und long enough develops a personality.”

Harry scowls, and only just barely doesn’t say I don’t know nothing! “Ohe on, not any magic— “

“Any magic,” Malfoy repeats. “If it’s around long enough, yes, Potter, it does. Haven’t you ever encountered a magical object and known, somewhere deep, that it was evil? In fact, scratch that, I know you have: I’ve seen you myself in in and Burkes.”

“Malfoy,” Harry exclaims, “we were twelve!”

“And that alters my point how?” Malfoy looks at him coolly as Harry takes the bacon out of the pan, pours some of the grease into a cup and cracks eggs into what’s left. “You were there, you saw what there was to see; you know I’m right. Any magic that’s been around long enough develops a personality. Not always evil, of course, but certainly always extant. You build something as powerful as a Wizarding house and take care of it for a century or two? Then, yes, for all intents and purposes it absolutely is alive, if not in precisely the same way as you or me. Which is why,” Malfoy adds, “they even came up with the Unbreakable part of the changing of houses in the first place, so that your enemies couldn’t secretly buy up your property and then murder it!”

Harry shrugs, and flips the eggs. “Sorry, Malfoy. That all sounds pretty barmy to me.”

“Oh for the love of—fine. Don’t take my word for it! Ask anyone you know who was raised Wizarding—ask Weasley, for all I care. They’ll all tell you the same thing!” Malfoy subsides, finally, into a sulky sort of silence.

Which leaves Harry to stare down at the range full of fully cooked food and conclude, rather horrified with himself, that he has made enough breakfast for two people.

He has a moment of panicked indecision—what is a person supposed to do in this situation? Should Harry just load enough breakfast for himself onto a plate and go sit down at the table and eat it? That’s got to be rude; he’d think it was rude, if somebody left a full portion of food on the stove and didn’t at least offer him some. Wasteful, too. But what’s he supposed to say? Hey, Malfoy, what are your feelings on the most important meal of the day? Christ. Maybe he really is still drunk, hangover potion or no.

But then Malfoy takes a deep breath and Harry can just tell he’s about to start in again, on the thing with the Prophet or the thing with the house or god knows what else, and suddenly it’s the easiest thing in the world.

“Look, Malfoy,” Harry says. “D’you want some breakfast?”

Malfoy’s mouth snaps shut. He stares at Harry for a second, eyes widening just a little —the way they had, Harry remembers, when an intruder’s fist was hovering threateningly over that little crystal vase.

“Do I want…some breakfast?” Malfoy repeats, faintly, after a moment.

Harry could just kill him for not saying yes or no, for leaving Harry standing here like this feeling so helplessly, hopelessly awkward. He’ll be damned if he’ll let Malfoy see that, though, so he forces one shoulder up into a shrug. “Y’know. Eggs? Bacon? Stop me when something rings a bell.”

“You…cook?” Malfoy says, looking slowly from Harry to the range, as though noticing it for the first time.

Harry raises his eyebrows. “What exactly did you think I was doing here?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Malfoy snaps irritably. Then he pauses, the line of his mouth going funny, just for a moment. “I suppose it doesn’t smell terrible.”

“Wow, Malfoy,” Harry says, rolling his eyes and grabbing some chives to top the eggs with out of the fridge. “Careful with the gratuitous praise, there. My head might swell up.”

Malfoy lets out a little noise that Harry thinks might be stifled laughter; by the time he’s turned back from the fridge, Malfoy’s face is impassive again, and he can’t tell.

Honestly, this is unbearable. “Look,” Harry says, slicing the chives with more force than is really required, “if you already ate or whatever, it’s—”

“Sure,” Malfoy says, before Harry can finish the sentence. Harry shoots a glance at him and Malfoy flushes slightly, looks away. “Fine. Breakfast! Why not.”

“Great,” Harry mutters.

He thought getting an answer would cut the awkwardness of the thing, but he was obviously mistaken, because Malfoy’s never-ending stream of chatter seems to have ceased entirely as Harry gets plates and cups, doles out portions. It’s strange—if Harry’d had to guess, a minute ago, he’d have said it would be a relief to turn off that particular tap for a moment. Instead he finds himself wishing Malfoy would start up again, save Harry from this empty, endless desert where something to say should be.

They sit down at his little two-person folding table, and Harry has to move some stuff off the other chair, and Malfoy doesn’t say anything pithy about how Harry is a slob, or living in squalor, or eating in the kitchen like an animal when he could have lived like a king in an ancient estate with an emotional profile. He just sits down, and kind of nods at Harry, and frowns down at his breakfast, and takes a bite.

