Chapter Thirty-Four of 'Soldier's Welcome'- A Crash Course in Strategy

[lomonaaeren]

Title: Soldier’s Welcome (34/45)
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 Thirty-Four—A Crash Course in Strategy

Harry didn’t hesitate. There was Ketchum, and there was Nihil falling backwards, and there was a whole crowd of trainees who roared like a hydra with twenty heads and drew their wands at once. Ketchum couldn’t face them by himself.

He smashed his shoulder into the door and then went rolling into the room. He couldn’t keep his feet at first, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he could draw his wand if he staggered and bumped along, faster than he could have if he was worried about keeping his dignity.

He cast Incarcerous three times, as fast as he could, and managed to bind three trainees on the floor.

Three more turned towards him. Ketchum had whirled and dived under the desk. Nihil was back on his feet, the painful glamour that kept Harry from seeing anything still over his face.

Harry wished he had an extra pair of eyes so he could watch the enemies in front of him and Nihil both at once. Pushkin was right; Observation could be the key to surviving a battle like this.

Then Draco was beside him, snarling low in his throat about Harry being stubborn and stupid and bloody impossible, and Arrowshot was slightly behind, her footsteps hesitant. But she had come into the room, and that was a good sign, Harry thought.

He used the Shield Charm to hold back the first curse the first trainee hurled, and felt the compatible magic roll smoothly over to Draco, offering him strength in return. At least Draco was smart enough not to use Dark Arts in a battle where they weren’t alone. He used the Unbalancing Charm, and the tallest trainee’s eyes crossed as he fought to keep his balance, his inner ears rebelling.

“Protego Maximus!” Arrowshot barked, and a larger shield than usual spread over them, bouncing two jinxes back at once. Harry nodded gratefully to her and used the brief breathing space to look towards the front of the room. If the rest of the trainees weren’t coming after them, they were probably fighting Ketchum, and Harry couldn’t imagine that he would survive that. They had to fight their way through to him as soon as poss-

Harry felt his thoughts fall silent as he stared.

The desk was hovering in the air like one of the floating boulders that Ketchum made so much use of it in the Battlefield Tactics classroom. It whirled and lowered and lifted and hurtled sideways, hitting the unprotected trainees and knocking them aside like billiard balls. Meanwhile, stones Ketchum must have plucked from the walls joined the dance, smashing in heads just hard enough to lay the victims out cold, and the floor regularly rippled and rolled under the feet of his opponents, interrupting their spells and making them fight not to join their comrades in unconsciousness.

Ketchum was clinging to one of the walls, his smile brilliant, his wand held in a relaxed grip.

I reckon there’s a reason he’s the Tactics instructor.

Behind the place where the desk had first stood was Nihil, who seemed content to regard the fight with his arms folded. Harry thought his face might have worn an expression of disgust, but it was rather difficult to tell.

Harry’s attention jerked back to the fight he was actually in as one of the trainees’ hexes nearly pulled his feet from under him. He cast a spell he’d seen in the margins of the Half-Blood Prince’s book a long time ago, and her shin turned backwards. She fell with a yelp, and the next moment Draco Stunned her.

That left one trainee, since the first one had fallen over from Draco’s Unbalancing Charm a minute ago. He backed up in front of them, his eyes flickering from one to the other of them as though he was trying to decide which one was the weakest. Then he turned and ran into the crowd of trainees.

Draco’s Blasting Curse sent him spinning end over end until he collapsed into a pool of blood. Harry caught his breath as the compatible magic rolled back to him with its gift of strength; it was hard to speak in a calm voice. “You could have used a Stunner, and then he wouldn’t stand so much chance of dying.”

“I didn’t feel like it,” Draco said, and then he gasped in turn. Harry followed the direction of his eyes, and understood.

Only two or three trainees were left on their feet now, and Nihil and Ketchum both seemed ready to ignore them. Ketchum had come down from the wall and was stalking towards Nihil, his wand in his hand. Nihil had his wand out, too, and from the looser stance he had, Harry supposed he might have been amused. He squinted at the wand, trying to decide if it was familiar, but even that had a glamour on it.

