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A Black Stone in a Glass Box	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 10351 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and am making no money from this story.

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Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Twenty-Five—The Transparent Keys

            “So Potter turns out not to have been good for you after all.”

            Draco didn’t lift his head from the book he was studying, a book he had got out from his parents’ library on possessions and the best way to remove a possession connected to a ritual. So far, he hadn’t found anything connected to chain rituals yet, but he still had half the book to skim. “Go away, that’s a good father,” he murmured.

            Lucius prowled further into the sitting room Draco had chosen, staring at him. Draco studied him critically. Lucius’s pale robes and pale coloring and the silver cane he had chosen for today contrasted horribly with the dark blue of the walls. He looked like a drifting smear.

“When someone is hammering on my wards,” Lucius said, his voice lowering, “I think it fair to deduce that the relationship has gone awry.”

            “He hammered on the wards once before,” Draco replied, turning back to his book. “I don’t remember you being compelled to comment on it then.”

            “He had not then spent a night under this roof.” Lucius’s voice rose.

            “I didn’t know roofs were so important to you, Father.” Draco nodded to him with a pleasant smile. “I’ll be sure to think of that in the future, and be careful who I invite to sleep under them, lest I offend you. Would a tent out in the gardens under the stars be more to your liking?”

            Lucius almost snarled at him. Draco leaned back in his chair, keeping his place in the book with one finger. He should have known that dismissing his father wouldn’t be as easy as that, he thought, but—and he wanted to whine this to himself—it should have been that easy. Lucius should trust him enough to leave him alone, especially since he knew now that his threats to disown Draco and his attempts to cow him wouldn’t work.

            “You will tell me what happened.” Lucius was attempting to strike the Haughty Lord of the Manor pose that had worked so well when Draco was a child. Draco wasn’t impressed. For one thing, Lucius was no longer that much taller than he was, and for another, Lucius couldn’t send him to his room without supper, either.

            And for another, Draco now knew how much of the money and time and effort and politics keeping his family afloat in those years had been his mother’s.

            “Fine,” Draco said. “We completed the chain ritual, killing its last animal component, and then Potter became possessed by something that seems to be a consequence of the chain ritual. The ritual was made by a Dark Lord to trap Dark Lord slayers, it seems. Potter wants to kill me and stop me from figuring out the best way to get his heart back to him, while I want to find out what’s possessing him and scare it away so that I can have my Harry back.” The whole speech and the effort he had put into it, so that he could tell Lucius what was going on without rendering himself too vulnerable to his father, was worth it when Lucius flinched at the words “my Harry.” “Satisfied?” Draco added, and turned back to his book.

            Lucius wasn’t satisfied, because he didn’t leave, but on the other hand, he was silent while Draco worked his way through two pages more of the book’s dense recommendations for allaying possession that happened as the result of finishing a ritual. Draco shook his head impatiently and paged on. No, he had thought this section would have something, but it didn’t. He should have remembered that, given the keys and the fact that they hadn’t recovered the physical object Harry had used to substitute for his heart, it wasn’t actually finished yet.

            “I might have something.”

            Draco glanced up. “Something for what?”

            Lucius had taken a seat across from him. He waved his wand, and the color of his robes darkened a little, which meant he had finally noticed the way he clashed with the room. Draco supposed he had to award him a point for that. “Something to end the possession and make the ritual yield.” Lucius was speaking gently, frowning at a point past Draco’s head, the way he often did in theoretical discussions. “Particularly if this ritual was designed by the Dark Lord. I have—I found something after he left our Manor for the last time.”

            “We don’t know for sure that the ritual was designed by the Dark Lord,” Draco pointed out, because all this meant was that his father hadn’t been listening, and Draco wanted to make sure that he did. “It could have been anyone. Harry found the book in a thief’s hoard. It could have been another Dark Lord.”

            “Nevertheless,” Lucius replied, and stood up, walking to the doorway. Draco couldn’t imagine what his father might have found that he thought would help, but he went back to his book.

            Only after a few seconds did he become aware that Lucius hadn’t left the room, but was standing in front of the doorway, staring towards him. Draco sighed and marked his place in the book with a finger again. “What?”

            For a moment, he thought Lucius would puff up and tell Draco to speak to his father more respectfully, but in the end, he only shook his head, sighed, and said, “If I help you, then you will owe me a favor.”

            “No,” Draco said. “I won’t disinherit myself, and I won’t stop seeing Harry. If those are going to be your conditions, then you might as well not help me at all.”

            Lucius looked as if he would like to clap a handful of nails to his forehead, because it would hurt less than having a disobedient son. Then he turned away with a noise of disgust, shaking his head. “Very well,” he said over his shoulder. “If I cannot have what I want in one way, I will get it in another. But I will still fetch what I found.”

