Monochromatic

By: Provocative Envy

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Warning: Very, very brief, non-explicit reference to past attempted suicide. This story isn't particularly dark, and has a happy, optimistic tone towards the end, but please be kind to yourselves.

xoxo

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00: lemon chiffon

Pansy knows that there's a word for what she's doing.

There are lots of words for what she's doing.

Depending on the day, she can be hiding, running, or escaping—and that last one isn't so bad, not really, not when it sounds rather dashing taken out of context; but the other two, the first two, the two that come to mind more and more often as the weeks fade into months and the dye in her hair begins to stain the enamel around hotel shower drains with rain-burst clouds of starkly unnatural color—

Those words.

Hiding—

From the past.

Running—

From the future.

Those words—hiding, running—they make her feel cornered and wild and indignant, overtly defensive and covertly ashamed, bitter-sweet and bitter-sour; they make her feel like she doesn't quite fit into her own skin, like she doesn't belong anywhere—doesn't belong where she's from, no, and certainly doesn't belong where she is.

So she finds a different word.

A better word.

She meets a pack of Australian muggles at a pub in Barcelona; they tell her that they're staying in a youth hostel with bunk beds and communal bathrooms and rat traps in the hallways—and she sneers in response, half-cocked and semi-automatic, but then a bottle of Absinthe is produced from an Army-issue canvas knapsack and she's being handed a fire-filled glass and told to 'say hi to the green fairy' and the lights spin and the room tilts and she smokes her first cigarette and kisses her first stranger and smears her pearl-pink lipstick on a cocktail napkin to wipe the sweat off her face and she hears herself laugh and laugh and laugh and there's music pulsing in bass-heavy shockwaves up the notches of her spine and there's salt on the insides of her thighs and the hollows of her hips and she isn't Pansy Parkinson anymore, no, she isn't a girl who hides or runs or escapes, no, she's someone else she's someone new she's someone who's breathing and fighting and alive—

Because there's a word for what she's doing.

She pierces a single emerald stud through her nose. She stows her wand in a vintage Chanel saddlebag. She streaks her hair with pink and orange, purple and blue, green and grey—she buys a leather jacket and a pair of scuffed brown combat boots and a slew of short, floral-print, lace-applique sundresses; she stacks gleaming gold bangles and shiny silver charm bracelets on her left wrist, always the left, and she gets a tiny black snake tattooed behind one ear, a brilliant red apple inked on the tissue-thin skin behind the other.

And she travels.

She travels how she hadn't traveled as a child, bratty and bored, and how she hadn't traveled as a teenager, soft and sheltered; she travels without any concrete plans, without any predetermined destinations—she goes to Paris to see the Louvre, snaps a picture of the chipped silver nail polish on her left hand, always the left, with the ambiguously smiling face of the Mona Lisa in the background; she spends a night in Munich for Oktoberfest, drinks enormous foamy mugs of Märzen while flirting with a tall blond boy in suspenders and a feathered fedora; she joins a group of American girls for a weekend trip to Mykonos, takes shots of ouzo in her bikini on the deserted wood planks of the boat dock and just—just watches the sun fucking set, watches the sky paint itself pastel shades of coral and tangerine, cerise and amber, watches the night eclipse the day and allows herself to really think about what it is that she's doing—

Because there's a word for it.

She's careful not to stay in one place too long. She wonders, sometimes, if Draco's owl is still chasing her, if her father has given up on the recriminating letters, if Blaise has set his Continent-dwelling mother out to look for her; but it doesn't matter.

She isn't ready to be caught.

Because the word, the word that she's found to replace its less than desirable predecessors—hiding, running, escaping—

It's imperfect.

It's wanderlust.

She blames it for everything that happens next.

###

01: stil de grain

Pansy has never seen the Black Sea.

So she goes to Odessa.

She checks into a clean, nondescript hotel in the city center, drags her feet along the smooth grey bricks of the tree-shrouded Parkway, looks up through a fan of waxy green leaves and idly searches for the waning yellow rays of the sun—there's a sparkle on the horizon, an electricity coursing through the gentle, salt-slick breeze, and she's wistful, suddenly, homesick and frustrated and lonely.

But she's lucky, too.

There's a remedy.

A quick-fix.

She eats pyrizhky filled with potatoes and mushrooms and eggs for supper, washes it down with two gilt-rimmed glass mugs of cherry-spiced nalyvka; she slips into a long-sleeved, tight white dress with a lace collar and a short hem, fishnet stockings and a pair of fringed leather ankle boots—and her lipstick is red, and her hair is both black and pale purple, and her eyes, when she finally looks in the mirror, are a vivid cobalt blue beneath the slash of gunmetal grey shimmering along the crease of her lashes.

