Chapter Twenty-Four of 'Ceremonies of Strife'- Inadequate

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Twenty-Three.

Title: Ceremonies of Strife (24/50)
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 Twenty-Four—Inadequate

Finding their way back to safe footing was a strange process, Harry quickly discovered. He had known that not all their problems would be solved when they walked out of the library, but he hadn’t realized that one of the worst ones would be the way that other people reacted to them.

Weston and Lowell both nodded when they showed up together to their next training session in compatible magic. Weston’s nod was grimmer than Lowell’s.

“When the next argument tears you apart,” she said quietly to Harry, during a point in the session when he and Draco were both leaning against opposite walls and panting, “perhaps you will come to us first.”

Harry looked up, ready to say something angry, but she had already moved away. When he looked across the room, he saw that Lowell had been standing in a similar position with respect to Draco, and the eyebrow he raised was met with a grimace from Draco.

How could we come to you, when you would have immediately tried to arrest me for using Dark magic? Harry thought, as he stood up and prepared for the next duel-like exercise that Lowell and Weston would have them try. I know that you’re committed to training us, but I trust you to be Aurors first and our mentors second.

Then there were Ron and Hermione.

They weren’t bad. Harry could never say that. They were trying to be supportive. But he thought they were giving Draco less credit than he actually deserved, and he was glad Draco wasn’t around to hear a conversation they had in Ron’s rooms two days after the Veritaserum talk.

“You’re really getting back together with Malfoy, mate?” Ron asked the question while Harry was in the middle of a sentence for his Stealth and Tracking essay, which of course he had put off until the last minute. How could he worry about the ethics of tracking someone with Dark magic when he was worrying about Draco all the time? That already used up his month’s supply of concern right there.

Harry finished the sentence so he wouldn’t forget it, and then looked up and nodded. “Yeah. I apologized, and he finally listened to me.” He hadn’t mentioned the specifics of the talk, because Hermione would worry about the Veritaserum and Ron would explode.

“But—” Ron scratched his ear for a moment, seemed to search for a subtle way of saying what he wanted to say, and finally gave up. “Are you sure you want to?”

“Yes,” Harry said. He pushed the essay aside and concentrated on Ron. “Why? Did you hear something that makes you think I shouldn’t?” He highly doubted that, or at least it wasn’t a rumor that could have any impact on Harry, but it was best to seize Ron’s hints and teasing head-on.

Ron blinked and sat up. “Not really,” he said. “I was just thinking about something.” He folded his arms, probably because of the skepticism that Harry could feel creeping into his own expression. “Now, just listen to me, mate. It’s a chain of thought that came to me the other day. You should be able to follow it, since it’s so simple.”

Harry winced. Sometimes, he did think Ron was doing something stupid, but he didn’t mean to make him feel that way.

“All right,” he said, folding his arms and doing his best to give Ron an encouraging smile. “Go on.”

Ron smiled smugly and then stood up and began to pace around the room. Harry watched him obediently, even though he was thinking that he would have rather been with Draco.

“Being with Malfoy seems to make you unhappy,” Ron said. “It worries you. Either you were getting upset with me and Hermione—and we did some stupid things—or you were getting upset with him. Or there’s something else wrong, like the necromancy, that gets between you and causes explosions.” He turned around and stared earnestly at Harry. “Do you feel you can tell him everything the way you can tell us everything? Be honest, Harry.”

The thing they all want me to be, Harry thought, curling his fingers into his palms. They think it’s easy, because I’m “naturally honest.” They have no idea how many secrets I had to keep from people in the wizarding world when I first came here, just to have a chance at a somewhat normal life. “I don’t tell you everything,” he said aloud. “And you don’t tell me everything, either.”

Ron stopped pacing and stared at him. “Name one thing we’ve kept from you,” he said after a minute, tilting his head proudly upwards.

“All the details of the times you had sex,” Harry said promptly. “And the way that you fought over Ginny—the way I know you fought over Ginny. And why Hermione decided to become an Auror when she was talking about going elsewhere for a while. And—”

“Fine, fine!” Ron’s ears were turning red. “But that was—personal stuff. It doesn’t matter like the secrets you’re hiding.”

Harry shook his head. “The necromancy mattered because it was wrong and it could have endangered other people. But why does it matter to you whether I have little arguments with Draco, Ron? They’re my business. And his,” he added, trying to think of how Draco would hear his words and how he would react to them. That was one thing he was trying to do now. “I’ll never have a perfectly happy relationship with anyone. All I know is that I want to be with him.”

Ron stared at him. “I just hate to see you as unhappy as you have been lately,” he said in a low voice.

