Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

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
- 2
- 3
- 4
Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Three—Sharing

“We have to decide what to do about the bed.”

Harry glanced up from his spaghetti. That was what the house had decided to deliver to them for dinner that night, and Harry reckoned it was better than anything he could have cooked, even though there was a faint, unknown spicy undertone to the sauce that covered it. Malfoy had a drop of red at the corner of his mouth, and Harry gestured to it silently, smiling in spite of himself. Malfoy started, then reached for the napkin at the corner of his plate and mopped up the sauce, not taking his gaze off Harry.

Harry had been trying to avoid thinking about this, but it was here now. He leaned back and sighed. “So far, the house hasn’t tried to force us to do anything but be in the same room together,” he said. “You even ate that bread and honey when I didn’t want some.” He nodded to the discarded crusts beside Malfoy’s plate. “Do you think that means that I could sleep on the floor and you could sleep in the bed and it wouldn’t do anything more than that? We don’t necessarily have to sleep beside each other.”

            “You’d offer me the bed?” Malfoy leaned back and put his fingertips together. “You don’t have to take the Gryffindor ideal of chivalry that far, Potter.”

            Harry rolled his eyes. “I have some training that allows me to wake and go to sleep pretty easily, and I’ve slept on plenty of hard floors before in pursuit of a case. Not always by choice, no, but enough to let me get away without damaging my back. Have you done the same thing?”

            Malfoy paused, then shrugged. “No. I always sleep in a chair when I’m planning to wake up and tend to a potion during the night.”

            Harry nodded. “Then you might as well let me do it. And like I said, it’s a good test. If the house does something to try and make us sleep together, we’ll know it’s more serious than simply spending time in the same place.”

            “Becoming lovers,” Malfoy said, voice flat and eyes dim. “You might as well call it by the full name of what the house is trying to do to us, Potter.”

            “Forcing us to become lovers,” Harry said, and grimaced.

            “You should know that I keep myself fit,” Malfoy said, and stroked his hands down his own arms as though admiring their smoothness. “You wouldn’t have anything to complain about if I did decide to slum with you.”

            “Yeah, until you started talking,” Harry retorted, and stole the honeypot from Malfoy so that he could smear some on his plate and eat it with a spoon. Malfoy recoiled when Harry dipped his spoon in.

            “At least put it on a piece of bread like a civilized person, Potter!”

            “No,” Harry said, and then craned his head down to lick at his wrist, where a drop of the honey had run.

            Malfoy made a noise somewhere between “Ick” and “Ugh” and pushed back from the table. The plates flew through the air to the kitchen, and invisible fingers began to scrub them. Harry quickly swallowed the last of the honey before Malfoy left and the honeypot melted through his fingers, going back to its cupboard.

            “See if I sleep with you while we’re here!” Malfoy yelled back from the corridor.

            Harry leaned back on his chair, grinning. And that was the only safeguard I was trying to set up.

*

            They found a pair of robes in the bathroom, the green one exactly the right length and size for Harry, and the blue one for Malfoy. “Apparently the house thinks you should be in Ravenclaw,” Harry said, and that ensured silence while they readied themselves for bed, even if Malfoy’s turned back had more than a hint of indignation about it.

            Harry followed Malfoy down the corridor with a mental shrug. Yes, they had got along well during the afternoon, but that hadn’t involved a lot of talking. Harry would maintain silence when he had to and then try to maintain it the rest of the time by simply making Malfoy too offended to speak.

            Hermione would scold him for his childishness, Harry thought, as Malfoy climbed into bed and Harry cast a Softening Charm on the floorboards in the bedroom. Well, she wasn’t the one stuck here with Malfoy.

            And I hope that I get to hear her scolding me soon. I really do. No Patronus had come yet, and Harry didn’t know if that was because they couldn’t figure out how to send one to him or because it simply took more time for a Patronus to travel in and out of the dimension that the house occupied.

            Nothing to do but wait. With the first bubble of panic and hatred burst, then Harry thought he could resign himself to do that.

            “You look ridiculous, you know.”

            “And you look the same way, bundled up to your chin as if you think a monster is going to attack you if you’re naked,” Harry retorted, and rolled over, lowering his own chin so that it was tucked into his chest.

            “See if I give you a blanket,” Malfoy muttered. There was a long, whispering sound that Harry assumed was the one someone made when they were snuggling down into the middle of a warm bed with silken sheets.

