Archive of Our Own

Chapter 1

Diagon Alley in June was a different creature entirely.

No press of bodies, no shouting first-years waving lists they hadn't yet learned to read. The crowds that descended in late August frantic, loud, smelling of sunscreen and new shoe leather were still weeks away. In June, the Alley moved at a considered pace. Proprietors restocked shelves without hurrying. Owls dozed in open windows. The cobblestones, warmed through by late morning sun, held the particular golden stillness of a place that had remembered, briefly, how to breathe.

Pansy Parkinson preferred it this way.

She moved through the crowd with the unhurried precision of someone who had learned early that purposeful movement discouraged conversation. Her oxfords were polished, her dark tights unwrinkled despite the heat, and the collar of her white button-down sat exactly right beneath a fitted black blazer she had no practical reason to be wearing in June. She wore it anyway. Appearance was armor, and Pansy had never seen the wisdom in going anywhere unarmored.

Her list was in her left breast pocket. Potions ingredients first Slug & Jiggers, then over to Flourish and Blotts for the two texts Professor Snape had pre-released for fourth-year Advanced. After that, Madam Malkin's for a fitting that her mother had scheduled and her mother would not be attending, because her mother was in Lyon with someone Pansy was not supposed to know about while her father was in Edinburgh with someone her mother definitely did.

June, she thought, turning up the narrow passage beside Gringotts. The month the Parkinson household remembered it was, in fact, two separate people held together by convenience and appearances.

She understood the architecture of that more than she let on.

Slug & Jiggers was quiet and cool and smelled of camphor and dried things, which Pansy found comforting in a way she never would have admitted to another living person. She worked through her list methodically lacewing flies, boomslang skin, a small parcel of bicorn horn exchanging only the necessary words with the young witch behind the counter, and was back on the cobblestones in under ten minutes.

She was consulting her list again, mentally reordering the remaining stops, when she walked into something solid.

No someone.

"Oof "

She caught her balance on instinct, the small paper bag pressed to her chest, and looked up.

Harry Potter looked back at her.

He was taller than she remembered, which was irritating. He'd grown over the year in the unfair way boys sometimes did between third and fourth year not dramatically, just enough that she was no longer quite looking at him level. He was in Muggle clothes, jeans and a plain grey t-shirt that had clearly been purchased to fit him rather than handed down, and he had a small bag from Flourish and Blotts already tucked under one arm. His hair was doing its usual aggressively untidy thing. His glasses sat slightly crooked.

He blinked at her. She watched the recognition cross his face not unpleasant, not hostile, just a sort of quiet arrival at oh, it's you.

Then he smiled.

It was a small smile. Sheepish, almost. A little crooked at one corner in a way that matched his glasses, like the two had developed the habit together. It did not invite anything. It did not perform. It simply existed, aimed briefly at her, and it was the most aggravating thing she had encountered all morning.

Something moved, once, behind her ribs.

She killed it immediately.

"You," she said, which was not her most sophisticated opening but had the advantage of being factually accurate.

"Me," he agreed, pleasantly, as though she had said something more interesting than she had.

Pansy glanced, very briefly, down the passage. A witch from Ravenclaw sixth year, she thought, Clearwater's sister perhaps was passing at the end of the alley and had not looked in their direction. Two older wizards stood arguing pleasantly outside Eeylops Owl Emporium, their attention entirely elsewhere. No one from Slytherin. No one who would carry a story.

She grabbed Potter's sleeve and pulled him sideways into the recessed doorway of a closed apothecary shop, stepping up onto the shallow threshold so they were half-concealed by the wooden frame.

He went without complaint, which was somehow worse.

"What are you " he started.

"Quiet." She released his sleeve immediately, as though the grey cotton had been briefly disagreeable. "I'm not trying to have a conversation with you in the middle of Diagon Alley where anyone might see it."

He considered this with an equanimity she found obscurely offensive. "Right," he said, after a moment. "Would you prefer a private one, then?"

"I'd prefer you didn't exist in spaces I'm currently occupying, but that seems to be beyond both our control."

The corner of his mouth pulled again. Just slightly. That same small crooked movement, like he found her specifically amusing in a way he wasn't going to announce.

"You always say the nicest things, Parkinson."

"I'm building to something worse. Give me a moment."

She tucked her list back into her pocket and looked at him properly, which was its own small miscalculation. Up close though she was not dwelling on the up-close he looked less like the vague ongoing catastrophe she had constructed a mental image of over three years and more like an actual person, which she found deeply inconvenient. There were new freckles across the bridge of his nose, which was an extremely neutral fact she was noting for no particular reason. He was looking at her with that attentive quiet he had, the kind that didn't ask anything of her, and she found it no less disorienting for its harmlessness.

"Why are you here in June?" she asked, because a question was less revealing than continued silence.

"Shopping," he said, and glanced at the bag under his arm with mild self-evidence.

"Obviously. I meant why early. Most people wait until August."

Something shifted in his expression brief, and then gone, closed over with the easy nothing he tended to wear in public. "Easier this way," he said, and didn't explain what he meant, and she didn't ask, because asking would have implied she wanted to know.

She didn't want to know.

"Fine," she said. "I'm going to leave this doorway in approximately thirty seconds. When I do, you are going to walk in the other direction."

"Where am I walking to?"

"Away. That's the entirety of the instruction."

He tilted his head fractionally. "What if I need to go to Flourish and Blotts?"

"You already have a Flourish and Blotts bag."

"I might need to go back."

"Potter."

"Parkinson."

She looked at him. He looked back. The sheepish smile had faded to something quieter, something she didn't have a ready category for patient, maybe, in the way that wasn't passive but simply unhurried, like someone who had decided they were content to wait without making a performance of it.

It was worse than the smile, actually.

"This was not a complicated set of instructions," she said.

"No," he agreed. "I'm just enjoying watching you give them."

The thing behind her ribs made another small movement. She addressed it firmly.

"Go away, Potter."

"Sure." He stepped out of the doorway, unhurried, shifting the bag to his other hand. He glanced back once not lingering, not pointed, just a brief ordinary look the way you looked at something you expected to see again and then turned and walked west toward the wand-makers' end of the alley.

Pansy waited until he had turned the corner.

Then she smoothed the front of her blazer, adjusted the list in her pocket, and stepped back onto the sunlit cobblestones.

She had potions ingredients. She had two texts to collect. She had a fitting at Malkin's for dress robes her parents had agreed on as a peace-offering to each other, with her cast as the gift.

She had a great deal to be attending to.

She walked toward Flourish and Blotts at her usual measured pace, and if her thoughts returned, once, briefly, to the crooked corner of a sheepish smile, she disposed of them efficiently and did not revisit them.

She was Pansy Parkinson.

She was, at all times, perfectly fine.

The trouble with Flourish and Blotts in June was that it was small.

This was not a problem she had ever previously identified, because she had never previously needed the shop to be large enough to lose herself in. She was four steps inside the door, pulling her list from her pocket, when she heard the laugh.

She knew, with a flatness that settled somewhere below her sternum, exactly whose laugh it was.

Not because she had catalogued it. Simply because Hermione Granger laughed the way she did everything else thoroughly, and with complete unselfconsciousness, as though the idea of moderating herself for the comfort of a room had never once occurred to her. It rang off the low bookshelves and the creaking wood floor and the paper-smelling air, and a shopgirl near the back looked up smiling at nothing in particular, caught in it the way people tended to be caught in things that were genuinely unguarded.

Pansy located the source without meaning to.

Granger was at the far end of the second aisle, holding a book open and apparently reading a passage aloud to the girl beside her. The girl beside her was Ginny Weasley, a year below, who was laughing with her head tilted back and one hand braced against the shelf, the picture of someone with no history of caring what they looked like while laughing. Her hair an aggressive, confident red fell over her shoulder in a loose plait that had partially unraveled, and she didn't fix it. She simply left it, undone and vivid, and somehow it looked better for the disregard.

Harry was two steps behind them, leaning against the opposite shelf with his arms loosely folded and the expression of someone who had accepted that he was along for the duration of this particular browsing session and had made his peace with it. He was watching Granger read with the fond patience of someone who found even the familiar things worth watching, and the small smile was back not the sheepish one from earlier, not the crooked self-conscious version, but something softer and less defended, the kind that appeared when a person didn't know they were wearing it.

She should have turned around.

She was, instead, reading the spine of a book she had no interest in acquiring.

Advanced Charms Refinement: A Practitioner's Companion. She would have found it marginally useful two years ago. She held it anyway, because it gave her hands something definitive to do, and she watched Granger pass the open book to Ginny and say something that made the red-haired girl cover her mouth and look, immediately, at Harry.

Harry looked at the ceiling with the expression of a person exercising great dignity in trying circumstances.

Ginny threw the book at him gently. He caught it without looking, because apparently he had developed some kind of peripheral awareness of incoming projectiles, and said something short that made both of them laugh again, and then Granger linked her arm through Ginny's as they moved further down the aisle, and Harry followed, and the three of them moved through the cramped shop like

Like people who knew how to move together. Like people who didn't have to calculate the distance.

Pansy put the charms book back on the shelf.

She was aware, in the specific clinical way she had developed for survivable truths, that what she was doing was following them. Not closely. Not intentionally, at first. But they drifted to the next aisle and she drifted to the adjacent one, and she told herself she was simply shopping in the same building, and she believed this for approximately forty seconds before she stopped pretending.

She stood at the end of an aisle lined with divination references she had no use for and watched the three of them through the gap in the shelving.

Granger was taller than Pansy had remembered, or maybe she simply occupied space more generously standing straight with the artless confidence of someone whose intelligence had always been her most obvious feature, who had never had to decide what her most obvious feature would be. She was built solidly, healthily, wearing jeans and a soft blue jumper pushed up at the sleeves, and she moved with complete physical ease, like a person who had never spent a meaningful amount of time negotiating with her own reflection.

Ginny was a different architecture entirely looser-limbed, with the unselfconscious physicality of someone who'd grown up with brothers and had never been taught to take up less room. She laughed with her whole face. She touched Granger's arm casually when she made a point. She had that red hair, which continued to be vivid and annoying in equal measure.

Pansy looked down at herself, briefly, with the flat precision of someone taking inventory.

White button-down, collar neat. Black blazer, properly buttoned. Dark tights, oxfords. Her hair cut close to the nape of her neck, black and deliberate. She was slight in the way that looked correct in photographs and diminished in crowds narrow-shouldered, taking up the minimum acceptable space, existing within her own clothing like she was afraid to press against the seams.

She looked, she thought without particular drama, like a shadow that had learned to dress itself.

Or like a dark ghost haunting a bright afternoon, present in all the technical senses of the word without actually being there at all. There was something both precise and unbearable about being invisible in a public space not invisible the way Harry Potter was invisible under an actual cloak, protected and deliberate, but invisible the way furniture was invisible, present and unremarkable, something the eye slid past in search of something more worth landing on.

Granger said something earnest and gesturing, and Harry listened to it with that particular attention he had focused, unhurried and then said something back that made her smile and roll her eyes simultaneously, the expression of someone deeply accustomed to being quietly exasperated by someone she trusted completely.

Pansy recognized the trust from the outside, the way you recognized a foreign country on a map. The topology of it.

The jealousy arrived without apology.

She didn't shy away from it. That had always been a distinction she held privately about herself she was not afraid to look at her own darker weather directly, to name it plainly without dressing it up in something more palatable. She was jealous. Full-stop, clean, unqualified. Not of Granger's marks or Ginny's ease or even the laughing itself, though all of it stung in the peripheral sense of things that reminded you of what you didn't have.

She was jealous of the way Harry Potter stood two steps behind people he loved and watched them with that quiet unhurried warmth like it cost him nothing.

She wanted that directed at her and she found the wanting repellent and she experienced both simultaneously without being able to remove either.

It was not romantic, she told herself, with a firmness that was perhaps slightly too firm to be entirely convincing. It was simpler and more embarrassing than romantic. It was the wanting of a specific thing she had not had since she was small enough to not yet know that she wasn't going to get it: the wanting of someone who stood two steps behind you not to make sure you were still useful, but simply because they preferred to be where you were.

Her parents stood two steps behind each other strategically. Her allies at school stood beside her when it was advantageous. Even Daphne, with her cool composure and her genuine if contained regard, maintained the careful baseline distance of someone who had also learned that closeness was a liability. They understood each other. It was not nothing.

It was also not this.

Harry said something to Ginny quietly she couldn't hear it across the shelving gap and Ginny punched him lightly in the shoulder, and he absorbed it with that sheepish smile, the crooked one, the one that had appeared in her doorway twenty minutes ago and that she was absolutely not still thinking about.

She was slightly still thinking about it.

Granger had found whatever book she'd been looking for and was holding it against her chest with the expression of private satisfaction that Pansy recognized from her own reflections when she'd solved something difficult, which was a parallel she immediately decided not to examine. Ginny was reading the back of something with the unselfconscious concentration of someone who didn't care who watched her concentrate. Harry was looking at the ceiling again, patient, unrushed, wearing the unhurried warmth of a person who found even the waiting worthwhile because of who he was waiting for.

She wondered what it would look like to be on the other side of that patience.

She wondered this for approximately four seconds and then folded the wondering up with the same efficiency she'd applied to everything else, tucked it behind the neat front of her blazer, and turned away from the shelf gap.

She had Advanced Potions textbooks to locate.

She had a fitting at Malkin's.

She had a functional life full of purposeful movement and she intended to return to it immediately.

She found her two texts in the next aisle without incident, paid for them at the counter with a smile she had constructed specifically for transactions, and walked back out into the warm June cobblestones.

She did not look back to see if they were still inside.

She did not wonder if he had seen her.

She walked toward Madam Malkin's at precisely her usual pace, the books in her bag, the list folded in her pocket, the blazer buttoned against a warmth she could feel but had decided not to acknowledge.

Perfectly fine.

As always, perfectly fine.

The fitting took forty-five minutes.

Madam Malkin was efficient and kind in the impersonal way of skilled professionals, and she did not ask why Pansy was alone, which Pansy appreciated more than she would ever say. The dress robes were deep green, her mother's selection, chosen to complement the Parkinson coloring the black hair, the pale skin, the dark eyes that people sometimes called striking when they were being generous and unsettling when they were not. Pansy stood on the fitting platform and held her arms out and looked at herself in the three-paneled mirror and thought that her mother had, at minimum, an excellent eye for color even when she deployed it in service of an agenda.

She looked well. She looked composed.

She looked like someone who had been dressed for a purpose rather than for herself, which was accurate, and which she had stopped minding the way you stopped minding a chronic ache once you'd accepted it as structural.

By the time she emerged back onto the Alley, the afternoon had tipped past four and the light had gone golden and long, lying in warm strips across the cobblestones, catching the dust motes above the street in small constellations. A few more people now late shoppers, a family with young children being steered past Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes but still the unhurried June pace, still the easy quiet that August would demolish.

Her Portkey was scheduled for five.

The designated waiting point for international and distance Portkeys was a small courtyard tucked behind the Leaky Cauldron, accessible through a narrow archway that most people walked past without noticing. Pansy had used it three times twice for trips with her mother, once for an arranged visit to her father's family in Wiltshire and knew it as a functional, forgettable space: three stone benches, a dormant fountain, a large potted rosemary that had grown sideways.

She settled on the center bench with her bags arranged at her feet and her hands folded in her lap, and she waited, and she was completely alone, and that was perfectly normal and completely fine.

She had been waiting for approximately twelve minutes when footsteps came through the archway.

She didn't look up immediately. She arranged her expression first.

Then she looked up.

Harry Potter came to a stop just inside the courtyard and looked at her with the particular expression of someone confronted with something they hadn't expected but weren't opposed to. He was carrying a small paper bag different from the earlier Flourish and Blotts one, smaller, from somewhere she didn't recognize and he had, evidently, at some point acquired a smudge of something on his left cheekbone, which he appeared entirely unaware of.

"Huh," he said.

"Go away, Potter," she said, with less force than she'd intended, which she attributed to fatigue.

"I'm waiting for a Portkey."

She looked at him. "To where."

"Surrey." He said it with the same flat neutrality she might have used to say Lyon or Wiltshire, the voice of someone who had made a practised peace with a destination they hadn't chosen. He looked around the courtyard with mild interest, then at the remaining two benches, then at her, and then he sat down beside her on the center bench with the uncomplicated ease of a person who had evaluated the situation and arrived at a conclusion she hadn't consented to.

She moved her bag six inches to accommodate him.

She told herself this was practical.

"Yours?" he asked.

"Five o'clock."

"Mine's five-fifteen." He settled back slightly, elbows on knees, and looked at the dormant fountain with the easy patience she had now clocked multiple times and was beginning to categorize as simply how he was, rather than a specific thing he was performing for her benefit. The golden afternoon light came in over the courtyard wall and lay across the side of his face and the crown of his hair, and she looked at the fountain as well.

The rosemary smelled faintly in the warm air. Somewhere past the courtyard wall, the Alley went about its last hour of business.

He reached into the small paper bag and produced a chocolate bar. Honeydukes, dark, the paper wrapper still folded neatly at one end. He broke off a piece without ceremony and held it out to her with the same unstudied ease as everything else he did not an offering, exactly, not a statement, just the automatic extension of something to a person sitting beside you.

She looked at the chocolate.

She looked at him.

He was looking at the fountain.

She took it.

It was very good chocolate. She had always had strong opinions about chocolate and these were validated. She ate it in two small bites and did not say anything and neither did he, and the silence was the specific and slightly bewildering variety that did not require filling.

He broke off a piece for himself.

She wasn't sure precisely when it happened. She became aware of it the way you became aware of weather gradually, and then all at once the pressure of his leg against hers, the outside seam of his jeans against her tights, contact that was entirely accidental and which she had apparently engineered by increments she hadn't consciously approved. The bench was not small. She had simply, without any instruction from her rational mind, closed the distance.

She did not move away.

The heat from his shoulder reached her without them quite touching there, a half-inch of warm air between the grey cotton and the shoulder seam of her blazer, and he smelled she catalogued this with the detached inventory of someone simply gathering data clean, and faintly like the outside, and something warmer underneath that she didn't have a specific reference for, just warmth and realness and the uncomplicated fact of a person who was simply, presently, here.

She had not been this physically close to another person who was not her mother's tailor or her father's solicitor in some months.

She stared at the dormant fountain and breathed carefully.

"You should write," she said. The words arrived before she'd fully decided on them, which she disliked, so she finished them with precision. "Over the summer. Letters are a reasonable expectation between people who have now had two separate conversations in a single day, which exceeds my annual average with most people I nominally know."

She felt him look at her from the side, though she didn't turn to confirm it.

"That's a lot of words for write me," he said.

"It's a directive dressed in context so you understand it is non-optional."

"Got it." A beat. "You could write first."

"I could," she agreed. "I won't."

"Because "

"Because it's your turn." She paused. "I'm giving you a turn. Try to keep up."

He was quiet for a moment. She watched the dormant fountain and worked very hard at looking like someone who was experiencing nothing in particular.

"Okay," he said, simply.

Not I'll try or probably or any of the dozen qualified half-promises she had been offered by people with considerably more social obligation to her. Just okay, in the tone of someone who meant it in a small and total way, the way you meant things that weren't complicated enough to require elaboration.

She breathed in once through her nose, measured.

"See that you do," she said. "I have specific standards for correspondence. Full sentences, legible handwriting. No drawings. I once received a letter from my cousin that contained a drawing of a horse and I have not forgiven him."

"What was wrong with the horse?"

"It was a terrible horse, Potter. It barely had legs."

She felt rather than saw the small shake of his shoulder. Not quite a laugh. The contained version, the one she'd seen translate into that quiet smile.

Something warm moved through her chest and she identified it and set it aside with the firm intention of examining it at some unspecified later date, which was to say never.

The bronze chime above the courtyard archway rang once a low, resonant sound that signaled a Portkey warming to activation. She looked at the weathered walking cane propped against the fountain's base that she knew to be hers.

She rose, smoothing the front of her blazer. Collected her bags. Made herself neat.

He stood as well, slightly after her, with the automatic courtesy of someone who wasn't performing it. He was a little taller than her in a way that was currently very close and which she was absolutely not noting.

She looked at him.

He looked back.

She arranged her expression into something with an edge the narrow, specific look she had, the one with the dark eyes and the slight pull at one corner of her mouth, the look people at school generally correctly interpreted as I am thinking something unkind and I am enjoying it.

"Be safe, Potter," she said.

It came out quieter than the look warranted. She kept the look anyway, because she needed something between her face and whatever her voice was apparently doing.

He blinked once. The sheepish smile came back, slow and crooked, and this time she was close enough to see that it reached the corner of his eyes.

"Yeah," he said. "You too, Parkinson."

She held the look for one more second.

Then she turned, picked up the Portkey, and felt the familiar hook behind her navel as the courtyard dissolved into nothing.

She had her dress robes, her textbooks, her potions ingredients.

She had, apparently, a correspondent for the summer.

She stared at the ceiling of the Parkinson entrance hall as the familiar rooms assembled themselves around her in the way of returned places, and she thought about chocolate, and about the outside warmth of a grey cotton sleeve not quite touching her shoulder, and about a boy who said okay like he meant it.

Be safe, she had said.

As threats went, she thought distantly, it had not been her most menacing.

She picked up her bags and walked upstairs.

Chapter 2

The Parkinson house in July was a study in careful architecture.

Not the physical kind, though the house itself was considered and deliberate in the way of old money that had learned to wear its age as an aesthetic rather than an admission—high ceilings, dark wood, portraits that watched without commenting, rooms that had been arranged for impression rather than comfort. Pansy had grown up navigating its specific geometry: which sitting rooms were safe on which days, which hallways carried sound between floors, where to be and when to be invisible.

No. The architecture she meant was the human kind. The structure her parents maintained between themselves with the load-bearing precision of people who had agreed, tacitly and without ever articulating the agreement, that the house would not become a theater. Voices did not raise. Doors did not slam. Her father came down to breakfast at eight and her mother at nine and the forty minutes between contained Pansy alone with her toast and the morning edition of the Prophet, which she read cover to cover not because she was interested in all of it but because reading gave her somewhere to put her eyes.

They were civil to each other. This was somehow worse than if they hadn't been.

At dinner they discussed safe subjects—the Ministry, mutual acquaintances, the Parkinson holdings in the north that her father was apparently restructuring, a process Pansy understood to be code for something she hadn't been given the vocabulary for yet. Her mother asked about her preparations for fourth year. Her father mentioned that Durmstrang had a finer Potions program, as he had mentioned approximately four times per year since she was eleven, and Pansy said yes, Father in the tone she had perfected over years, which managed to convey attentiveness while committing to nothing.

After dinner her father went to his study and her mother went to the conservatory and the house settled into its particular evening quiet, which was the quiet of two people performing solitude in separate rooms while being very much aware of each other.

Pansy went upstairs and read.

This was July in the Parkinson house. It had been July in the Parkinson house for as long as she could remember, with minor variations in cast and temperature, and she had long since developed the internal resources for surviving it. She had books. She had her notes from third year, which she organized and reorganized with the genuine pleasure of someone who liked systems and found the imposition of order onto accumulated knowledge quietly satisfying. She had a window seat that caught the afternoon light at the correct angle, and she had a view of the grounds that was genuinely pleasant if she wanted pleasant, and she had the practiced ability to make the inside of her own head sufficient company.

She was fine.

She was quite often fine, and the fineness had a texture to it in July that was somewhat thinner than its August or September version, and she noticed this the way you noticed structural things about load-bearing walls—with a practical awareness that had no immediate remedy.

The first two weeks passed.

She received a letter from her mother's solicitor regarding a trust document requiring her signature at seventeen. She received a brief, correctly punctuated note from Daphne Greengrass—typed, which was very Daphne—confirming that she was in Wiltshire, that it was dull, and that she had read two books Pansy might find interesting, titles enclosed. Pansy wrote back with equal economy and genuine appreciation and placed Daphne's note in the correspondence folder she maintained with the same organizational instinct she brought to her school notes.

She received nothing else.

This was, she told herself, expected. She had an extremely small social architecture, by both design and circumstance, and she had not genuinely anticipated—

She had the letter-sending fully sorted in her head by the third day of the second week, which was embarrassing, and which she noticed and set aside. She had drafted the opening in her head more than once, which was more embarrassing, and which she also set aside. She was not waiting. She was simply existing in sequential days that happened to pass without particular event, and if her attention moved occasionally and involuntarily toward the window where the owls came in, that was a reflex, not a vigil.

By the third week of July she had stopped expecting anything.

She was at her window seat on a Tuesday afternoon, approximately twenty days into the month, with her Advanced Potions text open to a chapter on Draught of Living Death variations, when she heard the particular soft percussion of wings against glass.

She looked up.

Two owls.

Not one—two, arriving within seconds of each other, the second apparently having caught up to the first mid-flight, jostling each other on the windowsill with the mild irritation of strangers forced into proximity. One was a handsome tawny she didn't recognize. The other was a battered-looking creature of indeterminate breed that had clearly lived a full and eventful life.

Both had letters attached.

She set her book down with a steadiness she was proud of and crossed to the window.

The letters were addressed in the same handwriting—not her father's solicitor, not Daphne, not anyone she'd been expecting. The script was direct and slightly inconsistent, the letters formed with clear intent but without the cultivated elegance of someone who'd been drilled on penmanship since childhood. The hand of someone who had things to say and prioritized getting them down over how it looked.

She stood at the window for a moment with both letters in her hand.

Then she sat back down on the window seat, arranged herself correctly, and opened the first one.

Parkinson—

Sorry this is late. Hedwig was being used by Ron and I had to borrow this other owl whose name I don't think anyone actually knows. He's fine but he has strong opinions about where he's willing to fly, which is apparently not all the way to wherever you are without a significant break, hence the second letter.

I didn't forget. I was going to lead with something more interesting but that seemed like the right thing to say first.

How's your summer.

—H.P.

P.S. Full sentences, you said. That last one technically has a subject and a predicate. I'm counting it.

She read it twice.

The second time she was aware of something happening in the region of her chest—not the single-movement thing from the bookshop, not the warm current from the courtyard bench, but something steadier than either, something that arrived with the quality of water finding a level rather than cresting. She recognized it distantly, from the outside, the way she'd recognized the topology of belonging in Flourish and Blotts. She recognized it as what it was and she did not immediately fold it away.

She let it exist for approximately thirty seconds.

Then she opened the second letter.

Parkinson—

This is the second owl because the first one stopped in Coventry apparently. I'm not sure how I know this but Hermione seems confident. Anyway if you get these out of order, the first one is the one that makes slightly more sense.

I've been thinking about something you said in the courtyard. The part about letters being a reasonable expectation between people who've had two conversations in a day. I've been counting and I think we've actually had four, if you count the doorway one as separate from the Flourish and Blotts almost-one, which I do, because in the almost-one you technically weren't speaking to me directly, you were just existing in the same aisle.

Anyway. Four conversations. That seems like enough for a summer.

Write back when you want.

—H.P.

P.S. The chocolate was Honeydukes 70%. In case you wanted to know. For correspondence purposes.

She sat with both letters in her lap for a long moment.

The afternoon light shifted across the window seat. One of the owls had departed. The battered one remained on the sill, watching her with the patient resignation of an animal that had learned to wait out human decision-making.

She counted, privately and against her will, the number of times she had read the line I didn't forget and what it had done each time.

Twice. It had done it twice, and the second time was worse, because she'd already known what it said and it had still landed with the same small force, the particular and disproportionate weight of a very plain thing said plainly.

She reached for her writing case.

Potter—

Your owl has an excellent work ethic and I have respected him for it accordingly. I've enclosed a small piece of dried fish which he accepted with what I can only describe as dignified relief.

My summer is structured and fine, as summers here tend to be. I have read four books, reorganized my third-year notes, and attended one dinner party with my parents' colleagues at which I was displayed to good effect and said nothing of consequence to anyone, which is apparently the correct outcome for these events.

I have a proposal, which I am framing as such rather than a request because I negotiate from a position of equivalence and I'd like you to be clear on that from the outset.

There is a bookshop in Bloomsbury—Thornfield's, on Museum Street—that carries both Muggle and wizarding texts and is not Diagon Alley and therefore involves no social calculus on either of our parts. I go in August. I am willing to adjust this to late July if the timing is workable for you.

This is not a significant invitation. It is a logistical proposal between two people who have apparently decided to correspond and who are both in London at accessible intervals.

Let me know if the 26th suits.

—P.P.

P.S. Your postscript convention is noted and I'm adopting it. The 70% was the correct choice. The 85% is technically superior but requires a specific mood.

She sealed it, attached it to the battered owl with the efficient movements of someone completing a practical task, and watched him launch from the sill into the warm July afternoon.

She picked up her Potions text.

She read approximately one paragraph.

She set it down again.

The response came on Thursday.

Parkinson—

The 26th works. Museum Street at noon?

—H.P.

P.S. I looked up the 85%. I'll bring some. For research.

She read it standing at the window, still in the process of opening it, the owl already gone.

The 26th works.

Five words, a location, a time.

She was aware of her heart doing something she would have described, in the interest of accuracy, as swooning, which was a word she had previously considered the exclusive property of badly written romance serials and people with less self-possession than her. She revised this assessment. She stood at the window with a four-line letter in her hand and her heart doing the thing and the warm July afternoon going about its business entirely indifferent to her situation, and she allowed it.

Thirty seconds.

She folded the letter.

She placed it in her correspondence folder, behind Daphne's typed note, in the section she had not yet labeled because labeling it would have constituted an acknowledgment she wasn't prepared to formalize.

She returned to the window seat.

She picked up her Potions text.

She read the same paragraph three more times before it took.

Outside, July continued in its careful, architectural way, and for the first time since the month had begun, the inside of Pansy Parkinson's head was considerably more interesting than the silence of the house around her.

She did not examine this too closely.

She simply let it be there, warm and specific and entirely her own, like a secret she hadn't told anyone yet, including herself.

