Please Be There If I Remember

Chapter Eighteen: Waiting

Draco paced restlessly in the bathroom—the only free place in his dorm where he could do this since Blaise and Theo had come back from the Great Hall and were now talking to each other about some strange thing that he couldn't be bothered to listen to.

He cast a tempus with a flick of his wand impatiently, and he could almost feel the seconds ticking by, mocking him.

Tick...Tick...Tick...

His pacing stopped. Groaning to himself at the utter absurdity of himself at the moment—he was walking in the middle of a bathroom for Merlin's sake—he decided to take a shower, if only to let it take his mind off of the time that seemed to be going at the pace of a snail trudging through mud.

Once he stepped into the shower, he let the water pour over him, splashing onto his hair and letting the stray droplets drip onto his face and rest on his eyelashes. In one corner there was an array of products, ranging from the normal shampoo and conditioner, to the more mundane things like face cleanser and hair softener. Deciding to just throw whatever the hell he wanted into his hair to help take up the time, he grabbed the first thing he saw and dumped the bottle of clear-looking liquid into his hand, rubbing it thoroughly on his head.

It lathered easily, and Draco stopped for a moment to glance at the bottle that he had grabbed.

"Oh shit."

There, lying in big, bold letters were the words: THEO'S. DO NOT USE. (You know what will happen to you do—yes I'm talking to you, Draco.)

Draco panicked, running his head under the water and aggressively rubbing it to get all of the shampoo out of it.

"No, no no..."

Draco wasn't sure what the warning meant, but he had a distinct feeling that it wasn't going to be good.

Once he had effectively scrubbed his head so many times that he was pretty sure his scalp was red, he finished off his shower in a rush and stepped out to look in the mirror to see what the damage was.

"THEO!"

~*"*~

"Is there any way you can fix it?" Draco whined, glancing up at his hair from under his eyelashes.

"The book I used to create it said it lasts for three days. It never said anything about a counterspell," Theo answered slightly apologetically. "But you did use my shampoo, which I warned you about at the beginning of the year, and there was literally a warning right there on the bottle, so really, you have mostly yourself to blame," he said with a despondent shrug.

"I wasn't aware, remember," Draco seethed.

"Oh, right," Theo muttered, looking down.

Draco frowned again at the state of his scalp. The shampoo had been charmed to turn anyone's hair that wasn't Theo's a bright red. His once shiny, platinum locks were now a searing, sharp red—enough that even Blaise kept his eyes turned away from it unless he was looking at it to laugh again.

"Three days..." Draco mumbled with a hateful glare at the top of his head. "I'm not going to last that long."

"Oh come off it," Blaise stated from where he was leaning against one of the bedposts with a shit-eating grin on his face at Draco's demise. "You'll live."

"Not pleasantly," he snapped back.

Blaise shrugged. "Living is living, no matter how you look at it."

"Sure Blaise," Draco said with a mocking roll of his eyes. "Whatever you say."

The boy smirked at him and turned to his bed for the night. For what felt like the eighteenth time in the past few hours, Draco cast another tempus, impatiently waiting for midnight so he could meet Potter on the seventh floor or wherever he had wanted to meet him.