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The Rising of the Stones	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 13237 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Seven—After the Impasse

            Potter, infuriatingly, kept silent after his stupid dictionary definition, and seemed content to lie in the ropes. Draco strained against the grip of the hand that held him, tried what few earth spells he could remember to make it go back into the stone, and severed a few of the fingers with Severing Curses. Since the stump immediately grew other fingers that clenched even higher on his leg, that left him worse off than before.

            “You can’t get out of the ropes without me,” Draco finally told Potter.

            Potter seemed to wake up, or come out of some kind of meditative trance, blinking at him. “Oh, right, you’re still here,” he said. “I was talking to the stones. I forgot.” He sat up, shifting around, and whistled once, the kind of whistle Draco would have used to call a Crup.

            One of the more triangular stones that lay along the walls of the cavern came tumbling over to him. Potter held out the ropes, and the edges of the stone cut through the ropes. Potter stood up and stretched, then turned to Draco with a faint smile.

            “One of the advantages of not using wand magic. It’s easier to counter the spells cast with it if you have elemental forces at your command.” He cocked his head as if listening—to rocks, Draco supposed—and then nodded. “I’ll be sending you back to the entrance of the cave now.”

            The hand holding Draco began to move, cutting through the stone as if it was moving through water. Draco stumbled, and cursed, and yelled back as loudly as he could, “I’ll accuse your friends of helping you escape!”

            The hand paused.

            “You’re despicable,” Potter said softly, coming towards him. His gait was odd, and Draco’s back prickled when he noticed a second later that Potter’s feet were buried in the stone, like the hand he’d conjured. He was running along as if carried on invisible skates. “And you’re the Ministry’s best Auror? I suppose they judge competence only on number of arrests and power of magic, not on whether you’re upholding principles.” He gave an ugly laugh. “Thank Merlin I didn’t stay with them.”

            “I’m not above using blackmail when I need to,” Draco corrected. He sat up in the grip of the stone hand and smiled at Potter. He knew he was going to get his way, so he could afford a smile or two. “And I’m one of the most effective Aurors for it. The others wish they knew what I know.”

            “Probably not, given some of the magic that you used to get in here. That kind of Dark Arts corrupts someone’s mind and soul.”

            He spoke the words so simply that he gave Draco pause. They were the last ones he would have expected to hear from a man who’d collected Dark Arts books for months and acted as if he was prepared to use rituals to burn away his soul-mark. Draco shook his head. “You believe that?”

            “Yes, of course.”

            This isn’t a simple case at all. Draco didn’t know if he wanted to laugh, or snarl in frustration. In the end, he decided that he wanted to keep questioning Potter. “But you used Dark Arts yourself.”

            “All of this is elemental magic, not Dark Arts,” said Potter, and cocked his head at the hand that held Draco, and the stone behind him, and even the lake in the middle of the cavern, although as far as Draco knew, water and earth magic didn’t mix well. “I planned when I decided I had to leave, Malfoy. I didn’t dash into it and then act proud because I was just so much smarter than anyone else. I know I’m not.”

            “You could convince me of that by telling me the truth.”

            “I don’t want to.”

            “Then your friends—”

            Potter cut him off with a growl that reminded Draco of the noise that the earth giant had made when he was confronting it out in the outer cave. “And the Minister would probably believe you, because he thinks me capable of anything,” Potter muttered. He pushed his fingers through his hair, glared once at Draco, and then said, “Leave me alone for a minute, Malfoy, so I can think.”

            Because it was more promising than anything else Potter had said so far, Draco obediently sat still and let Potter get on with the thinking, although it was a painful task to look at him. Potter leaned back and tapped his head on the wall and ruffled his hair again and sighed hard enough that Draco looked around for who else he was communicating with. Finally he turned around again.

            “Fine,” he said. “You’ve probably heard the rumors about my soul-mark being my scar, or being underneath my scar.”

            Draco nodded. He couldn’t see Potter’s scar well from this angle, and it would be obvious what he was looking at if he ducked his head, or he would have tried to see if it was true.

