dlessly changeable landscape now that Harry has every kind of fruit and veg there is, held forever at peak ripeness, at his fingertips.

“Oh, I wanna dance with somebody,” Harry is singing to himself, tunelessly, over a pot of raspberry sauce for the lemon cake, when he hears Malfoy clear his throat.

Abruptly, the fog lifts, and Harry looks around to realize that he has made…really quite a lot of food. Much, much more food than he and Draco could possibly consume. He says, “Er.”

“Are you throwing a party?” Draco looks much too amused for anyone’s good, least of all Harry’s. “Or raising an army, perhaps?”

Harry flushes. “I, er. I think I got a bit…carried away?”

“Oh, do you think so?” says Draco, raising both his eyebrows in entertained incredulity. “I said make me breakfast, Potter, not make me breakfast for twelve.”

“You never told me about the storeroom!” Harry exclaims. His cheeks are burning, but the hell if he’s going to let Draco win without a fight, the storeroom-hiding little git. “And then Kreacher showed me and—I mean—” He gives Draco a helpless look, spreading his hands, and drips some raspberry sauce on the floor.

Draco’s face does something—strange, for a second. He’s staring at Harry with such an odd intensity that Harry almost thinks maybe he’s going to do—something, walk across the kitchen and just…well. Harry doesn’t know what. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because Draco swallows, averts his eyes.

“Yes,” he says quietly. “I see how a person could get carried away.”

Harry makes a face at him, because he’s weird and he’s mad and half the time Harry thinks he talks in riddles for the sole purpose of driving Harry crazy. Draco doesn’t seem to notice, gaze fixed out the window, and Harry shrugs, finishes off the last few things on the stove, and then stares down at the whole mess of it, wondering at the best method for serving it all up.

“Er,” says Harry, a little despairingly, “do you want to just—go at it?”

Draco turns to look at him so quickly that Harry startles a little. He stares at Harry, blinking fast, for a moment, and then looks at the food and releases this little sound, half sigh, half…Harry doesn’t know what.

“Oh,” Draco says, sounding a little breathless for some reason, “well, that’s. A horrific and philistine idea, actually, but: sure. Why not.” He picks a fork out of the drawer, walks over to the dish of potato hash, holds the fork poised over it for a moment, and then gives Harry an apprehensive look. “You know what, I take it back. This just feels wrong.”

Harry rolls his eyes, but Draco won’t be moved; in the end and at his direction Harry ends up cutting or spooning a heaping portion of everything onto a giant platter that he leaves in the middle of the kitchen island.

“Which was stupid,” he says to Draco, as they eat, “because all we did is dirty an extra dish, and we’re still standing up and being philistines, or whatever.”

“Yes, well,” Draco says, “I liked that part of the idea. It seemed avant garde and unusual! Someday, many years from now, my grandchildren will say to me, ‘Oh, Grandpapa, what’s the strangest experience you've ever had,’ and I’ll say, ‘Well, children, once I stood in my kitchen with Harry Potter, ate four times my bodyweight in breakfast foods, and ended up in St. Mungo’s, which just goes to show the importance of proper decorum at mealtime.’ And they will look up at me with rapt attention and say ‘Oh, Grandpapa, what an exotic and fascinating story, you do bring life to even the most uninteresting topics,’ and I will thank them and carry on with my business.’”

“You’ve never actually met a kid in your life, have you?” Harry asks, thinking of Teddy, who would sooner die than spit any one of those sentences out of his mouth.

Draco scowls at him. “I seem to recall that I was entertaining several of them when we met a month ago.” He stops, looking briefly horrified, before, sullenly, he says, “Not met, obviously. I just meant—”

“I know what you meant,” Harry says, because he does. It feels that way a little for him, too, like Draco is a totally different person than the child he knew in school, even though in some ways he’s so like that proud, unyielding boy that it’s as though no time has passed at all. “You want kids, then?”

