Title: Quiescent 3: A Simple Act of Faith
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ginny/Pansy
Rating: R (in general...this chapter is PG in its dreams)
A/N: This fic has a prologue and two first chapters, all of which can be found here. It is also a sequel to a sequel of a story with a prequel. Or, put another way, this story is the fourth in a set of four (so far). Origins, Haven, Belong, and Quiescent is the general reading order, though not the writing order.

this fic has no beta. My usual beta has not read the fics that come before it, and I think she's too busy for this anyway...so there are probably lots of missing words and stuff. I am to blame for all of it. If you're interested in betaing for me, let me know, but you can ask

bonibaru and

silviakundera, I'm no fun to beta for. I'm not nearly grateful enough for advice and I only take about a third of it anyway. Also, I'm ridiculously demanding. No fun at all. But if you're okay with that, please, do let me know, I'd be thrilled to hear from you. :)

I'm happy with this chapter, but I don't know if anyone else will like it anywhere near as much as I do. Writing this fic underscores for me that I really do only write for myself; I think it has an audience of four. I appreciate each of those four people very, very much. *smooches* I can't help it, I have to write Pansy's story.

3. A Simple Act of Faith

Draco couldn't concentrate on his own lecture. He kept trailing off, about to make a point about grammar or linguistic structure, and then his mind would jump into some traitorous memory: his mother standing in St. Mungo's, her hands on the shoulders of a little girl, or in her west sitting room, drinking tea and resolutely not noticing the line of bruises down Draco's neck or a fresh cut across his cheek. Or the image of his mother in the dining room of Malfoy Manor, smiling that charming smile, and asking some guest or other if he would like more soup, more asparagus, more bread. When he opened his mouth to talk about emphasis and intonation he felt as though he were standing directly in her line of vision, caught between her crosshairs. He rubbed his temples and stared at his notes.

He was afraid and angry and both feelings made it nearly impossible for him to concentrate. The basic principles, magical linguistics, the history of spell formation and incantation, it was all slipping away from him. He blinked and found himself staring into the blank faces of the undergraduate students, the same ones he had been lecturing to for the last two months, all of whom were looking at him as though he had possibly just lost his mind. His knuckles were very white on the podium.

"Questions?" he said. That was always a good way to make sure they wouldn't say anything at all. He looked down at his notes again. He had gone over roughly half of what he meant to cover, which wasn't too bad, and it wasn't as though they were listening anyway. He pulled one of the course texts off the desk to the left of him and waved it around. "Chapters fifteen through twenty-one," he said. "Burrows describes this all rather well. Why don't we cut this short for today."

He had a sudden desire for one of those ridiculous little plastic machines Harry always carried around, the one that bleated out a metallic-sounding song when someone wanted to talk to him. He had sworn up and down that he hated that thing and would throw it out the window if Harry ever left it anywhere near him while he was working, but suddenly he wished he had one. If he hadn't been so stubborn he would be able to pull one of those silly things out of his pocket right this instant and tell Harry to come meet him now instead of in an hour. It would be reassuring to hear his voice, even disembodied, sounding alive and busy as usual.

Somehow he felt better knowing exactly where Harry was at any given time, particularly now when danger seemed to be looming. That morning he had woken up just before the sun rose shouting something incoherent, convinced that he was strapped to a wall covered with needles and Harry was gone, vanished, kidnapped, decapitated, thrown into Azkaban, turned into smoke, into a portrait, or into candle wax.

But as reality settled around him he felt Harry's arms around him, heard him saying, "shhh, it's okay," in his drowsy mumble, sitting up to embrace Draco and rocking him. He felt a great weight lift off his heart, until he remembered that his dream might as well have been prophecy. He buried his face in Harry's neck and sighed, feeling Harry's body relaxing back against the mattress and into sleep, his arms still clutching at Draco, sleepy fingers sliding slowly across his back.

