He had the week off.

A full week — no Ministry summons, no late meetings that stretched past midnight, no green flames flaring in the hearth with yet another obligation waiting on the other side. For the first time in what felt like years, Draco Malfoy was simply home.

And the house felt different for it.

The corridors of Malfoy Manor were still vast and echoing, the marble floors still polished to a cold shine, but the silence no longer felt suffocating. It felt occupied. Warmed. The maids moved quietly as ever, but their presence faded into the background when he was there — when his voice drifted lazily from room to room, dry and amused.

Even with his occasional moping — and Merlin, he did mope — the days were better. He would linger by the windows with a cup of black coffee, sleeves rolled, staring out across the frost-silvered gardens as if he were single-handedly brooding the weather into submission. And yet he never strayed far.

Basking in one another’s existence had become its own quiet ritual. No grand declarations. No theatrics. Just shared rooms, shared glances, the faint brush of fingers when passing in the corridor.

By the final two days, however, something shifted.

He latched.

You couldn’t cross the bedroom without him noticing. Couldn’t so much as suggest breakfast without a hand catching your wrist.

“We can eat later,” he muttered one morning, voice thick with sleep, tightening his arm around your waist before you could rise. “It’s not as though the world will collapse if you remain precisely where you are.”

“You said that yesterday,” you pointed out.

“And I was right yesterday as well,” he replied smoothly, pressing his face into your shoulder. “Don’t be dramatic.”

There was something almost boyish about it — the way he refused to relinquish you, as though the week were slipping through his fingers and he meant to anchor himself to the only certainty in the room.

It happened properly on the fifth night.

The air was low and warm, the curtains half-drawn, candlelight pooling gold against dark wood. You’d barely settled at the edge of the bed when he reached for you — not hurried, never frantic — but deliberate.

“Come here,” he murmured, and it wasn’t a request.

Within minutes you were in his lap, his hands firm at your waist as though reacquainting himself with something he feared losing. He tilted his head, studying you first — always that pause, that measuring look — before leaning in.

The first kiss was slow. Testing.

Then less so.

His fingers curled lightly into the fabric of your gown, tugging you closer with quiet insistence.

He kissed you again before you could answer — deeper this time, less restrained. The careful polish he wore in public slipped away in private moments like these.