Tea and No Sympathy

Chapter 9

Draco's still asleep in Potter's guest bedroom when time resets itself, and he has the disconcerting experience of the time-shift waking him up; he comes to, with a lurch, and finds himself standing stark bollock naked in front of his desk. The time-turner is casting a sickly glow that lights up the whole corner of the room now, and the unsettling glare makes Draco blink. Doesn't he have enough to deal with, with an extreme case of morning wood, without being blinded by a malfunctioning time-travel machine?

He flings a blanket over the time-turner, which conceals most of the light, although thick pulses of it ooze out from under the fabric. He turns his back on it and tries not to see it. Happily, the morning wood situation is more easily dealt with – a few slippery strokes of his cock in the shower has him coming in streams against the shower wall.

By the time he's recovered himself and steps, clean and damp, out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist, he's already decided on an itinerary for the day: collect his owl, woo Potter, snog Potter.

As plans go, it's a little light on detail, but it contains all the essentials. He needs his owl, for reasons. He needs to woo Potter, because Potter deserves to be wooed. Draco tries to push down the feeling that maybe Potter deserves a slow wooing, not a high-speed wooing with intentions . . . and that maybe he wants to give him a slow wooing. It's impossible to do a slow wooing when you only have twenty-four hours before time resets itself.

And, finally, he needs to snog Potter because this morning Draco feels sure – well, relatively sure – that doing so will set him free of the time loop.

It's a little tenuous, the idea that kissing Potter will fix everything, he knows that. But, although he has no firm evidence to base it on, it seems entirely logical. From the start, it's been obvious to Draco that Potter lies at the heart of the time loop – that the whole thing is, basically, Potter's fault. It was him who walked out of Draco's speech, and him who caused Draco to spin the time-turner. He is its centre. And . . . if Draco's honest with himself, Potter is his centre, and always has been. Throughout his childhood, Draco always wondered what the legendary Potter was like – and once he found out for real, everything was so much worse. Potter has wrapped his way round Draco's life and inserted himself into every nook and cranny, so that Draco lives and breathes and dreams him.

It makes perfect sense that the only way to explode the time loop and restart time itself is to make himself Potter's centre too. To join their bodies in the way that their lives have already entwined themselves.

Plus, it has to be said, Draco's getting really, really tired of not kissing Potter. Each day he doesn't kiss Potter seems a day wasted. And if it doesn't break the time loop? Well, he'll still have kissed Potter. As far as Draco can see, it's a win-win situation.

He's pretty sure now that Potter wants to kiss him too – it's just Potter's natural instinct to push him over and stamp on him, ingrained by years of rivalry, that's been getting in the way so far. Draco quite understands; he is driven by a similar urge.

He's half hard again when he pulls on a pair of soft, close-fitting black silk boxers – he loves the way they feel against his skin – but he ignores his growing erection; he has things to do today and no time to waste. He follows the boxers with socks, light-grey trousers and a dusty-blue fitted T-shirt. He examines himself in the mirror and, finally, adds the platinum necklace that was his mother's seventeenth birthday present to him, tucking it under the neck of the T-shirt. He feels underdressed, like he's playing Muggle, but he kind of likes the look – and, more importantly, he thinks Potter will too. He's finding it hard to forget the way Potter's eyes raked over his body the previous night, when he turned up drunk on Potter's doorstep. He may not have acted on it, but he was definitely looking.