Drabble for pokeystar
Title: Making A Mess
Author: Empath Apathique
Word Count:
Request: Harry/Pansy, moving in together, get a housewarming gift (what is it? What does it do?)
Note: This was so fun! It went away from your request a bit, but…
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There are too many boxes on the floor-too many for Harry to see or think or walk in a straight line from the sitting room to the loo.
He says, “Pansy, why are there so many boxes on the floor?”
She says, “I don’t know, Harry Potter. Maybe because we’re moving in.”
And he glares at the kitchen door, because he can’t see her and that’s the closest thing to her that he can see. He knows that they’re moving in. She’s been babbling about it for weeks. She has never lived in a Muggle house before, and she must ask him everything so she can tell her mother everything and her mother can stop worrying. She owls him at work about inane things related to the move, like where he last put the spell-o-tape, and if Muggles smell, and whether pots and pictures can be packed in the same box.
“It isn’t as if they’ll mind,” she says defiantly when he tells her no, pointing to the smiling faces waving at them from within their frames.
“You can’t pack pots and pictures together, Pansy,” he tells her tiredly, collapsing into the couch by the fire, sighing in exhaustion. Their old flat is a wreck then, stuck in a halfway point of being lived in and packed away at the same. Only, Pansy has never packed in her entire life. She’s had house-elves to do it for her when she lived at home, and she’d lived with her parents until she’d moved in with him two years ago.
It’s a complete and utter disaster.
She picks up a pillow and sits next to him on the couch. She looks down at him, worried. “You’re tired,” she says.
“I work.”
She frowns. “It’s hardly my fault no one will hire me, Harry Potter.”
“You’ve the worst track-record at keeping jobs in wizarding history.”
She shrugs. “I don’t like to take orders.”
“You don’t know how to.”
“Perhaps, if you married me sooner, my potential employers would be less inclined to fire me,” she’d told him.
Harry looks at her incredulously, then accio’s a bottle of Firewhisky from the cupboard. He looks at her plainly and asks her to pass him a glass. She smacks him in the head with a pillow and tells him to get it himself.
“This is my point,” he mumbles, drinking straight from the bottle.
“Piss off, you misogynistic poof.”
“This is why you can’t keep a job.”
Whatever, she says. She doesn’t need a job. She has money, he has money; hell, he works. She will sit at home all day and order from catalogues, she tells him. In-between popping out kids.
He looks at her, horrified.
“What’s wrong with that, Harry? Can’t I be a housewife?”
The conversation ends there. Harry refuses to respond, and Pansy is been satisfied with shocking him enough that she lets him be.
He doesn’t know then that she’d gotten work as a contributing writer for Witch Weekly. He will find out weeks later, when she returns home well into the night, complaining about Lavender Brown and her deadlines and how she has no eye for lyrical style.
“And what are you doing with Lavender Brown?” he asks, arms crossed as he sits up in bed, watching her undress. He feels like the nagging housewife she claims to be, viciously accusing her husband of having a go at it with the new office tart. Oh, the spectacle she’d made when she’d discovered Ginny Weasley had been made his partner.
“We’re just partners,” he’d told her.
She’d glared. “I don’t care.”
“But we’re just partners, Pansy!”
“I. Don’t. Care. The last thing I need is to give that hussy another chance of insinuating herself into your trousers. It will change,” she’d said, stomping away.
The next day, she had gone to Kingsley Shacklebolt herself and had demanded that a change be made. When he’d arrived at work the day after that, Anthony Goldstein had been at the desk across from his, and Ginny Weasley had been nowhere to be found. Pansy hadn’t said anything about it since.
But Lavender. When he asks about Lavender, she says:
“I work for her, Harry.”
He wants to ask questions, but she gets into bed and will have no more of it. He has to stalk Lavender Brown the next day to find out what it is all about.
“Yes, she works for me,” Lavender says. “But I’m going to fire her.”
