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there is a house in new orleans
they call the rising sun
and it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy
and god, i know i’m one
- The House of the Rising Sun, by the Animals
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Daphne is livid.
She’s generally not the most emotional sort – her parents had stressed, very early on, the importance of keeping their feelings on an even keel (although that may be due to paranoia that, like the Blacks, generations of inbreeding have resulted in their genetic makeup degenerating into a soup of batshit crazy).
But – Cassius is dead, and she is grieving, and she is enraged at the fact that she is going home to a whole house of people who have noted his death down as a regrettable casualty in the pursuit of their version of the greater good.
It’s not like her parents are actually Death Eaters – Merlin knows that her father would sooner snap his own wand in half than actually risk any of his jacquard-print silk wool cloaks getting mired in dirt and blood and ashes.
However, Greengrass & Greengrass have been in the literal magic circle of wizarding solicitors since the mid-1700s, and she has a pretty good idea of the kind of people who keep their Special & Private Clients team on retainer.
Mr Greengrass himself specialises in cross-border commercial disputes, as he will tell you. Nevertheless, he’s still the managing partner of a firm that defends Death Eaters.
And so, Daphne knows that her father, at least, knows the truth behind Cassius’s passing. Death Eater parents – like Lucius fucking Malfoy – have been telling their children that an amazing thing has happened, and that they needn’t wait long for society to be purified. The wizarding world will be a better place.
Cassius is dead. How could the world be a better place?
When Draco Malfoy had burst into the common room, heralding the glorious news that the Dark Lord had returned the morning after Cassius’s death, Daphne had launched herself bodily at him and no one had even tried to stop her. Sure, she barely got a punch in, because Malfoy is still an athlete and Daphne… Daphne admittedly skips from fad diet to fad diet and hates exercise like fiendfyre hates everything in its path. But, it was uncharacteristic enough of her to do that, and thus Slytherin – even the most inbred of the lot – put two and two together.
He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is the most powerful wizard on the planet. There is no logical reason for Cassius Warrington to go into a graveyard with him and Harry Potter, and only for Harry Potter to come out alive. And, regardless of how much Slytherin is supposed to hate Potter on principle, no one can seriously entertain the possibility of Harry Potter avada-ing Warrington.
Because that’s what the mediwitch had said to Pansy, while Daphne had been saying her goodbyes. From the brief preliminary examination of Cassius’s body after he’d been laid out in the castle, it appears that he had been hit with an Avada Kedavra.
So after living the remainder of the school term as if she were in a dream – wafting from room to room, smothered by the veil of grief she’d drawn around her, she comes home for the summer and doesn’t wait for her parents to bring it up before doing what Pansy would call losing her fucking shit.
“He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is back,” she announces without any preamble the moment she bursts into the drawing room in the Greengrass townhouse. It’s half-past five on a Friday afternoon, and her father has left work early to welcome her back home. He has never done this before.
Her father keeps his expression professionally neutral, and gestures at Astoria, who’s been hovering behind her, to leave the room. Astoria, bless her, stays resolutely where she is and kicks the door to the drawing room shut behind her. Her mother winces, and stands to try to shepherd her into a chair.
“Daphne. I know that this doesn’t sound like the most sympathetic thing I could say, but perhaps you would like to have a bath and change into something more comfortable before we have this conversation.”
She’s been up since four in the morning and just alighted from a seven-hour train ride. She cannot wait to have this conversation.
“I know you know. I know your friends and your Swivenhodge partners and your clients have already forewarned you. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is back and he killed – he murdered – Cassius.” Her voice breaks, and she is shaking, and she hates it, because she is supposed to be righteously infuriated and thunderous, and she just sounds like she is going to cry.
Astoria slides up behind her and slips her hand into hers. Daphne takes a fortifying breath and looks her father straight in the eye.
He shifts his expression into polite interest and sits back in his chair.
“Know that I am only saying this because I understand that you have suffered an unspeakable loss. What my clients tell my associates and I is subject to solicitor-client privilege. I am not at liberty to disclose anything which they may have admitted to in my confidence.”
Daphne opens her mouth to – scream, wail, rip her hair from her head in frustration and despair – but her father raises an eyebrow, and she subsides. She hates herself for that, too.
“Hypothetically – hypothetically – if the Dark Lord had arisen, and he had indeed called his followers to him – a number of whom may be individuals who are clients of my firm – and it is alleged that the said Dark Lord murdered a boy, I am led to understand that such murder was not carried out in their presence, and they did not assist in the disposal of such body. There was also no premeditation on their parts. Legally speaking, they are not accessory to Cassius’s death, if it is true that the Dark Lord did murder him.”
At this, Daphne feels a swell of rage that surely Hermione Granger feels every single time a flobberworm dies. “Even so, they know he died. They’re not idiots. They arrived at that graveyard and there was a dead boy on the ground – my dead boyfriend. They aren’t saying anything. They aren’t aiding any investigation into his death. Is there even an investigation into his death?”
Her father’s lips thin. “Even if my purported clients allegedly saw a dead body, they do not know the circumstances surrounding his death. There has been no call for witnesses thus far. They are not, under British magical law, obliged to go to the Aurors of their own accord.”
She tries, she really does try to stop them, but the tears come anyways. “I can’t believe you,” she whispers. I can’t believe this.
Her parents’ expressions soften, and before she knows it, they are around her – her family is around her, holding her as she cries.
“We are your family,” her mother says, smoothing her hair back. “Whatever hurts you hurts us.”
“We’ll always be here to protect you, Daphne,” her father adds, his arm heavy around her shoulders. She can feel him shaking, feel him finally caught up in the emotion that they have all learned to put aside in the face of efficiency and societal expectation. Her mother is crying into her collar. “Whatever it takes, we will protect you.”
