Chapter Four of 'The House That Lovers Built'- Home Troubles

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Three.

Title: The House That Lovers Built (4/10 or 12)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione mentioned
Warnings: Angst, violence, forced bonding (of a sort), hurt/comfort.
Rating: R
Summary: A planned Auror raid on a notorious Potions brewer goes wrong. Badly wrong. To the point of Harry-ending-up-trapped-in-a-magical-house-with-Draco-Malfoy wrong. And the secret to leaving is going to be something that Harry might not have the strength to face.
Author’s Notes: This is a hurt/comfort fic for both characters in some ways. The forced bonding is more related to the house than to a typical bond. And, finally, I’ve been wanting to write this fic for a long time. It will update every Monday, and probably be somewhere between ten and twelve chapters long.

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Four-Home Troubles

Except for lunch, which was thick beef sandwiches in the kitchen, they worked on the potion all day. And Harry’s Patronus still hadn’t come back by the time Malfoy looked up at him and jerked his head at the cupboards. Harry put the cap of salt and the knife away while Malfoy swept up the leaves. Harry reckoned he deposited them somewhere where they’d be safe, because they were gone when he turned around.

“Dinner,” Malfoy announced, and walked out of the lab. The sunlight through the windows promptly became dimmer. Harry rolled his eyes and followed him, pondering the best way to ask his question.

“Do you think that a Patronus could get out of the dimension, but not in?” he asked, when they were halfway up the stairs.

Malfoy turned and looked at him blankly, then shrugged. “Oh, you’re thinking about the message you sent yesterday. I have no idea. But I can’t worry about it, because right now we’re working towards a solution, and we don’t know if it will succeed yet or not. There’s no reason to concentrate on anything but the potion right now.”

Harry smiled in spite of himself. “You sound like the way I feel about Auror work,” he murmured, and kept climbing.

He’d meant it as a throwaway comment, but Malfoy sneered at him as they entered the kitchen. There was a fireplace in one corner, and Malfoy opened the cupboards and began looking for something specific. Harry opened the refrigerator, saw a bowl of hard-boiled eggs, and took them out with a little shrug. Good enough.

“What makes you think we have any similarities?” Malfoy drawled, not looking up from the loaf of bread. He’d sliced some pieces off and evidently meant to toast them over the fire. Harry shook his head. Malfoy ate more bread than anyone he’d ever met.

Harry tried to remember for a moment if he’d eaten that much bread at Hogwarts, then dismissed the attempt. A different memory, a different world.

“We have to focus on the task at hand until it’s finished,” Harry said, and looked around for salt, mourning the amount he’d left in the Potions lab. Luckily, a saltcellar sat on the table. Harry tapped the egg on the side of the bowl to begin the crack in the shell. “That’s what Ron doesn’t understand, and what I keep telling him. He wants to interview half-a-dozen witnesses and then go and chase down reports of the criminal somewhere else, and I tell him to finish the interviews first. It’s the best way.”

“So Weasley isn’t the star Auror that so many people thought he would be,” Malfoy said, and rolled his eyes. Harry caught the movement even though Malfoy had mostly turned so he was facing the fire. “Does the fault lie with his abilities or with the judgment of those who thought he was perfect in the first place? One really must wonder.”

“One doesn’t need to wonder,” Harry said quietly, stripping and then salting his egg. If his hands were busy, he was less likely to strike out with his fists or reach for his wand. “Not when one knows that he’s a fine Auror in other respects, and he’s made more arrests than I have.”

Malfoy’s shoulder twitched. “But you were still the leader on the raid that imprisoned us here.”

“I was assigned to that, and Ron doesn’t want a lot of leadership positions. He’s good at them, but that’s not the same thing.” Then Harry wondered why the hell he was talking about his friends with Malfoy, and returned to eating the egg instead. Probably for lack of other things to talk about, honestly. Well, and fear that Malfoy would return like a yelping dog to the incident in the shower this morning if he didn’t.

