2
Truth be told, Harry tries to take Malfoy’s gripes on board. He really does.
It doesn’t even get to midday the next day before Malfoy’s breaking their no-talking rule and barging into Harry’s office, brandishing, much like it was Harry’s own death warrant, a public statement release form due to their media team that Harry had delivered to Malfoy by interdepartmental owl not 5 minutes before.
“Potter,” Malfoy demands, a warm greeting, making Harry look up from the pile of evidence from the banned substance smuggling case the department was attempting (as of yet, unsuccessfully) to close. “Do you happen to have a vested interest in the methods of communication favoured by the Ancient Egyptians?” Malfoy pauses, standing in the doorway and giving Harry, brow now scrunched, only enough time to drop his jaw to respond, before he continues. “Because this document is written in what can only be likened to 3100 BC hieroglyphics. Your penmanship is so pathetic it’s resistant to even a translation charm.”
Harry swings his mouth shut, blinks blankly at Malfoy and then goes back to scanning the files spread across his desk. “Yeah, I’m fine, thanks, Malfoy. And you?”
“I am beguiled, actually.” Malfoy responds, walking further into Harry’s office without invitation and beginning to pace in front of Harry’s desk. “How can one reach adulthood with such a limited grasp on the fundamentals of the written language? Your chicken scratch makes actual chicken scratch look like Baroque calligraphy,” Malfoy muses to the room.
“I offer you my sincerest apologies I didn’t grow up with tutors teaching me the most visually appealing way to cross my ‘t’s’ and dot my ‘i’s’,” Harry says without looking up, considering for a moment a frankly garish crime scene image before putting it back down on the pile and picking up another of the crime scene images.
“Tittles are the least of your worries when the ‘i’ looks like a fatal knife wound,” Malfoy’s gripes, offhandedly.
Harry looks up sharply.
“Titties? I think I would remember drawing a set of tits on the release form,” Harry says disbelievingly, and it’s Malfoy’s turn to drop his jaw in incredulity, halting in his pacing to meet Harry’s look.
“While they wouldn’t look entirely out of place amidst the rest of the scribblings, no. A tittle is the mark over lowercase ‘i’s’ and ‘j’s’,” he stares at Harry for a second longer, abject disgust stark across his features, as Harry’s disbelief gives way to mirth. “And you are a child.”
Harry huffs a laugh, head rearing back in mock offence. “You’re the one who’s swept into my office to talk about titties, Malfoy. Robards did tell <em>the both of us</em> to grow up.”
Malfoy groans low in his throat, possibly sensing the futility of continuing this specific line of complaining at Harry, then turns on his heel and leaves, talking the form with him. Harry hears, loud and clear, the sharp thwack of Malfoy’s office door shutting behind him from across the hall.
Harry snickers into his case notes and promptly goes back to exactly what he’d been doing prior to Malfoy’s sudden and short appearance in his office.
His comments do play on Harry’s mind though. As a people pleaser to the core, bred from childhood that way, it rankles slightly on Harry’s nerves that his work isn’t up to par. Even though it’s Malfoy’s par he’s trying to match.
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“Do you think I have bad handwriting?” Harry asks, apropos of nothing, sat across from Ron as they eat their sad Ministry lunches in the sad Ministry cafeteria that afternoon.
Ron shovels a forkful of questionable chicken curry into his mouth before he shakes his head and responds.
“Uh, no?” He tries, chewing. “I don’t know, mate. You tell me what kind of response you’re looking for from me here and I’ll give it to ya,” he says, and goes back to hoovering up his lunch.
Harry slides a mound of chicken and rice from one side of his plate to the other with the back of his fork. “I just- Someone said I have bad handwriting. Harped on about it, actually,” he explains to his plate of curry. “But, said person is known for being a bit of a dramatist.”
Ron chews for a quiet second.
“Malfoy said you’ve got bad handwriting?” he asks, and Harry looks straight up at him from his sad plate.
There isn’t any judgement in Ron’s open, placid expression. If anything, he looks mildly satisfied that Harry’s reaction affirms he’s guessed right: a look he must have picked up via osmosis from Hermione. If Harry’s honest, the corners of Ron’s mouth are stained umber with curry powder, so it’s hard to look at him and notice much of anything besides that. Still, abashed at being caught out so quickly, Harry nods furtively. Ron nods back decisively.
“And you care?” Ron prods, preparing another heaped forkful of imitation-curry.
Harry looks back down at his plate. “Against my best interest, yeah. I think,” Harry says. And then, “He’s also been going on about how I don’t listen to him and that I’m giving him extra work having to ‘translate’,” Harry emphasises in his best imitation of Malfoy’s starched London accent, “my notes. Pointy twat though he is, he’s helpful when he wants to be. I want to be pulling my weight.” Harry puts his fork down, dropping the pretence of eating the sludge altogether.
Across the table, when he looks up, Ron’s just blinking at him.