Something in Draco didn't want to sleep; he felt too vulnerable. There was nothing in the world he would let come between him and Harry, nothing, and lying like a frightened child curled up on top of him only reminded Draco of their fragility, the way they had thrown all caution to the wind, the way they had forgotten how lucky they had been. Just when he thought Harry had fallen back to sleep Draco felt him shift, and then felt Harry's lips on his shoulder. His breath felt warm and real against Draco's skin.

He would have to talk to Harry about getting him one of those plastic, bleating talking machines. Damn handy, really.

He waved the students out of the classroom by pulling out his leather satchel and shoving his lecture notes inside it. They didn't ask, or even seem surprised. They just packed up their books and headed for the door. All except for Beatrice, one of Draco's eager hangers on, an undergraduate student who stopped by regularly at his office hours. She always had a litany of questions, none of them things the textbook didn't answer, and she giggled and jiggled her rather well-proportioned bosom at him, scissored between her arms to heighten her cleavage.

"Are you feeling alright, Professor Malfoy?" She touched his arm and he flinched. "Professor Malfoy?"

"I'm fine, thank you," he said rather shortly. "I have an appointment, I can't keep my office hours today."

"I see," she said, "If I could, Professor Malfoy, there's something I-"

"This isn't really a good time, Beatrice." He slung the satchel over his shoulder and tucked his jacket under his arm. "Perhaps next week we could-"

"You're in great danger," she said quickly. She bit her lip and turned pink.

Draco stopped dead and blinked. "What?"

"I.." Beatrice started. "Well, I...I'm a Divination major, you know, and I..."

Draco raised an eyebrow.

"I was...I was doing a project on...well, I had some...uh...of your hair, and...." Beatrice blushed. "I was experimenting with, you know, with predicting people's future, uh, relationships-"

"Good Lord, Beatrice," Draco sighed. He made a mental note to talk to the head of the Divination department and demand to know why they were encouraging students with pointless crushes to experiment on Linguistics instructors. She made a face and wrapped her arms around her chest.

"I'm sorry, I am, but I saw the most dreadful things, Professor Malfoy, please!" She was nearly crying, holding her well-manicured hand up to her face and waving back her tears. "I had the most terrible nightmares afterward and now I'm scared. Something's not right. There's a woman, a blonde woman, very cold eyes...fire, destruction...she's come to find you. You're in great danger."

Draco didn't know what else to do, so he brought Beatrice home with him. She seemed to recover from her distress the moment he suggested she come to his house for lunch to discuss it, and was bouncy and talkative and apologetic the entire way. As they walked along the tidy rows of houses with pretty gardens toward the house she talked about Hogwarts and her first year at the university and the wonders of Divination. He discovered en route that she was a former Ravenclaw, which did not entirely surprise him. She was bright and driven and her papers were nicely written and well argued. Her tactics in trying to get Draco's attention with her low-cut tops and short skirts were too overt to have made her a product of Slytherin house, and she didn't seem distant and self-obsessed enough to have been a Gryffindor.

Draco wondered what he had in the cupboards for lunch, and managed to direct Beatrice ("Just call me Bea!") into a grocery store before they got home. Draco wasn't sure how to explain the presence of Harry, who was just putting on his coat and tying his shoes when Draco unlocked the door and motioned Beatrice inside.

"I know, I know. I cut the lecture short." Draco answered the question on Harry's face before he could ask. "Harry, this is Beatrice, she's one of my students. Beatrice, this is Harry. Harry Potter."

"Hi Beatrice!" Harry said. He put out his hand and she took it.

"Harry Potter!" she said. Draco wondered momentarily just how many crushes the poor girl had. She had turned a rather shocked pink and her mouth was hanging open. "Call me Bea!" she squeaked.

"Okay. Hi Bea!" Harry smiled. "Come on in!" He arched an eyebrow at Draco and looked amused.

