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Ron eyed the two children rolling out of his floo, into his kitchen, and then out into the living room. Ron watched them with a sense of wariness and confusion, and beneath that, the overwhelming and pervading happiness and love and well being and all those other things that came with fatherhood. But mostly he felt lost.

“What do I do with them,” Ron whispered frantically to Hermione.

Oblivious to their father's pain, Rose and Hugo were scampering up the stairs. Their bags, charmed to levitate behind them until told otherwise, thunked against every step and clattered against every railing.

Hermione shook floo powder and ash from her skirt. “Feed them. Make sure you know where they are. Remember that you love them when they won't eat their vegetables,” she said briskly. “You don't have any problem looking after them any other day.”

“I don't normally have them for an entire day, though,” Ron protested. During the divorce, it had been agreed that they would trade off dinners, nights and breakfasts when the kids were home from Hogwarts, but that Arthur and Molly would generally look after them during the day: Hermione was run off her feet by the Department of Mysteries; Weasley's Wizard Wheezes kept Ron much the same. The only exceptions were the rare days Hermione had off work, or the even rarer days Ron did. And on those days, either Rose or Hugo or both were normally off visiting a friend or at some party. Ron was used to handling his children on an individual basis.

Enough of Ron's despair must have shone through for Hermione to relent enough to say, “Hogwarts' owl arrived early. Rose will want to pick up her school books. Hugo was saying that he broke his last self-inking quill.”

“Right. Hogwarts.” Ron took a moment to spare a thought for George: the day Hogwarts' letters were sent out were always frantic at Wheezes.

Hermione was looking at him fondly. “Try to resist the urge to rope them into helping out at the shop. You've had this day off planned for weeks now.”

“I'll try,” Ron said grudgingly. It was unfair how well she still knew him. “Kids! Come down and say goodbye to your mum before she goes to work!”

The kids came clattering down the stairs. Goodbyes were exchanged. Hermione hugged Rose and Hugo, and kissed Ron on the cheek in farewell before disappearing into the floo.

Ron was left surveying his two children. Rose, fresh faced, in a Muggle skirt that was just on the side of too short for his liking. Hugo, slightly less fresh faced, the beginnings of adolescent acne ravaging the underside of his jaw, and wearing casual robes like his dad.

“Right,” Ron said more decisively than he felt. Destination, determination, deliberation. Worked great for apparition. Might even get him all the way through the Hogwarts shopping. “Who's for Diagon Alley?”

Diagon Alley was chaos. Every shop was horrendously overcrowded with flustered parents struggling to control their overexcited children. Hermione always did the Hogwarts shopping. She actually enjoyed the whole harried process of squeezing through Flourish & Botts, and searching for instruments he never remembered even glancing upon in school. Ron tried ducking into Wheezes, but he and the kids barely had the time to wave at a harassed looking George before the press of the crowd forced them back out again.

“Okay,” Ron said. He stood under a shop front awning where there was a lull in the traffic. Hugo waited patiently by his side, eyeing the kneazles in the shop front opposite. Rose leant against the wall on his other side, already skimming her new Transfiguration book. All the other newly purchased books and sundry supplies had been dumped into one of Hermione's expandable bags. Ron flicked his eyes between the two book lists he held in his hand. He started listing off items. “Books bought; you don't need new robes; potion supplies can be sent for by owl order – ”

“I want a pewter cauldron. A collapsible one,” Rose said. “You can't shrink those.”

“I need some new quills,” Hugo said absently, eyes still on the kneazles.

Ron mentally tallied up the shops they had left to visit. “We can get those after lunch.”

Both kids perked up. “Lunch?” Hugo asked.

A speculative look passed over Rose's face. “Well, if we're getting lunch – ”

“Cake isn't lunch,” Hugo said quickly.

“ – there's a place on Knockturn Alley I want to visit.”

“No,” Ron said automatically, even as Hugo was saying, “You just want to piss off Malfoy.”

Visions of shadowy corners and dubious miscreants were instantly derailed. “What's this about pissing off a Malfoy?” Ron asked Hugo.

“Scorpius Malfoy,” said Hugo. Rose, sensing victory, was silent. “He's working in Knockturn Alley all summer. Told all his mates to come visit him.”

“How do you know that?” Ron asked. He had a brief, panicky vision of Hugo and Rose, expressions dark and brooding, lurking at Scorpius Malfoy's side like a hilariously lanky, ginger version of Crabbe and Goyle. “You're not mates with him, are you?”

“Of course not,” Rose reassured him. “You'd disown us. But Gryffindor table's right next to Slytherin these days, and he's not exactly quiet.”

Just like his dad, then.

“Well, if it will piss off a Malfoy,” Ron said, in the tones of a man coming to a reluctant compromise. “Lead the way.”

Knockturn Alley had undergone a slow process of gentrification after the war. Slow, because the general aura of Death Eater scum had lingered long after the post-war raids had cleaned the place out. Which was why Ron found himself standing in front of a blue, lace-less version of Madame Puddifoot's that he distinctly remembered being an apothecary shut down for illegally traded boomslang skins during his brief stint as Auror. He had maybe a minute to survey the handsome, heavy door that heralded the shop's entrance before Rose was tugging at his cuffs and pulling him through.

The interior had all the tiny, cramped seating arrangement reminiscent of Madame Puddifoot that the shopfront had promised, but none of the kitsch. The tables and furniture were dark varnished wood. In the corner, a hugely fluffy, white cat lounged on a table, flicking its tail as it eyed the newcomers. Behind the counter, directly across from the entrance and boxed in by countertops laden with tiered cake stands, was Scorpius Malfoy. Ron had only ever seen him at a distance through the steam of the Hogwarts' train, but up close the Malfoy hair and chin were unmistakable.

“Good afternoon,” Scorpius greeted, with a jaunty smile. His gaze swept past Hugo, lingered on Ron, and then fell on Rose. “Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes,” Rose said triumphantly. She made a beeline for the counter. Hugo made a beeline for the cat. Ron, torn between his two children, followed the one more likely to cause havoc.

“You can't not sell me the cakes,” Rose was saying as Ron reached her. Scorpius leaned against a countertop, ostensibly relaxed, but his eyes were flicking back and forth between Ron, Rose and Hugo. This close, the minute differences between him and his father were visible: his cheekbones were slightly softer, and his eyes closer to blue than grey. His hair was slicked back as his father had done when his age, but softer, ruffled so perfectly it had to be deliberate. “I'm in person, so you can't put me off saying that you don't do owl order. And you can't pretend you don't want to sell to me 'cause you don't want them damaged in transit. Cough up those cakes, Malfoy! Ten Wakeful Waffles, five Curling Crullers, and ten Mindful Mints!”

Scorpius bent a lot faster than Malfoy ever had. He straightened up, sweeping his hair back with his hand. Except his hand never touched a hair on his head. Probably didn't want to disturb the pomade.

“I concede defeat,” Scorpius said, sighing. His lips stretched into the blankest, emptiest smile that Ron had ever seen since his father himself. “Except...you don't have your wand with you, do you? Statute of Underaged Magic, after all, and Gryffindors would never flout the rules!”

Rose deflated.

“What a pity,” Scorpius said. False cheer was turning to genuine amusement. “You've come so close, yet so far!”

Rose was slowly turning as red as her namesake. “Hold up,” Ron said. He placed his hands reassuringly on Rose's shoulders. “What's this about wands.”

Scorpius pointed wordlessly at a slab of glass that Ron swore had not been there a second ago, hovering besides the register. Engraved in the glass was:

Ron zeroed on that last sentence. “Restricted goods, eh?” he asked suspiciously. The presentation of wands wasn't an uncommon request; Wheezes had a similar policy as well, on a small plaque next to the alcove that housed the more pragmatic goods that Wheezes had to offer. Sneakoscopes, and Foe-Glasses, and the like. Stock from the war that they had never really stopped selling. But pastries weren't exactly in the same realm as Peruvian Darkness Powder.

Scorpius was not deterred. “Yes, sir,” he said. Ron took a moment to boggle at a Malfoy calling him sir. “Pernickety Pâtisserie reserves the right to refuse the sale of certain goods to witches and wizards of certain ages, such as those that contain stimulants like the Wakeful Waffles and Mindful Mint Mouthfuls.” Here Scorpius gestured at some glaringly green waffles, and a line of what looked to be after dinner mints adorned by a single, crystalised mint leaf. “Pastries that contain liqueur like Cherry Sherry Scrolls and Vodka Voulevants cannot be supplied to witches or wizards under the age of seventeen.” Again, Scorpius pointed out the various pastries as he spoke, indicating some plain, red scrolls dotted with glacé cherries. They looked almost disappointedly nondescript next to their neighbours, a row of tall, tan pastry cylinders, filled with a red syrup that bubbled lazily around a stick of celery.

“And what if I refused to hand over my wand,” Ron said. As far as he could remember, the Daily Prophet had not reported Malfoy Junior unleashing a torrent of death eaters on unsuspecting students and professors, but Malfoys bred true. Probably.

“Oh, in that case I have to call the management,” Scorpius said cheerfully. “Dad!”

“What,” Ron said blankly. Before he could object, a door behind Scorpius opened, and Draco fucking Malfoy emerged.

“Scorpius, what – oh.” Ron saw Malfoy about as much as he saw Scorpius. Which was to say, only at King's Cross. Though there had been that September two years back where neither father nor son were anywhere to be seen. It wasn't until the Easter holidays that Malfoy had reappeared, looking small in a poorly fitting robe. Present day Malfoy was obviously wearing tailored robes: the material wasn't as flash as Ron would have expected from what he remembered of Lucius Malfoy, and Ron definitely knew flash from George, but they were still cut to show Malfoy's unfairly narrow stomach and hips. But his hairline was definitely receding, Ron was delighted to see. Malfoy inclined his balding head shallowly. “Weasley.”

“Ferret,” Ron acknowledged. On second glance, one of Malfoy's cheeks was slightly paler than the other. Strangely, it pulled out memories of watching his mum baking apple pie, flour in the air and on her face. It was...distracting. And confusing. Why would Malfoy have flour on his cheek, unless –

The brightly coloured pastries were suddenly significantly more menacing. Like those snakes that Hermione had told him about, the ones in the rainforests that used vibrant colours to warn would-be predators that they were poisonous and deadly. Ron drew Rose closer to him. “Rose,” he hissed quietly. “How do you know everything isn't poisoned.”

Scorpius hid a laugh. Ron tried to deconstruct it for signs of ill intent. Malfoy merely regarded him coolly.

Rose tried to shrug him off. “Dad,” Rose hissed back. “You're embarrassing me.”

Malfoy had his eyes on Ron, but spoke to his son. “Scorpius, don't bait weasels unless you wish to be bitten.”

Ron bristled. Then tried to figure out if Malfoy had unwittingly complimented him.

Malfoy leaned down until he was eye level with Rose. “Miss Rose, was it? What was it you were after?”

Ron was treated to the bizarre sight of Malfoy conversing as though he had something other than ice melt flowing through his veins. Rose didn't appear to notice anything amiss; she rattled off breathlessly the list of pastries she was after, Malfoy nodding as he listened. Ron committed each one to memory, mentally making a note to have each and every one sent off to Harry so that Forensics could take a gander.

“I don't see why you needed me,” Malfoy was saying to his son.

“She didn't have her wand, and Mr Weasley was unwilling to hand over his for inspection.” Scorpius looked like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. “Since she was after pastries that are only for restricted sale, I thought it prudent to double check it'd be okay.”

“Pernickety Patisserie,” Malfoy muttered under his breath. He flicked Scorpius on the forehead. Scorpius ducked away, blushing. Ron's mouth fell open of its own accord. “I need to check on those Cheering Cheesecakes,” Malfoy said. He kissed Scorpius on the forehead where he had flicked him – Ron thought his jaw would freeze into its gaping, shocked position – nodded at Rose, and left.

Silence reigned. Scorpius appeared resigned. Rose looked cheerfully vindicated. Malfoy was gone. All was not right in Ron's world, but it was looking brighter.

Scorpius picked up a small, dainty pair of tongs, and sighed. “What was the order again?”

“Ten Wakeful Waffles, five Curling Crullers, and ten Mindful Mints,” Rose repeated gleefully. And, as an afterthought, “And three croissants.”

Ron never did get a chance to send off samples to Harry. The moment the pastries were in Rose's hands, carefully arranged in a pale blue paper box by Scorpius, she took great joy in eating one of the crescent shaped croissants with exaggerated sounds of pleasure. Hugo, who was never one to say no to food, took the second. And Ron, who for some unknown reason had wanted to see a replay of that look of horror on Scorpius's Malfoy-like face, ate the last croissant against his better sense of judgment.

To his mortification, it was delicious. Delicate flakes of pure butter and salt and sugar that melted on the tongue. Ron bought another three.

