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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 Three—The Full Moon
            “Hermione says,” said Ron, and then paused and took a drink of pumpkin juice as if that would keep him from saying something he regretted.
            “Hermione says what?” Harry asked, and did his best to smile and speak in a relaxed voice, so Ron wouldn’t think he was annoyed by the interruption. Yes, Harry had been reading the book of rites, as best as he could when half the words were still missing from the full moon ritual, at breakfast, but he’d already had to pause because he’d dripped honey or butter or tea on the pages.
            “She says that she should be back even earlier than she expected. She says.” Ron cleared his throat and rattled the letter he held. For an instant, Harry thought Ron would let him read it, but Ron had been pretty private with Hermione’s letters, and Harry thought she was just writing to him, not to Harry. It didn’t bother him, particularly. When Hermione had left, Harry had been so heavily under Shadow’s influence that he hadn’t even shown up at the Portkey site to bid her good-bye. “She said something to me.”
            “Yes?” Harry asked quietly, encouragingly. He reached out and played with the teapot for a second. Neville was simultaneously trying to read a Herbology book and give both of them his own encouraging glances.
            “She proposed to me.”
            For a second, Harry was sure that he couldn’t have heard correctly. Then he set his book down and gaped at Ron. Ron stared back with red cheeks, moving one hand as though he thought Harry would snatch the letter out of his hand and he was determined to protect the actual words Hermione had written.
            “Really, mate? That’s wonderful!” Harry leaned over to shake his hand, and then, because that didn’t seem enough with such momentous news in the wind, to pound him on the back. Ron’s face was flaming by now, but he accepted the congratulations. Harry grinned at him. “Were you surprised because you were going to propose to her first?”
            Ron looked down at the letter and shook his head. “I never—I mean, I knew I wanted to marry her, of course, but I never anticipated that it would be like this, you know? I thought we were going to wait until after we were out of Hogwarts to get married.” Then he cleared his throat. “I mean, I suppose we technically still will. But even the proposal I thought was going to wait.”
            “Hermione knows what she wants,” Neville said from the side, making Ron start and turn around. He seemed to have thought that nobody but Harry had listened to what he was saying. “Congratulations, Ron, really. If anyone should be together, then it’s you two.” He leaned out with one hand extended.
            Ron hesitated for one second, and then grabbed Neville’s wrist and pumped furiously. “Yeah, thanks,” he said.
            “I’m glad someone knows what they want,” said Ginny from a little further down the table. “How much longer were you going to dance around her, Ron?”
            As Ron spluttered and tried to answer, Harry examined Ginny carefully. But no, she wasn’t looking at him, and she didn’t sound spiteful. She was just grinning at Ron, excited. Good. Harry was glad that she didn’t think Harry should have proposed to her, or anything. Or at least, it didn’t sound as if she thought it.
            Harry just didn’t think that would happen, now. He was figuring out what he wanted, but he wasn’t sure yet.
            He hoped the rites would help him determine it.
            As he turned back to his book, he happened to see Malfoy looking over from the Slytherin table. Malfoy gave him a significant glance, and Harry grinned back and tipped his head at Ron before he thought about it.
            Malfoy relaxed, picked up what looked to be a cup of coffee, and turned back to the chatter of the Slytherin table as if nothing had happened.
            And nothing did, really, Harry told himself, with a sharp shake of his head. I mean, maybe Malfoy just wanted to know what the fuss was about.
            As he turned back to the book, equally sharp prickles danced up and down his spine, making him wonder how he could be so sure that it wasn’t just that, and why it mattered.
            Maybe that’s something else the rite will tell me.
*
            Harry stopped cautiously on the edge of the lake, and looked around curiously. Malfoy had told Harry to meet him here at moonrise, but Harry didn’t see him yet. Only the water, flooded by moonlight.
            Malfoy had also told Harry not to bring any ritual tools. He had said that he would organize everything. When Harry had asked why that was—he had vaguely thought that Light wizards should be especially powerful during the full moon, which meant he would have to bring a lot—Malfoy had said, “Correspondences. I’m a Dark wizard, I conduct the Dark rite, and it requires more preparation during a time of such light. But a Light wizard gets his power from the sky.”
            Harry looked up at the moon. He had never paid that much attention to it during most of his life, except after his third year when he had started to pay attention to it because he would be thinking about Remus. But what did it mean, really? What did it mean for him?
            “I’ll show you what it means.”
            Harry started and turned around. It was sort of creepy that Malfoy had reached out and heard his thoughts, or maybe he had just seen what Harry was thinking from his posture and the position of his head. Or used Legilimency from a distance? Although Harry thought even Snape would have had to be looking into his eyes.
