Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Pansy woke to red. She passed her hands in front of her face, and saw nothing but a dense, curdling fog like a curtain of vapourized blood.

Where had her shadow gone? Her toad? She didn't dare call out for them.

Slowly, the colour leached from the mist like dye rinsed down the drain.

Within the endless blind whiteness left behind, a cool and unseen hand folded into hers.

I’ve been looking for you, said Pansy. I needed you, and you weren't there.

A voice that was her own asked—politely, because she’d been raised to have nice manners, even if she didn’t feel nice a lot of the time, Do you remember?

Remember what?

The story.

Possibly. How does it go?

How they always go.

You’ll need to be more specific.

Start like this: once upon a time, there was—

A boy. I know this one.

Shall we tell it?

She’d seen him at Flourish and Blotts—a shivering jelly of a child bumbling through the stacks behind a rangy, patrician woman wearing a hat with a taxidermy bird. A few days later that same awesome specimen of a matriarch shepherded her grandson along Platform 9 ¾, scolding him at length about a toad.

Hold on— is it about a boy?

Shall we start again?

Why not? Stories are free. It’s ink and paper that costs money.

Once upon a time, there was . . . ?

. . . a stepmother.

No.

A mother.

And . . . ?

A father.

And what they longed for more than anything in the world—

Was a child.

The morning Pansy left for Hogwarts, she received a summons to Dahlia Parkinson's rooms. The promise of a private audience at her mother's dressing table set Pansy’s heart off like a firecracker in a shoebox. She arrived dressed for the train and found her mother in her silk slip, gracile and otherworldly as a naiad.

Dahlia motioned for her to come close. Pansy drew near enough that she could have reached out and touched her mother's elegant wrist, if she wanted to see her flinch. Her signature jasmine scent throbbed in Pansy’s sinuses.

Dahlia's eyes shifted from her own reflection to catch Pansy’s gaze in the mirror. “I need you to understand something before you go.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“People will cast their judgements the moment they set eyes on you. Those judgements will be final. Have I been clear?”

“Yes, Mother.”

She looked Pansy up and down. “You’re as bad as your father for slouching.”

Pansy straightened her spine.

That seemed to be all Dahlia meant to say, and she focused on her reflection again. Pansy remained rooted in place, mesmerised by the sight and heady smell of her. At the parting of her lips, a soft pink cosmetic pencil drifted from the vanity and began outlining Dahlia’s mouth. Pansy had never thought of her mother as being young. Thirty was quite old, really. But her skin was dewy and unlined, her glass-green eyes large and clear as a child's. With her glossy black hair hanging loose at her waist and her make-up half finished, she looked like an impossibly lovely girl playing at her mother’s vanity.

“There will be those who can lift you up,” Dahlia went on, angling her chin forward at the approach of a hovering lipstick tube. “And those who would drag you down.” She cast a chill glance at her daughter. "Know who you are. Know who you're dealing with. Act accordingly. And for God’s sake, Pansy, try, if you possibly can . . .”

She sighed. To the chagrin of everyone involved, she’d bred true. The unwanted daughter was a perfect copy—a leggy, knob-kneed foal wobbling beside an identical mare.

The rogue streak of temper was all the father.

“Yes, Mother?”

Dahlia fixed her eyes on her own reflection and pressed her rose petal lips together. “Learn how to bite your tongue.”

Am I—are we—the villain?

That depends on who you ask. And where it stops.

The rumour that the Harry James Potter was on the Hogwarts Express—live and in the flesh—travelled from one car to the next like Fiendfyre. Talk of a scuffle followed swiftly on its heels, and when Pansy visited Draco’s compartment she found him having a sulk.

His ego had been dragged through the street and publicly flogged. Whatever had transpired sent him slinking off to verbally preen and chomp through a deluxe chocolate wand while Greg Goyle sat in the corner fussing over a rat-bitten finger.

“Leave it to the Longbottom squib to lose his useless amphibian before he’d even got it on the train,” Draco seethed. “And of course Weasley’s put his oar in with Potter. That family’s in for whatever they can get.”

Pansy recognized the stench of humiliation. Draco was living her own worst nightmare, and so incensed about the rejection he could hardly see straight.

A voice sounded overhead. “We will be reaching Hogwarts in five minutes’ time.”

Pansy left Draco to marinate in his vinegar and prepared to disembark, soothing her own nauseous anxiety by tracing the length of the wand in her pocket. It was exactly ten inches long, blackthorn with a dragonstring core, and stiff as blazes. Most importantly it was hers—truly hers—safe and secure, unlike Longbottom’s toad.

Pansy knew the name. His was a tarnished house, only half a step up from the Weasleys. What an inauspicious debut. And how embarrassing for Harry Potter, world’s sturdiest infant, to get caught up with all the wrong sort of people straight away.

An hour after Rubeus Hagrid found the missing toad lumping around the soggy bottom of a boat, Pansy sat beneath the Sorting Hat and waited for her rightful connections.

Connections, eh? said a voice only she could hear.

Her friends were Sorted: Daphne and Millie, Draco and Theo, Vincent and Gregory, who’d inexplicably let Draco treat them like lap dogs since they were all in nappies.

Pansy’s mouth watered with nausea. Chin lifted, moving only her eyes, she scanned the room. Her attention landed on the Longbottom boy. To crown the day's degradations, he'd spent an agonising four minutes under the hat, face contorted in effort like he was trapped in mortal combat with a stuck gherkin jar. He now sat moon-eyed at the Gryffindor table, House of the arrogant and reckless, packed with Weasleys and the self-satisfied, fast-talking Muggle-born girl who’d made a spectacle of herself grandstanding before anyone who would listen on the train.

A smattering of freckles decorated Longbottom’s nose, and discombobulated teeth crowded his mouth. His jumper fit awkwardly, large enough to accommodate his torso but so long it swallowed up his hands, which were overlarge, like the paws of a puppy bound to grow into a very big dog.

Here was the bottom of the curve. No one in their year could have possibly made a worse first impression.

The Boy Who Couldn’t Keep Hold of His Toad realised she was looking at him, and had the nerve to give her a lopsided smile.

Hogwarts was going to dismantle him.

Pansy wouldn’t let that happen to her. She strained to keep her mind focused on her rightful House. Instead, her single, desperate thought was, I know who I am!

Do you? said the voice inside the hat.

Its tone was so smarmy and doubtful it sent a wave of anger cresting over her fear.

Just put me in my father’s House, you armpit-smelling, lice-ridden heap of mouldy upholstery scraps! For good measure, Pansy added, Or I’ll throw myself out the window while you’re still on my head!

Within the silent circle of their conversation, the hat roared with laughter. Audible to the room, it shouted, “Slytherin!”

Spine straight and head erect, she took her rightful place with those who could lift her up.

Six and a half years later—

Wait.

Is something wrong?

I know this part.

I’m sorry.

—she crawled down the stairs outside the Dark Arts classroom on her hands and knees, lips pursed around a gathering mouthful of blood.

The problem with the Cruciatus Curse was that you had to mean it. It didn’t matter what Professor Carrow put before her that year: snakes; spiders; mice; a snivelling First Year Hufflepuff; a nit; a leech. It had taken years of snapping and snarling, claws bared, to be crowned Head Bitch of Hogwarts. All it took was five seconds and a dribble of colourless smoke from her wand to reveal that Pansy Parkinson literally couldn’t hurt a fly.

Of course few students could. But it was her that Amycus Carrow held back for remedial study.

For weeks she stood before him, knees locked, teeth clacking in the unheated room, trying to hurt something to avoid being hurt. She pictured everyone she disliked. Everyone she hated. Nothing was ever enough. She closed her eyes and imagined the angriest she’d ever been. Potter’s face swam before her, bold and defiant after nearly bleeding Draco dry in a bathroom scuffle. She'd wanted to swab the devil-may-care look off his face—to scrub him and his band of entitled, duplicitous rulebreakers from the Hogwarts roll books and make everything clean and orderly again.

But Potter had been telling the truth all along. Voldemort returned. The Ministry fell. And Pansy understood that from then on, cleanliness and order would be code words for butchery.

Never having developed a taste for genocide or grovelling at the feet of dark overlords, Pansy’s father went on permanent holiday to more favourable climes. With only one year left at school, his daughter and wife remained.

Pansy told herself she could do almost anything for a year— be anything.

But she was wrong.

At the beginning of their session, Carrow placed a caged tit on the desk before her. It was a white puff of a thing with small black eyes, black wings and a long black tail. With each failed attempt on the distressed creature, Carrow drew closer.

"You're Head Girl, Miss Parkinson," he said. "Top marks. Exemplary discipline. Was I wrong to expect more from you?"

"No, sir."

There was no outcome in that room that Pansy wanted. All she could do was prolong the inevitable by holding up her wand and biting out a word that would forever be dead on arrival. Carrow stood just behind her. He wrapped his hand around her wrist. He laid his lips against her hair. He dug his wand tip into the base of her spine.

She thought, How will you choose to hurt me?

But she knew.

The first time a man’s voice rumbled past her ear, low and hot, it said, “Crucio.”

On the way down, she caught her chin on the desk, and her teeth chiselled cleanly through her tongue.

She curled on the floor in a halo of yellow-green light. Jagged, filthy knives of pain sliced deep through her flesh as though shearing it from the bone. He was flaying her. Carving her. Digging for glimpses of her private self amongst the offal. When the man standing over her grew satisfied, Pansy lay shivering in a puddle of her own piss, crumpled like a discarded wad of tissue in the bottom of his bedside bin.

Professor Carrow crouched and lay his hand on her thigh. “The Dark Lord punishes as lavishly as he rewards, Miss Parkinson," he said softly. "This was a kindness. Do you understand?”

Pansy nodded.

He patted her haunch. “Clean yourself up. We'll try again next week.”

She waited until he left, then allowed herself to cry.

Now she was crawling backwards down the castle stairs towards the infirmary. Only her head didn’t feel right, and her vision was blurred. Worryingly, it didn’t help when she wiped away the tears.

“Pansy? What are you—oh, shit.”

Pansy knew that voice. It belonged to a ghost, a boy who’d gone into hiding inside the castle and turned himself into a rumour.

“Can you walk if I support you?” Longbottom asked.

She squeezed her eyes shut and retched. All the blood she was trying not to swallow gushed out of her mouth at once.

Without a word of reproach about the mess, he scooped her off the floor. As he carried her down the stairs, Pansy tucked herself up in his arms like a little girl and cried.

When he spoke, he sounded cold and deliberate. "Did Amycus do this to you?"

Pansy only said, "I'm sorry."

“It’s alright. You’ll be alright.”

“I’ll stop crying.” Her voice was thick and grotesque, like she had a mouth full of porridge. “I promise. I’m sorry. I’ll stop.”

“Merlin,” he said, shouldering through a door. “Madam Pomfrey!”

He laid her down on an infirmary bed, then pressed a cold metal basin to her chin, into which she gratefully dribbled.

“Sweet merciful heavens,” said Poppy Pomfrey.

Neville left.

A web of spells and several draughts saw Pansy’s tongue mended, though still thick and inflamed. Her head no longer felt like someone had cracked it open with a claw hammer. She was merely sore and tired. In the cool and quiet infirmary, she slept.

She dreamt that she sat before Dahlia’s dressing table mirror. Instead of her own reflection, she stared into her mother’s sea glass eyes.

“What did you learn?” her mother asked.

Pansy opened her mouth to show her.

Sometime in the night, she woke to the creak of the bedside chair.

A candle flared, and Pomfrey whispered, “You shouldn’t be here. You’ll be caught.”