            He shut his eyes. He really didn’t need blankets, and he could feel sleep waiting for him. He could always use it, continually behind due to long nights in the office and raids as he was. Soon slumber caught him.

*

            Harry woke up when something long and wooden, something that felt rather like a furniture leg, slammed into his side.

            He woke up swearing, and reaching for his wand. And then he stared around and wondered where he had woken up.

            He lay at the bottom of what looked like a wooden chute. The walls slanted steeply upwards and away, and he could see a glimpse of faint light from the top. The bottom was only small enough to contain him and the thing he had slammed into, which was—

            The leg of the bed. The bed sat beside him, at the bottom of the chute, and Malfoy was sitting up in it, staring in several directions.

            “Malfoy!” Harry sat up, waving his wand so that the pain in his side would ease a little. “Do you have any idea why the house would decide to change the way the bedroom worked so suddenly?” He hated having to depend on Malfoy for information, but he resolved to think of it like a case, where he would have some informants that might not be very reliable. He waited for answers, poised on one knee.

            Malfoy sighed. “It rolled us down,” he said. “I didn’t wake up until halfway through the fall. This is still the bedroom. It just tilted the floor. You’ll notice that it didn’t actually hurt either of us.”

            Says the one who didn’t sleep on the floor, Harry wanted to point out, but he kept the temptation down. He was the one who had volunteered to sleep there, after all. “All right. But why?”

            Malfoy looked silently at him, but parted the bedcovers in invitation.

            Harry wished he had something small and easily breakable and not valuable on hand. As it was, it had to be a half-hearted glare and a slide across the floor until he could reach the side of the bed more easily. Then he clambered up and in. Malfoy immediately rolled away to give him more room, and Harry sighed. As long as neither of them wanted to touch each other, they might be all right. They weren’t responsible for what the house did to them.

            He settled his head carefully on the pillow, and waited a few moments before he sneaked a quick glance at the rest of the room from under lowered eyelids. Yes. The room had gone back to the way that it looked before, steep roof and all. Harry shook his head. He hadn’t even felt the change. The house had more powerful magic than he’d thought and more complicated inner workings than he had reckoned.

            Not really. Not complicated if all it wants us to do is fuck each other.

            That wasn’t something he wanted to think about, either. Harry closed his eyes, told himself the warmth behind him was Ron helping him defeat the cold on a long watch, and drifted off again.

*

            The next morning, the most irritating thing at first was having to wait for Malfoy to wake up so that he could go into the bathroom and brush his teeth. When Harry tried to reach out and shake Malfoy’s shoulder, his hand simply slid away on the air a good few centimeters short of him, as if off greased glass. Apparently the house thought it was more romantic to make them wait for each other.

            Harry stared at the ceiling and thought a lot about spells to rot wood and break plaster. He would have tried them, except for the experience of trying to break out yesterday.

            Malfoy got up yawning and grumbling. Harry went with him to the bathroom, ignoring those sounds. He would have to do a lot of that if he was going to spend any appreciable amount of time here with Malfoy; it was good to have a head start.

            Harry brushed his teeth and stepped back from the sink so that Malfoy could get up to it. But Malfoy didn’t move in. Harry looked around, and was confronted by an expanse of naked shoulders as Malfoy whipped off his sleeping robe.

            “Malfoy!” Harry yelped, and turned away. They had undressed in the same room last night to put the robes on, because after finding them hanging there it didn’t seem like a good idea to ignore the house’s “hints,” but they had at least averted their eyes by mutual agreement. This time, Harry could have seen something. “What are you doing?”

            “I want a shower,” Malfoy said, and moved so that Harry was catching a glimpse of a long pale leg in the corner of his eyes. He hastily shut them. He heard sounds that were probably Malfoy assembling soap and scented unguent and whatever else he needed for a long, decadent shower. “I assumed you would want the same.”

            “I’m planning to use Cleaning Charms,” Harry said between gritted teeth, head still firmly turned away.

            “No wonder,” Malfoy said, and stepped past Harry into the long shower. He pulled the door closed behind him, but Harry heard the distinct splash of water and Malfoy groaning as the spray hit him.

            Harry turned his back firmly on the shower and looked longingly at the door. But if he left, the water would shut off and Malfoy would be too pissed at him to make being out of here worth it. Harry sat down and began casting the Cleaning Charms with more attention to detail than he had ever used. He didn’t use them on his teeth only because they made his gums sting when he did, but he wondered if he should start.

            Minute after minute passed, and Malfoy was still in the bloody shower. How long did it take him to scrape some dirt off? Of course, he was probably exfoliating and plucking out ingrown hairs and all the rest of that shit, too.

