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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
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Chapter Two—Doors Without Keys

The other rooms were the same, Harry noticed as they passed them. When he and Malfoy were together as they walked past the bathroom, he heard running water, and the sunlight perceptibly brightened under the green door, which he had left partially open, when their shadows crossed it together. He thought now that the cupboards in the kitchen had only been full of food the first time he looked because Malfoy had been right behind him, even if Harry didn’t realize it.

            The stairs didn’t appear to have any particular objects to be activated by them going down separately. Harry was glad, because the steps weren’t wide enough for two.

            Unless they squeezed their hips together and leaned in so that each of them had an arm around each other’s waist instead of gripping the banister…

            Harry frowned up at the ceiling, which rose above them as the staircase dipped lower and lower. He was starting to have some disturbing ideas about what this house was intended to do.

            They reached the bottom without incident. The staircase dumped them in a small space that seemed to be made of the walls of other rooms, but had a series of thick, small rugs in various colors on the floor. Harry lifted his wand to the windows as they appeared, but they were all done in thick panes of glass, covered with iron bands, and he couldn’t see snarling faces through them.

            Of course, he couldn’t see anything else, either. Other than a blank dazzle of sunshine. Spells crawled up the glass, humming softly, hiding any sight of a garden or the flat plain that Harry had privately imagined the house would stand in. Harry swallowed back his nausea and looked around, crossing from the spare room into the larger space immediately in front of them.

            The smell of water touched his nostrils, and for the barest moment he thought they’d found another bathroom, followed by the hope of a way out. But, no. Harry jerked to a halt and stared, while Malfoy peered over his shoulder and shoved with one hand in the middle of his back, as though he assumed that Harry was obstructing his view on purpose.

            It was a pool. A room done in the same blue and green tile that occupied the bathroom above, yes, but deeper colors this time, and with a pool set in the floor. Harry sniffed, and the scent of Astringent Charms came to him. Yes, this was a pool meant for swimming, not a giant bath. Fresh water, but carefully treated to keep algae from growing in it, or animals getting into it.

            And it was gigantic. Harry assumed that was the reason it was down here, where he thought it would have made more sense to put the kitchen, at least. He circled it warily, watching the smooth sides for signs of traps. He saw nothing breaking them, however, but a set of wide steps going down into the water on one side and a small platform level with the surface on the other. When he bent down to examine the platform, he discovered a system of creaking hydraulics that would presumably raise it and allow it to be used as a diving board.

            ”Ridiculous,” Harry said flatly, shaking his head. He would have liked to say a lot more, but Malfoy wandered to the edge of the pool and started talking.

            “The potion was only meant to create an exercise room,” he murmured. “Or a training room, a place that you could practice your spells so you wouldn’t get sloppy. I never imagined anything like this.” He darted a look at Harry that wouldn’t have been out of place on a sniffing ferret. “Do you like to swim, Potter?”

            Harry felt his face flame, as though he’d been caught naked beside the pool. He turned away roughly. It was true, he did, but he saw no reason to admit it to Malfoy. It wouldn’t help them in their goal of getting out of here.

            He walked across the pool room, ignoring the way the water lit up and bubbled. That particular tiled room opened into another, smaller one, this time with a proper tub instead of a pool, but ornamented with so many fancy faucets and spigots that Harry was sure it would heat up like a Muggle hot tub. He rolled his eyes and kept walking, although Malfoy lingered to stare into that tub with a delighted expression.

            The room beyond that was a conservatory.

            Harry stood and gawked up at the glass roof arching overhead. The room shimmered, hot and sticky, a sensation he hadn’t felt even a meter beyond the threshold. Wards—well-done ones, since Harry hadn’t heard them humming—must confine the heat to this room.

            Everywhere were shelves and pots and frames and trellises. At least, Harry thought they were there. It was hard to see them under the riot of flowers and vines and neat, precise rows of magical plants that ran everywhere.

