lomonaaeren

Chapter Thirty-Three.

Title: Ceremonies of Strife (34/50)
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 Thirty-Four—Scattered and Shaken

“Don’t do that again,” Aran whispered, his voice so shaky that Harry winced back before it. “I’ll tell you what you need to know. Just—just don’t do that again.”

Draco stood in front of Aran, looking down at him. His face was perfectly calm, so fine that Harry thought it would have been easy to mistake it for the face of a statue. “I won’t need to,” Draco said, in a voice as cool, “if you’ll tell us the truth, and what you are, and who gave you your orders.”

Aran whimpered for long minutes without replying. Harry shook his head in wonder. Aran hadn’t seemed the same since he attacked him in the corridor—the Spell Lexicon instructor Harry knew would never have let himself be taken by surprise and defeated by two trainees—but this was the greatest difference Harry had noticed. Aran cowered away from Draco as if Draco were Nihil, lifting one hand to shield his face.

And Draco stood there with such pitiless eyes that Harry was sure he was enjoying it, on some level.

“What did you do to him?” Harry whispered, bending close enough to Draco that he thought other people would have a hard time overhearing.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Draco asked, and then glanced at Harry with a mean edge to his smile that Harry hoped never to see again. “I hit him with a spell that didn’t permit him to breathe for a short time, and he’s terrified I’ll do it again.”

“I got that part,” Harry said, lowering his voice further. How could Draco sound proud of that, of tormenting another human being? “But why is he so frightened of that? If he really is part of Nihil, then he must know that he isn’t going to die, no matter what happens to the human body that he’s wearing at the moment.”

“Oh, Harry,” Draco said, and laughed into his ear in a way that caused certain stirrings from Harry’s body he didn’t like to think much about. “It is obvious. But you’re polite and pleasant and good enough that I’m not surprised you don’t see it.”

Harry jerked away, his neck prickling. He wanted to think it was with indignation at what Draco had said, but he was afraid it came from—well, fear. “Explain it to me, then,” he said, his voice rustling and crackling like eggshells being stepped on. “Since I don’t get it.”

Draco smiled at him for some time more before moving his glance back to Aran. Aran had stopped whimpering, but still sat with his arms folded and his face half-shielded by one hand. Hermione stepped forwards and knelt down next to him, though she had more sense than to touch him. Her brow was furrowed, as though she were studying the invisible marks Draco’s spell had left.

“What caused Nihil to become Nihil?” Draco asked. “What makes him so intent on getting vengeance against Death Eaters?”

“They tortured him,” Harry said. “Or part of him.” It was still hard to explain what he had seen in that vision in Nihil’s mind. He had guessed, though, that Nihil wanted to protect it not because his original identity was a matter of such importance, but because the vision contained the seeds of an answer to what he was.

“Yes,” Draco said, and looked back at Aran. “If he is part of Nihil, then he will fear torture more than anything else. It doesn’t even need to be torture as severe as what Nihil, or Caradoc Dearborn, endured. He won’t be able to put up with even the slightest suggestion of pain, and we can use it to make him tell us the truth.”

Harry closed his eyes. Then, knowing that Draco was watching him with eyes keen enough to score slashes on his cheeks, he shook his head.

*

Draco sighed. He had been afraid of this reaction. Or not afraid, exactly, because he knew what needed to be done and he would do it whether Harry approved or not, but he had known Harry wouldn’t support him in a time when it would be infinitely easier to have his support.

“Harry,” he said. “Do you have a better solution to the problem of getting answers, especially since we can’t use Veritaserum?”

Harry gave him a level look and folded his arms. “Forget about answers for now,” he said. His face had set in the particular stubborn lines that Draco remembered seeing when he had confronted Harry in the past about risking his life for insane reasons. “I’m more worried about what this will do to you. How can you torture someone without losing your soul? How can you do it without corrupting yourself?”

Draco rolled his eyes. He really shouldn’t have called what he was doing torture if he wanted Harry to listen, he realized. Still, that didn’t mean he was the only one to blame here. Harry had always been irrational about certain small things. “Listen, Harry,” he said, and hoped that his voice didn’t shake with fury or exasperation. “I’m not worried about some kind of nameless, faceless, abstract corruption. You’ve already faced corruption that’s fairly strong and definable, and you haven’t succumbed to it. Can’t you trust that I can do the same thing, use the Dark Arts but not give in to them? Whatever giving in means,” he had to add, because that was one thing most of the books he’d read had no idea about. Either they approved the use of the Dark Arts as just another tool in a wizard’s arsenal or they hinted at dire consequences and never explained what those dire consequences were. Draco had tried for years to find a book that described the “horrible fates” of Dark wizards, in vain. Most of the time, the horrible fate seemed to be Aurors.

