A Soul to Keep

CHAPTER TWO

"I will kindly ask you not to fondle me, my lad"

In March of her sixth year, Pansy Parkinson watched idly by as Harry Potter punched Draco Malfoy in the mouth.

Draco had remained generally belligerent toward the Gryffindors, even following what Pansy had heard him murmur to Harry on the night of her birthday. He was still a rude, confrontational, loud-mouthed prick who didn't know when to back down or to give up, and it wasn't long before he stepped over the line.

To be truthful, it had been more like a running leap over the line onto thin ice.

Pansy had been walking beside him through the packed corridors on the way to Charms when Hermione ran straight into him, sending their quills and parchment flying skyward and then smashing spectacularly onto the stone floor in a quickly spreading puddle of black ink.

"Watch where you're going, Mudblood," Draco spat at her as she stooped to collect her things.

"Malfoy," Potter warned, emerging from the crowd behind her.

Draco didn't appear to be in the most compliant of moods. "Potter."

Pansy could see by now that Draco was painfully jealous of the amount of time that Weasley and Granger spent with Potter. He always had been. His passion for tormenting those two burned even stronger following January, and it was beginning to wear thin on the nerves of his clandestine boyfriend. Draco was quick to anger lately and had recently developed a nasty habit of shoving the smallest of the Gryffindors out of his way in the corridors between lessons.

"Watch what you say," Potter finished, crouching down to pull what could be salvaged from the sea of ink.

Draco was already livid. He had never been able to handle being given instructions, and, from the look on his face, he was not about to accept them even from someone that he had claimed to love. He kicked the parchment from Potter's hands and pulled him up by the front of his robes.

"I'll be sure to do that," Draco hissed, his grey eyes dancing with unprovoked fury. "As soon as I decide to take orders from the son of a Mudblood."

The crowd of Gryffindors around them made a collective "Ooh" sound.

Pansy knew he was going to say something like that, it was in his superfluous nature to rise above and beyond the call of offensive. However, she wasn't expecting him to say it with such passion.

In seconds, Potter freed himself from Draco's grasp and pinned him up against the wall in a twisted parody of the scene that Pansy had witnessed two months earlier. He tangled one of his fists in the fabric of Draco's collar, choking the other boy ever so slightly, while he kept his other hand pressed flat against the wall, blocking all paths of escape.

"Say that again," he demanded in a low growl, his face inches from Draco's.

"Son of a Mudblood," the Slytherin replied slowly, matching Potter's composure.

Potter nodded, let go, and backed up.

Draco looked rather pleased with himself and took two steps forward.

"Right," Potter said and swung. His fist connected with Draco's face with a loud smack, sending the surprised Slytherin stumbling backward with the force of it as several Gryffindors cheered their friend's bravery and daring. Harry ignored all of them, shaking with white-hot rage, as he appeared to be employing every ounce of will power he possessed not to trounce the other boy. Or, perhaps, to cry.

Meanwhile, Draco leaned helplessly against the wall. He looked pained, injured devastated, aggrieved as a thin line of blood erupted from the split in his lip, blazed its way down his chin, and finally exploded, crimson and telling, across the Slytherin crest on his robes.

***

Her bed was deliciously soft and seemingly made of heat, so when a firm hand shook her violently by the shoulders, Matilda was prepared to kill rather than to be removed from her queen-sized pocket of warmth. She opened her eyes to find Pansy, looking irate as ever, hovering over her.

"Your idiot cousin has announced that he won't leave for breakfast until you do. We're all starving. Get up."

She continued to hover as Matilda tried to blink the light away and vainly attempted to piece together the words that had just fallen, jumbled and foreign sounding, out of her roommate's mouth.

"I said get up!" Pansy snarled, tearing Matilda's beautiful blankets away along with their heavenly warmth, and dragged her bodily from the bed. She savagely ushered her roommate, still partially paralysed and semiconscious, to the washroom and slammed the door behind her.

"Good morning," Matilda mumbled and washed up as slowly as she could.

By the time she was finished, Pansy had vacated and had joined everyone in the common room. There, Draco sat sprawled out in the centre of the black couch and appeared to be entertaining the entire house with one of his wild tales.

"Well, of course the Ministry has already offered me a position very high up indeed," he prattled pretentiously, "but I'm still holding out. I don't want to make any big decisions until the Cannons get back to me, seems they haven't seen a Seeker with my sort of talent in decades."

The packed common room burst into a clamour of affirmative sounding gibberish and emphatic nods, and Matilda could just make out her roommate through the crowd. Pansy sat straddling the arm of the couch furthest from Draco, staring into the middle distance and looking bored to tears.