The rest of the pastries Rose clutched in her arms the way her mother would a particularly rare and esoteric text. She didn't let go of the blue paper box until they arrived home, whereupon she immediately set up her new pewter cauldron and started taking over the kitchen.

“Fruitful trip, then?” Hermione asked when she dropped by after dinner. She peered over Rose's shoulder, looking at her notes with interest. There was a smudge of ink on her cheekbone, and her eyes had that peculiar dull light to them that meant she had likely been squinting at tiny manuscripts all day, or intricate spellwork, or both.

Ron manfully resisted the urge to check the time, and went looking for the tea.

“Yep,” Rose said grimly. She lifted her chopping board of diced...wriggling things, and leveled them into the simmering cauldron with her knife. The cauldron gave a half-hearted gurgle, and turned blue. Rose poked at it with a ladle, frowning, and made a note. When he'd asked, Rose had told him that she wanted to work out what were in the pastries.

It was a testament to how tired Hermione was that she didn't even comment or offer advice, simply taking the mug that Ron handed her and collapsing into a seat.

“Pretty fruitful, yeah,” Ron said. He watched as Hermione took a sip, the corners of her eyes easing. He would have snuck in some Pepper-Up if he didn't think that would start a row.

“Mmm,” Hermione said, in the way that told him that she was only half present. It took her about half the mug before she had enough presence of mind to ask, “Where's Hugo?”

“Upstairs,” Ron said. “Reading, probably.”

Dinner had been relocated to the living room, given that Rose had turned the kitchen into a strange sort of pastry butchery. The moment Rose's last spoonful of dinner had reached her mouth, she'd rushed back into the kitchen. Ron had followed her in afterwards, to watch her poke and stir and dice, and whatever else it was that she was doing with Malfoy's pastries. Hugo, less enamored with Rose's potions technique than his father, had disappeared upstairs with a copy of Martin Miggs that he'd picked up in Flourish & Blotts earlier in the day.

“Mmm,” Hermione said again. She finished off her mug, and yawned. She rose to rinse the mug in the sink, and said, “Can you tell Hugo I dropped by? I think I'm just going to go home; I'm shattered.”

“Sure,” Ron said. Hermione waved a hand in thanks. She'd brushed a kiss against Rose's head and had just reached the fireplace when Ron remembered to ask, “See you at the Burrow for dinner tomorrow, yeah?”

Hermoine grimaced at him over Rose's head. The biggest row the two of them had ever had had been over Molly Weasley. Hermione insisted that she'd never felt completely comfortable at the Saturday dinners, even before the divorce. Ron had dug in his heels like he hadn't on any other issue: family dinners were an important part of growing up a Weasley, and Hermione and his mum would learn to play nice.

“I'll be there,” Hermione said, obviously unwilling to show any sign that they were anything other than amicably divorced in front of Rose. She disappeared in a whoosh of green smoke and flames.

Ron blinked away the patches of light floating his vision. It was a pity that Hermione had been so tired, he thought, as he stood to clear away Hermione's mug, and maybe make a cup for himself. If she hadn't, he could have asked her about Malfoy.

He did ask George about it, though, the next day at work.

“Malfoy?” George grimaced. He was stocking the Skiving Snackboxes as Ron fixed the display for the Puking Pastilles. “Yeah, his tea shop must have opened up...what was it, late last year? Must have been, I only started seeing him at the Leaky after Halloween.”

“Yeah?” Ron asked casually.

“Yeah,” George parroted back. He knocked an elbow deliberately into Ron's side, and cackled when Ron squarked. “But that's as much as I know about Malfoy's little shop.”

And then a customer asked them about the care of pygmy puffs, distracting them both. Malfoy didn't come up again until dinner that night, and it was Rose that brought him up. Molly had asked what Rose had been doing cooped up in her room all day, which had set Rose off on a tirade about Malfoys and pastries and cheating.

“There's no way Malfoy's not using those Mindful Mints to boost his memory or something,” Rose raged. “He keeps getting Os for Muggle Studies. Os! Both his parents are purebloods!”

Hermione, seated beside Ron, pointed out, “Uncle Harry was brought up as a Muggle, and he still trips on escalators.”

All the Hogwarts-aged children, and therefore all the beneficiaries of Hogwart's post-war mandatory Muggles Studies, laughed raucously. Across the table, Harry made a face.

Ron leaned towards Hermione. “Escalator?” he whispered quietly. Across the table, he could see his mum doing the same to his dad.

“Moving staircase,” she whispered back.

“But we have those at Hogwarts.”

Hermione just shook her head in a gesture to convey that she would explain later.

“I wouldn't be surprised if ickle Scorpius was cheating,” James was saying. “He plays dirty enough. Filthiest Seeker in Hogwarts' history after his own dad, probably. What do you think, Al?”

“I dunno,” Albus said coolly. Albus was on the Slytherin Quidditch team, too, Ron remembered. Chaser to James' Seeker. Out of the corner of his eye, Ron could see Ginny looking back and forth between her two boys, frowning. Harry looked resigned, but grim enough around the edges that Ron knew that he wouldn't hesitate to shut the conversation down if it started getting out of hand. “Not as filthy as that time you tried to knock Scorpius off his broom and fell fifty metres into the mud.”

That had been some time during Rose's Third Year, which meant at the time Scorpius had been thirteen, and James fifteen. James, under the pretense of making a sharp right to avoid a bludger, had barreled into Scorpius. Or tried to: James had overshot, overbalanced, and toppled off his broom.

A well placed cushioning charm from Madame Hooch had saved James from the worst of the damage, but still netted him a broken arm and battered pride, and distracted the Gryffindor Seeker enough that Scorpius had managed to snatch the snitch, and won the match. Slytherin had then gone on to defeat Hufflepuff handily, and take the Quidditch Cup.

Albus had retold at Christmas dinner last year with some smugness, as James sulked in the corner. Time seemed to have lessened the pain, though, as James did little more than laugh, punch Albus' arm, and turned the conversation towards Gryffindor's chances at the Cup the following year.

After dinner, Harry caught Ron in the living room while the other adults were alternatively dispersed around the Burro's bottom floor and the garden, and the children were running havoc upstairs. “So I looked into Malfoy's cake thing,” he began.

“Of course you did,” Ron said, thinking of Sixth Year. Across the room, Hermione and Ginny were curled up on the couch with their heads bent towards one another, surrounded by cushions. That, combined with the topic of conversation, almost reminded him of Gryffindor Tower, except for the occasional shouts of “James, you jerk!” (Lily), or “Attack! Attack!” (Fred) floating down through the ceiling.

Harry opened his mouth to defend himself, and then thought better of it. Instead, he said, “When Malfoy opened up his shop, we got flooded with complaints. Most of them looked like petty shit stirring, but we got enough of them that we had to open an investigation.”

“And?” Ron asked expectantly. He wasn't sure what he was expecting. A Death Eater hideout, maybe, or trafficking baby boggarts.

Harry shrugged. “And nothing,” he said. “We looked into everything – the deeds, the licenses, even the galleons used to fund the shop. Everything was above board.”

“He's selling potions, though,” Ron said, thinking of the little glass sign. “Modified ones, at least.”

He'd heard a little about the trouble Fred and George had had when they first opened up Wheezes, and Ron had seen George try to introduce enough new products to see the process firsthand: to market any new potion it needed to be first approved by a Potions Master, and then approved by the Ministry. It wasn't a costly process, or Fred and George would have never had been able to open Wheezes in the first place, but it was time consuming. Potions Masters generally had better, more lucrative things to be doing, and the Ministry was slow.

“All approved,” Harry said. Ron wasn't convinced. Harry added, “We ran every item he has for sale through every test we could think of. Couldn't find a single thing to fault.” And then, a little sheepishly, “Some of my Aurors buy from him quite regularly, actually. Swears it helps their performance.”

That, more than anything, was why Ron didn't put up a fuss when Rose asked him to pick up some more pastries scarcely a week later.

The second time Ron set foot into Pernickety Pâtisserie, Scorpius was again behind the counter. He'd been haunched over a book when Ron opened the door, but straightened with a distracted smile. Bafflingly, the shop was again empty, even though Diagon Alley had been doing a fairly bustling lunch trade when Ron had walked through it, and Knockturn Alley had a healthy amount of foot traffic for Knockturn Alley.

Scorpius was distracted throughout the entire transaction, his eyes flickering behind Ron's shoulder to look at the door. He was otherwise polite, asking after Ron's health as he handed over the three Waking Waffles and five Mindful Mints. Ron had tried to discreetly sneak a look at the book he was reading, but it wasn't anything that Ron recognised. The paper was too thin for a Hogwarts text, and, interestingly, the font too regular and distinct than was typical for the Wizarding world.

There were actually customers the third time Ron came by. Only two of them, two witches too young to be Ron's generation, but too old to be in either Rose or Hugo's. They alternated between petting the white cat that apparently called the tea shop home, and whispering and staring at Ron behind
their hands. Ron ignored them.

At the counter, Scorpius seemed no less distracted than the last time Ron had been in. Just as Ron was reaching for the now familiar blue box, Scorpius hesitated and said, “Mr Weasley.”

This is it, Ron thought. This is where I succeed where Harry and the Aurors failed. This is where little Scorpius cracks and confesses his dad's tea shop is actually a front for an illegal potions ring. He knew that tone from nervous criminals, too deep in over their heads but with no means to extricate themselves. Ron cast his mind back to long forgotten years of Auror training, drew his shoulders up, and asked neutrally, “Yes?”

Scorpius bit the corner of his mouth, twisting it. “Miss Weasley isn't mad at me, right?”

Ron's mind blanked. “Rose?” he asked, when he finally worked out Scorpius wasn't talking about Ginny. His eyes narrowed, trying to recall if Rose had mentioned any opportunity or desire to contact Scorpius in the last two weeks. “Why would Rose be mad at you?”

“Oh!” Scorpius said. He looked relieved. “I just thought, when she didn't come by again...”

“No, she's just been busy,” Ron said, reluctant to admit to Scorpius that Rose was busily trying to work out his father's recipes.

“I see,” Scorpius said agreeably. He had another book open on the countertop: it looked to be Arithmancy. Scorpius was worrying at the bottom corner of an open page with his fingers. “Only, it's easier to tell what she's thinking when she's yelling, and I knew that dad was going to sell her the cakes anyway, and – um. Never mind.” Scorpius pulled out a second, smaller box, and slipped into it two sturdy looking pies. Ron hadn't thought that this shop had anything more substantial than tea, but there were the rest of the pie's fellows, tucked away on the counterspace furthest to the left. “One for you, and one for the Hufflepuff,” Scorpius said with a smile.

The first box got accosted by Rose the moment Ron stepped foot in the Burrow, long before they made it back through the floo to Ron's place since he had the kids for the night. The second box was forgotten until much later. One moment he was shifting on the lumpy couch, trying to find a better position for his back as he played chess with Hugo, and the next there was something digging into his hip. The pies, like Rose's pastries, had been shrunk, but shoved into a different pocket. The pastries were retrieved, squashed and cold but otherwise delicious, and doled out between him and Hugo. It was then that Ron recalled Scorpius's stilted inquiry after Rose, the nervousness with which he had held himself, and how it contrasted with the showmanship he'd shown the first time Ron had met him.

Growing up as one child in seven had instilled in Ron a certain sense of awareness of other children, Ron liked to think. Becoming a parent had only reinforced it. And so, Malfoy or not, Ron asked, “So, Rose and Scorpius get along well, then?”

Hugo's face was screwed up in thought. Crumbs of flaked pastry clung to his cheek as his eyes flickered back and forth across the chessboard, clearly torn between saving his knight or taking a strategically placed pawn. Take the pawn, Ron urged silently.

“Kinda?” Hugo volunteered. He moved his knight, taking one of Ron's bishops, but dooming himself to a check in eight turns. “I know they're Potions partners – ”

That Ron hadn't known.

“ – and sometimes Scorpius will go over to the Gryffindor table.”

“To talk?” Ron asked sceptically. He moved a pawn, opening a path to Hugo's queen.

“Yeah.” Hugo hadn't rolled his eyes, but Ron could hear it in his voice.

“About?” Ron prodded.

“Nothing much.” Hugo scratched his jaw in thought. Flakes of pastry fell onto the chalkboard. Hugo frowned, and rubbed at his cheek. When more flakes fell, he looked up at Ron with mock betrayal. Ron assumed a look of innocence. Hugo managed to keep it together for a few more seconds, and then broke into laughter. “Dad!”

“I would have told you eventually,” Ron insisted. Hermione would have brushed off the crumbs the moment she saw them, but he liked them. They'd reminded him that Hugo was still a child; his child. Ron nudged the chessboard closer to Hugo. “So, Scorpius and Rose? They must talk about something.”