“Not at night.” The candlelight picked out Neville Longbottom’s hunched silhouette beside the bed, his hair overgrown and unkempt. “I wanted to check. That’s the worst I’ve seen him do all year.”

“Is the bird alright?” Pansy slurred, woozy with pain potion. “Poor darling looked terrified in that cage.”

Neville breathed out a laugh, more puzzled than amused. “Seamus let it out.”

“That’s good.” Pansy hugged her knees to her chest under the infirmary sheets. “That’s something good.”

After a beat, Neville said, “Yeah. It is. Feel better.”

Then he was gone.

She didn’t know then how close they were to the end. Less than a week, and it would all be over.

Pansy dreamt about sifting through the burnt wreckage of the castle. In the midst of the smoking rubble, she found an open cage.

I remember the next part.

Put out the fires.

Mop up the blood.

Call the children back inside.

And teach them.

"Whore." The Fifth Year leaned over Pansy's shoulder and spat a juicy gobbet of mucus into her soup.

Avoiding the eyes of her table mates, Pansy laid her napkin over her bowl. It was alright. She'd tried lunch, and it hadn't worked out. Anyway, she was never hungry.

She pocketed a bread roll, and from the Great Hall went to the library,  then Arithmancy and Charms. Her eyes remained straight ahead. She only ever spoke when she was spoken to.

Another attempt at dinner in the Great Hall didn’t appeal. Cocooned in her private room in the Eighth-year dormitory, she picked at the bread roll for hours as she transcribed rune tables and graphed charm inflections. When her eyes began to sting, she put on her pyjamas and cleaned her teeth. She slept, and dreamt of nothing.

Her sole objective was to sit her N.E.W.T.'s. After that, she could go anywhere. Vienna or Sydney. New York or Singapore. One foot in front of the other for nine more months, and she'd be nothing more than a cautionary tale.

Until then, there was spit in her soup. Powder down the back of her robe that gave her a blistering rash. A flashing sign tacked to her back reading, Someone grab her! The groping that followed. On the Potions blackboard, a detailed and expressive chalk drawing of Pansy with vampire fangs and enormous tits, receiving Voldemort’s gargantuan snake-shaped penis from behind.

Which was a missed satiric opportunity. If anything, post-resurrection Tom Riddle had hemipenes.

She was a laughingstock. A hated thing. Why wouldn’t she be? For seven years she’d guzzled piss from the chalice of her poisoned House and boasted she was sipping Champagne. And for what? Complicity. Ruin. Ichor in the joint between the paving stones.

What really bothered her was that she was always, always cold.

When he knocked on her door, she sat on her bed wrapped in two jumpers and a quilt, rewriting her notes on the subphases of partial inorganic Transfiguration.

Neville held out a plate.

She stepped away like it might bite back. “What’s this?”

“Roast chicken,” he said, stating the obvious. “Loads of veg, and the rolls you like. Pudding. I don’t think you eat it, but I do, so. Hard not to take some.”

He’d finally grown into his paws. He matched Ronald Weasley for height, but was broader and more muscular, like he’d spent all his spare time in hiding doing Pilates. Neither Theo nor Daphne would shut up about his being fuckable, a word which made Pansy want to confiscate the English vocabulary from both of them until they proved they could be responsible.

Weren't they all children?

Of course they weren’t.

His freckles hadn’t changed a jot. But even Pansy couldn’t deny he was no longer a round-faced flop with unfortunate teeth clutching his Remembrall. Somewhere along his path to glory he’d shed that skin and emerged anew. The result had girls queuing by the dozen. Pansy doubted it was a hardship. Tall, short, dark, fair, tits, arse—whatever he liked, the wares were available. It would be a waste, frankly, if he didn’t sample them.

The plate steamed. Pansy’s mouth watered.

“Thanks.” She took the plate from his hands and began to shut the door.

“There's a gathering by the lake some nights,” said Neville. “Just our year. You’re welcome to come. And . . . I’ve let McGonagall know about the harassment.”

“What harassment?”

“The jinxes, the . . . art . . .”

Calling it art was a bit of a stretch, but judging by Pansy’s expression in the drawing, so was Voldemort’s snake dick.

“There’s been some poetry, too,” Pansy said. “If you like satiric pornography in trochaic octameter, I could do a reading.”

He rested his arm against the door jamb like he meant to stay a while. “It’ll stop. We’ll make it stop. There’s no need to isolate yourself.”

That’s where he was wrong. Pansy inched the door closed, hoping he’d take the hint.

He didn’t.

“Hermione sorted out how to play Muggle music in the common room,” he said. “You could come and have a listen.”

Pansy didn’t want a great big grown-up man clogging up her door, and she damn well didn’t want his pity. She also didn’t want to argue. She very much wanted him to go away so she could gorge herself on roast brussels sprouts in peace.

“Alright,” she said.

He straightened in surprise. “Alright?”

The chicken smelled gorgeous. She just said she was willing to socialise. It was a lie, obviously, but why wasn’t he leaving?

“Not tonight,” she said, in case he was confused. “Another time. Later.”

“Alright.”

That was one alright too many. Pansy tore off a crisp piece of chicken skin with her fingers and shoved it into her mouth. A carnal rumble sounded deep in her throat, like a food-aggressive cat. She swallowed, licked the grease from her fingertips, and glared up at Neville.

He was equal parts bewildered and amused. “Good?”

As she considered whether to simply plant her face in the plate right in front of him, Neville produced a set of silverware wrapped in a napkin.

“Mm hm. Thank you.” She snagged the cutlery and shut the door in his stupid masculine face before he could say another word.

Alone at last, for what felt like the first time in her life, she ate her fill and was satisfied.

I didn’t like him.

Not really, no.

Lots of other girls liked him.

He’s broken quite a few hearts.

I like him.

Of course you do. He’s him.

The wind cut across the black lake and whistled through the weaving of Pansy's overcoat, threaded her heavy jumper, thumbed its nose at the wool camisole beneath her dress, and made itself comfortable in her marrow.

Most of their year had come back. Fresh off an apocalyptic final confrontation, the three Houses Tom Riddle did not belong to extended a grace to their enemies Pansy couldn’t begin to understand.

Still, they weren't exactly skipping circles through the meadow singing tra-la-la and jerking one another off.

Pansy was well aware she was being tolerated. And it wasn't because the other Houses were especially benevolent. It was simply that they'd recently travelled through hell and back, and craved peace and normalcy for their own sakes.

No problem. Slytherin House was ever eager for an excuse to keep itself apart.

The night Theo needled Pansy enough to draw her down to the lakeside fire, the booze flowed freely. Pansy had no intentions of getting inebriated, but wasn’t above a tipple. The whiskey was charmed to keep off the cold, and she desperately needed the warmth.

The rest of the party was well lubricated. Seamus and Ginny busied themselves chucking anything that wasn't nailed down into the fire. Someone had led Ernie Macmillan to believe his guitar playing was wanted, and Lavender warbled breathily along. Theo slumped in a camp chair with a tumbler in one hand and his wand in the other, conducting folk ballads. Neville drank from a beer bottle and stared pensively at the flames, Hannah Abbott perched on his knee.

Pansy looked out over the lake. She’d never felt more lonely in her life.

Michael Corner sat debating some opaque Muggle controversy with Granger, who insisted with increasing volume and vehemence that beetles were more influential than the Queen. A sudden high-pitched shriek sent a jolt of fear up Pansy's spine. Seamus had Lavender’s wrists in his hands. In a sort of demierotic consensual Viking abduction, he slung her over his shoulder and started off at a jog towards the lake.

Everyone moved all at once, like they’d been waiting their whole lives for permission to become barbarians. The Patil sisters ran after a bellowing Dean Thomas. Hermione bounced along like a feisty bantam boxer beside Michael, still strenuously making her point.

“But musically,” she slurred. “The sheer cultural impact! There’s simply no comparison!”

Hannah took Neville by the hand and led him to the shore.

 On the beach, they followed Seamus's example and stripped off all their clothes.

“Now that’s a party,” said Theo.

Draco had spent the last hour gazing morosely into his glass like an Irish novelist.

Theo grabbed him by the coat collar. “Come along, my wan Victorian child. Let’s ogle.”

Pansy was left alone beside the fire. She stared longingly up the switchback trail leading to the castle. She was on two—no, three—generous pours of the 15-year sipping whiskey Theo brought down. Half a drink waited in her hand. The question was whether to leave before she’d emptied her glass or after. The warmth was exquisite.

“Come on, Parkinson!” Seamus shouted from the water. “Pull the stick out your arse! Or do you need some help with that? Dean’s got a nice strong grip.”

Pansy sent him a two-finger salute.

Lavender took up Pansy’s cause and splashed Seamus full in the face. “Don’t listen to him! But you should come in! If you cast a warming charm, the water’s lovely!”

Blaise grabbed hold of Daphne in the shallows and lobbed her like a ragdoll into deeper water. “Lies! It’s fucking ice!”

“It’s Scotland!” Terry Boot thrashed the water with both arms, soaking everyone within two metres.

“Let her do what she wants,” said Neville, still on the lakeshore unbuckling his trousers. “If you’d like to go back to the castle, someone could walk you.”

Pansy’s cheeks burned with anger. She tossed back her tumbler and clanged it down with a shiver. All she wanted in life was to be left alone so she could sit her exams. Longbottom could thunder around on his white steed all he wanted, but Pansy refused to let him use her to score nice guy points with Hufflepuff Hannah. She didn’t understand why he bothered. Abbott was a fait accompli, naked and calling out to him from the water.

Pansy jumped from her chair and stomped down to the lake, thumbing open the buttons of her overcoat as she went.

Discarded clothes littered the beach. The water churned with twenty shades of naked flesh. Pansy chucked the overcoat aside, wriggled out of her wool tights and tugged her dress over her head. Conscious of watchful eyes, she turned her back to the water as she peeled off her camisole and slipped out of her knickers.

She cast the warming charm twice, and clenched her teeth to stop them chattering.

Stripped down to the clothes her mother gave her, Pansy entered the water up to her knees. Theo's lovely dram was no match for a Highland lach in October. Her skin erupted in gooseflesh, and she began to shake all over. But she forged ahead. Better to die of hypothermia and be eaten by the squid than spend another second being patronised and paraded around as someone’s pet charity project.

Icey water sloshed over her navel. She breathed to the bottom of her lungs and pushed forward until the lake swallowed her up.

She’d spent hours in the Slytherin common room watching the mermaids swim. There was another world on the watery side of the windowpane, no less brutal than her own but infinitely more beautiful. Gravity’s grip loosened. Pansy tucked up her legs and sank like a stone in the quiet.

She thought of nothing.

When her lungs began to burn, she came up for air at the periphery of total chaos. Sprays of water doused her face, tossed up by slashing arms and thundering feet. There were shrieks of laughter, promiscuous dunkings, a whirl of arms and legs and tits and torsos. A blinding alabaster arse that could only have belonged to Draco rose above the water line like a dorsal sighting.

Pansy kicked off the lake bottom and floated on her back. Water filled her ears, dampening the sound. She blinked droplets from her eyes and looked up at the cold white stars.

The chill wicked out of her. She grew warm, and her thoughts preoccupied with sleep.

At length, the bathers scrambled out of the lake as spontaneously as they went in, still shoving and wrestling, hollering and gripped with laughter. They made their way back to the fire half in and half out of their clothes, Ernie leading them all in a scattershot rendition of the pub classic, Would You Look at That, a Pointed Hat!

