Draco added the fluxweed to his cauldron, and then set his newest experimental healing draught to simmer, before checking the time and making note of it in careful handwriting on the scrap piece of parchment he had out for notes.

Well, he had about half an hour to waste, and nothing in particular to do with it. Unless he wanted to get a head start on his marking, which he really didn't, and besides, he had the whole winter holidays to do it. And the holidays had already started for him, since his last class right now was a free period, so if nothing else, that was certainly something he had over Harry, because he was near certain Harry wasn't in the same situation at all.

Oh. That was definitely what he should go do: bother Harry and be insufferably smug about it.

He set off out of the dungeons in high spirits, humming Christmas carols as he made his way up to the first floor.

As he approached Harry's classroom, however, his vague rendition of God Rest Ye Merry Hippogriffs trailed off as he started to hear intermittent shouts, which only got louder the closer he got. The scene inside, when he peeked through the door, left standing slightly ajar, was absolute bedlam, which may have been a bit predictable from the shouting, but was still a little shocking.

He looked for Harry, and found him standing calmly, the eye of the storm, watching the children and occasionally flicking his wand at one of them and saying a few words of instruction or encouragement.

Well. Apparently he was in control, but still, Draco didn't envy him his place at the moment.

As he looked closer, he saw that it was the third year Slytherins and Ravenclaws, and that they were ostensibly practising duelling, with many students on the floor with wobbling legs or doubled over with uncontrollable laughter. A good number of them were repeatedly failing at jinxing their opponent first, and yet everybody still seemed to be having fun.

Hmph. Draco leaned back against the wall. Maybe Harry's classes were fun, but Draco's were still far superior. Even if the students didn't actually appear to be having fun.

Ugh. They were here to learn anyway.

Draco peeked back through the door after a moment, and couldn't help but laugh quietly to himself; it was just all so ridiculous. The fact that Harry was so calm and encouraging in the middle of it made the situation even more hilarious.

"Alright, that's enough for today!" Harry called, quickly restoring the few students who were still under jinxes to their normal state. "We'll work on response times and improving counter-jinxes after the holidays. You're all dismissed."

The students started to go gather their things to leave.

"And no, you may not practise jinxing other students under the guise of studying for my class," Harry added quickly.

Draco smiled at how apprehensive he sounded, and entered the classroom as the students began to leave.

"Hey Professor Malfoy! What are you doing up here?" one of the students asked with a smile.

"Just come to talk to Professor Potter. I do occasionally come upstairs, you know — I don't have to stay in the dungeons."

Harry rolled his eyes at Draco's response and went into his office, and Draco followed and casually sat himself on Harry's desk, leaning back on his hands on top of all of Harry's papers and crossing his legs.

Harry sighed and leaned back in his chair. "Why is it that you're more comfortable on my furniture than I am? I don't even like you. And please remove yourself from my papers."

Harry forcibly pushed one of his hands over off of a stack of essays.

Draco tutted disapprovingly. "Is that any way to treat a guest, Harry?"

He laughed as Harry continued trying to push his hand off of the desk, and continued lecturing dramatically.

"Whatever happened to manners? You know, 'Please make yourself at home', and 'What's mine is yours—'" he cut off, looking over as he saw a student in the doorway out of the corner of his eye.

"Er. I was just going to ask Professor Potter for recommendations on books for studying up on Dark creatures...but I can leave if it's not a good time." Her eyes darted over them, taking in the situation.

Harry looked confused. "Of course it's fine. Why wouldn't it be?"

He beckoned her in, and Draco straightened up uncomfortably on the desk under the girl's scrutiny.

"Any certain kind, or just Dark creatures in general? I think I have two that would be useful for an overview."

"Just general, I need to refresh myself on as many as possible for my O.W.L.s."

"Starting early, then. Alright, you can borrow these two, but return them after the holidays, please. The top one has general overviews on the classification and identification of most Dark creatures, and the other has the best ways to combat them. Both are set up alphabetically by creature."

Her eyes kept darting over to Draco and back as Harry spoke.

"Thank you. Er, see you after break...Professors."

She left and Harry turned to Draco. "Did you think she was acting oddly?"

Draco sighed. Harry just didn't catch on to some things at all, did he? Draco had realised as soon as she had walked in that it must have looked like they were...flirting. Or something.

