Ame's Insanity (amejisuto) wrote in the_playground, @ 2008-10-31 12:38:00 |
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Entry tags: | ame's fics, drarry |
Title: Haven
Chapter
Author: amejisuto
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Harry/Draco, various background pairings but the main one will be Fred/George/Lee.
Rating: R
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoat Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. .
Warnings/Squicks: Manipulative!Dumbles. I wouldn't go so far to say Weasley!bashing but um, I'm close. A few minor character deaths are mentioned, but not any of the main characters. Mpreg of secondary character. More warnings may be added as I write the story.
Summary: Harry's graduated from Hogwarts, turned eighteen and defeated a Dark Lord. Now what is he going to do with his life?
Find the previous parts here.
Beta'd by the wonderful suki_blue. Thank you sweets!
Notes: First of all, I tend to totally ignore HBP and DH. I tend to think JK lost the plot sometime halfway through OotP, but that's just my opinion. So yeah, this is a total AU after book five. Don't look for quick updates with this story, I'll try to put up a new chapter once a month. Oh, and for any HP reading that haven't read my Spander epics, I tend to suck at writing smut so there will be much on the friendship and THEN the relationship and then a tiny bit of smut. LOL Hope y'all enjoy the show!
Extra Note: This chapter is mainly here to explain the wards around Harry's home and why he can have television and Muggle appliances. Because even if it's just in my head, at some point in time the Twins and Lee must be able to watch Monty Python dvd's. I have this image of them having an entire aisle in their shop with nothing but cans of Spam.
Chapter Nine
Harry thought about using his pen to stab himself in the ear. Maybe if he poked his brain cells this stuff would make sense. "Mr. Montgomery ..."
"I've told you boys to call me Jim." Jim Montgomery was an American, and his accent seemed odd to Harry.
"Jim then, is there any way you can explain how the castle exists and how it doesn’t show up on the Muggle maps without the use of complicated equations or the use of the words tesseract, sub-space and pocket dimensions?"
"Poor Potty. Should have taken Arithimancy instead of Divination, shouldn't you?"
"Shut it, you, else I'll make you go to ADSA* and buy your own notepads."
They were all sitting around the table in Harry's study and Draco had been fascinated by his notebook. Harry had a sneaking suspicion that Draco's penmanship wasn't that great and he liked the lines. Harry, touched in the head as he was, had promised to buy Draco office supplies of a Muggle nature.
Still, Harry loved the mental image of Draco venturing into ASDA for his own notebooks, which was where Harry had bought his. Especially since they were having Back to School sales. All those Muggle children, running about screaming while their parents chatted in the aisles. It would be a mad house!
With a shock, Harry realized it was September 1st. For the first time in seven years he wasn't going to ride the Hogwarts Express and wouldn't have to listen to the Sorting Hat, or Ron complaining about when they were going to eat and Hermione shushing him. It was a bittersweet feeling. On one hand he was glad to be away from Dumbledore and his intrigues, but Harry did miss the Hogwarts of his early years, back when he was innocent and naïve.
He pushed those thoughts away as he watched Jim sketch out a tall rectangle. "Right. Let's go to an easier explanation. Think of the real, or Muggle world as you call it, as the ground floor to an apartment building. In the States we call it the Mundane world. Most wizards, those who don't have an immense amount of power, share the ground floor with them. Places like Hogwarts, Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley were, for lack of a better word, shifted to the floor above ages ago by very powerful wizards."
Harry pushed his glasses up his nose in thought. "So if a Muggle was just walking around the Highlands of Scotland, he'd walk right by Hogwarts?"
Jim used his draft pencil to drawn in what looked to be doors to a lift. "For the most part, unless they stumble on the link from the second floor to the lobby. There are places in the world that have connections to other worlds. A tree that leads to Underhill, a cairn of stones that shows the way to Avalon, a lake that leads to Lyonesse, a mountain pass that leads to Shangra-la ... "
Harry gasped. "The Bermuda Triangle!"
Jim smiled at him. "Right! All of these places are real, but they're on different floors. There's a floor of Goblins underneath the Mundane World and Xanth is out on what we Americans would call the back porch. Every once in a while a Yeti from the Seventh Floor will get turned around and wander around the Ground Floor where the Mundanes are, or a Chupacabra will find his way up the pipes. Those little shits are worse than rats at skulking around and are nastier than Grindyglows. That's how the Mundane world has such a wide variety of magical creatures, but how they're never found. They go back to where they've come from leaving drunken hunters babbling about seeing a seven-foot hair-covered monkey up in the Pacific Northwest ... or little old British grannies fussing about the fairies in her garden."
Draco was taking notes faster than Hermione could ever hope to do, and making little equations out of numbers and funny symbols. "So someone in Potter's family built this castle and moved it from the Muggle floor to another one?"
