Pansy's estate becomes absolute anarchy within hours. The location is remote, and Pansy has her floo on lock down so it's difficult for most witches and wizards to get here. One person gets stuck inside the floo after deciding to try their luck on getting inside her home, and I convince Pansy to send a letter to Harry rather than kill the intruder herself. Harry takes care of the problem, a disgruntled woman who lets me know all of the terrible things that Draco did to her child as if I actually remember sleeping with the man who did them, or as if I condone them now because I had sex with him while we were fifteen, before the war happened at all.

Harry has the estate disconnected from the Floo network within an hour, and there is an anti-apparition jinx and multiple wards on the property to prevent people from getting over the fence. Pansy notes that the apparation jinx prevents her from apparating onto her own grass. The porch is fine, but not a single step further. She can still move around the inside of her estate easily. I don't know why she is complaining. It isn't like she would want to take a stroll through the hedges anyway.

I'm unbothered by the apparation. It isn't something I would ever do again, willingly. I cannot say the same for the two protestors who have to be rushed to the hospital from disastrous splinches. After that everyone else seems to decide not to try anymore.

I also spend an hour with Harry, where lets me know that I am going to be grilled by the aurors soon. They want to make sure I don't know Draco's whereabouts. No one is to use Veritaserum or legilimency on me due to the fragility of my memory as it is. It takes some time to reassure him that I'm not going to give him up before he lets me return to the drawing room with Pansy. As he apparates out, Pansy glares at me.

"Don't they have better things to do?" Pansy asks, gesturing toward the front gate. "There are nine days until Christmas. Their children will be getting off the Hogwarts express tomorrow. Certainly, the ministry needs to solve this unemployment problem."

"Well, the protestors need to make sure I don't break into their houses and torture their sleeping children," I try to be funny, but it is dry. I would be worried too if I were these parents, I guess. "Or perhaps they are worried that I'm going to seduce their husbands and sons with my wild ways."

"Please, half of these people were okay to turn the blind eye to the mass capture and execution of muggle-borns, you give them too much credit," Pansy says.

It is the first time she has called people like me muggle-borns, rather than calling us mudbloods. I'm almost startled, for a second.

"The other half?" I ask. "Who are those protestors?'

"A mix of idiots," she says. "Muggle-borns and blood traitors with misdirected anger, and people who actually helped the Death Eaters but are clever enough not to admit it."

"You're quick to judge other people, knowing you also helped to torture and kill people like me," I add, stepping closer to the window. I can see a bit of a crowd outside of the fence.

It may be close to Christmas, but without a war happening around us, people have time to fight different battles. Unfortunately, protesting my existence is their newest crusade.

"The thing is, I know I'm nasty," Pansy shrugs. "There are a lot of qualities in people I hate. Stupidity, sentimentality, lovey-dovey expressions of feeling. You should know I also hate people who lie to themselves about being a good person. You and I know that we are smart and mean. They are stupid enough to believe that they are smart and good."

"I don't know how you can be both smart and good," I admit. It's not accusatory. It's a question. I want to be both smart and good, but I don't know how.

"You can kind of do both," Pansy shrugs. She approaches the window, staring out at the same people as me. "You can pick two of the three. You can be smart, good, or alive. There are only three people who I hate to admit managed to stay smart, good, and alive, and they all have Chocolate Frogs, patting them on the back for toppling Voldemort."

These three people are immediately clear to me. It's strange to hear Pansy admit that Ron, Hermione, and Harry are smart. Draco was always keen to call them unintelligent, especially Ron. I will admit, winning the war the way they did, being smart, good, and alive is necessary, if incredibly difficult.

After several hours, I am starting to lose it. I need to get out of here. Shortly after midnight, the protestors are gone. Pansy sends an owl to Harry to get the floo reattached and asks him to have it unattached in the morning.

"You're planning on escaping in the middle of the night?" I joke.

"You are, I bet," Pansy says. "You seem to get cooped up easily, and I'd rather you use the floo then try to escape on foot."

"Fair."

We continue to stay in the sitting room, sharing a bottle of Ogden's in silence, with Pansy checking every twenty minutes on the floo. It takes just over an hour for it to work again.

"Can you tell me where you are going?" she asks, crossing her arms. "I'd rather not chase you down later."

"Terry Boot's place in Derry," I say. "I want to apologize for sending the press after him."

Pansy groans, "Turner, do not get sentimental on me."

"It's about not burning bridges," I say, to cover up that it is simply about being kind.

All Pansy can do is roll her eyes.

From there, I use the floo to get to Terry's home. The feeling of travelling, though it is farther, is less miserable this time. The discomfort is familiar, and I've felt worse. When I get to his floo, I'm trapped inside once more. This time, I don't open my mouth to scream or even open my eyes. I flourish my wand to make a loud bang.

