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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-Eight—A Formal Punishment
“This is going to hurt, Mr. Potter, so you’ll want to be prepared.”
Harry only closed his eyes and shrugged with his good shoulder, as if to say he had endured pain like this before and could take it. Draco rolled his eyes and moved up beside him, in case Harry needed him. They were in a small room in the Hog’s Head. Lovegood was still setting up the wizardspace tent where Harry would speak in a few minutes.
Draco found himself peculiarly comforted that the walls were made of stone. It wasn’t something he would have noted as more than an incidental detail before, but at least now he knew Harry could move fast to get out of the building.
Harry’s free hand reached out to squeeze his arm, and Draco dipped his head in brief acknowledgment, even though he knew Harry hadn’t read his thoughts. To him, it meant that Harry would take both of them out of danger, no matter how he had to do it.
“Now,” said the Healer, whose hands had been flitting over Harry’s arm. She was a tall woman with grey hair and stern hazel eyes that reminded Draco, except for the color, of his mother’s. She nodded a little and then reached out and braced her feet. Harry closed his eyes and sucked in his breath.
The Healer gave a mighty yank on the broken arm at the same time as she cast a wordless spell. Harry cried out wordlessly, too, his head bowing and his shoulders hunching with such pain that Draco found himself stroking them helplessly. Harry shot him an exhausted smile and closed his eyes.
“That should do it.”
Draco gave a quick glance at Harry’s—perhaps formerly—broken arm. To a casual glance, it didn’t look different. “What did you do?” he asked, turning to stare at the woman, who gave him a faint smile.
“I merely made sure that he had a sturdy enough bone for me to create a new bridge in the middle of it,” the Healer said. “A bridge made of calcium and magic, which is going to hold the shattered pieces of the bone in suspension for a time, and then encourage them to grow together quickly. It should be back to normal in a day’s time.”
Draco wanted to ask why it would take so long, when he knew that Healers could often cure a broken bone with the tap of a wand, but then he remembered the length of time since Harry had shattered the bone, and how bad the magical backlash had been. He closed his mouth and gave a faint nod.
The Healer departed, with a parting comment about how much she was looking forward to Harry’s speech that Harry didn’t really pay attention to. He was sunk into himself, his breathing as soft as if he was meditating.
“Harry?”
“I’m all right. Just making sure that I could feel the magic in my arm the way I could before it broke.” Harry smiled a little as he opened his eyes. “Another thing Hail taught me. The earth magic is only as strong as the body that contains it. If I become weaker for some reason, then I can’t channel as much.”
Draco raised his eyebrows. “That’s why you were sweating trying to contain the Aurors the other evening at Luna’s house.”
“Yes. And thank you for calling her Luna.”
“Well, since she started using my first name I felt I had to use hers.”
Harry raised his eyebrows so high Draco felt he was missing something, but he didn’t understand until Harry said quietly, “I meant, instead of Loony. Or any of the other degrading nicknames that people have given her over the years.”
Draco shrugged. He hadn’t known how much it would mean to Harry, since it wasn’t like he had mentioned it recently. “I still stand by what I said. She’s giving me some respect, and some informality at the same time. And she’s done a lot for us. It would feel…ungrateful to call her a stupid nickname after that.”
Harry scanned him as if he was trying to find secrets hidden underneath Draco’s expression like gems hidden in a mine. Then he smiled and laid his hand over Draco’s, squeezing lightly.
“Thank you anyway,” he repeated, and then walked out of the Hog’s Head towards the edge of the village. Draco shook his head and followed. Sometimes he knew exactly what Harry was thinking and feeling, without him having to explain it.
And then again, there were times that he didn’t.
*
“Thank you for coming to Harry Potter’s speech about his lack of a soul-mark, everyone.”
Draco winced a little—Lovegood’s introductions were as painfully honest and awkward as always—and let his gaze wander around the tent for a moment. It was a huge one, pale blue and glittering transparently above them where the sunlight came in. The crowd in front of them was a huge one, too, shifting back and forth and muttering rebelliously to each other about who knew what. Draco could recognize Aurors he knew in that crowd, although not in their robes, and some of the Harryheads, and people who had been in the crowd Doge had gathered to listen to Harry’s first “speech.”
He kept a sharp eye on the Aurors he knew, making sure they weren’t standing too close together or moving in strategic patterns that could signal an attack. Yes, perhaps he was paranoid, but he honestly didn’t trust anyone who worked that closely with de Berenzan and hadn’t broken away on their own yet. Lovegood could if she wanted, Harry would welcome them with open arms, but someone had to be the sensible one of the group.
