Day 1

Draco should have taken the raging headache with which he awoke as a sign to skip the day and go back to bed. Instead, he stumbled out of the sheets, grabbed the first set of robes he laid hands on, and staggered down to breakfast, where an insolent first-year started a food fight with his mate. By the time Draco had left the Great Hall to go to class, there were eggs in his hair and down his robes, and he had taken points from the two first-years—even though they were Slytherins and thus normally exempt from punishment. Needless to say, Draco had not eaten a thing, and his head only throbbed harder for it.

“Thank you for joining us, Mr. Malfoy. If you would, please sit with Mr. Goyle,” McGonagall said through tight lips as Draco entered the Transfiguration classroom only a smite bit late.

They began studying wandless human transfigurations. Of course Goyle was basically an idiot, so when class was dismissed, Draco's nose was still so abnormally small, it might as well have been non-existent. A Hufflepuff girl dared to laugh at him in the corridor, exaggerating his irritation and his headache.

His nose grew back to size in the middle of Charms class, startling Flitwick as Draco demonstrated a new charm they were studying, and causing the goblin-blooded teacher to fall off his stool with laughter. Potter and Weasley laughed along with the professor, taking great joy in the untimely magic, Draco was sure.

Draco's mood was so foul by the time he dropped into a chair in the library during his study break that he couldn't tolerate a single person. He spent more time rubbing his temples than he did researching the magical properties of the Chilean Jumping Bean as compared to its Mexican brother, and Blaise Zabini kept glancing at him with an annoyed sneer.

“If you are in that much pain, you should go to the hospital wing,” he said to Draco. Despite his words of concern, there was no hint in his voice that he cared whether the blond felt well or not—not that Draco expected such kindness from him.

“Shove off,” he muttered back. “I'm fine.”

Zabini's supercilious scowl spoke volumes of how much he disliked his housemate, a dislike that was long-lasting and mutual. They tolerated each other, just like they tolerated the other Slytherins, because family politics dictated it. The animosity within Slytherin House was only apparent to those inside of it. To outsiders, they were a united body. They were, certainly, but for no other reason than because they thought themselves superior to all the other Houses.

“It's your pride that will get your family in trouble, just so you know,” Zabini replied as he scanned a passage from a book for the information they needed for their Potions essays.

As if he could talk! The Zabinis were well-known for their excessive and undeserved pride. Draco's eyes narrowed dangerously. “I'd watch your mouth if I were you,” he warned, but part of him—the part of him that viciously scolded him for getting out of bed that morning—wanted Zabini to keep going, to push his buttons so that Draco would have a reason to punch something.

“Going to fetch the Dark Lord on me? Or maybe Daddy?”

Draco closed his eyes, colors bursting behind his eyelids, and suddenly felt sick to his stomach. “I'm not putting up with this shite,” he said, gathering his things together.

“Run away, Malfoy. Your family is good at that.”

Of any day for Zabini to decide to pick a fight, Draco would have preferred it not be this one. Of course, the day did not get any better.

Sixth-years were filing out of the Potions classroom in a raucous barrage as the seventh-years were entering. Draco, preoccupied with trying to remove the (hopefully) last piece of egg lodged in the collar of his uniform, did not move out of the way when a red-headed girl barreled out of the door carrying a small cauldron of potion. Instead, he ran right into her. Consequently, the potion spilled all over them as the cauldron jerked out of her hands.

Draco stood shocked for some seconds, but the girl acted immediately.

“Take off your robe, Malfoy! Take it off now!”

“What?”

Rather than explain, she quickly removed her robe, throwing it against the wall away from them, and then she proceeded to tear his off his body. He could see nothing of her face for the dark copper hair that surrounded it, but he instinctively knew who she was. Unfortunately, Snape chose that moment to investigate the hold up in the doorway of his classroom, and happened upon the scene as Draco got tangled in his own robe, nearly falling into his assailant.

“Weasley! What is the meaning of this!”

She jumped nearly a foot in the air, but the motion was enough to finally remove the ruined piece of clothing.

“Sir, Malfoy made me spill the potion. I was just making sure it didn't burn through his skin,” she answered, tossing the robe into a pile with hers.

“I made you spill it? Me? What are you doing walking around with a cauldron anyway?” Draco protested, looking to Snape for the support he would surely provide for someone of his own House.

“That's enough! Detention, both of you.”

Detention! Snape had never given Draco a detention before. Snape had never punished Draco before. He had the dignity not to let his mouth hang open in flabbergasted dismay, which couldn't be said for some of the on-lookers.

“Malfoy, Weasley, go to the hospital wing and make sure none of the potion got on your skin. Everyone else, inside.”

“You will pay for my robe, Weasley,” Draco muttered as they headed upstairs. She glared at him, and he smirked back.

“You should pay for mine, you dolt. Why don't you watch where you're going?” she replied, her cheeks flushed with anger that burned in her eyes.

“I'd give you a Sickle to pay for your robe, but I fear that may be overestimating its worth,” he replied, artfully ignoring her question.

“I find you highly irritating,” she said, her expression one of distaste.

“The feeling is mutual, you can be sure.”

“You don't even know me,” she replied.

“I don't have to. You're a Weasley, aren't you? That's all I need to know.”

They didn't speak again until they arrived on the fourth floor, and then Weasley scowled and sighed in exasperation, looking as if she'd been containing herself but couldn't any longer.

“I'm having the worst day of my life and you come along making it worse! It's just the thing to happen to me! McGonagall is going to take points for sure.”

“You're having a bad day? What about me! The world does not revolve around you, you know!”

“Ha! Says the pot to the kettle!”

Draco released a breath through his nose, sounding like an annoyed horse.

“If I did not have this blinding headache, I'd have hexed you already.”

“And if I didn't have such high moral standards, I would have hexed you already, too!”

He did not need this back and forth on top of everything else today, so he let her win that round and kept silent. Even after they arrived at the hospital wing, he kept his mouth shut, allowing Weasley to do all the talking.

“After Henry turned our anti-aging potion toxic, Professor Snape said that it couldn't be Vanished like others can, so he told me to take it to his office so he can dispose of it properly,” Weasley explained.

“Yes, yes. Mr. Zimmerman is still unconscious over there. The fumes of toxic potions are very unkind to magical bodies. Mixes with our power oddly,” Madam Pomfrey explained to Draco, while Weasley nodded along as if she'd heard it all before.

“Well, Malfoy managed to knock me over while I was carrying the potion and it spilled on us. Professor Snape wants us to make sure none of it got on our skin.”

“If there is one thing that can be said about Professor Snape, it is that he cares deeply about his students' health,” the matron replied sagely.

Draco snorted but remained silent. He was so riled up when they were released that he forgot to ask for a potion for his head. It wasn't until dinner that he finally started feeling like a human being again, but the thought of detention afterward made him want to smash his head against the table.

As he left for detention, though, he was accosted by his least favorite Weasley, who stomped toward him like an angry hippogriff.

“Malfoy! What's this I hear about you stripping my sister in the middle of a crowded corridor?”

Draco pinched the bridge of his nose. His head had started to pound in a rhythm that reminded him of words, and it was hard to concentrate when two headaches were speaking to him. “What the hell are you on about?”

“It's all over the school that you were undressing my sister in public! What do you think you're doing undressing her at all?”

Still not following the conversation well, Draco replied, “I'm sure she quite enjoyed it or I wouldn't have done it.”

That was not the answer Ron Weasley wanted to hear, and a second later, Draco was reeling backwards with the force of a punch he had not seen coming. He fell against the wall, and just managed to keep himself standing, before Weasley approached him, pointing a long finger in his face.

“You keep away from my sister, Malfoy. I'll break something next time.”

Already feeling quite broken, Draco remained silent, watching the ginger-headed nitwit as he walked away. He checked himself for bruises or tenderness—none—and then made his way to Snape's classroom.

Luckily, detention was the most uneventful part of his day. He and Weasley kept to themselves as they washed cauldrons and scrubbed the work tables. Not a word was said as they chopped ingredients for the stores and reorganized the storage cabinet. They were released before midnight, and as Draco entered the seventh-year boys' dormitory, all thoughts of homework were beaten and suppressed. He climbed into bed fully clothed (minus the ruined robe Professor Snape had had to throw out) and immediately fell asleep, despite his ever-throbbing head.

At least this day is over, he thought just before he fell asleep.

Day 2

When Draco awoke the next morning, his head was still pounding with all the ferocity of a Cornish Pixie loose in his skull, beating on his brain with a hammer. He groaned loudly, clutching his hair in a grip he instantly regretted for the intensified ache.

He resolved to not make the same mistake as yesterday and just go to the hospital wing for a headache potion. Maybe his day would turn out better if he started it on the right foot.

Dressing quickly, Draco made his way up to the fourth floor. If he hurried, maybe he'd have time for breakfast before class, but when he arrived, no one was around. Madam Pomfrey should have been there, should have shown up at some point, but after twenty minutes, no one appeared, and Draco had to leave so as not to be late for class.

When he arrived at Transfiguration, class had just barely started.

“Thank you for joining us, Mr. Malfoy. If you would, please sit with Mr. Goyle,” McGonagall said, pointing to the seat next to Goyle right in the front row.

“Again?” he complained, not looking forward to tiny ears to match his tiny nose from yesterday.

Goyle laughed when Draco sat down and told him a story about some first-years starting a food fight at breakfast that morning, but the blond tuned him out so he could concentrate on his spell. Human transfigurations were hard enough without being distracted by idiotic anecdotes, and even though any transfiguration applied incorrectly to Goyle's face would have improved his looks, Draco still wanted to do it correctly. At the end of the class, he sported the same nose he'd worn yesterday (the product of Goyle's shoddy spellwork, not Draco's, of course), and in the corridor, the same Hufflepuff girl laughed at him. He did a double take as she walked by, but it was definitely the same girl. When she met his eyes, she blushed and looked away, scurrying down the hall quickly to avoid his glare.

“Today we'll be studying Protean Charms. Does anyone happen to be familiar with this charm?” Professor Flitwick announced at the beginning of Draco's next class.

Odd, Draco thought. Didn't we go over this yesterday? He raised his hand while on the other side of the room Granger raised hers, though much less gracefully than he.

“Excellent! Mr. Malfoy, why don't you show us how it's done then?”

Before Draco could finish uttering the incantation, his nose grew back to size, startling Professor Flitwick. The little man giggled at first, obviously trying to contain his laughter, but the guffaws of Draco's classmates undid him. Draco felt no pity when Flitwick lost his balance and fell off his stool. In fact, he was irritated that the shock of such an occurrence was still as funny today as it had been yesterday and irritated that it had happened to him twice.

And all the while, his head continued to hurt.

For his study break, he decided to stay away from the library, in the case that Zabini was in the same foul mood as yesterday, and instead ventured back to the hospital wing to see if Madam Pomfrey had seen any sense in showing up. Before he made it there, however, he met Ron Weasley on the Grand Staircase, and still sore from the punch he received yesterday, Draco confronted him.

“Hey, Weasley!”

Weasley turned around, his eyes narrowing when he saw Draco.

“What do you want?”

“I just wanted to let you know that you won't get away with punching me yesterday,” he replied as he drew his wand.

“What are you talking about?” Weasley said, but Draco didn't bother to answer.

He flicked his wand in an upward motion as he thought Levicorpus.

“Hey—!” Weasley's body flew up into the air, jerked upwards by one leg as if caught in a trap.

“Tarentellegra!”

While he hung upside down, his legs began to jerk in twitchy dancing motions. Weasley tried to pull out his wand, but it fell out of his shaky grasp onto the floor. Draco smirked as he kicked the wand down a flight of stairs.

“I say, you scoundrel! You wait until Dumbledore hears about this!” a man with a rather long goatee yelled at Draco out of a portrait next to the door to the west wing of the castle.

“I'm not afraid of Dumbledore,” Draco said, shaking his wand at the portrait. But the man had gone.

“M-Malfoy! G-g-get me d-down from here!” screamed Weasley, his voice trembling with his body's twitching.

“If you lay one hand on me again, you'll receive much worse, you can be sure,” Draco warned, and then continued on his way, feeling smugly satisfied.

The hospital wing was cool when Draco entered, as if the air temperature was regulated separately from the rest of the castle. It was also brightly lit with orbs of white light hanging over each bed, which, combined with the white sheets and curtain dividers that concealed the beds, made the room look pristine and clean. It was always a strange experience to walk from the dark drafty corridor into the bright hospital wing.

Draco shivered. He'd never felt comfortable in this part of the castle, sure that it was contaminated with illness and disease with which he wanted no contact.

“Can I help you, Mr. Malfoy?” Madam Pomfrey asked as if she were being inconvenienced by his being there.

“I've had this horrible headache since yesterday morning and I wanted something to get rid of it,” he replied, rubbing his forehead in irritation. The action reminded him of Potter, and once it did so, he dropped his hand to his side as if burned. “I came this morning, but no one was here,” he added, a bit of an accusation in his voice.