Pansy paddled into the reedy shallows. Once they’d nearly all walked back to the fire, she made for the shore to dress in privacy.

Longbottom was the lone straggler. By the time she dragged herself out of the water he’d put his boxers back on, and had just threaded his feet into his trousers.

Pansy glanced at him as she gathered up her clothes. She sniffled. She couldn’t feel her hands at all, and her fingers refused to close around her wand. For some reason, it didn't bother her.

Neville's staring certainly did.

“What?” Pansy stopped trying for her wand and fished her jumper from the pile. She’d left her clothes too close to the shore. Every article was fully saturated, the jumper dripping and heavy as lead. She began the clumsy, tedious work of turning it right side out without the benefit of magic, muscle control, or sensation.

Neville tugged his trousers over his hips and drew up the zipper. 

Of their own accord, Pansy’s hands released the jumper. It landed in the mud with a foul wet slurch.

Neville went motionless in her peripheral vision.

“What?” Pansy glowered at him. “Is there something I can help you with, or are you just having a look?”

She felt much drunker than she’d been before—so drunk she could barely stand. His gaze was plain and direct. In a swell of self-consciousness, she folded her hands over her breasts.

Slowly, like her body fascinated him, he looked her over. A knot of humiliation tightened in her gut. She’d seen herself in the mirror after a shower. Bruised the sharp prominence of a hip bone against a table once or twice. It wasn’t a question of what she’d lost, but what she could afford. Her Gringotts vault might be swollen with wealth, but her body’s savings had been meagre. Like everything else in that goddamned icebox of a castle, they were exhausted.

“What?” she asked again, and her voice sounded shrill and small. She very much wanted a nap.

“It’s just—” He studied her face. That felt much worse than when he’d looked at her body. “All those years, I was so afraid of you. But you’re just a child.”

Pansy’s hands fell to her sides. “Do I look like a fucking child?”

“Yes. I mean—” He glanced at her breasts, stippled with lake water. “No. I don’t mean like that.”

Her teeth clattered in a rhythm like train wheels.

“You’re freezing.” He squinted at her in the dark. “Pansy, your lips are blue.”

He drew his wand and cast a charm over his own jumper, then came so close she felt the phantom pressure of his proximity.

He cast a second charm to dry her, a third to warm her, and said, “Arms up.”

Pansy scowled at him as she raised her hands straight overhead. It was the first time she’d been close to a shirtless man, and the first time a boy had seen her naked.

The jumper swallowed her up, sleeves dangling past her fingertips and hem brushing her knees. Its charmed heat was a pleasurable discomfort, like turning her back to a fire for too long on purpose.

Her legs faltered, and he caught her around the waist.

“You're not well,” he said. “You need to see Pomfrey. I’ll walk you up.”

“Kindly go and fuck yourself.”

Pansy twisted out of his grip and dug for her knickers in the jumble. But her hands still didn’t work, so she scooped everything up in one wet armful and stumbled as she stood.

Neville caught her elbow. “I’ll consider fucking myself after you’re in the infirmary.”

He briefly let go of her to pull on his undershirt then hooked one of his long arms around her waist.

“I’m walking her up to the castle,” he told the gathering as they passed.

Hannah sat on her own beside the fire, watching their progression.

“You coming back down?" Seamus asked.

“I think I’ll turn in, actually,” said Neville. “Goodnight, everyone.”

Pansy felt like her brain had been swaddled in a weighted blanket. She still couldn’t feel her feet. On the hike up the switchback, she let herself settle against Neville’s side. She didn’t need the infirmary, just a long, hot bath and a good night's sleep. But that lacked drama, and made her a less valuable prop in Neville’s one man show of chivalry. Damn Theo for not shifting his arse to help her.

“I think you’ve hurt your girlfriend’s feelings,” she said.

“It’s not like that.”

“Obviously it’s not like that.” Her head was stuffed full of cotton wadding. She felt like she could say anything at all. “I’m a nasty, scrawny little bitch and you’re . . . you. But you abandoned your girl for someone who's wearing nothing underneath your jumper. It's not a great look.”

“Do you want to stop and put on your, ehm—”

“My knickers are not the point. What I’m saying is that flowers wouldn’t go amiss tomorrow.”

“When I said it's not like that, I meant she’s not my girlfriend.”

Pansy scoffed. “Does she know that?”

Neville remained quiet for a long time. Then he said, “Flowers?”

“A reasonable first step when you’ve hurt a girl’s feelings.”

It was her father’s standard opening when he’d been publicly indiscreet.

“I dunno,” said Neville. “I think I’d prefer to give them just because.”

“Because you love her,” said Pansy snidely. “Every week, no doubt. No—every morning. You’re going to make someone disgustingly happy one day. It’ll be sickening. I’m vomiting about it already.”

“It’s a good job you’re headed to the infirmary.”

“I don’t need the infirmary.”

“Better safe than sorry.”

“I’m already sorry.” Her feet were coming back to life. It felt like being swarmed by fire ants made of burning gunpowder. “I’ll be able to walk on my own in a moment. Then you can go back down to your not-girlfriend.”

“Before or after I fuck myself?”

“Suit yourself.”

As though on cue, Pansy slid on a patch of loose rock. Neville pulled her tight to himself.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” she said.

His arms flexed around her. “We actually do.”

“You’d make an excellent fireman, though.”

“Would I?”

“Yes.” Pansy wriggled away from him and hobbled along like a crone, his sleeves flapping around her knees. “But if you keep giving away your jumpers, you’ll need spares.”

I gave the jumper back. When he was meant to be in class. Clean and folded in front of his door.

Only . . .

He opened it, didn’t he?

The snow came and stayed, piling up beside the walkways and on the windowsills outside the dormitory tower. In the soul-sucking half of winter that followed the new year, Hermione taught her dormmates how to knit.

Pansy was a dab hand. On the nights she couldn’t sleep, she settled herself in a window seat overlooking the lake and pulled out her needles. Sometimes she turned on the record player with the volume low. To the crackle and hiss of Hermione’s worn Muggle albums she cast stitch after stitch in a kind of trance until her eyes began to close on their own.

“Who’s that one for?”

Pansy hid a wide panel of cream-coloured cable knitting in the well of her folded legs. “No one. Dean, probably.”

Neville padded towards the dormitory kitchenette in his hideous red and gold pyjama bottoms and white undershirt. His hair was in damp disarray, like he’d been tossing in his sleep.

“A bit large for a hat,” he said. “Unless it’s for a giant.”

Pansy had already made hats for half the dormitory. Also scarves, cowls and half a dozen pairs of socks. The work in her lap was a new challenge. While he was occupied, she buried it underneath the balled skeins in her knitting basket.

Neville fixed two mugs of cocoa and pressed one into her hand as he took up the opposite end of the window seat.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked.

Pansy huddled deeper into her jumper and blew on her drink. “Did the music wake you up?”

“No. Just a bad dream.”

If she were not herself, or if he were another man, Pansy might have reached out to squeeze his hand.

But they never touched.

Other girls cuddled up to him like he was their own personal comfort object or a reliable source of winter heating, and he opened his arms for them all. On the nights he and Pansy found one another in the common room they kept strictly to their own sides of the bench, though in fairness they ought to have portioned out the seat according to size.

He threaded a delicate needle. Younger students treated the Eighth-years like living legends, and Neville first among them. After their October swim he chose, for reasons opaque to Pansy, to wield his reputation on her behalf. Though it must have pained his conscience, he openly talked to her. Walked with her. Sat beside her in the Great Hall and drew her into conversation as they ate. And just like he promised, her ordeal ended. No more jinxes. Not a single work of art. No one dared approach while he was next to her. She ate in peace and abundance, gobbling up roasts and salads and slabs of butter melting on hot fresh rolls, even pudding, if she fancied it.

Pansy hadn’t the energy to stop him from endangering his reputation. But she could do her part to mitigate the damage. No sense in feeding a false narrative that he fancied her, or, God forbid, had taken her to bed. His door was almost always open, and other girls lounged there all the time, but snow would fall every day of July before Pansy invited herself in.

Huddled up in their respective halves of the seat, they sipped their cocoa in comfortable silence as the record player spiralled into another song.

The snow had let up for the first time in weeks, and in the hard chill of a clear night a collar of ice ringed the lake. As Pansy’s eyelids drooped, she saw movement on the surface—a slowly rotating hoop of white froth like the beginnings of a whirlpool.

She set her cocoa aside, cupped her hands around her eyes and leaned into the windowpane.

Figures turned in the water, head to tail in a churning kaleidoscopic loop that paused and changed pattern and direction in a regular rhythm. They were—

“Mermaids,” said Pansy.

Neville peered out the window. “Where?”

“Over there.” Pansy pointed. “Look.”

He positioned himself behind her to level their vantage points, his hand planted beside hers on the windowpane.

“Just there.” Pansy gasped at the increasing intricacy of their movements. “How beautiful.”

“They look like they’re dancing,” he said.

They almost certainly were. But Pansy’s attention was fixed on the warmth of his cheek beside hers and the condensation outlining his fingers on the glass. He’d propped his other hand on the bench, so that she was loosely caged by his arms.

Her heart hammered palpably in her chest. When his breath brushed her ear, an electric blend of fear and anticipation crackled along her nerves. The song on the record player was too slow. Her skin was too thin. If he touched her, the tension holding her together would snap, and she’d pour down all at once like an upended water glass.

His arm tensed. Pansy drew up the courage to glance at him. She didn’t know what she expected to see—perhaps his eyes focused on the lake.

But he was looking at her, solemn and disbelieving, as though he’d just been informed of an unexpected death.

Pansy froze. The awful realisation struck that she wanted him to kiss her. Her —someone he tolerated. Pitied. She had to kill the impulse. Hold it underwater until it stopped struggling. But the harder she pushed the more buoyant the thought became. The only route of escape was to run out the castle doors and keep going until she was far enough away to never see him again. But she kept still as a prey animal.

How long had she wanted him? She cast her mind backwards, trying to find the inflection point. There was no change in direction to her feelings, no bend or curve, only a steep, solid line descending back to a bookshop and a boy with a lopsided smile.

She couldn’t understand how she’d made such a mistake. Where was her vitriol? The poison at the tip of her tongue? All swallowed and gone, and none left for him. If he kissed her, what would he taste?

Their eyes locked, and in a moment of blind panic Pansy felt he could see inside her, like her skin and muscle were transparent, all her bare nerves and vital organs visible to the naked eye. Her blood red heart sat open to him. All he had to do was carve it out.

But he only looked away. Without another word he got up, walked to the kitchenette and poured his cocoa down the sink.

“Thanks,” said Pansy.

Neville was already halfway across the room. He paused and shook his head like he needed to clear it. “What?”

“Thank you,” she said. “For the chocolate.”

“Right. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.” The word passed her lips without a sound.

Pity isn’t the same thing as love.

No. But care is.

For a week, he kept to himself.

In the Great Hall, he sat at the table’s opposite end. He acknowledged her cordially in the halls. Pansy supposed that with her dragons slain, his knightly interest in her was concluded. The protection he’d gifted her by proximity stuck. If anyone glared at her between classes, they did it behind her back. Her dinners were uneventful, whether she sat between Theo and Daphne or Michael Corner and Terry Boot.

Nevermind she had no appetite.

On the eighth day, Neville brought her flowers.

Pansy opened her bedroom door, and hoped it wasn’t obvious she’d been crying.

“What’s this for?” she asked.

“I’m sorry.” He held out a pot full of pansies. “I needed time.”

She rubbed her congested nose. “Time for what?”