Eleven days, she thought, without meaning to.

She turned the page.

She changed four times.

This was not something she would ever tell another living person, including Daphne, including any hypothetical future version of herself she might someday become, and she filed it immediately into the same unlabeled section of her internal correspondence folder as everything else that had accumulated there since Thursday. She changed four times and the fourth time she put on exactly what she had intended to wear from the beginning—the simple black dress, fitted and correct, ending just above the knee, with grey tights and flat black shoes and no blazer because it was July and she refused to be uncomfortable for the sake of armor—and stood in front of her mirror and looked at herself with the flat inventory gaze and decided it was fine.

She looked fine.

She looked like herself, which was either the same thing or a different thing depending on the day.

She did her hair the usual way—close to the neck, neat, the black of it sharp against the pale of her skin—and touched the small pearl studs in her ears that had been her grandmother's, because they were the correct scale for the neckline and for no other reason, and took the Portkey to Charing Cross Road at eleven forty-five.

Museum Street in late July was pleasantly busy in the Muggle way, which was to say busy without any particular sense of magical urgency, people moving at the pace of a Tuesday with somewhere mild to be. The bookshop was narrow-fronted, its sign hand-lettered in dark green over a cream background—Thornfield's: Books, Maps, and Curious Things—with a small card in the window advertising a reading event for the following week and a large tabby cat asleep on the sill, one ear tracking the street without any corresponding movement in the rest of its body.

Pansy was three minutes early.

She stood outside and did not check her watch again, because she had already checked it twice and that was already twice too many times for a person who did not care about the time in the way she was currently not caring about it. She watched the tabby cat. The tabby cat did not acknowledge her.

"Parkinson."

She turned.

Harry came up the pavement with the particular quality of movement she had now catalogued enough times to recognize—unhurried, slightly unassuming, as though he had not entirely made up his mind that he deserved the space he was occupying. He was in dark jeans and a plain white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and he was carrying a small paper bag that she suspected she knew the contents of, and his hair was doing the thing his hair always did, which was aggressively nothing.

He stopped a comfortable distance away and looked at her, and then he did something she had not prepared for.

He looked at her dress.

Not in the way that required defense, nothing transactional or appraising about it—just the honest, brief flicker of someone registering something and not having the social architecture to conceal the fact that they'd registered it. His expression moved, barely, toward something she couldn't fully classify.

"I like your dress," he said. Simple, direct, in the tone of someone relaying a true thing because it was true.

The blush arrived before she could convene the committee that would have voted against it.

She felt it move up the side of her neck and touch the edge of her jaw and she held very still and looked at him with the most composed expression she could assemble on short notice, which was, she felt, reasonably composed given the ambush.

"It's just a dress, Potter," she said.

"I know," he said, agreeably, as though this didn't change anything about what he'd said.

She turned toward the bookshop door and pushed it open.

Inside, Thornfield's smelled the way all correct bookshops smelled—paper and age and something faintly resinous, the smell of accumulated attention, of rooms that had been thought in. The ceilings were low, the shelves dark wood going nearly to the top, requiring a rolling ladder on a rail that someone had left at a slight angle near the back. There was a section on the left that was clearly wizarding-adjacent, the spines shifting occasionally when you weren't looking directly at them, and a section on the right that was Muggle and arranged in the idiosyncratic way of independent bookshops, which was to say with internal logic visible only to the person who had shelved them.

Harry came in behind her. She heard him take in the space the way people did when they liked it.

"You've been here before," he said.

"Three times."

"It's good."

"Yes," she said. "I know."

She moved toward the far wall without looking to see if he followed. He followed.

This was how it began—the two of them moving through the narrow aisles with the awkward initial calibration of people who had not yet established a shared pace, stopping at slightly different moments, reaching for spines with a half-beat of uncertainty about whether the other person was going to reach for the same one. She was acutely aware of him in the peripheral way she had perfected in the bookshop in Diagon Alley, except that this time it was not a gap in the shelving and it was not covert and there was no pretense of any other reason to be there.

He was there because she had asked him to be there.

She held this fact at arm's length and turned to look at the history section.

"What are you looking for?" he asked, from beside her left shoulder.

"I'll know it when I find it." She ran a finger along a row of spines. "You?"

"Not sure." A pause. "I don't really have a system."

"That's apparent."

"Is it?"

"You've been looking at that shelf for forty seconds and you've moved on three times. You're browsing without a method. It's inefficient."

He leaned against the opposite shelf and looked at her with that quiet attention. "What's your method?"

She considered whether to answer, which took less time than she'd have preferred. "Section first, then spine color—dark spines tend to be older stock, which is where the interesting things are. Then I read the first line of the first chapter. Not the back cover, not the blurb. First line."

"Just the one line?"

"If the first line doesn't justify itself, nothing that follows will."

He considered this with the seriousness he occasionally applied to things she said that she hadn't expected him to take seriously. "That's a good system," he said.

"I know," she said, and moved to the next shelf.

She was aware, with the particular precision she reserved for survivable truths, that she was being selfish.

She recognized it clearly, and she leaned into it without apology, the way she had leaned into the jealousy in Flourish and Blotts with the same clean unsentimental honesty. She was being selfish and she knew exactly what she was being selfish with: his attention. The quality of it, specifically—that unhurried, present, genuinely interested quality that she had watched him extend to Granger and Ginny Weasley from across a shelf gap, that she had catalogued and quietly wanted without letting herself name it, and which was now pointed at her with nothing and no one to distribute it across.

She had him entirely to herself.

There were no Grangers here. No red-haired girls with unraveling plaits. No Ron Weasley, no inside references, no shared history of years that she stood outside of. Just the bookshop and the afternoon and Harry Potter standing one shelf over asking her about her system, and she wanted to press the moment flat like a flower in a book and keep it, which was the most embarrassingly sentimental thought she'd had in recent memory.

She found a book with a dark spine—1890s, by the look of the cloth—and opened it to the first page.

She had lived too long with the knowledge to pretend it was a surprise.

She bought it without reading further.

They had been in the shop for nearly an hour when he found her in the back corner near the maps section, sitting on the floor beside the rolling ladder because the one narrow chair was occupied by a small boy doing his homework with great concentration. She had three books in her lap and was reading the first lines of each in rotation with the efficient focus of someone running a proper assessment.

Harry sat down beside her on the floor without asking.

She looked at him.

He produced the paper bag and held it out.

Inside: two pieces of chocolate, both Honeydukes, both wrapped, one dark and one a slightly lighter wrapper.

"Research," he said.

She took the darker one. He unwrapped the other, and for a while they sat on the floor of the maps section in companionable silence while she read first lines and he looked at a large Victorian map of London that he'd pulled from the bottom shelf and unfolded partially across his knee, tracing something on it with the idle concentration of someone who had nowhere to be.

She was aware of his shoulder against hers.

Not the almost-touching of the courtyard bench this time—an actual point of contact, warm through the thin cotton of his sleeve, steady and unannounced, the result of two people sitting against a narrow bookshelf in a small space. He didn't shift away. She didn't shift away. The map rustled quietly as he turned it.

"This one's from 1887," he said, mostly to himself.

"Mm."

"Museum Street's here." He tilted it slightly toward her without demanding she look.

She looked anyway. His finger—ink-stained slightly at the edge of the index, which she noticed and filed—rested on a narrow line of type. She leaned slightly to see it, which brought the crown of her head approximately level with his jaw, and she could smell him again—clean and warm and that same real, present quality, like standing near something that radiated actual heat rather than the performance of it.

She straightened.

"So it is," she said.

Her voice came out level. She was proud of this.

He refolded the map with the slightly imprecise technique of someone who had never been taught that maps had specific fold lines, and she did not correct him, which cost her something, because the incorrect folding was genuinely distressing. She held her opinion. A gift, freely given, that he would never know about.

"You're quiet," he said.

"I'm always quiet."

"Different kind of quiet from the Alley."

She turned one of the books over in her hands. "You're cataloguing my quiet types."

"You catalogued my smile types."

She looked at him sharply.

He looked back with the sheepish version of it, immediate and involuntary, the one that had started all of this, and she understood with a flatness that had become familiar that she had no reliable defense against it. None. She had looked down the inventory of her available responses and found them all inadequate for this specific expression on this specific face.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said.

"Doorway one," he said, pleasantly. "Bookshop one. Courtyard one."

"Potter."

"Parkinson."

"I will put these books back and leave."

"Okay," he said, in the tone that meant he knew she wasn't going to.

She turned back to the first lines. Her heart was doing the swooning thing again, low and steady and completely outside her jurisdiction, and she sat with it the way she'd sat with the letters—not fighting it, not indulging it, just aware of it the way you were aware of a light left on in a room you weren't using.

The small boy with his homework packed up and left. She moved to the chair with her three books, not because she needed to move but because she needed two inches of air between his shoulder and hers before she did something she couldn't catalogue away.

Harry watched her move without comment.

She opened the first book.

He went back to the map shelf.

And yet—she was aware of him. Continuously, peripherally, the specific awareness of someone whose location in a room had become information she was tracking without having decided to. He moved to the front of the shop. She knew it. He drifted back toward the wizarding section. She knew that too. When he came and sat in the low chair across from her small corner with a book of his own—something from the natural history section, she noted, which was unexpected—she felt the fact of him settle into the room like a temperature change, like weather that had arrived and made itself at home.

She read her first line again.

She had lived too long with the knowledge to pretend it was a surprise.

She thought about armour, and about the specific and inconvenient mechanics of things that found the joints in it—not forcing them, not pressing, just existing in the vicinity of them with enough quiet warmth that the metal began, despite all sensible instruction, to consider the possibility of being something else.

She thought about eleven days, and letters in an unlabeled folder, and a map with the wrong fold lines.

She turned the page and read.

The afternoon arranged itself in small moments.

This was the thing she hadn't anticipated—not one sustained event she could brace for and endure, but a series of minor unremarkable things that accumulated without warning into something she didn't have a category for. Harry holding the bookshop door for a woman with a pushchair and then immediately walking into the door frame because he'd been looking the wrong direction. Harry reading the back of a book about Victorian sewage infrastructure with apparent genuine interest. Harry producing, from somewhere about his person, a slightly bent Muggle coin he'd found on the floor near the natural history section and presenting it to her with the solemn formality of a significant discovery.

"It's a ten pence piece," she said.

"It's got a lion on it," he said.

"Most British currency does."

"Right, but this one was on the floor."

She looked at him. "I understand the words you're saying."

He put it in his pocket with the equanimity of someone whose enthusiasm had survived less supportive audiences than her. She watched him do it and pressed her mouth together very firmly.

They found a small café two doors down from Thornfield's at half two, the kind of Muggle establishment with mismatched chairs and a handwritten menu on a blackboard that Pansy would not normally have chosen and found, upon sitting down, completely acceptable. Harry ordered tea and a toasted sandwich with the decisive ease of someone untroubled by menus. She ordered tea and considered the handwritten options with the deliberate attention she brought to decisions and chose the soup, which arrived in a large bowl with bread on the side and was extremely good, which she acknowledged internally and not aloud.

Harry ate his sandwich with the unceremonious appetite of someone who had spent years eating quickly or not at all, which was a thing she understood because of what she knew about his home life from circulated Hogwarts rumor and which she did not mention because it was not her information to mention.

"You're staring," he said, without looking up.

"I'm observing," she said. "There's a distinction."

"What are you observing."

"Your table manners."

He looked up. "Are they bad?"

She considered. "They're functional." A beat. "The sandwich didn't stand a chance."

He laughed—an actual one, short and real, and she felt the vibration of it somewhere in her chest and looked at her soup with the focused attention of someone examining excellent soup.

"You're mean," he said, without heat.

"I know," she said.

"It's funny though."

"I'm aware."

"Do you ever say anything nice?"

She looked at him across the mismatched table with her dark eyes and the particular expression she had—composed, slightly arch, the freckles across her cheekbones doing nothing to soften it. "I'm here, aren't I," she said.

He went quiet for a moment, not the nothing-quiet but the kind that meant he'd received something and was placing it carefully.

"Yeah," he said. "You are."

She ate her soup.

They were back on Museum Street by half three, moving without a particular destination, which was something Pansy did not usually do and found less uncomfortable than expected. The afternoon had stretched into the easy golden register of late July, warm still but with the beginning of a cooler breath underneath it, and the street had thinned to a more relaxed crowd of people doing Friday afternoon in the city with nowhere urgent to be.

She was carrying her Thornfield's bag—two of the three books, in the end, the 1890s cloth-bound one and a slim volume of essays on architecture and power that she'd found behind it—and Harry was walking beside her in the easy unassuming way he moved through spaces, not quite matching her pace, which was precise, but adapting to it without appearing to make an effort.

She was explaining the first line system in more detail, which she had not intended to do but which had happened as a natural consequence of him asking a follow-up question she hadn't prepared a deflection for.

"—it's not a rule, it's a filter. The first line tells you what the writer thought was worth starting with, which tells you something about their priorities, which tells you whether your priorities are going to be compatible with—"

She grabbed his sleeve and pulled him sideways.

The movement was reflexive, total, and completely instinctive—she registered the group coming out of the tea room on the left approximately two seconds before they came fully into view and her body made the decision before her mind had finished processing it. She pulled him into the recessed arch of a shop doorway, deeper than the Diagon Alley one, a proper shadow with a closed door behind them, and she pressed back against the wood with Harry approximately six inches in front of her because the arch was not built for two.

Cassius Warrington. Two sixth-years she recognized by face and house affiliation. And Marcus Flint, graduated now, broader and slower-looking than she remembered, wearing robes that still somehow managed to look like a threat.

They moved past the doorway without looking in. Laughing about something. Gone.

She let out a breath.

And then she became aware of the situation.

Harry was very close. This was the proximate fact, and it was a significant one. He had turned when she pulled him, so they were facing each other in the narrow arch, and he was close enough that she could see the slight imperfection in the left lens of his glasses, the way his collar sat, the specific detail of his jaw in the shadow of the doorway. The summer had given him a faint tan across his nose and the tops of his cheekbones that his Hogwarts pallor had previously obscured, and his eyes behind the glass were very green, and he was looking at her with an attention that was not alarmed and not amused and not performing anything, simply focused and present and, she thought, trying very hard not to make the proximity into something that would make her retreat.

She was burning from the jaw down.

She was almost certain this was visible. Her complexion—pale to the point of translucence in winter, the pale that showed everything, the pale that her mother called interesting and her father called striking and which Pansy privately considered a structural liability—offered no concealment for warmth. She could feel it moving up her neck in slow insistent increments and there was nothing to be done.

She kept her expression still and looked past his shoulder.

"Warrington," she said, quietly. "And Flint."

"I know," he said, equally quiet.

"If they'd seen us—"

"I know."

Something in his tone made her look at him directly, which was a mistake she committed anyway.

"You know they would have made it ugly," she said.

"Yes." No argument, no performance of offense at the premise. "I'm not arguing with you."

"I'm not asking you to."

A beat. The arch was cool and smelled of old stone, and his warmth was approximately six inches away, and she needed him to say something ordinary so that she had somewhere to put her attention that was not the green of his eyes and the very unfortunate proximity.

"I just want you to know," he said, in the same quiet tone, "that I'd tell them."

She looked at him.

"If they asked," he said. "Or if they didn't. I'd tell anyone that we're friends. I'm not—" He stopped, considered, started again with the slightly imprecise honesty of someone working something out in real time. "I'm not embarrassed about you, Parkinson. I want to say that plainly because I think you might be waiting for me to be, and I'm not."

Something happened to her face. She felt it happen. A small motion at the corner of her mouth that was not the arch expression and not the controlled one and was entirely outside her management, something open and quickly covered, like a window blown wide by wind and pulled shut again in the same second.

"Don't be sentimental," she said. It came out softer than she'd aimed for.

"I'm not being sentimental," he said. "I'm being straightforward."

"There's a fine line."

"I know which side I'm on."

She looked at him for a moment longer than she meant to, in the cool shadow with the street going by a foot away, his face very clear and the warmth off him reaching her in the six inches between them. His expression didn't ask for anything. It simply held what he'd said, steady, the way he held most things—without requiring her to confirm receipt, without watching her face for a reaction that would tell him whether it had landed.

He already knew it had landed. She understood this and found it deeply inconvenient.

"They would make it difficult for you," she said. "People like Flint. And worse than Flint."

"I know."

"I'm not—" She stopped. Looked at the street. "I'm not pulling you in here for my sake, Potter. You should understand that."

He was quiet for a moment. "I know that too," he said.

"Good." She straightened. Looked out at the pavement, clear now. "Then we understand each other."

She stepped out of the arch before he could answer and walked back onto Museum Street and did not look at her reflection in any of the shop windows, because she knew already what she would find there and she wasn't ready to look it in the face.

She snapped at him twenty minutes later.

It was small and she knew it was small and she knew exactly why it had happened—the arch, and the closeness, and the thing he'd said, and the window blown open and pulled shut and the residual cold of it still sitting in her chest alongside the warmth, and none of this being his fault, and that being somehow the most difficult part. He'd made an observation about something she'd said, mildly, in the way he sometimes did, and she'd responded with an edge that was sharper than the conversation warranted and colder than she'd intended, and she'd seen the moment it landed—nothing dramatic, just the brief stilling of his expression, the slight recalibration.

He hadn't snapped back. He hadn't withdrawn. He'd simply—absorbed it, and moved on.

She walked beside him and felt dejected in the specific way of someone who had been handed something careful and reacted to it with a chisel.

The light was going, finally, the gold tipping into something softer and lower, and the street was evening-warm now with the cooler undercurrent that had been building since half four. She had her books in her bag and her arms crossed loosely over her front and she was looking at the pavement with the composed expression of someone who had absolutely no feelings about anything.

She was very cold.

She had not brought a cardigan because it had been July at noon and now it was July at six and the difference was meaningful and she had miscalculated and she was not going to say anything about it.

"You're cold," Harry said.

"I'm fine."

"Your arms are crossed and you've had the same expression for the last three minutes."

"This is my usual expression."

"Your usual expression is more—" he searched for the word, "—pointed. This one is trying to be pointed and is actually just cold."

She turned to look at him with all the pointed expression she could assemble.

He was already pulling off his hoodie.

It was grey, worn soft with use, Muggle—she registered the texture of it before she registered the fact of it being held out to her, which was fast, because Harry was apparently operating on the same timeline as the chocolate, the coin, and the floor of the maps section, which was to say the timeline of someone who did things before she could build a position against them.

"Potter—"

"It's cold," he said, simply.

"I'm not taking your—"

"Parkinson."

She looked at the hoodie. She looked at him, in his white shirt with the sleeves still rolled to the elbow, standing on Museum Street in the evening cool as though the temperature was a completely theoretical concern.

She took the hoodie.

She put it on.

It was enormous on her—she was slight enough that it swallowed her in the specific way of a garment built for a different architecture entirely, falling past her hips and swamping her shoulders, the sleeves past her wrists so that only her fingers showed. She pushed the sleeves up with what she hoped was the efficiency of someone completing a practical adjustment and not the gestures of someone drowning pleasantly.

It smelled like him. Warm and real and that specific clean-warmth that she had catalogued from the courtyard bench and the maps section and the archway, and she was now wearing it, walking down Museum Street with it around her, and she looked at the pavement and breathed through her nose with the measured care of someone negotiating a significant challenge.

He looked at her.

She could feel him looking at her.

"Don't," she said.

"I wasn't saying anything."

"You were about to."

A pause. "You look—"

"Potter."

"—warm," he finished, with the sheepish smile evident in his voice without her needing to see it, the crooked insufferable one that had started all of this on a June afternoon in a different doorway.

She pressed her mouth together.

She was swooning and she was furious and both of these things were completely true simultaneously, the swooning located somewhere behind her sternum and the fury located in the part of her that had looked down the inventory of her defenses and found every single one had been quietly circumvented over the course of a not-date in a Muggle bookshop by a boy who sat on floors and folded maps incorrectly and gave her his hoodie without making it mean anything, except that it meant everything, and she had no mechanism for this that she had been equipped with.

She was pale and slight and dark-eyed and sharp-featured and thirteen years old and she was wearing Harry Potter's hoodie on Museum Street and her heart was doing the thing completely beyond her jurisdiction.

"I'm still annoyed at you," she said.

"From earlier?"

"From generally."

"Fair," he said.

They walked to the corner where Museum Street met the Bloomsbury main road, and she stopped because her Portkey back was keyed to this junction, a small bronze lamp-ring on the post that would activate at six thirty. Harry's was apparently from Charing Cross, she knew from the letters, a small detour.

She faced him at the junction with the evening light behind her and her books in her bag and his hoodie around her shoulders and her face—pale, the freckles visible across the high line of her cheeks, her dark eyes catching the low amber of the evening—giving away approximately nothing, which required slightly more effort than usual.

"The hoodie," she said.

"Keep it for now," he said. "Return-by-owl policy."

She looked at him.

He looked back, and the expression was—not the sheepish smile, not the soft one, but something quieter than both, something that didn't announce itself or ask for recognition, just existed in the specific way of things that were true and didn't need saying.

"Potter," she said, after a moment.

"Parkinson."

"Next time." She paused, selected the words with the care of a person assembling something structural. "If there is a next time—"

"There's a next time," he said, simply.

She held his gaze for one beat, two.

"I'll pick somewhere better than the floor of the maps section," she said.

"The floor of the maps section was your choice."

"It was a practical decision about available seating."

"Sure," he said, in the tone that meant he was keeping the sheepish smile in reserve and she was only temporarily safe.

She turned toward the lamp post.

"Be safe," she said, without looking back, and she heard him make a small sound that might have been a quiet laugh.

"You too, Parkinson."

The lamp-ring warmed under her fingers, the familiar pull arrived, and Museum Street dissolved into the Portkey dark.

She landed in the Parkinson entrance hall with the books in her bag and the hoodie around her shoulders and her face, finally, privately, doing the thing she'd been holding it back from doing for several hours—the thing with the corner of her mouth, the window blown open, something that wasn't the arch expression and wasn't the controlled one and looked, in the dark mirror of the hallway, rather like something she didn't have a name for yet.

She stood in the hallway for a moment.

She pressed her face briefly into the collar of the hoodie.

Clean and warm and real and him.

She straightened.

Smoothed the front of the hoodie, which did not smooth, because it was enormous on her and entirely unwilling to behave.

She walked upstairs.

Chapter 3

The Dark Mark hung over the campsite at half past two in the morning.

Pansy did not see it directly. She saw it the way most of Britain saw it—in the Prophet's special edition that arrived before breakfast the following morning, dropped through the Parkinson letterbox with the particular weighted thud of a paper that knew it was carrying something significant. She was already awake. She had been awake since just past one, for reasons she couldn't entirely account for, sitting in her window seat with the lights low and her knees pulled to her chest and the night outside being very quiet in the way that felt, in retrospect, like a held breath.

She heard the thud. She came downstairs in her dressing gown.

She read the front page standing in the hallway with her bare feet on the cold tile.

DARK MARK OVER QUIDDITCH WORLD CUP CAMPSITE. DEATH EATER ACTIVITY CONFIRMED. MULTIPLE CASUALTIES REPORTED. MINISTRY RESPONSE ONGOING.

She read it twice.

Then she set it very carefully on the hallway table and went back upstairs.

She did not know, concretely, that Harry had been at the Quidditch World Cup.

She knew it the way she knew most things about him—through the accumulated context of letters and conversation and paying attention to things she would not have admitted to paying attention to. Ron Weasley had been talking about the Cup in the corridors since April. Harry went everywhere the Weasleys went, as a structural matter. Harry had mentioned in his second letter, in passing, that he was going to a match that he was somehow managing to be low-key about, which she'd found suspicious even then.

She had not asked directly. She had not wanted to be the kind of person who kept a ledger of his whereabouts.

She sat on her window seat in the grey early morning light and was the kind of person who kept a ledger of his whereabouts, and did not enjoy the discovery.

The worry arrived immediately and was enormous and she was very angry about this.

Not at the situation, though the situation warranted anger. Not at the Death Eaters in the abstract, though they warranted considerably more than anger. She was angry at herself, specifically and pointedly, for the scale of what she was feeling, for the fact that she had apparently allowed someone close enough to her that their potential harm registered as a physical thing in her chest, a clenching, a wrongness, a fundamental objection she hadn't been consulted about before it installed itself.

She had told herself.

She had told herself repeatedly and with great clarity and now she was sitting in a window seat at six in the morning in her dressing gown turning the pages of a newspaper about Dark Marks and her hands were not entirely steady and this was unacceptable information about herself that she was simply going to have to manage.

She managed it by being angry instead. This was a reasonable substitution. Anger was functional; it had directionality and edge and it kept you from sitting still in the specific useless way of worry, which required no motion and produced no results. She was angry on his behalf in a fierce, clean, uncomplicated way she hadn't anticipated having access to—angry at the thing that had moved through the campsite in the dark, angry at whatever hand had cast that Mark against the sky, angry with a sharpness that had nothing to do with politics or houses or her parents' carefully maintained neutrality and everything to do with the fact that someone had threatened a specific person on a specific night and she had extremely strong feelings about that.

She was protective of him.

This was also new information she was declining to fully process.

She went downstairs and ate breakfast and read the rest of the paper with the same face she wore for dinner and said, when her mother came down at nine and saw the front page, that it was very concerning and yes she understood they would want to review travel arrangements for the start of term.

She went back upstairs.

She wrote a letter to no one in particular with no particular content and then put it away.

She waited.

The day passed with the quality of a held note.

She reorganized her school notes, which did not need reorganizing. She finished the cloth-bound 1890s book from Thornfield's in one sitting, which under normal circumstances would have been satisfying and was instead simply something her eyes did while her attention was elsewhere. She ate lunch. She came back upstairs. She looked at the window at regular intervals with the casualness of someone who was absolutely not doing that.

By evening she had reached the specific far end of worry where it hollows out and goes quiet and cold, the place past anxious movement where you simply exist in the waiting with nothing left to spend on it. She sat on her window seat with the hoodie across her lap—she had not returned it yet, which was a choice she was not examining—and looked at the grounds going dark and was very composed and entirely fine.

She did not sleep particularly well.

The second day arrived and was identical in texture to the first and she was beginning to construct, internally, the architecture of a feeling she recognized as the specific combination of relief that hadn't been earned yet and preemptive grief that she absolutely did not have the right to—

The owl came at half eleven.

She heard the wings before she saw it—a white shape resolving out of the mid-morning sky with the purposeful directness of an animal that knew exactly where it was going and had opinions about the efficiency of the route. It landed on her windowsill with the composed authority of a creature accustomed to being let in immediately, and looked at her with large amber eyes that contained, she felt, a complete and accurate assessment of her entire situation.

Hedwig.

She knew the owl from Harry's descriptions—she's white and extremely judgmental and smarter than most people I know—and she was, in person, exactly this. She sat on the windowsill and regarded Pansy with the patient authority of someone who had delivered important correspondence before and understood its weight.

Pansy opened the window.

Hedwig stepped inside with the unhurried dignity of a house guest who had pre-approved her own invitation and extended her leg with the small composed motion of a professional completing a handoff.

Pansy unrolled the letter with hands that were steadier than the previous morning. Marginally.

Parkinson—

I'm fine. I know that's probably the first thing. We all got out before it got bad—I won't go into it in a letter but it was a long night and I've spent the last day being alternately questioned by Ministry officials and fed soup by Mrs. Weasley, which is an experience, and I'm fine.

Hedwig wouldn't let me send anyone else. She was very insistent about this. I think she wanted to check on you specifically, which I'm choosing not to read into.

Are you alright? That's a real question, not a formality. I know you'd have seen the papers.

We leave for school in two weeks. I have a lot of things I want to tell you that aren't for letters. Save me a piece of that 85% if you have any.

—H.P.

P.S. Full sentences throughout. I'm improving.

She read it once.

She put it down on her knee and looked at Hedwig, who was sitting on the corner of her desk with the expression of someone who had completed the primary task and was now simply present as a courtesy.

"He's fine," Pansy told the owl, which was not something she had ever previously done—spoken to an owl as though it was a participant in the emotional content of a situation—and which she was doing now with complete naturalness, as though Hedwig had asked.

Hedwig ruffled her feathers in a way that conveyed, with remarkable precision, the sentiment of obviously, I know, I was just there.

Pansy laughed.

It came out small and she would have been embarrassed by it in front of anyone else, but it was just her and the owl in the morning light and it came out anyway—quiet, a little unsteady, the laugh of someone who had been clenched around something for two days and felt the tension release before they'd prepared for it. She pressed two fingers to her mouth briefly after, like she could put it back.

Hedwig looked at her with the amber eyes.

"Don't," Pansy said.

Hedwig made a small sound of supreme indifference.

Pansy reached over and, after a very brief hesitation, ran one careful finger down the top of the owl's head. Hedwig accepted this with the dignity of a creature that had made better people than her work harder for the privilege and had decided, on this occasion, to grant it freely.

Pansy wrote back.

Potter—

I saw the papers. I'm glad you're alright. This is not a statement I intend to elaborate on or repeat.

Your owl is excellent and clearly the best-organized member of your immediate social circle. Please convey my regards.

Two weeks. Don't do anything catastrophic before then.

—P.P.

P.S. I have the 85%. Conditions for access to be negotiated on arrival.

P.P.S. The soup was probably necessary. Accept the soup.

She attached it and sent Hedwig back out into the morning with a small piece of the dried fish she had kept, she was not going to think about why she had kept it, in the corner of her desk drawer.

She watched the white shape diminish into the sky.

Then she leaned back against the window frame with Harry's letter in her lap and the hoodie pooled beside her and the unlabeled section of her correspondence folder getting quietly heavier, and she sat with the relief that had finally arrived now that there was somewhere for it to land, and she let herself feel it without managing it for the first time in two days.

He was fine.

She was extremely angry about how relieved she was.

