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The Dust of Water	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 20632 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Thirty-Six—The Trap Ritual

            When Harry got done describing the situation with Draco and his father and the house-elf, Fleur was silent for a long, long time. Harry took the chance to look around Shell Cottage. It hadn’t changed that much from his memories of it during the war, but of course he knew that meant next to nothing. It didn’t speak to how much Bill and Fleur’s lives had changed in the meantime, and the births of three children would have altered them a lot.

            Fleur finally looked at him, her eyes calm and measuring. “I wouldn’t do this for anyone except you, Harry,” she said.

            “I know,” Harry said.

            “It is—a complicated case.” Fleur tapped her fingers on the arm of her chair and then stopped, looking a little embarrassed. Harry thought he knew why. She didn’t want to show interest about something that must seem like such a troubling and Dark case, but she was interested anyway.

            Harry smiled a little as he said, “That’s part of what kept Draco from going to other magical theorists for so long. And he still wants to be sure that you aren’t going to betray him to the Ministry immediately.”

            Fleur raised her hands, then dropped them. “It has been, what, ten years? And he is now seeking to redress this. And the Ministry has not always been kind.”

            For an instant, her mouth tightened, and her hand moved up to touch her long, silvery hair. Harry nodded slowly. It didn’t surprise him that some people in the Ministry were still as upset about magical creatures getting any rights as ever. Or maybe Fleur was just tired of people endlessly drooling over her as a Veela.

            “If he asks me to use any Dark Arts, I will not,” Fleur continued, her accent strengthening for a moment. “But I will do what I can to save his father and free him from the house-elf. For the father’s sake, and the elf’s.”

            Harry nodded. “I knew you would see the elf’s side.” It was no use asking Draco to see it that way, and Harry hadn’t tried. On the other hand, it didn’t surprise him that Fleur would.

            Fleur looked straight at him for a second, her eyes troubled. “Has he told you what he intends to do if he restores his father? In that case, he would no longer be the legal owner of the Malfoy lands and gold. Would he willingly give that up, do you think? Or would he do something to sabotage the ritual at the last moment?”

            Harry blinked. That wasn’t something he’d considered. He supposed Malfoy must have told the Ministry his father had disappeared and left everything to him. Or died.

            If there had ever been any investigations. Harry thought most people wouldn’t have shed that many tears for a former Death Eater.

            “I haven’t talked to him about it,” he said slowly. “But if he made the commitment to bring his father back, I think Draco must have considered it. That means he’ll be prepared.”

            Fleur gave an unimpressed snorting sound. “It seems to me, that everything is being handled on assumptions,” she said. “Even your memory was so, when they thought you would remember certain things and you did not. If you want to make an assumption, you may make it on something I have nothing to do with. You will ask Mr. Malfoy about this before I make a real ritual.”

            Harry blinked a little, and then he nodded. “All right.”

            Fleur eyed him once more, then seemed to relax. “But I may work with the theory before the actual outlines,” she said, and reached down into a box standing beside her chair. Harry watched her pull out a large piece of parchment with several small holes burned into it. “I may do this.”

            She unrolled the paper on the table; it opened like a scroll. For a moment, she sat in front of it with her eyes half-closed, as if she was trying to remember what to do with it. Harry could see faint brown lines between the holes when he looked, but he couldn’t tell what pattern they formed. Maybe a spiderweb, in the center of the page?

            At last Fleur opened her eyes and began to trace the quill in her hand over the paper. Some of the lines she made followed the spiderweb’s; others seemed to spiral off into nothingness. Harry leaned closer and tried again to see a pattern, and still he couldn’t. He had to sit back with a blink and a shake of his head.

            He would have questioned Fleur about what she was doing, but her face was so rapt that he didn’t like to. He sat still instead, and watched as her hand moved without a rest or lifting from the parchment. She only stopped to shake her wrist when the parchment was mostly covered with black and gleaming lines, and Harry thought she’d created a painting.

            Fleur only looked at him patiently when he told her that. “No,” she said. “This is a ritual that must encompass much about your life, yes? You want to free Malfoy’s father from entrapment in the house-elf, but from what he said, that happened partially because of his obsession with you.”

            “Yes,” Harry said slowly, not seeing what she was getting at.

            Fleur nodded. “Then to free his father from the house-elf, we must trap and sever the pattern that bound him there. Malfoy’s emotions about you are part of that. And your life has been complex of late.” For a moment, her fingers danced on the parchment, and then she smiled a little and pulled her hand back. “You have your enemies like Kelvin, and you have the lost memories, and you have the entanglement with Malfoy and the disappointment of Ron and Hermione that you do not have your memories back.” She paused and touched a single thick line that sprang from one side of the paper to another without crossing any of the ones in between. Harry blinked again as he looked at it. He had thought the paper was so crowded that there was no possible way one of those could exist. “And there is something else involved that you have not told me. What is this?”

            Harry stared at the line. “I have no idea. I don’t know anything about magical theory.”