Harry smiled at him. “I know. And I appreciate the defense and the concern. But if I say that I’m happy and we’ve made up now, you have to leave me alone, just the same way I would leave you and Hermione alone and trust you to solve it if you rowed.”

Ron finally nodded and gave the walls of the room a kind of helpless shrug, as if to say that he had tried and Harry had inexplicably kept to his stubborn course. Harry shook his head and turned back to his essay.

*

“Tell me about your childhood.”

Draco raised his eyebrows. They were walking together down one of the less-traveled corridors in the trainee barracks, past a bunch of rooms once occupied by trainees who had washed out of the Auror program. The others seemed to feel that that weakness would infect them like a disease. Draco didn’t see any reason that this stone-walled, stone-floored place covered with doors was different from the rest of the barracks, and Harry agreed with him once Draco told him it was one place they could speak privately.

“What do you want to know?” Draco tried to keep his voice neutral. He was thinking of the way that he had done normal things, and the way Harry would probably think they were strange simply because he hadn’t grown up doing them.

“Who you played with,” Harry said, and his voice was wistful. Draco would have liked to ask why, but they were talking about him now. “Did you know a lot of the people you were Sorted into Slytherin with before you went to Hogwarts? Were they your friends? Did you fly with them, or weren’t you allowed onto broomsticks? It seemed like a lot of people at Hogwarts didn’t know how to fly. What did you want to do when you grew up? Did you have practice wands? Did you pretend to cast spells on each other?”

Draco felt his muscles relax. Questions like this were a lot easier to answer than the one he had assumed Harry was asking: what was it like to grow up with a Death Eater father who was suspected by the Ministry?

Besides, thinking about that part of his life wasn’t really hard, unless he let himself think about the difference between Lucius as he had been then and Lucius as he was now.

“I knew Pansy, and Vince, and Gregory, before I went to Hogwarts,” he said. “We were friends. Their parents visited my parents and discussed politics, and we would be sent out into the gardens to play.”

“I didn’t think they would,” Harry said, and from the way he turned red when Draco glanced at him, Draco knew he had meant it thoughtlessly.

“What do you mean?” Draco asked quietly. He would keep his voice as light as possible, he thought to himself. He would. He wouldn’t accuse Harry of being stupid or prejudiced unless he had proof that he was. But it was hard to remember that, sometimes, when Harry had been so stupid in the last few weeks.

“I thought they would let you stay there while they discussed politics.” Harry met his eyes and seemed to brace himself, as though he could guess that Draco wasn’t so pleased with him. “After all, if they expected you to go into politics, too, why not give you some experience while you were young?”

Draco laughed and relaxed. “It’s hard for most adults to make politics interesting for a bunch of seven-year-olds,” he said. “My parents were sure I’d have plenty of time to learn what I needed to know later in life. When I started to whine, they would send us off. And yes, I did fly, but the broomsticks were charmed not to rise more than fifty feet off the ground, and we always had house-elves watching us.”

It was odd how clearly the memory came back to him: Draco himself hovering in the air, shouting encouragement to Pansy, who had fallen the first time she flew and wasn’t sure she wanted to try it again. Vince and Gregory stood behind her, stolidly clutching their brooms and looking back and forth between him and Pansy, ready to react if they needed to. The elf assigned to watch them jumped up and down and wrung its hands, sure that something would go wrong, but not able to stop them as long as they kept within the orders laid down by their parents.

“What kind of games did you play?” Harry asked. “When I learned about the wizarding world, I used to think there were all sorts of marvelous games that wizarding children must have, but I never saw any of them at Hogwarts except a few like Exploding Snap and chess.”

“The culture of Hogwarts didn’t encourage those,” Draco murmured, new memories waking up, “or many games except chess once you were past fifteen, because it was supposed to be good for building political strategy. And Quidditch, of course, but that isn’t the same as the others.”

“Why, though?” Harry insisted. “What’s the difference?”

Draco shot a curious look sideways at him. This was the kind of thing that he hadn’t considered, but of course Harry wouldn’t know about it the way that someone growing up in it would. Draco thought he could see it clearly only because this last year and a half had taught him to see the world in different ways, to question what he’d once thought was reality.

“You’re supposed to go straight from child to adult when you hit seventeen,” he said. “That’s the year most people will come out of Hogwarts, and then you’re going to become an Auror, a Ministry flunky, an apprentice, or start training for a mastery. Or otherwise start on your adult career, whatever it is. Most people also get married young and start a family.”

Harry nodded, incomprehension clearly written on his face.

Draco sighed. “In practice, of course, no one can do that. So there are ways of separating adults from children before you get that far. You play fewer games. You do harder spells, which are supposed to be what you concentrate on perfecting instead of your skill at Gobstones. You take harder subjects. You’re taught, at least if you’re in Slytherin, that some of your friendships can stay the same and others will have to change. That way, when seventeen comes, you’re not caught as unprepared as you would be otherwise.”