Harry waited near the back of the tent, out of sight for the moment behind Lovegood, who was floating around on an enchanted, flat disk of wood. Draco glanced at him again to find his head bowed and his lips moving.
He’ll do better than he gives himself credit for.
Draco watched Harry open his eyes and turn his head as if he had heard him. He smiled a little. Lack of soul-mark or not, it seemed he and Harry connected at times at a fundamental level. More than Draco could imagine ever connecting with anyone else.
More than I did with her.
But his failure of a soulmate was not someone he needed to think about right now, watching Harry rub his hands together and then turn to face the front of the room as Lovegood's speech built up to a climax.
"...And since someone has to stand up to the Ministry and its killing of markless babies, and standing up to someone has always been his role, I give you Harry Potter!"
Harry ran forwards and leaped up onto the wooden platform beside Lovegood. Draco thought he might be the only one who noticed the slight surge of magic that bolstered Harry as he did that, a push that made the stone more flexible beneath his feet. He smiled and leaned back against the wall, rejoicing in a secret he possessed that no one else did.
"Thank you for coming today," Harry said, and the Sonorus Lovegood must have cast on him overpowered the cheers and yells and swoons from the crowd. "I know you came to hear me tell you why we have to oppose the Ministry and take de Berenzan down--"
Not even Harry Potter could have made his voice heard in the mess of the next minute, Draco judged. The screaming, the yelling, the stomping of feet and clapping of hands and waving of badges from the Harryheads, simply made it impossible. Harry waited for a second, his head bowed and his hand poised like he was going to command the stones.
He went on the instant they had to pause to take a breath. "But I need to talk about something else more important, too. Something I never knew about growing up."
"What?" someone called so eagerly that Draco would have thought they were a plant, except he knew Harry had no need of that to make people pant after his answers.
Harry smiled, a gentle, sorrowful smile. "Soul-marks don't mean perfect romances," he said. "I always thought they did. I grew up knowing people who were soulmates and had perfect marriages. I always heard about my parents having that kind of marriage, too, and I knew they had the same mark. But I think now that I was simply lucky in the stories I heard."
The crowd went silent completely, craning up their heads. Draco, meanwhile, muffled his snort. Lucky? Or selectively blind?
"I could have looked around at any time and seen there were plenty of people who didn't have perfect romances," Harry said steadily, echoing Draco's thoughts so closely that he jumped. "Or people whose soulmates had died, or who never met them, or who spent all their time pining for someone whose mark they didn't share and never would. People in other Houses and other experiences.
"I never once thought I wouldn't find my soulmate with the same mark as me and the same soul as me and in Gryffindor. I never thought to look beyond that. If my scar was hiding my mark, then all I had to do was defeat Voldemort and I would know who it was." Harry grinned a little. "That was one of my main motivations for fighting him, you know. Defeat him and I would finally know who I was supposed to be in love with."
Draco cocked his head. He would have made fun of this a short time ago, but now it only sounded desperate. Sad.
And not in a way that he needed to mock.
The crowd seemed to agree with him. They were certainly hanging on Harry's every word.
"And then I realized that I was losing my magic, and that I would either have to admit I didn't have a soul-mark, or spend the rest of my life pretending I did." Harry blew out a slow breath. "I didn't like those choices. I spent as long as I could studying soul-marks and trying to find some way out of the trap.
"I didn't find one. Instead, I found that the Ministry had been murdering all the people like me they could get their hands on--another reason that I didn't even think about what being without a mark or a soulmate would mean.
"That enraged me. But it also made me feel like I was wrong and they were right. People had called me a Dark Lord before. What if I had those some tendencies? What if sometimes babies without marks did get spared and grow up to become horrible people?"
Draco hid his growl. They hadn't discussed this portion of the speech at all! Trust Harry to go and mess up a carefully-laid plan!
But from the enraptured expressions of the Harryheads when Draco leaned out to see what they were doing, it looked like it was working. And even the Aurors and Healers and other people Draco could recognize in the audience were at least frowning instead of screaming.
"I spent a long time thinking I was soulless," said Harry quietly, shaking his fringe out of his eyes. "Almost certain of it, in fact. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure why I was so certain. No one ever told me that someone missing a soul-mark would be missing a soul, just like no one ever told me that soulmates would always have perfect romances. I assumed that. And people told me about soulmates without the word 'always.'"
That's because the he only people he knew were ignorant Gryffindors, Draco thought with a snort. Harry had said something about the Sorting Hat wanting to put him in Slytherin; Draco wished it had, if only because that might have cured Harry of some of his romance.
"I had to change my mind. Think about things. Reevaluate my priorities." Harry grimaced. "And even if that meant running away at first, well, it brought Draco into my life, and he was the one who taught me to rethink even more."