“Of course you did. Unfortunately, there are several hundred people in this castle, not just you, so I was busy with another patient this morning. Take a seat, and I'll see what I have for a headache cure.”
She left through a door in the back of the room, which Draco supposed concealed a supply closet. He did as she commanded and sat at the foot of a bed, but he did so petulantly, feeling wrongfully chastised.

He hadn't sat there long before someone entered the ward noisily, slamming the door open and letting it fall shut behind them. When they were within his line of sight, he discovered the Weasley girl hoisting a male body over hers. She was panting heavily from the effort, though Draco marveled that she'd been able to carry him at all, while the boy seemed to be unconscious.

“Where's Madam Pomfrey?” she asked, and he noticed now that there were tears in her eyes, though they didn't seem to have fallen. There was an odd note in her voice as well, something strained. It made her sound mad.

“Is he dead?” Malfoy asked, wondering if that might be the reason she was crying.

“No!” she cried, sniffling loudly. “What are you doing here? Aren't you supposed to be somewhere else?”

“Excuse me?” Draco asked. She approached him and Draco jumped off the bed, wary of her, but she just deposited her load onto the bed and sighed.

“You weren't here yesterday,” she replied. “W-when I brought Henry here yesterday. You weren't in here.”

Draco eyed the lump on the bed, taking in the dark blond hair and wide nose. He vaguely remembered the story Weasley had told Madam Pomfrey yesterday about a toxic anti-aging potion. It seemed as if she and Zimmerman couldn't get their potion right today either.

“So?” Draco replied. She looked as if she was going to say something else, but at that moment, Madam Pomfrey returned from the supply cabinet, a vial of potion in hand.

“What's this? Miss Weasley?”

Weasley's lips quivered as she answered, and she was wringing her hands nervously.

“W-we were doing anti-aging potions and Henry turned ours toxic. The—the fumes got to him, and he fainted.”

“Oh dear. The fumes of toxic potions can be very unkind to magical bodies. Mixes with our power oddly,” Pomfrey said in a softer tone than she'd used with Draco. “Here you are, Mr. Malfoy. Drink that and you should be good as new,” she added, handing Draco the vial.

He downed the potion and immediately felt the effects, the pressure in his forehead fading and the pounding at his temples completely stopping. He felt like a brand new person, and suddenly, his taxing day seemed less horrible.

He even felt good enough to thank the matron on his way out, but before he'd moved two steps, Weasley called to him, her voice shaking.

“You're different. No one else has noticed that it's the same. It's just us. Just us.”

He didn't understand her meaning and thought her raving, maybe from the fumes of her ruined potion, so he turned his back on her and exited the hospital wing.

Draco spent the rest of his study break in the Sytherin common room—definitely not hiding from the male Weasley's wrath (if he ever got down from the ceiling, that is). When it was time for Potions, he left early, moving cautiously, in case the other Weasley was charged with walking around the dungeons with cauldronfuls of toxic potions again. He did not want a repeat of yesterday and ruin a second set of robes or risk his own life.

They passed each other near the door to Snape's office, and he saw that she was being equally as careful herself, to prevent any more mishaps. Her eyes were dry now, with a determined edge to them. She nodded to him as he walked by and he nodded back.

When Draco sat in his usual seat at the back of the classroom, he noted the presence of Granger and Potter sitting at the front, but Weasley was obviously absent. He smirked to himself, wondering if he was still hanging in the air somewhere on the Grand Staircase.

Draco didn't have to wonder long because a nervous looking Ravenclaw girl entered the classroom and approached Snape's desk. She spoke for a moment or two before Snape nodded tersely and called Draco's name.

“Professor McGonagall wants to see you. Take your things.”

That did not bode well.

Draco gathered his belongings together, putting away his cauldron and supplies, before he exited the room on the heels of the girl. She didn't speak to him as they climbed the stairs, but she eyed him out of the corner of her eye. Draco knew what McGonagall wanted him for; he didn't have to be told. His prediction proved itself true as he met Ron Weasley's eyes upon entering the Transfiguration teacher's office. The expression on his face was smug, while the one on McGonagall's was livid.

“Had Professor von Rheticus not informed Professor Dumbledore of your unprovoked attack on Mr. Weasley earlier today, he might still be hanging there, Mr. Malfoy.”

Draco suppressed a snort, knowing how well that would go over with the Transfiguration teacher. Then he wondered who the hell Professor von Rheticus was and remembered the portrait of the man with the goatee. That snitch.

“This sort of unprovoked attack—or any attack, for that matter—will not be tolerated here—”

“Wait just a minute!” Draco interrupted. “He's the one who punched me first! Yesterday, after dinner!”

McGonagall turned her steely gaze on Weasley, whose smug expression turned to one of outrage.

“I never laid a hand on him! Not yesterday, not any day!”

“Yes, you did! You told me to stay away from your stupid sister and punched me!”

“I bloody well didn't—and what are you doing with my sister, anyway!”

“That's quite enough!” McGonagall cried. “Mr. Weasley, Mr. Malfoy, you'll both serve detention with Mr. Filch this evening. Until then, I want you to remember that fighting is strictly prohibited, and if I hear word from another portrait that either one of you has been fighting again, I'll take the matter up with Professor Dumbledore himself. Good day.”

The boys filed out of the room, both of them sharing in their indignation.

“It's just like you to make up a story to bring me down with you,” Weasley muttered ferociously.

“I did no such thing,” replied Draco in a seething voice.

“You don't have to pretend with me, Malfoy.”

Before Draco could reply, Weasley disappeared through a secret passage that led to the next floor up, leaving Draco alone in the corridor. Why couldn't he just have normal days, instead of everyone going mad on him?

Later that night, they served their detention with Filch, sweeping and mopping floors, shining suits of armor, and even scraping Drooble's Best Blowing Gum from the underside of classroom desks. Draco and Weasley regarded each other with tense silence, but, just like his detention the day before, the time passed quickly and wordlessly. Filch worked them giddily until well past midnight, and for the second night in a row, Draco dropped into his bed, exhausted down to his bones. These past two days had been the longest, most trying days he had ever experienced. He could only hope the next day would be better.

Day 3

Draco groaned and growled into his pillow the next morning when he awoke with another pounding headache. As he got ready for class, he didn't take his usual time carefully getting dressed or styling his hair. He flew out of his room and up to the infirmary, expletives running on a repeat cycle in his mind. If Madam Pomfrey was not in the hospital wing this morning, he planned to raid her supply closet for the cure he needed. He could not stand another day, another moment, with this stupid headache.

Alas, when he arrived at the hospital wing, it was just as he'd feared: the matron was nowhere to be seen. He looked around the dividing curtains to see if any patients were hiding out of sight and then opened the door to the room he'd seen Madam Pomfrey enter just the day before. As he'd guessed, it was a large storage closet lined with shelving. He eyed the labels on the vials of potion shelved nearest to him, but he didn't need Pepper-Up potion or Dreamless Sleep.

He wasn't sure how the shelves were organized, as the vials weren't labeled alphabetically, so it took him a few minutes to find anything that looked promising. He spotted the headache cure on the bottommost shelf in the far left corner of the closet, but when Draco reached down to take one of the potions, the door swung closed behind him. Startled, he spun around, cure in hand, and tried the door handle, but it wouldn't open.

“Awww, dammit,” he cursed, yanking on the handle once again. The slab of wood didn't budge. He pulled out his wand and tried all the spells in his arsenal that could open locked doors, reveal hidden passages, and move solid objects, but the door remained firmly locked, and Draco knew that he would be in deep trouble when Madam Pomfrey discovered him in her stores.

Ah, well. He might as well take the headache potion if he was going to be punished for stealing it. He chugged the contents of the vial down and then replaced the empty container on the shelf, hidden behind the other vials.

There was nothing else to do but wait, so he took a seat and tried not to think of the breakfast he was missing. His watch ticked loudly in the silence as the minutes passed, and nearly an hour later, he heard the sound of the door handle turning. Draco scrambled to his feet and put on a contrite face, hoping it would be enough to save him from detention, or worse.

Madam Pomfrey stared at him for a moment, shocked to find a student in her supply closet, but then she recovered, sighed, and said, “Mr. Malfoy, what are you doing here?”

Draco thought about lying, telling her that he had waited for her with another student, who had then cruelly and unexpectedly shoved him in the storage closet and left him there to rot, but there was nothing for him to say, because he could tell by the look on her face that she was not going to accept any excuse from him.

“Detention, then?” he asked in a tone that would have sounded resigned to her, but was actually a bit sneering.

“Tonight. I'll see you here right after dinner.”

He decided to skip Transfiguration, since he was late anyway, and instead went to the kitchens to get something to eat. House-elves swarmed around him as soon as the portrait of the bowl of fruit opened, and he spent the next twenty minutes being served different foods and enjoying every minute of it. Draco regretted having to leave for Charms, and as soon as the lesson began, he knew he shouldn't have shown up to that class either.

“Today we'll be studying Protean Charms. Does anyone happen to be familiar with this charm?” Flitwick asked for the third day in a row, and Draco, shocked beyond belief at the man's memory and lack of planning with his lessons, didn't bother to raise his hand.

This time, Granger was alone in her knowledge of Protean Charms, so Professor Flitwick called on her for a demonstration.

“Excellent! Miss Granger, why don't you show us how it's done, then?”

Draco felt a surreal sense of déjà vu, even though this class was going differently than it did the previous two days. Since he hadn't gone to Transfiguration, his nose was the same size it always was, so Flitwick didn't fall off his stool laughing at Draco when it grew back to size in the middle of the lesson. This time, class progressed as usual. Granger showed off her skill by showing everyone how to cast a Protean Charm. Flitwick awarded her House points, nearly wetting himself in excitement that she knew the charm so well. Then the class as a whole practiced the incantation and the wand movements, moving on to put the charm to practical application.

He didn't know why, but Draco did not feel like he was a part of the class. He felt outside of it—like a stranger looking in. He recalled Weasley's words in the hospital wing from the day before.

No one else has noticed that it's the same. It's just us. Just us.

For a moment, he wondered if this is what she had meant, this feeling of déjà vu, of feeling apart from everyone else, but he shook his head, pushing the strange thoughts away.

Draco decided to spend his study break in the library today, and he was not surprised to see Blaise Zabini there, sitting at the table they usually reserved for themselves during this period. As he sat down, Draco realized that he didn't know what homework he had to do. His essay for Potions about jumping beans? But he had been sent out of class the last two days in a row, and the assignment should have been turned in the day before yesterday.

“What are you working on?” he asked Zabini, nodding to the pile of books in a stack next to the other Slytherin.

“Potions essay,” he replied tersely, not bothering to look away from his reading.

“The one comparing the usages of Mexican and Chilean Jumping Beans?”

“That would be the one,” Zabini said drily.

“But wasn't that due Tuesday?”

Zabini sighed in exasperation, obviously annoyed by Draco's interruptions.

“It still is due Tuesday. You know, today? Next period?”

“No, it isn't.”

“What?”

“It can't be Tuesday. It's Thursday,” Draco said.

“You've gone bonkers! It's not Thursday. Today is Tuesday!”

“I'm not mad!”

Madam Pince took that moment to appear from an aisle and noisily berated Draco for his loud voice. Instead of listening, he grabbed his bag again and left the library at a speed that could almost be called running, except for the fact that Malfoys did not do such undignified things as run.

He wasn't sure where he was going, only that he needed to find a copy of today's Daily Prophet. If he had gone to breakfast that morning, he would have seen...

There was a flash of bright red hair ahead of him, turning to go up a staircase, and his heart jumped. Weasley! She'd known about this. Surely that's what she had meant—today? The day before yester-today? Two cycles previously?—two days ago?

No one else has noticed that it's the same. It's just us. Just us.

But as he got closer, he realized that it wasn't the female Weasley at all taking the stairs to the next floor, but her oaf of a brother. Draco stopped at a corner and waited for him to leave, looking to avoid another encounter with him, since they seemed to always turn out badly.

Then he wandered the corridor, looking for the Weasley girl, and when he found no sign of her, he went to the next floor up and searched that one. It was only when he looked at his watch and realized it was almost time for Potions that he remembered where she would be at this moment. Her Potions class was the period before his. He managed, on his way down to the dungeons, to convince himself that he didn't need to talk to her at all. That he was being foolish in even considering...

He stopped in his tracks. What was he considering, exactly? That time had stopped? That he had repeated Tuesday two days in a row? That only he and Griselda Weasley were aware of what was happening?

Draco snorted and continued down the stairs. What an absurd thought! He was just confused. Of course it was Tuesday, and the strange sense of déjà vu he had felt earlier only seemed strange because that was the nature of déjà vu. He must have had a vivid dream that he had forgotten and had been reminded of it during Charms. That explained it.

In the dungeons, on his way to Potions, he saw Weasley hurrying down the corridor to Snape's office carrying a small steaming cauldron. Even though she was in a rush, he could tell that she was trying to be careful, just like she'd been the day before, just like she hadn't been the day before that.