Harry stared at him. “What does not playing games have to do with being an adult?”

“They take away from time that I reckon they want you to spend thinking?” Draco shrugged. He had never thought much about it. It was simply a part of his culture and his life, and as he had grown up, the children’s games did seem less attractive. “I don’t know, but that’s the way it is.”

Harry fell silent, scowling fiercely. Draco let him do it as they walked to the end of that corridor and then turned a corner.

Then Harry almost visibly shook off his interest in that subject, perhaps because he thought that it had little to do with understanding Draco, and asked, “Did you like being an only child?”

“Having a brother or sister would have been strange,” Draco said. This was another question he didn’t have to think much about, though this time it was because he had spent time pondering it when he was a child himself. “All the families we knew only had one child, except the Greengrasses, and I think they only had two daughters because they didn’t think the older one, Daphne, was pretty enough.”

Harry curled his lip, and Draco braced himself for some remark about pure-blood culture. He had thought Harry would prefer the reason Draco had talked about to the one everyone knew about but never voiced: only one child meant less competition for the inheritance. But instead of condemning him, Harry swallowed whatever he’d been about to say and asked instead, voice soft and neutral, “Did you wish for a sibling anyway, though? I mean, even though it would have been strange?”

“No,” Draco said. “I would have had to share my parents’ attention with them.”

Harry gave him a half-smile. Draco didn’t know if it was meant to be scornful or not. “You like attention, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Draco said fearlessly. He was not going to apologize anymore for the things that might make him inadequate in Harry’s eyes. He was going to adventure forwards, and if Harry really didn’t like him for it, then he was welcome to go away and find someone else. Paradoxically, nearly losing Harry had made Draco think about the ways in which he could stand alone. “If you don’t want to give it to me, then I’ll take a lover who will.”

Harry turned his head from side to side, making his neck crack, instead of answering. Draco waited.

“I just—” Harry said. “I can’t always put you first. If you’re happy and Ron or Hermione is suffering, then I would have to help them first.” His voice was low, but passionate. “Do you understand?”

“Oh, that,” Draco said. “Of course. But that doesn’t mean I’ll accept every distraction equally. If you always ignore me and go to your friends first, I don’t see any reason for us to stay together.”

Harry spun around to face him. “I want to pay attention to you. It’s just that I can’t, always.”

“And I’m telling you that’s all right,” Draco said, standing relaxed and easy and feeling lighter as he realized how simple this was, “as long as it’s not always that you’re paying attention to other people.”

Harry exhaled, then nodded sharply and started walking along the corridor again. Draco followed. One fight averted. They would certainly have others. And it wasn’t the perfect relationship he had sometimes dreamed of when he looked at his parents’ marriage when he was a child.

Then again, that marriage had not been the mirror of perfection that he believed it was.

Draco shook his head. He sometimes wished he could have gone through life with the same attitude he had as a child: that everything was made of glowing colors or deep shadows, and that he would always live within the colors, feasting on dreams. This life he had now was full of breaks and compromises.

On the other hand, this was the life he had.

*

“Have you convinced him that he can’t be a leader?”

Harry looked up, startled. Ventus had settled beside him at the table in the dining hall where Harry had been waiting for Draco. Harry set aside the apple he’d been half-heartedly eating and picked up the bacon, frowning at her. “What do you mean?”

“Draco,” Ventus said, fixing him with those eyes that always seemed slightly mad. They reminded him of Luna’s eyes, but Ventus’s voice was louder, and she seemed to see things in the world around them fine; she just saw them all wrong. “I know that he would be the most effective leader of the resistance against Nihil. Have you convinced him that he can’t be one?”

“Of course not,” Harry said. “He’s never talked about it to me one way or the other. I don’t know why you think he wants to be one.”

Ventus shook her head. “Anyone can see that he’s longing for attention and distinction. He’ll be an Auror, but not for a few years yet. I know he went to the War Wizards and they wouldn’t take him. And he’s your partner, but a lot of people think he’s overshadowed by you. If he wants power that doesn’t depend on his future or who he’s fucking, then this is the best option for him.”

Harry choked on his bacon. “I think you have a lot of nerve—”

“That’s just because you’re not used to people being honest and selfish,” said Ventus dismissively. “Look.” She unfolded a piece of parchment on the table.

Harry looked, mostly because he wanted her to shut up and go away. He blinked as he saw a map of the kind that Ketchum had taught them to recognize in Battlefield Tactics, though they hadn’t yet learned how to draw one. The dotted lines on the map showed possible attacks, the solid ones attacks that had failed. Harry didn’t recognize the landscape, though.