But facing up to my own embarrassment would be better than letting Malfoy insult my friends. Now that he was more distant from what had happened that morning, it didn’t seem to be as big a deal as it had at the time.

“You screwed that up, too.” Malfoy turned his skewer, and a perfect slice of golden-brown toast flopped on the table. He was roasting another almost before Harry could blink and recover from the shock of the first one landing.

“Yes, I did,” Harry said. “I should have looked first and made sure that you weren’t hiding in the Solitary Brewer’s house.”

“If you’d let me get in and then get out with the potion, none of this would have happened-”

“We didn’t know you were there!” Harry spun around, crushing the last of the egg he held in one fist. He ignored the slimy feeling on his hands and glared at Malfoy. “But you claimed to know we were. Why the fuck didn’t you wait until the Auror raid was done and then come in and take your prize?”

“You would have taken it,” Malfoy said tightly. “And you might have had someone competent enough in your labs, notice that I say might, to work backwards from the completed potion and figure out the recipe. That means I would have lost any and all claims to it. It would be harder to take it out of the Ministry than it was to take it out of a house without enough wards.”

Harry checked his tongue and his temper, reminded himself that this was like arguing with one of his Aurors who had been snogging on duty, and turned away. “Yes, whatever you want to say, Malfoy, I’m sure,” he murmured, and reached for the next egg.

“You think it would be easier to steal it from the Ministry?” Malfoy laughed, short and like a needle digging into Harry’s eyelids. “Then you must have less faith in your security than I knew you did. Interesting.”

Harry shut his eyes and reminded himself that Malfoy’s words could only irritate him if he let them. Plus, they were trapped here, and Malfoy’s potion was the only means they had, at the moment, of getting out.

“I have faith in my own wards, but I didn’t put all of them up in the Ministry,” he said. “So there’s a chance you could have stolen it. Sorry.” He bit viciously into his egg, and bits of yolk fell down his hand.

Malfoy was silent. Harry didn’t turn and look at him again, so he didn’t exactly know why, but that wasn’t the sort of thing he needed to concern himself with. He concerned himself with eating and cleaning up instead, and sitting with his profile turned to Malfoy while Malfoy ate. He made new plans for casting Patronuses, for conjuring an owl strong enough to get through the wards that must be around the house, for forcing Malfoy to cast the Patronus in conjunction with him so that the house would think they both wanted to leave and have to give them passage.

But all of those were useless plans. Right now, their best chance was Malfoy’s potion, and that meant not irritating Malfoy. Harry stayed with Malfoy until he was done eating, accompanied him to the bathroom-one shower a day appeared enough for him, luckily-and then went to bed with him. At least the bed was large enough to let them lie back-to-back without touching, Harry thought, as he shut his eyes.

Malfoy hadn’t spoken a word since Harry’s apology. Harry felt the little twitch of curiosity traveling up his shoulders, urging him to turn around and see what Malfoy’s expression looked like.

But that would anger Malfoy more, likely, or at best show Harry a face he didn’t know how to read. So he kept his eyes shut, and breathed the way he did when trying to get some sleep in the middle of a case, and drifted off soon enough.

*

“Potter, get off!”

Harry’s eyes popped open. The first thing he noticed was that the floor seemed a lot further away than before, and then that his head was dangling over the side of the bed.

And the third that he was folded like a map along Malfoy’s side, with Malfoy shoving at Harry’s arms and legs where they crossed his body.

Harry hauled himself further away, and caught the edge of the bed before he overbalanced. It was a near thing, but the floor was not. The bed had grown higher, yes, so that they were now perhaps six meters above the bedroom. Harry turned his head, assuming that the ceiling slanted a centimeter above their heads now, but found that it was much higher. The house must have adjusted the size of the room.

And the size of the bed. Harry was convinced there was less space to either side than he had ever had before.