            “But this is an image of something in your life that complicates the matter further.” Fleur folded her arms and gave him an unimpressed look. “Or perhaps Malfoy’s life, but it is tied to your magic. I know you did not lose your magic with your memories, no? What is it?”

            Harry winced. He probably did know, but he didn’t know if he wanted to let the knowledge out even to Fleur.

            On the other hand, if he couldn’t trust the Weasleys to keep his secret, he was probably already betrayed. He said slowly, “The wand I’ve been using for the past few weeks is the Elder Wand. An attack from one of my enemies snapped my holly one, and this time, the Elder Wand refused to heal it.”

            Fleur’s eyes widened the more he spoke, and Harry almost thought she would move her chair further away from him. Then she shook her head a little, pursed her lips, and said, “That would explain it.” She looked at the chart, or whatever it really was, again.

            “Does that mean I need to go back and explain other things?” Harry added apprehensively. He supposed he could see why, if she was sketching something she saw like an aura, unexpected changes would mess things up.

            “I cannot see anything else that looks so independent from the local patterns,” said Fleur, and smiled at him for a moment. Her fingers danced above the parchment again, and then she bent attentively down towards the holes and nodded. “Yes, even they are in alignment.” She faced Harry, and her face was relaxed. “But you understand what this means? This ritual must draw everything together. We must have your enemies trapped and the emotions in you and your Malfoy soothed at the same time as we try to bring Lucius Malfoy back from the house-elf.”

            “No, I didn’t know that,” Harry said, when he could force the words past what felt like a block in his throat. “How can—you can’t just stand there and tell me that, right? There’s a way that you think you’re going to make it come true!”

            Fleur winked at him. “Yes. I can make it come true when we bring together the pattern of the ritual. And I am glad I spoke,” she added simply as she started rolling up the parchment. “It would be horrible if you did not know all this and then only found out when we were in the middle of doing the ritual.”

            “How can we put it together? How can that parchment tell you what the ritual needs to be like? I don’t understand that.”

            Fleur laughed. “And you could not understand all of it without a lot more training in magical theory than you have had the time to receive! I just want to make sure that you understand why you need to be honest with me, and tell me about things like that.” She nodded towards his sleeve that held the Elder Wand. “And when it comes time for you to make your steps in the ritual, that I can tell you what you need to do.”

            Harry thought about that. “That’s why you need honesty from Draco, too. Because he needs to follow the steps?”

            Fleur dipped her head low enough for her long hair to partially pool on the table. “And if he cannot be honest, if he cannot confront the feelings for his father that you told me about, or if his negative ones, they are stronger than his desire to bring Mr. Malfoy back…then he needs to stay out of the ritual.” She looked at the parchment with faint exasperation. “And I will need to draw a new one of these. Right now, this is predicated on the understanding that Malfoy—Draco—would be part of the dance.”

            Harry rose to his feet, feeling as though he had shed several kilograms of iron chain. Even with the challenge that Draco himself had admitted existed, and the complexity of the ritual, at least Fleur had agreed to try. “Thank you. I’ll tell him.”

*

            “I thought there would be a less complex method of getting my father out of the house-elf,” Draco whispered, when Harry had gone through everything Fleur had done that afternoon and explained what she was concerned about. “And after what I did to him…I think he’ll probably kick me out of the house and change his will the instant he gets back to himself. Assuming we can bring him back to himself, of course.”

            Draco sounded so shocked and subdued that Harry got up from behind the library table where he’d sat to read and came to sit beside him. “Then I suppose you’ll have to face your feelings before the ritual begins after all,” he said. “Fleur thinks we need to create a ritual that will trap, or net, all the influences and things that have gone wrong in the last little while. And I’m part of it because of the way you feel towards me.”

            Draco’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I suppose the ritual doesn’t happen to include a requirement that we have orgasmic sex with each other?”

            “No.” Harry hesitated. Then he said, “If you lose Malfoy Manor and your place in your father’s will, you can come live with me.”

            Draco stared at him. “But—it’s going to take money to repair and cleanse Grimmauld Place. You said.”

            “I still have some of that. Not even Old Harry, or me in the last few months, ran through the whole thing. And if the ritual traps all the enemies that are hunting me, then I don’t have to shelter behind heavy wards to foil them.”

            Draco reached out and squeezed Harry’s hand. Harry felt how his hand was shaking, and smiled as sympathetically as he could. Draco bowed his head and whispered, “So I need to solve a question that I haven’t been able to answer for almost ten years in a few days.”

            “Yes. I’m sorry,” Harry added, when Draco lifted his head and stared at him with bleak eyes. “If I could do something else, I would. You know that.”

            “Yes.” Draco folded his hands tight in his lap and sat with his eyes closed. “Can you leave me alone for a while? I think I need solitude to decide this.”

            Harry touched his shoulder and stood up. “I’ll be outside with Royal,” he said. “He’s upset that I haven’t spent more time with him. I know he was considering eating my finger instead of breakfast this morning.”

