Chapter Text
“Good morning, beautiful.”
Pansy shook off the too-warm finger tracing a line down the bare skin of her hip, and half-cocked a single, sticky eyelid.
Fuck .
The sun was slamming into her retina without even buying her a drink first, and her mouth tasted like the inside of a bin at a fish market.
Pansy sealed her eye shut again, and rolled over onto her belly.
Gods, what was this one’s name? She breathed in, fighting back the feeling of rising sick, and tried to think through the previous evening.
It had been an admittedly good fuck.
He was a sales clerk at the Muggle bookshop she liked: tallish, rower’s arms, black hair, cable knit sweater, massive, beautiful brown eyes, notably smooth cock, said nothing but “Yes,” repetitively, while he was buried balls deep inside her.
She’d recognized him at that bar in Fitzrovia that Tracey liked to take her to, the one with the ironic collection of blunderbusses hung on the wall, and had brought him home, encouraging his searching hands to go further in the back of a cab.
“Tea’s in the kitchen, Sharif,” she said through dry lips. “Second cupboard to the left of the sink. Then feel free to let yourself out.”
She pulled her pillow over her head, and was asleep again before he could make any answer.
“Pansy.”
It was later, whatever that meant.
Pansy stirred, slightly less than half awake, and pulled the pillow tighter around her ears.
“Fuck off,” she mumbled.
“Pansy Parkinson.”
“I said, fuck off, Sharif,” she repeated from underneath the pillow. “You have a very pretty cock, but I’m in the midst of an ongoing dispute with last night's tequila, and I'm not sucking you off again. If you’re hard, have a wank, fix yourself a fucking tea and make sure the bloody door clicks shut on your way out.”
“Lovely," said a deliberate voice that sounded like it was capable of explaining eight generations' worth of family oil portraits, and had been exposed early and often to an abundance of privately owned country air. "I’m enormously pleased that our investment in elocution lessons afforded you with the means to express yourself in the richest and most sophisticated of terms.”
Pansy threw the pillow off of her head, and sat up.
“Oh. Fuck,” she said.
“Indeed,” said her mother.
Pansy scrambled for the bed sheet that was wound around her hips, and pulled it up to cover her breasts.
“Good morning, Mother,” she said once she was situated and rubbing at her eyes with her fingertips.
“It’s nearly one o’clock in the afternoon," declared her mother from her perch at the edge of the low armchair in the corner of Pansy’s bedroom.
She was dressed in her near daily uniform of a wool crepe pencil skirt and long-sleeved silk blouse, a set of understated pearls at her neck and dangling from her ears, and her black hair, tinseled sparingly with threads of grey, was wound into a smooth chignon. Her legs, in sheer nude stockings, were crossed at the ankles, and tucked away with well-bred propriety to one side. The type of dragon leather handbag for which there was a years-long waiting list, her sole nod to conspicuous consumption, sat stiffly next to her feet, a patterned silk scarf knotted at the shoulder strap.
She looked as she always did: cool and perfected, pale and brittle as porcelain, as she brushed a piece of imaginary lint from her skirt front.
"How long have you been here?" asked Pansy. She leaned over the edge of the bed, and rifled through the balled up fabric of last night's dress until she located the right pocket, and pulled out a silver cigarette case and Muggle lighter.
"Long enough to be treated to the sight of a Muggle helping himself to a cup of tea in your kitchen, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and a smile. I Oblivated him for you and sent him on his way."
"You did what?" said Pansy. "I didn't expose him to any magic, Mother."
"Yes. Well. Apparently that's the only thing you didn't expose to him."
Pansy lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and blew out a stream of smoke in the general direction of the chair.
"I can't tell if it's my fucking that bothers you, or my fucking Muggles," she said, pulling a flake of tobacco from the tip of her tongue. "Or perhaps you have specific qualms about Scottish-Egyptian boys from West Kensington who like to recite Walt Whitman."
Her mother wafted away the smoke with one hand, and rose from the chair.
"What bothers me," she said, "is the owls that I receive from well-meaning friends delicately informing me that my only child is frequently spotted stumbling across Muggle London, soaked in gin, rubbing her hind quarters against every available male like a cat in heat."
