Like Clockwork

Chapter Three

In retrospect, he was surprised it had taken him this long to realise he was falling in love with Potter; he had only ever been a hair's breadth away from it in the first place.

Still, it was horribly annoying to discover that he was becoming less distracted by Potter's uniquely wild form of attractiveness, and more distracted by... well... him, just him. It was disgusting, and Draco tried to push it from his mind.

The decorations had been out for weeks in Diagon Alley, but now that the first of December was behind them, the feverish excitement of the place seemed to have exploded all around them. The tinsel that lined the lampposts was lit with tiny lights that sparkled against the falling snow, and enchanted snowballs could be seen bobbing along behind children as they darted through the crowd after unsuspecting friends.

Draco wasn't even bothered by the sound of carolling in the distance, though he had grown up in a household that found street choirs awfully pedestrian. As a child, he had secretly loved the carollers that went from door to door, and he used to find any excuse to linger by them when they came to Diagon Alley. Looking back and remembering the fond smile his mother would give him as he stopped to tie his shoelace or point into a conveniently-placed shop window, he had a feeling he possibly hadn't been as discrete as he'd attempted.

Even the knowledge that he was doing something so stupid and irreversible as pining after the impossible wasn't enough to completely ruin his mood, though it was making him more introspective than normal. He wondered if, had he been able to avoid this curse business and live his life with a continued distance from Potter, would he have been able to avoid this realisation? Or was it simply one of those things that had a sinking inevitability to it? Perhaps he had only ever been living on borrowed ignorance, and now his stash had run out.

Or, perhaps being surrounded by laughter and love was turning him into a sentimental twat, and as soon as they parted ways he would fall back into his blissful life of bachelorhood.

Even he snorted at the blatant lie in that one, startling a resting owl on the sign beside him into taking flight and showering him with cold droplets of snow that he probably deserved. His life was a mess. But then, he'd been given the chance to study an area in his field that no witch or wizard had been given for hundreds of years, and in return, he just had to take the teensy tiny problem of developing a crush on the least available wizard of his generation. Surely, it was worth it.

He turned into Flourish and Blotts and began to peruse the shelves for a gift for his mother. She was becoming increasingly difficult to buy for, as her hobbies turned more and more eclectic. Ever since Lucius had passed away, every year had been a step further down the path of mindless distraction. Last year had been her obsession with pottery. He lost track of the number of sculpture books and materials she had acquired, although he had to admit she had produced some lovely clay peacocks.

This year, he was fairly certain her obsession had turned to bee-keeping, which Draco was at least seventy percent sure she had chosen mostly for shock value. Not that he'd tell her that, of course.

As he browsed the shelves, he heard some children burst into the shop, bringing icy wind whirling in with them for a split second before it hit the shop's warming charm and fell away.

"Did you see the squid slippers?" The young girl burst out, lowering her voice quickly as the door closed and muffled the sound of the bustling alley. "They puff out black smoke so no one can see you if you need to run away quickly!"

"No one's running anywhere fast in those slippers." The boy laughed. "They've got tentacles for Merlin's sake."

The girl rolled her eyes. "Duh, that's because the tentacles have a hovering charm, like on a baby broom, so you can get away faster."