Clara idly stood outside Snape's office on a blustery Saturday afternoon. She'd knocked twice, but no one had answered. Even mustering up the courage to open the door proved to be a waste of time, because it must've been deadlocked from the inside, and she wasn't good enough at Charms to unlock it without some struggle.
She dared to turn her back on the door and descend the narrow stone staircase back to the empty classroom. That was a day wasted, she swiftly concluded. She'd slept in for most of the morning in a pointless effort to avoid the inevitable, only for her teacher to fail to show up somehow.
"I told Snape about your injury. He wasn't going to listen to Granger anytime soon."
Clara lifted her head. Malfoy was standing in the doorway, leaning back against the wall with his arms folded across his chest. He definitely hadn't been there earlier. Or maybe he had, and she'd been far too lost in her own thoughts to notice. It wouldn't have been the first time.
She shook her head. "You didn't have to do that," she murmured.
"No, I didn't," he agreed, "but that's the good thing about favours. They go both ways."
Clara frowned. "What do you mean?"
"You owe me an explanation," Malfoy said simply.
She didn't know what he was referring to, so the only response she could provide was a noise of confusion and a bewildered expression. And then the diary crossed her mind, and the idea of him figuring her out. Her eyes were twitching a little as she suppressed the urge to widen them in horror.
"For the last two weeks, you've been off," Malfoy stated, "and I don't mean the regular kind of strange that you usually are. It's only whenever I'm around."
"I don't know–"
"You do," he interjected. He caught her by her arm before she could walk past him and leave. "And what's with that book you always carry around with you?"
He reached forward, as if to snatch her diary out of her arms, but she managed to recoil away with it protectively clutched to her chest before his fingers could brush against the leather binding. In response to the sudden and visibly desperate action, he raised an eyebrow.
"There's nothing strange happening," Clara responded, swallowing thickly. "I'm sorry if I made you feel like there was."
She wasn't sure whether Malfoy was buying into her answer or not, but in the case that he wasn't, she was sure she'd manage to find some ingredient in that room that would successfully melt her flesh into the floor.
"And the book?" he prompted.
"It's a notebook. I'm forgetful, so I have to write a lot of things down, like padlock codes and important dates and things," Clara answered carefully. "I'd rather not show anyone for privacy reasons."
Malfoy rolled his eyes a little. "Merlin, you're boring. You could've at least had something interesting, like a secret hit list or a diary or something," he remarked. His gaze slid down to his wristwatch. "Wanna head to the Three Broomsticks for lunch? I'm starving."
Clara blinked at him. "Um . . ." She almost replied with a no. Almost. "Good idea."
She unlocked the Hufflepuff common room door. Some of the portraits just outside muttered something disdainful about a Slytherin following her in, while another threatened to tell Dumbledore, but really that small bit of rule-breaking was the last thing on her mind.
"Why does it smell like compost in here?" was the first thing Malfoy said upon entering. His face scrunched up in disgust.
Clara pointed to a row of plants Sprout had recently brought in on her way upstairs to her dormitory. She figured there was no point in making Malfoy wait for any longer than necessary. He looked unhappy to be there in the first place.
She dropped her things down on her bed and hastily reached for her coat. The snow was no longer coming down quite so heavily, but the thick layer of sludge that it left behind still hadn't thawed yet. She hoped her boots would fare well against the elements.
She sprinted back down the stairs, but she froze at the bottom. Malfoy was sitting casually on the armrest of the sofa. The right sleeve of his jumper was tugged over half of his hand, which he held out in front of a playful Lilia who leapt and scratched at his skin with her underdeveloped claws. He lowered his arm tauntingly before retracting it back the moment she wiggled and jumped up for it.
"This your cat?" Malfoy drawled, now sending Lilia in circles.
Finally getting a hold of herself, Clara nodded and quickly swept her cat up from the sofa. The last time Lilia had gotten out of the dorms, it had taken several days to track her down again. That had been the worst few days of her year easily, and that was saying something considering the diary incident.
"Someone must've let her out again," Clara said once she returned. Lilia was now safely deposited in her dorm with a little woven ball containing a bell to keep her occupied.
"You could've chosen any pet," Malfoy said. "And you chose a cat?"
