___
It was a fairly early morning at the manor, Draco was sitting in the kitchen with his cup of tea, everything being just as it had been every single morning ever since Potter had gotten to the manor. There was comfort in the routine, something to keep them both grounded in this very unusual situation that they both just had to learn how to live with.
To Draco’s big surprise, he had found that he minded Potter’s company less and less, even finding it in himself to find it enjoyable at times. It helped a lot that Potter had insight into things that Draco knew that he would never have been allowed to learn on his own. It made it seem all the more possible that he would actually be able to help with the case.

_________________

The longer Harry had spent at the Manor, the less necessary he had found it to fill every possible silence. The pauses in their interactions no longer felt awkward, the tentative familiarity of sharing a workspace seeping into the time they spent together off the clock. Silence was no longer a sign of hostility, Harry had come to learn. He had finally experienced that over the course of the passing weekend, time spent apart but together. So, on his second Monday there, Harry silently flipped through that morning's Prophet without any remorse, even though Malfoy was sat across from him.
Not one to entertain himself much with the public news cycle, Harry had been flipping through it rather inattentively, only pausing to read a sporadic paragraph now and then. He had spent the weekend giving Kreacher's choice of Russian litterature another go, and at the prospect of reading more case files within the hour, Harry picked at the paper mostly to keep his hands busy.
He was skimming over the obituaries for familiar names when a scrape at the window made him look up, startled back to reality. His eyes found Malfoy first, and the window second, finding Tango on the outer sill with a brown paper package at her side. Even at a distance, Harry recognized the Ministry wax seal.
"Oh," Harry quirked the moment he realized what might be delivered in a box rather than an envelope. Abandoning the paper, he stood, leaving the dinette in favour of the window. "This might be from Towthorpe already. What time is it?"

The easy bliss of their morning was broken by the tapping of an owl on the kitchen window, something that wasn’t out of the norm for their mornings either. Potter both sent and received and awful lot of post at the manor, all of it going through the window in the kitchen despite the fact that Draco had offered for Potter to use his owlery.
Most of the post that Potter received was of no interest to Draco, but an update on Towthorpe could potentially help move the case along. While he found that Potter’s company wasn’t unpleasant at all, he was still eager to get him out of his home,
“Yeah?” He asked, looking at Potter over the brim of his cup as he was letting the owl into the kitchen. Even if the two of them were already drowning in information that they could use for their research, Draco still cherished any new information they could get their hands on.

_________________

Harry hummed in confirmation, able to tell the content of the parcel both from its size and the way it creased in the middle, revealing a centre seam.
Dissatisfied by the fact that Harry offered no trade, the owl nipped at his fingers when he tried to undo the lacing of the parcel, making him wince. Coote, helpfully, transfigured a plate of biscuits and uncooked bacon onto the windowsill. The owl chose its offering – the meat – and set off from the window in a single bat of her wings. As the plate once again disappeared, Harry was already unwrapping the brown paper.
Once the paper was peeled back, the parcel fell apart into two cubical boxed, identically sized and decorated in Ministry burgundy. Harry let out a thoughtless sound of satisfaction as he flipped the boxes over, reading both archival numbers on their bottoms.
"They’re the field mappings of the house," Harry explained, not needing to open the boxes to confirm it. Genuinely excited by the prospect, still too many unanswered questions about the house itself, Harry turned to rest the small of his back against the sill, the newest mapping in his hand.
His eyes flickered towards Malfoy, if only in a courtesy, as he undid the clasp keeping the box closed. There were things on his mind, yet Harry didn’t know how to phrase them; in contrary to the work Malfoy was carrying out, Harry’s questions couldn’t be answered from any texts.
So, Harry’s attention returned to the box without further comments. Flipping the top open, the box revealed a translucent glass ball the size of an orange; within it, was the silver suspension of the house at Towthorpe. Beneath the house was no signs of a newly revealed basement.
"Oh, really?" Harry said, intrigued rather than disappointed. He raised it better at eyelevel, tilted as to look at the building’s foundation, no immediate signs of a trap door either.

Draco sipped his tea as Potter unpacked the package he had received from the ministry, having little more than just a passing interest in the field mappings of the house. Sure, it was nice to have something new that they could take a look at, but Draco was still thinking about just how cold Potter had been to the touch.
It was likely nothing and Draco should probably just take what Potter said at face value and believe him when he said that he had always been cold. However, there was something that told Draco that there was more to it than what Potter was telling him. Not that he thought that Potter was purposefully keeping things from him, but he also knew that Potter knew a lot less about dark magic than he did, and he also knew that Potter had been exposed to a large amount of dark magic in his life.
“Anything of interest?” He asked, not really looking at the glass ball in Potter’s hands, instead looking more at Potter himself, sipping slowly at his tea.