Draco wasn't really in the habit of bringing undergraduates home with him. While Draco's relationship with Harry was no particular secret, it had generally fallen into the category of open secret. While the Daily Prophet had no qualms about reporting the romantic liaisons of most well-known witches and wizards, they still shied away from including homosexual content in what they suddenly considered their "family-oriented" news rag. When Harry was occasionally mentioned within its columns, Draco rarely was; if Draco's name was impossible to reasonably avoid they referred to him only as "Mr. Potter's friend, Draco Malfoy." The more world-wise took their meaning, but others, like poor Beatrice, who were too naïve to take the phrase anything but literally, remained blissfully ignorant. Draco was perfectly happy with this arrangement, and rarely deigned to explain the workings of his private life with anyone. "None of their business," he said huffily.

Draco took Beatrice's coat and hung it in the front closet. "Sit down," he said nodding toward the front room. "You too, Potter."

Beatrice explained everything to Harry, who looked worried as she spoke. Boiling water, Draco's hair, cedar shavings and coal, crushed lavender and mother of pearl. She looked guiltily at Draco and said, "I'm really sorry."

"And you saw a blonde woman?" Harry asked. "What else?"

"She was standing in flames, everything was burning, and there was blood all over her." Beatrice shivered. "It was very overwhelming. She had blood on her hands and there were pictures all around her, faces. People's faces, in pain. It's hard to explain but...she killed all those people, she was speaking, she was saying their names, reciting a list. Of people she killed." She shuddered. "It was horrible."

"And you got the impression that she's looking for Draco?"

"Yes," she nodded. "I'm not sure how I know that. But it was as though...as though she were walking toward him. Not seeing him yet, but looking." She was gripping a mug of tea Draco had made for her and looking down at her feet.

"Would you recognize her face, if you saw a photograph?" Draco asked. He had been hesitating to suggest it. The last thing he wanted to do was pull out that old box.

It was easier to deal with the future, and the past, if he didn't think about his mother. Harry had suggested therapy but Draco scoffed and rolled his eyes. He mourned for her as if she had died, because it was easier than focusing on the fact that he wished she had. His own memories seemed skewed and confused, filled with betrayals he had never seen, cruelty on a level Draco would never have believed could possibly exist. Harry said over and over that she was insane, but Draco knew that wasn't true. She wasn't insane. He didn't wonder why she did any of the horrible things she did, or allowed to be done, or ordered to be done; he knew exactly why she did every single thing they had accused her of.

He knew why she had let him suffer, why she had brought Voldemort back, why she had turned away from his father and left him to die. She was very logical, she wanted power without having to be in charge, she wanted to be the woman behind the power. She hated any source of weakness, including Voldemort's blinding passion to destroy Harry, his ridiculous ploys to rid the world of Muggle-born wizards and witches. These things meant nothing to her. She wanted to manipulate everyone and everything, she only wanted control. She was so rational and sane that it scared him, and he was terrified to come up against her again. She had no Achilles heel because she didn't care about anything, there was nothing she wanted to protect, not even herself. She didn't have a weakness like Draco's love for Harry, his desire for a normal life. In his nightmares his mother always arrived on their doorstep to kill Harry, because she knew that was the only thing that tied to him a world that he would otherwise have turned from long ago. The pictures of his false-happy childhood stuffed into a box him feel ill, and he had almost pitched the whole thing when they bought this house but Harry wouldn't let him.

"Keep them," he said, covering the box with it's dusty old lid. "You may want them someday. You may need them someday." Draco hid it away in the basement and tried very hard to forget it was there.

Beatrice tucked her feet up under her and folded her hands into her lap. "I'm so sorry," she said again. Harry had gone down to fetched the box from the basement.

"Well," he said. "This may prove useful in the end anyway, Beatrice. Bea."

She smiled. Harry closed the basement door behind him and set the old box down on the coffee table.

"Okay," he said. "let's see." He rifled through them without giving Draco a chance to look into the box, for which he was grateful. After a moment he pulled a picture out and passed it to Bea.

