Ask Me If I Am Fine | pansmione, drarry | completed

~Chapter 15: Birds~

Pansy-

For some unknown reason when Draco put the apple into the vanishing cabinet today, the apple always comes back with a bite taken from it. It is as if the cabinet is finally working.

"Does it mean we've successfully fixed it?" I ask, unable to believe the cabinet suddenly listened to us all of a sudden.

"I wouldn't get my hopes up," says Draco, taking the apple out of the cabinet, "if we don't figure out how the cabinet works, I wouldn't trust this cabinet too much."

"True," I say, "I think we should move on to transporting living things."

"Where could we get the 'living things'?"

"Been with Potter for a day already made you stupid?" I snigger, "we are wizards, we can conjure up alive birds...or get the birds from the birdcage down the hall."

"Let's get one bird from the cage," Draco says, already moving toward the door, "wait for me."

"As if I could do anything else," I call after him. 

After a few minutes, Draco came back with a small, white bird.

"About time, Malfoy," I say, as I carefully place the bird inside the cabinet. 

I mutter the necessary enchantments to wake the cabinet, then we both watch in anticipation as I open the cabinet door, expecting the bird to vanish.

Oh.

The bird is still inside the cabinet and it is dead, blood covering the cabinet.

"How?" Draco asks as he begins pacing around, "What did we do wrong?"

I take the now dead bird and throw it into an empty basket, "trial and error, my friend."

It turns out that 40 trials produced neither success nor progress.

"Draco..." I start.

"What?" 

"Where do we hide the birds?" I ask, looking at the bird corpses scattered around us.

As if just noticing the birds' bodies lying around us, he says, "hide them for now, then we'll find time to dump them in the Forbidden Forest."

"And noun would be the wiser," I finish.

The following days went like this: Draco and I spent hours each night in the Room of Requirement, Draco and I pretending like everything is fine, Draco and I barely keeping food down our throats. Draco now sits at the Slytherin table for meals, leaving a very displeased Potter. I could care less about what Potter thinks, but it obvious that Hermione and Potter are beginning to suspect Draco and I again. Hermione tries to ask me what is going on during Arithmancy, our conversation usually goes like this:

"What is going on with you?" Hermione would ask.

"Nothing, what do you mean?"

"You know what I mean, the bloodshot eyes, your school robes getting looser each time I see you..."

"Before you list my entire medical condition, does it ever occur to you that nothing is going on? I am naturally this way?!"

"Pansy, let me help you," Hermione would hold my hand by this point.

"There's nothing you could do," I would say, saying the truth.

From Draco's account of conversations with Potter, he is basically doing the same thing as me; pretending there is nothing going on, changing the topic, using spells to try to hold our robes up.