Chapter Text
Chapter 1
For some, Hogwarts was home.
That wasn’t Pansy Parkinson’s experience. For her, the differences between school and home were too stark to be confused.
Home was where her father ignored her.
Lionel was generous enough. He spent his Galleons to satisfy her every whim, doting on her as was expected of a fashionable, high-society man for his only daughter, but his affection was purely material.
He’d wanted a son.
Pansy understood that truth from a young age, unmistakably evident in the physical distance he maintained between them. She confirmed it at age eight, when she overheard a row between her parents. Accusations were flung, blame assigned, and clarity delivered. That night, she stopped hoping for more from her father and resolved to content herself with better. Clothes, jewellery, shoes, accessories, things. If Pansy couldn’t be enough for her father, she could at least put his money to good use, rise above her peers, and bring him some measure of pride.
Home was where her mother scrutinised her.
Su-Jin sought to offset her husband’s neglect by doubling the attention paid to their daughter. A steady stream of private tutors brought with them an endless array of lessons designed to mould the perfect young woman. The traditional suite—etiquette, dancing, singing, piano, and painting—were supplemented by the unique. Fencing, archery, foraging, philosophy, composition, dressage, and falconry had all been trialled. To Su-Jin’s disappointment, Pansy’s natural talent rested elsewhere.
Home was a collision of apathy and intensity, opposing forces that might have crushed Pansy beneath their weight if not for the singular escape she had discovered.
For Pansy's natural talent—the one lesson that stuck and the only subject Su-Jin regretted ever introducing—was needlepoint.
She started with embroidery. The thin needle felt natural in her grip, and the stab of the sharp point through fabric was a satisfying outlet for emotions too inappropriate to express aloud. The friction and tug of thread pulled taut soothed a riotous, unfocused part of her brain. And it was meticulous work. Her stitches had to be precise and fastened securely, her thread untwisted, her fabric stretched tight but not overly so. She spent hours each day with an adjustable hoop and a growing collection of floss in different colours and weights, knots building in her neck and beneath her fingers.
When embroidery lost its challenge, Pansy transitioned to knitting and crochet.
After everyone in her mother’s social circle had been given a summer shawl or winter wrap, Su-Jin negotiated a trade: needles and hooks for a new dress form and an old manual Singer. Her father scowled as he levitated the hinged table up to her bedroom, its heavy iron legs threatening the integrity of his pristine white carpet and coffee cream walls. The machine itself was a behemoth, intimidating despite the faded gold filigree on its black, cast iron body. She could barely reach the honeycombed treadle. When the machine ran, it sounded like horses galloping over cobblestone.
It was like learning to fly when all she’d ever known was the pace of her own two feet.
By the start of her life’s first decade, Pansy knew the direction the rest of it would take.
Su-Jin considered Pansy’s obsession common. Beneath her. Her mother’s modern condescension stemmed from an ancestral shame that she had never fully explained yet nevertheless structured her life to avoid. Su-Jin had never intended any of her descendants to pursue a career in textiles, but no amount of bargaining could dissuade her stubborn, contrarian daughter.
Pansy spent the summer before Hogwarts collecting fabric, organising patterns, and disassembling her favourite blouses, skirts, and trousers to study their construction. She taught herself the rhythm of the foot pedal and how it corresponded to the speed of the needle. She learned how the correct stitch sounded before she recognised it by sight or even understood its construction.
Her first pieces were butchered, the sizing, stitching, and style wrong, wrong, and wrong again. But Pansy would not be dissuaded. She was close, on the cusp of success, and then…
September.
Her dress form and sewing machine were not portable. Her trunk had no extra space for yards of rolled fabric or delicate paper patterns; Su-Jin had conveniently neglected to divulge the existence of Extension Charms. A six-inch hoop, two needles, and a small collection of floss were Pansy’s only allowances for her First Year.
They didn’t keep her occupied for long. A sketch book, sent from home after a desperate, pleading owl, helped busy Pansy’s fingers as well as her mind. If she could not work in three dimensions, two would suffice.
Years passed in this way: nine months at Hogwarts, daydreaming and designing; three months at home, crafting and creating. Her education was an unavoidable delay in her hobby’s practical application. Potions, Astronomy, and Divination were a waste of time, unnecessary to her future success. What mattered was practice: growing her skill by trying, failing, and finally succeeding.
All told, Hogwarts had cost her five years and three months of irreplaceable, hands-on experience.
True, other interests interceded—social gossip, attractive boys, a brewing war—but none could usurp Pansy’s first love, which she had nurtured from talent to hobby.
A hobby she fully intended to translate into a career. But breaking into the world of fashion and design required more than skill with a needle and an eye for style.
It required reputation.
Pansy had never imagined that this, of all things, would be what she needed to cultivate.