Pansy tossed her head back and laughed.
"That is a vivid image," she said. “Please inform your friends that lately I’ve been favoring whiskey, neat, although last night belonged entirely to a rather peppery tequila blanco.”
Her mother crouched down demurely from the knees, pinched a pair of black lace knickers lying on the floor between her clear-lacquered fingernails, and dropped them into the crowded laundry hamper in the corner.
“As much fun as this little chat has been, I have come here with a point.”
“Please,” said Pansy, “don’t wait to make it on my account.”
“I was pleased to receive an invitation to the wedding of Draco Malfoy,” her mother said, looking at Pansy pointedly.
Pansy sat up higher against her headboard, took another drag from her cigarette, and said nothing.
“I’m sure you were made aware,” said her mother.
“He’s marrying a Muggle-born witch, Mother," said Pansy, flicking ash into the jadeite tray on her nightstand. "I’m sure you were made aware of that.”
Pansy’s mother stiffened slightly, then relaxed again, polished and serene.
“Times aren’t what they were,” she conceded tranquilly. “And, I trust, that's all for the best. The issue at hand is that your peers are settling down and starting their families, and in many instances since that regrettable war, rising before their time to take over at the helm of their family fortunes. And you, Pansy, are getting drunk almost every night and making a mockery of the values of purity and propriety that have been the bedrock of respectable Wizarding families for countless generations."
Pansy abruptly swung her legs over the side of her bed and stood, cigarette pinched between the index and middle fingers of her right hand, and wrapped the bedsheet tightly around her chest.
“That’s all very interesting, Mother, but please excuse me, I have to pee in the worst way.”
She shut herself into the en suite, stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray next to the bathtub, leaned against the wall, and let out a long outbreath.
She was drinking too much. She didn’t need her mother to tell her that. It wasn’t every night, for Merlin’s sake, but it was far too often, and far too much.
And she knew about Draco’s impending nuptials, as she’d been on the extremely short list of people he Flooed with the wonderful news straight away after getting his answer.
She was happy for him, genuinely, although she couldn't say she entirely understood the attraction of an uptight goody goody who came prepackaged with a pair of useless appendages in the form of Potter and the least competent Weasley.
And while she would never apologize, ever, for inviting any consenting adult she pleased into her own bed, she also couldn’t say she was overly sorry about her mother Obliviating the unfortunate Sharif. She rather liked his book shop, and wasn’t sure she was going to be able to go back there once she’d spent time cradling his balls in her mouth and listening to him whine about it.
In any case, the last thing she was going to do was give her mother the satisfaction of knowing she was right, ever, about anything.
Pansy peed, washed up, dragged her fingers through her dark French bob, and rewrapped herself in her bed sheet before charging out of the bathroom and straight into her closet.
“Pansy?” said her mother through the door as Pansy was pulling on a pair of cheeky knickers and a bralette.
She flicked through a rack of dresses, and then opted for a pair of black cigarette pants and an oversized black and white striped Breton shirt.
She sailed back out into her bedroom, where she stashed her wand, her cigarette case and lighter in the pocket of her trousers and turned to face her mother.
“Yes, Mother? Can you speed things up, I'm expected at brunch."
“You're being cut off.”
Pansy blinked.
“What?”
Her mother sat back down on the edge of the chair in the corner of the room, with her handbag perched in her lap like an extremely expensive little dog.
“In light of your ongoing behavior, your father and I have agreed, and the terms of your trust have been altered.”
For a moment, Pansy was at a loss for words.
“You can’t change the terms of my trust,” she finally said, incredulously. “Can you?”
“We can, and we have. For the time being, the house,” Pansy’s mother gestured slightly, indicating the London townhouse Pansy occupied, “is unaffected, as neither of us is interested in you sleeping under an overhang in Diagon Alley, but your allowance will be conditional.”
Pansy felt a wave of fear wash over her skin.
“Conditional on what?” she asked.
“On your being married,” said her mother.
“Married?” shouted Pansy. “I absolutely, categorically, will not …”
Before she could continue, her mother raised one of her narrow, elegant hands to stop her.
“Or ,” continued her mother, “you will work.”
Pansy’s jaw clamped shut.