And the change—it hits her like a jolt of caffeine.

She finds a club.

It's loud, throbbing with the synthesized up-tempo beat of Ukrainian pop music and a mass of writhing bodies. She pushes a path through the crowd, gradually shedding the ever-present weight of being Pansy Parkinson—and the air is thick with sweat and smoke and glitter, erratic spotlights and hazy vodka fumes. It's easy to get lost in.

Her posture relaxes.

She tosses her hair back just as a stocky man in a thin white t-shirt turns to face her; and that's when the world stutters to a grinding, groaning halt—

She stares.

Red hair, freckles, blue eyes, wide grin, red fuckinghair—

She stares.

She stands stock-still and flash-frozen at the edge of the dance floor, surrounded by the claustrophobic press of soft stomachs, pointed elbows, hard chests—

There's a Weasley at the bar.

###

02: aureolin

Charlie Weasley apparently lives in Romania.

Pansy discovers that he's taken a month's leave from his job, also in Romania—I work with animals, he tells her with an evasive shrug of his remarkably broad shoulders—and that it's his first night out in Odessa.

He isn't difficult to read.

He's good-looking in a terribly earnest sort of way; his nose is peeling from a sunburn, and his jaw is scruffy with auburn stubble, but his smile is charming—disarming—and his gaze is clear and hot as he appraises her for a long, sinuous moment that feels like it just lasts and lasts and lasts—

Charlie Weasley doesn't have a clue who she is.

He still pretty obviously wants to fuck her.

"And what's your name, sweetheart?" he asks, nodding at the bartender as two cut-crystal tumblers of vodka are placed in front of them. "Didn't quite catch it."

And Pansy—

She's at a crossroads.

To the right, there's honesty and condemnation and the sharp, searing burn of yet another Gryffindor's scorn. To the left, though—

To the left.

To the left, always the left, there's lying and erasing and the impossibly intoxicating freedom of forgetting.

"Penelope," she says, smoothing her thumb over the inside of her left wrist. "I'm Penelope."

He knocks back his drink.

"Well, it's very nice to meet you, Penelope. No last name?"

She hums.

"Mm, no. Lost track of that somewhere in Italy, I'm afraid—last names can be rather slippery, can't they?"

He hikes an eyebrow up and something like surprise—maybe even genuine understanding—flickers across his eyes.

"Yeah," he says thoughtfully, waving at the bartender for more vodka. "Real tricky bastards."

And the night goes on.

She talks about the white sand and turquoise water of the beaches in Ibiza, and he talks about his siblings—six…five of 'em, he says with a fond, incredulous laugh, my parents didn't know what it meant to quit while they were ahead—and he shows her the enormous Chinese Fireball he has tattooed on the flat of his lower abdomen, forked scarlet tail curling into the waistband of his jeans, and she shows him the crisp red apple behind her left ear, always the left—there a reason there's a bite taken out of it? he murmurs, breath warm and moist and tingling against the hinge of her jaw—and he moves close and then closer, a thickly muscled arm coming around to rest along her shoulder blades, and his voice gets low and then lower, accent slurring as it coats the surface of her skin, and they continue to sit at the bar, swapping stories and drinks and his jokes get more ridiculous and her smiles get more inviting and he smells dangerous, like ash and thunder and fire, like the woods after it rains, like evergreen and petrichor and home, that's what he smells like—

"What made you stay here?" she blurts out. "In—Romania, Ukraine, wherever—why haven't you gone back to England?"

He blinks, cocks his head to the side, and studies her curiously—until a smile stretches across his mouth, dirty and deliberate, the slant of it twisting something in her gut.

"Sometimes, sweetheart," he says, leaning forward and cupping his hand around the nape of her neck. "Sometimes…things just click, y'know?"

She doesn't know.

She doesn't know.

It's why she kisses him first.

###

03: mustard

They exit the club a little after three in the morning, and Charlie offers to walk her back to her hotel.

"Oh, is that what you call it?" she asks, shrieking out a giggle when he scoffs and grabs her by the waist, crouching down to flip her over his shoulder, forearm hooked around her legs. "What are you—you're going to drop me!"

"Nah," he says, clapping the back of her bare thigh, right where her stocking ends—and the callused tips of his fingers linger for a second, she's sure of it. "You're not that heavy—"

Pansy releases a mock-indignant sound of dismay.

