Draco is in the Manor now. He is in his father's old office, which he hardly ever goes into unless he wants to feel morose and self-pitying, and the fire only reaches halfway across the room, which is not uncommon for the malicious old house. Draco tries to spend most of his time in only the newer wings of the house where the numerous Dark Arts spells that have been cast in and on the house haven't had time to seep into the stones yet. There are times when Draco wonders if someone once cast something on them to make them not just lurking and bizarre and evil but also melodramatic.
This is not one of those times.
This is, instead, a drinking-twenty-four-year-old-scotch time. There is a letter in his hand that is slippery from all the charms that have been placed on it to preserve it for the past ten years. Next to his right elbow, on the corner of the desk, there is a wooden box with something in it that could immediately get him twenty to thirty years in Azkaban, no questions asked, just for possession. Draco will sit here for a long time and look at the door absently and think rather harder than he usually does, which is difficult.
The part of his mind that's trying to convince him that he is not brooding over a woman who left him a decade ago and who, if he had asked for it, would never have never given him a moment of her time since is instead congratulating himself on burning the wreath his house elves were just trying to hang on the front door. It's an appealing cliché: Draco Malfoy, king of the Slytherins, Christmas hater extraordinaire. But the truth is that he doesn't like disliking Christmas. He doesn't like not hanging up mistletoe and doesn't like not having someone there with him who always knows just what to buy him for Christmas or how to whisper erotic nonsense into his ear until he's a puddle of lust just from her voice, and he doesn't like what she turned him into all those years ago by refusing what he was trying so desperately to give. He would be a fool not to realize that he is the reason the newspaper finally threw up its collective hands and told her to go wherever she wanted to because she was going to do it anyhow and it wasn't their problem if she got killed doing it, but for Merlin's sake, next time won't she at least check in from to time to let them know she's been getting the owls, especially when she's planning on showing up in the middle of Neo-Death Eater meetings. He knows this because Colin Creevey has decided that Draco is the perfect person to discuss these things with whenever they see each other at functions. Never mind that Draco never gave him the time of day during school. Or that the last thing he wants to think about is a redheaded reporter with a death wish and a list of broken hearts behind her.
No, apparently Draco Malfoy is so pathetic that he doesn't need to keep tabs on the only woman he's ever loved because he's so obvious that everyone else will do it for him.