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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 Four—The Dark Moon
            Harry noticed it everywhere he went over the next few days. It was like he always knew exactly how much distance was between him and Draco—once again it was no trouble to call him that even outside the confines of the ritual. He could turn his head, and he knew Draco was on the other side of the Potions classroom even before he looked. One morning when he didn’t see Draco at breakfast and thought he’d slept in, he had his head turned away from the doorway when Draco did come in, but Harry knew at once.
            Draco seemed much the same way, only it seemed more obvious to Harry because he could feel the stares, too. Draco didn’t seem to glare or even stare dreamily, the way Harry knew he did far too often. He only looked at Harry, calmly, and then away, with the satisfied expression of someone thinking about their own skill at something.
            It would have irritated Harry, but the pounding in his blood as he anticipated the next ritual was too demanding. Besides, Ron was too wrapped up in writing wedding plans to Hermione to pay much attention.
            Neville, though, reached out and gripped Harry’s arm one evening about a week after the full moon rite when Draco had left the Great Hall and Harry got up to go after him. “You don’t want to celebrate the rites with me?” he asked in a low voice.
            Harry blinked at him. “What? I mean—” He flushed, suddenly not knowing if he was even supposed to talk about the rites with someone else if he had already accepted Draco as a teacher. “I have someone who’s working with me.”
            “Hmm.” Neville’s eyes slid to the corridor outside the Great Hall, and then came back to him. “And you’re getting along all right?”

            Harry touched a hand to his hair, and ruffled it a little. “You can’t not get along when you’re doing the rites,” he said honestly.
            Neville’s eyes widened, and his hand fell away from Harry’s arm. Harry flinched, worried that Neville was about to scold him, but Neville just huffed a laugh and waved his hand. “Fine. Go on, then. I probably just made an enemy by touching you.”
            Harry blinked, and then blushed. He didn’t try to argue, though, because Neville was giving him a knowing look, and that was—that was not on, discussing the rites with Neville or anyone else who would have to know what was going on anyway. He cleared his throat.
            “I’m just going to—go,” he said awkwardly.
            “Yes, you need to,” said Neville, his face alight with something too gentle to be glee, but not really like any other emotion that Harry was familiar with, either. “But remember me for a rite that’s bigger, that doesn’t need to be celebrated by just two other people. I would be happy to celebrate it with you.”
            Harry stared, startled, but then felt a prickling pull on his arm. Draco was waiting for him, and Harry knew he was impatient. That sensation was new, and vaguely unpleasant, but he had to go.
            He nodded hastily to Neville, said, “I didn’t know there were rites that could be performed with more than one other person. I’ll remember!” Then he turned and ran after Draco, out of the Great Hall.
            Draco grabbed his arm the minute he did, and swung him around. He leaned over Harry and stared at him the way he had during the last rite, when he and Harry had almost kissed. Harry looked at him defiantly, tilting his head back so that he could meet and hold Draco’s eyes. It was his right to talk to who he wanted. He hadn’t actually agreed to take Neville as his teacher in place of Draco or anything like that.
            “He was close to you,” Draco said.
            A neutral statement, but it felt more threatening than that to Harry. He let his head tilt further back and his chin come up and his eyes lock on Draco’s. “He didn’t try to take your place,” he said. “And he’s not interested in me romantically. You don’t have to worry about that.”
            “I wasn’t worried,” Draco said, but then went on when Harry was opening his mouth to argue the point. “Anyway, we have more important things to talk about. The next rite that we can perform is at the dark of the moon. Will you do it with me?”
            “This dark of the moon?” Harry resisted the temptation to take a step backwards, which wouldn’t help when Draco was holding onto him anyway. “I thought you wanted more time between the rites. More space.”
            Draco’s eyes widened. Then he moved closer, and stood next to Harry, not in an intimidating way, just as if he wanted Harry to feel all his body heat.
            “What,” he whispered, “would give you that impression?”
            Harry swallowed. His ears were ringing. His head was reeling, and it was hard to remember why he had thought Draco would want to wait. Maybe to give them both time to recover from the intensity that had exploded between them during the last rite.
            Draco snorted softly and reached up to cup Harry’s cheek. “The intensity isn’t going to just disappear,” he whispered. “And we need to be together, you and I. It’s still awkward for us to do that in classes or where everyone can see. I know. But if we try to wait and not resolve this…” His head tilted, and his eyes were huge. “Harry, I need this.” He took Harry’s hand and laid it flat on his own arm.
            Harry gasped. There was so much heat suddenly blazing up from Draco that he looked at his face. “Do you have a fever?”
