Over the next three weeks, Harry gets used to it.

What a lie. He’s not even able to convince himself that it’s true in his bleakest moments, the ones where he needs it most; he doesn’t get used to it. How could a person get used to it? Harry wakes up every morning and stares up at his ceiling and marvels that people walk around every day, being in love, and there aren’t more folks just—dropping dead on the street of it, the way he feels like he’s going to about a third of the time. It’s unimaginable. It’s insane, carrying around this many feelings in your chest for someone else; Harry barely has room for his own, most of the time. He thinks maybe he’s just not properly equipped, and then he decides that that doesn’t matter, because it’s happening anyway. He’s stuck with it, and it’s not the most underprepared he’s ever been for a situation, probably. He fought Voldemort when he was eleven; that’s probably true.

It doesn’t feel true. It feels like Harry’s standing on a long, thin pane of glass, watching the tiniest crack creak its way slowly towards him, ready to shatter at any moment. In a good way, sort of, and also very decidedly not. Harry’s trying not to think about it, but for the first time in a storied career of shutting things away in the back of his mind until he feels prepared to deal with them, he’s not having very much sess. He keeps catching himself thinking of Draco without even realizing it, which, aside from being inconvenient, is also really bloody embarrassing. He’s not paying attention in meetings. Seamus nudged him at a crime scene one afternoon to say something seemed different, and was he finally getting laid? It’s horrifying.

Living with Draco, incidentally, is not helping with Harry’s little problem. He sort of thought maybe it might at the beginning of the third day, after he left a mess in the kitchen the night before, but in the end he and Draco had about half of a screaming row before Harry, abruptly, said, “You know what, fuck this, I’ll just clean it up,” and Draco blinked and then said, “Oh, what, that’s it? Suddenly you’re Mr. Agreeable?” After that the whole thing descended into…well, still a screaming row, but sort of a…playful…one. Harry feels a little queasy even thinking about it—well, ‘queasy’ might not be the right word. The correct ones do actually make him feel like he’s going to hurl, though, so he’s sticking with the vocabulary he’s got.

Every day it’s something else. Every day Harry tells himself that he’s hit capacity and found the ceiling and from here on in his feelings will shrink, not grow, and every day he’s wrong. Draco does or says the stupidest little things—just, these inconsequential nothings, the way he stirs his coffee, it doesn’t make any sense—and Harry feels the already unbearable pressure of the whole thing ratchet up another level. More than once he has to fight the urge to go round to Ron and Hermione’s, sit them down on their sofa and demand to know how they’ve done it all these years, been in love with one another and not simply expired from it, otten how to draw air after so long without.

There’s a dangerous voice in the back of Harry’s mind when he thinks this way. It says: Maybe, you idiot, the whole mutual nature of the arrangement has something to do with it, what do you think? Harry tries to ignore it. Harry tries not to think of who it sounds like.

Some of it isn’t inconsequential things, anyway. Some of it’s a lot worse.

Harry goes into Sirius’s room one night, about a week and a half in. He’s just—he’s bored. Draco’s out at dinner with Pansy, who’s decided to stick around town for a while, and with Blaise, who seems never to leave town and whom Harry half suspects of actually physically being everywhere, just out of sight, all the time. Ron and Hermione are having a date night, and he doesn’t feel like Firecalling anyone else, or even particularly like going out. He finds he sort of can’t remember what he used to do with his spare time, although he recalls having a lot of it. Did he just, what—sit and stare off into space? Think about nothing?

He tries it. He thinks about Draco. It’s awful; it has to stop. He gets up.

He doesn’t even really mean to open Sirius’s door. He’s just sort of poking around, looking at stuff—there are a lot of rooms in Grimmauld Place, because it’s bigger on the inside than it looks from without, and though Harry had left a lot of them sitting empty when this was his house, Draco’s done something with all of them. Even the ones that don’t have a specific purpose have fascinating things inside them, all these magical artefacts that Draco’s collected but hasn’t yet put out in the museum, or only puts out in the museum on specific days based on some insane system he’s always telling Harry about that Harry never pays attention to. It’s weird stuff he’s collected, too, everything from cursed toucan sculptures to a frankly unsettling amount of information about ancient Wizarding bathroom practices. It’s wild.

And Harry—Harry just wants to see what’s behind Sirius’s door, is all. He knows what used to be there. He wants to see what Draco’s done with it.

