Poison Ivy || Draco Malfoy

7 - The Mystery of Draco Malfoy

A/N: Just a warning, this chapter moves fast. There is a reason for it and the story will slow down so please don't be thrown by the pacing.

*****

I had been too busy with Quidditch practice to notice that Luna and Ginny had distractions of their own in fourth year.

A particular distraction that I wasn't to be a part of thanks to being a Slytherin.

Montague worked us hard, upping the practices to four nights a week on top of our Sunday morning sessions. He was furious after our Gryffindor defeat; namely blaming Draco for being too distracted singing his song to see that Harry had gone for the Snitch.

He also grudgingly accepted that I was a better Beater than Crabbe and moved him to reserve, thus securing my position.

And then there was the Inquisitorial Squad.

It made my sister unbearable. However, the jealously she had over the time I got to spend with Draco during Quidditch training seemed to evaporate, especially as he started to put the squad before Quidditch.

"Quidditch is no fun now Potter has been banned for life," Draco sniffed. "There's no one to wind up."

I could not help but feel a flicker of hurt. The brief comradeship that Draco and I had shared over Quidditch had vanished, and Pansy was very much once again glued to his hip as they stormed the school together acting like a pair of megalomaniacs.

He loved the power. He loved it too much.

I could see it in his eyes; the sheer delight of being able to issue detentions and dock house points to anyone he simply did not like the look of.

Being a fellow Slytherin, I was safe from Draco's reign of terror, but I kind of envied the attention everyone else was getting from him; even if it was unfavourable. Instead I was back to being just Pansy's invisible little sister.

And then came the incident when Dumbledore did a moonlight flit and the truth of his underground army came out.

"We wanted to tell you, we really did," Ginny said when I expressed my hurt that her and Luna hadn't involved me in this army. "But Harry insisted that no Slytherins were to be told about it in case word got back to Umbridge."

But I still felt incredibly hurt, because it meant for the first time, without me even knowing it, my Slytherin status had come between the only friendships I had within the castle.

And that just made me feel lonelier than ever.

*****

Draco changed after his father got locked up in Azkaban.

No one else really noticed it, but I did.

At first he was angry, so very angry. He expressed it silently, behind a face set in stone. But I saw the telltale signs; the flicker in his eyes, the tiny muscle that pulsed along his jawline, and the stiff way that he composed himself.

Pansy, on the other hand, was completely oblivious to it and carried on yakking incessantly around him. I had never seen him look more irritated with anyone so much before, and I was just waiting for him to blow up at her.

Ginny and Luna had both been involved in the incident surrounding Lucius's arrest, and I wasn't sure how I felt about this.

On one hand, I was horrified for them; I loved them, and the idea that they had been in so much danger terrified me. But on the other hand, I couldn't help but feel excluded; their shared adventures were causing them to drift away from me.