Chapter 3

Harry stayed in the empty bedroom for hours, staring at the wall while he was consumed with guilt and frustration. This was his fault. This was all his fault. It only he'd stayed put at the Dursleys like he was supposed to, this wouldn't have happened.

Well, that wasn't necessarily true, a small voice whispered in Harry's mind. There was no telling Snape wouldn't have gotten his hands on Harry at some point. Harry had always planned to go to Godric's Hollow eventually with Ron and Hermione, so Snape might still have caught up with him there. And then perhaps Ron and Hermione would have been captured as well.

No, while Harry knew a lot of what had happened was his fault, he also knew there were some things in life one couldn't stop no matter what.

And Snape turned out to be a very clever, very sneaky and very evil wizard. Harry wouldn't have stood a chance against him, no matter when he'd run into his former professor. Hell, Snape had managed to take out Tonks, Lupin, Moody and Shacklebolt, and all of them had been powerful and talented in their own rights.

The more Harry thought about it, the more he realized he was playing right into Snape's hands by losing his fucking mind over the deaths of the people he knew and cared about. Harry could just see it. Snape watching him go completely crazy through whatever magical equivalent of security cameras Snape must have installed in this house.

This was what Snape wanted! Harry losing his sanity while he and Voldemort kept trying to kill each other.

At once Harry was filled with a new kind of resolve. No matter the pain and the grief and the guilt that consumed him, Harry refused to give Snape the pleasure of seeing Harry fall apart. Harry was going to find a way to deal with all this shit, even if it was the last thing he ever did.

He was not going to help Snape play this sick game in any way, shape or form and that was that.

Now all Harry had to do was find a way to not go slowly insane being locked up with his arch enemy, but how he was to accomplish that Harry had as of yet no idea.

Surprisingly, it was hunger that eventually drove Harry out of the bedroom. He'd been eating so irregularly these past few days that his stomach growled while his head grew light and Harry realized he needed to eat something or else he might actually pass out and hit his head and severely injure himself.

His cheek and temple throbbed where Voldemort had repeatedly hit him, but Harry ignored it.

Shuffling down the stairs, Harry kept an ear open for his homicidal companion. Sizzling could be heard from the kitchen, followed by the sound of a spatula scraping across a pan. The air filled with the enticing scent of browning meat.

Harry's stomach rumbled again, even louder this time.

Fear coiled inside Harry's chest until he remembered Voldemort couldn't kill him. Even if he tried. Which he'd done. But he couldn't injure Harry more than a few slaps to the face. Which Harry could take. Uncle Vernon had done far worse when Harry was a child. A few slaps was nothing, honestly.

Voldemort stood with his back to Harry as he entered the kitchen. Without saying a word, Harry sat down at the kitchen table. Inhaling a deep breath, Harry vowed right there and then to pretend nothing had happened. As much as Harry wanted to scream and shout, he knew acting on such impulses would get them nowhere.

Harry needed Voldemort, and Voldemort needed Harry. Simple as that.

"Care to explain what happened earlier?" Voldemort asked, back still to Harry, as he finished cleaning a whole pile of green beans. He added them to a pot of boiling water.

"Huh?"

Finally, Voldemort glanced over his shoulder, face giving nothing away. "Why you decided to act like an utter buffoon, racing across the house."

"I'm sorry," Harry muttered, at least glad Voldemort seemed mostly calm again, even if his shoulders looked a bit more rigid than usual.

"Not what I wanted to hear." Voldemort grabbed a different pot, one with potatoes, and poured them out in a colander over the sink. Steam rose and briefly obscured Harry's view.

"I don't know why I did that," Harry said honestly with a frustrated groan. There it was again, that urge, that need to move. Harry got up, opened the fridge and got the carton of orange juice out. He got a glass from the cupboard and poured out the juice. Only when Harry brought the glass to his lips and had his first taste did he realize how thirsty he was. He emptied the first glass at once and poured a second.

"Still waiting," Voldemort said, now with a vague notion of humour in his voice.

"Yeah, I wasn't lying. Sometimes, I just need to move. When I'm angry or scared or frustrated." Harry sighed and sat down again, glass and carton of juice within easy reach. "It's this uncontrollable urge. And I've been very, very frustrated since I woke up here."

Something niggled at Harry's mind, something so big and so dark and so evil that Harry had trouble even thinking about it. Yet it was there in the hidden crevasses of his mind, trying to pull Harry's strings.

"Dopamine," Voldemort said out of the blue, dumping the potatoes back into the pot to mash them. "That's what your body craves. Exercise is one way to release it into your brain. Another is the use of dark magic."

