Beneath Boundless Skies part four
Jun. 27th, 2008 03:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blamebramptonPart one
Part two
Part three
The next day passed no differently.
*****************
On the third day, Jon knocked at their door before dawn.
Harry let him in, ignoring the older man’s wince when he opened the door.
“How’s he going?” Jon asked.
“What you’d expect,” Harry replied.
“Did they bury her?”
“Yesterday. A private service. The Minister of Magic, her sister, and the Weasley family, you met Ron when he was here. They were cousins, distantly.”
“He didn’t get to say goodbye.”
Harry turned his face away.
“You didn’t get to say goodbye, either, did you?”
Harry’s laugh was more bitter than he’d intended. “The people I lose don’t tend to have good deaths at home.”
Jon covered Harry’s hands with his own. “You carry them with you, you know. When I saw you the first time, I could see all these ghosts standing behind you. You gotta let em go, Harry. For you, for them.” Jon looked down at the still-sleeping Draco. “He’s gotta do the same thing. If you don’t, you can’t get on with the living, and that just makes your old people sad. They want to go, and they want you to go on, you see.”
“That’s easy to say.”
“I kept telling you two you ought to do Environment.” Jon smiled gently at him. “Can you get him up and dressed? Bring your brooms. We’re gonna say goodbye. You’re going to do a ceremony, with a bit of my culture since you’re so far away from your own.”
Harry looked at him bleakly.
“Trust me,” Jon asked. “I promise I will not make it worse.”
Harry nodded.
“I’ll meet you out front in fifteen.”
Harry waited until he had gone before putting another log on the fire and waking Draco.
“It’s early,” Draco complained.
“We’re going out.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Jon wants us to do a ceremony,” Harry told him, aware of the note of cajoling in his voice.
“I want to go back to sleep.”
Harry reached out and pushed Draco’s lank hair back from his face. “Please?”
Draco frowned, but he got out of bed.
“You go and get dressed. I’ll make us some sandwiches.”
They managed warm clothes, brooms, and a sandwich apiece in the allotted time. Jon was waiting for them with a backpack and his broom. With few words, the three of them mounted up and began to fly northwards.
The flight to school had been one of discovery and pleasure. This was one of purpose. Miles disappeared below them as the light grew grey and then fingers of orange began to reach onto the sky in the east. By the time the sun was well up, the ground beneath them, was looking familiar to Harry. Jon led them over the green coastal lands they had passed before, and towards a jutting ridge of craggy sandstone and granite.
He landed in the scrub at the ridge’s base.
“Going to show you two something. It’s not secret, you’re allowed to see it, but it is sacred. Do you understand?”
Harry nodded. Draco did, too, though Harry was not sure how much attention he was paying.
Jon led them in beneath an overhang and pulled a torch from his pack. He cast the light upwards. There were figures painted onto the underside of the rock, a man, another man, a bird, a fish, maybe a river … all connected with lines and dots.
“It’s a story,” Jon explained. “See that man, he was in love with a woman he couldn’t have, so he came into her camp one night, and he tried to steal her from her husband. She cried out and her husband came to help her, but the man tried to kill him, so he changed into a fish and sprang into the river, and she changed into a bird and flew away. And then the man went away, because he couldn’t love a bird. And she looked down into the river and saw her husband, and he looked up into the sky and he saw his wife.”
Harry looked at Jon blankly.
“The thing is,” Jon spoke patiently, “see these lines and dots? Well, even though she was in the sky and he was in the river, that didn’t stop them loving each other. Maybe they couldn’t hear each other or touch each other, maybe they couldn’t see each other when she was in the clouds and he was in the deeps, but they could still love and know they loved.”
Harry thought of a slight woman pushing her long hair back from her face and looking at him with such loving hunger. He looked at Draco, who was looking at Jon with hope.
“Do you think she knew?” Draco asked quietly. “I don’t remember the last time I told her.”
Harry looked at Draco seriously. “Never doubt that she knew you loved her. It is the one thing anyone who ever met her can say about your mother with absolute certainty”
Draco pursed his lips together and nodded. “Is this your ceremony?” he asked Jon.
“Nah,” the older man grinned. “This is the start. Now you’re going on to the next step.”
He led them out from under the overhang and handed them quills, ink and sheets of parchment. “Sit and write your goodbyes,” he instructed. “Tell them what you want to.”
“Them?” Draco asked, uncertain.
“It’s not just your mother you miss, is it?”
