He wakes up before all the other boys the next morning and gets ready silently, doing his best not to wake everyone up. He hopes this is just because they stayed up late the night before, but he’s not counting on it, and he mourns the loss of Blaise as his roommate. They’re both early risers, so they would have woken at the same time and gotten ready while chatting and made their beds with the same impervious flicks of their wand. They were planning on it, were looking forward to it, and now, well.
That’s most of the reason he’s being so considerate as to not wake any of his dormmates. He doesn’t exactly want an audience this morning.
Draco puts on his red and gold tie, smooths his hand over the lion crest across his chest, hoists his book bag over his shoulder, and goes down to the great hall.
The Gryffindor and Ravenclaw tables are basically empty this early in the morning, but there are a fair amount of Slytherins, and the Hufflepuff table is nearly full. He detours from his own table to go to the Slytherin one, stopping awkwardly in front of the first years. “Hey.”
Blaise is frowning and Pansy looks like she wants to rip his head off with her bare hands. Her being here is a bad sign, because she’s not an early riser, which means she’s here specifically to yell at him. Greg and Vinny wouldn’t get out bed early for love or money so he’ll have to wait to hear whatever opinions they have about his house.
Daphne, his least favorite chess opponent but currently the best person in the world, leans around them to grin at him. “Get a bit lost last night, didn’t you Draco?”
“Something like that,” he says. “Look, I can explain.”
“I cannot believe,” Pansy hisses, “that you’re abandoning us so you can cling to Harry Potter’s coattails.”
Well, it’s not like he would be friends with them if they were stupid. “Okay, one, I’m not abandoning you, Slytherins and Gryffindors have like all their classes together anyway and I promise I’ll still double check all your homework,” she looks slightly mollified at that, so at least some of her anger was related to her projected academic loss, “and two, if anyone’s riding on anyone’s coattails, it’s Harry on mine. You know he didn’t even know he was a wizard until a couple weeks ago? It’s like giving a baby a wand just to see what happens.” He may have closed his curtains, but he hadn’t gone asleep right away, and he was up more than long enough to overhear Harry talking to the others.
“Dad was so mad when we did that to Lucas. Mum thought it was funny, though,” Pansy muses.
“It was funny,” he says, because it was. Lucus, barely a year old, had turned the whole east win of the manor yellow, and hey, now his parents knew for sure he wasn’t a squibb, so really they were doing them a favor. “Come on, you know what my dad told me to do, I’m just following orders.”
Blaise finally relents, shoulders drooping. “I’m sharing a room with Theodore for seven years! It was supposed to be us, Draco!”
Draco thinks back to the many conversations they’ve had about how Theodore is possibly a psychopath, and the five boys he’s forced to share a small space with, and says, “Blaise, believe me when I say, I think I envy you.”
Blaise tries to raise an eyebrow, trying to look as cool and aloof as his mum, but he doesn’t quite manage it, biting his bottom lip to stifle a laugh and failing.
Some of the uneasiness he’s been carrying around settles. He’s not doing this alone. Even if all of Gryffindor hates him forever, he still has his friends.
“OI, MALFOY!” He turns, wide eyed, and one of the Weasley twins is waving at him. He cups his hands around his mouth, even though the great hall isn’t nearly full of noisy enough to justify it. “YOU’RE AT THE WRONG TABLE!”
“You know,” Pansy says, “I think the consequences of your actions are punishment enough.”
He rolls his eyes and elbows her before throwing a quick smile at Blaise and Daphne and going over to the Gryffindor table.
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