Chapter Six of 'Seasons of War'- Overall

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Five.

Title: Seasons of War (6/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, torture, sex, angst, profanity, ignores the DH epilogue.
Summary: The war against Nihil enters its final stages, Harry and Draco train as partners, and they may actually survive to become effective Aurors. Maybe.
Author’s Notes: This is the final part of the Running to Paradise Trilogy, sequel to Ceremonies of Strife, and won’t make much sense if you haven’t read the first two stories. I don’t yet know how long this one will be, but based on the others, I’m guessing 45 to 50 chapters.

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Six—Overall

“It makes you difficult to work with when you are hiding things from me.”

Draco started and looked up. He had been contemplating what he would be able to do if he could simply keep Nusquam for a few more days and use more complicated piercing and impaling spells, of the kinds that Professor Snape’s memories contained. It had made him, he knew, slow and inattentive to what Gregory was doing, but he had not expected that particular remark. “I beg your pardon?” he asked stiffly.

“You are exhilarated.” Gregory eyed the list in front of her a moment, and then turned around with that abrupt kind of movement that usually made Draco try to keep his distance from her. “I am able to see this from the way your eyes glow and focus beyond me. And there is nothing to be exhilarated about concerning either your performance in classes or the methods of torture we have discovered. What is it?”

Draco studied her carefully for a few moments before replying. Gregory was more observant than he had thought. He’d never doubted her intelligence, but had counted on the way she tended to focus on one thing at a time to keep his secrets safe around her.

“I have a secret,” he responded. “I’ve won a victory that could make the difference between winning and losing the war.”

Gregory leaned forwards and then waited, seeming to assume she only needed to do that to have the secret shared.

“You could tell the other Aurors,” Draco said, folding his arms, “or at least the instructors. And that would be the end of it.” He was pretending reluctance, but really his mind was racing, trying to calculate the precise chances of Gregory betraying them. He would like someone to share this with who would appreciate his skill and finesse in a way that he rest of the comitatus could not.

“What reason have I to tell them?” Gregory tilted her head back, and her eyes were wild and bright and scornful, the way Draco imagines his would look under similar circumstances. “They were the ones who believed me a traitor based on slight evidence. They were the ones who cast me out and turned their backs on me, refusing to spend time searching for evidence that would have proved Dearborn’s ridiculous story false. No, I have no reason to talk to them about this.”

“Why did you come back and ally with them if you despise them so much?” Draco asked.

“They’re my best chance to defeat Nihil,” Gregory answered, giving Draco a strange look, as if she had assumed everyone knew that.

Draco pondered one moment more, and then decided to trust her. At least it would be easy enough to use a Memory Charm on her if he turned out to be wrong. Gregory’s mental defenses weren’t that great compared to her physical ones.

“All right,” he said. “I managed to capture one of Nihil’s major servants, and so far she’s staying where I put her instead of dying or changing into a different body to escape.”

Gregory paused. Her hands, resting on the table, began to tremble a moment later. Draco looked at them uneasily and wondered if he had made the wrong decision.

“Nusquam,” Gregory said. “It must be. There is no other servant I know of is who both major enough that you could be proud of capturing her and female.”

“Well, I could have arrested one of the Auror instructors,” Draco muttered, but he didn’t think he was that displeased that Gregory had figured it out without being told. After all, it was clear that his announcement itself had surprised her.

“Not without severely disrupting the schedule of classes and the life of the camp.” Gregory locked her hands on the table again, this time to hold herself upright, her eyes bright and steady and hungry. “Well, shall we go see her?”

“If you can come up with a good reason to venture out of the camp in daylight,” Draco said. “She’s in a tent beyond the edge of it, actually easier to reach at night when not everyone thinks they need a reason for your business.”

“Or sees you to think they do so,” Gregory corrected him. “Yes, in fact, it’ll be easy. I’ll tell them that I’ve chosen you to demonstrate some of the more dangerous techniques on, and that I’m worried your partner might think they’re abusive. Hence the need for a private place to practice.”