            “No,” said Draco. “I have an unsolved case of rite desire. I need you. And you need me the same way.” He reached out one hand and brushed the backs of his fingers against Harry’s face. Harry had to close his eyes at the overwhelming rush of sensation. “I think you’re feeling the same thing. You didn’t know what it was, so it was easier for you to ignore it.” He paused. “Can you do that now?”
            Harry had to shake his head. He hadn’t realized that knowing where Draco was and knowing when he was looking at him was rite desire instead of some side-effect of the rites in general, but now the need was there, buzzing beneath his skin like a swarm of bees without a home. He reached out and squeezed Draco’s hand, not able to speak.
            “Good,” Draco whispered. “The dark of the moon rite isn’t complicated, but the bulk of the preparation is on you this time, as the Light wizard. I think we ought to go and study it.”
            When he pulled gently on Harry’s hand, Harry didn’t resist.
*
            Harry leaned back on the grass and slowly reached out his hands the way that the book said he had to. Around him was the circle of salt he had scattered from the central point, and beyond that, the ring of trampled grass Draco had prepared. They were doing it on the opposite side of the lake this time, away from both the castle and Hagrid’s hut, to avoid awkward questions in case someone should look out.
            “You’re all right there, Harry?”
            Draco’s voice was a calm, normal thing in the darkness that seemed to be gathering around Harry as his eyes sought the moon in the horizon and found no reassuring light. Not this time, Harry thought, and his hands closed on the stones that were above his head, reachable only when his arms were spread-eagled like this. “Fine,” he said. “I can do this.”
            “Good,” Draco said, and he held his wand out. The tip blazed with soft black light the way that the black candle had in the last rite. Above it—although he didn’t know how he could see through it, or see Draco’s face by it, when it technically wasn’t light—Harry saw Draco smiling at him. “Look up towards where you feel the moon is, and call to it.”
            Harry wondered how he was supposed to know where the hell the moon was. There was no crescent, no solitary spot of light to guide him—
            But wait. His eyes went to one place in the sky, and lingered there, the way they lingered across the room when he was looking at Draco. Harry nodded his head against the earth and opened his lips. The rite had said that he would know what to sing when the moment came.
            Sing? Harry didn’t have much of a voice on a good day. He hoped that this night, when he was nervous and shaking with the expectation, the impact, of the magic and his desire, wouldn’t prove him even worse than he thought he was.
            But the sound welled out of his mouth as if it was coming of its own free will, with nothing to hold it back. It wavered and fell up and down, slid and whistled back and forth, although it wasn’t a whistle. It sounded as though a werewolf had shrunk down and grown a slight bell of a voice.
            Harry tensed a little. He thought he sounded ridiculous, and he wasn’t sure what would happen next. He hesitated.
            “Yes, that’s right,” Draco said.
            The satisfied sound in his voice made Harry open his mouth wider and let the song keep coming through. He didn’t think he was the only one singing, not really. Other Light wizards, others who had stood or lain in this exact place during this exact same rite, would have had the same voice. The turning earth beneath him and the turning moon above him had heard this song before. Ancestors and kin in spirit would have sung like this.
            Harry gasped suddenly. It felt as though an anchor had suddenly sprung into place beneath his heart and yanked down into the earth. Harry lay there, still gasping. And managed to understand what had happened when he thought about it.
            He’d gone so much of his life with no past, no family, no certainty about what had happened when his parents died or where he came from. The Dursleys’ lies had been brief. They hadn’t told Harry any details about the accident they had claimed killed his parents. They had dwelled, instead, on the awful things that his parents had supposedly done when they were alive.
            But now, Harry knew he came from somewhere. He knew it as surely as he knew the grass beneath him grew in soil.
            And when he looked up at the sky again, reeling through the center of himself that had firm foundations now and was no longer just a platform drifting in space, he saw the moon.
            There was a flat circle floating in the air, nothing like the shapes that Harry had seen the moon make when it was a crescent or waxing or full. This was like a smaller circle within a larger one, but Harry couldn’t see the larger one; he was sort of guessing that it existed. Darkness and not light reached out towards him.
            “You’re seeing through the moon,” Draco whispered. “To the side that human eyes normally never see.”
            My ancestors would have seen this, Harry thought, and lifted one of his hands, the left one, up towards the beaming dark moon.
            It was the one that held the piece of smooth black marble Draco had placed on the ground when he had come out earlier. It was his sole preparation for the rite, and even then he hadn’t fussed over the place, only plopped it on the ground. Harry had had to place his stone in relation to that one.
