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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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Six—Changing Soulmates
“So Granger thinks that maybe the belief in soul-marks being linked to soulmates is wrong. We can think they are, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. And if someone gives someone else an extra chance because they have the other half of their mark…well, that just means they may be able to overlook annoying things that would drive them away from someone else. They will themselves into being together because they think that they’re meant to be together.”
Harry had stayed silent while Draco explained. Draco honestly wasn’t sure what he would say, or that he would react at all. He turned a mug of steaming tea around and around in front of him, and frowned at his breakfast.
“Does that make sense, Harry?”
Harry sighed at last and raised his head. “It makes some things hurt less.”
“But only some?”
“Everyone’s always told me how blissfully happy my parents were. If soul-marks don’t mean anything in particular, then maybe they shouldn’t have been with each other? Or it wasn’t a romance—”
“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a romance.” Draco concealed a sigh as he reached out and trapped Harry’s tapping fingers against the table. Trust Harry to come up with a way to make things sound horrible when he should have been rejoicing that he wasn’t that different from other people after all. “It means it wasn’t a destined one.”
“I wanted it to be destined.”
“Your parents’?”
“No. Mine.” Harry looked up at him, eyes haunted. “Because that would mean it had been worth something after all, all the suffering I went through because of a prophecy. If I had a destined love, that would make up for having a destiny that said I had to fight Voldemort.”
Draco sipped his own tea—thick but still warm—while he thought about that. Well, he supposed he could see it. Someone whose life had been formed by a prophecy would regard a different kind of prophecy with hope, not disgust, as Draco had.
Still…
“I think you’ll find that I’m more than enough compensation for any suffering you went through,” he said, and trailed his fingers through Harry’s, making sure to give him little strokes on his sensitive skin that made him shiver. “And it’s more Gryffindor of you to find your way to love without a destiny, isn’t it?”
Harry had been about to say something else, but his breath caught, and he looked at Draco with twin spots of color burning on his cheeks. “You really—you really think you could love me?” he breathed.
He has no idea how attractive he is. Of course, it was up to Draco to encourage him to see the truth only insofar as it would make him believe Draco. “Yes,” said Draco. “And it’s more than your earth magic, or the past we shared. It’s because you have qualities of strength that I never knew you had.”
Harry seized those words and took them in a different direction than Draco had thought he would, the way he was always doing. “Why did you turn against your soulmate? Because she didn’t have the same kind of strength you did?”
“Not the kind that I demanded,” Draco retorted, and kept himself from touching the fucking mark only by an effort of will. “And no. She was weak. Every time she had a choice, she made the wrong one.”
“Weak how? Magically weak?”
“No. She has no strength of will. She didn’t play any part in the war, did you know that?” Draco rolled his eyes at the puzzled look that Harry gave him. “Yes, maybe at one point her being neutral would have made her more attractive to me. But I decided after I started clawing my way up the ranks of the Aurors that I despised that. You and your friends at least fought for something, even if I thought it was wrong at the time. You at least had beliefs.”
“I think most people do.”
“She doesn’t. She got into a situation where she had to make a simple choice. Just one. All she had to do was go home early to avoid confronting someone she didn’t want to confront. But instead she stayed and confronted them, and they pressed her into doing something that—ruined her magic.”
“Huh.” Harry spent a moment nibbling his lip, and then nibbling at his bacon. “So part of it is that she’s magically weak, after all?”
Draco laughed, hearing the rasping bitterness in the back of his mouth. “She’s not a Squib. But it’s as if you became an earth mage and then all you did was learn enough magic to shift a couple of pebbles around. She doesn’t want to do anything more than the bare minimum now.”
“You wouldn’t be very interested in me if I hadn’t mastered the earth magic, would you?”
“That was the first thing that caught my attention. But realizing how intelligent you are, and even how noble…” Draco reached across the table for Harry’s neck, and palmed the back of it for a minute. He knew his eyes were soft, but no one else was here to see them, so that was all right. “The nobility bothers me, but at least it makes you do something other than the bare minimum.”
“Ah.” Harry leaned into his touch, his eyes and smile bright. “So your main problem with her is that she’s not ambitious.”
“You can be ambitious in different ways. I didn’t need her to run for Minister. I just needed her to care about something other than living from day-to-day.”
“I see. Well, I can’t pretend that I’m very sorry for her. Because it means that I have a chance with you, which I wouldn’t if you were contentedly married to your soulmate. Or dating her, or whatever.”
“I would have given her up for a chance to have you.”