He promises her an interview in exchange for his fiancé’s continued employment. Lavender agrees. His face is splayed on the cover of Witch Weekly two months later. It is one of the most uncomfortable experiences in his life. It is worse than The Daily Prophet calling him a liar. Witch Weekly proclaims on its cover that it knows his favorite position in bed. Pansy giggles when she reads it.
“Where does Lavender get this shit?” she asks him. He glares at her. He wonders why she fells threatened by Ginny Weasley but not by Lavender’s racy interview with him in a gossip rag. “She’s harmless, Harry,” she says.
Harry doesn’t think Pansy knows what ‘harmless’ means.
And even though she hasn’t been fired, Lavender is demanding another exclusive with him. He can’t imagine what she can possibly ask him now. But then he can, and contemplates letting Pansy get sacked.
But that isn’t the point. The point is that it has taken them seven bloody months to move, and now that they are finally in their new house, he cannot make it to the loo because everything is everywhere and he swears that he had shrunk these boxes and pushed them to the side of the room not twenty minutes before.
He tells Pansy this. He says, “What did you do in here?”
She says, “I was looking for something, Harry. The blender, you know. The blender.”
Harry wants to smack himself. He wants to know what Pansy plans to do with a blender when she is supposed to be unpacking, “doing the kitchen” in her words, even though they both know she hardly knows a skillet from a saucepan. Pansy doesn’t cook.
“I want to see what it does,” she tells him. “It’s just so bloody shiny. I want to turn it on.”
“It won’t do anything,” he calls back, pushing boxes to the side as he wonders how Pansy has managed to throw the entire room into disarray while looking for one thing. He hadn’t thought it was possible. He wishes that they had hired a house-elf for help. “You need to plug it in-”
“I know how to plug it in,” she says testily. “Granger showed me how.”
He’s pulling at their obscenely heavy couch and wondering why, why, why someone who claims to be his best mate would buy his girl a Muggle appliance for a housewarming gift. As if he needs another disaster in his life. He needs to give Hermione a call.
But Pansy is talking. She says, “I bought bananas and everything, just like Granger said.”
“Bananas?” he repeats, dumfounded. He is still holding one side of the couch in his hands. “What are you doing with bananas?”
“Making smoothies, Harry.”
Harry drops the couch onto the floor, racing to the kitchen just as he hears the blender shriek at his girl. She screams, points her wand at it, and blows it up in a flash. There is smoke and a flicker from the electrical circuit in the wall, and Harry grabs Pansy hand, pulling her out of the room as the smoke detector begins to sound. He puts out the small fire with his wand, but there is still smoke and Pansy is still coughing and he pulls her out of the sitting room and onto the porch. He sits her on the stairs, wipes mushy banana from her cheeks as he asks her if she’s okay. Her eyes are teary but she nods, hand on her chest as she coughs.
He can still hear the smoke alarm, and he thinks that he should do something about it, lest the neighbors hear and decide to report it to the fire department. But Pansy looks small and afraid, as if she doesn’t know what went wrong, and he sits next to her on the stoop and puts an arm around her shoulder, pulling her to his chest.
“I don’t know what went wrong,” she says.
“It was a bad idea to begin with.”
“Maybe. I had good intentions,” she tells him.
“When have I heard that before?”
“Your hair grew back, didn’t it?”
Harry rolls his eyes. “That’s hardly the point, love.”
“I know.” She sighs. “We better clean up,” she says, standing. “And stop that god awful noise.”
The fire alarm is still beeping annoyingly from within the house. Harry stands as well.
He watches as she wipes her messy hands on her shirt, uses his own to get it out of her hair. “Good intentions, huh?”
She pouts, and he feels like an arse. So he kisses her nose and her cheeks and her lips, tells her she tastes like banana, and that they must buy a new blender so she can do this right.
She smiles and kisses him back just as a bright red engine stops in front of the house.
“Shit,” Harry says.
Pansy waves.
“We were making smoothies,” she tells the officer. He nods in reply, scribbling away at his pad.
-fin