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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 Forty—Permanence

            “I’m sorry,” Harry had to say, because the harassed look on Fleur’s face made him wince even though he knew he’d done the right thing by telling her.

            “It will only be a matter of redrawing a few lines,” said Fleur, although with a long sigh that suggested she was anger than she’d let him see. “I am more worried about the complexity of this.” She touched a thick blue line in the center of the parchment.

            “What is it?” No matter how long Harry looked at the ritual drawing, he couldn’t interpret it. Of course, since he didn’t have the training Fleur did, he shouldn’t expect to.

            “The preparations we will need to make to call in your enemies.” Fleur sat down in front of the table and mixed some blue paint in an eggshell off to the right. Harry blinked and started to open his mouth when he saw her dipping the ends of her hair in the paint, but Fleur calmed him with one look. “I know what I am doing, Harry. What I must be doing.”

            Harry just watched as she trailed the ends of her hair over the parchment, creating small snagged trails that looped back and forth and wandered dizzily around each other. That was, when they appeared at all. Harry thought the pressure of her hair was really too light to affect the parchment.

            Fleur only shook her head when she sat back and saw it, then applied some more paint to her hair. “We need more color,” she muttered. “Although the gaps are interesting in their own right.” She used a pair of small silver scissors next to the eggshell to trim a few pieces of parchment in random shapes—at least, Harry thought they were random—and then used Sticking Charms to paper over some of the gaps. Then she began painting with her hair again.

            Harry waited until she sat up before clearing his throat. He was starting to understand where the usual stereotype of magical theorists being mental came from. “What do you mean about the need to call in my enemies?”

            “The pattern that will channel their free will and give them what they think is their own idea for coming to confront you,” Fleur explained. She took up a cloth, wet it with an Aguamenti, and then began to scrub briskly at the paint in her hair. “We need to leave open a way for them to act and for you to respond, both at the same time.”

            “So that’s why it’s so dangerous,” Harry said, shivering a little as he thought about that.

            Fleur nodded. “The ritual dictates that you have a chance of winning. It will pull together your enemies so that you also have a chance of finishing this. But in the meantime, that same opening leaves them a chance for victory.”

            She told me that before, but not so bluntly, Harry thought, and sat down and looked again at the parchment. He wished the lines meant something to him. Maybe he could understand how big the chance of dying was.

            What’s wrong with me, though? I never used to worry about dying.

            But Harry had to shake his head. He thought that had changed even before he went to sleep—his last memory that him and Old Harry had in common. He’d just died in the Forbidden Forest. He didn’t want to die again so soon. And Old Harry had risked his life, but he’d also done lots of things that meant no one would even suspect him. Harry thought he had probably only put his life in danger when he absolutely had to.

            “I am sorry.” Fleur’s voice was gentle, and her hair was back to shining silver, if wet silver, as she leaned back and regarded Harry with compassion in her eyes. “This is the best way to give you a life. It is not without risk. It is not without sacrifice.”

            Abruptly she leaned down and picked up something from under the table. It was a small silver vial, corked with a pale golden spell. Harry watched without comprehension as she pushed it towards him.

            “What is it?” he asked, picking it up and tilting it back and forth. Despite the spell that corked the neck of the vial, there was nothing inside that Harry could see.

            “This is your part of the sacrifice.” Fleur folded her hands on the table. It struck Harry then that she wasn’t meeting his eyes. “I told Mr. Malfoy what he would need to give up to free his father. The wealth, or at least the possibility of wealth, if his father chooses to disown him once he is free, yes?” Harry nodded. Fleur finally looked at him again. “This is what you must give up.”

            “You still haven’t told me what that is. Just tell me, Fleur.”

            “Yes,” Fleur murmured, although Harry thought she wasn’t talking to him, mostly. “There is a chance—small, because it is not what the ritual is designed for, but there—that you could regain your memories through this.”

            Harry jerked. It was as though someone had pushed him over a cliff. “But my brain is damaged. Hermione told me that. Even the best Healers couldn’t give me my memories back.”

            “The Healers, they are not studying pure magical theory of the kind I am talking about.” Fleur lifted her shoulders, held them there for a long moment, and then let them fall again. “They cannot cure brain damage. Very well, no, they cannot. But the ritual is about opening chances and paths of possibility.”

            “So I could get them back if things went a certain way?” Harry traced the line of the vial. “And this chance is the one I have to give up to make sure the ritual goes correctly? What, do you think I’m so desperate to get my memories back that I would twist everything?” Harry set down the vial harder than he meant to, but then, his hand was shaking. “Why even tell me about the chance? Why not just let me go ahead with the ritual?”