The floo gets unlocked. I duck my head to stumble out. I sit on the ground, knocking the butt of my palm against my temple to try to ease the pain.

"Marty," Terry says. "You always seem to come in the middle of the night."

"I wanted to apologize for this mess," I tell him. "I didn't want to drag you into it."

Terry shrugs, "I sort of knew what I was getting into."

Once I'm able to properly open my eyes, I get up. He uses his wand to clean most of the soot on me. I sit down on his sofa. On the coffee table, there are half a dozen letters.

"These are all the notes I've gotten that aren't howlers," he says. "I'm giving them to Harry tomorrow, to investigate. He told me that you were with him before you came to me. I'm going to give an interview to The Prophet tomorrow, to let them know I lied to protect you from Blaise, and that I had no idea about your relationship with Draco."

"You have my full blessing," I tell him.

"Yeah," he says. "Harry told me about the protests at Pansy Parkinson's estate. I'd give the interview without your blessing to avoid that mess, and I'd only feel a little bit badly about it."

I nod since it's extremely fair. He is in pajamas. I suppose it is late. I'm a bit drunk. Unfortunately, I make a lot of poor, terrible, no-good decisions. I've dragged Terry into this mess even though all he did was help me. At least for now, I've kept the others out of the press.

"Was I a skank like everyone is saying?" I ask.

Terry moves to the sofa next to me. He sits down, "you're drunk. I can let you sleep in my office again."

"Everyone seems to think I am some evil seductress," I point out, shaking my head. "Are they right about our relationship? How do they know where we first had sex?"

"They don't," Terry says. "We didn't have sex in the astronomy tower. That's a bit cliché. I can tell you where we did, if you'd like, but I don't think that's going to help. I'm not going to coddle you, and also I really think you should sober up before you say or do anything else."

Knowing that they were wrong about one thing is a fraction of enough, "you know, maybe I am evil. What kind of person is willing to sleep with someone who was so cruel to me and people like me? He tortured children!"

Terry sighs. I lean my head on his shoulder, and he doesn't seem to mind. It's not romantic. He isn't Draco. All of this suffering of everyone else just so that I would properly know him, and this is what I have as a reward; I don't have my memories and I don't know where he is. It's a terrible fate. It's a terrible love.

"I don't want to engage in this conversation when your drunk," Terry says. "It's not going to be productive for you."

"I fell in love with someone who tortured children," I repeat. "I fell in love with him twice."

"You and I both know that it's at least a bit more complicated than that," Terry says. "He is a war criminal and I know that if he was a muggle he wouldn't go to prison for war crimes because he did all of them before he was eighteen, but this is the wizarding world. Things are different here. The morality doesn't lay out one to one. I know that's hard for you to understand, but it's true."

I don't care about the mapping. All of this is so fucked up. I'm so fucked up. I'm irreparable in a way that has nothing to do with the memory loss or the magical curses.

"I've fucked up a bunch of people's lives for memories that aren't even good," I shake my head. "I'm the villain."

The books that Draco gave me that I gave him originally had villains, even if these villains were broadly representative of the novels' themes. Draco and I are the bad guys.

"Most people in history aren't heroes or villains. It's a bit more complex. If you remember, Michael Corner helped save a child from torture and thinks doing so was selfish. You can't win," Terry disagrees.

"He did a good thing for a bad reason," I say.

"Draco did a lot of bad things for mediocre reasons," Terry shrugs. "At the end of the day, he managed to keep you as safe as he could for as long as he could. Certainly, we could ask for more, but it's a start, isn't it? How much can you really expect from someone when they are barely seventeen?"

"Yeah, well you can't be smart, good, and alive," I say to Terry. "Draco and I are both smart, and we are both alive."

Terry doesn't have much to say to that. The fire, ignited by my journey through the floo, crackles in front of us. I feel sick, and not from the liquor. I am sick of myself.

"You said you and Draco are alive and smart, and therefore you can't be good?" he says. "I can't speak for him, but if I recall, I'm pretty sure you're actually dead."

I hate to admit it, but he's right. I am actually dead.

~~~~~ 

It's not an update day, I know, but listen. Just listen. I listened to ceilings by Lizzy McAlpine, and I needed everyone to know that is Draco's song for so much of this book. Like, he's with Jane and imagining she is Marty. It's like, too accurate. Then, I listened to doomsday, and that is definitely from Marty's perspecive while she is in hiding during what should have been their seventh year at Hogwarts.

Do you have any songs that remind you of this book, or these characters? I have a spotify playlist under the username curiosityanddreams about Banality. Who knows. If you go there, you might get a title drop for something else with Draco and Jane/Marty.