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Ceremonies of Strife	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 16218 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Chapter Forty-One�The
Shadow of a Shadow

�� You�re
going, Harry?� Hermione�s eyes were big and worried, to the point that Harry
wondered if she would cry.

�� Yeah.�
Harry hugged her and held on for a moment longer than necessary. He thought he would see her again, but he
was also trying not to underestimate Lucius and how furious he would be. �Take
care of yourself.�

�� I feel
like I should be saying that to you,� Hermione mumbled into his shoulder. She
let him go after one more hard hug, and Harry turned to Ron.

�� Ron scowled
at him. Harry had told him what was going on last of all, and he was obviously
battling resentment of that. Harry held out one hand, half-hoping,
half-fearing, and Ron groaned and clasped it.

�� What she
said, mate,� he muttered. �Take care of yourself. And tell that bastard Malfoy
that if he does anything to you��

�� Anything
he does to me will be fully consensual and because I want it,� Harry snapped.
He understood his friends� concern, but he wished they had just focused on what
might happen to him because of Lucius�s anger and curses, rather than Draco.
Draco wasn�t going to do anything to him. Harry was sure of that, now, with the
bond of secrecy and horror about the Dark ritual stretched tight between them.

�� Ron stared
at him. Harry glared back at him with his jaw set, and Ron finally shook his
head and said in a tone of soft resignation, �You really mean that, don�t you?
You�re that sure of him.�

�� As sure as
you are of Hermione,� Harry said. He tried to make his voice gentler than he
had so far, because it sounded like Ron was close to a revelation, and Harry
didn�t want to make him back off if he was.

�� Ron blew
out his breath and nodded. �All right, then. We�ll try to take revenge on Mr.
Malfoy before we take it on�Draco.� He said the name as if it was strangling
him, but he said it.

�� Harry
spared one amused moment to wonder whether or not Draco would be happy be if he
heard Ron saying his name like that, and then reminded himself that it was the
kind of question he would ask in happier times, after this had finished. He
pounded Ron on the shoulder and turned to the door. He had to get back to
Portillo Lopez�s rooms from Ron�s as soon as possible, since he wasn�t supposed
to be wandering around at all for fears of �infection.� Luckily, he had his
Invisibility Cloak with him.

�� Harry?�

�� Harry
glanced back over his shoulder. Hermione stood there, hanging on to Ron and
facing him with glistening eyes. Harry shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot.
He was always upset when Hermione cried, and especially over him.

�� Stay as
safe as you can,� Hermione whispered. �Don�t take any risks that you don�t have
to. Will you promise me? I think Draco would agree.�

�� That was an
easy promise to make, and Harry gave it. Only when he was walking down the
corridor, clad in the Invisibility Cloak and avoiding the trainees and
sometimes Aurors who passed, did he allow himself to say the counterargument in
his mind.

�� There are so many risks to this situation
that the number of unnecessary ones is pretty low.

*

�� Amazingly,
Portillo Lopez let them go without one last piece of cryptic advice. She simply
watched them, eyes narrowed especially on Draco�instead of Harry, the one who
had actually practiced necromancy�as
they clasped each other close and prepared to Apparate from her rooms. She had
lowered the anti-Apparition wards temporarily so they could.

�� Draco felt
her gaze, but he didn�t turn to acknowledge it. He was picturing the small hill
near the Manor where they would appear instead, and so he had a legitimate
excuse.

�� But
someday, they were going to have it out, she and him.

�� The rooms
turned dark around them, and inside out. Draco gritted his teeth. He had always
felt the squeezing sensation of Apparition a lot more if someone else was with
him, as if the space didn�t grow bigger to accommodate both of them. But by
now, holding the image of the place he was Apparating to in his mind was much
easier than it had been, and he could maintain it through any amount of pain.

�� He tried
not to think that he might have to have that tested, soon.

�� When he
opened his eyes, it was like being slapped in the face. The barracks had been
dark; this hill was bright with the sun slanting off the snow. Portillo Lopez,
even more than the other instructors, liked to keep the air in her room motionless
so the small shifts of breezes didn�t disturb her potions. Here, the wind
moaned and danced around them, and Draco could see, from the size of the
clouds, that more snow would be coming soon.