She was also, underneath the anger, in the specific and unguarded territory of late morning in her room with no one watching, something that felt very much like glad in a way that reached down past the managed parts to something younger and less defended, something that hadn't yet learned to be careful.

She let it exist.

No folder. No label. Just there.

The two weeks passed.

She would not have said they passed quickly, because she did not believe in the particular comfort of that retrospective compression—time moved at the speed it moved and nostalgia for it began approximately three seconds after it ended, which was too fast and she refused to indulge it. But they passed with a different quality than the first three weeks of July had, a different texture to the waiting, because the waiting now had a shape to it and a direction and a date at the end of it that she was completely indifferent to in the same way she was completely indifferent to all the other things she'd been cataloguing in her unlabeled folder since June.

She packed with her usual system—transfiguration robes first, then textbooks alphabetically by subject, then personal items in order of frequency of use, nothing left to chance. She packed the two Thornfield's books in her reading bag. She packed the Honeydukes 85%, which she had indeed kept back, in the outer pocket with the careful wrapping preserved.

She did not pack the hoodie.

She folded it and put it on the corner of her desk, where it had lived for the past three weeks, because it was not hers to pack and she was going to owl it back to him now that she had definitive proof he was alive and able to receive laundry.

She was going to do this.

She picked it up once, briefly, because she was checking the pocket for the dried fish she might have left in it, and then she put it back on the corner of the desk.

She would owl it.

At some point.

September first arrived with the particular quality of the day that ended summers—cool and bright and carrying in its air the first true suggestion of autumn, the smell of turned earth and early morning and something that was almost woodsmoke but not yet. Pansy stood on the Parkinson drive in her travelling clothes—dark trousers, white shirt, grey wool coat she had pressed herself the previous evening because detail mattered—while her father supervised the loading of her trunk into the Ministry car he'd arranged, because her mother was still in Lyon and had sent a brief note and a silk scarf as a combined apology and back to school gift.

She folded the note and put it in her coat pocket.

She had long since learned to allocate her disappointments efficiently.

Her father kissed her on the forehead at the door of the car in the way he did when he was being, by his own measure, adequate—the gesture of a man who understood the requirement of fatherhood in the contractual sense and fulfilled it with reasonable regularity. He told her to work hard and to remember what the Parkinson name meant at Hogwarts.

"Yes, Father," she said, in the practiced tone.

She got in the car.

King's Cross was exactly what it always was—loud and warm and smelling of coffee and diesel and the particular kind of organized chaos that Muggles had developed for transit, purposeful and impersonal and moving in all directions. Pansy moved through it with the unhurried precision that served her in crowds, her trunk on its trolley, her reading bag on her shoulder, her coat buttoned against the September morning.

Platform Nine and Three Quarters was on the other side of the barrier, and the train was on the other side of the platform, and somewhere on the train or the platform was the beginning of fourth year, which included Advanced Potions and an Arithmancy module she'd been looking forward to and something she had been reading about in rumor and inference all summer—something the Prophet had hinted at, something her father's colleagues had mentioned obliquely over dinner, something involving a certain tournament that hadn't been held in over a century.

And somewhere on the platform, statistically—

She pushed through the barrier.

The Hogwarts Express stood in its red and certain glory, breathing steam into the September morning, and the platform moved around her in all the familiar directions—families, trunks, owls, cats, the sound of people who had been away from each other for three months discovering they still knew how to be loud together.

She found her compartment. She stowed her trunk. She settled into the window seat with her wool coat folded beside her and her reading bag open and the 1890s cloth-bound book in her hands, because she had finished it in July but she was re-reading it for the architecture of the prose.

She was not watching the platform through the window.

She was reading.

She was doing this with complete conviction and total awareness of the platform, simultaneously, which was a skill she had developed to a high proficiency.

The whistle went. The train began to move.

The platform slid away and became the edge of the city and then the outskirts and then the open country going gold with the beginning of autumn, and the compartment held its familiar rocking rhythm, and she read her book, and fourth year arranged itself in front of her like an unopened letter she already suspected the contents of.

She turned the page.

She was not thinking about anyone in particular.

She was four pages into her re-read when the paper appeared.

It arrived the way small magic arrived—quietly, without announcement, simply becoming present where it had not been a moment before, folded into a precise square and sitting on the seat beside her with the composed certainty of something that had always intended to be there. She looked at it for a moment before she picked it up, because picking it up was an acknowledgment and she preferred to make acknowledgments deliberately.

She picked it up.

The outside said Parkinson in the handwriting she recognized, direct and slightly inconsistent, formed with intent over elegance. She unfolded it.

Compartment six, front of the train. When you're ready. No rush.

—H.P.

She read it twice.

She looked out the window at the countryside moving past in its early September gold. She looked back at the note. She folded it once, precisely, along its original crease.

She sat for a moment longer than necessary, which she was aware of and which she attributed to finishing her page, which she was in the middle of, which was a reasonable reason that had nothing to do with composing herself.

She finished her page.

She put the book in her reading bag. She smoothed her trousers. She stood, and checked the small mirror above the seat with the brief inventory gaze—white shirt correct, dark hair neat, the freckles across her cheekbones doing their usual thing, her dark eyes giving nothing away—and she picked up her bag and walked to the front of the train.

Compartment six was at the far end of the first carriage, separated from the adjacent ones by slightly more distance than was architecturally necessary, as though someone had planned for the possibility of private conversation. The door was slid most of the way closed. Through the glass she could see him before he saw her—sitting with one knee up against the seat back, looking out the window, his hair doing its thing in the September morning light that came through the glass.

She was not prepared for what happened when she saw him.

She had been managing it, she realized. The whole of July and August, she had been managing the wanting-to-see-him with the same efficient systems she applied to everything difficult—the letters in the folder, the attention redirected, the feeling acknowledged and filed and not revisited. She had been doing this well. She had been, by her own measure, functional.

And then she saw him through a train compartment window and all the managed parts rearranged themselves without her permission and what was underneath them was very simple and very large and had been there since the morning she'd sat with the newspaper in the hallway with her bare feet on cold tile and her hands not entirely steady.

She had been frightened for him.

Past tense, present tense, both simultaneously.

She pushed the compartment door open.

He looked up.

The smile appeared—not the sheepish one, not the soft one from Flourish and Blotts, but something more immediate than either, the smile of someone who had been waiting for a specific person and had just seen them. It crossed his face before he could think about it and she suspected he knew this and didn't mind.

"Parkinson," he said.

"Potter," she said.

She stepped inside. She slid the door closed behind her.

He was standing now, unfolding from the seat with the easy motion of someone who had decided on a course of action and was seeing it through, and she had approximately one second of looking at him—taller than June, summer-tan faded to something more moderate, the glasses still slightly crooked—before she closed the remaining distance between them and put her arms around him.

She was not entirely sure she had decided to do this.

Her body had made the assessment faster than her mind and had acted on it without convening the committee, and the committee was several seconds behind, catching up, arriving to find the situation already in progress. Her arms were around his shoulders and her face was pressed into the side of his neck and she could feel the warmth of him through his shirt and the solidity of him, the simple fact of him being real and present and here and unharmed, and the thing that had been sitting in her chest since the newspaper in the hallway came loose all at once like a knot released.

She pulled him closer.

She felt the moment he understood what this was—a small stillness, a fraction of a second, and then his arms came up around her without any performance, one across her back and one higher, careful and unhurried, and she felt him breathe in once and then release it. A long, slow exhale that moved through his whole chest. The sound and shape of something setting down weight.

The train rocked gently on the rails.

The compartment was quiet.

She kept her face where it was and said nothing and he said nothing and the silence was the kind that didn't require filling, the specific silence of two people who had arrived at the same place from different directions and had, for the moment, stopped moving.

She was aware of details with the heightened precision of extreme proximity—the warmth of him, the steadiness of his breathing, the way his hand sat at the middle of her back with a weight that was present without being demanding, simply there, the way he tended to be simply there. He smelled the same as the hoodie she had not returned. She registered this with the flat inventory part of her brain and did not do anything with the information except hold it.

She pulled back first.

She did this with the measured deliberateness of someone choosing the moment rather than being driven to it, and she kept her hands at his shoulders for a beat after, because her body was still several steps behind her composed expression. She looked at him.

He looked back. His expression was very quiet. Not the smile, not the sheepish version or the soft one—just his face, open and undisguised, with something in it she didn't have a ready word for and wasn't going to look for one right now.

She removed her hands from his shoulders.

She sat down across from him in the window seat, arranged her reading bag beside her, and looked out at the countryside with the composed expression of someone who had not just done what she had just done.

Harry sat back down.

He did not say anything. This was, she thought, the correct instinct.

After a moment, she said, "You're in one piece."

"Mostly," he said.

"Mostly is insufficient."

"There's nothing wrong with the other bits," he said. "They're just—tired."

She looked at him directly then. He did look tired. Not the surface tired of a bad night but the deeper kind, the tired that had moved into the architecture of a person over an extended period and made itself structural—a faint shadow at the corners of his eyes, something in the way he sat that was carrying more than his usual easy posture. The summer had been in him differently than she'd read in the letters, she thought. The letters had been careful. He was less careful in person, or perhaps simply less able to be, and she looked at the tired in him and felt the anger move through her again—clean and fierce and not at him.

"Tell me what happened," she said. "Not the Prophet version. Not what you told the Ministry."

He looked at her for a moment.

"You don't have to," she said, which cost her something, because she wanted to know and the wanting was not mild.

"No, I—" He leaned back slightly. "It was mostly fine until it wasn't. There were people in masks. The Mark in the sky." A pause. "I lost Ron and Hermione for a while in the dark."

She absorbed this. "Were you hurt."

"No."

"Were you frightened."

A beat. "Yes."

She nodded. She looked at the countryside. "Good," she said.

He raised an eyebrow at her.

"Being frightened means you understood the situation accurately," she said. "It's the people who aren't frightened that make catastrophic decisions."

He considered this. "That's—actually a reasonable way of looking at it."

"I have a reasonable way of looking at most things. You'd know this if you paid attention."

"I pay attention," he said, and said it simply enough that she had nothing to deflect with, so she looked back out the window.

"This year," she said, after a moment.

"Mm."

"I need you to—" She stopped. Began again with the precision of someone choosing words that would commit to something while retaining the appearance of not committing. "There's something coming. You know that. The Mark in the sky wasn't random and it wasn't vandalism, it was a signal, and signals mean something is being organized toward and whatever it is being organized toward will find you faster than it finds anyone else because it always does." She paused. "I need you to be careful this year."

"I'm always careful," he said.

She looked at him with the full weight of what she thought of this statement.

He had the grace to look slightly abashed. "I try to be careful," he amended.

"Try harder," she said. "Significantly harder. With intention and sustained effort."

"Parkinson—"

"I mean it, Potter." Her voice came out quieter than the words warranted, with an edge underneath it that was not quite anger and not quite the other thing and was probably, she acknowledged privately, both. "I mean it in a way that I am choosing to express as a directive rather than as whatever it actually is, and I would appreciate you receiving it in that spirit."

He was quiet for a moment. The train moved through a stretch of countryside that went briefly dark under cloud cover, and the compartment dimmed and lightened again, and his face in the changing light was very clear and attentive.

"Okay," he said, in the small total way.

She breathed in once through her nose.

"Good," she said.

She reached into her reading bag and produced the Honeydukes 85% with the composed efficiency of someone completing a scheduled handover. She broke off a piece and held it out.

He took it. His fingers were warm against hers for the half-second of the exchange and she removed her hand with the smooth unhurried movement of someone for whom this was a completely unremarkable physical event.

"Conditions for access," he said, with the memory of the letter.

"Satisfied," she said. "On this occasion."

He ate the chocolate. She ate hers. The train rocked on through the September morning, and the countryside outside the window went gold and green and gold again, and the compartment held its easy quiet, and she sat with her reading bag and her composed expression and the warmth of the hug still in her arms like a temperature the air hadn't quite caught up with yet.

She would not think about it while she was still in the same room as him. That was a rule she was instituting immediately and retroactively.

"Your owl," she said, after a while.

"What about her?"

"She's extraordinary."

Something shifted in his expression—the soft version of the smile, the unselfconscious one from Flourish and Blotts, the one he wore when he didn't know he was wearing it. "Yeah," he said. "She is."

"She assessed me," Pansy said. "In approximately four seconds. I've met adults who couldn't do it that efficiently."

"What did she decide?"

Pansy looked at her reading bag. "Apparently I passed," she said, which was as close as she was going to come to telling him that she had sat with his owl in her room on a Tuesday morning and laughed for the first time in two days.

Harry nodded, unsurprised, as though Hedwig's endorsement was both expected and significant. "Good," he said. "Her opinion matters."

"I gathered." A beat. "I still have your hoodie."

"I know."

"I was going to return it."

"Okay."

She looked at him. "I didn't."

"I know that too," he said, in the same easy tone, the tone that wasn't making anything of it and somehow made everything of it by not making anything of it, and she looked at the window because she needed somewhere neutral to put her eyes.

Outside, the last of the summer countryside was giving way to the first true signs of northern autumn—the trees beginning to consider their colors, the light carrying its new September angle, the whole landscape in the process of becoming something other than what it had been. She watched it move past and held the warmth of the last half hour like the 85% chocolate, present on the tongue before you were ready for it to be gone.

"I should go back," she said, eventually. "To my compartment."

"You could stay," he said. Not pressing, not performing. Just the option, placed on the table with the same ease as the chocolate and the note and the compartment number.

She looked at him.

"Daphne will be looking," she said.

"Okay."

She stood. Collected her reading bag. Smoothed her trousers. Looked at him in the September light with her dark eyes and her composed expression and the freckles across her high cheeks that she couldn't do anything about.

"Potter."

"Parkinson."

"Don't make me worry again," she said, and said it plainly, the way he said things, without the armor, just the true thing underneath it placed briefly in the open air.

It cost her something considerable.

He looked at her with the quiet open expression that didn't ask for anything, and something in it was careful and sure in a way that moved through her chest like the first line of a very good book.

"I'll do my best," he said.

It was, she thought, the most honest answer he could have given, and she had known him long enough now—in whatever sense she knew him, in whatever category this was—to understand that he meant it in a way that was total and structural and would hold.

She nodded once.

She opened the compartment door.

She walked back through the rocking train to her own carriage with the September light in the windows and her reading bag on her shoulder and the warmth of him still present in her arms, and she did not look back, and she did not need to, because she already knew what she would find there.

Him, watching. Quietly. The way he always did.

Not going anywhere.

Chapter 4

The image she caught in the mirror of the fourth-year girls' dormitory on the first morning back was, she thought, marginally different from the one she'd left in June.

Not dramatically. She didn't believe in dramatic changes, found them narratively convenient and practically unlikely, the province of stories where people emerged from summers transformed rather than simply incrementally revised. But the mirror told small truths if you looked at it with the flat inventory gaze and she looked at it every morning with exactly that, because the alternative was looking at it the way her mother looked at mirrors, which was with an evaluative hunger she had decided early she would not inherit.

Her hair was shorter.

She'd had it cut in August, on an impulse that was actually the result of two weeks of consideration, which was how her impulses tended to work. The cut before had sat at the nape of her neck, neat and deliberate. This one sat just at her ears—blunt-edged, precise, the black of it sharp against the pale line of her jaw. It made her face more visible, which she had anticipated and accepted as the terms of the decision. Her jaw, sharpening now in the way of fourteen with its slow reliable geometry, and her cheekbones, which her mother called pronounced and which were becoming more so, and the freckles across them, which she could not do anything about and had stopped attempting to manage.

The freckles were more visible than they'd been in June.

The summer sun had found them despite her careful habits and brought them out across the bridge of her nose and the high curve of her cheeks in the light scattered way of something that couldn't be curated, small dark points against the pale that she examined in the mirror with the same impartial attention she brought to everything about herself. She did not like them. She did not dislike them. They were simply there, a feature of her face that operated independently of her preferences, like the dark of her eyes and the particular quality of her stillness.

She was taller by perhaps an inch since June, which she had also noted with the same impartial accounting. Her legs were longer in the way of fourteen going on fifteen—still slight, still narrow, the architecture of her build consistent with what it had always been, which was lean in the way that photographed well and disappeared in crowds. She wore her school skirt at the regulation length and her black tights, always, and her oxfords polished, and her robes correctly pressed, and she moved through the corridors of Hogwarts with the deliberate unhurried precision she had developed as a first year and refined since, the walk of someone who had decided that posture was the minimum viable armor.

She became aware, in the first week, that people were looking.

Not students her own year, or not primarily. Older students. Fifth years, sixth years, once or twice someone she recognized as a seventh year whose name she didn't know, who looked at her in the corridors between classes with an attention that was not hostile and not predatory in any immediate sense but was simply—assessing. The look of someone revising an impression. She had been at Hogwarts for three years and had moved through it largely beneath notice, which had been intentional and successful, and now something in the summer's revisions had apparently complicated this, and she catalogued it with the flat inventory gaze and did not change her walk.

She did not smile about it.

She did not smile about most things.

This was not a decision she had made consciously. It was simply the result of a long and honest accounting that had arrived, somewhere around age eleven, at the conclusion that her smile was something she could not control the meaning of once it left her face—that it would be interpreted and used and filed in people's assessments of her in ways she hadn't authorized—and so she had quietly retired it from general circulation. She still had it. It existed. It had appeared, in the unlabeled section of this past summer, at specific and unplanned moments that she had subsequently examined with some concern.

But in the general corridors of Hogwarts, in classrooms and the Great Hall and the public architecture of the castle, Pansy Parkinson did not smile, and this, combined with the rest of her, produced an impression she was aware of and had decided was more useful than the alternative.

Parkinson's cold. She'd heard it. She received it as information rather than wound.

Cold meant contained. Cold meant people made their calculations about her and then left her to her own.

Cold was useful.

The loneliness was not new.

She wanted to be precise about this, as she was precise about most things, because there was a version of this story that was sentimental and she refused to tell it. The loneliness was not a fourth-year development, not something that had arrived with the new haircut or the freckles or the corridors of older students revising their impressions. It was structural, load-bearing, had been present since she was small enough to sit at her parents' dinner table and understand that the conversation happening above her head was two people performing a marriage for an audience of one.

She had simply become more aware of its specific texture at Hogwarts, because Hogwarts put it in high contrast.

The common room on the first night back had the quality of a room resuming itself—people falling back into the easy groupings of the previous year with the naturalness of returned travelers, the conversation picking up mid-sentence, three months of summer becoming material for collective story. Pansy sat in the chair nearest the window, which was her chair in the operational sense of something claimed by consistent occupation rather than declaration, and she watched it happen.

Millicent Bulstrode was laughing at something Tracey Davis had said, a full laugh, unguarded, her whole face involved. Tracey had her knees pulled up on the sofa in a way that suggested she had been sitting exactly like this in this exact room for three years and the room agreed. Two fifth-year girls Pansy knew by name and house affiliation were sharing photographs from someone's family holiday, leaning into each other with the ease of people who had learned to trust the leaning.

Even Daphne, cool and composed and precise as Pansy herself, had a particular way of settling into the common room that suggested, subtly, that she was home. She sat across from Pansy now with a book open and a cup of tea and the contained ease of someone for whom the world moved at an acceptable pace. They were friends in the Slytherin sense—allied, mutually regarding, genuine in the limited honest way of two people who understood the terms. Daphne was the closest thing she had and she was glad of her in the way you were glad of something real that fell short of what you needed.

The gap between what she had and what she'd watched through a bookshop shelf gap in July was the same gap it had always been. She simply had a clearer measure of its width now.

She opened her Potions text and read the same paragraph twice.

Draco found his angle in the third day.

She had been expecting it in the abstract, because Draco operated by finding angles and he was rarely slow about it, and she had spent three years in his social orbit with the careful navigation of someone who understood the difference between an ally of convenience and a person who wished you well. Draco did not wish anyone well, precisely. He wished himself well, and others were useful or they were not, and she had been useful in previous years as a piece of social architecture—present, composed, decorative in a way that reflected well on the group.

She had spent the summer writing letters.

She had spent an afternoon in a Muggle bookshop.

She had worn Harry Potter's hoodie for three weeks and she was still not returning it.

These were not things Draco could know. But Draco had, she had long since concluded, a finely calibrated sense for shifts in social loyalty, the way some animals sensed atmospheric pressure changes before a storm, and he had apparently sensed something.

He found her in the corridor outside Potions on Wednesday morning, flanked by Crabbe and Goyle in the way he always was—not for companionship, she had always thought, but because he'd learned early that physical adjacency was a form of emphasis.

"Parkinson," he said. Pleasant surface, the tone of someone about to say something that wasn't.

"Malfoy," she said, in the same register.

"Good summer?" The question had the shape of small talk and the function of something else.

"Adequate," she said. "You?"

"Productive." He fell into step beside her with the ease of someone claiming the space. "My father mentioned he hasn't seen yours at the usual events."

"My father's been in Edinburgh," she said, which was true and neutral and revealed nothing.

"Mm." A beat, timed with precision. "You seem different."

She looked at him with the full weight of her dark eyes and the expression that had no warmth in it, the one that older students in corridors had been cataloguing from a different angle this week entirely. On Draco it landed as it was intended—not aggressive, not defensive, simply impenetrable, the look of someone who had assessed the situation and found it unworthy of elevation.

"Do I," she said. Not a question.

"More—" he considered, with the performed thoughtfulness of someone who had chosen the word already— "distracted."

"I'm not distracted," she said. "I'm thinking about Potions, which is what one does outside a Potions classroom."

"Of course," he said, pleasantly.

She stopped walking. He stopped with her, which was what she'd wanted, because the corridor was clearing and she preferred to have this where it couldn't become a performance for an audience.

She looked at him with the full steady directness of someone who had nothing to conceal because she had already decided what she was and was not going to concede.

"Say the thing you're actually saying, Draco," she said, quietly. "I find the preliminary tedious."

Something moved in his face—not quite surprise, but the revision of a calculation. He had expected the social machinery, she understood. The careful deflection, the maintained surface, the performance of alliance. She had spent three years providing this and she was aware, with a clarity that had arrived somewhere over the summer, that she was not going to spend a fourth year doing it.

"There are people asking questions," he said, dropping the pleasant tone to something more direct. "About your family. About which side of certain things you're likely to be on."

"And you've appointed yourself the person to bring me this information."

"I'm being collegial."

"You're testing the fence," she said. "To see which side I'm standing on." She held his gaze. "I'm standing on my own side, Malfoy. I have always been standing on my own side. You know this because you've been watching me do it for three years and have found it useful, which is the actual basis of our arrangement."

A moment.

"People will want to know your position," he said.

"Then they can ask me directly," she said. "And I'll give them the same answer."

She walked into the Potions classroom.

She found her seat, placed her textbook on the desk, and arranged her ingredients with the systematic precision of someone for whom external order was a reliable resource when everything else was less reliable.

Her hands were completely steady.

This surprised her slightly.

She had expected the confrontation to leave the residue that confrontations usually did—the low hum of adrenaline, the tight awareness of exposure, the calculation of what it would cost her. Instead there was something else, quieter and less familiar, something that sat in her chest with the quality of a load-bearing wall that had been tested and had held.

She was, she thought, very tired of being an asset in other people's arrangements.

She had spent the summer being seen, specifically and without agenda, by someone who asked her about first-line systems and sat on bookshop floors and said okay like he meant it, and she had not realized until she was back in the architecture of Slytherin's social mechanics exactly how much that had changed the calibration of what she was willing to accept.

She opened her textbook.

Draco came in two minutes later and took his seat without looking at her, which was the correct social reading of the situation and confirmed that she had, by his own measure, handled it on acceptable terms.

She read the first line of the page.

She turned it.

By Friday she had developed her fourth-year routine with the same systematic precision she brought to everything.

Breakfast alone, earlier than most, when the Great Hall was quiet and the morning light came in low through the high windows and the post owls arrived in their unhurried early-morning way. She ate without rushing and read the Prophet and was gone before the rush of students made the hall into the particular kind of noise that required energy to sit inside.

Classes, in which she was quietly exceptional and careful about how visible this was, because visible excellence in Slytherin required careful management of tone and she had learned this in first year and had not forgotten it. She answered when called on, did not volunteer, and produced work that was assessed at the top of the range and discussed with no one.

Library, evenings. The corner table near the restricted section, not for access to restricted materials but because it was the table with the best light and the least foot traffic.

Common room, briefly, before the fire burned low, because she needed to maintain the social presence that kept her operational in the house and because Daphne was there and Daphne was real, even at the limited honest depth of what they were to each other.

Her window seat, last. Her own room, her own things arranged in their correct places, the small portrait of a landscape above her bed that she'd brought from home because it didn't talk, and the cloth-bound Thornfield's book on the nightstand, and in the top drawer, folded with slightly less precision than she would have applied to her own things, a grey hoodie that she was absolutely going to owl back at some point.

She lay in her dormitory bed on the Friday night of the first week and listened to the other girls' breathing settle into the even rhythms of sleep and looked at the stone ceiling and conducted her usual honest accounting.

One confrontation navigated. No new damage. Academic standing intact. Daphne present and reliable within established parameters.

The Great Hall had been full of people laughing all week. She had sat at the end of the Slytherin table and watched it happen in the detached peripheral way she'd watched the courtyard and the bookshop, and she had been fine. She was practiced at fine.

She was, she thought with the same flat precision, quite lonely.

Not dramatically. Not in a way that asked for anything. Simply in the honest structural way of a person who had taken inventory and found a gap she'd been living around for so long it had acquired the quality of geography—not an absence so much as a feature of the landscape, something you navigated by rather than mourned.

She had, she supposed, one correspondent.

She had an owl who had assessed her in four seconds and decided she passed.

She had an empty compartment on a Hogwarts Express where she had put her arms around someone without the committee's approval and felt something come loose in her chest like a held breath, and he had held her back without making anything of it, and she had spent the rest of the train journey in her own compartment with the September light coming through the window and her face doing the thing she couldn't quite stop it doing.

She looked at the stone ceiling.

Outside, the castle settled into its evening sounds—the creak of old wood, the distant sound of water, the deep particular quiet of a very old building being very old in the dark.

She was fourteen and she was in the top quarter of her year and she knew how to walk through a corridor like someone who required nothing from it, and she was lying in the dark being precisely honest with herself in the way she was always honest with herself, which was her only reliable private luxury.

She was lonely.

And somewhere across the castle in a tower she had no reason to go to, there was a boy who said okay like he meant it and folded maps incorrectly and had given her his hoodie without making it mean anything, and she was going to lie here and be honest about what she felt about that too, quietly, with no one watching.

She felt it.

She turned over.

She went to sleep.

The second week had a different quality than the first.

Not better, precisely. The first week had established the load-bearing structures and the second week was simply living inside them—the early breakfasts, the careful classroom visibility management, the library evenings, the Draco situation settled into a cold and functional equilibrium that she understood and could navigate. The loneliness was the same loneliness. The gap was the same gap. None of this had changed.

What had changed was Harry.

Not in any organized or announced way. He didn't seek her out in any fashion that could be documented or submitted as evidence of anything. It was more that he appeared, with a frequency that exceeded coincidence and fell short of pattern, in the vicinity of her days. As though the castle had quietly rerouted certain of his movements through her general coordinates without informing either of them in advance.

Monday she was crossing the courtyard after Transfiguration, head down against the early October chill, when she heard her name—not her surname, her name, which he had never used, just Pansy, said the way you said something you'd been thinking—and she turned and he was crossing from the other direction with his bag over one shoulder and a slightly harassed expression that resolved, when he saw her, into something considerably less harassed.

They walked to their respective next classes in the same direction for four minutes without saying much. It was four minutes out of his way. She knew this because she knew the castle.

She filed it and moved on.

Tuesday he appeared at the end of her library table while she was doing Arithmancy and set down a cup of tea from the Great Hall kitchens—still hot, the precise temperature of something that had been brought quickly—without explanation. She looked at the tea. She looked at him. He was already opening his own textbook across the table with the settled air of someone who had completed the relevant action and was now simply studying.

"You can't study here," she said. "This is my table."

"The library's public," he said, turning a page.

"It's my table by established precedent."

"I'll be quiet."

She looked at her Arithmancy and then at the tea and then at her Arithmancy again. "You may study at this table," she said, "on a probationary basis."

"Noted," he said, and was, in fact, almost entirely quiet for the next forty minutes, which she found both acceptable and slightly suspect, because Harry was not someone she associated with sustained silence and it suggested he was making an effort, which she received as information she was not going to process right now.

Wednesday he wasn't there and she noticed his absence with the specific attentiveness of someone who had become accustomed to a temperature and registered its removal. This was new data about herself that she filed with some firmness and did not revisit.

Thursday he was at breakfast when she arrived early, which she had not expected—he was not, by any evidence she'd accumulated, a person who chose early breakfasts when sleep was an alternative—sitting at the Gryffindor table alone with toast and looking at the morning with the slightly unfocused expression of someone who had been woken by something and hadn't entirely arrived in the day yet.

He looked up when she came in. Raised a hand, briefly. The sheepish smile, half-assembled, still working on it.

She gave him the smallest possible nod and took her usual Slytherin seat at the far end of the table with the width of the entire hall between them, and ate her breakfast and read her Prophet, and was aware of him across the room in the way she was always aware of him now, the peripheral tracking that had become as involuntary as breathing.

She refilled her tea twice, which was once more than usual.

Friday he stopped her outside the Potions classroom before she went in, touched her elbow briefly to get her attention, and said, in a low voice, "Snape's in a particular mood today," with the tone of someone who had access to advance intelligence, and she looked at him for a moment and said "when is he not," and he said "fair," and she went into class with a very small and entirely private sensation of warmth in her chest that she addressed firmly and did not indulge.

By Saturday she had accepted, with the flat honest accounting she applied to difficult inventory, that Harry Potter showing up at the margins of her days made the days considerably better and that this information was simply going to have to coexist with everything else she was managing about the situation.