She'd forget though, over the break, since clearly nothing was happening between them, so it was really a non-issue. However...maybe it wouldn't be prudent to fill Harry in. He was known for having quite the temper.

"I'm sure she was just intimidated by the Saviour. And, of course, the best-looking teacher to ever grace Hogwarts also unexpectedly being in the room."

Harry snorted. "Wow, you really never pass up a chance to inflate your own ego, do you?"

"I can't help it if I'm devastatingly handsome. And now, I must be off, my potion is about to mature. I expect I'll see you at some point tomorrow?"

Harry seemed surprised. "You won't be leaving?"

"No, I hadn't said?"

"No. I guess I just assumed you would be going home."

"To whom? Father is still in Azkaban and if I go to the manor, Mother will only beg me to visit with her — and as much as I might if it were anywhere else, I will not go back to that place."

"Oh."

Harry seemed a bit startled by his honesty, but Draco wasn't sure what else he was to have said if not the truth. It wasn't as if Harry didn't know very well where he'd been and the state of his broken family. Probably better than most — not that it was exactly private information to begin with, unfortunately.

"You...never got married or anything?" Harry asked, a bit hesitantly.

"What? To whom?" Draco repeated. "Once I rejected my parents' arranged marriage, I didn't really have any options. I'm a Death Eater, Harry."

"Former Death Eater," Harry corrected. "And you were pardoned. Hardly the same as a Carrow or a Lestrange."

Draco clenched his jaw. That was exactly like Harry to spout off with some inane Gryffindor bullshite like that, as if Draco was not living in a reality that told him exactly the opposite every fucking day. He mostly got along with Harry nowadays, but Merlin's tits he really knew how to piss him off still sometimes.

"You see this permanent mark?" Draco said, yanking his left sleeve up to bare the scarred ghost of the Dark Mark still — and, indeed, forever — on his forearm. "Nobody is going to look past that, so take your Gryffindor, feel-good, 'there's always someone' positivity elsewhere," he spat.

Harry crossed his arms. "I'm just saying," he muttered.

Oh. Just saying. Well, of course, if he was just saying, Draco thought bitterly. Fuck off. Harry wasn't the one who had to live with that stain on his life forever, and he couldn't possibly understand what it was like when he was in exactly the opposite situation.

Still, it wasn't going to do any good to keep being antagonistic. Clearly Harry didn't think he'd said anything wrong, and Draco had learnt the hard way to start biting his tongue and keeping his sharp words to himself. Instead, he just took a deep breath.

"Well, I don't want my healing draught to boil over. I'll see you later," he excused himself as gracefully as he could (though the words were still a bit tense), and then swept out of the room.

~*~

The next morning at breakfast, Harry and Draco sat next to each other silently, each reading that morning's edition of the Daily Prophet.

Harry was still a bit bothered by his and Draco's conversation yesterday, and he hadn't even shown up to dinner the night before, instead sneaking down to the kitchens to quickly grab something and bringing it back up to his quarters to stew on Draco's words by himself.

It was just... The whole thing was nonsensical.

The war was over. It had been over for seven years now, and he knew more than anyone that the ghosts would always haunt them, but people needed to learn to put certain things behind them. The people who were dead weren't coming back, the people who deserved to be punished had been, and everyone else should just be allowed to live their lives. Weren't there enough things for people to worry about without adding more resentment to their plates?

Harry had been personally subject to Draco's more terrible side over the years, and if he could move on, he didn't understand why people who had nothing to do with it couldn't do the same.

Harry stared at his paper under the guise of reading, still stewing, and Draco read his own, both of them blissfully unaware of the rumour mill bubbling more boisterously than usual below.

Apparently, the fifth year Hufflepuff who had paid a visit to Harry's office yesterday was quite the gossip, and she had found the experience very intriguing indeed.

Conversations amongst all of the tables were filled with snatches of gossip.

"Did you hear? Clara Hopkins said they were holding hands! And I asked some third years and they said Malfoy did come in at the end of the lesson! Do you think it's true?"

"I thought there was something going on before, there's no way there's not, have you seen—"

"Do you think she was lying? They're both hot, wouldn't it be a shame..."

"Wasn't Professor Potter married to Ginny Weasley for a long time? Maybe that's why it ended! If he's not into witches..."

