The Shadow She Casts

Padma awakens at half-past two in the morning, in Pansy's bed. It takes her a moment to recognize the place, and remember how she came to be here, and she blushes rose-red when the memories come back. The library - the locked bedroom door, and the key falling between Pansy's breasts - herself crying out to be freed, then crying out for entirely different reasons when Pansy touched her, and oh -

She shakes herself to forget the feeling of hands pressing against her, and turns her head toward her unlikely bedfellow. Padma, the more prudish of the two, wrapped herself in a sheet before falling asleep; but Pansy, decidedly immodest, did not cover herself, revelling in the knowledge that she has a beautiful body, and Padma is a bit disturbed by this.

But Pansy is beautiful, there's no denying that. Padma examines her, the black hair falling across the pale ridge of her cheek, a few strands tickling her bloodless lips and heavy lids, and feels unworthy of contemplating such loveliness. She looks at the two red marks on Pansy's throat, the two bites she managed to get in before Pansy's tongue left her breathless. She reaches down to touch her, slipping her fingers down Pansy's left arm, sliding her palm over the swell of her breast, then lower, down her stomach and across her thighs. Pansy's sleeping lips twitch at the corners.

Padma lifts her hand from Pansy's body and lies back down, resting her forehead lightly against Pansy's shoulder. She smiles to herself; her expression grows thoughtful as she remembers how gentle the Slytherin girl was with her the previous night. Pansy always takes what she wants without sparing a thought for the people around her. Padma supposed that would apply in bed too, that Pansy would bite and scratch and fuck roughly, drawing blood; but she kissed and caressed Padma almost reverently, as though she were handling a sacred object, or a goddess made of spun glass, and instead of kicking her out after the sex was over, as Padma half-expected her to, she let her share her slumber.

This means she must trust me at least a tiny bit, thinks Padma, and, emboldened by this hypothetical trust, she snuggles up to Pansy a bit, even puts her arm around the girl's middle. She falls back asleep with a small smile on her mouth that matches Pansy's own.

*

Pansy wakes at six, as she always does, and catches Padma getting dressed. She remains silent for half a minute, watches the girl pull up her knee socks, and finally says, "Leaving so soon?"

Padma jumps, startled, and nods. "I'd like to get back to my dorm before anyone notices I'm gone."

"Right," says Pansy, and there's a note of disappointment in her voice she hadn't wanted to put in.

Padma reacts to it: "I'd rather not leave," she says, doing up the last buttons of her blouse. "But I don't have much of a choice."

"I guess I'll see you around," says Pansy, and she shrugs very nonchalantly to make up for her accidental disappointment.

"Yeah." Padma's voice is momentarily muffled by the robe she's pulling over her head. "I'll check my schedule to see when I can see you again." She picks up a large ornamental butterfly, borrowed from Parvati in fourth year and not yet returned, and places it behind her ear.

The other, cross-legged on the bed and still naked, watches her with cunning grey eyes.

Padma laces up her trainers. "I'm off. It's half-past already." She moves toward the door.

Pansy smiles at her with false sweetness and says, "I'll miss you," looking up at her from underneath curved, dark lashes.

Padma seems to vacillate mid-movement, as though her ankles are suddenly too weak to support her weight; then she leans forward, drops a soft kiss on the bridge of Pansy's nose, whispers: "Bye" - and then she's out the door.

Pansy waits for her skin to stop tingling from the kiss, then lies down on the bed, closes her eyes and thinks of the previous night. It was worth everything - the stalking, the scheming, the nights she wasn't able to sleep because she was thinking of Padma, and now she can sit back and savour her victory. Nothing she ever felt before is as intensely satisfying as the knowledge that nobody before her ever did such things to Padma; nobody has run their hand up Padma's thigh, or left angry-looking bite marks around her navel, or licked lower. She's the first - the one she'll always remember, thinks Pansy, and smirks.

Whenever she, as a child, received a new doll, she methodically smashed it to pieces, and then threw tantrums because she couldn't put it back together. And just as, back then, she enjoyed breaking off the painted porcelain cheeks, she enjoyed tearing down Padma's purity. But Padma is not irreparably broken; she is new and improved, a toy that will surely bring her much pleasure, and yet there is a lot of room left for further corruption, which gives Pansy something to look forward to.

The only drawback, she thinks, is that Padma, being a logical, cold Ravenclaw, is not the type to become easily dependant; but she has time enough to work on that. Pansy doesn't want her to go seeking pleasure elsewhere, now that she's had her first taste of it.

Next time, Pansy promises herself, I'll be rougher. She kept her viciousness firmly in check last night, knowing Padma wouldn't appreciate being manhandled. Next time, I'll have her skin beneath my fingernails,
and her blood will dry on the sheets as she sleeps in my arms...

A memory-image flits behind her eyes : Padma, naked, trembling and wet beneath her hand, murmuring, "Oh, Pansy, please," in the voice of a child on the edge of tears, and Pansy moans out loud and slips a hand between her own thighs.

Next time...

*

Padma exits the Slytherin common room without noticing a single strange look its early birds send her. She makes her way back to Ravenclaw Tower, eyes turned inward, humming to herself, because there's no happier person on Earth than a girl who's falling in love and thinks the feeling is mutual.