27 - panville (lets pretend its after their wedding) (lets also pretend this isnt me trying to extend bright objects epilogue in every way I can) (but just because you are the real queen of this ship)
Drabble #27: “I’m pregnant.”
by PacificRimbaud
Pairing: Pansy Parkinson x Neville Longbottom
Tags: WWII AU, unplanned pregnancy, hospital, brief mentions of war
Wiltshire, May 1944
“I’ve had a letter.”
Lavender’s voice dipped to a conspiratorial low, as though a letter was a secret Pansy both had an interest in and ought to be party to.
“From which one?”
Pansy shut off all attention to Lavender and inspected the label on a bottle of morphine tablets. Finding it sound, she filed it away in the back of the second shelf from the top in the medicine cabinet, and made a sharp graphite tick on the inventory form.
“Lieutenant McLaggen. The fellow from Dunfermline. Oh, thank you.” Lavender received a wrapped bundle from one of the laundry girls, and set it down on the center of the table on the opposite side of the room. “He’s going to be in London next month, and wants me to come over on the train.”
Ticking at her form, Pansy fitted away a third vial, made another tick, and then filed a fourth in a martial row moving forward in the cabinet.
“You need to be careful with all that,” she said.
“Oh, I am.” Lavender checked the tag on the laundry. “I might seem silly, but I’m not daft.”
Pansy scraped her pencil so hard against her form that it tore a small hole in the page.
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“You alright?” Lavender asked, hand paused at the task of untucking the edges of the bundle.
“I’m fine.”
Lavender laid out the edges of the cloth wrapping, removed a stack of cloth face masks, and set them on the shelf in front of her. “It’s only you look a bit flushed, Pans.”
Pansy tightened the aperture of her attention down to a ruthless diameter, wide enough for nothing beyond the minute detail of dates printed on pasted labels and the tick of her freshly sharpened pencil.
Once the old bottles were secured at the front of the shelf and the new ones filed behind them, Pansy closed the cabinet doors and brushed her hands against the cotton of her pinafore.
“I’m going to get some air,” she said, her shoulder nearly glancing against Lavender’s on her way out the door.
“Alright, love,” Lavender called after her. “I’ll tell you about the letter I’ve had from Second Lieutenant Creevey when you’ve come back.”
For a long while, Pansy had thought of the hospital as a cheap robe hung on the exalted bones of Thornwood Abbey. The war would end, and it would fall away as immaterial and disposable as the wrapping on a parcel.
No stain, no echo, no vibration of its requisition would be left behind.
It would be her sanctuary once again, and only hers, free to take her tea in solitary silence by the large window in the drawing room, watching the mallards dabble in the lake.
As it was, the drawing room was filled with men who sent up prayers to God if they woke with a headache from the anesthetic.
Day by day, Pansy felt the memory of her home drain away, replaced as it needed to be by the urgent and essential now.
She passed Daphne in the hall outside the room where her servants used to eat their dinner. She intended to keep up her pace and offer nothing beyond a tip of her head, but Daphne slipped her hand into the crook of Pansy’s elbow.
“Your captain is looking for you,” she said quietly. “I’ve tried to deflect him, but I think he’s gone to Pomfrey already and knows you’re here.”
A voltaic shimmer traveled down the surface of Pansy’s skin and back up again.
“Fucking hell.”
Pansy turned around and stalked off in the other direction, abandoning the idea of a turn around the rose garden.
She nearly escaped to the nurse’s dormitory that was once her own, solitary boudoir.
But naturally he recalled the narrow service stairs in the east wing, and opened the door to descend just as she arrived at the top.
“Pansy,” he said, almost breathless with a sort of half-panic. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“Neville.”
He held his hat at his side, pinched between his spare, muscled fingers.
His hair was never fully tamed, and the impacts of having put his hat on his head and then removing it again made themselves clear.
Pansy flattened herself against the wall of the confining stairwell, grasping her own forearms in her palms behind her back.
“Well?” she asked. She pursed her lips and lifted her chin, fluidly performing the impatience and imperious nonchalance that constituted the entirety of her personality as far as most people were concerned.
“I’m leaving.” He breathed in, an intake of air meant to fortify and compose. “Today. Just now, actually.”
His dark eyes scanned her own, but her vision caught on the pink line of scar tissue running from below his left ear, over his cheekbone, through the outside third of his left eyebrow, then turning back to end in a jagged half circle at the hairline at his left temple.
The scar and a Victoria Cross he kept folded in a handkerchief at the back of his top bureau drawer were the only mementos he had been given for a wound that had done everything in its power to end his life.
The desire to trace it with her fingertips flooded her with so much force that she pinched the skin of both her arms hard enough with her fingernails that she sucked in a breath through her nose.
“I wish you all the luck, then, Captain,” she said, leaning hard into the clipped tones of her breeding to mask the quaver in her throat.
“Pansy, please.”
She might have persisted—would have persisted—had he been any other man, but his hand was at her hip, and then his elbow was crooked behind her nape, and she was in his arms, sighing against the mouth that had been mercifully spared of injury for her own selfish, covetous, unappeasable use.
“I’m going to write to you,” he muttered against her jaw.
“I told you. I won’t read them.”
“I don’t care.”
Pansy took his hand in hers, and folded it over her breast.
She might have known better. Should have known better.
He made her mindless with want.
His hand closed hard, in the way that she liked best, over her too-tender breast, and she gasped with the pain of it.