He stopped, their eyes meeting, and suddenly, without evidence, without being told, he knew that the absurd notion that had popped into his mind less than ten minutes ago had to be true. That's why Flitwick had introduced Protean Charms as if the class had never done them before for the past two days. Even though Draco knew now, he couldn't actually be sure. He wanted the proof, because this was just... impossible. Unreal. How did this happen?

Weasley seemed to see the realization in his eyes, because as she passed him, he heard her mutter, “Meet me in the library after dinner.”

“I have detention,” he replied automatically.

“I suppose it really doesn't matter,” she said to herself. “After your detention, then. Meet me in the seventh floor corridor, in front of the tapestry of the trolls in tutus.”

“I'm probably mad to agree to meet you,” he said as he backed away.

“You already think you're mad, don't you?” she asked, her head cocked to the side and her eyes knowing.

“I'm not mad.”

“No, you're not. And I can prove it to you.”

“Tonight, then,” he said.

“Tonight,” she repeated.

He entered the Potions classroom once again feeling that surreal sense of being outside of the experience somehow. It was all in his head, of course, but there seemed to be a barrier between him and his classmates—and Professor Snape, even—as he took his seat. He noticed Ron Weasley's disapproving look, Blaise Zabini's glare of dislike, Snape's frown of discontent, but they had no effect on him. The moment passed and class continued as normal, no one else any wiser that Draco Malfoy was indeed going mad.

After a demeaning detention of cleaning bedpans in the infirmary, Draco wandered up to the seventh floor, using his Prefect duties as an excuse to be out of bed past curfew. Weasley was already waiting in front of the tapestry she had mentioned, pacing back and forth and muttering to herself all the while. A door appeared in the wall across from the tapestry, and Draco remembered this place as the one where Potter and his friends had held Defense Against the Dark Arts lessons two years ago. He and the Inquisitorial Squad had raided the place on Umbridge's orders.

Weasley entered the door without a word to Draco, so he followed her in, taking in the small, well-furnished room and deeming it worthy and comfortable enough for him. Two green plush chairs sat in front of a fireplace on the far left wall and a table covered in all sorts of food took up the area in front of the door. Paintings that looked vaguely familiar to Draco hung on the wall, as well as Slytherin and Gryffindor banners.

Weasley made a face at the décor, but Draco quite liked it. He helped himself to a sandwich and some fruit from the table before joining her in the chairs.

They sat without speaking for several minutes, only the crackling of the fire and the sound of Draco's chewing filling the void. Finally, his patience ran out and he said, “You can tell me what's going on?”

“Not really,” she replied, turning her face away from the flames to look at him. It was a strange thought, but it seemed to Draco that her eyes had collected some of the fire as she had stared at it, and now they glowed with the same heat.

At his scowl, she corrected herself.

“I don't know what's going on. All I can tell you is that this day has repeated itself twice. At breakfast... on the second day, the first time it repeated, I noticed the newspaper when Hermione received it. Tuesday, February the seventeenth. The same date as the day before. She didn't seem to notice anything odd about it. No one did. And when I went to my classes, they were all the same. The same lessons. The same lecture. The same mistakes and the same successes.

“The only thing that was different about it was you. You weren't in the hospital wing the day before, when I'd had to take Henry there. I thought that maybe it was the same for you. It is, isn't it?”

She looked at him with wide eyes that were uncertain, just as Draco was uncertain. Maybe they had gone mad. Maybe they were both sharing the same delusion.

“No. I don't know,” he replied, looking back down at his sandwich before taking a large bite. She waited as he stalled, chewing slowly and deliberately, thinking through his options. He swallowed and saw her still staring at him, and sighed before replying. “Some things are... similar. But many things are not. How am I supposed to know if... if... your theory is true?”

Weasley straightened up at that, moving close to the edge of her seat as if ready to jump up if the need arose.

“Do something that you can check the next day. Write yourself a note tonight, and when you wake up in the morning, see if it's still there. Destroy your dormitory. Cut all your hair off. Insult a teacher. Get points taken away.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Draco interrupted, his eyebrows slanted together in thought and anger. “You're just trying to get me in trouble!”

Her head was already shaking before he finished speaking, and the frown on her face told him that she was becoming impatient with him.

“Fine, then! Don't do those things! But do something, Malfoy! This is serious. I am serious. This isn't a dream come true for me, you know. Repeat one horrid day over and over again, and the only person who might have any idea what is going on, the only person who might be experiencing the same thing, is you? Color me delighted!”

“Of all people, why would I get stuck in this with you?” he snarled, knocking his plate of food to the floor as he stood from the chair.

She stood up as well, her hair and eyes both glinting a bright orange in the light of the fire. “That's my question exactly! I thought we could be civilized about this, just so that we could get through it, but it's obvious to me now that we can't!”

She stormed out of the room, slamming the door shut behind her, and with her went the fire. Draco sat back down, huffing in frustration as he looked into the empty grate, watching as smoke rose from the hot ashes.

He fell asleep in that chair sometime later, his body shivering in the cold.

Day 4

Draco got his proof the next morning when he woke up in his own bed with a headache that felt as though it were trying to split his head into two. He groaned as he buried his face in his pillow, not looking forward to another day of pain, but a moment later, he remembered the night before and where he had fallen asleep.

He shot up into a sitting position, looking around the dormitory in shock. He was alone, the unmade beds of his housemates a signal that Crabbe, Goyle, Nott, and Zabini had already left for breakfast. Carefully getting out of bed and selecting a clean set of robes, Draco thought about Weasley's theory, the same one that had crossed his mind briefly the day before, and wondered if it could really be true. Oh, sure, he'd fallen asleep in the Come and Go room and had awoken in his own dormitory, but there could be an explanation for that, right? Maybe a house-elf had brought him back here with their type of magic. Maybe he had dreamt the entire encounter.

He snorted to himself as he did up his tie.

He must have dreamed it. There was no way he would have met with Gingerbread Weasley otherwise.

Pausing for a moment, he wondered if that was such a good thing after all, dreaming of clandestine meetings with a Weasley.

Instead of going to the hospital wing for a headache cure, Draco went to breakfast, a man on a mission.

“Hey, you!” he called out to a Ravenclaw he recognized from his Arithmancy class as he entered the Great Hall. “What's today?”

“Tuesday?” the Ravenclaw answered, with a bit of an attitude, Draco thought.

“And the date?”

“The seventeenth. Of February?” He was now looking at Draco as if he thought the Slytherin had more than a few screws loose, so Draco left him and headed to his table.

On the way to his usual seat, he poked a Slytherin fourth-year in the temple, and asked him the same question.

“Tuesday, you bugger!” the fourth-year answered, but when he looked up at Draco, his eyes widened in horror. “I'm sorry, Mr. Malfoy! Of course you're not a bugger!” he squeaked in a pleading sort of voice.

“Stop that,” Draco answered mindlessly, his eyes already roaming to his next victim. “Slytherins do not plead.”

He took a seat in the middle of the table and proceeded to ask every person around him what day of the week it was and the date.

“Finish my sentence,” he said to a girl with sleek brown hair and a round face. “Today is...”

“A gloriously beautiful day!”

Draco looked around, for the girl he asked hadn't been the one to answer. Luna Lovegood stood behind him, her eyes wide and sparkly. Draco then looked up at the ceiling and saw that the skies were gray with thick, dark clouds and the occasional flash of lightning. He looked at Loony again, but she hadn't moved or changed her expression.

“I just thought you should know that you are looking rather orange today,” she said.

Draco looked to his neighbors, but they were eying Lovegood with just as much confusion as he was.

“You mean me?”

“Of course you. It's rather strange, actually. I've never seen so many orange auras, but I just noticed them today. Three. They stand out quite a bit against the blues, pinks, greens, and grays.” She eyed the length of the table, and Draco didn't have to wonder to whom the gray auras belonged.

“That's nice, Lovegood, but we're really not in the mood to humor you today,” Draco responded, turning back to the table.

“You never are,” she said, sighing wistfully.

She must have left because she didn't speak again, but as Draco gathered some eggs and bacon on his plate, his eyes happened to look up, catching Gemima Weasley's knowing gaze.

~*~*~*~*~

That about did it for Draco. He was convinced now that he and Weasley were stuck in some sort of time loop that would repeat Tuesday, February the seventeenth, over and over again for an eternity. Well, maybe not an eternity, but for an indefinite length of time. He didn't know how to feel about it. A tiny part of him that he would never admit existed was panicking, but the rest took the news in stride. What could he do about it? Well, he did have one idea.

He left breakfast, and instead of going to the hospital wing for a headache cure (suddenly, his headache didn't seem to matter, even though it continued to throb), or even to Transfiguration. He went back to his dormitory and scrounged around for a piece of parchment and a quill.

Dear Mother,

I find myself in a bit of a predicament.

Time has stopped moving. I am stuck in a cycle of never-ending Tuesdays. What is the date at home? I cannot tell if the time loop only exists here at Hogwarts or if this is a world-wide phenomenon. It has been Tuesday for the past four days, each one of which begins with the most agonizing headache, and I just don't know what to do.

Please send help.

Draco

Then he headed off to the Owlery to send his letter.

~*~*~*~*~

What should he do with all his free time? That's exactly what it was, he had decided: free time—time to do whatever he wanted to do without consequence because the next day it just wouldn't matter anymore. He had made a list of things he wanted to accomplish, which he now carried with him in his pocket. As he headed out to the Quidditch pitch, broom hitched over his shoulder, he knew he had to do what he could with this time given, before it disappeared and the days started running chronologically again.

If they ever did.

“Malfoy!” a female voice shouted to him in the entrance hall. He stopped and looked around, spotting Weasley fighting against the tide of students heading upstairs to reach his side. “Where are you going?” she asked, unruly strands of her hair falling in her eyes as she panted.

“Not that it's any of your business, but I thought I'd go play some Quidditch,” he replied with a sneer.

“But we have classes! You can't just skip them!” She looked a bit harried, which Draco found amusing. She was trying much too hard when she certainly didn't have to.

“Weasley, Weasley, Weasley,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder gently, and looking down into her brown eyes with a confidence that she only wished she could have had. “Why bother?” Then he pushed open the great oak doors before she could shake herself out of her shock.

“Wait just a minute!” he heard her say as he descended the front stairs. She was steps behind him, following him out onto the grounds.

“Look,” he said, spinning around. “I'm not going to waste my time sitting in the same class over and over and over again, with the same idiots, receiving the same lecture, learning the same spells, for days on end. If that sounds like your idea of a good time, well, bugger off and go do that. I'm going to have some fun with this time we've been given.”

“So you're just going to skive off your classes? You're just going to fake sick until this... this... problem works itself out?” she asked, her brows slashed downwards in an angry V, her hands waving wildly through the air. Hm. She seemed agitated.

“I'm not even going to do that,” he replied, turning on his heel. “I'm just not going to show up.”

He could hear the whirring of her brain through the enlarging space between them. It was easy to guess the conflict going on in her head. Draco had made a good point. Her desire to shirk off her responsibilities and do what she wanted to do warred with that Gryffindor sense of goody-goodiness. Or maybe that was just a Weasley attribute.

But a moment later, he heard her make an aggravated noise that sounded a bit like a roar, and then there were stomping footsteps, until she caught up with him.

“I don't know why I'm doing this,” she said.

Draco smirked at her.

“Life shouldn't be so redundant that it becomes boring,” he answered.

They spoke no more the rest of the way to the pitch.

~*~*~*~*~

After getting into the broom shed and pulling out a broom for Weasley and the trunk containing the Quidditch balls, she and Draco made their way onto the pitch and into the air. They released the Snitch and competed against each other trying to catch it, but sometimes they forgot about their search and just raced laps from one set of goalposts to the other and gloried in the freedom of not sitting in class. Not even the gray skies could bring them down, and if it happened to rain on them while they were flying, at least being wet and outside was better than the alternative.

“Malfoy, what is that?” Weasley called, pointing at something off in the distance.

Draco was concentrating and didn't look much farther than across the pitch, where Weasley was flying and pointing.

“I'm not falling for that,” he called back as his eyes returned to the sky in front of him for a hint of gold.

“No, really! It looks like an owl!”

He didn't bother to reply, but a few moments later, a bird landed on his head and pecked at his skull. He swiped at it angrily, but it just flew off and re-landed on his arm, while the package it had been carrying fell into his hands.

Weasley flew up beside him, eying the black owl sceptically.

“Who is it from?” she asked.

“None of your bloody business!” he answered.

She flew away, back to the opposite goalposts in an offended huff as he read the letter he had unattached from his mother's owl's leg.

Draco,

Darling, do you feel well? You sound nonsensical! I know you would not want your studies to suffer because of your health, so I think you should go to the hospital wing as soon as possible.

Everything is fine here. It's the 17th, darling, just like it is at Hogwarts. Are you having headaches? I've sent some headache potion with Orion.

Please get well.