            “He always looks like he’s about to eat someone’s finger,” Draco muttered, but he didn’t open his eyes, keeping his head bowed, and Harry understood that he wouldn’t be able to simply joke it off this time.

            Harry nodded and departed through the door that led out to the gardens. Royal was already circling overhead, and he came blazing down the minute he saw Harry. He didn’t land on his shoulder, though he looked like he would, but after a playful swipe at Harry’s eyes, he took up a perch on a stone wall.

            “Would you eat Draco’s fingers?” Harry asked him, for the lack of any other question to ask.

            Royal turned his head to the side, which was his version of being coy. Harry rolled his eyes and took a small box from his pocket. One of the house-elves had caught a mouse for him that morning, though with a lot of doubtful glances, as if he thought that Harry would scold him for a mouse being anywhere around the Manor.

            “Yes, I thought you’d like it,” Harry said, and opened the box to release the mouse. It leaped into the grass and scurried away so fast that Harry lost sight of it. Royal turned his head to apparently watch it go.

            Then he stuck his head beneath his wing.

            Harry stared at him with his mouth open, knowing he was being silly and undignified, but stunned anyway. “You—you’re going to pretend that you care about mice and then not do anything about them?” he asked.

            Royal rustled his tail feathers.

            “Well, that’s the last time I try to do anything for you, then,” Harry said with a roll of his eyes, and started to turn away.

            He saw movement from the corner of his eye and promptly rolled and ducked, his arm coming around his head in a defensive tuck. But it wasn’t Royal coming after him. It was him unfolding his immense wings and storming over the grass, then coming down in a perfect dive that ended with the mouse clamped in one talon.

            Harry stood up with a small shake of his head, his breath still coming faster than he’d like. “You knew where the mouse was all the time,” he said. “Didn’t you.”

            Royal looked at him with his head still coyly cocked to the side, then started dissecting the mouse with his beak. Harry moved up beside him and stood there with his hands in the pockets of his robes, watching the wind ruffle the grass. Now and then it bobbed the flowers, too, and Harry saw the quick, darting head of what he thought was one of the white Malfoy peacocks.

            He tried not to look at them too hard. He didn’t want Royal getting ideas in his head about them.

            It felt odd, standing here. A different owl at his side, a place he couldn’t have imagined visiting willingly in his former life and which Old Harry had visited for entirely different reasons, and strange motivations working themselves out in his heart and mind. He wanted Draco to decide to help his father. Harry could remember a time when he would have thought Azkaban was the proper place for both Draco and his father.

            What would Old Harry think?

            Harry snorted a little. Well, he thought he could imagine it now. He understood the twisted way Old Harry’s mind worked. He would have thought he should condemn both Malfoys, and would have writhed in his conscience because he was using Draco’s Potions skills instead of arresting him, and he would have used them anyway.

            “Thank Merlin I’m not him anymore,” he told Royal.

            Royal twisted his head in a different way, this time saying it was all very interesting, but he had small bones to crunch here.

*

            “I think I can do it.”

            Harry started. He’d actually come back into the house and had the house-elves show him into the dining room for dinner—although to his relief, the grey-eyed one wasn’t one of the elves ordering him about—and hadn’t thought he would see Draco for a few more hours.

            But Draco collapsed into the chair next to Harry now and snatched up a plate full of roast duck and rice and started eating it as if he hadn’t eaten anything since the day before. Harry planted his elbow on the table and gazed at him.

            Draco glared at the elbow. “That’s horrible manners, Harry.”

            “So’s eating so I can see every bite,” Harry retorted. “Well?”

            “Well what?”

            “What made you change your mind?”

            Draco ate for a few more minutes in silence. Harry let him. At least he was eating more slowly now, and Harry didn’t have to decide whether he wanted to look at chewed duck and rice or the wall.

            “I can do it because it’s the first time in years that something in my life has offered the potential for so much change,” Draco whispered. “I thought about Father kicking me out of the Manor once he has his body back, and…the main thing I felt was relief at the thought of living with you instead.”

            Harry relaxed a little. “You took me in. The least I can do is take you in.”

            Draco looked up abruptly at him. “But I don’t want to be a ‘least you can do.’”

            Harry reached out and caught his hand. “Then you won’t be. We’ll find our way together.”

            They sat like that for an absurdly long time, holding hands, while Draco used his free one to eat and normal house-elves appeared and watched them and vanished again, and Royal patrolled somewhere overhead.

*

            sera21: It’s been easier for me to include smut near the end of stories for a long time. I think part of the reason is that every other story I have now is either near the beginning or in the middle. But this one is now nearing the end. So perhaps soon!

            moodysavage: That is a really accurate way to sum him up.

            SP777: Thanks!

            Severus1snape: Thanks! Fleur is thinking more about the elf than anyone else. Harry is thinking more about Draco.
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The Dust of Water