Her mother stood again, and moved toward the fireplace in Pansy’s bedroom.
“The changes to the trust took effect early this morning.” She turned her wrist over to look at the face of a delicate gold watch. “I believe while you were sleeping off your abysmal life choices with your paramour. As I'm well aware that you do not have immediate employment prospects, I took the frankly humiliating liberty of using my Ministry connections to secure you a job."
Pansy shook her head in disbelief.
"A job? Doing what?"
“I’m sorry, Pansy, would you prefer the marriage option?”
Pansy’s left eye twitched.
"I thought not,” said her mother. “You'll be personal secretary to a high ranking civil servant within the offices of the Ministry for Justice. You begin tomorrow, Monday morning at 8 a.m. sharp, so you may wish to dry out. Freshen up. Get a haircut.” She looked around the room. “Deal with your laundry.”
She reached into her handbag, pulled out a matte ecru business card, and tucked it in front of one of the small cups of a fire engine red demi-buste brassiere dangling from the mantelpiece over the fireplace.
"As long as you have a full-time job, of any kind, you will have this house, and your allowance. If your employment lapses, you will lose the latter, unless you secure a new job in a timely fashion. We’re also not leaving the townhouse entirely off the table, if you fail to rein in your behavior. At the very least, attempt to be discreet.”
She bent down, and when she stood, there was a man’s white cotton athletic sock pinched between her fingernails, held out as if in explanation. She dropped it again, and dusted off her hands.
“I needn't spell it out that it will behoove you to at least try , Pansy, to do your best."
Before Pansy could think of a clever rejoinder, her mother lifted a measure of Floo powder from the dish on the mantelpiece, tossed it lightly into the fireplace, and was gone.
Pansy approached the fireplace, and lifted up the business card.
It read, in an aggressively plain black geometric sans-serif typeface:
Percy Weasley
Second Permanent Secretary
Office of the Minister for Justice
The image of an auburn-haired Prefect, walking the halls of Hogwarts with a stick rammed up his back end and a look of unsmiling superiority planted on his freckled face flashed through her mind.
"What the fuck!" Pansy shouted.
She leaned down, cupped her hands around her mouth, and shouted pointlessly into the fireplace.
"Cunt!"
“Percy Weasley? He’s a cunt.”
Pansy, peering through the lenses of a pair of enormous round black sunglasses despite the unbroken sheet of cloud cover, pulled the celery stick from her Bloody Mary, then pointed the dripping tip of it at Blaise.
“He’s a walloping great cunt,” she asserted, then turned the celery stick to her mouth and bit it.
“D’you know he once prevented me keeping an appointment to feel up Tracey in the alcove behind the tapestry of the dubious pixies in the first-floor corridor?” said Blaise, breaking open the yolk on top of his eggs Benedict.
“Cockblocking, cunt behavior,” said Pansy. “Hold on a minute, you’ve felt up Tracey?”
“No, I never have. I was cockblocked, you’ll remember,” said Blaise, morosely. “I’m not sure she had much going in the way of breasts just then, but they’re uncommonly lovely now, and I’ll never know what they feel like, will I.”
“You've always been a breast man. You could break up with Daphne again and have a go,” said Pansy, licking away a strip of salt from the rim of her glass.
“I’m reasonably satisfied with Daph’s breasts for the moment, thanks," shrugged Blaise.
“That’s a ringing endorsement that I’ll be sure to pass along to her.”
“Besides,” Blaise continued, “old Father Greengrass would have me framed for grand larceny or some kind of pervert crime if I broke things off again within three months.”
“You are a bit of a pervert.”
“To the extent that Daphne allows it, yes.”
“You know damn well that under that soft blonde exterior, she's a Viking warrior queen that takes exactly no shit. And yet, you return.”
“Indeed,” agreed Blaise. “Though it’s not like you’d ever let anyone push you around, either.”
Pansy gave a little laugh.
“He’d have to be something very special, wouldn’t he.”
Blaise nodded, and took a bite of his egg.
“Shall we go to the shops, then?” he asked. “I’ll advise you on what’s best suited to secretarial work at the Ministry. We’ll start with the tight leather skirt straining across your perky wee bum, six inch heels, fishnets with the seam down the back of those bloody great stems of yours, a little peek of leopard bra through the strained buttons of your Oxford blouse.”
