lomonaaeren | Chapter Forty-Three of 'Soldier's Welcome'- The War Wizards

Title: Soldier’s Welcome (43/45)
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-Three—The War Wizards

“They’re magnificent.”

Harry glanced curiously at Draco. He didn’t think he’d heard that particular tone of voice from him before. Draco sounded as if he meant the words he was speaking, and that was remarkable when he was talking about something that didn’t belong to his family.

Draco caught his look and frowned at him. “What?”

“Nothing,” Harry said hastily, and faced the spectacle in front of them again. Yes, he had to admit they were magnificent, though it wasn’t the first word that he would have chosen.

The War Wizards wore robes of dark scarlet, which Harry had thought were so they wouldn’t show blood and Draco had told him resembled a dark rose—though he’d admitted there was no real reason they should resemble a dark rose when Harry asked him. Their collars had a silver edging attached, and a symbol at the throat. Harry thought the symbol was a wand crossed with a sword, which he had seen on several pamphlets the Ministry had handed out about the War Wizards.

Currently, they were training in the middle of a large hollow that Harry thought was a crater and Draco said couldn’t be, somewhere out in the country where Muggles wouldn’t come. The Auror trainees had been released from classes for the day and Apparated to the spot to watch them. Harry thought the instructors, and Shacklebolt himself, were hoping that any spies among the trainees would warn Nihil about what he was up against, and perhaps make him think twice.

If anything can, Harry thought, shifting his position on the thick grass. So far, all the War Wizards had done was march about in drills and lift their wands to cast an illusion of a rising golden dragon, which it seemed was their signal for help. Harry thought their discipline was impressive, but he didn’t see how it would help them win battles.

Then the tiny, green-robed figure in front of the War Wizards, one of their trainers or commanders, stepped back and made a shrill noise, a whistle louder than any whistle should be.

The War Wizards broke apart into dizzying patterns of red robes. Harry’s eyes crossed as he tried to track everything at once, so at first he didn’t realize what they were doing.

Then he saw.

Some of the War Wizards unleashed terrible boiling storms of light at each other, or small, concentrated beams of red and green light which Harry knew from studying with Dearborn could be more powerful curses than the flashier ones, or conjured weapons and animals out of nothing to attack their comrades who stood opposite them. A storm of spears streaked the sky. True, living dragons as big as the Hungarian Horntail Harry had faced in the Triwizard Tournament appeared and lunged forwards, their jaws parted, their fire real. The earth cracked open. The smell of smoke rose to Harry’s nostrils. The valley became dazzling with magic, and his skin tingled and his jaw ached in that way which meant Dark Arts were nearby.

The War Wizards who stood opposite the attackers answered.

Shields appeared in every form and variety that Harry had learned, and some he hadn’t: shields of smoke, of silver, of wood and stone and ivory and ebony, of teeth and what looked like the thighbones of giants. Swarms of enormous bees swooped down on the dragons and bore them from the sky with their sheer weight. The beams of red and green light were eaten by glowing golden dogs that started up from the ground in front of the defenders, snapped their jaws twice, and then dug back into the soil when they were done. The earth softened and firmed, burned and disintegrated and reformed, so fast that Harry had to piece together what had happened afterwards.

Draco’s hand closed on his arm. Harry looked at him, at his pale face and staring eyes, and nodded. He’d felt it, too. The magic rising out of the valley was more powerful than their mingled compatible magic, many times over. It was the first force they had encountered since they started working together that was, unless you counted the various tricks that Nihil had played.

“I have to learn how to do that,” Draco said, his voice reverent.

Harry looked into the hollow again and wondered what kind of “that” he was talking about. There were so many to choose from, and it looked as though the War Wizards were turning around and exchanging places so that they could launch another, new wave of spells. Of course, Harry thought. You couldn’t have half your army only knowing how to do one thing. “I don’t think they offer training outside their ranks,” he said aloud. “That was what Portillo Lopez said, anyway.”

“I want to find a way to get in,” Draco insisted. “Think of what we could do with it.”

Harry smiled, touched that Draco had included him automatically even though he hadn’t expressed any interest in learning about War Wizardry. “I wish you good luck with that,” he said. “But I think you’d have to give up learning how to become an Auror.”

Draco hesitated just a moment. Then he flicked his hand in the stubborn, dismissive motion Harry knew he used whenever he didn’t want to consider that something might be beyond his reach. “Lies,” he said coolly. “Why would I? It would be much easier, and better, to combine the two types of training.”

