Birds of a Feather

Chapter 3: The Only Truths I Know

I stared at my two bestfriends, struck once again by the insanity that always plagued them. Here they had experienced some of the most traumatic events that life can offer, and yet they casually rambled on about breakfast or something like that. But going home was not an option, and I'd been aching to spend some time with Pansy, and so I followed her into the Parkinson Manor, stepping over some aurors to cross through the doorway. Pansy was now rambling on about something completely different in French, something that neither Blaise nor I truly cared about, though that wasn't what she was truly talking about. This was a rather normal habit for many of the Slytherins: having a rather serious and meaningful conversation hidden under a casual and meaningless conversation. The undertones of this conversation were Pansy's reassurance to us that she was fine and that we were going to be fine.

Of course, I already knew that Pansy was fine. She was practically made of steel, which may seem like an exaggeration, but I can sure you that no bit of it is. I swear as much as that girl drives me up the wall, she's tougher than anything else on Earth. She's the kind of person that you could believe managed to outrun lava from a volcano or could just will an earthquake to stop. If someone had told me that she had been tossed up in a tornado and managed not to break any bones, I would believe them, because that's who Pansy is.

I looked over at Pansy as she stalked to her kitchen, followed by Blaise who was saying something about Weasley that made her throw her head back in laughter. Pansy didn't have a very pretty laugh, not when she really found something funny. I mean no insult to her, she would understand, but she just has a loud and obnoxious laugh that would make you want to punch her in the face, but also was one of my favorite sounds. Over the course of the war, Pansy had lost the high-pitched shriek of a voice that she had had before, and her slightly pug-like face. She had also grown at least a foot, and now was taller than almost all of the girls at Hogwarts, excluding Bean who doesn't really count since she's bigender. She was incredibly attractive, if you hadn't learned from the offensive things pretty much every Gryffindor boy mutters about her when they don't realize she can hear, though they've never made much of an attempt to be quiet. Her crazy looks were often shocking since she didn't fit the beauty standard for girls at all, besides being rather thin. She had almost no curve to her and was rather tall and lanky with sharp angles instead of sweet drops the way that girls were supposed to have by some creepy and unwritten law. Not to mention she had rather broad shoulders and was pretty much 90% legs. She had long black hair that reached almost to her waist, though she had been wanting to cut it for forever, but her mother still insisted that ladies were supposed to have long hair, even though she had been the one to violently chop Pansy's hair off before her first year in a fit of anger.

"Do you think I can get away with dyeing my hair now?" Pansy asked, as she collapsed on her kitchen counter with a tub of ice cream in her hands. I watched the tub for several seconds, not because I was judging it, I too wanted ice cream, but because I knew she would probably cry in guilt about it later.

"Depends...what parts are you dyeing and what color?" I responded, raising my eyebrows at her quizzically in a way that made her chuckle into her ice cream.

"My undercut," she gave a gesture to the bottom layer of her hair as she said this, a spoon still poised in her hand and smearing the slightest bit of mint ice cream into the black locks "and a dark green color." She gestured to about the length of her shoulders "and I was planning on cutting it about that short before."

"Hmmm...look at me." She swiveled her head towards me and threw on the most flirtatious smile I'd ever seen. "Yeah, I think it will look pretty good."

"Everything looks good on me." She responded with an arrogant smirk.

I dramatically rolled my eyes and said "Suuure." in the most sarcastic tone I could muster. The truth is, regardless of what she decided to do with her hair, it would look absolutely stunning on her, the way that everything did that made you want to punch her in the face or pull her hair since she could manage to pull off literally anything (even a garbage bag, I can attest to that) and you often could barely find robes that didn't make you look like a five-year-old drowning in your dad's sweater, or at least that was my experience.