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Time slowed to a near standstill, Pansy’s mind raced a mile a minute. In the dusty, dimness of a forgotten hideaway in the Room of Requirement, the rising moonlight fractured through the ancient windows. She raked her brain, trying to think how she ended up here, with her hair mussed, her tie askew, and Neville god damn Longbottom looking down at her with fire in his eyes and three little forbidden words on the tip of his tongue.
"Don't," she begged of him.
When had she gotten in so deep?
She’d gone under, their relationship so sweet and so cold, and it had swept her away without even realising it.
There was one crucial moment that seemed to be escaping Pansy’s memory.
The moment she had fallen so deep that by the time she realised, she didn’t have it in her to claw her way back out of the situation.
She could, however, remember the moment this all started.
It was the first door handle she saw, she didn’t think about it when she turned it and burst through. She didn’t think about the fact that she’d never seen a room here before, she was just glad that when she needed it more than ever, she pushed the heavy door and it let her through.
She’d barely made it three weeks into 7th year before Professor Carrow had her sprinting along the 7th-floor corridors. Her blood thumped in her ears as vicious hex’s hit the stone walls around her in her attempt to flee detention.
Blood from her maltreatment started to soak through her robes, she could feel her sleeves growing heavier with it. That was a problem for another time though, for now, she had to get away.
She pressed herself against the closed door, holding her breath, willing her ragged breathing to calm enough for her to hear the pursuing footsteps rush by her. She could feel her pulsing heartbeat under her palms as they pressed against the door.She waited until the rhythm slowed before letting out a relieved breath.
'However, the softest clatter behind her had her spinning on her heels and whipping her wand out from her robes between speedy heartbeats. Her wand held steady at eye level, its tip pointed up at the face of a boy, who’s eyes widened in alarm, his hands out in surrender.
Longbottom.
“What are you doing here?” she snapped. It came out more croaky than she’d wanted, but the intended venom was still laced through her words and that was good enough.
His eyebrows knotted in confusion.
“Me? How did you even get in here?”
“I asked you first, Longbottom,” Pansy retorted, but Longbottom didn’t reply. He pressed his lips together in a thin line, his jaw tensing. This movement caught Pansy’s eye. She couldn’t help but notice that he seemed more man-shaped than she remembered. No longer gangly and disproportional but broader, taller, almost handsome.
Although, if she was being honest, normally, she paid Longbottom no mind, so it wasn't entirely surprising that he had changed so drastically without her noticing. What was surprising, however, was the realisation that she actually quite liked it.
She shook the thought away.
Keeping her wand trained on him, she looked around them now, realising that she wasn’t in any classroom she’d ever seen before. In fact, it didn’t look like a classroom at all.
It was cluttered and messy, full of niknaks and doodads that Pansy had never seen before and couldn’t even begin to guess what their purpose was. Everything from ratty piles of outdated textbooks to ugly, old busts and relics to battered and beaten cages that looked like they should actually be trapping creatures, which was rather alarming.
Behind Longbottom, long tables were set up similar to Professor Sprout’s greenhouses, dirt and leaves were scattered around a dozen or so burly, terracotta pots, each containing a luscious, green plant.
“What is this place?” she asked him, not lowering her wand from the middle of his face.
“You don’t remember?”
“Remember?”
“It’s where you turned over half of your year to Umbridge,” Longbottom replied, not bothering to hide the venom in his voice now.
“You lot deserved it.”
He tensed his jaw again. Pansy watched him do it.
“You can leave the same way you came in,” Longbottom said after a moment.
Pansy shuffled her feet to take his advice and forget this interaction ever happened, but immediately, her heart sped up.
She couldn’t leave yet.
“Problem?” Longbottom asked her.
“I need to hide out for a bit,” Pansy admitted regretfully.
“That’s a bit of a big ask from someone whose wand is pointed between my eyes,” he said.
Begrudgingly, she lowered her wand. The last thing she needed right now was to be turfed out at Carrow’s feet by Neville Longbottom no less.
He barely acknowledged her surrender. He turned to tend to the plants lining the tables and barely acknowledged her at all, just went back to where he must have been before she burst in on him. Pansy, however, had never been one to be ignored and certainly not by someone like Longbottom.
“What are you doing?” she asked loudly.
“Why?” he mumbled, not looking away from clipping small, round leaves from the plants’ branches to look at her. “You want to go running back to your headmaster with some new information? Maybe get some nice house points, eh?”
“Christ, I only asked a question, Longbottom,” Pansy snapped.
“Neville.”
“What?”
“My name is Neville,” he said, turning to look at her. Any other day, Pansy would have gone off on one, but something about the authoritative tone in his voice made her pause and she didn’t know what to say. Longbottom sighed and went back to tending his plants.“I’m growing dittany,” he told her.
“Dittany? Like for healing potions?”
“Exactly.”
