Likewise the bears in couples agree.
The first time Pansy Parkinson ever saw Draco Malfoy she thought, What a little git.
Mother had delayed the maid until Pansy had almost missed the train, and so it had been underway for ages while she was lugging around her trunk and looking for someone at all familiar.
Mother had said that all the best children were off to Durmstrang, really, but there were bound to be some children she’d met at the parties who would be in Slytherin too. The trunk was so heavy, though, that Pansy was two seconds away from sitting anywhere she could find. She’d already almost taken a free seat, when some boy with dreadlocks had produced a tarantula.
Pansy hoped everyone in this stupid school was not going to be waving around enormous arachnids. The twits. Exactly what good was a spider to anyone?
Everyone knew frogs’ legs were a better alternative to spiders’ in any spell.
Pansy also observed a toad hopping alone down the corridor. This train was little better than a zoo. She gave consideration to the idea of taking it, since obviously its owner didn’t want it any more, but she didn’t think toads’ legs were good for anything either.
She was in a foul temper at this stage and she didn’t much care if she squashed the toad as she heaved her trunk along, but as she did she saw a dark boy sitting alone in a carriage. He looked vaguely familiar.
Good enough, she decided, and opened the door.
“Hello, my name is Pansy Parkinson, I’m sure I’ll be in Slytherin and I’m going to sit here,” she announced. “Give me a hand with this trunk.”
The boy looked at it dubiously. “It looks a bit heavy.”
“I’m a lady,” said Pansy, reduced in desperation to her mother’s cliches. “Surely you won’t let a lady do menial work?”
“I don’t mind,” the boy said.
So much for that, then. Pansy had always been intensely sceptical about it in any case.
“Give me a hand or I’ll hex you,” she said.
He shrugged. “All right then.”
They got her trunk stowed away, and she looked at him. He seemed sensible enough, and of course he was going to be Slytherin, or he’d have said otherwise. She began to hope, rather self-consciously, that he was Draco Malfoy.
“My name is Blaise Zabini,” he said as they sat down.
Well, to hell with that.
“I’ve got some Chocolate Frogs,” she offered cautiously. “Do you have anything to trade?”
“I’ve got some lollipops,” he said. “One for one?”
“Two lollipops for a Frog, and you can keep the card.”
He mulled it over. “Yeah, okay.”
He tried to pass a blood-flavoured lollipop over to her, but she gave him an oh-come-on look. She chose a kiwi-flavoured one and a milk-flavoured one, because she was a fan of the classics.
They sat eating happily enough until someone started making noise outside their door. It sounded like someone was trying to drawl and spit at the same time, and it came out rather strangled.
The spitting person came in, accompanied by two faintly boy-like gorillas.
“Who does he think he is, anyway?”
One of the gorillas frowned. “Harry Potter?” he offered. “You know… he’s famous and everything.”
The spitter, who was short and pasty-looking, wheeled on his enormous friend and looked for all the world as if he was going to smack him.
“Shut up, Goyle!” he commanded, and then got on with his rant. “That’s not the point,” he proceeded. “That’s not the point at all, the point is that he’s going to be sorry, the point is that he is phenomenally rude!”
Blaise coughed.
The pale boy raised his eyebrows. “What is it, Zabini?”
“Oh, nothing,” said Blaise. “Just wanted to say hello.”
“Hello,” the boy said briefly, slightly distracted from his venting. “Oh—Goyle, Crabbe, this is Zabini. It is Zabini, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Blaise.
“Who’s your girlfriend, then?”
“I’m Pansy Parkinson,” Pansy said, loudly.
“I’m charmed,” sneered the boy. “Malfoy.”
“Oh,” said Pansy, in what she realised afterwards was an openly disappointed way.
“Oh?” the boy repeated, his cold grey eyes narrowed to slits. “My father said your mother was a society beauty. You have a face like a pug dog.”
“Well, you have a face like a rat,” Pansy snapped.
“Why don’t you—oh my God, is that a toad?”
That toad had slowly hopped by the open door again. Everyone watched it. Draco Malfoy’s face twisted up.
“My father said this place was going to be a pit,” he announced. “They seem to be transporting roaming livestock along with us. I bet they don’t even wash the bedsheets.”
“My brothers said the dormitories were quite nice,” Pansy volunteered.
“You see, we don’t even get rooms to ourselves,” Draco told her. “We might as well all huddle under one blanket with the pigs.”
At this point, a girl hurried by. She had a bush of frizzy hair and spoke in a loud, bossy tone, and Pansy wondered why their carriage couldn’t be attracting people with slightly more pleasant voices.
“Has anybody seen Neville’s toad? He seems to have lost it, he’s in a terrible state,” she said, looking at them as if they might be responsible.
“Is he? I’m all torn up inside,” said Draco.
The girl’s mouth thinned. “I was just asking if you’d seen it,” she said sniffily.
“No,” Draco said. “Don’t recall that I have. Have you seen a toad, Pansy?”
Pansy shook her head. “Maybe,” she theorised, “it climbed out of one of the windows.”
“Probably got crushed under the train wheels,” Blaise agreed with a mournful air. “Innocent little toads can just crawl away and then…”
“Splat,” Draco said with a certain amount of satisfaction. “Goodbye,” he added, and shut the door in the girl’s face.
“I don’t think that’s very funny!” she exclaimed in an outraged voice, and they all broke into laughter as she stormed off in a huff.
Draco looked around, and appeared to come to a decision. “Right,” he said. “I have sugar quills with me. Who here wants to trade?”
“I’ve got lollipops,” Blaise volunteered.
Draco brightened. “D’you have any blood-flavoured ones?” He looked offended at the round of groans. “What? I just like them.”
Crabbe and Goyle turned out to be dim enough to give out pasties without anything being given to them in return, and Pansy felt more cheerful about Hogwarts.
A few days later, her mother wrote that it was not particularly ladylike to bond with people over the humour of tormenting others. Pansy shrugged as she read the letter over breakfast, while Blaise read it over her shoulder and laughed and Draco made faces at the speccy boy across the room.
Apparently he was Harry Potter. Pansy was very unimpressed.
Nay, I like her for her faults.
By the time Pansy got to her dormitory, her dorm mates were already ranged into two groups. On one side there was a thickset person called Millicent Bulstrode and a girl with a pitted face who went by the name of Eloise Midgen, and then there was Morag MacDougal, who was a pixie-like Scottish girl, and blonde, laughing Sally-Anne Perks.
Pansy didn’t know much about other girls, but she knew enough to know which group she belonged to. She felt stroppy and miserable as she shook out her nightgowns, and heard Morag’s little laugh.
“Very… frilly,” she said in her soft Scots voice, ever so slightly mocking.
“My mother chose them,” Pansy told her stonily.
“Oh sweet,” said Morag.
Pansy tilted up her chin. “Well,” she said. “I’m far too busy practising magic to waste my time shopping.” She smiled a secretive, mysterious smile. “I’ve even been taught some Dark Arts stuff. You never know when somebody is going to hex you.” She looked at Morag. “Do you.”
Morag took a step back. “I suppose not,” she said in a smaller voice.
Pansy smirked and continued laying out her pink, frilly nightgowns. Nobody commented until Sally-Anne offered her a Chocolate Frog, which she said she just happened to have lying around and didn’t want at all.
So the dormitory worked out all right, and in the common room Draco and Blaise called her over and introduced her to their other dorm mate, Theodore Nott. She’d assumed that Blaise was more or less going to be the leader of their little group, and she was surprised to see, even on the first night, that Draco Malfoy tended to end up centre stage.
He just seemed to assume that he would, and somehow it worked. Even though his incessant boasting and unsubtle references to his father made him an easy target for mockery, and he rewarded mockery with spitting little temper tantrums, and he should really have ended up being bullied a bit.
It might have simply been that his father was important, but Pansy didn’t think so.
“Did you hear that old man?” Draco sneered. “Nitwit! Blubber! Aren’t I the most genial good old boy that ever was? Why are we being bossed by Santa Claus in a pointed hat?”
He did a very good Dumbledore impression. He had energy to burn, Pansy supposed, and it turned into a weird kind of charisma.
She liked Blaise more, but Draco Malfoy was interesting.
She inspected Sally-Anne’s Chocolate Frog, broke off a leg and passed it over to him.
If she trusts you, then she will have you.
Pansy was horribly nervous about her first flying lesson, but would have died rather than admitted it.
“Oooh, Pansy, did Mumsy ever let you fly?” Draco whispered as they went out, swinging their brooms. “Was she afraid you’d mess up your hair? Just follow my lead,” he bragged.
Pansy hit his broom with hers. “I know you won’t mess up your hair,” she hissed back.
Draco went a bit pink. He must have been flattering himself that nobody caught his sidelong checks into mirrors.
Still, she knew he had been flying, and she never had. She might be about to make an idiot of herself.
She was very relieved that somebody raised the bar of idiocy too high for her to match it. Some fat kid lost his head and ignored the teacher, kicking off into the air so hard Pansy gave a gasp of laughter.
“That idiot! He’s going to go into orbit!”
They all watched with interest to see if he would while the Gryffindors ran around as if he would conveniently fall back out of the sky and into their caring arms. The kid—Neville Longbottom, Pansy thought, and richly deserving of the name—further proved his idiocy by losing his grip and falling with a thud onto the ground. Then he burst into tears.
Madam Hooch and the Gryffindors all rushed towards him. Pansy and the others strolled up to take a look.
“Oh, why doesn’t he suck it up? It was his fault,” Pansy muttered, rolling her eyes as the teacher fussed over him and dashed him off to the infirmary.
“What precisely did he think broomsticks did?” Draco laughed. “Did you see his face, the great lump?”
“Shut up, Malfoy,” said Parvati Patil, a pretty girl who Pansy had met at parties and who talked about nothing but hair clips. Not that she’d talked about anything to Pansy once she was put in Gryffindor.
“Oooh, sticking up for Longbottom?” Pansy snapped. “Never thought you’d like fat little crybabies, Parvati.”
Draco stepped forward and picked up Longbottom’s Remembrall, which that extremely righteous Harry Potter seemed to object to.
Pansy, Blaise, Crabbe and Goyle all had to watch and wince as Potter outstripped Draco flying and got the ball. Draco was in a snit about that for a week, when another crescendo of outrage was reached.
Harry Potter got a broomstick and was proclaimed Seeker for his team, and said something about it being thanks to Draco.
If he was such a hero, he should’ve had more consideration for Pansy’s eardrums.
“Can you believe this!” said Draco, stirring his porridge as if he had a personal grudge against it. “That little! A Seeker! He has defective eyesight! How can someone with defective eyesight be a Seeker! That flying was a fluke! Wait till my father hears!”
“Uh, you’re not finishing your sentences,” Vince Crabbe pointed out, looking upset and confused.
“Gah!” said Draco, and did a vigorous impression of someone searching for the Snitch. “Look at me, I’m Harry Potter! Where’s the Snitch? Where’s the pitch? Oh no, in my blindness I have wandered across the sky and now I will be eaten by carnivorous seagulls!”
Pansy ducked to avoid getting hit in the eye, and reached for the toast.
“Maybe he has radar,” Blaise suggested helpfully. “Like a bat.”
“Draco, please can I… have… some… coffee…” Sally-Anne looked upset when she and Draco ended up in a grim tug of war for the coffee pot.
“No,” Draco said between his teeth. “I need it more than you.”
Pansy picked at her toast. “You’re not even twelve yet, and you’re slave to a habit.”
Sally-Anne relinquished the coffee pot in fear, and Draco clutched it protectively to his chest.
“So?” he snapped. “What’s your point?”
“Nothing. It’s just very sad.”
That was when the news came that Eloise had accidentally cursed her own nose off, and would be in the infirmary indefinitely.
“I hate this school,” moaned Draco, carrying on and curling himself up, Pansy suspected, as a prelude to trying to bodily insert himself into the coffee pot. “The Slytherins are cursed. There is no second coffee pot. I am going to die here.”
Pansy buttered her toast. You got used to the drama queen airs fairly quickly.
He did have other qualities that offset them.
Such as when Eloise got back from the infirmary with all her acne still in place, but her nose now unfortunately off-centre. There was sniggering to her face in the common room, of course, but that was nothing to the sniggering behind her back throughout the corridors.
Her brother Pellinore had told her, in one of his rare communicative moments, that you had to watch out for your own. The other houses were all filled with subversives, people whose parents were against you or whose parents were Muggles and dangerous. Pansy understood that—the mockery directed towards Eloise was vicious, and if you let that behaviour continue towards one of your own then you were on the line when it got out of control.
She, Sally-Anne, Morag and Millicent all formed into a protective group around Eloise as they walked to and from classes. Millicent’s glare alone could send their Hufflepuff yearmates running.