"Here she is!" Draco exclaimed with perfect joy and waited until Matilda was standing at his side before setting off for the Great Hall. "I see your new best friend didn't murder you in your sleep," he added quietly.

As she sat down beside her cousin at the Slytherin table in the Great Hall, Pansy flopped down across from them at Blaise's side. She seemed to trail them like a rabid little puppy and Matilda was becoming eager to shake her by the shoulders and demand an autobiography.

In a few moments, Snape began handing out their timetables in stony silence.

"Ooh, Drakey," Blaise cooed once he'd received his, "Herbology with Gryffindor, first thing! You think Harry's in that class?"

"Why the hell should I care, Zabini?" Draco drawled, shovelling an obscene amount of scrambled eggs into his mouth.

Blaise shrugged innocently and poured himself a cup of tea. "You in that class, Matty?"

Matilda sighed. She was very curious as to why everyone had begun calling her Matty all of a sudden. She had a policy concerning nicknames and their utilisation: they were not to be utilised. At all. Under any circumstance. Unfortunately she was far too exhausted to expound her ingenious viewpoint, and decided to wait this Matty phase out.

She glanced over her timetable as she finished a cup of coffee and said "Yep," before pouring herself another.

"You too, dear?" he asked Pansy. She nodded; staring down at a plate of food that was to remain largely untouched.

"So, why should Draco care if Harry's there or not?" Matilda casually inquired.

Blaise beamed. "Well! It's obvious that-"

"Not one more word, you mutinous bastard!" said Draco. "It is only obvious that you have very little going on in your own lives, and you have grown to be so bored that you have become delusional. And that is sad, very sad, but no reason to invent horrible little tales about me. Everyone shut up now."

"That was awfully rude, cousin."

"I'm never rude," he replied, absently staring across the Great Hall.

"Must you glare at him all the time, Draco?" asked Pansy, speaking calmly and without malice. She raised a piece of toast to her lips and carefully took a small bite. She seemed on the verge of smiling.

"As long as he insists on attending this school, then, yes, yes I must." He grabbed the mug from his cousin's hand and swallowed deeply.

Matilda didn't mind. She was in the middle of exchanging knowing looks with Blaise. And Draco wasn't glaring; he was squinting. The prince of vanity beside her refused to wear glasses, when in reality he had suffered from pathetically poor vision since early childhood. She took her empty mug back from him and finished her breakfast quickly as he announced that it was time to leave for class.

She noticed with great delight that a certain Gryffindor was leaving as well.

*

There was a great confusion surrounding the location of their lesson, as the sign on the door of Greenhouse Three gave vague and rain-smudged instructions for the class to meet Professor Sprout at Hagrid's hut. Or perhaps to "Eat Professor Snout of Rabidshut". Either way, Draco seemed to disapprove greatly. Nonetheless, he set out at the head of the pack and led the Slytherins out of the castle. Matilda seized this golden opportunity and purposely fell back to walk beside Blaise.

"So," he said mildly once he had caught up with her.

Most annoying, she thought. Feigning ignorance should be a sin.

"Yes, so!" she pointed wildly in her cousin's direction. "What's all this about with Harry Potter?"

Blaise rolled his eyes. "Oh, honey," he said with a sigh and a helpless wave of his hand, "just watch. He thinks we're all oblivious. Actually most of us are." He tilted his head toward Crabbe and Goyle who were currently staring up at the grey sky as if it was an entirely new phenomenon in Britain.

Matilda nodded. So they were surrounded by idiots; that was fine. However, she was not and had never been an idiot and was presently on the verge of spontaneous combustion.

"That's all you're going to tell me, isn't it?"

"That's all you need to know. You're a smart girl. Oh, look out!" he added as Pansy rushed by, bashing into Matilda's shoulder like a berserk Christmas shopper and throwing her completely off kilter. Blaise helped her regain her balance and tusked as they began moving again.

"What about her?" she asked as they watched Pansy fall into step with Draco and proceed to ignore him completely.

"I'm not really certain," Blaise admitted, scratching his heavily gelled head. "She and Draco used to be great friends, but then one day she started to seem sort of annoyed at him. It was really strange. She used to be sort of his right hand woman, you know? You should have seen the look of terror on her face when that hippogriff attacked him a few years ago."

"I heard about that, yeah."

Blaise nodded and continued. "Over a few months in sixth year she just stopped talking to all of us, but she stayed. I don't understand it. She used to smile and laugh all the time, and now she just sits there. It's like she stays with us out of habit." He sighed and shrugged feebly, yet did not seem particularly concerned. "I was a bit pleased with the situation for a while. She has the most annoying laugh and it was all of a sudden gone, but it must have been hard for Draco. His father escaping and not coming home, and then the thing with Pansy... not that he'd let on about it though."