Pansy looked down at her bosom.
“These aren’t straining the buttons on anything any time soon. Still, I could go for a little naughty leather. Can you imagine the look on Weasley’s face?” She dropped her chin, looked up at Blaise through her eyelashes, and said in a breathy, humid voice, “‘Yes, sir, I’ll file your papers for you directly, sir. Do you take your women the way you take your tea...sweet, and hot?’”
“Oh, don’t do that to poor, wound up old Cuntweasel. He’d be a quivering mess,” said Blaise. “Merlin, do that, and I’m halfway to being a quivering mess, and I’d wager I’ve seen an exponentially greater number of women out of their knickers than that thundering cunt has. You sure we can’t have a torrid affair one of these days?”
Pansy looked seriously at Blaise, tall and beautiful, with his burnished bronze skin, wide-set eyes and soft, obnoxiously charming curls.
“Don’t take this poorly, as you are undoubtedly a god among men, and by all accounts you have an inch on Draco in every interesting dimension, but please, just for a moment: picture my hand on your cock,” she said.
Blaise shuddered, and not in the good way.
“Exactly,” she concluded.
In the end, they decided on making her look not entirely unlike her mother.
On Monday morning, she stepped through one of the Ministry Floos at 8:02, hair shining and pressed into loose waves, wearing a wool crepe pencil skirt in black. If it was tighter and shorter than her mother would have worn, Pansy chalked it up to Blaise’s influence. Her white silk blouse had a round collar and a black contrast bow at the neck, which she echoed with a pair of black heels with a cheeky ankle strap. She’d done a sheer pink lip for her first day in the office, but opted for her favorite winged eyeliner, and in lieu of a robe, she wore a black half cape, and carried a green dragon leather handbag.
She was clutching a Muggle paper hot drinks cup with thin paper handles as her heels clicked over the polished floors.
At 8:06, she had located the mahogany front door of the Office of the Minister for Justice, and pushed her way through.
There was a long central desk at the front of the room, behind which stood an orderly grid of smaller individual desks, most occupied with a witch or wizard scratching busily away with a quill. There was a long transom window over the entryway, propped open, and through this moved a steady stream of folded paper aeroplanes, which looped over the heads of the employees and dropped down onto their desks. Pansy saw two or three tissue paper parachutes float through dragging bundles of rolled parchment, which dropped onto their target desks before the parachutes spontaneously combusted into wisps of scentless smoke.
Arranged around the perimeter was a series of closed mahogany doors, flanked by brass name plates, each with a transom window of its own and a desk out front, set parallel to the wall.
At the long front desk sat a pair of witches wearing matching looks of the sort of bored yet justifiably prideful complacency that comes with total mastery of a job’s daily demands.
“Can I help you?” asked the witch on the left, elegantly dressed in a blue shawl collar pullover and earrings in hammered silver shaped like moons, one full and one crescent, and whose smooth brown skin looked 20 years younger than her braided salt and pepper hair. She wore a brass name tag that read “Ines.”
“I’m here for the secretary position,” said Pansy. She hitched up her chin defiantly. “With Mr. Weasley.”
Ines exchanged a brief, loaded look with her desk partner, a narrow-shouldered, light-skinned witch whose name tag said “Kath,” and whose warm blonde hair was cropped into a pixie cut over sweetly protruding ears. She wore an ill-fitting hand knitted cardigan, and reading glasses with clear pink frames clipped around her neck on a crocheted eyeglass chain.
“I’ll let him know that you’re here,” said Ines. She pulled a quill from its stand, wrote a brief note on a small square of pastel blue parchment, and gave it a tap with the hawthorn wand she drew out of a pocket in her floral skirt. It promptly folded itself into the shape of a hummingbird, flew off into the crowded airspace of the interdepartmental memos, narrowly avoiding a collision with a swinging parcel of parchments, and ducked through one of the transom windows over the interior doors.
Ines stood, watching Pansy with neutral interest, while they waited.
“Stopped for a tea, love?” she asked Pansy.
Pansy looked down at the cup clutched in her freshly manicured hand.
