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Before the war, virtually no one she knew, no one her age, could see thestrals.
The older female ambles towards her and accepts a bit of raw meat from her hand. As she eats it, Pansy absently strokes her neck.
She remembers the Care of Magical Creatures lesson. Hagrid. Umbridge. Draco.
Harry.
Most of all, she remembers herself. It’s an uncomfortable recollection.
The thestral, finished, starts sniffing at her hand, looking for more food. Pansy spreads her hands apart. “All gone,” she says, and the creature walks away at once, clearly disappointed.
It’s a very Slytherin way of making friends, Pansy thinks. To show affection only when you get something in return. Of course, it takes one to know one. She was once the queen of friendships of the self-serving kind.
“She’s having you on,” Harry says, walks up behind her and puts a hand on her shoulder; gives her the usual quick massage. “She’s been fed twice today.”
Pansy leans into him. “How do you stand me?” she asks quietly.
“Well, it’s a dirty job,” he says. “But someone’s got to do it.” His voice is tender; as though he were whispering love songs; and, actually, he kind of is.
He kisses her hair; she puts her arms around him, but still stares towards the thestral field. He rescued them from a Dark wizard’s abandoned estate, bought land just to give the rare creatures a place to live.
Like her, she thinks. He built a house here too, for himself and her.
“You could always see them,” she says. Sometimes she thinks he is the only one who can see her.
“Well, yeah,” he says. “But so can you now, so —”
“You could always see everything,” she interrupts, not wanting absolution, though he will always, always offer it to her.
“I think Trelawney’d disagree with you about that,” he says. “I could never see anything worth looking at in her stupid bloody tea leaves . . . speaking of which . . .”
Harry takes her hand, and they walk slowly back towards the house.
He will pour her tea, let her have the last chocolate biscuit, and love her with an understated passion that is uniquely his; make her forget, for a while, that she once betrayed him, everything he stood for, and with it all, herself.
“Pansy,” he says.
“Mmmhmm . . .” She’s starting to relax. He has that effect.
“You know what I didn’t know?”
Finally she lets herself smile. “That you would love me?”
“You ruined the punch line,” he pretends to complain.
“Heard it before, Potter,” she says, soft, caressing the words, her heart glittering with warmth; enchanted by the repetition of the ordinary, extraordinary love that found her with this man.