It was different with the older students. On their way up from Potions one day, two Weasleys popped up. Everybody’s parents told them about the Weasleys, with their father who kept twisting laws to Muggle advantage and trying to enforce laws with their families that he did not think he had to keep himself.
“Wait, hold on, girl!” said one of the Weasleys, grinning broadly. “You dropped something back there. Think it’s your nose?”
They all glared at him silently. Pansy stepped forward.
The other Weasley pushed her back. “Now, now, ladies, we just want to talk,” he said. “Anyway, you know your friend shouldn’t move too fast, who knows what would drop off next?”
They chortled and high-fived each other. Pansy hated every freckle on their stupid, superior faces.
“Get out of my way, Weasley,” she spat, and whirled her fist into his special parts.
He looked outraged. “You vicious little Slytherin bitch,” he said, and shoved her back. “We weren’t doing anything to you!”
Pansy let her bag fall and found a centre of gravity. Then she felt the press of Millicent behind her, getting her back.
“Excuse me,” said the imperious and unpleasant voice of Draco Malfoy, pushing between the Weasleys. “What on earth is going on here?”
“Nothing, midget,” one of the Weasleys snapped. “One of your little friends just went rabid on us.”
Draco smirked. Pansy wished he would get out of the way, he was an only child and she had a suspicion that he would be pathetic in a fight.
“Then let’s all go,” he suggested. “Unless you’re keeping them here, of course.”
“Yeah, go, get out of our sight. If only you’d all leave the school,” the other Weasley said. “We wouldn’t keep you,” he added with what seemed to be genuine indignation. “We’re not bullying Slytherin gits.”
“Fancy,” Draco drawled. “I am.”
Morag, Millicent and Sally-Anne were already filing away. There was not much you could do in these circumstances, except remember and wait for an opportunity to pay them back someday.
Pansy stood between Eloise and Draco, waiting for them to go, but as Draco moved to do so he murmured, “Backing down like this is what got your father the position and salary he has today.”
A Weasley slammed him against the wall. “Who the hell do you think you are, you twerp?” he shouted.
And then behind him, at the entrance to the dungeons Draco had been eyeing for some time, there came a soft voice.
“What do you think you are doing, Mr. Weasley?”
It was Professor Snape, the greasy-haired teacher who Pansy thought was funny, but a little alarming.
“He was badmouthing my father!” yelped the Weasley.
Eloise spoke up then, with a conveniently shaking voice. “They were teasing me, sir. About my nose.” She squeezed out some tears, as the Weasleys glared at her.
“Thirty points from Gryffindor, I think,” Snape said smoothly. “You three may go to your next class.”
They all went obediently, and Draco suppressed his gleeful cackling until they had rounded a corner.
“I am king of cunning,” he crowed. “I am a master of deceit! I will rule you all.”
Pansy smiled, but immediately qualified by saying: “I could have taken them.”
“Where did you learn how to fight?” Eloise asked speculatively.
“One of my brothers is called Peaseblossom Parkinson,” said Pansy. “Where d’you think?”
She remembered this moment when Draco was embarrassing himself making jokes about Harry Potter, and moderated her snickering.
If I cannot bend the gods, I will let hell loose.
Not snickering was sometimes difficult in the face of the near-constant collapse of Draco’s Really Cunning Plans. Things kept going so wrong, until all they should have done was point and laugh at Draco, but somehow he always bounced back.
He was a malicious india-rubber ball, or the rest of them were possessed by morbid curiosity.
Somehow, he did manage to keep a tenuous hold on dignity.
“Well, I didn’t think he was going to jump on me, did I,” Draco said haughtily, as Pansy tried to apply a cold compress to his swelling eye.
He’d apparently been provoking the Weasley that Harry Potter dragged around.
“Your beauty is ruined,” she said, elbowing him lightly in the throat. “And I bet he got off without a scratch.”
She’d try to pick a fight with him sometime, she swore it.
Draco lifted his chin. “Not at all,” he said with a great deal of satisfaction. “I almost broke his horrible nose.”
He shouldn’t have been able to do it. The Weasley was big and had roughly a dozen older brothers, but that was Draco. He would bash his head against brick walls with absolute, bull-headed stubbornness until he made the wall say ‘ouch.’
This did not, unfortunately, make him a master of subtlety. Pansy was no big fan herself, but her view was that if you wanted to do it, you should do it right, not in a way that got you detentions in the Forbidden Forest.
The silly twit deserved it, and Pansy never really understood why she got up at an ungodly hour of the night and wrapped her dressing gown around herself, and went to the common room to see what had happened to Draco.
He was sitting in one of the carved chairs by the fire, still in his cloak and huddling by the empty grate. Pansy knew he was older than she was, and had just turned twelve, but he looked about six.
“Hey. Draco,” she said. “What—what is it?”
His face was pinched with fear when he lifted it. “What are you doing here?” he asked suspiciously.
“I wanted a glass of water,” she lied promptly, and then went over to sit on the hearth. She looked up at him and wanted to say, we’re the youngest Slytherins, we have to stick together, I understand, tell me and I’ll help you. She said, “Did they make you do menial labour, Draco?”
His fists were small and pale and clenched.
“They ditched me and Potter and a cowardly hound in the forest,” he answered tightly. “And we saw… It was dark and… Promise you won’t…”
He wanted to ask her to promise not to tell, but he wouldn’t. Draco did not believe people, on principle.
He got a grip on himself. “It was the Dark Lord,” he said in a low voice. “It was, I’m sure it was, and he was drinking unicorn blood and—my father will hear about this!”
“All right,” said Pansy, feeling small and threatened and wanting to attack in some directions.
He was shaking. “I had to run,” he said, and bitterness twisted in his voice as with her heart. “I had to. Of course, they rescued precious Potter first. Almost forgot about me, and I was wandering around the forest alone and I’d seen him and—”
The Dark Lord, someone their parents talked about with longing and fear, who might be regretted but who was gone, not real, like the Burning Times.
Pansy had never been so aware of how very young they were.
“I wasn’t scared,” exploded Draco, with sudden vicious emphasis.
“Of course you weren’t,” Pansy said. She put her hand near his, not holding it of course, but close enough so he could feel some warmth. His hand was icy and trembling.
“It was just so cold out there,” Draco said defiantly. “Wait till I tell my father.”
He did not tell his father. She sat with him for the rest of that night and he waited, watching for something he could do to make it even between them. She made quietly sure he couldn’t.
She told herself that it was better that he owed her a favour.
Nobody had protected Draco. Nobody would protect any of them. They learned that when they were sitting at the end of year feast, glowing with the rush of success, better than any of them, showing all of them.
Then that old man stood up under Slytherin’s banners and spat in their faces, during their feast, by awarding Gryffindor just over the number of points they needed for some wild idiot reason. Like it wasn’t a deliberate statement against them.
They sat down and listened to everyone else cheering for their humiliation.
“We’re on our own,” said quiet, nervous Teddy Nott.
Draco’s hand was clenched around the goblet he’d been thumping the table with, and Pansy thought about it white and shaking.
“I like it better that way,” he said, sneering at the entire room.
Pansy thought about that as they walked out of the Great Hall, Morag beside her, and she thoughtfully tripped up that bossy girl called Hermione Granger. Hermione fell on her face.
“Ow!” she exclaimed. “You—you stupid Slytherin cow!”
Pansy passed on. “That’s right,” she tossed over her shoulder.
By the end of her first year, Pansy knew the score.
I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I water’d it with fears.
That summer, neither of Pansy’s brothers came home often. Even Peaseblossom had no time for her, and she was left too often sitting with her mother and her mother’s friends in the pink and gold parlour.
“Of course she’s great friends with young Draco Malfoy,” her mother said, sounding sleek and pleased. “Which is lovely, you know, because Lucius is such a dashing man—”
“Oh yes, such an air of authority,” agreed Mrs Pucey.
Lucius Malfoy was rich and powerful and everybody was afraid of him, which was why Pansy had been hearing about Draco Malfoy ever since she could remember.
“And we’re, well, we’re quite comfortable and our family is well respected,” her mother said, with a discreet little titter.
“Yes,” Mrs Pucey replied delicately, and touched Pansy’s hair, pulling her hair back so both of them looked into her face.
Her mother bowed to the insinuation. “If only the child was prettier,” she sighed. “I hear the Malfoy boy is a sweet-looking child.”
Pansy got to her feet. “He’s short,” she said. “And he’s my friend.”
She ran out of the room. Her brothers were grim, and silent, and they never came home. Her father was not aware she existed. And her mother…
“Dear Pansy,” her mother said, twisting her hair too tightly around her fancy comb as Pansy shut her eyes and gritted her teeth. “Do you miss your friends?”
When she got back to school, it was only better for a little while.
Draco was tense and nervous because he was practising so hard for the new Seeker try-outs. She thought it was just desperation to beat Harry Potter, until he told her and Blaise that his father had promised him secretly that the team would get new brooms if he got the place.
Then she thought of all her mother’s delicate offers of dresses and jewellery last Christmas after she had made friends with Draco, and imagined how she would have reacted if she’d cared for that approval. Draco was hopelessly, unwittingly open about his father.
Pansy wanted him to get it so much that she made a grinning fool of herself when he did, when he danced in all lit up with delight, and made them all smile. It was so rare for him to be openly, shamelessly happy.
It was all ruined by Hermione Granger accusing him of buying his way onto the team.
“I wasn’t the one who special concessions were made for,” he snarled back in the common room. “I wasn’t given a broom by a teacher—Professor Snape hinted as much—I’m going to be better. They’ll all see, including that stupid little Mudblood.”
It was not a word any of them had ever used before, though of course they had all heard it. It was a dangerous word to use, Pansy had thought, but Draco spat it out and they all knew some kind of line had been crossed.
He didn’t beat Harry Potter, but he beat the Hufflepuffs and he beat the Ravenclaws, and Marcus Flint gave him some grudging praise and the new first years sidled around their group to listen to him when he talked.
People listened to him more when all the talk of the Chamber of Secrets started. Draco was able to swagger with success for once, because he didn’t fail when things were important, and he reported that his father had told them they would all be safe if they just kept out of it.
That was not much help, of course, when nightmares about a monster faded and the fact life was becoming harder emerged.
“None of the Slytherins have been hurt,” some curly-haired Ravenclaw girl whispered, and Pansy wheeled on her.
“Yes, but we haven’t been hurting anyone, either,” Pansy snapped, walking forward and knowing her expression was dark and forbidding. Her face was good for that much. “Isn’t that nice of us.”
Everyone could hear the whispering. They had always been apart, and now people felt threatened they wanted to threaten in their turn.
The only choice was to threaten back.
“We’d all be safe if the Slytherins were chucked out,” said the Weasley twins in a corridor, with teachers in it who were pretending not to hear.
Flint went for them, and thirty points were promptly taken off. Pansy hung back and burned with fury until Professor Snape took points off every other house on every pretext that he could think of. She saw Draco beaming at him with proprietory pride. He was well known to be Snape’s favourite.
The day he took the final ten points off Gryffindor, though, the same curly-haired Ravenclaw who Pansy had spoken to before shoved past her a touch too hard. Pansy fell down and had an angry bruise from her wrist to her elbow.
“Don’t you worry about it,” Blaise said, putting healing ointment on because Madam Pomfrey asked questions and dealt out justice in a way that made people vengeful. “She did it because she’s got a secret thing going on with the speccy Weasley. I’ll make sure another of his stupid family hear about it, since they seem to be keeping it under wraps.”
They were sitting in the girls’ dormitories on her bed, and Pansy bit her lip against the pain. It was cold down in the dungeons, but safe.
“I wish the monster would kill them all,” she said venomously, and got some comfort out of it. They huddled under her blanket, pretending they weren’t scared, pretending they weren’t twelve, waiting for their pretences to come true so everybody would be sorry.
Blaise’s dark secretive face looked tired.
“Nott keeps waking up screaming,” he said. “I won’t do anything like scream.”
“Nor will I,” Pansy said fiercely. “Ever.”
They were cold but trying not to touch, until she realised that they were chest to chest. Hers had only just started developing, and she was still unsure about her new proportions. She stopped, feeling clumsy and realising with horror that she was blushing.
Nobody touched her at home but with a purpose, and she felt lonely and scared and she knew a purpose people could touch with.
They bent forward fumbling, and kissed. Their lips were damp and unsure, but because they were kissing they could clutch at each other’s shoulders and hands. There was warmth and comfort in that.
Pansy concentrated on breathing through her nose, and when it became too hard she sat back.
Blaise blinked at her, his dark shuttered eyes a little vulnerable for once.
“Pansy,” he said in a low voice. “I think I might like boys.”
She kept hold of his hand for an incautious moment. “That’s lucky,” she whispered back with awkward affection. “You’re awful at kissing girls.”