"Do you see her there?" Harry asked. He sat down next to Draco, ruffled his hair, and then rested his hand against the back of Draco's neck, his arm curled warmly against Draco's spine. Draco closed his eyes and rubbed at his temples with thumb and forefinger, warding off even looking at the picture. He recognized it just from the blur of colours as it passed from Harry's hand to Bea's; Christmas, ten years ago. There were Norwegians in the house, and Draco was giddily and still recently in love with Harry. He remembered the picture so well he could still see the ridiculous smile on his face, standing behind a row of shiny blonde girls squinting into the sun. He was looking into the camera, his hands in his pockets, one eyebrow slightly raised. He remembers what he was thinking just then, too; fencing, Harry's hands, the happy anticipation of something he couldn't entirely predict. He wondered now if his mother knew his secrets even then. At this point he put nothing past her, nothing. Of course she knew.

"Yes," Bea said, choking. "That's her." She was pointing at the picture, looking terrified. Harry rose and stood beside her, pushing his glasses up against his face with his forefinger and squinting.

"Wait," Harry said. He reached down and pointed. "Her? Are you sure?"

"Yes." Bea passed the picture to Harry, who looked confused. "That's her." She shivered and sipped at her tea. "She looks different now, but that's her all right." Harry frowned and shook his head.

"What?" Draco said. "What is it, Harry?"

"It's not your mother, Draco. It's Pansy Parkinson."

*

The first thing Ginny did was strip her bed. After that she put on fresh sheets, picked up some stray underwear she's left on the floor, dragged her laundry hamper out of her bedroom and into the living room, and then offered her bedroom to Pansy.

"Go on," she said. "You really do look exhausted. Take a nap. I'll go do some laundry."

It was exactly twelve steps down from the shadowy hallway into the basement laundry room. Ginny leaned her hamper against her hip and practically skipped all the way down. She wasn't sure why she was so happy. Somehow playing hostess was more pleasant than she'd thought it would be. Having Pansy Parkinson in her apartment was strange, dangerous, frightening, but also exhilarating. She hadn't felt this real and alive in months.

She had managed to find her wand; it was shoved behind some magazines on her bookshelf beside the door. She dropped her hamper in the laundry room and pulled out her sheets, laying them out on the racks. Her mother always told her to be very thorough, very careful; you never know when someone is going to get a good look at your sheets. She said the same for her underwear, her shirts, her pants, her socks, and her hair. Just last week her mother had sent along some new spells for different cleaning scents; "April rain", "seaside", and "daffodil blossom". She used a variety of them, watching the dirt lift off her socks, her shirts. Doing the laundry was strangely relaxing. I should do this more often, she thought.

She had taken some of Pansy's clothes with her too. They all looked extremely worn and smelled like cigarettes, which made Ginny desperately want one. She had quit smoking a year ago after years of Harry insisting. "You're killing yourself," he'd say, over and over. Draco wouldn't stop coughing when she lit up either, which was just annoying.

But it wasn't the thought of death that convinced Ginny to quit, or even Harry's touching concern. Ginny didn't like the way she looked when she was smoking. Once she thought it was cool, she thought she looked adult and suave and sexy. But one day she saw herself reflected in a shop window, holding a cigarette in one hand, talking to Harry, leaning over to suck on the filter instead of kissing him. She had chosen cigarettes instead of Harry; in a flash she saw all of her mistakes in one reflection. If only she had chosen Harry, she thought. Then it would be Draco who was chain-smoking.

But it wasn't only that; she didn't like the lines around old women's mouths, the ones that all point forward in that lip-pursed motion. The mark of a life-long smoker, the lines on your face start to point to your mouth instead of to your eyes. When she saw herself reflected, smoke rising from her fingers, she saw herself as an old woman, lonely, hunched over, with brownish marks on her face and wrinkles that all go the wrong way. She connected the cigarettes with her own unhealthy obsessions and decided to dump them all in one fell swoop. She had traded coffee for tea, too, after reading about the medicinal properties of tea and how it was good for her heart, how it prevented cancer, how it would give her energy and lift and sparkling eyes and soft hair. She tried to like green teas but just couldn't; it was Earl Grey or back to her seven-cup-of-coffee-a-day habit. Now she only drank coffee with friends on the weekends, with an overpriced pastry in a coffee shop.