If Scorpius was anything like his father, he'd be spitting insults. Blood-traitor was one that Malfoy'd favoured. Mudblood. But Malfoy would have never asked after a Weasley at Scorpius' age.

“Not really,” Hugo insisted. “They don't talk much, anyway – except for last year, I guess, when she was badgering him about his cakes.” Hugo must have caught on because he moved a pawn, ineffectually blocking Ron's steady march. “I only notice 'cause Scorpius doesn't talk to very many people.”

Ron mulled Hugo's words over in his head. “He has a great cat, though.”

Hugo brightened. “He does! I've never seen the cat at school though. She was nice.”

Ron weighed the happiness of his son, and what he knew of Scorpius, against Scorpius's father. “Do you want to see her again?”

The fourth time Ron swung by Pernickety Pâtisserie, both Hugo and Rose were busy, both of them at Grimmauld Place where Teddy had corralled all of the younger Weasleys plus some for a great holiday bash, but on the fifth visit Hugo was free, and Ron picked him up from the Burrow using the floo at the back of Wheezy's. Ron spent his lunch break that day watching Scorpius and Hugo bond over the cat who, as Ron and Hugo learned, was named Tabitha.

On the sixth visit, Scorpius gave him a friendly wave, but called his dad before Ron had even reached the counter. Malfoy emerged, looked Ron up and down, and said, “Weasley, as much as I appreciate the fact that you seem determined to single handedly fund Scorpius's new racing broom, and therefore the Slytherin Quidditch Cup, I cannot in good conscience supply you with more Waking Waffles. Or Cheering Cheesecake, Mindful Mints, or Calming Creams, or whatever it is your daughter is after today.”

Ron grimaced. “I wouldn't put a single knut towards Slytherin winning the Quidditch Cup,” he sniped. Years of mingled hatred and envy had begun flooding back the moment Malfoy had started in with his drawling.

Malfoy was immovable. “Then you're not getting a single cake, pastry, nor bloody profiterole. These things weren't meant to be inhaled, not unless your daughter is trying for heart arrhythmia by the tender age of sixteen.”

“She's not eating them,” Ron said irritably. He slapped down a two sickles and one nut. He'd started to memorise the prices. “Just give me the damn things. Five Calming Creams, and seven Waking Waffles.

“Oh.” Malfoy's eyebrows drew together. “Weasel, you're not trying to work out the formulations for your joke shop, are you?” he accused.

“No,” Ron said flatly. A dull heat rose from his gut into his head. “Do I look like a filthy, underhanded Slytherin?” Too late, he remembered that Scorpius was still in the room. Scorpius met his apologetic glance with a smile like he'd heard it all before and didn't particularly care, and shrugged.

Malfoy looked between Ron and Scorpius, and frowned. “Well, then,” he said slowly. “Purchase away.”

And then he actually stayed for the transaction, taking Ron's money and fetching pastries as though serving a blood traitor wasn't below him.

The next time Ron visited, Malfoy was behind the counter. Scorpius sat at a table in the corner nearest the counter, surrounded by sundry pastries, another book, and Tabitha.

“A dozen Mindful Mints,” Ron said, already pulling the sickles from his pocket.

Malfoy's brow was creased in thought. It wasn't a good look, in Ron's opinion. It drew attention to how his stupidly blond hair was crawling away from his forehead, and made his eyes look like dull steel. Malfoy's visage cleared as he drawled, “Given up on the Waking Waffles, has she?”

Scorpius was watching closely from his table.

As Rose became frustrated by her inability to discern the makeup of all the different pastries, she'd started narrowing her focus on the Mindful Mints. Those she was dead determined to nail. But like hell was Ron going to reveal that to Malfoy.

“A dozen Mindful Mints,” Ron repeated firmly. He was above it all, he hold himself, mentally preparing himself for some snide comment on Rose's intelligence.

Malfoy simply said, “Tell her to try Routledge's Ratio.”

Against Ron's better judgment, he did.

The next time Ron came by, Scorpius and Malfoy had traded places. Malfoy sat at the corner table, reading a sheet of parchment, his bottom lip pinched between his teeth. He neatly turned it upside down and laid it aside when Ron marched towards him, and sat himself down without asking.

“What did Routledge's Ratio have to do with anything?” Ron demanded. At the counter, Scorpius sat up, listening intently. “Rose's driving herself spare.”

Malfoy's eyes gleamed. “Absolutely nothing,” Malfoy drawled, “unless she's looking into the Arthimantic properties of children born with blue eyes to red headed fathers.”

“What the hell, Malfoy,” Ron said. Scorpius was laughing himself sick. “You absolute git.”

Malfoy merely raised a single pointy eyebrow, and said, “If she's using Dionis' Method of Distillation, tell her to boil one of the Mints in water, and another in bile, and to note the difference in condensation.”

“And what, send her on another goose chase?” Ron asked sourly.

“Now that I know her mother isn't helping her, I see no reason to mislead her,” Malfoy said.

Ron's shoulders had tightened on instinct at Malfoy's reference to Hermione, but Malfoy said no more. Ron debated not telling Rose what Malfoy had said. There was always the chance that he was lying again, and when had Malfoy ever lifted a finger to help him in potions? That should have tipped Ron off the first time around. But in the end, the minuscule chance that Malfoy had actually said something useful for once won out, and not two hours after Ron had passed on Malfoy's message, he heard Rose let out a whoop from the kitchen.

And so formed an awkward rhythm, where Ron went into Pernickety Pâtisserie every other day on his lunch break – his trips were becoming more frequent, now, since Rose had determined that trying to break down the Mints worked best when they were freshly procured – and traded insults to Malfoy's mostly useful, but always snide, tips. Sometimes Hugo came along to play with Tabitha. Sometimes, but more rarely, Rose came to badger Scorpius into giving her information. She never tried to pry any out of Malfoy.

Malfoy halted him the final week of August, just as Ron was handing over his sickles. “Miss Rose still hasn't worked out the formula, then?”

Rose had been growing frantic as the end of the holidays approached. The thought of his little girl, face flushed red by steam and frustration, made Ron sour.

“She's figured out the filling,” Ron said defensively. And Merlin, the amount of test mints she'd pushed onto him and Hugo for testing. Ron was never eating anything with mint in it ever again. “She's close.”

“Hmmm.” Malfoy handed him the day's blue box. “Bring her in tomorrow.”

Which had filled Ron with all kinds of suspicion, but Rose, desperate for any hint, wouldn't hear any word of not going. Hugo, overhearing, had insisted to be brought along as well. Ron, leery, but having no reason to refuse, had acquiesced. In the end, though, all Malfoy did was hand Rose a scroll of parchment.

“What's this,” Ron said, instantly on alert. He thought of Lucius Malfoy, and a diary being slipped into Ginny's cauldron. “Rose, give it here.”

“Dad, calm down,” Rose said. She was unrolling the parchment, unconcerned. “It's – ” Rose shrieked, and clutched the parchment close to her chest. She stared at Malfoy with what looked too close to be awe in her eyes for Ron's tastes. “Really?”

“Really,” Malfoy affirmed.

Ron looked between the two of them. “Really what?”

Rose pulled the piece of parchment far enough away from her chest so that he could take a peek. In neat, spiky cursive, was what looked to be the recipe for Malfoy's Mindful Mints.

“Seriously?” Ron said disbelievingly. Malfoy was a Slytherin, through and through. They never did anything for free. “What's the catch?”

Rose punched him on the arm. “Don't let him take it back,” she whispered. “C'mon dad. I'll even let you take me to a Cannons game.”

Rose had started refusing to go to Cannons matches with him sometime after she'd turned thirteen. She loved him, Rose had said, but no love was worth being photographed at a Cannons game.

“He's a Slytherin,” Ron whispered back. “He probably wants your first born.”

“No catch,” Malfoy said. Faint annoyance flashed across Malfoy's face, so briefly that Ron would have missed it had he not been looking at Malfoy's face at the time. "But since you don't seem to believe that I could give her my recipe in good faith, know that I'm doing so because I trust that Miss Rose would never publish it in the Daily Prophet, given her thoroughly...Gryffindor breeding."

Only Malfoy could give a compliment without actually giving a compliment.

“As for why...,” Malfoy shrugged. Ron stared. He'd never seen such a casual gesture on him. He hadn't even known Malfoy's shoulders could move like that, rolling like silk.

“Perhaps I admired her work ethic,” Malfoy said. He wasn't even drawling. “Perhaps she was drawing close, anyway – you did very well to identify the crushed Morning Glory petals, Miss Rose.” Rose beamed. Ron vaguely remembered boasting about Rose's discovery to Malfoy. “Or maybe I just felt like it.”

“Well,” Ron said grudgingly. In the corner, Rose was waving her newly obtained recipe in Scorpius' face as Scorpius looked on, shaking his head ruefully. Hugo had Tabitha cradled in his arms. “Thanks, I guess.”

And that was that, Ron thought. And so ended his daily lunch trips into Knockturn Alley, and gingerly hiding shrunken blue paper boxes of pastries in his pockets so that George wouldn't eat them. No more of Malfoy's snide drawls, or listening to Rose pester Scorpius, or watching Hugo play with Tabitha.

Never again would Ron have to look at Malfoy's ferrety face and his fine, white-gold hair, and the way it brushed against his ears and curled towards his cheekbones, except across the platform at King's Cross, or maybe as they passed by one another in Diagon Alley.

And then there was a spate of break-ins along Knockturn Alley and Broadside Lane.

"You want to go to the STOUT meeting?" George asked. He spoke slowly, enunciating every syllable as though Ron had gone and hit his head. "Ron, you never go to those."

Ron shrugged. "I dunno. I thought I'd go in, have a listen. It's not like the Aurors are looking into it."

Until something was actually reported stolen, the Aurors couldn't open an investigation. Didn't stop the Shopkeepers and Traders' Official Union Tattle assembly from holding a meeting, though. George hated those things, complained loudly after each one that it was just a whole lot of hot air that failed to achieve anything, but still went to each and every one dutifully. Ron told himself that he was doing it as a favour to George.

George shot him another bemused glance, but grinned broadly. "Better you than me. I'm looking forward to a night in with Angelina.”

“Too much information,” Ron said instantly, ignoring the burst of jealousy in his chest. With the kids away at Hogwarts, all Ron had to do in the evenings was to go home and contemplate his pantry. As it was, he just ended up turning in early every night for lack of anything better to do. He had never been more rested in his life.

George, taking Ron's words at face value, just laughed.

The STOUT meeting, as were all other STOUT meetings, was held in the Leaky Cauldron. Membership had originally been limited to Diagon Alley, but over the last few years its concern and scope had expanded to encompass all the major lanes and alleys that branched off Diagon Alley. And so, when Ron turned up twenty minutes after the meeting had been slated to begin, but ten minutes before it would actually start, he could see Malfoy's blindingly white hair across the room. Beside him was Ulbert Hodge, the owner of a small emporium on Broadside Lane whom Ron only knew of secondhand through George: cantankerous, given to ranting, and never without a drink at meetings. True to form, he had a glass of red wine in one hand, which he was sloshing around as he used the same hand to punctuate his diatribe.

Ron made his way to the bar, where Hannah Abbott greeted him warmly and poured him a pint of the week's special. They chatted a little about inconsequential stuff – Neville was up at Hogwarts teaching Herbology with their little one, who had sorted into Hufflepuff not a month ago.

Eventually Ron caved, and nodded towards Malfoy. “How long's he been trapped with Hodge over there?”

He didn't even know why he was asking. Only, Malfoy had a slightly glazed look to his eyes, and they kept drifting over Hodge's shoulder before periodically snapping back to Hodge's face. Hodge ranted on, oblivious. It was actually rather funny.

“Malfoy?” Hannah asked. When Ron nodded, she frowned. In thought, it seemed, because Hannah eventually said, “Not sure. Malfoy turned up on time – you'd think he'd know better by now, he's been to enough of these. Mr Hodge must have come through the doors ten minutes after that.

“But I'm sure Malfoy can handle himself,” Hannah said, smiling wryly, no doubt thinking of their Hogwarts days.

Ron nodded. Which didn't explain why, a minute later, he was shouldering his way towards Malfoy and Hodge, pint in one hand and firewhiskey in the other, saying, “Seen any ferrets lately, Malfoy?”

Malfoy looked at him, face blank until Ron held up the firewhiskey, whereupon the corner of Malfoy's mouth twisted upwards into something that wasn't quite a smirk. “No, but I have been seeing an awful lot of weasels lately,” he said, and accepted the tumbler of firewhiskey. Hodge spluttered at being ignored.

