Tea and No Sympathy

Chapter 2

Draco snaps awake in front of his desk, with a now familiar sense of disorientation, and thinks: bollocks.

Fucking, shitty, cunty, arsey bollocks.

The time-turner glows a little more brightly, as if it agrees with him, and even peering down at it makes him feel peculiar, so he turns away, closing his eyes and rubbing a hand over his face. When he reopens his eyes, he takes another irritated look around the room. Apart from the time-turner, it seems identical to the last morning. And the morning before. Which was the same morning, Draco supposes, already confusing himself.

He looks down at himself. He's wearing the silk pyjamas he went to sleep in last night – which was the future, he supposes. Looking on the bright side, at least he hasn't woken up dressed in alcohol-soused formal robes – not least because if he has to give the bloody speech again today, he'll need to wear them, and his own cleaning charms never give that really fresh feel that the laundry's do.

It's not much of a bright side though. If he's trapped in a time-loop, he can think of many things that would be useful; daily clean pyjamas is not top of the list.

He jams his slippers on his feet and heads downstairs. He knows it's going to be the same, but a flame of hope flares in his chest when he enters the dining room and sees his mother. It's quickly extinguished though. She's reading the paper, and the headline is clear as day: MALFOY HEIR TO PROMOTE UNITY WITH MUGGLES.

The disappointment makes him sag, and he leans against the edge of the dining table for support.

"Good morning, dear," his mother says, setting the paper aside and looking at him with sympathy. "Are you nervous about your speech?"

Draco sits down and spreads a napkin on his knees – because he did that last time, and the time before, and who the hell is he to break the pattern? – and his mother pours him a cup of tea and summons a house-elf.

"No," he says. "Not at all." And it's true – he's not nervous. He's angry.

While he butters the toast the elf brings him, he tries to decide who he's most angry at. He's angry with himself that he managed to screw up fixing the time-turner, although he still feels no small amount of pride that the thing worked at all. OK, so it's not perfect, but he went back in time, didn't he? And clearly at some point he'll stop going back in time; he just needs to figure out what, exactly, is keeping him stuck here.

Or, rather, who.

By the time Draco's finished his toast, it's all so blindingly obvious, he wonders why he didn't see it before.

It's all Potter's fault, just like always.

The logic is inescapable. Who was it who walked out of Draco's speech? Potter. Who was, therefore, the reason Draco had to use the time-turner? Potter. Ergo, if Potter hadn't walked out of his speech in the first place, Draco would never have had to use the blasted thing. It follows logically, therefore, Draco thinks, that if Potter doesn't walk out, then Draco will never have to use the time-turner, and the time loop will collapse.

Draco sips his tea and even feels cheerful enough to skim read his mother's discarded paper, although he avoids the front cover. His father's campaign to fill the papers with positive press on his behalf has been a successful one – so successful that he occasionally feels a sympathetic pang for Potter and the way the Prophet used to hound him, and still does. It's not as gratifying as he thought it might be, and people do send him the strangest fanmail.

"I'd better go and get ready," he tells his mother as time wears on, and she smiles at him as he rises and goes over to kiss her on the cheek.

"Wear the dark-green," she says, as if his choice of robes – formal, old-fashioned, traditional – wasn't decided at least a month ago. "It suits you." Her smile grows fonder and more sentimental, and he can feel her eyes on his back as he leaves the room.