“Where did you get that?” he hissed.

“I stole it from the War Wizards,” Ventus said, giving him a look that suggested he should have known that. “They have maps of where they think Nihil will attack.” She moved her finger down a line covered with circles that meant nothing to Harry; Ketchum hadn’t taught them to read lines that looked like that. “Look. This is a place where there’s been a lot of sightings of the living dead, but no specific attack. They’re gathering there because they think Nihil’s planning something, but they don’t know what it could be.”

Harry glanced at the map for names, and saw none. “Where is it?” he asked, finally having to admit defeat.

Ventus blinked at him. “You don’t know your own country?” Harry’s glower was apparently enough of an answer, because she rolled her eyes and gave in. “Wiltshire.”

Harry caught his breath. Malfoy Manor was in Wiltshire. “How much necromancy are we talking about?” he asked. “Have the Muggles seen the living dead, too? Have they found Nihil?”

Ventus shrugged. “The map doesn’t tell me that, only what they’ve seen and what they’re planning to do about it.” She traced one of the dashed lines almost reverently. “They have a good plan. The problem is, War Wizards are obvious, and Nihil has no reason to come back to a place where he knows they are. But what if five Auror trainees went there—five people who would make a lot less noise than an army, and two of whom he hunts?” She looked at him slyly. “Nihil might show up then.”

“Five?” Harry asked blankly, because his mind was spinning with the possibilities.

“You, your friends, me, and Draco,” Ventus said.

Harry frowned at her, trying to make the spinning possibilities calm down so that he could think about things that made sense. “Why didn’t you go to Draco first?”

Ventus changed in the blink of an eye, slamming a hand down on the map and leaning in accusingly. “Because he doesn’t believe he could be a good leader,” she hissed. “Have you talked to him? Have you told him that? Every time I bring up ways that he could acquire power, which I know he wants, he smiles at me and changes the subject. He doesn’t think he’s adequate. Is that your fault?”

“I never thought about him as a leader until you brought this up,” Harry admitted, a bit shame-faced. It did seem that he should have thought more about Draco’s ambition since it was clearly so important to him. “I never said one thing to discourage him.”

Ventus nodded, looking a bit more satisfied than she had, and pushed some of her lank black hair out of her face. “So if I convince you, then you can convince him. Whereas if I went to him, he would only tell you, and then probably pick up some clue in your manner and convince himself he couldn’t do it.”

“I don’t mean to discourage him,” Harry started to protest.

“Hush, I know.” Ventus patted his hand, again reminding him in a weird way of Luna. “But he needs to see that he can do it successfully before he’ll really believe in himself, I think. So if we do give him the chance to show what he can do on a mission like this, then he’ll either rise to the occasion or he won’t, and if he doesn’t, then I can find someone else to follow.”

Harry narrowed his eyes. “You’re talking like this mad mission is an assured thing.”

“Isn’t it?” Ventus stared at him blandly. “Don’t you want to make a difference in the war? I’ve been listening. The War Wizards can’t corner Nihil. They have nothing to lure him in with, and no idea of what he wants. We have both. I have no illusions that we’ll defeat him, but we could learn something important, if we play this right.”

Harry shook his head. “Everyone’s trying. Why should we be any more successful?”

“Because we have the combination of skills that we need to win,” Ventus said. “My fighting skill, and my determination. Draco’s leadership skills, assuming he has any. Your compatible magic, and Draco’s. Your friend Hermione’s intelligence; she can help us set up the trap. And your friend Ron’s loyalty.”

Harry licked his lips. The vision Ventus presented was tempting, and yes, he did want to do something about this war. At the moment, with no new attacks but also no new information, the Ministry was reduced to trying to appear wise and solemn, while in reality everyone crouched tensely in the strange silence and waited for what was going to happen next.

“We don’t know that we can trust you,” he said, finding the objection that Hermione and Ron would surely raise and which would have the most weight with Draco at the moment.

“Test me under Veritaserum, if you need to,” Ventus said, with a shrug. “I don’t want to jump right into this, anyway. We’ll need to think up a plausible reason to be in Wiltshire, so that Nihil has no reason to suspect this is a trap. You need time to learn to trust me. And since I don’t think there’s any way we can defeat him at the moment, we have to make up our minds what we want to learn and how we’re going to learn it.”

A sharp, sweet shiver ran through Harry. This was what he most missed from Hogwarts, the mysteries and how to solve them. There was no making progress with the mystery of Nihil, ordinarily, but at least this sounded different.

“Let me talk to Draco,” he said.

Ventus raised an eyebrow. “Of course,” she said. “Between you two, he’s the smart one.”