"You don't even know where you're going," she says, reaching back to pinch one of his straining bicep muscles. "So—put me down. I'll let you hold my hand the whole way there if you do."

A helpless chuckle reverberates through his chest.

She feels it—

She shivers.

"The whole way?" he drawls, releasing her knees from his grasp. "Don't spoil me, sweetheart."

She slides over his shoulder, steadily straightening her spine as he guides her into a standing position—and she can't tell if it's his doing, or hers, or the both of them working in some kind of subconscious synchronicity; but it's all so slow, all so liquid, the drawn-out glide of her body slithering down the front of his, and his hands are big and rough against the curve of her ribs, the soft swells of her breasts brushing his chest, nipples tightening and breath faltering—and the cornflower blue of his eyes is star-studded platinum, pupils contracting inky black as he licks his chapped, weather-worn lips—

She smirks.

"Don't you want to hold my hand, Charlie?" she whispers.

"Oh, is that what you call it?" he teases.

She nips at his chin and darts away.

"Exciting, yeah?"

He ducks his head and makes an exaggerated show of lacing their fingers together, smacking a kiss onto the back of her wrist.

"Exceedingly. Although—I suppose I am a bit of a thrill-seeker."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, I like…adrenaline. The rush of it. Flying—" he breaks off, clearing his throat, a faint splash of pink rising up from the v-neck of his shirt. "Sky-diving, I mean. I like—to do that. In the sky. With the—the diving. Hey—you, ah, up for a game?"

She's almost amused at the transparency of his blunder—but then she remembers why he even thinks he made a blunder, why he thinks that he can't mention flying or broomsticks or magic—

She swallows.

She squeezes his hand.

"A game?" she repeats, carefully dubious.

"Yeah, sweetheart, a game. Twenty Questions."

"This isn't that long of a long walk, you know."

"Is that deflection I hear?"

"Probably not, no."

He snorts.

"One question, then."

"One each?"

"Nope," he says, popping the 'p'. "Just one question for the both of us. My choice."

"Mm."

"So…what's your favorite color?"

"That's your question? Really?"

He flashes her a grin.

Her heart skips.

"Really," he insists. "And I gauge all further compatibility based on your answer."

She chokes on a laugh.

"But no pressure, yeah?"

"None whatsoever," he confirms, swinging their enjoined hands. "In fact, I'll even go first—my favorite color is yellow. Bright yellow. Like the kind you see on a bumblebee. Or in the middle of a fire. Just—really bright bloody yellow. Makes me happy."

Pansy taps the pad of her index finger against his knuckles as she considers what to say next—because she doesn't quite know what to do with his sincerity, or his simplicity, or his unfeigned interest in the person she's purporting to be. No one's wanted to play Twenty Questions with her in years. It's disconcerting.

"Yellow's alright," she eventually replies.

"Alright?" he bleats, incredulous. "Well—go on, then, what's yours? Red like your apple, or black like your soul?"

She quirks her lips into a small, mostly mischievous smile.

"Charlie," she says, playfully patronizing. "Why would I ever settle for just one color when there are so very, very many to choose from?"

At that, he abruptly stops walking—and she trips over her heels, huffing out an exasperated giggle as he reels her back, his hands framing her hips when she finally bumps into his chest; and Charlie isn't particularly tall, not like his brothers, but neither is she, not really, and she finds that she rather likes that, likes how they fit together, how his chin touches her shoulder as he bends down, bends closer, so that he can speak directly into her ear—

"Fair enough," he says, tongue just barely grazing her skin. "One more question, though?"

She arches her back, causing one of his hands to drift further around, thumb tucked into the hollow of her pelvis.

"Depends."

"On?"

"What the question is."

"It's yes-or-no, if that makes a difference."

"It—ah—it might," she hedges.

"Remember what I said earlier—about being a bit of a thrill-seeker?"

"Is that the question?"

"No, sweetheart. That's not the question."

"Then what is the question?"

He rocks his hips forward, cock a thick, half-hard line against the curve of her arse—and she nearly gasps at the hummingbird buzz of awareness that erupts in the pit of her stomach, no, lower, no, a static vibrato ping dancing across and around and into the restless ache between her thighs—

"Anyone ever make you come in public before?"

Her mouth goes dry.

###

04: metallic gold

The hotel lobby is empty.

The elevator isn't.

A yawning middle-aged businessman in a bedraggled pinstripe suit gets on with them. He pushes the button for the fourteenth floor; Pansy picks the seventeenth.

