The Malfoy Project

𝟗𝟑 - 𝐓𝐢𝐜𝐤, 𝐓𝐨𝐜𝐤, 𝐃𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐨

༻⚜️༺    

It was nighttime when I finally stumbled out of the Room of Requirement, blinking my tired eyes into the torchlit darkness of the empty corridor.

Slowly, one foot in front of the other, I trudged doggedly back to the Hufflepuff dorms. My mouth was dry as sand. The Time Turner weighed nothing in my trouser pocket. I felt it clink gently against the side of my thigh.

Most of the students had turned down for bed, save for two Seventh Years sitting by the fire playing some sort of card game. They were too engrossed and didn't give me so much as a second glance as I stole towards the Eighth Year girls' dorms and knocked, furtively, on Ainsley's door.

It swung open, and I was immediately greeted with a quick, sharp slap across the face.

The sound snapped like a whip and bounced off the circular walls. When the white in my vision cleared, Hannah stood before me, tall and broad-shouldered. Fuming.

"How could you!" she cried.

"Hannah," I said, holding my stinging face. "I need to speak with Ainsley."

Hannah made an inarticulate sound, half gasp, half scoff. "As if! You have some massive fucking balls, leaving her on the street like that, then coming round here like it's nothing!"

My cheek was starting to smart terribly. "I know," I said through gritted teeth. "I came to see if she's all right."

Hannah's lashes fluttered rapidly, like she was trying to blink away something stuck in her eyes. "All right? She's got pneumonia, you bastard!"

"Again?" I shook my head. "How's that possible? It's almost summer."

"How should I know! When I saw her in the infirmary, she was coughing and saying she couldn't breathe. Thank Godric some passerby got her back to the castle. Pomfrey very well lost her mind!"

"The infirmary, you said?"

"Yeah, where else— Hey, wait! Draco, wait!" She said something else, but I didn't hear it. I was racing back through the tunnel.

The kitchens were hot and dark, the thick air trapped in there like a baking oven. Ainsley's face was the only thing on my mind as I tore through the castle to the hospital wing. Her large sad eyes, swollen and rubbed raw, looking up at me, pleading for the understanding and forgiveness I was incapable of. Her skin, so thin and deathly pale I could count the tiny lightning-shaped veins in her cheeks. How they had shifted away from my view as I turned away from her, until they were completely replaced by the street that led back up to the castle.

But I couldn't have stayed, I might have done something, something violent. To the people around me, to myself, or worse, to her. I don't think I would have, but I don't know myself anymore. I don't know anything.

The ghostly orange light of the hospital wing loomed ahead. I was about to dash in when I was greeted by a scene that made me skid to a halt.

Ainsley was propped up on a bed. By her side was Montague. His hulking figure was bent over her as he stroked her hair, murmuring something to her, the same way as I had done the last time she was sick, in his absence. My heart sank.

Get away from her, I wanted to shout. But Ainsley was in bad shape. Really bad. Even from where I stood I could see the sweat gleaming on her forehead, the pull of muscle between her brows as she hacked out wet, phlegmy coughs.

Montague was holding a paper bag by her mouth with his other hand. "Spit it out," he was telling her. "You have to spit it out." But Ainsley only coughed harder and could not expel the thick phlegm that was stubbornly lodged in her throat.