Malfoy pushed at him again. Grimly, Harry clung and turned. “The house shrank the bed and lifted it,” he said. “What do you want me to do? I can try sleeping on the floor again, but I doubt the house will like that idea any more than it did before.”

Malfoy stared at him, then shook his head. “That’s ridiculous, Potter. Think about what you’re saying.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “The house has changed the temperature of the water and the food in the cupboards and the shape of this room before, without trouble. Why do you balk at the idea that it would change the bed?”

Malfoy fell silent, from which Harry surmised that he really didn’t have a good argument. Harry snorted and carefully rose onto his knees. Watching the walls and the ceiling as much as he could, he dangled his feet over the side of the bed, ready to jump onto the floor.

The ceiling promptly shot up and straightened, and the bed followed it. Malfoy gasped and clung. Harry did the clinging without the gasping, because he had more than expected it.

“The house wants to make sure we spend the night in each other’s arms, evidently,” he said over his shoulder to Malfoy. He found himself almost cheerful in the face of this stupid development, even given what Malfoy’s touch had done to him in the shower yesterday. It was just another consequence to be dealt with on their way to brewing the potion and getting out of here. Harry had always been happiest when he had an enemy to fight, and calling Malfoy an enemy was out of the question right now.

“That’s,” Malfoy said.

“Disgusting, right, I know,” Harry said. “But let’s see what happens when we make a move in that direction.” He rolled towards Malfoy, keeping an eye on the ceiling and window as he did so, the only parts of the room that were easily visible when he was facing in Malfoy’s direction.

The window widened and acquired a sill. The ceiling rose further above them as the bed lowered a bit, and Harry thought he felt more of it expanding away behind him. He wouldn’t look, yet, in case the house took that as a signal to shrink it again.

Malfoy stared at him. His breath filled the space between them, making Harry glad that both of them had brushed their teeth last night. Then he shut his eyes and turned his head away from Harry, shuddering.

“I don’t smell that bad,” Harry said, and leaned his head on Malfoy’s shoulder. It would make an acceptable pillow, he thought. Malfoy’s arms dangled along his sides like cold noodles, but some pulling got them into position.

“I’ve never slept this close to anyone else,” Malfoy whispered, and shuddered.

“You think I have?” Harry snapped back. Perhaps it was true that he’d slept in closer quarters with Ron and Hermione on the Horcrux hunt, but they’d always been careful to leave some space between their pallets, and their tent had more room than this bed. “We’re both going to just have to learn to deal with this, Malfoy. Shut up and go to sleep.”

Malfoy didn’t, of course, instead lying there like a tense and frozen thing. Harry spent a little time rolling his eyes and a lot of time rearranging Malfoy so they would be vaguely comfortable. Or he would, and since Malfoy wasn’t speaking to him at the moment, that could cover both of them, as far as Harry was concerned. He assumed Malfoy would kick him back or lash out if Harry crossed over the sort of invisible line that he seemed to want separating them.

The bed was the whole world. Harry felt the sheets grow damp beneath them as they lay there, from the sweat, and he could count each one of Malfoy’s eyelashes. That taught him a lot of things about Malfoy’s cosmetic charms that he would have preferred not to know.

But he was an Auror, and they could sleep anywhere. He shut his eyes, ignored the way Malfoy’s breath rattled his lashes, and slipped into a restless doze.

*

The next morning, the bed retained its smaller size, but it had shrunk back down to near the floor, and Malfoy was gone. Harry rose and stretched. He reckoned Malfoy had preferred a cold shower to the enforced intimacy a warm one would produce.

Funny. I would have understood that better yesterday.

But this was enemy territory, and they had to figure out the way to survive until they got out or someone rescued them. Harry decided he could probably accept that more easily because he had survived these kinds of situations before. He tied the dressing robe firmly around his waist and padded out to the bathroom.

A small, sullen shape stood in the shower, turned away from Harry; he could see that much through the glass of the door. Harry shrugged and began to brush his teeth, then cast the Cleaning Charms on himself, gasping a little as they tingled sharply up and down his body. It was like toothpaste for the skin, really.