Harry only shook his head as if he knew something Draco didn’t, which was annoying. But for the moment, he was content to leave it alone, because Harry kissed the center of his palm and then stood up as an ethereal white owl came fluttering through the window.
“I think that’ll be Luna’s special edition of the Quibbler.”
Draco settled back with a faint frown. He hoped that he’d convinced Harry, but he didn’t know that he had. Although he supposed it wasn’t very important whether Harry believed that Draco would have left his soulmate for him, as long as he believed that Draco wanted to be here.
Harry was chuckling at the story on the front page. With an effort, Draco interested himself in a story that he fully expected to be filled with references to nonexistent magical creatures. Harry turned the paper so he could read.
MINISTRY FILLED WITH WRACKSPURTS THAT MAKE THEM KILL BABIES!
Draco choked. Yes, all right, the headline referenced a nonexistent magical creature, but he hadn’t expected such a bold and uncompromising presentation of the case. He was sure that Doge’s article would say something different. He took the paper away—Harry didn’t protest, but went back to eating—and read it.
Yes, it is true, dear readers. I, Luna Lovegood, have learned that certain Wrackspurts have entered the Ministry and infected generations of Ministers into believing that people born without soul-marks are dangerous. They’re apparently all Dark Lords. Even though you know as well as I that Dark Lords are extremely powerful and sadistic wizards. It’s strange for more than one to appear in fifty years.
The Ministry, because of suspicions that are much older than that, killed one or two babies who might have become Dark Lords, and thousands more who were babies. Only babies. They were all listed as having died of a heart attack before their first birthday. What are the odds of that? Our own dear Harry Potter might have been among them, if not for the accident of the war and parents who were in hiding, and Ministry people who didn’t know what they were looking at with his birth records.
In the meantime, some rogue Nargles who are disgusted at the antics of the Wrackspurts have provided me with some proof.
Draco turned the page and had to admit his jaw dropped when he stared at the copies of the birth records printed neatly on the next two pages. They named pure-blood babies, from old families like the Selwyns, who were all listed as having no soul-mark and the same cause of death.
“How did she get these?” Draco whispered.
“Didn’t you pay attention?” Harry looked up from the toast with his eyebrows arched. “The Nargles, of course.”
Draco scowled at him and flipped back to the article. Lovegood concluded with an air of superiority that was practically dripping off the page.
These birth certificates could have been those of Harry Potter, you remember me saying? Well, Harry Potter was born without a soul-mark. The lightning bolt scar was never the sign of his soul-mark or even concealing it, but the sign of where Voldemort marked him, the same way that that prophecy said. He’ll be presenting in public in two days, and you can ask him yourself.
Draco turned the paper over, but no, the next article was a breathlessly serious report about how the French Ministry had been taken over by something called the Goldspot Plague that made all the people who talked to Lovegood burst out in giggles. He laid down the paper and stared at Harry.
Harry ignored him for a minute, then looked up and added, “What?”
“She didn’t say where you would be making your speech.”
“Do you want the Wrackspurts to find out?”
Draco aimed his wand along the side of the table, which made Harry roll his eyes and mumble something about how he just didn’t understand Luna’s genius, which made Draco cast a Stinging Hex, which made Harry raise a tiny stone wall with a gesture of his palm that deflected the hex. Draco blinked and leaned forwards to stare at the wall, momentarily distracted. “Where did that come from? Not the stone of the floor.”
“No. I conjured it.”
“Out of what?”
“Air. Magic. The earth that’s always running somewhere.” Harry shrugged. “Where do the things you conjure come from? There’s probably a small pile of rocks somewhere that’s missing a few pebbles.”
Draco shook his head and put aside the magical theory he wanted to debate for the moment, if a little regretfully. “Why didn’t she announce it?”
“Do you want the Ministry to find out?” Harry grinned sharply. “The word is going to spread among the Harryheads and some of those people who know to owl Luna directly. And some of the people who attended that meeting Doge organized, I suspected. They’ll find out soon enough, and when I appear, the Aurors won’t know.”
“Unless some of them owl Lovegood,” said Draco, and scowled. He couldn’t deny that Lovegood made a valuable ally, but he could wish that she wasn’t in charge of such an important part of their strategy. “Did you think about that?”
“She has a charm that will detect harm towards me,” said Harry, and gave a small, pleased smile. “I bound it to a pebble for her.”
”When?”
Harry raised his eyebrows. “Yesterday. While you were complaining to Ron and Hermione that they weren’t doing enough to advertise my knowledge of earth magic and lecturing them about why they shouldn’t refer to me as ‘soulless.’”