            “There’s a lab beyond here,” Malfoy said, in a deep, satisfied voice that woke Harry somewhat from the daze of scents and colors crowding around him. “A proper one. Fully stocked.” He turned his head and smiled at Harry. “So I can brew while you’re swimming, Potter.”

            Harry reminded himself of who he was, what he was here to do, and what he had been doing before they stumbled into this mess. “No,” he said quietly. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

            Malfoy shook his head. “You think the pool and the lab won’t work without both of us there? But the water didn’t change that much when we passed it by, and there’s no spells in the lab except the ones that keep the ingredients fresh and the dust off. I’m sure that we could be apart for the length of the rooms between us without drowning or blowing something up.”

            “I mean,” Harry said, harnessing the words he wanted to snap with steel, “that you are not going to act as if we’re here for an extended holiday. We’re not. We’re here to make sure that we find a way out.”

            “No, we’re here because a potion exploded and didn’t work the way we wanted it to.” Malfoy drifted towards Harry, one eye on him. “Are you all right, Potter? You look as though you’re about to explode.”

            Harry clenched his hands down and took a deep breath. “Look, Malfoy,” he said at last, “I know that. But we have to work on a way of getting out of here. Not just settle back and—and enjoy the luxuries the house has to offer, or whatever you were proposing we do.”

            “I was proposing to settle back because there’s no door to the outside that I’ve seen,” Malfoy said steadily. “This lab curves back around to join with the other side of the pool room. No way out.”

            Harry licked his lips. The air settled around the top of his head like a muzzle, and he wanted to strike out, lash out, carve a way through the walls if there wasn’t one. He heard himself breathing, and Malfoy moved towards him with one hand extended.

            “We missed something,” Harry said, and turned to hurry back through the conservatory and tub room and pool room, ignoring the way that Malfoy protested and pattered after him. Of course Malfoy would want to stay in a place like this, perfectly safe and without any luxuries that he had to pay for. But Harry was more sensible.

            He went at a dead run back to the entrance hall, and then turned through the doorway that they hadn’t taken before. He almost slammed straight into a wide table covered with gleaming carving knives and stirring rods.

            Malfoy was right. The ground floor was set up as a huge circle, unlike the first floor. They didn’t have a simple door they could walk through and find themselves outside again.

            Harry shut his eyes and trembled, arms locked rigid. Gradually, he forced his muscles and even his breathing back under control. He had been through worse than this, he told himself. A lot worse, in fact. He had no reason to think that he would explode simply because he was in a house without a door.

            Like the cupboard. Or Dudley’s second bedroom. A locked door that he could never open, a window that he had to gaze out of between bars, and watch all the people below walking through the neighborhood who would never know or believe how lucky they were merely to be able to go from place to place…

            Malfoy snatched his wand hand. Harry turned on him, and Malfoy immediately threw his head back and raised his hands.

            Displaying his belly and throat. Making himself helpless in the face of Harry’s rage, which triggered instincts that went deeper than Harry’s Auror training. He turned his head away and shut his eyes, counting his breaths, making himself focus on the numbers burning in his mind as if lit up with magnesium.

            “You have claustrophobia, then?” Malfoy sounded like a Mind-Healer, the way they had the few times Harry had visited one, serene and indifferent to any personal aspects of the problem at hand. One of his fingers brushed Harry’s back, then withdrew. Harry was at least glad to realize that Malfoy understood the ramifications of the problem and that there were some lines he shouldn’t cross.

            “No,” Harry snapped, and thought of a bright, glittering 30 before he opened his eyes. “Only a dislike of not being able to leave a place when I want to.”

            “The same thing,” Malfoy said. “Especially since this is such a big house, and you could have gone into another room if you felt uncomfortable in this one.”

            Harry rolled his eyes and moved further away, towards the stairs again. It was the best place for what he had in mind. “That sounds like you’re talking yourself out of me having claustrophobia, not into it.”

            “Why would I try to talk to myself, either way?” Malfoy asked, following him. “You’re the one I want to convince.”