The door to the shower banged open, and Malfoy leaned out. “I didn’t need you to make the water warmer,” he said.

“Glad to hear it,” Harry said, and cast another Cleaning Charm on his hair, then reached for the comb that the house had thoughtfully provided.

Malfoy slammed the shower door again. Harry shook his head, listened to the almost musical echo of the bang, and compared it with the first one. On the whole, he thought the first bang superior.

He waited inside the bathroom until Malfoy had finished, all the while deciding that he would release another Patronus at noon today if he heard nothing before then. When Malfoy stepped out, the house rushed him with towels, and Harry kept his head turned to the side as Malfoy dried himself.

“Typical,” Malfoy said in a voice that buzzed and hummed around Harry’s teeth the way the brush had. “You can sleep with me, but you can’t look at me the morning after.”

Harry shuddered, then laughed. “You don’t seem to need my help,” he said. “You were the one who chose to get up without waking me and take a cold shower. Why do you think I owe you something for that?”

“Look at me.”

Malfoy was right beside him. Harry’s mind rang with visions of what he might see if he turned, but on the other side, keeping his face averted like some blushing virgin when Malfoy had challenged him was worse. He turned around.

Malfoy had a towel around his shoulders and one clutched in his hands, more or less at waist height. He stared at Harry. Harry looked back, and only knew what was coming from the fey flash in Malfoy’s eyes the moment before he uttered it.

Too late to stop it, certainly.

“I know you were hard when we showered together yesterday,” Malfoy whispered. “Because of how I touched you. I felt it.”

Harry thought for a second he would pass out; stars exploded along the edges of his vision that suggested that, and he swayed back and forth. But he had survived harder things than this, he told himself. The Cruciatus. The Dursleys. Having to tell Ginny that they had grown apart during the war and he really didn’t want to date her again afterwards.

Besides, now it was out in the open. That meant he didn’t have to fear mentioning it himself, or having it happen again and Malfoy finding out that way.

“Are you finished?” he asked. “With the shower, with the taunting. We should get some breakfast and then work on the potion.”

“You’ll sit back on your useless arse in the chair, you mean,” Malfoy snarled at him, “and I’ll do all the work.”

“I’m not good at Potions,” Harry said, steady, despite his blush. “I can do simple tasks like the one you gave me yesterday, but otherwise, I’m probably useless, yes. But you know that, and you know trying to force me to participate because it’s ‘fair’ would ruin the potion, and our chances of getting out of here.”

Malfoy trembled for a second. Harry didn’t want to name the emotions raging across his face and behind his eyes, because he didn’t think either of them wanted to hear those names.

Malfoy finally broke away. “You think of getting out of here, and nothing else,” he said, over his shoulder, as he dropped the towels and reached for the clothes that the house had already hung on hooks. Harry had put the ones from yesterday back on, because the house had cleaned them overnight and he saw no reason not to. “You act like a machine, and then you’re surprised when I don’t like you.”

Harry shook his head. “And now you’re not making sense. What else should I think about? You admitted that you don’t know how to escape, and the house resists destruction and won’t let us out, and even the potion is only a chance.”

Malfoy snapped and snarled his way through the rest of his dressing, but without words. Harry stood stolidly aside and waited for him. He thought he had done all that could reasonably be expected of him.

Of course, that was before they got to the kitchen.

*

“Why the fuck won’t they open?”

Harry watched in silence as Malfoy attacked another cupboard, which might as well have been a decorative piece of solid wood for all the impact he made. It had been the same with all the cupboards, and the refrigerator had turned itself into a solid block of metal despite still having a door. It hummed, so Harry was sure there was food in there, but the house seemed to have decided they were to have none this morning.

Harry shuddered a little. He had found some full dungeons when cleaning out Dark wizards’ houses before. Starvation was a long death, and not a pretty one.

Cheer up, it probably won’t let us have water either, so we’ll die of thirst before then, he thought.

