Chapter Twenty-Four of 'Soldier's Welcome'- On the Move

[lomonaaeren]

Title: Soldier’s Welcome (24/?)
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 Twenty-Four—On the Move

When Harry walked into Dearborn’s class the next day—most of the instructors didn’t require them to attend after the exams were finished, but of course Dearborn had to be the exception and insist on a final “review” class—he saw Draco talking to Catherine Arrowshot. Their heads were bent together, and from the looks on their faces, what Harry could see of them, they were either arguing or agreeing intensely.

There was no reason for the stinging bile that flooded Harry’s mouth, or his sudden inability to breathe, or the way he wanted to hit someone. There was no excuse for it. Draco could talk with whoever he liked.

In fact, Harry thought, as he slowly took a seat towards the front of the classroom and turned around so that he couldn’t see Draco and Arrowshot anymore, he needs more friends than just me. He still doesn’t have someone who will stay in the same rooms with him. I would, but that would mean abandoning Ron. He still doesn’t have people lining up to talk to him after class, no matter how brilliant he is at the subject. He doesn’t have a study partner or someone who will sit with him at meals, other than me.

I should be happy that he has someone who doesn’t mind spending time around him, even if it’s only because they’re discussing Nihil.

Harry glanced at the door. No, Dearborn wasn’t coming in yet, which meant he could dig his fingers into the desktop with no one to scold him. He hated showing that much emotion in front of the Offensive and Defensive instructor. Dearborn would always find some way to mock him for it, or to look at him and make him feel as if it was a weakness.

I have no idea why Draco likes him so much. Harry had to smile a bit, though, as he remembered how Draco would have done the same kinds of things to him in Hogwarts if he could muster the coolness of expression. Similar personalities, maybe.

Draco’s laughter sounded from behind him. Harry heard more laughter, too, laughter he assumed was Arrowshot’s. He hunched his shoulders and moved them defensively, then stopped. He could hear Dearborn’s footsteps in the corridor, but more than that, he was revolted by his own behavior.

He deserves to talk to anyone he wants. He needs friends, I know that. It’s disgusting of me to make any kind of a fuss about it.

Harry almost relaxed when his irritation and jealousy turned into self-loathing. At least he knew how to deal with that kind of thing since Draco had confronted him about his conversation with Ginny.

I had thoughts that were stupid, but as long as I don’t actually do anything stupid, then it’s all right. Besides, I have Ron and Hermione as friends, and Draco doesn’t object to them nearly as much anymore. I shouldn’t object to Arrowshot.

Dearborn walked in. Harry heard a rustle of robes as the students standing up and talking to each other scuttled to their seats. He rearranged the quill and parchment on his desk and told himself that he didn’t mind where Draco sat, that he wasn’t waiting—

Draco dropped into the chair beside him and raised an eyebrow at him, as if asking why he had a half-sulky expression on his face. Harry relaxed and smiled back.

“You should know,” Dearborn’s voice began, “that the next term of Defensive and Offensive Magic will be different from this one. You have learned the differences between them and used them in duels against each other. Next term, you will have to combine spells and use them in large-scale battles with three or four partners working together. This is done to prevent two people’s magic from becoming so deeply entwined that they can only function in pairs.” Harry frowned as he saw Dearborn looking at him. “I will give you the names of several books that may help you if you wish to begin preliminary study over the Christmas holidays…”

Harry heard the soft scratching of a quill from his left, and knew that Hermione was already taking notes. Beside him, Draco folded his hands and raised his eyebrows, as if he wanted to know what the book titles were before he would bother writing them down.

Everything’s normal, Harry reassured himself. See? It’s not going to change anything if Draco has other friends.

He picked up his own quill and parchment when Dearborn began to reel off the titles, sounding as if he were naming old companions. There was probably no chance of getting hold of them, since the trainees’ library never had enough copies of the required books for everyone, but on the other hand, he was staying at the barracks over the Christmas holidays the way he used to stay at Hogwarts. He might have a chance when most of the other trainees had gone home.