Draco blinked away tears. “No,” he said.
“So you write to all of them. Both of you do. Then we do the next step.”
Harry sat beside Draco, and the two of them began to write. Harry’s first letter was easy, to his parents: he wished he’d really known them, had more than ghosts and shadows to remember them by. To Sirius: he wished he’d been less impetuous, had understood more, and maybe he wouldn’t have died. To Tonks, Remus and Fred: he wished he had understood the horcruxes sooner, had been able to end the war sooner, or keep them from danger. To Tom Riddle: he wished he’d never been born, had never touched Harry’s mind, had never destroyed so many lives.
Harry was surprised to see that it was past midday when he finished.
Draco was watching him, with a look of interest. “You wrote to Riddle, but not to Dumbledore,” he pointed out.
Harry shrugged. “Dumbledore and I said everything we had to say to each other. Who did you write to?”
“My mother, Vincent, Tonks, Snape. I wanted to apologise to Snape for hating him, I thought he was part of the reason I was trapped with Voldemort, I didn’t realise he was trying to help. I told Tonks I like her son, and I was sorry we didn’t know each other, we should have.”
“She’d have liked that.”
“What did you write to Riddle?”
“I told him to get fucked.”
Draco laughed mirthlessly. “Is that in the spirit of the step?” he asked Jon.
“They’re your goodbyes,” Jon said. “They can be to whoever you like.”
“I think we’re done,” Draco told him.
“Then we climb the ridge.” Jon set off at a fast walk towards a section of the rock that came down to the earth. Draco and Harry followed at a trot.
“Why don’t we just fly?” Harry asked.
“This is the next step,” Jon called back over his shoulder.
It took longer than they thought it would. Twice Jon stopped to give them water from his pack. “If you ever get lost in this place, these rocks are full of life. You can find water in the morning, or if it rained in the last week, and you can find snake and lizard, you can live on them for weeks. Best of all, people can see you when they come looking. So you go up the ridge, unless it’s a fire or a lightning storm. Ridge’ll get you killed in one of those.”
Harry and Draco did not have enough breath to talk and climb.
At last they reached the top. From below, it had looked as though it would be rocky and treeless, but in fact it was green and pleasant, with a stand of gums not ten feet from where they stood.
“I used to come here all the time with my mum and dad when I was little,” Jon told them. “Then when I was older and knew I was going to be a baajim man, I’d come here by myself, see if I could hear all the spirit voices. Never could, really. But it was a good place to watch.”
He pointed, and they looked about, with far horizons in every direction. Jon spoke, and the cool blue day they saw changed under his words.
“You can look out across the fields and see lightning crashing through the clouds to earth, a wave of green light telling you there’s a storm miles away, the air crackles with ozone – it smells new. Or in the years it doesn’t rain, you can stand here and see the earth cracked in every direction, trees brown and brittle, fire racing through them, a red sea of destruction, and after that will come the green from the black earth.” Jon took a breath. “This is a good place to watch,” he repeated.
“Are we watching?” Draco asked.
“Eh?” Jon looked at them. “Nah, ignore me, you two are burning.”
He pulled together a pile of twigs and small branches and lit them with his wand. “Right, letters on.”
Draco fed his sheets in one by one, Harry followed. When they were all ash, Jon handed them a small shovel from his pack. “OK, now you go and send them out,” he explained. “You throw them off the edge.”
“And that’s a ceremony in your culture?” Harry asked, wanting to get it right.
Jon shook his head. “It’s one in yours, but you need to get your goodbyes out of the way before we can move onto the next bit.”
It was nearly dark by the time they had finished clearing the ashes. Jon had built another fire, larger this time. After a while, he pushed the burning wood down to one end, leaving embers behind. He walked to the nearest gum and stripped off some of the low green branches, then dipped them in the embers until they started to smoulder.
“This part’s the ceremony,” he told them. “The smoke cleanses the spirits. Tells them to stop holding onto you, tells you to stop holding onto them. So we send away all those little ones from the past and that just leaves the one big one who doesn’t want to leave you yet. You have to tell her to go.”
Draco’s eyes were wet, but his voice was steady as he addressed the smoke-filled twilight. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry that I wasn’t there. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you how much I love you. I’m sorry that I didn’t keep you safe. I know what you did for me, you were so brave, but I’d have loved you the same even if you weren’t.”
Jon’s feet transcribed a pattern in the dust, beating out a slow rhythm. The smoke swirled about them, and Harry could hear low voices and the beat of sticks in the distance. Draco took his arm. “Look,” he said, pointing.
