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The House That Lovers Built	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 14853 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
- 10
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Chapter Eleven—Outside the House

            “Harry. You’re all right.”

            Ron’s voice was flat with exhaustion and disbelief. Harry found it so good to hear after so long that he didn’t really care. He nodded and fought to keep on his feet, because Ron—who had been waiting outside the Solitary Brewer’s house—had stood up and was staring at him. God knew what he would do if Harry fainted.

            Particularly when Draco emerged from the house behind him, his head bowed as he scrubbed at his robes with the heel of one hand. He was scrubbing off soot and the like, but Ron still instantly raised his wand. Harry concealed a sigh and got between them. He knew what that expression on Draco’s face meant; he was getting ready to unleash a tirade. He would say that he had known all along Harry’s friends would react like this, and that was why they couldn’t know what he and Harry had done in the house.

            “Did he hurt you, Harry?” Ron demanded. His wand had simply turned to the side, like a weathervane, to point around Harry’s head at Draco.

            Harry moved again, and said, “No. He was brewing a potion that would have got us out of the house.” He didn’t look at Draco, because he thought that even one look might give them away, and he wondered what the hell the best course was. Should he tell Ron about them being lovers, when that might make Ron attack Draco and Draco didn’t want him to know anyway?

            No. Not right now. He was going to wait, and he would speak when the air was clearer, without all these emotions flying around, and they could see what the best course would be.

            “Would have got you out.” Ron pounced on that, of course. “But that means it didn’t, and that means something else must have. What was it, Harry?”

            Harry grimaced and shook his head. “I don’t know.” He suddenly hoped that the print of Draco’s hand on his cheek wasn’t visible and that it didn’t sting as badly as it felt. That might be one reason Ron was acting hostile. “We were—arguing, and the house dissolved around us. I thought maybe you and Hermione had finally found a way through.”

            Ron took a step back, but Harry thought that was only to get better aim at Draco. “We didn’t,” he said shortly. “Hermione’s been researching like mad, but she hadn’t come up with anything yet. Did you get her last Patronus?”

            Harry swallowed, and nodded. “She said something was still missing in the list of ingredients I’d given her. It must be something I misunderstood. You know I’m pants at Potions theory.” And he kept his eyes pointed away from Draco, no matter the suspicious look that Ron flung him. No, he wasn’t about to get into the blood magic Draco had added to the potion right now.

            “Well.” Ron finally lowered his wand, but spun it between his fingers, and still kept his hard, suspicious stare on Draco. “We have you back now, but I wish we understood what had happened better, and what’s going to happen next.”

            “So do I,” Harry said, rubbing the back of his neck. It felt as though all his tension had concentrated there. The only mercies so far were that Draco hadn’t spoken, and there were no other Aurors with Ron; it looked as though he had been camping outside the Solitary Brewer’s house alone.

            Ron shut his eyes and finally stepped in, gathering Harry up in his embrace. Harry hugged him back, his head reeling with exhaustion and confusion. He had no idea what would happen next, but he knew that he wanted to go home.

            “It’s good to have you back, mate,” Ron whispered into his ear.

            Harry nodded and said, “Same. What happened to the Solitary Brewer? Did you catch him?”

            Ron grinned; Harry could feel it even before he pulled back and saw it on Ron’s face. “He was just as distracted by the accident you had as anyone else,” Ron said. “He tried to snatch something—I think it was the vial that potion was in—but the smoke blinded him. I took him out of there.”

            “Good for you,” Harry said, grinning back and feeling some small, curled-tight part of himself relax. He couldn’t do anything about the cases he had missed while he was stuck in the house, but he was at least glad that the Solitary Brewer couldn’t run around poisoning anyone else.

            Draco pointedly cleared his throat.

            Ron turned and looked at him. “Yeah? What do you have to add to this, Malfoy?”

            Harry looked at him along with Ron. He saw the way Draco’s eyes lingered on the arm Ron had wrapped around Harry’s shoulder before turning pointedly away. Harry found himself caught somewhere between sighing and laughing. He had told Draco how it would be, that he would be back with his friends and they would have to know everything that had happened in the house if they were going to accept his relationship with Draco.

            But maybe there was no relationship. From the way Draco was looking away from him, from the way his eyes had narrowed in that moment when he was still looking, he might have made the same decision he had been pushing Harry to make: that this was at an end, that they should just give up on it if they couldn’t be the most important people in each other’s lives.

            “I can vouch that Malfoy wasn’t helping the Solitary Brewer,” Harry said quietly to Ron. “He came there because he wanted his potion back. The Solitary Brewer had stolen the recipe, but it really was an accident that the vial broke like that and affected both of us at the same time. Don’t charge him with anything.”