“Oh my god, Potter,” Draco says, appalled. “It’s not even eleven in the morning, you’re a horrifically ill-mannered person and I refuse to answer that question. Who just—asks someone! That question!”

Harry shrugs, and eats some of his lemon cake with the raspberry sauce. It’s not bad. “I don’t know. I didn’t know it was a thing, or whatever. I was just saying—because you said, you know, that whole rant about—” he waves his fork in the air expansively, “—your weird manners-obsessed future grandchildren.”

“Oh, honestly,” Draco says—exasperated, but maybe a little amused, too. “I was doing a bit. I didn’t actually intend us to have some sort of,” he pauses, shudders hard enough that Harry’s almost certain it’s for dramatic effect, “heart-to-heart about it, or anything.”

“Oh,” Harry says, and remembers something else from last night. “A ‘We’ll do this where no one can hear you scream’ sort of thing?”

Draco gives him a crooked little smile, inclines his head very slightly, and says nothing, and Harry has to pretend to be intensely focused on the crumb of his lemon cake so that Draco won’t see the stupid look on his face. It’s—Harry doesn’t quite know what’s happening, suddenly, in this familiar room in this familiar house with this all-too-familiar person. Something feels…wrong with him this morning, maybe, or maybe it’s something wrong with Draco, or with them both. Or, maybe, ‘wrong’ is the wrong word for it entirely. Maybe there’s a better way to describe this sensation that skittering along the edges of Harry’s awareness, just very slightly unsettling him. It’s as though everything’s the same, but totally different. Or just…more intense, or something.

Then, in a total departure from everything Harry has ever understood to be true about him, Draco says, thoughtfully, “You know, Potter, you’re really quite good at this cooking lark.”

Harry thinks, for a horrible moment, that it’s some kind of—like a pity thing, maybe, or something. Like Harry got all weird and fucked up with Draco last night, told him all that stuff he never tells anybody, and now Draco doesn’t feel like he can be mean anymore. God, Harry thinks he might lose his mind if that’s happened, and how absurd, how nonsensical, that he so hates to think about losing—what, about 45 insults an hour and several unflattering nicknames? Who wants that from someone? Why?

Luckily, when he looks up Draco is staring at his fork as though it has horribly betrayed him, so Harry doesn’t have to worry about it.

“That really took a lot out of you, saying that,” Harry says, relaxing. “Didn’t it? I can tell.”

“I felt a whole year of my life slip through my fingers,” Draco agrees, and Harry throws a potato at him, and thinks that he’s just being crazy, and everything is perfectly normal.

That night, he goes to dinner at the Burrow. Molly and Arthur are thrilled about the baby and furious that everyone else found out before they did—“It was the Gryffindor pub night, Mum!” Ron protests in desperation, “we couldn’t move it, it’s not my fault you wouldn’t skip Great Aunt Agatha’s Deathday Party!”—and when Harry looks for the knot of bitterness and fear in his chest, he finds it isn’t there. Or, well. A bit of it still is; maybe Draco’s thing about emotionalpost was more appropriate.

Just—just. Maybe it won’t be so terrible. He holds Rose on his lap, and Ron and Hermione talk to each other, of course, but they talk to him, too, and so does everyone else. It’s not like the Gryffindor piss-up, the rest of Harry’s life: he doesn’t feel abandoned or alone most of the time. Lonely, sure, but not in the same way; not like he’s stuck at a table with no one to talk to.

He smiles a little, that strange feeling from this morning stealing over him again, foxing the edges of his awareness. He had someone to talk to last night, this morning; so what, if Ron and Hermione’s lives are changing, filling up? Harry’s life is changing too. Harry’s life is fuller, just now, than he thinks it’s maybe ever been before.

He thanks Molly for a lovely meal. He goes home. He falls asleep grinning, laughing to himself, about Draco saying “Get thee hence, thief!” which his brain has held back from him all day, saved as a happy little gift on which to close his eyes.

He wakes up to the crack of a house-elf appearing in his bedroom door.

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