Saturday she studied too late.

This was the simple mechanics of it—she was in the library from three in the afternoon working through the second Arithmancy module and the supplementary reading for Advanced Potions, and she had her system, her notes in their correct columns, her reference texts stacked in order of frequency of use, and the particular focused quality of a person for whom good work was one of the more reliable pleasures available to her. The time moved the way it did when she was working well, which was to say it moved without her noticing, and she looked up from a Potions calculation at what she estimated to be half seven and discovered from the library's single clock that it was quarter past nine.

The library closed at nine.

Madam Pince had, apparently, decided that Pansy's focused presence in the corner warranted an extension of professional tolerance rather than ejection, and had extinguished the lamps in the other sections and left quietly without disturbing her, which was either an act of librarian solidarity or oversight, and which Pansy appreciated either way.

She packed her bag with the efficient movements of someone who had done this in a hurry before and had developed a system for it—notes first, reference texts in order, quills capped, ink sealed. Robes correct. Bag on shoulder. She was out of the library in four minutes and into the castle corridor, which was dim and quiet and considerably colder than it had been at three that afternoon, and she was going to have to take the long way back to the dungeons because the shorter route went past the Trophy Room and the Trophy Room at this hour was where Filch directed his patrols on Saturdays, which she knew because she made it her business to know things like this.

She was moving at pace, not rushing—she did not rush, it was undignified—but with the intention of someone who had a specific destination and a clear route to it, and the corridor was empty and the torches were low, and she was approximately twenty feet from the library door when something happened.

A hand emerged from what appeared to be empty air.

Then a face.

Harry's face, materializing out of nothing at approximately her eye level, wearing an expression that suggested he had timed this and was pleased with his timing.

Pansy made a sound.

She would spend some subsequent time in private determining how to categorize this sound, and would arrive at no satisfying conclusion. It was not a scream. She was completely firm on this. It was not a scream because she did not scream, as a matter of both character and record. It was a—reaction. A sharp, involuntary, high-pitched reaction of the kind that any reasonable person would have produced upon a disembodied face appearing out of corridor darkness at nine-fifteen on a Saturday night, and her bag went sideways off her shoulder and her notes went partially across the floor and her hand went to her chest and she stood there for one complete second with her face doing something she had zero control over—eyes wide, the composed expression entirely absent, something open and startled and for one involuntary moment almost laughing visible on her face before she assembled the mask back over it.

Harry was laughing.

Not unkindly—the real laugh, the short genuine one she'd heard in the café over the sandwich, except this time it went longer, and he emerged further from the cloak with one hand braced on the corridor wall for support, and his eyes behind the glasses were bright with it, and he was laughing at her and she was furious, and also—

Also the mask had slipped and the something-almost-laughing was still trying to get out from behind the reconstituted composure and she was having to actively hold it down, pressing her lips together against it, which she was doing with reasonable success except that her dark eyes were slightly brighter than usual and this was not a detail she could do anything about.

"You nearly—" she started.

He was still laughing.

"Potter." She bent and retrieved her notes with sharp precise movements. "Potter, stop."

"Your face," he managed.

"My face was perfectly composed."

"It absolutely was not."

"It was—" She straightened, notes in hand, bag back on shoulder, the composed expression now fully reconstructed and operational. "It was a startled expression appropriate to the context of a disembodied face appearing in a dark corridor. Any reaction was entirely proportionate."

"You squeaked," he said.

"I did not."

"Pansy. You squeaked."

"That is a complete fabrication and I will not—"

"A small one," he said, and the laugh had settled to the contained version, the one that lived in the corner of his mouth and his eyes, and he was looking at her with the swooning-inducing version of the sheepish smile, the full one, crooked and bright and directed entirely at her, and she was having a significant and private experience behind her composed expression.

"If you repeat that to any living person," she said, with great precision and complete calm, "I will transfigure something you care about into something you care about considerably less, and I will do it with a skill level that precludes any possibility of reversal."

"Noted," he said, in the tone that meant he was keeping the memory regardless.

She looked at the section of corridor where the invisibility cloak was still pooled over the rest of him. "Why are you under an invisibility cloak outside the library at nine fifteen."

"I was waiting for you."

She absorbed this. "You were waiting for me."

"You study late on Saturdays. I knew you'd be coming out around now." He said this with the simple delivery of someone reporting a fact, without apparent awareness of what it revealed about his level of attention to her patterns, and she looked at him with the inventory gaze and found she had no efficient response to it.

"That's—" she started.

"The corridors aren't great at this hour," he said. "Filch does the Trophy Room route on Saturdays."

"I know that."

"I know you know that," he said. "I thought you might want company on the long way around."

She looked at him for a long moment in the low torchlight, with her notes in her hand and her bag on her shoulder and her face composed and her dark eyes doing the thing she couldn't stop them doing.

"You have an invisibility cloak," she said.

"Yes."

"And you were going to walk me back under it."

"If you wanted."

She weighed this against her dignity, which took approximately four seconds.

"Fine," she said. "But if you make the squeak comment again I'm walking back alone."

"Completely forgotten," he said, and she could hear the smile in it, and she was absolutely furious about how warm she felt.

The cloak was smaller than she'd imagined.

Not small in the sense of insufficient—it covered them both completely, and Harry held it at the edge so the hem stayed down—but small in the sense of proximity. Standing shoulder to shoulder and moving at a matched pace through a darkened corridor was an exercise in the very specific physics of two people attempting to share a single outline, and it was an exercise she had not prepared for.

She was approximately one inch shorter than him in flat shoes, which meant the top of her head sat at his temple, which she had not previously had occasion to measure and was now measuring with extreme precision because she needed somewhere to put her attention.

She put her attention on the corridor.

They moved in silence for the first stretch, which was the long corridor past the Great Hall and down the east staircase toward the dungeons, and she was acutely aware of the warmth of his arm against hers and the pace of his breathing and the fact that under the cloak the normal rules of personal distance had been quietly suspended by the logistics of the situation, which was not her fault and had nothing to do with any choices she had made.

She was leaning slightly into him.

She noticed this after approximately thirty seconds. She did not correct it.

"Quiet night," Harry said, low, because under a cloak in a corridor the natural register was quiet.

"Mm," she said.

"How was the studying."

"Productive. The second Arithmancy module has an elegant proof structure I find genuinely satisfying, which I mention only because I know you'll have questions about Arithmancy at some point this year and I'm establishing myself as the correct resource in advance."

She felt the small shake of his shoulder. "That's a very you reason to mention it."

"I'm a very consistent person."

"Yeah," he said, and the warmth in it was quiet and total. "You are."

She filed this. She moved on.

The staircase required brief recalibration of the cloak at the turn, and Harry's hand found her elbow for a second to navigate the step in the dark, and she was very composed about this, and then they were at the bottom and moving along the lower corridor toward the dungeon entrance and she was leaning into his arm again without having consciously renegotiated this.

"Are you ready for the schools arriving?" he asked.

"As a neutral spectator to the Tournament, yes," she said. "Though I expect it to be chaotic in the specific way of events that have been planned by the Ministry."

"Dumbledore seems excited."

"Dumbledore seems excited about most things. It's not always predictive." She paused. "Are you thinking of entering?"

"You can't enter below seventeen."

"I know that, Potter. Are you thinking of finding a way around it."

A beat. "...No."

"The hesitation was damning."

"I'm not entering the Tournament," he said, with slightly more emphasis than necessary.

"Mm," she said, in the tone that conveyed complete skepticism while maintaining plausible deniability.

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Have you seen the Beauxbatons lot's practice schedule? They're using the pitch Tuesday mornings, apparently."

"I don't monitor the pitch schedule."

"Cedric Diggory does," he said. "Half of fifth year does. Apparently—" a slight shift in his voice that she catalogued immediately and filed under new data with considerable attention— "apparently the Beauxbatons students are—I mean, people are saying they're—"

"Attractive?" she supplied, at her most neutral.

"I was going to say impressive," he said.

"You were going to say attractive and then you decided impressive was the safer word."

"They're both true."

"And Cho Chang came up in this context, did she."

This came out before she'd fully authorized it. She heard it emerge and it was too specific and too quick and too precisely targeted, and there was a half-second of corridor silence in which she was acutely aware of having revealed the location of something she'd been keeping under careful cover.

"I didn't mention Cho," Harry said, carefully.

"You didn't have to," she said. "The hesitation before attractive had sufficient information content."

Another brief silence.

"Cho's not—I wasn't—"

"It's not my business," she said, crisply. Too crisply. She adjusted. "I'm simply noting that you have a well-documented tendency toward transparent affect, which makes you easy to read, which is a liability you should be aware of for general purposes."

Harry was quiet for a moment in the way that meant he was looking at the side of her face even though she was not looking at him, and she kept her eyes on the corridor ahead with the focused attention of someone who was very interested in the stone floor.

"Are you—"

"The dungeon entrance is here," she said.

It was, in fact, there—the stretch of blank stone wall that she approached and spoke the password to with the crisp efficiency of someone completing a task. The wall slid open.

She stepped out from under the cloak into the lit common room corridor.

She turned and looked at him, still under it, just his face visible—which was, she thought, an absurd amount of face to be dealing with at nine forty on a Saturday, the green eyes and the crooked glasses and the expression of someone who had noticed something and was choosing his next words with unusual care.

She arranged her face.

"Thank you," she said, which cost less than she'd expected. "For the escort."

"Anytime," he said, and meant it in the structural way he meant things.

She held his gaze for one beat.

"Potter," she said.

"Parkinson."

"If Cho Chang says anything dim at you," she said, with great composure and the expression that had no warmth in it, the inventory gaze, the one she'd been wearing in corridors all week while older students revised their impressions, "I expect you to exercise better judgment than your affect suggests you're capable of."

He blinked at her.

"That's as close as I get," she said, "to telling you to be careful with things."

She walked into the common room.

She let the wall slide shut behind her.

She stood inside for a moment in the green-lit common room quiet and breathed in once through her nose and did not examine the thing in her chest that had been there since she'd heard his voice go careful around Cho's name in a dark corridor under an invisibility cloak, pressing her one inch into his shoulder.

She was fourteen and she was extremely annoyed and she went upstairs.

She lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling.

Cho Chang, she thought, with great precision, and it was not a generous thought, and she did not apologize for it, and she lay there for a while being quietly and specifically jealous in the dark with no one watching until she was tired enough to sleep.

She went to sleep.

She heard his name come out of the Goblet of Fire the way everyone heard it—in the specific charged silence of a room that had been expecting three names and received a fourth, the silence of a collective intake of breath that hadn't been exhaled yet.

Harry Potter.

She was at the Slytherin table and she watched him stand, and she watched his face, and she knew.

She had been watching his face for four months with the involuntary attentiveness of someone who had stopped pretending they weren't, and she knew every register of it now—the sheepish smile and the soft one and the quiet attentive one and the one he wore when he was tired in the structural way and the one from the compartment when she'd walked in and he'd seen her and the expression had moved before he could think about it. She knew all of these.

The face he was wearing when Dumbledore said his name was none of them.

It was the face of someone who had been handed something they hadn't asked for in front of a room full of people who were already revising their interpretation of them, and who understood both of these things simultaneously, and who was walking forward anyway because the alternative was standing still in front of everyone, and who was—

Frightened, she thought. Genuinely. The accurate kind.

She watched him walk through the door to the back room.

She watched the room around her assemble its reaction, which was not a single reaction but several—excitement among the younger years, speculation among the older ones, and in the specific social architecture of Slytherin, something colder and more deliberate, the calculation of people who had just received new information and were already running it through their frameworks for what it meant and who it advantaged.

Draco was smiling.

She looked at her plate.

She ate the rest of her dinner with the composed expression and said nothing and went upstairs and sat on her bed in the quiet dormitory for a while, looking at the stone wall, conducting the honest accounting.

He hadn't done it.

She arrived at this not through loyalty, not through the specific warmth of the unlabeled folder, but through the same flat evidence-based process she applied to everything. She knew him. She had sat on the floor of a bookshop and walked under his cloak through dark corridors and read his letters and watched his face for four months, and Harry Potter did not have the social architecture for this kind of calculated self-promotion. He didn't have the vanity for it. He didn't want more visibility—he wanted less, consistently, structurally, in every context she'd observed him. The idea of him engineering his own entry into a dangerous tournament for attention was so incompatible with the actual person she knew that it wasn't a theory she could hold in her mind with any structural integrity.

He hadn't done it.

And he was somewhere in the castle tonight with the weight of the entire school's speculation and his best friends' faces and Dumbledore's exhausted expression, and she knew, with the certainty of someone who had spent fourteen years learning the specific geography of loneliness, exactly where he would be.

The lake in October at nine in the evening was cold in a way that was almost architectural—the cold came off the water in layers, first the surface chill and then the deeper cold underneath it, the cold of a very old body of water that had been cold for a very long time and had no particular plans to change. The sky was clear and very black and full of stars that the lake reflected in its still outer edges, and the castle behind her was lit and distant, and the grounds were empty.

She found the rock without difficulty.

It was a specific rock, broad and flat, jutting slightly over the water on the far western edge of the lake where the grounds curved away from the castle and the bank was overhung by the last of the autumn trees, their branches mostly empty now, the remaining leaves the dark copper of late October. She knew this rock the way she knew her corner of the library and her table and her window seat—by the quality of the solitude it offered, which was complete.

Harry was there.

He was sitting with his back against the rock's raised end and his knees pulled to his chest and his arms folded over them, looking out at the lake with an expression she could see from ten feet away—not sad, not angry in the hot sense, but the cold and contained version of it, the anger of someone who has been wronged in a public way and has retreated to somewhere private to hold it without an audience.

He didn't look up when she approached.

She sat down beside him.

Not close enough to touch, not yet—just present, her robes pulled around her against the cold, her feet at the edge of the rock, looking out at the same water he was looking at. She didn't say anything. She had thought, walking down from the castle, that she would have something to say, and she had arrived and found that she didn't, or that what she had was not words yet, and so she sat with him in the cold and the dark and let the silence be what it was.

The lake was very still.

Somewhere out in the deep center of it something large moved beneath the surface, a slow displacement of water, and then was still again.

She didn't know how long they sat before he spoke. Long enough for the cold to settle into her properly, into her hands and the exposed line of her neck above her collar. Long enough for the stars to shift their positions by a small and measurable amount.

"How did you know I'd be here," he said. Not accusatory. Just the question.

"You go to places where you can be alone and see a long distance," she said. "I've been paying attention."

He absorbed this. Looked back at the water.

She looked at him.

The starlight and the reflected water gave everything a particular quality of clarity—she could see the set of his jaw, the line of his shoulders, the way he was holding himself slightly tighter than his usual easy posture, the effort of someone keeping something contained. His hair was doing its thing, wind-moved now by the lake air. His glasses reflected a small cold star.

He looked, she thought, very young.

Not in a diminishing way. In the way of someone who was fourteen and had been handed things that people significantly older and better-resourced than him had failed to handle, and who was sitting with the weight of that on a rock by a lake in the dark and had not, as far as she could tell, cried or broken anything, and was simply—enduring it. Holding it. The way he always held things, with that quiet structural patience.

She found him, she thought without any of the management she usually applied to such thoughts, extraordinarily lovely.

Not in the way she might have said it to be mean, not in the sharp social sense. In the plain honest way. He was honest in a way she had almost no template for—honest in his face and his expressions and his okay and his I didn't forget and his showing up outside libraries under invisibility cloaks and his sitting on bookshop floors and his giving her his hoodie without making it a thing. He was honest the way very few people she had encountered were honest, which was completely and without apparent effort, and she found it—

She found it devastating, actually, if she was being precise.

She moved closer to him.

Not gradually—she made the decision and acted on it, the way she'd made the decision in the train compartment, and she put her arm around his shoulders and with a slight application of pressure she brought him sideways into her, his head tipping to rest against her temple, and she held him there in the cold by the lake and said nothing for a moment.

She felt him resist for exactly one second—the instinct of someone who had learned to carry things alone because the alternative had historically not been available—and then it left him, the resistance, like something exhaling, and he leaned into her with a heaviness that was not defeat but simply the weight of someone who had been holding something for too long and had found, briefly, somewhere to put it down.

She tightened her arm.

"I didn't do it," he said, quietly. Not defensive. Just the fact, placed in the air.

"I know," she said.

He was quiet for a moment. "Everyone thinks—"

"I know what everyone thinks," she said. "I don't think it. That's the relevant data point from where you're sitting."

She felt the small movement of him—not quite a laugh, not the contained shoulder-version, something smaller and lower, the movement of someone receiving something and not quite knowing what to do with it.

"You believe me," he said, and it came out with a quality she hadn't heard from him before—not surprised, exactly, but something close to it, the tone of someone who had expected to have to argue the case and found that they didn't, and who was slightly undone by the not having to.

"Yes," she said. Simply. Without the sarcasm, without the arch expression, without any of the armor she typically wore when she said true things that cost her something. Just the word, placed flat and direct and complete.

He didn't say anything for a moment.

She looked out at the lake and held him and the cold settled around them both and the castle was lit and distant and the stars moved their small measurable amount across the black sky.

"Can I ask you something," he said, eventually.

"You can ask."

"Why do you—" He stopped. Reorganized. "You never—most people don't. I mean, even Ron and Hermione were—" Another stop. She waited. "Why does it not bother you? That I'm—me. That I'm—whatever I am to you. Whatever this—" He gestured slightly, which she felt rather than saw. "Why aren't you like everyone else about it."

She considered this for a long time. Long enough that the lake made another slow subsurface movement and stilled again.

"Because I know what it is," she said, finally, "to be in a room full of people and to be—" She chose the word with care. "—beside it. Not in it. Present in every technical and visible sense and beside the actual thing. The warmth of it. The inside of it."

He was very still.

"My parents' marriage is a performance," she said, in the tone she kept for true things that she had stopped spending energy on. "I have been the audience for it since I was old enough to understand what I was watching. I have allies at school and not friends. I have a house that belongs to people whose values I do not share and I navigate it because the alternative is being without the structural protection it provides." She paused. "I have spent a significant amount of my life being the smartest person in the room and being very careful that no one found out, because visible intelligence in my circumstances is a liability rather than an asset, and so I have been alone with it." Another pause. "I know what lonely is, Potter. Not the romantic version. The actual version. The load-bearing kind."

He was quiet for a long time.

Then: "Yeah," he said, low. "I know that kind too."

"I know you do," she said. "It's one of the reasons you're—" She stopped.

"I'm what," he said, and his voice was quiet but the question was direct, and she felt it the way she felt first lines—the question that justified everything that would follow it.

She looked at the water.

"You're honest," she said. "You're honest in a way that I find—" She selected the word with great precision and deployed it with the composure of someone detonating something small and controlled. "—disproportionately affecting. And you show up. You show up in corridors and at library tables and at compartments and outside libraries at nine in the evening with an invisibility cloak because you knew I'd be coming out, and you have never once—" Her voice stayed level. She was quite impressed with it. "—made it something I owe you. You just—show up. And it is—"

She stopped.

"It is what," he said.

She breathed in once through her nose.

"It is very difficult to be appropriately defended around," she said, which was as close as she could get, and which she thought covered the territory with reasonable accuracy.

Harry was quiet for a moment.

She could feel him considering. She could feel the quality of his attention, which was the specific and undivided kind, the kind he gave things that mattered to him, and she sat with it and looked at the lake and held herself very still inside the warmth of his weight against her side.

"Pansy," he said.

The name again. Not her surname. Just her name, said in the quiet particular way of the courtyard.

"Mm," she said, which was a safe response that committed to nothing.

"I think," he said, slowly, with the careful honesty of someone working something out in real time and trusting the person they were saying it to, "that you might be the most interesting person I know."

She blinked.

Once. Twice.

She looked at the water.

She had prepared, in the four months of accumulating data about Harry Potter, a reasonable inventory of things he might say to her and responses she might construct for them. She had not prepared for this. She had not prepared for the most interesting person I know said plainly and without apparent awareness of what it cost to receive, in a voice that was quiet and tired and completely certain.

She looked at the side of his face, tipped against her temple, the star reflected in his glasses.

She felt, very specifically and with complete clarity, that she cared about him in a way that had moved past the cataloguing and the management and the unlabeled folder and the architectural loneliness and had arrived somewhere she didn't have a ready word for—somewhere past the warmth and the swooning and the jealousy of Cho's name in a dark corridor, somewhere that was quieter than all of that and considerably more serious.

She cared what happened to him.

Not as data. Not as something to file and manage and revisit at controlled intervals.

She simply, deeply, quietly cared.

She looked back at the water before he could see what was in her face.

"That's an extremely low bar," she said, "if I'm the most interesting person in a school of several hundred."

"I meant it as a compliment," he said, and she could hear the small smile in it.

"I know you did," she said.

She did not say anything else for a while.

She kept her arm around him and he kept his weight against her and the lake was still and the stars were cold and the castle was lit and distant, and she sat with what she'd felt and what he'd said and the quiet particular weight of the both of them together on a flat rock in October, and she let it be what it was without managing it, without folding it into a labeled or unlabeled folder, without the inventory gaze.

Just this.

Just here.

She was fourteen years old and she was sitting by a lake in the dark holding someone she had decided mattered to her, and it was—

It was enough, she thought.

For right now, this moment, this cold October night with the stars moving slowly overhead.

It was enough.

Chapter 5

October turned slowly, the way it did in Scotland—not all at once but by degrees, the cold arriving a little further into each day, the trees giving up their color in stages, the lake going from grey to silver to something darker that had no clean name for it. The castle smelled of woodsmoke and old stone and the particular damp of rain-soaked grounds, and the corridors were full of whispers that followed Harry Potter like weather.

Pansy moved through October like she moved through everything.

Deliberately. Quietly. With the appearance of someone who had somewhere specific to be and was going there.

The difference was that somewhere specific, more and more, was wherever he was.

It started small, the way things that became significant always started—not with a decision but with a series of moments that accumulated into something she only recognized as a pattern once it was already established and would have been dishonest to pretend she hadn't built.

The Monday after the Goblet, she was crossing the entrance hall when she saw a cluster of fourth-year Hufflepuffs near the bottom of the stairs, the kind of group that had assembled itself around a specific energy—pointed, gleeful in the cruel way of people who had decided someone deserved what they were getting. She didn't have to hear the words to know the shape of the conversation. She had grown up learning the shape of that conversation from the inside.

Harry was at the edge of it, not engaging, just present in the way of someone who had decided engagement was beneath him and was waiting for it to resolve, but she could see from twenty feet away the set of his jaw and the careful nothing he was wearing over something that was not nothing.

She walked through the cluster.

Not aggressively. Simply—through, with her full height and her full composure and the dark eyes and the expression that had been making sixth years revise themselves in corridors for a month, and she stopped beside Harry and looked at the group with the inventory gaze and said nothing at all.

The group lost its shape within thirty seconds.

She walked on.

Harry fell into step beside her. "You didn't have to—"

"I was going this way," she said.

He looked at the side of her face. "You were going the other way."

"I changed my mind," she said. "People do."

He was quiet for a moment. She could feel him deciding whether to push it, and then deciding not to, and she appreciated this about him—that he knew when to let something be what it was.

"Thank you," he said.

"Don't mention it," she said. "Literally. Don't mention it."

She felt his shoulder shake against hers. Not the full laugh. The contained one.

She looked straight ahead and walked.

It kept happening.

Not always the interference; sometimes it was smaller than that, quieter. She would find him at the library table without planning to be there and she would simply study beside him in the particular ease of two people who had learned each other's working silences. She would leave a cup of tea at his elbow with the same silence she'd received her own that first Tuesday. She would appear at the edge of his afternoons the way he had appeared at the edges of hers in the first week, and she would not examine the symmetry.

She started noticing the detractors with a precision she had not previously applied to his social landscape. She knew which fifth years were loudest. She knew which Slytherins had adopted the Potter's a glory-seeking liar line as a social position, and which of those she had sufficient leverage over to make them quiet about it, and she applied that leverage with the calm efficiency of someone doing light housekeeping. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that could be named. She was a Slytherin and she had three years of careful social architecture at her disposal and she used it without apology.

She did not tell Harry.

This was essential. If he knew, it would become something; something he felt about, something that shifted the balance of what they were in a way she wasn't ready to negotiate. So she kept it separate, the way she kept most things, in its own internal compartment with no connecting door.

But she felt it, the protectiveness, growing alongside everything else; the warmth and the swooning and the possessive thing she was trying not to name. She felt it the way she felt weather, a pressure system moving through her chest, large and quiet and not entirely comfortable.

He noticed her nails on a Wednesday in late October.

They were in the library; her corner table, his probationary status long since converted to something more settled, his books on one side and hers on the other with a comfortable distance of clear wood between them that they both instinctively kept. She was writing up Potions notes with her usual precise hand, and she reached across for a reference text, and he stopped talking mid-sentence.

She looked up.

He was looking at her hand.

She had painted her nails that morning; black, the way she had been painting them since third year, neat and careful, each nail a small deliberate darkness. She looked at her hand with him, briefly, with the flat gaze of someone seeing something they'd decided about and were not reconsidering.

"What," she said.

"Nothing," he said. "I just—" He gestured slightly. "I hadn't noticed before."

"They've been like this for a year."

"I know, I just—" He stopped. The sheepish smile made one of its appearances. "I like them."

She looked at her nails. She looked at him. She pulled the reference text toward her and found her page.

"They're nails, Potter," she said, with great composure.

"I know what they are," he said, easily, and went back to his textbook, and she spent the next ten minutes reading the same half-page with more focus than it required.

He noticed the lip gloss the following Friday, in an alcove off the third-floor corridor that she had pulled them into when she'd spotted Cormac McLaggen and two sixth years coming their direction with an energy she didn't want Harry walking into alone. The alcove was narrow and the corridor torch was behind them and they were very close in the way of the cloak, the way of the archway on Museum Street, the way of all the small pockets of privacy she had been quietly building around the two of them like someone constructing rooms they hadn't admitted they were constructing.

She was watching the corridor over his shoulder. He was watching her.

She felt him watching and kept her eyes on the corridor and waited until the footsteps passed.

"They're gone," she said.

"Mm," he said, not moving.

She looked at him then, because she had to turn back into the alcove to step out and he was directly in her way, and she found him closer than she'd calibrated for, the green eyes and the slight warm proximity and the expression of someone who had been looking at her face while she wasn't watching.

"What," she said, which was becoming her primary response to being observed.

"You're wearing lip gloss," he said.

"I wear it most days."

"It's—" He searched for the word with an honesty that was completely unguarded and which she found devastating, as she found most of his honesty devastating. "Nice," he said, which was not the sophisticated word he'd been reaching for but which landed considerably harder than sophisticated would have.

The warmth came up from her jaw again. She was fairly certain he could see it, pale as she was, and she had approximately no tools available to address this, so she stepped out of the alcove with the decisive movement of someone who had somewhere to be.

"Come on," she said.

He followed, and she could hear from the quality of his following that he was wearing the sheepish smile, and she walked slightly faster.

She touched his hair for the first time on a Thursday morning.

They were in the entrance hall—they met there sometimes in the mornings now, quietly, without ever having arranged it explicitly, the way all their arrangements tended to work—and he'd clearly come straight from the dormitory with approximately no attention paid to anything above his collar. His hair was doing its worst, which was, she had long since accepted, saying something.

She didn't think about it.

She reached up and pushed it back from his forehead with her fingers—black-nailed, careful, one single pass—and then stood back and assessed the result, which was negligible, because his hair was going to do what it did regardless of her input.

"That made no difference," she said.

"I could have told you that," he said.

"I had to try," she said, which was an extremely honest thing to say, and she moved it immediately into the category of things she'd said before the committee had assembled.

He was looking at her with the quiet open expression. Not the smile—something softer and less defended, the one from Flourish and Blotts that he wore when he didn't know he was wearing it, and she looked at his collar and found a thread out of place and addressed it with her fingers because she needed something to do with them.

"You're very—" he started.

"Don't," she said.

"I was going to say something nice."

"I know," she said. "Don't."

He smiled. She felt it rather than saw it. She straightened his collar and stepped back and they walked into the Great Hall together and split to their respective tables with the clean practiced efficiency of two people who had been doing this for weeks, and she sat at the Slytherin table and picked up her fork and did not look at the Gryffindor table for several minutes, which was the longest she had managed recently.

The hand happened on the way back from Herbology.

The path from the greenhouses back to the castle was uneven in October—rain-softened, the stones loose in some places where the frost had started getting into the gaps, and she caught her heel in one and went sideways with the graceless momentum of someone who had been walking with insufficient attention. She didn't fall—she was closer to the edge of the path than the mud, she had the balance of it—but she lurched, and Harry's hand came out and caught hers.

Just her hand, her fingers, pulled back from the edge of the uneven stone.

He held on for a moment after the balance was recovered, just a beat, and she felt every detail of it with the heightened precision of someone whose nervous system had apparently decided this was significant—the warmth of his hand and the slight roughness of his palm and the easy certainty of the grip, and then it was over and he let go and they were walking again.

"You're welcome," he said.

"I didn't say thank you," she said.

"I know," he said, pleasantly.

She looked at the path and put her hand in her robe pocket and kept it there for the remainder of the walk, which was not an emotional decision but simply a practical one about warmth.

She thought about it for the rest of the afternoon.

Being around him was a tonic and a poison and she had stopped being confused about this because she had resolved it into a single honest fact: it was both, simultaneously, completely, with no resolution available.

The tonic was simple. She had been lonely for a long time in the load-bearing structural way, and Harry was the first person in her life who had—not fixed it, she was too precise for that, she didn't believe in fixed, but inhabited the gap alongside her in a way that made it feel like less of a feature of the landscape and more of a thing that simply existed between two people who both understood it from the inside.

Around him, she was—lighter. She didn't have the word she wanted for it but lighter was approximately true. Like something she'd been carrying for a long time had been set down without ceremony, just placed on the ground beside her, still present but no longer requiring all her effort.

