George Weasley x Reader ~ Jaffa Cake

31 - Feeling Faint

'So? What were they doing?'

You shut the door of the classroom behind you and threw your pointlessly thick cloak onto the nearest chair, before letting yourself fall to your knees, adopting a sitting position with your back against the wall and your arms holding your legs. There was a large part of you that really wished you hadn't agreed to finding out 'what Draco was up to' because now you had an extremely bothersome secret to keep. Secret keeping didn't bother you in the slightest, you were fine with staying silent for others, but not when the secret was one that could potentially cause the friendships you'd built to instantaneously perish. It was like an impossible choice between two alternative life paths.

In short, due to her awfully phoney newspaper articles, a gossipy journalist by the name of Rita Skeeter had been completely banned from the walls of Hogwarts. And within about 25 miles of it, too, as if inside the walls hadn't been enough. Draco had just told you that this sneaky woman was actually one of the likely many unregistered animagi, so she had the appearance like that of a little black beetle when she transformed and was able to sneak into the grounds in order to get inside views from students at Hogwarts - students at Hogwarts being a small selection of Slytherins that happened to include Draco and Pansy. That was why it looked as though Draco had been speaking into a walkie talkie or his hand when you saw him through the window; he'd been spilling gossip and fake news to her in her Animagus form and had been using Crabbe and Goyle to shoo passers by away. That last part also explained why Crabbe and Goyle had been so aggressive and pushy with you when you approached them. 

The only problem with knowing all this was that you weren't to say a word to the three who were standing in front of you, all wide-eyed and ready to hear what you had to say. You knew that this was a situation you'd have to lie your way out of.

It wasn't really clear whether you were a terrible liar or not. Sure, you'd had to lie quite a few times before, but those were white lies. Everyone tells white lies, if someone said they never had then it would be a lie in itself so even then they'd be immediately stumped. Saying something as simple as 'I'm fine' was the one most people got caught on, purely because no matter how good your life is or how happy you are to be alive, no one is 100% 'fine'. That's just common knowledge.

Some people are excellent liars. They can make all sorts of things up on the spot and can be believed no matter what - but that's just because some people are naturally good at things like that, just like how some people can draw and some people can't. But then, you can also learn to draw over time, just like how you can learn to lie. The lying always seems gets easier the more tough your life gets, which is given and pretty much unavoidable. Drawing doesn't really get easier though, because from personal experience, you decided that it just got harder the better your pieces got. It sort of worked in the opposite way.

But did you really have to lie your way out of it? You could just tell Harry, Ron and Hermione the truth. That would eliminate the chances of ruining some of the best friendships you'd made this year, and you wouldn't have to live with the guilt of keeping something so dodgy a secret. But Draco's friendship mattered to you just as much. Sure, he could be an absolute git to many people (many people including the three you were in the room with), but to him you weren't 'many people'. You were y/n. One of his closest friends. 

Oh man, what a sucky situation to be in.

You took a moment to wonder - what would George do? Well, for starters, he'd definitely tell these three what was going on, but that was given because Draco wasn't exactly an important person to him. Just because they made a truce and got along didn't mean that he was valuable to George in any way, at least not more than his own brother and Harry Potter, for goodness sake. Seemed to you like that thought process was an absolute waste of time, it didn't benefit you at all; in fact, it seemed to make things even worse. You had a strong gut feeling that telling them the truth would be the right choice, because they deserved to know, but you couldn't bring yourself to doing it. So you chose to lie. It was time to test the lying skills.