He laughed, and pretended to punch her. Then they went back to pretending they were not shaking, and she pretended her arm did not hurt, and both of them talked quietly about revenge.
One night Teddy Nott woke up screaming so loudly that Pansy was convinced the monster had killed one of them. She and the other girls ran to the boys’ dormitories, and flung themselves in at the moment when Draco slapped Teddy and he went quiet.
They all pretended that they were going to have fun breaking the rules, and sat on Teddy’s bed under the blanket, talking idly about Quidditch and feeding Hermione Granger a muteness potion.
Eventually, Teddy spoke. “It was after You-Know-Who—died,” he said in a steely voice. “There was suspicion flying around and there was a mob. Things got out of hand… they burned my father and my brother. He was only fifteen. I was three.”
Nobody asked whether his father had been a Death Eater. Everybody knew about Teddy’s uncle.
Nobody said, burning. Just like the Burning Times, the ones their parents whispered about. They could come back, and then we’re next to the fire.
“I wish the monster would kill them all,” Teddy said, and Pansy shivered even though she had said the same thing herself. “It’s not safe until they’re all gone. Until then—there’s always a chance the Muggles will find out, and the Mudbloods and the Muggle sympathisers will always be against us. It’s us or them.”
His eyes were huge and black in his thin face. Pansy was starting to learn about meaning what you said.
The threat of the monster was gone at the end of the year, and the Gryffindors were suddenly in possession of the House Cup again. Of course, that might well have no relation to the disappearance of the basilisk. Draco did several impressions of Dumbledore saying, “Another fine day, thanks to Harry Potter! Give the Gryffindors the Cup and thanks for all this wonderful sunlight!”
That summer, Peaseblossom came home one night with blood on his robes. He asked Pansy to hide them in her wardrobe, where Mother would not look.
“Yes, of course,” said Pansy, sweating and confused and caught between terror and sleep. “W-whose blood is it?”
He sat on her bed and held her hand. He was her brother, and he had taught her how to protect herself. She wanted him to hug her and he had once or twice when she was small, but now he had blood on his robes.
“You have to understand, Pansy,” he said in a soft, intense voice. “It’s us or them. The Dark Lord knew that, that we all have to stick together and then we can stand against them. You know we need to protect ourselves, don’t you? Dumbledore practically rules the Ministry. You don’t want him to rule you, do you?”
“No,” Pansy replied in a small, fierce voice.
“Good girl,” he said back. “We all do what we have to do.”
He went away, and did not speak to her for months afterwards. The bloody robes stayed in her wardrobe, and she had trouble sleeping. She was so grateful when Draco Owled her and asked her to come and stay.
He had had Vince and Gregory over since the start of the summer, because they were his best friends and admiring shadows. She, Morag and Blaise all arrived together.
He showed them off to his aloof mother and his frankly terrifying father, and they sat there and tried to look impressive.
Malfoy Manor was huge and dark and Pansy did not like it, and Draco did not belong there. He strutted around it as if he did, though, and threw his vitality at the darkness in one of those idiot battles he always plunged himself into.
He was only quiet and still at mealtimes, when his father would give speeches and talk to him sternly, and he would try to argue but eventually fall silent, convinced he had done something wrong. He would be sullen and quiet and as soon as the meal was over talking about what his father said and what his father would buy him as if they had not heard themselves.
Pansy did not like Draco’s father, but she knew he was important and they all listened to him. He said what everyone else was saying, with persuasive force behind it. She could see why he was such an important politician, and now and then she would be really impressed and see, oh, this is the person Draco is trying and failing so spectacularly to be.
She liked the times when they were on their own best. She remembered those times with pleasure, like the time they were all creeping around in the dark and in their pyjamas down the portrait gallery, and one of the portraits began to scream at them and they all ran yelling down the corridor into Draco’s room.
Panting under the blankets, Pansy had said accusingly, “You shrieked, Morag.”
“I did not,” Morag said. “It was Draco.”
Draco scowled at all of them, muttered “Did not,” and then betrayed his guilt very clearly by running a hand through his hair.
We all have to stick together and then we can stand against them, Pansy remembered. All six of them curled up on the bed and went to sleep together, Draco making a fuss about being crowded and uncomfortable and probably contracting rheumatism. Pansy never wanted to go home, but she knew what to do when they got back to school.
The spirit burning yet unbent,
May writhe—rebel—the weak alone repent!
The year began badly. There were Dementors all over the place, and every time they went near them Pansy thought about blood and felt sick, and Draco began to panic, and Teddy froze up in horror.
The only bright spot was that Harry Potter fainted at the sight of them, and Draco spent many happy morning swooning dramatically into the arms of everybody around.
“All right, Draco, you’re practically vomiting with glee and it’s not healthy,” Pansy said placidly, spooning up her cereal as he rested his fair head on her shoulder. She poured him a cup of coffee and then passed it on.
Draco smiled winningly at her. “Ah, coffee, let us be true to one another,” he said. “Have I told you about my Creative Magic classes?”
“Only constantly,” she answered. One of Draco’s problems was that he harped on a bit.
Another of his problems was that, while it was entirely understandable to cover fear with bravado, he always went too far.
Dumbledore, typically, had proclaimed a man Pansy suspected had giant blood their teacher, and Pansy was introduced to this terrifying hulk of a man who previously she had only seen lurking around the grounds when he announced that they were going to play around with enormous, clawed monsters. She understood now why people said that you could not trust anyone tainted with inhuman blood. They were insane.
Her chest tightened as she watched Draco going overboard as usual, and swaggering up to one of the creatures, and then she relaxed as it looked as if he was going to get away with it. She turned to her own worries and let his drawling voice slip over her, comfortingly confident.
“I bet you’re not dangerous at all, are you?” he said, sounding pleased and almost caressing. “Are you, you ugly great brute?”
The scream made her freeze in horror. She kept thinking desperately, but Hagrid can’t have put thirteen-year-olds in with things that would attack at that, Draco always talks like that, that isn’t an insult, oh God, and she thought of Teddy Nott’s pinched face and Peaseblossom’s robes and all she could see was Draco’s bright red blood.
It was only when they carried him away that she realised, to her sheer horror, that she had gone quite mad and was crying.
She scrubbed fiercely at the tears and they kept coming. Even Potter and his pet Weasley could see it, and the Weasley actually looked taken aback that Slytherins could cry. She shot him a venomous, humiliated glare through her tears and he screwed up his stupid freckled face and glared back.
“They should sack him straight away!” she shouted with the others, forcing anger into the place of fear and still not able to stop these embarrassing tears.
Dumbledore wouldn’t do it. Not because a Slytherin had been hurt. They all knew that.
He’d said he was dying, Pansy recollected and suddenly felt cold with dread.
She sent one last glare at the Gryffindors and banished all pride. “I’m going to see if he’s okay!” she exclaimed, and ran up the steps with her heart hammering in panic.
Madam Pomfrey said she could not come at first.
“Of course he’s not dead. He’s sleeping, now run along,” she said sternly.
Pansy was not sure where her control had gone. She had never behaved like this in her life before. “Oh please,” she said, and fought back a sob. “Oh please, can I just see him?”
Draco had to keep bouncing back, it was what he did, she knew him. And she had no idea why Madam Pomfrey ended up letting her in, but then she thought it was because she had been Draco for a minute, wanting something so stubbornly she got it, and she thought, does Draco care about everything this much?
When she saw him with his arm bandaged up and his face white and small as it had been in first year, against the pillow, she burst into more of these ridiculous tears, ran over and swooped down on him in hysterical relief. She kissed him four times before she realised that he had opened his eyes and was looking at her.
“Pansy,” he said in perfectly scandalised tones.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped out. “I thought you were dead!”
She put her face in her hands and then finally summoned up enough willpower to stop crying.
“What, right then? That’s sick!” exclaimed Draco, who still sounded panicked.
“No, I mean before!” she yelped, sitting up and rubbing at her cheeks.
“Oh,” said Draco, calming down. “Oh. Well, I very nearly did,” he added, falling back from shock into his familiar state of outrage. “I bet I still could. Filthy looking animal. Not to mention our teacher, who is plotting to kill me, setting savage animals on me. I shall write to my father!”
“You really should, you know,” she agreed, fighting the impulse to weep some more in sheer relief. “We have to get rid of him. And until we do, we’ve got to pay such close attention to the lessons. He doesn’t care if we get hurt.”
“Hurt!” Draco spluttered. “I was practically murdered. Why do things keep pouncing on me?”
“Only one thing—” Pansy stopped, and gave him a dirty look. “I don’t think you’re funny, Draco.”
There was a smug smile all over his pointy face. “Nooo, you think I’m irresistible. Not that I blame you, Pansy,” he added with great condescension.
It was the first time they had ever joked about things like that.
“Keep it up, Draco, and lose the use of your other arm,” she suggested sweetly.
He subsided back on the pillows, closing his eyes. His voice was slightly sleep-fogged. “Good God, woman, am I to blame for my own charm?” He opened his eyes a slit to see her reaction, and they both cracked up. “Fluff my pillow,” he added plaintively, trying a different tack. “I’m injured.”
She had already done so before she realised what she’d done, and he smirked.
Then Madam Pomfrey came up and ordered Pansy out. She went, hearing Draco’s voice ring out behind her.
“What if I need someone to feed me grapes? I am being attended by an incompetent! My father will hear about this.”
When Pansy returned, she found that while she was having her brief lapse of sanity the others had been planning. She listened over dinner, and bore the inevitable and merciless teasing.
Her lapse of sanity recurred again the next day, when she saw Draco come in with his arm bandaged up and had to resist the urge to fling herself at him and wrap him up in blankets.
“How is it, Draco? Does it hurt very much?” she asked, smiling to hide the disgraceful wobble in her voice.
“Yeah,” said Draco. It was only when she saw him wink from the corner of her eye that she realised he was carrying on like a poor wounded martyr, and rolled her eyes at her own stupidity.
Draco played his martyr role to the hilt and it was hilarious to see all the Gryffindors grinding their teeth to powder. When Professor Snape started delegating Draco’s jobs to Potter and Weasley, she looked up and caught a glint of mischief in his eye. She grinned delightedly up at him, and really began to see why Draco liked this man.
Aside from the fact that Hagrid was allowed to keep his job, it would all have been perfect if Pansy had not been concerned about her own inexplicable reaction. Carrying on like a feeble baby in front of the Gryffindors was totally unacceptable behaviour, and she caught Parvati Patil and her friend giggling behind her back about Draco a couple of days later.
Morag put her head close to Pansy’s, and made a loud comment about Parvati marinating in her perfume. Pansy laughed and the other two glared.
It was just that—she needed Draco. They all did. She found herself thinking absurd things like that he brightened up the dungeons the way he had the manor, and then being quite surprised when faced with another proof of his undeniable brattishness.
There was the day she came home early from Hogsmeade and found him having a conniption about the mud Harry Potter had thrown at him.
“It’s in my hair,” he kept wailing, and gestured to it violently. “It’s in my hair, it was a vile and unprovoked attack, and I will tell my father!”
Pansy reflected that the vile and unprovoked attack might be retaliation for Draco’s last Really Cunning Spectacular Failure, which had involved dressing up as a Dementor. However, Draco already looked a bit wild-eyed and more than a bit brunette.
“Ah, I think you could use a shower,” she said diplomatically.
He spent four hours in there. They could hear him cursing Potter from the common room.
Even when he was being a brat, she didn’t need him any less.
The night before the big Quidditch Cup match, he could not sleep and kept pacing in front of the fire, talking loudly about how beating Potter would be no problem and looking sick. Blaise produced some Butterbeer bottles and they all sat out by the common room fire and talked all night long.
“The only thing the Gryffindor team has going for it,” Blaise announced with a small smile, “is that the Keeper’s quite cute.”
“Zabini fancies a Gryffindor!” Gregory exclaimed. Faces were made all around.
“Well, who d’you fancy then?” Blaise asked peaceably enough.
Gregory seemed to be trying to catch Pansy’s eye. She looked determinedly away.
Dear God, no.
Morag and Millicent yelled with laughter. “And we all know who Pansy fancies,” Morag declared, and left Pansy confounded and going violently red. “Personally, I think that Cedric Diggory has something.”
“He’s a Hufflepuff, all he has is a work ethic,” Draco sneered.
“If I fancied anyone, it wouldn’t be one of you,” said Teddy wickedly. “Let’s face it, you’re all a bit lacking in the chest department.”
Millicent started throwing empty bottles.
“How dare you!” Sally-Anne exclaimed, and giggled. “Besides, Pansy’s are quite impressive.”
Pansy had never thought much about her breasts, and was extremely discomfited when everyone leaned forward to inspect them.
“Cut it out,” she growled, crossing her arms over the damn things.