Blooms in soft shades of cream, rose, burgundy and peach spilled over the rim of the pot. Each blossom was prize-winning perfection. They must have taken weeks to cultivate, even for someone with his skill in Herbology. She folded her arms. The last thing she was going to do was take it out of his hands.

“I just needed some time,” he said again. “Look.” He brushed his hand over the tops of the flowers, and they changed colour, pastels darkening into bruised purples and midnight blues.

Pansy couldn’t help herself. She gasped in delight and trailed her fingers over the petals, watching in awe as they changed colour again, from nighttime darks to sunny yellow and late afternoon gold.

“Did you get all the time you needed?” she said without looking at him.

“Yes.”

She took the pot from his hands and cradled it in her arms.

For weeks after, right into spring, they did nothing but talk. In the greenhouse, she sat atop a workbench, knitting and yammering on about visual puns in imperial Chinese jewellery and the wool quality and temperament of sheep breeds. On sludgy walks to Hogsmeade he listed the rare orchids he’d like to see one day and owned his anxiety about finding an affordable London flat.

“I’m simply going to live in a castle,” said Pansy regally. “I won’t even need to be rescued from a dragon first.”

Neville knocked his shoulder into hers. “That’s alright for some.”

In the middle of an afternoon walk into the mountains behind the school, she said, “I’m sorry.”

She meant: about everything. But as she mulled how she might begin to list everything out, she rapidly became overwhelmed.

He stopped ahead of her on the trail. Their climb to the snowline had brought colour to his cheeks.

He considered her for a moment, then said, “I know.” As though he felt the exchange was sufficient, he followed up with, “Are you cold?”

“I’m always cold.” It was true, but to show she didn’t need his concern, she tramped past him at a clip to warm herself.

Later, on the single blissfully clear day March had to offer, Pansy lay prone in the grass beside the lake, her chin resting in her folded arms, and pulled faces at a toad.

“Only Trevor knows what true sorrow is.” She copied the toad’s look of anguish.

Trevor observed her with stoic dignity and said nothing.

“I’d be plenty sorrowful if I knew what millipedes tasted like,” said Neville.

He sat next to her, weaving a red clover stalk around the tip of his little finger. Occasionally he stopped and angled his face to catch the full heat of the sun, such as it was. It was still cool enough that he wore a cream-coloured jumper. It fit him beautifully and had more minute flaws than Pansy cared to think about. But he swore he would wear it forever, and Pansy chose to believe him.

“Millipedes?” She stuck out her tongue at the impassive toad. “Very nasty of you, sir.”

Trevor blinked.

“Are you going to Hermione’s charms study session?” Neville asked.

“I’d be a fool not to.” Pansy plucked a clover leaf and settled it carefully between Trevor’s eyes like a cap.

“I like being a fool sometimes,” said Neville.

Pansy blew a puff of air upwards through her fringe. “Not about N.E.W.T.’s, though. Not all of us have Fire Brigade acceptances in hand.”

Neville secured the end of his clover ring and handed it to her. Ever since the incident at the window, Pansy felt like she was boiling all over, all the time. She wanted to toss the ring into the lake to show she understood what a meaningless nothing it was, how childish and silly. But she slipped it onto her right ring finger, where the blossom sat like an enormous jewel. She turned her hand from side to side admiring it, then drew it off in a hurry. She set it atop Trevor’s head so that it looked like a tiny but extravagant crown.

Neville lay down beside her to stare at the toad in its awesome finery. Pansy’s pulse doubled. When he was close, she sometimes thought she would be entirely happy for the rest of her life if he’d merely settle his hand in the small of her back and keep it there. What could anyone ever want for after that?

“Do you think if I kissed him, he’d turn into a prince?” she asked.

Neville looked at her, very pale and serious.

“He would try.”

He waited, then slowly leaned in and pressed his lips to hers. His kiss was chaste, almost diffident, like he expected her to draw away and shout at him. When she didn’t, he sighed against her mouth and kissed her in an entirely different way that set her knees chafing against one another beneath her skirt.

She didn’t know it was possible to kiss another person so deeply or for so long, but by the time she shoved him away and laughed at the grass fronds struck through his hair, the toad had wandered off.

When they finally found Trevor and made their way back to the castle at an awkward, bewildered distance, Pansy’s skin shimmered with a strange vitality. In the waning golden hour she understood that she was different—soft in all sorts of small, secret places where she used to be hard, mild where she once was sharp, robed in light and crowned with sweet new clover.

I’d never felt that way before.

Neither had he.

It was like a wound. Only I wanted it to keep hurting.

“Do you not want to be seen with me?” Neville asked.

Pansy opened her eyes and tried to focus. “What?”

They’d been lying on his bed for ages, his tie hung over the headboard and his hand pushed under her bra.

It was far from the first time.

A week after they first kissed, she quietly made her way to his room. Her visits always began by sitting on his bed for a perfunctory quarter of an hour to stare at books. When her nerves sizzled to a crescendo, the charade would end, and it was time for him to take the book from her hands and kiss her until her lips were hot and swollen. She didn’t care whether he’d done exactly the same thing a thousand times to Ginny or Hermione or Luna, only that he was finally doing it to her.

For a long time, everything between them seemed to move impossibly slow, though she had no notion of doing anything other than let him steal the breath from her lungs so she could promptly take it back. But one afternoon his hand floated up her ribs, and Pansy arched her back to show him he could go on. When his fingers brushed over her covered breast they both sighed from the relief of it.

Even better was the day she guided his hand underneath her shirt, and better still the first time he unclasped her bra with fingers that shook so badly she had to turn around so he could see what he was doing.

But they never touched when others could see them, and each time Pansy knocked on his door, she made sure the hall was empty.

What had he just said? Did she not want to be seen with him? Why would he ask her that?

“I don’t—” She couldn’t think straight while he was touching her. “I thought you wouldn’t want anyone to know.”

Neville's jaw went slack.

“I haven’t told anyone.” She dug her fingers into his nape and tried to draw his mouth back to hers. “We can do whatever you want. I’ll never say a word.”

He kissed her like he couldn't stand her to say anything more.

The following evening, Seamus made everyone play First Letter, Last Letter with the album collection Hermione inherited from her parents.

Lavender opened with Cherry Bomb. Michael answered with Blitzkrieg Bop. Theo took his time combing through the stacks, letting side one of Ramones play all the way through before he settled on Pain in My Heart.

Pansy passed Neville on her way to the kitchenette, and he caught her hand. She warned him off with a frown, but he pulled her into his arms and swayed her to the music.

“I don’t think this is—” she began.

He cut her off with a kiss that made her light in the head.

“Oh, very nice, very nice,” said Seamus. “But you’re up next Parkinson, so don’t go riding off on Nev's broomstick just yet.”

Pansy ended the evening borne down by Neville’s weight in her own bed. He was more assertive than he'd ever been before, rucking her skirt around her hips and slotting his thigh between her legs.

“Can I touch you here?” He stroked her over her knickers.

Pansy bit her lip and nodded. When he slipped his hand under her waistband, Pansy’s eyes rolled back in her head.

“I'm not ashamed of this,” he murmured. "And I will not hide."

At the end of a long interlude of trials and adjustments, Pansy was made to understand the fuss about orgasms.

It was all as new to him as it was to her. But where the subject treated him kindly, Neville was a quick study. It surprised them both how responsive she was to his mouth and hands. After that first naive crisis, her climaxes were steep and intense and made her useless for long minutes after. While she lay limp he would kiss her belly and her breasts until she revived and pulled him back into her arms.

It took her longer to drum up the courage to please him. She would rather have died than carry an unwanted child. He was the source of all danger, especially when she lay in his arms with her knickers on the floor. But curiosity and desire won out, and once she began kissing her way past his navel there was no stopping what followed.

The week before N.E.W.T.’s she paid a visit to Pomfrey. Late that night she went to Neville’s room and found him reading by candlelight.

“Everything alright?” He sat up at the edge of his bed and set his book aside.

She moved close, and before her courage failed, guided his hand to the tie of her silk satin robe. He pulled it loose and parted the fabric. Then he scrambled for his wand on the bedside table, cast a charm on himself and took her hand.

She’d already cast two separate charms of her own. Set aside a potion for after. Downed a draught to help her relax.

Afterwards, she cried.

He thought he’d hurt her, and the grief and panic that replaced his perfect, drowsy contentment made Pansy cry harder still. Of course he’d been gentle. She’d received all of him without complaint and managed to come while he was inside. What more did he want from her? It was only sex, something even brainless blobs in the open ocean could do, not some solemn occasion calling for a moment of reflective silence. So why did feel she’d embarked from a shore she’d never see again? She swivelled her legs off the bed and reached for her robe, but he pulled her back to him and kissed her wet face and mouth and made her stay.

When he had her under him again, he said that he loved her.

Much later, as he wrung drops of joy from her spent body in the anaemic predawn, she said it back.

Do you remember what the boy did next?

He gave her a castle.

By August, they were playing house in Pansy’s flat.

Nominally, Neville lived in a room in 12 Grimmauld Place and was looking for a flat of his own. But all his nights were spent at Pansy’s, save the ones he slept at the fire station, and after weeks of exposure to Ron and Hermione’s rowing it was a simple matter of hauling a suitcase from Islington to Chelsea.

He grew Flitterbloom and Fluxweed next to potted ferns in the sitting room, and culinary herbs in the kitchen. Pansy vetoed Cobra Lily and Snargaluff altogether, but welcomed the orchids that ringed their tub and filled the bath with scent. He built a hothouse in the closet, so she’d have flowers every day.

She apprenticed with a jeweller at the British Museum of Magical Arts and Artefacts, and at night practised being grown up. Her life couldn’t be less subversive, except where her mother’s feelings were concerned. She made dinner half the time. Did half the chores. Turned around at the flare of the Floo to melt at the sight of Neville in his Fire Brigade blues. They improved at cooking and perfected sex, and matched one another’s enthusiasm for both.

She was in love, and loved, and happier than she had any idea a person could be.

How were people meant to endure it?

Every instinct screamed at her to withdraw. Under Daphne’s advice she contracted the services of a mind Healer and forced herself to talk.

“You could smell them on him sometimes.” She lay in the crook of Neville’s arm, drifting off to sleep when she ought to get up and shower. "They all wore different perfumes. When I was a little girl, I thought it was great fun to guess the notes aloud. I thought he’d be proud of me.”

Neville brushed his lips against her temple. “I’m so sorry he treated you that way.”

“Lousy fathers are a Sickle a dozen. That’s why stories always end with the wedding.”

“Hm.” He circled his fingertips idly over her bare shoulder. “That’s really odd.”

“What do you mean?”

“Aren’t weddings all about the beginning?”

He brought her to see Frank and Alice.

After the first visit, Pansy went once a week, sometimes with Neville and sometimes alone. She brought them flowers and scones and biscuits, and, as part of their Christmas, jumpers with no mistakes.

On the nights after they’d seen his parents he always fucked her slow, keeping as much of their bodies in contact as he could and kissing her gently—reverently—like he needed to make it last.

Just after his birthday, when they’d lived together for a year, he brought her out to The Middle of Nowhere, Noplace, Northumberland, and showed her a castle.

Or what was left of one. Amongst a proliferation of silver birch there stood a motley ruin. It was no more than two poky old towers, one a military stalwart, the other a rickety half-timbered affair suffocating in a nest of ivy. Between them lay a string of disintegrated walls. There were mice. Squirrels. Piles of glass bottles and plastic Muggle rubbish. Oily blobs of black wax everywhere and a warped cauldron halfway up a tree.