Mum

“Ah, well, I've done everything I can,” Draco said, pocketing the letter and opening the accompanying package. His mum had sent six vials of headache cure, one of which Draco downed immediately, but he looked at the remaining five a bit sadly. He would wake up tomorrow with another headache, but because it would be a new Tuesday, he wouldn't have the five vials of potion anymore. It seemed such a waste, especially since he knew he would need them tomorrow.

“I've got it! I've got it!” Weasley yelled, interrupting his thoughts.

Draco hastily rewrapped his package and stuffed it in his pocket with his letter. At that moment, Weasley reached his side with the Snitch in hand and a gloating glint in her eyes.

“I win,” she said.

“One point to Griselda,” Draco conceded distractedly.

Her face fell into an expression of confusion. “What?”

“Er... Gorgonzola?” At her uncomprehending look he tried Ginger, Jennifer, and Giselle, but none of these seemed to work either. Finally, he threw up his hands in defeat. “Well, I really don't care what your name is, all right?”

“You thought my name was Gorgonzola? I wasn't named after a cheese!” she cried, and Draco rolled his eyes, expecting more drama than her name was worth.

“No, I thought your name was Griselda. Obviously, I was wrong.”

“My name is Ginny. Ginevra, if you want to be hexed. Not Griselda, not Gorgonzola, not Ginger, or Jennifer, or Giselle!”

“Can I start calling you that, then? Since we're now such good friends?” he replied sarcastically, his grin wicked. Her eyes narrowed at him and her Snitch-less hand wandered slowly to her sleeve, where he supposed she hid her wand.

“Don't you dare.”

“It's too late,” he replied, flying in circles around her. “You are now Ginevra, forever after.”

“Don't call me that!” she yelled. “My own mother doesn't even call me that!”

Before Draco could answer, a voice shouted from the ground below, “Miss Weasley, Mr. Malfoy, what in Merlin's name do you think you are doing?”

~*~*~*~*~

They hadn't expected Madam Hooch to appear on the pitch to teach a class, and now that they'd been caught, Weasley was looking quite frantic.

“This was all your idea!” she hissed at him as they stood in front of the doors to Dumbledore's office, waiting for him to answer their knock. “This is your fault!”

Draco shrugged. “You didn't have to come along. I never intended for a little weasel to follow me.”

She glared at him as the door opened and the headmaster looked down on them with a serious eye.

“Well, come in, come in,” he said, gesturing towards two chairs in front of his desk. They sat down and he continued. “I must say, I am quite surprised. This is an... unexpected development.”

Draco drummed his fingers on the arms of his chair, glaring at the portrait of a man pointing at him and whispering to his neighbor.

“What?” he said drily. “That Weasley and I would be skiving off classes?”

“Certainly that, Mr. Malfoy. Mostly that you, er, skived off together.”

Draco noticed Weasley wriggling in her seat as if she were about to explode, and when she said, “If I may, sir?” Draco rolled his eyes.

Dumbledore nodded for her to continue.

“It's a funny story, actually... you may not even believe it, but I wouldn't lie about this! Malfoy and I are stuck in a time loop. We've been repeating the same Tuesday for the past four days. That's why we skipped our classes. We never should have, of course, but...”

“You've already sat them,” the headmaster finished for her, looking intrigued by this news.

“It sounds absolutely absurd,” Weasley continued, fiddling with the fabric of her robes, “but it's true. You have to believe me.”

“Oh, I believe you, Miss Weasley,” he replied, smiling at her consolingly. “That does sound like quite a problem.”

“Y-you do?” she said, and Draco shared her shock that the headmaster didn't question what she said. Draco wondered if he trusted Weasley's word because of the fact that she was a Weasley, or if the story was just absurd enough to be true.

Draco didn't want a Weasley representing him, so he spoke up to have his say. “We skipped class because what we do doesn't matter anymore. What's the point in going to class? Who cares about getting detentions? Tomorrow we will start all over again, a brand new slate, as if the day before had never happened, because you know what? It never did.

“So, yeah, we skipped class. And we are going to skip all the rest of our classes. And if you give us detention, we'll skip that too,” Draco said, the expression on his face showing—possibly—how deeply the whole situation really affected him.

Dumbledore watched him with a blank face that gave none of his thoughts away.

“That's true, Mr. Malfoy. In this case, it would be laughable for me to punish you. But what will you do when time moves forward again?” he asked.

“What?” Draco said.

“Let's say that I expel you both from Hogwarts and send you on a train home tonight. What will you do if you wake up tomorrow and it is Wednesday?”

Draco looked over at Weasley, who bit her lip worriedly and didn't seem to be paying any attention to the conversation, though he knew that she was.

“I'll deal with it when it happens,” he answered after a few moments of thought.

Dumbledore smiled at him as if he was humoring Draco, as if Draco was acting childishly. Suddenly, all the Slytherin wanted to do was leave, and he'd just resolved to let himself out when the headmaster spoke again.

“Well, I'll do what I can to figure out a solution to this problem—just in case it resolves itself before I forget this conversation ever happened, of course. If you feel inclined to go to the detention that Madam Hooch has prepared for the both of you, you can meet her in the trophy room at seven o'clock. Enjoy your Tuesdays for as long as they last.”

With that, Draco knew they had been dismissed. Weasley followed him as he exited the office.

“We—we could mess our entire future up, fooling around like we did today,” Weasley said. There was a shrillness in her voice that Draco secretly felt, but he would never speak his mutual fear aloud.

“If you want to go to detention, be my guest,” he replied. “And if you want to sit through all your classes again tomorrow, you can do that, too. But leave me out of it. I'll do what I want.”

He stalked off but Weasley yelled after him, “Fine then! Ruin your life! When the world goes back to normal, I'll be ready for it!”

He heard the sound of her angry footsteps receding in the opposite direction, but she could bugger herself, for all he cared.

Day 13

Draco didn't see Weasley around for the next several days. If he were anyone else, he would admit to wondering how she had been spending her time the last nine Tuesdays, but he was Draco Malfoy, and he refused to admit to himself that he was curious. Besides, she was probably being the Gryffindor goody-goody he thought she was and sitting in each of her Tuesday classes like a little swot.

Not Draco.

For nine days, he'd enjoyed the freedom of sleeping in the middle of the day, jumping on Zabini's bed, remaining in his pajamas, sitting around the kitchens letting house-elves cater to his every whim, ignoring all his textbooks, drawing pictures of the various ways Potter could “accidentally” injure himself, reading romance novels he found stuffed under Goyle's mattress, trying out new hairstyles, sending Filch prank owls, and basically wanting to hang himself from boredom.

He'd spent most of his time in the dormitory or the common room, but he was starting to go stir-crazy. Now that he knew what time Hooch taught one of her flying lessons, he could plan forays to the Quidditch pitch accordingly, but there just didn't seem to be a point playing Quidditch alone. There would be no one with whom to chase the Snitch, no one to whom he could gloat about his skills, no one to belittle, and no one for him to make feel inferior in every way possible.

He almost wished he and Weasley would bump into each other again. He didn't like her, but he couldn't deny she was entertaining. More entertaining than lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, anyway.

His almost-wish came true as he was leaving lunch, heading back to the Slytherin common room for his third nap of the day. Weasley ran up to him, grabbed his arm and started pulling him up the stairs, moving with an excited, frenzied air.

“What the bloody hell do you think you're doing?” he asked, trying to yank his arm from her grasp. But she held on firm.

“I think I've figured it out, Malfoy! I know why we're stuck in this mess!”

“Well, get your paws off me and just tell me then!” he cried, making another unsuccessful attempt to free his arm. “Where are we going?”

“Somewhere we can talk,” she replied.

As they climbed staircase after staircase, Draco simultaneously watched her face and tried not to trip. Her eyes and cheeks glowed with the excitement that buzzed all around her, making her hair look sparkly and different, unless he just hadn't looked at it properly before now. The color was atrocious, especially combined with her freckled complexion, but he couldn't help but think that it suited her. The orange. The freckles. The easily flushed cheeks. They were indicators of her poor class, and it was such a pity that she could never be truly pretty because of them.

But enough of that.

Draco recognized the corridor they entered and somehow found the sight of the door to the Come and Go room comforting. He relaxed and let her pull him along inside, where the fireplace, chairs, and table of food all existed just like they had the first time they'd visited, several Tuesdays ago. Weasley shoved him down into a chair and paced in front of the fireplace, which had sprung to life as soon as they had entered.

“Okay, so, the anti-aging potion. You know the anti-aging potion, right?” she said.

“What?” Draco said as he tried to straighten his robes, not comprehending her at all.

“In Potions the very first Tuesday. Remember? My class was brewing anti-aging potions, and Henry Zimmerman ruined ours. You made me spill the toxic mess all over us. I think that's why we're repeating that Tuesday!”

Draco's eyes followed her as she roamed back and forth, back and forth, but he couldn't grasp her words.

“I don't understand.”

She huffed in exasperation and took Draco by the shoulders, making eye contact with him and holding it.

“You heard what Madam Pomfrey said in the hospital wing, didn't you? Toxic potions don't react well in our bodies, with our magic. We didn't consume any of the potion, so it didn't kill us, but maybe we absorbed more of the potion than we thought we did. Maybe it wasn't actually fatal to us. Maybe the way our potion turned out sort of... reversed the effects. Maybe the world is not aging, while you and I are. It's all because of that potion!”

“So... this is all your fault?” Draco asked slowly, his eyes narrowing at her with suspicion.

“What do you mean my fault? If you hadn't been day dreaming and bumped into me, I wouldn't have spilled the potion at all!”

“So you admit that you spilled it!”

She threw her hands into the air and made an angry sound of disgust. “You are so insufferable!”

“If I'm so insufferable, why don't you leave me alone, then!”

The color and anger in Weasley's face drained and she seemed quite shocked. Well, that was the only way Draco could put it. Maybe it wasn't shock; maybe it was more like... disappointment? But why would she be disappointed?

“You're right,” she said in a much calmer, though still very terse, voice. “Silly me. I'll stop bothering you.” She was backing towards the door, as if putting distance between herself and a wild animal, and Draco wondered if that wasn't an apt description. The closer she got to the door, the more he felt her absence. The boredom of the last nine days would only get worse if he didn't see her. He thought briefly of the possibly infinite number of Tuesdays stretching into his future and felt... lonely.

“I mean, who cares if we know what caused this, right? We still can't do anything to fix it,” she said when she reached the door, her hand on the doorknob, as if eager to leave. “So I'm sorry that I've been such a nuisance to you. You won't see me again.”

And then she was gone.

And Draco, who hadn't stood up from the chair since she had pushed him down into it, felt his legs go numb and unstable as his stomach churned, sick with dread.

What could he do?

~*~*~*~*~

That night, as he laid in bed, his thoughts ran rampant, making him restless. He hadn't expected to feel this way about Weasley agreeing to leave him alone. He really hadn't meant to say those words to her. No, he didn't like her, not a thing about her, but she was all he had. Sure, the castle was full of people, his housemates, his rivals, all sorts of people he could interact with. But how long would that last? They would always be the same—doing the same things, saying the same things. Draco will have heard it all in three Tuesdays, and then what? Weasley was the only one who was different, just like she'd said to him all those Tuesdays ago when she'd seen him in the hospital wing. She was the only one who changed with him, Tuesday after Tuesday after Tuesday.

He wouldn't crawl back to her. He refused to beg her to stay with him, to get rid of his loneliness and boredom. No amount of Galleons in the world could make him.

So he would just do the best he could with the people he had. For Merlin's sake... he could do anything! Anything at all! He could go to Paris tomorrow! Or trip Filch in the halls! Or tell Dumbledore what he really thought of the headmaster. He could seduce every girl in the school. He could fly his broom through the corridors. He could... he could....

The world was his with which to do what he wanted. Draco had to take advantage of that.

Day 15 – 21

It hadn't taken much seducing at all to convince Parvati Patil, one of the prettiest girls in Draco's year, to join him in an unused classroom after lunch. In fact, she had been quite eager to agree. He had been prepared with all his best smoldering looks, pickup lines, and challenges (because he knew Gryffindors loved a challenge and would never back down from one) when he'd cornered her in a corridor, thinking that, as a Gryffindor, she would have been stubborn and put up a fight. But none of these tactics had been needed. It was a bit off-putting how eager she was. Draco wasn't sure he liked it.

He also wasn't sure that he liked her snogging. She was overzealous, even in this area, taking control where Draco liked to be the one in control, her tongue shoved down his throat like it was an ice cream she feared would melt.

No, this hadn't exactly gone to plan.

She pulled her mouth away from his, making quite an endeavor out of it, and looked at him with half-closed eyes. She must have thought she looked sultry, but Draco merely thought she was falling asleep.

“Oh, Draco, I knew, I just knew, that you liked me. I always knew. Professor Trelawney predicted it ages ago. Are we going to do it? Right here? In this classroom?” she said in a husky voice that had to be put on.

“W-what?”

“Because I can clear these desks away, and we can lie on our robes. I'll transfigure these chairs into giant candles! It will be so romantic!” she said, her grip on the front of his robes tightening so that he felt he was being bullied, not propositioned.

