[From Litha to Lammas]: Huntsman's Honor, Harry/Lucius, R, 3/3
Part Two.
Title: Huntsman’s Honor (3/3)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Lucius, mentions of Lucius/Narcissa
Content Notes: Angst, not epilogue-compliant, ritual magic, violence, gore, animal harm, dark Harry
Wordcount: This part 6800
Rating: R
Summary: Harry has long wanted to perform a ritual that might let him bring Sirius back through the Veil, but he needed help to both gather the ingredients and cast the ritual itself. And accepting that that help could come from Lucius Malfoy took him even longer.
Author’s Notes: This is another of my “From Litha to Lammas” fics, being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This is in response to a request by nia_kantorka, who asked for Harry/Lucius with the prompt of Harry always wanted to try that ritual. Now he’s got the partner(s) to actually do so. There will be three parts total. Also, please look carefully at the content notes.
Thank you for the reviews. This is the third and last part.
Part Three
It was time.
Harry could hardly breathe with how hard his heart was hammering. He didn’t reach up to brush the sweat off his forehead, though. He kept his gaze on the altar in front of him instead, the long slab of obsidian with his own scrap of finger bone lost somewhere in it, in the center of the pentagram formed with small pieces of black basalt carved with the appropriate runes.
He had thought that having lost a finger might impair the way he handled his wand, but it didn’t seem to have. Perhaps holding the Elder Wand was a factor in that.
The homunculus, which had absorbed a large part of the gems in one of the Black vaults, lay silent and still in the upper point of the pentagram. Harry had half-wondered if it would remind him of Voldemort’s baby body, but it didn’t. It was only a form, like a doll, with mitten-like hands and black beads for eyes. The potential it had to absorb magic was what made it cost so much, not the materials.
In the pentagram point to the left of the homunculus lay the Hand of Glory, and in the point to the right of it the horn chopped from the head of the Acromantula Transfigured into a unicorn. Harry stood in the point next to the Hand of Glory. Malfoy would take the one next to the horn.
At least, that was where they would stand until the ritual began in earnest.
Harry turned at the sound of an Apparition, but his heart pounded no harder. Again, he had strung wards all around the ancient Black house that would warn him whether anyone hostile to their purpose was approaching. And the magic that surged towards him had grown oddly familiar over their harvesting expeditions.
Malfoy was taking his cloak off as he approached the pentagram. He stopped for a moment as though to consider the runes or the positioning of their ingredients one to another. He locked eyes with Harry.
“Once we begin this, there is no going back,” he said.
Harry smiled. “I know,” he said. He didn’t bother to hide the joy in his voice.
Malfoy shook his head and laid down the cane that Harry knew held his wand. Then he turned to unbuttoning his robe.
Harry was the one who had to begin the ritual and conduct most of it. Malfoy would only bring in his offering of the Dark Mark when it was fairly far advanced. Harry turned to look at the altar, and saw the first soft, questioning flicker of blue light on it. Placing these ingredients like this had begun the ritual, but Harry needed to take the next step.
Harry drew in his breath. “Voco Sirius Black.”
The blue light leaped into being, blazing all around the altar before turning to a darker violet. Harry took his shirt off. His eyes were locked on the flames, waiting for the moment when he would have to place the homunculus on the altar. For the moment, however, the fire remained violet instead of black, and he frowned.
“You should undress further,” Malfoy said. “It will show the ritual that you are fully committed to all parts of this, including the part where you lay your virginity down.”
Harry glanced at him, and swallowed a little when he noticed that Malfoy was already naked. But the fire continued to waver and didn’t turn the black color that he needed it to, so Harry undid his trousers and lowered them to the ground, still gazing at the altar.
The flames halted, then deepened a shade before beginning to waver back and forth again.
Reassured, Harry bent down to undo his socks and then lowered his pants. The grass within the pentagram prickled against his feet, but Harry didn’t care. The flames had become deepest indigo, and the roar of whirling air against his senses was picking up.
Malfoy shifted in his pentagram point, and Harry glanced at him. He was hard. Good. That would make this sacrifice easier.
