The Consequence of Ambition

Deal With The Devil

9:30- Draco was not at breakfast.

10:30-Draco did not attend potions class.

01:00-Saw Draco with Pansy and Theo, Pansy was all over him but he seemed distant and uninterested.

Didn't see him for the rest of the day.

Recently he always seems distant and uninterested. Especially since our meeting in the hospital wing. Not many signs of him being suspicious however. Just sad and reserved.

All she did nowadays was write daily updates in the journal and then obsess over them, over-analyse them, she would stay up all night sometimes, desperately re-reading past entries, looking for something she may have missed in her own scribbled out thoughts. When she would finally fall asleep her mind was filled with a multitude of different and all equally horrifying scenarios as to what made Draco Malfoy act so suspicious all the time. He was a different person in her mind. During the day he was quiet and distant, but in her nightmares he was trapped in the body of the boy who had thrown her so viciously against a wall and left her unconscious on the floor. He always seemed so powerful, a towering figure decked in his black suit, the height of sophistication and strikingly handsome with his carved out jawline and shockingly blonde hair. But there was always a deep and dangerous desire flashing behind his eyes, a lust for blood so prominent it radiated from every fibre of his imaginary being, and even in her dreams, Lana could feel his tainted magic oozing from his dark mark and daintily skimming along the edges of her skin. Whatever the scenario, the dream always ended the same. Him towering over her, his lips curled into a cruel sneer, the look in his eyes so shockingly evil it made her seem even smaller than she already was. She would be crying. Every time. And the conversation would always go the same.

"You got yourself in too far this time Beaumont. And there's no one to pull you out now. This is what it feels like to be alone." Then his mouth would contort so he was smiling down at her. Relishing in his undeniable power.

"But I can remedy that for you. You are very good at keeping your word, all that Gryffindor loyalty I guess. If you make one more promise, I might spare you." And then he would extend his hand, his hand that was red with blood. Fresh blood that formed a blanket over his knuckles and washed down his fingers, clinging to his nails before dripping away and pooling on the floor beneath them.

"Do you want to make one more deal with the devil?" And that was when she would wake up, sweating and shaking, the scar on her shoulder stinging vaguely. She had no idea what the dream meant and she definitely wasn't the type to give a second thought to things that weren't real. But this, this seemed like a warning. A warning that she was indeed in too far. She had to admit that this had become an obsession, an obsession that effected her every day life. Hermione was right, she spoke to her friends a lot less nowadays, she slept very little and her performance in class was dropping notably. It was fair to say that she spent more time on updating the journal than she did on her actual studies, and her lack of effort in class was evident in her marks.

"God, you get worse grades than me" Ron had noted one day when the four of them had been together in the common room, staring at the FAIL scrawled roughly across the top of her essay for Defence Against the Dark Arts.

"It's just Snape's form of punishment for having to carry me to the hospital wing" She had told him, knowing full well her efforts were lying elsewhere. "That reminds me. I'm supposed to meet with him this afternoon to discuss my- pathetic attempts at his essays- as he so delicately put it"

"You didn't tell us that?" questioned Hermione, "When did he ask you to meet with him?" Lana's heart fell as she realised she had indeed forgotten to tell her friends, normally she would have told them straight away, but she hadn't even thought to tell them, it had seemed like such a small insignificant thing buried under a steadily growing weight of unspoken worry and obsession.