You Make It Feel Like Christmas / drarry

'Tis the Season (To Be Jolly)

24 days until Christmas.

"It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas," Millicent Bulstrode remarks on the ground floor of the London Library as she sets her worn work satchel on her desk.

"Everywhere you go," Draco Malfoy hums disapprovingly as he's checking the morning mail. He'd clocked the garlands that were put up during the weekend and the poinsettias on every conceivable surface as he entered this morning.

Draco's not what one would call a 'Christmas person'. He likes the food and the presents well enough, but deep down he despises the artificial atmosphere of the holiday and the forced pleasantries exchanged with people he doesn't care about. Every year it's the same thing: 'We should do this more often', and they never do, because they don't want to. What's the point?

"Oh, brighten up you wanker," Millie rolls her eyes as she plops down to assess the thick file that's been dropped on her desk, "Every year you pretend to loathe Christmas, but I know for a fact that you've already dug out the tin of gingerbread biscuits you've been saving since October."

Draco frowns at her from behind his coffee. "I thought they were running a bit low compared to my own consumption. How'd you know about the biscuit tin in the first place?"

Millie only smirks mischievously, the cow, as she leafs through her papers.

"Bloody Pansy, I'll have her bollocks for this," Draco huffs, but he won't. He's got too much work to do for that. He grabs the mail that's arrived for him and retreats to his office to go through it in peace.

It's ridiculous that he even has an office, seeing that it's only him and Millie down here. Yanti had retired to her maternity leave a month ago and was not expected back before next year, and Ababio was on sick leave for reasons unknown. They are both brilliant, much too bright to be working in this dump, and against his nature Draco secretly misses them. And not only because the library didn't deem it necessary to stretch their budget and actually hire someone to cover for the two absentees, although that might also have something to do with it.

Draco goes through his letters as quickly as he can, making notes in his calendar as he does so. He casts aside any marketing materials and tries to focus on the letters that are actually about work. He shivers under his jumper—bloody brick walls are freezing during the winter—and takes a sip of his lukewarm coffee in a desperate attempt to warm himself up.

It takes close to an hour before he can continue with his current project, picking up where he left off yesterday. Draco returns to the bigger room to join Millie and moves down to their file cabinets. He undoes the protective charms on the drawer with a firm tap of his wand and pulls out his latest undertaking: a heavy book delivered to them a few months ago from the British Museum to be translated. It was dug up from the legendary Sutton Hoo excavation site in Suffolk a year back and the museum had been restoring it before sending it in. Preserved in an iron chest, it had extensive damage but was not beyond repair, and now Draco's doing his best to translate the jumble of Middle English, Anglo-Norman French, and Latin.

So far it appears that the opus is merely full of ancient bookkeeping records that oversee the spending of money and resources on sea travels. The chest was found in a ship dating to the late Middle Ages, so the existence of such logs makes sense. However, over the past few weeks Draco's also stumbled upon descriptions about places that the crew visited, although it looks like they mainly sailed back and forth between England and the coast of the Holy Roman Empire and France, today known as Germany, the Netherlands, Brussels and, well, France.

So far it has been quite uneventful.

After all the unpleasantness of 1998, Draco left England to study ancient languages. It wasn't necessarily his passion—frankly, he needed to do something that didn't remind him of the past three years of his life, or the fact that his father was in prison and his mother in house arrest at the Manor, or the fact that his family name, his name, was tarnished forever, or the fact that he could hardly go anywhere in Britain without being targeted as a terrorist.