Harry stared at the flames. Black, and he used his own magic to whirl the homunculus into the air and deposit it on the altar. The fire wrapped around it eagerly, sucking at the materials it was made of.
In a few seconds, the bead eyes fell away from the homunculus’s head. Harry gasped as he watched the flames eat into the silk-like material of the doll’s body, and the silk turn into skin here and there, in glistening strips. Then it halted.
Harry nodded to Malfoy, and Malfoy bent down and neatly flipped the horn into the air. For a second, Harry’s chest clenched as he watched it somersault, thinking it would end up somewhere other than the altar, but it landed, point down, in the middle of the obsidian, and the flames leaped over to it. They touched the horn as delicately as Harry remembered the Fiendfyre caressing the diadem of Ravenclaw.
And then the horn exploded.
Malfoy flinched back, even given that he must have expected it, but luckily, he didn’t leave his point of the pentagram. Harry found that he couldn’t take his eyes from the altar. The horn was twisting and untwisting, losing its substance to the lapping flames. Harry’s breath was coming quicker to match the horn’s destruction, but the rhythm fell out of place at the exact moment that the last of the horn dissolved.
And what looked like shards of bone flew to fill the homunculus’s body.
Harry smiled slowly. Those would be Sirius’s bones, when he came back to earth.
The flames danced and sang, and the homunculus rose briefly, increasing in size. Harry watched it hungrily, but it grew only to about half the size of an adult human being before it flopped back on the altar, and the small arms spread wide, yearning.
Harry knew what they needed. He reached out to the point of the pentagram nearest him and flipped the Hand of Glory into the air. He had to use both hands, since it wasn’t anything like so light as the horn, and it covered the altar rather than embedding itself in it.
It didn’t matter.
Spirals of flame seized on the sides of the giant’s hand, burning off the skin, the flesh, the muscle beneath, and taking them into the homunculus. When enough of the Hand of Glory was gone for Harry to see the homunculus beneath it, it was clad entirely in human skin, the missing patches filled in, and there were muscles bulging and rippling in the arms like swimming eels beneath the surface of a pond.
Harry swallowed. The flames were a bright, clear blue again, and turning slowly so that they pointed towards him and Malfoy. The last two points of the pentagram. The last two who had to make sacrifices.
Malfoy met his eyes, his expression calm. Then he nodded and extended his arms.
Harry crossed from his point of the pentagram to Malfoy’s, aware of the insistent singing of the flames behind him.
*
Lucius was stunned, and impressed. It seemed that so far the notoriously tricky Ritual of Bone and Soul was working just as it ought. As if the bone truly would be the bone that Potter had sacrificed to the altar and the ones made from the false unicorn’s horn, and the soul would be the taint that Potter had inflicted on his. Or the soul summoned back from the grave.
And from the determination with which Potter moved towards him now, another part of it was going to be completed soon.
Potter stood on his toes when he entered the same point of the pentagram, and brushed his lips across Lucius’s. Lucius shuddered, because the kiss had been clumsy to the point of a shock, and because the spark that leaped between them was so potent.
Ritual magic, only, of course. But Lucius thought he was not alone in finding it powerful. Potter juddered back, his eyes widening.
Then, of course, he tried to shoulder past it and kissed Lucius again.
Lucius took control of the kiss, sinking his hands into Harry’s hair. Harry tried to press forwards, but Lucius held him still.
There were no strictures on the sex they had in the ritual, except that the virgin had to be penetrated and they had to remain within the point of the pentagram where Lucius had begun. There was no law, no rule, that said the sex had to be hasty or painful, although for all Lucius knew, Harry might think it would be a better sacrifice that way.
But Lucius was determined to make sure that it was painful for neither of them, and would still fulfill the ritual’s instructions.
It took a long moment, but Harry at last melted into the kiss, opening his mouth with a soft sigh. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his tongue, either, but Lucius coaxed him into a gentle exchange that left Harry a trembling mess against him.
That will do, Lucius thought, and pulled back from the kiss to study Harry.
His face was dazed, his cheeks a brilliant red. Lucius didn’t think he’d seen him look that alive since they began the preparations for the ritual. He kissed Harry again, this time on the cheek, and whispered, “Do you want to be on your back or on top of me?”