All around them, lines shimmered above the earth. Some red, some silver, some golden. “Now that,” said Jon, finishing one last step. “That part there was my culture. Some of it works even for you whitefellas.”
Harry could feel the lightening Jon had worked. Draco’s face showed he could, too.
“Do we go back now?” he asked.
“I do,” Jon said. “Gonna get a good night’s sleep after that. But you two stay here. You need to know what’s next before you can finish burying your past.”
“Stay here till when?” Draco asked.
“Morning,” Jon told them. “Then you’ll know what you’re meant to do.”
Harry opened his mouth to argue, but it was too late, Jon had gone.
“That was a top-grade piece of Environmental magic,” Draco said admiringly.
“I thought it was something indigenous,” Harry replied, surprised.
“Same thing, didn’t you read any of the brochures?” Draco asked patiently.
Harry looked at him.
“Of course you didn’t.” Draco smiled. “Here, help me build this fire up. If we’re here all night, we may as well be warm.”
“Don’t suppose Jon left any food?” Harry asked.
“No, just water.”
“I suppose he expects us to roast a lizard or two.”
“I’m really not that hungry.”
They built up the fire, and gathered what spare wood they could for the evening. All too soon it was fully dark, they sat side by side, staring at the flames.
“Harry,” said Draco, after a long while. “Thank you. The last few days have been … bearable, because of you.”
Harry put an arm around Draco’s shoulders in lieu of speaking.
“You’re brave,” Draco said after another long silence. “You hold people when you have no idea if they can be held.”
“I’m not afraid of holding you, Draco,” Harry told him. “And I’m far from brave. I’ve spent the last seven years terrified that I’d either be killed by Voldemort or turn into him.”
Draco scoffed. “You could never turn into Voldemort. You’re too disgustingly pleasant.”
Harry wanted to laugh, but he shuddered instead. “There were times when I felt all of his glee for slaughter, felt what it was like to live only caring for yourself, not for who was trampled in your bid for your own desires. I could feel him trying to beat me down sometimes, and it terrified me. I didn’t think there was any way I could hold him out.” Harry drew in a ragged breath. “And I had to hold him out, because I would have destroyed myself before I let him take me to his side.”
Draco looked up at him. “But what about all your power? I’ve seen you – Merlin, Harry, I’ve fought you. You can do things none of us can hope to.”
“That’s not true.”
“Harry, you killed Voldemort.”
“No! I didn’t! I wish people would stop saying that! I defeated him, but he killed himself. I don’t kill.”
Draco’s voice was very quiet. “You do injure.”
Harry looked at him guiltily. “I do,” he agreed. “I’m sorry. It was all a … I thought that I …” He took a ragged breath, searching for a way to explain. He found one.
“I know that you know nothing about the Muggle world, but they’re not stupid, the way you think they are. When Grindelwald was waging war against our world, they were fighting on two fronts.”
“I know about Hitler, Harry.”
“But do you know about the war in Japan? They were afraid that they would never be able to end it without losing thousands more soldiers. So they used a bomb that had been designed by a team of brilliant men. As they were making it, those men saw it as a series of problems, as a challenge to their genius. Then, when they finished it, they realised with horror what it could do. When the Muggles dropped the first of these bombs, 70,000 people died straight away. One of those brilliant men said ‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’” Harry took a breath.
“That man wished he could go back in time and never start down that path. I read about him at school, before I came to Hogwarts. I … I never forgot.”
Draco put his own arm around Harry’s shoulders. “It’s not in you to be another Grindelwald or Voldemort,” he said.
“I can’t guarantee that. But I can guarantee that I will never let myself make those choices,” Harry vowed.
Draco tightened his grip. They sat for a few minutes. Then Draco chuckled. “Look at me, I’m being blinded by your angst and forgetting the obvious. It’s not in you to be another Grindelwald or Voldemort, Harry, because you’re too stupid. Thickies can’t be Dark Lords. My father had the job description on his desk for years, it was very clear.”
“Git.” Harry laughed despite himself.
“Idiot,” Draco replied affectionately.
Harry bunted Draco’s head with his, and was not surprised when his lips more or less accidentally made contact with his friend’s.
Draco shivered. “That’s twice you’ve kissed me.”
Harry shook his head and put his hand on Draco’s jaw, angling it towards him. “No,” he murmured. “Three times.”
Draco blinked at him after that one.