She loves her parents. She does. They may not always be the most affectionate, but she knows that they would do anything for her.
It’s just that now, she understands what anything means to them, and she isn’t sure she’s willing to pay that price.
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Pansy Parkinson grew up with one commandment that she places above all others: protect your own.
And then Cassius Warrington died at the hands of the Dark Lord – because, let’s be honest here, Cassius Warrington did die at the hands of the Dark Lord, whatever the Ministry and the stupid little Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws and even Gryffindors are saying. For once, Harry Potter and Dumbledore have got it right.
The Dark Lord is back, and he broke Pansy’s cardinal rule.
The way Draco had described it, the Dark Lord would welcome them – the pure of blood, his brothers and sisters – into his halls with open arms. But then he just murdered Cassius Warrington – last scion of a respectable line of pure-bloods – in cold blood. Like Daphne had realised, there was literally no other reason to murder Warrington apart from him just being there.
He had turned on someone whose parents would have broken bread with him, and opened all of their eyes to the kind of leader whom they would follow.
He had betrayed them, and it was the kind of betrayal that Pansy cannot abide.
There had been a screaming row between her and Draco, after Astoria had hauled Daphne off him with a surprising amount of strength and dragged her back to bed.
We don’t have to simper and pander to Potter and his band of mudbloods and blood-traitors, Pans, Draco had reasoned, and Pansy – Pansy erupted –
Cassius Warrington was one of us and he was murdered by your Dark Lord, Draco, I think you should reconsider who the fuck you’re calling a blood traitor here –
- don’t be disgusting, the Dark Lord couldn’t have known that Warrington was a Slytherin –
because he didn’t bloody check! We both know that the Dark Lord, being the Dark-fucking-Lord, would have known that there would have been a Slytherin champion from Hogwarts, and he just murdered a boy just because he was extraneous without fucking checking -
Draco throws his hands up and calls her treasonous, a traitor, and a fool. Pansy, who had spent the majority of her life waiting on Draco’s approval, no longer gives a shit. A boy died and Draco – Draco doesn’t seem to care that he was one of them.
What if it were me, she wants to scream. What if it had been me instead of Cassius?
She doesn’t ask that question. She doesn’t know if Draco would still take the news any differently.
Pansy already tries to spend as little time as she can at home, but this summer, she doesn’t go home at all. She knows exactly the kind of man her father is, and so did her mother.
She checks into a hotel room on the cheaper side of Vertic Alley – a little shabby, but she is only fifteen and she needs the secret trust fund that her mother left her to last as long as possible.
She’s been doing this since she was thirteen and realised that she didn’t have to go back home, not when her mother had left her almost the entire Rosier fortune before succumbing to dragon pox when Pansy was ten. Sure, her father usually panics a little, but then he never finds her, because Lipsy has more magic than Jove Parkinson, and Lipsy has been looking after Pansy her entire life.
So Pansy calls Lipsy, and the latter performs the necessary protection wards with a snap of her spidery fingers before spiriting Pansy’s clothes back home to be freshly laundered so Pansy needn’t spend more coin than she needs to.
Then Pansy, who would have gladly thrown herself at the Whomping Willow a year ago for even thinking this, sits back and considers: if I were Harry Potter, Ronald Weasley, and Hermione Granger, how exactly would I go about saving the wizarding world from Lord Voldemort?
And how would I convince them that they need me?
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There is no bravery without fear, Hermione knows.
And Hermione knows fear.
She knows what it is that drives Harry further into the sky on grey evenings and she knows the tremble in Ginny’s fingers when she reaches for him in the temporary warmth of their common room. She sees it reflected in Ron’s eyes when he lies in bed memorising each moving pixel of a photograph of his family and she smells it in the scent of hippogriff manure that clings to Neville after he emerges from the greenhouses after six hours straight of re-potting plants.
Hermione’s scared, too.
And so when she’s accosted by none other than Pansy Parkinson just outside Slug and Jiggers, she doesn’t wrench herself away and slap the girl, even though she wants to.
She really, really wants to, but she’s glad that she didn’t when Parkinson squares her shoulders, eyes clear, and says you have my wand.
This is not a conversation that one should be having in the middle of Diagon Alley, with Mrs Weasley three stores down at the grocer’s trying to haggle down the cost of feeding the Order of the Phoenix in residence at 12 Grimmauld Place. But Hermione recalls Parkinson pressing her shoulder against Greengrass’s, and remembers her expression, like thunder caught in granite, at the leaving feast.
And Hermione can feel Parkinson’s fingers cupped around her elbow, shaking despite Parkinson’s conviction. She’s just as terrified as Hermione is. More.
Hermione is a Gryffindor because she refuses to hide behind her fear – not her fear of Voldemort, and not the fear that Parkinson had, admittedly, tried to bully into her all throughout school.
It’s not like Hermione forgives Parkinson for all of that – not at all. But If Parkinson is scared enough to come to her, given their history, then she trusts that this is real.
She trusts that Parkinson will be in this for real.
“Keep your eyes and ears open,” Hermione says. “I’ll speak to you when term reopens.”
Parkinson nods grimly, and melts into the next herd of witches passing by.
In that moment, Hermione thinks, we can use this, and shoves Parkinson’s offer of allegiance into the back pocket of her muggle jeans under her robes, to be considered at length later.
Later, when reviewing her memories, Hermione still cannot see how she is suddenly untethered from Parkinson with nothing but a palm of scrap parchment with Pansy’s correspondence details scribbled into a corner.
Years from then, Hermione thinks that this is when the DA takes root: with Pansy Parkinson pledging herself to a girl she had loathed, without any doubt or uncertainty – with fear, and bravery. And how she, shrill, and emotional, and ruthless – she had swallowed her own hate, and opened her hands with grace, because it was the human thing to do.