lomonaaeren

Title: Soldier’s Welcome (42/45)
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 Forty-Two—Rumor, Refusal, Temptation

“I don’t understand.”

Harry kept his eyes on the books in front of him. He didn’t feel up to a confrontation with Draco right now. “What’s not to understand? I’d rather concentrate on studying and making sure that we’re not expelled from the Auror program. That’s more important to me than finding out who Nihil is.”

He could feel Draco’s stare from the other side of the room. That didn’t mean that he needed to look up and respond to it.

He turned a page, and that seemed to be the signal for Draco to lose control of the temper he’d been so carefully keeping back.

“You’re a coward sometimes, you know that?” The table Harry was studying at rattled when Draco stalked closer. Without a lot of weight—he was still slender no matter how much he ate while he was recovering under Portillo Lopez’s care—he walked in a way that made his point. “Just because I was hurt, is that enough to scare you off from learning more about Nihil? Especially since we were so close to finding more substantial answers? Especially since your friend Granger’s suspicion is probably right and Nihil looks more and more like one of the Death Eaters’ victims?”

“My friend Granger?” Harry felt free to look up now, because he could give Draco a teasing glance. “When you’re the one who’s spent more time with her than me lately, trying to find out what spells could have scrubbed those potions vials clean and why the resonance spell triggered that trap?”

Draco leaned nearer, his nostrils flaring. “It’s not about that,” he said. “It’s about your being afraid because I was hurt.”

Harry sighed. It seemed he couldn’t escape this no matter how much he wanted to. He put the book down and leaned back in his chair so that he could put a bit of distance between himself and Draco. “Yes,” he said. “It is.”

Draco shook his head and paced away again. “Why? I don’t understand why that makes such a difference to you. After I was wounded during that battle with Nusquam, you never thought of giving up.”

“You came closer to dying this time,” Harry said.

Draco gave him a blank look. “No, I didn’t. I think burns aren’t the same thing as the corruption of my magical core.”

“I couldn’t help you this time,” Harry said, “except by ending the spell. And even then, I needed Ron’s help to do it.” He grinned when Draco grimaced. No matter how many days passed since their journey into the cache, it seemed that Draco was no nearer coming to terms with the fact that Ron had saved his life. “That’s—different for me, Draco. It clarified a lot of things. I could risk my life, but not yours.”

Draco stared at him again. Harry looked back. He had no idea what other words he should use, because those words were the truth.

“What are you saying?” Draco whispered.

“Exactly what I said,” Harry replied, confused by the way Draco’s eyes were shining. “I care more about your life than my own.”

“But you didn’t say anything about your friends,” Draco breathed. He took a step closer, and now the air in the room had changed and was charged in some strange way, and Harry didn’t know why. “They were with us. Why didn’t the danger to their lives change the way you felt about this?”

Harry frowned and shifted. Yeah, now that he says that, it should have. Maybe Ron and Hermione weren’t in the same kind of danger that he was, but they weren’t safe. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just different.”

“You feel differently about me than you do about other people.” Draco was still whispering. He reached out and closed his hand around Harry’s wrist. Harry started. He hadn’t realized Draco was that close.

He looked up and met those glowing eyes and felt as if he should swallow or say something or cluck his tongue to break the mood. But he couldn’t.

“Yeah,” Harry said at last, though he didn’t know if Draco heard him, with his voice reduced to a whimper in the back of his throat.

Either Draco did or he could tell from the shape of Harry’s lips what he was saying, because he looked suddenly smug and dropped Harry’s wrist, stepping away. “That was all I wanted,” he said, voice both satisfied and wistful. “To know that you thought about me differently than you did about other people.”

“No, you wanted to be more important to me than everyone else,” Harry snapped, but the force of Draco’s smile stopped him.

“I know what I want better than you do,” Draco said calmly, and then turned around and picked up his Auror Conduct book. When he came back with it, he sat down across the table from Harry, turning pages as though he had intended to study all along.

“And that’s it?” Harry demanded. “You aren’t going to argue anymore that we should hunt Nihil down no matter where he is?”

“It isn’t getting me anywhere right now, is it?” Draco looked up, his face calm. Harry thought it was the cool and collected expression he had tried to achieve many times in school and had done so little. “I’ll wait until your fear’s worn off a bit. Then we can investigate. I want to get revenge on Nihil for what he’s done to me.”

Harry nodded almost against his will. He had wanted much the same thing; he simply hadn’t seen how they could get it.

“We’ll find him,” Draco said. “But there’s no reason we can’t wait until the instructors’ vigilance wears off, so we can do it without being suspected. It’s probably for the best, anyway. We should do what will heighten our chances of success, not what will obscure them simply because we’re stubborn.” He looked down at his book again.

