Death Beds, Love Songs, and Ancestors

She had been satisfied with her prescribed life, but part of the satisfaction came from ignorance, and she wasn’t really ignorant anymore. Damn her, over analyzing endlessly. So now, how did she stop it?

There was no moonlight to fall romantically across her path, no stars to light her way to this boy who waited patiently out in the horror of the spring storm to grasp her wet body and pull her to him. Maybe there was no boy at all. Maybe it was some weird Potter escapade she’d inadvertently become involved in. Maybe this note, soft and warm against her cold flesh deep in the pocket on her hip, was a ploy to catch her alone and interrogate her. It had been a quiet year. Sure, there were a million teeth clenching stories unfolding around her every day, some as rapid fire as floo powder, some as meandering as a classical midnight caravan, but only a handful involved her. Those ones were either woefully inadequate portraits of her boring daily life, teenaged angst and slings and arrows, or gaudy almost-sexual escapades with various more masculine members of her house, usually Draco, where she got pushed over eventually for some other, well, let’s say weird reason. Few were this encompassing, this endlessly yet some how necessarily complicated. None had ever been this tiring, this painful to see through. Yet she knew she could let it stop, and when she thought like this, something inside her, her heart, she supposed, leapt with panic when she thought of turning around and retreating to the dorm. No, this was one story she knew she must see through to the end. How ever endless, however painful.

Pansy looked down at the backs of her hands, finely boned and stretched with fair, almost blue skin. The new scar was barely visible, a shadow tucked in the recess of her wrist. Palm up, it was the snow white tail of an exotic dragon, jagged and fixed, thick as a pencil, encircling the mound of Jupiter and slicing neatly through her radial artery. Already three random, unsolicited suggestions for removal. She wanted to keep it, but she wouldn’t be able to verbalize why if pressed. Madame Pomfrey said it would fade over time anyway, so what was the hurry? Besides, it would let him know, in some unspoken way, that he’d had an affect on her.

Above her were windows, massive eyes glaring far into the night, wet and hard, with nothing but pitch beyond. Watching. Protecting. Keeping those who should stay out, out; maybe keeping others in. She lifted her gaze to them and felt a twinge of empathy. How much like those windows were her own hard cold eyes, how much like her was this Spring storm — how does the quote go. . .? Oh yes, a story told by an idiot, full of sound and fury yet signifying nothing.

She wanted to feel foreboding, even fear, but instead she felt the same iron fist of stoicism balling in her solar plexus. If it was scary, she could deal with it, if it was deadly, she had more than a fighting chance. Getting caught was no deterrent, but the threat of impending happiness was sobering. For a girl who’d never had anything of her own, all she felt was sort of sick. Ron was something that could be taken away. Would be taken away. Did she want something that she could have so little control over? Would she be happy, even if she was counting the days until someone, more likely, something, came between them? Wasn’t she too young to be thinking like this? What did it matter in the long run anyway? Now that she was caught in this whirlpool of rationalization and reality, she just wanted to be swept away.

She threw her hands up, pressing her forehead into the stone wall, a sudden movement, too desperate for her to understand. Her palms, hot from being clenched in tight fists, fogged the glass over her head. She couldn’t see out, beyond this, the mess, the black hall, but she could feel it. The thoughtless storm, restless and wicked, shaking the glass in it’s casement, the casement within it’s stone anchor. The castle, it’s place in the landscape, the runoff and soil, the reservoir, the lightning and threat of fire. The animals, enchanted and ordinary, side by side in the forest neither knowing the function of the other and never questioning it. The circle, the cycle. Life and death, chances and missed opportunities. Pansy took a deep breath, imagined all her thoughts as graffiti scrawled on a blackboard and them wiped it clean with a flick of her wrist.

"Too drops in a bucket," she said out loud.

Her words did not go unheard.

Cliched, perhaps, but as Pansy put her hands to the massive door and then stepped through the goddamn sold thing, Harry felt as though someone had broken an egg on his head and the slime was oozing down his spine, trickling between his collar bones and down his sides. Whether it was because she actually intended to meet Ron or because she had actually stepped through the goddamn solid thing, he couldn’t be completely sure.

He came out from behind the gargoyle on the pedestal and took a few steps into the center of the landing. From here he could see the landscape the Pansy could not. The rolling lawn (lashing, actually, this instant) meeting flush with the window frame. Rain washed down the windows in sheets, overhead the sky grumbled, more uneasy than angry. Somewhere beyond the windows, outside in the final throws of the storm, his best friend had forgotten about him and was with a girl. A girl who was not just from a different house, but from the worst house. A girl that was not just from the worst house, but one that had been kept secret from him — and would continue to be kept secret from him, as far as Ron was concerned. Her palm prints were still visible. A testament to his complicated ire.