Harry turned to Draco, spreading out a hand, and at least they'd rehearsed this part and Draco knew what he was supposed to do. He sprang up lightly beside Harry on the platform and nodded to the watching crowd. A few Harryheads scowled, probably just now remembering he was dating Harry. Draco ignored them.
"I was the one able to tell Harry that it didn't make sense to assume he was soulless," said Draco, with a bland smile. "And the one able to get him to think about the consequences of opposing the Ministry."
"Do you think he should, then?" asked a man named Jasper Wentworth whom Draco called to mind after a few minutes of struggle. He had a drooping black mustache and had once worked for the Ministry as a secretary, before he quit in disgust about some scandal that Draco had never bothered to pay attention to.
“Of course he should,” Draco said, and even managed to keep his voice bland and his eyebrows low instead of rising up to touch his hairline. Where did the man think he was? “For the reason that he’s been talking about. The Ministry has been killing markless babies for who knows how many years—”
“Come off it, Malfoy. I know as well as you do that you don’t care about any of that.” Wentworth folded his arms and snorted. “I just mean that de Berenzan’s a good Minister, better than a lot we’ve had, and if we’re going to oppose him, we should have a better reason than—”
Draco didn’t mean to, but he laughed. Wentworth stopped speaking and stared at him. Draco sneered with one corner of his mouth. Then he said, “If you knew what I know about de Berenzan, then you couldn’t say that with a straight face.”
“Tell us, then!” That was a former Auror on the crowd, standing on his toes as if he thought that would help him divine Draco’s plan better. “If you know so much and you’re so politically wise!”
“de Berenzan is weak and frightened,” Draco said flatly. “He sent Aurors after me when he had no idea that I might have begun to oppose him, simply because I frightened him. He set me to chase the Boy-Who-Lived when he knew perfectly well that Harry didn’t have a soul-mark. He chose me on purpose. He hoped our old rivalry would make me refuse to question what I saw and heard, and I would just chase Harry down and bring him in without uncovering the truth.
“And two days ago, he tried to silence Miss Lovegood from speaking the truth in her articles.” He nodded to Lovegood, who gave a faint smile out over the heads of the crowd. “He would have nothing to fear if we were lying, would he?”
“He wouldn’t send Aurors to—”
“He did,” Lovegood said, and her voice was soft and earnest. “I can put the memories in a Pensieve if you want, so you can see them.”
Wentworth shut up, looking uncomfortable. Draco leaned forwards, and he knew he probably looked half-demented, but he found it hard to regret it. “Do you want to know any more, Wentworth?”
“That doesn’t sound like the de Berenzan I know.”
“It is,” said Harry, and his voice had the right touch of softness and sympathy. Draco would let him handle taking care of all these people who thought they knew better than Draco did. “He chased me when all I wanted was to leave the wizarding world behind. He was too afraid of what I might tell people about not having a soul-mark and exposing the Ministry’s treachery. And he kept being afraid. He sent Draco after me for the same reasons Draco’s already told you.”
“Why choose me of all Aurors to work Harry’s case?” Draco added. “He told me that he just wanted to know Harry was all right. But if Harry heard I was hunting him, he would be more distrustful and less likely to reveal himself to me. Who does that when they really want the Boy-Who-Lived back?”
“You can stop using the stupid title anytime.”
Draco assumed a saintly expression. No one else but Lovegood was close enough to hear Harry’s muttered aside, and Draco didn’t have to pay attention to it if he didn’t want to. “We can show you memories to convince you. Shall we do that?”
“We believe Harry!” shouted one of the Harryheads who had enormous dangling earrings, a picture of Harry’s face in the center of each shiny circle.
“Does that mean that you don’t believe me?” Draco asked mildly, and the witch stammered and backed down.
“We have all the Pensieves we need,” Lovegood intervened. “So we can show the truth to anyone who wants to see it.”
More than one of the former Aurors came forwards to look. Draco disregarded the fear that they might see something no one in their little resistance could explain. He knew that wasn’t true, so why did he have to worry about it?
Harry touched his arm, and Draco nodded. He was borrowing trouble from the future, the way Harry had when he wondered whether people would like his speech.
They had, and more than one person was staggering away from the Pensieves with a devastated but accepting expression. And Granger and Weasley and the Harryheads were traveling through the crowd of people who weren’t already true supporters, ready to explain anything that they wanted to hear.
And passing out copies of that little work written to convince Minister Bagnold to continue with the killings.
Draco smiled a little, and leaned back. He was going to bloody well enjoy their first taste of triumph.
*
SP777: I'm sure they have, but I don't knwo the titles of any off my head.
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The Rising of the Stones