the girl with all of the choices

s i x t y - n i n e

**TW: Panic Attacks**

5790 words

january third- leaving safety

The day had finally come for us to leave the Room of Requirement. Everyone who had gone home for the holiday would be returning to school tonight right before dinner, so we had until then to vacate the Room.

It was mid-morning.

We didn't really have anything to pack. Everything that we had in here, save for our wands and his copy of Pride and Prejudice had appeared when we arrived. It was assumed that it would go back to where it belonged once we left.

So, we had spent the majority of the morning lounging around, enjoying each other's company, thinking and overthinking about everything that was to come once we left the sanctuary within these four walls.

Without warning, time moved suddenly, meaning that it was already lunch.

"Is there anything you want to eat?" he asked, standing from the couch and crossing over to the kitchen.

"I'm not really hungry," I mumbled, pulling the blanket we were sharing back up over me to shoo away the cold.

"I'm not buying that," he said, crossing back over so he was leaning over me from behind the couch. "You have to eat something."

"I don't have an appetite."

"That's not an excuse."

"Well, I don't know what to tell you, because I'm not eating," I protested, grabbing my wand off of the coffee table to practice charms, a habit that had developed during our time in this space. "Avis."

A flock of four birds erupted from the tip of my wand, flying around above my head before one came to land on my knee.

Draco huffed in frustration and crossed back over to the kitchen. I ignored him, continuing to focus on my birds, distracting me from all of the bad things that were to come.

I didn't want to eat because I wasn't hungry. I wasn't hungry because I knew I would have to see my friends later today. There was no way I would survive that. I was just too anxious to eat.

Too guilty.

"I think I have something that might convince you otherwise," he said, coming back to sit next to me on the couch, a plate in his hand.

What I saw on it baffled me, because there was no way Draco Malfoy managed to just produce a plate of fish and chips from the vendor in Hyde Park that we went to during last Christmas.

"How did you get these? You can't just conjure food, it goes against Gamp's Law," I said, trying to make sense of the scenario.

"I didn't conjure it, the Room gave it to me."

"Is that not the same as conjuring considering it wasn't here when we got here?"

"No, it isn't. See, think of it more as the apparition of food. All of the food in this place existed somewhere else before we got here, but the room needed it, so it apparated it from where it existed previously to where it existed here in the cupboards. It did the same thing with our clothes, so why wouldn't it have done the same with food? Now, eat."

"That makes absolutely zero sense."

"It doesn't have to make sense," he argued, holding the plate up to my face once more. "At least just eat three chips. That's all I ask of you."

I looked at the plate warily, really not wanting to have to subject myself to food.

"Don't end this on a bad note," he said, trying to coax me into eating once again, taking a bite of a chip himself as a means of enticement. "It's not healthy to avoid eating."