I must say, since the Loss, the air feels cleaner somehow.

That sound, however, is new… ah ha, Caterwauling Charm.

Some people disgust me. A perimeter ward like that is little more than an alarm to warn of trespassers, a small precaution by definitions. But in order to keep it maintained, it means someone has to give up their blood for it.

“Confringo!” The bright color of the spell tells me whoever has decided to lay their attack on me isn’t lacking for power. Which in this day and age means he’s more than likely not just powering his wards with someone else’s blood, but himself as well.

I dive to the side just to watch the door I had just kicked in be destroyed. The Caterwauling Charm cuts off, and intermingled in the planks of wood and splinters, is blood and decimated human organs. What kind of sick fuck traps a living person in their door to power an intruder alert? “Defodio!” Apparently the same kind of sick fuck who casts gouging spells at people.

The Defodio spell actually has a physical presence, something few know. More precisely, something few people bother to be near enough to one to find out. “Elpulso!” It takes very good aim, but hitting his spell with mine pushes it away from me. It doesn’t return it to wherever he is, but enough that it finds the happy medium between us and sends it crashing there. “Protego. Engorgio.” The shield increases in height, not in power, but it decreases the magic needed to cast it. Whoever is firing their spells at me is obviously watching. Spells this size would immediately start a drain on whoever is casting them. If he isn’t an idiot, he’ll sit back and let me leave it up.

Four more sets, creating an enclosure around me entirely, must seem utterly stupid. My wand rotates quickly before firing an Expulso at each shield around me, and each of them are blasted in a different direction. Running low to the ground back from the door, I find a table to overturn and crouch behind, as several spells impact the table with varying results.

Even though it makes me sick, I have to fix the door. The light from the night coming in illuminates me, and prevents me from hiding in the dark like the coward I fight. “Reparo” fixes the door, but isn’t able to repair the destroyed body that had been inside of it, leaving bits and pieces of the body intermingled with the wood. It looks like some sick post-modern display of visceral art.

“Meteolojinx Recanto” Further corrects this slight, as the unnatural darkness fades away, leaving me able to see the room for the first time. It’s a large sitting area, that is perfectly square with three staircases going up from the exact middle of every wall besides the one with the door on it. Strategically, it holds a lot of advantages for my opponent, sniping perches everywhere. But I have to smile to myself, because my shields had taken their banishing perfectly, and sat perfectly innocuous in each corner of the room.

“Tergeo” “Expulso!” “Sonorus!” Racking my memory, I remember the incantation for the Caterwauling charm that my opponent had apparently enjoyed employing just in time to send it following. Each staircase got the same treatment, the bottom step hit with that combination of spells casts on some of the blood magically sopped up from the bleeding door.

“Avis.”  A flock of small birds circle around me, before “Oppugno” sends all of them on a mission up the middle staircase. I cast Avis and Oppugno again, and leave the birds orbiting around me, their purpose would hopefully not have to be seen. Watching closely, the birds all turned left, which meant the far right staircase wasn’t where he was. No birds appeared past the other staircase, which meant he wasn’t on the far left either, but between the left and middle. Ordering one of the birds orbiting me, I send it up the left staircase on the same mission, and just as it went to turn the corner, I say fuck it and Fiendfyre the poor thing.

And just as I suspected, rocketing down the middle staircase, came just who I was looking for. My Glisseo hit the staircase and right after I cast Muffliato toward the shields on either side of the middle staircase. He crosses the blood-line just as the Muffling spells impacted each other, effectively sealing off my side of the room. They wouldn’t stay up long, but long enough for the Sonorus-Powered Caterwauling charm to ruin his eardrums. While his eyes were closed from pain, I run to each corner of the room, casting Geminio on myself before each shield in each corner of the room. A Disillusionment Charm and I’ve disappeared from view and have set up the perfect torture. I don’t have long, given the Fiendfyre raging up the stairs, but long enough to do what I need to.

The spells wear off on him, and he stands to find four of me standing about. His immediate reaction, in spite of ruined hearing, was to begin cursing. Bad move, given the fact that the spell passed right through the copy of me, hit the shield and returned to him.

Two minutes later, he had sufficiently crippled himself. The real question here is, would he leave his inevitable doom, or continue trying to attack me?