“It has to be on my back.”
“No,” Lucius said. “There is nothing in the ritual’s instructions that says so.” He had revised them last night, to make sure, and while Harry might be the expert on ritual magic that he had presented himself as, Lucius knew much more about sex. “Which way?”
“You’re-not offering on my knees.”
“I want to see your face.”
Harry blinked as if that had never occurred to him. Lucius took a step back and let his gaze slip down Harry’s body for the first time. Harry was half-hard, perhaps from the kiss. He stirred and grew more erect as Lucius watched.
“I want to make sure I’m not hurting you,” Lucius said. “And I want to see you the first time you have sex. The first one ever to do so.”
Harry nodded slowly, his eyes still wide and with something that might have been the beginnings of puzzlement in them. He hesitated and then said, “On top of you, then.”
Lucius nodded, unsmiling. He had thought that might be the case. “Then let me arrange myself more comfortably,” he said, and began to work spells on the grass in his point of the pentagram that would allow him to lie on his back without hurting his spine.
Now and then he glanced at Harry, who was still watching him with a furrowed brow. Lucius didn’t think it was worry over Lucius’s comfort, or even his own. He was probably wondering why Lucius didn’t simply bull ahead and do whatever was necessary for the ritual.
Lucius sighed and decided that wasting time on words right now would be counterproductive. If he was right about what would happen when they began the sexual portion of the ritual, Harry might understand soon enough without them, anyway.
*
Harry cast a lubrication charm on his arse while Lucius was arranging the grass to his satisfaction. After a glance at Lucius’s prick, curving up until it almost touched his stomach, he added a few pain-relieving charms, as well.
His skin was tingling with the heaviness of the magic in the air, while his lips burned with the kiss. That didn’t make much sense, Harry thought absently as he watched Lucius sprawl out on his back, then sit up and cast a few more Cushioning Charms in the direction of his hips. He’d kissed Cho and Ginny before. Harry knew what kissing was like. This wasn’t-
It shouldn’t have made such an impact on him.
But it had.
Harry shook his head, impatient with his wandering thoughts. What did it matter what he felt as a result of this? The only important thing was summoning Sirius back and giving him the chance to live again, and Harry the connection with his family that he needed.
When Lucius looked up at him and nodded, Harry moved forwards, then halted again. He’d just realized that he was thinking of Lucius by his first name. Was that wrong? Was that going to affect the intensity of the ritual, or its patterns, or-anything else?
Then he decided again that it didn’t matter. He had to focus on Sirius, not his own reactions, unless he started doing something that would contradict the instructions for the ritual.
“Harry? Is something wrong?”
He’s calling me by my first name and nothing terrible has happened yet, Harry told himself, and he moved forwards. “No, it’s all right. I’ve cast the lubrication charm,” he added, and started to sit down on Lucius.
Lucius’s hands came up and clenched his hips. Harry started. The touch of those hands, and even Lucius’s eyes when he sought them out, burned in the way that the kiss had.
“Maybe I want to cast my own charm,” Lucius whispered. “And savor this for a moment. It’s been a long time since I had this particular pleasure.”
Harry blinked and wondered if that was about having participated in the Ritual of Bone and Soul before, or having had sex with a virgin, or what. But he wasn’t interested enough to ask. He sat back and tried to muster his patience when the idea that Sirius’s return was only a few minutes away was burning in him harder than any touch.
Lucius’s fingers skated up his hips and circled gently, on skin that Harry hadn’t known was that sensitive, and which made him jump and start. Lucius leaned up to kiss him. Harry went with it, as little as he liked the way his own perceptions seemed to soften and narrow in the middle of that kiss. By the time Lucius leaned back again, he was a bit dizzy.
“Now,” Lucius said. His cock was slick with a charm Harry hadn’t heard him cast, and his chest was heaving. Harry squashed his own discomfort that he hadn’t noticed the magic-Lucius was an ally-and eased back, reaching down just enough to touch the base of Lucius’s erection and guide it into him.
Harry had expected the burn, this time, even with the pain-relieving charms that he’d cast. The lubrication slicked and made a squeaky sound, which he’d expected, too. He was a virgin, not ignorant.
