mpts to begin— “Dear Draco,” is right out, but “Dear Malfoy,” looks equally ridiculous, and he’s not about to write “Dear Mr. Malfoy,” like he’s one of the children from yesterday—he decides to omit the greeting entirely, and writes:

Hey. I need toe by and take the rest of your statement, plus go over some stuff with you, and get a good look around. Do you have time today?

-HP

He rolls it up and holds it out for Mathilda, the barn owl he bought a few years ago. She’s not Hedwig, but she’s a character in her own right, and Harry’s grown to love her little strangenesses. True to form, she pops her head up under his hand and rotates it nearly all the way around and then back again, knocking all her feathers into an avian imitation of bedhead, before she sticks out her leg and lets him tie the letter on.

“This goes to Draco Malfoy,” Harry tells her, stroking her feathers lightly back into place. “Wait for his reply if he starts writing one, but don’t feel like you have to hang around all day for him, okay?”

Mathilda hoots in soft acquiescence and swoops out of his office window.

Harry spends the hour she’s gone pouring over Malfoy’s records. They are, as he’d suggested the day before, punishingly thorough, and Harry’s eyes swim after just a few minutes of looking at them. He pushes gamely on, though, and before he is mercifully interrupted by Mathilda’s return he draws two conclusions. The first is that Malfoy is an absurdly meticulous git whose very existence somehow manages to gives Harry a headache. The second is that Malfoy’s actually got quite a lot of incredible stuff in Harry’s old house, and seems to have done a fairly enormous amount of work to get it.

He takes the parchment from Mathilda’s leg, grateful to have anything to look at that isn’t Malfoy’s ledgers. In the neat script Harry’s gotten all too familiar with this morning, he reads:

As my business has been temporarily closed due to cataclysm, yes, Potter, I am available today. I have meetings with potential restorers for some of the damaged exhibits scattered across the day; if you don’t mind the asional 15 minute break, you maye by at your leisure.

Cordially,

Draco Malfoy

P.S. Your inability to correctly format a letter is bordering on grotesque. No greeting? No signature? You must have been raised by wolves.

Harry scowls at the P.S. until he rereads the letter and notices that Malfoy has not manage to include a greeting either. Then he grins, grabs up his belongings, and hits the door.

Kreacher pulls open the door at Number 12 before Harry even gets the chance to knock, which is nice, if a bit creepy. He doesn’t get there quite in time to stop Harry from reading the little sign on the doorway, though: Closed Indefinitely for Repairs. Your Patience is Appreciated in This Trying Time, handwritten in Malfoy’s newly familiar script. Harry’s not sorry to stop looking at it, although he couldn’t quite say why.

“Harry Potter!” Kreacher says, beaming at him and ushering him inside. “Master Draco is expecting you. Kreacher will take your coat.”

Harry hands Kreacher his coat and scarf gamely enough, noticing again the little golden nametag hanging proudly from his crisp white toga. “What’s with the nametag?”

Kreacher draws himself up proudly and beams. “Kreacher is a tour guide for the Modern Museum of Wizarding History between the hours of ten and six, Harry Potter! Kreacher is employee of the month.”

He vanishes with a familiar crack on that little disclosure, leaving Harry to blink in surprise after him and then shake his head, look around. The place already looks better than it did yesterday, if still in obvious disrepair; the debris has been cleared from the ground, the worst of the torn wallpaper cut away. Most of the damaged furniture seems to have been pushed out to the edges of the rooms Harry can see from the foyer, leaving what’s left within them looking bare and strangely forlorn.

It really is pretty amazing, Harry thinks, what Malfoy’s done with the place. He’d hardly think it was the same house he remembers from the war. Every surface that Harry recalls as dampening light catches it instead, and the ceilings actually seem higher, which Harry knows logically that they’re not, but. He remembers Grimmauld Place as close and claustrophobic, musty, dark. The museum, even in what has to be the worst condition of its short history, is open, airy and bright. It’s hard to reconcile.

There’s another crack as Kreacher reappears, and when Harry turns his head he sees that the elf is wringing his hands, hopping slightly from foot to foot. Harry crouches down, alert at once, and demands, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Oh, nothing! Nothing, Harry Potter!” Kreacher says, voice squeaking on the words. “Kreacher didn’t mean to suggest anything was wrong! Kreacher only wanted to say—thank you for answering the call!”

