Such Sweet Sorrow

Twenty-Two

Draco Malfoy

The slamming of the door shook the wall behind my bed enough to catch my attention. Why the fuck did she slam the door that hard?

I sat still in the silence for a second, trying to listen in for her voice, or possibly another voice, which I was hoping I did not hear. 

There was silence for a few moments, and then I heard the unmistakable hiccup of a sob, and then another, and then another. 

My immediately instinct was to get up. Go to her. See what was wrong. 

Did someone hurt her? Is she okay? What happened? Did Diggory do something to her? I swear to Salazar--

But then again, it wasn't my place to comfort her, was it? Since when did I have the urge to comfort people at all? I didn't. That really wasn't my thing. 

But there was something about hearing her cry that made me feel unsettled. Something about the pure heartbreak in her sobs that made even me feel something. Maybe is was sympathy. Maybe it was curiosity. Maybe it was the desire to find out to had made her cry like that and knock their teeth out. 

Her cries bled through the walls, and my instincts became too strong to ignore. My feet were on the floor and I was half way to the door before I even comprehended the decision I had made. I muttered the stupid password as quickly as I could and threw the door open to see her sobbing on the floor just a few feet in front of the door she had slammed about a minute ago. 

"What happened?" I asked immediately, crouching down next to her, reaching out to touch her but flinching my hands back to myself. 

She's not mine to touch. 

There was no way for her to get a word out. I could see her shaking, and I recognized a panic attack when I saw one. They were something I had become familiar with beginning the summer between 5th and 6th year. As soon as I took the mark, the attacks became a part of my daily routine. They were all consuming and pure torture to go through. 

"Eloise, tell me what happened." I urged, not being able to stop the feeling of protection I had when it came to her for some asinine reason. 

"C-Cedric--" she stuttered through her tears, "I said...n-no and he...s-started...y-yelling--" 

White hot rage immediately clouded my brain, and once I saw the forming hues of purple and red on her neck, I decided that seeing Diggory's blood running down my first would be worth the lifelong stay in Azkaban. 

"You're having a panic attack." I tried to keep my voice calm, for her sake, but on the inside, I had already thought of at least 5 different ways to make that Hufflepuff bleed, "I know this is cliche as hell but you need to force yourself to take a full breath." 

Her breathing was choppy and fast, on the brink of hyperventilation from what I could hear. 

Her arms still shook and her breathing wasn't changing. Telling someone to breathe when they were clearly struggling to was one of my biggest fucking pet peeves. No shit, I need to breathe. Thanks for the fucking obvious. But it was the only thing I could do while still maintaining the whole no contact thing. 

When these panic attacks originally started, I didn't know what they were. I would just get in my own head and start to spiral until I started to shake uncontrollably, and my chest would hurt due to the mixture of a pounding heart and constricted lungs. It would take me almost an hour to return my breathing back to normal, and after that, I was basically useless for the rest of the day. It drained everything from me. 

I dealt with them on my own, until my mother caught me in the midst of one. She would hug me close to her, even with my frame being much too large for her to hold me like she did when I was a child, and just that simple contact would calm me down in a matter of minutes. It was the only time I was allowed to be vulnerable, and she knew just how to help me every time.