But it seemed nothing could really prepare him for the feeling of something inside him until it happened. Harry started and squeezed down despite himself, then closed his eyes and panted. Lucius ran his fingers in more gentle circles down Harry’s sides and up again, his voice slow and soft. “It’s all right, Harry. Take your time.”
“I shouldn’t need to,” Harry muttered. His eyes were still closed, even though he should have been able to force them open. His forehead was slick with sweat. “Sirius needs me.”
“Would he want you to damage yourself in the course of trying to bring him back?”
“No,” Harry muttered. He opened his eyes and found Lucius’s waiting for him as if he had anticipated the need Harry would have to look at someone else. Lucius simply nodded.
“When you’re ready, then you can begin to move.”
To Harry’s shame, he needed another minute before he could truly say he was ready. Then he decided he would just begin as he meant to go on, and sat down hard in the second before he began to rock forwards.
Ouch. Harry yelped as a different burn began, and Lucius’s hands reached up and restrained him again. Harry tried to look around to see what the flames on the altar were doing, but Lucius shook his head.
“It will be all right,” he said, voice thick. “Keep your focus on me.”
*
For Lucius, that jolt Harry had taken to slide down him had been pure pleasure, but obviously not for Harry. And from the way his arse tightened and his hands clenched into fists, he was annoyed more than he hurt. He wanted to simply charge through the pain and summon his godfather back.
He hasn’t had anything but this for eight years. Nothing but obsession for eight years.
Lucius held Harry still and repeated as gently as he could, “Keep your focus on me. It’s all right, Harry.” He glanced down and noted that Harry’s cock was soft against his stomach. “Remember that for the ritual to work, you need to come, as well.”
Harry let his eyes flutter shut and waited as though he was seriously thinking about Lucius’s reminder as some kind of condition. Lucius felt a pulse of pity travel through him. For all the sacrifices he had made, for the insane determination that Harry had shown in trying to harvest the ingredients for the Ritual of Bone and Soul, he was still a young man who hadn’t let himself experience much of life.
“All right,” Harry said, but his cock hadn’t moved. Lucius reached down and stroked it.
Harry’s eyes flared open with a sharp gasp that seemed to rip through him, and Lucius nodded to him while continuing to stroke.
“You can do this,” he said. “You can do whatever is necessary to make sure that your godfather comes back and that you enjoy yourself.”
Harry blinked at the last requirement, as if no one had ever said that to him before, as if he hadn’t let himself feel it. And while he was still sitting there like that and seemed more open than Lucius had yet seen him, Lucius readjusted the angle of his cock and drove upwards.
This time, the gasp was one more of pleasure than shock. Harry clenched down, and Lucius no longer thought he was trying to live with pain. Lucius gave him an encouraging smile and thrust again.
“This isn’t-part of the ritual,” Harry said, while he rocked in place with an expression of confused enjoyment.
“It doesn’t have to be. The only instructions for the ritual are that the virgin is penetrated, that we both come, and that you feel the intensity.”
“I can feel that.”
Harry’s eyes were fixed on him now, and Lucius was pleased to see that they shone as he had once imagined they might, the only time he allowed himself to imagine this since Harry named the ritual he wanted to do. He thrust again, and Harry answered with a movement of his hips, and the true sex had begun.
*
Harry had read enough about ritual sex that he’d thought he knew what to prepare for. And he’d been the center of rituals that he’d conducted by himself and with a few people who didn’t know his real identity, and that had been-enough to make him sure that he knew what intensity really was.
Until now.
The burning that flashed up from his arse through the center of his chest, which he’d thought he’d been ready for because it was just pain, had changed character. It was pleasure, now, which gripped his organs and did strange things to them. And made him want to keep moving.
He hadn’t thought one way or the other about whether he would enjoy sex with a man. What did it matter? He would do it if he had to, if a ritual required him to, and that was the only thing that mattered.
Now, Harry could see why some men preferred men. Or at least having something thrusting inside their arses.
“All right, there?”
Lucius’s voice was a rumble, deep and amused. Harry managed to nod, and reminded himself that no matter how it felt, this was for Sirius, not him. He caught his breath and twisted his head to see what was happening to the color of the flames on the altar.
