climb. Harry follows. Harry doesn’t know how anyone could do anything else.

He never does find out where that finish line was supposed to be; in the end they mostly end up chasing each other around, each pulling out whatever tricks they’ve got to try and show the other up. Draco does an impression of Viktor Krum that’s so absurd and over-the- top that Harry nearly falls off his broom laughing, and Harry tells Draco about the World Cup he went to with Ron and Seamus three years ago, shouts the story of how Seamus nearly threw over Dean for a leprechaun after a few meads too many through the rush of wind and speed. It’s good—it’s clean—it’s fun, and when they touch down at last they’re both breathing heavily, grinning with delight.

“This was a brilliant idea,” Draco says, and then, seeming to remember that it was Harry’s, quickly adds: “Not that you’re any less stupid in general, of course.”

“Oh, of course,” Harry agrees mildly, rolling his eyes. He wants—well, what he wants is to draw Draco in by the lapels of his jacket, kiss his wind-chapped lips long and desperate and a little bit filthy against the wall of the bridge, but. This is okay. This is nice. It’s not more than he can bear, just to be Draco’s friend; it’s more than he should even expect, and he’s grateful for it. He’s sure he can figure out a way for it to be enough.

They go home—they go back to Grimmauld Place, Harry reminds himself, for what feels like the hundredth time—and Draco says that he’s starving, and won’t it be tragic when the thievese back and he’s inconveniently already dead from malnutrition. Harry pulls a face at his histrionics but heats him up a plate of Fuck You Uncle Vernon Chicken, though he doesn’t mention what he calls it when he places it in front of Draco on the table.

After a long, slightly nerve-wracking moment of staring at it, Draco says, faintly, “Is this coq au vin?”

“Hell if I know,” Harry says, shrugging, as he drops into the chair across from him. “Could be, I suppose.”

Draco sniffs at it; pokes it with a fork; takes a bite. His eyes widen. “It is—wait. Potter. You know how to make coq au vin, but you don’t know that it’s called coq au vin?”

Harry shrugs again. “I guess? I don’t know. It’s just something my aunt used to have me make for dinner parties as a kid; I don’t think I ever knew what it was called. The recipe kind of stuck with me, I suppose.”

Draco hums around a mouthful, an interested little noise. When he swallows, he says, “Did you cook a lot as a child?”

Harry tenses up, but there’s no careful pity in Draco’s voice, just curiosity. “Yeah,” Harry says, and surprises himself by adding, as lightly as he can, “It was kind of a ‘Don’t cook, don’t eat,’ sort of situation.”

“How charming,” Draco mutters, tone sharp with anger, but then changes tack so quickly Harry doesn’t have time to feel—to feel however that was going to make him feel. “I just meant—did it start back then, was my question. Your whole bizarre secret food obsession, I mean.”

“It’s not bizarre,” Harry says, a little defensive. “And it’s not a secret, and—no. Not really.” He’s never really thought about it before, and his next wordse out slow as he casts back in his memory. “When I cooked as a kid I just did it because I was hungry, mostly, or because I was told to, and I knew they’d take it out of me if I didn’t. I never did it for fun, or to make me happy or anything.”

“Does it now?” Draco’s tone is casual, but gaze is probing, intense. “Make you happy, I mean.”

Harry has to consider the question for a long time. Cooking’s mostly just something he does; he’s never really prodded himself for an emotional reaction to it, or wondered all that much as to why. Everyone has to eat, and he’s good at it, and there aren’t any huge, horrific stakes on a sandwich or a pot of stew. No one ever prophesied that neither he nor the chicken stock could live while the other survived, and he likes that, the steady, reliable, never-waving nature of it all. It helps him think. It calms him.

“Yeah,” he says eventually, and steals a mushroom from Draco’s plate. “I think so.”

“You think so,” Draco says, rolling his eyes. “Some days I genuinely wonder how you survived to adulthood—where you won’t remain, Potter, by the way, if you don’t leave my mushrooms alone.”

Harry shrugs, and maybe grins a little, and sort of very slightly wishes Draco would kill him, because if he’s fighting for his mushrooms it means he likes what he’s eating and that makes Harry’s chest hurt, which is pathetic, and also horrible. He backs off, though, and lets Draco finish his dinner, and is just about ready to get up from the table and consider the possibility of going back to bed when Draco clears his throat.

“I asked for coq au vin every year on my birthday from ages six to sixteen,” Draco says, eyes on his empty plate, so quietly that Harry almost doesn’t hear him. “I haven’t had it since the war. I thought—oh, I don’t know what I thought.” He looks up at Harry just for a second, this flash of eye contact there and gone again, and Harry’s heart breaks a little when he smiles down at his plate. “It’s really good. I’d otten.”

“I,” Harry says, hopelessly overfull of a thousand things, but not one of them something to say. That clearly meant something to Draco; it meant something to Harry, too, not that he could begin to explain even to himself what or why. Still, despite that (or perhaps because of it), the only thing he can manage to work out of his mouth is: “I, er. I call it ‘Fuck You Uncle Vernon Chicken,’ actually. Because—well. Because my Uncle Vernon never liked it very much.”

Draco lifts his head to stare for a second, but then he laughs, shaking his head. “You really are a very strange man, aren’t you, Harry?”

“Like you’re one to talk,” Harry says, good-naturedly enough.

“Oh, I know that I’m strange,” Draco agrees. “I’ve probably known that as long I’ve known anything. But from you…” he pauses, shrugs. Smiles down at his plate again. “From you it’s a constant surprise.”

Harry goes to bed that night thinking of the look on his face, the warmth in his voice, all these little ways it turns out they intersect perfectly, without intersecting at all. Maybe it’s not such a workable problem, being in love with Draco. Maybe Harry’s been doomed all along.

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