The Silent Order: Draco Malfoy

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

The first week back at school for spring term, I was having breakfast in the Great Hall when I saw a flash of orange out of the corner of my eye.

"Something Weasley this way comes," Pansy snorted.

I shot back, "Maybe if you'd stayed here with your lonely roommate over the holidays I wouldn't have had to replace you with a Gryffindor."

She shook her head, smiling, "I'm irreplaceable."

Ron sat down next to me at the Slytherin table.

"Hey Lil," he greeted me.

Millicent turned up her lip, "A Gryffindor dares to defile the Slytherin table?"

"More like improving it," he smirked at her. She gave him a grudging smile. Ron turned to me, "So anyway, my mom wrote me after Christmas asking how my holiday was. I mentioned you since, well, you were in the bathroom with the troll with us and you spent so much time with Harry and my brothers and I and well she, sort of has this thing for knitting for the less fortunate."

He pulled an emerald-green wool beanie from somewhere within his cloak. "She made this for you. I'm sorry it's not wrapped and late."

I had to restrain myself from choking up in front of the other Slytherin first-years, who were watching this exchange with a mixture of disgust and interest. Don't cry. They'll eat me alive.

I put the beanie over my head, causing my curls to poof out around my ears. "Hmmm. Very warm. I assume it makes me look even more beautiful than I am already, difficult to achieve. Hmmm. It's a perfectly passable hat," I grinned. The other Slytherins chuckled and returned to their breakfasts. Quieter, I whispered my thanks to Ron and held his gaze meaningfully in an attempt to beam my immense gratitude into his brain to him and his mother for this kindness.

Further down the table, I heard a rather obnoxious voice say, "A hat? Really? Knitwear has always been the choice gift of the impoverished." Crabbe and Goyle started laughing. I slammed my fist down on the table and stood, staring him down. In that moment, I didn't even know what to say to him. The kid was full of mixed signals. First telling me he wanted to be friends and that he wanted to stop being so mean, then immediately calling my other friends slurs or insulting their family's finances. I don't get him.

As I stared him down I battled with my mind over what zinger I could hit him with that would get him to wipe that stupid smirk off of his face. But my mind felt like mud. After the concussion I received from my tussle with the troll, I found it hard to think clearly. Or cohesively. And my perpetual state of confusion seemed to amplify whenever Draco and I crossed paths.

Ron and the other first-year Slytherins were all looking at me flounder. I couldn't come up with anything to say back to him in that moment and Draco knew it. He cocked an eyebrow, "Troll got your tongue?"

That's it. I was so mad I was frozen, but buzzing, about to snap. No, about to crack. No, about to flash. Why do I feel so hot?

And that's when the clouded ceiling in the Great Hall congealed into the dark gray sky of impending lightning. Somehow I knew what was about to happen even though it shouldn't have been able to. He was still holding my gaze, smirking as though the overhead threat weren't bothering him at all.

The Great Hall lit up, blinding everyone within it. A half second later, before any of us could re-acclimate our eyes to the dim hall in winter, a boom shook the building so intensely the ghosts were shaken out of the walls and floors they were hiding in. The rose window behind the professor's table fractured like a spider's web.