Choices ~ Draco Malfoy

Chapter 18

'Are you okay?' Hermione asked me during Arithmancy one day, but I didn't exactly hear her as I stared at my desk. 'Sally?' She poked me in the arm.

'Oh - yeah, sorry what was that?' I blinked, sitting up straight to look at her.

'Are you okay?' She repeated, her eyes searching. 'You look... Well... Blank.'

I laughed weakly. 'Yeah, I'm pretty tired I guess.'

Quite a lot had happened between the Quidditch trials and now. Practise had been quite intense this year with Edmund's advanced yet effective strategies on playing the game and to be quite honest, I don't know where he got and thought of these with his busy schedule. He was organised like that, I suppose.

I attended three suppers with the "Slug Club", which was basically a group of students who were favourites of Professor Slughorn. All of them were mainly involved either because their relatives are famous or are great friends with Professor, or they just simply interest Slughorn. Some of the people include Ed, Hermione, Blaise, Ginny, Neville and, much to Ed and Draco's dismay, Cormac McLaggen. Harry's supposedly involved too, but he's managed to slip out of all three meetings. Though it's a fair enough reason: he had (or purposely put) Quidditch practise and if he attended the suppers, Ron would be left out.

Also Draco and I had been busy with the Cabinet as we started to look and tried to mend the connection itself. As expected, this was an extremely difficult process and there were hardly any information about how to fix the Cabinet in the books from the school library, which is quite large. There weren't much on the books from the Restricted section either. We also figured that I didn't have the need to stay with Draco for the entire time he worked on the Cabinet, so sometimes I left the Room of Hidden Things earlier that him to catch up on homework. But even with the amount of time we were working on the Cabinet, it didn't seem to be mended at the slightest.

I hardly got any sleep these days because of all those things.

'I heard that Quidditch practise was pretty hard for the Slytherins.'

'Yeah, you know my brother. He hates losing.' I laughed weakly.

'That's true but...' Her eyes flickered to the dark shadows that was starting to appear under my eyes. 'You need sleep Sally, especially this time of schooling.'

I gave her a small smile. 'Thanks Hermione but really, I'm okay.'

***

Later that night, I lay on a large couch in the Room of Requirement (no, not the Room of Hidden Things) in front of a roaring fire, snuggled up against Draco who had his arms around me lazily.

We were doing this quite often these days. After working on the Cabinet for a good three hours or so, we would change the Room's appearance to a cozy one so that we could spend the rest of the night (sometimes after curfew) here. I managed to produce food and beverages with magic too. The room also had another door that lead to a bathroom.

'I can't go tomorrow anymore.' Draco said in a quiet, flat voice.

'I know.' I murmured. He got detention from Professor McGonagall because he didn't complete three assignments in a row, and the day of detention happened to be on the day of the Hogsmeade trip.

'You go with Potter and that.'

I raised my head to look at him with surprise.

'I mean - they're - well - suspecting you too, right? If you stay with them and - well - something happened during the trip, they won't think - well - you did it. Or at least you were involved in it.'