Those Wrong, Yet it's Right, Things

Prologue

When we reach the end of all the light we have and take that first step into darkness, we must believe one of two things: there will be something solid for us to stand on, or we will be taught to fly.

~Patrick Overton

Pansy sat up and pulled her cloak tighter around her. The dungeons were the last place you wanted to be in the dead of the night in the wintertime. She scooted her way to the edge and let her bare feet fall onto the cold stone. Glancing at all the drawn beds, she could tell she was the only one awake at this hour.

Pushing her body off the bed she made her way to the window. Even though the dungeons were below ground the windows were bewitched and Pansy was able to glance out at the stars. Wisps of her warm breath rose up to tickle her red nose and she fought a shiver with the want to work its way down her spine. The sky looked the same it had years ago, but everything was so much more complicated now.

Pansy wasn't twelve, thirteen, fourteen anymore; she was seventeen years old. The cry of war had always been a rumble, somewhere in the distance, but now it was a storm, shouting in their face. It was a time where children still figuring out who they were had to determine their lives by choosing sides: fighting with their family or against them. It was a time when innocence fell and the guilty triumphed. It was a time Pansy wished she didn't have to see.

She sat on the small ledge and brought her knees up to her chin like she did when she was a little girl. Taking her index finger from its refuge in the warm cloak, she brought it to the glass. Using slight pressure she carved a word in the frost before diving back into the shelter of her huddled body. The word lingered there, taunting her, reminding her of when times were simpler.

Back then Pansy knew what she had to do; she knew what she was supposed to do. Pansy was brought up to be the perfect Slytherin--yet, alas, she couldn't find the heart to be one, so she had just hid in the shadows all these years. She was raised to be an obedient wife to the heir of the great Malfoy household himself. What an arrogant son of a bitch Pansy thought, sliding off the windowsill. Even though it wasn't what she wanted it was what she was supposed to want. It was all laid out there for her, predetermined, black and white. It was what Pansy had accepted as her future. But Pansy wasn't a naive little girl anymore and it wasn't what she wanted. Despite the fact that it didn't matter whether she wanted it or not, Pansy couldn't even find the strength to pretend to want it anymore.

She was tired of acting like some stupid, obedient slut. She was tired of clinging to a boy who obviously hated her. Pansy was tired of bending to everyone's vision of who she was supposed to be.

Sighing at the weight on her shoulders she hadn't had when she'd woken up, Pansy crawled back into bed. Safe beneath the harbor of warmth she closed her eyes and tried to fall asleep, letting her worries float off into the cold night air. Little did she know that parents don't determine fate. Little did Pansy Parkinson know that destiny, or bad luck, or whatever you want to call it, had something else in mind.

They say two wrongs don't make a right. They say doing something wrong isn't going to lead to something right. They tell you there are definable lines between good and evil, black and white, dead and life. What they don't tell you is that sometimes right and wrong do coincide. Because Pansy was about to embark on a journey that would lead her to one of those wrong, yet its right, things.

And as the pale strips of the sunrise filtered onto the cold stone floor, they cast a shadow of a word a restless teenager had carved into their window. The word was meant to say 'evil,' but to someone on the other side of the glass, it simply said 'live.'