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lomonaaerenChapter Fifteen.
Title: Ceremonies of Strife (16/50)
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 Sixteen—Changes
“Very good.” Weston’s voice was cool as she paced around them, watching them with critical eyes—eyes that were critical of things Draco thought hardly mattered, or didn’t exist, or at least weren’t clearly explained. He and Harry had managed to get through the training exercise with the row of dummies, not striking each other with a single spell. And still Lowell and Weston set the bar higher for them, and shook their heads when Harry or Draco fell a bit below their standards.
What standards are there for compatible magic, anyway? Draco thought as he mopped at his brow and stepped back to give Harry a perfunctory duelists’ bow. Every fighting pair is so different that there can’t be that many similarities between them.
“There is always room for improvement, of course,” Weston said. “But from the look of things, you have not been sleeping well.” Draco bit his tongue so that he wouldn’t say one cause of that was Lowell and Weston and their bloody early-morning-on-Saturday lessons. “Go away and rest. For your next lesson, we will expect you to have figured out the basics of the trick we used when we tossed our wands to each other.” She turned her back on them and walked to the door of the room, as if she were tired of watching them.
Lowell lingered, his eyes expertly studying every move they made. Harry finished stretching quickly and cast the charms that dried his sweat, then hurried away. Draco wasn’t surprised, though he would have enjoyed a bit more of his company. Harry had told him that he was having to write his essay for the Spell Lexicon class over again. Though they’d had only one meeting with Aran, where he’d spent most of the time talking about how honored they should feel to be his trainees, he seemed to expect better work out of them than he did of the other students.
Draco actually didn’t mind that. If Aran was demanding now, he had promised to repay the effort they put into their work soon.
“Trainee Malfoy.”
Draco glanced up, surprised. Lowell was gliding towards him as if he were a snake and Draco a timely-spotted bird. Draco took up his wand instinctively, then remembered that Lowell couldn’t want to duel him without his partner around.
Of course, maybe he was going to attack for other reasons. One never knew who might be corrupted or possessed by Nihil. Draco lowered his wand again, but kept a careful watch on the instructor.
Lowell’s face was grave, but he simply studied Draco for a time without saying anything. Draco glanced around just in case. Sure enough, Weston was gone. He felt a stab of worry he couldn’t explain. What was so grave that Lowell needed to explain it to Draco without his partner, as well as without Harry’s presence?
“We told you last week,” Lowell said, his voice calm and deep, “the barrier between you caused by lack of communication was mostly gone.”
Draco nodded, mystified. “Has it returned?”
Lowell shook his head. “There is part of it that has not dissipated, and it should have moved by now, as much time as you have spent together. Tell me, did you share your secrets equally? Auror Weston, who is more sensitive than I am to such things, thinks the barrier thickest on Trainee Potter’s side, and I am inclined to trust her perceptions.”
Draco paused. There had been so much happening since that day when he and Harry had finally spoken, and Harry had been so much more open and caring, that Draco hadn’t thought about it in detail.
But yes, the conversation had been focused on him. He had been the one to confess his love, his longing for power, his feelings against Mudbloods, and Harry had listened and reacted and encouraged him past those beliefs he obviously felt were barriers, but he had not really offered any confidences of his own.
“I think it should be,” Draco said. “We have shared things, and it seems right, but it’s true that he might be keeping secrets from me.” Exasperation built up in him like ice as he spoke. What was so horrible that Harry would think he had to keep it from Draco? Probably another of those sores of his past that his sensitivity exaggerated. He would think that some feelings he’d had years ago were too horrible to confess, or he would say something about Draco’s longing for power. Any and all of those were possible candidates. Draco sighed. “I’ll talk to him.”
“Do so.”
Lowell’s voice was so grave that Draco blinked and looked up at him. “Is something wrong, sir?”
“I think that this secret may be graver than you know.” Lowell gave him an inscrutable look. “If my partner’s talent with barriers extends to telling who creates them, my talent extends to telling how troublesome they are. The barrier was originally ordinary; it blocked your magic, and therefore it had to be dealt with. But now it has grown darker, for lack of a better word.” Lowell shook his head. “Someone should have invented the vocabulary for this already,” he murmured. “Unfortunately, compatible magic is little studied.” He refocused on Draco. “Yes, his secret is a dark one.”
Draco went his way with his nerves jangling like plucked wires. What in the world was Lowell talking about? Perhaps the Dark Arts, but Draco couldn’t imagine Harry using the Dark Arts for any reason. Nor was there any indication that Harry was changing in the way that most people who used the Dark Arts did: longing for power like Draco, talking only about that subject for hours at a time. If anything, Harry seemed unusually dedicated to his classwork and to taking care of Draco lately—
Draco paused.