“Oh,” Harry says, huffing out a relieved breath and offering him a little smile. “Well, that’s—that’s all right, Kreacher. I didn’t mind.” He’s about to stand back up when he considers the phrasing—”answer the call,” that’s a bit weird—and he wonders, for the first time, why on earth Kreacher had shown up at his cubicle yesterday. Not at the Auror department; his cubicle.

“Say, Kreacher,” Harry says, keeping his voice pitched in the tone of casual inquiry, “I meant to ask. Why’d youe to me in the first place? I mean, to my desk? Not that I wasn’t happy to help, but it’s usually better to go to intake with a crime in progress.”

“Kreacher is not always a tour guide, and Harry Potter is a former Master of the House,” Kreacher says, voice going oddly formal. “Kreacher serves the Master, and Kreacher serves the House. If the House seeks aid, Kreacher goes to the Master; if the Master seeks aid, Kreacher goes to the House. If both seek aid, Kreacher must find another Master, or another House, to answer the call.”

He gives Harry a significant look and then vanishes again, with a crack that seems somehow more pointed than the first two.

“Huh,” Harry says, rocking back on his heels. He’d known that some of the magic tied up with old Wizarding homes was a bit bonkers, but apparently he’d had no idea.

“Oh for god’s sake, Potter,”es Malfoy’s voice from the top of the stair. “What are you doing, looking for clues in the woodgrain?”

Scowling at having been caught crouched on the floor like an idiot, Harry stands up and turns to see Malfoy descending the staircase. He’s wearing his hair pulled back today, caught in the tiniest tuft of a ponytail at the crown of his head and revealing that, though long enough to hang down past his ears on top, the sides are shaved down short. It looks—not good on him, Harry thinks hastily, he doesn’t really care about that, but. Fitting, Harry supposes, is the word. Sleek, but unusual.

He’s also, Harry notices with some irritation, still sporting the massive black eye that was starting to develop on his face the previous evening. Someone should have healed that for him, and it grates a little under Harry’s skin, seeing it there; it’s doing the Aurors a discredit, letting Malfoy walk around with that obvious injury over his soft green sweater. Harry’s just about to open his mouth and say as much to Malfoy when he realizes who is descending the stairs behind him.

“Neville,” Harry says, shocked. “I, er, didn’t know you’d be here.”

“Me neither,” Neville says, and gives Harry a tight, ufortable little smile. “I mean, that you would be here. I would have—gone. Or not. I mean, I wouldn’t have—you get what I’m saying.”

“Sure,” says Harry, and looks away. It’s just been…awkward, hasn’t it, with Neville and Ginny, in these years since everything fell out. Harry doesn’t want it to be; sure, he’d been angry at first, hurt that she’d left him, brokenhearted that it was for another man, for one of their friends, but. He doesn’t think he could ever really have been happy with her, not in the long term, now that he’s had the time to properly think about it. He doesn’t think he could have made her happy, either, and Neville obviously does; he’s glad for her, for both of them. He is.

But sometimes even now Harry sees them together, laughing and leaning into each other at the Weasley dinners, or trading jokes and sly glances across Ron and Hermione's table, and hates them both, just a little. Hates Neville for being what he wasn’t, and hates Ginny for needing that, even though he knows she deserves it and wants her to have it. Hates that they’ve got each other, and he’s alone.

It’s awkward, is all. He hasn’t ever quite been able to figure out how to make it right.

“Well, isn’t this the most upsetting little display of social ipetence since man discovered the wheel,” Malfoy drawls, rolling his eyes. “If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand time: they don’t socialize you Gryffindors properly, it’s why you alle out hopeless bores. Longbottom, Potter is here to ask me a series of invasive questions in the name of justice. Potter, Longbottom tends to the vicious, ancient hag who lives in my attic.”

Harry stares, and is about to demand to know how Neville Longbottom, of all people, got stuck dealing with that painting of Sirius’s mad old mum, when Neville makes a soft tsking sound and slaps Malfoy lightly on the shoulder with a rubber gardening glove.

“Don’t talk about her like that,” Neville says, and then, in rapturous tones, “Harry, Malfoy has the oldest known living Venomous Tentacula up there. Found her half-dead on some dig and installed her in the attic—apparently these old wizarding homes like having a bit of deadly shrubbery about the place, and of course Tentaculas feed on magic as well as sunlight, so the climate suits her fine. She’s nearly a thousand years old, just an absolute beauty, a really incredible specimen—”

“A nightmare,” Malfoy interrupts, “that I should have left to die in the sand where I found her. Tetchy and expensive and barely even a museum attraction, because as it turns out no one wants to g

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