“Do you want me to stop? I can stop.” Harry pushed Draco’s long fringe back from his eyes.
Draco blinked again. “That would be a terrible waste of all the time you’ve spent running around at home wearing just a towel.” He grinned, and pulled Harry towards him for another kiss.
Harry made a noise that was somewhere between a laugh and a moan. Quite a lot of things made perfect sense to him at this point, the main one being that he was exceptionally aroused by the fact that Draco was strong enough to pull him off balance. He gave in to gravity, and found himself beneath Draco, looking up at his flushed and happy expression. “You are pretty,” he laughed.
“Shut up, Potter,” Draco replied, and leaned in to do the job himself.
Harry wormed his hands under Draco’s clothes, one sliding up his back, the other making a bid for his waistband.
Draco leapt to one side. “Cold hands!” He came back immediately, grabbing Harry’s hands and holding them between his, then lying on top of him so their hands were warmed between their chests.
Harry tilted his head up, and kissed Draco again. He dropped back down. “Right now,” he said. “If I give in to instinct and rip off all your clothes, we might actually die of hypothermia through the night.”
Draco nodded. “That’s why I have hold of your clothes-ripping hands,” he agreed.
“But tomorrow, when we are back at school …”
“We will only need clothes for classes, and guests. New rule,” Draco said, leaning down and kissing Harry happily.
“That is a fantastic rule.”
“Possibly my best work.”
“If I move against you like this …” Harry grinned as Draco shivered far more spectacularly than the last time.
Draco nipped at his lip and pushed him into the ground. “I do not want some anonymous rub in the woods, Potter. I want you naked and behind a locked door for hours, do you understand me?”
Harry grinned broadly. He did. “You’d better let me up, my current instinct is to charm away your clothes, and see if I can spread the heat of the fire to cover us.”
Draco sat back, and helped Harry up into a sitting position. “Bad idea. You are nowhere near ready for a spell like that.”
Harry kissed him again, marvelling at the way every move had a small fight for dominance.
“We were supposed to think about what’s next,” Draco said, looking up at him.
Harry grinned, and Draco punched him in the arm.
“Real-life serious what’s next,” Draco said.
“This is real life,” Harry said, kissing him again. “I am serious.” And another kiss. “But in addition to serious educational usage of the internet soon after we get home, I also have plans for writing to Kingsley and finding out what the hell he’s doing with his Aurors, then finishing school, whether that’s here or at Hogwarts.”
Draco traced Harry’s lips with his finger. “You should be where I am,” he said.
Harry nodded, it seemed like the best idea.
“Except that when we go back home, your friends all hate me.”
“Luna doesn’t,” Harry reminded him. “And neither does Neville. And Ron will come round, you two are more or less family.”
“Don’t remind me,” Draco said with a groan. “We could stay here.” His voice was soft and quick. “We could play Quidditch through uni, you could do post-graduate work in Defence and help really change things when we go back. Andromeda and Teddy can have the Manor until then.”
“We could,” Harry agreed. “We don’t need to make our minds up now.”
“No,” Draco kissed him, sleepily. “We don’t.”
“Are you falling asleep?” Harry whispered.
Draco nodded, and Harry cushioned him against his chest. “I’ll keep you safe from snakes and spiders. And from Drop Bears and Bunyips.”
Draco’s hands curled up in Harry’s jumper, and his breathing quietened. Harry stayed awake a while longer, listening to crack of the fire and the gentle rustle of small scaled creatures keeping to the night.
When he woke up, the sun was poking over the horizon and Jon was there, with Leanne. “He told me he brought the two of you out here, thought that you’d be wanting some hot soup about now.”
Harry accepted the flask from her with a smile, and woke Draco by waving it under his nose. They gulped a mugful each, both praising her name and foresight.
“So,” said Jon, looking at them closely. “Do you know what’s next?”
Harry took Draco’s hand. “Sort of. Whatever it is, we’ll be facing it together.”
Jon smiled, “That’s good. That’s what you’re meant to discover at times like these. So where are you going now?”
Harry stood up and looked around him. Leanne was sipping from her soup flask, Jon was looking down at Draco intently, and Draco was staring out into the distance. Harry followed his gaze. At the very edge of the horizon, he could see the shimmer of sunlight on water, and in front of it the shadows sprang into sharp relief across the landscape as the light grew higher.
“It is beautiful here,” Harry said.
Draco looked up at him, a gleam of hope in his eyes.
