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The Splendor Is Waiting	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 4729 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Two—The First Rite
            Getting the Galleons to Malfoy was simple enough. And when Malfoy lifted his head and fixed his eyes on Harry one morning, then turned away casually, Harry was prepared for the owl that came winging down the center of the Great Hall and made straight for him, hooting in agitation.
            “Whose owl is that?” Ron looked up from the mess of potatoes in front of him that he had already mashed flat with his fork, blinking. “Not yours, is it, Harry?” He looked as if he was perking up a bit when he said that. He had urged Harry to get another owl. Hedwig, he had said, wouldn’t want Harry to pine over her.
            Harry, who had been unable to bring himself to get another owl for much the same reason he had been unable to come out of Grimmauld Place that summer, only shook his head and reached out as the bird landed on the table. There was a heavy package slung around its neck on a leather cord. Harry wrapped a piece of bacon around a piece of sausage and handed it to the owl, which promptly ripped into it. Then he unwrapped the package.
            The leather cord turned out to be a tassel that was part of the cover of the book itself. Harry turned it over and over, nodding slowly. Yes, the book had a picture on the front of a golden patch that might, if you were generous in the way you interpreted it, resemble a flare of light, or Light, from a candle. The only words said simply, The Battle Against Shadow. Harry couldn’t see any sign of an author.
            A gasp came from beside him. Harry looked up, curious. Ron must know more than Harry had thought he did, if he recognized the book, or what the book meant.
            But it was Neville, who leaned back and cast Harry a gape-jawed look. Harry blinked. Since the war, he had become used to the confident, self-assured Neville. He suddenly looked as if he’d been sent back in time about four years.
            “I didn’t know you were interested in that,” Neville whispered, glancing from Harry to the book and back again.
            Harry suffered a sudden qualm. Why hadn’t he thought of asking Neville? Of course his family was Light, and considering how stern his grandmother seemed, there might be a chance they would still practice the old rites. But it hadn’t even occurred to Harry, and it was too late now. He gave Neville an apologetic grimace and shrugged and said, “I started reading about Shadow over the holidays. There was nothing on the specific rites to put it back to sleep, though, so I asked someone to get the book to me.” With a heroic effort, he didn’t look over at the Slytherin table when he said that.
            “I could have helped,” said Neville, but he didn’t sound hurt. He just looked thoughtful. “We have a copy of a book—not this exact one, one like it—that you could have borrowed.”
            Harry smiled at him. “Well, if there’s anything left out of this book, I’ll come and let you know. It’s something I’d like to know a lot about.”
            “What is it?” Ron interrupted, and leaned over.
            Harry let him look at it willingly enough. Ron only snorted and sat back, shaking his head. “I never thought you’d be one to get into all that old stuff, Harry,” he said, and glanced up and down the table as though he was looking for Hermione, to report that to her.
            Harry waited for him to get over the sharp, inevitable sting of disappointment, and said as diplomatically as he could, “I started learning about it over the holidays, but Grimmauld Place didn’t really have much. There are separate sets of rites for Dark and Light, you know, and of course the library there belonged to Dark wizards.”
            Ron shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. My family left it all behind a long time ago. It seems pretty stuffy and traditional to me.”
            Harry shrugged back. “If I don’t like it,” he said lightly, “then I don’t need to spend any more time reading about it.” He opened the book.
            Ron grumbled a little, but didn’t object. Harry smiled. He was glad. He wouldn’t have listened to Ron even if he had objected, but he didn’t want a bone of contention between him and his friends. Not now that he had started to live again.
*
            “You understand now.”
            Malfoy’s voice made Harry blink and lift his head, but he didn’t jump. He’d been sitting on the edge of the Forbidden Forest for a while, turning the book over in his hands and sometimes reading a stray page. He’d done a lot of reading already, of course, so this was more in the nature of refreshing his memory.
            “Yes,” he said, turning and looking up at Malfoy. Once again, Malfoy stood where the shadow of the leaves could cross his face. Harry hoped that wasn’t a bad omen, given what they were fighting.
            “Why I can’t tell you. Why I have to show you.” Malfoy came a step closer, then stopped as if frightened by the sound of his own foot crushing the moss.
            There were so many things Harry could have said to that, but instead he only nodded and murmured, “Yes” again.
            Malfoy exhaled once, then smiled. Harry almost envied him that smile. It looked like it came from someone who was totally in control of his situation and knew all the nuances of it. That was a smile he would have liked to give. But he didn’t envy Malfoy completely, because soon Harry thought he would be able to do the same thing.
            He put the book down beside him and looked at Malfoy. “Will the gaps in the sentences be filled only when you show me things? Or can you cast some spell that will fill them now?”