“It’s not the magic,” Harry said. “I’ll acknowledge that you can do the Dark Arts if I can do necromancy, and still walk away unscathed. But causing pain…” He shook his head. “What kind of person will that make you?”

Draco sighed. “A sensible one?” Harry’s mouth tightened, and Draco decided he would probably have a shouting match on his hands in a minute if he didn’t try to treat this a little more seriously. He lowered his voice again and did his best to make it persuasive. “One who knows exactly what he’s doing and why. One who knows what he’s responsible for. And I’m sure that you’ll stay beside me and tell me if you see me going too far, Harry.” This time, he could make his smile genuine, considering the methods he thought Harry would probably resort to to tell him that. “This isn’t a lightly-made decision.”

“But the Dark Arts—” Harry began.

“Dearborn was right about one thing,” Draco said forcefully. “What spells were declared Dark Arts depends a lot more on what the Ministry says and what the historical circumstances of the time were than anything else. There are harmless spells that someone didn’t like because, say, they were the signature incantation of a political enemy, and so they were banned. Those political rivals are dead now and no one cares about their passions anymore, but we all have to suffer the consequences.”

“I wasn’t talking about the Ministry’s definition,” Harry said, his gaze direct and unflinching. It reminded Draco of the way he had looked in that final duel with Voldemort. “I’m talking about spells that are used to harm people. Those are what I’m calling Dark Arts, and those are what I don’t want you using.”

Draco tapped his fingers against his arm. “What do you call the spells the War Wizards use?” he asked, and hoped that his voice wasn’t as taut with fury as his chest felt. Harry folded his arms and retreated a step anyway. “What about the spells that Ventus and I used in the battle against Nihil’s army?”

“They’re dead,” Harry said. “I don’t want you, or anyone, using spells that could hurt living people.”

“We’ve already hurt Aran,” Draco said, and his voice deepened into a growl. He didn’t care. If Harry wanted to make this a fight, Draco would. He wasn’t going to give up the chance to learn the answers that Aran and Nihil had been keeping to themselves for so long and which he didn’t think they would have an opportunity of fighting the war without. “We learn spells in class every day that are meant to kill Dark wizards if there’s no other option. Would it make you feel better if I gave Aran his wand back and let him fight me?”

“That’s not the point,” Harry said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Then tell me what I should do instead, since you oppose this course of action.” Draco clasped his hands together so that he wouldn’t strike out at Harry. He loved him, he did, but he didn’t love these principles that bound Harry like chains and that he would try to wind around other people at the most inconvenient times. “What I’m doing is only different in a few essentials from what we’ve already done and you had no qualms about. And since we’re not about to release Aran or turn him over to the instructors right now, then I need to know what we can do, Arbiter of Justice.”

Harry’s teeth were grinding together, if the sound Draco heard from behind his closed lips was any indication. “I don’t want to restrict what you can do,” he said. Draco snorted, and Harry flicked him an irritated glance as sharp as a whip. “That’s not—I want to restrict the illegal and dangerous things you can do,” he said. “I’m sure that you’re familiar with the impulse, since you keep me from trying to risk my life.”

Ah, so that’s it. Draco stepped towards Harry and leaned in towards his ear. By now, Weasley and Granger were staring at them with avid curiosity, obviously wanting to know what they were talking about. Ventus continued to watch Aran and ignore them, which made Draco more grateful to know her.

“There’s something you should know about me,” Draco whispered. “I thought you already did. Why, I’m not sure. But you don’t know, so I’m going to tell you now, and I want you to always remember it.”

Harry narrowed his eyes and nodded. Draco could feel the tension hovering in the air between them, and licked his lips. He knew the best way of solving that tension, but it was hardly possible with Harry’s friends in the room and a prisoner to interrogate.

“I don’t care about as many people as you do,” Draco said. “The ones who are important to me, the ones I want to protect, are the people I love.” He rested his hand on Harry’s arm and hoped the weight, if not the words, would emphasize what category Harry was in. “That means that I don’t care about the abstractions in the way that you do, or the faceless mass of people that you were willing to die to save. I wanted the world saved, but that was because my parents and I lived in it, not because I cared about everyone else.”

Harry’s face went white, while his lips clamped down so hard Draco honestly thought he would break some teeth. Then he whispered, “That can’t be true, or why did you keep from identifying me when the Snatchers brought me to Malfoy Manor?”

“Because I thought you were the means to saving people I loved,” Draco said. “Why else?”

Harry looked away from him, half-shut his eyes, and shook his head. “No. That can’t be right. I know that you’re a better person than you think you are. I know you care more about principles than you say you do.”

Draco sighed in disgust. “And there you are again. Why does caring about the abstract motivations behind someone’s actions make you good? It makes you Gryffindor, and you’re still locked into that mindset. But I’m not, and I’m going to use this spell, and others like it, to interrogate Aran, and you’ll have to fight me to stop me.”

