Chapter Twenty-Three of 'The Rising of the Stones'- Vaster Than The Sun
Chapter Twenty-Two.
Title: The Rising of the Stones (23/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco, mentions of Draco/others and some canonical pairings
Rating: R
Warnings: Angst, some violence, soulmate markings AU
Summary: Draco Malfoy has become the Ministry’s best Auror. He executes all kinds of unusual assignments, including one to go after the unexpectedly fugitive Harry Potter. But as he chases Potter down, Draco learns a lot more about what the Ministry has been hiding from the wizarding world than he ever wanted to know-secrets that may impact more than just his ability to arrest Potter. Updated every Monday.
Author’s Notes: This will probably be between twenty and twenty-five chapters. It does involve soul-marks, the idea that soulmates can identify each other by corresponding marks on their skin. However, this doesn’t necessarily promise perfect happiness between the soulmates in question.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Three-Vaster Than the Sun
“You’re not going to stay any longer?” Oatten was visibly disappointed, sitting up so fast that some clinging pieces of moss fell off his cloak. “But it’s long enough since you’ve been here…there were some people looking forward to talking to you.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea when Hail wants to destroy me.” Harry sat upright and slender next to the cooking fire they’d warmed their meal on. Draco watched him as he ate. He was utterly confident again, the stuttering man Draco had confronted last night vanished. “I’ll only bring you trouble.”
“We partner with the unicorns. They won’t want to destroy us. Stay a while.”
“They won’t want to destroy you,” Harry agreed, with a delicate infection that made Draco have to hide his smile behind the cooking pot when someone passed it to him. “But I’m needed in Britain.”
“You only just came here. Are your visits always going to be like this, flying visits that never do anything they’re supposed to properly?”
Harry didn’t get the chance to answer. Someone else, draped in such a moss-ridden cloak that Draco couldn’t see her face or even be sure it was a woman, turned and pointed straight at Draco. “It’s due to him, isn’t it? You brought him here for some reason we can’t figure out, and now you’re taking him away again.”
“I’m not about to let him become unicorn or Dementor food,” Harry said, with a slight shrug, as if that was the only reason Draco’s fate mattered to him. Draco was the only one who saw the way Harry leaned forwards to pick up a piece of blazing hot meat from his plate with his fingers. “But I brought him here because he didn’t believe that people might not have souls. Now I think he’s convinced.”
Draco knew how to feign it for the benefit of their audience, at least. He bit his lip and lowered his eyes. “I’m sorry I doubted you,” he said in a small voice.
Harry looked as if he was ready to throw the piece of meat at him, but at least the other soulless were eating up the confession. “Now that you do know,” said Oatten, sounding a little more relaxed, “you could come back if you wanted. And spend some time talking to us and learning elemental magic.” He glanced slyly back and forth between Harry and Draco. “I think that’s one of the reasons that you’re jealous of Harry, right?”
Draco only blinked, wondering where they’d got the notion of jealousy, and then saw Harry glaring at him. He must have played it up as part of their disguise, or maybe people knew they had once been rivals and were exaggerating that.
“I’m a little jealous, yes,” Draco said, and looked straight into Harry’s eyes across the fire, pouting. “I want that strength and fire all to myself.”
Harry’s eyes dropped, while the woman in the moss-draped cloak complained that Harry’s magic was made of earth and not fire. Draco concealed his chuckle and dipped up some more pieces of meat and the heavily-spiced rice they were mixed with.
If he’s told them something more than he told me, something he wants me to go along with, he’s going to find two can play at that game.
*
“I wonder how you feel about certain Dark rituals,” Draco said casually to Harry, once they’d made the necessary Apparitions and were back in his house. He already had the block of crystal he would need in his hand, and if Harry refused to help him, then he would simply shut the door and lock himself in the lab until he was done. But it might be easier with earth magic that would make the crystal react in interesting ways.
“Nothing that requires blood or pain,” Harry said, in a voice that made it sound like such a practiced answer, Draco paused and stared at him. Harry let his eyebrows crawl upwards. “What?”
“You’ve done this before?”
“How can I answer that question until I knew what ritual you’re proposing?”
“I didn’t mean the specific one. I meant Dark rituals.” But then Draco had to think about some of the earth magic he’d seen Harry perform. It might be neutral, not classified as either Dark or Light, but the Ministry would surely shriek about some of it and try to call it Dark, if only because they were afraid of it.
“I didn’t just learn earth magic and find the soulless. I wandered a bit first. Chances are that I’m okay with it if it fulfills the conditions I told you about.”
“You’ll like this one,” Draco said, and smiled at Harry as he beckoned with one finger. “It won’t cause pain to either of us, and it only needs a little of my blood. And if it causes pain to others…well, we won’t know it.”
Harry, of course, folded his arms and planted his feet. Draco rolled his eyes. “I’m going to destroy the sympathetic magic amulets that the Minister is using to track me,” he said.