“I was running a little late this morning, and hadn’t had a cup yet,” she explained. “Didn’t want to be yawning at the desk first day.” She gave Ines what she thought was a congenial smile.
“No. You do not want to do that,” said Ines, and though her mouth was slightly upturned, her voice contained no hint of amusement.
After a moment, a nondescript small white paper bird descended to the desk in front of Ines, and flattened itself out into an unwrinkled square. She peered at the writing, then walked around to the end of the long desk, and gestured for Pansy to follow her.
They traveled clockwise around the perimeter of the room, passing by several of the mahogany doors. Pansy noted that at each of the desks posted outside these doors sat a witch or wizard, each one with a quill in hand, all of whom looked up at Pansy with wary interest.
When they reached a door a third of the way along the farthest wall, they stopped, and Pansy glanced down at the desk outside, empty but for a waiting quill stand, ink pot, letter tray, and a little stack of square pieces of parchment, all white.
The brass name plate beside the door read:
Percy Weasley
Second Permanent Secretary
Ines knocked twice, softly, and a male voice sounded on the other side.
“Come in.”
Ines turned the door handle and led Pansy inside.
Pansy wasn’t sure what she had anticipated, but Percy Weasley’s office managed to defy every expectation, most of which had flowed from her broad perception of what it meant to conduct one's life as a Weasley.
She’d long outgrown the pettiest impulses towards meanness that she’d had at school. So much so that sometimes lubricated with alcohol, and sometimes dry and rough, she’d made apologies for the casual cruelties of her past where she felt like she ought.
But she retained, despite the firm intentions she made each first of January of being a better, kinder, wiser Pansy, an edge to her, narrow and cool and sharp as a well honed blade. And she had never shaken the opinion that the Weasley clan was something comprehensively shabby.
The office she entered was not.
Where the Ministry corridors vibrated with the bureaucratic choreography of clicking heels, hustling bodies, and paper wings stirring up shadows over dark floors and shining hardwood surfaces, Percy Weasley’s office was cool and silent and comparatively light.
Pansy was intimately familiar with the ways in which the very rich chose to indulge their aesthetic impulses. She’d seen countless attempts at the exhibition of good taste, and more commonly, at the exhibition of how much of someone else’s good taste could be bought, from gilded Rococo excess to brilliant and shimmering embroidered silk oases to brute grey stoicism, but Pansy was overwhelmed with the impression that this space wasn’t about any of that.
There was the clean surface of the wooden desk, likely of ornate and bulky Ministry issue, here Transfigured into a warm teak slab on slender, softly geometric legs with a lean row of simple drawers.
The pair of chairs that sat in front of it were a sculptural paean to function-driven form, mid-toned wood joined invisibly into curved and continuous lines from back to floor, their lightly concave seats upholstered in pebbled black leather. Pansy found herself wishing Percy would stand from his place behind the desk so she could have a look at whatever he was sitting in on the opposite side.
The room was spacious, and where the walls weren't hidden by meticulously organized shelves of books, she could see that they were painted a dark grey-green. A fire burned low in the hearth, above which was an unadorned mantle. The space would have called to mind the Slytherin common room, were it not for the large rectangular window behind the desk.
It was enchanted to show a visual field of variegated green: a cluster of girthy evergreen trees and maples, with amber sunlight twisting its way through the lichen-strung branches.
There was nothing that didn’t need to be in Percy Weasley’s office: a utilitarian magical brass desk lamp; low-lit wall sconces; a plain, slub-textured charcoal grey rug; everything had been invited there to perform a function, except for a cluster of large indoor plants in cream-colored pots grouped in a corner close to the window.
They were tall and lush, with dark, glossy leaves lifting their tips lazily toward the filtered sunlight streaming past the window.
Percy was sitting at his desk with a quill in hand, head bent down towards a long strip of parchment.
Pansy tried to think back to the last time she’d actually seen Percy Weasley. It had been ages, perhaps not since he’d left school. Eight years ago?
He had changed, and also had not.