She was a member of the Sacred Twenty-Eight through birth and blood, and the only daughter of wealthy parents. Thoroughly trained and socialised, painstakingly shaped into the paragon of a young lady, she was poised to hit the marriage market and find a man equally as wealthy, pure, and cultured. She was destined to become one of their society's elite ladies, a metric against which all others were measured.
These truths were intrinsic, as permanent and irremovable as her heart and lungs.
Until the end of her Seventh Year.
Until the crime of public suggestion unmade it all.
Pansy spent nine months in a retreat.
That was the lie her parents told the world, when reporters and Potter supporters started writing, stalking, and pressing them for an answer to what should have been a simple question.
The truth wasn’t so dissimilar. Pansy did retreat. She locked herself in her childhood bedroom, took food from her house-elf, and spoke only to her parents.
They all agreed it was the right decision. Sheltering was the safest way to weather a storm, and the Parkinsons—while they had not endured a worse tempest for about a century—were confident it would eventually pass.
But not easily.
Lionel chided, scolding Pansy’s expensive misread of public opinion. Su-Jin mourned, grieving her daughter's—and by extension, her family's—precipitous fall from grace. Pansy endured their emotion and bottled her own, only to spill it into her pillow when the manor’s grandfather clock struck midnight. Her sobs were drowned out by the twelve chimes of another wasted day.
After a week of guilt and fretting, her parents made a proposal. Or, more accurately, put forth the non-negotiable condition for her release.
Redemption.
When it was deemed appropriate for Pansy to reappear in public—a determination Lionel and Su-Jin alone would make—it would be with a fully-fledged plan to restore the Parkinsons to their post-war standing.
Su-Jin thought their social circle offered the best route back into society. After all, a surprising handful of their exclusive collection of friends had remained free from Azkaban. She winnowed the options using her little black book of Floo addresses
Which families had reputations stalwart enough to withstand the indignity of a tarnished house?
Not many, as it happened.
Of those, which might be willing to lend some of their polish to the Parkinsons?
Not any, in fact.
As was often the case, Lionel turned to money as the solution to life’s problems. How many charitable organisations could they join without appearing transparently desperate? How many Galleons were required to successfully renovate a disintegrating castle and a once-grand house that had fallen into disrepair? And could their Gringotts account support the massive expense?
The throughline was an unwavering certainty of their ability to predict public opinion. And while Pansy respected the audacity of using the very whim that had created this mess to resolve it, she doubted its efficacy.
The pointless hypothesising would have driven Pansy mad if not for her shears and her Singer. But nine months of social stasis was better than prison. And her parents, at least, believed that their family would reemerge into the world better than when Pansy had forced them to leave it.
Pansy remained sceptical. Because the lynchpin of their plan—the sole requirement, the basic foundation, the cornerstone that, if compromised, would cause the whole thing to detonate like a house of cards built with an old Exploding Snap deck—was Pansy’s regret.
Lionel and Su-Jin assumed that Pansy felt sorry for daring to offer Potter to Voldemort. They thought, accurately, that her proposal had been fueled by fear. Now that Potter had won, surely Pansy felt foolish and ashamed. After a profuse, public apology—delivered halfway through her house arrest after some mandated soul-searching—she could redeem herself through acts of true contrition, like any truly apologetic person would.
But these acts of true contrition were unattainable, because Pansy was not contrite.
Offering Potter to Voldemort had been an expedient end to unnecessary suffering. She’d had no stake in the war. Money was more important than blood, and her family had plenty of it. And her blood couldn’t be altered: she was who she was. No war could alter that. Whether Voldemort won or lost, her life wouldn’t change. What mattered more than anything was that it ended. Had the positions been reversed—had Potter demanded Voldemort be given up—she wouldn’t have hesitated.
She could never tell her parents.
While the truth would certainly disrupt the numbing monotony of her quarantine, the break would not be permanent. Her parents would restart their pressure campaign, only this time, they would try to convince her and each other why regret was the correct choice. Why what she currently felt—something closer to rage—was wrong.
Pansy couldn’t risk extending her isolation another day, never mind however long it would take her parents to convince her that they were right, or for her to convince them of her insincere agreement. If this was the process her parents needed to follow to convince themselves of her redemption, then Pansy would play the obedient daughter.
She’d done so all her life. A few more months of pretending was nothing.
Parallel to the rehabilitation plan Lionel and Su-Jin created, Pansy made one of her own.
Convergences occurred: both began with a public apology and featured sundry social appearances designed to restore her reputation.
The end goal was likewise the same: the family’s—and thus Pansy’s—triumphant return to their former societal standing.
But there would be no selfless acts along the way.
