Chapter Ten of 'Ceremonies of Strife'- A Trembling in the Bones

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Nine.

Title: Ceremonies of Strife (10/50)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione, Lucius/Narcissa
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, Dark magic, angst, profanity, sex (slash and het), character deaths (not the main characters).
Summary: Sequel to Soldier’s Welcome. As Harry and Draco head in to their second year of Auror training, they are resolved to try and balance the relationship between them with their personal difficulties. That might be a bit harder than they think when the difficulties include necromancy, Azkaban escapees, unicorn ghosts, the risen dead, a secret order of assassins…and the second war, guided by Nihil.
Author’s Notes: This is the second part of what I’m calling the Running to Paradise Trilogy, focused on Harry and Draco’s Auror training. A reader on AFF called SP777 suggested the idea for this series to me. I’d advise you to read Soldier’s Welcome first before you try to read this one, as this story doesn’t spend a lot of time recapitulating the first one.

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Ten—A Trembling in the Bones

Harry sat up in bed, feeling as though someone had plucked a bowstring attached to his feet. He was gasping, and he bent down and rubbed absently at his feet before his mind caught up with his body.

The pinch had come from his side, from the area where Dearborn had told Draco he would feel it when Harry was in trouble.

Harry flung back the blankets and leaped to his feet. He would have bolted out the door of their rooms first thing, but there was the small matter of robes that he had to put on. He jerked and tugged, and cursed when one of his legs tangled in the robe and nearly sent him crashing to the ground.

After what seemed like far too long, the buttons were done enough that the robes wouldn’t fall off him, and Harry dashed to the door, snatching up his wand on the way. He could feel a stirring, and then Flash was flying after him, wings spread and neck extended and eyes so brilliant that Harry found it difficult to look at him.

Politesse was already waiting by the door, scratching and whining and swinging his scorpion tail so fast that Harry leaped to avoid it. He opened the door, and Politesse at once bounded into the corridor, small legs scrambling as he turned. Harry followed him. The pinch in his side would lead him to Draco, sure, but he thought Politesse was more likely to find a safe route.

Out in the corridors, he could hear people shouting and swearing, and a steady, hungry roar rising like the call of a hunting horn. The walls seemed to vibrate, and once the floors buckled. Harry, eyes on Politesse, had already jumped; Politesse had leaped in the air a moment before the wave that rippled the floor hit.

Harry had once heard that dogs and cats could sense earthquakes. It made sense that a magical dog could sense a magical change in the environment.

Flash suddenly settled on his shoulder, so heavily that Harry staggered and leaned to the side. He slid down next to the wall, struggling with the pressure of Flash’s claws, his turning head, his madly beating wings. “Geroff,” he muttered, pushing at the base of Flash’s tail, then squeezing it because he thought it might make him fly up.

Flash bared his teeth and didn’t respond. Instead, he growled, a rumble that went through one of Harry’s ears and came out the other.

Harry froze. Ahead of him, Politesse had paused with one foot in the air and his head thrust forwards, lips pulled back from his teeth and a tiny snarl working its way out of his throat. Harry lifted his wand and pointed it at the corner.

The thing that came around it walked softly; Harry would have had no chance of hearing it if he’d been running. It looked like a large bird at first, or so Harry thought, but it had no feathers. The brown-red skin was smooth, without hair either, and its wings were so short and stubby that there was no way it could have flown. It turned its head towards Harry, and parted its jaws. They were covered with teeth. It flipped its wings forwards, and Harry saw claws on the edges of them, and cutting membranes of skin. The large, chicken-like feet it worked on had long curving toenails, and Harry could imagine what would happen if they got caught in his belly or his chest all too well.

It lunged at him, moving so lightly that Harry wasn’t ready for it when it landed in front of him.

Luckily, Politesse and Flash had decided to take over at that point.