            Draco grunted and went back to his book. What he found continued to be useless. All of the rituals in the book were assumed to be performed with the help of another person, or from a reputable book, or they were easier to disrupt and break. There was nothing there about someone alone performing a ritual that had been designed by a Dark Lord out of a book that no one knew anything about and sensible people would know not to trust, and then having to kill magical creatures to break down the ritual’s effect.

            Of course not. Because this is Harry we’re talking about.

            By the time Lucius came back, Draco had nearly forgotten him. He had found a few notes that would help, or at least that might help if he could combine them and get ready to break the ritual that way. He glanced up as his father walked in, carrying a black trunk banded with sliver and with a black lock on it.

            Draco immediately drew his wand and checked for curses, but found only defensive spells. “The Dark Lord left that behind?” he asked, tucking his wand away. “It seems rather large to forget.”

            Lucius shot him a withering look as he lowered the trunk to the floor. “This is only what I stored it in when I discovered that the book corrupted every book on the shelf beside it,” he snapped, and set about casting the counters for the spells that guarded the trunk. The main lock itself must have been a spell, because it melted into air a few seconds after Lucius began to cast.

            “Corrupted them how?” Draco bit his lip to keep down his chuckles at the vision of the Dark Lord’s book whispering naughty tales at nighttime to other books on the shelf.

            “Turned them to grey slime,” Lucius said shortly, and stepped back as the trunk’s lid fell slowly and majestically open.

            Draco blinked and took a step back himself. He reminded his racing heart that this could be like the blue book that Harry had got the chain ritual out of, and that he shouldn’t hope too much.

            Lucius floated the book into the air rather than touching it. After a look at it, Draco understood why. The book’s “cover” was really multiple strips of skin, all bound around each other to contain the pages inside. Draco recognized Ashwinder skin, and a long strip of molted green that had probably come from the Dark Lord’s snake, Nagini. Not to mention other colors that looked a bit more human.

            “How are you going to open it?” Draco asked. The book bulged so much that he thought flinging open the skin would scatter the pages all over the floor, and Draco didn’t particularly want to touch them, either.

            “Watch and learn,” his father said smugly, and waved his wand at the book, intoning a spell so soft-voiced Draco couldn’t hear it. Draco scowled at his father’s profile. Spoilsport.

            The strips of skin unfolded, peeling back as though something with claws had gripped them and pulled. For a moment, they fluttered raggedly, and then the pages spread out along them as if arrayed on the top of a desk. Draco had to nod grudging praise. His father’s ego was big enough and really didn’t need any more stroking, but it was true that Draco hadn’t heard of that spell and never could have performed it himself.

            Lucius studied the pages, using his wand to move the ones he didn’t want further and further along the strips of skin, now unfolded to their fullest extent. Draco caught a single glimpse of the snaky writing, in a rust-brown color of ink, on the nearest parchment, and turned away. He had seen that enough during the year of hell that he’d received courtesy of the Dark Lord. He didn’t need to see it again.

            It seemed to take forever for Lucius to make an enlightened noise, but when he did, the sound burned and sizzled along Draco’s nerves. He turned around and flung his arms across the back of the chair, waiting.

            Lucius came towards him, a strip of skin that looked like an Ashwinder’s trailing next to the page he had found. “Read this,” he said to Draco, whirling the page towards him and casting another spell that magnified the writing.

            Swallowing, and deciding that he would go away after this mess was done with and perform a different rebellious act each day for ten days to get the sting of obedience out of his throat, Draco leaned forwards and read.

            …In my genius, I have discovered that a ritual might be turned on its caster at the end, if an enemy attempts to dispel it, by making that enemy himself part of the ritual’s continuation. This is an unparalleled discovery, never made before in the history of wizarding kind. If it had been, I would surely have run into it…

            Draco skimmed the next two paragraphs, all the Dark Lord’s nattering in praise of his genius, and shuddered. The truly disconcerting thing about the wittering on the Dark Lord did was the insufferable arrogance of it all, and as a connoisseur of arrogance, Draco had a lot of samples to compare it to.



            He arrived, finally, at what he was looking for, and what had to be the thing his father had located and thought could help.

            …The caster can escape only if another ventures in his place to destroy the caster’s tie to the ritual.

            Draco sat back with a small frown. Did that mean he would have to take Harry’s place as guardian of Harry’s heart? That wasn’t a solution, because it meant Draco was just waiting around to be killed or dissolved himself, and Harry remained ready to collapse into an emotionless automaton at any moment now.

            Then he smiled, and jumped to his feet. “I know what it means,” he said aloud.

            “That you will slaughter Potter because you refuse to sacrifice your life?” Lucius asked hopefully.