_________________

Harry pulled a face at that, the mirrored image of the same hesitation Malfoy so often expressed. Answers were mere just straight forward in their field of work.
"Not immediately, but that’s rather interesting in and of itself," he admitted, keen to do a more precise comparison of the two maps. Aimlessly, he turned the map around in his hand, casting another preliminary glance of the structure before pushing himself away from the sill.
With a quick glance, Harry grabbed the twin box, bringing that along with him as he returned to the dinette, attention still completely fractured.
"This is the new one," he said, offering Malfoy the crystal map; if anything, Malfoy might find it interesting getting an image to the house Harry had spent week referring to. "If it was a ward that struck us it’s still in place, there doesn’t seem to be anything structurally different about the house. No exposed magic, either."

As Draco reached out to accept the map, Draco’s fingers brushed against Potter’s, once again realising just how cold he was. Not thinking too much about the action, Draco moved his hand on top of Potter’s to keep it still, as he moved his other hand up to rest against Potter’s wrist to feel his pulse.
A soft frown seemed to have taken permanent residence on Draco’s forehead, as he registered that Potter’s pulse seemed to be completely normal, despite the freezing temperature that he seemed to constantly be. It was weird and Draco still didn’t quite know what to think of it.
Instead, he simply retracted both of his hands again, taking the map with him this time to take a proper look at what Potter had been telling him about for so long. He didn’t know what he had expected upon seeing the house, maybe an epiphany or something, but nothing realise seemed to come to him. It was an overall weird case.
“Nothing seems odd here,” Draco agreed as he took in the house, unable to see anything that was out of the ordinary.

_________________

The surprise of Malfoy’s hands curling around his wrist drew Harry’s mind to a complete standstill, a pebble in his gears. Unable to comprehend how that had come about, Harry could do little but gawk at Malfoy; the pause he held, allowing Malfoy to count his heartrate was less intentional as it was necessary, any coherent thought having left his consciousness.
The moment Malfoy’s fingers left his pulse point, Harry’s own heartbeat became loud in his ears, unsurprised to find it to be elevated. The touch had caught him off guard, only the fourth or fifth they had shared at all, but remarkably more so intimate; if only, because Harry saw no immediate point to it.
He blinked, completely derailed.
"Uh," he buffered, failing to recognize what on Earth Malfoy was saying. He wasn’t even sure whether or not he was speaking about the house or Harry himself.
"No, yeah," he added, cheeks heating in a delay. He only spoke to fill the space as he opened the other box. Malfoy didn’t seem intent on addressing what or if he had leaned anything, and Harry didn’t even know what question to ask to prompt him to speak.
"This shows the wards active before entry."
Harry, suddenly self-aware, offered Malfoy the twin map with some awkwardness, this clouded by different colours wherever special magic had been identified. "They were all effectively dismantled by the time of the second mapping."

“Dismantled or collapsed?” Draco asked, unsure if the difference really mattered, but it felt important to Draco to get confirmed one way or another. In the end, Draco was convinced that it was something minute that was going to crack the case open, so he was going to have to keep following even the tiniest of leads, just to make sure they didn’t miss anything.
Draco looked lazily at the two balls, comparing the wards to how the house seemed completely unprotected now. It was a weird thing to look at, seeing something that had clearly served its purpose, something that Draco was far too familiar with, just be able to crumble and disappear like that.
Sure, most of them had probably been dismantled by ministry workers, but Draco also knew that some of them had just gone to the passing of time.
“These all seem old, even in the before, yet also solid.”

_________________

Harry finally took a seat at the dinette, sinking slowly into the chair as Malfoy made a reference to the illustrated wards, his eyes darting to the globe in his hand. How easily Malfoy had returned to the subject was disarming.
"Uh, dismantled," he reaffirmed, the pause in part occurring because it was a solid question to ask. "I have the Cursebreaker’s report, and their dismantling matches up with the number of wards observed on the map."
That had been Szczepanski’s initial reaction too, the suspicion that those two reports would not match up. After a thorough comparison, Harry had found no discrepancies that suggested tampering with the scene. Not from their people, at least.
"The first map is from a month ago, mind you. There’s no telling what wards were in place originally, but I think it’s safe to assume they’ve collapsed with age."
Thoughtlessly, Harry leaned forward, hands on the table as he itched to once again get a hold of the maps; equally as mindlessly, he bared his palm upward. "If I was hit by a ward, it has managed to remain hidden through two mappings, and it hasn’t destabilized itself after firring enough for it to show."