Tiny Felicia Flitwick, a second cousin of Professor Flitwick, jumped up and began the meeting. The meeting was a long and tedious affair: Flitwick had every shop proprietor affected, however obliquely, stand up and speak about what had occurred at their shops. And since at every locale no wards had been broken, not a single item taken, nor sign of the intruder to be had, it all amounted to a whole lot of nothing. The most tedious speaker of all was Hodge, who was determined to list every item of inventory that could have been, but wasn't, stolen.

When it was over, Malfoy nodded at him, and then made sharpish for the floo.

Well then, Ron thought. Good deed of the week done. He drained the last of his now tepid beer, and went home.

It was a surprise, then, when Tabitha appeared at Wheezes the next day, proudly bearing a scroll of parchment between her jaws.

“Aren't you a looker,” George said, unconcerned that there was a cat inside the shop. On the shelf beside him, the pygmy puffs squeaked in terror. He picked Tabitha up, who pressed her face against his cheek with a massive, muffled purr. George tried tugging the scroll out of her mouth to no avail. “C'mon, kitty. What do you have here?”

The corner of the scroll had unraveled. Ron could see the tail end of half-familiar, slanted writing.

“I'll take the cat,” Ron said hurriedly. He nodded at where the pygmy puffs had started climbing each other to form a tiny, furry mountain of terror. “Before they start having heart attacks or something.”

Tabitha was much happier to give up the message to Ron, parting her jaws the moment Ron reached for it once he'd taken her outside. Message delivered, Tabitha leaped nimbly from Ron's arms and disappeared in the direction of Knockturn Alley. Unscrolled, the message read Weasel, how do you feel about a stakeout? You know where to find me. – DM

What the hell, Ron thought, and made his way to Pernickety Pâtisserie after Wheezes shut that evening.

When Ron arrived, the front door to Pernickety Pâtisserie was unlocked, but not defenceless: Ron felt intricate wards parting around him as he crossed the threshold. The countertops, normally brimming with bake goods, were forlorn and empty. The only source of light spilled from the half-open door behind the counter, narrow but golden and warm.

And, Ron noticed when he took a surreptitious sniff, carrying with it something that smelt bloody fantastic.

“Malfoy?” Ron called out. There was no reply. Ron frowned. There was someone in, though, that was for certain: Ron could hear the clatter of someone moving beyond the door. Ron angled his body so that he presented the smallest target, and held his wand hand out and ready. He cautiously crept towards the door, pushed it open –

– and walked into the strangest kitchen he'd ever seen. It was a healthily sized room, easily as large as the floor space at the front of the shop. Aside from two identical marble-topped workbenches that ran the length of the floor, there was nothing harmonious about its layout. The left side of the room didn't resemble so much a kitchen so much as it did a potions classroom with the wall lined with cupboards, and the workbench laden with bubbling cauldrons. The right side of the kitchen was more in line with what Ron expected from a kitchen, and had a wall full of ovens and yet more cupboards.

In the middle of it all, looking distracted, was Malfoy.

“Malfoy,” Ron said again. Malfoy ignored him, and bent to peer into one of the ovens. He was wearing, absurdly, muggle trousers that clung to his arse and thighs. Apparently he had legs under those robes of his. “Oi! Ferret!”

Startled, Malfoy jumped up and whipped around. His mouth started to curl into a sneer, before his face slammed shut into a blank stare. He said, cordially, “Weasel.”

Merlin, Malfoy was disconcerting. Ron waved his message in the air. “This isn't exactly a stakeout. Anybody could have wandered in with your doors unlocked.”

“What?” Malfoy was still staring at him. And then his usual lofty expression was stealing over his face. “Oh, well. I couldn't possibly match the lowly standards of the Aurors.” Malfoy sniffed. “You probably had to camp out in tents.” And then Malfoy was moving to the other side of the room, peering into the various simmering cauldrons. Even from a distance, Ron could identify the thick, gloopy mixture in the cauldron to the far right as Skelegro. Just looking at it made Ron's throat burn.

“What are those?” Ron asked, curiosity overcoming his need for answers. “You're thinking of selling Skelegro...Sweetmeats?”

“No,” Malfoy's voice had taken on that distracted tone again. “These aren't for the shop; they're for the mail order potions business I run on the side.”

Malfoy ran two businesses. Both of which he actually worked for. Ron's mind fairly boggled.

“And no, not just anybody could have wandered in; I set very specific wards.”

“Right,” Ron said sceptically. “Like you set the charms here.” Ron nodded at the tables. It'd taken him a few minutes, but he'd figured out why, for all that he could see them, he couldn't actually smell the potions happily bubbling away. A series of charms carried the steam and odour of the potions up towards a grate set high up in one of the walls. There was no great amount of magical strength behind them but they, like the wards, spoke of delicate, controlled spellwork.

Malfoy looked delighted. “Exactly.”

Ron had meant to be sarcastic, but Malfoy looked so damned pleased. “None of the shops broken into could detect anything wrong with their wards,” Ron pointed out instead. “Whoever the culprit was, they must have a way around them.”

“Well, yes, I'm counting on that,” Malfoy said, and launched into an explanation of a plan that could only be described as hare-brained if one was being very, very generous. The plan, explained Malfoy, was to simply wait. “After all, if they're making their way through Knockturn Alley, eventually they'll pay us a visit.”

Malfoy was ridiculous. Ron told him as such.

“Maybe,” Malfoy said, undeterred. “But I also have cake.”

And pies, and cookies, and waffles. And mints, which made Ron blanch when Malfoy pulled them out of the cooling cabinet. Malfoy, the evil bastard, laughed, but put them back.

As stakeouts went, it wasn't bad. Malfoy made up for his general Malfoy-ness with food, and somewhere warm to be when the alternative was his empty house. And it was bloody novel, watching Malfoy bustle around his kitchen like a house elf, and then haunch over a cauldron in the space of less than five steps. But mostly Malfoy had food, which was why Ron stayed, surrounded by the scent of warm bread, as Malfoy demonstrated how much he loved the sound of his own voice. Which Ron already knew from Hogwarts, but Malfoy had never said anything worth listening to then. But Slytherins traded in information, which meant that Malfoy knew all manner of information that Ron didn't, like which of their classmates swapped had Mallowsweet behind the greenhouses, or spit in the empty sixth floor classroom.

And, as Ron found out when he turned up the next day, reasoning that it was cheaper than buying dinner, and easier than troubling his mum, Malfoy knew which teachers were doing the same.

“You're lying,” Ron said automatically, when Malfoy said that Madame Hooch had a regular liaison with Professor Sprout.

“No, weasel,” Malfoy drawled. His cheeks were flushed and pink. “Madame Hooch just happened to smell like mandrakes for no good reason.”

“But how,” Ron whispered, trying to imagine it while trying not to imagine his old teachers going at each other. Malfoy only laughed, before turning back to whatever potion it was that he was working on. His eyes took on that glazed, distracted look that Ron was starting to learn meant Malfoy was actually thinking very hard.

When he wasn't concentrating, Malfoy was generally happy to babble. The mail order potions business, Malfoy let slip one day, helped cover the overheads of the Patisserie. Ron, thinking vaguely of the reparations the Malfoys had been ordered to pay by the Wizengamot after the war, and whose own general expenses were covered very comfortably by his wage from Wheezes, may have gloated.

Sometimes Malfoy had information about Rose and Hugo and the other younger members of the Weasley clan, gleaned from letters from Scorpius, that Ron wasn't aware of: that Lily had once kissed all the Hufflepuff boys in her year on a dare; that Fred and James wanted desperately to live up to their namesakes and had planned on letting loose a round of fireworks in the Great Hall, only to be foiled by Peeves when he stumbled upon their stash; that Snape's portrait occasionally made its way to the Slytherin common rooms, where more often than not he would sneer insults at Albus, mistaking him for his father.

Most of the information Malfoy dropped revolved around the Slytherins from their year, and their sickeningly mundane lives. Gregory Goyle and Millicent Bulstrode had moved to Wales, and produced bouncing, burly babies like their parents. Daphne Greengrass had moved to France. Pansy Parkinson still lived in England, but in London, since the Parkinsons had lost their country manor after the war. It was all information Ron hadn't wanted to know, and didn't care to know. Ron tended to tune Malfoy out when he started talking about his Slytherin dorm-mates, except for one day where Malfoy abruptly segued from a heavily embellished account of the Slytherin – Hufflepuff match in fifth year to a description of Theodore Nott blowing Blaise Zabini in the Slytherin changing rooms.

Ron, who had been chewing little sandwiched biscuits, choked. “What,” he spluttered, once he'd coughed the little bits of almond flour and icing out of his lungs.

“Did the brave boys of Gryffindor Tower not lend each other a helping hand?” Malfoy's cheeks were flushed pink with suppressed laughter.

“No!” Ron said sharply, thinking of how round and awkward Neville used to be, or worse, Harry, who was one step removed from being a brother now that he had married Ginny. Malfoy looked smug. Ron asked, without thinking, “Why? Did you?”

“Yes.” If possible, Malfoy looked smugger. Ron imagined Goyle's hulking mass pushing Malfoy's small, lithe figure against Hogwart's rough stone hewn walls, and pushed away the rest of his biscuits. Malfoy laughed outright.

The dynamic between them changed that day. Ron hadn't even realised they had a dynamic, but surely they had, because Malfoy started doing...things. Nothing big enough or noticeable enough that Ron could call him out on it. Just small touches here or there, the brush of fingertips against his when Malfoy passed him a cake, or the tickle of Malfoy's hair against his face as he leaned over Ron's shoulder to get at something on the workbench. And, annoyingly, it meant that Ron started noticing the delicate cast of Malfoy's skin, and the way it made his pale blond hair glow.

More irritatingly, Malfoy got it into his head that he could start needling Ron. Ron, who had grown used to the practice of turning up to Malfoy's kitchen after work, eating Malfoy's food and listening to his prattle, and otherwise not being expected to engage in conversation, resisted. “No,” he said, when Malfoy asked for the umpteenth time why he'd left the Aurors.

Malfoy had this trick of turning down the corners of his eyes. It made him look not unlike Tabitha when she was angling for a scratch behind the ears, and gave Ron the uncomfortable sensation of wanting to give Malfoy what he wanted. “Why not?” Malfoy wheedled. He was standing between the narrow aisle of space between the two workbenches, minding a potion. It meant that Ron, seated on a tall stool near the ovens, had a fantastic view of the sweep of Malfoy's workrobes over his backside that he was telling himself he wasn't ogling. “You didn't even tell the Daily Prophet. Not even a press release.”

“Of course I didn't tell the Prophet.” Ron snorted. “I don't even read it. The Prophet's rubbish. We use it to line the pygmy pens at Wheezes. And anyway, it wasn't like I had anything to say.”

“So, what, you just decided one day to leave the Aurors,” Malfoy said incredulously.

“Yes,” Ron said. Except, in actual fact, he had been mulling over the decision to leave for well over half a year by the time he left the Aurors. Neville, the only other student from Hogwarts in their year who had been offered a fast track into the Aurors without his NEWTs, had left months ago for an apprenticeship under Professor Sprout. He'd seen no reason to stay with the Aurors once the last of the rogue Death Eaters had been caught. The old guard had been pleased. None of them had much liked the 'Hogwarts Heroes', whom they saw as receiving preferential treatment. Harry, who was being blatantly groomed for Head Auror by this stage, with his time split between being in the field and Kingsley's and Robard's offices, was unaware of the pointless jockeying in the office. But Ron had had enough.

“Hmm.” Malfoy didn't sound convinced. “You should have at least stayed on as a consult.”

“I don't think so,” Ron said, unwilling to follow this topic of conversation.

“Well you should have,” Malfoy huffed, so much like Hermione that Ron had to crack a smile. It came out more like a grimace. Malfoy took it as a victory, and so started a new pattern, where Malfoy interspersed his babbling with touches and brushes, and little pointed needles about consulting for the Aurors, and Ron went home every night and pretended he didn't think of Malfoy writhing underneath Zabini in Hogwarts' shadowy corners.

Ron had honestly stopped expecting to come from this weird twilight existence, where he and Malfoy weren't quite friends, but weren't exactly more and not exactly less when, about a month in from when his evening visits had started, Malfoy suddenly paused in the middle of decanting the contents of a cauldron into little ampoules. Tabitha, who to all appearances had been napping on the corner of one of the workbenches, rose sharply onto all four paws.

“Mehreht,” Ron mumbled through a mouthful of flaked pastry.

Malfoy shook his head minutely. He pressed a finger to his lip, eyes gleaming. “I think we have a visitor,” he said. Ron saw a flash of Malfoy's wand, and then the lights dimmed.

Ron hastily swallowed his mouthful. “What are you – ” he began, and then froze as his ears picked up a scratching noise. Malfoy's kitchen had three doors leading out from it: the door that led to the shop; the door opposite the first that presumably led to the living quarters above the shop, but that Ron had never been through; and a door on the potions side of the room, nestled between two tall cupboards that led to a small, cobbled alleyway. The scratching was coming from the alleyway. “Malfoy,” Ron said cautiously, reaching for his own wand.