Harry went slowly back to his own, now and then looking up to eye Draco. Draco presented a supremely innocent, busy picture, no matter how long or when Harry looked at him.

He’d been thrown back into uncertainty again with just a few words from Draco.

But, he thought, uncertainty with Draco was a lot better than certainty without him.

*

Draco hesitated, then pushed the door open. The longer he hesitated, the worse he would make it, as his mother had told him when he was reluctant to have some wound opened and healed.

The rooms beyond were so cluttered that Draco nearly turned around and left again. Books, half-open, dangled off the table. The table itself was balanced on more books and an essay that looked as if it bore more of the professor’s comments than Weasley’s own words. The chair was wrinkled and had a large stain in the middle of it that Draco could have sworn was mustard, or at least mustard-colored. The door had several scratches in it. Draco shook his head. He didn’t know what had caused this mess, and every reasonable explanation he could think of caused unwanted images to rise in his mind. He could only hope that Harry had never lived in quite this state of disorder, or at least that he had cleaned off the lice and fleas by now if he had.

“Mate, I—Malfoy?”

At least Weasley sounded as displeased to see him as Draco was about being here. It was some small comfort to think that he was causing someone else distress. Draco raised his eyes to Weasley’s face.

Weasley was red, but that was nothing new. It was new for him to be dressed in a trailing bedsheet, and Draco tried, and failed, to not imagine Granger in a similar state in the next room. He shuddered and cleared his throat, while he tried to pretend that he was peering intently at a book sprawled on the table.

“I came to thank you for the magic you lent to Harry in the cache,” he said. His words sounded odd and stilted to his ears, unfamiliar.

“Harry already thanked me for that.” From the sound of things, Weasley was rubbing his neck and probably heartily wishing Draco out of the room. “But thanks, of course,” he added hastily.

“You don’t understand,” Draco said, and felt a bit of irritation work its way through his embarrassment. “I thought you would, since you know more about the pure-blood ways than Harry does. I owe you a life-debt.”

“Yeah,” Weasley said. “And I don’t want it.”

Draco stiffened his courage and glanced back at him. Luckily, the bedsheet hadn’t slipped more than an inch, and he didn’t have to see more than that of a chest covered with fuzzy red hair. “You can’t refuse a life-debt that way.”

Weasley squinted at him, and then laughed. “Of course you can. What kind of ‘pure-blood ways’ did you grow up with? Dad always taught us that life-debts only mattered when there was some kind of attachment between the wizards. So I reckon you and Harry should consider how much you owe your lives to each other—” He made a gagging noise. “But you and I don’t have to.”

Draco stared again. It was true that his father had sometimes mentioned the existence of debates over the life-debts and how much better it would be if wizarding society could choose one way of conforming to them, but he had not imagined anything like a positive refusal existed.

“Why did you save me, then?” he asked, when he had his breath back. “If not to have me under your control because of a life-debt?”

“There’s this little thing,” Weasley said, “called friendship. Harry cares about you. Don’t ask me why. And don’t give me details,” he added defensively, as though Draco had offered to spend the Galleons of his innermost thoughts on him. “But I saved you because I knew he would have been devastated if you died. And…” He paused.

“Go on,” Draco said, keeping his eyes narrow and his voice arrogant despite the warmth he felt. I’m important to Potter. His best friends recognize the fact and have to put up with it. And isn’t that just too bad for them?

Weasley stared at the ceiling, rolled his eyes, looked at the floor as if the answer would be there, and muttered something inaudible.

“You were the one who indicated that you had more to say to me.” Draco leaned forwards. “At least do me the courtesy of speaking plainly. Both of us the courtesy, in truth. I don’t want to be here and you don’t want me to stay when you could be fucking your girlfriend instead.”

Weasley gritted his teeth and turned red enough that Draco expected an attack of apoplexy any moment, but nodded his head and said in a clipped voice, “Fine. I did it because no one should have to go through the kind of pain I could hear you were going through.”

Draco stood still. He would have made fun of that kind of Gryffindor idealism if Harry exhibited it, secure in the knowledge that it meant he was dear to Harry. He had no idea what to say when Weasley, of all people, showed it.

“Don’t tell anyone about this,” Weasley said. His voice was low. There could have been many emotions causing that, and Draco was not inclined, at the moment, to try and disentangle them. “I mean it.”

Draco snapped himself out of his trance and nodded, eyes resolutely fastened to Weasley’s. “You don’t have to worry,” he said.

“Good.” Weasley flung himself back into the bedroom, in an action so near a flounce Draco would have laughed if his lips didn’t feel numb. He slowly let himself back into the corridor, licking his lips absently, trying to figure out what he was going to do next.

Someone else cares about me—at least a little. You don’t save the life of someone you’re absolutely indifferent to.

I don’t—I don’t know how to cope with this.

