There's No Place Like Home
Date: July 3, 2000
Time: evening
Location: Spinner's End, Draco's room
Characters Involved: Draco Malfoy, Melisande Durand, Amie Laurent and OPEN to other Spinner's End residents
Rating: PG-13ish
Incomplete
It was relatively silent in the house. This was nothing new. It had been relatively silent for the last few days, and eerily so. It had really all started a few days before when Draco had come home after a visit with his father and Remus had locked himself up in his bedroom and since then nothing had felt quite right. It made Amie uncomfortable and, as a result, she'd been cooking nearly nonstop. Melisande, generally, spent ten minutes a day trying to coax Draco out of his foul mood, but it never worked and so she would wander down to the kitchen and help Amie when she could.
On the plus side, the kitchen was fully stocked with every kind of bread and biscuit that Amie had ever learned to bake, plus a few that she'd practically made up by throwing random ingredients together and adding sugar. There was also soup. Lots of soup. Mostly for Draco but he'd pretty much given up on solid, nutritional foods in favour of developing a frightful addiction to coffee. Melisande kept telling him he'd only make himself sick at this rate, to which he scoffed and said it didn't matter much to anyone if he did. To which Amie smacked him upside the head, called him an ungrateful bastard and threatened to run back to France and never come back.
She hadn't run yet and Draco had made a bit of a concession in the food department by devouring biscuits and hunks of bread smeared with butter and washing it all down with a cup of coffee. Not that it was very healthy, mind, but occasionally Melisande could convince him to lay off the sugar, carbs and caffeine by offering him a fag if he'd have a nice, big bowl of soup. As a result of that, Draco would probably end up with a nicotine addiction on top of everything else.
Melisande and Amie were both getting tired of him and Draco was obviously getting tired of the world at large and so it was time for drastic measures. They were going to make Draco talk and to do so they needed chocolate, lots and lots of chocolate (and, Amie insisted, some food staples because she was getting bloody tired of baking all the time). The two women ventured out into the world to find an appropriate store which took them a couple of hours. By the time they returned to Spinner's End, their arms were laden with bags of groceries and they were chatting in their usual, amiable way without the tension that had been making them both tense for the last few days.
They walked into the house, depositing most of the groceries in the kitchen but keeping the chocolate with them, the better to ply Draco with, and realized as they neared Remus' room that something was going on. Amie's eyes narrowed and their steps slowed, but nothing terrible had happened except that Harry Potter was in Remus' room which was missing a door and the wards that had formerly surrounded it, and apparently the man was accepting visitors now.
"I feel like we missed something," Melisande whispered to Amie who nodded.
They bypassed the room, peeking inside as surreptitiously as possible before making their way to Draco's. They opened the door and saw Draco sprawled out across his bed in the most dramatic pose possible.
"Shit, Draco, what the hell's going on and why the hell are you up here?" Amie demanded.
The whole house had been worried sick about Remus. Melisande and Amie hadn't been caught up in it as much as everyone else, obviously, but they knew Draco had been worried. He didn't say as much, but they could tell. And now he was up here moping just because Potter was downstairs? Honestly, men were such idiots sometimes.