The place positively breathed magic.

“DMLE responded to a report about a Dark coven,” said Neville. “By the time they got here, whatever they were working on had exploded. They called us in to provide aid to the survivors and put out the fire.”

As she walked around the crumbled wreckage, he watched her with a kind of pleading puppy dog expression.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.

He turned his attention to the western tower and gave a fallen wooden beam a probing kick. “Like what?”

“You’re expectant. If you’re looking for my approval, you have it. It’s a beautiful ruin. Apart from the garbage.” Pansy crouched at the edge of a wide, rather lovely moat and peered into the black water. “Oh, good God!”

As she stumbled backwards, Neville came running with his wand out.

“What’s the matter?”

“I thought I saw a man down there.” She laid her hand over her heart and laughed. “There isn’t, is there?”

Neville walked all the way around the perimeter and confirmed that there wasn’t.

Taking great care on each worm-eaten step, they made their way to the top of the half-timbered tower, where a low passage led to an open room with six sides. Animals had made their homes in the unglazed windows, and when they entered, birds fled the rafters.

It was a hot day, but the tower room was cool and inviting. Pansy leaned in one of the empty windows. A picturesque wood stood on the other side of the moat, and through its silver branches Pansy spied green grass and stone walls. A dreamy haze stole over her. She sighed, and cupped her cheek in her palm. A vivid image formed in her mind of new glass panes in windows hung with gauze curtains. There would be a bed in the centre of the room, of course, very large and made up with the softest linens. Cream coloured, with tiny pink flowers. Through one of the inner doors there would be a bath, with a tub large enough for two and shelves for Neville’s scented orchids.

Neville nestled into her back and rested his chin on her shoulder. “How many generations do you suppose lived here?”

“Loads, I should imagine.” When his hand crept under the skirt of her sundress, Pansy parted her legs in welcome. “I wonder if it misses being lived in?”

“Hm.” He slid one of her dress straps down and mouthed at her bare shoulder.

Pansy felt certain they weren’t alone. Rationally, she knew the only living creatures who could see them were the birds and the mice. The nearest house was nearly two kilometres down the dale, and who knew how far the one after that. But as he delved into her knickers and found her eager, Pansy couldn’t shake the sense that an intense and palpable curiosity was being directed at them, and that whatever was watching meant them no harm.

"Where would we put the kitchen?" He tugged her knickers down and loosened his belt.

"Near the other tower. Overlooking the moat, and— oh." She arched her back as he stroked her and carefully eased his way inside.

"The garden," he said.

"What garden?"

"The one we’re going to grow." He slid her other dress strap off her shoulder and began teasing her breasts the way she liked.

“What are you talking about?”

He picked up his pace and touched her in more deliberate circles. She forgot what she meant to say. It was a distraction. In a minute or two she'd be quivering on his cock and too brainless to question or deny him anything.

"I have enough,” he said. “From my parents. To get us started."

Pansy tried to clear her head. Why was it so easy for him to make her come undone? Her only consolation was that her body made him work for his endurance. It pleased her to hear his breath turn ragged at her ear.

What was he asking for?

To make a home.

Out of sheer disbelieving stubbornness, Pansy fought her impending climax by considering practicalities.

She doubted she’d see a Galleon of her inheritance on her mother's side before the day Dahlia died. But she could contact her father, wherever he was on his world tour of debauchery. Ask Daddy very sweetly for what her mother wouldn’t give. He'd hand it over and more just to spite his wife. The plumbing would be an unthinkable nightmare, and the birches growing in the collapsed hall would have to go, but even in the most ravaged piece of jewellery there was always an echo of what had been.

She could see the castle perfectly. The restored carvings around the fireplace. The dining table off the kitchen. The polished central stair.

“Could I have sheep?” Pansy asked.

“Yes.”

“And in the other tower. A room of my own.”

“Yes.”

"What will you grow?" She tensed around him on purpose.

"Sunflowers. An orchard. Fuck, Pans, you're going to make me come."

She wasn't one for vocal theatrics, but her orgasm hit her so hard her knees buckled and she wailed, obliquely aware he was holding them both up with one hand on her hip and the other on the windowsill as he emptied into her.

"It's a fucking broken down castle in the back of the beyond," she panted, indulging in a string of aftershocks. "You can't fuck me into major financial decisions."

"No?" He landed a messy kiss on her shoulder. "It was worth a try."

"I mean, clearly you can."

"Oh, good," he said. "As far as I'm concerned this is my only job. Hold on—are you serious?"

"Yes. But you do realize it's fucking haunted."

“Oh, profoundly.” In his elation, he bit her lovingly on the shoulder.

They split their time between Chelsea and a well-appointed tent on the edge of the castle moat.

Two months into the impossible restoration, Neville paused in his work to kneel down and dig through a pile of stony rubble in what was once the family rooms beside the great hall.

"What is it?" Pansy asked. She wore dungarees, a handkerchief around her hair, and about fifty different species of dirt, which only seemed to increase Neville's zeal for giving her a midday tumble whenever she asked.

He yanked off his leather gloves and dusted the soil from an object in his palm. When she approached, he held it out to her.

It was a ring. Age and abuse had dulled the gold, and grime was compacted in its crevices. Pansy thought it was mediaeval. Within its bezel sat a pink ruby cabochon with the most distinct and beautiful asterism Pansy had ever seen, fully a dozen rays at first glance.

“How beautiful,” murmured Pansy.

She went to touch it, but Neville took her hand.

Pansy’s pulse leapt. “That’s not funny.”

“You’re it for me. You know that, don’t you?”

“Stop it. I don’t want you to joke like that.”

“Pansy—”

“I’ve told you,” she said, “I don’t want babies.”

“And I’ve told you I don’t need them.”

“This is foolish.” Pansy swallowed around the lump in her throat. “We’re infants—building castles on the strand and thinking they’ll last.”

He ran his thumb across her knuckles. “I like being a fool with you.”

In the tent that night, she lay naked in his arms, gazing at the freshly polished ring on her finger. She could find no trace of anxiety within herself, only a bone-deep sense that everything in the world was good and right. It lasted right up until the shimmering blue face of a watery young man phased through the tent wall and said, “That looks better on you than it did on my mother.”

Pansy screamed. 

Like the perfect fools they were, the young couple married the following summer. They honeymooned in France while the poppies were in bloom, and a month later fell in love with a one-eyed dog.

“This is our child.” In the passenger seat of the car they borrowed from Hermione, Pansy buried her nose in the puppy’s fur and sniffed. “He is smelly and perfect.”

“Half dad, half mum,” said Neville from the driver’s seat.

His right hand gripped the wheel, and his left rested on Pansy’s thigh. She held her own left hand out the open window to let her rings catch the sunlight for the umpty millionth time.

"Excuse me," said Pansy. “I have never smelled once in my entire life.”

Neville squeezed her leg. “That’s because you’re perfect.”

“Are you suggesting,” she said coyly, “I should give you a bath?”

Why did I let my guard down like that? Nothing stays except death.

Except love.

Pansy sat on the bathroom floor and cried for a long time. When she was finished, she wiped her eyes, poured clear liquid from a small glass tube down the sink and Vanished the rest of the test kit. In the bedroom, she opened a box she kept underneath the bed and took out the unfinished yoke and body of a tiny jumper knit in fine soft yarn. She ripped it back, unravelling the work row by row until it was gone. Then she wound the crinkly yarn back into a ball, shoved the ball back in its box, and kicked the box under her bed.

She made the walk to her west tower studio feeling numb. Halfway up the stairs an unmistakable ache passed through her belly, and she scoffed. Sod’s law. One Galleon six Knuts for the stupid test, and she’d bleed by the following morning.

Alone in her atelier, she swallowed back tears while she opened a backlog of packages.

Every awful thing she said replayed itself.

It’s not fair for me to hold you back.

And:

If this marriage will never feel complete to you, maybe it’s best that we—

He’d left, and she hadn’t said she loved him.

She’d send an owl later. A brief apology and the daily declaration. I love you. When he got home, they could talk again. She wasn’t pregnant. There’d been no accident.

She covered her face with her hands and wept.

There was relief, of course, but also pain, vast and alien. She’d made up her mind long before to never have a child. So why was she grieving one that never existed?

She pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes and breathed deep and slow.

Lawrence’s face popped up over the windowsill above her desk. “What are we up to today?”

“Nothing much.” Pansy hastily bent over her desk so he couldn’t see her face. “Incoming parcels.”

“Oh! That’s my favourite.”

He sat on her desk nattering away while Pansy tore open package after package and logged items in her inventory. Her eyes could hardly focus. All she saw before her was Neville’s back on his way out the door, and felt the goodbye trapped in her throat.

Not knowing won’t make it go away.

Or maybe it will.

“What are you doing here?” said Lawrence.

Pansy rolled her eyes as she ripped open a mailing envelope, chagrined that her distraction was noticeable. “My job.”

A pendant slid out of the envelope and hit the desk with a heavy thud. It was a carnelian cameo in an elaborate and expensive gold setting.

“Not you, duck.” Lawrence’s back straightened. “Why are you here?”

Who on God’s green Earth was he talking to? She picked up the pendant, and a needle sharp point sank deep into her finger. She cried out. A thick bead of blood formed on her fingertip. Pansy popped it into her mouth.

One last story.

One last?

In our dream—

Why last?

In our dream . . .

There was a fire.

It washed over the horizon like a tide.

She watched it from the window of a pink castle with slate roofs and fairy tale towers. “What’s happening?”

“A curse.”

A silver-haired woman stood in the centre of the foyer. She was unthinkably old. No, not old—quite young, actually, with long copper hair and dark eyes. But no—neither young nor old, but middle aged. The voice she spoke with was dark and reverberant, like she stood in the bottom of a vast and undiscoverable cavern. As Pansy watched, the woman jittered out of phase, becoming two and then three and then a dozen overlapping echoes of herself at different ages, fanned out in a line.

Her two dozen eyes were solid black.

Pansy didn’t recognize any of their faces, but their shared essence couldn’t have been more familiar.

“Tess?”

Tess’s cavernous voice splintered into several parts. They spoke with the same intonation, only out of sync and slow as a record played at three quarter speed. “I can hold . . . for now. Help. Com . . . ing.”

“Who’s coming to help?” Pansy asked.

Sweat beaded on Tess’s brow. Without warning she was battered about from side to side, her teeth clenched in a ferocious grimace. Her voice emerged as a chorus of monstrous growls. “Ev . . . ry . . . one.”

The sky was the colour of the apocalypse at dawn. The oceanic swell of fire swallowed up each white cotton cloud in its path like combustive fuel, roiling forwards with a whetted appetite. 

“It’s going to take everything,” said Pansy.

Tess howled with pain, then ground out, “Yes.”

Pansy couldn’t stop her hands from shaking. A hot wind blew ahead of the fire’s leading edge and shimmered against her face. How long did she have? She guessed less than five minutes.

She ran past Tess and sprinted up the stairs. Where would she put everything? A bottomless handbag like Granger’s? There were a hundred closets. The memory of that handbag could be in any of them. A suitcase—no, too heavy. A rucksack. Outside, the Highland cows bellowed. Pansy wiped the sweat from her brow. She would need to sprint hard when it came—harder than she’d ever run before. It had to be something she could fit in her pocket. A pencil box. A pill case. A chocolate tin. No. No. No. On a landing near the top of the castle, she skidded on the rug and fell hard on her knees.

“ Fuck!” she wailed. “ Neville!”

He appeared beside her in his Parahealer uniform. It was fresh and crisp and his hair was neatly combed, like he was ready to go to work.