Pansy was not a selfless woman. She had ambition and, now more than ever, the drive to achieve. Meeting her goals would require canny manoeuvring and taking advantage of opportunities she wouldn’t see until she was upon them. Her plan had little to do with tax-incentivised altruism, as Lionel hoped, and even less to do with a man, to Su-Jin’s inevitable disappointment.
At their end, the nine months of self-reflection weren’t a total waste. They allowed Pansy adequate space and time to visualise her ideal future: one in which she set the standard, controlled the narrative, and existed independently.
From now on, everything she did would serve those goals.
And she would not be distracted.
Pansy’s apology ran at the bottom of the Daily Prophet’s third page, squeezed into the Socials section after a detailed timeline of the most recent celebrity divorce. Five paragraphs long, it contained one block quote and misspelt her mother’s name.
It was good enough.
Her parents—through ambivalence or strategy—had never overtly sided with Voldemort. As such, Pansy had escaped total alienation. But it would take more than charitable donations made in her name and attendance at ribbon cutting ceremonies to mend what she had torn.
She moved into her own flat: a shitty little walk-up in the dodgy part of magical London, as far away from the Parkinson estate as she could manage.
In a nearly immediate, unplanned deviation from her parents’ carefully crafted plan, Pansy used funds from her own, modest Gringotts account to purchase a seat on the War Orphans’ Benefit Dinner Planning Committee.
She turned away her parents’ owls on the subject. She had no use for their opinions or their continued schemes. After months of isolation, Pansy was determined to become a free woman, unrestrained and unapologetic.
The Planning Committee was run by Hermione Granger, and while it never hurt to be associated with a war heroine, she and Granger had never been on friendly terms. It was foolish to think that would have changed in less than a year. As such, Pansy went to the first meeting with low expectations.
Granger proved her wrong.
She was more pecuniary than Pansy remembered. Colder, somehow, and ruthlessly practical. Or maybe she was just done. Through playing nice and now playing to win, using whatever means necessary to secure her victory.
Pansy could relate.
She respected Granger’s financial focus. The benefit’s explicit goal was to generate as much money as possible for those orphaned, in whole or in part, by the war. Pansy suspected that this is why she had been allowed to purchase a seat: she had Galleons, and Granger had an empty palm.
But it was not enough to pay the entrance fee, attend meetings, and feign interest. Departing from tradition, a seat on Granger’s committee required active participation.
Pansy’s first task was flowers.
Pansy reached out to her old social circle, pleased to learn that her network of Slytherin classmates had remained mostly intact.
Millicent Bulstrode's father had secured her a miserable administrative job with a cauldron manufacturing company. It was a marvel she hadn't been sacked: Millicent was the most disorganised person Pansy knew, a procrastinator, and absolutely shite at follow through.
Blaise Zabini had sped off to Italy with his mother. A sabbatical, he called it in his letters. It sounded suspiciously similar to Pansy's own retreat, though the Amalfi Coast was infinitely preferable to dreary England.
Theodore Nott had kept his nose predictably clean, graduated his Eighth Year, and had started at St Mungo's as a Junior Healer. He sounded challenged, harried, and happy.
Draco Malfoy was none of those things. Avoiding prison was not the same as avoiding consequences, and Draco felt the icy shoulder of public ostracization. Here was someone who needed a carefully wrought plan. He would have benefitted from a pair of over-involved parents, instead of one locked in Azkaban and the other lost in grief.
Continued association with a former Death Eater was certainly not what her own parents had envisioned. That was partially why Pansy took up with him.
They met once a week. Draco and Theo most often, though Millicent joined whenever she could escape her mother's attempts at matchmaking. They did not speak of Gregory Goyle, who was in prison, or of Vincent Crabbe, who was dead.
Instead, they drank, and they laughed, and they talked not about the past, but about the present and what occupied them most. Futures uncertain, they dove into details, preferring to swim in certainties.
The asinine work of meeting new cauldron thickness regulations. The complicated procedures at wizarding Britain's biggest hospital. The asinine and complicated requirements that the Planning Committee—specifically, Granger—had for the benefit dinner, which was to be hosted at Hogwarts on the first Saturday in June.
“That’s my birthday.” Draco sounded mildly surprised that he still had them.
It was just her and Draco today, with Theo taking a shift at the hospital and Millicent stuck at work. Only moneyed socialites had the freedom to meet in the afternoon for tea. If all went to plan, Pansy wouldn’t count herself among those fortunate few for very much longer.
“It is,” she agreed, setting down her biscuit.
“I have a garden.”
She paused, the teacup lifted halfway between her saucer and her lips. Their eyes met over its rim. Draco’s familiar greys were steady and unreadable. Pansy never could tell what he was thinking. Today was no different.
She finished her sip and balanced the cup and saucer daintily on one knee.
“Is that an offer or a statement of fact?”
She needed to hear it.