"Right in one!" Jim grinned delightedly at Draco and the blond smiled back. Maybe Harry would try to learn Arithimancy if Draco was that interested. The older man got up and went to the tapestry hanging on the wall. "Look here, if you follow the road that leads up to the castle, it comes out on a back road in Surrey. The path through the forest here will come out in a wooded area outside of Scarborough and if you go in one direction on your beach, you'll end up in Blackpool and the other you'll in up in Cardiff." Jim came over to sit down at the table again and frowned. "If I were you I'd look into either moving the connection to Cardiff or closing it all together, there some sort of weird multi-dimensional rift there that mucks about with everything, sucking all sorts of nasties into the Mundane world. Been there forever."
Harry was looking at the tapestry again. "So that forest in the north, it really is part of the Forbidden Forest, even though that's several kilometers away?"
"Right. And you've got to stop thinking in Muggle terms when it comes to size, Harry. If you brought a Muggle car here, it would take you longer to drive across your lands than it would to drive from Penzance to Aberdeen. You've got a right good bit of land here young'un. Some of the Goblin teams inspecting the boarders have found traces of both dragon and griffins up in the mountains. Now that there are magic users living in the castle again, this whole place will start livening up and I bet you'll find yourself overrun with all sorts of magical critters."
Harry found himself grinning. "Wicked!" He missed Hagrid more than ever at the moment. His old friend would have loved exploring. Harry made a mental note to do just that, not only so he could learn about the lands surrounding the castle, but in honor of his old friend. "Right, tell me about these new wards."
"Want me to keep it simple?"
Harry let out a great sigh. "Please, and then maybe if you have a manual or something you can leave it and Draco or the Twins and Lee can explain it to me."
Draco snorted and Harry could have sworn Harry heard a soft 'idiot' from the blond but he ignored him. They were supposed to have a lobster salad for lunch and if Penny caught Harry kicking Draco, even if it was under the table, she might not let him have any.
Jim rummaged through his briefcase and pulled out what looked to be a bag of rocks. They had been tumbled and were smooth and were almost the same color of orange used by the Chudley Cannons. "These are sunstones, a variety of feldspar with a bit of hematite mixed in, red hematite and that's part of what gives it its color. Now, you Brits don't seem to be all that fascinated with the uses of gemstones and crystals in magic, while us Americans find them just as fascinating as potions. Sunstone has several properties, depending how it's used. We'll be using it for its protective and energizing properties. Our teams have replaced shingles on the roof, certain strategic stones in the walls, even the loose gravel on certain parts of the parapets and on the walkways around the castle have been replaced with sunstones. I want you to think of these as a type of solar battery."
"Bat-Harry? Does this mean I get to hit you, Scarhead?"
Harry picked up a left over bit of paper where Harry had given up taking notes and crumpled it up and threw it at the blond. "Prat! Solar batteries soak up the energy of the sun and turn it into electricity."
Draco rolled his eyes. "I keep telling you that I'm not that ignorant about Muggle things ... I just find the mental picture of hitting you over the head with a Beater's bat much more fun than wiring and plugs."
Jim cleared his throat and Harry sheepishly looked down. He'd gotten caught up in fighting with Draco and had almost forgotten the other man's presence. "Sorry."
Draco, for his part, didn't look sorry at all. He sat there with a smug look on his face. Harry wanted to hit him. Or kiss him. Okay, he wanted to do both. He knew that wasn't exactly a normal feeling but considering the Twins and Lee were the most successful romance that Harry knew of in his age group and his adult role models were the Weasleys, and even Arthur Weasley admitted he was hen pecked, and the Dursleys.
Just thinking about Petunia and Vernon sharing a marriage bed was enough to warp Harry's brain.
"How the sunstones work ... " Jim gave both of them a mild glare and Harry forced himself to pay attention. "Is rather like solar batteries. They absorb residual energy from the wards, the sun, the power of the wind hitting the shingles. They even take in extra energies from you and your House Elves. When you use your magic, say to levitate a trunk up the stairs, what magic isn't used on the trunk goes to the sunstones scattered around. That energy in turns, fuels the wards, as well as allowing you to use Mundane technology. We installed special plug-ins for your TV and appliances, and you have a supply of special batteries made out of sunstones for your Walkmans, CD Players and the like."
Visions of all the telly shows he'd heard from his cupboard but not really seen ran through Harry's head. "Wicked! Do I need to buy any special kind of equipment?"
Jim shook his head. "Nope. We've taken care of that for you. Now if you want working Internet and satellite, then you need to fix up one of your homes in the Mundane world, and we can link it to the castle. Like a relay station. Costs a good chunk of change but it's not like you've been pinching pennies on this remodel kid."
"Brilliant! I know of two homes I want modified already!" He'd send Penny and the rest of the House Elves to clean up Grimmauld Place, and while he hadn't seen it yet apparently he had a cottage near the beach in Brighton. He'd been waiting until the wards at the castle were set up to inspect the place, but decided to pop over later that day.
The meeting soon turned into a lesson in warding and quantum physics or something for Draco, while Harry made lists of what kind of videos and music he wanted to buy. He even had a list of movies he thought the Twins and Lee might like, but he wasn't sure about that.
There were only so many times Harry could listen to Spamalot and not go insane, and he was sure once the twins got a hold of the movie, he'd never hear the end of it.