Unless that’s part of a cover to keep me from suspecting something.
His hand closed into a fist. If Harry had been lying to him, and doing it well enough that Draco had not suspected anything wrong, that would hurt.
In the meantime, Draco had to watch.
*
Harry murmured the spell over again. It was a spell he had learned in one of the books he’d read last year while studying for Offensive and Defensive Magic, and it had taken him some time this year to best use it, because he’d had to substitute “necromancy” for “potions” in the original incantation. The Latin hadn’t been right at first, or so Harry had decided when the spell produced no result. Now he had it right, and it should show him any books on necromancy among Snape’s collection.
Draco’s books, now. Snape left them to him. You really shouldn’t be doing this. How would Draco feel if he knew?
Harry felt his face burn, but it was a sensation he experienced from a distance, like the guilty thought. He was more involved in watching to see if any of the books glowed.
Draco wouldn’t like it, yes. But Harry had decided that he would just have to do what he could to help the dead, and then make it up to the living later. He had more time to make it up to the living. Though Harry couldn’t explain why, the feeling of a deadline pressed on him when he thought about making it up to the dead. If a certain period passed, he believed he would never have another chance.
That could be true. Next year, when the training is even more intense, or later in this term, when Aran starts making us work harder…
Harry shivered, and watched.
A single book was glowing, one in black leather—of course—that Draco had stood up on a shelf between the bed and the bathroom. Harry walked slowly towards it, wondering if it was trapped, and then reminded himself that Draco would have sensed any traps and dissipated them before now. He didn’t want the books to shock or hurt Harry if he touched them while Draco was out of the room.
You can trust him, and he can’t trust you.
Like all the thoughts that Harry had had about Draco in the last few days, it was a thing to brood over, feel bad about—and ignore. Harry reached out and started to pick up the book. It had neither title nor author, he noticed.
Then he heard Draco’s footsteps in the corridor.
In a panic, Harry shoved back from the shelf, fell on the bed, and saw the book tilting to fall after him. He quickly whispered a Sticking Charm so it would stay up there. The last thing he needed was for Draco to walk in and find him with the book on his chest.
The door opened. Harry rolled over and tried to smile up at Draco sleepily, as though his coming had awoken Harry from a nap.
“I thought you would be in the library,” Draco said, turning around to shut the door with unusual slowness. Was he injured? Harry had thought he’d taken a heavier blow in the Combat class the other day than Morningstar really should have allowed without a healing spell. “Change your mind?”
“Yes,” Harry said. “I’ve been feeling more tired than usual lately for some reason.” He yawned elaborately. “Of course, waking up at seven for Lowell and Weston doesn’t help,” he added, with a grumble that he knew would sound realistic. Draco almost hadn’t hauled himself out of bed in time this morning.
“Oh.”
That was all Draco said, before he walked across the room, picked up a book from his own tottering stack, and sat down to read it. After a moment, he pulled out parchment and a quill from a different pile and moved over to the table in the center of the room, where he started taking notes on the book.
Harry blinked. The flat tone seemed to indicate something was wrong, but Draco hadn’t moved like he was injured when he bent down, and his face was closed-off. He could just be concentrating intently. Harry had learned not to disturb him when he did that.
Draco, what is it?
The sentence formed in his head so easily.
And still Harry couldn’t force it past his lips. In the end, he forced himself to start writing the essay that was due on Monday in the Spell Lexicon class instead. It was a struggle, because his thoughts wanted to fix on either Draco or the necromancy book, and he wouldn’t let them.
Draco would tell Harry what was wrong in his own time. Since they removed the barrier from their compatible magic, he had been more open, and had even confessed a few minor problems Harry would never have guessed at, so good was Draco at hiding his emotions. Harry just had to trust that the same thing would happen this time.
And he could always pick up the necromancy book some other time when Draco was gone.
*
“From what I have learned,” Pushkin said, “Nemo bred these beasts out of nothing, they came from nowhere, and nothing like them has ever existed.”
Draco looked around the table at the other members of the Fellowship. Good. He wasn’t the only one who looked as if he wanted to kill Pushkin.
“You must have learned something,” Ketchum said, apparently because he willed it to be true.
“And we know that it’s not true the beasts resembled nothing,” Granger said. “The one that attacked us in the corridor looked like a dragon. There were others that resembled lizards, or chimeras, or griffins. So he had to have used a mold of some kind for them, shouldn’t he? Even if he didn’t use normal animals?”
Despite himself, Draco had to admit Granger had a point. He smiled reluctantly at her, but she didn’t notice. All her attention was focused on Pushkin.
