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Starfall	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 32486 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Fifteen—Blood Magic
            Harry carefully lowered the vial of blood to the table in front of him. His arms were twitching with the excitement of his pent-up magic, power he had been calling on steadily as he arranged the ritual implements around him.
            It was time.
            Harry touched his wand to the vial of blood, and spoke the command that would pop the cork. It would be best if he didn’t touch the blood until he was ready to make the connection with the Dark Snake.
            He had looked up the tracking spell and studied it carefully, only to find that it was considerably more like a ritual than the simple incantation and wand movements he remembered. Luckily, he’d had everything he needed around his house from previous ritual attempts; one of the ways he’d distracted himself in the past few years was spending more time on magical theory and with magical books.
Now his power rose and began to dance lazily around his head as he directed the vial to tip the blood into a shallow silver dish. There was a slight hiss, and a cloud of white vapor rose up from it. Harry nodded. It was nice to confirm his suspicions that the blood was tainted with the Snake Tongue potion, although in all honesty, he hadn’t doubted it once he saw the dark flecks floating in it.
He pricked his finger, and for a moment, his magic tried to leave his body through the unexpected new hole. Harry ignored its attempt and laid his finger on the piece of cedar wood he’d arranged beside the bowl. In a second, a small dark stain spread across it, and Harry was ready to make the connection between his blood and the blood Bailey had collected.
From there, it would be a relatively simple spell to make the connection between the blood that flowed in the Dark Snake’s veins and that which flowed in his.
Harry closed his eyes, arranging his knowledge of the words in his head, making sure he was ready to move. Then he tapped his wand against the silver dish again, and spoke the words of the spell in time with the dying, pure echo.
“Sanguis ligo.”
            The power that sparked up his veins then! Harry gasped and opened his eyes to see bright blue sparks running up the inside of his arm, just beneath the skin. On and on it went, spreading, bounding, heading for the heart.
            The spell was supposed to work that way, Harry reminded himself, to calm his own nervousness. In truth, he had performed spells like this before and even blood magic before. There was nothing to be nervous about.
            Only the look of the thing…
            The blue sparks vanished beneath his robes. Harry closed his eyes and steadied himself with one hand clutching the table. Sometimes the revelations provided by blood magic spells like this were literally stunning.
            And so it proved with this one. The minute the sparks arrived at his heart, Harry staggered backwards, overwhelmed by the sense of a second body, encasing a second flow of blood, and a second heartbeat filling his head and his ears.
            He balanced himself quickly. Lose track of the spell now, and it would be hard to begin it again. The spell required a certain amount of blood poured into the silver bowl, and Harry doubted that he had enough left in the vial. He kept his eyes shut and concentrated until he was sure that he could separate his own heartbeat from the Dark Snake’s, the body he could flex and lift from the one he didn’t control.
            And then he looked through the Dark Snake’s eyes, passively, not trying to control what he looked at. The only thing he needed now was for the Dark Snake to turn in the right direction, so their heads were aligned. The direction was the most mystical part of the spell, the thing that would finally cement the location in Harry’s head.
            The Dark Snake glanced out a window, which looked as though it was located on a level—probably a top level—of a tall stone tower. Harry shivered as though he had pneumonia. The moment was coming, coming, when they would align. He could feel it approaching like a thunderstorm.
            “Harry!”
            Harry’s head rocked back on his neck. He felt the Dark Snake’s rage, his confusion, because he had partially heard what Harry had, at least to the point that it made a buzzing in his ears, and he didn’t understand what it was. He grabbed his wand and spun around in the middle of the room, tossing his head from side to side as though that could make his enemy, whoever it was, stop tormenting him.
            In the middle of his spinning, he faced in the right direction, though Harry knew it was by luck. The knowledge of his location came flooding to life in Harry, the name of the tower and how far it was from where he stood, and in what direction.
            Northwest. Forty miles.
            Harry repeated the information aloud to himself, even as someone shook his shoulder impatiently and the alignment dissolved. He felt the Dark Snake reaching after him, a tendril of magic trying to snare the escaping power. But either the Dark Snake wasn’t familiar with this particular spell or he simply couldn’t move fast enough, because Harry slipped free, and knew he was free, and opened his eyes to Ron’s shocked face.
            “What are you doing?” Ron was dancing from foot to foot, shaking his head. “You have to come right now! Teddy’s sick!”
            Harry had a cold in the bottom of his stomach that no magic could match. He nodded. “I need to Floo this information to Auror Bailey,” he said. “Or, wait, better. I’ll send it by Patronus. Then I’ll come with you. He’s already at St. Mungo’s?”
