Chapter Seventeen of 'Ceremonies of Strife'- A Storm

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Sixteen.


Title: Ceremonies of Strife (17/50)
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 Seventeen—A Storm

Draco didn’t know exactly what Harry had been doing, but thanks to the chill in the air and the circle of blood on the floor, he could guess. There were several kinds of Dark Arts that required blood. They didn’t bring cold into the room with them, though. It was a rare kind of Dark magic that would. Most of them conveyed warmth, as though the wizards who had designed the spells didn’t want to scare off too many potential victims too soon.

This was necromancy.

How could he.

The thought fell dead in his mind, not even a question. Draco stared at Harry, at the book open on the floor beside him, which he thought he recognized as a book from his own library, and could say nothing more.

His expression must have been enough. Harry began to shift, casting glances at the circle and the melting frost on the walls as though he wished he could clean it up, and erase what had been happening by erasing the evidence.

Nothing can change this, Draco thought, beginning to move slowly forwards. He didn’t know exactly what would happen when he reached Harry, but he knew that the force of his own conviction was drawing him steadily on. He could no more have disobeyed the urge than he could have closed the door and left Harry to his bloody rituals. Nothing can destroy this, or make this not have happened, or make it any better.

His breath was beginning to pass more rapidly in and out of his lungs, and his hands were clenching into fists.

“Look, Draco,” Harry said, and Draco thought his voice was nervous, if nothing else. Good, Draco thought, prowling closer to him. It should be at least that. “This isn’t what you might think it is.”

So it’s going to be more lies.

The fire that sprang to life within him then—bursting through him, searing his veins from the inside out, charring his hope—decided Draco on his course of action, too. He reached up, grabbed Harry by the shoulders, and began to shake him so hard that his teeth rattled together and his lips flapped.

Harry uttered a garbled protest and grabbed Draco’s wrists as though he was going to wrench his hands away. But Draco was talking now, and Harry had better listen if he knew what was good for him.

“I trusted you. I told you the truth. I let you know what was happening in my life when it would have been so much easier to keep it all to myself.” Draco was gasping and panting through the words now, but that didn’t matter, because Harry was giving him the sort of transfixed expression that told Draco he was taking in every word. “I gave you everything. And you kept this from me, and all the time you were in league with Nihil.”

Harry closed his fingers down on Draco’s wrists in a gesture that seemed to be pure shock. “I’m not in league with Nihil,” he snapped, and he had the gall to look hurt and angry. “I’m using necromancy because—”

He stopped. Draco knew why. The admission was out between them now, hanging in the air, and there was no way that Harry could ever take it back.

Draco squeezed his shoulders once more and then tore his hands away and began to move around Harry, his breath rasping. Harry turned with him, eyes large and wary and still angry, as though that emotion had a right to belong to anyone in this room but Draco.

“Necromancy,” Draco said. “Why? Just tell me that. Why?”

“Because there are so many people who are dead,” Harry said, and from the passion in his voice, Draco thought he’d probably been wanting to talk about this for a long time but had been denying himself. Not that I care, Draco decided viciously. If he’d talked about this to me the moment he had the stupid idea, then we could have avoided every bit of this. “They died in the war or they died before that. And they had so little time, or they had so little time when they weren’t being hunted and persecuted. My godfather, Sirius Black. I’ve told you about him. He suffered so much, Draco, and then he died because he was coming to rescue me, because I’d done something stupid—”

“And the way you thought you’d repay him for his sacrifice was by doing something else stupid?” Draco had to stop and stare at Harry; there was just no other action that would adequately convey when he was feeling. “You don’t learn, do you?”

Harry flushed. “It wasn’t stupid,” he said. “Not as long as I had the right rituals and did the right things.”

“Which didn’t include telling me,” Draco said. The squeezing ball of hurt in the center of his chest tried to spill out his mouth then, and he wanted to tell Harry how much this had injured him, how at the moment he thought he would never trust anyone again. But he forced that hurt back. Harry would strike at him where he was vulnerable and try to force Draco to agree that his actions were rational if he thought Draco was weak and in pain. Far better to show the anger only.

“If I’d told you, you would have stopped me,” Harry flung back.

“And that didn’t tell you something right there?” Draco snapped his teeth on the last word, the closest he could come to his dreadful desire to bite Harry and force the point on him through blood and torn skin. “Something I disapproved of that strongly, some secret you couldn’t share with me or your friends, was going to be something good?”

“You’ve always said I shouldn’t take too much on myself,” Harry said, and his new form of gall was to stand up straight and looked proud and noble and innocent. “I thought you’d say that this was another form of that, instead of just atonement I really wanted to do.”