“Right,” Ron says once, after a second, head tilted slightly like a dog and looking like he’s still quite mystified. Then: “Right,” he says again, somewhat surer, avowed to entertain Harry’s whims since the age of 11. “Let’s see it then.”
“Right,” Harry echoes, “Brilliant,” he says, quite pleased for a second opinion, and then dithers patting down the pockets of his robes until he hears the the crinkle of a hidden, once- forgotten receipt and pulls it out. Wandlessly conjuring a pen out of his fork, he writes a line on the back of the scrap of paper and turns it promptly, expectantly, to Ron. Whose mouth promptly slackens around his forkful of orangeness, eyes promptly going round with disbelief.
Ron looks from the paper to Harry, and back at the paper, slides the fork out of his mouth and settles it blindly onto the table.
“Have you always written like that?” He asks, subtly incredulous.
Harry flusters.
“I- No? I mean, probably something like this. But, I don’t write much nowadays and when I do, I’m usually in a rush,” Harry says, looking down at the note with a bunched brow and new eyes. Truthfully, the longer he looks at it, the less it looks like a collection of letters and the more it looks like his pen had exploded over the old receipt. “Brilliant,” he mutters, dismayed this time, staring down at the receipt and wishing the scribbles on it to magically metamorphose into neater, cleaner font.
Ron looks back at it too, and makes a similar noise of concerted distress.
“Mate. You know it physically pains me to do this to you,” Ron starts and Harry looks at him, a sympathetic warmth to his eyes and a sympathetic tilt to his stained mouth. “But, I actually agree with the ferret,” he admits, looking and sounding like the news is shocking even to him.
Harry groans plaintively, eying again both his thoroughly played with but uneaten lunch and his failed attempt at moral support. “That’s just brilliant. I’m going to have to apologise to Malfoy,” Harry adds before he groans again, grabbing the receipt off the table and fisting it into a tight ball. “Which wouldn’t be an issue, but he’s so bloody…” Harry searches for a word that captures Malfoy’s cantankerous, condescending passive-aggression.
“Malfoy?” Ron supplies, spooning the last grains of rice from his plate. He chews for a beat, wincing consolingly at a baleful Harry, then flicking his eyes down at Harry’s plate. Harry sighs and slides it across the table towards Ron, watching the right side of Ron’s mouth lilt up in a deprecating upturn. “Cheers, mate. I forgot breakfast at home and ended up with a bacon and egg butty from here,” Ron motions over his shoulder at the Ministry cafeteria counter with a grimace. “It was like much having a wallet for breakfast. Knuts and all. At least whatever this,” he points with his fork at the plate, “actually somehow doesn’t taste like anything whatsoever.”
Harry huffs a laugh and watches Ron cram amber mush into his mouth for the rest of their lunch hour.
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In the lift back up to the Auror department, Harry resigns himself to the unfortunate but unavoidable conversation he’s about to have with Malfoy. Apologising. Repenting. Even though he’s the only one who’s been legitimately punched in the face this week.
Except when he gets back up to his office, Malfoy isn’t in his own (McGillivary, a senior Auror whose desk happens to sit facing their offices, tells Harry that Malfoy has taken a scenic lunch out of office and won’t be back for the rest of the day. It’s nice for some, a hungry-but-too-busy Harry thinks, glumness returning in full force), but there’s a guest in Harry’s.
Perched atop his ‘to-look-at’ pile of evidence folders is a oak-eyed tawny owl holding a parcel in it’s beak.
Curious, Harry regards the owl from the doorway and the owl, in turn, regards him with large, unblinking eyes.
He hadn’t ordered anything to the office, he considers quickly, and interdepartmental owls usually are so busy they barely have time to break flight when pelting deliveries in the recipient’s general direction, let alone have time to sit and stare unnervingly at the recipient. With both readily available options to explain this owl’s appearance in Harry’s office crossed-out, he’s left without an explanation.
Curiouser, he walks into his office towards the actually quite stunning owl with the intention of accepting the parcel and then scouring his office for some owl treats. However, as soon as Harry gets close enough to reach out for the bundle of brown paper, the owl drops the parcel and ducks to take chunk of one of Harry’s fingers.
Swearing, he grabs the parcel off his desk and looks scornfully at the owl, glancing down at the blood gathering at the pad of his finger and sucking it into his mouth with an offended noise. “Merlin, you’re a piece of work. Have you been sat there waiting to have a go at me?” He grouses, keeping a close eye on the bird as he walks around his desk to sit and open his unexpected parcel. The owl’s eyes follow him without it having made any discernible movement as he sits, like some abstract avian interpretation of the Mona Lisa.
The parcel is neatly wrapped, he finds, and stamped with Scrivenshaft's embossed wax seal. Odd. Harry certainly hasn’t ordered anything from Scrivenshaft’s. He barely even remembers to buy the things to keep him alive, the likelihood of Harry purchasing <em>stationary</em> for himself, when he can just pocket whatever he needs from the department’s mail room, is an absolute and outright zero.