“Oh, hush,” said Malfoy's voice, his body a shadowy blur in the corner of Ron's vision. At least he sounded amused, Ron grumbled to himself as he got to his feet. Malfoy's outline blurred. Waving his wand again, Ron surmised, when the alleyway door unlocked with an audible click.

There was the sound of something scampering across the kitchen's wooden floor. Ron may have jumped. The door clacked against its frame as Malfoy relocked it, and then the place was blazing with light again.

When Ron's eyes had readjusted, he found Malfoy standing at a cabinet near the alleyway door. Tabitha was at his feet, pawing at the space between the bottom of the cabinet and the floor, meowing softly.

“Seriously?” Ron said, exasperated. He made his way over to Malfoy, casting detection spells as he went: whatever was beneath the cabinet didn't seem to be dark, but it was certainly sentient, and definitely alive. He could hear it moving. “You just let it in?”

Malfoy rolled his eyes. “Obviously the 'culprit',” and Ron could practically hear the quotation marks, “wasn't human. Otherwise the wards would have been affected, and of course we all know wards don't affect magical creatures the way they do humans. Owls would never reach their recipients if that were the case.” Malfoy stopped and looked at Ron expectantly.

“Of course,” Ron echoed dumbly.

“Well, go on then.” Malfoy said. He nudged one of Ron's feet with his own, and tilted his head towards the ground.

“What. No,” Ron protested. He objected, very reasonably, “What if there are spiders.”

Malfoy raised a haughty eyebrow. “In my kitchen?” he demanded.

Ron thought of the scuttling noise he had heard. “What if it's a fire crab?”

“Then we will deshell it, and turn it into fire crab stew,” Malfoy said unreasonably in reasonable tones. He nudged Ron's foot again. “Down, brave Gryffindor.”

“But it's your kitchen!”

“But I'm not a big, brave Gryffindor,” Malfoy said. He didn't flutter his eyelashes, but it was a near thing; he'd turned his head down, looking up through his lashes so that they cast pale shadows on his high cheekbones.

Ron swore. He could feel his heartbeat in his fingertips. “If I die, ferret,” Ron said warningly.

“Yes, yes,” Malfoy said as Ron cautiously dropped to his knees, and bent his head towards the bottom of the cabinet. “The Ministry will throw a massive parade down Diagon Alley, fireworks and all, and there'll be a full page obituary in the Daily Prophet, and we will all mourn you very, very much.”

“Damn right you'll mourn me – aargh!” Ron careened backwards, a hand clutching his eye. There was a white blur as Tabitha pounced, her head darting underneath the cabinet.

Malfoy knelt beside him, tugging at his arm. “Move your hand, let me see,” he said. He was frowning.

“Well, it wasn't a fire crab,” Ron grumbled. His heart was still pounding. “Fire crabs don't have paws.”

Malfoy's fingertips, cool and dry, pressed against his jaw as Malfoy turned his head so that he could examine the side of Ron's face. “No, they don't,” Malfoy said softly. He turned his head to where Tabitha had emerged from the cabinet, a dark, mottled ball of fur clamped firmly between her jaws. Tabitha gave a muffled, pleased meow, and the bundle shifted until it turned into a small, twitching kneazle. Ron, thinking of Crookshanks, gingerly moved away.

Malfoy snorted inelegantly. “Big brave Gryffindor, scared of a cat,” Malfoy said mockingly. His mouth was held just so, the way he did when he was teasing.

“Kneazle,” Ron retorted shakily. He'd managed to half-crawl away from the kneazle into Malfoy's side. This close, he could tell that Malfoy didn't smell of vanilla and honey like his kitchen, or asphodels and billywig stingers like his potions. He smelt of musk and salt, and the heady bite of men's cologne. “Look at its tail.”

“Half-kneazle,” Malfoy argued. Tabitha had managed to grasp the Kneazle between her paws, and was licking the kneazle as it squirmed in protest. “Look at its ears.”

The kneazle's ears were short, stubby things, folded over almost cutely to brush against its own head. They stayed there for a little while, Ron breathing in the scent of Malfoy's cologne and feeling the heat of his body seep through his clothes, watching Tabitha lick and fuss until the kneazle subsided into a drowsy ball of fluff.

“Well, we can't leave it here,” Malfoy said, and got up. Ron's body felt his loss keenly. Malfoy looked down at him with a crooked smile, and said, “Coming?”

Malfoy led him to the back door, which revealed a narrow stone stairwell. Tabitha delicately padded past them, easily making her way to the top of the stairs even with the kneazle between her teeth. The top of the narrow stairs opened up into a living area, not unlike George's setup at the top of Wheezy's. But where George had gleefully used wizarding space to turn his top floor into a busier, more lurid amalgamation of the ground floor and his room at the Burrow, Malfoy appeared to have barely touched his. The wooden flooring and paneled walls were a bland, mid-toned brown. Furniture was minimal, with a single couch sitting opposite a fireplace. Behind the couch was what looked to be the general eating area, with a small hardwood dining table accompanied by two plain, matching chairs. Behind that was what amounted to a small kitchen, with a stovetop, sink, cupboard and cooling cabinet all pushed up against the wall.

Ron watched as Malfoy leaned up on his toes, the fabric of his robes stretching tight across his shoulder blades as he pulled two small bowls from the top shelf of a cupboard. From the cooling cabinet he produced a plate of what looked to be raw, diced chicken meat and liver, and he emptied its contents into the two small bowls. The two small bowls went on the floor; the plate went into the sink. Tabitha waited until the kneazle had started noisily eating, her tail curled around it, before delicately eating out of her own bowl.

“Your kitchen is tiny,” Ron said, for lack of anything better to say, as Malfoy set the plate to rinsing itself with a flick of his wand.

“No one I bring up here is much interested in food,” Malfoy said, smirking, and disappeared through the one door that led off the living room. When Ron followed, the room revealed itself to be a bedroom. Like the rest of the floor, this room was also plainly decorated, and held a plain if spacious bed, a nightstand, and chest of drawers.

Malfoy shucked his outer robes, which floated away and obediently draped itself across the top of the chest, revealing muggle trousers and shirt sleeves underneath. Ron stood in the middle of the room, looking around, taking in its emptiness.

“Now,” Malfoy said. While Ron had been taking in the room, Malfoy had come up to stand behind him. Startled, Ron jerked around. Malfoy pressed his hands to Ron's biceps to catch him. This close, Ron could make out the faint hint of freckles scattered across Malfoy's nose. And the warm scent of his cologne, gently enveloping them. “Assuming I haven't misread the situation,” Malfoy murmured, and pulled Ron into a kiss.

Ron's first thought was that Malfoy was tall, but that he was taller. His second thought was that Malfoy had his fingers pressed against the back of Ron's neck, little pressure points of sensation gently tilting his head down. His third was that Malfoy was kissing him, his warm soft lips gently teasing at Ron's.

When Malfoy pulled away, Ron said triumphantly, “You have been flirting with me!”

“Ten points to Gryffindor,” Malfoy mocked, his mouth close enough to Ron's that his words sent little puffs of air tickling across Ron's cheeks. “What else?”

Ron froze. “Uh. You kissed me.”

“Another ten points,” Malfoy said. He loosened his grip. “Scared?”

Malfoy's eyes were bright, even in the dim lighting seeping in from the open door to the living room. His skin was ghastly pale against the shadows of the room, and his long limbs too slender to be effectual in a fight. Malfoy didn't have it in him to be terrifying.

Ron's mouth was dry all the same. “No.”

Malfoy smirked. “Good,” he said. And then abruptly fell onto the bed, pulling Ron down with him.

Malfoy didn't kiss like Hermione. Or Lavender, and that was the extent of Ron's less than exhaustive points of reference. Malfoy was impatient, nipping restlessly at Ron's lip and jaw until Ron found Malfoy's lips with his so that he would stop. Malfoy liked it rough, rolling his hips delightedly when Ron shoved him down into the mattress, pushed by Malfoy's little taunting smirks and jibes. But mostly Malfoy was sly, distracting Ron with pinches and twists to his sides and nipples with one hand, and somehow managing to unbutton Ron's robes and grasp their cocks together with the other.

Ron felt fever-hot. “Malfoy,” he gasped, grasping at Malfoy's shirt where it stretched over his shoulders and his arms.

Malfoy reached for Ron's hand, and took it in his. “Like this,” Malfoy instructed, moving Ron's hand so that he was holding both of their hot lengths between his fingers.

Ron managed maybe five, ten pulls of pure brilliance before he came, gasping against Malfoy's mouth and spilling over his fingers. Seconds later, Malfoy followed with a muffled grunt pressed between Ron's neck and his shoulders.

“Fuck,” Ron said, as his heartbeat sluggishly returned to normal. “Fuck. Fuck.”

“Calm down,weasel.” Malfoy was waving his wand, spelling away cooling come and sweat. Satisfied, he flopped down on the bed beside Ron. With his eyes closed and his hair scattered across his forehead and the pillow, he almost looked serene. “It doesn't have to mean anything.”

“Oh,” Ron said again. He surreptitiously snuck a glance at where Malfoy's cock was still hanging out of his trousers, pale and pink and limp. Ron breathed deeply as his heart rate slowed, his body basking in the afterglow. “Okay.”

Malfoy seemed content to lie in silence, the two of them side by side, shoulders and fingers and thighs touching. And then he rolled over so that his body bracketed Ron's. “Well, this is all very nice,” Malfoy drawled. “For Gryffindor. But allow me to show you what we in Slytherin dorm got up to.”

And Malfoy then proceeded to coax a second slow, painfully brilliant orgasm with his finger and lips and tongue.

Demonstration was Malfoy's preferred method of instruction. Particularly on himself, as Ron discovered over the next few weeks, as he found himself tumbling into Malfoy's bed in the evenings more often than not, and then some more on the weekends for good measure.

It was inevitable, then, that Ron started noticing stupid details after spending so much time with Malfoy. The way that Malfoy only really drawled when incredibly pleased, or incredibly obnoxious, or both if he was being incredibly prattish. The way that Malfoy was slow to wake in the mornings, but even slower to go to sleep. The way he'd twitch awake in the middle of the night, sweating profusely, but Ron didn't know a single witch or wizard in their generation that didn't have nightmares. But mostly he noticed that Malfoy liked to bite.

Ron wasn't the only one; George noticed the marks maybe two weeks into Ron and Malfoy's new arrangement, and started teasing him about his new bird. Harry seemed to have noticed something had changed as well, but by the time Harry got around to asking, Ron had wised up and started healing the bruises. Harry's queries were centered around Ron's declining appetite at the Saturday dinners, even though it was only by a course or two, and his fattening waistline.

Panicked, Ron blurted out, “I've been thinking of taking up consulting work for the Aurors.”

Harry had never questioned why Ron had left the Aurors. He knew the official reason that Ron had given to his family and friends: that at the time, George hadn't fully recovered from Fred's loss; that George needed help in the shop; and that he, like Neville, had decided that the Aurors didn't need his help once Fenrir Greyback had been put away in Azkaban. Ron suspected that Harry knew that wasn't all there was to it. But he had never asked and Ron, unwilling to admit that he'd quit because of something as petty as office politics, and maybe a little jealousy if he looked deep, deep within himself, deeper than the bowels of Gringrotts, had never said. But Harry had known that Ron hadn't been happy when he left.

Harry broke out into a broad smile. “That's brilliant. We could really use a consultant on some of the bigger cases we have right now. You might even have your old security clearance.”

Malfoy was absurdly pleased when he found out. “See?” he said smugly as Ron read case files. Malfoy was filtering potions across the workbench. “I was right. I told you that you should consult – ” Malfoy broke off, sighing. “Get away from there, Trevor.”

Ron looked up to see Malfoy gently place the kneazle on the ground, only for him to start clawing his way up Malfoy's robes towards the bench. Tabitha watched indulgently from her position on the floor, lying on the side and flicking her tail.

“Trevor?” Rona asked suspiciously. Vague memories of going to bed in Gryffindor Tower, only to find his bed already occupied by something green and slimy swam slowly to the surface of his memory.

“He is rather toad-like, isn't he?” Malfoy looked at the kneazle make its way up his leg fondly. He let Trevor reach his hip, before slotting a hand under his belly to put him back down on the ground. “He keeps wandering astray into places he shouldn't be. Like the sink. And my underwear drawer.”

Ron resolutely did his best not to think of Malfoy's underwear drawer. By the amused look on Malfoy's face, he knew he was failing. He asked, “So, what, you name him after a Gryffindor pet? Not very Slytherin of you.”

“Why not?” Malfoy looked unconcerned. “This one,” he picked Tabitha up, “I used to call Scarface until Scorpius named her Tabitha.”

