The Mudblood

Chapter 75 : Year 4

Though my numb mind had a stiff, frigid haze around it, my sore body was encased by plush warmth. My sealed-shut eyes detected no light, but my nose breathed in the alluring aroma of spices and cedar, as well as the rancid scent of sweaty feet. My horizontally lying body shifted with the repulsiveness of the smell, and I instantly felt a sharp pain behind my right ear that had previously been mollified by the heat radiating behind my back. As I breathed in through my sour-tasting mouth, the air hit my tender throat with a sting so sharp that I only managed not to yelp because my ears had been distracted by the sound of hog-like snoring.

With the sudden alarm of another human being present, my eyes flew open to be bombarded by the sight of a rotund face whose drool-covered chin shimmered in the dim light of the room's candles. As his flaring nostrils took in another snoring breath, my body jolted backward in fear and disgust only to be halted by a cushiony object that let out a muffled grunt.

Blinking frantically, I stared at the fat face in front of me that my brain now recognized as Vincent Crabbe. With his ceaseless snores, he was clearly in a deep slumber, though I couldn't seem to process why he was asleep in the top bunk of the bed next to...next to the top bunk of a bed that I was lying in—a bed that was clearly not mine judging by the plain black sheets rather than polka-dotted turquoise sheets that covered it.

My frenetically darting eyes caught onto the large blob on the bottom bunk of Crabbe's bed that was undoubtedly Gregory Goyle. On the top bunk of the bed beyond theirs, Theodore Nott's spiky brown hair was protruding from beneath his deep green blankets, and when I peered my head over the edge of the bed I lay on, I found that Blaise Zabini was dead asleep beneath.

While it proved to be difficult not to hyperventilate over the realization of my current location, I forced myself into calmness as I pondered the pressing question of, if I was truly lying in the fifth year boys' dormitory, where was Draco Malfoy?

"What the bloody hell are you doing, Fitzroy?" I heard a low, nearly incoherent voice grunt from behind me: a simple sound that managed to momentarily stop my heart. "You're squeezing me into the wall, you know..."

At the pace of an impaired snail, I rolled my body onto its other side, now facing the stone wall that this bed was wedged up against as well as the groggy face of my most alluring enemy.

"Oh—oh God—" I choked under my breath as I scrambled away from him. The only reason I didn't flail off of the bed and plummet to the stone-hard ground was because he instinctually grabbed my arm and yanked me back toward him.

"What do you think you're doing?" he hissed impatiently, peering over me to take a look at his sleeping roommates. "Do you want them to find out you've been sleeping in my bed?"

"I think they'd be just as appalled as I am," I growled through gritted teeth, shrugging his hand off of my arm as I fidgeted uncomfortably. "Why am I in your bed anyway, hm? Why am I not in my own bed?" 

"Because you passed out in the common room last night, don't you remember?" he whispered in an agitated tone. "We were having an...important conversation—and you just fell asleep—"

"I doubt I just fell asleep in the middle of a conversation, Malfoy," I snorted, rolling my eyes at him as he ran his hand through his messy bedhead. "You'll have to come up with a story that's a bit more convincing than—"

"I'm not lying," he insisted lowly as he peeked over me at his sleeping roommates again. "We were talking and you passed out—like you were having a vision or something—"

My eyes widened as I recalled the events of the previous night: the fight with Malfoy, his confession of attraction, and then that horrible vision of Arthur Weasley being brutally maimed by a snake.