Charlie relaxes against the oak-paneled wall. His legs are stretched out on the industrial grey carpet, and his body is pressed firmly against Pansy's. He's nonchalant. Casual. Bored, almost. And his expression is bland and his gaze is polite and his hand is currently creeping up the back of her dress, middle finger teasing at the center seam of her knickers, a soft slow gentle prod at her cunt.

She bites down on her lip.

The elevator continues its ascent.

Charlie starts to whistle.

His finger roves in a maddeningly irregular rhythm. She's so wet that the slip and slide of damp cotton is smooth against her clit—not enough pressure, not enough friction, not enough anything. Her abdominal muscles are tense. Spasmodic. Clenching and unclenching while her thighs fucking quiver.

The businessman coughs.

The elevator jerks and sways as it passes the tenth floor.

Pansy's pulse races faster.

Charlie's finger sneaks under the edge of her knickers. The sensation of his nail scraping at her flesh wrings a whimper from the back of her throat. He goes still. Nothing happens. And when he moves his hand again, when he rubs a tight, slick little circle, just one, just one, around the swollen nub of her clit—she shudders, she does, because the calluses on his palm are rough against her skin and her blood is running hot and fierce and sticky in her veins and she wants to come, she wants to come, she wants to come.

The elevator chimes cheerfully and stops at the fourteenth floor.

The doors open.

The businessman leaves with an awkward grimace and a mumbled goodbye.

The doors close.

Charlie glances over at her.

Their eyes meet, clashing blue on blue; hers are fractured facets of azure and sapphire, dark and flinty, while his are lighter, prettier, tints of cerulean and traces of cyan.

He shifts towards her.

Slightly.

Slightly.

And then—

She's spinning around, yanking him by the collar into a kiss that's all teeth and tongue and thirst, yes, and he's flexing his wrist, fucking two of his fingers into her cunt while he drags his thumb across her clit, and he's hitching her knee up and wrapping her leg around his lower back and fucking groaning into her mouth when she grinds into his hand and the bulge of his cock and she's fumbling for his belt buckle and he's kneading her arse and her breasts and her hips and it's like he can't decide, like he needs to touch her everywhere, all at once—

The elevator reaches the seventeenth floor.

He pulls away.

There's a strange intensity to the next few minutes.

Pansy leads him down the hall, pace sedate and mind scattered; and she understands, she thinks, she understands what he'd meant about liking the rush of adrenaline that comes with flying—having to trust magic or gravity or fate to cushion the fall.

They enter her room.

The lock clicks.

"Yeah?" he asks, voice gravelly.

She massages the inside of her left wrist, always the left, and unzips her dress.

"Yeah," she says.

###

05: maize

It's like a dream.

Pansy wakes up after that first night to find him still there, in her bed, his forehead pillow-creased and his chest enticingly bare—and she wastes a moment staring at him, wastes a moment losing herself in the burnt sienna of his freckles and the rusty copper of his eyelashes; and she wonders what he might see when he looks at her in the milky white light of day—smeared black mascara and faded red lipstick, tangled strands of hair flat with purple dye.

She assumes that he'll leave.

Hopes for it, if she's being honest.

Because she suspects that if he isn't the one to set boundaries on what this is—on what it had been—then there aren't going to be any boundaries.

But he doesn't leave.

He doesn't leave, and she isn't really sure why.

Three weeks go by in a blur.

They talk sparingly of their respective pasts and not at all about their respective futures—and despite that, despite the obvious impermanence of their relationship, it doesn't quite manage to feel like it has a proper expiration date.

They go to the harbor, eat bublik with sour cream as a boat unfurls its sails, and she tells him about Italy, about the crumbling exterior of the Coliseum in Rome and the effusive scent of basil and garlic and motor oil that had permeated the entirety of the city; and he tosses the remnants of his deruny at a flock of dove-grey pigeons, piece by meticulous piece, tells her about growing up as the second-oldest brother, about the responsibilities he'd defined himself by and the expectations he hadn't known how to leave behind; and she doesn't—she can't, she can't—respond to that, no, so she does what she does best, what she'll always do best—

She runs.

She cocks a challenging brow and drops a kiss onto the tip of his nose—and then he laughingly chases her halfway up the Potemkin Stairs, catches her by the hood of her sweatshirt, pulls her into a kiss while her blood hums with oxygen and her chest heaves with exertion—and it's surreal.

It's like a dream.

Towards the end of the third week, he takes her to an unoccupied stretch of the main beach just as the sun is disappearing from the dusky orange sky. They drink honey-gold mead out of red plastic cups and strip down to their underwear and go swimming in the Black Sea with the crystalline, silver-blue glow of the moon streaking like paint across the waves—and she closes her eyes, floats, drifts, wishes she could scoop up the desperation she's starting to feel around Charlie and just—chuck it, make it a message in a bottle and ship it off to the far side of the Crimea and let it fucking die.