Suddenly, she remembered her arm, torn up from a rather vile round of detention hexes. With her heart rate slowing down, it was like she could feel every beat pumping more blood into the sodden sleeve of her robes. She shifted awkwardly.
Longbottom noticed.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she replied defensively, tucking her wounded arm behind her slightly. He narrowed his eyes at her.
“Tell me.”
“It’s nothing!”
Longbottom reached for her partially hidden arm and she pulled away from him.
“Show me, Pansy,” he demanded. Pansy didn’t know what came over her because she released the tension in her shoulder and allowed him to take her arm. She saw the alarm behind his eyes as soon as the skin of his palms turned red from her sleeve. But he didn’t pull away from her. If anything, he continued on a little more gently.
He carefully pulled back her bloody sleeve and she winced as the air hit her torn flesh. His large hand gingerly held her bare arm, seeming not to mind one bit that her blood was staining his fingertips. She watched the interaction mesmerised.
“Bloody hell,” he sighed. “What happened?”
“Detention.”
Pansy heard him exhale loudly through his nose, his jaw clenched tight. He was angry.
“I’ll fix it up for you,” he told her.
“I’m fine really,” Pansy told him but he gave her arm a small squeeze and she hissed in pain. He cocked an eyebrow at her.
“I’m fixing it,” he said decidedly. The issue was clearly not up for debate in his eyes. “It’ll take two seconds.”
He lightly dropped her arm and moved around the plant tables and ducked underneath them. Pansy heard the clinking of glass and not a moment later, Longbottom was back, unstoppering an unlabeled phial.
“Arm, please,” he requested and she held it out to him. He dropped a generous amount of the liquid over her arm. She watched her wounds pull themselves together, the blood stopped flowing and after a second or two, all that was left was pinkish lines strewn across her pale skin. It tingled rather than hurt, like a spider crawling over her. She shivered.
Longbottom looked up at her with intense eyes. When had he gotten so close?
“Thanks,” Pansy whispered.
“No problem.”
It took her too long to pull away from him. She yanked her arm back and shoved her sleeve over her healed skin. He stepped back, his expression something akin to hurt. He coughed slightly.
“It’s the reason all this is here anyway.”
“You’re gonna make dittany for the whole school Longbottom?” she sneered, realising too late that she’d called him Longbottom instead of Neville. His jaw clenched but he didn’t bite.
“If I have to, yes,” he told her. “I’ve been growing dittany and brewing potions since the start of term … well, since detentions started anyway.” He nodded slightly towards her healed arm.
“I’m sure Madame Pomfrey has enough though, is all this really necessary?”
“Well, I’m sure your Professor was just about to take you to her right after he finished chasing you down the corridors,” he jibed.
“Fair point,” she conceded with a slight smirk. If she didn’t laugh, she’d cry and she’d never dare do that. Longbottom seemed to feel the same, his mouth was curved into a vague smile but it didn’t meet his eyes. Pansy couldn’t really blame him. “This place is different from how I remember. What’s it supposed to be anyway?”
“It’s called the Room of Requirement. It changes depending on what you need most,” he told her.
“And you needed a tatty room full of old junk?” she asked, picking up a rusty magnifying glass that seemed to be missing its glass part. Longbottom chucked.
“Not quite, but I did need a quiet, safe place and it gave me this,” he gestured around him. “You needed refuge and it seemed to think I’d give it to you.”
“Yeah, why did you?” Pansy asked bluntly, earning herself another chuckle from him,
“All this -the growing, the brewing- what’s the point of it if I refuse it when someone needs it most? I’m not one of them,” he nodded past her now.
“Your generosity could get you killed, you know,” she told him.
“Maybe,” he said seriously. “But not yet.”
They sat for a moment watching each other, unsure of how to progress with this mild lul they’d created in their animosity towards each other. Pansy found, however, that the moment made her feel quite content knowing that she wasn’t about to be tossed out into the hall.
Safe even.
Here.
With Longbottom.
It was an odd feeling and she wondered if she’d actually ever felt it before. Odder still, Longbottom didn’t seem to mind it so much either.
In the following weeks and eventually months, Pansy found it easier than she thought she would to seek out the safe haven she'd found with Longbottom.
In the beginning, they didn't speak to one another. He didn't even seem surprised when she would come bursting through the door, hexes hot at her heels, panting from her pursuit. The only time he seemed truly surprised was when she started slipping in quietly late in the evenings with no excuse as to why she was there and didn’t bother to invent one. He said nothing about it though, just let her sit with him while the bubbling cauldron made quiet ambient sounds.
Eventually, the silence between them said too much for Pansy's liking. It indicated that she had become too familiar, too content with him and she began to feel like she needed to shake things up a little.
She'd felt like just another one of the forgotten niknaks and Pansy wasn't used to being overlooked by anyone, let alone Longbottom.
With an annoying question here and there, she'd begun to make her presence known.
“What does this do?”
“Don’t you worry that these cages had something in them?”
“How tall does dittany grow?”
“What language is this?”