After Draco had dragged every Arithimancy equation out of Jim, the man turned the discussion back to the wards. "We'll be ready to raise the permanent wards on Friday. The Heart of the castle is in the lowest level of the dungeons, three floors down. I know you haven't been taught all this fun Pureblooded, Lord of the Manor stuff, kiddo, so I'll walk it through with you now and your buddy here will fill you in on anything you're confused about later.
"Basically, since we're not technically in the United Kingdom and do not fall under the Ministry's rules, we'll be using Blood Wards. These will work as long as you consider Caer Gwydion your home."
Harry couldn't help but flinch at those words. Jim was looking down at his day planner but Draco noticed and raised his eyebrow in question. Harry just shook his head. Now was not the time to go into it and even if it was he wasn't sure he wanted to talk to Draco about it. The Twins and Lee, yeah, but Draco was too ... Draco. Harry had a crush on him, yeah, and considered him a friend but he wasn't sure baring his insecurities from his childhood with the blond was a good idea.
Jim continued, thank Merlin, and Harry turned his attention back to the man. "We'll use a special dagger, and you'll bleed on a big crystal that's set into the ground, surrounded by a complicated set of runes. A few words of Latin and the mojo is up and working. If someone did manage to slip into your lands, you'll know. The floo will only work outward, unless you connect it personally. Like you can connect it to the house where we'll be setting up the Internet and satellite relays and then floo out from there. If you place the property under the Fidelus, that would make it doubly safe."
Jim pulled out a modern looking Muggle key from his briefcase. "I know you know this, Harry, but I'll go over it again. We'll be giving you twenty keys. These keys will not only serve as portkeys, but will allow people to Apparate directly into the castle. If they’re people you consider family, give them one of the blue keys and if it's just someone visiting give them a red one and that will send the visitors to a receiving room. Family has unlimited access to the castle and can pretty much pop up anywhere but private quarters that are not their own."
Harry pushed his glasses up his nose. "What if I need more keys? Can I make them myself?"
"It is ... strongly suggested that you buy Goblin made keys. They have a guarantee for safety and confidentiality. For instance if you were to give Draco here a key ... he wouldn't be able to give it to anyone else or even tell someone about it. It really is the best way to go."
Harry nodded. He might be able to do it as well but it would probably require lots of studying and Runes or something. He had the money so he'd just buy it, it would be much easier.
Draco was frowning at his notes. "What if someone does manage to, say, follow Harry from the, umm, Muggle world to here? Or Cardiff or wherever, and they attacked?"
Jim nodded. "Good question, since there is a road that leads from the castle to Farnham in Surrey. There are several layers of wards, from notice-me-not to Confundus. On the off chance someone does manage to break through the first set of wards, the castle and the grounds around it for a kilometer are surrounded by even stronger ones. From ones that will stun any and all attackers if they try to take them down, up to ones that will strip a wizard or witch of their magic." Seeing the shocked look on both Harry and Draco's face Jim put up a hand. "Don't worry, guys, there will be plenty of warning and anyone with an ounce of sense will stop after the second warning, which is a modified voice recording of one of the meanest, nastiest Goblins from Gringotts giving a description of what will happen to them, including a few other threats like the removal of several body organs. "
Draco chuckled at that. "That might be fun to watch."
Harry huffed at his friend. "Draco, it's not like they're going to cough up a lung or something." He turned to Jim with a curious look. "Will they?"
The older man laughed. "No, they won't. Although if they attack the wards physically a few layers of skin would probably peel off. The best part about the wards, in my mind at least, is if anyone does attack the castle, the wards drain off that energy and feed it to the sunstones, which in turn feed more power to the wards. The more effort put in to taking them down, the stronger the wards will be."
Harry grinned evilly. "Wicked!" He could just imagine Dumbledore trying to breech his wards and the man's own magic being turned against him. Then again Harry doubted the old coot would be that foolish, but it was a fun thought.
"One last thing, and then I think you'll know pretty much the basics." Jim took off his glasses and leaned back in his chair. "When I say that you'll be charging the Heart of the castle with your blood and magic, that's exactly what is going to happen in a way. The magic in your blood will recharge the Heart which in turn gives you mastery over the castle. The more magic you have in your blood, the more the castle will wake up."
"Wake up?" Why couldn't anyone just come out in say things in plain Queen's English, Harry didn't know.
"Of course. Right now the castle is asleep, only a few of the portraits are awake, and none of the rooms have moved all that much. After Friday, that should change, and then the castle's ghosts should wake up."
Harry sat up, shocked at what he was hearing. "GHOSTS?"
Jim laughed. "But of course, this is an ancient castle after all. According to the records, Caer Gwydion has quite a few ghosts. Not so many as Hogwarts, but then again this grand old man's staircases don't move as much either, only when someone asks them to. It's really quiet convenient. You'll be waking the entire castle up on Friday."
Harry groaned. He only hoped the ghosts were helpful, like Nearly Headless Nick. If he had to put up with a Peeves or Moaning Myrtle, he was going to learn how to perform an exorcism.
*****
TBC ...
End Notes:
*Just so y'all know, an ASDA is the British version of Wal-mart. Can't you just see Draco's reaction to Wal-mart of all places? LAMO!