            “They can be filled when I’m holding the book,” said Malfoy quietly, and sat down beside Harry, reaching out to hold onto the edge of the cover. Harry bent over and watched small lines of ink spring to life, scribing in the missing words that had so puzzled him.
            More than half the sentences in the book that described the rites were incomplete, ending a long way before the period, or missing several words before suddenly springing to life again and continuing as if nothing had happened. Harry had thought at first the book was defective, then that it was under some enchantment that prevented someone from seeing the words until the spell was broken. He’d been up half the night trying to cast the right charm or countercharm.
            But then he had started paying more attention to the contents of the unbroken paragraphs around the rite descriptions. They had said that the rites could not be performed alone. They were always for communal celebration. There had to be at least two wizards, representing different souls that could beat back Shadow. Members of a family were the most usual, but if a wizard had formed a teaching relationship with another, then that teacher had to join with him in the performance.
            Harry devoured the newborn words, saying absently, “Do I have to get another Light wizard to do these with me? I mean, if Light and Dark wizards do different series of rituals, then I don’t want you to have to do something you can’t do, anyway. I think Neville would…”
            Malfoy’s stiffness and silence finally penetrated his awareness, and Harry looked up. Malfoy was staring at him with narrowed eyes, looking as ready to charge him as a centaur.
            But, finally, Malfoy sniffed and relaxed. “I will put this down to ignorance,” he said.
            “Do,” Harry muttered, dropping his eyes. “I couldn’t read the whole book before, of course.”
            Malfoy sniffed once more. “You can’t perform the rites alone at all. There are two different sets of them, however. If Longbottom had been your teacher,” and Malfoy’s voice cast serious doubts on Neville’s competence, “then you would do one set. But there is another set, one that meshes with the rites I know. Light and Dark wizards dance opposite one another.”
            Harry blinked. When he thought about that, it made a certain amount of sense, although he would never have considered it before, given how the Book of the Heir was devoted to one set of Dark rites and how Malfoy had acted at their first meeting. “Okay. Can we only do the rites when we’re both holding onto the book, though? That would be inconvenient.”
            Malfoy leaned back, although he kept one hand on the book’s cover, and shook his head. “It should be much easier now that we’ve revealed the truth once. We can read them together, and check our understanding of them as necessary.” He paged through the book to a rite that Harry had had to skip altogether, as everything except one paragraph of text at the beginning had been nearly blank. “I suggest we start with this one.”
            Harry leaned over and began to read. It sounded simple, he had to admit. They had only to find a circular place, which, as the book explained, could be a clearing, a hollow, or a ring they created themselves with salt or the like. And then they would acquire a number of things, like a piece of obsidian for the Dark wizard involved and a piece of topaz for the Light one, and they would set them out, and…
            “Wait, wait, we slide our souls into each other?” Harry leaned back with his spine prickling and stared at Malfoy. That sounded similar enough to some of the things Voldemort had done with his soul that Harry was reluctant to attempt it. “What good will that do to defeat Shadow?”
            Malfoy rolled his eyes, but he didn’t sniff again, or back off, or look offended. “The rite calls it souls, but it’s a fancy way of saying that we’ll read each other’s minds without being able to use Legilimency. It’s pretty intimate, Potter. I don’t think there’s any reason to suspect that it will actually affect our souls.”
            Harry nodded. So it wasn’t an absolute guarantee, but the rest of the rite sounded, well, soothing. The sort of thing he had wanted to perform for a while. He glanced up again. “When can we start?”
*
            “I got a letter from Hermione.”
            Ron said it quietly, but there was little else that could have affected Harry as strongly as those words. He immediately sat up and smiled at Ron, who was hunched over his breakfast like a dragon protecting her eggs. Harry had thought he was guarding his sausages, but it made more sense that it would be the letter.
            “That’s great!” Harry leaned over, but Ron only turned a little to the side and protected it some more, so Harry let his hand drop. He was confident enough in their friendship now that he didn’t need to insist on their sharing every secret. “What does she say?”
            “That she found her parents. She’s still trying to remove the Memory Charm from them, but she doesn’t think it’ll take—that long.” Ron spoke slowly, as though he was reciting the letter from memory right then, although his eyes were fixed on empty air. “And she’ll be back home in about a month.”
            Harry sighed with relief. “Good. I’ve missed her.” He paused and studied Ron again, his red cheeks and slightly dazed expression and his tight grip on the letter, and then nodded. He wasn’t going to ask about the rest of what the letter contained, in case it was something potentially embarrassing. “Thanks for letting me know,” he added casually, and turned back to his own breakfast.
            He still watched Ron from the corner of his eye. Ron waited until Harry had been eating a few minutes, then smoothed the letter out on the table in front of him and gave it another hard, dazzled stare.
            Harry smiled and went back to reading about the rite he and Malfoy were going to perform.
