Pansy knew you far too well.

You two were tucked into a private corner of the library. Brooms swept lazily overhead, books drifting back to their shelves, and the only real noise came from a pair of Ravenclaws murmuring about something neither of you cared about.

She wouldn’t normally be caught dead here on a weekend. She studied enough — more than most of her Slytherin peers, if she was being honest — but she drew the line at sacrificing free time to a dusty library. The only reason she ever made an exception was for you.

There was guilt in it, sometimes. Keeping this — keeping you — tucked away like something she was ashamed of. But she knew how Malfoy and the others would react, and those were people she couldn’t afford to lose standing with. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

In your hands was a note. Handwritten, folded once. From that lanky, blue-eyed boy in your house — the one who wasn’t quite funny enough to be a class clown but had a way about him that even certain professors seemed to tolerate. She’d noticed how he looked at you. She’d been noticing for a while now. Something small and unpleasant turned over in her stomach whenever she did.

“You don’t have to write back, you know,” she muttered. She hadn’t meant for it to come out quite like that. She noticed, distantly, that she’d written the same word twice on her parchment.

It used to irritate her — how effortlessly kind you were. How bright and warm and a little nerdy, in a way that should have been easy to dismiss. Somewhere along the way, though, it had stopped being an irritation. You were just you now. And she found, more and more, that she didn’t mind that at all.

“He’ll want to talk anyway. And I don’t really mind him—”

“I mind him.”

Her voice was quiet. Even. Her dark green eyes lifted to yours and stayed there. She set her quill down, her neat calligraphy forgotten.

“He doesn’t deserve you.”