“Define ‘easy,’” Harry muttered. “Besides, I don’t think that you could. They would insist that you choose one or the other.”

Draco rolled over to face him more fully. “And you think that doing things the old way will defeat Nihil?” he demanded. “You really think that simply flinging defensive spells and hoping for the best will work?”

Harry met his gaze evenly. He was getting better at not taking offense when Draco said something like this, because, most of the time, he wasn’t the one Draco was angry at. “I don’t,” he replied. “But the Aurors and War Wizards probably think exactly that, or we would be fighting at their side.”

Draco rolled onto his stomach again and stared down into the hollow with a scowl on his face. Harry reached out and laid a hand on his back, hoping that he could convey silent sympathy.

At one point, Draco tensed as if he would shrug Harry’s touch off, but then he sighed and cuddled closer to him. Harry made sure that he kept his smile private.

*

“What do I have to do to get training from the War Wizards?”

He must have startled Portillo Lopez, although Draco had thought he’d made enough noise as he was coming into the office to warn her. Her hand slashed a black line of ink across the page she was writing, and she stared at it in deep offense for two minutes before turning around to face him. Draco swallowed but forged ahead. “I watched them training. They were magnificent. Why don’t we learn that? Can I?”

“I expected better of you, Mr. Malfoy.” Portillo Lopez lowered her quill to the table and tapped her fingers together. “To speak such questions in such a tone, as if you were a two-year-old asking what certain words meant.”

Draco flushed, but told himself the Battle Healer was manipulating him in exactly the way his mother had when he was a child, by commenting on a loss of dignity and expecting him to flinch before her.

The problem was, it was working.

Draco looked at the wall in a way that he hoped would mingle shame and a way to regain his composure, and asked in a neutral tone, “I’ll limit it to one question, then, the one I asked before. What do I have to do to get War Wizard training?”

“Leave the Auror program,” Portillo Lopez said, arching her eyebrows. “I must admit, after our attempts to keep you in the program, I find it ironic that you would depart of your own free will.”

Draco glared at her. “I won’t leave Harry behind.”

“Your loyalty is admirable,” said Portillo Lopez, so smoothly that Draco wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic or not. “However, the restrictions on combining Auror and War Wizard training are long-lasting, firm, and just. You will not persuade the Ministry to relax them simply because of your whim.”

“It’s not a whim,” Draco said. He knew it. Nothing in his Auror training had provoked such a settled awe and hunger in him as the display he had seen yesterday, not even his private training sessions with Dearborn. “I want to combine the two. Yes, I entered the Ministry as an Auror and I’ll stay here as one. But why can’t I learn some of the spells and techniques, even if I never use them the way the War Wizards do?”

“Because of what would happen if you did try to use them within the confines of Auror work,” Portillo Lopez said. “Are you that stupid, not to see what would happen if you attempted a combination?”

“Suppose you tell me.” Draco leaned against a table and did his best to look cool and nonchalant. His effort shook a bit when the table wobbled and he had to stand upright again and check on the welfare of some potions vials on the shelves.

Portillo Lopez’s lips twitched, but her eyes remained serious. “The demonstration that you saw yesterday occurred because we are on the brink of a war,” she said. “Imagine what would happen if you used such spells to attack fleeing criminals, to intimidate suspects that you wished to interrogate, or to investigate a disturbance, all the most regular parts of Auror work.”

Draco frowned. He could see the point she was trying to make: that they were too flashy, too dramatic, and, in a way, too much overkill. “But why can’t we learn the defensive spells and not the offensive?” he asked.

Portillo Lopez changed her tactics and gave him a withering stare. “Because none of the Ministry hierarchy are stupid enough to believe that you can separate one discipline from the other,” she snapped. “Why do you think we have a class called Offensive and Defensive Magic?”

Draco tapped his fingers against his arm. He still wanted to learn both Auror work and War Wizard arts. He wasn’t interested in fighting any more battles, but to know that he had that power at his command, even if all he ever did was show the very edges of it in dealing with ordinary criminals…

“It is a dream others have had,” Portillo Lopez continued in a milder tone. “But that does not mean they can be allowed to practice it.”

“Could I leave Auror training for as long as it takes me to become a War Wizard, and then come back?” Draco asked.

“And leave Trainee Potter?” Portillo Lopez leaned forwards and scrutinized him with lively interest. “I must say, you are less loyal than I thought you were. Pushkin may be pleased to hear it, because his observations have not entirely convinced him that your partnership will work out for long-term success.”