Politesse crouched in place as the beast stepped over him, then leaped up and seized the stubby, featherless tail. His jaws crunched down, and his tail curved over his head and lashed down to bury the stinger in the middle of the creature’s back.

The creature craned its neck sideways and tried to reach Politesse. All that happened was that it turned in place.

Then Flash hit it from the other side, digging his fangs and claws into the swan-like neck. The thing gave a faint, thin cry like a teakettle boiling without much steam.

By then, Harry was ready.

He stood up, and aimed his wand at the floor beneath the thing’s feet. For all he knew, it might be immune to magic. He thought it was one of Nemo’s beasts, and breeding in an immunity to spells was something he would do. “Ramenti!” he shouted.

The floor burst up in a wave of stone and chips of stone, and Harry hastily raised a shield in front of himself. Politesse was dodging, Flash looping in circles to avoid the worst of it. The beast was caught in the middle of it, lifted off its feet, and dashed against the ceiling and then against the far wall. Its neck broke, and it sagged in place, tail smashed beneath it, wings dangling in front of it.

Harry grinned briefly, then lifted his arm. Flash landed on his shoulder and coiled his tail firmly around Harry’s neck. He was chattering, his tongue lashing hungrily at the air, the spikes around his neck bristling out in a stiff mane. Harry stroked his tail once and nodded his thanks to Politesse before following the tug towards Draco again.

*

“Where’s Harry?”

“Still in bed, for all I know!” Draco pressed his back against Granger’s and flicked out a few testing spells towards the tiny, purple, bat-like creatures flying beneath the ceiling. He utterly failed to affect them, as he had expected. The creatures themselves weren’t much of a problem; they could make people duck and be annoyed, but they couldn’t score your cheeks or rip your eyes out.

It was their delaying tactics that worried Draco. Almost certainly, the creatures were working to hold them here so that something worse could find them.

He had run into Granger not long after that initial roar. She had also been out of bed and on her way to the library, no surprise, and she had told him that she thought it must be Nemo and the beasts he bred attacking the Ministry. Draco had agreed with her, but he hadn’t cared much. He wanted to get back to Harry and make sure that he was all right, not stand around and theorize about enemies who would show themselves soon enough.

Now, though, they had no choice. They had already driven off a creature that looked like a white lion with a necklace of human heads around its throat, and there were the bats, and there was worse to come. Draco checked that Granger was standing steadily behind him, so that their enemies would find it hard to come between them, and then turned his head to the corner. For the last two minutes, he had thought something was lurking around it.

Yes.

It stepped out now.

Draco found his eyes aching as he tried to focus on it. It was a sharp, silvery, metallic color, its sides swimming with shades and images that didn’t actually originate in its hide. Draco thought that it was mirror-like, and the glimpses he could catch of his own face in it were among the things it was reflecting.

Which didn’t make it any easier to tell what it was.

Dragon-shaped, Draco decided at last, seeing the long neck, the parted jaws, the flickering forked tongue. The body, though, was heavier and squat, a horse’s or perhaps a pig’s, and the tail had a triangle of flesh at the end that Draco watched warily. The triangle was red, and easier to focus on than the constantly changing hide.

“What is it meant to do?” Granger breathed behind him. Draco rolled his eyes. Naturally, she would want to know something like that when we should concentrate on staying alive.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But since it’s like a dragon, maybe it breathes—”

The creature pulled back its head and released a breath of air across them. Draco found himself raising the Shield Charm instinctively, though he had been wrong and no fire came with the blast of air.

Something worse did.

It was cold. The cold crept into Draco’s hands, and he watched the skin whiten and turn wrinkled and than a repulsive-looking purple like the color of the creatures who had delayed them for this one. He felt his eyelids droop and become encrusted with ice. His breath froze in his lungs. His body shuddered once and then stood still.

It would have been painful, but it seemed as though cold consumed the thoughts in his head, too. They slowed and grew grinding, like the crystal gears of a broken clock. Draco swayed in place, and he thought he would shatter if he fell, but the matter didn’t seem urgent. There were people who shattered when they fell, and others who didn’t, and that was the way it was.