            “No,” said Ron, and shivered for a second beside the fireplace, which still had a tinge of green to its flames, showing the way he’d come. Harry shook his head. The experience of being in the Dark Snake’s head had taken a lot less time than he thought. “They don’t—Harry, Andromeda’s worried that it’s lycanthropic. And you know what they would do to someone they suspected was a werewolf, or had any werewolf qualities.”
            Harry went cold enough that he thought he’d shatter if he fell. “Yeah,” he said quietly, drawing his wand. “I know.”
            He created the stag Patronus with a burst of happiness at the memory of what he’d felt the last time Teddy hugged him, and told it, “The Dark Snake is forty miles northwest of my home, which will put him not far outside Ottery St. Catchpole. Look for a stone tower called the Hand of Malice. I think that he felt something from me, so he might be gone, but at least you’ll have a lot of clues to look for.”
            Harry watched as the stag bounded through the wall, then nodded and turned to Ron. “Let’s go.”
*
            “You all right, Draco?”
            Draco started and turned around. He’d been sitting alone in the kitchen of Theodore’s flat—well, Theodore’s lover’s flat—brooding. He hesitated, then shrugged and said, “Yeah. Wondering what I should write next.”
            “To your mysterious correspondent?” Theodore yawned and wandered over to the small alcove in the corner of the wall, touching his wand to the kettle that hung there above a tiny hearth. Water poured into it, and the fire sprang to life.
            “Yes,” Draco murmured, watching it. “He said some things in the last letter that don’t make sense. I wonder if it’s worth pointing out that they don’t make sense, or if he would only become defensive.”
            “You seem to know a lot about someone you refer to as mysterious.” Theodore looked up from where he was Summoning food from the cabinets, and his eyes were as sharp as Draco remembered them, from when he could somehow tell that Draco hadn’t studied for an Arithmancy exam. “Who is he?”
            “That’s something I’m not ready to tell you,” Draco said. Something in Theodore’s face made him add, “Or anyone else. I haven’t told Blaise or Pansy or my parents.”
            “But you do know.” The kettle whistled. Theodore must have added a charm to make the water boil faster. He swung the kettle smoothly off the fire and Summoned some cups even as he began to toast bread with a second charm. “How long has he not been so mysterious to you?”
            “I discovered the truth by accident.” Draco decided it was safe to admit that much. He watched idly as Theodore fixed breakfast. He might have offered to help if he was less distracted, but he really wanted to work through these thoughts about Potter if he could. “I don’t know what I want to do about it.”
            “Yes, you said that already,” Theodore murmured, with that flash of dry wit Draco also remembered. “What really matters is why you think you need to do something about it. He isn’t someone you want in your life, is he?”
            “What, as a friend?” Draco tried to put Potter and the word “friend” in the same sentence, even in his head, picturing words the way he sometimes did, scrawling sharp black against a white piece of parchment, and shuddered a little. “Merlin, no.”
            “Then just don’t write to him,” said Theodore, with all the dignity of someone who had discovered a new magical theory. “It’s not as though you have to. Let this correspondence die, and there’s nothing else you need to do.”
            “Yes, I suppose not,” said Draco, and apparently he said it with enough force and conviction that he fooled Theodore. His friend smiled and reached for a plate to put the toast on.
            “Now, I hope that you’re ready to be introduced to people, because I have someone who’s dying to meet a pure-blood from England…”
            Draco listened with half an ear. He didn’t know what he was going to do; that much was real whether he admitted it to Theodore or kept it to himself. What he did know was that letting it lapse was too casual for him.
            Potter was Potter, and Draco was Draco. Things weren’t done between them.
*
            “It’s worse than lycanthropy.”
            Harry lifted his head, his eyes dull. He’d spent most of the night with Teddy—the part he hadn’t spent on the tracking spell trying to find the Dark Snake—and although all he had done was cast spells to lower his fever and try to soothe his delirium, it felt as if he had run miles. The Fever-Cooling Charms weren’t working as well as they should, as well as they usually did. Harry didn’t know why. He only knew that the fever would stay down for perhaps five minutes before it flared back up. He could cast another one right away with no ill effects on Teddy, but his hands shook now, and he collapsed into a chair before he turned to face Andromeda.
            “Tell me what’s worse than lycanthropy.” Harry had the feeling that he didn’t sound exactly sane, or rational, from the sharp stare Andromeda gave him before she turned to look at Teddy. But he didn’t care. He had to know. There was enough fear in his stomach to make a dozen nightmares already.
            “The fever is a rare symptom,” Andromeda said, as if talking to herself, although she wrapped her arms around herself like she was cold. She never took her eyes off Teddy. “But I don’t think the delirium comes from it. I think this is the Black madness.”
            For a second, fear made it impossible for Harry to breathe. He bent over at the waist, his own arms wrapped around his chest, and Andromeda ran over to him and swatted him in the back. He grunted and started breathing again.
