Pansy had never been one for cliché romance. Roses bored her. Candlelit dinners made her teeth ache. But you—you were not like other girls. And thank Merlin for that.

You were the peculiar sort. The type who whispered to ravens, collected odd trinkets like teeth and buttons, and read books about ghosts not for the thrills, but because you said you missed them. There was always something just slightly otherworldly about you—something ancient that made the hairs on Pansy’s neck stand up, even as her chest ached with the sheer want of you.

It was snowing the night she took you to the graveyard.

You’d been staying with her at the Parkinson Manor for the winter holidays, tucked away behind the sharp, cold elegance of pureblood silence. Her parents assumed you were a school friend—Daphne’s cousin, perhaps, or someone pitiably dull. They never paid close attention to the way Pansy looked at you. How her fingers lingered on your wrist for half a second too long. How she always stood just a little too close.

She had slipped you out after supper, swiping the Manor’s keys with a practiced flick of her wand. The world outside was velvet-black, dusted in a quiet hush of white. Pansy had worn her best wool coat—deep emerald, lined in silver silk—and slipped her hand into yours without saying a word. You smelled like ash and something sweet, like burning sugar. She loved that about you.

The graveyard was a twenty-minute walk through the frost-bitten woods behind the Manor, past frozen hedgerows and twisted old trees that reached out like skeletal hands. She had charmed the snow to stay off your shoes, even if it meant hers grew damp. You’d looked at her with those strange, moonlit eyes—half-question, half-devotion—and she hadn’t spoken. She didn’t need to.

The gate creaked open with a mournful sigh. The graves, old and crumbling, stood like forgotten sentinels beneath a silvered sky. Marble angels with chipped wings. Iron fences tangled in ivy. Names worn soft by time and weather. You had smiled—really smiled—and Pansy felt something in her ribs collapse.

You’d whispered something about how peaceful it was. How beautiful decay could be. How the dead didn’t judge, not like the living. And Pansy, arms folded, had only watched you with that familiar tightness in her chest—the one that always came when she realized, again, that she could not bear the thought of a world where you did not exist.

“I thought you’d like it here,” she murmured, her voice curling into the cold like smoke.

You’d looked at her then. Properly. Like you always did when she said something that felt too honest. Pansy hated being seen, but with you—it didn’t feel like exposure. It felt like air.

You’d kissed her between the headstones. She tasted like frost and peppermint lip balm, like ink and ghost stories. She’d gripped the back of your coat with cold fingers and kissed you back like someone trying not to fall off a ledge. The wind howled through the trees, and you laughed against her mouth, that weird little laugh she adored—like mischief dipped in honey.

Later, you sat cross-legged on a flat stone marked Beloved Daughter, 1873–1890, sharing one of the spiced plum tarts Pansy had nicked from the kitchen. She hadn’t felt this peaceful in weeks. Her head on your shoulder, your hand stroking absentminded circles over the back of hers. The world could burn, and she wouldn’t have moved.

“You’re not like anyone else,” she’d said softly, more to the snow than to you. “And thank Merlin for that.”

You hadn’t replied, just laced your fingers with hers. Pansy closed her eyes.

She could almost believe that here—among the dead, among the forgotten—she could finally feel seen. Not as a Parkinson, not as the sharp-tongued Slytherin, not as a future wife of someone respectable. But as hers. As yours.

And she liked who she was, in that graveyard, with you.