Chapter Five of 'Soldier's Welcome'- A Bagful of Troubles

[lomonaaeren]

Title: Soldier’s Welcome (5/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: R
Pairings: Harry/Draco preslash, Ron/Hermione
Warnings: Violence (and plenty of it), profanity, references to sex, takes account of DH but ignores the epilogue, heavy angst.
Summary: It’s the first year of Auror training for Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, and…Draco Malfoy, But with Hagrid, Snape’s second Pensieve, rogue Death Eaters, Auror classes, and someone trying to start a second war to worry about, Harry might not have the time to pay that much attention to Malfoy. At first, anyway.
Author’s Notes: This story is the first in a trilogy called Running to Paradise, which takes its title from a W. B. Yeats poem. Each story will be novel-length, and each will cover a year of Harry and Draco’s training as Aurors. Though there are a lot of fics out there about them acting as Auror partners, there aren’t as many about their training, so I hope to cover some original ground there. I’m indebted to a reader named SP777 for suggesting a training fic for me to write.

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Five—A Bagful of Troubles

“Will you come with me, Harry?”

Harry paused and blinked as he realized that Ron was standing in the door of their room, his hands clenched so hard around the corners of the doorframe that his arms bulged. Harry glanced around, trying to determine if something in the room had caused Ron to look like that, but the room was the same as always: brownish carpet, pale blue walls, the Quidditch posters he and Ron had put up, the big orange splash of a Chudley Cannons banner on the bathroom door, and the tables and desks that had come with the room.

“Come with you to do what?” Harry asked, turning back to his friend. His heart was hammering and buzzing, and he realized that he was deeply afraid Ron would say that he wanted to drop out of Auror training.

“I need to speak to Portillo Lopez.” Ron was biting into his lip and causing a faint trickle of blood from it. “There’s no way I’ll pass that class unless I can get some kind of help from her!”

Harry relaxed. At least Ron knew there was a problem when he couldn’t even tie bandages correctly, much less cast a healing spell, and was willing to do something about it. “I’ll come with you. In fact, I need to talk to her myself.”

Ron’s mouth dropped open slightly. “But you’re doing well in that class!”

Harry grimaced and shook his head. “At the cost of so much effort that it leaves me exhausted all the time. I think she only really wants to teach natural students, but since everyone has to take the course and not everyone can be perfect, there must be some method that she has for people who can’t learn as easily.” He picked up his cloak and his scroll of parchment covered with notes from the Battle Healing class that day. Sometimes Portillo Lopez looked at him as if she suspected him of not studying. Harry wanted proof that he was trying to do the work.

“Thanks, mate.” Ron gripped and almost crushed his hand.

Harry smiled back at him. “No problem.”

*

“So,” Ron said, stumbling to a stop over his words every few seconds, “we would really like it if you could help us. Please.”

Harry didn’t blame Ron for being intimidated. Portillo Lopez seemed interested in an implacable silence that stretched on and on. She hadn’t moved a muscle in her face since Ron started his plea. Harry found himself clenching his fists at his side as he waited. Did she want them to fail?

Then she smiled. Harry nearly fell over with the shock. He realized now that he had never seen her do that before. Even with her most favored students, the only ones she seemed to think were worthy of encouragement, she nodded and lifted her eyebrows.

“I am simply surprised,” she said, her voice low. “Very few students come to me to ask for help. They seem to have a horror of looking stupid in front of others that outweighs their desire to pass the class.”

“But you must see that a lot of people are struggling in there,” Harry said, unable to keep silent even if he sounded disrespectful.

Portillo Lopez shook her head. “I once assumed that every student who struggled wanted help, and offered it. They despised me for it.” Her mouth hardened for a moment, and Harry wondered what she wasn’t saying. Maybe people had despised her for her accent, even though it wasn’t hard to understand at all. “They thought me weak and afraid to judge. And many of them believed that they did not need to learn any healing at all. In time, I accepted that they took my art seriously only when I was severe. So, if someone does not ask questions and does not ask for help, I assume they do not need or want it. It is easier that way.” She inclined her head when Harry stared at her. “Am I to be a mind reader, or assume that everyone will hold faster to common sense than to pride?”

The solution didn’t really satisfy Harry, but at least Portillo Lopez was beginning to tell Ron that his problem was his impatience, which meant that he never wanted to tie the bandages properly, and that was a start.

*

“Concentrate harder.”

“I am concentrating as hard as I can.” Draco forced the words out between clenched teeth. He had almost been in the state of mind necessary to produce a Patronus, he was sure, and Potter had the nerve to interrupt him.

“Then try something else.” Potter ran a finger around the shell of his ear and shook his head at Draco in despair. “Another memory, maybe. The show you’ve been putting on so far is just pitiful.”