After a brief hesitation, he confirmed, “An offer.”
Her shoulders rolled in an elegant shrug, which she hoped looked nonchalant instead of dismissive. No way the Planning Committee considered Draco’s offer. He was too far outside of the ton to be accepted back, even through as innocuous an inroad as providing flowers for a charity event.
Draco’s regret over the role he had played in the war was genuine. It saturated the few, skimming discussions they had about their pasts. His bitterness and longing were potent enough to thicken the air around him. She could feel his need for redemption. His desire not to simply be granted forgiveness, but for the opportunity to earn it. His yearning to prove that he was more than his mistakes.
Pansy was unsure if anyone else knew him—or wanted to know him—well enough to realise this, too.
“I’ll pass it along.” It was a noncommittal answer. The decision was out of her hands, anyway.
Granger vetted everything.
As expected, the debate was fierce.
Pansy sat with her arms crossed and her tongue pinned between her teeth as Draco’s intentions were dissected, examined, twisted, and rearranged.
These people did not know him; they knew of him. And they thought they knew the worst.
Granger sat across from her. Unaffected by Pansy’s glare, she listened to each complainant with utmost patience, a feat worthy of her inevitable Chocolate Frog Card. Once the standard, ten-minute roundtable debate concluded, Granger cleared her throat and stood. She flashed Pansy a wicked smirk before addressing the room.
“One of our key tenets was to keep out of pocket costs at a minimum, which will allow us to maximise the return to the foundation. Correct?”
Murmured agreement.
“Draco Malfoy is offering the use of his extensive gardens at no cost. Free flowers for our event. Does that meet our tenet?”
More murmurs, less enthusiastic.
“I hear your concerns.” Granger’s gaze alighted on those who had argued the fiercest. “I propose we delay the vote on flower sourcing until we perform appropriate due diligence. I will vet Malfoy Manor. Pansy?”
She straightened from her slouch, unprepared for the spotlight.
“Will you visit Hogwarts?”
“Of course,” Pansy replied. “Thank you for giving him a chance.”
Granger’s smile turned tight. “We have a commitment to the foundation. Either option represents a budgetary win.”
Simply being considered represented a win for her struggling friend. But, seeing the committee’s collection of sour faces, Pansy kept that point to herself.
Her annoyance at having to visit Hogwarts was felt on principle only.
Malfoy Manor was effortless: a quick Floo, a visual verification that Narcissa’s garden had not fallen to shambles since her last visit, a cuppa, a chat, and a quick Floo home. While Hogwarts was not substantially more effort, it was more than the minimum.
As such, Pansy grumbled whilst donning her tweed mini skirt and tailored blouse. She debated which of her highest pumps to wear. Choosing those with the thinner heel, she composed herself as much as one could before travelling through a system of interconnected chimneys wearing a white shirt.
She landed in the Hogwarts’ faculty lounge perfectly on time. Headmistress Sprout was already waiting. The old professor looked harried, like Pansy was pulling her away from far more important business.
With the school term closing at the month’s end, that was probably true.
“Here for the greenhouses,” Sprout confirmed, less question than statement. She gave Pansy a quick once over, then raised a thick, grey eyebrow. “It rained last night, you know.”
Pansy did not know. She lived in London; weather in the Scottish highlands was not high on her list of concerns. Nevertheless, Pansy’s three-inch, patent leather stilettos no longer felt like a statement of power, but rather an embarrassing lack of foresight.
She beat the feeling back with the lift of her chin.
Sprout had never liked her, not like Flitwick or Hooch. But what did it matter if this old witch, who was more interested in plants than people, thought Pansy was foolish? Sprout meant nothing to her. She was the means to an end.
“Which greenhouse is open?”
“Number seven. Would you like an escort?” Sprout eyed the door. She had only asked to be polite. Pansy was sorely tempted to call her bluff.
“No,” she answered instead. “I know the way.”
Pansy navigated the castle with squared shoulders, though every piece of mislaid stone added weight to them. Over a year had passed since the Battle of Hogwarts, but time’s passage did not seem to matter here.
Shifting staircases remained stuck in place, emitting steady, low-grade groans as they ached to move. The walls were either scarred with scorch marks from open flames and misfired spells or pocked with gouges, divots, and dings from a hundred different sources of shrapnel. Corridors remained off-limits. Some were blocked by chunked stone and crumbled masonry piled higher than Pansy was tall. Others were cordoned off by glowing yellow lines, the reason for closure listed in scrolling black letters: floor missing, roof cave-in, haunted.
Everywhere, evidence of violence. The memory of the evil that had befallen this place was inescapable.
As was the memory of what she had done to perpetuate it.
Whispers hurried her footsteps. Most students she recognized; some she did not. They all knew her.
Or knew of her, and likely only the worst.