“They are,” said Ted, looking suitably impressed. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“I had,” said Draco with an exaggerated leer, tipping his bottle towards her in a toast. She went even redder and, to her own extreme disgust, could not quite repress a smile.
Morag leaned forward, and pecked Draco on the cheek. “For good luck,” she explained, the shameless hussy.
“Don’t worry,” she said to Pansy later. “He’s a bit too titchy and pale for me.”
“Like I care,” said Pansy. Clearly, she’d been warned off just in time, the tart.
She sat by Draco throughout breakfast while every other house united against them, and held her hand beside his, so she could warm it. It was cold again.
And she sat by Vincent and watched the Quidditch match, her Omnioculars held so hard to her eyes that they left red rings, his hand around hers and crushing it. She did not even notice that she was in pain until she saw Harry Potter knock away Draco’s arm and grab the Snitch.
She, Greg and Vince set off to find him in different directions. She stormed through the celebrating crowds and right into an exuberantly cheering Weasley.
“Watch where you’re going!” she snapped.
It was Ron Weasley, and he scowled back at her. “Sore that the best man won?” he demanded.
She kicked him hard in the shin. “You know who saw the Snitch first,” she hissed. “Ask yourself what would have happened if Draco had been on the faster broom. And shove off!”
She elbowed her way through the crowds, hoping she was hurting quite a lot of people. She found Draco outside the Quidditch shed with Gregory and Vince already with him. He was still in his sweaty Quidditch gear, and staring at the wall of the shed. It looked like someone had just been kicking it.
“Why are you people still trailing around after me?” he barked, face twisted and mean. “Did you not notice? I lost.”
Why should anyone follow me, if I lose?
Pansy stood close beside him. She would have liked to put her head on his shoulder, but that would have been unforgivably sappy and besides, they were the same size.
“We like to hang around for the entertainment value,” she told him.
The condemned animal that had attacked Draco got away somehow. There was never revenge for Slytherins.
And Professor Lupin, who Pansy had quite liked, whose clothes even Draco had only mocked to a certain extent, turned out to be a werewolf. You couldn’t trust anyone but your own.
“Don’t worry,” said Draco, in that too-confident voice he used when murderers or monsters were on the loose or while Gryffindor was winning the House Cup, which was happening again before them. “We’ll get them. And I know who’ll be first against the wall.”
He made a venomous face in Potter’s direction.
“Yeah,” Teddy said. “We’ll get them.”
Pansy nodded with the others.
An apology for the Devil—it must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. God has written all of the books.
That summer, Pansy let her mother buy her some more clothes. She thought she looked stupid in them.
She sat in one of her frilly nightgowns and stared morosely into the mirror, more often than she ever had in her life. Mirrors made her mother’s voice ring out in her ears.
Her nose turned up horribly, and she thought her skin was sallow. Her hair was long and black and she thought it should be pretty, but it just made her face look more sullen. She looked into the dark, discontent eyes and glared.
Experiments with lipstick made her think her mouth looked all right when it was red and curling, and she remembered what Draco had said about her breasts and began a daily tug of war with her neckline.
“Such a pity about the dear child’s looks,” her mother said to her father one day. Her father grunted, not even looking in her direction, and Pansy ran up to her bedroom and kicked her bed.
She wasn’t pretty, she was never going to be pretty, and fourteen was too young to be thinking about mushy stuff anyway.
Still, she noticed there was no invitation to Draco’s that summer. Invitations to a girl now would be particular, special. And she wasn’t.
Peaseblossom and Pellinore did not come home that summer at all. Pansy spent most of her time in her room, wishing that she would stop growing.
When she got back to school, she found to her horror that she was a shade taller than Draco. That was it, she was huge and ridiculous and vile looking.
He still seemed pleased to see her, though. She was his friend, and that was enough, even though he was closer to Vince and Gregory, who he absolutely trusted to have no agenda but his. She wished sometimes that she was stupider and could think less about the effect he had on the other Slytherins and how he could use it, just so she could have a bit more of him. He was always saying things to them like ‘remember the midnight duel that never was?’ and she was irrational enough to feel left out.
Sometimes she even felt like Harry Potter had more of him than she did, and Potter made it clear that he’d rather have headlice.
She was oddly proud of the way Draco could get under Potter’s skin, though. People were always whispering things about Potter, but nobody could annoy someone like her Draco.
So when she heard that they were duelling, she went running to see and instead she saw that terrifying new teacher, Professor Moody, and everybody watching a ferret that was being flung against the walls and ceiling and crying out in pain.
She saw the ferret was pure white, and she stopped and watched in a silent agony of terror. She could only watch the helpless fury on Gregory and Vince’s faces, and listen to the sound of flesh against stone. She kept listening for the cracking of bones, she kept thinking head trauma and it seemed forever until Professor McGonagall rushed down the stairs and transformed him.
She had never seen so much blood in his face, and she wanted to run up and throw her arms around him, help him up. But he got to his feet by himself, and when she saw his one tightly controlled wince she knew how much doing so had cost him. She felt fiercely proud as she saw that Draco, master of histrionics, was refusing to let himself cry in front of them.
Professor McGonagall let Professor Moody drag Draco off to Professor Snape. Pansy should’ve known that there would be no retribution for someone who had just hurt a Slytherin.
Pansy ran into the Great Hall and began to snatch up an armful of rolls. A first year looked like she was going to protest about all this dinner roll theft, but Pansy gave her a look that just dared her to try it on and she snapped her mouth shut.
As she was turning to go, she looked over at the Gryffindor table. She heard Ron Weasley say ‘amazing bouncing ferret’ and she heard the other smug gits laugh about it, laugh like people who were safe and who won everything. She stood with her arms full of dinner rolls and hated them all ferociously. She wanted to punch Ron Weasley in the face and say, ‘He’s hurt, someone did it to him who is supposed to be teaching and protecting us, and it’s not funny!’
They did not care if he was hurt, and teachers did not care about what they were supposed to be doing for Slytherins.
Pansy stormed out of the Great Hall instead, and went to the boys’ dormitories. Professor Snape was there with Draco, applying a healing potion. Draco had his shirt off and there were angry, purple bruises forming all over his thin pale chest.
He was arguing ferociously that he intended to go to classes tomorrow.
“Very well,” Professor Snape said, “but rest assured I will take this matter up with Professor Dumbledore. I will not permit the abuse of my students!”
“I brought you some food, Draco,” Pansy volunteered from the door.
“Excellent, Miss Parkinson. Watch him, if you please. I am going to go speak to the headmaster,” Snape said coldly.
When he straightened and turned around, she saw the impotent hatred in his black eyes, and she felt a sudden rush of kinship with him. He was Slytherin, too. He was on their side.
“Thanks, Professor,” she said unsteadily.
“Dumbledore won’t listen to him,” Draco sneered, flopping back as Snape went out. “Dumbledore doesn’t give a damn if all of us are fed to the giant squid.”
“He knows that,” Pansy said. “Come on, Draco, eat some rolls.”
“Rolls for dinner,” Draco said. “This school has now officially become Azkaban.”
She climbed up onto his bed, and shoved the rolls at him. He pushed them peevishly away.
“Eat them,” she said, “or I’ll poke your bruises, I swear to God.”
Draco, who knew her threats were never empty, reached hastily for a roll. With his mouth full, he retorted: “You just want to get your hands on me with my shirt off.”
“Again you insist on believing that you’re irresistible.”
“I go with the majority view,” Draco said smugly, and even though she knew he got laughed at for being one of the shortest boys in their class and for his total abject inability to tan, he almost made her believe it.
Then she rolled her eyes. “Draco. You’re trying to be smooth, aren’t you?”
“I am smooth,” Draco said indignantly, then flung his head back self-importantly and went into his best Professor Lockhart imitation. “Pansy Parkinson! Are you saying you don’t want my autograph, my signed book, my ravishing body?”
Pansy burst out laughing. Draco laughed too, and then looked down at his chest as if his ribs had gravely disappointed him.
“Are you sure you want to go to class tomorrow?” she asked quietly, sobering.
Draco’s eyes narrowed into slits of hatred. “I am not going to give them the satisfaction,” he answered.
“All right,” said Pansy, and sat beside him as he carefully lay down and irritably inquired as to the whereabouts of Vince and Gregory.
She hated them all.
And she sat in Professor Moody’s class, and burned with it, and she watched Potter the hero get proclaimed a competitor for the Triwizard Tournament, and burned with it, and she watched Draco and knew he did too.
She only raged inwardly. Draco, of course, came up with another Really Cunning Plot.
“Badges are not really something that’ll cause wailing and a gnashing of teeth,” Blaise remarked as Draco bent over his work.
“I’m starting off small,” Draco said haughtily. “It’s very cunning. Also I believe my message is succinct and comprehensive.”
Pansy watched and smiled as everyone in Slytherin put on one of Draco’s ‘Potter Stinks’ badges.
When Potter saw them, the outraged look on his face was priceless. She looked at him and his smug little friends and remembered them laughing at Draco, and felt something dark and delighted uncurl in her stomach and laughed so hard she thought she was going to be sick.
Potter did his nut and Pansy felt very proud, and then she watched in incredulous delight when Granger got caught by Draco’s curse and her oversized teeth shot out. She could barely feel concern for Gregory, who got hit too, because Professor Snape had arrived and he would deal with it. She just pointed at that self-satisfied cow who had laughed at Draco, and laughed until tears came to her eyes.
Professor Snape looked at Granger and commented, “I see no difference,” and that was going so far that Pansy stopped laughing and lifted her chin to look at him. She saw the same raging, trapped hatred she had been feeling for weeks in his eyes, and once again she felt that flash of kinship.
“That showed you lot,” she whispered to Ron Weasley as she passed him on the way to the classroom, and the look of blank, righteous fury on his face warmed her through and through.
If I were pressed to say why I loved him, I feel that my only reply could be: ‘Because it was he, because it was I.’
Then the Yule Ball was announced. Pansy almost cried when she heard about it. Boys were supposed to choose girls to take, and they would choose the girls they liked best, who would look best next to them, and there was simply absolutely no hope. Draco was fiendishly fastidious about the very cut of his dress robes.
Gregory asked her, and she refused with a snarl and then worried that she should have accepted.
“I’ll take you, if Draco doesn’t ask you,” Vince offered gruffly, and she wanted to thank him even more for thinking it was possible than for the offer.
Of course, she had to hold her head up among the other girls, and was just sharp enough to them so the question of her Yule Ball partner never came up, even though it was practically the only thing everyone was talking about.
Blaise and Sally-Anne had decided to go together, and they were going to make a lovely couple as long as Blaise did not stare too openly at that Hufflepuff Chaser boy he was admiring from afar. Pansy could not quite work out why Sally-Anne wanted to go with Blaise until she noticed how Sally-Anne’s eyes tended to linger on that disgustingly pretty Veela halfbreed, Fleur Delacour.
Interesting, Pansy thought, and then shrugged it off. It didn’t matter anymore than it had with Blaise. Sally-Anne was Slytherin, and her friend, and that was what counted.
Morag had chosen some Ravenclaw called Michael Corner who apparently always got the pretty girls, and they would make an even lovelier couple.
Frankly, Pansy only sympathised with Eloise, who was in a state of snarling indignation.
“That Hermione Granger is trying to fix me up with somebody,” she said. “She feels sorry for me because she’s heard people teasing me, and so she’s being wonderfully nosy and condescending. Just like she is with the damn house elves.”
In horror at the idea of this indignity, Teddy offered to take her, and Millicent took this moment to tell Pansy that she had been asked by the Beater Sextus Derrick, who’d said he liked to see a well-built woman. Pansy congratulated her in lofty tones and resisted the urge to bite her nose off.
“I think Pansy has a secret date, like Hermione Granger,” Morag said archly. Morag always had the gossip.
Draco looked up from his copy of something called ‘Great Expectations’ which his Creative Magic teacher was forcing him to read and he was forcing them all to hear about.
“Does she?” he said in an outraged tone. “Well, she can bloody well tell her secret date that she’s going with me. Naturally I assumed that we were going together! The cheek of this person!”
Pansy tried not to look as if she was swallowing the heart that had inconveniently jumped into her mouth and started dancing around there.
“Never assume anything with a lady,” she said, managing to sound arch. “But I had pretty much taken for granted that we were going together, too.”
She got out of the room and performed a little dance once the door had swung shut, then told herself she was being an idiot, then ran to the dormitories hugging herself and deciding to wear the best robes her mother had bought for her. They might look like a crazy frilled birthday cake, but Mother had told her archly that all boys liked pastels, and she had to be right about something.
She spent ages on her hair and lipstick the day of the Yule Ball, while making it clear to everyone else in the dormitory that she was bored and uninterested in the entire proceedings.