Draco nodded, and followed Gregory out of the tent and across the camp. Not many people tried to speak to them, though almost everyone paused to watch Gregory’s cold, disdainful face and fast stride. Draco reckoned he could count on that as a safe alibi in one way. No one was going to forget seeing them, but on the other hand, Gregory’s company was its own guarantee of a good purpose.

The sentries didn’t bother stopping them, so they didn’t have to use their story. Draco was pleased about that, since he didn’t want Harry to worry.

More than he already is, at least.

Draco frowned and thought again about what Harry had done in the last few days. He spoke less, and he had refused, with an absent air, Draco’s attempts to introduce intimacy into their interactions since they had captured Nusquam. He spent a lot of time looking at the walls of the tent. His essays were sloppier.

He was probably worrying about Draco and when the invisible corruption that was supposed to plague everyone who committed torture would set in. Perhaps he was even worried that it hadn’t come yet. At least then he would probably have some solid plan for how to act towards Draco.

Draco rolled his eyes and snorted so loudly that Gregory glanced back at him until he waved her on. It’s ridiculous. He stopped being a Gryffindor years ago, and still he can only see the world through a Gryffindor mindset. I still have Slytherin traits, yes, but at least I can look beyond them and see through other people’s eyes.

*

“But if it’s based on my connection to Voldemort, that’s just as bad,” Harry said. He didn’t know why he couldn’t make Portillo Lopez understand that. The latest snake illusion around his shoulders, a python, swayed and hissed, and Harry had to murmur several soothing words in Parseltongue to hold it back from attacking his supposed mentor. “Then it’s not something I can teach to anyone else.”

“We don’t know that yet,” Portillo Lopez said, with that unfailingly patient manner that sometimes bolstered Harry and sometimes irritated the fuck out of him. “Let us try one more time.” She conjured a mirror and held it floating above her head, then cast another spell that filled it with bright blue and yellow lines. “Bring your snake to look into the mirror.”

Harry sighed and asked the python to do so. It flowed down his shoulders with an extreme slowness that suggested it was only doing this to oblige him and then floated through the air to hover opposite the mirror.

The yellow lines disappeared, leaving only the blue ones. Harry blinked. That was the most result they’d had out of any of the tests they’d done so far.

Before he could call Portillo Lopez’s attention to that, though, she spoke a single word. The blue lines stabbed out of the mirror and hit the snake like a sunrise.

Intense agony cut through Harry, and he slumped to the ground, so much in pain that he couldn’t even cry out. His mouth filled with blood, his hands filled with loose earth as he scrabbled at it, and he tried to grip his wand but simply dropped it. Even when the pain faded, he knelt there, gasping and loose-limbed.

“That proves it,” Portillo Lopez said. Her voice was soft and proud.

Harry managed to force his head up, and sternly told himself that he could kill her later, when she might deserve it even more. Portillo Lopez was still looking into the mirror, instead of at him. “What did you do?”

“The lines of light in the mirror represented various kinds of magic connected to life and death,” Portillo Lopez said. “The yellow lines represented the magic of life. When they vanished, I knew that your magic is not purely based on illusions and Parseltongue.”

“And let me guess,” Harry muttered. He was feeling a little better, but he still shook his head and moved away to stand up on his own when Portillo Lopez extended a hand. “The blue lines are the magic of death, which means that my magic is necromancy after all.”

Portillo Lopez chuckled. “No, because they would not have caused you pain if both they and your magic were part of the same category. Instead, your magic is what I theorized it was, a combination of the forces of life and death.”

Harry sighed and leaned shakily against the table that Portillo Lopez had covered with diagrams, drawings, and lists before they began this experiment. Harry hadn’t bothered looking at the parchment because he knew he wouldn’t understand it anyway. “I still don’t see how that helps.”

“Don’t you?” Portillo Lopez looked at him with a faint frown. Then she nodded. “Of course not. You have told me that you have trouble understanding magical theory.”

“Especially from people who hurt me without a moment’s notice,” muttered Harry. He’d already decided that he didn’t want to tell Draco what had happened today. Draco would probably get as angry as he had about Holder, and they might actually need Portillo Lopez.

