STARDUST

CHAPTER FOUR

The dusky glow of the day presses on the window of her chamber. It’s absolutely depressing. The cold leaves its mark on the glass, forming beads of water, like dew, making the atmosphere sodden and clammy amidst the chill. Pansy wishes the weather would hurry the fuck up and snow already, even though it’s only November. The weather transforms in its own snail’s pace. And interim is always the worst.

But still, it has yet to chill her the way she shivers when Peony tells her there’s a letter for her from Cynthia Parkinson.

Her first panicked thought was, Father. It had been about six months since she saw him in Azkaban. In the dreary cold, wet place. He had a dementor behind him when he was pushed to the grey room where Pansy and her mother had waited. Cold and shivering in the lovely May. Pansy sucked a long breath and tried her best to look emotionless. She shouldn’t have bothered. It didn’t matter at all. He had hardly recognised her. Hardly registered that she was there. When he saw that his wife was there, he shivered in some heartbreaking, primal way, and held her - and cried. It wasn’t a quiet, manly cry. It was loud and harrowing and like a child. Her father was a man born into wealth and privilege, that made his fall harder to stomach. He smelled so foul as he hugged Pansy at the end of the visit, she wondered for the first time in her life if Azkaban had water, or if he soiled himself just then. His hands shook violently as the dementor flew above him.

She vomited the second he was taken back to his cell. Her mother was shaking, but she held her hair as Pansy hunched down, tears and bile and snot making a mess of her expressionless mask. 

“Thank you for holding it as long as you did, Pinky,” she said softly.

The cries came later, at night. Something changes in a person when they see their parents in such reckless indignity, some veil falls from the world that is never replaced - nothing is ever pristine, not anymore.

Pansy looks at the letter in her hand. It’s not about her father, not about anything sinister at all. Her mother wants her to come home. That’s as sensible a wish as any. Her mother wants to meet her. It has been exactly a month since she came home and she needs to renovate her room, even if she doesn’t want to live there anymore. After twenty one years of her life living with this woman, trying to read her face, her every footstep, she knows her mother misses her. She also knows the words I miss you will never appear, side by side, consecutively, in anything she writes to Pansy.

But still she reads between the lines, still it brings a smile in her mouth. It would’ve been nice all the way through if not at the end of the letter her mother mentioned a fundraising event Pansy must attend. 

And also, Draco Malfoy would be there. She could hear her mother’s muted hope in the cursives.

Pansy would snort if there was anything funny about this. But not anymore. Trying to seduce Draco had been a ship tried and tested, mounted and aborted, and now it was a dead cruise. Life would have been easier if she and Draco could just fancy each other, or see each other as anything other than a demented mirror. She knows Draco in her bones, and it’s also there she knows that nothing but a lifelong friendship could come from the two of them.

Pansy could decline. She has half a mind to do so. But the other half aches for the familiar, their house-elf Ditty, the scent of lavender in their home. The garden she and her mother used to care for together. 

And she does miss her mother, even if they don’t talk much. Choosing a career as a healer wasn’t a standard deviation from her previous future plan, obviously. And she suspects her mother’s emotions were hurt just as much as her ego. 

Pansy wishes she could make her understand her compulsion. Her desperate need to do something with her hands, something tangible, to look at someone hurting and consciously helping them. Perhaps her mum does understand, but doesn’t want to admit it. Pansy was Cynthia Parkinson’s last quid to play in the business of maintaining status quo. With her father rotting in Azkaban, their family inheritance debilitating, their position in the upper class society was… precarious at best. And she gets it, she really does, the loss of the familiar, the horror of getting left behind. That her mother’s worst fear isn’t losing money, it’s losing propriety.