Draco turned slowly to face Potter, his body quivering with tension. They had spent most of the night in his room, with the air thick and still—something had gone wrong with the circulating charms, and none of the air-moving spells that Draco cast in compensation were enough—and Potter sighing and rolling his eyes. And now, this. When Draco had poured so much effort into something that he hated automatically because he saw how easy it was for Potter.

He had tried. Potter was being as unreasonable as Ketchum, who would congratulate Draco on a victory achieved in Battlefield Tactics and then hand him a new puzzle to solve. Perhaps he didn’t want to try any longer, if Potter made an instructor as poor as the rest of them.

Except Auror Dearborn, Draco’s loyal mind pointed out.

He poisoned the loyalty and buried its corpse. He did not feel like being reasonable right now.

“You call me pitiful, Potter,” Draco said, edging to the side so that he would have a clearer angle to strike, “when I survived the Dark Lord.”

“So did I.” Potter pushed his hair back so that his scar showed. The gesture was far too easy and practiced for someone who really hated the scar for marking him out, Draco thought in triumph. There was proof that Potter didn’t mind his celebrity as much as he tried to make it seem he did. He wondered what Pushkin would say to that observation. “So did lots of people. It doesn’t make you special.”

“You have no idea what I suffered,” Draco hissed. He could feel his fingers clenching down on his wand, but what he really longed to do was to spring at Potter and bite and hit him. There was a satisfaction in raw physicality, a brutality at the heart of it, that couldn’t be found anywhere else.

And that rawness is what makes it uncivilized.

The voice of his good breeding joined the corpse of his loyalty in a shallow grave.

Especially when Potter sneered at him and said, “And if you had the slightest idea of what I went through to finish Voldemort, then you wouldn’t dare speak to me of suffering.”

That was enough. Draco flew at Potter with a cry that he barely remembered to turn into a curse instead of a punch when he saw that Potter had also lifted his wand.

Draco’s curse emerged as a sickly bolt of yellow cloth, Potter’s as a spreading purple light. They met and merged in the middle of the room, struggled wildly against each other for a moment, and filled Draco’s head with a drumbeat and his mouth with a foul taste. He was lifting his hands to his ears when both spells blazed and vanished.

“What does that mean?” Potter demanded, his voice too loud. At least he winced and clutched his head a moment later.

Draco wanted to laugh when he realized the truth, and then to spit. The truth left his tongue coated with more bitterness than the clash of their spells had.

“It’s the compatible magic,” he said. “It’s not easy for us to hit each other with spells. If we were in a life-and-death situation, it would work. But we’re simply quarreling like idiots over something that doesn’t matter, and so the magic refuses to act. Or,” he added, when Potter gave him an incredulous glance, “if you don’t believe that magic can choose what to do, we simply can’t put enough force behind the spells when they’re directed against each other and when we aren’t serious about defending our lives.”

Potter swore in a vulgar manner, without great depths of imagination, stomping back and forth. Draco watched him in elegant silence, and waited for him to realize that they also had another problem.

Potter whirled around at last, his eyes wide and his hair standing on end from the way that he constantly ran his fingers through it. He would look much more handsome if he could refrain from that gesture, Draco thought, but he didn’t expect that realization to ever arrive in Potter’s head. “What happens when our instructors ask us to duel in class?”

“Yes,” Draco said. “That is a problem, isn’t it?”

“And here,” Potter continued, as if he hadn’t heard Draco. “How can I instruct you if we can’t actually duel?”

“Show me defensive and healing magic,” Draco responded instantly. He kept himself from saying Because that’s all you’ll ever be good at, given the bias of your magic, by remembering that Potter was doing only a little better in Portillo Lopez’s class than he had been. “That doesn’t require an attack. And if we fight together against conjured enemies…well.” He lifted his shoulders and dropped them in a small shrug that he hoped would suffice to explain the matter.

It didn’t, of course, and Potter was glaring skeptically at him in the next instant. “How will fighting together help?”

“Must I lead you to everything?” Draco snapped, no longer afraid of the way Potter bristled. “Our compatible magic will make us stronger if we’re trying to fight side-by-side instead of attack each other. It more or less makes up for our inability to use offensive spells in a personal duel. We can’t stab each other in the back anymore—” with magic he refrained from saying, because if Potter couldn’t figure that out, Draco wasn’t going to tell him “—but we can fight back-to-back with much more ease.”

Potter’s nostrils flared. “I want proof of your word.” He turned away before Draco could express the offense he felt that Potter refused to believe him and began casting with neat flourishes of his wand that Draco hadn’t ever seen him make. If he was half that neat in his notes for Auror Conduct, then he would do much better in that class.

