Reverence

It's Wednesday evening—she'll remember that, after. A breeze plays from the waters to their faces and back again, and you can tell from the dew in the grass and the uncluttered quiet on the winds that it's the first week of April, the respite of Easter break. Girl lounges in boy's shadow by the lake and sees the way he's looking at Astoria Greengrass across the grounds, hears the way he dismisses every desperate intimation she sneaks between empty, empty words. She never would have pegged herself for one to endure another's quicksand, make any concession it takes not to be left in a room alone. But Pansy can remember every Saturday they fought and every Thursday they made up and every Tuesday she shrank herself trying to fit in his lap while he studied in the library and their pinkies linked and she prayed that she could tread on all their eggshells without cracking them, hack away her angles until she fit him, somehow. Usually she sands herself into a misshapen lump of an adoring and simpering thing she's certain he doesn't want, but better this, she figures, than the jagged lines and jarring splinters that patchwork themselves together into whatever she is, more crack and hole than body, slivers peeking out through the fissures in the mirror.

She doesn't recognize herself, doesn't know if she'd want to. Anyway, it's easier this way, playing the role: Slytherin instigator, reverent girlfriend—or sex toy, if Draco likes, which most of the time he does. He comes every time before she's even close; she skims light fingers over his chest in his afterglow until he swats her away, protesting sleep, and she gathers her soiled robes around her and retreats from Crabbe and Goyle's hoots and Zabini's wandering eyes to the refuge of her four-poster's curtains and comforter, rubbing herself blind the way Draco doesn't care to until she forces herself to stop right on the edge, sobbing with self-loathing and waiting out the tremors through too many hours before slumber.

This is Pansy, whose brother Cruciated and Sectumsemprated her favorite aunt to her death for sleeping with a Mudblood when Pansy was six, his voice cracking as he shrieked the incantations over and over while Pansy watched from the stairwell, transfixed to immobility and cheeks sticky with tears. This is Pansy, whose lips haven't left her same bottle of Firewhiskey since she broke into her mother's stash when she was thirteen, after Father left during summer holiday and Mother thrust Pansy's hand under her robes and said make me scream.

She'll put on masks if that's what it takes to keep him—better yet if they keep her from finding herself out. But springtime is no rebirth and Draco is batting her away as he etches out another sentence of his essay, poised with concentration and wholly, entirely alone.

A/N: I thought this was brilliant when I first wrote it and now, rereading it, I hate everything about it. Figures. Anyway, this was written for The Reviews Lounge, Too's Springtime Collab, which you should go check out right now do it do it do it. Thanks for reading!