Mrs. Miffy’s Home Dining Experience: Eating made simple!
The flyer was an eye-watering orange. Sort of reminded him of Wheezes, if Fred and George were also psychotic murderers on the side.
Ordering is simpler than ever. Speak the word menu and it shall appear, aglow in the space before you. Magic will direct you precisely to the dish you are currently craving. No more going, ugh, what’ll we have for dinner tonight?
Harry’s crockery was all still packed in who-knows what box. His new fridge was empty. All the places he tried ringing gave up on trying to locate his address. Wards, Hermione had said, at some point in her life, probably.
After you placed your order by yelling the selected number, your food will arrive near-instantaneously with one of our lively staff members. Don’t forget: it’s hot! (or cold!)
His head was pounding. They say that moving house is one of life’s greatest traumas. Which, of course, made him laugh like someone had punched him in the gut, with fucking tears in his eyes, but hey, this wasn’t incredibly easy, either.
Now there’s nothing more to worry about: bon-appetite, and we’d love to see you again at Mrs. Miffy’s Home Dining Experience!
He was tired. He was hungry. Everything seemed thirty times heavier than normal, and his therapist Evil Jean said that this feeling has a name, and he should try to find it. To banish it? To… do something about it. Harry was a terrible client and an awful lazy man and all right, all right, enough with this now. Half out of spite, Harry said, “Menu.”
Jumped three feet backwards when the whole room tilted sideways, and started shrieking—no, it was the images that suddenly popped, violently into existence. Who the hell thought this was a good… swallowed, swallowed, closed his eyes, tapped his chest till his heart climbed back down. Fucking fuck. Deep breath. Okay.
His new flat was half the size of Grimmauld and currently packed with boxes. Gin said that moving isn’t that big of a deal if you know the right spells, but Harry didn’t know anything, and definitely not the right spells. In the eerie light of the dozens of images hovering, it looked sad.
Still there was something in his gut pulling—the magic, right, he’d nearly forgot. Saying the word Menu must have activated it as well, and now Harry found himself pointing at an image which showed… a bowl of fried rice with tofu.
You know what, fuck it. Fuck it, why not. He was sort of hoping for something a little, erm, not that, but fried rice was good and tasty and he was so tired and it might just be the perfect thing. Harry cleared his throat. “Seventy-six!”
Your order has been placed, said a low baritone that nearly made him pee his pants. It came out of the fucking fridge? Probably not on purpose. Then, in an entirely different voice, chipper and high-pitched, sit tight and we’ll be right there to serve you!
Harry paced and paced and paced. Not much room for it, with the boxes, and the chest of drawers he didn’t know where to put, and the stack of letters he tucked in his pocket for fear of losing and then promptly placed on every clear surface as it bothered him constantly bumping into stuff. Moving was… fine, it wasn’t the problem. Harry only wished Ron and Nev and Luna could have stayed. He wished, selfishly, that his friends were as miserable and social life-less as he was, only for tonight. He wished…
The doorbell went off, a jarring sound. Harry jumped (and told himself to quit it), breathed, breathed. Fingers sweaty on the handle, get yourself together, this will be nothing.
“Good evening my name is Draco and I’d be happy to serve you exactly the way you’d like please choose level of interaction from one to three.”
Harry was openly staring. His belly, weirdly, filled with ice. In front of him was—“What?”
“Good evening my name is Draco and I’d be happy to serve you exactly the way you’d like please choose level of interaction from one to three.”
He was taller than Harry remembered. Broad shoulders, narrow waist. Hair falling past his ears, still as blond as ever under the truly-horrendous cap that said Mrs. Miffy’s! in balloon letters. He stood so impossibly still that Harry suspected he must be under a spell or something.
“Malfoy?” he tried in this choked voice.
“Good evening my name is Draco and I’d be—”
“Yes, yes,” Harry stopped him with a hand out, “you said. You… work for… Mrs. Miffy’s?”
A fragment of a question hiding at least five hundred others: you work, and also you’re here, and also you still exist? Because Harry had completely-completely forgotten about him. This tall, slightly shocking apparition of a boy from his youth grown into… this.
Malfoy blinked metre-long eyelashes. “Please choose,” he said in a perfectly bland voice. “Between one and three.”
Stabbing a guess: “Three?”
He nodded and made to step forward, only Harry was still frozen, and still blocking the door. “Pardon me,” Malfoy said.
“No,” stupidly. “I mean—sure. Come in, I mean. I mean—”
Malfoy didn’t wait to unravel the rant. Instead he snuck through the space Harry had made, and stopped in the middle of the would-be living room. Turning around a full 360, blinking and blinking. “You,” he said, “you don’t have a table.”
“Not yet.”
“Right,” eyebrows hiking on his face. “Right, it’s—I can transfigure one of the boxes temporarily.”
Harry shrugged. Getting past the whole shock of Malfoy in his flat, in legitimately the worst ensemble he’d ever worn and still so destructively handsome, pointing at a box labelled STUFF and turning it into a belly-heavy sort-of-table. He even conjured a tablecloth. He even conjured a vase with flowers.
“Would you like anything to drink, Sir?”