"Do you think they're connected? The escape and Pansy, I mean."

Blaise harrumphed. "No, how could they be? Pansy's dad's still in Azkaban."

"Yeah, and suppose she's jealous."

"Jealous of what, Matty? Lucius escaping and leaving his family to find out in the papers the next day? Or perhaps she's envious that he hasn't contacted them in nine months?"

"Fine." He was probably right. "But don't be surprised when it turns out that Lucius ran off to save his own life or something. He probably took the cell with the good view and started finding death threats carved into his soap bar."

"The good view? Are we talking about the same Azkaban?"

"Shut up."

"Soap?"

"Anything's possible, Blaise."

He suddenly dropped his volume and whispered, "Shut up, Draco's right there."

"I already told you to shut up!" Matilda half yelled.

"Stop being a child," Blaise chuckled.

"You stop being a child, child!"

Draco laughed as they approached. "Seems you've made a new friend, Matty."

"Matilda," she corrected.

Hagrid did not appear to be home, yet a short, rather rotund woman greeted them once they had reached the hut and instructed all of them to stand along two parallel lines on the grass. Draco petulantly elbowed his way into the centre and pulled Matilda along beside him. She wondered idly if she would ever regain complete rule over where she went and how quickly she travelled when she found herself facing fifteen seventh-year Gryffindors, namely Harry Potter who was standing directly across from her cousin.

"Good morning class!" called Professor Sprout. "I apologise for the inconvenience, but this is the perfect weather for our subject of study today." She motioned to several enormous plants, each appearing to be hideous mutations of various types of flowers. The smallest of them was three feet high, while the largest was taller than even Goyle. She babbled about their names, history, and properties for what seemed to be hours while Matilda steadily grew wet and miserable. She noticed that Crabbe had pulled his robes up and over his head, holding his hood out in front of his face like a screen, squinting through the torrents of water that began cascading through his thick fingers and down across the tiny window he had fashioned for himself.

What was his real name, anyway?

She was not nine years old; she refused to refer to anyone by his or her surname. She made a mental note to learn his and Goyle's given names when a discontented huff pulled her attention to her left. There stood a blond boy, pouting familiarly and growing more agitated with every syllable flying incoherently from the professor's mouth. Draco huffed again and began to frantically pat at his hair to no avail, and every one of them was soaked through by the time Sprout had finished her monologue.

"So," she said loudly, drawing Matilda's attention back to her and away from her own frozen fingers, "this being your final year, it is high time you move beyond petty house rivalries. Each of you will be paired up with a person from the opposite house. That is except for you, my dear." She pointed to Matilda and smiled maternally. "Who is your roommate?"

Oh, Merlin, no.

"I, er, Pansy."

"Alright, dear. Since this is your first day, you may be partnered with a familiar face. Now, everyone else will complete their assignment with the individual directly across from them. Two pairs to a plant, go on!"

Hold on, there, woman! Matilda thought. I disapprove! Have you not met this girl?

Pansy swept past her and moved to a monstrous version of her namesake, dragging an especially pale and soggy Draco behind her. Harry followed the two of them, his shoulders slumped and feet dragging slowly in the muddy grass. He obviously had no respect for his footwear. Matilda passed him quickly and stood a good distance away from Pansy who was presently staring at the flower and appeared to be willing herself to overcome the wards and disapparate from the school grounds.

Good plan.

Wait a minute. "What are we supposed to be doing?" Matilda asked. She really hadn't been listening at all.

"We're supposed to be pruning them," Harry replied unhelpfully.

"That's not so bad," Draco said, reaching out to touch a leaf.

"I will kindly ask you not to fondle me, my lad," the flower said with annoyance. Draco tore his hand away and issued a small yelp of horror before diving back behind Harry, using him as a human shield.

"But they wake up when it rains, and they're a little bit... easily provoked," Harry finished, taking a step forward. "We're being marked on whether or not we actually get any leaves off." He picked up a large, muddy pair of pruning shears and turned to hand them to Draco.

"Why do I have to do it?" he scoffed, looking for all the world as if the idea in itself was utterly outrageous.

"Because you seem to so enjoy being in charge, Malfoy," Harry replied, thrusting the shears into Draco's chest.

"I prefer to delegate, Potter," he spat. He shoved the shears back at Harry, but maintained his iron grip on them - or, perhaps the hand wrapped around them. "Get to work!"

