The next month is…interesting.

In a lot of senses, he does the same things he’s always done. He goes to the office; he goes home; he has dinner with Ron and Hermione. He spends a few afternoons with Teddy in the park, plays strange games that Teddy invents and hopes he’s not messing up being a godfather too horribly. Twice he goes to the Burrow for the Sunday meal, and three times he babysits for Rose, who is a delightful little bundle of laughter even if Harry is, almost constantly, afraid that he’s going to drop her. He walks through the routines of his everyday life. He proceeds as normal.

He just also—spends some time with Draco.

It’s still strange to think of him by his first name; the switch happened without Harry realizing at some point a few weeks back. By the time he noticed he was doing it, he knew it’d been happening for days already, couldn’t pinpoint a source for the change. He’s not insane enough to actually try calling Draco by it—Draco, who still peppers the word “Potter” into about a third of the sentences Harry hears him say, almost always like it’s an insult— but there doesn’t seem to be any going back to thinking of him as Malfoy. Harry’s decided he might as well try and ept it.

It was just visits to the museum, at first. That night with the reporters, Harry told Draco that the department was going to have to pull the house’s protective detail and Draco looked—stricken, just for an instant. It was enough, though, to make Harry start dropping by every couple of days. He made a show of it at first, dropping his coins into the little box marked “Price of Admission: Seven Sickles” as Dracoplained that the museum was closed, and he didn’t know why he’d opened the door in the first place, and if Harry was going to linger in bold violation of the closed for business sign, he might as well help Draco refinish the drawing room floor. But after the first few times…well, after the first few times, Harry started just kind of showing up.

It was fun, was all. For the first week or so they did a lot of repair work, restorations both physical and magical, and moved all the exhibits to different spots easily six times. Draco was incessant and intense about his work—Draco was incessant and intense, full stop —but Harry, who’d spent six years in classes and one year at war with Hermione Granger, didn’t mind. It was nice to have something to do with his hands, work that he could look at and touch when he was done, and anyway Draco told fantastic stories as they made their way through the museum. Every artifact seemed to have some kind of insane, rambling tale attached, from the crystal goblet that Rowena Ravenclaw had whipped at a suitor in a drunken rage to the enchanted chains Harry encountered the day of the break-in, which were rumored to have belonged to Blackbeard the Pirate.

It urred to Harry, one night while they were up late re-hanging paintings, that the museum was really more a collection of old stuff Draco thought was interesting or funny than it was aprehensive walk through the annals of history. When he said as much, Draco rolled his eyes.

“Oh, honestly, Potter—yes, of course it is. To epass all of Wizarding history I’d need a building the size of Hogwarts, and also I’d have to rob blind the seven museums scattered across the globe that are already attempting to carry that mantle. I didn’t open this place with the goal of full andplete historical coverage in mind.”

“Why did you open it, then?”

Draco took a long time to answer the question; he did, sometimes. Harry was learning. When he finally spoke, his voice was careful.

“After the war,” Draco said, “it was—difficult. I don’t particularly enjoy talking about it, to tell you the truth, and I won’t now, so don’t ask.” He gave Harry a stern look, as though Harry was planning on asking that very instant, and Harry gave him one back, as if to say D’you think I want to talk about the war? “But then I heard Grimmauld Place was up for sale, and Mother was already abroad and my father was—well, you know where my father was.”

The unspoken weight of Lucius’s sentence—life in Azkaban, no parole—hung between them in the air for a moment. Harry’s never been sorry a day in his life that Lucius Malfoy is rotting in prison, and he wasn’t then, either, but he was sorry for the way the truth of it curled Draco’s shoulders, pulled at the line of his mouth.

Then Draco sighed and waved a hand, as if to clear the topic away. “Anyway, I didn’t want to live in the Manor anymore, and I always loved this house when we’de to see Auntie Walburga when I was a child. And then I had control of my trust as well as a portion of my father’s holdings, which was…not a small amount of money, even after what was seized. So I bought it. Then, of course, it turned out you’d left it a shambles—”

“I know,” Harry groaned. “I know, I know.”

