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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-One—The Corridor of Copper Bells

            “This doesn’t seem like it’ll make much sense,” Ron muttered under his breath as he bent down and fastened another vine around the copper bells Fleur had wanted them to gather.

            Harry only shook his head. He would have said something, but they’d been working most of the morning, and he was too out of breath to talk.

            The meadow Fleur had chosen as the site for the ritual was about a mile from Shell Cottage, near another wizarding house, but the owners had said they didn’t mind the use of their property. They were a man and woman with three young kids. Harry thought they would keep well out of the way of the ritual.

            Right now, what he and Ron had to do was string vines—not even chains—through the tops of hundreds of little copper bells, and set them up so they formed small aisles down and through the meadow.

            “Why copper?” Ron asked, in the tone of someone asking to distract himself from foolish questions. He stood to stretch his aching back.

            Harry shrugged, still silent. He pulled on another vine, and cursed silently as some of the outer plant skin peeled back from the top of the bell. Fleur had been insistent that all the vines had to be whole, not peeled, and he and Ron had already gone through hours of work charming big loops onto the tops of the bells that could take a vine through them.

            “I don’t know,” Harry finally said, when he could catch his breath because Ron had waited for him to cast a charm that would tuck the strip of cut vine back along its length. “Does it matter?”

            “Yes,” said Ron. “Or at least to Hermione. She’s been pestering me to ask Fleur why copper so that she can try and figure out more of the base of Fleur’s theory.”

            “Then—ask Fleur.” Harry was once again doing the tricky work of threading a vine through the tops of the bells, and there was no attention he could spare for a question that Hermione was capable of finding out on her own.

            It took until dusk to encircle those designated parts of the meadow with the lashed vines, and then cast the charms that would strengthen the vines and ensure they didn’t break under the strain. Harry had asked, once Fleur had repeated the instruction four times, what would happen if the vines broke in the middle of the ritual.

            “One of us would cease to exist.”

            Harry shuddered and went to check on the vines on the far side of the clearing, the ones he and Ron had strung this morning. An answer like that killed a lot of his impatience.

            “Harry.”

            Harry turned around, in time to see Ron coming over to hug him. Harry leaned against him and shut his eyes. He wished he had more memories of times when they’d stood like this, leaning on each other, instead of mainly ones from the Horcrux hunt and Hogwarts.

            “Fleur told me that you gave up the right to find your old memories during the ritual,” Ron finally murmured, when the embrace had relaxed Harry’s muscles a bit. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

            “It wasn’t a right,” Harry said, and pulled back and shook his head. “It was a possibility. And this ritual wasn’t made for me. It’s about the chance to pull Lucius Malfoy out of a house-elf. Draco would be devastated if I used it for myself.”

            Ron grimaced a little at the mention of Draco’s name, but he was far more interested, Harry thought, in something else. “Is that really the only reason you were able to give it up? Fleur said it was easy for you. She expected you to have conflicted feelings about it, and—” Ron’s hand made a vague swooping motion.

            “The way I look at it,” Harry said slowly, “Old Harry died when I lost my memories. And you remember what Dumbledore said about magic that could bring back the dead?”

            “Or what the Tale of the Three Brothers said.” Ron shivered and wrapped his arms around himself, then nodded. “You think you’d be killing the part of you that’s lived since then, right?”

            “Yes,” said Harry. “And I can’t bring myself to kill the man who loves Draco to bring back the man who loved Ginny. Or might have loved her. Or pretended to love her.” He shook his head. “Even talking about him like this is confusing, and not because he was part of me.”

            Ron again nodded. He stood looking off into the distance, and Harry waited patiently. Fleur and Bill hadn’t known how long it would take them to string the bells, so they would have a late dinner waiting at Shell Cottage that could be heated up whenever Harry and Ron got back.

            Ron finally turned around and said, “What is it like, loving Malfoy?”

            Harry smiled before he could help himself. “I assume you don’t want all the details any more than I want all the details from you and Hermione.”

            Ron’s face assumed the approximate color of a brushfire. “Merlin, mate,” he said, and turned away to start walking in the direction of Shell Cottage. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

            “No.” Harry paced beside his best friend and thought about it. There had to be words that would tell Ron a good part of the truth while not exposing anything too intimate.

            And when he thought about it, there were.

            “It’s like walking down a bridge,” he said, and smiled a little when Ron gave him a confused glance. “The only way that there can be a bridge between two parts of me, the old one and the new one. Draco’s the only one who knew so much about what the old version of me was doing at the time, and knows the new me this well, too.”

            “So you don’t love him for himself? Only the way he knows you?”