Shadows appeared along the opposite wall. Draco raised his eyebrows, reluctantly impressed. Most spells that conjured enemies followed the same basic formula, creating what were essentially animated wooden dummies. Potter didn’t appear to have studied those spells, so he followed the call of his own originality instead. These dummies were less bulky, grey instead of brown, and moved with shadow-like grace as they slid away from the wall and stood on their own.

They were also carrying wands, which wasn’t usual in the training duels that Draco had ever seen. He gave Potter a narrow look. “We have to duel their spells?”

Potter shrugged, his attention on the dummies as he stepped up to Draco’s side. “They only know a few. Mostly hexes and jinxes.”

Draco kept his opinion to himself—that it was extremely unusual for training dummies to know spells at all—and stood beside Potter. The warmth of his magic reached out and enveloped Draco. Draco rolled his eyes when the temptation to relax flooded him. This was hardly going to be productive in battle. He wondered if compatible magic was more trouble than it was worth, and if there was any way to get rid of it.

Then Potter’s conjured enemies stepped towards them, firing off Tripping Jinxes as they came, and Potter said in a tense voice, “You take the ones on the left, I’ll take the ones on the right. Go!”

And Draco discovered exactly why so many books were always babbling on about the advantages of compatible magic.

When he lifted his wand, he could tell exactly where Potter was, by the feeling of the magic that came with him and the way the warmth shifted closer or further away. That would be dead useful in the middle of a crowded battlefield, Draco had to admit, or at night. He could also feel the power gathering like a halo around Potter’s head and wand before he cast. With some concentration and practice, Draco thought he would be able to sense what spell was coming.

Potter shouted, “Commuto aream!” A long spray of white shot out of his wand, changing the floor in front of the dummies to ice. They advanced mindlessly and slipped, scrambling and flailing their arms. Draco had a moment to think that real enemies wouldn’t be that stupid; they would take some measures to avoid the ice.

The backblast of Potter’s strength caught him.

Draco gasped, his body humming with energy, fizzing and sparking up his wand and demanding to be let out as magic. He barely managed to aim his wand in the right direction before he cast the spell—the first time he had ever managed it nonverbally—and watched as one of the dummies burst into flame.

It burned fiercely, sending sharp-edged shadows sliding around the room. In two seconds, the dummy was gone, seared away to a fine grey ash that scattered around the room and into the corners. Potter turned to gape at him. The other dummies kept mindlessly marching forwards, which Draco knew wouldn’t really happen in battle, either. Fire that consumed one of them had to give most sane people at least a little pause.

“What the fuck, Malfoy,” Potter said in reverent tones. It didn’t take much concentration at all for Draco to find the admiration and awe in them.

He lifted his head and preened slightly, then laughed as a Tripping Jinx got through the distracted Potter’s defenses and sent him to the floor. Curious to see if the effect would work in the other direction, Draco lifted a Shield Charm to defend himself against jinxes coming from more of the dummies.

At once Potter hissed out a Finite that countered two of the other jinxes zipping towards him, and then his Shield Charm almost blinded Draco as he brought it up. He shook his head as though he were wondering about the immense surge of magic that Draco knew he must be feeling, and managed to stumble to his feet. He was looking at Draco from the corner of one eye.

Draco had no time to preen about it, because four of the dummies launched spells at once and his Shield Charm vibrated and weakened. Draco dodged to the side, aware all the time where Potter was as though it were some strange new sense he had picked up, and cast more spells that would bring down the dummies and deprive them of limbs without burning them all. He didn’t want the fire to get out of control. So far, the compatible magic seemed to give them increased raw strength, not finesse.

But we will learn to control it.

Draco curled his lip as he watched Potter cast spells that dissolved the magic holding the dummies together and made them vanish. Did I just think about doing something in common with Harry Potter that doesn’t involve beating him up?

But he had. And he decided that it would be easier to use the compatible magic than to struggle against it, especially since it seemed unlikely to vanish.

In a few more minutes, all the dummies were gone. Potter spent a few moments panting. Draco decided, smugly, that a year of studying for NEWTS had done Potter no favors in the exercise department. Draco, meanwhile, had made sure that he had gone for runs and regular flights on his brooms even when he was deepest in his studies.

Then Potter straightened up and turned to face him.

The expression on his face was wary. Draco laughed at him. “I promise, Potter, compatible magic doesn’t allow me to murder you in your sleep. Pity,” he had to add, when Potter’s mouth widened a bit in outrage. “I can think of times when I would have wanted to do that.”

Potter entirely ignored the implications of that statement, which, for Draco, were a signal that he didn’t want to murder Potter in his sleep anymore. “Is it always going to be like that when we fight?” he demanded.