He was built from the same tall, gangly blueprint as the rest of his brothers, though age had filled him out into something less like a jangling collection of elbows, more long-limbed elegance than awkward angles. He wore a midnight blue three piece wool suit and a dark tie with a conservative pattern of cream-colored dots, and his auburn hair was cropped tidily and combed meticulously into shape. He wore a pair of black horn rimmed glasses, and his angular jaw was shaved perfectly smooth. The dusting of freckles was exactly the same as she remembered, and something about the way they played in rebellious disorganization across his skin seemed like the fingerprints of nature’s defiance over all the things he had so conspicuously found himself able to control. His handsomeness was nearly pedestrian and unremarkable, but then there were added the freckles, and his mouth, a millimeter too wide, and he became imperfect in a way that elevated him into something new. You found you wanted to look at him, and Pansy realized instantly and to her absolute disgust that if she’d just met him in a bar, she’d fuck him in a heartbeat.
He sat up straight in his chair like he’d taken part in the same comportment classes that Pansy had been made to sit through for fifteen years of her own life, and as he worked, his hand moved with unhurried ease across the parchment.
The tips of his fingers were lightly stained with ink.
Without looking up, he said, “Thank you, Mrs. Guerrero.”
It was a clear dismissal, and Ines nodded and slipped out the door, shutting it behind her with a click.
Pansy stood, waiting.
After a long moment where his quill never stopped scratching against the surface of his parchment, Percy finally gestured with his free hand at one of the chairs in front of his desk.
“Please, Miss Parkinson, have a seat.”
She moved around and sat, perched lightly at the edge of the chair, and waited while he continued to write, never once looking up at her.
“You arrived late,” he said, abruptly, then set down his quill, lifted his face, and fixed her with a stare. "With a takeaway tea."
Pansy started.
His eyes were a clear, warm blue, unwavering and self-assured.
“It’s my first day,” she said. “And I haven’t worked in…” she twisted her fingers around the handle of her bag, “...well, ever.”
“So I understand.”
He blew gently on the strip of parchment to dry the ink, then carefully and slowly rolled it up, and placed it at the top of a pyramid of similarly rolled papers at the front of his desk.
“As I wasn’t able to participate in this hiring decision, Miss Parkinson, I am wholly in the dark as to what qualifications you bring to this position. I suspect none. Unfortunately for me, secretarial work doesn’t bear much resemblance to what I’ve been led to believe you’re accustomed to doing with your time, which is primarily going out to clubs, taking late lunches, and spending your parents’ money.”
Pansy narrowed her eyes.
“Am I mistaken in any respect?” he asked.
She breathed out hard, and clenched her jaw.
“And yet, here we find ourselves,” he said. He pulled up his sleeve, and glanced down at the face of a plain watch with a black leather strap. “I take my tea very hot, with one sugar, and a generous splash of milk.”
With that, he was finished with her. He pulled a fresh sheet of parchment from a stack to his left, and picked his quill up to write.
Pansy sat, blinking.
“I’ll just fix you a tea then, shall I?” she asked, and she wasn’t sorry to hear the edge of sarcasm in her own voice.
“I’ll leave you to it, Miss Parkinson.”
She huffed as she rose, and let herself out of his office.
Throwing her bag down on the desk outside his office door, she removed her half cape and hung it up on a coat tree standing nearby, and made her way to the front desk, where Ines was busily filing rolls of parchment into a large bank of square compartments, and Kath was watching as a pink paper parrot unfolded itself in front of her.
“Pardon me,” said Pansy, archly, “but it appears that he’d fancy a cup of tea.”
Ines flicked her eyes to Pansy.
“The kitchenette is just through there, dear,” said Ines, pointing to an open doorway on the opposite side of the room to Percy’s office.
In the kitchen, Pansy found a large kettle, a box of tea, a sugar bowl and a pitcher of milk with a cooling charm sitting on the neat wooden counter top.
“I take my tea very hot, with one sugar, and a generous splash of milk,” she repeated, mockingly, as she poured boiling water over the tea leaves. “Wanker.”
She made her way back across the office, carefully balancing the steaming hot cup on its saucer, and turned the handle of Percy’s door.
He was still writing away on his parchment, and she moved to his desk, set down the cup and saucer, and took a step back.
“Will that be all, Mr. Weasley?” she asked.
“‘Sir’,” he said, again without looking up.
“Excuse me?” she said.
He set down his quill, looked up, and fixed her with his warm blue gaze through the clear lenses of his glasses.
