Never Any Good News
Date: April 15, 2000
Time: Morning, breakfast
Characters Involved: Residents of Spinner's End
Status: Complete
Rating: Aw hell, we're talking at least PG-13, possibly R
Draco should have seen it coming. Everything was going oddly that morning. For one thing, it was morning. Generally Draco was not up nearly so early. He wasn't much of a morning person, which didn't mean that he couldn't function in the morning, just that he didn't want to. For another thing, he'd gotten an almost restful night's sleep. No nightmares, no memories, no uncomfortable feelings. Just sleep.
He woke up feeling refreshed which was abnormal, and so he had a feeling that something was off. He rolled out of bed, saw that it was barely eight o'clock, and wanted to roll back over. But he didn't. Instead he got out of bed, stomach roiling with some kind of nervousness (and wasn't it fucked up when he was more freaked out at the prospect of no nightmares than at the prospect of . . . anything else?) and decided that he might as well have breakfast.
He arrived in the kitchen before the post did, but not before Zak and one of the other werewolves, both of whom were sitting at the table waiting for their food to cook, reading the Prophet. They exchanged absent greetings and Draco was just beginning to reorient himself when Zak made a small noise, rather like an animal being choked to death. Draco looked over at him with a raised eyebrow only to see Zak staring at him with huge eyes.
"What?" Draco asked a bit crossly.
"Nothing," Zak said before cursing under his breath. "Dammit! I can't lie. This."
"I keep telling you, it's because of your Hufflepuff genes," Draco shot back, accepting the section of the paper that Zak pushed toward him.
It was a Skeeter piece and for a moment Draco assumed it was just going to be something that he could use against Potter. And then he saw the headline and he choked on his own spit.