“Come on,” Harry reached down to him. “Let’s go home.”
*****************
On the third day, Jon knocked at their door before dawn.
Harry let him in, ignoring the older man’s wince when he opened the door.
“How’s he going?” Jon asked.
“What you’d expect,” Harry replied.
“Did they bury her?”
“Yesterday. A private service. The Minister of Magic, her sister, and the Weasley family, you met Ron when he was here. They were cousins, distantly.”
“He didn’t get to say goodbye.”
Harry turned his face away.
“You didn’t get to say goodbye, either, did you?”
Harry’s laugh was more bitter than he’d intended. “The people I lose don’t tend to have good deaths at home.”
Jon covered Harry’s hands with his own. “You carry them with you, you know. When I saw you the first time, I could see all these ghosts standing behind you. You gotta let em go, Harry. For you, for them.” Jon looked down at the still-sleeping Draco. “He’s gotta do the same thing. If you don’t, you can’t get on with the living, and that just makes your old people sad. They want to go, and they want you to go on, you see.”
“That’s easy to say.”
“I kept telling you two you ought to do Environment.” Jon smiled gently at him. “Can you get him up and dressed? Bring your brooms. We’re gonna say goodbye. You’re going to do a ceremony, with a bit of my culture since you’re so far away from your own.”
Harry looked at him bleakly.
“Trust me,” Jon asked. “I promise I will not make it worse.”
Harry nodded.
“I’ll meet you out front in fifteen.”
Harry waited until he had gone before putting another log on the fire and waking Draco.
“It’s early,” Draco complained.
“We’re going out.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Jon wants us to do a ceremony,” Harry told him, aware of the note of cajoling in his voice.
“I want to go back to sleep.”
Harry reached out and pushed Draco’s lank hair back from his face. “Please?”
Draco frowned, but he got out of bed.
“You go and get dressed. I’ll make us some sandwiches.”
They managed warm clothes, brooms, and a sandwich apiece in the allotted time. Jon was waiting for them with a backpack and his broom. With few words, the three of them mounted up and began to fly northwards.
The flight to school had been one of discovery and pleasure. This was one of purpose. Miles disappeared below them as the light grew grey and then fingers of orange began to reach onto the sky in the east. By the time the sun was well up, the ground beneath them, was looking familiar to Harry. Jon led them over the green coastal lands they had passed before, and towards a jutting ridge of craggy sandstone and granite.
He landed in the scrub at the ridge’s base.
“Going to show you two something. It’s not secret, you’re allowed to see it, but it is sacred. Do you understand?”
Harry nodded. Draco did, too, though Harry was not sure how much attention he was paying.
Jon led them in beneath an overhang and pulled a torch from his pack. He cast the light upwards. There were figures painted onto the underside of the rock, a man, another man, a bird, a fish, maybe a river … all connected with lines and dots.
“It’s a story,” Jon explained. “See that man, he was in love with a woman he couldn’t have, so he came into her camp one night, and he tried to steal her from her husband. She cried out and her husband came to help her, but the man tried to kill him, so he changed into a fish and sprang into the river, and she changed into a bird and flew away. And then the man went away, because he couldn’t love a bird. And she looked down into the river and saw her husband, and he looked up into the sky and he saw his wife.”
Harry looked at Jon blankly.
“The thing is,” Jon spoke patiently, “see these lines and dots? Well, even though she was in the sky and he was in the river, that didn’t stop them loving each other. Maybe they couldn’t hear each other or touch each other, maybe they couldn’t see each other when she was in the clouds and he was in the deeps, but they could still love and know they loved.”
Harry thought of a slight woman pushing her long hair back from her face and looking at him with such loving hunger. He looked at Draco, who was looking at Jon with hope.
“Do you think she knew?” Draco asked quietly. “I don’t remember the last time I told her.”
Harry looked at Draco seriously. “Never doubt that she knew you loved her. It is the one thing anyone who ever met her can say about your mother with absolute certainty”
Draco pursed his lips together and nodded. “Is this your ceremony?” he asked Jon.
“Nah,” the older man grinned. “This is the start. Now you’re going on to the next step.”
He led them out from under the overhang and handed them quills, ink and sheets of parchment. “Sit and write your goodbyes,” he instructed. “Tell them what you want to.”
“Them?” Draco asked, uncertain.
“It’s not just your mother you miss, is it?”
Draco blinked away tears. “No,” he said.
“So you write to all of them. Both of you do. Then we do the next step.”