Draco nodded at that, having assumed that the wards would have just been dismantled, but he felt like he had to make sure about every single thing that he could. However, he also felt that Towthorpe was more Potter’s area of study than it was his, Potter likely being more practiced and far more interested in the house than Draco was, even if he definitely thought that it was related to what was going on with Potter.
With the house mostly at peace in his mind, Draco’s attention returned to Potter’s body temperature, finding it strangely unusual and feeling like it was connected. It didn’t matter just how much Potter denied the two being connected, because Draco felt absolutely certain that it was the key to figuring some of this out.
“I know you say that your body temperature has always been like that, but have you ever experienced it worsening?” He asked, tilting his head to watch Potter rather than the balls on the table.

_________________

The abrupt change of subject left Harry slightly open-mouthed, entirely blindsided by the conversation Malfoy had drawn up. For the second time within minutes, Malfoy had managed to derail Harry completely, interrupting him not in a sentence but a train of thought.
"Sorry?" he had to ask, not because he hadn’t heard but because he didn’t understand why Malfoy wanted to know.
It took that question for Harry to realize Malfoy had been taking his temperature, something that felt even more invasive than taking his pulse. Harry’s inherent chill hadn’t been brought up in the passing several days, and the fact that it was still a consideration on Malfoy’s mind made Harry lean back in his seat, uneasy.
"No," Harry dragged out as a reluctant answer. In his opinion, his temperature fluctuated the same as anybody else, but he didn’t know how to say something that felt so intuitive. Even more so, he didn’t think that was a useful answer to Malfoy’s question; it hadn’t worsened.

Even if the answer wasn’t what Draco had wanted to get from Potter, it was more of less the answer that eh had expected anyway. He knew that Potter was likely going to be disgruntled with him for constantly pursuing this lead, but Draco definitely felt that there was something there, and it was up to him to figure out what that was.
“Alright,” he stated, seemingly willing to just let it go at that, even if Draco knew that there was no way that he was letting it go. In a way, he felt certain that Potter knew that as well, but he also hoped that he wasn’t going to comment on it.
Instead, he poured himself another cup of tea, getting himself ready for another long day of research and trying to tie their many, many loose ends together. “Just checking.”

_________________

How easily Malfoy dropped the subject he so violently introduced managed to unknit Harry’s brows. For a moment, he just looked at the other man with a sense of disbelief before, eventually, an equally confused smile pulled at his lips.
He huffed a chuckle, a whisper of a laugh and a sign of complete disorientation. It was still too early for Harry to tell if age and solitude had made Malfoy this way, or if he had always been this odd.
For now, Harry found it hard to fault him for him, given how unintrusive the line of questioning had turned out to be; he did, however, not fail to notice that Malfoy evidently hadn’t dropped his considerations, only stopping from speaking them out loud.
"Either way," Harry, just as unapologetically, attempted to wrangle the conversation back on track. Despite himself, a grin remained at the corner of his mouth as he leaned back in, reaching for the oldest of the two maps.

___
As the evening had drawn on, Draco had found he and Potter both being drawn to the drawing room, both of them probably in the need of a glass of wine to kick back a little.
The work they did was tedious at best, and Draco knew that the amount of frustration that he felt would probably pale next to Potter’s. This was why he handed Potter the glass of wine that he had just refilled for them, his wand stuck enough in his hair that he hadn’t really wanted to bother with untangling it.
In a split moment decision, Draco decided to take a seat next to Potter on the couch, it was wide enough that both of them could sit there comfortably anyway, rather than returning to the chair that he usually sat in. It just seemed natural with the way they were talking and Draco doubted that Potter would even think twice about it.
“I am not saying it doesn’t make sense,” he stated as he got seated comfortably, turning slightly to take a look at Potter as he spoke. “I am just saying that I really cannot believe just how easy it is for you to gain access to all of these papers.”