"I don't need to know that," Harry said quickly because the last thing he wanted was to listen to Voldemort wax poetically about all the advantages of dark magic. Harry just wasn't interested.

"Another way," Voldemort said pointedly, mashing away at the potatoes vigorously. "Is an orgasm."

"What?"

Had Voldemort seriously just said the word orgasm. Harry stared at Voldemort as though he'd never seen him before. There was only utter shock coursing through his entire body.

"In other words," Voldemort said, giving Harry a rather tired look. "Just masturbate, Harry, like the rest of us. A couple of times a day will keep your brain as happy as a niffler in Gringotts."

"I…er…what?" Harry's mind was still utterly numb with shock.

"Now set the table. Dinner is almost done." Voldemort went to pour out the water of the green beans.

Harry set the table entirely on autopilot, his brain still reeling from the mere idea that Voldemort had basically just ordered him to wank a few times a day to keep himself calm. Or something. That was at least what Harry had gotten out of that conversation but part of him still couldn't believe Voldemort had told him to masturbate.

Harry masturbated plenty, thank you very much. Usually before going to sleep in bed, at least once. And usually also in the shower. He wouldn't mind wanking a bit more than that but he spent most of the year sharing a room with four other boys and there wasn't much privacy to be had. And Harry didn't feel secure enough to just wank whenever like Seamus did. Part of Harry feared someone might see and tell the Daily Prophet, share silly details about his cock or something.

But ever since Harry found himself locked inside a house with Voldemort he hadn't even thought about wanking. His mind had been completely absorbed by pain and worry and fear and enormous amounts of frustration.

And yet, now that Voldemort had mentioned it, Harry couldn't stop thinking about it.

Perhaps he should take a shower later and just do it. Voldemort had fucking suggested it, so it wasn't as if the man would get offended by the idea of it.

Harry's thoughts didn't return to the situation at hand until Voldemort served them dinner. Lambchops cooked medium-rare, green beans and mashed potatoes. Harry's stomach all but jumped with joy as Harry started chowing down on is dinner, absolutely famished. Voldemort snorted and then tucked into his own meal with much more poise.

Few words were spoken during their meal, their truce still fragile since their outburst that morning. But at least they could sit in the same room together again without any attempts at homicide so Harry counted that as a win.

The big, evil thing in Harry's head stirred again, and his stomach suddenly roiled.

"Do you think Snape will kill Ron and Hermione as well?" Harry asked, his voice taking on a slightly hysterical note. It was such a horrible thought that Harry had spent considerable energy these past few days not thinking about it. "They know everything I know, but they are still only Hogwarts students, right?" Harry gave Voldemort a pleading look. "They're not much of a threat, they're really not."

"I doubt they are a priority for Severus," Voldemort said quietly. "But eventually, I'm sure Severus will find a way to take them out. But for now I'm sure there are still targets more important to Severus."

Briefly closing his eyes, Harry nodded, pushing his almost empty plate away from himself. "That's something, I suppose. That gives us time."

"Perhaps," Voldemort said and ate the last bit of mashed potatoes from his plate before sitting back.

"What do you mean?" Harry asked, voice tight with mild hysteria again. He could not lose Ron and Hermione. He couldn't. If he saw their names in the Prophet one morning, he'd go insane, he was sure of it, no matter if that was playing right into Snape's hands.

"There is one way we might get out of here, but it will take time. At least 4 to 6 weeks, perhaps even longer," Voldemort explained while he gave Harry a measured look.

"How? What should we do?" Harry leaned forward, giving Voldemort a pleading look to explain how they could finally get out of there.

"We can make a blood wand." Voldemort held up a hand when it looked like Harry was going to interrupt him again. "It is a rudimentary wand carved from wood, but instead of a magical core you fill it with blood. Our blood, in this case. The blood then has to seep into the wood, giving it magical strength, before we can use it. That will take time."

"But afterwards we could use the wand," Harry said eagerly, hope swelling in his chest. They could do this, he was sure of it. Harry would happily donate buckets of blood if it meant getting out of there.

"Yes, but remember, it's a rudimentary wand. It will get us out of here, but that will be pretty much all it can do."

"So we buy new wands once we get out of here, got it." Harry wanted to bounce in his chair, he was so excited that they seemed to have a solid plan to move forward.

"Tomorrow, we collect any object we can that's made of wood and that's big enough to be carved into something resembling a wand. We then have to figure out which wood suits us best."

"Sure, we'll do that," Harry agreed at once. His heart was racing and his body was itching with the urge to get started right away, but Voldemort was the only one who knew how to make a blood wand so Harry decided to follow his lead. For once.