He had to stay focused. He was here to become an Auror. There had to be other things in his life besides Draco and who Draco was spending time with.

And if he felt jealousy for any reason, it was up to him to conquer it and not let it make him stupid.

*

“You’ll be coming to the Burrow for a few days, right, Harry?” Weasel’s voice was loud, anxious, and unmistakable, even from a corridor away. Draco leaned his shoulder on the wall and shook his head. Weasel was right to be anxious about Potter refusing, since they’d been arguing most of the term.

“I reckon,” said Potter. Draco heard a few muffled thumps that were probably him throwing clothes into a bag to travel—wherever his Muggle relatives lived. Or maybe he was going to spend the holiday with Potter relatives, if he had any left. “Christmas Eve and Christmas Day? And maybe Boxing Day, if no one minds.”

“Who would mind?” A solid sound, as though the Weasel had clapped Harry on the shoulder. Draco curled his lip. He always clapped too hard; Draco had seen the bruises before.

“Ginny,” Potter said quietly.

An awkward pause. Draco smiled sharply, bowing his head. You don’t have an answer to that one, do you, Weasel?

“You have as much right to be there as she does,” the Weasel said suddenly, fiercely. “Come along if you want, Harry. And I’ll tell Mum to make sure that she doesn’t seat you together.”

Potter laughed. Draco strained his ears, but he couldn’t tell how much genuine merriment was in his voice and how much was probably a contrivance for Weasel’s sake. “All right, Ron. I’ll see you then, and probably sooner.” This time the solid sound was, Draco thought, a clap on Weasel’s shoulder in return.

He waited until he heard the Weasel’s footsteps leave before he rounded the corner. When he peered through the door of the room, he blinked and wondered how he could so have misinterpreted the noises. Potter wasn’t packed yet. Instead, he stood frowning at a thick book, shaking his head as though he had found a theory he disagreed with. Draco eyed the back of his neck. He hadn’t realized how long Potter’s hair had grown. It lost some of its messiness as it sprawled towards his shoulders, though it would never look as elegant as Draco’s did.

He cleared his throat, since Potter was taking an unconscionably long time to notice him. Potter started and looked up, but relaxed when he saw it was Draco.

I do that to him, Draco thought smugly as he walked further into the room. Me. “Are you ready to visit my mother?” he asked, running a critical eye up and down Potter’s trainee robes. “No, of course you aren’t. Use a Cleaning Charm first.”

“I thought we were going tonight.” Potter put the heavy book down on his bed as if it had hurt his hands. Draco rolled his eyes. Honestly, sometimes Potter seemed to forget he was a wizard. Why not just use a Lightening Charm?

“There’s no reason to when we’re being allowed to leave the barracks anyway,” Draco said, with a shrug. “When I told you that, I had heard rumors from the instructors that they would extend our days here with extra meetings like the one that Auror Dearborn wanted to have. Now I know they’re not going to.”

Potter glanced at him with eyes that were brilliant and a mouth twitching with laughter. “Why not just admit that you made a mistake, Draco?”

“Because,” Draco explained carefully, “I didn’t.” He could feel a smile lifting the corners of his lips. Why that was happening, he couldn’t understand and perhaps should not try to.

There’s no one else in the world I could see myself joking with like this. Draco had never considered before whether a lover should be able to make him laugh, because other traits had always come first in his mind. But now, as his gaze lingered on Potter’s rolling eyes and flushed face, he decided that the trait might be worth considering.

“All right,” Potter said. He turned towards the door of his rooms, leading Draco along behind him, and then asked, in such a pointed tone there was no way he could make it sound casual, the way he seemed to wish, “Oh—what were you talking about with Arrowshot this morning?”

Draco cocked an eyebrow. He deserved to get part of his own back since Potter had seen fit to laugh at him. “Jealous, Harry?” He deepened his voice, and watched in great satisfaction as if Potter’s shoulderblades twitched as if he was about to grow wings.