She spoiled this entirely when Draco offered her his arm, and she clutched it tightly as they went up the stairs with her heart hammering in her chest. He’d chosen her.
“You look nice,” she told him quietly.
“You, er, look a bit like a birthday cake,” Draco said doubtfully. “Is that intentional?”
Pansy laughed in a brittle way. “Oh, well. Who cares?”
It was Hermione Granger who was the surprise belle of the ball. It was Gryffindors who things worked out for, who got asked by a dream boy and suddenly looked stunning. She saw Draco glance at Granger almost admiringly, and she just stared enviously. Of course. Granger got the famous boy hanging all over her beautiful self, and Potter and Weasley got the lovely Patil twins, and Draco had just asked a friend he felt comfortable with and was regretting it now when he saw everyone else had asked the really pretty girls.
She felt miserable and she wanted to crawl into a hole, and she hated everyone because nobody had thought to equip the Great Hall with one of them. She even hated dancing, because Draco clearly knew what to do and immensely enjoyed it, and she was making a fool of herself. She would have died rather than let anyone else see that she wasn’t enjoying herself.
They danced, and danced, and then they went for punch and sat beside Blaise and Sally-Anne. Blaise was looking entertained.
“Potter and Weasley just sneaked out together,” he announced. “I always thought they seemed a bit too close.”
Pansy and Sally-Anne laughed. Draco looked slightly nauseous.
“Ew, a Weasley,” he said. “Even Potter could do better than that. I bet they have freckles everyw—oh my God, how could you people sit there and callously let me have that thought? I shall be sick.”
Pansy silently handed him her punch. She was going to be a good date if it killed her.
He coaxed her onto the dance floor again, and she thought she was getting better at it, at which point of course the ball ended. Couples were lingering everywhere, walking each other to dormitories hand in hand.
Morag and Michael Corner had apparently gone off to the rose garden, which was apparently crawling with couples.
Draco, of course, showed no desire whatsoever to make his way with her into the rose garden. He offered his arm again, though, and she held onto it despite her sick feeling. She had been his date, and nothing could change that.
“What a bunch of idiots,” Draco said in his most disdainful way as they went out of the Hall. “You were the only girl worth going with in the place.”
Just like that, Pansy was smiling. “Really?” she said, and then could have bitten her tongue out.
“Naturally,” Draco replied. “Did you see that Indian girl with the gold braided into her hair? What was that? If you hadn’t come with me, I would have absolutely refused to attend.”
Pansy was smiling wider, despite her best efforts to hold onto some dignity. “I thought my dress was like a birthday cake.”
“Well, it is,” Draco said frankly. “But your mother picked it, didn’t she? It’s not your fault. Besides, even if you had been wearing a birthday cake, you would have been the only girl there worth my time. Why should I care what you wear? I mean, you don’t care if I’m—slightly less—looming than the oversized oiks like Weasley.”
He maintained his extremely haughty tone throughout the conversation, but she understood that if he had brought it up at all he felt uncertain about it.
“I think you’re the perfect size,” she told him recklessly. After all, nobody else was in earshot, and she was the only girl worth his time.
He raised his eyebrows. “Well, Pansy, you’ve hardly had time to find that out,” he drawled.
She looked at him and started to laugh. “You’re trying to be smooth again, aren’t you.”
She would bet anything that his father could be diplomatically charming and flirtatious with every woman he met. Draco’s face went slightly pink as they went towards the common room.
“How many times do I have to tell you, woman. I am smooth,” he said, and leaned forward and promptly knocked noses with her.
“Ahhh!” said Pansy. “Sorry! Sorry! I was just looking around to see if anyone else was there!”
She was a complete romantic incompetent who did not know how to stand still when the boy was kissing her.
“Ow,” Draco complained. “All right. But I’m getting better at being smooth, damn it.”
She laughed and began to hope that everything was not ruined after all, and scarcely dared to breathe as he leaned forward again.
“Just you wait,” he told her. “I’m going to be a Casanova,” and then he kissed her.
His lips were soft and not sneering, which seemed odd, and he tasted of coffee, which was to be expected since he carried a flask around with him and was a hopeless, doomed addict. She wanted to cling onto him but wasn’t quite sure if that was all right.
“Whoo! Go, Malfoy!” said Teddy, who Pansy was one day going to kill.
Draco and she jumped apart. She was sure she had turned a violent red. Draco offered her his arm again with a little flourish.
“Come, my lovely partner,” he said dramatically. “I will escort you to your chamber. Thank you for an enchanted evening.”
She couldn’t help herself clutching again. “You know, you really are getting better at that smooth thing.” She paused. “Of course, you’re no Professor Lockhart yet,” she added wickedly.
Draco threw back his head and laughed. Pansy loved Yule Balls. Not even Gryffindors could spoil them for her.
Afterwards, Draco acted almost as if nothing had happened. But he showed her the article about crazy Hagrid being half-giant even before he showed Gregory and Vincent, and introduced her to Rita Skeeter, when she decided that since the news was funny she was going to start having Witch Weekly delivered to her. So she got to show him the article about Hermione Granger the scarlet woman first, and they laughed over it together, and he turned and caught her eye and they laughed together again when Professor Snape saw the article and read it aloud in class.
Granger was sent over to sit by her, and Pansy had great fun.
“So sorry I’m not a boy,” she said. “I know you’re just dying to toy with more affections.”
“Shut up, you utter cow,” Granger said under her breath. “Accusing me of making Love Potions is possibly the stupidest thing you’ve ever done. Wait, no, it isn’t—you’re seeing Malfoy, aren’t you?”
Pansy was silent, but in that moment she could almost feel fond of Granger.
It was a good year, with the articles coming in to amuse them and the excitement of the Triwizard Tournament. She even got in a dig at Weasley in stupid Care of Magical Creatures class, when a Niffler almost bit off her watch.
“Oh, no, poor thing,” Ron Weasley muttered. “Wore a solid gold watch to class.”
She smirked at him. “Yes,” she said sweetly. “It’s good to be rich.”
Draco congratulated her on that.
And during the Third Task, when everyone was standing around looking without much interest at the maze the competitors had disappeared into, Draco reached over and took her hand.
“Party in the common room if Potter loses,” he said. “You’re going to be my date.”
“Oh, am I?” said Pansy, and tried not to hold his hand too obviously. “I’m not so sure.”
“Of course you are,” Draco told her, his voice reaching new levels of arrogance that let her know he was uncertain. “Remember how smooth I am?”
“There is that,” she admitted, and he was leaning forward to give her a kiss when Professor Snape doubled over in front of them, clutching at his wrist.
Draco dashed forward. Pansy hovered in the background, worried, and saw people starting to murmur behind them.
Panic was rising, and it exploded when Potter reappeared with Cedric Diggory’s dead body. There was nothing but shouting and confusion, and when Professor Snape strode away she got hold of Draco’s hand again and clung shamelessly as everyone around them started whispering.
It was evening in the common rooms before Morag came back with the full story. Potter was saying the Dark Lord was back, and had killed Cedric Diggory.
Everybody went still, and then looked at Draco. Pansy remembered that vividly, afterwards. Everybody looked at Draco.
He never allowed himself to look uncertain. “My father said that the Dark Lord had some good ideas,” he said.
“That’s right,” Teddy agreed. “He wanted to protect us from the Muggles.”
Everyone started talking at once, voices rising desperately to convince each other and themselves. If there was a choice between someone and Dumbledore, they had to pick anyone else. Everybody knew Dumbledore was not going to protect them. It would be good to get their own back on everyone, to show everyone that they had been right all along.
“Who cares what happens to someone like that Mudblood Granger?” Draco added, curling his lip, and then he reached out and took Pansy’s hand with a possessive gesture that meant he could do it without seeming weak.
She held onto it tight, and neither of their hands shook because they could hold on. Everyone kept talking, reassuring themselves that they would be safe and it might be good, and Pansy tried not to think about the bloody robes in her wardrobe or Professor Snape doubling up in pain, or Draco’s terror about the Dark Lord drinking blood years ago.
There was no other choice, and they did want revenge and safety. There was no other choice.
Draco talked about other people paying in a very loud voice until they all fell asleep, and when Pansy woke his hand was still loosely curled around hers.
On the train back he went so far as to say all that to Potter, and then Potter’s little gang and the twin Weasley goons hexed him, Vincent and Gregory until they sprouted tentacles on their faces. She and Morag found them, and she pulled Draco’s head onto her lap and concentrated on trying to get things right. Draco’s father would murder him if he found him like this.
We have no choice, she reminded herself. They’ll gang up on someone who is frightened and just talking.
She was so relieved when Draco opened his eyes.
“Gah,” he said. “I’ll kill Potter, I swear. They got the jump on me.”
“You had tentacles on your face,” Pansy informed him. “I have taken pictures and you will have to pay me to get them back.”
That nosy little first year, Malcolm Baddock, suddenly appeared from another carriage.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Pansy and Draco stood up. “Mind your own business,” Draco commanded, and shoved him unceremoniously back into the carriage he’d come from. They got back to helping Morag with Vince and Greg, and everybody looked mostly normal by the time the train came in.
Pansy looked out at the station where her mother, and the Malfoys all stood waiting. They had new expressions on their faces, and when Pansy thought about what Potter and his bunch had done to her friends she felt the same expression creep over hers.
Almost the same expression. She thought.
She and Draco stood close together. “I’ll Owl you,” he said quietly. “Just. You know, to let you know what’s happening. My father will know.”
“If you like,” said Pansy, and felt a little glow of pleasure in spite of everything else.
Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot
That it do singe yourself.
Pansy lived on Draco’s Owls that summer. Everyone in the house was always busy, but Draco kept writing. His style was officious and self-important and silly, and his insistence that he was confident made her feel better and convinced her in spite of herself.
“Is it true?” she asked Peaseblossom, on one of his rare visits. His face had become harder over the last few years, and she had not noticed until this moment.
“It might be,” Peaseblossom answered quietly. “And if it was—wouldn’t you feel better if you knew nothing could hurt you again, that you would be a safe and privileged member of a wizarding world nobody will ever touch again?” He leaned down. “They burned us, Pansy,” he said. “They took our wands and they burned us, and now the Muggle-lovers are lying to us about it. Things have to change, don’t they?”
“Yes,” Pansy said. She was absolutely certain of that.
“We’ll show them all, Pansy,” he said. “It will be best for you, if it is true. Say you believe me.”
“I do,” Pansy answered solemnly, and wrote an account of their conversation to Draco.
When they all assembled on the platform that autumn, she could see they had all made the same resolution. She also saw to her horror that she was still a shade taller than Draco, who had grown a bit but still not as much as she had. He was going to laugh at her.
He didn’t, but nor did he take her hand or kiss her. They all talked politics and admired Draco and Blaise’s prefect badges. Draco was perfectly friendly, and now everyone in Slytherin was listening to him, and Pansy was proud of him and she still had no idea of how to proceed.
She should not even be thinking about that, not while everything was so tense and difficult, but…
In the first Quidditch match of the season, Draco got into a punch-up with Potter and one of the Weasley twins, and afterwards he came to talk to her.
They talked for a while about Quidditch, because she loved the game too and she absolutely understood the twist of frustration and despair Draco must have felt when he just missed the Snitch, his fingertips against the back of Potter’s hand.
“Hey, Pansy,” he said suddenly. “I know you’re all aggressive and stuff. Care to teach me a few moves?”
She tried not to seem too happy about agreeing, and reminded him that he owed her a favour. He was quick and he was determined and he was as stubborn as always, and he became good after a very few lessons. It was not quite November when she announced that she had taught him all she knew.
“Now you can be manly and protect me from things,” she added, smiling slyly at him.
“Like vile men trying to steal your maiden virtue,” he suggested, smirking back, and he took her arm. She hesitated, thinking he might be about to take her hand, but instead he used a move she had taught him, got her off balance and threw her onto her bed. She grabbed him on her way down and he fell too.
He propped himself up on one elbow. “That was very nearly a triumphant victory for me,” he announced, breathing a little hard. “You see, I’m manly.”
Then he leaned down and kissed her again. She was surprised and her mouth opened, and she quickly decided that surprised kisses were the best kind. She put her hands in his hair, which was very soft, and heard his startled little gasp as she caught his lip between her teeth.
“Done this a lot?” she asked breathlessly. To her extreme shock, she was quite good at being flirtatious.
“Almost constantly from the cradle,” Draco lied blithely. “You could probably tell from my skills.”
At that point, Millicent and Eloise walked in. They looked startled, and Draco levered himself up on his elbow again and looked annoyed.
“Excuse me, can I get no private time with my girlfriend?” he asked.
She was so happy she hardly slept that night, and accidentally gave Ron Weasley a warm smile the next morning. She was pleased to note that he spent the rest of the day looking suspicious and unsettled, and hanging onto Granger, his brand new probably dominatrix girlfriend, like grim death.