            “You said that you didn’t think that that—ever came to someone whose direct ancestor didn’t have it,” he said, when he could speak again. “You didn’t have it, Tonks didn’t have it, Teddy can’t have it.”
            Andromeda shook her head. “I thought that was true. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder what ‘direct ancestor’ means. Go back far enough on the tree, and you’ll find some grandfather or grandmother that had it. Maybe it just skips generations.”
            Once, Harry would have thought she was cold, detached, the way she stood there and talked about things. But he knew better, knew her better, now. She stood there as if calm, but her eyes were wide and wild.
            The Black madness, as Andromeda had told Harry when Teddy was young and they watched him constantly for signs of becoming a werewolf, was the source of most of the mental things the Blacks did—like hanging the heads of their house-elves on the wall. It usually started with one member of the family seeming delirious for a while, usually around puberty, and then seemingly recovering. But after that, the madness was in them, and it would twist everything they said and did.
            Harry had banished the thought from his mind when Andromeda told him she’d never had it, though. That meant Teddy was safe.
            Maybe not, Harry thought now, as Teddy launched into another rambling monologue.
            “Trains—it’s like the trains! And they’re like the clouds! It’s like the Muggles! They want us to stop talking about it, but they can’t make us stop talking about it…”
            Maybe he’ll be like this for the rest of his life, never able to put two thoughts together in a row, Harry thought, and then dragged himself back to the present when he realized Andromeda was speaking again.
            “I’ve been—looking through books my father left me.” From the nausea in Andromeda’s face, Harry understood how hard that was for her to do, even for Teddy, and he reached out and pressed her hand in silent support. Andromeda gulped a breath and went on. “There’s a potion that might help, if it is the madness and not a bad illness. At least, it won’t hurt him.”
            “What’s the problem with the potion?” Harry asked quietly. He knew as well as she did that she never would have hesitated to brew the potion, or ask him to help her, if there wasn’t a serious side-effect to it. Or maybe the ingredients were rare and expensive, and she was hesitating to ask him to go and get them.
            There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for Teddy, Harry thought, and his gaze went back to the bed. More precious than Ethan’s hypothetical children, more precious than any secret he intended to carry to his grave. That was Teddy, and Rose, and Hugo. The children who were his own.
            At least he knew that. In a different mood, Harry thought, he would have been tempted to give thanks to Malfoy for prompting that revelation.
            “The potion needs Black blood,” said Andromeda. “Blood from the person suffering from the madness, blood from an immediate relative, and blood from a relative who’s not a parent or grandparent or sibling or child.”
            Harry felt as though he was in the middle of a pounding drum. “So the Malfoys are the only ones left.”
            Andromeda shut her eyes and nodded. “And for all that I don’t think my surviving sister hates me as much as Bella did, I don’t know if I dare ask her about this. She’d probably just refuse my firecall or return my owl unopened.”
            Harry swallowed. “I can call in a life-debt.”
            “She doesn’t owe you one,” Andromeda said, soft as snowfall. “But her son does.”
            Yes, he does. And I might as well not have run away or tried to allow Malfoy some say in his own fate, I suppose, since this just happened to slap us back together.
            But Harry refused to say that right now. He nodded. “I did testify for him at his trial, and that’s a debt as well. I’ll send an owl to him.”
            “Thank you.” Andromeda sighed. “I don’t like thinking that it might take a life-debt to compel someone to save a child, when they should just do that anyway, but at least I know that that call is one that Malfoy won’t be able to refuse.”
            “He should do it anyway,” Harry agreed, and wondered for a second if he should tell her about the history that he had with Malfoy, the recent history, that made it nearly impossible for either Malfoy or him to just do it.
            He destroyed the suggestion in his own mind a moment later. No, that way lay nothing but madness. He would have to explain about not only Ethan, but Malfoy’s involvement with the warlocks, and Scorpius, and all sorts of other things that he had no desire to mention to Andromeda.
            Especially when Teddy could be going mad, he thought, with a quick glance at the bed. Teddy had stopped murmuring to himself and was sleeping, but restlessly, with one arm flung over his face as if he wanted to hide from the world.
            He knew without Andromeda saying so that they had only a short time to brew the potion. They had to do it, if it was the madness, before the fever broke permanently and Teddy went back to “normal.” That would mean the madness had permanently stained his mind and would be part of his actions forever.
            Teddy writhed and cried out again with the heat. Harry leaned forwards and cast another Fever-Cooling Charm.
*
            Draco still hadn’t decided what to do about Potter when the next owl found him lying wakeful in the spare bedroom of Theodore’s flat. Draco tore it open, his heart quicker than it should have been.