For a moment, he thought it was going to happen. Harry tensed, his shoulders rippling, and stared at Draco. His face had some color back. Draco waited for his hand to dip into his pocket and grab his wand. That would be the beginning of a serious duel, and one he would have to pay attention to, as much as he wanted the interrogation to be over right now.

But then Harry turned away and dropped his head, his fists clenching. Draco nodded. “Thank you for admitting that some of your rules have to yield to practicality,” he said, and turned back to Aran, already considering what spell he should call on next.

*

Harry watched from the corner of one eye as Draco lifted his wand again and Aran crouched down, both hands splaying in front of his face despite the chokehold it put on his neck as the ropes pulled tight. His face was blank, his eyes looking flat with fear. Harry felt his throat ache, and wondered if he should move forwards and stop it.

His conscience said yes. His sense of practicality and his loyalty to his friends and Draco, the part of him that was tired of fighting endlessly and receiving no answers, told him to stay still and see what would happen. Perhaps it wouldn’t be anything too bad.

Since when is torture not anything too bad?

Harry ground his teeth. The hell of it was, he didn’t have a better plan for getting the answers out of Nihil, or at least out of someone Nihil had possessed, assuming Aran had ever existed independently of him.

To distract himself, he studied Aran, wondering why the man was so different from what he remembered of him. That Aran had been cool, self-possessed, in love with the sound of his own voice. That man had confronted Harry for a few minutes in the corridor, when he had first cast the spell and continued to move forwards despite Harry’s taking away his wand and attacking him. But after that, he had acted childish and helpless, and that was continuing at the moment.

Why?

“Yes,” Draco said, as if agreeing with someone invisible who had given him advice, and then brought down his wand in a swift slashing motion. Aran strained up against the ropes and cried out at the same moment.

Harry stared at his leg, where the pain seemed focused, if the way Aran’s muscles twitched and spasmed was any indication. There was no cut there, or bruising, or signs that the blood had stopped flowing. And yet, Harry had no doubt that the spell Draco had cast was responsible for the pain Aran experienced.

“Finite Incantatem!” Hermione cried out.

Nothing happened. Aran leaned forwards to clutch his leg, and gagged as the ropes pulled tight. But his whimpers were fading now, and he stared at Draco with frank fascination, the way a mouse might look at a snake.

“Stop it!” Hermione said, whirling to face Draco and holding her wand towards him this time, as if she were going to stab him through the eye with it. Draco acted as if he didn’t see her, but Harry knew he did, and from the way he was tensing, he was prepared to do something about it. “You can’t hurt someone like this and not expect there to be consequences!”

“I’ve already had this discussion with Harry,” Draco said, his voice was flat as Aran’s expression. “I have no interest in it with you.” He looked at Aran, and his lips twisted into a small, cruel smile that Harry had only seen echoes of on his face during the time they were in Hogwarts. “Besides, these particular consequences are the ones we want.”

Harry looked. Aran was shaking his head back and forth, gargling on desperate words in his throat. “Please, no more,” Harry made out after a moment, whispered over and over as if the repetition would be enough to keep him from pain. “Please, no more.”

Draco smiled at Hermione, who had her hands to her mouth and looked as if she were going to be sick. Then he knelt down next to Aran and said, almost tenderly, “I can stop it. But for it to stop, you have to tell us everything you know. About Nihil. About what it means that you’re a part of him and can resist Veritaserum. About anyone else you know in the Ministry who is connected to him or infected by him. Do you understand?”

Aran looked at him with something that Harry thought you could call filthy gratitude, and nodded excitedly. “I don’t know everything, but I know much,” he said. “What you have to understand is that I am only a part of him. I know as much of him as he allows me to see, as much as I had to so that I could keep working for him.”

“And you have his fears,” Draco said, smiling into Aran’s eyes and stroking his wand. “Unless you were tortured, yourself?”

Aran closed his eyes and shook his head.

Draco rocked back on his heels, gave a triumphant glance at everyone in the room, and then turned back to Aran. “What does it mean to say that you’re a part of Nihil? We had thought he was one person, and although we know now that he can’t be killed as readily as we thought he could, losing a body still takes him out of the immediate area. Doesn’t it?”

Aran sighed. Some color was returning to his face, and Harry tried, unsuccessfully, to convince himself that that meant what had happened was all right. “No. Nihil is more like a great plant, with many roots extending under the ground and surfacing in unexpected places. I am one of the blossoms of those roots. Daffyd Dearborn was another, at least after he became part of Nihil. Like him, I can act on my own and possess my own opinions and enough of my former personality to fool those who need to be fooled. But I am ultimately under his control and answerable to him.”

“Then won’t he kill you when he finds out what you told us?” Hermione blurted out.