Ripping into the paper, he has a wholly perfunctory and passing thought that this parcel, coupled with this aggressive bird, may signify some kind of danger. In the split second of credence he gives the idea, he figures he’ll cross that bridge if/when he comes to it.
The first thing that falls out of the parcel is a very well considered and much needed package of luxury owl treats. The owl, still sat, watching, on Harry’s desk, hoots meaningfully.
Huffing, Harry tears open the package and shakes out a plentiful heaping of the pellets onto his desk, unwilling to put his limbs in the way of this owl and it’s food. Hopping forward, the owl chirps and busies itself eating the offerings, looking up at Harry every so often in something close to admonishing apology. Like it’s Harry’s fault it had to hold treats in its mouth without eating them for however long it had taken Harry to get back to his office and find the bird.
The rest of the package, Harry finds, as he lays it out on his desk, is a mixture of posh-looking quills and shiny, heavy pens. And a note.
Harry huffs a laugh. How completely bizarre, he thinks. A gift from Malfoy.
Well. A snarky gift, a condescending note and an attack from what must be Malfoy’s owl. Malfoy’s owl who, having eaten it’s way through the pellets Harry had emptied across the desk, has begun to help itself to the rest of the pack, periodically looking up at Harry as if threatening bodily harm should Harry try to stop her. Framed like that, Harry realises it’s actually quite a Malfoy-branded but otherwise <em>nice</em> thing to do.
Unsure how else to get rid of the slightly scary bird and genuinely compelled to give Malfoy his thanks, a gut-feeling possibly spurred on by his recently induced guilt re Ron’s confirmation of his apparently atrocious handwriting, Harry flips over Malfoy’s note and picks up one of the quills to write his own note back.
Seemingly offended by behind handled, the quill immediately jolts to life and shakes violently out of Harry’s grip, rising in the air with a thorough, dignified shiver of it’s plumage. Harry blinks.
The quill hovers in front of his face for a second, waiting for something Harry has yet to clue onto. Impatiently, the tail end of the feather twirls itself into a sassy motion Harry imagines translates, in quill speak, to something near: ‘Well, go on then. Talk!’
“Right. Er… Uh,” Harry dithers immediately, looking blithely around the room and readying himself for the oddness of talking to what is literally just an old feather so it can write a note for him. The quill wastes no time in darting to the parchment and scribing Harry’s dithering.
“No! No, don’t write yet, I’m-,” Harry says, reaching for the quill to stop it as it starts determinedly penning the rest of Harry’s external monologue but the quill jets out of his grasp like a missile. An then embarks on a high speed chase across the plane of Harry’s desk, scribbling aborted letters on any piece of parchment it crosses as Harry follows it with an intent hand.
Quite frankly overstimulated by the whole endeavour, Harry snatches the parchment off the desk, muttering agitatedly as he holds it flat and close to his chest, seizing the quill in his fist when it rushes at him to capture his muttering.
“God,” he huffs, tense across the shoulders and a little sweaty. The quill twitches agitated in his grasp like a captive prisoner. Harry immediately stuffs it in the top drawer of his desk.
Breathing out roughly, stress abating, he puts the parchment back down on his desk and leans back heavily in his chair.
Malfoy’s owl has abandoned it’s devouring of owl treats to stare obtrusively at Harry.
Cheeks reddening (being bested by a partially sentient quill with the audience of an incredibly vociferous owl is quite starkly embarrassing), he hesitantly taps the nib of one of the other, untouched Quick-Notes Quills with a gentle finger, letting out a breath he’d been unconsciously holding when it obediently floats into the air and waits there.
It takes Harry about 10 minutes to get the message down. Once he does, he ponders for a second how to stand-down the second quill he’d used without rousing as vicious of a fight as was waged by its predecessor. He reaches out for it slowly where it’s hanging in front of him and tentatively clasps his thumb and forefinger over the bare stretch of the nib end, sighing in relief when it immediate goes inanimate and allows him to lay it back down on the desk.
Frankly exhausted, he proof-reads the note.
Satisfied but not altogether impressed with his efforts, he folds his response and holds it out to Malfoy’s owl, who looks quite begrudgingly like it may be scorning him for the act of requiring her to return to her job as opposed to allowing her to continue to judge him unrelentingly.
With a final lofty hoot, the owl takes the letter and takes off back out into the corridor.
As soon as the owl leaves his sight, Harry stands up from his chair, now not only absolutely starving but with a vehement hankering for something alcoholic. And strong, at that.
When he comes back from the messroom, stomach full of at least 2 of every kind of biscuit the department keeps stocked to accompany their teas and coffees, and a hot mug of said accompanying tea, not only is there a new piece of parchment on Harry’s desk, there is also a showering of owl droppings from a certain owl right across the whole spread of the desktop.
Taking a soothing, rejuvenating, absolutely scalding sip of tea, Harry vanishes the droppings and opens the note.
Harry, feeling snarky and quite truthfully too tired to even attempt a response, doesn’t write back. He does, however, conjure a neat, clay container to store his new stationary in on the corner of his desk before he leaves the office for the day.