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It was the meowing and the scratching that woke Harry up. He couldn’t tell where the noise was coming from at first. It felt like it was coming from inside the walls, and Harry thought for a frightening second that there was a cat stuck inside there. After getting out of bed and investigating further, however, he realised that it was coming from his living room.
He blinked and tiptoed outside to see that a cat had somehow dragged a milk carton out of the kitchen and tipped it in front of itself so it could lick the milk that fell out of it.
“What the hell,” Harry muttered to himself. He quickly walked over to the cat and picked up the milk carton, placing it on the kitchen table before grabbing a wet cloth to wipe the milk off of the living room floor.
As he walked back, he saw the cat licking the milk off of the floor and sighed. Pushing it away, he began to wipe his floor clean. The cat glared at him, responding with a scratch and a bite to his hand.
“Ah, fuck!” Harry swore and looked at the cat. “How did you even get here?”
He narrowed his eyes at the cat as he got a closer look at it. Its fur was a pale, almost whitish blond, and its eyes grey. It reminded Harry of a familiar face, but it couldn’t be him, could it?
“Draco?” Harry asked, softly and unsurely. What could the chances of Draco Malfoy finding his way into Harry’s home as a cat be? The cat narrowed its eyes at him. “Malfoy, is that really you?”
The cat slowly nodded its head.
“Why the hell did you bite me, then?” Harry demanded. He saw the cat titling its head a little and smirking at him.
Alright, that was it! Harry’d had enough of cat-Malfoy. He still couldn’t wrap his head around the fact that Draco was an Animagus now, and that his Animagus form was a cat. Picking the cat up by its scruff , he dropped it onto the kitchen counter.
“Well, you’ve been a bad kitten, Malfoy, so either you get out of my house or you turn back into your human form and give me an explanation.” Harry crossed his arms in front of cat-Malfoy to show him that he was serious about what he had said.
Cat-Malfoy blinked at him, once, twice, and then opened his mouth, giving a soft purr and making a soft ‘meow’ sound that had Harry’s heart melting. He watched cat-Malfoy’s eyes growing large as he gave Harry a pleading look.
“Fine,” Harry sighed, “What do you want?”
Malfoy’s eyes grew larger as he pointed a paw to the milk carton, which was half empty now, and then to his mouth, which was wide open.
Harry groaned and took out a bowl from one of the kitchen drawers. Filling the bowl with milk, he gave it to Malfoy, who began greedily licking it up. Harry watched Malfoy for a few moments and then started to make breakfast for himself. Pulling a chair up to the kitchen counter, he ate his breakfast alongside Malfoy.
As Malfoy finished his breakfast, he gave a cute little yawn and curled up into a ball. Harry cleared his throat to get Malfoy’s attention. Grey, sleepy eyes looked up at Harry. “Do you want to sleep on the bed with me?” Harry asked, flushing as those grey eyes analysed him.
Relief filled his senses as Malfoy nodded his head and let out another sleepy yawn. Harry tried not to think about how it made him feel and gently carried cat-Malfoy in his arms. He kept Malfoy carefully on the bed and instinctively curled himself around him.
When he woke up, Harry was surprised to find that he had fallen asleep almost instantly, and more surprised to realise that this was the first time he had slept so peacefully, without getting any nightmares, since the war. He felt fresh and more awake than he had felt in a long, long time.
What surprised Harry the most, however, was seeing a fully dressed Draco Malfoy sitting on his bed. “We should probably talk about this,” Draco said, with that same smirk that Harry had seen on cat-Malfoy, now visible on Draco’s human face.