He looked around the dusty classroom at all the old desks cluttering the room and tried to envision the giant candles that the chairs would become, but Draco couldn't make any sense of it. He wanted to laugh at the notion of giant candles surrounding them while they did the dirty. And shagging on top of their robes? Um, ew? He thought girls had higher standards than that! He thought Gryffindors had higher standards than that!

He pried her fingers off his robes, restraining her wrists in case she decided to grab him again.

“Look, Patil. It's been lovely,” he lied. “But I've got to go. Other things to do, other girls to see. You know how it goes.” He was straightening his hair and robes as he said this, completely missing the utter look of dejection on Parvati's face.

“You're... what?”

“Leaving,” he replied, but as he reached for the doorknob, he heard her ask, “Are you gay?”

He turned around and stared at her in outrage, utterly speechless and shocked.

“You are, aren't you!” she cried, tears forming in her eyes. “I never knew!”

“I—I'm not gay!” Draco cried.

“You have to be!” she returned. “You wouldn't turn me down if you weren't!”

“You—you have no idea what I would and would not do!” he replied, growing increasingly flustered.

“It's okay, Draco. I won't tell a soul!” She mimed the action of locking her lips and throwing away the key, and Draco was so disgusted, he left the classroom before he lost control and strangled the girl.

Draco stopped short when he saw Weasley in the corridor, walking toward him. This was the first time they had seen each other since she had vowed to leave him alone. He saw her glance at him, but she looked away with determination, and normally Draco would assume that she found it impossible to peel her eyes away from him and comment on that fact. A moment later, Parvati came out of the classroom, and Draco winced at how flustered and ruffled she looked. There was no mistaking what she and he had been doing. He noticed Weasley's eyes widen when she caught sight of her housemate.

“Oh! Ginny!” Parvati cried, running up to Weasley's side and grabbing hold of her arm. Draco could see a reluctance in Weasley's face that spoke of how welcome she found Parvati's presence, but the girl herself was oblivious. “Did you see the newest edition of Witch Weekly? There's this fabulous article about—”

The girls disappeared down the corridor, Parvati's voice growing quieter and quieter as she pulled Weasley along.

Draco felt the oncoming of another headache and made his way to the hospital wing to take care of it.

~*~*~*~*~

By dinnertime, everyone in the castle had heard the rumor that Draco Malfoy was gay. Everyone he passed in the halls ogled him without reserve, whispering to their neighbor behind their hands, pointing at him, laughing at him. It wasn't until he sat down at the Slytherin table that he found out what everyone was talking about. Blaise Zabini was quite gleeful to have heard the rumor and did nothing to hide it.

“So the great Draco Malfoy is a poof, is he?” Zabini asked as soon as Draco sat down.

“Excuse me?” Draco replied, more shocked than angry. These were not words he had ever expected to hear from anyone's mouth, and yet he'd heard them twice in the same day.

“No need to play dumb. It's going all around the school that Parvati Patil wanted to shag you but you turned her down because you're a poof.”

Draco should have known better than to believe Parvati when she said she wouldn't tell anyone. As if she could hold back from spreading a good piece of gossip!

“I'm not a poof! Patil is revolting. That's why I turned her down.”

“Like I said, Malfoy. No need to play dumb. I suspected all along that you might be. You can't hide it now. And, for your information, Patil is one of the least revolting girls in this school. But since you're a poof, of course she's revolting to you.”

One look at Zabini's face told Draco that he was enjoying himself immensely. And Draco, disgusted and humiliated, suddenly couldn't stomach dinner when the majority of the Great Hall's occupants were staring or whispering about him. Without a word, he stood from the table and left, but he didn't want to go back to his dormitory, where any of his housemates could find him.

He found himself taking the stairs all the way up to the seventh floor corridor, and he didn't stop until he was standing in front of the door across from the tapestry of dancing trolls. He tried the doorknob and the room was there—just like he needed it to be—chairs, fireplace, table of food and all.

But the chairs were empty, and he wanted to hex himself for hoping that Weasley would be in one of them.

~*~*~*~*~

After five days, Draco had about all he could take of the Come and Go room. He'd woken up every morning and made his way to the room, and there had been no need for him to leave for the rest of the day, what with the table of food constantly refilling itself for every meal and the bathroom he had discovered after taking a closer look at the walls. Even though the school had forgotten the rumor about Draco's sexuality, as if the rumor had never existed—because it hadn't!—Draco couldn't forget it.

But it wasn't just that.

He could do anything he wanted... but there was nothing he wanted to do. What was the point? It was going to be the same thing, day after day. He was only one person. Just because he behaved differently, that didn't mean that everyone in the school would react to him differently. Even if he went to Transfiguration and sat the class, he would still be partnered with Goyle. Goyle would then manage to shrink Draco's nose to nothingness. Draco could then dash out of the classroom, avoiding the laughter of those who saw him in the corridor, and hide out in a broom closet for all it mattered, until his nose grew back. But what did that change?

He could go up to Weasley's brother and punch the git in the nose. He might even get a detention from McGonagall for it. But when Draco woke up the next day, the punch and the detention would be erased. Weasley would never know he had been punched. McGonagall would never know that Draco should have gone to detention the previous evening. There was no satisfaction in punching a git who wouldn't remember being punched.

Even thinking that, Draco wanted to laugh! This is not the tune he would have sung on Monday. Any excuse to punch Weasley would have been a welcome one, especially if Draco could do it again, as many times as he liked, with Weasley not remembering a single black eye.

But now...

Draco was free as a bird, but he felt caged. Caged by Tuesday, and watched over by Monday and Wednesday sentinels.

He hated to admit it—absolutely loathed to admit it—but he needed Weasley. For his sanity.

On the sixth day, Draco woke up with his usual pounding headache and made a decision he hoped he wouldn't regret.

He didn't go to the Come and Go room. Instead, he went to breakfast, where first-years were throwing food at each other. Rather than waste the time he had left for his meal taking points away and scolding ickle firsties, Draco endured the eggs in his hair and scarfed down his breakfast, keeping his eye out for Weasley to leave her table. As soon as he saw her stand, his fork dropped to his plate with a loud clatter, earning the attention of the housemates sitting around him. But he ignored their stares and followed Weasley out of the Great Hall.

“Hey,” he muttered, his eyes sweeping the entrance hall to see if anyone would catch him talking to a lowly little blood traitor. Whether she hadn't heard him or was simply ignoring him Draco didn't know, but she never stopped. “Hey, Weasley,” he said, a little louder this time. “Oi, Ginevra.”

She stopped at that one and spun around with her fists tightly clenched at her sides and an annoyed scowl on her face. “My name is Ginny!” she cried.

“Right, right,” Draco said, waving his hand in the air as if dismissing her name. “Look, that rumor isn't true.”

“What?” Weasley replied. She closed her eyes and shook her head, obviously very confused.

“I know you've heard the rumor that Parvati Patil spread, and it's not true!”

He felt her gaze in a tangible way, and if it was her intention to make him feel like an idiot, then she had succeeded, though he would never tell her that out loud.

“Parvati Patil spreads all kinds of rumors. You will have to be more specific.”

Draco looked around again to measure their audience. The entrance hall was growing more populated as the start of the first class of the day loomed nearer, but no one seemed to be paying any particular attention to them, so he figured he was safe.

“The rumor,” he said in a low voice, leaning in closer to contain the rumor between themselves, “that I am gay.”

“You will have to speak up. I can't hear you.”

He huffed in agitation. “I'm not gay!”

A few people passing them turned to look at Draco, questions in their eyes, and he felt his cheeks grow warm because of it.

“I'm not!” he repeated to the people listening, who all dashed off to avoid his ire.

Weasley rubbed one of her eyebrows as if the conversation were giving her a headache, but Draco thought he saw one corner of her mouth twitching. His eyes narrowed. She had better not be laughing at him!

“Malfoy,”—she paused as if trying to gather the patience to teach a child something simple—“that was several days ago. The rumor is gone. No one here has ever heard it.”

“You have,” Draco replied, and he hated how petulant he sounded. He hoped she hadn't heard the childish tone in his voice.

Her brow creased in anger that Draco didn't understand. What did she have to be angry about?

“What does it matter what I've heard? You were the one who didn't want me around. Who cares what I think if we're on opposite ends of the castle at all times?” She turned and continued walking up the steps, but Draco would not let her end the conversation that way. He hated following after her, like a puppy dog or a lovesick fool, but sometimes things needed to be done even if he found them unpleasant.

“It matters a lot! I can't let you go around thinking I'm a poof!”

“Because my opinion means so much to you!”

Well, she had stumped him there. Her opinion wasn't supposed to mean anything to him at all. She was a Weasley, a Gryffindor, a pauper, a blood traitor. The complete opposite of everything he and his family believed in and stood for. And she wasn't even that pretty because of her speckled face and ugly ginger hair. So what did her opinion matter?

Draco raced up the stairs to catch up to her near the second floor corridor. He grabbed her arm and tugged her around, and then silenced her angry interjection with his equally angry words.

“You're the only one I have. I can't let you think that about me. Everyone else in the school may have forgotten it, but you haven't, and you need to know the truth.”

Because I need you, he didn't say.

He knew he'd won her over when her eyes softened, but what he read in them was pity, and he instantly hated her for pitying him and himself for saying those things to her.

“The truth,” she said, almost sadly. “What do you know about the truth?”

She pulled herself free and continued up the stairs, leaving him on the landing below. Just as Draco was about to go back down to the dungeons, she turned around, stabbing him with her glare.

“Does this mean you don't want me to leave you alone?” she asked.

He paused to think, but memories of the last who knew how many days made his decision for him. He couldn't go through this alone. He would tolerate her because he had to, because his sanity depended on it. Because the loneliness and boredom would eat him up from the inside without her.

“Yes,” he replied, and then straightened himself up, pulled himself together. The arrogant expression that normally lived on his face returned as he said, “I'll allow you to bother me. For now.”

She rolled her eyes at him and continued up the stairs. He descended a few but stopped once again at the sound of her voice.

“Oh, and Malfoy...” She was leaning over the railing, looking down at him with a mischievous grin on her face. “I never believed for a second that you were a poof. But your display right here was truly lovely to behold.”

His cheeks burned as she disappeared through the door to the third floor corridor.

~*~*~*~*~

For the rest of the day, Draco's heart ached and the heat refused to leave his cheeks. He fell into bed wondering how he could have acted like such a stupid little Gryffindor, revealing emotions and telling the truth like the Sorting Hat had placed him in that obnoxious house from the beginning. Weasley had tricked him, that's how! How could he have fallen into her trap?

But he slept soundly, knowing that each Tuesday from here on out would at least be entertaining.

If he ever got over his embarrassment, that is.

Day 37

“She—she didn't really say she would transfigure the chairs into—giant—candles, did she?” Ginny asked as she rolled around in the grass, breathless with laughter, her face as red as a tomato and her eyes streaming with tears.

Draco wanted to laugh at her antics—mirthfully, not disparagingly—but he refused to allow himself to lose his grasp on his composure. She may not have cared if she was acting like an idiot, but he certainly did. Either way, he couldn't stop his lips from turning up into a smile. No one had listened to him or laughed at a story he had told in such a long time. Since Monday at least.

“She absolutely did,” he assured her. “I mean, can you imagine it?”

Ginny stared up at the boughs of the tree under which they were lounging (well, Draco was sitting with his back ramrod straight; Ginny was the one splayed out on her back on the ground), her hand held to her mouth as if to impede her giggles, even though her shoulders still shook every now and then. Draco could tell that she was trying to picture a room filled with candles the size of tree stumps and an amorous couple in the middle of the room expelling words of passion.

But then he was imagining such a scene, and laughter was erupting from his mouth before he could hold it back. Ginny only laughed harder at seeing Draco lose control, and then both of them looked quite idiotic sitting under a tree near the lake, their bodies convulsing against their will.

What did it matter if anyone saw them being all chummy and acting like heathens? Draco would wake up the next morning with a clean slate, no one realizing that he and Ginny spent more time together than anyone would have believed. Not that they were all chummy or anything. They argued a lot—or Draco would provoke Ginny just to make her angry—and some days they didn't even speak to each other, just took walks outside the castle. But it was different taking a silent walk with someone, compared to being alone, because Draco knew that if the urge to speak came to him that she would be there to hear what he had to say (whether she liked it or not). Alone, he could only speak to the trees and the grass, to the gray skies and the slow rumbles of thunder.

Somehow, word always seemed to get around that he and Ginny were in each other's company. On an almost daily basis, Ron Weasley had stumbled across them, stared as if he couldn't believe his eyes, and then tried to punch Draco. He and Ginny could go anywhere and her brother would always find them, unless they spent the day in the Come and Go room, which they had done for a couple Tuesdays. But they didn't like staying locked up in a room, so they made sure to venture out to other parts of the castle or the grounds.

Ginny's body was still, the laughter of minutes ago now in control. Draco was watching how the sun's light played with the color in her hair when she groaned and sat up.