“Malfoy!”

Something was shaking him, but Draco couldn’t feel the shaking as much more than clumsy vibrations that worked their way slowly through his body. His shoulder couldn’t feel the hand. Or was the hand on his shoulder? Perhaps it was the top of his head, or his foot, or his leg, or his arm, where that hand rested.

“Malfoy!”

Another yell, but the word was dim and distant. He didn’t know where it was coming from. He didn’t know what it applied to. And he didn’t feel cold anymore. That was a great improvement, wasn’t it? He could feel the slumber slowly washing over him, and he might have welcomed it with open arms if he could have.

Then something hit him and woke him up.

Draco opened his eyes with a gasp as tingling pain flooded his arms and his hands. He stared, blinking, at the spectacle in front of him, though it took long moments for his eyes to unstick and his thoughts to unfreeze and make sense of it.

Harry was dueling with the dragon-thing in the middle of the corridor, his eyes half-shut. That was probably to keep away the dazzle of its mirrored hide, Draco thought absently. The waving red fin at the end of the tail arched and curved and stabbed at Harry, but he was always where it wasn’t.

Fire covered the air between him and the dragon, and the dragon flinched every time the flames brushed it.

Around its head flew a humming blue-green-gold projectile that Draco knew must be Flash. And a growling shape orbited its feet, the right size and shape to be Politesse. Draco would have thought that the dog would be protecting him, but perhaps Politesse had assumed that he was safe for now and his first duty was destroying the thing that had hurt Draco.

“Are you all right, Malfoy?” Granger whispered from behind him.

Draco cleared his throat. It was full of ice, but that melted, if slowly, and he could move his tongue. “What—what’s happening?”

“Harry cast a spell that hit the dragon from behind,” Granger whispered back. Her voice sounded dazed, at least, so Draco wasn’t the only one in the corridor who was surprised by this turn of events. “And then I was able to wake you up by melting the ice instead of trying to defend us both from another blast of that cold air.” Her voice altered to something very like the scold that Draco’s mother might have given him in the same situation. “What in the world were you doing, getting in front of me like that? Don’t you think I know how to protect myself against something dangerous?”

Draco turned his head to stare at her, as fascinating as the battle was. “I wasn’t protecting you!” he complained. “I happened to be in the way when the dragon breathed out, that’s all!”

Granger eyed him skeptically, and shook her head. “I’m used to people who think I can’t do things as well as they can,” she said. “Ron and Harry tended to use me for homework help in school.” Bitterness curdled in her voice for a moment, and then was gone. “They know I can cast useful spells. But they think I can’t fly and I can’t fight. You’re starting to do the same thing.”

Because trying to argue with something so absurd would only make him more absurd, Draco shut his mouth and turned back to watching the battle. His focus should have stayed there in the first place, but Granger had a talent for drawing people into the fall after her.

Harry’s fire, or perhaps the bites that Flash and Politesse had kept delivering, had worn down the dragon-thing’s defenses. It drooped, its skin seeming to flow into the walls and floor around it. The red fin of flesh at the end of its tail flapped once, and then fell still.

And then it was gone, reduced to nothing but a tiny, sad puddle of meltwater on the floor. Harry blinked and stared at it, then shook his head and seemed to decide that battling it had wasted enough of his time. He turned around and hurried over to Draco.

“Are you all right?” he asked, reaching a hand out to stroke his cheek. Then he changed his mind and flung his arms around Draco instead.

Draco leaned against him instead of replying. The cold lingered in his bones despite Granger’s spell. He could easily have died, and that would have meant leaving Harry behind. He was beginning to realize just how much he didn’t want to do that—not for the sake of the War Wizards, not for the sake of power or specialized magic, not for anything.

“He’ll live,” Granger said in a dark voice. “As long as he doesn’t take up the habit that you and Ron have sometimes of thinking I can’t do anything on my own.”