            But the minute he saw Malfoy, he calmed down. Malfoy was carrying a heavy silver bag over one arm, and he set it down beside him and nodded. Standing like that, with the moonlight splayed across his face like the touch of a loving hand, he was Draco again. Harry found an easy smile, and then the smile found him, and there was no forcing about it.
            “What do we do first?” he asked. “That ritual was half-complete, which is better than some of them without you, but.”
            “Everything is better with me, Pot—Harry,” said Draco, and smiled at him as he bent down and undid the clasps of the bag. Harry cocked his head, curious. It looked a lot like one of the big purses that some of the elderly Muggle ladies Harry had seen carried, especially around Privet Drive. There was a huge set of handles, and it might have swallowed up half the grounds without trouble. “First, this.”
            Draco took out a single thick black candle, and set it in front of him. He glanced around for a moment as though estimating distance and other things Harry couldn’t imagine, then nodded and reached out with one easy, slashing motion of his hand. The candle lit, although Harry hadn’t seen the spell he cast.
            He blinked. “How did you do that?”
            Draco looked up at him. “You don’t feel it?”
            Harry breathed in for a second. “I smell it.” Yes, a thick scent that he’d never experienced before was coming to life around them, a scent that mingled pines and fresh-cut grass. And then it changed and moved again, like the scent of Amortentia, and he thought he smelled rain.
            “Yes,” said Draco. “I’m not surprised that it would manifest to you through another sense. Light and Dark wizards.” It sounded mild, an explanation, not a protest or a justification. He bent down and lit another candle beside the black one. This one was white. “Now. Watch me. You’ll know where to come in for your part of the rite.”
            He closed his eyes and began softly to breathe. Harry watched him, blinking and wondering what would happen next. He was drifting into a sort of trance, he thought, although Draco was the one who was breathing in the careful, controlled pattern. The soft, soothing sounds were echoing the pace of his own heartbeat, and Harry would have thought, if someone asked him, that he would have fallen over and died if his heartbeat was that slow.
            But he didn’t. He was breathing the pattern of the winds, he thought, of the rolling lake. And of the light falling from the moon, although of course he didn’t know how to see it radiating from the moon in any pattern.
            There was the pattern, though. Harry found that he did know the moment Draco meant, the exact moment to step forwards and interfere. He moved his foot forwards and snuffed the light from the white candle with his boot.
            The moonlight flared around them, a shimmering sphere. Or half a sphere. Harry realized he was standing inside the white half of it, large enough to surround him completely, and looking towards Draco.
            There, the sphere was completed. A black half had joined it, and Draco held out his hands. The black candle floated between them, although if it was still burning, Harry couldn’t see it. Instead, a ball of pure night seemed to hover above it, absorbing the light but letting through the moonshine that formed the other half of the sphere.
            “I acknowledge the dark side of the moon,” Draco whispered, “the side never seen by human eyes, but always present, always influencing the light.”
            From the silver bag, moving as if suspended on invisible strings, rose a swaying object that Harry’s eyes at first refused to see properly. Or maybe it was passing through shadows and he couldn’t see it properly. Either way, it swayed the other direction, and Harry recognized it this time.
            A choked noise escaped his throat.
            It was one of the silver instruments from Dumbledore’s office, the ones that Harry had smashed so many of in his temper tantrum three years ago. It spun softly on its axis as it passed into the center of the sphere, exactly halfway between them. It paused there, but continued to spin as it hovered.
            Then something else rose out of the silver bag. Harry strained his eyes. It was a replica of his Invisibility Cloak, translucent, so that it didn’t make what it passed in front of invisible. It swayed beside the silver instrument.
            After that came something soft and shining and flame-colored. This didn’t have a recognizable shape. It moved between the silver instrument and the cloak, and they let it come. It hung there, unmoving. Harry squinted and tried to will it to become a phoenix or something, but it never did. It was content to be itself, apparently.
            “The symbol of your past regret,” Draco whispered. “Of your present desire. Of your future hopes.”
            The silver instrument made sense, Harry supposed. He had a lot of regrets concerning Dumbledore. But he didn’t understand the other two. He shook his head. “I don’t want to hide,” he muttered. “I want to face up to what’s coming.”
            “It might mean that you’re hidden by Shadow.” Draco’s voice was uncertain now, not the firm tone he had spoken in when announcing what the images represented, and Harry stole a glance at him. His face looked endearing like that, with wide eyes and a bitten lip as he squinted at the images floating in the center of the circle. “Or something. I don’t know.” He sneaked a glance at Harry as if thinking that would make him storm off in disgust.
            “It’s all right,” said Harry, and smiled at him. “And the fire?”