Harry sat beside Draco, and the two of them began to write. Harry’s first letter was easy, to his parents: he wished he’d really known them, had more than ghosts and shadows to remember them by. To Sirius: he wished he’d been less impetuous, had understood more, and maybe he wouldn’t have died. To Tonks, Remus and Fred: he wished he had understood the horcruxes sooner, had been able to end the war sooner, or keep them from danger. To Tom Riddle: he wished he’d never been born, had never touched Harry’s mind, had never destroyed so many lives.
Harry was surprised to see that it was past midday when he finished.
Draco was watching him, with a look of interest. “You wrote to Riddle, but not to Dumbledore,” he pointed out.
Harry shrugged. “Dumbledore and I said everything we had to say to each other. Who did you write to?”
“My mother, Vincent, Tonks, Snape. I wanted to apologise to Snape for hating him, I thought he was part of the reason I was trapped with Voldemort, I didn’t realise he was trying to help. I told Tonks I like her son, and I was sorry we didn’t know each other, we should have.”
“She’d have liked that.”
“What did you write to Riddle?”
“I told him to get fucked.”
Draco laughed mirthlessly. “Is that in the spirit of the step?” he asked Jon.
“They’re your goodbyes,” Jon said. “They can be to whoever you like.”
“I think we’re done,” Draco told him.
“Then we climb the ridge.” Jon set off at a fast walk towards a section of the rock that came down to the earth. Draco and Harry followed at a trot.
“Why don’t we just fly?” Harry asked.
“This is the next step,” Jon called back over his shoulder.
It took longer than they thought it would. Twice Jon stopped to give them water from his pack. “If you ever get lost in this place, these rocks are full of life. You can find water in the morning, or if it rained in the last week, and you can find snake and lizard, you can live on them for weeks. Best of all, people can see you when they come looking. So you go up the ridge, unless it’s a fire or a lightning storm. Ridge’ll get you killed in one of those.”
Harry and Draco did not have enough breath to talk and climb.
At last they reached the top. From below, it had looked as though it would be rocky and treeless, but in fact it was green and pleasant, with a stand of gums not ten feet from where they stood.
“I used to come here all the time with my mum and dad when I was little,” Jon told them. “Then when I was older and knew I was going to be a baajim man, I’d come here by myself, see if I could hear all the spirit voices. Never could, really. But it was a good place to watch.”
He pointed, and they looked about, with far horizons in every direction. Jon spoke, and the cool blue day they saw changed under his words.
“You can look out across the fields and see lightning crashing through the clouds to earth, a wave of green light telling you there’s a storm miles away, the air crackles with ozone – it smells new. Or in the years it doesn’t rain, you can stand here and see the earth cracked in every direction, trees brown and brittle, fire racing through them, a red sea of destruction, and after that will come the green from the black earth.” Jon took a breath. “This is a good place to watch,” he repeated.
“Are we watching?” Draco asked.
“Eh?” Jon looked at them. “Nah, ignore me, you two are burning.”
He pulled together a pile of twigs and small branches and lit them with his wand. “Right, letters on.”
Draco fed his sheets in one by one, Harry followed. When they were all ash, Jon handed them a small shovel from his pack. “OK, now you go and send them out,” he explained. “You throw them off the edge.”
“And that’s a ceremony in your culture?” Harry asked, wanting to get it right.
Jon shook his head. “It’s one in yours, but you need to get your goodbyes out of the way before we can move onto the next bit.”
It was nearly dark by the time they had finished clearing the ashes. Jon had built another fire, larger this time. After a while, he pushed the burning wood down to one end, leaving embers behind. He walked to the nearest gum and stripped off some of the low green branches, then dipped them in the embers until they started to smoulder.
“This part’s the ceremony,” he told them. “The smoke cleanses the spirits. Tells them to stop holding onto you, tells you to stop holding onto them. So we send away all those little ones from the past and that just leaves the one big one who doesn’t want to leave you yet. You have to tell her to go.”
Draco’s eyes were wet, but his voice was steady as he addressed the smoke-filled twilight. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry that I wasn’t there. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you how much I love you. I’m sorry that I didn’t keep you safe. I know what you did for me, you were so brave, but I’d have loved you the same even if you weren’t.”
Jon’s feet transcribed a pattern in the dust, beating out a slow rhythm. The smoke swirled about them, and Harry could hear low voices and the beat of sticks in the distance. Draco took his arm. “Look,” he said, pointing.