�� I forgot
what it was like out here,� Harry muttered. �It�s easy to do when you never go
outside.� He paused, and a strange, wistful tone came into his voice. �It�s
almost Christmas, isn�t it?�

�� Draco
nodded silently. He knew Harry was thinking of last year, when they had gone to
the Manor for Christmas and his mother had welcomed Harry (who had been going
to spend part of the holiday alone in the trainee barracks and part of it with
the Weasleys, as if he didn�t have more and better places to go, if he wanted).

�� Hmmm.�
Harry, luckily, didn�t say any more about it; Draco wasn�t sure how well he
would deal with mentions of his mother right now. Instead, he dropped Draco�s
arm and cast several Warming Charms. �All right. Where are you going to hide?�

�� Draco
looked around, mentally adjusting his map of the country to take in the snow.
It wasn�t very deep, really, and he had flown over these tiny hills, Muggle
villages, and fields during all seasons, plenty of times. �There,� he said,
pointing. The group of rocks he had chosen was the only one of its kind in the
immediate area, small, rugged, humped boulders, but though Lucius might use it
as a rallying point, he wouldn�t think Draco would use it as a hiding place.
The rocks weren�t especially magical, and his father had a prejudice in favor
of magical means of defense so strong that he tended to think other people
would do the exact same thing he did. �Behind the rocks. Within them.�

�� Harry
nodded. His eyes were sober, even half-hidden behind the veil of his warm
breath rising in the air. �And how long will you need to cast the spell?�

�� Draco
considered for a moment, keeping his gaze on the rocks so that he wouldn�t have
to turn and look at the shimmer in the distance that hid Malfoy Manor. He added
time to cast the spell, time to wait until Lucius was sufficiently distracted,
and time it would take to get his father out from behind the walls, and then
subtracted that again. He wouldn�t begin the spell until he was sure Lucius was
in position, after all.

�� Give me
fifteen minute from the time he first appears,� he said.

�� Harry
nodded. His face was grim, his gaze distant, and Draco thought he was already
sinking into the kind of battle-trance that Draco had seen him wear when he was
commanding the necromantic snake against Nihil. Harry was actually calmer and
more focused when he was fighting, the only person Draco had ever seen like
that. Harry would probably deny it, but Draco didn�t intend to argue about it.
It was only important that he was the
one on the battlefield who understood Harry.

�� Will do,�
Harry said, and then he leaned over, one hand holding Draco�s shoulder for
balance, to kiss him.

�� Draco felt
Harry�s cold, chapped lips differently than he usually did. This might be�he
was trying to resist the thought, but it would
come�the last time they kissed. If Lucius destroyed Harry, as Draco knew he
could do if Harry wasn�t careful, then it would be.

�� Draco
blinked. He had expected to feel at least some
fear for his own life, but really, his heartbeat was amazingly calm. It was
Harry who seemed surrounded by a halo of uncertainty, the same color as the
light from the snow, to him.

�� What?�
Harry stepped back and raised an eyebrow.

�� Draco
mustered a smile. �Stop stealing my characteristic gestures.�

�� Harry
promptly waggled both eyebrows up and down, and Draco laughed. Then he touched
Harry one more time on the shoulder and turned to focus on the rocks. He was
going to Apparate behind them, not within them. He had once had a hiding place
inside the tumbled stones, yes, but he didn�t know if it was still there, and
no desire to Splinch himself finding out.

�� Good
luck,� Harry whispered.

�� Draco
nodded once, and then leaped into nothingness, his mind already ticking with
the complex syllables of the spell.

*

�� Harry stood
on the hill and stared in the direction that Draco had told him led towards
Malfoy Manor. He didn�t think it was as easy to see the shimmer that marked the
wards as Draco thought it was; Draco could probably do it because he�d lived
there all his life and was used to what the defenses looked like from the
outside.

�� But when
Harry focused his eyes, he could make out the shimmer after all, a ghostly
light dancing over the fields and concentrating in an egg-like shape around
something close to the ground. Harry smiled grimly, made sure that he was
aligned as perfectly as he could be with the shimmer, and then tapped his
throat with his wand, casting the Sonorus
Charm. Time to stop mucking about and let Lucius have it.