Voldemort pushed his chair back and got up. "I'll leave the dishes to you, since you seemed so eager to clean earlier." And with a swish of his robes, Voldemort left the kitchen. Harry hoped he was already going to look for suitable wand wood. The sooner they made a wand, however simple a wand it may be, the better.

Doing the dishes took all of 15 minutes and afterwards Harry decided to put Voldemort's advice to good use, no matter that part of him was still utterly mortified by the memory of Voldemort talking about masturbation.

Harry turned the water on nice and hot and undressed in the bathroom, the door carefully locked. The second he stepped under the spray his body relaxed and his mind became noticeably calmer, thoughts of friends recently dead pushed to the back for now. Harry grabbed his limp cock and gave it a few strokes. It sprang to life at once, even if it had hardly even twitched this past week.

Harry quickly got a familiar rhythm going, his mind settling on some vague images of Katie Bell and Angelina Johnson in the Quidditch locker room while his mind remembered the feeling of Ginny's lips against his own, her body warm and soft under his hands.

Within minutes, Harry came with a quit groan, spurting his release to the tiled floor where it was washed away at once. It did seem that his mind was even calmer after that, at least for now.

But, as Voldemort had more or less suggested, Harry could wank whenever he needed to. It's not like he had much else to do, aside from collecting wooden objects starting tomorrow. Harry doubted that would keep them busy for more than a day. The house was not that big.

After Harry towelled off, he wrapped it around his waist and sauntered to their bedroom. There he got a clean pair of pyjamas and put those on. It was around that time Harry remembered he'd put clothes in the dryer he'd yet to fold. So that's what he did next. Even though the clothes were a little wrinkled from having sat in the dryer for a few hours, Harry still folded them carefully and put them away. It's not like anyone aside from Voldemort and himself would even get to see those clothes for the foreseeable future after all.

Harry found Voldemort in the living room, spread out elegantly on the couch. The Prophet lay on the coffee table while Voldemort held a full glass of whiskey, taking a sip occasionally.

Sitting down in a chair opposite Voldemort, Harry picked up the paper and paged through it.

"Feel better?" Voldemort said with a knowing smirk.

Cheeks positively flaming, Harry merely nodded. "Yes, much better, thank you." Then he looked at Voldemort and gestured at the glass in his hand. "Can I have a glass?"

"You're expecting me to waste my good whiskey on a child?" Voldemort grumbled, yet he still got up and fetched a glass from the nearby liquor cabinet. He filled it halfway and handed it to Harry. "I suppose we might as well raise our glasses on a productive future."

"To blood wands," Harry said, raising his glass at Voldemort before taking a generous sip. The whiskey burned going down, but Harry liked that burn. It kept other, less pleasant things like thoughts about his friends getting killed at bay. Voldemort returned the salute and went back to staring at the dark fireplace.

"The Montrose Magpies lost," Harry muttered as he read through the Quidditch section of the paper. "To the Tutshill Tornadoes. That is a really embarrassing loss, seriously."

"Hm." Voldemort drank more whiskey.

A small part of Harry's mind kept telling him that sitting in his pyjamas while sharing a glass of whiskey with Voldemort was absolutely not normal and he should be freaking out, but Harry pushed that annoying little voice all the way to the back of his mind, where it could rot away with any thoughts about dead friends.

Harry wondered when it would be appropriate to go and wank again. The orgasm had been nice and it did make him feel better.

Maybe for now the whiskey would take over where the orgasm had left off.

Dopamine. What a funny word.

"I am turning in for the night," Voldemort mumbled before emptying his glass in one swig. "Come keep watch."

Harry pulled all the old Prophets from the newspaper bucket beside he fireplace so he'd have something to read.

As always, Voldemort crawled into bed naked, but instead of avoiding looking at the man altogether, this time Harry subtly took a peek. Voldemort's body was thin but strong and he really did have a nicely sized cock. Larger than Harry's, as far as Harry could tell without comparing both with a ruler.

"Good night," Harry whispered as he sat down in the armchair. "I'll wake you up in five hours."

"Good night," Voldemort replied and turned on his side, eyes closed.

Harry finished his glass of whiskey while he took his time reading every single article in the sports section of every copy of the paper. He didn't dare read the general news section because he didn't want to be reminded of the people he'd lost and might still lose if they couldn't get out of there soon enough.

After what must have been an hour or two, Harry caught himself staring at a picture of Peach Williamson, a Chaser for the Falmouth Falcons. She was very pretty, with long, blond hair and a voluptuous build, including fairly large breasts. She was fully dressed in her Quidditch uniform, of course, as she flew towards the goal poles and scored. But Harry had a vivid imagination plus lots of memories to draw back on from the dirty magazines Seamus always had lying around. So when it came to it, he knew exactly what Peach Williamson looked like without her Quidditch uniform on.

