Moment

It was one of those moments that Ginny wanted to grasp and not let go. Sometimes it seemed so horribly, harshly unfair that a moment would never be there again, that in just another beat the kiss would be over and it would never happen ever again. No more soft lips pressed against hers, no more tongues sliding playfully together, no mores hands in her hair nor soft hips against hers. It would be gone, lost in the recesses of nothing, as though it had never existed at all.

And then, despite Ginny's frantic attempts to slow down time... there it was. They pulled apart, and no matter how hard she tried to keep the feeling of that instant, it slipped out between her fingers as she tried to trap it between her hands like she used to do as a young child with fireflies. The dark haired girl in front of Ginny smiled one last genuine smile, running her hand gently along Ginny's cheek in a silent farewell.

As Pansy turned and began to walk away, Ginny found herself absurdly surprised that she couldn't see sparking remnants of the kisses and the caresses flying away from her as well. But there was nothing.

"Pansy," she cried out desperately, trying to find some way for her to stay, some way to be sure that all of it had happened and, damn it, if she walked out of that door then it would finally be real. Ginny couldn't stand for it to be real.

The other girl turned around, but did not make any move, neither towards Ginny nor away from her.

"Yes?" Pansy asked. Her face was expressionless. She was very good at making her face very blank. Once upon a time-- had it really only been a few months ago?--Ginny had been used to it. She'd sometimes even considered it an endearing quirk, and had always laughed when she saw Pansy's massive haul from the Slytherin Alumni Poker Night each month.

But right now Ginny wept and screamed--inside, of course, Pansy would never bother staying to listen to someone who was carrying on so immaturely--for some scrap of understanding of what was going on behind that well painted face. No matter how hard she looked, there was nothing. Back in school, Ginny had thought of Pansy as a reflection on glass, so shallow that even her physical existence may as well have been an illusion, a trick of the light. Even now Ginny couldn't feel certain that Pansy was more than skin and void and lipstick without feeling the heat of her body and the beat of her heart.

"I... it's..." Ginny grasped about for something to say, anything, just to speak and for the words to make just enough sense to keep Pansy there in the room with her for a few more seconds. She didn't know what she'd do after that. She just wanted to hold onto the illusion for as long as possible. But only one thing came to her mind. "Why?"

It was the same thing she'd asked so many times before, but it had always seemed so far off, so distant, so discordant with the reality she'd painted for herself that somehow, no matter how much she told herself intellectually what would happen, it felt remote, distant. An abstract concept that wouldn't actually have any bearing on Ginny's life.

Maybe it was just because as Ginny was growing up, year after year, everything was always in flux, on the brink of destruction. It wasn't too unusual for there to be debates about whether or not Hogwarts would stay open. Yet her life was fairly stable. Go to class, do homework, go out on dates, fight in a deadly final battle that had been brewing since long before Ginny was born, then a couple days later sit and take her finals and return to school next year.

Through all that she'd expected would change the nature of her life, everything had stayed surprisingly routine. So the idea that anything could shake up her world so badly, especially now, when the war was over, when there were no longer the Death Eaters running around killing people-- perhaps it was not surprisingly that Ginny rational side hadn't managed to convince her heart of the truth.

"You don't really want to go over this again, do you?" Pansy's voice was deliberately nonchalant. Ginny would not have been entirely sure it weren't an act, except for the fact that Pansy did not turn around again to leave. "Your friends and family will never accept me. My friends and family will never accept you. Just because the Dark Lord is gone, that doesn't mean we walk in the same world now. I thought once you thought about this more, you wouldn't go through this nonsense again. After fighting for the Order, you don't want to have to see all the people you tried to kill. They don't want to see you. And you're high-profile, now. Everybody will know. This is the right thing to do." Seeming to think that was an end to the matter, Pansy turned on her heel.

"If this is the right thing to do, then why does everything feel unfinished?" Ginny demanded, grabbing Pansy's shoulder and whirling her around. "I feel like we were just in the middle of everything, and just dropping it now is like... My mum always told me to finish what I start. This--"

"--is finished, Weasley," she interrupted, forcibly removing Ginny's hand from her arm, looking bored. Ginny tried not to wince at the use of her last name, which was something Pansy hadn't called her in ages. After seeing Pansy open up-- not completely, but likely as much as she ever had to anyone--and finding the unexpected warmth, the girl's suddenly freezing aloofness hurt her as much as she imagined Crucio might. It was like she wanted to erase what they'd been. Pansy continued. "So what's the problem? Don't worry, Weasley, I have this hunch your mum won't mind if you stop seeing me."

"No, it's not finished," Ginny insisted, ignoring Pansy's deliberate misunderstanding. "Stopping something isn't the same as finishing it. If we were supposed to end it now, everything wouldn't feel so... so half-done. Things were... happening, developing, and they haven't had a chance to be concluded."

