She was considering trimming it back though. Now that she had all this hair, she wasn’t sure what to do with it. She’d daydreamed about having hair this long as a little girl, but her mother had refused to let her grow it more then half-way down her back.
When had her mother stopped calling her pretty? All mothers called their daughters pretty when they were young, but Pansy had the feeling no mother could say it forever unless the girl actually was pretty.
It wasn’t that Pansy thought of herself as ugly, exactly. In any case, she knew for sure that she wasn’t the ugliest girl in the dorm; that honour went to Millicent. She might even be called cute, if one wanted. But she felt her looks a lot when there was a beauty in the dorm.
Morag MacDougal. Daughter of a Gryffindor and a Zabini, with a delicate face, which included her mother's family's most famous features, and hair to die for. When had she suddenly become so gorgeous anyway? Pansy was certain she hadn’t been a couple of years ago. Every boy in Slytherin had noticed her, and several of the ones in Ravenclaw too.
It wasn’t that Pansy was really afraid of losing Draco to Morag, if only because her father had been a Gryffindor and Malfoys were very fussy about their women. But she wanted to kill whenever she caught Draco staring at her.
She had a far plainer twin sister. But Shannon MacDougal was in Ravenclaw. Pansy wished that Morag was in Ravenclaw. Some might say beautiful girls not in Slytherin had a double advantage over less pretty girls in Slytherin when it came to three-fourths of the school’s male population, but Pansy wasn’t interested in that three-fourths. In fact, she’d never had much interest in anyone besides Draco. It wasn’t that she was undyingly in love with him or anything; she merely didn’t find it worth it to pay attention to anyone else.
Come to think of it, she wasn’t sure why she had taken such an interest in Draco in the first place. She’d been on friendly terms with him since their first year, flirted with him through their third, and been some sort of girlfriend to him since their fourth, though he’d never called her that. Nor had she called him her boyfriend. But why him? She didn’t know. Or at least didn’t remember anymore. All she knew was that she wanted him now, and she didn’t want anyone else.
He probably thought it was because he was popular. Which was ridiculous, simply because he wasn't. Not as popular as he thought he was, anyway. Draco could be blind in very strange ways, and he had made his belief clear that most of his housemates would become Death Eaters, when in fact only a minority were even considering it.
Not that they told her things, but the views of the Slytherin seventh-years, save one, were all obvious to Pansy. First off, the Zabinis liked to call themselves “progressive,” so that took Morag off the Dark Lord’s side. Blaise and his mother objected to this position on the rest of the family's part, but she had the feeling they viewed themselves above the fight, and combine that with his attachment to Morag and he was out too. Theodore Nott's parents might be Death Eaters, but he had a mind of his own, one that didn't want to follow in their footsteps; his chances of joining might have been bigger if they'd been against it. The Bulstrode’s didn’t hold with that sort of thing, and Millicent didn’t even care. Not enough to risk her life for it, anyway. Tracey Davis was a half-blood, which was enough to rule her out. Which made one wonder what she was doing in Slytherin, but after seven years of sharing a dorm with her Pansy knew she otherwise fit the house description a bit too well.
The only one who might join Draco and his two minions was Daphne Greengrass. It was impossible to tell what she’d do. So she should still be ruled as just as likely not to become a Death Eater, if not more. It was so strange to Pansy. She had called Daphne her best friend for years. Of course she hadn’t really been; she was merely second-in-command of their group, but to still in the end know nothing about her was a little extreme.
Pansy wondered what Draco expected of her. She didn’t think he would insist on her being a Death Eater. He might even be inclined to think her place in the home, sitting around the drawing room looking pretty for when her husband came home. His mother wore a Mark, of course, but he'd given the strong impression that she wasn't very active. If this was what was to be expected of her, Pansy would try not to mind, and gratefully so, for she most emphatically did not want to become a Death Eater.
And while she’d never tell him, she didn’t want Draco to become a Death Eater either. Not because she thought the Dark Lord was wrong in his intentions, though sometimes she wondered if killing Mudbloods was going a little far, but because of the risks it would mean. He laughed them off with the idea of giving the excuse of being under the Imperius Curse, but she was convinced that if it came down to a duel with an Auror, Draco was likely to be killed before he could give any explanation. This war was going to be more brutal then the last one, so certainly the Aurors were going to kill, just like they did before.
And he would die for what? Some wizard who had been defeated by a mere baby, and who didn’t care about Mudbloods anyway, but only about power? Because Pansy was dead certain this was the case. It always was in the case of powerful people, whatever philosophy they declared. It had been in the case of the former Minister Cornelius Fudge and his little house-elf Umbridge, and if Albus Dumbledore was half as powerful as he was said to be, it had to be the case for him too.
Pansy herself knew the lure of power, and of possessing people, because she knew about her own wishes. She had held power over most of the girls of Slytherin, and she had enjoyed it, even if sometimes she had wondered if it was worth always having to be on edge, since she always knew that her friends weren’t really her friends and would love to topple her and climb to the top. But that power was gone now, her association with Draco had taken its toll, her group had dissolved, and now she had no friends, real or otherwise. Except maybe him. The one person whom she still maybe had any power over.
She was jealous, she knew. Once Draco took the Dark Mark, he wasn’t really hers anymore, but he belonged to the Dark Lord, and she just got what was left of him. But even now she was getting what was left of him. The person who really owned him was his father.
Lucius Malfoy. Pansy could never tell Draco how much she hated him. She didn’t think he cared for his son at all, only for his own skin and his vendetta against Mudbloods, in which he was a coward too. Her own greed played a part in her designs on Draco, true, but at least she truly cared about what happened to him.
All the girls in Slytherin probably thought this about someone or other, Pansy knew. She knew she might be deceiving herself. But what was the use of pondering that? One had to cling to someone or she risked losing her heart. It wasn’t just the girls who clung either; the most obvious case amoung the boys was Blaise and his cousin, but the only one really attached to noone was Theodore. Pansy admired and envied him that. She knew Draco did likewise, and in fact, she thought any of them who didn’t was a fool.
If Lucius Malfoy was to die tomorrow, what would Draco do? Would she have him? Or would his father have him even as a ghost, if only to pass on to the Dark Lord? She wished she could think that impossible, because then she could hope for his death, but instead she thought it probable.
And yet here she was, trying to decide how long he would like her hair. Would he go to all that trouble for her? For his father, maybe.
Maybe she should leave it as it was. She liked that way. Besides, he might. Or he might not care. Just leave it to her.
Was that a tear in her eye? “It’s not,” she said to her reflection. Angrily she swiped her wand across her hair. Half of it fell off, leaving the rest hanging neatly around her shoulders. It would do. “Never really expected more," she muttered to herself. "That’s just not the way we are raised.”
She turned away from the mirror just in time to see Daphne come in, Morag with her. At some point Morag had become Daphne’s shadow when she wasn’t Blaise’s. Millicent and Tracy had gone their own ways after the breaking up their circle.
“Making yourself pretty,” Daphne laughed scornfully. “For Malfoy, I assume.”
“Think what you want,” Pansy shot back, and with a flounce of her robes, she swept out of the dorm, and went down the stairs in search of Draco.