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Until the Solstice Rises	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 5147 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Title: Bells to the Wild Sky

Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

Pairing: Harry/Draco

Rating: R

Warnings: Some angst, far-future established relationship

Wordcount: 1990

Summary: Harry and Draco, on the New Year’s Eve of their thirtieth year together, look back on the changes in the wizarding world.

Author’s Notes: Written for the prompt given to me by vaysh11, with the summary pretty much a restatement of her prompt. The title is taken from Tennyson’s In Memoriam: “Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky.”

Bells To the Wild Sky

            They sat on a hill high above the glittering lights of Londinium, and looked down on them. Now and then, Draco’s hand would reach out and touch Harry’s. Harry touched back, and smiled with both his lips and his eyes.

            Draco watched him thoughtfully, wondering if Harry knew what that smile meant to him. Thirty years together, thirty years tonight, and still, sometimes he didn’t think he had the words for the emotions. Or perhaps it was that the emotions grew deeper and deeper the more time they spent together, so that it was like trying to put a bridge across a river that continually carved a new bed.

            “Do you think we should go to bed?” Harry’s voice was soft and hoarse, a legacy of the scar that twisted gently across his throat. Draco reached up and traced the scar, and Harry leaned back towards him, smiling. Draco leaned in to kiss the scar, and Harry tilted his head back and gasped, then swore as his knee popped.

            “You’re just a mess,” Draco said, knowing that he would get away with the teasing, though he was perhaps the only one in the wizarding world, either the way it was now or the way it had been, who could.

            “Messes need cleaning up,” Harry disagreed, drawing Draco onto him with his eyes as much as his hands and voice. “And I just need fucking.”

            Draco kissed his face, his eyelids, the scar on his fingernails, the marks of old burns on his forearms, where someone had taken him and marked him with the Dark Mark, and Draco, in a rage, had cast a spell that burned it off again. Harry arched his neck in a mute plea, and Draco prepared him with a shaking wand.

            They went slowly after that, though, partially because they had to pause and cast Warming Charms that kept wearing off due to the intense cold around them, and then more charms to protect against the snow that began to fall, and partially because if they went fast, they could no longer recover as fast at fifty-one as they had at twenty-one. But Harry still sighed when Draco slid into him, and it was still as much of a challenge as it had ever been to make him do more, say more, be more. Draco rocked into him, and Harry rocked back, emphasizing with sharp thrusts of his hips that he was there, still, smooth, real, scarred, pitted, by no means fragile.

            Draco shut his eyes, listening to the distant bells as they began to toll the New Year. It seemed fitting to him that they should be hearing it as they fucked, as they celebrated their relationship, as they made their commitment to each other new again.

            He could pretend it was the same bells that had brought them together if he listened, although those New Year’s Eve bells had rung not to celebrate the cycle of time but to announce that their worst fears had come true, and the Muggles had discovered who wizards were and a way into the wizarding world.

            He and Harry had both come back to Hogwarts after three years of denial that they needed to finish up something at that place, and had stumbled out of their rooms into the same corridor, gasping and red-eyed. They’d stared at each other, and then run for the Great Hall, where McGonagall’s enhanced voice was summoning the students, explaining what had happened, and enjoining them to be calm.

            Of course no one was calm by the time she finished explaining, and the Great Hall was filled with wailing, as though the slaughter had already begun. Draco had turned his head, and Harry was there, and his eyes were so killingly determined that Draco could feel himself nodding back. Together, they moved together, and provided a solid wall for the first-years to lean against, while they used their own enhanced voices to explain that no one should panic, and they had plans for defending the school.

            They didn’t have plans, yet. But they were the only young survivors of the war there, and the only ones who knew what this might mean—the only ones able to draw on resources of adrenaline and reserves of strength that seemed to have been lying dormant all those years they resisted the call of Hogwarts, and fling themselves back into battle.

            Then Harry’s nails cut into his hips, and Draco sagged forwards and gave in with more hammering thrusts, and the memories broke apart like the salt that the Muggles had scattered on the site of Hogwarts—what they thought of as Hogwarts. He leaned his head on Harry’s shoulder and breathed, in and out.

            They had started to work together on that distant New Year’s Eve, and perhaps it was true, the old idea that whatever you did on the eve of the year, you would be doing the rest of the year. And they had never stopped.

            Draco smiled, kissed the side of Harry’s neck, and reached down to stroke him off. It took him longer and not as long, and he groaned and sighed and released while Draco held him, and watched fireworks rising up above Londinium, casting their light over its shining, twisted streets, not easy for any marching army to find their way along, but perfect for the dancing that filled them now.