Pansy snorted, somehow managing to make a snort lady-like, and took off the mask of indifference and donned instead one of derision, with a hint of condescension. "Life isn't like a nice little story where everything is wrapped up in the end," she told Ginny, taking a packet of cigarettes out of her robes. "Whenever a relationship ends, there's something left undone, for at least one person, anyway. Care for a fag?"

It gave her an excuse to walk over to Pansy, so Ginny said yes. The moment when she took the cigarette from Pansy's hand, their fingers brushed against each other, but it was so fleeting that Ginny didn't even have a chance to savour the contact. Pansy put the carton of cigarettes back into her robes and pulled out her wand, conjuring a small fire on the end of it and lighting her cigarette. Ginny awkwardly put the cigarette between her lips and leaned in for Pansy to light hers as well. Ginny breathed in and immediately began coughing. She managed to murmur a quick charm to calm down her lungs, but she remained red with embarrassment and just looked at the cigarette awkwardly, not really sure what to do.

Pansy still hadn't left, but the moment when she would had to be getting closer and closer.

Ginny just had to keep her there a little longer, to get used to believing that this was it, it was over. The longer she saw Pansy here, acting as though they were strangers or enemies from school instead of two people who had intimately shared both body and mind, the more reality would sink in and she would accept it.

"The first hit always feels the worst," Pansy told her, referring to the cigarette. "It shouldn't be as bad after that."

"Just because life doesn't always tie up nicely," Ginny said, looking down at the slowly burning cigarette between her fingers, "doesn't mean that we have to go out of our way to tangle everything up."

"Bloody hell, you think that ending this is going to tangle things? Are you daft? Keeping up this madness, this travesty, that's what would tangle and confuse everything." Pansy took a long drag from her cigarette.

Pansy was using the same voice that used to scare Ginny, back when she'd just been a little redheaded Gryffindor first year or second year, terrified of the older, dark Slytherin girl who would make fun of her and make her feel ignorant and hopelessly inept. A dunderhead, like Snape would say. Ginny was oddly glad, because she knew it meant Pansy was getting upset. Maybe she would begin to yell. Maybe she would even say something to make Ginny hate her again, like she used to, and she could just be angry instead of broken and incomplete.

Pansy still hadn't left yet. Her cool mask had cracked a little bit, but the small sliver in the porcelain, the form of which was an unrehearsed set of her jaw and eyes a tad too wide and shining, but Ginny could only tell if she looked very closely. Anyway, she was pretty sure that the only reason that Pansy's feelings seemed so dim was for the same reason that as a child the fireflies she chased at night seemed to shine as brightly as the stars did. She wondered where Pansy managed to put her feelings that they could be so very far away from here.

She thought about how someone might go about trying to find them-- one could not simply catch stars the same way one catches fireflies, after all-- but dismissed it as soon as it occurred to her. She knew that Pansy would not stay. All she wanted was to keep trying to extend this moment and experience it until it was no longer possible anymore.

"Time always changes things," Ginny murmured. She knew that she was changing the subject and being completely irrelevant. She hoped that it confused Pansy, or made her mad at the waste of time. No, actually, what she really wanted was to try and work as much out as she could. Her time was being stolen away, prematurely she thought, and so she had to tie up who knew how many weeks or months or years of progress and denouement into however long she could keep Pansy here so that it still counted. What did it matter if Pansy thought her tiresome or silly or clingy now? Ginny wanted her bloody resolution. So, she continued speaking.

"All the time, every instant, it's never going to be there ever again, and no kind of magic can actually recreate it. We can watch it again, we can even go through it again-- but it's not the same, it never can be. Where does it go? Everything that's happened to us, it's just not there anymore. And everything changes. What things are at the beginning will never stay, and everything has to end sometime. I guess if it weren't that way, we wouldn't care as much. It wouldn't be so important for me to try to grasp a moment if it were actually possible. But there's something that's supposed to happen, something we're supposed to be or do, and it hasn't happened yet. It's not supposed to go this way." Ginny let out a breath, slightly surprised that Pansy hadn't walked out in the middle of that little speech. She braced herself for the other girl's inevitable scorn.

"Your cigarette will burn you," was all Pansy said.

Ginny looked down at the forgotten cigarette in her hands, now burned to the butt and approaching her fingers. She dropped it quickly on instinct, and then regained her senses, taking out her wand and vanishing the butt just as it hit the ground. "Reparo," she intoned at the carpet, and the small burn disappeared.

Pansy had already put out hers, and was in the process of lighting another one. She offered on to Ginny, who declined this time. Pansy shrugged held the cigarette to her lips, inhaling deeply, then removing the fire charm from her wand. Ginny took a deep breath. In, out. Another slice of time passed.

