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Author: Antosha Story: The Wisest Course Rating: Mature Setting: Pre-DH Status: Completed Reviews: 7 Words: 142,408
Blaise wasn’t kidding; this is very nice Siamese Green. Cannabis Magistra. Pansy’s senses are wrapped in swaths of lovely, golden-green silk, and all of her rage and fear is drifting about three feet to the left of her head. “I think Loony Lovegood must feel like this all of the time,” Daphne sighs, and both girls giggle. “Bloody hell,” snorts Pansy. “That would explain an awful lot. Mad bint’s always on about all those bloody creatures because she’s got the bloody munchies!” Again they giggle, and the world dissolves into golden-green… “Anthony says she’s not really that daft,” Daphne says once they’ve run out of giggles; she plucks the mouthpiece to the hookah from Pansy’s hand. After a bubbling inhalation, she coughs and splutters. “Says she’s actually rather sharp.” “Hides it bloody well,” snorts Pansy. Bloody air-headed twit, babbling on about Blubbering Bollywoggles or whatever, someone should have let the air… Pansy gives her head a shake, and the irritation detaches itself and floats off to join the cloud with the rest of her sorrows. “Anthony?” Pansy grabs back the mouthpiece, even though she doesn’t think she should take another hit. “You still pining after that swot?” Daphne pouts, her chubby cheeks flowing downward in the silliest way. Pansy laughs. Really, Daphne is thoroughly ridiculous when she’s enamored, which is constantly. She followed Blaise around for two years looking like a bloody spaniel till he finally told her to go away. Blaise, the Great Black Love God of Slytherin, who spent his nights wanking to images of a skinny little freckled… Freckles. Oh. How can the mere thought of a sea of spots on pink flesh make Pansy’s middle flutter? Really, it’s… Daphne smiles a bit, then laughs too. “He’s sweet. And he’s not as airy-fairy as most of the ‘Claws…” “Maybe. But Goldstein barely knows you from Hecate. And he’s one of that crowd who follow Potter.” “The world,” Daphne proclaims with the exaggerated seriousness of the terminally high, “isn’t divided into Draco’s friends and Potter’s friends.” “It isn’t?” Pansy ponders this. A year ago it would have seemed ludicrous—the world was clearly divided into those who recognized the supremacy of pure blood—of whom the Dark Lord was the champion and whose self-designated lieutenant at Hogwarts Draco was—and those who opposed them: Potter. Dumbledore. Now… “You would know, I suppose.” Daphne accepts this statement with a grand show of noblesse oblige. “And he knows who I am.” “Does he?” Pansy asks, thinking, Only because you, he and the Granger hag are the only Gs in our year. That thought, too, joins the swelling cloud over Pansy’s nightstand. Daphne nods. Then she frowns, her eyes seeming to darken as the already bloodshot whites disappear. Flopping onto her belly, she lizards her way over to Pansy and whispers, “Pansy? Have you heard from Draco?” This last word is spoken in so hushed a tone that Pansy suspects that it may have been a cannabis-induced hallucination on her own part. Pansy decides to behave as if Daphne actually said the forbidden name. Staring up at her bed’s pink canopy, she shakes her head. Suddenly that dark, angry nebula is pressing around Pansy’s head, smothering and searing. Her forearms itch. “I saw Millie yesterday.” “Oh?” Pansy manages. “Is she…?” Daphne shakes her head. “Not yet. She wants to, though. Greg’s been trying to get her to take it, and you know how Millicent is about Greg.” The three of them. Tracey’s been sneering at them for years, but then with her face and her name she has even less chance of snagging a boy from a good family than the Mudblood—Millie’s always been happy that there’s someone in their dormitory even more haggish than she is. Then again, at least Tracey Davis hasn’t ever made an idiot of herself over some... The three of them—Pansy, Daphne, Millicent. All simps. All spaniels. Following their boys. At least Millie’s always stayed constant. What was I…? “Yeah. Four brain cells between them and Millie gives her three to Greg.” Freckles on pink skin. “Alons enfants de la Patrie…” “Anyhow,” says Daphne, “she said that Greg told her that Draco’s being made a bit of an example.” The cloud seeps into Pansy’s smoke-clogged lungs. “He’s alive?” Daphne shrugs. “Yeah. Though he, the Dark Lord, like I said, he’s making a bit of an, um, example of Draco—Greg kind of likes it, you know, showing Draco up after all those years of having to play the lackey.” “Greg is a lackey,” snorts Pansy, words and smoke puffing from her mouth like dragon flame. “Born and bred to it.” “True,” concedes Daphne. Surprisingly, she giggles. “D’you think he and Vince really spent all that time Poly’d up as Nott’s little sister and the Harbottle girl