He was pants at cheering himself up.

Malfoy broke away from the cupboard swearing fluently, and turned around and glared at Harry. Harry shrugged a little and walked up to stand beside him, studying the cupboard door. It didn’t gape at all. He thought it was the one Malfoy’s precious loaf of bread had been in, which explained why he was so desperate to get into it.

“We should just have left the food on the table,” Malfoy said, folding his arms and scowling at Harry and the cupboards impartially. “It’s not like we have to worry about mice or insects finding it.”

“Yes,” Harry said, because he was tired of disagreeing, and leaned nearer to the cupboard. He thought he had seen the door tremble when he did, but if Malfoy had tugged on it all this time without producing any change, why should he think that simply being near it would do that?

Malfoy moved up behind him, already mouthing the next arguments, and the cupboard door did tremble. Harry took a deep breath and reached out, taking Malfoy’s hand before he could object. Then he used his free hand to tug on the door of the cupboard.

It flew open. Harry promptly scooped up Malfoy’s bread and the honeypot before the house could change its mind, and turned to set them down on the table. Malfoy exclaimed sharply and tugged away from him.

The cupboard door slammed shut.

Malfoy glared at it. Harry waited for the inevitable explosion, but when it came, it was a tempered, “We can only open them by holding hands?”

“It seems so,” Harry said, and turned towards the drawer where he knew the house kept the knives, snapping his fingers at Malfoy as he did so.

Malfoy followed him, and Harry seized his hand again to open the drawer. This time, he managed two knives before Malfoy danced free, and stood there waving his hands as the thing slammed shut.

“It’s ridiculous.”

“And the way we have to survive here, just like we have to survive by sleeping in the same bed,” Harry said, and used the knives to begin cutting the bread and spreading the honey. Malfoy took a step towards the kitchen doorway. Harry clenched his teeth, but said evenly, “If you go, then I think the food will just disappear back into the cupboards again, and that means that no one gets something to eat.”

“Maybe I think that’s worth the price, to deprive you of it,” Malfoy retorted, and took another step nearer the door.

Harry promptly stuffed a huge bite of bread in his mouth and hurled the other dripping piece at Malfoy’s head. It stuck in his freshly-shampooed hair, and Malfoy whirled around, cursing. Harry finished sucking and swallowing his bread, coughing when it stuck in his throat, and then yelled. His words were louder than Malfoy’s, and more coherent, which was probably the reason that Malfoy shut up to hear them.

“Will you fucking listen to yourself? You’re acting like a child, throwing tantrums because the house is making you uncomfortable. Well, I’m so sorry that your precious potion caused this and this is the way we have to live. You were making fun of me yesterday for not settling down and accepting the inevitable. It doesn’t look any more attractive on you when you do it, you know.”

Malfoy stared at him, his mouth open, then yelled, “If you hadn’t bumped into me, I wouldn’t have dropped the potion!”

“And if you haven’t been in the house during an Auror raid, then I wouldn’t have bumped into you,” Harry snapped back. He was starting to regret the loss of the bread he had thrown at Malfoy, although it had been the best way to get his attention. He was still hungry, and he thought Malfoy still might end up storming out of the kitchen. “Look, it was both our faults, if you want to look at it that way. I frankly don’t care. What I care about is that you’re going to make life here impossible for the both of us for the sake of-what? Your stupid pride? What is wrong with you? Showering together is fine but holding hands offends your nonexistent Malfoy sense of dignity?”

Malfoy stomped back towards him. Honey was starting to drip down the side of his face, but it didn’t make his eyes less murderous. “You want to know,” he said. “You want to know why this is different for me?”

“Yes, you idiot,” Harry said. “Or I wouldn’t have asked. I know that you’re used to doing everything that’s the opposite of sensible, what with being Slytherin and all, but the rest of the world occasionally asks for what it does want-”

“You got me hard!”