The weight she shouldered began to unbalance her. Her footsteps faltered, but the courtyard’s open space was in sight. Chest tight, Pansy cleared the threshold and caught herself on an awning column.
A deep breath of cool, fresh air drove the dust and despair from her lungs.
Hogwarts had never felt like home.
It had always been just another place she needed to be, a waystation from one phase of her life to the next. She had done her time, fulfilled the requirement, and scraped a handful of useless N.E.W.T.s despite the sham of their Seventh Year. With any luck, and notwithstanding her attendance at the benefit dinner, this would be her last visit here. Then she could put Sprout, this school, and everything associated with it behind her, and she would never look back.
The school’s greenhouses glittered on the edge of the Forbidden Forest, mirages in the morning sunlight and rising fog. Between her and them was a ten-minute sojourn over uneven, apparently soggy terrain. A damp breeze beckoned her forward.
Pansy stripped her heels, hooked them in her fingers, and began to walk.
Pansy had only visited Greenhouse Seven once, when Sprout had sent her to fetch a pair of replacement shears when hers snapped during a pruning lesson. Closest to the forest, its windows cracked and dirty, the student population had collectively deemed the structure creepy. It was a storage greenhouse back then, dimly lit and filled with cracked terracotta, extra tools, items in need of repair, and a smattering of overgrown, rotting, infested, infected, and generally dying plants in need of focused rehabilitation.
In the intervening year, Greenhouse Seven had transformed.
Broken equipment no longer cluttered dirt-caked and water-spotted benches. Their stainless steel tops were clear and clean, shining like new in the glass-filtered sunlight. Each bench was fronted with two, wood-topped stools and equipped with a pair of thin gardening gloves, a thick pair of dragon-hide gloves, and a set of tools soaking in clear bottles of sparkling liquid. To one side of the door, a green bucket waited beneath a spigot. A hose coiled like a sunning snake rested nearby, ready for use. To the door’s other side was a steel sink with two deep, wide wells. To the left of that was storage: tidy rows of hooks hung with rakes, shovels, and hoes; stacks of spare pots and compostable trays in an array of sizes; piled bags of soil, mulch, and plant food mixes.
Though humid and warm, the greenhouse was not uncomfortable. One of the roof panels—meticulously cleaned inside and out, like all of the structure’s tempered glass—had been cracked to allow for air exchange.
Pansy supposed the airflow would not harm anything. For a greenhouse, it was markedly devoid of plants. There was only one, in fact: a rustling bush near the rear bench, overgrown enough to partially obscure the man behind it.
Neville Longbottom stood and dusted off his hands.
He wore a leather apron over a pair of khaki trousers reinforced with dark canvas at the knees. His filthy shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbows.
He had filled out.
Considerably.
Pansy tried not to stare at the broad span of his shoulders, the barrel of his chest, or the dark blond scruff on his cheeks and chin.
He stared at her, too. Studied her like he would a plant, from petal to root, blue eyes focused as he catalogued her every flaw. His eyebrows rose at the high heels dangling from her fingertips.
Though Pansy considered herself difficult to embarrass, having a former classmate see her barefoot and grass-stained brought blood into her cheeks.
“All right, Parkinson?”
The uncertainty flitting through her belly like a nervous bird found a perch. Neville’s body had changed, but he sounded the same. If she squinted—or better yet, closed her eyes completely—she could still imagine him as an awkward, insecure boy flummoxed by his own magical ability.
“I’m fine.” She answered like the question was foolish, like she would never be anything but fine in this situation, and bent to put on one shoe. With precarious balance, she stood on one leg and slipped on the other.
Neville watched her with rapt attention. Pansy allowed herself an interior grin.
Though the months of isolation had put her out of practice, Neville was still a man, and therefore easily manipulated by a pleasant body that could contort itself into pleasant shapes.
She cocked a hip, drawing Neville’s eyes from her shoes to her smirk.
“Sprout told you I was coming?”
“Yeah. She said you were looking for inspiration.”
“I said I was looking for flowers.” Pansy made a show of examining the space, which was utterly absent of anything organic aside from them and the overgrown Flitterbloom. “You don’t seem to have any.”
“I keep the angiosperms in Greenhouses Five and Six. But you and Hermione already know that Hogwarts can provide whatever the Planning Committee requires. Anything I don’t have can be grown in time for the event.”
It was Pansy’s turn to raise a brow. “Granger told you I was coming, too?”
“She actually wasn’t sure you would,” he admitted, lifting a hand to rub the back of his neck and, intentionally or not, showing off a well-toned forearm. “We had a bet.”
Granger’s scepticism was justified: Pansy’s due diligence was performative at best. She could have lied to the committee and no one would have known. Still, it stung to be so thoroughly underestimated. Pansy scowled, crossing her arms over her chest.