Portillo Lopez gave him another frown, as if trying to determine what he was talking about, and then took up the thread of her talk again. “You have already used a weapon that combines the forces of life and death. The wand I gave you. The wand affected you, I understand, when you tried to use a blood ritual against this shadow of Lucius Malfoy, but not as badly as it should have. Your magic is a hybrid.”

“But that doesn’t help,” Harry said, and raked a hand through his hair. Draco wasn’t here to tell him not to do it, anyway. “If it’s something so intensely personal, how am I supposed to teach it to anyone else, or help with the battles unless I’m right there?”

Portillo Lopez sighed. “Because I believe we can modify that weapon to yield others that might affect Nihil. And your magic gives us an idea of how to do it.”

Harry stared. Finally, a statement that he understood, and one that actually sounded hopeful.

“How are we going to do that?” he asked.

Of course, when Portillo Lopez began to give her explanation, Harry was promptly lost again, but he clung fiercely to that one statement he’d understood. If he could provide some way to defeat Nihil that didn’t rely on torture, then he was going to do it.

Draco’s great. He’s doing something necessary. But…

I just think it would be a good idea to have some other weapon on our side that we could use if we needed to.

*

When they came out of the tent that held Nusquam, Gregory was walking with the same flushed face and bright eyes that she had accused Draco of displaying to give away his secret. Draco touched her arm before they got back to the camp.

“You understand why this has to be kept a secret?” he asked.

Gregory snapped him a look of contempt and nodded. “You must think that I’m stupid,” she said. “Not trusting me with the secret of Nusquam’s capture in the first place. Thinking I would betray you to the other Aurors. What reason do I have to do that? They’re allies to me, and nothing more. I told you that before.”

“I know,” Draco said, but he was thinking: You and I are nothing more than allies, too. What reason will you have to keep the secret if you decided that someone better had come along, or that you could take better charge of Nusquam than I could?

He waited until they were most of the way back to his and Harry’s tent before he brought up his next idea. Gregory was watching one of her classes at a distance, perhaps with an Eagle Charm on her eyes, and snapping instructions. Draco waited until she turned around with a distinct scowl on her face.

“You know that Nusquam developed the spells that bring Nihil’s servants into the center of the camps, behind the wards,” he said. “And that those spells are based on links to specific individuals.”

Gregory moved her head in answer, but didn’t deign to look at him. Draco gritted his teeth and reminded himself that he knew about pride—enough not to let it become a liability.

“We’ve broken the links on people we can reach,” he said. “Harry, I, Granger, and Weasley were all victims of that particular spell. But there are others we can’t reach and convince to hold still for the spells—Holder, in particular, and a few of the higher-ranked Aurors, such as Ketchum. Could you come up with a reason for us to cast the Finites on them that they would believe, without revealing the secret of Nusquam’s capture?”

Gregory stopped walking for a moment, standing there with her foot raised from the ground while she stared into the distance. Then she grinned and nodded. “I can come up with one for Holder, at least. As for Ketchum and the others, leave them to me.” She glanced sideways at Draco. “You know that I will have to have the full list of names, in order that I can create plausible stories for all of them.”

Draco nodded back, and said nothing else. He had made the decision to involve Gregory in the secret in the first place, and he refused to regret it now. Especially when Gregory sounded like she would be useful to them.

Especially because regretting it now would give Granger the material to say that she told me so.

*

“Potter, Malfoy, stay behind.”

Harry winced at the cutting edge in Weston’s tone. She hadn’t spoken to him and Draco like that in days, and he had finally started to hope that they were good enough to match her impossible standards. Well, their impossible standards, since Weston and Lowell didn’t seem to have a lot of thoughts that they didn’t share.

But of course not, Harry thought gloomily as he trudged to the center of the training ring, slipping twice. The instructors covered the mud with charms to keep it as smooth as the stone of the Ministry during practice, but the spells usually had begun to wear off by the time the class was over. We can never do well enough to please them.