He pulled back instantly, skin flushed and lips heated for her, and stared at her with an expression of hurt and confusion that she hated, instantly and forever.
“Pans, I’m so sorry. I—”
She prayed, earnestly, fervently, for his stupidity.
But there was only one time she’d known him to be a fool.
His thinking was both careful and thorough, and after a moment his skin paled.
“You’ve been avoiding me for a week,” he said.
She wouldn’t tell him.
She refused.
He would go, and meet the enemy at the door with nothing to remind him of her except the knickers she’d folded into his pocket on the afternoon he’d first taken her, breathless, his scar still red, against the grass bordering the rushes at the edge of the lake.
He would go, and there he would be stupid, beating back disaster with the hard brick of his self-sacrificial love.
Maybe he would come back to find her Miss Parkinson of Thornwood Abbey, sitting in her drawing room with a cup of tea.
Maybe he would come back to find her another man’s wife.
Maybe he would come back with no desire to find her anywhere.
Maybe he wouldn’t come back at all.
“Pansy.”
She was hard as flint.
She was so soft.
She could have told him the hour of the disaster with devastating precision.
Lying on her back, a prohibited object in his bed, she’d been lost with him moving in her, bleary eyes half closed, muting her voice against the sweat at his shoulder, heels at the small of his back holding him tight to her as she gasped out that she loved him.
She had hoped he hadn’t heard, but outside the borders of her own unbearable arc of sensation, she was aware that he’d finished inside her.
If she’d moved immediately after, it might have been possible to have done something, but she couldn’t care about anything beyond how it felt to be held in his arms.
In the dreary dark of the stairs, he studied her with dogged and patient intelligence.
And then his fingertips stroked down her belly, and flexed over the secret below.
He moved quickly then, ducking down and tossing her over his shoulder, and marching with singular purpose up the stairs to the second floor.
Below her, the familiar carpet of her ancestral hall streaked away from the backs of his heels.
He finally stopped at the mahogany door to what was once the least-offered guest bedroom in the east wing, and pushed it open with startling force.
He set her down on her feet in the middle of the room, and tightened one of his long arms around her waist.
The chaplain sat at his desk ramrod straight, auburn hair slicked into an adamant wave over his forehead and spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose. He cradled a pen in his hand, poised over a sheet of paper.
“Captain Longbottom. Nurse Parkinson,” he said, mannerly and terse. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I’m going to need you to marry us, Father Weasley,” said Neville. “Straight away.”
Father Weasley laid his pen down in a strict perpendicular to his page, and folded his hands together at the edge of his desk.
“I’m afraid you’ll need to submit the proper paperwork. Then Major Weasley will have to approve. He’s on leave in Devonshire at the moment,” he said, shifting his pen a millimetre to the right, “and isn’t expected to return until Tuesday.”
“Get Brigadier General Moody to sign off on it. He’s downstairs in the wards.” Neville’s hand tightened on Pansy’s waist. “I’m...that is so say we’re—”
He turned to Pansy, pink-cheeked, eyes shining, and smiled with half his mouth like an absolute clot.
Pansy couldn’t bear to look at him. Instead she stared hard at Father Weasley until he puffed a beleaguered breath through his nostrils.
He looked at the face of his wristwatch, then drew open a drawer at the side of his desk, and pulled out a blank form.
“You’ll need a witness.”
Neville released Pansy’s waist, stalked to the door and stuck his head out.
“Malfoy,” he called out. “You’re needed.”
Half a minute later, Captain Malfoy strolled through the door entirely unbothered, half-eaten apple in hand.
“Hullo. What’s going on then?” he asked.
“Give me your ring,” said Neville.
Malfoy looked down at the emerald ring on his little finger.
“What do you want my ring for, Longbottom? Go and get one of your own.” He looked Pansy up and down. “Where’s your wee cap gone, Pans?” He took an enormous bite of his apple. “I shouldn’t think the priest has it.”
“Father Weasley’s marrying us just now,” said Neville. “You’re needed as witness.”
Malfoy laughed. “What? Right now? What’s the bloody great rush?”
“I’m pregnant, idiot,” said Pansy.
Malfoy’s eyes widened. “Well that’s extremely naughty of you.”
With an effort, he pulled the ring off his finger and tossed it to Neville.
“You’d better have something a fair sight better than that in your vaults, Longbottom. I hope you’re aware that our Pans has champagne taste.”
Pansy tucked her hair over her ear. “Fuck off, Draco.”
While Father Weasley scribed at the form, Pansy tucked her hand in Neville’s, and turned to face him.
“I’m going to write to you,” he said quietly, rolling Draco’s ring in his fingers. “Constantly. I don’t care whether you read them.”
For two weeks, Pansy had watched the mirror with mounting terror.
She’d seen her soft, glassy eyes. Her swelling breasts. The heat rising visibly at the surface of her skin.
Fatigued and faint, nauseated and utterly sick with love and longing, she shifted to fill the open geometry of Neville’s body.
“Normally we’d get two days, Pans, but we’re...I can’t—”
She pulled up on her toes, and his arms tightened around her, lifting her nearly off the floor and into the warm space he kept reserved for her at the side of his neck.
“Were you going to tell me?” he whispered hoarsely.
“You can’t worry,” she muttered against his pulse. “You’re not allowed.”
“I’m going to use every last piece of paper I’m given.” He pressed his face into her hair. “I don’t care if you read a single one.”
Pansy breathed him in, using every sense to press him hard into the soft wax of her memory. “I’m going to read them all.”
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