“I don’t like people corrupting our trainees,” Ketchum said, causally, but with an undertone of anger that Harry could feel burning in his bones like an electric shock.

“How fortunate for me that I am making use of them and not corrupting them,” Nihil said.

Ketchum shook his head once, though Harry couldn’t tell if it was in disagreement or irritation, and then gestured with his wand. “Sum auctor ieiunitatis!”

The air between him and Nihil vanished in a sheet of white flame. Harry had no idea what it was supposed to do, because it stopped short of Nihil by inches. Nihil said, “A spell that will not work on someone like me, Samwise? How like you. Duco!”

Ketchum gasped as his head snapped backwards, and Harry thought it looked as though someone had suddenly jerked on invisible puppet strings tied to him. His wand twitched and his lips moved, but Harry couldn’t hear the spell. Maybe it was nonverbal. Anyway, the strings suddenly fell away and Ketchum was flying towards Nihil as if launched from a catapult, snapping, “Salta!”

Nihil’s body jerked to the side, but he said something Harry couldn’t make out and that stopped. Ketchum landed and rolled under the desk, which had come back to the floor. Nihil destroyed it with a Blasting Curse, but Ketchum was already on his feet again, behind it, and nearly burned the floor between Nihil’s feet; it might have worked, except that Nihil leaped into the air and floated to the other side of the room like a feather.

Spells rained down from him, flying so fast that Harry wondered if there was time to pronounce the incantations that must have controlled them. Ketchum met Nihil defense for defense, his arms twisting in impossible directions, his face concentrated and scowling, his hair flying.

When we’re full Aurors, will we be able to do that? Harry thought wistfully. I hope so.

Stones joined the battle, and part of the ceiling tried to fall on Nihil. He deflected Ketchum’s weapons with barely a shrug, once by opening a pit of absolute nothingness in front of the stone that was flying towards him. It vanished as though eaten by a vast mouth. Harry shivered, and felt Draco edge closer to his left side.

Purple corkscrews decorated the air between Ketchum and Nihil. Lightning leaped from wand to wand, and Harry and Draco had to duck more than once. Bronze shields formed and faded. The ground heaved again, but this time it extended all across the room and made Harry and Draco both fall. Harry made sure to curl around Draco’s head with his arms, shielding him as best as he could from impact with the stone.

Ketchum barked some spell that Harry couldn’t identify; it didn’t sound like Latin. The air in front of him turned white, and a small dragon flew straight towards Nihil.

Nihil recoiled. He yelped something, and then he was gone and so were all the trainees in the room, as suddenly as if they’d Apparated—though Harry didn’t hear the crack.

What he did hear, as he knelt there blinking in the sudden aftermath of battle, was Ketchum’s cursing.

*

Draco made sure that he and Harry were on their feet by the time Ketchum got around to glancing at them. He had noticed three things that he didn’t think Harry had, and that meant he was the one who had to prepare defenses against them.

One was that Ketchum had obviously been in control from the first moment Nihil marched him into the room. No one broke the Imperius Curse that suddenly, and he hadn’t had the expression on his face characteristic of the Imperius Curse anyway. So the instructors had known about and planned to invade these meetings, and Ketchum might accuse them of interfering.

The second was that Ketchum had looked at them when they first burst through the door with a critical, assessing glance. He would ask certain questions, and Draco didn’t think Harry would answer them gracefully.

The third was that Arrowshot was gone.

“Trainee Malfoy, Trainee Potter.” Ketchum had a bright, cheerful voice when he wanted to. Draco had learned to watch his eyes to learn how difficult an obstacle course would be. At the moment, those eyes were frozen harder than he had ever seen them. “Very strange that I should meet you here.” He nodded to both of them. “Mind talking about the strangeness?”

Harry shifted sideways next to Draco, and Draco knew he was probably opening his mouth to give an answer that would be unfortunately honest. He touched the small of Harry’s back, out of Ketchum’s eyesight, and Harry drew a startled breath. That was enough time to let Draco speak.