And the cunning runt could walk through goddamn doors, too. Imagine what else she might be capable of, what the hell kind of magic was that, anyway? It wasn’t apparition, maybe it was more like transfiguration, like she became the door. It was another glowing white pebble in the midnight path of the unfolding drama.

The strange magic, the missing hours, it had been an odd two days in an exquisitely complicated life and Harry was dismayed to find himself as shook up at this emotional upheaval then he had been when he found out he was a wizard, when he found out how his parents had died and who was responsible, when Cedric — but somehow, all of that had been bracing; emotional brussel sprouts, not enjoyed but good for you just the same. This was grimy, left a feeling on his skin like rotten silk.

Clearly she had been affected by Ron as much as he appeared genuinely affected by her. She was a Prefect, after all, and people who’d kept their noses clean long enough to earn a title like that weren’t the type to risk sneaking around with just anybody. No, but there was no reason for her to like him — there was no reason for him to like her, they should be repelled by each other, as they always had been, as it should be natural for members of these two house to be enemies. But she was taking risks visiting him out there like this, not just Ron’s empty bed and emptier excuses, there was reciprocation and follow-through on this. It was private, secret, and if Ron was keeping secrets with Pansy Parkinson, then who was his secret-keeper?

"

"Show you," he said. The words echoed around the room, came back to him more accusatory that he expected, but it did not phase him. He backed up the stairs a few paces, stumbling as he did, "Show you both," he repeated in a hiss, and fled down the hall, towards Gryffindor Tower, where he had every intention on reporting his dear friend, Ron Weasely, missing.

Amalthea didn’t wake so much as came screaming into consciousness. Dull black pain radiated from her forehead, clearly the entry point for the white hot iron rod now buried deep within her brain and sinking solidly into her spine like mercury. She tried to raise her arms to push the rod away but there was no response. She managed to open her eyes and immediately wished she hadn’t.

Could she remember him? And having ever been so handsome? No, the face was always a mask and he was nowhere near her forehead, it was her arm he was holding. The Mark he was pressing delicately with too-long fingers. She tried to weave her thoughts together to protest, to cry out, but she’d been drunk and between the alcohol and the pain, she found herself completely paralyzed

(jezzus! Ryan, did you — oh god what is that-)

Jack’s voice like from the other room maybe from somewhere in her head. She saw the plane pitch forward, lose altitude and then gain, like a toy on a wire in a cheap movie. Like some almighty hand plucking it from the sky. And her son, his almost man voice breaking in disbelief, terror even. She didn’t know her eyes were closed until she opened them and saw his face again. So handsome.

Her grandmother’s violet eyes seared into her own. Her husband’s bland features sharpened by her family’s bone structure, the full lips she knew she herself wore parted wolfishly. "You’re awake," he said mildly, as a son would say to a mother.

(Ryan? Ryan?! oh god please help us)

She opened her mouth to welcome him, reached out to pull him to her, but pain shot through her neck and shoulders.

"No darling, I think you’ve had too much to be bouncing around at this late hour. Sleep. Go ahead, I’ll watch over you." The face continued in a soft, soothing voice, the hand still lingered over the Mark, the iron rod still fixed solidly in her brain.

She focused on the pain in the rod, feeling the energy drain from her limbs, sinking deeper into her arms and legs. The alcohol made it more difficult, but she gathered what was left of her conscious self-preservation and used it as a pole vault with which to pull herself out of a ominous dark.

She opened her eyes and focused on the piano that Daniel used to play as she rolled onto her back in only a thin teddy, wiggled her bottom and spread her legs wide as they would go. The pain receded a bit, but it took all her energy to concentrate; at least she could maintain a medium.

Despite the alarms the blared anxiously within her system, the room, the whole scene, appeared quite peaceful from beyond. The flowers tapping their multi-purpled heads against the glass, the shadows on the walls from the car parked beyond the unlit room, and the young man tending to his infirm mother, bent over her, stroking her arm.

Daniel, that had been worship. She would sing and he would touch the insides of her thighs to hear her voice tremble. Then he would kiss her, but not on the mouth. His lips fixing gently on that little bud of pleasure and his tongue would bath it so slow and thoroughly and then he would slip two fingers into her, reaching for that perfect spot.

"

(oh god please help us)

Amalthea opened her eyes wide and gazed into the face of the man who held her down, this man who she’d never volunteered to serve, this man she had been promised to, the man she’d promised. Man nothing she thought bitterly as tears began to leak from her eyes.