*

            Harry opened his eyes and grinned. Draco was watching the celebrations. Well, even after thirty years to get used to them, it still wasn’t entirely familiar, Harry reckoned. He stroked the back of Draco’s neck and hummed to him, while his mind filled with his own memories, of the night that they had used the Great Spell that separated the Muggle and wizarding worlds again.

            He and Draco had been the centers, the conduits, the controls. It was the only way the Great Spell would work; it was the only way a spell could become a Great Spell, really. There had to be someone at the center of it, a single person who would sacrifice their life and magic to it, or a powerful pair who trusted each other completely.

            If it had been three, Harry would have stood with Ron and Hermione. But it was two, and he had turned and drawn Draco into the middle of the circle before anyone could voice a different suggestion.

            They had stood there, in the dark, on the damp grass, their hands resting on each other’s shirt fronts, with Draco’s eyes so bright and expectant that it was hard to bear the weight of his gaze. Harry had kissed him once, the conclusion they had been moving towards even if it hadn’t been until tonight that they reached it, and they had stepped away from each other and held hands.

            The other wizards involved chanted around them. Hermione, with her face streaked with tears; she hadn’t been able to convince her parents to come into the wizarding world with her. Ron, his hands steadier than they had been since before Fred’s death. McGonagall, giving all her heart to this next phase of battle. Even Narcissa Malfoy, her voice low and exquisitely modulated, and the power swelling all around her as though it didn’t want to be left out.

            And in the center with Harry and Draco was the Mirror of Erised, the inspiration and anchor of the spell. When the moment came that the spell was to take effect, Harry and Draco had turned together and cast the magic straight into the center of the glass, their reflections showing their wand movements and their parted lips and their flicking wrists. At the moment, there was no other place that either of them would rather be.

            The spell flared deep in the heart of the mirror, white and glass and gold. There was a confused sensation when Harry felt as if he were being ripped apart, doubled.

            And so they separated the wizarding world from the Muggle world, creating an image of their desire and channeling all of the places and people and things they wanted into that: Diagon Alley, Hogwarts, their friends and families, the Ministry, Quidditch rules, the intense darkness of the Forbidden Forest and the intense lucidity of Dumbledore’s tomb.

            Except, when they opened their eyes in the new world, the reflection of what had been set free from the tyranny of what was and able to stand on its own, they found they had done more than that. They had created something more, drawing on the dreams and hopes of every wizard in Britain, including the children—and all the magical creatures.

A reflection of London lay in this new world, a place where all could walk and fear no Muggle, an expansive city with places waiting for them to enter to sleep and buy and talk and eat and live. They had called it Londinium after a city that had once been, that had changed and grown into something else. It seemed only right to call this graft from the same root by an older name.

And there were meadows no wizard could enter where unicorns galloped free, and a larger and deeper Forbidden Forest where centaurs told the stars, and a deep band of blue-green ocean encircling this new isle of Britain where merfolk swam. A variation of Wolfsbane that eased the pain of transformations and promised to eliminate them finally if taken long enough. A Malfoy Manor with rooms where Voldemort had walked transfigured into different ones.

            A Godric’s Hollow with an unbroken cottage in the center of it, and no war memorial.

            They had begun their lives then, in this place that was not a new world but was more that than anything else, and it was where they had lived since.

            Harry turned his head again. The bells had fallen silent, and so had the fireworks, and there was only the dancing left now, tangled chains of bodies moving through the streets, hands waving and feet stamping and voices shouting.

            He would be the last to proclaim that the changes they had inflicted on the wizarding world were the best course. He wished he could have sought some other way, that they could have lived with the Muggles.

            He would be the last to say that their reflection was perfect.

            But it was theirs, and it was very grand and good if it was not perfect, a gift of heart’s desire. It was not the mirror’s fault, not the image’s fault, if one’s desires changed later but the image remained fixed.

            And in one thing, at least, Harry thought, turning his head and focusing on Draco, my desire will never change.

            “Again?” Draco asked, turning to look at him. His face was bright with weariness and excitement, his hair paler than ever with the white that had begun to thread through it. The fingers he held out to Harry had more calluses and spots than before, and more broken fingernails, and were stronger than ever.

            “This, again,” Harry said, and sat up, and kissed him.

            Below them, in the city they had helped to create, one more bell rang, and was silent. On the hill, they stepped into the New Year without stepping, they glided, they sat, and they smiled against each other’s lips.

            The End.



*

            SP777: No, simply someone who likes to dress feminine.

            And I like Solstice better than Christmas.

            BAF: Thank you! I did like writing that fic in a guilty pleasure sort of way.

            And thank you for the review on the other fic, too.

            Rina: Thanks! The bet he lost was the prompt, basically. ;)

            Makoto_Sagara: Thank you! I don’t think the Draco from the BWWOT universe will ever tire of reminding Ginny about the past.
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Until the Solstice Rises