He’s not expecting it to look exactly the way it was the last time he saw it, minus the layer of dust and grime. It’s clean but otherwise unchanged, Sirius’s posters on the wall and his bedspread hanging a little loose, and Harry leans back against the doorframe without really realizing he’s doing it, slides down to sit on the floor. He didn’t think—he doesn’t know—it doesn’t make any sense that Draco would have kept this, Draco who never even knew Sirius, Draco who’d have no way to know this was his room, once.

Harry’s eyes burn, looking at it. He thinks that maybe his father sat right there, on that bed, with Sirius, and played—fucking Exploding Snap, or something, when they were boys. He thunks his head against the doorframe a few times; not hard, just enough to…ground him, maybe. Enough to keep him still. He doesn’t want to be here, but he can’t bring himself to go, and so he just sits, quiet, for a long time.

Eventually Dracoes home. Harry hears his steps on the stairs and sighs; he should move, but he doesn’t. He just sits, and waits, and after a few minutes, Draco finds him.

Draco sighs too, a messy exhale that sounds loud in the quiet room. “Ah. Brooding, I see. Here I thought perhaps you were doing something productive with your time.”

Harry doesn’t have the heart to snipe with Draco right now, so he just says, “No.” And then, after a beat, “This was Sirius’s room. When he was a kid.”

“I know that, you great pillock,” Draco says, and before Harry can ask him how, he walks over to a bookshelf and pulls out a thin volume, tosses it at Harry. “This kind of cleared it up for me.”

Harry stares down at it, a thick, angry knot at the back of his throat. It’s a black notebook, leather-bound, but someone has painstakingly carved the words “PROPERTY OF SIRIUS BLACK. DO NOT OPEN. THIS MEANS YOU MUM.” into the cover. He flips it open, not sure what he’s expecting to find, and lets out a little sigh of—relief? Disappointment?—when he realizes all the pages are blank.

“Flip to the end,” Draco says, from much closer than Harry expects. He looks up and Draco’s sitting on the floor, too, legs crossed, leaning back against the other side of the doorframe. His eyes are bright, searching in the semi-darkness, the only light in the room pouring in from the hallway behind him.

Harry flips to the end. There, on the last page, in Sirius’s looping, messy handwriting, are the words Ha! Fooled ya! -S.B. Harry chokes on his breath a little, but Draco’s good enough not to call him on it.

“I tried to change this room once, you know,” Draco says, conversational. “When I first moved in. He had veryprehensive taste, I’ll grant you, but I thought the space might be better served with some new decor.” He shakes his head, expression going wry. “When I came back in the next morning, everything was exactly the same as before I’d started. It was as if I’d never done any work at all. After that, I decided it was better to leave well enough alone; the house obviously wanted to keep this room the way it was.”

“Why?” Harry says. His voice cracks on it, but—he doesn’t understand, not at all. Sirius was horrible to this house, came back and gave it hope only to leave it again to sit cold and unloved and alone. This house should be angry at Sirius, the way Harry is, sometimes, even though it’s silly and not fair, and he knows Sirius did the best he could with the rough hand he’d been dealt. Even though it was a long time ago. This house has more reason to be angry at Sirius than Harry does and yet here they sit, in this piece of him that it has preserved—that will maybe, Harry thinks, be like Ron’s window at the Burrow, and stay this way for the next hundred years, until this is just a room that nobody knows looks like Sirius, even though it still does.

“Perhaps it wanted to remember,” Draco says, considering, after a moment. “Or perhaps—and stay with me on this theory, Harry—the boggart I found in here when I first cleaned it was just the tip of a hideous boggart iceberg, and in fact what we are seeing now is something entirely new to the ways of magic. The horrific illusion of many boggarts fused together! A boggart king, if you will.”

Harry can’t help it; his eyes slide, almost against his will, away from the rest of the room to focus wholly on Draco. Exasperated—terribly, hopelessly fond—he says, “I knew I shouldn’t have told you about rat kings.”

“You are so wrong,” Draco says. “You should be telling everyone about rat kings, you’re an Auror, it is your public duty. People are out there right now! On the streets! Unaware of the horror lurking beneath their very feet!”

“It’s just a Muggle myth, Draco,” Harry says, shaking his head. “They’re not real.”

“We’re a Muggle myth!” Draco declares, throwing his hands in the air, which, actually, isn’t a terrible point. “Since when, I ask you, is

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