            31 appeared in Harry’s mind, but he was glad that he had come up with the plan that he had. It might keep his magic from denting Malfoy’s skull. “Stand out of the way,” he said, and when he held up his wand, Malfoy hastily did so, flattening himself against the wall as if a mouse had tried to crawl up his trousers.

            Harry smiled briefly, and then his training relaxed his muscles and made his fingers into a light, loose grip on the wand. He checked the angles, instincts running beneath the conscious surface of his mind, and nodded. This should be fine. He half-closed his eyes and launched the Blasting Curse at the wall opposite him, the one that the doorway to the pool room stood in.

            The blow rocked the house, and dust drifted down at the same time as Malfoy squeaked and flung himself at Harry. Harry turned so that Malfoy didn’t block his wand and hit the wall in the exact same place again. More dust, and a groaning that made Harry smile. The house might not have a door, but it wasn’t going to stand up to simple destructive magic.

            “What are you doing?” Malfoy screamed, trying to grab Harry’s wand without actually touching it, or Harry’s arm, or anything that would get him in the way of a hex. “Do you want to bring the roof down on us?”

            “The house is too sturdily built for that,” Harry said, aware that he sounded a little like he was shouting through the ringing in his ears, and used the curse a third time. “We have to hammer a way to the outside world!” he added in the echoes of that one, watching as cracks spread up and through the wall.

            The house shuddered a bit, and Harry got ready to raise a Shield Charm in case something did fall on their heads. But instead, the walls steadied a moment later, the cracks sank into the plaster and vanished, and Harry’s wand leaped out of his hand and into Malfoy’s.

            Malfoy gaped, but gestured sharply with the wand when Harry started to move towards him. “I wouldn’t,” he drawled.

            Harry halted, less because he thought Malfoy might hurt him on purpose than because he would probably try it by accident when handling Harry’s wand. “Do you have any other idea on how to get out of here?” he snapped.

            “No,” Malfoy said. “Not yet.” It was unfair that he sounded so calm, now Harry was Disarmed. He studied Harry for a moment, then added, “But given that everything else—the food and the tub and so on—only functions when we’re together, it’s got to be something that we can do together, not apart.”

            “I don’t understand,” Harry said, scowling at him.

            “I know you don’t,” Malfoy said. Indulgently, Harry thought, and his cheeks flamed. Malfoy gave him a leisurely study from head to foot, as if he thought that he would find wisdom in Harry’s left knee, and then shrugged and tossed Harry’s wand to him. Harry reached up and caught it, waiting for the moment it would jerk out of reach, but that never happened. Perhaps the house could feel Harry’s intention not to damage it for a while. “But the potion was intended to create a true safehouse, one that couldn’t be destroyed from either inside or outside. It’s done that. I suggest we go to the kitchen and get something to eat. No one can think comfortably on an empty stomach. Probably the reason that some of your raids failed,” he added. “I thought your Aurors looked hungry.”

            Harry closed his eyes and reached for the memory of holding Ron and Hermione’s daughter for the first time instead of responding. Then he swirled his wand, and the silver stag danced into being, flicking its ears at the walls for a minute before it focused on Harry.

            “Take this message to Ron,” Harry said, and deepened his voice the way they’d all learned to do when they wanted a Patronus to report to someone else. Otherwise, there was a sort of distance to the voice that meant messages sounded squeaky or vanished altogether. “I’m trapped in a house created by the potion that spilled. Malfoy’s with me. I can’t damage the house, and it has no door. Everything can only be done by two people together.”

            The stag dipped its antlers to him and then leaped out the window. Harry sighed. He reckoned that was all he could do for now.

            He turned around to find Malfoy watching him with a clearer expression than he’d worn so far. It actually made him look adult, instead of the whining teenager he’d been that morning or the drawling one that holding Harry’s wand apparently made him into. Harry blinked and tilted his head. “What?” he asked.

            Malfoy shook his head. “Nothing. I didn’t think you would find a way to get a message to someone else, since the Floos are blocked and there’s no way that an owl could get through any of these windows, even if it could find its way into this dimension in the first place.”