            “Because that is not something I can do with the ritual itself.” Fleur spread her hands. “We need to give your enemies a chance to come to you and strike back. I need to give you the chance to know about your memories and try to get them back if you want them.”

            “Then this…?” Harry tapped the vial against the table, partially to relieve his mood and partially for the satisfaction of seeing how Fleur winced when he did it.

            “Will fill with a blue light when you commit to the decision to give up on retrieving your memories.”

            Harry closed his eyes. “How can I know that?”

            “When the vial fills with blue light,” said Fleur unhelpfully. When Harry did open his eyes a little to glare at her, she added, as if apologetically, “I know it will take time, but that is what Mr. Malfoy had to do with his commitment to rescuing his father, yes? He had to make up his mind and work until it was real and stronger than his fear.”

            Harry sighed one more time and regarded the vial. He wanted to say that he already didn’t want the memories back, that he and Old Harry were different people and what he could remember was enough, but that must not be true. Or the blue light would already be there.

            Draco had finally had to think through what he wanted and what he needed in depth, what his father coming back would take from him as well as give. Harry needed to think through the chance of having the last ten years back.

            What would he gain, as well as lose?

            Well, he would know right away what other secrets might be hiding around the house he’d shared with Ginny, or Grimmauld Place, or the Shadow Vault, instead of possibly stumbling on them years later. He would know more about his enemies, and the ways to defeat them, which might help when they showed up during the ritual. He would know things for certain that he had to speculate about now, like why Old Harry had fallen in love with Rob and why he’d been so afraid that other people might not see him as a hero.

            Harry thought he knew those stories. But that was nothing like living them from the inside, being able to remember.

            He would know Ron and Hermione and their kids again. And Bill and Fleur and their kids. He would know what his friendship with George had been like, and his good relationship with Teddy. He could be the godfather Teddy needed.

            The friend his friends needed. Maybe even the man Ginny needed.

            For a minute, longing so powerful filled Harry that his hand shook, and the vial made a musical chiming noise as it knocked against the table. It wasn’t so simple after all, to put that temptation out of his head and say that he only wanted to be Just Harry, in the present.

            Harry shivered and opened his eyes and stared down at the vial. He would give a lot to know those stories.

            But would he give up the person he had turned into?

            Because that would be the price, Harry was fairly sure. He wouldn’t be either Old Harry or himself if the memories came back. He would be some blend of the two, and he would only have a few months of the “new” memories to put against ten years of old allegiances and loyalties and secrets.

            And what would happen to all the moving forward he’d done? Would he feel the same way about Draco? About his friends, glad that the secrets were out in the open? Would he start feeling guilty about his decision to give up Auror work again, instead of glad that he’d done it? Would he decide he had to confess and go to Azkaban, since he would remember being close to Kingsley?

            It’s not worth giving up the person I am. The person I could become. I told everyone Old Harry was dead.

            And I’m not a necromancer. I don’t even want to use the Resurrection Stone, no matter how much the Elder Wand says I’m the Master of Death. I want the present.

            I choose it.

            Fleur choked. Harry opened his eyes as a little warmth touched his fingers and saw the vial shining with delicate blue light, paler than he had assumed it would be.

            “I thought that would take you much longer,” Fleur said with a little frown as she peered at Harry. “It took Mr. Malfoy much longer to accept his true feelings and reveal them.”

            “I know,” Harry said, sitting back a little as he admired the blue light. “But I think Draco was a lot more conflicted about it. He’d had years and years to be afraid that he didn’t really love his father or want to release him. I’ve only had a few months to think about it.”

            “Perhaps that is true.” Fleur still watched his face cautiously as she took the vial, but Harry shook his head at her and stood up.

            “I have someone waiting at home for me, who’s already suspicious because I had to come alone two days in a row. Is there anything else you can think of that I need to know about the ritual?”

            “No.” Fleur touched her hair as if she thought that she might still have paint in it, and then put the vial down beside the parchment. Maybe the light in it had to shine over the painted lines; Harry could readily admit he had no idea. “I will let you know what objects you need to gather for the ritual.”

            Harry nodded. Fleur had already told them that certain objects would form a ritual circle and ritual “corridors”—the places that certain actions had to take place. “All right. Thanks, Fleur.”

            Once he was outside the front door of Shell Cottage, Harry found himself closing his eyes and taking a breath that felt as deep as the sea.