Matilda found that she was standing much too far away from the action. She took a few cautious steps forward and - yes. Yes, Draco appeared to be squeezing the life out of Harry's right hand.

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me, Potter."

"Is that an order, then?"

"What else?"

"Knowing you? It could mean anything." Harry wrenched his hand free and crossed his arms in an attempt at an I-have-a-wand-and-I'm-not-afraid-to-use-it look.

"What is that supposed to mean?" Draco boomed, throwing his arms out in front of him and waving them around angrily. "You inarticulate half-wit! How do you manage to communicate with anyone at all? I would think that your vague ramblings would soar over the head of your pet Weasley over there."

"They seem to have soared over your head as well, Malfoy."

Draco paused as a sly grin crept across his pointed face. "You just can't get my head off your mind, can you?"

"W-what?" Harry spluttered, wide-eyed and suddenly very red.

"Oh, I can just imagine your twisted little fantasies, Potter. But, I'm afraid that this is neither the time nor the place for acting upon them."

"How about Pansy does it?" Matilda asked, smiling at the boys' surprised expression. "The pruning, I mean." They appeared to have forgotten that anyone else was present and, while it had been tremendous fun, their acerbic exchange had been wholly unproductive.

Pansy didn't reply, but instead opted to grab the shears from Draco.

Harry was at least six feet away in an instant.

"I'm only doing this because I want them to shut up," she hissed at Matilda over her shoulder. Her brown hair bounced lightly on her back as she walked haughtily, shoulders squared and head held high, toward the towering flower.

"Indeed," the plant said, sounding bored. It cocked its head and sighed deeply, the kind of sigh that has no purpose other than to make others feel fundamentally imbecilic.

"Hold still," she told it and grabbed for a leaf. The monstrous stem quickly twisted away, easily pulling from her hand.

"I don't think so, my darling," the plant said irately and began to wave its leaves and petals wildly. As it spoke, a mouth full of long, jagged yellow fangs appeared where the pollen should have been.

That was unexpectedly terrifying.

Matilda took a careful step away from it and crossed her arms behind her back - she was not about to lose a hand today.

Pansy dove forward at the stem with a look of supreme exasperation and grabbed hold of it with her left hand while she attempted to aim the shears with her right. The flower twisted furiously and let out a loud, high-pitched squeal just as the other flowers began to do the same. Several of the other Slytherins jumped away from their plants while at least one Gryffindor was thrown from theirs. Pansy was having considerable difficulty holding on, but she dared not let go as it began to snap its teeth at her head.

As amusing as this should have been, bothersome waves of anxiety suddenly assaulted Matilda and a pure panic began to pound behind her eyes. The stinging rain was falling faster and with more force now and she could just barely make out the look of sheer alarm on Pansy's face. She began to search for a way to help. Draco was predictably backing away and Harry began to circle around, looking, presumably, for a way to save the day.

"Pansy!" Professor Sprout shouted as she trotted toward them. "Don't let it bite you, it may be venomous! Stay where you are, it can't reach you!"

"Why are we studying venomous plants?" Draco cried hysterically. The flower's head flopped in his direction and he made the same small yelping sound as he dashed toward Harry once again.

Professor Sprout didn't reply, and instead shooed him further away, motioning for Harry to do the same. They came to stand next to one another before the growing crowd of chattering, panic-stricken students.

The plant issued another squeal and snapped at Pansy once again. She screamed as a great deal of her hair was lifted up into its mouth and then dropped, thoroughly soaked with pink saliva. It snapped twice more and Pansy continued to scream as she was thrown about, her grip sliding dangerously from the slick stem.

"Help her, hero-boy!" Draco commanded. He was shouting at Harry, whose face was contorted with the same look of terror as his own.

"I can't, Malfoy!" he shouted back. "You do something!" Each of the boys stared uselessly at the other, both of them sharing the same vacantly distressed look.

This was getting ridiculous, Matilda thought. Harry was supposed to be the champion protagonist here.

Feeling rather disappointed in him, she ran forward and picked up the shears; completely disregarding the shouts of her cousin and the professor. The flower snapped at her, its huge teeth coming to close inches from her face. A sickly-sweet stench assaulted her as it opened its mouth once more and, without a thought to reason, she threw the shears down its throat. If it did in fact have a throat. Either way, it turned for a split second to spit them out and she seized this opportunity to grab Pansy around the waist and drag her away from the monstrous flower.

Having got to safety, Pansy detached herself from her rescuer's grip with great enthusiasm and actually looked relieved. "Thanks," she said breathlessly.

Matilda nodded, unexpectedly mute and pleasantly amazed at herself.