�� Lucius!�
he shouted. �Lucius Malfoy!�

�� The stones
that Draco had gone to hide within shuddered form the force of his voice. Harry
decided not to glance at them, in case Lucius was already watching him. He
didn�t want to do anything that would alert Lucius to his son�s hiding place.

�� I wanted
you to know,� Harry said, trying to render his tone conversational despite the
loudness, �that Draco has entirely forsaken
everything that you ever trained him into. He�s an Auror now, serving the
Ministry. He thinks it�s grand that the Aurors might come and search through
his heirlooms someday, finding the ones that are Dark artifacts and taking them
away. I haven�t managed to convince him to give you up yet, but it�s only a
matter of time.�

�� He paused,
swinging his hand idly back and forth, keeping a large grin on his face, and
hoped that Draco wouldn�t take this too hard. Harry had warned Draco about what
he would say, but knowing it and hearing it were two different things.

�� Silence so
far. Harry shrugged and shouted, �Oh, yes, I did mention that, didn�t I? He
changed his mind because of me. He�s
so desperate for me that he doesn�t sound like a Malfoy anymore. He begs, and
he knows that I�m the only one who could fill him up. In return, I�ve demanded
that he change, because I could hardly associate with someone who didn�t live
up to my standards, could I? Like I said, the only thing he hasn�t changed his
mind on yet is you, but given that you�re not loyal to him anymore and wanted
to force him to marry against his will�even though he�s as bent as a triangle�I
don�t think it�ll be too much longer before I manage to convince him.�

�� There was a
sullen smolder now above the hidden walls and towers of Malfoy Manor. Or, at
least, Harry convinced himself there was. The wards looked a little different,
at least. Was that enough to count?

�� Harry
gritted his teeth and did his best to continue in the same triumphant, bragging
tone. �I�ve got your son kneeling at my feet, Lucius. He sucks cock like a
champion, did you know that?� He paused and tilted his head thoughtfully to the
side. �What am I saying? Of course you know that. You probably took advantage
of his mouth a time or two yourself.� He lowered his voice confidingly, though
he was sure Lucius could still hear every word. �Were you the one who taught
him to be careful of his teeth? I owe you a debt of thanks, if you did.�

�� A cold wind
raced past Harry, swifter than the breeze that had been blowing ever since they
arrived. Harry checked the sky instinctively, but the clouds were moving too
slowly to have blocked the sun or started shedding their snow yet. He smiled.

�� What�s the
matter, Lucius?� he asked. �Scared to face the one who�s proven that he can be
a real man for your son?�

�� An
ear-splitting screech hit Harry, and he whirled around to face the creature
coming at him from above. It had wide wings, a golden beak, and hooked talons,
and looked like a giant eagle. The shimmer at its edges said it was an
illusion.

�� It was
among the hardest things Harry had ever done, but he folded his arms and stood
facing the bird without a flinch. Illusions couldn�t hurt him, he thought,
repeating the advice that Dearborn, of all people, had given him. He had to
stand up to them and look around for the real trap while he did so.

�� He heard a
slight crunch in the snow behind him in the moment before the bird let out
another screech and stabbed out with one talon as if it wanted to tear his head
from his shoulders. Harry whirled around, wand in hand.

�� Lucius
stood there, one hand flaring with unnaturally bright scarlet fire, which he
hurled at Harry. It might only be another illusion, but Harry didn�t think so.
He dropped and rolled, and felt the fire sting at his cheek as it rushed by
overhead.

�� And then he
was on his feet and dueling for his life, and he hoped that he could keep it up
for fifteen minutes.

�� Lucius
hurled complex spells, chained together, so that the fire spell caused one that
ripped up the earth at Harry�s feet, and while he was still dodging that, there
was another one that loosed a lightning bolt at his temple, and then a pair of
illusion-birds began circling his head, not damaging him but blocking his view
of what Lucius was doing next. It was a use Harry had never considered for
illusions, and he hissed in irritation.