“I—no!” There was no way that Potter could make that convincing, either. He seemed to realize it a moment later, since he turned around. “I wanted to know if she’d found out anything else about Nihil.”

Draco shook his head. “She has more extensive ties to the Ministry than we do, however, since she has family members working there. She intends to ask them to listen for rumors and to spread the rumor herself that the Auror program might lose some of its trainees if people get nervous enough.”

“That’s true, I reckon.” Potter ran his hand through his hair, making Draco wince, and then turned around again. “Well, let’s go face the Wild Beast of the Manor.”

“We don’t keep wild beasts running about to devour the guests,” Draco said, as he cast a nonverbal Styling Charm at Potter’s hair, “not since the war ended.” He did not want to think about Nagini, but at least the thought in teasing words sounded less fearsome than the memories it would stir if he tried to be serious.

“I was talking about your mother, actually,” Potter said, and then had the good sense to dodge to the side to avoid the hex that followed. Draco only felt more irritated when he remembered that their compatible magic wouldn’t actually have let him touch Potter.

Well, I can still trip him up, or punch him, or hold him against a wall and breathe on his lips until he thinks we’re going to snog.

Draco could not decide which of those would be more fun.

*

“Mr. Potter. How lovely to see you again.”

Harry was sure Narcissa Malfoy’s words weren’t sincere. Why would they be? He was the reason that Voldemort was dead, and even though he knew she had helped him escape Voldemort in the Forbidden Forest, he’d still cost her family a lot of prestige and money, and helped to put her husband in prison.

But because she sounded so absolutely sincere and was smiling while she extended her hands to him, Harry thought that the least he could do was return the courtesy. He clasped her hands and bowed his head to give the back of the right one a kiss. “The pleasure is all mine, Mrs. Malfoy,” he murmured as he stood back up. He hoped that was right. He was mostly running on old memories of shows that he’d sometimes glimpsed on the Dursleys’ telly that were set in historical times.

Draco drew in a sharp breath that made Harry wince, sure he’d got it wrong, but Mrs. Malfoy looked more charmed still. “Call me Narcissa, Harry,” she said, and hooked his hand in her arm and drew him into the Manor. “Let me show you the portraits of our ancestors. This is the very first Lady Malfoy, who was born Harmonia Torrent…”

Harry was glad for the tour; it let him look around without seeming like a gawker, and it gave him some time to recover from his first impressions of the Manor. He’d been thinking of it as the place where Hermione was tortured, and getting more and more tense as they came up the long gravel drive. He needed to stare at each wall and each portrait and each piece of furniture for a while until he could get the screams out of his head.

Draco followed them like a shadow, and when Harry glanced back at him, he found him scowling. Harry wondered what in the world he’d done wrong, but the only thing he could do was to try and give Draco a reassuring smile. Draco hunched his shoulders and turned away with a sniff. Harry shook his head. He had no idea what that was about.

“And this is the glass case with the relics of the Persecution…”

Harry found himself calming down as they wound further and further into the Manor; they were avoiding any of the rooms he remembered. He wondered if Mrs. Malfoy knew that he wouldn’t want to go into them, and then shook his head and told himself not to be so vain and stupid. Why would that matter to her? She probably had bad memories herself, and so those rooms were shut up or something.

“And this is the beak of the griffin that Octavius Malfoy killed all by himself, in the days when the Malfoys still demanded some sort of trial of manhood…”

Mrs. Malfoy’s pointless chatter was actually soothing. By the time the tour finished and they were sitting down in a room so posh that Aunt Petunia would have drooled at the sight of the cushions, Harry was more relaxed. He tried to ignore the fact that the glass in his hand probably cost more than four sets of his robes would have as he said, “Did Draco tell you why we’re here, Mrs. Malfoy?”