The house burned down, and Draco Malfoy, in all his rage and lust for revenge, died inside of it. Nothing guarded the door. No one stopped him from leaving the house. He was free to flee and save his own life. He chose not to.

Idiots like that, don’t deserve to live.

So now, he no longer does.

I had no real reason to do this, it didn’t give me any answers, and had I left him alive, I probably could have gotten something from him, though it would have been like pulling teeth. Realistically, it probably would have taken pulling his teeth out, with my bare hands, but it could have been something.

But sometimes your plans have to change in an instant.

And the fact that he had a living person trapped in his door, powering an alarm, was cause enough for a reevaluation of my plan.

Oh well, back to square one again. Time to go make my report.

---

Pansy Parkinson.

The gray tint to her skin, her hair cut short, and her sunken-in cheeks belied the nobility she attempted to portray with her upturned nose and imperial attitude.

It's hard to be a stuck-up bitch when confined to a hospital bed.

There’s a lot about Pansy Parkinson people don’t know.

There are only a handful of things about Pansy Parkinson I don’t know.

Her favorite color is, apparently, the color of pure mercury. A liquid silver intermingled with black. Her eyes, incidentally, are this exact color. She is as narcissistic as possible. She loves herself above all other things.

Another little known fact about Pansy Parkinson: her second love (after herself) is actually dancing. Her mother took her to ballet classes as a small girl up until she received her Hogwarts letter. She went away to become the girl I knew, just to come back from school to find the teacher clueless to who she was. Pansy had never forgiven her mother for removing all of her teacher’s memories the week after she left for school.  

You learn a lot about a girl when you spend the better part of a few years taking care of her.

Like her heartbreak at her broken spine.

And the many ways that heartbreak manifests.

She still has the tendency to throw things at me whenever I wander in, but it doesn't bother me nearly as much as I let on. It's amusing to hear her then politely (for Pansy) ask for them back...only to sniff and comment on how my place is bowing before her as I pick her things up.

She was the reason I regained a lot of my hand-eye coordination, catching the things she threw to prevent her joy at my kneeling in front of her.

She was the reason I went to investigate (and later kill) Malfoy in the first place. She asked me to locate the little cretin's whereabouts for the express purpose of not doing exactly what I did. As the reason for her being handicapped, plotting Malfoy’s murder at her hands became her obsession - an obsession that was a complete change from the sycophantic, hanger-on girlfriend I knew her as. I'm sure the time spent not throwing shit at me was spent planning the perfect revenge...but I suppose I killed those off as well.

Oops?

Something about her eyes tells me she knows. It could have been the unapologetic look on my face. Or maybe it was the fact that she could smell the smoke on me the second I entered. I could have just as easily removed the scent, but if there’s something I can’t validate taking away from Pansy anymore, it’s her ability to figure things out for herself. She spends all of her time, trapped in a room confined to a bed, unable to mock, and impede, my attempts to decipher my past in real time. The least I can do for her is let her feel smarter than me.

“Potter…”

“Don’t start. The little shit had it coming.”

“How do you screw something like that up? It was surveillance! You shouldn’t even have been seen by him, nonetheless have to kill him!”

“Pans…”

“Don’t ‘Pans’ me, cretin!” Ah…so that’s where I got that word from! “Of all the things for you to fuck up! I mean seriously…How could you-”

“He had someone trapped in his front door, powering his goddamned alarm ward, Pansy.”

The silence was instant, absolute, as the weight of how low Malofy had stooped hit her - hit the both of us, really. A human being was kept trapped in a hollowed-out, wooden door, so scum like Draco-Fucking-Malfoy could sleep a bit more soundly as he hid from his retribution.

The silence lasted for a beat, then -

"Did you get him, Harry? Tell me you got him." The way she asked made me sure anything less than the most unspeakable agony would be unacceptable.

“He got himself, Pansy. If there was one thing you’ll appreciate about me deviating from the plan, it’s the irony of his demise.” Explaining the situation brought a light to her eyes that I wasn’t sure I’d ever see. And I was glad for it.

“So at the end of it all, his own need to harm others, and his hatred for me, blinded him to his own survival. But I’m sorry he was even in the situation, to disallow you to exact your devious little revenge that that evil head of yours likely plans out daily.” She grins at me gently. It’s sardonic, but there’s something deeper hidden away in there.

