entanglements | d.m.

11.wounds

October '98 | H I M

Draco is talking with his friends at lunchbreak when out of bloody nowhere, in the middle of too many people, Blaise takes a generous swig of his flask.

Eyes bulging, Draco hisses, "A teacher is right fucking there, dickhead."

The teacher being Oakes who is actually not looking in their direction at all. No, that man is standing at the side of the Transfiguration courtyard talking to a younger student, but it's not the Hufflepuff boy his focus is on. Not entirely.

Every once in a while, he'll be glancing at the fountain where Wood is standing with her set of friends. Now that just seems odd. Especially after Oakes asked Wood to stay after the lesson last week.

Draco waited until she was out of that classroom before he could go his own way. He physically couldn't leave her alone—limbs not moving, heart having an unsual rhythm—which is absolutely bonkers, but he has long given up on trying to understand that protectiveness he holds over her.

He doesn't need her to know the extent of his patheticness, though.

Again, Oakes takes a gander at Wood, the eighth in the last twenty minutes, but she's not reciprocating. Her eyes are squinted, her mouth stretched in a laugh at whatever Malone just said.

Sometimes, Draco wishes to have some super hearing power. Devyn doesn't laugh often, but when she does, it's a sound as lovely as a symphony. Draco fell asleep to that sound playing in his head a lot at one point in his life.

Malone pulls her into his arms, his front to her back and they sway to whatever occupies their mind. Jealousy is burning through Draco, as sharp as the first time he saw them be so intimate. He can't help it. He never could when it came to Wood.

Her and Malone look like a couple. And every instinct in him says to take that place instead. Unfortunately, logic resides right next to it and it is screaming to leave her be.

She doesn't want you anyway. Doesn't need you.

She looks happy. Finally.

It worked.

Then why doesn't it feel as good as he thought it would? What is that bitterness for?

Maybe because it did work in the first place.

Leave her and she'll find happiness.

His mind tracks back to the nightmare she had, the terror he knows so well and has much less control over. She had no bad night since while he is doing everything to suppress his own, not show her.

There is no greater display of differences.

"Disgusting, aren't they?" Pansy mutters only to Draco, her gaze set on the two Ravenclaws—both their partners. She is sitting in an unglazed window Draco is leaning against, fully ripped him from his thoughts.

He can't get a word in because Daphne does, speaking to Blaise, "—It can't be right. You have to get a look at it."

Oh—

Blaise bristles. "I told you to mind your own fucking business, Daph."

Yep. There is the daily round of Zabini's wrath. Though it hasn't been directed at Daphne for weeks. She knows what battles to fight, how much she can verbally take, and that she voices her worry openly means she prepared for backlash—or too worried to care about it.

"I would, if you would mind your own but you're clearly disregarding your health—"

"None," he seethes, the quiet before a storm. "Of your business."