*
            “Potter?”
            “Here.” Harry stood up. They’d agreed to meet near the lake, in a place where Malfoy said it would be easy to flatten the grass and create the sort of circle that the ritual required. Harry had accepted that without question. Malfoy had been doing this sort of magic a lot longer than he had. It made sense that he would know things like that.
            Malfoy appeared, carrying a huge dish of what looked like tarnished silver. Harry blinked and looked more closely. On the dish were a piece of obsidian, a slender silver rod, and something else, a black ribbon, that Harry didn’t remember the rite describing.
            “The ribbon is to give us something to keep us grounded while we’re tumbling around in our heads,” Malfoy said, when he noticed Harry looking, and put the dish down on the ground. “Mutual Legilimency can be overwhelming.”
            Harry nodded his understanding, and stepped back to retrieve his own piece of topaz while Malfoy set about trampling down the circle. It had been easier to get hold of than he’d thought it would be. While McGonagall might not understand why he wanted to perform the rites at all, she was more than willing to let him go to Diagon Alley to find what he needed. Harry had followed Malfoy’s instructions, going into a jeweler’s shop and sorting through the pieces of topaz he found until one felt right, warm and throbbing against his palm.
            His own silver was in a ring shape. Harry picked it up and turned around, balancing the topaz in his left hand and the silver in the other.
            Malfoy, on the other side of the circle exactly opposite him, gave Harry a deep smile and lifted his right hand, where the obsidian was. Harry found his left arm rising at the same moment, opposing the topaz to Malfoy’s obsidian, although he hadn’t remembered that was what he should do. A swift, thrilling rush traveled down his spine, the way that it had when he first saw Hogwarts, and he smiled.
            Malfoy’s smile widened, turned softer. He whispered, “I call upon the darkness that beats at the heart of this stone, born in the greatest light of all, of fire.”
            “And I call upon the light that beats at the heart of this stone,” Harry answered at once, “which lay in the greatest darkness, beneath the earth.”
            Malfoy held out his silver rod. Harry moved a step forwards with the circle and slipped it over the rod. For an instant, a great clanging noise reverberated in his head, much louder than the soft ting of metal touching metal.
            Malfoy stepped back, bearing the encircled rod with him, and put both pieces of silver down on the grass near his feet. Harry had known that was going to happen, but he was unprepared for the sensation that flooded him when it did. His heart felt stretched, as though a literal cord extended from his chest and moved with the rod. He took a deep breath and blinked, surprised.
            Malfoy didn’t show the same discomfort, or maybe he was simply too near to the silver to feel it the same way. He dipped his head to Harry and held out his free hand, the one that didn’t clutch the piece of obsidian. Harry moved up and put his hand in it.
            Everything around them began to turn. Harry couldn’t decide later if it was the circle they had made that was turning widdershins to the rest of the world, or if it was the world that had begun to rotate. Or even just the patch of sky above them, which was where he noticed it most. Smoke had surged up and swallowed the edges of the circle, or pure darkness. There was gold around them, too, the last lingering rays of the sun in the high trees of the Forbidden Forest, but it seemed suddenly much more prominent.
            “Harry,” Malfoy whispered.
            Harry started and turned back to him, distracted from the rest of the world by the sheer passion in Malfoy’s voice. He hadn’t known that was going to happen, either, at least not without Legilimency.
            But Malfoy moved towards him and slid the hand that held the obsidian down Harry’s back to his waist, where he clutched at him. Harry moved in, borne by the ritual or the pressure of Malfoy’s hand, or both—he didn’t know—and hooked his arm around Malfoy’s shoulders in return.
            They stood together, so close that Malfoy’s body heat made little hairs on Harry’s arm rise. Malfoy loosed a harsh, panting breath. Harry leaned his head against Malfoy’s chest and trembled a little.
            “Don’t know how—how you can—” Malfoy said. Harry looked up and met his eyes again, remembering distantly that that was one of the requirements of the rite.
            The instant they locked gazes, Harry was swept away in a flood-tide.
            All around him were images that jumped cloudily to life, images that Harry knew. How many times had he walked through the large dining room at the Manor? How many times had he slapped the standing stone at the edge of the grounds for luck as he spread by it on his broom? How many times had he stood wide-eyed before the black candles that his mother had brought with her on her marriage, candles that would grant you a wish if you could look at them for five minutes without blinking?
            Never.
            Harry knew that, in one part of himself. These were Draco’s memories, and not his own.
            But the sense of reality overlay his physical senses, and he knew what it was like to stand taller than he did, to have a different kind of grace on a broom, to look at Lucius Malfoy and feel complicated love flood his heart. He knew what it was like to toss back his head laughing at one of the rare jokes Theodore Nott would crack in private. He knew what it was like to move through the Slytherin common room and feel all eyes following him, at least before his family had conclusively lost their power.