"That's got to be it. No way he'd divorce her for no reason!"

"Do you know how many people would die for a chance to date one of the Harpies? There's gotta be some good reason he fumbled that."

The conversations got progressively more ridiculous, but luckily the students would have a long break to forget. Or not to.

~*~

Several students dropped by Harry's office before the train left to wish him happy holidays, and he even got a few chocolate bars (Honeydukes, at that!). He was elated. His students actually liked him, and he'd gotten free chocolate — he definitely couldn't wait to shove this in Draco's face.

When those leaving for the holidays finally departed from the grounds, Harry practically skipped down to the dungeons. And he didn't even get lost at all, thank you, even though it was the second week of an even month and there were twice as many passageways in the dungeons as usual, mainly leading any unsuspecting wanderers in circles. He hadn't had to use the Map in a whole month and he was ridiculously proud of that fact.

He paused in the doorway of the Potions room when he arrived. Draco was concentrating hard on a cauldron, which he was stirring very precisely.

Three months ago, Harry would have wanted to startle him and mess up his brewing (admittedly, a small part of him still did), but now he realised that not only was it not worth it, but it also wouldn't make him feel better; it wasn't like he actually gained anything from it.

Draco straightened and pointed his wand at the flames, which lowered, before starting to tidy up the table a bit. He picked up a few of the jars and turned, and then jumped slightly when he saw Harry.

"Merlin, Harry! You could've warned me you were there, instead of sneaking up and just standing there like a cat. Reminds me of bloody McGonagall."

"Minerva, Draco," Harry said sternly, in his best impression of the headmistress.

Draco smiled slightly against his will.

"Never pursue a career in acting. You are truly terrible at impressions."

"I'm wounded, Draco, that was my best one!"

Draco scoffed and made his way over to the ingredient storecupboard, starting to put the jars away. "Why are you down here? Bored of marking already?"

"Please, I haven't even started. I'm not saying it's why I came down, but I may have had several students come by and wish me happy holidays."

"Pfft, so did I," Draco dismissed without looking back. "Yours were probably just obligatory pity gestures."

"I got chocolate, though," Harry bragged. "Honeydukes. Do you think that's just pity?"

Draco headed back for more jars, but managed to spare Harry a disdainful look on the way. "With how painfully skinny you still are? Yes, absolutely."

"Fuck off," Harry said sourly.

It was true he'd never lost his knobbly knees and elbows, but he thought he'd grown into himself fairly well, and the muscle from Auror training had certainly helped (though unfortunately it had been quick to disappear again when he had been switched to desk duty and exercise had fallen to the wayside). But even then, at his most physically fit, the knobbliness of certain bits refused to go away, and he suspected they would persist no matter how much he gained in other places.

"You just wish you'd gotten chocolate," he told Draco.

"I did get chocolate."

"So why wasn't it pity when it came to you?"

"Because I'm clearly the far superior teacher, Potter," Draco sniffed as he put the jars back on their respective shelves.

"Harry," he corrected, grumbling.

"Harry," Draco amended, reaching up to turn the last jar he'd put back so the label faced out, and then turning back toward Harry. "Will you help me bring this cauldron up to Poppy? She and I need to test this."

Harry peered curiously at it. It looked vaguely like honey, if he was honest, but something he couldn't quite place just seemed very wrong about it. Maybe it was the disconcerting wateriness and the warm steam rising from it. He'd definitely seen more disgusting looking potions, though, so it could have been worse — this one didn't look half bad, and it smelled pleasantly medicinal, but with something a little sharp to it as well. Perhaps ginger?

"What is it?"

"It's an improved healing draught I've been working on, and I think I've finally made sure the nausea side effect is gone."

"Really? That's kind of impressive, actually. How's it different than the regular one?"

"It can heal more serious injuries and some hexes, and it heals small things faster."

"Nice." Honestly, that sounded brilliant, and Harry was perhaps more than a little bit impressed. "Yeah, I'll help you bring it up."

It was one thing to be good at following potions instructions, but it was another to entirely create your own — especially one so essentially helpful. Truth be told, he was a bit jealous of Draco's skill.

Draco smiled at him and Harry suddenly felt for some peculiar reason like he probably had a good idea of what that warm honey potion felt like going down and curling up, molten and toasty in his stomach.