Harry was losing it. This was the only explanation. He hit his head on the moving van and is lying on the pavement, unconscious. Malfoy was still in Azkaban and certainly not here.
“Erm, do you—do you have Irn Bru? Only the muggle shops down here don’t usually sell it.”
Malfoy produced a cool box he most certainly didn’t have before and took an orange can out. “Do you need cutlery,” he said more than asked.
“Yeah. Erm, yeah.”
Another nod, and now from a pocket that was far too small and too tight, a complete set with three forks (including the little one for the, fish or, whatever). Malfoy then proceeded to pull out a napkin, and fold it into something that quite resembled a swan.
“When you’re finished with your meal please shout Porter! And I will collect the dishes. Your box—table—your—it should go back to its original form in about an hour.”
Harry said, “Okay.”
“Anything else you might require?”
Blinking and blinking. Harry was losing his mind. “You know who I am, yeah? Is there a… spell maybe that stops you from seeing me, or?”
“You’re Harry Potter,” Malfoy said in the same blank, somewhat-pleasant tone. “We went to school together.”
“We went to—yeah, I mean, sure. You… remember? School?”
“Do I remember school?” Malfoy tipped his head sideways. He was so impossibly handsome that Harry didn’t manage a full breath. “That’s an odd question.”
“Well you’re being odd! Why are you so—like that when you normally are…”
Malfoy sighed, a deep, pained thing, like Harry was the one being ridiculous. “Is there anything else you require, Sir. For your meal. For which you paid.”
“I… want you to fucking answer the question?”
His hair shimmered as he shook his head. “Yes, I remember school. Our headmaster was Albus Dumbledore. Care of Magical Creatures. He Who—the battle—I remember.”
“And…” why, why, why was he pushing, why did it even matter, “you remember me?”
“Harry Potter,” Malfoy said again. Entirely expressionless.
“Yeah. Yes. I, but do you remember our… we weren’t exactly friends. Do you remember—”
“I remember. Is there anything else you require for your meal?”
He felt like pulling his own hair out. “Why are you being like this! What are you doing here! I thought you were sentenced for ten years, what, what, what!”
Malfoy remained impassibly stoic. “I was sentenced for ten years. The parole board decided to release me early for what they dubbed ‘good behaviour’. I promise you I wasn’t good, would never dream to presume. Is that enough?”
“When did—”
“Potter,” Malfoy said, still in the same tone but with tired eyes, “is there anything else you require. For your meal.”
It felt all the kinds of wrong Harry knew. “No, I—I don’t need anything else.” The bland sort of misery behind Malfoy’s face didn’t crumple, didn’t move an inch. He nodded, turned to leave. “Wait—”
Harry didn’t mean to stop him, but Malfoy did stop, back turned and breathing very slowly, very deeply. “Yes?”
“What’s three?”
He did turn now. “I beg your pardon?”
“You said I can choose between one and three, but you never explained… the… interaction level. What does it mean, what’s three?”
“The highest level,” said Malfoy.
“Oh. Yeah. That… makes sense.”
“Thank you for your business,” with a motion so tiny it couldn’t be considered a bow, “we hope you have a wonderful dining experience and would love to hear your thoughts. See you next time!” and he left. Harry stood in front of the once-box-now-table, a plate filled with colourful rice steaming on a conjured placemat (Harry certainly never owned something this nice), a glass of Irn Bru already poured and the fucking, napkin-made swan. Nothing about it made the slightest bit of sense. None of it, at all, made sense, at all. No sense.
Tearing through the crammed kitchen, flinging boxes here and there, looking for… oh, he’d already placed it in what he decided would be the take-out menu drawer. The bright-orange flyer had a whole bit in the back that he forgot he once read.
Mrs. Miffy is a muggle-born witch who always loved cooking and, most importantly, eating. She remembers getting take out with her family with great fondness: “When I was young it felt like the most wonderful thing. A vacation in our own home. [I] felt like we were exploring the world, from the convenience of our own living room!” when she encountered the problem of locating magical houses while trying to order a curry, she knew she had to find a solution. The business came a few years later, with the assistance of Ministry funds to help make Mrs. Miffy’s dream come true. Eating, made simple.
Harry’s head was spinning. He made himself go back to the table (to the, box, that made an actually-not-too-shabby a table), realised he didn’t have a seat. Took the plate in both hands and sank to the carpet, overwhelmed and annoyingly supporting a semi.
Malfoy was working for a muggle-born witch. Malfoy was delivering food. Malfoy was released from Azkaban after seven years instead of his original ten. Malfoy was… hot, and weird, weird, weird, just, the weirdest thing he’d ever met, and a mystery, and a project, and a—no. Right. That way lies madness, he’d already tasted it once. Twice. Malfoy wasn’t a part of his life and it shouldn’t matter, what he did or how he looked.
But the rice was delicious, and somehow exactly what he needed. Harry ate the whole thing, and drank the whole glass, and felt, well, a little less ridiculous, for once. Maybe there was something there after all. Maybe there was something.
He put the flyer back in the drawer carefully. Standing in front of the table: “Porter?”
Half-expecting Malfoy to come back, he wasn’t really disappointed when the plate just Banished out of existence. Wasn’t because he was already thinking, what will I get next?
