Slightly backdated Who:Blaise and Pansy What: Sometimes journals just make things worse When: Sunday, June 10 Where: Astronomy tower
Blaise had spent the better part of the morning worried about Pansy. He’d no clue what had gone on between she and Tracey and it killed him on the inside to not be able to do a thing for her. When he’d seen the journal entry focused on Draco it had torn out his heart. As a result Blaise did what he always reverted to and put the walls up, not because he wanted to but because it was easiest. The thing that scared him the most was that every time the wall tried to force its way back up she accused him of wanting to leave. Nothing could be further from the truth and he didn’t know what to say that would convince her. It seemed the more Blaise talked the worse things got.
So here he was, ascending the final stairs to the top of the Astronomy Tower. Would she berate him more for his words? Would she end everything before they had a chance to figure themselves out? Could he even make her see how much he really wanted her?
Pansy had made it to the Astronomy Tower a full five minutes before Blaise, if only because she had already been on her way before she wrote it. Lately there was something about being under the stars that calmed her nerves, and that seemed to be the only thing that did the trick.
When Blaise reached the top of the stairs, he would find her sitting against the far wall, knees pulled up to her chest and with her forehead resting on her knees. Mentally, she was exhausted. She couldn’t wait for the school year to be over so that she would never hear Draco Malfoy’s name again. The fact that people kept bringing up her name with his made her so angry that she wanted to punch things... and yet, all she seemed to want to do lately was cry.
With Blaise, she was beginning to feel helpless. She had wanted him since her fourth year, and now that they were finally together, she felt like she was always at arms length. The fact that Tracey had accused her of still wanting Draco had naturally only made things worse. As she waited, a wicked thought occurred to her: what if Tracey wanted Blaise? And she was using Draco to drive a wedge between him Pansy?
When he reached the top of the stairs Blaise immediately noticed that Pansy was already there. He slowly walked across without a word and slid down the wall to sit beside her. There was so much swimming around in his head that he didn’t know what to say or where to start. Daphne had told him that his best bet would be to simply stay away until they were removed from the castle, but he just couldn’t.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly deciding that an apology was the best place to start. He reached over and placed a soft hand on her upper back. “I shouldn’t have lost it again. I’m just afraid that I can’t stand up to your expectations. You seem to have everything together most of the time and I often don’t feel like I fit into your life. And well, the way you defend him makes me wonder if I’ll ever fit in.” His fingers lightly rubbed against the fabric of her clothes. “I want to be with you or I wouldn’t be fighting so hard.”
“Me too,” Pansy said, immediately following Blaise’s apology. More than anything, she was sorry that this school kept coming between them. It shouldn’t matter, and yet it always seemed to rear its ugly head. She shivered with a bit of relief when Blaise touched her, and allowed herself the risk of leaning gently against him.
It was ironic. She couldn’t feel any more opposite of what he said. She didn’t feel like she had anything together at all; she felt like she was free falling and searching for something to grab on to. She felt like she didn’t live up to his expectations. How was it that they could both be thinking the same thing about one another?
“I’m fighting hard, too,” she promised. “I feel like everyone else is trying to tear us apart. I wasn’t defending Draco, I was defending myself. He isn’t a part of my life at all, but everyone keeps trying to put him there.”
When she leaned against him Blaise allowed his hand to slide around her shoulder and pull her close. He bent down and gently kissed the top of her head in hopes that his actions were speaking louder than the words he used so poorly.
“It’s the public way in which you chose to do it that doesn’t sit right. You know how quickly our house mates and the other vultures around here latch onto anything they can. You should have dealt with this quietly. It was between you and them, not you and Hogwarts.” That was the part that had gotten to him. By making her apology public Pansy had given everyone the opinion that he’d accused her of being fact.
He closed his eyes and his grip tightened slightly as he breathed in her scent as if he were trying to commit it to memory because he may never have the chance to do so again. “I just wish I could see some of that passion sent in my direction,” he sighed.
“If anyone should have dealt with it quietly, it’s Tracey,” Pansy pointed out with a bit of a pout. Everyone constantly telling her how wrong she was had started to really get to her. Her throat felt tight and she fought to keep tears from brimming in her eyes. “She had some issue, and instead of saying something quietly and privately to me in the dorms, she had to make a big deal out of it. At prom of all places.”
She shook her head, giving shuddering sigh. “I guess I made it public because I want everyone to stop judging me. If I had said something only to Tracey, she would have just thrown it in my face, like she did at prom. If I had said something to only Slytherin, everyone would have gotten mad at me, which they sort of did anyway. It’s kind of sad that I got more help and support from people outside of our house, when all along I thought that Slytherins were supposed to be my mates through thick and thin.”
Blaise’s hand continued to run along Pansy’s back. It was good that she was talking. All too often the two of them talked around things instead of about them. He was glad she was opening up. It meant that she really did trust him. The fact that she was sitting here letting him hold her while she lamented Tracey’s issues meant more to him than any words Pansy could have spoken.
