Title: Things Behind The Sun
Author: Amalin
Notes: For Susan. PG-13.


April. Pansy is sixteen today.

Year sixteen, A.D., she thinks, curling her lip at the pitcher of orange juice and pouring herself chocolate instead. It's her birthday; she deserves to be lavish for one day. After Draco.

She knows it is silly to base her age on the sharp features of a boy who will never be hers, but she remembers the portrait of her birth, attended by a regal, beautiful woman and her son. Pansy is cradled in velvet blankets in her mother's arms, while Draco has eyes only for the painter; in the picture, he is always restless, reaching for his mother's hair, snatching at Pansy's mother's sleeve. She finds it strange--and strangely comforting--that she has hardly spent a breath of her life not knowing Draco.

"Happy Birthday, Pansy," he tells her in the common room later, dropping a flawlessly wrapped package in her lap. She tangles her fingers in the Spellotape and tries not to flush when she pulls out a tiny necklace. A small charm dangles from the gold chain, a little flower, and when she looks closer the petals flutter beneath her breath.

"A pansy. How clever of you." She rolls her eyes at him, sitting beside her on the arm of the chair, but beneath her derisive laugh, there is something else. When he leans over her to clasp it around her neck, she looks away. His fingers are warm.

Draco's look is exasperated. "Not just. Sixteen means something around here, you know. I had Mother put special protection charms on it." When Pansy only turns the charm over in her fingers, nestled in the hollow of her neck, he prods her in the shoulder. "It was expensive."

"You're such a Malfoy, needing appreciation," she says, turning to kiss his elbow. He is fed up with her affection already and moves restlessly to lean against the fireplace. Yes, Pansy thinks. A Malfoy.

Sixteen does mean something in Slytherin, but not to Pansy. At the age of sixteen and a half, she won't be brought before the Dark Lord, the way Draco will be in five short months. Too weak, her father had proclaimed her, to be good for much. No, the Mark is not for Pansy.

She wonders if she should be glad.






May. A snapshot: Pansy, six years old, pudgy and sandy, standing in front of the seashore with her hair blowing wispy in her face. In the background, Draco kicks at a sandcastle, already precocious. A cloud passes over the sun.

Pansy shoves it back in the drawer where it belongs, irritated with herself. She had watched Cho Chang at dinner that night, watched the slim fingers and the quiet movements of her eyes, and remembered how beautiful Cho looked when she flew. Pansy had entertained the notion of having a crush on the Ravenclaw girl, until Draco accidentally jostled her elbow and drew attention to his sharp tone addressing Millicent.

I wish you weren't so beautiful, she had thought. She forgot about Cho altogether.

Days later, curled around the shadows in bed, Pansy thinks of Cho sucking on her burnt finger from a too-hot dish at dinner. She wonders if she might be a lesbian. The word makes her think of raw-eyed girls and too much skin. No, perhaps not.

Draco's face swims before her eyes. She thinks, resignedly, You are still the one I love.

She has taken to fingering the charm he gave her. Curling her fingers around its warm weight, she falls asleep and dreams of summer orchards, of dark shadows, and what she will never be.







June. Her mother throws a garden party, full of lace napkins and cucumber sandwiches, and Pansy amuses herself by throwing cherry stones at the goldfish that swim by, shadows in the garden pond. Draco is not there.

His mother is, however, arm in arm with a tall, dark woman: her sister. It's the hushed-up scandal of the wizarding world, that Narcissa Malfoy bribed the Ministry to pardon Bellatrix Lestrange instead of her own husband. They are always together now, while Lucius rots in his cell, and Draco throws things at mirrors without a father. Pansy has never met Bellatrix before. She isn't sure she wants to.

It doesn't matter. Bellatrix finds her and stalks forward like a predatory cat, eyes glinting. "Hello, little girl," she laughs, scornful of Pansy's lacy robes and the ribbon threaded through her hair. "And what are you doing all alone in the garden on such a lovely day?"

Bellatrix has a cruel mouth, but her words are even sharper. Later, when mostly everyone else has left and Narcissa lazes sleepily on the terrace with Pansy's mother, both with goblets in their hands, Bellatrix traces a careful line along her red lips and says thoughtfully, "I think you are in love with my nephew. You shouldn't fall in love with Malfoys unless you are better at their games than they are."

"I can't help it," Pansy admits, before she can shut her mouth over the words.

"Oh, there are always choices." Bellatrix smiles a long, languid smile, as dangerous as a cat's lazy flex of claws. Her eyes flick to Pansy's bowl of cherries. "Give me a cherry, Pansy."