When Draco looked back at him, he realized something he should have remembered earlier: always observe the Observations instructor. Pushkin had something else to impart, if the way he smiled was any indication. His hands were folded together calmly on the table in front of him, but the thumb of one stroked swiftly across the back of the other. Draco had seen him do that on days when he was about to give exams.
He has something else to say. Draco settled back in his chair and waited for Pushkin to stop being stupid and smug and get on with things.
When Pushkin had had enough of silence, or perhaps had bored himself, he said, “The animals are formed from normal creatures after all, but they are disguised not to look like it. They have been through the process that Nihil and Nemo discovered which brings people back and beyond death. Death has been flushed through their veins, and that changed their nature enough that the ordinary spells I cast on the corpses could not recognize their parents. But now I know how to distinguish an animal touched by such a process from an ordinary experimental animal. I can isolate the nothing and turn it into something.”
Harry gave a little gasp next to Draco. Draco shot him a quick glance. That was the kind of gasp he would have expected of Granger, who instead sat in reverent silence, watching Pushkin with shining eyes; to be frank, Draco wasn’t sure that Harry would have understood Pushkin’s explanation. He barely understood it himself.
Harry locked his shaking hands together a moment later and gave Draco a small smile. Draco didn’t believe that smile, but Portillo Lopez was speaking now, voice high and quick, and he didn’t have the time to question Harry about it.
“You know how to identify that process?” she said. “Do you understand what it is? How to counter it?”
“Eventually, I will,” Pushkin said, peering at Portillo Lopez as if her excitement were a compliment to him. “For the moment, I can only identify an expanse of nothingness in the bodies of these particular beasts. Identifying it as a thing in and of itself in the bodies of humans is still far off.”
Portillo Lopez leaned back with her eyes shut and her hands folded over each other. Her lips moved in what might have been a prayer.
What’s her part in this? Draco wondered, and then decided that he didn’t care, at least for right now. He already had one person to watch and figure out. Portillo Lopez would be an unnecessary distraction.
“This, combined with the information about Caradoc Dearborn that Potter and Malfoy brought us, makes me hopeful.” Ketchum leaned forwards and nodded at all of them one by one, perhaps assuming that his notice was the only thing they lacked after such good news. Annoyingly, Draco felt a sunburst of satisfaction flare to life in his chest.
“But where do the unicorn ghosts that Trainees Potter and Malfoy reported fit in?” Hestia Jones tugged on one curl of her frizzy hair and looked from one to the other of them. She’s so stupid that she probably thinks someone has been able to discover the clue to that puzzle already, Draco thought scornfully.
“We don’t know yet,” said Ketchum. “But until phantom unicorns start attacking people, I won’t worry much about it. We have Nihil and Nemo and Nusquam on our minds instead. We need a battle plan.”
Pushkin began to object that they couldn’t do anything until he understood the process of traveling beyond death better; otherwise, their enemies would simply melt away from them and take new bodies, as he believed Nemo had done. Draco didn’t listen to that, or Ketchum’s spirited replies, or the interjections Granger occasionally made. Ordinarily, he would have been interested in a debate on theory, but he had to be practical for right now.
Weasley and Harry were having a soft-voiced argument. Draco pretended to wait breathlessly for Granger’s convoluted sentences, while in reality casting a charm with his wand under the table so that their voices became more distinct.
“You were supposed to meet us for dinner last night,” Weasley said. “Where were you?”
Draco arched his eyebrows. The dinner with his friends was the excuse Harry had fed him when Draco asked if he wanted to eat together last night. Harry had been apologetic and had managed to look the picture of realism when he admitted that it was terrible his friends still didn’t trust Draco.
A burning sensation like a firework invaded Draco’s gut.
I can’t trust him at all anymore.
“I got dizzy on the way to the eating hall,” Harry said. He ducked his head and stared at his hands. Draco wondered if Weasley knew him well enough to tell the signs of a lie. “I thought I might have a fever. I was going to find Portillo Lopez, but then I remembered the way she fussed last year.” He rolled his eyes. “So I returned to our rooms. And the dizziness left after a little while. Then Draco and I…” He let the words trail off and gave Weasley a significant look. Weasley promptly turned green.
“No need to say more, mate,” he said weakly. “I think I understand.”
I’m your shield against them, am I? Draco curled his fingers hard enough into the edge of the table that it jolted, and Ketchum and Granger looked at him. He didn’t care. Harry, what the fuck are you hiding?
“Is something wrong, Trainee Malfoy?” Ketchum had a look of concern on his face that Draco was sure was false.
“No, Auror,” said Draco, and smiled at Harry when Harry turned around to look at him. Harry smiled back and squeezed his hand under the table.