            He knew what he valued, now.

*

            “Some of these objects make no sense,” Draco objected, studying the parchment in front of him and shaking his head as if that would make some of Fleur’s words change shape into ones he had expected. “Bells? Excuse me, copper bells. And chains. And whistles? What does she think we’re doing, training Crups?”

            Harry shrugged and tossed another mouse for Royal. Because he had condescended to deliver Fleur’s letters to them, he seemed to think that he needed about three times the usual amount of food from Harry. “I don’t know. She just told me that they’re part of the ritual.”

            “Right,” Draco drawled. “I studied a little bit of magical theory when I was trying to learn how to free my father, and none of the books ever mentioned things like this.”

            Harry waited for a second until he had watched Royal settle heavily on the mouse and stab it with his beak. Then he turned around and asked quietly, “Second thoughts?”

            Draco swallowed and closed his eyes. “I suppose I can’t, can I?” he whispered. “Or my father stays exactly where he is forever.”

            “I don’t know about forever. Fleur might be able to come up with something else. But the way she had me give up my chance of getting my memories back, I think she wants us to have an absolute commitment to this.”

            “And my second thoughts might destroy it. Right.” Draco opened his eyes. “I would be angry, too, if I put all that work in and then someone ruined it.”

            “Right.” Harry waited, but Draco looked out over the grass of his gardens and the soft clouds rolling in and said nothing. “So. Second thoughts?”

            Draco closed his hand on the rim of the goblet that stood next to him. He and Harry had been drinking Firewhisky as they read Fleur’s letters and watched Royal flying and a few of the house-elves—the ones that didn’t have essence of Lucius in them—tending the flowers. Draco seemed to roll the words around in his mouth as he answered.

            “No. I want to do this.”

            “Then we need to do what Fleur directs.” Harry picked up the list and scanned it again. Then he paused when he saw ink coming through the other side of the parchment, and realized the list continued there. He flipped it over.

            “Oh, wonderful,” he said. “We have to have pieces of the appropriate wood for our wands, shaped to look like them, but without a core. Fleur said that we could borrow appropriate unfinished wands from Ollivander.”

            “Who probably doesn’t work with elder wood,” Draco said in a low voice. “Who might not be pleased to do a favor for me, considering what my family did to him during the war.”

            Harry shrugged and put the list down on the stone wall around several flowering rosebushes next to him. “We can go to Gregorovitch, or whoever took over his business, if we need to. I’ve read that sometimes they use elder wood more often in Austria or France. Trying to capture that mystique of the Elder Wand.”

            “If you have to let a wandmaker look closely at it,” Draco said quietly, “what’s going to happen if they recognize it as the Elder Wand?”

            That wasn’t something Harry had thought about. He opened his mouth to say he would use a charm to disguise the wand, and then shut his mouth, shaking his head. They couldn’t do that, or the replica wouldn’t be exact, and Fleur’s list was insistent that they needed copies as close as could be for the ritual.

            “I’ll go to Ollivander after all, then,” he said. “He might not be willing to work for you, but for me…he’ll keep quiet, I think. He probably keeps a lot more secrets than we know.”

            Draco nodded and reached out. Harry took his hand, and for a second they sat in silence, hands clasped between them, the only sound the tearing of Royal’s beak through the corpse of the mouse.

            “Thank you.”

            It took Harry a minute to realize Draco had spoken; the peace of the evening was that resistant to breaking. He blinked and turned to look at him. “You’re welcome,” he said. “But you did a lot for me, too. Gave me a place to stay, gave me an identity separate from the one as Old Harry…”

            Draco smiled a little. “It’s nice to know that my obsession with him had some good result after all.”

            Harry pulled Draco against him, and they sat, watching as Royal took flight once again and the dusk settled over the gardens.

            I can do this, Harry thought, even as he looked down at the massive list of ritual preparations and knew how much time it was going to take, and, probably, how much money it was going to cost. For a chance to sit like this and not have clouds from the past hanging over our heads…

            And even though it’s beautiful here at Malfoy Manor, we can have the same mood and the same people at Grimmauld Place, or some house I haven’t even bought yet.



            Draco had his eyes closed when Harry looked at him, head still tilted to rest fully against Harry’s shoulder, lips parted in a little dreaming smile.

            Yes. For him, it’s all worth it.

*

            Severus1snape: Draco would say that he’s always hot, no matter what happens.

            SP777: For this story, it felt right.
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The Dust of Water