________<br/><br/>It had been considerably harder to settle in for the night without a sense of utter exhaustion weighing him down. Even considering the toll Malfoy’s tests had had on Harry, he had only been awake a few hours before returning to his room; while Malfoy’s preliminary diagnosis didn’t haunt him, Harry had spent most of the night going over its implications, retroactively looking for any signs that might help contextualize the gravity of it all. He had finally given up at 5 in the morning, having only gotten a few hours of restless sleep.<br/>Showered and dressed in his uniform, Harry had ventured out into the morning chill of the Manor; this time around, he wouldn’t have needed a guided path to the kitchen, though the lights marked it none the less.<br/>He had spent the morning mentally listing out a series of letters he wanted to write and send before the morning rush at the Ministry. In the early hours of the morning his guilt had finally crept up to him, and he wanted to deliver on his promise to Malfoy to assist with any relevant documents describing the incident.<br/>His mind preoccupied, Harry stopped dead in his tracts in the doorway to the kitchen. It didn’t surprise him to find the kitchen empty, not having expected to see Malfoy on this side of dawn; what had caught Harry unprepared was the teapot and the still-steaming pitcher of milk, neatly prepared on the dinette.<br/>It made Harry blink, and then it made him smile, huffing a touched chuckle into the silence of the room.<br/><br/>Malfoy’s house elf – Coote, Harry finally retained upon meeting him, though not for a lack of repetition – was considerably more amicable than Kreacher, readily and willingly offering Harry a blank stack of unmarked stationery and quill to write on. He had, however, seemed hesitant at the prospect of letting Harry use one of the Manor owls to mail them, and Harry hadn’t bothered pressing on the matter. He figured it would be worth passing them through Grimmauld Place anyway, not yet certain he wanted Robards to know he had ignored his Healer’s orders to go home and rest.<br/>Instead, the dutifully written letters were stacked as Harry wrote them. He had written three by the time Coote refilled both the pot and the pitcher, and Harry had written another four by the time he asked for butcher’s twine to tie them all together. With considerably shoddier penmanship, Harry wrote a note with directions for Kreacher, pinching into the twine writing side up.