“I wouldn’t let her or any of them get to you. People in our house are all about making sure they have what they want first and foremost. Oh, they’ll be polite enough but overall we all look out for ourselves before worrying about the others.” It was an observation he’d made early on and one of the reasons that he took what the others said with a grain of salt. That need to watch out for oneself was also the reason they kept butting heads. Not because they were necessarily trying to, but because it was the nature of a Slytherin to stand alone before leaning on another.
He reached across with his other hand and placed it under her chin in order to coax her to look at him. Blaise could hear a bit of vulnerability in her voice and wondered if she would trust him enough to look at him.
Looking at him was a little harder than Pansy had anticipated. Not because she didn’t want to, but because she was afraid there might be the glimmer of tears in her eyes. The one thing Pansy had kept to herself in her seven years at Hogwarts had been her tears. She had never cried in front of anyone, friend or foe, and she prefered to keep that weakness private. She wasn’t crying now, but she knew that he would be able to see that she was close, and that thought scared her. Still, she dared herself to look into his eyes.
“It’s just hard,” she went on. She felt like she kept saying the same things over and over. “Thinking you have a best friend for seven years and then finding out they’ve been waiting all of this time to get rid of you.” It was harder for Pansy to write off the others because she had genuinely felt a sense of sisterhood with the girls of Slytherin. The boys were her friends, sure, but the girls were her best friends. She’d never hesitated to tell them anything before, and now to feel like she couldn’t talk to them was doing a number on her psyche.
Blaise could see the moisture building up at the edges of her eyes. He readjusted his hand so he could lightly brush his thumb along her cheek bone. Leaning forward slightly he fought the urge to lean over and kiss her. She didn’t need him to push things away with physical affections, Blaise believed Pansy needed him to prove he could just listen.
“I think we’re all trying to figure out how to separate ourselves from one another. As a side effect we’re hurting those we don’t want to,” it made sense when he said it whether it was the actual truth or not. “Daphne says we just all need to take a break from one another. Maybe she’s right.”
Pansy shivered a bit at his words. It made sense, sure, but she wasn’t ready to just let go of everyone around her and be alone. “Do you want a break from me?” she asked, her voice a ghost of its normal confidence. She bit her lip, hard. It just hadn’t been what she’d been expecting to hear.
Shit he’d done it again. Blaise had a bad habit of saying one thing when he meant something entirely different. Either that or Pansy had a bad habit of taking things the wrong way. He didn’t know for sure which was closer to the truth.
“Do you honestly think I’d be here now if that were the case?” He didn’t wait for her to respond. Words obviously weren’t getting through her thick skull. Leaning in, he kissed Pansy gently at first but increased the intensity as he shifted himself so as to allow for her to be pulled into his lap.
She let herself kiss him because she needed it. She needed the closeness, the physicality of knowing that he wasn’t about to leave her. Her lips prodded at his and her breath caught in her throat. But after a moment she pulled back to search his eyes. He had said that they all needed to take a break from one another; did that include the two of them?
“I don’t want to lose you,” she told him, reaching up with the pads of her fingertips to touch his lips ever-so-softly. “When this is all over and everyone goes their separate ways, I don’t want this to end. I need you, Blaise,” she admitted.
He allowed her to break the kiss even though he wanted to continue to savor taste of her lips. When she reached up and touched his mouth he gently kissed the tips of her fingers. “I’m not going anywhere,” he whispered as he wrapped both his arms around her waist and pulled her tightly against him. “I don’t think I could stand to be without you.”
Pansy hugged him tightly, snuggling her face into his neck. She was relieved that they’d decided to talk in person in order to get a feel for each other’s true emotions. Things seemed to get jumbled and convoluted when one couldn’t see the other person’s face.
“We can’t let them drive us apart,” her voice was muffled against his skin. “That’s what they want, I’m sure of it.”
Blaise moved Pansy so he could look at her face. “No, I don’t think that’s what they want at all. Daphne’s in our corner and I honestly don’t think the others care.” His hands brushed her hair as he spoke to her. “Besides, even if they wanted to I wouldn’t let them. If I were going to let all this insanity pull you from me I’d have already been gone. I don’t do crazy, you should know that. But for you it’s different, I think..” he stopped right there. He couldn’t, no shouldn’t, say what he’d been thinking. It would scare her away. They’d only been together about six weeks and it was too soon for him to say anything that emotional, even if it was the only reason he could think of for allowing himself to put up with Pansy’s brand of crazy.
She leaned her forehead against his, eyes closed. “I’m glad we found each other,” she told him. “After all this time. I never thought you cared for me, all of these years.”
It was true. She might have crushed on Draco in their second year, and Theo in their third, but fourth year Pansy had been damn hung up on Blaise Zabini, especially since their snogging session after the Yule Ball. When he’d rejected her back then, it had hurt more than any of her other conquests, and so she had been sure that there was no hope for her and Blaise.
“You make me happy, Blaise,” she whispered, then brushed her lips over his again.