ed out to filter it and not caring much. “One thing tonight that I knew before you two did. At least it’s a big one!”

Silence again. This time it’s heavy, weighted, but Harry cannot find it in himself to give a single fuck. He’s too—he’s too—whatever the word for it is, when your two best friends in the world tell you they’ve known about your secret embarrassing horrible feelings for Draco Malfoy since neen ny fucking six. He’s too—that, to care right now.

Eventually, though, it does get to him, and he snaps, “Oh, would you please just stop— stop looking at me like that. It doesn’t mean anything, anyway.”

“Harry,” Hermione says, cautious, “I think it means kind of a lot.”

“No it doesn’t,” Harry snarls—like if he says it harshly enough, that will make it true. “It doesn’t, it’s just…a phase, or something. It can’t matter, he’s not—I mean, we couldn’t— and, anyway, it’s not like he feels the same way.”

“I wish I didn’t know this,” Ron says, with a little shudder, “but, mate: I’m pretty sure he does.”

“I mean,” Hermione hedges, when Harry whips his head up to stare at Ron, “obviously we don’t know if he—if his feelings for you are—as, ah. Deep. As yours for him.” She exchanges another nervous glance with Ron, and then finishes, “But I think Ron and I can say with some certainty that what we’ve been witnessing has definitely not been one-sided.”

“It’s really gross,” Ron says, patting Harry on the shoulder. “Not because of the gay thing or anything! Because of the Malfoy thing. And, also, because you guys are really gross about it.”

“I suppose the—intensity,” Hermione says slowly, “does make a lot more sense, now that we know you two haven’t—”

“Don’t say it!” Harry says, throwing up a warning hand. “Not again. No more. I just—I just want to go be someplace where you two. Aren’t. Right now.”

“That’s fair,” Ron says, a little distantly, after a moment. “We’re, uh. We’re sorry?”

“Very sorry,” Hermione repeats, too quickly. “Really, Harry, we thought—”

“Yep,” Harry says, “sure, I got it,” and walks back through the Floo, unable to do anything more.

Draco’s still reading in his armchair in the sitting room when Harry steps through the grate, and he raises one eyebrow when Harry lets out half of a strangled little shout on seeing him. “Good lord, Potter. What did that baby do to you?”

“I,” Harry says, blinking rapidly. Sixth year! screams a hysterical voice in the back of his mind, which he suspects may never stop screaming until the day that he dies. Possibly not even then. “Ahaha. Nothing. Everything was—perfectly fine. Normal! And fine!”

Draco cocks his head, and puts his book down. “Oh, because that’s such a normal and fine thing to say.”

“Just,” Harry says wildly, “I can’t—I don’t want to—talk about it. Ever. Forever. Forever and ever, is how long I want to—to—to never ever think or talk about it again! Okay? Is that okay with you?”

“Y…es?” Draco says. He looks like he’s considering taking Harry to St. Mungo’s. After a minute, carefully, he says, “Do you want to—talk about something else?”

“Please,” Harry says, collapsing into his own armchair. “Anything. Maths. Slugs. Whatever you like.”

“Hmm,” Draco says, frowning at him, but then he shrugs and launches in on some rant about a bicorn horn from 1812 that he’s been tracking for three and a half years, and Harry zones out to the rise and fall of his voice, the soothing rhythm of his pointed inflections, until he feels like he can breathe again.

So: in school, too, then. Not in the same way, sure, but—still.

So, yeah. Harry doesn’t get used to it. He does, however, grow ustomed to it; not just to Draco, to the way he feels about Draco, but to living with Draco, in Grimmauld Place, without an end date in sight.

It’s…nice. Surprisingly nice. Obviously some of that is just a result of—whatever, the stupid emotional shit, the fact that every time Harry so much as looks at Draco he’s suffused with warmth and affection and, yes, okay, a bit of visceral horror, also, but still. It’s not surprising, that he’s enjoying spending time with Draco; he does, generally. He got over that particular shock a while ago.

What is a surprise—what Harry can’t help but be a little bowled over by every time—is the way they fall into certain routines. Is the way Harry enjoys them.

He’s never been a particularly structured guy, is the thing. Harry’s always kind of subscribed to the theory of playing it fast and loose with—well, with almost everything, just making decisions when decisions came along. He eats when he’s hungry. He does laundry when he’s out of clean clothes. He tidies up when things get dirty, or he’s having trouble finding something. It always felt oppressive, weird, to force rules on himself in the absence of someone else to do it for him, like he was putting himself in a box for no reason other than to be inside of one. It never sat right.