            The marble grew lighter and lighter as Harry’s hand traveled upwards, until at the top of its arc it was weightless but still dragging Harry’s arm along. Harry felt as if he was floating in deep water. He stared at his hand, feeling dreamy, and then his fingers parted. The black marble was gone.
            Instead, his palm cradled a tiny pool of moondark.
            Harry stared. It was cool on his skin where light would have been warm—or at least, sunlight would have been warm—and it thrummed as though he was holding onto the string of a vibrating harp. Harry didn’t know what to do with it for a long second.
            Then his right hand, the one that held the piece of white quartz he’d had to contribute like he had the salt, rose and came to a hovering halt next to the left one.
            Harry opened his hand. He thought he still held the quartz, because there was some kind of weight there, and what else would it be?
            But when his fingers parted, his hand was absolutely empty. Harry stared, and breathed. Then he saw the light, which shimmered and played over his fingers in a way that made it hard to see at first. Only when Harry cupped his palm the way he had with the moondark did he see the small reflection of a nonexistent full moon.
            “Nonexistent right now, right here,” Draco breathed as he stepped towards Harry. “The light shines somewhere else. The moon reflects the sun, and the sun never stops shining, simply because it’s not here right now.”
            Harry lifted his head. He knew what would happen next, because the rite had told him in detail that it didn’t use when describing what would happen to the stones. Now he understood several references that had been obscure before.
            But he still wanted to see it happen.
            Draco reached out to his right hand and gently tapped Harry’s palm with his fingers. The pool of moonlight flowed into his hand, and he brought it up to his mouth. Then he arched an eyebrow.
            Oh. Right. Harry held his left hand to his own mouth.
            Draco nodded, and Harry found that they didn’t need to count to three or anything to coordinate their swallowing. It simply happened. They parted their lips and stuck out their tongues and scraped the little moon-pools into their throats at the same time. Harry felt a tickle like a sour sweet on his teeth for a second.
            Then his body arched off the ground, and he nearly cried out. He would have, he thought, if all the air in his lungs hadn’t suddenly become darkness.
            His head was spinning. His world was diving, splitting, separating. He could see through his own eyes, he could feel the sensations in his body, and he could feel from inside Draco’s skin at the same time.
            It was like the first rite, the one where they slid their souls into each other. Harry had wondered, when he read the description this morning, what the point of this rite really was. It seemed to repeat what had gone before.
            But while that had mostly involved memories, some of which happened to be memories of living inside the same body as Draco, this one was physical sensations only. Harry knew how sour sweets tasted to Draco (horrible). He knew how his sobs had torn his chest the night after the Battle of Hogwarts, when he finally realized that Voldemort was dead and he could live the way he wanted. He knew how much his little finger, jammed against a door, could hurt, and he knew the curve of his hands as he gripped his broom.
            He knew the way that Draco would move when he made love, what it was like to be inside his body.
            Harry shuddered and shivered and opened his eyes when he was back in his own body completely, the darkness that had granted him access to Draco’s sensations gone as quickly as it had begun. He wondered if Draco would be staring at him in shock or amusement. After all, Draco knew now the absolute lack of sensations for Harry in regards to making love. He would—he would laugh or something. He had to.
            But Draco was kneeling above him, the sight startling Harry enough to make him buck the way he had when he first swallowed the moondark. He hadn’t felt Draco move near, and he thought he should have, with his constant awareness of Draco lately.
            And there was no laughter in his eyes. The minute Harry met his gaze, he felt stupid for thinking there would have been. Draco looked at him heavily, silently, instead, and then reached out and slid one hand down the side of Harry’s face, across his ear.
            “I’m going to have you now,” Draco said, voice still as heavy as a stone being dragged across the ground.
            “And I’ll have you, too,” Harry retorted, although he thought it was a little spoiled by his breathless groan at the end.
            Draco slung a leg over Harry’s body and leaned down to kiss him. This time, Harry welcomed it. Before, the intensity had been almost too much. Now, the swarming beneath his skin was worse, and he knew he could let it out if he kissed Draco.
            Now, the thrilling in his veins wasn’t enough. He wanted, he wanted, he wanted, and knowing what he wanted wasn’t scary. It was freeing.
            Draco reached under him, murmuring something, and gathered his body up. His wand was in his hand, and he cast a spell that mounded the earth beneath Harry, pushing his arse up. Harry laughed in delighted surprise and spread his legs.
            Draco was the one to look at him and tremble, then, and it was a delicious sight. Harry smiled at him and held still as Draco Vanished their clothes, then conjured a slippery liquid with a twist of his wand. Even knowing why Draco knew that spell didn’t make it a bad thing. It was wonderful, at the moment, because Draco was going to be his.