“And?”
At this, a boyish grin, far too charming. “I won.”
His unfounded faith warmed her, but not enough to soothe the sting.
“We can still tour Greenhouses Five and Six,” he offered. “My Fifth Years have nearly completed their group research project on how soil composition affects plant growth. Between us, they’ve all passed. Extraordinary blooms this year.”
“No need,” Pansy said with a dismissive wave. “I should have known this was a fool’s errand.”
She turned to leave, but Neville caught her arm.
It was like being seized by Devil’s Snare. Free one moment, captive the next, by a grip so firm it felt permanent. Neville's skin was warm through her blouse’s thin fabric, his hand large enough to almost entirely encircle her forearm.
Their eyes met.
His hand dropped.
“Hermione was wrong, wasn’t she? You’re here. You made the trip, you might as well make it worth your while.”
“In a greenhouse with no plants?”
“We could talk about the arrangements. I don’t know what Hermione’s vision is, but maybe you have an idea of what she’s thinking? Or some ideas of your own?”
“I do,” Pansy agreed with narrowed eyes. “What’s your angle, Longbottom?” Had she not been so serious, his wide eyes would have been comical.
“Angle?” He shook his head. “I don’t have—”
“Cut the shite. You have no reason to be nice to me. What do you want?”
“I don’t want—”
“To get me kicked off the committee?” she supplied. “To gloat?”
“Pansy, that’s not—”
“Then why am I here?” She stepped toward him, chin lifted to hold his bewildered gaze. To his credit, Neville stood his ground. “Why did Sprout send me to meet you in a greenhouse with no flowers to perform a paperwork exercise specifically about flowers?”
“I thought you needed the chance.” Their silence spanned a breath. Neville continued slowly, weighing the intention of every word. “I wanted to meet you here. This isn’t a teaching greenhouse; it’s my greenhouse. Private, no students allowed. I thought a private meeting, away from the castle, might… help.”
Pansy crossed her arms. “Help me with what, exactly?”
Neville struggled for an answer. He knew about her nine-month isolation—everyone did—yet he refused to acknowledge it. Instead, he shrugged, letting her fill in the reason for herself.
Curiosity.
“Listen, I’m not going to keep you here. If you want to go, you can go. I just thought that if you wanted help with the flowers, at least, or whatever else you have going on, maybe I could give it.”
Unaccustomed to such bare sincerity, Pansy searched Neville’s face for any sign of guile: overly innocent eyes, a slack jaw, a charming tilt of the head. She saw none of it. Neville faced her square and steady, assuming nothing, waiting on her decision. She had a strange feeling that he would wait a century for her, if that’s what it came to.
For him, perhaps it really was that simple. Neville offered her inspiration and asked for nothing in return.
And Pansy needed to take him up on it.
After her last visit with Draco, Pansy had inquired about a position at Witch Weekly. Not one of those shite jobs, with low pay, long hours, and demeaning work. She wanted a career as a designer. A trend-setter. Someone with the power to dictate what was in and what was out.
Someone who could prove to her parents that a pure-blood woman was capable of being more than a wife or a mother.
The receptionist’s condescending smile was worse than rejection. With a quiet voice and in a tone more appropriate for a child than a young professional, she explained that the magazine did not just hire designers. There was a process: time required, dues to be paid, mettle to prove.
She offered Pansy an application or the door.
Pansy took the application.
Her first day was everything she’d feared: standard hours and terrible pay for the privilege of running coffee, tea, and pastry to those with actual work to do.
Once they’d learned of yet another deviation against their carefully crafted plan, Lionel and Su-Jin urged her to quit.
She wasn’t going to.
Mostly because her parents, sceptical of her ability to endure the monotony of a pointless nine-to-five workday, expected her to. Spite made for powerful fuel, and Pansy had plenty to burn. Besides, she was not above earning her place, even if it meant starting on the corporate ladder’s bottom rung.
To her surprise, being uninvolved with the office’s actual work had its perks. While her betters were trapped in conference rooms, being reamed out by management that, from her eavesdropping, sounded utterly clueless about the heading of the cultural winds, Pansy did her research.
She circuited the cubicles, casually flipping through papers left on desks and conjuring breezes to open folders left unguarded in inboxes.
She riffled unnoticed through sketch pads, cataloguing the rough lines of designs still in their infancy.
She flipped through curated portfolios of finalised forms, thick with fabric swatches in colours and patterns that might eventually fill fast fashion shelves or crowd boutique racks.
She identified trends and styles that could make it big if marketed correctly, and if their production timelines aligned with the zeitgeist’s unpredictable ebb and flow.
She recognized her potential within the industry. Pansy was clever, and people were predictable. There was no question of her ability to master the timing of production, navigate the valleys and crests of fashion, and make millions. Make her name.