That isn't how it works, though.

She knows that.

He tackles her out of the water, onto a blanket spread out across the sand, and they play more Questions. She contemplates asking him about why he hadn't gone home to England, to his family, if he'd had a whole month off; but she's scared of what he might say, of how he might answer, of what he might ask her in return—so she doesn't.

And for a little while, it's normal.

He's 27; she's 19.

His favorite food is his mother's Shepherd's pie; hers is the paella she'd had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner the month she'd been in Valencia.

He gets twitchy if he spends too much time indoors; she's never even slept in a tent.

"We'll have to fix that," he remarks, combing his fingers through the fishtail end of her braid. "Ah—my turn, yeah?"

"Mm."

"Do you…believe in magic?"

She freezes.

###

06: papaya whip

The lies multiply.

He explains about the existence of the wizarding world—cautiously, warily, the scope of his gaze decidedly narrow as he assesses her for symptoms of a panic attack—and he removes his wand from a hidden pocket in his jeans.

She doesn't speak.

He demonstrates a basic summoning spell, moving a slate-grey rock from one pile of wilting, green-yellow seaweed to another.

She doesn't speak.

"You're in shock, I get that," he says quietly, calmly, like he hadn't just ruined everything, like he hadn't just made a horrible fucking mistake, like he hadn't just re-introduced her to a reality that she'd so very badly wanted to pretend wasn't there. "Penelope? Sweetheart? Are you—look, I can…we can forget about this, there's a charm I can use, if it's too—too much, or too weird, or too…whatever. It's okay."

Except it isn't okay.

He's sharing his greatest secret with her—and oh, she knows what that means, she does, she knows and she knows and she aches with the knowing—

Because she's Penelope to him.

Not Pansy.

Not Parkinson.

Just—Penelope the mysterious muggle with no last name.

And if she were Pansy, if she had been truthful to him from the beginning, she wouldn't have this. She wouldn't be allowed to have this.

"I…" she trails off, uncertainly.

"Are you alright?"

She absently rakes her nails over the inside of her left wrist, always the left, forcing herself to swallow her nausea—there isn't room for that, there isn't room—and plaster a smile onto her face.

"Fine," she says thickly. "I'm—fine. Surprised. Yeah. That's…wow. You—magic. Wow. Um. Why…why did you show me?"

He studies her for a moment, silent and serious. It's uncharacteristic. Unnerving. She has a single fleeting, paranoid thought that this was a test. That she's failed it. Failed him. She shakes it off.

"I work with dragons," he finally says, a glimmer of what might be—must be—genuine happiness filtering into the dwindling space between them.

"Dragons," she echoes, not even having to feign her astonishment at how open he suddenly looks—and isn't that a depressing realization, that he'd been guarded around her; that she was so used to evading and prevaricating that she hadn't noticed him being guarded around her.

He laughs.

"Dragons," he says again. "Want to see one up close?"

And Pansy—

She has seen a dragon up close. She has seen multiple dragons up close. She has no reason to say 'yes'—no reason to continue to lie to Charlie—no reason to—no reason to—

Wanderlust, she thinks grimly.

###

07: jonquil

They go to Romania.

Charlie's dragon preserve is nestled deep in the Carpathian Mountains, craggy ridges of ocher and russet and umber surrounded by slanted fields of vibrant spring green, peridot blades of grass and scraps of drab olive moss. It's brown. Remote. Desolate. There's a peculiar, untamed beauty to the wilderness, however—piercing bolts of bronze and gold, chestnut and mahogany, shot straight through the dirt and the rocks and the chaotic, ever-present haze of dust that swirls around the dragon pits.

He takes her to meet a young, incredibly docile Swedish Short-Snout named Athena.

"She tends to prefer women to men," he explains, directing a fond smile at the dragon. "Come on, just hold your hand out, yeah, like that—it's safe, I promise. I wouldn't let anything hurt you."

And he wouldn't.

He absolutely wouldn't.

She skims trembling fingers over the leathery, pearlescent, misty periwinkle scales of the dragon; and Charlie is watching Pansy intently, pale blue eyes projecting something like pride and hope and affection—and it's staggering, it's terrifying, it makes the invisible knot of tension lodged in the vague vicinity of her spine fucking constrict—

"She also tends to prefer virgins," Charlie adds, slinging an arm around Pansy's shoulders and planting a kiss onto the side of her head, "but we might be shit out of luck with that one, sweetheart."