Pansy clutched his hands and pulled. Her grip was wet with perspiration, and she nearly lost her hold. “You have to come. Now.”

The window overlooking the landing was a wall of blistering orange. Pansy’s eyes burned with smoke.

Neville took one glance at the fire in the sky and grasped her hand. As he hauled her behind him down the stairs, her fingers slipped out of his in the heat. In an effort to not lose him, she wrenched her fist in the back of his shirt.

They careened downwards, Pansy taking three strides for every two of his. She fell once, and then again. A hissing whine rose above the roar outside. Neville yanked her back to her feet so hard her elbow popped. When they were on the second landing from the bottom, every window in the castle blew in.

Pansy’s hands slipped free and she tumbled down, striking step after step like a broken doll until she splayed on the next landing. Neville hoisted her up and threw her over his shoulder. The smoke clawed at her eyes as he leaped down three treads at a time.

In the heart of the castle, Tessamandra burned.

Three women stood back to back in a column of cool white fire. Pansy couldn’t tell if they were turning in a circle or if they stood still and transformed themselves, each figure wearing its multitude of faces one after the other in rapid succession. Their black eyes seemed beyond sight, and their mouths moved as one, though no sound escaped.

Neville knelt and set her down. The doors to the back garden had been blown off their hinges, and a curtain of fire hung across the opening. Beyond it, the field and hedges flickered in the heat.

Beams groaned overhead. Fire thrashed at the walls, but gave the circle surrounding Tess a wide berth. Hot smoke seared the inside of Pansy’s windpipe. She gripped Neville’s shirtfront and retched while he stroked her hair.

“I can’t lose you,” she rasped. “You need to hide.”

“Where?”

There was no way out, and far too much to carry. She might be able to run with Neville as he was now, but not without leaving behind Neville as he was the day before, or the day before that. And where would they go? Every time she tried to hold out a thought and examine it, it blew away in the smoke.

There was no more time. The room boiled with heat. Pansy watched in horror as thin cracks formed on Neville’s skin, glowing like molten metal. The tips of his hair crackled.

“No.” She scrubbed at his arms, willing his skin whole again. “No.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Embers dotted his shoulders and chest, burning tiny holes in his shirt.

“Stop.” Pansy slapped them away without concern for the blows she was landing on his body. “You may not.”

Tears tracked clean lines through the soot on his cheeks.

Pansy tried to smother each tiny flame that flared on his skin. Her palms went pink, and then red, and then black. “I said no.”

“Pansy.” He wrapped a hot hand around her wrist.

“You may not.” She yanked her hand away, pushing and slapping at him as he gathered her in his arms. “I will not let you.”

But he was going, burning from the inside out and falling away in flakes of ash.

“I love you,” he said.

He flickered, and was his younger self again, wearing a plain white t-shirt and pyjama bottoms. Then he was a youth in a grey jumper and red tie. Then a man in dusty dungarees and a cuffed flannel shirt.

Every version of him burned.

Then he was naked, the way only Pansy knew him. He kissed her with fire in his mouth.

A weight tugged at the bottom of Pansy’s pocket. With a shaking hand, she fished out a clear glass ball filled with a colourless mist.

A Remembrall. Small enough to fit in her pocket. Too small to fit so much as a man’s heart. But large enough to hold an idea—or a memory.

The fog inside the glass was white. Nothing had been forgotten yet.

She held the Remembrall between them. “It’s just for a while. Until I wake up.”

Neville rested his forehead against hers. “Alright.”

The fog inside the glass swirled. Pansy licked the tears from her blistering lips and tasted salt and ash and blood.

“I won’t forget,” she said.

Red beads of liquid formed on Neville’s skin like bloody perspiration. They gathered into rivulets and streams, trickled down his arms and seeped into the glass ball between them. The mist inside turned pink. 

“I’ll love you even if you do,” he said.

Pansy reached out with her mind and called down everything.

Like sap boiling out of live wood when it burned, glistening red liquid oozed up from the sizzling floors and from within the walls and dripped through the ceiling from the rooms above. It splattered on the floor and snaked across the tile, then slithered up Neville’s limbs and funnelled into the Remembrall. She wanted all of him—every molecule. She took her heart in both hands and wrung it. Everything she’d never forgotten poured out. The fire hissed in the damp. Pansy saw glimpses of her past in the reflective wet as it coursed by. There was Neville on his knees in front of Alecto Carrow, gritting his teeth in defiance through a Cruciatus. Pansy pinching her nose as he walked past on the Hogwarts Express reeking of Stinksap. On Christmas morning in Prague, opening their presents in bed. Him as a child in Flourish and Blotts, backing into a display and sighing with relief that he hadn’t knocked it down.

Beyond the curtain of flame barring the way to the garden, Wallace paced back and forth and whined.

“Wallace!” Pansy whistled and patted her thigh. “Wally! Come on!”

He wriggled and thumped his tail. His fur smouldered, and flames burned at the tips of his ears and tail.

“Wally!” Pansy willed him to come. “Come on my good boy!”

He crouched as if he meant to jump, then paced and whined and crouched again. He wailed, and his throat was full of fire. A wind gusted through the flames now covering his body and carried him away in a column of swirling ash. 

“Wallace!” she screamed. “ Wallace!”

The memories flowed on without him. Pansy filling the shelves Neville built in her atelier. Lawrence weeping over his ghostly copy of The Wandmaker’s Wife in Pansy’s bath while Pansy was still in it. Applying balm to Neville’s broken nose and kisses to his swollen lips after he was kicked in the face on shearing day. A wet-eyed groom. A flower-crowned bride. Moving astride him under an apple tree in early bloom.

Lawrence and Leonard sank out of the rafters in a streak of heart’s gore and blue.

“Help me remember this,” said Pansy.

“‘Tis not I out there, but he, and he is not me any more than I am thee.” Lawrence tapped his nose. “You’ll have to look to thine own counsel, my dove.” He kicked upwards, spread his arms and swan dove into the Remembrall.

Leonard bowed. “Until you wake, sweet lady.”

As the fire tried to consume Neville from inside, Pansy was draining him dry. He was growing pale, more smoke than flame. Pansy was winning. She’d give nothing to the fire. Not a drop.

By the time she gathered him safely in the sphere, all that was left of him was a white husk of exhausted ash. His eyes were blank as marble. His fingers dissolved as he reached for her cheek—not even a reflex. Just an echo.

She choked out a sob, then clapped her hand over her mouth. No time. She had so much work left to do.

But he was leaving her. He was already gone.

“If I remember one thing,” she said, “it will be you.”

A breath of air rushed through him, and he scattered in a drift of dust.

Tess held out until the stairway fell. As wood and marble collapsed in a cascade of sparks, Tessamandra's tripartite spirit folded into herself, and the column of white flame blinked out.

The fire entered the hall like floodwater. It poured over the empty window sills and bubbled through the walls. Pansy dropped to her hands and knees.

Waves of flame crashed against the rafters.

When Pansy was five, her father brought her to the seaside. Looking over the end of the pier, she dropped her bag of toffee into the waves by accident. Pansy scrambled over the ledge after it, howling bloody murder, but her father laughed and hauled her back in one arm. “Stubborn little chit,” he said, then, with a false, almost playful solemnity, “The sea keeps what it takes.”

Choking for air in the baking heat, Pansy shoved the Remembrall in her pocket and crawled beneath the smoke. Alright, she thought. Let it try.

At the burning doorway to the garden, Pansy covered her head and jumped. Just as she leapt the castle foyer caved, arms of fire stretching after her, hungry for fresh tinder. She struggled to her feet in the gravel, coughing out lungfuls of black phlegm as she hobbled towards the lawn. The scent of burnt hair clung to her nostrils. By the time she reached the grass, the flames tasted her heels, charring them black and drawing up angry blisters. She forced her body into an impossible run and never stopped.

Fire was her constant companion. In the labyrinth, the monsters fled before her. All she had to do was follow their terrified bellows as the thorny hedge succumbed behind. At the labyrinth’s centre, Godric Gryffindor’s sword protruded from the back of a small marble girl. Pansy charged headlong at a furious sprint and ripped the sword from the statue’s back. The fire gobbled up the hissing hedge and drew even alongside her. But it didn’t like Pansy’s sword one bit. It shrank back at every slash, and by the time she reached the edge of the darkened forest she’d pulled out ahead.

Where was she going?

The forest was a place of shadows. The warped black trees were old, their wood dense, and the fire was hard put to digest them. Orange fireglow lit the perennial night of the understory, and shapes ran and leapt and crawled away from the radiance and heat. An enormous wolf with black fur and luminous eyes streaked past. It snapped its vast jaws at Pansy’s head as though it couldn’t quite give up the habit, even as its fur glittered with embers.

Shadows formed and reformed ahead of the deadly glow, some that resembled people Pansy knew. Her father. Her mother. Crabbe and Goyle. Herself as a nearly grown child, turning pirouettes, capering and watching the advancing destruction like it was delighting in a show.

Shadows, Pansy supposed, couldn’t burn.

Her chest was clogged with ash. She paused to vomit, and found her shadow self standing near, head cocked to one side in curiosity. It leaned over and mimicked Pansy’s movements, its silhouetted mouth agape and spasming.

“You’re fucking joking,” Pansy croaked.

The shadow folded its hands over its mouth and laughed.

They pushed deeper into the forest, and the shadow kept just ahead, delighting in Pansy’s struggles. When Pansy’s feet began to bleed, the shadow diverted her off the easiest path to a softly glowing pool. Pansy cooled her feet, keeping one eye on the advancing fire, and when she stepped out from the water, her soles were good as new. She knelt and cupped her hands to drink, desperate to quench her burning throat. But the shadow knocked the water out of her hands and kicked at the pool.

“You’re telling me drinking from the magic forest pool is a no, then,” said Pansy. “Nice to know you have your uses, you fucking weirdo.”

The shadow scrambled up a tree like an uncanny monkey and crouched on a heavy branch with its chin in its hands. You’re nice.

“What the actual fuck,” said Pansy.

They ran for what felt like days, though it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. Pansy hardly had the endurance for a hill hike, let alone an ultramarathon with charbroiled lungs. From time to time she drew a Remembrall from her pocket and examined it. The mist inside was a deep, dazzling red. Apparently she’d forgotten something. What was it?

The shadow took a great interest in the sphere, examining it from every angle whenever Pansy brought it out.

“I need to hide this ball,” Pansy explained to the shadow. “Somewhere it will be safe from the fire.”

The shadow perked up and waved her on.

Regarding her reflection in a crystalline forest pool as silver and reflective as a mirror, Pansy took up her sword and sawed off the sizzled remains of what had once been lustrous black hair. With half an eye on the advancing fire head, she admired the bald and ash-smeared warrior she saw. She growled and bared her bloody teeth. She had a lovely glass ball in her pocket, gorgeously heavy when she held it in her hand and red as blood.

The fire was lovely, too, tall as the treetops, fierce and yellow and hungry. Pansy stopped to admire it. Her shadow slapped her hard, then laughed when Pansy snarled. But she forgave the shadow, then forgot why it had to be forgiven. Together they passed through dark places, and heavy fog, and scenes of great beauty and sorrow that Pansy could no longer remember once she’d left them behind.

The forest grew hot and damp. Clicks, throaty calls, and an endless buzzing filled the air all around. The fire fell further behind them. At length, they reached a clearing. The shadow coaxed Pansy to the edge of an empty black maw in the earth, rimmed with a lip of rock. There, the shadow pantomimed that Pansy ought to throw her beautiful glowing ball down the bottomless dirty well.