She didn't particularly care about the answers to her questions, in fact, she really couldn't care less. The only thing she cared about was that Longbottom would answer each one cooly and seriously without even glancing up at her.
Finally, enough was enough.
Pansy had grown irritable. Her inane questions hadn't gained his attention for more than a few seconds at a time and given the amount of time they spent together now, she demanded more of it.
She watched him with narrowed eyes as he brewed, picking up potion ingredients from where he had laid them out neatly in the order he would need them on top of his potions textbook. He'd long since surpassed the book's guidance but he set it out every time all the same.
Perched on a dusty couch, that had begun appearing a few weeks after she'd engaged in her bizarre rendezvous routine, Pansy looked around her for something breakable, the noisier the better. A particularly broken lamp balanced precariously on the rickety table beside would do just the trick.
A simple wave of her wand was all it took to send it crashing to the floor in a million pieces. Longbottom jumped and turned to look at her, his face scrunched up with irritation.
"Sorry," she said, but they both knew she wasn't apologetic in the slightest. The smirk playing on her lips probably gave it away too.
But still, Longbottom turned back to his bubbling cauldron and pretended she was nothing more than a nuisance cat.
Now, Pansy was pissed. She rose to her feet, quick as a flash, and stormed over to his potted dittany forest and swiped the closest one onto the floor with a smash.
"What the hell are you playing at Pansy!?" Longbottom yelled.
"Finally! A bloody reaction! At least now I know I'm not a goddamn ghost!"
"You're such a petulant child!"
"I'm a child? You're the one pretending I don't bloody exist!"
"The world doesn't revolve around you Pansy," he hissed. A chill shot down her spine at the darkened way he said her name.
"Well, it doesn't revolve around brewing potions either!"
She stomped towards him, her hand out and poised to take a swipe at his cauldron but before she could, his large hand grabbed hold of her wrist and held it tight.
"You wanted my attention? Well now you've got it," he snapped at her furiously.
Pansy said nothing. She'd put so much effort into gaining his attention that she hadn't even spared a moment to think about what to do once she got it or why she even wanted it in the first place.
"What, Pansy? What!?" He snapped.
She didn't know what possessed her to do it. Maybe it was the enticing smell of brewing flames on his school jumper. Maybe it was how he was so close she could feel the warmth radiating from him. Maybe it was the rage on his face that didn't quite meet his darkened eyes.
But as soon as her eyes drifted to his lips, furiously pressed together in a line, she lunged forward and kissed him.
When he didn’t immediately kiss her back she pulled away and studied his face as it flashed through a myriad of emotions. When he didn’t say anything, she asked the question that constantly pushed her to the brink of flipping.
“Why do you ignore me?” she asked, it came out a little more pathetically than she’d meant it to.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
"Because I have to," he admitted.
"Why?"
"Because if I don't, I'll cave in," he looked her straight in the eyes as the admission fell from his lips.
And that's when Pansy saw it.
The feeling behind his eyes, the one that she felt right now, the one that pushed her time and again to come back here, to see him, to piss him off.
Need.
"So cave in," she whispered. "Please, Neville, I need it."
His face twisted and Pansy watched him flounder as his own needs fought against his better judgement. Her own judgement was lost in the sea of other forgotten things in the Room of Requirement.
His hand burned where it wrapped around her wrist but it was nothing to the scorching in her veins when he pulled her against his body and kissed her.
When everyone in her world seemed lost and adrift, he pulled her in and made her feel wanted.
She should have been more guarded, remembered who she was and more importantly who he was.
She should have known better than to the let herself be sucked in by a Gryffindor. He'd made her weak, dependent. On him.
He'd lured her into his whirlpool of loneliness and acceptance and now she found herself looking up from underneath, unable or perhaps unwilling to fight her way back out again.
It was peaceful being this deep, his lips on hers each evening, removing the pressure to speak or even breathe. And although she was adrift, a thousand miles out now, she'd found a place to rest.
But she would crash into the rocks if she let him say the words that threatened to escape his mouth now.
"Don't," she repeated, pleading.
"Why not?" He asked her desperately. She knew that he could see the same emotion burning behind her eyes but she refused to let it out.
"Because I won't say it back," she told him truthfully.
"I don't care!"
"But I do! I refuse to say it! I refuse to acknowledge it!"
"You're being childish," he scolded.
"Maybe, but I need to be so that this doesn't come crashing down on me!" She cried hysterically.
She could feel the pressure swelling inside her, she wanted to scream or cry, anything to let it out. All this devotion, she'd never known her whole life, rushing out of her all at once.
He moved in closer, his open arms surrounding her, pulling her in, pulling her under. She wasn't going to give it up but she was willing to give in.
Her fists full of his jumper, she clung to him as he soothed her, her erratic breaths puffing against his chest.
"I won't say it," he told her quietly. "Doesn't mean I don't feel it though."
She nodded into his chest.
"Never let me go," she begged.
"Never."