Two can play at the lying game, Harry. Two of us can speak wide-eyed little deceptions and pretend that we care about each other when we’re really pursuing our own ends.
“I’m glad you’re fine,” Harry whispered.
And I’m better at it than you are.
*
Harry laid his new book down on the floor next to him and studied the ritual one last time. Yes, it was amazingly simple—so simple that Harry was really surprised his first book on necromancy hadn’t included it. It didn’t require expensive props or an elaborate circle. Harry just had to be prepared to give up blood so that he could speak with one of the spirits he was trying to bring back to life.
What’s that, when I’ve spilled so much of it already?
He rested the knife—an ordinary knife, unlike the one he’d had to conjure for his last ritual—against his left palm and waited until his heartbeat calmed down. The book said that it would be best if he was relaxed before he made the cut, because panic would induce him to try and close the wound before he had all the blood he needed. The advice made sense to Harry.
Why can’t all our textbooks be that clear? Harry had spent hours struggling with the Spell Lexicon book and swearing at it for not including clear definitions of the terms it wanted him to use. He would definitely ask Aran about that at their next meeting.
He pressed the knife down, and the skin parted before the blade. Harry had to saw deep; this was a knife from the eating hall, meant to cut bread and not meat. But he had a respectable cut and a good amount of blood dripping before long. He began to walk in a circle, holding his hand out so the blood dripped as evenly as possible.
All the time it spread, he concentrated on the image of Sirius. He had called him up once before, or at least the vision of him, at Grimmauld Place, and he was probably the one Harry missed most. Harry had been most responsible for his death, after all, and so Sirius should really be the first one he brought back to life.
When he finished, the circle of blood was lopsided, but present. Harry smiled as he cast a Numbing Charm on the wound. The book had said that it was his will that really sealed the circle, not chalk or salt or even the blood itself. The dead would feel how much he was willing to give up to bring them back to the world and would draw near of their own accord.
He stepped back and closed his eyes, trying to picture the tunnel the book had talked about. To this author, the world of the dead wasn’t some vast and silent Sea that the spirits had to float out of. Instead, the worlds of the dead and the living were only separated by a thin barrier, but a necromancer had to envision a tunnel as projecting through that barrier, a hole of warm black air with light at one end and darkness at the other. That was the tunnel he would send his voice through to summon the listeners.
Not that I’m really a necromancer, Harry reassured himself as he began to call. Just that this is the best way to make up for the wrongs I did.
He thought hard of Sirius, of everything he knew about him: the place where his name had been burned from the Black family tapestry, how he’d been Sorted into Gryffindor, the way he’d looked in Snape’s Pensieve, the startled look on his face as he fell through the veil, the sharp way he hugged, his Animagus form. And slowly, a mist that he hadn’t tried to consciously picture seemed to rise from his body and reach out through the tunnel that he was trying to picture to the mind on the other end.
Sirius Black, Harry called, and then repeated it, feeling the name almost wrenched from him by the demands of the spell. More memories of Sirius were sleeting through his head now, memories that he thought he hadn’t tried to call, memories that weren’t his. Sirius Black! The world of the living requires you!
The air in Catherine Arrowshot’s old room turned so cold that, when Harry opened his eyes, his fingers had already gone blue. He shivered and wished he could cast a Warming Charm, but that might disrupt the delicate pattern of frost growing along the walls.
And the blue swirl slowly coming to life in the middle of the circle.
Harry caught his breath. Yes, this was different from the vision he’d seen in Grimmauld Place, and it was the real thing. The balance of magic changed in the room, and Harry felt a faint echo that might be Sirius’s magical signature. He smelled the scent of a wet dog, and saw the familiar face form on top of the blue swirl. Then his body shimmered and changed into Sirius.
Sirius stood there with his eyes closed. Harry wondered for a moment why he wasn’t breathing, and then remembered that he hadn’t called him back into a body yet, just here as a ghost. He didn’t need to breathe.
Moments passed, and Sirius didn’t look at him. But Harry was patient. The book had said that it might take a while for the spirit to make sense of the transition from the world of the dead to the world of the living.
The door blasted open.
Harry spun around, staring in spite of himself. Something—his sudden movement, the startled breath he took, his lack of concentration—made the balance waver, and when he looked up, the frost was melting from the walls and the spirit was melting in lazy spirals from the center of the circle.
Harry might have turned back and tried to summon Sirius again. He was already cursing the instincts that made him turn towards every source of noise because it could be dangerous.
He might have done that, except that he was staring at Draco in the doorway.
Draco’s eyes went to the circle of blood and the traces of cold on the walls, and then came back to Harry.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he breathed, and there was anger enough in his voice to make worlds break.
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Date: 2010-02-18 07:43 pm (UTC)