ones with pearl buttons that come just past her wrists, or just past her elbows. In the mornings, Pansy wakes early and walks the grounds in her nightgown, dew still clinging to the first tender blades of grass.
The cemetery is out past the gardens. Past rows of box hedges and red tulips and Easter lilies, past the orchards, past the fields, unmarked headstones tucked up against the hillside like broken fingernails shoved up through the ground. They are worn at the edges, rough under her fingertips, old, hunched - and there, there is one in the back, recent, a small thorny vine climbing over it. Pansy leans close, and she can see the pink-lipped teardrop shapes of rosebuds.
++
It’s her sixth birthday, and she’s kneeling on the floor of the nursery, unwrapping a purple box - peeling back ribbons to find a small hand mirror cradled in airy tissue paper, holding it up to see her reflection and giggling in surprised delight as it murmurs beautiful, just like her mother’s, just like a lady’s. She looks to Rose, brushing aside pink wrapping and holding up the tiny flowered circle in expectant silence. Looks to Rose as her smile fades, and she blinks, and tries again - nothing, the mirror is silent, their parents standing in the doorway, faces drawn; she tries once more and begins to cry. Pansy looks to Rose as she throws the mirror to the carpet and it doesn’t break, as her mouth moves, no, no.
Pansy looks to Rose as their father steps forward angrily, and then she’s very tired, very very tired. Her attention folds to the carpet and her eyes drop closed, no, no, but she’s asleep, dreamless.
Author: taffetablue
Rating: R
Summary: Pansy dreams more than most people do. (Pansy, Pansy/Draco)
Notes: For niuserre via a_humumentathon. Thanks to ninjajab and yeats for beta.
It wasn’t until Professor Vector asked them to open up to page five-thirteen in their textbooks, please, and begin taking notes on the entropic algorithm coefficients for memory charms that Pansy thinks, oh. She dips her quill in black ink and begins to copy.
++
Pansy dreams more than most people do, she thinks - every night, almost; a little less in winter and a little more in summer.
In her dreams she hides in the clump of violets behind rose bushes, plays hide and seek in lacy lavender robes and white pinafores, touches rain-covered windows with small hands and pulls them away to see four foggy handprints and twenty skinny fingers splayed out like petals. She learns to play the pianoforte, sitting on only half the bench; a second musician accompanies her stuttering melody, a reedy voice in counterpoint to her own. When she takes tea at a small, child-size table, the chair across from her is empty. She looks away, and back, and half a sandwich is gone.
++
After the Yule Ball their fourth year, she lets Draco kiss her clumsily on the lips, too uncoordinated and stiff and uncertain (it seems the right thing to do - this is what all the older girls whisper about in the bathrooms, and they will be married soon, after all) and lets him palm her breasts through the soft fabric of her robes, and lets him undo the ties at her back, fingers shaking. Pansy unbuttons his dress robes, runs her hands along his pale chest, and he looks at her, terrified and wanting.
They’re elbows and knees, angles, too sharp - she can count his herring-bone ribs, and he rubs his thumb across the protruding edge of her collarbone over and over. So rich they’re starving, but it feels so good to touch, shivering and unaccountably warm in the drafty dorms before anyone else has returned.
Draco’s eyes shut tight when he comes, gasping brokenly against her neck, and Pansy threads her fingers through his hair as if he were a child.
++
Her bed is in the nursery, headboard painted with flowers, big, like she’s still five years old. It’s dark, and she can hear someone else’s light sleeping breath. If she squints, she can make out a small, dark-haired girl flickering in and out of being in a bed across the room.
++
She receives letters from her mother twice a week, on Tuesdays and Saturdays, detailing the social events of the past few days, and discussing Pansy’s impending Ball (three years isn’t much time at all, her mother reminds her, and they need to begin thinking of colours and table settings, and centerpieces of flowers or fruit) and asking after Draco. Her father sends her missives once every two weeks, on heavy cream parchment, asking after her studies. To his, she promptly replies.
When she was very little, she threw a tantrum and the house shook, and her father was pleased.
++
It’s her sixth birthday, and she’s kneeling on a heavy chair in the dining room, hair pulled back from her face with small rosebud barrettes. Her cake is iced with small purple flowers, and Happy Birthday Pansy in flowing lavender script on a sheet of sugary white.
She turns her head, and to her left, another girl kneels, laughing - a white cake in front of her, decorated with roses, and she looks almost exactly like Pansy, eyes slightly smaller, bluer, her nose a little rounder at the tip. Pansy’s mother brushes the girl’s hair back from her eyes and kisses her forehead, murmuring: rose, rose.
++
The Easter holiday is spent attending teas and garden fetes and three forgettable dinner parties. Pansy’s mother makes her wear gloves - thin lace, white ones with pearl buttons that come just past her wrists, or just past her elbows. In the mornings, Pansy wakes early and walks the grounds in her nightgown, dew still clinging to the first tender blades of grass.
The cemetery is out past the gardens. Past rows of box hedges and red tulips and Easter lilies, past the orchards, past the fields, unmarked headstones tucked up against the hillside like broken fingernails shoved up through the ground. They are worn at the edges, rough under her fingertips, old, hunched - and there, there is one in the back, recent, a small thorny vine climbing over it. Pansy leans close, and she can see the pink-lipped teardrop shapes of rosebuds.
++
It’s her sixth birthday, and she’s kneeling on the floor of the nursery, unwrapping a purple box - peeling back ribbons to find a small hand mirror cradled in airy tissue paper, holding it up to see her reflection and giggling in surprised delight as it murmurs beautiful, just like her mother’s, just like a lady’s. She looks to Rose, brushing aside pink wrapping and holding up the tiny flowered circle in expectant silence. Looks to Rose as her smile fades, and she blinks, and tries again - nothing, the mirror is silent, their parents standing in the doorway, faces drawn; she tries once more and begins to cry. Pansy looks to Rose as she throws the mirror to the carpet and it doesn’t break, as her mouth moves, no, no.
Pansy looks to Rose as their father steps forward angrily, and then she’s very tired, very very tired. Her attention folds to the carpet and her eyes drop closed, no, no, but she’s asleep, dreamless.