“You will refer to me as ‘Sir,’ or ‘Mr. Secretary,’ Miss Parkinson.”
She laughed.
He didn’t smile.
Pansy pursed her lips, and fought back the urge to roll her eyes.
“Alright then,” she said. “Mr. Secretary.”
He nodded slightly.
“What else can I do for you, Sir?”
“Take these over to Simmons for his signature,” he said, gesturing to a pile of rolled parchment, “and then I have an order of official robes that need picking up from Hart and Grumble’s Cleaners in Diagon Alley.”
He lifted the cup of tea, took a sip, and nodded in apparent approval.
“You want me to pick up your cleaning for you,” she asked blankly.
“Yes, Miss Parkinson, I do.”
“Oh. Well, it will be my pleasure, Sir,” she said.
She grabbed the pile of parchment, and headed out the door to find out who Simmons was.
Once she’d found him, slowly and peacefully balding and going grey at one of the desks behind a door on the opposite side of the office, acquired his signatures, and had Kath demonstrate how to send off the parchments via parachute to a clerk in another office on the second floor, she grabbed her handbag, put on her cape and headed into Diagon Alley to fetch Percy Weasley’s blasted laundry.
“You’re Secretary Weasley’s new girl?” asked the young woman who handed Pansy the garment bag full of Percy’s carefully pressed robes.
“I suppose I am,” said Pansy.
The girl actually giggled.
“Good luck with that, then,” she said. “If you ever need a good cry and a cuppa, they sell an excellent raspberry scone and clotted cream over the road at Plimshaw’s bake shop.”
Pansy stood up straight.
“I’m quite sure I’ll be able to handle him,” she said. “He’s a bloody Weasley, for Merlin's sake.”
The girl laughed again and shrugged, which filled Pansy with unease.
Pansy stepped lightly over the cobblestones on the way back to the Ministry, and delivered the clean robes to Percy’s office. He wanted her to hang them in the closet tucked into the front corner of the room, organized by degree of formality. Then, she was to organize her desk outside his office, and then fetch him a salad, a bowl of soup, and one chocolate biscuit from the Ministry cafeteria.
The second half of the day was taken up in a flurry of silently peeping intraoffice notes and flapping Ministry memos, while Pansy was given a vast sheet of parchment containing Percy’s schedule in a packed calendar grid. It turned out that you had little control over the form your bird notes took, and Pansy was amused to find that when she tapped her wand on each little slip of white paper, they turned into miniature crows, who opened their little beaks and cawed silently at her before they flew. She sent off a whole murder of them in the process of coordinating meeting times with several of the other higher ups across the floor and in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, about an upcoming piece of legislation in the Wizengamot that was set to impact public access to information regarding past criminal convictions.
At the end of the day, Pansy’s heels ached, and she found herself running through her mental list of eligible wizards, and how long it might take her to seduce a reasonable one into marriage, when a nondescript white bird landed on her desk, and flattened out into a smooth white square.
It read:
My office for end of day review.
Pansy pushed aside the stack of Ministry memos she’d been working her way through, and quietly entered Percy’s office.
He had his back to her, and was spraying the leaves of one of his plants with a glass misting bottle, and wiping them down with a cloth.
“Sit, please, Miss Parkinson,” he said.
She sat.
Without looking to her, he slowly and carefully continued to mist the leaves of his plant. Outside his window, the light in the pine trees had become diffuse and pink with an unseen sunset, and a raven perched on a maple branch opened its beak and made no sound.
“As I said before, Miss Parkinson,” he began, “your presence in this office is the result of machinations in which I had no hand.”
She shifted uncomfortably in her seat.
“And yet, mercifully, you haven’t been entirely incompetent.”
She rolled her eyes at his back.
He disappeared the bottle and cloth, and turned to face her.
“You will, of course, need to drop your cigarette habit, immediately.”
Pansy shook her head in confusion.
She hadn’t had a cigarette since that morning, as she hadn’t had the time for one at lunch. In any case, she always applied a very useful charm that quickly dissipated the smoke without a trace. As much as she would have loved to know she was sending her mother home after each visit with her wayward daughter’s bad habits sticking to her hair and clothes, she’d never said a word about it.