All around them, lines shimmered above the earth. Some red, some silver, some golden. “Now that,” said Jon, finishing one last step. “That part there was my culture. Some of it works even for you whitefellas.”
Harry could feel the lightening Jon had worked. Draco’s face showed he could, too.
“Do we go back now?” he asked.
“I do,” Jon said. “Gonna get a good night’s sleep after that. But you two stay here. You need to know what’s next before you can finish burying your past.”
“Stay here till when?” Draco asked.
“Morning,” Jon told them. “Then you’ll know what you’re meant to do.”
Harry opened his mouth to argue, but it was too late, Jon had gone.
“That was a top-grade piece of Environmental magic,” Draco said admiringly.
“I thought it was something indigenous,” Harry replied, surprised.
“Same thing, didn’t you read any of the brochures?” Draco asked patiently.
Harry looked at him.
“Of course you didn’t.” Draco smiled. “Here, help me build this fire up. If we’re here all night, we may as well be warm.”
“Don’t suppose Jon left any food?” Harry asked.
“No, just water.”
“I suppose he expects us to roast a lizard or two.”
“I’m really not that hungry.”
They built up the fire, and gathered what spare wood they could for the evening. All too soon it was fully dark, they sat side by side, staring at the flames.
“Harry,” said Draco, after a long while. “Thank you. The last few days have been … bearable, because of you.”
Harry put an arm around Draco’s shoulders in lieu of speaking.
“You’re brave,” Draco said after another long silence. “You hold people when you have no idea if they can be held.”
“I’m not afraid of holding you, Draco,” Harry told him. “And I’m far from brave. I’ve spent the last seven years terrified that I’d either be killed by Voldemort or turn into him.”
Draco scoffed. “You could never turn into Voldemort. You’re too disgustingly pleasant.”
Harry wanted to laugh, but he shuddered instead. “There were times when I felt all of his glee for slaughter, felt what it was like to live only caring for yourself, not for who was trampled in your bid for your own desires. I could feel him trying to beat me down sometimes, and it terrified me. I didn’t think there was any way I could hold him out.” Harry drew in a ragged breath. “And I had to hold him out, because I would have destroyed myself before I let him take me to his side.”
Draco looked up at him. “But what about all your power? I’ve seen you – Merlin, Harry, I’ve fought you. You can do things none of us can hope to.”
“That’s not true.”
“Harry, you killed Voldemort.”
“No! I didn’t! I wish people would stop saying that! I defeated him, but he killed himself. I don’t kill.”
Draco’s voice was very quiet. “You do injure.”
Harry looked at him guiltily. “I do,” he agreed. “I’m sorry. It was all a … I thought that I …” He took a ragged breath, searching for a way to explain. He found one.
“I know that you know nothing about the Muggle world, but they’re not stupid, the way you think they are. When Grindelwald was waging war against our world, they were fighting on two fronts.”
“I know about Hitler, Harry.”
“But do you know about the war in Japan? They were afraid that they would never be able to end it without losing thousands more soldiers. So they used a bomb that had been designed by a team of brilliant men. As they were making it, those men saw it as a series of problems, as a challenge to their genius. Then, when they finished it, they realised with horror what it could do. When the Muggles dropped the first of these bombs, 70,000 people died straight away. One of those brilliant men said ‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’” Harry took a breath.
“That man wished he could go back in time and never start down that path. I read about him at school, before I came to Hogwarts. I … I never forgot.”
Draco put his own arm around Harry’s shoulders. “It’s not in you to be another Grindelwald or Voldemort,” he said.
“I can’t guarantee that. But I can guarantee that I will never let myself make those choices,” Harry vowed.
Draco tightened his grip. They sat for a few minutes. Then Draco chuckled. “Look at me, I’m being blinded by your angst and forgetting the obvious. It’s not in you to be another Grindelwald or Voldemort, Harry, because you’re too stupid. Thickies can’t be Dark Lords. My father had the job description on his desk for years, it was very clear.”
“Git.” Harry laughed despite himself.
“Idiot,” Draco replied affectionately.
Harry bunted Draco’s head with his, and was not surprised when his lips more or less accidentally made contact with his friend’s.
Draco shivered. “That’s twice you’ve kissed me.”
Harry shook his head and put his hand on Draco’s jaw, angling it towards him. “No,” he murmured. “Three times.”
Draco blinked at him after that one.
“Do you want me to stop? I can stop.” Harry pushed Draco’s long fringe back from his eyes.