_________________

Harry accepted the glass, looking at Malfoy with a sense of intrigue over the rim of it as he took a drink. He was surprised to see him join him on the couch rather than to resettle in the armchair, feeling his heart draw up into his throat with unwarranted expectation. It was nothing, Malfoy was of course free to roam freely in his own home, but it had Harry changing his posture, shifting into the corner to better accommodating the change of speaking distance.
"It’s part of my job," he dismissed, hearing what Malfoy was fishing for him to admit. Even though Harry might get different processing times, he would firmly maintain that he wasn’t allowed to view documents that were above his paygrade.
Harry was, despite it all, not unaware of why Malfoy might have thought that. It drew another, unwilling little smile from him. He rested his arm against the backrest, picking at a seam.
"People want to be helpful," Harry eventually confessed, grin only widening.

No matter how insistent Potter was that it was simply part of his job and that people wanted to help him, Draco knew that there was a lot more to it than that. It was easy to get people to want to help you when you were generally considered to be the saviour of the wizarding world.
It wasn’t a luxury that Draco was ever going to be familiar with and he knew it.
“People want to be helpful to you,” Draco elaborated, taking a sip from his wine and softly shaking his head. It wasn’t that he was resentful, knowing that there was no reason to be resentful about something like that, and the goodwill people were willing to show Potter was working in Draco’s favour while they were working on this case. However, it was impossible to not feel a little bit jealous that life seemed a lot easier to Potter than it ever would to Draco.
“Perks from being the golden boy, I assume,” he stated, his tone neutral as his eyes rested on Potter, almost as if he was trying to see something new.

_________________

Harry made a face at that interpretation, ready to argue that there had to be an intrinsic difference between having been granted special access and going through the proper channels faster than others. He had often found himself to be caught in a cycle of wanting to prove his worth as an Auror and being rightfully but excessively rewarded, something which only seemed to perpetuate Harry’s own fears of being dismissed as a figurehead hire.
Looking over at Malfoy, Harry seemed ready to challenge that assumption. However, all that washed away when Malfoy spoke of Harry in terms, he was certain he hadn’t heard in a decade when Malfoy had last sneered it at him. It surprised him to such an extent that it made him laugh, caught off guard.
“**** me,” Harry lamented with a smile, speaking it into his wineglass as he raised it to his lips. “Golden boy.”
He took another generous drink, scoffing a chuckle as he swallowed it. For all it was worth, Harry’s expression was bright, humoured despite the misery this line of conversation inflicted upon him. His eyes returned to Malfoy, eyebrows quirking.
“Is that how you think of me, still?” There was a genuine sense of interest in his eyes, finding no bile in Malfoy’s voice; nothing compared to their youth, anyway, and it was hard to make sense of. “’Cause that came out with practiced ease.”

Draco simply shrugged at the question, having had so very little connection to the world outside of the manor that he wasn’t updated on Potter’s current nickname from the public. Besides, until recently, he hadn’t seen Potter for over a decade, so it really was no wonder that Draco would have to draw on what he still remembered from seeing him directly after the war.
“Of course it is,” Draco stated with a shrug, unsure of what else to say. It made perfect sense to him to still view Potter as someone completely glorified by his surroundings, even if it likely weren’t as bad as it used to be anymore. In fact, that almost made Draco more bitter that Potter had a semblance of a normal life after everything that they had been through.
This wasn’t something he was going to take out on Potter though, knowing that it was hardly his fault, and that maybe he deserved it in a way.
“And I bet that that is how most other people view you as well, even if they don’t use that word,” he added with a shrug, before taking a sip from his wine.

_________________

Harry of course knew that; he saw it on the tip of people’s tongue more often than he’d like. Over the course of the passing decade, Harry had come to accept that compromise, if it meant he’d get to do his work under comparable conditions as his peers. He was less uptight with what was given to him out of work, knowing precisely what and how much had come to him in his adulthood solely for things he was forced to do as a teen.
That hadn’t really been what had interested Harry, anyway. Not having seen Malfoy in a decade meant he had blurred from Harry’s consciousness, allowing the other man the freedom to exist independently from his youth. Every day they spent together those two Malfoy’s grew incrementally further apart. It seemed like Harry hadn’t been granted the same grace in Malfoy’s mind; he wasn’t sure why that disappointed him, but it made it hard to put that praise into words.
"But boy?" Harry pressed instead, the smile on his lips letting know it was halfway to a joke; he was no longer denying Malfoy’s point. The other half was an uncomfortable sense of infantilization, but that showed less on his expression. "We’re pushing thirty, Malfoy, I would’ve hoped I’d at least aged out that part."