If Pansy’s mother couldn’t find a reason to complain, he shouldn’t have been able to tell.
“Excuse me, Sir?”
“You can drop the sarcasm as well, Miss Parkinson,” he said.
She narrowed her eyes.
“In all due respect, Mr. Secretary,” she said, sarcastically, crossing and uncrossing her legs at the ankles. “I don’t believe my habits outside of the office are any of your business.”
Percy stood and looked at her, and pushed his hands down into his pockets.
“In the main, that may be true, but I don’t allow anyone working in this office to smoke,” he said.
“How can you bloody well tell?” she said, too loudly.
“Come here,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
Pansy’s breath hitched.
He stood, unmoving, and unmoved, watching her.
Finally, as if compelled, Pansy rose from her chair, and crossed the room to stand in front of him.
He was lit from behind by that gold-pink light, and still had his hands in his pockets.
“Closer, please,” he said, and she shifted to stand nearer.
He bent his head almost imperceptibly toward her.
“You’ll permit me,” he said.
Said, not asked.
And she would. Permit him.
She nodded.
He leaned down, brought his face close to her neck, and breathed.
“Citrus,” he said, quietly, “and mango. Peony.”
He pulled back, and brought his hand close to her wrist, but stopped just before he touched it.
“May I?” he asked.
She shook her head yes again.
He wrapped his long, cool fingers around her wrist, gently, and lifted it to his nose.
He breathed in.
“Lotus, labdanum, incense,” he continued.
“Musk,” he added, and dropped his blue eyes, sharp and dispassionate, to hers.
“And, if I’m not mistaken, Muggle cigarette, probably American, to maximize the irritation to your mother,” he concluded. “The perfume is very beautiful, the tobacco is not. I won’t tolerate it in my office.”
She wasn’t sure the last time a man had the balls to try to tell her what to do. If any ever had, whoever it was sure as fucking hell wasn’t a gods damned Weasley.
What a massive cunt.
An absolute fucking wanker.
A neat-minded, ice-veined despot with his stripped down office and ticking wristwatch and perfectly ordered three piece suit.
She could feel the defiance on her tongue, scratching to get out.
She looked up at him, tall and lean and angular, dry and detached and so fucking sure he was going to get what he wanted. His fingers were still around her wrist, and Pansy wanted to pull away from his grip and strike him.
She thought back to her conversation with Blaise.
Tight leather skirt.
Strain the buttons on the shirt.
She suddenly wanted nothing more than to watch this perfectly stitched up man come unraveled at the seams, and know she’d been the one to do it.
Alright.
If Percy Weasley wanted obedience, she’d give it to him.
She dropped her chin, looked up at him through half-lidded, half-narrowed eyes, and said, very quietly, “Yes, Sir.”
His brow twitched so quickly she almost missed it.
“Good,” he said, almost inaudibly, and let go of her wrist.
He cleared his throat.
“It’s 5:00, Miss Parkinson, and you may now gather up your things and take your leave,” he said crisply. “You are expected to be at your desk and prepared to begin your work at 8 o’clock precisely, and not a moment later. If your tardiness continues, you’ll face corrective action. Is that clear?”
Pansy stared at him.
“It is, Mr. Secretary,” she said, then she spun on her heel and walked out of his door.
She Flooed home to a quiet townhouse.
She’d left her laundry on the floor, because fuck her mother.
Kicking off her heels, and pulling the black bow free from her collar, she sat down at the edge of her bed, picked up the silver cigarette case from her nightstand, and clicked it open. She pulled out a cigarette, pressed it between her lips, flicked the flint of the lighter, and brought the flame towards her mouth.
Yes, Sir.
Good.
She felt a shiver wind up her spine.
Her hand wavered, then she clicked the lighter closed with an angry snap, and pulled the unlit cigarette from her lips.
She sat for a long while, then stood, tossed the cigarette into the bin next to her bed, straightened her collar, and slipped her feet back into her heels. She’d need something for the nicotine withdrawals, and the Apothecary she preferred would be closing in an hour or so.
As she made her way down the sidewalk of Diagon Alley, bag over her shoulder, she found that entirely against her will, her lips had pulled into a smile.