BETWEEN REVENGE AND LOVE

46

Tuesday 08/10/1995

I feel gross.

It's not only the cold that has seeped through my bones, the stuffy air and my empty stomach are also to blame for it.

The damp rooms' smell isn't helping me with my well-being either. The air feels far too thick to breathe and smells of an overwhelming mixture of various herbs. Like it always does in here. Snape dries them bunched up hanging from the ceiling, where I can watch them dangle in the draught every time I'm here for Potions lessons. 

Normally they don't bother me at all. Today, that's different, they do bother me, so much I wish the stares I shoot them could light them on fire and burn them to dust.

For me, it feels like a lot of time has passed, dead-boring ages. But there is something, in midst of all the clutter on Snape's large desk, that insists on proving me wrong.

An hourglass it is, its dark fine greyish sand streaming ever so elegantly and silky as water yet sluggishly through its enclosure. Generously valued, maybe barely a tenth of this detention is over. Realistically, more of a fifteenth.

But I am not the only one, sitting here teeth-gritted and grim-faced in front of their Transfiguration essay. He's there too. He. We're stuck in here together. Stuck in these long two wholly unjustified hours of detention.

McGonagall did this because she doesn't like us, surely not because of our in-class behaviours.

Draco though doesn't look as if he were struggling like me at all. 

On the contrary, he looks really concentrated.

My eyes kept flicking over to him, to say 'from time to time' would be an unabashed understatement. 

I stalked. Watched him write and write and write down so many words which I still can't understand where he took them from. The longer I looked at him the less thought I devoted to the essay. To be downright honest the less thought I devoted to anything. 

I suppose at one point I stopped working, stopped thinking, I just sat there and breathed.

But that's okay because now I'm theoretically more than ready to get it over with, this whole detention situation. 

With my quill in my palm's tight grip and a piece of parchment in front of me, waiting for me to fill it with words, there really isn't much stopping me now from finally getting a grip. But there is.

There are incredibly many things that distract me, too many restless factors for my brain to start thinking sense. I simply cannot concentrate. 

So my gaze continues to wander my surroundings, from my parchment to the front of the classroom, passing Snape fleetingly, who, just like me, doesn't seem to want to be here. Further on I look, across all the shelves with ingredients for, well, potions, and at some disturbingly huge glass-preserved claws. In the end, once again, I find myself back where I always do.  

This time it doesn't go unnoticed by him. He's turned his head out of nowhere and the not-at-all-exhausted cocky smirk that's plastered all across his lips flashes at me. If he were next to me now and not a good 15 feet away at his own table on his chair, I'm sure I'd get to listen to some kind of teasing comment. But under these circumstances, I may well be spared that. 

Seeing him return to his writing leaves me more bored than before. 

All the more distracted. 

. . .

How am I supposed to write an entire essay on a topic I never learned anything about before? 

So far, all that smears my parchment is one hideous heading "How to cast a Switching Spell and what to note" The whole thing is underlined with the most crooked least straight-line humankind ever glimpsed.