The poison was also simple. She was possessive of him in a way she found alarming when she looked at it directly, which she was trying to do less, because the looking made it larger. She was possessive of his attention and his time and the sheepish smile and the particular quality of the quiet he kept when he sat beside her, and she was jealous of every person who moved through his days in the easy natural way of people with established claim, and she was most jealous—she was honest about this in the dark at night with no one watching—of the people who got to know him without all the architecture, without the alcoves and the careful corridors and the invisibility cloak and the keeping of separate tables in the Great Hall.

She wanted to be the person he walked next to in the open.

She was not ready to be that person.

She understood both of these things simultaneously and kept them alongside each other and got on with October.

She pulled him into alcoves with what she recognized was increasing frequency.

Not always for reasons she could fully justify with the detractor logic. Not always because someone specific was coming. Sometimes because the corridor was full and open and the alcove was there and the instinct moved through her before the committee had a chance to raise its objections, and she'd grab his sleeve and pull and he'd follow and they'd stand in the small private dark together and she'd say something about someone coming and he'd look at her with the expression she couldn't fully read and say right in the tone that meant he knew and wasn't going to make her say the true thing.

She was building private rooms around them.

She understood this. She was doing it deliberately and she was doing it because she could not yet do the other thing—could not be in the open with him, could not be in the bright middle of the corridor walking beside Harry Potter where anyone could see it and name it and put it into the social machinery she didn't trust—and so she built the only alternative available to her, which was a series of small dark spaces where it could exist without being seen.

It was not enough. She knew it wasn't enough. She knew he probably knew it wasn't enough.

But it was October and the first task was coming and his name was still in every sentence in the castle with something complicated attached to it, and she had his hair on her fingertips and the warmth of his hand in her memory and a cup of tea waiting at his elbow whenever she got to the library first, and for now, in this particular October, this was what she had.

She intended to protect it with everything she had.

She reached across the library table on a Friday evening and straightened the cuff of his robe where it had folded under, brisk and efficient, and he looked down at what she was doing and then up at her and said nothing, and she said nothing, and the fire in the library hearth was warm and low and the night outside was very dark, and she turned back to her Potions notes and listened to the sound of him turning pages beside her and breathed in once, carefully.

Tonic and poison.

Both.

Always both.

She turned her page.

Three days before the first task, the castle had taken on the particular quality of held breath.

The foreign students had been at Hogwarts long enough now that the initial stir of their arrival had settled into a new kind of normal—Beauxbatons girls moving through the corridors in their powder blue with the easy grace of people who had been taught since childhood that they were worth looking at, Durmstrang boys occupying the Great Hall with the broad physical confidence of students from a school that apparently valued that sort of thing. The Tournament had reorganized the social atmosphere of the whole castle, and everyone was moving through it differently, recalibrating, finding their new positions.

Pansy moved through it the same as she always had.

Or almost the same.

She had been looking for Harry since after dinner—not obviously, not in the way that could be named, just the low persistent awareness of someone whose attention had a specific direction it wanted to go in. She'd checked the library first, then the east corridor, then the entrance hall, and she had just decided to abandon the exercise and go upstairs when she heard his voice coming from the narrow passage beside the stone archway near the Trophy Room, low and carrying slightly in the quiet corridor.

She turned.

The passage was in partial shadow, the torch on that wall having burned low, and she was almost at the entrance of it when she stopped.

It was the laugh that stopped her.

Not Harry's laugh—she knew Harry's laugh, the short real one and the contained shoulder-version and the quiet one that lived only in his eyes. This laugh was unfamiliar and entirely lovely and French and accompanied by a voice like water moving over something smooth, and it was coming from approximately two feet from Harry's shoulder.

Fleur Delacour.

She was leaning against the stone wall with the unselfconscious ease of someone for whom leaning against walls was simply another form of being beautiful, her silver-blonde hair loose over one shoulder, her face tipped slightly up toward Harry with the expression of someone who was genuinely amused and completely aware of the effect she was having. She was speaking in a mixture of French and English, her hands moving in the fluid illustrative way of someone who thought partly in gesture, and she was—

She was charming him.

There was no other word for it. Harry was standing with his arms loosely folded and the sheepish smile going at full capacity, which was the smile she had catalogued and named and which she had privately believed was at least partly particular to her and which was apparently available to silver-haired Veelas who laughed like water in stone passages, and something dark and specific moved through Pansy's chest like a blade looking for a gap.

She walked into the passage.

She didn't plan it. She didn't convene the committee or select her words or do any of the management she normally applied to situations that required it. She simply walked in, directly, with the full height and the full composure and the dark eyes and the expression, and she came to stand beside Harry with the physical confidence of someone who had decided this was where she was standing and the universe could negotiate with her from there.

"Potter," she said. Her voice was perfectly level.

Harry turned. The smile went from sheepish to something more complicated in the half-second of seeing her expression.

"Parkinson—"

"I've been looking for you," she said, which was true and which she had not intended to lead with, and which she heard herself say with the internal note that the committee had been fully bypassed tonight.

She looked at Fleur.

Fleur looked back at her with the calm self-possession of someone who had been looked at like this before by any number of people and had long since stopped being troubled by it. Her eyes were very blue and very clear and she was, close up, so luminously pretty that even Pansy's most weaponized composure felt slightly underpowered in her vicinity, which was deeply irritating.

"I do not think we 'ave met," Fleur said, pleasantly.

"No," Pansy agreed. She let the silence sit for a beat too long. "Parkinson. Slytherin."

"Fleur Delacour." The French accent made it sound like something from a poem. Pansy found this aggravating. "You are 'Arry's friend?"

"We know each other," Pansy said, which was the most technically accurate and least informative answer available.

"She's my—yes," Harry said, apparently deciding not to navigate the sentence to completion.

"'E speaks of you," Fleur said, and the smile she turned on Pansy was both genuine and entirely unbothered, the smile of someone who understood exactly what was happening in this passage and found it more charming than threatening. "I 'ave been asking 'im about the first task. For comparison of what we each know. 'E is very—" she searched for the word with the gesture of someone translating in real time— "gallant. About sharing."

"How generous," Pansy said, in the tone she kept for things she found deeply ungenererous.

Harry's expression shifted into something she recognized as the beginning of exasperation.

"Fleur was just telling me about Beauxbatons' approach to—"

"I'm sure it was fascinating," Pansy said.

Fleur's smile didn't waver. If anything it deepened slightly, the way the smile of someone who had seen this before and found it rather sweet tended to deepen. She looked between Harry and Pansy with the clear-eyed assessment of someone who had just organized the available information into a complete picture and was choosing not to say so.

"You are very pretty," Fleur said to Pansy, with the simple directness of someone from a culture that stated true things plainly. "Your 'Arry is lucky, I think. 'Is girlfriend 'as good eyes."

The passage went very quiet.

Pansy felt Harry go very still beside her.

She looked at Fleur with the full weight of the inventory gaze and the composed expression and the dark eyes that Fleur had just called good and which were currently doing their absolute level best to reveal nothing.

"I think you've misunderstood the situation," she said, crisply.

"'Ave I?" Fleur said, with the serenity of someone who did not think she had.

"We're acquaintances," Pansy said. "Nothing more complicated than that."

Fleur looked at her for a moment with those very blue very clear eyes and then she looked at Harry with an expression that was kind and faintly amused and entirely too knowing, and she pushed off the wall with the liquid grace of someone for whom even pushing off walls was worth watching.

"Of course," she said, pleasantly. "Acquaintances." She gathered her hair over one shoulder. "Bonne chance, 'Arry. For the task." She looked at Pansy. "And bonne chance to you also, I think. For—" a small gesture, a small smile— "whatever you are doing."

She walked away down the passage and the shadow she left behind was considerably smaller than the space she'd occupied.

Pansy looked at the wall.

Harry looked at Pansy.

The silence had a specific texture to it—not the comfortable library kind, not the lakeside kind, not the cloak kind. This was a newer, tighter silence, the kind with something running underneath it that was building pressure.

"So," Harry said.

"Don't," she said.

"I'm just going to—"

"Potter, I swear—"

"You were jealous," he said.

She turned and looked at him with everything she had, and what she had was considerable, and it landed on him with its full weight and he met it without flinching, which was one of the things she most and least appreciated about him at this particular moment.

"I was not jealous," she said, with great clarity and no truth.

"You walked in here like you were going to hex someone."

"I walk everywhere like that."

"Pansy—"

"Don't call me—" She stopped. Recalibrated. Her voice came back colder and more controlled, which was the direction she wanted it to go. "You were sharing information about the tournament with a competitor. Three days before the first task. Which is the sort of decision that suggests you are not taking the basic mechanics of your own survival seriously, which is—" her voice despite her best efforts came out with an edge that was less cold and more raw than she'd intended— "which is consistent with a pattern I have been watching with increasing frustration since October."

Harry's jaw tightened. "She asked me a question. I was being polite."

"She's charming you."

"She's a person, not a strategy."

"Everyone in a competition is a strategy, Potter, that's what competition—"

"Not everyone has an angle," he said, with the specific patience of someone who had been pushed to the edge of it. "Not everything is a move. Some people are just—talking."

"That is an extraordinarily Gryffindor thing to say."

"And that's an extraordinarily Slytherin thing to say, so we're both being exactly what we are and neither of us is wrong," he said, with a sharpness that was uncharacteristic and which landed because of it.

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

The passage was very quiet.

"I am trying," she said, and her voice was very controlled now, very precise, with all the effort of someone keeping a lid on something that wanted to come off, "to keep you safe. I have been trying to keep you safe since October, in ways you don't know about, and ways you do know about, and it would be—considerably easier—if you would apply a minimum of the same effort to yourself."

Something moved in his face. The exasperation was still there but something else had arrived behind it—softer, attending to something specific in what she'd said.

"Ways I don't know about," he said, carefully.

She had walked directly into that and she looked at the wall and let the silence answer it.

"Pansy," he said, and the name was very gentle and she hated what it did to her, now as every time.

"Don't make it into something," she said quietly.

"I'm not making it into anything. I'm just—" He stopped. She heard him sort through several options and arrive at one. "I'm not trying to scare you. I'm not trying to—I know this year is—" Another stop. "I know what it looks like from where you're standing."

"You don't," she said, and it came out fiercer than she'd wanted.

"Then tell me."

She looked at him then—turned and looked at him fully in the low torchlight with her dark eyes and her short black hair and the freckles she couldn't do anything about and the lip gloss and the black nail polish and whatever was in her face right now that she was failing to completely manage.

"From where I'm standing," she said, very quietly, "you are the only person I have—" She stopped. Hard stop. The honest thing right there at the edge of her mouth and she pulled it back. "You are someone I—" Another stop. She looked at the floor. Tried again, smaller. "You matter to me. In a way that is not—in a way that is more than convenient. And you are three days from a task that no one will tell you anything useful about and you are spending your evenings chatting in passages with people who are very beautiful and very charming and who are not—" she stopped again— "who are on the other side of a competition that could hurt you."

The silence that followed was very long and very full.

"Nothing was going to hurt me from talking to Fleur," he said, finally, gently.

"You don't know that," she said.

"Pansy—"

She picked up her bag from where she'd apparently set it at some point without noticing. Her hands were steady. She was proud of this.

"I need to go," she said.

"We're not finished—"

"I need to go," she said again, with the precision of someone who means I cannot stand here for one more minute with you looking at me like that and keep this expression in place. "I'll see you tomorrow."

"Pansy—"

She walked out of the passage.

She kept her pace even and correct all the way to the dungeon corridor and through the common room and up the stairs to the dormitory and she sat on the edge of her bed in the dark and put her face in her hands and pressed her palms against her eyes.

She was embarrassed.

She was embarrassed in the deep specific way of someone who had walked fully into a lit room having believed the lights were off—every messy thing visible, every managed thing unmistakably unmanaged, the jealousy and the protectiveness and the ways you don't know about all right there in front of him in the low torchlight with no folder and no label and no alcove to pull them into.

But underneath the embarrassment, sitting very still at the center of it all—

She would do anything.

This was what she had said and not said and said again in every way except directly, and she looked at it now in the dark with her hands pressed to her eyes, and it was simply, completely true. She would do anything to keep him safe. She would run interference and leverage social capital and walk into passages and fight with him about French Veelas and sit by cold lakes in October and fold herself smaller and smaller inside alcoves of her own building if it meant he walked out of this tournament—walked out of this year—walked out of whatever was coming, that she could feel gathering at the edges of things the way she'd felt the Dark Mark's morning like a held breath—

She would do anything.

She dropped her hands.

She looked at the stone ceiling.

She was fourteen years old and she was a Slytherin and she was her parents' daughter and she had been raised in the architecture of careful allegiances and strategic positioning and nothing freely given, and she had apparently, somewhere between a June doorway and an October passage, built something that operated on entirely different principles, and she couldn't take it back and didn't want to, and that was the most terrifying and most certain thing she had ever known about herself.

She lay back on her bed.

She stared at the ceiling for a long time.

Bonne chance, Fleur had said to her. For whatever you are doing.

She closed her eyes.

She was going to need it.

Chapter 6

She didn't sleep the night before.

This was not something she acknowledged in any visible way—she came down to breakfast at her usual time, dressed with her usual precision, ate with her usual composure, read the Prophet with the same flat attention she brought to it every morning. From the outside she was exactly what she always was. Neat and contained and going about her morning with the unhurried efficiency of someone for whom the day held nothing extraordinary.

Inside she was coming apart at the seams in the quiet specific way of someone who had been holding something very tightly for a very long time and could feel the grip beginning to cost her more than she had.

The first task was today.

She knew what it was. She had found out the way she found out most things—through careful attention and the social architecture of Slytherin, where information moved in particular channels if you knew which ones to listen to. Dragons. They had dragons in the enclosure beyond the forest, four of them, one for each champion, and Harry was going to walk out in front of the entire school and the delegations of two foreign wizarding schools and the Ministry officials and the judges and he was going to face something that breathed fire and was the size of a house and had been alive long enough to have developed strong opinions about intruders.

She had lain in her dormitory bed and stared at the ceiling and been precise about her fear the way she was precise about everything, and the precision hadn't helped at all.

She found him in the corridor outside the Great Hall an hour before the task.

She had been watching for him, not obviously, from the corner near the staircase that gave a clean sightline to the main entrance without being immediately visible from it, and when she saw him coming down the stairs with his bag and the expression of someone who was managing something large and doing it reasonably well, she stepped out.

"Potter."

He saw her and something in his face did the thing it did—the arriving, the resolving into something less managed—and he came over without hesitation, which still did something to her every time, that he came without hesitation.

She looked at the corridor. Empty enough. She took his sleeve anyway and pulled him around the corner into the alcove off the main hall, the wide one near the tapestry, because she could not do this in the open and she was done apologizing to herself for it.

She let go of his sleeve.

She looked at him.

He looked back, and his face was tired in the structural way and something underneath that that she didn't have a word for—not frightened, or not only frightened, but the look of someone standing at the edge of something large and looking down and having to keep standing there regardless.

She put her arms around him.

She did it the way she'd done it on the train—without the committee, without the management, body making the decision before the rest of her had finished the meeting. Both arms around his shoulders, her face into the side of his neck, and she held on with a tightness she knew was more for her than for him but couldn't adjust, because her hands had gripped the back of his robes and were not taking instructions from anyone right now.

He held her back immediately. No hesitation, no stillness this time—just his arms around her, one hand at her back and one higher, and his chin dropping to rest against her hair, and she felt him breathe in once the way he had on the train, the long slow exhale of something being set down.

"Hey," he said, very quietly. "Hey. I'm alright."

"You don't know that yet," she said into his collar.

"I know," he said. "But I'm going to be."

"You can't promise that."

"No," he said, honestly. "But I'm good at not dying. I've got a reasonable track record."

She made a sound against his shoulder that was not a laugh and also was.

"That is the least comforting thing anyone has ever said to me," she said.

"Three for three," he said. "Three attempts on my life, zero successes. Solid statistics."

"Potter—"

"Pansy." His voice was very gentle. "Look at me."

She pulled back. She looked at him. His face was close in the shadow of the alcove, the green eyes clear behind the glasses, the tired underneath them but the expression itself—calm, and certain, and entirely, devastatingly honest.

"I'm going to be okay," he said.

"You don't—"

"I have a plan," he said. "A real one. Hermione helped. It's—it's actually a good plan. I'm not walking out there with nothing."

She looked at him for a long moment.

"If the plan fails," she said.

"It won't."

"If it does—"

"Pansy."

"—I need you to know that I'm—" She stopped. Started again. "About the passage. The other night. I was—" She looked at his collar, which was slightly crooked, and she straightened it with two fingers and kept her eyes there. "I was not behaving with any particular grace."

"You were worried about me," he said. Simple. No edge.

"I was jealous," she said, which cost considerably more than the collar-straightening, and which she said to the collar rather than to his face. "And I was—yes. Worried. And I combined them badly and pointed them at you, which was unfair. So." She looked up then, briefly, and back down. "I'm sorry."

"I know," he said. "I'm sorry too."

"You have nothing to—"

"I was dismissive," he said. "You were trying to tell me something real and I got defensive." A beat. "I know you—" He stopped. Chose carefully. "I know what it costs you. To say things directly. And I should have—I should have been better with it."

She looked at him properly then.

He looked back, and the expression was the open one, the undisguised one, and she was close enough to see the faint remaining tan across his nose and the line of his jaw and all the specific details she had been accumulating for months and which she was, she understood with complete and uncomplicated clarity, deeply attached to.

"Don't die today," she said.

"Top of my list," he said, and the sheepish smile made its appearance, and she felt the familiar warmth of it move through her like light through water.

She reached up.

She wasn't entirely sure what she intended—something small, something she could justify as practical, the collar or the hair or some other reasonable intervention—but her hand found the back of his neck and her fingers moved into the short hair there, and she felt him go very still in the particular way of someone receiving something they hadn't expected.

She let her nails drag lightly—just once, just the tips of them, black against the pale skin at the nape of his neck—and she felt the small shiver that moved through him, felt him breathe in slightly unevenly, and she looked at the tapestry over his shoulder and kept her expression composed and removed her hand with the smooth unhurried movement of someone for whom this had been a completely routine gesture.

She looked at him.

His ears were pink.

Both of them. Very pink. Visible even in the shadow of the alcove, even with the low light, even with the composure he was attempting, which was not going as well as hers.

She filed this information in a place she intended to revisit at length.

"Go," she said quietly. "And come back."

"Yeah," he said, a little unevenly. "Yeah, okay."

She stepped back.

He stepped out of the alcove and into the corridor and she watched him go with the flat inventory gaze and the composed expression and the warmth moving through her chest like something she was trying to carry very carefully so it didn't spill.

She stayed in the alcove for a moment after he'd gone.

She pressed her fingernails lightly against her own palm and breathed in once and went to find her seat in the stands.

She watched the whole thing.

This was its own specific endurance—sitting in the Slytherin section of the stands with her hands in her lap and her face completely composed and watching Harry Potter face a Hungarian Horntail that was larger than anything she had a useful reference point for, larger than the diagrams in Care of Magical Creatures, larger than the thing she had constructed in her worst imaginings of the night before, and it was breathing fire in long terrible orange sheets and she was sitting very still and not making a single sound.

She watched him fall off his broom in the first minute.

Something happened in her chest that she had no category for. It was not a thought. It was something older and more animal than thought, a clenching wrongness that moved through her whole body in the half-second before she saw him grab the broom again and pull up, and she breathed out very carefully and looked at her hands in her lap and then back at the arena.

She watched him fly.

She had known, in the abstract, that he was good on a broom—everyone knew this, it was simply a fact of Harry Potter the same as the scar and the parents and the history—but knowing it as a fact and watching it were different things entirely. Watching him move on the broom was watching someone doing the thing they were made for, precise and intuitive and utterly unself-conscious, the quality she recognized from his honesty and his okay and his sitting on library floors but translated into pure motion, and it would have been genuinely beautiful if she hadn't been absolutely terrified.

The dragon's tail caught him.

She made no sound.

She pressed her fingernails into her palm under the cover of her robe and she made no sound and she watched him come down and she did not breathe properly again until she saw him stand up.

He stood up.

The crowd made a noise she felt in her chest.

She looked at her hands.

She didn't go to the celebration.

She knew there would be one—Gryffindor would assemble in their tower and it would be warm and loud and full of people who loved him celebrating that he was alive, and Hermione would have already known about the plan and would have her specific relieved expression, and Ron—whatever was happening with Ron—and the whole bright interior of it, and she was not a part of that interior and she was not going to stand at its edge tonight.

She went to the library until it closed.

She sat at her corner table and opened a book and read the same page eleven times and was completely fine and when Madam Pince turned off the lights she packed her bag with her usual efficiency and walked out into the corridor and stood against the stone wall for a moment with the cold of it against her back and just—

Breathed.

He had stood up.

She pressed the back of her head against the stone and looked at the ceiling and let the thing she'd been holding through the whole afternoon and the whole evening come up to the surface for just a moment, where it expanded in her chest like something that had been waiting for the space—the relief and the fear residue and the thing underneath both of them that she had named on the edge of the lake in October and which had only gotten larger since.

She breathed it out.

She pushed off the wall.

She went to the lake.

She was sitting on their rock for perhaps twenty minutes before she heard the footsteps.

She knew them. She had catalogued them, apparently, along with everything else—the particular rhythm and weight of them, unhurried, slightly uneven on the left side from the fall she'd watched him take that afternoon and which had left something she was choosing not to examine in the vicinity of her solar plexus.

She didn't turn around.

He sat down beside her.

She looked at him then, sideways in the dark—and immediately, without intending to, looked at his hands.

They were worse than she'd expected.

The right one was scored across the knuckles with the kind of scrape that came from stone or scale, a long shallow mark that had bled earlier and dried dark, and his left palm had a burn at its outer edge—minor, not serious, she told herself this firmly, not serious—but red and real in the moonlight and she looked at it with the feeling of the dragon's tail and the half-second wrongness moving through her chest all over again.

She looked at the lake.

"Before you say anything," he said.

"I'm not saying anything," she said.

"You have the face."

"I always have the face. It's my face."

"The specific face."

She looked at him. He looked back. The scrape across his knuckles was very visible and she looked at it and then at the lake and she felt the thing she'd been breathing through all evening settle into something quieter and more solid.

"I'm alright," he said. Gently.

"I know," she said. "You stood up."

Something crossed his expression—soft and undefended, the Flourish and Blotts one.

"I stood up," he agreed.

She looked at the water.

He reached into his robes and produced something she hadn't seen before—a piece of folded parchment, worn soft at the creases from long use, pulled from somewhere clearly habitual, somewhere it lived. He held it for a moment and then held it out to her.

She looked at it.

"Open it," he said.

She took it from him with two fingers and unfolded it carefully and looked at what it was, and then looked at it more carefully, because what it was was extraordinary.

The whole castle. Every corridor, every room, every staircase and passageway and alcove—their alcoves, she thought with a strange private lurch—laid out in moving ink, the tiny labeled footprints of every person in the castle moving through it in real time, the whole living geography of Hogwarts breathing on a single piece of parchment.

"This is—" she started.

"The Marauder's Map," he said. "My dad made it. Him and his friends." A pause. "I don't show it to—" Another pause. "I've shown it to Ron and Hermione. That's it."

She looked at him.

He was watching her face with the particular quiet attention she recognized as meaning something—not casual, not idle, the attention he paid to things that mattered to him.

"Why are you showing me," she said.

"Because you need to be able to see where I am," he said, simply. "When you're worried. You can borrow it—" He stopped. Reconsidered. "You can have it. When you need it. I'll find you when I need it back."

She looked down at the map.

The tiny footprint labeled Harry Potter was right there beside the one labeled Pansy Parkinson, both of them at the edge of the lake, the two small marks moving occasionally with their breathing.

She folded it carefully along its existing creases.

She held it in both hands.

"Harry," she said, and his name in her mouth was still unfamiliar, still cost something, still felt like reaching through a window she wasn't sure she was allowed to open.

"Yeah," he said.

She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't have the end of it. She held the map and looked at the lake and felt the warmth of what he'd just done move through her so slowly it was almost painful, the way feeling came back into cold hands—the small bright pain of circulation returning.

He shrugged off his jacket.

She felt it before she saw it—the warm weight of it settling around her shoulders from behind, the dark green Hogwarts Quidditch jacket he wore unofficially, worn soft and slightly too large, and it smelled—

It smelled like woodsmoke.

Dragon smoke, she thought precisely, and it moved through her like something she didn't have language for—the sharp sweet terrible fact of it, the evidence of what had happened today held in the fabric against her shoulders, this very specific warmth that smelled like the thing she'd watched almost take him and which he was currently draping around her without ceremony, without making it a thing, the way he always did.

Her eyes were very bright.

She was looking at the lake.

"You're cold," he said, which was both true and the least important fact about the current situation.

She didn't answer.

She took his right hand instead.

She did it quietly and without announcement—just reached across and took it and turned it over in her lap, and she looked at the scrape across his knuckles in the moonlight, the dried dark edges of it, and she ran her fingertip along it very carefully—not pressing, just tracing, just the lightest acknowledgment of it—and then across the back of his hand and along each finger and across the place where his palm began.

He was very still.

She traced the burn at the edge of his left palm in the same way—the careful outer edge of it, just the boundary, just the evidence—and felt him breathe out slowly beside her.

She held both his hands loosely in her lap and looked at them.

He had good hands, she thought, in the way of someone making an inventory and getting distracted from the function of it. Not remarkable hands, not the hands of someone who had been taught to maintain them—the short nails and the ink stain she'd noticed in October still there at the edge of his index finger, and the callus from his broom on the inside of his right thumb, and the scrapes and the burn now, evidence of today layered over the evidence of everything else.

Working hands. Real hands. Honest hands, the way all of him was honest.

She cared about them.

She cared about them with a specificity that was new—not the general warmth, not the swooning behind the composed expression, but something that went right down to the particular detail of the ink stain and the callus and the scrape, the care of someone for whom the specific was precious rather than merely the whole.

She cared about all of him.

All of the specific, unremarkable, extraordinary details of him—the hair that couldn't be fixed and the glasses that sat crooked and the way he said okay and the map worn soft at its creases and the jacket that smelled of smoke—and it was too large to file and too real to manage and too certain to deny, and she sat with it by the lake under the October stars with his hands in her lap and the smoke-warmth of his jacket around her and she let it be as large as it was.

She was not ready to say it.

She was not going to say it tonight—not here, not yet, not when she was fourteen and he'd nearly been killed this afternoon and she was still white-knuckling the relief of him sitting beside her—but she held it in her chest like the map in her hands, folded carefully along its creases, real and present and entirely her own.

She would keep it safe.

The way she kept everything that mattered.

The way she intended, with everything she had, to keep him.

Chapter 7

November arrived the way it always did in Scotland—without apology.

The cold came down from the mountains and settled into the castle with the intention of staying, finding the gaps in old stone and the drafts in corridor corners and the particular chill of the library in the evenings that no amount of fire seemed to fully address. The grounds went silver with frost in the mornings and the lake took on its darkest color, that deep almost-black that had no clean name, and the sky sat low and grey and permanent over the towers.

Pansy found she minded it less than usual.

She noticed this in the honest accounting way—lying in her dormitory on a Tuesday morning watching the frost patterns on the window with the same flat attention she brought to mirrors, taking inventory. The cold was the same cold. The castle was the same castle. The loneliness was—

She paused on this.

The loneliness was still there. She wasn't going to pretend it wasn't, wasn't going to dress it up in something more comfortable than it was. It was still load-bearing, still structural, still the geography she navigated by. But something had shifted in its quality, the way a room shifted when you moved a lamp—same room, same dimensions, different light. The shadows were in different places.

She knew where the different light was coming from.

She was not examining this too closely.

He was in her orbit now.

She thought about it in those terms because orbit felt accurate in a way that other words didn't—not because it was cold or mechanical but because it was precise. An orbit was not accidental. It had shape and weight and its own specific gravity, and things that entered it tended to stay, and the body at the center felt the pull as much as the thing that circled, whether or not it acknowledged the feeling.

Harry was in her orbit and she was in his and they had been moving around each other with increasing proximity since June and neither of them had named it and she was—

She was not going to name it tonight.

But she felt it with a clarity that had grown from the warmth behind her ribs to something considerably larger and less manageable, something that lived in the specific details now—in his ink-stained index finger and the map worn soft at its creases and the jacket that still smelled faintly of smoke, folded on the corner of her desk beside the hoodie she had still not returned. Two of his things on her desk. She had looked at them one morning with the flat inventory gaze and then looked away and gotten on with her day.

She didn't tell herself they were temporary anymore.

She became aware of the effect gradually, the way she became aware of most things—through accumulated evidence assessed with the flat honest attention that didn't allow for comfortable conclusions.

Harry wanted to make her smile.

This was the first piece of evidence, and it was specific and undeniable and she had watched it happen too many times to attribute it to anything else. He would say things—not trying to be funny, not performing, but with the particular care of someone who had identified a specific outcome they wanted and was working toward it—and he would watch her face with the attentiveness she recognized as meaningful, and when the corner of her mouth moved, when the thing she tried to keep down made it to the surface for a half-second, the expression that crossed his face was—

She didn't have a clean word for it.

Satisfied, maybe. Pleased in the private way of someone who had achieved something they'd been working on and wasn't going to announce it. It happened every time, and she noticed every time, and she had stopped pretending she didn't notice.

The second piece of evidence was that he asked for her advice.

Not about everything—Harry was not someone who asked for advice in the general way, he was someone who made decisions with the quick instinctive honesty of someone who trusted his own judgment and then lived with the consequences without excessive complaint. But he asked her. About people, mostly—about how someone had meant something they'd said, about what a particular dynamic signaled, about the social architecture of situations that confused him. He asked with the genuine interest of someone who understood that her way of reading rooms was different from his and valued the difference, and she gave him her honest assessment and he listened with the full attention, and she felt herself opening up in those conversations in the specific way of someone being genuinely used—not used in the diminishing sense but in the sense of being the right tool for the right task, which she found more satisfying than almost anything else available to her.