            Ron snorted like a bull. “It isn’t really me that you should say that to, Harry. Tell it to the Auror hierarchy. They were ready to charge Malfoy with murder, or at least kidnapping, until your Patronus showed up and we realized what had really happened.”

            Harry could imagine the way Draco’s shoulders would stiffen even better than the way he actually saw it happening. He rapidly shook his head. “I’ll testify for him myself, then. Do you think the Auror hierarchy would want to be roused out of their beds in the middle of the night to talk about why they would be wrong to arrest him?”

            Ron started at him. “What? No. Of course not.”

            “Then it can bloody well wait until morning,” Harry snapped, and moved away from Ron, ignoring the way his best friend was studying his back, to look at Draco’s face.

            Draco stared at him, then flickered his eyes away. There was a look of defeat in his face Harry had imagined several times in the house, but found that he hated seeing when it was put into reality. They weren’t schoolboys anymore, and he didn’t really want to see Draco beaten down and humiliated.

            But what they were to each other didn’t have a name at the moment. Harry put out one hand, but Draco stared into the distance and ignored it. Harry ended up dropping it back to his side and clearing his throat awkwardly.

            “They’ll probably want to talk to us in the morning,” he said quietly. “I’ll speak up for you, and there’s no reason they should arrest you when you were the innocent victim in this.”

            “That’s what you think,” Draco said, staring into the distance still. There must be something infinitely fascinating there, from the intense study he was giving it. “But the Ministry can always find new ways to screw you over when your name is Malfoy.”

            “If you think the Ministry has screwed you over more than it has Harry during the years when they thought he was lying about You-Know-Who,” Ron began.

            “It’s not a competition, Ron,” Harry said, and the quiet, vicious tone in his voice was enough to make Ron stare at him. Harry knew he would have to explain that later, but he didn’t care. What he cared about at the moment was getting some answers from Draco, defining what they were to each other since they had come out of the house.

            But Draco continued to look into the distance, his hands clenched at his sides, and Harry was becoming aware of the large and deafening silence that beat between them, of how he wouldn’t be able to break through that silence if Draco was determined to keep it. He controlled the temptation to wave his hand up and down in front of Draco’s eyes. It would humiliate Draco without accomplishing anything else.

            “You can go,” he said at last, and stepped back.

            Draco walked away immediately. There was no glance back, no final farewell, the way Harry had thought there would be. Hadn’t Draco been the one who had acted like he was madly in love with Harry, or at least determined to remain with him once they were outside the house?

            But no, he Apparated, and left Harry to talk to Ron.

            Harry sighed and turned back to face Ron. Ron, who knew him. Ron, who was staring at him now, bent forwards at the waist, his folded arms dropping to his side and his face conscious with dawning knowledge.

            “Holy shit,” he said. “Harry. After all the times that you talked about shagging being a waste of time and how you couldn’t understand the Aurors whispering and sniggering about it…you shagged Malfoy?”

            Harry sighed. “We thought it was the best way to get out of the house at the time. Malfoy made the potion originally as a way to create a safehouse for one person. But with us both in there, the potion screwed up and created a house that seemed to want us to be lovers. We had to sleep in the same bed and take showers at the same time to use the hot water and eventually eat from each other’s hands. Being lovers was part of that.”

            Ron studied him soberly for a moment, then gave him a smile. “The sad thing is,” he said, “with your life, I’m pretty sure you’re telling the truth.”

*

            Harry woke from a sound sleep sometime after ten in the morning. Once again, he knew the time even before he cast a Tempus Charm to check because Hermione’s Patronus was floating in front of him and chattering away about it.

            “…ten in the morning and you’re supposed to be at work, Harry! Ron’s facing an inquisition about where you are and why you aren’t at work if you’re really back, safe and healthy, from the house. I think they’re halfway ready to decide that he was the one who kidnapped you. Go and help him, won’t you?”

            The Patronus zoomed towards the ceiling and vanished. Harry sighed and sat up. His own stag was active, but he would hate to have a Patronus like Hermione’s; the otter was simply so fast, and hard to handle.

            He washed quickly, ignoring how strange it was to feel hot water on his back without someone in the shower beside him. That only made sense, considering all the showers he and Draco had taken at the house. He would get used to something different in time.

            If you want to.

            Harry grimaced and shook shampoo out of his hair, raking more water through it. Yes, that part he was sure he wanted to forsake. Whether or not he was ever with Draco again, whether they spent more time together or not, he wouldn’t miss forced showers and forced meals. He liked choosing his own morning routine.

            He dressed carefully that morning, as carefully as though Draco was watching him and judging him on his performance. The Auror robes had to be crisp and fresh to impress the people he was speaking to; the dragonhide boots had to be shining. Harry took care of that with a muttered charm rather than actual scrubbing, but it was still a concession. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have bothered.