Her eyebrows quirked in confusion. "What's wrong with cats?"
"Nothing," he responded. "They're just a bit boring, aren't they?"
Clara shook her head. "Lilia's an emotional support cat," she explained.
"Why do you need an emotional support cat?" Malfoy asked.
"I don't need an emotional support cat," she responded curtly on her way out, holding the door for Malfoy to follow her.
The Three Broomsticks was becoming an oddly frequent spot for her this year. On most Hogsmeade weekends, she usually just hid in the Hufflepuff basement and made the most of the solitude the trip provided, with maybe only one excursion during third year just to pick up some sweets from Honeydukes for herself.
Clara had barely made a dent in her steaming bowl of chips yet. "Are you sure you don't want me to pay you back for the food?" she asked.
Malfoy, in her defence, wasn't eating particularly fast either. "I'm a Malfoy," he reminded her. "I don't need whatever pennies you can scrounge up."
She didn't want to start an argument over whose family had more wealth, because as much as her father's and her brother's jobs probably paid better than his father's, they had so much old money in the Malfoy family that he definitely wouldn't need to work once they left school. He could sit around, twiddling his thumbs all the way to his grave, and he'd still be completely stable financially.
She slowly bit into another chip as she watched a small group of Beauxbatons students leave the building, wrapped up tightly in luxurious furs. Several people naturally turned their heads. It was difficult not to when most of the students looked like that.
Malfoy shook his head, as if to bring himself back into the present. "The second project's due in 4 weeks," he said. "I figured we'd do honeywater. I've looked over the specification, and it's all based around a chosen ingredient. I mean, we can do a different ingredient if you'd prefer, but honeywater is an easy one that I doubt many people would think of."
"It's okay," she agreed. "We can do honeywater."
He nodded. "You sure?"
"You've clearly given it a lot of thought," she said.
Malfoy scoffed in agreement as he reached for the salt shaker. "Don't look so surprised," he remarked. "I'm not some dunderhead, you know."
"Sorry," she muttered under her breath.
These kinds of reactions were instinctive to her. It was why it wounded her a little whenever a remark would be made about her insistence on profusely apologising in just about every conversation. Having her family at home teasing her was bad enough.
"Tell you what." Malfoy sat forward, now in control of his taunting amusement. "If you can go the rest of this year without apologising to me, I'll . . ." He trailed off with a frown. "Shit, is there anything you actually want?"
Clara loosely shrugged, partially to distract herself from the embarrassed pink hue of her face. "If I make it to the summer without apologising," she started quietly, "you have to make sure I pass my OWLs."
"I'm not a miracle worker," he laughed. "Kidding, kidding. Alright, you have a deal."
He held his hand out across the table. She hesitated shaking it, taking the opportunity to scan the room for anyone nearby. After a few seconds, she slowly placed her hand in his. It already felt wrong. She could already feel herself subconsciously paying far too much attention to just about every detail of his fingers, his palms, his smooth skin–
"Awh!"
Clara's expression had never dropped so fast in her life. She practically jumped in her seat as she turned her head to find Fred and George standing directly beside them, the dustings of snow on their shoulders suggesting that they'd only just stepped inside. Somehow the pair of them had completely slipped her vision just seconds ago, and she was mortified.
"Our best friend Clara's in love, Fred."
Fred wiped mocking tears from his eyes. "So beautiful, George."
"I thought I was starting to smell rubbish here," Malfoy said snidely, gesturing to the twins. "That explains it."
"Well that's just–"
George was interrupted by Fred's rapid shushing. "Hey," Fred peered around the corner of the window, "what's Moody doing all the way out here?"
She didn't miss the way Malfoy's white eyebrows lifted just a little. Now that she thought about it, she did recall some gossip going around the school more recently concerning him and what had simply been dubbed as "the incredible bouncing ferret" incident. She wasn't sure if she wanted to know the implications of that.
Clara looked outside for herself. "I don't see him," she said.
George threw his arms up exasperatedly. "Oh, you've ruined it."
"Still as twitchy as ever though," Fred noted, "aren't you, Draco?"
The state of Malfoy's brief shock weakened the wittiness of his retort. "Isn't that joke getting old?"
"Nah," George replied dismissively, "never."
