mirror // pansy parkinson

nine

- third person's point of view -

Carter sank into a couch, feeling tired. He noticed Winona was at the main room too but didn't say a word.

Winona, who was sitting across him, lowered her magazine to take a good look at the blonde. She smirked. 'Tired of looking at a pretty girl for too long?'

Carter glared at her. 'Shut up.' He buried his head in his hands.

Winona sighed as she put down her magazine on the coffee table near her. She leaned over to him slightly. 'You'll end up hurting yourself.'

He lifted his head. 'I know.'

'And you just love hurting yourself.'

Winona and Carter known each other for ten years. Winona considered him as her brother and she loves him very much. Now that she saw that Carter had a crush on a girl with a rare disease, she couldn't bear to see him getting head over heels with the girl he couldn't spend his whole life with.

Carter looked at her dead in the eye. 'Win, it's not my fault I fell for her. It's not my goddamn fault, it's my heart! I didn't want to love her, Winona, but I couldn't resist it. I do love her a lot. I tried not to at first but it's torturing.'

Winona shrank in her chair.

'She nearly got herself into West Wing,' said Carter in a more calm tone. 'I stopped her.'

Winona crumpled the magazine in her hand. 'This is utter shit.'

'She was lost-'

'No, I don't mean her. I mean that your mother not allowing her or any other patients before her to know they'll eventually to die is utter shit.'

Carter stared at her then weakly said, 'maybe it prevents them from dying faster-'

'Dying faster or slower, they'll still die sooner or later,' Winona said harshly. 'You know, you're not the only one that cares for Pansy.'

He raised his eyebrows. 'I thought you dislike her.'

'Are you mad? I never hated anyone who comes in here. I entirely put the blame on me when all of them died. Those patients...they all had false hopes. At least, well, if we say what's going to happen to the patients, they would spend their last times with things they wanted.'

She paused before adding, 'Besides, Pansy's an angel.'

Carter was glad to hear that. 'She told me she had done horrid things in Hogwarts School. I couldn't bring myself to believe it.'

'I can't either.'

Both of them were silent for a moment before Carter brought up another topic that Winona despise.

'How's Poppy?'

Winona gritted her teeth. Thinking about her sister sickened her. 'I don't want to talk about her.'

'Pansy is a good lesson for you, ' Carter carried on hastily. 'Don't let yourself regret when it's too late.'

'What late? Am I the one wrong now? She is the one that should apologise and not me.'

'She won't make a move so-'

'And I won't make a move too, if that's the case!'

'You don't get it-'

'You don't know anything about my past-'

'As a matter of fact, Winona Pomfrey, I do.'

'But,' Winona raised her voice, 'it's none of your business.'

'My love life is none of your business too, then,' Carter said.

'I don't want you to get hurt!'

'And I don't want you to regret.'

There was a silent staring contest between the two. Winona broke the eye contact by standing up, tossed the crumpled magazine at Carter and stormed away.

Carter looked at her angry retreating figure then lifted his head to look at Greta's door a level high.

If Greta told Pansy what really was happening to her, he wondered how she would take it.

Nah. Greta wouldn't.

The door of her office opened and he saw Pansy grumpily stalked out. Even with a frown on her pale face, she looked astounding. Carter leaped to his feet and met her on the stairs.

'How's...things?' Good lord, Carter. That was lame.

'Ridiculous. That was utterly ridiculous.'

'Did she tell you..?'

'What my disease is? Yeah. Apparently I have a disease that its name hasn't been chosen yet. A diseases that practically I inherited from someone in my family.'

Her voice was starting to get shakier and shakier.

'But only one person of his or her descendant get it. But it's not like a blood curse, she said, so I guess-'

'Pansy-'

'I mean that's fine right, she said I still have hope to live of I'm fully cured here.'

Carter blinked. 'She...said that?'

'Yeah. At least that's reassuring.'

'That's...good. That's good.'

'I know,' Pansy said, fixing her glasses. 'Anyways, I think of lying down to take a nap. See ya.'

She trudged up the stairs into her room. She firmly shut her door.

Carter leaned against the railings before heading to his mother's office to have a talk.

What he didn't see, was that Pansy silently opened her bedroom door and stalked off towards the West Wing.