“No stranger than it is seeing you, sir,” he said coolly. “We followed the advice and guidance of a trainee named Catherine Arrowshot who told us about the trainees meeting here. But how did you come here?”

Ketchum paused, and Draco felt the moment teetering on the edge of a blade .Sometimes his father had looked like that, right before he got angry, and sometimes Professor Snape.

But in the end, the balance tipped the right way and Ketchum laughed. “You must have already guessed,” he said. “I saw the way you were looking at me, Malfoy. Was I under the control of anyone else when I stepped into this room?”

Draco relaxed. Though Ketchum’s manner was bold and unconventional, and though he was still a Mudblood, Draco preferred this kind of rough honesty. “No, sir,” he said. “This was part of a plan to spy on Nihil and try to stop him.”

“Yes.” Ketchum studied Harry now, glance so keen that Draco felt Harry shift uneasily under it. “I’m starting to think that we should have included you in those plans, since you are prone to show up when we execute them.”

“Of course you should have,” Draco said, making sure to keep his tone mild and not confrontational. Ketchum might appreciate their abilities, but Draco doubted he would feel the same about a consistent challenge to his authority. Mudbloods were especially touchy about that, since many of them could feel the natural superiority of pure-bloods when they were in close contact with them. “Wouldn’t it make more sense for us to work together, instead of blundering about in ignorance of what the other is doing and then meeting in the middle?”

Ketchum nodded. “But after this…” He jerked his head towards the empty room. “And the way your companion disappeared with them, and the fact that Nihil has Merlin knows how many other recruits, we’ll have to take strict precautions about who we tell.” He looked Draco straight in the eye. “How do you feel about Veritaserum?”

Draco shivered in spite of himself. And then Harry stepped forwards and stood between Draco and Ketchum.

“He shouldn’t have to take it,” Harry said fiercely. “He’s been the victim of most of Nihil’s attacks and he had to undergo Veritaserum interrogations during his trial in front of the Wizengamot. Leave him alone.”

Draco put a hand on Harry’s shoulder. This wasn’t the right time, but he would have to tell Harry what that defense of him had meant to Draco. For now, all he could really do was rub gently back and forth, hoping the sheer motions of his fingers would manage to convey the right meaning.

“I understand that, Trainee Potter.” Ketchum nodded to Harry. “But everyone will have to do it. I’m not singling Malfoy out because of…unfortunate choices he may have made in the past.” That was perhaps the most diplomatic way Draco had ever heard it referred to. “We need to make sure that we can trust everyone who forms a part of this team. As you said, Trainee Malfoy has been attacked. That means Nihil might have had a chance to infect him with more than grief magic.”

Harry gave a small, tense shake. “I insist on undergoing it, too,” he said.

Ketchum raised an eyebrow. “Of course.”

“Before he does,” Harry said. “And from the same vial, just so we can be sure no one is mixing anything nasty with the potion.”

Draco wished he could lean his head on Harry’s shoulder and simply breathe into his ear, because he doubted he could find the words. But they weren’t alone, and Draco would not betray weakness to a stranger like Ketchum. His mother and Harry were the only people who had a right to see it.

“Your unshakability on this point is touching,” Ketchum said dryly. “I can assure you that we planned to do that anyway.” He raised his wand, and a door appeared in the far wall at his gesture, not the one that Nihil had come in by or the one that Arrowshot had shown them. Draco wondered if it was advanced Transfiguration or simply the revealing of a passage that the full Aurors knew about. “Now. Follow me. I can’t decide what to tell you until I see the others.”

He strode off. Harry immediately followed him. Draco tried to pass him, but Harry shifted again. Draco realized that Harry was still protecting him, probably because he envisioned Ketchum turning around and launching a curse.

Ketchum had vanished into the newly revealed corridor without waiting for them. Draco could snatch a moment. He laid his chin on Harry’s shoulder and breathed into his ear “Thank you.”