They had darkened a little, but towards indigo rather than black. Harry swallowed, and began to bounce a little harder on Lucius’s cock.
“I would prefer to go slowly.”
Harry jerked his head at the altar. “Yes, and that would be fine if the flames weren’t getting ready to go back to an earlier stage.” Cold gripped his throat at the sight that they might have done all this and it might be wasted.
“As long as we’re moving, they will not.” Lucius picked up one of Harry’s hands where they were dangling down near his sides and brought it slowly up to near his lips. Harry couldn’t tell if he actually kissed it or not, the touch was so light. “Will you indulge me?”
Slowly, Harry nodded. Lucius had done enough for him that he could, he thought. He squeezed a little with his inner muscles and resumed a slower pace than he’d been trying for.
“Thank you.”
Harry gave Lucius a faint smile. What in the world was he supposed to say in a situation like this? “Sure.”
*
Harry was beautiful like this, and Lucius regretted that his first time was in the middle of a ritual pentagram, under circumstances that would hardly encourage Harry to linger and realize how beautiful.
At the same time, Lucius was selfishly glad that Harry had waited to shed his virginity and that Lucius, himself, had been chosen for this ritual. He got to see the beauty, the magic that welled like light through Harry’s skin.
None of it was death magic, either, the way Lucius had imagined it might be after the darkness he had conjured for Borgin and to destroy the fence around the hippogriff sanctuary. It shone and twisted, thick as the flames sheathing the obsidian altar, but so warm that Lucius could feel it like sunlight on his senses.
Harry had his eyes closed, now, his movements sharper despite himself. His lips were parted, and Lucius wished he had the right angle to kiss him. He thought about trying anyway, but he didn’t want to call Harry’s attention back to what they were doing or make him self-conscious.
He’s conscious enough already.
Instead, Lucius flexed his hips and adjusted his angle, thinking he hadn’t made Harry gasp in a while, and Harry did it again, sitting back and shivering all over. His cock was hard enough now to curl up against his belly. Lucius reached down and stroked it with one finger up the center.
Harry made a choking sound, staring down at him. Lucius smiled and touched him again. Harry gripped Lucius’s hand with both of his, straining, arching, and Lucius was sure he would have bruises later.
But it didn’t matter, not when Harry was beginning to come.
Lucius enjoyed every movement of Harry’s fingers pressing into his skin, and the way his head hung almost completely backwards as he finished his orgasm. When he brought his head down again, his lips were drawn up in a smile that seemed half-asleep.
Lucius then let go the tight chains of control he’d been clinging to while he coaxed Harry into orgasm. His pleasure took him in talons like a hawk’s and raked through him the way it always did, and Lucius dropped back onto the grass and raised his arms to receive the weight of his lover.
But Harry was already turning his head to look back towards the altar, even as he remained seated with Lucius going soft inside of him. Lucius looked with him, because it would be a waste not to. The flames were black again.
And there was a cold wind blowing from them. As he stared, Lucius felt his heart twist in his chest.
The Ritual of Bone and Soul might demand the caster’s soul, he had told Harry when they first talked about it. And Harry had been sure that the ritual wouldn’t demand his.
But Lucius, as part of the participation of the sex act and in the harvesting, could also be seen as the caster.
He became aware that his left arm was rising, without his will, tilting to aim his Dark Mark towards the altar. He fought it, because this was the last sacrifice, the one that would call the soul into the body that waited on the altar, looking like the Sirius Black he had seen all those years ago in the Department of Mysteries, and that meant he should do it of his own free will.
But his left arm went on rising.
The Ritual of Bone and Soul approached its completion.
*
Harry squinted hard into the black flames. He understood the cold wind that was blowing from them, as he had felt it often enough himself. Cradling the black globe that he’d used to show Borgin his fate had made a faint touch of it surround him. And he’d encountered it in other rituals.
But it shouldn’t be here. All the descriptions of the Ritual of Bone and Soul said the soul of the being to be resurrected should appear at this point and be drawn into the body, and the artifact that had once contained a piece of a Dark Lord should be sacrificed, which would complete the ritual.