He valued how she thought.

She held this fact very carefully, like the map, like the jacket.

The third piece of evidence was the Yule Ball.

She had known it was coming. The announcement had gone through the castle like weather—everyone talking, the older years already negotiating their social positions, the fourth years suddenly aware that they were the relevant age and doing various degrees of panicking about it. She had received the information with the flat attention and the composed expression and had sat with it in her private accounting.

She was not going to be asked.

She was clear-eyed about this. She knew what she was to most people at Hogwarts—the cold Slytherin girl, Parkinson, the one with the dark eyes who didn't smile, the one you revised your impression of in corridors and then thought better of approaching. She was not the girl people asked to dances. She was the girl people watched from a careful distance and discussed in terms that were more about their own anxiety than about her.

She was in the library on a Wednesday afternoon three days after the announcement, working through Arithmancy with the focused efficiency of someone using work to keep other thoughts orderly, when Harry sat down across from her.

He sat down the way he always sat down—without ceremony, with the easy settled quality of someone arriving somewhere they intended to be.

He opened his bag.

He took out a book.

He looked at it.

He put it down.

"Do you want to go to the Yule Ball with me," he said, looking at the book.

She looked up from her Arithmancy.

He was looking at the book with the expression of someone who had decided to say a thing and was in the process of having said it and was now waiting to find out what happened next, and his ears—she checked, with the attentiveness she'd been applying to his ears since the alcove—were going very slightly pink at the edges.

She looked at her Arithmancy.

She looked at him.

"Yes," she said.

He looked up.

She looked at her Arithmancy.

"Okay," he said. The small total version.

"Arithmancy," she said, and pointed at her parchment, and he opened his book and they worked in silence for forty minutes and she read the same theorem four times before it went in and the warmth in her chest was so large she was slightly amazed it wasn't visible from across the table.

She was almost to the library door, bag on shoulder, when he said her name.

She turned.

He was still at the table, book in hand, and he was looking at her with the open expression—the undisguised one, the one he didn't know he was wearing.

"I wouldn't have fun with anyone else," he said. Simply. Flatly. The way he said true things.

She looked at him across the library.

She had no response prepared for this.

Her mouth did the thing—the corner, the window blown open—and she turned around before it became something she couldn't take back, and she walked out of the library and stood in the corridor with her back against the cool stone and pressed her fingertips to her mouth and stood there for a moment being completely undone in the privacy of an empty hallway.

I wouldn't have fun with anyone else.

No performance. No qualification. Just the true thing, placed in the air between them like everything he said, like okay and I didn't forget and the most interesting person I know, and she stood in the corridor and felt it move through her from the top of her head to the soles of her feet and she stared at the ceiling and breathed carefully.

She was fourteen years old and Harry Potter had just asked her to the Yule Ball with his ears going pink and she had said yes and then he had told her the true thing across the library and she was—

She was not going to stand in this corridor indefinitely.

She pushed off the wall.

She walked upstairs.

She sat on her bed and looked at the two things on the corner of her desk—the hoodie and the jacket—and she smiled.

Not the corner-of-the-mouth thing, not the window-blown-open thing.

Actually smiled.

Small and private and entirely her own, in the empty dormitory with no one watching.

Then she smoothed her expression and opened her Arithmancy and got on with the evening.

She organized the dance lessons.

This was a practical matter and she approached it as such—she was an adequate dancer, her mother had ensured this with the same motivation she ensured most things, and Harry was, she was fairly certain, not. She had no evidence for this beyond the general principle that Harry's relationship with physical grace was inconsistent, which was itself based on evidence she'd accumulated since October, and she was not going to walk into the Yule Ball having done inadequate preparation.

She found an empty classroom on the third floor—one of the unused ones near the Charms corridor, broad enough for the purpose, with a gramophone she transfigured from a stack of books in the corner because she could and because it was easier than finding another solution.

She told Harry.

"Tuesday evenings," she said, in the corridor outside Potions. "The unused classroom near Flitwick's. Eight o'clock."

"Dance lessons," he said.

"Yes."

"You're teaching me to dance."

"I'm ensuring that neither of us embarrasses themselves at a formal school event," she said. "The framing is a practical one."

He looked at her with the quiet attention. "Can I bring Ron—"

"No," she said, and walked into Potions.

The first lesson established several things.

The first was that Harry was exactly as she'd anticipated—not incompetent, not without rhythm, but someone who had learned to move through the world in the quick instinctive way of a Seeker and had not yet applied that instinct to dancing, which required a different relationship with the body of another person, which he was currently negotiating with the slightly careful energy of someone who had been told not to break anything.

The second was that the classroom was very quiet at eight in the evening and the transfigured gramophone played something old and slow that suited the room, and Pansy had thought through the practical logistics without fully thinking through what the practical logistics involved, which was him holding her hand and his other hand at her waist and her hand at his shoulder and the two of them occupying the same small circle of space and being required to stay there.

She had thought through this insufficiently.

"You're counting," she said, on the third rotation.

"I'm not—"

"Your lips are moving."

He pressed his lips together. They were not, for approximately ten seconds, moving.

"You're still counting," she said.

"How can you tell if my lips aren't—"

"Your whole face counts," she said. "You have a counting face. Stop thinking about the steps and think about the music."

"Those are the same thing."

"They are not remotely the same thing. The steps follow the music. Stop leading with the steps."

He tried this. She felt the adjustment in the hand at her waist—the slight shift from effortful to something fractionally more natural—and she looked at his shoulder and tried not to notice that this version, the slightly more natural version, involved him actually holding her waist rather than resting his hand there in the careful way of someone who wasn't sure of the terms.

"Better," she said, at her most neutral.

"Really?" He sounded genuinely pleased, the way he sounded when he'd gotten something right that he'd been working on, and she looked at the middle distance over his shoulder and kept her expression together.

"Marginally," she said.

"That's practically a compliment from you."

"Don't get ahead of yourself."

The gramophone reached the end of the record and wound down and they stopped, and she stepped back and assessed him with the inventory gaze.

"Again," she said.

"How many times—"

"Until you stop counting," she said.

He went back to her and she took his hand and they began again, and this time he stepped on her foot on the turn, and she said "Potter," with the full weight of it, and he said "sorry, sorry, I felt it go wrong and overcorrected—" and she said "don't overcorrect, that's worse than the original error," and he said "that's actually useful advice for most things in my life," and something about it—the easy honesty of it, the way he said it without drama, the way the whole thing was slightly ridiculous and entirely comfortable—made the something-almost-laughing rise in her chest and she pressed her lips together hard and looked at the ceiling.

"Are you—" Harry was watching her face with the specific attention. "Are you laughing?"

"I am not."

"Your eyes—"

"I have expressive eyes. It's a structural feature. Keep dancing."

He kept dancing, and the corner of his mouth was doing its own thing, and they moved around the classroom in the low warm light with the gramophone playing and his hand at her waist and her black nails against his shoulder, and she let herself be—just for this hour, just in this room—a little less managed than usual.

It was both terrible and wonderful.

She was beginning to accept that most things involving Harry Potter were both.

The asking happened apparently while she wasn't paying attention.

She found out in pieces over the following week—a Beauxbatons boy, one of the sixth years, had approached her at breakfast with the specific formal politeness of someone who had rehearsed it, dark eyes and very correct French manners. A Hufflepuff fifth year. Marcus Belby from Ravenclaw, who she was fairly certain was operating on a dare. Cormac McLaggen, which she had addressed with a brevity that had apparently impressed Daphne considerably.

Four, in total.

She had declined all of them with the composed efficiency of someone completing administrative tasks.

She did not mention them to Harry.

Harry found out anyway.

She wasn't entirely sure how—she suspected Seamus Finnigan was involved, through the architecture of Gryffindor gossip—but he arrived at the library table on Friday with the expression she hadn't seen since the passage with Fleur. Not the exasperation from their fight—something quieter and tighter than that, the expression of someone who had received information they had feelings about and were negotiating those feelings with incomplete success.

He opened his book.

He closed it.

"McLaggen asked you," he said, looking at the table.

She looked at her Arithmancy. "Among others."

The quality of silence that followed had a very specific texture.

"Others," he said.

"Four, in total," she said, at her most neutral. "I declined all of them."

"I know you declined them," he said, and the slight edge in it was the interesting part—not accusatory, not exactly, but with the tightness of someone who had been bothered by information they thought they weren't bothered by.

She looked at him.

His jaw was set. He was looking at the table with the expression of someone applying careful effort to their composure, which was not something she was accustomed to seeing from him because he usually wore his composure without effort.

She found it, she admitted privately, quite gratifying.

"Potter," she said.

"I'm fine," he said.

"You look fine," she said, in the tone that meant the opposite.

He looked up. His eyes behind the glasses were very direct. "Four people asked you in a week."

"Yes."

"And you declined all of them."

"Yes."

"Because—"

"Because I'm going with you," she said, simply. And then, before the committee could object, before she could manage it into something smaller: "Because I wanted to go with you. Specifically. Not as a default. Not because no one else asked." She held his gaze with the dark eyes, the full steady weight of them, the sharpness of her features and the freckles across them and the black of her hair all composed and deliberate and entirely directed at him. "You. Specifically."

He looked at her.

She held the look.

"And for the record," she said, quietly and precisely, "that works in both directions. You belong to my—" she paused, selected, "—to my orbit, Potter. I don't share orbits."

His expression moved through several things in quick succession and arrived at something that was not the sheepish smile and not the soft one but a third thing—something deeper and less practiced, something that looked like it had come up from somewhere and hadn't been put together for her benefit, just arrived.

"Your orbit," he said.

"Yes."

"So I'm—what. Yours."

She looked at her Arithmancy.

"Technically," she said, "the gravitational relationship goes both ways, so the possessive applies to both of us, which you would know if you'd done more Astronomy."

"So we're each other's," he said, and he said it with the honesty he brought to everything and it landed in the center of her chest with the precision of something that had always been going there.

She looked at her parchment and her black nails against it and felt the warmth of him across the table like the jacket around her shoulders, smoke-warm and specific and entirely real.

"Technically," she said again.

He opened his book.

She heard, from across the table, the quiet sound of him exhaling—slow and certain, the sound of something being set down and also picked up, the sound of a thing being named in the only vocabulary they had for it yet.

She turned her page.

She was smiling.

Not the corner. Not almost.

Properly, privately, bent over her Arithmancy in the library with her dark hair falling forward and her black nails against the page—actually, genuinely smiling, small and real and completely her own.

She kept her face down until it passed.

It took a while.

Chapter 8

The end of November at Hogwarts had a particular quality that Pansy had never quite found a word for.

It wasn't the bleak grey of deep winter, not yet—that came in January, the proper cold that settled into the bones of the castle and stayed. November was something else. It was the last of the amber, the dying back of everything that had been alive in October, the world going spare and honest in the way of things that had given up pretending. The trees along the lake were bare now, their reflections in the water dark and skeletal, and the grounds in the mornings had a silver stillness that Pansy found, though she would not have said this to anyone, genuinely beautiful.

She had started waking up early enough to see it.

This was not, she told herself, because Harry was usually at breakfast by half seven and the entrance hall caught the eastern light in a way that was entirely pleasant in November and had nothing to do with anything else. She was simply an early riser. She had always been an early riser. The fact that early rising had acquired a specific destination was a logistical detail and not a significant one.

She came downstairs on a Monday morning in the last week of November in her school uniform—skirt and dark tights and the oxford shoes she polished every Sunday evening because she found the ritual satisfying, the Slytherin robes pressed, her black hair cut clean to her jaw and still carrying the cold of the dormitory in it—and the morning light came through the entrance hall windows in long amber strips, and Harry was already there at the Gryffindor table with toast and the slightly unfocused expression of someone who had been awake long enough to be present but not long enough to be fully committed to the day.

He looked up.

He smiled.

Not the sheepish one, not the soft one—the simple immediate one, the one that came before he decided to have it. The one that was just—her. Just seeing her and being glad about it, with no performance in either direction.

She walked to the Slytherin table and sat down and poured her tea and opened the Prophet with the usual composure.

She felt warm from her sternum to the tips of her fingers.

She read the same headline three times before it went in.

The weeks after the first task had rearranged the castle in small ways.

Harry's name was still in every sentence, but the quality of the sentences had changed—the doubt had thinned, worn down by the evidence of the arena, replaced in most quarters with something more complicated that Pansy read as a combination of awe and guilt about the previous weeks, which she found neither surprising nor particularly interesting. What she found interesting was the effect on Harry himself, which was less about the change in the castle's opinion and more about what had settled in him since the dragon.

He was quieter. Not the bad kind—not the closed-off kind she'd seen in the weeks after his name came out of the Goblet, the careful-nothing over something that was not nothing. This was the quieter of someone who had done a hard thing and come through it and had arrived at something on the other side that they were sitting with.

He sat with things differently, she noticed. With more patience for them. Less like he was waiting for them to resolve and more like he had decided to just be in them for a while.

She recognized this because she had been doing it herself, since October.

She thought they had probably taught each other something, without either of them announcing it.

Tuesdays were the best days.

She would not have articulated this to another living person—it was the kind of observation that revealed more than she was generally comfortable revealing—but she had done the honest accounting and Tuesdays were simply, empirically, the best days. She had Potions in the morning, which she was quietly excellent at, and Arithmancy after lunch, which she genuinely loved in the way of something that rewarded precision, and in the evenings the library was quieter than the rest of the week, and Harry came.

He came with the same regularity he'd established in October and which had long since crossed from pattern into simply—fact. A Tuesday fact. He sat across from her and he worked, in his slightly haphazard way, and occasionally he asked her something, and occasionally she asked him something, and occasionally they didn't speak for an hour and it was the most comfortable silence she had in her life.

She had started arriving a few minutes earlier than necessary.

She had started, without fully deciding to, leaving the lamp on his side of the table turned up a little higher than the other one, because he read better with more light and he never adjusted it himself.

She did this without comment and he never mentioned it and she was glad of this, because she would have had to find something dismissive to say about it if he had, and she was increasingly tired of finding dismissive things to say about things she actually meant.

The Beauxbatons students in the library were a specific and recurring irritation.

Not all of them—several of the Beauxbatons girls she had observed were perfectly serious students who worked with the focused efficiency Pansy respected regardless of institution. But a subset of them had apparently identified the library as a social space, which it was not, and had taken to arranging themselves near the windows in the early evenings in the way of people who understood that the evening light was flattering and had no objections to being seen in it.

Harry was not unaware of this.

She had watched him notice it with the peripheral awareness she kept in his direction, which was essentially continuous now and which she had stopped apologizing to herself about. He noticed in the way he noticed most things—openly, without calculation, with the honest brief acknowledgment of something pleasant and then on with his work. This was the maddening thing about Harry. He noticed everything without making a project of it.

She moved her chair approximately three inches to the left on a Tuesday evening, which brought her to the edge of his sightline in a way that required him to look past her to see the windows, and she opened her book and read with great composure.

Harry, across the table, glanced at the new position of her chair and then at her and then at his book, and said nothing, and she felt, very specifically, his effort not to smile.

"The light's better over here," she said, without looking up.

"Sure," he said, in the tone that meant he knew.

She turned her page.

The Durmstrang boys were a different kind of irritation.

They were large and self-assured in the way of students from a school that apparently emphasized confidence alongside combat magic, and several of them had developed the habit of appearing in corridors at times that suggested they had worked out the schedules of specific Hogwarts students they found interesting. She had been aware of this in the abstract for two weeks before she became aware of it in the specific, which was when she turned a corner on a Wednesday after Charms and found Viktor Krum leaning against the wall outside the classroom with the patient quality of someone who had been waiting for a while.

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

"You are Parkinson," he said. It was not a question.

"Yes," she said.

"You are friend of Harry Potter," he said.

She considered the vocabulary. "Yes," she said again.

He nodded, slowly, in the way of someone processing information. He was, she acknowledged with the flat inventory attention, extremely handsome in the specific heavy-featured way of someone who had been told this frequently and had arrived at a neutral relationship with it. He was also looking at her with an expression she recognized as the corridor expression—the revision, the reassessment—and she held his gaze with the dark eyes and waited.

"He is lucky," Krum said, with the careful construction of someone working in a second language. "To have such a friend."

He walked away down the corridor.

Pansy stood outside the Charms classroom for a moment.

Then she went to find Harry.

She didn't tell him about Krum specifically. She sat across from him at the library table that evening and worked on her Potions essay and looked at the lamp she'd turned up on his side and thought about he is lucky, to have such a friend, and felt the warmth of it and the sting of it in the same breath, because it was not—quite—what she wanted to be, and she knew what she wanted to be and was not ready to do anything about it, and she was fourteen in November and there was time, and she told herself there was time.

There was time.

She turned her page.

He made her laugh on a Thursday.

This was not, in itself, new—he had been making her laugh with increasing frequency since the dance lessons, small private laughs she kept mostly behind pressed lips or bent over her work, the almost-laughing that she'd been carrying since the alcove in October. But Thursday was different because it was public, or nearly.

They were crossing the courtyard after Herbology—their routes overlapped for this specific stretch, which they had both noticed and neither of them had suggested rerouting—and the frost on the stones was still partly there at half two in the afternoon, the shadows holding it where the sun hadn't reached, and Harry stepped on a frozen puddle that cracked perfectly and theatrically under his foot and he went sideways exactly three steps before catching himself on a pillar with the expression of someone very committed to the narrative that this had been intentional.

"I meant to do that," he said.

She looked at him.

She looked at the cracked puddle.

She looked at him again.

The laugh came up from somewhere low in her chest and made it past all her management before she could address it—not the small contained version, not the pressed-lips version, but a real one, short and bright, and she heard it come out and there was nothing she could do about it because it was already out, already in the cold November air between them.

Harry's face did something extraordinary.

She had been watching his face for months and she knew all its variations and she had not seen this one before—something opened in it, something that went past the soft smile and the sheepish one to something more fundamental underneath them, the face of someone who had been given something they had been wanting for a long time without quite knowing how much they wanted it.

He looked at her like she'd given him something.

She looked away.

"Don't make it a thing," she said.

"I'm not making it a thing," he said, and his voice had the warmth in it and she walked on with the warmth of it following her all the way to the castle door.

She laughed twice more that week.

Once at something he said about Trelawney's newest prediction regarding his life expectancy, which he delivered with a flat resignation that she found unexpectedly devastating. Once at the expression he made when she beat him at Exploding Snap in the library, which she had produced from her bag because she had noticed he was restless and unable to focus and this was the most efficient available solution.

Both times she looked away after. Both times she felt him watching her face.

Both times she folded the feeling into the part of her that was growing past the unlabeled folder into something that required more space than a folder, something room-sized and warm.

She was getting bolder.

She acknowledged this with the same flat honesty she brought to everything about herself. She was getting bolder with him in small increments, the same way he'd been chipping at her armor since June—not dramatically, not in ways she would have to answer for, just the accumulation of small things that shifted the architecture of what they were.

She touched his hair more often now.

Not always the purposeful kind, not always the fixing of something. Sometimes just—the back of her hand against the top of his head as she passed behind his chair in the library, brief and light. Once, settling her fingers at his temple for a moment when he was rubbing at a headache he was pretending not to have, pressing very gently, and feeling him close his eyes for the four seconds she kept her hand there before she picked up her quill and said "drink water, you're dehydrated" and went back to her Potions essay.

She touched his wrist when she wanted his attention now instead of his sleeve—her fingers around the bone of it, light and specific, there and then gone. She had noticed that this particular contact made something happen in his breathing that she found both compelling and extremely useful as data.

She met his eyes more readily. Held the look longer than she used to. Let him find her looking sometimes without immediately redirecting her attention, which was a vulnerability she was consciously choosing and which cost her something and which she was making anyway.

She sat closer on the rock by the lake. The cold was serious now, the November cold with the wind off the water, and this made proximity rational—warmth was warmth and she had a practical relationship with it—but she was honest with herself, in the dark accounting, that she would have sat just as close regardless.

She was getting bolder, and she was doing it on purpose, and she was watching the effect with the careful attention she'd been paying to his face all year.

The effect was consistent.

This was the thing she had found and was still finding—that he was responsive to her in a way that was entirely unguarded, entirely readable, because he didn't have the social machinery to conceal it and had apparently decided not to develop any. When she touched his hair he went quiet in the specific way of someone receiving something pleasant and not wanting to disturb it. When she met his eyes and held the look he held it back, patient and present, the full attention going still and focused on her face. When she sat close on the rock he didn't shift or adjust or make anything of it—he simply settled into it, his shoulder against hers, warm and certain.

He wanted to be where she was.

She had known this in the intellectual sense for some time—since the library tea, since the map, since I wouldn't have fun with anyone else—but knowing it and feeling it, in the specific evidence of his body and his attention, were different experiences entirely, and she was still becoming accustomed to the feeling one, which moved through her differently than the knowing, warmer and more troubling and considerably harder to file.

She found herself thinking about him at odd moments.

In Potions, when the work was going well and the rhythm of it was good, she would think about telling him about it—what specifically had worked, what the smell of a properly made Draught of Peace was, whether he would understand the particular satisfaction of it. In the early mornings over tea she would think about something she'd read the night before and want to know what he thought about it. In the Tuesday library evenings she would look across the table at his bent head and the ink stain on his index finger and feel the room-sized warm thing expand in her chest until it pressed against her ribs.

She wanted him in her days the way she wanted tea in the morning.

Not occasionally, not as a treat, not as a thing she was rationing in case it ran out. As a structural thing. A regular thing. A thing that was part of the architecture of the day itself.

She was, she thought on a Friday evening in the last week of November, sitting by the fire in the Slytherin common room with her book and her black-nailed hands and Daphne across from her doing her Ancient Runes—she was in a great deal of trouble.

And she found that she did not mind very much.

The Ball anxiety arrived quietly, the way all her anxieties did—not announced, just present one morning when she woke up, sitting at the edge of her thoughts with the composed patience of something that intended to stay.

It was not about the Ball itself. She had been to formal events since she was small, had been dressed and presented and deployed in the social architecture of her parents' world since she understood what the architecture was for. She knew how to move through a formal event. She knew how to wear the right thing and say the right things and make the correct impression.

It was about the specific thing this Ball was.

She would walk in with Harry.

Not beside him in a dark corridor under an invisible cloak. Not around a corner, not into an alcove, not at separate tables in the Great Hall with the full width of the room as a buffer. She would walk into the Great Hall at Christmas with Harry Potter and every person in that room would see them together and would think what they thought about what that meant, and she would have to stand in the open with it and that was—

That was the specific thing.

She had been building private rooms. She had been building small dark spaces where it could exist without being seen, where she could have it without having to put it into the machinery of what Hogwarts did with information, and the Ball was the undoing of all the small dark spaces at once.

She sat with this on a Saturday morning, turning it over with the flat honest attention.

She could manage it. She had the tools for it—the composed expression, the walk, the eyes, the complete immunity she had developed over four years to the social opinion of people she did not respect. She could walk into that Great Hall with her spine straight and her chin level and the full inventory gaze and she could manage it with her eyes closed.

But she would also be walking in with Harry, who would not be managing anything, because Harry didn't manage things, he simply was them—and something about the combination of her managing it and him simply being it made her feel, in the private accounting, more exposed than she knew quite what to do with.

She mentioned it to Daphne, obliquely, in the way of someone testing a premise with a trusted skeptic.

"You're going with Potter," Daphne said, without looking up from her Ancient Runes.

"Yes," Pansy said.

"As his date."

Pansy looked at her book. "As his partner for the Ball."

Daphne looked up. Her expression was the contained precise one, the Daphne version of Pansy's own inventory gaze, and she looked at Pansy for a moment with complete calm.

"You'll be fine," she said.

"I know," Pansy said.

"You're nervous," Daphne said.

"I'm anticipating logistical complexity," Pansy said.

Daphne looked at her for another moment. "Pansy," she said, which was not a sentence but carried the weight of one.

"Don't," Pansy said.

Daphne went back to her Ancient Runes. "You'll be fine," she said again, with the settled certainty of someone who had assessed the available information and arrived at a conclusion she trusted. "He'll be wearing the expression he always wears when he's looking for you, and you'll be in whatever you're planning to wear, and you'll be fine."

Pansy looked at the fire.

"What expression," she said, very carefully.

"The one where he's looking for you," Daphne said, with the serenity of someone who had apparently noticed considerably more than she'd been letting on. "You know the one."

Pansy looked at her book.

She did know the one.

She was warm from her jaw to her collarbone and she looked at the fire and let it be there.

She ran into Fleur on a Friday afternoon in the corridor outside the Great Hall.

Not an unfriendly encounter—Fleur was constitutionally incapable of unfriendly, which Pansy had concluded was both genuine and the most effective social tool she'd ever encountered—and she stopped because Fleur stopped, with the grace of someone for whom stopping in corridors was simply another form of arriving.

"Parkinson," Fleur said, pleasantly.

"Delacour," Pansy said.

They regarded each other for a moment with the mutual assessment of two people who had met in a passage and understood what had been happening in it.

"Your robes for the Ball," Fleur said. "Are they decided?"

"Yes," Pansy said.

"Good." Fleur tilted her head slightly. "You will look very beautiful, I think. You 'ave the face for formal things." She said it the way she said everything—plainly, without agenda, as simple true information. "And 'Arry," she added, with the corner of her mouth moving, "will not know what to do with 'imself."

Pansy looked at the corridor past Fleur's shoulder.

"I'm not concerned with what Harry knows what to do with," she said.

"Of course not," Fleur said, in the tone of someone who thought the opposite with great serenity. She smoothed her own robes and shifted her bag on her shoulder. "I 'ope you enjoy the Ball, Parkinson."

She walked away.

Pansy stood in the corridor for a moment.

She thought about he will not know what to do with himself and felt the warm thing expand in her chest and pressed her lips together and walked into the Great Hall for dinner.

Friday evenings had become theirs.

She had not decided this and neither had he and it had happened anyway, which was how most things between them happened—not designed, not announced, just quietly present one day in a way that it hadn't been the day before. She would come to the library at seven and he would already be there, or she would arrive first and he would come in at ten past with the slightly windblown quality of someone who had been outside first, and they would work and they would talk, and sometimes she would go back to Slytherin at nine and sometimes it was closer to ten and Madam Pince had long since included her in the category of students who were above reproach regarding library closing times.

The Friday before the last week of November was cold enough that the windows had frosted at their edges, and the library fire was the best fire in the castle on days like this—high and generous, throwing its warmth across the whole reading section—and she had commandeered the two armchairs nearest it, not her usual table but the two chairs that sat at the edge of each other's personal space, close enough to talk without raising voices.

Harry came in at half seven with his bag and a slight redness across his nose from the cold outside and his hair at maximum entropy, which was saying something.

She looked at his hair.

"Don't," he said.

"I haven't said anything," she said.

"You had the hair face."

She was apparently generating a taxonomy of facial expressions in his mental catalogue, which she found both irritating and oddly gratifying. She gestured at the second chair and he dropped into it with the easy physicality of someone who had long since stopped calibrating himself around her, and she found herself noting this with the particular warmth of something she'd been watching develop over weeks.

He pulled his Charms textbook from his bag with the resigned air of someone about to spend time with something they hadn't chosen to care about.

"The Summoning Charm," he said.

"For the task," she said.

"The second one." He frowned at the text. "Finite Incantatem and the peripheral applications—"

"That's the wrong chapter," she said. "You want the theoretical basis first, then the applications, or the applications won't make sense."

He looked at her. "How do you already know what's in the Charms text for a module we haven't started?"

"I read ahead," she said.

"You read ahead," he repeated, with the expression of someone finding this entirely believable and entirely her.

"Chapter four," she said. "Theoretical basis, then six for the applications. You can skip five unless you want the historical derivation, which you don't."

He found chapter four. He looked at it for a moment. "Do you actually enjoy reading ahead," he said, "or is it a preparation anxiety thing?"

She looked at the fire. "Both," she said, which was more honest than she'd intended to be about it.

"Yeah," he said, without judgment. "I get that."

He read. She read. The fire was warm and the library was quiet and outside the windows the frost was thick on the glass, and she sat in the armchair with her black-nailed hands around her book and her dark eyes on the page and the warmth of him in the adjacent chair a consistent and uncomplicated fact.

After a while he said, without looking up from his text: "Can I ask you something."

"You can ask," she said. Her standard answer.

"About the Ball."

She turned her page with the same composure. "What about it."

"Are you—" He stopped. Started again. "Are you actually alright with it? All the—the walking in, the being seen—" He gestured slightly, which she felt rather than saw. "I know you—I know it's complicated. The way we are here. I don't want you to feel like I'm—"

"Potter," she said.

He stopped.

She looked at him. He was watching her with the genuine concern of someone who had been thinking about this and had decided to say it rather than let it sit, which was exactly how he handled things and which she found both exasperating and the most honest thing about him.

"I want to go," she said, simply. "With you. I've decided to want to and I don't revise decisions."

He looked at her for a moment. "Okay," he said.

"But," she said, because she was not going to be entirely undone by his concern without levying some cost, "if you step on my feet—"

"I haven't stepped on your feet in a week and a half—"

"You stepped on them twice on Tuesday—"

"Once," he said, "the other one was a graze—"

"A graze is a contact—"

"A graze is barely—"

"Potter, if you step on my feet at the Ball, I will cause you a specific and lasting inconvenience," she said, and he was laughing—the real one, short and bright—and she pressed her lips together against the thing trying to get out and went back to her book with the warmth of the laugh still in the air between them.

"Noted," he said, when he'd assembled himself. "No feet."

"No feet," she agreed.

They went back to their reading.