            “Well, that’s not entirely true.” Potter smiled without humor. “This lightning bolt isn’t my soul-mark. You have to be born with that.” There was a harsh undertone to his voice. “Most people seem to forget that I was eighteen months old when Voldemort marked me.”

            “No one knows much about that night,” Draco felt justified in saying. “I thought that perhaps it meant the Dark Lord was your soulmate.”

            Potter widened his eyes and stared at him in silence for such a long time that Draco started to open his mouth, insulted. Then Potter abruptly collapsed forwards and began to roll on the floor, holding his sides.

            Draco’s first thought was some mysterious contact poison, then a fainting fit, than a curse that only got triggered when someone came near to guessing the truth about Potter’s soulmate. It seemed like the sort of curse de Berenzan would cast. But when Potter rolled back towards him, gasped, and then roared, Draco understood.

            Potter was consumed with hysterical laughter.

            Draco sat as still and as offended as possible. That often had an effect even on the hostesses who invited him to their parties because he was a “mysterious and awful Death Eater” and then got embarrassed when he wasn’t Dark in their presence at all.

            But it didn’t stop Potter’s laughter. He sat back up, shaking his head, and dashing off moisture from the corner of his eye. “If I’d known you thought like that,” he gasped, “I would have let you just go on thinking it. There’s no way you’re ever going to find the truth as long as you’re going through that door. Me and Voldemort. Soulmates!” He fell into another fit of giggling.

            “It’s certainly true that I can’t imagine now how I thought that,” Draco said, austerely, coldly. “You are not a fit mate for his magnificence.”

            Potter snort-giggled. “Of course not. I have a nose.”

            Draco drew in some of his emotions and folded them around him like dragon wings. Potter had always fought better on this ground of levity and irreverence. Draco had been stupid to forget. “There is still the matter of what your friends might tell me. Or the Minister, if I convinced him that they were involved.”

            Potter narrowed his eyes at him. “I deliberately told them nothing so that they couldn’t implicate themselves even under Veritaserum.”

            “But in cases where there’s a huge preponderance of evidence and the criminal would have no reason to want to indict himself, Veritaserum isn’t often used…”

            “Damn you, Malfoy!”

            Potter flung himself forwards and was suddenly right there, in Draco’s face. He hadn’t been this close before, or it seemed like it, even when Draco was hanging onto him and being transported through the earth. He snarled at Draco, and Draco’s head snapped back. It was like being caught in a blast of dragonfire, the heady aftertaste of power that hung around him.

            Earth magic is like that, Draco argued feebly with himself. You work with the same sort of power that causes earthquakes, and of course you’ll seem like you’re strong yourself.

            But his eyes never left Potter as the man stalked back and forth in front of him. He had always respected strong opponents. They were the only ones worth the risk of chasing down and capturing. A stupid opponent might kill you by accident, a weak one might manage to squirm out of the charges with a lot of money and whining, but a strong one would have plans that Draco could fight with his own and magic that was worth contending with.

            “Fine,” Potter snapped finally. “But if you make a move towards my friends after this—because you’re disappointed with how prosaic the truth is, or whatever—then I’m going to have the earth under Malfoy Manor heave and crack open and just disappear that bloody ostentatious house, got it?”

            Draco licked dry lips. Perhaps the threat would be more personally effective if Potter had said he would simply vanish Draco, but maybe not. Draco cared a lot about his ancestral home for all that he didn’t spend much time there. “Agreed.”

            Potter nodded, and then turned and said something in a low voice Draco couldn’t hear to the triangular stone that had rolled up behind him to cut his ropes. It rolled over towards Draco and rooted itself firmly in the earth, tapping on the hand. The hand opened and retracted into the rock. Draco stretched, able to feel his legs again.

            “Why couldn’t you simply dismiss the hand the way you called it up?” he asked.

            Potter sighed and sat down on a boulder that was already in the right place. “Because I come near to getting magically exhausted,” he replied. “I accomplish a lot more with some gestures than I could with a single spell, but then I get a lot more tired from it, too.”

