Chapter Text
“This train is about to depart. Please mind the doors.”
“FUCK!” Pansy yells at the closed tube doors just it leaves the station. Thirty seconds. She had been thirty seconds late to meet her train, and now her entire day, and probably the rest of her life, was in shambles.
How had things gone to pot so quickly? Maybe if she had set her alarm for 5:45 and not 6 o’clock? Or if she hadn’t taken the time to redo her eyeliner when the left side looked a little off? She should have stayed home when her coffee had spilled all over her kitchen counter, bleeding onto her final proposal. If any one of these things had been different, then maybe, just maybe, Pansy wouldn’t be in the shit storm she was currently in.
Sitting down on the metal bench located along the wall, Pansy thought of her options: She could leave the station and grab a cab. The traffic wasn’t too bad, and maybe she could bribe the driver to run a few amber lights? The only problem was that she was too far underground that leaving now would be another five minutes before she reached a taxi stop.
Pansy could always just wait for the next train. She was already there, and trains to Waterloo weren’t too infrequent. It was a typical Tuesday morning in March. Why wouldn’t the trains be running on time? Moving from the bench, Pansy got closer to the electronic train schedule. “well fuck me.” After reading that the next train to Waterloo wouldn’t be for another ten minutes. But then she noticed something odd on the sign. Scrolling at the bottom of the sign, in smaller green letters, read “Green Line arriving in 2 minutes.”
“The Green Line?” Pansy said to herself, looking around the platform. Could this Green Line be like the Night Bus or the Hogwarts Express, a vehicle to take people, specifically witches and wizards, to where they need to go? Moreover, would it take her to the exact place she needed to go?
Well, whatever it was, Pansy was getting on it.
“Train is approaching. Please mind the gap.” The announcement sounded, and Pansy looked down the tunnel to see a set of green lights coming towards her. Hitting her bag higher on her shoulder, she moved closer to the edge of the platform and smiled. Pansy’s day was beginning to look up.
Pansy stepped into the last car on the train and was happy to find it empty. After taking a seat, she pulled her muggle phone out to text her advisor to let him know she would be late and then sent a quick Patronus to let her magical advisor know what was happening as well.
It’s been seven years since the battle of Hogwarts and the end of the war. And in those years, Pansy’s views on muggles and muggle topics had been altered fundamentally. However, returning to her family’s home after the battle had only shown Pansy what she had always known. Her parents were nothing more than opportunistic wizards, happy to join in with those they believed to have power. Moreover, her parents seemingly had no true loyalty to any side, least of all to their daughter. They proved this when she walked off the train wanting nothing more than a hug from her mother and a few kind words from her father. But what Pansy got was a lonely floo trip and a borage of questions. “Can you get us a meeting with Harry Potter?” or “Did you know Hermione Granger? She was in your year, yes?”
Pansy spent the first month afterward sitting in her room, trying to contact anyone that would talk with her. But, of course, pansy wasn’t surprised to find that no one wanted to speak with the girl who tried to turn the Chosen One over the Dark Lord.
By July, she had to decide if she would go back for her eighth year; NEWT qualifying was essential if she wanted to do anything in rebuilding after the war.
That was something Pansy wanted to do more than anything. She had always enjoyed building things, creating things with her hands and her want-- when something went from her mind to paper and then finally into a maquette was a glorious feeling to her. Her parents only let her go because she said Hermione Granger would be there, but the truth was, Pansy, didn’t know if she would or not. Not that it mattered to her because Pansy was going back to Hogwarts for one reason and one reason only—it was a means to an end to get away from her family.
After graduation, she went to the ministry to work, but no one knew what to do with her. Pansy wanted to build things. She came to find out much later the muggle words were an architect and urban planner. When Pansy spoke with the ministry, they said their world didn’t need anything like that, and the muggle world wouldn’t accept a witch with no muggle knowledge. And maybe she should find something more magical to do.
They sounded just like her parents, and Pansy had had enough of being told what to do by people who didn’t care.
It had been her former headmistress, Professor McGonagall, who had suggested muggle university. That perhaps she should take a few muggle courses and see how she liked it. It turned out Pansy loved it. Never in her entire magical life would she, Pansy Parkinson, a child of the Sacred 28 would love sitting in class surrounded by muggles. Was this how Hermione felt at Hogwarts?
In her time at Uni, Pansy had made friends with more muggles than she had magical friends. She kept in touch with her old schoolmates, but when the world shunned her the way it did, the last thing she wanted was to impose on their lives. She didn’t want to be the albatross around the necks of those trying to rebuild their own lives.