I’ve long since abandoned any hopes of interpreting the more complex looks she tosses at me. Not because I’m some idiot who couldn’t work out what it all meant, but simply because it wasn’t worth it. Pansy would always be Pansy, and the look she gave me one day may disappear, never to be seen again, within moments.

“Thank you, Harry. As much as I wanted to destroy him for what he did to me…there’s something…amazing about what you did, regardless.” She’s quiet and her eyes are cast down at her hands, and the whole byplay is very unlike her. “Something amazing about everything you’ve done.”

“Don’t mention it. It’s the least I could do, at the end of the day.” The anger in her eyes was instant and frighteningly clear.

“What the hell do you mean, ‘the least I could do’, Potter? This is my life we’re talking about, I will be damned if you write off the fact that you have been taking care of me for the last who-the-fuck-knows-how-long, as routine!” She composes herself quickly, but I can tell she wants to say more. I bite back the witty comeback that burns the tip of my tongue, in hopes that she might continue.

“When you found me, I was crawling on the floor like an animal with my lame legs dragging behind me. I couldn’t even get up the stairs in front of me before I was gasping for air, and I thought I would crawl away from an Auror raid? The girlfriend of someone you hated in school, was crawling pitifully at your feet, to escape the fate she made for herself,” she paused to breathe deeply, and I couldn’t help but be glad for her head being down. I too remembered that night vividly, often. “And you decided somewhere in that screwed up head of yours, to lift me up in those dirty, grimy, blood-stained arms of yours, and carry me off.”

“Hey now…I had to fight my way into that damned building, thank you very much. And I’d like to remind you, not only did you personally cause some of those cuts on my arms, but you weren’t exactly Irish-Spring-fresh your damned self, Parkinson.”

“Exactly. And…here we are, years later, and you’re taking care of me as if I was an ill family member, or as if I was some long-time friend who was dying. And I’m none of those! If it had been you crawling at my feet, I would have sent a cutting curse to the back of your neck, after grinding my heel into your face.”

“Then lucky both of us that it wasn’t you?” I laughed in spite of myself, and reached over for the box of tissue that sat on a table near me. Throwing it toward her, the little cardboard box pegged her in the side of her head, and dropped down onto her hands. Her head immediately whipped up, and I could make out the sparkle of her tears, shaken from her face in her haste to glare at me.

“He’s dead now. And probably for the best. I have way too much going on to have to wonder if he’s crafted some plot that I might stumble into while worrying about everything else in the world. Literally.”

I filled her in on everything that was going on, and she dutifully issues the rightful (though late) warnings about Daphne Greengrass. She laughed heartily over the information about Tracey Davis, and it was good to see her in a more spirited mood. Which, for Pansy, meant she was back to insulting any and everyone I mentioned by name.

Good to have her back.

We spoke for a bit longer, before I got up to leave. As usual, I made a special point to ruffle her hair, which she hates. Turning away from her, I placed a small radio on the bed near her feet. Walking back out, I pulled the door to and slid down the wall next to it.

Visits to Pansy were always somewhat taxing. They were draining, and revitalizing, at the same time. I did everything I could for her, not out of some feeling of obligation or pity, but because it was what I did. I ate. I drank. I fought. Occasionally, I smoked. And I took care of Pansy Parkinson.

The static of her trying to find a good station on the radio was audible from outside of the door, and the fragments of conversations from the dial moving through stations was actually worse than the feedback.

It was my personal radio, but she didn’t need to know that. I could do without it, and if need be, I could just take another. Hearing the static stop as she left the radio on a station playing classical music was worth it. If nothing more than to hear the girl who was once the de facto Queen of Slytherin, humming along to Mozart.

Peeking through the door, I watched as she crawled her way to the edge of the large bed carefully, and eased her foot down onto the floor. She balanced gently as she held her body up with one leg, and spread the other out behind her.

Pansy had been able to walk for over a year. But she knew in her mind, that if she could walk, then she should have been getting her revenge on Draco Malfoy. And although I’d been able to get her walking, and get her back functional physically, some wounds don’t heal so easily.

And some don’t heal at all.

Pansy Parkinson danced around her room to classical music, her mercury-colored eyes alight.. The knowledge that the man who wronged her was no longer out there made her seem so much lighter. The need for revenge no longer keeping her grounded.

It would have been cute, if she didn’t keep spinning herself and knocking all my shit over.

---