Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

The Rising of the Stones	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 13237 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
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“I’m starting to think I’m never going to understand you.”
Harry grimaced and ducked his head as Draco performed another healing charm on the broken bone in his arm. Draco sat back with a sigh. He’d fetched a couple books from one of his hiding places and looked up healing spells in them, but none of them were putting the bone back the way it had been before Harry broke it.
“Is it so hard to understand that I wanted to spare someone suffering?”
Draco cast him one glance as he laid his wand along the bone again and tried to think about Skele-Gro and make his spell effective by the sympathetic magic of his thoughts. “Of course. When they’re trying to hurt me.”
“Is that what bothers you most? That I seemed to care more about them than I did about you?”
Draco flinched and looked once at Harry’s eyes, which had gone dark and burning. “Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I think it is.” Harry reached out with his good hand and clasped Draco’s wristbone, sliding up to wring his hand. “I promise you, Draco, I wasn’t thinking that it would be a good thing if they lived and you were still in danger. I just wanted to solve everything with the least amount of pain to everyone.”
“And that’s what you were doing when you ran away from the wizarding world, too? Trying to cause the least amount of pain to everyone?”
Harry straightened up and probably would have tried to fold his arms, except Draco had thought he might do something stupid like that, and placed a spell that cradled his broken arm and held it immobile. “It was. It sounds stupid when you put it like that, but it was.”
“It sounds stupid because it was stupid. Oh, no, someone might be tainted by my presence! I think I shall run away!”
“It wasn’t—”
“It was.”
Draco abruptly realized that he was leaning across the table, practically shouting into Harry’s face. He pulled back with a wince. After all the thoughts he’d had about getting Harry excited, and the way he’d congratulated himself for keeping him calm while he tried to heal his arm, now he’d gone and done this.
“I know you think it sounds stupid,” Harry said softly, after a long moment when both of them had kept their eyes on the bone pressing against the flesh of his arm. “But it wasn’t. It really wasn’t. I was only trying to do the right thing.”
“Is that what really matters to you? The right thing?”
Harry hesitated, and Draco felt something in him relax. Unlike the quick action Harry had taken to shatter the crystal and the amulets and yet spare the lives of the Aurors who had them, this time Draco would have been upset if Harry had known the answer right away.
“I don’t know,” said Harry finally, his eyelids folding in a little as he frowned. He started to tap the fingers of his good hand in a rhythm on the table. “It was, for a long time. If I didn’t do the right thing, then people would die.”
“Well, then you know what the right choice is now. Acting against de Berenzan and his Aurors,” said Draco, leaning forwards so he could stare directly into Harry’s eyes. “The markless children will continue to die if we don’t oppose them.”
Harry bit back whatever he was about to say. Then he said, “But I wasn’t thinking of saving them when I ran.”
“Obviously, or you would have stayed and tried to fight the Minister.”
“I meant that as proof that I don’t always do the right thing.”
Draco snorted and leaned back once more to look at Harry’s broken arm, shaking his head regretfully. He really couldn’t come up with a way to heal it more than this. Soon, they would have to risk taking Harry to a Healer. “Fine, but now you know what the right thing is. It’s good to know it doesn’t always matter to you, or I would have walked away from you.”
Harry winced, but didn’t grab him. “Why?”
“Because I want a lover who cares more about me than about some abstract principle of right and wrong.”
“I do. I do care.”
“You’re learning to.” Draco stood up and reached for his wand. “I need to send a Patronus to Granger and Weasley. I don’t know any more magic than this that could help your arm, and I’m no Healer. They’ll know someone who has loyalty to you and some training as a Healer, I’m sure.”
“If you send a Patronus to them and they’re not alone, someone else could realize that you’re allied with them.”
Draco snorted. “Sometimes you seem to think that no one but you ever had any Auror training, Potter. Of course I’m not going to send them a message that just anyone could understand.” He waved his wand back and forth, concentrating, and the pale viper coiled outwards from the tip.
“Always thought it was a ferret.”
Draco ignored that. The fact that his Patronus had been, when he first learned to cast it, was neither here nor there. It had changed into a viper forever after he had decided that he would go without his soulmate. “Granger, your friend made an absolute mess of himself. Get here and clean it up. I refuse to try any longer.”
The viper flicked its tongue once as if testing for the scent of the words, and then turned and sped away along the invisible paths of the air, fading through the wall. Draco sighed and turned back to Harry.
“They’re still going to wonder who her friend is and why you would be cleaning it up,” Harry muttered, even as he slumped against the table.
Draco snorted in incredulity as he went back to his shelf. Another idea had hit him, not one he thought would heal Harry, but which might ease his pain until a qualified person could come. “Are you always this hard to help? I’m starting to see why your friends didn’t seem surprised that you ran away.”