            “I think that your future could be bright, but it’s undefined,” Draco said, and he had gone back to sounding confident again. “You haven’t molded the fire into a shape yet. Given that you’re trying to recover from Shadow, that makes sense.”
            Harry nodded. It did. And in the meantime… “What about you?”
            Draco lifted the black candle and puffed on the ball of night hovering above the wick for an answer. Harry thought he saw it bulge and ripple, and something small and almost unnoticeable pass from it to the silver satchel sitting beside Draco. In a second, three images had arisen from the bag and were tracing shimmering trails of grey back and forth across each other.
            Draco’s face looked strained. He closed his eyes. Harry wondered if he was afraid of what the images would form into, and almost stepped across the circle to comfort him, but fear of disturbing the rite kept him in place.
            The images finally settled opposite the ones that Harry had conjured, hovering themselves, and then burst into soundless explosions of black and grey. When Harry could see them again, he blinked and stared.
            One of them, the one that stood opposite the silver instrument and so probably embodied Draco’s past, was a very familiar shape, the sooty snake and skull of the Dark Mark. Harry caught Draco’s eye, and nodded. There was no need to explain that one. And he hadn’t explained his own curious image to Draco, anyway, so it was only equal treatment.
            The one opposing the Cloak was a wand. A hawthorn wand that Harry had an acquaintance with, in fact. He whistled softly. “Do you want to tell me why you’re afraid of your wand?” he asked.
            “I’m not afraid of it,” said Draco. “But it shows my struggle with my own magic. My wand didn’t adapt easily to coming back to me, you know. It struggled, and fought, and it—why am I telling you this?”
            Harry glanced across the circle again. Draco had his face buried in one hand, and the other hand raking through his hair as if he hoped to smooth it down that way.
            “It’s okay,” Harry said quietly. “Would it help if I dueled you for it or something? Would the wand switch its allegiance back to you?”
            Draco blinked, Harry could see from the motion of his eyes from the side, but didn’t respond for a long moment. Then he turned and faced Harry instead, cocking his head.
            “You’re so different from what I thought you were,” he breathed. “Even knowing that these rites usually open the Dark and Light wizard to each other if they—if they do them properly, I didn’t expect this.”
            Harry smiled. “Well, so far this rite doesn’t seem as intimate as the last one,” he admitted, and looked at the image that represented Draco’s future, ignoring the mutter Draco gave that sounded like, “Just wait.”
            The softly shimmering globe that turned in the place of the future image made Harry wonder if it was a magical artifact for a second, but if it was, it didn’t resemble one that he’d seen before. It was black and gold, and it was—
            Oh. It was the sphere of light and darkness that enclosed him and Draco, only in miniature. He turned back to Draco, his skin softly prickling again the way it had before the rite.
            Draco steadfastly avoided his eyes. But Harry put his hands together and clapped them softly, and Draco glanced at him before he could stop himself.
            “It’s all right,” said Harry. “If your future is part of these rites, if you want…” He paused, not even knowing how to name the thoughts that were flashing through his head. “If you want to be with me beyond the ending of these rites,” he finally said, “I wouldn’t object to that.”
            Draco swung to face him, his eyes wide and his face blazing with some emotion that Harry didn’t think had a name. Or maybe it didn’t have a name for him, because he had never seen something like that in Draco Malfoy’s face before. He extended a hand, and Draco moved forwards this time, across the middle of the circle, and clasped it. The images disappeared with a soft pop as he did so.
            Harry shivered. The touch of Draco’s hand on his own should have been warm, he thought, but instead it felt cool, as though the full moon had infected Draco’s skin with its own coldness. He drew Draco nearer, one arm around his shoulders and one around his waist, and Draco let himself be drawn, his eyes as wide and his face as soft as though he was dreaming.
            When they were close enough to each other that Draco’s hips bumped his, Harry found out what Draco had meant about a Light wizard not having to do as much preparation for this rite.
            The air around Harry shimmered, softened, transformed. He knew he was standing next to the lake with Draco beside him, but he was also soaring, floating, above the ground, speeding over the Forbidden Forest. All he had to do was half-lid his eyes, and the sounds of the lapping water on the shore faded. He heard the rustle of leaves instead, and felt something soft and warm in his hand.
            Draco’s hand.
            This time, it was warm, the way it should be. And when Harry looked off to the side, he found Draco flying beside him, his face turning towards Harry and his smile so bright that it was like a second moon.
            Draco would never be a Light wizard. But that didn’t keep him from shining with a light of his own.
            The image, or vision, or whatever it was, wrapped them for so long that Harry nearly thought he was there, drifting on the wind like a bird, without a broom, above the Forbidden Forest, and holding Draco by the hand, and hearing the leaves rustle and the lazy birds chirp and Draco’s heart and his own beat. But then the vision faded, and they were standing on the grass again, close together.
            It should have been awkward.
            It wasn’t.
            Harry studied Draco’s chest in front of him, the slight ripple his heartbeat made under the cloth of his shirt, and the only unnatural thing about it to him was that he couldn’t hear Draco’s heartbeat as easily as he’d been to a short time ago. Then Draco reached down, slid a gentle hand around his jaw, and tilted his head back.
            Harry went with it. Dimly, he knew that a short time ago, he would have shivered at the thought of Draco Malfoy having him by the throat in such a way. But this wasn’t a short time ago, and he met Draco’s eyes without fear.
            Draco leaned down towards him. His eyes were enormous, gleaming, in the moonlight. Harry held still, not sure what was going to happen. He knew Draco must have shared the vision, or a similar one, or he probably would have asked Harry why he was standing there and staring at Draco like an idiot.
            “Where did you get all those images?” Harry blurted out.
            He regretted it a second later. Draco sprang back from him as though some sweet tension between them had been snapped, some support that was keeping him on his feet. He folded his arms and turned away from Harry, kicking at the ground for a moment. He sent a clump of grass flying, and shivered.
            “I just want to know how you knew what to bring if you didn’t know how the images would come out,” Harry pursued, hating the way his voice sounded thin and reedy, but also knowing that he might as well go on and try to get the answers, now that he was here. “I mean—you said you brought lots of things in the bag, but you didn’t say that they would turn into those. How could you know what they would turn into?”
            Draco took a deep breath, and answered. “I brought what the rite said to bring. It’s a collection of feathers, stones, metal—all sorts of natural things—that can take on the form of the images when the rite starts. The rite transforms. It transforms darkness into light, and the other way around.” He faced Harry, his arms folded and his face as stubborn as a bull’s. “I don’t know how that happened. That’s part of the mystery of the rite.”
            Harry nodded hesitantly. “You—you were going to—” He stopped. He didn’t know how to name what Draco had been going to do to him.
            “This is another reason that I had to show you, and not tell you,” Draco whispered fiercely. “We’ve been in each other’s souls, as the first rite said. Did you think I could go unaffected by that? Did you think you could?”
            Harry took a step back, unnerved by the intensity in Draco’s voice. “I didn’t really know what would happen,” he confessed, shaking his head. “You forget how new all of this is to me. I—I thought that we would become friends. Or teacher and student. And that was before I knew that Dark and Light wizards could perform the rites together. I thought you would point me in the right direction and pat me on the shoulder and send me off.”
            “No.” Draco’s smile was light and merciless. “Of course not.” He took a step back towards Harry, who found himself tight, thrumming, with fear and excitement. “It’s going to be more intimate than that. Always. Sometimes people become siblings in spirit, and sometimes they become friends for the rest of their lives. If there’s a big age gap between them, then yes, they might become master and apprentice.” He took a breath that seemed to draw in some of the moonlight that hovered around them. “But it isn’t going to be that way with us, is it, Harry?” From the slight choke in his voice, Harry thought he had tried to say “Potter” there, but the sheer intensity of the situation wouldn’t let him. “We can’t let the tension between us explode any other way. We’re going to be lovers. You know it. I know it.”
            “I didn’t know it until just now,” Harry said, with absolute truth. “I—that’s why you’re angry. Because you thought I knew and leaped back on purpose when you were going to kiss me.”
            “Yes,” said Draco, and relaxed the way Harry had sometimes seen birds do, smoothing down all his feathers. “You didn’t know?”
            “I hadn’t the slightest suspicion,” Harry said hoarsely. His whole world was his heartbeat, and Draco’s gaze.
            Draco held his eyes challengingly. “And are you going to back out now?”
            “How can I?” Harry asked honestly. He hadn’t the slightest idea, not when he could feel the curve, the deep thrum, of the passion around them, calling them on. “I couldn’t give up the rites. And I can’t give you up.”
            Draco stood gazing into his eyes for long enough that a cloud went over the moon. Then he bowed and turned slowly, picking up the silver bag and carrying it towards the castle again.
            Harry watched him go this time, not trying to catch up and walk beside him. He had a lot to think about.
            Including what would happen.
            But what he had said was true. He wasn’t going to back off, because he needed this.
            And wanted it, he thought, and although he wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, not even Draco, he walked back to the castle thrumming with desire.
*
ChaosLady: It’s supposed to symbolize joining. And yes, the joining will be sexual.
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The Splendor Is Waiting