Draco blinked again. “That would be a terrible waste of all the time you’ve spent running around at home wearing just a towel.” He grinned, and pulled Harry towards him for another kiss.
Harry made a noise that was somewhere between a laugh and a moan. Quite a lot of things made perfect sense to him at this point, the main one being that he was exceptionally aroused by the fact that Draco was strong enough to pull him off balance. He gave in to gravity, and found himself beneath Draco, looking up at his flushed and happy expression. “You are pretty,” he laughed.
“Shut up, Potter,” Draco replied, and leaned in to do the job himself.
Harry wormed his hands under Draco’s clothes, one sliding up his back, the other making a bid for his waistband.
Draco leapt to one side. “Cold hands!” He came back immediately, grabbing Harry’s hands and holding them between his, then lying on top of him so their hands were warmed between their chests.
Harry tilted his head up, and kissed Draco again. He dropped back down. “Right now,” he said. “If I give in to instinct and rip off all your clothes, we might actually die of hypothermia through the night.”
Draco nodded. “That’s why I have hold of your clothes-ripping hands,” he agreed.
“But tomorrow, when we are back at school …”
“We will only need clothes for classes, and guests. New rule,” Draco said, leaning down and kissing Harry happily.
“That is a fantastic rule.”
“Possibly my best work.”
“If I move against you like this …” Harry grinned as Draco shivered far more spectacularly than the last time.
Draco nipped at his lip and pushed him into the ground. “I do not want some anonymous rub in the woods, Potter. I want you naked and behind a locked door for hours, do you understand me?”
Harry grinned broadly. He did. “You’d better let me up, my current instinct is to charm away your clothes, and see if I can spread the heat of the fire to cover us.”
Draco sat back, and helped Harry up into a sitting position. “Bad idea. You are nowhere near ready for a spell like that.”
Harry kissed him again, marvelling at the way every move had a small fight for dominance.
“We were supposed to think about what’s next,” Draco said, looking up at him.
Harry grinned, and Draco punched him in the arm.
“Real-life serious what’s next,” Draco said.
“This is real life,” Harry said, kissing him again. “I am serious.” And another kiss. “But in addition to serious educational usage of the internet soon after we get home, I also have plans for writing to Kingsley and finding out what the hell he’s doing with his Aurors, then finishing school, whether that’s here or at Hogwarts.”
Draco traced Harry’s lips with his finger. “You should be where I am,” he said.
Harry nodded, it seemed like the best idea.
“Except that when we go back home, your friends all hate me.”
“Luna doesn’t,” Harry reminded him. “And neither does Neville. And Ron will come round, you two are more or less family.”
“Don’t remind me,” Draco said with a groan. “We could stay here.” His voice was soft and quick. “We could play Quidditch through uni, you could do post-graduate work in Defence and help really change things when we go back. Andromeda and Teddy can have the Manor until then.”
“We could,” Harry agreed. “We don’t need to make our minds up now.”
“No,” Draco kissed him, sleepily. “We don’t.”
“Are you falling asleep?” Harry whispered.
Draco nodded, and Harry cushioned him against his chest. “I’ll keep you safe from snakes and spiders. And from Drop Bears and Bunyips.”
Draco’s hands curled up in Harry’s jumper, and his breathing quietened. Harry stayed awake a while longer, listening to crack of the fire and the gentle rustle of small scaled creatures keeping to the night.
When he woke up, the sun was poking over the horizon and Jon was there, with Leanne. “He told me he brought the two of you out here, thought that you’d be wanting some hot soup about now.”
Harry accepted the flask from her with a smile, and woke Draco by waving it under his nose. They gulped a mugful each, both praising her name and foresight.
“So,” said Jon, looking at them closely. “Do you know what’s next?”
Harry took Draco’s hand. “Sort of. Whatever it is, we’ll be facing it together.”
Jon smiled, “That’s good. That’s what you’re meant to discover at times like these. So where are you going now?”
Harry stood up and looked around him. Leanne was sipping from her soup flask, Jon was looking down at Draco intently, and Draco was staring out into the distance. Harry followed his gaze. At the very edge of the horizon, he could see the shimmer of sunlight on water, and in front of it the shadows sprang into sharp relief across the landscape as the light grew higher.
“It is beautiful here,” Harry said.
Draco looked up at him, a gleam of hope in his eyes.
“Come on,” Harry reached down to him. “Let’s go home.”
End notes tomorrow, I've run out of go ...