“You’re mad,” said Pansy. “I’m not throwing it down a well, I’ll never get it back.”

For reasons she couldn’t understand, she believed that nothing had ever been more important to her.

It will be safe. The shadow gestured at the distant fire. It had slowed, but still progressed, gorging on the forest as it went.

Hide it, said the shadow, rather more like a person telling a dog to drop a shoe than Pansy liked.

“How will I find it again?” Pansy asked. “I don’t know my way back.”

With an air of pride, the shadow pointed its thumbs at its chest.

“I’m not going to listen to you after I wake up,” said Pansy. “I’ll take one look at you and think I’m in a horror story.”

The shadow snapped its fingers. You know the story.

“What story?”

The ball in the well.

The ball in the well and the prince and the kiss. An unaccountable sadness sieved through her. But then an itchy little thought arose. She could look to her own counsel. Who could she trust more than herself? And of each of the girls Pansy had once been, which of them had more stubborn endurance than the rest combined?

It was like drawing a splinter from her thumb. All she needed to do was grasp the end of what she wanted with the tip of her tweezers and yank. She found the right Pansy inside her, grabbed her by the hair and pulled. One step back, and a skinny little sourpuss in a pleated skirt and green tie stood before her.

The girl took in Pansy with her sword and shaved head and body like flame roasted pig skin. Then she regarded the shadow, crouched on an unsavoury looking fungal stump with the shadow of a dragonfly wing hanging from its mouth.

“No,” said the younger Pansy. “Whatever the fuck this is, absolutely not.”

“I’m going to throw this ball down the well,” said Pansy quickly, “and I need you to guide me back here. Because I’m going to forget.”

Eighteen year-old Pansy narrowed her eyes at the approaching fire wall. “The world’s on fire, you end of days-looking raggedy-arse cow.”

Nice cow, said the shadow.

“There’s no time,” said Pansy. “Will you help me?”

The younger girl folded her arms and glared.

“Fuck it.” The elder Pansy lobbed the ball down the well.

“What did you go and do that for?” cried the girl. “I believe we wanted that!”

"Right!" Pansy took her younger self’s hand. “So we can’t let it burn.”

“We’re all going to burn,” the younger Pansy sneered. “In about two minutes.”

“You won't if you’re a frog,” said Pansy. “Like the story. You can pop on down the well and sit on a ledge or something.”

“So my choices are ‘burned alive’ or ‘frog in a well.’”

“Exactly.”

“That's fucked,” said the girl.

“Without a doubt,” said Pansy. “I’m so sorry. And thank you.”

“I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

“You’re seriously considering ‘burned alive?’”

The younger woman rolled her eyes and withdrew her wand. “If I try to fetch you here and you ignore me, I will end you.”

“I won’t ignore you. I’ll understand. And if I don’t, kick me in the head or something.”

“If you leave me in here and forget you did it I will burst from your head like a daughter of Zeus and kick your arse until you cry. I will make sure every happy thought that ever crosses your mind feels like passing a kidney stone. I will turn you into soup.”

Pansy ignored her and gestured at the shadow. “If any of this forest is left at all, I think she’ll be here to help you. Please, darling.”

“Don’t darling me, you crispy bitch," said the girl. “You look like that time Daphne and I tried to use sticks for wands and set all her dolls on fire.” She aimed her wand at her chest. “What kind of frog?”

“Oh. I don’t know. The wet kind.”

The girl glanced at the hole, brows knit in thought. “Did you just throw something down there? What was it?”

“I don’t . . .” Pansy shook her head. “I don’t remember.”

“Fuck it,” said the girl. “I think I prefer toads.”

In a blink, the wand was on the ground and a toad sat at the lip of the well. The first wave of intense heat washed over them. The toad winked at Pansy and jumped down the bottomless hole.

Pansy knew she had completed a task. She couldn’t recall what it was, but now it was finished, and the full extent of her pain and exhaustion became clear. She hobbled to the mouldy stump and crouched beside the shadow. The shadow held out the silhouette of a dragonfly wing the size of a dinner plate.

“No, thank you,” said Pansy. “I ate before I came.”

She touched her lips. They were a mass of searing blisters. Her tongue hurt, like she’d French kissed a campfire. Overhead, the sky was a riot of stars. She hummed a bar of a tune she couldn’t name.

“Pain in my heart,” she sang quietly. “Is treating me cold. Where can my baby be? Lord, no one knows.”

As the flame rolled over their heads, Pansy’s shadow took her hand.

The white mist cleared.

Standing in a poppy field under a marine blue sky, Pansy held the hand of a woman who looked just like her.

Do you remember this? The woman wore a chin-length bob and a dress the same colour as the flowers.

I do. Pansy tried to steady herself on trembling legs. She was naked. Blood bubbled from her half-eaten hand and the missing chunk of her thigh and every thorny wound. She felt ashamed. She said, We’d just been married. I’d never been happier.

The self that Pansy was before she forgot brushed her fingertips across the blooms. As she touched each flower it turned from brilliant orange-red to deepest blue, its petals dotted with a hundred glimmering points of light like the sky before the electric night.

She cupped Pansy’s face in her hands.

Hot tears trickled over Pansy’s chin. She said, I’ve been looking for you. I needed you.

I know.

It took so long.

The Pansy in the poppy-coloured dress pressed her forehead to her counterpart's . Do you understand what happens next?

Yes. But I’ve only just found you. I don’t want you to go.

Nothing stays.

Why not? Why is it only ever death?

And love. The Pansy in the orange-red dress tilted her radiant head and kissed her lips.

Dizzy from loss of blood and sick with relief, Pansy closed her eyes and melted into her own embrace.

Had they been able to see themselves from outside, they would have watched two Pansies coalesce into one.

The person they became had long black hair pulled into a chirpy ponytail. Blood dripped from her broken body and soaked her poppy-coloured dress. Pansy shook out her hands, and both became whole. She ran her palms over her torn flesh, and the bleeding was stanched. By the time she crossed out of the poppy field and into a low-humming darkness marked by a sharp antiseptic smell and steady beeps, her wounds were clean and tender. They itched, and had begun to heal.

In a bed bracketed by safety rails, tucked between linens with a thread count no living person should have been forced to endure, Pansy woke. The green plaid curtains were drawn. A sodium yellow streetlight bloomed through the gap between, and beyond it she glimpsed a sky without stars. St. Mungo’s slept without sleeping. From dusk to dawn it hummed a vigilant chorus. Syncopated beeps and an unmodulated buzz underscored lowered voices in the hall and footsteps passing across the glow beneath the door. Pansy stretched her arms and legs and swallowed. Her limbs were whole, and her throat and lungs were clear. She'd had a dream. There had been smoke and fire and blood and pain, monsters in the deep and shadows in the forest, and her nasty little self at eighteen. She sat up and greedily guzzled the glass of chilled water waiting beside the bed.

Pansies in soft shades of cream, rose, burgundy and peach beamed at her from a ceramic pot on the bedside table. Neville had given them to her Eighth-year, and refreshed their soil in the greenhouse every fall. She ran her hand across their tops like she was greeting an old friend, and the blooms darkened to black plum and Fire Brigade blue. With another brush of her hand they changed to old gold and turmeric yellow.

In the manky old soup-looking chair, Neville slept.

He’d tucked up his body as best he could, but his long limbs hung over the arms like a gangly plant that had outgrown its pot. He wore the trousers Pansy had tailored to her personal taste in London every fall and a jumper in natural cream-coloured worsted, the first Pansy ever knit and now more Reparo than its original stitching. His hair needed a wash, and he’d grown a three-day crop of stubble.

Pansy’s intravenous port wasn’t connected to anything at the moment. She climbed quietly out of bed, wearing nothing but a hospital gown and heavy wool socks. The monitor beside her bed piped out half a dozen hysterical warnings, but Neville didn’t stir. Carefully, so as not to upend the long-suffering chair, she slipped into his lap.

He wrapped his arms around her and blinked the sleep from his eyes. “Hm?”

Pansy brushed her fingers across his lips, and they parted in surprise.

“I love you,” she said.

He was fully awake then, eyes dark and sad and robbed of sleep for far too long.

“I didn’t say it when you left,” she went on. “We’d fought, and you left for work and I never said it.”

“Pans?”

He was so beautiful, and even more so now than he’d been in their younger years. She traced his stubbled jaw. Then his dark brows. His prominent ears. His cupid's bow. The freckles dotting his strong nose. She’d get to everything, eventually.

“I was afraid I wasn’t going to love it,” she whispered.

Neville tightened his hold around her. “Love what?”

“There wasn’t one,” she said. “I took a test. And there wasn't. But what if there had been, and I couldn't love it?”

Neville worked through his confusion in silence. Then his whole body wilted at once. He held her face and kissed her in the way he did when he came home after a work shift marked by tragedy, slow and decisive and almost unbearably present.

“You are loving,” he murmured against her mouth. “You are kind.”

She reflexively ran her thumb over her left-hand ring finger and found it bare. The hospital had removed her wedding rings again, and she felt naked and exposed.

He drew back. “There’s something I have to say. I don’t know if it’s going to make any sense to you. But I should have said it before I left that day. I just thought we’d have time.”

Pansy drew in a breath and held it.

“As long as this marriage has you and me in it,” he said, “it is complete.”

Hushed conversation drifted past the door. Water gushed through the pipes.

“There are children in our future,” he went on. “Harry and Ginny will have a few. Ron, probably. If I need a fix, I can volunteer to hold babies on the maternity ward. If I want to make a lasting impact I can teach. There are lots of ways to be part of a child's life. We don't need to make one ourselves.”

“I thought we had made one.”

“I know.”

“We didn’t.”

“I know.”

“The test didn’t turn colour. I thought it would, but it didn’t.” Pansy rubbed her eyes. “And I didn’t know why I was so sad.”

“Oh, sweetheart.” Neville held her head against his chest. “Shh. It’s okay.”

"There's no rational reason to have a baby."

"Not really, no."

"I'm under no obligation."

He buried his nose in her hair and inhaled. "None."

“But half of it would have been you.” His heart beat under her ear, much faster than usual. “And I never got to meet it."

A nurse opened the door. "Oh, good, we're awake!" She bustled in and adjusted the monitoring display so that it beeped less urgently. "I'll call the Healer."

Half an hour later, Draco swept in looking harried and underslept. Pansy sat on the bed, and he checked her eyes and reflexes and listened to her chest.

"What do you remember?' he asked.

"After we—" Pansy caught Neville's eye over Draco's shoulder and blushed. "We were intimate. Then I had a headache. Am I alright?"

"You’ve been unconscious for three days. But labs and scans are great. Physically, I like everything I'm seeing."

"Thanks," said Pansy. "I take after my mother. May I have my rings, please?"

"Do you remember anything else?" Draco asked. “Anything besides sexual activity that might have precipitated this event?”

Pansy twisted the godawful bed sheet in her hand. "I remember everything."

“That’s good. It would be helpful to identify any recurring factors with these episodes."

“I mean,” said Pansy, “I remember everything."

“Everything is great. I’ll run and get some parchment, and we can—” He cut off mid-thought as the shoe dropped. “Oh, shit! Are you serious?” Draco's hand twitched towards his wand. His gears turned. He was dying to get inside her brain. “Before we go any further, I’m going to call Granger in and grab that parchment.”

"Absolutely fucking not,” snapped Pansy. She darted a guilty glance at Neville. “No, thank you. I'd be delighted to let you and Granger take turns ransacking my castle another time. But I’m going home. Now.”