            Draco had acted like an idiot during the last moments they were in the house, but he had still brewed the potion and cooperated, and Harry really did believe it was an accident that they had ended up there. At the very least, the house hadn’t been doing what Draco wanted when it dissolved.

            Why did it dissolve?

            Harry sighed. He probably wouldn’t get the answer to that just thinking on his own, either. He needed Draco and his expertise on Potions theory, or at least Hermione. If she had worked out that the potion he’d told her about was missing a certain ingredient, she could probably figure out the rest on her own.

            I don’t know what to do next. I don’t know what the Ministry is going to want to hear, either.

            Harry changed the grimace into a smile with a bit of effort and a glance in the mirror. Well, the Ministry might want to hear certain things, but they were going to hear the load of bollocks that he shoveled together every time he had to make an official report. Whether the raid had gone wrong or not, whether they had captured the criminal or missed them, the Ministry hierarchy would fuss and complain and yell. Harry would give them less to yell about with his polished neutrality.

            What would Draco say, if he was here?

            And I can’t answer the question, Harry thought as he opened his door, because I knew him inside the house, but not outside, and that’s an outside question. A real question.

*

            “You expect us to believe that the potions accident that locked you and Mr. Malfoy in the house together was just an accident?”

            Yes, and I believe that you should serve in the Repetitive Department of Repetition, Harry thought, but kept his face calm and serious as he nodded. He had made sure that his fringe was swept away from his scar when he stepped into the room where officials from the DMLE and the Wizengamot waited to meet with him. There was a certain kind of person his scar impressed, and from their constant nervous little glances in its direction, this particular room was full of them. “It was an accident, sir, yes. No one could have predicted the potions vial would fall in that particular way, and Mr. Malfoy seemed as surprised at the house’s nature as I was.”

            Or not quite. But the nice thing about having been in a house that was in a pocket dimension and had its own ideas about security was that no one could prove he was wrong with a Pensieve memory or a ward picture.

            That particular questioner sat back, and Mathilde Terezi, one of the brighter individuals Harry had to deal with at this level, leaned forwards, with her own attempt at a serious expression. “Do you think there is any chance it could have been a plot by Mr. Malfoy? He admitted he was there to steal information from the Solitary Brewer.”

            “No,” Harry corrected her, with his best smile and deep glance that made it seem as though Terezi was the only one in the room he was paying attention to. It always flustered her, and it worked now. “He claimed he was there to steal back the potion that the Solitary Brewer had taken from him. He didn’t want that madman to have the credit for inventing the potion.”

            He heard the door of the hearing room open and close behind him, but assumed it was one of the hierarchy come late and paid no attention. Until he heard several gasps, at least, and looked over his shoulder.

            Draco stood there, his arms folded and his gaze so intense that Harry found himself flinching away from it before he decided what he was going to do.

            Draco smiled at that and nodded, with equal grimness, as if he had come here to find Harry betraying him and wasn’t surprised to see the flinch. He walked up the aisle between the spectators’ chairs towards the podium where Harry stood and settled into the chair waiting there. Harry had assumed the chair was for him and that the Wizengamot members had forgotten, as usual, that he never sat down during these inquisitions.

            It was harder to hang onto composure with Draco’s gaze digging into his back. Harry faced the questioners again to make it easier.

            “Mr. Malfoy is here to tell his own story, as you say,” Terezi said triumphantly, waggling her head so that her long, tangled black hair fell out of her eyes. “What will you have to say if it contradicts yours?”

            “The truth,” Harry said calmly, and smiled at the way that flustered her in turn, and moved away from the podium so Draco could get up and speak.

            Draco stared at him as he did so. Harry bowed and made a gesture with one hand towards the podium. No one could say that he hadn’t been gracious with Draco, that he hadn’t invited him to speak. That was the way it had to be, of course. Never show you were afraid of anything someone else might say.

            Even if your heart was pounding hard enough to give you a headache and your hands would have been too slippery to grip a wand, right then.

            Draco turned away with a faint sniff after a moment, and marched to the podium. He was dressed in a pair of rich, dove-grey robes that suited him, and which made Harry wonder what robes he wore from day to day as a Potions brewer. Probably plain black ones. It had been Snape’s costume of choice.

            I know him so little. That’s not the kind of thing we talked about.

            No, they’d talked about sex and how to escape the house and a little bit about their pasts. The more Harry thought about it, the more artificial their time in the house seemed.

            Harry could see Draco shifting around, probably because his back was to Harry and so he couldn’t see what Harry was doing at any given moment. Harry sympathized, but sitting down now, when he had made such a point of not doing so, would seem suspicious and maybe give the people interrogating them some sort of clue. So he remained standing, and after a little while, Draco calmed down.