Athena nudges Pansy's hand before shuffling back to her nest.

"Well, you certainly know how to make a girl feel special," Pansy says tartly. "Charmer."

Charlie grins, twirling a strand of her hair.

"Blonde, huh?"

"Is that a Question?" she deflects.

He pauses, and she feels his thumb lightly trace the snake tattooed behind her ear.

"What would you say if it was?"

She turns towards him, shifting her body around so that she can see his face—and he slips his other arm around her, then, tugging her closer.

"I'd say," she jokes, oddly hushed, "that purple hair runs in my family."

He chuckles, rubbing his hand down the inside of her arm, the bend of her elbow, the flat of her wrist.

He goes perfectly still.

And the scar there—the tiny, waxy, gnarled strip of skin—it does it what it always does, what it always will do, it blisters and it itches and it burns, it burns, it burns—

"Accident?" he asks, voice raspy and careful, so careful, like she's fragile like she's glass like she's liable to break—again, the weak, traitorous part of her murmurs, again—if he doesn't respect her privacy.

"No."

He's silent for a while.

"Left England for a reason, then," he eventually says.

She licks her lips, gripping the front of his navy jumper with small, white-knuckled fists—

"I couldn't even…" she trails off, confession heavy on her tongue. "I couldn't even do it right. I—I stopped. Wasn't brave enough."

He releases a long, stuttering sigh, tucking her further into his arms.

"Good," he says. "Good."

###

08: mikado

Two days later, it all goes wrong.

She wakes up to Charlie holding her wand and staring blankly at her unzipped bag and she feels the world fucking tilt on its axis as her stomach rolls and her throat tightens and the dread she'd been ignoring for weeks, weeks and weeks, it comes roaring back with a deafening, debilitating vengeance.

"Pansy Parkinson, right?" he asks abruptly, without inflection.

She flinches.

"How do you—"

He interrupts with a decidedly bitter snort of laughter, and then taps his nose and the spot behind his ear.

"You were so familiar that first night," he says, tone sharp and incredulous and positively dripping with venom. "But you weren't blonde, and all I remembered about the girl who'd tried to hand my baby brother's best friend over to Voldemort was that she had blonde hair and a Slytherin tie on."

"I was scared," she tells him, too quietly.

He clenches his jaw.

"D'you know what Voldemort had in store for muggle-borns? For muggles? Shit, for Purebloods—like me, like my family, who just…didn't agree with him? You were scared, yeah, and you put your own life, your own fear, in front of the lives of thousands and thousands of innocent people. You being scared doesn't—that isn't an excuse. At least not a good one. Try again."

Pansy inhales, exhales, inhales, holds her breath until the bite of his disdain and the serrated steel of his voice doesn't cut so much, so hard, so deep; and she wonders, consciously, if this is what heartbreak feels like—if this is what she'd needed all along, the punishment of having and having and losing.

"I'm still scared," she whispers, shrugging helplessly; and she isn't sure why it sounds like such a secret, why it sounds like she's confiding in him, but it does, it does, and—

A muscle in Charlie's neck visibly twitches. He opens and closes his mouth, looking like he badly wants to say something.

Ultimately, though, he doesn't.

He doesn't say anything.

###

09: daffodil

When Charlie returns that night, she's almost done packing her bags.

"What are you doing?" he blurts out, sweat dripping down the side of his face; his jeans are liberally spackled with dirt, terracotta khaki and dark rusty brown, and his right wrist is wrapped in beige linen gauze. She guesses that he's been with his dragons.

"Leaving," she replies evenly.

He crosses his arms over his chest.

"Why?"

Her eyebrows fly up.

"You can't be serious."

"And you can't be serious about—about leaving, not after everything we've…I mean, come on, Pansy."

"Oh, how sweet," she simpers acidly. "You know my real name now."

"Don't do that."

"What, remind you that you don't know me? Why shouldn't I?" she demands.

He scoffs.

"Because I do know you, and I know what you're doing right now," he snaps. "Pansy."

"And what is it that you think I'm doing, Charlie?"

"You're running. From this. From us. From—from me, shit. You're running."

And that—

And that.

"Yeah?" she sneers, lifting her chin before she lashes out and spews vitriol, cruel and unforgivable, because she's angry and she's sad and she's fucking scared, again, she's scared of this moment and she's scared of what it means and she's scared, she is—"And who are you to talk to me about running away? You, the man who, what, turned eighteen and graduated Hogwarts and moved to bloody Romania the first chance he got? To play with dragons? What do you call that, Charlie?"