Harry’s step faltered for a moment. Then he reached up, snagged Draco’s hand, and squeezed so tightly Draco thought his circulation was cut off for a moment.

They followed Ketchum.

*

Harry’s head was starting to ache with the way that the instructors argued. Around and in circles and sideways and upside down, and all because they didn’t want to mention the plan that Ketchum had tucked about—how to infiltrate Nihil’s ranks and fight him—in front of Draco and Harry, because they hadn’t decided if they should trust them yet.

I never knew how many variations of “that thing we talked about the other day” there were in the English language, Harry thought, and cast a series of golden sparks down the center of the table. At least it had the effect he wanted. People turned to him, their mouths open in astonishment, and shut up. Harry stood and looked around at them all. Portillo Lopez, looking harassed, her scarf half-undone around her hair; Hestia, her face pale rather than pink; Dearborn, watchful and calm and amused as always; Ketchum, irritated with all the rest of them; and Pushkin, glancing away from the glass he had been studying with faint disappointment, probably because he hadn’t got to observe it longer. They hadn’t included Morningstar in this meeting. Harry wondered why, but then decided she was probably too new to trust. And this group seemed particularly close, because they hadn’t included Draco’s Battle Brewing professor, either.

“Will you just tell us what the bloody plan is?” he asked.

Dearborn’s eyes darkened. Portillo Lopez paused in patting her scarf, giving Harry a stare that made him feel eleven years old and new to the wizarding world all over again. Hestia squeaked and put a hand over her mouth. Pushkin gave him a long, slow, considering look, as if Harry should take the place of his glass as a subject of observation. Even Draco reached up and pinched Harry’s side with a ferocity that Harry knew meant they would have words later.

Ketchum laughed, and laughed loud and long. He leaped to his feet and grinned at them.

“I told you it wouldn’t work to keep them out of this forever,” he said happily. “They aren’t like other trainees.”

“You keep saying things like that, Ketchum,” Portillo Lopez muttered, and her hands closed on her wand. “This is the first time I’ve seen it come true.”

“He has said that one hundred and sixteen times in the last fortnight,” Pushkin said, with the same calm tone he used in class when he wanted a student to be more precise about an observation. Harry was glad that they weren’t the only ones who got to hear it. “And this is the first time he has been proven right. On the other hand, he need only be proven right once. If you would wait, I can calculate how many times he is likely to say such words again before he is proven—”

“No,” Portillo Lopez said.

Pushkin gave a shrug that Harry could read as clearly as words, maybe thanks to his classes. You have no patience.

“It doesn’t matter,” Ketchum said fiercely. “I’ve said all along that we can’t fight Nihil with silence and secrecy. It’s too obvious that he has allies inside the Ministry, and if some of those allies are gone now, because you said that the trainees didn’t come back, that doesn’t mean they’re all gone. We should do what I said we should do: form a force that can effectively fight Nihil and his cohorts, and use proper tests to make sure that we can trust everyone inside it.”

“Of course you should!” Harry said, astonished. He had suspected that the instructors’ plan wasn’t complete, but it had seemed clever, persuading Nihil that Ketchum was going along with him and then having him turn at the last minute. But if they didn’t have any organization in place to deal with things like this…”Dumbledore ran the Order of the Phoenix, and he assigned people tasks, and there were secret ways of getting messages around and secrets that not everyone in the Order knew. Do you mean to say that you don’t do that? What kind of idiots are you?”

“Harry,” Draco whispered.

“You forget yourself, Trainee Potter.” Dearborn rose to his feet and leaned across the table as if he could intimidate Harry that way.

Unfortunately for him, Harry had faced world-class experts in intimidation. He stood up and leaned forwards in response.

“We’re fighting another war here,” he said harshly. “I don’t know everything about Nihil’s goal, but I think it’s more widespread than just the Ministry. Draco and I have seen signs of his work outside it.” Even as angry as he was, he had enough sense not to mention the party he and Draco had attended. “I have experience in a war. And during the last year, I studied a journal Dumbledore left behind. It had a lot of the contact information for the Order of the Phoenix, descriptions of how it worked. Apparently he wrote it after the first war with Voldemort and then charmed it so that no one else could read it until after Voldemort was safely gone forever. I think I can improve your plans—no, scratch that, I know I can.”