Draco could feel Harry giving him an inquiring glance. He chose to roll his eyes and not respond, simply burrowing further into the warmth that Harry represented.

“What have you seen?” Granger asked then, brisk, and Draco was glad that she had taken over the task of asking questions.

“Not much,” Harry said. Draco felt his hair rustle against his cheek as Harry shook his head. “Most of the people I met along the way were taking shelter in their rooms. I saw a few holes in the walls where some of the beasts must have come through, and I’ve killed a few.” He said that so casually, as if it was something he accomplished every day. Draco must have made some small sound, because Harry stroked the back of his neck absently. “A few people were fighting, but most of the beasts died without much effort. If Nemo and Nihil are attacking the Ministry again, I can’t see what the purpose is.”

“What if it’s to see whether they can get through the wards?” Granger asked. “That would make sense.”

“But then the Ministry will strengthen the wards again,” Harry said. “So that’s a useless thing to learn about the present wards.”

Granger fell silent, and Draco wished he could turn around and see the expression on her face. But Harry’s warmth was essential to him right now, both because he wanted it and because it seemed to coax the frozen thoughts packed in his head to move.

“What if they wanted to leave something behind?” he muttered. “That fits with the pattern they’ve established so far. They leave infections in the magical cores of anyone they can. They sent those false Death Eaters infected with grief magic and left them in Ministry custody so that they could spread the grief magic further. Probably,” he added. That was a theory of Ketchum’s, and Draco didn’t believe it completely. “What if they want to leave something behind this time?”

Harry’s arms tightened convulsively around him, and Granger gasped. “Of course that’s it,” she said. “And now I wish we’d paid more attention to where they were going and where the attack seemed to be aiming.”

Harry ignored Granger’s fretting, which Draco thought was wise, and stepped back, touching Draco on the shoulder and looking him in the eye. “Are you ready to fight?” he asked.

Draco took a deep breath and nodded. More than the cold itself, it was the way it had affected him that had undermined his confidence. He had stood there, and he would have let the dragon have him if Harry and their pets hadn’t come along. He hadn’t been able to move, defend himself, or make decisions.

He had been powerless.

I hate that feeling so much, he thought, as he bent down and scooped up Politesse, who was wagging his tail and dancing in circles in an attempt to get Draco’s notice. Politesse promptly climbed onto his shoulder and crouched there. Draco wasn’t sure, but he thought he felt a soothing warmth begin to flow from Politesse’s paws that washed away some of the cold cramps that remained in his muscles. Is it any wonder that I’ll do almost anything for power?

Except betray Harry or leave him behind.

Draco found his gaze focusing on Harry as they started trotting along the corridors, looking for the beasts’ original point of entrance. By now, most of the trainees had gone to ground, and they no longer saw new creatures roaming the corridors. Distant cries and roars told Draco that the Aurors had probably corralled the beasts in a single area and were destroying them one by one.

Harry walked through it all like he was unafraid, though Draco’s suggestion might have grotesque consequences. He looked at the walls and nodded and answered questions and asked them when Granger offered her own opinions. He scratched under Flash’s chin, and reached back every few minutes to brush a hand over Draco’s shoulder. Maybe that was for his own benefit, too, but it had the effect of reassuring Draco that Harry was with him and wouldn’t let anything happen to him.

I need him.

It was something Draco had said to himself before, but this felt like the first time he had believed it.

*

“We don’t know that’s the first hole they came through,” Hermione said behind him, almost in a whinging tone.

“Hush,” Harry said absently, and bent down to examine the sides of the hole more thoroughly. He knew Hermione was upset partially because she didn’t have Ron with her and didn’t know where he was. He was probably safe in his rooms or with the Aurors, but Harry could understand her concern. He had run through the corridors until he was united with Draco, after all.