            Only to find that this letter came from Harry Potter, Senior Auror and Savior of the World, instead of Harry Potter, man who used inexplicable false names and snarled at him in alleyways.
            Dear Malfoy,
            I hate to ask you for a favor. However, if you don’t want to grant the favor—which is totally understandable—than you can think of it as fulfilling one of the life-debts that you owe me instead. I only mention that because of the recent history that we have between us which makes this harder, I understand, on you.
            Your cousin Teddy Lupin, the son of your cousin Nymphadora Tonks and the grandson of your aunt Andromeda, is sick. We think that he has the Black madness, which could be permanent if we can’t cure it with a blood potion Andromeda found. However, that potion needs Teddy’s blood, Andromeda’s blood, and the blood of someone descended from the Most Ancient and Noble House of Black who’s not in the direct lineage. So no siblings or parents or grandparents or children.
            Will you please provide the blood for Teddy? I think you would have to come to Andromeda’s house to deliver the blood. It would take too long for an owl to fly that distance carrying a vial.
            I await your decision, and if you do it of your own free will and not because of a life-debt, then I swear that you shall have whatever you desire of me in return.
            There was a signature this time, as sharp as though at the bottom of a report, in letters Draco was surprised weren’t twelve feet high. Harry Potter.
Draco lowered the letter to the bed and stared at the ceiling again, swallowing as though that would help him make a decision.
He wanted to fling the letter away from him. He wanted to burn it. He wanted to firecall Potter and explain all the many, many, many ways that this was stupid and why he should never have sent the letter in the first place.
            He wanted to wake Theodore up and make his excuses now, and Floo home immediately. All the conflicting desires surged back and forth in his head, like ocean waves, battering him and then darting away again, and Draco shut his eyes and gave a long, ragged sigh.
            Conflicting desires, but only one at the bottom of them, one that Draco knew would probably always have won out. He wasn’t going to write back to Potter. He was going to sleep until morning—only a few hours away now—and then get up, make his excuses to Theodore, and go home. He would give the blood to Teddy.
            He would do it of his own free will, and without being compelled by a life-debt, and then ask why Potter had written to him under the guise of Ethan Starfall. All the reasons, including why Potter had invented that name and life in the first place. Draco thought he did know the general outlines of the story, but that wasn’t enough, not for a story that had changed his own life so completely. He wanted to know everything.
            As he lay there and managed to relax, he could feel sleep creeping up on him, mingled with a satisfaction that had the shape of a held knife.
            He would know. And he would hold onto his temper this time. Maybe he would leave Britain immediately after his interview with Potter, to give himself time to react to the news safely far away.
            He was going to know.
*
            Harry woke up with a start. For a second, he didn’t know what had awakened him. He certainly hadn’t meant to fall asleep.
            He gave a glance at Teddy’s bed, and saw that he still twisted and writhed. That was a good thing, in its way. It meant that the attack of the madness, if that was what it was, hadn’t ended yet, and they still had time to make the potion that might cure Teddy.
            If Malfoy ever responded.
            Harry rubbed his eyes. And then he nearly leaped to his feet as someone knocked again on the door of Teddy’s room. He licked his lips, staring at it. He knew Andromeda wouldn’t knock even if she thought he was asleep. Perhaps a Healer from St. Mungo’s had found out about Teddy and come to try and “cure” his “werewolf” symptoms after all.
            “Come in,” said Harry, and the door opened, and Malfoy stood there.
            They looked at each other with what felt like years of silence between them. Harry refused to speak first, and Malfoy finally turned and looked at Teddy’s bed, nodding a little. “That’s my cousin?”
            “Yes.” Harry held back all the harsh words about how a decent person would have visited their only family before now, and how it should be obvious. It wasn’t like he and Malfoy had got on recently, and it wasn’t like it was all Malfoy’s fault.
            Malfoy examined Teddy as minutely as though he was looking for signs of the Black family features. Then he turned back to Harry.
            “I’m here to donate my blood to the potion. No life-debt required. I would have done it before now if I’d had any idea of the need.”
            “Andromeda only looked up the potion and what we needed to do yesterday,” said Harry. He felt oddly as though he was in a dream, or a vision, one of the ones that he used to get when he was connected to Voldemort, except he already knew the conclusion of this one. “And what favor do you want from me?”
            Malfoy gave him a thin smile, and spoke the words that Harry already knew he would. “The true origins of Ethan Starfall—name and children and all.”
*
NadiaMalfoy: Draco’s trying. He certainly couldn’t have done what Harry asks of him here a fortnight ago.
Winged-ashes: I’m not sure what you mean by that. The romance?
SP777: My bird’s fine, thanks for asking! His latest passion is shredding cardboard boxes.
Draco is capable of learning. Although Harry will have to be careful what he says around him.
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Starfall