One professor recognized her from the Daily Prophet, his wife, a witch; Pansy came to learn was also living with one foot in each world. Their son Simon, a squib, became Pansy’s closest friend and later Pansy’s roommate. After graduation, Pansy moved onto grad school, but thanks to the help of Simon’s mother, Pansy now had a firm grasp on what she wanted in her life.\
As a child, Pansy once dreamed about meeting a muggle and having one as a neighbor. She was a sad, lonely child, and the dream of a friend, even a muggle one, was something that stayed with her through the years. Then, one day Pansy read an article in the Prophet that read the war had created a lack of housing in the magic communities. And how dangerous it was for magical families to live in muggle communities. Pansy couldn’t believe just how racist that statement was to her. One of the things that Pansy had realized about the war was segregation of the communities only leads to the belief that one is better than the other.
The next day, Pansy began a plan to merge the two communities safely, showing them to her advisor and mentor. Dr. Tufts was a renowned city planner and architect and saw the potential but knew pansy would need to have a magical advisor as well. Pansy’s doctoral review was days away now, years of work all culminating to this exact moment.
This morning where everything had gone wrong. But Pansy had worked too hard and too long to let a few bumps in the road slow her down. So, with the text and Patronus sent, Pansy sat back in the bench seat as the train came to a stop on another platform.
A strange bell sounded like tinkling fairy chimes instead of the typical sound of a train coming to a stop. This was a magical train, after all. So why wouldn’t it sound different? If only she knew where it was going.
The doors slid open, and a group of men entered the train, all talking over one another loudly, a stark difference from just moments before.
“…if he thinks he’s going to try and buy me off, he’s got another thing coming.” One of the men said, the voice oddly familiar. The slight northern accent made her smile thinking of a pudgy boy she had grown up with bucked teeth and a propensity for clumsiness.
“Well, our Majesty, I’m not sure we can hold them off too much longer.” Another one in the group responded.
“Yeah, well, they can go fuck themselves, can’t they?” the first one retorted. Pansy shifted, trying to get a better look at the man’s face, but all she could see were his forearms. Soft dark red-brown ferns tattooed on the skin and a signet ring on his right hand. His other hand gripped the ring hanging from the ceiling of the car.
Damnit, if only the others would move, Pansy could see if the rest of him was a sexy as his hands.
“Not sure that’s how diplomacy works, Majesty, but that’s why you have us.”
There it was again. Majesty. Pansy knew her backing away from the magical world might have led to some forgetfulness, but she would remember a handsome sounding, tattooed member of a magical royal family.
Wouldn’t she?
The train came to another stop, and Pansy looked around to see the name of the stop.
“Milton Keynes? You have to be joking.” Pansy was now in a total panic. How had she not realized this train had left London entirely?
“Shit shit shit!” she pulled out her phone to see she had no signal, not that Pansy knew what she’d do if she had one.
“Pansy?”
It was the voice she recognized but couldn’t place. Only, Pansy had, without realizing. “Pansy Parkinson, is that you?” He carefully walked from the small group he boarded the train with to sit across from her.
“Neville Longbottom?” The man in front of her was a far cry from the awkward boy she saw on her last day at Hogwarts all those years ago. Tall, handsome, and proper fit didn’t even begin to describe the man. His hair was a little shaggy, and his skin a little more on the golden side from what she would think someone from the north would have. Maybe he had come back from holiday?
The tattoos were beautiful and were on both arms, and if she wasn’t’ wrong, they went up to his neck as well, peeking out from under the collar of his sage green button-up. But as much as his outward appearance changed, pansy could still see the sweet boy she grew up with. She used to make fun of tease endlessly because she felt she was meant to because of who and what she was.
“Wow, you’ve… grown.” She could feel the embarkment spreading across her face as he smiled. His amber eyes were bright with humor at her obvious observation.
“As have you, how are you doing? But more than that, what are you doing on this train?”
“Oh, umm, I’m good. Well, ok, not right now. I’m a bit panicky right now.” Pansy began to stammer the full implication of her choice to get on the train, not fully hitting her until just now.
“I’m supposed to be getting off at Waterloo station, but I missed my train. I thought maybe this train was like the Night Bus, that it would just take me where I needed to go. But now I feel I have a major miscalculation!”
The manic laugh that escaped her throat was unpleasant even to her ears.
“Yeah, I hate to be the one to say this, love, but this train only goes to one place,” Neville said with a look of regret on his face. “Leeds.”
“THE FUCK?!”