But now he had Draco back, and Flash riding his shoulder with his head turning back and forth as if he were just waiting for another threat to attack Harry, and an interesting theory to explore. He would go with Hermione to search for Ron if she asked him, of course, but she hadn’t asked so far. And there was no reason that they couldn’t look at the holes in the walls along the way.

Harry couldn’t have said why he was so sure they would find some answer there. But the holes did look strange. They had partially melted at the edges, but so far they hadn’t encountered any of the beasts who breathed fire. And the way they were positioned, it seemed as though the creatures had come into the trainee barracks from further inside the Ministry, rather than from the outside.

There has to be a reason they entered this way, and there has to be a reason that the holes look melted even though we can’t feel heat coming from them.

“Did you find anything?” Draco breathed, leaning over his shoulder so that he could peer at the edges of the hole.

Harry reached back to grip his hand and reassure himself that Draco still existed, then shook his head. “This one looks the same as all the others,” he said, and started to straighten.

Something reached through the hole and grabbed him.

Harry hissed in shock and swung his wand around before he thought it, incanting a Severing Charm. It bounced off the thick tentacle that had encircled his leg. Harry had time to see that the tentacle was a swirling purple with a green background before it yanked him straight through the hole.

Hermione and Draco cried out from behind him. Harry tried to respond, but another tentacle wrapped around his head, and then he was involved in trying not to have his face ripped off.

If he couldn’t attack them directly, then he would attack what was around them. He aimed in a direction that he hoped would lead to the floor under his feet or the walls, and shouted a Blasting Curse.

Something broke, and someone uttered several words that Harry didn’t understand, though they sounded like swearing in another language. The tentacle around his face released him. Harry hopped back to his feet and tried to bolt away, but one of the tentacles was still wrapped around his legs, and he fell.

He was in the smashed wreckage of a room that had probably been part of the trainee barracks originally. Harry wasn’t sure how far he had traveled, but he could no longer see the hole he’d come through, and this room was full of slightly waving tentacles and the bits of stone that his spell might have caused to fall.

Then a wizard stepped around the tentacles and confronted him.

Harry had never seen this face before, but he thought it must be Nemo. At the moment, he wore the form of a tall, powerfully-built, dark-haired man, with doubtful grey eyes that considered Harry as if he was a potion gone wrong.

“I don’t know why he wants you,” he mused. “It’s not as though the resources inside you couldn’t be found in others. I reckon he’s more interested in your body, and the form you’ll wear after your transformation.” He turned his back, staring into the writhing mass of tentacles as if he was silently communing with it.

Harry hesitated. Nemo was acting awfully unconcerned for someone in the same room with Harry; he hadn’t even drawn his wand. Perhaps that meant something horrible would happen the moment Harry tried a spell.

There was a noise like hot water sizzling, and Flash struck from above, driving all twenty claws into Nemo’s neck where it joined his shoulder.

Nemo fell, screaming, and the tentacle let go of Harry’s leg and lashed about randomly. Maybe the creature didn’t know what it was doing without commands, Harry thought, heart pounding as he scrambled up. He aimed his wand at Nemo’s feet and spoke the charm that Roger Aran had taught them the other day in his calmest, clearest voice. “Scaurus!”

Nemo cried out again as his ankles swelled up to large, puffy cartoons of themselves, and then the spell swept over his legs, effectively disabling him. Harry used a Stunner on him before he could recover, and Nemo fell with his mouth gaping.

The tentacles went quiet immediately.

Harry held out his arm and said, “Come to me, Flash.”

Flash eyed him sideways, stared at the quiet and bleeding body he still had his claws embedded in, and then pulled them out and flew to Harry’s shoulder. He rubbed his head against Harry’s chin, then began to delicately lick his claws. Harry shook his head and cast the Patronus that would summon help.

Then he sat down, wrapped his arms around his legs, and studied Nemo in silence for a long time, until Draco was beside him with his arms around him and Hermione was whispering in his ear and he could make himself realize he'd just captured one of their major enemies.