            It was intoxicating. It was exhilarating. It made Harry want more, more, more, and he reached out possessively into Draco’s mind without even thinking about it.
            He thought he heard a deep breath, but not a protest, and then the memories grew more emotional. There was a black whirlwind of fear that covered the last two years, the hard press of the sink in the bathroom where he had come to cry under his elbows, the pain where Sectumsempra had cut his chest open. There was the sincere and utter contempt for his vows once he saw past the power that the Dark Lord used to command his Death Eaters and he saw what he had sworn himself to follow. There was the endless, quiet, unrolling sunshine on the day that he had stumbled out of the Ministry and known he was acquitted.
            Draco was peering and pulling through Harry’s mind at the same time. He knew that. But it was a fact shut behind glass, not mattering. Maybe just because so much of his life was public property already, he was less bothered about what Draco would find.
            There were shadows dancing around him, concealing things that Harry couldn’t quite see. He knew he could push and find them, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to enjoy the shadows themselves, pooling and flowing over the floor, and skittering across the walls, and he reached out with one hand to pull them close. They weren’t the same as Shadow, they were warm and deep and comforting, and—
            He landed again with a jolt in his body and on the ground. As he sagged to his knees, he realized abruptly that he and Draco had forgotten to hold onto the ribbon that Draco had brought. He shrugged a moment later. It wasn’t as though it mattered all that much. Neither of them had hurt themselves in the fall.
            “Well,” Draco said.
            Harry wondered for a second if he should go back to thinking of him as Malfoy, but that was honestly impossible now. He smiled up at him, and Draco smiled back and gently let go of Harry’s hand. Harry did it at the same time, shaking his head.
            “How does that rite actually fight Shadow?” he asked, sitting back on his heels and rubbing with his hands at his eyes. “I mean, it’s good that we got to see more of each other’s pasts, but I could have done it with someone I already knew well.”
            “It fills you up with a sense of another’s life, is the way that the books I’ve read explain it,” Draco said, and smiled at him again. He didn’t seem inclined to brush dirt off his clothes, or stand up and walk away, like Harry had assumed he would be immediately after the rite. He only reached out and absently touched Harry’s shoulder, as if confirming that it wasn’t his shoulder any longer. “The more you have to think about, the more you have to live for, the less easy it is to fall in line with what Shadow wants of you.”
            Harry nodded slowly. “That makes sense.”
            “It does.” Draco abruptly looked him in the eye. “And so do a whole lot of other things I never thought much about.”
            Harry caught his breath. Draco wasn’t smiling right now, but he didn’t look as though he was going to punch Harry or something like that (which Harry had also thought about as a possible consequence of the ritual). He simply looked…interested, and wise, and confused.
            “Likewise,” Harry said, a second after he should have.
            Draco inclined his head and stood, reaching out with one hand. It was so natural for Harry to accept the help up that he thought nothing about it until he had actually done it. Then he and Draco stood there for a long second, staring down at their joined hands, before Draco cleared his throat and turned to pack up his ritual ingredients.
            Harry slid his piece of topaz into his pocket, and nodded at the silver rod and ring, still joined. “What do we do about that?”
            “Oh, they stay joined,” Draco said. “As a permanent record of the rite.” He slipped them reverently onto the dish he had carried outside with him, and turned to walk back into the school.
            Harry walked with him. He could feel Draco’s soft breathing, hear the sound of his footfalls, and felt a prickling strangeness all over his skin. After all, he knew how those things felt from the inside, now.
            Draco looked at him from the corner of his eye. Harry squinted back, a little.
            “The next one needs to be done at a full moon,” Draco said in a rush. “Can we do the next full moon in a fortnight, or would you like some more time to study the ritual?”
Harry didn’t even have to think. He wanted—he hungered to have an experience like that again. “A fortnight’s fine.”
            Draco’s mouth relaxed in a smile. “Good. I’ll need to have my mother send me a few things, but she can owl them in time, no problem.”
            Harry shut his eyes instead of replying, and listened. Even the soft grunt Draco made as he shifted the dish in his arms, and the rustle of his clothing, seemed special.
            I know him.
            And it was much harder than Harry had expected to part from Draco when they reached the point in the Hogwarts entrance hall where they would have to go their separate ways. He cleared his throat a couple times before Draco finally gave him an awkward nod and turned towards the dungeons.
            Harry watched him go. Draco didn’t look back, but he did walk with his head higher and his back straighter than usual, Harry thought. He knew Harry was watching.
            Content that it should be so, Harry went to bed.
*
ChaosLady: A day late, but it will be mostly updated on Wednesdays.
SP777: Well, that’s the effect of Shadow. ;)
starr: Thank you!
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The Splendor Is Waiting