Fred nodded in agreement. "Not for as long as you jump at even the mention of — okay, I'm not even joking anymore, he's actually outside."
Malfoy was growing tired of this conversation. "You Weasleys are all just as stupid as each . . ."
The chip he'd picked up fell back into his bowl with a wet thud. Professor Moody hobbled into the pub and, by some insane chance, towards them. His glass eye rolled around in quick circles in a way that always made her feel dizzy if she ever tried to pay too much attention. Judging by his only real eye though, he was definitely heading towards them.
Fred and George stepped out of his way. "Good afternoon, sir," they both said in perfect unison.
Moody replied with a disinterested grunt. He dropped a roll of parchment in front of her which narrowly missed landing directly in her lunch. She opened it up.
"I expected more from Davies' daughter," he said gruffly. "Do better."
She recognised the document to be her most recent Defence Against the Dark Arts essay. He'd made her rewrite it twice now, and she just hoped and prayed he wouldn't be interested in a third revision of her limited knowledge of the subject.
Fred whistled low. "Brutal."
"I thought he was about to turn you into a ferret," George remarked.
Malfoy peered over at her pass mark. "That grade really puts that madman's punishments into perspective," he commented dryly.
Fred seemed to agree. "I'm surprised he had enough red ink."
Clara briskly concealed her score again by rolling up the parchment and stood up to slide her coat back on. "I should head back . . ."
"We haven't even told you our joke yet!" George protested.
By this point, she was far enough away from the table for the voices behind her to have quieted in volume considerably. She picked up the sound of Malfoy offering to walk her back, which quickly transgressed into a tense argument between him and the twins. The only positive takeaway of that turn of events was that their conversation had been definitely steered away from the topic of her grades.
The Hufflepuff common room was a little busier now that the day was beginning to come to a close. The fireplace had been started up, and a few students in various year groups engaged in quietly muttered conversation.
"You look rough."
Clara froze in front of the dorms. She turned around to find Justin and Ernie both sitting in chairs beside the fireplace, with a spread of various sweets and chocolates from Honeydukes and Zonko's across the table in front of them. Justin picked up a striped paper bag and held it out in invitation.
She wordlessly walked over to them and accepted the bag. As she sat down and tore open the seal, she peered inside and pulled out a piece of white chocolate fudge. A ghost of a smile graced her face. She'd told him that that was her favourite sweet years ago now.
"Where have you been all day then?" Justin asked.
Clara hesitated. "I had detention with Snape."
Ernie laughed under his breath. "Sounds like the worst way possible to spend a Saturday afternoon," he remarked.
She hummed. "You have no idea."
January 16th 1995
Dear diary,
I don't know why Malfoy effectively asked me out on a date. I know it wasn't exactly, but it was a little too awkward to not consider it one. If one of his friends, or Merlin forbid Astoria, would've walked in, I don't even want to imagine how that could've ended.
He must know there's something going on. I reckon he's doing this to provoke an answer or reaction out of me, but I don't know what he wants to hear. The actual answer will ruin both of our lives no doubt, but clearly he's not going to buy into some made up response to get him to leave it be. But anyway, how could he expect me not to be awkward and weird around him when he keeps me around almost as much as his girlfriend? And how is Astoria not bothered by this? Surely she is.
Or maybe she knows it's me. Maybe she's figured it out.
Never mind, respectfully I don't think she has the mental capacity to make those kinds of deductions.
I don't know if I hate Astoria or Malfoy more at this point. Both feel like they're going out of their way to make my life a living hell, Astoria by living literally through my feelings, and Malfoy by questioning my upset about it. And Fred and George too, maybe. I sometimes wish they'd just give it a rest with the whole trying to make me laugh thing. I'm considering taking a sick day tomorrow, but I worry if I do that then it'll make things worse.
Yeah, a sick day would be good. I think I'll take a sick day. Maybe a few days off. To be honest, it's not as if I don't have the flu. I've been feeling progressively worse all evening, and I'll probably have to take something for it in the morning, so I could always just not. I know it's only been 2 weeks back at school, but I deserve the rest.
{. .}
Author's note: I was supposed to write something else this week, but instead I found myself completing this chapter completely accidentally. Whoopsies.
[EDITED: 24/1/25]