            Harry groaned and wished there was some way he could say everything he needed to at once, and be perfectly understood. Only there was no way. Draco would misunderstand him sometimes, he’d always had some arguments with Ron and Hermione, Old Harry had lied to a lot of people, and even with Royal, there were snippy attempts to bite his fingers off when he showed up without a mouse.

            But there were no perfect ways to make people think of him and love him. And if Harry thought long enough about it, then he could see where Old Harry’s temptations had come from.

            “I love him for himself. And the way he knows me.”

            Ron thought about that, visibly wincing a little at some of the thoughts that must have been occurring to him. Harry let him work through them as needed, now and then glancing back at the copper bells strung in the meadow.

            Ron finally swallowed and whispered, “It must have been—incredibly hard, for you to realize who Hermione was and that all your memories were gone.”

            They’d had this conversation a few times since he woke, but not since they’d come to realize how much Old Harry had been hiding, and the way his relationships had been based on lies. Harry only nodded, watching Ron.

            “And I suppose—Malfoy was willing to tell you what had happened, and confirm that in some ways, Old Harry was doing Dark Arts.” Ron looked at Harry out of the corner of his eye. “While we didn’t want to acknowledge it.”

            Harry reached out and squeezed Ron’s shoulder hard enough to make his friend look at him nervously. “You couldn’t acknowledge it,” he said firmly. “You didn’t know about it. And when it finally started to come out, I don’t blame you for wanting to deny it. It was like—like you had a different best friend, one I didn’t know, and suddenly he disappeared and the person responsible for his disappearance was standing here and telling you what an awful bloke he was. I wouldn’t want to listen to me either.”

            Ron’s face slowly relaxed, and he said, “That’s why you’re my best mate. Because things happen that ought to destroy us, and we climb past them and keep on going.”

            Harry nodded. “Like having arguments during the Horcrux hunt. It didn’t stop us from succeeding.”

            “No.”

            Ron’s smile was a little sad, and Harry thought he knew why. Ron would be thinking of things more recent than memories ten years old, memories that Harry could no longer share except as stories, and probably wondering if he should even mention them.

            Then Ron said, in a light tone that told Harry how desperately he wanted to change the subject, “And dating Malfoy. This is a crisis that we’ll get through, too.”

            “Draco’s not going to disappear,” said Harry carefully. Sometimes he made mistakes where he thought he was reading Ron right, and then he had to remember that ten years had passed, again. “If that’s what you’re thinking—well, get rid of it, Ron. He’s close enough to me that even if we stop dating, we’re still going to be intertwined in some way.”

Draco was obsessed enough with me to not want to get married when his father told him he had to, even when he had no idea that I might like blokes and might ever like him back. But saying that, without the context Harry had seen it in, would only give Ron the wrong idea, so he didn’t.

“I never thought that,” Ron protested. “I mean that Hermione and I will grumble and then get used to it.”

Harry had to smile. “Hermione is already used to it.”

            “Knowing Hermione, she has a contingency plan in place if you break up, a contingency plan if you stay together, a contingency plan about what to do if Malfoy hurts you…”

            Harry laughed, as he knew he was supposed to, and the conversation limped through the rough patch long before they got back to Shell Cottage and were eating the perfectly delicious soup Bill had made and left under a Warming Charm.

            Get through rough patches, Harry thought, watching as Ron sipped with his mouth closed and didn’t talk when it was full, proving a few things had changed since Hogwarts. Because that’s what we do.

*

            “Where are we going?” The grey-eyed house-elf stood in front of Draco as he reached out and wrapped a band of forest-green cloth around his arm. The elf ignored that, though. His attention was all for Harry.

            He does have something in him that makes him different from the majority of house-elves. Dobby would have asked about the band, or refused to wear it, or wanted two hundred of the same kind. Other house-elves would probably have stayed silent, or at least asked about the band. This one…

            Harry wondered, for the first time, as he saw wariness come into the elf’s eyes, if they would have to deal with rebellion from one of the people the ritual was meant to help.

            “We are bringing you to people who want to heal you,” said Draco. He bent down in front of the elf. “You have visions that disturb you, I know. Memories that you can’t account for. You told me that once.”

            Two pairs of grey eyes locked on each other like that, so similar, made a sight that Harry abruptly realized he couldn’t watch. He turned his head and looked at a tapestry on the far wall, which showed a hunt under a full moon. He breathed slowly.

            “I remember the visions,” the elf said slowly. “But I was not having them in a long time.”

            “I remember them even better,” Draco said. “And I know where they might have come from. If you want to go back to what you were, then you’ll come with us. We’re going to visit a magical theorist who’s agreed to help.”

            “Magical theorists are…” The elf’s hands were trembling by the time Harry couldn’t stand it anymore and turned around to look.

