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Pansy was trudging through the snow back towards the castle when she saw Rigel.
After the routine hecticness of the holidays it had been a bit of a relief to get back to school. Her father had taken her aside and stressed that she must not do anything that would turn away potential matches. In practice that meant she'd spent a lot of her vacation time being perfectly considerate and available to a number of people Pansy would rather have avoided. After arriving back at Hogwarts she hadn't been able to resist escaping outside for some solitude. She'd only conceded defeat to winter after her fingers had turned completely numb and decided to head inside.
The sky was overcast and the figure sitting by the lake was wrapped in a coat so she didn't recognize him until she drew closer.
She frowned. Rigel occasionally did things outside, but he never just . . . sat there.
For a moment Pansy hesitated. Rigel probably wasn't sitting on the empty grounds in the bitter cold because he wanted company, and Pansy also wasn't entirely sure she was feeling up to company right now. But the small dark smudge of Rigel's coat looked lonely against the large, white field of snow and she found her feet turning her towards him before she'd even noticed she'd made a decision.
"Rigel?" she asked hesitantly, stopping to stand near him.
Rigel turned and blinked at her like he'd expected her to be there but didn't respond.
They stared at each other for a moment. "It's cold," she said finally.
Rigel looked away from her and out onto the lake. It was frozen over and there was a thick layer of snow on top of it. You could only tell it was even there because of the indent it made in the landscape. Now that the students were back from Hogwarts she knew Hagrid would clear the snow off so it could become a place for ice skating.
"Yeah."
Pansy studied his profile for another moment before sitting down next to him.
It was still really cold, but she tucked her gloved hands into her armpits and her clothes had heavy warming enchantments on them. It wouldn't kill her to sit with Rigel for a while.
The sky got darker before Rigel finally broke the silence.
"The others weren't very nice to Harry at Yule."
Pansy tilted her head at him, but internally she sighed. Draco and Theo especially had never bothered to learn the art of making people feel welcome when they weren't. Alienating everyone you disagreed with would only make you friendless, and Pansy had learned that often the longer you spend time with your enemies, the more you realize you have a lot in common.
"I should have expected it more," Rigel muttered, drawing his knees to his chest. The position made him look young, but the tired expression on his face made him look ancient.
Maybe if Pansy hadn't been so withdrawn herself she would have answered differently, but she didn't feel up to crafting pretty platitudes. "We're all careful to not talk politics with you. What's normal to you is odd to them."
"What? Treating humans with basic respect regardless of blood?" Rigel griped.
Pansy didn't respond. After a moment Rigel sighed and let his head fall on his knees.
"I maybe shouldn't even tell you this," Rigel muttered half-heartedly. "I was so young. I didn't think it through at all. I didn't think about what it would mean for me, about what I'd be supporting just by being here."
Rigel went dead silent for a long moment before lifting his head to look at her. "I had the opportunity to go to AIM, and sometimes I think it would have been better if I'd have gone there."
A shiver of fear went down her spine, Pansy didn't want to picture a life without Rigel. It felt wrong on an instinctual level to even consider it, but she also didn't dare brush over what her friend just said. These words clearly came from somewhere deeper inside Rigel than Pansy had probably ever seen, and to try and invalidate them now would only cause Rigel to close that part of her to him and not actually make that part go away.
It didn't escape her notice that Rigel was having this conversation with her instead of with Draco.
"Why?" Pansy whispered, her breath puffing out in between them. "What would be different?"
Rigel turned his head back to the frozen lake. "I wouldn't have to hide there."
There was another long moment of silence.
Pansy hid a lot. She covered up her emotions and replaced them so completely that she often forgot what she'd actually been feeling in the first place. She'd pretended to be sweet for so long that she actually became sweet. It was so inherent to who she was at this point that to act in any other way would feel unnatural. But it seemed like what Rigel had been doing was different. Pansy replaced bitterness with forgiveness and insults with compliments. Rigel had never accepted other ideas or politics, he'd just suppressed his own. Instead of spouting SOW propaganda he'd chosen to go silent.
Pansy hid things, but she also changed until her insincerity became sincere. Rigel wouldn't do that, nor would Pansy want him too. Some things were too important for that. So he wasn't expressing lies but he also wasn't expressing anything else. No wonder the silence was starting to choke him.
"Did you know that at Yule I insulted one of my dance partner's ancestors to his face and afterwards he called me charming?"
Rigel huffed a surprised laugh and turned to her. "What?"
"He was talking about how his great grandfather was famous for hippogriff hunting," Pansy recalled, "and I told him I wasn't sure I'd be able to look a man that killed my family's hippogriff in the eye. He said something about it being different back then and changed the topic. I think maybe he won't bring that up again so quickly in the future."
Rigel watched her blankly. She could almost see his face starting to close off. She bit her lip hard. He thought she was just trying to change the subject. She'd been trying to say you could share your opinion without making someone think badly of you but it was a bad example. She couldn't, shouldn't, just dance around this.
"I just meant to say," Pansy said, dropping her voice to something quieter, "that you don't have to . . . you don't have to confront everyone to make your opinion known, and you don't have to stop liking someone because they disagree with you. I won't stop liking you if you disagree with me, and I don't think Draco will either." Pansy paused for a second to gather her thoughts. She was rambling, which she normally never did, but she also never had these kinds of discussions either. Rigel needed to know that he could share what he thought and felt about politics and blood purity and other things, but she also didn't want to pressure him. "There are steps between keeping everything a mystery and revealing everything. If keeping so many things ambiguous is weighing on you then you can start sharing more, but you also don't have to do it all at once. And . . . I'll be with you. Whatever you're hiding. I care about you more than I care about that."
Rigel sat there, completely frozen. If Pansy couldn't see the small plumes of breath floating from his face she might have thought he'd been turned into a statue.
Then he launched at her so quickly she almost fell over backwards. His arms were tight around her (he was stronger then he looked) before she could blink and it took her a second to reciprocate.
When her thoughts caught up she was hit by matching waves of joy and relief. Joy that Rigel seemed happy, and relief that at least her rambling had had some effect. It was a little jarring to feel because relief implied past uncertainty, and Pansy didn't normally feel that, but she was willing to just enjoy it in this case.
They hugged for a moment until Pansy's whole body shivered and Rigel pulled away to stand and pull her up next to him.
"Oh," he said, almost sheepishly, "you must be cold."
Pansy had been trained to be far too sophisticated to roll her eyes—which is why she thought about it and then decided to do it anyway. "It's frigid out here. Are you not?"
Rigel looked embarrassed. "I'm fine," he said. "My coat is really warm."
That was most definitely not a valid reason to not be feeling the cold, but Pansy let it slide. They may have just had a deeply emotional conversation, but Rigel was still Rigel. Keeping secrets was what he did. She'd figure it out one day, and by then he'd have a couple dozen more for her to wonder about. Rigel was an endless conundrum and she wouldn't change that if she could.
"Well I'll be sure to ask to borrow it next time then," Pansy said demurely, "but for now let's go back inside."
She took a few steps forward, but a hand grabbed her arm.
She turned back to look at Rigel quizzically but her face slid into surprise without her permission at the raw sincerity on Rigel's face.
"You have no idea what your words mean to me," Rigel said, and Pansy felt suddenly that she was being shown parts of Rigel she'd never seen before. He was softer, more sincere and emotional, then she'd ever seen him. "Thank you."