n,” Draco says. Only one of his eyes is visible, but that one eye is wicked. “Don’t look at me, Potter, you’re the one who set the precedent. If you didn’t want to make me breakfast you shouldn’t have epted the potion in the first place.”

“Which time?” Harry says, more to entertain himself than for any other reason, since either way it’s not like Draco gave him much of a choice.

“Oh, either,” Draco says. “Both. Who cares? Take your pick.”

He yawns then, huge and cracking, eyes falling shut and staying that way, one arm sprawling out to stretch halfway into the space Harry vacated when he sat up. Harry looks down at his wild hair, the faint circles under his eyes, and finds himself suffused, suddenly, with a rush of affection for this man, however odd or bossy or exhausting. He’s remembering more of last night now that his body’s not actively fighting him, and he’s not sure anyone’s ever—done anything quite like that for him, before. He can’t even entirely wrap his mind around it, the shape of the memory strange and incongruous, its smooth, polished edges not finding anywhere to fit with the rest of Harry’s largely jagged mental landscape.

He wouldn’t trade it, though. Not for anything. Breakfast’s probably the least he can do.

“Don’t get used to this,” Harry warns, standing up. “I don’t want you to go getting any insane ideas about bossing me around being a good or effective strategy for making me to do stuff.”

Draco makes a little scoffing noise into his pillow. “Oh, please. Like I don’t know how to get you to do things. I want sausages.”

“You’re getting bacon,” Harry says, automatic.

“See?” Draco says, and yawns again. “You’re so easy, Potter. It’s honestly quite sad.”

“I don’t know why I spend time with you,” Harry says, “I really don’t,” but he picks his coat up off the floor anyway, walks downstairs and opens the front door to head out for supplies.

At least, he starts to. Kreacher appears with a crack between him and the door before Harry can open it more than an inch, grabs him by the ends of his shirt, and says, “No! Harry Potter will not do this again!”

Harry sighs. “Look, Kreacher—”

“Harry Potter will not ‘Look Kreacher’ Kreacher!” say Kreacher. “Kreacher will ‘Look Harry Potter’ Harry Potter! If Harry Potter likes to cook, then Harry Potter likes to cook. Kreacher understands. What Kreacher does not understand,” he continues, his tone going dark and foreboding, “is why Harry Potter keeps insisting on leaving! Is why Harry Potter keeps bringing into the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black foods that smell awful and are locked in packages which Harry Potter must cut with a knife!”

“Er,” says Harry, staring. “You mean—groceries?”

“Kreacher does not care what they are called!” Kreacher nearly wails this, pulling hard on Harry’s shirt. “Why is Harry Potter not using the storeroom? Kreacher worked hard for many years on that storeroom! The House worked hard for many years on that storeroom! Harry Potter does not otherwise seem like a cruel person!”

Privately, Harry thinks that maybe so many years with Draco has made Kreacher a more dramatic elf. He’s not planning on mentioning it to anyone, though.

“I,” Harry says. He blinks at Kreacher, who looks like he might be about to cry, and caves. “Do you know, Kreacher, I’ve actually never seen the storeroom.”

Kreacher stares at him for a moment, and then realization lights up his face. “Oh! Of course! Because Harry Potter was a terrible Master and never bothered to learn the secrets of the house!” Kreacher sighs a little mistily and pats Harry on the leg. “Kreacher likes Harry Potter so much better now that Harry Potter is an adult.”

“Er,” says Harry, “thanks, Kreacher.”

Kreacher nods cheerfully and then starts walking, one corner of Harry’s shirt still in his hand. Helplessly, Harry lets himself be towed, thinking that Kreacher really has be rather a lot like Draco and finding that he’s vaguely amused by it.

They go down to the kitchen, and then through the kitchen to the mudroom, and then Kreacher reaches out and presses a finger against the grout between two tiles on the far wall. Harry stands, eyes widening in shock, and watches the whole wall fold back and away into an enormous set of wooden stairs, clearly old but well-maintained, solid.

Kreacher lets go of Harry’s shirt and hops up and down a bit in excitement before he adopts a very solemn manner and gestures Harry in. “The storeroom, Harry Potter.”

Harry takes the first few steps down the stairs hesitantly. Then, when he sees what’s actually below him, he takes them two at a time.