“Incoming,” she muttered.

Stomping down a sloping hill towards them was the other Weasley, the expression on his face changing from astonishment to outrage when he met Draco's eyes. Draco pulled himself to his feet, surreptitiously drawing his wand as he did so.

“W-what is this?” the git asked when he met them under the tree. “Ginny... since when did you... How long have you and...”

“It's not like that, Ron,” Ginny said, climbing to her feet herself now.

“What else could it be?” he replied, his arms stretched out, framing the scenario. His eyes suddenly narrowed on Draco, and Draco knew what was coming, because it wasn't the first time he had heard it. “Unless you are behind this.”

“I'm not sure I know what you mean,” Draco replied, picking a piece of lint off his robes.

“You've... you've done something to her! Why would she be with you otherwise?”

“Maybe because she wants to be, Weasley. I'm sure she knows how to make her own decisions.”

“Not if you've got her under an enchantment!”

Draco saw Ginny slap her forehead and groan, and Draco was equally as unimpressed as she.

“Ron,” she said slowly, putting her hand on her brother's shoulder and shaking it a little, as if to put some sense into him. “I'm not under a spell or a potion or anything like that. You should just leave it alone. You'll forget this by tomorrow.”

The oaf's mouth opened and closed, unintelligible, but outraged sounds issuing forth. Finally, he took his sister's arm and pulled her away from Draco, turning her so that both of their backs were to him. He tried to whisper, but the Slytherin heard every word.

“How long has this really been going on?” he asked her. “I was willing to forgive you yesterday, but this is... fraternizing with the enemy, this is!”

Draco's eyes narrowed at the back of Weasley's orange head at the same time that Ginny's mouth fell open in shock and her eyes widened.

“Y-yesterday? What do you mean yesterday? We... we were never together yesterday...” she said.

“I already caught you! You can't deny it!” At her uncomprehending look, he sighed and gripped her arm tighter. “Remember? I saw you leaving the Room of Requirement together. You assured me that you hadn't been doing anything, but with your track record—”

“My track record?” She and Draco hadn't been spending time with each other for very long, but he knew the danger of that tone in her voice. It normally preceded heavy spell-fire. “What do you mean 'my track record'?”

For a moment her brother was cowed, but his anger swelled up again, and he forgot to whisper.

“I mean the way you and your past boyfriends could be found all over the castle snogging in dark corners! I'm not stupid enough to believe you hadn't been doing anything in the Room of Requirement yesterday! I just can't believe you would do it with him!”

A finger was pointed at Draco, who looked down at the ground and then at the tree, pretending he wasn't blatantly listening.

“How do you even know about yesterday? You aren't supposed to remember anything about it! What else do you remember?”

Ron's anger slowly dissipated, but confusion grew in its place.

“I... Don't be silly. Yesterday was... you know... yesterday. Things... happened.”

As he tried to remember the previous day, Draco met Ginny's eyes. This was strange. It was clear that her brother remembered their encounter the previous Tuesday, but he didn't seem to remember anything else about it. The loss of memory—or trying to squeeze that encounter into his memories of Monday—confused him.

Had Weasley somehow gotten pulled into the time loop, too? Or was it... fading?

“Come on, Malfoy,” Ginny said, grabbing Draco's hand and pulling him away from the tree.

“HEY! You can't sneak away that easily! Ginevra Molly Weasley, get back here!”

He was ignored as the two went back up to the castle.

“Where are we going?” Draco asked as she led him upstairs.

“Remember my theory? We were soaked in the potion, probably absorbed some of it, and maybe that's why we're stuck in this mess. Henry Zimmerman was the only other person to have contact with that potion,” she said.

“But I thought he only inhaled the fumes,” Draco said.

“That's right. He inhaled enough of the fumes to pass out. So maybe the potion is affecting him, too, but maybe not exactly the same way it's affecting us.”

“Your brother didn't have anything to do with that potion,” he pointed out. “How does that explain why he remembers meeting us yesterday?”

She was silent for a few moments before she answered. “It doesn't. I don't understand that either. I don't know why I never thought to talk to Henry though, so we're going to go do that now.”

They didn't stop until they reached the hospital wing. Draco checked his watch. At this point in time he was supposed to be in Potions, so Zimmerman should still be in the hospital wing recovering from inhaling his potion's fumes. Draco reckoned that without Ginny's help—since she hadn't bothered to go to any of her classes for at least two weeks—he would have been in worse shape now than he had been with her help.

“Mr. Malfoy, Miss Weasley! What can I do for you?” Madam Pomfrey asked as they entered the ward.

“We just wanted to see how Henry was doing,” Ginny answered, her voice light and sweet. She widened her eyes so that they were big and round, and her smile matched her tone: saccharine. Draco was rather impressed by the display. It was clear that Madam Pomfrey wanted to bar access to her patient, but one look at Ginny's angelic face and she relented.

“All right. But only for a few minutes.”

“That's all we need,” Ginny muttered between her teeth, her smile still in place.

The matron led them over to the first bed on the right side of the room and then disappeared into her office. Henry Zimmerman's eyes were closed, and his breathing was shallow, his pudgy face the image of peace. His blond hair fell over his forehead, long enough to tickle his eyelids. Ginny took one of his hands in hers and patted it gently.

“Henry? Are you awake?”

One eye popped open, but upon seeing who the visitor was, both eyes blinked. Draco had the idea that Zimmerman had only pretended to be asleep.

“Oh, Ginny. How's it goin'?”

“That's what I came here to ask you,” she replied, smiling slightly.

“Oh, it's fine, I guess. I'm getting tired of this place though. When's lunch?”

Ginny's head tilted as she looked up at Draco. “Have we had lunch?” she asked.

Draco shrugged and shook his head. He couldn't remember having eaten lunch since Monday.

“I think we missed it,” she said to Zimmerman. “Look, I wanted to ask you something, actually.”

“I'm sorry. I've already got a girlfriend,” he answered, his face so serious, and Ginny's so shocked, that Draco couldn't hide his snort of amusement.

“No. That's not what I was going to ask.” It amused Draco more to see her scowl. “I was just wondering if you've noticed anything, er, strange happening.”

“Strange like how?” Zimmerman asked. Draco was starting to think that he was dumb as dirt and frowned at the bedridden boy.

“Like... well, like anything. Have you been experiencing a lot of déjà vu? Er, maybe your classes are a little repetitive?”

Zimmerman was already nodding. “Yeah! Yeah! You know, you didn't go to Potions today, but I had this weird feeling that you were supposed to be there, you know? Like... like... Like something was missing.” He nodded solemnly, his eyes wide.

Draco groaned internally, closing his eyes to the idiot.

“Um, I don't think that's what I meant. I mean—”

But Draco was tired of this already and knew they wouldn't get anything useful out of him, so he touched his hand to Ginny's shoulder and jerked his head in the direction of the exit.

Once they were back in the corridor, he said, “He couldn't tell us anything.”

“I dunno. He's not the brightest person, so maybe that was his way of letting us know what was happening.”

“Or maybe he's just not bright. Observant though, isn't he?”

Ginny slapped his arm without heat.

“So what do we do now?”

Draco stopped, remembering one Tuesday morning in particular. “Lovegood,” he said.

“What?”

“We need to find Lovegood. I have a feeling that she knows what's going on.” At Ginny's dubious stare, he amended, “Well, sort of. Do you know where she is?”

“No. We don't have this period together.”

“That's all right,” Draco replied, walking forward once again. “We can talk to her after dinner.”

~*~*~*~*~

He kept an eye on Lovegood during dinner, but he quickly grew impatient as the girl sat staring at the ceiling rather than eating. Zabini kept turning to glare at him as Draco drummed his fingers on the tabletop, disturbing him as he tried to chat up the girl sitting next to him. But finally, Lovegood rose from her seat, and after meeting Ginny's gaze across the Great Hall, Draco stood up to follow.

“Oi, Lovegood!” Draco called in the entrance hall. She stopped and turned around, and if he hadn't been so familiar with her looniness, he would have thought he'd given her the shock of her life.

Ginny had caught up by then, and she eyed the other two students with a mixture of curiosity and shrewdness.

“Oh, hello, Malfoy, Ginny. Can I help you with something?”

“You told me my aura was orange.”

“I did?” And this time, Lovegood looked genuinely surprised.

“Yes, you did. You made it sound like it was rare to see them,” he continued.

“Well, I was right about that.”

“What does orange mean?” Ginny asked, looking first at Draco and then to Lovegood.

“It's just strange,” the blonde replied. “There aren't any orange auras. Very few, anyway. Daddy says—”

“You told me you had seen three,” Draco interrupted, not particularly caring what Daddy says.

“If I said that today, then I would have been wrong,” she replied, and Draco got the distinct impression—from the way she had mentioned 'today'—that she knew something about the time loop. But maybe she didn't. She always said some insane things. That's why people called her Loony.

“I saw four orange auras at breakfast this morning,” she said. “Yours, Ginny's, Ronald's, and Henry's.”

“Henry's?” Ginny repeated breathlessly. “What does that mean?” she asked Draco.

Draco shrugged. “I don't know. But at the beginning of all this, one of the first few Tuesdays, Lovegood told me she saw three orange auras, and now she sees four. Maybe it's connected. These auras and the way your brother remembered yesterday.”

Weasley was looking up at him with such large brown eyes, such trusting, sad eyes. “What should we do?” she asked quietly.

“I... don't know. I don't think we can do anything. Maybe it's wearing off.”

“Hmmmm,” Lovegood hummed. “Now your auras are all sorts of colors. It's kind of hurting my eyes, so I'm going to go now.” She didn't wait for either of them to say goodbye. Just turned and left up the stairs.

“Either it's wearing off,” Ginny said, looking back at Draco with a serious, grim stare, “or it's pulling more people in.”

Day 50

The only thing Draco and Ginny could do was to put the auras all behind them. Draco had been right: there was nothing they could do about the situation but wait it out.

Ever since Ron Weasley had found them sitting underneath the tree by the lake, he'd continued the pattern of finding them together each Tuesday. Only now, once he spotted his sister with his enemy, he stopped in his tracks, his face contorting into an expression of deep confusion, and then he wandered away as if to convince himself that what he had seen hadn't been real. It was a relief to Draco, who was quite tired of the monotonous confrontations Tuesday after Tuesday.

He and Ginny continued to spend time together, but the endless Tuesdays were getting to them both. Ginny had kept track of how many Tuesdays had passed, but Draco didn't even want to know. So many days of his life were being wasted and he didn't want to know exactly how many.

“Have you ever had a girlfriend?” Ginny asked him quietly. They were in the Slytherin common room and it was well past midnight. If any of Draco's housemates discovered Ginny there with him, they gaped but kept their mouths shut, running off to their dormitories to hide.

“Not really,” he replied. He sat in one of the chairs by the fire, staring into the flames, wishing for them to unhypnotize him and wake him from this dream.

“None at all?” Ginny pressed from the floor. She was lying on her back, her head turned toward the flames as well, but she looked up at Draco as she asked. “I find that hard to believe.”

“Believe whatever you want. There was just no one who interested me,” he said with a sneer. The personal questions made him uncomfortable, but he wasn't sure if that was because they were just that—personal—or because she and the topic were almost related in his mind.

His eyes flicked from the fire to her. The way she was lying down, he could easily see the rise and fall of her chest with each breath, especially with her hands lying across her stomach the way they were. Her skin looked warm in the light of the fire, and even the freckles that were sprinkled heavily across her shoulders seemed appealing in the glow.

“I've had two boyfriends,” she said, as she turned her head away once again. “I liked them, but it just didn't work out. They weren't right for me.”

“I could tell you that this is fascinating, but I'd be lying,” Draco said, his body tense all of a sudden. It showed through in the harshness of his voice, but he couldn't help it. Maybe he was sick.

She either hadn't been listening or chose to ignore him. “I just wish that I had found... someone,” she said softly, an ache in her voice that Draco felt as a physical pang in his chest.

He looked closely at her face, and even though it was turned away from him, he could see how bright her eyes looked. She was crying, he realized. He didn't know whether to be disgusted or...

And, well, it was that 'or' that kind of frightened him. He should have been disgusted. He should have sneered at her.

“I'm someone,” Draco said instead, completely against his will.

“Ha. Ha,” she muttered, wiping at her eyes in a way that he could tell she was hoping looked casual.

Draco felt another pang, a softer one, but this one actually hurt a little bit.

“I wasn't joking,” he said through a clenched jaw.

Ginny raised herself onto her elbows, looking at Draco so seriously that he thought she could read every thought in his head. He certainly hoped she couldn't. It was a mess in there. A big, disgusting, orange mess.

She looked at him for such a long time and Draco met her gaze, afraid to look away. It would have felt like he was giving in, letting her win something, and he couldn't let a Weasley win anything.

“I think there's spaghetti on your shirt,” she finally said.

Confused, Draco looked down and discovered a strand of spaghetti from that night's dinner stuck to the front of his shirt.