She reached across and tucked the corner of a page that had folded wrong in his textbook back into place, because it was there and it was wrong, and his eyes moved to her hand and then back to the page and she felt him make the decision not to say anything about it, and she felt the warmth of that decision sitting alongside all the others in the room-sized place she was keeping them.

The fire burned. The frost crept further across the windows. She turned her pages.

This was November. This was what November had become.

She looked at the fire and at the black of her nails and at the small reflected stars the frost made at the edges of the windowglass, and she thought—without management, without filing, without the inventory gaze—that this was the most content she had been in a room in as long as she could remember.

She thought she would like to remember it very clearly.

She looked at him.

He was reading with the particular absorbed expression, the one where his focus went completely into the text and his face went soft and unguarded, and the fire was on his face and his glasses reflected a small warm point of it, and he was in her armchair on a Friday in November and he was—

He was hers.

In whatever vocabulary they had for it yet.

Hers, and she was his, the gravitational relationship going both ways.

She turned back to her book.

She was smiling.

Small and private and bent over the pages.

She let it stay this time.

The last Friday of November she wore her grey wool over-robes to the library because the castle corridors were at their coldest, and she arrived to find him already there—not at the armchairs but at her usual table, which he had apparently migrated to, with both lamps turned up the way she kept them and her usual chair pulled out at an angle that she recognized as him doing the thing she did for him, making the space ready before she arrived.

She stood in the library doorway for a moment.

He looked up. "Cold out?" he said.

"The corridor by the Charms room is unreasonable," she said.

"I left the lamp up," he said, nodding at her side, and went back to his textbook with the ease of someone who had done a natural thing and did not require acknowledgment for it.

She sat down.

She arranged her things.

She looked at the lamp on her side of the table, turned up for her, and at his ink-stained hand moving across parchment, and she felt something move through her chest that was too large and too warm and too specific for any of the words she had for it, something that reached down to the particular and the ordinary and made them both precious.

She uncapped her quill.

She worked.

Outside, the last of November went dark and cold and the frost came down again and inside the library it was warm and lit and she sat across from him in the lamplight with her black nails and her dark eyes and her short black hair and all the room-sized warmth she had given up managing, and she was—

She was happy.

She let herself know it.

She was happy.

Chapter 10

She started getting ready at four.

This was earlier than necessary—the Ball didn't begin until eight, and she required, by honest assessment, approximately ninety minutes for everything she intended to do—but she had looked at the afternoon and understood that she needed the extra time not for the practical elements but for the other thing. The managing. The sitting with it quietly in a room by herself before she had to take it out into the world.

She waited until the dormitory had emptied.

This didn't take long. By half three the other girls had begun migrating in groups toward each other's rooms, toward the sixth-year dormitory where someone apparently had a better mirror, toward the bathrooms at the end of the corridor that had better light. They went in the way that girls went to these things—in clusters, trailing laughter and half-finished sentences, carrying each other's things. She watched them go from her bed with the flat even expression of someone observing a weather pattern that didn't apply to them.

Millicent and Tracey left together, Tracey already talking about something she was going to do with her hair that Millicent was skeptical about. Two fouth-year girls she knew by name and house went past the dormitory door with their arms full of fabric. From down the corridor she could hear the particular pitch of several girls laughing at once, the warm chaotic sound of people getting ready together, the sound of being in the middle of something rather than beside it.

She sat on her bed and listened until it faded.

Then she got up.

The dormitory was very quiet.

She had the bathroom to herself, which she preferred, and she ran the bath at the precise temperature she liked and washed her hair with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had been doing this alone for as long as she could remember, which was all her life, because there had never been a mother who sat on the edge of the tub and talked to her while she washed her hair—her mother existed in the next room, the next floor, the next wing, available in the performed sense and absent in the real one, and Pansy had grown up learning to do all of this alone and had arrived at something that was not quite acceptance and not quite peace but was the functional version of both.

She dried her hair with a simple charm and sat at her vanity in the quiet.

Her reflection looked back at her.

She looked at it for a moment before she began—the flat inventory gaze, the honest accounting. Her jaw had sharpened again over the autumn, the geometry of fourteen continuing its reliable work, and her cheekbones were more pronounced than they'd been in September, the freckles across them visible in the vanity light in a way she found inconvenient on a night like tonight. Her dark eyes were clear and her black hair sat at her jaw in the precise blunt cut she kept, and she was—

She was pale. Always pale, the translucent kind that showed everything—every flush, every temperature change, every feeling she failed to contain. She had accepted this the way she'd accepted most structural things about herself, which was with the practical acknowledgment that there was nothing to be done about it.

She opened her makeup case.

She had two modes with makeup—the daytime mode, which was the lip gloss and nothing else, and the formal mode, which she had used at her parents' events and which she now applied with the same practiced precision. She did her eyes first. The liner went on in a clean dark line, sharp at the outer corners, the kind that made her dark eyes look darker and more deliberate, the kind that looked like she meant it. She kept it clean. She kept it precise. It was the only decoration she trusted herself with, the only thing that didn't feel like she was putting on something that wasn't hers.

She looked at her reflection.

The freckles were still visible.

She reached for her powder.

She paused.

She thought about Daphne saying you'll be fine, and about Fleur saying you will look very beautiful, and about Harry's voice in the library going carefully neutral when he was trying not to make something a thing but not quite managing it.

She put the powder down.

She left the freckles.

She was not entirely sure why. She would examine this later, in the private accounting, at some future date when she had the distance for it. For now she simply looked at herself in the vanity mirror with the liner and the freckles and the black hair and applied the lip gloss—the clear kind, the faintest shine—and put her hands in her lap and looked at her reflection as though they were meeting each other.

"Right," she said, to no one.

She went to get dressed.

The gown was hanging on the back of her wardrobe door, which is where it had been for the past two weeks, and every morning she had looked at it with the same expression she brought to the unlabeled folder and the corner of her desk with the two folded things on it—not lingering, not performing, just—present to it.

She had chosen it in October.

She had written to the seamstress her mother used—a witch in Kensington who worked in both Muggle and wizarding formal wear and who had been dressing Pansy for events since she was nine—and she had described what she wanted with the precision she brought to all descriptions, and what she had described was this.

Simple. Conservative in the way that was actually its own sophistication—no elaborate architecture, no excessive detail, nothing that asked for attention before she chose to give it. The cut was clean, long to the floor with a small train, fitted through the bodice and falling straight from the hip in the way that suited her slight build without trying to be something it wasn't. The sleeves were to the wrist—she almost always had her wrists covered, this was a consistent preference she had never examined too closely—with the same clean line throughout.

And the color.

She had known the color before she'd known anything else about the gown. Before the Ball was announced, before Harry had asked her across the library table with his pink ears, before the unlabeled folder had become something room-sized. She had known the color the way she occasionally knew things—with a certainty that arrived fully formed and didn't require justification.

Red.

Not a dramatic red. Not the red of attention or performance or the red that announced itself. A deep, muted red—the color of red when it had been in a room for a long time and had settled into its own depth, the color of red that was sure of itself without making a declaration. Dark enough to be serious. Rich enough to be warm.

She had not, when she chose it, let herself think about why.

She was letting herself think about it now.

She had thought about it every morning for two weeks when she looked at the gown on the back of the wardrobe door, and the honest accounting had arrived at the same answer every time, which was the answer she had known from the beginning and had been managing at arm's length. It was Gryffindor red. It was the particular shade of Gryffindor red that appeared in the common room tapestries and the Quidditch stands, and she had chosen it with that knowledge sitting in the back of her mind like a small light she wasn't looking at directly.

She had chosen it for him.

Not in the sense of performance, not to make a statement, not for any of the complex social reasons she usually had for the choices she made. She had chosen it because she had stood in a seamstress's workroom in October with sample fabrics spread across a long table and she had touched this particular red and thought immediately and involuntarily of Harry, of the warmth of him, of the specific warmth of Gryffindor tower that she stood outside of and toward which she had been moving in small careful increments all year, and she had said this one without allowing herself to think about it any further.

She lifted the gown from its hanger.

She put it on.

She stood in front of the long mirror on the inside of her wardrobe door and looked at herself.

The red was right. It was exactly right, the way things were sometimes exactly right and you understood that you'd made the correct decision even if the correct decision had been made for reasons you were still working up to being honest about. The color was warm against her pale skin, which she had not fully anticipated—she had expected it to make the pallor starker, but it did something else, something the seamstress had probably understood that she hadn't, warming the white of her skin into something that had its own kind of richness rather than the stark contrast she'd been prepared for.

The freckles across her cheekbones were visible.

She looked at them.

She left them.

She put on her shoes—black, low-heeled, because she'd made the pragmatic calculation about dancing and Harry's feet and the physics of the situation—and she stood at the mirror and looked at herself for a long moment with the honest inventory gaze, and what she found was—

Fine.

Not fine in the architectural way, not the load-bearing functional fine. Fine in the genuine sense. She looked like herself in a red gown, which was both true and more than she had been expecting, and there was something in it—the liner and the freckles and the muted Gryffindor red—that felt less like a costume and more like a declaration.

A small one. A private one.

But a declaration nonetheless.

She took her small bag—black, beaded, chosen for size rather than occasion—and her wand tucked into it, and she left the dormitory.

The corridor outside was empty.

Not in the transient way of somewhere people had just passed through—empty in the specific way of somewhere that had been full of noise and warmth and had exhaled it all in one direction, toward the event, toward the Great Hall, leaving the space it had occupied behind. She could hear, distantly, the sound of it—voices and music carried up through the castle's stone like warmth through old walls.

She walked.

The dungeons corridor, then the staircase up to the entrance level, then the long corridor toward the main hall, and the castle was doing its particular cold evening thing—the drafts in the corners, the torch shadows on the grey stone, the high silence of an old building that had seen centuries of people walking through it toward things that mattered to them. She walked through it the way she walked through everything—with the deliberate unhurried pace, the spine straight, the chin level—and she was alone in the way she was always alone, the way she had been alone for so long that it had become the geography, the thing she navigated by.

She felt it, tonight, more than usual.

Not as a wound. She was too honest and too practiced for that. She felt it as a fact—clean and clear and unadorned, the way facts were—that she had gotten ready alone while the dormitory was full of people getting ready together, that she was walking through an empty corridor in a red gown on her way to the most significant formal event of the year, and the walking was alone, and the getting ready had been alone, and all the small bright things she had accumulated over the past months—the map, the jacket, the hoodie on the corner of her desk, the lamp turned up on her side of the table—all of them were real and true and exactly what she knew them to be, and she was still walking alone through a cold corridor.

She thought about the dormitory sounds she'd listened to while she waited for the room to empty—the laughter and the voices and the ease of people helping each other. She had not wanted to be in the middle of it with the specific girls in her dormitory, who were not people she trusted in the way that easy intimacy required. But she had wanted—she held this in the honest accounting, because she owed herself honesty even about the things that cost something—she had wanted the thing the sound represented. The inside of it. The being helped. The sitting at someone's vanity while they did something to her hair and talked about something that didn't matter, the weight of another person's ease and warmth and casual care in the room.

She had wanted not to do it alone.

She walked through the cold corridor and let the wanting exist for the length of this passage and then she put it in the part of herself that was strong enough to hold it and she kept walking, and the warmth of the Great Hall was beginning to reach the corridor in faint degrees, and the sound of music was clearer now, and she was going to walk into the Ball and she was going to be—

She heard her name.

"Pansy."

Not her surname. Her name. The way he said it—the particular way, the specific weight of it, with the abandon of someone who had stopped calculating the distance between the impulse and the action.

She turned.

Harry was at the far end of the corridor.

He was in dress robes that were—she took this in with the inventory gaze and then with something considerably less inventory and more—he was in dark green dress robes that were slightly too formal for the ease with which he wore them, the cut correct and the color good and his hair doing the thing his hair always did, which tonight, rather than being a liability, was simply—his. His hair and his glasses and the slight tilt to the way he stood, and he was walking toward her with the directness he always had when he'd seen her, the not-circling-toward quality, the straight line.

She stood still and let him come.

He came.

He stopped approximately three feet away and he looked at her.

She held the inventory gaze.

He wasn't doing the inventory gaze. He was just—looking, openly and without any of the management she herself was deploying, the way he looked at things that mattered to him, the full undivided attention.

He looked at her for a long moment.

"Pansy," he said again, and this time it wasn't the calling across a corridor, it was just—the name, the word, in the particular quiet that meant he was in the honest place, the place he went when he said okay and I didn't forget and I wouldn't have fun with anyone else, and she felt it move through her the way those things always moved through her—from the outside of her chest to somewhere considerably further in.

"Your hair's a disaster," she said.

The sheepish smile arrived, immediate. "I know."

"I can see you made an effort with the robes," she said, with the tone she kept for things she meant more than she was going to let on.

"Hermione helped with the robes," he said. "The hair was always going to be a loss."

"The hair is a loss," she agreed. "The rest is—" She gave it the inventory gaze that was not quite the inventory gaze, that was the other thing wearing the inventory gaze's clothes. "Acceptable."

"Acceptable," he repeated, and the smile had the warmth in it.

"Don't push it," she said.

He looked at her. He looked at the gown, without calculation—just the open look, the honest taking-in of something that warranted it. She stood and let him look and did not redirect him, which was itself a small act of deliberate courage that she was aware of and which cost her something and which she was making anyway.

"You look—" he started.

She waited.

He was not someone who struggled for words in the way of someone performing a search. He struggled for words in the way of someone for whom words were important and who wanted the right ones, and she had learned to wait out the gap without filling it.

"You look really pretty," he said.

Plainly. Directly. The way he said true things, with the flat honest delivery that stripped all the social performance out of it and left only the fact—you look really pretty, said with the same weight and certainty as okay and I didn't forget, with the complete absence of calculation or performance or any design except the simple one of saying the true thing to the person it was true about.

She felt it go through her.

All of her.

Not the warmth in the chest—that was always there now, had been there so long it had become a baseline she measured other things against. This was different. This started at the top of her head and went down through all of her to the soles of her feet and back up again, warm and specific and thorough, the feeling of being seen by someone whose seeing mattered in a way that nothing else had managed to matter.

She looked at his collar.

It was slightly crooked.

She reached up and straightened it with two fingers, the gesture she'd made so many times now that her hands went there automatically, and she felt him go still in the way he went still when she touched him, the particular attentive stillness that had become one of the most reliable things she knew.

"There," she said.

Her voice came out level.

She was proud of this.

"Thank you," he said, quietly.

She dropped her hands and looked at his shoulder, which was a safe place to look. "You said my name across the corridor," she said.

"I saw you," he said, with the simplicity of someone who had not considered this required further explanation.

She looked at him then—properly, for a moment, with the full weight of her dark eyes and the liner and the freckles she had left and the muted red of the gown. She looked at him and felt the room-sized warmth and the longing she had been carrying since October and the specific particular tenderness of this moment in the corridor—the empty castle, the cold stone, the distant music, and Harry looking at her like she was the thing in the room he had been looking for.

She had wanted not to walk to the Ball alone.

She was not, she understood with the sudden total clarity of something she had known for a long time and was only now letting herself look at directly—she was not going to walk to the Ball alone.

"Shall we," she said.

She offered her arm.

It was a formal gesture, the one she'd been taught since childhood as the correct deportment for arriving at events with a companion. She offered it with the composed expression and the straight spine and all the architecture intact, and she felt—underneath all of it, in the warm honest center where she kept the things she didn't manage—the wanting of it, the real wanting, the wanting that was not about deportment or correctness but about his arm against hers, his warmth, his presence walking beside her through this particular castle on this particular night.

Harry looked at her arm.

He looked at her face.

He took her arm.

His hand at her forearm was warm through the sleeve of the gown, and they were standing in the corridor together, and she could feel the specific weight of him beside her—the height, the warmth, the easy unremarkable solidity of him—and something in her chest that had been drawn tight for a long time, since long before Harry, since long before Hogwarts, since long before she understood what it was drawn tight about—loosened.

Just slightly.

Just a fraction.

Enough to breathe a little more fully than she had in a very long time.

"You look really pretty," he said again, more quietly, like he needed to say it twice to have finished saying it.

She looked at the corridor ahead of them.

"You said that already," she said.

"I know," he said.

She pressed her lips together against the smile.

She kept her eyes ahead.

She let him walk beside her.

The corridor to the Great Hall was beginning to have people in it—small groups, couples, clusters of students moving in the same direction with the collective nervous energy of an event that had been anticipated for weeks now finally arriving. She felt them the way she always felt crowds—with the peripheral awareness, the automatic assessment, the reading of the room from its edges.

She also felt Harry.

This was not new. She had been feeling Harry with a specific and continuous awareness since September at minimum, and probably since June if she was being honest, which she was being, because she was always honest in the private accounting. But tonight it was different—tonight the awareness was warmer and larger and less manageable than its usual form, and she thought it had something to do with the red of the gown and the two times he'd said you look really pretty and the way his name, said across a cold corridor, had moved through her like something finding the thing it was looking for.

She was intoxicated by it.

She had not had another word for this feeling, had been circling it for months with the vocabulary she had available—warm, and swooning, and the room-sized thing she kept—but tonight, walking beside him with his hand warm at her arm and the formal robes and the Christmas music reaching them now from the hall, she arrived at the honest word for it.

Intoxicated.

By his attention. By the specific quality of it—undivided, unguarded, unperformed. By the way he had said her name across a corridor with the abandon of someone who had seen the thing they wanted to see and had not calculated whether saying so was appropriate before they said so. By the way he was looking at her, even now, in the peripheral—she could feel the occasional small movement of his attention toward her face and she found she was not redirecting herself away from it, was not managing it, was letting it land and sitting with what it did when it landed.

He wanted her to know he thought she was pretty.

He wanted her to know he wouldn't have fun with anyone else.

He wanted her to know her orbit was real and mutual and that he was in it the same way she was in it, and he communicated all of this in the only language she could receive it—plainly, directly, without design or performance, just the true things said to the person they were true about.

She had spent fourteen years in the architecture of careful things—calculated things, performed things, things that were true only in the service of something else. She had grown up in a house where everything meant something other than what it said, where the real things lived underneath the surface things and never came up for air, where she had learned to read subtext before she learned to read text and had become so fluent in it that plain things confused her.

Harry was plain.

Harry was just—exactly what he said and said exactly what he was, and she was intoxicated by it in the specific way of someone who had been thirsty for a very long time and had not realized how thirsty until the water was already there.

She was, she thought, in a very great deal of trouble.

She was, she thought immediately after, completely certain that she did not mind.

They were close to the Great Hall doors now.

She could hear the music clearly—something slow and formal for the processional, the kind of music her mother had played in the house on the evenings she felt nostalgic or wished to perform nostalgia for an audience of herself. The doors were open and the light from inside was warm and golden and considerable, spilling out into the corridor and touching the faces of the students waiting to go in.

She felt the flutter of something in her chest that she identified after a moment as nerves.

Not the managed kind, not the logistical complexity she'd discussed with Daphne. Actual nerves. The nervous system event that bypassed the managed parts and went directly to the body, and her body was currently informing her that she was about to walk into the Great Hall in a red gown with Harry Potter and every person in that room was going to see them together and would think what they thought and she was going to be standing in the open with all of it visible.

She breathed in carefully.

Harry, beside her, said: "Okay?"

She looked at him.

He was watching her face with the specific attention—not the performance of checking in, just the genuine attending to. He had noticed the something that had moved through her, which she found both invasive and deeply comforting, which was the condition of most things about him.

"Yes," she said.

He looked at her for a moment.

"You look really pretty," he said, and this time it was different from the first two times—this time it was doing something else, it was saying I see you and you're here and whatever you're feeling I'm here too, and it was the most efficient and most Harry thing he could have said, plain and warm and completely particular to her.

She looked at his terrible hair and his slightly crooked glasses and the dark green robes and his hand at her arm, and she felt the longing for him with the full honest weight of it—not tucked away, not at arm's length, not in a folder or a drawer or an unlabeled section, but right here in the corridor with the music reaching them and the light ahead—

The longing, and the warmth, and the specific bright particular thing that lived where the longing and the warmth met, the thing she was not going to call what it was tonight but which she held with both hands, carefully, the way she held the map—

Real.

Present.

Entirely hers.

"Come on, Potter," she said.

She moved them forward toward the doors.

Chapter 11

The champions' waiting area was a small antechamber off the main corridor, and it smelled of hothouse flowers and the particular nervous energy of people who had been told to wait and found waiting difficult.

Pansy did not find waiting difficult.

She stood beside Harry with her arm through his and her spine straight and her composed expression fully operational and she looked at the room with the flat inventory attention and she was—mostly fine. Mostly. There was a low hum somewhere in the vicinity of her sternum that she was declining to examine, and her fingers on Harry's arm were slightly tighter than strictly necessary, and she had straightened his collar twice already in the last ten minutes, but from the outside she was precisely what she always was.

Composed. Contained. Entirely in hand.

Harry was not in hand.

He was looking around the room with the open expression and the slightly windblown quality of someone who had been handed an extraordinary situation and was experiencing it rather than managing it, which she had long since accepted was simply how he existed in the world, and which she found—as she found most things about how he existed in the world—both exasperating and the most honest thing she'd ever seen.

The other champions were there already.

Cedric Diggory stood near the window with his date—a Ravenclaw girl Pansy recognized, composed and pretty in blue—and he had the easy confidence of someone who had been prepared for this his whole life, which she respected in the abstract. Krum stood with his arms loosely folded near the door, his dress robes severe and dark, and he looked across the room at her when they entered with the same assessing regard he'd deployed in the corridor that Wednesday, and she met it with the inventory gaze and he nodded, fractionally, the nod of someone revising an assessment upward.

Fleur was across the room.

She looked extraordinary, which Pansy acknowledged with the flat honesty of someone capable of aesthetic recognition even when it was inconvenient. The silver-blue of her robes made her look like something from a different story entirely, something older and more luminous, and she was standing with the unconscious grace of a person for whom grace was simply the default setting of being alive.

She saw Pansy and smiled.

Not the knowing smile from the corridor—the genuine one, warm and direct, the smile of someone who was, Pansy was grudgingly concluding, actually just like this.

"You look beautiful," Fleur said, crossing to them with the fluid movement, and she said it the way she said all true things—plainly, without agenda. Her eyes moved to Harry. "'Arry." The corner of her mouth. "You look very—" she searched for the word— "yourself."

"Thanks," Harry said, with the sheepish smile, which Fleur received with the serenity of someone who had expected nothing different.

"The red is perfect," Fleur said to Pansy, and her eyes were warm and knowing and Pansy looked at her in the flat level way and said "thank you," and Fleur's smile suggested she knew exactly what the red was for and was not going to say so, and Pansy found her genuinely tolerable, which was more than she'd expected.

Hermione arrived with Viktor Krum three minutes later and changed the atmosphere of the room in the specific way of someone entering a space they had earned rather than been granted, which Pansy noted with the honest acknowledgment she reserved for people who did things correctly. She was in periwinkle blue, her hair done up in a way that was a complete departure from the everyday, and she looked—Pansy did the flat assessment—genuinely lovely. More than lovely. She looked like herself, very clearly herself, taken seriously.

Krum beside her had the expression of someone who had made an excellent decision and was aware of it.

Hermione saw Harry first, with the relief of someone spotting something familiar and beloved, and then she saw Pansy, and the expression moved—not badly, not hostilely, but with the honest surprise of someone recalibrating.

"Pansy," she said.

"Granger," Pansy said.

A half-second of assessment, mutual, the two of them looking at each other with the particular attention of people who were intelligent and careful and both aware of the significance of the moment.

"You look lovely," Hermione said, and meant it, which Pansy received as the information it was.

"As do you," Pansy said, and she meant it too, and they both knew the other one had meant it, and something settled between them with the quiet efficiency of two people who had decided, without negotiating it, to be civil in a genuine way rather than a performed one.

Harry, beside Pansy, had the expression of someone watching something happen and being very pleased about it and exercising great restraint about not saying so.

She pressed her elbow into his ribs, lightly, without looking at him.

He made a small sound of innocent surprise.

"How is your preparation for the second task?" Pansy asked Hermione, because it was the right question and because she was, in the honest accounting, genuinely curious, and Hermione looked at her for a moment with the recalibration still in progress and then answered properly, and they had a conversation that was—

Real, Pansy thought. Actual. The kind she didn't often get.

She was aware of Harry watching her throughout it with the soft expression, the undefended one, and she did not address this but she felt it the way she always felt his attention—warm and particular and landing in the specific place it always landed, the place she had given up trying to armor.

Ron Weasley arrived separately from the champions' area, via the main doorway—she heard him before she saw him, which had historically been true of Ron Weasley, in her experience.

"You're joking," was what she heard, in the specific register of someone saying something they intend to be heard.

She turned.

Ron was standing in the entrance of the anteroom looking at Harry and then at her and then at Harry again with the expression of someone who had received unexpected information and was not certain how to file it. He was in maroon dress robes that she was not going to comment on because she was not going to comment on anything about Ron Weasley tonight that she didn't have to.

"Ron," Harry said, in the warning version.

"No, I'm just—" Ron gestured vaguely at Pansy, at Harry, at the space between them. "You and—her?"

Pansy looked at Ron with the full weight of the dark eyes and the composed expression and all the apparatus, the look that had been making sixth years revise themselves in corridors since October.

Ron, to his credit, did not entirely wilt. He was Gryffindor and stupid-brave and she found this, very privately, the most tolerable thing about him.

"Weasley," she said, at her most neutral. "You look—" she glanced at the maroon robes— "festive."

Ron looked at her.

Harry looked at the ceiling with the expression of someone in the presence of two unstoppable forces that he loved in different ways and could not do anything about.

"I didn't mean—" Ron started.

"You meant exactly what you said," Pansy said, without heat. "It's fine. I have low expectations for the social grace of people who aren't expecting to see me, and you've met them."

Ron blinked.

Harry made a sound that was very close to a laugh and converted it, imperfectly, into a cough.

"Right," Ron said, and then, with the ungainly honesty of someone who didn't have the social architecture for anything except the true thing: "You look—I mean. The robes are. Yeah."

Pansy regarded him for a moment.

"Thank you, Weasley," she said. "That was almost a sentence."

Ron looked at Harry.

Harry shrugged with the expression of someone who had long since accepted their position in this particular dynamic.

"She's always like this," he said, and the warmth in it was everything, because always like this meant she was known, meant she was expected, meant she had been integrated into the ongoing story of his life as a fixed point, and she heard all of this in the two words and looked at the floor and composed herself and was ready again in approximately four seconds.

"Good luck with the processional," she said to Ron, with genuine disinterest, and turned back to Harry.

Harry was looking at her with the soft open expression and the warmth that was, she thought, going to be her undoing before the year was out.

"You didn't have to be kind," he said, quietly.

"I wasn't particularly kind," she said.

"For you," he said, "that was extremely kind."

She looked at his collar. It was straight. She straightened it anyway.

The processional was announced and they were arranged and she was standing beside Harry at the top of the queue and the Great Hall doors were about to open and the hum in her sternum had reached a frequency she was actively managing, and she felt Harry lean down slightly so his voice was close to her ear.

"It's just a room," he said.

She looked straight ahead. "I know it's just a room."

"Full of people you don't care about."

"Most of them," she said.

"And you look really pretty," he said, for the third time, the fourth time, she had lost count—and this time it was the version that was simply—grounding. The version that said you're here and I'm here and it's just a room and you're here with me, and she felt something in her chest settle with the small particular click of something finding its correct position.

She squeezed his arm.

She felt him register this—the small breath, the slight shift—and she held it for one beat, two, and released.

"Don't step on my feet," she said.

"Starting intention at one hundred percent," he said.

The doors opened.

The Great Hall was extraordinary.

She had been in it for four years and it was still—on nights like this, dressed like this—a room that did something to the person walking into it. The ceiling was showing the winter sky, clear and black and enormous, with snow falling through it that vanished before it reached the tables, which had been moved to the edges and replaced with round ones draped in white and silver and lit with floating candles that multiplied themselves in the ice sculptures between the tables, and the whole room was a particular shade of blue-white and gold that was both entirely formal and completely extraordinary.

She heard the room react to them—not to her, she had no illusions, to Harry, to the Boy Who Lived in dark green dress robes with his catastrophic hair—and she walked beside him with the spine straight and the chin level and the composed expression and she did not look at the room but she felt it looking at them.

She felt him look at her.

She glanced at him.

He was looking at her face, not the room. Watching her, specifically, in the way he had in the antechamber and the corridor and every time she walked into the library, and the warmth of it moved through her chest and she looked ahead and breathed and walked beside him into the extraordinary room.

The first dance.

She had anticipated it. She had prepared for it, both practically, in the dance lessons that had become their Tuesday evenings, and in the internal sense of someone who was about to do something in public that they had only done in private, and the two were different experiences in ways she had thought carefully about.

What she had not anticipated was what it actually was.

Harry took her hand at the edge of the dance floor with the same unceremonious directness he brought to everything, his palm warm and his grip easy, and she put her other hand at his shoulder and felt his at her waist—properly this time, not the careful Tuesday version, but the settled version, the version with intention in it—and they stepped onto the floor.

The music was something slow and formal, the kind that gave the dancer time to find it, and Harry found it with the unhurried quality she had watched him develop over weeks of lessons, not the counting face but the listening face, the face of someone paying attention to the music rather than his feet.

His feet were, initially, imperfect.

He caught her toe on the first rotation—not a full step, a brush—and she said "Potter" quietly and he said "I know, I felt it" and she said "don't overcorrect" and he said "I'm not overcorrecting I'm correcting" and she said "there's a difference" and he said "they feel the same from here" and they were, she realized, having a Tuesday lesson conversation in the middle of the Yule Ball first dance with the entire school and two foreign delegations around them, and something about this—the complete continuation of themselves into this formal space, the fact that they were still exactly them—made the thing in her chest expand to a size she wasn't sure the evening could contain.

He settled.