Draco, as it turns out, is a very structured person. It’s really pretty startling, how little Harry minds.

He’s not, Harry works out after a period of observation, unwilling to break from his patterns, exactly. Like a number of things about Draco, they seem to be there mostly for show. But he has them, and he defaults to them most of the time, and though, again, he isn’t married to them, he’ll kick up a hilarious fuss if they’re disrupted for any reasons other than his own.

Like: Draco eats dinner at seven. Not 6:30; not 7:15; seven. It takes Harry about a week to figure out that Draco’s actively herding him towards the kitchen at ten after six every night in order to achieve this goal, and then another four days of dragging his feet and making roasts that take hours to cook before Draco snaps and yells at him about how seven is the most rational and civilized time to eat, which is really pretty satisfying.

“What did you even do before you press-ganged me into feeding you all the time?” Harry asks, when Draco has calmed down a little and Harry has subtly turned up the heat on the stew he’s making so it’ll be done on time—it’s fun winding him up and everything, but Harry’s not cruel.

“I starved,” Draco says, rolling his eyes and throwing dramatically himself across the counter, before he makes a face like he’s just bitten a lemon and straightens up. “Honestly, the ego on you, it’s sickening. I had Kreacher cook for me, of course. Or I ordered takeout, or went out to eat with one of my many scintillating friends, none of whom ever felt it necessary to say, ‘Hey, Draco, when you and I are aren’t out sharing a meal such as this one, d’you just sit alone in your kitchen and try to will dinner into existence with the power of your mind?’”

“I was just asking,” Harry says, putting his hands in the air in mock surrender and maybe flicking a little stew at the wall in the process. Draco narrows his eyes at the spot on the tile, and Harry laughs as he Scourgifies it—he’s such a little git, it’s honestly unbelievable. “Why don’t you just do that, then, if I’m so—er, what’d you say—inexcusably and criminally tardy all the time?”

“Yours tastes better,” Draco says, and then promptly looks horrified with himself. He grabs a handful of a nearby spinach salad and throws it at Harry, yelping, “You tricked me into saying that! I’ll never admit it on record! Expunge it from your memory! Burn the evidence!”

Harry laughs and flicks carrot peels at him and laughs some more, and then realizes Draco has gotten some salad in the stew, and dinner’s late after all. But after that he goes to the kitchen at ten after six all on his own, except on those nights Draco arbitrarily decides that they’re going out. It’s weird, but Harry thinks that he…likes it, actually. The reliable sameness. It’s not a rule or a box; it’s a fencepost. It’s something to construct the rest of his day around.

Or: the mornings. Draco gets up at the same time every day; showers at the same time every day; sits and reads the paper in his sitting room at the same time every day. He changes it up from there—and Harry has the sneaking suspicion that maybe he didn’t used to eat breakfast at all, because he doesn’t seem to care what time that happens—but those in first three things he never wavers. It’s earlier than Harry used to get up, but he finds himself waking to the sound of water rushing through the pipe in the wall behind his bed when Draco gets into the shower, and then—well, then he’s thinking about Draco in the shower, so he can’t go back to sleep. One way or another he always ends up having one himself, and then meeting Draco in the sitting room. Draco’s usually read most of the Prophet by the time Harry drops down into his chair, toweling his hair dry and yawning a little, and he tells Harry what’s worth knowing, since Harry still won’t read the paper and doesn’t ever intend to, either. It’s helpful; Harry never realized how many conversations he couldn’t follow at work were actually just people talking about what was in that morning’s Prophet. Now he even joins in sometimes, although generally he gets weird looks when he does.

Harry can’t get used to being in love with Draco, but it’s almost impossible not to be familiar with his various idiosyncrasies and patterns, the little ways in which he seems determined to shape the world around him. They make sense to Harry, even though they shouldn’t, even though the fact that they do goes against a lot of the things he’s always thought were true about himself; they resonate for him, work for him, in a way his own habits have never really done. He’s trying not to worry about that. He’s trying not to think that maybe he’s never known himself very well at all.

Anyway, that’s why, when hees downstairs to an empty sitting room on a Saturday morning in the end of the third week, he knows that something’s wrong.

“Draco?” Harry calls, pulling his towel away from his head and hurrying down the stairs. It’s probably nothing—Draco’s probably just answering the door or something—the museum’s not open until ten and it’s only 8:30, but someon

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