            “Yeah, I thought that was probably true,” Harry said, and made himself think of this the way he would the end of an unsuccessful raid. He and his team could sit around then, and eat biscuits, and bitch about what had gone wrong. “Let’s go find that food.”

*

            In the end, because the house refused to provide chairs in the kitchen, they had to drag in some from the green sitting room. “Maybe it only wants us to eat in bed,” Harry said, dropping the heavy armchair he’d brought with a thunk that he hoped would scar the tile floor of the kitchen. The only reaction was a little tremble.

            “I think it does want that.”

            Harry snapped his head up. Malfoy had taken a jar of honey and a loaf of bread out of the cabinets and called himself satisfied; Harry had been the one who forced him to find fresh tomatoes for Harry to cut up, apples that Harry pared, and a carafe of pumpkin juice in the fridge as well as some glasses in the same cupboard that held the cutlery. Malfoy was eating a piece of honeyed bread now, slowly, and sticking a bit of a slice of tomato in his mouth at the same time. Harry refused to think about what that combination probably tasted like.

            “What do you mean?” he demanded.

            Malfoy leaned back and swung his legs, considering Harry with a careful, cool eye. Yes, he was different from the man Harry had woken up beside this morning. And it seemed that seeing Harry in a moment of weakness had restored him. Because Harry would rather have competent help than fear, he made himself sit down in the armchair and reach for the plate of tomato slices.

            “There are only so many reasons that a house would shove people together,” Malfoy said quietly, intensely, leaning forwards over the table. Harry almost paused, but by now his stomach felt deflated, so he ate his tomato. “And the potions theory—well, when you brew any potion like this, Thugger’s Law of Finite Expansion indicates that you can’t violate Grummer’s Law of Expansive Boiling—”

            “I don’t know what that means,” Harry said, waving a hand at him. “Just tell me what you think the house wants, please.”

            Malfoy sighed and licked honey off the corner of his mouth. “The house was meant to provide a safe stronghold, and that purpose doesn’t change even if there’s two people now. And who’s the kind of person you would feel most comfortable sharing a stronghold with?” He waited, but Harry stared at him silently, because his only answer was “someone who could get me out of it.” Malfoy shrugged and finished. “A lover.”

            The tomato really tasted sour. Harry put the rest of it down on his plate and ran his hands through his hair, staring at his plate until a small strand of black pulled out of his head and dropped there. He snorted, finally. “Oh.”

            “Yes,” Malfoy said. “And I think that means the house will go on pushing us together, because it sees no reason it shouldn’t. This was made for lovers, and lovers would want to spend every minute together, wouldn’t they? Sleeping in the same bed. Watching each other brew or swim. Eating meals at the same table.”

            Harry grimaced. “Yeah.” He reached out and picked up the remaining tomato slice, and it tasted a little better. “Thanks for the explanation.” He raised his eyes to Malfoy’s face finally, and saw him still leaning forwards over the table.

            “We give the house what it wants,” Malfoy said. “Stay together and act as happy as we can. When we both want the house to open equally, it will.”

            “I find that hard to believe,” Harry said. He could forget about the personal aspects of the question if he just concentrated on what Malfoy was saying. “We both want out of here already, don’t we? Even if you think that we’re going to arrest you—and I can put in a good word to keep that from happening—we don’t want to stay here.”

            Malfoy’s smile was a shadowy thing, slipping onto and across his face but not touching it. “I mean that we both have to want the same thing,” he said. “At the same time. With the same level of intensity. That’s the stereotype of lovers, and just as the house was created to provide the safest place possible, I think it might be, in this altered form, created for the most romantic pair of lovers possible. We haven’t wanted the same thing, not yet. I wasn’t willing to destroy the house to get free, while you were.”

            Harry snorted and stood. “Then I reckon that green room down the corridor is going to get some use after all.”

            “Pardon?” Malfoy asked, not bothering to stand. In fact, he reached for another piece of bread and the knife he was using to spread honey on them. “Why?”