“Only when having people help me could hurt them.”
Draco turned around with the heavy book in his arms and laid it on the table. Then he leaned forwards and stared into Harry’s eyes until Harry started fidgeting and glancing away. Draco nodded in satisfaction and continued in a gentle voice that he wanted to sting and hurt. “I volunteered for this. All right? Your friends volunteered to be your friends. And I actually don’t want to leave, because that would just make you validated in your absurd attempt to play martyr. I’m going to stay with you and make myself as annoying as possible while pointing out all the times I’m right and you’re wrong.”
A small smile touched Harry’s lips. “Then you’re going to annoy yourself, too.”
“Oh, was that one of the reasons you thought I would jump at any chance to leave? Because you would exasperate me too much?” Draco tapped Harry’s forehead with his curled fingers, making him start and try to duck away. “Let me tell you this. I can take any amount of exasperation myself if I get to annoy someone else more.”
Harry stared at him with bewildered eyes. Then he nodded slowly. Draco gave him a smug smile. He didn’t actually think Harry was having a hard time understanding. What he was having was trouble in understanding why his attempts to mope and brood and strike dramatic heroic poses wouldn’t work.
“Now,” Draco said, and opened the book as if nothing had happened. “I’ve had a lot of reason to think about sympathetic magic lately, and it reminded me of this.”
Harry cocked his head so he could see around Draco’s arm and onto the pages. “You have books about elemental magic? But why, if you never learned it?”
“Because I thought I might want to learn it. Now that I have a teacher, you see how wise I was.”
Harry rolled his eyes and muttered something about “overly-clever bastards.” Draco only smiled and held the book helpfully open, showing Harry the image of a crystal that someone was running their hands over.
“You used a crystal successfully to break the amulets,” Draco said. “And injure yourself. Why couldn’t you use some rock or crystal or gem or piece of metal that you resonate well with to take your pain and ease your arm?” He didn’t know if Harry could heal the break completely, but at least he could try.
Harry frowned intently. He turned a few pages and read them, then sat back. “The problem is that the rock I resonate best with isn’t here.”
“Can I fetch it? Did you leave it in one of your patterns that you were using for power?”
“Oh—sorry. No, I didn’t mean it was one rock. I meant a kind of rock. A ruby.”
Draco had to smile. “Of course you would resonate best with one of the precious stones,” he said, and went into the room at the very back of his house, the one that had all the heirlooms he’d brought out of the Manor. He rarely thought about them now, except on the nights when something tempted him to get drunk and maudlin. And then it was better to brood and think about revenge than be maudlin.
He came back out with his mother’s rings and necklaces spilling over his hands, and put them down in the center of the table. “Here,” he said, and made them tilt and catch the light. “Are bigger rubies better?” One of them was a ring with a ruby in the center that Draco frankly hoped Father hadn’t bought for her, because it was in such bad taste. Or at least he might have bought it when they were young and stupid.
“I—Draco, I can’t take your mother’s jewelry.”
“It’s mine now,” Draco said quietly.
“I know, but—they’re for your family.”
“As it stands right now, do you think I’m going to have a traditional marriage and children I can leave heirlooms to? Do you think I even care about such things in the traditional way anymore?”
Harry spent a long moment staring at him before he nodded in what looked like acceptance, instead of resignation. “All right. Can you put everything that has a ruby in front of me? I have to see which one feels best to me.”
Draco nodded and cast a quick charm that swirled all the rings and necklaces and brooches that had rubies into one place in the center of the table. Harry leaned forwards, elbow resting on the table. Draco concealed his frown at the breach of manners and waited to see what would happen. A hand waved over them? Or would Harry conjure a stone and use it to feel out the resonances of the rubies somehow?
Neither happened. Instead, Harry opened his mouth and sang a single piercing, clear note that made Draco jump and look instinctively at the glass of his windows.
But nothing shattered. Instead, Draco heard a high note, singing back to Harry. He turned and saw Harry nodding at the gaudy ring. “That one.”
“Good.” Draco used his wand to free the ruby of its golden setting without damaging the rest of the ring. “I never liked it anyway.”
“And the ruby is glad to be free.” Harry laid it on the table and then stretched his broken arm over it, wincing only slightly at the pull of his bone against his skin. “You might want to look away. This won’t be pretty.”
Draco leaned obstinately forwards, and Harry rolled his eyes. “Fine, then.” He sang again, this time a soft humming noise that seemed to vibrate in Draco’s bones the way Harry’s attacks from under the earth had.
The ruby began to spin in place, its facets glittering more and more brightly. Draco had time to shield his eyes in the moments before it glowed, shedding an intense red light through the room that drowned the fire.
