#plaise

Three days later, he finds Pansy sitting cross-legged on the shag rug in his living room, manually and methodically shredding the society section of the Prophet. 

There’s not enough of the editorial left to jigsaw together into a whole picture, but Blaise knows that it’s most likely a snapshot of the new Granger-Malfoys, giddy with love and symbolic in the joining of the light and the dark after the war.

He settles himself down in front of her and waits.

Her mouth twists, and she incendios the pile of paper dust wandlessly.

“I can’t hate them,” she finally confesses, voice hoarse with disuse. “I hate my parents, for selling me into a redeemed name. I hate his parents, for playing on familial duty and grasping at my money. But I can’t hate them.” She scratches at the tiny infinity loop on her neck, over her pulse point. “They are what they are, and I was just in the way.”

Her eyes are flinty but unfocused, and her next words follow slower, as if they are rising from a great depth. “They were together at Hogwarts. They were separated by the war, but they loved each other still. They loved each other all throughout his marriage. All throughout my marriage. I thought – I thought he was mine; I thought he was over her, and I thought he really wanted to try. But then he didn’t, and so I stopped trying, and I put all three of us out of our misery.”

Then she laughs, hard and grating. “At least, I put the two of them out of their misery. Not that they were very miserable when Draco and I were married, though. I hadn’t even realised that they were still fucking until Theo told me.” Blaise makes out the outline of a nazar hidden behind her right ear when she turns her head to glare out of the window. “More fool me.”

There’s a brief silence while they both watch the sun set over Blaise’s vineyard. The room is almost completely darkened when Blaise scrapes up the courage to speak.

“My mother murdered my father,” he tells her quietly. “She loved him but she poisoned him. He was a muggle-born. He told her that he was a half-blood.”

Pansy looks faintly repulsed and incredibly horrified. “She killed him for being a muggle-born?” She’s holding on to herself, clawing her nails into the weave of her distressed knit jumper. Blaise wants to pry her fingers free, but he just runs the pad of his thumb over a seam in the parquet floor.

He looks up at her, eyes dark, and glances pointedly at the skull on her ring finger.

“She killed him for lying.”

He rips the envelope from the eagle owl’s leg and tosses it back out into the morning without bothering to give it a treat. It hoots in indignation, but is too well-mannered to do anything else but eye him balefully for a couple of seconds before going on its merry way. Blaise slams the window shut and takes a moment to calm himself before carefully slicing the top of the envelope open with his wand. 

The penmanship is perfect, but he notes the smudges from where Draco folded the parchment without letting the ink dry first. He claims to be worried about Pansy – apparently she’d disappeared right before his wedding to Granger – and she hasn’t been seen anywhere.

Blaise is sure that Draco cares about Pansy. They all care – in varying degrees – about each other. Snakes huddle together to keep warm.

But Draco has forfeited his right to any kind of information about his ex-wife.

When Pansy stumbles into the kitchen, yawning and rumpled, Blaise has already Vanished the missive and is in the process of making perfectly scrambled eggs.

She kisses him two weeks later, when they’re curled up in front of the fire with a bottle of wine after a long day harvesting grapes.

Her lips are soft and taste like alcohol and strawberries, but Blaise isn’t a teenager any more. He isn’t fifteen, he isn’t sixteen, and he isn’t seventeen. He holds a fist tight around his heart and doesn’t breathe for the long second that she’s got her mouth pressed to his. 

He feels like he’s drowning, and when she pulls back, stung, vulnerable, and humiliated, he resists the impulse to lunge over and bury his nose in her shoulder.

He’d spent half of his childhood being what Pansy needed. Blaise digs his heels in and lifts his chin. 

“I’m done with being your backup,” he tells her, and he catalogues the way she flinches with the cool, unflappable detachment that had been legendary in the Slytherin dungeons. “If you want me, you want me.”

Something flickers in Pansy’s eyes, and she has the grace to look slightly ashamed. “I’ve had years to think,” she says, gaze fixed on a point over his right shoulder. “I know what I want.”

Blaise laughs. Half of him is furious that she’s presumptuous enough to think that he still feels the same way – that he still would brave Voldemort and Grindelwald and Gryffindors during Quidditch season just to have her hand in his and his name on her lips in the dark of the night.

She knows what he’s thinking and flushes a dull, unattractive red. “You wouldn’t have let me stay if you didn’t still want me,” she points out, and he snorts sourly into his glass of merlot. 

Because other half of Blaise is resigned to the fact that Pansy’s arrogance – alive and well even when she’s broken and bitter – will always be something that he loves about her. 

Blaise loves a lot of things about her.            

“Then stay,” he says flatly, and watches the firelight cast shadows on Pansy’s face. “No more creeping out in the early mornings. No more casual brush-offs in the corridors. No more running back to Draco every fortnight. Stay with me.” 

Pansy looks him squarely in the eye and finishes her glass of wine.

Blaise feels the oxygen drain from his blood and his tongue grow thick in his mouth when his bed dips under her weight.

She hasn’t turned the lights on, but he can see the paleness of her cheek as she runs a hand through her freshly-shorn hair and he can smell her: one part citrus-scented soap, one part petrichor, and one part Pansy.

She rolls clumsily under the duvet and curls her toes against his shins. They’re cold, but he doesn’t shift away. 

He tucks her head under his chin with a hand that barely trembles, and it’s like the last decade had never happened. Pansy Parkinson is in his arms, and he sleeps better than he has since he ran away from her wedding reception.