“I didn’t know that was possible.”
“A lot of the things the Ministry doesn’t want you to know are possible, they’re banned and declared Dark.” Draco cocked his head and tried to look winsome, although from the slow look Harry gave him, he wasn’t very good at it. “Please?”
“Fine.”
Draco led the way triumphantly into the lab, and still locked the door once they were both inside. There would be no interruption from Harry, but if someone knocked on the door-or broke it down and tried to arrest him-then he would need, at the least, the minute the extra safeguards would provide.
Harry shook his head a little as the protective spells engaged. Draco paused. “Did part of your training include sensitivity?”
“I think it induced it.” Harry rubbed the back of his hand as if something tingled there. “I had to learn how to distinguish different kinds of rocks and soils from one another. That seemed to include picking up magic.”
“I really want you to teach me earth magic.”
Draco thought he could let his voice tingle with his own intensity and longing because they were alone, but then he saw the way Harry winced and turned his eyes away, and he thought, Maybe not.
“I don’t know that someone who’s still using a wand can master it the way I had to.”
“You were driven to master it knowing that you couldn’t use a wand ever again,” Draco summed up, as he put the block of crystal on the table in the middle of the lab and his silver scalpels and chisels down next to it.
Harry nodded.
“Well, then, if it’s mostly a matter of will, it ought to be no problem.”
“You want revenge on de Berenzan that much?”
“I want to share what you have that much.”
That left Harry blinking and standing there with his mouth slightly open, the way Draco had thought it might. Satisfied, he turned back to the block of crystal and spent a moment standing there, orienting himself to the tools on the table. He’d already washed them to clean them of any trace of leftover magic from the last time he’d done a ritual with them, as well as more ordinary dirt and blood.
When he closed his eyes and opened them again, he was settling into the middle of a deeper stillness. He picked up the nearest chisel and tapped it once against the block of crystal. It rang with a high chime. Draco nodded, and then drew up one of the scalpels and held it over his arm. Again and again he chimed the chisel against the crystal, listening to the note, gauging the tone and the pitch.
Then he cut into his arm with the scalpel, and imitated the tone of the chime as best he could with his scream.
“Christ, Malfoy.”
That was a Muggle oath, and it was a mistake, just like using Draco’s last name was, Draco was sure. He serenely ignored Potter for the moment, and laid the chisel back on the table. Then he took up the scalpel and rested the bloody end on the top of the crystal. There was a small hollow there, invisible when seen from a distance, seemingly carved by some pool that had vanished.
“Draco?”
“Shhhh,” said Draco, and twisted the scalpel slowly back and forth. He could have used a knife, but that didn’t have the same connotations of precision and cleanliness that a scalpel did. Obedient to his intent and the swirling motion of the scalpel, the blood began to spiral into a thin crimson thread that pierced the heart of the crystal. Draco twisted until he was sure that all the blood was gone from the scalpel, and then turned his head and smiled at Harry.
“I’d like to use some of your earth magic, if I can,” he murmured. “Can you affect the crystal?”
“I’ve only tried to affect ones that are naturally growing out of the earth before. Never one in the middle of a ritual, or carved like this…”
“Try.”
Draco must have got the inflection right, just the right mix of persuasion and sweetness that he wanted, because Harry nodded and moved forwards, biting a little at his lip. He rested a hand on the crystal block, and closed his eyes. “The idea is to infuse the crystal with enough of your magic and essence that it’ll reach out to the amulets the Minister has,” he murmured. “The blood will make a connection with the hair or whatever it is they have. And then we’ll shatter the crystal, and send the shattering racing up the connections, and they’ll shatter the amulets. Right?”
Draco stared at him. But Harry didn’t have his eyes open, and all he did was half-open one of them after a moment and look impatiently at Draco.
“Yes,” Draco breathed. “It’s incredible, how much you know without being told.” He moved behind Harry and placed his hands on either side of his waist. “Infuse the crystal with your magic. It’ll make it stronger.”
“The bond. Not the crystal.”
“Of course not the crystal,” Draco said, and let his lips brush behind Harry’s ear. “That would be counterproductive.”
“The way you’re touching me is counterproductive, if you want a clear amount of earth magic infused here.”
“Come, Harry,” Draco said, and smiled into his skin when he felt Harry tremble and knew how those words had affected him. “Are you telling me that Hail and the other unicorns never tried to distract you when they were training you? If only because they might hope you would fail and give them a meal? You can’t tell me that.” He worked the tips of two fingers under Harry’s overlong shirt and traced up and down the soft skin over his ribs.
“You are going to kill me,” Harry murmured, but he still focused on the crystal and didn’t try to move out of Draco’s arms. Draco rested his chin on Harry’s shoulder to watch, his skin buzzing with triumph.
The magic became visible as it twisted into the crystal. Suddenly there was a clouding around the crimson thread of Draco’s magic in the middle of the block. It grew like frost on the panes of a window, spreading out across the crystal and then up the sides, until Draco seemed to be looking at the blood through frosted glass.
