When Professor Granger receives a howler at breakfast, even owls stop flying.
It’s Ron. He’s breaking up with her.
“—as long as Malfoy is all you talk about, it’s ov—”
Hopeless, the witch sets the envelope on fire, but it’s too late. The Potions Master is already smiling.
“It wasn’t you,” she says as soon as she enters his classroom before the morning’s classes begin, not having considered that a few students would have already found their seats at their tables.
“The… Malfoy that Ron mentioned,” she repeats more quietly though no less harshly once she has crossed the gloomy room as casually as possible, her chin raised high, to his desk. “It wasn’t you.”
Focused on the preparation of some potion, his left hand busy stirring the hot liquid, her former classmate turned colleague doesn’t look up from his cauldron as he retorts, “Is that so? What’s with the urgency, then? You didn’t even took the time to clean up that cruddy pumpkin juice stain on your white blouse. You know, the one you caused in your panic.”
Caught off-guard by his comment, the witch tightens her robes over her chest, painfully conscious of the heat rising to her cheeks.
“Yes, well, you’re one to talk about cleanliness; your classroom reeks of your cologne. I know you’re trying to cover the fact that you never leave this hole to sleep or shower, but still. I’m sure your students would appreciate you airing it out a bit.”
That makes him pause and meet her gaze for two seconds that seem to last an eternity.
“What?” she grits through her teeth.
“Nothing. I just think it’s funny that you mention it, considering I’m not wearing any perfume today.”
She scoffs. “Yes, of course. And I’m totally imagining that green apple and eucalyptus scent that’s currently assaulting my nostrils. Sure.”
“Professor?” A student asks at the same time Hermione realises that every stool has now found its student. “Is the class cancelled?”
Shit.
“Oh, no. Actually, it’s already started,” Malfoy replies as he redirects his attention to her with a devilish grin on his lips. “Professor Granger, why don’t you share with the rest of the class what you just smelled in your Amortentia?”
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Cursed!Draco as a Triwizard Tournament champion
— 1135 words
content warning: drowning (no one dies I promise)
Draco knew, since the moment he thought he saw a green flash hit him during his heated encounter with that one student from Ravenclaw—whose name he’d never cared to learn—on the train, that something was wrong with him.
He could feel it every time he climbed stairs, when he found himself panting like an old man as if he’d never got used to climbing them in the past seven years.
But he wasn’t going to pay a visit to Madam Pomfrey just now and ruin his chances at finally proving himself.
Not when the Cup had chosen him. Not another Chosen one or a brave heart, like it had in the past. Him. The only student in this school who had been an Azkaban convict.
It hadn’t enchanted him, at first. The opposite, in fact. The war had made him a target—quite rightly. Now certainly wasn’t the time to be in the spotlight.
But it was his opportunity to show them he wasn’t the boy who had blindly listened and obeyed to stronger than him anymore. And he wasn’t going to miss it just because of some pain in his chest.
“Ten galleons that someone will take care of his case before he has time to step a foot into that arena,” he heard a Hogwarts student not so discreetly tell a Durmstrang student as he passed them in the corridor. It was the day before the First Task.
The dark-haired girl met his gaze, then, considering her answer, when a familiar bushy head interrupted her train of thoughts, a finger pointed at her interlocutor’s face. “We don’t bet on the champions’ lives, Darwin. Twenty points from Gryffindor.”
“You can’t do that,” Darwin exclaimed indignantly. “We’re from the same house!”
“All the more reason to teach you a lesson,” Granger snapped back, eyebrows drawn severely as she walked away, barely giving him a glance.
As with his trial in which she had testified on his behalf, it wasn’t the first time she put her nose in his business to get him out of an uncomfortable situation, and all it did was make him more confused. Angry. Ashamed.
The third time was during the Second Task, when he realised with horror and ever more incomprehension that she was the one thing that had been stolen from him.
It was already a surprise that he hadn’t drown in the first few minutes of the task, given that he had been denied access to the library due to his past and exposition to the Dark Arts and therefore had been unable to find a way to breathe underwater, but seeing her floating amongst the hostile merpeople for him to save really was the cherry on the cake.
As his lungs painfully rejected the freshwater of the lake, he hesitated. None of this made sense. What the fuck did it mean, Granger being stolen from him? What would it mean to others?
Still, he’d made it this far. Somehow. And before his brain could even process it, he was grabbing her by the waist and pulling her to the surface as if his four members now had a mind of their own.
Or at least, he tried, because as soon as he started kicking the water it suddenly felt like claws were closing around his heart, dragging him down.
Down.
Down.
Overcome by panic, he kicked harder, but his efforts were in vain. In just a few minutes, he lost his hold on Granger, breathed what he was convinced to be his last, and let the depths of the lake swallow him.
He regained consciousness with a start, coughing up all the water that had seeped into his lungs.
“Mr Malfoy, are you feeling alright?”
“Obviously not,” he rasped, lying on his side, going completely still when he noticed Pomfrey wasn’t the only witch present in the tent.
As soaked as he was, a few curls already sticking up on either side of her face, Granger was looking straight ahead. Like the last place on Earth she wanted to be right now was on this stool but she had no choice.
Looking down, he quickly realised why; her hand was laced with his.
Appalled, he tried to wrench it out of her grasp, but she held on strongly.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Madam Pomfrey warned, a close eye on his vitals.
“Why not?” he asked through his teeth, goosebumps all over his skin.
“Because you’ve been cursed, Mr Malfoy.” She let that sink in, probably unaware that it was a daily occurrence for him. “And whoever hit you with it didn’t want you dead, but miserable for the rest of your life.”
That didn’t explain why Granger was holding his bloody hand. Merlin. He’d never had anyone hold his hand like this before.
“Well, clearly it failed. As you can see, I’m alive and don’t feel particularly worse than usual. Now tell her to let go of me,“ he groaned.
“The thing is you shouldn’t be alive. And you have Miss Granger to thank for that.”
“I didn’t do anything—” the latter said, still not looking at him.
“Voluntarily, no, but it doesn’t change the fact that you did.”
He saw her stifle a laugh and wondered if he was imagining the pinker tint to her cheeks.
“Care to explain?”
“You were hit by an Octopus curse,” Pomfrey revealed, point blank, lips pursed. “A rare curse which forced your body to undergo certain changes in a very short amount of time, such as growing two extra hearts.”
Rendered speechless, Draco could only listen, though the warmth of Granger’s skin against his own was irritably distracting.
“Two hearts you’ve already lost,” she continued in a graver tone. “As one was apparently stopped with the Killing Curse and another deprived of oxygen for too long.”
“One heart left, lucky me,” he muttered sarcastically after a few seconds, sitting up and locking eyes with Granger. “And what should I be thanking you for, hm?”
Eyes as dark as he’d ever seen them, the witch looked like she wished he’d never resurfaced.
“You remaining heart, it seems, only beats because of me, Malfoy.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. What an insufferable show-off. “Yes, I figured,” he snapped. “What I meant was—”
“Because,” she cut him off, squeezing his hand so hard he feared for a second his bones would break. “I make it flutter every time our eyes meet,” she spat, her voice full of reproach. “And makes it beat faster when I touch you. I keep you alive.”
“In simple terms, she has your life between her hands,” Pomfrey added as if she fucking needed to. “So I suggest you listen carefully to what I have to say.”
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