One day when everyone was going over letters from their parents in the common room and trying to work something out and Pansy was feeling tired and thinking, when we said we wanted them to die we just meant go away and feel sorry…
Then Draco took her hand. “Come on,” he said, and grinned at her. “Let’s have a really romantic getaway.”
“What? No, I have plans today—I have homework,” objected Pansy, and went with him because while she was a practical, evil-minded Slytherin she seemed to become a ridiculous pile of mush around this boy.
He took her on the new cruiser around the lake. They stood on the stern of the boat and the wind whipped around her hair until she was blind and shrieking and he kept nudging her and saying that he was going to push her over the edge.
“By the way,” he added loftily, “I like your hair,” and he tried to kiss her. It was like kissing through a veil made of hair.
Then he pushed it behind her ears, and she leaned in and hid her face against the warm pale line of his throat, and had a brief moment with nothing but happiness and peace.
“Weasley?” Draco said loudly over her head. “How did you scrape up the fare for this trip? Or did you smuggle on board?”
Ron Weasley, all tangled up with Hermione Granger, did not respond, but Harry Potter almost knocked Draco over the side.
Pansy assisted with a couple of strategic kicks, and then stood innocently by while the ferryman told both the boys off sternly.
“He started it,” Potter protested.
“I did not,” Draco argued vigorously, and slipped his arm around Pansy’s waist. “I was just trying to enjoy a nice trip with my girlfriend,” he said. “Much you’d know about that.”
“Oh, I’m really jealous,” Potter said, giving Pansy a disgusted look.
“Thought so,” Draco returned smugly, and Pansy turned and kissed him. At that stage, she really hoped that Potter wandered off somewhere all on his lonesome.
Afterwards they went to a coffee shop where all the couples went, and Draco looked around covertly at the other couples and seemed to decide that he would outstrip them all, then snogged her enthusiastically over their drinks.
When he sat back, Pansy laughed behind her hand.
“What?” Draco asked, looking affronted.
“You’ve got cappucino foam on the front of your robes,” she explained, trying to smother a giggle with her cup.
Draco looked exceedingly vexed.
Then they walked home, hand in hand. She was so ridiculously in love.
“I would be delighted to entertain you in my private room,” Draco told her as they went into the common rooms.
She and in fact everyone in Slytherin had been shown his new prefect’s private room already, but she had never been in there alone with him. Especially not after a day-long date.
He’d actually sounded quite smooth when he said it, but he ruined it by giving her a panicked glance out of the corner of his eye and adding hastily, “If you want.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course I do.”
They went in, and Draco left her sitting on his bed with a quick, “Just one minute.” He came back with the front of his robes dripping from hasty washing, his hair wet at the ends and just-smoothed, and his face damp and bright pink.
That made everything easier. She was able to laugh softly and take his face in her hands, and kiss him. He tasted of tepid water and soap, and showed her he was a quick study as he tugged on her lip with his teeth and fell forward onto her.
She felt something twist warmly inside her chest as he risked a hand down her top, and then glanced at her face as his fingers settled on her breast.
This is all right? said the quick glance, and she stretched lazily and happily and meant yes. He started stroking it, with mingled method and affection, as she had seen him stroke other people’s cats, and to her surprise she felt the twist of warmth in her chest pool hot and come to a peak under his palm. She parted her lips in a quick breath of shock, and he smiled his victorious little smile, being a brat as usual, and leaned in to kiss them.
She got her hand in his and started stroking down his chest, trying clumsily to return the favour. His chest felt thin and delicate and quite different, and she liked it when she touched his nipple and he made a small sound, but she felt a wave of harsh fear when she stroked along his ribs and felt how fragile the skin was over it, saw his eyes widen clear grey and light-filled and endless and thought of them shuttered with fear back in first year.
“I’m afraid too sometimes,” she admitted, telling him a secret she tried to hide from everybody else.
His face was serious, and he was still stroking her breast soothingly, as if it was a distressed kitten. “Don’t you worry,” he said in his haughtiest way. “I shall protect you.”
She laughed shakily, and stroked at his ribs some more. Then she stroked at the softer skin of his stomach, and heard him make another tiny sound. He touched her stomach too, and with his mouth still curled in assurance his eyes asked for permission.
She gave it by moving her hand under his waistband. The sound of his startled gasp felt like the surprise-pleasant hollowing of her insides as he moved his hand down too. His hand was questing, and still trying to be soothing, and she did feel soothed as his fingers moved against and inside her, and she held on carefully and watched for the rising colour in his cheeks.
He leaned against her, and the little weight felt nice, and he kissed her lightly, carefully, even when she tightened her fingers mid-kiss. His fringe brushed her forehead, feeling light and flyaway and nothing like her own hair, and she would not have known how to say no even if she had wanted to. She squirmed against him and breathed in, fast and then faster, and he breathed in and out quickly too, and they twisted sharply together to the breathless sound of their own breathing in another sharp hot peak of feeling.
After a minute Draco looked ruefully down his robes, his breath still short. “Foam and now this,” he said, lying warm beside her. “I think I may just throw them out.”
“The house elves will clean them,” Pansy assured him.
“They’ll return them frayed,” Draco insisted softly. “Raving incompetents. I’m telling you. So—did you have a good time today?”
“Hmm,” said Pansy, pretending to think about it. “Yes, I suppose so.”
“Naturally.” Draco preened. “I am the best boyfriend ever,” he continued in a pleased voice. “It must be marvellous to go out with me.”
“It’s all right,” Pansy conceded. “Of course, I did have to go out with you.”
“Oh yes?” said Draco, and the instant pang of unease and distrust in his eyes made her remember instantly about loneliness and fear.
She leaned up and kissed him, trying to promise that he would be safe with her. “Yes,” she said. “You’re the only boy in Hogwarts who’s as big a bitch as I am.”
She even dared to tell him that she would miss him when they went home for the Christmas holidays. She would have loved to stay in Hogwarts with him for Christmas, but he was all excited about his father and their family yachting trips, and she did not even suggest it.
He kissed her goodbye and Harry Potter, nearby, made a face.
“That kind of thing should be outlawed,” he said to Weasley.
Draco lifted an eyebrow at him. “That’s the kind of thing that’ll be outlawed,” he said, nodding to Granger with his lip curling. “You’ll see. Your lot will be the first against the wall.”
She sat in her room, trying to hide from her mother’s praise, when the news came that the Dark Lord had killed Draco’s father, and Draco himself had been rescued from the freezing lake in shock.
She never waited to see if she was allowed to go to him. She just went.
Oh, my love, my love, wilt thou ever know how I have loved thee?
She met a house elf striding out of the fireplace, and she ordered it to take her to the young master. It looked like she was going to object, so she knelt down and took it by the ear.
“You’ll take me to him,” she snarled, “or I’ll twist off your head.”
It showed enough wisdom to obey.
Gregory and Vincent were already with him, and Vince gave her a smile. They never had any idea of what to do with Draco, apart from the most important thing of standing by him.
Draco was sitting up in bed, his face older and thinner and with the skin stretched pale around his eyes and mouth.
“Pansy,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
She wanted to say, I had to come, but she was afraid of laying herself open like that when he was looking at her with those bleak eyes. “I thought it would be appropriate if I came to see how you were,” she answered.
“Oh, I see,” Draco answered in a neutral voice. “So you’ve heard the news.” He cleared his throat. “All of you understand that my family’s political power has been severely diminished,” he said, still in that distant adult voice. “It’s something for me to take into account.”
And for you, he meant. God, they had been friends for years. What had his father been telling him to make him think it was really all about the balance of power?
Pansy took power into account, but it weighed very little for her just then. “I don’t care,” she said recklessly, and came over to sit on the bed. “Draco. How are you?”
He cleared his throat again. It was a painful sound. “I’m well. I have a bit of a cold,” he added absently. “Please don’t listen to the house elf if she starts telling you about Master Draco’s delicate chest. In fact, throw something sharp at her and cut her off if she tries.”
He grinned, a weak attempt at his usual flashing malicious grin.
They were allotted rooms, and Draco was up soon, picking at his food but not complaining about it. Fear and worry grew so cold and intertwined in Pansy that she could no longer tell which was which.
She was searching for him one night when he’d wandered off again, when she came upon Narcissa Malfoy, sitting alone in a room. Mrs Malfoy’s aloofness was legendary, and Pansy had not seen her touch, or speak a soft word to Draco since she had been here.
“I think you will find him in his father’s study,” Mrs Malfoy said in a cool voice.
Pansy hesitated on the threshold. “Why don’t you go and try to comfort him?” she asked, her tones harsh in her own ears.
“I do not feel I am suited to that kind of task,” replied Mrs Malfoy, with a small smile as if the idea was incredible. “I would be grateful if you would go and—try—to comfort my son yourself.”
Pansy had never wanted to kick anyone so badly in her life. “I won’t do it because of that,” she snapped, and slammed the door behind her.
She behaved like such a fool about this boy.
She found him in his father’s study, going over some old journal accounts and history books. He looked intent, pulled to attention by every string in his body and with his face even sharper than usual. She looked at him and tried to fight down fear, and then he turned with the candlelight on his skin, golden warmth on pale smooth lines, and she felt a sharp flash of fear for a completely different reason.
Dear God, he was going to be beautiful.
She also saw that he had a crystal decanter open on the desk, and a glass with his father’s best Firewhiskey in it. He followed her glance with his grey eyes, still clear and cruel.
“Father would never let me try it,” he remarked. “Well. I suppose he can’t stop me now.”
“Draco,” she said.
“They mark you, you know,” he continued, his eyes on her, cold and speculative, undressing her but not quite seeing her. “He marks you. He burns a black snake onto your arm, and he makes it burn every time he wants you. And it burns and burns, so you can never get away and you never forget. I don’t need one. I won’t forget.” His eyes narrowed. “I’ll have him,” he said.
“Draco,” she said shakily. “Are you declaring war on the Dark Lord?”
She was the most frightened because she knew him, and she knew that he never gave up, he just kept on trying and piling up horrible failures with that fierce and merciless obstinacy until a mountain of defeat became success.
“What if I am?” he asked, his voice thin and furious.
“You need to go to bed,” she said weakly. She did not know how to do anything but try to shove away the new threat of his face and voice.
He got up. She could probably take him in a fight, but she backed up several steps.
“What a wonderful idea,” he said. “What a kind offer.”
He’d succeeded again, because for a moment he sounded exactly like his father. He offered her his arm, and when she took it gingerly it felt like an iron band.
When they got to his room, his arm had turned under hers to grasp her wrist. He pulled her in with that steely stubbornness—he was going to pull her in or she was going to break his wrist.
He pulled her in.
“Draco, you aren’t feeling well,” she told him, and threw a weapon. “It’s your father. You’re still scared and upset.”
“I’m not scared,” Draco said violently. “I wasn’t scared. It was dark and cold and he was screaming, but I was never scared, do you hear me? I know what I’m going to do.”
His hands on her arms were too tight and shaking, and he pushed her down onto the bed with an almost distracted air, as if he had no idea what he was doing. He kissed her too hard, with teeth that almost gouged at her lip. She swallowed down a small sound of protest with the blood.
She could have stopped him, but he was stronger than she was in every other way, and she’d always known that.
The air was cold on her breasts and his still-shaking hands were even colder, icy as they always got when he was frightened. His weight on her was hard, pressing down so she felt hurt even by the press of his ribs and the angle of his hip. He kissed her again, pushing his tongue between her lips, and she opened her mouth for him as much as she could.
He glanced up once, and she thought that was the one glance he could give, asking for permission. She looked back at him, and opened her mouth again in answer.
“Don’t worry about it, Pansy,” he said breathlessly, his voice still taut with pain and desperation, and his eyes glittering hot and terrifying. “I know what to do. I’m going to make a new plan.”
His hands were still shaking, shaking even more, when he removed his belt, but his lips were curled vindictively. He didn’t know how to do anything else when he was in pain, and she didn’t know what else to offer.
He replaced them on her naked hips and the pain of his nails digging into the skin was what she tried to concentrate on. He pushed in hard and she absolutely was not going to scream.
“You know we always talked about revenge, Pansy,” he said, hot against her skin even though he was cold and shaking all over. He kept pushing in, again and again. “I’m going to have it.”
His jerky movements felt like shaking, and the trembling aftershock felt like shaking, and she was really shaking and when he collapsed on her they both clung to each other, cold and horrorstruck. She laid her face in the curve of his neck and held on tight, feeling raw inside and with wetness seeping over her thighs.