Harry is desperate enough to consider bringing up the weather when Malfoy, thankfully, says, “I say, Potter! This is actually not terrible!”

“It’s the ‘actually’ that really sells that, thanks,” Harry says. He hopes his voicees out dry, as opposed to so relieved he’s a bit ashamed of himself.

“That little underestimation incident from before affected me more deeply than you know,” Malfoy says. He spears a potato, and, in what he clearly imagines is a reassuring tone, adds, “I dropped my expectations very low.”

“Great,” Harry says, rolling his eyes. “So I assume I’ll be receiving a stern letter at the office about how I’m going to bungle the investigation, then?”

“Oh, they’re lower than that, Potter, what do you take me for?” He chews and swallows a bite of bacon thoughtfully. “I give you until—end of this week, tops, before you’re living in a box next to the river.”

“This would be the river with my secret underground palace for services rendered, would it?”

“Oh, quite,” Malfoy says, mouth quirking up at the corners. “Of course, they won’t let you in there anymore by the end of the week. You’ll have urinated on a public figure and set several tourist attractions on fire by then. Very down on that sort of thing, the secret palace people.”

“I thought it was my palace,” Harry says, distantly aware that this entire conversation ispletely bonkers and just…not caring very much. “Shouldn’t a man be allowed to do what he likes in his own home?”

“Within reason, Potter, within reason.” Malfoy’s actually, honestly smiling now, though it’s directed at his plate, and not at Harry. “Anyway, those tourist attractions are all much too large to fit under the Thames, and I don’t know how you’d lure a public figure down there to pee on them.”

Harry gives up and laughs, really laughs, the noise loud enough to fill the room. He can’t help himself—it’s funny, andpletely bizarre, and so unexpectedly easy that he’s not entirely sure what to with himself.

“You’repletely mental,” Harry says, a little laughter still riding on the words. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

“D’you know, I’ve heard it before.” This smile Malfoy does direct at Harry—it’s slow, lazy. Entertained. “Never quite seen it, myself.”

The silence that falls between them this time is almostpanionable, and Harry’s getting used to it—god help him, maybe even enjoying it—when Malfoy lets out a little huff of laughter, only half vocalized but undeniable this time.

Harry raises his eyebrows. “What?”

“Oh, it’s just,” Malfoy says, and shakes his head, releases that little huff of a laugh again. “Well—it’s just a bit surreal, isn’t it?” He gestures back and forth between them, to the coffee and plates. “I mean, for one thing, I think at some point during school I swore a solemn oath that I’d never break bread with you.”

“That is a little surreal,” says Harry. “Did it escape your attention that we ate practically every meal together for the better part of six years?”

“That didn’t count,” Malfoy says. He takes a haughty sip of his coffee while Harry stares at him, waiting for the explanation, which, sure enough: “We were separated by—how did I phrase it—two full tables and the chasm between our disparate ideologies.” He gives his fork a loaded look. “I believe that, technically, I’m supposed to tear out my entrails and burn them now. You’ll ive me if I let that one slide.”

“The chasm,” Harry repeats, “between our disparate ideologies.”

“I was a gifted child,” Malfoy says, nodding as though he is agreeing with a thought Harry has already proposed. “I had the wrong end of the ideological stick, obviously, but nevertheless I was the envy of all my schoolmates. And, of course, of their parents, who only wished they’d produced offspring so naturally brilliant.”

“Brilliant enough to want to burn your own entrails, were you?”

“I didn’t want to,” Malfoy says, as though Harry is the crazy one. “But it’s no good laying out an edict without an appropriately weighted punishment, is it? The point was that I would burn them, not that I particularly hoped to ever have to do so. How else was I to make sure I never violated the rule?”

“I don’t know,” Harry says, mock-thoughtful. “How about the fact that we would have started a food fight in about eight seconds if you ever ot about—the, er, chasm—and gave it a go?”

Malfoy smiles at him again. This one is smaller, but more—honest, Harry thinks, somehow. It makes him feel like he’s won something. “Well, sure. When you put it like that.”

There’s another nearlyfortable silence, and then Harry says: “I did et to do the toast, actually. So technically we didn’t, y’know. Break any bread.”

“Well, Potter,” Malfoy says, swallowing his last mouthful of food—he’s cleaned his plate, which Harry is weirdly gratified by. “That might be the cleverest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

Harry rolls his eyes instead of answering, stands, clears their plates. He’s placing them in the sink when something urs to him, and he walks back over to where

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