            Abruptly, Malfoy yelped. Harry spun around, although he held his head to the side so that he could watch just Malfoy’s shadow. “What happened?” he called.

            “The water just turned cold!” Malfoy squeaked, and he popped the door open and his head around the door. Harry backed up a step and nearly looked away again, but it seemed that Malfoy was keeping the rest of his naked body decently out of sight, so Harry didn’t have to retreat that far. “Come in here, Potter.”

            “I am in here,” Harry pointed out, and eased away from the door, in case his fantasies of flight had minded the house to give Malfoy a freezing shower.

            “I meant, in here,” Malfoy said, and pulled the door open so abruptly that Harry didn’t have the chance to hide his eyes. Luckily, a huge swirl of steam did it for him. He wrapped his arms around himself and snorted, head bowed and eyes squeezed shut so that the resulting wrinkles hurt his forehead.

            “Why would I want to share a shower with you, Malfoy?”

            “You don’t want to,” Malfoy said, his voice dipping, “but I promise, I want to stand under an icy spray even less. And if we’re together, then the house is going to give us warm water. It thinks that we’re lovers, remember? Or should be. Lovers wouldn’t object to sharing a hot shower together.”

            “There’s this thing,” Harry told the floor, “where I object to standing naked in a shower with another man.”

            “As though you never showered in front of anyone at Hogwarts,” Malfoy said. “And I’m sure that you had to strip the shirt from at least one wounded Auror so you could look at his injuries. Get in here.”

            Harry winced and edged a step nearer. “Maybe if I come and stand just outside the door, it’ll warm up?” he suggested.

            In response, Malfoy scooped up a handful of water and flung it at Harry. Harry made a sound somewhere between a growl and a shriek. It was like standing under a cluster of icicles that had just begun to melt.

            “Now, Potter.”

            Harry shuddered and reluctantly began to pull his robe off. He didn’t know if Malfoy was still watching, but he didn’t dare open his eyes to check. He wouldn’t have been able to keep going if Malfoy was.

            And if he thought about it in any detail, Malfoy was right. Harry had showered in front of other members of his Quidditch team, and other Gryffindor boys, and even other Aurors on occasion when they had to use the special bathrooms at the Ministry for removing dried potions that might have an unexpected effect on them if they waited until they were home. Why was this so different?

            Because it was one person instead of many. And because Harry had never been in this situation before, and he wasn’t sure what to do. There was nothing among the Aurors like it, and nothing like it in Hogwarts. He had been naked in front of other boys, but not in front of Slytherin boys.

            Or a Slytherin man.

            Harry walked towards the shower with his eyes shut and his hands reaching out to feel the glass of the door. Malfoy hissed under his breath and snatched his wrists, tugging him into the shower. Harry stumbled, caught himself on tile, heard the door slam shut, and opened his mouth to object that it hadn’t worked, because the water swirling under his ankles and pounding on his head was cold—



And then he groaned, and Malfoy groaned, because the spray had turned hot again, and Harry had to admit that it was wonderful. Probably just the effect of the enchantments on the house and the fact that Harry didn’t take hot showers all that often, relying on Cleaning Charms and quick, lukewarm baths, but God, it was getting into all the cracks in his muscles where he still carried tension and melting them.

That didn’t keep him from trying to do an impression of a flattened spider when Malfoy reached past him and brushed his hand against Harry’s shoulder. Harry cowered, and heard Malfoy exhale hard enough that Harry could feel it even past the water.

            “I only want the shampoo,” Malfoy said in painstaking tones, and then he apparently located it, because he turned his back and left Harry alone. Harry heard his hands moving in strong, regular motions, and he knew that Malfoy would be working the shampoo steadily into his hair, and probably down the nape of his neck just in case there were little blond hairs there that needed it.

            Harry hesitated. It seemed like a waste to not wash in the shower, as long as he was in it.

            “Pass that here when you’re done,” he said.

            Malfoy answered with a grunt and a tossed bottle that clanged near Harry’s head. He bent down and fumbled with it, and came up too near Malfoy’s arse for comfort. He knew it was there. He kept his head turned as he fumbled his way past the unexpectedly thick cap on the bottle, dumped some of the shampoo out, washed some off under the water because it was too thick and too much, and then finally put his hands in his hair.