“Thanks,” he muttered somewhat hatefully as he picked the piece of food off his clothes, his embarrassment making his words cutting and his cheeks grow warm.

More silence followed, which Draco both wanted to maintain and break.

“So...” he said slowly, but then he stopped, unsure where he was going with that.

“So?” Ginny prompted him.

“Do you remember the second Tuesday?” he asked. “The one in which you realized we were in a time loop?”

“Of course,” she answered without looking at him.

“Do you remember how we met in the hospital wing?”

“Yes, of course I do.”

“What was with the tears?”

Her head turned towards him again. “Excuse me?”

“You were so... distraught. It was only the second day.”

“And you weren't?” Her face shone in astonishment. “I didn't know what was going on, and I thought I was alone. Of course I was distraught.”

He could still remember her words to him that day, as well as the expression on her face. He didn't think he could ever forget it.

No one else has noticed that it's the same. It's just us. Just us.

“Are you still?” he asked quietly.

“Still what?”

“Distraught.”

She rolled over onto her stomach, resting her chin on the backs of her hands and looking up at Draco through her eyelashes. She was chewing the inside of her cheek as she thought about the question.

“Not in the same way,” she answered. “That day, I was afraid of being all alone in this, and now I'm not.”

“But you're still distraught about something.” Draco's back stiffened a little bit.

“It just feels hopeless.”

He could agree with that.

“I wonder what would happen if we stayed awake,” she said, but her eyelids were already drooping, her head tilting as if it were too heavy to balance on her hands, as if it were weighted to the floor.

“Maybe we should try it,” Draco replied, but he knew it would never work. He, too, was quickly losing his grasp on the waking world.

“Draco?” Ginny mumbled.

“Yes?” He yawned and stretched, and then made himself more comfortable in the chair, making room for his long legs to dangle over one of the arms.

“I'm glad you're here,” she said.

“Me too.”

Day 61 – 67

For the first time in many, many Tuesdays, Draco didn't meet Ginny to spend the day with her. He remained holed up in his dormitory, pacing furiously around the room in his pajamas, even though it was close to dinnertime now. The insanity that had begun to creep up on him before he and Ginny had started spending so much time together was creeping again. It had to be insanity. That was the only explanation.

He'd caught himself staring at her. Sure, the same way he would have stared at an extraterrestrial in a zoo, but still. Staring. There were some quiet times when they were together—for instance, the Tuesday night they had sat in front of the fire in the Slytherin common room—when Draco's eyes were drawn to her, all kinds of wordless questions clogging his brain and making his headache return. Philosophical wonderings about what it really meant to be a Weasley and if red hair, freckles, and lack of money were really character traits that should be abhorred.

Technically, they weren't character traits at all, but he had always treated them like they were. What if someone hated Draco on principle because his hair was too blond and he had a ton of money? That didn't really have anything to do with Draco, did it? But that was completely beside the point.

Draco hadn't left his room this Tuesday because he didn't want to face her. He may have been half asleep in front of that fire however many Tuesdays ago, but he had heard her when she'd mumbled his name with sleepiness. His own exhaustion hadn't stopped his stomach from jumping so violently inside him that it made his chest hurt. He could still feel the ache today, just imagining the sound of his name leaving her lips. And he didn't understand why he'd had such a reaction to it, why he still had that reaction every time he thought about it. It was embarrassing. Ginevra Weasley was so beneath him she might as well have been the dirt stuck to the dirt on his shoe.

But that didn't stop the ache in his chest. It was like his body didn't know what it meant to be a Malfoy, like it had absolutely no pride, no standards. He was convinced now that he was sick. Certainly that's all it was? A disease? A passing bug? He could be cured of it, right?

Draco rubbed his sternum and plopped back down on his bed, staring at the top of the canopy blindly, seeing something beyond it.

He would have taken the headache over this any day.

~*~*~*~*~

“I knew I'd find you out here,” she said, inching closer to him on her broom. She was being cautious, approaching the same way she would have approached an animal in pain.

“What do you want?” he asked, kicking his feet through the air. He could tell that he was making her nervous, but she had nothing to fear. Draco had a good grasp on the ring of the hoop. There was no way he could fall.

“I haven't seen you in a while. I was just wondering what you were up to,” she said casually.

Draco wished she had said something else, given some other reason to look for him. Maybe a reason that could appease the ache in his chest, which pounded against his ribs in a painful beat. He stared down at the ground, wondering what it would feel like to fall. His broom hung in the air beside the goalpost, waiting for him to mount it again, but Draco quite liked it up in the air with nothing but the rim of the hoop saving him from a fall. He wondered if a broken back would be able to block out the pounding in his chest.

“What are you doing?” Ginny asked carefully.

Draco shrugged. “Sitting.”

“Is... is it getting to you?” Her voice was soft so as not to spook him and make him fall to a possible death.

“Is what getting to me?”

“The time loop. It's getting to me, too, but you shouldn't...”

“What? Kill myself?”

The thought hadn't properly entered his mind until that moment, but suddenly it seemed like such a brilliant idea. His original plan had been to sit up in the golden hoop until he got the courage to fall, hopefully only breaking a few bones to drown out his ache. But if he jumped with the intention of dying... well, that would certainly get rid of the ache, and it would end the time loop. How could the day start over again if he was dead? It was a brilliant way to get rid of two irritations in his life.

But then Draco looked over at Ginny hovering in the air giving him a desperate look of... of something. He couldn't tell what it was. He didn't want to know. He didn't want to know that much about her. But a part of him did, the achy part of his chest. It didn't like the idea of never seeing her again, of never being able to do the things that it wanted Draco to do, like run his fingers through her hair and see if her skin was really as warm and soft as it looked.

Draco kind of agreed with his chest. He wanted to do those things too.

“I don't want to kill myself,” he said, not realizing he had said it out loud.

Ginny had heard him, apparently. “Then please get down from there,” she said, her voice rising in barely controlled alarm.

Draco kicked his feet harder and rocked back and forth a bit while he was at it.

“I can be convinced if you go out with me,” he said. The words tasted like sand in his mouth—he couldn't believe they were coming out at all, from him!—but they were right. Whether he liked it or not (which he certainly didn't) he wanted to spend time with Ginny, but not how they had been for the past five hundred Tuesdays. It didn't make any sense at all, but for some reason it was right.

“W-what?” she said, looking more nervous now than she had when she'd first found him on the goal post.

“I promise not to let go if you go out with me,” he repeated as he leaned back some more, eying the ground over his shoulder.

Was it a despicable move to blackmail her into going out with him by threatening to kill himself? Sure it was, but there was a reason he was a Slytherin, wasn't there?

“Stop being stupid and get down from there!” she yelled, substituting her nervousness of only moments ago with anger.

Draco felt his heart sink like it had literally dropped into his stomach. The thing about blackmail is that it was supposed to get him what he wanted, but it obviously wasn't working, and probably wasn't going to. He let go with his hands and heard Ginny scream as his body swung from the hoop, his legs the only part of him keeping him in the air.

“Malfoy! Get down! Please, get down!”

“Go out with me,” he called.

She was silent then. Draco waited several moments, but now he knew that she would never agree to go out with him. He closed his eyes to keep from seeing the ground rushing towards his face.

And then he unfolded his legs and let go.

He heard her scream his name, his first name, and he was glad it was the last thing he would hear. There was no point going on if she refused to be with him. He didn't want to live in a world of everlasting Tuesdays, and that's all the future had in store for him: Tuesdays and loneliness.

Suddenly, his world went black.

Day 68

There was a commotion somewhere around him. It sounded muffled, like it was far away. Or maybe underwater? What was he doing underwater? A moment later, the commotion grew louder, and he realized that his head was pounding, as if someone was beating on it like a drum. Maybe that was the source of the commotion; it was all in his head. He would have accepted this conclusion as fact if a door had not slammed open just then. The sound brought him back to himself—or woke him up. He jolted up in his bed, looking around the room in panic.

At the door stood Ginny, her chest rising and falling heavily with emotion, tears in her angry eyes.

“You idiot!” she yelled at him, storming over to his bed and jumping on him. She had his pajama shirt clenched in her fists and she shook his body with impressive strength. “How could you do that to me!”

“Do what?” he asked. And then he remembered the previous Tuesday and grimaced guiltily.

“Let go! Kill yourself right in front of my eyes!”

“Obviously it didn't work,” he said, trying for funny. But this kind of funny didn't come naturally to him. “I'm not dead.” He smirked at her, but it fell off his lips after one look into her hurt eyes.

“You were yesterday! I had to... I had to pick you up... your body, and somehow... somehow call for help.” Tears were now streaming down her face, and she shook him even harder. “Why the hell would you do that!”

“Because I can't take this anymore!” He grabbed her arms and pulled her off him, reversing their positions so that she was the one on the bed and he was the one looming over her. “I'm tired of Tuesday! Of the same day over and over again, the same classes, the same people, the same weather! Nothing ever changes!”

He noticed that her face was a deep red. She swallowed audibly before saying, “But that's why we stayed together.”

“And now that's unchanging, too,” he replied in a calmer voice. “The same thing every day. You and me. Nothing changing except how we convince your brother to leave us alone. I'm tired of that, too.”

The tears that had filled her eyes only minutes ago filled them again, but these weren't tears of anger. Draco looked away from her face but he didn't get off her. The sound of her sniffling filled the room.

“You're tired of me?” she asked in a small voice. She stared at something on the right side of the room, refusing to meet his gaze.

“I'm tired of thinking about you,” he admitted. “I'm tired of wondering what you feel like.” He let go of one of her arms and reached for her hair, letting his fingers run through it and get tangled in the knots. He realized then that she was still in her pajamas. She must have jumped right out of bed to come down to the Slytherin dormitory, before she had changed clothes or brushed her hair.

“How did you get in here?” Draco suddenly asked.

Ginny sniffled, and her face was so red, it clashed with the color of her hair.

“The portrait hole. I heard you give the password the other Tuesday. Of course it wouldn't change.”

“What was all that noise, then?”

“Some of your housemates were in the common room. They weren't going to let me in, so I hexed them.”

He had to admit he was impressed. “You took all of them down?”

She waved her hand around as if it were nothing. “Can I get up now?”

“Hold on,” Draco said.

Then his lips connected with hers, surprising her, though not for long. Her free arm wrapped around his neck and he heard her sigh. That ache in his chest turned into a warmth that spread throughout his entire body. It urged him on, but to what he wasn't sure. When he came up for air, both of them were panting. He decided, as he looked down at her fevered eyes, that he quite liked the color red. He also liked the freckles on her face when there was a blush behind them and even her red hair when it was fanned out over his pillow.

“Free to go,” he said, rolling off of her.

But by that point, she wasn't ready to go anywhere.

~*~*~*~*~

Later that day, they took a walk around the lake, their fingers interlocked loosely as they strolled at a leisurely pace. Ginny was uncharacteristically shy, or maybe just quiet. She didn't say much and seemed to blush often, if the color of her ears were anything to go by. As for Draco, the most idiotic urge to smile refused to go away, but he managed to curb it so that what came out looked like a smirk. At least, that's what he hoped it looked like.

Maybe he should have thought more about the reasons behind what they were doing. Did it really make sense? Not at all. It was wrong, wrong, wrong. Had she only kissed him back, was she only holding his hand now, because he was the only person she could kiss? The only person whose hand she could hold? It's not like she could start a relationship with someone else in the castle. Relationships were built over time, and the only time that everyone else had was twenty-four hours.

What about him? Was that the only reason he had wanted her? Boredom? Loneliness? Because she was the only person available? He didn't know, but he was okay with that for now. For forever, if it had to be that way. Neither one of them knew when the time loop would end, so the only thing they could do about it was wait it out and take it one Tuesday at a time. That's exactly what Draco was doing. When he got bored of this—he gripped her hand tighter as he thought it—then it would end. It was just as simple as that.

“If it ever gets too much again...” Ginny began. She looked down at her feet as she walked, seemingly deep in thought. When Draco looked at her, all he could see was her hair, vivid and bright and red. He didn't have to ask her what she was referring to. “If you can't take it anymore,” she continued, “please don't jump off a goal post again. At least, not in front of me.”

She still hid her face from him, and Draco wondered at that for a moment. It hadn't occurred to him what she would have seen, how she would have felt. He assumed she wouldn't have cared. If she didn't want him to die, she would have agreed to date him, but she hadn't done that. But what he'd done, he'd made her personally responsible for his death, and even though he had been oblivious to the world as soon as his neck had broken, she had still been there to witness it.

It chilled his bones thinking about it. He tried to imagine that she was the one falling, and what she would have looked like when she had landed, but he couldn't stomach it.

“I'm sorry,” he said with all the sincerity he possessed. He didn't think it came out quite that way, and he regretted that. “I promise I won't do it again.”

He thought back to Dumbledore's words days and days and days ago. What if next time, time didn't repeat? What if he jumped off the Astronomy Tower and then the next day was Wednesday and he would always be dead? He shivered again.