*

“I still can’t learn anything about him.”

Harry watched Ketchum pace back and forth across the room the instructors had chosen for their private meeting with Harry, Draco, and, now that they had undergone the trial by Veritaserum and were wearing jade bracelets, Ron and Hermione. The Battle Tactics instructor looked more harassed than Harry had ever seen him. He kept running his hand through his hair and tugging at the roots as if he thought it would soothe him to have it come out.

“We know that he’s powerful,” Ketchum continued. “We know that he has, or had, a position of influence in the Ministry. But why did he pull back? Where is he hiding now? What is his real name?” He shook his head and halted, staring around as if he had just now realized that his audience might be getting dizzy. “I’m a trained investigator. It should be easy to find this out. But it’s not.”

“From my observations,” said Pushkin, with a slight pause after the word as if it was sacred for him, “it is not surprising that he pulled back his influence from the Ministry. We made things too hot for him. He could not stay in a place where his every movement was suspected and where Maryam had discovered a way to cure the magical disease that he inflicted on others.” He inclined his head to Portillo Lopez. “Why would he wish to continue a confrontation which would simply escalate, with more exposure of his motives and methods and more disadvantages to himself? A retreat to a prepared, safe location and a recovery of his forces was to be expected.”

“One thing I don’t understand, sir,” Hermione said, speaking a lot more respectfully than Harry had thought she would. But then, he thought, propping his chin up on his fist as he turned to look at her, she was the only one of us who was relieved to find out we wouldn’t be allowed to investigate on our own. “Why did he flee when you cast that dragon at him in the battle? Harry described it, but it seemed such a simple spell. Does he have an allergy to dragons?”

Ketchum laughed, though Harry thought Hermione hadn’t meant her last sentence to be funny, from her little frown. She was desperate to find some kind of weakness to Nihil, or at least to Nemo and Nusquam. “I’ve been pondering that myself,” he said. “It was a standard defensive spell. None of the others I used made much impact. He hardly bothered to protect himself from most of them. Why should he have feared that one? Badly enough to leave the Ministry with his trainees, even?”

Hermione gnawed her lip. “Can you cast the spell again, sir? Just so the rest of us can look at it and get an idea of what would scare Nihil?”

Harry looked hard at her. Hermione was trying to look innocent, which made him sure she had some other motive behind the request.

Ketchum studied her as if he was wondering the same thing, but nodded and held up his wand. The incantation was carefully and loudly pronounced. Harry saw a smile tugging at the corners of Ketchum’s mouth, and thought he probably liked being able to show off without anyone accusing him of being superficial. “Draco vitae me defend!”

The air in front of him coalesced and pulled together into a burning pool of light, and then the dragon Harry remembered from the battle hurtled away from his wand, wings spread wide and mouth parted. The light about it boiled and danced, and built up to such a peak of brightness that Harry couldn’t bear to look at it. It vanished before it hit the wall, though, or at least he didn’t hear it hit.

“Why did you say Draco vitae, sir?” Hermione’s voice was eager.

Harry blinked away the afterimages and glanced sideways at Draco. His face bore a complicated mixture of emotions. Harry wondered if it was easy for him to think about Nihil when he had almost died, and placed a compassionate hand on his arm. Draco leaned towards him and whispered.

“It’s disconcerting to hear your name as part of an incantation.”

Harry blinked, then bit the inside of his cheek so he wouldn’t burst out laughing. Sometimes, he thought, he worried too much.

“I’m not a Latin scholar,” Ketchum said. “It’s just the incantation I learned.” He glanced over his shoulder, and Harry saw that he faced Dearborn. Now that he was thinking of it, he remembered Draco saying Dearborn had also conjured a dragon.

“The incantation literally means, ‘Dragon of life defend me,’” Dearborn said, his posture in the chair elegant, his voice polished and without inflection. “The spell draws on the life-force of the caster, which is one reason that many of us feel weak afterwards.” He raised an eyebrow at Ketchum.

Ketchum puffed out his chest. Harry had to work hard to contain another laugh. He didn’t think the professors at Hogwarts had ever seemed half so petty and jealous to him. Was it because they were better people, or just because he was younger then and hadn’t known them as well?

“That’s it, then,” Hermione said, her voice high and excited. Harry stared at her, but he could feel Draco nodding slowly beside him. That was one thing he envied both Draco and Hermione, the ability to have their minds dart ahead like that and reach some conclusion that wasn’t immediately obvious. “Don’t you see? The spell is made of life-force. Nihil’s specialty is death, and coming back from death. It’s no wonder he couldn’t deal with it.”

Harry felt a burst of pride in his chest, and wished he could have put a hand on Hermione’s shoulder, but he was too far away. He glanced around the table, though, and saw more than one face shining with the revelation.