Weston waited for them in the middle of the ring, eyes narrowed as she surveyed them, arms folded. Lowell stood at her shoulder, but he seemed to have decided that she should handle this conversation. Harry wondered how they made their decisions, then shrugged. He only knew that it was on some level of cooperation he and Draco appeared incapable of reaching.

He looked sideways and found Draco standing there quietly with his eyes narrowed. He looked like a cat waiting for someone to step on his tail, Harry thought.

Then he remembered some of the things Draco had done when he looked like that, and mentally winced.

“Your compatible magic is once again suffering,” Weston said bluntly. “Why?”

Harry blinked. That hadn’t been what he expected to hear. He cast Draco a glance, but Draco’s eyes were as wide and his face as pale as though those words had been a surprise to him, too.

Maybe they were and maybe they weren’t, Harry thought. He didn’t know that he could read Draco that well anymore.

And I think that’s the problem, Harry decided after a slow moment, when the answer hit him like a Bludger.

“I think that we’re having private disagreements that affect our performance,” he told Weston. “It’s not the disagreements that are the problem, it’s that we’re keeping silent about them and not telling each other. That sets up the barriers.”

Lowell sagged forwards as though he would fall, and Weston supported him with her back while she gave a low laugh. “Well done, Trainee Potter. I am gratified to see that you recognize the problem.” She shook her head. “Now, perhaps, you could go away and repair it, and prevent it from happening at all next time?”

Harry nodded, and then turned to face Draco. He was glad that Weston and Lowell hadn’t asked about his problems with Draco, because almost all of them had to do with Nusquam, and that wasn’t something they could discuss in front of other people.

Draco stared at Harry, then at Lowell and Weston, nodded once, and turned around to walk with Harry back to their tent. When they’d got inside and put up the wards and silencing charms, he paced in a slow circle before he turned to face Harry.

“Well?” he asked.

Harry had been planning to sit down, but he decided that he didn’t want to, and walked closer to Draco instead. Draco stood where he was and watched him come.

Their faces ended up closer together than Harry had planned on, which was a good thing, he decided, because it made Draco look a bit uncertain. This wasn’t going to be Harry raising silly concerns that Draco would be free to immediately disregard. It just wasn’t. He was going to talk about things that mattered to him, and if Draco ignored them, that would be grounds for another row.

“I’m worried about you,” he said.

“And my torturing Nusquam, I know.” Draco nodded, fixing a bored expression over his face like armor. “Granger has already discussed her concerns with me, and until someone comes up with a better method that would intimidate Nihil and his servants as much as the use of Death Eater torture would, then I don’t see—”

“I’m worried about you because I think that you’re changing into a different kind of person than the one you want to be,” Harry said. “And I’m worried for me, too, because I think that I might accidentally do something that would hurt you.”

Draco paused, blinking. “What?” he asked at last.

“Listen,” Harry said. “During the war, Voldemort ordered you to torture people. You did, but reluctantly. Is that reluctance gone now? Are you the same person you were then, or is it different because this time you’re hurting people who have already tried to hurt you in the way that those Death Eaters didn’t, or what?”

Draco tilted his head to the side. Harry hoped that he was listening to his own real wishes, rather than the things he thought he had to do to make himself hard and tough for the war.

“I’m not the same person I was then,” Draco said at last. “Of course not. And it changes things that Nihil and his servants have hurt you.”

Harry nodded. “All right. But how far are you going to go in pursuit of hurting people who hurt me? Torture’s included. Killing’s included. What about Holder, for example? She hurt me the first day we came to the camp, and I know by the expression on your face when you mention her that you intend to get back at her. Would you torture her?”

“I never even thought about that,” Draco said, his face closing up in the way that meant he was uncomfortable and didn’t want to discuss this anymore. “The circumstances are different. She’s not Nihil’s.”

“But you described her as an enemy the other day,” Harry said. “I heard you. And she hurt me. That puts her in the category of people you’ve agreed to torture. How far would you go? Would you rack her? Stab a spike through her wrists, the way you did with Nusquam? Strangle her? Read her mind with that painful Legilimency? Flay her? Impale her? Use the Cruciatus Curse on her? Gouge her eyes out? Break—”

“Stop it!” Draco snapped. His eyes were a little wild. Harry wondered if he was making him relive bad memories, and winced—this had been part of why he was afraid—but he wasn’t about to back down now. “No, I wouldn’t do any of that.”