Giving up coffee was easier than giving up cigarettes. Even a year later the smell of smoke made her desperate for a drag. Just one, who would know? She had had to remove the memory of how to transfigure paper into cigarettes; Harry kept it in a pensieve somewhere in his basement and thoughtfully didn't give her any more detail than that.

She found French coins in Pansy's pockets, as well as the stub of a pencil, an old eraser, a crumpled up receipt for a blurred amount, and a packet of cigarettes, French, two thirds empty. She stared at it for a long time.

So far the rumours of Pansy's disappearance to France seemed to be correct. Beyond that Ginny really knew nothing. Why was Pansy back in London? Why was she looking for Ron? Who was she hiding from? Where had she gotten those burns on her legs, and why wouldn't she answer any of Ginny's questions? Why was Draco not allowed to tell Ginny the whole story? In her mind Pansy grew into a greater and greater threat until finally Ginny imagined that she was actually a werewolf, a vampire, a zombie, or Voldemort himself, transfigured into a strikingly beautiful woman.

By the time she hauled the hamper back upstairs she was nervous again. Pansy Parkinson. Ginny didn't know what she was thinking. She should run down to Harry's house right now. She should grab a broom from the kid down the hall and fly. She should at least go back into the basement and head one door over into the smelly owlry and send a quick note: Dear Harry, I have a houseguest. It's Pansy Parkinson. Should I worry? Will be in all afternoon. xxx Ginny. Instead she opened the door and walked back into her flat.

When she peeked into her bedroom Pansy was awake, leaning back against the headboard with a sketchpad on her knees. Ginny watched her for a moment, hearing her pencil scratch across the page. There was a blue woman on Pansy's upper arm, naked and on her knees, arms raised above her head. Ginny couldn't tell from the distance if she was supposed to be happy or sad, praising or mourning. She had long black hair that curled waist around her like hands.

"Did you sleep at all?" she asked, pulling her hamper back into the bedroom.

"A little. Thanks." Pansy pushed her pencil into the spine of her notebook and closed it.

"Oh, don't stop on my account," Ginny said. She opened up the hamper and started dumping her folded clothes into her dresser drawers. "What are you drawing?"

"Nothing really," she said. "Just faces." She swung her legs onto the floor and yawned. She was wearing nothing but underwear; an old, ratty pair of panties with a broken waistband and a graying undershirt with no sleeves. There was something black on her lower stomach, on her right side. It was the same spot where Ginny's mother had her appendix scar, an operation Ginny had always been terrified she would need one day. An ungainly slash across her mother's skin so large it looked as if they'd sliced her open with a steak knife, though her mother assured her that they did no such thing. Ginny used to have nightmares about waking up with that scar somewhere on her body; on her stomach, across her chest, or in place of her mouth.

Pansy had no such scars; only multi-coloured ink in beautiful designs, all fascinating and beautiful and melancholy. Just the top of the tattoo peeked out over the edge of her panties; something solid black, like a hole in her stomach. Such a dark black Ginny wondered how they could put that much ink under Pansy's skin without killing her.

Ginny must have been staring too much, because Pansy pulled her panties back a bit so she could see. "This?" she said, pointing. It was a baby. A baby, curled up the way they are in the womb, eyes shut and a thumb in its mouth. It was so black it looked like a silhouette of a baby, but more defined, with eyes outlined in white, delicate eyelashes, a small mouth, perfect nose. It was creepy and strange but beautiful, unlike the Muggle photographs she'd seen of fetuses. It had perfect little hands, perfect little feet, all in relief on her skin, as though it hovered above her, a shadow of something gone; a baby black like night on clear, pale skin. "That was my third tattoo. That one really did hurt."

