Tainted Love

The Engagement

IRIS

Mr. and Mrs. Parkinson of Alresford, Hampshire, are pleased to announce that their beloved daughter, Pansy Eloise Parkinson, is engaged to be married to Blaise Alexander Zabini. More details and dates to follow. We invite you to send your congratulations to the happy couple. Please address all correspondence to: Mr. and Mrs. Blaise Zabini, Doberon Hall Queens Drive, London, England. We request the use of highly trained owls only for the convenience of the handlers on grounds.

There was no real point to reading it again. Iris had already looked it over a dozen times, inadvertently memorized Pansy's address. For some reason, having the paper in front of her made the whole situation seem more manageable, less dire.

There was no way less than a hundred words should be able to peel through the house the way they had. The perfect cursive, painstaking curls on all the L's - it seemed too robotic, too sensationalized, to be real.

As soon as she put the letter down, though, it seemed very real indeed.

She had work in less than half an hour and she had yet to pack her bag or start sorting through the piles of parchment she had left out over their vacation. It was her first day back at work, only her second day back at home, and she thought she might rather melt into the wall and stay there forever than talk to Daisy.

She might rather do that than talk to anyone.

Besides Draco. But he was in the basement. He had been in the basement for the majority of the time they had been back - ever since the letter. Iris supposed that it had been less than a day since they had returned. It wasn't as if he had been avoiding her for weeks. But still.

His presence in the kitchen, in her life, had been replaced by the presence of a pile of symmetrically ripped envelopes. They hadn't even been home ten minutes before he disappeared.

It felt like a plane crash in her body.

She had never really felt a high like Paris before. Slipping in and out of cabs and alleys, between streetlights and wandlights and the big red windmill of the Moulin Rouge. He looked at pictures of fucking fruit with her, he held her head in his hands and she felt his chest buzz when he whispered something about wildfire to her, a quote he had picked out and assigned to her body.

Now he was a shadow in their house, in and out of their bed so early - so late - that she couldn't grasp hold of him. Back in the basement before the sun could even hope to rise this morning, relentlessly working on something Iris didn't understand.

Or maybe he wasn't working at all. Maybe he was standing down there, staring at the wall, murmuring lines of the letter to himself the same way Iris was doing now. Mr. and Mrs. Parkinson of Alresford, Hampshire, are pleased to announce...

Shit. She'd be late. She crossed the room quickly, grabbing handfuls of parchment and stuffing them in her bag. They were painstakingly organized but she was messing them all up. She held one wrong and it cut her hand in the space between her thumb and forefinger.

Had Pansy sent them the same letter she sent everyone else? It was her mother's signature but Iris couldn't help but believe that they were Pansy's words.

Maybe she had made her mother write in larger cursive for Draco, or include some salacious detail that had been left out of all the others. Just to rub it in, just to rip him open.

But it wasn't Pansy's fault that Draco had withdrawn from her. It was just his.

The lifts were stale and the atrium had lost its charm. Iris didn't bother scanning the room for anyone she knew. She didn't want to talk. The thought felt ugly in her brain. She hadn't seen Theo and Sebastian and Tracey for over a week - she should be happy to see them.