            No one else had made love to Draco like this, as part of the rites. Harry felt very good right now, his breathing swift and steady, like he was running through a forest without tiring or slowing down.
            This is life.
            And Harry could see, now, why a rite like this, which had seemed so strange to him when the book first described it, would play its part in defeating Shadow.
            The smile lingered on his lips as he kissed Draco and Draco smeared his fingers on Harry’s face in retaliation. That just made Harry snicker, because of course Draco would need to conjure more lube.
            “It doesn’t matter,” Draco said simply, either still reading Harry’s thoughts because they were still joined or just reading his expression. He waved his wand and coated his palm again. “It means I’ll spend more time here, and that’s not a loss.”
            Harry’s breath caught in his throat for one ridiculous moment. Then it caught because Draco was easing his fingers inside Harry, and no matter how ready Harry had been for this in one part of himself, it still hurt. He bit his lip and spread his legs, tossing his head in silent objection, in pain.
            “It’ll be all right,” Draco said, and held his eyes. “You remember how I breathe when I’m getting ready to hop into the air and chase the Snitch? Breathe like that.”
            “I shouldn’t even know that, how am I supposed to remember that with all the memories I have—” Harry began, but the memory was there, after all, when he reached for it. He breathed in and breathed out, and the sharp tingle through his chest made him relax at the same moment as Draco’s fingers eased completely into him. He leaned back his head on the soft pillow of the grass and smiled dazedly at the distant sky. He thought he could see the glinting edge of the invisible moon again.
            “It feels good, doesn’t it?” Draco whispered, and memories flared to life in Harry’s head, memories of making love and using spells and—other experiences that he hadn’t known he would have, or that he understood. Harry reached out and caught hold of Draco’s hand and kissed it passionately in return.
            “Good,” Draco said, and smiled at him as his fingers went deeper and deeper, and Harry caught his breath again, and expelled it again, and then Draco leaned over and kissed him again.
            Harry opened his mouth, reveling in the taste of moonlight. Draco dropped slowly back from him, leaving his mouth in place as long as he could, and there were some wet sounds as he slicked himself up. Then he murmured, “Ready?”
            Harry nodded, and Draco eased forwards and into him. Harry caught his breath this time and didn’t immediately let it go, even when Draco was urgently muttering at him in his ear to do so.
            It was so good.
            This time, the burning had been transmuted, like the taste of the moondark as it continued down his throat. Harry could feel it coming, could feel it coiling on the edges of his perception, but it didn’t dominate things. Draco was there, and it was good, and Harry reached out and caught Draco’s head and dragged him down to kiss him.
            Draco went with it, his eyes so bright that Harry thought the moonlight was still alive in him and shining out through his face. Then he sat back up and began to move, and Harry laughed softly as the motions shifted his arse on the cushion of grass.
            “You aren’t laughing at me, I hope.” But Draco’s voice was soft and peaceful, dreaming, not painful and poking the way it would have been if he was really convinced that Harry was making fun of him. And he kept thrusting, which was the most important thing at the moment. Harry reached up and caught his hand, squeezing it hard.
            “No, of course not,” Harry said, and tilted his head back as he felt the thrusts inch him almost off the grass-cushion. “The tickling of the grass on my skin, and the way it feels.”
            Draco seemed content to accept that answer, and shoved once more back into him. This time, he didn’t object when Harry caught his breath. Harry thought he almost liked it, the sensation of making Harry feel so much at one time.
            You must know my body from the inside out, too, Harry thought, and caught Draco’s hand and squeezed it again, feeling the intensity of bone and flesh there, the warm purr of blood in the veins. Someday you’ll know this from the inside.
            Draco’s eyes flared open, and he smiled down at Harry, as if hearing and sharing his thoughts. He probably was, Harry thought, staring back at him. He knew they had a connection between them still, because of the rite, but he couldn’t actually feel Draco’s thoughts touching his or anything like that. It was probably because his head was full of sloshing light. Memories. Thoughts. Being.
            Sensation. When he came, it was like being flung off a cliff and finding out he had wings he’d never noticed. He tumbled, and then he flew.
            When he opened his eyes again, Harry couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing at first. Then he discovered it was wisps of soft blond hair in front of his face, and they stirred when he breathed on them. He reached up and tugged lightly on them.
            “Yeah,” Draco said sleepily from the middle of his chest. “We’ll get up and go back to the school in a while.”
            But it was a long while, and in the meantime, Harry wrapped his arms around Draco and held him in the midst of his own thundering heartbeat, happy beyond happy.
*
ChaosLady; Thank you!
starr: Hermione isn’t even back in the country yet.
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The Splendor Is Waiting