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batsutousaiTitle: Cottage Refuge
Fandom: Harry Potter
Author: Batsutousai
Rating: Teen
Pairing: Harry Potter/Lord Voldemort
Summary: Harry buys a quiet cottage in the middle of nowhere, and Voldemort starts crashing there when he needs some calm.
A/N: Every winter season, I send out cards to anyone willing to give me their address, and I decided two winters ago to start adding fic to the cards. This year, I settled on the very loose prompt of getting stuck in a cabin because of a snowstorm. Which some fics held to better than others, whoops. XD
It had actually started as a joke, of sorts. After watching the Dark Lord lose his temper for the third time in as many minutes – in Voldemort's defence, Wormtail was extremely aggravating – Harry had said, "What you need, is a nice, quiet little cottage where you can go to be alone. Maybe I'll buy you one for your birthday."
Voldemort, of course, didn't respond aloud – something about losing face in front of his followers because he was talking to hallucinations, Harry recalled – but his displeasure was plenty obvious through their bond.
Harry just smiled and returned his attention to the work he was supposed to be doing before being so rudely interrupted by Voldemort's rage fit; so long as Voldemort was trying to come up with ways to torture Harry that didn't have any negative impact on the Dark Lord's own health – which, hey, good luck; they'd only been stuck in their current limbo for three years – he wouldn't be raging at his minions obviously enough to give Harry another concentration-breaking migraine. Which, in the end, was totally worth the much less distracting sensation of someone plotting his demise.
Harry didn't actually buy any quiet little cottages with the intention of giving them to Voldemort – mocking aside, he had as little to do with magical Britain's current ruler as he could – but he did end up buying himself a plot of land in the middle of nowhere after the third time in a week his shields had almost gone down on account of certain people who knew his address and were angry that he'd chosen to save his own skin over killing Voldemort. With magic and the help of some friends, he had a nice, cosy little home that was unplottable and had enough wards to make Sirius' father proud. (Or not; Harry was fairly certain there were plenty of darker wards he hadn't gone looking for that the former Black patriarch would have sworn by.)
Wards aside, Harry couldn't say he was particularly surprised when it took Voldemort approximately five minutes to hunt him down.
"What," he demanded upon letting himself inside, "is this?"
"My home. Now, if you don't mind–"
"You have a home."
"I like this one better. Go away."
Surprisingly, Voldemort did.
Even more surprisingly, he came back. The first time had been a little weird: Harry had been in the middle of some work, heard the front door open, and since he generally trusted everyone who knew where he lived, he didn't rush to check, just finished what he was doing. When he finally made it out to his living room, he found Voldemort sitting in the most comfortable of the three chairs in front of the fireplace, with a mug of something that looked suspiciously like tea or coffee with a lot of cream in it, or else hot chocolate. (Harry assumed it was one of the former, if only because the idea of the Dark Lord drinking hot chocolate was brain-breaking.)
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Being calm," Voldemort informed him with just enough bite to make it clear that wasn't going so well. "Go away."
Harry had ended up leaving him be, which had led to the current status quo of Voldemort showing up in his home about once a week, stealing from his hot chocolate stash – Harry tried not to think too hard about the revelation that the Dark Lord liked to drink hot chocolate to calm down – and sitting quietly in the living room for between forty minutes and three hours. It was downright bizarre.
It was also, they found out when Voldemort came during a relatively mild snow storm that turned into a proper blizzard while he was sitting calmly in front of the fireplace with his hot chocolate, potentially a really, really bad idea.
"If you would just allow apparation inside–" Voldemort was snarling, after having apparently tried twice to walk out to the apparation point. (The second time, Harry had needed to summon him back inside so he could warm back up; the danger in letting yourself become part snake, it seemed, was that your body started to shut down when it got too cold. Harry was trying very hard to not laugh. Or, at the least, wait to laugh until after the trigger-happy Dark Lord had gone home.)
"If you want a quiet little cottage in the middle of nowhere with apparation indoors, go buy yourself one and leave me alone," Harry replied, unimpressed; not all of them could have a legion of minions lying in wait to murder intruders if they happened to figure out the password to apparate through the wards.
Voldemort scoffed and glared out the window at the white world from the safety of directly next to the roaring fire.
(Harry was seriously going to bust a gut from trying not to laugh; at least he'd have the honour of being the only person Voldemort had killed via not laughing.)
Harry went to get himself some hot chocolate as an attempt at self-preservation. Which lasted about as long as it took Voldemort to figure out what he was doing, whereupon he followed him to the kitchen. Somewhere in the middle of dishing out a serving of hot chocolate mix into Voldemort's favourite mug – and how long, exactly, had he been storing one of his mugs in Harry's cabinets?! – Harry finally lost it and started laughing at the absurdity of it all.
"What, exactly, is so humorous?" Voldemort demanded, wearing that particular expression that meant someone was going to die in approximately two minutes if they didn't talk fast. (That, or something else distracted him before he could raise his wand.)
"You are," Harry informed him, because he'd never had a great deal of self-preservation as it was, and years spent annoying the Dark Lord from the safety of their mental link had made him less inclined to think things through before speaking. "Your snake-like abhorrence of cold and your love of hot chocolate and the fact that you keep coming to my home to relax."
Voldemort didn't respond for a long moment – plenty long enough for Harry to start wondering if he shouldn't make a break for the blizzard – and then he said, in a tone that was so utterly flat and unimpressed, Harry would have thought it was a joke, from anyone else, "What, exactly, is wrong with me enjoying hot chocolate?"
"...Where's that bottle of firewhiskey?" Harry muttered to himself, because alcohol sounded like an excellent solution to his current state of mind.
"Not in the kitchen; I would have found it already."
Comforting; Voldemort had gone snooping through his cabinets. (That explained him always managing to find the hot chocolate, no matter how hard Harry tried to hide it.)
They ended up sharing a bottle in front of the fire, each in their own armchair. And if they woke after the blizzard was over to find themselves magically in a single loveseat that hadn't existed in Harry's cottage before they'd started drinking, curled up together to conserve heat, well.
What happened while trapped in a cottage by a blizzard, stayed in that cottage.
.