The cellar—because that’s what it is—is enormous, spanning what has to be the underside of the entire first floor. Massive, load-bearing columns are spaced out evenly across the expanse, and between them are seemingly endless shelves, each one of them covered with food. Harry can see lettuces and legumes, pomegranates and potatoes, a tank full of lobsters, a whole side of beef; in one corner a sheaf of wheat seems to be milling itself into flour and then reassembling into stalks again, an endless, impossible cycle.

A little blindly, just wanting to prove to himself that he’s not having some kind of— hallucination, or something—Harry reaches out and picks up an apple from the nearest bushel. It…resists, almost, for a moment, like his hand is reaching a little farther than just the distance Harry can see in order to pick it up, but then ites away easily, and, as Harry watches in amazement, is immediately replaced by an identical apple.

He takes a bite. It tastes like the sun rising.

“How?” Harry demands of Kreacher, staggered to think that this was here, under his feet, when he was seventeen and mentally shattered and eating crappy take-away for dinner every night because he couldn’t keep his thoughts in order long enough to so much as make a shopping list. “How can this—even exist? How did it do,” he gestures, with his bitten apple, to where its identical cousin is now perched, “that?”

Kreacher beams. “The storeroom has been here since the house was built, Harry Potter! The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black has made many shrewd trades and deals over the centuries, and some of them were for food, and some of them were for farming rights. The storeroom is remembering that.”

“So, what,” Harry says slowly, trying to parse Kreacher’s always cryptic house-talk, “every time the Blacks got food, like, ever, since the house’s been built, they just—put it in here? How does it not all go bad?”

“The storeroom has veryplicated Stasis charms, Harry Potter,” Kreacher says. Lowering his voice conspiratorially, he adds, “There are even stories of Mistresses and Masters sleeping in it, to keep themselves fresh!” He titters, a shrill, shrieking sort of giggle, before he calms himself and nods at the apple in Harry’s hand. “And some of it is replenishing constantly, because of trade agreements that have been honored for hundreds of years. That apple Harry Potter is eating is from the orchards at Malfoy Manor; Master Draco is making sure himself.”

Harry stares down at the apple. He takes another bite; it’s even better than the first one was. A little wryly, thinking of all the times he has left for a Tesco’s run and Draco, the bastard, has just let him go, he says, “So Master Draco is knowing about the storeroom, huh?”

“Master Draco is knowing about everything,” Kreacher says, with, Harry notes in amusement, a slightly grim affect. “Master Draco is knowing about things even Mistress Black was not knowing about. Things the House did not think a Master would ever know again.”

“He’s weird like that,” Harry agrees. “Probably went absolutely mental and read every book in the whole place for the notes in the margins and shit. Maybe he dug up the journals of all the old owners; I wouldn’t put it past him.”

Kreacher makes a little squeaking noise, the way he does when they’re treading too close to the dangerous territory of actually insulting Draco, and vanishes with his customary crack. A basket appears in the spot where he stood a second later, and Harry picks it up, tucks it over his arm. He eats his apple, and when he puts the core into the basket to throw away upstairs, it simply vanishes; the same happens with the hull of a perfectly ripe strawberry, the top of a sweet, crisp carrot. There’s a whole shelf covered just in loaves of bread; Harry cracks one open and inhales, bowled over, because for all he knows it’s from the 1850s, but it smells fresh from the oven. When he puts that in the basket, it seems to know he doesn’t want it vanished and holds it for him, even though he’s already taken a bite.

Harry doesn’te upstairs for a long time. When he does, he’s not really thinking about cooking Draco breakfast so much as he’s just thinking about just—cooking, all the random passing ideas he’d had as he walked around that he gathered up ingredients for because they were there, because he felt like it.

The kitchen—which has always just seemed to be a kitchen to Harry before, if a much better and brighter one than his own—seems to work with him, now that he’s not working with outside food. His chopping spells all cut themselves off at the exact right amount for whatever dish he’s working on, even when he ets to check them; the spices grind themselves by magic over the bowls and pots; the stove turns down the heat the moment he wants it to without his even reaching for the knobs. Harry finds himself humming as he works, some old Muggle song he remembers from the radio as a kid, and even though Grimmauld Place couldn’t possibly know it, it almost seems to be humming along, pans and spoons clanking and clattering to the beat.

Harry makes apple popovers and spinach quiche and bacon, because Draco said he wanted sausage. He makes crêpes and citrus bars, a potato hash studded through with wild mushrooms, soft-boiled egg and avocado toast. He makes fruit salad, which seemed such a simple thing once upon a time, but is suddenly an en

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