“Pans,” said Draco, “if you remember everything—”

“I said everything, didn’t I?”

“This is quite literally without precedent. Granger’s been burning the candle at both ends for weeks on this case. I realise that’s not your problem, but implications for mind Healing aside, you need follow-up care.”

“Fine. I’ll schedule an appointment for later this week.” Pansy hopped off the bed. “I don't know what you people do to these linens, but it's like sleeping on gravel."

The castle ghosts met them in the entryway, flickering with an anxious spectral vibration.

"Welcome home, my lady," said Leonard.

Lawrence hovered open-mouthed like a choking goldfish until Leonard jogged him with a slap between the shoulder blades.

"Art thou well?" Lawrence asked in a silted voice.

Pansy wanted to tell him about the dreams she had. But she’d been to places she didn’t know how to describe, and seen and felt things she couldn’t explain. Even if she could, he wouldn't understand them. But perhaps that wasn't true. With luck it would be many years before she shared in the knowledge of ghosts.

“I’m fine now, Lore,” she said. “I think I’m perfectly well, actually.”

Lawrence’s eyes clouded with black as he looked her up and down, then they cleared. “You found them. All your memories.”

Pansy swallowed back an unexpected swell of tears. Lawrence had been fighting for her every step of the way, more than she could have possibly known.

“I’ll try and tell you about it sometime,” she said.

"Do you want breakfast?” Neville took her coat and hung it up. “We have salmon, I could do up some rice and miso soup.”

Pansy worked a tangle from her hair with her fingers. “Could we have a bath?”

Lawrence turned to hide his smirk. Pansy couldn’t blame him. Neville flushed very prettily for a sexually active man who delivered babies on occasion.

Every horizontal surface in the east tower bedroom was strewn with acorn caps, small bright stones, rosehips, rust-red leaves, feathers, and a disconcerting number of children’s marbles. A spider silk greeting hung over their bed:

B E E  B E T R

P A N Z E E

🖤

Neville ran them a bath.

Pansy felt unaccountably self-conscious stripping off her dress and following him into the hot and scented tub. But she focused on providing care, and any residual anxiety from her time without memories melted away. She straddled his legs and shaved his whiskers, then took up a cloth and scrubbed and rinsed him from head to toe. When she was satisfied, she nestled between his legs while he washed and combed out her hair.

Afterwards, he dried her body with a warm towel and led her to their bed.

He’d endured months without her touch. But he took the time to turn the linens down, and when she was laid out on the pillows before him, he reclaimed her body from temples to toes with patience and unalloyed wonder. When he’d run his hands and mouth over each and every part of her, he slotted himself between her hips. Before he could carry his point home, Pansy coaxed him onto his back, knelt between his legs and ducked behind the curtain of her hair. If he harboured any doubts about her memory, she dispelled them then and there. In love, he’d been her sole instructor, and she his dutiful pupil. She tightened her grip and parted her lips and demonstrated absolute mastery.

He let Pansy take him to his limit and not a flick of her tongue beyond. Before her goal could be accomplished, he hauled her back up the bed and began the steady and meticulous work of taking her apart.

From the very beginning, her pleasure had been his. They never codified or labelled it. If she'd ever been pressed on the subject, Pansy would acknowledge that he liked to please her, possibly more than other men liked to please their partners, and sometimes in a way that involved certain connotations around power and control. She knew that when he touched her, her mind went quiet and her flesh came alight. She understood that safety and desire were intricately linked, and that from time to time she wished to turn her body over to him completely, in the absolute trust that he would honour it.

He made a light meal of her, then settled between her thighs and guided himself inside. He lay his body over hers and moved in her with savouring strokes, feeling her, and obliging her to feel him.

He kissed her everywhere on her face except her mouth. “Did you find the girl from the photograph?”

“I did.” Pansy brushed her fingers along the curve of his arse. She urged him in. In. “In a dream.” In a well.

“I’m glad.” He sucked a breath through his teeth and pulled all the way out. “You missed her so much.”

He gathered her wrists in one hand and held them over her head.

“But— you missed her,” said Pansy.

"No." Neville lowered his mouth to her breast. “I missed you.”

Her mind reeled. She’d crawled through fire and blood to rescue a better, kinder version of herself and bring her home. But the Pansy from before the curse had been much the same as Pansy was now, and in some ways more naive. In any case, she was gone. The princess who went up the tower would never come back down again. And the one who came down would not be her.

Neville tasted his way from one breast to the other, leaving a string of damp impressions. He had an uncanny ability to pin her spirit to her body when he held her down. Inside the boundary of his arms she was free to bloom, opening out in endless affirmation.

Yes. Yes.

She died. She was reborn. She was newly embodied. She was always herself. Always new. Forever dying. Never fully unfolded and constantly unfolding.

That Neville had understood this startled her. But hadn’t love and pain and memory been tangled up for him from the start?

He entered her again on an indulgent stroke and began building her up methodically, like stacking a tower of wooden blocks so high one needed a chair. When he felt like it, he knocked it down. She came for him, then later with him, and finally for him again.

“Are you happy I remembered?” Pansy lay in his arms after, tracing sappy messages into his shoulder letter by letter.

Neville sighed. “I’m . . . relieved.”

People often seemed to feel that way at the end of ordeals. Was it like that in stories? Did Cinderella roll into the castle courtyard on the day the slipper fit and think, I’m sublimely happy, or Thank God that’s done?

And what happened after?

Well. Pansy’s noble knight washed her again in the shower, and whether they came out any cleaner than when they went in was anyone’s guess.

They napped until the late afternoon, then walked to the farm down the valley to collect Wallace.

As they followed the stone fence home, Neville plucked a long grass blade and wound it around the tip of his little finger.

“Do you remember the night we saw the mermaids dancing?” Pansy asked.

“Of course.”

“You looked at me like I’d snapped your wand, and then you left. What were you thinking?”

Neville walked along without saying anything. His hair was shiny and clean and dried here and there into perfect coils. He tied off the end of the ring and handed it to Pansy, and she slipped it on her finger next to her wedding rings.

“I was thinking that when I kissed you, everything would be different.” He took her hand in his. "That I would be different."

“When? Not if?”

He squeezed her hand. “When.”

“It horrified you,” she said.

“No. Not the way you mean. I already knew I wanted you. It was bigger than that.”

“You weren’t ashamed?”

“Is that what you thought?”

Pansy shrugged.

He stopped and faced her. “You were so close. And you smelled incredible. But when I looked at you, it suddenly felt like I was falling at a hundred miles an hour. There was nothing to hold on to. And I knew it would never stop. I don’t know if that makes any sense.”

The sun lowered over the hills. Wallace raced down the stream after his squeaky Snitch, then circled back and hopped atop the stone fence to try his hand at intimidating the ewes. Neville draped his arm around Pansy’s neck, and they started towards the castle again.

"I was wrong, though," he said.

Pansy took hold of his hand where it hung over her shoulder and brushed her lips over his knuckles. "You eventually stopped falling?"

"No." He drew her tight against him and kissed the top of her head half a dozen times. "I was wrong that there wasn’t anything to hold on to."

As they passed through the wood and into the back garden, Pansy heard voices.

“Wait.” She laid a cautioning hand on Neville’s chest.

The castle looked like it had been dipped in honey. Its stones reflected the molten sun, and each window was a radiant pane of copper-gold. Lawrence and Leonard stood atop the west tower battlement, watching a pod of painterly clouds swim along the horizon like saffron-bellied beasts.

Once upon a time, two men who never met in life found one another in death. How long had Lawrence waited? As Pansy looked on, Lawrence caught Leonard’s mouth in a kiss. Pansy didn't think it was their first, and the intimacy made her blush. But as she turned her face away, Lawrence’s hands roamed over Leonard’s back, and in one sharp movement he yanked the knife handle free from between Leonard’s shoulder blades. Leonard stumbled backwards, mouth agape. Lawrence gave the blade a casual toss, caught the handle, then wound up and threw it as hard as he possibly could out beyond the moat. It arced end over end through the fading sunlight, shedding a trail of blue sparks as it went until it dissolved midair and was gone.

Leonard’s ghost light flared. Dark blue vapour streamed upwards from his wound and dissipated in the air. As Pansy watched, the stream thinned to a trickle. Then it stopped.

“He’s angry.” Neville took a step forwards, but Pansy tugged him back.

With a guttural bellow and a burst of movement that startled the crows from their roost elm, Leonard charged at Lawrence and took him up in a crushing hold. Pansy’s heart clenched with despair—the cantankerous bear of a man meant to throw Lawrence over the parapet. But the raucous roar scattering the forest life was laughter. Leonard spun them both around, then pressed Lawrence’s back to the parapet and kissed him.

Pansy finally looked away when Lawrence’s spectral linen shirt went soaring over the battlement like a lost kite.

“Do you think they’ll stay long?” Pansy asked.

“Or move on?” said Neville. “That’s a good question. I suppose it depends on whether or not something holds them here.”

As they crossed the bridge from the rear garden, a soul ballad poured from the open kitchen window.

Pansy looked up at Neville. “Tess.”

The iron-caged record player was off limits to Tess’s magic, but an intrepid mouse or a motivated squirrel might push a button and start a machine.

Neville took her hand, then took her waist. “Waste not, want not.”

Holding her tight to his body, he danced her around the deck of the bridge.

The black moat reflected the denim blue sky and the gilded clouds, the honey-dipped castle and its extravagant gold-glass windows.

Neville sang along to the record in his beautiful baritone. “That’s how strong my love is . . .”

He danced them close to the water’s edge, and the moat showed the shadow of a tall man with his jumper sleeves bunched at his elbows and a smallish woman in a cold weather dress swaying in time to the music. Pansy rested her cheek on Neville’s chest, and her reflection in the water did the same.

Once upon a time there was a dog who preferred people to sheep. He lay down by the castle's back door and angled his face to the sun, tongue lolling and one eye smiling.

Tess's spirit lay all around them. The air surrounding the castle was always clean. All the little animals were plump. The crows even tempered. The trees all broad and wise. Even the moat water, if anyone cared to try it, tasted sweet.

Once upon a time there was a cottage in the woods, and in the cottage there lived a witch. She knew death and preferred love, and when she was called to move on she stayed, in the water and the trees and the cottage and the birds, and in time she became a castle.

The sun was dying fast.

It was time to put the chickens to bed and feed the dog. To start the dinner and wash the clothes.

Pansy's shadow in the water waved her hand. Pansy's heart pinched with grief, and she waved back.

"You know what's funny," she said to Neville, "is that the problem wasn't that I'd forgotten. It was that I remembered."

"Was it?"

"Mm hm. But it's a long story."

"Whenever you're ready," said Neville, "I want to hear it."

"I don't know the ending."

Neville hummed and turned her towards the waiting welcome of the castle door. "How stories should always end."

"Happily?"

"I was thinking: with take-out noodles and sleeping next to my wife in my own bed."

"A book and a bath," suggested Pansy.

"Tea and Christmas," said Neville. "Do you want anything in particular this year?"

To be alive, Pansy thought. To be with you. To wait a long time to find out how it ends.

"New records," she said. "Bees."

"Box full of bees," said Neville. "Zesty."

"No, I want them in my stocking."

Once upon a time there was a woman and a man, and what they longed for more than anything in the world was each other.

"I'll be the breeze after the storm is gone," Neville sang. "To dry your eyes and love you warm . . . "

Their dance ended at the castle door. Neville let Wallace in and they followed, hand in hand through the warmth of the firelit night, and every day that came after.