�� But he knew
one thing he could do that Lucius wouldn�t be expecting, something that he
disliked but which would give him an advantage and therefore had to be used. He had made sacrifices
for Draco already; he could make one more.

�� He reached
to the dark shimmer in the back of his mind and looked up at the circling
birds. He tried to forget his fears about what Lucius might be doing while he
did it. If he could complete this, it would turn the battle in his favor and
distract Lucius well enough that Draco should have no trouble completing the
spell.

�� Harry
hissed in Parseltongue, trying to think of the way that the dark shimmer looked
in his mind�s eye, trying to make it reach out like a rope and encircle the
birds the way his magic had somehow encircled the dark glamours that Ron and
Hermione had cast on the battlefield against Nihil. His magic had formed a
snake out of those illusions then; surely it could do the same thing this time,
when he needed it to.

�� But the
illusions didn�t respond, and Harry realized a moment later what was wrong. On
the battlefield against Nihil, he�d had a blood ritual�fake though it was�to
work with and stir up his necromancy. Necromancy still required blood, and he
didn�t think he could get away without using it.

�� Cursing,
especially because now he�d lost track of what Lucius was doing, he reacted on
instinct and spun to the right, because the birds were particularly insistent
on trying to attract his attention to the left.

�� Another
crackling lightning bolt stung the air where he�d stood, and the birds faded.
Lucius must be preparing another spell, Harry saw, and there was a good chance
that he didn�t have the energy to keep up the remnants of the prior one.

�� Preparing�

�� Harry
turned his head and bit into his thumb, around the nail. He didn�t have the
time for a lot of finesse, and so he bit down and then wrenched his head
backwards. The wound tore open hastily, along the nail in a long strip of skin.
Blood fell onto the snow, and Harry heard a slight hissing that could have been
simple heat or the magic that he wanted to use it for taking form.

�� He didn�t
have time to make a circle, either. He concentrated on the small patch of
blood-soaked snow, neck prickling with the anticipation of Lucius�s strike, and
hissed again as he cast a small illusion of a snake with his wand.

�� The snake
snapped into being, a small cobra, because that was the first thing Harry had
thought of, its scales brilliant green and its hood flaring with an equally
brilliant black figure-eight. It probably didn�t look exactly like a real
cobra. Harry didn�t care. His purpose wasn�t to fool Lucius.

�� He hissed a
command to attack, and the snake floated towards Lucius, crossing over his
blood on the way.

�� Things changed. The world rang for Harry as
though someone had hit him on the side of the head, and the dark shimmer in the
back of his mind expanded until it filled his thoughts like an oil slick. He
gasped and reached out, snatching at the air, not sure what he was reaching
for, but sure that he would know it when he found it.

�� He caught
hold of something.

�� The world
swayed again, and then Harry was on his feet, although he didn�t remember
rising, his hands stretched out in front of him and closed as though he were
holding onto a bar. The snake boiled in front of him, scales the color of soot
now, and watched him with chill, dead eyes. The blood was gone.

�� Harry again
hissed the command to attack, and the snake flowed off. It had a body now;
instead of just a glamour, it churned with cold energy, and Harry could see
darkness opening into a far abyss if he concentrated on any part of its coils.
He shook his head to resist the temptation and looked up at Lucius.

�� Lucius was
gone.

�� Harry
narrowed his eyes in confusion, relaxing his grip on the snake a bit, and then
saw Lucius again, as if the narrowing of Harry�s eyes had disrupted the glamour
he was hiding behind. He was crouched down, digging his hands into the snow, a
determined snarl on his face. Harry didn�t know what spell he was hoping to
accomplish; it fact, it looked as though he was holding on against an
earthquake or a powerful blast of wind instead.

�� Then a glow
from the corner of his eye distracted him. Harry commanded the snake to close
the distance between it and Lucius and looked down.

�� Sticking
out of the corner of his pocket, blazing urgently, was the ivory wand Portillo
Lopez had given him.

*

�� Draco was
halfway through the spell when he began to sense that something was wrong.

�� He opened
his eyes and turned his head in a slow circle, seeking out the truth with his
eyes. Then he realized how stupid that was when he was surrounded by solid
rock, and turned so he could lean out the narrow entrance he had discovered to
his old hiding place.