Lucius gasped beneath him. Harry spun in place. Lucius’s face was white-not pale, but white-and the center of his chest was bulging, along with the Mark on his left arm. The glow of his soul was rising up through his body, perhaps visible to no one but the eyes of someone like Harry, and the gold streaks in the center of the white said he was near death.
“No!” Harry shouted, even as the air above the altar began to spin, and the Dark Mark began to fragment apart on Lucius’s arm. “I summoned Sirius Black! Leave Lucius Malfoy’s soul alone!”
He knew it wasn’t his imagination that all the flames on the altar bowed inwards when he spoke Sirius’s name, and then he heard the voice he had remembered so well for eleven years whisper, “Harry?”
Harry whipped back to face Lucius. Lucius caught his eye and managed to say, through a series of stuttered gasps, “My soul…not the homunculus. The…sacrifice.”
The Ritual of Bone and Soul may demand the caster’s soul.
Harry been so sure that couldn’t happen, not when he was the Master of Death. And he had been arrogant enough to think that he would be seen as the sole caster of the ritual, when he had been the one to initiate the process.
Lucius’s body was actually breaking apart now. Harry had participated in one ritual that had gone wrong, that had reaped the soul of someone who hadn’t been careful enough and had gone outside the ritual circle. This looked like that.
“No!” he shouted again, and faced the altar. When he raised his hand, the Elder Wand was in it, and he aimed it at the flames, bearing down with his will at the same time. “I refuse this bargain! I call on you to resurrect Sirius Black with the sacrifice of my virginity, my innocence, the giant’s Hand of Glory, the homunculus, my fingerbone, and the unicorn horn! And the Dark Mark,” he added. “I forbid you the soul of Lucius Malfoy!”
His will shot out and bore down across the circle in a whirling black wind. A blacker one answered it, rising out of the homunculus.
The winter wind continued to pull on Lucius’s soul.
And Sirius’s voice whispered again, “Harry?”
Turning away from him and back to Lucius was the hardest thing Harry had ever done, but he did it. Lucius’s body was dissolving from within like a crumbling Illusion Charm. His soul had risen almost out of it, along with the last fragments of the Dark Mark.
Harry knew what happened to a reaped soul. It would go into the sacrifice, or the ritual, or the mouth of the summoned being in the case of the ritual he had seen that went wrong, and there would be no rebirth or afterlife for it. It would be treated like a tool, an object, and burned up, consumed, in the use.
His magic was faltering before the pressure of the coldness coming from the altar. The misty figure of Sirius was forming above the altar itself, hovering there like a spirit, being drawn down towards the body.
And for the first time in eight years, Harry’s resolve to have his godfather back broke.
He didn’t shout the spell, simply willed the homunculus out of existence with all the power of his death magic.
It vanished, and the black flames on the altar froze. Then they began to crack down the middle with sounds so sharp that Harry winced away from them. He turned back to Lucius and choked when he saw that his appearance had returned to normal, and there was no sign of his soul rising through his body.
Lucius stared up at him. “You worked for eight years to have your godfather bac-”
“There are some things that have too high a price,” Harry said, and tried not to snap the words. He stood up and walked over to clear the dust of the ashes that had been the black flames from the top of the altar. His hands were shaking, and he looked for a long moment at his left hand and the little finger missing from it.
All for nothing. All wasted.
But he couldn’t have let the ritual kill Lucius. He had always been determined that if there was a price to pay for having his godfather back, he would be the one to pay for it, and the removal of the Dark Mark was what he had had to offer Lucius. A reasonable gamble, a reasonable price for the danger of the harvesting and the favor of having sex with Harry in the point of the ritual pentagram.
When Harry glanced over his shoulder, Lucius was getting dressed again, but his left arm was still bare enough for Harry to see that the Mark was gone.
Harry sighed. One promise, at least, I kept.
*
“Thank you again for your help, Mr. Malfoy.”
Harry had Apparated with him back to Malfoy Manor, and now he was staring off into the distance. His voice was heavy, although Lucius couldn’t have named the emotion that was behind it. Bitterness? Well-concealed, if so.
Perhaps simple grief.