Aran gave her a thin smile full of pity. “No. He cannot kill me. He can reabsorb me, pull me back into himself, and he may do that. But he ordered me to destroy your gift for necromancy.” He looked at Harry, and there was nothing gleeful in his eyes or his face. He might have been speaking of being ordered simply to kill Harry. “He fears what could happen if someone who knows his secrets and has a talent for it faces him on the battlefield.”

Harry swallowed. “And you resented his orders,” he guessed, remembering the things Aran had said as he was attacking Harry. “You wanted to just kill me or knock me unconscious and get rid of me that way.”

“Yes,” Aran said indifferently. “He has an obsession with you that I think quite unnatural. There are other ways to accomplish his goals than by taking you and corrupting you, or taking you and using your fame to his own ends. And he has the same obsession with you,” he added, turning to look at Draco.

Draco let out a huff of breath and his eyes widened, but Harry knew him too well to be fooled by the pallor of his face. He was flattered and trying not to show it. “Why me?” Draco asked. “I don’t have much in the way of fame to offer, except the notoriety that would make people back away from me instead of helping me.”

“You were a Death Eater,” Aran said. His voice remained indifferent. He was looking over their heads into a corner of the ceiling now, as though he were counting the moments until Nihil came and reclaimed him. Harry wondered what would that look like, when it happened—if it happened. “Or your father was. Either was good enough for him. He thought that you might know secrets that would help. And of course you might know Dark Arts, or have access to books, that he didn’t. And he’s obsessed with that kind of magic. Since it was used against him, he wants to make a weapon of it.”

“He’s always reacted like that, hasn’t he?” Harry asked, remembering the vision that had flashed in his head, the strength of Caradoc’s desire to cause pain to the people who had harmed him. “If someone does something to him, then he has to respond in exactly the same way if he can.”

Aran nodded, and he wore a faint smile this time. “You are beginning to understand how his mind works. If you can call it a mind. If someone who is human can understand something that truly is not.” He paused, seeming to muse for a moment before he continued. “He is incapable of understanding anyone as an ally or friend, of course, which limits him in his own way. You are resources to him.”

Harry shivered. Nusquam had said something like that. He reckoned he was glad he hadn’t comprehended it fully before; it would have discouraged him as they struggled to fight against Nihil.

“What does Nihil want?” Draco asked.

“Aren’t Nemo and Nusquam his allies?” Hermione asked at the same time.

Aran answered Draco first, his voice tired. “The clue is in his name. Indeed, he has told everyone who cared to know about him the truth from the first day, but people rarely follow the clue back to its beginning.”

“He wants nothing?” Draco said. He raked his hands through his hair. “That makes no sense, not when he’s been striving so hard after something, and he clearly wants to bring down the Ministry and destroy Harry and me.”

“He wants to reduce the world to nothingness,” Aran said, with a faint bite to his words that Harry suspected was as close as he could come to impatience at the moment. “Himself included. He cannot die. He can change bodies, but he is always the same in the core of himself, with the same driving purpose. Indeed, the extensions of him who have some free will, such as the man you called Dearborn and I, are often happier than he is. We can forget the pain for a time, the memories.” He shuddered and glared at Draco. “Until something brings it back again.”

Harry shivered. “And he doesn’t care who or what he has to crush to do it, does he?” he asked.

Aran shook his head. “He didn’t strike for years after the first war because he was trying all the various magical methods available to him of forgetting. Nothing worked. So if the world is destroyed, and there’s no scrape of matter left for him to animate or escape into when his last body is killed, then he figures he’ll have oblivion and peace at last.”

“That’s insane,” Ron said, blankly. Bleakly. Harry glanced at his best friend and saw him standing with his arms folded, his eyes wide.

“To someone human, yes,” Aran said.

“What about Nemo and Nusquam?” Hermione insisted. “Were they normal people that he possessed, too? How does he possess people? Are they his allies?”

“Nemo and Nusquam are his most independent tendrils, the first ones he created,” Aran said. “Nusquam is the part of himself that has perfected their methods of travel, and Nemo works with the beasts. Nemo is less sophisticated than Nusquam and has a less stable appearance through his various transformations. As for the possession question, I can only try to tell you what I know of myself. Nihil appeared to me in the guise of Daffyd Dearborn and flashed that onyx ring he was always carrying at me. The infection travels by light. When I saw it, I felt something change within me. The infection acted differently than it does in those people, such as you, whom Nihil wanted to leave alone until he could figure out how to use them. It ate away everything I was, and left me as this.”

There was silence. Even Draco looked more somber than he had been, and Harry wrapped his arms around himself and wondered if the others were thinking the same thing he was.

How in the world are we going to fight this?

Then he saw Draco lifting his head again and staring at him as if daring Harry, silently, with his eyes, to give in. Harry began to smile back in spite of himself.

There’s a way. We’ll find it.

Although, Draco, please, it has to be a different way than yours.