Miss Quinn

142 ~ The Twins' Farewell

By the time Easter Holidays rolled around, and classes were stopped for a week, Emma had successfully convinced Draco to let her use the room of requirement while he was on guard duty. After days of only being able to run through the castle and across the grounds for exercise, slashing blades and embedding arrows into targets was a much-needed relief.

In fact, while her friends were revising for exams six weeks away, Emma was escaping to train, to release the everbuilding stress from her body. She studied too, of course. Whenever she found time and energy. But she found herself putting off revising until it couldn't be postponed any longer. Emma knew if she wanted to continue with her classes, she had to do well on her OWLs. But there was something about the act of sitting down and reviewing notes and spells that bored Emma out of her mind.

On one such occasion, when Emma had deigned to visit the library to look up a few specifics on the goblin wars they'd studied in History of Magic, she had been re-reading the same passage over and over again, completely zoned out. She was snapped out of her reverie by something landing hard on the table in front of her. Her eyes finally left the page and settled on the object that had caused such a noise. It was some sort of box. Dark-painted wood, by the looks of it. Emma's gaze rose to the person who had slammed the box on the table. She wasn't surprised to see white-blonde hair and striking gray-blue eyes.

"Mum sent chocolate," Draco Malfoy informed her. "Want some?"

Emma's eyebrows rose of their own accord. No matter how used to Draco she became, his generosity would always shock her. For so long, she'd believed him to be a stuck-up, selfish prick. And while in public, he was exactly that, there were times when he chose to reveal his softer nature, beneath the facade.

"Of course I do," Emma replied hesitantly. "But we are in a library."

Draco peered around, then shrugged. "Don't see Pince anywhere. What'll you have?" He was opening the box and pulling out various chocolates, including rabbits, eggs, frogs, bars, elaborate molded chocolate trees, and more.

"Got any dark chocolate?" Emma asked, leaning across the table to look.

"Yeah, here," he said, handing her a chocolate tree. The sight of it made Emma's mouth water. It was almost too pretty to eat.

Draco took a bite off of his own chocolate tree and glanced at the book in front of Emma. "What're you researching?"

"Just goblin wars." Emma broke off a tiny branch from her tree and nibbled on it. "Boring as Hell." She took another nibble. "Actually, Hell is more exciting than this."

Draco chuckled at that, his pointed face losing some of its rigidness. "I forget, sometimes, that you've actually been there."

Emma finally gave in and stuffed an entire section of the tree into her mouth. "So do I, occasionally," she muttered through the chocolate.

"I don't believe this!" screeched a voice from behind Emma. Draco's face had gone pale, and he began hurriedly placing chocolate back in the box. Emma glanced over her shoulder to see Madam Pince positively fuming, hands on her hips and all. "This is the second incident today! Chocolate in the library!" Emma stuffed the rest of the tree into her mouth and packed up her parchment, quill, and ink, leaving the book on the table. "Get out, both of you!"

Draco and Emma fled as quickly as they could, Emma fighting the urge to burst out laughing amidst the embarrassing situation. When they'd emerged into the corridor, Emma finally released her laughter, and Draco stared at her incredulously. It took Emma a minute to realize his look was probably because she hadn't finished chewing all the chocolate in her mouth, and self-consciously put a hand over it as she continued to laugh. Draco just shook his head at her.