like Blaise was saying? I mean, can you imagine it?” “Not really, no.” Daphne snorts, and stoned as she is, her face is looking more porcine than Pansy has seen it look in years. “I mean, Pansy, can you imagine them traipsing after him? Bet they weren’t half terrified what he’d do to them!” The cloud congeals around Pansy. She swats at it, but it refuses to depart. “Bet they weren’t.” She takes another deep drag. Bet they weren’t half… The thing is, Pansy can in fact imagine that—can imagine how Crabbe and Goyle felt. She remembers all too well second year, biting her lip as he probed around up her skirt, tell her what a sweet little tart she was, his sweet little tart. It was terrifying, but she liked the way it tied him to her, the way that she could use the lure of access to her own body to keep him close. She remembers the sting of walking into the unused dungeon—their dungeon—to find him pushing his thing into the little Dobbs bint’s face. She and Draco haven’t ever talked of it, but he has to know why the cunt was eating through a straw for a month. She remembers the look of glee on Draco’s face in Umbridge’s office at the end of last year while he surreptitiously groped the Weasley trollop—just before the nasty little thing hexed the bloody hell out of him. He likes little girls. Skinny girls. Pansy shrugs her shoulders, feels the weight of her breasts flow with the movement. Nothing little or skinny about her any more. “Millie says… says Narcissa Malfoy’s dead.” Oh. The cloud adds weight to its turgidity. “Wha—?” That can’t be true. “That she was plotting against the Dark Lord, which sounds pretty bloody stupid, doesn’t it? She was going ‘round spreading rumors ‘bout him being nothing but a half-blood and all, which can’t have gone over well, and she tried to get Professor Snake… Prof… Snape to turn on him, like that would ever happen. Bloody stupid, isn’t it?” Daphne lies on her back, following billows of smoke with one finger. “Well, must have been, ‘cause he had his great bloody snake eat her, can you believe?” “Oh.” Yes, that Pansy can believe. Yes, indeed. Poor Draco. Daphne frowns, peering over at Pansy. “I… I’m sorry.” “Never liked her much anyway,” Pansy says, but even she can feel the tears wetting her cheeks. If Draco has ever loved anyone it is his parents. “Where?” “What?” Daphne blinks. “Oh. ‘pparently they’re all holed up at Malfoy Manor.” Draco’s room. Sprinkling the bed with black-red rose petals. Listening to the I love you behind the moans and filth as he banged away. I could go there right now. I could… Or I could… No. This past year it all started so nicely. After the Bat-Bogey debacle, all Pansy had to do was say Ginny Weasley’s name, and Draco would obediently prove his devotion to her. Repeatedly. With what passed in him for great verve. Then, starting around Halloween… Something was bothering him, and he wouldn’t open up, not even to her, who’s been at his side, thick and thin, but no, he was disappearing, he said it was this mysterious mission, he said with Crabbe and Goyle, but she saw him coming out of the girls’ loo more than once, all pale. Buggering some second-year, probably, she suspected at the time. But now… There was a mission. Draco did bring the Death Eaters into the school, and they did kill the headmaster… Still, it’s obvious: Draco doesn’t trust Pansy. And… “A half-blood, did you say?” The mad snake-face, leading his pure-blood army… Of course! He’s jealous of us all, that’s it, he’s… “Well,” Daphne says, playing with the beads that Pansy gave her when they were twelve, “that’s what Millie said that Narcissa…” He’s going to kill the rich, the powerful, off for spite and Galleons, one by one, family by family, THAT’s what… He’s going to kill Draco. Pansy sits up. The cloud in her head, the cloud in her room—they all dissipate in a blink. She has never felt more clear-headed. “You’re wrong, Daph.” “What?” Daphne mumbles blearily. “Millie said that Greg said that Mrs. Malfoy—” “No, no, silly twit, not that. The world is divided. Not into Potter’s cronies and us, but into the Dark Lord’s toads and everyone he’s going to destroy—which is everyone, Daphne, can’t you see? He’s going to suck us all dry, all of the pure-blood families, all in the name of…” Pansy springs from the bed. That’s where all of our money… Maman, drunk in the drawing room… “He’s a bloody psychopathic bloody nutter who’s got to be stopped, Daph, he’s going to bloody destroy us all.” He’s going to kill Draco. “Oh.” Daphne blinks up. “So… we’re joining Potter’s gang?” “No. I don’t think so.” Pink skin, covered with freckles… “You just want to ogle Goldstein, anyway,” Pansy murmurs with something like her usual swagger. And both girls dissolve into a storm of giggles that momentarily wakes Claudine Parkinson from her stupor downstairs.
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