“Scarface,” Ron repeated, unimpressed.

Malfoy drew close, pushing the thick fur on her face apart to reveal a small scar on Tabitha's cheek. “And of course she's such an attention whore,” Malfoy said. Tabitha responded in the affirmative, a loud purr rumbling through her chest as Malfoy scratched her chin. “It's the perfect name.”

Ron rolled his eyes, and ate another of Malfoy's cakes.

It was moments during moments like that that his thing with Malfoy, whatever it was, felt weirdly comfortable. Almost enjoyable, if Ron forgot to stop himself from thinking too much about it. It was nice having a warm body to fall into bed with. Someone who had a ready supply of headache potion on hand, and able to read him well enough to wordlessly hand him a vial when he got a dull ache between his temples. It was something he used to have with Hermione, before their respective schedules became a wall between them, and their bickering became too constant and too prolonged to be mistaken for lovers' quarrels.

But of course, nothing nice with Malfoy could last.

On a crisp December morning, when it was freezing everywhere other than under Malfoy's pleasantly warm covers, Malfoy rose onto his elbows and said, “I won't be here next Saturday. I'll be at Azkaban to greet my father when he's released.”

“Okay,” Ron said at first, because it wasn't uncommon for them to cancel on one another. Normally it was Ron who canceled, because he had an important case he was working on, or because the Aurors wanted to show him a particular crime scene. Sometimes it was Malfoy when he had a particularly large order to fulfill and didn't want to be distracted, or was visiting Narcissa Malfoy in her villa in France. But mostly it was Ron, so Ron listened in good grace before he realised, “Wait. Lucius Malfoy? You're going to see him?”

Malfoy smiled, but the corners of his eyes were tight. “That is my father's name, yes.”

“When he gets out of Azkaban,” Ron repeated slowly. A dull fire he had forgotten was rising in his chest.

“Yes,” Malfoy said. He looked annoyed, and made to roll away. “I shouldn't have told you.”

Ron stopped him with a hand around his arm. “What,” Ron said incredulously. “You shouldn't have told me that you were going to meet your Death Eater father as he gets out of Azkaban.”

“Past tense,” Malfoy said tersely. “Death Eaters stopped existing when the Dark Lord fell.”

“Voldemort,” Ron said cruelly, just to see Malfoy flinch. He'd seen Malfoy wake up in the middle of the night enough times, drenched in cold terror and sweat, mumbling something about the Manor and snakes. “He tried to kill Ginny! And he's still a bloody Death Eater.”

Malfoy had seemed to come to some conclusion. He drew himself up, and asked, terribly calm, “What does that make me, then?”

“I hadn't forgotten, Malfoy,” Ron said. The flush of anger had given way to sheer, cold fury. “You tried to poison me, remember?”

“I did, didn't I?” Malfoy said, as calmly as if he were discussing the weather. Malfoy maneuvered them so that his back was to the sheets, Ron looming over him. Ron let him. “What else?”

“I remember you in the Room of Requirement,” Ron said. “Your Death Eater arse with your Death Eater friends.” It hadn't escaped Ron's notice that Malfoy never took his shirt off in front of Ron. Even now he was buttoned firmly at the neck and wrists, while Ron was buck naked. He grasped Malfoy's forearm, and twisted until he gasped. Throughout it all, Malfoy guided Ron's cock between his legs, where he was still soft and open from the night before. “I remember saving you from the fire, you and Goyle, even though you'd have sooner called Hermione a Mudblood than thanked her.”

“I did what I had to do,” Malfoy said. His voice had taken on a soft, rhythmic quality, stroking Ron to full hardness. “I had to make sure we made it out alive, me and my mother and my father. He's family.”

“Some family,” Ron scoffed. Malfoy shuddered as Ron pushed in roughly, but Ron was too far gone. “Hell, he's probably the reason your wife's dead!”

The moment the words left his lips, Ron knew it was a low blow. Ron had said he didn't read the Prophet, but that wasn't entirely true: he didn't read the Prophet, except for those occasions when Hermione showed him an article.

There had been that one time during the summer that marked the end of Rose's Second Year at Hogwarts, and the end of Hugo's First. This was when Hermione and Ron had still been married, and Hermione was still chasing magical beasts and creature welfare, before public interest in her charities had dried up. On the morning in question, Rose and Hugo were sleeping upstairs peacefully in the Ottery St. Catchpole house that Ron still kept today, as Ron and Hermione had breakfast in the early hour to which they were accustomed. Ron had been spreading marmalade on his toast when Hermione gasped, dropped her fork in her egg, and said, “That's where I'm working this week.”

When Ron managed to pull the Daily Prophet far away enough from Hermione's fingers to read over her shoulder, the headline read EXPLOSION AT HIGGLE & PIGGLE LAW FIRM; ONE DEAD, THREE INJURED; NO SUSPECTS FOUND.

The article had been short, but brief, noting that the firm was well known for championing fringe rights and interest groups, like those of squibs and disenfranchised house elves, and that one Astoria Malfoy née Greengrass had been taken to St Mungo's, and passed away in the early hours of the morning.

Ron, busily firecalling Harry to find out if Hermione had been placed on a protected list, hadn't cast a single thought for the Malfoy in the picture accompanying the article, caught outside a private room in St Mungo's, bent over with his arms around his sobbing son.

The Muggle papers reported the incident as a freak gas explosion. One in a million. The Aurors never managed to determine the exact cause of the explosion, or the culprits responsible for Astoria Malfoy's death, but a week later Lucius Malfoy was arrested on suspicion of conspiring to resurrect a Death Eater cell.

Ron froze, and tried to edge away, his cock softening halfway up Malfoy's arse.

Malfoy grasped wildly for his throat, missed, and snagged his shoulder instead. “Don't you dare stop,” he growled. His face was twisted, his eyes and nose made small and scrunched, and an unpleasant mottled red. He slammed his hips alarmingly hard towards Ron's. Ron's dick, traitorous thing that it was, responded eagerly. “Finish what you started, you stupid, fat, ugly arse, with your stupid, fat, ugly mother and – ”

Malfoy always knew how best to get under someone's skin. Ron had caught glimpses of it in Hogwarts, like during the slug incident in Second Year, and Weasley Is Our King in Fifth. But Harry had always stolen Malfoy's attention in school. Ron had never fully appreciated how utterly relentless Malfoy was capable of being, and the way he could make someone's blood burn red hot.

So they fucked, and it wasn't pretty, with Malfoy gasping out insults and jibes, and Ron riding him hard into the mattress the entire way, even as something inside him recoiled.

Afterwards, Malfoy didn't even seem fazed. He just lay there, panting, eyes closed and arms akimbo as was his fashion.

“Weasel,” Malfoy said, and Ron didn't know when their childhood taunts had become terms of affection, but it was all too apparent in that terrible moment. “I need you to leave.”

If Malfoy had been Hermione, or even Lavender, Ron would have known what to do here. He would have apologised, explained he understood what it was that he'd gotten wrong, and maybe grovelled a bit to reinforce how sorry he was.

But Ron hadn't been wrong. Draco Malfoy had been a Death Eater, and he had poisoned Ron, and had called Hermione a Mudblood, and done all manner of other ugly things besides. And if they had the kind of relationship where they apologised to each other, or grovelled, then maybe Ron would have done that. But they hadn't, so he didn't. Ron simply left.

It occurred to him, even as he was pulling on his robes, that leaving was a coward's decision. But in the moment he still felt a lingering anger, at Draco Malfoy and his father and everything that had happened in the war, and a vague sense of guilt that he couldn't explain.

It left him feeling grumpy and out of sorts, and it stayed with him all the way through Saturday dinner, where Harry and his family exchanged baffled looks over the roast, and it stayed with him all through the week, where George had made some vague comment about there always being more fish in the sea and then sent him to count stock in the back room less he scare the customers away, and it stayed with him through to the next Saturday dinner, the last one before the kids came back from Hogwarts for Christmas break.

Dinner wasn't any more pleasant than last week's. Perhaps even less so, since Harry had decided that bringing Hermione would help diffuse the situation. And since Ron wasn't speaking to anyone much, and it was normally Ron that Hermione spoke to, it was up to the rest of the family and Harry to make stilted conversation with Hermione so as to not exclude her from the rest of the table. Save Molly, of course, who had never been particularly close to Hermione even through the marriage, and even less so now.

Ron was very much glad when it was over, and escaped promptly to the living room. His family, sensing danger, scattered, save for Harry and Hermione, both of whom seemed determined to be a burr in his side. Harry and Hermione had scarcely had the time to exchange a look and draw breath to speak, before the floo flared and Luna Lovegood stepped out.

“Hello,” Luna trilled, in that airy voice of hers. Ron hadn't seen Luna in easily five, ten years. She still had the childlike, moonshaped face that Ron remembered from school. She'd eschewed her butterbeer cap necklace for a choker of what looked to be little baby carrots, interwoven by their green stems, and clashing hideously with her canary-yellow robes.

Ron was dumbfounded. Hermione looked even more so. Harry had a slightly shifty expression on his face.

“Hullo, Luna,” Harry said. He ushered her towards a seat, looking wary and nervous. “Is this about the graphorn case? That could have waited 'till Monday.”

“Oh, no,” Luna said. She approached Ron, who tossed Harry an askance look over her shoulder. Harry shrugged helplessly. Luna took Ron's hands in his, and said, very sincerely, “Ronald, I hope that despite whatever has come between you and Draco, that the two of you will be able to overcome it. Draco has been dreadfully upset lately.”

Ron stared at her blankly.

“What!” exclaimed George's voice. Ron turned to see that they had an audience, because of fucking course. George, Ginny, his mum and his dad, and even bloody Percy were peering into the living room from the kitchen. “Malfoy's your bird?”

His mum was wringing her hands in her apron. Her face was pale and drawn. “Malfoy! Ron, how could you. That boy – ”

“Is there a problem with that?” Hermione said, voice surprisingly cold.

“Well, of course we don't have a problem with...I mean, Charlie,” his mum said, even though Ron didn't remember his mum being best pleased when Charlie had announced that he was chucking it in to live in Romania with his dragons and his boyfriend. His mum didn't take kindly to anything that harmed her chances for more grandchildren. “But – Draco Malfoy, that horrid boy. You remember what he did in his sixth year, all those terrible things.”

“Merlin,” Ron said faintly, unwilling to have to defend himself if it meant defending Malfoy by extension. He retreated to the back yard, to the faint background noise of Harry speaking about making amends and new beginnings in his most conciliatory Ministry voice, and the sound of Ginny and George audibly torn between retching and laughing.

He should have apparated away then and there, but the last time he'd just up and left hadn't worked so well. So he stayed. It was Harry that found him, lingering in the back paddock, watching the lumpy shadows that were the garden gnomes grudgingly clearing the snow away from the entrances to their warrens.

“So you've been sleeping with Malfoy,” Harry opened.

There wasn't any point denying it, not now that Luna had hinted as such, and George had gone and put the pieces together. “Yeah.”

“You know what this means, right.”

Ron looked at him bleakly.

Harry's face was carefully blank. “You've lost all right to take the shit out of me over Sixth Year.”

Ron considered it for the half a second it deserved. “No, I don't think so,” he said.

Harry heaved a sigh. “It was worth a shot.” Harry squatted by Ron's side, and handed him a beer. It must have been one of his dad's, filched from his cluttered garage, since dad so rarely drank in front of Ron and his siblings even though they were now fully grown. They drank a little in companionable silence, before, “Seriously? Malfoy?”

Ron pressed his hands to his face, and moaned. “I know.” Harry was curiously silent. When Ron eventually dropped his hands from his face and looked over, Harry was staring out over the yard, face pensive. “Harry?”

Harry shook his head. “I was thinking that I don't really know Malfoy these days.”

Ron leaned back on his hands, and looked at him. “I didn't know you knew Malfoy at all.”

“His boy's in the same year and house as Al,” Harry said, shrugging. “And Andromeda holds a second birthday party for Teddy each year, one just for family. I see Malfoy then, since Teddy always wants me at both.”

“Interesting times?” Ron asked, noticing Harry's grimace.

“Yeah, he's... always been a little peeved at me for something that happened during Sixth Year.”

Ron thought of all the shit that Malfoy had gotten up to in Sixth Year. “You'd think he'd be the last person to get peeved at what anyone did in Sixth year.”

Harry laughed a little stiltedly. “Yeah,” he said, and drained his beer. Harry got up to leave, hesitated, and laid a hand on Ron's shoulder. “I didn't know that Luna was up to.” Ron didn't reply, but something in his expression had Harry explaining, “I told you we were taking on more consultants, right? Particularly ones with specialised knowledge: we've been bringing Luna in on some of our smuggling cases. I thought it was a bit odd that Luna was asking after you, but well. It's Luna. I knew she and Malfoy talked – I always see them together at Teddy's birthday parties, since she and Teddy are third cousins or something – but I didn't put two and two together.”

