ice will melt and spring will come :
pansy hates being watched.
she could feel prying eyes on her when she was five, her mother’s gaze burning instructions in her posture. every time someone stares at her, she feels like she’s done something wrong– even if she knows she hasn’t. she hasn’t done anything wrong, apart from being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
neville’s gaze tastes like vitriol. it stretches all across her skin, paints her in grime. puts an anvil in her hands, says you can never drop this. if you do, the floor shatters. pansy’s familiar with brittle ground; she knows how to stride across ice with the weight of the world on her shoulders. but it feels flimsy, like this. when the floor is her best friend’s heart.
pansy can keep a secret – her entire life was built on lies and mysteries. she knows the value of puzzle pieces of information, and how they can change an entire narrative when put together. she is not my daughter, her mother had said. neville had stopped in their tracks, in an instance of confrontation. pansy knows why she’s being watched, and she resents them – draco and neville, the both of them – for it.
it will break blaise’s heart either way. secret or public, it won’t matter. pansy doesn’t want the blame on her shoulders. she doesn’t want to be an accomplice to a crime that might tear all of them apart. neville touches her shoulder, and it burns a spot right through cloth, skin, flesh, blood. she hadn’t thought it’d be so public, neville’s attempt at keeping draco together, coming apart at the seams. she raises an eyebrow. “i know what this is about. i don’t want to talk about it.”
he’d forgotten how cold the slytherins could be. well, not entirely, draco’s frost-bitten gaze still sometimes cool on their sun-warmed skin, but the icy hostility that had accompanied dismissive gaze and sharp words that still stung whenever he thought back over them -
‘ i know, ’ he says instead, tries to fix the words together that are spinning around in his head, make sense of the panic thats replacing his ribs with daggers. pansy is being cold to him, someone he’d not truly met, hadn’t had any real memories with - either negative or positive - until traces of their help in seventh year, gentle indifference and kindness from then on. it’s a side he’d never really had cause to see before, had never asked to be directed his way.
but her gaze had met his and perhaps it was one heart against the other, but if ginny found out --- if blaise found out, he knows is draco’s concern, no matter that they’d sort of been dating since they’d met in new zealand, had made it official between the two of them before even coming back in august --- what was a lie of omission against doing something you know will only hurt everyone around you?
(( at least that’s what he tells himself, because any lie, no matter the flavour, has always tasted like ash and dead in his mouth, soil that could never hope to grow anything ))
‘ i don’t, this isn’t - ’ he starts, closes his eyes, tries again when he doesn’t have to look directly at her. ‘ and i don’t want you to talk about it. to anyone. ’ perhaps that’s what it was, an unspoken agreement, and now he’s aired it and now its an agreement coming unraveled.
‘ draco can’t - i can’t - please don’t tell anyone else? ’