“In time, we will gain some control over it, I hope.” Draco shuddered at the thought of being bound to Potter’s level of interaction with magic for the rest of his life. “But I suspect that we will always be able to sense each other’s direction and draw on each other’s strength when one of us casts a spell.”

Potter sighed and shook his head. “Well, at least it isn’t likely to come up outside of these private dueling lessons.”

Draco stiffened. “Have you forgotten that we’re both Auror trainees, and may have to face each other, or fight beside each other, in our classes in the future?”

“But not until next year,” Potter said quickly, “and by then, we should have more control of it, like you said. I don’t see us ending up as partners.”

Draco shook his head. “Of course not.” As convenient as it would be to fight beside Potter in duels, or battles, or when capturing criminals, he couldn’t live with Potter’s personality while he did it. “Now, do you want to try again?”

“Of course,” Potter said, with a grin that burned straight into the center of Draco’s soul and made him smile back. “And then, we can go back to practicing the Patronus Charm.”

At least he said “we,” Draco thought crossly as he watched Potter conjure more enemies. Of course, that might make it worse, since he knows well enough that he needs no bloody practice. Condescending bastard.

*

Harry closed his eyes and lowered his forehead onto his hands. His head was full of a buzzing, sparking tension, and every sound around him seemed muffled, as though it had to come through several layers of cotton. He knew exactly what that meant, especially since his sleep had been filled with an ominous silence last night instead of nightmares.

But what could he do about it? His problems didn’t have the grace to show up on the weekends. This was a day of classes, and a particularly heavy one, since they would be having exams in three of the classes—Conduct, Battle Healing, and Offensive and Defensive Magic—and a sharp workout in Combat. At the moment, they were in Combat, the first class.

He would have to endure, that was all.

He made himself think about times when he was shut up in the cupboard at Privet Drive and needed to use the loo and no one would let him, and the time when Voldemort had bound him to the altar in the graveyard and taken blood from him. Both of them were harder than this. Living in a tent in the wilderness while Death Eaters hunted them was harder than this.

This was only a few eyes.

“Potter!”

And Auror Gregory, of course.

“Get to the front of the class, Potter, and fight West,” Gregory snapped.

Harry stood up and walked slowly to the front of the classroom. The silence in his dreams traveled with him now, flickering around his head, so that he could hardly hear anything at all. His breathing moved his chest up and down, but he felt as if he were moving through a dream, or as if someone had turned him into an Inferius. He turned to face Darien West, the trainee from his group who had discovered the passage through the magical door nearest their rooms, and nodded to him. Darien, a tall man with pale brown hair who never seemed to stop washing his hands in nervous motions, nodded back and took up the stance that Gregory had told them to use so many times. He did it naturally. Harry did his best to follow suit, and hoped that Gregory hadn’t told him to do something else, because he wouldn’t hear her.

The world narrowed down in front of his eyes, and the weight of silence and guilt and sorrow turned around and fell on him.

Snape lay on the floor of the Shrieking Shack, and stared up with empty, accusing eyes. Harry knelt beside him with an aching heart. He hadn’t told the others that he was going back for Snape’s body; Ron and Hermione had thought he was taking advantage of a brief spell of privacy to sleep.

“I’m sorry,” Harry whispered without any sound. “I’m sorry that you tried to protect me and I never knew. I’m sorry that you loved my mother and I thought the only thing that mattered to you was hatred of my father.”

But no matter how many words he whispered, Snape couldn’t hear him. He had gone where he would never hear anything again. And if Harry tried to atone for his ignorance in the socially acceptable ways—such as by making sure that people remembered Snape as a hero of the war—it still wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t undo Nagini’s bite or give Snape the ability to know that he was honored now.

Everything Harry could do, even living itself, seemed so useless in the face of death.

“Potter! Potter!”

Harry shuddered and flinched, scrambling back from the voice that was yelling at him. He had one arm over his face before he considered what that would look like, and ripped his arm free, gasping.

Auror Gregory stood over him, staring down with narrowed eyes. Darien stood beyond her, blinking the way he always did. Ron and Hermione were trying to get close, but a crowd of interested people held them back, all gaping at Harry.

Harry wanted to close his eyes and retreat into the silence that had surrounded him and was dissipated now. He’d had another of his fits, when memory and grief overcame him and reminded him that, no matter what he did, he had still failed a lot of people and he would never be able to make up for that.

And this time, everyone had seen.

The worst thing, when he looked again, was the piercing light in Gregory’s eyes, as though she had just learned something that would make it all right for her to despise him. Hermione’s horrified concern and Ron’s blank incomprehension weren’t much better.

Disturbing in an all-new way was the steady stare Malfoy gave him, as he stood with his arms folded beyond Hermione’s shoulder and looked into Harry’s face.

Chapter Six.

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