Three more pulses of red light followed, and finally Draco felt able to lower his arm and stare at Harry. Harry was cradling his arm with less pain than before, and Draco couldn’t see the shape of the broken bone anymore. The ruby was a pile of uninteresting rusty flakes on the table. Draco swallowed. He supposed he could see one reason why elemental healing magic wasn’t more common. Most wizards wouldn’t be able to afford all the ingredients.
“Is it set now?”
“It hurts less, and the bone doesn’t feel as though it’s forever scraping and grinding against the others.” Harry gave him a tired smile. “It’ll hold until we can find a way to have a regular Healer look at it. Thank you, Draco.”
“You have to teach me that.” Draco scooped up the rest of the jewelry and cast a spell that washed the red dust off the table.
“If you want, we can start looking for the jewel you resonate with. It’ll take a while, though, because Hail didn’t seem to think that there was any reason a person would resonate with one more than another.”
“Well, a ruby isn’t surprising for you, anyway.”
“Because of my temper?”
“And the Gryffindor connotations, and the fact that of course you need a precious stone instead of a semiprecious one to work your magic.”
Harry rolled his eyes. "It's only magic on my body, like that, that I need a ruby to work with. You saw what I did with perfectly ordinary circles of stones and pebbles before this."
"Why should magic that mimics Healing be harder than magic than mimics Apparition?"
"If I knew, I would be a magic theorist and a genius, and we probably would have stopped de Berenzan already."
Draco opened his mouth to say that it had taken a magic theorist to work out how someone could use ancient stones carved by humans for the human touch that such magic required, and then stopped. For one thing, someone was knocking briskly on the door.
For another, he wasn't sure that Harry needed to hear that he was a genius. Not right now, anyway. The only thing worse than a Potter martyr was a Potter with a swollen head.
Granger swept in the minute Draco opened the door. At least, he assumed it was Granger. He caught only a glimpse of the frizzy brown hair under the swimming colors of a Disillusionment Charm, and then she was past him and hugging Harry so tightly his face turned red.
"At least drop the Charm, Hermione," Harry managed to gasp against her neck.
"Of course," said Granger in the strange sort of muffled voice that people had when Disillusioned, and she did. She was standing there in Draco's drawing room now, a blaze of color, eyes fixed on Harry as if she intended to hug him with those, too. "What's this about you needing a Healer?"
“Broke my arm containing the backlash of a spell,” said Harry, and motioned with his chin towards his arm. Draco thought Granger might be more suspicious—he would have been if Harry was saying that sort of nonsense to him—but she only nodded and took out a thick white towel with blue edging.
“What’s that?”
Granger looked at Draco without seeming to see him; much of her attention was focused on Harry. “It’s a towel with a Healing charm that one of our contacts at St. Mungo’s prepared for me. I thought it was probably too dangerous to bring a Healer here, but this will bind the bone in place until it fully heals.”
“You came yourself, but you thought it was too dangerous to bring a Healer,” said Draco, his head slowly tilting as he thought about that.
“You already attracted attention with that Patronus, especially since I was in a meeting at the time.” Granger tucked the towel around Harry’s arm, making sure two of the blue edges met. Draco felt the magic engage, and sighed out a little as he sensed the soft change in the air. “I didn’t want to risk more.”
Draco snorted a little and moved away, to give Granger and Harry some privacy. When they’d spoken softly for a few minutes and were starting to laugh, he broke in to ask, “What’s been going on with the Prophet?”
“Doge has planted some good stories asking about the Ministry’s policy on Dark Lords, and hinting that they might kill them in the womb. And Luna has recruited some of the Quibbler readers to ask questions about the ones born without soul-marks.”
“Quibbler readers.” Draco curled his lip. “Is the rest of the public going to trust them?”
“Once we have some momentum and proof behind us, they will. This is sowing the ground.” Granger turned her head to meet Draco’s eyes. “You know that, Malfoy. It was part of the strategy you designed.”
Draco acknowledged that with a wave of his hand. He had simply never thought of the hordes of the great conspiracy-obsessed marching behind Lovegood as she directed them against de Berenzan.
Now that he thought about it, though, he had no idea why not. It was a great image.
“And Ron is busy gathering some people who want to meet us,” said Granger, with a faint smile on her lips. “Or meet Harry, rather. People who listen to gossip and rumor, like Muriel Prewitt. People who worship the Boy-Who-Lived and will do whatever he tells them to. People like—”
“Really, Hermione? You didn’t!”
Granger ignored Harry’s groan, and kept speaking to Draco, only her twitching lip giving her away. “Harry’s official fan organization, the Harryheads. We’re going to be late for the meeting if we stay here much longer. Come on.”
*
SP777: I don't think I'll have time by Halloween, but you can make a request for an Advent one-shot if you want?
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The Rising of the Stones