His answering glare is fierce, but it fades rapidly, only to be replaced by a profoundly uncomfortable scowl.

"Look, Penel—Pansy. Pansy. This morning—it was bad. I don't want to call it a shock, because it wasn't, not exactly, but…you lied to me—"

"Yeah, which is why I'm leaving. This isn't complicated."

His nostrils flare.

"So—that's it? You get found out and you just—go?"

"I'd think you'd want me gone, all things considered."

"Well, I don't."

"Well, maybe you should. Maybe I've lied to you about more than just my name. Maybe you'd be better off if I left."

He shakes his head.

"I don't believe that."

She grits her teeth.

"You should," she says again, voice cracking. "You should want me to leave. You should—you should be telling me to leave, Charlie, you should be—"

"Pansy."

"What?"

"I've spent the past month falling in love with a girl who's—okay, maybe she has a bit of a mean streak, but she also—she's clever and she's funny and she's brave, yeah, even if she doesn't see it yet. So—why, why, would I ever want her to leave?"

And Pansy—she bunches her hands into the clothes piled at the top of her suitcase, and she takes a deep, deep breath, shuddering and endless, and the air—it hangs, suspended and tense, in the cavern of her lungs, and she blinks and she blinks and she swallows, tries to swallow, tries to ignore the pressure in the back of her throat and the scorching sting in the corners of her eyes—

It's too much.

It's too much.

She's turning around and she's taking four quick steps towards Charlie and she's crying, she's crying like she hasn't cried in a year, no, more than that, and the guilt, the guilt she's been harboring like a fucking fugitive since before she'd even met Charlie—it's slick and it's oily and it's a dull, lifeless grey vapor infecting her heart and her pores and her thoughts and she's clung to it, she has, she's clung to it just as she's now clinging to him, burying her face in his chest and her problems in his arms—

"Why did you stay here? How did you—why did you—why haven't you gone home?" she asks; the very same question she'd asked him a fucking lifetime ago, it seems—when they were still strangers and she was still wandering.

Charlie hesitates.

His hold on her tightens.

"Sometimes, Pansy," he says, dragging the words out. "Sometimes…things just click, y'know?"

She does know.

She does know.

But it isn't enough.

Not yet.

###

10: saffron

She leaves.

She doesn't go far—can't really bear to—but she bounces around Prague and Budapest and Vienna, tours a medieval cathedral and scrapes foam off the top of her Turkish coffee, visits the Schonberg gardens and takes polka lessons while listening to a local youth orchestra absolutely butcher something by Strauss; and the dye in her hair gets lighter and lighter, pale honey blonde emerging from behind storm-cloud black and ripe-bruise purple, and she trades burgundy matte lipstick for a clear coat of lip gloss, thick wings of kohl around her eyes for a thin film of sparkling beige-brown shadow; and it's slow, and it's gradual, but a month passes, and then another month, and then another month, and a girl who might have once been Pansy Parkinson begins to look back at her from the crystal-clean surface of her hotel mirror.

And then one day, she's sipping tea at a waterfront café in Sebastopol, the sleeves of her ivory cashmere cardigan rolled up to her elbows, nothing but a loose, antique silver watch strapped around her left wrist, always the left—and she sees a bright, bright yellow, cotton eyelet sheath dress hanging off a mannequin in a nameless boutique window.

And she thinks about Charlie.

And she thinks about how in his last letter he had casually continued their game of Questions—come on, sweetheart, everyone has a favorite color—and how she'd felt a tentative burst of excitement take root in her stomach, an ignition switch finally turned on to a low, gentle simmer, just waiting for permission to explode—

She goes to Romania. To Bucharest.

She signs a lease on a two-bedroom flat. She writes to Charlie—do you like any muggle music?—and she starts keeping her passport in her bedside drawer like a normal person. She learns how to make an omelet from Bernard, the retired French chef who lives next door. She writes to Charlie—The Beatles are embarrassing, you sound like a prat—and she buys a footstool shaped like a rotary telephone. She learns how to unclog a kitchen sink without magic from Dika, her elderly Romani landlord. She writes to Charlie—this isn't an argument, this is an intervention—and she accidentally kills four and a half houseplants before giving in and plopping a cactus on the center of her coffee table. She learns how to put together a stupid Ikea bookshelf from Aasim, the Indian carpenter who's dating Bernard. She writes to Charlie—comparing The Who to anyone who isn't The Who is the actual definition of cruel and unusual—and she binge-watches three Die Hard movies in a single afternoon.