“Just reminding you,” Draco said, shamelessly glad at Harry’s displeasure and guilt. “Look, Potter, the point is: I spent all this time cleaning it up, and then all I really wanted to do was show it off. But I wasn’t exactly rich in friendship or positive public opinion at the time, things being what they were, so I thought—maybe a museum. Fill the place with beautiful things to lure them in, and then trick them into admiring the house while I’ve got them.”

“A cunning plan,” Harry said, dry, and ignored the face Draco pulled at him in favor of picking up a sculpture of a raven with a large cockroach crawling out of its mouth. “And this is one of those beautiful objects, is it?”

Draco gave him this weird look, then, a little too long, his head cocked. Eventually, thoughtfully, he said, “Interesting turned out to more worthwhile than beautiful.”

“Did it,” Harry said, difited and not wholly sure why. He shifted in his chair and Draco seemed to snap out of it, jerking his attention abruptly over to the next painting in line to be hung.

“Yes, well,” Draco said, spelling the frame to the wall with a savage little flick of his wand, “as it turned out I liked the work, and was rather good at it. And…” He paused, bit his lip, and then shot Harry an usatory look, as though Harry was forcing him to say all of this instead of basically just standing there holding an ugly statue. “And maybe it was nice to, I don’t know, be part of preserving some history, instead of seeing it destroyed. To share it instead of…well, instead of whatever else. We turned a profit. It made me happy. It felt like enough.”

“Sure,” Harry said easily. It sounded logical enough to him.

Draco narrowed his eyes anyway, tetchy little git that he was. “Oh, don’t hold back on my ount, Potter,” he sneered. “Tell me what you really think, you won’t be the first. My mother insists that calling it the Modern Museum of Wizarding History is false advertising, and really I should call it The Museum Of Little Oddities, and sell tea sandwiches. Blaise says it’s just an excuse to keep spending my ancestral money acquiring strange objects that nobody needs, and I swear to god Pansy still thinks the whole thing’s a practical joke, and one of these days I’m going to jump out from behind a potted plant and yell, ‘SURPRISE! I’ve had a Gringotts job the whole time.’”

Harry laughed, but then he shrugged and put the sculpture down. “I didn’t say any of that, Malfoy, you nutter. I just said it seemed like the pieces were more driven by your taste than by, you know. History as a whole.” He held up a hand before whatever defensive, cutting thing was about toe out of Draco’s mouth could hit the air. “I didn’t say it was a bad thing. I like it, actually.”

“Oh,” Draco said, and turned vaguely pink, and went off to another room to find some item or another that he found himself in need of, suddenly.

So—yeah. It was just evenings spent more or less like that, at first.

Only then…well, then the museum was about to reopen, and Draco had clearly made his peace with the lack of a constant Auror detail at the doors, and Harry could practically see how it would go, how it was all going to play out. The museum would open and Draco wouldn’t need Harry around anymore and they’d go back to being—well. Not the bitter enemies they once were or anything, but Harry knew, knows, how these things happen, how people can just fall out of your life without your realizing it until they’ve already gone. He could just picture it, him and Draco running into each other somewhere a year or two down the line and maybe having a drink, laughing awkwardly about their strange three weeks of not-quite-friendship, before they returned to their wholly separate lives.

Harry didn’t want it to happen, for reasons he was not planning on examining too closely. He sort of hated even thinking about it.

“We could…eat,” he said, the night before the museum was set to reopen, while he and Draco were drinking celebratory Firewhiskey in Harry’s favorite sitting room, enjoying the novel sensation of having nothing left to get done. “That’s a thing that people do.”

“You really do have all the social grace of a flatulent hippogriff, don’t you,” Draco said, but he was smiling. “Yes, Potter, people do eat, what an incredible grasp you have on the human experience. Would you like to give it a go?”

Harry flipped him the finger at the insult but also said that he would, and they went to this little cafe up the road that did the best pork chops Harry’d ever had in his life. It’d been there for 40 years; Harry had lived right up the street from it, and he’d never known.

After that they just sort of started…eating dinner together, a couple of nights a week. Usually they went out, but one night they got caught up in some discussion and didn’t end up leaving the museum until so late that all the worthwhile places were closed. Draco panicked a little, made a whole production out of the fact that he was going to starve to death on the streets in the bloom of his youth, but Harry just rolled his eyes and Apparated them to an all-night Muggle

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