            “Magical theorists are dangerous.” Draco leaned back against the wall. “I remember telling you that, a long time ago. I was afraid they could take one look at you and figure out what you were. But that’s obviously not true, and even if they’d been able to do that…” He gave a quick, shallow breath that made Harry come up beside him before he thought about it and press his fingertips to Draco’s shoulder.

            “I should have let them help you,” Draco whispered, his eyes lingering on the elf’s face.

            The elf stared back and forth between them. Harry thought he looked slightly longer at Harry, but it really was hard to tell. Then he swallowed and said, “Master Harry Potter was being here at times.”

            “Yes,” said Draco. “And he’s going to help in the ritual to free you. I want you to listen to him the way you would me.”

            “Free me from what?” Maybe Draco didn’t notice, but Harry could hear the shrill edge to the elf’s tone, the way of speaking he was getting that Dobby had had sometimes right before he burst out sobbing.

            When Draco started to talk, Harry caught his gaze and shook his head. Draco hesitated, then stepped back. Harry was the one who knelt in front of the house-elf and caught that tearful gaze.

            “We know that you were once two different people,” he said. “One was an elf, and one was a human. Lucius Malfoy.”

            The elf’s hand shook. He was trying to form a fist above his heart, Harry thought, but he didn’t know why. He waited until the elf gave a little nod, as if to say he was willing to listen to this, although Harry didn’t have a great deal of faith that he would understand all of it.

            Then again, no one except maybe Fleur did. Hermione had spent a lot of time talking to the little house-elf, but she had admitted that she didn’t know what to make of his mingled personality and memories.

            “We want you to be free,” said Harry. “So part of you can be a house-elf and part can be a human, and there’s no confusion. When the parts of you are separate again, then you won’t have those strange memories and dreams.”

            The elf hesitated.

            “I once had a house-elf who was a friend,” Harry said, inspired. “His name was Dobby. He might have worked with you before you were part human. I promise that whatever you say to me, I’ll listen to you.” He carefully kept his back turned to Draco, because he knew he couldn’t make the same promise for him. The best you could say when it came to Draco and house-elves was that he was trying.

            “I am who I am,” the elf whispered. “What if I want—what if I am wanting to keep those memories and dreams?”

            Harry blinked. He hadn’t expected that. But he knew the answer, because he had discussed this specific situation with Fleur along with listening to a lot of the theory behind the ritual.

            “The ritual gives you the chance to choose,” he said. “I lost my memories, too, you know? I couldn’t decide who I wanted to be until I was confronted with those old memories and I could really understand them. You’ll see the memories, and you can choose if you want to be a separate human and house-elf, or stay the way you are.”

            Draco hissed behind him, but Harry didn’t turn around. That was the way things were. In the end, the ritual was all about free will, and the house-elf had free will as much as any of them. It probably wouldn’t have worked with a normal house-elf, Fleur had admitted, because of their magic and desire to serve, but this was already an unusual case.

            The elf looked at Harry with huge eyes and trembling eyelashes. Harry braced himself. This was usually the point when Dobby would burst out crying and fling his arms around Harry. At least Harry didn’t think he’d have to deal with this particular elf talking about how “Harry Potter was a great wizard.”

            But the thought made a little stab of pain travel up the middle of his chest anyway.

            I miss Dobby.

            “Master Harry Potter is being strange,” whispered the elf. “Talking about an elf’s free will.” He shook himself once, but he still didn’t back way or look down, which were “normal” things to do. “Elves haves no free will.”

            “Sometimes they do,” Draco said, and Harry was glad he had come forwards to take part in the conversation now. Ultimately, Draco was the one who was Lucius Malfoy’s son and commanded the part of the elf that was pure elf. “This ritual is one of the times. I want you to participate in it and look at the memories and—decide for yourself what you really want.”

            His voice caught. Harry reached out and looped an arm behind his neck, then staggered when Draco leaned on him strongly. He hadn’t expected that much weight.

            “All right, Master Malfoy,” said the elf uncertainly, and spent some more time looking back and forth between them. Then he nodded and stood straighter. “Master Malfoy is being satisfied? I can go?”

            “Yes, you can go,” Draco said, and leaned some more on Harry.

            When the elf had vanished, Harry turned Draco to face him and gently kissed his chin. Draco nodded without looking up. “I’m convinced this is the right thing to do,” he said. “I didn’t change my mind—since.”

            “Good,” Harry said quietly.

            If Draco could be convinced it was the right thing to do even knowing he might never see his father again, if the elf chose to stay an elf…

            Harry kissed him again, because he had to convey his admiration for that, and then Draco lifted his head and the kisses changed, and Harry gladly thought about something else other than grief and hardship for a while.

*

            Severus1snape: Thank you!
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The Dust of Water