            Draco sighed and glanced at him. “Poor Father,” he said, mildly enough, he thought. There was no reason for all that bristling Lucius promptly did. “It rankles you, doesn’t it, that I managed to escape from the clutches of the Malfoy family and establish myself as an independent person, and you never did? I found those old journals, you know, the ones you wrote when you were my age and fulminating against Grandfather Abraxas. You should have continued the trend. You would be a better person today.” He paused, considering the stiff way his father stood, and added, “If only because you’d be more relaxed.”

            Lucius tried to say something, but outrage had stifled it to a death rattle in his throat.

            “No,” Draco confirmed, taking the glass keys from his robe pocket and studying them thoughtfully. He had believed it was useless trying to find the keyhole they fit, because he had to find some way to break the possession on Harry first.

            But it made sense that the possession was part of the chain ritual itself, to make Harry into a guardian for the last important object—the equivalent of the tooth and the bit of beak and the keys themselves. The ritual had to have an end somewhere, and that meant a final object. If Harry was a guardian now, what was he guarding?

            His heart.

            Draco had to find the object Harry had bathed with his blood and stored his heart’s emotions in, and destroy that. Go around the guardian, not through him, because Harry wasn’t like the other guardians.

            “How do you know anything about what I wrote?” Lucius whispered.

            Draco stared at him blankly, not understanding for a moment what he was talking about. Then he sniffed and waved his hand. “You’re not the only one who can look around the house for interesting artifacts abandoned by a previous owner, Father.”

            “I am not the previous owner. And neither was the Dark Lord,” Lucius added, which was a less than impressive addition given that he had already swollen up like a toad.

            “You’re previous because you’ve ceded power to me as your heir, and you can’t take it back,” Draco said, turning his back and walking out of the blue sitting room. His father followed him, promptly blending in a little better with the décor. “And you made the Dark Lord owner when you swore allegiance to him and gave him the ability to take over the house of anyone with the Dark Mark.”

            Lucius spluttered behind him, noises that Draco didn’t have to pay attention to, such as “Dark Mark” and “impertinent brat” and “getting another heir.” Draco knew that last would never happen, both because the threat had worn out already, as he’d told Lucius this morning, and because his mother loved him and Lucius couldn’t actually make a new heir by himself.

            He glanced at the glass keys in his hand again, and then out the window at the nearest wards. They bounced and shimmered under Harry’s assault, but his mother had strengthened them the other day, and there was going to be no more buckling and shattering. No, Draco didn’t fear that Harry could get through.

            At least, not without an invitation.

            Draco grinned. It was going to be risky, but what was life without risk, as he observed aloud to his father a moment later?

            “Life,” snapped Lucius.

            Draco laughed, and sprang lightly down the stairs.

*

            Cutting a small hole in the wards from the inside was child’s play. It took longer for Harry, or the monster that inhabited Harry’s body and turned his eyes the color of pond scum, to notice and charge towards him.

            Draco lifted the glass keys and then one leg, as if he would break them over his knee. Harry jerked to a stop, staring at him and huffing.

            “So,” Draco said, smiling at him. “You know that I was trying to keep one key from you? And that you need one?”

            The monster inside Harry didn’t dispute that. It just made Harry’s head bob, its eyes fixed on the key that Draco had Summoned from in front of it.

            “Well,” Draco said. “I’ve decided that I’m tired of putting all this time and effort into destroying the chain ritual, and getting fucked over by Harry’s bad decisions in turn. So you can come and take the key, as long as you take it gently from my hand instead of snatching it or hurting me, and Apparate to whatever you need to guard right after.” He let his lower lip tremble. “I think I’m owed that much tenderness after what I did.”

            The guardian hovered for a moment, and Draco wondered if it would believe him. But it did, the same way Harry had believed him and answered him honestly when Draco had asked him what the chain ritual did. This was a trick by a Dark Lord, after all, meant to destroy the Dark Lord destroyer, not actually preserve his life.

            The monster came forwards and gently laid its hand on the key. Draco sniffled. But the monster kept its word, and lifted the key from Draco’s hand without scratching or otherwise hurting him.

            Draco nodded. “Good-bye,” he said.

            The monster nodded, and started to turn to Apparate.

            Draco promptly leaped after him and seized his arm.

            The monster was Apparating before he realized what Draco had done. He had Harry’s quickness of action and Harry’s lack of foresight, Draco thought smugly. As they disappeared, the monster Side-Along Apparating him without meaning to, the monster’s roar of rage had to cut off, but Draco’s thoughts didn’t.

            And the one who thinks is the one who wins.

*

            delia cerrano: Definitely. Although Draco has a few good ideas.

            SP777: Thanks!
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A Black Stone in a Glass Box