Harry had turned away when Lucius caught his arm. He shook his head when Harry glanced at him, blinking. “And you think that you should be alone tonight? After what happened there?”
“I think that I nearly cost you your soul because I was an arrogant idiot. I’m sorry I ever got you involved in this.”
“I am not.”
“What? Oh, right. Because the Mark is gone.” Harry sighed. “I’m glad I was able to keep that part of my word to you. But-”
“I would very much like to have you come in. To talk to you. To spend some time with you in the future, if you’d allow it. And I do not think you should be alone tonight.”
Harry was staring openly now, his eyes dipping for a moment as if he was imagining the way Lucius’s chest had looked when it was bare, although now the robe was in place. If that was the case, Lucius would not be displeased. “But I nearly got you killed.”
“In the end, you gave up your godfather coming back for me.” Lucius kept his hold on Harry’s arm and tugged, gently. “That is something no one else has done. Not even when you testified at my trial after the war. That was about paying debts and doing what you could for your sense of justice.”
“Just because we slept together-”
“Is it just?”
Harry clenched his jaw, but he said, “I don’t want you to feel obligated. I don’t want you to ever feel as if you owe something to me, because you don’t. And I told you that I was obsessed with getting my godfather back for eight years. Not to mention all the risks I was willing to take in harvesting the ingredients, and tonight.”
“What of it?”
“I’m not right.” Harry shook his head. “I can’t go to a Mind-Healer because I’ve never found one that won’t try to sell my stories to the papers, but I can read well enough. I know what a healthy mind looks like, and it’s not mine.”
“Do you think I am perfectly healthy, Harry?”
“Healthier than me, Lucius. I don’t want to drag you down.”
“What if I don’t think you will?” Lucius asked, and drew him closer. Harry went with the pull, but he was watching him in what was obviously deep perplexity. Lucius stroked his hair away from his forehead, staring at the faded brand of the lightning bolt scar. It occurred to him that he hadn’t got to touch Harry’s hair nearly enough, and that he’d like to. “What if I admire some of the traits I saw you display during our hunt-determination and knowledge and intelligence-and I’d like to have the chance to engage with you more?”
Harry blinked and searched Lucius’s face with his eyes. He was so painfully bewildered that Lucius didn’t feel the impulse to smile. He waited a few moments, and then added, when the silence thickened, “If that is something you would be open to exploring with me. I did not mean to make you uncomfortable.”
“I,” Harry said, and looked away. Then he said, “Maybe I need to be uncomfortable, a little. And I never wanted to be alone. I just didn’t think there was anyone who could give me any companionship who wasn’t family.”
Lucius leaned in and gently kissed the faded scar. Harry looked up at him with wide eyes, but didn’t object.
Not even when the house-elves brought him hot chocolate, again.
Not when Lucius herded them both up the stairs, and into a bedroom that he hadn’t shared since Narcissa divorced him.
Not when they both lay down on the bed, still clothed in everything except their robes and boots, and Lucius drew Harry against his chest.
Lucius fell asleep while he knew Harry would still have a long time of staring at the ceiling, but at least Harry’s chest was rising and falling against his hands.
*
Harry woke in a slow daze. He didn’t feel rested, but he also didn’t feel as though someone had pulled him from a sound sleep, even though he knew that was the case. He sat up and stared around at the dark grey walls and “floor” around and beneath him. It looked like the inside of an enormous, smoky tent.
“Harry.”
It was the same voice that had spoken above the altar, and Harry whipped around, face hot and eyes feeling swollen. Sirius was standing in front of him, looking at him with that mad, fond smile he’d had during the summer when they’d both been at Grimmauld Place.
“Sirius,” Harry whispered. He had no doubt this was real, for a version of “real.” His dreams of Sirius had never been like this, and the air around him was filled with the pulsing of his death magic. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t give you a body.”
Sirius shook his head. “Merlin, Harry, I’m so sorry that I couldn’t be there for you. But you never need to apologize for failing to do the impossible.”
“I could have-”
“Could you have sacrificed Malfoy’s soul for mine? Or yours?”
Harry closed his eyes. “No.” He had always thought there was no limit to what he was willing to do for his godfather, but there always had been something, lurking in the background.