“Then what would you do?” Harry cocked his head. “Why is Nusquam different? Why do you use torture on only some people and not others, after you told me that you used it on everyone who fit into certain groups?”

“You’re not—” Draco said, and then closed his eyes. Harry left him alone this time. From the state of his face, Draco was at least doing some hard thinking, and Harry wanted to leave him to work this out for himself.

Until it turns out he needs help.

*

I never thought of that. I never realized the inherent hypocrisy of promising to destroy someone but not being willing to use methods on her that I use without hesitation on people like Nusquam.

Draco hated recognizing limitations and flaws in his thinking after the fact. He preferred to anticipate arguments before he had them, so that he had the responses packed like shining blades in his skull, to deploy as necessary.

And to find that Harry, of all people, had identified one of those flaws and made him recognize it…

Draco winced. Another unpleasant thing to realize was that he had been surprised by every instance in the last few days of his partner’s intelligence.

He may be stupid about magical theory, but not about other things.

Draco opened his eyes, looked at Harry, took a deep breath that he hoped absurdly would help him, and then said, “You’re right. There is a difference in what I planned to do, and it’s taken me until now to recognize the grounds of that difference. I didn’t think about torturing Holder because, although she’s an enemy, she’s still human and doesn’t serve Nihil. Nusquam is neither of those things.”

“So you’ve been thinking that the only victims of your torture would be his nonhuman servants?” Harry pounced on the information as though Draco had just offered him a peace gesture. “Nemo, and Nusquam, and Nihil himself, and the living dead? If they can even be tortured,” he added doubtfully.

“I think they could be, with the same techniques, depending on how much of Nihil’s mind was in them,” Draco muttered, temporarily distracted by the problem. “In that case, the desire would be to cause them not pain, but fear.”

Harry nodded. “But you’re only going to torture his nonhuman servants?”

Draco opened his mouth. He could torture others. He could nerve himself to it, and it would be easier than it had been under the Dark Lord, because he was an adult now and had been a child then. He didn’t want Harry to think him weak.

And then he stopped, because he doubted that Harry would think him weak for admitting his lack of stomach for torture.

“Yes,” he said at last. “I am.”

Harry smiled at him, and Draco caught his breath. It had been too long since he’d last seen Harry’s smile that free and uninhibited. “Thank you,” he said. “That was the thing that frightened me most, the lack of clear boundaries. I wasn’t sure how far you’d go, what I was allowed to object to and what I wasn’t, what might be most important to you and what was trivial. So I stewed and was upset about it, and that caused the barrier.”

“Why would you not be allowed to object to something?” Draco tried to remember anything he’d said or done that Harry might have thought was an invitation to shut up.

“Because I’m not objective,” Harry said. “I’ve been tortured. That might influence my perspective too much, and I knew that I wasn’t really feeling sympathy for Nusquam, just thinking about what I would feel in her position.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Draco said. “I’m not interested in the finer points of philosophy like that. I’m more interested in when you were tortured. I know that you weren’t at Malfoy Manor.”

“With the Cruciatus Curse when Voldemort kidnapped me after fourth year,” Harry said. “And—” He stopped, and an expression of particular stubbornness came over his face. “It wasn’t torture. Just bullying. By my cousin.”

Draco knew enough to back off. He nodded as though completely satisfied and said, “Then I value your opinion. I’m not going to stop torturing Nusquam. You needn’t watch. But I won’t torture anyone else unless we capture the others you named. There may be other ways that we could get the information we need from them.” He thought of Aran, who had been willing, even eager, to betray Nihil, who had taken him over against his will. There could be others like that.

“Thank you,” Harry said again, and stepped forwards to kiss him.

Draco returned the kiss, deepened it to a snog, and tugged Harry experimentally towards the bed.

This time, Harry went along with a laugh that warmed Draco even more than the smile or the kiss had.