“It is another form of that,” Draco said. He would have liked to seize Harry by the shoulders again, but this time he thought he would go far enough to hurt him, and he didn’t want to do that—if he didn’t have to. Maybe it will come to that, because Harry doesn’t seem to understand any other way. “Don’t you see? Who brings the dead back to life? Who feels so much guilt that they would have to do that, and who feels that the deaths of others are their fault?”

“Everyone feels like that,” Harry said. He looked puzzled, confused, and hurt. “Don’t you? Wouldn’t you give a lot if you could bring Snape back to life somehow, because the way he died wasn’t fair?”

“You’re an idiot,” Draco said, and he hissed the words because he wanted so much to scream them. “I’m sorry he died, but I’m not going to use Dark magic to bring him back to life. Why would I do that? It would be a betrayal of his sacrifice. He was the one who killed Dumbledore so that I wouldn’t have to, so that I wouldn’t have to hurt my soul by using Dark magic.”

Harry blinked at him. “But you ended up using it anyway, when you used Cruciatus to torture people for Voldemort.”

Draco clamped his hands onto his arms. He was sorry now that he had ever told Harry that. There wasn’t any secret he had given up that Harry wouldn’t turn against him, he thought, no way that Harry would ever not try to hurt him. That hurt almost more than the fact of Harry lying in the first place.

“It’s not the same thing,” he finally said. “And you’re trying to make it be, which only shows how far you’ll go to protect your dirty little secret.” Shame and sorrow burned away in anger, and he leaned forwards. “Did it ever occur to you what would happen, if I found this out? Did you think that you were sacrificing my trust? Or was bringing back the dead all that mattered?”

The question he couldn’t ask stung the back of his throat like bile. Did you really love me? Or were you making it up, humoring me, first because you were sorry that I didn’t have any friends and then because you wanted to use any books I had on necromancy?

Harry shook his head. His eyes were faintly dazed, as though someone had hit him and he was trying to recover from the blow. Draco would have liked to think that his own questions were the blow, but he doubted it. If he was that powerful, then Harry would never have turned to necromancy in the first place, because he would have feared losing Draco’s approval more than he evidently did. “That’s not—look, Draco, I knew that what I was doing would hurt the living. But I was going to make it up to you, I swear. But I had to make it up to the dead, too. It was my fault they died.”

“You’re not listening to yourself,” Draco said, his voice flat and calm, and he didn’t know—although he wished he did—whether he was speaking the truth or simply a desire. “You can’t be listening to yourself. Or you would know what you were saying was insane.”

Harry shook his head, a faint, melancholy smile on his face. “Don’t you see? That’s the kind of thing that people want to believe. Because so few people ever think that they have a chance to make it up to the dead. Death is supposed to be the ending of pain and the forgiveness of debts. But if you had the ability to make up for your mistakes, then you would have to do it. People don’t want to make the effort. They lie and they forget about necromancy, and they tell themselves so many comforting little lies that eventually everyone in the world accepts them as truth. Except the people whose guilt is stronger than their faith in the lies.”

Draco’s fingernails dug into the centers of his palms. It was an odd sensation, distant, as though his fingers had done it of their own free will. He had to work hard to free his tongue from the dry, dusty vault it seemed to occupy, the vault that had formerly been his mouth. “Well. It’s nice to know that you think I’m lying all the time, and that you’ve managed to turn things around so that you’re the innocent and determined one who wants to make up for his mistakes and I’m part of the problem.”

Harry stirred uneasily again. “Draco,” he said. “I didn’t want to lie to you. I just had to.”

Draco’s temper burst the bounds that he’d been trying to impose on it, and he sprang at Harry across the distance that separated them. He knew, dimly, as he went, that he’d lost any chance of having a reasonable discussion with Harry.

On the other hand, it was starting to look as though Harry was beyond any kind of reasonable discussion, so Draco might as well hit him as hard as he could and find relief for one kind of pain, the intolerable, boiling tension building up in him.

He hit Harry in the chest first, so that Harry wheezed and bent over. He hadn’t been expecting it, Draco thought, his mind whirling and spinning and spitting sparks as though it were a top that was frying the track it spun on. Even with all the words that Draco had said to him, he still hadn’t thought it worthwhile to raise his defenses, because he had thought he could persuade Draco around to his point-of-view.

The second time, Draco hit Harry in the face, the jaw, a punch that Morningstar had been trying to get him to put all his force behind for months. She would be proud of him, Draco thought madly as he heard something in Harry’s jaw pop.

Harry fell to the floor and rolled, and Draco wondered if he should be concerned. But the concern was a long way behind the constant thump of anger and fear and frustration in the forefront of his mind, so he just stepped forwards again.