His cock grew hard, right there and then, with Voldemort sleeping not three feet away.

A part of Harry was tempted to just pull out his cock and wank until he reached a messy orgasm, but that seemed a bit too impulsive, even for him. Voldemort couldn't kill him, but Harry wasn't so sure if the magical vow would protect him from castration by Voldemort's bare hands if he got caught. So instead Harry quietly walked towards the bathroom. He noticed the smudges of blood on the wall where he'd left them but he ignored them.

Harry was simply going to have an orgasm instead of wallow in misery and grief. Dopamine. Good stuff.

Placing the prophet on top of the sink, picture of Peach clearly visible, Harry pulled his cock out and had a quick and dirty wank. The bathroom door was wide open because Harry feared that closing it might wake Voldemort. But somehow, the idea that Voldemort might overhear him was somehow kind of exciting, in a very disturbing kind of way.

Harry stroked his cock hard and fast and came all over the prophet and poor Peach's picture. He wiped as much of the evidence off as he could and then very quietly washed his hands before returning to the chair. Voldemort hadn't stirred by the looks of it, and Harry released a relieved sigh, his brain calm again and not at all obsessed with thoughts of Ron and Hermione getting killed by Snape like it wanted to be.

Before Harry woke Voldemort up halfway through the night he made another trip to the bathroom and poor Peach got another face full of Harry's release.

Oh, that sweet, sweet dopamine. Harry was never doubting Voldemort again.

Voldemort didn't mention anything as Harry woke him up and slipped into the warm bed after him. It was still kind of weird, to share a bed, but at that point Harry was so tired he couldn't really be bothered by it.

Sleep came soon after and Harry slept well throughout the night until the smell of eggs frying woke him up the next morning. It took Harry a few moments to remember where he was and what day it was exactly. But when his mind caught up with current events, Harry all but launched out of bed, made a quick stop in the bathroom and then rushed down the stairs.

"What had we decided about running in the house," Voldemort said with a pointed glare as Harry all but threw himself into the kitchen.

"Sorry," Harry mumbled, pleased to see the table already set. There was a steaming cup of tea and a glass of orange juice waiting for him. "Thanks. I'm just excited."

"I can tell," Voldemort said, turning back to the stove where the bacon was sizzling. "Do try to show some decorum. We'll get started right after breakfast."

Harry wanted to reply but he spotted the Prophet lying folded on the edge of the table near Voldemort's plate. "Anyone we know today?" he whispered, unable to stop staring at the newspaper.

"There wasn't anyone in it at all today," Voldemort answered calm as you please. "Even Severus cannot keep killing people and blaming it on others day in and day out without eventually someone seeing a pattern. I suspect he will leave things be for a few days before moving to his next target."

"That makes sense." A huge wave of relief crashed over Harry and he couldn't hold back a smile at the knowledge people out there were safe, at least for a bit.

Harry sipped his tea and before long he had a steaming plate of toast, eggs and bacon in front of him and he dug in at once. After breakfast Harry left the dirty dishes in the sink with the promise to do them later that day. They had more important things to do now.

Making another brief stop in the bathroom to wash and get dressed hardly put a dent in Harry's tireless enthusiasm. "Where do we start?" Harry asked, voice pitched just a bit too high as he joined an exasperated Voldemort in the hallway.

Voldemort handed him a small notebook and a ballpoint pen. "Write down any wooden pieces of furniture you see that are too big to move for now. Anything that you can carry you put in the conservatory. I'll start upstairs, you start downstairs."

"Right away!" Harry dashed into the living room and started on the right side of the door. He systematically made his way around the room. He wrote down the details of every piece of wooden furniture and collected every wooden box and candlestick and picture frame and much more besides. He dumped them all in the conservatory, as instructed. He even dragged the dining room chairs, which they never used anyway, inside the conservatory. The kitchen yielded lots of wooden bowl and spoons and cutting boards, which Harry also dutifully removed. He left the chairs there, because they did have to eat at the table.

Voldemort occasionally appeared downstairs with his arms full of wooden items.

It wasn't until Harry was just about done with his part of the house, right around lunch time, that Voldemort released a shout that seemed entirely joyous. A loud banging followed, which was soon revealed to be Voldemort dragging on old wooden trunk with iron handles down the stairs.

"I found it in the attic," Voldemort said, giving Harry a slightly manic grin which did all sorts of things to unnerve Harry. "It's made of Cyprus."

Harry shrugged, not having a single clue why that mattered.

Voldemort sniffed at Harry's obvious ignorance and dragged the trunk further into the living room. "Cyprus has much the same properties as Yew. In fact, it's often used as a replacement wood for Yew in wand making."