Make it her own.
Perhaps this was where it started: in a greenhouse, accepting the help of a man who did not understand the significance of his offer.
“As it happens, I am looking for inspiration,” Pansy said delicately, dropping the tension from her shoulders, “but it’s not on behalf of the Planning Committee. It’s more of a personal project.”
A small crease formed between Neville’s brows. “Personal?”
“That means it’s for me, Longbottom.” The jab prompted a blush and a quick skitter of his eyes away from hers. Good: shame was a swift teacher. She didn’t intend to explain any more than she had to. “What can you show me?”
“Um…” Neville looked around the greenhouse, as if an idea would detach itself from the glass and land in his upturned hands. Coming up empty, he planted them on his hips. “It might help if I knew what you were looking for.”
That she could tell him.
Fashion was seasonal. Although Pansy was too new at Witch Weekly to have a chance this year—rush orders needed to be placed eight weeks ago to even entertain a dream of production now—she could begin building for next year.
“Spring,” she answered. “I’m looking for spring.”
Neville’s eyes grew distant. After a moment, an idea took root.
“Spring is about shoots. New growth.” He gestured her over to the empty back bench. Pansy’s heels clicked against the swept concrete floors, while Neville’s soft, rubber-soled shoes scuffed close behind. “What do you remember of plant biology?”
Pansy narrowed him a look. Neville smiled, and it teased forward one of her own. He hadn't meant the question maliciously. In fact, asking had given her the benefit of the doubt and provided space for a face-saving lie.
She didn’t bother. Feigned expertise helped neither of them.
“Educate me.”
Neville waved a second stool over. It scraped across the floor with the sound of a trainwreck. Pansy winced, but Neville didn’t seem to notice, his eyes alight with excitement.
“All flowering plants are either monocots or dicots. The distinction has to do with the number of seed leaves, or cotyledons, contained within the seed itself. Here.”
He laid out a thin, dirt-stained cloth over the benchtop, then snapped his fingers. Pansy didn’t see the seeds fly across the room, but they appeared in his palm nonetheless: two corn kernels and two lima beans. He withdrew a scalpel from the benchtop jar, releasing the faint aroma of bleach, then looked over at her, standing two feet away.
“You can sit, if you want.” His eyes flicked to the stool at his side, then snagged briefly on her legs.
Pansy smirked and decided to make a show of it. Two, hip-rolling steps brought her beside him, and she took care to smooth her miniskirt over her arse before taking the stool with a delicate hop. A slow cross of her legs inched her hem further up her thigh.
His blush was impossible not to notice. Pansy cleared her throat and stared pointedly at the corn kernel set before them.
“Right,” he said with a stern shake of his head. “This is a monocot.” Then he pointed to a lima bean. “This is a dicot.”
The scalpel looked tiny between his blunt-tipped fingers, but he wielded it with the same precision as Pansy did a needle. He halved the seeds with a single cut down the long edge, then placed the halves next to one another for comparison. The scalpel went back into the aseptic solution, traded for a pair of fine-tipped forceps.
“Do you see here?” He pointed to a small, green structure in the corn seed. “And here?” In the lima bean, a pair of stubby tendrils, lifted like reaching arms. “These are the cotyledons. Everything surrounding the cotyledons is the endosperm.” Pansy kept a straight face as Neville gestured to the off-white material that made up most of the corn seed and the broad, milky-white interior of the lima bean. “This provides food for the seed and allows the plant to sprout. And when they sprout…"
Neville held the other two seeds flat in his palm. As she watched, they began to germinate, his skin and resolute will enough to provide life, at least temporarily.
“Monocots have a single leaf, versus dicots, which have two. If you look closely, you’ll notice the veining. Parallel veins for monocots, a branching network for dicots.”
He gently set them on the workbench and backed away, allowing Pansy to lean in. She noticed the leaf shapes differed, too: a single spike for the monocots, like a blade of grass, and an outfolding of two leaves for the dicots, like little wings. Pansy imagined that, if she were to spin the dicot seedling between her fingers, the air would catch beneath its young leaves and send it whirling into the air.
“Why are they like this?”
Neville’s answer was simple. “Evolution.”
It wasn’t a wholly satisfying response, but perhaps that was life: just a series of changes accumulating over time, which only made sense when the organism and the environment were considered together, instead of independently. Not everyone had the ability to step back and appreciate the wide-lens view of the world.
Pansy certainly didn’t. But maybe she could learn.
“Do you mind if I sketch these?”
Neville’s eyebrows rose. “You draw?”
Her eyes met his in silent reproach, his incredulity a shade too familiar. “Yes, I draw,” she said. “I do a great many things that might surprise you.” Another man might have become defensive. Neville simply smiled. “A woman of many talents,” he noted, shamelessly, like he should have expected it all along. “I’ll be working on this Flitterbloom. Let me know if you have any questions.”