“Narcissa, Harry.” She sat on the couch across from him, her pale robes a contrast to the deep red of the cushions. Her hair was done up in some kind of complicated arrangement with silver combs that Harry knew his hair would never agree to. She gave him a smile with a bit of a bite to it. “That’s what friends of the family always call me.”

Harry was glad he hadn’t been taking a sip of wine just then, because he would have choked on it. Friend of the family? He was Draco’s friend and he owed a life-debt to Mrs. Malfoy, but he wouldn’t say that he was a friend of the entire family. Draco, too, was shifting on his chair as if he disagreed with those words.

“And yes, he did,” Mrs. Malfoy went on, turning to her son. “You want to make the kind of political contacts that would let you find out who this ‘Nihil’ is.” She framed the name carefully with her lips as if she disliked pronouncing it.

“Yes.” Draco gave his mother a smile and finally seemed to relax. “I know that we Malfoys don’t have as much political capital as we used to, but what do you think of the name of Potter? It ought to get us what we want.”

Harry shifted in turn. “I don’t want to do that unless we have to,” he said.

“We have to, Potter,” Draco snapped, glaring at him. “End of discussion.”

“There’s no proof of that yet,” Harry said, and turned to Mrs. Malfoy. “What do you think, ma’am? Do you think that we’ll really have to trade favors to get people to investigate Nihil? After all, he threatens the safety of the world they’re living in, too, and not just Draco’s safety or mine.”

“I would like you to call me by my first name, as I have several times told you to.” Mrs. Malfoy’s voice was low and sharp. Her smile had vanished entirely as she put down her wineglass on a table beside the couch and took up her wand.

Harry stared at her, then glanced sideways at Draco, who was quietly chuckling. He sighed. “What do you think, Narcissa?” The name tasted foreign on his tongue, worse than when he had had to start calling Draco by his first name. At least there was friendship there to help him over the initial barrier.

As though there had never been an argument between them, Narcissa settled back into her seat and picked up the wineglass. “I think I would rather not try weapons that didn’t work and see them fail,” she said equitably. “We will begin with your name, Harry, instead of waiting on it. That will secure us the results that we want, and faster.”

Harry hissed between his teeth, but nodded. “All right,” he said. “If we must.”

Narcissa tilted her head to the side in curiosity. “Forgive me for asking, in case the answer is obvious,” she said quietly, “but why are you so reluctant to use your power? The Ministry has not been. They have bragged consistently that you are in the Auror program since you joined, hoping to draw more recruits.”

Harry tightened his hand on his glass and stared blankly into the fire. That shouldn’t surprise or hurt him as much as it did. Of course it had happened, and he probably would have known that if he’d been able to pay attention to anything outside exams, his friends, trying to find Nihil, and Draco in the last few months.

“I don’t—I don’t want to ask for anything unfair,” Harry said at last, when he glanced to the side and realized that Draco was waiting for the answer, too. “I’ve received so much already from the wizarding world, and not all of it is stuff I deserve.” He ran his hand through his hair, which made Draco give a full-body twitch for some reason, and shrugged. “And I also don’t want to do unjust things for people I’m obliged to.”

“Asking for help to find Nihil is not an unfair use of your power,” Draco said, his voice so thick with conviction that it took Harry a moment to sort out the words from the tone. “And I’ll make sure that you’re not bound to anything too bad.”

Harry looked at him. “You will?”

“Trust me.” Draco’s lips were parted and his eyes shone.

Harry smiled in spite of himself. “That’s no problem,” he said. “But even you can’t stop people asking for things that I might not want to grant.”

“Then we will simply negotiate the price down,” Narcissa said briskly. “I know a few people I can ask—those who might have had some sympathy with either side but remained neutral during the war. They would know more than the Ministry would at the moment about undercurrents shifting among their social circles. They are also the ones who might be approached and asked to support Nihil.”