Draco scowled. He kept running up against that barrier. If he wasn’t interested in fighting another war, he could only imagine that Harry would be even less interested.

But the image of the spells he had seen in battle yesterday rose before his eyes again, and he licked his lips. There had to be a way to share in that—the power and the glory—and he was honest enough, with himself at least, to admit that it was the power of the spells that attracted him more than anything else.

“I should be able to,” he whispered.

“Perhaps you should,” Portillo Lopez agreed.

Draco looked up quickly.

“But you cannot,” Portillo Lopez finished, and turned back to her writing.

Draco let himself out of the office, eyes narrowed in thought. So the instructors would not be enough help, but he would find another way.

He had to. His soul had been marked by what he’d seen yesterday.

*

Nihil really did seem to have vanished from the Ministry.

No matter how anyone searched, no matter what they studied, they uncovered no clues that could prove he was still lurking about. Harry had asked about the documents they’d found in Auror Gregory’s rooms, and Portillo Lopez had admitted that most of them were false, involving the names of people who had never existed or trainees who were able to say under Veritaserum that no one had approached them. Ketchum had taught them all the incantation that would call up the life dragon, but he admitted that he didn’t know many more spells that would be useful. Hermione had promptly run off to the library to look some of them up.

Harry had thought that perhaps the other people Draco had recruited for the spy network would prove useful, but Margate continued to protest that he’d seen nothing. Pollian Kepler, whose sister Harry had talked to, seemed to think she’d paid her debt by bringing them the Veritaserum they’d used on Ron and Hermione. She never looked at them in any special way in Ketchum’s classes, and otherwise Harry didn’t think they ever saw her.

He tried to resist becoming absorbed in the normal routine of classes. After all, sooner or later Nihil would come back, and Harry didn’t want to be caught sitting when he did.

But the days passed, and nothing happened. April whirled away towards May, and the only significant change was that Draco got more and more obsessed with becoming a War Wizard and started spending more time looking up the regulations that separated them and the Aurors.

Well, and Harry had to admit, to himself at least, that he was probably in love with Draco.

It was a hard thing to say. What did he really know about being in love? He’d had a crush on Cho, and of course that hadn’t worked out. He’d thought he was in love with Ginny, and then it had all fallen apart. Harry wasn’t really afraid of how Draco would react when he told him; he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to hold up his end of the bargain. Or maybe the publicity that would come with dating the Boy-Who-Lived would be too much for Draco.

You can’t know that until you tell him and it happens.

Harry sighed and blew his fringe out of his eyes. They were in the middle of their room at the moment. Draco dozed on the bed—he’d been up most of the night trying valiantly to find a loophole that would let him at least get the basic War Wizard training—and Harry was supposed to be looking at the latest painting Pushkin had assigned them, coming up with two hundred facts about it.

Harry bit his lip and focused his gaze on Draco again. He would have to be careful that his list for Pushkin didn’t include any facts about Draco, he thought. That could easily happen, since Draco was the centerpiece of his mind these days.

The danger Draco had been in after the fist of white fire attacked him had clarified and sharpened Harry’s feelings at last. He knew what he wanted. He was sure about what he wanted.

But if it failed…

It’ll hurt so much more than it ever did with Ginny. And how could we go on being partners if we didn’t work out as lovers? I don’t want any other partner but him. I don’t see why he would want to stay around if we just had row after row, though, or if it turned out that I couldn’t protect him.

Harry rubbed his hand across his mouth. He was getting disgusted with himself. The best way to make things happen the way he wanted to would be to speak out and see what Draco said.

He just had to pick the perfect moment to do it.

Now wasn’t it, since he would have to wake Draco up and then Draco would be cranky. Harry convinced himself of that without much effort and bowed his head, fixing his eyes on the page in front of him.

*

Harry obviously had something he wanted to say to him.

Draco could tell it not only from the way that Harry kept opening his mouth and almost starting to speak, then shutting it again, but the coy glances he kept giving at Draco before he looked away. Harry wasn’t hard to read once you got used to him. His eyes and his mouth told the truth, and so did the way he played with his fringe, and rustled his papers more than usual, and took care to sit next to Draco in every class but then didn’t speak to him.

Draco wondered if it would be about the disastrous attempt to get Carbury to agree to be friends with him. He knew about that, thanks to an owl from Carbury. Draco had rolled his eyes at the time and dismissed the incident. Harry had done no lasting harm. Besides, at that point Draco had thought he was close to getting an interview with a War Wizard.