"You appear to have saved the day, darling!" Blaise called out through the roar of the bewildered crowd. As he emerged from the sea of students and walked up behind Harry and Draco, the two boys jumped apart as if lightning had struck between them.

Excellent.

***

Three weeks following Potter's violent episode, the boys' constant quarrelling had got out of hand. They could no longer walk past each other in the halls without hurling insults at one another, Potter even inciting some of the more energetic of the arguments. It was even worse in class when they were forced to remain within close proximity for over an hour.

Draco was hurt; Pansy could see it as he glared across the room, waiting his turn to shout foul things embellished with choice obscenities at the Gryffindor.

He didn't mean a word of it.

During one particularly spirited argument in the Great Hall, Snape and Hooch had been forced to physically restrain the boys as McGonagall confiscated their wands to prevent them from hexing each other at every turn.

Later that day, the professor decided that it was perfectly logical to temporarily returned them for Transfiguration. This lead, predictably, to Draco growing a tail and Potter sprouting green boils all over his chest and arms.

Pansy had always thought of McGonagall as somewhat of a genius until their punishment was decided upon; they were both given detentions. Together. They were to clean out the quidditch shed without their wands that night.

Draco's injuries turned out to be quite mild, while Potter wasn't able to leave the hospital wing for nearly a week. Narcissa Malfoy was contacted and forced to reimburse the school for every broomstick that Draco had broken over the Gryffindor's body.

By now, the band had tightened around Pansy's neck considerably and its temperature was dropping fast. She hadn't been given any orders to follow, and she was beginning to fear that something was expected of her that she was just too stupid to understand. But she did have an idea.

She followed Draco to the infirmary two nights following the detention.

She had meant to speak to him in his room. She needed to have a word with him while he was alone, and she feared that she was running out of chances.

As she crossed the common room, remaining in the shadows just for safety's sake, she saw Draco run past and out the door. She hastened to follow, and was lead directly to the infirmary, thanking God and all things holy that Filch hadn't happened across them.

She watched as he held Potter's hand for the better part of two hours, whispering apologies to the darkness as the injured boy tried to remain conscious long enough to tell him to calm down, that everything was fine.

It was sick.

It was perverse.

It was touching.

Again, at the sight of any tenderness between the two, she felt the Dark Lord's pleasure in the back of her mind as the band loosened and became warm. She knew that his plan involved the both of them together.

If she had any desire to save Draco, she was going to have to keep them apart, even keep them from arguing, if that was at all possible. Unfortunately, she feared that she enjoyed breathing far too much.

***

To say that Pansy's attitude toward Matilda was altered greatly by the heroics of that day would be a gross overstatement. While she took well under an hour to get ready for bed and she no longer glowered openly at her, Pansy's innate dislike for all things Matilda would not waver.

Throughout the week, Pansy said no more than five words to her roommate, while gracing Draco with a derisive, "Again?" each time he began to tell the tale of the fateful Herbology lesson in which his actions were profoundly intrepid, with his momentous heroics increasing exponentially with each telling.

At breakfast on Friday, Pansy maintained her usual hawk-like vigilance of the untouched food before her, although her scowl was decidedly lacklustre. On top of this peculiar alteration in behaviour, Pansy seemed to have forgotten to frown at Matilda altogether, opting instead for a detached look of dispassionate annoyance. Draco, meanwhile, was stunning the first year Slytherins with an exhilarating tale of his fearlessly gallant deeds of the preceding Monday, in which he saved not only Pansy, but his cousin and Professor Sprout as well from the insatiable hunger of the ten-foot flower monster of death.

"All the while," he added quietly, leaning in toward the hushed group for effect, "Potter stood by, whimpering and frozen to the spot. I thought the bloody wretch was going to cry!" He clapped his hands as he laughed, then sat back to take a long sip from his coffee mug, his eyes dancing merrily about the room. The first years looked crestfallen as they took this as a signal that Draco's fascinating story had come to an abrupt close.

Matilda was beginning to wonder if her cousin's usual high energy and self-absorbed manner was more of a sign of ADHD than any innate arrogance.

"I have decided," Draco announced after a few seconds of silence, slamming his empty mug loudly onto the breakfast table, "that we shall go to The Three Broomsticks tonight!" He glanced around the room again, his gaze falling on Harry Potter whose blushing head had just shot up from his toast to stare back in what appeared to be utter astonishment. Harry flinched and looked over to Blaise, who winked suggestively and raised an eyebrow, before the modest Gryffindor seemed to decide that the plate in front of him was uniquely fascinating.

"At eleven o'clock," Draco added loudly, enunciating each syllable with care.