Ron shrugged. “Yeah. No, it's...fine.” Ron made himself smile ruefully when Harry opened his mouth to speak. He knew Luna was one of the few that Harry counted within his circle of friends. “It was all going to come out eventually, anyway.”

“Yeah,” Harry said. He clapped a hand on Ron's shoulder, and left.

Harry must have gone and told Hermione where Ron was, because she appeared not ten minutes later, just as Ron was contemplating whether or not his toes were going to fall off from frostbite. She looked at him, sitting on the ground with his arse wet from the snow and said, exasperated, “For goodness sake, Ronald.”

In short order, she'd cast enough warming charms that his toes were more likely to melt off than freeze off, pulled Ron's now empty beer bottle to conjure flickering Bluebell Flames. It was only after she'd delicately set the Bluebell Flame filled bottle in the snow that she sat down next to Ron, gathering her robes beneath her.

The Bluebell Flames were incredibly nostalgic. “Merlin, we never should have broken up,” Ron said thickly.

Hermione huffed lightly, knocking her shoulders into his. “You were just as relieved as I was when the divorce papers came through,” she said.

Which was true enough, but still hurt in its own way. “Yeah.”

Hermione, never one to beat around the bush, said without preamble, “Luna's gone home, but that's probably for the best. Fred and Ginny have calmed down a bit, but Molly looks like she's about to cry at the drop of a pin,” Ron winced, “but that's her problem, really. And what happened with you and Malfoy?”

“What?” Ron asked, caught off guard.

Hermione leveled a look at him. “I heard what Luna said. She wouldn't have bothered if it was just a continuation of the bad blood between you from school. Which meant you must have gotten close enough to him to have a fight.”

Merlin, Ron didn't want to do this. “Malfoy had bad blood with everyone.”

“True,” Hermione said, as though she hadn't slapped him in Third Year. “What did you fight over?:

Ron grimaced. “You, actually,” Ron said. He cast his mind back over the fight. “Well, lots of things. About him being a Death Eater, how he called you a Mudblood. How he nearly killed me in Sixth Year.” There was no positive way to spin this next bit, “And I might have said Lucius Malfoy was the reason why his wife died.”

“I see,” is what Hermione had to say. Hermione then said, “I worked with Astoria Greengrass a lot those first few years after Hogwarts.”

“I didn't know,” Ron said blankly.

“No,” Hermione said. She was frowning at the Bluebell Flames. “She was a Slytherin. You weren't much of a fan of anything Slytherin, so I didn't say. But she was one of the few people with a pureblood background going into wizarding law that would listen to what I had to say on House Elf rights. She was nice.”

Ron knew that Astoria Greengrass had been two years below them at Hogwarts. That was the extent of his knowledge. He hadn't really thought about her, or wondered what she was like. He hadn't really wondered at the relationship she had shared with Malfoy, or why Malfoy never brought her name up in conversation.

“I worked with her less once she and Malfoy married,” Hermione was saying. “Not because of any ideological shift; she was just too busy getting married, then getting pregnant, and then raising Scorpius. She always gave me the same address to reach her at whenever we crossed paths, though. I might still have the address somewhere.”

Ron didn't immediately look up the address that Hermione gave him. He could have gone the day after on the Sunday, but for all Ron knew Malfoy was at the Manor with his father. He could have gone during the week, but he spent most of it at work, dodging George's baffled looks as they frantically restocked and sorted orders in the lead up to Christmas. He tried Pernickety Patisserie a few times, but every time he went it was closed and locked. And then Friday rolled around, and it was time to pick up the kids from the Hogwart's Express. Malfoy and Scorpius were noticeably absent from King's Cross.

“Is Scorpius staying over at Hogwarts for Christmas?” Ron asked Rose. They were at his house, he and Rose and Hugo, since Hermione had been too busy with work to pick up the kids. He leaned against the doorway to Rose's room, watching her unpack.

“Scorpius?” Rose pulled her massive potions book from a bag no wider than her foot, flicked through a few pages, and then dropped it back in. “No. His dad picked him straight up from Hogwarts so that they could portkey from Hogsmeade. He said during Potions that he was going to visit his grandma in France.”

Rose paused, and looked up sharply. “Why are you asking?”

“I might have pissed his father off and need to talk to him,” Ron admitted slowly. Rose didn't appear mollified. “Did Scorpius say when he was coming back?”

“Wednesday,” Rose answered, looking at him suspiciously. So Ron went to see Malfoy on Thursday after work.

The address that Hermione had given him was to an unfamiliar London suburb. It took Ron an hour to drive there, fighting every step of the way with the mechanical talking map system that Hermione's dad had gifted him a few years earlier. It led him, more or less, to a quiet Muggle suburb not quite on the outskirts of London, but not precisely London proper either. Ron got out of the car, looked around at the neat houses and their neat gardens, marched up to Malfoy's door and knocked briskly.

Pansy Parkinson opened the door.

Ron didn't know why he wasn't surprised to see her. Slytherins were always good at traveling in packs. Parkinson blanched, and moved to shut the door. Reflexes honed in years of being an Auror meant that Ron managed to insinuate his shoe between the door jamb and door before it could close in his face.

“Go away, Weasley,” Parkinson snapped. Her face was as pug-like as ever, and her black hair still in its short bob, but a general abuse of hair potions and overly red lipstick meant that the effect looked deliberate, rather than the awkward result of a parent's well-meaning intentions. Parkinson pulled on the door ineffectually. “No one asked for you.”

“Hello Parkinson,” Ron said. They were at an impasse. Parkinson couldn't reach for her wand without taking a hand off the door handle. Ron was at too awkward an angle to easily widen the door opening. He probably could overpower Parkinson if he really wanted to, but that wasn't exactly auspicious way to enter a house. “I'm not moving. Gryffindor, remember?”

“Don't care,” Parkinson retorted. “I'll call the Aurors. I know you've been playing consultant for them, but you're certainly not one now.”

Ron played his trump card. “Yeah, but if you call the Aurors and mention my name, they'll probably send in Harry as courtesy to me.”

The widening of Parkinson's eyes told him he'd won. “He's Head Auror,” she protested, but it was weak. “He has better things to do than chase after his twat of a friend.”

“You sure?” Ron grinned. It wasn't a nice grin.

Parkinson swore, and let go of the door handle with ill grace. “Suit yourself,” she snapped.

Malfoy's house was far nicer than the rooms he kept above his shop. The front door opened into a corridor. Where the wooden flooring in the rooms above Pernickety Patisserie were dull and mid-toned, here they were a dark, rich brown. The walls were plaster, but painted a lovely calming cream, and trimmed with pale blue where it met the ceiling and the floor.

Ron was faintly aware of Parkinson saying, “Don't move,” and disappearing further into the house, but he was too distracted by the framed photographs arranged alongside the corridor wall. They were entirely Muggle, all of them showing a static moment caught in time. The larger frames were professional pieces, obviously stylised black and white photographs of Malfoy with Astoria and Scorpius, one for almost every year of Scorpius' life. Artfully arranged around those were smaller, colour photographs, candid shots inexpertly and shakily taken of Malfoy and his family living their lives. In all of them Astoria was missing, and Ron made his way along the wall, tracing the existence that Astoria had lived.

Gradually, he heard the sound of voices growing louder, until his path took him to an open doorway. Through it was a small living room, made up of couches pushed against the wall, and a long, low lying cabinet, upon which sat a giant blocky machine that Ron knew from Hermione to be a telly. In front of the telly sprawled Scorpius. To his left was a boy that Ron didn't recognise. To his right, lying idly on his front and with his fingers tangled in Tabitha's fur, was Albus.

Scorpius noticed him first. He straightened with an exclaimed, “Mr Weasley!”

Albus shot up, obviously startled. Tabitha, disgruntled that her source of attention had been taken away, made her way to Ron, mewing plaintively. “Uncle Ron,” Albus said nervously.

“Hello Scorpius, Al,” Ron said. He bent down and scratched Tabitha behind the ears so that she'd stop pawing at his leg. He nodded at the last boy. “We haven't met.”

The boy was introduced as Marcus. “A friend from primary school,” Scorpius said. He shook his head slightly, trying to convey something.

Primary school, Scorpius had said. Wizarding children didn't go to primary schools. Now that he looked closely, all three boys were dressed in casual Muggle dress. Parkinson hadn't been wearing robes either, but a smart blouse and dress pants. Ron was suddenly rather glad he'd gone for a shirt and trousers himself.

If Ron had any doubts the boy was Muggle, they dissipated when he and Marcus exchanged greetings: Marcus was polite, but there was not a flicker of recognition in his eyes when Scorpius introduced them.

Trying to wrap his head around the idea of Scorpius having a Muggle friend, Ron asked Albus, “Does your dad know you're here?”

“He knows I'm at a friend's place,” Albus said shiftily.

Marcus laughed and said, “Rebel!” Scorpius, looking a little awkward, laughed and shoved at Marcus' shoulder.

“How'd you get here, then?” Ron asked.

“Uh. Ms Parkinson drove me,” Albus said. His eyes swung back and forth as he frantically lied. Behind him, Scorpius exaggeratedly mouthed floo powder.

As though summoned, Parkinson appeared by Ron's shoulder. “Sorry for intruding, boys,” Parkinson said sweetly. She didn't sound sorry in the slightest. Her nails had been filed into tiny, sharp points, as Ron discovered when they dug into the crook of his elbow. “I'm just going to steal away Weasley here.”

As Parkinson pulled Ron away, he heard Marcus say, “What does your school have against first names?”

Parkinson took him further down the corridor and around the corner to a set of stairs. “Talk fast, Weasley,” she said.

Ron shook her off. “I don't owe you an explanation,” Ron said coolly. Aside from Malfoy's anecdotes, the last time he'd heard of Parkinson was when she wanted to hand Harry off to Voldemort.

Parkinson crossed her arms. “Don't care,” she said tightly. “What did you say to Draco? He's been in a terrible mood all month.”

Ron snorted. “Like hell am I telling you. Look, are you going to let me go up and apologise to Malfoy or not.”

Parkinson paused. “Apologise?” she said slowly.

“Yeah?” Ron said, suddenly uncomfortable. He'd had enough time away from Malfoy to think about what it was that they had been doing. He knew that he missed Malfoy's food, and his body in bed, and a not insignificant part of him missed Malfoy's humour, and how he seemed to know all sorts of things about their year level that Ron did not. He still wasn't sure why Malfoy had been so upset when all Ron had said was mostly true. Hermione had looked at him a little sadly when he told her so, but in the end agreed that apologising was a start.

Parkinson had her hand to her head, like she was feeling for a fever. “Draco, you idiot,” she groaned softly to herself. To Ron, she said, “Up the stairs. Last door at the end of the corridor. Don't you dare fuck this up,” and promptly flounced off.

Parkinson's instructions led him up a wooden staircase into another corridor not unlike the one downstairs. The walls were inset with closed doors, except the one on the far end, which was open just a crack. When Ron pushed his way through, he found himself in a medium sized study lined with bookshelves and a fireplace, burning away merrily, and tall enough to floo through without stooping

Mafoy sat at a heavy wooden desk in front of the fireplace, surrounded by scrolls of parchment. He had looked up at the sound of the door opening. “Weasel,” he said coldly. “Did you not learn how to knock growing up in that barn of yours?”

Malfoy wasn't trying very hard if he was reusing insults from school. “I'd never make it through the door if you knew I was coming,” Ron said, and invited himself into one of the seats in front of Malfoy's desk. He had to lift Trevor out of the way first, picking him up and resettling him on his lap. Trevor yawned widely, and sniffed his hand in greeting, but curled up and went back to sleep.

Malfoy didn't look terribly upset, Ron noted. Pale, maybe, and a little twitchy, but Malfoy was generally pale and twitchy, when he wasn't pale and drawling. Malfoy was also pointedly ignoring him as he read his scrolls. Bored, Ron reached for one of the scrolls within reach, and nearly fell out of his seat. “What the hell!”

Malfoy snatched the scroll out of his hand. “I'll be taking that back now,” he said snidely.

Ron snatched it back, and scooted back into his seat so that Malfoy couldn't reach. He reread the figures on the parchment. “I thought the reason you had the potions business was because you couldn't afford to keep the shop on its own,” he accused. The parchment was a Gringrotts statement that listed Malfoy's investments and business interests, which included but were clearly not limited to his potions
business and his shop. Each line had a number indicating how many galleons it brought in, minus expenses adding up to a subtotal at the bottom with more zeros than Ron cared to count.

“Yes,” Malfoy said. “The shop that I am not funding with Malfoy money.” When Ron continued looking offended, he said, “You didn't honestly think I'd have to work a day in my life if I wanted to, did you?”

