Occulemens || Draco Malfoy

Chapter 2 - Somebody Else

I stirred into consciousness to an unfamiliar smell lingering in the air. I rolled onto my side, cocooning myself into my blankets. The bed creaked under me as I rustled around, attempting to keep every bit of body warmth inside the covers.

No, not the overwhelming scent of Pansy's Marc Jacobs Daisy perfume. I inhaled again, deeply this time. The distant scent of Daphne's bundles of Eucalyptus that she had sat out last night to hang in the showers was missing. Rather, I was getting an undertone of cinnamon. My nostrils flared as the overly warm scent burned my nose.

I frowned and buried my head deeper into the pillow, regretting spending so much time writing Snape's Potions paper last night. If only that arsehole didn't assign so many feet of parchment. I flexed my hand under the pillow, surprised when it didn't ache dully from gripping my quill so hard last night.

The night before

"You're going to hurt yourself if you think any harder, Blake," Malfoy had said as we sat across from each other in the library. His icy eyes stared at my white knuckles as I gripped the quill. He reached out and plucked the quill from my hand, his long fingers swirling it around in the air. "What is it that you're be struggling with so bloody hard?"

I flexed my hand, trying to restore blood flow. "Not all of us are Potions whizzes," I'd replied carefully, not used to Malfoy forming a soft whisper. His words were typically confident and pronounced, but last night, they carried a bit of caution.

Malfoy rolled his eyes. He would be furious if I knew that he was second to Hermione Granger in our class. He set down the quill and craned his neck so his head was eye-level with me—even sitting, he had the capability to have two or three inches over me with the new-found growth spurts he seemed to be having. Gone was the young boy with red cheeks and baby fat—somehow, he had been replaced in mere months with someone entirely different. Complete with an angular jaw, shaggier blonde locks, and a much taller, slimmer build. As I watched him, I realized he had been speaking.

I shook my head. "Sorry, what?"

"Do you think," he began, stopping to turn my parchment so he could read it. He tilted his head as he read. "You can simply pay attention and finish writing so we can go get supper? It's not like Crabbe and Goyle are waiting for us so they can gorge themselves. I'll bet they've gained a stone by now."

I didn't miss the subtle 'we'. He didn't stand up and leave me here. Our friendship wasn't in my imagination. "Oh, so now you enjoy my company enough to eat together?"

He pulled his eyebrows together and shook his head, but toward the end broke his solemn expression with a smirk. "Not even a little bit, Blake."

I picked up the quill again. "I think they have butternut squash tonight."

The smirk on his lips almost pulled into a whole smile as he shook his head and focused back on his own parchment. "Then you better hurry up so we can go."

*

I cracked my eyes open slightly once again, met with the shining of the sun through the window. That was weird. Typically, we weren't facing East when the sun was coming up. Our dorm room was dark and dreary until the afternoon hours when the sun would stream in for a couple of delicious hours. More than once, I had taken midday naps during autumn when there was a slight chill in the air. The sun streaming onto my face through the window was always my favorite staple of fall.

I blinked a few times, trying to fully wake up. It wasn't out of the question that I wasn't completely engulfed by reality yet; I always had such vivid dreams that I could never quite tell if what I saw when I opened my eyes was completely right.