“Thank you, Narcissa.” Harry sipped at his wine again while Narcissa and Draco steered the conversation in different directions, mostly talking about people he’d never met. He was happy to remain silent. He felt hopelessly out of his depth, and had since he’d entered the Manor. This was a rich place, and he wasn’t rich. This was a pure-blood place, and he wasn’t a pure-blood.

This was a family place, and he didn’t have a family.

Harry scowled into his glass. Yes, you do. You have the Weasleys. Just because you don’t feel like spending every spare minute around them these days doesn’t mean that they abandoned you.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself.

It was hard to do, but watching Draco’s face as it lit up with wicked humor at some joke of his mother’s more than helped.

*

“You need not be so hard on him, Draco,” his mother murmured the moment Potter had followed one of the house-elves out of the dining room in search of the bathroom.

Draco grimaced and pushed his fingers through the side of his hair, where the ruffling wouldn’t show. “I know that,” he said. “But he’s so exasperating sometimes, Mother. And he could at least return the level of attention that I’ve shown him so far.” He knew his voice was petulant. He could feel Narcissa’s disapproving stare. He scowled at the table.

The last few days, since their encounter in the Forbidden Forest with Gregory, Draco had found himself more and more dissatisfied with the way that Potter didn’t understand things. He wasn’t as attuned to Draco as Draco was to him. He didn’t volunteer information about himself; he still hadn’t told Draco where he was staying for the Christmas holidays. He wouldn’t admit the most obvious things, such as that he was clearly jealous of Draco’s conversation with Arrowshot, or arrive at the most obvious conclusions from them, such as that he might want Draco to be more than a friend.

Pushing Potter, snapping at him, insulting him at times where he wouldn’t have before, was all Draco could think of to express his displeasure, because telling Potter the truth seemed only to inspire him to more creative ways to deny it.

“Try not to destroy him in your quest to bring him to that level of attention,” Narcissa said mildly, and leaned back in her chair as she finished a bit of the delicate Dragonsmilk Cheese. “I’m pleased for you, Draco. He seems like someone who can help you in numerous ways, and who is worth your wanting.”

Draco gave her a quick, grateful glance. He had thought often enough of Potter as a lover in the past few weeks, but if his mother had opposed Draco because she did not think Potter worthy of a Malfoy, any attempt to make him so would have been much harder.

“Merlin knows why that longing is there,” he said, sitting up and trying to speak more cheerfully. “There’s no one more unsuitable for me in many ways. But the compatible magic began it, and—”

A crack cut across his words, and Draco turned about in annoyance. Most of the Malfoy house-elves knew better than to Apparate into a room when a member of the family was speaking.

But this was Margy, the elf who had escorted Potter to the bathroom. Draco found himself on his feet, wand drawn, before he consciously thought about doing it. From a distance, his mind considered that all those Auror instincts the program was attempting to instill in his head were useful after all.

“Margy is sorry, sorry!” the elf squeaked, yanking on her ears as she spoke. “But Master Harry Potter, he has collapsed in the bathroom, and his face it is blue, and he is having troubles breathing, and—”

Draco had already started running. He heard the rustle of robes behind him as his mother rose to her feet to accompany him, as well as her mild command that would make Margy stop punishing herself. They would probably need the elves’ help, if Potter had been taken by poison.

Maybe she wanted to make sure that no one could blame them, either, as they would try to if they found out Harry Potter had suddenly become sick while dining in Malfoy Manor.

But those thoughts were ones that Draco barely felt behind the overwhelming, shrieking pressure of the ones that said, My partner. Mine. And he’s dying.

He kicked down the bathroom door when he came to it, and fell to his knees beside Potter’s twitching, panting body, taking him in his arms.

As he did that, Potter gave a great gasp and stopped breathing.

Chapter Twenty-Five.

Comments

[hogwartshoney.livejournal.com]

The slash may begin faster than I meant it to

Nothing wrong with that....

[valkyrie17.livejournal.com]

...definitely nothing wrong with that:)