He handed her the forceps and returned to his plant. The Flitterbloom whapped him for his absence. He glared, muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, “Jealous little thing,” and resumed pruning.
Pansy conjured her newly purchased sketchbook, regretting her choice of a white cover. Wincing, she set it on the workbench and felt instantly better. Perfection was an impossible standard to reach, nevermind maintain, and mess was unavoidable. Everything got dirty if it existed long enough.
She positioned her fine-tipped, self-inking quill between her fingers and began. She sketched the basic structures and anatomy first, then moved into the more creative realm of application.
Leather jackets with pauldrons shaped like newborn leaves. Dramatic swaths of fabric modelled to shoot up from the ground instead of fall to the floor. Designs that defied gravity, requiring the subtle application of magic to work at all.
Neville fussed over his Flitterbloom, and Pansy found her eyes drifting from her designs to the man who had inspired them.
He’d changed.
Or maybe he was simply different from what she remembered. As a rule, Pansy had taken very little notice of anyone outside Slytherin, but Neville occupied a particularly hazy, nondescript area of her recollection. Shy, quiet, and always in the background.
His carriage now was very much the opposite. Neville was unafraid to occupy space, unashamed to conduct his business while hers existed in parallel. He was independent and self-directed.
As he coaxed his Flitterbloom into lifting its branches and twisting its trunk, it became clear that Neville was not there for her. He didn’t even seem to care about Pansy’s presence. Neville made her feel like she was just another plant. Or maybe a student. If she were a plant, he probably would have given her more time.
It was freeing. Accustomed to being the centre of attention, being allowed to work without expectation was a gift. She didn’t have to impress him, or prove herself, or fight for anything. She could exist without wondering who watched and what they thought about it. In this greenhouse, she could simply be.
She liked it.
And it made what little interest Neville did show—for he’d caught her staring, and their hooked eyes held for longer than felt proper—feel all the more special.
“All right?” Neville asked, his head appearing from behind the Flitterbloom.
“I’m fine.” Pansy snapped her sketchbook shut and brushed soil from the front cover. An exercise in futility: dirt streaked the white canvas, and the whorls and arches of her inky fingerprints dotted the spine. “In fact, I’m leaving.”
“You have what you need?” He sounded unsure, maybe even surprised.
“Yes.” For now. Pansy knew this sense of peace wouldn’t last forever, and one season of sketches did not make a complete portfolio. But there was no need to give him that reassurance. “I might be back, if I need inspiration.”
“Any time.” Neville stood and wiped his hands on his apron. “Will I see you at the charity dinner?”
“No.”
His brow furrowed. “You’re not going?”
“Of course I’m going. I’m on the committee,” Pansy said with a flip of her hair. “But you won’t see me there.”
She had enjoyed today, but that didn’t change the facts: Neville was not part of her rehabilitation plan. In fact, no man was. Though her mother was probably correct in predicting that hanging off the arm of some well-to-do, virtuous gentleman would prove the existence of Pansy’s caring heart and tender soul, the idea of using a man to springboard herself back into society’s good graces nettled.
If Pansy were going to redeem herself, she would do so on her own.
Her rejection was plainly cruel, and Neville’s eyes flicked away as it struck home. Pansy lifted her chin against the drag of guilt. Its gravity made her feel heavy, closer to the ground than she had mere minutes ago. More akin to the dirt on the cover of her sketchbook than a flower rooted in earth.
“Well, I’ll be there anyway,” Neville said, stubbornly clinging to civility.
Pansy rolled her eyes and headed to the greenhouse door. She measured the distance to Hogwarts and frowned. It was a long, uphill walk to manage in bare feet on damp ground.
“Need a ride?” Neville sounded half smug and half amused. The mixture made her bristle. “You can borrow my broom, if you’d like.”
“I’ll be fine,” she snapped. “I don’t need your help.”
“Just my greenhouse.”
Pansy whipped her head back in a glare, which Neville met unflinchingly. Something shifted behind his dark blue eyes. A decision made in silence.
“I’ll be seeing you, Pansy.”
It sounded like a promise.
It was certainly a dismissal.
With as much pride as she could manage—which, at this point, wasn’t much—Pansy stripped off her high heels. With aching calves, she walked back to the castle, took the Floo to her flat, and landed with a polluted exhale of heat and cinder. She stepped from her hearth, heedless of the ash, soil, and grass she trailed across her white carpet. The urge to tidy the mess was strong, but she suppressed it.
She needed the reminder of her unpreparedness. She needed to see the evidence of perfection’s fleeting nature and the futility of attempting to meet impossibly high standards.
Even if she couldn’t grant herself the grace to be anything less.