Eventually they crawled under the covers and curled around each other, and Draco went to sleep with the heavy stillness of an exhausted child. Pansy huddled under the blankets and did not feel warm enough to sleep, just stayed there shaking until Draco made a soft sound in his sleep and moved his head to rest against her shoulder. She looked down at his pale strained face and began, slowly, to stroke that light soft hair so unlike her own.
“Shhh,” she said, and she could say anything she wanted because she was safe, and nobody but herself could hear. “It’s all right, my darling. I love you. I love you so much.”
Draco smiled in his sleep, and she kept stroking his hair. She didn’t quite dare to go asleep, didn’t feel safe enough, but she could keep stroking his hair.
“I love you,” she whispered again in a small voice, perversely liking the sound of the words. She had never told anyone that before, not even as she knew other children did with their families, not even when she hadn’t meant it.
She was such a fool for this boy.
A fiend like thee might bear my soul to hell.
Draco did not touch her again for the rest of the holiday. She spent New Year’s with him and Gregory and Vincent, and he kissed her, a brief perfunctory brush of cold lips. He was wrapped up in thoughts of his father, and horrified by it all, and far too arrogant to admit to any of it.
On the last day of the holidays, he took them all aside.
“There’s been a change of plan,” he said, so autocratic that he must have been wretchedly uncertain. “We’re not going to join the Dark Lord. We’re going to join the Young Order of the Phoenix.”
They watched and waited, knowing Draco.
“I have tallies here of the deaths dealt out to Death Eaters at the hands of their masters,” Draco continued, in the same voice, producing the papers he had been poring over in the library. “At one time or another, a third of his force were killed at his hands, and the majority of his followers are regularly tortured. Moreover, his followers will not be offered a say in the leadership and I have here records that indicate the Dark Lord may be half Muggle. He’s unstable and we will not be safe. It’s an unacceptable proposition.
If we join the other side, we will be granted much more of a say in future years. All of this dangerous pro-Muggle legislation has been instituted since most of the old families were discredited by their support of the Dark Lord. We can change that. We already have the money, and we can get the voice.” His lips curled up, and for a moment he stopped using the stern logical tones of Lucius Malfoy. “I’m not saying we like Dumbledore and his crowd now,” he snarled in exasperation, as if somebody had been arguing with him. “I’m saying we have to beat them at their own game.”
He promised safety and power as if he could deliver them personally, and she knew he couldn’t but she believed him anyway.
“I am doing this,” he said in his most disdainful manner. “Are you going to follow me or be stupid?”
“Might as well follow you,” Pansy said at last. “For the entertainment value.”
He smirked as if he expected it, and then took her hand. It was held so it wasn’t shaking, even without her help.
“Wait till you see their faces when we walk in to the Young Order meeting,” he said. “We’ll show them all.”
He talked the others around. She was never quite sure how, just that the white heat of his energy swept through the dungeons like a forest fire. Safety, power, promises, the name of Malfoy and the authority of Professor Snape behind him, and the fact he made it clear where his loyalties lay.
“I won’t do it!” Teddy shouted. “They killed my father, and I’m going to kill them all! You can tell them so, if you like.”
“We’re not going to betray each other,” Draco said, his words careful because they had to be.
They were still Slytherins. Bargains were struck, as much of a coldblooded bargain as any Lucius Malfoy ever conducted, but Pansy was watching. The reason people kept those bargains was because he belonged to them with all his furious heart, and they knew it.
He went into the Young Order with two-thirds of the Slytherins at his back, and Pansy at his right hand, and Professor Lupin looked at him and smiled, and told him he could sit down. They faced the shocked and indignant faces of the others around them. It was just as sweet as Draco had promised.
“I told you, didn’t I,” Draco laughed, dizzy and triumphant afterwards. “You should all have trusted me.”
“I do trust you, Draco,” Pansy said, and gave him her hand and said the words she had said to Peaseblossom, meaning them this time. “I do.”
He made a wicked little face. “You shouldn’t trust yourself with me,” he said. “I can be very bad.”
Pansy put her arms around his neck. “Why don’t you show me?”
They went to Draco’s room. Pansy looked at him for a moment and shook, but he took her hand and stroked it, and then stroked her neck and the skin leading to her breasts and then her breasts and stomach, and kept stroking with light intent strokes until she was warm and shivering and undone.
“Oh,” she said. “You really are getting smoother.”
Draco laughed, proud of himself, and kissed her. Then he moved his mouth down her throat, and followed the same shivery stroking path. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the wet, careful tracing of his lips, and then arched up to their touch.
“Oh, Draco,” she said. “Draco. Draco.”
She had nothing else to say. She looked up at him when he was over her at last, moving carefully, lip caught between his teeth and focused. She smiled and thought he looked as he did when he was playing Quidditch or doing Creative Magic homework, and she kissed him and they both smiled into the kiss, and the shivering reached a hot shocking pitch.
He lay beside her afterwards, tracing the ends of her hair and the beads of sweat on her shoulders, and smiling a little.
“It’s all right now, isn’t it?” he asked, almost as a demand but not quite. “I mean… it was all a bit messy. We can just pretend it never happened. This can be the first time.”
There was a soft indentation in his lower lip that sometimes spoiled the perfect hatefulness of his sneer. Pansy kissed it.
“Whatever you want, Draco,” she said. “Well. You know. As long as you buy me a really good birthday present.”
He laughed and rolled onto the next pillow. Pansy reached over when he was quiet, and stroked his hair between her fingers again.
“I love you,” she whispered. She was not sure if he was asleep that time, but he smiled sleepily and she was able to go to sleep beside him.
She slept beside him most nights after that. He was always bent over papers or having spectacular tantrums in the middle of the common room, sending books and candlesticks and first-years scattering, and all she could do was be with him like Vincent or Gregory, silent and unable to help, unable not to rely on him. All she could do was scowl at the Gryffindors when they looked across the Young Order table suspiciously, or when Harry Potter whispered something about finding out what Draco was up to.
She had the nights, though, when Draco could relax and laugh and kiss her. She had all the times Draco relaxed.
“We don’t quite look like the other Order members,” Blaise remarked at one point.
Draco looked up from a book on ancient runes. “I should hope not,” he said in a scandalised voice. “If my hair ever starts to resemble Potter’s, it will be your duty as my friends to put me down like a dog.”
Pansy frowned. “He’s right, you know,” she said. “That prissy Granger is always running around in a blouse and jeans.”
“Oh. Is that all,” said Draco, and a speculative look crept onto his face. He seemed charmed by some internal vision. “Not to worry,” he told them. “I have a really cunning plan.”
It turned out to be careful instructions to a robes shop, and then intensive shopping. Draco was a heartless taskmaster.
“Get back in there, Eloise!” he said sternly. “You think you can wear your hat crooked with that nose? Oh, please.”
Pansy inspected herself in the Muggle dress. It was red, and it made her hair look blacker and her lips look redder, but she was slightly uneasy about the way it clung rather than draped. It made her breasts and hips look exaggerated, even faintly ridiculous.
“And you, Blaise!” Draco snapped. “Don’t think I can’t see you wondering about vinyl. Let it go.”
She waited and smoothed the dress over herself, waiting for the snapped comment, and felt hands slide over her hips.
Draco sounded smug in her ear. “Hey. Look at my gorgeous girlfriend,” he said, and she looked at the rumpled black hair and the red fabric stretched over her curves, and the smile on her face as Draco looked over her shoulder, his hands around her and his fair hair above her. She thought she might be pretty when he was framing her.
She also noticed that he was getting taller.
In his bedroom, he tried on some black jeans and walked doubtfully around, and she laughed hysterically because he walked like a wooden puppet. But she also noticed the long lines his body was built on, the way he adapted to grace, the way his face was smoothing out just enough so it was more angular than pointed.
He swaggered around in his black jeans as if everybody was going to look after him, until everybody did. He was attractive, and he could convince people he was handsome.
She glared the others away, but she was not sure that a Ravenclaw or a Hufflepuff would understand and be intimidated. There were some very, very pretty girls in those houses, and Draco was past master in the art of being appealing—in a weird, wrong way.
It wasn’t like she could make herself beautiful.
She was thinking of that when they were all supposed to be looking up protection amulets, and feeling tired. If only someone would make a move so she could act, instead of having to see covetous glances here and there and just waiting in agony. She had nobody else in the world.
She looked up, and saw Draco looking at her, and all the tired faces around them.
“Come on,” he said. “We’re going to the pub. I’ll square it with Professor Snape.”
“We won’t get served,” Gregory pointed out, his face wrinkling.
Draco lifted his chin. “I happen to be a Malfoy,” he said. “Are you telling me that something is impossible?”
They were served, and then they went downstairs. Pansy wore her red dress and danced with her boyfriend in his black jeans, and watched the other girls watch his hands on her.
“I think Morag fancies you,” she whispered, tossing her hair back and making it clear that she simply found this rather amusing.
“She’s out of luck, isn’t she?” Draco said, preening. “Because you’re still the only girl here worth my time.”
He shimmied down her body, looking around as if inviting spectators to come and witness his Malfoy-like glory. He escaped ridiculous into spectacular once more, and she kissed him with a wet open mouth and loved him absurdly.
They tumbled into his room that night in a storm of giggles and wandering hands, and she rolled him over and grinned triumphantly down into his face.
“You know,” he drawled, his eyes wicked, “While you’re there… you could stand with losing a bit of weight.”
She rolled her eyes and hit him, and they fell into a wrestling, laughing and then moaning tangle. She liked licking his throat when she was drunk, she discovered, when it could be wet and sloppy and uninhibited.
Afterwards they went to sleep in each others’ arms, and before she did she touched his hair, lightly, with her fingertips, combed it through and loved the feel of it.
“I love you,” she murmured, and felt him push his face against the palm of her hand, and felt quite sure that he was only pretending to be asleep. She said it again and again to see the small smile on his face, and then laid her cheek against his and went to sleep.
It was then she realised that Draco might not care if she was pretty.
Friendship may, and often does, grow into love, but love never subsides into friendship.
She whispered love to him at night all through March and April, as the Young Council was set up and normalcy seemed restored by a couple of stand-up throw-down screaming matches between Draco and Potter.
Draco made up a song about Ron Weasley’s Quidditch skills with fairly banal lyrics but a tune that kept everyone humming it, and while Draco flew she took his place in front of them all, and conducted them with some of the dramatic flourishes he would have insisted on.
Potter caught her elbow in the halls and said in a low, fierce voice: “You’re his girlfriend, aren’t you? You have to know what he’s up to.”
“Excuse me, get off,” said Pansy, stepping hard on his foot.
“I’m going to find out, you know,” Potter said with a dark glare, and slunk off.
Even Potter knew she was Draco’s girlfriend.
Pansy got used to Professor Lupin’s smiles, and they all got used to wandering around school in Muggle clothes.
“Oh nice,” Granger said, looking appalled as Pansy cheerfully removed a first year from her path by the ear, and then dashed down the corridor to where Draco had appeared. She was morally sure that Granger was whispering to her red-headed boyfriend about Pansy’s short dress, and she planned some small revenge as Draco swung her up into his arms.
He was tall enough to do that now, but it still felt strange and made her giggle and him lurch.
“You’ll put your back out, you idiot,” she murmured, leaning forward so his face was hidden by her hair.
“Only because you’re so gigantic. And I happen to be a debonair, dashing idiot,” Draco informed her sniffily and kissed her, and then made a face and spat out a bit of her hair.
She leaned forward and touched the tip of his nose with hers. He was so close, and it was dark, and she was happy. It felt like night.
“I love you,” she whispered.
Draco dropped her. “I have to go,” he said abruptly. “I need to talk to Professor Snape. I just wanted to say hello,” he added with a brief smirk. “Aren’t I sweet and considerate?”
He turned and walked, quickly. Draco had never been any good at hiding when he was scared.
“You love that?” said a familiar annoying voice.
Pansy sighed and rolled her eyes at Potter. She should have remembered that those three ran in a pack. Potter probably hung around and offered instructions while Granger and Weasley went at it.
“I have my reasons,” she replied, and smiled slyly. “Anxious for the details?”
Potter went scarlet. Even his neck looked hot, and she watched with amusement.
“No, don’t be disgusting!” Potter said loudly. “I don’t know how anybody can bear to lay hands on Malfoy.”
“Just hands? I don’t know either,” Pansy agreed, opening her eyes wide. “You’re a man of restraint, Potter.”
She was a bit disappointed when he didn’t have a heart attack, but happy enough to laugh into his puce face and go on.
When she got back to the common room, she saw Draco laying down the law to some third years in his most lordly manner, and she went up to join him and he took her hand. So that was all right.
Except that when she reached out her hand to stroke his hair that night, he pushed her hand away. “I’m trying to sleep,” he said crossly.
She wanted to scream at him that it was all right when he was pretending to be asleep, but she was afraid of what would happen. Afraid that they and all their plans would collapse, so she lay quiet by his side.