“Then it was impossible,” Sirius said firmly. He paused for a long moment, and Harry opened his eyes, drinking him in. He was sure this would be the last time he would ever see Sirius like this, the only time. “But I wanted to know something. Why did you never try to summon my spirit with the Resurrection Stone? You could have, you know.”
“I was afraid that I would give in to the same temptation Cadmus Peverell did,” Harry whispered. “That I would commit suicide to be with you. I was walking to my death when I saw you the first time with the Stone, after all. That was the only reason I wasn’t afraid of it then.” He swallowed. “Same reason I never summoned Mum and Dad. Or Remus.”
Sirius nodded, in a way that said he already knew the answer. Harry blinked at him. Then why ask the question? But Sirius spoke, and he knew he was going to know. “Then you always meant to live, Harry.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve buried yourself in your books and avoided the real world,” Sirius said quietly. “You pulled away from your friends. Hermione would probably say that you were avoiding life.” Sirius smiled then, another fond smile. “But you never intended to die. You were afraid that you might be tempted to commit suicide if you spent too much time in the company of the dead, so you had the self-control not to do it. When it came down to it, you had the morality not to sacrifice someone else’s soul, even someone some people might say deserve it.”
“He doesn’t,” Harry said softly. “No one does.”
Sirius nodded. “You have the will to live. Live, Harry.”
“But your soul is drifting around in the Veil-”
Sirius snorted. “No, it’s not. That’s the Veil lying to you like the bastard it is, trying to tempt you into it. I’m with your parents and Remus, the way you saw when you walked into the Forest. I’m in a good place, kid.”
Harry tilted his head. “But I heard your voice above the altar last night.”
“The Ritual of Bone and Soul can summon someone back to life,” Sirius said roughly. “It doesn’t matter what happened to their body or whether their soul is drifting around or not. The reason it doesn’t work most of the time is that people aren’t willing to sacrifice their soul or the soul of the person they slept with. And a good thing, too.”
Harry bowed his head. If-
If it had always been impossible, then the guilt eating him inside now would begin to die.
A hand touched his shoulder, and Harry’s eyes flew open. He looked up and found Sirius right in front of him, beaming as though Harry was his own son, his own godson, as though he hadn’t played a part in Sirius’s death.
Spirits couldn’t touch him. It had been one reason Harry had been so desperate to have Sirius back in a body.
“I’m so proud of you,” Sirius said. “I was worried about you these last eight years, we all were. But I knew you hadn’t changed from the good kid you were underneath. Not when push came to shove.” He gripped Harry’s shoulders and shook them a little. “I’m honored to have you as a godson. Live.”
Harry caught Sirius in the last embrace he knew he would ever give him, and sobbed once. The air around them was solid for long enough.
Then it shimmered, and disappeared. The last thing of Sirius to fade was his smile.
*
Lucius opened his eyes.
And Harry was still in his arms, sleeping hard, in the worn-out way that would be expected if someone who had performed intense ritual magic.
Lucius stroked Harry’s forehead slowly, fingers lingering on the lightning bolt scar. Harry stirred under his touch, and Lucius slowed it, but didn’t stop. Harry opened his eyes and stared up at him.
He looked far more at peace than Lucius had expected. Lucius didn’t know how that happened, but it made him cautiously hopeful, enough to ask the next question that he had rather than waiting on it.
“Shall I have the house-elves bring us breakfast?”
There was a long moment when the air seemed to hang frozen between them, ready to be broken, the way Harry’s innocence must have broken in his chest when he injured the hippogriff. Then Harry nodded, as slowly as Lucius had touched his forehead.
“Yes, I’d like that.”
And he smiled.
Lucius caught his breath, hoping he didn’t sound dramatic, but Harry was already sitting up and stretching and reaching for his wand to cast a pain-relieving charm on his arse, so he doubted Harry noticed. That left Lucius to stare at Harry’s back and make his own decision.
The smile made him want more.
Who knows if I’ll get it?
But he hadn’t known he would survive having his soul almost ripped out of him, either.
When Harry looked at him again, Lucius smiled back.
The End.