Work Text:
The sky is crying with rain. Pansy feels like she’s swimming as she trudges through Trafalgar, hood soaked without her Impervius as she stomps through a puddle. She tells Ginny this to make her smile and as always, she does.
Occasionally, when Pansy is feeling particularly romantic, she lets herself think about what it would be like to have that smile forever – a smile strong enough for her to cast her Patronus, a crow with a particular affinity for indomitable spirits. (Ginny likes to tease her about that, about how crows like shiny things. But Ginny is so, so bright, and Pansy wants to hold her forever.) Barring that, for she knows they’re never really to be after all, she wants to tell Ginny to freeze so Pansy can trap that smile in her grandmother’s locket. But to ask that of her would be to ruin Ginny, and Pansy would never want that. Not anymore. She would far rather ruin herself, inch by inch by inch.
When she wakes in the morning and pours Ginny’s tea, just how she likes it – heavy on the cream and light on any actual tea – she thinks about those three words. Instead, it something prickly, waspish that she lets slip, past the defences of her lips, past her teeth, standing guard. Watching, waiting. When they do their eyebrows in the morning together, Pansy painting her defences on, she lets Ginny lick a stripe up her face – ruining what’s left of her foundation potion, her mask. Tangled later in bed, afternoon rays lighting Ginny’s hair aflame, she knows she is so happy she could cry. And she does, a little (but just a tear or two). Pretends it’s a cough, but Ginny knows; Ginny knows as Pansy buries her head into her freckled stomach, teeth tugging on her piercing, tongue wandering past her hipbones down, down, down. It is almost enough for her to feel safe. Comfortable. Warm. But crows are harbingers of rain, and letting herself admit her love would be her hamartia, she knows.
So she’s taking Ginny on a date to show her, if she can’t tell. A date in Muggle London, inspired by a chewed-up flyer she found stuck to the back of the broken metal gate near Ginny’s flat by Draco’s, gummed and soaked in someone else’s spit. They tramp through the galleries, pretending to understand, eat two slightly soggy sandwiches and take the Tube, funny orange tickets and all. All the way down to Somerset House to skate, falling and tripping and bleeding over each other, laughing all the while. They bathe in the streetlights, letting the glow of the moon cover them in her blanket – Ginny kissing Pansy’s neck, collarbone, sternum, breast…
She’s never been so in love. The day was mostly nothing, meandering thoughts and meandering walks, sitting to feed the pigeons and nattering on about Harry’s new job as they crossed their legs on the steps. But they’re happy and together, and to Pansy, so used to her edges and clothes and words as armour, it’s all so new. She lets herself relax, incrementally, just enough for her to lean over and snog Ginny in full view of Muggle London, proud and proud and proud. Nothing bad, she thinks, could happen to anything but her heart, not with Ginny by her side. Her beautiful, fiery Ginny, stemming the floods that Pansy brings. She lets Ginny stick her warm hand into her back pocket of her Muggle jeans and offers the last of her Every Flavours in return, smearing Ginny’s cheek with the colour-changing lip-gloss she got for her nineteenth.
‘Did you like it,’ Pansy asks, who had done enough research to impress Granger. She wants to show Ginny that she isn’t her father, isn’t her mother - although she sometimes suspects she still is.
‘Yes,’ Ginny says, surprised. ‘Why wouldn’t I’ve?’ Pansy doesn’t say anything to that, just slips her grandmother’s ring off her pinky and onto Ginny’s, covering her hand with her own. The three words feel like a songbird, trapped in her throat. Even though they could’ve Apparated, they hold hands all the way home.
Home is Ginny’s small flat, shared with two Muggles they never see. They don’t spend a lot of time there, preferring to live their life on the outside, but Pansy loves it nonetheless – the burnt sienna curtains, thickened with heat, the two broken chairs by the loveseat and their blue bed, a pile of Puffskein-down pillows and unspoken words. Pansy’s head finds home in Ginny’s lap as she rolls her calves out on the floor, preparing for her next match. Pansy goes to see them, sometimes. When she can. When she’s not busy with the next edition of the Quibbler, run by Ginny’s ex she’s not sure if she’s jealous of, or the latest coming out for the debs of the season. She lets fingers travel to Ginny’s muscled thighs, watching them tremble as she ghosts the softened skin there with her breath, in awe – I can make her break.
She has to bite her lip as they cook supper, reheating Molly’s soup with the stale bread from four nights ago. Ginny looks at her from where she is (settled on the table with her feet in Pansy’s lap), face open and red and in love. She smells like soup and bliss. Pansy is desperate. She burns her tongue with the too-hot soup instead, flinching in pain and watches the tureen, Draco’s housewarming present, crash to the floor.
‘Alright there,’ Ginny says, after she’s kissed Pansy better. No, Pansy wants to reply. I never will be. Not after you. She bites at Ginny’s throat instead, but gently. So gently, too gently.
And later that evening, as Pansy sweeps the broken crockery off the floor with a flick of her wand, she thinks of her childhood. How her mother used to do this for her, call her darling, pet her hair. Her mother used to love her.
‘Darling,’ she says, choking on it. ‘No – you don’t have to,’ Pansy reassures as she watches Ginny pick up the shards of ceramic off the floor with her bare hands, her broom-calloused hands, her tender hands.
Ginny looks at her oddly. ‘Darling,’ she says, almost wonderous. ‘I don’t feel much like a darling.’
‘Yes – okay,’ Pansy replies, desperate. ‘That’s fine.’ The bird’s wings are fluttering in her throat, stab stab stab.
The bird, a crow now, waits there - lodged in the back of her throat, keeping her tonsils company. It is now dark. She fiddles with Ginny’s hair as she tells Pansy about her forthcoming match, the new girl to join the Harpies, their touring season. Can Pansy come? She’d love to have her. It’s next year she knows, but it’s never too soon to plan ahead with things like this.
All Pansy can hear is that Ginny wants her to stay. She asks nothing in return.
‘You’ve been awfully quiet today,’ Ginny remarks, as they lay in their blue bed, so much like the sea. ‘It’s not like you. Where’s the bite I know and love?’
‘Shut up,’ Pansy tells Ginny. Lightly, softly, lovingly. Ginny squeezes her thigh back, letting her hands linger. ‘I love you too,’ Ginny says.
Pansy excuses herself, runs to the loo, dry-heaves. She looks in the mirror and doesn’t find someone worthy of Ginny’s love. She digs her fingernails into her arm till she leaves half-moon marks, to remind herself that Ginny wouldn’t stay with someone she didn’t love. She trusts Ginny. It’s herself she can’t trust – but Ginny does. Ginny does. Ginny loves.
She returns to their blue bed, braver, bolder, brighter.
‘I just want to have this forever,’ she whispers, her wish a broken sound, lost to the patter of the rain of the crows of the night.
‘You can,’ Ginny says, face soft but smiling as she wraps her leg round Pansy’s, ‘for as long as you’ll have me.’