"But," Ginny started. "I mean, it's beautiful, but why..." she fumbled for the words. "Why a baby?" Suddenly that seemed rude and she blushed.

"Well," Pansy said, snapping what was left of her waistband over the tattoo. "It's sort of...well, the tattoos all mark my rites of passage." She looked at Ginny seriously, as if she were speaking code. Ginny gulped and wondered if Pansy had had a stillbirth, or a baby that she gave up, if the blackness of that fetus was meant to indicate death, or absence, or mourning. Did she leave Hogwarts because she was pregnant? Ginny seemed to remember that being a rumour. It looked like a baby-shaped hole in her stomach, the place where the baby should go, ripped out of her body and never replaced. From the look of her, Pansy had had a lot of rites of passage.

"Did you...have a baby?" Ginny asked.

"I can't have children." She said it very matter-of-factly, as if she were pointing out that she had two arms, two legs, and that the sky was still blue. "You didn't know?"

Ginny blinked. "No," she said. "Why would I...why would..."

"Oh," Pansy said. "I thought maybe...forget it." She pulled on her jeans, which Ginny had just cleaned for her. "Thanks," she said. "I lost my wand somewhere between here and Paris."

Ginny thought about children as she tidied up the living room, trying hard not to stare at Pansy as she sat at the dining room table, looking out the glass doors into the Muggle parking lot next door. She had pulled open her sketchbook again and was drawing in bits and pieces, her eyes drifting back to the window at intervals. Ginny could hear her pencil against the paper; long strokes, something that sounded like checkmarks, and then a long pause.

She always thought she wanted children. Ginny spent most of her childhood wishing she had a baby of her own. She dressed up her dolls and put them in carriages, she gave them the names she wanted to give her children. The first would be a boy, and he would be named Alexander. The second would be a girl, named Isobel. She carefully chose names that belonged to no one in her family, because these were her babies, not theirs. She would have a third too, another girl, and it would be a surprise. A happy surprise, of course, and she would call this last love child 'Joy', because that's how Ginny would feel. As a girl she never thought about where these children would come from, or who their father would be.

After she graduated from Hogwarts she wasn't so sure about wanting children anymore. She couldn't imagine being a parent to someone like Draco or like Ron or God forbid, the twins. Other people's children made her feel frustrated. She didn't have the patience for their slow speech and their unclean, indelicate hands. She didn't find babies cute, and didn't think they smelled nice. She positively did not want her own.

Lately she had been reconsidering her position on children, not because she was likely to get pregnant any time soon, or because she had encountered any particularly nice ones. She had just been reconsidering it. She saw mothers shopping with their daughters, or pushing a carriage with a sleeping infant in it, and they looked happy. Busy, with three different conversations going on around them, but happy. The only things multiplying around her these days were pizza boxes and dishes that needed to be washed.

She wondered how she would feel if she found out that she couldn't have children. The idea made her very sad, even though she wasn’t entirely sure yet that she wanted any. To be told you couldn't; that was the tragic part. She wondered how Pansy found out, and how she felt when they told her. Pretty Pansy Parkinson, set to marry Draco Malfoy ten years before, the envy of most of the girls because there was nothing she didn't have. Did she know then? Ginny wanted to ask but none of her questions seemed appropriate.

Pansy sighed, put her sketchbook down on the table and pulled the pack of cigarettes out of her pocket. "I'm going to have a cigarette, do you mind? I'll stand on the balcony."

"Oh, sure. Yeah, that's fine," Ginny said.

"You want one?"

"Yeah. Thanks."

Current Mood: accomplished

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

crimson-stained.livejournal.com

you. are. so. beautiful. to. me.
*jumps on top of ivy to snog her*
itsjustsobeautifulforwords.
you are so loffley. i was feeling crap and then i read this.
am now happy and joyous and satisfied and ohh!
*glomps*

From:

Navigation

I'll put the kettle on

Quiescent 3

PLEASE DON'T KILL DRACO OR HARRY!!!!!

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags