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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.

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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirty--Knowledge Confirmed
"I fail to see why you're so upset about it."
Draco went with the instinct that served him the best in that moment, turning his shoulder towards Harry and wandering over to sit down at the breakfast table. A few sweeps of his wand Summoned bread and marmalade. He would have toasted it ordinarily, but this time, he simply spread the marmalade directly on and took a large bite.
"Because she's your soulmate," Harry said, hissing the word as if he'd never fancied having one for himself. "And because the papers are presenting me as the destroyer of this happy relationship."
Draco cocked his head and looked critically at him. "And that upsets you why? It's not as if you care about the opinions of people who would believe this nonsense."
Harry snorted loudly enough to make Draco flinch--he had to think about where those flying nose-droplets were going to end up--and slammed himself back from the table. "The same people whose opinions we're manipulating via the newspapers! Who knows how many we've lost? They already have a prejudice in favor of the Ministry! If they go back and believe that de Berenzan hasn't done anything so vile after all, because I'm an evil person, just like he said--"
"Calm the hell down," Draco said, without raising his own voice, which forced Harry to stop raising his. "The problem de Berenzan has is that he never advertised your lack of a soul-mark in the first place. Maybe he could have wooed some people to his side by pretending that your supposed Dark Lord nature was a problem, but did he do that? Of course not. Stop worrying about it."
"What do you think people are going to think, then?"
"That it's too little, too late." Draco took a huge bite of his bread, more to make a point than because he wanted it. "And among the people who know Rose Sheldon, there will be laughter that magic could ever have considered us fit mates of each other's souls."
"Who is she?"
Better. Harry at least sounded willing to listen this time. "A woman who works in the Ministry." Draco leaned back to look up at him. "She's passed information to me several times. In return, I brew her the potion she's addicted to."
Harry jumped as though Draco had cast the Lightning Curse at him. "You gave up on her because she was addicted to a potion?"
"Not so much that. I could have weathered that." Draco didn't say that he knew other potions that would force Rose into a sickness so deep whenever she took her preferred one that she'd never do it again. "But because she was weak enough to become addicted."
"You were one of the people providing it for her, though!"
"And if she'd been strong, she would have resisted."
Harry shook his head, eyes fastened on Draco as if he'd never seen him before. "You're attracted to me because of my strength?"
"It's one of the reasons." Draco leaned forwards, making sure to keep his hands in sight and his eyes utterly steady. Harry was going to understand him. "Not the only one, now. But at first? Yes. I was curious what kind of weakness could make you run and abandon your friends and the world that adored you. Then I began to wonder what kind of strengths you'd found to replace wand magic. Now I know how much else you've dealt with in your life, and it only makes sense that I'm in love with you."
Harry jerked with his mouth wide open like he was a snake poised to lunge with his fangs, and then he lowered his head. “You can’t mean that,” he whispered.
Pleased because the words had helped distract Harry—even though they were true—Draco raised his hands. “I’m serious,” he said calmly. “And I never even considered being with my soulmate once I learned what I did about her. It’s true that I never believed in the romantic nonsense like you did, but I was going against the pressure of social expectations even so. My parents are soulmates, you know.”
Harry looked down at the table, and then stiffened his spine as if he was pouring hot metal into it to harden. “What you did to her was still wrong.”
Draco rolled his eyes. “You can think of things that would have made your soulmate unacceptable to you, I’m sure. If they’d been a Death Eater and not repented? If they went around casually using the word ‘Mudblood’ in daily conversation? If they had tried to kill you in the past and expressed no remorse for it?”
Harry shook his head. To Draco, he looked as if he were struggling free of a choking fog. Draco would have admired that more if he wasn’t trying to create the choking fog himself. “But those are wrong in a different way.”
“Why?”
“I mean—some of those used to apply to you.”
“True. And if I was still that way, you wouldn’t have accepted me. Just as if you were addicted to a potion, and that turned out to be the source of your weakness in leaving the wizarding world behind, I wouldn’t have pursued you.”
“Draco, that’s awful.”
“Shall I apologize for having standards?”
Harry looked down at his hands again. Draco took the opportunity to get some actual bacon and porridge that he drizzled honey on. Explaining reality to someone who still had Gryffindor standards of morality was hungry work.
“I suppose,” Harry finally said, his words heavy, “what makes it different for me is that you sold her that potion. It would be one thing if you just didn’t want to be with her. Everyone needs to make that decision for themselves. But you sold it to her.” He looked up at Draco.
Draco swallowed a mouthful that was more honey than solid food, and put his spoon down. “For information I needed. And she had a lot of options, you know. She could have gone to the Ministry. That would certainly have got me in trouble along with her.”
Harry’s eyes widened a little. “You didn’t take precautions against that?”
“There were things I could have done if they tried to arrest me. Altered my Pensieve memories. Claimed that I didn’t brew the potion strong enough to make it illegal, and shown records of the ingredients I obtained to back that up. Even fallen back on the romance myth and said that I couldn’t bear not to give my soulmate what she desired.”
“But none of that is true.”
Draco rolled his eyes. “How many lies did you tell, Harry? By omission if nothing else? Please don’t tell me that this has changed your mind about me.” That came out as more of a plea than he liked, and he winced and shut his mouth, watching as Harry struggled.
“I suppose,” Harry finally said, softly, his words struggling along, “what—really gets me is that you were disgusted she succumbed to temptation. So you tempted her again and again. Why?” He shivered and met Draco’s eyes with determination.
“My incurable romanticism.”
“Draco.”
“I mean it. In some ways.” The ways that Draco didn’t mean it weren’t ways that he thought he could explain, anyway. “I wanted to give her more chances to prove herself. And when she never did, then I could feel less bad about my own decision to go against convention.”
“You’re hardly conventional.”
“But there was a time after the war when I thought about seeming that way. If I had been able to settle down with my soulmate, then it would have been another disguise that I could pull over me, another way to make people stop looking at me strangely.” Draco warmed his hands on the sides of the mug of tea that Harry had slid over to him. That made him feel smug, because sharing tea meant Harry was halfway to forgiving him. “I think you know something about that.”
“I wanted to find my soulmate because I thought I would have a perfect love with—her, I thought at the time.”
“And being exactly like everyone else didn’t have its charms?” Draco smiled a little as he watched the flush on Harry’s face deepen. “You didn’t think once that you wanted to have the perfect love that your parents and your friends had, that you would be normal if you had it—”
“That word is charged for me in ways you can’t understand,” Harry said flatly, but he was looking down at his hands, and Draco found it easiest to wait and see what happened. Harry finally looked up, the flush still fading out of his cheeks. “Of course I wanted that kind of thing. I told you that myself.”
Draco nodded. “Then you can understand the attraction. I thought it was possible Rose would change, for a while. I kept offering her the potion, and I thought she might refuse it. Sometimes I didn’t see her for months. That’s enough time to shake an addiction to the Lucid Dreaming Potion if one is determined enough.”
“The Lucid Dreaming Potion?” Harry was sitting back and looking all appalled again, Draco saw, swallowing a sigh. “Malfoy, that potion is foul!”
“Funny, the scent has always been extremely pleasant—”
“I mean that the way it changes and corrupts people is—” Harry struggled to find an adjective other than “foul,” Draco thought, sipping his tea again as he watched him. In some ways, Harry was still extremely conventional. “I know all about that potion. I watched a few Auror trainees succumb to it.”
Draco nodded. “I’m not denying that it’s powerful and addictive. I knew as much when I brewed it.”
Harry lifted his hands slowly to his face. “Why are you telling me this?” he whispered between his fingers.
“Because I want to make a clean breast of everything. I didn’t before, and de Berenzan managed to use Sheldon against us. If you know the worst about me, then you can’t be taken by surprise like this again.”
For a few moments, there was no sound but Harry breathing slowly, in a controlled way. Draco sipped his tea, and waited. Then Harry dropped his hands and looked at him. “I suppose you would say that I haven’t exactly obeyed the laws, either.”
Draco shrugged a little. “That doesn’t bother me. You acted to protect your life and make choices you can live with, and then some of the things you did were things I urged you to do. I don’t mind that you took the choices the Ministry left you with.”
Harry swallowed, and the tips of his ears turned pink. “It would be hypocritical of me to blame you for breaking the law, too—”
“Thank you—”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
Draco settled himself in the chair. He supposed he ought to have known this was going too smoothly. “What do you blame me for, then?”
“For constantly tempting someone who was struggling. For making things worse for her for no other reason than that you despised her.”
Harry met his gaze head-on when Draco leaned forwards. Draco didn’t intend to let that discourage him. “You have no real idea what you’re talking about, do you?” he asked in tones of soft contempt. “You did the same thing when you ran away like that. You were testing your friends. And at least I despise Sheldon. You don’t despise them.”
“What?” Harry recoiled, shaking his head. “I—I never intended to tempt them, or—make them hurt. I really intended to leave and not come back!”
“Then you would have burned or covered up the evidence more smoothly,” Draco countered. “You had Auror training, even if you never completed it. You know how to do that. Instead, you do this.”
“I did not want them to follow me!”
“Then it wasn’t a test, it was a punishment? You should have been able to trust your friends with this news, Potter. You should have known they would stand by you!”
“Why the hell are you calling me Potter?” Harry shoved himself back from the table.
“Because you called me Malfoy, before!”
“This is ridiculous.” Harry slammed his hand down into the middle of the table and stood there breathing like a hippogriff, his shoulders hunched. “I can’t believe that you’re acting as if I’m the one at fault when you tempted and taunted someone and then sat there feeling smug that they didn’t resist the temptation!”
“She should have,” said Draco. “She really bloody should have.”
“Even though you would have lost your source of information? Even though you were probably relieved that you didn’t have to acknowledge she was your soulmate?”
“Yes,” Draco said. “For the same reason everyone should be strong. For the same reason you shouldn’t curl up and let the Ministry take your life and freedom away. It’s the way things are.” He hesitated, and then said what he was thinking, in the spirit of not keeping things from Harry anymore. “If I came back from the brink, with everything against me, then she could do the same.”
“Not everyone has your inner will, Draco.” Harry said it tiredly, pacing slowly back and forth across the kitchen and looking at his chair as if it had burst into flames. “You can’t hold other people to the same standard.”
“But I can hold the people I’m going to spend the rest of my life with to it.” Draco turned so he was fully facing Harry. “Even if that means they’re going to disappoint me sometimes. And I don’t want to be bound by the romantic nonsense of a soulmate when I don’t like who my soulmate is.”
Harry laughed. “I can’t believe I was strong enough to satisfy you.”
Draco relaxed. That sounded as if they would recover from the argument and go on, which he hadn’t been sure would happen at first. “You wouldn’t have been if you kept backing down and whining about what the Ministry would do to you and how you just wanted everyone to go away. But it’s fine now that you’ve proven you’re capable of more than that.”
“You were the one who nudged me into being strong, though. Don’t you resent that?”
“I took a chance on you. The chance turned out to be worth taking.” Draco brushed his lips with marmalade, more because he wanted to act normal than because he felt that way. “I should be the one asking you if you resent me, because I kicked you into taking your life back.”
Harry collapsed hard into his chair. “I don’t know why I got so upset about you tempting Sheldon,” he muttered. “I already knew that you weren’t exactly a nice person.”
“And to make it clear, I wouldn’t have cared that much about the Ministry killing markless children if they didn’t also threaten you. And if it wasn’t something that I could use to bring de Berenzan down.”
Harry choked a little and looked up at Draco, shaking his head in what looked like resignation. “Always clear and straightforward, aren’t you, Draco?”
“I want you to know that I’m not lying. Not even if you want me to, or to make myself look good.” Draco nodded at the newspaper. “This is the only thing I really kept from you, and it almost destroyed your trust in me. I’m going to make sure that de Berenzan doesn’t have any other weapons to use against us.”
Harry traced his finger around the base of his teacup. Then he said, “I should—should have waited you to explain it, I suppose. And I can’t claim the title of nicest person in the world myself.”
“If anyone should be able to claim it, then you should. Not that I have any idea what you would want with such a thing.”
Harry gave him half a smile, his eyes lingering on Draco’s face. “If I was pure and morally righteous, then I would have stood up for the lives of markless children before it started affecting just me. I would have thought of more than just me. And told my friends the truth. And realized on my own that just because I don’t have a soulmate—that doesn’t mean I need to give up on life.”
Draco smiled at him. “And you would reject me for my treatment of Sheldon if you were pure and morally righteous, of course. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”
“It kind of is.” Harry rolled his head forwards and winced a little, as if hearing the bones in his neck pop wasn’t pleasant. Draco didn’t imagine it would be. “I suppose we should be grateful that we found each other. We’re both strong and determined and unpleasant in the same ways.”
Draco took a single stride around the table. He’d hardly realized he’d stood up. Harry’s startled eyes blinked at him, and Draco seized his face and pulled him out of his chair, kissing him hard enough that Harry gasped. But Draco didn’t care about that, or the way he’d slammed Harry’s arse into the table. He nearly bent him over it backwards before Harry caught his hand and held him back, shaking his head. “Draco? What is this about?”
“I want to prove to you that I won’t ever abandon you for Sheldon.”
Harry snorted and didn’t release his hold on Draco’s wrist, much to Draco’s displeasure. “I never really thought you would.”
“Admit it. You had a moment’s fear.”
“Half a moment.”
Draco smiled. “Very well. But we can both tell the truth, and we’ll stand beside each other no matter what de Berenzan tries.”
Harry’s eyes widened and softened and deepened. “Of course,” he said, and then lifted his face for a kiss.
Draco did better than that, hauling him towards the bedroom. Harry moved alongside him, never looking away from his eyes.
He trusts me now in ways that he didn’t before. He knows my secrets.
Thank you, de Berenzan.
*
SP777: Harry was probably never going to be satisfied until he did know.
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The Rising of the Stones