“We may have the beginnings of something to deal with him, then,” Ketchum said. His voice was softer, and his smile had gone away, though his eyes were no less wide and bright. Harry thought he had the growl in his tone that he had heard when Ketchum was fighting Nihil in the middle of the trainees’ meeting.

“We almost certainly do,” Portillo Lopez said, and shook her sleeve. Quill and parchment popped out of it, and she began to scribble. “The method is similar to what I used to cure the infection in the magical cores of the students I tested. Why did I not think of this before?”

“From my observations,” Pushkin said, again with his reverent little pause after the word, “we did not think of it before because we were thinking that the magic that we must use to defeat Nihil would of course be complex and rather like the Dark Arts. We would have distrusted a solution like this as too simple.”

“Now we know of it,” said Dearborn, with a slow smile that changed his face remarkably. Harry thought that he actually looked human, and didn’t wonder anymore that Draco had wanted to study under him. “Now we can use it.”

In the middle of the excited chatter—even Hestia was talking now, as she rarely did at these meetings, leaning across Pushkin to ask Hermione questions about what other spells she could think of that used life-force—Harry glanced at Ron and Draco. Ron had a hard little smile on his face Harry wouldn’t have wanted to face in battle. Draco was glancing from person to person as if he wanted to memorize all the suggestions that everyone was making for testing later, now and then tapping his fingers together as if he was making mental notes.

No one was looking at Harry, so no one (probably) had seen the odd expression he knew had crossed his face when Hermione talked about death magic and life magic.

Yes, it made sense. He knew it made sense, even though he hadn’t thought of it before because he had had no idea what Ketchum’s dragon was actually made of.

He knew it made sense because he had lingered behind in one of the rooms they’d explored in the cache and picked up a book that had caught his eye. The book looked like it was about necromancy.

Maybe it was trapped. But so far, it didn’t seem like it. Harry had had it hidden in their rooms for weeks now, and it hadn’t exploded or poisoned anyone.

He knew Hermione and Draco would both disapprove of him having it. Probably Ron, too. But he just—he just needed—

It was a thought. He hadn’t done anything so far.

He just needed to think about what could happen if, maybe, he could bring some people back to life who had died unfairly.

It was a thought. He hadn’t done anything yet. It wasn’t wrong.

*

“Draco?”

Draco immediately strode to the fireplace and dropped down to kneel in front of it. His mother’s face was floating in the flames, and she looked so distressed that Draco had to bite his tongue so he wouldn’t offer to come back to the Manor.

“What is it, Mother?” he said, gently. Only later, thinking about it, did he realize that was the tone his father had always used with her when she was upset.

Narcissa took a deep breath and extended one hand. She didn’t actually reach through the flames, however, pulling back her hand at the last moment. “Have you heard anything about the rest of the family, Draco?” she asked. “Anything at all?”

“The rest of the family?” Draco repeated, mystified. There were distant Malfoy cousins in other parts of Europe—some of them distant enough that the family would have considered them possible allies instead of competitors for the Manor and the vaults—and he recalled, dimly, that he might have a great-great-aunt still living. Maybe his mother meant the Blacks. “Is there something wrong with Aunt Andromeda?”

Narcissa gave her head a quick little shake. “That’s not what I meant. You’re sure you’ve heard nothing?” She was watching him with wide eyes, but her panicked breathing had calmed a little.

“No, nothing at all.” Draco paused. “Is it Father?” He was trying to brace himself for the news that Lucius had died in Azkaban or suffered some worse fate, while dimly aware that he would fall over if it was true.

“No.” Narcissa swallowed. “I thought—there was a rumor.” She passed a hand over her forehead. “But you would have heard something if it was true,” she murmured. “They would have been obliged to let you know, since you are the head of the family now.”

“I wish you would speak plainly, Mother.” Draco drew his legs up beneath him and tried to get comfortable. “Is there some problem with the vaults? Is the Ministry threatening you again?” Either of those were crises that he had expected before and ones that he thought he could deal with.

“No.” Narcissa closed her eyes. “I must—of course it was only a rumor. Amelia Ravenhurst doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

“I wish you would speak plainly,” Draco said again, while he was trying to make sense of what she’d said. The Ravenhursts were a family so minor that he was somewhat surprised his mother had contact with them at all. Of course, they might be some of the allies that she’d found who had made promises to her based on the weight of Harry’s name.

How would they know anything about our family?

“All’s well,” Narcissa said brightly. “But I have duties I must attend to.” And then the flames went out.

Draco stared at the fireplace, shaking his head. His mother had never done something so discourteous as to end a Floo call like that.

Troubled, and hoping that this didn’t turn out to be something worse than it seemed on the surface, he rose and went to fetch the books Harry had asked him to bring to the library, where they would begin a study session.

Chapter Forty-Three.