“I can feel them.”
“The amulets?”
Harry only bobbed his head in an abstracted manner, as if to say, “Of course the amulets.” Draco let his fingers stay resting on Harry’s sides, but didn’t move them now. There was pleasure and there was suicide.
“I could shatter them,” Harry said, and Draco trembled himself under the resonance of power in Harry’s voice. “But-I don’t know. If I do this with such power, and they’re wearing the amulets, it’ll probably kill them.”
"They want to kill me. Or at least de Berenzan wants to kill me." Draco nuzzled his chin further into Harry's hair and closed his eyes on a long sigh of bliss. "What do you care? What do you care at all?"
"I care because the individual Aurors might or might not know what he's doing."
Harry's voice was utterly steady even as he poured more magic into the crystal. Draco sighed and rolled his eyes. Ultimately, Harry was in charge of this part of the ritual and not him. "Then do what you think best."
"Thanks, I will." Harry's voice had a strange hollowness to it, as if he was shouting through a cavern. Draco opened his eyes in time to see a tunnel of light opening in the middle of the blood and clouding in the crystal.
The tunnel turned and expanded, as if they were looking at it from the side or moving constantly, rather than the tunnel itself. Then it turned up like a tube and sank into the blood. Draco could hear the humming now, as Harry's magic formed the connection between the blood and whatever other parts of Draco lay in those amulets.
Strangely, he could feel the buzzing in his own bones, too. Draco shook his arm a little, frowning. Sympathetic magic was supposed to affect him, yes, but in this case just by drawing the Aurors to him or him to their amulets, not letting him feel anything once the blood was out of his body.
He wondered for a fleeting moment if what Harry was doing could shatter him, but a second later he shook his head and steadied himself. Harry would never let that happen.
The buzzing died for a long second, although Harry was muttering to himself and Draco could still hear the hollowness in his voice. Now it was more like the wind moaning through a cavern than Harry saying it, though. Draco tensed in anticipation as he watched the crystal began to vibrate, turning a little, dancing in place.
One of Harry's hands rose, clenching. It reminded Draco of the stone fists that had trapped the Auror in the forest. He opened his mouth to say something about that, sure he wouldn't interrupt fatally. From the power he could feel in the room, Harry was nowhere near the level he needed to shatter the crystal yet.
Then Harry yanked.
Draco found himself yelping and tossing his arms up over his head, as if he could shelter from flying pieces of crystal. But nothing happened as far as that went. Instead, he heard several long cracks and then a groan from Harry. Draco lifted his head and stared around, trying to decide what had happened.
The first thing he realized was that there were several deep cracks in the crystal, which had broken inwards in a star pattern. Draco blinked, a little dazed. He could see nothing of his blood in the cracks, which argued the magic of the ritual had consumed it completely.
But why wouldn't it fly apart? It should have, if Harry had destroyed the power of the amulets.
He turned to Harry, and found him leaning against the table, grimacing. It didn't take Draco more than a second after that to notice that Harry was cradling his left arm with his right, and that the left arm had bone sticking through the skin.
"Idiot," Draco breathed, even as he drew his wand. "You're an idiot."
"Not an idiot," Harry said in a slightly breathless voice. He was still refusing to make any more noise than that, which drove Draco mad. Did he think it was heroic not to scream when you had a broken arm? Or just required if you were a hero? "I--pulled the force back. It had to go somewhere, but I made it go through--me instead of the Aurors. I knew with my earth magic and my affinity for the crystal defending me, it wouldn't--hurt me as badly as them." He smiled at Draco. "But the amulets are still destroyed. I felt them go."
"You hurt yourself to spare them pain."
"Um, yes?"
Draco moved closer, and nearly forced Harry to back up before he remembered about his broken arm and how he would probably jostle it if he moved much further. He hissed between his teeth and shook his head, reaching out to rest his wand against Harry’s bone. “Like I said,” he whispered, “idiot.”
Draco wasn’t a trained Healer, but he did know enough spells to fix battlefield injuries, and this looked like one. He held Harry still as he repaired the crack in the bone, and then rubbed the arm with a Numbing Jinx and another spell that would ensure Harry couldn’t move the part of the arm that had broken. Harry flexed his shoulder with a grimace.
“Don’t do that again,” Draco said.
“But now they can’t track you. And they aren’t hurt.”
“You are.”
Harry shrugged, and said nothing. But Draco knew the answer, knew it from the way he’d fled the wizarding world rather than cause “trouble.”
Draco hissed and moved forwards to lay his hands on Harry’s shoulders, forcing him back against the table this time. Harry went, still staring at him.
Draco’s feelings surged inside him, more complex and vaster than the sun, full of fierce affection and exasperation as sharp as that broken bone.
In the end, he settled for kissing Harry again and muttering a few warning words against his lips. There was nothing else he could do that would give the slightest hint of what brewed inside him.
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