            It promptly made his hair clump and cling, and the scent that rolled around him was thick and fruity, like watermelon. Harry wrinkled his nose but kept rubbing, under the certainty that it would be worse if he left the clumps there, and then shuffled forwards with his head bowed to get under the strongest spray.

            He collided with Malfoy, and blinked his eyes open. Malfoy had braced himself against the wall with one arm, and glared at Harry now.

            “You’ve still got all shampoo on the left side of your head and dripping down your face,” he said crossly, and reached out to rake his fingers steadily through Harry’s hair.

            Harry would have been happy to lean forwards with his arms against the shower wall and drip into a puddle of goo right there. Instead, he called on the strength of will that Auror training had developed in him, stood upright, and retreated frantically the moment Malfoy was done, even though Malfoy tried to hand him the soap.

            “You’re not done yet,” Malfoy told him, shaking water out of his own eyes and regarding Harry with a pointed gaze that he couldn’t meet.

            “My hair is, and the Cleaning Charms will take care of the rest,” Harry said. “And you’ve been in here half-an-hour, any longer isn’t good for you.” He leaped out onto a green towel spread precisely to receive him on the floor, and another whisked up while Malfoy was still cursing at him for turning the water cold before Malfoy could shut the showerhead off. Harry seized the towel and buried his flaming face in it.

            Apparently he really liked it when someone else petted his scalp that way. Really liked it.

            But he had a towel around his waist before Malfoy even opened the shower door, and he had another one on his face, and the bathroom piled him with more of them, all the towels he wanted. For once, Harry was glad of the house’s impulse to pamper its inhabitants. He squeezed the water out of his hair and ignored the way that Malfoy ranted behind him, until Malfoy took a step as if he would actually seize Harry’s hair.

            Then Harry snapped his head around and snapped the towel out to flick Malfoy on the back. Malfoy yelped and hopped, which kept Harry from having to look at his groin, either. The house promptly buried Malfoy in fluffy towels that manifested from blue light near the ceiling and tumbled down like the world’s plushest rain.

            “I don’t like people manhandling me,” Harry said. “Especially when I’ve been through the Auror training I have. I could have seriously hurt you if you touched me without my permission anywhere else. You should be glad that it was just my hair.”

            Malfoy blinked at him indignantly, and then leaned against the bathroom wall, nursing his abused back. At least the pile of towels was high enough to hide him now, and Harry solved any further problem by turning away and continuing to rub at his hair until it stood out in a frizzy halo around his head.

            “I didn’t think about that,” Malfoy said at last, hesitating as if he didn’t know whether Harry had scored a point he should respond to or not. “I thought the house would keep us from hurting each other.”

            Harry was wrapped up in the sleeping robe now. He could turn around and shrug. “It probably depends in part on our behavior. It tries to shove us together when it thinks we’re not getting along, but it didn’t prevent you from getting soaked with cold water. Or flicked with the towel. Or me rolling down the floor and slamming into the bed.”

            “You have injuries remaining from that?” Malfoy stared at him.

            “I healed them,” Harry said. “The point is that it’s obeying the stereotype of committed lovers more than the reality.” Ignoring Malfoy’s mutter about that, he turned around and began to search for more suitable clothes. The ones he’d been wearing yesterday had vanished. Sure enough, there was a basket of shirts and trousers in his size in one corner. “We can have lovers’ quarrels, and the house will try to reconcile us, but it won’t prevent us from having them.”

            “As if I would ever have you as a lover, Potter.”

            “Right,” Harry agreed, and took off the robe to drape the shirt he’d found around his shoulders. It was ridiculous, white sheer cloth of some kind with embroidered violets at the cuffs and collar, but at least it would cover him, and as long as he was turned away, Malfoy couldn’t see anything. “I have much better taste than that.”

            Malfoy threw the soap at the back of his head. Harry charmed it to fly back at him, and in the contest of insults and raving and tossing water that followed, Malfoy seemed to have forgotten entirely about anything he might or might not have seen in the shower.

            They ate a breakfast of steaming porridge and bangers that Harry had to admit were cooked better than Kreacher could have done, and then went downstairs to the lab again. Malfoy brewed, or rather checked shelves and made notes as he prepared for the potion. Harry sat with his hands stretched out, slouching enough to relax his muscles, and closed his eyes, resolved to doze.

            And not worry about his Patronus, or where it might have gone.

*

            “Potter, I need your help with something.”

            Harry blinked and came slowly out of the trance he’d fallen into, somewhere between a doze and a contemplation of the far wall. “What?” he mumbled, stretching. “Is the house refusing to open certain cupboards for you unless I’m along?”