It had turned out that he wasn’t. Now Draco had to admit that he might never gain his desire, at least not by the official routes that he’d been using so far. He would have to retreat and think it over until a plan came to him.

Now he could think of other things than Nihil and training, he was beginning to notice Harry again.

While Draco waited for Harry to make up his mind and speak, he took pleasure in noticing the envious gazes that came his way—never from Granger and Weasley anymore, but from others. There were plenty of Auror trainees who would have been glad to be Harry’s friend, or more, his partner or lover. Harry never noticed.

Draco smirked back and made sure to touch Harry’s shoulder or neck or arm. That heated the glances with hatred, but Draco didn’t care. It was their own fault for lifting their eyes to a treasure too high for them to possess.

And the weeks went on, and there was no sign of Nihil, and Harry grew a little stronger, a little firmer, every day. He was moving closer and closer to a declaration of some kind.

Based on his behavior, Draco thought he knew what it would be. And, when he thought of that and what would come once it was said and how things would change and how he would have to face up to what had so far been only fantasies or nightmares dancing through his head…

For once in his life, he didn’t mind waiting.

*

Harry chose the first day of May to speak the words to Draco. It seemed appropriate, somehow.

He wished he had some kind of gift to give along with the words, but everything he could think of was stupid. Ginny would have liked flowers, but Draco was a boy. Sweets and cards of some sort were out for the same reasons. Maybe Draco would have liked potions equipment, but he had everything Harry had thought of, and Harry had some vague idea that that wasn’t romantic enough. Draco already had Politesse, and Harry knew he couldn’t afford other expensive gifts like that. He never could have afforded Politesse if he hadn’t been given away for free.

I think I know everything about Draco, but I can’t think of anything he’d like for a gift, Harry decided in frustration. So much for knowing him.

On and on his buzzing thoughts went, until he decided this was another delaying tactic to put off the moment of the words. He should just say them, and if Draco wanted a gift after that, maybe he could mention one and Harry could get it.

Their last class of the day was Observation, and for once, miracle of miracles, Pushkin didn’t keep Harry back to recite more useless facts about a stone or a leaf. They both got out at the same time, and Draco was talking, as usual, about ways that he could find an in with the War Wizards.

“Maybe they take extraordinarily talented people,” he said, striding down the corridor with a restless motion Harry had realized recently that he loved, like almost everything else about Draco. “We’re talented, aren’t we? The compatible magic, the way we fight, the way we survived against Nihil, the way we’ve managed not to go mad despite all the things we’ve been through—”

His expression was brilliant and keen, cutting like a hawk’s. Harry could have stared, mesmerized. Instead, he put out one hand and touched Draco’s shoulder, halting him.

Draco turned around, mouth open to deliver some sarcastic remark, and then paused. He seemed to have sensed the words behind Harry’s lips, his shaking hand. His mouth shaped other words entirely. “What is it?” he whispered.

“I love you.”

The universe didn’t crumble into flames after all when Harry said that. Draco didn’t fling himself away and sneer about how Harry hadn’t been able to say that and mean it to Ginny. Instead, his eyes fluttered, and he stood very still. Harry would have thought he was unaffected, except for the way his pulse beat madly in his throat.

“I really love you,” Harry said, his voice growing stronger. “I want to have sex with you. I want to stay with you. I want to be your friend. I want to be your partner. I want to be with you in as many ways as you can imagine, and some that we can invent together.”

Then Draco was drawing him closer, mouth clamping down on his, face hard with passion, and Harry didn’t have time to think about it any longer.

The wall was against his back, smooth and cool. Draco’s fingers slid along his skin, warm and urgent and stabbing into places along his ribs and under his shoulders that Harry didn’t even know he had. Their breath mingled between them in wild pants, and Harry found himself looping his arms around Draco’s neck without knowing how they’d got there.

They kissed, and moved closer together, and kissed again. Harry was beginning to feel faintly smug. Maybe my words were enough of a gift for him.

A flash of soundless light tore through the air. Harry pulled back from Draco, blinking. His first thought was that his excitement had made him lose control of his magic and it was lashing out around him.

Then he heard the alarms singing, and the students screaming, and he fell back close to Draco for another purpose, drawing his wand.

And then a voice, Portillo Lopez’s voice carried on some spell Harry didn’t know, spoke from every corner of the Ministry.

“Nihil has come. To arms, Aurors.”

Chapter Forty-Four.