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Harry knew he’d done something. Draco’s behaviour over the last 24 hours or so was proof enough of that. The problem was, he had no idea what it was that he had supposedly done to piss his boyfriend off.
They had been perfectly fine at dinner last night. He’d cooked cottage pie, a throwback to their time at Hogwarts, and they had followed it up with a treacle tart that Draco had bought on his way back from Gringotts. It had been a wonderfully normal evening until they’d curled up together on the couch.
Draco had grabbed a book as he usually did to read while Harry went through the case notes of his still active enquiries. He was currently into true crime stories, finally something that Harry found interesting as well, rather than regency era dramas or Shakespeare. Harry had even picked that one up off the coffee table earlier in the day, getting thoroughly engrossed in the retelling of the horrific crimes, worse than most of what he had dealt with as an Auror.
It was when Draco opened the book, already curled into Harry’s side that things changed. Draco had moved as far away from Harry as was possible to do so on the sofa and, when he looked to see what was wrong, Draco had replaced the contentment on his face with his old, sharp Malfoy mask, refusing to come out of it.
“Is everything okay, Draco?” Harry had asked, puzzled.
“I’m sure somebody thinks it is,” Draco had muttered back, flipping quickly through the pages of his book, smoothing down the corners of all the pages.
“All right then…” Harry had stared at his boyfriend a moment longer, unable to pick out any hints in his face, resolving to let Draco work through whatever it was and come back to him.
Except the mask had stayed in place even while they got ready for bed. The only words Draco had spoken were “Somebody needs to do the laundry tomorrow,” when he walked out of their bathroom before climbing into bed.
“Sure, love,” Harry had said, rolling onto his side to wrap around Draco’s slim frame.
But Draco had scooted away from him with a grunt and refused to open his eyes, even though Harry knew Draco had felt the bed shift as he leant up on an elbow to look confusedly down at his boyfriend.
“Somebody has an early meeting with the Minister tomorrow,” he had muttered, and Harry knew he would not be seeing contented Draco again before they went to sleep.
“I know love,” he had sighed, placing a kiss on Draco’s temple and rolling over.
In the morning, despite Harry being the one who had an early meeting with Kingsley, Draco seemed to have already left the house. Although not without leaving a few notes.
“Somebody drank all the milk yesterday.”
“Granger is still waiting for somebody to rsvp.”
“Ginevra says somebody still owes her a Firebolt.”
Harry had put each of them in his pocket and remembered to stick the laundry in before he flooed to the Ministry.
He didn’t hear anything from Draco all morning and, when he hadn’t turned up to see if Harry was free for lunch, Harry had given it half an hour before walking down to the archives to see where his boyfriend was.
An older fellow called Kirk was on the service desk and disappeared into the dark rows of shelves to look for Draco when Harry had asked for him, only to return with a frown on his face.
“Sorry, Sir. He said, ‘somebody else should take the initiative for once’”. Harry’s mouth gaped open as he comprehended that Draco was still pissed off at him. He turned slowly to go, still half expecting Draco to show himself, but Kirk cleared his throat before he could step towards the door.
“He also said, Sir, that ‘somebody should have pressed that shirt’.”
“Oh, for goodness sake,” Harry had thrown his hands up in exasperation, not caring that he looked like an idiot when he shouted into the gloom, “Draco, I’m sorry for whatever the bloody hell I did, alright. Please just talk to me.”
He waited, holding his breath for close to a minute before letting out a frustrated groan and marching back up to his own office. Not long after he’d found the focus to start working again, a violet memo floated through the gap underneath his closed door and up onto his desk.
“Somebody should already know what they did.”
Harry screamed to his empty office and faceplanted his desk, pressing his glasses painfully into the bridge of his nose.
When he got home from work, later than he should have, Draco had already left another note in the kitchen but was nowhere to be found.
“Somebody still hasn’t replaced the milk.”
“Well no shit, Draco,” Harry grumbled to himself.
It was the last straw. He couldn’t take the silence and the snide notes for one more hour. He was going to have this fixed before they went to sleep.
Before Draco got back from the shops, Harry was going to draw his boyfriend a bath, light those candles he knew he liked, and bring a bottle of the Cotes du Rhone Narcissa had gifted them up from the cellar.
As soon as he heard Draco finish putting the groceries away, Harry lifted him up bridal style, a squeal of surprise breaking through the mask Draco had put in place the night before, and carried his boyfriend upstairs to the candlelit bathroom.
“For you, love,” he said, kissing Draco’s temple before setting his feet down on the floor and handing him a glass of the wine. “Relax, please.”
He walked out of the bathroom, smiling at the astonishment he could see on Draco’s face.
While Draco was in the bath, hopefully doing as he’d requested and relaxing, Harry went about lighting the candles in the bedroom and bringing Draco’s favourite chocolates up from the secret stash he kept behind the pan draw in the pantry.
When he heard Draco start moving around on the other side of the bathroom door again, Harry knelt on the bed so that the first thing Draco laid eyes on when he opened the door was him, naked and apologetic, palms placed facing upwards on his thighs, green eyes pleading and sorrowful as they met silver.
“Well,” Draco drawled, smirking as he stalked towards Harry, stroking his cheek with his thumb. “I suppose this will do.”
Afterwards, as they lay stroking light fingertips over each other’s chests, pressing feather-light kisses to shoulders, jaws and closed eyelids, Harry sighed and asked what he needed to know.
“What did I do, love?”
Draco just chuckled deep in his chest. “You read my book.”
“Am I not allowed to read your book?” Harry enquired, lifting his head to study Draco’s face, both of them quirking an eyebrow.
“Not when you’re a brute who cracks the spine and dog-ears several pages, you’re not.”