            “Not that,” Malfoy said. He was standing in front of Harry wearing tight, silken clothes of the kind that the house had thought would fit him. Harry blinked. The white silk had a blue shimmer to it that was—distracting. He tore his eyes away and lifted them to Malfoy’s face with an effort. “But I need someone else to chop the valerian, and as long as you’re here, you might as well make yourself useful.”

            Harry rolled his eyes and rose to his feet. It was true that he had done about as much sleeping as he could for right now, but he thought it only right to warn Malfoy. “I have no skills whatsoever with Potions, Malfoy. None.”

            “I can readily believe that,” Malfoy snapped, and shoved a knife at him. Harry juggled it hastily while Malfoy laid out the spiky green leaves on the table and put a small silver cap of what looked like salt nearby. “But all I need you to do is cut each leaf in half and sprinkle it with the salt. Don’t worry about how much salt you’re using. I’ll give you more when you run out.”

            “But does it matter if the halves are symmetrical?” Harry asked, tilting his head to the side so that he could make out the sharpness of the knife. “I never managed to do that well enough for Snape’s satisfaction.”

            “I’m not Snape,” Malfoy said. “Luckily for you,” he added under his breath as he turned back to the cauldron he’d been tossing things in.

            “Because Snape would have let me rot here before he brewed a potion to let me escape?” Harry cut the first half and reached into the cap for the salt. It made the leaf sparkle and a scent that was sweet and sharp rise up from it. Harry blinked and shook his head, and the smell dissipated. He laid the leaf half aside and reached for the next one.

            Malfoy said nothing. Harry looked up and found that Malfoy was gazing at him in a way that warmed Harry’s cheeks.

            “Don’t talk like that about him,” Malfoy whispered. “He never would have done something like that.”

            “Probably not,” Harry conceded, cutting the next leaf and reaching for a handful of salt to sprinkle. This time, the leaf turned slightly pink. Harry checked Malfoy’s face, but had to look away. And surely Malfoy would have said something if the leaf was unusable, Harry decided as he put it aside. “He always did what was needed to save my life. I was just thinking that he might not care because he would have everything he needed here, and I would be safe as long as no Death Eaters found a way into the house. He could sit back and laugh at me.”

            Malfoy slammed his tools on the table and spun to face Harry. Harry kept his hands moving, although it was slower than before because he had to look at Malfoy instead of looking at the leaves as he cut them up. At least, with the knife, he had a weapon close to hand if Malfoy chose to attack him like a beast.

            “He would never do something like that,” Malfoy repeated, his breath rushing as his hands curled in front of him. “He would have—he would have saved you, he would have tried to get you out of here and back to the battle. He was a lot more heroic than you think he was.”

            “I know that he gave his life for the war, for me, in a way, so that I could have the time to defeat Voldemort,” Harry said quietly. He put the knife down, because he was going to cut the leaves wrong and ruin their chances of getting out of here if he wasn’t careful. “That doesn’t mean that he liked me, and that doesn’t mean that he—hell, Malfoy, he knew I was going to die. He knew I had to walk into that Forest and give up my life. He didn’t like it, but Dumbledore told him, and he did everything he was supposed to do to make sure I stayed alive until I did it. That makes it hard to think about him. I think that he cared a lot about making sure I survived, but I don’t think I always understood his motives. And he wanted to see my eyes when he was dying. Because he cared about my mother, everything was for my mum. Not me, and not even the war, really. Her.”

            Malfoy stood there with his lips slightly parted. Harry didn’t think he’d ever realized before that they were actual honest-to-God red, instead of the chalky pale color that he remembered dominating Malfoy’s face in school.

            “He would have done what was needed to get you back for the battles,” Malfoy repeated, and then turned around and started chopping again. His hands were steady and he’d hidden his face, so Harry had no idea what he felt.

            Hell, maybe the revelations hadn’t made any difference to him. Harry couldn’t pretend that someone revealing details about Dumbledore’s hidden motives would really change his mind. He knew Dumbledore had arranged things so he could die, but also so he could survive, and he’d made his pace with that.

He turned his attention back to salt and valerian leaves.

*

            moodysavage: Draco still has to guess, right now, since Harry has no intention of telling him.

            unneeded: If It comes down just to practical day-to-day living, Harry can cope, but he really doesn’t like the house trying to shove him together with anyone. You’re right that it would probably be more awkward with Ron or someone he knew well, though.
- 2
- 3
- 4
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

The House That Lovers Built