Harry stopped ranting and stared at him. Malfoy promptly spun away, but didn’t seem to have the strength to lift his feet. His face had turned as red as Harry was sure his must have burned that morning.

Never, not once, had he thought Malfoy was reacting out of much the same embarrassment that Harry had been feeling yesterday.

Harry cleared his throat, and tried to think of what to say. What came out was, “I don’t understand.”

“In the bed,” Malfoy said. “I told you that I’d never slept that close to another person before. You got me hard, and I didn’t-want you to know, and I hate this house, and I hate the world, and I hate you.” He folded his arms and bowed his head, his sides heaving for a moment as though he was struggling to control sobs.

Harry could only shake his head. “Fine,” he said at last. “So we did it to each other, and we have equal things to be embarrassed about. But that doesn’t mean that we need to behave like children. You scolded me for it. You were right.”

“That’s not what you said yesterday.”

“I’m sorry,” Harry said, and cast a Tempus Charm. “From now on, I shall note the exact time of all my apologies. Nine hours and two minutes into the morning this time. Perhaps my next one shall be at ten hours and three minutes. I think that would be preferable, don’t you? To anything else, I mean. Because it’s so precise.”

Malfoy stood there for a second, and Harry was equally ready for him to walk out or to continue fighting. Instead, he shook his head, came back to the table, and started casting the spells that would take the honeyed bread out of his hair, while cutting himself a piece. Harry sat down on the other side of the table, chair pushed as far back as possible so that Malfoy would have more room, and waited for him to finish.

Malfoy was perhaps three bites from the end of the piece when the air in front of Harry shimmered, and he started to his feet. The next moment, a gleaming silver otter stood on the table, lifting its nose towards him. It was fainter than usual, perhaps because Hermione had had to send it such a distance.

“Harry,” the otter whispered, nose twitching and whiskers vibrating. “Your message…break through as soon as we can. We found the place that the house touches…world, but the wards are…As soon as we can.”

Harry closed his eyes in relief as Hermione’s Patronus disappeared. At least he knew his friends were coming, even if it would probably take them weeks of work to break through the wards.

And at least he knew that he had managed to tell them what had happened. The thought that they might never know what had happened to him because he simply vanished was a nightmare to him.

“Then you’ll wait for them?” Malfoy’s voice was curiously sharp.

Harry blinked. “What do you mean? I don’t have much choice but to wait for them, because they’ll be digging through the wards and I don’t think I can get out from the inside.”

Malfoy slammed his bread down on the table and leaned forwards. “I meant,” he whispered, quicksilver-vicious, “that you won’t want me to brew my potion anymore, because your precious friends are coming.”

“No,” Harry said. “I don’t know that they’ll manage to actually get into the house. It’s best that you keep working on your potion at the same time, because then we have a double chance of getting out in case one of the methods doesn’t work.”

Malfoy leaned forwards with his hands planted so solidly into the center of the table that Harry didn’t understand the stiff tension in his shoulders, the shaking of his arms. Harry stared back as those narrow grey eyes examined him, and almost wished that he could reassure Malfoy. But since he had no idea what Malfoy was upset about in the first place, he couldn’t. Malfoy ought to be happy that they wouldn’t spend as much time around each other. Harry had embarrassed him, yelled at him, and needed to be coaxed and prodded. Malfoy wasn’t happy here right now. Why would he want to stay?

Oh.

“I promise that I’ll tell the others what happened, and that you helped,” Harry offered. “That way, no one will arrest you for being in the Solitary Brewer’s house, and you don’t have to worry about the Aurors prosecuting you.”

Malfoy walked out of the kitchen, leaving the crust of uneaten bread on the table. As Harry had thought would happen, the bread vanished the moment Malfoy’s foot crossed the threshold. At least the refrigerator didn’t stop running this time, probably because the house had no need to enforce that prohibition when it had simply stuck the doors of the cupboards shut instead.

Harry sighed and followed Malfoy, braced for another long day of chopping.

Chapter Five.

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