�� Harry and Lucius
were at a distance from him, on top of the hill. Harry was standing still with
something that looked as if it extended from his hands like a sword or a ribbon
in front of him. Draco narrowed his eyes. What was that? Did Harry intend to
defeat Lucius with an enchanted object instead of his magic?

�� And then
Draco realized what was wrong, as he watched his father crouching in the snow.
He could have been performing a spell or ritual there; that was normal. What wasn�t normal was what wasn�t there.

�� Draco
should have been able to see the colored filaments of light spiraling around Lucius,
reaching out from him to the Manor, made visible by the spell Draco was
performing. Those filaments would flow towards Draco throughout the spell,
until they finished by settling into him and giving him the stolen power.

�� But there was
no such light around Lucius.

�� Draco
paused, holding the spell ready in his mind but in abeyance for the moment.
That was what had awakened him from the almost-trance he�d sunk into as he
worked. The spell was reacting in odd ways, the power tugging itself towards
him and then fading, swaying back and forth when it should have been steady. In
fact, it had been swaying back and forth almost from the first moment that
Draco touched it, as if Lucius had done something that caused the old wards and
ancient protections to be displeased with him.

�� Acting on
instinct, Draco turned to face the Manor.

�� There was
the light he had expected to see, great chains of copper and bronze and
scarlet, arching across the sky and descending through the air to join their
claimant.

�� They were
linked around his wrists, his arms, his chest, his neck, the way he had
expected them to be after he had stolen them from Lucius.

�� Draco
licked his lips. If he had continued with the spell, he would have been trying
to steal power from the current owner and defender of Malfoy Manor�himself�to give
to someone else�himself. The spell would still have tried to do so, but it
would have become an endless circle, and Draco didn�t know what the end result
would have been. Probably something destructive.

�� Surrounded
by those dancing chains of light, by the storm and the rainbow, Draco turned to
face the hill again, looking closely at his father.

�� Who was not
there. Who was less than a shadow of a shadow against the great and gleaming
lights that broke from behind him.

�� Draco shook
his head. His mouth was dry and his limbs shaking. He didn�t know what was
going on and didn�t think he could describe it. He broke into a shambling run
towards the hill, though, shouting for Harry to stop. He didn�t know what would
happen, either, if Harry managed to kill Lucius.

�� If he did.
How could you kill a shadow?

*

�� Harry took
the ivory wand in hand. The red jewel continued to glow, and the wand itself
trembled and yearned against his grip, as if it wanted to fly towards Lucius
and stab him through the heart.

�� Harry
looked up again, and found that Lucius had vanished. There wasn�t even an
impression in the snow where he had crouched.

But let his eyes squint, and Lucius
came back, dodging Harry�s cobra with kicks and curses, his face paler than the
snow.

Harry could think of only one
solution. Lucius had somehow been replaced with a creature of Nihil�s devising,
some kind of ghost in service to him. Harry had seen ghosts like that on the battlefield
not far from here, though they had looked more transparent than Lucius and had
stayed the same between one blink and the next.

He knew what to do when this
happened�what he should do before
Nihil sensed his creation�s distress and came to confront Harry and Draco.

He touched the wave-like carvings
on the wand that Portillo Lopez had shown him and aimed the wand at Lucius,
cupping his hand around the jewel.

The world shimmered and shook with
the blast of power, and with Draco�s rising shout.

*

polka dot: That�s the kind of sacrifice
you make for Dark magic.

SP777: Didn�t you suspect the
killing of the cat long before the point where it happened? I thought you would
have.

There�s a very good reason for
those suspicions.

And I suspected that some people
might think Harry was weak for not stopping the ritual.

SpiritOfBeyond: Portillo Lopez is
getting there. Her main problem is that Draco and Harry are not at all what she
has been trained to expect from necromancers and the lovers of necromancers.

thrnbrooke: Thanks!

MewMew2: As Draco says, rousing
suspicion seems like it would be too big a price to pay for whatever advantage
having the illusion move out of its cell could bring.
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Ceremonies of Strife