Harry raised himself on his elbow. He had his wand out, and he pointed it at Draco with a hand that shook.

“I’ll cast at you,” he gasped. “I swear I will.”

Draco stood still, but he sneered and said, “And have you forgotten that the compatible magic won’t let us hurt each other? You’re pathetic. You pretend to be so strong, but you can’t even fight me. You have to use your wand instead, which I wasn’t using because it wouldn’t work and because I wanted to keep this fight on a minor level.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Harry said.

“Then you’ve done everything exactly wrong,” Draco said flatly. He didn’t know that he could get through to Harry now, so he would just say everything that came into his head. It would relieve his feelings, and that was the only thing he cared about right now. “You’ve lied to me, you’ve broken my trust, you’ve made me believe that I was stupid to say I loved you in the first place, and probably stupid ever to love you. How do I know that you weren’t lying from the beginning? You probably were. You have such a misplaced sense of what you’re responsible for, you probably saw people treating me poorly and decided that you would help me out just because you were sorry for me. And maybe you wanted me to look up at you with big grateful eyes and worship you like people did in school, too.”

Harry’s voice cracked. Draco saw the devastation on his face, and rejoiced. This was getting through to him in a way that Draco’s previous words hadn’t. “I didn’t—I never felt that way. I never enjoyed the attention.”

“I notice you’re not denying the other accusations.” Draco would still have liked to hit Harry—the bruise flaring along his jaw was huge, but not big enough—but he hadn’t forgotten how to cut someone down with words. “You don’t care about me, do you? Not the way you care about your precious dead.”

“No, I do, I do!” Harry said. His free hand scrabbled uselessly at the floor. Draco wondered what he was looking for, and then told himself he didn’t care. Nothing mattered about Harry anymore except the way he had tried to hurt Draco. “I meant it when I said I loved you. I do! I want to help you. I want to be with you. I’m sorry I hurt you.”

Draco waited a moment, then cupped a hand around his ear. “What’s that?” he asked brightly. “More lies? Why, yes, I believe so!”

Harry stared at him with eyes that were overly bright, though Draco wasn’t sure whether he was about to shed tears. He wasn’t sure of anything, he told himself brutally. All those little secrets he’d thought he’d discovered about Harry, whether he’d been told them or learned them on his own—they were worthless. How did he know what was true? If Harry could keep a secret of this magnitude from him, he could keep anything.

“I’m not lying,” Harry whispered.

“But how do I know that?” Draco countered swiftly, and watched with satisfaction as hot as lava while Harry paled. “Nothing you say can be trusted. You were just spouting the most ridiculous shite as if you believed it. You always want to save people. You were going to bring back the dead because making up for your mistakes and preserving your precious reputation as the Savior of Everything is more important than not practicing Dark magic. Fuck, Harry! Why am I supposed to believe you now?”

Harry blinked again and again. He couldn’t be blinking against tears, Draco thought—not genuine tears. They would only be tears of self-pity, if anything, because he had been stopped from doing something else that would make him seem like a hero.

“I never meant to hurt you,” Harry breathed, and this time he didn’t seem to think that Draco would believe him if he said it. It sounded like the last gasp of a broken machine.

Draco ran a shaking hand through his hair. The problem with expressing your anger, he found, was that once it was gone, it left you nothing to support you.

Except weariness. And disgust. And a sadness that made him want to curl up and weep, except that he would be weak if he did that, and he needed to despise Harry rather than himself.

“I’m not going to be your partner anymore,” he said.

More blinking. Harry really didn’t seem to know what was going on, and that disappointed Draco, because he wanted the git to know, and suffer. But he spoke the words anyway, in the hope that they would linger in Harry’s mind and make their impact later.

“I don’t want to fight next to someone who lies to me and can’t even be honest about his own impulses towards Dark magic,” Draco said. He started for the door, then paused and Summoned the necromancy book. He wasn’t going to leave that with Harry. In fact, he would search their rooms, because he thought it would be a long time before Harry dared to show his face there, and find any other books that he might have hidden. He’d destroy or hide them. Maybe he should give them to the Fellowship. There was a faint chance that they might help them understand what Nihil was doing.

Harry’s doing what Nihil did.

The thought made Draco feel faint and sick, and fuck, this was the kind of accusation he would never have believed if he hadn’t seen Harry in the middle of a ritual for himself.

“Draco.”

He probably shouldn’t have turned around. After all, he’d heard the kind of weak justifications that Harry tended to serve up when he believed himself in the right. But because he was a fool, he turned around and reluctantly looked at Harry, muscles braced tight against another disappointment.

Harry held out a hand towards him. Draco’s heart wrenched, but then he thought about the way Harry had betrayed him and how even this gesture might just be another way that he would use to go on practicing necromancy, and his heart froze instead.