            The questions he answered were intrusive, or at least Harry thought. Terezi thought she knew something about Potions making and kept trying to trip him up on the theory. Another small, grey-looking man whose name Harry could never remember kept going over and over the most minute details of Harry’s answers, and trying to find inconsistencies with Draco’s.

            Through it all, Draco never raised his voice, or seemed as if they could be annoying him. He just spoke, and replied, and listened, and nodded when appropriate. Harry couldn’t fault his grace or courage under fire.

            It would be different if he desired any of them.

            Through long effort, learned when he was an Auror trainee, Harry didn’t blush and possibly ruin some of the fine responses Draco was giving. He stared in front of him and pretended that nothing interested him less than the interrogation, until Terezi called him forwards again.

            “Auror Potter,” she said, her jaw set in a way she probably imagined looked determined but simply made her look like a pouty child. “Would you say that Mr. Malfoy did not take advantage of you?”

            Shit. There was Ron leaning forwards in the audience, and Draco watching him out of the corner of his eye, and of course the inquisition waiting for him to trip up. And Harry still was better at bending the truth than lying.

            He stared straight at Terezi, and said, “He did not take advantage of me. We were both trying to escape that awful place, and he helped me adjust to the house’s unreasonable demands.”

            From the corner of his eye, he saw Draco flinch. Was it perhaps because he’d called the house awful? Well, it had been. Harry might have different opinions at any given moment on whether he liked Draco or not, but he would never change his mind about the house being horrible, and his gladness at being free had exploded through him when he was sure it had really happened, and wasn’t just some new trick.

            “You’ve been evasive about what those demands were,” said the grey man, and waited, his silence more full of traps than his question.

            Harry sighed. “The house wanted us to spend every waking moment together. We couldn’t eat unless we were in the same room, not sleep unless we were in the same bedroom.” All true, and he didn’t falter as he said it. “We even had to brew the potion together, which was probably more of a challenge for Mr. Malfoy than anything else, and might have delayed our escape. I’m no Potions brewer.” He turned his head to look at Draco directly for the first time since he’d entered the hearing.

            Draco’s eyes led away into forever, and asked lots and lots of questions that Harry wasn’t ready to answer. He turned back, with what he hoped wasn’t undue haste that would surely offend someone, to face Terezi again.

            Terezi was drumming her hand on the arm of her chair. “Would you say that Mr. Malfoy took sexual advantage of you, Auror Potter?” she demanded suddenly.

            Harry raised his eyebrows. “If I felt that I had been raped, or harassed, or driven, what would stop me from reporting that to you, Madam Terezi? Everyone knows that I had no particular regard for Mr. Malfoy in our schooldays.”

            Terezi looked back and forth between them again. Then she said, “You might lie to spare someone else.” But even she didn’t sound as if she believed it.

            Harry sighed patiently. “I hope that I can be fairer to Mr. Malfoy than my schoolboy self would have been, Madam Terezi. But, as you must know, I haven’t dated much of anyone since my unfortunate separation from Ginny Weasley. I would have felt pressured by almost anything Mr. Malfoy did. Unfairly, yes. And I would have reported it.”

            He held Terezi’s gaze, and either he was better at lying than he had thought, or she was poorer at reading faces, because she waved her hand and went on to her next question with ill-concealed irritation.

            And now Draco was staring, and Harry was glad they would only need to spend a few more minutes in each other’s company. The last few questions were indeed perfunctory, and in less than ten minutes, people were putting papers away and chatting to each other and yawning.

            Harry hesitated, but turned towards the door of the room. He wanted to talk to Draco, but here, in front of everyone else, might undermine the neutral picture that he had been trying to build towards.

            “Potter. A moment.”

            Perfect, Harry decided with relief. Draco would be the one to set up the meeting, and away from everyone else, surely. He turned around.

            Draco stood in front of him and continued to stare. Harry didn’t incline his head and retreat, but he badly wanted to. There were so many questions in those eyes, and surely no one person could answer them all.

            Then Draco said, “I wanted to give you some of the books on Potions theory that we discussed in the house, which might help you understand what went wrong better, and save you if you are ever in a similar situation.” He spoke smoothly, but Harry could hear the hurried staccato of his words underneath, the fear of rejection. “Would you like to adjourn to a place we could talk?”

            Harry nodded, caught Ron’s eye, shrugged a little, and said, “Of course, Mr. Malfoy. Lead the way.”

            It isn’t ideal, but it might be the best we can hope for right now.

*

            delia cerrano: I doubt Harry’s friends would interfere that much. Draco does think they will, though.

            moodysavage: Not in the house itself, no.

            addiena saffir: Yes, indeed.

            monkey lady: Maybe someday.

            Makoto_Sagara: Well, their spat is more recent, so he may remember that more.

            Katlin Malfoy: They really are out of the house.

            unneeded: They aren’t yet sure that they do, really.
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The House That Lovers Built