Chagrined, Ron muttered something about reparations.

“Yes, well. The Malfoy coffers are quite a bit deeper than that, you'll find.”

Ron tossed the scroll back onto the desk, disgusted. “So, what, you lied about everything?”

Malfoy sneered. “Didn't you enjoy the production? I would have thought you'd rather enjoyed the thought of a Malfoy working two jobs to earn a living.”

“I enjoyed your cakes,” Ron said.

“Please,” Malfoy scoffed. “You only ever tolerated my company because I was convenient.”

Malfoy was deliberately riling him up again. Ron rubbed a hand across his face. “Look,” he said sharply. “All I came to do was to say sorry for being such a git about your father, even though I think he's a complete prat, and for saying... all that other stuff.” Ron petered off. Malfoy was looking at him as though he'd started vomiting slugs again. “I'm just gonna...leave...now.”

Malfoy didn't seem inclined to speak. Ron got up, gently replacing Trevor back on the seat.

“Weasel,” Malfoy said, just as Ron made it to the door. Ron turned back. Malfoy was staring very hard at the open scroll in front of him, eyes a little glazed over. “I didn't mean to call your mother ugly. She's still fat, that's undeniable, but I... I was very glad when she killed Aunt Bellatrix.”

Coming from Malfoy, that was as good as an apology. “Thank you,” Ron said awkwardly, and left.

Parkinson pounced on him the moment he closed the door behind him, digging her sharp nails into his arm and pulling him into a nearby room. “What did he say?”

Parkinson had pulled him into what was obviously Malfoy's bedroom. A massive four poster bed took up the bulk of the room, the posts intricately carved with dragons and griffins and other magical beasts. An entire wall was dedicated to photographs. Unlike the ones downstairs, these were entirely magical. Ron, distracted by a photo in which Malfoy wiped flour disapprovingly off a tiny Scorpius as a hand in the corner of the picture shot out to steal a cupcake, said, “He apologised for calling my mum ugly.”

When Ron's eyes had had their fill of looking around Malfoy's room and made their way back to Parkinson, she had her hands on her hips. “And?” she demanded.

“We talked.”

“You talked,” she said dubiously.

“Yes,” Ron said. “We talked. We had a conversation. Using words, and not just echoing what the other person said.”

Parkinson ignored the slight. “Well, then,” she said. And, because Slytherins made not a lick of sense, she dragged him back downstairs and into the living room with the telly and the boys. There she bullied the boys into showing Ron the machine they'd been using, which turned out to be some kind of Inferi killing stimulation.

“What the hell,” Ron complained when Parkinson, rather than going for the Inferi as they were meant to, killed him with a wooden club to the head for the umpteenth time.

Parkinson smiled insincerely with lots of teeth.

Parkinson made him stay for dinner as well, where Scorpius and Marcus carried most of the conversation, talking about Muggle friends and fashions he didn't know. Parkinson chimed in occasionally, Albus rarely, Malfoy and Ron almost not at all. Ron spent most of dinner sneaking glances at Malfoy as he kept his eyes fixed upon his son.

Marcus's mother came to pick him up after dinner. By then, Malfoy had gone and shut himself off upstairs, so Ron was treated to the sight of Parkinson interacting with a Muggle as if it were something she did every other day.

“That didn't go as badly as it could have done,” Parkinson said once Marcus had left. And then she kicked both Ron and Albus out, ignoring Scorpius' protests.

Ron ended up driving Albus back into London. “I didn't know you were friends with Scorpius,” he said as he pulled out of Malfoy's driveway.

Ron saw Albus grimace in the corner of his eye. “As much as he lets me,” Albus complained. “Scorpius has it in his head that if he doesn't talk to anyone outside of class, he won't attract attention.”

“I thought Malfoys liked attention,” Ron said. But even as he was saying it, he knew it wasn't true. Malfoy didn't seem to do much of anything from what Ron could see, other than brew potions, and bake pastries, and visit his mum.

“Not Scorpius,” said Albus. “Took me forever to talk him into trying out for Seeker, even though everyone knew his dad had gotten him the new Cleansweep. He point blank refused unless I tried out as well.”

“Maybe he thought he'd be a rubbish seeker.”

“No,” Albus refuted. “He flies by himself all the time, and he really knows the game. He's brilliant! It's probably 'cause – um.” Albus was frowning at something outside the window. “He doesn't want to be mistaken for his father.”

Ron had an uncomfortable memory of his words to Rose as he sent her off to First year.

“I thought he and Rose were friends, though” Ron said after a while. “They talk, don't they?”

“What?” Albus sounded confused. “In Potions class, maybe,” he said, and lapsed into silence all through the rest of Ron's drive back into London. The car he left in a Wizarding underground car park near the Leaky Cauldron; Albus he watched floo back home from the Leaky. And then he took himself home, since Hermione had Hugo and Rose for the night.

If Ron had expected anything to change for having apologised to Malfoy, he was sorely mistaken. No owls came. Pernickety Patisserie remained closed, but now Ron knew that Malfoy could afford to never open shop again.

Ron didn't see Malfoy until the kids had gone back to school, and another STOUT meeting was called for January. George was busy, having been called off to Hogwarts: Fred and James had never managed to let firecrackers loose in the Great Hall, but they had had great success at enchanting all of the tea leaves in the Divination classroom to clump together in the shape of a hare once drained and swirled.

The meeting was a general meeting, which meant it was somewhere between an avenue for general catching up with fellow shopkeepers, and an outlet for the airing of grievances. Ron had honestly forgotten about the supposed break-ins from September until Hodge got up, and started ranting about Death Eaters breaking into shops, and vandalising the walls.

Anti-Malfoy sentiment had been on the up since Lucius Malfoy had been released from Azkaban, and started throwing Galleons around as though it were the pre-war days. It was being disguised as disgust for the Death Eaters and all they had done during the war, but it was quite obviously a direct reaction in response to Lucius Malfoy; Ron had started idly perusing the Daily Prophet before shredding them for the pygmy puff pens. Judging by the looks being directed at Malfoy, Ron wasn't the only one who had noticed. Malfoy ignored them all, instead regarding Hodge with a cool expression.

Hodge had started a particularly flowery explanation of how exactly Death Eaters were benefiting from signing unrelated names on shop windows with Unerasable Ink when Ron snorted loudly before he could stop himself. Hodge stopped mid-sentence, looking indignant.

“This is highly irregular,” Hodge blustered. “Mr Weasley, this is a very serious issue.”

Ron could barely contain his scorn. “I don't think Death Eaters care about whether shops in Broadside Lane have pristine windows or not,” Ron said, “on account of the fact that Voldemort is dead.”

There was the round of titters and gasps that saying Voldemort's name always inspired, even now. Hodge paled, then turned red, but sat himself down shakily with a harrumph. When Ron cast his eyes around the pub, he caught Malfoy looking at him oddly.

After the meeting, Ron caught Malfoy before he could disappear into the floo. “Truce?” Ron said hurriedly.

Malfoy still had that odd, considering look on his face. “Truce,” he said, but flood away before they could shake on it.

But Pernickety Patisserie was open when Ron dropped by during lunch the next day, and Malfoy's wards parted to let him through when Ron ventured a visit after work.

It wasn't as though they instantly fell back into the easy evening rhythm that they used to have, where Ron would work on case files in Malfoy's kitchen as he baked and brewed and prattled. Lucius Malfoy as a topic was off limits. But so was Ron's mum, so fair was fair. Not that they spoke much, to begin with. Mostly they just fucked, in hot, bruising tangles of limbs.

Gradually, Ron's family came around to the idea of Ron sleeping with Malfoy. George stopped giving him askance looks, and said, “If someone in the family had to shack up with a Malfoy, better you than Perce,” as Ron spluttered. Mum stopped looking like she was going to cry. Dad started asking after Malfoy at dinner. Harry and Hermione started dropping into Malfoy's shop to show their support. Rose and Hugo, both of whom Ron and Malfoy sat down during the Easter break with Scorpius, hadn't cared beyond the fact that they had a new source of treats. Scorpius claimed to have known all along.

“Or at least since Christmas,” Scorpius amended, when Rose expressed her disbelief.

Slowly, Malfoy thawed. Ron learned that he hadn't married Astoria for love, but “it wasn't precisely arranged either,” Malfoy told him one night, when they'd been drinking in the empty rooms above his shop for lack of anything better to do. “We got along well enough, and thought it safer than waiting to see what kind of partner our family would sooner trap us with. And I must have loved her in the end, to miss her so badly”

Taking up baking had been Astoria's idea, when Malfoy had completed his Potions Master but unable to find employment, and spent his time rolling around the house and complaining. He'd eventually started the mail order potions business, but stuck to the baking, incorporating little potions into the cakes so that Astoria would have something to eat and alleviate her headaches while she worked. The shop had been Scorpius' idea, though, everything from the layout down to the name.

Ron learned why exactly Harry was convinced that Malfoy still hated him when Draco took his shirt off, and showed him the Sectumsempra scar twisted across his chest.

“I'm not actually mad at Potter still,” Malfoy said. “At the time, I was furious. I would have hurt him if I'd been – capable.” Malfoy's breath hitched as Ron traced the scar with his fingernail.

Malfoy was sprawled beneath him, in the way he insisted made him feel coveted, but always gave Ron guilty memories of roughly fucking into him. Ron was sufficiently distracted by the way Malfoy's hair spilled across the pillows, before he realised, “If you don't care, why do you let Harry think you do?”

Malfoy was smirking. “Because I can guilt him into buying Teddy better gifts,” he said, and maybe it was a sign of change that Ron had changed when he just shook his head and said, “Slytherins.”

And, when Ron woke up in the morning with Malfoy beside him, he learned that the Dark Mark had faded with disuse, and resembled nothing more than a mottled, grey patch of scar tissue.

In return, Ron told Malfoy stories about growing up as the unremarkable child in a family of seven, and then becoming the unremarkable sidekick. He told stories about their adventures at Hogwarts, he and Harry and Hermione, the ones that earned them enough points to snag the House Cup that they'd never really explained to the rest of the school. And then the ones that didn't earn them house points, but had been made nostalgic by the passage of time. The look on Malfoy's face when Ron told him about polyjuicing into Crabbe and Goyle in Second Year to grill him about the Heir of Slytherin was priceless.

He told Malfoy about that last year they had spent looking for Horcruxes, stories that none of them had
ever shared to the media. Stories like how he had run off on Harry and Hermione, and the low thrum of guilt in his stomach that he felt even now.

Malfoy shook his head. “You came back in the end,” he said softly, lazily, as though there had never been any doubt that he would. And Ron found they had a new, tentative rhythm, where sometimes Ron would work while Malfoy prattled, or Malfoy worked as Ron rattled restlessly around his shop kitchen, or his London study, or wherever it was that Malfoy was working. If they were feeling particularly maudlin they would drink, or if they didn't feel like anything they would just loll around, talking, or simply not talk at all and just lie in companionable silence. Sometimes they fucked, and sometimes they did not. Mostly they just did whatever they felt like. But it wasn't until summer came back around that Ron felt they had reached a sort of peace.

It was a Friday, and Ron was off work. Hogwarts letters had arrived that morning. Scorpius had been named captain for the Slytherin Quidditch team, and seemed pleased about it. He was flying looping circles in Ron's back yard as Rose circled him, making jibes about how he was going to fall behind in his coursework. Hugo was lying on the grass below them, passed out blissfully with a stomach full of cake, bookended on either side by Tabitha and Trevor. Malfoy, who had finally admitted that his shop did more trading by owl than by foot traffic and had taken to half days, had arrived some time after noon and taken over Ron's kitchen as he was wont to do.

Afterwards, when Hermione got off work, she would join them for dinner, because Ron and Malfoy were trialling this new thing where Malfoy tried to be friends with Ron's friends, and Ron tried to be friends with Malfoy's. Afterwards, Hermione would take Hugo and Rose for the night, and Ron and Scorpius would relocate to Malfoy's London house, where Parkinson was no doubt lying in wait with whatever Muggle game had taken her fancy this week.

Ron knew precisely where everyone was, and what it was that they were doing.

“What are you smiling for,” Malfoy said waspishly. Malfoy was standing beside Ron's sink, wand in hand as he set little bowls of cake batter to beating themselves enthusiastically. Malfoy had taken to stockpiling Ron's cupboard whenever he was over, in the hopes was that Ron would one day turn up to his mum's Saturday dinner with his appetite absolutely ruined. This was despite the fact that Malfoy absolutely hated Ron's oven. He complained loudly that his cakes came out too pale every single time.

Ron swiped a biscuit as it was cooling on a cake tray. Malfoy narrowed his eyes at him, his cheeks flushed pink underneath a smear of white flour. Ron said, “Absolutely nothing.”