“I didn’t mean to do this,” Harry whispered.

Draco jerked his head at the circle of blood, powerless now but not completely dry, never taking his eyes off Harry. “This looks pretty bloody deliberate to me.”

“I meant—” Harry shut his eyes. “I never meant to hurt you. That was the only thing I was talking about.”

Draco took a deep breath. He almost asked Harry if he meant to give necromancy up now, meant to stop.

But the words froze like his heart, because he had just remembered that he couldn’t trust the answer even if Harry gave one.

He turned around and left without waiting for a response.

*

You’ve fucked up now, and Draco’s left you for good.

Harry didn’t remember when he’d put his head into his hands. It seemed like forever. His face felt a little better if he hid it.

He wished he could do the same thing for the rest of his body, but it was no good. His chest felt hollow with its heart gone, and his arms were chilled and shaking. Even his hands felt cold where his cheeks and forehead rested against them.

How could I have done that?

He honestly hadn’t realized how much his necromancy would hurt Draco. He’d kept it secret because he knew Draco would accuse him of wanting to make up for too much, which he had, and he would be upset that Harry was doing Dark magic. And he knew that Draco wouldn’t understand his intense need to rescue the dead no matter how much he explained it. He’d thought that Draco might even resent the time Harry was spending on the rituals, rather than with him.

But he hadn’t realized he was destroying Draco’s trust.

I can’t even tell him that, because he doesn’t believe a word I say.

Harry shivered and finally dragged himself back up again. He looked at the circle of blood, and he still did wish he could see Sirius spinning to life in the middle of it. Because he knew necromancy was wrong, and he knew he had disappointed Draco, maybe alienated him forever, and he knew that he never should have kept this a secret, but spoken about it with Draco in the first place.

But one thing no one could tell him. Even taking his necromancy book away just made it a harder question to answer.

How in the world was he supposed to make up for his mistakes to the dead now?

There didn’t seem to be a way. They would just remain in the darkness, forever unavenged, forever without bodies or justice.

Harry took a step away. He was still shivering. He put his hand to his head and frowned. There seemed to be a heaviness in the back of it that was strange, as though he’d opened the top of his skull and packed his brain with rocks. And he couldn’t hear well. The silence around him was punctuated by the sounds. They tore through it like knives tearing through heavy canvas.

Then the memory seized him.

He was lying in bed the night after he destroyed Dumbledore’s office, the night after Sirius died, his eyes wide and tearless and staring up at the ceiling. The broken mirror rested on the table beside him. He’d had it all along. He could have communicated with Sirius and asked him if he was all right. He could have escaped the consequences of being responsible for Sirius’s death. Sirius might still be grumbling in Grimmauld Place how no one ever let him do anything.

Grief tore into him, its claws longer than he remembered, and anger, and hatred—he was going to make Bellatrix pay—and pain. And he still couldn’t cry. And soon he would be going back to the Dursleys’, where he could never cry.

The pain was as real and as present as though he was living it over again. Harry shook, his heart laboring in his chest, his mind grey and dizzy with tears.

When he opened his eyes again, the ceiling looked as strange as the silence had felt before. He lay there, licking his lips, coming to terms with what this meant.

He’d had a fit—his first in over a year.

Harry lay still and let the memory leave him, and thought of the way he and Draco had searched through the library of Malfoy Manor and hadn’t been able to find a cause for those fits. Draco had believed it must have something to do with his magical core. Still, no information they found seemed a whole explanation, and the intriguing partial explanations that were almost like the fits didn’t lead anywhere.

Harry braced a hand on the floor beneath him and levered himself slowly back to his feet.

He thought he understood the cause of the fits now.

They were caused by his grief for the dead, his guilt taking itself out on him the only way it could, because he couldn’t make up for what he’d done. The fits had stopped when he became more interested in Draco than he was in the dead, and then, even when he was hurting Draco, they hadn’t come back because the necromancy was a way to deal with his grief and guilt and atone at last.

With both those protections gone…

Harry smiled bitterly.

I’m probably going to die of them.

He kept one hand on the wall as he slowly stumbled out of the room, barely remembering to turn back at the door and banish the circle of blood from the floor. All the time, his mind was working, dry and savage and remarkably clear.

Draco had been partially right. The fits came from his magical core. The memories couldn’t be that clear and powerful without a magical component.

Harry’s magic was punishing him for what he’d done wrong, because no one else would do so.

I can’t tell Draco, either, because he wouldn’t believe me. And I’ve hurt him enough already.

As he limped down the corridor, heading for Ron’s rooms—he doubted Draco would want to stay in the same small space with him—Harry decided, carefully, that he was fucked.