            “Because I’ve learned to meditate, and you must have learned to concentrate, if you’re a successful brewer,” Harry said. “And meditating is the only way I can think of to make our wills align perfectly.”

            “Perhaps,” Malfoy said, licking delicately at the honey that fell off the edge of the knife. Harry opened his mouth to comment that he could cut his tongue on the blade if he did that, then shut it again. Surely Malfoy knew. “I find myself unconvinced it would work, however. Or that your learning gave you any benefit.” He regarded the bunched muscles in Harry’s arms.

            “It’s a little hard to be calm right now!” Harry yelled, and then shut his eyes and shook his head. “Sorry, you’re right. But it’s the best chance we have, and I don’t want to stay here a minute longer than necessary. I don’t even know if we caught the Solitary Brewer or not, and Ron and Hermione will be worried.”

            Malfoy rolled his eyes. “If you insist on leaving right now, then the food will disappear. I want a full lunch. That’s my price for trying the meditation,” he added, when Harry opened his mouth. “You eat, and I eat, and that way, there’s no rumbling stomachs to distract us when we try it.”

            Harry hesitated, but he could see the sense of what Malfoy said, and he had always been a fan of common sense in Auror investigations. He sat back down and reached for one of the apples.

*

            “Now. Lean back against the wall. Relax.”

            Harry kept his eyes closed, and resisted the temptation to snap that he didn’t need advice about how to practice meditation, that he had learned how to do it well enough in his Auror training program and often took advantage of that training. Snapping would destroy the entire reason they were here.

            Instead, he concentrated on the things that were unfamiliar to him, letting them tumble through his mind as though they were sand grains passing through a sieve. Malfoy’s breathing, the way he seemed compelled to clear his throat every few minutes, the thick carpet beneath his legs and the soft song coming from outside the window. A single, persistent bird, it sounded like—though since they were in an enchanted dimension, Harry had little idea. He breathed, and he watched without eyes, and he listened, until it felt as though the prickles of sensation he was extending in all directions like whiskers had begun to relax and droop at last. Then, and only then, could he begin to concentrate on his thoughts.

            There was a reason that the method of Occlumency Snape had tried to teach Harry had never worked for him. He couldn’t simply leap straight from a chaos of thoughts into a state of blank calmness. He had to exhaust himself first, wear out the temptation to look in all directions out of curiosity or simple caution, and then begin to meditate. Think about the things inside his head when the interesting ones outside it had been exhausted.

            If Snape had been a better teacher, or if Harry had understood himself better from the beginning and insisted on learning that way…

            Harry let the thoughts tumble through his mind and pass out, not slowing down, the same way that he’d done with the sensations outside his closed eyes. Quiet. Calm. His mind was a stream, flowing away with utter silence under the willow branches, and it took thoughts and memories like that with it, until Harry was in no danger of succumbing to the bitterness over thoughts of losing Sirius.

            He floated there, and began to think of getting out of the house.

            Images of open doors and open windows and secret passages surged up, and then fell away again. Harry let the idea become more and more a pure philosophical point, the idea of escape, the desire to get out. He pared away the worry that he might not get back in time to see the end of his investigation, that he might worry his friends or send them into a frenzy of despair, that the Solitary Brewer had escaped because of the chaos Harry and Malfoy had caused with the potion. He became a single point of pure desire, spinning in space, and waited for Malfoy to tune his mind to the same frequency.

            Silence. Peace. Purity that Harry had never discovered the last few times he meditated, which had been in the middle of a case when he absolutely needed to relax for a little while. He felt the names themselves—silence, peace, purity—become unimagined and distant, sounds that lost connection with the ideas they represented and drifted away in the stream.

            He didn’t know how long he waited there, but then a hand touched his shoulder and jerked him rudely out of his silence. He opened his eyes to see Malfoy’s face in front of him, and Malfoy’s head shaking. “I tried,” he said. “I wanted and wished as hard as I could for the house to open a door. Did you feel anything?”

