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Harry Potter, a confirmed bachelor, was perfectly fine with his life.
Every day, he awoke at a random time, usually less than ten minutes before he needed to be sat at his Auror desk, and every morning was a different kind of chaos that involved lost socks and cursing at inanimate objects and forgetting to pull on his pants before his trousers. Every morning, Ron watched him come through the door, late and dishevelled, and every morning, Ron looked a little more worried than the last. Harry did not understand why. There was nothing wrong with hating routine, and so far, their boss had only reprimanded him for his lateness five times. Six, if he counted the time he was called into the office for spelling the hallway Christmas tree to burp loudly every time someone walked past it and the conversation had veered into discussing his chronic lateness. It was all perfectly fine.
Every evening, Harry came home to a night of quality telly. He cleared a spot for himself on the sofa, pushing aside dirty clothes and Quidditch magazines, and ate nutritious meals of salt and vinegar crisps and sugar-loaded fizzy drinks while Mary Berry praised some contestant’s flan. Some nights, just to shake things up a bit, he fell asleep on the sofa instead of in his bed and woke up the next day with a crick in his neck. Luna, who had always been a little strange, suggested he might want to get rid of the plipperblongles weighing him down. He smiled at her fondly when she did. There was really nothing wrong with his life.
Had it not been for Hermione, things might have gone on like this in the perfectly normal life of Harry Potter, a person who was, by all accounts, doing perfectly fine.
Hermione had never been in the habit of worrying. She had also never been in the habit of softly suggesting that change might be necessary. No, Hermione had always acted when action was required. And, taking a long, hard look at the life of Harry Potter, confirmed bachelor and perfectly adequate human being, she had apparently decided that action was urgently required.
And in the aftermath of said action, Harry, who had always been perfectly content living alone, found himself on the deck of the Spellbinding Circe , a large cruise ship hosting the Sorcerous Singles’ Colossal Christmas Cruise.
There was nothing about the ship that appealed to Harry even in the slightest. It was large, for one. Which might not have been such a problem had it not been in the middle of the sea and simultaneously crowded with people. There was no comfortable telly, no can of Irn Bru to call dinner, no early-morning sock hunt.
The first morning, Harry woke up at 7:52 and jumped out of bed in a panic before remembering Robards was not awaiting him at 8 o’clock sharp. He stood in the middle of his cabin, in his pants and a misbuttoned shirt, with a sock in one hand and a toothbrush in the other, slightly confused by this turn of events. He didn’t even bother to take his shirt off before crawling back into bed. Why would he bother being awake when there was clearly no point to it?
By late afternoon, Harry couldn’t sleep anymore. By early evening, he had given up on his original plan of staying in his cabin throughout the entire week on account of being bored out of his mind. He pulled on a pair of joggers and went for a stroll on the deck. He was not busy sulking at the fact that the sea around him was very wet and very large and entirely unescapable, therefore, he wasn’t at all startled when he heard a voice call his name.
“What in the name of Merlin are you doing here?” the voice asked as if it wasn’t perfectly natural for him, an attractive bachelor, to find himself on this fine boat in the middle of the sea, on a cruise meant for wizards such as himself.
Harry turned around.
Malfoy was wearing a dove grey shirt and beige shorts. Harry did not notice that they were impeccably pressed. Harry did not notice that the light grey linen of the shirt brought out the fine gold of Malfoy’s hair and the quicksilver of his eyes. Harry most certainly did not notice the solid outline of Malfoy’s shoulder under the fabric.
“I like the sea,” he answered with impeccable wit.
“You… like the sea? The sea, Potter? You’ve gone and booked a singles’ cruise just to have a good stare at the sea? Because you like it? What kind of ridiculous answer is that?”
Of course, Malfoy didn’t understand his superior intellect. Harry huffed. Malfoy had always been a thorn in his side. A thorn with porcelain-smooth skin and a very desirable dip at the base of his throat, but a thorn all the same.
“Piss off,” he said, eloquently.