“You would tell us that we have reckoned without the Boy-Who-Lived, would you?” Harry didn’t think even Snape or Draco had ever sneered at him with more contempt than he could see on Dearborn’s face right now.

Harry stared back at him, and replied, “That’s exactly what I’m saying. This stupid title ought to be good for something.”

*

Draco had been staring at Harry in shock ever since he’d begun this little charade. He could understand that Harry was frustrated because Nihil seemed to escape again and again, and they couldn’t put the pieces together, and now Arrowshot was gone and they didn’t know if they’d been wrong to trust her, but he shouldn’t take out his anger on the instructors.

Only when Harry began talking about a new war did Draco realize he was entirely serious. A bolt of dismay shot through him and tried to pin him in his seat.

I don’t want to fight again.

Luckily, he managed to realize on his own that that was ridiculous. He wouldn’t have become an Auror if he couldn’t stand the thought of fighting. And he knew Harry was right. Besides, he was Harry’s partner and friend and to-be lover. He couldn’t let him stand unsupported.

He rose to his feet and put a hand on Harry’s shoulder. Harry reached over and clasped his arm in return. He hadn’t moved otherwise, he was still standing with his eyes on Dearborn, but, just like when Harry had defended him from Ketchum, Draco didn’t need direct eye contact to make the gesture resonate for him.

Dearborn’s face cooled somewhat when he saw Draco rise, but he only studied them, for so long that Draco was sure his reserve would break and admit something loud and snarling any moment. Then he glanced down at the table and nodded.

“Perhaps I have been hasty,” he murmured.

“Not hasty enough.” That was Ketchum, springing in again, and Draco breathed, because the dangerous moment was past and they had some support from the full Aurors. Even if he is a Mudblood. “We need to move faster. We need to conduct the tests of who we can trust. We need to decide what we can do to fight back.”

“At the moment, I do not know if there is anything we can do.” Dearborn shook his head, but he was wearing a more normal expression now. “If they can infect our people through light, if they can corrupt such a large portion of our trainees…”

“I believe I can counter the infection,” said Portillo Lopez. She smiled thinly at the way their heads turned towards her. “Since I had the chance to study the infection working through Trainee Malfoy’s magic, I have been at work.” She sniffed. “Hard, but only on the surface. They used an Alexander’s Knot underneath—”

“Observe the way that their faces went blank just now,” Pushkin told her in a flat voice. “That is a sign that you are getting too technical.”

Draco bit his lip to hide a smile. He honestly didn’t know if the Observation teacher was making a joke or not, but it left Ketchum free to jump in again.

“I’ll start gathering up the Veritaserum,” he said. “I can tell them it’s for my classes, and that’s even partially the truth.” His eyes shone, and he canted his head to one side. “What are we going to name ourselves?”

“Pardon?” Dearborn curled his lip and touched his onyx ring so that it flashed, something Draco had only seen him do in front of other Aurors when he was desperately bored.

“Dumbledore’s group was the Order of the Phoenix.” Ketchum shifted from leg to leg. “What are we? I think we should call ourselves the Fellowship.”

“Your parents have corrupted you for life by naming you after a character in those ridiculous Muggle books,” Portillo Lopez snapped.

The rest of the meeting fell apart into unimportant bickering from there on in, and Draco felt free to sit down again. Harry sat beside him and squeezed his hand so hard Draco gasped a little.

“Thank you,” Harry leaned over to whisper.

“I didn’t say anything,” Draco felt compelled to point out.

“But I know what you would have said.”

Such pride and trust shone in Harry’s eyes that Draco had to close his own a little and look away.

Chapter Thirty-Five.

Comments

[lomonaaeren.livejournal.com]

Thank you! His first name is Samwise, but this isn't mentioned much after the chapter that introduces him.

Do you think Nihil's weakness is dragons, then?