            “Tell me about it,” Draco commanded, stepping towards him. Potter flashed him a quick, wary glance, and Draco made himself hold still.

            But it was so hard. He was so curious.

            “You’ve heard rumors about my soul-mark, you said,” Potter muttered, looking up the tunnel. Draco sat down companionably on the boulder next to him. Potter, looking away, didn’t seem to notice how close he now was. “Well, the rumor you jumped to isn’t the right one.”

            It took a second for Draco to realize what he meant. “The scar altered your soul-mark?” he asked.

            Potter gave a bleak little smile. “The scar isn’t my soul-mark, right.” He reached up and rubbed at his scar for a second. “I had a part of Voldemort’s soul attached to my soul. That’s going to screw up everything, right?” He laughed harshly. “You missed a nuance of the ritual that you found in my home, Malfoy. I wasn’t trying to call up my soul-mark so I could destroy it. I was looking into a hypothetical universe, at what my soul-mark would have been if things hadn’t happened to screw it up. I hoped it would be the mark of someone I knew and I could see who I might have been matched to, if…” He trailed off and shook his head.

            Draco said nothing for a second. There was indeed a ritual that could do that, and enough like the one to burn a soul-mark that it would have been easy to for him to mistake one for the other.

            Well, also easy because the ritual Potter was talking about, the one that could peer across universes and fold time, took a staggering amount of power, patience, and preparation. Draco was now ready to believe Potter could have the first one, but not the others.

            He realized Potter was looking at him, and felt a momentary blush crawl across his cheeks. “What?” he added. “What did I miss that you said?”

            “I said the mark that appeared wasn’t one I recognized, so that was useless.” Potter shrugged. “And as for the wand magic, were you aware that one’s wand is a reflection of one’s soul? With my soul-mark changed, my wand affinity changed. The only one that would let me use it now is the Elder Wand.”

            “Well, then,” said Draco, not understanding. Maybe the problems Granger had thought Potter had with his magic were the result of him trying to use the Elder Wand and not putting enough power behind it. Draco reckoned that the Elder Wand would demand a harder master than Potter. “Why don’t you just use that?”

            Potter turned such a look of loathing on him that Draco fell back before he thought about it, raising his wand. But Potter caught back his magic, or whatever words he was about to say, and sighed. “You wouldn’t understand,” he said. “The corruption I felt—the way that the soul of the wand reached for mine, and—it probably wouldn’t have mattered, but—”

            “Your friends, Potter, remember,” Draco said, speaking in as bored a tone as he dared. Potter was so infuriating. If Draco had managed to master the Elder Wand, he would have told everybody. Why would Potter want to hide something like that?

            “Yes, I know,” Potter whispered. “Anyway, I couldn’t stand the feeling when I used the Elder Wand. It was probably worse because of the way my soul-mark had—changed. So I started learning about elemental magic. You can use it without a wand. You can use it without knowing who your soulmate is.”

            “Or having one,” Draco said. “That’s what it is, isn’t it? You have no soulmate because the mark is too changed.”

            Potter looked away from him and sat still. Draco waited, but there was no change. Draco leaned forwards and rapped him sharply on the back of his head. Potter jumped.

            “What was that?” he asked, turning around and lifting his hand to touch the place Draco had tapped.

            Draco just barely kept from shaking his own head. How could someone who seemed so powerful and dangerous most of the time act like that now? “Because you stopped explaining. That’s what happened. You have no soul-mark because the Dark Lord changed you so much. And you turned to elemental magic.”

            “Yes.” Potter sighed and dragged his hand down his face.

            “Even that doesn’t make much sense,” Draco said. He was more interested in magical theory than Potter’s self-pity. “How can you use earth magic that moves runes around on the stones? What makes you able to use rocks that are normally indifferent to humans?”

            Potter smiled a little. “That I am surprised you didn’t figure out,” he said, which made Draco bristle. That implied all the other mysteries were easy, and diminished Draco’s feats of understanding. But he continued, and Draco did have to listen. “The stones that I used to make the runes or create the spell effects are flaked stones. Made by humans. Ancient tools,” he added, as Draco stared at him in silence. “Before we learned to make tools out of metal or wood. Some ancient axes, knives, that kind of thing.”

