The Sleeping Beauty Curse

Chapter 6

Harry woke up with a start to the blare of his alarm clock. He had a pounding headache, and he felt as rough as a badger's arse. He noted that he was still in his uniform, his glasses squished uncomfortably up his nose, and for a brief moment he wondered if he'd drunk so much the night before that he was suffering from memory loss. When he reached for his wand to turn off the fucking alarm, though – he wasn't great at mornings, and Hermione had given him, as a 'thoughtful' gift, an alarm that required a lengthy incantation to turn off to ensure its victim was truly awake – yesterday's events smacked him in the face, like an unkindly-aimed Bludger.

Harry wanted to lie back down and brood for a bit, before taking a very long, hot shower to try to make himself feel less like complete shit. To his despair, though, he realised he couldn't turn the alarm off without magic, and – the cherry on top of the burnt cake – he couldn't turn the shower on without magic, either. So much for brooding. If he attempted it, he'd only end up trying to throw the alarm clock through the wall. He had an annoying memory that the manufacturer had installed cushioning charms on the clock, for just this eventuality.

Harry creaked up and off the bed, feeling approximately a million years old, and gave the clock a death stare that failed to kill it. He ran a hand through his hair, in an attempt to flatten it, picked up the blaring clock and made his way to the spare bedroom, his desire to turn the alarm off before his brain leaked out of his ears warring with his desire to sink into the floor and never have to face Malfoy again. He needed a wash, and a litre of coffee, at the bare minimum, before he could do it.

To his relief, the door to the bedroom was open, so at least he didn't have to face the prospect of knocking and waking the fucker up. He'd experienced the sleeping beauty thing once; he thought a second exposure to it might kill him stone dead. When he peered in, however, Malfoy was nowhere to be seen. Harry began to feel faintly uneasy. The bathroom door had been ajar when he'd gone past it, so where was Malfoy? He stared a bit more inside the room. There was no evidence that Malfoy had ever been in there. The bed looked unslept in, the sheets pristine and unwrinkled.

Harry gave himself a mental shake and took himself and the alarm – which was now wailing at the volume of approximately a hundred really angry Howlers – back into the hallway and down the wide main staircase to the ground floor, striding through the black-and-white chequerboard floor of the large entrance hall and hoping that the fact that the door at the far end was ajar was a good indication that Malfoy lay beyond it. The feeling of relief when he saw Malfoy's back, as he stood in front of the open fridge in the kitchen, was almost indescribable. Harry strode towards him and, in almost one movement, dropped the alarm clock on the floor – it bounced – caught Malfoy's wrist with one hand and swished his wand with the other, chanting the nonsense verse to turn the instrument of torture off.

The sound of silence was glorious; Harry almost wept with it.

Malfoy pulled away, turning to face Harry. He looked terrible – grey and drained, his hair a tangled mess. "Well, you look like shit," Malfoy said, by way of greeting, and Harry pulled him into his arms, burying his face in the side of his neck, in response.

For a frozen moment they stood there like that, Harry wondering why the fuck he'd done that, while he simultaneously felt the relief of reconnecting with his magic, of having Malfoy close, thrum through his entire body, making him relax from head to toe. The tight band of pain that clutched around his head, threatening to squeeze his brains out, eased a little, too.

"Do you know that there's absolutely nothing in your fridge?" Malfoy said judgmentally. He didn't pull away, though, his hands coming to rest, lightly, against Harry's back, as if morning hugs were a perfectly natural part of their relationship and not to be commented on. "No, wait," Malfoy amended. "There's something that possibly used to be milk, before it mutated into something with an intelligence all of its own, and a green thing, the origins of which I prefer not to speculate about."