She told herself that she understood. She’d never really been offered love, but Lucius Malfoy, that astute politician, had promised unimaginable rewards if Draco could just meet his demands, and Draco had tried to do so and failed. He would not believe a word she said about love he did not think he had earned, no matter how much he liked to listen to it.
There was no point in making him angry. She just had to prove it, but she did not know how.
When he was sitting charting his version of a battle plan for the real Order of the Phoenix, she went to sit by him and slipped her arms around his waist. He glanced over at her, startled, and she liked the clean sharp line of his jaw.
Then he looked down at the battle plans and his face cleared. “Oh,” he said, and gave her a quick kiss. “Don’t worry about it, Pansy. I am going to protect you.”
She narrowed her eyes at him and stomped off. She could not say that she did not want him to save her, to save all of them. She loved him because she believed he was the only one who could do that.
But she didn’t want it to be a bargain, and he would never trust her if it was a bargain, and she had no way to convince him that even if she did want something from him it was different, different…
He began to be angry with her, and she was not sure how to respond to him. She snapped, scowled and left him, and he became quiet and she thought she was confirming his fears. So she stayed and bit her lips to keep quiet, and he looked at her with distrust.
When Professor Dumbledore spoke to the Young Order, they all stood back with Draco. She looked around at everyone leaning on or near him proudly, and then realised she was leaning against him herself.
I’m not like that, she wanted to tell him, but he didn’t look at her.
He tried to write important letters to his mother, and received cool, warning notes and carte blanche on expense. She found him one day reading a letter with one hand, and cutting across the top of his desk with a letter-opener.
“Draco, it’s all right,” she said. “I—”
“Shut up,” he said, and she did until he was out of the room, when she threw the letter-opener against the wall.
“Everybody wants something,” he announced another time, trying to craft a strategy for winning over some more Slytherins.
“Everybody?” Pansy said, wishing she could deny it.
“Oh yes,” Draco said, his mouth tightening. “My father taught me that. For instance, I want a cup of coffee. We have to start training the first years to be our slaves.”
Later, he gave up on strategy, lost his temper and shouted the Slytherins into submission. That put him in a worse mood.
“But you got them in the end,” Pansy argued with him. “That’s what counts.”
“It’s not what counts if it won’t work again,” Draco snapped. “I have to do this right.”
“How do you know what’s right?” Pansy asked.
“I don’t know!” Draco yelled at her. “My father would have known! But there’s only me, and there’s nobody here to help—” He stopped himself.
“I’d help you if I could,” Pansy said. “Just tell me what to do.”
“I have told you,” Draco answered coldly. “I have no idea. Why don’t you go to hell?”
“Fine. I will,” she shouted back, and slammed out of the door.
She realised afterwards that she had left him when he told her that he didn’t know how to save them. She sat on her bed, snarling at the others to leave her alone until they escaped to the common room, and she thought in the dark about what she could do that would be enough.
He came and sat beside her on the bed. “I’m sorry,” he said, which was a big thing for Draco and which he said very ungraciously. “Look. Naturally, I know what to do. I am, after all, a superlative genius.” He stopped. “I was taking some things out on you. Look, Pansy—it’s not very clever to get too involved when we’re this young.”
There was nothing but cold emptiness inside her suddenly, sick and terrible.
He smiled at her. “After all,” he drawled, “it would be a pity to waste that dress on just one man. Even if that man was me.”
“Especially if that man was you,” Pansy said, and smirked at him. If he wanted to be let go, she was not going to embarrass herself.
He put his arm around her, which was unexpected, and held on tight for a moment. “I’ve promised to make sure we’re all safe, remember,” he told her. “I’ll keep my word.”
She had not loved him because he would save them. She’d loved him because he could save them.
“I should hope so,” she agreed. “I’d hate to have a liar for a friend.”
She did not cry.
I am still thy lover true
Come once again and love me
She did not cry then. She did not cry in front of her mother, who intimated gently that she was very disappointed, and she did not cry when Peaseblossom came home to briefly inform them that Pellinore was dead. She attended meetings at Draco’s house, and she came home and tersely answered questions about what she was doing. She heard a rumour about Draco and some Beauxbatons student, and she did not give a sign. She sat with him through the first Young Order meeting of the year, and agreed with him loudly about the vote for no increased news warnings for the Muggle Prime Minister.
On one of their club nights, she saw him, a slim laughing silhouette, with Morag all in glittering black robes and looking up at him with Scottish blue eyes. They were laughing and flirting and he tipped salt onto his lower lip and she licked it off and then took a tequila shot.
She broke, and ran, and he ran after her.
“Pansy! Pansy, where are you going?” he asked irritably as soon as he’d caught up with her in the street. “Don’t disappoint Crabbe,” he added with a smile. “He’s dying for a dance.”
She went to slap him, hard, but he grabbed her wrist. She stared up at him through smarting eyes.
“Not with her,” she said, passionately. “With anybody but her.”
Draco looked affronted. “I don’t know what you’re im—”
“Promise me!” Her voice cracked.
His sharp face softened. “I promise,” he said, after a moment, and then he let his hand slide from her wrist to her fingers, and held on for a minute. “I do miss you, sometimes,” he told her, glancing warily up at her as if even this much information would allow her to hurt him. “I do. But there’s no point—there’s no such—I can’t.”
He let her go, and she ran back to Hogwarts, home and the dormitories, and then she cried, face down on the pillow and clutching it in her fists as if she could hurt it by holding tight enough.
If she had been able to demand everything so fiercely, Draco might have given it to her. If she had needed him less, or needed him more, if she could have loved or hated or tried or screamed enough…
The next club night, she went out and did not look at what Draco was doing. She did shot after shot with Sally-Anne, and they ended up clinging to each other on their way home, declaring undying friendship, two happy, happy girls. When Sally-Anne fell onto her bed with her she looked up at her halo of blonde hair, and felt cold and lonely and surprised that someone so pretty might want to be with her. She pressed closer for warmth as Sally-Anne pushed her breasts against Pansy’s, felt the soft taut flesh dragging heavy over hers and shut her eyes.
She didn’t want Draco to come back and be smooth and flirt with her. She wanted him to kiss her and touch her awkwardly, so she would feel safe and sure he would not leave her. It was not so different.
She woke up under her sheets with Sally-Anne the next morning. God knew where the other girls had gone.
“I have a splitting headache,” she said muzzily.
Sally-Anne drew closer to her. “My mother’s a Mudblood,” she said softly into her ear, and then her green eyes opened wide to catch Pansy’s reaction. “Do you hate me?”
Pansy held on hard to her naked shoulders. “What? No, of course not! You’re Slytherin,” she told her fiercely. “It’s not your fault. Nobody—”
She stopped. She had no idea what the others would do, and she was not like Draco and able to order them to do what she wanted and somehow have it happen. But she did know, down to her bone, that you stood by your own and tore down whoever threatened them, and they did the same for you. It was the only way to be safe.
“Thank you,” said Sally-Anne, sounding content for some reason, and shut her eyes again, her blonde hair pooling around her on Pansy’s pillow.
Pansy still could not work out why Sally-Anne had wanted to be with her.
She worked out that there was a bit of power in her curves in a short dress, and her mouth if she curled it right. Nothing warm like the fun it had been to be almost-pretty with Draco, and nothing that attracted affection like Morag, but power was power and she could use it.
She was at the bar ordering a drink on the next club night, when she recognised a familiar face. Adrian Pucey. He’d been on the Quidditch team, and his uncle had been a Death Eater, and he was watching her.
“Let me get that drink,” he said.
“No thanks,” she said, sneering. “I have to go through all my money and several more attractive people.”
“I hear young Malfoy’s on a crusade to avenge his father,” he continued casually.
“I wouldn’t know. We’re not that close.”
“I hear differently,” Pucey replied. “Malfoy’s really doing quite splendidly, keeping you lot together on this one. But I hear parental pressure is really going to get started, and everybody knows Ted Nott is a bit of an anti-Muggle fanatic. Might cause a nasty split if he learned that one of your dear little band isn’t quite as pure-blooded as everybody thinks she is.”
She met his eyes, and took the packet under his arm. There were records, photographs, birth certificates for Sally-Anne and her parents.
“I’ll talk to Draco,” she said in a level voice. “We might be able to do a deal.”
“We might indeed,” Pucey answered, his eyes travelling everywhere her dress covered.
Pansy cursed herself for a fool, and did not drop her own eyes. “How very flattering,” she replied archly. “One night, then?”
“At least six months,” Pucey disagreed. “You’re attractive enough, and I’m not terribly interested in choosing sides just now, but do make it worth my while.”
“Perhaps a week.”
They shook on two months. His hand was big, and rather sweaty. She let him buy her that drink.
It wasn’t too bad. He treated her quite well, and she giggled over drinks and meals, and took care to show pleasure between the sheets. Sometimes there even was some, though it was all a little mechanical.
When she got the records, she burned them one by one, sitting alone in the dark, and then went to throw the bin full of dust and ashes out the window. She saw Weasley and Granger wandering hand in hand along, and waited until they were directly underneath her, then tipped it up.
She went down to inspect the wreckage, and was amused to see that Granger’s frizzy hair had turned thick grey. Weasley was spluttering.
“You bloody Slytherin bitch!” he shouted, going dark red in the patches under the grey. “What’s your problem?”
She shoved him savagely away. “Looks to me like it’s you who has the problem,” she told the, and walked off.
Sometime in the dark cold hours of night that year, she admitted to herself that she did not want anything complex, did not want to fight for anything and wait and think it tortuously through and never ever feel secure. All Pansy really wants is to be safe and loved, and to have Draco back—which contradicts all the rest.
If she waited, though, she told herself. He was never going to let anyone as close as he had unwittingly let her. If she waited, and tried, there was a chance. It wasn’t perfect, but he was bright and she was cold, and…
Oh, she loved him, and she had never loved anything else. She thought perhaps that she couldn’t do it.
Through perils both of wind and limb,
Through thick and thin she follow’d him.
The summer before her seventh year, her mother locked her in her room and explained that she was not going back to Hogwarts, for her own good.
She and Draco had been prepared for this contingency. She broke the window with sheets clenched around her fists, took Draco’s broom from his cupboard and arrived on the platform on time.
“My baby, you’re all right,” said Draco, rushing up to her. “And Pansy, it is good to see you too,” he added, cradling the broom in his arms.
“My God, Draco, what happened to your hair over the summer?”
“There are some things,” Draco told her in freezing tones, “that are not, in fact, amusing. Shame on you, Pansy Parkinson. Shame.”
“I’m going to buy some Chocolate Frogs,” Pansy announced.
“Addiction is a terrible thing, Pansy,” Draco warned. “Oh, and if you see a coffee pot, grab it off the trolley for me.”
She had to wait in the corridor while Granger and Weasley lugged their trunks down to their carriage. Granger was discussing Arithmancy, and Weasley’s eyes were glazed over.
“Excuse me, can we move on before I get so bored I lose the use of my limbs?” Pansy snapped.
There’s another poor sod who’s never going to be clever enough, she thinks, but then she remembers that apparently he is and Granger loves him and they’re happy and everything is perfect, as things are for Gryffindors, and ‘accidentally’ elbows him in the solar plexus as she goes by.
She couldn’t do much but stand by Draco, so she does so while he burns and splutters through another ill-fated romance and, much more important, through gathering dark whispers of suspicion.
She holds. She stays firm.
Until the day when Harry Potter comes to the dungeons and asks to talk to Draco, and then she realises that Draco was never waiting for revenge from someone who had thought he was not worth attention. He was waiting, as Draco does, pushing and insisting that he was worth it, and as Draco does, he failed horribly and thoroughly and nastily until he succeeded.
He would not love her, and now Harry Potter had decided to steal her friend.
Blaise thought that it was funny at first.
“How are you and the hero getting on, then?” he asked.
Draco sneered. “Oh, fine,” he drawled. “We’re madly in love.”
Blaise soon changed his mind.
The Gryffindors, who get everything, were not allowed to have a single claim on Draco. She needed him. They all needed him, he was theirs, and she had almost held his cold and shaking hand in the night six years ago. She could do nothing but sit there and resent Potter, and hate Draco because she was so afraid. Pansy absolutely hated being afraid.
She thinks she can do nothing else, until Ron Weasley stood up at the Young Order meeting and accused Draco of betraying the whole school, and demanded that he be sent to Azkaban.
Pure, simple rage flooded through Pansy. She thought about awkward kisses and crazy promises and pretending not to be frightened and not to be in love, and she launched herself across the table at Weasley’s throat.
“I’ll kill you for that, Weasley!” she shouted, and she would. She would kill for him without a second thought.
She can still love Draco, still follow him, still believe in him. No matter what happened.
She has always done that.