            “I’ve never heard of them.”

            “You haven’t studied Muggle archaeology, then,” Potter said, as if it was something normal and wizards did that on a regular basis. “It took some doing to find those stones, since Muggles look for them all the time and haven’t found that many, but there’s a spell I modified to locate them.”

            “That resulted in you using the Elder Wand?”

            Potter’s face grew stubborn in that way which meant Draco had a point but he didn’t want to admit it. “Those stones are ancient, but also touched by humans,” he said. “Created human artifacts. That means I can use the powers of old rock and overcome that problem of old rocks mostly having no connection to humans.”

            Draco scowled. It was a clever solution, he had to admit, and also one that most magical theorists wouldn’t have come up with, as they had no reason to think that Muggle artifacts were important. But he wanted to hit Potter for the smug smile he wore anyway.

            “Where did you get that idea?”

            “Books.”

            Draco rolled his eyes. If they were Muggle books, he probably wouldn’t want to read them. “Fine,” he said. “So you had the means of getting past the most common barriers on earth magic. That still doesn’t explain why you decided to run away from wizarding society to do this.”

            “How long before someone noticed that I wasn’t using wand spells anymore? Or even worse, figured out why and came to challenge me and try to take away the Elder Wand?” Potter shrugged, his face seamed with pain Draco still thought was exaggerated. “I’ve had enough trouble in my life. It’s the same reason I quit Auror training. Being able to bring down Dark wizards isn’t worth it if they start hunting me, or other people duel me to prove they’re better.”

            That was an attitude so foreign to Draco that he sat there for a long moment contemplating it before he shook his head and moved on. “You still could have done something else. Gone into hiding in—”

            “All wizarding communities use wands,” Potter interrupted him. “A lot of them know my name. I don’t want questions. I want to live in peace.” He paused. “Would it make a difference to the charges you want to arrest me on if I told you who I acquired the Dark Arts books from?”

            “No.”

            Potter narrowed his eyes. “So, in other words, I might as well not have told you all this. You’re still going to try and arrest me and haul me back to the Ministry, and my friends will get hounded anyway by members of the press or de Berenzan’s agents who’re convinced they know something.”

            Draco held up his hand. “I’m an Auror, Potter. I do thank you—” the words stuck on his lips, but he pushed them out “—for telling me all this. But you still committed a crime.”

            “Yes,” said Potter. “And I’m about to commit another one.”

            There was a bright glow around Draco in seconds, the boulder he was sitting on and the patch of earth it stood in all ringed in blue flame. Draco leaped to his feet, and then stopped. The flames weren’t actual fire, which would probably have required elemental magic Potter wasn’t a master of. Instead, they were fountains of dancing, tumbling, sharp-edged sapphires.

            “It’s annoying to have to abandon a place that was getting to be a home,” said Potter from beyond the fountains. “But these sapphires should keep you in place long enough for me to do what I have to do. And I wouldn’t suggest trying that spell you used to track me down again. Really, I wouldn’t.”

            “Why not?” Draco asked, more than half his attention on the sapphires. “It worked once before.”

            “And next time, there’s going to be an earthquake under your house.”

            The sapphires began to rise, piling on each other, moving clacking rings of them that tumbled back and forth and altered in such unpredictable patterns that Draco couldn’t come up with a spell that would blast them apart. He was bracing himself to try anyway when they abruptly collapsed, the gems lying around in glittering patterns that were level with the earth and harmless.

            Potter was gone. A second later, the earth glinted under the sapphires and sucked them in, too.

            Draco stood up slowly, scowling.

            Not because he had lost Potter again, or because of Potter’s threats. Where Potter had left a weakness once, he would leave another one. And Draco didn’t think Potter would actually kill him.

            No, because he had realized that nothing Potter had told him—sensible though many of the explanations were—clearly outlined what was in his birth records to make de Berenzan fear him.

*

            Jester: Thank you! You have part of an answer.

            SP777: Lengthy, but not complete!
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The Rising of the Stones