"You're a conceited twat," Potter snaps angrily. Draco knows and is ashamed enough to do the one thing he hardly ever does.
"Look, Potter, I apologize. That was unpardonably rude and—"
The other man holds up a hand to stop the flow of words, and so Draco happily falls silent. While he knows he needs to apologize, it doesn't mean he is any more eager to do it than usual.
"If I came here for politeness, I'd have left long ago, Malfoy," Potter says without malice, and Draco is pathetically pleased to hear the tiny vein of affection in his voice.
"What are you here for, then, Potter?" he asks with a smile.
"The scotch."
There is another lull in the conversation while Potter transforms a sheet of blotting paper into a cup that comes out a strange cross between a glass and a teacup, looks askance at it, and then pours some into it anyhow. This pause is not quite comfortable, because he and Potter will never do comfortable, but it is also somehow easy. Not right, because in a right world—the type of world that Draco's decided to create—Ginny would be here, and there would be Christmas decorations around the Manor, and he would not be sitting here on Christmas Eve across from the savior of the wizarding world with a fire that was hardly burning anymore, some rather superb scotch, and a decade's worth of emptiness, but if Draco were farther gone, he'd probably admit to himself that if there were anyone in the wizarding world he would most want to be sitting here alone on Christmas Eve with, it's probably Harry bloody Potter, two sheets to the wind and all.
Finally Potter breaks the silence to say, "I just want to know why."
Draco thinks about it a long time before answering. "Because I can," he says finally. "And because ten years is a long time to regret something."
"Sometimes things have to be done the hard way, not the easy way," Potter says sharply, but he closes the door gently on his way out.
Draco stares into the fire's death throes, deep in thought once more. Finally, he reaches into the box and pulls out the timeturner. Placing it around his neck, he takes a deep breath, and then he begins to turn it over and over, the white sands rushing against one another.