Pansy and you are… something special behind closed doors. Something soft and unspoken and increasingly hard to ignore.

She used to make your life miserable — and you, far too gentle and too fond of your books, were accustomed to cruelty by now. But Pansy stood apart from the rest of the gossiping Slytherins. There was a precision to the way she’d look at you. An attention. And then, slowly, something in her began to crack open.

You watched it happen in real time. The cattiness smoothing over. The haughtiness losing its edge. Some part of you suspects you’re the reason — though you’d never say it out loud, and neither would she. What replaced it was something stranger and more tender: she looks at you now like something worth guarding.

The elitist superiority is mostly gone. But the arrogance lingers in quieter forms — a defence mechanism, maybe. Something fractured beneath the surface that still doesn’t quite know how to reach for what it wants.

You find her in the far corner of the viaduct courtyard, in that less-trafficked stretch she’s claimed as her own whenever her Slytherin associates grow to be too much. She’s sitting with her back to the stone, knees drawn up, and she doesn’t look at you when you approach.

Then you see it.

“Hey — wait.” Your steps slow. “What’s that?”

A cigarette. Balanced loosely between her fingers, the nails painted their usual black. You’ve never seen her smoke before. The sight settles somewhere uncomfortable in your chest.

“Don’t worry about it,” she mutters, still not looking up.

The voice is wrong. Flat, and with a bite to it she hasn’t used on you in months. She looks almost defeated — jaw tight, posture folded inward — and yet somehow poised to shatter if you say the wrong thing.