            Harry revised the last several timeless times carefully, and at last shook his head. “I could feel my own desire to get out, but I didn’t feel any connection from you or any door opening.”

            “Yes, blame me,” Malfoy snapped, and turned away, tromping over to the window and flinging it violently open. The birdsong came in louder and clearer at once. Harry rose carefully to his feet, his legs cramped less by the position he’d been sitting in than by the fact that he’d paid no attention to them at all for some moments. Bars shimmered into place across the window as he moved.

            “I wasn’t,” Harry said. “Only saying that I couldn’t feel anything. I may have been mistaken. Let’s go down and see if there’s a door there that wasn’t there before.”

            Malfoy paused and turned his head a little. “I think I prefer you when you’ve been meditating,” he told the air to the left of Harry. “You’re not so quick to spring on me and make me feel like an incompetent idiot.”

            Harry thought it best not to answer that. His legs had stopped pretending they didn’t exist, and he walked to the door and out. He heard Malfoy trailing him, and heard the birdsong stop the moment Malfoy crossed the threshold.

            Harry grimaced. That suggested one reason that their meditation trick hadn’t worked, one that would relate to the food the house provided, and the running water, and the single bed. If the house wanted to see them do certain physical things together, if it was set up for that, then of course it wouldn’t be impressed by purely mental activity no matter how closely their wills coincided.

            Malfoy came up to walk beside him. Harry studied him with some of the distance of meditation in his mind, and saw the clenched chin, the pinched lines that ran down beside his mouth and nose.

            At least he takes it seriously, too. At last he’s not treating this like a holiday and refusing just to spite me. Harry could think of some Aurors who would have.

            They made a quick circuit of the four rooms on the ground floor, but once again, everything looked the same as it had. Pool room, hot tub, conservatory, Potions lab, without a door to the outside. And this time, from the way Malfoy halted as they stepped into the lab, Harry was sure he had noticed, as Harry had, the way the tables acquired an extra sheen and the labels on the vials suddenly became easier to read.

            “I thought I could brew us a solution if nothing else,” Malfoy murmured, putting his hands on his hips and staring around the lab. “But it seems I’ll only be able to brew, maybe even only open the cupboards and the vials, if you’re in here with me.”

            Harry shrugged. “I’ll meditate, then. Maybe put up protective charms if you think the potion likely to explode.”

            Malfoy’s head swiveled. “You’d trust me to brew something to get us out of here?”

            Harry looked evenly back at him. He was sure the meditation made the words easier to say, but really. “You’re the one who knows about the Potions theory. I don’t. If you say that you can help us escape, I don’t have a choice but to believe you, because I’m out of ideas.”

            Malfoy spent some more time trying to speak without stuttering. Then he said, “I’ll have to take an inventory of what’s here and what I might need to pick from the conservatory or try to get the house to produce for us. I probably couldn’t start the actual brewing until tomorrow.”

            Harry nodded, and conjured a stool to wait on in a corner of the lab. Malfoy, still sneaking cautious glances at him from time to time, began to read the shelves.

            Harry waited, reaching now for the training that had allowed him to survive captivity in the hands of criminals or people who wanted ransom from the Ministry several times. He had done the best he could. He didn’t have any more ideas, and what he had to do now was to wait and let the experts get on with it.

It wasn’t easy, but if he wanted easy, Harry wouldn’t have become an Auror. He managed to hold his tongue and his temper through a long afternoon of watching Malfoy make notes, sniff at ingredients, and cast charms that meant nothing to him.

*

delia cerrano: Things are already starting to shift, as you can see here. Draco is more hard-headed once he realizes the inevitability of things, and that Harry isn’t going to ride to the rescue this time.

unneeded: Harry doesn’t know if he got away or not.

cinder1013: Thank you!

moodysavage: If Harry thinks of him as someone he can work with, that might be enough.

ArienAngel529: Draco was more whiny at first because he thought Harry would fix the problem. Now he’s having to accept that it won’t be fixed as easily as he thinks, and so he has to take a more active part.
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The House That Lovers Built