After the first rotation the imperfections smoothed into something that was, not polished—Harry would never be polished on a dance floor, this was a fact she had accepted—but genuine. He moved the way he moved in everything, with the quick honest instinct of someone who had found the thing and was simply doing it, and the hand at her waist was warm and present and entirely sure of itself in the way of everything he was, and they turned through the music with the particular ease of two people who had been negotiating shared space for months.

She kept her eyes at his shoulder.

She felt him looking at her.

She looked up.

He was looking at her face with the expression she didn't have a complete word for—the one she'd first seen in Flourish and Blotts on a July afternoon, the one he wore when he didn't know he was wearing it, the open undefended one that lived under all the other expressions. Looking at her the way he looked at things he wanted to keep looking at.

"You're staring," she said.

"I know," he said, and didn't stop.

She looked at his shoulder again.

She was warm from her jaw to her fingertips.

She was standing in the Great Hall at the Yule Ball in a muted Gryffindor red gown with Harry Potter's hand at her waist and his eyes on her face, and around them the ice sculptures were catching the candlelight, and the ceiling was showing winter stars above the conjured snow, and she had gotten ready alone in a quiet dormitory, and she had walked through the cold corridor, and she had felt the loneliness of it with the clear honest weight of a fact—

And now she was here.

In the warm.

In the inside.

His foot caught hers—her toe, the left one, squarely—and she said "Potter—"

"I know—"

"That was deliberate—"

"It absolutely was not—"

"Your face knows it was—"

"My face is—"

"Your ears," she said.

He pressed his lips together. His ears were, in fact, doing the thing.

She felt the laugh come up from the low warm place and she let it—let it reach her face, let it actually arrive, and she saw the moment it did, saw what happened to his expression when she laughed properly, and she looked away because she couldn't look at it directly for too long without losing the composure entirely.

"Again," he said, quietly, like a private request.

"I'm not a performer," she said.

"I know," he said. "That's why."

She looked at his shoulder and felt the smile staying on her mouth and didn't push it away, and they danced.

An hour into the Ball, the formal architecture had loosened.

The champions' table had dispersed into the wider room and the music had shifted from the formal processional to something more ordinary, and the floor had filled with the uncurated movement of several hundred students who had stopped being conscious of themselves and had simply started being at a party. The room was warm and loud and the ice sculptures were melting at their edges in the most beautiful way, running thin threads of meltwater that caught the candlelight and disappeared.

Harry had been very good—she acknowledged this in the honest accounting. He had been attentive without being hovering, he had said the right things to Cedric and Fleur and navigated Viktor Krum's brief and severe conversation with the diplomatic instinct of someone who was better at people than he thought he was, and he had stayed beside her with the ease of someone who knew where they were supposed to be.

And he had kept his feet largely to himself.

She needed the restroom.

She told Harry this with the minimum of ceremony—"I'll be back, stay where I can see you" which she had not intended to add but which had come out anyway, which he received with the slight smile of someone who was used to being monitored and found it—she suspected—more than usually tolerable from her—and she made her way through the edge of the room toward the corridor.

The corridor outside the Great Hall was cool and quieter, the sound of the Ball muffled to something more manageable, and she stood in it for a moment and just—breathed. Let the hum in her sternum settle. The evening was going well in every sense she had a measure for, and she was warm and the gown was right and Harry's hand at her waist had been real and his eyes on her face had been real and she was—

She was very happy.

She allowed herself this, briefly, in the cool quiet corridor.

Then she went to the restroom.

Fleur was at the mirror.

Not in distress—Fleur was not the kind of person who experienced distress at mirrors, Pansy suspected she had been on comfortable terms with her own reflection her whole life—but touching up her lip color with the composed attention of someone for whom appearance was simply one of the things she maintained.

She met Pansy's eyes in the mirror.

"You are 'aving a good evening," Fleur said. Not a question.

"It's been adequate," Pansy said, at the mirror, touching the edge of her liner.

"'Arry," Fleur said, with the corner of her mouth, "cannot look away from you."

"He has a limited attention span," Pansy said. "I've noticed."

"Not tonight," Fleur said, simply. "Not from you."

Pansy looked at her own reflection. The freckles. The liner. The red of the gown warm at the edge of the mirror.

"You are very hard on yourself," Fleur said, quietly, and the French accent made it sound like something gentler than a diagnosis, which it was, which Pansy recognized and received with the particular vulnerability of someone who had not been expecting kindness in a school bathroom on Christmas night.

She looked at the mirror.

"I manage," she said.

"You do more than manage," Fleur said. "I think—" she smoothed her robes with a small decisive gesture— "I think you are one of the most interesting people I 'ave met 'ere. And I think 'Arry Potter," the knowing light in the blue eyes, "knows this very well."

She moved toward the door. Stopped.

"The red," she said, "was the right choice."

She left.

Pansy stood at the mirror for a moment.

Then she straightened her own reflection with the inventory gaze, and she went out.

She heard Ron before she reached the corridor junction.

His voice was the carrying kind on ordinary days and tonight it had the particular carrying quality of someone who had been saying something for a while and had committed to it. She turned the corner and found the three of them—Ron and Hermione and Harry—in the alcove near the doors, and the situation was immediately readable.

Ron was mid-sentence in something he clearly felt strongly about. Hermione was standing with her arms crossed and the expression of someone who had been in this conversation for too long and had arrived at the end of her patience. Her eyes were—bright in the way that wasn't just the evening—she'd been crying, or close to it, and her hair was slightly undone from its careful arrangement and she was holding herself in the taut way of someone keeping something together by effort.

Harry was standing between them.

Not physically—they were not positioned that way—but in every other sense. He was between Ron and Hermione with the attentive patience of someone who had deployed himself there deliberately, and he was saying something to Ron in the low direct voice he used when something mattered to him, and Ron was doing the thing Ron did which was to be loud and then recede and then be loud again, and Harry kept his voice level and his eyes on his friend and he was—

He was defending Hermione.

Pansy knew this because she knew how to read these situations and because she could hear enough—that wasn't—you didn't have to—she's your friend, Ron, she deserved——to understand the shape of it.

She knew, also, because she had seen it before.

She had seen it in Diagon Alley and in the library and in corridors and on a rock by a lake in October—the way he put himself between the people he loved and the things that were going at them, without calculation, without announcement, just—himself, positioned. The quiet steadiness of it.

She stood at the edge of the alcove and felt the room-sized warmth move through her chest with the particular ache of something that was almost too large for the space it was in.

She looked at Harry standing there.

She was in a very great deal of trouble.

She had known this for months and it had never been as clarifying as it was right now, watching him stand between his best friends and refuse to let one of them be unkind to the other, just—be the thing he was, always, steadily, without needing to announce it.

She moved toward Hermione.

"Granger," she said, quietly.

Hermione looked up. Her eyes were definitely bright—not spilling over, she had the controlled expression of someone who would not allow that, which Pansy recognized from the inside out—and her mascara had done the beginning of the thing mascara did under duress.

"I'm fine," Hermione said, reflexively.

"I know you are," Pansy said, in the tone she used when she meant something straightforwardly. "Turn toward the light."

Hermione blinked. Then, with the practical intelligence of someone who recognized a competent person offering competent help, she turned toward the corridor torch.

Pansy produced a small case from her beaded bag—she had brought it precisely because she had anticipated that the evening might require it, for herself if not for anyone else—and she addressed the mascara situation with two careful movements, and the eyeliner with one, and she looked at the result with the inventory gaze and it was—good. Better.

"There," she said.

Hermione looked at her.

"Why are you—" she started, and then stopped, reassembled, started again. "Thank you."

"It's a practical skill," Pansy said, closing the case.

Hermione looked at her for a long moment with the large brown eyes and the expression of someone who was revising something significant and was honest enough to show the revision in her face.

"He talks about you," Hermione said, quietly. "Harry. Quite a lot."

Pansy looked at the case in her hands.

"He talks about everyone," she said.

"Not like this," Hermione said, simply. And then: "You're good for him. I didn't—I wasn't sure, at first. But you are." She said it with the directness she applied to all true things, which Pansy recognized as the same directness Harry had, the same basic refusal to manage the true thing into something more comfortable. "And I think he might be good for you too."

Pansy looked at her.

Hermione Granger, in periwinkle blue with her eyes very bright and her careful hair slightly undone, looking at her with the honest open expression of someone who had made a decision and was extending it fully.

Pansy thought about the dormitory and the sounds of people getting ready together and the walking through the cold corridor alone, and about you'll be fine and the red was the right choice and about all the small private rooms she had built and the things she had kept in them.

"Granger," she said.

"Hermione," Hermione said.

A beat.

"Hermione," Pansy said, and it cost something and was worth it. "You looked lovely tonight."

Hermione's expression did the thing—the window blown open—and she pressed her lips together and then said "so did you," and they looked at each other in the corridor outside the Yule Ball with the music reaching them in warm degrees and something settled between them, something Pansy would not have known how to name in June and could not quite name now but felt with the specific weight of a real thing.

"Shall we go back in," Pansy said.

"Yes," Hermione said, and straightened herself with the decisive efficiency of someone who had put something down and was picking up what came next. "Let me just find Ron and—"

"Leave Ron to Harry for another five minutes," Pansy said.

Hermione looked at her.

The corner of Pansy's mouth moved.

Hermione—laughed. Short and genuine and slightly startled, the laugh of someone who had not expected that particular observation from that particular direction, and Pansy felt the warmth of it reach her.

"Five minutes," Hermione agreed, and went back inside.

Harry was still in the alcove, Ron having apparently retreated—she could see the maroon robes moving toward the punch table across the room—and he turned when he heard her footsteps and his expression did the arrival.

"Is she—"

"She's fine," Pansy said. "Mascara addressed."

He looked at her with the soft open expression. "You helped her."

"It was a practical—"

"Pansy." Just her name, just the warmth of it.

She looked at his collar.

She reached up and addressed the bowtie, which had come slightly undone at some point during the evening—loosened, listing a fraction to the left, the kind of thing that was almost unnoticeable and which she noticed because she always noticed the details of him. She straightened it with careful fingers, the black of her nails against the dark fabric, and she felt him watching her face with the specific attention.

"Your freckles," he said, in a voice that was very quiet.

Her fingers stilled.

"What about them," she said.

"I like them," he said, in the same quiet voice. The plain direct way. The way he said you look really pretty and I didn't forget and the most interesting person I know—with the flat certain honesty of someone saying a thing that was true and wanted to be said. "I really like them. I always—" he stopped. Started again. "They're one of my favourite things."

She looked at his bowtie.

The warmth came up from her jaw and she felt it cross her cheeks and she knew he could see it, pale as she was, she knew it was visible, and she could not do anything about it and did not try.

She looked at him.

His eyes were very green and very close and he was wearing the open expression—the one from Flourish and Blotts, the one he didn't know he was wearing—and his freckles were there on his own nose, the ones she'd noticed in June on a summer doorway, and his hair was at maximum entropy and his bowtie was now straight, and he had said one of my favourite things in the quiet certain voice with the full honest weight of it.

She looked at him for a moment.

Then she rose up on her toes.

She pressed her lips to his cheek.

Brief, warm, exact—her mouth against the edge of his cheekbone, the lightest deliberate contact, and she felt him go completely still beneath it, heard the small quiet intake of breath, felt the stillness of someone receiving something they had wanted and had not quite allowed themselves to expect.

She came back down.

She took his arm.

"Come on," she said, and her voice was only slightly not level, which she considered an achievement.

Harry was—she looked at him from the side as they turned toward the Great Hall—wearing the expression. The third one, the one she'd seen in the corridor for the first time tonight, the one that wasn't sheepish and wasn't soft but was something deeper and less practiced and entirely, helplessly, completely delighted.

Dumbfounded, she thought precisely.

She had made Harry Potter dumbfounded.

She filed this in the place with the pink ears and the steadied breathing and the small exhales and all the other accumulated evidence of the effect she had on him, and she found the place needed considerably more space than a folder, and she did not address this, and she walked beside him toward the music.

"Your ears," she said.

"I know," he said.

"Both of them," she said.

"I know," he said.

She pressed her lips together.

She kept the smile this time.

She let it stay.

Chapter 12

She found out about the egg by accident.

This was the way she found out most things about Harry's tournament situation—not because he was keeping secrets in the deliberate sense, but because the information tended to arrive sideways, through the accumulated context of paying attention to someone with great consistency over a significant period of time. She had been paying attention to Harry with great consistency since June. She noticed things.

She noticed, specifically, that he had been carrying the golden egg from the first task everywhere with him in February with the expression of someone living alongside a problem they hadn't solved yet. She noticed the way his attention snagged on it sometimes in the library, going briefly inward with the focused look he had when something was working in the background. She noticed that he was not sleeping particularly well, which showed in the structural tired around his eyes in the mornings, and that the not-sleeping had a different quality from his usual tired—not the emotional tired of someone carrying something heavy, but the active tired of someone who had been thinking too hard about something for too long.

She said nothing for two weeks.

She waited.

On a Tuesday evening in the second week of February she arrived at the library to find him at the table with the egg open beside his Charms text, which was producing the underwater wailing noise she had heard from three tables away and which was making Madam Pince look over with the expression of someone experiencing significant professional provocation.

She sat down.

She reached over and closed the egg.

The noise stopped.

"It's underwater," she said.

He looked at her. "What?"

"The sound. It's been processed through water—it's distorted, that's why it sounds like wailing out here." She folded her hands on the table. "Have you tried listening to it underwater?"

He stared at her.

"I've been carrying this thing for three months," he said.

"I know," she said.

"Underwater," he said.

"It's a reasonable inference from the sound quality," she said. "The second task is in the lake. The clue is sonic. The distortion is consistent with—"

"Underwater," he said again, in the tone of someone arriving at something they were going to be thinking about for a while.

"The Prefects' bath has good acoustics," she said, and opened her Potions text. "Third floor, fifth door on the right past the mirror. Password is pine fresh, I believe, though it may have changed."

Harry looked at her for a moment.

"How do you know the password to the Prefects' bath?" he said.

"I know most passwords to most places in this castle," she said. "I find it useful."

He shook his head with the expression of someone who had given up being surprised by her and found this a comfortable place to have arrived at, and she looked at her Potions text and felt the warmth of his expression without needing to see it directly.

"You should go tonight," she said. "You're running out of February."

"Tonight," he repeated.

"I'll come," she said, which she also had not planned to say, which came out with the same certainty as all the unplanned things, the certainty of something that had already decided itself before she'd gotten there.

He looked at her.

"To the Prefects' bath," he said.

"To help you listen to the egg," she said, with great composure. "You are not, historically, someone I trust to analyze auditory information without a second perspective."

He opened his mouth.

He closed it.

"Alright," he said, in the small certain way.

She regretted it slightly at nine o'clock, standing outside the fifth door on the right past the mirror on the third floor, which was both further and more significant than it had seemed as a suggestion in the library.

She had changed after dinner—not for the bath, she was absolutely clear on this, she was not changing for anything—but because her school robes at the end of a Tuesday were not how she chose to move through the world in the evening, and she had put on her school uniform proper: the skirt, the dark tights, the white button-down with the sleeves she could push up, and she had left her robes in the dormitory because the castle was warm enough in February on the upper floors and she was going to help Harry listen to a clue in an egg and there was nothing logistically requiring outer robes for this.

She had her hair neat. She had the lip gloss, which she wore most days, which was not a special occasion thing.

She was meeting him to listen to an egg.

She knocked.

"Password?" said the door.

"Pine fresh," she said.

The door opened.

The Prefects' bath was extraordinary.

She had been in it once before, in third year, when Gemma Farley had brought the fourth-year girls as a post-exam indulgence, and she had forgotten the scale of it—the room was large enough that the sound of the water reached her from across it before she reached the bath itself, and the bath itself was the size of a small swimming pool, the kind of bath that had been designed with the understanding that a hot bath at Hogwarts was a serious undertaking and had been given the space that reflected this. The taps around the edge were ornate, and the steam was considerable, and the room smelled of pine and something warm and floral and the particular combination of clean things that suggested it had been recently used and thoroughly refreshed.

The light was low and warm. The ceiling was high.

Harry was already there.

He was sitting on the wide stone edge of the bath with his feet in the water—in swim trunks, she noted with the flat inventory attention she deployed because it was the only available tool and she was using it—the golden egg on the stone beside him, and he was looking at the water with the slightly unfocused expression of someone who had been thinking and had only just stopped. He had a towel over one shoulder that he had done nothing useful with.

He looked up.

"You came," he said, and the surprise in it was small and warm.

"I said I would," she said.

She came to the edge of the bath and sat down—not in the bath, on the edge, the wide stone edge, pulling her tights under her and settling with the composed efficiency of someone claiming territory. She pushed her sleeves to her elbows and looked at the egg.

"Open it," she said. "Put it in the water and listen."

Harry picked up the egg.

He looked at it.

He looked at her.

He slid it into the water.

She leaned forward, her dark hair falling forward, and listened.

The sound that came up from the water was—different. Completely different. Not the wailing at all, but something that resolved, underwater, into words—actual words, a riddle, clear and rhythmic, and she caught most of it in the three seconds before Harry's face changed with the expression of someone receiving information they'd been waiting for.

"It's people," he said. "Something—someone I'll miss—they're going to take something I'll miss—"

"Into the lake," she said.

"Ron," he said, with the immediate certainty of someone for whom the answer required no calculation. "It'll be Ron."

She nodded.

He looked at the water with the focused expression, the thing-in-the-background working expression, and she watched him work through it—the particular quality of his thinking, which she had observed over months and which she found genuinely interesting, the quick honest instinct of it—and she thought about the second task and the lake and him underwater for an hour and felt the hum in her sternum start its familiar frequency.

"The lake in February," she said.

"I know," he said.

"In Scotland."

"I know, Pansy."

"You're going to need a solution for the temperature and for the breathing," she said, in the tone she used when she was managing the hum by being practical, which was a reliable technique. "Not simultaneously—they're separate problems. The breathing is more significant."

"Gillyweed," he said, after a moment. "Hermione mentioned it once—a plant, makes you—"

"Breathe underwater, yes," she said. "Transforms your respiratory system temporarily. It's not glamorous but it's effective." She looked at the water. "You'll also need to be able to see and navigate. The lake in February has almost zero visibility in the upper—"

"Okay," he said, which was the I'm keeping this version, and she looked at him and found him watching her face in the particular way.

"What," she said.

"You've already thought about this," he said.

She looked at the water.

"I think about things," she said, which was the most accurate and least revealing answer available.

"You've been thinking about my second task."

"I think about many things simultaneously."

"Pansy."

She looked at her hands on the stone edge. Her black nails. The slightly damp stone. She pressed her lips together.

"Someone has to," she said, finally, quietly.

He was very quiet for a moment.

She was going to look at the water for the rest of the evening and redirect anything further with the inventory gaze and the composed expression, and she had fully committed to this plan and it was a good plan and she was—

He reached over and covered her hand with his.

Not her wrist, not the elbow gesture—her hand, his over hers on the stone, warm and certain and entirely present, and she looked at their hands and felt the warmth move through her from his palm to every point of her, and she breathed once carefully.

"Thank you," he said. Just that. Just the plainness of it.

She looked at the water.

"The Gillyweed," she said. "I'll find out where to source it. There should be something in the Hogwarts greenhouses—Sprout's stores—"

"Okay," he said, and he didn't move his hand.

She didn't move hers.

They sat with the egg for another twenty minutes—she made him put it in the water twice more and repeat the riddle back to her until she was confident he had it fully and accurately, because Harry's relationship with precise recall was inconsistent and precision was going to matter—and the steam from the bath wrapped around them in the warm comfortable way of a room designed for exactly this, and she found herself—

Relaxed.

This was not her typical mode.

She was composed, which was different from relaxed. She was controlled, which was different from relaxed. She was at ease with him, which was different from relaxed in most settings and which was not different in this one, because this one—the low warm light and the steam and the ridiculous ornate bath and Harry sitting beside her with his feet in the water and his towel doing nothing useful—was the easiest she had felt in any room in some time.

She was aware of him with the continuous particular awareness that had not abated since the Ball, which she had accepted as simply—how things were now.

He was, she thought, doing the thing the steam and the water did, which was that it made the usual ambient details of a person more visible—the line of his shoulders, the way his hands rested on the edge of the bath, the specific fact of him sitting beside her in swim trunks with his feet in the water and the towel over his shoulder and his hair, freed from even the modest constraint of the school day, doing the extraordinary thing it did when there was nothing at all to stop it.

He had good shoulders, she noticed.

She noticed this with the flat inventory attention and then noticed that she was noticing it with rather more than the flat inventory attention, and she looked at the ceiling with great composure.

He had, over the past year, grown in the way of fourteen

—quietly, consistently, the body doing its reliable revision. She had a complicated relationship with noticing this. She noticed it with the honest attention she brought to everything and then immediately applied the management she'd been developing since October—the folder, the redirect, the practical alternative observation. She had been managing this specific category of noticing for some months.

The steam was making the management more difficult than usual.

She looked at the water.

"We should test the egg again," she said.

"We've tested it three times," Harry said.

"Thoroughness is a virtue."

"Pansy."

"I'm being thorough."

"You're sitting very straight," he said, "which means you're thinking about something you've decided not to say, which means I should probably not ask."

She looked at him with the inventory gaze.

He looked back with the patient certainty of someone who knew her, which was its own specific challenge to the composure.

"The riddle is clear," she said, crisply. "You have what you need. The next step is sourcing the Gillyweed, which I'll address—"

"I can source my own Gillyweed—"

"You sourced your own preparation for the first task," she said, "and you almost didn't find out about the dragons until the night before."

He opened his mouth.

He closed it.

"Neville," he said, after a moment. "Neville knows about plants—"

"I'll source the Gillyweed," she said, in the tone that closed this particular negotiation, and he looked at her with the expression that meant he was accepting the conclusion while reserving the right to be slightly exasperated about it, which was fine, which she found—she found it warm, the exasperation, because it was exasperation at her specifically, and she had long since added his exasperation to the catalog of his expressions she kept.

She reached over to retrieve the egg from the water.

Her reach was slightly further than she'd calibrated for—the egg had drifted toward his side—and she leaned forward, and the angle was further than anticipated, and Harry leaned the same direction at the same moment for a different reason she didn't catch, and what happened next was entirely the result of physics and poor coordination and nothing else whatsoever.

His elbow caught her forearm.

She was already off balance.

She went in.

The water was warm.

This was the first coherent thought she had, surfacing approximately one second after going under—that the Prefects' bath was temperature-managed and the water was actually warm, which was relevant and which she was prioritizing over the complete list of other things that were currently happening.

She came up.

She pushed her hair out of her face.

Harry was staring at her.

He was in the bath as well—he'd gone in a fraction of a second after her, catching her arm in the instinctive way he caught everything, which had done nothing to prevent the entry but had ensured company in it—and the golden egg was floating serenely between them and her hair was flat to her face and her tights were comprehensively ruined and her shoes were—

She looked down.

Her shoes were at the bottom of the Prefects' bath.

She looked at Harry.

He opened his mouth.

"Don't," she said.

He closed it.

"Don't say a single word," she said, with great precision and complete calm from a position of standing in the Prefects' bath fully clothed at nine in the evening having gone in via elbow.

Harry's expression was doing several things simultaneously. She could see the effort—she could genuinely see it, the active work of a person applying everything they had to the maintenance of a particular facial configuration—and it was not going well, the effort, because the corner of his mouth was moving in ways he was not successfully controlling.

"Your elbow," she said.

"I know," he said.

"You did that," she said.

"I know," he said, and the corner of his mouth had now migrated to his eyes, which were bright with the contained thing.

"Potter—"

"I'm not—" he started, and then the towel, which had been on the edge of the bath, slid off the stone and into the water with a small deliberate splash, and the contained thing in his eyes escaped, and he laughed—the real one, the full one, warm and genuine and the sound she had been cataloguing since July—and she stood in the Prefects' bath in her soaked school uniform and listened to him laugh and felt, deeply against her will and completely unavoidably, the warmth of it move through her like light.

She looked down at herself.

Her white button-down, soaked, was—

She looked at Harry.

He had stopped laughing.

His eyes had also stopped being where his face was, which was to say they were—

She looked down.

The white cotton, thoroughly wet, was doing the thing that thoroughly wet white cotton did, which was to say it was not doing a great deal in the way of its primary function, and through it, very clearly, the outline of her black bra was—

She looked at him.

He was looking at the water.

He was looking at the water with the focused and committed expression of someone who had decided that the water was the most interesting thing in the room and intended to maintain this position indefinitely.

His ears were the color of the Gryffindor common room tapestries.

She had thought, on a Tuesday evening in October under an invisibility cloak, that she had found the maximum ear-pink available in Harry Potter. She had been incorrect. The current situation had surpassed all previous records by a significant margin.

She looked at the ceiling.

She breathed in once through her nose.

She waded to the stone steps at the shallow end with the dignity of someone who had decided to simply continue existing in the current situation because there was no available alternative, and she climbed out and stood on the bath tile in her dripping school uniform with her shoes in one hand—she had retrieved them from the bottom with her foot—and she looked at Harry, who was still in the bath, still finding the water extremely compelling.

"Your elbow," she said, again.

"I know," he said, to the water.

"You owe me new tights," she said.

"Yes," he said, to the water.

"And new shoes," she said.

"Yes," he said.

"And you're going to tell absolutely no one about this."

A pause.

"Define no one," he said.

"Every person who exists," she said.

He looked at her then—and she saw the moment he made the error of looking at her, the precise moment his eyes processed the current situation, and he looked immediately back at the water with the speed of someone who had received information they were not equipped to manage and were removing themselves from.

She felt the warmth of the blush come up her own neck and she addressed it with the full force of her composure and only partially succeeded.

"Get out of the bath, Potter," she said.

He got out of the bath.

He handed her his towel without looking at her directly, with the careful peripheral navigation of someone who had committed to a sightline and was maintaining it, and she took the towel with the composed efficiency of someone completing a practical transaction and applied it to her hair.

Harry retrieved his own things from the edge of the bath and stood with his back to her at a slight angle, the ears still doing their thing, the towel around his shoulders, and she looked at the side of his face in the low warm light—the jaw, the glasses steamed and impractical, the catastrophic hair now at truly peak entropy—and felt the warmth of the entire situation move through her the way it moved through everything: from the outside of her chest to somewhere considerably further in.

She had gone into the Prefects' bath fully clothed.

She was standing in the Prefects' bath with ruined tights and wet shoes and her hair doing something she was not going to think about, in front of Harry Potter, who was currently discovering a profound and apparently inexhaustible interest in the far wall.

She stepped toward him.

She reached up.

She put her hands in his hair—both of them, her fingers in the wet chaos of it—and she pulled it back from his face with the deliberate pressure of someone with a specific intention and a secondary intention running alongside it, and she felt him go still with the particular stillness she knew, the receiving-something stillness.

"Hey," he said, quietly.

"Your hair," she said, in the tone of someone completing a practical task, "is genuinely beyond—"

"I know—"

"It's not a fixable situation—"

"I know—"

"I've accepted this," she said. "I just—" She pulled slightly, just the fingertips, just the light pressure, not fixing anything, just—her hands in his hair, the warm wet of it, the specific realness of him under her fingers. She felt him breathe out slowly, the long exhale, the weight-setting-down version. "Your elbow," she said again, but softer now, and the exasperation was mostly not exasperation.

"My elbow," he agreed, and his voice had the warmth in it.

She pulled his hair back once more—both hands, the full length of it, the slight drag of her black nails against his scalp—and felt the small controlled shiver move through him, and she was warm from her jaw to her fingertips and standing in wet clothes and she had never in her life felt more specifically and completely herself.

She dropped her hands.

"Gillyweed," she said.

"Gillyweed," he said, faintly.

"I'll have it by the end of the week."

"Right," he said.

She picked up her bag from where it had miraculously remained dry on the stone floor—she had set it down before reaching for the egg, which was the only decision she had made this evening that she fully endorsed—and she tucked her wet shoes under her arm with the composed movement of someone completing their departure from a normal evening.

"I'm going to need a drying charm for the corridor," she said.

"I've got one," he said, and produced his wand, still slightly dazed, and cast it with the efficiency of someone who had been performing practical magic since eleven and whose hands knew what to do regardless of what the rest of him was doing.

The charm was good. She was mostly dry. Her tights were unsalvageable but structurally functional for the walk back to the dungeons.

She looked at herself.

She looked at him.

He was looking at her now—properly, with the open expression, the undefended one, and the ears were going back to their usual color by degrees, and his hair was damp and at absolute maximum entropy and he had the particular expression of someone who had been thoroughly undone by an evening they had not fully anticipated and was finding this more than usually difficult to manage.

Good, she thought.

She reached out and straightened the strap of his bag on his shoulder, two fingers, the gesture she made without thinking about it, the one her hands did automatically now.

"Second task," she said. "Three weeks. Gillyweed by Friday. And Potter—"

"I know," he said. "Be careful."

"Extraordinarily careful," she said.

He looked at her with the expression.

She held it for a moment—the dark eyes and the freckles and the liner slightly disarranged from the bath and the warm low light of the Prefects' bathroom—and she felt, as she always felt in the moments when her management was least operational, the full honest weight of what she felt for him.

It was very large.

It was larger every week and she had stopped being alarmed by this and had started being—grateful, maybe. In the private accounting. Grateful for the size of it, the room it had made in her, the space it had opened up in the architecture of herself.

"Go," she said.

He went.

She stood in the Prefects' bath for a moment in the warm steam with her ruined tights and her shoes under her arm and the echo of his hands in his hair still in her fingers, and she looked at the golden egg floating at the edge of the bath.

She picked it up.

She dried it with the corner of her robe.

She set it on the stone edge, properly, where he would find it.

She walked out.

The corridor was cool and quiet and she walked through it with the usual deliberate unhurried pace—spine straight, chin level—and the small smile on her mouth that she was not currently managing.

She let it stay.

All the way down to the dungeons, she let it stay.