“Oh no, Potter. Oh, I’m not pissing off as you so delicately put it. Pansy signed me on this stupid cruise, and you’re the first entertaining thing I’ve come across so far. You’re not getting rid of me that easily. Come, I’ll buy you a drink and you can tell me all about how much you love the sea.”
Harry followed Malfoy. He had nothing else to do after all. It was not that he couldn’t find anything clever to retort. And it especially wasn’t that Malfoy was gorgeous and warm and made Harry feel like the sun had settled behind his ribs and was warming his blood. It was just the best way Harry could find to stave off boredom.
As Harry sipped his first drink, he told Malfoy about his idiot colleagues and his absolute cretin of a boss.
As they ordered another drink, Malfoy described his own disgrace of a boss. Harry laughed, and commiserated, and called Malfoy Draco . Malfoy didn’t seem to notice. Harry decided not to think too much about it.
After drink number three, they veered on the subject of annoying friends meddling with their lives.
“Pansy—the absolute cow—she thinks I need to loosen up a bit. Learn to live and enjoy myself. She simply refuses to acknowledge that there is nothing wrong with getting up at 5:48 sharp every morning and coming home at the exact same time every night,” Draco said.
“Hermione is the same,” Harry said. “She did not approve of my morning routine and her answer was to stick me on this seafaring prison. Is a man not allowed to enjoy a bit of spontaneity in his daily life every now and then?”
They ordered a fourth drink and everything went to shit.
“Your hair is gorgeous,” Harry blurted out sometime during their fifth drink.
“You have no idea how obsessed I was with you when we were in school,” Draco confessed as he swallowed the last sips of his sixth glass.
“I’d really like to kiss you,” Harry admitted before they got started on their seventh drink. Draco did not answer. Instead, Draco fisted his hands in Harry’s crumpled, misbuttoned shirt and pulled Harry flush against him.
They did not finish their seventh drink.
They also did not leave Harry’s cabin for the entirety of the cruise.
At the end of the cruise, when they were finally released onto dry land, they saw no reason to change that, and it was decided that Draco would come to live in Harry’s flat, much to the satisfaction of both Hermione and Pansy, the meddling cows.
And every subsequent day, at 5:48 sharp, Draco got up. He kissed Harry’s forehead and closed the door behind him. At 7:54, as Draco arranged his cashmere scarf artfully around his neck in front of the mirror, Harry usually came barreling into the living room, half-dressed and doing something as ridiculous as trying to brush both his hair and his teeth with one hand while he tried to pull on his trousers with the other. Draco kissed him goodbye and Apparated to his ministry desk a good half an hour in advance.
“Why don’t you wake him up when you get up?” Hermione asked Draco once in the Ministry hallway, “You really ought to. You know he’s always late for work.”
“Why, Granger, I was under the impression I had agreed to move in with my boyfriend, not my four-year-old son,” Draco replied, and he Apparated back to their flat, at the exact same time he did every day. He proceeded to make himself the exact same cup of the exact same tea he always drank when he came home and sat down in his perfectly tidy armchair with a book as he waited for Harry.
Harry made it through the Floo at half-past seven and immediately collapsed upon the five plastic bags and three empty cups that were littering the sofa.
“Pansy asked me why I don’t force you to get out more, today,” he said as he turned on the telly. “She really does seem very disturbed by the fact you like a routine.”
“I thought she might yell at you about it at some point,” Draco replied, lazily turning a page of his book.
“I told her to piss off,” Harry said as he opened his can of Irn Bru, “I like you the way you are, routine and all.”
Draco smiled fondly, and they both settled into a comfortable, domestic silence, interrupted only by Fiona Bruce fawning over late 19th-century pottery.
That night, Harry Potter ate a packet of crisps, and Draco Malfoy ate rice with steamed vegetables and chicken because it was Thursday, and that was what he always ate on Thursdays. Draco did the dishes, and Harry lost the empty packet somewhere under a sofa cushion and could not find it again. It didn’t matter to either of them. After a cosy evening of reading and telly and quiet conversation, they fell asleep entwined in their bed, happy and content and very much in love.
Their life was, indeed, absolutely fine.