The face of her dead son saw these and his wolfish grin spread, showing the clean sharp peaks of his teeth. In her grandmother’s violet eyes she saw the vision of her daughter, tied resolutely to an alter that looked a lot like a pyre. Face solemn and resigned, her daughter. She saw her house in flames, she saw a sea full of unicorns and a castle that still stood guard over a kingdom abandon thousands of years before. She saw debris floating scorched in a great body of water. She touched the corner of her dead son’s wolfish smile and he said, "Don’t cry mother, it will all be over soon."

Amalthea wanted desperately to believe that, but she knew better.

Ron couldn’t believe his eyes when she appeared. There was no doubt in his mind it was her, even with her magnificent hair plastered to her back, even wrapped in a shapeless cloak and already soaked. "Beautiful night, eh?" She said.

"Perfect night for a moonlit stroll."

They looked at each other, not knowing what to do next. Each tense with emotion, buzzed on the adrenaline of sneaking out, deluded with hormones and pheromones or whatever it is that makes you feel this way and then sends it out towards another person so that they know you feel this way.

Pansy stepped forward, pushing the hood of the cloak back off her head and looking up at Ron. "I’m a prefect, I can’t explain why I did this. Only that you asked me to."

"I’m glad you came."

He looked down at her, the rain beaded in her eyelashes, how bright her eyes looked despite the moonless stormy night. She looked back, watching the cogs catch and release behind his irises, feeling the surge of desire and wanting to run with it but also the pang of embarrassment and guilt, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. That this was some kind of diversion.

"This is crazy," Pansy said, a silly grin on her face. "I think I’m only here because a boy has never asked me to sneak out before."

"I didn’t know you had to sneak out." Ron blushed, thankful for the darkness, the waterlogged hood of his cloak. "I mean, don’t take chances. I guess I only asked you to see if you’d do it."

They eyed each other.

"You shouldn’t be here," Ron said, starting off towards the lake.

"Neither should you!"

"By showing up, you’re making suggestions that you can’t follow, promises you have no intention of keeping!"

"Who, me?" She was incredulous, pulling back on him. "I don’t think so — you could have left me there! Called someone and gone on your way. But you didn’t. You even fucking carried me! Why didn’t you leave me there?"

"Because it was my chance to do something good, something right, and not because of Harry or of You-know-who, not because I was evolved in some over complicated plot but because I created the situation and I saw only one way to end it!"

The sudden roar of the storm through the trees was deafening, as if nature Herself didn’t think they belonged there either

For nature’s fury, there was only one thing Ron could think of to do.

Pansy pushed a length of wet hair out of her face and opened her mouth to suggest that they met another day when Ron grabbed her hand and pulled it behind her back, using it to press her to him. "I’ve never wanted to be anywhere more in my whole life."

His mouth came down on hers, she put her free hand to his face to push him away, but his mouth was butterbeer sweet and his body so warm against hers that she simply trailed her wet fingers down his jaw and over the back of his neck, pulling his mouth deeper on to hers.

Ron was as surprised as she was, that it had happened, that she hadn’t boxed him, and when she touched him back, when she moaned softly in the back of her throat and licked his lips with the tiniest flicking of her tongue, he gripped her so hard he was sure he would hurt her.

She slipped her fingers from his and linked her hands behind his neck. The new hand was not yet warmed by body heat and the fresh burst of wet and cold sent a shiver down Ron’s spine and right into his cock. Pansy, who had been resting a little astride his thigh seemed to approve of this and pressed harder against him, the cold fingers twisting in the hair at the nape of his neck. She sucked gently on his lower lip, running the tip of her tongue across the surface in the same, tentative flicker motion and then brought her hot mouth to his ear.

"We should go to the edge of the forest, behind the pumpkin patch."

Ron started back, stepping slowing towards the forest, the Forbidden Forest full of carnivorous spiders and crazy anglias and every other flesh loving creature on the good earth, but with Pansy in his arms, her enormous amethyst eyes so full of that shine that to keep looking into them could cause his heart to burst right out of his chest, with her in his arms, urging him softly back with little desperate kisses, he would have walked backwards into the caldera of Tolkein’s Mount Doom.

They sandwiched there between their heavy woolen cloaks, on the edge of the Forbidden Forest, hidden by Hagrid’s pumpkin patch and by the sounds of the spring storm, passionately unaware that just within the doors of Hogwarts, two esteemed professors where standing over a second empty bed, exchanging horrified glances.

"There are many prophecies," Snape said, after several silent minutes had passed between him and McGonagall as they stared down onto Pansy’s still-made bed. "Many prophecies."

"And there are promises, too, Severus. Promises are much different from prophecies."

Neither moved. Across the room, Livia Rookwood started to tremble.