Pansy takes one and means to hand it to her, but somehow her fingers find themselves at Bellatrix's parting lips and then there is cherry juice trickling down her hand and Bellatrix is sucking gently on her fingertips, the motion of her tongue intoxicating.

You shouldn't fall in love unless you are better at her games than she is, Pansy amends inwardly, never afraid of generalizations. For the first time, she wonders what power feels like.






July. Pansy lounges on the beach, her legs bared to the sun, a floppy hat shading her face. She is already far too sunburnt for her complexion. Her mother tells her it's unladylike.

Squinting, she looks out and sees Draco throwing stones at the waves; he makes an ethereal picture, pale and little more than an blur of sunlight, set against the backdrop of crashing white. Pansy pretends she doesn't know that Bellatrix and Narcissa have Apparated back to Malfoy Manor to make love in the cool shadows of Lucius's former chambers. Sometimes, Draco is so naïve.

Things were simpler when she was younger. She looks in the mirror these days and has to stare deep into her own pupils, teeth pulling uncertainly at her lower lip. I am not Bellatrix, she tells herself. She isn't sure who she wants to be.

When Draco flops down beside her, his trousers are rolled to his knees, and his feet are plastered with sand. He gives her that sloppy smile that so rarely appears, the one she is always afraid will disappear forever someday. She thinks he might be staring at the swell of flesh from her bathing suit top, or perhaps the way she's lengthened the chain until the tiny flower swings between her breasts.

Pansy fingers the brim of her hat. Another year, another snapshot—only there is no one about to take their picture, to preserve the day. Well, she thinks, I'll have to remember myself, then.

"Tomorrow's Potter's birthday," she says softly, toeing a design in the sand. Draco scowls.

"Potter," he snarls, as if the word contains everything he loathes. Perhaps it does.

Pansy smiles. Some things never change.







August. The night before his half birthday, Draco appears at their door, his eyes full of shadows. As her father is away on business and her mother is drunk in her chambers, she lets him in and leads him without a word to her room, because she knows he doesn't want her to speak. Draco kisses her hard against the door, his hair tickling her forehead, his hands rough when they clutch at her hips.

They don't speak until after Draco has arched over her, his pale figure like a stray piece of moonlight against the wall, his fair hair falling down over her face. Sex is messier than she thinks it should be.

"Do you think I'm doing the wrong thing?" he asks then, legs tangled with hers, voice smaller than she remembers it being.

"Do you?"

Draco turns away from her. "No. Yes. No. I don't have a choice."

"There are always choices," Pansy says. She brushes her hair out of her face, watching the shadows of her movements against the wall. Draco is just a slim figure at her side, motionless. "Why did you come, then, if you don't have a choice?"

"I wanted to leave everything I've been with you." His throat works suddenly as he tries to explain. "All the years. You know."

Pansy knows. She doesn't want them. She doesn't want to be the guardian of had-beens and things left behind.

"I love you," Draco says, in a tone that suggests to Pansy that he is a sixteen-and-a-half year old boy who has no idea what he's talking about. Worst of all, she thinks, startled by the fact that she wants to laugh, he believes it. She loves him, hates him, and pities him all at the same time.

"You're such a Malfoy," she says, kisses him on the forehead, and climbs out of bed. When she comes back from the bathroom, he's gone.






September. Bellatrix has a hand on the small of Pansy's back, but it's more of a subtle warning than any sort of comfort. Bellatrix doesn't ask if she's sure, another triviality for which Pansy is grateful. After all, she isn't a child.

The Mark hurts a bit, a sharp, blinding, Cruciatus pain before it dulls to a low awareness, but Pansy has spent hours fascinated with Draco's own and isn't much surprised. Afterwards, Bellatrix presses blood red lips to the dark spot, then kisses all the way up Pansy's arm, over the sensitive skin in the crook of her elbow, into that ticklish spot just above Pansy's collarbone. Pansy knows she is imagining it, but she thinks Bellatrix tastes like cherries.

Later, Bella will teach her the beauty of green light, the way someone's body wracked in one screaming plea for mercy can be the most beautiful thing in the world. Later, Bella will press her lips into the hollow of Pansy's navel and Pansy will feel the sharp curve of her smile like a razor blade kiss. Even later, she will dangle a tiny flower charm over a murky fishpond and drop it carelessly, watching it vanish between the shadows of the fish. But that is later.

Now, she lifts it from her neck and fingers it thoughtfully, Bellatrix's mouth where it usually lies.

You could never protect me, Pansy thinks, sixteen-and-a-half and older than she thought she would be. Love is a different kind of danger. There are only better thrills to come.

Somewhere else, Draco shreds flowers in a cold marble house and waits for someone to remember who he is.