Draco scowled. Yes, they had met yesterday to discuss some more strategy, and perhaps he had spent time informing Weasley and Granger of why they were going about some of the steps the wrong way. But that was a long way from complaining the way Harry said he had. And a long way from missing something this important.
“You should have told me.”
“Maybe I would have, if you could stop criticizing Ron’s hair for two minutes.”
“I criticized a lot more than his hair!”
“Yes, but that was one of the things. And what does that matter next to his strategy or the way that we can use the Weasleys’ reputation as war heroes to make people agree it would be a good thing to support me?” Harry shrugged. “I think that you need to learn to pay more attention to what’s going on around you, Draco.”
Draco narrowed his eyes. Then he said, “There’s a reason that you didn’t tell me, isn’t there?” The man he was listening to now, the one who could plan things like this, would have dragged Draco into the conversation he’d had with Lovegood unless he had a reason for keeping him out.
“Yes,” Harry said calmly, and then grinned at him. “It has to do with the fact that you would have decided it was too dangerous for me to appear in front of a crowd, even if it was a location that they would only know about a short time before the speech. We didn’t want to deal with your complaining, so Hermione and I planned that out when you got into that argument with Ron.”
Draco closed his eyes and bit his lip until he could feel it getting ready to split under his teeth. “You don’t have to manipulate me like that. I would have listened to you. I wouldn’t have liked it, but I would have listened to you.”
He opened his eyes to find Harry’s intensely skeptical gaze fixed on him, and bristled. “I mean it!”
“Right,” Harry drawled. “Anyway, it’s planned now. And Luna has that pebble I enchanted for her.”
“How in the world could you enchant a pebble to—what? Tell if someone’s really a secret Auror?”
Harry shook his head. “To tell if someone’s planning to betray me. All they need to do is write the letter with that intention in mind, and the pebble, which is linked to me because I spent so much time working with it and holding it, will pick it up when Luna passes it over the ink.”
Draco leaned forwards a little, staring. Harry didn’t seem to realize why, and gave him a placid look back as he reached for his tea. “What?”
“How did you enchant the pebble to tell her?” Draco whispered. He might understand whether Harry’s achievement was of the magnitude he thought it was when he heard this answer.
“It’ll flash different colors and make a sound like a horse’s neigh,” said Harry, and grinned a little. “Luna said that was the sound Wrackspurts make. I couldn’t deny her. It was a simple enough request to grant.”
Draco shivered. If the spell had been only one of those things, changing colors or making a noise, then he might have thought it wasn’t that remarkable. But to have both… “Do you know how wonderful that is, Harry? To be able to infuse a piece of elemental magic with not only loyalty to you that enables it to distinguish loyalty or not to you in other people, but to make it able to give multiple warnings?”
“Um, it wasn’t that hard.” Harry shook his head and sipped again, his fingers flitting for a moment as though he wanted to play with the handle but thought that would be bad manners. “I held the pebble for a while and thought about what I wanted it to do, and then I infused it with some of my will and magic. That’s it.”
“Still remarkable,” Draco said, and leaned across the table to kiss him. Harry still seemed a little puzzled, but accepted the kiss willingly enough. Draco pulled back only when Harry’s tongue began lapping at his and he suspected he would lose track of his purpose soon. “And I suppose I can’t blame you for keeping part of that from me. I’ve kept some things from you, like the identity of my soulmate.”
“I assumed you had a reason for keeping it secret.”
“I’m ashamed of her.” Draco raked a hand through his hair and shrugged. “But maybe someday I’ll tell you.”
Harry grinned suddenly. “You don’t have to offer that as a bargaining piece, you know. The only reason I kept this from you was because you would have complained. I’ll tell you in the future. And that doesn’t rely on you telling me things.”
Draco closed his eyes a little. If someone had told him years ago, when he had made his final rejection of his weak soulmate, that someday he would care for someone who had the dangerous weakness of magnanimity, he would have snorted. He couldn’t think of something much less appealing.
Now, he could see the appeal. Now his hands trembled and his mouth filled with saliva, and he was only sorry that they were supposed to see Harry’s friends this morning, so that he couldn’t drag Harry to the floor and have him right now.
He opened his eyes and said, “Now we just need to make sure that all the protections possible are in place when we go to Hogsmeade.”
Harry inclined his head. His eyes were brilliant and sharp, as if he could follow all the twists and turns of Draco’s mind and still approved of them. “Let’s start on that. And continue your education in earth magic.”
Yes, he was meant for me, no matter what soul-marks really mean.
*
SP777: The wizarding world doesn't have a lot of other celebrities, so with Harryheads it's probably more like 99.9999%. ;)
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The Rising of the Stones