Heirloom

Pansy Parkinson has never been beautiful, not even on her wedding day. She knows this as she smoothes the white silk across her stomach, standing before the glimmering mirror in her mother's closet, listening to the fabric and beading rustle with each breath.

The war is five months new, has settled over everything like a layer of dust. Pansy is five months, too, with child, but it is fear that grows now like a balloon in her lungs. Later, when Draco leans in for the kiss, she thinks of all the versions of this moment she's imagined since childhood, and how none could have predicted the coldness of his lips or the terrible feeling of being utterly, utterly alone beneath his touch.

Narcissa Malfoy wears black. Pansy sees her as a castle of glass, brittle and lifeless and beautiful.

That night, Pansy is not surprised, as she carefully unbuttons the layers of her dress and presses it into the heirloom chest, that Draco doesn't visit her on their wedding bed. She spells the pins from her hair, lets them fall noiselessly to the floor with a motion of shaking off water. She wonders to herself how all of life's promises can be swallowed and spit up as an eternity cursed to this chamber of stone, alone except for a husband in love with someone else.

The child, when it comes, is stillborn, and Pansy cries for six days on her bed. Narcissa buys a tiny black coffin, refuses to bury it on Malfoy land. Her own mother is cheerful, for there will be other, legitimate children, but Pansy knows the tiny body she held in her arms was the only life her womb will ever produce. Draco says nothing, doesn't touch her, has never touched her, will never touch her again.

Voldemort calls, and Pansy feels the war swell in her throat like chloroform.

Sometimes, when Pansy lies half-awake at night, feeling her existence flicker in and out with sleep, she imagines what Draco does on other beds. By now she can see them clear as a photograph, entwined with a passion she only pretends to understand. She sees the dark hair in disarray, the spectacles balanced on a cheap nightstand, the lightning scar resting quietly, afterwards, against Draco's skin.

There are nights when her fingers reach like strangers beneath her nightgown, whispering through a land foreign and cold for so long. Other nights she is sick and rushes retching to the nearest sink, watches with unblinking eyes the vomit that swirls down the drain like a weather pattern. Staring into the mirror, she sees a face receding into the stone that encases her, gray and chalklike and barren.

She grows uglier.

Pansy has wished to be beautiful every night since she was seven. Now, she knows with a certain glee that beauty will do nothing to save her. She thinks of Narcissa Malfoy, one floor above, with a black skull on her arm and a more perfect reflection, and no longer wants to be her.

Then, Draco sends home a letter from the warfront. Pansy feels the paper heavy in her hands, folds it into a triangle and doesn't read it for eight days. On the ninth day, the ministry is on her doorstep. She unpacks her wedding dress, pulls the white train up the stairs where Narcissa watches the scar fade like a promise. Draco, Pansy knows, isn't coming back.

The aurors are moving slowly . Pansy does not find it difficult to climb through Narcissa's window, except for the stones on the ledge which slip like water against her fingertips.

The manor is quiet, still. The whole thing is a bit easy, she thinks, and Pansy does not hear the silk swimming past her ears.