Ginny felt the tremor in his hand and patted his arm gently, looking up at him with an encouraging smile.

Maybe it was time to think about the future, even if the future was spiteful enough to never arrive.

Day 76

When he woke up, Draco wanted to die. He'd felt the same every consecutive Tuesday to which he had awakened, but normally he just went to the hospital wing, when he knew Madam Pomfrey would be there, and asked for a cure. Not today. Today's Tuesday was going to be different from every single Tuesday that had passed before it.

The day Draco had woken up not-dead, he and Ginny had made a list, a schedule of what the first repeated Tuesday had been like for each of them, and then they did the same thing for as many of the following Tuesdays as they could remember. It had been hard. Every day had been virtually the same, and in the beginning, Draco hadn’t wanted to remember anything about the loop. He’d spent so many days wasting time away in his room, and distinguishing those days from more active ones had been difficult. Together, he and Ginny had worked out the differences and similarities between each Tuesday—which days Draco had gone to the hospital wing for headache potions, which days Ginny had had to carry her cauldron of ruined potion to Snape’s office, etc—and had constructed several carefully planned schedules for them to enact, in the hopes that one of them would make the time loop disappear.

They didn’t know if it would work, but they had to try something. They could no longer sit around and let madness consume them, could no longer let life pass them by. They couldn’t allow it. This Tuesday marked their eighth try, their eighth plan, eighth schedule, but they hadn’t lost hope.

Draco rolled out of bed and grabbed the first set of robes he put his hands on, and then went down to breakfast. He smirked at Ginny where she sat at the Gryffindor table, and she nodded back grimly.

Before he could take a bite of the food he had gathered on his plate, rogue eggs landed on his bacon and more fell into his hair. He glared at the first-years who had thrown the food, but shoveled down his breakfast while he had time. By the time he'd arrived at Transfiguration, his headache had dulled. Draco took his seat next to Goyle before McGonagall could instruct him to, and at the end of the class he had an infinitesimal nose, but Goyle had something even worse—if he ever found it.

Charms went as Draco had expected. Flitwick's laughing fit right off the chair was old news by now (to Draco, anyway), and once the tiny teacher had climbed back onto his stool, class continued as normal. And having researched Jumping Beans more times than he could count by now (though never before feeling motivated enough to actually finish the assignment), Draco spent his study break writing his essay in silence, which was just the way both he and Zabini liked it.

In a dungeon corridor on his way to Potions, he and Ginny regarded each other. She had been the one in the beginning who had been cautious with her future, going to her classes day after day and behaving as if every day was not a recycled Tuesday, while he had wiled the days away doing nothing at all. This could only work—hypothetically speaking; they had absolutely no idea if it would work at all—if they worked together, if both of them took their life and the consequences of their actions seriously.

They nodded in acknowledgment, careful not to let Ginny's toxic potion spill. Class passed and that's all Draco could say about it. It was the most uneventful part of his day, besides Ron Weasley's glare boring into the side of Draco's head. Ron remembered more and more of each Tuesday as the days passed, but he wasn't quite “in” the time loop, like Draco and Ginny were. There were others like him, students who remembered parts of past Tuesdays, even though they shouldn't, but he only knew that from asking Lovegood about the orange auras again. No one had remembered enough to be noticeable.

After his classes, Draco returned to the Slytherin common room to start some homework before dinner. He wondered how Ginny's day had been, if anything eventful had happened. His heart beat more quickly as he tried to imagine this idea succeeding. What would they do if they woke up tomorrow and it was no longer Tuesday? What would happen to them? Would she still let him snog her? Would they continue to take walks around the lake?

He tried not to think about the future though because he didn’t want to lose hope if this schedule failed. If he longed for the future and it never arrived, what would stop the madness from coming back? They had to take things one day at a time. They could think about Wednesday when Tuesday ended.

After dinner, he met Ginny at the entrance to the Come and Go room. When they entered, the room had changed. Gone was the table of food and the chairs in front of the fire. The walls had stretched to accommodate a four-poster bed hung in rich velvet curtains of gold, and covered with a thick brown duvet. Two desks with accompanying chairs sat against opposite walls in the part of the room to the right of the door. Ginny's ears burned red as she put her bag down next to one desk, and Draco couldn't keep the smirk off his face as he took his seat at the other. His heart hammered in his chest and he knew that the bed was at the forefront of both of their minds as they tried to complete some homework.

They didn't dare lock eyes, but once they did, their homework sat abandoned on the desks as they retreated to the bed, their bodies already entwined before they hit the mattress. Draco's lips discovered the softness and taste of the skin of her neck, and only her insistent hands could pull him away. She placed kisses on the tip of his nose, his cheeks, his chin, and then kissed a trail along his jaw. Their breathing was heavy and their bodies were warm with heat and color. Draco had never liked freckles or red hair more.

“I wasn't saying no,” Weasley said suddenly, as he fiddled with the buttons closing her robes.

“Yes, I see that,” he replied glibly, growing frustrated with himself as his fingers shook too much to actually release any of the buttons.

“No, no,” she said sitting up. “I mean... the day you killed yourself.”

A shiver traveled down Draco's spine. He didn't want to be reminded of that day.

“I wasn't rejecting you.”

“You didn't say yes either,” he replied bitterly.

“I didn't think you were serious. I thought you'd found out how I felt and were making fun of me. I didn't think you would actually let go or I would have done something. Acted faster.”

“How you felt about me?” Draco asked, looking into her brown eyes with what he hoped was enough power to force out the truth. This was one time he wished he were more skilled at Legilimency instead of Occlumency.

“Never mind,” she said. She started to get out of bed, but Draco stopped her with a hand on her arm.

“Wait until tomorrow. We can talk about everything, then.”

She looked into his eyes, probing him with her own. He didn't know what she was looking for or what she had found, but he knew that she understood what he was saying.

Tomorrow. Everything depended on tomorrow. If tomorrow was Wednesday, they could move forward with what they had, whatever it actually was. But if it was Tuesday again, they might as well stop while they were ahead. They couldn't afford to let the relationship sour. They were the only people they had in the world, at least until the time loop brought the rest of the world into it, or the time loop faded away. Who knew how long that would take?

“Tomorrow,” she agreed.

Draco pulled back the blankets on the bed and removed his shoes, while she successfully unbuttoned her robe and then turned to do his.

“Does this feel familiar?” she asked with a smile. He smirked back at her, remembering how she had ripped his robe off him after the toxic anti-aging potion had ruined it.

They climbed into the bed, Ginny snuggling up close to Draco's side. He reached for her hand and held it, wondering what the next day would bring. He promised whatever kind of deity was listening that he would change his ways—not too much, of course. He would make sure that his life wasn't redundant, and for some reason, he felt that Ginevra Weasley was the cure for his boredom.

They drifted off to sleep, their fingers tightly entwined.

Beginning or End?

The first thing he noticed was that his head didn't hurt. At all. Not a bit.

The second thing he noticed was a warm body pressed closely against him, a freckled arm draped over his stomach.

Turning his head, he caught sight of a mass of orange hair, and a smile erupted onto his face, uncontrollable in its excitement.

“Hey, Ginny!”

She startled awake, nearly falling out of the bed in her surprise.

“Whayouwan?”

He stared at her with a genuine smile until she registered where she was and who she was with, and once she had, her eyes lit up and she tackled Draco with a happy squeal.

“We did it! We did it!” she cried, planting kiss after kiss on his face.

They walked down to breakfast together, eager to make sure their ordeal was over, that they were free and their time wasn't. Of course, they couldn't tell if anything had changed by just standing in the doorway to the Great Hall. Draco took his place at the Slytherin table while she took hers with the Gryffindors. There were no rogue eggs flying through the air this morning. The sky as reflected on the enchanted ceiling was sunny, bright, and cloudless. And the date at the top of the Daily Prophet Draco had snatched out of someone's hands read Wednesday, February 18th.

They had done it.

His excitement was so great—albeit controlled—that Draco could hardly finish his breakfast. Weasley kept glancing up at him from her table, smiling so widely, so happily, that his chest ached to see it. But it was such a good day already, Draco didn't even mind the ache.

He left breakfast to get to Arithmancy early, but was stopped on the landing to the third floor corridor by the sound of his name being called. When he turned around, Ron Weasley was racing up the stairs to catch up to Draco, his ears and cheeks already tinged pink.

“I know you and my sister are together!” he cried accusingly as soon as he was on the same level as Draco. “I don't really know how I know, but you'd better know... I know it!”

Draco rolled his eyes and pretended to inspect his fingernails. “And?”

Weasley's face turned a darker shade of red. “And? And? And cut it out! Stay away from her, you git!”

“Oh, that will be difficult,” Draco replied. “I promised her last night that things would be official starting Wednesday.”

“Today is Wednesday.”

The Slytherin feigned surprise. “Oh! So it is. Well, I suppose it's official, then.”

“Like hell it is!”

Draco saw Weasley reach for his wand, but he was one step ahead of him. Before the wand could leave the Gryffindor's robe pocket, Draco's fist was connecting with his jaw, sending Weasley reeling backwards against the wall. Unconscious. Draco had knocked him unconscious. With his own fist!

He scanned the Grand Staircase for other students or teachers and then continued up the stairs. It wouldn't do to be caught at the scene of the crime, even though Weasley would certainly rat him out as soon as he gained consciousness.

After Arithmancy, Draco got called into McGonagall's office. Weasley was already sitting across from the professor's desk, glaring up at Draco as he walked in. He took a seat in the last available chair and crossed his arms over his chest in disinterest.

“Professor von Rheticus tells me that you were fighting on the staircase earlier today,” she said. In a portrait behind her, a goatee-ed man looked down his nose at Draco, who remembered the portrait from one of the earliest Tuesdays.

“I'll take a detention, Professor, but I was acting in self-defense. Weasley already had his wand drawn. If I hadn't punched him, who knows what he would have done to me?” Draco said, surprising McGonagall with the acceptance of his punishment, as well as his admission.

“Oh. Well. Yes, then. Detention for both of you with Mr. Filch tonight at eight o'clock. You may leave.” She shuffled some papers on her desk in agitation, obviously unsure what to do with herself now that she didn't have to argue with Draco about his punishment.

Draco smiled falsely at her on his way out, but he didn't get far before Weasley rounded on him again.

“It's just like you to make up a story to bring me down with you,” he said in a furious growl.

“Yes, it is,” Draco agreed with a smirk.

That caught Weasley—who had been expecting a denial or a lie, no doubt—off guard, giving Draco just enough time to escape.

He then went to Herbology (even though he was late, Sprout didn't seem to mind) and Ancient Runes, and for the first time in his entire Hogwarts career, he looked forward to his classes and enjoyed being in them. What would they learn that day? Who would receive a detention? He had no earthly idea! And he was glad he didn't.

He bumped into Ginny as he was leaving dinner.

“Oh! Dr—Malfoy. Um, are you busy at this current moment in time?” she asked awkwardly, her ears turning pink. Draco had decided, maybe the previous night, that he liked it when her ears changed colors like that. He enjoyed the feisty side of her, the one that argued and competed with Draco, but there was also something appealing about her embarrassment. Maybe because it was so easy to embarrass her. He predicted that one day it would take more than setting eyes on him to make her cheeks glow with an awkward blush. He looked forward to not only breaking her blushing habit, but of finding out what kinds of things would bring it back.

“I'm on my way to detention,” he said.

“Oh. Oh, sorry. You get a lot of those, don't you?”

Draco shrugged. “I can meet you afterward, if you'd like.”

“Oh. Yes. Sure. At, um, the usual place?”

The corner of his lips twitched. “Yes, at the usual place.”

“Okay. All right then. See you later!” She rushed into the Great Hall, though Draco thought she had been on her way out of it to speak to him.

All throughout his detention, Draco's thoughts wandered. He knew what he would much rather be doing as opposed to mopping, sweeping, and scraping gum off the undersides of desks—and better yet, who he would much rather be spending time with. If Weasley had only known how Draco's thoughts revolved around his sister, he probably would have dumped a mop bucket on the Slytherin's head. The thoughts made his work go quickly, and sooner than he had expected, he and Weasley were released from detention.

He raced up to the seventh floor corridor, to the room across from the tapestry depicting ballerina trolls. When he opened the door, the room was just as it had been the very first time they had entered it, with the chairs by the fire and the table of food by the door. Weasley was sitting in one of the chairs, but she stood as he closed the door behind him, smiling at him for a moment before rushing into his arms and pulling his lips down to hers.

“Here to finish what we started last night?” he asked against her neck. Her body trembled against his, but then she stepped away, her grin widening on her face.

“Yes! You said we could finish talking about us today, right?”

Draco suppressed a groan. Talking was not what he had imagined doing with her while he had been in detention.

“Can't we do it later? We've got all the time in the world,” he whined.

“Exactly,” she replied, her smile turning into a bit of a smirk. She kissed him on the corner of his lips and then pulled him over to the chairs, pushing him down into one before plopping into his lap. “And we'd better make good use of it.”