And Pansy—

She's okay.

She's okay.

And it's illuminating and it's amazing and it's liberating, it is, it's everything she'd been hiding from and everything she'd been running to.

So—when, on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday morning, a hauntingly familiar eagle owl taps furiously on her living room window, two eggshell-white parchment envelopes tied to each of its ankles—she lets it in, and she gives it a bowl of water and a tin of chocolate biscuits, and she bites down on the inside of her cheek to hold back her grin when she sees Draco's neat, sloping script and Blaise's spiky, untidy scrawl.

Her past had found her.

She was done hiding.

Her future, though—

###

11: yellow

Pansy knows that there's a word for what she's doing.

There are lots of words for what she's doing.

"Oi! Weasley! Visitor!"

She licks her lips as she waits outside the staff room of the dragon preserve; it's just as inhospitably hot and dusty as she remembers, but there's still that eerie, savage sort of beauty to the red-rock plateaus and snow-capped mountains paving the skyline.

"—fuckin' busy, the Ridgeback's all ornery, is it important?"

It's been six months since she'd last seen Charlie. Since she'd last let herself see Charlie. She'd thought about him, of course, had answered his letters and played his game of Questions—in which Twenty had become Thirty, then Forty, then Fifty—

It's been six months since she'd last seen Charlie.

"—a blonde girl, yeah, looks real expensive—"

She had waited.

And waited.

And waited—

She had needed to know, was the thing; she had needed to be able to explain exactly why she was there, even if it was just to herself.

Because there's a word for what she's doing, there is, and it's important—so, so important—that she picks the right one.

"Did you say—you said she's blonde?"

She laces her fingers together and twists her hands into the folds of her skirt and observes the way the puckered, salmon-pink scar on her left wrist, always the left, catches the sun, turning opalescent and shiny and pretty in the flood of azure white and citrus yellow and flame-hot marigold—and she's glad, suddenly, that she hadn't worn any bracelets today.

Especially today.

Because there's a word for what she's doing.

"—be right there, don't—don't let her leave, Christ—"

She rocks back on her heels, the soles of her shoes—navy blue ballet flats with ecru lace panels stitched into the sides—slipping against the dirt.

She wonders if she should have warned him she was coming.

She wonders if he's going to kiss her.

She wonders if they'll still fit together how they used to—if his hands will still mold to the curve of her waist, if his lips will still stick to the divot between her collarbones, if her laughter and his smiles and that preternaturally placid sort of contentment that she'd associated with both—if it'll still be there, still exist, still envelop her senses and engulf her bloodstream and inspire the most bewildering blend of urgency and happiness, fear of the unknown and exhilaration at the possibility of what that unknown might be.

"Pansy."

She glances up.

She sees Charlie for the first time in six months.

She takes in his wind-ruffled hair—Weasley red, messily cut, chunks of it strung dark and sweaty across his forehead; and the lean planes of his face—high cheekbones, crooked nose, square jaw; and his expression, fuck, mouth slack and brow furrowed and blue gaze pinned to her own with an intensity that's as startling as it is satisfying, like he's afraid that if he looks away, even for a moment, no, less than that, that she'll disappear forever—

There's a word for what she's doing.

"Miss me?" she calls out, unable to mask the shakiness of her voice.

He approaches her slowly, boots crunching on the cream-colored pebbles and ice-white bricks of quartz dotting the smoky grey gravel.

"What d'you think, sweetheart?" he returns, halting in front of her, raking his eyes over the bright yellow of her dress, the bare skin of her arms, the blonde of her hair, the emerald stud she'd kept in her nose just because she'd liked it.

And there's a word for what she's doing.

She isn't chasing—that would be an exercise in futility, even if Charlie would want to be caught, even if Charlie would let her win, because the imbalance of it all would be so exhausting, so overwhelming—

No.

That isn't the word.

"I think," she replies softly, "that I'm ready to introduce myself. Properly."

And she isn't following—that would implicitly strip her of the autonomy she'd worked so fucking hard for, would cheapen their relationship, whatever it's going to be, by making it more about him and what he'dwanted, and less about them and what they'd needed.

No.

Not that word, either.

She isn't chasing.

She isn't following.

She's—

"Yeah?" he asks, stepping closer.

She's—

"Yeah," she whispers, holding out her hand, waiting for him to take it, take it—and, oh, his skin is warm against hers, warm and rough and honest. "By the way. My favorite color—it's yellow."

Because there's a word for what she's doing.

She's falling.

She's jumping.

###