"I don't really believe in predestination," Pansy said after a moment, twisting the cigarette around in her fingers. Fidgeting. Ginny could never remember seeing her look so real. "That Trelawney cow was such a fake."

Predestination? Trelawney? What was Pansy talking about?

Oh.

"Neither do I, really," Ginny replied. "It's just a feeling. I can't explain it. I think it's not seeing the future, but seeing what was happening, and knowing that life was happening in a way that it was good for it to happen. Stopping now will just leave-- leave me," she knew better than to say us, "wondering."

"What did you think was happening, that we were falling in love or something?" Pansy was being deliberately harsh. Ginny remembered that only a minute ago she was wishing to become angry at Pansy, yet now as she realized that the girl across from her was trying to do just, she found that the last thing she wanted was to leave this angry. She wanted to remember Pansy lovingly, like right after the kiss, a tender look in her eyes as she stroked her. Maybe she should have just said goodbye and let Pansy go.

She had tried drawing out a moment, pulling it thinly across more than it had meant to be, as a small compensation for her inability to grasp it, touch it, keep it in her drawer. It was only fair, she thought, since their rightful time, hers and Pansy's, had been just as unnaturally cut off.

Yet nothing, not herself, not even Pansy, could stay constant inside this artificial bubble of a few seconds painstakingly stretched over minutes. So Pansy was trying to be inflammatory instead of indifferent, and Ginny wanted to be accepting instead of angry. Yet the fact that Pansy was showing something was an improvement over a few minutes ago. It gave Ginny hope of-- she didn't even know what.

So it was Ginny who answered calmly, trying to look no more than contemplative. "I hadn't figured it out yet. That's part of the problem. Maybe if I--"

But Pansy wasn't paying attention. She had vanished her cigarette and was reaching into her pocket again. Instead of taking out a cigarette carton, however, she pulled out a small golden coin, which Ginny recognized as the popular modern form of wizarding communication that had made Hermione Granger rich.

"I'm late," Pansy said, looking down at the coin. "I have to go." She turned around and headed to the fireplace.

"Pansy, please, wait!" Pansy didn't pause as Ginny followed behind her, but rather reached into the pouch of floo powder on the mantle. Ginny continued anyway. "Can't we talk about this some more?"

"There's nothing more to talk about. You go on about how something good was happening, but you don't know what, it's just vague bullshit. You aren't really ready to deal with what would happen if we stayed together." Pansy raised her arm to throw the powder into the fireplace, but Ginny grabbed her arm to stop her.

"Yes, I am!"

"You're ready to face your family's shock, their hurt, their disapproval?" Pansy was back to an eerily neutral voice again. "You're ready to risk cutting yourself off from all your friends and family?"

"Yes!" cried Ginny, driven by a frenzied desire to make things work out okay, make things turn out okay like they did when she was a child, and the conviction that somehow, if she could keep Pansy here long enough, they would.

"You're either lying, Ginny," Pansy told her, face very near to Ginny's their lips practically touching, "or you're very stupid. Diagon Alley!"

She threw the powder down, leaped into the fireplace, and was gone.

After having spent so much time trying to delay this moment, Ginny just stood there, dazed, staring at the fireplace where what maybe could have been her answers had just been. Her mind went blank while an achy emptiness filled the rest of her. When she exhaled it felt as though there were nothing left inside of her.

Ginny sat on the floor in front of the fireplace, breathing deeply. She thought for a moment about following Pansy to Diagon Alley, but that would do more harm than good.

Now that she was actually gone, the dreaded deed actually done, the whole affair felt oddly far away. Ginny still felt hurt, still felt empty and incomplete, but it had happened, it was done, and if those moments as they were still existed, they were somewhere even modern magic could not safely go.

So Ginny stood up and walked to the kitchen to fix herself something to eat. Maybe this really was the way it was supposed to be, and what she needed was to learn how to deal with unfinished business. Or maybe there really was some fate in store for them, and this day had not really seen the last of the special significance that Pansy and Ginny had found together.

Or, of course, life might just be senseless and random, and there really wasn't any meaning or purpose or "supposed to be" at all.

As she got some of her Mum's cake out of the cupboard, Ginny realized that the idea that life might not have meaning didn't particularly bother her. She didn't have to depend on fate to decide whether or not she got a chance to explore what she had with Pansy Parkinson! The war was over, Voldemort had been defeated and the Death Eaters mostly captured, so they both probably had over a century left to live.

It still hurt. Yes, she still felt empty and incomplete. But so much could change inside of a single moment. Ginny didn't feel at all like the same woman she had been half an hour ago. That she would never again in a hundred years get another chance was absurd.

The wrong thing hadn't happened. The right thing hadn't happened. Something had happened, that was all.